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A Website of Alternative Thinkers & Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

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MORE EPSTEIN MISCELLANY…

It's been a long time since I actually blogged on the weekend, but with all the Epstein news and speculation out there, I simply had to do so, sort of as a "bonus" this week. To be frank, I had thought about doing this blog during the weekdays, but as this website as a more or less international audience, I thought that it would be better to do so as a kind of "extra" rather than fixate on it during the week.  But make no mistake, the Epstein case is significant, precisely because of its international nature. As no other case or individual, Mr. Epstein was connected. In the apt words of one American commentator, he was the most important prisoner in the world.

The case is significant also for an almost philosophical reason, because according to polls in America, the vast majority of people are simply not buying the suicide narrative, and of those who do, the outrage factor is in the red zone. Epstein has crystallized the sense of outrage so much that his case symbolizes a cultural and epistemological crisis that the country is in. Virtually every aspect of the narrative that we're being told has already been questioned, and virtually every detail can be interpreted from a variety of points of view and in the absence of trust in any narrative put out by the government, speculations and theories abound, many of which make much more sense than the narrative we're being asked to accept. In short, Epstein has created a kind of epistemological crisis: so deep is the cynicism now that - as I remarked in a private conversation to a friend - if the government investigation initiated by Attorney General Barr were to be completely transparent and tell the absolute truth, no one is going to believe it, and you can put me in that category. The institutions of government have lied to the American people for so long, and so deeply, the double standard application of law has become so apparent, that the cynicism runs so deep no one will believe them any more. That's an epistemological crisis, a cultural one, and ultimately, a crisis of governance. At this stage, some big name people are going to have to appear in orange jump suits - and soon - or government regardless of who is running it is going to lose what tiny little shards of credibility it has left.

As a case in point to illustrate this "epistemological crisis", consider the following article:

FBI agents swarm Jeffrey Epstein's private Caribbean island

In the aftermath of Epstein's suicide-Arkancide-substitution or whatever-it-was-that-happened last weekend, one school of thought quickly expressed itself, namely, that with Epstein officially out of the way, nothing could prevent the government from going in and seizing all sorts of stuff from his various properties and estates. Et voila! That's what the article here states has happened, and in jig time too. Nothing suspicious about that (heavy cough). On the internet, a certain segment of people have commented that this is all "according to the plan worked out in detail years in advance" and so on, and that all is well. Trust the plan. I view this group with the same jaundiced skepticism as I do the whole Epstein whatever-happened story, and in the same sort of mood as I view the Inter-galactic Blue Chickens Disclosure group. In effect, they're saying, "See? The FBI is on top of this, and they're gathering more evidence! The arrests are about to begin!"

Really?!? Why couldn't they be destroying evidence? After all, this was the same government that: (1) lied about JFK with its magic bullet-lone nut theory; (2) destroyed evidence at Waco, (3) destroyed evidence at Oklahoma City, and (4) repeated the performance on 9/11, and on and on we could go. The FBI, which was clearly politicized and weaponized by one political group against another - think Ohr, Stzrok, McCabe, Comey &c - is all of a sudden trustworthy? My point here is, that one may interpret each detail in a variety of ways, often mutually contradictory.

And that's what I mean by an epistemological crisis. With so many reasonably articulated theories out there, with so little forthcoming, and with trust at an all time low and skepticism at an all time high, why should one believe anything the government or the media - and let us never forget the Clowns In America's penetration of that media - says? One famous American tv talk show host, I've noticed, has been repeatedly stating in his broadcasts that the FBI is the world's greatest investigative organization. Why would he be doing this? Because trust and respect are earned, not commanded, and the FBI has lost both. Don't feed me the line that there are many good people in the organization, for an organization that can be so easily subverted and perverted by a few at the top is not an organization to be trusted. What holds true for a few popes and cardinals in the Middle Ages (or for that matter, more recently) holds true here. Penance requires the perp walks in this instance, and things are so bad that unless people start seeing the orange jump suits, no one is going to believe them any more.

But I had to do this blog for a very different reason, because there is a template in the case that no one - to my knowledge - has noticed. I noticed, but didn't want to comment on it, lest people think that once again I've fallen off the end of the twig, hit my head, and become loonier than the usual high octane speculation. I decided to blog about this template when I received an email, or a comment - I don't remember which - from someone whose initials I forget, who also noticed that same strange template, a template which may point a finger at whoever may have been behind his suicide, substitution, abduction, or whatever-it-was-that-actually-happened-last-weekend.

And that is, have you noticed the very strange and detailed parallels between the Epstein whatever-happened-last-weekend story, and that of Rudolf Hess? While there's obviously much to distinguish the two, consider the following strange parallels:

(1) Both men were, at the time of their alleged suicides, the most important prisoners in the world, each having an international significance;

(2) Both men were under heavy guard and being watched constantly, and in maximum security prisons - the "tombs" in Epstein's case, and Spandau in Hess's;

(3) Both men allegedly committed suicide under circumstances that made their doing so next to physically impossible;

(4) Both men's alleged suicides also invoked theories of substitutions and doubles, which theories included close examination of their physical appearance: World War One wounds suffered by Hess and the apparent lack thereof on Spandau Hess, and different nose and ear shapes between Epstein and the pictures of the body being we've been shown (always remembering that the mockingbird media might be deliberately obfuscating that data precisely in order to create a bit of "Epstein" theater to distract attention);

(5) Both men had strong ties to the British royal family;

(6) Both men stated prior to their deaths that someone would try to kill them;

(7) Both men had an international network of connections and knew "secrets" which if exposed could damage many reputations and operations;

(8) Both men were deeply connected to intelligence agencies;

(9) Both men had some sort of connection to Jewish interests, Epstein being Jewish, and connected to suspected Mossad interests, the Bronfmans, &c., and Hess being connected to the Haushofers (and let's not forget Menachim Begin's alleged warning to Carter about Hess);

(10) In the case of both men, governments moved quickly to seize papers and other evidence, and to obfuscate evidence, in Epstein's case, as was seen above, by quick raids shortly after the whatever-it-was-that-happened last weekend, and in Hess's case, both the UK and Nazi governments moved quickly to seize compounds and papers after his flight to Scotland, and then again, after his death when significant files in the UK went conveniently missing.

And on and on we could go.

It's that template, here, in other words, that disturbs, particularly in Epstein's case, for it suggests that an old playbook was dusted off, and reused.

See you on the flip side...

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ANOTHER EXPLODING AMMO DUMP, THIS TIME IN IRAQ

G.B. spotted this one, and I have to wonder, as did G.B. in the email which included this article, whether or not we're looking at something "large" going on, in the wake of the  two Russian munitions plant explosions in the past few weeks. This article is from The Times of Israel:

Blast at pro-Iranian militia base weapons depot rocks Baghdad

The article alleges that the munitions dump was an Iranian-backed militia dump, and implies, though does not explicitly state, that the explosion was caused by an Israeli air strike inside that country:

A massive explosion in a weapons depot on a pro-Iranian militia base rocked Baghdad on Monday evening, local media reported.

The blast appeared to have triggered some of the munitions stored on the base, sending projectiles into surrounding neighborhoods.

Sky News Arabia reported that incoming mortar shells set off sirens in the area around the US embassy in Baghdad, known as the Green Zone.

Local media reported that the weapons storehouse was controlled by the Sayyid of Martyrs Battalions, an Iraqi Shiite militia supported by Israel’s nemesis Iran.

Explosions seen at a base south of Baghdad on August 12, 2019. (screen capture: Twitter)

A massive explosion in a weapons depot on a pro-Iranian militia base rocked Baghdad on Monday evening, local media reported.

