Another false claim from Robert Morningstar

James Concannon writes...

        Of all the Apollo Moonwalkers, the late Ed Mitchell is the unquestioned darling of the pseudoscience crowd. In more than one interview, he stated quite categorically that representatives of extraterrestrial civilizations have visited Planet Earth, and continue to keep watch over our affairs right now. He does not claim to have any actual evidence of this, only that he has been told this by senior US military officers and believes them.

        The pseudoscience people often simply project that rather weird claim into areas that they wish were true, like Mitchell's own experiences on the Moon. Yesterday, Robert AM* posted this on the Book of Farces:

" I discovered photos of UFOs taken by Mitchell hlehe [sic] was on the surface of the Moon."

         Challenged to produce these photos, he did not respond. What makes it funnier is that, at almost the same time, he posted a link to part of a Mitchell interview on the Tube that is You. At 1:25 in this video, Mitchell says "I don't have any personal first-hand UFO experience." In plain language, Mitchell saw nothing and heard nothing on the Moon that amounts to any hint of an extraterrestrial presence (unless you count rocks).

        Why does AM*, who bills himself as a "civilian intelligence analyst," make these false claims? I can only guess, and my guess is that he likes his fans to think he's "in the know" about woo-woo affairs. It reminds me of when, in January 2015, he claimed to have a copy of the "1967 edition" of the Brookings Report. There is no such document, and he has never been able to cite any language from it that supports his erroneous interpretation of the 1960 report.

 

        Just like Hoagland, Bara, Wilcock, Brandenburg, Lainey et al., AM* has a different concept of "truth" from that which most of us share.

Update April 2017
         Just for shits & giggles I asked him about this again. It turns out he means this image of Turtle Rock:

image credit: NASA

        Yes, there's scanner contamination up in the sky, near the second fiducial from left. Ed Mitchell stepped a little to his right and shot the next frame:

Oh look, nothing in the sky.


--James Concannon

John Brandenburg, lost in space

        People often ask, about pseudoscientists, whether they really believe the nonsense they peddle or whether, perhaps, they just pretend to believe as a way of selling books and raking in the conference fees. I've asked that question myself, particularly in respect of Richard Hoagland. Can a man who may not be highly educated but who has accumulated a certain amount of knowledge about spaceflight really think that NASA's launch times are governed by astrology? I don't know the answer but I think the default assumption must be "Yes, he really is that stupid."

        Perhaps the extreme case of this dilemma is John Brandenburg, who was given yet another two hours on Coast to Coast AM last Wednesday night to promote his 2015 book Death on Mars. Brandenburg is a bona fide physicist with real expertise in nuclear fission and fusion, and a real grasp of the realities of interpreting scientific data from unmanned space missions. So why is he still telling us that the so-called "Face" on Mars has eyes, nostrils and a headdress, when we all know that has been falsified (see my blogpost 40 Years of the Face on Mars.) Why is he telling us that NASA/JPL never released the THEMIS imagery of Cydonia returned by Mars Odyssey, when it's so easy to find those images on the net?

        Most puzzling of all, why is this man now devoting his career to the proposition that there is evidence of thermonuclear warfare on Mars? On Wednesday, he took full advantage of the opportunity handed to him by George Noory to trot that pony round the ring once again. I've already pointed out the weakness of his evidence about xenon isotope ratios, and so has Stuart Robbins, so there's no need to torture our brains on that topic today. But another piece of what he claims as evidence is the discovery of glass on Mars. On C2C he said "thousands of square miles were turned to glass, and made radioactive." He did not cite evidence for that, but on another occasion he has said this:

"Vitrified soil, etched with acid, has been found at the sites of both hypothetical explosions, but nowhere else on Mars. This mineral resembles "trinitite", the melt glass found at the site of nuclear explosions. So I consider my hypothesis is being supported by new data." [emph. added]

        When he wrote that (in December 2014) he cited a paper in Geology by Briony Horgan and James F. Bell: "Widespread weathered glass on the surface of Mars." See that word "widespread"? Horgan and Bell offer absolutely no support to his contention that the glass is concentrated at his two nuclear explosion sites. They report volcanic glass over virtually the whole Northern hemisphere, and nowhere state that it is radioactive. Brandenburg has committed the cardinal sin of citing someone else's work as supporting a hypothesis when it in fact does no such thing.

