Mayday!

The HopeLaura Knight-Jadczyk

My last contribution to the Blogosphere must have been pretty scary. Geeze! You shoulda seen my mail! People going bananas and writing “what to do? what to do!?”

Well, this one’s not going to be any better. But let me say in advance that today’s particular collection of items will lead us to a certain point of hope which I wish to elucidate at the end.

It is 7.17 am, Eastern Standard Time, on the thirtieth of June [some year in the not-too-distant future]. Suddenly the power fails.

The basement centre of the Defense Communication Operations Unit adjoining the White House is plunged into darkness, and only the distant rumble of early morning traffic reminds the duty officer that another day has already begun. There have been power failures before, however, and there is no hint of impending crisis

Almost immediately, an automatic switch brings in the emergency supply. But now the duty officer observes that something is wrong. Telephone links to the outside world have gone. These include the open links, via commercial cables, to NORAD’s bunker a thousand feet under Cheyenne Peak in Colorado, and to the Offutt command post near Omaha

Within seconds it is ascertained that neither the President nor Vice-President, both of whom are out of town, can be contacted: radio communications are blacked out, on all frequencies. Further, because of the telephone failure, none of the Presidential stand-ins scattered around town and country can be expected to call in to give their exact locations, as they would normally if there were a recognized national emergency. However, the Secretary of Defense, third in the chain of command, is at breakfast somewhere in the White House

It has taken 45 seconds to confirm the general breakdown of communications; it takes another 45 seconds to locate the Secretary of Defense and inform him of the problem; and it is another 90 seconds before the Secretary finds himself in the cramped underground Situation Room along with his advisors. He is aware that the travel time of a missile from a hostile submarine off the Atlantic coast to Washington is just over fifteen minutes; three of these minutes have gone

Emergency procedures for transferring authority are now in hand and the Secretary of Defense becomes in effect the new President. The ‘gold codes’, which would enable him to initiate a nuclear response, are placed before him. The black SIOP books with their theoretical scenarios are produced. The ‘Mystic’ and ‘Nationwide’ communication systems are successfully activated utilizing deeply buried, protected cables. He now has control of the National Command Authority, the channel of communication for execution of a nuclear strike; and another two minutes have gone

The underground cables to Cheyenne, Offutt and other SAC bases are now open with secure links to the radar lines covering the northern approaches. None of them - Dew Line, the 55th Parallel or Pine Tree - is functioning properly, however; their screens are strongly upset with many spurious signals: there seem to be huge scattering modes in the ionosphere.

Satellite communication with military forces abroad is impaired. No information is coming in from the big synchronous DSP satellites over South America, the central Pacific or the Indian Ocean; nothing is arriving from the relay stations near Aurora in Colorado or Pine Gap in Australia. And the ‘hot line’ is dead. On the other hand in the minutes before the confusion they had reported no anomalous infrared emissions and hence no evidence of heat from the exhausts of rising missiles. At the moment all that can be said is that there is a very unusual atmospheric disturbance, that telephone lines are dead and that there are widespread power failures. The disturbed atmosphere might just be some strange effect due to sunspots or the like, but the telephone and power failures are ominous. On such a scale, the only plausible explanation is an electromagnetic pulse caused by nuclear fireballs

Eight minutes into the emergency - if it is an emergency - the Secretary issues a number of precautionary orders. His deputy is ordered upstairs to await the arrival of a helicopter from Quantico Marine Corps base about 30 miles away. This will transport the deputy to the waiting ‘Nightwatch’, a Boeing 747 which functions as an airborne command post. Another helicopter is dispatched to retrieve the President. A ‘flash alert’ is sent to Hawaii, to get a second command post aloft, but the message goes unacknowledged. SAC missile silos and bomber bases are put on full alert

Nine minutes on, information begins to flood in from sensors and antennae in orbit, at sea and scattered round the Earth. Much of it is reassuring: there are no patterns of activity on land, sea or air consistent with hostile intentions, no evacuations of barracks or the like are in progress.

But now something deeply disturbing is coming in from one of the DSP satellites. A television screen shows a brilliant patch over south-east Nevada, bright enough to saturate the lead sulphide cells in the satellite. Intense heat is radiating from an area of about ten thousand square kilometres. Distant ground sensors are reporting large tremors emanating from the same area - unnecessarily, as the Situation Room has begun to sway and vibrate, and loud rumblings are coming up from deep under the ground.

Then, from Offutt, comes devastating news. Air Force pilots are reporting a huge explosion in the desert area close to Boulder City. The city itself has gone, reduced to rubble. Las Vegas and other towns within 100 miles are enveloped in huge firestorms. The Hoover Dam has disintegrated. A column of dust and rubble has been sucked up to great altitude and a mushroom cloud is spreading outwards. Huge amounts of smoke are blanketing the state of Arizona and spreading into New Mexico and Mexico itself. The Secretary and his advisors can see it all on their television screens

The Secretary now has a maximum of five minutes in which to discuss and evaluate the information, make any decisions and implement them.

He is informed that the damage corresponds to explosions amounting to at least twenty megatons, and must have been caused by more than one bomb. The possibility of accidental detonations is quickly ruled out, because of its technical improbability and the magnitude of the explosion. Further, he is told that both ground and air bursts must have been involved to disrupt both cable and ionospheric communications. The conclusion seems unavoidable that for some reason the Soviets have targeted bombs on to American territory having somehow circumvented military radars. perhaps armed satellites with low radar cross-section have suddenly been diverted downwards; or perhaps submarine-launched cruise missiles have been fired; or perhaps bombs had already been smuggled into the area.

But why? The desert is a bizarre choice of target, Boulder, Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam of low strategic value. No sense can be made of the attack.

Perhaps, it is suggested, they were chosen because they have little value. The attack may be a prelude to some major military adventure and may be a warning, a “keep out’ notice pitched at a level low enough that the risks of ‘nuclear response are not justified and yet high enough to demonstrate deadly earnest. Or, the impacts may be intended to disrupt radar and communications for reasons which can only be guessed at

Whatever the merits of such speculations, the Secretary cannot responsibly rule out the possibility that further bombs may follow, completely jamming command and control over nuclear weapons, or even that Washington is an imminent target whose destruction might for example be awaiting only the positioning of armed satellites, already in orbit, over the city, or the arrival of cruise missiles.

