The War that No-one Wanted
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, Living in Korea, The Destruction of History
It’s probably because I don’t have a TV any more (and I would probably only watch UFC etc. all the time if I did), but if the Norks lobbing the occasional dud missile into the sea constitutes “provocation”, might I respectfully suggest that the people saying this are in need of “medication”?
Because you’d have to be living in a media-shill-controlled little bubble to think that the Norks are going anywhere fast. The parties with an interest in all of this are clear to see and the Americans in particular should have been sitting around a table with the Norks, Chinese and Russians, at least, to find a solution.
War on the peninsula is not inevitable but is being stoked by those who profit from it, for whom any person who is not in their diabolical little circle (ordinary people in Korea, North and South, plus the remainder of humanity) is expendable trash, that’s exactly how they see us.
And if anyone starts to raise the dubious spectre of “Democracy versus Totalitarianism” or similar waffle to justify a conflict, let’s remember that there used to be regular meetings between the concerned parties (“democratic” and otherwise), and an agreement was reached to help the Norks with their power requirements, which the Americans were proposing, but, ah… the disadvantage of “Democracy”, in this case, is that when the citizenry are swayed to change their administration, policy also changes, and that is why we are talking about this today, otherwise the “problems” with NK would have been solved around fifteen years ago and everything would have been much more tranquil.
But hey, there’s no profit in peace… is there?
Pentagon should move US military families from S. Korea ahead of possible war – Sen. Graham
Getting Away From Google
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Uncategorized
I have been looking into alternative (non-mainstream) search engines for some time, but here is a well-known commentator’s experience…
For those among us who value privacy and a certain lack of pious result filtering, here is James Corbett’s recent Corbett Report on some alternatives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=496&v=gE_DyB7uS8E
The site referenced at the beginning, “Countermarkets”, can be found at: http://countermarkets.com.
Posted: October 15th 2017
Breakfast in the Ruins II
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Breakfast in the Ruins, Environment, Lost Geographies
Absolutely. I have nothing to add to this.
The Trials and Tribulations of a New Job
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Commentary, General, Living in Korea, Odds and Ends...
It frightens me sometimes to think how long I have been here… tonight I am back in the Pinot Wine Bar in Banpo, Seoul, not far from the Express Bus Terminal, and predictably, just like when I first started coming here all those years ago (when I was working in Korean public elementary schools, God help me!) I couldn’t remember the way (wrong exit from the Bus Terminal again) and ended up getting more early evening exercise than expected…
Right now, the early spring air in Seoul is something of a miasma, as the first clouds of the annual ‘Hwang sa’ (the ‘Floating Yellow Dust’ from the Gobi mentioned previously at times in this blog) waft their noisome way across the brief stretch of ocean separating the Korean peninsula from mainland China and combine with the indigenous smog of an early Seoul evening, and already, close to the end of March, the KTX train coming north from Daegu was filled with the sound of irritated lungs coughing; at both ends and all points in between, where the line of sight allows it, the distant hills are barely distinguishable from the grey, overcast sky. Happily, perhaps, the weather app on my phone is promising rain tomorrow, but towns in the south seem to be having surprisingly high levels of airborne dust. Thus it comes to pass that, as is the case every spring, the true harbinger of the coming summer is not the emerging green buds and leaves on the trees, but a grey sky and a constant cough in the throats of all of those unwise enough to venture out without a dust mask of some description, although some of us also take some dubious medication for it, too.
Alas, what brings me here on what should now be my odd weekend (the new job involves working from Wednesday to Sunday evenings each week; my ‘weekend’ is now Monday and Tuesday) was yet another visa screw-up – immediately after receiving copies of the countersigned contract and the other papers necessary to transfer sponsorship from the old employer to the new, I took the Seoul subway to the correct Immigration Office, and what did I discover? They had gone completely over to a reservation system the previous April, and no longer used the drop-in-take-a-ticket-and-wait-yer-turn method which, ironically perhaps, seems to work so well elsewhere. One might even point out that even when the old Busan office, which used to occupy a couple of floors of the Customs Building down near the harbour, was transplanted into a swanky, squeaky-clean new place a couple of blocks down the road, it was not necessary to enforce the new system because, as anyone who went there could see, customers occupied surprisingly few of the seats whilst waiting… which was quite a contrast with the previous situation, where you could hit the place on a weekday afternoon and find it full of Russian and Chinese sailors in nervous groups in the corners, Korean grannies looking after Filipino-Korean grandchildren as they ran around screaming and shouting, and various odd European and American English speakers regarding the melée with a mixture of confusion and amusement on their faces as they were waiting their turn.
Anyway… so… I then began a furious KakaoTalk chat session from my cell phone with the recruiter who was involved this time and who – alas – did not seem to understand that it was no longer possible to take a ticket and wait – you had to go online and make a reservation for some time in the near(ish) future, and – double alas! – it seems that the Seoul office already had no less than an eighteen-day backlog of applicants. It rapidly became apparent, also, that I was far from the only foreigner with this problem, as the enquiry desk off to the right-hand side of the office was swamped and just to add unwanted fuel to the already blazing fire, after talking with the female member of staff there (via my own cell phone) the recruiter demanded that I get the name of the office staff member so that she could lodge an official complaint because “she is so rude!”. I had to talk her down from her state of High Dudgeon (is there such a thing as Low Dudgeon???), and she went online and reserved a time slot for me, which (as I sit here writing) is tomorrow afternoon. And then back home and lessons on Wednesday, possibly after being up for hours with little sleep prepping up.
It’s one of the stranger aspects of being in a country for a long time, and travelling between towns to wherever the next job takes you, that you realise one day, with something approaching (let’s call it) amusement, that you could probably write a whole raft of blog entries about your experience with the Immigration Offices alone; it could be a whole series. Likewise, the strange emergence of the requirement for an annual medical check, something not deemed a necessity when you arrived here with an entry visa stamped in your passport, a suitcase and a couple of large wheelie bags full of books and stuff, and a slow trail of boxes sent by surface mail from Taiwan for cheapness, but which was suddenly applied by the customs people immediately after Lee Myung-bak was elected President at the the of 2007. Somewhere, when it was out of your sight, that nice square wheelie bag that you purchased new in Taipei was ripped apart at the seams, presumably by a Customs minion, and had to be unceremoniously discarded once ensconced in one’s new home. And not a word about compensation…
The documentary requirements quickly accumulated: first, they wanted you to take a health check each year; simultaneously, they started demanding criminal record printouts, in my case from the Metropolitan Police Database, which alone took at least two months. But pretty soon, this was considered insufficient – next, they wanted the copy of your original Degree deposited with the offices to be apostilled (and since it was a copy rather than the original, this meant that it first had to be notarised. In England. And then apostilled!), and finally, they wanted the (original) criminal record to be apostilled, too!
This made the provision of documents an expensive venture in insanity, both in terms of total price and in the amount of time required (as procuring a fresh criminal record printout could take upward of three months). For myself, I think the final straw came when I signed the contract for the year at the KDLI outside of Icheon in Gyyeonggi-do. It seems that they had decided that they should also have their own copies of the same documents provided by the applicants, and this could not have happened at a worse time for me personally, as the cost of relocation had crippled me financially and resulted in my new five-million-won credit card being commuted to (a more sensible) two million limit; it took an agonising FIVE MONTHS to get the CRC (from the Met in London) apostilled and with a notarised, apostilled Degree copy into the hands of Captain Lee, who was the foreigner liaison officer (the Korean Army were in charge of the place, or so it seemed; I never did quite figure that part out).
Even worse, two years after I graduated from what was originally CCAT in Cambridge (now the Anglia Ruskin University), the government of the time (Conservative) decided that it was appropriate for all of the former colleges and polytechnics, who used to issue Degrees on behalf of the CNAA (Council for the National Accreditation of Awards) or other existing universities should now become self-accrediting in their own right. This had the unfortunate consequence of consigning past CNAA records into the care of the Open University somewhere in north London, from whence (the last time I asked) it was not possible to obtain copies or reproductions in the event of loss or destruction. So I became very panicky at the prospect of having to send my one copy of my Degree back to England for whatever reason… even worse, institutions like EPIK (English Program In Korea) also demanded at least two sealed transcripts from said university, which the changes since my graduation have likewise rendered impossible, thus limiting opportunities for employment here, although I would have to say that I would not, nowadays and at my age, consider a new EPIK position to be appropriate or desirable. Those days are over!
The final nail in the coffin of EPIK applications, however, is that applicants from the UK and Australia now also have to submit copies of their birth certificates (why is that, I wonder???), something rather difficult because (a) I would have to fly back to find the silly thing because it is doubtful that my parents would be able to locate it, and (b) Korean employers tend to be rather mean with allowances for time off and it would, in any case, probably cost the equivalent of two months’ salary payments just for the air tickets! It might be possible to do this between jobs but it might also mean having to produce fresh apostilled documents, adding more cost in terms of money and time, the regulation here being that an applicant is not required to submit new documents provided that they are out of Korea for a period of less than three months.
