Since attending David Icke’s lecture at the Brixton Academy a few days ago (see below) this photograph has come to my attention. It’s an aerial view of the venue with the picture of the Illuminati pyramid on the US Dollar Bill for comparison; and they match! Astoria Walk or Brixton Road makes the foundation with Stockwell Road forming the left face and Stockwell Park Walk forming the right face. My jaw dropped when I saw it. David has delivered his last three British lectures inside an Illuminati truncated pyramid! It even has the capstone’s Eye of Horus on it! The Illuminati love putting symbols into things like street plans. They know that symbols can alter the spiritual energy of a particular place, the same way that a particularly shaped object placed in a river can alter its flow. (See my own articles on symbolism in Oxford: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/08/illuminati-architecture-in-oxford.html and
http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/08/oxford-architecture-pictures.html )
The origins of this symbol are obscure. It is part of the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States of America. One story goes that Thomas Jefferson, who designed the Great Seal in 1782, was sitting at his drawing board one dark, stormy evening, trying out drafts for the Great Seal, when there was a knock at his door, not the front door, but the patio doors to his garden! He opened the doors and a man stood before him clad in a long black cowl with a hood. The spectral stranger handed him a piece of paper with this design on it. His visitor then left without a word. Jefferson looked at the piece of paper and saw the pyramid design and decided to incorporate it into his design for the Great Seal.
The official historical analysis for the design is that the unfinished pyramid represents the unfinished new nation of the United States; the shadow represents the undiscovered country in the Wild West. The eye is the eye of God, the Christian God, looking after the country. The continuous repetition of the number 13, the 13 levels of the pyramid, the 13 stars and 13 letters in the motto etc, is because the independent nation was originally formed out of 13 imperial British, Spanish and French colonies. These became the first thirteen states, a number that was later raised to 50. The Latin motto of the United States appears on the Seal: Annuit Coeptis- Novus Ordo Seclorum. The first part means “He favours our undertaking” (Who does?) and the second part is a quote from Virgil: “New Order of the Ages”. However this can also be translated as… wait for it… New World Order! Yes, the pyramid can be interpreted in another way: The structure representing the people. The bulk of the people are in the main pyramid, but there is a small superhuman elite, signified by the capstone, governed by the occult powers of Ancient Egypt and possessing knowledge that the "profane masses" are denied. The small gap between the pyramid and the capstone is the separation of the Illuminati, literally "The Enlightened Ones", from the rest of us. They see us as an inferior species. We're just one more breed of farm animal to them.
Does David know about this? Has he noticed that he’s doing his live lectures inside an Illuminati pyramid symbol? Why? Some people think he’s an agent working for them. I doubt this, seeing as he has such a transparent background, but I think he may be being duped by them. Did they subconsciously entice him to this particular venue? He should have listened to Matthew Delooze!
I got very ill very suddenly on the coach home from the 2006 lecture. I actually fainted in my seat. Was I being assaulted by the energy of the Pyramid and All-Seeing Eye?
Friday, 30 May 2008
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Chocky
The 1984 Thames TV adaptation of Chocky is now on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kP6xJC_MiY You can also get it on DVD, together with its two sequels (Although the sequels are rather poor imitations in my view). I remember as a child watching this avidly. I found it creepy, exciting and very absorbing, but in those days I didn't understand the themes of the story. Today I do.
The TV series is adapted from the last novel by John Wyndham, published in 1968, the year before the author’s death. This is the famous British sci-fi writer who wrote many very insightful and chilling tales of otherworldly matters. Like Day of the Triffids, about giant alien carnivorous plants. He also wrote a terrifying novel about alien-human hybridization called The Midwich Cuckoos. Chocky is the story of an ordinary 12-year-old schoolboy called Matthew who is one day contacted psychically by an intelligence from another world, either an alien planet or dimension. The plot vaguely resembles that of the film Harvey which I’ve written about before (http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/03/imaginary-friends.html), but Chocky is not a comedy and is far less light-hearted. It is actually quite disturbing. Matthew’s parents are not initially concerned, thinking that it’s just a childhood imaginary friend; although Matthew is slightly old for one, they assume it’s a brief phase. But as time goes on they realize that Matthew is picking up knowledge and developing skills that he could not possibly have learned at school. The knowledge transfer is two-way; the alien entity has an equally voracious curiosity about the Earth and humans. Matthew’s telepathic encounters eventually get him and his family into trouble. He is taken into the care of psychiatrists and the family find themselves shadowed by undercover government officials, rather like the Men-in-Black.
When I watched it as a child I didn’t know what I do now: That the story of Chocky is very similar to real events. I wonder how much John Wyndham really knew. Did he have access to people and information that he hasn’t revealed? There are real people who’ve had experiences just like Matthew’s. I’ve read true-life books by them and even met a few of them. Somewhere “out there” in space or even hyperspace, there are conscious beings that are able to communicate with Earth humans and even visit them! Some of these cases are even more bizarre and disquieting that Matthew’s. Matthew is not “possessed” in the sense of a demonic walk-in. He is able to control the alien’s access to his mind and eventually develops a friendly working relationship with it. Real encounters are often far more violent and damaging. Interest and obtrusion by government agencies is another aspect to these encounters that happens in real events too.
I strongly recommend this excellent TV series to anyone with an interest in aliens, UFO’s, ghosts, channeling or abductions. I’ve never read the book, but I’ll have to get hold of the copy and read it.
The TV series is adapted from the last novel by John Wyndham, published in 1968, the year before the author’s death. This is the famous British sci-fi writer who wrote many very insightful and chilling tales of otherworldly matters. Like Day of the Triffids, about giant alien carnivorous plants. He also wrote a terrifying novel about alien-human hybridization called The Midwich Cuckoos. Chocky is the story of an ordinary 12-year-old schoolboy called Matthew who is one day contacted psychically by an intelligence from another world, either an alien planet or dimension. The plot vaguely resembles that of the film Harvey which I’ve written about before (http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/03/imaginary-friends.html), but Chocky is not a comedy and is far less light-hearted. It is actually quite disturbing. Matthew’s parents are not initially concerned, thinking that it’s just a childhood imaginary friend; although Matthew is slightly old for one, they assume it’s a brief phase. But as time goes on they realize that Matthew is picking up knowledge and developing skills that he could not possibly have learned at school. The knowledge transfer is two-way; the alien entity has an equally voracious curiosity about the Earth and humans. Matthew’s telepathic encounters eventually get him and his family into trouble. He is taken into the care of psychiatrists and the family find themselves shadowed by undercover government officials, rather like the Men-in-Black.
When I watched it as a child I didn’t know what I do now: That the story of Chocky is very similar to real events. I wonder how much John Wyndham really knew. Did he have access to people and information that he hasn’t revealed? There are real people who’ve had experiences just like Matthew’s. I’ve read true-life books by them and even met a few of them. Somewhere “out there” in space or even hyperspace, there are conscious beings that are able to communicate with Earth humans and even visit them! Some of these cases are even more bizarre and disquieting that Matthew’s. Matthew is not “possessed” in the sense of a demonic walk-in. He is able to control the alien’s access to his mind and eventually develops a friendly working relationship with it. Real encounters are often far more violent and damaging. Interest and obtrusion by government agencies is another aspect to these encounters that happens in real events too.
I strongly recommend this excellent TV series to anyone with an interest in aliens, UFO’s, ghosts, channeling or abductions. I’ve never read the book, but I’ll have to get hold of the copy and read it.
Sunday, 25 May 2008
David Icke- Live!
Yesterday I went to see David Icke live in London. He was appearing at his usual place, the Carling Academy in Brixton. I’ve attended every one of David’s live shows since 2002 and this is probably the best one. I thank David as well as Sean, Linda, Ayem and everyone else who made the show possible. The ticket price for the show was £30. That sounds very expensive at first, but actually, when you consider that it is an all-day event at one of London’s top nightspots, it’s an absolute bargain. Amy Winehouse appeared on that same stage only last year and it would have set you back £58 to see her. What’s more her show lasted less than two hours, as opposed to David’s seven and a half!
I left home at 6 AM and got to London at 8. I did a bit of sightseeing, walking round by the “Reptile House”- Buckingham Palace and the seat of the Illuminati-Occupied Global Government (UK branch) at Whitehall, Downing Street and The Houses of Parliament. I saw the Ministry of Defence and was in two minds whether to knock on the door and see if Nick Pope was in! I then walked along the river to the City of London to see the Temple Church, the famous esoteric building featured in The Da Vinci Code. Contrary to popular belief it’s quite accessible and easy to find and you can get to it just off the City end of Fleet Street, down an alleyway to the right. Unfortunately it was shut and even the courtyard around it was locked up. I’ll have to go back another time. I arrived at the venue early and was near the front of the queue. I did an interview with a reporter from Kerrang Radio, a station that has featured David a lot recently. But I got the distinct feeling that the interview was a bit tongue-in-cheek. The reporter asked me: “Do you believe in the Lizards then?” I answered honestly: “I think it’s worth looking into. So many people have seen other people shape-shifting that there’s a case to answer. The phenomenon also can be found throughout history and mythology all over the world. I agree that it sounds bizarre, but maybe its bizarreness is the very thing that keeps it secret. There’s no need to suppress something if people are just going to laugh it out of town.” The reporter smirked as if a comedy gag had just come off.
It didn’t take long to meet up with some of the other David Icke Forum members. I already know Thirdwave and Dondaz, but yesterday I also met I Am, PT23, Lostinastrangeworld, Mitch and several others. They all seemed to recognize me, coming up to me and saying “Hi, are you Hagbard Celine?” I must have one of these instantly-discernable faces; is that good or bad!? The best part of the day was that I managed to get a backstage pass, so I could go up to the performers’ lounge and meet David in person. It was lovely to get to talk to David face-to-face at last! I had a couple of beers, although David stuck to soft drinks, and discussed many subjects, along with several other new people I’d met there. I asked David about Professor Richard Dawkins and David echoed very much what I’d written about him myself in my review of The God Delusion (see below): “Richard Dawkins is the ultimate left-brain prisoner.” And that’s exactly it. Unlike Jill Bolte Taylor (see my article A Stroke of Genius below) Dawkins has never had the opportunity to witness the awe and majesty of the right brain when it shakes itself free of the warped and poisoned malfunctioning left-brain taskmaster that lives... has been cultivated... in all our heads. I bought David’s DVD of his appearance at the Oxford Union. I wanted to go along to that personally and even found somebody to sign me in, but unfortunately David had to cancel at the last minute and was rebooked at too short notice. I’m looking forward to watching it because it must have been a challenge for David. The Union has been the central hotbed of controversy in Oxford for almost two hundred years and its members are trained and practiced in grilling people. Still I’m sure David gave them a run for their money! David has been an enormous inspiration to me and his work has totally transformed my life; if it wasn’t for him then HPANWO probably would not exist. It was an honour to meet him.
David, as usual, opened his show by playing music. In this case he chose the song A Kind of Magic by Queen. It was very appropriate and set the scene for the lecture very well. David has changed a lot since the last show two years ago. He has lost some weight and looks much healthier. On his birthday last month he announced that he’s gone teetotal. He seemed to have more energy too. At all his other shows performing on stage really seems to take it out of him. He used to pant for breath, sweat and go red in the face; not this time. He had a spring in his step that I’ve never seen before. He’s changed the format of his lectures since the last Brixton show, as you will see if you watch his pay-per-view Mount Shasta talk. He now opens with the holographic universe theory and the nature of reality, goes into the “5-sense stuff”, 9/11 and Reptilians in part two and ends with how to break the spell. His work is concentrating more on the physics and metaphysics of the universe than the nuts-and-bolts of the conspiracy than it used to. However he doesn’t neglect the Bilderberg Group, the Masons and Round Table etc and still explores it. His website still relates information on the political and social consequences of the New World Order agenda. This event was very good-natured and all the rumours I’d heard about organized plans to disrupt it happily proved false. The hecklers who’d spoiled parts of the 2006 talk were nowhere to be seen. In fact the whole sold-out auditorium was united in a celebration of David’s liberating and joyful ideas. I’m very glad I went to Brixton and I’ll do everything I can to attend David’s future talks. I strongly recommend them to all HPANWO-readers.
After meeting David in the theatre I went with all my forum buddies on the Underground to Victoria and spent a lovely hour or so in a pub. I then had only a short walk to the coach station. I fell asleep on the coach home, but was relieved not to suffer the illness that suddenly hit me after the last lecture in 2006. I got home at 1 AM this morning, totally exhausted, but extremely happy.
I left home at 6 AM and got to London at 8. I did a bit of sightseeing, walking round by the “Reptile House”- Buckingham Palace and the seat of the Illuminati-Occupied Global Government (UK branch) at Whitehall, Downing Street and The Houses of Parliament. I saw the Ministry of Defence and was in two minds whether to knock on the door and see if Nick Pope was in! I then walked along the river to the City of London to see the Temple Church, the famous esoteric building featured in The Da Vinci Code. Contrary to popular belief it’s quite accessible and easy to find and you can get to it just off the City end of Fleet Street, down an alleyway to the right. Unfortunately it was shut and even the courtyard around it was locked up. I’ll have to go back another time. I arrived at the venue early and was near the front of the queue. I did an interview with a reporter from Kerrang Radio, a station that has featured David a lot recently. But I got the distinct feeling that the interview was a bit tongue-in-cheek. The reporter asked me: “Do you believe in the Lizards then?” I answered honestly: “I think it’s worth looking into. So many people have seen other people shape-shifting that there’s a case to answer. The phenomenon also can be found throughout history and mythology all over the world. I agree that it sounds bizarre, but maybe its bizarreness is the very thing that keeps it secret. There’s no need to suppress something if people are just going to laugh it out of town.” The reporter smirked as if a comedy gag had just come off.