Twelve minutes into the emergency, the Secretary’s deputy is still on the White House lawn waiting for a helicopter, there is no communication with the President and the only information still coming in confirms that towns over several thousand square miles have been destroyed in nuclear blasts. He has no time left and must come to an immediate decision

He could initiate the dreaded ‘Major Attack Option’. This is quickly ruled out because it is beyond reason, leading only to mutual annihilation. He could choose to do nothing. But it is pointed out that in the present situation paralysis could also lead to holocaust. Whether the National Command Authority is ‘decapitated’ in the next few minutes depends on whether further missiles are about to land. If they are, then all control over the counter-strike force may be lost and, with bombs falling on the USA, a full-scale attack on the Soviet Union will, following standing instructions, be unleashed by individual submarine commanders, and by the one-star generals aboard their Cover All airborne command posts. It is therefore vital to forestall any further nuclear attacks by calling the bluff, that is by retaliating at a similar level. All the options are dangerous. The least dangerous is an immediate ‘controlled response’

The discussions are interrupted by confused reports of a storm of missiles, a cataract of fire pouring in over the states of the western seaboard and Canada. But the reports go unconfirmed; again, communications are failing over the whole of the United States

It is 7.30 am, Eastern Standard Time, on the thirtieth of June. In the revamped over-the-horizon radar base near Gomel in ByeloRussia officers are horrified to see, through the confusion of the still disturbed ionosphere, a dozen missile tracks appearing on their screens. Peacekeepers are rising over the plains of Kansas..

Even as they look, however, another unheralded missile is encountering the atmosphere high over the Bernese Oberland. Coming in at sixty thousand miles an hour, a hundred kilometres above Interlaken, the missile is gathering around itself a narrow skin of compressed air whose temperature surges up to about half a million degrees. Waves ripple within the hot air-turned-plasma; atoms, scattering off the waves, reach huge speeds, collide violently, and are stripped to their nuclei; electrons, torn from the atoms, accelerate violently and radiate fiercely at all wavelengths. For the most part this fierce emission is invisible, hard ultraviolet light or soft X-rays, and the atmosphere absorbs these at altitude, 50 to 90 kilometres up.

Only a tiny fraction of the radiation reaches the ground as visible light. Even so, Europe is lit up as if with a flashbulb: survivors from Ireland to Austria and from Denmark to Italy later describe ‘a bluish white light, too bright for the naked eye’, or ‘a fire brighter than the Sun’, or ‘a thunderbolt … blinding in its intensity’.

Approaching from the south east, the missile passes on a long, shallow trajectory, throwing moving shadows over the Jungfrau, Berne and Basle. It crosses the sky in a few seconds, leaving a wake of hot, luminous debris and air surrounded by a rapidly expanding red trail. Ten seconds after its first encounter with the atmosphere, the missile has penetrated the ionosphere, passed through the stratosphere and is moving rapidly into the lower atmosphere

Here at an altitude between 10 and 15 kilometres, the missile hits significantly denser air and suddenly disintegrates. It never reaches the ground therefore and instead unloads its stored-up power, 200 megatons of impact energy, into the air over Louvain, a medium-sized town in central Belgium. The missile vaporizes in a third of a second. It is now, momentarily, an incandescent cylinder a few kilometres long and a few hundred metres across. The temperature within the cylinder is over100,000 C. The pressure for an instant reaches some tens of thousands of tons per square inch; the missile blows up into a ball of fire radiating X-rays of huge intensity. These are absorbed within a few metres by the surrounding air; but, in doing so, the envelope of atmospheric gas acquires their energy. Simultaneously, hot, compressed material is thrusting rapidly outwards from the point of disintegration and snowploughing the air ahead of it. A blast wave develops; ‘the fireball expands. From the first trace of incandescent tail high over Interlaken, to the beginnings of the fireball over Louvain, less than eleven seconds have elapsed.

When the fireball has reached about four miles in diameter the shock wave breaks away and races ahead of it. The corresponding blast brings a wind speed of over a thousand miles an hour. Survival at this distance is impossible; Louvain, directly under the fireball, disappears in less than a second. The fireball meanwhile inflates and soars rapidly upwards for several kilometres until, in the stratosphere, it flattens out and takes the classical mushroom shape. The cloud is seen from Copenhagen to Florence, from Edinburgh to Budapest. And over the whole of Europe, the ground shakes and buildings sway dangerously. Trains are derailed in southern England and beneath the Channel. The mushroom cloud is quickly broken up by jet streams at about 60 kilometres altitude and is subsequently dispersed around the globe

Within 25 kilometres of Louvain, all buildings are reduced to rubble. A few girder bridges survive due to accidental cancellation of pressure waves from above and below. The shock wave reaches Brussels to the west and Liege to the east. The buildings within these cities collapse, domino-like, as the wave sweeps through; and all traces of roads are immediately erased by rubble.

Beyond 25 kilometres, some structures survive, although few houses remain intact. Throughout Antwerp, for example, about 50 kilometres from ground zero, roofs are stripped bare of tiles and window frames and doors are blown in. Beyond this the damage becomes lighter: about 100 kilometres to the north, the blast, sweeping through Eindhoven, blows tiles off roofs and shatters windows

People out of doors and 25 kilometres from Louvain are hurled about to metres and are usually killed. Flying glass, though, is the greatest hazard. Shopping precincts and office complexes within 50 kilometres find themselves swept without warning by lethal blizzards of flying glass. Indeed, shards of glass account for most of the loss of life in these areas. Even 100 kilometres from the epicentre of the explosion, the blast is still strong enough to flatten forests

Nuclear reactors within reach of the ground tremors and air waves are damaged, their coolant pipes snapped and containment vessels cracked. Some begin the process of meltdown. Already, swathes of radioactive debris are pouring into the atmosphere, mingling with the dense chemical smog, drifting into Germany, and destined for Poland and Scandinavia

Immense destruction is caused by fire as well as blast. Serious flash burns from the thermal pulse of the fireball are sustained over an area of several thousand square kilometres, and virtually all exposed individuals within about 50 kilometres of ground zero receive third degree burns (charred skin) requiring labour-intensive hospital treatment, but in the hours and days following the impact it is impossible for medical services from outside to reach, let alone cope with, the seriously burned, and many of the injured die untreated from shock within twelve hours

The intense heat from the rising fireball sets off fires at a range of 70 kilometres or more. Fanned by the updraft of air sucked in behind the rising ball, these merge into a mass fire, a single all-consuming conflagration. Such fire services as have survived are immobilized in a sea of debris, deprived of water and overwhelmed by the extent of the raging fire.