The blast appeared to have triggered some of the munitions stored on the base, sending projectiles into surrounding neighborhoods.

Sky News Arabia reported that incoming mortar shells set off sirens in the area around the US embassy in Baghdad, known as the Green Zone.

Local media reported that the weapons storehouse was controlled by the Sayyid of Martyrs Battalions, an Iraqi Shiite militia supported by Israel’s nemesis Iran.

“An explosion occurred because of the piling up of munitions inside the Saqr military base in southern Baghdad,” Iraq’s joint military-police Baghdad Operations Command wrote on its Facebook page.

The blast came amid reports that Israel has been increasingly carrying out airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq.

Last month, Asharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic-language newspaper published in London, cited Western diplomatic sources as saying an Israeli F-35 plane was behind a July 19 strike on a rocket depot in a Shiite militia base north of Baghdad.

The Saudi-based al-Arabiya network reported at the time that members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and Hezbollah had been killed in the strike. It said the base had shortly before the strike received Iranian ballistic missiles, which were hidden inside trucks.

Now before we get to today's high octane speculation, which, for the record, I share with G.B. who originally sent the article to me, let me state for the record that I have no difficulty believing that Israel has, and is probably continuing, to conduct air strikes inside of Iraq against Iranian or Iranian-backed targets. It certainly has the capability, and more importantly the will and motivation to do so, as the article subsequently makes clear.

But what leads me to my high octane speculation of the day is that under normal circumstances, Israel has seldom denied specific airstrikes against specific targets. Normally, it admits it has done so after the fact. This, however, has not been done in this case, it has only been implied, which leaves the door open that this explosion may have been brought about by different means: agents in place on the ground in an act of sabotage, or perhaps by more exotic means, and it's these latter possibilities I want to explore in my high octane speculation, and in the context not only of those curious Russian explosions, but also in the context of those Chinese chemical plant explosions a few years ago. The Tianjin chemical plant explosion in China continues to occupy my mind, because as I have pointed out in previous blogs about that story, the crater left by that explosion was both narrow and very deep. In other words, it is not the type of crater signature that one would normally associate with chemical explosions, which would normally be both wider and shallower. At the time, this odd signature prompted me and others to conclude that perhaps a space-based "rod of God" kinetic weapon might have been used. This speculation gained some credence when, during a press conference, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff stated that "all options were on the table" regarding North Korea. A reporter asked him if that included "kinetic weapons" and his response was "yes."

All this to say that it's been my suspicion that we are looking perhaps at some form of exotic warfare taking place with these munitions plants/dumps/chemical plant explosions, perhaps cyber warfare, or the use of other more exotic technologies. Thus far, those events have included facilities in China and Russia, the "big two" in the Shanghai accords nations, but with this event, the pattern - if indeed it is that - has now reached out to include another major player in that bloc: Iran. if this speculation has any merit, then one should expect that the pattern will eventually encompass similar types of facilities inside Iran itself.

The problem, of course, is something I've often mentioned with this type of covert warfare: "covert operations" is a game that two can play. So if munitions plants or ammo dumps suddenly start exploding in the West, then in my opinion it's a sure bet that my covert warfare model is true. But even without that, if similar events suddenly start to happen in Iran, then in my opinion it's also an equally sure bet.

See you on the flip side...

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THE US NAVY: BACK TO ANALOGUE…?

Do you remember the USS Donald  Cook, USS Fitzgerald, and USS John McCain incidents? In the two USS Donald Cook incidents - one in the Black Sea and one in the Baltic - the Aegis class ship's electrical and computer systems went entirely dead, just as an obsolescent Russian Sukhoi 22 fighter bomber approached it, low and fast. The Russian aircraft then made no less than a dozen mock attack runs on the ship, which beat a hasty retreat to the Romanian port of Constanza for "rest", or so we were told. Later, on patrol in the Baltic, the Russians repeated this performance on the Donald Cook. At the time of the first incident, I blogged that it was my belief that in the tensions created by the West's meddling in The Ukraine, that the Russians had demonstrated a capability to interfere with and shut down sophisticated US electronic systems. It was a clear message: don't start something you can't finish. And in the wake of the strange explosions at Russian munitions plants in the past couple of weeks, I've also offered the speculation that we might be watching some sort of electromagnetic and/or cyber warfare playing out between Russia and the USA, although Russia has now offered the explanation that the most recent explosion near Archangel was due to a small reactor explosion. That's prompted some commenters on the internet to conclude "more Russian incompetence" Chernobyl-style. I'm not so sure, quite frankly, and have always had the suspicion that perhaps Chernobyl was also some sort of cyber warfare along the lines of the gas pipeline explosion caused by deliberately faulty software that the USA tricked the KGB into stealing as a part of the famous Farewell case, the French mole being run inside the KGB's technical acquisitions branch by the French DST.

But in any case, back to the subject at hand. After the Donald Cook incidents, we then had the two strange cases of the USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain, similar ships to the Donald Cook, which both collided with freighters, the first in the waters off Japan, and the second in the busy waters near Singapore. Again, at the time, my suspicion meter was in the red zone that these incidents may have been examples of more electronic warfare, and that the collisions had been deliberate messages. The US Navy at the time of these incidents wrote them off to poor crew training, fatigue, and irresponsibility of the ships' captains and bridge officers. A friend of mine and a former US Navy officer confirmed this view, and told me -- politely of course -- that my speculations were nonsense.

Well, in case you haven't guessed by now, there's an "update" to those stories, and particularly to the Fitzgerald and McCain incidents, in this article that was spotted and shared by N.:

The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers

What's intriguing here is that the article confirms my naval officer friend's views, for it rehearses the "poor training" and fatigue memes once again, with some new telltale clues:

The US Navy will replace the touchscreen throttle and helm controls currently installed in its destroyers with mechanical ones starting in 2020, says USNI News. The move comes after the National Transportation Safety Board released an accident report from a 2017 collision, which cites the design of the ship’s controls as a factor in the accident.

On August 21st, 2017, the USS John S. McCain collided with the Alnic MC, a Liberian oil tanker, off the coast of Singapore. The report provides a detailed overview of the actions that led to the collision: when crew members tried to split throttle and steering control between consoles, they lost control of the ship, putting it into the path of the tanker. The crash killed 10 sailors and injured 48 aboard the McCain.

The report says that while fatigue and lack of training played a role in the accident, the design of the ship’s control console were also contributing factors. Located in the middle of the McCain’s bridge, the Ship’s Control Console (SCC) features a pair of touch-screens on both the Helm and Lee Helm stations, through which the crew could steer and propel the ship. Investigators found that the crew had placed it in “backup manual mode,” which removed computer-assisted help, because it allowed for “more direct form of communication between steering and the SSC.” That setting meant that any crew member at another station could take over steering operations, and when the crew tried to regain control of the ship from multiple stations, control “shifted from the lee helm, to aft steering, to the helm, and back to aft steering.”

The NTSB report calls out the configuration of the bridge’s systems, pointing out that the decision to transfer controls while in the strait helped lead to the accident, and that the procedures for transferring the controls from one station to another were complicated, further contributing to the confusion. Specifically, the board points to the touchscreens on the bridge, noting that mechanical throttles are generally preferred because “they provide both immediate and tactile feedback to the operator.” The report notes that had mechanical controls been present, the helmsmen would have likely been alerted that there was an issue early on, and recommends that the Navy better adhere to better design standards. (Emphasis added)

In other words, in addition to poor training and fatigue, you may now add faulty and overly complicated design to the list, a design which, in effect, led to several consoles responsible for the throttles and wheels. It would be like a bridge on a ship in, say, 1912, having two wheels, and two sets of mechanical throttles, each canceling out the other. In this case, the cancelling-out systems were digital-manual.