OMG Klingons!
       In the second hour, Brandenburg launched himself even further from science and logic. On the topic of "disclosure," he said this:

05:50 "Let's assume for the sake of argument that the US Government knows we're not alone in the universe.... If there's that much smoke there must be fire... So let's say the government knows this, and it realizes its goal is that some day we're like Startrek. If we're up to speed with the rest of the universe, yeah the Klingons are out there, so are the Romulans, so are the rest of the Federation ... There's a whole zoo out there, but we can get along with them, especially if we keep our powder dry and our eyes peeled. So we can deal with this, but we must become spacefaring, we must become an advanced race. So if that's the government's goal, then they have to eventually break it to the public that we're not alone. And the best way, as it turns out, is to find a primitive, long dead, civilization on Mars. It's the best possible way, because unlike a radio signal... the government I'm sure has a list of radio beacons that they know about^{note 1}. And ... but if you allow those to come to light, then this causes a big fuss.  And a bunch of nitwits will argue "Oh we should send a message back saying that we're friendly."...^{note 2} So instead of having all that debate [about whether we should reply] ...  and deciphering the message.. Instead of having people trying to decipher the message to try and respond, there's none of that debate. No-- these people are dead. They've been dead for a long time, they were primitive. So that not only makes us feel advanced, it also makes us feel lucky. So there's a positive message there. We're alive, they're dead, and by the way the people depicted on the faces look very humanoid."

        See the inherent fallacy there? He's talking as if the powers that be are vigorously promoting his ideas and those of Hoagland, Bara, Carlotto etc. as a way of gently breaking the news. But that's not at all what's happening. On the contrary, Brandenburg, Hoagland et al. are getting absolutely no encouragement from The White House, Congress, or The Pentagon, still less from NASA or from Malin Space Science Systems.

        So I say Brandenburg is delusional. What's more, not only does he pronounce "nuclear" incorrectly ("nucular") but he pronounces "Mare" (as in Mare Acidalium, for example) like a female horse, instead of the latin "Mah-ray." Credibility gap, anyone?

=======================/ \======================
[1] This is so unlikely that it can be discounted. The government (well, NASA) started a serious SETI program in 1992 but Congress canceled it (ref). What's a serious physicist doing putting out these silly rumors without evidence?
[2] I elided Noory's interjection "Stephen Hawking says 'Don't answer back'". Hawking's warning has had a lot of attention in the media, but it's not new at all. "If the cosmic phone rings, don't answer" was the title chosen by Nick Pope for his report on the 2010 Royal Society 2-day conference, whose full title was “The detection of extraterrestrial life and the consequences for science and society”. I am certain that the first person who said that was an anthropologist, speaking in the 1970s. Unfortunately I can't remember who it was, and Google doesn't recognize life before about 1990.

Morningstar, Bara, not even wrong

James Concannon writes....

"Obama handing The Peoples’ Internet to Communist China" -- headline in Canada Free Press, 30 September, reposted on the Book of Faces with relish by Robert Morningstar.


        The utterly misinformed article under that headline claimed that on October 1st "control of the Internet" was handed to the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU)-- an organization that is run by the Peoples Republic of China.

        I guess that must count as what the Rational Wikipedia likes to call "Not Even Wrong"--meaning, a statement so totally unconnected with anything true that it isn't even possible to discuss it. As I'm sure most readers here already know, the contract between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the US Department of Commerce lapsed, as had been planned for 18 years. All it means is that the US Govt will no longer have oversight of the Domain Name System (DNS) database. DNS will be curated, as it has been since 1998, by an expert international body. ICANN has no ability, or desire, to control content on the net. The change had the support of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Verizon, organized as the Internet Governance Coalition (largely because they feared that, if this didn't happen, something worse would). The ITU has nothing to do with it, and is not an arm of Communist China in any case.

        Robert Morningstar is not an expert on Internet policy or technical structure, in fact he appears to be remarkably ignorant on both topics. The sole reason he reposted that spectacularly false CFP article is that he thought he would score a political point. Candidate Trump, you see, is one of several American politicians who opposed the ending of ICANN's contract on First Amendment grounds. Morningstar has been frothing at the mouth over the US Presidential election all this year. ICANN itself released the following statement:

"The US government has never, and has never had the ability to, set the direction of the (ICANN) community’s policy development work based on First Amendment ideas ... The US government has no decreased role. Other governments have no increased role. There is simply no change to governmental involvement in policy development work in ICANN."

