TBR News May 5, 2018

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. May 5, 2018:”Israel, highly concerned about the enormous and potentially deadly missile holdings of the southern Lebanon-based Hezbollah, has been making what they believe are secret contacts with the United States to allow them to obliterate the menace with Czech-obtained nerve gas.

Trump, it is reported, is all in favor of this project but others inside the Beltway are not. In the recent past, Trump has been informed that certain of his Israel-originating plans for violent action against Israeli enemies in the Middle East are not possible.

One of these is an attack by American bombers using bunker bombs against all of Tehran and another is to bomb potential Iraninian naval bases on the Indian Ocean.

Trump may love Israel but aside from creatures like Bolton and Crystal, he has little Washington support, and leakage of these murderous capers is growing daily.”

 

 

Table of Contents

• Why is Trump surrounded by cocky, unqualified and kooky men?
• Israel and Hezbollah Are Girding for War—and the Next Round Could Be Horrific
• Ecumenical Disinformation
• This Is What Would Happen To The World If The Yellowstone Supervolcano Erupted Today
• Spy agency NSA triples collection of U.S. phone records: official report
• Cambridge Analytica is dead – but its obscure network is alive and well
• Fresh earthquakes signal Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano to erupt again

 

Why is Trump surrounded by cocky, unqualified and kooky men?

Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Anthony Scaramucci: the traits of men in Trump’s orbit are surprisingly consistent

May 4, 2018

by Richard Wolffe

The Guardian

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. The presidency is no different: when it comes to a commander-in-chief, you can tell a lot from the aides they keep close.

Barack Obama’s closest staffers were often intensely competitive, earnest, studious types who struggled to understand why the world didn’t admire their idealism and talent as much as they did. George W Bush, at least in his first term, surrounded himself with trigger-happy street fighters who confused patriotism with their own paranoia and prejudice.

In the case of Donald Trump, the company he keeps is surprisingly consistent: a singular type with a shared set of character traits. They are, to a man, cocky, unqualified and kooky. You might call this the CUK theory of the Trump presidency, in honor of one of their archetypes: Steve Bannon.

All the president’s men – at least, the CUKs – are a constant presence, in spite of the huge turnover among them. There was Bannon, now there’s Bolton. There was Scaramucci, now there’s Giuliani. It matters not. Trump cycles through his CUKs happily and frequently because he needs to keep one or more close through all his volatility.

Let’s start with Bannon: the man who believed he was reshaping global politics. Never mind all that help from Russia and Facebook, Bannon was riding the crest of a wave of his own making. Nobody had discovered white male resentment before: not Richard Nixon, not Pat Buchanan, not even Bill Clinton.

Bannon thinks he’s so good at this stuff that he was considering running for president himself in 2020. He also told Vanity Fair that getting fired from the White House was an upgrade: inside the West Wing he had influence, but outside he had real power. Cocky? Check.

How unqualified was Bannon at his purported job of chief political strategist? Exhibit A is Roy Moore in Alabama, a candidate accused of child abuse, whose doomed campaign was Bannon’s great last stand. If you can’t see the limits of white male resentment in the state that built its politics on those foundations, then you have forever lost your credentials as a political strategist. Status: unqualified.

Kookiness was Bannon’s calling card, his cri de coeur. You could plunge into the conspiracy-filled world of his media creation, Breitbart, to explore all the crazy theories he thrived on. Or you could read about the guy who ate green ketamine before he showed up to work, because he makes more sense.

So many pundits took Bannon’s kooky ideas as some kind of mark of genius, because of 70,000 votes in three swing states and the quirks of the electoral college. But to recap, Bannon was inspired by a French occultist and Italian racialist to assert that western civilization was locked in “a new dark age” as part of an existential battle with Islam. Which just goes to show that reading books doesn’t necessarily make you less kooky.

Where does John Bolton, the latest in a long line of Trump’s national security advisers, sit on the CUK scale? If Bannon is a perfect 10, Bolton is a nine.

People who worked with him in the Bush administration say he’s arrogant, when they’re trying to be diplomatic – a quality that Bolton lacks entirely. Bolton even maintains his arrogance about his biggest, most obvious disaster: his cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq. When Tucker Carlson, of Fox News fame, asked him if the war in Iraq had empowered his great enemies in Iran, Bolton said: “No, because I think your analysis is simple-minded, frankly.”

Calling the supremely cocky Tucker Carlson “simple-minded” is a power play in the league of cocky politics.

This takes us directly to his obvious lack of qualifications to manage national security for the world’s greatest military force. In addition to his colossal errors of judgment about Iraq, he is a hothead and a disastrously bad manager. He isn’t even on the same page as his boss about talking to North Korea, having spent a career trashing them as serial liars and conmen.

Which brings us to his kookiness. This is a national security adviser who recently advocated for a pre-emptive strike against North Korea. This is a former UN ambassador who believed the top 10 floors of the UN could be demolished with no impact on the organization. He only drops a point on the CUK scale because of the lack of occultist influence.

Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci is an epic example of the president’s favorite man. Cocky doesn’t come close to the extravagant strutting and preening of a man who claimed everyone else was obsessed with their own penis. The Mooch was so unqualified for the job of White House communications director that he lasted 10 or perhaps 11 days in office. That’s in a West Wing where the only qualification for a job is a pulse and never-ending praise for the boss.

Which brings us to his kookiness. For the Mooch, Trump is “perhaps the least racist” person on the planet, even though he sympathizes with neo-Nazis. Trump is also “neurologically sound” even though, well, everything he has tweeted in the last 16 months.

Overall on the CUK scale, the Mooch’s supreme cockiness balances out the relative lack of kookiness, making him a solid eight.

So to our latest member of the gang: Rudy Giuliani. According to the otherwise friendly New York Post, it was Rudy’s arrogance that killed his 2008 presidential campaign. For some reason, early state voters found it a turnoff. This is a man who endorsed Trump at the Republican convention by saying the next president would carry the Giuliani torch: “What I did for New York City, Donald Trump will do for America.”

If anyone had any doubts about Rudy’s qualifications to be the latest in a long line of Trump’s lawyers, this week was truly special. In a couple of Fox News interviews, Giuliani contradicted the previous official story about Trump’s lawyer paying hush money to the actress known as Stormy Daniels. Along the way, he exposed his new client to additional legal risk and managed to refocus the world’s attention on the president and a porn star on the National Day of Prayer. Pure genius.

