The "Intellectual Dark Web" hoaxed?

 

I was fascinated, gob-smacked in fact, by the rather curious YouTube video (above) by atheist Rebecca Watson and published by PZ Myers on his blog. At first, I thought I'd take a look because PZ Myers billed it as video about schismogenesis in the New Atheist and secular communities. I have followed this theme for some years and wanted to see how these divisions were shaping up. Not that I thought any worse of the atheist community for it: After all, the historical Christain subculture of which I'm part has a lot more experience of sharp schisms than these atheists; about 2000 years' worth more of experience!  When it comes to humanity, Christian and otherwise, schism is the name of the game: As Sir Robert Walpole might have put it in my all-time favorite quote, it's "The natural state of human affairs". 

But I was in for a big shock if I thought this video was going to be just another archetypical story of human epistemic challenge and disagreement, whilst I looked on with unsurprised and jaded cynicism. Rebecca Watson is seldom lost for words but today she gave a lot of airtime to atheists Sam Harris and Eric Weinstein with whom she is very much at odds. In fact she just let Eric and Sam pay out enough rope to hang themselves. 

In the video we hear both Harris and Weinstein claim that they have been contacted by government insiders telling them that we are due for a big official disclosure about the UFO phenomenon being utterly real. Harris referred to his contact as a "private outreach" and that this contact informed him that government sources, especially the military, have incontrovertible evidence of the presence of alien technology.  Eric Weinstein, a man who also entertains Covid conspiracy theories, says that his inside informer has told him that a "big update" is due from government on the subject of UFOs. He's been told that he will be flown out to Colorado Springs, met by a car, blind folded and taken to a place where he will be shown stuff which means we'll never be the same again! Weinstein has been "on standby" sitting on this promise of UFO disclosure for all of three years, sometimes being told "not this week because we are too busy". But one can't help the idea popping into one's head that he is being strung along by a hoaxer. Apparently, he along with Sam Harris and others in their orbit, have been flattered by the suggestion that they will be needed to bring this news to the world.

Well, I was in stitches especially as Rebecca Watson (like PZ Myers) always finds exactly the right words to lampoon this kind of claim, and especially so if the claimant looks to be motivated by all-too-common human weaknesses & conceits! Watson floats the thought that Harris and Weinstein are being hoaxed and that these two big names, who she thinks are getting far too big for their boots, were easy targets for to this kind of flattering hoax because their (masculine) hubris means they always think of themselves as "the right men for the job"! I was very much reminded of the hoax played on Tim Ventura by "flying saucer engineer" Bob Lazar and the way Tim was strung along by Lazar for about a year. But Tim Ventura has always come across (to me at least) as Mr. Nice-Guy and he was only open to Lazar's hoax because like the rest of us he had career ambitions and a natural vanity which can sometimes be exploited.  But in credit to Ventura he is humble enough to admit he was hoaxed, but then only for a year and not 3 years. (See also here for more on Ventura). Is that because Eric Weinstein's ego is 3x bigger that Tim Ventura's?

And yet....and yet...like Weinstein I have heard the testimony from so many disinterested witnesses who have had firsthand encounters that I too feel sure they are genuinely experiencing something unusual although I'm not sure exactly what that something is - but I very much doubt it is technological aliens as we think of them. Also, Weinstein was clearly gen'd up on the Skin Walker Ranch case and the scientists involved who have seen "things". He just couldn't believe that these people were lying and frankly neither can I.  As he said "there is too much data; something is going on". But Weinstein thinks it's down to technological aliens; that I very much doubt. The Skin Walker Ranch case is too bizarre and looks more like the loose associative, drifting & phantasmal thinking of the human vision-generating mind somehow spilling over into reality: The paranormal has its roots in the earthly biosphere and in particular human consciousness. 

Yes, I agree something's going on, but it's not little gray men with their technology: They are just a facade for something else and not a very convincing facade at that: My best guess is that it is more to do with the nature of reality which like our own minds may at times be subject to some kind of delusional dysfunction. After all, what makes reality but the fact that those laws of physics are primarily a way of organizing our experiences with such a replete coherence that they provide the equivalent of a physical version of a "Turing Test" facade, ensuring that our epistemic interrogations are answered so fully that a picture of an all-round "solid" reality appears to emerge. But these strange paranormal experiences are the opposite. It's as if they are to the rational world of physics as our visions, dreams and hallucinations are to the wakeful rational mind. Our dreams appear to have a loose associative meaning, but sleep brings on a very chaotic synthesis of elements from our waking life, driven by a mix of emotions. Apart from being a fragmented recapitulation of elements we know from waking life the chaotic juxtapositions of our dreams are largely without meaning and appear to be a consequence of some mathematically chaotic logic that rules the night visions. Likewise, ghosts, UFO's and the apparitional in general looks too much like the contents of the human id & ego somehow projected out on to reality itself in a chaotic mishmash.  

The chaotic states of mind and the paranormal (the latter embraces the whole of gamut of apparitions from ghosts, alien animals & life forms to UFOs) are far too erratic, singular, irregular, complex and probably subject to some underlying chaotic dynamic to make them easily amenable to a scientific epistemology that can pin them down.  Scientific epistemology depends above all on a stable status quo. 

As for the relationship of government and UFOs, I'll wager that government doesn't have any special inside knowledge of the phenomenon apart from having bigger databases; in fact just more of the same puzzling observational traces, but, I'll hazard, no hardware, no alien bodies and no Lazar-sport-model flying saucers. Official institutions are probably as puzzled by the whole thing as are the rest of us. But officialdom needs to appear competent and in control, therefore they are loathe to admit their ignorance and lack of control. To my mind this is sufficient to explain the authority's reaction to the paranormal, a reaction which ranges from outright denial to at best an embarrassed evasiveness & silence.