So the navy has, in effect, ordered a return to more analogue and intuitive systems, in effect, a wheel, and throttle levers. Turn the wheel right to make the ship turn to starboard, turn the wheel left to turn it to port, push the levers forward to make it go faster, pull the levers back to slow it down. Simple, and much easier to execute under stress than this: "Select File. Under file, select 'Bridge.' Under Bridge, open 'Steering controls,' type in the number of degrees for the turn in the first box, check "starboard" or "port" in the second box, hit enter, and then type in the speed in knots in the third box, hit enter. Then select file, and then "save file" Hit enter..."  You get the idea; several non-intuitive steps, versus one step, and with the latter, comes immediacy of execution. Instead of "Ensign, why aren't we turning yet?" and "I'm working on it sir," we get, "Thirty degrees to port, aye aye sir."

All of this makes me think, once again and in spite of my officer friend's input, that we're not being told the full truth about those incidents, and my context here is the Donald Cook incident once again. Cyber systems simply aren't secure; they can be hacked into, or simply taken down. Not a good thing to have happen if massive freighters are bearing down on a collision course. Digital solution: frantically type in numbers after opening all the correct windows. Analogue solution: turn the wheel of the ship. I suspect that what we're looking at is a general trend, something being done to secure national security, and of a piece with the sudden interest in the last two decades with finding, repairing, and making fully operable those old steam locomotives that I've occasionally blogged about, with all their huffing, puffing, hissing, and clanking, their levers and wheels and analogue gauges, because there's one thing a steam engine can do that a diesel-electric locomotive cannot: it can still run during an electro-magnetic pulse incident, and its analogue levers and wheels gauges are utterly immune to hacking...

... and that raises another important point, one to watch for if my theory is correct: watch for the railroads to bring back manually operated semaphor and switching systems along the rail lines, or for the navy to start emphasizing and training in the all-but-lost art of celestial navigation once again, or the use of flag signals and semaphors for inter-ship communications in task force formations. And the simple reason is: analogue is impervious to hacking and EMP... GPS can be hacked and "spoofed" and taken out, but the stars, astrolabes and sextants don't lie.

After all, the US Navy isn't going to the expense of "going manual", nor is the Union Pacific railroad going to the expense of restoring steam locomotives and learning how to actually build and operate them again, just for kicks and giggles. Of course, what we're really looking at is at a new kind of integration of analogue systems with digital ones, but that's a whole other story...

See you on the flip side...

 

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ANOTHER EXPLOSION IN A RUSSIAN MUNITIONS PLANT

There has been yet another explosion at a Russian munitions plant, this time near Archangel in the arctic. But this time, there are odd reports in the western media, including reports of higher than normal background radiation accompanying the event, which may indicate that it was a nuclear event of some sort. Here's the story from the UK Daily Mail (thanks to G.B. for pointing this out):

Siberian military base is rocked by new explosions when artillery shells detonate four days after massive blast killed one and injured 13

You'll note that in this article, there has been another explosion at another munitions plant in Archangel. So in the space of a mere two weeks, we've had (1) a munitions plant near Krasnoyarsk suddenly explode, and now, (2) a munitions plant near Archangel explode. Notably, the article in the Daily Mail is writing off the latter explosion to a failed test of Russian's new Zircon cruise missile:

It comes after two were killed and six injured in a blast at the Nyonoksa weapons testing site in the sub-Arctic Arkhangelsk region yesterday. Moscow has thrown a veil of secrecy over the incident.

Radiation levels are said to have temporarily soared 20 times above the normal level in Severodvinsk, a city 18 miles away, sparking 'panic' and 'hysteria' and a rush to buy iodine from pharmacies.

Today, reports surfaced in Russia claiming the spike in radiation may have been caused when one of Vladimir Putin's top secret Zircon hypersonic missiles exploded during tests.

Needless to say, I have all sorts of high octane speculations running through my head, not the least of which is the strange resemblance of these explosions to the explosions in Chinese chemical plants a few years ago. The first of those, near Tianjin, completely leveled several blocks, and left such a deep and almost conical crater, that  I and others on the internet began to question the public narrative that such a crater could result from a mere chemical explosion, which would have left a wider, and shallower crater. Some, myself included, speculated that perhaps a space-based "rod of God" technology may have been used. Such explanations for the Tianjin explosion might seem totally off the end of the twig, until one recalls that recently the cat was let out of the bag when a reporter asked the Joint Chiefs chairman if "kinetic weapons" might be an option on the table for dealing with North Korea, and the general's response was not to deny the existence of such weapons, but rather a simple "Yes." At the time of that strange incident, I had the distinct impression that the reporter was a plant, and had been instructed to ask the question in such a manner as if to catch the general off guard, so that he could then answer as he did, and "send the message."  The message, of course, was "we don't need nukes. We've got something much better, than doesn't have fallout to  consider as a price for their use."

Now, I'm not saying that kinetic weapons are the case in these two Russian munitions plant explosions. We simply don't know, because no pictures of the damaged plants have been forthcoming from the Russians. So what caused these explosions? One explanation is course "incompetence" or "corruption." But I'm not buying. One plant, yes, two, no. And even one is iffy, when Russian national security is involved.

So what caused the explosions? What's intriguing in the Daily Mail article is this summary statement in the sub-headers prior to the article:

This time, lightning caused a huge fire that led to new blasts at munition base 

Yet, within the body of the article, there is no expanded explanation for this statement. In fact, there's no mention of lightning at all, nor of which base was supposedly struck by lightning, though it seems that the article is trying to point to the plant near Kranoyarsk, since the explosion near Archangel supposedly was a missile test gone wrong. It's as if the article was deliberately trying to draw attention to lightning by mentioning it in the sub-headers, and then not mentioning it at all in the main body of the article.

Which leads me to my high octane speculation of the day. Assuming for the sake of that speculation that these incidents are not accidents, nor incompetence, nor tests gone wrong, then they might have been deliberate attacks. The question is, how? What's the modality? In my book The Third Way I pointed out the case of the French mole, codenamed Farewell, which the French DST was running inside the KGB's technical  acquisitions branch. In that book, I pointed out that this mole had given the French the KGB's "shopping list," the list of western technologies it wanted to steal. French President Francois Mitterand personally shared this information with then American President Ronald Reagan, and Reagan's National Security Committee took the decision to allow the KGB to steal doctored software (which I believe to have been some version of PROMIS). This was done, a a few months later, this software was used by the USA to cause a gas pipeline explosion in Russia which was so large it was visible from outer space. It was the first known example of cyber-warfare, and cyber warfare might be a candidate for these munitions plants explosions, not to mention, failed missile tests. If so, then perhaps a message was being sent, particularly during a missile test.  I mention the possibility of cyber-warfare, and the Farewell-gas pipeline explosion, because it does appear that the USA and Russia have been engaged in a quiet but nevertheless real 'hot" cyber-war, given the fact that the Russians apparently shut down - twice - the electrical systems on the USS Donald Cook, the first time in the Black Sea, and the second in the Baltic Sea. On both occasions, the electrical systems on the ship died when Russian aircraft flew close to the ship.  In that context, sending a "message back" in the form of cyber-warfare attacks on munitions plants or missile tests does not seem out of the question.  It would be a kind of "lightning" that the Kremlin could not ignore.

But there's another possibility, real - and directed, that is to say, weaponized - lightning, either in the form of EMP taking out systems, including safety systems, or actual lightning strikes themselves. The latter may sound fanciful, until one recalls that some people maintained that ionospheric heaters could indeed create such narrow regional charge differentials between the ground and the atmosphere that narrow channels could be created for unnaturally powerful lightning strikes. It's a convenient way of hiding behind what most of the public would consider to be natural events, and it's a convenient way to start fires.

