KIDNAPPING GEORGE WASHINGTON

I am thankful that William Tyron, the Royal Governor of New York, was a little too sure of himself. Although American  “patriots” had chased Tyron out of town, he was still lurking, like a spider, a few hundred yards off shore, spinning his loyalist webs aboard the 74 gun “HMS Dutchess of Gordon”. Each day the sailors and royal marines from the "Dutchess" and the two other Royal Navy ships in the harbor, would row to shore for fresh water, to buy food, to even have their shoes repaired and to exchange communications with the loyalist mayor, David Mathews and his many agents. Perhaps, too many agents.

New York City in 1776 was a crowded town of 25,000 at the very southern tip of Manhattan. Tyron’s web of spies was strung between the city’s many taverns; “The Highlander” at Beaver Street and Broadway, “The Sergeant At Arms” run by conspirator Alexander Sinclair, and most significantly “The Corbie”, near Spring and Wooster Streets, which was just a few yards southwest of General Washington’s isolated headquarters on Richmond Hill. At his own establishment on Broadway - “The Sign of the Sportsman” - gunsmith Gilbert Forbes, “a short thick man”, waited patiently to buy ale for weary Continental soldiers and listen to their complaints. And in exchange for five gold guineas, he swore them in as members of the Governor’s conspiracy. It was Forbes who first swore in eighteen year old Sergeant Thomas Hickey, a member of General Washington’s personal guards.The 180 officers and men of the Life Guards were as formed on March 11, 1776 out of the regiments laying siege to Boston, as a personal guard for General Washington and his baggage. Washington’s orders called for “…good men, such as they can be recommended for their sobriety, honesty and good behavior " They were also handsome and "well made”We know that Sergeant Hickey was a “black Irishman” who must have been very handsome because he was neither sober nor honest. He had deserted from the British Army, and had for some years lived in Wethersfield, Connecticut. And we know he was a man who wanted money. Hickey claimed he got involved with the conspiracy only “…for the sake of cheating the Tories and getting some money from them”. We also know that Forbes put Hickey on an allowance of 15 shillings a week. We know that Hickey brought with him into the conspiracy four other members of the Life Guards, and that he was paid a bounty for bringing them each into the conspiracy. And we know that on June 15th Hickey and Private Lynch were both arrested for passing counterfeit continental dollars.To finance the revolution two million Continental Dollars were printed on thick rag paper by Hall and Sellers of Philadelphia. And immediately counterfeiters began copying the sad little notes. An advertisement in the journal “Rvington’s Gazette” openly promised, “Persons going into other colonies may be supplied with any number of counterfeit Congress notes ….They are so neatly and exactly executed…it being almost impossible to discover that they are not genuine”. Once locked in the crowded three-story city jail, Hickey was warmly greeted by his fellow inmates.One of those inmates was a professional counterfeiter, Isaac Ketcham, and he appealed to the patriot colonial council to release him in the name of his “six poor children”. And in case that did not work he added he had “…something to observe…entirely on another subject.” In private Ketcham told the council that he had heard Hickey’s drunken boasts (liquor seems to have been in ample supply in the jail) that “…there were near seven hundred soldiers and civilians enlisted for the King" . Ketcham insisted Hickey said he "would he never again fight for the American cause.”

Washington could now compare Ketcham’s story with the warning from businessman William Leary, that one of his employees, James Mason, had boasted about the same loyalist plot. And there was also a warning from William Collier, a waiter at The Corbie. Putting all these sources together, Governor Tyron’s plan was clear.

Just before the British Army was to land on Long Island, loyalists would blow up or capture the Kingsbridge over the Harlem River at the far end of Manhattan Island, 13 miles north of the city. This would sever the only land connection into New York and trap the Continental Army. In addition Loyalists militias were to screen the British landings. And most dastardly of all, Mayor Mathews later told a Royal Commission, “I formed a plan for the taking of Mr. Washington and his Guard, prisoners…”At one in the morning of Saturday, June 22nd colonial troops surrounded Mayor Mathew’s house in Flatbush near the village of Brooklyn on Long Island. Mathews was arrested, and over the next several hours hundreds of other loyalist conspirators were taken into custody. On the 27th Sergeant Hickey faced a court martial and was quickly found guilty and condemned to death.