 But be all that as it may: The question remains: Who is hoaxing the Intellectual Dark Web? Some kind of Bob Lazar figure? The whole thing looks so much like the bizarre Bob Lazar fraud where Tim Ventura (initially at least) was strung along with promises, promises, promises.  

Tim Ventura, Anti-Gravity, and The Philadelphia Experiment

The Fascinating World of Fringe Science

I ran the story below 18 years ago in 2006, back in the days before I had formed a conceptual framework for dealing with conspiracy theorism. The story is in fact my tongue-in-cheek retelling of the "Philadelphia Experiment" as told by Anti-gravity aficionado, Tim Ventura.  Well, I call him an "Anti-gravity aficionado" because that was then when he ran a websitre called "American Anti-Gravity": Since, Tim's actually moved on, enhanced the gravitas of his image by wearing a tie & suit rather than T-shirts and now has a YouTube channel where he interviews investigators and technologists who work on, to put it nicely, risky avant-garde science; that is, science at the boundaries of the accepted mainstream; some might call it "fringe-science", still others would call it pseudo-science! It's risky because professional dabblers in these borderline paranormal connections are putting their reputations and careers at risk

Tim Ventura's original telling of the "Philadelphia Experiment" can be found here.  I have to confess that the only Ventura interview I've watched was the one with Kevin Knuth whose fair-minded reasonableness actually did impress me. 

Other relevant links:

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Anti Gravity Road Show. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: An Identified Lying Object? (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Bizarre Case of Bob Lazar. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

***

Some years time ago, whilst I was working as a programmer, a software engineer who was aware of my physics background approached me and asked if I knew anything about LCR circuits. The outcome of the ensuing conversation was that I promised I would give him some information on the theory of these circuits, and subsequently I provided him with a couple of sheets of equations. He never did tell me just why he wanted this information. I knew him to be accomplished in both hardware and software engineering and I guessed he was engaged on some private hardware project. In time he left the company, but that was not the last I heard of him. Some years later I happened across an engineering magazine containing an article where he was being hailed as an inventor of a new device. The device? - A dimmer switch for fluorescent lighting. That’s a bit like managing to invent a tin of stripped paint. The magazine article claimed that my friend had been told that such a device was against the laws of physics.

Although I don’t think there really was any contravention of the laws of physics here, this engineer's attitude is in many ways typical of his class. He now has a consultancy and in his publicity material we read of: “ ….our radical and positive attitude. Where others might say ‘it's not possible’, we'll take up the challenge to inquire, improve and innovate.” As a theorist I like to keep an eye on the practical inventors; if anyone is going to test the laws of physics to breaking point it’s the engineers and inventors – their eye is on what they can actually achieve and not on what the laws of physics tells them they can’t do. They tinker around until they get what they want or stumble across something new, and if they manage to achieve this by dispensing with the laws of physics, so be it!

Perpetual motion has long been an interest of engineers and inventors, and the modern version of the perpetual motion aficionado can found amongst the “zero-point energy” web sites. The “zero-point energy” enthusiasts are not actually striving for perpetual motion as such, for their hope is now grounded in fundamental physics and they are seeking to harvest an inexhaustible supply of free energy by extracting it from the quantum fluctuations of space. These web sites are not for the girls – they don’t present sensitive green schemes that modestly gather energy from nature’s gentler and familiar forces of wind, wave and water, but instead these are very masculine projects that aim to hunt down and wrench energy from nature by exposing her deepest secrets. It is a boys story of daring do, a venture into the unknown for treasure, exceeding great treasure. And it’s not all amateurs: Professor Martin Fleishmann of cold fusion fame probably fits into this category.

However, my favourite cutting edge engineer-inventor web sites, for obvious reasons, are the antigravity sites. If there is such a thing as gravitational anomalies that break the mold of current gravitational theory then these men stand a good chance of finding them. Prominent among the antigravity workers is Tim Ventura. Dubbed as “The Linus Torvalds of Antigravity” he is the designer and constructor of the high voltage lifters popular amongst garage-based inventors (See leading picture accompanying this post). These ‘lifters’ are reckoned by some to demonstrate an antigravity effect, although it has to be said that the physics of these lifters looks suspiciously like the well-known ion wind effect rather than a true gravitational anomaly.

As well as constructing lifters Ventura spends a lot of time researching the background of antigravity, and he mixes with some colourful characters and tells some very colourful stories. One story he reports is so fantastic that it has provided material for film producers. It is a story of intrigue, misunderstood geniuses, secret Nazi projects, heroic refugee scientists, cover-ups, governmental conspiracies, sci-fi technology, flying saucers, you name it. It’s the physics version of The DaVinci Code, an admixture of all the ingredients of block-buster cinema. Does real life ever bring together all this in one convenient concentrate? It does in Tim's stories.