Anyway, getting back to the main story… the odd factor in the equation in fact takes me back to a brief few minutes at the Suwon Immigration Office at the start of my time with the KDLI in 2013, which I had to travel to by public transport (seems like that’s something of a theme here, too) and at my own expense after a morning session of four lessons. I had no idea whether things would be okay, but I was assured by Mr. Han from Busan, the recruiter who brought me here from Taiwan all those years ago, that all I needed to transfer my visa was a set of four documents: passport, ARC, Letter of Release and a copy of the signed contract, and of course, I was well informed by his experience. And as it transpired, the process took no more than about fifteen minutes, tops, and the staff there turned out to be a pleasant group of girls who liked a laugh, although they did express surprise at the fact that I had resigned suddenly from the last position, which was (sadly) the seventeen-month extended contract offered to me by the same public elementary school who had employed me before I went to Busan to work for YBM… but I have mentioned this before…
“Ohhh, it was terrible!” I told them. Well, I think they believed me…
But we should consider from this anecdote that there was no actual problem with the Suwon Immigration Office themselves; the necessary documents had been deposited when I moved from Yangsan to Seomyeon, Busan in 2011 (and in fact, as I sit here writing this, these documents are still current, because circumstances have, yet again, prevented me from leaving the country since I did a visa run to Fukuoka in 2010), and the only documentary change they required was essentially notification of the new employer and the contract to prove it. No, it was the KDLI insisting that they were entitled to their own set of apostilled docs that caused so much grief; paying for them involved giving money to a friend so that I could use their credit cards. And the whole thing had to be done one afternoon in a PC room in Changwon – we had to find one where we could print the receipt web pages as proof of purchase. I kid you not!
So we should perhaps also include a nod of gratitude to the staff at the Immigration Offices, who often have to work with fractious and volatile foreigners with whom communication is difficult. I have never forgotten that it was one of their number, Mr. Kang, who at that time was working at the airport on Jeju Island, who came to my rescue when I landed there after flying out from Taiwan with only a wedge of New Taiwan Dollars in my wallet and none of the local currency, having received my final salary payment from Carol Hui, the secretary of my dubious employer and then left in something of a hurry; I actually had to overstay my visa AGAIN because I was waiting for someone to deliver the ticket before I could pay the overstay fine at the customs office and fly out. Despite the fact that it was late at night and the currency bod had already closed shop for the evening, Mr. Kang persuaded him to Do The Dirty Deed for me. Likewise, much more recently, my stint down in Geoje was cut short by the unavailablity of a new position from my then-employer, who actually sent my Letter of Release to the Geoje Immigration Office the same day as the semester ended, but somehow didn’t think to tell me about it immediately (and why was that, I wonder???); I was then going backwards and forwards between the Geoje and Masan offices for days while they worked out which one was responsible for handling me, and which was finally resolved when Masan allowed me an extra month thereafter to find a new job. They might have offered me even more time, but sometimes, perhaps, a beggar can’t be a chooser. Or cheeky, come to that…
After my visa experiences in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, I’m sure that my readers could share many similar ones of their own. Suffice it to say that the root of these procedures is the security of their countries, and while we may complain at the levels of inconvenience that they impose upon us, they are not usually trying to treat us unfairly; one could hardly blame them if they had a stereotype of an eternally-complaining (and usually, I don’t know, kind of pale-skinned?) foreigner who somehow seems to have an unreasonable belief that they have an automatic right of abode just because they happened to be there. It might be a good idea to step back for a moment and ponder the situation which finally evolved vis-a-vis the required documents here, because in the end, it seems to have reached an equitable balance between establishing the probity of the applicant and not imposing unnecessarily regular demands for new apostilled papers. Once the documents have been submitted to the local Immigration Office, they are scanned and retained in their database; thereafter, they remain current until such a time as the visa holder leaves the country for three months or more – meaning that it is now possible to leave the country for an extended period and still retain the visa, resuming legal activities here upon your return. It is also possible to stay in the country for up to six months between jobs by transferring to a D-10 (Jobseeker) visa and then (in my own case) transferring back to an E-2 once a new contract is signed. This is not a cheap process, however.
I suppose we could say that what often seems to happen in the case of immigration arrangements is that everything seems almost perfect, when all of a sudden, we find that there’s an annoying fly in the ointment, except that where immigration is concerned, the fly tends to involve an awful lot of financial and temporal expense. In addition, because a negative result vis-a-vis a visa (my God, I’m alliterating again!) could be catastrophic, the foreigner feels nervous and therefore, despite probably the best efforts and intentions of the Immigration Office staff, the whole thing collapses – like when (I was told) a loud American at an Immigration Office one day lost it and started abusing (verbally) the staff who were attending him, so they cancelled his visa right there and then, and he was out. As I found out first with my experience at Suwon and then more recently in Daegu, a little patience and humour goes a long way.
In the event, it took a huge amount of said ‘patience’ to get the thing sorted. Why? Because when I went up to the Immigration desk at the allotted time, the first thing the (lady) officer said was to ask where the Proof of Residence was; as it turned out, the new company had not included this in the original bundle that they gave me. Secondly, I was told at the time that it should be in my Inbox because it was sent by e-mail, but when I returned home that night, before sitting down to do at least some minimal prep before hitting the sack, I checked both of the e-mail accounts to which documents had been sent by the company, and could find said attachment in neither of them. Finally, it just so happened that the company manager was in the US at the time (!!!), and it took some four hours to get a copy of the housing contract faxed directly to the Immigration Office to complete the process. Again: I kid you not.
What we can observe here is the contrast between a straightforward transfer of visa sponsorship (because that’s what it was, and that’s how it should have been) and one compounded by inattentiveness on the part of one (or both) parties… there was at least one other complicating factor here, but I will not labour the point. I think it’s fair to say that in this particular case, difficulties arose because of the habit amongst the natives to not discuss with (or to make aware) their co-workers about what they are doing in the event that a crisis emerges and the co-worker has to (however temporarily) carry the can for them (a point which, oddly enough, figures large in the “Lesson Planning” component at my new employer…). I’ve seen it so many times, but this time it was almost catastrophic… you can’t mess about with Immigration, no matter how sympathetic they themselves may be.
As for myself… sometimes it feels as if I have a huge pot of ointment, the top is always open and it’s always so clogged with flies that it looks like a good old Spotted Dick pudding (but where’s the fucking CUSTARD???); but even though their involvement in my life is so fundamental and potentially life-changing, it would be wrong to single the Immigration Offices and the Ministry of Justice out because they are not the only insects trapped in my personal pot of cream. The ‘trouble’ is that they require a stack of documents for compliance, and so many things can go wrong along the way; this is my main point here.
As an illustration of other complicating factors in my life here, recently, a letter arrived which (I was told) was an invitation to partake in cancer screening, as I am now in my (ahem) fifties , and It’s The Done Thing (meaning, there is probably a legal requirement involved); Joseph, my manager in the previous position, hinted that it might be free (well, whoopee…). And I have been lamenting for a long time now that the requirement to plan lessons and find or design materials (and seek out materials online) involves a lot of sitting down; the lifestyle is simply not healthy, so I have been adjusting my diet accordingly, but this sedentary occupation also means that losing weight is not easy.
And the involvement of the Seoul Immigration Office in the Big Picture does seem to complicate things further, but in the end, like myself, the staff there are merely small units within the big machine, and patience and politeness are the lubricants for all of the dubious cogwheels; and as I adumbrated long ago, whether we like (or understand) it or not, when we arrive upon the shores of Korea we are the real ambassadors of our peoples; if our complaint with regard to peoples such as the Koreans is that we are seen through eyes that cannot see us afresh, maybe we should remember that actions speak louder than words, and maybe the actions of those belonging to our own nations here, in the past, may not have been as good or as beneficial as we might like, and the only way to counter the negatives is to be positive ourselves.
Peeling Secrets…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under General, How-To, Odds and Ends..., Uncategorized
Saw this on Yahoo this morning and the scales fell from my eyes… just goes to prove you’re never too old to learn something new!
The (Alleged) Death of Dialogue
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
What follows is an edited and extended rant in response to an online friend’s link to an article in The Federalist. [1]
As a remote but entertained observer of politics both in the USA and Europe (and therefore, by extension, in my homeland, the UK), I am sometimes – nay often – left gobsmacked by the execrably low level of public discourse. The USA is a place where ‘free speech’ is allegedly enshrined in their Constitution, which is all fine and dandy, but very often nowadays you will notice two things about it: that it is routinely abused, on the one hand to cause gratuitous offence, and on the other in a narcissistic manner, as if the very fact that one could speak freely means that what you say needs no prior critical faculty in the grey matter (read: bullshit filter), yet in the end, peoples’ intolerance will be the death of it.
When it comes to the right of free speech – something I would never wish to deny to anyone – it does seem to me these days that its abuse in the US stems from the notion that ‘freedom of speech’ equals the right to say literally anything, which common sense clearly suggests it does not. In particular, the tendency of people in positions of financial or political power (I shall leave religion to one side for the purposes of this diatribe) to spout out anything that they think their audience wants to hear (with the aim of gleaning more votes) has been demonstrated in abundance during the 2016 US Presidential campaign, more particularly, one thinks, by the losing party, meaning that onlookers have been alternately buffeted between hysterical laughter and mindless horror for the duration. We won’t continue to trouble ourselves with the fates of the sore losers, except, perhaps, to note with a little more amusement that among the so-called ‘snowflake’ population – young millennials who protested so vigorously against the possibility that The Donald, who seems to originate from outside the rarified atmosphere of normal political circles, might actually win and allegedly had to retire to ‘process’ the ultimate (negative, from their point of view) outcome – were often demonstrable hypocrites who did not even bother to actually vote (the startling figure of 48% non-voters among that group of electors has been bandied about). [2]
‘Free speech’ means that one should be allowed to express one’s opinion without fear of persecution. It does not mean freedom from criticism (which is a different barrel of sardines entirely), or freedom to libel or slander others. Yet this seems increasingly to be what many people desire – the enshrined right to vilify, demean and otherwise generally insult people without fear of legal or physical retribution. To this we might add the increasing general intolerance of many to anything but their own opinion; however, this only serves to remind us of my previous remarks in these pages because what we are seeing is the expression of narcissism; they don’t like to be reminded that their echo chamber is not private.