At eleven o’clock the following morning, June 28th, a crying Hickey was marched to the scaffold with a clergyman at his side. As the clergyman stepped away Hickey, “With an indignant, scornful air” wiped away his tears and “...assumed a confident look.” He muttered that one of the witnesses against him should be the next to hang. The blindfold was tied over his eyes, and Thomas Hickey then slowly chocked to death at the end of a rope in front of 20,000 spectators.The very next day, July 29th, four new British warships dropped anchor in New York harbor. They were the vanguard of 130 ships carrying 34,000 troops which would arrive over the next week. In the face of that fleet the patriots of New York might have been more willing to listen to the siren song of Governor Tyron. But he had recruited too many agents too quickly. There were too many rumors swamping the city. And General Washington was too competent not to have paid attention to them. And in that the citizens of the young nation (the Declaration of Independence would not be voted on for another week) were very fortunate.

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VICKSBURG Fourth Week in May

FRIDAY MAY 22, 1863

Since midnight, the 220 artillery pieces in Grant's arsenal have been bombarding the Vicksburg land defences, joined by Union gunboats in the river. The barrage continues for four hours after dawn. At 10:00 am the Union infantry advances along a three mile front. Along Graveyard Road, the assault is led by 150 volunteers who have nicknamed themselves "The Forlorn Hope". They carry scaling ladders and planks to lay over the wire entanglements at the bottom of the revine. But "The Forelorn Hope" is driven back under heavy fire, as are the assaults all along the line. By 11:00 am Generals Sherman and McPherson are convinced the attacks are useless, and Grant is inclined to agree.

Just then a messenger arrives from General McClerand, commanding on the left. He requests another division in reinforcement and hints that he has captured two forts. Grant demurs, telling McClerand to use his own reserves. But both Sherman and McPherson now launch additional assaults, to support McClerand's troops.

In truth, McClerand has captured no Rebel forts, and by 5:00 pm, all the assaults are called off. Union causalities are 502 dead, 2,500 wounded and 147 missing. Confederate General Pemberton has lost less than 500 men, in total. And Rebel moral has been substantially restored. Vicksburg is never going to fall to assault. And Grant has yet another reason to want to be rid of McClerand.

SATURDAY MAY 23, 1863

It is exactly three weeks since Grant's 42,000 man army crossed the Mississippi and began its march on Vicksburg. At no time did Federal troops have more than a 2,000 man advantage over the Confederate forces in total, and yet at each individual engagement Grant held a substantial battle field advantage - At Port Gibson, Grant had 20,000 men, General Bowen, less than 5,000 - At Raymond led Grant 12,000, Gregg 4,100 – At Jackson, Grant commanded 38,000, Johnston, 5,000 – At Champion's Hill, Grant led 32,000 men, Pemberton just 22,000 – And at the battle of the Big Black River, Grant commanded 32,000 men while Bowen led just 5,000. He had always been victorious because of his remorseless drive to a single objective.

In far off Washington, General Hallack decides to reinforce success. Just a week before he was seeking to sidetrack Grant to Bank's command at Port Hudson. But now Washington is sending Grant every man it can, bringing his force, by the end of the campaign, to 77,000 men. And it is Banks who has been regulated to a sideshow.

Also this day, the Illustrated London News discusses a deputation of English Labor Union members who the day before had visited the American Ambassador, to express their belief that “the cause of the North to be the cause of freedom, that they wished for the success of Mr. Lincoln's armies...”. The News was skeptical, but hastened to add, “We are not going to interfere for the South....we encourage no breaking of the (Union) blockade...” With each passing day it becomes less likely that any foreign nation will recognize the slave state Confederacy.