Mike Bara places his virtual foot in his twitter mouth
        Another of this blog's regular targets, college dropout and world-famous author of unintended fiction Mike Bara, also got this event spectacularly wrong, and for similarly slimy political reasons. Yesterday he tweeted "The first thing that ICANN will block are all the videos showing Hillary using a teleprompter in the first debate."

       Another superb example of not even wrong--and now I hate myself for allowing myself to be drawn into such crass stupidity as the secret teleprompter. Ugh.

Update 2 Oct:
A follow-up piece from Canada Free Press, dated 1 October, reported:

"As quickly as you could say Barry Soetoro the Internet was all but officially stamped ‘Made in China’ at midnight last night."

        The author of both these pieces of shit is Judi McLeod. Ms. McLeod hasn't, apparently, even now understood that the ITU is nothing to do with this story.

refs:
Obama’s handing off Internet to China Controlled UN ITU now a fait accompli CFP, 1 Oct
US hands internet control to ICANN C|Net, 1 Oct
Has the US just given away the internet? BBC News, 1 Oct
Y2K 2.0: Is the US government set to “give away the Internet” Saturday?  Ars Technica, 30 Sept

Thanks to Chris L for sources

The wisdom of Robert Morningstar

James Concannon writes...

        More laughs with Morningstar. Today he posted a 1:42 excerpt of one of his lectures at the Edgar Cayce NYC Center. The audio quality was utterly appalling but after several runs I came up with the following transcript, which I believe is accurate apart from a few minor elisions.

"Remote viewing  [and]  out-of-body experiences  are the natural processes of the human mind, and soul.   Science, over the last 150 years, has... er... suppressed them, and quashed them, and repressed it, and tried to convince us--the public--that if you believe in these faculties you are superstitious. Ahhh... you are... ahhmm..ignorant. And that there's no basis in fact...[?]      Because they believe in a totally materialistic, linear, one-directional time concept of reality. Which is the real falsehood. The idea that life unfolds like a stack of dominoes--just hit one domino and inevitably all the dominoes will fall.   Well, that's not true. Ahhh.. because you're not logical. The universe is not logical.  We now know..[?]...     the last 100 years as well.  The arrival of quantum physics...    relativity...    has shown us that we live simultaneously in a matter-antimatter universe. And the matter universe is the after-effects of the antimatter universe."

        Only seven audience members are visible in the Youtubery, but we must assume that many more had paid decent money to hear this. I have a couple of comments, since I know at least as much as AM* about quantum physics--which is to say, not very much.

1. Science has made no efforts that I know of to suppress or quash remote viewing. Indeed, I don't know how it would go about such a project even if it wanted to. Science has simply said "Show me the money." In other and better words, "Let's see some consistent results from RV that are repeatable and clearly better than guesswork." A 1995 evaluation^{note 1} by a blue ribbon panel did find a statistically significant RV effect under some conditions, but it cautioned  "It is unclear whether the observed effects can unambiguously be attributed to the paranormal ability of the remote viewers as opposed to characteristics of the judges or of the target or some other characteristic of the methods used." As for the usefulness of RV in formal intelligence gathering, the panel nixed that completely, and as a result the DIA's $20 million Stargate project was shut down.

A follow-up report by Wiseman and Milton^{note 2} found four methodological problems with SAIC's "Experiment One,"  which the 1995 panel had found compelling, and reported that it could not be repeated. Repeatability is, of course, a requirement for scientific acceptance.

More on the anecdotal side, the celebrity remote viewers who have turned up on the radio show Coast to Coast AM over the years have shown how wildly adrift most of this work can be.  Ed Dames can't seem to get anything right (we're still waiting for his "killshot" to wipe out the human race.) Courtney Brown remote viewed an artificial object trailing Comet Hale-Bopp and was indirectly responsible for the suicide of 39 members of the cult group Heaven's Gate. His "artificial object" was never detected.


So I don't think it's at all unreasonable for the science community to reject the claims of RV-- and rejection is not the same thing as suppression. Ray Hyman, in an article in Skeptical Inquirer, put it succinctly:

"What seems clear is that the scientific community is not going to abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles on the basis of a handful of experiments whose findings have yet to be shown to be replicable and lawful."^{note 3}

2. Quantum physics has not shown what Morningstar says it has shown. Its essential usefulness is in explaining three of the four fundamental forces that make everything happen. It also sheds much light on the wave-particle duality of light. It has little or nothing to say about anti-matter.