I have personally been shocked (but on reflection, not necessarily surprised) at the kind of malicious talk of some in the anti-Trump camp, who have thought that their candidate was ‘the One’, when in fact she (yes, I’m talking about Hillary, not Bernie or any of the others) was clearly ill, received more than twice as much in donations as her main opponent and still lost, flip-flopped between all kinds of stated positions and, being part of the Rarified Few, patently thought that the election was hers, like some kind of entitlement. This was a person who would have taken the US and everywhere else (and their dog) to World War III, which was clearly what some of her major financial donors wanted. As for The D., I would say that we should sit back and see what he is able to do. At the time of writing, he still hasn’t assumed his elected office and one would at least like to be charitable enough to suggest that he surely couldn’t be as bad as some of his predecessors…
What brought me to the keyboard today was an article linked on Facebook from The Federalist, which appears to be an American on-line publication with a more right-of-centre slant than one tends to encounter on a routine basis. This is called The Death of Expertise and was written by Professor Tom Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College (which sounds kind of ominous)[1]. I read his article and while I would agree with him broadly as to his main points, I have a fundamental disagreement with him when it comes to the desirability of ‘experts’. Partly, this is a humorous hangover from previous participation in the UK business environment, where we often say that ‘X’ is an unknown quantity, and a ‘spurt’ is a drip under pressure, but also partly that people are often described as ‘experts’ without any guarantee that their alleged ‘expertise’ will lead inevitably to favourable results or situations.
But I would like to assert my view that a person like myself with a background in practical science is hardly the kind who could be branded (as I think this author is trying to do) as a ‘non-expert’ (although in commenting on this, I have to point out that I am not an American citizen myself, and have no desire to be, the way things there seem to be going). One of the reasons I gave up on science is that much of it is falsified and cannot be supported by the data as they stand (or to put it another way, current paradigms fail to account for all the anomalies), and the ‘healthy option’ of having a range of competing hypotheses which could replace the current paradigm is barely ever mentioned because of the emotional, financial and career-related attachments that practitioners enjoy, and do not want to lose. Someone like myself will always be critical of authors like this because when they write, they are really trying to justify themselves and the system which supports them. To take a parallel from science when reading an article like this, one has to remember that waaayyyy back in the year that I was born (cough, cough), Thomas S. Kuhn was already lamenting, in his landmark tome “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, the fact that ‘normal science’ had given way to ‘verification’ of the paradigm rather than trying to challenge it; likewise, in his own book “Against Method”, Paul K. Feyerabend asserted (against a wall of criticism) that ‘normal science’ involved an anarchistic process in which the progress of a scientist’s career – if successful – involved an awful lot of schmoozing and ass-licking. This is essentially what we are seeing here, in the political context.
The author is talking here about the larger political arena, and while he is right to lambaste those who criticise the practitioners in this field on the basis of their personal delusions and acquired (inculcated) opinions, he unfortunately shows where he is coming from when he starts name-dropping with some of the 20th century’s greatest unhung criminals – the likes of Kissinger and Brzezinski. What he is really saying is that when you criticise ‘experts’, you are criticising the ‘status quo’. This is, in itself, wilful obfuscation: we would all acknowledge that (a) a brain surgeon is a virtually unchallengeable ‘expert’ in his field and (b) virtually any commentator (other than another ‘expert’ brain surgeon) would be unable to contradict said brain surgeon’s opinion as to methodology with any reasonably sophisticated or even meaningful argument. However, the brain surgeon operates in an area where peer review (and managerial and other feedback) works to prevent disasters as far as possible; colleagues in the field would be able not just to criticise his practice, but to make positive suggestions. One cannot say this regarding (for example) broad areas of science, where very often an erroneous paradigm is maintained at all costs, and even the direct observation of phenomena (and the data resulting from research) is deliberately obscured so that questioning the data and their interpretation is made extremely difficult. And the more difficult observation becomes, the more outlandish the claims; I have made my opinions clear about this in a range of blogs, but not before undertaking a lot of reading and attempting to understand the nature of the criticisms as well as the phenomena being observed.
To comprehend the nature of my criticism here and my continued reference to the practice of science when the author’s original theme was political, consider the following: the practice of engaging militarily inferior ‘enemies’ at great distance from the homeland mirrors the scientists’ practice of constantly attempting to place phenomena in sufficient isolation, be it in space or time, that casual observation is in fact rendered impossible. Examples from cosmology include the so-called ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Black Holes’, not to mention ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’. We are still living in an age where the power of stars and even the heating of planetary interiors is thought to be due to radioactive decay even though more logical hypotheses such as EU now seem more relevant.
In both cases, when non-practitioners desire to see things for themselves, chances are that practitioners will defend their contemptible little patch up to and including litigation, enactment of specific and targeted new laws (as has been seen in the aftermath of Fukushima in Japan, and now elsewhere) and in the final resort, outright murder of critics. Even U.S. Presidents are not immune from this.
We see also that “Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School.” In other words, he is a well-integrated component of the ruling system whose career is closely bound to its survival; his interest is political as well as practical. But his ‘expertise’ is such that he could never come to me and tell me how to improve a chromate conversion coating on zinc by altering the pH, or likewise how to remove metals from solution by a similar method. I also doubt if he could tell me anything useful about soil husbandry, animal rearing or solar or wind power if my final disenchantment with politics should persuade me to head for the hills. MY education, training and experience therefore lead me to distrust HIS ‘expert’ opinion and to suspect that there is a subtext to this article, and to think that I am right (Kissinger, Brzezinski). I therefore challenge his assertion that a person like myself should be considered unfit to pass comment in the political arena, and advise Americans to be even less tolerant. In reality, he’s trying to tell his fellow citizens how to think.
The kind of obfuscation seen in the scientific context is now rampant in the political arena, where the broad “West” is clearly trying to justify starting World War III by demonising countries such as Russia and China and dependencies such as Syria, and their prime agents are their puppet media; where are the signs that we need to understand the nations in question? How is Russia, in particular, posing any kind of ‘threat’ to the West? The ‘system’ controls the media (do what they say, or lose your career), demonstrating how dangerous the ‘gatekeepers’ can be; and the fact that many modern American laws seem to be the result of industry lobbying and graft rather than solid scientific investigations and/or popular opinion demonstrates the falsehood of this so-called ‘democracy’ itself. Surely modern America is an obvious plutocracy when such things can happen? And when people in the know reveal those things which the system wants to keep hidden, they are not labelled as ‘citizens exercising their democratic right to free speech’, they are ‘whistleblowers’, demonised, legislated against and maybe even murdered for their efforts and opinions. Yet, for some reason, this system advertises itself as the epitome of democratic sanity. Perhaps we should remember that the incoming President got himself elected by (a) inflaming the ‘mainstream media’ to get their outlandish reactions and (b) made (and is still making) extensive use of alternative media to get his messages out. That is democracy and inclusion. The ‘mainstream media’ represent the exact opposite.
Unfortunately (from my own point of view), those who claim ‘expertise’ in the political arena must always be subjected to the most rigorous criticism, because their errors (which may be in concert with the interests of large industrial entities) are of a nature where the consequences of their execution may be dire and when they themselves are dead, other people’s descendants have to handle the downstream sequelae. One would not wish to support a system, as can be seen in so many countries these days, where there is sufficient obfuscatory power that legal systems can be co-opted to actually prevent people from uncovering and interpreting its inconvenient data. Increasingly, so-called ‘liberal democracies’ have been enacting laws to prevent both journalists and citizens from discovering and disseminating information about things that affect them (like Fukushima), the media are dumbed-down and demonstrably complicit in the obfuscatory process and the media themselves shout down anyone who questions anything the system doesn’t like to be in the public arena. This behaviour even extends to sciences like cosmology, which is an utter disgrace to the broader scientific enterprise.
Why all the obfuscation, you may ask? What is the point of all of this? Well, the alternative word for ‘obfuscation’ here would be ‘occultation’, yet when we think of the word ‘occult’, science is the last major field of human endeavour that comes to mind, showing that this methodology of disguise has worked extremely well so far. Science is just as much an ‘occulted’ activity as any Hermetic Order, and therefore its practitioners seek to make access difficult for the ‘uninitiated’; likewise practitioners of politics and the performing arts often have similar involvements, which they often give away with their words and gestures. Mark Passio goes into this in some depth here [3]:
So thank you, Professor, but you’re not an ‘expert’ in any area which interests me. Rather the contrary: from what you are saying, it seems like you are trying to justify a system which essentially disrespects the opinions of intelligent and experienced onlookers like myself, and represent said system’s ossification and elitism. In my opinion, this kind of haughty commentary is only a step or two away from criminalising political dissent… oh, wait…
[1] http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/#.WG8fBOJEFTy.twitter
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3942278/PIERS-MORGAN-Memo-millennials-awful-feeling-ve-got-called-losing-happens-want-know-win-stop-whinging-bit-learn-lessons-Trump.html
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1V98DsNXi0
Minor edits: Sunday 12th February, 2017.
Why All Taxation Is Theft
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Gripes
Damn right!
This is an anarchist talking… something we need to understand better, if only because current political philosophies are so bankrupt and common sense is sorely needed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6C1M_7BzZ0
Always remember: Theoretical anarchism is only ever enlightening.
