Laura Knight Jadczyk

NASA, Sky & Telescope, J. Kelly Beatty, and Criminal Negligence

2011-04-18T10:32:00.005+02:00

Recently it has been brought to my attention by a reader that a fellow named J. Kelly Beatty has written about Comet Elenin on the official NASA disinfo site, "Sky & Telescope." Beatty saw fit to include the following defamatory comment at the end of his article:

Meanwhile, you have my permission to ignore or refute any of the wacky postings about the supposed danger posed by Comet Elenin. All this nonsense seems to have started back in January, when edge-of-reality blogger Laura Knight Jadczyk made provocative warnings — all based on information from a member of her research team who's "an astronomer at a large observatory". (Yea, right.) It's not even worth giving you a link to her ramblings. (J. Kelly Beatty, Sky & Telescope)

Now, while I do admit that I am rather pleased at the higher educational level of this particular defamer (in comparison to the really ignorant fundies of both the mainstream religion and New Age variety who often go after me because I don't subscribe to their various savior theories), the fact is that this guy is rather more dangerous to the world at large than the small fry alternative crowd. Let me quote from this month's edition of SOTT's "Connecting the Dots" (a worthy read if ever there was one!) to make the point.

Marvels and Portents

"We do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions;
rather we need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions!" ~ Victor Clube

It's a hell of a challenge trying to round-up countless reports about the fire in the sky when your years' long attempts to broach others' awareness about the impending danger persistently falls on deaf ears.

If everything we need to know, we learned in kindergarten, then remember, when you were a kid, how you were instructed by your carers about the basic safety measures: never take candy from a stranger, be aware of the environment at all times and be in contact (network). Learn to scream "FIRE" to get people's attention, because there is nothing quite like a fire hazard to activate people's natural self-preservation instincts.

And yet, here we are screaming "fire!" year after year, not for the sake of getting attention, and still we get responses like to this one. Sheesh, we sometimes feel like Cassandra!

But where some would give up and concentrate on their personal survival, we instead choose to utilize this cubic centimeter of opportunity still available to humanity, and be like the hummingbird from the following Chinese parable:

One day an elephant saw a hummingbird lying on its back with its tiny feet up in the air. "What are you doing?" asked the elephant. The hummingbird replied, "I heard that the sky might fall today, and so I am ready to help hold it up, should it fall." The elephant laughed cruelly. "Do you really think," he said, "that those tiny feet could help hold up the sky?" The hummingbird kept his feet up in the air, intent on his purpose, as he replied, "Not alone. But each must do what he can. And this is what I can do.

And fixing our eyes on the skies and keeping informed about the upcoming firestorm is what we can do. But let's change the format of last year's summary just a bit, shall we? Instead of simply listing all the reports we received, we will concentrate on a few key events which acted as markers or signs highlighting the perceptual problem that humanity is facing. If you're after the raw data, please do visit our blog, where you'll find a thorough chronological listing of reported fireballs, meteorites and airbursts.

The confusion surrounding the phenomenon of cosmic debris piercing our atmosphere ultimately lies in the misguided trust we tend to place in those to whom we give authority for tackling problems of global proportions. Admittedly, such responsibility cannot be easy to handle. However, there is a difference between honest error as a result of reaching the limits of knowledge and understanding available in a specific field, and a science corrupted from sacrificing truth to further political agendas or certain preconceptions, in the name of maintaining an illusion and a lie for which we are all about to pay with our very lives.

A case in point:

NASA's senior scientist, David Morrison, stated that 80 percent of the near Earth asteroids that are 1 kilometer or larger have been identified and that he could assure those gathered at the conference that "We are not going the way of the dinosaurs." He also says the Spaceguard Survey has not turned up any near Earth asteroids as large as the one that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.

Morrison pointed out that asteroid strikes are the only natural hazard that in principle can be completely eliminated. Thanks to the Spaceguard Survey, humanity will likely have decades of warning before an impending collision. Once alerted, missiles could be used to nudge a threatening asteroid so that it misses the earth.

Cosmic Elephant in our living room.

The definition of criminal negligence is recklessly acting without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences).

We have this nagging suspicion that David Morrison's assurances that we have nothing to worry about when it comes to threats from space, and that we can peacefully go on with our daily lives, filled with quiet desperation on a planet where human tragedy and horrendous atrocities have become as common as fruit flies, amount to a disturbingly clear example of criminal negligence.

Perhaps this is why:

The experts are not remotely agreed on how worried we should be. Telescopes and satellites are now in a position to detect potential "planet-killers" - asteroids or comets over one kilometre in diameter - many years or even decades before they might collide with the Earth.

The problem, according to Jay Tate, director of the public information resource Spaceguard UK, is that no measures are in place to avert them, and smaller objects could still "whistle through" to strike us at any time. "Do you want to know how much warning we would have of a country or city-killing asteroid?" asks Tate. "About four seconds. A major impact is just as likely to happen before the end of this conversation as 10,000 years from now."

A retired British Army officer and guided-weapons specialist, Tate became curious about government plans to defend against meteorites after the SL9 comet bombarded Jupiter in 1994, and was furious to find that they didn't have a single one. He and several eminent scientists formed a task force on Near Earth Objects (NEOs), presenting parliament with a series of recommendations for action in 2000.[...]

"Very little has been done since," says Tate, from the Spaceguard Centre at the former Powys Observatory in Wales. "The official British line seems to be that we don't need to bother, because the Americans are taking care of it. But if that's the rationale, then what the bloody hell are we doing in Iraq?"

Bloody hell, indeed, is what they created in Iraq.

And since we can't rely on the "brightest and best" at NASA to present us with an accurate assessment of cosmic threats, without muddying the water or intentionally concealing crucial data (dare we call it a conspiracy of cosmic proportions?), we will take a shot at the job (once again), reminding you that from a historical point of view,

the only reality is that of conspiracy. Secrecy, wealth and independence add up to power. Deception is the key element of warfare, (the tool of power elites), and when winning is all that matters, the conventional morality held by ordinary people becomes an impediment. Secrecy stems from a pervasive and fundamental element of life in our world, that those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps are necessary to maintain the status quo. [Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State, Vol. I]

And maintaining the "status quo" in science has to be one of the main objectives of the Power Elite. So let us break the status quo by presenting you with facts that were once known or understood by humanity on an instinctual level, learned the hard way after facing and surviving numerous life-shattering calamities.

Here is what acclaimed astrophysicist Victor Clube has to say:

There is a paradigm shift involved in recognizing that it's not just ancient history we have got wrong - it's all history.

So, what is my point? My point is that you do not have to dabble first in mythology and prehistory and geology, as Velikovsky did, in order to understand the sky. You first take the modern sky accessible to science, especially during the Space Age, and you look at its darker debris with a view to relating its behavior to the more accessible human history which we can, in principle, really understand. And by this approach you discover from the dynamics of the material in space which I'm talking about that a huge comet must have settled in a Taurid orbit some 20,000 years ago, whose dense meteor stream for 10,000 years almost certainly produced the last Ice Age.

What else can we learn from history that will help us to understand that cometary bombardments are not isolated events, but act as an integral part of our existence by periodically bestowing upon us their fiery gifts that carry a message of 'wisdom through the awful grace of God'. And if we're getting too Biblical for your taste, dear readers, it's because even that notorious manuscript of our times has cosmic catastrophe written all over it.

Sodom and Gomorrah may have been destroyed by debris from a comet, startling new archaeological and astronomical research suggests. Another bombardment from space may have brought on the Dark Ages. [...]

The conference, on natural catastrophes during Bronze Age civilisations, will bring together astronomers, archaeologists, geologists and other scientists to try to find an explanation for the near-simultaneous fall of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, the Sumerian civilisation in Mesopotamia and the Harrapin Civilisation of the Indus Valley. In all, some 40 cities are thought to have disappeared, in a series of catastrophes. [...]

Dr Victor Clube, senior research fellow in astrophysics at Oxford, says the Biblical account accords well with similar events in Babylonian records. He has calculated that the Earth would have passed through a particularly dense cloud of debris - the Taurid meteorite stream, thought to have resulted from the break-up of a comet 40,000 years ago - between 2200 and 2000BC.

This happened again between 400 and 600AD and may have led to the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages. when contemporaries report "fires of righteous vengeance" falling from the sky.

The Taurid Stream is not due to return until the end of the next millennium but Dr Clube says that similar bombardments from other debris could occur in the meantime. "There is danger in the sky," he warns, "and people would be right to be afraid."

We are NOT trying to "spread fear and panic". People are very stressed at this point in time, in general, and we believe that the ultimate source of this stress lies in our deepest memories of cyclic catastrophes brought on by cometary bombardment of some form or another. Much strength and creative resourcefulness can be found even in the most dire and dark situations. Forewarned is forearmed, and the spear of truth and knowledge is sharper than the psychopathic Powers that Be's dagger of deception.

From Clube and Napier's Cosmic Winter, we learn that:

The Pleistocene ice epoch began about 2.5 million years ago, consistent with a sudden influx of comets from the disturbed cloud, although mountain glaciers were beginning to extend even before then. This epoch, like others which have occurred in Earth history, is broken up into a series of very erratic ice ages, each of duration typically 10,000 to 100,000 years. Again, these timescales are about those associated with the intermittent arrival and disintegration of the greatest comets, although no great precision can be put on the figures.

The last ice age ended just over 10,000 years ago. We are therefore, at the moment, living in a warm interglacial period. Interspersing such warm periods, however, are short cooling episodes, very sudden in onset, and lasting typically ten to a hundred years. During these episodes the Earth's climate plunges into glacial severity.

Such cooling episodes may be of great human consequence and will be discussed presently; for the moment we note only that for the first time there is a scientific basis for a catastrophic interpretation of human history; and we begin to discern that the threat from the sky may have a wintry aspect.

The imminent Ice Age is of course another factor that will result in the dissolution of the current civilization's way of life. So we're not only talking about a 'death by fire!' As Robert Frost so poignantly expressed:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

This poem is not merely an attempt to add a poetic touch to an otherwise 'cut and dried' or cynical depiction of what awaits us just around the corner. Let's just say that if cosmic or other catastrophes mirror the human experience, and if this observation is even remotely true, judging from what is currently happening on the third rock from the Sun, we are way overdue for some 'balance restoration', where Mother Nature takes charge and does an extensive 'housecleaning'.

But back to the issue at hand.

Some mainstream verification of what Sott.net has been saying for years is finally coming through the information blackout, with the UK's Daily Mail reporting in April, 2010 that the last ice age was caused by cometary bombardment. A similar rarity occurred in February, 2010 as mainstream media "revealed" how a swarm of comet debris caused the 'Dark Ages' circa 500 AD. Bill Napier, as well as Victor Clube, deserve major recognition for their dedication in putting many of the puzzle pieces together. The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith is the seminal book on the Younger Dryas Impact Event at the end of the last Ice Age.

But besides older comets that break up and leave debris trails through which Earth periodically passes, Laura Knight-Jadczyk's tireless research has led us to consider the cyclical mechanism by which comets from the Oort Cloud surrounding the outer solar system are knocked into the inner solar system in the first place. An article from February, 2010, 'Getting WISE about Nemesis,' corroborates her research:

Our solar system is surrounded by a vast collection of icy bodies called the Oort Cloud. If our Sun were part of a binary system in which two gravitationally-bound stars orbit a common center of mass, this interaction could disturb the Oort Cloud on a periodic basis, sending comets whizzing towards us.

Considering the above information, let us pose a question. For every instance of space traffic we do spot, how many go unnoticed? Only by chance did amateur astronomer Nick Howes capture images of a comet exploding in March, 2010, an event completely missed by anyone else.

The steady increase in the number of fireball sightings, together with research which reveals that our environment is constantly affected by interaction with comet debris and cosmic radiation, tells us that our Big Blue Marble is once again on the threshold of encountering a cosmic storm. In fact, we're long overdue the Big One. But don't expect our dear leaders to inform us of this anytime soon. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk has written elsewhere:

If we can't stop an asteroid or comet from hitting us, do you think they'll panic the public by announcing an impending collision beforehand? Nevertheless, panicking the public is de riguer for the Powers That Be, but only for those things they can manage. Global warming that would slowly play out over decades is the ideal problem for those seeking power: the ever more dire warnings feed into the controllers' hands as they use it to justify ever higher military spending, dismantling of civil liberties, more control for corporations, and "preemptive" invasions in the quest for dwindling resources. What the public doesn't realize is that this may very well be all in preparation for when that first comet swarm panics us little earthlings who have no underground bases, no stockpiles of supplies, no protocol for surviving such an event, to emerge on the other side still in control.

Indeed, it is highly unlikely that world leaders at the highest level are not aware of the threat of a meteorite impact. We have been suggesting that they are aware, and have been for a very long time. The reader might wish to peruse Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Comets and Catastrophe series. They are also aware that they cannot do anything to prevent impacts such as those described in the above article. And so, they marginalize the subject and feign disinterest all the while they are making their own preparations to survive.

There is much evidence to strongly suggest that much of the landmass of Western Europe was destroyed in an meteorite impact around 540 AD, ushering in what is known today as "the dark ages". Further evidence from the study of fossilized tree rings and ice core samples, not to mention historical records, suggests that this most recent event was but one of many events that have happened in a cyclical pattern throughout the course of human history.

As far as we know, no human has ever got out of this place "alive". Perhaps now that the Universe, by posing a clear and present danger to our very existence, is drawing attention to that existence, we might all begin, even at this late hour, to ponder just what the real meaning of our lives, individually and collectively, really is.

On this note, we finally come to the point of recapitulating past year's (and up to this day) marker events. Ladies and Gentlemen, brace for impact.

We will begin with NASA that has developed a new telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The telescope has been scanning the skies to locate brown dwarfs, including the Sun's hypothesized Dark Star companion - referred to as 'Nemesis' (first proposed in 1983 by Richard A. Muller, physicist at the University of California, Berkeley). In just six weeks the telescope has already found 16 previously unknown asteroids that swing close by Earth. WISE is expected to find up to 1000 Near Earth Objects, but astronomers estimate that the number of unknown objects with masses large enough to cause significant damage upon impact runs into the tens of thousands.

A report in late 2010 confirmed what we have suspected all along: the number of comets entering the inner solar system is on the rise:

It took SOHO ten years to spot its first thousand comets, but only five more to find the next thousand. That's due partly to increased participation from comet hunters and work done to optimize the images for comet-sighting, but also due to an unexplained systematic increase in the number of comets around the sun. Indeed, December alone has seen an unprecedented 37 new comets spotted so far, a number high enough to qualify as a "comet storm."

And a "comet storm" it was, with 25 comets crashing into the Sun in the space of ten days at the beginning of January:

Sundiving comets - a.k.a. "sungrazers" - are nothing new. SOHO typically sees one every few days, plunging inward and disintegrating as solar heat sublimes its volatile ices. "But 25 comets in just ten days, that's unprecedented," says Battams.[...]

"Since SOHO was launched there has been a trend of increasing numbers of Kreutz sungrazers," he points out. A table in Knight's 2008 PhD thesis shows SOHO detecting 69 sungrazers in 1997 compared to 200 sungrazers in 2010. "The increase is significant and cannot be accounted for by improvements in SOHO or the increasing skill of comet hunters."

What are the possible repercussions of such an impressive display for us Earthlings if, according to NASA, we are safe as long as it doesn't fall on our heads, and the chances for a head-on collision happening are pretty slim? By the way, if you want our take on the value of NASA's input, we would advise them to lay off the drugs before telling us how it is when it comes to extraterrestrial affairs.

As it happens, one of the biggest lies told for centuries, and which affects everything, especially in science, is that whatever happens on this planet originates on this planet. Except for a few "rare" and potentially destructive events such as massive solar flares, we are supposedly pretty much isolated from anything that happens in our solar system. Common sense tells us that everything is interconnected, but for some peculiar reason this connectedness apparently ends somewhere in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Talk about confused minds!

It's this fundamental confusion that provides the opening for accepting nonsensical ideas such as global warming. But in a round about way, Al Gore's tall tales are not that outlandish. In fact, we might say that he is telling a half-truth. According to him, the world awaits

"an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it." How awful a calamity? "The displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases."

And this part is probably true. What is not true is that it is due to global warming, but rather to climate change brought on by changes in our cosmic environment, i.e. The Ice Age Cometh.

What we suspect has really been happening, based on our research thus far, is that the upper atmosphere is cooling because it is being loaded with comet dust, which shows up in the form of noctilucent clouds and other upper atmospheric formations.

Magnificent and mesmerizing noctilucent clouds (also called polar mesospheric clouds), once were considered to be rare. But now they are puzzling scientists with their recent dramatic changes. Apparently, the clouds are growing brighter, are seen more frequently, are visible at ever lower latitudes and are now appearing even during the day. If scientists were allowed to conduct an honest interdisciplinary research, such changes wouldn't be a mystery.

They would be able to figure out that comet dust is electrically charged which is causing the earth's rotation to slow marginally. The slowing of the rotation is reducing the magnetic field, opening earth to more dangerous cosmic radiation and stimulating more volcanism. The volcanism under the sea is heating the sea water which is heating the lower atmosphere and loading it with moisture. The moisture hits the cooler upper atmosphere and contributes to a deadly mix that inevitably leads to an ice age, preceded for a short period by a rapid increase of greenhouse gases and "hot pockets" in the lower atmosphere, heavy rains, hail, snow, and floods.

Expect this trend to continue but don't believe in "man-made global warming". Whatever warming there has been, it's really a prelude to the way ice ages begin. Let's hope that there aren't any catastrophically large chunks in that stream of comet dust cycling through our solar system. The outlook isn't very promising in this regard, as we'll see further on.

An unimaginable calamity indeed.

Recall this image of two suns that were caught on camera last month in China.

We've heard some suggest that it's a kind of 'sundog' which forms when sunlight refracts through ice crystals and produces striking halo effects, but since it is not an isolated or not an exclusively winter phenomenon, we propose that "two suns" and other similar anomalous phenomena is a 'mirage' effect of some sort whereby the sun is being refracted by the changed atmosphere. That is, a combination of possible comet dust loading and changes in the layers of the atmosphere.

Besides, when was the last time you heard about "two suns" being reported or observed? This is very strong evidence for major changes in the atmosphere and the question you've got to be asking yourself is, why?

Other indications of something radically different about our atmosphere are vivid contrails left by rocket launches, like this one filmed over Kopeysk in southern Russia, just over the border from Kazakhstan, last December:

Whether these are US ICBMs being launched or, as seems more likely given their locations, Russian rockets like the one that produced a weird spiral effect off the coast of Norway during the same week last December, what makes them so dramatic is the interaction of their exhaust with comet dust in the upper atmosphere, causing the trails to dissipate slowly as if suspended in a denser atmospheric solution than normal.

Here is another example of Space Shuttle Discovery producing a colorful show no less impressive than noctilucent clouds (think there is a connection?)

© Adam Bojanowski
Space shuttle launch April 2009: We can see now why the ancients described comets and fireballs as "dragons in the sky"

[...]

Be they rocket launches or cometary arrivals - the amazing displays they're producing in the sky are telling us something about the change of its composition. Laura Knight-Jadczyk wrote recently about the smokescreen of chemtrails, most of which are not chemtrails at all; the suspension of jets' contrails in the atmosphere are another sign telling us that the very sky itself is changing.

We try to be extra careful about all kind of ideas that are being propagated in the alternative scene, which after thorough analysis and investigation invariably turn out to be on a par with the mainstream media's lies and are nothing but COINTELPRO red herrings adding more smoke to the matter. So-called "Chemtrails" are one of them. As Laura Knight-Jadczyk wrote this in the end of her article :

I think that I have presented more than sufficient food for thought on the topic of so-called "chemtrails" to suggest that, yes, there is something really wicked going on, but it ain't what you think. In fact, it's worse. YES, something is VERY wrong in our skies - but it is not chemtrails. The CONTRAILS themselves have changed and THAT is a huge warning about our atmosphere and our climate and the implications are a lot scarier than if some nutjobs in the Pentagon were just trying to poison us. Heck, we could survive that. Most of life on earth will NOT survive what these contrails portend!

Okay, that's the end of the quoted section from the latest "Connecting the Dots." Now, I want to ask you: have you ever learned anything equal to the above information - backed up by sources and evidence - from Mr. J. Kelly Beatty of "Sky & Telescope"? Backed by that benevolent organization we all know and love, NASA? Owned and operated by the Global Elite that have brought this planet to the edge of the abyss?

The fact that you haven't is, in my opinion, Criminal Negligence.

Axis Shift? What's Next?

2011-03-13T09:25:00.006+01:00

Rather than post a comment in response to a comment on a previous Comet Elenin post, I thought I would just address it here. The comment was "How do you feel now that the earths axis has indeed shifted 25cms? You were adamant about it not happening...but it did."

Amazing how some people are able to spin things to preserve their "rightness". There was a lot of hoopla about a "POLE SHIFT" as in the poles of the planet reversing entirely, and it was destined to happen on either March 12th or 15th, depending on your source and was going to be globally cataclysmic.

There's a world of difference between a Pole Shift, as in "reversal" or major movement, and the few centimeters that the poles shift during major earthquakes.

Since these Chicken Little types were so hot on this pole shift and are now claiming that their prediction came true with a 4 inch shift, let me recapitulate a bit of fairly recent history. You see, the pole shifted with the Chile Earthquake, too, but nobody went around crying "The sky is falling" then.

What we see here is the same phenomenon that erupted at the approach of Comet Hale-Bopp - hysteria among some folks who might be a bit psychic, driven by pathological COINTELPRO handlers. Is there going to be another "Heaven's Gate" suicide as a result? We hope not; and it is for that reason, keeping a cool head in the face of real Earth Changes, that I work to stay balanced on the topic, present the data, and encourage people to do their own research and don't get rattled.

Anyhoo... the first report about the pole shifting as a result of the Japan Earthquake seems to have come from Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology. Naturally, they have such an institute with lots of funding since they live on a volcanic and earthquake hot spot. They tell us that "the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rattled Japan Friday shifted the earth's rotation axis by about 25 centimetres. INGV's report, which came hours after the devastating incident, is equivalent to "very, very tiny" changes that won't be seen for centuries, though..." [Source]

Did you get that last part? It's something you can't even notice. If you didn't have such friendly experts to tell you that it happened, you wouldn't know it happened.

Hmmm... a conspiratorial minded person as myself, with a lot of experience sussing out COINTELPRO and knowing that nearly all the institutions in positions of power on this planet are controlled by psychopaths at the summits of power, might wonder about that... but never mind.

Back to the earthquake; we are informed:

Last year, NASA reported that a 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Chile shorted the day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to computer-model calculations.

NASA had estimated that the Chilean earthquake shifted the globe's axis by about 10 centimetres, National Geographic reported at the time.

INGV, which is Europe's largest research institute to monitor geophysics, said the impact of Friday's event was "much greater" than 2004's notorious Sumatra earthquake, which clocked in at a magnitude of 9.1.[Source]

So, this is clearly not a new or even very dramatic event. It happens. It's happened before, probably more times than we realize, and it will undoubtedly happen again.

People, this is not a "Pole Shift" in the terms that the general public - or the Chicken Littles - use "pole shift" though certainly, the Earth's axis made an adjustment to accommodate the movement of Japan's landmass some 8 feet!

Now THAT figure should give us pause.

Japan's recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about eight feet (2.4 meters), the US Geological Survey said. ... The quake and its tectonic shift resulted from "thrust faulting" along the boundary of the Pacific and North America plates, according to the USGS.

The Pacific plate pushes under a far western wedge of the North America plate at the rate of about 3.3 inches (83 millimeters) per year, but a colossal earthquake can provide enough of a jolt to dramatically move the plates, with catastrophic consequences. [Source]

Judging by the ping-pong effect of these back and forth Pacific Rim events, this may very well mean that the West Coast of the U.S. is next. For what it is worth, this is what the Cassiopaeans have said about California:

San Diego, San Bernardino, North Bakersfield, Barstow: all are fracture points. Hollister, Palo Alto, Imperial, Ukiah, Eureka, Point Mendocino, Monterrey, Offshore San Luis Obispo, Capistrano, Carmel: these are all stress points of fracture in sequence. "Time" is indefinite. Expect gradual destruction of California economy as people begin mass exodus. Also, Shasta erupts; Lassen activity. Ocean floor begins to subside. [3 December 1994]

And from 4 July, 1998:

A: ... How about a shattering subduction quake in Pacific Northwest of U.S.? We estimate 10.4 on the Richter scale. We have warned of Ranier. Imagine a 150 meter high tsunami in Puget Sound...

Q: (L) Now, you have mentioned this earthquake. I know that you don't usually give predictions, why have you done so now?

A: We do not give time tables.

Q: (L) Anything else other than a tsunami in Puget Sound and a big subduction quake... 10.4 on the Richter scale is almost inconceivable.

A: Ranier... caldera.

Q: (L) What about the caldera?

A: Expect one.

Q: (L) Other than floods, anything else for Florida upcoming?

A: All areas experience accelerating "freak weather patterns."

Q: (L) Okay, all of these freaky weather patterns and bizarre things going on on the planet, how does it relate to the comet cluster and the brown star? Is it related?

A: Human experiential cycle intersects.

Q: (L) Any specifice physical manifestation of either this brown star or this comet cluster or this realm border, that is related to these events on the planet?

A: Approach of wave stimulates precursor activity which in turn causes effects which in turn stimulates further "heating up" of activity...

...

Q: (L) Okay, is there anyway we could graph this ourselves, and if so, what types of events would we include to create the background data?

A: "El Nino, La Nina," etc...

Q: (L) Is this El Nino thing connected to sunspot cycles?

A: No.

Q: (L) It has its own cycle. I don't think it has been tracked for long enough to get...
A: Global warming, a part of the human experiential cycle.

But then, Mother Nature may not be done with chastising Japan yet either. The Cassiopaeans have said that after the 8.9 event, an even bigger one will manifest and Japan will "buckle."

The point I'm making here is this: the Cassiopaeans predicted a whole slew of stuff back in the 90s in regards to our future after some sort of "take-over". Well, the take-over occurred on 9-11 and humanity allowed it to happen. So I figure that means most - or all of - the rest is going to come down too.

But the Cassiopaeans have also said that the future is open, that such events aren't locked in until just before they happen, that human beings can always - if they wake up en masse - mitigate disaster. The Cassiopaeans have said "It's not where you are, but who you are and what you see" that matters during Earth Changes. Obviously, if you are a "who" who can "see" you will do things rather differently than somebody who is not a "who" and who cannot "see." And that's the difference that makes the difference. (What this means in practical ways is discussed on the Cassiopaean Forum.)

Anyway, the bottom line is this: yes, the axis shifted a bit - as it has before - as a result of the Japan earthquake, and such things will happen again, but NO, there was no "Pole Shift" (in caps) as in globally catastrophic pole reorientation. But yes, we are still in the soup because too few people are awake and aware. There are going to be more earthquakes, more severe earthquakes, volcanism to an extent this planet hasn't experienced for a very long time (that's already happening and is the cause of the so-called global warming).

There is probably a "dark star" out there, as the Cassiopaeans have been saying for many years now, and it is getting close, grounding the electrical energy of our Sun, and setting the engine of change in motion. These changes can be seen in "global warming" which seems to be taking place on ALL the planets in the solar system (which precludes human causes).

Where it will end, we do not know, though we have a fair approximation: an Ice Age is coming. What is important in times like these is to keep a cool head (no pun intended)! We've got this year to get through, with Comet Elenin approaching, several alignments coming up, so just keep your eyes open and collect reliable information.

If you want to SEE, have a look at the following:

UFOs, Aliens, and the Question of Contact

- part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqoMNnVDH3k

- part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGFswoHN-m8

- part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOLQvYukqi0

- part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3axiX6JliQ

- part 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8eEGZB_wNs

- part 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBR8jCBLndM

- part 7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr-D6oR2GZI

- part 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cbL2qJBpvo

Now, I'm going to go downstairs and have breakfast.

Comet Elenin Update!

2011-03-10T17:05:00.006+01:00

Today we have an update from our astronomer friend on Comet Elenin. Before I get to that, let me just reassure folks that there is NOT going to be a pole shift in the next week or so as certain raving nutzoids have been spamming all over the net. Also, Comet Elenin is NOT going to hit Earth (which is not to say that other things won't at some point in space and time). However, there are a few things about this comet that are extremely interesting in view of the plasma comet theory of James McCanney. Again, I suggest that readers get a copy of this book and get up to speed on this theory and how comets can affect our entire solar system electromagnetically, and how that can dramatically affect our sun and therefore planet Earth. There is an increasing body of evidence that electromagnetic disturbance of our Sun is directly related to earthquakes, volcanism, and weather on our planet.

So, with that in mind, let's have a look at some new predictions for what relationships the planets of our solar system might form with the incoming body. Our astronomer friend - who wishes to remain anonymous for the present, but I can tell you that he works at a large observatory - has run the algorithm with the latest orbital elements available on Elenin. Here is the animation:

On the animation, there are two dots to represent Elenin's position; one is from the February 4th elliptical orbital elements and the other is from the February 23rd elements. This is just to test the convergence of the calculations.

The perihelion date is September 10th.

Now, we have some additional graphs that plot the distances between the Earth and Elenin and the angles between the Earth and the inner planets and Elenin, as viewed from the Sun. Here is the distance plot.