Parapsychologists have fallen in love with quantum theory because of the phenomenon of entanglement, per which sub-atomic particles that are very far apart can affect each others' states instantaneously. They speak of "consciousness entanglement" as a possible or probable explanation for RV, but there isn't even a whisper of evidence that such a phenomenon exists, let alone has any practical value.

Now what?
        Well, speaking of practical value-- what, I wonder, does Morningstar think his lecture audiences are going to do with the information he supplies? Storm the gates of the National Acadamies demanding that science get more lenient with parapsychological claims? Remote-view the lottery numbers? Only if they could actually perform the latter trick would they have got value for their money, I fear.



======================/ \====================
[1]  An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications. American Institutes for Research September 29, 1995

[2]  Experiment One of the SAIC Remote Viewing Program: A critical re-examination by Dr Richard Wiseman and Dr Julie Milton. J. Parapsychology 62 (4): 297–308

[3] The Evidence for psychic functioning: Claims vs. Reality. Skeptical Inquirer March-April 1996.

Robert Morningstar: First pseudo-Science, now pseudo-Shakespeare

James Concannon writes...

        As we all know, I no longer follow Robert AM* on the book of farces because I can't stand the political hate (which reached a crescendo over the weekend after Hillary Clinton's fall--the anti-Clinton crowd screaming "media cover-up!" despite the fact that it was the lead story in every newscast I saw last night.) However, I do check in on his page now and then, and I was rewarded yesterday not only by the aforementioned example of loony hysteria, but by this:

        As a follower called Vernon Cutrere correctly pointed out, there is no character named Horatio in Julius Caesar, neither is there an authentic quote expressing the same thought.

        So what--I might even say wtf-- was AM* thinking of? His error headed a link to his favorite and most trusted source of information--the London Daily Mail. In this case it was an article about poverty in the USA. So presumably what he had in his addled mind was "There but for the grace of God go you and I."

Maybe he garbled this quote from Julius Caesar:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

Or maybe he was thinking of the play that really does have a Horatio in it, Hamlet:

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

        Mr. Morningstar, the  "civilian intelligence analyst," should stick to what he's good at--frisbee and chess. Come to think of it, every good chess player I've ever met has been a bit dim at everything else.

David Wilcock gets another 2 hours to misinform and mislead

        On Coast-to-Coast AM Tuesday night, David Wilcock wasn't exhibiting very much of that adolescent rage I wrote about in connection with his stint on Other Side of Midnight a month ago. OK, he did at one point say "The cabal folks are using the power of our consciousness against us," but for most of his first hour he was about the sordid business of book marketing. It was pseudo-history rather than pseudo-science--Jason Colavito's territory par excellence. But he strayed into my territory later, when George Noory asked him about the Secret Space Program.

32:45: "We are surrounded by dozens and dozens and dozens of different extraterrestrial civilizations, that not only visit us, but this is their home. And that's a very important point. There is such a need for space--for living space--on the Moon that the back side of the Moon is just developed out as much as you can handle. There's no space left that hasn't been settled--and apparently, according to some insiders we have coming out of the Russian side of things^{note 1}, it's so busy on the night side of the Moon right now that it looks like Manhattan at night. It's just totally loaded with light, because there's so many different groups there."

        So yet again we have a fantasist with no actual knowledge of space science or astronomy telling us fairy stories about the Moon without making any reference to the ultra high definition imagery available online from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just take a look around those images and you'll quickly see that what Wilcock was telling us is

NOT
                                      FUCKING 
                                                                                                           TRUE.

        To make matters very much worse, Wilcock had the nerve to actually pretend he had done legitimate photo-research.

35:12: "As much as possible I'm bringing in the evidence, I'm bringing in photographic proof --such as what's called the Blair Cuspids, a group of obelisks that were photographed on the Moon. You can see the shadows coming off of 'em, they're clearly obelisks. And there's these rectangular pits in the ground around where they are. And those rectangles would represent rectangular ruins under the surface, that meteors hitting the Moon causing craters have smashed in the roofs, because they're so old that they're kind-of falling apart."

        Well, we've met the Blair Cuspids before, in the context of Ancient Aliens and my bloggery at that time. Here's the image both AA and Wilcock are relying on:

credit: Prometheus Entertainment

        So here's this buffoon, claiming to be a bona fide researcher ("a professional intuitive consultant," in his C2C profile, ha-ha) but relying on an image taken in 1966 with a resolution of a couple of meters. The original complete frame shows the scale of these shadows: they are not towering obelisks but smallish rock formations at a very low sun angle (look at top right of image h2.) "Trekker," a regular reader and commenter here, found the site at 5.0252°N, 15.583°E. Here they are, at double the resolution of the 1966 shot and a much higher sun angle:

What David Wilcock told his audience on Tuesday night is

NOT
                                      FUCKING 
                                                                                                           TRUE.

