Crescent Observation Predictions For Shawwal 1433 AH (2012 AD)

Long time, no see! I have just returned from the moon with some great news. Read on.

Another Eid al-Fitr is around the corner and so is lunar confusion. But need one confuse things given the very clear scientific data below? Beware: no amount of science can cover the flaws of human observation, cloudy weather or extreme geographical locations.

I have provided the crescent visibility curves and data for Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), Peshawar (Pakistan) which seems to blindly follow the distant Saudi horizon to falsely report crescent sightings, Karachi, then Lahore and finally those of London. You can easily see from the coloured legend (bottom right hand side) if your country falls within one of the visibility curves on a given date.

Shawwal 1433 AH crescent at sunset on 19 August, 2012 (bright curve shows DAY)

Finally, I have provided realistic representations of where the sun and the moon will be on 17, 18 and the 19 August, 2012 (Shawwal, 1433 Hijrah). The horizontal line, with compass degrees marked on it, represents the horizon.

The lunar calendar will always remain a necessity for determining occasions such as Ramadan, Hajj (pilgrimage at Makkah) and the two Eid festivals. At this time, we need not dive into an oily kingdom’s preference for unsettled crescent observation criteria. The onus of responsibility clearly falls on those who falsely report crescent sightings or support outright liars. This institutional wrong means that Muslims could end up starting the holy month of Ramadan (fasting) and celebrating Eid on the wrong dates.

The idea behind writing about lunar astronomy is to help one look with precision at the sky. Astronomy must be studied by each Muslim, as was done during the zenith of Muslim rule, to appreciate the inner workings of God's System. Observation matters need not be left to the experts; even novices can enjoy watching the sky in order to fulfil God’s Will and the sunnah (practices of Prophet Muhammad, peace on him).

A simultaneous global sighting of the crescent is an astronomical impossibility due to the moon’s eccentric rotation and orbital behaviour. Hence, celebrating Eid on a single day across a huge land mass (USA, China, India) is not a religious requirement but rather a new age idea propounded by the religious globalists. It has now become a fitna (trial, tribulation), frequently leading to disagreements and discord; please ignore this effort designed to divide Muslims further on non-issues.

A few important points need to be borne in mind this time:

1. The birth of the new moon (conjunction) will take place on 17 August 2012 at 15:54 UTC (20:54 Pakistan Standard Time).
2. Moonset will occur 00:27 minutes before sunset.
3. The Shawwal crescent will be born 02:35 hours after sunset (at 15:54 UTC). Hence, it will be invisible on some parts of the globe until maybe the next evening (18 August).
4. A 'fat' crescent will be clearly seen on the evening of 19 August. Therefore, in Pakistan Eid al-Fitr will fall on Monday, 20 August 2012—unless the Riyals will it otherwise.

I thank Allah and remain indebted to my astronomer friends whose accurate predictive software programmes and research have lit up my path of lunar astronomy.

I welcome your questions and comments on this important subject, and hope that you will attempt to not only understand what I have provided here but also help others understand matters for their own good.

Once you wish to be guided by taking a few essential steps in the direction, Allah's Promise will come true: you will be protected and guided.

They will ask thee about the new moons. Say: "They indicate the periods for [various doings of] mankind, including the pilgrimage." (Qur’an 2:189)

Have a lovely Eid al-Fitr!

 

Jeddah, SAUDI ARABIA (Saturday 18 August, 2012)

Sunset:  18:51 LT

Moonset: 19:13 LT

Moon Age:   +23H 57M

Moon Lag Time: +00H 22M

Moon Altitude: +05°:04':23"

Moon Azimuth: +271°:59':17"

Distance: 378,126.87 Km

Crescent Visibility: Visible with optical aid only (hence, Eid on 19 August)

***

Peshawar, PAKISTAN (Saturday 18 August 2012)

Sunset: 19:01 LT

Moonset: 19:08 LT

Moon Age: +22H 06M

Moon Lag Time: +00H 08M

Moon Altitude: 00°:58':11"

Moon Azimuth: +274°:15':58"

Distance: 378,388.95 Km

Crescent Visibility: Not visible even with optical aid (but then who knows!)

***

Karachi, Pakistan (18 August, 2012)

Sunset: 19:03 LT

Moonset: 19:19 LT

Moon Age: +22H 09M

Moon Lag Time: +00H 16M

Moon Altitude: +03°:44':30"

Moon Azimuth: +272°:45':21"

Distance: 378,383.59 Km

Crescent Visibility: The Crescent Visibility is: Not Visible Even With Optical Aid.