More From the FBI…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, General, Gripes, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
This was shared to my Wall this morning. And the most interesting comment seems to be part of that about the late Philip Klass:
“Always striving to stay on the cutting edge, Klass published an “Exclusive Report on Counter Measures” in the November 18th and 25th, 1957, editions of Aviation Week. This report was referred to the FBI for the “unauthorized disclosure of information classified ‘Secret’”. An investigation into the disclosure was dropped when the US Air Force told the FBI that the disclosed information could not be declassified for purposes of prosecution.”
http://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/fbi-files-the-paranormal-collection/
This covers a range of characters who by now are well-known to the UFO research community.
As I have stated on a number of occasions (and indeed blogged about fairly recently), I am not personally of the opinion that all unidentified lights or objects in the sky are by definition guided or piloted by beings from other worlds; it seems to me that many of them must be of purely ‘natural’ origin and the great crime of science is that it has persistently failed not only to seek an explanation for them, but also to offer any reasonable explanation of why it has not done so. It seems to me that they provide some kind of convenient ‘smokescreen’ for ‘something’ that ‘someone’ wants to keep in an obscured condition.
We might add (just for a lark) the comments of the late Apollo astronaut and first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, which seem curiously relevant in this context:
“There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of the truth’s protective layers. There are many places to go beyond belief.”
… and one thing you absolutely cannot say about Neil is that he was not someone who knew something.
Discovering Terence McKenna and the Tyranny of Neoteny
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, General, The Destruction of History
The greatest benefit of having a resource like the Internet is the way it makes so much information available. The chance of making serendipitous discoveries is enormously increased by being able to interrogate and cross-reference vast databases, such as those of Google and YouTube, and this birthday weekend was no exception… I listened again to someone I had heard of previously and respected but did not view often enough, and discovered that he had hit a nail quite squarely on the head some time before he died…
Also, since I begin writing this piece of extended bile, over the big pond in America they had an election, and what a surprise, the candidate favoured by the press lost! And in the process of trying to condition the electorate into believing that Killary was a better bet than Flump (as if this really represented any kind of reasonable choice), they lost their own credibility forever. The notion that the American press are ‘free and impartial’ is gone, and people are looking to alternative news sources for a true account of reality – and Europe has wasted no time in trying to enact legislation to stifle the voices of the genuinely ‘free’ sources. But more of that later…
To celebrate my 53rd birthday (quietly), and by invitation, I took a bus to Changwon that Friday [8] afternoon and stayed at my customary motel. The ‘party’ was, alas, merely four of us, but of course, it’s the fact that those few people cared enough to come and give whatever gifts they felt were fitting for the occasion that is most important.
We’ll skip over that event, and cut to the early hours of the morning: munching on a couple of cheese toast sandwiches (my avoidance of gluten-rich products tossed temporarily out of the window due to a case of the munchies), I found that there was plenty of unsecured wifi available to that room, and watched a very interesting two-hour lecture by the late Terence McKenna:
(The point in question is at about 31:30 minutes into play time)
For those of you not familiar with this person, he became famous for his studies of ethnobotany and the relationships between psychedelic plant extracts and shamanism, and their use as entheogens [1]. Like many of those who have sampled potent psychedelics (although this is not absolutely necessary, of course), his mind became much more open to ideas which conventional ‘education’ (read: ‘social control propaganda’) would otherwise stifle and suppress, and he made a set of remarks which, even at that early hour and with a masticated glob of cheese toast sliding down my throat, struck a chord and made me realise that he was discussing precisely what I myself had been suspecting for a very long time, although perhaps using a rather different phraseology: the inculcation of a state of neoteny in humans as a means of social and psychological control.
McKenna’s extended description of ‘neoteny’ was not as accurate as I myself would have preferred, although his initial definition was fair enough: in animals, neoteny consists of the retention of larval (or other immature) body features whilst simultaneously being able to reproduce. In other words, the retention of juvenile morphological features of the species in the adult morph; this is also referred to as paedomorphism or paedomorphosis. When I was younger, the most commonly-quoted example of neoteny was that of the Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), in which retention of neotenous features is postulated to be part of a survival mechanism in environments which tend to be low in available iodine, which is required for the thyroid gland to produce the growth hormone thyroxine. Experimentation showed that administration of iodine, either as an injection or in food, permits an increase in thyroxine production and consequent metamorphosis to the adult (salamander) form.
The main neotenous features observed in Axolotls are the retention of the larval tail and external gills, as well as underdeveloped fore and hindlimbs, but they are able to produce viable sex cells, and thus also reproduce. More widely, however, as the term refers to the retention of juvenile features in adults, there are notionally ‘neotenous’ features which separate humans morphologically from both supposedly ‘ancestral’ primates (surviving apes have more extensive body hair than humans, for example) and other cultural or other ethnic groupings within the species (see [2]). Interestingly, commentators such as the late Lloyd Pye also pointed to a range of such features which, it was claimed, constituted evidence that humans were not, in fact, apes [3].
McKenna postulated that humans had historically been kept in a state of psychological neoteny, and that their immature mental state mirrored that of their bodies, which in fact more resemble those of baby (or even foetal) apes rather than the adults of other ape species. Cultures supply individuals with a simplified and likely mythologised explanation of reality, which is extremely convenient for those parties whose interests are well-served by the distraction and ignorance of others, and such a mechanism therefore keeps people in a psychological state which is more easy to control – alienated and psychotic. He has absolutely hit it on the head.
McKenna’s interest in psychedelics and entheogens led him to suggest that they allow the individuals who use them to mature intellectually beyond their inculcated psychologically neotenous (read: ‘juvenile’) state and see the control system for what it is. It is interesting to note that in this lecture, he points out that he did not personally encourage or assist others in the use of psychedelics, which probably suggests why he was still lucid as the years advanced whereas another well-known tripper, Timothy Leary, seems to have become rather a wreck later in life.
For our purposes, however, it is probably sufficient to realise that a service such as the Internet functions rather like a psychedelic, in the sense that the abundance of stimulation (information) and connections between events can allow us to form a more accurate picture of the world than our cultures (read: ‘mutual self-repeaters of the propaganda of our would-be controllers’) desire us to see; specifically, the artificial limits to our horizons imposed by conventional publishing and media have been subverted by the democratisation of technology and information. Thus, rather than listening to the radio we might instead subscribe to a set of podcasts or Internet streams which we feel present us with more representative viewpoints, opinions and information; and now virtually anyone can create these, and since many of those who do so are likewise in a psychologically neotenised state, we have to use our intellectual faculties (in the sense that McKenna uses the term ‘intellectual’ here – in his own words: “Anyone who has figured it out”) to distinguish the diamonds from the dross. A huge amount of the material available on the Internet is pure disinformation, intended to create disorientation and keep observers distracted, and it takes critical faculties to avoid this, something which seems to be a bit of a stumbling-lock for modern educational paradigms. It goes without saying that because of the democratisation of the transmission process, we can access it repeatedly and at our own convenience, rather than as and when the originators (formerly the dominant TV and radio networks) desire.
My own experience with the Internet since 1997 seems to be that no source of information is one hundred per cent. reliable, neither at the institutional nor the individual level; an opinion is just an opinion (a point which is very important to bear in mind when, for example, you are a student using a textbook which is periodically ‘updated’ to a ‘new edition’ – it is surprising how much content may be replaced, but does this necessarily imply that what was replaced was somehow ‘no longer important’? Who decides these things? And did those bits of information cease to be? Surely the phenomena they describe are still with us?). Those with authoritarian tendencies would surely like us to believe otherwise, but that only undermines their own credibility, as the disparity between reality and their delusions is often clearly visible. We form a much more accurate picture of reality in our minds when we realise that every fact should be verified by as many sources as possible; this way, truths link with each other and non-facts are increasingly excluded [7]. Paradoxically, perhaps, we need to keep an open mind at all times, lest we dismiss facts in error by excessive scepticism.
The simple fact that so many authoritarians would like to limit free speech and to regulate what can and cannot be shared over a vast network like the Internet only serves to demonstrate that effective communication makes hiding secrets difficult, and the people who have the greatest desire to hide secrets are those whose (neoteny-based) power would be destroyed by it. How odd, then, that it is the authoritarian who loves to suggest that “if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear”!
“Let him that is without sin cast the first stone” is my response to that one!
At the heart of what McKenna was adumbrating, however, is the notion that by limiting and diverting the natural process of information accumulation through education and experience (and of course, by deliberate distraction in the form of the media, organised sports, etc.), authority keeps the majority of the citizenry in a psychologically and emotionally stunted, immature state, with a view to controlling them by imposing artificial barriers which people themselves then reinforce with stereotyped (culture-determined) behaviour (a point often repeated by our own dear David Icke). The citizenry therefore remain in an essentially psychologically juvenile or ‘neotenised’ state which is self-perpetuating for as long as those same citizens are prepared to tolerate the disinformed ‘peer pressure’ which supports the current paradigm. It is only when they are prepared to reject this that wider and more accurate viewpoints become possible, and the neotenous ‘spell’ is magically broken.
In the past, when I personally have thought about these things, I have often considered what I call the ‘tyranny of the familiar’ – the fact that too many people exist within a culturally delimited ‘comfort zone’ and are unwilling to venture beyond it for fear of the great discomfort involved, which of course also includes the derision of peers due to the pernicious bubble of “… but everybody knows that..!” or “… but we’ve always done it this way!” … so how about this for a new concept? Try to be an enlightener and an opener of doors, rather than a mere repeater for the contemptible statist/collectivist controllers? Do you really need to be one of their robots? Indeed, what proof could you offer to others that you are truly an individual and a unique thinker? Where do the limits of your ‘knowledge’ really lie? When you read a book or a news article, are you doing so with a sufficiently critical mindset, or do you simply accept things as ‘facts’ because an authority figure is broadcasting them? Where does the ‘authority figure’ get his or her ‘facts’ from?
