Just a short entry to say that I’ve been taking Danish language course this past 2 months. Now I have off for summer vacation(I don’t have to work I was told)…how nice! I look forward to renting my own apartment(soon hopefully). My parents have moved up here from France so we are three now in the house. I can get annoying sometimes because my mom makes lots of noise. The weather is nice- sunny and raining and all.
SOTT editors
SOTT.net
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 18:45 EDT
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Update: Dry weather, fires, spontaneous combustion? As it turns out the Taurid meteor event was not a complete bust, more like a combustion:
1st of July 2008 - Witnesses across Southern California say they saw an object ‘moving very fast across the northern sky’ and falling near the San Bernardino Mountains. Officials have no firm answers on what it was.
From Hollywood Hills to the Nevada state line, people reported seeing a fireball streaking across the sky and falling near the San Bernardino Mountains this morning. But explanations of the mysterious object were scarce.
San Bernardino County Fire Dispatch reported receiving dozens of calls related to what was described as fireball moving at high speed and falling in northwest sky around 10:40 a.m.
"We got quite a few reports. It started with a gentlemen in the Lake Arrowhead reporting a fireball in the Meadow Bay area and then we started getting calls from all over," said San Bernardino County dispatch supervisor Tom Barnes. "Fire crews in Barstow and on I-15 near Stateline came up on the radio and reported an object in the sky moving very fast across the northern sky and described it as yellowish green in color with streaks of debris. It looked like it burned up before it hit the ground."
Now isn’t it a "coincidence" that California became engulfed, at its peak, in 1,783 fires across the state, scorching over 527,000 acres, including one in the San Bernardino mountains. Firefighters are still battling over 300 fires. Yet, all the fires are being blamed on "unusual early-summer lightning storms".
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An interesting sequence of events unfolds around the Axis of Evil:
- Signs appear of escalating agendas in the higher echelons of power, as heads of state slink around the globe to confer, accompanied by ‘random’ shootings and mysterious missiles.
- Big Brother cracks down in cyberspace - even SOTT comes under the crosshairs of mysterious hackers.
- The food crisis continues, and more vegetable species become endangered (banana, wheat, tomatoes).
- Technology goes berzerk, with serial collapsing cranes, and mysterious resurrecting WWII bombs.
- Floods and droughts abound.
- The sun loses its spots and the fireballs associated with the Taurids are nowhere to be found.
All the while, the public is kept ever more distracted by the growing media circus of Obama vs McCain.
The chain of command hands out its orders
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been in domestic political trouble with accusations of corruption. Maybe he is in need of support from outside, or in need of a distraction for the public; but the fact is that his troubles do not divert him from more important plans for the Zionist agenda. So he pays back a visit to Bush, who has just been in Israel for the country’s anniversary. It was not really a secret that they were discussing an attack on Iran. Nor does it take a genius to see that the often used phrase "stopping Iran by all possible means" is a euphemism for war. But what other details can we learn about the topics keeping the most prominent Axis of Evil members so busy in meetings and private discussions? We can infer a little from the context and sequence of events.
In a move which echoes General Fallon’s resignation (the man who would not allow an attack on Iran while in charge of the Middle East military operations), the US Air Force leadership quit. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates picked Gen. Norton Schwartz as Air Force chief. As ‘Les Visible’ rightly comments:
Now they’ve put CFR member, General Norton Schwartz in charge of the Air Force. Since he’s the first non-fighter pilot put into that position in a long time it makes you wonder about dissension in military ranks over the ongoing neo-con worldwide murder spree. It might cause you to give thought to that missing nuke and the killing of Tony Carnaby by the Houston Police. Of course you could also flashback to other replacements in the military, notably the one that led to General Petraeus.
It appears that these changes have stimulated the development of the Axis of Evil plans, as the US Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to pay a surprise visit to Israel at the end of the month (we hope you are keeping count of how many public figures ‘checked in’ with the Zionists in the last two months or so - see below for more examples!).
As Olmert’s feet touched ground back home in Israel, he announced that "the pendulum" was "much closer to tough military action" in Gaza, and that he was considering launching "operations that would be much harder and more aggressive". We wonder if he got a blessing from Bush, or if it was the other way around and he went to hand his orders to Bush before continuing his plans for genocide in the local area.
In any case, it was to be expected that Palestine would heat up - not that the area was not hot enough already, as the occupied land suffers crimes and abuse on a daily basis. A few days after Olmert’s declaration, an explosion destroyed a Hamas commander’s house. The Israeli Offensive Forces denied any involvement and CNN even blamed the victim by calling it a "work accident". Hamas, on the other hand, affirmed that the explosion was caused by an Israeli F-16 aircraft bombing the house. Whatever the cause, the fact is that twelve people died - including a baby - and the only beneficiary, as always, is Israel.
As usually happens in this conflict, there was an apparent appeasement; the fantasy of Israel as a democracy interested in peace needs to be sustained somehow. Much was said about the ‘hope’ that a truce with Hamas represents, but nothing positive should be expected as a couple of days after the truce, Israel closed Gaza’s borders alleging that it was responding to a rocket attack. Again, only Israel benefits.
The meetings continued. Rice visited Tel Aviv just a week after Olmert’s return. Ostensibly, the subject of discussion was Israeli settlements in the West Bank. However, we can surmise that this was rather a distraction: Rice called the settlements "a problem" (terribly harsh words for Israel coming from the US Secretary of State), and Israel responded by accelerating the construction of Jewish houses in the West Bank. Clearly this topic of discussion was not ‘on the table’, despite any comments made by Rice. So what was the real discussion about?
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Then it was Bush’s turn to go to Europe, and again we see the pattern of the chain of command handing its orders out across the globe. Apparently, the purpose of his "farewell trip" was to dictate his stance on Iran to Europe - and to force it on the UK. Judging by the way in which Prime Minister Gordon Brown was so eager to please Bush, the UK government didn’t need any encouragement.
Another result of Bush’s ‘friendly’ farewell visit was a pledge by both Germany and the UK to increase the number of young men and women they will be sending to their deaths in Afghanistan. The trigger for that request was a suspicious prison break-out that enabled 700 ‘militants’ to escape - funny that US troops were stationed just northeast of the prison and chose not to intervene while Afghan security forces and militants fought for hours. This dragged Pakistan further into the conflict, by putting pressure on their borders and enabling continued killing of civilians in Kandahar using ‘vacuum’ bombs. The big-wigs of the oil business must be very pleased; not only have they agreed how to divide Iraq’s oil among themselves, they now have more cannon-fodder to guard their new oil pipeline. It’s not about the oil at all - honest!
In the meantime, the propaganda against Iran has been increasing as usual, with talk about war being ‘inevitable’ now. The message was sent loud and clear as Israel was seen rehearsing an Iran attack. The arch neo-cons John Bolton and Bill Kristol are now talking about Israel attacking Iran either right before or after the US elections. Bolton in particular predicted the attack for after November but before Bush left the White House. Though they are engaging in propaganda as usual, the schedule may have been actually revealed through Bolton, as it does make sense that they would rather not disturb the electoral theatre, but would not want to miss the opportunity that the remaining Bush administration represents. Don’t plan your holidays according to these dates, though - one can never be sure with psychopaths, who may even try surprises to have their war ahead of time and cancel the elections. Do, however, expect an increase in anti-Iran propaganda in the ensuing months.
This month, a series of curious incidents took place in the background which suggest that there may have been attempts of, or preparations for, terrorist attacks (and no, we are not talking about Al Qaeda™ here). A month ago, a Continental Airlines pilot reported seeing "an object with a flaming tail and a trail of smoke" flying in front of the aeroplane; other people saw it too. The official ‘plausible’ explanation is that this was a model rocket (i.e. a toy); however, we can’t help but think of all the propaganda talk about terrorists trying to knock down passenger planes with shoulder missiles within US territory. A few days later, explosive materials were found in a stolen car near Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland - including military grade explosives. One week later, Washington experienced a widespread electric power outage and a subway fire which darkened downtown for nearly three hours. The fire and the outage did not seem to be related, and both the Treasury Department and the White House were affected. All of the above happens in the context of a public simultaneously being socially engineered through anti-terror and war exercises in Denver and Washington State, with the cooperation of Canada on the latter.
Likewise, let’s remember that in Britain there was, in Exeter, a failed bombing attempt in May, and this month the UK government has developed its nasty habit of ‘losing’ secret documents and laptops which the media happens to recover, miraculously containing information about terrorism and Iran.