Now, assuming that there are no errors and no dramatic changes to the orbit of Elenin, we find that the minimum distance (the closest Elenin will come to Earth) is 0.235 AU. (In other words, over 35 million kilometers distant - not likely to be much in the way of potential impact there!)

Referring back to the theories of Jim McCanney, there are three notable alignments between Elenin and Earth and some other body of the solar system in relation to the Sun.

On March 15th, there will be a Sun-Earth-Elenin Alignment. I guess we can look for some EM activity following that. Storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, perhaps even a little thinning of the veil?

On September 27th, there will be another Sun-Earth-Elenin alignment. There will also be a new moon at this time (rather close) and this might produce more dramatic EM action on the planet. If you check the angles plotted on the graph below, you'll see that this alignment is actually very interesting because Mercury also lines up on the opposite side of the Sun. So it is really a Mercury-Sun-Elenin-Moon-Earth alignment.

On November 23rd, another Sun-Earth-Elenin alignment. The new moon of November comes two days later on the 25th, so that might be "close enough for horseshoes" in the case of EM action.

If there are going to be any discharge related events as described in McCanney's theory, these dates may be important.

Here is the alignment graph:

Gnosticism and the Christian Myth

2011-03-03T14:10:00.004+01:00

Taking off from, and expanding on, a number of ideas found in the works of Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, I'll be posting a number of concepts and theories for consideration.

Freke & Gandy have done an excellent job in their books "The Jesus Mysteries" and "Jesus and the Lost Goddess," but, as we have found again and again, without both the scientific background of cosmic catastrophe we have uncovered via hints from the Cassiopaeans, and the more esoteric background concerning hyperdimensional realities, again, via explication by the Cs, most of what gets written about these matters tends to not cover some of the most essential issues. I hope to bridge these gaps here.

So, let us begin.

For thousands of years, human beings have grappled with the Mystery of Life. The legends tell us that during a Golden Age, mankind KNEW the secrets and lived a blessed life in communion with the gods until some terrible thing happened and the gods withdrew leaving man in darkness, more or less. This may be an allegorical myth AND a literal description of cosmic events. As above, so below. I’ve covered another aspect of this in the upcoming issue of the Dot Connector so those interested in the topic will want to get this issue.

Over 2,000 years ago, there was, at the time, a wide ranging Gnostic tradition that flourished among all the cultures of the ancient world. These cosmopolitan Pagan civilizations had been trading, conquering and synthesizing with each other for centuries. Plato had described the peoples of the Mediterranean as “frogs around a small pond.” Then, along came Alexander the Great who transformed that world into essentially one culture.

The Gnostic tradition had a common mystical philosophy and they all were trying to go beyond literal religions. Among some Jewish Gnostics, a school of thought began to form in Alexandria, Egypt, and it is they who synthesized the Jewish and Pagan mythology, producing rather distinctive variations on the more ancient forms.

This approach was, from the beginning, contaminated by certain elements that allowed it to be easily distorted. Those familiar with Ponerology can understand those elements as the work of schizoidal psychopaths. Those elements were present in the Jewish literature - a schizoidal take on writing history after the model of Herodotus – and this was blended with the purer, Pagan Gnosticism. This hybrid form eventually came to be known as Christianity.

Under the influence of the cosmopolitan Greek world, certain Jewish mystics sought to find greater depth in the Jewish “history” that had been produced. As an aside, there are those who say that this literature was produced to be intentionally initiatory, but the facts do not support that thesis. The allegedly historical Israel was created to support the agenda of a religious priesthood-clique seeking power and it was necessary to gather support from the masses and thus, the fake history of Israel was produced from many tribal tales and legends, genealogies created and added in order to show that a very disparate group were really “one”, and voila! Instant ancient history leading all the way back to god himself!

Getting back to the Jewish mystics who aspired to Gnosis, the Jewish Gnostics pored over their “history,” declared it to be mystical allegory, and claimed to be inheritors of secret mystical teachings passed down from their own great Gnostic master, Moses. They actually went further than that: they claimed that the great Pagan philosophers had originally received their wisdom from Moses and that all other intellectual advances were thanks to the Jews. This view has come under increasing criticism as more and more researchers discover that things were actually the other way around: the Jews borrowed many myths from other cultures, re-worked them as history which they saw as doing things one better than the originals.

However, in a world that came to be dominated by this Jewish version of history, many things are obscured and incomprehensible due to the simple fact that this single element – that the Jews stole the history of others and claimed to have it all first – is not factored into our view of our past.

It is not likely that these early Jewish Gnostics realized that the slow-acting poison of schizoidia was already incorporated into the history that they now proposed to study as allegory. Of course it was very much allegory because it originated as the myths of other peoples!

So, in their re-working and re-combining of the Pagan and Jewish materials, these Alexandrian Jewish Gnostics did not realize that they had included the poison of the schizoid in their system – they were simply trying to explore reality in a particular context and were just trying to “get closer to god,” so to say, in a context that was acceptable to their social milieu.

At the beginning, they were not known as Christians; they were probably known as the Therapeutae and the Essenes which the Jewish Gnostic, Philo, described as two branches of a single school of philosophy. They honored not only their alleged own master, Moses, they also followed the great Pagan philosopher, Pythagoras whose disciples had set up communities throughout the Pagan world. The Jewish historian, Josephus, tells us that the Essenes were comparable to the Pythagoreans. Philo, the Jewish Gnostic, was known as “the Pythagorean.” He describes the Therapeutae as practicing a contemplative life which is also what the Pythagoreans did. He tells us that their wisdom came from Greece. The Greeks, of course, said that it came from Egypt. If one has studied the works of Iman Wilkens, (Where Troy Once Stood), one might be aware that the land called Egypt was originally located in Northwst France and it was only after the conquest of Alexander the Great that the land we now know as Egypt was called Egypt. So, when one reads of ancient Egyptian mysteries, one must be very careful to consider exactly what this may mean.

Anyway, back to our Therapeutae and Pythagoreans: The Cynic school of Pagan Gnosticism called their tradition “The Way.” The Therapeutae called their tradition “The Way” also. The 4th century Christian historian, Eusebius claimed that the Therapeutae were the first followers of his “historical Jesus Christ.” The problem with this is that Philo’s description of the Therapeutae was written before the time that the historical Jesus was supposed to have lived. However, Eusebius may have been right in one sense: the Therapeutae and the Essenes may very well have created the Christian Myth of Jesus.

The Jewish Gnostics synthesized the myths from Genesis and Exodus with the works of Plato (Timaeus), and Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting god (which were originally something else, as we will see) to create the Jesus story.

According to these Jewish Gnostics, Genesis was supposed to encode the descent of the soul into physical incarnation. The Exodus was interpreted as a myth encoding the “way back to god.” That is, the Jewish exodus from Egypt was interpreted by the Jewish Gnostics as stages of initiation and return. Combined with the Dying God myth (Moses dies before entering the Promised Land and is resurrected as Joshua), and voila! You have the most influential myth of our civilization.

Basic Structure of Exodus and the Jesus Story as Initiation Allegories as presented by Freke & Gandy:

Initiation Process Exodus Jesus Story

Purification: Crossing the Red Sea -- Baptism by John
Death of the Old Self: Death of Moses -- Crucifixion
Gnosis: Promised Land/Joshua -- Resurrection

The next question is: what happened to the Jesus Myth as a MYTH? How did it become history?

Comet Elenin: Harbinger of What?

2011-02-15T09:34:00.005+01:00

We had a chat with the Cassiopaeans the other night and got in a few questions about Comet Elenin, to wit:

Q: (Andromeda) Is the outburst of asteroid 596 Scheila related at all to Comet Elenin?

A: Yes. And other bodies. See McCanney.

Q: (Andromeda) So what caused that asteroid to become a comet?

A: It became electrified!

In case you don't know, 596 Scheila is an asteroid that suddenly began behaving like a comet this past December. See HERE for some nice images.

As I've mentioned before, James McCanney's Plasma Theory of Comets is quite interesting and deserves some consideration. I understand from a few people who have written to me about it that McCanney isn't the only one approaching the problem from this direction: there is also Wallace Thornhill and David Talbot, but I haven't yet had time to explore what they are saying.

Anyway, in respect of the above remarks by the Cassiopaeans regarding McCanney's theories vis a vis 596 Schiela, my astronomer friend made the following comment to me in a private communication:

The activity of Scheila started roughly at the same time as the storm on Saturn. Can it be because of an alignment Saturn-Elenin-a few belt asteroids-Scheila?

He included a graphic showing the alignment:

Now, the Storm on Saturn is an interesting thing. From Spaceweather:

February 8, 2011 – STORM ON SATURN: A vast thunderstorm that erupted on Saturn during the closing weeks of 2010 is still going strong. “It looks like a comet plowing through Saturn’s northern hemisphere,” reports amateur astronomer Christopher Go. He took these pictures on Feb. 5th using an 11-inch Celestron telescope in Cebu City, the Philippines. “The storm is very bright,” says Go. “I spent a few minutes observing it visually (through the eyepiece) and it is very prominent.” Researchers call the storm the “northern electrostatic disturbance” because (1) it is in Saturn’s northern hemisphere and (2) it is strongly charged with lightning. Receivers onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft are picking up radio crackles each time a bolt discharges–much like the static you hear on a car radio when driving through an electrical storm on Earth.

As mentioned, this storm on Saturn started at about the same time as 596 Scheila began to act like a comet and you can note the alignment in the graphic above.

One of the Cass Forum members, axj , noted:

Quite interesting symbology to Comet Elenin's name as well:

ELEven NINe, or even more striking when read backwards: NINELEven

And according to NASA, Comet Elenin will have its closest approach to the sun on... September 10, 2011 - which is also a NINE ELEVEN if you look at the year as 11 and month as 9. (JPL website for orbit data)

Now, what does all this mean? As it happens, there were other questions asked about Comet Elenin in that session that may be rather concerning especially in light of the recent superstorms on planet Earth, and possible future storms, not to mention the fact that we may spend some time in the tail of Comet Elenin towards the end of the year.

Q: (L) Next question. (Andromeda) Will Comet Elenin interact with and cause a major disruption of earth this year?

A: Possible yes.

Q: (Perceval) It's probably not possible to know exactly when. (L) Yeah, I think it depends on the conditions of the planet and so many other variables. It hasn't even gone through the asteroid belt yet. That traversal... The asteroid belt is between Jupiter and Mars, and it won't go through that until March and April....

A: Elenin is already taking its toll.

Q: (Perceval) How big is it?

A: 500km diameter along the long axis.

Q: (Perceval) At least it's not Venus...

A: It is growing.

Q: [discussion of answer] (L) Anything else about it?

A: And that is only the core.

Q: (Psyche) Yeah, and the tail... (Andromeda) Anything else on Elenin? (Perceval) We'll have to wait and see? (Psyche) {Considering the research we have recently done on comet borne pathogens and their possible relationship to the destruction of more than half of humanity during the Dark Ages which have now been identified as periods of cometary bombardment}, are we going to see a return of the Black Death?

A: Extremely likely.

Q: (Galaxia) In Europe first? Where's it gonna hit?

A: Wait and see.

Q: (Galaxia) Oh no! That's all I've got to say.

A: Those that have a certain genetic profile may suffer very little.

Q: (Andromeda) Is that any of us? (Galaxia) That doesn't sound like anybody is immune... like, "They'll suffer very little before they die!"

A: Smoking tobacco is a clue and an aid.

Q: (L) A clue to the genetic profile?

A: Yes.

Q: (Psyche) Oh, interesting. [everyone lights a cigarette and starts laughing] (Psyche) Everybody lights up! I feel like smoking! (laughter)

A: It is not just aliens that don't like to eat people that smoke! But from a certain perspective the viruses that cause such illnesses as the Black Death are "alien".

Q: (Psyche) You should read the article in the next issue of The Dot Connector magazine: "New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection". (L) If you look at it from a 4th density perspective, when something like the Black Death comes and there is global suffering - and when you read about it, the Black Death is just horrible - but if there was such suffering on our planet from something like that, 4D STS would be getting a rich feast of suffering which is what they feed on. So, an alien virus would be interactive with 4D reality by providing its food.

A: Close enough!

Q: (Andromeda) When will this start? (Atriedes) That's kind of a prediction... (laughter) (Galaxia) Soon, or long term?

A: 18 months to 2 years.

Q: (L) In other words, if Elenin or something else has something like that in its tail, and the earth goes through the tail, it can still take a year or so for it to precipitate onto the earth?

A: Yes

Q: (Galaxia) Will colloidal silver help us fight the plague?

A: Not alone, but very helpful.

Q: (Galaxia) Will our dietary changes help us fight it off?

A: Enormously!!! Especially fat consumption for cell protection.

And so, we begin to understand more of the Evil Plotting going on behind the scenes by the PTB, the efforts to destroy human health by advocating low fat diets and trying to stamp out tobacco smoking!

As always, this is just speculative, but the Cs do have a darn good track record!

Pole Shift in March? Not Likely!

2011-02-09T14:02:00.002+01:00

I've recently become aware, via some Facebook posts, that there are a number of people posting videos on youtube about an alleged coming Pole Shift in March of this year. It seems that these people are using my posts about Comet Elenin along with my astronomer friend's little comet animation, without our permission to promote this ridiculous idea.

Please notice that in my posts I emphasized that Comet Elenin will achieve perihelion in the Fall. A lot can happen between now and then. This comet will only be passing through the asteroid belt in March or April and that is a long way away from Earth! Many other comets have passed through the asteroid belt in the past, so this is not something that is going to cause a pole shift. Heck, the magnetic pole is doing plenty of shifting on its own possibly as a result of discharging of the Solar capacitor.

Indeed, James McCanney (and others) predict wild weather on Earth (as accompanied Hale-Bopp) and there may be many surprises, but it's just plain nuts to go around predicting a pole shift in March based on the approach of Comet Elenin!

And that's not to say that a pole shift isn't going to happen in our future; and here I mean, the axis of rotation, not just the magnetic pole. A recent article by Terence Aym, (who is known for writing sensational articles with based on shallow or incomplete research) entitled: The Beginning of Ice Age: Magnetic polar shifts causing massive global superstorms, is going in the right direction. But there is a factor that a lot of people aren't talking about. You see, the Earth doesn't stop wobbling all of a sudden for no reason. We are seeing the effects of a change in the electro-magnetic forcing upon the Earth (weather and geology). The change is forced upon the Earth and not the other way. For example if other planets experience a magnetic change, this is a smoking gun that it doesn't come from the Earth but from space. (Too bad the article has no references.)

Aym suggests it is just the Sun's interaction with the Earth. Well, that's partly true. But what is affecting the Sun's behavior so that it induces this change in our planet? I think the Cassiopaeans answered that question ten years ago:

31 October, 2001:

Q: (L) Now according to these guys who are writing this web page about pole shift, they say it can be predicted where the poles will shift to. Is this in fact the case?
A: No.
Q: (L) Why can't pole shifts be predicted? Can't we know where the new pole will end up?
A: Chaotic function here
Q: (L) Okay, in a pole shift does the lithosphere of the planet slide on the core? (A) No. We have to be very precise. There are three possible things that would come under the name pole shift. Only one of them may come, or two, or three, okay? And these are the following - the axis of rotation with respect to stars is changing, straightening out for instance; this is one thing; while all the rest goes with the axis, the lithosphere and the magnetic field. Second, the axis stays where it is, maybe it shifts a little bit; the lithosphere stays where it is - maybe it wobbles - but the magnetic field changes: for instance reverses. Third, axis stays, magnetic field stays, but the lithosphere is moving. So that's three ways a pole shift can happen. And of course there are things that come together. The most dramatic one which is seen from outside is when the axis of rotation changes. The next dramatic one is probably when the lithosphere changes. And the third of unknown consequences is when the magnetic pole changes, okay? So, we want to have an understanding what will be the main change. (L) Well I guess we ought to ask an even more basic question: are we looking at a pole shift happening? That's starting at the beginning. (A) Alright. (L) In the next ten years. Is a pole shift possible in the next ten years?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Is a pole shift of the axis...(A) Honey, you ask if the pole shift is possible, of course it's possible. But suppose it's almost zero probability? 'Is it possible' is not the right question. 'Is it going to happen?' That's a question. (L) Okay you ask, carry on. (A) Are we looking at a pole shift during the next ten or so years with a high degree of probability?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) In this concept of pole shift, what would be the main feature of this pole shift, of all those which we were discussing?
A: New axial orientation, and magnetic reversal.
Q: (L) That's fairly dramatic. (A) Alright, now, change of axis or orientation of axis of rotation: can we say we would straighten up, getting almost perpendicular to the ecliptic? Or the other possibility is that it will fall down being almost parallel to the ecliptic. The third is that we'll flip completely by 180 degrees. We know it's highly unpredictable, but can we have a clue from which one is, so to say, dominate?
A: Perpendicularity will be restored.
Q: (A) We know the axis will change dramatically and magnetic reversal will happen. You didn't mention a change or shift of the lithosphere alone. Can we...
A: Lithospheric shift will feature to some extent.
Q: (A) But, that means eventually that the equator will almost not change because...
A: Correct.
Q: (A) So it will just shift a little bit, but its not going to go to Hawaii? (L) Oh rats! That was my theory! Well, it was a good idea. (A) What about changes in the lithosphere: can we predict a little bit of change in geography, coming from motions in lithosphere and changes in water level?
A: Chaotic features predominate but in general it will be safer inland and in mountainous areas since less folding occurs in such locations.
Q: (A) Now, the major, the change of the orientation of the axis, what would be the main trigger, force, or activity, or what kind of event will trigger this change of the axis?
A: Cometary bodies.
Q: (L) Are the planets of the solar system going to kind of shift out of their orbits and run amok? Is that a possibility?
A: Yes.
Q: (A) Due to cometary orbits alone?
A: Yes. Twin sun also.
Q: (A) When we speak about these cometary bodies, are we speaking about impacts?
A: Some will hit.
Q: (A) What would be - if any - the role played by electric phenomena?
A: Twin sun grounds current flow through entire system setting the "motor" running.
Q: (L) Does this mean that all of the different bodies of the solar system are like parts of some kind of giant machine, and once this electric current flows through them, depending on their positions relative to one another at the time this current flows, that it has some influence on the way the machine runs?
A: Yes, more or less.

I doubt, however, that the fundies promoting the end of the world in March will be quoting the Cassiopaeans any time soon.

Comet Elenin Update!

2011-01-16T08:25:00.005+01:00

I've received updates on Comet Elenin from the astronomical insider who shall, as I said, remain anonymous for the moment.

The first item of note is that, with the update on the orbit of Elenin, which was made on 09 Jan 11, that is 9-1-11 (interesting, no?), it is scheduled to reach perihelion on the 9th of September, that is: 9-9-11; Another interesting numerical combo.

My friend has made a nice little animation of the calculated orbit:

An interesting alignment occurs right around the autumnal equinox where we have Earth, Comet Elenin, the Sun and almost Mercury lined up like ducks.

Now, have a look at this image:

I hope you can make out the yellow line of Elenin's orbit. (Click the image to see it larger.) In the image, Astronomical Insider has included the position of the asteroid belt as a big circle. He has also noted the position of the member of that belt, Schiela which is the asteroid that began to develop a comet-like coma back in December . The blue ellipse is an approximation of the southern Taurid meteor stream. Something may change, of course, when the comet crosses the asteroid belt in March/April.

Stay tuned for updates!

Comet Elenin is Coming!

2011-01-12T11:06:00.004+01:00

One of the members of our research team is an astronomer at a large observatory. We've been having a number of exchanges about the theories of James McCanney. Unfortunately, I can't find any really good videos of McCanney talking about his ideas. I did find the following which are basically just audio with minimal graphics. They do explain his ideas so have a listen before you continue on. If anybody has links to better videos, please let me know!

Okay, now you know a bit about the possibilities of comets as parts of the Electric Solar System. McCanney cites all the strange weather on earth, strange behavior of the sun, that arrived in tandem with Comet Hale-Bopp. So now along comes Comet Elenin. Let's start with the likely trajectory. On the image, which came from my astronomer friend, it looks like this:

E – Earth

W - Venus

M – Mars

The little black curved line represents Mercury.

Hopefully, it should be visible somewhere around mid-August. Its closest approach to the Sun is scheduled in the first half of September. Where it will go exactly - we do not know. Since its orbit is close to the ecliptic plane, it should be visible low in the sky. Orbital parameters are yet uncertain. So far it looks harmless:

© Leonid Elenin / ISON-NM © Leonid elenin / SpeedN-NM
Comet Elenin (C/2010 X1) appears as a tiny, faint smudge in this stack of four 240-second exposures taken on the morning of December 10, 2010, with a remote-controlled telescope in New Mexico. (The quadrupled stars are due to the comet's motion between exposures.)

It is called Elenin since it was discovered by Leonid Elenin. I expect the internet to soon be ringing with rumors and news bytes about this comet. For now, there isn't much to say so I'm sharing what I've received in private from an astronomer at a big observatory that shall remain anonymous for the moment. He says:

It is too early to accurately predict the future path - it's orbital parameters haven't been revised.
Among the observable hyperbolic and parabolic comets (those that come from the Oort cloud) this one has the smallest perihelion distance and the smallest inclination to the ecliptic plane.
Comet Elenin's orbit may be unstable as it may encounter some dark bodies, for example, in the asteroid belt or even some Taurid objects. What would happen in those cases is a matter of luck.
This comet may carry a significant amount of material with it and if it follows the currently projected orbit, the Earth may very well pass through this material.
If Elenin is anything like what Victor Clube or James McCanney describes, we might be in for some surprises - good or bad, who knows?

For comparison a picture with some of the known comets:

For those interested : Ephemerides of the comet C/2010 X1 Elenin

Currently, according to Nasa the predicted trajectory can be viewed here

Predicted brightness:

Where to look:

Interview with the discoverer ("Comets may represent a serious danger": )

« Кометы могут представлять серьезную угрозу »

Elenin's telescope

Not Ready To Make Nice

2011-01-12T10:53:00.002+01:00

First let's have a little musical interlude to get us in the right mood for what I'm going to say in this essay:

I sure stepped in it writing about so-called "Chemtrails." The flamers and ad hominem attackers came out of the woodwork and when that happens, you know you've hit a hot button or a sore toe. Can we say COINTELPRO controlled clappers in the audience trying to keep the attention on the distraction so nobody will figure out what is really going on?

My readers know I'm into conspiracies - have been since the time I read None Dare Call it Conspiracy back in 1985 and tried to convince myself it was all paranoid nonsense and failed. What's more, I've paid a high price for what I've learned and shared. I don't do this for my health or to win a popularity contest. After all, people in mainstream religions hate and fear me, mainstream science types hate me, New Agers hate me, and even a lot of conspiracy theorists hate me. I guess it's because I don't buy into the "friend of my friend is my friend, enemy of my friend is my enemy"; I prefer to take each situation and examine it on its own merits. And when I see the kinds of reactions I got to my little piece about chemtrails, I know that something is rotten and getting smellier by the day and it isn't chemicals being spouted from the rear of passenger jets.

The thing is that I do think that there is a certain amount of spraying of toxic chemicals on human populations and I said so in point 1 of my article. But for some reason, people reading this article both on SOTT and on Facebook just keep missing that. They want to insist on the involvement of nearly every plane in the sky and every trail made by those planes, is evil "chemtrails." As I said, there appears to be more to this resistance than meets the eye. I mean, God's nightgown! Why aren't they looking at the obvious culprits to the disbursement of lethal chemicals in the troposphere: corporate industrial pollution that is killing millions and being blamed on cigarette smoking and chemtrails!

Or what about looking at what they eat and drink for solutions to the health issues they claim to suffer from these "chemtrails". Oh, no! Can't do that. If you find a real life criminal-polluting source you actually have to DO something. As long as it is some vague secret government program, you get to just yell and scream bloody murder, but don't actually have to do anything like get a lawyer and take them to court.

I tell ya, I'm really turning cranky lately because I don't have much patience with such stupidity anymore.

But that isn't really what I want to talk about today, though it is a 'Sign of the Times' that relates to the topic pressing on my mind. So let me give you a little background.

Back in 2002, after months of being flamed, defamed, slandered and libeled by a gang of cyberpaths bent on destroying my reputation so that no one could ever benefit from my research conclusions and experiences, I became ill. Well, yeah, now I know that it was stress-induced illness caused by direct exposure to psychopathy but detailed knowledge about such things was still in the future at that point. So my husband and I sat down and decided that we had to turn our energies in a more creative direction than just daily fighting a small group of pathological liars; it was a huge waste of time and energy.

So, I did what I always do with any situation, began to research it and share my findings. I wrote a series entitled Adventures With Cassiopaea. When I had reached a certain point in that project, which delved into some of the most interesting conspiracy theories on the planet, I realized that it did, indeed, seem as though the events of our world suggested we were approaching some sort of End Times dénouement. I then decided to chronicle daily events hoping that some sort of pattern would become clear that I could point to and say "see?!" and either prove or falsify the idea.

Thus began Signs of the Times, now known as SOTT.net.

Someone recently asked me why I chose that name, was I aware that it was the title of a collection of writings by a late 19th century Seventh Day Adventist, Ellen White who also happened to be a white supremacist and eugenicist?

I was not aware at the time that there was a religious publication by that title, though I'm not surprised since the phrase has been used by many people in many ways and contexts. I picked 'Signs of the Times' because that is the topic that concerned me: the signs of the times as in Matthew 16:1-3:

"The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? "

And further described in Matthew 24:3-31, excerpted:

And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

All these are the beginning of sorrows.

And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.

And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.

And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.

But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken

Why? Because of the following exchanges from my Cassiopaean Experiment:

Q: (L) The passages attributed to Jesus in Matthew 24 and Luke 21, where Jesus predicts the end of the age and his return, is that fairly accurately rendered?

A: Close.

and:

Q: (L) In the recent past you indicated that chapter 24 of Matthew and chapter 21 of Luke, were given by Jesus after his extended sleep state. Now, both of those chapters refer to the present time as being like the days of Noah. Is that a correct assessment?

A: In a sense and individual events are as yet undetermined.

This, of course, brings me to the crux of the matter here.

You see, in the beginning Signs of the Times was a personal chronicle, just for myself and a few other people. I wanted to keep track of all those 'Signs of the Times' listed in Matthew such as wars and rumors of wars, plague and pestilence, flood and famine, signs in the heavens, the love of people growing cold, false prophets, and lies so deep and wide as to deceive even the very "elect", whoever that might turn out to be.

Well, time went by, the page became popular, helpers came along, and we all had a discussion about where to go with something that was gaining popularity despite the obvious efforts of the defamers and google trying to hide our existence. (We spent - still spend - a lot of time and effort figuring ways to deal with google censorship. Unlike Julian Assange, we have never made a deal with the devil to gain global popularity. SOTT has been on-line 9 years now and we've worked and sweated blood for every single reader.)

Our idea at the time was that there are still many, many mainstream type thinkers who simply can't deal with the esoteric angles but they still deserve to have the truth presented to them in a way that they can understand and maybe the best way to do that is by the clever juxtaposition of mostly mainstream articles that are 'truthified' by commentary and/or headline adjustment to better reflect what is actually being said or done. Of course, all of this was continuously informed by our esoteric work so the views we held came not only from our personal development and ability to see the unseen, but also sometimes directly from information provided to us by the aforementioned Cassiopaean Experiment.

As time has gone by, two things have become apparent:

1) Yes, we are in some sort of "End Times" whether that end is brought by the natural extinction of the human race due to being taken over by psychopaths or is due to long prophesied Earth Changes that the Cs pointed out would occur as an "as below, so above" reflection of what is going on here on Planet Earth; and

2) people either get it or they don't and no amount of diplomacy or soft-selling is going to change that. It is either inside you or it is not.

But still, it was a noble effort and it did deserve the energy we put into it for 7 of those 9 years of SOTT's existence. At least we know we did all we could.

Which brings me to the crux of the crux of the matter: On Christmas Day, I published a short piece entitled The Gift of the Magi to the Elect in which I wrote:

The situation is so bad that I see no hope for humanity at large at all. Extinction of our race is the inevitable outcome and I am no longer the only person who thinks so; even some mainstream scientists and pundits have written as much. They don't seem to be able to put their finger on the root of the problem, tending to blame it on effects, not causes, but they feel the prickle of the hairs rising on the back of their neck, and they sense the wolf circling in the darkness.

The problem is personal evil. And in our world, personal evil manifests always and ever through pathology whether it is a sickness of the individual body or mind, the body social or politic, or the body of our mother: Planet Earth. As above, so below.

Just as germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing, so the psychopaths presently ruling humanity do not realize - because they cannot - that the only end for all under their rule - including themselves - is death.

Later in the piece I did something that we had agreed not to do back in 2003 when SOTT began the effort to wake up the average man or woman, I brought up the Cassiopaeans:

Here I'm going to bring up a topic that I don't often discuss on SOTT.net - my foray into superluminal communication - the Cassiopaean Experiment. I think I need to mention that we here at SOTT do get a lot of guidance from the Cs on the topic of world affairs even if that guidance is mainly suggesting that we research deeper - and hint at the direction or give some clue words... and they are right more often than not. After all, the Cs have said:
Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the 'past.' People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the 'Future.'
Everything that is happening right now on the planet is exactly what they predicted back in 1997 - 2000... I don't think we would have navigated through it as far as we had if we had not been getting this guidance. I don't know if you - the reader - have read The Wave and Adventures With Cassiopaea or not, but I laid it all out online back in 1998 and '99 and so far, they've batted them out of the park repeatedly. So I'm inclined to give them a pretty high probability of being right much of the time.