This is, I think, something we all need to discover. For example, when we look at the lauded ‘achievements’ of ‘civilisation’, what are we really seeing? If achievement requires venturing beyond the socially-enforced bounds of behaviour or thinking (here we might, as an illustration of ‘limits’, pause to reflect upon what is considered ‘acceptable’ to the current cosmological paradigm), is what we see from any particular era in human existence a set of creations produced by the thinking of free minds, or merely ‘reflections’ of the current thinking which seemed at the time to be ‘free’ simply because it was not subjected to realistic criticism, as it was actually conforming with the accepted and current ‘norms’? What is ‘civilisation’ really worth? One would venture to suggest that ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’ are as separate as the stock market is from the wider economy, yet we allow an illogical mental link between the two to persist and the result is extremely damaging.
Worse, how about the bizarre position of an archetypal ‘Power User’ of computers, a stereotype which seems to have emerged very rapidly in tandem with the aforementioned democratisation of computing technology, where a person could be very adept in the use of a particular software package, but legendarily could not figure out how to turn the machine on and off? One would like to think that this was merely the stuff of urban legend, except I have known (and still know) so many people whom this characterises exactly – and not solely in relation to the use of computers either (you can find tons of real-life examples at Computer Stupidities [6]). People in ignorance (and I myself could be one of them, as a single person’s knowledge is strictly limited, which was Socrates’ most memorable point) assuming that certain types of behaviour are correct, when in fact they don’t realise what they are doing or whether it is beneficial or harmful. I have a feeling, personally, when I step back for a moment and ask myself what is really happening when I undertake even the most trivial activity, such as the substances I use for cleaning or personal hygiene, for example, that my own ignorance or refusal to acknowledge that my own actions may be in some way detrimental to the wider environment is thoroughly reprehensible. But I don’t have the whole story… and preventing people from having the whole story is they key to controlling them. ‘Someone’ decides which ‘news’ is worthy of publication and which is not, according to their own agenda; ‘someone’ decides which information is worthy of inclusion in the pages of WikiPedia, and actively removes anything deemed ‘incorrect’ according to their prejudices, rather than factuality; and ‘someone’ has been responsible for the repeated loss of knowledge throughout history through the destruction and looting of libraries, achieved by a hidden hand manipulating vast masses of people. War, in particular, is very effective in this regard as a plausible ‘excuse’ for ‘unavoidable’ damage, and a very convenient and lucrative smokescreen behind which to hind all manner of evil deeds – the wilful but clandestine destruction of society’s wisdom being one of them. We are constantly hammered by the idea that war is somehow ‘unavoidable’, when in fact, it’s just a rich man’s game, and the rest of us losers are expected to foot the bill, both financially and in terms of lives lost.
We come full circle when we consider the entertainment industries, whole sectors of society which are purely engaged in making ridiculous (and perhaps unjustifiable) profits from indulgence and distraction. It has not escaped my observation that these industries, whose business is essentially the promotion and exploitation of pointless flim-flam and the concomitant emotional responses to stereotyped visual tropes, are also intimately involved with the attempt to predetermine what users may or may not actually do online, not realising perhaps that this will eventually lead to a hypocritical and parasitic industry which will self-destruct as the Internet becomes little more than a means of consumption (or maybe it already has – witness Hollywood’s constant obsession with ‘sequels’, and when they proved to be insufficient, they started on the business of ‘prequels’… as our dear friend D. Icke often puts it, “You just couldn’t make it up!”).
Additionally, the bankers don’t even want us to have real money any more, but want to replace that purely with numbers in (their) databases. Thus they will control everything in our lives, and we will be forever and irretrievably ‘neotenised’ and increasingly dysfunctional and incapable at a personal level. Is this not a despicable and tyrannical vista to behold? It’s already happening in places like Denmark [9]. Or maybe people will develop a bartering system to replace money when their ‘governments’ only allow them to have a bank account and a piece of plastic. At least when the predicted economic collapse arrives, people will still be able to trade!
We do have to note, however, that the attempts to censor and limit access to the Internet may already be demonstrably self-defeating. For example, remote payments by such means as credit cards. As I have been living in Korea for such a long time, my bank (in England) now refuses to send items such as new cheque books, credit and debit cards to me as they have (apparently arbitrarily or whimsically) imposed an ’embargo’ on certain countries, and have told me repeatedly that South Korea is among these, however illogical that may seem. The entertainment industry loves to use the Internet as an excuse to force people to cough up more cash, but maybe is ignoring the fact that electronic payments are still an impossibility for huge numbers of the global population, and for the dumbest of reasons. But as a lot of their modern products are also correspondingly dumb and unworthy of purchase, why not just keep your cash to yourself and strangle them out of existence with the power of your wallet? Let’s face it, you won’t miss them…
At the same time, in the visual realm of what are often referred to as ‘special effects’, there has been a strong tendency to create a kind of ‘virtual reality’ which is clearly intended to be, ultimately, sufficiently indistinguishable from the real world that the latter can comfortably be ignored, as if our whole lives were being eked out on a film set – or rather that the boundary between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ can no longer be detected easily, making the visual validation of falsehoods much more straightforward. And the fact that some precious people seem to think that their own behaviour should emulate the tantrums and follies of the various mind-manipulated moppet celebrities forced down their throats by the so-called ‘entertainment industry’ merely underlines a point in my previous articles about the dangers of narcissism – such a person is very easy to manipulate – and we can’t fail to notice that narcissistic, self-important personalities are also especially prevalent in the world of entertainment. Again, this is a kind of maintained neoteny, representing the intentional juvenilisation of personality, and consequent mass juvenilisation by imitation. Beware of the formation of a cult around a ‘personality’ (read: ‘celebrity’) when examination of the latter reveals them to be little more than a hollow, manipulated shell. More and more, famous people under stress have been seen to experience very public ‘meltdowns’ which are being observed on TV – just Google for ‘celebrity meltdown’, the list is endless [10].
It all means that in every possible way, we must resist the tyranny of imposed neoteny, and the only way to do this is to surround ourselves with verifiable facts and counter-arguments to the constant flood of deliberate disinformation and outright lies which mockingly purports to represent ‘reality’. It means that we need to supply our own antidote to the sensual and intellectual garbage constantly forced upon our consciousness by the agents of our would-be controllers, and construct our own factual schema to counteract the encroachment of a pernicious ‘virtual reality’ which seeks to imprison us in our own personal ‘goldfish bowls’ of distorted vision and narcissism. And most importantly, perhaps, we should vote with our wallets and choke them all off at source.
References:
[1] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna
[2] Wiklipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny#Neoteny_in_other_species
[3] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHFh3Z0DOQ4 for the full lecture. Unfortunately, Pye used to espouse a lot of otherwise dubious ideas, such as the stories of Zecharia Sitchin, which are interesting but somewhat discredited.
[4] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboPUQ0xCDs for McKenna’s lecture; discussion of cultural neoteny begins at 31:30
[5] Note that neoteny is characteristic of the Tiger Salamander family, of which the Axolotl is a member; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl
[6] Rinkworks: http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
[7] Take a cue from the late journalist John Keel, who sought at least three verifiable sources of information for each occurrence in his investigations of UFO incidents, and used this as a filter for exclusion of a huge corpus of witness accounts.
[8] Birthday Thursday, October 15th 2015; went to Changwon the next day.
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11586778/Denmark-moves-step-closer-to-being-a-cashless-country.html; since I began writing this, Sweden have now started making similar noises – google ‘sweden cashless society’ and notice that the prominent news sources on the first search page were also Killary supporters during the 2016 Presidential election.
[10] See, also, the ridiculous parade of celebrities who screamed that they would leave the country if Flump came to power. Example: http://www.ibtimes.com/if-donald-trump-wins-presidency-these-18-celebrities-will-leave-us-will-canada-be-2440762 … my first reaction on seeing a lot of this stuff was: “Who..?”
Disambiguation
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Lost Geographies, The Destruction of History
In a previous article, I adumbrated what has recently become – for me – a key component in my quest for truth: the dire effects of ‘plausible deniability’, applied in multiple dimensions, to confuse and confound peoples’ world-view and thereby obfuscate any clandestine activities undertaken by ‘vested interests’ who would prefer that said activities remain obscure and – ideally – ignored and undetected by the wider public, who in one way or another are actually funding it all.
Time to wake up and smell the bullshit…
But first, some explanation of the term I intend to use here, for those who have not encountered it before. ‘Disambiguation’ refers to the process of separating out single meanings in situations where multiple meanings are able to apply. So for example, here in Korea, because the writing system is simplified (has only forty-four characters, and is therefore an ‘alphabet’ rather than a ‘syllabary’), a foreigner learning the language may often have to make reference to the corresponding Traditional Chinese* characters from which words are derived (in South Korea, roughly 70% of words in use in spoken Korean today are said to be of Traditional Chinese derivation) in order to separate out the correct meaning. This is because the transition from a complex syllabary to a simple alphabet leads to numerous homophones, where previously words (in this particular example) in Traditional Chinese would have been easier to distinguish because Chinese is a tonal language, and each lexeme is obviously separated from others which sound similar. Lexemes with the same sound are disambiguated by their different characters.