Among the many kooky theories Rudy has peddled was his repeated stirring of the pot about Hillary Clinton’s health, his obvious superiority to Beyoncé, and his recent description of FBI agents as “stormtroopers”. For all this and so much more, Rudy scores another perfect 10 as a CUK.

Curious minds might wonder why this president chooses to surround himself with so many men who are cocky, unqualified and kooky. For someone so modest, so well-versed in world affairs, and so cogent, it seems so obviously out of character.

 

Israel and Hezbollah Are Girding for War—and the Next Round Could Be Horrific

Hezbollah has been steadily consolidating power and weapons—and some fighters maintain it played a role in shooting down an Israeli jet over Syria.

April 5, 2018

by Sulome Anderson

The Nation

Unlike urban areas of the country, the air in southern Lebanon is free from pollution. The hills are lush with early-spring growth and the entire landscape has a rugged beauty that belies the violence it has experienced. The only visible marks of war are martyrs’ posters that line the streets winding through picturesque villages—young local men lost in a decades-long conflict with the neighboring Jewish state of Israel.

Just a few kilometers away from the border, where Israel is in the process of erecting a hotly disputed wall to separate itself from the Hezbollah-controlled south, a local official and brigade leader in the Iranian-backed Shia militant group smoked a slim cigarette as he discussed the prospect of yet another round of violence. Every now and then, a villager wandered into his house, which sometimes doubles as an office, to get documents stamped, and the conversation paused until the visitor was gone.

The last major episode in the conflict took place in 2006, when Israel invaded Lebanon in a retaliatory offensive unsuccessful in eradicating Hezbollah, which has been celebrating its victory over the invaders ever since. The 2006 war was an impressive win for the group, in that it successfully fought the most powerful army in the Middle East until it was forced into a cease-fire, with fewer Hezbollah casualties and more Israeli casualties than expected. Hezbollah has been consolidating power and weaponry ever since, fully funded by its Iranian benefactors and increasingly alarming its neighbor, which is better accustomed to facing the much less imposing Palestinian Hamas.

“The situation is very tense in the south and we are closer than ever to conflict,” the Hezbollah official said. “The Iranians and Hezbollah are now at the borders of Israel in Lebanon and Syria; any upcoming war will be endless.”

The official, like all the Hezbollah members interviewed for this article, asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak with foreign press. He was referring to the political atmosphere after an Israeli F-16 jet was shot down over Syria on February 10, where Hezbollah is fighting on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The jet was responding to an Iranian drone’s incursion into Israeli territory when it reportedly took fire from up to four different kinds of Russian-made antiaircraft missiles and crashed in northern Israel. Israel then launched a second raid, which it claims damaged a significant portion of Syria’s air-defense systems, hitting 12 Iranian and Syrian targets.

All news coverage of the event reported that the Syrian regime fired the barrage of surface-to-air missiles, one of which hit the Israeli plane or exploded close enough to bring it down. Israeli officials and even Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, credited Syria with the decision to destroy the first Israeli F-16 since the country began using the jets in the 1980s. Analysts agreed that Syrian regime soldiers manned the position from which the surface-to-air missiles were fired.

In an official statement, Hezbollah celebrated the event, saying it marked the end of Israel’s ability to freely exploit Syrian airspace. “[This is the] start of a new strategic phase,” the statement read. “Today’s developments mean the old equations have categorically ended.”

Hezbollah-controlled media also triumphantly covered the downing of the jet. But some Hezbollah members took the celebrations further, privately claiming that their group played a role in the decision to shoot it down. They said the Iranians and Hezbollah wanted to send a message to Israel via the Syrian regime, but the group’s involvement wasn’t made public in order to avoid further escalation. According to two of these men, if it became known that Hezbollah was involved in shooting down one of its planes, Israel would look weak unless it responded forcefully to the Shia militants—and they acknowledged that neither side is ready for an all-out war yet.

Four Hezbollah members separately claimed the Shia group played a role in shooting down the jet. Their identities were individually confirmed by viewing photos and/or video taken during combat in Syria and during the 2006 war with Israel. One Hezbollah captain held up his phone to show off a picture of the Israeli plane falling from the sky, which had been turned into a meme—one of many shared on social media following the incident. “Junk F-16 parts for sale” was written at the bottom in Arabic.

“We broke their wings. They’ll think twice before flapping them over Syria again.” —Hezbollah captain, on the downing of an Israeli F-16

“We broke their wings,” he laughed. “They’ll think twice before flapping them over Syria again.”

Most analysts have said these claims must be merely bravado. But Hezbollah and its supporters certainly treated the downing of an Israeli jet as a victory for their side. Even if the Syrian Arab Army was manning the position from which the plane was shot, Hezbollah is fighting side by side with the regime. Russia, which is heavily involved in the conflict alongside the regime and Hezbollah, has been providing the Syrian government with sophisticated weapons for some time now. That raises the question of just how much advanced weaponry Hezbollah now possesses as a result of its role in the Syrian civil war—particularly in regards to surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs, which would pose a problem for Israel’s air power in a future war.

There have been reports that Russia is directly arming the Shia group, but most experts say that since the Russians are supplying the Syrian regime with advanced weaponry, some of it probably makes its way to Hezbollah indirectly. However it gets there, given the deadliness of Russia’s arsenal, the prospect of Hezbollah moving such weaponry into Lebanon has increasingly concerned Israel since the Syrian war broke out. The Jewish state has responded to this threat by reportedly striking Hezbollah weapons convoys in Syria nearly 100 times in five years. In March 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s air force had launched raids on Syrian-regime targets in order to destroy advanced missiles that were destined for Hezbollah.

Nasrallah claimed in a 2013 speech that the group was receiving “game-changing weapons” from the Syrian regime, so whether Russia is directly arming Hezbollah or the group is receiving gifts from its Syrian allies, it seems likely that advanced Russian weaponry is ending up in Hezbollah’s hands—but how much could be moved into Lebanon is an open question.

According to Phillip Smyth, Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank in Washington, DC, despite the number of airstrikes against the group in Syria, it seems impossible that Israel has been able to prevent every movement of Hezbollah weaponry into Lebanon. He said this has likely allowed the group to build up significant arsenals in both Syria and Lebanon—a development that could be quite dangerous for Israel in a future conflict.