So perhaps - perhaps - the mention of lightning without further explanation is, after all, a message.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

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TIDBITS: THIS WEEK’S HONORABLE MENTIONS

This was an incredible week for articles, and there are a lot of honorable mentions, many of which I debated long and hard over. Most of these missed the "final cut" by mere nano-fibers of a hair. Many thanks to V.T., C.A.F., E.G., G.P., G.B., for sharing these:

Map Secret Underground Areas For DARPA and Win $2 Million

Abortion Was the Leading Cause of Death Worldwide in 2018, Killing 42 Million People

US Patent 6506148 B2 Confirms Human Nervous System Manipulation Through Your Computer & TV

Report Sheds Light On The Rockefeller Family’s Covert ‘Climate Change’ Plan

Robot-Human Marriages: The Future of Marriage?

China Curiously Says It May Join U.S. Persian Gulf Maritime Coalition Despite Trade War

Forget Iran, Maximum Pressure Has Shifted To China

In Stunning Upset, Germany's Far-Right AfD Set To Defeat Merkel's CDU In The Country's East

America reportedly wants to station missiles in northern Australia

Jakarta and Several Cities in West Java Hit by Major Blackout

Madoff Money and Mind Control Research

Harvard Scientists Funded by Bill Gates to Begin Spraying Particles Into the Sky In Experiment to Dim the Sun

A New Study Examines How Consciousness in the Universe is Scale Invariant and Implies an Event Horizon of the Human Brain

World’s first ever human-monkey hybrid grown in lab in China

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THE FACTIONAL INFIGHTING HAS BEEN NOTICED…

For some time in various blogs but more importantly in interviews dating back some time (almost a decade now) I've been advancing the hypothesis that there is massive "factional infighting" going on in the deep state(s) of the West, and particularly in the USA. My position has been rather simple (and some would say, simplistic), namely, that Mr. Globaloney was essentially like the Mafia, with various dons representing various families and interests, all sitting around their conference tables sipping brandy, smoking cigars, and figuring out how to make more money and dominate the world, while on the streets their lackeys were shooting at each other. In other words, far from viewing Mr. Globaloney as a monolithic, all-encompassing and omni-competent monolithic conspiracy, it had its own internal fissures and fractures along factional lines, and that as it grew closer and closer to its goal of eradicating nation-states, that factional infighting would only increase as it approached its goal, for one faction, and one faction alone, could be the "winner" in the global domination game. Or to put it country simple: globalism is a self-defeating enterprise.

Part of my rationale for this view was the fact that beginning around 2005-2010, it became clear that some of these factions had realized that their globaloneyism wasn't panning out quite as planned, and that there were serious risks to their power base (i.e., North America), and that they would eventually have to "reshore" industry into that base. Trump, on this view, wasn't so much a "fluke" as an inevitability; the choice between Darth Hillary and Trump was a choice between very different deep state factions and agendas.

Now, however, it seems that others have finally noticed this factionalism and infighting, and in The Financial Times, no less, in an important article by Alastair Crooke reproduced over at Zero Hedge (this story was brought to my attention by A.F.; many thanks!):

The Citadels Of America's Elites: Fractured And At Odds With Each Other

There are many crucial points in this article, but for me, the main one was this:

Martin Wolf was first off, with a piece dramatically headlined: The looming 100-year, US-China Conflict. No ‘mere’ trade war, he implied, but a full-spectrum struggle.

Then his FT colleague Edward Luce, pointed out that Wolf’s “argument is more nuanced than the headline. Having spent part of this week among leading policymakers and thinkers at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado,” Luce writes, “I am inclined to think Martin was not exaggerating. The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a ‘new cold war’ is something that takes my breath away. Eighteen months ago the phrase was dismissed as fringe scaremongering. Today it is consensus.”

But behind this "consensus" there's another problem, and it's that factional infighting:

The two FT correspondents effectively were signalling – in their separate articles – that the US is entering on a momentous and hazardous transformation. Further, it would seem that America’s élite is being fractured into balkanised enclaves that are not communicating with one another – nor wanting to communicate with each other. Rather, it is another conflict between deadly rivals.

One such orientation insists on a renewal of the Cold War to sustain and renew that supersized military-security complex, which accounts for more than half of America’s GDP. Another élite demands that US dollar global hegemony be preserved. Another orientation of the Deep State is disgusted at the contagion of sexual decadence and corruption that has wormed its way into American governance – and truly hopes that Trump will ‘drain the swamp’. And yet another, which sees DC’s now explicit amorality as risking the loss of America’s global standing and leadership – wants to see a return of traditional American mores – a ‘moral rearmament’, as it were. (And then there are the deplorables, who simply want that America should attend to its own internal refurbishment.)

But all these divided Deep State factions believe that belligerence can work.

However, the more these fractured, rival US élite factions with their moneyed and comfortable lifestyles, cloister themselves in their enclaves, certain in their separate views about how America can retain its global supremacy, the less likely it is that they will understand the very real impact of their collective belligerence on the outside world. Like any cosseted élite, they have an exaggerated sense of their entitlement – and their impunity.

These élite factions – for all their internal rivalry – however seem to have coalesced around a singularity of talking and thinking that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of an America subject to severe stress and strain – the fable of a hegemon which still can elect which non-compliant governments and peoples to bully and remove from the global map. Their rhetoric alone is curdling the atmospherics in the non-West. (Italicized emphasis added, boldface emphasis in the original)

Being a proud member of "the deplorables," I look at this and see a fundamental problem, which Crooke's article also points out: with the deep factional divisions reflecting very different primary objectives and agendas, there is no unity of vision or purpose and hence no real ability to coalesce around a grand strategy, which mere "belligerence" is not. A real (and rational) strategy would be to figure out how to expand the economy such that the bloated military-industrial complex no longer accounts for half of the USA's gross domestic product, and hence rein in its influence over ever aspect of policy formation. To allow things to continue along the same lines as they developed under Eisenhower is a recipe for disaster, not a strategy, for sooner or later those global hegemonic empires always contrive an enemy, and a war to get rid of that enemy. Think of Britain's pre-World War One maneuverings to encircle Germany, and then to wage war against it.

This deep factional infighting creates a situation in which it is increasingly difficult for foreign nations to assess the USA's direction, as powerful bureaucrats can, and do, institute policy to influence the nation. Consider the implications of Crooke's warning here:

The leader of any nation is never sovereign. He or she sits atop a pyramid of quarrelling princelings (Deep State princelings, in this instance), who have their own interests and agenda. Trump is not immune to their machinations. One obvious example being Mr Bolton’s successful gambit in persuading the Brits to seize the Grace I tanker off Gibraltar. At a stroke, Bolton escalated the conflict with Iran (‘increased the pressure’ on Iran, as Bolton would probably term it); put the UK at the forefront of America’s ‘war’ with Iran; divided the JCPOA signatories, and embarrassed the EU. He is a canny ‘operator’ – no doubt about it.

And this is the point: these princelings can initiate actions (including false flags) that drive events to their agenda; that can corner a President. And that is presuming that the President is somehow immune to a great ‘switch in mood’ among his own lieutenants (even if that consensus is nothing more than a fable that belligerency succeeds). But is it safe to assume Trump is immune to the general ‘mood’ amongst the varied élites? Do not his recent glib comments about Afghanistan and Iran suggest that he might leaning towards the new belligerency? Martin Wolf concluded his FT piece by suggesting the shift in the US suggests we may be witnessing a stumbling towards a century of conflict. But in the case of Iran, any mis-move could result in something more immediate – and uncontained.