These leaks appear to have been intended to stimulate some ’shocking headlines’ in the media in preparation of Bush’s visit. But the runaway UK laptops appear to be almost epidemic as one with information on 20,000 British health patients was also lost.
Even more interesting was French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent visit to Israel. Before the Knesset, he did his best to make it clear that he is on the side of the Zionists, pledging to "block" Iran from developing nuclear weapons and even offering France’s soldiers and resources to aid Israel. During the farewell ceremony at Ben Gurion airport, a guard tasked with perimeter security died of a gunshot wound to the head. The official story is that he decided to commit suicide right there and then (perhaps we are meant to believe that this man didn’t take goodbyes very well). This is strange enough to raise severe suspicions, especially because his family believes he had no reason to commit suicide; he was standing on a rooftop just 100 meters from Sarkozy, Olmert and Shimon Peres; and a police spokesman initially said that it was being investigated whether the man had "accidentally discharged his weapon", an unlikely scenario given that he was shot in the head.
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| Raeed Ghanem. Suicide, failed assassination attempt, or something else? |
It almost looks like a failed assassination attempt. Of course, we do not have enough data to confirm this hypothesis, nor can we claim that Sarkozy himself was the target, as there were enough important people on the tarmac to provide several viable targets. Perhaps it is a mere coincidence, but a day and a half after the ’suicide’, Ben Gurion airport held a disaster drill testing readiness to handle a large crash - the sort of exercise that may be useful to destroy evidence and cover the tracks of any wrongdoing.
An alternative explanation is that this was no failed attempt but a message meant to intimidate Sarkozy. If this is the case, it is reminiscent of the event more than a month ago, in which Tony Blair was threatened by Israeli fighter jets while flying over the country.
So much for the US and Western Europe, all on the side of the Zionist plan to "obliterate" Iran, in Hillary’s infamous words. In contrast, Russia moved closer to Iran by signing a $2.5 billion deal to build airliners. Furthermore, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov observed during a conference that Russia and the US had more trust and respect for one another during the Cold War than they do now. The prospects for a peaceful world do not look very promising, do they?
A circus …
Oh, how much time and energy the mainstream media has spent on the race for the democratic candidacy in the US; how much will they spend now on the campaigns; and how much have they ignored the fact that Obama is not going to make any difference if he wins? What does all this hype around Barack Obama do to empower the average American? We received a letter from a correspondent that is somewhat disturbing in its implications:
I work closely with a colleague who is an African American woman. We had some heated discussions during the Clinton vs Obama battle. She couldn’t decide whether being black or being a woman was more important. I just thought voting was futile when all the presidential runners are in the pockets of the CFR, AIPAC and corporate lobbyists.
She would enthusiastically ask me, "Would you vote for Hilary or Obama?" I would tell her it was a circus designed to keep Americans entranced and distracted from the real issues that they should be concerned about. Like the trillions of dollars spent on illegal wars; GMO food giants decimating the food industry with toxic crops and biofuels; economic collapse, and uncontrollable inflation.
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t quite the answer she was looking for.
Towards the end of the 17 month Democratic ‘race’, she was beginning to think that maybe there was some truth to what I said. I could see the telltale signs of someone slowly awakening from their slumber; beginning to question the lies that have been culturally programmed into us from birth by our family, friends, leaders and the complicit media.
When it was announced that Obama would be the presidential nomination, all those questions she was about to ask stopped in an instant. She was no longer identifying with being a woman anymore, Instead she was at one with her ethnic roots. A hypnotic trance seemed to have engulfed her. She had spent the evening telling her boys that they too could achieve whatever they wanted. If a black man can run for president, then they can rise up any corporate ladder they wanted to.
I didn’t know what to say. But the truth is she couldn’t hear anything I said. She was lost, glazed eyes looking into the heavens of hope and the utopic change that Obama would bring to the world.
©Unknown
The dream-like look immediately reminded of a time I caught up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a long while. In our time apart he had given up his drug, alcohol and partying addictions and become a ‘born again’ Christian. At his house he put some popular Christian music on. In an instant he was off. A glazed carefree expression engulfed his face as he swayed and hummed along to ‘Shine Jesus Shine’. He was hypnotised by his new found faith, and lost like a leaf blowing in the wind, to what ever direction his ‘church’ would lead him.The same level of hypnosis had taken my colleague. I realised she is one of millions of people who will have experienced the same detachment from reality. Obama the saviour will bring about change. Belief that there is hope after the tyrannical Neocon regime.
Given Bush’s standing in the opinion polls it seems quite likely that this situation is the rule, rather than the exception, in America at the moment. Barack Obama has become a savior figure that has the dreams of a desperate nation invested in him - and this is not by coincidence. On the announcement of Obama’s candidacy, newspapers and magazines around the world were quick to propagate and capitalise on the news of a new presidential messiah. Rupert Murdoch likened Obama to a rock star who would win the presidency, and his tabloids in the UK used the headline "Obama has a dream" - associating Obama with civil rights leader Martin Luther King. And there was ‘that’ cover of Rolling Stone magazine which used the tagline "A New Hope" - a reference to the hero Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars movies:
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| ©Rollingstone magazine |
Recently, Obama’s campaign staff duped the press in order to allow him to attend ‘private meetings’, at which we can only speculate about what dealings occurred. Obama may be good-looking and charismatic, but he has also made no secret about his commitment to the Corporate State. In his own words: "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market". Nor has he shied away from his role as a hawk. In the annual AIPAC conference and wearing both an American flag pin and an Israeli flag pin, Obama declared Jerusalem indivisible - and it’s not hard to see which side of the ‘conflict’ (read: occupation) should get the whole cake for itself in the candidate’s view. Hillary Clinton made a quite explicit comment in this regard:
"Let me be very clear, I know that Senator Obama will be a good friend to Israel"
To be fair, no candidate would have any chance of being elected if they didn’t go through these grotesque rituals of selling their souls (if they have any) to the elite in the first place. The structure of power would not allow it, and that is why it is most reasonable to regard the ‘Obama Hope’ as mere wishful thinking. As Dennis Loo writes:
If Obama really were a solution, then why should we expect him to have an awakening upon taking office if he’s been slumbering, morally and legally, all of these years?
If Obama really were a solution, and did have such an awakening in the White House, why would the same system and same individuals who cooperated all these years with the monsters running our country let Obama do an about-face in the White House? […]
Sure, there is a remote possibility that Obama is cleverly playing the game in order to get himself into the White House, hoping that he can make a difference once in there the way Kennedy tried. On that train of thought, some people have been speculating hard about a scenario in which Obama gets the same treatment as the Kennedys. Even Libya’s Gadhafi suspects that Obama fears a bullet from Mossad if he doesn’t support Israel enough (and who could blame him? Mossad does not believe in fair play, as Sarkozy may have learned at Ben Gurion airport).
But if he has any real intentions for change, the democratic candidate would have to prove himself to the people, and so far we haven’t seen any of that. Quite the contrary, besides his discouraging declarations quoted above, the fact that people like Rupert Murdoch think he’s a rock star is a disturbing sign that the status quo has nothing to fear from Obama - in fact they welcome him. Thus, his campaign is reduced to a side show - whether the rock star is a pawn of the elite, or the elections turn out to be irrelevant anyway because some shocking event (like a terrorist attack or a war with Iran) interrupts the process.
…But no bread
It is looking more likely that false hope is the only thing that people will have to eat in the future. On top of the global food crisis, the economic crisis (have you felt the rise in the cost of living already? we have!) and the deaths of key animal species, such as bats and bees, we now have enough species of fruits and vegetables in danger to start making a list:
- Bananas are dying of Panama Disease.
- One fourth of the world’s wheat is at risk from a new fungus.
- Tomatoes infected with salmonella have been discovered in the US. Although this does not affect the species itself, the fact is that the fruit ends up being destroyed out of fear of the disease.
This list doesn’t even take into consideration the harvests affected by floods and droughts (see below).
The noose tightens around the Internet
Meanwhile, the noose is increasingly tightening around the Internet, one of the last places where there is still some semblance of free speech. Under the guise of protecting copyrighted materials, many countries around the world are getting tough on the ‘illegal’ downloaders, with penalties ranging from barring broadband access to heavy fines. The irony is that the artists, the very people those Orwellian measures purported to protect, are quick to criticize the Orwellian measures. In another more extreme, if not ridiculous, example, AP news agency goes after a little known blogger for publishing fragments of their news articles and reports. It seems that their lies and propaganda get exposed so often by the army of bloggers that they have now chosen to resort to such blatant intimidations - the move of a liar protecting his lies.