I was surprised to receive a number of emails and comments from readers that they really missed the old SOTT where the C's comments were freely deployed. I realized that I missed it too. It was an artificial restriction on ourselves, a sort of handicapping for the game.

In case some of you aren't aware of it, the Cs have informed us that we have until 2014 to sort things out one way or another. That means, time is getting short. And certainly we notice that this pressure is building within the power elite circles. They are becoming more and more desperate for control of absolutely everything. And certainly, they will largely achieve this control before the Universe and Mother Earth and Father Sun intervene. After all, they only react to what happens here on Earth. We did think we could ameliorate things if enough people could wake up in time - for the elect's sake will those days be shortened - but we no longer think this is possible. The window has closed and the evidence is all around us in the weather, in the skies, in the dying birds and fish, and signs in the heavens. Even now, Comet Elenin approaches and if Jim McCanney is correct, we may be in for some very interesting 'Signs of the Times' - if not more - come September and October.

Every year we do an annual I Ching reading for the year ahead (yeah, I know, why do I Ching when you have the Cs? Because we always like a second opinion!) and the reading for this year was rather disheartening. After all, this is the year that is going to produce the date 11-11-11. The question is always about the global conditions and which direction we should go in our work. We got the K'un Hexagram, number 47 (and 4 + 7 = 11, by the way), which is Oppression (Exhaustion). The following is a slightly paraphrased Richard Wilhelm translation:

above Tui the Joyous, Lake
below K'an the abysmal, Water

The lake is above, water below; the lake is empty, dried up; it is empty. It is dried up, exhausted, because an abyss has opened up within it and beneath it. Exhaustion is expressed in yet another way: at the top, a dark line is holding down two light line; below, a light line is hemmed in between two dark ones. The upper trigram belongs to the principle of darkness, the lower to the principle of light. Thus everywhere superior men are oppressed and held in restraint by inferior men.

When there is no water in the lake, conditions are exceptional. It represents a time of adversity when, everywhere, superior men are oppressed and held in restraint by inferior men.

Oppression means encountering adverse fate. It is something that happens by chance.

The Judgment

OPPRESSION is a test of character:
It leads to perplexity and thence to success.
When one has something to say
One gets no hearing: one is not believed.
But through oppression does one learn
To lessen one's rancour.

Times of adversity are the reverse of times of success, but they can lead to success if they; befall the right man. When a strong man meets with adversity, he remains cheerful despite all danger, and this cheerfulness is the source of later successes; it is that stability which is stronger than fate. He who lets his spirit be broken by exhaustion certainly has no success. But if adversity only bends a man, it creates in him a power to react that is bound in time to manifest itself. No inferior man is capable of this. Only the great man brings about good fortune and remains blameless. It is true that for the time being outward influence is denied him, because his words have no effect.

Therefore in times of adversity it is important to be strong within and sparing of words.

Only a great man can bring about good fortune by keeping blameless and correct.

THE IMAGE

The lake is dried up, exhausted.
When adverse fate befalls him
The wise man stakes his life
On following his will.

At times of adverse fate there is nothing one can do but to acquiesce in one's fate and remain true to oneself. This concerns the deepest stratum of one's being, for this alone is superior to all external fate.

There were two changing lines, one and six:

THE LINES

Six at the beginning means: One sits oppressed under a bare tree: One strays into a gloomy valley.

When adversity befalls a man, it is important above all things for him to be strong and to overcome the trouble inwardly. If he is weak, the trouble overwhelms him. Instead of proceeding on his way, he remains sitting under a bare tree and falls ever more deeply into gloom and melancholy. This makes the situation only more and more hopeless. Such an attitude comes from an inner delusion that he must by all means overcome.

Six at the top means: Oppressed by bonds one now can break.

As one's distress draws to an end, one can easily master the oppression with insight. If one is still irresolute and influenced by one's previous condition, one fears to make a move. One must now grasp the situation, change one's attitude and be decisive.

So, taking the clues in hand and thinking about them, we think that it is time to turn our attention to working in favor of the destiny of those who are awake. It seems that the window of opportunity for people to wake up and possibly have some effect on the coming Earth changes has closed. Those changes are pretty much upon us now and it is clear that there is no possibility of effecting changes via political routes. We need to concentrate our resources on educating those who are at least partly awake.

And so, SOTT is going to be changing over the coming days and weeks. The first thing you will notice is that the news categories will be changing. Since we are taking a different approach, we will be looking at different lines of force to follow in the news. SOTT is going to become, once again, a place for those who are going in the same direction, seeing the same things, working to keep each other awake and aware.

Certainly, that means that there will be more articles about conspiracy theories, either the kind that have proven true, that may prove true, or the kind that have been created as COINTELPRO cover-ups for even more nefarious activities. (Kind of like double reverse conspiracy). And if the COINTELPRO dominated New Agers and Conspiracy Theorists don't like it, just go elsewhere, okay? Find someone you like and hang out with them. Because, I won't back down from telling the truth as I see it and I'm not ready to make nice!

Chemtrails? Contrails? Strange Skies

2011-01-12T10:45:00.003+01:00

A few things that should be considered when talking about so-called "chemtrails":

1) Obviously, there is some "spraying" that goes on and it's not for the benefit of humanity. I've heard a few stories from people about very low flying planes dispersing stuff that lands all over everything or makes people sick. And I do mean LOW flying.

2) Spraying that actually affects a designated area beneath the sprayer (the plane in question) must be at a fairly low altitude otherwise what is sprayed will not come down on the area beneath the spraying. This is due to the fact that our atmosphere has a number of layers and each layer has its own temperature and wind speed and direction, and very often, things in one layer take a very long time and distance to mix or mingle with other layers, IF they mix at all. Usually, the wind speeds in the upper layers are such that anything deposited there might only penetrate to lower, weather, layers, after many thousands of miles of travel. It's a very nonlinear situation and highly, impossibly, unpredictable.

3) So, if you are talking about chemical spraying that you can see above in the sky, that then falls on the area below it, you must be talking about low altitude spraying.

4) Therefore, trails that are very high in the sky that have no hope of ever interacting with the ground below them cannot properly be called "chemtrails" except, perhaps, if a chemical is being sprayed that is supposed to affect the weather (and even that is done fairly low). Cloud seeding is done by dispersing elements such as dry ice crystals or silver iodide in the atmosphere with an airplane or even ground based stations. Seeding clouds is believed to promote condensation of water droplets, thus, rain.

5) Cloud seeding is usually done TO clouds, it doesn't create them. Plus, it, too, must be done at a fairly low altitude in order for the effects to affect the area below the activity. Otherwise, the higher wind speeds in the upper layers will carry the silver iodide away, disperse it, and the desired effect will not be had. Here's a page about cloud seeding: http://www.sandylandwater.com/ops.htm

6) Small private planes fly at 12,000 feet maximum. Passenger airliners fly from 25,000 to 45,000 feet. The Concorde super-sonic transport cruised at Mach 2 at 57,000 feet. Miltary fighters get up to 80,000 feet, some specialty planes such as The U2 spy plane and the SR-71 are thought to go as high as 120,000 feet. the x-15 has a ceiling of 354,000 feet.

7) From Wikipedia:

© n/a

Cirrus clouds generally refer to atmospheric clouds that are characterized by thin, wisp-like strands, often accompanied by tufts, leading to their common (non-standard) name of mare's tail.[1] Sometimes these clouds are so extensive that they are virtually indistinguishable from one another, forming a sheet of cirrus called cirrostratus. Sometimes convection at high altitudes produces another form of cirrus called cirrocumulus, a pattern of small cloud tufts which include droplets of freezed water. The term is also used for certain interstellar clouds composed of sub-micrometre sized dust grains.[2]

Many cirrus clouds produce hair like filaments made of the heavier ice crystals that precipitate from them. These "fall streaks", a form of virga, often indicate the difference in the motion of air (wind shear) between the upper part of the cirrus cloud and the air below it. Sometimes the top of the cirrus cloud is moving rapidly above a slower layer of air, or the streak is falling into a faster moving lower layer. The directions of these winds can also vary.

Cirrus clouds are formed when water vapor freezes into ice crystals at altitudes above 8000 meters (26,000 ft).[3] Due to the sparse moisture at a high altitude, they tend to be very thin.[1] At this altitude, aircraft leave condensation trails that can turn into cirrus clouds.[4] This happens when hot exhaust, mostly water, freezes, leaving a visible trail. Streaks may appear straight when wind shear is absent, giving the clouds the appearance of a comma (cirrus uncinus), or tangle, an indication of high-level turbulence. The falling ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground.

© Wikimedia Commons

A high number of cirrus clouds may be a sign of an approaching frontal system or upper air disturbance. This usually signals a change in weather in the near future, usually becoming increasingly stormy.[6] Cirrus clouds can also be the remnants of a thunderstorm. A large shield of cirrus and cirrostratus typically accompany the high altitude outflow of hurricanes or typhoons. Cirrus clouds have also been observed developing after the persistent formation of contrails from an aircraft. Increase in air traffic is a possible cause of an increasing amount of cirrus clouds.[7]

8) Now, what is wrong with the picture presented above?

Answer: the altitude of cirrus clouds vs the altitude of many jetliners that criss-cross the skies with trails which are obviously much lower than the altitude designated for cirrus clouds.

YET the trails left by these aircraft ACT like cirrus clouds used to act at much higher altitudes.

Most logical (and scariest) conclusion: the cold layer of the upper atmosphere has gotten lower and probably thicker and therefore, more airplanes flying at lower altitudes are forming contrails in that icy air which used to be the much higher domain of cirrus clouds.

Because, again, if you understand about the layers of the atmosphere, temperatures, winds, etc, then you will realize that what is happening is NOT spraying of the human population or even intentional weather manipulation, it is the EVIDENCE that our planetary atmosphere has changed dramatically in the past ten years or so. More like 20 because that was when I began noticing the changes in cloud formation.

9) Also notice that the trails left by planes at much LOWER altitudes, generally dissipate quickly. What is bad news is that they leave ANY trail at all at those altitudes! (And knowing how layers that form cirrus clouds function from the above, you can pretty well understand that they are not spraying stuff on the ground below.) But certainly, there CAN be the natural formation of cirrus clouds by plane exhaust or fuel dumping AND low level spraying of "stuff" at the same time. I would suggest that such cases are "cover up" the same way the endless "gray alien abductions" are a cover-up for what aliens are REALLY doing on this planet.

For example, this very stupid video that is claimed to be "cloud seeding":

It is not. What it is is evidence that the atmosphere layer that the plane is flying through is very cold. Now, whether that is a problem or not depends on where and what time of year the video was made. In some cases, cold air that low would not be out of season, so to say.

10) Do these activities have any effect on the weather?

Undoubtedly they do. But that is not intentional. See above discussion of cirrus clouds where the net effect is HEATING of the atmosphere.

What seems to be happening is that the area of weather phenomena - the troposphere - seems to have been compressed by an expanding (or dropping) stratosphere and the stratosphere itself seems to have changed it's characteristics. THIS is VERY concerning! These are signs and symptoms, along with many others that we have chronicled on SOTT, that something very unusual is going on in our cosmic neighborhood because weather changes are taking place on other planets, too. I can guarantee you that they aren't doing "chemtrails" on Mars or Jupiter or Saturn.

11) If you study the work of James McCanney, you will come to the understanding that the 5 layers of the Earth's atmosphere are also layers of alternating electrical charge. THIS IS IMPORTANT. McCanney also discusses how these electric flows around and on the earth interact with the sun to create our weather/climate. Piers Corbyn is becoming famous for utilizing similar principles for far more accurate weather predictions than the mainstream climatologists are able to work up. The fact that Corbyn CAN predict the weather as accurately as he does argues against the "chemtrails" being a weather modification activity. His method is concerned with solar activity, not so-called "chemtrails".

12) Regarding these layers of electromagnetism surrounding the Earth, in 1958 some things were done that may very well have a strong bearing on the conditions of our planet in the present day. I would like for you to think about this in respect of climate change, so-called "chem-trails" and HAARP.

"Between August and September of 1958, the US Navy exploded three fission type nuclear bombs 480 km above the South Atlantic Ocean, in the part of the lower Van Allen Belt closest to the earth's surface. In addition, two hydrogen bombs were detonated 160 km over Johnston Island in the Pacific. The military called this "the biggest scientific experiment ever undertaken." It was designed by the US Department of Defense and the US Atomic Energy Commission, under the code name Project Argus. The purpose appears to be to assess the impact of high altitude nuclear explosions on radio transmission and radar operations because of the electromagnetic pulse (EMP), and to increase understanding of the geomagnetic field and the behavior of the charged particles in it. This gigantic experiment created new (inner) magnetic radiation belts encompassing almost the whole earth, and injected sufficient electrons and other energetic particles into the ionosphere to cause world wide effects. The electrons traveled back and forth along magnetic force lines, causing an artificial "aurora" when striking the atmosphere near the North Pole. This was reported only much later, on August 13-20th of 1961 in Keesings Historisch Archief (K.H.A.). The report said that the US Military planned to create a "telecommunications shield in the ionosphere at 3,000 km height, by bringing into orbit 350,000 million copper needles, each 2-4 cm long [total weight 16 kg], forming a belt 10 km thick and 40 km wide, the needles spaced about 100 m apart." This was designed to replace the ionosphere "because telecommunications are impaired by magnetic storms and solar flares." The US planned to add to the number of copper needles if the experiment proved to be successful. This plan was strongly opposed by the International Union of Astronomers."

Then:

On July 9th, 1962, the US began a further series of experiments with the ionosphere. From their description: "one kiloton device, at a height of 60 km and one megaton and one multi-megaton, at several hundred kilometers height". (K.H.A., 29 June 1962).

These tests seriously disturbed the lower Van Allen Belt, substantially altering its shape and intensity. "In this experiment the inner Van Allen Belt will be practically destroyed for a period of time; particles from the Belt will be transported to the atmosphere. It is anticipated that the earth's magnetic field will be disturbed over long distances for several hours, preventing radio communication. The explosion in the inner radiation belt will create an artificial dome of polar light that will be visible from Los Angeles". (K.H.A. 11 May 1962).

This was the experiment which called forth the strong protest of the Queen's Astronomer, Sir Martin Ryle in the UK. On the 19th of July... NASA announced that as a consequence of the high altitude nuclear test of July 9th, a new radiation belt had been formed, stretching from a height of about 400 km to 1600 km; it can be seen as a temporary extension of the lower Van Allen Belt" (K.H.A. 5 August 1962).

"... Starfish made a much wider belt [than Project Argus] that extends from low altitude out past L=3 [i.e. three earth radiuses or about 13,000 km above the surface of the earth]."Later in 1962, the USSR undertook similar planetary experiments, creating three new radiation belts between 7,000 and 13,000 km above the earth. According to the Encyclopedia, the electron fluxes in the lower Van Allen Belt have changed markedly since the 1962 high-altitude nuclear explosions by the US and USSR, never returning to their former state. According to American scientists, it could take many hundreds of years for the Van Allen Belts to destabilize at their normal levels."

Keep in mind now that, while they are out there blowing up our atmosphere, they want to blame Global Warming on the masses of regular people!

My backyard overlooks the Pyrenees, the crossroads for air traffic between Europe and Africa, South America and Spain, Northern Europe, England, Scandinavia, and Southern Europe and Africa. It's a very busy place. I sit at my desk beside a window that overlooks this sky and I look out this window many times per day and notice the sky in all humors. The following photographs I took from my backyard are of CONTRAILS made by high volume air traffic that, on some days, leaves lingering trails due to the conditions in the stratosphere. Those conditions can be correlated with conditions in the troposphere as well as the weather before, during and after the days when these trails form and linger so long. If I was a hysterical, brainwashed nutjob, I would think I was being poisoned. But I know what they are, I have observed them for hours and days on end and have a memory of similar phenomena on a much smaller scale - and much less frequent because the planetary conditions were different - when I was growing up. Believe me, they are CONTRAILS...

During the 1980's, rocket launches globally numbered about 500 to 600 a year, peaking at 1500 in 1989. There were many more during the Gulf War. The Shuttle is the largest of the solid fuel rockets, with twin 45 meter boosters. All solid fuel rockets release large amounts of hydrochloric acid in their exhaust, each Shuttle flight injecting about 75 tons of ozone destroying chlorine into the stratosphere. Those launched since 1992 inject even more ozone-destroying chlorine, about 187 tons, into the stratosphere (which contains the ozone layer).

I'm reading a paper about cometary impacts which has some information that bears on our topic and I think we can trust it since it is not being produced in a program to disinform relative to so-called chemtrails.

The first thing of interest is the main historically known large body which impacted the Earth: the Tunguska object. What is important to us in relation to chemtrails is that this object exploded in the atmosphere in June 1908 and for many nights afterward the sky was unusually luminous over Europe and western Asia, allowing people to read newspapers at night.

When scientists finally made it to the remote site in 1927, no visible fragments of the exploded body were found. Later field work uncovered peculiar black, shiny, metallic spheres in the soil of numerous small, shallow, oval craters - 50 to 200 meters diameter - similar to the craters of the Carolina Bays. These spheres were typical of extraterrestrial bodies having a composition very high in iridium, nickel, cobalt and other metals.

Now, here is where the connection comes in: An unusually high content of these same metals were later found in Antarctic ice cores, but in the layer relating to the year 1912.

That is to say, it took four years for the stuff deposited in the stratosphere to precipitate onto Earth.

From the Antarctic data, global fallout of 7 million tons was estimated for the Tunguska body which means that it's diameter would have been about 160 meters.

The dust from such objects exploded in the stratosphere diffuses over the globe and it usually takes a period of about three to six months for this to happen. The time that it takes for anything in the stratosphere to get to the ground is about 3 years (or more) and that is "independent of the initial amount of dust {or whatever}." Also, there are so many atmospheric variables that it cannot be determined where the stuff will go.

That is, materials injected into the stratosphere do NOT precipitate onto the ground under which it is "laid" (as in so-called chemtrails) except, perhaps, almost accidentally, and much, much later.

Again, this has no bearing on spraying that takes place at much lower altitudes, as in the troposphere, but clearly, what is going on in the stratosphere is NOT "chemtrails."

I think that I have presented more than sufficient food for thought on the topic of so-called "chemtrails" to suggest that, yes, there is something really wicked going on, but it ain't what you think. In fact, it's worse. YES, something is VERY wrong in our skies - but it is not chemtrails. The CONTRAILS themselves have changed and THAT is a huge warning about our atmosphere and our climate and the implications are a lot scarier than if some nutjobs in the Pentagon were just trying to poison us. Heck, we could survive that. Most of life on earth will NOT survive what these contrails portend!

Witches, Comets, Planetary Cataclysms

2011-01-12T10:41:00.001+01:00

This article was first published in The Dot Connector Magazine, official publication of Sott.net.

When you think of Halloween, what is the first image that comes to mind? I took a little informal poll among my friends, family and associates. Guess what image came in first? Jack-o-lanterns! Bet you thought I was going to say "witches". Well, I sure thought it would be witches, but they only came in a close second!..

When I think of Halloween, i think of grade-school art projects where we cut out silhouettes of witches to paste onto large yellow moons made of construction paper. The witch was always on a broom with her black dress flying in the wind, accompanied by a black cat sitting on the back of the broom. I wondered even then how the cat managed to stay on and why anybody would think that straddling a broomstick as a seat would be even remotely comfortable.

But, there you have it: in a significant way, Halloween is associated with witches, evil women who consort with the devil and do evil things like caging lost children to fatten them up and eat them, giving poisoned apples and setting up spinning wheels to poison abandoned or hapless princesses who are only looking for true love.

The word 'witch' comes to us from the Old English wicca, which was a masculine word meaning 'wizard'. The feminine version was wicce, pronounced 'witch'. This came from Middle High German wicken , which meant to 'bewitch', and even older, from Old High German wīh which meant 'holy'. The dictionary tells us that a witch is someone who has malignant supernatural powers and practices spell casting with the aid of a devil or familiar. It also refers to an ugly old woman, or a beautiful young woman. The word 'witch' is an epithet for any woman who isn't inclined to be a doormat, flung to the floor by any individual who wants her to be subject to his or her will. Last of all, a witch is a practitioner of Wicca.

Gerald Gardner.

Wicca is a British construct created by an amateur anthropologist named Gerald Gardner who claimed to have had many interesting encounters and experiences with the occult and paranormal throughout his life. At one point, he claimed to have doctoral degrees from the Universities of Singapore and Toulouse, which was a lie. He claimed that he was initiated into a New Forest coven of witches which was the survival of a pre-Christian pagan witch cult. This alleged ancient coven has been shown by subsequent research to have been formed in the early 20th century and its ideas were based mainly on folk magic and the theories of Margaret Murray, so again, his honesty is rather suspect.

Gardner incorporated elements from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, and the imaginings of Aleister Crowley and others. Most of what one sees when carefully examining these elements that combined to form modern Wicca bears no relationship whatsoever to the ancient religions as they can be discerned by deep study. Rather, these elements are likely more influenced by taking the descriptions of the persecutors of witches during the Inquisition as a guideline, instead of realizing that they were the defamatory falsifications of psychopaths. It is more likely that those accused of witchcraft during the witch persecutions were following beliefs akin to those of the Cathars - dualism - or even more ancient dualistic concepts. They also likely employed ancient knowledge handed down from Paleolithic shamanic systems which had little to nothing to do with 'ceremonial magic', spells or a 'liberal code of morality'. Unfortunately, neither Gardner nor Crowley had access to modern scientific archaeological studies from which one can actually infer something about the abilities, beliefs and practices of our truly remarkable ancestors.

My work is all about following the lines of Pagan/shamanistic ideas and teachings back to the Ice Ages - the cave painters, the Northern European origins - to find the most original, fundamental, common foundation of all of them. The idea that there was a time when man was directly in contact with the Celestial Beings is at the root of many of the myths of the Golden Age. Myths tell us of a time when the 'gods withdrew' from mankind. As a result of some 'happening', i.e., 'The Fall', when the communications were broken off and the Celestial Beings withdrew to the highest heavens.

But the myths also tell us that there were still certain people who were able to 'ascend' and commune with the gods on behalf of their tribe or family. Through them, contact was maintained with the 'guiding spirits' of the group. The beliefs and practices of present day shamans are a survival of a profoundly modified and even corrupted and degenerated remnant of this archaic technology of concrete communications between heaven and earth. This shamanism seems to have been born in Western Europe with the arrival of Cro-Magnon man and the myths seem to have been redacted repeatedly until we have numerous claims of occult secrets of various sorts revived by this or that person, including Wicca. If that is the case, then true 'witchcraft' is really shamanism, aka Druidism, and even more, as we shall see. Mircea Eliade writes:

Recent researches have clearly brought out the 'shamanic' elements in the religion of the Paleolithic hunters. Horst Kierchner has interpreted the celebrated relief at Lascaux as a representation of a shamanic trance.

... Finally, Karl J. Narr has reconsidered the problem of the 'origin' and chronology of shamanism in his important study. He brings out the influence of notions of fertility (Venus statuettes) on the religious beliefs of the prehistoric North Asian hunters; but this influence did not disrupt the Paleolithic tradition. ... It is in this "Vorstellungswelt" that the roots of the bear ceremonialism of Asia and North America lie. Soon afterward, probably about 25,000 BC, Europe offers evidence for the earliest forms of shamanism (Lascaux) with the plastic representations of the bird, the tutelary spirit, and ecstasy.

... What appears to be certain is the antiquity of 'shamanic' rituals and symbols. It remains to be determined whether these documents brought to light by prehistoric discoveries represent the first expressions of a shamanism in statu nascendi or are merely the earliest documents today available for an earlier religious complex, which, however, did not find 'plastic' manifestations (drawings, ritual objects, etc.) before the period of Lascaux.

A female shaman from the Altai mountains.
... It is indubitable that the celestial ascent of the shaman is a survival, profoundly modified and sometimes degenerate, of this archaic religious ideology centered on faith in a celestial Supreme Being and belief in concrete communications between heaven and earth.

... The myths refer to more intimate relations between the Supreme Beings and shamans; in particular, they tell of a First Shaman, sent to earth by the Supreme Being or his surrogate to defend human beings against diseases and evil spirits."

It was in the context of the 'withdrawal' of the 'Celestial Being' that the meaning of the shaman's ecstatic experience changed. Formerly, the activity was focused on communing with the god and obtaining benefits for the tribe. The shift of the function of the shaman associated with the withdrawal of the benevolent god/goddess was to 'battling with evil spirits and disease'. This is a sharp reminder of the work of Jesus, healing the sick and casting out demons - the shamanic exemplar 'after the Fall'.

There was, it seems, another consequence of this 'shift'. Increasingly, the descents into the 'underworld' and the relations with 'spirits' led to their 'embodiment' or in the shaman's being 'possessed' by 'spirits'. What is clear is that these were innovations, most of them recent. What is particularly striking in the research of the historiographers of myth, legend, shamanism, etc., is the discovery of the "influences from the south, which appeared quite early and which altered both cosmology and the mythology and techniques of ecstasy". Among these southern influences were the contribution of Buddhism and Lamaism, added to the Iranian and, in the last analysis, Mesopotamian influences that preceded them.

The initiatory schema of the shaman's ritual death and resurrection is likewise an innovation, but one that goes back to much earlier times; in any case, it cannot be ascribed to influences from the ancient Near East. But the innovations introduced by the ancestor cult particularly affected the structure of this initiatory schema. The very concept of mystical death was altered by the many and various religious changes effected by lunar mythologies, the cult of the dead, and the elaboration of magical ideologies.

Hence we must conceive of Asiatic shamanism as an archaic technique of ecstasy whose original underlying ideology - belief in a celestial Supreme Being with whom it was possible to have direct relations by ascending into the sky - was constantly being transformed by an ongoing series of exotic contributions culminating in the invasion of Buddhism...

The phenomenology of the trance underwent many changes and corruptions, due in large part to confusion as to the precise nature of ecstasy. Yet all these innovations and corruptions did not succeed in eliminating the possibility of the true shamanic ecstasy.

More than once we have discerned in the shamanic experience a 'nostalgia for paradise' that suggests one of the oldest types of Christian mystical experience. As for the 'inner light', which plays a part of the first importance in Indian mysticism and metaphysics as well as in Christian mystical theology, it is already documented in shamanism.

What seems to be most important about Central Asian shamanism in the history of mysticism is the role the shaman plays in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community. Shamans are pre-eminently the anti-demonic champions; they combat not only demons and disease, but also the black magicians. The shaman is the tireless slayer of demons and dragons.

... It is clear that shamanism, as it is known, has declined from its original unified and coherent system. One reason for thinking so is that, while there are many local terms for a male shaman, there is only one for a female shaman. Shamanism, it seems, was formerly a woman's activity. In one Tartar dialect, utygan, the word for a woman-shaman, also means 'bear'.

... The magico-religious value of intoxication for achieving ecstasy is of Iranian origin. ... Concerning the original shamanic experience ... narcotics are only a vulgar substitute for 'pure' trance.

The use of intoxicants is a recent innovation and points to a decadence in shamanic technique. Narcotic intoxication is called on to provide an imitation of a state that the shaman is no longer capable of attaining otherwise. Decadence or vulgarization of a mystical technique - in ancient and modern India, and indeed all through the East, we constantly find this strange mixture of 'difficult ways' and 'easy ways' of realizing mystical ecstasy or some other decisive experience." (Ibid.)

Now, let me make a point here. The religion of the Ice Age was so satisfying to all the peoples of the Earth that it was stable for over 25,000 years, as is evidenced by the archaeological and historical data. There were shamans, women, who engaged in ecstatic ascents which brought benefits to the tribe and, later, defended the tribe against negative influences. In short, it seems that Paganism, even Druidism, was the original Christianity, and the original 'Christed Ones' were women. Many researchers repeatedly point out that Christianity has pagan roots. Well, yeah; more than anybody suspects. And if the lines of research I have presented in my book, The Secret History of the World, are anything to go by, then the original 'witches' were Christs.

This, of course, leads us to wonder how can things get so turned around that we actually end up believing the opposite of the truth in almost every field of endeavor? We may turn away from mainstream religions that we can see are false and contradictory, only to fall into the arms of New Age religions that are not any better, being just another variation on a control system designed to prevent us from accessing what is real. It is going to be difficult for me to boil this down into the short space I am given for this article, but I will do my best. Just keep in mind that I am not going to be able to provide extensive quoted evidence from primary sources, which is my general way of writing. If you wish to know more, you can read my books which go into these matters in great depth and detail.

The last day of October is a holiday that is said to be the ancient Celtic celebration of the 'End of Summer', Samhain, Halloween, or All Hallows Eve. As I mentioned at the beginning, many people think of witches when you say the word 'Halloween'. One immediately wonders why October 31st should be associated with witches and celebrated as the 'end of summer' when the Autumnal equinox, over a month earlier, is the actual end of summer?

Therein lies the tale!

According to British historian Ronald Hutton, the festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the 'lighter half' of the year and beginning of the 'darker half' and is sometimes regarded as the Celtic New Year. According to folklorist John Gregorson Campbell and archaeologist Bettina Arnold, the ancient Celts believed that the curtain separating this world from the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both good and bad) to easily traverse the otherwise sturdy barrier. They dealt with this by inviting the good spirits in - usually family ancestors - and utilizing various techniques to ward off or scare away any bad spirits. It is suggested that this is the origin of wearing costumes disguising oneself as skeletons, ghosts, and goblins, the principle being that if you looked horrible enough, you could even scare away the devil himself!