        What a week for George Noory! Glynis McCants, David Icke, and this. I thought about blogging Icke but I don't think my blood pressure could stand another self-important nincompoop.

===============/\=====================
[1] What do the Russians have right now, capable of observing the back side of the Moon? Nothing that I'm aware of.

George Noory swallows a turkey

        About half way through the first-hour interview last Monday on Coast to Coast AM, George Noory asked his guest "When you first heard this story from Bill Ryan, did you believe it?" The guest replied "I realized intuitively that it was a true story."

        LOL, as they say. Bill Ryan, the former squeeze of Kerry Cassidy, is about as unreliable a source as can be imagined, as this blog has written before. As for "intuitive realization," that and 25¢ will get you a short phone call. The guest was Len Kasten, and the "story" was none other than Project Serpo.

40 × C
        The story of Project Serpo, in a nutshell, is this: One extraterrestrial being survived the "flying saucer crash" at Roswell in 1947, and retrieved a communication  device allowing him to talk to his home planet Serpo, a planet of the ζ Reticuli binary system 39 light years from Earth. This led to an exploration of Serpo by 12 U.S. military astronauts, traveling at 40 times the speed of light. Both wikipedia and rational wikipedia have articles on this hilarious sci-fi fantasy, and both point out the obvious logical objections to the narrative. Perhaps chief among them is that distance. How do you have a conversation with somebody 39 LY away? How do you travel at 40 × C? Kasten, having no education in relativistic physics, confidently states that it's all done by a wormhole, but what exactly is he asking us to believe? Is there just one wormhole linking our solar system to ζ Reticuli, or is there a network of these things in the universe? Are they labeled? How would an expedition find the entrance to the appropriate one, given that a wormhole has never been actually observed and probably never could be? FYI: A wormhole is a purely theoretical solution to some advanced equations in relativity, and the primary benefit therefrom is an exciting way to teach a difficult subject. If wormholes exist at all, they are most likely transient and an excessively unreliable way of traversing the universe.


        Kasten was on hand last Monday not only to reaffirm his faith in this fantasy but to provide updates. The classic version of the story has it that all 12 astronauts died a long time ago, but Kasten now says that one, called "Mr. Euro", survived until 2014 and met with Pope Benedict. Not only that, but diplomatic relations between Earth and Serpo are flourishing, and nine other expeditions have taken place since the original one. The originator of the Serpo story, who was only known as Request Anonymous, was in fact a high-ranking DIA official, and editor of the Red Book of Presidential briefings. Numerous valuable technical secrets have been derived from Serpo, most notably the key to free energy. Kasten explained that we could all be benefiting from free energy right now, but the Illuminati, "who run this planet," won't allow it. So here we go again with that adolescent rage I wrote about in my last post.

Fact vs. fiction
        Well, of course this is all poppycock. Even the gullible Bill Ryan finally admitted he'd been hoodwinked and partly repudiated the story. George Noory himself may have had doubts about it, but he conducted the interview exactly as if he believed every word. He called it "this incredible story" and that's just what it is. There's a key to understanding this bullshit, and it's this. Len Kasten has a book to sell. "Request Anonymous" is not a high-ranking DIA official but Richard C. Doty, a former security guard with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Doty had a book to sell as well. Bingo.

       Why do I care? Why not let C2C-AM get on with its campfire yarns and stop snapping at their heels? There are two reasons. One is that yarns like this seriously devalue real science. The terrible danger is that impressionable people believe them, and since they are incompatible with real science, the real science gets rejected in their eyes. The other is that I feel a duty to remind the consumers of this rubbish that it's really all about selling books and conference fees. This is just how chat radio works--radio gets interviewees for free (and they lose a night's sleep, often) in return for flagrant  book marketing. Welcome to the real world.