SUNDAY MAY 24, 1863

Yesterday evening, along Grant's Mississippi River supply line, just south of the Tennessee border and near the riverfront village of Austin, Mississippi, Confederate sharpshooters fired on a supply boat, killing able Seaman Philip Dalton. Angered by that attack, this morning Brigadier General A.W. Ellet lands his forces and is drawn into a fruitless two hour battle eight miles outside of Austin with the 2^nd Arkansas Cavalry. The Rebels eventually withdraw.  Believing Confederate agents in the town have been bringing in weapons and ammunition from across the river (which they probably have), Elliot orders the town burned to the ground.  It is an act of terrorism (as was the sniper shot) and a warning to all Rebel sympathizers.

MONDAY MAY 25, 1863

Grant issues Special Order Number 140, instructing “"Corps Commanders will immediately commence the work of reducing the enemy by regular approaches (siege). It is desirable that no more loss of life shall be sustained in the reduction of Vicksburg, and the capture of the garrison. Every advantage will be taken of the natural inequalities of the ground to gain positions from which to start mines, trenches, or advance batteries." 

Also on this day, whiskered U.S. Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles (center - to Lincoln's right) notes in his diary that an argument over the fugitive slave act broke out in a cabinet meeting between Postmaster General Francis Blair (to Welles' right, a slave owner) and Salomon Chase (to Lincoln's left, a Radical Republican), the Secretary of the Treasury. President Lincoln finally intervened, to tell one of his stories, about a man from Illinois “who was in debt and terribly annoyed by a pressing creditor, until finally the debtor (pretended) to be crazy whenever the creditor broached the subject. “I,” said the President, “have on more than one occasion, in this room, when beset by extremists on this question, been compelled to appear to be very mad." He continued, ” I think none of you will ever dispose of this subject without getting mad.”  Three years into the war and there were still leaders in the north who favored returning escaped slaves to their masters in the borders states, Slavery as an institution was not yet dead.  

TUESDAY MAY 26, 1863

Today, General Frank Blair, son of the Postmaster General Blair, leads his division from Sherman's corps out of the siege lines. His orders are to destroy the supplies Confederates are collecting at Mechanicsburg, Mississippi, intended for General Johnston's troops still in Jackson, Mississippi. General Blair will be gone a week, during which time, while dueling with Wirt Adam's cavalry, he will burn 500,000 bushels of corn, and the grist mill used to grind it, and capture 1,000 head of cattle, 300 mules and 40 bales of cotton  He will also bring back “negroes, equal to my own command”. Thanks to this raid, no matter how many men General Johnston is able to gather, he will not be able to advance from his lines around Jackson until he has replaced those supplies. There will be no relief for Vicksburg from Jackson, Mississippi.

WEDNESDAY MAY 27, 1863

This morning, General Banks launches his 13,000 man army against the defenses of Port Hudson. The attacks are uncoordinated and are easily thrown back. Among the attacking units are the 1^st and 3^rd Louisiana Native Guards, the first black Americans to officially wear Union Blue. Union casualties are 1,995, while the Confederates lose just 235.  General Banks will not be rushing to replace Grant anytime soon.

THURSDAY, MAY 28, 1863

After the overnight cloud burst a week earlier, the drought in Mississippi has returned with a vengeance. In Vicksburg this is already creating concern. The city has no wells. It has always drawn water from the numerous streams and rivulets that cut through the bluffs to the Mississippi River. General Pemberton has almost unlimited weapons and ammunition, collected here to supply the entire Confederacy. But he is short of food, and already rationing water. To escape the almost constant Federal bombardment, citizens of Vicksburg begin to dig in the cliffs to protect themselves. All hope in Vicksburg now rest on General Johnston in Jackson. In fact, that hope is already dead.

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SPEAK NO EVIL

I have absolutely no sympathy for Anthony Comstock, a man described by a biographer as having “no conspicuous talents and...boundless energy”.   His brother's death from wounds suffered in the three days of slaughter at Gettysburg, compelled Anthony to join the Union Army. But chance sent the Connecticut farm boy far from the crucial battles around Richmond, and he spent a year of isolation and boredom guarding the backwaters of St. Augustine, Florida. Most of his fellow soldiers considered him a bible thumping prig, who instead of simply refusing it, pompously poured his daily whiskey ration out on the ground. And the great lesson this “religio-monomaniac” took from the war that ended slavery, was that his fellow soldiers were addicted to pornography.