Samhain was also the time when people in the old times took stock of their food supplies, butchered cattle and pigs, and prepared grains and other foodstuffs to put up for the winter.

Bonfires were an important part of the celebrations. Hearth fires were put out, the bones of the slaughtered cattle were tossed into the bonfire, and each home re-lit their hearth fire from the coals of the bonfire. Sometimes two bonfires would be built so that people could pass between them with their livestock for 'purification'. This practice may be a survival of the times when the ancient tribes purified themselves by burning alive: a) any members who were less than perfect so that the tribe could be cleansed of sinful elements, or b) those members who were actually perfect in some way and volunteered to be offered as a sacrifice to appease the gods so the rest of the tribe could live in peace for another year. This is, in fact, an interesting clue.

The name 'Halloween' is an old Scottish variant of 'All Hallows Eve', or the night before All Hallows Day, or the Feast of All Saints. What is interesting to observe here are the old customs regarding this day, and especially the following two days, from around the world that were later Christianized, but obviously represent something far more ancient.

In Portugal and Spain, offerings are made on All Saints Day. In Mexico, All Saints coincides with the celebration of the Day of the Innocents, part of the Day of the Dead honoring deceased children and infants. In Portugal, children go door to door where they receive cakes, nuts and pomegranates. The holiday focuses on family gatherings where prayers for, and remembrance of, friends and family that are departed are the focus. Traditions include building altars honoring the deceased, feasting on sugar skulls (devouring death?), and the favorite foods and beverages of the departed, decorating with marigolds and visiting graves with these as gifts. Scholars trace the origins of the modern holiday to indigenous observances dating back thousands of years and to an Aztec festival dedicated to a goddess called Mictecacihuatl, the Queen of Mictlan, or the underworld. It was believed that she was sacrificed as an infant, and she is represented with a defleshed body, and her gaping jaw swallows the stars during the day.

Mexican ‘day of the dead’ offerings, including sugar skulls.

In the Philippines, this day is called 'Undas', 'Todos los Santos' (literally 'All Saints'), and sometimes 'Araw ng mga Namayapa' (approximately 'Day of the Deceased'). This day and the one before and one after it are spent visiting the graves of deceased relatives, where prayers and flowers are offered, candles are lit and the graves themselves are cleaned, repaired and repainted. The practices are similar in most European countries.

In Brazil, Dia de Finados is a public holiday that many Brazilians celebrate by visiting cemeteries and churches. In Spain, there are festivals and parades, and, at the end of the day, people gather at cemeteries and pray for their dead loved ones. Similarly themed celebrations appear in many Asian and African cultures.

These celebrations, which occur on November 1st and 2nd, and have indigenous forms that the church assimilated, strike us as curious. It seems that what is important is that they follow immediately on the heels of October 31st. One is compelled to ask why. What happened on October 31st that turned the following day into the Day of the Dead?

The symbols associated with Halloween formed over time and, just as the medieval church assimilated the ancient death-themed images and practices, many of the customs of contemporary times have assimilated the medieval practices. In traditional Celtic Halloween festivals, large turnips were hollowed out, carved with faces and placed in windows to ward off evil spirits. The American tradition of carving pumpkins was originally associated with harvest time in general, not becoming specifically associated with Halloween until the mid-to-late 1800s.

While most Christians just think of Halloween as a secular holiday which allows kids (and big kids!) to dress up in silly costumes, eat candy, and generally make fun of everything that is normally scary in our world, some other - mostly fundamentalist - Christians ascribe a negative influence to the celebration because they feel it celebrates paganism, the occult, or trivializes it so that their members are not properly fearful of ghosts, demons and the devil. Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate Halloween because they believe anything that originated from a pagan holiday should not be celebrated by true Christians. This is ironic considering what I have written above about original Christianity. How did we get from there - true spirituality that honored women, with women shamans that provided for the tribe - to here, the modern-day Christian view of women as something barely human?

Many of those who follow Pagan ways consider the season to be a holy time of year and, naturally, Wiccans feel that the whole holiday as it is generally celebrated, is offensive because it associates witches with the other list of 'evil spirits' that need to be warded off. They are right about that, but most of what they consider 'Wicca' is as wrong as Christianity is wrong.

This brings us back to the question this article hopes to answer: What is the origin of Halloween, what does it really commemorate, and why are witches associated with it?

The first point I would like to bring up is that I think, when we look at Halloween, we are seeing something very ancient that is filtered through many layers of interpretation. What is consistent throughout, however, is the theme of easy traversal of the border between life and death, leading mainly to death, which suggests that death on a massive scale came on Halloween a very long time ago. Whatever it was, it was so terrifying, so widespread, that cultures the world over have commemorated it, and the days following it, in ways that appear to be designed to ward it off, to prevent it from ever happening again. And along the way, things happened that turned everything around so that those individuals - real, holy, witches - who actually might be capable of knowing such things, of ameliorating such terrors, became identified with the cause of the death and destruction.

In the book, The Worship of the Dead, or the Origin and Nature of Pagan Idolatry and Its Bearing Upon the Early History of Egypt and Babylonia, by John Garnier (1904, London: Chapman & Hall; Chapter One, pages 3-11), the author writes that the modern-day celebrations for the dead focused around All Hallows Eve, including the following few days, originated to memorialize the people who died in the Deluge brought by God on a wicked world. He bases this on Genesis 7:11. He writes:

"There is hardly a nation or tribe in the world which does not possess a tradition of the destruction of the human race by a flood; and the details of these traditions are too exactly in accordance with each other to permit the suggestion, which some have made, that they refer to different local floods in each case.

The mythologies of all the ancient nations are interwoven with the events of the Deluge and are explained by it, thereby proving that they are all based on a common principle, and must have been derived from a common source.

It is clear from these remarks that one or other of the two great events in the history of the Deluge, namely, the commencement of the waters and the beginning of their subsidence, were observed throughout the ancient world, some nations observing one event and some the other.

It would also appear probable that the observance of this festival was intimately connected with, and perhaps initiated, that worship of the dead which, as we shall see, was the central principle of the ancient idolatry.

The force of this argument is illustrated by the fact of the observance of a great festival of the dead in commemoration of the event, not only by nations more or less in communication with each other, but by others widely separated, both by the ocean and by centuries of time.

This festival is, moreover, held by all on or about the very day on which, according to the Mosaic account, the Deluge took place, viz. the seventeenth day of the second month - the month nearly corresponding with our November.

I don't know which of the many Jewish calendars he was using, but Garnier's point was that holidays that bring honor to dead spirits are un-Christian because they have pagan roots (never mind all the honoring of dead saints and praying to them - they were Christian before they died, or so it is claimed) and because they are founded on honoring the deaths of the wicked people who were justifiably destroyed by God in Noah's Flood. This 'Christian' spin on all things Pagan is why, apparently, Halloween has such an emphasis on demonic images, ghosts, monsters, and gruesome things in general, because, as Garnier points out, the flood meant the death of the hybrid children of demons, the Nephilim (see Gen. 6:1-4, 13 and the Book of Enoch).

So, it seems to be just a conjecture made by a religious antiquarian of olden times; nothing to see here. But, maybe not? Maybe Garnier was onto something and didn't really know what it was?

Regarding the alleged Flood of Noah, we can say that at more than one point in our known history civilizations and/or cultures have collapsed and/or disappeared or been destroyed by no-one-knows-what. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age civilization in Palestine, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilization in India, the Hilmand civilization in Afghanistan and the Hongshan in China, all fell into ruin at more or less the same time. Not long afterward, in archaeological time (though the chronology is a mess), destruction came to the Myceneans of Greece, the Hittites of Anatolia, the Egyptian New Kingdom, Late Bronze Age Palestine, and the Shang Dynasty of China.

Researchers in the fields of archaeology and history are baffled by the lack of any direct archaeological or written explanations for the causes (as opposed to the effects), though there is a rich body of myth and folklore that very well might provide the answers if analyzed correctly. Since the 'experts' in those fields have consigned myth to superstition, while simultaneously believing that the historicized myths incorporated into the Bible are history, they aren't getting very far with their problem and usually ascribe the collapse of civilizations to invasion and warfare on a gargantuan scale.

The palace at Knossos – the Minoan Empire mysteriously disappeared.

Some decades ago, certain natural scientists became intrigued by the problem and, concentrating on the Bronze Age collapses listed above, they realized that the range of evidence suggested natural causes rather than human actions (invasion, warfare). So, they all started talking about climate change, volcanic activity, and earthquakes. At present, these types of explanations are actually included in some of the standard historical accounts of the Bronze Age period, though many problems still remain: no single explanation appeared to account for all the evidence.

Immanuel Velikovsky upset everyone by suggesting that the Exodus - but only the Exodus - was caused by a bombardment of rocks, dust, carbons, and so on, as a result of Venus running amok in the Solar System. He collected an amazing assortment of myths and legends from around the world that strongly suggested that some sort of global cataclysm was being described, but when, where and how exactly it happened was rather iffy. There were others who wrote and talked about these matters before Velikovsky, including Ignatious Donnelly, who deserves an honorable mention for ascribing the myths to the Great Flood of Noah which he claimed was actually the destruction of Atlantis as described by Plato. Whether or not there was an advanced civilization known as Atlantis is not our concern here, but whether or not there was a flood, and when it may have occurred, is.

In the late 1970s, British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier of Oxford University began investigating cometary impact as the ultimate cause. In 1980, Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his colleagues published a paper in Science which argued that a cosmic impact is what led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Alvarez's paper had immense influence, though that influence acted in different ways on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the US, there is the 'wishful thinking' school which posits that only asteroid impacts are significant and they are so rare that we don't have to worry. In Britain, further research by astronomers Clube and Napier, Prof. Mark Bailey of the Armagh Observatory, Duncan Steel of Spaceguard Australia, and Britain's best known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, all led to their support of the theory of cometary impact loosely termed the 'British School of Coherent Catastrophism'.

According to Clube and Napier, et al., in the same way that Jupiter was struck repeatedly in 1994 by the million-megaton impacts of the comet Shoemaker-Levy, so Earth was bombarded 13,000 years ago by the fragments of a giant comet that broke up in the sky before the terrified eyes of humanity. The multiple impacts on the rotating planet caused tidal waves, raging fires, atomic bomb-like blasts, the mass extinction of many prehistoric species such as the mammoth and sabre-toothed tiger, most of humanity, and left the world in darkness for months. (See: The Cosmic Serpent and The Cosmic Winter by Clube and Napier. See also: "The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion", Anshen Transdisciplinary Lectureships in Art, Science, and the Philosophy of Culture by Fred Hoyle.)

Some American scientists are joining the Coherent Catastrophism group. Physicist Richard Firestone and geologists Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith write in their book, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes (Bear & Co., 2006):

In 1990, Victor Clube, an astrophysicist, and Bill Napier, an astronomer, published The Cosmic Winter, a book in which they describe performing orbital analyses of several of the meteor showers that hit Earth every year. Using sophisticated computer software, they carefully looked backward for thousands of years, tracing the orbits of comets, asteroids, and meteor showers until they uncovered something astounding. Many meteor showers are related to one another, such as the Taurids, Perseids, Piscids, and Orionids. In addition, some very large cosmic objects are related: the comets Encke and Rudnicki, the asteroids Oljato, Hephaistos, and about 100 others. Every one of those 100-plus cosmic bodies is at least a half-mile in diameter and some are miles wide. And what do they have in common? According to those scientists, every one is the offspring of the same massive comet that first entered our system less than 20,000 years ago! Clube and Napier calculated that, to account for all the debris they found strewn throughout our solar system, the original comet had to have been enormous.

Clube and Napier also calculated that, because of subtle changes in the orbits of Earth and the remaining cosmic debris, Earth crosses through the densest part of the giant comet clouds about every 2,000 to 4,000 years. When we look at climate and ice-core records, we can see that pattern. For example, the iridium, helium-3, nitrate, ammonium, and other key measurements seem to rise and fall in tandem, producing noticeable peaks around 18,000, 16,000, 13,000, 9,000, 5,000, and 2,000 years ago. In that pattern of peaks every 2,000 to 4,000 years, we may be seeing the 'calling cards' of the returning mega-comet.

Fortunately, the oldest peaks were the heaviest bombardments, and things have been getting quieter since then, as the remains of the comet break up into even smaller pieces. The danger is not past, however. Some of the remaining miles-wide pieces are big enough to do serious damage to our cities, climate, and global economy. Clube and Napier (1984) predicted that , in the year 2000 and continuing for 400 years, Earth would enter another dangerous time in which the planet's changing orbit would bring us into a potential collision course with the densest parts of the clouds containing some very large debris. Twenty years after their prediction, we have just now moved into the danger zone. It is a widely accepted fact that some of those large objects are in Earth-crossing orbits at this very moment, and the only uncertainty is whether they will miss us, as is most likely, or whether they will crash into some part of our planet.

And so we see that this new type of 'natural disaster' is beginning to be regarded by many scholars as the most probable single explanation for widespread and simultaneous cultural collapses at various times in our history. These ideas have been advanced largely by astronomers and geologists, dendrochronologists, etc., and remain almost completely unknown among archaeologists and historians, which significantly hampers their efforts to explain what they may be seeing in the historical record.

The new theory posits trains of cometary debris which repeatedly encounter the Earth. We know most of these trains as meteor showers - tiny particles of cosmic material whose impact is insignificant. Occasionally, however, in these trains of debris, there are chunks measuring between one and several hundred meters in diameter. When these either strike the Earth or explode in the atmosphere, there can be catastrophic effects on our ecological system. Multi-megaton explosions of fireballs can destroy natural and cultural features on the surface of the Earth by means of tidal-wave floods (if the debris lands in the sea), fire blasts and seismic damage leaving no crater as a trace, just scorched and blasted earth. In the case of a significant bombardment, an entire small country could be wiped out, completely vaporized.

Trees were knocked down and burned over hundreds of square km by the Tunguska meteoroid impact.

A recent example, known as the Tunguska Event, occurred in 1908 over Siberia, when a bolide exploded about 5 km above ground and completely devastated an area of some 2,000 km² through fireball blasts. This cosmic body, thought to have measured only 60 m across, had the impact energy of about 20 to 40 megatons, and was equivalent to the explosion of about 2,000 Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs, even though there was no actual physical impact on the Earth. In other words, if there were ancient, advanced civilizations, if they were destroyed by multiple Tunguska-like events, it is no wonder there is no trace, or very little, which is usually ascribed to 'anomaly'.

For years, the astronomical mainstream was highly critical of Clube and Napier and their giant comet hypothesis. However, the impacts of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994 led to a rather rapid turnaround in attitude. The comet, watched by the world's observatories, was seen to split into 20 pieces and slam into different parts of the planet over a period of several days. A similar event vis-à-vis our planet would have been devastating, to understate the matter. In recent times, the increasing numbers of fireballs and comets, the fact that Jupiter has been impacted yet again and again just this year, suggests to us that Victor Clube and Bill Napier are correct: we are in a very dangerous period.

In Rain of Iron and Ice by John Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Co-Director of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center, and Commissioner of the Arizona State Space Commission, we learn that the earth is regularly hit by extraterrestrial objects and many of the impacting bodies explode in the atmosphere as happened in Tunguska, leaving no craters or long-lasting visible evidence of a body from space.

These impacts or atmospheric explosions may produce earthquakes or tsunamis without any witnesses being aware of the cause. After all, the earth is 75% water, and any eye-witness to such an event would very likely be fried and never tell about it, so we really have no way of knowing if all the earthquakes on our planet are tectonic in nature or not.

In short, what the work of Lewis brings to the table is the idea that some well-known historical earthquakes could very well have been impact events. The dates that these researchers have given to events that can be discerned in the scientific records are 12,800, 8,200, 5,200, and 4,200 BP ('years Before the Present'). These can be adjusted as more precise dating methods are developed or applied.

The 12,800 B.P. event is the one of most interest because that is the one which, apparently, nearly destroyed all life on earth. At the very least, it destroyed the mega-fauna on all continents. Plato wrote about the catastrophic destruction of Atlantis which occurred in a day and a night about 11,600 years ago, which is pretty darn close. This event is the topic Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith cover exhaustively in their book The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes. They include a great many Native American myths that describe the event side by side with their own scientific work on the evidence.

As already mentioned, Clube and Napier identified the progenitor of the Taurid complex as a giant comet that was thrown into a short-period (about 3.3 year) orbit sometime in the last twenty to thirty thousand years. The Taurid complex currently includes the Taurid meteor stream, comet Encke, 'asteroids' such as 2101 Adonis and 2201 Oljato, and enormous amounts of space dust. Asteroids in the Taurid complex appear to have associated meteor showers, which means that many asteroids are likely to be extinct comets. In other words, there can be more than just some dust and snow in a comet - there can be a significant rocky core and lots of poisonous gasses and chemicals as well.

The Taurids…

We come now to the bit of evidence that may link between this comet business and Halloween. As it happens, the end of June and the end of October/beginning of November are the times when the Earth passes through the Taurid stream. That means that the event that marked the boundary between the Pleistocene and Holocene (present epoch) must have occurred at the end of October. It was a day when the boundaries between the living and the dead became very thin, because nearly every living thing on this planet perished and the memory of this event has come down to us in the 'End of Summer' commemoration we call Halloween, known in the Bible as the Flood of Noah.

Where do the witches come in? Well, hang on, we are getting there. Clube and Napier write:

...Meteor streams are fossil evidence of past intersections with comet orbits... the major streams are of great antiquity...

The progenitor of comet Encke and the Taurids, supposing it to have been about 20 km in diameter, would, at its closest approaches to the Earth, have attained a magnitude -12, approaching that of the Moon and sufficient to throw shadows at night. It would have appeared as an intense yellow spot of light surrounded by a circular coma probably larger than the full Moon, with a tail stretching across a large part of the sky ... graduating from bluish white near the nucleus to a deep red in colour... If the disintegration history revealed by the current debris took place within the sight of men, then there would have been occasions when subsidiary comets, perhaps even an array, would have been observed. ... There would (be) greatly enhanced seasonal fireball activity, rising to enormous levels at periodic intervals corresponding to a strong commensurability between the orbital periods of Earth and Encke; and the risk of Tunguska-like impacts would have been greatest. In a periodic orbit, the close approaches would obviously have been predictable. Indeed, if, at these close approaches, the Earth ran into debris of the sort we have discussed, prediction would have been a matter of urgency...

The author of Genesis (15:17) wrote: 'When the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp...' The description appears to be that of a comet; but its representation is that of a vision of God to Abraham. Or again, in 1 Chronicles (21:16): 'And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord standing between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders of Israel, who were clothed in sackcloth, fell upon their faces.' Once more the object is seen as a divine being, and 'angel of the Lord', and a religious interpretation is placed on a natural phenomenon. (Clube & Napier, 1982.)

Clube, Napier, Hoyle and others make a good case for the origins of Judaism in celestial phenomena, later twisted and distorted by priests into the superstition it is today. Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas wrote a fascinating book, Uriel's Machine, about the megalithic cultures wherein they propose that stone circles were constructed as astronomical observatories that were not for the purpose of knowing when to plant the corn, but rather to keep a watchful eye on errant comets. They make a very good case.

The beginnings of Christianity may have been the result of similar cosmic encounters. Burton Mack writes:

"The story Josephus tells of the sixties is one of famine, social unrest, institutional deterioration, bitter internal conflicts, class warfare, banditry, insurrections, intrigues, betrayals, bloodshed, and the scattering of Judeans throughout Palestine. ... There were wars, rumors of wars for the better part of ten years, and Josephus reports portents, including a brilliant daylight in the middle of the night!" (Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, 1988, 2006)

Josephus gives several portents of the evil to befall Jerusalem and the temple. He described a star resembling a sword, a comet that "continued a whole year...", a light shining in the temple, a cow giving birth to a lamb at the moment it was to be sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple, armies fighting in the sky, and a voice from the Holy of Holies declaring, "We are departing" (Josephus, Jewish Wars, 6). (Obviously, the voice was apocryphal.)

Some of these portents are mentioned by other contemporary historians, Tacitus for example. However, Tacitus, in book five of his Histories, castigated the superstitious Jews for not recognizing and offering expiations for the portents to avert the disasters. He put the destruction of Jerusalem down to the stupidity or willful ignorance of the Jews themselves in not offering the appropriate sacrifices.

In short, it very well may be that the eschatological writings in the New Testament, the very formation of the Myth of Jesus, were based on cometary events of the time, including a memory of the 'Star in the East'. The destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem may very well have been an 'act of God', as reported by Mark in his Gospel, though not quite as true believers think it was.

This brings us, of course, to the transition: the imposition of Christianity on Europe by Constantine. Paul K. Davis writes:

"Constantine's victory gave him total control of the Western Roman Empire, paving the way for Christianity as the dominant religion for the Roman Empire and ultimately for Europe."

It is commonly stated that on the evening of 27 October, with the armies preparing for battle, Constantine had a vision which led him to fight under the protection of the Christian god. The details of that vision, however, differ depending on the source reporting it.

Lactantius, an early Christian writer of the time in question, states that, in the night before the battle, Constantine was commanded in a dream to "delineate the heavenly sign on the shields of his soldiers" (On the Deaths of the Persecutors, 44.5). He followed the commands of his dream and marked the shields with a sign 'denoting Christ'. Lactantius describes that sign as a 'staurogram', or a Latin cross with its upper end rounded like a P. There is no certain evidence that Constantine ever used that sign, opposed to the better known Chi-Rho sign described by Eusebius, but it is certainly suggestive since it would look a bit like a mushroom cloud.

New Scientist, (vol. 178, issue 2400, 21 June 2003, page 13) reported the discovery of a meteorite impact crater dating from the fourth or fifth century A.D. in the Apennines. The crater is now a 'seasonal lake', roughly circular, with a diameter of between 115 and 140 meters, which has a pronounced raised rim and no inlet or outlet and is fed solely by rainfall. There are a dozen much smaller craters nearby, such as would be created when a meteorite with a diameter of some 10 meters shattered during entry into the atmosphere.

A team led by the Swedish geologist Jens Ormo believes the crater was caused by a meteorite landing with a one-kiloton impact - equivalent to a very small nuclear blast - and producing shock waves, earthquakes and a mushroom cloud. Samples from the crater's rim have been dated to the year 312, but small amounts of contamination with recent material could account for a date significantly later than 312.

The legend of a falling star has been around in the Apennines since Roman times, but the event that it describes has been a mystery. Other accounts from the 4th century describe how barbarians stood at the gates of the Roman Empire while a Christian movement threatened its stability from within. The emperor Constantine saw an amazing vision in the sky, converted to Christianity on the spot, and led his army to victory under the sign of the cross. But what did he see?

Could the impact of a meteorite hitting the Italian Apennines, or a Tunguska-like overhead cometary explosion, have been the sign in the sky that encouraged the Emperor Constantine to invoke the Christian God in his decisive battle in 312, when he defeated his fellow Emperor Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge?

The conversion of the Emperor to Christianity certainly couldn't change the beliefs and practices of most of his subjects. But he could - and did - choose to grant favors and privileges to those whose faith he had accepted. He built churches for them, exempted the priesthood from civic duties and taxes, gave the bishops secular power over judicial affairs, and made them judges against whom there was no appeal. Sounds like how a Fascist regime takes over, does it not?

So, let's recap here: The god of the Jews leaped upon the stage of history - probably as a cometary event that was memorialized as the plagues in Egypt and recast as a heroic 'Exodus story'. Through his priests, centuries after the event when the reality of the 'god' was forgotten, this god promised his people something new and different - destruction of everybody else on the planet who were nasty to them - and only those who followed his rules carefully would survive and get to rule everybody else. Notice that this did not necessarily mean resurrection - it was to be a physical earthly kingdom with the Jews in top position.

Early Christianity had very distinct and novel ideas that were grafted onto Judaism. Christianity, in turn, retained and passed on in a virulent way certain ideals of Judaism which have produced the foundation upon which our present culture is predicated.

The main template of christianity - received directly from Judaism - is that of sin. The history of sin from that point to now is a story of its triumph. Awareness of the nature of sin led to a growth industry in agencies and techniques for dealing with it. These agencies became centers of economic and military power, as they are today.

Christianity, promoting the ideals of Judaism under a thin veneer of the 'New Covenant', changed the ways in which men and women interacted with one another. It changed the attitude to life's one certainty: death. It changed the degree of freedom with which people could acceptably choose what to think and believe.

Pagan cults also dealt with the issues of suffering and troubles. The big difference was that, to the pagans, troubles fell on a person because they may have failed to propitiate the appropriate god or goddess. Suffering and troubles were a consequence of the actions of the gods - who were surprisingly human-like and fickle - and were not a personal, internal 'flaw' that damned the individual.

Another big difference between Pagan cults and Monotheistic cults was that Pagans were not committed to revealed beliefs in the strong Christian sense. In other words, faith was neither endorsed nor encouraged. Pagans performed rites, but professed no creed or doctrine. The rites included detailed rituals involving the offering of animal victims to their gods, but there was nothing like the 'faith' of Judaism or Christianity.

To be a 'follower of pagan religion', one did not have to accept the philosophic theology, nor did he have to belong to a 'mystery cult' where myth and ritual were closely entwined. These were just 'options'. What the myths actually did was confirm man's constant awareness of the potential anger of the gods, the uncertainties of Nature. Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century AD, did not accept the outlandish stories of mythology. But there was one thing that Pausanias was sure about: the tales of the past anger of a god which had manifested in famines and earthquakes and cataclysm. He reminds us of how fragile civilization is against the constant dangers of geology and the weather.

And so it was, to 'follow pagan religion' was essentially to accept this tradition of the past anger of the gods expressed in the violence of nature, and that the gods could be appeased. And it was precisely this fear of nature itself - of the gods that expressed themselves in the forces of nature - that caused the pagans to reject the Jews and Christians for claiming that they were immune to such things because their god had power over nature and would save them from calamity.

This brings us to another difference between the ancient myths and cults and Judaism, Christianity and Islam: where the pagan cults offered myths of their gods, Jews and Christians produced a recent, living history. The pagan cults had 'mysteries' to which very few - if anyone at all - had access. Monotheism offered a 'revelation' direct from God. Never mind that the history consisted of the plagiarized myths of other cultures that had been dressed in historical clothing as the 'History of Israel'.

Pagans had been intolerant of the Jews and Christians whose religions tolerated no gods but their own. The rising domination of Christianity created a much sharper conflict between religions, and religious intolerance - incepted by Christianity - became the norm, not the exception. Christianity brought the open coercion of religious belief. You could even say that, by the modern definition of a cult as a group that uses manipulation and mind control to induce worship, Christianity is the Mother of all Cults - in service to the misogynistic, fascist ideals of Judaism.

The rising Christian hierarchy of the Dark Ages was quick to mobilize military forces against believers in other gods and, most especially, against other Christians who promoted less fascist systems of belief. This probably included the original Christians and the original teachings. One wonders, of course, about all the stories of Christian martyrs. Is it possible that these were apocryphal stories of pagans who resisted the imposition of Christianity with the details changed just a bit?

Meanwhile, there was a third group of individuals during the transition time: the pagan Platonists. There were two paths of Platonists: one which taught that one could approach god only by contemplating their own soul and knowing themselves; the other emphasized the beauty of the world as the means by which one might know god. These two ideas became the property of the educated man of the time, including Jews and early Christians. However, it was among the intellectual Jews of Alexandria that these ideas were given a subtle twist: a man could not know himself and thereby know god, he must give up any idea of ever knowing himself and resign himself to the 'grace' of god. God might choose a man and apply grace, but man must never think he could choose god and achieve grace. The Christian theologians took this idea and sculpted it to fit their new ideas of Christ and Redemption.

Many pagan ideas were adopted into Christian theology, but the chief difference was, as I have noted, the idea of sin being a personal thing, a personal fault, a sort of 'scapegoat principle' writ on the human soul. The pagans never considered it necessary to die with one's sins forgiven, and the dramatic deathbed scenes of Christianity, with all the praying for the afterlife of the individual, were novel and rapidly spread. Pagans had prayed to the dead, Jews and Christians prayed for them. Fearing their own inevitable fault and sinful nature, Christians also prayed that the dead would intercede with god on their behalf. Christians, like pagans, continued the practice of feasting and celebrating death, with the added element of 'intercession' giving new meaning to the event.

Further along, there was another event in the Pagan world of Europe that helped bring Christianity to dominance in the West of Europe, and brought another player onto the stage: Islam.

"It was a warm, clear afternoon in the capital. The bustle of metropolitan commerce and tourism filled the streets. Small sailing vessels dotted the sheltered waters within sight of the government buildings, riding on a soft southerly breeze. The Sun sparkled on the gentle swells and wakes, lending a luminous glow to the poppies and tulips nodding in the parks along the water's edge. All was in order.

But suddenly, the sky brightened as if with a second, more brilliant sun. A second set of shadows appeared; at first long and faint, they shortened and sharpened rapidly. A strange hissing, humming sound seemed to come from everywhere at once. Thousands craned their necks and looked upwards, searching the sky for the new Sun. Above them a tremendous white fireball blossomed, like the unfolding of a vast paper flower, but now blindingly bright. For several seconds the fierce fireball dominated the sky, shaming the Sun. The sky burned white-hot, then slowly faded through yellow and orange to a glowering copper-red. The awful hissing ceased. The onlookers, blinded by the flash, burned by its searing heat, covered their eyes and cringed in terror. Occupants of offices and apartments rushed to their windows, searching the sky for the source of the brilliant flare that had lit their rooms. A great blanket of turbulent, coppery cloud filled half the sky overhead. For a dozen heartbeats the city was awestruck, numbed and silent.