“The Israelis have a very efficient air force, but they can’t get everything, so in a war, they’ll need to have air power not just in South Lebanon but also deep into sites in Syria,” said Smyth. “So what happens if [Hezbollah has] access to a longer-range, or even a medium-range, ballistic missile or another kind of advanced rocket system? Since there’s no chance [Israel] can strike all these weapons in transit, what happens if Hezbollah hits Tel Aviv?”

Uzi Rubin, a former brigadier general in the Israeli Air Force and a missile-systems analyst, said he believes Hezbollah has access to most of the Syrian regime’s arsenal. “I think there is no difference between Hezbollah and Syria,” he said. “Whatever Syria has, Hezbollah has. So it’s not important whether at this moment, it is located on Lebanese soil. Hezbollah has [the weaponry]; it’s available to them.”

In Dahiyah, a suburb of Beirut controlled by Hezbollah, a fighter in a Special Forces unit was on leave from deployment in Syria. According to him, Hezbollah has accumulated even more advanced arms than the Syrians. “We have a different set of weapons than the regime,” the fighter said. “Ours are better because we don’t depend on anti-tank and such; we count on antiaircraft, anti-ship, and long-range missiles.”

What these men said about the incident with the Israeli jet placed even more emphasis on the cunning and military prowess of the group and its Iranian sponsors. Asked about the downing of the plane, the Special Forces fighter said that although he wasn’t present, he was told the entire sequence of events, starting with the dispatch of an Iranian drone into Israeli territory, was a setup to bait the Israelis into flying into a trap. “We fired 20 or 25 [low-grade] missiles [at the jet], and among them, one sophisticated missile,” he said. “I think the Israeli air force is not as free as before to fly over Syria.”

The narrative that the Iranians, the Syrians, and perhaps Hezbollah flew a drone into Israel in order to tempt the Israelis into a trap seems far-fetched, but it has some backing by analysts who have studied the scenario. Smyth of the Washington Institute said it’s notable that the Iranians sent that drone in particular, which indicates there may have been some foresight involved.

“They didn’t just send one of these cardboard cutout things, like they would have ten years ago,” Smyth said. “It’s interesting that they sent this one, which was a copy [of an American drone] and probably launched out of the back of a truck. The other interesting factor is that they flew it over the state of Israel for a while.”

According to the IDF, the drone was shot down after traveling three or four miles into Israeli territory, and was indeed a sophisticated copy of a US drone intercepted over Iran in 2011. Iran and Syria denied that the drone violated Israeli airspace and claimed it was on a routine intelligence-gathering mission against ISIS. The Israeli government released a video of its helicopter destroying the drone, but admitted that it remained a mystery why the drone entered Israel. During an interview in Dahiyah, the leader of a small Hezbollah tank unit in Syria also claimed the drone was meant as bait in an elaborate trap. “At the same time [an advanced antiaircraft] missile was fired, many other minor missiles were also fired as a disguise mechanism,” the unit leader said.

The claims of these Hezbollah members do fit with the fact that, according to Israeli media reports, several different types of Russian antiaircraft missiles were fired at the Israeli plane—all of which vary in technological sophistication. Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese army general and lecturer on military strategy at the American University of Beirut, argued that if the Israeli jet was shot down as the result of an ambush, that would mean Iran, Syria, and possibly Hezbollah likely wanted to engineer a rewriting of the rules of engagement, not spark a full-on conflict.

“The Iranians may have wanted to draw some red lines of their own,” said Hanna. “Things are changing. Now, the Israelis will really try to calculate how they are going to go into Syria and hit a convoy of Hezbollah’s or a convoy of the Iranians.”

But most analysts were skeptical when asked about the Hezbollah members’ claims that the group was directly involved with the decision to shoot down the Israeli jet. Joseph Bahout, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, another Washington-based think tank, said the idea was ludicrous and dismissed Hezbollah members’ perception of the F-16’s destruction as a victory.

“The result is that the Israelis made raids after that,” said Bahout. “OK, [the Syrians] succeeded in shooting down an F-16, but that’s it. I mean, it stops there…the fact is that every time the Israelis overfly Lebanon to mid-Syria, there is no answer from Hezbollah. So either they can’t or they don’t want to, in order not to unveil their capacity.”

Other experts said the group has certainly built up an impressive arsenal but weren’t convinced they played a role in the downing of the Israeli jet.

“It seems unlikely,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s counterterrorism program. “What I had heard was that…it was different this time because [the Syrians] really wanted to hit something, and they shot up a whole bunch of stuff at once.” He added that although he doesn’t believe Hezbollah is militarily capable of shooting down an F-16 at this point, the fear among Israelis is that they will acquire that capacity as a result of the Syrian conflict.

Asked why these men would be claiming credit for the downing of the jet if Hezbollah was uninvolved, Smyth, who is also skeptical that Hezbollah played a major role, explained that members of the group could be using the incident as an excuse to celebrate Hezbollah’s own surface-to-air missile capacity in another war with Israel.

“In any future conflict, Hezbollah will attempt to do more than simply bloody Israel’s nose,” said Smyth. “In the realm of SAMs, this means constraining Israel’s significant ability to control the air. Air power is always a major, if not the major, game-changer in a conflict. Does bravado tie into this? Sure. It’s highly likely it does. The reason they all said it could [be] that possibly Hezbollah does have a new antiaircraft capability…with this recent incident, they might want to send a stronger signal for propaganda value.”

When pressed on exactly what type of weaponry Hezbollah has acquired, the tank unit leader in Dahiyah smiled enigmatically. “Hezbollah cares most about surprises in the next war,” he said. “We will never say exactly what we have.”

But the Hezbollah official in South Lebanon was much more unconstrained in his assessment of the group’s arsenal, though it was sometimes hard to tell truth from bravado. He sipped a glass of syrupy tea as he talked animatedly.

“As long as Hezbollah is on the ground [in Syria], Russia is giving us weapons,” he boasted. “Russia gave the maximum they could for Hezbollah. Hezbollah has T-90 light tanks in Qusayr [a city in Syria].… In addition, Hezbollah owns S-200 [surface-to-air] missiles.… The hills where we used to fight Daesh [ISIS] and Jabhat al-Nusra in the Qalamoun area and northern Baalbek are equipped with antiaircraft missiles. Now the strategy has changed; fighters are scattered everywhere, fully equipped with advanced weapons and missiles.”

