Sunday, 20 November 2016

Are Conspiracy Theorists Narcissists?

An article has come to my attention that claims conspiracy theorists are likely to be narcissists. Narcissism is a personality trait that includes excessive vanity, a grandiose opinion of one's own qualities and abilities; and sometimes these cover up internal low self-esteem. The word originates from Greek mythology, a story about a man who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water. This new idea about conspiracy theorists comes from a study carried out by psychologists at the University of Kent. They conducted an online correspondence with a number of people asking about their belief in popular conspiracy theories, for instance: Were the moon landings faked? Do governments carry out false flag terrorism on their own soil? etc. Alongside this they were given a questionnaire that gauged their narcissistic personality traits. There was a distinct correlation between those who scored high and those who were open to conspiracy theoretical ideas. The lead author of the report, Dr Aleksandra Cichocka said: "Narcissists think that they are better than other people. At the same time, they are convinced that others are constantly trying to undermine them. This fosters paranoia and a conviction that others might conspire against them... We find that people high in narcissism are more likely to believe in various conspiracy theories. This does not mean that all narcissists believe in all conspiracies. It also does not mean that everyone who believes in some conspiracy theories is necessarily a narcissist." Interestingly, despite the statement from the article's author: "In the internet age conspiracy theories can incubate in quiet corners of the web, but it may be psychological predispositions of believers which keep them alive, rather than cold hard facts." There is almost no discussion of any factual issue. They do refer to Dr David Grimes' explanation, as have I, see here at about 46 minutes in: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/programme-179-podcast-marcus-allen.html. It's only when you get down to the comments section that people start asking the obvious question: What if some conspiracy theories are real? These days in the media, the comments are always far more interesting than the newspaper articles. Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3482408/Believe-conspiracy-theories-probably-narcissist-People-doubt-moon-landings-likely-selfish-attention-seeking.html. I hope this study is mistaken because narcissists are usually very unpleasant people. Their inflated ego tends to regard others as inferior and objects of contempt; either that or the hidden low-self-esteem makes them feel others as threatening and therefore to be treated with hostility. I decided to test myself using this online survey: http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/narcissistic.htm. I scored 14, which is dead on the median average. According to this test I am not a narcissist. I'm sure readers will agree that my level of conspiracy theory belief does not need additional testing.

One name comes to mind that is very notable by its absence from the report: Prof. Karen Douglas. She is a top research psychologist, also from the University of Kent; and she has conducted a thorough analysis of conspiracy theorists and what makes us tick. She says: "My primary research focus is on beliefs in conspiracy theories. Why are conspiracy theories so popular? Who believes them? Why do people believe them? What are some of the consequences of conspiracy theories and can such theories be harmful?" See: https://www.kent.ac.uk/psychology/people/douglask/. She has published a paper entitled Organizational conspiracy theories and work-related outcomes; and I know only too well what those outcomes can be, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/one-year-on.html. She could use me as a guinea pig. I saw her give a live lecture at the British Humanist Association's conspiracy theory conference in 2011 where she made it clear that her focus was not on whether conspiracy theories are factually true or false, only why people believe them. I responded by suggesting she carries out a similar study on skeptics, but my sarcasm went right over her head, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/british-humanist-association-conspiracy.html. Nevertheless I have attempted to do one myself, see background links below. The reason Prof. Douglas' name can't be found on that paper might be related to another report she wrote in 2013 with a colleague Michael J Wood indicating that conspiracy theorists are "more sane" than their detractors. This is an extraordinary statement for somebody in her position to make. Does this indicate that she is changing her mind? See: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/conspiracy-theorists-more-sane-than.html. Next weekend I will be speaking at a conference alongside Prof. Douglas and I hope I get the chance to ask her for more information on this matter, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/ben-emlyn-jones-at-assap-seriously.html.
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/challenge-to-skeptics-bust-spooky.html.

Saturday, 19 November 2016

Teenage Cryonicist

One of the first subjects I covered on HPANWO, shortly after I launched it in 2007, was cryonics. This is the practice of cryopreserving a recently deceased body in the hope that the dead person can be resuscitated and cured at a later date, perhaps only in the distant future when technology has sufficiently advanced. Cyropreservation is a common medical procedure for whole embryos, independent cells and tissue; sperm, ova etc. However it's debatable about whether it would work on an entire body. This hasn't stopped 350 people so far, and even a few dogs, having their bodies cryopreserved after their death, with over a thousand more waiting in the wings. Cryonics involves freezing the body at a very low temperature, below minus 130 degrees centigrade. This is far more complicated than it sounds because the body has to be dehydrated first as much as possible otherwise our internal water would tear apart our cells when it forms ice crystals. The blood and fluid in our bodies is replaced with an alcohol-based antifreeze chemical. The body is then placed in an insulated canister filled with liquid nitrogen to keep it cold, to be left there indefinitely. The idea is that at some time in the future scientists will invent the means to revive the corpse, bring the departed person back to life, and also heal whatever illness or injury claimed their lives in the first place. Cryonics is just one part of the general life-extension movement headed up by the bushy-bearded maverick Aubrey de Grey. See background links below for more detail. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2GLAgOaRVI.

