This year’s Christmas ink drawing is the darkest so far, and it mirrors some very dark times. At the time of this writing a $700 billion dollar bailout for failing Wall Street banks has been hastily approved against unprecedented public opposition. After initially failing in Congress, the original $700 billion dollar bill had $150 billion dollars of political bribery added to it to win the votes needed to pass this ridiculous sign of desperation that is looting our US Treasury at the end game of the Bush Administration. This is already being called the worse financial disaster since the Great Depression. The point being made here is that these are indeed dark times where currently everything from war to climate change disasters are plaguing mankind. It is typical in ancient myth and folklore to depict historic disasters with allegories of monsters that have gigantic epic proportions. In that spirit this year’s drawing features a monster from ancient myth called the Chimaera, drawn in the style of an ancient statue known as "the Chimaera of Arezzo." The Chimaera, according to Greek myth, was a creature born at the mythological beginning of the universe from the primordial serpent Echidna who was also the mother of Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra. These monsters were said to be the causes of disasters beyond mankind’s control such as the volcanic Lycian soil where Chimaera was thought to vent her rage. The father of Chimaera is the mythic monster Typhon who was the origin of hurricanes and Typhoons. The three-headed Chimaera had a lion, a goat, and a serpent head as her tail, and one of the heads could breathe fire like a volcano. Perhaps this fantastically far-fetched description for a legendary monster is the reason the word "Chimaera" also means ‘a vain and idol fancy.’ It seems that many flights of fancy are coming home to roost these days. Our quick 2001 victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan has changed in 2008 into the Taliban now closing in on our fragile hold on Kabul with insurgents from Iraq and all over the Middle East answering the call of Jehad, and moving into Afghanistan to fight the American infidels. Last year Benazir Bhutto, right before her violent assassination, gave an interview where she named Omar Sheikh as the one who (quote) "murdered Osoma Bin Laden." This is a very strange thing for the nemesis of the Musharraf coup to say. Omar Sheikh was the subordinate who the ISI General Mahmud Ahmed used to wire $100,000 dollars to the 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta. He was also the one who was prosecuted and killed a couple years ago for being the culprit that beheaded the reporter Daniel Perl. Earlier this year Perez Musharraf of Pakistan finally resigned under threat of Impeachment. Oh, if only America could behave as democratically. Another flight of fancy was the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia at the end of Summer resulting in the Russian response, and Russia will now probably not be removing troops from Georgia any time soon. Recently Putin publicly accused the United States of orchestrating the Georgia invasion for "political expediency," and it’s a documented fact that aids associated with both John McCain and Dick Cheney were in Georgia prior to the failed invasion of South Ossetia. The world is deep in the intrigue of power struggles for energy dominance. Russia has nationalized its energy companies and this year one of Dick Cheney’s excursions abroad got Yukos oil executive Mikheil Khodovkousky arrested after he met with the US Vice President. Cheney was allegedly seeking to buy a dominant stake in Yukos. Mikheil Khodovkousky is also associated with the theory that oil doesn’t come from ancient fossil debris as we’ve all been told, but is in fact a much more common form of hydrocarbon that is actually more plentiful deeper down in the Earth’s crust. Deeper in the Earth’s crust is where we don’t even bother to look because we all live under the fossil fuel paradigm. This theory about the origin of oil is called the "a-biotic" theory. On December 5^th 2007 in Omaha Nebraska, a shooter named Robert A Hawking killed 8 people and himself in the Westroad’s Shopping Mall. President Bush happened to be in Omaha Nebraska that day, and DHS Chief Chertoff had a security advisor at the mall during the shooting. Earlier reports of the Dec. 5^th 2007 shooting showed pictures of a youth in Army fatigues with a weapon hiding under a bus bench before he was arrested. A hand grenade was also found at this mall a week or so before the shooting. Other curious facts about Omaha Nebraska would be that it was the center of the Franklin boy prostitute scandal back in the 1990’s as well as the first place George W. Bush flew to on 9/11 after being told of the falling towers at an elementary