***

Lahore, PAKISTAN (Friday 17 August 2012)

Sunset:  18:46 LT

Moonset: 18:19 LT

Moon Age:  -02H 08M

Moon Lag Time: -00H 27M

Moon Altitude: -05°:55':22"

Moon Azimuth: +284°:11':07"

Distance: 382,142.78 Km

Crescent Visibility: Not visible even with optical aid (because the moon sets before the sun, and the conjunction occurs after sunset).

Lahore, PAKISTAN (Saturday 18 August, 2012)

Sunset: 18:45 LT             

Moonset: 18:55 LT

Moon Age: +21H 51M

Moon Lag Time: +00H 10M

Moon Altitude: +01°:40':25"

Moon Azimuth: +273°:49':20"

Distance: 378,426.83 Km

Crescent Visibility: Not Visible Even With Optical Aid.

Lahore, PAKISTAN (Sunday 19 August, 2012)

Sunset: 18:44 LT

Moonset: 19:31 LT

Moon Age: +45H 49M

Moon Lag Time: +00H 47M

Moon Altitude: +09°:20':35"

Moon Azimuth: +263°:10':20"

Distance: 375,307.79 Km

Crescent Visibility: Easily visible by naked eye.

London, United kingdom (Sunday 19 August, 2012)

Sunset: 20:16 LT

Moonset: 20:29 LT

Moon Age:  +51H 21M

Moon Lag Time: +00H 14M

Moon Altitude: +02°:00':56"

Moon Azimuth: +264°:11':57"

Distance: 374,685.52 Km

Crescent Visibility: Visible with optical aid (could be seen by naked eye).

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2012

Speechless Freedom Of Speech

I like the industrious Japanese because I grew up owning most things ‘Made in Japan’, and now in this ‘Land of the Pure’ we are beginning to copy the copycats by proudly inscribing on local products ‘Made AS Japan’. This is great progress.

If you recall reading Kiss Of The Unveiled Spider-Woman which was about the Japanese invention of a Kiss Machine, you will discover in this piece how the blind Pied Piper of science is leading all the racing rats into a bottomless pit.

A still tongue makes a wise head

Out of pure love for freedom of speech, two Japanese men have developed a strange portable gun (‘SpeechJammer’) that can painlessly silence people more than thirty meters away.

‘Fear the tongue more than you would the sword’, so they say. Considering that the plethora of television channels, endless chatter of mobile phones, and Draconian revisions to the constitution are weapons known to weaken human resolve, the inhuman elites now have one more gun in their common arsenal with which to shoot down a citizen’s ability to launch verbal attacks.

At the heart of this show-stopping invention is the Japanese wish to have people ‘obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking’. Although what they call ‘proper’ is debatable, perhaps they want Japanese citizens to become wise by suddenly having shorter tongues, if not long ears and big eyes.

Culture ‘Made in Japan’

Let us now examine a few Japanese traditions. Not so long ago, Japanese society encouraged people to hide their true feelings by not smiling. One may wonder how they lived both in public and in private. The serious attitude has only begun to change recently.

Aristocratic women would shave off their real eyebrows and paint new ones very high on their forehead. Hence, when they raised their natural eyebrows, the painted ones remained in place and nobody was able to tell if one was surprised. Japan made tremendous progress once the citizens learnt to raise eyebrows and discarded the cover of makeup.

Heian-era beauty's preparations consisted of piling on the silk robes in a style called ‘twelve layers’. Some upper class women wore as many as forty layers of unlined silk. How the men reacted to this body armour in bedrooms made from rice paper is anybody’s guess. Since Japanese monks devised scores of meticulous steps for preparing and serving traditional tea (Chanoyu), forty layers of dress meant no trouble at all for the less religious.

Showing one’s white teeth was thought to be like showing the white of the bones. Heian women also painted their teeth black because they appeared more attractive than yellow ones and matched the very long black hair women grew. Black teeth magnified the brightness of their powder-white complexions. Thought to preserve the teeth, the Meiji era brought the practise of blackening to an end to appease foreign visitors and to gain acceptance as a Westernized and ‘equal’ nation.

Hence, in a feudal culture ruled by the Ninja (men in black), Samurai warriors (covert assassins), feudal lords and shoguns (military dictators), and where plants were trimmed to eventually become midget Bonsais, the above-mentioned idiosyncrasies were considered virtues and assets.

Teacher, leave my speech alone!