Then, without warning, a tremendous blast smote the city, knocking pedestrians to the ground. Shuttered doors and windows blew out; fences, walls, and roofs groaned and cracked. A shock wave raced across the city and its waterways, knocking sailboats flat in the water. A hot, sulfurous wind like an open door into hell, the breath of a cosmic ironmaker's furnace, pressed downward from the sky, filled with the endless reverberation of invisible landslides. Then the hot breath slowed and paused; the normal breeze resumed with renewed vigor, and cool air blew across the city from the south. The sky overhead now faded to dark gray, then to a portentous black. A turbulent black cloud like a rumpled sheet seemed to descend from heaven. Fine black dust began to fall, slowly, gently, suspended and swirled by the breeze. For an hour or more the black dust fell, until, dissipated and dispersed by the breeze, the cloud faded from view.

Many thought it was the end of the world..."

The above quote is a reconstruction of events in Constantinople, AD 472, extracted from Rain of Iron and Ice (1996) by John S. Lewis. According to Dr. Lewis, whose fanciful scenario of what it might be like to witness an overhead cometary fragment explosion, our Earth actually experiences these types of events rather often, even if somewhat irregularly. Explosions in the sky - some of them enormous - have, according to him and many other scientists, profoundly affected the history of humanity. One obvious prospect is the great Antioch earthquake of AD 526 which was described by John Malalas:

"...those caught in the earth beneath the buildings were incinerated and sparks of fire appeared out of the air and burned everyone they struck like lightning. The surface of the earth boiled and foundations of buildings were struck by thunderbolts thrown up by the earthquakes and were burned to ashes by fire... It was a tremendous and incredible marvel with fire belching out rain, rain falling from tremendous furnaces, flames dissolving into showers... As a result, Antioch became desolate... In this terror up to 250,000 people perished." (E. Jeffreys, M. Jeffreys and R. Scott. The Chronicle of John Malalas. 1986, Melbourne: Byzantina Australiensia, Australian Assoc. Byzantine Studies 4.)

Strangely, historians, as a group, don't speak about such things. But the evidence is mounting:

"Analysis of tree rings shows that in 540 AD in different parts of the world, the climate changed. Temperatures dropped enough to hinder the growth of trees as widely dispersed as northern Europe, Siberia, western North America, and southern South America.

A search of historical records and mythical stories pointed to a disastrous visitation from the sky during the same period, it is claimed. There was one reference to a 'comet in Gaul so vast that the whole sky seemed on fire' in 540-41.

According to legend, King Arthur died around this time, and Celtic myths associated with Arthur hinted at bright sky Gods and bolts of fire.

In the 530s, an unusual meteor shower was recorded by both Mediterranean and Chinese observers. Meteors are caused by the fine dust from comets burning up in the atmosphere. Furthermore, a team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland published research in 1990 which said the Earth would have been at risk from cometary bombardment between the years 400 and 600 AD. ...

"Famine followed the crop failures, and hard on its heels bubonic plague that swept across Europe in the mid-6th century.

... At this time, the Roman emperor Justinian was attempting to regenerate the decaying Roman empire. But the plan failed in 540 and was followed by the Dark Ages and the rise of Islam." (Robert S. Boyd. "Comets may have caused Earth's great empires to fall." Knight-Ridder Newspapers, August 17, 1999)

The change of the Western world from Pagan to monotheistic - Judaism, Christianity, Islam - effectively changed how people viewed themselves and their interactions with their reality. And we live today with the fruits of those changes: war without end. Constantine's victory paved the way for the recognition of Christianity by the Roman Empire and the union of church and state that lasted for nearly 1,500 years and may, in fact, still be strange bedfellows though they have pulled up the covers to hide their relationship. An inscription quoting an ancient Hittite king informs us that a great prince needs the priests to instill the fear of the gods into the people so that they will do the will of the king, and the religion needs the protection of the ruler to impose its practice. So it has been for millennia. Astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier write:

Illustrations of two important historical comets taken from Lubienietski’s Universal History of All Comets, 1681. The 1000 A.D. illustration shows a blazing thunderbolt with a ‘long drawn out tail landing in open space’, having ‘fallen from a dragon-like comet with a horrendous tail’. The 1180 A.D. comet was viewed with horror since it had the appearance of a winding serpent with gaping jaws.
"...[W]ithin these last few years, it has been found that there is a great swarm of cosmic debris circulating in a potentially dangerous orbit, exactly intersecting the Earth's orbit in June (and November) every few thousand years. More surprisingly, perhaps, it has been found that the evidence for these facts was in the past deliberately concealed. When the orbits exactly intersect, however, there is a greatly increased chance of penetrating the core of the swarm, a correspondingly enhanced flow of fireballs reaching the Earth, and a greatly raised perception that the end of the world is nigh. This perception is liable to arise at other times as well, whenever fresh debris is formed, but deep penetrations occurred during the fourth millennium BC, again during the first millennium BC, taking in at their close the time of Christ, and will likely take place yet again during the millennium to come.

Christian religion began appropriately enough, therefore, with an apocalyptic vision of the past... once the apparent danger had passed, truth was converted to mythology in the hands of a revisionist church, and such prior knowledge of the swarm as existed, which now comes to us through the works of Plato and others, was later systematically suppressed.

... The Christian vision of a permanent peace on Earth was by no means universally accepted, and it was to undergo several stages of 'enlightenment' before it culminated with our present secular version of history, to which science itself subscribes, perceiving little or no danger from the sky. The lack of danger is an illusion, however, and the long arm of an early Christian delusion still has its effect.

... The idea of a terrible sanction hanging over mankind is not, of course, new. Armageddon has been widely feared in the past, and it was a common belief that it would arrive with the present millennium... Sometimes the proponents of such ideas escape to newfound new lands where in due course they meet opposition of a homegrown kind. In the United States, for example, despite freedom of speech, old traditions of cosmic catastrophe have recurred from time to time, even in the present century, only to be confronted by Pavlovian outrage from authorities. That being the case, it is perhaps ironic that elections in the United States are generally held in November, following the tradition of an ancient convocation of tribes at that time of the year, which probably had its roots in a real fear of world-end as the Earth coincided with the swarm.

In Europe, the millennium was finally dispensed with when an official 'providential' view of the world was developed as a counter to ideas sustained during the Reformation. Indeed, to hold anything like a contrary view at this time became something of a heresy and those who were given to rabble-rousing for fear of the millennium were roundly condemned. To the extent that a cosmic winter and Armageddon have aspects in common, therefore, authoritarian outrage is nothing new.

... Enlightenment, of course, builds on the providential view and treats the cosmos as a harmless backdrop to human affairs, a view of the world which Academe now often regards as its business to uphold and to which the counter-reformed Church and State are only too glad to subscribe. Indeed, it appears that repeated cosmic stress - supernatural illuminations - have been deliberately programmed out of Christian theology and modern science, arguably the two most influential contributions of western civilization to the control and well-being of humanity.

As a result, we have now come to think of global catastrophe, whether through nuclear war, ozone holes, the greenhouse effect of whatever, as a prospect originating purely with ourselves; and because of this, because we are faced with 'authorities' who never look higher than the rooftops, the likely impact of the cosmos figures hardly at all in national plans.

An image from ‘The Nuremburg Chronicles’, 1493.

A great illusion of cosmic security thus envelops mankind, one that the 'establishment' of Church, State and Academe do nothing to disturb. Persistence in such an illusion will do nothing to alleviate the next Dark Age when it arrives. But it is easily shattered: one simply has to look at the sky.

The outrage, then, springs from a singularly myopic stance which may now place the human species a little higher than the ostrich, awaiting the fate of the dinosaur." (Clube and Napier. The Cosmic Winter. 1990.)

An abundance of fireballs and repeated comet sightings apparently excites a lot of 'eschatological activity' - predictions that the world is going to end - that can lead to all kinds of social unrest which is, as Clube points out, highly undesirable to the ruling elites. After all, if people are thinking the world is going to end, they generally blame it on their rulers for being so corrupt and evil. The way they usually handle that sort of thing is to create an ostensible enemy who is responsible for it all, get a war going that soothes everyone's 'end of the world blues' and kills most of them in the bargain. Clever, aren't they?

Victor Clube wrote a summary statement of conclusions based on his Narrative Report on the Hazard to Civilization Due to Fireballs and Comets, which he wrote under the sponsorship of the US Air Force and Oxford Department of Physics (1996, just two years after comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter), which includes the following:

"Every 5-10 generations or so, for about a generation, mankind is subject to an increased risk of global insult through another kind of cosmic agency." During these epochs, broadly coinciding with the Hundred Years' War, the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War (including the English Civil War), the French Revolutionary Period (including the American War of Independence) and the mid-nineteenth century Revolutionary crisis in Europe (including the American Civil War), the various national authorities could do very little to restrain public anxiety in the face of the perceived danger."

Every 5 to 10 generations? That's a pretty shocking statement. If it is true, then why don't we know about this? Why don't historians know about it? Why don't average people who learn history (one is told) in school know about these things?

It is here that we are going to discover how witches came to be associated with Halloween.

The Hundred Years War covers the 116-year period from 1337 to 1453, the Black Death 1347/48-1351, and then the Renaissance, 1400 to 1600. Some really ugly stuff was going on back then. Dendrochronologist Mike Baillie, has written a book asserting (with good evidence) that the Black Death - one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, said to have killed possibly two thirds of the entire population of Europe, not to mention millions all over the planet - probably wasn't Bubonic Plague but was rather Death by Comet(s).

Baillie has the scientific evidence to support his theory, and his evidence actually supports - and is supported by - what the people of the time were saying: earthquakes, comets, rains of death and fire, corrupted atmosphere, and death on a scale that is almost unimaginable. Most people nowadays are not really aware of what happened just 663 years ago. (Hmmm... The inquiring mind immediately wonders what might happen when we hit 666 years after? That would be 2013...) There really is quite sufficient data presented in Baillie's book to support the theory that the Black Death was due to localized, multiple impacts by comet debris - similar to the impacts on Jupiter by the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy back in 1994. As to exactly how these deaths occurred, there are a number of possibilities: earthquakes, floods (tsunami), rains of fire, chemicals released by the high-energy explosions in the atmosphere, including ammonium and hydrogen cyanide, and possibly even comet-borne disease pathogens. It is worth pausing a moment to consider the numbers.

China, where the Black Death is said to have originated, lost around half of its entire population (going from around 123 million to around 65 million). Recent research into European death tolls also suggests a figure of 45% to 50% of the total European population dying during a four-year period though the figure fluctuated from place to place (which is a problem as we will see). In Mediterranean Europe - Italy, the South of France and Spain - where the plague ran for about four years consecutively, it was probably closer to 70-75% of the total population. (In the US today that would be equivalent to reducing the population from its current 305 million to 75 million in less than four years. That would also amount to having to bury or dispose of around 225 million corpses.) In Germany and England it was probably closer to 20%. Northeastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary are believed to have suffered less for some reason (and there are a few theories which are not entirely satisfactory).

There are no estimates available for Russia or the Balkans, so it seems that they may have suffered little, if at all. Africa lost approximately 1/8th of its population (from around 80 million to 70 million). (These figures actually highlight one of the problems that Baillie brings up: the variability of death rates according to location.) Whatever the death rate in any given location, the bottom line is that the Black Death produced the largest death toll from any known pandemics in recorded history and, as Baillie points out, nobody really knows what it was.

Social upheaval and terror at the time of the ‘black death’ and the ‘hundred years war’. (Pieter Bruegel the Elder. “The Triumph of Death”, ca. 1562. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.)

In Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets cited above, Victor Clube adds:

"Confronted on many occasions in the past by the prospect of world-end, national elites have often found themselves having to suppress public panic - only to discover, too late, that the usual means of control commonly fail. Thus, an institutionalized science is expected to withhold knowledge of the threat; a self-regulated press is expected to make light of any disaster; while an institutionalized religion is expected to oppose predestination and to secure such general belief in a fundamentally benevolent deity as can be mustered.

... The Christian, Islamic and Judaic cultures have all moved since the European Renaissance to adopt an unreasoning anti-apocalyptic stance, apparently unaware of the burgeoning science of catastrophes. History, it now seems, is repeating itself: it has taken the Space Age to revive the Platonist voice of reason, but it emerges this time within a modern anti-fundamentalist, anti-apocalyptic tradition over which governments may, as before, be unable to exercise control... Cynics (or modern sophists), in other words, would say that we do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions; rather we need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions!"

Turning to the full text of the report, on page 2, discussing potential impacting giant comet remnants, we read that "... their presence is readily enough betrayed by the zodiacal dust, which continues to accumulate in the ecliptic, and by the rather sudden encounters which the Earth makes every other century or so, for several decades... These encounters produce an overabundance of fireballs, penetrating the Earth's atmosphere, implying both an increased probability of bombardment by sub-kilometre debris and an increased risk that the Earth will penetrate the core of a minor disintegration stream à la Shoemaker-Levy.

The so-called 'Hundred Years War' was a conflict between France and England, over claims by the English kings to the French throne. It was punctuated by several brief and two lengthy periods of peace before it finally ended in the expulsion of the English from France, with the exception of the Calais Pale. We notice that this state of conflict was already in motion about ten years before the Black Death fell on Europe.

A woodcut by Hans Glaser (1566) showing a strange celestial event in 1561 over Nuremberg.

When one studies the history of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War side by side, the thing that stands out is that whatever was going on then, there were conscienceless people taking advantage of the situation of confusion and terror. For example, we read the following:

This would be a war of devastation. Villages and crops were burned, orchards were felled, livestock seized and residents harried. On Edward's entry into France he spent a week torching Cambrai and its environs. More than 1,000 villages were destroyed. France did what it could in England, at the war's onset seamen ventured to the southeastern coast of England to burn and ravage there. Much plunder was taken back to England and the thought of acquiring ill-gotten gain enticed many to support the war.

Cruelty abounded. After the city of Limoges was captured and burned, Edward ordered the townsmen executed. Much of Artois, Brittany, Normandy, Gascony and other provinces were reduced to desolation (circa 1355 to 1375) and France did the same to the provinces that sided with England. Walled towns were safe during the early period of the war, but churches, monasteries, villages and rural areas were ruined.

Truce and treaty were not observed. The 'Free Companies' went into action, bandits of either English, French or hired mercenaries led by captains that dominated large areas and levied tribute on towns, villages and churches. They also seized women, took clergymen as accountants and correspondents, children for servants and plundered. (Edward P. Cheney. The Dawn of a New Era. 1250-1435. 1936.)

Albert A. Nofi and James F. Dunnigan tell us:

For the first few years of the war there wasn't much happening except English raids into France and Flanders. Then, in the 1340s, England and France took opposite sides in the long-running civil war over who should be the duke of Brittany. In 1346 this resulted in a French invasion of Gascony and the shattering French defeat at Crecy. The English then rampaged through western France, until a truce was signed in 1354 (brought on by the devastation of the Plague, which hit France heavily in 1347-48)

The truce didn't last. In 1355, the war began again. In 1356 another major battle was fought at Poitiers and the French king was captured. English raids continued until 1360, when another truce was signed.

One wonders if all this is not history written after the fact, placing the blame of cometary destruction and social unrest on a 'hundred years war'? As evidence to support this, it seems that the weather was going crazy. Clube and Napier write:

One chronicler at least reports of the most immediate cause of the plague in 1345 that 'between Cathay and Persia there rained a vast rain of fire; falling in flakes like snow and burning up mountains and plains and other lands, with men and women; and then arose vast masses of smoke; and whosoever beheld this died within the space of half a day...' There seems little doubt also that a worldwide cooling of the Earth played a fundamental part in the process. The Arctic polar cap extended, changing the cyclonic pattern and leading to a series of disastrous harvests. These in turn led to widespread famine, death and social disruption.

In England and Scotland, there is a pattern of abandoned villages and farms, soaring wheat prices and falling populations.

In Eastern Europe there was a series of winters of unparalleled severity and depth of snow. The chronicles of monasteries in Poland and Russia tell of cannibalism, common graves overfilled with corpses, and migrations to the west.

Even before the Black Death came, then, a human catastrophe of great proportions was under way in late medieval times. Indeed, the cold snap lasted well beyond the period of the ... plague. A number of such fluctuations are to be found in the historical record, and there is good evidence that these climatic stresses are connected not only with famine but also with times of great social unrest, wars, revolution and mass migrations. (Clube, The Cosmic Winter.)

It sounds surprisingly like our own era, does it not? There are differences in detail and in scale, but the dynamics of a world gone mad, incredible cruelty running rampant, and global climate fluctuations are the same as we see before us now.

Calvinism was one of the developments that came out of this period. As Clube notes, the Protestant reformation was partly due to the fact that the powers of the time, the Catholic Church, had built their control system based on the Aristotelian system of 'God is in his heaven and all will be right with the world if you are a good Christian'. Obviously, they didn't want to talk about a cosmos run amok over which their vaunted god had no control. And the fact that things were running amok and the church couldn't do anything about it (not to mention the corruption of the church that was evident to the masses) gave ammunition to the Reformers who then were able to attract many followers just as Christianity attracted Constantine at a time when the pagan gods did not seem to be able to help in the face of cometary bombardment.

The Protestants thus were able to use the situation to their advantage, suggesting that it was 'The End of Times' and that this was all part of the plan and people would be saved if they would only come over to the Protestant side.

Of course, once the Protestants had 'won their place', so to say, they too had to establish authority and adopt the Aristotelian view! 'Now, God is in his heaven and all will be right and there won't be any more catastrophic disruptions as long as everybody goes to church, tithes, and obeys the appointed authorities.'

This brings us to the topic of witch persecutions. From the early decades of the fifteenth century until 1650, continental Europeans executed between two and five hundred thousand witches (according to conservative estimates), more than 85 percent of them being women. (Ben-Yehuda, 1985.) People of the time, and even later, really did believe in the reality of witchcraft and evil demons. Men like Newton, Bacon, Boyle, Locke and Hobbes firmly believed in the reality of evil spirits and witches. As historian and religious scholar J. B. Russell said:

Tens of thousands of [witch] trials continued throughout Europe generation after generation, while Leonardo painted, Palestrina composed and Shakespeare wrote. (1977.)

Witchcraft and witches have existed throughout history though in a context completely different from that which came to be understood during the crusade against witches. The Old Testament pretty much ignores the topic, except to report an encounter between King Saul and the witch of Endor, and to include a law: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live". But other than that, in a way that seems to bizarrely contradict that law, stories of witches in the Bible are surprisingly neutral. There is no conceptualization or elaboration of witches, devils, or any kind of demonic world. The world of the Old Testament is, in fact, a world surprisingly devoid of anything truly spiritual.

In ancient Greece and Rome, magic was used to produce rain, prevent hail storms, drive away clouds, calm the winds, make the earth bear fruit, increase wealth, cure the sick, and so on. It could also be used against one's enemies to deprive them of those desirable effects. These beliefs were widespread in the ancient world influenced by Pythagoras and his Northern European Druidic training, and generally, 'good magic' was lawful and necessary, and 'bad magic' was condemned and punished. The state even supported those who could purportedly do 'good magic'. It depended on perspective whether you were a 'good magician' or a 'bad' one. That's probably why the English condemned Joan of Arc for being a witch and France turned around and canonized her.

The Graeco-Roman religious universe - the supernatural world - was not divided into extreme good and extreme evil. It was occupied by every shade and combination of all qualities exactly as existed in human society. In this world, magic was simply an attempt to harness the power of the Unseen, while religion occupied itself with respect and gratitude to Nature and its representatives for results. In this way, prayers and spells could be easily combined.

A ‘witch’ being burned at the stake.

The witch or sorcerer was a person who had a method - a technology - that could be used to harness and activate supernatural powers for her/himself or for others. She/he could 'control' the forces of nature. (At least, that is what they believed, and who are we to say that the truly ancient shamanic technicians couldn't?)

So, two points are important here: 1) witchcraft/sorcery was a technology, and 2) there was a definite distinction between good magic and bad magic, and context was all-important.

After the disintegration of the Roman Empire and the rise of Judeo-Christianity, many missionaries, on finding that the pagans had their own spectrum of local deities and beliefs, often sought to convert them by the simple expedient of canonizing the local gods so that the native population could continue to worship them under the aegis of Christianity. They became 'Christian saints' complete with invented hagiographies (as I mentioned above, possibly most 'Christian Martyrs' were actually pagans killed by the church). The old temples were converted into churches so that the pagans would come to familiar places of worship to hear mass and pray to their 'saints' just like always. Magical practices were tolerated because it was felt that the people would give them up naturally over time once they had become truly Christian.

Official church policy held that any belief in witchcraft was an illusion. In the famous, but mysterious, Canon episcopi, we find a few clues:

Some wicked women, perverted by the devil, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess themselves in the hours of night, to ride upon certain beastes with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of night to traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her commands as of their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on certain nights. But I wish it were they alone who perished in their faithlessness and did not draw many with them into the destruction of infidelity. For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true, and so believing, wander from the right faith and are invalued in the error of the pagans...

Wherefore the priests throughout their churches should preach with all insistence ... that they know this to be false and, that such phantasms are imposed and sent by the malignant spirit ... who deludes them in dreams...

Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing such in sleeping which he never sees [when] waking?

... And who is so stupid and foolish as to think that all these things, which are only done in spirit, happen in the body?

It is therefore to be proclaimed publicly to all that whoever believes such things ... has lost his faith. (Translated by Kors and Peters, 1972, pp. 29-31.)

The origin of this document, that Kors and Peters date to 1140, is not clear. It has been attributed to an obscure meeting, the Council of Anquira, held possibly in the 4th century. Although there is no record of this council, the statement on witchcraft was adopted by later canonists as official policy. What it does tell us is that there were, apparently, worshippers of the Pagan Goddess Diana who had profound experiences that were declared to be delusions brought on by the Devil. Right here we see how the Goddess was replaced by Satan the deluder. It is interesting to compare the description of what these ancient witches were said to be doing with the activities of ancient Siberian shamans. One is also reminded of the Paleolithic cave paintings when reading, "in the hours of night, to ride upon certain beastes with Diana, the goddess of pagans..." This is a precious clue to the fact that the Paleolithic religion and its shamanic lines did survive for thousands of years.

In any event, for more than six centuries this was the official attitude of the church toward witches - that it was an illusion or delusion or just the product of dreams, and whoever was "so stupid and foolish" as to believe such fantastic tales was an infidel. That, apparently, applied to monks, and priests, and the general public as well. The important point here being that you had to believe in witches to persecute them, and believing in them as real was against church doctrine.

Taking into account the Black Death and the wars of the time killing off so much of the male population, one might suppose that there was an increase in unmarried women or women who had inherited estates when all other family members had perished. In short, women were becoming autonomous as a consequence. And certainly, women who had 'gifts' would be more likely to survive such calamities than those who did not.

The details of exactly what happened may be forever lost to us thanks to the cover-up of history instituted by Joseph Justus Scaliger in the sixteenth century as has been suggested by Clube and revealed in some detail by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko (though Fomenko does not take catastrophic destruction of society into account). The best we can do is to speculate.

The most spectacular 'witch' was Joan of Arc who was tried, condemned, and burned in 1431. Her trial and execution can clearly be seen as political, often a major, underlying motivation for such accusations.

It could be said that the witch persecutions were simply a reviving of the Inquisition that had created similar rules for dealing with the Cathars two hundred years earlier. In order to fully understand how easily this attack on 'witches and sorcerers' could manifest legally and socially, we need to take a quick look at the beginnings of the Inquisition.

Joan of Arc as depicted by Hermann Stilke (1803-1860).

Many people think of the inquisition as something that was started to eliminate witches and Devil worship, and the word conjures images of the rack and iron maidens and all kinds of bizarre and twisted torture equipment. Sure, torture was a big part of the Inquisition, but not as much as some people might think. You have to remember that the Inquisition began during a period of history when human life was treated so casually that cutting off noses or ears or hands, or gouging out eyes was not unheard of as a legal punishment for minor crimes.

The Crusade against the Cathars led to years of brutal massacres, destruction of the land, and some of the most horrible events ever to bear witness of man's inhumanity to man. Toward the end, Pope Gregory IX decided that it was only results that counted. He intended to wipe Catharism from the face of the earth. He must have sat up at night to create the bizarre system that was put into place to deal with heresy.

First, he created special Papal legates who were granted wide powers of prosecution similar to what we have today in the Department of Homeland Security, and sent them out all over Europe. The men chosen for this task were clearly psychopaths, and their mission was to spread terror all over Europe.

Gregory staffed the Episcopal palaces of the South of France with psychopathic bishops who offered a cash bounty to anyone who betrayed a heretic. The inducements to betray one's neighbor were surely tempting in the best of times. But in a time when starvation and destruction was everywhere after more than 20 years of the rampaging of the Crusading armies, it was well-nigh impossible to resist. The terms were that the property confiscated from the heretic was divided between the informer, the church and the crown. Naturally, in a land that was financially devastated, where people were displaced and starving after years of being battered by this same church and crown, there were a lot of individuals offering up their neighbors for blood money. Sound familiar?

Robert le Bourgre, whose name means 'the bugger' (suggesting the contempt in which he was held by the people), terrorized formerly peaceful northern France. Another legate, Conrad of Marburg found unsuspected heretics everywhere in the Rhineland. Thousands were sent to the stake, often on the same day that they were accused. Conrad rode about on his mule with two assistants, bringing terror to every village and town they approached. Apparently, even the regular clergy saw through this nonsense and finally decided to do something about it. On July 30, 1233, a Franciscan friar, driven to act in the name of justice, intercepted Conrad and murdered him.

The pope had had enough. He turned to the Dominicans. In the spring of 1233, Papal inquisitors were appointed in Toulouse, Albi, and Carcassonne. These inquisitors were succeeded in an unbroken line for 600 years.

Hundreds of people were summoned to testify before inquisitors. The questions were repetitive, designed to plant doubt in the mind of the person being interrogated as to what, exactly, the inquisitor knew, and who had told him.

A person suspected of Cathar sympathies was not always informed of the charges hanging over his head. If apprised of the danger, he had no right to know who his accusers were, and if he dared to seek legal help, his lawyer could be charged with abetting heresy.

Whatever the verdict of the inquisitor - who was prosecutor, judge and jury - no appeal was allowed. Anyone could be held indefinitely in prison for further questioning without cause of explanation. Nowadays, we call them 'enemy combatants'.

The inquisition destroyed the bonds of trust which hold societies together. Informing on one's neighbor became not only a duty, but a necessary survival strategy.

For 100 years, the Inquisition was a fact on the ground of life in the Languedoc. The arrival of an inquisitor in a town was the occasion for demeaning displays of moral collapse.

In theory, of course, no one could be punished if no one talked because the inquisitor could not act without a writ of denunciation, but in practice, no community possessed the cohesion needed to combat the power of a secret tribunal.

The same is true in America today. Everyone has been adequately conditioned by watching 'reality TV' and 'Survivor', and they know the rules: Do unto others before they do unto you.

And so it was in the Languedoc, the historical model for the 'witch' persecutions, for what happened in Germany under Hitler, and for what is happening in the world today vis-à-vis the 'War on Terror'.

Upon his arrival in a town, the inquisitor consulted with the local clergy. All males over the age of 14 and females over the age of 12 were required to make a profession of faith in the Catholic Church. Those who didn't were the first to be questioned.

Then the inquisitor would give a speech in which he invited the people to spend some days thinking very, very hard about their activities past, present and future and to come forward in the following week to give confidential depositions. After a seven day grace period, those who had not denounced themselves would be issued a summons.

The punishments ranged from loss of property to loss of life. Aside from the capital crime of being a Cathar, punishable offenses included sheltering a Cathar or even failing to report any instance of heresy.

The real proof of genuine piety toward the Catholic Church was measured by the number of people the sinner was willing to betray.

It only took ten years for the Inquisition to go from being the work of a few psychopathic fanatics to becoming a proficient bureaucracy that lasted for 600 years. It employed hundreds of individuals who interrogated thousands of people with such monotonous regularity that a regular 'glossary' was established for the 'workers'.

Armed with a list of proposed offenses to be considered 'heretical' or 'supporting heretics', which included just knowing that a heretic had crossed one's property and failing to report it, the Inquisition proceeded to intimidate the population of Europe on a scale that was impossible to imagine. The sheer numbers of people called to testify, and re-called to testify again and again, was staggering. In a strange twist of historical irony, the Cathars - who believed that the material world was evil and irrelevant - inspired the codification of the Police State.

A cross-referenced compendium of the confessions extracted from tens of thousands of people was compiled, creating a map of the mental landscape of the Languedoc. The more than five thousand transcripts of interrogations that survive represent only a small fraction of the work of the Inquisition.

{{IMG|45584|witches19.jpg|left}}Inquisitors' manuals were created to serve as guides for the growing number of Papal courts in Europe. These manuals reminded the inquisitors that they were in the business of saving souls, but I think that the distinction was lost on those whose lives were lost or ruined by the judgments of the Inquisition.