The official also lent credence to another potential flashpoint in a future conflict: reports that Hezbollah and Iran have built missile factories inside Lebanon itself, an action that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has called a “red line.” The Hezbollah official said that the factories exist, but claimed they don’t have the capability to actually manufacture missiles, just improve upon the ones they have already acquired. “We only upgrade missiles here [in Lebanon], but we do not make them,” he said.

According to Levitt, that assessment makes sense. “It’s probably not true domestic production,” he said. “It’s probably just enabling Iran to ship the stuff in much smaller pieces. Then you don’t need a big flatbed truck, you know, with these big rockets.… There’s precedence for this idea of finding a way to make it easier to smuggle by just sending smaller components…but for the Israelis, that’s a real problem.”

Rubin said that regardless of capacity, if Hezbollah and the Iranians have established any type of missile factory inside Lebanon, the Israelis would consider it a very serious development.

“That could start a war,” he said. “It was announced by Netanyahu that [missile factories in Lebanon] are a red line, and I believe him. And he will have the support of the country.”

Robert Malley, former National Security Council adviser to President Barack Obama and president of the International Crisis Group, explained that given all these highly combustible components, this conflict is particularly prone to another flare-up—which would almost certainly be much more severe than the 2006 war.

“Both sides profess, and I think it is accurate, that they don’t want a war because they’ve reached a point—not of mutual assured destruction, because I don’t think Hezbollah could destroy Israel—but mutually assured heavy damage,” he said. “But that’s not always a guarantee that things won’t get out of hand…because each side has to regulate how far it can go without going too far in the eyes of the other side. Any system that is based on mutual deterrence runs the risk that one side will misread the other. Each side is constantly probing, and at one point they could make a mistake and it could trigger a reaction by their opponent which exceeds what they can accept without reacting in kind.… That’s the way unwanted wars start.”

In the south, where the impact of an “unwanted war” on Lebanese civilians would be most severe, local residents seemed unconcerned by the potential destruction a new round would bring. Israel has long accused Hezbollah of operating in civilian areas in order to maximize potential casualties, essentially using them as human shields. After experiencing several Israeli invasions in the past few decades, though, most civilians here are enthusiastic supporters of the muqawama—“the resistance,” as they call Hezbollah.

Fatimah, a local woman in her 50s officially unaffiliated with Hezbollah, said that no matter what happens, she would not leave her home. “It is my country, it is my land, and it is my ideology,” she said. “It is not about Hezbollah. Many people stayed here during the 33 days of war [in 2006]. We were living off the vegetables we grew. If we ate a chocolate bar, we did not throw the paper on the ground, because if the [Israeli] jets saw any sign of life, they would hit us.”

She smiled triumphantly. “Israeli people cannot tolerate war. They cannot endure like we do.”

 

 

Ecumenical Disinformation

May 5, 2018

by Christian Jürs

Not even the year of Jesus’ birth is known although many theologians have concluded that Jesus was born sometime in the autumn, between 11 and 13 CE. Also, there is disagreement about where Jesus was born. Different theologians, as opposed to historians, argue Bethlehem in Judea, and Nazareth.

That was prior to certain archeological discoveries in the Dead Sea area.

From the Dead Sea scrolls, we learn that Jesus was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Egyptian Jewish father and Egyptian mother.

He was not born in a stable in Bethlehem nor were there any wise men visiting nor a special star hovering overhead.

The basis of all of this revisionist material is clearly set forth in a scroll found at Cave #3 on the Dead Sea in 1953.

It is on parchment (used only for important documents…the rest were on papyrus) and was written at the time of Jesus, about 50-55 CE.

The document is the only extant period reference to Jesus; all the others were created, often out of whole cloth, two hundred years later, and in the case of significant paragraphs in Josephus, later Christian forgeries.

This revealing scroll has been forensically tested as to age, type of ink, handwriting etc and was very clearly created at the time and place indicated.

The text of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in four different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean.

The scroll in question here, from cave #3 is in Nabataean, used from the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE

From this we discover that Jesus was a Jew but born in Alexandria, Egypt, ten years after the date ascribed in the Gospels to his nativity.

‘Bar Nasha’(son of man) was Jesus name for himself.

Jesus was not a Nazerene, as is often stated in the New Testament, but an Alexandrian Jew. His parents immigrated to Palestine, and the young Jesus joined the Essene religious movement where Jesus’ elder brother was a member of this religious and agricultural cult.  He subsequently became heavily involved in their revolts against the occupying Roman power, was one of the leaders in a revolt attempt, fled when the Roman troops attacked in a pre-emptive strike, leaving many of his fellow cult members to be captured by the Romans and all later crucified.

He escaped with a small number of Essenes to the desert where he remained until he died.

The interesting aspect of this is that the Essene cult was an all-male agricultural commune and very specifically homosexual in nature and practice.

In the scroll, Jesus’ sexual orientation is specifically addressed and names of his male lovers covered.

It should be noted that the scrolls themselves were prepared by members of the Essene cult who were themselves homosexuals and therefore not critical of Jesus orientation.

During the Procuratorship of Antonius Felix (52 to 58 CE) Jesus amassed a mob of about 30,000 Palestinian Jewish dissidents, planning to attack Jerusalem and drive out the Roman garrison. One of Jesus’s Essene close associates, a man named Judas, informed Felix of the impending raid and it was stopped by Roman troops with a heavy loss of life for the rebels. Many were taken prisoner, tried and later crucified for rebellion against the Roman government but the period records show, very clearly, that their leader, Jesus from Alexandria, escaped and vanished into the desert.

Roman period writings show that this man came out of the desert with a force of 30,000 and went up the Mount of Olives in order to fall on the city of Jerusalem, expel the Roman garrison and become ruler. Felix engaged the Egyptian and his followers in battle and dispersed them, taking most of them prisoners.

Josephus, who lived and wrote during the period, wrote about this plot of an Egyptian Jew under the procurator Felix.

The history of Josephus is full of similar occurrences, which show the state of mind of the Jewish population at the time of Jesus.

An attempted putsch by the Alexandrian Essene prophet, Jesus, would be fully in accord with it.

If we think of Jesus’ activism as such an attempt against Roman authority, the betrayal of the Essenes to the Roman authorities by Jesus’ co-conspirator, Judas, becomes understandable as well.