By 1861 there were almost 3,000 photographers in Paris, and 200 schools teaching the skill in London. And from day one, a significant percentage of these technicians found taking “dirty pictures” very profitable. Shortly after Gettysburg, another smug priss, General Marsena Patrick, had boasted in his diary of “burning up a large quantity of obscene books, taken from the mails.” And it wasn't just pocket editions of “Fanny Hill”, and the “Libertine Enchantress” that he burned. There were also the “barrack favorites”, the “carte de visite” french postcards – nude photos of women, which went for twelve cents each, and “London and Paris Volupuarties” engaged in actual sex, for $3 a dozen ($9 for stereoscopic views). Comstock found himself drawn to these “deadly poisons” - as he called them - “cast into the fountain of moral purity.”

By 1868 the muscular Comstock was a menial worker in New York City, making $12 a week as a porter for a dry goods store. He was a man "devoid of humor, lustful after publicity, and vastly ignorant “ who, by his own admission, spent many lonely evenings fearing “for the souls of the young men” who roomed with him. He joined the Young Men's Christian Association, and became convinced he faced “some of the most insidious and deadly forces of evil” in America. A nation racked by continued violence inspired by four bloody years of war saw pornography as a low priority. But Comstock did not share that opinion.

He quickly attracted the attention of the President of the WMCA, Morris K. Jessup, who had made his fortune as a banker for railroad tycoons. Jessup interviewed Comstock in his Madison Avenue mansion and liked what he saw. They made an unlikely pair. Jessup stood over six feet tall, and was a philanthropist to many causes. Comstock was short and brutally single minded. But for forty years Jessup was supportive of Comstock, with money and political influence, even creating the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice for the Christian warrior, when others in the WMCA questioned his tactics. (It is interesting to note that of all the social reform movements of the late 19^th century, the Comstock's “Society” was the only one with no women in positions of authority.)Comstock would admit in his diary, “ Only one man thinks as I do and that is Mr. Jessup.”

With Jessup's support Comstock successfully lobbied congress for the Comstock Law, the last act of a lame duck congress on March 3, 1873, which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material through the mail. Comstock included in that definition of lascivious was anything pertaining to birth control or preventing venereal disease. In Comstock's view, “God has set certain natural barriers. If you turn loose the passions and break down the fear (of unwanted pregnancies or disease) you bring . . . disaster.” His first year the new Special Inspector, always dressed in his black frock, traveled 23, 000 miles on a free rail pass, looking for sin in America. And luckily, since his job depended on it, he found it everywhere, and 24 states passed their own versions, collectively called the Little Comstock Laws.

In 1872 Comstock won national attention when he went after Victoria Woodhull (above). She was no common pornographer, but a feminist who had run her own Wall Street brokerage firm and her “Weekly” newspaper -  in which Victoria argued,”When woman rises... into the ownership and control of her sexual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom...then will woman be raised” To highlight the hypocrisy of men making decisions about birth control, the “Weekly” published details of an extramarital affair by one of her critics, popular Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Breecher. The same day the article appeared, Victoria, her husband and her sister were all arrested. Reporting the affair, said Comstock, was spreading obscenity. Comstock's belligerent theatrics in the court room so offended some members of the jury, they hung. Still, the trial only increased the popularity of both Comstock and Breecher.

Comstock claimed he convicted 3,500 people of distribution of pornography and destroyed 15 tons of obscene books, including medical text books that displayed female anatomy charts or mentioned abortion. To Comstock, woman’s health was far less important than their moral purity. He also burned novels written by D.H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser. Comstock even tried to close down a play by George Bernard Shaw, whom he called an “Irish smut dealer”. Of the first twelve people convicted of violating the Federal Comstock law, 5 were pardoned by President Ulysses Grant, who had signed the law. And of the 105 people arrested for violating Comstock's federal anti-birth control campaign, all but 16 were found not guilty. In state courts Comstock fared much better.