school in Florida. In January of 2008 Palestinians breached the separation wall with Egypt since they had been enduring a crippling siege by Israel that continues to this day in Gaza. The siege is an Israeli response to Qassam rocket attacks allegedly from the ruling Hamas party in Gaza. The untold story behind the Gaza siege may be that in 2000 the British Gas Group discovered proven natural gas reserves in Gazan territorial waters amounting to 1.3 trillion cubic meters worth 4 billion dollars. The Abbas government had been working on a deal that would have provided 10% of Israeli energy needs with a natural gas pipeline to Israel however, the 2006 Hamas victory has diverted those plans to Egypt. Soon after the December 2007 shooting in Omaha Nebraska, Steve Kozmierczak entered the Illinois University on February 14, 2008 and opened fire killing five people and himself. Both this shooter and the Virginia Tech shooter of last year used the same web dealer to purchase glocks and glock magazines, but that’s a coincidence easily dismissed considering how Internet search engines work. In February Hillary Clinton was caught in a whopper of a lie about the situation in Bosnia during a trip she took there at the time of her husband’s Presidency. She vividly recalled sniper fire, and having to take cover from bullets. Soon after she made that statement the media produced film footage of the same trip to Bosnia where she is greeted by a procession of people there while getting off the plane with no evidence of sniper danger at all. This gaff really made Hillary look like a liar and may have been the deathblow to her formidable campaign for the nomination that almost produced America’s first female President. We do, as a consolation, seem close to electing the country’s first black President, which is just as monumental in white-ruled America. Perhaps she was accurately recalling the situation in Bosnia, but because of the deceitful nature of government and politics, some fabricated film footage was put together at the time for war and propaganda purposes to convince the world that the First Lady’s trip to Bosnia was peaceful and uneventful. That may or may not be true, and the professional liar may have just been lying, but this serves as a reminder that things are almost never what they appear to be in the world of media illusion. We live in a world where an unguarded moment of candor can become the whopper of all lies. A recap of this year’s ‘flights of fancy’ would not be complete without mentioning the recent autocratic over-reach of the Texas Rangers once again raiding a religious cult compound in response to an anonymous phone call from an abused child at the polygamous fundamentalist Latter Day Saints cult. This church is lead by the prophet Warren Jeffs who has been in prison since 2002 on rape charges. The cult owns two towns in the United States, and is currently suing Texas for the return of over 400 children back to their parents, who were apprehended in the Texas Ranger raid. The year of 2008 has been haunted by volcanoes and earthquakes all around the Pacific Rim, and none are more noteworthy than a devastating earthquake that China is still digging its way out of. Thousands have died in that terrible calamity. A lot of this loss of life was because of shoddy construction as a consequence of China’s race to the bottom of economic mass production. Overshadowing this challenge to Chinese policy is a cloud of pollution as thick as England fog that blanketed this year’s Summer Olympic games held in Beijing.

This challenge to human civilization is being rubbed in the faces of all the people of the world, and it is clear to most now that we prosper or perish depending on what we change in the next couple years as a world. This idea overshadows the underwater rock pyramids on this year’s drawing with dark waters that flow over them from melting ice. These pyramids are the structures that exist under Rock Lake Michigan, which stick up off the lake bottom like primitive Stone Age teepees. The local Indian legend says that fair skinned people built these rock pyramids, who were driven off when the lake flooded the settlement. This mysterious archaeological find is close to another find on Lake Michigan of ancient copper mines that used sophisticated crab lifts to hoist more than 3 tons of rock at a time. They also employed a highly efficient method of prospecting, and all this is calculated to have occurred before 3000 BC. This puts the origin of these rock pyramids and the copper mines back at the time of the Bronze Age, which required a lot of copper for bronze production. Much of the bronze for the Bronze Age can actually be traced to these Lake Michigan copper mines. This could be a link to the ancient lost continent of Atlantis chronicled by Plato to have waged a war with Egypt