A new cryonics story has just emerged that is very unusual and especially poignant. The patient in this case is a fourteen year old girl. Because of her age she has not been identified for legal reasons and is known by the media as "JS". JS lived in London with her mother. Her father was estranged and she hadn't even seen him since 2010 when she was aged only about eight years old. JS was struck down by a rare and fast-acting cancer. She was given a terminal prognosis, but then she went online and looked up cryonics. She decided to take a chance on it and wrote this letter to the judge: "I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die. I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up - even in hundreds of years' time. I don't want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish." Because she is only fourteen the law states that she needs her parents' permission. Her mother supported her, but her father did not. JS took the case all the way to the high court and eventually the judge ruled that as long as her mother supported her, JS could have her last wish granted. It's appropriate that today is International Men's Day, see: http://www.internationalmensday.com/, (no Google logo of course) and there is an issue related to it here. I don't know why JS' parents divorced or why the father has not had access to his daughter. Of course most people will simply assume that it's because he didn't care about her. However it turns out he made some applications to visit his daughter and these were turned down; therefore the bar is raised and the call goes out that he was simply a violent alcoholic or sexual abuser or something. Do we know that for sure? What we do know is that the father changed his mind about the cryonics and offered JS a deal. He would agree to her last wish if he could see her body after she died. She said no. This is odd. She felt so strongly about her father not coming near her, even after death, that in order to stop him she risked her entire case, the legal ruling going against her and scuppering her bid for immortality. All she had to do was agree to let him see her after death and the whole matter could have been settled out of court in an instant. This does indicate some passionately bad feeling in their relationship, for whatever reason. JS died peacefully on the 17th of October surrounded by her family. The judge who granted her request came to visit her too. Whatever happens next to her; I hope she is happy and well. Cryonics is expensive; a whole-body process costs £37,000. Just having just your head frozen is a bit cheaper. Her grandparents raised the money.
As a former hospital porter I know the usual procedure for disposing of an inpatient's dead body, yet with a cryonicist it's entirely different. A team of volunteers from Cryonics UK was on standby outside the hospital and as soon as JS was pronounced dead by her doctor they moved in and took her body away. The hospital staff were concerned and confused by this unusual practice and the judge in the hearing made note of this, saying that there should be more regulation for cryonics in future. I'm personally far more suspicious of state interference and find its absence rather comforting, but it might concern others that the cryonics industry is completely unregulated. Indeed when the movement began in the 1960's the first company went bust; and, unfortunately, there was no option except to remove the bodies from storage and bury them. Today there are three organizations that provide cryonics services, Alcor and the Cryonics Institute in the USA, and KiroRus in Russia. Things have improved a lot since the early days and when JS died she was immediately placed in an insulated canister with dry ice. Then she was transported by air to Michigan in the United States of America where the cryopreservation process could be completed. There is no such facility in Britain. Now her body is lying head down in a tank of super-chilled liquid gas, waiting for the day when... if... the means exist to resurrect her. However, if that happens what would her new life be like? She'll be emerging into a world decades, maybe centuries in the future. Society and culture could have changed beyond all recognition. It's likely that everybody she knows and loves will be dead. She may have little or no memory of her past. Now, to answer to the question you're all probably asking... No. I am definitely not going consider cryonics for myself. I pretty sure we have a natural afterlife anyway in the spiritual sense. Of course I'm not one hundred percent certain but I'm certain enough to risk it. Either way, I'm not sure I want to live forever in this world.