The Sun eventually sets, but Europe is already dark, only the light from raging fires penetrates the smoke

Sixteen hours after the event the Sun rises again, but it shines down only on a dense, choking smog created by blazing cities and petrochemical complexes. Aerial survey is impossible. Within a circle of radius 50 kilometres, the dead greatly outnumber the living. Even without the mass fire which is still blazing, penetration of the area is impossible as roads are strewn by debris and wrecked vehicles. It will be several days before the fires burn themselves out and the smog disperses enough to reveal the flattened cities and towns, villages and farms. Belgium, it will turn out, has been obliterated. And several weeks would need to pass before French, German and Dutch forces have the capacity to clear the roads, shelter the living and bury the dead. Belgium, however, will wait in vain …

For the Earth has encountered a cosmic swarm.

Twelve hours later, the death-dealing fusillade is peppering the other side of the globe. Indeed, the bombardment continues for nearly a night and day, the planet rotating all the while, first presenting one face, then the other, until eventually it emerges on the far side of the swarm.

Compared with the fireball over Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War, that over Boulder was a thousand times greater whilst that over Louvain was ten times bigger again, but they are just two of the several hundred pieces of grape-shot that meet the Earth, and they are trivial compared with the larger pieces of ordnance in train. These rarer missiles are each capable of unloading as much energy as would be unleashed in a major nuclear war, and in their case the atmosphere provides relatively little protection. Thus unlike their smaller counterparts, these larger bodies get through to the surface of the Earth, an ocean impact generating a tsunami, a land impact generating a small crater.

There is another difference: each huge fireball is now too energetic to be properly contained by the atmosphere. As before, it ascends, laden with dust, but now it breaks through generating a vacuum in its wake which is filled by a vast stream of air. Thus, on the ground, once the initial blast has swept past, there is a counter flowing hurricane, itself sweeping up dust thrown up by the impact, and blowing it upwards after the rapidly receding fireball. Within minutes the fireball has reached an altitude of several hundred kilometres, in the high stratosphere. Here it stabilizes, and the dust begins to spill outwards over the top of the atmosphere

Closer to the ground, the intense heat of impact from one large fireball has generated hundreds of fires over an area about the size of France. Essentially everything combustible along the line of sight of the rising fireball has caught fire. Loss of life over this area, already massive from the prompt effects of blast and heat, becomes almost complete when these fires merge into a single, all-consuming conflagration. About fifty million tons of smoke pour upwards, in dense plumes rising 10 kilometres into the atmosphere

Within a few days, the wildfires are almost global in extent. Tens of millions of tons of fine dust lofted into the stratosphere, and a comparable amount of smoke in the lower atmosphere, have spread over the northern hemisphere and are beginning to cross into the southern one. At ground level, sunlight is blocked from reaching the ground, and all activity takes place in a black, choking smog. There is no question of mounting any rescue operation to save the devastated areas: the damage is so widespread that communications around the globe have now effectively ceased to exist; individual regions are virtually isolated; devastated populations are thrown back on their own resources; dozens of cities are reduced to smouldering rubble; river pollution is rife; and forests throughout the world are ablaze. Life as we know it is drawing to a close

The cosmic encounter is over. Our planet has finally emerged from the swarm. Both continue, of course, along their predestined paths, the swarm merely a few missiles less, the Earth now charred and encased in a lingering veil of dust and smoke. With the destruction of cities and urban areas, the infrastructure of civilization has already gone; with the loss of sunlight, continental land temperatures have already plummeted to those of a Siberian winter; thick ice covers rivers and lakes; storms of unprecedented intensity rage along the continental margins; with animal and plant life devastated, farming and agriculture have already collapsed. Soon, the disrupted weather patterns will cause the continental land masses to be blanketed in a thick covering of snow

After several months, the Sun begins to be seen through a hazy sky. When, eventually, the dust clears, the land masses of the northern hemisphere are covered in a snowfield which, reflecting sunlight back into space, has become permanent. The snowfield is added to each year, centimetres at a time. A thousand years on, North America and Europe are covered in ice sheets half a mile thick and the ocean level has dropped by about fifty metres. The Earth is locked into a new ice age. Mankind has survived, but the human population has crashed and society has dissolved into hungry marauding bands. A new ecological balance is being worked out on the blasted landscape: indeed the struggle for survival has only just begun… [The Cosmic Winter, Victor Clube and Bill Napier]

In short, the Hammer of God struck.

Victor Clube and Bill Napier are not members of some whacked out “Doomsday Cult” as I have been accused of being after first presenting the idea that the Earth is facing a date with a swarm of cometary bodies over 13 years ago. At the time the book quoted above was written, Clube was Senior Research Fellow in Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and had also been Acting Director of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. Napier was an astronomer at the Royal Observatory. They were cited by Firestone et al, whose scientific work on the Holocene Extinction suggests that the planet encountered a massive “swarm” of cometary bodies that nearly destroyed every living thing on Earth about 12000 years ago. As Firestone et al wrote:

Until recently, the astronomical mainstream was highly critical of Clube and Napier’s giant comet hypothesis. However, the crash of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994 has led to a change in attitudes. The comet, watched by the world’s observatories, was seen split into 20 pieces and slam into different parts of the planet over a period of several days. A similar impact on Earth, it hardly needs saying, would have been devastating.

The question is, of course, whether or not such a future is really lining up for the human race. As I mentioned in my previous article, we have been keeping track of these things and, it doesn’t look good.