through a tributary of the Nile that at the time was extending west all the way to Libya. That tributary has recently been verified to have actually existed, and according to Plato it was the Athenians who prevailed over the Atlantians on behalf of Egypt. In this age where DNA research is revolutionizing anthropology as well as providing a definitive roadmap for the theory of evolution, we may have traced themitochondria DNA genetic marker for the ancient nation of Atlantis to a group of chromosomes called the X haplogroup. This genetic marker has a proximity to our Michigan copper mines through the Iroquois nation of Indians in the NE United States. It was Edger Cayce who first prophesied that immigrants from Atlantis became the Iroquois Indians, but now the X haplogroup genetic marker possibly provides scientific evidence of this. This same mitochondria DNA marker can also be found in people from the Basques of the Pyrenees and also the Berbers of Morocco. These are areas of Europe and Africa that would have provided close refuge from the sinking of a continent that stretched from Cuba to the Canary Islands according to legend. Since 1970 there has been documentation of a Bahamas Pyramid under the waters off of Cuba that provides physical evidence of the Atlantis continent currently so buried in myth, fable, antiquity, and water that its very existence is denied by conventional wisdom and scientific thought. Still there are Bronze Age North American copper mines staring the skeptical in the face where copper had been mined between 2000 BC and 1000 BC in the production of bronze for the Bronze Age. Around 3000 BC, anthropologists document that 500,000 tons of copper was mined in the Upper Peninsula of the state of Michigan. The largest mine was on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. The extraction is even calculated by scientists to have began no later than 5300 BC, and possibly as early as 6000 BC, even though smelting is only known to have existed from 4000 BC on. Anthropologists also document that all mine activity was halted around 1200 BC. It begins again around 1000 AD until 1320 AD when halted once again after an additional 2000 more tons were removed. Ore was removed through large fires combined with water to crack the rock, and then remove the ore. The Menomonie Indians of North Wisconsin have a legend speaking of the ancient mines. "Light skinned men worked them." "They threw magic stones on the ground that made the copper ring like a bell." The archaeological sight near the Michigan mines is called Aztalan where no burial sites have ever been found although they have found millions of mining tools. It has appeared since 1922 when William A Ferguson discovered a harbor on the north coast of Isle Royale that this copper had been imported along a trade route down the Mississippi River. The copper may have been used from 1400 BC to 1000 BC by Mexican Toltecs, but extraction is documented to have began before 3000 BC when the only advanced civilizations known were Egyptians and Indus. Bronze Age Europe came to an end in 1200 BC, which coincides with the end of mining activities in Michigan. The techniques are identical to Bronze Age activity in the British Isles where Bronze Age tin originated.

It is possible that the abrupt end of mine activities coinciding with a flood that legend says the miners orchestrated to hide the temple under Rock Lake, could also coincide with the catastrophic end of the continent of Atlantis. There is other speculation that these mines are actually the long lost mines of King Solomon, however the times of activity in these mines predate ancient Israel, and go back to a time prior to recorded history. That makes these mines seem more likely to be evidence that Atlantis could have actually existed. Atlantis, according to legend, could not save itself for all its sophisticated technology. If nothing else, the legend has much to say to our current age of melting ice. On the drawing, a figure sits at the center of the cracking ice of Rock Lake where it is said that strange things are reported to occur such as electrical equipment that won’t work on the ice of this lake above the pyramids. It is said through Indian legend that the Atlantians settled around Rock Lake south of the snowline and called the place Tyranena. They flooded the lake so enemies wouldn’t discover it after they discovered more copper further south. The drawing shows the figure sitting on the ice beneath the Moon of emotion, which drips upon him with dire feelings. Among these dire feelings are inflation, bad weather and war creating a crushing silent tsunami of famine that is first overtaking the poorer countries of the world. Zimbabwe still exists under the crushing hyperinflation of a failed Mugabe regime that won’t relinquish lost power in order for the country