Friday, 18 November 2016

African Tribespeople

A number of videos have been posted to YouTube lately that consist of short films taken in rural Africa within communities which still practice traditional lifestyles. These videos are quickly removed from YouTube, usually within hours or days. For this reason I won't bother posting any links. However more keep reappearing so if you search for "African tribes" you'll probably find a few. The reason YouTube remove these uploads is because they "breach community guidelines" relating to scenes of nudity. The people filmed live in a very different culture to that of my own country, Britain, and much of the rest of the world. The most obvious deviation is that they wear little or no clothes. No doubt the people who post them to YouTube do so for their erotic value, perhaps understandably. However for the people in the videos there is nothing extraordinary or lewd about walking around naked. They live in a climate that is never cold and they have dark negroid skin to protect them from sunburn. Perhaps the taboo against nudity that exists in Europe comes from the fact that in many cases clothing is necessary for survival. A naked human outdoors on many days in Britain, let along further north, would die of hypothermia. Because the weather is always warm in central Africa the people do not have that taboo. Nevertheless they pay a lot of attention to their appearance, especially the women. They wear elaborate jewellery; bangles, beads and ribbons. They braid their hair and paint their skin white, blue, purple, red and many other colours. They also have odd piercing and other forms of body modification, such as inserting a clay disc beneath their lower lip and stretching it out until it is many inches across. To me this looks unsightly. I wonder if it's comfortable and it must impede their speech; but in their eyes they're very pretty. An interesting feature of their demeanour is that they seem very jubilant. In almost all these videos they are engaging in dancing, singing and beating drums, sometimes in elaborate formations that indicate a kind of ritual to celebrate something. Even going about their daily lives they seem ebullient and lively. They laugh constantly while they're talking. Another thing I noticed is that they're obviously healthy and well fed. I didn't see anybody who appeared disabled, sick or malnourished. Whenever they smile, which is most of the time, you can see that they usually have a full set of strong teeth. They live an austere life compared to our own. They have no electricity and all the luxuries that come with that. No running water, no machinery. They live in huts made of tree branches and dried mud. They make basic tools of wood and stone. They don't go to church and follow a shamanic religion. Yet they appear far more jovial than most people I know in England. They clearly enjoy life. These are certainly not the people I see on the news starving to death in UN camps or jumping into ramshackle boats to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. I don't think these people would ever become immigrants because the life they have already suits them perfectly. The irony is that the Africans who are currently contributing to the refugee crisis are not those who practice the indigenous culture. They are the "modern Africans" who live in cities or labour on corporate farms and sweat shops. Their grandparents may have lived the old life, but over the years the globalist takeover has infected their society. Sadly fewer and fewer people live like those in the videos. If the urban Africans were left free to go back to the old ways they'd probably be much happier. I'm not suggesting that they should give up Western technology if they don't want to; but perhaps find a way to blend it to their local customs without displacing them. These videos have got me thinking, especially about how they relate to my interest in other unique human communities that are under threat, like St Helena.

Thursday, 17 November 2016

An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Dear Mr President-Elect,
Congratulations on your election to the office of President of the United States. I am not American, but if I were I would have voted for you because I believe that when you say you want what's best for your country and the world, you mean it. Unlike your opponent Hillary Clinton, you are not lying; you are being sincere. You now have a unique opportunity, like no other statesman on Earth. You can become the greatest leader the United States of America has ever known, or you could become just one more puppet on the strings of the hidden forces that control your nation and the world; just like the monotonous pathetic array that came before you, dragging America down to total collapse so it can be absorbed into a totalitarian one-world government. Your predecessor Dwight Eisenhower's last act as president was to warn the American people about the dangers of the "military industrial complex"; if only it had been his first act. You may be aware of this already, or you may not be; but I am going to tell you anyway just in case: There is a malevolent cabal secretly ruling America and the world beyond it. This cabal cannot be identified demographically; its members are both male and female; black, brown and white; Catholic, Anglican and Hindu (outwardly). You are neither complicit nor are you a fool, therefore you cannot fail to have understood that the 9/11 attacks were not the work of nineteen men armed with hardware tools. The destruction of the World Trade Centre and the damage to the Pentagon was the work of a resourceful and powerful conspiracy of criminals operating from inside your country, and they have access to weapons of a destructive yield way beyond anything the militaries of the globe are openly armed with. You must also understand that the unidentified flying objects that are commonly reported in the airspaces of the world are in truth artefacts of an extraterrestrial civilization. The cabal knows this because these artefacts have come to grief on the earth's surface and have been secretly salvaged. The most famous of these incidents took place in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The cabal has studied the debris and has probably worked out the power-plants and propulsion systems of these craft. This knowledge could provide free, clean, safe and unlimited energy for all people forever, abolishing poverty and environmental destruction. Will you, as president, work towards the declassification of the secret information on UFO's? Will you endeavour to apprehend the real mass murderers who perpetrated 9/11? The same goes for the many other "conspiracy theories" that I don't have time to detail in this letter, but you can discover for yourself. This is the choice that lies before you. As president-elect, you have yet to be sworn into office to carry out your governmental projects, but you also have yet to make any mistakes. This is a very fertile window of opportunity for you. You have just over four days to sit and think about what I'm saying here. Not only do you have a choice, Mr President, but you have a duty to do what is right by the American people. You therefore already know what you must do. The question really is: have you got the courage? If you do the right thing, you will go down in history forever as one of those who transformed the world from a hellhole into a paradise. You will never be forgotten nor will people ever stop paying homage to your name. Alternatively you can chicken out. You can do what Hillary Clinton had already been doing her whole life, along with her crooked husband, and serve the agenda of the malevolent cabal. You can be just another cut-out copy of the suited bureaucrat who nods his head and signs away the planet's future. In which case, not only will you receive no gratitude from your satanic masters, you will be reviled by the world along with all the other traitors; the heartless, gutless, brainless administrators of doom, into which you will seamlessly blend. If you are the man of honour, decency and bravery that I think... I hope... you are, you will make the right decision. Therefore I must give you a word of warning. If you take the right path, you will meet obstacles and fierce opposition. Another of your predecessors, John F Kennedy, took the right path and his enemies assassinated him. They might try to do the same to you, and you must take precautions to protect yourself and your family. We "conspiracy theorists" will do everything we can to protect and defend you from our side. The future of the world is in your hands. It's all up to you. Good luck!
Ben Emlyn-Jones