Admittedly, almost nothing can be done about such a scenario. It is the fate of ALL species to become extinct and certainly, the other human-like species have already done so. Mankind is not the be-all and end-all of Earthly existence, though he might like to think so. And, considering the behavior of our leaders - those we allow to lead us - throughout history, and particularly over the past 100 years or so, culminating in the obscenity of George W. Bush and his cronies, it might be better if at least one sub-set of the human species did become extinct: psychopaths and other pathological deviants.

Clube and Napier tell us that an asteroid in a Taurid orbit, carrying 100,000 megatons of impact energy, coming out of the night sky, would be visible in binoculars for only about six hours before impact. By the time you could see it with the naked eye, you would have only half an hour. But, if adequate preparations had been made, that would be enough time - for many.

Considering the seriousness of the threat against the survival of humanity, as more and more scientists are beginning to agree, and noting the billions of dollars spent in the War on Terror and “Homeland Security” Bird flu and AIDS, which are, most definitely, lesser hazards, you would think that rational human beings who actually CARE about humanity, about the future of our children and their children, would begin to focus on what is truly important. However, I would like to point out that almost no money is being spent on sending up satellites to monitor what is “out there;” it is all being spent on killing people down here.

Discovering and tracking what is “out there” is certainly technically feasible. Diverting a small asteroid is technically feasible. It would also be helpful for money to be spent on unbiased scientific study of what has actually happened to the Earth in the past, an attempt made to discover the risks and conditions and effects, and to analyze these so that proper preparations can be made for maximum survival of those elements of our civilization that are most conducive to bringing needed knowledge and insight to future inhabitants of our planet.

But the main problem at the moment is the lack of awareness of the real problem. It’s all smoke and mirrors and “Global Warming” and “terrorists” out there. After all, there’s no real money to be made by arms industry if there isn’t somebody to kill or populations to oppress. There is considerable political capital invested in maintaining the status quo and this is what induces the establishment - even the scientific establishment - to continue to cover up what is really going on out there. They have a deep investment in making people believe that the cosmos is non-violent and our Earth is sailing along safely even if human beings, themselves, do nothing but find bigger and better and more effective ways of killing each other. For them, as Clube and Napier point out, Temporal Power takes precedence over the fate of the human race.

The Thought Police have done their job well. Now, in addition to the late Osama and Saddam, we have Global warming to keep us busy and get humanity accustomed to total oppression.

Let’s take a look at how this actually works.

One of the SOTT editors, Henry, regularly attends meetings of a sort of “social activism” group in a nearby town. This little group is mostly into social issues, and they often schedule films to be shown to the attendees that are about things like unfair taxation, justice in the workplace, and so on. You know, your basic do-gooder types who claim to care about people and want to do something positive. But, apparently, there is a limit to those they care about and want to do good for; it doesn’t extend to future generations that might survive a global cataclysm.

The other night, the film that was on the agenda of the meeting was Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” (Naturally, it was dubbed in French.) After the film was over, Henry reports that everyone was all worked up and saying “what to do? what to do?” and the discussion began. After a period of time listening to the blame game (humanity getting the brunt of it, mostly Western industrialism (which we all can agree is a problem, but that’s not the point here)) , Henry managed to get a word in and pointed out that it wasn’t just the Earth that was warming up. He informed the gathering of about 150 people that several other planets in the Solar System were also experiencing Global Warming and, as far as he knew, there were no industrial civilizations on any of them.

The moderator of the discussion was a bit taken aback, but apparently recovered quickly and said something like, “Oh, yes, we know that SOME Global Warming can be due to the activity of the Sun, but that’s only a small percentage, blah blah blah… we need to focus on what we can fix now blah blah.”

Apparently, in the “Inconvenient Truth” film, there is some mention of the Thermohaline Current and how it was affected by Global Warming 12,000 years or so ago and that this was due to abundant ice melt of the glaciers in Canada. Henry says (I haven’t seen the film) that this is said as though it just started heating up for no reason and melting, and that was that. Of course, as we know very well, all of those events occurred because of cometary or meteor impacts as demonstrated conclusively by Firestone et al, and reported in my previous article.

So, Henry brings the attention of the crowd to this matter that was mentioned in the film, and points out that the apparently gradual “Global Warming” of that time was followed by meteor or cometary impacts which then brought on a sudden ice age.

The moderator said: “So?”

Henry then asked if anyone in the room was aware of the news reports that a jetliner had just narrowly missed being hit by a meteorite, and had anybody been noticing the unbelievable increase in the numbers of cosmic bodies entering the Earth’s atmosphere, some of them even causing significant damage?

Missing the entire point, the moderator cut him off and again, said the equivalent of “so? There’s nothing we can do about that… but there IS something we can do about THIS, i.e. “human caused global warming.”

Can we say “Ostrich with head in sand”?

It’s actually kind of synchronous that I had just written about this very attitude.

Humanity is facing a global cataclysm of Atlantean proportions in the near future from which very little of our modern world will emerge intact - if anything at all….

Sure, I know that a lot of people - if you brought it to their attention - would just shrug and say “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it, so just let me live my life as I see fit until it happens and when it does, I’ll be happy that I did what I wanted.”

That is exactly how most people have been programmed to think. They are so concerned with what affects them now that they don’t even perceive how their altruistic impulses have been trapped, twisted, and diverted from what really matters: the FUTURE OF OUR CHILDREN! However, there were several people who wanted to know more. Henry pointed out to them that the whole hullabaloo about Global Warming is designed to distract from the real issues. If all the attention that is being put on Human Caused Global Warming was being put on our governments to get rid of psychopaths and install systems that were actually democratic, manned by psychologically healthy people who worked for the PEOPLE, the possibilities of getting through whatever may be heading our way would be greatly enhanced for many people, and most particularly for humanity at large. And this is where we come to those people who feel a sort of responsibility to the future of humanity and to our children, and it is those people we are speaking to.

It is possible that the PTB ARE thinking about their future and the future of humanity in terms of them surviving and coming out on top and making slaves of anyone else who might happen to have survived, and for some reason, that idea really irks me. If someone I loved were to survive some terrible cataclysm on earth, I certainly wouldn’t want them to survive only to be made into a slave. (If you want a good idea of what such a life might be like, just read The Thrall’s Tale!) If you can consider your children and your children’s children living such a life and it doesn’t bother you, then you obviously aren’t SOTT reader material, so move along and go back to sleep! (And if you believe in reincarnation and want to be born into such a world, go ahead and ignore what I’m saying here!)