He saw himself as “the weeder in God's garden”, but his critics saw him as “a first class Torquemada” and chief of America's “moral eunuchs.” In 1877 Comstock went after Massachusetts social activist Ezra Heywood for publishing a pamphlet about marriage called “Cupid’s Yokes”. The judge told the jury the pamphlet was too offensive to allow them to read it, and they sentenced Heywood to two years at hard labor in the Dedham jail. Six months later President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Heywood, but Comstock saw that as a challenge. He now persecuted Heywood, having him arrested four more times, once for reprinting two poems by Walt Whitman, and again for discussing a contraceptive device called the “Comstock syringe” . By the fourth arrest the sixty year old Heywood was broke and emotionally exhausted, and was convicted and sentenced to another two years of hard labor. This time there was no pardon. A year after he was released in 1892, Heywood died of tuberculosis he had contracted in jail. Comstock had won again.

Comstock boasted he had driven 15 people to suicide. His most famous victim was Ida Craddock, a free spirit and writer of fact based guides like “The Marriage Night” and “Right Marital Living”. After pleading guilty and receiving a suspended sentence in 1899, for to violating Illinois' Little Comstock Law, she was arrested under New York's version in 1892 and suffered three months in a workhouse. As she left that jail Comstock had her arrested again on Federal charges for the same offense. This time she was sentenced to five years at hard labor. And Comstock let her know, that as soon as she served that term, he intended on arresting her again.

The night before she was to enter prison, Ida Craddock put her head in the oven, turned on the gas jets, and then slit her wrists. In her public suicide note, Ida blamed her death on “This man, Anthony Comstock,...(who is) unctuous with hypocrisy...if the reading of impure books and the gazing upon impure pictures does debauch and corrupt and pervert the mind...(and) Anthony Comstock has himself read perhaps more obscene books, and has gazed upon perhaps more lewd pictures than has any other one man in the United States, what are we to think of the probable state of Mr. Comstock's imagination? ...The man is a sex pervert; he is what physicians term a Sadist...for nine long years I have faced social ostracism, poverty, and the dangers of persecution by Anthony Comstock..I beg of you, for your own sakes, and for the future happiness of the young people who are dear to you, to protect my little book...” Comstock insisted that her death was one of his proudest moments.

It was not Comstock's bullying, but his lack of self awareness that gradually weakened his grip on public morals. The final breaking point came in 1913 when Harry Reichenbach besieged Comstock with complaints about the Braun and Company gallery on west 46^th street in Manhattan. The prig-in-chief found the sidewalk in front crowded with young men snickering and praising the beauty of painting of a nude woman in the front window. Comstock stormed into the gallery and ordered the painting removed. The clerk, James Kelly, stammered, “But that is the famous “September Morn” by Paul Chabas”(above).  The work was famous, having won a medal of honor from the French academy of Painting just the year before. Undaunted, Comstock replied, “There is too little morning and too much maid”, and threatened to arrest the gallery owner, Philippe Ortiz if the painting was not removed.

Defiantly, Mr. Ortiz kept the painting in his gallery's front window for another two weeks, removing it only after the crowds jamming his studio had bought out every print of it. Twenty years later in his memoir, “Phantom Fame”, Reichenbach admitted he had staged the entire thing, including hiring the young men to ogle the painting, as a publicity stunt for the gallery. Comstock, who was not in on the joke, had behaved as boorishly and brutally as expected.

Comstock died suddenly on the evening of September 21, 1915. His monument was that during World War One the United States was the only nation not to supply its soldiers with prophylactics.. As a result the American Army and Navy discharged 10,000 men who had become infected with untreatable sexually transmitted diseases, the largest single cause of causalities during the war. It would be another 18 years before birth control could be openly purchased in the United States. Echos of Anthony Comstock's warmed vision could be heard as far away as the election of 2012, a century after his death.. It seems that every prig like him is convinced they are the savior of civilization. And yet none of them ever prove to be.

