Wednesday 30 September 2015

Ben Emlyn-Jones on The Joeress Podcast- part 2 of 2

I have been interviewed on the Joeress Podcast; this is the second of a two-part interview, see here for the programme: http://joeress.com/joeress-podcast-16/.
Subjects discussed include the 9/11 anniversary, the Mecca crane disaster, the Bilderberg Group and much much more. The show is hosted by Joe Ressington, a musician from London who used to be a colleague of mine on Mind Set Central, see HPANWO Radio. His co-host is an American called Isaac. This was a challenging interview and the presenters asked me some tough questions, but it was a good-natured discussion and great fun. See here for the first part of this interview: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/ben-emlyn-jones-on-joeress-podcast-part.html.

Tuesday 29 September 2015

Environmentalist favours Fracking

Baroness Worthington is a veteran environmental campaigner who has worked for various charities including Friends of the Earth. Earlier in the month she was appointed shadow energy minister. Then she astounded and dismayed several of her fellow environmentalists by publicly declaring her support for fracking. She has not done so without qualification and insists that the introduction of it must be conditional, but she no longer sees fracking as the unequivocal danger that many others, including myself, do. She urges her fellow greens to "think again" and "keep a cool head". Her reasons for her position are very predictable; she says: "We have the mother of all challenges- getting emissions of greenhouse gases out of our energy system. Environmentalists should not be adopting a priori objections to technologies but appraising them... We have to be realistic. We are going to be using gas for a long time because of the huge role it plays for heating homes and for industry. The important thing is to minimize the carbon emissions from gas. That means if we can get our own fracked gas, it's better to use that than importing gas that's been compressed at great energy cost somewhere else." Baroness Worthington is taking a softer line than some of the other "new greens". She will not back fracking unless it's accompanied by "CCS- carbon capture and storage". This is a system where carbon dioxide gas, or Carbon™ as it is known today, is removed from the exhaust of fossil fuel-burning appliances and prevented from entering the atmosphere. There are various ways to do this; the Carbon™ can be put into chemical compounds for industry and agriculture or buried underground in old mines, bonded chemically to certain kinds of rock, or in depleted oil wells. Some of her peers are not so contemplative over fracking and are saying nothing except "full steam ahead!" This is because shale gas has comparatively low Carbon™ emissions compared to other fossil fuels. Already the power generation infrastructure in Britain is being shifted from coal to gas; we've seen this at Didcot Power Station. Didcot A has been demolished and replaced by a gas-fired plant, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpZqN-orAjk. Currently all of this gas is being imported from the Middle East, therefore Ms Worthington thinks we should instead be exploiting our own gas deposits. Most of her peers in Friends of the Earth and the Green Party oppose anything except a single stage transformation in energy generation from fossil fuels to renewables. Craig Bennett of FoE said: "Fracking won't help us tackle climate change. Even people in the industry agree that shale gas wouldn't make any big difference to our energy sector until the mid-to-late 2020's, which is exactly when the UK needs to start getting out of gas, wherever it comes from. Building a whole new gas infrastructure will keep us addicted to expensive fossil fuels for decades to come." (Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34191713)

I suspect the pressures which led Baroness Worthington to make her statement are part of a larger and more strategic movement within environmental politics. Environmental activists have changed in recent years. Rather than having beards and woolly hats they wear smarts suits and ties; and they no longer sail boats into the paths of whaling ships. Instead they sit in locked boardrooms and speak in hushed voices. They have a Punch and Judy puppet cast of useful idiots to stand in front of the media and explain how nuclear power isn't all that bad and GMO crops are necessary to prevent starvation. Examples I've talked about before are Mark Lynas, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/2015-and-climate-change.html, George Monbiot, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/death-to-climate-change-deniers.html, and Sir David Attenborough, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/bbc-horizon-why-most-of-us-need-to-die.html. Fracking has now been added to that list of things environmentalists used to be united in their opposition to for perfectly rational reasons, but now are grudgingly accepting because of hysteria over climate change. The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference is beginning in Paris at the end of November so statements like Baroness Worthington's are a strike on a very hot iron. Of course I think she's deeply mistaken and irresponsible even to suggest fracking could be anything but a disaster, see background links below. As researchers like Ian R Crane and Richard D Hall have explained, the agenda behind fracking, when you get to its fundamentals, is not really one of energy. The supposed "shale gas rush" is actually a huge bubble; the government have exaggerated the amount of gas available many-fold in order to lure investors, and bribe MP's and other officials. Also the "War on Terra" dictates a global scorched earth policy; the toxic gas and chemicals introduced into the biosphere by fracking will achieve that. The good news is that since Baroness Worthington was appointed shadow energy minister a new Leader of the Opposition has been elected, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/the-corbinator-wins.html. Jeremy Corbyn is luckily very much against fracking and will hopefully soon send Ms Worthington swiftly back to her evening church hall meetings.

Monday 28 September 2015

Ben Emlyn-Jones on the KTPF 9/11 Debate

The long-awaited 9/11 debate on the KTPF Community Talk Show is now available as an illustrated podcast: https://www.facebook.com/ben.emlynjones/videos/374402191698307/.
You, the listener, can decide for yourself which of us presented the best case. I really enjoyed being on this programme. Andy and the other hosts were great fun and this was a respectful and civilized conversation in the best traditions of KTPF.

Wednesday 16 September 2015

Michael Shermer Update

In October last year I reported that one of the world's most renowned skeptics was having doubts about his position. Michael Shermer became interested in the paranormal when he had a mystical experience while taking part in a bicycle race. This led him into the study of anomalous psychology, and in 1992 he founded the Skeptics Society, an international organization which today has over 55,000 members across the world. It publishes the quarterly journal Skeptic which Shermer edits and it has featured columns by Richard Dawkins, James Randi and many other heroes of Skepticism. Shermer has organized conferences, outings and activism. He has written seventeen books, including Why People Believe Weird Things, The Skeptic Encyclopaedia of Pseudoscience and The Believing Brain. He's one of the most regular lecturers at skeptic events and is a sought after media pundit on all skeptic matters. He is among the last people on Earth I thought would ever question the House of Skeptic. However, he did. Exactly a year ago, on the 16th of September 2014, Michael Shermer published an article in the magazine Scientific American entitled: Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core, and it was subtitled: I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism. Two months earlier he had married his German sweetheart Jennifer Graf at his home in Beverly Hills, California USA. Several months before that Jennifer moved into his house and had her luggage shipped over from her previous home in Cologne, Germany. Her father had died when she was very young and so her mother had brought her up with Jennifer's grandfather Walter. However when she was sixteen Walter died leaving her devastated. For this reason she deeply treasured an old transistor radio that Walter had owned. It was a Philips 070, made in 1978, and it didn't work; but Michael decided he'd have a tinker with it to see if he could get it going. He failed, so the couple put the old radio in a desk drawer in Michael's study and forgot all about it. Then a few months later it was "The Big Day" of their wedding and just before the ceremony began Jennifer told Michael how badly she was missing her family and friends back in Germany. She lamented that her grandfather was dead and so couldn't give her away. The ceremony began and just at the moment when they said their wows and exchanged rings the sound of music made everybody stop and look around them. Everybody checked their mobile devices, but they had politely turned them all off. Then they realized the music was coming from Michael's study, specifically a drawer in his desk. It was the old radio, the one that wouldn't work. It was not only working, and had started working at the very climax of the wedding ceremony, but it was playing a romantic love song that Jennifer's grandfather really liked. After that the radio broke down again and has never played since. Shermer says in his article that if he'd heard it from somebody else he'd never have believed it; and he has heard it from other people and hasn't believed them, many many times. More than anybody else, he knows the implications of questioning a "rational explanation" for an anomalous event. His new wife was as much a skeptic as he is (how could she put up with him otherwise?), but she feels the same way he does about what happened. Shermer goes on to say: "I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my Skepticism to its core... The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious". See here for the full article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/anomalous-events-that-can-shake-one-s-skepticism-to-the-core/. This is an extraordinary statement for a skeptic to make. What if Michael Shermer has actually ceased to be a skeptic?