Languedoc was, essentially, the laboratory for repression. The reputation of the Inquisition was enhanced by the talented Inquisitor of Toulouse, Bernard Gui, who was the villain in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

The Inquisitors persuaded a handful of captured Cathars to convert and sell their testimony. Sicard de Lunel of Albi gave the friars an exhaustive list of Cathar sympathizers, even fingering his own parents. Anyone who had ever helped him in his life as a Cathar, whether they had just given him a bed for the night, a bit of food, or even a jar of honey, were hauled in to be punished, just on his word. He and several others like him were lodged thereafter in a castle outside of Toulouse in the medieval version of the 'witness protection program'. Sicard was well paid for his perfidy and lived to a ripe old age. One wonders how peaceful it was.

The use of torture was delicately referred to as 'putting the question'. In the Languedoc, successive waves of highly trained inquisitors, aided by informers and torturers, fired by the totalitarian creed of the Catholic Church, with detailed manuals and expanding registers of 'intelligence', slowly but surely ground Catharism into oblivion. Thousands of dramas of conscience ended in the dungeons or in fires quenched with blood. By the end of the century, only the truly heroic dared to say that this world was evil.

It was not a legal system, it was a system designed to create fear. This 250 years old Catholic system of terror was the system that was handily available at the beginning of the witch persecutions, though, curiously, the first persecutions were not ecclesiastical but rather political.

In 1397, a man named Stedelen was accused of being a witch in Simmental, Switzerland, after the harvest had failed at his village. According to his accusers, Stedelen used black magic to destroy the crops by allegedly sacrificing a black rooster on the Sabbath at a crossroad and placing a lizard under the doorway of a local church.

Peter von Greyerz, the judge, was a firm believer in witchcraft, which he believed had been introduced in Simmental by a noble man called Scavius in 1375. He was killed by his many enemies, but he had a student, who according to Greyerz had been the tutor of Stedelen.

There was no real evidence presented, of course, but Stedelen had allegedly become an expert on magic and supposedly learned to steal manure, hay and such from others' fields by magic, create hail and thunderstorms, make people and animals sterile, make horses crazy when he touched their hooves, fly and terrify those who captured him. Greyerz also accused Stedelen of having taken the milk from the cows of a married couple in order to make the wife miscarry. After torture, Stedelen confessed to summoning forth demons as part of a pact with the Devil. His trial took place in a secular court following which he was burned at the stake.

Greyerz believed that there was a satanic cult, whose members swore themselves to the Devil and ate children at the churches at night. He continued his persecutions and once tortured a woman to confirm this.

In 1415-1419, in the Duchy of Savoy, there was a civil-war between clans of the nobility. Various noble families had rebelled against the Raron family, and the masses were drawn into the conflict. This had gone on for some time and, by 1428, the entire society in that area was in a state of great tension. No one knows who came up with the idea that all the troubles were due to witches, but on 7 August 1428, delegates from seven districts in Valais demanded that the authorities investigate alleged, unknown witches and sorcerers. Anyone denounced as a sorcerer by more than three people was to be arrested. If they confessed, they were to be burned at the stake as heretics, and if they did not confess, they would be tortured until they did so. Also, those pointed out by more than two of the judged sorcerers were to be arrested.

A fanciful interpretation of the Salem Witch Trials.

These accusations, trials and executions were probably seen by other elite individuals - or individuals who wished to become members of the elite by seizing the property of those they resented or envied - as a handy way to deal with many problems. The craze rapidly spread north into Germany, then to France and Switzerland. The main accusations consisted of:

- flying through the air and plundering wine cellars;

- lycanthropy - to have killed cattle in the shapes of werewolves;

- to have made themselves invisible with herbs;

- to have cured sickness and paralysis caused by sorcery by giving it to someone else;

- to have abducted and eaten children;

- to have met Satan and learned magic from him;

- to have planned to deprive Christianity of its power over humanity.

From this list, we can surmise the kinds of troubles that the people were suffering: starvation leading to theft and vandalism, destruction of their livestock, widespread sickness, loss of children, and, undoubtedly, even cannibalism. It was clearly a very difficult time.

One hundred years after the black death had destroyed about half of Europe's population, the Hundred Years' War was coming to an end, things were still very, very difficult, and in order to restore order and control on the recovering society someone had to be blamed (definitely not cometary explosions). The problem was, of course, how to get around the Canon episcopi. It was necessary to diminish this official church policy in order to even have a 'witch craze'. So, the first attacks were made on the validity of the document itself.

In 1450, Jean Vineti, inquisitor at Carcassone, identified witchcraft with heresy, and in 1458, Nicholas Jacquier, inquisitor in France and Bohemia, identified it as a new form of heresy - that is, contemporary witches were claimed to be different from the ones that the document was about. In 1460, Visconti Girolamo, inquisitor professor, Provincial of Lombardy, stated that the act of defending witchcraft (or witches) was itself heresy.

Incremental steps were being made toward establishing an official standard, but still, when Kramer and Sprenger (both members of the Dominican Order and Inquisitors for the Catholic Church) wrote the Malleus Maleficarum and submitted it to the University of Cologne's Faculty of Theology on May 9, 1487, seeking its endorsement, it was roundly condemned as unethical and illegal. The Catholic Church banned the book in 1490, placing it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and Kramer was denounced by the Inquisition. It should be noted here that, in 1484, Kramer had attempted a systematic persecution of witches in the region of Tyrol which bombed dramatically. Kramer was thrown out of the territory and dismissed by the local bishop as a "senile old man". According to historian of the church Diarmaid MacCulloch, writing the book was Kramer's act of self-justification and revenge.

The main thrust of the Malleus was to systematically refute the Canon episcopi and to discredit those who expressed skepticism about the reality of witchcraft, to claim that witches were more often women than men, and to educate prosecutors on how to expose and convict them. Experts say that the Malleus was based, in part, on the Formicarius by Johannes Nider written about ten years earlier. Before Nider, magic was thought to be performed by educated men who performed intricate rituals.

In Nider's Formicarius, the witch is described as illiterate and female. Unfortunately, Johannes Gutenberg's printing press - a product of the Renaissance - allowed the work to spread rapidly throughout Europe. This crystallization is what resulted in the beginning of the witch craze itself. The idea that any person could harm another via magic simply by devoting themselves to the worship of Satan - especially women who had been long-viewed as helpless and somewhat less than human - was terrifying and shocking.

As the craze spread over Europe, literally hundreds of thousands of women were burned at the stake. Children and even whole families were sent to be burned. The historical sources are full of horrifying descriptions of the tortures these poor people were subjected to. Entire villages were exterminated. One account says that all of Germany was covered with stakes and Germans were entirely occupied with building bonfires to burn the victims. One inquisitor is reported to have said: "I wish [the witches] had but one body, so that we could burn them all at once, in one fire!" (Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays. 1967, p. 152).

In the 1580s, the Catholic Counter-Reformation became dedicated witch hunters also, going after Protestants, mainly. In France, most witches happened to be Huguenot. In Protestant areas, most witches were Catholic. It could be said that most cases of witch burnings were either personal or political or both. One victim was a judge who was burned in 1628 for showing 'suspicious leniency'. As the craze spread, the viciousness and barbarity of the attacks increased. The aforementioned judge, a Dr. Haan, under torture, confessed to having seen five burgomasters of Bamberg at the witches Sabbath, and they too were executed. One of them, a Johannes Julius, under torture confessed that he had renounced God, given himself to the Devil, and seen twenty-seven of his colleagues at the Sabbath. But afterward, from prison, he contrived to smuggle a letter out to his daughter, Veronica, giving a full account of his trial. He wrote:

Now, my dearest child, you have here all my acts and confessions, for which I must die. It is all falsehood and invention, so help me God... They never cease to torture until one says something. If God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burnt. (Trevor-Roper, 1967, p. 157.)

Protestants and Catholics accused each other, and the early decades of the 1600s were infected by a veritable epidemic of demons! This lasted until the end of the Thirty Years' War. It is said that if the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum was the beginning of the terror, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was the end.

During this period, the distinction between good and bad magic vanished and witchcraft became something purely evil and almost totally female. The pluralistic conception of the supernatural world also vanished and we were left with only a very good god who was, however, seemingly impotent in the face of evil mankind in cahoots with a very evil devil. Well, not exactly 'mankind', mostly 'woman-kind'.

In recent times, the Malleus has been examined critically, though not by individuals with any awareness of the cosmic events of the time. Nevertheless, what they have observed has a bearing on our subject here. In his article, "Sexy Devils", Dale Keiger writes:

One evening 10 years ago, Walter Stephens was reading Malleus malificarum. The Malleus, as scholars refer to it, would not be everyone's choice for a late-night book. Usually translated as 'The Hammer of Witches', it was first published in Germany in 1487 as a handbook for witch hunters during the Inquisition. It is a chilling text - used for 300 years, well into the Age of Reason - that justifies and details the identification, apprehension, interrogation, and execution of people accused of consorting with demons, signing pacts with the devil, and performing maleficia, or harmful magic.

'It was 11 at night', Stephens recalls. 'My wife had gone to bed, and on the first page (of the Malleus) was this weird sentence about people who don't believe in witches and don't believe in demons: "Therefore those err who say that there is no such thing as witchcraft, but that it is purely imaginary, even although they do not believe that devils exist except in the imagination of the ignorant and vulgar, and the natural accidents which happen to man he wrongly attributes to some supposed devil."'

That convoluted sentence dovetailed with a curious line Stephens knew from Il messaggiero, a work from 1582 by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso: 'If magicians and witches and the possessed exist, demons exist; but it cannot be doubted that in every age specimens of the former three have been found; thus it is unreasonable to doubt that demons are found in nature.'

Stephens, the Charles S. Singleton Professor of Italian Studies in the Hopkins department of romance languages, is a literary critic, and he sensed that something intriguing was going on beneath the text on the page. Tasso, and especially the Malleus' author, a Dominican theologian and inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer, had in their works invested a striking amount of energy in refuting doubt about the existence of demons. What was that about?

For the next eight years Stephens read every treatise he could find on witchcraft, as well as accounts of interrogations, theological tracts, and other works (his bibliography lists 154 primary and more than 200 secondary sources). Most of the 86 witchcraft treatises he cites had been written in Western Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, and one after another (including the Malleus) contain accounts of sexual intercourse with satanic spirits. Why? Were the authors' remorseless misogynists hell-bent on portraying women in the worst possible light? Were they lurid, repressed celibates who got off by writing accounts of demon sex? Stephens didn't think so; the texts, in his view, didn't support that reading. Elsewhere in the Malleus he had found a key reference to accused witches under torture as being 'expert witnesses to the reality of carnal interaction between humans and demons'. These guys are trying to construct proofs that demons exist, he thought. They're trying to convince skeptics. And then he thought they're trying to convince themselves.

Stephens' thesis profoundly revises the conventional wisdom about centuries of cruelty and injustice. The great European witch hunts, he says, were the outgrowth of a severe crisis of faith. The men who wrote books like the Malleus, men who endorsed the torture and burning of tens of thousands of innocent people, desperately needed to believe in witches, because if witches were real, then demons were real, and if demons were real, then God was real. Not just real but present and attentive. Carefully read the works composed by the witchcraft authors, Stephens says, and you will see how profoundly disturbed these educated, literate men were by their accumulating suspicions that if God existed at all, He wasn't paying much attention to the descendants of Adam.

... The Church itself fractured, riven by massive organized heresies, and by a schism that led to as many as three men simultaneously laying claim to be the true pope. How could a world created by a watchful, benevolent, and engaged God be such a mess? (Johns Hopkins Magazine, 2002; emphases mine.)

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a time when the forces of nature ran amok, and the powers of the time needed to save face and keep control: how was it that they, who overcame paganism by the promise that their God could protect his believers from the forces of nature, now were exposed as totally incompetent to do so? There was, undoubtedly, a resurgence of Paganism and to prevent that it was probably seen as ideal to blame the enemy - pagans - for destruction that they had nothing to do with. Protestantism was on the rise, of course, but its proponents did not see it as politic to go after the Mother Church which still held a great deal of power, so some other sin-bearer had to be found. At the end of the Hundred Years War and the Black Death, and the Thirty Years War - all of which may have been periods of cometary destruction on the earth - the Witch Persecutions were utilized to hush up completely any hint that the Earth was not securely hung in space, and history and truth was suppressed with blood and burning human flesh.

Such persecutions were a means of controlling those who uttered 'heresies' against the 'providential' order of the universe established by the Church and State, like pointing out that an increased number of fireballs and comet sightings may very well suggest that the planet and its inhabitants are in potential danger. This was the period of Galileo, after all, and he was accused of being a 'heretic' for not supporting the potency of God Almighty.

Spanish edition of the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) by inquisitor Heinrich Kramer.

Another point to note is that, before this period, witches were still comprehended as beings that could use a technology to control the powers of nature - shamanic; after this period, they were known as beings that only channeled evil into the world because they were under the control of the Evil One. They were all purely Satan's puppets and no good could ever come from them. The Malleus Maleficarum specifically mentions that "witchcraft is chiefly found in women because they are more credulous and have poor memories", and because "witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable". (Sprenger and Kramer. Malleus Maleficarum. 1968, pp. 41-48.)

The political uses of these ideas should be obvious. Sprenger and Kramer, et al., came along and wrote books describing healthy, competent, intelligent women as witches, and presto! Problem solved. All the excess women (or anybody, for that matter) can be gotten rid of; all the autonomous women with property can be done away with and their property confiscated; and, at the same time, the psychological control of men over women, re-establishing the subservience of women to the Church, can be accomplished in one fell swoop! (One also has to consider the destruction of many genetic lines of powerful women - shamanic lines - in this process, which has been ongoing, so it seems.)

One of the most distressing results of this change in attitude toward witches was the creation of witchcraft as a systematic anti-religion in the minds of its persecutors; it became the opposite of everything that Christianity - both Catholic and Protestant - stood for. Witchcraft as an elaborated system of religion was unknown before the fifteenth century. (This is why modern-day reconstructions are not likely to be very accurate.) This was a period in which a theory of supernatural demons was invented and crystallized as an explanation for the evils that fell upon mankind. How else to explain the Black Death which killed indiscriminately in spite of the prayers and supplications of the priests of the Christian church, both Catholic and Protestant?

It seems that the legends of gods fighting in the skies (the break-up of a giant comet 13,000 years ago) were later corrupted into certain Gnostic ideas such as the 'cosmic error'. Certainly, at a certain level, there is duality, otherwise nothing would exist, but this Gnostic take on things went way too far with these ideas. (See: The Other God by Stoyanov for a better understanding of Gnosticism, keeping in mind the work of Victor Clube and Bill Napier.)

The 'witch myth' was created in the late 1400s in reaction to the Black Death - cometary destruction on an almost unimaginable scale - and this 'myth' consisted of a whole, coherent system of beliefs, assumptions, rituals, and 'sacred texts' that had never existed until this time and that were created by a couple of psychopathic accusers! The Dominicans developed and popularized the conceptions of demonology and witchcraft as a negative image of the so-called 'true faith', and the Protestants were just as busy!

What all this means is that being a 'Witch' in the time of the witch persecutions must have meant something more akin to following a dualist belief system similar to the Cathars, being an observer of nature, astronomy, speaking truth to power, really, more like how Burton Mack described the early Jesus People. It probably also meant being able to 'see the unseen' in terms of cosmic, social and human energies, to 'walk between worlds' as the Paleolithic shamans did, and to use these abilities on behalf of other people. Perhaps the image of the witch flying on her broom across the face of the full moon was actually a corrupted ancient symbol of a comet with a tail personified as woman?

A comet came and nearly destroyed humanity at the end of October 13,000 years ago, and impacting debris from the same comet brought Judaism, Christianity, Islam and, later, the imposition of Christianity on the Western world. Later still, the same comet stream brought the Black Death and the persecution of witches, both male and female. This scape-goating was utilized to get rid of a lot of individuals who threatened the status quo - the control over the masses - and that included a great many strong, independent women. And so, today, we associate witches with Halloween, the end of October, and the anniversary of the destruction of nearly all life on Earth. It is just a variation on the 'Eve ate the apple and brought about the fall in Eden' story, created by psychopaths who hate women and all they stand for: Creation, Nurturing and Service to Others.

Indeed. The calamities of that time - of any time - assault religious faith. And anyone who talks about such calamities in a reasonable and factual way as just what Nature does, and who backs it up with scientific data, must be silenced because they threaten the very foundation of Western Civilization: Judeo-Christianity, and Uniformitarianism, and Fascist control of humanity.

Cosmic Climate Change is Underway

2011-01-12T10:34:00.003+01:00

Another MUST READ from SOTT!

Plane Madness

If you thought the volcanic eruption in Iceland was awesome, wait till you see what Mother Nature has in store for us. Increased seismic activity around volcanoes suggests we can look forward to more spectacular eruptions in the months ahead. Mount Redoubt in Alaska is stirring from its slumber while Mount Etna in Italy threatens to enter a new eruptive period. Preparations are being made to evacuate 3,000 people from the Gaua Volcano on the Pacific island of Vanuatu as renewed activity suggests a large eruption is imminent. The Ischia Volcano off the coast of Naples in Italy has some observers worried, although as SOTT.net pointed out in its Connecting the Dots installment for March, it's the 13 major underwater volcanoes off Italy's southern coast that are scientists' primary concern. Somebody had better contact air traffic controllers in central America and explain to them the intricacies of ash particles and jet propulsion. When an eruption at Guatemala's Santiaguito Volcano sent a plume of ash 30,000 feet into the atmosphere and dusted a large swathe of western Guatemala late April, regional airspace remained open for business. Either politicians there care nothing for airlines' safety or they know something the "experts" in Europe do not.

The Global Warmists have jumped on the hysteria generated by this "ash cloud" to claim that increasing volcanic activity is due to decreasing pressure from melting ice caps, which of course is due to 'man-made global warming'. But the ice caps cannot be melting because the increasing extent of sea ice in the Arctic broke records throughout April. Other warmists found their silver lining in the flight ban itself, claiming to have quantified the amount of evil CO2 the planet was saved from grounded planes! Admittedly, the skies were brilliant blue over Europe during the flight ban's first week, but that is besides the point. The point is that oceans absorb and thus regulate the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. It is statistically redundant attempting to quantify the net atmospheric CO2 levels from a 70% reduction in air traffic over one continent for 6 days! It may seem like a significant factor from a local perspective, but in terms of the overall system, it isn't. Fred Goldberg explains that "one can never find more than 4 percent of CO2 in the atmosphere coming from humans."

Disclosure and Comets

2011-01-12T10:26:00.002+01:00

With all the rumblings about 'Disclosure' going on all around, I can't help but wonder why those who are interested in this topic seem to be missing the biggest cover-up of all: cometary/asteroid disruptors/destroyers of history.

Destroying history means, of course, destroying large segments of the human population who pass history on to their offspring. When you find a blank spot in history, a discontinuity, you can pretty well figure out that something really awful must have happened.

I've recently been wading through the complete works of Anatoly Fomenko. Those of you who have read my book The Secret History of the World know that I referred to him and his theories, but this was based on the available articles about it in English at the time. I've now been gifted with volumes 1 through 4 of his 7 volume work, along with the images from the final three volumes which are still being translated. It's a real revelation.

Now, for those of you who are familiar with this work, let me assure you that I am not reading uncritically. What I do find is that Fomenko's deconstruction is masterful. His method and results that prove that our history has been falsified are, in my opinion, incontrovertible. The numbers simply do not lie. What I am not very impressed by are some of his interpretations of what he does accept as data and his reconstruction is not satisfactory at all. He seems to be entirely unaware of why history must have needed to be re-written: repeated cometary destruction of Europe and the Mediterranean regions over the past 2000 years or more. That general ignorance is widespread and it has a powerful bearing on the 'Disclosure' issue, I think.

Some of the recent 'Disclosure' trends seem to include information from 'government insiders' who have told their stories, or whispered hints of amazing technology just waiting for all of us when this 'inevitable' event happens. Sorry, but I think its all wishful thinking. Why? Because what is interesting to me is the fact that, with all the tracking of government documents and conspiracies and so on, it seems that no one has mentioned to the purveyors of 'Disclosure' just how interested the government actually is in cometary impacts.

On 4 November 1996, Edward Teller wrote to then British Prime Minister, John Major:

Every few human lifetimes, there is a bombardment event like that which occurred in Siberia in 1908, wiping out most life over an area of about 10,000 square miles... Quantitatively, the time-averaged loss-of-life is comparable to that due to large floods, earthquakes and aeroplane crashes... The advent during the last half-century of reasonably large-scale rocket propulsion has given us the technological means necessary to avert such impacts.

Teller, apparently, believed that the greatest threat to humankind is not nuclear war, but asteroid or comet impact.

Some groups within the military believe the problem to be very serious indeed. A document on the subject of impact threat - now cleared for public release but formerly classified - was prepared by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1996. (Planetary Defense: Catastrophic Health Insurance for Planet Earth, 1996)

Due to a lack of awareness and emphasis, the world is not socially, economically, or politically prepared to deal with the vulnerability of impacts and their potential consequences. Further, in terms of existing capabilities, there is currently a lack of adequate means of detection, command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C41), and mitigation...

In terms of courses of action in the event of a likely impact of an ECO, [earth crossing object], other than a nuclear option, no defensive capability exists today. However, new technologies may yield safer and more cost-effective solutions by 2025. These authors contend that the stakes are simply too high not to pursue direct and viable solutions to the ECO problem. Indeed, the survival of humanity is at stake.

Dr. Jasper Wall, director of Britain's Royal Greenwich Observatory, Cambridge noted that the Tunguska blast could have had far more serious consequences, would have changed history, if it had occurred at a different time.

Had Earth moved for another three hours or so before the impact occurred, the target would not have been a barely populated corner of Siberia, but Moscow itself. Ten million people would have died. [interview conducted by Austen Atkinson, 1998]

Tunguska sized events occur every 30 to 100 years and smaller incidents occur more frequently. Just such an event occurred in Brazil in 1931. They seem to be increasing, so any day there could be another Tunguska anywhere on the planet... or multiple Tunguska-size events.

The technology needed to detect and deflect these 'small' high-speed objects simply does not exist.

Something like 250 atomic-bomb-sized detonations due to comets and asteroids have been registered by the USA's nuclear-detection system and spy satellites over the course of a single decade up through 1999. These explosions were all at relatively high altitudes, but came with a frequency of at least 2 per month. The recent closing of this data to scientists and the public suggests that there is something to be hidden.

There is a 1-in-24,000 chance that you will be killed by a comet or asteroid impact during a 70 year lifespan. The chances of you getting CJD (mad-cow disease) is 1-in 15 million during the same lifespan. Despite the fact that you are 625 times more likely to die from a comet or asteroid impact and are extremely unlikely to die from CJD, the CJD risk has been highly propagandized, British beef was banned from tables, and everyone totally ignored the far more pressing problem of possible imminent death from space rocks. The MOD has taken no action while the Ministry of Agriculture certainly did.

Why such a strange state of schizophrenia?

Perception. The people perceive that the government can do something about a disease, but can do nothing about space rocks.

The approach of those promoting 'Disclosure' reflects the general lack of knowledge of the problems we face that are real and far more pressing than aliens on our planet. Mike Baillie points out that there is still enormous ignorance of the dangers even within the archaeological community. There is still no archaeological or historical paradigm to deal with the historical presence and influence of impacts. This is particularly troublesome in regards to 'Disclosure' since strange sightings in the skies and strange beings and events historically accompany cometary events. It's as though there is some dimensional doorway-opening capacity connected to the comets/asteroids.

Mike Baillie once asked for a show of hands at an archaeological conference, when he asked the audience if they were aware of the impact phenomenon and its probable role in killing off the dinosaurs and its relevance to human history. Only 10% raised their hands.

Is this an example of "ignorance is bliss"? Do people really think that all will be well if we close our eyes and minds to reality? Unfortunately, Nature is not usually very kind to the slothful or apathetic. It's not adaptive and such individuals may not pass on their genes to future generations.

Because of the hold that religious uniformitarianism has on the minds of most members of our civilization, the concept of cometary impacts has been relegated to popular fiction and entertainment. The scientific community has been uniformly slow in understanding the wider implications across disciplines from astronomy to geology to economics and history.

It all seems so remote to them... what with our Earthly troubles, politics, war, economic troubles, etc. If people could only step back for a moment and really understand that those problems are meaningless in the context of the fact that it all could come to a sudden, fiery end in an instant; death that is unwelcome, terrible, and without mercy.

In 1979, Victor Clube and Bill Napier published their seminal scientific paper in the British journal Nature, titled "A Theory of Terrestrial Catastrophism". There was little notice paid to this paper. It was seven months later that Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, linked this theory with their geological mystery: the extinction of the dinosaurs. They published their work in 1980 in the American journal, Science. There was an uproar and an immediate backlash from the Uniformitarian school. In 1990, ten years after the Alvarez paper, the K/T impact crater was found in data obtained from oil drilling geophysicists. Here we notice that it is private industry that is controlling the scientific data that is needed so desperately by all of humanity. This should change!

Nowadays, the detractors of the impact theory are in the minority and look increasingly like lunatics in denial. The Uniformitarian view has gripped science for so long that some of them will go to their graves denying the overwhelming evidence. Some of them will accept the K/T impact, and then comfort themselves with the idea that it only happens at millions of years intervals.

Not so.

We must not be seduced into thinking that this is a threat that is remote from us, nor be hypnotized by thinking only about large, global extinction impactors such as the K/T event. The primary threat is that of the 'deathrock' in the size range of 300 meters to 2 kilometers. The risk from these objects is very, very real and can produce catastrophes that kill millions, if not billions, and render vast tracts of the globe uninhabitable for long periods.

Tree-ring chronologies along with ice-cores have been very valuable in assessing the possibility that impacts have been far more frequent, and dangerous, than ever previously suspected. Many events have occurred since 2345 BC and have continued to the present day.

Historical records can also provide precious clues if they are looked at properly. There are many historical accounts of what can only be understood as impact phenomena in history that have been, up to now, wrongly interpreted.

The only way to develop coherent understanding and theories about these matters is via cross-disciplinary studies. There is so much information available in all fields that, if it is all cross-referenced and correlated, a true picture of our past - and future - can be had.

Unfortunately, very few scientists are studying the matter in a polymathic way. I'm not a scientist, but I guess I'm a polymath. More of such are needed, desperately.

The U.S. Military is, apparently, as I've already noted, quite concerned about these matters and it is surprising that the 'Disclosure' advocates have missed this fact. A 1 kilometer asteroid traveling at an average speed of 50 km/s will impact the Earth with an explosive force equivalent to 30,000 megatons of TNT. That is the equivalent of 2.5 million Hiroshima-sized bombs!

Smaller impactors in the 50 to 1 meter range can generate H-bomb-sized explosions, the equivalent of 10 to 20 megatons of TNT. Tunguska experienced just such an event in 1908, as did Brazil in 1931.

The Tunguska event produced a global scattering of iridium discovered in the Greenland ice cores.

As noted, you have a 1-in-24,000 chance of being killed by a comet or asteroid. This is about the same risk factor you experience when you get on an airplane. See the problem? An enormous amount of money is spent on aircraft safety, and virtually none spent on the same time-averaged risk of impact threat.

Since the 'Disclosure' advocates have gotten so close to the military technology people (according to them), perhaps they are aware that military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and government agencies such as NASA, have become extremely concerned by the potential impact threat. Lockheed Martin used its energy laboratory at Sandia to research the impact threat. Using energy equations similar to those developed by Teller, which take into account environmental and atmospheric factors, Sandia's team of scientists were able to create virtual-reality simulations of a catastrophic impact. This project was led by David Crawford and Arthurine Breckenridge. They modeled the impact of a 1.4 kilometer-diameter comet, weighing approximately 1,000 million tons and traveling at 60 km/s as it strikes the Atlantic Ocean 25 miles south of New York. This work was done with the most advanced computation equipment on the planet. This was no computer game. Sandia's team also modeled the impacts of Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter with stunning accuracy.

The conclusions were horrifying.

The comet impacts with the ocean and instantly vaporizes 300 to 500 cubic kilometers of water forming a temporary cavity in the ocean. The equivalent of 300 gigatons of TNT energy is released at that instant - ten times the explosive power of all the world's nuclear weapons together. The heat generated is in excess of 5,000 degrees Celsius.

Five seconds after the comet hits the ocean, a tremendous impact plume composed of superheated debris, earth and water, smothers most of Long Island.

Eleven seconds after impact, the New York coastline is swept by superheated steam and ejected debris. At the same time, a large proportion of the ejected debris has now penetrated Earth's atmosphere in sub-orbital trajectories. Molten ejecta begins to fall on New York and the heat generated by the impact has begun to incinerate everything in its path - entire cities and forests are turned into cinders almost instantly.

Finally, the global debris cloud rapidly lowers temperatures worldwide and this is followed by the moisture evaporated into the atmosphere starting to fall as snow. David Crawford, leader of the Sandia team, said:

It's almost like doing an experiment - one you could never do. One you would never want to do. {Sandia National Laboratory, PR: 5 May 1998}

What is interesting is how our "fearless leaders" are looking at this problem. Their question is: "Is Earth and its human population worth saving?"

My guess is that they are trying to get everything locked down so that they can eliminate a lot of people with plausible excuses, and get away with it; that is, do it without risking the entire population turning against the PTB. And so, they play war games, they create terrorism, they play out farces of being at odds with one another when it is really the average human being in all countries who is the enemy of the leaders, all of whom - even if they play at being opposed to one another - are in the same club.

Freak Arctic Weather Precursor to the Coming Ice Age?

2011-01-12T10:14:00.000+01:00

This is a must read item on SOTT!