To bring this idea together with my current thinking, after many years of reading about UFOs and aerial phenomena generally (and this means my reading stretching back into the early 1970s, when many readers here were not yet born), a similar idea began to gnaw at me: after all, some of these, at least, must be natural, and there were hypotheses which hinted at this. But the study of apparently ‘unidentified’ aerial objects suffers from the same syndrome seen so often, where the observer’s ability (or lack thereof) to distinguish phenomena is hampered by lack of access to information – interpretations are flawed because of the limitations of knowledge imposed upon them, either by themselves (restricting the areas into which they can move for information) or by others (reading the pet theories of other individuals which are not supported by either observation or a logical framework based upon observation and existing information, or by a process of intentional and deliberate disinformation and misinformation). It is a sad fact that one of the hallmarks of a free and open system for information interchange – the Internet – is the anonymity which allows people to nurture and expound wild theories and speculation about any subject under the sun without any need – or indeed inclination – to engage critical faculties (Scott C. Waring, I’m talking about YOU). [8]
We might add to this lamentable picture our own observation that, given the requirement for gullibility on the part of their audience, there have been (and continue to be) a large number of individuals who have been profiting in the long term from the willingness of their listeners to cough up dosh to hear the same tired old mish-mash of reports and factoids which bedevil the UFO community (they know who they are, names need not be mentioned further). This is an area where much speculation results from the slightest possibility that a story might be true, despite the acknowledged fact that the only consistent aspect of the field is its inconsistency. Misinformation introduced at the right time results in long-term disorientation: satellite observations presented at the highest level of pixellation as proof of a civilisation on Mars, or the Moon, for example. Enough, already!
Observations have themselves been shown to be subject to a number of influences, one of which seems to be the curious habit of mirroring technologies with which the observers themselves might be familiar; commentators have speculated that this would allow the operators of such craft (when encountered by the observers) to pass themselves off as people like themselves, rather than obviously ‘alien’ or perhaps government operatives, a point elaborated by (among others) the late John Keel.
When investigating any phenomenon which might be described as ‘natural’ (and even if they originate on another planet, UFOs are not actually ‘unnatural’ in the sense of being ‘unreal’, but rather are ‘dislocated’ from their point of origin), we need to keep an open mind and be wary of the pitfalls of trying to fit observations into any new or pre-existing schema without good reason. This would be especially true in situations in which similar external characteristics might cause natural and unnatural (i.e., in this case, technology products) phenomena to be conflated. This is a very important point to bear in mind.
Again, this returns us to the notion of ‘plausible deniability’: being able – at least to some extent – to hide things (which ‘someone’ has decided, arbitrarily, need to be hidden) behind other phenomena which are actually natural is a very convenient form of obfuscation; the more so if they are objects which exhibit (or appear to exhibit) some advanced technology which is inexplicable in terms of conventional daily experience. We should be warned at the outset that UFOs are not the only phenomena to which this type of thinking may need to be applied. And since a ‘real’ UFO would undoubtedly be the product of technology which is both highly advanced and (perhaps) literally ‘alien’ in concept, we are faced with four or five essential classes of observable phenomena:
1: natural phenomena, possibly of an electrical nature, which persist for some time in the atmosphere and are, in fact, created by a combination of natural events. Among other things, we should refer to Paul Devereux’s ‘Earth Lights Hypothesis’ and the ‘Electric Universe Hypothesis’ to discuss these. There may also be a ‘cryptid’ involvement in these.
2: technology products of purely terrestrial origin, which probably represent exotic manned or unmanned vehicles, and which may even have quite mundane intended functions, but which look or behave strangely to the untrained and unfamiliar observer.
3: technology products of extraterrestrial origin, relatively exotic crewed or uncrewed vehicles which may have relatively mundane functions such as observation platforms, but which may be engaged in scientific or military (as we understand the terms) functions. Little of the information which becomes available to the observer during encounters would be familiar enough for them to understand the technology, the intention of the operators or the intended function of these devices. This much would remain true, whatever their actual origin may be.
4: the objects represent living entities of an unknown type, who are able to hide normally but who become visible at certain times, under certain conditions. Again, a potential ‘cryptid’ involvement which is often suggested in discussions of this topic.
5: most contentiously perhaps, and supported largely by rumour and speculation, technology products of terrestrial origin but modelled after examples of (allegedly ‘captured’) extraterrestrial equivalents, intended for various purposes but built entirely terrestrially, although possibly with the assistance of the ‘originators’. This grouping includes alleged ‘reverse-engineered’ craft, of which there seem to be many stories and typical locations where they are seen and stored when not in use. However, when considering this latter classification, we should always bear in mind the ‘alleged’ part!
It is not my purpose here to engage in an exhaustive categorisation of UFO types. Rather, my interest is to discuss the desirability of separating them out – to apply ‘disambiguation’ to them – from natural phenomena. Our first call should be to two theories which are undoubtedly closely intertwined: the ‘Earth Lights’ theory and the ‘Electric Universe’ theory, and for reasons which will become clear as we proceed, we will visit the second of these first.
One of the most bizarre aspects of so-called ‘modern science’ is the extent to which, when confronted with new data which contradict existing models, practitioners engage in a kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ and refuse point-blank to accept the notion of falsification of their cherished hypothesis. The extent to which a practising scientist will doggedly stick to trying to ‘verify’ a theory when evidence is pointing in a completely different direction is both touching and pathetic. But there are two very important points to be borne in mind when practising science:
1: In science, the most essential part of any hypothesis is that it should be falsifiable. This is because the closer the hypothesis comes to verisimilitude – a closer and closer approximation to reality – the better able it becomes to predict previously unsuspected or unobserved phenomena. If there is an accumulation of data which are observed regularly in the course of investigation and experimentation, but which cannot be explained by the hypothesis, it must eventually be considered ‘falsified’ and replaced by another competing hypothesis which does account for these data, or ‘anomalies’ as they were called by Thomas S. Kuhn (among others). It would not be inappropriate to suggest that since verisimilitude cannot be approached directly, but rather in a prolonged and stepwise fashion due to the periodic falsification of successive hypotheses, one hypothesis has to be judged against the other in terms of accounting for a greater proportion of these ‘anomalies’ than its predecessor – but not all of them. It is the basic and essential function of a successful hypothesis to account for more of the observed phenomena than its predecessor. The succeeding hypothesis would probably be able to subsume the original observational data more accurately within its new conceptual framework.
2: Human beings are very prone to try to fit information into frameworks or ‘schemas’. The problem with this is that there are many factors involved as to exactly where in any theoretical framework any phenomenon should be placed. The above example of Korean (or Japanese) simplification versus Traditional Chinese exactitude illustrates exactly the kind of pitfall waiting for us when our interpretation is wrong, and why it is so important to check. Good science has (or should have) a variety of hypotheses, competing to interpret the same data, some of which are more likely to be a closer approximation to reality than others, and which therefore have the equal and automatic right to be heard and used as tools in investigations.
We might add to these that the more extreme the individual practitioner’s professional isolation becomes, the less they are likely to be able to import ideas from other fields which might bear fruit in their own investigations – indeed, this is a process which is discouraged in many organisations, and was a hallmark of paranoid twentieth-century military thinking from the beginning of World War II onwards, with all the disastrous consequences we have seen. Prior to that time, it was considered normal for scientists and technologists working in disparate areas to discuss what they were doing and what their research had discovered, but now we seem to have a situation in which discussion only takes place within a group of professionals, and others (who might be able to contradict them, or at least promote plausible alternatives) are excluded and marginalised. In America, this process of ‘compartmentalisation’ really appears to have taken off under the oversight of Vannevar Bush in the ‘Manhattan Project’ [2].
This is the fundamental malady of modern science: the practitioner’s lack of tolerance for (and the necessary consideration of) hypothetical competition. It accounts, perhaps only in part, for why modern science is so divorced from reality and appears to see the public only as a source of income. Supported through tax dollars levied upon the wider populace, the modern scientist builds a vast paradigmatic empire, but because this is science, that empire is built upon shifting sand; no matter how successful a paradigm may prove, the accumulation of anomalous (from the paradigm’s point of view) data must eventually cause its collapse. Addiction to the group paradigm – which may be used to argue for extensive public funding, for example – will continue until that group is actually forced to admit exactly what part (or the whole) of their paradigm is incorrect. The field is then (theoretically at least) open for succession.
At the same time, practising scientists clearly see the general public as ‘ignorant’ and in need of education – their education – by inculcation into a paradigm which is probably shaky at best, but which needs a ‘critical mass’ (i.e. sufficient magnitude of quorum) of popular support to avoid being denied funding. In concert with the mass media (whose practitioners, of course, are also not specialists, and therefore depend upon science for their material, and follow it largely blindly), practitioners persistently and rabidly promulgate their ‘party line’ and often are happy to indulge in pathetic ad hominem attacks upon opponents when logic fails – a rather strange practice from those who would have us believe that science is impartial, evidence-based and can provide all the answers to our questions, and surprisingly like the kind of reaction one would expect from a True Believer when their ability or patience abandons them in the face of hostile criticism – this latter being precisely the kind of public reaction which is so useful when it swings in their favour. Practitioners should be more intellectually honest, and admit it when they cannot answer because they do not know, rather than trying to cover it up with dissemblance and misdirection.