The inventors of SpeechJammers noted that ‘some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt others when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions, and also tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech’. The Japanese traditionally treat small painted lips as beautiful, and if big loudmouths are bad, only SpeechJammers can make lips smaller and silent.

By the above definitions of polite conversations and agreeable debates, we need thousands of SpeechJammer guns in a world in which TV talk show hosts are unable to silence guests who begin to deliver speeches instead of concise answers to simple questions. Then there are the hosts who hijack discussions. Citizens need SpeechJammers to silence war-mongering politicians, the covert agencies need them to keep dissidents and their own men more silent, and the courts need them to keep top dogs in civilian clothes and the top cats in camouflaged battle fatigues quiet. The list goes on and on.

How does SpeechJammer work?

The SpeechJammer targets one’s speech through a direction-sensitive microphone and then fires the words back at with a 0.2-second delay. This in turn affects the brain's cognitive processes and causes a speaker to stutter before silencing completely.

SpeechJammers give back one a taste of his or her own medicine. The inventors claim that the ‘effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking’. Nevertheless, this is what they claim; the effects will become known much later or never at all.

The inventors also found that the device works better on people who were reading aloud than engaged in spontaneous speech and it cannot stop people making meaningless sounds, such as 'ahhh,' that are uttered over a long time.

Good news for authoritarian governments

Japanese culture places utmost importance on ‘being on time’ and expects people to jump off tall buildings if they lose face, and this is why a 0.2-second delay is used. By sharp contrast, in our land where VIPs arrive hours late and where traffic comes to a grinding halt because of the toing and froing of such giants in black limousines, 0.2-seconds means nothing. Here, we do not need to reconsider what we have just said—hallmark of true freedom of speech. In fact, we do not need any limits on our national behaviour. The only time our esteemed official consider staying silent or begin to stammer is when the Americans and the IMF speak—or rather dictate policy.

The only way to beat the SpeechJammer is to remain vigilant. If one finds ‘something fishy’ pointing at one while asking loud probing questions or presenting shrill undeniable counter-arguments, switch to normal speech and start uttering long ‘ahhh’ sounds. The machine will fail and disappoint its abusers.

Who needs this?

With the GPS (global positioning satellite), the covert agencies can see what places you visit; with the credit cards they can see what you buy and from where; with the internet (browsers, Facebook) they can track what sites you browse and who your friends are; and now with the SpeechJammer they will be able to have a planet full of silent obedient robots.

The huge mass of humanity does not need demonic technology but rather the governments who wish to snoop on citizens in order to monitor what they are doing or thinking. This is indeed a New World Disorder because what the conspiring elites plan and then implement to keep the masses forever ignorant is what begs for research and counterbalance. In a truly New World, citizens should be able to hear and see everything their leaders are up to in secret and it is for the achievement of this ideal that the current waves of protestations and resistance are rising.

 

With anti-constitution laws firmly in place in America and elsewhere, the Japanese stand to gain from exporting SpeechJammers all over the globe. American security agencies will readily flock to purchase special ‘federal’ models of this gun that will enable them to silence the entire disagreeable anti-war world. For instance, New Jersey’s governor (Chris Christie) could use the invention on the likes of a former US Navy SEAL veteran whom he recently called an ‘idiot’ for disagreeing with the state’s proposed plans to reconfigure public universities.

Why is the world suddenly full of dissidents, agitators and rebels with genuine causes? The answer lies in excessive governmental control designed to take away whatever few liberties now exist in the minds of citizens.

The reverse side of the reverse side

Psychiatrists who were once considered as the ‘lowest rung’ of the medical profession, have labelled human anger, happiness and a host of other emotions as ‘diseases’ that ‘require treatment’ with psychotropic drugs. From very young children to senior citizens, all are customers of the troika of doctors, test laboratories and pharmaceutical companies; declaring electronic warfare on the rest of the population fills the leftover cracks.

We do not require suppression through electronics means or through psychotropic drugs. Inventing a machine that will convert one’s discourteous speech into courteous utterances is bad science—courtesy of men in white coats whose scientific inventions are sufficient for centuries to come.

SpeechJammer might become the proverbial Japanese ‘summer heater, winter fan’, that is, something useless. Who would fancy such technology when simply pointing one’s middle finger skywards or uttering only ‘shut up’ will silence almost anybody even beyond a distance of thirty metres?

In a world obsessed with weaponry and wars, there are two weapons at the common person’s disposal: the middle finger and the tongue, both are only three inches long yet able to cause grievous harm to a man six feet tall.

©Tahir Gul Hasan, 2012