***

The story starts with that now legendary theoretical genius, Einstein. After developing his space-time curvature theory of gravity Einstein went on to attempt the development of a unified field theory that would incorporate electromagnetism; this much is well known. It is also well known that this had the effect of marginalizing Einstein from the mainstream of physics as the new kids on the block went on to develop quantum theory, a theory toward which Einstein expressed diffidence. Hence, the picture of Einstein in his later years is that of solitary genius working by himself into old age on a now forgotten project, a project that many today would regard as the work of a has-been. It is at this point that Ventura’s less substantiated narrative takes over. Taking up the testimony of some of his mysterious contacts Ventura hints that Einstein’s efforts to create a unified field theory were at least partly successful and when he escaped Nazi Germany and fled to America Einstein left a colleague in Germany who handed over the details of this theory to the Third Reich. The Nazis set up a research park under SS chief, Hans Kammler (pictured) where they endeavored to make use of Einstein’s unified field theory to develop new superiority weapons. Like "The DaVinci Code" Ventura’s story has real sites that you can actually visit and ponder the mystery. The research park is in Poland and you can enter its dank underground workshops. Above these workshops on the surface is a strange concrete construction (pictured), which, provided you have flying-saucers in mind, looks suggestively like a flying-saucer launch pad. In fact it looks like a modern-day Stonehenge and thereby accrues all the associated mystique of that much debated ancient structure.

The Nazis, it seems, did not succeed in bringing about a practical result. Instead the research park was overrun by the Russians, but not before one of the top scientists escaped to America. This scientist then provided vital input toward secret American military projects of which the most notorious was the infamous Philadelphia Experiment. 

So, what was the Philadelphia Experiment? It was an experiment that, like all promethium tamperings with the fundamentals of nature, went horribly wrong. It was intended that via an application of Einstein’s unified field theory rays of light would be bent round an object in such a way as to give it a cloak of invisibility. However, instead of merely providing a cloak of invisibility the experiment succeeded in teleporting the test object! And what was the test object? Was it an experimentally controlled carefully quantified block of metal? No. Was it a fly that accidentally got trapped in the apparatus? No. Was it a laboratory rat? No. Was it a tank? No. Was it some brave volunteer? No. It was nothing less than a whole battleship, crew and all! (USS Eldridge – pictured) Today there is a cast of colorful characters flitting in and out of the shade who are supposed to have some sort of connection with and/or knowledge of this experiment and know a lot more than they are letting on. Tim Ventura, of course, has had contact with some of these actors and like a modern day Tintin he is helping to bust the Governmental cover up and conspiracy surrounding the experiment.

I like Tim Ventura; he’s ambitious, he’s bright, he’s freelance, he’s fair-minded and he thinks big, but he has, perhaps, taken the male hankering after the Boys own adventure just a little too far. I recommend Tim's site, if like me, you find fiction rather tame compared to stuff that adds an extra twist by inextricably tangling fact with, let’s just say, some creative interpretations (a bit like the Jack the Ripper Dairies!) and thus presents the investigator with the interesting challenge of trying to extract the true story. Unfortunately, although I am a gravity investigator myself, I can’t come anywhere near matching this kind of drama, and this may be why I have to tell you about other people's adventures rather than my own. The story of my own encounter with the romantic force of gravity is utterly commonplace and banal. That story would include those holidays spent on the beach at the Norfolk seaside resort of Hemsby as I reflected on the problem of gravity, a problem that I increasingly felt was coming my way. Whilst the Children played in sand and sea I, between sips of tea from a vacuum flask, spent many hours with binoculars looking out to sea, pondering with amazement the bulging curvature of the planet Earth that becomes so apparent when good binoculars are used. I have always found that sight breath taking. To see the Earth as a planet from a height of just a few feet above sea level added a palpability to Arthur C Clarke’s technically competent 2001 trilogy of interplanetary travel, a trilogy I read through on more than one occasion during those Hemsby beach holidays. That’s about as near I got to intrigue and high adventure during my forays into Gravitational theory. Boring? No doubt, but then I can only tell it as it is.

Jottings on Reality, the Paranormal and Chaoskampf. Part I

Below are my latest thoughts on the nature of reality. They are jottings of ideas that have been hanging around for some time, although I have on occasion expressed these views in some of my blog entries and also in the prologue of my book "Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity" (See here, here and here for example).  Much of it is a repeat of what I've written elsewhere, but to go over it again is one way of trying to take the ideas forward and hopefully clarify them.

My website/blog is a kind "Donald Crowhurst" log of my thinking on the meaning of life. It is a "pilgrim's" journal of philosophically inclined thoughts written down as life slips past; life is short and therefore one needs to capture one's thoughts in text, otherwise they are forgotten and disappear into oblivion. As Donald Crowhurst neared his end on his lonely journey he did his best to solve the riddle of the meaning of it all; it was his personal Riddle of the Sphinx and like H.G. Wells' Time Traveller he found himself in dire straits. His desperation, his loneliness, a very badly bruised ego and the pressure to make some sense of an apparently nonsensical situation unhinged Crowhurst and he became incoherent. Nevertheless,  I'm happy to honour this flawed hero; he was only doing what countless humans have tried to do; probe the meaning of life and in Crowhurst's case use it as a means to dignify his predicament at the same time. Like Crowhurst I seek adventure in my own (small) way and I also know the pressing need to make sense of life as it flies by but fortunately not under quite so desperate and solitary circumstances!

If am I given the time perhaps one day I will organise my rather raw and haphazard journal notes into a systematic book form. But just at the moment there are still too many avenues to explore and when I abandon this latest exploration I'll be moving on. I see my endeavours as a kind of wrestling with reality in order to squeeze out its secrets. But perhaps as a Christian I should really characterise it as a wrestling with God himself (cf. Genesis 32:22-32); for through created reality God makes himself known. Unfortunately in comparison with contemporary Christian culture's blends of scriptural fundamentalism, fideism, ecstatic experiences, divine encounters, undamings of the emotions, hi-passion scenes, spiritual existential crises, spiritual pizzazz and holy star-dust my relatively dry endeavours are unlikely to register on the spiritual radar. But then that may be a good thing; I become self-conscious and distracted if I think I'm being noticed!