Wednesday, 16 November 2016

Arrival

I first saw a trailer for Arrival a few months ago and was very keen to watch it as soon as I could, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLO4X6UI8OY. Its release date was after the election so I knew it wouldn't contain any presidential propaganda of the kind I've been talking about, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-american-jo-cox.html. As always, I avoided reading any reviews until I'd seen the film myself so I wouldn't be biased. I ended up going to see it with two of my UFO/conspiracy/paranormal friends who were just as intrigued by it as I was. Last Monday I travelled all the way to London's West End and bought tickets at a retro-themed cinema and bar/restaurant near Leicester Square. It was designed to look and feel like a 1920's picture palace, an effect that was well thought out by its architects. Arrival is a science fiction film about aliens unexpectedly and suddenly landing on earth without invitation. It is by the Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and based on a short story by Ted Chiang. The alien invasion has become a common movie scenario and films of the genre vary enormously in technical quality and intellectual content. Arrival is unusual for the trope because I think it would appeal to people who might not normally enjoy sci-fi. Anybody with an interest in language would probably like the film because the central theme of the story is linguistics. The makers of this film have thought long and hard; and done a lot of research on the subject.

There is a single protagonist called Dr Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, who is one of the world's leading linguistics experts. When a fleet of extraterrestrial spacecraft land on the earth she is recruited by the government to help them decipher the language coming from the aliens inside them who are trying to communicate with humans. The film makes one think about how an intelligent extraterrestrial species would speak. Most science fiction from the past gave little thought to this matter. Aliens tended to look like ex-American footballers... mostly because that's who their actors were, with blue beards and green eye-contacts who roar incoherencies about revenge being a dish best served cold etc. Real extraterrestrials would have a completely different psychology to us. They would look, communicate and act in ways that might well make no sense to us. They might even be completely beyond our understanding. Indeed research into alien abduction is revealing this very problem. The issues raised in this film have a lot of relevance for astronomers in the SETI- "Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence" programme and also people who analyze crop circles. We don't need to go off-planet to realize this either. Scientists involved in animal psychology studies say the same thing. In fact anybody who has a dog will sometimes be mystified by the behaviour of their pet. "Why is he doing that?" He knows because he's a dog; we're not dogs so we don't. Obviously humans do things dogs cannot comprehend either. Arrival brings up this vital point; that translation is about more than just decoding language when dealing with a different species. As that great hospital porter... and occasional part-time philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote: "If a lion could speak we still could not understand him." He would have enjoyed Arrival. Different ways of speaking involve different ways of thinking. This is why the powers-that-shouldn't-be pay so much attention to language. They whittle and mould it into ways that suit them, as George Orwell detailed in his book 1984. There are other features of the film that show clever conceptualizing and a very fertile imagination. It breaks from sci-fi norms in the nature of the spacecraft. They are huge crescent-shaped vessels nicknamed "shells" by the humans. They have a distinctly ceramic texture to them, as if they are carved flying mountains. The aliens have clearly invented antigravity and not just in the propulsion system of the vessel. The interior also has its own gravitational environment. The outer door on the underside leads to a long vertical corridor, also appearing to be made of stone. The humans who enter the vehicle use a cherry-picker to hoist them inside, but once there they can walk because of an artificial gravitational field at right angles to the earth's. Arrival also examines the concept of time being non-linear. This is a complex subject and I did not understand this element of the film completely, but it relates to Louise's memories of her past and how they change as she learns more and more of the alien language. David Icke has also explored the idea of "time loops" and even titled one of his books Tales from the Time Loop. The BBC TV series Doctor Who also sometimes delves into this idea. Arrival is very vivid and uses similar techniques as Paul Davids' Roswell movie to generate a fly-on-the-wall sensation in the viewer. There are lots of shots from a hand-held moving camera that made me feel I was really there. This kind of effect is best enjoyed at the cinema and can't be fully reproduced on TV, so do go and see it on the big screen while you can. The way the public react to the alien landing is very plausible; it's the kind of notion I've had to mull over when writing my own story, Roswell Rising- a Novel of Disclosure. The score is also highly unusual. It has vocals on many of the tracks, but these are just random syllables, a bit like old jazz scat singing. Maybe that's how human languages sound to aliens. There are many spooky tunes as well that are used on the wide angle shots of the spacecraft. All in all, this is a fascinating movie, an alien invasion flick with a huge difference. It's not often these days that Hollywood produces a really great standalone sci-fi movie; one that's not a remake, part of a series or an adaptation from some comic book or computer game. Highly recommended.