Alongside the intimidations, major ISPs are throttling users with high bandwidth usage. Some ISPs even hire a company to monitor and hijack websites that these users visit. All those measures serve to do one thing: discourage users from accessing the Internet. And where will they turn for news if not from the web? The TV with ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News, of course!
In the background, the wiretapping measures continue to be enacted. The US Congress has just passed the new surveillance bill, which combines the worst of all alternative bills. It both allows retroactive immunity to the telecoms and gives sweeping surveillance power to the government. Even Sweden, the country that hosts controversial sites such as Wikileaks and The Pirate Bay, has passed a bill that allows wiretapping, cross-border, of all telephone and Internet communications.
The weather and the eternal shine of the spotless sun
Our notes of the climate and geological events and disasters of the last month or so include a bit of everything:
- Tropical storms: Alma and Arthur hit Central America; Alma being the first Costa Rica born tropical storm ever. Typhoon Fengshen kills more than a dozen people in southern China.
- Floods: Midwest US, India, China and Mexico.
- Droughts: Texas and California. Australia suffers the driest May on record.
- Volcanoes in the process of waking up or already awake:Cerro Azul in the Galapagos islands, Etna in Sicily, Llaima in southern Chile, Semeru in Indonesia.
- Earthquakes: Powerful earthquake in Japan. Moderate earthquake in Panama and Costa Rica. Two earthquakes in Greece, and a few days later another three. Israel and Lebanon.
Al Gore and his followers would argue that man-made global warming is to blame for storms, floods and droughts and that geology should be ignored. We, however, would like to think outside the box - or rather, outside the planet. So maybe it is time to consider the weather and tremors of Earth in the context of cosmic weather - and more specifically, solar system weather?
You may have heard that the cycle of sunspots, usually quite regular, has slowed down as the sun has refused to produce its usual eruptions for a couple of years now (with a couple of exceptions in April-March). Solar physicists are puzzled, as they were expecting an increase in activity earlier this year. Well, of course the sun could decide it is time to get back to work any time now, but if it doesn’t, the most immediate consequence, based on historical record, is an ice age - an effect that would dramatically stress the importance of the weather of the solar system on our little blue marble.
Indeed, a US Army researcher claims that it is the sun, and not man, who is to blame for climate change. Is there a relationship with Jupiter’s recent new storms and its own climate change? How about Mars?
The Ulysses spacecraft concluded a mission studying the sun with some interesting results:
Ulysses ends its career after revealing that the magnetic field emanating from the sun’s poles is much weaker than previously observed. This could mean the upcoming solar maximum period will be less intense than in recent history.
It sounds a little too serious to us, as the sun seems to be taking a long holiday. Even more serious is this:
Ulysses also studied dust flowing into our solar system from deep space, and showed it was 30 times more abundant than astronomers suspected.
You see, with dust come pebbles, stones, rocks, comet fragments and comets; all of which seem to have the unhealthy habit of smashing our planet once in a while according to historical cycles.
The Taurid shower that did not happen
As you probably know, for the past several years SOTT has closely monitored the news for reports of meteorite and fireball sightings. Not an easy task when major news agencies have a non existent interest in covering them. In fact, extensive research indicates a possible ‘deliberate avoidance’ factor that plays a significant part in this rather peculiar media silence.
But still, there are times when many scientific magazines and mass media publications present the public with colorful and detailed articles about our uninvited and fiery guests from space. And those moments of publicity usually coincide with periods of major meteor showers. It is also the time when many fascinated eyes are directed toward the sky with an expectation to catch the sight of ‘falling stars’.
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And what meteor stream is more famous than Taurids stream, the same stream that brought us Tunguska, and the one that produces two annual meteor showers, during June 5 to July 18 and October to November?
So with that knowledge in mind and based on data indicating an increasing number of sightings, mysterious booms, overhead explosions, etc. eager SOTT staff searched the net, anticipating news feeds flooded with reports.
But there were none.
Yes, it is well known that Beta Taurids shower is visible only during the daylight hours, so everything seems to be in order, right? Sorry, no fallen stars this season, folks… The problem with this explanation is that until this month, and during periods when there were no meteorite showers, we were able to collect a significant number of news items on those topics. But not this month. Oh yes, as was mentioned above, all kinds of magazines and news sites were packed with publications on the mystery of Tunguska and graphic doom scenarios. But real time encounters with those doom harbingers were nowhere to be found.
So we are forced to ask - what is going on? And how we are going to deal with this situation when apparently we reached the level of even deeper suppression of ’something wicked’ on its way here. Maybe the solution hides between the dusty pages of history: in the testimonies of those who experienced great calamities brought by fire and pestilence:
The summer of 1871 had been excessively dry; the moisture seemed to be evaporated out of the air; and on the Sunday above named the atmospheric conditions all through the Northwest were of the most peculiar character…It was weird and unnatural. I have never seen nor felt anything like it before or since. Those who experienced it will bear me out in these statements.
At that hour, half past nine o’clock in the evening, at apparently the same moment, at points hundreds of miles apart, in three different States, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, fires of the most peculiar and devastating kind broke out, so far as we know, by spontaneous combustion.
Dry weather, fires, spontaneous combustion? Well, in fact there was one report of a fireball seen - in California.
Perhaps the key is to look for something other than the obvious signs; like descriptions of out of ordinary precipitations or ‘natural phenomena’ and see if it can be interpreted in a different context. And thanks to the media preoccupation with Tunguska, we were offered at least one handy clue.
International researchers investigating the Tunguska Event, an explosion exactly 100 years ago in central Siberia, say acid rain traces in the region back up the theory that the blast was caused by a meteorite…
"Extremely high temperatures occurred as the meteorite entered the atmosphere, during which the oxygen in the atmosphere reacted with nitrogen causing a build up of nitrogen oxides," one of the authors of the joint research, Natalia Kolesnikova, told RIA Novosti.
That reminds us of another interesting event that happened in Siberia at the beginning of 2007.
There is nothing unusual about snow in the towns and endless forests of Siberia. But when locals in the small village of Pudinskoye woke up on Wednesday they immediately noticed something rather strange: the snow falling from the sky was orange…
Russia’s environmental watchdog said the snow contained four times higher than normal quantities of iron as well as acids and nitrates.
Curiously enough, there was a sighting of a volleyball size meteorite in a neighboring region two week prior to the orange snow event. And if the meteorite exploded high up in the atmosphere, its very fine particles could easily float around for a couple of weeks or longer. On the other hand, thanks to Victor Clube’s work we now know that meteorites are often accompanied by the phenomenon of dust suspended in the atmosphere, so it didn’t have to be just an overhead explosion to cause such peculiar precipitation.
All in all, it offers many hints on how to read the news in a different way. And we encourage you, the reader, to help us to collect the clues and send us any such curious articles you may find while surfing the web.
Meanwhile, here are several examples of ‘mysterious’ events that happened this month and have a high probability of being an exact match and proof that traces of Taurids activity were found after all.
Mystery explosion in China causes earthquake
Bangladesh: Mysterious booms rock city
Romanian airplane hit by an UFO
Australia: Plane, meteor or just a UFO?
Blast but "no bomb" in Pakistani cities
Haunted skies: Towards disclosure?
One could say that the mysterious lights and crafts that haunt our skies are also part of the ‘cosmic weather’. Whatever they are, they have been present for quite some time, so in a sense they are not really news. What is becoming noteworthy however, is that slowly but steadily, they seem to be grabbing more attention in the mainstream media. The reports are not ridiculed as often as before. A man claims that he has a home video showing an alien peeking through a window, and the media actually listen. Furthermore, some governments are doing their part in letting the cat out of the bag. For example, let us recall that the UK Ministry of Defence recently opened its UFO case files in a tacit admission that there is something strange going on that needs to be recorded by the authorities. Does this trend indicate that we are being prepared for disclosure?
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UFOs appear all over the globe. But we noticed that lately they have been attracted to Wales. The police admitted engaging in a helicopter UFO chase in Cardiff, while in a separate incident, locals reported the sighting of orange circular objects. Similar lights were later spotted over Bala.