***

It is very tempting to take it for granted that the essence of reality is embodied in that heavy inertial stuff we perceive around us and call "matter"; sometimes it comes in lumpen homogeneous forms but at other times it appears in exquisitely organised forms such as we see in living organisms. But in both cases the underlying paradigm which dictates an interpretation of what we perceive is often the same: Viz: that is, it is taken to be self-evident that the third person perspective on matter  is the absolute and objective grounds for anchoring "truth". In the material paradigm matter has an unambiguous existence; it can't have a partial existence; it's either there or it's not there. This is materialist dualism which in its strong form dichotomises mind and matter but is apt to regard mind and its concomitant of conscious cognition as at best a ghostly epi-phenomenon and at worst a complete illusion.

I have always had difficulty with the thesis that a posited "material reality" is somehow the ultimate unambiguous anchor point for reality and the standard by which reality is defined: For a start, quantum theory suggests that matter  can exist in ambiguous states (more about that another time). Moreover, knowledge of so-called material reality can only ever come via our experience and our cognisance of it. As is so often pointed out in philosophical circles we really only see the world through our perceptions and therefore don't have any direct contact with some unambiguous well anchored "material-thing-in-itself"; as far as we are concerned the latter can only ever be evidenced by our experiences and then constructed by our cognition based on those evidences, almost as a kind of explanatory myth. Hence, I've always been inclined toward idealism as a philosophy; that is, the touchstone of reality is  not "matter", whatever that is supposed mean, but the shades of grey we call mental life. On this view reality derives from conscious cognition, but because conscious cognition comes in degrees of rationality and completeness this means that deciding what is real is itself not a binary on/off decision, but as with mind it comes in degrees of reality.

To me the notion of a fixed "material" world absent of the existence of sensing conscious thinking, "myth" constructing agents, is simply not an intelligible idea. The concept of a "concrete material reality unambiguously out there" is, I suggest, a kind of illusion worked on us because of the integrity and rationality of our experience and perceptions. In the normal rational mode of consciousness incoming data is so well organised, coordinated and potentially complete, not just for a single cognating agent but also across a whole society of agents, that it facilitates the mental construction of coherent objects. The mutually harmonious responses of these agents is evidence of a shared rational reality of high observational integrity (in most cases). Registration of the senses of sight, sound and touch and also the observational registration between agents means that conscious cognition, especially a society of communicating cognating agents, can construct the consistent "myth" of a single coherent world of great harmony and meaning. Reality is its rationality, coherence and observational integrity. Without this integrating integrity reality is compromised. For me, then, the existence of a benevolent God who underwrites this rational integrity is all important.

The foregoing is what I call mathematical materialism. The physical model of fundamental particles with its fields of signals is a way of describing this world of harmonious registration between observers. For me the replete rationality of physics looks like an organising principle and medium for a world of communicating observers. In one sense we do have direct contact with the "thing-in-itself" because that thing-in-itself is not made of particles, but of organised "cognita"; the stuff of mind; a coherent world of organised experience and a thinking rational mind to apprehend it. "Particles" are a computational device for describing this world of communicating minds. 

In Turing's test for the existence of true human-level "machine intelligence" a qualifying machine must hold its illusion of human intelligence under close natural language interrogation. However, this test effectively implicitly posits the existence of an interrogating intelligence of sufficient level of capability to pass a qualifying judgement. It is clear that given we are dealing here with the complex multidimensional phenomenon of intelligence the Turing test, like psychological tests in general, is not  going to  return simple "yes or no" answers but rather it is likely to confer a pass mark or score. It is notable, however, that the Turing test concept of mind has unleashed controversy over whether the third person perspective of a very convincing simulated facade is sufficient condition for identifying the presence of mind or whether intelligence has a deeper thing-in-itself in the form of the first person perspective of conscious cognition. Dualism assumes a dichotomy between "material-things-in-themselves" and "sentient-things-in-themselves" where to today there is a tendency to believe ultimate reality resides in "material-things-in-themselves" rather than "sentient-things-in-themselves". In contrast my choice is sentience as the ultimate thing-in-itself and moreover the thing-in-itself which underwrites the reality of matter.

Using the Turing test as a kind of template I propose that the qualification for material reality is that it must hold up under the close scrutiny of an investigating rational sentient agent and provide a sufficient suite of evidence faultless enough in registration, harmony, and coherence between observers for it to qualify as real. As in the Turing test, the test for material reality has an implicit assumption of the preexistence of a sentient cognating interrogator without which the test becomes meaningless. This concept of reality posits an up and running complex sentience as an a priori feature; for an agent capable of carrying out a reality test, that agent must itself be sufficiently rational, complex  and organised. In fact as it turns out human sentience is governed by the very same rational world of particulate order that is found in the world around us. Minds know what it feels like to be a mind and therefore because minds explain themselves in terms of a material paradigm minds are, in a sense, matter knowing what it feels like to be matter.

Therefore in probing that world of matter we are, in effect, probing the nature of our very selves: As I have said before, like a computer language compiler that is written in the self-same language it compiles, human beings can describe themselves in terms of their own physical concepts. But unlike the Turing test which unleashes controversies over whether mind is merely a facade or has a sentient-thing-in-itself behind the facade, there is for me no controversy of whether the material facade hides a particulate-thing-itself behind it; it simply doesn't: Rational reality is merely a highly organised facade: unless it be the mind of God himself who creates. organises and sustains this facade and underwrites its reality and rationality.