It didn’t take long to meet up with some of the other David Icke Forum members. I already know Thirdwave and Dondaz, but yesterday I also met I Am, PT23, Lostinastrangeworld, Mitch and several others. They all seemed to recognize me, coming up to me and saying “Hi, are you Hagbard Celine?” I must have one of these instantly-discernable faces; is that good or bad!? The best part of the day was that I managed to get a backstage pass, so I could go up to the performers’ lounge and meet David in person. It was lovely to get to talk to David face-to-face at last! I had a couple of beers, although David stuck to soft drinks, and discussed many subjects, along with several other new people I’d met there. I asked David about Professor Richard Dawkins and David echoed very much what I’d written about him myself in my review of The God Delusion (see below): “Richard Dawkins is the ultimate left-brain prisoner.” And that’s exactly it. Unlike Jill Bolte Taylor (see my article A Stroke of Genius below) Dawkins has never had the opportunity to witness the awe and majesty of the right brain when it shakes itself free of the warped and poisoned malfunctioning left-brain taskmaster that lives... has been cultivated... in all our heads. I bought David’s DVD of his appearance at the Oxford Union. I wanted to go along to that personally and even found somebody to sign me in, but unfortunately David had to cancel at the last minute and was rebooked at too short notice. I’m looking forward to watching it because it must have been a challenge for David. The Union has been the central hotbed of controversy in Oxford for almost two hundred years and its members are trained and practiced in grilling people. Still I’m sure David gave them a run for their money! David has been an enormous inspiration to me and his work has totally transformed my life; if it wasn’t for him then HPANWO probably would not exist. It was an honour to meet him.
David, as usual, opened his show by playing music. In this case he chose the song A Kind of Magic by Queen. It was very appropriate and set the scene for the lecture very well. David has changed a lot since the last show two years ago. He has lost some weight and looks much healthier. On his birthday last month he announced that he’s gone teetotal. He seemed to have more energy too. At all his other shows performing on stage really seems to take it out of him. He used to pant for breath, sweat and go red in the face; not this time. He had a spring in his step that I’ve never seen before. He’s changed the format of his lectures since the last Brixton show, as you will see if you watch his pay-per-view Mount Shasta talk. He now opens with the holographic universe theory and the nature of reality, goes into the “5-sense stuff”, 9/11 and Reptilians in part two and ends with how to break the spell. His work is concentrating more on the physics and metaphysics of the universe than the nuts-and-bolts of the conspiracy than it used to. However he doesn’t neglect the Bilderberg Group, the Masons and Round Table etc and still explores it. His website still relates information on the political and social consequences of the New World Order agenda. This event was very good-natured and all the rumours I’d heard about organized plans to disrupt it happily proved false. The hecklers who’d spoiled parts of the 2006 talk were nowhere to be seen. In fact the whole sold-out auditorium was united in a celebration of David’s liberating and joyful ideas. I’m very glad I went to Brixton and I’ll do everything I can to attend David’s future talks. I strongly recommend them to all HPANWO-readers.
After meeting David in the theatre I went with all my forum buddies on the Underground to Victoria and spent a lovely hour or so in a pub. I then had only a short walk to the coach station. I fell asleep on the coach home, but was relieved not to suffer the illness that suddenly hit me after the last lecture in 2006. I got home at 1 AM this morning, totally exhausted, but extremely happy.
Saturday, 17 May 2008
More British UFO Files Released!
(Background article: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/british-ufo-files-declassified.html )
There’s been a lot of talk in the media this week about UFO’s. This is because the Ministry of Defence has carried out another wave of UFO file declassifications. See:
The MoD has today begun a 4-year programme of releasing its entire archive of UFO files. I used to run the MoD's UFO project and because I worked on these files, I helped the National Archives on this project, selecting documents that might be of interest to the media. I commend the government for this move. These files don't prove we've been visited by aliens. Most UFOs can be explained as misidentifications of aircraft lights, satellites, meteors, stars and planets. But a small percentage are more difficult to explain and involve UFOs seen by police officers, commercial airline pilots and military personnel, or tracked on radar. Such incidents persuade me that whatever the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, it raises important defence, national security and flight safety issues. (Source: http://www.nickpope.net/index.html)
The files can be downloaded for free as PDF’s from the MoD’s website: http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FreedomOfInformation/PublicationScheme/SearchPublicationScheme/UfoReports19972007InTheUk.htm
I personally dispute Nick Pope’s brave claim that the government are releasing all their files. The Freedom of Information Act can be countered on the grounds of “national security interests” and has been. In one of Timothy Good’s books, there’s a report of a court case in which a FOIA suit failed for that reason. Anyone who looks under the surface at the massive amount of highly expert testimony on UFO-related government operations will see that there has to be more to the issue. It’s naïve to think that there are no other documents, perhaps stored outside the MoD, that are not far more explosive and damning. Nick is confident that as head of the UFO desk at the MoD if the government had secrets about UFO's then he'd know about it. Personally if I had a "saucer in a hanger" as Nick says, then Nick Pope, the public face of British UFOlogy, would be the last man on Earth I'd tell!
However the released files are well worth looking at. As you can see there are hundreds of reports. Barely a week has gone by in the last decade without someone reporting a UFO. They're a bit concise; just the date, town, county and a one-sentence description, but it's still worth a browse. See how many you can find from your home town or district! This is just the tip of the iceberg I'm sure, because how many people see them and don't report them? Myself for one. As regular HPANWO-readers will know, I've had two sightings myself and I've told none of the authorities at all, only amateur UFOlogists.
Unfortunately, but predictably, the media are treating this as a novelty story. This one is par for the course: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSL1364434320080514
The Rt. Hon. Paul Helyer MP, a former defence minister of Canada, said "UFO's are as real as the aeroplanes that fly over our heads." A US government UFO spokesman Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter once said: “The government is interested and concerned by the UFO presence in our skies, but through official ridicule and denial, the public are led to believe that the whole phenomenon is nonsense.” (My emphasis. Good 2006) This is what we’re looking at! Last year’s declassification wave was reported on by Richard and Judy, with the newscaster being harassed by a tin-foil model UFO on a string, accompanied by laughter from the studio! Official ridicule indeed!
(Scroll down after reading this because there are two new articles on HPANWO today)
There’s been a lot of talk in the media this week about UFO’s. This is because the Ministry of Defence has carried out another wave of UFO file declassifications. See:
The MoD has today begun a 4-year programme of releasing its entire archive of UFO files. I used to run the MoD's UFO project and because I worked on these files, I helped the National Archives on this project, selecting documents that might be of interest to the media. I commend the government for this move. These files don't prove we've been visited by aliens. Most UFOs can be explained as misidentifications of aircraft lights, satellites, meteors, stars and planets. But a small percentage are more difficult to explain and involve UFOs seen by police officers, commercial airline pilots and military personnel, or tracked on radar. Such incidents persuade me that whatever the true nature of the UFO phenomenon, it raises important defence, national security and flight safety issues. (Source: http://www.nickpope.net/index.html)
The files can be downloaded for free as PDF’s from the MoD’s website: http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FreedomOfInformation/PublicationScheme/SearchPublicationScheme/UfoReports19972007InTheUk.htm
I personally dispute Nick Pope’s brave claim that the government are releasing all their files. The Freedom of Information Act can be countered on the grounds of “national security interests” and has been. In one of Timothy Good’s books, there’s a report of a court case in which a FOIA suit failed for that reason. Anyone who looks under the surface at the massive amount of highly expert testimony on UFO-related government operations will see that there has to be more to the issue. It’s naïve to think that there are no other documents, perhaps stored outside the MoD, that are not far more explosive and damning. Nick is confident that as head of the UFO desk at the MoD if the government had secrets about UFO's then he'd know about it. Personally if I had a "saucer in a hanger" as Nick says, then Nick Pope, the public face of British UFOlogy, would be the last man on Earth I'd tell!
However the released files are well worth looking at. As you can see there are hundreds of reports. Barely a week has gone by in the last decade without someone reporting a UFO. They're a bit concise; just the date, town, county and a one-sentence description, but it's still worth a browse. See how many you can find from your home town or district! This is just the tip of the iceberg I'm sure, because how many people see them and don't report them? Myself for one. As regular HPANWO-readers will know, I've had two sightings myself and I've told none of the authorities at all, only amateur UFOlogists.
Unfortunately, but predictably, the media are treating this as a novelty story. This one is par for the course: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSL1364434320080514
The Rt. Hon. Paul Helyer MP, a former defence minister of Canada, said "UFO's are as real as the aeroplanes that fly over our heads." A US government UFO spokesman Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter once said: “The government is interested and concerned by the UFO presence in our skies, but through official ridicule and denial, the public are led to believe that the whole phenomenon is nonsense.” (My emphasis. Good 2006) This is what we’re looking at! Last year’s declassification wave was reported on by Richard and Judy, with the newscaster being harassed by a tin-foil model UFO on a string, accompanied by laughter from the studio! Official ridicule indeed!
(Scroll down after reading this because there are two new articles on HPANWO today)
Basic Income
Basic Income is a visionary social security system that is UK Green Party policy (not that I’m advocating voting for them!) and David Icke wrote about it in It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This. It makes far more sense to me than any other welfare system I’ve heard of. The best thing about it is its simplicity. It works by the state paying every single citizen a certain amount of money; not a king’s ransom, just enough to live on; enough to ensure that that person will not starve or lose their home. The simplicity comes from the fact that there is no means-testing. There is no need for the army of clerical staff, city blocks of offices, security and fraud investigators, humiliating job-seekers interviews, signing-on and dole queues. The payment is set at a single, fixed rate and paid to everyone, rich and poor, able-bodied and disabled, working or not working. This means that if you have a job, you’re still getting your basic income on top of your wages; the tax money you pay to fund the scheme is one you benefit from too; so there’ll be no need to grit your teeth and tear your hair out any more over “lazy scroungers”!
The main criticism of Basic Income is that it removes the incentive to work. But as we’ve been shown time and time again, the idea that people need a whip-cracking negative incentive to work is a myth. It’s a myth very widely-held in Britain unfortunately and is promoted by much respected political figures and some of our best-selling newspapers. Look at the statistics: During the recession of the1980’s unemployment rose to over 3 million, yet after that recession, in the late 90’s, it fell to less that 500,000. Why do people suddenly and mysteriously stop being lazy during boom-times, Margaret Thatcher? I moan about having to go to work sometimes, but last year, when I was off sick for several weeks, I couldn’t wait to get back! And, if you check out my article on Workers’ Cooperatives you’ll understand that if unemployment can be as low as half a million under the current global corporate system, imagine how low it could get in the future when we bring in Workers’ Coops!: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/09/workers-cooperatives.html
Basic Income is the welfare state of kindness, insight and common sense. It is sadly not in force on a large scale today. There are several local versions in Namibia and Alaska has a form of Basic Income linked to oil profits. I hope a time will come when it is used all over the world. But hopefully a time will come when even it is not needed! In a way, social security of any kind is a symptom of society’s failure; it’s a salve to prevent individual people from going under due to this failure. In an ideal world it would not be necessary. Of course the world we live in is not ideal, but it could be. There’s no point lamenting: “If only the world was a better place!” The world is our creation. If it’s in the state it’s in that’s because of what we’ve done, or haven’t done. We can make it better. It’s our choice!
Here's a website of the Basic Income proponents: http://www.etes.ucl.ac.be/BIEN/Index.html
The main criticism of Basic Income is that it removes the incentive to work. But as we’ve been shown time and time again, the idea that people need a whip-cracking negative incentive to work is a myth. It’s a myth very widely-held in Britain unfortunately and is promoted by much respected political figures and some of our best-selling newspapers. Look at the statistics: During the recession of the1980’s unemployment rose to over 3 million, yet after that recession, in the late 90’s, it fell to less that 500,000. Why do people suddenly and mysteriously stop being lazy during boom-times, Margaret Thatcher? I moan about having to go to work sometimes, but last year, when I was off sick for several weeks, I couldn’t wait to get back! And, if you check out my article on Workers’ Cooperatives you’ll understand that if unemployment can be as low as half a million under the current global corporate system, imagine how low it could get in the future when we bring in Workers’ Coops!: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/09/workers-cooperatives.html
Basic Income is the welfare state of kindness, insight and common sense. It is sadly not in force on a large scale today. There are several local versions in Namibia and Alaska has a form of Basic Income linked to oil profits. I hope a time will come when it is used all over the world. But hopefully a time will come when even it is not needed! In a way, social security of any kind is a symptom of society’s failure; it’s a salve to prevent individual people from going under due to this failure. In an ideal world it would not be necessary. Of course the world we live in is not ideal, but it could be. There’s no point lamenting: “If only the world was a better place!” The world is our creation. If it’s in the state it’s in that’s because of what we’ve done, or haven’t done. We can make it better. It’s our choice!
Here's a website of the Basic Income proponents: http://www.etes.ucl.ac.be/BIEN/Index.html
Monday, 12 May 2008
The Plankers
Crop circle season is here again, and the first formations of 2008 are already appearing. At the time of writing there are two in southern England, the crop circle “heartland”, and one each in Italy and the United States, see: http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2008/2008.html . As always the question invariably comes up: Who, or what, is responsible for these events? The crop circles have an interesting history. They first entered the public conscience in the 1970’s and 80’s, but the earliest crop circle reports date back to the 16th century in the Netherlands and the 17th Century in England; and the RAF took the first aerial crop circle photo in 1932 (Thomas 1999), but they remained virtually undiscussed until the 70’s. In 1991 two elderly Wiltshire men, Douglas Bowers and David Chorley, confessed to having perpetrating all of them as a hoax. They even created a simple circle on Central TV News to “prove it”. That was the end of it as far as the media were concerned; “Mystery solved!... What’s happening on Coronation Street?” (I'm ashamed to say that I fell for that one myself! I thought nothing of crop circles after that for more than 5 years until I saw Andy Thomas on Esther, Esther Rantzen's talk show, and I thought: "What!? Is it still going on!?") And to this day, for Conformism and science the answer is simple: They are a form of landscape art, made by ordinary people with a developed knack and using simple tools: surveyor’s measuring equipment, a garden roller and an invented tool called a “stalk-stomper”, a plank of wood with a loop of rope or chain attached. Is that all there is to the story? Are all crop circles simply the product of “Doug and Dave” and their protégés? You decide. Here's the website of the "plankers":http://www.circlemakers.org/
They’re an odd bunch. John Lundberg, the chief author of the site, emailed me once because I'd accused him of being a disinformer on the DarkConspiracy forum. In reflection I think I was being a bit harsh on him. I’ve no grounds to accuse him personally, and I don't see anything wrong with the plankers’ kind of landscape art (except for the damage it does to the farmer's field, although the farmers can make more than a compensating few bob off them if they know what they’re doing!), but there's no doubt that the circlemakers' activities is leading people to wrongly believe that every crop circle is made by the plankers. Even the plankers themselves don't claim that they've made all of them, although they water it down a bit; words to the effect of: "Well, no we don't know who made that one, so there must be circle-making gangs that we're not in touch with." (Matthew Williams- CFZ Weird Weekend 2006) The plankers are actually every bit as much “New Age” and "freaky" as most of the “croppies”, people like me who study crop circles as a paranormal phenomenon! They regularly report paranormal activity while they're making the circles. They carry out pagan ceremonies at their circlemaking sites too.