But I digress. Getting back to the emails I received about the last article, all the people asking “what to do?”

What do I tell them? It’s simple: Knowledge Protects. The more knowledge you have, the more protection you can activate in your life in every sphere of your life.

The main preparation that people need is a good education about human psychology; and here I don’t mean what passes for psychology today, (which, like everything else, has been co-opted by pathological deviants), but accurate knowledge of individuals and larger social systems. Why? Because it is in this kind of knowledge that we have our first layer of protection. If we really know about lies and liars and evil and deception, we are less likely to be fooled by Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. They cannot penetrate and subvert our action groups; they cannot penetrate and subvert all the fields of government and education and religion and so on, which is how they have taken control of our world and why it is in the condition it is in. Because human beings do not have this knowledge, they are at the mercy of The Cult of the Plausible Lie.

Now, we have a real problem here and we don’t have a lot of time to solve it, either. The main thing that is standing between humanity and the solution is a bunch of psychological deviants: Pathocrats who, as Clube and Napier said above, care more about Power than the human race. It would take an entire generation to undo the damage they have done to the minds of ordinary people, to straighten out the mess that passes for logic in this world. Sure, we need to round up the most virulent of the deviants and exclude them from society and we need to undertake some serious scientific studies about them so that if there are ways to prevent their emergence in society, we can implement those safeguards. But right now, the first problem we need to solve seems to me to be to really help people to understand that the house is on fire and we gotta go outside and form a bucket-brigade, like NOW. More than that, we have do this against the manipulations of the lunatics who have nailed the doors shut because they can’t see the fire, can’t feel the fire, and even if they did, they don’t care. If they see one of us trying to open the doors, they will hit us over the head and keep talking hypnotically to everyone else telling them that “don’t listen to that crazy person who’s trying to open the door! There’s no fire! And if there was, WE would take care of you! After all, we only have your best interests at heart!”

Yeah, right.
(cont. on site)

All physical theories are useful only insofar as they boost human freedom by allowing us to use more of our hidden potential. We are using perhaps only 10% of our mental abilities, and most of our DNA, called today “junk DNA”, is waiting to be awakened by the appropriate code giving human beings the ability to expand exponentially the arena and the scope of our perceptions and actions.

Science tells us that the Universe and the life in it will sooner or later end, either as the result of thermal death or, on the other extreme, due to a Big Crunch. These are just theories, and it seems to be so that they have arisen out of a Science that had already, as it seems, come to a dead end. There has been no essential progress in theoretical physics since the beginning of the 20-th century where the two main and contradictory theories: quantum theory and theory of relativity were created.

Physicists still do no know answers to the most important questions of our existence: What is consciousness? Where are the laws of nature coming from? What is reality?

Science has been corrupted, it has become an industry, an arm of the Military utilized primarily for dealing death and destruction on our planet, and this process is like a train speeding out of control toward a bridge that has been washed out by a mighty flood. The “truth” does not matter anymore. Greed and corruption rule science even if many scientists are sincere and well meaning.

Today we living in a corrupted society, corrupted to such an extent that the end of human civilisation is highly probable long before the “End of Everything” predicted by theoretical physicists; perhaps even in our lifetime. At the same time, synchronistically, the rate of “natural catastrophes” seems to be accelerating. We understand more and more that our human existence on the planet Earth is rather fragile and can end at any moment. A strike by an asteroid can annihilate most of the population of our planet, and evidence indicates that such can happen with literally no warning. A supernova explosion of a nearby star can all life on earth almost instantly. In this case there will be no warning at all. The star could have already exploded and the deadly radiation is already on the way towards us - with the speed of light.

Much closer to home, an eruption on the Sun, directed towards the Earth, can end nearly all life on our planet in the form that we know about (some sea creatures in the deep ocean may survive). Assigning probabilities to such events is simply meaningless. We do not know enough about the inner mechanisms inside our Sun or stars, we do not have means for shielding our planet from cosmic catastrophes.

And still we use science to build weapons, to kill and maim, to steal and starve others blithely ignoring the facts of history: he who digs a pit generally falls into it.

Then we have religions. They give us a different perspective, they give us hope: they talk about consciousness that transcends physical reality. But religions also tell us a lot of silly things and they have been the cause of probably more human deaths, cruelty and suffering than science and technology together. Religions have also been corrupted. Science ruled by religion or religion ruled by science seem to be equally deadly mixtures.

What to do then? This question occurs only to those that are not satisfied with being simply passive vitnesses and victims of the “unavoidable”. This question occurs to those who understand that there is no such thing as “unavoidable”, who understand that in a nonlinear universe the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. Even if today we may not be able to provide any constructive answer to these probalems of global importance, tomorrow we may acquire a different perspective and our questions may find their “Columbus solutions”. Knowledge, too, is nonlinear. But for this a special approach is needed. All corruption in science and in religion have to be spotted and discarded. A healthy marriage of the exact methods science and of the mysterious esotericism is needed.

There is no other solution. […}

Read more here:

By Robert Adams
New Dawn Magazine.com
6-21-5

When I first spoke to a close Christian friend of mine about the publishing of Tony Bushby’s The Bible Fraud, her reaction was one that many Christians have expressed, and one that made me aghast. She didn’t want the book available because it would “persuade them away from the Bible and the word of God.” Further discussions with her and many other Christians around the world about The Bible Fraud all result in the Bible being quoted as the ultimate reference for the apparent “words of God,” and therefore the basis for their arguments. The problem lies in that they believe the Bible is infallible. […]

As Tony points out, the history of our ‘genuine’ Bibles is a convoluted one. Firstly we cannot be sure that we have the full version as it was originally intended. In 1415 the Church of Rome took an extraordinary step to destroy all knowledge of two second century Jewish books that it said contained the true name of Jesus Christ. The Antipope Benedict XIII firstly singled out for condemnation a secret Latin treatise called “Mar Yesu” and then issued instructions to destroy all copies of the book of Elxai. The Rabbinic fraternity once held the destroyed manuscripts with great reverence for they were comprehensive original records reporting the life of Rabbi Jesus.