There are some things that do fail the "Turing" test for full reality. For example, our dreams, although sometimes feeling very real, do not return such a reality; the scenes and actors in dreams are not amenable to any closer scrutiny than the dream offers. In fact dreams have more the character of the scenes and actors in works of fiction such as films or computer simulations: those scenes and actors are bit parts with little or no background that can be investigated by oneself let alone share with other persons. Unlike much of the "material reality" we are familiar with, dreams do not allow their subject matter to get into the cross hairs of different perspectives and angles. In contrast in mathematical materialism the entities are not bit-parts; they have a background story and/or personalities worked out in full.

In the next part(s) I will be thinking about the paranormal phenomena when rationality partly breaks down and conscious cognition enters the "Oz" state. I will also be thinking about the reality of those distant galaxies and distant times and more on the role of God as underwriter of reality. 

Tribal Britannia

The xenophobic fears behind  fascist  tribal herding

instincts are not just confined to war time Germany. 

Those fears are alive and just as sick in the UK today.

We've all heard of those Japanese soldiers isolated on a Pacific island who have been found still  thinking they are fighting WWII many years after that war had ended. Well, I have found some people on an island on the edge of the Atlantic who are still fighting the war against the Germans. That island is called "Great Britain". You can find these people on a Facebook page called "EU -  I voted leave". This page seems to bring out the most jingoistic, belligerent, and bellicose individuals this small island has the misfortune to harbour.  For example "EU - I voted leave" posted the following text:

Here is another sample to keep the embattled warrior instinct alive:

Yes, that's right, they are not just fighting WWII but also all the wars this country has had with France, Spain and European powers in general. It is one thing to object to the EU on the basis of its inefficient and domineering bureaucracy, but quite another to object to it on the basis of a xenophobic fear of the motives of Germans, French, Spanish etc and to dwell under the illusion that somehow the UK doesn't host the same potentiality for corruption and absolutism; that's a propensity which can be found at home as well as abroad. This is the stuff of deluded fascist paranoia which majors in egotistical "great nations versus the scum" myths.

Anyway, below is a sample of the aggressive anti-Europeanism, in particular anti-Germanic sentiment, that this squalid Facebook page incites in its commenters. I've changed names, of course.

***

Bert Beefboard  The Germans are trying again to rule Europe but this time by using the EU Community. We see through this to the 4th REICH which has never died but has been in hiding. Now they are back. We must win this battle again and have complete Sovereignty. Brexit the Hard way is the ONLY way.

MY COMMENT: Another commenter on the FB page sensibly asks if Bert has any evidence for his claim. We then get this answer:

Bert Beefboard: Born and lived through the Germans and the wish to rule everything. Not more to say as I can tell from your comment you dont care for Sovereignty and are a remainer. Foolish boy!

MY COMMENT:  Note the nationalist grouping here: Beefboard uses the generic term "Germans" and not "The Nazis". In Beefboard's mind all Germans are under suspicion of tribal and nationalistic hegemony. This dehumanises them into a collective. I was under the impression that WWII was fought against the Nazi philosophy which had taken root in Germany and not against the Germans per see.

Craig Crackabump The last 2 attempts were stopped by bullets and blood. This attempt hopefully will be stopped by the ballet box

MY COMMENT: Presumably Craig is ready with his gun if the ballot's don't go his way!

Russell Rotter: Sadly a lot of people who lived through WW11 were conned into voting for the Common Market they thought it would stop another attempt by the Germans to rule Europe. My Mum would be turning in her Grave.

MY COMMENT:  Note once again the failure to distinguish between the corrupt human philosophy of Nazism and a national group. 

Dafty Duckit It's said that many SS and scientists relocated to Ireland and America to escape Nuremberg trials for crimes against humanity... One I think was caught and punished... alphabet soups were created using the very people who escaped and today we have their projects inhumane and otherwise still playing out Europe being one of them...

MY COMMENT: The conspiracy theorist speaks! Very reminiscent of the views that Hitler had; just replace "SS" with "Jews"!

Now here's a guy who seems to still be fighting the war against the American colonists! 

Benny Bumfrey  Just a quick reminder the U.S screwed us royaly. They literally stole islands and money before they joined the war. We had to give up so much just to get planes and tanks made. Henry Ford of Ford motors gave an entire years salary to hilter to build military trucks and tanks. The yanks also sold oil to to hilter before selling to the British as well. They may have joined in the end but they screwed us before they did.

MY COMMENT: Keep those grudges alive! Heck, you idiot Benny we had better not take on the American military as well; we won't stand a chance!

Terry Terrible:  this report tells all, you try and convince people that being ruled by a band of nobodies, a drunk and a mad Herman woman a little Napoleon type upstart that this the way to go I don't think so

MY COMMENT: I was wondering when Napoleon would come up! Better relaunch "HMS Victory" and send it to France!

Dafty Duckit: I've swatted since 2014 at five subjects a night...I've watched world.war two code breakers I've watched historians etc...I've read the national archives which state that war one was started because of "pirates" in European waters holding boats carrying food and all sorts.(minus liquorice) hostage and looting then Ferdinand etc... looking at our fight over fish today has Europe changed in any way? No it hasn't in or out there's still."pirates" in the water...the archives are very telling but withhold names...red cross were sent to Europe to help the injured and the ill during both wars...for a fee! United Nations were known as league of nations...they changed their name to hide again their corruption...and so it goes on.