Richard Hoagland has so much to learn

        We already know that Richard Hoagland is utterly incompetent at math, but now it seems he's about equally incompetent as a chat radio interviewer. I've "come across" an .mp3 file of the 30th July edition of The Other Side of Midnight, and it's pretty amusing. This is a two-hour show, five (theoretically!) nights a week, that he's been hosting for over a year now, and he still hasn't learned some basic interview skills such as NOT asking a question then cutting your guest off after he's spoken only ten words in reply. Here's a verbatim transcript:

 25:30 Intervieweee: "This election is a cartoon. It's unbelievable. Erm... You have this guy who's a ... a well-known blowhard, you know, celebrity narcissist character. And then you have this woman who, ah, basically if you understand certain insider testimony she already was president for eight years. She ran the country --  Bill was off signing greeting cards and, you know, messing around with staffers, and Hillary was in there actually making all the decisions. She was really the President."

Hoagland: "Hang on David, Hang on. How the hell do you know that?"

Intervieweee: "Multiple insiders have spoken to me, and have said that, ah..."

Hoagland: "Hang on, let me stop you..."

        The interviewee was in fact David Wilcock, a delusional author specializing in apocalyptic predictions. His bio claims, in part, that "Multiple insiders with access to highly classified information have shared what they know with David." He throws the expression "quantum physics" around almost as capriciously as Hoagland himself tosses out "hyperdimensional physics" and "torsion field." It's quite evident that neither of them has any actual understanding of physics. About half-way through this interview Wilcock informed us that if you look in a microscope anywhere in the universe, and you zoom down to the sub-atomic level, you'll arrive at the exact same point, the "seed." This is, er... not exactly correct.

It's paranoia time
         If one single word could encapsulate this extravaganza, it would be PARANOIA -- on the part of both Wilcock and Hoagland. Paranoia at an almost Kerry Cassidy level of intensity. Both of them seem totally convinced that  the Illuminati are enslaving all of us. Even the Alex Jones-inspired term "prison planet" came up without anybody's tongue in his cheek. Numerology also gets wrapped in to their thinking, as when Wilcock commented on the fact that Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack on the exact same day (7 March 1999) that Richard Hoagland had his own infarct^{note 1}.

18:41 Wilcock: "When we hear about something like people trying to ice you and actually icing Kubrick 666 days before January 1st 2001, it's not only not a coincidence, and it's not only a deliberate thing that was done. It is actually a black magic attempt to create energy through these human sacrifices."

        Hoagland himself keeps insisting -- without evidence -- that his cardiac emergency was a deliberate attempt on his life, rather than a natural phenomenon of a mid-50s man in a stressful situation. Kubrick was 70 when he died, and most people would look no further than his age and his highly stressful occupation for a causus morti. Wilcock didn't think to let us know whether this "attempt to create energy" was successful or, if so, what exact form the energy took.

        The bullshit was laid down thick and fast. Hoagland spoke of "psychotronic energy," which he explained as the use of hyperdimensional physics (of course!) to control human beings. Wilcock alluded to some "intention experiment" conducted by Maharishi Mahesh in the 60s, whereat meditation by a large number of people succeeded in reducing strife in the world by 72%.

47:36 Wilcock: "Look, there's no war strategy, there's no B2 bomber, there's nothing that they've ever spent money on that could even begin to accomplish a 72% reduction in terrorism. This technology -- and it is a technology -- has overwhelming significance and if you think about how threatening that would be to the power elite... They need us to stay depressed -- they need us to stay locked up in a world of weaponized food and alcohol and drug addictions to prescription drugs or all kinds of different things they're pushing on us. They don't want us to be happy, they don't want us to be empowered, they don't want us to be healthy, and they need us to stay depressed because if too many people get happy it changes the physics and they will not be able to maintain power."

        "Weaponized food" -- what a perfect description of that chicken vindaloo I had last Friday night. To me, there's something adolescent about this "THEY are controlling us" mindset. It's so reminiscent of children getting enraged when they discover that their parents have all the power in the family. There too, food -- the provision or withholding of it -- is often a symbol of power, or perceived as such. And what is teenage angst but the denial of happiness by a cruel world? When Wilcock says "if too many people get happy it changes the physics..." I become convinced that not only does he not understand physics, but he doesn't even know what physics is.

        At one point, discussing the mighty changes sweeping through the whole solar system^{note 2}, Hoagland came up with a wonderful ploy. Pluto, he said, was not only a planet but an artificial body, "an archive." He said "I predicted that -- months before they got there." So here's the Hoagland formula for self-defined success:

1. Make a nonsense prediction.
2. Claim that it came true.
3. Pat yourself on the back.

Brilliant.


===================/ \=================
[1] Actually, according to his own notes, Hoagland's event was a day earlier.

[2] It's brightening, according to Hoagland and Wilcock. Strange that astronomers with access to actual instruments haven't noticed that.