There's no doubt that some of the circles are made by the plankers, some even reckon it is the majority, but anyone who looks a little deeper will see that human activity cannot possibly account for the whole phenomenon. But how many people look deeper? Don't most people just switch off after reading stuff like the above picture? Does anyone look into the Leavengood Investigation, Lucy Pringle, Michael Glickman and all the other researchers who’ve concluded that the crop circles are not all man-made? Why doesn’t The Sun, "the People's Paper" report that?
Without accusing John Lundberg as a person outright again, it still pays not to underestimate the capacity of psyops and government disinformation. We’ve already seen, in other manifestations of the supernatural and otherworldy, that the authorities deliberately seed lies to put people off the scent of them: (EG:http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/03/roswells-galore.html ). They seem to have an almost knee-jerk aversion to strange phenomena, for whatever reason (which I explore elsewhere). Crop circles qualify as part of that department and I'd be far from surprised if the government initiated very broad and convincing propaganda to try and suppress the truth.
They’re an odd bunch. John Lundberg, the chief author of the site, emailed me once because I'd accused him of being a disinformer on the DarkConspiracy forum. In reflection I think I was being a bit harsh on him. I’ve no grounds to accuse him personally, and I don't see anything wrong with the plankers’ kind of landscape art (except for the damage it does to the farmer's field, although the farmers can make more than a compensating few bob off them if they know what they’re doing!), but there's no doubt that the circlemakers' activities is leading people to wrongly believe that every crop circle is made by the plankers. Even the plankers themselves don't claim that they've made all of them, although they water it down a bit; words to the effect of: "Well, no we don't know who made that one, so there must be circle-making gangs that we're not in touch with." (Matthew Williams- CFZ Weird Weekend 2006) The plankers are actually every bit as much “New Age” and "freaky" as most of the “croppies”, people like me who study crop circles as a paranormal phenomenon! They regularly report paranormal activity while they're making the circles. They carry out pagan ceremonies at their circlemaking sites too.
There's no doubt that some of the circles are made by the plankers, some even reckon it is the majority, but anyone who looks a little deeper will see that human activity cannot possibly account for the whole phenomenon. But how many people look deeper? Don't most people just switch off after reading stuff like the above picture? Does anyone look into the Leavengood Investigation, Lucy Pringle, Michael Glickman and all the other researchers who’ve concluded that the crop circles are not all man-made? Why doesn’t The Sun, "the People's Paper" report that?
Without accusing John Lundberg as a person outright again, it still pays not to underestimate the capacity of psyops and government disinformation. We’ve already seen, in other manifestations of the supernatural and otherworldy, that the authorities deliberately seed lies to put people off the scent of them: (EG:http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/03/roswells-galore.html ). They seem to have an almost knee-jerk aversion to strange phenomena, for whatever reason (which I explore elsewhere). Crop circles qualify as part of that department and I'd be far from surprised if the government initiated very broad and convincing propaganda to try and suppress the truth.
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Debating With a Skepster
I came across a brilliant webpage the other day which put into words something I've been thinking for a long time. I like to wrangle and often take my debate to the enemy, the Skeptic Movement, and if you visit the HPANWO forum (See links column) you'll see that they often bring theirs to me! By the way, the reason I always spell the word "Skeptic" in the American way with a k, rather than a c and a lower case s is that for me the two word forms have very different meanings. The word "sceptic" simply means someone who disbelieves, whereas the word "Skeptic" refers to a member of a socio-polticial movement that promotes conventional science, philosophical materialism and upholds the naturalist viewpoint.:
Ever get into an argument with a skeptic only to end up exasperated and feeling you've been bamboozled? Skeptics are often highly skilled at tying up opponents in clever verbal knots. Most skeptics are, of course, ordinary, more-or-less honest people who, like the rest of us, are just trying to make the best sense they can of a complicated and often confusing world. Others, however, are merely glib sophists who use specious reasoning to defend their prejudices or attack the ideas and beliefs of others, and even an honest skeptic can innocently fall into the mistake of employing bad reasoning. In reading, listening to and sometimes debating skeptics over the years, I've found certain tricks, ploys and gimmicks which they tend to use over and over again. Here are some of 'em. Perhaps if you keep them in mind when arguing with a skeptic, you'll feel better when the debate is over. Shucks, you might even score a point or two.
1.) RAISING THE BAR (Or IMPOSSIBLE PERFECTION): This trick consists of demanding a new, higher and more difficult standard of evidence whenever it looks as if a skeptic's opponent is going to satisfy an old one. Often the skeptic doesn't make it clear exactly what the standards are in the first place. This can be especially effective if the skeptic can keep his opponent from noticing that he is continually changing his standard of evidence. That way, his opponent will eventually give up in exasperation or disgust. Perhaps best of all, if his opponent complains, the skeptic can tag him as a whiner or a sore loser. Skeptic: I am willing to consider the psi hypothesis if you will only show me some sound evidence. Opponent: There are many thousands of documented reports of incidents that seem to involve psi. S: That is only anecdotal evidence. You must give me laboratory evidence. 0: Researchers A-Z have conducted experiments that produced results which favor the psi hypothesis. S: Those experiments are not acceptable because of flaws X,Y andZ. 0: Researchers B-H and T-W have conducted experiments producing positive results which did not have flaws X,Y and Z. S: The positive results are not far enough above chance levels to be truly interesting. 0: Researchers C-F and U-V produced results well above chance levels. S: Their results were achieved through meta-analysis, which is a highly questionable technique. O: Meta-analysis is a well-accepted method commonly used in psychology and sociology. S: Psychology and sociology are social sciences, and their methods can't be considered as reliable as those of hard sciences such as physics and chemistry. Etc., etc. ad nauseum.
2.) SOCK 'EM WITH OCCAM: Skeptics frequently invoke Occam's Razor as if the Razor automatically validates their position. Occam's Razor, a principle of epistemology (knowledge theory), states that the simplest explanation which fits all the facts is to be preferred -- or, to state it another way, entities are not to be multiplied needlessly. The Razor is a useful and even necessary principle, but it is largely useless if the facts themselves are not generally agreed upon in the first place.
3.) EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS: Extraordinary claims, says the skeptic, require extraordinary evidence. Superficially this seems reasonable enough. However, extraordinariness, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Some claims, of course, would seem extraordinary to almost anyone (e.g. the claim that aliens from Alpha Centauri had contacted you telepathically and informed you that the people of Earth must make you their absolute lord and ruler). The "extraordinariness" of many other claims, however, is at best arguable, and it is not at all obvious that unusually strong evidence is necessary to support them. For example, so many people who would ordinarily be considered reliable witnesses have reported precognitive dreams that it becomes difficult to insist these are "unusual" claims requiring "unusual" evidence. Quite ordinary standards of evidence will do.
4.) STUPID, CRAZY LIARS: This trick consists of simple slander.Anyone who reports anything which displeases the skeptic will be accused of incompetence, mental illness or dishonesty, or some combination of the three without a single shred of fact to support the accusations. When Charles Honorton's Ganzfeld experiments produced impressive results in favor of the psi hypothesis, skeptics accused him of suppressing or not publishing the results of failed experiments. No definite facts supporting the charge ever emerged. Moreover, the experiments were extremely time consuming, and the number of failed, unpublished experiments necessary to make the number of successful, published experiments significant would have been quite high, so it is extremely unlikely that Honorton's results could be due to selective reporting. Yet skeptics still sometimes repeat this accusation.
5.) THE SANTA CLAUS GAMBIT: This trick consists of lumping moderate claims or propositions together with extreme ones. If you suggest, for example, that Sasquatch can't be completely ruled out from the available evidence, the skeptic will then facetiously suggest that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny can't be "completely" ruled out either.
6.) SHIFTING THE BURDEN OF EVIDENCE: The skeptic insists that he doesn't have to provide evidence and arguments to support his side of the argument because he isn't asserting a claim, he is merely denying or doubting yours. His mistake consists of assuming that a negative claim (asserting that something doesn't exist) is fundamentally different from a positive claim. It isn't. Any definite claim, positive or negative, requires definite support. Merely refuting or arguing against an opponent's position is not enough to establish one's own position.. In other words, you can't win by default. As arch-skeptic Carl Sagan himself said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If someone wants to rule out visitations by extra-terrestrial aliens, it would not be enough to point out that all the evidence presented so far is either seriously flawed or not very strong. It would be necessary to state definite reasons which would make ET visitations either impossible or highly unlikely. (He might, for example, point out that our best understanding of physics pretty much rules out any kind of effective faster-than-light drive.) The only person exempt from providing definite support is the person who takes a strict "I don't know" position or the agnostic position. If someone takes the position that the evidence in favor of ET visitations is inadequate but goes no farther, he is exempt from further argument (provided, of course, he gives adequate reasons for rejecting the evidence). However, if he wants to go farther and insist that it is impossible or highly unlikely that ET's are visiting or have ever visited the Earth, it becomes necessary for him to provide definite reasons for his position. He is no longer entitled merely to argue against his opponent's position. There is the question of honesty. Someone who claims to take the agnostic position but really takes the position of definite disbelief is, of course, misrepresenting his views. For example, a skeptic who insists that he merely believes the psi hypothesis is inadequately supported when in fact he believes that the human mind can only acquire information through the physical senses is simply not being honest.
7.) YOU CAN'T PROVE A NEGATIVE: The skeptic may insist that he is relieved of the burden of evidence and argument because "you can't prove a negative." But you most certainly can prove a negative! When we know one thing to be true, then we also know that whatever flatly contradicts it is untrue. If I want to show my cat's not in the bedroom, I can prove this by showing that my cat's in the kitchen or outside chasing squirrels. The negative has then been proven. Or the proposition that the cat is not in the bedroom could be proven by giving the bedroom a good search without finding the cat. The skeptic who says, "Of course I can't prove psi doesn't exist. I don't have to. You can't prove a negative," is simply wrong. To rule something out, definite reasons must be given for ruling it out. Of course, for practical reasons it often isn't possible to gather the necessary information to prove or disprove a proposition, e.g., it isn't possible to search the entire universe to prove that no intelligent extraterrestrial life exists. This by itself doesn't mean that a case can't be made against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, although it does probably mean that the case can't be as air-tight and conclusive as we would like.
8.) THE BIG LIE: The skeptic knows that most people will not have the time or inclination to check every claim he makes, so he knows it's a fairly small risk to tell a whopper. He might, for example, insist that none of the laboratory evidence for psi stands up to close scrutiny, or he might insist there have been no cases of UFO's being spotted by reliable observers such as trained military personnel when in fact there are well-documented cases. The average person isn't going to scamper right down to the library to verify this, so the skeptic knows a lot of people are going to accept his statement at face value. This ploy works best when the Big Lie is repeated often and loudly in a confident tone.
9.) DOUBT CASTING: This trick consists of dwelling on minor or trivial flaws in the evidence, or presenting speculations as to how the evidence might be flawed as though mere speculation is somehow as damning as actual facts. The assumption here is that any flaw, trivial or even merely speculative, is necessarily fatal and provides sufficient grounds for throwing out the evidence. The skeptic often justifies this with the "extraordinary evidence" ploy. In the real world, of course, the evidence for anything is seldom 100% flawless and foolproof. It is almost always possible to find some small shortcoming which can be used as an excuse for tossing out the evidence. If a definite problem can't be found, then the skeptic may simply speculate as to how the evidence*might* be flawed and use his speculations as an excuse to discard the information. For example, the skeptic might point out that the safeguards or controls during one part of a psi experiment weren't quite as tight as they might have been and then insist, without any supporting facts, that the subject(s) and/or the researcher(s) probably cheated because this is the "simplest" explanation for the results (see "Sock 'em with Occam" and "Extraordinary Claims"; "Raising the Bar" is also relevant).
10.) THE SNEER: This gimmick is an inversion of "Stupid, Crazy Liars." In "Stupid, Crazy Liars," the skeptic attacks the character of those advocating certain ideas or presenting information in the hope of discrediting the information. In "THE SNEER," the skeptic attempts to attach a stigma to some idea or claim and implies that anyone advocating that position must have something terribly wrong with him. "Anyone who believes we've been visited by extraterrestrial aliens must be a lunatic, a fool, or a con man. If you believe this, you must a maniac, a simpleton or a fraud." The object here is to scare others away from a certain position without having to discuss facts. * * * To be fair, some of these tricks or tactics (such as "The Big Lie," "Doubtcasting" and "The Sneer") are often used by believers as well as skeptics. Scientifc Creationists and Holocaust Revisionists, for example, are particularly prone to use "Doubtcasting." Others ploys, however, such as "Sock 'em with Occam" and "Extraordinary Claims," are generally used by skeptics and seldom by others. Unfortunately, effective debating tactics often involve bad logic, e.g. attacking an opponent's character, appeals to emotion, mockery and facetiousness, loaded definitions, etc. And certainly skeptics are not the only ones who are ever guilty of using manipulative and deceptive debating tactics. Even so, skeptics are just as likely as anyone else to twist their language, logic and facts to win an argument, and keeping these tricks in mind when dealing with skeptics may very well keep you from being bamboozled.
When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
Source: http://www.discord.org/~lippard/stupid-skeptic-tricks.txt
I could add another one to the list (If readers can think of any more then please post them in the comments box or on the forum): Skepsters like to bait and inflame. They'll be rude and aggressive as a deliberate tactic to try and get you to retaliate and therefore leave the topic of the debate and, with any luck, get you banned from a forum. If you look at the HPANWO forum you'll see probably the most extreme example of this that you're likely to find! If the Skepsters were so sure of their argument I don't think they'd act like this. I think they're shooting the messengers because they can't shoot the message!