I decided I would monitor Michael Shermer's activities closely to see if there was any change in his behaviour to suggest that he was integrating his mysterious experience. He has a website which he doesn't do much with except post links to his Scientific American column, see: http://www.michaelshermer.com/. This column is the best source for his ongoing thought narrative. In the following issue, November 2014, Shermer published an article which predictably stuck a bell with me: Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories? He said therein: "Encouragingly, Uscinski and Parent (psychological researchers) found that education makes a difference in reducing conspiratorial thinking... Even so, that means more than one in five Americans with postgraduate degrees show a high predisposition for conspiratorial belief. As an educator, I find this disturbing." This must mean he has not begun thinking alternatively, at least on a conspiratorial level. Then in February of this year he asked: What Can Be Done about Pseudoskepticism? in which he riles against "climate change deniers!" and how the tobacco industry used to tell people smoking wasn't really unhealthy. His latest article, put online only yesterday, is the cherry on the cake as far as I'm concerned, and it has been given an almost textbook title for Shermer: The Difference between Science and Pseudoscience. Here he critiques Wal Thornhill's electric universe theory, 9/11 conspiracy theories and, most relevantly, Prof. Gary Schwartz and his work on afterlife communications. "(Prof. Schwartz) explained that the brain is like a television set and consciousness is like the signals coming into the brain. 'You need a brain to be conscious, but consciousness exists elsewhere. But TV studios generate and broadcast signals.' 'Where', I inquired, 'is the consciousness equivalent to such production facilities?' No answer." This must mean that Shermer has not entertained the possibility that the incident at his wedding with the radio was a genuine supernatural contact with his dead grandfather-in-law. See here for Michael Shermer's SA column links: http://www.scientificamerican.com/author/michael-shermer/. Shermer's focus has changed somewhat during the last year. His latest book is called The Moral Arc and is a departure from his previous writings. It is more a work of philosophical ethics and has clearly been inspired by Stephen Pinker. Pinker himself described it as a "sequel" to his own book The Better Angels of our Nature. It paints an optimistic and philanthropic view of mankind as becoming a kinder and less aggressive species as time moves on. Human rights of all varieties are now better regarded than they used to be. (I don't completely agree with either Shermer or Pinker, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/savages.html, but that's beside the point right now.) This shift in attitude began before his wedding experience though. The book was published just six months after the radio came to life. As somebody who has written books myself, I know that means he had to have been writing or editing it at the time. Shermer has also made a few video appearances and he has posted links to some on his website. He spoke at TEDx Ghent, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qP0xUNYzXc. He's also done a dialogue with a rather battered-looking Richard Dawkins, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bkDgmqrvg0 (Maybe Dawkins was beaten up by some Indian street-cleaners, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/richard-dawkins-patronizing-git.html) In conclusion, I'm afraid it looks as if Shermer has not changed his mind about the skeptic worldview. In fact after his "anomalous event" which "shook his skepticism to the core", he has simply picked himself up, dusted himself off and carried on walking down Skeptic Avenue without even breaking his stride. Does this mean all hope has gone? No. Very rarely do people change their minds overnight about something very fundamental to their worldview. Sometimes it can take even longer than a whole year. As I say in the background posts above, I never expected Shermer to have a road to Damascus conversion. He's a man who had an amazing experience at his wedding that might have begun a process in his mind. If so then the process could be a long one, with fits and starts, doubts and wrong turns. He may still yet become a "buh-leeva". There will be many obstacles in his wake, and not all of them will be internal. The defection of one of their top superstars will be a massive blow to the skeptic community and they will not let Shermer out of the gate with goodwill; and he knows this very well. Will Jennifer join him in his transformation, and if she won't could that spoil their marriage? As before, I can only say that time will tell. I once again wish Michael Shermer all the best and will defend him against his potential detractors to the fullest extent of my abilities.

Tuesday 15 September 2015

Another Super Stonehenge

A few weeks ago I reported on the discovery of a new Neolithic site in England, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/another-super-stonehenge-discovered.html. Now another has been found. This time the structure is at the long-known existing monument of Durrington Walls. This is a contemporary project to Stonehenge and it lies a few miles away between the modern villages of Amesbury and Larkhill. It consists of a circular raised bank some 1600 feet across and inside was a settlement where a large community of people lived, maybe Stonehenge's builders. The place was not occupied for more than about fifty years so that could explain it. Now new research has revealed that a row of about a hundred standing stones had been placed along one side of the bank. These are significant stones too, very similar to those at Avebury and Stonehenge; it would have required a lot of effort to move and erect them. Some are fifteen feet tall and so would have weighed many tons. Only about half the stones are there now and they've been found by a ground-penetrating radar survey. They're only about three feet below the surface and have lain there unknown for four and a half thousand years, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-34156673. Two things interest me especially about this discovery. Firstly it seems unlikely that this row of stones would have been put there for practical purposes. If, for example, it were necessary to construct fortifications because of a war with a neighbouring tribe or to keep wolves away from their livestock, then a simpler and more easily constructed wooden stockade would surely suffice. Did Durrington Walls for some reason combine the roles of residence and ritual temple? Or perhaps the village was home to the builders, as I said, and that the site was later finished and "consecrated" after the builders moved out. The second interesting fact is the burial of the stones. British megalithic sites have suffered from vandalism during the passing ages since they were built, especially in the medieval period. Some of the stones were taken away and broken up for building. Some were toppled over and buried where they lay, especially during times of Christian fundamentalism, when they were regarded as works of the Devil and associated with witchcraft. We can thank the antiquarian William Stukeley for preserving Avebury and many other ancient sacred sites as well as they have been. In the 17th and 18th century he waged a passionate campaign to protect our country's most archaic heritage. What's different about the stones at Durrington Walls is that they were pulled down and buried far earlier, in fact not long after they were put upright. Why? And by Whom? I don't see how we can find out. However actions like these are not entirely without precedent. Another indigenous culture existed on Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean. Unlike Durrington Walls, Easter Island was shielded from the Illuminati occupation of the world by geography instead of time. It is one of the remotest islands in the world, over two thousand miles from continental land. When it was discovered by a Dutch explorer in 1722, the visitors were astonished to find amazing statues all over the island, the famous Moai. Some of these had been deliberately toppled and broken into fragments. This desecration coincided with a terrible famine and civil war on the island. Were the statues those of gods whom the people blamed for their misfortune and turned against? One thing is clear; the ancient world was so complex and rich in knowledge. That world is forever separated from our own by the passing of the ages and the drive to centralize culture. Finds like Durrington Walls offer us a teasing hint at what really existed. I wonder what other treasures lie beneath our feet that we have yet to find.