In other words, each of those factions can initiate policy, and the possibility arises that they could each initiate some mutually contradictory policies via false flags at the same time. By the same token, each can withhold crucial information, and as gatekeepers to the Executive, can pretend to act with executive approval to initiate a policy, and then turn around and present the Executive with a fait accompli. Consider only the maneuverings of some of these factions first under Obama, and now under Trump, to force the executive into military actions in the Middle East, which both men, at least so far, had the good sense to avoid. If that sounds familiar, it should, because they tried the same thing under Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crises. And that, of course, may be the real unspoken lesson here, for Kennedy managed to coalesce those feuding factions into opposition to him, and he paid for it with his life, and the rest of the century was spent in conflicts.

See you on the flip side...

TEMPORAL ENTANGLEMENT

So many people saw this story and sent it to me that I have to talk about it. Indeed, if I had seen the story myself, I would have anyway, but in any case thanks to all of you who saw it and shared it, because if you've been following the wild and wacky world of quantum physics, and particularly the very strange phenomena of entanglement and non-locality, then it just became a whole lot weirder, for it seems that non-locality and entanglement are not restricted just to space, but also incorporate time, as I have speculated on this website before, and indeed, as many of the regular readers here - and in the members' vidchats - have as well.

Here's the story:

If You Thought Quantum Mechanics Was Weird, You Need to Check Out Entangled Time

The temporal non-locality experiment was conducted in 2013 by physicists at the University of Jerusalem, and here, as they say, is where "ye olde plotte thickeneth":

Up to today, most experiments have tested entanglement over spatial gaps.

The assumption is that the 'nonlocal' part of quantum nonlocality refers to the entanglement of properties across space. But what if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?

The answer, as it turns out, is yes.

Just when you thought quantum mechanics couldn't get any weirder, a team of physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in 2013 that they had successfully entangled photons that never coexisted.

Previous experiments involving a technique called 'entanglement swapping' had already showed quantum correlations across time, by delaying the measurement of one of the coexisting entangled particles; but Eli Megidish and his collaborators were the first to show entanglement between photons whose lifespans did not overlap at all.

Here's how they did it.

First, they created an entangled pair of photons, '1-2' (step I in the diagram below). Soon after, they measured the polarisation of photon 1 (a property describing the direction of light's oscillation) – thus 'killing' it (step II).

Photon 2 was sent on a wild goose chase while a new entangled pair, '3-4', was created (step III). Photon 3 was then measured along with the itinerant photon 2 in such a way that the entanglement relation was 'swapped' from the old pairs ('1-2' and '3-4') onto the new '2-3' combo (step IV).

Some time later (step V), the polarisation of the lone survivor, photon 4, is measured, and the results are compared with those of the long-dead photon 1 (back at step II).

The upshot? The data revealed the existence of quantum correlations between 'temporally nonlocal' photons 1 and 4. That is, entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted.

What on Earth can this mean? Prima facie, it seems as troubling as saying that the polarity of starlight in the far-distant past – say, greater than twice Earth's lifetime – nevertheless influenced the polarity of starlight falling through your amateur telescope this winter.

Even more bizarrely: maybe it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old.

...

In both forward and backward directions, quantum correlations span the causal void between the death of one photon and the birth of the other.

...

Temporal nonlocality further complicates this picture: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?

(When I read that last sentence, I couldn't help but think of that strange saying in the Gospel of St. John, "Before Abraham was, I am," but I digress.)

Anyway, thus far, if you've been following that strange work (and world) of Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev in the Soviet Union's black projects community, or for that matter, the strange experiments of future-causation of past events that seems to be indicated by some paranormal psychic research, this won't sound all that unfamiliar. What it does perhaps portend is a quantum basis relationship to consciousness (such as Roger Penrose has posited), and perhaps a way to figure out the bizarre relationship between consciousness and the flow of time. Many of us, I suspect, have had some sort of "strange" experience with time, where it seems to flow faster, or slower, depending on a bizarre set of circumstances and our state of consciousness, such as we experience listening to certain kinds of music, or that momentary glance at a digital clock, when the interval between seconds seems somehow to have momentarily "frozen" and then "stretched".

But before I crawl way out on to (or rather, in today's case, completely off) the twig of high octane speculation, we can all breathe easier, because the "relativity ex machina" is ready to swoop in on its broom and save the day:

Just a spoonful of relativity helps the spookiness go down, though.

In developing his theory of special relativity, Einstein deposed the concept of simultaneity from its Newtonian pedestal.

As a consequence, simultaneity went from being an absolute property to being a relative one. There is no single timekeeper for the Universe; precisely when something is occurring depends on your precise location relative to what you are observing, known as your frame of reference.

So the key to avoiding strange causal behaviour (steering the future or rewriting the past) in instances of temporal separation is to accept that calling events 'simultaneous' carries little metaphysical weight.

It is only a frame-specific property, a choice among many alternative but equally viable ones – a matter of convention, or record-keeping.

Whew! I feel so much better now; order restored, once again thanks to The Great Albert. Oh, but wait...

Einstein showed that no sequence of events can be metaphysically privileged – can be considered more real – than any other. Only by accepting this insight can one make headway on such quantum puzzles.

Hmmm... ok... I don't remember reading that, but I'll go with it, because it certainly seems to be one of the many endless and always helpful discoveries that one can make in relativity theory. But I still don't feel very good about it, because it's that little sentence that has me willing to step off the twig: "Temporal nonlocality further complicates this picture: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?" The implication here is that any merely "ordinary" materialistic metaphysical description breaks down entirely. It's unable to do so, it would seem to me, for the sentence is rather like the old biblical adage about being "in" the world but not "of" it. There's a "something" - and perhaps, dare I say, a "someone" standing outside and underneath (a certain Greek word called hypostasis comes to mind here) that makes that entity of non-coexistent parts possible. Without it, there would seem to be no such thing as "histories" or memories to begin with, and therefore, no need for the observation that "no sequence of events can be metaphysically privileged." (And that also sounds uncomfortably like the Mandela effect to me, but I digress once again...)

Or to put all this high octane off-the-end-speculation-twiggery as "country simple" as can be, perhaps we're reaching the point where physics, in order to make any progress, is going to have to start turning serious attention to personhood, and to individual and group consciousness themselves, in order to find a way through the jungle.

See you on the flip side...

 

LOCKHEED-MARTIAN’S, ER, MARTIN’S PRECISION FIRES?

One has to wonder sometimes what lurks behind corporate websites and their banner proclamations. For example, none other than Catherine Fitts found this one, and passed it along, and when you read it, you'll know why:

https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-areas/missiles-and-fire-control/camden.html

Now, as you might imagine, what piqued our interest in this find was the reference to "precision fires", which the website is maintaining is all about precision guided ordnance:

Lockheed Martin’s Camden Operations facility is a manufacturing, final assembly, test and storage operation for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) programs. Located in the Highland Industrial Park in Camden, Arkansas, it occupies a combined manufacturing and support function floor space exceeding 1.9 million square feet spread out over more than 1,800 acres of land. Approximately 650 employees work in the facility’s manufacturing and support buildings.

Established in 1978 as the home of the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) production program, Camden Operations is today Lockheed Martin’s Precision Fires operations center of excellence. It continues to produce the MLRS launcher and family of munitions, which includes the Guided MLRS Unitary Rocket. It is home to the Tactical Missile System (TACMS) missile, and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launcher, which fires both MLRS rockets and TACMS missiles. The Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) hit-to-kill air defense missile is also manufactured here. All of these systems are combat-proven.

There you have it: it's about nothing more or less than precision fire control and guidance systems for an array of guided missiles. Nothing to see here, move along.