As regular readers of SOTT are aware, we collect weather reports from around the world which often point to weird weather occurring in locations experiencing unseasonable weather. This week there has been an especially weird spike in reports of sudden cold and snow affecting many areas of North America and Europe! We think this dramatically illustrates the alarming speed with which the weather can change from stable, warm and dry conditions to turbulent, cold and wet conditions. Global news networks are churning out endless reports on the UK election, the financial shockwaves hitting Europe and the Times Square hysteria over some fireworks left in a car. What is not being reported prominently are the unprecedented freak weather events happening around across the northern hemisphere: hail, sleet and snow slamming southern California, deluges devastating the central cities of Nashville in the US and Hunan in China, the Korean Peninsula shivering with a record-low spring chill and reports of snow in Mexico and France.

READ MORE

Truth, Lies, Reality

2010-08-21T23:34:00.002+02:00

‎"Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' Say not, 'I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have met the soul walking upon my path.'" -Kahlil Gibran

In terms of dealing with reality, Gibran is wrong.

The line demarcating that which is true from that which is not didn't appear in our own civilization overnight; rather, it developed gradually in Western philosophical thought. The issues of truth and falsehood have occupied many eminent thinkers and until postmodernism was thrust upon us by pathological thinking, truth and falsehood were, at least in theory, understood?

With postmodernism holding sway over our culture, the idea that no boundaries exist between 'real' and 'unreal' penetrates our lives in a way that is unhealthy and unwholesome. There are many contrasts in our symbolic/moral universes (our personal, mutual and collective realities), some of them more profound than others so that the effect of postmodernism on our thinking can produce greater or lesser stress in our lives depending on where and how it is applied. A few of these contrasts are things like black vs. white, day vs. night, sea vs. land, mountains vs. valley, moving into abstract contrasts like good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, justice vs. injustice, and, of course, truth vs. lies.

The view that anything goes, that everything is a real, but different, version of reality has led to a form of cultural schizophrenia from which we must emerge if we are to survive in a world that is changing as rapidly as ours. History plays a big part in this schizophrenic reality. There are a great many versions of reality and numerous narratives that have some sort of value, but then we come to the challenge of examining everything and determining which is morally, or more importantly, empirically correct. As Nachman Ben-Yehuda comments in his book, Sacrificing Truth, "putting the Nazi version of reality on the same level with those of Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr, or Mahatma Gandhi is empirically false and morally impossible, though I do concede that morality is a contestable and negotiable variable."

As a historian, I have to say that there are versions of reality which are inconsistent with, even contradictory to, the facts. The problem is to really discover what the facts are or were. Phillip Knightley's book, The First Casualty, gives many modern examples of media deception and misinformation. Ben-Yehuda comments: "Taking different versions of reality as they are, without contrasting them and trying to find out which one is closer to the observable and known facts, will leave us in a haze of eternal uncertainties, a shadowy 'reality' where nothing is true or false. Living in such a universe cannot be easy. ... Adhering to social realities which are based on incorrect empirical facts and false information is – evidently – possible, but carries a heavy price tag in terms of a genuine understanding of the world in which we live." We are presently facing the results of living in a social reality based on lies right in the Gulf of Mexico! History and current affairs –which are just 'history in the making' – really are that important! Our lives may depend on knowing the Truth, or as close to it as we can get considering how much documentation has been destroyed or falsified. Ultimately, as Biblical lscholar George Bradford Caird wrote:

"All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology."

How can anybody be sure of anything in this day and time when the world seems to have gone mad and we find ourselves collectively in the position of the hero/heroine of the horror movie who hears a noise. Indeed, the audience can see that the monster is lurking in the bushes (no pun intended) just outside the door, the soundtrack is heavy with ominous portent, and with innocent naivete and a handy flashlight, the star of the movie puts his or her hand on the doorknob. The audience groans with the agony of knowing and collectively shouts "DON'T OPEN THE DOOR!" But, unfortunately, the movie world is not connected to the world of the audience, and no warning can cross that divide.

In the old days, movie heroes and heroines generally always survived such mistakes by dint of clever scripting. In more recent years, you can never be sure anymore: the hero or heroine is likely to die - reflecting real life - because of their stupidity.

Admittedly, when I was much younger, I only liked the kind of movies where the hero or heroine triumphed in the end. I was always upset and angry - I felt cheated - if the movie ended as real life often does: no haven, no help, no hope. Only later did I realize the usefulness of such movies; that they could be teaching tools that help us to analyze our hopes, our beliefs, our wishful thinking that "right will prevail" no matter what, so that, if - indeed - we ever found ourselves in similar situations, we could circumvent the "failures of intelligence" that led to failures in awareness and strategy. In short, observing how wishful thinking most often leads to disaster in real life, could teach us how to think rationally, how to analyze and predict, and thus, formulate an adequate response to any situation of danger.

It's a useful concept.

But it still doesn't bridge the divide between the actors in the movie and the audience that can SEE.

At the present time, it seems that much of the outside world is watching America in the same way an audience watches a horror movie. The audience, of course, has the benefit of a "bird's eye view," and all the clues of music and privileged perspective granted by the movie maker. The actors are in a state of "fantasy," or "wishful thinking," if you like. They have agreed, individually and collectively, to engage in acting out the drama. They have agreed to "forget" all they know about the script so as to more effectively "get into" their roles. When the movie making is over, they all have a cast party, toast each other for how well they managed to fool the audience, and agree that it was a great movie and go home to read another script.

The audience, on the other hand, if they are knowledgeable, will agree that their favorite actors sure had them going there for a bit! They will declare sagely how good the monster was, and how evil the villain was because the actor or actress was such a master of their craft.

Such analogies as audience and movie are often used by philosophers as a way of suggesting that all that happens on earth is exactly that: a grand play and everybody is all the same when the show is over: actors and audience are simply two sides that have agreed to play "parts" in the life of humanity. Certainly, at some ultimate "level" of reality, this may be true in a certain way, but we suspect that it is not at all exactly that simple.

Sure, in the ultimate Grand Scheme of things, everything goes back to source. The difference is that those with the BEing nature of Creativity don't like the idea of Entropy and they reserve the right to make a choice.

It is easier to resist evil at the beginning than at the end.

And it is oh, so easy to excuse yourself from resisting by just saying: "Oh, it's just a movie! We can all go home at the end and know that everyone played their parts well..."

There is more than a little scientific support for the above ideas that consciousness - the root of existence and BEing - has two fundamental states: on, or off. In the final analysis, it seems that the metaphor of humanity and its collective "higher selves" being a movie and an audience, may be simply anthropomorphizing creative and entropic forces of the universe for the purposes of "self-calming." The stakes, it seems, are a lot higher and more real.

This brings us to the issue of subjectivity vs. objectivity. In recent weeks, I have been queried by several people who want to know just HOW "Knowledge protects." My response was too lengthy to reproduce here, but I said in part:

As the C's have said, and this is echoed in the most ancient traditions: "It's not where you are, but WHO you are and WHAT YOU SEE that counts." This "who" and "what you see" have been somewhat problematical as research subjects, and it has only been in the last three years that clear understanding of these concepts have been articulated. I discuss both extensively in my lectures on Alchemy.

We must regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all forces controlling nature together with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it, nothing would be uncertain; the future and the past would be equally present to its eyes. Pierre Laplace

Certainly, such an intelligence as Laplace describes would be "Godlike," you agree? And certainly, no one of us human beings is capable of such "seeing," you will also agree. However, what does seem to be true is that this is a significant clue to the solutions to the pressing issues of our day: knowledge that leads to awareness.

Here I will insert a major clue: As the brain interacts with its environment, synaptic circuits combine to form synaptic maps of the world perceived by the senses. These maps describe small segments of that world - shape, color, movement - and these maps are scattered throughout the brain. As the brain's synaptic network evolves, beginning at birth - or even before - these maps process information simultaneously and in parallel.

Based on our synaptic maps of the world, we are enabled to have a more or less objective view of reality.

Classical physics asserts that the future already exists, as do the present and past. Everything that ever will happen has already happened. But for some unknown reason our minds can only experience the future a piece at a time in what we call the present.

Quantum physics says that we can never predict the future with absolute certainty. The future does not yet exist in a single definite state.

Quantum uncertainty does not deny us all knowledge about the future. It gives us the tools to make predictions, but only in terms of probabilities.

Bohr and other leading physicists of the Copenhagen School say that objective reality is an ambiguous concept at the quantum level. In physics, our knowledge comes only when we actually measure something, and even then the way we decide to perform the measurement affects the results we obtain.

Asking the same question in different ways may give seemingly contradictory answers, but no single experiment will itself provide contradictory information. Some experiments will show electrons as waves, and others will show them as particles. In no single experiment do electrons display wavelike and particlelike behavior simultaneously. Bohr called this complementarity.

Quantum mechanics leaves the observer uncertain about the actual nature of reality. Are they rally waves or particles? We don't know and no experiment will tell us. Detecting one of the attributes automatically excludes knowledge about the other.

There is a striking similarity between life and thought. Just as there are more potential life forms than the planet can hold, there are more potential ideas than our minds can possibly absorb and remember.

Just as evolutionary natural selection may generate change by choosing from among the many potential forms of life, so may thought be able to generate evolutionary change by choosing among many potential thoughts.

The master evolutionary mechanism is found in the wave function of the universe. The observer guides the selection from an infinite number of potential arrangements that the universe may assume from moment to moment.

The universe has many possible future states or potentialities represented by the wave function. The wave function is constantly collapsing into the present as the many possible states become a single state as the present unfolds and possibilities become actualities.

Many individuals have decided that this Quantum Uncertainty means that you can "create your own reality" by what you believe, or depending upon what you give your attention to. This is a popular idea among many New Age types, and is actually the foundation of most religions whether they realize it or not. Let's have a look at what can be done with a little twist of scientific knowledge:

Hysterica Passio
Chris Floyd
October 22, 2004

Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult -- a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will -- undergirded by the cult's supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith -- is likewise openly declared: "Empire."
You think this is an exaggeration? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior adviser" to the president, who, as The New York Times reports, explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of 2002.

First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Suskind's attempt to defend the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man.

"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Anyone with any knowledge of 20th-century history will know that this same megalomaniacal outburst could have been made by a "senior adviser" to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao. Indeed, as scholar Juan Cole points out, the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the "reality-creating" declaration of Mao's "Little Red Book": "It is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." For Bush, as for Mao, "discernible reality" has no meaning: Po litical, cultural, economic, scientific truth -- even the fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself -- must give way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by unbending zealots.

And:

Faith Instead of Reason
For George Bush, faith is more important than reality, and the will transcends any need to consider the facts.
Scott D. O'Reilly
Intervention Magazine

President Bush is not a man given to doubt. Faith, he believes, can not only move mountains, it can transform the world. This is powerful stuff, and it is at the heart of why so many Americans fervently support George W. Bush, even when it is clear that he has committed gross errors in judgment.

For Bush, and his followers, reality isn't something you accommodate yourself to, it's something you shape until the facts reflect your will. "Reality," to borrow a line from the classic black comedy Being There starring Peter Sellers, "is a state of mind."

Four years ago the Bush campaign began to impose its state of mind on the American people. An electoral deficit was no obstacle to their designs; the man who got half a million fewer votes than his opponent was able to convince the American people to accept the premise that examining disputed ballots would only "cloud" the election. Thus, the election was not decided by the voters, but by the campaign excluding voters. As Joseph Stalin once remarked, "The voters decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything."

The impartial media-sponsored recount showed that in a statewide recount Gore received more votes than Bush in the critical state of Florida. If it had been up to the voters -- both in Florida and the rest of the United States -- Gore would have been president. But as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court William Rehnquist ruled, there is no guaranteed federal right to vote for president in America. Democracy, it appears, is just one state of mind among others, and one wave of the judicial magic wand is all it takes to undo the spell of democracy and make it disappear.

Convincing America to accept Bush's version of the election on faith, rather than empirically examining the ballots, was one of the great conjuring tricks of our age. For the Bush campaign, success would be self-legitimizing; quickly shaping new realities would render old realities irrelevant. The Bush administration, however, has been far more successful is shaping the public's perception of reality than in shaping reality itself.

One could say that the Bush administration succeeds precisely because it is so adept at denying reality. For Dick Cheney, deficits don't matter; for Donald Rumsfeld, the insurgency in Iraq was confined to just a few dead- enders; for Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq's oil revenue would finance Iraq's own liberation; and for Bush, the continued violence in Iraq has been cited as proof we are succeeding. We are, to use the president's words, victims of our "catastrophic success." Well, if that isn't the mother of all understatements, oxymorons, and mixed-messages, all at the same time.

Notions of "catastrophic success" and the idea that "deficits don't matter," only produce cognitive dissonance for those unfortunate enough to have contact with the real world. But Bush lives in a virtual bubble, where hi s virtuous intentions are assumed sufficient to guarantee a good outcome. [...]

The need to temper faith with reason is well illustrated by a story told by the 19th century mathematician and philosopher William Clifford. Clifford asks us to imagine a ship owner who knows his ship could do with a costly inspection and repairs, but sincerely believes that Providence will see the ship and its passengers through on a difficult voyage. Clifford argues that the ship owner's faith was not acquired "by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts." When the ship sinks, its owner's guilt is not absolved by the sincerity of his faith; indeed, he is culpable precisely for substituting belief in place of practical measures.

I believe Clifford's story speaks to the predicament that Bush's leadership style presents. Bush's personal faith may be quite admirable, but his certainty -- on Iraq's WMD, for instance -- has proven demonstrably false. Faith is one thing. But stifling doubt because one doesn't like reality is another. And I, for one, believe that George W. Bush no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

The view of the Bush Reich is, as it happens, diametrically opposed to the view we promote at SOTT.net. This view has been stated quite economically by the Cassiopaeans:

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future."

Human beings are both fascinated and repelled by what is called "evil." The fascination stems from the fact that "good" people find it difficult to comprehend how evil can exist in a world that is allegedly overseen by a benevolent and loving creator. Rahter than struggle to identify it, quantify it and understand it, they simply deny it.

Complicity does not mean that you have to support evil, it simply means that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

We here at Signs of the Times are not in the business of telling anyone what to do. We are only here as a lighthouse, a constant sweeping illumination that goes around and around and says, basically, the same thing over and over again. Our readership is growing by leaps and bounds, and we know that there are new readers every day who have not read every daily report for the past couple of years. We also know that there are regular readers who, after reading the page, go back to sleep and think "it can't be THAT bad." And so, again and again we shine the light, ring the alarm bell, and try to think of different ways to get through to others the extreme peril in which we stand.

This brings us back to the issue of how does Knowledge Protect?

In the past dozen years, we have made some considerable progress on our mandate of discovering what really makes reality tick and how does humanity fit into it. Much of this work is pure science - physics and mathematics - but I'm not going to give you the formulas or the computer simulation codes, I'm going to explain it to you in simple terms.

Our universe seems to be made up of matter/energy and of consciousness.

Matter/energy by itself "prefers", as it seems, a chaotic state.

Matter/energy by itself doesn't even have a concept of "creation" or "organization". It is the consciousness that brings to life these concepts and by its interaction with matter pushes the universe towards chaos and decay or towards order and creation.

This phenomenon can modeled mathematically and simulated on a computer using EEQT (Event Enhanced Quantum Theory). Whether EEQT faithfully models the interaction of consciousness with matter, we do not know; but chances are that it does because it seems to describe correctly physical phenomena better than just the orthodox quantum mechanics or its rival theories (Bohmian mechanics, GRW etc.)

What we learn from EEQT can be described in simple terms as follows:

Let us call our material universe "the system". The system is characterized by a certain "state". It is useful to represent the state of the system as a point on a disc. The central point of the disk, its origin, is the state of chaos. We could also describe it as "Infinite Potential." The points on the boundary represents "pure states" of being, that is states with "pure, non-fuzzy, knowledge". In between there are mixed states. The closer the state is to the boundary, the more pure, more 'organized' it is.

Now, an external "observer", a "consciousness unit", has some idea - maybe accurate, maybe false or anywhere in between - about the "real state" of the system, and observes the system with this "belief" about the state. Observation, if prolonged, causes the state of the system to "jump". In this sense, you DO "create your own reality", but the devil, as always, is in the details.

The details are that the resulting state of the system under observation can be more pure, or more chaotic depending on the "direction" of the jump. The direction of the jump depends on how objective - how close to the reality of the actual state - the observation is.

According to EEQT if the expectations of the observer are close to the actual state of the system, the system jumps, more often than not, into more organized, less chaotic state.

If, on the other hand, the expectation of the observer is close to the negation of the actual state (that is when the observer's beliefs are closer to being false than to being true according to the ACTUAL state - the objective reality), then the state of the system, typically, will jump into a state that is more chaotic, less organized. Moreover, it will take, as a rule, much longer time to accomplish such a jump.

In other words, if the observer's knowledge of the actual state is close to the truth, the Truth being defined as how the Universe views the matter, then the very act of observation and verification causes a jump quickly, and the resulting state is more organized. If the observer's knowledge of the actual state is false, then it takes usually a long time to cause a change in the state of the system, and the resulting state is more chaotic.

What this means is that order can be brought out of chaos by observing chaos as it IS and not pretending that it is otherwise. Also, you have a robust feedback mechanism so that you can train yourself to recognize Truth.

Everyone who "believes" in an attempt to "create reality" that is different from what IS, increases the chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain't gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this "staring down the universe" exercise with you.

On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance, you then become more "aligned" with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential.

In the Adventure Series, I concentrated to a great extent on the problem of psychopathy in our world today. I was motivated to do this by the fact that we had been victimized by a psychopath whose behavior was utterly incomprehensible. As a consequence of this research, I was much better prepared to understand George Bush and his Reich and that served to "inoculate" me against the fear tactics that are utilized by the psychopath to paralyze their victims. I realize that Americans who are "stupid" are that way by design. In a sense, it is not their fault. They are no more capable of thinking on their own than the mouse is capable of escaping the claws of the cat determined to eat it.

But not everyone is a mouse. It is for those who are evolving that we continue to keep the lighthouse going. But be aware, the day may come - and sooner than you might expect - when the storm is so violent that the keepers of the flame will abandon the task, knowing that no light can be seen in such Stygian darkness.

In the Adventure Series, I wrote the following:

Could it ever be an evolutionarily stable strategy for people to be innately unselfish?

On the whole, a capacity to cheat, to compete and to lie has proven to be a stupendously successful adaptation. Thus the idea that selection pressure could ever cause saintliness to spread in a society looks implausible in practice. It doesn't seem feasible to outcompete genes which promote competitiveness. "Nice guys" get eaten or outbred. Happy people who are unaware get eaten or outbred. Happiness and niceness today is vanishingly rare, and the misery and suffering of those who are able to truly feel, who are empathic toward other human beings, who have a conscience, is all too common.

Nevertheless, a predisposition to, conscience, ethics, can prevail if and when it is also able to implement the deepest level of altruism: making the object of its empathy the higher ideal of enhancing free will in the abstract sense, for the sake of others, including our descendants.

In short, our "self-interest" ought to be vested in collectively ensuring that all others are happy and well-disposed too; and in ensuring that children we bring into the world have the option of being constitutionally happy and benevolent toward one another.

In short, if psychopathy threatens the well-being of the group future, then it can be only be dealt with by refusing to allow the self to be dominated by it on an individual, personal basis.

Preserving free will for the self in the practical sense, ultimately preserves free will for others.

Protection of our own rights AS the rights of others, underwrites the free will position and potential for happiness of all.

If mutant psychopaths pose a potential danger then true empathy, true ethics, true conscience, dictates using prophylactic therapy against psychopaths.

It seems certain from the evidence that a positive transformation of human nature isn't going to come about through a great spiritual awakening, socio-economic reforms, or a spontaneous desire among the peoples of the world to be nice to each other. But it's quite possible that, in the long run, the psychopathic program of suffering will lose out because misery is not a stable strategy.

In a state of increasing misery, victims will seek to escape it; and this seeking will ultimately lead them to inquire into the true state of their misery, and that may lead to a society of intelligent people who will have the collective capacity to do so.

And so it is that identifying the psychopath, ceasing our interaction with them, cutting them off from our society, making ourselves unavailable to them as "food" or objects to be conned and used, is the single most effective strategy that we can play. [...]

To allow oneself to be conned, or used by a psychopath is to effectively become part of his "hierarchy" of feeding. To believe the lies of the psychopath is to submit to his "bidding" (he bids you to believe a lie, and you acquiesce), and thus, to relinquish your free will.

In strictly material terms, this doesn't seem to be much of an issue, right? After all, somebody lies to us and who really cares? Is it going to hurt us to just let them lie? Is it going to hurt us to just go along with them for the sake of peace, even if we know or suspect they are lying? After all, checking the facts and facing the psychopath with truth, and telling them "no" is generally very unpleasant. Remember, the game is set up so that we pay a lot for being ethical in dealing with the psychopath. In material terms, it really doesn't seem to be worth it because we suffer all kinds of attack - verbal, psychological, and even physical abuse - so it's just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, right? [...]

At best, we can only really penetrate to the level of the psychological reality, observed behavior that is discordant, or self-destructive. And we are thoroughly programmed to help by giving until it hurts, or trying to fix, or to make nice. All of these things, all of these accommodations of psychopathy, on just a practical level, can be seen to "select for psychopathy" in terms of the gene pool.

But on another level, considering the great amount of evidence we have that there is something very mysterious going on that has to do with "controlling the minds of humanity," and covering up something that may affect every single human being on this planet, we find that the issue is crucial. Refusing to accommodate the manipulations and maneuvers of the psychopath may, indeed, be critical to the positive transformation of our planet. [...]

And we see that the ultimate aim of the psychopath, as living representatives of the Universal forces of Entropy, of Non-Being, is to MASTER creative energy. To assimilate it to the self, to deprive others of it by inducing them to believe lies.

Because, when you believe the lie of the psychopath, you have given him control of your Free Will - the essence of Creativity. [...]

As I quoted above: Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously. Therefore, the second law is "follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature."

All creation is a result of the engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil. But the second, prescriptive law determines to which "Face of God" one will return: Life or Death.

There ARE such things as "evil planets," and dark stars. And the real question at this time is: Is Mother Earth about to become one?

Warpaint of the Gods

2010-07-19T11:39:00.005+02:00

Excerpted from Warpaint Of The Gods: Essential Thinking for the New Millennium, by Nila Sagadevan:

In 1961, a group of preeminent astronomers and physicists convened at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. Their objective was to determine the probability of extraterrestrial life in our galaxy, the “Milky Way”.

The resulting “Green Bank Equation” yields the probable number of technically advanced civilizations in our galaxy as a function of other astronomical, biological, and psychological factors. The Green Bank Equation suggests there could be as many as fifty million different civilizations in our galaxy alone.

So, approximately how many other galaxies might there be in the known universe? Sir James Jeans, the distinguished British astrophysicist, estimated the universe to be about as one trillion times as big as the volume of space visible through our most powerful telescopes of the time.

Jeans compared the total number of galaxies in our universe to the total number of grains of sand on all the beaches of planet Earth combined.

This mind-boggling analogy deserves repetition: Jeans referred not to planets; nor even solar systems. He was referring to galaxies, each of which contains hundreds of billions of solar systems similar to ours.

Now, if one were were to apply the aforementioned Green Bank Formula to this incomprehensibly huge number of galaxies — i.e., to the sum total of all the grains of sand found on all of the beaches of this planet — just how many “technically advanced civilizations” might there be?

And what if we were to include all civilizations, instead of just the “technically advanced” ones...

A friend of mine, after contemplating the above, wrote the following comment:

Viewed in this context, to even contemplate whether God -- the Creator of the entire Universe — would single out this infinitesimally trivial galaxy of ours (“grain of sand”) for a bit of “divine favoritism” would be ludicrous.

To claim He would then -- equally arbitrarily — consider singling out a speck of cosmic dust called Earth, floating in a microscopic solar system (one of several hundred billion) at the edge of this obscure, utterly nondescript galaxy -- and then choose to shower His boundless blessings upon this corpuscular little speck is a notion that leaps beyond the absurd.

But it seems God hadn’t quite narrowed down his bizarre sense of partiality quite yet: We’re told He then singled out a trifling, characterless sliver of dirt located in some some obscure corner of this spectacularly indistinct planet; named it “Israel”; deeded it -- for eternity! -- to a favored group of homo sapiens... And... And then anointed these folk His “Chosen Ones”! Yes, in the entire universe!

Bloody hell.

While we’re at it, let’s not forget to look in the mirror ourselves. Take, for instance, that favorite little self-righteous incantation of ours: “God bless America.”

So, I suppose the Big Guy not only decided to give us His divine thumbs-up for being such wonderful warmongers, He, in His infinite wisdom, also elected to dump on the other 191 countries in the United Nations for being such a pathetic bunch of worthless sods.

Beam me up, Scotty.

All For One and One For All

2010-06-24T13:26:00.004+02:00

The issue of methane and outgassing has occupied me to quite some extent for the past few years particularly after writing New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection. I even asked the SOTT.net editors to keep their eyes open for news items about anything that might be related to outgassings. There's quite a collection in the database if you search. And now, with the recent news about the methane involvement in the BP Gusher, and that news getting more dire every day, I started digging around for some data I knew I had written about and, after finding a few things, I thought: how interesting that this "Mother of all Gushers" may give birth to the "Mother of all Storms." You'll understand what I mean in a minute!

First, read this bit that is current on SOTT. The Real Consequences of An Ocean Floor Collapse.

Note that it says:

The two possible scenarios are either a complete collapse of the ocean floor right above the Deepwater Horizon well and surroundings or a partial collapse in the form of a mud slide on one side of the well.

In this article I wrote back in 2007: Fire and Ice The Day After Tomorrow there's a bunch of collected articles which includes one about the THE LAKE NYOS GAS EXPLOSION, CAMEROON 1986 where we read:

Lake Nyos is one of only three lakes in the world known to be saturated with carbon dioxide -- the others are Lake Monoun, also in Cameroon about 100 km away, and Lake Kivu in Rwanda. A magma chamber beneath the region is an abundant source of carbon dioxide, which seeps up through the lake bed, charging the waters of Lake Nyos with an estimated 90 million tonnes of CO2

Lake Nyos is thermally stratified, with layers of warm, less dense water near the surface floating on the colder, denser water layers near the lake's bottom. Over long periods, carbon dioxide gas seeping into the cold water at the lake's bottom is dissolved in great amounts.

Most of the time, the lake is stable and the CO2 remains in solution in the lower layers. However, over time the water becomes supersaturated, and if an event such as an earthquake or volcanic eruption occurs, large amounts of CO2 may suddenly come out of solution.

Although a sudden outgassing of CO2 had occurred at Lake Monoun in 1984, killing 37 local residents, a similar threat from Lake Nyos was not anticipated. However, on August 21, 1986, a limnic eruption occurred at Lake Nyos which triggered the sudden release of about 1.6 million tonnes of CO2. The gas rushed down two nearby valleys, displacing all the air and suffocating up to 1,800 people within 20 km of the lake, mostly rural villagers, as well as 3,500 livestock. About 4,000 inhabitants fled the area, and many of these developed respiratory problems, burns, and paralysis as a result of the gases.

It is not known what triggered the catastrophic outgassing. Most geologists suspect a landslide, but some believe that a small volcanic eruption may have occurred on the bed of the lake. A third possibility is that cool rainwater falling on one side of the lake triggered the overturn. Whatever the cause, the event resulted in the rapid mixing of the supersaturated deep water with the upper layers of the lake, where the reduced pressure allowed the stored CO2 to effervesce out of solution.

It is believed that up to a cubic kilometre of gas was released. Because CO2 is denser than air, the gas flowed off the mountainous flank in which Lake Nyos rests and down two adjoining valleys in a layer tens of metres deep, displacing the air and suffocating all the people and animals before it could dissipate. The normally blue waters of the lake turned a deep red after the outgassing, due to iron-rich water from the deep rising to the surface and being oxidised by the air. The level of the lake dropped by about a metre, representing the volume of gas released. The outgassing probably also caused an overflow of the waters of the lake. Trees near the lake were knocked down.

The laky Nyos situation was about a different kind of gas... maybe. In any case, a similar event with methane is even more problematical.

Anyway, there is a lot in that article I wrote in 2007 that applies to the present situation, most particularly:

John Barnes, in his fiction novel, Mother of Storms, described the release of vast quantities of methane as the trigger for a global superstorm that nearly destroys the earth.

Mother of Storms takes place about thirty years from now. The UN has become dominant and at the start of the book the US President is maneuvering desperately to avoid losing any more sovereignty to the UN. The UN undertakes a nuclear strike against the Siberian Republic's secret--and illegal--nuclear weapons caches buried in the Arctic seabed. The explosions result in the release of huge amount of methane from the methane clathrates buried there. The methane causes a near-runaway greenhouse effect with global temperatures going up by 10 degrees F in a matter of months.

The hot, wet oceans are perfect breeding grounds for hurricanes which rapidly develop into storms of unprecedented strength, duration and number.

Obviously, if such a scenario were to play out at present, the roles would be reversed to what Barnes imagined: it would be the U.S. undertaking a nuclear strike that unleashes the methane that triggers the Global Superstorm. It would probably only be in such a manner that enough methane would be released fast enough to make such an impact.

The above really caught my eye. In the book, "Mother of Storms", the methane is released by a nuclear explosion in the arctic... well, so far they haven't set off any nukes in the Gulf of Mexico, but it looks like the situation there is developing rather similarly to what John Barnes described in his novel. He did a lot of research on the science, by the way, so it's worth reading just to get an idea of what COULD happen!