Monday 14 September 2015

Ben Emlyn-Jones on The Joeress Podcast- part 1 of 2

I have been interviewed on the Joeress Podcast; this is the first of a two-part interview, see here for the programme: http://joeress.com/joeress-podcast-15/.
Subjects discussed include the 9/11 anniversary, the Mecca crane disaster, the Bilderberg Group and much much more. The show is hosted by Joe Ressington, a musician from London who used to be a colleague of mine on Mind Set Central, see HPANWO Radio. His co-host is an American called Isaac. This was a challenging interview and the presenters asked me some tough questions, but it was a good-natured discussion and great fun. The second part of the interview will be available shortly.

Sunday 13 September 2015

The Corbinator Wins

The inevitable, and the impossible, has happened. Jeremy Corbyn, after thirty-two years on the back benches of the House of Commons has become leader of the Labour Party. He is part of the tendency in the party of traditional economic socialists now considered tamed and outmoded, part of Labour's past. As I've explained before, the Labour Party completely transformed during the 1980's and 90's. After a series of election defeats to the Conservatives, they decided to abandon traditional left wing ideals and become a much more moderate, centre-left, social democratic party. They changed their logo from the red flag to the red rose and adopted the slogan: "Meet the challenge- make the change" at one of their national conferences. Margaret Thatcher, who led the Conservatives through most of this period, quipped that the greatest triumph of her career was her conquest of the Labour Party. Some in the party opposed this change. They wanted the party to stick to its founding principles and persevere in persuading the electorate that these principles were the correct ones. The foremost figure in this tendency was the party's former chairman and minister for energy Tony Benn, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/tony-benn-dies.html. One of his supporters was a newly-elected back bench MP for the constituency of Islington North called Jeremy Corbyn.
See here for essential background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/jeremy-corbyn-new-labour-leader.html.
Those of the Blairite New Labour former leadership are shaking their heads and gasping in disbelief. How could this have happened? Right up the last minute many of them were still in denial. Tony Blair broke his corporate complicit silence to show genuine emotion for the first time in his career and rant about how the Labour Party was doomed forever to the depths of hell if Corbyn were made leader. This was probably counterproductive and sealed the fate of the other three candidates. In truth, there has always been a popular "old Labour" streak within the grass roots of the party. While I was a rabid teenage trade unionist many people in Oxford were involved with Trotskyism, centred around the The Militant. If you had walked through Oxford in those days you would often see a bushy-haired callow youth selling that newspaper on a street corner; that was me. Some of my social media friends are Blairite Labour-supporters and they're lamenting Corbyn's triumph in a similar way to their mentor. Tableaux of mock gravestones with "RIP Labour Party- 1900 to 2015" have been doing the rounds on Facebook. Maybe the real reason this revolution has happened is because there is simply no credible role for New Labour any more. The best analysis of the Corbyn victory has come from the paleoconservative journalist Peter Hitchens. He explains very persuasively how the New Labour Project was adopted and mimicked so completely by the 2000's Conservative Party that there was simply no need for it in Labour any more. Cameron is almost a face-transplanted Tony Blair when it comes to our continued membership of the EU, foreign constabulary wars, NHS privatization and many other policies, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTu3gVvm_K8. Yesterday I was talking to a portering friend of mine who is a die-hard Thatcherite Tory and he said: "Labour have lost it! They've gone back to the Stone Age and elected a dinosaur!" I don't think it's as simple as that. The classic left failed in the 80's because they were up against another ideological visionary- Margaret Thatcher. Today the Corbynnies have simply to knock over David Cameron, and that's a completely different kettle of fish. As Hitchens says above, Cameron does not stand for anything; he is neither left wing nor right wing, neither authoritarian nor libertarian, neither conservative nor liberal. He is a political prostitute. I personally do not share a lot of Corbyn's political views, but if I had been eligible I'd have voted for him without hesitation; see the background link above for more details. I wonder how many of the people who support Corbyn have not really rediscovered socialism, and are instead, like me, just sick of the monotonous, dismal, insincere status quo? British politics has suddenly become so much less boring! Viewing figures for Question Time and Parliament Today are going to skyrocket. It's a recurring situation in politics; an organization has to choose between pragmatism and idealism. In 2010 the Liberal Democrats decided to be pragmatic. They sacrificed some of their principles in exchange for being a junior partner in a crooked coalition with the Tories. This has destroyed them; they've lost almost all their MP's and their members are deserting the sinking ship like the proverbial rats. I've always been an idealist and I respect other idealists, even if I don't necessarily share their ideals. Right now Jeremy Corbyn is reorganizing the party, which will be a big job and we're going to see a lot of changes. He has made the brave and admirable step of not deliberately making his deputy leader a woman, and therefore is rebelling against the Liz Kendalls of this world. His deputy, Tom Watson, looks like a middle-aged Harry Potter. He has said dismissively: "Any shadow cabinet members who resign can easily be replaced." This is following the eight front-benchers who have refused to serve under Corbyn. David Cameron has Tweeted: "The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family's security."... This is going to be fun! I'm surprised that none of my many detractors have spotted my mistake in the background article above. Normally these people spend all day scouring every word I write in order to pick out my errors. I wrote: "Jeremy Corbyn is never going to be Labour leader. The 'men in grey suits' would not permit it in a million years. Something will happen that will change the opinion polls and knock Corbyn off his perch. This could be a sex scandal, an accusation of financial misdeeds. Perhaps another kind of incident whose name will have the suffix '-gate'. Then again he might just do a Robin Cook/John Smith and have a convenient heart attack. Maybe he will suddenly commit suicide for no reason like Dr David Kelly. I would at least recommend him to stay well away from Paris for the next few weeks." I was wrong; Jeremy Corbyn is now the Labour leader. But for how long? For goodness sake, the man could be Prime Minster within five years and he's a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign!... I don't think so, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8Uot_r59N4. Mossad are mixing the poison as we speak... Fancy a walk in the woods, Jeremy?