Marcus Antonius Felix was the Roman procurator of Iudaea Province 52-58 CE, in succession to Ventidius Cumanus.

The period of his rule was marked by internal feuds and disturbances on the part of the Jewish population, which he put down with great severity.

On returning to Rome, Felix was accused of using a dispute between the Jews and Syrians of Caesarea as a pretext to slay and plunder the inhabitants, but through the intercession of his brother, the freedman Pallas, who had great influence with the Emperor Nero, he escaped unpunished.

Porcius Festus succeeded him as procurator of Judea.

The Essenes

After his move to Judea, Jesus became an Essene, and Christianity as we know it today evolved directly from this sect of Judaism, with which it shared a majority of ideas and symbols

The Essenes were a religious sect of Judaism that existed from the 2nd century BCE to the the 1st Century CE, in Qumran, a plateau in the Judean desert along the Dead Sea.

The origin of the name Essene is debated. Some credible possibilities are either a version of the Greek word for “holy,” or an Aramaic dialect term for “pious.” In their writings, they refer to themselves as the “Sons of Light”.

The Essenes are discussed in detail by Josephus and Philo. Scholars very clearly believe that the community at Qumran, that produced the Dead Sea scrolls, were Essenes, that Jesus was an Essene, and Christianity as we know it today evolved from this sect of Judaism.

The Essenes were, in any case, an agricultural community that had a communistic approach to their life style. There was a common purse and shared wealth and much, if not most, of the first expressed Christian dogma came directly from the Essenes.

Unfortunately for religious acceptance reasons, like the Spartans and Zulus who were essentially a military community cult, the agricultural Essenes were male-oriented and firmly homosexual in nature.

The Essenes were finally outlawed by the Romans following their participation in on-going revolts, and many members were subsequently crucified in a general crackdown under Titus, not because of their sexual practices but because of their political opposition to Roman rule.

The small remnants of the Essenes either retreated to their Dead Sea area and eventually died out or changed their names and joined other more acceptable Jewish religious groups.

Before the discovery and publication of a number of the Dead Sea scrolls, little was popularly known about the Essenes other than from the writings of a few select contemporary authors.  These authors included; the Jewish priest and Galilean commander, Flavius Josephus, in his “Jewish Wars” written about 73-75 CE (Jewish Wars 2:119-161) and Josephus’ “Antiquities of the Jews” written about twenty years later. (Antiquities 18:11, 18-22); Josephus, claiming firsthand knowledge, called the Essenes, the Essenoi.

The earliest mention of the Essenes is by the Jewish philosopher Philo (20 BCE – c. 50 CE) of Alexandria.  Philo wrote that there were more than 4,000 Essenes (Essaioi) living in villages throughout the Palestinian- Syrian area. Among their neighbors they were noted for their love of God and their concerns with piety, honesty, morality, philanthropy, holiness, equality, and freedom.

The deeply religious Essenes did not marry and lived a celibate life, and practiced communal residence, money, property, food and clothing.

They cherished freedom, possessed no slaves, and rejected the use of weapons or participation in commerce.

Philo did not mention any names or places, nor any background to the origins of this group.

The next reference to the Essenes is by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (died 79 CE) in his Natural History (N’H,V,XV). Pliny relates in a few lines that the Essenes did not marry, possessed no money, and had existed for “thousands of generations.”

Unlike Philo, who did not mention any particular geographical location of the Essenes other than the whole land of Israel, Pliny, also a geographer and explorer, , located them in the desert near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered in the year 1947 by Muhammed edh-Dhib and Ahmed Mohammed, two Bedouin shepherds of the Ta’amireh tribe.

At this point we find this passage, which contains the only description of local people in this section of Pliny’s work:

“From [or towards] the west onward,Essenes flee the banks [or shores] that harm;  a group set apart [or isolated] and in the entire world beyond all others extraordinary [or unique] — without any women, stifling every urge, without money [or possessions], consort of palms.”

The nature of the organization clearly indicates that it was an outspoken communism. They lived in common dwellings, 4000 strong in the time of Josephus, in various villages and rural cities of Judea.

“They live there together,” Philo says of them, “organized by corporations and clubs for friendship and dining (kata thasous, hetairias kai syssitia poioumenoi), and regularly occupied in labors for the community.

“None of them desires to have property of his own, neither a house nor a slave nor a piece of land nor herds nor whatever else constitutes wealth. But they put everything together indiscriminately, and all of them use it in common.

“The money they earn by their labor in various ways they hand over to an elected administrator. Out of it he buys what is needed, and gives them ample food and whatever else is needed for life.”

It might be inferred from this that each man produced for himself or worked for wages.

Somewhat later, Josephus gave a detailed account of the Essenes in The Jewish War (75 CE) with a shorter description in Antiquities of the Jews (94 CE) and The Life of Flavius Josephus (97 CE). Claiming firsthand knowledge, he lists the Essenoi as one of the three sects of Jewish philosophy to include the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

He relates the same information Philo did on the Essenes concerning piety, celibacy, the absence of personal property and of money, the belief in communality, alienation from associating with women, and commitment to a strict observance of the Sabbath.

According to Josephus, they had customs and observances such as collective ownership, the sharing of a common purse, the electing of a leader to attend to the interests of them all whose orders they obeyed, were forbidden from swearing oaths and sacrificing animals controlled their temper and served as channels of peace, carried weapons only as protection against robbers, had no slaves but served each other and, as a result of communal ownership, did not engage in trading. He further adds that the Essenes ritually immersed in water every morning, ate together after prayer, devoted themselves to charity and benevolence, forbade the expression of anger, studied the books of the elders, preserved secrets, and were an all-male society, enjoying their own company in preference to that of women.

Also, there was the observation that the Essenes were an all-male cult, using women to produce male children. Women who produced female children were expelled from the Essene community along with their female child. Like the Spartans, and to a lesser degree, the Greeks, women were used exclusively for breeding purposes.

Both Josephus and Philo have lengthy accounts of their communal meetings, meals and religious celebrations.

Their theology included belief in the immortality of the soul and that they would receive their souls back after death. Part of their activities included purification by water rituals, which was supported by rainwater catchment and storage.