Curious people as we are, we wonder what those UFOs might be doing in Wales. What else has been on the news about that part of the UK lately? Could there be a relationship with the strange suicides in Brigdend and the double murder and suicide on Father’s Day, again in Wales? Perhaps. Perhaps not, but it certainly warrants at least a moment’s consideration.
Something is rotten in the Kingdom of Colorado, WWII Redux and Cranes attempting to fly?
In our last article we mentioned the idea of paying attention to emerging patterns that may signal something about the nature of events that are likely to take place soon. And as we were able to see, all the signs pointed toward the impending collapse or crash of reality as we know it. Unfortunately, we have a similar undeniable trend this month, with an emphasis on history repeating itself.
But first, we’ll take a trip down the rabbit hole, straight to the new headquarters of NORAD in Colorado Springs, US.
As some of you may know, NORAD (the control center that is responsible for detecting attacks on North America) moved in May from its longtime location in the Cheyenne Mountain to a new and shiny location at Peterson AFB. The move was announced as the necessary step toward better and quicker response to crises or attacks. But as it turns out, the outcome of this particular relocation is going to be quite the opposite.
"On March 3, military leaders reported to Congress that an assessment of a building at the air base that serves as the nation’s homeland security nerve center found "several physical security problems."
But The Gazette of Colorado Springs said it obtained a classified document that was even more critical. According to the document, the assessment found "the existing security system at Peterson AFB … would fail if attacked by even a low level threat."[…]
Peterson Air Force Base is adjacent to Colorado Springs Airport. One security expert, Christopher Hellman of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation in Washington, said he was troubled by a failure to assess the risk posed by the civilian airport’s proximity.
"There’s going to be lots of air traffic and that’s going to make it difficult to identify whether there’s hostile aircraft until the last minute, if at all," Hellman told the newspaper after being briefed on the contents of the assessment. "You won’t know its intention until it’s too late."
We must admit it would be a shame to question the mental abilities of those whose duties are to be on the front line protecting American people and calculating the outcome of any possible scenarios. So it leaves us no choice but to conclude that the above described grave security negligence was deliberate. And if so, for what purpose? Is it possible that there is a connection between that and recent ‘terror drills’ in Denver, or McCain’s aide’s remark that a terrorist attack in the United States would benefit the Republican nominee politically?
And if that wasn’t enough, there was yet another ‘burning’ issue occupying the minds of Colorado Springs residents:
There was no fire, but the ground was hot enough in a Colorado Springs park to burn through an eight year old boy’s shoes and cause at least second degree burns on his feet. The boy went the hospital. His Crocs style shoes that were left behind have big holes with burned edges.
After the boy was treated and sent to the hospital firefighters took surface readings that showed hard to believe temperatures. According to Chief Matthews, "The highest temperature we got at the surface of the soil with the sun shining on it was 800 degrees, which is pretty darn significant. Radiant heat from the sun will get it up around 150, 160 degrees, but not to that level."
And evidently that was only the beginning. Three days later, firefighters had to fight a wildfire near NORAD no less, which was supposedly sparked by a lightning.
Interestingly enough, Golden Hills Park is very close to the Air Force Academy, and on the same line as the Cheyenne Mountain, now second home of NORAD.
Truly shades of X-files, and no less intriguing than the following chain of events. Apparently two old WWII bombs were found on the same day near two different airports: in London and in Amsterdam. The discovery was followed by closing both of the airports.
Now, even if we are trying to stay as rational as possible, we can’t deny the peculiarity of this coincidence and inquire about reasons for shutting down both heavily active airports at the same time. There are indeed many possibilities, like transporting something from one location to another unobserved, installing various systems or performing a test run. Anything is possible, so use your imagination!
And as we are going to utilize just that, we will speculate about the meaning of those WWII ammunitions popping up all over the world during the last two months. In Hungary, Japan, Malasya, Germany, Iceland, Austria and France.
There is a well known saying: Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. And we think it is pretty clear by now that humanity is on the verge of taking a deep dive, and entering into a loop of events similar to WWII. Does this mean it is too late to try and break free from this merry-go-round?
Speaking of breaking, it seems as though the past month’s collapse trend took a rather intensive curve, resulting in series of serial crane collapses all over the world, but especially in the US. As cranes aren’t supposed to break, bend or collapse so easily, we wonder if there is something in the atmosphere that’s affecting them. Or perhaps, as it may seem reasonable to assume under our crazy circumstances, it is due to the general ‘atmosphere’ of total collapse as well. The Universe is continuing to send out messages in order to get our attention. Unfortunately, only a handful are able to decipher it and scream it from the rooftops to the sleeping masses walking down the street.
It started with three sequential collapses last month in New York, Iowa and Kansas. It then continued with June crane collapses in Maryland, Colorado, Texas, Miami, and again New York.
The last news item is of particular interest - we could not ignore several curious details of the event:
Firefighters say the flatbed truck was carrying the crane in the Flatbush neighborhood on Wednesday when it fell several inches into a sink hole.
A flat-back truck was carrying the crane in the ‘Flat-Bush’ neighborhood! Sometimes the Universe just can’t be clearer than that.
Hope, when bold, is Strength!
This month, like so many countless months before it, has presented us with a glimpse of the chaos that lurks behind the self-certainty of our worldly leaders. Their certainty, whether it be in their often ludicrous explanations of world events or ’science’ that merely serves to cover up real science, offers many a sense of respite. We look to others for the comfort of certainty. And yet, the only voices of certainty to which we can turn are pathological imitations: the self-assured certainty, even if it brings us to oblivion, of a psychopath.
We are so full of self-doubt that, rather than trusting our voice of conscience, and speaking with the certainty of the truth and objectivity of conscience, we look to others to find that impulse expressed. Without this ’social proof’, without an external ideal with which to identify, without this magnetic ‘pole’ that counters the spellbinder’s pull, the moral impulse never gets expressed. We repress our conscience, and the only voice heard is that which signals our own destruction. It is this all-too-real cowardice that plays a role in ponerogenesis equal to that of psychopathy. Like a note never sung, thus never heard, the sound of conscience will not resonate in the hearts of others if there is no one capable of producing its tone.
So what does this mean? It means that we must become those voices of conscience. We must be that voice of reason and conscience that speaks for those who cannot speak. We must present a view of the world that is solid, and that solidity must reflect an inner solidity. This world "as it is" is not the only possibility for life. There is another possibility. But for people to see this, the state of this world must be condemned for what it is. Lack of conscience must be called out in public, and the sound of conscience must be produced for all those capable of hearing. SOTT exists for this purpose.
If we don’t do it there are few, if any, on this planet who will. It is easy to lose hope. How can we do anything of good on this planet when the side that seeks only its own ends gives an image of perfect certainty, and the media pander to this image? In a world that treats psychopaths with no critical distance, and even idolizes them, it is easy to stifle the voice of your conscience. We have so far to go before we even acquire the necessary state from which to be poles of conscience for this planet. But the only other option we have is to give up and fall back asleep. And we at SOTT would rather work our entire lives, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, than resign ourselves and the world to that fate.
Looking at the events of a whole month on this troubled planet and thinking about where they might lead is an overwhelming task, both intellectually and emotionally. All these different threads seem to be pulling us down. But what for? What is the meaning of our lives in this intricate cosmic drama? Is this all one big joke on us?
We at SOTT do not think that we live in a sea of existential nonsense. We prefer to accept the invitation of the Universe to find out what is worth fighting for and fighting for it. Having been born in a world of lies, we believe that the Truth is what is worth seeking and defending, and the only chance that anything creative has to survive. The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno wrote something that gives us some hope, when all hope seems lost:
What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote, today, in this world? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But though men hear not, the wilderness hears, and one day it will be transformed into a resounding forest, and this solitary voice that goes scattering in to the wilderness like seed, will fructify into a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the lord of life and death.
What is at first a note shyly sung, and scarcely heard, grows into a symphony. Even if our voice goes unnoticed, the universe does hear, and we would be foolish to presume to deduce the unprecedented from the precedents, as Hannah Arendt put it.
The spice of wonder: It’s crop circle season!
In fact, in spite of often feeling crushed by the daily bad news on this planet, we try to retain a sense of wonder and joy in the task of understanding this mysterious world. On this hopeful note, we celebrate that it is crop circle season again! Crop circles: a wonderful mystery like no other. Oh, what a stimulating idea to think that crop circles are neither the product of teenagers with wooden planks nor of ‘flying saucers’… indeed, perhaps the universe not only hears our call, but responds as well? A voice of truth and beauty in the wilderness of a humanity so lost, so backwards, and yet imbued with such potential.