Later, Pope Alexander VI ordered all copies of the Talmud destroyed, with the Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomas de Torquemada (1420-98) responsible for the elimination of 6,000 volumes at Salamanca alone. Solomon Romano (1554) also burnt many thousands of Hebrew scrolls and, in 1559, every Hebrew book in the city of Prague was confiscated. The mass destruction of Jewish books included hundreds of copies of the Old Testament and caused the irretrievable loss of many original handwritten documents.

The oldest text of the Old Testament that survived, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was said to be the Bodleian Codex (Oxford), which was dated to circa 1100 AD. In an attempt by the church to remove damaging Rabbinic information about Jesus Christ from the face of the earth, the Inquisition burnt 12,000 volumes of the Talmud. In 1607, forty-seven men (some records say fifty four) took two years and nine months to re-write the Bible and make it ready for press. It was, by the order of King James, issued with a set of personal ‘rules’ the translators were to follow. Upon its completion in 1609, it was handed over to the King James for his final approval. However, “It was self evident that James was not competent to check their work and edit it, so he passed the manuscripts onto the greatest genius of all time… Sir Francis Bacon” The first English language manuscripts of the Bible remained in Bacon’s possession for nearly a year. During that time … “he hammered the various styles of the translators into the unity, rhythm, and music of Shakespearean prose, wrote the prefaces and created the whole scheme of the Authorized Version. At the completion of the editing, King James ordered a ‘dedication to the King’ to be drawn up and included in the opening pages. He also wanted the phrase ‘Appointed to be read in the churches’ to appear on the title page. The King James Bible is considered by many today to be the ‘original’ Bible and therefore ‘genuine’ and all later revisions simply counterfeits forged by ‘higher critics’. Others think the King James Bible is ‘authentic’ and ‘authorized’ and presents the original words of the authors as translated into English from the ‘original’ Greek texts. However, as Tony points out, the ‘original’ Greek text was not written until around the mid fourth century and was a revised edition of writings compiled decades earlier in Aramaic and Hebrew. Those earlier documents no longer exist and the Bibles we have today are five linguistic removes from the first bibles written. What was written in the ‘original originals’ is quite unknown. It is important to remember that the words ‘authorized’ and ‘original’, as applied to the Bible do not mean ‘genuine’, ‘authentic’ or ‘true’.

By the early third century, it became well noted that a problem was occurring . politics! In 251AD, the number of Presbyter’s (roving orator or priest) writings had increased dramatically and bitter arguments raged between opposing factions about their conflicting stories. According to Presbyter Albius Theodoret (circa 255), there were “more than two hundred” variant gospels in use in his time. In 313, groups of Presbyters and Biscops (Bishops) violently clashed over the variations in their writings and “altar was set against altar” in competing for an audience and territory. […]

Comment: Laura has recently written an excellent review of The Book of Q and Christian Origins by Burton Mack. Here the reader will learn that “Q” is short for the German word Quelle (which is source). Q is one of the two sources for Matthew and Luke, the other being old Mark, but the unknown lost source is now named Q. While this subject comes up under the subject heading of Q hypothesis - (synoptics criticism), since the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, it really isn’t a hypothesis anymore.

Read that last bit again: It really isn’t a hypothesis anymore. In the analysis of the Q Document, you can discover what has the highest probability of being the truth of Christianity available today. In short, this is probably the real scoop on the so-called “Bible Fraud.”

Mack writes:

In Q there is no hint of a select group of disciples, no program to reform the religion or politics of Judaism, no dramatic encounter with the authorities in Jerusalem, no martyrdom for the cause, much less a martyrdom with saving significance for the ills of the world, and no mention of a first church in Jerusalem. The people of Q simply did not understand their purpose to be a mission to the Jews, or to gentiles for that matter. They we re not out to transform the world or start a new religion.

Q’s challenge to the popular conception of Christian origins is therefore clear. If the conventional view of Christian beginnings is right, how are we to account for these first followers of Jesus? Did they fail to get his message? Were they absent when the unexpected happened? Did they carry on in ignorance or in repudiation of the Christian gospel of salvation? If, however, the first followers of Jesus understood the purpose of their movement just as Q describes it, how are we to account for the emergence of the Christ cult, the fantastic mythologies of the narrative gospels, and the eventual establishment of the Christian church and religion? Q forces the issue of rethinking Christian origins as no other document from the earliest times has done. […]

With Q in view the entire landscape of early Christian history and literature has to be revised. […]

The narrative gospels can no longer be viewed as the trustworthy accounts of unique and stupendous historical events at the foundation of the Christian faith. The gospels must now be seen as the result of early Christian mythmaking. Q forces the issue, for it documents an earlier history that does not agree with the narrative gospel accounts. […]

The issues raised are profound and far reaching. […] They strike to the heart of an entrenched reluctance in our society to discuss the mythic foundations for attitudes and values, both shared and conflictual, that influence the way we think, behave, and construct our institutions. Q can hardly be discussed without engaging in some honest talk about Christian myth and the American dream. [The Lost Gospel by Burton L. Mack]

Mack’s discussion shows how the Jesus movement was a vigorous social experiment that was generated for reasons other than an “originating event” such as a “religious experience” or the “birth of the son of God.”

The Jesus movement seems to have been a response to troubled and difficult times. Mack outlines and describes the times, and shows how the pressures of the milieu led to thinking new thoughts about traditional values and experimenting with associations that crossed ethnic and cultural boundaries. The Jesus movement was composed of novel social notions and lifestyles that denied and rejected traditional systems of honor based on power, wealth, and place in hierarchical social structures. Ancient religious codes of ritual purity, taboos against intercourse across ethnic boundaries, were rejected. People were encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to the larger, human family. Q says: “If you embrace only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?”

The Jesus people not only rejected the old order of things, they were actively at work on the questions of what ideal social order they wanted to manifest and promote. The attraction of the Jesus people to its followers was not at all based on any ideas to reform a religious tradition that had gone wrong, nor was it even thought of as a new religion in any way. It was quite simply a social movement that sought to enhance human values that grew out of an unmanageable world of confusing cultures and social histories. It was a group of like-minded individuals that created a forum for thinking about the world in new ways, coming up with new ideas that included the shocking notion that an ethnically mixed group could form its own kind of community and live by its own rules.