Josephus describes their life as follows:

“After this [the morning prayer] they are dismissed by their chiefs and each goes to the work he has learned, and when they have diligently labored until the fifth hour [counting from sunrise, about eleven o’clock] they come together at a stated place, gird themselves with white cloths and wash their bodies in cold water. After this purification they go into the refectory, into which no one has entry who is not a member of their sect. When they have sat down in silence, the baker puts bread before each man and the cook sets a dish before each with one kind of food. Then a priest blesses the food; and it is not permitted to taste anything before prayer. At the end of the midday meal they give thanks again, and thus before and after eating they praise God, the giver of all food. Then they put off their mantles like sacred clothing and go to work again until evening. Supper is taken in the same way as dinner, and when guests come [members of the order from elsewhere, since strangers were not allowed in the refectory.], they too sit at table with them. Neither outcries nor disorder sully the house, and when they converse, one speaks after the other, not all at once, so that people who are not of their order feel the quiet in the house as mysteriously impressive. The cause of their quiet life is their constant moderation, for they eat and drink no more than is required for maintaining their life.

“In general they do no work except on the instructions of their chiefs, with the exception that they may be free in showing sympathy and helpfulness. Whenever an emergency requires it, any one of them may assist those who need and deserve help, or bring food to the poor. But they may not contribute anything to their friends or relatives without the consent of their chief.”

Their communism was carried to an extreme. It extended to their clothing. Philo says:

“Not only food, but clothing as well is in common with them. For there are heavy cloaks prepared for the winter, and light outer garments for summer, so that every man may make use of them as he will. For what one has counts as the property of all, and what all of them have counts as everyman’s.”

They rejected slavery. Farming was their chief occupation, but they also engaged in crafts. Only the manufacture of luxury articles and weapons of war was forbidden, along with trade.

The basis of their whole communistic system was community of consumption, not social production. There is some talk of the latter too, but it is only a question of work that brings in money for individuals either for wages or for goods sold, in either case the work is done outside the social organization.

All the members of the order however have their lodging and meals in common. That is what held them together, above all. It was the communism of common housekeeping. This requires giving up separate housekeeping, separate families and separate marriages.

From the Essenes down through all the early Christian communistic-type sects we can see that all of them are very firmly against marriage.

The Essenes, in fact, rejected all social contact with women.

 

This Is What Would Happen To The World If The Yellowstone Supervolcano Erupted Today

November 14, 2017

iflscience

Yellowstone’s supervolcano is essentially a giant, lid-topped cauldron, and it’s so vast that it can only truly be seen from low-Earth orbit. Its crater is 72 kilometers (45 miles) across, and its underlying plumbing contains several tens of thousands of cubic kilometers of magmatic material.

By the latest estimate, it would take several centuries for both sides of the Niagara Falls to fill up just its shallow chamber, let alone its far more voluminous deeper reservoir.

What would happen if much of this suddenly re-emerged in a horrific supervolcanic eruption? Who would live, who would die – and would the United States of America survive? We spoke to one of the country’s most respected volcanologists to get the most up-to-date low-down on the future of the world’s most famous supervolcano.

Tick Tock

Right now, the two-step magma chamber is in a state of dormancy. According to Yellowstone Volcano Observatory’s Scientist-In-Charge, Dr Michael Poland, it may not have enough energy at present to produce a supereruption. “Right now, much of Yellowstone’s magma body is partially solidified, and you need a lot of magma to feed a large eruption.”

Throughout most of its life, the region has featured extensive lava flows or (far more frequently) hydrothermal blasts, which suggests that any future eruption is far more likely to replicate this. Although these will cause a problem, they certainly won’t be anything apocalyptic – and even these eruption types are exceedingly rare.

The chances of a supervolcanic paroxysm are currently around one-in-730,000, which makes it less likely than a catastrophic asteroid impact.

However, a sudden injection of new magma from beneath, or a sudden weakening of the geological layers encasing it, as unlikely as this is, may be enough to trigger a sudden depressurization event, and the entire system would violently expunge onto the surface and up into the atmosphere.

What happens next is somewhat speculative, but Yellowstone’s frightening history gives us a clue. We’re thinking about the worst-case scenario here, so let’s assume its entire magmatic belly is emptied in a colossal supervolcanic explosion.

This has happened at Yellowstone three times on a cycle of 660,000-800,000 years: 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago, and 640,000 years ago.

The most explosive eruption was its first, which produced about 2,500 times the amount of volcanic material as the 1980 destruction of Mount St Helens. Even the most recent blast created an eruptive column so colossal that it coated about 60 percent of the contiguous United States in thick layers of ash.

So let’s say that the original record-holding blast was to happen again: What would happen to the United States and the wider world?

Zero Hour

It’s unclear how much warning organizations like the United States Geological Survey (USGS) would get, but shortly before the eruption happened, the ground around Yellowstone National Park would rise upwards somewhat. Hydrothermal system, including the geysers and geothermal pools, would rapidly heat to temperatures above boiling, and they’d likely become extremely acidic – more so than usual.

A swarm of earthquakes would be detected making their way towards a central point, indicating magma rising rapidly through the crust. Then, the roof rock would fail and the eruption would begin.

A vast column of ash and lava would shoot upward to heights of around 25 kilometers (16 miles). Sustained by both raw explosive energy and the release of heat through cooling lava blebs and bombs, it would sustain itself for days, pumping ash into jet streams that would transport it around the stratosphere.

When the eruptive column or parts of the column fail, enormous pyroclastic flows would blast their way across the park.

These mixtures of ash, lava blebs, and superheated gas exceed temperatures of 1,000°C (1,832°F) and can move at speeds of up to 482 kilometers per hour (about 300 miles per hour). If they hit anyone, they’d die within seconds; those nearby would be burned as the air heats up to around about 300°C (570°F).

Generally speaking, pyroclastic flows travel up to 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) out from their source, but they can theoretically reach up to 100 kilometers (62 miles).

This is basically the length of Yellowstone National Park, so if the vent emerged directly in the center, and the pyroclastic flows were particularly energetic, many in the park would die, either from the pyroclastic flows or the collapsing caldera roof itself.

On average, there’s about 11,000 visitors there at any one time, based on a yearly visitor count of 3.8 million. There are far more visitors in the summer months, so a summer eruption would be far more deadly.

When the pyroclastic flows and ash deposits settle and cool, they may seem harmless, but they’re not. If it rains heavily after the eruption, especially on any slopes, then these could mix with mud and turn into rapidly-moving, cement-like slurries called lahars. If you get stuck in one, there’s a good chance you’ll die.