We leave you with two beautiful examples of such mysteries.
Pi in a crop circle:
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| ©Alex Pictures |
| The circle is a coded representation of pi to the 10th significant figure |
And a gigantic circle in South Korea; the first one to be documented in the country:
Spring seems to had arrived now. The weather is more clement and there are no hail showers like there were a couple weeks or so ago. No more snow on the ground and its warmer and sunnier out.
I just included a few articles that I seems to like. I haven’t read them all entirely. Will get to that.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
sott.net
Sun, 23 Mar 2008 11:28 EDT
How can anybody be sure of anything in this day and time when the world seems to have gone mad and we find ourselves collectively in the position of the hero/heroine of the horror movie who hears a noise. Indeed, the audience can see that the monster is lurking in the bushes (no pun intended) just outside the door, the soundtrack is heavy with ominous portent, and with innocent naïveté and a handy flashlight, the star of the movie puts his or her hand on the doorknob. The audience groans with the agony of knowing and collectively shouts "DON’T OPEN THE DOOR!" But, unfortunately, the movie world is not connected to the world of the audience, and no warning can cross that divide.
In the old days, movie heroes and heroines generally always survived such mistakes by dint of clever scripting. In more recent years, you can never be sure anymore: the hero or heroine is likely to die - reflecting real life - because of their stupidity.
Admittedly, when I was much younger, I only liked the kind of movies where the hero or heroine triumphed in the end. I was always upset and angry - I felt cheated - if the movie ended as real life often does: no haven, no help, no hope. Only later did I realize the usefulness of such movies; that they could be teaching tools that help us to analyze our hopes, our beliefs, our wishful thinking that "right will prevail" no matter what, so that, if - indeed - we ever found ourselves in similar situations, we could circumvent the "failures of intelligence" that led to failures in awareness and strategy. In short, observing how wishful thinking most often leads to disaster in real life, could teach us how to think rationally, how to analyze and predict, and thus, formulate an adequate response to any situation of danger.
It’s a useful concept.
But it still doesn’t bridge the divide between the actors in the movie and the audience that can SEE.
We get a lot of letters from readers and entries in our forum by people who complain that the SOTT Team sound like they are "frustrated" or "insulting" or "repetitious" or they don’t understand that it is all just a cosmic game and we can go home at the end and have a party with all the bad guys. They aren’t aware, of course, of the many discussions we have trying to figure out what may or may not work to get the attention of the reader in a way that will truly serve to galvanize them to wake up. One day we may try one thing, and another day, we will try something else.
At the present time, it seems that much of the outside world is watching America in the same way an audience watches a horror movie. The audience, of course, has the benefit of a "bird’s eye view," and all the clues of music and privileged perspective granted by the movie maker. The actors are in a state of "fantasy," or "wishful thinking," if you like. They have agreed, individually and collectively, to engage in acting out the drama. They have agreed to "forget" all they know about the script so as to more effectively "get into" their roles. When the movie making is over, they all have a cast party, toast each other for how well they managed to fool the audience, and agree that it was a great movie and go home to read another script.
The audience, on the other hand, if they are knowledgeable, will agree that their favorite actors sure had them going there for a bit! They will declare sagely how good the monster was, and how evil the villain was because the actor or actress was such a master of their craft.
Such analogies as audience and movie are often used by philosophers as a way of suggesting that all that happens on earth is exactly that: a grand play and everybody is all the same when the show is over: actors and audience are simply two sides that have agreed to play "parts" in the life of humanity. Certainly, at some ultimate "level" of reality, this may be true in a certain way, but we suspect that it is not at all exactly that simple. I wrote a bit about this in my book: The Secret History of the World. It is a bit esoteric, but I’m going to quote it anyway. It’s my page, I can do what I want.
The great Sufi Shaykh Ibn al-’Arabi explains that "imperfection" exists in Creation because "were there no imperfection, the perfection of existence would be imperfect." From the point of view of Sheer Being, there is nothing but good.
But Infinite Potential to BE includes - by definition of the word "infinite" - the potential to Not Be. And so, Infinite Potential - The ALL - "splits" into Thought Centers of Creation/BEing and Thought Centers of Entropy/Non-being. It can be said that Infinite Potential is fundamentally Binary - on or off - to be or not to be. That is the first "division."
Since absolute non-being is an impossible paradox in terms of the source of Infinite Potential to BE, the half of the consciousness of Infinite Potential that constitute the IDEAS of non-being - for every idea of manifestation, there is a corresponding idea for that item of creation to NOT manifest - "falls asleep" for lack of a better term. Its "self observation" is predicated upon consciousness that can only "mimic" death. Consciousness that mimics death then "falls" and becomes Primal Matter. […]
It has been represented for millennia in the yin-yang symbol, which, even on the black half that represents "sleeping consciousness that is matter," you can see the small white dot of "being" that represents to us that absolute non-existence is not possible. There is only "relative" non-existence. […]
At our level of reality, the understanding that "nothing is real," as has been promulgated by gurus and teachers down through history, is as useless as saying "gravity isn’t real." Such considerations are useful only for expansion of perception. They are not useful for practical application since the energies of creation apparently transduce through several "levels" before they meet in the middle, so to say, in our reality.
Organic life exists at the "crossroads" of the myriad ideas or thought centers of being and non-being. As such, they have the capacity to transduce energies "up" or "down" depending on the "consciousness energy directors" of that unit. […]
Against the opposition of those forces seeking to "capture" energy of consciousness and induce it to the "sleep of non-being," which is gravitational in a certain sense, the energies of consciousness seek to "inform" matter via awakening the self-awareness of those organic units on earth that are capable of resistance to the gravity of non-being. As self-aware "transducing units," the human being has the potential for going either way - toward intensified being, or toward intensified non-being. […]
God creates the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful, the straight and the crooked, the moral and the immoral. Between these traits lie the manifold dangers of the path of the seeker of Truth.
Many modern day "teachers" and "gurus" tell us "Since there is only One Being which permeates all things, all we have to do is see everything as only light", and that will transmute the darkness, and we will "create our own reality of light."
Such a statement ignores the fact that the statement "God is One" describes a reality that is a higher level from which our own "mixed being" manifests. The man who assumes that he can become like God at this level just by thinking it, ignores the facts of Being vs. Non-being which outrays from "God is One" at a level of existence that is clearly several levels above our own. Evil is REAL on its own level, and the task of man is to navigate the Cosmic Maze without being defiled by the Evil therein. This is the root of Free Will.
Man faces a predicament as REAL as himself: he is forced to choose - to utilize his knowledge by applying it - between the straight path which leads to Being, and the crooked paths which lead to Non-Being.
Human beings are required to discern between good and evil - consciousness energy directors - at every stage of their existence in this reality. Because, in fact, they must understand that God is consciousness and God is matter. God is good, and God is evil. The Creation assumes all the different properties of the many "Names of God." The Cosmos is full of Life-giving and Slaying, Forgiveness and Vengeance, Exaltation and Abasement, Guidance and Deception. To attempt to assume God’s point of view and "mix everything" at this level, results only in STAYING at this level. Therefore, human beings must always separate God’s point of view from their own point of view and the fact that all creation assumes the divine Names and Traits.
Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously. Therefore, the second law is "follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature." All creation is a result of the engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil. But the second, prescriptive law determines to which "Face of God" one will return: Life or Death. [The Secret History of the World]
Sure, in the ultimate Grand Scheme of things, everything goes back to source. The difference is that those with the BEing nature of Creativity don’t like the idea of Entropy and they reserve the right to make a choice.
It is easier to resist evil at the beginning than at the end.
And it is oh, so easy to excuse yourself from resisting by just saying: "Oh, it’s just a movie! We can all go home at the end and know that everyone played their parts well…"
There is more than a little scientific support for the above ideas that consciousness - the root of existence and BEing - has two fundamental states: on, or off. In the final analysis, it seems that the metaphor of humanity and its collective "higher selves" being a movie and an audience, may be simply anthropomorphizing creative and entropic forces of the universe for the purposes of "self-calming." The stakes, it seems, are a lot higher and more real.