I've made a decision today: I'm going to write a book about the Skeptic Movement. There are plenty of books about "Woo's" written from the Skeptics' persepctive, like Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Crazy Things, and James Randi's Flim-Flam, but I don't think anyone's ever written a book about Skeptics from the position of conspiracy theorists and paranormal-believers like me. I'll have to go along to some of these Skeppie events like "Skeptics in the Pub" to do some research. Shame I missed the chance to see James Randi live last month. This is a book that will take me a long time to write because I'll only be able to do a little bit of work on it at a time, otherwise it would drive me nuts!
Here's a list of Skepster forums:
http://forums.randi.org/index.php
http://www.skepticforum.com/
http://www.skeptics.org.uk/forum/index.php
http://skeptic.org.uk/forum/
Ever get into an argument with a skeptic only to end up exasperated and feeling you've been bamboozled? Skeptics are often highly skilled at tying up opponents in clever verbal knots. Most skeptics are, of course, ordinary, more-or-less honest people who, like the rest of us, are just trying to make the best sense they can of a complicated and often confusing world. Others, however, are merely glib sophists who use specious reasoning to defend their prejudices or attack the ideas and beliefs of others, and even an honest skeptic can innocently fall into the mistake of employing bad reasoning. In reading, listening to and sometimes debating skeptics over the years, I've found certain tricks, ploys and gimmicks which they tend to use over and over again. Here are some of 'em. Perhaps if you keep them in mind when arguing with a skeptic, you'll feel better when the debate is over. Shucks, you might even score a point or two.
1.) RAISING THE BAR (Or IMPOSSIBLE PERFECTION): This trick consists of demanding a new, higher and more difficult standard of evidence whenever it looks as if a skeptic's opponent is going to satisfy an old one. Often the skeptic doesn't make it clear exactly what the standards are in the first place. This can be especially effective if the skeptic can keep his opponent from noticing that he is continually changing his standard of evidence. That way, his opponent will eventually give up in exasperation or disgust. Perhaps best of all, if his opponent complains, the skeptic can tag him as a whiner or a sore loser. Skeptic: I am willing to consider the psi hypothesis if you will only show me some sound evidence. Opponent: There are many thousands of documented reports of incidents that seem to involve psi. S: That is only anecdotal evidence. You must give me laboratory evidence. 0: Researchers A-Z have conducted experiments that produced results which favor the psi hypothesis. S: Those experiments are not acceptable because of flaws X,Y andZ. 0: Researchers B-H and T-W have conducted experiments producing positive results which did not have flaws X,Y and Z. S: The positive results are not far enough above chance levels to be truly interesting. 0: Researchers C-F and U-V produced results well above chance levels. S: Their results were achieved through meta-analysis, which is a highly questionable technique. O: Meta-analysis is a well-accepted method commonly used in psychology and sociology. S: Psychology and sociology are social sciences, and their methods can't be considered as reliable as those of hard sciences such as physics and chemistry. Etc., etc. ad nauseum.
2.) SOCK 'EM WITH OCCAM: Skeptics frequently invoke Occam's Razor as if the Razor automatically validates their position. Occam's Razor, a principle of epistemology (knowledge theory), states that the simplest explanation which fits all the facts is to be preferred -- or, to state it another way, entities are not to be multiplied needlessly. The Razor is a useful and even necessary principle, but it is largely useless if the facts themselves are not generally agreed upon in the first place.
3.) EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS: Extraordinary claims, says the skeptic, require extraordinary evidence. Superficially this seems reasonable enough. However, extraordinariness, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Some claims, of course, would seem extraordinary to almost anyone (e.g. the claim that aliens from Alpha Centauri had contacted you telepathically and informed you that the people of Earth must make you their absolute lord and ruler). The "extraordinariness" of many other claims, however, is at best arguable, and it is not at all obvious that unusually strong evidence is necessary to support them. For example, so many people who would ordinarily be considered reliable witnesses have reported precognitive dreams that it becomes difficult to insist these are "unusual" claims requiring "unusual" evidence. Quite ordinary standards of evidence will do.
4.) STUPID, CRAZY LIARS: This trick consists of simple slander.Anyone who reports anything which displeases the skeptic will be accused of incompetence, mental illness or dishonesty, or some combination of the three without a single shred of fact to support the accusations. When Charles Honorton's Ganzfeld experiments produced impressive results in favor of the psi hypothesis, skeptics accused him of suppressing or not publishing the results of failed experiments. No definite facts supporting the charge ever emerged. Moreover, the experiments were extremely time consuming, and the number of failed, unpublished experiments necessary to make the number of successful, published experiments significant would have been quite high, so it is extremely unlikely that Honorton's results could be due to selective reporting. Yet skeptics still sometimes repeat this accusation.
5.) THE SANTA CLAUS GAMBIT: This trick consists of lumping moderate claims or propositions together with extreme ones. If you suggest, for example, that Sasquatch can't be completely ruled out from the available evidence, the skeptic will then facetiously suggest that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny can't be "completely" ruled out either.
6.) SHIFTING THE BURDEN OF EVIDENCE: The skeptic insists that he doesn't have to provide evidence and arguments to support his side of the argument because he isn't asserting a claim, he is merely denying or doubting yours. His mistake consists of assuming that a negative claim (asserting that something doesn't exist) is fundamentally different from a positive claim. It isn't. Any definite claim, positive or negative, requires definite support. Merely refuting or arguing against an opponent's position is not enough to establish one's own position.. In other words, you can't win by default. As arch-skeptic Carl Sagan himself said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If someone wants to rule out visitations by extra-terrestrial aliens, it would not be enough to point out that all the evidence presented so far is either seriously flawed or not very strong. It would be necessary to state definite reasons which would make ET visitations either impossible or highly unlikely. (He might, for example, point out that our best understanding of physics pretty much rules out any kind of effective faster-than-light drive.) The only person exempt from providing definite support is the person who takes a strict "I don't know" position or the agnostic position. If someone takes the position that the evidence in favor of ET visitations is inadequate but goes no farther, he is exempt from further argument (provided, of course, he gives adequate reasons for rejecting the evidence). However, if he wants to go farther and insist that it is impossible or highly unlikely that ET's are visiting or have ever visited the Earth, it becomes necessary for him to provide definite reasons for his position. He is no longer entitled merely to argue against his opponent's position. There is the question of honesty. Someone who claims to take the agnostic position but really takes the position of definite disbelief is, of course, misrepresenting his views. For example, a skeptic who insists that he merely believes the psi hypothesis is inadequately supported when in fact he believes that the human mind can only acquire information through the physical senses is simply not being honest.
7.) YOU CAN'T PROVE A NEGATIVE: The skeptic may insist that he is relieved of the burden of evidence and argument because "you can't prove a negative." But you most certainly can prove a negative! When we know one thing to be true, then we also know that whatever flatly contradicts it is untrue. If I want to show my cat's not in the bedroom, I can prove this by showing that my cat's in the kitchen or outside chasing squirrels. The negative has then been proven. Or the proposition that the cat is not in the bedroom could be proven by giving the bedroom a good search without finding the cat. The skeptic who says, "Of course I can't prove psi doesn't exist. I don't have to. You can't prove a negative," is simply wrong. To rule something out, definite reasons must be given for ruling it out. Of course, for practical reasons it often isn't possible to gather the necessary information to prove or disprove a proposition, e.g., it isn't possible to search the entire universe to prove that no intelligent extraterrestrial life exists. This by itself doesn't mean that a case can't be made against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, although it does probably mean that the case can't be as air-tight and conclusive as we would like.
8.) THE BIG LIE: The skeptic knows that most people will not have the time or inclination to check every claim he makes, so he knows it's a fairly small risk to tell a whopper. He might, for example, insist that none of the laboratory evidence for psi stands up to close scrutiny, or he might insist there have been no cases of UFO's being spotted by reliable observers such as trained military personnel when in fact there are well-documented cases. The average person isn't going to scamper right down to the library to verify this, so the skeptic knows a lot of people are going to accept his statement at face value. This ploy works best when the Big Lie is repeated often and loudly in a confident tone.
9.) DOUBT CASTING: This trick consists of dwelling on minor or trivial flaws in the evidence, or presenting speculations as to how the evidence might be flawed as though mere speculation is somehow as damning as actual facts. The assumption here is that any flaw, trivial or even merely speculative, is necessarily fatal and provides sufficient grounds for throwing out the evidence. The skeptic often justifies this with the "extraordinary evidence" ploy. In the real world, of course, the evidence for anything is seldom 100% flawless and foolproof. It is almost always possible to find some small shortcoming which can be used as an excuse for tossing out the evidence. If a definite problem can't be found, then the skeptic may simply speculate as to how the evidence*might* be flawed and use his speculations as an excuse to discard the information. For example, the skeptic might point out that the safeguards or controls during one part of a psi experiment weren't quite as tight as they might have been and then insist, without any supporting facts, that the subject(s) and/or the researcher(s) probably cheated because this is the "simplest" explanation for the results (see "Sock 'em with Occam" and "Extraordinary Claims"; "Raising the Bar" is also relevant).
10.) THE SNEER: This gimmick is an inversion of "Stupid, Crazy Liars." In "Stupid, Crazy Liars," the skeptic attacks the character of those advocating certain ideas or presenting information in the hope of discrediting the information. In "THE SNEER," the skeptic attempts to attach a stigma to some idea or claim and implies that anyone advocating that position must have something terribly wrong with him. "Anyone who believes we've been visited by extraterrestrial aliens must be a lunatic, a fool, or a con man. If you believe this, you must a maniac, a simpleton or a fraud." The object here is to scare others away from a certain position without having to discuss facts. * * * To be fair, some of these tricks or tactics (such as "The Big Lie," "Doubtcasting" and "The Sneer") are often used by believers as well as skeptics. Scientifc Creationists and Holocaust Revisionists, for example, are particularly prone to use "Doubtcasting." Others ploys, however, such as "Sock 'em with Occam" and "Extraordinary Claims," are generally used by skeptics and seldom by others. Unfortunately, effective debating tactics often involve bad logic, e.g. attacking an opponent's character, appeals to emotion, mockery and facetiousness, loaded definitions, etc. And certainly skeptics are not the only ones who are ever guilty of using manipulative and deceptive debating tactics. Even so, skeptics are just as likely as anyone else to twist their language, logic and facts to win an argument, and keeping these tricks in mind when dealing with skeptics may very well keep you from being bamboozled.
When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
Source: http://www.discord.org/~lippard/stupid-skeptic-tricks.txt
I could add another one to the list (If readers can think of any more then please post them in the comments box or on the forum): Skepsters like to bait and inflame. They'll be rude and aggressive as a deliberate tactic to try and get you to retaliate and therefore leave the topic of the debate and, with any luck, get you banned from a forum. If you look at the HPANWO forum you'll see probably the most extreme example of this that you're likely to find! If the Skepsters were so sure of their argument I don't think they'd act like this. I think they're shooting the messengers because they can't shoot the message!
I've made a decision today: I'm going to write a book about the Skeptic Movement. There are plenty of books about "Woo's" written from the Skeptics' persepctive, like Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Crazy Things, and James Randi's Flim-Flam, but I don't think anyone's ever written a book about Skeptics from the position of conspiracy theorists and paranormal-believers like me. I'll have to go along to some of these Skeppie events like "Skeptics in the Pub" to do some research. Shame I missed the chance to see James Randi live last month. This is a book that will take me a long time to write because I'll only be able to do a little bit of work on it at a time, otherwise it would drive me nuts!
Here's a list of Skepster forums:
http://forums.randi.org/index.php
http://www.skepticforum.com/
http://www.skeptics.org.uk/forum/index.php
http://skeptic.org.uk/forum/
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Beyond Knowledge Conference 2008
(Photos: Top- Icke forum members; I'm on the far left. Second and third- the venue. Bottom- Icke forum members with Michael Tsarion.)
I only decided to go to the Beyond Knowledge Conference on impulse. Like most of my impulsive decisions, it turned out to be a good one. It was held in the city of Liverpool, a place I’ve never been to before so it was quite exciting. It turned out to be a very picturesque and vibrant place and I’d have liked to have had a bit more time for sightseeing. It’s full of very grand architecture just like London, but the architecture of Liverpool has a different kind of grandeur to London, more feminine, more gentle, less intimidating and imposing, on a more human level. Liverpool is full of derelict buildings, not just single houses, but whole city blocks in the centre of town. At the same time though there are building sites everywhere and I got the feeling that the place was going through a recovery and renewal process. The ruins were more like clean scabs, signs of healing; and one of the locals confirmed this: he told me that they’re all going to be redeveloped. The people of Liverpool seem generally more cheerful than those in Oxford. They’re very chatty and discuss things at bus stops with anyone who happens to be beside them in “Scouse”, their very distinctive and unique dialect, spoken nowhere else in the world outside the Merseyside area. They seem very proud of their hometown and as soon as we stepped out of the station, a man came up to us to give us directions. One thing that bothered me was that in the shopping precincts at every cross roads were huge TV screens displaying Sky News or another popular channel. It brought back memories of when I read 1984. In fact, partly as joke, on the Church Street crossroads, I stood in front of the TV screen lifted my arms in the cross symbol, seen in the movie, and shouted “I love Big Brother!” For a change I was not traveling to this conference alone; I was accompanied by two friends, someone I know from work called Vicky (not the same Vicky I mentioned in my Valentines Day article) and her mum Sue. They are probably the only two people in my daily life I can discuss HPANWO-related subjects with. I spend a lot of time at Vicky’s house watching David Icke and Chris Everard’s films. This was their first conference and they were very excited. I had had a great deal of trouble booking a place to stay. It was a bank holiday weekend after all, but if I’d wanted just a place for myself it would have been no trouble. The thing is I wanted three single rooms so that the three of us could stay in the same place and in the end had to resort to a B and B in Crosby, a district in the far north of the city. It was nice through, in a big Victorian detached house that must have once belonged to an opium merchant or something; it still had the old call-bell on the wall of the dining room for the servants! I also detected something of a spooky atmosphere to the place, similar to what I felt when I visited a haunted house last year (see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-trip-to-haunted-house.html ) And on my last night I did catch a glimpse of something strange that might have been paranormal. It was an oval-shaped orange light, just a few inches across that I glimpsed in a mirror. (The commitment of some of the delegates was very deep. Someone told me that when they couldn’t find a hotel to stay in they’d slept rough! It was such a good conference that in retrospect I’d probably have done the same!) The rest of the hotel was filled by a group of women on a 50th birthday weekend. The birthday girl was called Alice so the entire troupe wore T-shits saying: “Who the F*** is Alice?” On the second night they all dressed up as nurses and at 3AM on Friday night I was treated to the sound of screaming, drunken laughter and went out of my room to see an inebriated Alice trying to climb the stairs to her room. She looked like Hillary on Everest! One of the ladies, the prettiest as luck would have it, ran up and embraced me! (and it’s been far too long since that’s happened!) Unfortunately Vicky and Sue are light sleepers and ended up very tired the next day, not to mention annoyed at Alice and her friends; I can sympathize with Vicky and Sue, but I can’t bring myself to share their disdain! The lady who runs the hotel is called Bernie and was very accommodating, but she refused to acknowledge my suggestions of improving her business. I thought that a profitable source of work might be, seeing as Liverpool still has, unlike so many former British harbours, a working dockland, to open her boarding house to sailors. She said: “No way! I do have standards! They’ll expect me to provide them with call-girls!” which is probably true!