Saturday 12 September 2015

Mecca Crane Disaster

Yesterday there was a terrible disaster in the holy city of Mecca. A construction crane fell on top of the Masjid al-Haram, the world's biggest and most sacred mosque. Mecca is reputed to be the birthplace of the prophet Mohammed and was also where he is said to have met with the Angel Gabriel and was dictated the revelation from God that he later wrote down and published as the Holy Quran, one of the world's most widely-read books. In the centre of the mosque is a cuboid black building called the Kaaba. Inside this is a black stone with a mark on it said to be the footprint of Mohammed, his last on Earth before his assumption into Heaven. Muslims always face in the direction of the Kaaba when they pray, wherever they are in the world. The black stone might be a meteorite. One of the five pilars of Islam is the Hajj, this is an annual eight-day pilgrimage which all adult Muslims are obliged to take at least once in their life. The pilgrims walk around the Kaaba seven times during one of the rituals of the Hajj. The Masjid al-Haram mosque can hold almost four million worshippers and an extension is being built to increase its capacity even further. The huge builder's cranes have been a temporary addition to the skyline of the mosque from some time now. These structures are familiar sights all over the world, springing up whenever a large building project is being put up; they have become the symbol of economic growth and future prosperity. Modern cranes look highly precarious with their tall, thin towers and top-heavy arms, but they are very stable, being anchored firmly to the ground. They are formed of an open framework which means they have a low weight relative to their size and are not easily dislodged by the wind. Therefore it was astonishing and horrific when one of them toppled over and crashed down on top of the crowded mosque. Emergency services quickly attended the scene and removed the injured to hospital. At the time of writing, the death toll is a hundred and seven. Politicians from around the world have stated publicly how sorry they are; David Cameron, the UK Prime Minster said: "My thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed... I'm shocked and saddened to hear of the accident in Mecca involving a large number of fatalities amongst those attending the Hajj." The crane was made in Germany and belonged to the Saudi Bin Laden Group, one of the world's biggest construction corporations. The company is run by Mohammed Bin Laden; and his son Osama Bin Laden is supposedly the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks... the irony is not lost on me. Is it therefore just a coincidence that this tragedy happened on September the 11th? The official news reports are blaming it on high winds, but the wind speed over Mecca was only twenty-five miles per hour; and, as I said, modern cranes aren't badly affected by the wind. It would probably take a raging gale to blow one down. How people will react to this alleged accident will depend on who they are. For those who blame militant Islam for the 9/11 attacks, they may well feel a sense of satisfaction because for them September the 11th is a day of infamy. Perhaps they will interpret the crane crashing down on this auspicious day as God's revenge, an alternative to the customary bolt of lightning. I imagine Pastor Terry Jones is smirking right now, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/burn-koran-day.html. For Muslims, especially those inside the mosque yesterday, they might also regard the disaster as a sign from God, but a very different one; that He is not pleased with his chosen people for their terrorist persecution of the United States of America and the rest of the infidel world. If, supposing, this was a contrived event, then the CIA or Mossad agents who planted a bomb at the base of the crane, or demolished it with whatever method the intelligence services use, will be thinking: "Ha ha! This is payback time. The West strikes back fourteen years ago to the day you Muslims struck us!" All these mindsets have one thing in common: they all assume that the official story of 9/11 is true. As regular HPANWO-readers will know, I do not, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/911-fourteen-years-on.html.

Friday 11 September 2015

9/11- Fourteen Years On

Today's 9/11 anniversary is not a decade or any other special milestone other than the annual one, the thirteenth following the actual 9/11 atrocity itself; however it feels special in some way. In terms of activism there's a lot going on this year; more than usual. In fact there was a big meeting in London a while ago to make plans, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/911-truth-meeting-in-london.html. The "official" 9/11 Truth group in the UK has held a fringe event at a Stop the War conference yesterday. Tomorrow they'll be picketing and leafleting the BBC. They've called a public meeting in a few weeks which I'll be attending; should be interesting. There's also going to be the premier of a new 9/11 movie called Incontrovertible; it's produced by a company with the rather engaging name of "Killing Auntie Films"... I kid you not. The film features the story of Tony Rooke, a man who was taken to court for refusing to pay his TV licence as an act of rebellion against the BBC for lying over 9/11. So far the venue, date and time of the screening have not been announced, but I'll be sure to go and see it if I can. However I won't be attending any of the activism events because I don't feel comfortable getting involved with the "official" 9/11 Truth group any more. I used to; In fact I was once a member of the Oxford chapter of the group. Together with the group's leader, a somewhat dour and aloof man from out of town, we held a "week of action" two or three years after 9/11. This man was grudgingly accommodating with my involvement in the group because he didn't think "other conspiracy theories" should mix with the 9/11 issue. Since then I've come across more information relating to the 9/11 attacks which has made me understand that you simply cannot separate 9/11 from other esoteric matters. The definitive discoveries of Dr Judy Wood have proved beyond doubt that free energy, the secret space programme, and possibly even UFO's, are essential ingredients in any proper scientific 9/11 investigation. Yet the 9/11 Truth mainstream have failed to recognize Dr Wood's research for what it is, suspiciously so I think. Some of them have treated her with unequivocal hostility, for example see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAqbBWzRIAA. I have no intention of travelling all the way to London to wave placards and yell slogans about "thermite!" and hijacked planes hitting the buildings. No aircraft or thermite were involved, see background links below. The UFO community have also been cynical, in fact Bryce Zabel, the screenwriter of the UFO-themed TV series Dark Skies and co-author with Richard Dolan of AD- After Disclosure, wrote an article called "UFO's and 9/11 Truth should not Mix". Recently I interviewed Stephen Bassett on HPANWO Radio and brought up the subject of the Rt. Hon. Paul Hellyer MP talking about Dr Judy Wood and he doesn't consider it as significant as I do, see here at 76:27: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/programme-153-podcast-stephen-bassett.html. (See here for details on Mr Hellyer's statement: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/hellyer-checks-evidence.html)

Four years ago was of course the first decade anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and to commemorate the passing of ten years the mainstream media produced an utterly dire documentary called 9/11 Conspiracy Road Trip, see: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2jlcfz. The programme featured Charlie Veitch, one of the Truth movement's most celebrated figures. During the course of the programme he changes his mind and decides that the official story was true. This was clearly an attempt to derail the 9/11 Truth campaign and it partially succeeded, I must say more from our reaction to Charlie's defection than his turnabout itself, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/911-conspiracy-road-trip.html. I'm still on good terms with Charlie. I think he's a fool and he made a huge mistake, but I don't think he deserved the threats to burn down his house and murder his son. I myself was asked to take part in the three-part follow up series to 9/11 Conspiracy Road Trip... I declined. Since then things in some areas have been looking up. Dr Karen Douglas, a psychologist who studies conspiracy theorists has concluded that we are actually saner than the average Joe, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/conspiracy-theorists-more-sane-than.html. My own contribution to 9/11 Truth on this auspicious day was to distribute some fliers sent to me by my friend and fellow researcher Andrew Johnson, see: http://www.checktheevidence.com/pdf/911%20Photo%20leaflet%202014.pdf. (Also see link on main site) I went along a street putting them through people's letterboxes. Unlike the ones 9/11 Truth Official are using, this one includes the indispensable information gathered by Dr Judy Wood. Andrew sent me a sticker too; unfortunately I couldn't get the back off it, but I put it through somebody's door. The truth the Truth movement want has already been found. We know what happened. That has to be the first stage to find out who did it. How much longer will it take before the second question is answered? We shall see, and I shall persevere. Maybe we can then prevent similar crimes of mass murder in the future. On that subject, don't forget my 9/11 debate coming up soon: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/911-debate-ben-emlyn-jones-vs-andy.html.