This brings us to the issue of subjectivity vs. objectivity. In recent weeks, I have been queried by several people who want to know just HOW "Knowledge protects." My response was too lengthy to reproduce here, but I said in part:
As the C’s have said, and this is echoed in the most ancient traditions: "It’s not where you are, but WHO you are and WHAT YOU SEE that counts." This "who" and "what you see" have been somewhat problematical as research subjects, and it has only been in the last three years that clear understanding of these concepts have been articulated. I discuss both extensively in my lectures on Alchemy.
We must regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all forces controlling nature together with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it, nothing would be uncertain; the future and the past would be equally present to its eyes. [Pierre Laplace]
Certainly, such an intelligence as Laplace describes would be "Godlike," you agree? And certainly, no one of us human beings is capable of such "seeing," you will also agree. However, what does seem to be true is that this is a significant clue to the solutions to the pressing issues of our day: knowledge that leads to awareness.
Here I will insert a major clue: As the brain interacts with its environment, synaptic circuits combine to form synaptic maps of the world perceived by the senses. These maps describe small segments of that world - shape, color, movement - and these maps are scattered throughout the brain. As the brain’s synaptic network evolves, beginning at birth - or even before - these maps process information simultaneously and in parallel.
Based on our synaptic maps of the world, we are enabled to have a more or less objective view of reality.
Classical physics asserts that the future already exists, as do the present and past. Everything that ever will happen has already happened. But for some unknown reason our minds can only experience the future a piece at a time in what we call the present.
Quantum physics, on the other hand, says that we can never predict the future with absolute certainty. The future does not yet exist in a single definite state. Quantum uncertainty does not deny us all knowledge about the future. It gives us the tools to make predictions, but only in terms of probabilities.
Bohr and other leading physicists of the Copenhagen School say that objective reality is an ambiguous concept at the quantum level. In physics, our knowledge comes only when we actually measure something, and even then the way we decide to perform the measurement affects the results we obtain.
Asking the same question in different ways may give seemingly contradictory answers, but no single experiment will itself provide contradictory information. Some experiments will show electrons as waves, and others will show them as particles. In no single experiment do electrons display wavelike and particle-like behavior simultaneously. Bohr called this complementarity.
Quantum mechanics leaves the observer uncertain about the actual nature of reality. Are they really waves or particles? We don’t know and no experiment will tell us. Detecting one of the attributes automatically excludes knowledge about the other.
There is a striking similarity between life and thought. Just as there are more potential life forms than the planet can hold, there are more potential ideas than our minds can possibly absorb and remember.
Just as evolutionary natural selection may generate change by choosing from among the many potential forms of life, so may thought be able to generate evolutionary change by choosing among many potential thoughts.
The master evolutionary mechanism is found in the wave function of the universe. The observer guides the selection from an infinite number of potential arrangements that the universe may assume from moment to moment.
The universe has many possible future states or potentialities represented by the wave function. The wave function is constantly collapsing into the present as the many possible states become a single state as the present unfolds and possibilities become actualities.
Many individuals have decided that this Quantum Uncertainty means that you can "create your own reality" by what you believe, or depending upon what you give your attention to. This is a popular idea among many New Age types, and is actually the foundation of most religions whether they realize it or not. Let’s have a look at what can be done with a little twist of scientific knowledge:
Hysterica Passio
Chris Floyd October 22, 2004
Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult — a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will — undergirded by the cult’s supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith — is likewise openly declared: "Empire."
You think this is an exaggeration? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior adviser" to the president, who, as The New York Times reports, explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of 2002.
First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Suskind’s attempt to defend the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man.
"That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Anyone with any knowledge of 20th-century history will know that this same megalomaniacal outburst could have been made by a "senior adviser" to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao. Indeed, as scholar Juan Cole points out, the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the "reality-creating" declaration of Mao’s "Little Red Book": "It is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." For Bush, as for Mao, "discernible reality" has no meaning: Political, cultural, economic, scientific truth — even the fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself — must give way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by unbending zealots.
Thus: The conquered will welcome their killers. The poor will be happy to slave for the rich. The Earth can sustain any amount of damage without lasting harm. The loss of rights is essential to liberty. War without end is the only way to peace. Cronyism is the path to universal prosperity. Dissent is evil; dissenters are "with the terrorists." But God is with the Leader; whatever he does is righteous, even if in the eyes of unbelievers — the "reality-based community" — his acts are criminal: aggressive war that kills thousands of innocent people, widespread torture, secret assassinations, rampant corruption, electoral subversion.
Indeed, the doctrine "Gott mit Uns" is the linchpin of the Bush Cult. Tens of millions of Americans have now embraced the Cult’s fusion of Bush’s leadership with Divine Will. As a Bush volunteer in Missouri told Suskind: "I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down … God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time." God appointed Bush; thus Bush’s acts are godly. It’s a circular, self-confirming mind-set that can’t be penetrated by reason or facts, can’t be shaken by crimes and scandals. That’s why Bush’s core support — comprising almost half of the electorate — stays rock-solid, despite the manifest failures of his administration. It’s based on blind faith, on poisonous fantasy: simple, flattering ("We’re uniquely good, God’s special nation!"), comforting, complete — so unlike the harsh, bewildering, splintered shards of reality.
This closed mind-set is constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous right-wing media — evoking the threat of demonic enemies on every side, relentlessly manufacturing righteous outrage — and by Bush’s appearances (epiphanies?) at his carefully screened rallies, where even the slightest hint of demurral from his Godly greatness is ruthlessly expunged. For example, three schoolteachers were ejected from a Bush rally under threat of arrest last week. Not for protesting — they hadn’t said a word — but merely for wearing T-shirts that read, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." Thus the faithful "create the new reality" of undivided loyalty to the Leader.
Let’s consider that crucial paragraph:
"That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
The view of the Bush Reich is, as it happens, diametrically opposed to the view we promote at Signs of the Times. This view has been stated quite economically by the Cassiopaeans:
Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future."
Human beings are both fascinated and repelled by what is called "evil." The fascination stems from the fact that "good" people find it difficult to comprehend how evil can exist in a world that is allegedly overseen by a benevolent and loving creator. And so, they struggle to identify it, quantify it and understand it.
Throughout history, different individuals or groups of individuals have been labeled "evil" by the "authorities" of the time. In our own period, we often find that the mass media will display photographs of murderers with the caption, "The face of evil." The viewer shudders with fear and thanks his lucky stars that such an individual is not a part of HIS of HER life!
At the top of the list of the 20th-century’s most evil people, we find an ordinary looking guy named Adolf Hitler. Like George Bush, he was more comical and absurd than frightening. There are many surviving photographs that show him dandling babies and fondling pets.
Nevertheless, when we gaze upon these old photos of Hitler, our perceptions are automatically conditioned to produce that frisson of fear: this is HITLER, the FACE OF EVIL. We see, in retrospect, that the dandling of babies and scratching the dog’s ears were undoubtedly the propaganda of the time. We know that because we know the history of what Hitler did.
What we all tend to forget is that Hitler could not have come to power and committed Germany to its policies of war and genocide without the tacit consent of the German people and without the rest of the world turning a blind eye to what was going on in Germany. In a certain sense, this makes the entire world responsible for the crimes committed in Germany.
Would the German people have been so susceptible to Nazi rule if there had been a concerted effort on the part of other peoples to assist them in waking up, in seeing their folly?
Why did everyone think "it’s not my business," most particularly those governments that could have acted more strongly to curtail the rising power of Hitler? How much responsibility do they hold for the 65 million deaths of the Global Holocaust that was World War II?
Knowing that the German people were the foundation on which Hitler stood, his soldiers and workers and assistant killers, is one thing; understanding how it came to be is another.
If other countries did not forcefully object, surely the German people thought that the direction Hitler was taking them was at least their own solution to their particular problems, even if not exactly the solution other countries would have chosen.
There was no real consensus of rejection of the Nazi ideals conveyed to Germany in an effective way and certainly, the German people were suffering a variety of serious internal problems to which Hitler’s answers seemed to be good ones.
There was no single moment in time when the German people - as a whole - suddenly "became evil." The Germans - the people susceptible to Adolf Hitler - were a people desperate for identity and economic prosperity. Germany was a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows: World War I, the treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression, were all blows that ruined or diminished the admirable qualities of Germany as a whole. These disasters left the way open for a truly horrifying ideology.
Hitler tapped into this desperation, whipping the people of Germany into a religious, messianic fervor. Little by little, they were induced to close off their consciences as the price that had to be paid for their dreams; they were induced by clever fear tactics and propaganda to incrementally realign their collective morality so that, in the end, the Face of Evil was the face of every supporter of Hitler.