MY COMMENT: Very reminiscent of the kind of paranoid hyper-nationalist sentiment that Hitler stirred up in order to start WWII: Recall that Hitler played on the grudges stemming from WWI. To Dafty Duckit history is all about remembering and keeping alive grievance. 

Now, below we have the commenter Jane Pain  who starts by telling us that what Duckit has just written is "All true": 

Jane Pain: All true. I need to add one thing. Noah built an Ark to save many people from the flood. Today Jesus is the Ark. Not religion! But a relationship with our creator. I'm not religious, religion is what turns thousands away from Christ. JOHN 3:16

MY COMMENT: Not too surprising really: This looks like a Christian fundamentalist. Christian fundamentalism, hyper-nationalistic based paranoia and fascism are linked it seems, perhaps via the idea of the leader-patriarch. In fact it was actually one of my Christian fundamentalist FB friends who approvingly shared the "EU - I voted leave" post which drew my attention to it in the first place. She added the following comment to her shared post:

Tina Breadcrust Our Europhile Parliamentarians don't know their history! They don't have confidence in us as a nation. We sometimes feel like saying "Why don't you emigrate to Europe?" The deal our Prime Minister is seeking seems to be a halfway between being in and out from the noises Brexiteer MPs are making!  😢 ⛈Looks like stormy weather ahead!!! God gave this nation the Gifts it needed to survive on its own. Just as he gave Israel the necessary Gifts to overcome and survive alone. Confidence is all that's needed.*

MY COMMENT: Fancy Tina Breadcrust accusing Parliamentarians of not knowing history! How ironic! I know Tina personally and I try not to be too hard on her as she's a nice but vulnerable person. Frankly, however, she's as impressionable and gullible as they come, completely lacking in critical faculties!  See here. But nevertheless she holds hyper-nationalistic sentiments allied to a fundamentalist sense of utter conviction absent of any epistemic humility, a mix which I regard as potentially toxic. One of Tina's Trump supporting right-wing American FB friends then pipes up:

Patsy Storedump: Sounds like the deceived are doing in America. Why come here. To be free. To worship as one chooses. Now we are finally fighting back. People first Citizens first Politicians out. Get a man like TRUMP and get rid of all your professional politicians. He is not done with America yet. We can only pray and fill our alters with repentant hearts. Let God lead and take back your country from the enemy. We will Pray for you as you pray for us. Allies in the Lord.

MY COMMENT:  We begin to see here how just how in tune Christian fundamentalism is with the fascist exhilaration over the concept of the "great leader & saviour":  "Stuff parliament and the Magna Carta. Stuff the constitutional monarchy and 1688. We want a Fuhrer great leader!" There is something about the fundamentalist psyche which has a worrying resonance and emotional connection with hyper-nationalism, bordering on fascism**

I couldn't resist responding to Patsy as follows:

Timothy V Reeves ...but perhaps not get a man like CROMWELL. He got rid of all our professional politicians within an hour or two. When he didn't like what he saw he cleared the house of commons with his army!. That proved to be a lot more effective than the gun powder plot! But I wouldn't recommend this to Donald as a way of "draining the swamp"! It's too banana republic!

I got no reply!

I think I've had enough of all this, so let's finish with just two more examples of "Brexit" chauvinism (My emphases):

Dafty Duckit: Philip Codpiece it's tough though isn't it because we won't give them another ballot...I'm glad we have maybe a couple of people who had this all to deal with in the 70's I was only four when all this started I only remember my mum having ago at me for asking questions about it because it made her cry...my mum said "your grandad died for your freedom just for the Germans to come through the back door".. I don't like dictatorship so I stood up against it not just for myself and children but my family who are no longer with me

Jonny Bilgewater: Who are you kidding Mrs Merkel if you think old Englands done. We are the boys who will stop your little game etc etc. They don't like it up em. SOD Mrs Hitler Merkel and her French white flag waving sissies. We don't need EU it's a dying flawed institution and will collapse within a few years. We want OUR country back.

***

What a horrible lot! These views are such a self-send up that I did wonder if we had tongue-in-cheek trolls abroad. If so Poe's law strikes  again!  But to think that I might be trapped on a small island on the edge of the Atlantic with these people! It's enough to make one emigrate to Europe! But then Europe's got these bellicose right-wingers as well! I've never thought of myself as xenophobic but when I come across such people I sense more than a touch of xenophobia as I realise just how alien and how utterly irreconcilable their world-view is to mine. Perhaps, I wonder, there is some kind of mathematical limit which stops many humans from extending tribal entitlement to the whole of the human race; you need some people left to blame for your problems! Xenophobia breeds xenophobia as civilisation collapses under the weight of international distrust and infighting.These people are far more alien to me than the open minded Europeans with whom I have had contact and with whom I feel  much more at home. If the views of the above people become popular they would be the kindling that inflames war. It never occurs to them that there are also hyper-nationalists in the countries they so fear and that these extremists are finding similar excuses to justify their xenophobia, and if necessary to wage war. 