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TIME PIECE

I am assured by fundamentalist Christians that six thousand years ago God created the world in six days. Of course, six thousand years ago a day was about the shortest period of time humans could measure accurately. And the mystical number six is also the number of sides to the electromagnetic spaces that give cell phones their name. Within each 10 square mile cell surrounding every tower, 832 separate frequencies are used, two frequencies for every individual phone conversation. For the last half century the preferred method for defining these frequencies, the time between each electromagnetic wave crest, has been to hit a ball of 10 million pure cesium atoms with a microwave beam. The cesium then produces one energy wave crest 9 billion, 192 million, 631 thousand 770 times every second and will maintain that exact frequency, it is estimated, for about 20 million years. And 20 million beats 6 thousand any day of the week.

The only problem is that pure cesium is rare. The metal is so it eager to combine with oxygen that on contact it instantly steals water's two oxygen atoms, thereby generating enough heat to visibly explode the now free hydrogen atom like a mini-Hindenburg. Given a little time cesium will even dissolve glass to steal its oxygen. Cesium is only stable in nature in a rare rock called Pegmatite (above), and 82 % of all the cesium rich Pegmatite known to exist on earth has been found in one place, beneath a single narrow lake along the Bird River in Manitoba, Canada, a land unknown in 1656, to the Archbishop of Ireland.

In retrospect the Irish primate James Ussher (above) seems an unlikely source for 300 years of dogmatic intellectual stagnation. In life he was a purveyor of political compromises. Ussher's “Annales veteris testamenti” (Annals of the Old Testament), published in 1650, displayed his love of dusty manuscripts, esoteric minutiae and ancient languages. As an academic it was his judgment the world began after sunset on Sunday 23 October, 4004 B.C. He was using the best evidence available at the time, and disagreed about the date for creation with the Oxford mathematician Sir Isaac Newton by just four years.

Bernic Lake is about 60 miles northeast of Winnipeg, just beyond the western edge of the Canadian Shield. But on this spot two and a half billion years ago, Precambrian rains fell upon sterile volcanic basalt of the shield, chemically altering and eroding the rock into the world wide ocean, laying down oxygen poor sediments called Greenstone belts. These belts were buried and heated, compressed and folded at least three times, beginning two billion years ago with the advent of plate tectonics, until eventually batholiths of a new rock, granite, rose and (above) intruded the Greenstrones at depth. And at one batholith, about 15 miles due west of today's small community of Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, cracks in the Greenstone were injected with chemically rich waters from the granite, concentrating a potpourri of rare earth metals, lithium, beryllium, tantalum and cesium.

Sir Isaac Newton's modern fame is that of the discoverer of gravity, the inventor of calculus and optics and his three Laws of Motion. When praised by his contemporaries Newton explained he stood on the shoulders of geniuses. But the great economist John Maynard Keynes also called him “the last of the magicians.” Newton devoted most of his time and effort to alchemy, and his search for the Philosopher's Stone, which would magically turn lead into gold. Newton was no more a fool, than Bishop Ussher. But both of men were of their age, and they lacked the technology to more precisely measure the world.

The Bird River flows through the largest remaining, seemingly eternal, boreal forest on earth. It is an awe inspiring terrain, but capable of supporting only two humans per square mile. Since 1929 some 60 families in Lac du Bonnet have depended upon the Cabot Corporation's Tanco mine (above) to earn a living. Since the middle of the 1990's, each year's 30,000 kilograms of cesium extracted from the great rock rooms beneath Bernic Lake, have been destined to lubricate and cool oil drilling equipment world wide, in the form of caesium formate. The tiny fraction used in atomic clocks would never economically justify keeping the mine open. But there is enough profitable cesium under Bernic Lake to last another ten years. If the mine does not swallow the lake first.