Thursday 10 September 2015

Mysterious Pebble

A few weeks ago I was having a day out in Skegness, a popular seaside holiday resort on the coast of Lincolnshire. I was walking along the beach, a very fine award-winning one, watching the surf kneading the sand when I decided to pick up a pebble; I do this kind of thing habitually whenever I'm at the seaside. It was a pebble like most others, about two inches long by one wide, made of a blue and grey streaked stone; it's probably some kind of flint. It had originally been a jagged shard, probably broken off a larger lump of rock, but its edges have been worn smooth by the constant friction of the waves. I was about to throw it back into the sea when I noticed a strange marking on it. I bent down and washed the sand off it in the surf. It was a double arc cut into the stone, one inside the other. The two were not parallel and they tapered together somewhat at one end to create a rough half-crescent shape. Inside the curve of the arcs was a flattened and smooth surface. It was almost as though somebody had pressed the bottom of a coffee mug into some wet clay and let it set; except this was stone not clay. I was surprised to find such a strange feature on a seaside pebble. I didn't think too much of it at the time because my mind was occupied with heading towards the nearby ice cream stalls as soon as possible, but I did take the pebble home with me. Could it be a fossil? You do get fossils in flint. I looked online at a fossil-hunters' website and found out that Skegness is not a hotspot for fossils because there are no cliffs or exposed rock. However small rocks are carried southwards by the current from Holderness, a coastal region of Yorkshire. If so then it doesn't resemble any kind of fossil normally found on that beach, according to my source, and I've not seen any pictures of prehistoric animal and plant life which look like what was on the pebble, see: http://www.chapelpoint.ukfossils.co.uk/. It's possible that the pebble came from one of the stacked boulders that make up Skegness' storm defences; the rock looks like the same kind. As the above link says, it's impossible to date the pebble accurately because there's no way of knowing what layer of the ground it came from.
Could it be one of these out-of-place artefacts that I've been reading about? Richard Thompson's and Michael Cremo's Forbidden Archaeology is a thousand-page doorstep of a book, but it's well worth reading because it reports on the remarkable finds of archaeologists that don't fit in with the conventional image we have of the distant past. For example, the bones of modern humans in the same period as dinosaurs and man-made stone tools in an epoch where only sea life was supposed to exist. Not only that, but Forbidden Archaeology also explains how there is a tacit collusion among academics to suppress knowledge which contradicts the familiar narrative. In one of the most interesting chapters, the book describes artificial objects like gold chains being found in lumps of coal from Wales and a strange metal sphere several billion... not million... years old found in South Africa. This came from a time when there were supposed to be no life forms on Earth except the very earliest aquatic microbes. It is definitely artificial because it has a distinct and exact series of notched grooves around its equator so that it resembles a cricket ball. There are also human footprints hundreds of millions of years old, which alone would be anomalous enough even if these feet were not wearing shoes. The flat soles are visible, and even the stitching around the edge where they’re sewn onto the uppers. Cremo calls this cover-up the "knowledge filter", for example see: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/egipto/esp_electricidad_egipto_1.htm. I met Cremo once at a conference, see background link below. In that case what could the marks on my pebble be? As I suggested above, it could be the imprint of some circular object with a raised rim; I'm not sure if such a thing exists in nature. It's difficult to tell; we have just a segment of something bigger which gives us a mere glimpse of what it might be. That's very tantalizing. I also don't know if there's any way to tell how old the marking is? Could it simply be caused by the pebble resting for several years against a ship's anchor or something? If it is truly ancient, then this might be another discovery to add to that long, long list of evidence that Cremo and Thompson have accumulated.

Wednesday 9 September 2015

Ben Emlyn-Jones on the Kev Baker Show 2

I have been interviewed on the Kev Baker Show (aka MrGlasgowTruther) on Truth Frequency Radio, see here for the podcasts: http://truthfrequencyradio.com/the-kev-baker-show-57470/ and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Bxeg-VVUI.
Subjects discussed include the Bases conferences, the "Bloop", CERN, Ayahuasca and much much more.
See here for my previous appearance on the Kev Baker Show: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/ben-emlyn-jones-on-kev-baker-show.html.

Tuesday 8 September 2015

Presque Isle

It's very strange how the most unexpected things so considerably move and influence us. I've written before, in background links at the bottom, about how a pair of cheap and popular TV movies changed my life; and I'll never forget the time when I was a small child I saw Kate Bush's rock video Cloudbusting in the cinema, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF813vmbcQY. It haunted and consumed me for many years, and I had no idea why. It was a very long time later that I discovered that the track is a ballad about the life and works of Wilhelm Reich. Did a part of me predict in advance where my adult life would take me? See here for more details: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/programme-36-podcast-peter-robbins.html. There was another such event in my life that I've never written about before despite it being extremely formative for me. It's one of the most unexpected and it concerns a place I've never been to in my life, before or since, and had never even heard of before until that auspicious moment.