But if you're a regular reader here, you know I cannot resist crawling to the end of the twig of High Octane Speculation, where the weight of the speculation far exceeds the load bearing capacity of the twig, and today is certainly a prime example of it, for I cannot help but think there's "more" lurking behind this "precision fires" thing than meets the eye. My rule of thumb is: if it's the government saying it, it's lying, and if it's a major defense corporation saying it, it's really lying. And perhaps, as is my wont when indulging in my high octane speculations, I parse the words too closely, but I cannot help but notice the careful choice of words here: "precision fires", and not "precision fire control systems", which is the explanation we're given at the website in the main text of the article, and indeed, given the ordnance involved, precision  fire control systems makes eminent sense.

My context for this high octane speculation were all of the anomalous things (and pictures) that were noticed in the wake of the fires in California: houses that burnt to the ground, cars with wheel rims melted, bridges whose metal-work, guard rails, and rebar were twisted beyond recognition, while nearby shrubbery and trees were seemingly not affected at all, the sudden appearance of the military in some cases after the fires, and now, pace recent developments, the involvement of the Department of Defense in planning for the next disasters in that state. Like many others, I've speculated that perhaps these fires were set by arsonists, but arsonists with a variety of exotic "toys" and technologies to play with, from directed energy weapons, microwaves, and I've even entertained the idea that the power grid itself was used as a broadcast antenna in to start fires in some instances.

So I have to wonder if this language referring to "precision fires" and not "precision fire control systems" might be doing a bit of double duty, and if in fact, these sophisticated fire control systems are about much more than standard guided missiles, and if some other technology is implied as well, the kind of technology that can burn houses to the ground, melt wheel rims on cars, twist guard rails and rebar on bridges and roads, and so on.

Though my high octane speculation on the end of the twig far exceeds the evidence, it's that suggestive ambiguity in the wording of the headline that has me wondering, and I'm willing to say that I think it probably does. We may, in fact, be looking at a backhanded admission of the existence of catastrophe capitalism.

See you on the flip side...

 

UK MEDIA ON IRAN: THE RUSSIANS DID IT

K.J. found this one, and it's left my jaw hanging open. I suppose that if you're like me, it was only a matter of time before some part of the lamestream corporate-controlled Western media got around to blaming Russia for Iran's attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf, in this case, media in the UK, the same country whose media has been scrambling to convince everyone that Mad Vlad was behind the Skripal case as well. But Russia behind the Iran thing? Guilt by association, I suppose. But lots of countries do business with Tehran, including China and India, but so far, no one's blaming them, just Russia. But there's something that bothers in this story, actually, quite a few things, so today I'm going to kick off the week with some high octane speculation, because in my opinion, something isn't passing the smell test in this whole Iran thing:

UK Media Found ‘Russian Trace’ In Recent Tanker Seizure By Iran

If you're like me, you can probably think of quite a few reasons why Russia would goad Tehran into seizing tankers, and quite a few reasons why they wouldn't be involved in any way. Just to give two simple examples: on the "they would do it side", there's the price of oil. Creating tensions in the Gulf drives up the price of oil, and that benefits Russia. On the "why they wouldn't do it side," instability in the region is not what Russia and China and India need in order to complete their long term goals. (That last one might be a reason for some long-term concern and midnight-oil burning in Tehran, for if those countries decide the regime is a liability to their long term plans...well... you know where I'm going with that one.)

But back to the main point here: according to the article, some in the UK suspect that Russia "hacked the systems" in those tankers, and provided false coordinates both to the British and to the Iranians:

Following that, British media began to stir hysteria, that actually the British tanker was steered towards Iranian waters to be captured by false GPS coordinates sent by “Russian spy technology.”

This was reported by the Sunday Mirror, which citing anonymous security sources aid that the GCHQ and MI6 were investigating whether Iranian intelligence transmitted spoof signals to the skipper of the Stena Impero.

According to reports, a Royal Navy warship attempted to assist the tanker, but it arrived “10 minutes too late,” to do what exactly in Iranian territorial waters is unclear.

...

Anonymous security sources said that Iranian drones may have tampered with GPS signals.

...

Of course, Russia’s involvement can’t happen without “evil overlord” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval. And the “evidence” that such a meddling may have taken place is that MI6 and other Western intelligence agencies have discovered that Russia has the technology to fool ships into false location recordings.

This relates to an earlier report which found out that wherever Putin goes, GPS stops working.

So, it could potentially “make sense” (surprisingly how UK media haven’t come up with that yet) that Vladimir Putin was on some private cruise vacation in the Persian Gulf and that’s why the Stena Impero moved into Iranian waters. (Boldface emphasis in the original)

So, if this article is true in its basic outlines, then the incident was caused by someone with (1) the capability to hack into ship board computer systems and (2) the ability to project false GPS readings, and, in an implicit admission not covered in the article, (3) the ability to project false radar returns (you'll have to think about that one for a moment). Those three requirements narrow the possible players down to just a few countries, and a few non-state actors (e.g., corporations and so on).

The problem that I have is that you'll recall Iran supposedly did this to a Japanese tanker, while the Japanese Prime Minister was visiting Tehran. I found it very unlikely that - crazy and nutty as the mullahs in Tehran are - that they would be so crazy as to pull a stunt like that. But wait, apparently they had a similar impeccable sense of timing with the seizure of the British ships:

Iran seizes two British tankers and makes a huge mistake

Note this paragraph towards the beginning:

Acting against the British while the U.K. and Iranian foreign ministers were seeking compromise over Britain's recent seizure of an Iranian tanker, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have further isolated Iran on the international stage. With a multinational naval task force for tanker escorts likely to be announced next week, the Iranians are increasingly outgunned and diplomatically isolated. Losing a drone to a U.S. warship on Thursday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is also now aware of American red lines against threats to U.S. life.

One wonders if, in fact, that hacking and sending false GPS coordinates scenario might have some traction - just take Russia out of the mix, and leave the "who is doing this?" part of the equation blank for a moment. With that in mind, let's recall that Europe's GPS system went down for a few days, more or less around the time of the Iranian incidents, and we were told that this was another "incident" (the  technical term is "glitch ex machina") in the technical  infrastructure on the ground:

Europe's Galileo GPS system back after six-day outage

Europe's version of GPS suffers major outage Technical issues on the ground blamed

The timing of the stories is intriguing, to say the least, since the European GPS stories appeared on July 16th and 18th, and the tankers were seized on July 19th. Needless to say, I suspect that you, the reader, knows already what my high octane speculation is: namely, that the Iran-tanker story and the European satellite GPS outage stories are somehow related, and that events are being manipulated by someone; the kooky mullahs in Tehran might indeed be that crazy, but I strongly suspect that much bigger players are on the field here, trying to drive both Iran and the West into actions that benefit neither party. (And while we're at it, I might as well leap off the end of the twig and draw a couple more connections, and say that I suspect the USS Fitzgerald and USS John McCain incidents may have been dress rehearsals for what we see going on now.)

See you on the...

...oh, wait. Did I mention that K.J. also found this story about someone hacking into Russia's security agency, the FSB?

Massive Data Leak From Russian FSB Reveals Nothing New, But Sheds Light On Cyber Security Problem

Ok... now I'm done.

See you on the flip side...

GLITCHES EX MACHINA GALORE

Something very odd happened this week in my email inbox: I received a swarm of emails all about "things going wrong" all over the world, and for a moment, I was tempted to put them all into this week's "honorable mentions" blog on Saturday. But I can't avoid the intuition - and it's nothing more than an intuition - that all these weird stories might somehow be related. The how is of course, the problem. I've decided to call these "glitches ex machina" because, as always, we're told that all of this is due to that now well-known gremlin in the systems, or, to put it differently, we're simply being told nothing at all, other than it's all due to the "technical glitch gremlin."