The Beyond Knowledge Conference was held in a very modest venue indeed: the Old Police Station in Lark Lane near Sefton Park. It was not what I expected. I had this image in my mind of one of the fancy Liverpool conference centres that are scattered everywhere throughout the city. The toilets were smelly and there was no bog roll in them, the roof leaked when it rained, but you know what? As the weekend progressed, I grew strangely fond of the lovely old place and I wouldn’t have swapped it for any squeaky carpet, parquet ceiling, air conditioned, velvet-chair Conformatistory with sweet-smelling shithouses that the better-heeled “sophisticated host” might provide. Fuck that! Give us our down-to-Earth human cultural rendezvous any day! It would probably have doubled the price of the tickets anyway; and we’d have lost all the charm and “delightful squalor” of a truly humanly historical, down-to-Earth meetinghouse, of what Philip Pullman would call “a Gyptian Roping”. When the BK team hosts their next conference, I hope it will once again be within this humanistic, community-supporting, adorable old venue! The conference was very much an international event. Among the delegates were people from all the nations of Scandinavia, one of the Palmgren brothers of Red Ice Radio, other Swedes, people from Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, France, the French Pyrenees, places in Scotland from the Isle of Lewis to Edinburgh, the USA and of course everywhere in England, including Oxford, like myself. There were eight speakers in all; and they were all very interesting. I’ve reproduced my interpretation of what they said to the best of my understanding. If any of them are reading this, or anybody else better-informed, and I’ve made some mistakes then I apologize.
Marcus Allen
http://www.aulis.com/index.html
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/
Marcus Allen is a former corporate CEO who trained as a photographer. In 1994, he took over as editor of the UK edition of the Australian conspiratorial magazine, Nexus (Of which I am a subscriber), which investigates conspiracies and the paranormal. At the beginning he asked us to raise our hands if we thought people had been to the moon. I put my hand up because I do believe that people have gone to the moon, but I later caught up with Marcus and explained to him that I still agreed with him. People have been to the moon, but not in the way and at the time history tells us they did (I can’t elaborate right now). Marcus informed us that fakery is rife in space exploration, both with the Americans and Russians, but the moon landing programme was the biggest fake of all. He says that the photographs taken supposedly on the lunar surface show no signs of radiation damage, which is odd because in space there’s a lot of radiation and the cameras and cartridges had no protection. The film used to take IMAX pictures on the Space Shuttle has to be stored in lead-lined boxes, and the Shuttle doesn’t go right out into deep space; it just stays in Earth orbit. The pictures all show signs of having being taken in a studio, some using special effects. There’s a photo taken of the “Earthrise” from the Apollo orbiter, 70 miles above the lunar surface. The problem is that the horizon is wrong; it contains too much detail and the surface features are too large. The pictures of the astronauts walking on the moon show signs of being lit by floodlights and are sometimes taken from impossible camera angles. There is even an example of a photo taken showing both astronauts in the same frame! How can this be as no more than two men were on the moon at any time? There’s a photo in which you can see the other astronaut reflected in the visor of the subject astronaut, therefore the reflected astronaut has to be the photographer; except the man does not have his hand on the shutter and the moon cameras had no timed shutter function There is a picture of the lunar rover, the little electric car they used to move around in, with no tyre tracks coming from the wheels, as if it’s a prop on a studio set that’s just been put there; Marcus’ theory is that this is exactly what it is! There is also the issue of temperature variation. In open space, the sun warms things almost to boiling point, including the spacecraft and astronauts. Out of the sun everything freezes to below minus 200 degrees. Once again this is a problem on the Space Shuttle, but not on the moon missions. Marcus also tells us that the moon rock, some of which is on display in museums all over the world, is not really moon rock at all, but just ordinary rock from Earth. It also seems odd that since Apollo nobody has been back to the moon. In fact George W Bush is the first US president to announce any future plans to go to the moon. China has also announced that they plan to send a manned mission to the moon. But both these expeditions are going to take 20 years or so to develop, almost three times as long as Apollo. In the immediate aftermath of Apollo, people were filled with optimism; Apollo was going to be just the start of a new frontier. A commentator at the time stated that by 1985 man would have walked on Mars and there would be permanent moon base. Arthur C Clarke’s book 2001, spoke of a moon base called Clavius that had a resident population of hundreds by the year of the book’s title. It’s now 2008, and since Apollo no humans have left Earth orbit. If anyone in the late 60’s could have known the future they’d have gasped in dismay! Why is this? Marcus said that it is because deep space travel is simply not possible with current or foreseeable technology and our single mission to another world, the moon landings, were faked. The pictures and TV footage was all done in a studio here on Earth. Marcus also says there are things about the moon itself that we haven’t been told. Not all the craters are impact craters; some are caused by volcanism and electrical discharge, although he doesn’t explain what that means. Marcus Allen’s speech was a subject I’ve looked into a lot and I’ve heard him do it before at Probe, but it’s always worth while hearing it again, together with new information.
Kenn Thomas
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/
Kenn Thomas did two addresses at the conference, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. He is the founder of the Steamshovel Press and “parapolitics”. On Saturday he explored the link between Wilhelm Reich and the American administration, especially Reich’s relationship with President Eisenhower. (Here’s some background on Wilhelm Reich: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/10/legacy-of-wilhelm-reich.html) After the Roswell Incident in 1947, Eisenhower became fascinated UFO’s and it is said that he saw alien bodies at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during a mysterious time when he disappeared for an entire afternoon. The official story was that he went to the dentist, but researchers have proved that this was a lie. He was somewhere else. Amazingly there is a record in the library at Orgonon of a secret visit to the facility by Eisenhower, maybe on that same afternoon. The President was interested in the Cloudbuster and its relationship to UFO’s, as I describe in the linked article. Reich discovered that there were two types of orgone, normal orgone and DOR, Deadly Orgone Radiation. A Cloudbuster can be set to generate DOR as well as normal orgone. Under the influence of DOR pollution accumulates in the area and bad weather can erupt, high winds and rainstorms; experimental subjects quickly became ill. Not only that, but Reich observed that it has a negative effect on UFO’s. The many UFO’s that flocked to Orgonon vaporized when the Cloudbuster shot DOR at them. Reich had inadvertently invented a weapon that could destroy UFO’s. You can bet that this would interest the government enormously. Kenn speculates that they have been developing an ET weapons programme since before World War II and UFO’s have been shot down both before and after Eisenhower’s visit to Reich’s laboratory. After the speech we had a brief Q and A session. I asked Kenn about Wilhelm Reich’s archive, and unfortunately there’s still no news. But Kenn mentions that just before he died, Reich finished the manuscript of his last book, entitled Creation. This book vanished from his cell in Lewisburg Prison on the day he died. Kenn hopes, as do I, that a copy of it somehow made its way into the Reich archive. It seems unlikely that Reich would not write a back-up copy just in case the original went missing. With all the attacks and witch-hunts against him by the authorities, he knew very well that this was a possibility. The Reich archive is now open and so hopefully we’ll find out soon.
Sunday: On Sunday Kenn Thomas did another speech also about the link between UFO’s and government. In this case, the Maury Island UFO and the Kennedy assassination. The Maury Island Incident took place a few days before the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the Roswell crash. A man called Harold Dahl was out on a boat near the island, salvaging drifting logs to sell the wood. He had two friends, his son and his dog on board with him. He sighted 6 ring shaped objects in the sky which descended to hover above the boat, dropping what appeared to be red hot molten metal onto the boat. Everyone on board rushed to get into the boat’s cabin. Dahl’s son was injured and the dog killed. The boat was badly damaged and some of the “slag” fell into the water around the boat, hissing loudly and producing steam. The following day Dahl was visited by Men-in-Black, one of the first reported encounters with these strange individuals. (Dahl later confessed that the incident was a hoax, but soon afterwards retracted his confession, perhaps because he was warned by the Men-in-Black.) Another investigator, John Keel, said that Maury Island was actually a Fugo balloon, an unmanned balloon fitted with a bomb invented by the Japanese to attack mainland America during World War II. Not all of them are accounted for and there are rumours that some continued to drift around after the war was over. Dahl approached Fred Crisman, a mysterious man alleged by many to be a secret FBI agent; his name pops up everywhere something strange happens. He was also one of the producers of the TV series The Invaders. The odd thing is that Crisman is connected with the Kennedy assassination. Jim Garrison, the district attorney who carried out the only prosecution for Kennedy’s murder received an anonymous letter naming Crisman as being on the Grassy Knoll. He was already known to be one of the tramps arrested after the shooting. Kenn showed us the famous and very gruesome Zapruder film showing the last few moments of John F Kennedy’s life. He points out Crisman’s location on the film. All in all it’s an amazing series of connections, but with no cogent narrative and manifest plot. No doubt Kenn will continue to research the subject and maybe give us more information if he comes back to the conference circuit.
Jerry E Smith
http://www.jerryesmith.com/
Jerry E Smith’s address was all about technology to control the weather. I’ve already written about Kenn Thomas and his lecture on Wilhelm Reich and that covers the subject a bit, but there’s a lot more to expand upon. Many political thinkers and writers have explored the possibility of manipulating the weather and contrary to popular belief, the technology to do it does exist; it has been developed, patents have been awarded and it has been used on several occasions. It has a long history too. In the American Civil War, General Dan Ruddles made the observation that great storms always seem to follow great battles. He launched a study which concluded that this was because of the smoke from exploded munitions filling the air, along with the changes in air pressure that the explosions create. In World War II Bernard Vonnegut invented the “cloud seeder” a device that discharges a silver iodide solution into the air from an aircraft or missile that causes rain clouds to form. In the Vietnam War, the first weather battle began with Project Popeye. This was a massive cloud-seeding operation over the border of Vietnam and Laos, a then-neutral country. It had the effect of extending the Southeast Asian monsoon by over a month and disrupting the Ho Chi Min trail with heavy rain. (It also probably killed many innocent people too, but why let the trifling matter of indiscriminate mass murder get in the way of a good idea!?) In 1978 there was a UN ban on EnMod, Environmental modification weapons, but all that happened was that the project went underground. Eventually they came public and nothing was done to stop them. It seems that the UN law is one nobody is willing to enforce. Two organizations have been exposed as secretly developing ways of creating bad weather as a weapon of war. Spacecast220 and USAF 2005.It includes not only attacking the enemy with weather modification, but melting the polar ice, thinning the ozone layer (Did they test it in Antarctica, creating the Ozone hole?) Nowadays the American and Colombians governments are spraying the Amazon jungle with herbicides to kill the trees where the drug barons have hideouts, just like the Agent Orange fiasco of Vietnam. In Kosovo NATO forces blew up a toxic waste dump upwind of a Bosnian Serb lair, and let the smoke poison them. This effected many innocent people, animals and vegetation too no doubt. The burning oil wells in Saddam’s “Scorched Earth” policy in Kuwait may well have caused the terrible floods in Bangladesh which killed over 100,000 people. (Ian Crane had something to add to that the following day!) There is even a government contractor called Weather Modification Inc! It’s not just being done in the US either. Oddly enough just before the weekend of the conference, China announced that it could “guarantee” good weather for the Olympics! How can anyone guarantee the weather!? Only one way: EnMod technology! There are even rumours that China used EnMod technology to attack North Korea. Bad weather is potentially apocalyptically destructive and allows the attacker complete deniability. Jerry then went on to discuss HAARP, the High Altitude Aural Research Project. This is a massively powerful radio transmitter that can shoot transmissions hundreds of miles up into the ionosphere and fill the entire Earth with electrical charge. What’s it for? Well, the official reports are a bit vague. It’s used to transmit extremely low frequency ELF radio messages to submarines. But it could be used as a weapon. The Earth is like the brain, in that it operates by very subtle electric charges; and we all know what happens when a human is given an electric shock to the brain: madness! Jerry reckons that HAARP might be used to bore holes in the Van Allen belts, which is not only relevant to Marcus Allen’s moonhoax theory, but the fact that a lack of radio-shielding for the Earth would leave vast areas, and maybe even the whole planet, vulnerable to solar storms. In fact HAARP may well have been behind the Columbia disaster, a “field test” so to speak. And in case you think that they wouldn’t destroy a spacecraft and kill the people aboard, remember the innocent people killed by Project Popeye? Do you think they’d care? Jerry has a very controversial view of chemtrails that most people disagreed with. He says that they’re simply plane exhaust condensing in specific atmospheric circumstances, but he does mention talk of government projects to stop the supposed danger from global warming by sprinkling shiny dust in the upper atmosphere and blocking the sun with giant space mirrors. The long term objective, says Jerry, could be the creation of a perfect mind-control system where the Earth’s manipulated electric field is used to dull down the undesired elements of human thought. Scary! But it’s better that people know. If you think information is disturbing, try ignorance!