Below are some pictures of the people we really need to fear and you don' find them only in Germany or Europe. In fact you find them everywhere, unfortunately:  

....in the USA

...in the UK

***

So, once again we find a worrying juxtaposition of Christian fundamentalism, hyper-nationalism bordering on fascism and conspiracy theorism. It is interesting to note that the "Intelligent Design" correspondent Denise O'leary who writes for the ID web site "Uncommon Descent" also had a similar view on Europe to the people I have quoted above; as with the above she conflated the war with Nazism with a war on the German people itself. See here:


Footnotes:
* Tina holds a romantizied and nostalgic view of the UK's past as a once "Great Nation".   Viz: No one seems to remember that we were once a great country in the days before the Common Market turned Economic Community turned European Union. What a stupid comment!  I think you will find that most people, even with a casual acquaintance of history, will remember when the small Kingdom of Britain had a vast empire and, unlike Tina, many have at least some inkling as to why things have changed for this relatively small country. What Tina doesn't grasp is that this country achieved its imperial "greatness" (not that it was always very "great" in the moral sense of the word) via a complex of circumstances that really no one understands; from the Anglo-Norman social ethos, through its isolated island status, to the confluence of the many factors which came together in the industrial revolution, a myriad conditions played their part in the rise & rise of Great Britain. But now that the advanced nations have industrialised or are industrialising the advantages of being a "first-in-nation" have run their course. You would think that being a Christian who subscribes to the apostolic authority of the book of Romans Tina would understand that fundamentally human beings are pretty much the same paradoxical mix of good and bad where ever you are.

** The Nazis weren't Christian: In fact underneath it they despised its apparent untermensch style "weakness" which contrasted to the "strength" of Nietzsche's Godless concept of the "ubermensch". However, Hitler exploited the conservative, tribal and authoritarian tendencies of the church in Germany to his advantage and that church bears some culpability for the outcome.

The Paranormal Part 5: The Last Straw

Crop circles, Rabbit Holes and Time Loops - Rob Buckle

Crop Circle Truth, with Rob Buckle on Circlemakers

See also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krA-PYWZQPc 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=ofNNwsNCB0g

And the channels Zenrabbit1 and Zennrabbit on YouTube

The above videos are talks by crop circle researcher Rob Buckle. His interest is in human made crop circles – that’s right there really are human constructed crop circles out there and they are very impressive by the sound of it! However, as a result of his emphasis on the human aspect of this phenonmenon Buckle has earned the ire of the traditional circle researchers who have placed a huge stake in the “alien intelligence did it” hypothesis. Ironically it is these people, whose life’s work and businesses swing on this thesis, that have become the powerful crop circle establishment. As might be expected given the natural state of human affairs, this establishment via their well entrenched interests have backed themselves into a corner, unable to gracefully bow out. They have burnt their life boats and Buckle has not just rocked their ship, he has also pulled the bilge plug.

Evidently Buckle has some acquaintance with the circle of circle makers and can tell us which circles he knows for a fact to have been created by them. None of this is to say that Buckle himself doesn't have some rather exotic notions of his own: He appears not to rule out that some circles may have non-human origins, but he is more interested in the far more frequent human created circles and that is because of the strange lore and anecdotes that now surrounds the making of these prodigious works of art. In his talks Buckle relates some of the weird paranormal events that have haunted, yes, haunted is the right word, the circle makers; for example, frightening tall shadowy figures appearing in fields at night, presences that have barred entry to fields, lights, orbs, UFOs and this is just for starters: Particularly intriguing are the circle makers who have had to abort their corn circle mission for various reasons and then found later that either their planned circles were executed by other (unknown) parties, or, if they got only half way through, finding that by the next day someone, or something, had completed them.  Watch the videos to hear more. Unfortunately most of the evidences Buckle offers are one-off anecdotes that cannot be tested by traditional hard science; in fact it is all too likely that such peculiar phenomena are far too anomalous and erratic to yield to test tube precipitating and spring extending science. But having said that let me mention that Buckle also shows a video of a scientist who attempted to distinguish between so-called “real” and “hoaxed” crop circles using his instrumentation only to find that these instruments showed just as strong readings in circles known to have human origins.

Some time ago during the nineties “corn circle” (as they were then called) craze I remember watching a TV program where a farmer said that his parents, who were farmers between the wars, would find the occasional (simple) crop circle in their fields. In those days they just shrugged their shoulders and got on with their work. Since seeing that program I’ve had the sneaky suspicion that although the recent highly sophisticated circles are likely to be the product of expert and well practiced crop artists there has been all along a background of simpler formations that are not a product of human agency. Buckle, in fact, confirms this opinion in the comment thread of his second video above:

The few that still have a question mark over them are usually small and simple, but with swirled lays, done in one movement. These type were more common in the early days, but now are very rare.

In these simpler designs the emphasis is on their faultless machine like execution. That suggests to me a very algorithmic type "intelligence" rather than the very general necessarily mistake prone* all-purpose intelligence of humans. Who knows, perhaps the mysterious agency behind these machine perfect circles is becoming jealous of human efforts which have put their rather simple formations into the shade and this may explain why crop circle hauntings have had the effect of frightening away some artists!

It is wrong to call the crop circle creators hoaxers or pranksters – they are true artists who love the adventure, creativeness and artistic high that their clandestine work gives them as they have pushed it to the very highest level of development. Also, in view of the hauntings perhaps there is the added frisson of a dangerous encounter with the supernatural. But with that must go a warning; they are outlaws beyond the protection of society and opening themselves up to who knows what. Hauntings have a disquieting way of attaching themselves to people if those people find themselves in a position where they can become “infected”. Therefore I would categorically advise against proactive attempts to make a connection with the otherworldly. On the web site of crop circle researcher Colin Andrews (who has similar views to Buckle) we can read of a case where an off duty policeman who spotted tall white entities in the vicinity of a crop circle near Silbury hill and tried to interact with them. Faced by this custodian of the law these beings legged it over a hill pretty fast, but that didn't stop the officer subsequently picking up a haunt: See here http://www.colinandrews.net/UFO-PoliceSergeant-SilburyHill.html:

After the experience the officer suffered what he called poltergeist experiences. Several electrical items began to malfunction and there were strange knocks at the front door. When the officer answered the door there would be no-one there. The officer felt he had brought something home with him, several days after the experience he said that he had felt a presence within his home. Sometimes, when walking out to the kitchen, he said he saw in his minds eye a brief flash of a towering black figure (approx 8ft)) standing before him (Much like the figures circle makers see - Ed). These types of experiences are quite common with experiencers.