With that in mind, T. M. spotted this article about the last-minute delay of the launch of India's lunar Chandrayaan-2 lander which was put on hold due to - and I quote - a "technical glitch":

India's Chandrayaan-2 moon mission called off minutes before launch

Then, G.B. sent along this article from RT which states that Europe's Global Positioning Satellites were offline for "several days" due to "a technical incident" which, with somewhat more candor, the Europeans are saying was "related to its ground infrastructure":

‘Technical incident’ puts Europe’s GPS system fully offline for days

And by the way, there was also a power blackout in Manhattan on the anniversary of the 1977 blackout, according to this story shared by "B":

Manhattan Goes Dark: Major Power Outage Hits NYC On Anniversary Of 1977 Great Blackout

Let's not forget, according to this story shared by E.G., that earthquakes are occurring at three times their normal incidence along the volatile Pacific rim:

The Number Of Global Earthquakes Is 3 Times Above Normal

And lookie lookie, many of them, as I've pointed out previously, are concentrated around American black projects research sites, and some of them have been "knocked off line" (map courtesy of K.S.), note the cluster of quakes around China lake and Nellis AFB in Nevada:

Earthquake map

And R.B. spotted this story about the China Lake base being declared not mission capable:

China Lake naval base declared ‘not mission capable’ after earthquakes, but weapons and ammunition are secure

Now of course, all the earthquakes around the Pacific rim could be entirely natural. And Manhattan blackouts have happened before. And there have been "technical glitches" as well. But with respect to each one of these, one could advance the speculation that none of them may be entirely natural. As I've commented before about the strange weather, given the fact that there is such a high amount of weather modification technologies in play, one has to conclude, as does Elana Freeland, that there is no such thing any more as completely natural weather. That's not to say that the weather engineering results are exactly what "they" wanted, the point being that the capability is there, is being used, and hence, once cannot a prior anymore rule out that the results are to some degree intentional. The same with earthquakes: the uptick in the number of earthquakes in an earthquake prone region is not unusual, but with concentrations of quakes around black projects sites and military bases, one cannot a priori rule out the possibility that similar geophysical engineering technologies are being used in some vast geophysical engineering, or warfare, agenda, with the rest of the activity being "collateral damage" from the use of such systems. In short, in the "Farrell Corollary" to the "Freeland Hypothesis", there is no such thing as completely natural geophysical events - such as earthquakes - any more either. The events may be the natural blowback or collateral damage of a technology, but the point is, a technology is in use, somewhere (at least, in my opinion).

Now, if you're willing to crawl out that far with me on the twig of high octane speculation, then we turn to blackouts, GPS satellites going offline, and lunar probes being delayed, due to "technical incidents", the European cousin of the "technical glitch" branch of the gremlin family. The Europeans have been the most  forthcoming on their GPS satellite shut down, implying some sort of ground-to-space problem, which, given the natural of the systems involved, could be computer-related, or electromagnetic in nature (signals being jammed, and so forth), or some combination of both. The satellites may have been hacked, or some sort of electromagnetic interference may have been in play. And one might hazard a guess that this might have happened to Chandrayaan-2 as well.

So let's make the assumption for the sake of argument that all these "glitches ex machina" are not isolated and merely coincidental events, but somehow related. What's the one thing they all have in common? Answer: they're all, in some form or fashion, electrodynamic systems, i.e., they are able to be manipulated electromagnetically, if one but has the technology to do so. And to pursue this speculation, then what might be going on? If this speculation is true, then someone is engaged in some sophisticated geophysical warfare, and perhaps several parties, both the "usual players" and perhaps "someone else." Part of it might be "disaster capitalism", and someone "shooting back" because of collateral damage caused thereby to their own countries. It's intriguing to note, that as all these events were occurring within more or less the same time frame, that French President and rootless cosmopolitan technocrat Emanuel Macron has now come out with his own call for a French "space force." Perhaps it's not related at all to what's going on, perhaps it is, but I just thought it worth "tossing in there".

But that, for whatever it's worth, is my take (at least for the moment) on all these strange glitches ex machina...

See you on the flip side...

OLD PAPERS, NEW DISCOVERIES, AND AI

If you're familiar with the work of Lt. Col. Tom Bearden (US Army, Ret.), this story will sound eerily familiar in its basic outlines. But for those of you who are not familiar, Col. Bearden maintained in various books and papers that the post-war Soviet Union undertook a most unusual form of black science projects research. According to Bearden, Stalin, faced with an overwhelming American numerical superiority in nuclear weapons, lashed the Soviet Academy of Sciences to find some technological breakthrough that would do an end run around this superiority. In effect, Stalin was searching for the next generation in strategic offensive and defensive weapons, a technological edge that would render nuclear and themonuclear weapons obsolescent if not obsolete. According to Bearden, vast and secret research bureaus inside the Soviet Union were established, whose sole task was to comb through the west's vast scientific literature and papers of the previous decades, and to "pull" any papers containing undeveloped, or interesting ideas for further study. In Bearden's argument, this effort led to the creation of the vast Soviet effort in what he came to call "scalar" physics - a term whose current currency owes its popularity in large part to Bearden's efforts - and with it, the whole world of secret Soviet research into everything from the torsion experiments of astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev, to the massive Soviet research into the "paranormal" (which I review in my book Microcosm and Medium).

With that in mind, J.E. (and many others) spotted this story at Zero Hedge, and it's worth careful consideration, for it appears as if the "Stalin-Bearden" model (with apologies to the colonel!) has been adopted and "updated":

AI Pores Over Old Scientific Papers, Makes Discoveries Overlooked By Humans

Notably, not only is the "Stalin-Bearden" model operating here, but the project is centered at a well-known American "black projects" research facility:

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory trained an AI called Word2Vec on scientific papers to see if there was any "latent knowledge" that humans weren't able to grock on first pass.

In other words, rather than Stalin's armies of bureaucrats in research institutions sitting at their desks and reading paper after paper of scientific journals and pulling the interesting or anomalous paper for further study, the search for "the odd and forgotten" has been turned over to an artificial intelligence program, which reads and scans several papers, and then, most importantly, draws connections between them by a process of analogical mapping based on technical words and their context  (for those following my "Analogical Calculus/Topological Metaphor of the Medium" idea, that should sound very familiar):

The algorithm didn’t know the definition of thermoelectric, though. It received no training in materials science. Using only word associations, the algorithm was able to provide candidates for future thermoelectric materials, some of which may be better than those we currently use. -Motherboard

"It can read any paper on material science, so can make connections that no scientists could," said researcher Anubhav Jain. "Sometimes it does what a researcher would do; other times it makes these cross-discipline associations."

The algorithm was designed to assess the language in 3.3 million abstracts from material sciences, and was able to build a vocabulary of around half-a-million words. Word2Vec used machine learning to analyze relationships between words.

"The way that this Word2vec algorithm works is that you train a neural network model to remove each word and predict what the words next to it will be," said Jain, adding that "by training a neural network on a word, you get representations of words that can actually confer knowledge."

...

The algorithm linked words that were found close together, creating vectors of related words that helped define concepts. In some cases, words were linked to thermoelectric concepts but had never been written about as thermoelectric in any abstract they surveyed. This gap in knowledge is hard to catch with a human eye, but easy for an algorithm to spot.