David Hatcher Childress
http://www.psitalk.com/childress.html
This “real life Indiana Jones” is one of the most maverick archaeologists since Colonel James Churchward and Erich von Daniken. He spoke of the fact that our view of ancient civilizations is not what we think it is. There are structures built many thousands of years ago which have properties which do not fit in with the official view of the civilizations said to have built them. There are strange stone walls in Inca monuments that couldn’t have been built by the Incas, the Sphinx may be many millennia older than we thought because it shows signs of having been weathered by rainfall. Similar walls to the Inca ones appear in Japan and other places, made of perfectly-shaped irregular polygonal blocks. I wanted to ask if there was a reason for their irregular shapes. Couldn’t the culture that constructed them have built with square or oblong stones as we do today? They must have wanted to make them like that for some reason. There are many pyramids all over South America which have doorways in them just leading to nowhere; there are just blank stone walls behind them. This makes me think of stargates, or the holes in spacetime that feature in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books. This same phenomenon is found on other continents, even though South America is supposed to have been completely isolated until the 15th Century. This comes to another problem. The ancient classical native civilizations of the Americas have sculptures that depict people of many different races, bearded white men like Viracocha and the huge stone heads of the Olmec culture that are very obviously Negroid. Sadly the Olmec city of La Venta was demolished by the oil industry, maybe to keep some of its secrets safe. There is also the phenomenon of the crystal skulls. These incredible artifacts are total enigmas. Nobody knows how they were made and why. They also have strange psychic and physical properties: like electronic effects and sonic resonances. One of them is going to be on display at the next Nexus conference. In Mohenjodaro, the oldest ruined city in India, there is a carving showing a cow-like animal that is known to have become extinct thousands of years before the city was built. As with Ralph Ellis, David Hatcher Childress wipes out all the assumptions we make about the history of humanity and forces us to look at it again, differently.
David Griffin
http://www.exopolitics.org.uk/
David Griffin is the leader of the UK branch of the exopolitics movement. Expolitics is the study of potential political and social interaction with cultures from another world beyond Earth, in space or another dimension. It differs from UFOlogy; UFOlogy is the study of UFO’s themselves, whereas exopolitics assumes they exist and deals with the human consequences of the phenomenon. Unfortunately the subject is still considered fringe and crazy. In fact Michael Salla lost his job as a professor for writing an article on the subject in the New York Times. The governments already know that these things exist, and as I’ve already discussed, they’ve been covering up their knowledge of it. Why? Partly because of the impact it would have on society if the presence of ET civilizations became accepted truth, but also because of the impact of any technology the aliens might have. These are big subjects that I can’t go into detail about here, but it’s worth looking at the website and following the links to the Disclosure Project and other resources. The UFO subject is “black budget”, in other words it’s completely secret. Perhaps it is also funded by the 2.3 trillion dollars that went missing from the US defence exchequer! Some people have claimed that illegal drug profits also go into funding secret UFO research. David showed footage of aliens interacting with Earth spacecraft, and spoke of reports of UFO’s interfering with nuclear missile bases. A UFO almost launched a missile from a Russian base and shut down some missiles in a US base during the Cold War. You can imagine how that panicked people! The UFO’s seem to have a fascination with nuclear power and weapons. I myself took a photo of a UFO above the Faslane Trident submarine base in Scotland (I’m trying to find the print as I write these words!) There is also evidence that aliens might have had a hand in genetically engineering some of the life on Earth, including humanity! David showed examples of alien-like skulls that could not have belonged to humans. All in all this is a fascinating subject that I spend a lot of time investigating. It reminded me of the brilliant address by Paola Harris at Probe last year. The subject is well worth a look. And remember, the truth about aliens could come out at any time!
Ralph Ellis
http://freespace.virgin.net/kena.edfu/
I met Ralph Ellis at the conference and got to speak to him, without knowing who he was, in the most unusual of circumstances. We were both in the toilet and went hunting for toilet paper! Ralph is an imposing and charismatic-looking historian. He is very tall and wears a waistcoat and leather sunhat. He’s just published as book called King Jesus which tells a never-before aspect of the Christian story. He builds it on the back of his other works that show how the stories of the Old Testament are not original; they are actually plagiaries of ancient Egyptian myths. They are supposedly the history of the Jewish people, from their beginnings at the dawn of time, through disaster and rebirth through Noah’s Ark, from slavery and escape to freedom, to the founding of Israel, the “promised land”. But every one of these tales is also found in Egyptian myth that is much older, in some cases more than a millennium older! They are copies, and Abraham, Moses, David and all the other heroes of the bible are just Egyptian heroes with new names. The same goes for Jesus. Jesus, as we know him through the Christian churches, is a character based on older mythology. His whole life is a walkthrough of astrological symbolism; the recurring theme of fish connects to Pisces and the twelve Apostles represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The whole story was concocted by one man who is thought of as two people St Paul and the historian Josephus Flavius. The similarities in their lives are too strong to have been separate; they were the same person. But the source for Jesus himself was a real man, Jesus of Gramala, a very powerful prince who lived in the First Century and fought in the Roman-Jewish war. He was not a carpenter and definitely not poor! This is a mistranslation; “carpenter” should really be “architect”. The source of his power was his incredible pedigree. He is better connected then probably anybody ever born before or since. He comes out of the house of Orania, a city-state based in Palmyra, in the east of modern Syria. His grandparents were all rulers. One was the daughter of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, another was Phrates, Emperor of Persia (This is why three Magi, the “wise men” visit him when he’s a baby. This is a Persian tradition for a new prince), another was Jubba II, King of all Libya (North Africa). So all Jesus’ ancestors were rulers of the world’s four superpowers, Egypt, Rome, North Africa and Persia. This effectively made him heir to all those thrones. So we’re talking about the only person in history who had the right to call himself King of the World. I wonder, was it an early attempt by the Illuminati to establish the New World Order? If so it failed, but will they try to do the same thing today in a similar fashion? There’s more to the story, and this connects with the legend of King Arthur! This is why the subtitle of Ralph’s new book is From Kam to Camelot (Kam is a very ancient name for Egypt). Jesus of Gramala was crucified after the Roman victory in the war. He was put on the cross with two other leaders of the Jewish rebels. Those two other men died, but St Paul/Josephus Flavius, rescued Jesus in time to save his life. This is clearly where the Crucifixion and Resurrection story comes from. He was however not pardoned. The Roman authorities decided to exile him as far a way as possible to prevent him from doing any more harm. This is similar to what was done 1800 years later to Napoleon. He was at first exiled to his home of Corsica, but escaped to reap more havoc so they sent him to the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena. In Jesus’ case, he was sent to Britain, the remotest backwater of the Roman Empire. He was held secretly in comfortable quarters in Fort Dewa in Chester. The site of this fort was excavated by archaeologists a few years ago and it was a big mystery because it is the biggest Roman fort ever constructed. It was also made of stone, not wood, so much have cost a packet! Why was such a huge castle built in a very quiet and unimportant place? It was like building the Pentagon on an island in Alaska! Well maybe it was built specially to house the exiled Jesus. The archeologists discovered that there was a sealed section of the fort. This must have been a restricted area and nobody outside it could have found out what was really going on inside. But obviously there must have been speculation, in the same way that Area 51 causes speculation today, and legends emerged of somebody called “Arturi”; which is another name for Egypt. The dimensions of the secret annexe were the same as the Jerusalem temple and one of the rooms was built in the shape of a Vesica Piscis. This once again connects to Jesus’ story through fish symbolism. Unfortunately the archeologists could not complete their work because the site was destroyed to make that recurring bane of archaeology: the shopping centre! But could the legend of the mysterious exile: Arturi have inspired the legends of King Arthur? The story of the Fisher King; fish once again. The Fisher King was also the “maimed king” who is healed by the Holy Grail. This could refer to circumcision or castration. Many dangerous exiles were castrated to prevent them fathering any children to cause more trouble in the future. The way Arthur marries Morgeana, but has Gwynyfyr on the side is also Egyptian in origin and maybe Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Mary symbolizes Gwynyfyr. Ralph amazed the whole audience; few of them, including myself, had ever heard of any of this before. We all knew the Holy Blood-Holy Grail story, but Ralph’s discoveries deepen and complicate the story enormously. It just goes to show that we’re looking at the past through a distorted Kaleidoscope lens and it takes a lot of work to make sense of the confusing images. The past is lost, sometimes through deliberate suppression, but also through accidental distortion. But knowing our own past gives us a grip on who we are today. I was very impressed by Ralph’s address. Ralph’s book will not be on sale in the UK for a few weeks, but he had four copies with him that he auctioned off to raise money for Gary McKinnon (Here’s some background on Gary McKinnon: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/04/gary-mckinnon.html .) The first book went for over £100!
Ian Crane
http://www.ianrcrane.co.uk/
http://www.foolmeonce.co.uk/
Ian Crane was easily the best speaker of the conference. I’ve seen him live before at Probe, and as with Probe, his address was explosive; he totally raised the roof! He used to be an oil company executive and went on to be chairman of the UK 9/11 Truth Movement. They must have regarded him as something of a pariah! I’ve worked with the 9/11 Truthers myself and they hate to be linked with “conspiracy nuts” and do everything they can to avoid the label. Ian criticized Jerry E Smith’s view of the oil fires in Iraq because he was actually there and said he saw the bodies of Iraqi soldiers around the fires. They’d been defending the well-heads and it was US Special Forces who lit those fires! He also disagreed with Jerry’s view on chemtrails saying that there’s no way they could possibly be natural phenomena. He said that he complained to Sir Anthony Stein, his MP in Devon and Stein was very keen to investigate, but then suddenly lost interest. Was he warned off? Other issues that Ian tackled were the new Codex Alimentarius laws which will destroy the alternative health industry if allowed to go unchallenged. They also severely increase the control authorities have over food production, effectively forcing us to eat GM crops, eliminating organic faming and reducing the amount of vitamins and essential nutrients we get. It also means an end to food labeling so we will be ingesting GMO’s and chemicals like Aspartame without knowing it. So we get ill quicker and more often and the official healthcare system has a total monopoly over our treatment! How convenient! He also says that Peak Oil is a myth. The Americans are actually paying Middle Eastern countries leave the oil in the ground. One of the reasons Iraq was invaded was they began trading oil in Euros instead of US dollars. The Elite he talks about believe they are the lost biblical tribe of Ephraim and that it is their destiny to create the New World Order, turning London into the New Jerusalem mentioned at the end of the Book of Revelations. They’ve used US forces in Iraq to destroy the antiquities that reveal their true origins. The London Olympics in 2012 is going to be a massive ritual for them and the Olympic logo, designed by the former British athlete and Zionist, Sebastian Coe, can be redrawn to spell the word “ZION”. The year 2012 is mentioned in many prophesies and predictions as a year of change and revolution. Could the Illuminati try to pull off something major in that year? The Report from Iron Mountain revealed that they are planning to fake an alien invasion, Independence Day-style. This was confirmed by Dr Carol Rosin of the Disclosure Project when she interviewed Werner von Braun in 1977. Will 2012 be the year they decide to do it? Ian ended his speech by playing The Power of Love by Frankie goes to Hollywood, with his own illustrations; I found it very moving. Ian is a magnificent speaker. His optimism is infectious and uplifting. He really makes me feel joyful and hopeful, even more so than David Icke, and listening to him really makes me believe we can get out of this mess.
Michael Tsarion
http://michaeltsarion.com/
Michael Tsarion topped the bill at the Beyond Knowledge and was the last speaker to address the conference. He is the most famous person there, on his first ever UK event. He is a major global speaker, in the same league as David Icke, who lectures in big-name locations all over the world. He’s an odd combination because although his family comes from India and he is Asian in appearance, he speaks with a strong Ulster accent and grew up in Belfast. He lives today in Seattle USA and has made dozens of full-length movies, making him probably the most prolific researcher in the world today. Before his address he did a photo call outside the venue where lots of people had their picture taken with him, including Dondaz from the David Icke forum whom you can see in the photo above. Dondaz is the film producer who did The Glastenbury Affair and he set up his camera and did a quick interview with Michael. Michael then lectured non-stop for 3 and a half hours! The longest I’d ever heard anyone talk. After that was a 45-minute Q and A session. The basis of his lecture was similar to Ralph Ellis’: history as we know it is a distortion up hold by dogma and habit rather than factual knowledge. We have an “East to West” view of history, in which civilization began in the East: Egypt, Sumer etc, then spread slowly west with the Greeks and Romans and finally the European colonial powers and North America. Michael has the opposite view: “West to East.” He says civilization began in Atlantis, of which Britain and Ireland were a part, and spread East to the places official history views as the cradle of civilization. His evidence comes from many areas: religion, mythology, linguistics, geography. He’s a learned man and some of the details escaped me, but I gathered the basic plot. It all centres on the mystery of why the Druids were exterminated. Michael says that this is because they held knowledge from the secret past of humanity. Druidism actually is the source of the culture and religion of ancient Egypt, whereas official history says that they are totally unrelated. Michael says that the Irish are not Celtic, but were “Celicized” by the Gaelic invaders who were in fact the Atenists of Egypt. The background to this is a civil war over the religious reformation of Egypt between the existing Amenists and the new Atenists. This war eventually spread back to the roots of their civilization: Ireland. The triumph of the Atenists marked the start of modern monotheistic religion and tyranny. He mentions that in those days people traveled the world over, explaining the enigmas presented by David Hatcher Childress. This is why cocaine has been found in Egyptian tombs and mummies found in the USA. He says that prehistoric man was not savage as we’ve been taught in school but that in the past there was an antediluvian civilization that was a very high vulture and that we descended into savagery. Real history has been suppressed, like when the Alexandria Library was burned (Carl Sagan compared the lost information there to as if all Shakespeare’s plays were lost except one!) It was destroyed to that future generations could not know the truth! The name for Ireland really means “Aryan land”. In this case “Aryan” doesn’t refer to a race, but to a noble ideal form of human existence. The name for Britain comes from the Egyptian for “seat of the Gods”. One of the mythological island roots of Ireland is called Murias; doesn’t that sound a lot like “Lemuria”? Michael brings the whole subject up to the present day by describing the way modern society is controlled and directed by the Elite, descendants of the Egyptian Atonists, sun-worshippers. All the empires and wars since have been a continuation of the millennia of war by the Atonists against the Amenists. He mentions the missing trillions from the Pentagon budget, like Ian Crane did, and speculates that maybe the ancient Egyptian treasuries still have some money in them today that is used to fund the Pentagon in America. The bottom line is that the whole thing is a psychic war. They “shut down thought and make us jump through hoops!” But Michael is optimistic and believes that freedom is within our grasp and that 2012 will be the “age of the revealing”.