Presque Isle is a peninsula on the south shore of Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes, as their name suggests, are a series of huge expanses of fresh water in North America that lie roughly on the border between Canada and the United States of America. They're so big that they're generally regarded as inland seas and Presque Isle sits on the small segment of the coast given to the state of Pennsylvania, creating a natural harbour. Its name comes from presqu'île, meaning "peninsula" in French, literally "almost an island". It is a remarkable geological formation; a massive six-mile long sand spit that was created by the interaction of the prevailing anticlockwise currents of Lake Erie with the shoals of the south shore. Presque Isle is not a specific object in itself, but the effect of an action. Sand washed in by the current accumulated at the western end of the shoal a few thousand years ago and piled up to form the infant peninsula. Since then it has been moving steadily eastwards along the south coast of Lake Erie like a slow motion wave of sediment, by about half a mile per century. The current steadily washes away the west coast of Presque Isle and deposits sand on the eastern shore, by the mouth of Presque Isle bay. This creates a unique natural wonder in that the biological landscape changes from east to west because the land gets older as you travel westwards; this makes Presque Isle a geographical time capsule. On the eastern extremity you have the newest deposits, just banks of sand and mud with the typical beach life. A few hundred yards inland you start to see small sand dunes with grass. Further west you get bushes and shrubs, further still small trees. By the time you reach the opposite shore the habitat has developed into a full-sized developed deciduous forest. This is termed a "climax forest" because after that it's time for the waves to take back what they've given, and the land is swept away into the lake by the relentless longshore drift. However, this is only part of the natural cycle of Presque Isle; everything swept away on the west shore is deposited on the east to begin the process all over again, for five or six hundred years until the spit has moved on and the cycle turns again. This precious wonder has made Presque Isle a site of special scientific interest; it has the status of a Pennsylvania state park. The Erielhonen Indians were the first people known to have lived on Presque Isle; because its shape resembles a human arm they believed that it was the arm of the Great Spirit. In the colonial era Britain and France battled for it and in the 19th century it was fought over in the 1812 Anglo-American War. There are the ruins of forts everywhere, making it a site of special historical and archaeological interest too. Today it is a popular tourist attraction with miles of winding roads and footpaths. Its fresh beaches are attractive for bathing and water-sports in the summer. There is an annual fun weekend there of sports, hiking, amusements, arts and crafts and other attractions, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zltXdDB91Xs. In winter cold winds from Canada blow in to make it freezing there. Interestingly there was a UFO incident on Presque Isle in 1966, a multiple witness CE-3. Despite attempts to debunk it I still think it holds water, but that's a story for another time, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO7-v10TG5Q.
This information all came to me in a single one-hour documentary I saw in about 1993 or 94 on the Discovery Channel or a similar platform; unfortunately I can't find a recording of it anywhere online. It discussed the future of Presque Isle and how intervention was going to be needed because the cyclical action described above would continue to move the formation eastwards. The beaches on the western side were being eroded away. In fact at several times in the 20th century Presque Isle- "almost an island" became a real island when freak winter storms washed the causeway all the way through severing the main body of the peninsula from the shore until the link was repaired. The original plan involved a tried and tested technique called "sand nourishment"; one used on many seaside beaches. Sand is brought in from another location and deposited on the beach to replace that which is lost to erosion. The problem with sand nourishment is that it has to be a continuous process that costs continuous money; half a million tons of sand are needed every year and it all has to be driven in by lorry. Then in the 1990's a new plan was proposed, one which it was believed would halt the erosion altogether. In a single one-off operation that would cost the equivalent of three years of sand nourishment, a series of huge offshore groynes would be constructed in the surf. However, as the documentary stated with scorching poignancy: "it might destroy the magic of Presque Isle forever." The beaches on the west side would be saved, and might even expand out to the groynes, but without the sediment flow from those beaches, the eastern end of the formation would begin to erode; all the new sandbanks would never develop into climax forested land and would instead be returned immediately to the lake. Presque Isle would become a static location, halted in its patient, tireless and millennial march eastwards. The whole peninsula would eventually become forest and a lot of the unique seaside habitats would disappear. To be fair, if Presque Isle were left to nature it would eventually be destroyed anyway; in a few thousand years it would fall off the eastern end of the shoals and be gone forever. The advantages of sand nourishment are that there would be no erosion at the eastern side and that part of the feature would continue to inch eastwards while leaving behind the western half. In a few centuries we'd see a very differently-shaped Presque Isle, but still one recognizable in terms of its biological and geological environment. Nevertheless the breakwater plan was approved and the US Army Corps of Engineers built fifty-eight groynes, each 150 feet long 350 feet apart; and 200 to 300 feet offshore... these kinds of activities tend always to involve the military for some reason. Another effect of the breakwaters is that the coast's clean western skyline has been ruined. One of the beaches is called "Sunset Beach" because on a clear evening you can get such a lovely view of the sun descending to the horizon. Today the view is sullied by these huge elongated piles of rock. Ironically the plan has only partially worked anyway; a certain amount of sand nourishment is still needed to top up that accumulated by the breakwater system, see: http://old.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20011104erie1104p8.asp. Tellingly, and fatefully for Presque Isle, such a breakwater construction could never been done on an oceanic coast because they are banned at the seaside for being environmentally damaging. They got away with it at Presque Isle on a technicality... "Ah, but Lake Erie is a lake and not the sea, isn't it?" It's a pity that the documentary is not online because it's extremely well-made. It has a lovely score with electronic pan pipe music and piano melodies that I can still hear in my head to this day. As I watched the TV programme I was almost electrocuted by some of the most powerful emotions I'd ever experienced. I found somewhere private in the house and broke down, my heart shattered. It's difficult to describe in words exactly how it made me feel. I wept like a woman for several hours non-stop. I dreamed about Presque Isle for many nights afterwards, and I was unable to think about anything else for several days. I cheered myself up with violent fantasies about planting dynamite on the groynes and blowing them to pieces. Why, with all the reasons to be sad in this world, did the plight of Presque Isle rip into me the way it did? Maybe it's a symptom of how mentally fragile I was in those days. If I'd first heard about the story today it wouldn't affect me the way it did back then. This is not to say that the taming of the natural wonder of Presque Isle was would go unnoticed by me. It still does represent the conquest of nature by the fallen man; in fact it's an almost textbook example. I would certainly mention it on HPANWO and it might even trigger one of my "Boudica moments", see background links below. The first people to see Presque Isle were a pre-Illuminati culture, the Erielhonen Indians. One way or another, those people were almost all exterminated within five hundred years when they made contact with the Illuminati-occupied West. The historian Michael Wood calls this process very pithily "The end of sacred times, the triumph of profane times." When they saw the outline of Presque Isle the Erielhonen believed it was the arm of their universal divine principle, the Great Spirit. Well I believe that the Great Spirit does exist, in whatever form you wish to regard him. Maybe he spoke to me while I was watching that TV programme. I know he wanted to tell me that he doesn't like being handcuffed,

Monday 7 September 2015

The Alien Agenda with Ben Emlyn-Jones and Philip Kinsella

The Alien Agenda with Ben Emlyn-Jones and Philip Kinsella is an independent short film by Neil Geddes-Ward featuring Philip Kinsella, the author and extraterrestrial contact experiencer, see: http://philip-kinsella.co.uk/.
As you can see, the interviewer is me. The location was one of the most remarkable buildings I've ever seen; it's the home of Matt and Menna, a couple from High Wycombe who help run the High Wycombe Paranormal group. The house is decorated literally from corner to corner with thousands of items from the world of horror fiction, sci-fi, the paranormal, UFO's, aliens and the occult. For those interested in learning more, I myself will be the speaker at the next High Wycombe Paranormal event, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/ben-emlyn-jones-at-high-wycombe.html. See here for my previous appearance on Neil's channel: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-sirius-letters-ben-emlyn-jones.html.

Sunday 6 September 2015

UFO Truth Magazine- Issue 14

UFO Truth Magazine Issue 14 is now available. It can be purchased on this page as a single copy, but please subscribe and save money if you want to read it regularly, see: http://www.ufotruthmagazine.co.uk/subscriptions-shop/. Issue 14 includes an article in my column, entitled: Colonel Halt returns to the UK, which is a personal account of how I became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the recent Rendlesham Forest conference at Woodbridge.

Also you will find in Issue 14: An update on the Milton Torres aerial encounter, a USO in Brazil, UFO's in Renaissance art and much much more.
Also in this HPANWO Show programme I interview the UFO Truth's editor Gary Heseltine: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/programme-124-podcast-gary-heseltine.html.
See here for details on UFO Truth Magazine Issue 13: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/ufo-truth-magazine-issue-13.html.