Shadowy Skies

The most dangerous aspect of the eruption, however, is the ash fallout, both locally and globally.

Breathe this in and it’ll lacerate your lungs and form a glassy cement. It’s also about six times denser than water, which means plenty of architecture would collapse under its weight as it accumulates on rooftops. Poland points out that “even a few tens of centimeters of wet ash could cause weak buildings to buckle.”

Roads and sewer systems would clog and break down, water supplies would be contaminated, and electrical grids would short out. Millions of homes could become uninhabitable.

In this sense, those taking shelter in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming would be at the highest risk of harm. They would be so for up to a month, which is a fairly solid bet as to how long the eruption would ultimately be.

An area about 80 kilometers (50 miles) around the vent would be covered in 3 meters (about 10 feet) of ash in just a few days. Simulations have also shown that a supereruption could bury Salt Lake City and its surroundings beneath a meter (3.3 feet) of ash.

Assuming there’s no strongly prevailing winds, Denver would get about 30 centimeters (about a foot), whereas Calgary would get about 10 centimeters (3.9 inches). The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would help with the cleanup/relocation for many months or even years.

Elsewhere – say San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Chicago – would receive about 3 centimeters (1.2 inches). A fine layer would make it as far as Miami, New York, and Toronto within a few days, still enough to cause vehicles to break down and water to become unpotable.

Flights would be grounded or diverted away from the United States – at least for a few weeks – and it’s almost certain that the National Guard and perhaps the military would be drafted in to help evacuate many tens of millions of people from the affected region.

The death toll is extremely difficult to predict, but Poland suggest that “if people were present in the vicinity of the eruption – say, within a few tens to perhaps a few hundred kilometers – they would be in peril.”

Goodbye, Cruel World?

This is bad enough as it is, but worse is yet to come.

The ash’s injection into the stratosphere would cause it to darken the sky and cool regional, if not planetwide temperatures. If the eruption is particularly sulfur-rich – an efficient blocker of sunlight – then temperatures would plummet several degrees, to the point where the next few years will lack a summer.

“It’s likely there would be significant cooling for many years,” Poland explains. “But how long it would last, and how much cooling would occur, I can’t say. I’m not sure anyone can.”

If the far smaller but highly sulfur-rich eruption of Tambora back in 1815 is any example, a caldera-forming blast at Yellowstone would “alter global weather patterns and have enormous effects on human activity” for many years, according to the USGS.

The paths and timings of monsoons would change. Tropical cycle formation would become far more unpredictable for a while and the spread of waterborne-diseases could take highly erratic paths.

Agriculture would also suffer, which could severely disrupt food supplies. This would add to the overall economic damage, which would be severe: A recent estimate by FEMA of a Yellowstone supereruption put the total US damage at $3 trillion, about 16 percent of the nation’s total GDP. To put that in perspective, that’s $400 million more than was lost during the recent global recession.

The USGS is keen to point out that “scientists at this time do not have the predictive ability to determine specific consequences or durations of possible global impacts from such large eruptions.” Whatever happens, though, it won’t cause civilization to come crashing down.

“It would not mean the end of life on Earth,” Poland tells us. “In fact, this experiment has already been run, yet few people realize it.”

He points to the Toba eruption, one that occurred 74,000 years ago, and one that “was larger than anything that Yellowstone has ever produced.” Evidently, humanity survived that, and “they didn’t have the benefit of technology back then!”

Make no mistake though: Another full-on Yellowstone supereruption would be a devastating natural disaster, the type that would cost both livelihoods and lives. However, it cannot be emphasized enough that it’s extremely unlikely to happen in the near-future, if ever.

If it did, it wouldn’t be a civilization-ending event either. It would, however, be one that changes the world for the worse.
Spy agency NSA triples collection of U.S. phone records: official report

May 4, 2018

by Dustin Volz

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. National Security Agency collected 534 million records of phone calls and text messages of Americans last year, more than triple gathered in 2016, a U.S. intelligence agency report released on Friday said.

The sharp increase from 151 million occurred during the second full year of a new surveillance system established at the spy agency after U.S. lawmakers passed a law in 2015 that sought to limit its ability to collect such records in bulk.

The spike in collection of call records coincided with an increase reported on Friday across other surveillance methods, raising questions from some privacy advocates who are concerned about potential government overreach and intrusion into the lives of U.S. citizens.

The 2017 call records tally remained far less than an estimated billions of records collected per day under the NSA’s old bulk surveillance system, which was exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

The records collected by the NSA include the numbers and time of a call or text message, but not their content.

Overall increases in surveillance hauls were both mystifying and alarming coming years after Snowden’s leaks, privacy advocates said.

“The intelligence community’s transparency has yet to extend to explaining dramatic increases in their collection,” said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at the Washington-based Open Technology Institute that focuses on digital issues.

The government “has not altered the manner in which it uses its authority to obtain call detail records,” Timothy Barrett, a spokesman at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the annual report, said in a statement.

The NSA has found that a number of factors may influence the amount of records collected, Barrett said. These included the number of court-approved selection terms, which could be a phone number of someone who is potentially the subject of an investigation, or the amount of historical information retained by phone service providers, Barrett said.

“We expect this number to fluctuate from year to year,” he said.

U.S. intelligence officials have said the number of records collected would include multiple calls made to or from the same phone numbers and involved a level of duplication when obtaining the same record of a call from two different companies.

Friday’s report also showed a rise in the number of foreigners living outside the United States who were targeted under a warrantless internet surveillance program, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that Congress renewed earlier this year.

That figure increased to 129,080 in 2017 from 106,469 in 2016, the report said, and is up from 89,138 targets in 2013, or a cumulative rise over five years of about 45 percent.

U.S. intelligence agencies consider Section 702 a vital tool to protect national security but privacy advocates say the program incidentally collects an unknown number of communications belonging to Americans.

Reporting by Dustin Volz; editing by Grant McCool

 

 

Cambridge Analytica is dead – but its obscure network is alive and well

The company’s executives have formed a web of linked companies, suggesting its work will continue

May 5, 2018

by Wendy Siegelman

The Guardian

The announcement that Cambridge Analytica is shutting has a certain inevitability to it. Ever since 17 March 2018, when Carole Cadwalladr broke Christopher Wylie’s whistleblower story at the Observer and in the New York Times, there have been continuous revelations about Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL Group, and their brazen use – or misuse – of Facebook data and dirty tricks.