to be free to save itself. Haiti is also being crushed by this same economic famine where children are fed cake made out of sugar and mud in order to fill their starving stomachs. In addition to unprecedented deaths of journalists in Iraq, it is reported this year that since 2002 there have been 31 journalists killed in Columbia where it is still probably impossible to be a union leader and live. Speaking of deaths, recently Katherine Smith who was a Tennessee State License Examiner implicated back in 2001 of involvement in a phony ID scam led by a group of "Middle Eastern men from New York." This group is allegedly connected to the 9/11 hijackers, and one of them had a repair pass to lower levels of the WTC Towers dated September 5^th. Before her trial could begin, Katherine Smith was killed in her car by fires so severe that they couldn’t be accounted for by a 20 mph crash into a pole. Her arms and legs were completely disintegrated by the flames engulfing the car after the crash. On April 29, Houston TX CIA agent Roland "Tony" Carnaby was violently gunned down. He may have been on to another 9/11 false flag operation in the making. The FBI is currently investigating connections between Administration officials, Ahmed Chalabi, and Iranians who received sensitive intelligence information that was intercepted by National Security Agency intercepts. It’s scary when reality becomes better than a fictional Tom Clancy novel. Similar to the housing bubble that has just burst, the derivatives market has created a $581 trillion dollar bubble 50 times the size of the whole global economy. At the time of this writing oil is around $60 a barrel and going down against much speculation last Spring that we would be filling our cars at this time with $5 a gallon gas. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that the toxic debt of a collapsing mortgage market was leveraged against a gamble last Spring on oil futures made in anticipation of $5 a gallon gas by now. In July however, Americans revolted against $4 a gallon gas by driving less, riding busses, and walking, which resulted in a surprising drop for the cost of gas. That almost never happens during the Summer season. This makes the current stock market meltdown look like the end of that Eddie Murphy movie "Trading Places." Still $700 billion is an expensive movie, and this may just be a final looting of the US Treasury by Bush for the sake of his real constituents, "the have’s and have mores" who have possibly just lost some kind of stock market gamble and collection is suddenly due. It seems all these new speculation markets are more inclined to hyper-inflate the prices for everything then actually making our world a more affordable place. In fact deregulated speculation has obviously played a key role in causing this Stock Market meltdown, and one good thing coming from all this is that the word "deregulation" is now finally recognized as the bad idea that it always was. On the other hand, we always do have a sale on gasoline right before elections to encourage Republican votes, which might explain the current $3 a gallon we are now paying at the pump. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been just literally printed in the last year between the Federal Reserve and Central European banks. This is in response to this failed mortgage crisis that has already brought down this country’s largest bank, as well as insurance firms, investment firms, and also more on the way. Printing all this money has devalued the dollar threatening every American with higher costs for everything to include gas. Funny thing about overthrowing other countries is that being in the wrong always seems to work against you in many profoundly unforeseen ways. We may be starting to see Fatherland Security for the Trojan horse that it is in light of despicable responses to more overflowing levies in Midwest floods as well as another rapid-fire hurricane season. In China 100,000’s of children were hospitalized this year because Chinese milk is contaminated by melamine. This is the same Chinese additive that killed tens of thousands of American pets with bad pet food from China last year. The Chinese government has had its face slapped with ill consequences from the hasty adaptation of industrialization. One hopes that China, with its centuries of wise government, proves able to adapt to a more sustainable future. The ruins of other civilizations in history warn us of our own possible ruin. There has been evidence along the Atlantic coast of America since 1968 of a road under the ocean that may have been a road through the long lost kingdom of Atlantis known to anthropologists as the Bimimi road. More underwater evidence of the fallen continent of Atlantis may be on the way such as these temples and pyramids under the waters of Rock Lake Michigan.