At room temperature a single atom of cesium has 55 electrons in six orbits around its nucleus - two in the first level, eight in the second, eighteen in both the third and fourth, eight in the fifth and a lone single electron on the outside or valance level. It is the valance electron that emits energy at a specific frequency when excited by microwaves, as was first predicted in 1945 by Professor Isidor Rabi from Columbia University. With all due respect to Professor Rabi, he was not smarter than Newton, but as Newton put it, Rabbi was standing on Newton's shoulders. Seven years later the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) built the first cesium atomic clock. They kept perfecting and miniaturizing the design until about 1968, when they established the highest standard of measurement - until recently

Until 1989 cesium sold for less than $5 a gram (above). Then came the invention of cesium formate, a slurry that was liquid enough to lubricate drilling bits, and heavy enough improve drill efficiency and to carry rock back up the bore hole, while enduring the temperatures and pressures found thousands of feet underground. By 1998 the price of 99% pure cesium was over $60 a gram. It was then that Cabot decided to maximize profits by extracting even the ore holding the up the roof of their mine. They shaved away the pillars supporting the ceiling, from 50 feet in diameter to just 25. In 2012 the price of cesium was $70.60 a gram. Then, in 2013, Cabot admitted that over the past three years at least a ton of rock had fallen into their mine because “The crown pillar...is unstable and requires immediate action”.

The accuracy of cesium clocks is now the limiting factor in available cell phone channels, the accuracy of Global Positioning systems, higher precision and versatility in the electrical grid and better science in every field. So in the new generation of clocks, the NIST-F2, introduced on 3 April 2014, the chamber containing the cesium ball is chilled to minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit (-193 ºC). This does not change the frequency of the cesium, but it eliminates much of the “noise” of all the other atoms in the chamber, so the call of that single valance election can be more clearly heard and more closely defined. Instead of losing a second every 20 million years, the NIST-F2 loses a second every 300 million years. With this the internet will get faster, cell phones will get more versatile and dependable and there will be more profit and better lives for every living human on earth.

Bernic Lake (above) will drown Cabot's golden goose and the world's primary source of cesium within three years,  unless something is done. Cabot's solution is to bulldoze a new road through the virgin forest, build dikes across the lake, and “de-water” the now isolated section over their mine. In Cabot's opinion, this provides “an optimal solution, in that it eliminates the immediate risk of flooding, minimizes the long-term footprint of the project, and upholds Cabot’s corporate commitment to being responsive, responsible and respected citizens...”. It will also keep oil pouring into pipelines around the world, and profits pouring into the pockets of Cabot directors and majority stockholders. It will continue to pour $28 million a year into the Lac du Bonnet economy, and save 150 jobs in Manitoba. It will also provide cesium for new NIST-F2 clocks world wide. And it may kill the three mile long Bernic Lake, and poison the Bird River, the Winnipeg River and Lake Winnipeg which all those sources pour into.

About six thousand years ago a Sumerian Michelangelo crafted an 8 foot long, 3 foot wide copper tribute to his God, the powerful lion headed eagle Imdugud (above). Copper was a new medium six thousand years ago. The metal has two electrons in its first orbit, eight in the second, eighteen in the third, and like cesium, a single electron in the valance level. But unlike cesium, when exposed to oxygen and moisture, copper only slowly forms a layer of green verdigris, or copper carbonate, which then shields the underlying metal from further corrosion. 

The Imdugud frieze, found in the ancient city of al' Urbaid, has been dated using carbon 14 techniques, which uses the science developed by Newton and extended by Professor Isidor Rab. The science of chemistry and metallurgy tells us the ore for the frieze came from mines in present day Iran, mines whose tailings and waste rocks were scavenged for copper not long after Bishop Ussher's birth date for the universe. Perhaps the ore was carried to Ubaid in a ship powered by a sail, an invention which also made its first appearance about 6,000 years ago, as dated from the images painted on pottery, an unbroken line of which can be followed style change by style change, over the last six thousand years.

In the past Christianity has denied that atoms decayed, that sunlight could be split into a spectrum, that the sun was at the center of the solar system, that anything existed before sunset Sunday, 23 October, 4004 B.C. None of those contentions proved or disproved the existence of God. And eventually each, and a thousand others, were discarded, without destroying the faith of the faithful. Only insisting that ignorance is truth, that hypocrisy is devotion, taking his name in vain and by mistaking your will for God's will threatens the existence of God..

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