So science as it is normally (in the Kuhnian sense) practised may be interesting, amusing or entertaining, but as an important part of science is actually to be incorrect (which allows progress by later falsification and verisimilitude), it cannot be taken one hundred percent seriously – especially when it says, for example, that it needs huge public funding to split small atoms. It simply represents one small ‘area of knowledge’, possibly false according to the particular (peculiar? remember phlogiston!) interpretation of the times, and must therefore take its place beside other sources of ‘knowledge’ and compete to be heard. The usefulness of science ends when the knowledge it produces no longer has any practical value or, worse still, leads to dangerously incorrect interpretations of the natural world because of a pathetic and petulant refusal to accept that an accumulation of experimental and observational data have proven it to be wrong. Instead, it has become a cult. No more evidence would be required to demonstrate that ‘science’ is actually a ‘religion’.
The case of UFOs shows some of the worst attitudes prevalent in science, although one could point in other directions such as – for example – ‘cryptozoology’. Here however, we begin with the ‘Electric Universe’ hypothesis. According to this, the universe is suffused with plasma, and this plasma, being highly conductive, allows huge electrical currents to traverse cosmic distances, and the behaviour of this electrical current in the cosmic medium is responsible for forming all large, observable objects. And there is plenty of laboratory-based evidence for all of it. [10]
We know that the universe is composed of 99% plasma, and this was basically confirmed by the Explorer-1 satellite [1] launched by NASA in 1958. Ironically, America’s first successful artificial satellite, lofted into orbit in response to the success of Russia’s Sputnik I, produced data which contradict the entrenched scientific notion that Earth somehow exists in splendid isolation and is somehow not connected to the rest of the universe by anything other than gravity.
Let’s take careful note of this: a universe dominated by the presence and conductivity of plasma cannot behave in a way dominated by terrestrial processes. ‘Terrestrial processes’ exist only on Earth – that is why they are called ‘terrestrial’, or has nobody noticed this? And if the universe is dominated by electricity, we should be asking ourselves what the effects of this ought to be upon our lives. We should observe direct and indirect effects of massive current flow on a regular basis; and the magnitude of the observed effects is indicative of the strength of current flow.
This means that, historically: (a) there is a variety of effects which have been recorded which relate to our small part of the galaxy, which result from a wider flow of plasma-borne current which surrounds us, and (b) the force with which these effects manifest themselves changes as a result of the localised passage of current through the solar system, in much the same way that, say, the brightness of a bulb in a building can vary because of all the switches in said building being turned on and off all the time. In the Electric Universe context, stars are born in strings (because of the gross structure of a ‘Birkeland current’) and are connected electrically by intervening plasma. Their brightness can therefore vary according to the current load, like any terrestrial light bulb or other functional resistor.
The amazing thing is that this flow of current, and the effects which follow on from it, have been completely ignored at worst, or deliberately misinterpreted (to fit the prevailing paradigms) at best by scientific practitioners. As Kuhn rightly pointed out, the problem with ‘normal science’ is that established practitioners are more concerned with ‘verifying’ the theories they espouse, rather than challenging it and getting closer to the truth. They are afraid of threatening the existence of the thing which pays their salary, afraid of losing public funding for their temporary flim-flam (as any state in science is purely temporary), and afraid of losing credibility because they got it wrong, rather than challenging the theory and proving that their new hypothesis displays greater verisimilitude than what went before. Too much money and too many reputations and institutions are at stake when they do that. If there is one thing about modern science that is truly lamentable, it is that scientists are more likely to be gladiatorial in defence than attack. That is truly shameful.
It is ‘really coming to something’ when a famous American Bible scholar can produce videos which give a more accurate account of observations – and give appropriate credit to non-Christians who see things more clearly:
Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: the prevailing theoretical cosmogeny is utter and contemptible rubbish. We exist at the end of a process, not at its beginning, therefore we cannot make anything but the wildest guesses at what went before unless there is some kind of written or oral record of past events, and what is available must be scrutinised and cross-checked if possible to avoid errors. But if the paradigm we use is itself false, then there cannot be any correct interpretation of what we see; it is impossible because we have tied ourselves to a particular viewpoint, and we are not willing to venture outside of that claustrophobic conceptual straitjacket. Whatever his other faults might have been, the late Dr. Isaac Asimov was quite correct when he suggested that the concepts used to interpret an observational phenomenon were more problematic than the observation itself, whatever that original observed object or phenomenon may have been.
According to the current conventional Western cosmogony, the Solar System of which we are a part is supposed to have condensed out of a cloud of hydrogen and dust. Because of the use of isotope ratios to determine age, there is an upper limit to the age of the Earth of less than 5,000,000,000 years [4]. The accretion process is supposed to have been gravitational, with smaller bodies coalescing into larger ones until we have what we see today. But common sense suggests that if the Electric Universe theory is correct, then this process is impossible because any particles in any particular area of space would have very similar electrostatic charges, and would therefore repel each other; hence gravitational coalescence is unlikely. A more powerful force is required to coalesce disparate particles of matter to form large, solid objects.
A second argument against gravitation being responsible for what we see is the thermal activity of the outer planets. Space is very cold, and as we travel further out from the sun, the available radiance per unit area on any planet decreases proportionally. Yet we can see that the outer planets have very high-speed winds and enormous storms. Conventional science cannot account for this beyond suggesting that (in the case of Jupiter, for example) this is because of heat resulting from the eternally slow gravitational contraction of the planet, or to radioactive heat emanating slowly from the core. The possibility of another source of energy than the decay of radionucleides at the core of a planetary body is apparently never voiced in official astronomical circles. Neptune, however, is the furthest of the gas giants from the Sun, yet it has the highest observed wind speeds! [5] All of them radiate more heat energy than they are known to receive from the sun. [9]:
• Jupiter: radiates 1.5 – 2 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess left over from formation (cooling cake model).
• Saturn: radiates 2-3 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess comes from frictional heating from raining liquid helium.
• Neptune: radiates 2.6 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess comes either from frictional heating from raining diamonds or from gravitational contraction of debris absorbed by Neptune in the early days of the Solar System.
• Uranus: radiates 1.06 times the energy it receives from the Sun. Excess left from formation.
We might additionally be tempted to ask exactly where the required quantity of radionucleides might have originated which would be required to generate the necessary internal heat within our Solar System’s ‘gas giants’. If stars and their satellites are generated by electrical mechanisms, would larger planetary bodies really need such a method of generating internal heat, or is it actually because they are functioning rather like resistors in a larger electrical circuit?
According to the Electric Universe theory, our sun is an electric node in a galactic circuit, and is variable because the magnitude of the galactic electric current flowing through it also varies with time. Similarly, the planets are affected as conductive components in a circuit, and exhibit effects such as heating (take note of this, it’s important) which result from this. One of the most basic experiments in physics is simply to pass a current through a conductor and measure its temperature; the functions of light bulbs, electric fan heaters and even simple plug fuses are based upon the effects of this. The resistance of the conductive material to the flow of current produces heat and (with higher current) light.
Here is where current cosmology seems to fall flat on its collective face. Rather than take into account the possibility that much of what they are observing relates to the flow of electrical current through the Solar System and base their interpretation of observed phenomena upon an electrical paradigm, astrophysicists, cosmologists and other space scientists have put themselves into some kind of intellectual backwater by postulating the presence of unseen, undetectable ‘Dark Matter’ which somehow permeates everything and mysteriously accounts for phenomena which would more accurately be described as ‘electrical’ in nature. So the outward flow of particles from the Sun is characterised as a ‘solar wind’ rather than an ‘electrical current’ (currents need charged particles to ‘flow’) between the electrodes of a virtual cell, where the Sun is actually one of these.
The ‘Earth Lights’ theory follows logically from the ‘Electric Universe’ theory, and surprisingly, perhaps, also complements it, at least in part. Since the Earth is under constant electrical stress, relief of that stress would result in electrical discharge, in much the same way that compressing a quartz crystal releases energy as electricity or light [3], or the charge in a thunderstorm relieves itself by large-scale lightning discharge. But here we come to one of the problems of interpretation of phenomena. Such discharges seem sometimes to give rise to a form of ball lightning which is (for some time at least) self-sustaining and can travel for some distance from its point of discharge, presumably guided by localised surface charges in its surroundings, which it finds alternately attractive and repulsive.
Balls of plasma seem at times to appear from nowhere, even emerging from the ground or from bodies of open water when conditions are apparently right for them. They are seen more easily at night, but if certain suppositions are correct and so-called ‘UFOs’ possessing a uniform grey colouration during daylight hours are the same objects, then this could explain a great deal. Most importantly, science (and even more importantly, perhaps, a lot of UFO ‘believers’) would be forced to admit that these were natural phenomena and begin investigating them properly at last rather than as an occasional curiosity. You can’t seriously suggest to this author that such a widespread phenomenon is even remotely ‘harmless’ to air traffic!
The energy of the discharge is what gives it its colour, and again, this is relevant to the ‘Electric Universe’ theory because here, the colour or brightness of a star is not related to its size or composition, but to the localised electrical stress to which it is subjected by the ambient galactic current. So higher energy input corresponds to an output of increasingly blue-wavelength light, and low energy input to an output of increasingly red-wavelength light; and we note that accounts of these objects at night (UFOs, not stars, in this particular case) cover a range of colours, whereas similar objects during the day, subjected to bright sunlight, are said to appear a metallic grey colour. This is a clear indication that we must be careful when we try to interpret any phenomena of this type. It is interesting that some night-time UFOs are often said to exhibit (a) different colours of light, and (b) colours which change correspondingly with their activity. Interestingly, there seems to be plenty of observational evidence that some UFOs, at least, have some form of electrical-gravitic propulsion system – assuming that they are guided craft rather than natural phenomena.