It’s been a wonderful conference, and it’s been great to share the experience with Vicky, Sue and all my friends from the David Icke forum who turned up. Many thanks to all the organizers and speakers. As with Probe, the real pleasure of these events is not inside the auditorium, but in the lobby during the breaks and in the pubs afterwards. Talking and spending time with people who you can speak to about things that most of my everyday acquaintances think is crazy. I spoke to some of the organizers, Dom, Andy, Nikki and Ayem, a lady I met a few years ago at a Neil Hague exhibition. The Beyond Knowledge Conference was a resounding success and all being well, they plan to put it on again next year. I’ll be sure to get a ticket!
The Beyond Knowledge Conference was held in a very modest venue indeed: the Old Police Station in Lark Lane near Sefton Park. It was not what I expected. I had this image in my mind of one of the fancy Liverpool conference centres that are scattered everywhere throughout the city. The toilets were smelly and there was no bog roll in them, the roof leaked when it rained, but you know what? As the weekend progressed, I grew strangely fond of the lovely old place and I wouldn’t have swapped it for any squeaky carpet, parquet ceiling, air conditioned, velvet-chair Conformatistory with sweet-smelling shithouses that the better-heeled “sophisticated host” might provide. Fuck that! Give us our down-to-Earth human cultural rendezvous any day! It would probably have doubled the price of the tickets anyway; and we’d have lost all the charm and “delightful squalor” of a truly humanly historical, down-to-Earth meetinghouse, of what Philip Pullman would call “a Gyptian Roping”. When the BK team hosts their next conference, I hope it will once again be within this humanistic, community-supporting, adorable old venue! The conference was very much an international event. Among the delegates were people from all the nations of Scandinavia, one of the Palmgren brothers of Red Ice Radio, other Swedes, people from Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, France, the French Pyrenees, places in Scotland from the Isle of Lewis to Edinburgh, the USA and of course everywhere in England, including Oxford, like myself. There were eight speakers in all; and they were all very interesting. I’ve reproduced my interpretation of what they said to the best of my understanding. If any of them are reading this, or anybody else better-informed, and I’ve made some mistakes then I apologize.
Marcus Allen
http://www.aulis.com/index.html
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/
Marcus Allen is a former corporate CEO who trained as a photographer. In 1994, he took over as editor of the UK edition of the Australian conspiratorial magazine, Nexus (Of which I am a subscriber), which investigates conspiracies and the paranormal. At the beginning he asked us to raise our hands if we thought people had been to the moon. I put my hand up because I do believe that people have gone to the moon, but I later caught up with Marcus and explained to him that I still agreed with him. People have been to the moon, but not in the way and at the time history tells us they did (I can’t elaborate right now). Marcus informed us that fakery is rife in space exploration, both with the Americans and Russians, but the moon landing programme was the biggest fake of all. He says that the photographs taken supposedly on the lunar surface show no signs of radiation damage, which is odd because in space there’s a lot of radiation and the cameras and cartridges had no protection. The film used to take IMAX pictures on the Space Shuttle has to be stored in lead-lined boxes, and the Shuttle doesn’t go right out into deep space; it just stays in Earth orbit. The pictures all show signs of having being taken in a studio, some using special effects. There’s a photo taken of the “Earthrise” from the Apollo orbiter, 70 miles above the lunar surface. The problem is that the horizon is wrong; it contains too much detail and the surface features are too large. The pictures of the astronauts walking on the moon show signs of being lit by floodlights and are sometimes taken from impossible camera angles. There is even an example of a photo taken showing both astronauts in the same frame! How can this be as no more than two men were on the moon at any time? There’s a photo in which you can see the other astronaut reflected in the visor of the subject astronaut, therefore the reflected astronaut has to be the photographer; except the man does not have his hand on the shutter and the moon cameras had no timed shutter function There is a picture of the lunar rover, the little electric car they used to move around in, with no tyre tracks coming from the wheels, as if it’s a prop on a studio set that’s just been put there; Marcus’ theory is that this is exactly what it is! There is also the issue of temperature variation. In open space, the sun warms things almost to boiling point, including the spacecraft and astronauts. Out of the sun everything freezes to below minus 200 degrees. Once again this is a problem on the Space Shuttle, but not on the moon missions. Marcus also tells us that the moon rock, some of which is on display in museums all over the world, is not really moon rock at all, but just ordinary rock from Earth. It also seems odd that since Apollo nobody has been back to the moon. In fact George W Bush is the first US president to announce any future plans to go to the moon. China has also announced that they plan to send a manned mission to the moon. But both these expeditions are going to take 20 years or so to develop, almost three times as long as Apollo. In the immediate aftermath of Apollo, people were filled with optimism; Apollo was going to be just the start of a new frontier. A commentator at the time stated that by 1985 man would have walked on Mars and there would be permanent moon base. Arthur C Clarke’s book 2001, spoke of a moon base called Clavius that had a resident population of hundreds by the year of the book’s title. It’s now 2008, and since Apollo no humans have left Earth orbit. If anyone in the late 60’s could have known the future they’d have gasped in dismay! Why is this? Marcus said that it is because deep space travel is simply not possible with current or foreseeable technology and our single mission to another world, the moon landings, were faked. The pictures and TV footage was all done in a studio here on Earth. Marcus also says there are things about the moon itself that we haven’t been told. Not all the craters are impact craters; some are caused by volcanism and electrical discharge, although he doesn’t explain what that means. Marcus Allen’s speech was a subject I’ve looked into a lot and I’ve heard him do it before at Probe, but it’s always worth while hearing it again, together with new information.
Kenn Thomas
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/
Kenn Thomas did two addresses at the conference, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. He is the founder of the Steamshovel Press and “parapolitics”. On Saturday he explored the link between Wilhelm Reich and the American administration, especially Reich’s relationship with President Eisenhower. (Here’s some background on Wilhelm Reich: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/10/legacy-of-wilhelm-reich.html) After the Roswell Incident in 1947, Eisenhower became fascinated UFO’s and it is said that he saw alien bodies at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during a mysterious time when he disappeared for an entire afternoon. The official story was that he went to the dentist, but researchers have proved that this was a lie. He was somewhere else. Amazingly there is a record in the library at Orgonon of a secret visit to the facility by Eisenhower, maybe on that same afternoon. The President was interested in the Cloudbuster and its relationship to UFO’s, as I describe in the linked article. Reich discovered that there were two types of orgone, normal orgone and DOR, Deadly Orgone Radiation. A Cloudbuster can be set to generate DOR as well as normal orgone. Under the influence of DOR pollution accumulates in the area and bad weather can erupt, high winds and rainstorms; experimental subjects quickly became ill. Not only that, but Reich observed that it has a negative effect on UFO’s. The many UFO’s that flocked to Orgonon vaporized when the Cloudbuster shot DOR at them. Reich had inadvertently invented a weapon that could destroy UFO’s. You can bet that this would interest the government enormously. Kenn speculates that they have been developing an ET weapons programme since before World War II and UFO’s have been shot down both before and after Eisenhower’s visit to Reich’s laboratory. After the speech we had a brief Q and A session. I asked Kenn about Wilhelm Reich’s archive, and unfortunately there’s still no news. But Kenn mentions that just before he died, Reich finished the manuscript of his last book, entitled Creation. This book vanished from his cell in Lewisburg Prison on the day he died. Kenn hopes, as do I, that a copy of it somehow made its way into the Reich archive. It seems unlikely that Reich would not write a back-up copy just in case the original went missing. With all the attacks and witch-hunts against him by the authorities, he knew very well that this was a possibility. The Reich archive is now open and so hopefully we’ll find out soon.
Sunday: On Sunday Kenn Thomas did another speech also about the link between UFO’s and government. In this case, the Maury Island UFO and the Kennedy assassination. The Maury Island Incident took place a few days before the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the Roswell crash. A man called Harold Dahl was out on a boat near the island, salvaging drifting logs to sell the wood. He had two friends, his son and his dog on board with him. He sighted 6 ring shaped objects in the sky which descended to hover above the boat, dropping what appeared to be red hot molten metal onto the boat. Everyone on board rushed to get into the boat’s cabin. Dahl’s son was injured and the dog killed. The boat was badly damaged and some of the “slag” fell into the water around the boat, hissing loudly and producing steam. The following day Dahl was visited by Men-in-Black, one of the first reported encounters with these strange individuals. (Dahl later confessed that the incident was a hoax, but soon afterwards retracted his confession, perhaps because he was warned by the Men-in-Black.) Another investigator, John Keel, said that Maury Island was actually a Fugo balloon, an unmanned balloon fitted with a bomb invented by the Japanese to attack mainland America during World War II. Not all of them are accounted for and there are rumours that some continued to drift around after the war was over. Dahl approached Fred Crisman, a mysterious man alleged by many to be a secret FBI agent; his name pops up everywhere something strange happens. He was also one of the producers of the TV series The Invaders. The odd thing is that Crisman is connected with the Kennedy assassination. Jim Garrison, the district attorney who carried out the only prosecution for Kennedy’s murder received an anonymous letter naming Crisman as being on the Grassy Knoll. He was already known to be one of the tramps arrested after the shooting. Kenn showed us the famous and very gruesome Zapruder film showing the last few moments of John F Kennedy’s life. He points out Crisman’s location on the film. All in all it’s an amazing series of connections, but with no cogent narrative and manifest plot. No doubt Kenn will continue to research the subject and maybe give us more information if he comes back to the conference circuit.
Jerry E Smith
http://www.jerryesmith.com/
Jerry E Smith’s address was all about technology to control the weather. I’ve already written about Kenn Thomas and his lecture on Wilhelm Reich and that covers the subject a bit, but there’s a lot more to expand upon. Many political thinkers and writers have explored the possibility of manipulating the weather and contrary to popular belief, the technology to do it does exist; it has been developed, patents have been awarded and it has been used on several occasions. It has a long history too. In the American Civil War, General Dan Ruddles made the observation that great storms always seem to follow great battles. He launched a study which concluded that this was because of the smoke from exploded munitions filling the air, along with the changes in air pressure that the explosions create. In World War II Bernard Vonnegut invented the “cloud seeder” a device that discharges a silver iodide solution into the air from an aircraft or missile that causes rain clouds to form. In the Vietnam War, the first weather battle began with Project Popeye. This was a massive cloud-seeding operation over the border of Vietnam and Laos, a then-neutral country. It had the effect of extending the Southeast Asian monsoon by over a month and disrupting the Ho Chi Min trail with heavy rain. (It also probably killed many innocent people too, but why let the trifling matter of indiscriminate mass murder get in the way of a good idea!?) In 1978 there was a UN ban on EnMod, Environmental modification weapons, but all that happened was that the project went underground. Eventually they came public and nothing was done to stop them. It seems that the UN law is one nobody is willing to enforce. Two organizations have been exposed as secretly developing ways of creating bad weather as a weapon of war. Spacecast220 and USAF 2005.It includes not only attacking the enemy with weather modification, but melting the polar ice, thinning the ozone layer (Did they test it in Antarctica, creating the Ozone hole?) Nowadays the American and Colombians governments are spraying the Amazon jungle with herbicides to kill the trees where the drug barons have hideouts, just like the Agent Orange fiasco of Vietnam. In Kosovo NATO forces blew up a toxic waste dump upwind of a Bosnian Serb lair, and let the smoke poison them. This effected many innocent people, animals and vegetation too no doubt. The burning oil wells in Saddam’s “Scorched Earth” policy in Kuwait may well have caused the terrible floods in Bangladesh which killed over 100,000 people. (Ian Crane had something to add to that the following day!) There is even a government contractor called Weather Modification Inc! It’s not just being done in the US either. Oddly enough just before the weekend of the conference, China announced that it could “guarantee” good weather for the Olympics! How can anyone guarantee the weather!? Only one way: EnMod technology! There are even rumours that China used EnMod technology to attack North Korea. Bad weather is potentially apocalyptically destructive and allows the attacker complete deniability. Jerry then went on to discuss HAARP, the High Altitude Aural Research Project. This is a massively powerful radio transmitter that can shoot transmissions hundreds of miles up into the ionosphere and fill the entire Earth with electrical charge. What’s it for? Well, the official reports are a bit vague. It’s used to transmit extremely low frequency ELF radio messages to submarines. But it could be used as a weapon. The Earth is like the brain, in that it operates by very subtle electric charges; and we all know what happens when a human is given an electric shock to the brain: madness! Jerry reckons that HAARP might be used to bore holes in the Van Allen belts, which is not only relevant to Marcus Allen’s moonhoax theory, but the fact that a lack of radio-shielding for the Earth would leave vast areas, and maybe even the whole planet, vulnerable to solar storms. In fact HAARP may well have been behind the Columbia disaster, a “field test” so to speak. And in case you think that they wouldn’t destroy a spacecraft and kill the people aboard, remember the innocent people killed by Project Popeye? Do you think they’d care? Jerry has a very controversial view of chemtrails that most people disagreed with. He says that they’re simply plane exhaust condensing in specific atmospheric circumstances, but he does mention talk of government projects to stop the supposed danger from global warming by sprinkling shiny dust in the upper atmosphere and blocking the sun with giant space mirrors. The long term objective, says Jerry, could be the creation of a perfect mind-control system where the Earth’s manipulated electric field is used to dull down the undesired elements of human thought. Scary! But it’s better that people know. If you think information is disturbing, try ignorance!
David Hatcher Childress
http://www.psitalk.com/childress.html
This “real life Indiana Jones” is one of the most maverick archaeologists since Colonel James Churchward and Erich von Daniken. He spoke of the fact that our view of ancient civilizations is not what we think it is. There are structures built many thousands of years ago which have properties which do not fit in with the official view of the civilizations said to have built them. There are strange stone walls in Inca monuments that couldn’t have been built by the Incas, the Sphinx may be many millennia older than we thought because it shows signs of having been weathered by rainfall. Similar walls to the Inca ones appear in Japan and other places, made of perfectly-shaped irregular polygonal blocks. I wanted to ask if there was a reason for their irregular shapes. Couldn’t the culture that constructed them have built with square or oblong stones as we do today? They must have wanted to make them like that for some reason. There are many pyramids all over South America which have doorways in them just leading to nowhere; there are just blank stone walls behind them. This makes me think of stargates, or the holes in spacetime that feature in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books. This same phenomenon is found on other continents, even though South America is supposed to have been completely isolated until the 15th Century. This comes to another problem. The ancient classical native civilizations of the Americas have sculptures that depict people of many different races, bearded white men like Viracocha and the huge stone heads of the Olmec culture that are very obviously Negroid. Sadly the Olmec city of La Venta was demolished by the oil industry, maybe to keep some of its secrets safe. There is also the phenomenon of the crystal skulls. These incredible artifacts are total enigmas. Nobody knows how they were made and why. They also have strange psychic and physical properties: like electronic effects and sonic resonances. One of them is going to be on display at the next Nexus conference. In Mohenjodaro, the oldest ruined city in India, there is a carving showing a cow-like animal that is known to have become extinct thousands of years before the city was built. As with Ralph Ellis, David Hatcher Childress wipes out all the assumptions we make about the history of humanity and forces us to look at it again, differently.