After showing its capacity to predict future materials, researchers took their work back in time, virtually. They scrapped recent data and tested the algorithm on old papers, seeing if it could predict scientific discoveries before they happened. Once again, the algorithm worked. -Motherboard (Boldface emphasis in the original, italicized emphasis added)

Needless to say, that "testing" of the algorithm "on old papers" is where my high octane speculation of the day comes in. There's no doubt in my mind that the activity and experiment at Lawrence Livermore represents only the publicly-revealed tip of the iceberg, and that this sort of artificial intelligence scanning of old science papers has probably been going on for a long time, and at various institutes, analyzing not only the metadata of such papers, but also - pace the Lawrence Livermore "update" to the Stalin-Bearden model - looking for the anomalous concept or bit of data, or the "holes" in areas of research that were forgotten in the flood of scientific and engineering research. The veil on one technique of the ability of the breakaway group to pull ahead of the public science has been lifted and pulled back a little. I've proposed such a scheme of data mining and "pulling" of anomalous data for the operations at CERN, positing a secretive algorithm that allows select, and secret, committees of scientists to review that anomalous data. So I'm taking this Lawrence Livermore story as a bit of broad and general confirmation of that speculation. Once such concepts or data are pulled by the first computer pass, it can then be turned over to a "steering committee" - think the JASON group here folks, or RAND Corporation, DARPA, corporations like Mitre or  SAIC - which will then assign the discovery to a particular team for further research and development.

All of this means that with the addition of AI to the Stalin-Bearden model, the growth of scientific knowledge in the black research community will become (if it hasn't already) exponentially faster. And if it's been going on for some time as I suspect, then this lends even more credence to the hypothesis of many in the alternative research field that this black projects research world may be several decades in advance of the public in terms of its science and technology.

And notably, it was in Lawrence Livermore's case made possible by mimicking the processes of analogical thinking...

See you on the flip side...

 

 

THINGS (OR RATHER PEOPLE) THAT MAKE YOU GO “HMMM…”: ...

Well, this is a bit of a "fun" story, or is it? I don't know, which is why I'm filing this one under the "you tell me" category. As Angela Merkel continues to shake both herself and her government apart, there's been some rather odd "symbolic goings on" in that country. A few days ago I blogged about the intriguing story that Germany has completely rebuilt the facade of the old kaiserlicher Staatsschloss on Unter den Linden in Berlin. The building had, as its name implies, been the official state residence of the Kaisers until Wilhelm II's abdication, but it was maintained until after the Second World War when the Communists - who else? - demolished it in an effort that would make Confederate statue destroyers envious, for in its place a monstrosity of a modernist architectural box was built. Well, the box itself has been demolished, and in its place has risen the facade of the old Staatsschloss. Of course, the inside of the building is not restored. Wilhelm II's tastes were decidedly "not modernist" and ran to the Baroque (oddly enough) both in art and music, and restoring the interior of the old Kaiserschloss would have been prohibitively expensive. But that, apparently, was not the point. Rather, as I pointed out in my blog about the story, the palace was rebuilt so that the post-war modernist constructions of Berlin would have to "compete" (their word, not mine) with something much more pleasant to look at. The implication of the remarks about the project was "expect more to come." But it is odd from a purely symbolic point of view, and we'll get back to that in a moment, for the rebuilding of the Staatsschloss in the old government quarter of Berlin could be taken as symbolic of much more than mere nostalgia.

As I also pointed out in that blog, a Germany navy drill team was videoed in Ottawa, Canada, performing in plain view (and for all to see) what appeared to be the old "parade step", which we know of course as the goosestep. I was floored, because it was the first time, as far as I could tell, than any unit of the post-reunification and post-war Bundeswehr had done that. Ever. Needless to say, I was deluged by a swarm of emails and angry comments that what  the drill team had done was not, really, the old "parade step". The comments basically amounted to the fact that the "kick" was not the full high-stepping kick of the Imperial Army, the inter-war Reichsheer, or the Wehrmacht; it was "off" by "several inches." The pettifoggery of the comments missed my main point, which was entirely symbolic; an "implicit taboo" had been broken, and something very much like the parade step had been done in full view for the attending Canadians to enjoy (which, apparently, they did). The symbolism of the act, viewed from the standpoint of rebuilding the old state imperial palace, was, I argued, not coincidental.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those who thinks parade-stepping and carrying bell trees is a bad thing; it's a Prussian-German - indeed royal and imperial - military tradition, not a Nazi one. Not doing so is rather like the British military not using bagpipes; it's somehow just "off". It's the meaning of the return to these symbols and traditions, however, that is open to interpretation; just what does all this mean, particularly in a Europe overrun with "refugees" (thank you Angela Merkel), and virtually every country in Europe expressing some form of backlash against the multi-cultural dictats of the rootless cosmopolitans in Brussels.

So with that in mind, J.P. spotted this interesting article about what the old imperial and royal house of Prussia, the Von Hohenzollerns, have been up to lately:

German Kaiser's heir wants seized artifacts back

Other than the eerie resemblance of H.R.H. Georg Friedrich Ferdinand to his great-great grandfather Kaiser Wilhelm II, the story itself is worth noting:

The Culture Ministry confirmed Friday that the Hohenzollern family has been negotiating with the federal government and the eastern states of Berlin and Brandenburg "for several years" — and apparently in secret.

According to Der Spiegel news magazine, the aristocrats are seeking to reclaim tens of thousands of valuable paintings, sculptures, coins, books and furniture, as well as the right to live at one of several grand estates.

But an agreement may be a long way off. Monika Grütters, the government's commissioner for culture, said, "the positions of the negotiating parties are still very far apart." (Boldface and italicized emphasis added)

Stop and ponder that in the context of the revival of other symbolisms and traditions, and imagine the significance of a return of the House of Hohenzollern to residence in any of its former estates. In effect, it appears as if the Hohenzollerns might be  requesting some sort of de facto recognition of the House's status as the royal house of a united Germany via a symbolic act, in this case precisely by returning to residence in one of the old royal and imperial estates. That may seem far-fetched, but the symbolism of the naval unit in Ottawa springs to mind here again: the unit began their drill by literally marching backwards to the tune of the old military march "Prussia's Glory", and then began its quasi-parade-step forward, as if to symbolize "we're moving back to our cultural tradition in order to move forward." Indeed, by seeking return of art works and furniture, one wonders if the covert goal is eventually to outfit that rebuilt Staatsschloss with some of its original appointments, and if in fact it's all in long-term preparation for a return of the Hohenzollerns to residence in that structure. Admittedly, that is very far-fetched. But in today's crazy world, why not? You heard it here first.

And now that I've crawled to the very end of the twig of high octane speculation, I might was well step off the twig altogether: in today's Europe, with Frenchmen, Dutch, Austrians, Poles, Hungarians, Danes, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards and British protesting the decay of their cultural and national identities at the hands of Mr. Globaloney and his technocratic rootless cosmopolitan lackeys, one wonders whether or not we're looking at a longing to return to the status quo ante Brussels, and indeed, status quo ante bellum prima. In Germany's case, it might even resolve some thorny outstanding issues of international law.

If that's the case, then are we looking at a pattern unfolding behind the scenes? Perhaps, but if so, then one has to watch not just the Hohenzollerns, but the Savoys, the Hapsburgs, the Wittelsbachs, the Bourbons, and - dare I say it? - the Bonapartes(and yes, they're still around, the current head of the House just conveniently happening to have a Bourbon mother). And lest I forget, while we're on this "return-to-the-royals" theme, don't forget that a few years ago the Russians were discussing a return of the Romanovs.

In any case, the symbolisms are there, and in Germany's case, we now have not just two symbolic tea leaves to read, but three, and there's an old adage here that might be appropriate to ponder: one is a fact, two is coincidence, and three begins to approach deliberateness.

OK... I'm done. Now you can call me crazy.

See you on the flip side...

Bundeswehr Guard at Kaiser Wilhelm II's tomb in the Netherlands