But given the complex business structure of SCL and Cambridge Analytica’s UK and US affiliates, there are reasons to question precisely what Wednesday’s announcement means. Already there are some suggestions that those associated with Cambridge Analytica may re-emerge in another form.

Are Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group attempting to evade recent negative coverage, only to re-form and continue their work as part of a new entity?

Damian Collins, the British MP who chairs the digital, culture, media and sport Committee that is investigating SCL and Cambridge Analytica, tweeted some words of caution on Wednesday after the news broke, noting that CA and SCL “cannot be allowed to delete their data history by closing”.

Certainly the news presents as many questions as answers.

Cambridge Analytica and SCL have at least 18 active companies, branches, and affiliates with similar names, based in the UK and the US. The complex relationship among these companies makes it very difficult to understand how revenues, employment, and data are shared. It almost seems as though the business structure was created to make it impossible to track decision-making and funding.

On Wednesday afternoon Cambridge Analytica issued a press release stating: “SCL Elections Ltd., as well as certain of its and Cambridge Analytica LLC’s U.K. affiliates (collectively, the ‘Company’ or ‘Cambridge Analytica’) filed applications to commence insolvency proceedings in the U.K.” It also stated that “parallel bankruptcy proceedings will soon be commenced on behalf of Cambridge Analytica LLC and certain of the Company’s U.S. affiliates in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.”

It is notable that Cambridge Analytica’s press release does not mention SCL Group Limited, SCL Social Ltd, or SCL Insight Ltd. Is it closing only some affiliates and leaving others open?

Shortly after the whistleblower story on Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data broke in March, the Cambridge Analytica CEO, Alexander Nix, was suspended and three US states opened investigations into Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. In the following weeks, current and past employees of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have testified in the UK, the US, Canada and other countries, and a US and UK class action lawsuit was filed against both companies in early April.

However, reporting on Cambridge Analytica – from Cadwalladr and others – had begun to appear in 2015 and 2016 and intensified throughout 2017. While Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group began to be the focus of more media scrutiny, in the background, company executives were quietly setting up a new company. Emerdata Limited was incorporated in August 2017 with SCL Group’s chairman, Julian Wheatland, and SCL’s chief data officer, Alexander Tayler, as original owners, but the company suddenly expanded with new directors and funding this year.

On 23 January 2018, four new directors were appointed to Emerdata, including Johnson Chun Shun Ko, who happens to be deputy chairman of Frontier Services Group. On the same day that Ko joined the board of Emerdata, shares were issued valued at £1,912,502. On 7 March 2018, Firecrest Technologies Limited was incorporated, with Alexander Nix listed briefly as director and then replaced by Alexander Tayler, and Emerdata listed as the owner. And on 16 March, a few days before the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower story broke, two more directors joined Emerdata, Jennifer and Rebekah Mercer.

There has been much reporting on how Robert and Rebekah Mercer have funded US political action committees (Pacs) that have paid Cambridge Analytica, but there had been little public evidence showing a current legal or business connection from the Mercers to Cambridge Analytica.

The business purpose of Emerdata is not known, beyond the general description of “data processing, hosting and related activities”. However, in a Channel 4 News report, the SCL Group founder, Nigel Oakes, said it was his understanding that Emerdata was set up to acquire all of Cambridge Analytica and SCL.

Emerdata did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent to several company directors.

The news Wednesday about the closure of Cambridge Analytica does not mention Emerdata or its subsidiary Firecrest Technologies. And just one day earlier, on Tuesday, the UK Companies House website posted an update on Emerdata, noting two pending filings, for “Resolution of removal of pre-emption rights” and “Resolution of allotment of securities”. The documents are being processed and will be available in five days. Perhaps these filings will show that the company is dissolving, or perhaps they will be the standard filings of an active company. All of the other UK SCL-related companies are still listed as active and have no pending filings.

The beleaguered Nix is still listed as an active director and shareholder of SCL Group and many of the related companies. Wednesday’s news is big, but it is not clear yet what it means, and whether SCL, Cambridge Analytica, Emerdata and the same executives who ran these companies during the Brexit campaign and US election will re-emerge in a new entity to continue their work.

 

Fresh earthquakes signal Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano to erupt again

Two more earthquakes have forced fresh bursts of lava and ash from the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. Thousands of people have been ordered to leave the area due to the ongoing seismic activity.

May 5, 2018

DW

Hawaii’s Big Island was on high alert Saturday after a series of earthquakes prompted a further eruption of the Kilauea volcano, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate.

A magnitude 6.9 remor was reported Friday at 12.32 p.m. local time (22.32 UTC), about an hour after one measuring 5.4 hit the island. The second tremor was centered near the southern flank of the volcano, authorities said.

The National Guard said there were no immediate reports of injuries from the latest seismic activity.

The fresh tremors follow a 5.0 magnitude quake on Thursday, along with dozens of aftershocks that rattled the island.

Kilauea springs to life

The eruption of Kilauea — one of five active volcanos on the island — first began late afternoon local time on Thursday, spewing molten lava and releasing noxious steam into nearby residential areas.

Some 1,700 residents at Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens had to be evacuated; other residents in the Puna district were also asked to leave their homes.

In total, around 10,000 people were affected and several homes were destroyed. Hawaii’s Civil Defense Agency said two emergency shelters were open for evacuees.

Hawaii’s governor, David Ige, activated the Hawaii National Guard to help the official response, writing on Twitter: “Please be alert and prepare now to keep your family safe.”

‘Curtain of fire’

A drone video captured by resident resident Jeremiah Osuna  showed lava inching its way through Puna. Speaking on Honolulu television station KOHN, he called it a “curtain of fire.”

“It sounded like if you were to put a bunch of rocks into a dryer and turn it on as high as you could,” he said.

The combined tremors have prompted four active volcanic fissures to open up over the past day or so.

Big Island resident Janice Wei told the AFP news agency she felt “a big shake underneath my feet,” and then said immediately afterwards, she saw a giant pink plume of smoke.

The eruption follows days of seismic activity in Puna. A nearby school was closed due to the ongoing tremors, including a 5.0 quake on Thursday morning. Several roads have cracked under the strain of the repeated tremors.

Kilauea Volcano has been erupting almost continuously for more than three decades and is one of the most active volcanoes in the world.