Tuesday, 15 November 2016

Conspiracy Theorists finally Proved Wrong?

A short article has come to light with the brazen claim that because of the random and irregular nature of the modern political world, conspiracy theorists have been proven wrong. I deeply resent its racism... yes, white people can experience racism too... and also its highly unoriginal and toxic appeal to anti-Semitism (See here for more details: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/programme-188-podcast-jews.html) Despite all this, the article makes some interesting points. I've followed the presence of the hidden hand for over twenty years now via "the internet" "from my bedroom" and have made numerous predictions that have come true because of its existence; just look at what I've posted online over time on the HPANWO websites and you can see for yourself. Source: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/conspiracy-theorists-finally-convinced-no-secret-society-could-possibly-be-running-this-mess-20160724111302. (I've found out since that this is a satirical spoof website. Still the idea remains valid) Yet for the last few years I have had the distinct impression that the hidden hand's grip is weakening. This year especially; see the background links below for details. Specifically the Brexit situation and Donald Trump becoming the new US President. My predictions were completely wrong on both these events. There are only a few possibilities that can explain this. One is that the current affairs of the world are controlled by the hidden hand; it's just that the hand has achieved such a level of subtly and cunning that we conspiracy theorists can no longer detect its machinations. I have been fooled, but my tin foil hat-wearing peers have not; and they've told me so in no uncertain terms. The problem with that theory is that it is unfalsifiable. Any evidence refuting a conspiracy theory is interpreted as nothing more than just another even craftier manoeuvre by the conspirators. This is one thing the skeptics have got right. The other possibility is that the premise of the source article is correct and there simply is no hidden hand; and I've been wasting my time in delusion for the last two decades. Based on what I've learned I honestly don't think so. However, there is a third possibility: Could this be springtime in Narnia? By that I mean the power of the Illuminati is truly crumbling at the most fundamental level. The reason the power structures of the world are behaving so haphazardly is because they haven't had a call from head office for a very long time. It seems hard to believe when you look at the world around you, and I'm not saying this is the end of the New World Order. In fact I've always said that the fall of the NWO would be followed by a very turbulent transitional period. It could be a long time and we could suffer great hardship before the world settles down into the post-Illuminati age. But could this be the beginning of the end? From the lyrics of a song by Tracy Chapman: "finally the tables are starting to turn." No doubt the doom-addicts of the conspirasphere would dismiss what I've said as naive and hopelessly optimistic; naturally with their sense of superiority that goes with their self-congratulatory worldly-wise pessimism proudly displayed on their sleeve. However I'd therefore like to ask them, by what criteria would they officially declare the NWO over? According to their logic, it can never be seen to end. Time will tell, but if the chaos in the world continues and deepens, how much longer can we doubt? This can only be good news. However traumatic is will be to break our dependence on the Illuminati I think we can do it. We must! Nothing could be worse than things just carrying on as they are.

Sunday, 13 November 2016

Ben Emlyn-Jones on Enemy Within Radio 24

I have been interviewed again on Enemy Within Radio with Thomas Barnes, this show is part of the Truth Frequency Radio network, see: http://truthfrequencyradio.com/enemy-within-with-tom-barnes-68699/.
I am featured for the first hour and a half of the programme and subjects discussed include: the new US president Donald Trump, masculinity and cultural Marxism, fathers raising children and much much more.
See here for my previous appearance on Enemy Within Radio, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/ben-emlyn-jones-on-enemy-within-radio-22.html.