The officer’s continuing experiences show that whatever the origin of these events, once they enter into someone's life they seem to have a continuing presence.

To me that’s the equivalent of the frightening health warning picture on the back of a cigarette packet; I don’t think we have an inbuilt fear of the numinous for nothing. Better to keep to passive research rather than proactive research – that is, don’t try to stimulate "occult systems" to produce test output by poking them – instead just sit back, watch and think.  The occult is looking to me as if it’s a breakdown of the coherent rationality of our world in favour of some kind of cognitive delirium with, perhaps, a Freudian diagnosis of crises  in Jung's collective unconscious partly explaining it's meaning. But who knows; that's just a guess! If a passive approach helps keep this at bay it can’t be bad.

Other posts in my paranormal series:

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/paranormal-part-2-warning-dont-watch.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/paranormal-part-3-westall-66-and.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-paranormal-part-4-monsters-from-id.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/identified-lying-object.html

Footnote:
* Due to a trial and error heuristic of "search, reject and select". Human minds necessarily use error feedback to learn.

Silbury Hill from West Kennet Long Barrow taken during one of my visits. I have never seen or felt anything odd! I suppose I ought to be pleased!

Addendum 3/2/2014 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-399136/Crop-circles-hit-spiritualists-suicide.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ross-well.html

Through the Portal of Death and Beyond?

Did academic neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander get a quick demo of life beyond the grave?

In a blog post entitled “Newsweek-panders to the deluded again” we find atheist PZ Myers foaming at the mouth over a reported case of Near Death Experience. What may have particularly annoyed PZ in this case is that the person who is using his NDE to make claims about a heavenly realm is academic neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander, a lecturer at Harvard’s medical school. Now, you don’t get much more academic establishment than that and yet here is Alexander leading us “astray” with his scientific authority – or at least PZ Myers thinks so!

One might expect that of all people Alexander would at least have a modicum of neuro-psychological theory, and therefore something to say about the functioning of the brain (or lack of it) near death. So instead of giving us a first person account of the truly incredible why isn’t Alexander explaining his NDE in third person neuro-psychological terms, terms that PZ is predisposed to prefer? Instead Alexander stresses the reality of his experience and this clearly riles Myers.

But first let me concede this: From the perspective of Myers and myself Alexander’s affirmation of a world beyond the grave is hardly logically binding; it is certainly evidence relevant to the question of life after death, but it is not strong evidence, no stronger than the evidence we get about alien abductions. From a third person perspective there are likely to be a thousand and one explanations that can concocted and which are consistent with this perspective, but which make no recourse to life after death, starting, for example, with the explanation that conceivably the whole story is bogus (although some checking with sources might at least quickly eliminate that one from the inquiry)

Myers himself attempts to explain Alexander’s account in terms of confabulation:

These were stories that he built later, as he was coming to grips with that past trauma, and they were a means of coping with a huge painful gap in his memory. We know that this is what our brains do; it fills gaps in our knowledge with imaginary events to maintain continuity, a process called confabulation.

Here Myers requires the highly intelligent and critical Alexander to sit on a huge empty hole in his experience as it slowly gets filled in over a period of time and yet be unaware that it’s happening; is Alexander likely to be any less intellectually aware of this possibility than Myers? Rather than positing that Alexander had no experience while he was under, (As Myers suggests) more likely, I feel,  is that Alexander had some initial fragmentary experiences thrown up, perhaps, by a sensory deprived brain (not unlike Charles Bonnet syndrome). These fragments were then given some kind of continuity through further confabulation. Perhaps....

But in any case there is, I feel, something unsatisfactory about these attempts to explain away Alexander’s experience: Why hasn’t Alexander thought of this kind of thing himself? In fact, it is likely he has thought of it, but may be his first person “epiphany” was far more compelling and coherent than any explanation coming from third party observers like Myers or myself. As the saying goes: The man with an experience is never at the mercy of man with an argument! . Science depends on a dialogue that brings theoretical narratives and experience into a contention that seeks ultimate synthesis but allows neither theory nor experience complete dominance.  Therefore I'm prepared to at least give Alexander the credence of a doubt.

The big gripe I have with people like Myers is that one gets the impression they are unable to entertain a measure of self-doubt in their explanations. They live in the service of a particular, exclusive and ulterior ontological outlook, an outlook that is so thoroughgoing as to exclude even a small degree of reasonable doubt. Whilst an explanation of Alexander’s narrative in terms of confabulation built on fragmentary experience may be the best shot explanation from third parties such as myself there seems to be no accompanying leeway in Myers epistemology which allows him to simultaneously host alternative explanations; anyone who so much as courts a contradiction of Myers' ulterior metaphysical ontology is regarded by him as a mental cripple.

How PZ Myers habitually sees those who are less than enthusiastic about his ulterior ontology. (Dr Eben Alexander is pictured on the  right)

EbenAlexander's neurosurgeon mates are queuing up to operate on PZ Myers' brain.