In addition to reconstructing the times in which the Jesus people lived, Mack presents the Q document itself, showing that it was built up in three layers, each layer being additions made in response to external pressures on the group. What is most interesting is the analysis of the first layer, the one that must be composed of the actual teachings of the man called Jesus. It seems that Jesus’ challenge to his followers was to take a deeper look at their world and challenge it in how they lived their lives.

Seven clusters of teachings, or sayings, emerged from the study of Q, and each of these express a coherent set of issues. These sayings comprise a comprehensive set of sage observations that delight in critical comment on the everyday world and unorthodox instructions that recommend unconventional behavior! The ever-present theme of Jesus’ teachings was a review of life and conventional values that promoted the idea that customary pretensions are hollow, wealth, learning, possessions, secrets, rank, and power are meaningless in terms of the true value of a human being. Jesus was promoting the idea that the Emperor is naked, though in no way did he propose any idea of changing the system. Implicit in his critique is the idea that there is a better way to live. The challenge was to be able to live without being consumed with worry even if one was fully aware that the world “out there” was a dangerous jungle that required care to navigate.

When fully analyzed and compared with other norms of the time, Jesus emerges as a man living the life of the popular philosophy of the Cynic. This is striking because the Cynics are remembered as distinctly unlovable because they promoted biting sarcasm and public behavior that was designed to call attention to the absurdity of standard conventions.

Apparently many responded to the movement and associations of like-minded people began to form. And then, something very interesting happened… Suddenly, in the next layer of Q, a heightened sense of belonging to a movement becomes obvious because injunctions given as aphorisms now become rules supported by arguments. At this point, the idea of the “Kingdom of God” enters the picture. This “Kingdom” was, apparently, a realm or domain in which the rule of God is actualized. The rule of God is what the Q people said they were representing in the world. For the Jesus people, this meant something quite different from what Christians now assume it to mean. First of all, there was nothing at all apocalyptic about it (all that came later). For the Jesus people, the Kingdom of God was compared repeatedly to the natural process of growth as witnessed in Nature. Everything about this “Kingdom of God” was practical, having to do with things that can be accomplished in contrast to the conventional life.

The match between the Cynics and the Jesus people is not exact in all cases because the Jesus people DID have an interest in the “Divine” aspect of “God.” Unfortunately, there is little in the Q document that explains this Divine source other than the fact that the Jesus people represented it as a “Father” and those who could successfully resist the ruin of social evils were the “children of God.” The way the Jesus people referred to God was a bit more serious than the way the Cynics referred to such ideas. The Q people were concerned with the care of their members as a “family.” I would suggest that there was a perception of differences in human beings among the Q people, though Mack does not make a special point of analyzing that issue.

Mack continues to examine and identify the stages in the Jesus movement, including the point at which the movement experienced rejection, criticism, and censure. A sudden shift in tone is noted in the third layer of Q. This is one of the more interesting parts of the book which describes an extremely troubled phase of the movement. There is a concern with loyalty noted, which suggests that there had been pressure from some outside authority, and betrayal from within. At this point, the role of Jesus was expanded, and this seems to have been related to mutual recognition of other “Jesus people.” The movement must have been growing quite fast and threatening the authorities, and some action must have been taken which resulted in the need to find criteria for who was or was not a real follower of the teachings. So it was that concern for loyalty to the teachings resulted in the need to recast Jesus as the authoritative founder of the movement whose teachings must be “kept”. That is to say, the shift in focus was from the teachings to the teacher. The next step was, of course, loyalty to Jesus himself.

The question is, of course, what happened? The document doesn’t tell us, though it hints at the nature of the problem by virtue of the additional text that dealt with the issues. There were, obviously, painful experiences that were turned to a lesson. Mack suggests that the formation of Jesus people “families” must have seriously offended certain authorities.

It seems that families were being split, and ethnic conventions were being personally challenged over loyalty to the movement. The evidence indicates that this occurred in relation to Judaism.

Here we find the most fascinating twist of all in the development of Christianity. If the Jesus people had not been attacked by the Jewish authorities, they would not have sought to justify their movement in terms of the Jewish religion. It was only in defense that they did this. They ran afoul of the Pharisaic code, probably because they had Jewish members whose families were horrified at the participation of their children or relatives in the new movement. The issue of loyalty came to be phrased as a “Jewish” question, and the Jesus people felt they had to answer it in Jewish terms.

And so it was that the Jesus people turned to the labor of mythmaking. They had to find ways to best their critics by turning their own words against them. They began to search for self-justifying arguments, examples in support of their own movement. They were only doing it in the sense of the Cynic system of argumentation, but the results were nonlinear. What they presented as their arguments was then adopted as REAL, and the Jesus people made an implicit claim on the cultural heritage of the Jews.

It is clear that the individuals who did this were not well versed in the Jewish writings. They made no appeals to such obvious things as the promises to the patriarchs, the priestly covenants, the Mosaic law, the Davidic covenant, and so on. Most of the allusions to Judaism were taken from popular oral traditions that would have been available to non-Jews of the time.

Mack next takes the reader through the process of exactly how the subsequent myth was built, layer by layer, and it is fascinating. Effectively, what happened was that a group of people created a myth of broad - even global - horizons by elaborating on the sayings of an unlikely sage of Cynic persuasion who was reconceived as a wisdom teacher, an apocalyptic prophet, the son of God, and the means of atonement for all the world’s sins if people would just “believe.” By degrees, Jesus was saying things that only the wisdom of God could reveal. An amazing accommodation with Jewish piety against which earlier battles had raged was made, and Jesus was now quoting scriptures as proof texts that he was the son of God whose kingdom would only be revealed at the end of time.

This brings us back to the fact that Christians don’t like myths. At some level they surely know that Christianity based on the narrative gospels is a myth, but they are in denial. They cannot deal with the fact that, for the original followers of the teachings of Jesus, there was no need to claim any epic legitimacy. To them, Jesus was simply a Cynic sage whose insights were tried and tested and found to be good. His success was in his masterful Cynic discourse that challenged others to try a different way of living.