Back on the drawing, behind the dark waters of melting ice, beneath the night sky where the morning Sun begins to brighten a new day, is the city of tomorrow where our technology and ingenuity rise to the challenges of today. On February 21 the US impressed the world by shooting down a malfunctioned spy satellite while it orbited the Earth every 90 minutes at 22,000 mph, or 120 times the speed of sound. This is about a month after China demonstrated the same capability, and outraged the world. How convenient for a spy satellite to malfunction this way, just in time to show China that we can do this too. This was a prelude to a missile defense shield Bush is currently determined to provide on the soil of Poland, which Russia has already threatened to respond to with military action if necessary. If this is all just a race then we are racing to our final end. Humanity needs to clean up its act, global warming or no global warming, because there is simply no future at all for an unsustainable world. The emerging Chinese and India middle classes are sure to be ten times the numbers ever produced by America for the abuse of resources and the environment. Sustainability is an idea whose time has come for the sake of everyone’s children and grandchildren. Wind turbines like the ones already being put up across the country power the city of the future on this card. In front of this where the water flows like a river there are a couple turbines with paddle wheels turning in the flowing water. It seems like the problem for the world’s future boils down to just how we are going to turn some wheels, and the problem seems to have had a solution since the days of the little Dutch boy. If wind is such a plentiful resource it seems pretty feasible that we can also turn a lot of wheels with a constantly flowing river to keep all the lights on. Dams were good at this, and still are, but they became unpopular because of other problems created by stopping a river. Why bother to stop a river that already constantly flows with energy just waiting to be harnessed. Since the times of Morris Code messages sent by wire we have had documentation of geomantic energy that just always flows right through the ground itself. In the days of the telegraph there were patents made for an Earth Battery consisting of iron and copper poles buried in the ground to receive telluric currents. There where experiments with these currents that involved Tesla and Stubblefield who documented sending an audible voice across a great distance with telluric currents in 1882. That was before Maconi invented electric communication with dots and dashes. Also featured beneath the Sun on this year’s drawing is a new form of solar power generation that uses mirrors instead of solar panels. The mirrors are arranged to focus solar heat upon a central turbine facility that converts the heat into electricity. Again, just another way to turn a wheel in order to solve all the problems that plague the world.

Another source of power that is all around us is hydrogen, and our conversion to a clean burning hydrogen powered world is probably being held up by interests determined to exhaust the fossil fuel economy for its very last drop of profit. Rothman Technologies in Toronto Canada can demonstrate a 12-horsepower electrical generator that runs on water as fuel. This is based on electrolysis, which is a method of running electricity through water (H2O) to cause a chemical reaction that separates the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen atoms in the water. Rothman Technologies has also patented partially converted water called "Browns Gas" that will run just like regular gas in a common gas fueled vehicle. The problems holding up technologies like this are only economic, and recent increases in the cost of gas have provided economic incentive for finally developing alternative energy technologies. In fact a water-powered car doesn’t seem hard to design, and therefore this year’s drawing features the water powered car with a diagram of how it works. The key to the design, (which may even still be on the drawing board in reality,) is a battery capable of producing the energy for electrolyses. Of course this battery will have the advantage of re-powering when the car is running just like the car batteries we drive with now. A catalyst in the water such as salt can also be used to improve the efficiency of hydrogen production. This battery runs electricity through the water, which is causing electrolysis to fill a tank with hydrogen. The hydrogen is then directed to the engine for the firing of a piston. As a byproduct of the electrolysis, oxygen is expelled out the exhaust pipe. This oxygen byproduct can even help today’s world where there are already places such as Beijing that have facilities to provide oxygen for people because the local atmosphere is so depleted that people are literally suffocating. That’s the basic theory used to flip an 82 Volkswagen Rabbit design in the drawing into the water-powered car of the future. Forget about the flying cars that we were all promised decades ago, why aren’t we all driving water powered cars man? This is only one theory of hydrogen cars and currently fuel cell technology cars have already been introduced to the market. This year GM announced the creation of a car called the Volt that combines fuel cell technology with solar and gas power to produce a car that gets over 600 miles to the gallon. We can also easily retrofit our infrastructure for hydrogen production such as using nuclear reactors during off-hours for producing hydrogen to fuel our cars. Still we could also just get rid of the greedy hydrogen dealer middleman, and then drive water powered cars. We can just make water powered cars man! The danger of hydrogen’s explosive nature at least has the fact that it usually dissipates quickly and harmlessly into the atmosphere in stark contrast with liquid gasoline that is notorious for so many spectacular explosions in the movies. The emerging green technologies displayed on this year’s alternative energy / Atlantis card can also rescue America by creating new jobs through new emerging technologies. This can relieve us of a dangerous dependency on the foreign oil that is the real reason for our current hemorrhage of wars no matter how loud the denial gets.