The story of the rise of Adolf Hitler is the single most important story of the 20th century. With this event, in less than a single lifetime, one of the most civilized countries in Europe was reduced to moral, physical, and cultural ruin. The rest of the world was nearly gobbled into this black hole of evil. This should give everyone something to think about - and think about it long and hard.
At present, the model of what transpired in Germany can quite easily be seen by many people as unfolding in the United States today. There were other ways that the history of Germany could have unfolded in that time. There are other ways the history of the United States can unfold.
Complicity does not mean that you have to actively support evil, it simply means that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
At Signs of the Times, we are not in the business of telling anyone what to do. We are only here as a lighthouse, a constant sweeping illumination that goes around and around and says, basically, the same thing over and over again. Our readership is growing by leaps and bounds, and we know that there are new readers every day who have not read every daily report for the past couple of years. We also know that there are regular readers who, after reading the page, go back to sleep and think "it can’t be THAT bad." And so, again and again we shine the light, ring the alarm bell, and try to think of different ways to get through to others the extreme peril in which we stand. This brings us back to the issue of how does Knowledge Protect?
In the past three years, as I noted above, we have made some considerable progress on our mandate of discovering what really makes reality tick and how does humanity fit into it. Much of this work is pure science - physics and mathematics - but I’m not going to give you the formulas or the computer simulation codes, I’m going to explain it to you in simple terms.
Our universe seems to be made up of matter/energy and of consciousness.
Matter/energy by itself "prefers", as it seems, a chaotic state.
Matter/energy by itself doesn’t even have a concept of "creation" or "organization". It is the consciousness that brings to life these concepts and by its interaction with matter pushes the universe towards chaos and decay or towards order and creation.
This phenomenon can modeled mathematically and simulated on a computer using EEQT (Event Enhanced Quantum Theory). Whether EEQT faithfully models the interaction of consciousness with matter, we do not know; but chances are that it does because it seems to describe correctly physical phenomena better than just the orthodox quantum mechanics or its rival theories (Bohmian mechanics, GRW etc.)
What we learn from EEQT can be described in simple terms as follows:
Let us call our material universe "the system". The system is characterized by a certain "state". It is useful to represent the state of the system as a point on a disc. The central point of the disk, its origin, is the state of chaos. We could also describe it as "Infinite Potential." The points on the boundary represents "pure states" of being, that is states with "pure, non-fuzzy, knowledge". In between there are mixed states. The closer the state is to the boundary, the more pure, more ‘organized’ it is.
Now, an external "observer", a "consciousness unit", has some idea - maybe accurate, maybe false or anywhere in between - about the "real state" of the system, and observes the system with this "belief" about the state. Observation, if prolonged, causes the state of the system to "jump". In this sense, you DO "create your own reality", but the devil, as always, is in the details.
The details are that the resulting state of the system under observation can be more pure, or more chaotic depending on the "direction" of the jump. The direction of the jump depends on how objective - how close to the reality of the actual state - the observation is.
According to EEQT if the expectations of the observer are close to the actual state of the system, the system jumps, more often than not, into more organized, less chaotic state.
If, on the other hand, the expectation of the observer is close to the negation of the actual state (that is when the observer’s beliefs are not TRUE according to the ACTUAL state - the objective reality), then the state of the system, typically, will jump into a state that is more chaotic, less organized. Moreover, it will take, as a rule, much longer time to accomplish such a jump.
In other words, if the observer’s knowledge of the actual state is close to the truth, then the very act of observation and verification causes a jump quickly, and the resulting state is more organized; pure. If the observer’s knowledge of the actual state is false, then it takes usually a long time to cause a change in the state of the system, and the resulting state is more chaotic.
In short, everyone who "believes" in an attempt to "create reality" that is different from what IS, adds to the increase of chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain’t gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this "staring down the universe" exercise with you.
On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance of the reality and appropriate responses to how things really are, you then become more "aligned" with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order energy, and your actions are consonant with what is. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, matched by the appropriate actions, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential.
In the Adventure Series, I concentrated to a great extent on the problem of psychopathy in our world today. I was motivated to do this by the fact that we had been victimized by a psychopath whose behavior was utterly incomprehensible. As a consequence of this research, I was much better prepared to understand George Bush and his Reich and that served to "inoculate" me against the fear tactics that are utilized by the psychopath to paralyze their victims. I realize that Americans who are "stupid" are that way by design. In a sense, it is not their fault. They are no more capable of thinking on their own than the mouse is capable of escaping the claws of the cat determined to eat it.
But not everyone is a mouse. It is for those who are evolving that we continue to keep the lighthouse going. But be aware, the day may come - and sooner than you might expect - when the storm is so violent that the keepers of the flame will abandon the task, knowing that no light can be seen in such Stygian darkness.
In the Adventure Series, I wrote the following:
Could it ever be an evolutionarily stable strategy for people to be innately unselfish?
On the whole, a capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation. Thus the idea that selection pressure could ever cause saintliness to spread in a society looks implausible in practice. It doesn’t seem feasible to out-compete genes which promote competitiveness. "Nice guys" get eaten or out-bred. Happy people who are unaware get eaten or out-bred. Happiness and niceness today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who are empathic toward other human beings, who have a conscience, is all too common.
Nevertheless, a predisposition to, conscience, ethics, can prevail if and when it is also able to implement the deepest level of altruism: making the object of its empathy the higher ideal of enhancing free will in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants.
In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.
In short, if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the group future, then it can be only be dealt with by refusing to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis.
Preserving free will for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves free will for others.
Protection of our own rights AS the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness of all.
If mutant psychopaths pose a potential danger then true empathy, true ethics, true conscience, dictates using prophylactic therapy against psychopaths.
It seems certain from the evidence that a positive transformation of human nature isn’t going to come about through a great spiritual awakening, socio-economic reforms, or a spontaneous desire among the peoples of the world to be nice to each other. But it’s quite possible that, in the long run, the psychopathic program of suffering will lose out because misery is not a stable strategy.
In a state of increasing misery, victims will seek to escape it; and this seeking will ultimately lead them to inquire into the true state of their misery, and that may lead to a society of intelligent people who will have the collective capacity to do so.
And so it is that identifying the psychopath, ceasing our interaction with them, cutting them off from our society, making ourselves unavailable to them as "food" or objects to be conned and used, is the single most effective strategy that we can play. […]
To allow oneself to be conned, or used by a psychopath is to effectively become part of his "hierarchy" of feeding. To believe the lies of the psychopath is to submit to his "bidding" (he bids you to believe a lie, and you acquiesce), and thus, to relinquish your free will.
In strictly material terms, this doesn’t seem to be much of an issue, right? After all, somebody lies to us and who really cares? Is it going to hurt us to just let them lie? Is it going to hurt us to just go along with them for the sake of peace, even if we know or suspect they are lying? After all, checking the facts and facing the psychopath with truth, and telling them "no" is generally very unpleasant. Remember, the game is set up so that we pay a lot for being ethical in dealing with the psychopath. In material terms, it really doesn’t seem to be worth it because we suffer all kinds of attack - verbal, psychological, and even physical abuse - so it’s just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, right? […]
At best, we can only really penetrate to the level of the psychological reality, observed behavior that is discordant, or self-destructive. And we are thoroughly programmed to help by giving until it hurts, or trying to fix, or to make nice. All of these things, all of these accommodations of psychopathy, on just a practical level, can be seen to "select for psychopathy" in terms of the gene pool.
But on another level, considering the great amount of evidence we have that there is something very mysterious going on that has to do with "controlling the minds of humanity," and covering up something that may affect every single human being on this planet, we find that the issue is crucial. Refusing to accommodate the manipulations and maneuvers of the psychopath may, indeed, be critical to the positive transformation of our planet. […]
And we see that the ultimate aim of the psychopath, as living representatives of the Universal forces of Entropy, of Non-Being, is to MASTER creative energy. To assimilate it to the self, to deprive others of it by inducing them to believe lies.
Because, when you believe the lie of the psychopath, you have given him control of your Free Will - the essence of Creativity. […]
As I quoted above: Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously. Therefore, the second law is "follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature."