Saturday 5 September 2015

The Lonely Anglophone

I've always been very interested in linguistics, perhaps because I was brought up in a multilingual environment- speaking several languages. My father's family are Bristol Welsh and I was born and brought up in a region of Wales where the Welsh language is dominant. My father's own family has a Welsh-speaking branch too. My mother was a Dutchwoman and I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands with her family, all of whom also spoke German because we were close to the border where they lived in Limburg. Some of the older ones also spoke Groesbeeks, a rare dialect that has since died out. I've been thinking lately about how languages are classified and what defines a language as opposed to a dialect, and why it matters. Linguists define a dialect as a variety of language, in terms of its structure deviating from the standard; that refers to a certain group of the language's speakers. The same goes for an accent except this is when only the pronunciation system changes leaving the grammar and vocabulary intact. For example American English is a dialect because an American would say: "I'm pissed because I've gotten a busted leg from walking on the sidewalk by the drug store." while a Briton would say the same thing as: "I'm annoyed because I've got a broken leg from walking on the pavement by the chemists shop." If you spoke the latter sentence like an American would then you'd be speaking in an American accent, but not in American English. So a speaker's dialect and/or accent will vary depending on what town, region or country they live in; and their ethnicity or social class. Some people speak in their own unique way because of upbringing, personal choice, the influence of foreign languages and dialects or disorders of the brain, mouth or other vocal organs; these are called idiolects. (In the case of personal choice I suppose you would have to call it a "constructed idiolect".) However when dialects of a language deviate to a certain point from each other, should we reclassify them as separate languages? How do we know when it's right to do so? In academic linguistics, there is no universally accepted criterion. Languages come in families in a similar way to living organisms. Like living organisms they evolve, mutate, interbreed, speciate and sometimes become extinct. A while ago I wrote a detailed article on this subject which is essential background to this one, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/beyond-babel.html. Different languages are often closely related within the families and super-families I talk about in the article above. French, Spanish and Italian are all from the Romance family while Russian, Czech and Polish are all from the Slavic family. However these languages are not mutually intelligible, meaning that the speakers of each language can't understand the other when using their mother tongue. A language that is mutually intelligible means speakers can converse with each other in their own separate languages and understand each other. Mutual intelligibility is a sliding scale from total to partial to slight; there's also asymmetrical intelligibility, where one language can be understood by another's speaker, but not vice-versa. Sometimes the written language is mutually intelligible, but not the spoken. Icelanders can read Faroese, but not talk to a Faroese speaker. A Hindi and Urdu speaker can easily converse with each other, but not read each other's writing because the two languages use a completely different script; the same goes for German and Yiddish. Mutual intelligibility is the most popular yardstick separating languages from dialects, but because there is a continuum of separation, this has caused some controversy. There seems to be one exception in this categorization process that linguists tiptoe around with their arms pressed to their sides... English.

English is technically a West-Germanic language, the same family from which derive German and Dutch, yet it is unique in several ways. Firstly, it's very widespread. Because of the political global influence of Britain in the previous couple of centuries, and the United States of America during the last century, it is spoken in every corner of the planet and is a global lingua-franca. It emerged in England in the early Middle Ages and evolved quickly into a wide variety of dialects, some of which exist to this day. English comes from a sub-family of West-Germanic called Ingvaeonic. This evolved on the continental North Sea coast at the time when people in Britain were speaking Latin and Celtic- the ancestor of Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic etc (Boudica moment alert!). Today there is only one other living survivor of the Ingvaeonic group, Frisian. Unlike English this only exists in a small corner of the northern Netherlands, Denmark and Germany and is spoken by only half a million people. Despite being the closest living language to English it is not mutually intelligible. This is song by Frisian singer Piter Wilkens, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyFYylF3_g. The only parts of the lyrics I can understand are the Dutch loanwords because I can speak Dutch. In terms of upwards reclassification, English can never be regarded as a dialect of any other language. However, the reclassification I'm more interested in is downwards. I think English should be split up. Why has no academic linguist considered this? English seems to be ring-fenced in some way; for some reason it's become a sacred cow that has been put on a pedestal above the shuffling and analysis that all other tongues are subjected to. This makes it very lonely to be a monoglot Anglophone. The reason I say what I do is because many of the dialects of English are very low on the scale of mutually intelligibility. I'm thinking specifically in terms of the languages of the Caribbean and of some regions of the British Isles. There has only been a single official downward split in English that I'm aware of, Scots. Scots is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language spoken in the north and west of Scotland. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and some of the rural areas of Northern Ireland. Scots was formerly regarded as a dialect of English, but today it is classified as a language in its own right. This is fair enough I think. It is only semi-intelligible with British Standard English and also it has a proud and ancient literary tradition, especially due to the poet Robert Burns who is as influential in Scotland as William Shakespeare is in England. Scots recently became a third member of the Ingvaeonic sub-family. However I can understand fairly well Burns' poem The Mouse, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy8lehO7nqg, wheras somebody speaking Geordie at full strength is very low on the mutual intelligibility scale for me personally, and therefore probably will be for many other British English speakers. Geordie is a dialect spoken in northeast England. Some people in the region speak Standard English but have a strong Geordie accent; a good example is the conspiracy researcher Richard D Hall, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbS6hR9citU. However there are others who speak full strength Geordie with all the different words and grammatical elements that are absent from Standard English; a good example is the character Michael in the Alan Partridge comedy series, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ5CdJwKNI8. In some scenes Michael speaks so strongly that a fellow character describes his speech as "just a noise!" So why has Geordie not been classified as a language in the same way Scots has? Dutch and Afrikaans are officially separate languages, although they are mutually intelligible. Even I, whose Dutch is rusty, can understand much of spoken Afrikaans. There are other similar situations. English is the official language of nineteen of the twenty-eight nations that make up the Caribbean islands, but the people who live in those islands don't speak anything I'd recognize as English, let alone understand. These languages are known as patois or creoles and are familiar around the world because of the international popularity of Caribbean music. The lyrics of this ska song are typical of strong patois, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMrNDnU6PPk. You might argue that Althea and Donna are obviously speaking a form of English because of its Germanic features: word order, idea order, tense formation etc. But Dutch and German have an identical syntax; that does not make them English does it? Upgrading a dialect to a language is merely bureaucratic and rubber-stamping on one level; a bit like the fuss over whether Swindon is a town or a city, or whether Pluto is a planet or Kuiper Belt object. However it can be significant for political reasons which I'll come on to shortly. Having a recognized script is important in linguistic status. Scots has this thanks to writers like Robert Burns. Jamaican Patois has a linguistic academy, see: http://www.mona.uwi.edu/dllp/jlu/documents/spelling-jamaican-the-jamaican-way-Handout.pdf, and there are some road signs now written in it. Geordie does have a written form, but hardly anybody uses it in daily life. In popular culture, written Geordie is most commonly seen in the adult comic Viz which is set in an imaginary town in Northumberland called "Fulchester". Some of the characters are made to speak in strong Geordie, particularly Sid the Sexist whose catchphrase is: "Tits oot feh the lads!"
As far as I can see the English speaking world is falsely unified and some parts should be expelled. The Anglosphere should consist of southern England, parts of Ireland and Scotland, North America, Australia and several other places; everywhere else should be declared independent linguistic zones. When I was at school I used to read a magazine called English Today and watch a TV documentary called The Story of English, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0. These media speculated that English was developing into separate languages. This was in the 1980's, so why hasn't it? There are clearly political influences on language classification. I suspect that Scots has been made a language because of recurring historical waves of Scottish nationalism, one of which we're experiencing right now, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/programme-104-podcast-scottish.html. Afrikaans was probably upgraded from a Dutch dialect because of the constant warfare in southern Africa through the 19th century; indeed it used to be known as "Cape Dutch". So if English is being held together in the face of all linguistic reason, there must be a political ideology behind it; yet there is none I can find in the overt world. Does the English language occupy an important clandestine position in the global world order? Is it being groomed to play a specific role in the New one, the "Great Works of Ages"? Language is a very important part of political dynamics, as George Orwell ingeniously explained, see background links below. I think the answer to this conundrum might lie in the insights of Orwell. As of yet, I have no firm solutions myself. Another intriguing revelation about the history of English has just struck. Thanks to modern DNA testing techniques we now know that, contrary to previous beliefs, the supposed Anglo-Saxon migration never took place. We used to think that after the fall of the Roman Empire, Britain collapsed into chaos and immigrants from Ingvaeonic-speaking regions of the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark took advantage of the power vacuum and moved in to displace the remaining vestiges of the native civilization. This is not true. There was no significant immigration into Britain at all in the centuries following the departure of Rome and DNA analysis of the bodies in graves in the Anglo-Saxon heartland of East Anglia during the birth of the Anglo-Saxon world shows that almost all the people had a pure native pedigree. It seems that the Anglo-Saxons were not invading foreigners, but instead were local British people joining in with a cultural revolution. What's more the signs are there in the English language. English has grammatical features that it does not share with other Germanic tongues; features that are found in the Celtic family. The implications of this are astounding. English, the language I am speaking right now, first emerged as a second language spoken by people whose first language was Celtic, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLpgVEfy4mQ. This is a question for which I have no current answers, but could English even be a constructed language, at least partly-constructed? If the answer is "yes", then was it constructed for a long-term strategic purpose? Perhaps a parting gift from the Illuminati-occupied Roman Empire that was considering the future.