David Griffin
http://www.exopolitics.org.uk/
David Griffin is the leader of the UK branch of the exopolitics movement. Expolitics is the study of potential political and social interaction with cultures from another world beyond Earth, in space or another dimension. It differs from UFOlogy; UFOlogy is the study of UFO’s themselves, whereas exopolitics assumes they exist and deals with the human consequences of the phenomenon. Unfortunately the subject is still considered fringe and crazy. In fact Michael Salla lost his job as a professor for writing an article on the subject in the New York Times. The governments already know that these things exist, and as I’ve already discussed, they’ve been covering up their knowledge of it. Why? Partly because of the impact it would have on society if the presence of ET civilizations became accepted truth, but also because of the impact of any technology the aliens might have. These are big subjects that I can’t go into detail about here, but it’s worth looking at the website and following the links to the Disclosure Project and other resources. The UFO subject is “black budget”, in other words it’s completely secret. Perhaps it is also funded by the 2.3 trillion dollars that went missing from the US defence exchequer! Some people have claimed that illegal drug profits also go into funding secret UFO research. David showed footage of aliens interacting with Earth spacecraft, and spoke of reports of UFO’s interfering with nuclear missile bases. A UFO almost launched a missile from a Russian base and shut down some missiles in a US base during the Cold War. You can imagine how that panicked people! The UFO’s seem to have a fascination with nuclear power and weapons. I myself took a photo of a UFO above the Faslane Trident submarine base in Scotland (I’m trying to find the print as I write these words!) There is also evidence that aliens might have had a hand in genetically engineering some of the life on Earth, including humanity! David showed examples of alien-like skulls that could not have belonged to humans. All in all this is a fascinating subject that I spend a lot of time investigating. It reminded me of the brilliant address by Paola Harris at Probe last year. The subject is well worth a look. And remember, the truth about aliens could come out at any time!
Ralph Ellis
http://freespace.virgin.net/kena.edfu/
I met Ralph Ellis at the conference and got to speak to him, without knowing who he was, in the most unusual of circumstances. We were both in the toilet and went hunting for toilet paper! Ralph is an imposing and charismatic-looking historian. He is very tall and wears a waistcoat and leather sunhat. He’s just published as book called King Jesus which tells a never-before aspect of the Christian story. He builds it on the back of his other works that show how the stories of the Old Testament are not original; they are actually plagiaries of ancient Egyptian myths. They are supposedly the history of the Jewish people, from their beginnings at the dawn of time, through disaster and rebirth through Noah’s Ark, from slavery and escape to freedom, to the founding of Israel, the “promised land”. But every one of these tales is also found in Egyptian myth that is much older, in some cases more than a millennium older! They are copies, and Abraham, Moses, David and all the other heroes of the bible are just Egyptian heroes with new names. The same goes for Jesus. Jesus, as we know him through the Christian churches, is a character based on older mythology. His whole life is a walkthrough of astrological symbolism; the recurring theme of fish connects to Pisces and the twelve Apostles represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The whole story was concocted by one man who is thought of as two people St Paul and the historian Josephus Flavius. The similarities in their lives are too strong to have been separate; they were the same person. But the source for Jesus himself was a real man, Jesus of Gramala, a very powerful prince who lived in the First Century and fought in the Roman-Jewish war. He was not a carpenter and definitely not poor! This is a mistranslation; “carpenter” should really be “architect”. The source of his power was his incredible pedigree. He is better connected then probably anybody ever born before or since. He comes out of the house of Orania, a city-state based in Palmyra, in the east of modern Syria. His grandparents were all rulers. One was the daughter of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, another was Phrates, Emperor of Persia (This is why three Magi, the “wise men” visit him when he’s a baby. This is a Persian tradition for a new prince), another was Jubba II, King of all Libya (North Africa). So all Jesus’ ancestors were rulers of the world’s four superpowers, Egypt, Rome, North Africa and Persia. This effectively made him heir to all those thrones. So we’re talking about the only person in history who had the right to call himself King of the World. I wonder, was it an early attempt by the Illuminati to establish the New World Order? If so it failed, but will they try to do the same thing today in a similar fashion? There’s more to the story, and this connects with the legend of King Arthur! This is why the subtitle of Ralph’s new book is From Kam to Camelot (Kam is a very ancient name for Egypt). Jesus of Gramala was crucified after the Roman victory in the war. He was put on the cross with two other leaders of the Jewish rebels. Those two other men died, but St Paul/Josephus Flavius, rescued Jesus in time to save his life. This is clearly where the Crucifixion and Resurrection story comes from. He was however not pardoned. The Roman authorities decided to exile him as far a way as possible to prevent him from doing any more harm. This is similar to what was done 1800 years later to Napoleon. He was at first exiled to his home of Corsica, but escaped to reap more havoc so they sent him to the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena. In Jesus’ case, he was sent to Britain, the remotest backwater of the Roman Empire. He was held secretly in comfortable quarters in Fort Dewa in Chester. The site of this fort was excavated by archaeologists a few years ago and it was a big mystery because it is the biggest Roman fort ever constructed. It was also made of stone, not wood, so much have cost a packet! Why was such a huge castle built in a very quiet and unimportant place? It was like building the Pentagon on an island in Alaska! Well maybe it was built specially to house the exiled Jesus. The archeologists discovered that there was a sealed section of the fort. This must have been a restricted area and nobody outside it could have found out what was really going on inside. But obviously there must have been speculation, in the same way that Area 51 causes speculation today, and legends emerged of somebody called “Arturi”; which is another name for Egypt. The dimensions of the secret annexe were the same as the Jerusalem temple and one of the rooms was built in the shape of a Vesica Piscis. This once again connects to Jesus’ story through fish symbolism. Unfortunately the archeologists could not complete their work because the site was destroyed to make that recurring bane of archaeology: the shopping centre! But could the legend of the mysterious exile: Arturi have inspired the legends of King Arthur? The story of the Fisher King; fish once again. The Fisher King was also the “maimed king” who is healed by the Holy Grail. This could refer to circumcision or castration. Many dangerous exiles were castrated to prevent them fathering any children to cause more trouble in the future. The way Arthur marries Morgeana, but has Gwynyfyr on the side is also Egyptian in origin and maybe Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Mary symbolizes Gwynyfyr. Ralph amazed the whole audience; few of them, including myself, had ever heard of any of this before. We all knew the Holy Blood-Holy Grail story, but Ralph’s discoveries deepen and complicate the story enormously. It just goes to show that we’re looking at the past through a distorted Kaleidoscope lens and it takes a lot of work to make sense of the confusing images. The past is lost, sometimes through deliberate suppression, but also through accidental distortion. But knowing our own past gives us a grip on who we are today. I was very impressed by Ralph’s address. Ralph’s book will not be on sale in the UK for a few weeks, but he had four copies with him that he auctioned off to raise money for Gary McKinnon (Here’s some background on Gary McKinnon: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/04/gary-mckinnon.html .) The first book went for over £100!
Ian Crane
http://www.ianrcrane.co.uk/
http://www.foolmeonce.co.uk/
Ian Crane was easily the best speaker of the conference. I’ve seen him live before at Probe, and as with Probe, his address was explosive; he totally raised the roof! He used to be an oil company executive and went on to be chairman of the UK 9/11 Truth Movement. They must have regarded him as something of a pariah! I’ve worked with the 9/11 Truthers myself and they hate to be linked with “conspiracy nuts” and do everything they can to avoid the label. Ian criticized Jerry E Smith’s view of the oil fires in Iraq because he was actually there and said he saw the bodies of Iraqi soldiers around the fires. They’d been defending the well-heads and it was US Special Forces who lit those fires! He also disagreed with Jerry’s view on chemtrails saying that there’s no way they could possibly be natural phenomena. He said that he complained to Sir Anthony Stein, his MP in Devon and Stein was very keen to investigate, but then suddenly lost interest. Was he warned off? Other issues that Ian tackled were the new Codex Alimentarius laws which will destroy the alternative health industry if allowed to go unchallenged. They also severely increase the control authorities have over food production, effectively forcing us to eat GM crops, eliminating organic faming and reducing the amount of vitamins and essential nutrients we get. It also means an end to food labeling so we will be ingesting GMO’s and chemicals like Aspartame without knowing it. So we get ill quicker and more often and the official healthcare system has a total monopoly over our treatment! How convenient! He also says that Peak Oil is a myth. The Americans are actually paying Middle Eastern countries leave the oil in the ground. One of the reasons Iraq was invaded was they began trading oil in Euros instead of US dollars. The Elite he talks about believe they are the lost biblical tribe of Ephraim and that it is their destiny to create the New World Order, turning London into the New Jerusalem mentioned at the end of the Book of Revelations. They’ve used US forces in Iraq to destroy the antiquities that reveal their true origins. The London Olympics in 2012 is going to be a massive ritual for them and the Olympic logo, designed by the former British athlete and Zionist, Sebastian Coe, can be redrawn to spell the word “ZION”. The year 2012 is mentioned in many prophesies and predictions as a year of change and revolution. Could the Illuminati try to pull off something major in that year? The Report from Iron Mountain revealed that they are planning to fake an alien invasion, Independence Day-style. This was confirmed by Dr Carol Rosin of the Disclosure Project when she interviewed Werner von Braun in 1977. Will 2012 be the year they decide to do it? Ian ended his speech by playing The Power of Love by Frankie goes to Hollywood, with his own illustrations; I found it very moving. Ian is a magnificent speaker. His optimism is infectious and uplifting. He really makes me feel joyful and hopeful, even more so than David Icke, and listening to him really makes me believe we can get out of this mess.
Michael Tsarion
http://michaeltsarion.com/
Michael Tsarion topped the bill at the Beyond Knowledge and was the last speaker to address the conference. He is the most famous person there, on his first ever UK event. He is a major global speaker, in the same league as David Icke, who lectures in big-name locations all over the world. He’s an odd combination because although his family comes from India and he is Asian in appearance, he speaks with a strong Ulster accent and grew up in Belfast. He lives today in Seattle USA and has made dozens of full-length movies, making him probably the most prolific researcher in the world today. Before his address he did a photo call outside the venue where lots of people had their picture taken with him, including Dondaz from the David Icke forum whom you can see in the photo above. Dondaz is the film producer who did The Glastenbury Affair and he set up his camera and did a quick interview with Michael. Michael then lectured non-stop for 3 and a half hours! The longest I’d ever heard anyone talk. After that was a 45-minute Q and A session. The basis of his lecture was similar to Ralph Ellis’: history as we know it is a distortion up hold by dogma and habit rather than factual knowledge. We have an “East to West” view of history, in which civilization began in the East: Egypt, Sumer etc, then spread slowly west with the Greeks and Romans and finally the European colonial powers and North America. Michael has the opposite view: “West to East.” He says civilization began in Atlantis, of which Britain and Ireland were a part, and spread East to the places official history views as the cradle of civilization. His evidence comes from many areas: religion, mythology, linguistics, geography. He’s a learned man and some of the details escaped me, but I gathered the basic plot. It all centres on the mystery of why the Druids were exterminated. Michael says that this is because they held knowledge from the secret past of humanity. Druidism actually is the source of the culture and religion of ancient Egypt, whereas official history says that they are totally unrelated. Michael says that the Irish are not Celtic, but were “Celicized” by the Gaelic invaders who were in fact the Atenists of Egypt. The background to this is a civil war over the religious reformation of Egypt between the existing Amenists and the new Atenists. This war eventually spread back to the roots of their civilization: Ireland. The triumph of the Atenists marked the start of modern monotheistic religion and tyranny. He mentions that in those days people traveled the world over, explaining the enigmas presented by David Hatcher Childress. This is why cocaine has been found in Egyptian tombs and mummies found in the USA. He says that prehistoric man was not savage as we’ve been taught in school but that in the past there was an antediluvian civilization that was a very high vulture and that we descended into savagery. Real history has been suppressed, like when the Alexandria Library was burned (Carl Sagan compared the lost information there to as if all Shakespeare’s plays were lost except one!) It was destroyed to that future generations could not know the truth! The name for Ireland really means “Aryan land”. In this case “Aryan” doesn’t refer to a race, but to a noble ideal form of human existence. The name for Britain comes from the Egyptian for “seat of the Gods”. One of the mythological island roots of Ireland is called Murias; doesn’t that sound a lot like “Lemuria”? Michael brings the whole subject up to the present day by describing the way modern society is controlled and directed by the Elite, descendants of the Egyptian Atonists, sun-worshippers. All the empires and wars since have been a continuation of the millennia of war by the Atonists against the Amenists. He mentions the missing trillions from the Pentagon budget, like Ian Crane did, and speculates that maybe the ancient Egyptian treasuries still have some money in them today that is used to fund the Pentagon in America. The bottom line is that the whole thing is a psychic war. They “shut down thought and make us jump through hoops!” But Michael is optimistic and believes that freedom is within our grasp and that 2012 will be the “age of the revealing”.
It’s been a wonderful conference, and it’s been great to share the experience with Vicky, Sue and all my friends from the David Icke forum who turned up. Many thanks to all the organizers and speakers. As with Probe, the real pleasure of these events is not inside the auditorium, but in the lobby during the breaks and in the pubs afterwards. Talking and spending time with people who you can speak to about things that most of my everyday acquaintances think is crazy. I spoke to some of the organizers, Dom, Andy, Nikki and Ayem, a lady I met a few years ago at a Neil Hague exhibition. The Beyond Knowledge Conference was a resounding success and all being well, they plan to put it on again next year. I’ll be sure to get a ticket!
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