The beginnings of an obfuscatory system begin to arise before our eyes. Since these localised, ball-lightning phenomena have been known from antiquity, they are not in fact unfamiliar. Technology products which use a similar mechanism for levitation and aerial motion can therefore be dismissed as something else, hence plausibly denied. The point of which being that a technology product can therefore be distanced from oneself, i.e. the obfuscating party, by keeping such things obscure, mysterious and remote in technological terms from the befuddled observer. It has not escaped this author’s attention that visual observations are usually at the limit of resolution (i.e. observable distance) due either to the resolving power of the observer’s eyes or that of any recording device (such as a cell phone camera) which they happen to have to hand when the object is sighted, a situation which the gradual (and by now virtually complete) transition from light-sensitive film to CCD technology has not improved. Another problem relating to more modern technology is that, when zooming in on a distant object, the actual shape of the object is completely lost as the light passing through to the sensor is stopped down by the iris diaphragm; the result is often a diamond shape, and this is only confirming that the camera is working properly!
There is another connected phenomenon which should be mentioned. As mentioned above, a theoretical upper limit is placed upon the possible age of the Earth, based upon what can be observed, and similarly for the universe itself. In the case of the latter, one branch of ‘evidence’ is said to be the ‘cosmic microwave background’, which is supposed to be akin to an ‘echo’ of the ‘Big Bang’ (to use the late Fred Hoyle’s comical term). One thing we notice in scientific accounts generally is the tendency to try and fix some kind of ‘datum line’ to events, in much the same way as the birth of Christ was taken by Christians, so that each year thereafter was referred to as ‘in the Year of Our Lord . . .’. But history, even in the debased and conveniently sanitised version presented to us, clearly did not begin with the birth of Christ; that, however, is an issue for another discussion. We merely note here that the ‘Big Bang’ is an hypothesis resting upon very shaky (and clearly falsifiable) foundations; and that excessive expenditure upon experimental equipment cannot produce ‘facts’ when the underlying data contradict the theory. So attempts to estimate the age of the Earth can only be as good as the methodology used, and if that methodology should prove unsound . . . the data produced are nonsense. Think about that the next time you hear an expression like: “The age of X has been reliably dated to Y by carbon dating.”
The reason why the ‘cosmic microwave background’ might not be allowable is simply this: As mentioned above, according to NASA’s own measurements, the universe is 99% plasma. Plasma conducts electricity, therefore massive amounts of electricity are constantly passing through virtually every point in the cosmos. The passage of electrical current through a conductive material produces magnetic fields, and we are talking here about massive currents passing through huge conductors. High-energy magnetic fields produce radiation. So electromagnetic radiation – including microwaves – can be produced anywhere, at any time, and therefore cannot be adduced to be evidence of anything except the presence of plasma, currents and magnetic fields at the moment of observation, in the location in which it is observed. Er . . . that’s it.
So we might ask why it is that a sort of ‘artificial event horizon’ (to co-opt a term from astronomy and cosmology) could be thought so necessary? The answer is that it is a kind of mind control – an artificial temporal and psychological barrier beyond which it is not deemed necessary for the ordinary mind to go, at least in the minds of those who would control us. We become more easily controlled by being divorced from the true past, in which context we would see everything as it really is – unnatural and unreal, and . . . controlled. Remember that previously, we began to understand that history as we know it is only partly true, due to a combination of selective destruction and wilful fabrication; and the provision of an artificial datum line, as well as an artificial time line originating therefrom, is all part of this. Obfuscation, fabrication, and plausible deniability have given us the world we know today; a world in which one phenomenon is hidden behind another, and whole areas of phenomenology are frozen completely out of any scientific discussion, simply to prevent the collapse of careers and industries which are of debatable utility to general humanity, and which we probably do not need . . . and probably never did in the first place. Oh, but they do generate an awful lot of profit!
The simple fact is that once one part of the puzzle falls out of place, once one card in the dubious house of cards buckles and flips out, the rest follows. For example: What would undermine the use of radioisotope pairs in the determination of the ages of rocks? It would be if the isotopes used had an origin different from that which is assumed by conventional science. And how would that happen? It would happen if they were actually created at an earlier time, by stupendous and catastrophic electrical events, events which encompassed and bathed the entire solar system, affecting all things therein equally, but probably later in time than the dating method would seem to indicate. This would mean that the origin of those isotopes was instantaneous at some point in time, and even that the matrix in which they were formed may not have been pre-existing. This might also explain why large collections of discrete crystals are usually to be found buried in rocks.
But it would also represent an artificial ‘datum line’ of destruction; perhaps it destroyed everything on Earth that it encountered and left only broken remains and rubble behind; again, a notion we should bear in mind when we see the shattered surfaces of other planets and moons and – almost certainly – when we observe the large-scale structures of our own Earth. The destruction of visible history would lead naturally to the construction of fables in the mind of those who came afterwards. And later, some form of ‘rationalism’ would be instigated when it was realised that the survival of past events in metaphorical or legendary form could be used to obfuscate those events, using the claim that they were ‘unscientific’ and ‘mere folklore’ (or other convenient expressions to that effect). But this only serves to show us that the rise of ‘rationalism’ after the Middle Ages is an attempt to hide and disguise whatever message was being passed down to us by folklore. And that is mind control.
If so-called ‘UFOs’ are in fact natural, as some have speculated, how might we explain their sudden appearances? The origins of ‘Earth Lights’ may well be due to the release of localised geo-electrical stresses (as seen in some of the work of Dr. Michael Persinger [6]). Interestingly, a similar proposition has more recently been made regarding the so-called ‘Hessdalen Lights’, which have been the subject of ongoing research for many years (see, for example, [7]). In the context of the ‘Electric Universe’, such a release of energy on a large scale is proposed to lead to an overall decrease of electrical stresses on a larger body by forcing fission into a larger and smaller one – the charge is then spread over a greater surface area, but also this necessarily leads to the formation of a smaller body, and hence, this could be the simplest mechanism for the formation not only of planets from their parent stars, but also smaller bodies from their parent planets (think ‘the moons of Jupiter’). This illustrates the scalability of electrical phenomena, and it is also disconnected from any ‘Uniformitarian’ notion based upon the observation of purely ‘terrestrial’ phenomena; as stated previously, phenomena based upon the prevalent conditions at the Earth’s surface cannot be invoked for other known celestial bodies, many of which do not have an atmosphere or even conditions suitable for liquid water!
Since modern science is largely based upon ‘Uniformitarian’ principles, the whole enterprise is undermined when these are challenged. And since the universe is actually open to anyone who cares to observe it, when challenging observations arise, the only way to maintain the status quo is to insist that they cannot be true “because [insert mainstream scientific garbage here].” By obfuscation of the boundaries of reality and illusion, this status quo is maintained, but for how much longer, as the prevalence of both conflicting data and emerging paradigms becomes crushing?
If people were really well-educated, they would accept the possibility that there could be more than a single possible interpretation for any single observation or phenomenon; they would question things more openly because their minds were correspondingly open to new ideas. But modern ‘education’ seems to be part of a larger effort to delimit the margins of possible thinking, so that the kind of ‘disambiguation’ promulgated here is difficult, if not downright impossible; and what passes as ‘knowledge’ is merely the ability to memorise and regurgitate indoctrinated ‘factoids’ on demand. But this would imply, would it not, that so-called ‘science’ was in fact little more than ‘pseudo-science’ itself, because its practitioners were wilfully skirting and avoiding any discussion of important parts of wider reality, which anyone can see in their daily lives, and trying constantly to fob people off with pat answers just to get them off the practitioners’ backs?
So we approach the end of this diatribe by returning to the observations of UFOs. The key issue here is not whether they exist; the problem is that there is (and always has been) acknowledged to be a small percentage of observations which conventional thinking is unable (or unwilling) to separate out into ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, and my contention here has been, firstly, that this is part of a long-term arrangement to hide or otherwise disguise ‘something’ by obscurity and obfuscation, which by rights should have been ‘disambiguated’ from other phenomena long ago; and secondly, that this is preventing the progression of science at the paradigmatic level due to the steadfast but dogmatic and illogical refusal to encompass and assimilate changes which would lead naturally to a more objective view of the universe, and not just our own meagre cosmic backyard. Unknown objects observed in the sky exist, and we can be quite certain that they are not all piloted by beings from another galaxy; but all too often, agents of scientific (or other) authority are not explaining them properly. Either they don’t know because there has been insufficient publicly-funded research (and I would start to worry about this if I were a regular airline passenger), or we are being willingly misled according to some unknown ‘agenda’ which is trying to keep something secret. Whichever it may be, it is the population’s collective intelligence which is being insulted at all levels.
* It is of interest to note that after the Revolution, a process was put into practice to ‘simplify’ Chinese characters, ostensibly with the aim of increasing literacy by reducing the number and visual complexity of traditional characters, but some of us find this suspicious . . . and obfuscatory. One obvious result being, of course, the eventual inability to read an ‘older’ version of one’s own language, if one is a native Chinese speaker. Does this mean, then, that the millions of documents in their archives, which were written in Traditional Chinese, will eventually become illegible?
[1] http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/Exhibits/AirAndSpace/MissionToThePlanets/Explorer1/Explorer1.php
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
[3] http://rockartblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/lightning-stones-and-quartz.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_Earth
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune
[6] http://persingerpublications.com/, click on links as required to see materials.
[7] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2632650/Has-mystery-glowing-Norwegian-orbs-solved-Expert-claims-underground-battery-creates-amazing-light-show.html
[8] http://www.ufosightingsdaily.com
[9] http://m.teachastronomy.com/astropedia/article/Thermal-Radiation-from-Gas-Giant-Planets
[10] https://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/arch08/080124bostick.htm