All creation is a result of the engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil. But the second, prescriptive law determines to which "Face of God" one will return: Life or Death. Do you observe the world based on truth, objectivity, as the Universe views itself? That brings life. Or, do you view the word based on lies, subjectivity, and do you seek to shut-out, control, or force the world to bend to your will? If so, you have chosen Death.
It is only Truth and actions based on Truth that will restore Life and order to our world.
Robert Parry
Consortium News
March 28, 2008
(via sott.net)
An obvious reason why the mainstream US press can’t handle the Iraq truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other US officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals, says Robert Parry.
With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 US dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what’s transpired.
So, you have President George W. Bush, the chief author of this catastrophic war, declaring that "normalcy is returning back to Iraq" even as fighting rages across much of the country and rockets rain down on the highly fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.
Bush’s comment invited comparisons to the acronym coined by U.S. Army soldiers during World War II: SNAFU for "situation normal, all fucked up."
In the news media, there were specials, including a much-touted PBS Frontline two-parter on "Bush’s War" which followed the mainstream line of mostly accepting the Bush administration’s good intentions while blaming the disaster on policy execution - a lack of planning, bureaucratic rivalries, rash decisions and wishful thinking.
The chief interviews for the program were with former Bush administration officials and with journalists - such as Michael Gordon and John Burns of the New York Times whose influential reporting helped set the stage for the war - and with Bob Woodward, whose Bush at War was a generally flattering account of Bush’s decision-making.
Remaining outside the frame of mainstream U.S. debate was any serious examination of the war’s fundamental illegality.
During the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg, the United States led the world in decrying aggressive war as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Yet, Frontline and other mainstream U.S. news outlets shy away from this central fact of the Iraq War: by invading Iraq without the approval of the U.N. Security Council and under false pretenses, the Bush administration released upon the Iraqi people "the accumulated evil of the whole" - and committed the "supreme" war crime.
An obvious reason why the mainstream U.S. press can’t handle this truth is that to do so would mean that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, a host of other U.S. officials and even some prominent journalists could be regarded as war criminals.
To accept that reality would, in turn, create a moral imperative to take action. And that would require a great disruption in the existing U.S. power structure, which hasn’t changed much since Bush won authorization from Congress in October 2002 to use force and then invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Not only are Bush and Cheney still in office - and two of the three remaining presidential candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, voted for the war - but the roster of top Washington journalists remains remarkably intact from five years ago.
Iraq War hawk Fred Hiatt still runs the Washington Post’s editorial pages where you can still read the likes of Charles Krauthammer, David Ignatius, Richard Cohen and a bunch of other columnists who pushed for the war.
The same is true for the New York Times’s op-ed page, where writers like Thomas Friedman have prospered despite their erroneous war judgments and where one of the few changes has been to recruit prominent neoconservative William Kristol, who has used his column to chide Americans who won’t hail Bush’s courageous war leadership.
Deeper Trends
In evaluating this corrupt political/media elite, a historian might want to go back even further and wonder how someone as eminently unqualified and unfit as George W. Bush became president of the most powerful nation on earth.
How did a technologically sophisticated country like the United States with a relatively free press get led down this dangerous path? Why did so many American voters in 2000 believe made-up stories about Al Gore’s supposed delusions, like the apocryphal quote, "I invented the Internet"?
Indeed, how did a seemingly endless supply of myths and half-truths take root in the American psyche?
Going back even a bit further, how were Americans sold on the happy tales of Ronald Reagan’s presidency as the blood of U.S.-supported dirty wars in Central America and elsewhere was washed from the nation’s memory bank?
Why in a media environment with 24-hour cable news programming has intelligent dissent against U.S. foreign policy been so marginalized and excluded? Why are editors and producers so afraid of allowing some of these voices to be heard? How has such a destructive "group think" been allowed to take hold?
One of the obvious answers is fear - at least fear that one’s career would be irreparably damaged by wandering too far outside the safety of the herd.
And while running with that herd, it’s understood that there’s much greater safety in veering right, given the well-funded conservative attack groups that have devoured the careers of many independent-minded journalists who refused to bend.
(I’ve tried to address this history in my books, including Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, as well as at Consortiumnews.com.)
Well-Spoken Madness
While many Americans - both inside and outside Washington - recognize these real-world constraints on how politicians and journalists address issues, the larger consequences are less understood.
What these trends have done over the past three decades is not just shift the dominant U.S. political/media system to the right. Nor have they just constructed a "group think" that excludes reasonable points of view that challenge the conventional wisdom.
The cumulative effect of this willful conformity and this informal censorship has been to engender a form of collective madness at the decision-making levels of the U.S. government — and within the upper echelons of the news media.
But it is a flexible form of insanity in which reality is alternatively banished - as it was in the early phases of the Iraq War, from WMD "mushroom clouds" through "Mission Accomplished" - and then is brought in for retooling when matters get too far out of control, when the jarring gap between the official line and the truth starts to destabilize the national political consensus.
In listening to the measured tones of the Frontline narration - not to mention the well-dressed ex-government officials and the well-spoken mainstream journalists - I was left with the feeling that a new synthetic "reality" was being lowered in to replace the older discredited version.
It was as if the bloody madness that President Bush inflicted on the people of Iraq - aided and abetted by many witting and unwitting American accomplices - was being drained of its crimson hue and stripped of its human horrors.
Forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead and maimed. Forget the innumerable lives destroyed and the millions displaced. Forget the bizarre forms of torture at Abu Ghraib and the widespread mistreatment of detainees at other Iraqi prisons.
After all, we were being told, the war’s architects were honorable and reasonable men and women who were trying to do the right thing, but sadly they were undermined by bureaucratic inertia, back-biting and, yes, incompetence. It was just one big SNAFU.
But, with a few changes here and there - a new general or two, a tweaked counter-insurgency strategy, some more U.S. soldiers and a bit more patience - everything will work out just fine.
No need for national guilt. No need for accountability. No reason to purge the editorial offices of leading newspapers and TV networks. No reason to talk about impeachment or war-crimes tribunals for committing the "supreme" crime against world peace. No need for any of that.
As President Bush said on March 27, "normalcy is returning back to Iraq," if you don’t take note of the mayhem all around. One might add that a similar form of "normalcy is returning back to Washington," if you don’t take note of all the lies and the self-deceptions.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
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SOTT Special Correspondent
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"[…] the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you […]" Character V, from V for Vendetta
Yes, V is right. There is something terribly wrong with this country - and this could be referring to almost any country on the globe, since Pathocracy has taken global control. It actually makes sense for psychopaths to act as they do as such is their nature. But what about the rest of us? How is it that "fear got the best of us", and why is it that a paralyzing fear descends upon us when we consider resisting? Why is it that thoughts of "them" coming for us and locking us away, overshadow our truest human desires for Freedom, Love, Truth?
There is, in fact, a reason. It is called Learned Helplessness. One can find various websites on the respective experiments with dogs done by psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues in the 60s. But I’ll quote from Clarissa Pinkola Este’s book, Women who run with the Wolves, which sums up the experiment quite nicely.
We all were conditioned to this helplessness from our earliest days, and it is possible that those of us with the innate need to know and the ability to resist, defend and actually do something at some point in the future were particularly targeted in order to really embed this helplessness so as to keep us frozen in inaction.
In my daily life I interact with so many people who are confident, mobile, and intelligent, people who have ideas and speak up for themselves, but I always wonder why it is that they are not out there voicing their opposition to the corruption and criminality of big government. These people can’t be blind to the state of the world because the evidence is all around them, yet still they remain complacent in the face of a very grave threat to us all. They are content to live out their lives within the restrictive limits set them by the political and corporate elite of this world.
So the task of speaking out is left to us ‘neurotics’, despite all our fears and scars, we still have that burning desire to know, to understand, to see, and then see what we can do about it - to DO something about that which is causing our fear is the only way to alleviate it. And once we discover, once we understand something, we feel the need to share it, to pass it on to those who, like us, are searching.
Because frankly, what are we going to do with everything we learn if we keep it to ourselves? There’s a Greek folk song that says "life not shared is a stolen life". I would argue that also "knowledge not shared, is stolen knowledge".
If you think about it, it’s the not speaking up, the submission, the not sharing of our discoveries, the not pointing out that the emperor is naked that allows the psychopaths in power to continue their predatorial ways and for the situation to continue on its downward spiral. As with so many problems in life, the problem here is one of fear-based faulty thinking. People fear that "they" will come for them if they speak out, but the paradox is that by not speaking out and facilitating our continu