Then, there is the issue of earthquakes in the Gulf of Mexico. A few years ago I noted that there was an unusual earthquake in the Gulf and we archived the item on SOTT.net: 5.2 Earthquake Dead Center In Gulf Of Mexico - Precursor to a New Madrid Big One? Just read it and think about it.

Next, History Channel Mega Disasters - Methane Explosion, just to give you an idea of what all this means.

Even if nothing so cataclysmic happens, we have to deal with Gulf Coast Toxicity Syndrome which could kill and/or disable millions.

Many different gases from hydrogen sulfate to benzene are being released into the air at around 4000 times what it considered safe to humans. As a result of this people are going to become gravely ill. People are going to be poisoned and unfortunately some are going to die. We have already seen breathing problems in the Gulf region and now reports are coming in as far away as Atlanta, Georgia. [...]

In addition to destroying the wildlife, killing animals and devastating the coastal economy, the massive oil spill in the Gulf will have damaging psychological and physical consequences for Gulf coast residents, the entire state of Florida, and now it seems that Georgia and the rest of the southeastern United States could be threatened considering we are already seeing problems from people in Atlanta. And we are not even talking worse case scenarios. [...]

Others are worried about a massive loss of life through a methane explosion that would create a tidal wave that would take out all of Florida and most of the rest of the Gulf region. Included in the worst case scenarios is a toxic rain falling upon tens of millions further north from the Gulf as wind patterns and or a hurricane comes barreling into the region. Others see the entire North Atlantic turning into a black and very dead sea and the nightmare scenarios go on and on making any serious readers’ stomach sick to death over what has been done to our planet. We have allowed corporate capitalists do something they cannot undo and this is sad and truly tragic for the future of our children.

I know that all of us are feeling a little shell-shocked with the current events. It really is scary and for a good reason: it is a dangerous time to be alive. According to the Cs, we have very little time left. And, based on what we are seeing with the climate change business, adding the possible effects of the BP Gusher on Florida, the "coming global superstorm" is not so crazy an idea anymore. It could be next winter, or the winter after... and the planet could be locked down in ice for the next 10,000 years or so. We don't know.

We DO know that economically, this next year is going to be tough. I'm seeing failed harvests all over the globe due to the weather and the price of food going through the roof. Revolution is also possible. One thing is certain, Florida is going to be a place to get out of and stay out of because the situation is so unstable there.

Human beings were only able to evolve because of social ties. Trusting others seems to be an evolutionary strategy that served us well for a long time. In that evolutionary struggle, man was opposed to a "natural enemy," the environment and all it contained. All he had was his bigger brain to compensate for his smaller strength and speed; and, of course, his network.

Nowadays, we are no longer opposed to the natural world out there as the sparring partner, we are opposed to a culture that has been slowly infiltrated and taken over by pathologicals. At the same time, this outer world that has been shaped by pathology, also represents a certain pathological state within normal humans - their lack of ability to see pathology in individuals that look like themselves - an intra-species predator. Humanity's failure to perceive this, to adapt, means that our inner world, taken into us from the outside by means of identification, has become an "independent power" which, in its turn, by means of projection, is our own creation. After all, it is normal humans, not pathologicals, who have the real power to "create reality" as a group. Pathologicals only influence us - mostly women - to believe certain things are the norm, and we then act as they pull our strings.

This outer reality which has such a powerful influence on the formation of our character and the focusing of our creativity, has become a power itself and we are being challenged to become "new beings" that can evolutionarily adapt to this changing situation. Either we become fully pathological, in which case there will be no stress (the STS route), or we return to our roots taking with us the knowledge of the new "opponent" that will enable us to rebuild our social bonds and structures and survive through the massive changes that are ahead of us.

Because, realistically, even if no cataclysmic scenario of any external kind manifests, anybody with two neurons firing can see that we are most definitely heading straight into a "clash of civilizations" though it is not at all what is being touted. It is a clash of normal humans with pathologicals and right now, they have all the assets (which they have by trickery, cunning, cheating). Even the mildest scenario of the future is not pleasant to contemplate: Climate Change and its effects on humanity. It's not a pretty picture.

This principle that the inner world is taken in from the outside by means of identification, and then, in its turn, by way of projection, alters the external world so that it corresponds to the inner world even more closely, requires some serious thought. Basically, we have to bootstrap ourselves out of here by reverseing the process: we must create an inner world in the face of the opposition of the outer world, that then becomes strong enough, EN MASSE, to change the outer world.

The creative individual must be able to create and develop his standards beyond the identifications of the external pathological world. This means, in the simplest of terms, connecting with the higher self so that this part consciously guides and rules the creative will even in terms of the personality. The important factor here is that groups of individuals must get from here to there - here being the false personality created in us by the pathological external world, there being the merging with the higher self - by consciously choosing those factors that he will identify with.

This must be a group effort.

The only solution I can see at this point is for humanity to unite their consciousnesses in awakening and DOing what needs to be done to ameliorate the situation if possible, and pass through this Horror that psychopaths have created on our planet. The big question is: how to do that effectively and efficiently? In other words, something that really works. Something that really gets everyone on the same page, going in the same direction toward Truth... and the answer that I see is to follow what the Cassiopaeans have outlined as the only possible way out: to engage in practice that will help to rapidly clear old emotional programs that get in the way of both effective networking and effective SEEing and discernment: the Éiriú Eolas program that I have created with the help of the Cassiopaeans. And no, I'm not selling it though it will help us a lot if you DO buy the DVDs. We can then make more of them to give away. No, in fact, you can watch the whole program for free on the EE website.

So, that's the first order of business: getting clear. The second is for all of humanity to be praying in the same "direction." For that, the Prayer of the Soul which is part of the EE program is exactly designed to help you awaken. The breathing exercises combined with the meditation and prayer will quickly help you to achieve that state of consciousness necessary to be able to see the unseeen and know what it is you must do in concert with others.

As I explain in the video introduction to EE, stress is a worldwide epidemic. The number one disease of adults in the world is depression. Depression is the most extreme form of stress in your nervous system.

But here's the rub: stress response is vital for survival in times of danger. The problem comes when it is turned on too strong, too often.

The very fact that our stress response has gone off the charts tells us that our bodies are telling us something about our world! There is DANGER out there, only it is hiding amongst us in the form of pathologicals! We are constantly in a state of stress because we are in a state of cognitive dissonance. We sense the danger, but we cannot SEE it because we have been programmed NOT to see it by lies and false reality constructs.

James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds, suggests that multiple viewpoints from individuals with a wide range of backgrounds, rather than the restricted viewpoints of experts or specialists, are crucial in reaching informed decisions on complex topics. Getting input from a broad variety of people is like getting input from a wide variety of devices such as microscopes, telescopes, litmus paper, tensile testors, ultrasound devices, scales, and so on.

Here, of course, we are not talking about getting a lot of EMOTIONAL viewpoints, but rather perceptions and assessments of the shared, Primary Reality - what is REAL "out there". Even if we are agreeing that there is a real reality and it is what it is, no one of us has the all-encompassing way of perceiving that would give us the understanding of EVERY ASPECT of what is out there.

So, in this sense, the network itself is the Teacher.

But in order for a network to go anywhere and not just fall into entropy, there must be a direction and in that sense there must be a vanguard.

Vanguard: Etymology: Middle English vauntgard, from Anglo-French vantgarde, avantgarde, 1: the troops moving at the head of an army 2: the forefront of an action or movement.

It is also reflective of true evolutionary social activities that there are some who are trailblazers and others who support and "watch the back" of the trailblazers. Once the trail is blazed, and the destination is reached, the others not only benefit from the struggles of the trailblazer, they also set about organizing the details of the new environment and stabilizing it. So, everyone plays a role and if the network is tight, they all arrive pretty much together.

The bottom line is this: we are all in this mess together and we sink together, or we get our boat to harbor, but somebody's got to be the one who coordinates or we'll just go endlessly in circles, nobody will be bailing, paddling, or evaluating currents and signs to determine direction. I've created the EE program, right now hundreds, if not thousands of people are doing it and reporting amazing results. I have also created a legal organization for protection of our activities: in a world run by psychopaths, sometimes you have to take a play from their rule book to bootstrap yourself out of their trap: Fellowship of the Cosmic Mind. You can become a member and join with thousands of others who are networking to get themselves cleared and awake and working in a colinear direction to transform our world.

As I said, we evolved to trust one another - but that was a world where others were trustworthy. We live in a different world now. The cheaters in our world have evolved ways to induce us to trust them, but we can tell by our stress that we are going in the wrong direction, we are in mortal peril. But still, to get anything done at all, we MUST TRUST. And to figure out who to trust, we need to rely, again, on the network of observations from many observers. Again, we are not talking about getting a lot of EMOTIONAL viewpoints, but rather perceptions and assessments of the shared, Primary Reality - what is REAL "out there" and what really seems to work, to explain things, and has internal consistency over time.

Those who are able to accomplish this task of rebuilding social connections based on the new evolutionary standard of accounting for pathology in the equations, will evolve. Those who do not evolve will perish.

In short, I think the Cassiopaeans are right: we have just a couple years, if that. We really need to get people on the EE program asap. If you are not currently doing it, or involved in some way with sharing it with others, I hope that you can begin to feel the urgency of the situation. As I have said before, I don't see anything more important to be doing now than that, not only for the potential of the self, but also because, in coming times, an awake and aware nucleus of people is going to be needed to provide leadership to the lost sheep.

That's what I see from where I sit right now. United we stand, divided we fall. All for One and One for All.

Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep

2010-06-17T21:31:00.003+02:00

We had some unusual visitations in the days following my mother's passing here and I think she was saying goodbye.

Thanks to all for condolences; I'll be back in the saddle and working soon!

Dancing in the Stars

2010-05-23T11:52:00.004+02:00

Almost four years ago I wrote about my mother's stroke on this blog: My Mother Will Never Dance Again...

Mother had at least three more strokes since then, each one of them could have - should have - released her from the prison of her body, but they didn't. Her mind was still intact, but she could not speak or care for herself in any way. This condition was unbelievably cruel to such an active and energetic person. Finally, I think she realized that the body just was not going to let her go so easily and she took matters into her own hands, so to say.

I don't think I have ever witnessed such a mighty battle; she was determined to go, but her body kept living; she mastered it, finally. Last night she danced again, in the stars.

No Funeral Gloom, my dears, when I am gone...
Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness,
Yours still, you mine.
Remember all the best of our past moments and forget the rest,
And so to where I wait come gently on. ~ Ellen Terry

Alice Meadows Knight

28 September 1921 - 22 May 2010

I Love You.

Stan Gooch's "Cities of Dreams"

2010-05-21T14:31:00.004+02:00

Writing a review of this book is like trying to untie the Gordian knot so, let me make my stroke here at the beginning: it is the work of a very twisted mind and should only be read with the actual data to hand so that every claim or assumption can be cross-checked with what is actually known or only conjectured. I have to say that after I read numerous totally outrageous assumptions that are directly contradicted by known paleontological facts, I was tempted to just toss the book aside. But I was motivated to read it because it figures large in a recent work of Colin Wilson's which I had just finished and I was curious to see what was so compelling in this book that Wilson would be taken in by it since he is normally a very rational thinker.

Gooch does say quite a few things that a person searching for the Truth about our history and not satisfied with the obvious narrow-mindedness of mainstream scholarly research will readily agree with, and his style is certainly engaging; he romps through the topics. But there is value to academic research if you know how to handle it, and Gooch does not give much evidence of having delved all that deeply into the actual dirt and gravel reports - his bibliography is pretty slim pickin's from the academic perspective and pretty heavily loaded with alternative viewpoints. That's dangerous because many alternative writers, like journalists, not being experts in the field, very often misunderstand and misrepresent the data . I will agree with him that very often, mainstream academia has an agenda and isn't very open-minded, but the same can be true for alternative research, deliberately or by default.

Gooch begins with the premise that Neanderthalers (in various editions around the planet, not strictly the classic Neanderthal type in Europe) were something of a noble savage that had "evolved a culture of the mind (a) not only of a very high order indeed (for as I often say, whereas we build cities of stone, Neanderthal built cities of dreams) but also (b) of a strangeness that is very had for us to imagine or, even having imagined, to come to terms with (since we have, after all, experience of only one kind of human mind - our own)."

Then, along came evil, un-creative, murderous Cro-Magnon and it was like the Imperialistic British in their colonization all over the planet, wiping out the natives though also breeding with them and absorbing their culture and their genes.

Neanderthal was a Moon worshipper, a nocturnal creature who preferred group sex and cannibalism (but that's okay because he was such a great guy), and Cro-Magnon man was a Sun worshipper, a mighty hunter, and hated women. The proof is that Cro-Magnon went in for permanent pair-bonding instead of sexual rapaciousness, and didn't grovel before the Spider goddess who used him sexually and then ate him.

Gaaaah! Creepy! There are passages in this book where one gets the very distinct impression that the author wants a menstruating woman dressed in black leather to shove her booted foot in his face and scream "you worm!" and he would feel SO rewarded that he had been a "good boy."

Gooch is certain that modern man is a hybrid product of interbreeding between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. Well, he is partly correct according to the latest DNA evidence. The DNA shows that homo sapiens sapiens man is unlikely to have ever mated with any Neanderthal woman because the mtDNA of Neanderthal and homo sapiens sapiens is so far apart as to go back almost to the separation from the apes. But there IS evidence of nuclear Neanderthal DNA in some Europeans living today which would be the result of homo sapiens sapiens women being raped by Neanderthal males. That puts a whole different perspective on things.

What Gooch describes as Neanderthal is very close to the description of psychopathy and that may very well be at the root of one of society's pressing problem: psychopathy may be a consequence of interbreeding between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. The dull-witted, un-creative, animal-like (sexually depraved and cannibalistic) Neanderthal, mixed with a genetic strain of superior intellect, creativity, and certain instinctual urges, could have made a very deadly mixture. Unfortunately, when Cro Magnon women had been raped by Neanderthal, their natural, instinctive care for their infants would have induced them to protect the half-breed children with the resulting spread of psychopathy genes in the modern population. It's interesting that the Neanderthal DNA is said to exist in the modern European population at about the same rate as genetic psychopaths.

Anyway, Gooch is actually a pretty bright guy and asks a lot of interesting questions that really do need to be answered and not shoved under the rug, but again and again he demonstrates his ignorance of the facts and data. He makes a big deal about the red ochre mines of South Africa without a shred of data to attribute them to Neanderthal. He basically creates an entire Neanderthal "religion" from a single bone with a bit of red ochere traces found in the cracks!

He talks about Neanderthal as a "nomadic species" when the data says otherwise. At the end, his chapter on red ochre leaves one wondering "what?" because he basically established nothing, said nothing of significance, proved nothing, and didn't even fulfill his own mandate of coming up with a good reason for why ancient man was so interested in red ochre and why he used it as he did.

He states that "until 30,000 BP Neanderthal (homo sapiens neanderthalensis is the only modern man on Earth. That is not correct. There are a number of acknowledged finds of homo sapiens sapiens that go back at least 100,000 years and some recent finds that are even older. So, right there, all the things that Gooch attributes to Neanderthal could very well have been produced by homo-sapiens sapiens and most likely, were.

Gooch - and others - would be well-served by reading the works of Victor Clube and Bill Napier:Cosmic Serpent: A Catastrophist View of Earth History, Richard Firestone, Allen West, Simon Warwick-Smith,The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization Mike Baillie,Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets (English Heritage), The Celtic Gods: Comets in Irish Mythology, New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection E. P. Grondine,Man and Impact in the Americas, Heinrich Koch: The Diluvian Impact: The Great Flood Catastrophe 10,000 Years Ago As The Consequence Of A Comet's Impact and others dealing with the issues of cyclical cometary catastrophes for clues to understanding the anomalies that have been, up to now, incomprehensible in a uniformitarian world-view. Nearly everything that Gooch explains as the result of the traumatic destruction of Neanderthal by Cro-Magnon man is better understood in the context of global environmental stresses. The lack of material archaeological evidence for many things can be understood along with the tiny bits and pieces of evidence that have survived.

Well, I wanted this to be short so I'm just going to say that this is as silly a book as I've ever read - and I read it with the latest Neanderthal research to hand to cross-check every claim - and I don't think that anybody ought to waste their money on it. Gooch is not a consistent thinker - he often contradicts himself in a single paragraph - and his logic is not even as good as that of a 10 year old. If he likes something, he claims it for Neanderthal - Cro-Magnon turned it around - and if he doesn't like it and it has persisted through time, then it was so strong that Cro-Magnon couldn't subvert it!

Gooch has a very poor sense of psychological situation and reality in relation to his topic and this leads him to superimpose erroneous, pejorative interpretations on many things that are easily understood if the complexity of the situation is taken into account. He tends to see the issues at hand in a rather doctrinaire and simplistic manner. He definitely evidences a certain contempt for moral, spiritual, truly HUMAN behavior, and seeks, through his "jolly romp" style to impose a dystopian conceptual world view on human groups. His oversimplified reasoning, based on the most easily available data, and devoid of psychological color, warps literally everything he turns his mind to. He clearly experiences a basic contempt for human nature at its best and longs for a "leftist world" where his dreams of sexual dominatrixes around every corner can be reality.

Uggggh.

Lost Christianity and 9-11

2010-03-31T14:41:00.003+02:00

I recently finished reading Jacob Needleman's "Lost Christianity." I'm recommending it to many people because it is a powerful adjunct to the work of Gurdjieff as well as my own Cassiopaean Experiment, the creation of PaleoChristianity. and the breathing and meditation program that got the whole ball rolling back in the 80s.

In any event, rather than writing a single review of this wonderful book, I thought I would share some of my margin notes made as I was reading.

On pages 50 and 51, Needleman quotes the schizoidal rant of Jean Daniélou, a Roman Catholic Cardinal (and Jesuit, by the way). Needleman is quoting this guy not because he approves of what he says, but as a foil to his following discussion. Daniélou writes:

But the fact remains that this assumes that man is able to reach God by his own powers. Christianity must categorically deny this, for two reasons. The first it the reality of original sin. This consists in a separation between man and God, which man cannot abolish by himself...

"Original Sin" is a complete fraud. When one has sufficient data about ancient cultures and religions, cosmic catastrophe factors and how those affected humankind, one realizes that the idea of "Original Sin" was a complete fraud probably made up by psychopaths during some catastrophe so as to take advantage of the situation and gain control over people who were frightened, disoriented, and otherwise vulnerable. We can see a clear example of how this can be done in the 9-11 event. A shocking event, driven home over and over again to put people in a state of shock, and their minds can be easily taken over and made to believe anything.

Well, imagine a planet getting slammed by a rain of comets exploding in the atmosphere, raining down fire, volcanoes going off, torrential rains and floods, and you have people in the exact same shocked and awed condition. And psychopaths know our psychology very well... thus the name of the invasion of Iraq: "Shock and Awe." It was a dead giveaway to the psychopathy of the group that made the plan.

Okay, next, Daniélou writes:

...the first doctrine of the Christian faith is the doctrine of the Creator-God, that is, the radical distinction between God and man.

Again, the source of such an idea is pathological: psychopathy and schizoidal psychopathy.

...For Christianity, the saved are those who believe, regardless of their level of interior life.

A doctrine designed to mask and protect psychopaths. You can be a slimeball all you want as long as you "believe."

Thus compared with Christianity, the pagan religions seem out of date and distorted.

That is just jaw-dropping. But that's pathology for you. Because, certainly, Danielou's "Christianity" is psychopathic.

{quoting Pius XII} "The Church has never treated the doctrines of the pagans with contempt and disdain; rather, she has freed them from all error, then completed them and crowned them with Christian Wisdom."

This formula admirably sums up the attitude of Christianity. It does not treat the religious values of the pagan religions with disdain. But it first purifies them from all error, that is, it destroys the corruption - especially idolatry...

Again, Jaw dropping! It also reveals Pius XII as pathological.

Needleman rightly mentions the fact that no one can read this summation of the core of modern Christianity without a strong reaction, either positive or negative.

Well, mine was decidedly negative. I had just finished reading several books where scholars had painstakingly gathered every scrap of information about different ancient cultures to try to get some full sense of their historical records, and again and again it was noted how the Catholic Church (and later, the Protestant Church), came along and just wantonly destroyed and vandalized the heritage of humanity in the name of their dead-man-on-a-stick religion.

Sheesh!

So, these are my first notations in the book and it had nothing to do with what Needleman was saying at all!

Notice that Wikipedia tells us the following about Daniélou:

His unexpected death in 1974, in the home of a prostitute, was very diversely interpreted. He died on the stairs of a brothel that he was visiting. It turned out he was bringing her money to pay for the bail of her lover. Thanks to a group including Henri Marrou, his reputation was cleared.

Yeah, right. And 19 incompetent Arab wannabe terrorists pulled off 9-11.

Evidence of Pathology in Power

2010-03-11T15:22:00.001+01:00

The following items have been brought to our attention over the past few days.

A Detention Bill You Ought to Read More Carefully
Marc Ambinder

Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump.
According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.

(There is no distinction between U.S. persons--visa holders or citizens--and non-U.S. persons.)

It would require these "belligerents" to be coded as "high-value detainee[s]" to be held in military custody and interrogated for their intelligence value by a High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team established by the president. (The H.I.G., of course, was established to bring a sophisticated interrogation capacity to the federal justice system.)

Any suspected unprivileged enemy belligerents considered a "high-value detainee" shall not be provided with a Miranda warning.

The bill asks the President to determine criteria for designating an individual as a "high-value detainee" if he/she: (1) poses a threat of an attack on civilians or civilian facilities within the U.S. or U.S. facilities abroad; (2) poses a threat to U.S. military personnel or U.S. military facilities; (3) potential intelligence value; (4) is a member of al Qaeda or a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda or (5) such other matters as the President considers appropriate. The President must submit the regulations and guidance to the appropriate committees of Congress no later than 60 days after enactment.

To the extent possible, the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must make a preliminary determination whether the detainee is an unprivileged enemy belligerent within 48 hours of taking detainee into custody.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Team must submit its determination to the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General after consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General make a final determination and report the determination to the President and the appropriate committees of Congress. In the case of any disagreement between the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General, the President will make the determination.

Note that the president himself doesn't get to make the call.

And:

9/11 TRUTHERS LOCKED UP FOR LIFE UNDER NEW US LAW

It seems that the Pathocracy that is taking over the world is proceeding according to the diagnostic outline presented byŁobaczewski in Political Ponerology. To wit:

"Any war waged by a pathocratic nation has two fronts, the internal and the external. The internal front is more important for the leaders and the governing elite... Pathocracy has other internal reasons for pursuing expansionism through the use of all means possible. As long... as that “other” world governed by the systems of normal man exists, it inducts into the non-pathological majority a certain sense of direction. The non-pathological majority of the country’s population will never stop dreaming of the reinstatement of the normal man’s system in any possible form. This majority will never stop watching other countries, waiting for the opportune moment; its attention and power must therefore be distracted from this purpose, and the masses must be “educated” and channeled in the direction of imperialist strivings. This goal must be pursued doggedly so that everyone knows what is being fought for and in whose name harsh discipline and poverty must be endured. The latter factor – creating conditions of poverty and hardship - effectively limits the possibility of “subversive” activities on the part of the society of normal people. ...

"The ideology must, of course, furnish a corresponding justification for this alleged right to conquer the world and must therefore be properly elaborated. Expansionism is derived from the very nature of pathocracy, not from ideology, but this fact must be masked by ideology. Whenever this phenomenon has been witnessed in history, imperialism was always its most demonstrative quality. ...

"We need to understand the nature of the macrosocial phenomenon as well as that basic relationship and controversy between the pathological system and those areas of science which describe psychological and psychopathological phenomena. Otherwise, we cannot become fully conscious of the reasons for such a government’s long published behavior.

"A normal person’s actions and reactions, his ideas and moral criteria, all too often strike abnormal individuals as abnormal. For if a person with some psychological deviations considers himself normal, which is of course significantly easier if he possesses authority, then he would consider a normal person different and therefore abnormal, whether in reality or as a result of conversive thinking. That explains why such people’s government shall always have the tendency to treat any dissidents as “mentally abnormal”.

"Operations such as driving a normal person into psychological illness and the use of psychiatric institutions for this purpose take place in many countries in which such institutions exist. Contemporary legislation binding upon normal man’s countries is not based upon an adequate understanding of the psychology of such behavior, and thus does not constitute a sufficient preventive measure against it.

"Within the categories of a normal psychological world view, the motivations for such behavior were variously understood and described: personal and family accounts, property matters, intent to discredit a witness’ testimony, and even political motivations. Such defamatory suggestions are used particularly often by individuals who are themselves not entirely normal, whose behavior has driven someone to a nervous breakdown or to violent protest. Among hysterics, such behavior tends to be a projection onto other people of one’s own self-critical associations. A normal person strikes a psychopath as a naive, smart-alecky believer in barely comprehensible theories; calling him “crazy” is not all that far away. ...

"What happens as a rule is that the idea of driving someone into mental illness issues from minds with various aberrations and psychological defects.... any system in which the abuse of psychiatry for allegedly political reasons has become a common phenomenon should be examined in the light of similar psychological criteria extrapolated onto the macrosocial scale. Any person rebelling internally against a governmental system, which shall always strike him as foreign and difficult to understand, and who is unable to hide this well enough, shall thus easily be designated by the representatives of said government as “mentally abnormal”, someone who should submit to psychiatric treatment. A scientifically and morally degenerate psychiatrist becomes a tool easily used for this purpose. ...

"The abuse of psychiatry for purposes we already know thus derives from the very nature of pathocracy as a macrosocial psychopathological phenomenon. After all, that very area of knowledge and treatment must first be degraded to prevent it from jeopardizing the system itself by pronouncing a dramatic diagnosis, and must then be used as an expedient tool in the hands of the authorities. ...

"The pathocracy feels increasingly threatened by this area whenever the medical and psychological sciences make progress. After all, not only can these sciences knock the weapon of psychological conquest right out of its hands; they can even strike at its very nature, and from inside the empire, at that.

"A specific perception of these matters therefore bids the pathocracy to be “ideationally alert” in this area. This also explains why anyone who is both too knowledgeable in this area and too far outside the immediate reach of such authorities should be accused of anything that can be trumped up, including psychological abnormality.

So, we see where it is going and we can pretty well figure out how it is going to end... Psychopaths are incapable of really learning from history, but maybe this time the normies could figure this out and avoid violence?

Healing With Food

2010-02-22T13:18:00.004+01:00

We are still moving forward with the cooking videos and, after the first one, where I showed how to make something really yummy and easy, I thought I would give a little more background.

I think I'm actually warming up to using a camera instead of a keyboard...

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

Next I'm going to be talking a little bit about the well-equipped kitchen and why cooking is part chemistry, part alchemy, part metallurgy, with a big dash of love!

Comets and Cooking

2010-02-07T12:43:00.003+01:00

I have received a number of emails asking me when I am going to finish my "Comet Series" that is posted on the left side of the SOTT.net main page under the funny image of Al Gore getting whacked with an asteroid. The most recent email of this kind goes as follows:

I have a question regarding the Comets and Catastrophe series. This series has not been updated with a new installment since June 30th 2008. The most recent and last article is 'Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction'. That article ends with the following:

"Somehow, psychopaths and comets are inextricably bound together; it is even possible that the same cosmic forces that sent comets our way also "created" psychopaths. This is what I want to explore in the final installments to this series of articles.

Stay tuned, our next stop is the end of the Last Ice Age when the Cosmic Serpent appeared on the scene and the processes that have led to our involvement in the Sixth Extinction got underway."

However there were no new installments for the rest of 2008, all of 2009, and so far for 2010. My question is, are you still working on the final installments for the series? Or new installments for the series? And if yes, is there any projected release date for those?

True, true... no new installments for quite awhile now.

Why?

Well, as usual, I want to know everything about a topic before I write about it and this intimation that was growing in my mind as a result of writing that series - the idea that psychopathy was inextricably linked with comets and disasters on this planet, deserved a thorough investigation. I've read probably more than a hundred books and papers on topics related to this problem since then and I am, now, ready to put my ideas out there in a more or less formal exposition.

Along the way, we have learned a LOT in other ways, have done a lot of other things, and I hope that you will enjoy a couple of videos I recently made. The first one is an introduction that will be followed up by a series of videos with the working title: Knowledge and Being, the other is - ready? - a Cooking Video! Yes, indeed! I became so engaged in diet and detox during this extended hiatus in which I was working very hard to recover my health, that I want to share what I learned about healthy food (it's not what you may think!) with everyone!

So, enjoy this interlude while I write about Comets, Psychopaths, and the Sixth Extinction.

Knowledge and Being Intro Video:

And now for some fun: Cooking at Buckwheat Castle!

Musical Interlude

2010-01-24T13:51:00.003+01:00

In case some of you wonder what kinds of music I listen to while researching and writing, here's one of my new favorites:

I've loved the music of Liszt since I was about 13 and I've listened to this piece literally thousands of times. Every note is burned into my brain. I've listened to dozens of performances and I don't care if this guy dresses weird, he's the best I've ever heard. I don't care that he missed one note in this otherwise perfect performance, he more than made up for it in sheer artistic virtuosity. In short, Maksim is a wonderful pianist and he can dress any way he wants!

Armed Response to 'Climategate' question

2010-01-22T12:09:00.000+01:00

This is totally unbelievable!