Friday 4 September 2015

The Bloop

The "Bloop" is the onomatopoeic name given to a strange sound picked up by underwater microphones, known as hydrophones, in 1997. NOAA- the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an American scientific agency, has set up hydrophones in many seas of the world to listen to the sounds of the ocean. Some of these were originally called the Sound Surveillance System- SOSUS and had a military purpose; they were used by NATO to detect Soviet submarines and ships traversing designated regions of the sea. These hydrophones are very sensitive and have discovered that the oceans are in fact a very noisy place, even if that noise is of a kind we humans can't hear. Along with artificial noise of ships and underwater explosions, are the singing of whales, and other much louder sounds. Most of these can be identified as earthquakes on the seabed and impacts from icebergs. Then one day in 1997 (oddly enough I can't find a source pinpointing the exact date) a sound was detected that nobody recognized. It was at a very low frequency; it rose from nothing to just fifty hertz over the course of about a minute, and then vanished. What was remarkable about it was its volume, at least three hundred decibels, several times as loud as a whale singing at the top of its voice. The recording of the Bloop has to be sped up many times to make the sound audible to human ears, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBN56wL35IQ. It was heard by two separate listening stations over three thousand miles apart and comparing both their bearings the noise was roughly triangulated. It was thought to be in a spot in the deep Pacific Ocean about four hundred miles west of the tip of South America. After some consideration NOAA claimed that they'd solved the mystery; it was the sound of icebergs colliding. However another scientist, David Wolman, reckoned that it was still animal related, but what kind of animal? It was too loud to be a whale. The Bloop has never recurred since. What nobody denies is that the ocean still hides a vast array of mysteries. In many ways, we know more about outer space than we do about the watery envelope covering almost three quarters of the Earth's surface. Over 99% of the ocean floor remains completely unexplored. NOAA have picked up other enigmatic and inexplicable sounds since the Bloop which they'd christened "Upsweep", "Whistle", "Julia", "Slow Down" and "Train".

Several fiction writers have wondered what lies beneath. The most famous of these was HP Lovecraft who wrote a story published in a pulp fiction magazine in 1926 called The Call of Cthulhu. It was all about a submerged city originating in a mysterious otherworld that acts as a prison for a horrific sea monster called Cthulhu which was a gigantic reptilian winged humanoid with octopus-like tentacles emerging from its face. Strangely enough Cthulhu's city, R'lyeh, was said to stand on the seabed less than a thousand miles from where the Bloop was vaguely estimated to have broken out. Lovecraft's story inspired Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson when they wrote my favourite novel, The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Naturally the Bloop is fact and Lovecraft's story is fiction, but how often before has life imitated art? I can think of numerous examples. Perhaps fiction writers tap into some kind of psychic resonance which inspires them to write stories that closely match real events in ways that cannot be dismissed with that skeptic Joker: just a "coh-inss-i-dunce!" The 1989 James Cameron film The Abyss also explores the possibility of deep sea non-human civilization. Cameron himself descended to the Challenger Deep, the deepest place in the world's oceans, in a deep-sea mini-submarine; why would he do that if all he invented was fictional? It has been known for some time that the oceans contain natural deep sound channels in which sound waves are focused and concentrated into beams. These beams carry the sound much further and for far longer than a normal sonic medium. Some people claim depth charge detonations for the 1940's Battle of the Atlantic still to this day resonate around the world in these deep sound channels. Similar sound channels have been discovered in the upper atmosphere which is why Project Mogul was launched in 1947. This was a top secret operation to listen for Soviet nuclear bomb tests by hoisting microphones into the upper atmosphere on giant balloons. Project Mogul has been falsely claimed to be the explanation for the Roswell Incident. This article explains why that is incorrect, but also has information on deep sound channels, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/roswell-no-aliens-just-sound-waves.html. The Bloop has also played a role in the Animal Planet TV mockumentaries Mermaids- the Body Found and Mermaids- the New Evidence, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWE4g33dwdI and: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVhYo41FOY8. When I first saw these programmes I did wonder if they could be true stories. Now I'm 95% certain they are indeed completely faked, but I still think there's some genuine reason why these programmes were made. I'll have to write a dedicated post about this subject to explain properly. Could there be some kind of... something... deep in the liquid depths of our planet's hydrosphere that is beyond anything we have yet imagined? At the moment our telescopes are pointed up at the heavens, waiting for a sign of intelligent life from out there. The "WOW! Signal" could be one such call, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4EyZt9r8QE. Perhaps we should not only be looking upwards; we should also look down. Was the Bloop an undersea equivalent of the "WOW! Signal"?