The most ironic thing about the development of Christianity as a global religion is that it has aligned itself with Judaism as a “daughter” when the facts indicate that the adoption of a “Jewish” heritage was merely the result of a defensive maneuver. The Jesus people simply usurped the epic of their main detractors and used it against them. “Get off our backs. Your own history should tell you that what we represent is a critical voice in unhealthy times and has always been needed. See, we are OK even on your own terms.” It was never intended to be a serious alignment. Mack writes:

“Q puts us in touch with the earlier history of the Jesus movements, and their recollections of Jesus are altogether different. The first followers of Jesus did not know about or imagine any of the dramatic events upon which the narrative gospels hinge. […] All of these events must and can be accounted for as mythmaking in the Jesus movements, with a little help from the martyrology of the Christ, in the period after the Roman-Jewish war. The narrative gospels have no claim as historical accounts. The gospels are imaginative creations whose textual resources and social occasions can be identified. The reasons for their composition can be explained. They are documents of intellectual labor normal for people in the process of experimental group formation. […]”

From the above, we can almost understand why so many must insist on denying these conclusions. So much energy, for two thousand years, has been put into this mythology, into related mythologies, including an entire industry that today tries to come up with novel and alternative explanations for who Jesus was, whether or not he was married, did he die of a blood clot, is the Shroud of Turin authentic, and so on and so on. It seems, based on the Q document, that it is unlikely that Jesus was even Jewish.

Mack is NOT saying that there was not something going on at that period of history. Clearly there was. Clearly, there WAS a teacher and a teaching and followers. Of that, there can be no doubt.

Biblical scholars, of course, work very hard trying to find ways to “enhance” the picture of Jesus. For a very long time, they (and even alternative writers such as Bushby, Lincoln, Leigh, Baigent, and others) have assumed that Jesus was a unique individual, and his teachings and life must have been novel. But even this approach has failed to save the story told in the narrative gospels. When scholars reveal the results of their work outside scholarly circles, there is generally an anguished public outcry. People cannot bear to be told that Jesus did not say what Matthew, Mark and Luke say he said, and the scholars who are trying to save the buns from the fire don’t seem to be able to adequately explain to the public how they arrive at their conclusions. There is a complete lack of basic knowledge on the part of the general public about the formations of early Christianity, generally encouraged by the purveyors of the “religion” itself. “Thou shalt not ask questions,” they intone solemnly, and the threats of hell-fire and damnation are intimated for those who even open the cover of a book on the subject.

The average Christian is horrified to think that Matthew was either lying, or was mistaken, or he made it all up and didn’t bother to inform the reader that he was making stuff up. Mack deals with this issue in some detail and even if the explanation will produce discomfort in many Christians, the explanation is “eminently understandable.” The fact is, the authors of early Christian texts, following a tradition of Greco-Roman attitudes and practices with regard to sayings or maxims of a teacher, felt perfectly free to attribute new sayings, and even deeds, to Jesus. At various points in the history of these early groups, when certain tensions arose, it was seen as necessary and useful to recast the character of Jesus by speech attribution and narrative changes. This is exactly what was done, and the evidence is in the textual analyses. It was in this sense that the history of the Q community was traced.

At the first stage, the discourse was playful and the behavior public. The people of Q were challenging one another to live a life of integrity despite the social repercussions.

The second stage was that of forming groups. Apparently, these experiments in behavior produced satisfying results and more and more people were attracted to the idea. Human relationships became a particular focus, and there was no evidence of any idea of reforming society or any demand for conversion of outsiders.

And then, the third shift: apparently, when groups were formed, this attracted very negative attention. The distress signal in the text is evident, and it is also evident that it was not a consequence of weariness with reproach or discouragement, but rather that there was a definite and dangerous social conflict relating to certain members of the Q groups.

And then, another stage occurred, a period during which the people of Q began to see themselves as carriers of a social movement with a purpose in the grander scheme of things.

It was in this context that the ideas of the Christ cult of northern Syria overshadowed and even erased the memories and importance of Jesus, the Cynic teacher. As Mack points out, the cost of surviving the Roman-Jewish war must have been very high. This part of the discussion is particularly interesting, and one can speculate on the possibility of an esoteric tradition being combined with the social experiment and converted into a history. The “real” Jesus disappeared from the story because the narrative gospels told a more exciting tale that promised wonderful things in terrible times, and Jesus became the “lynchpin” of all history.

After reading Mack’s book, Tony Bushby’s The Bible Fraud is even sillier than I originally thought. It will have to join a host of others - including Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the Da Vinci Code, The Templar Revelation, The Jesus Conspiracy, Jesus the Magician, and just about everything that assumes a priori that there is ANYTHING even remotely historical in the narrative gospels - on the trash heap.

Yes, it’s all a fraud, no doubt about that, but not exactly the way so many are claiming nowadays when they create their equally ridiculous “New Age” or “alternative” mythologies to replace the Dead Man on a Stick nonsense.

I say good riddance to all of it.

Lots of people looking for information about St. Malachy and his predictions of the popes, plus the Da Vinci Code (find some startling info at that link) and Nostradamus

This blog I found have them all covered!

(sarcasm on) Well, this is a surprise. (sarcasm off)

Germany’s Cardinal Ratzinger Elected Pope

VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, the Roman Catholic Church’s leading hard-liner, was elected the new pope Tuesday in the first conclave of the new millennium. He chose the name Benedict XVI and called himself “a simple, humble worker.”

Got Visa?

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. [Revelation 13:16, 17]”

Further reading:
666: The Mark of the Beast?
Is Bush the AntiChrist?
The Beast and His Empire

From the Signs of the Times:

Cardinal Speaks Out Against “Dictatorship Of Relativism”
German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke against the ideology that there are no absolute truths in a homily given on Monday.

Vatican City — As cardinals prepare to choose Pope John Paul’s successor, there’s some blunt talk from a Vatican official often mentioned as a leading candidate.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany delivered the homily Monday as cardinals held a pre-conclave Mass. In his message, Ratzinger spoke against “a dictatorship of relativism;” the ideology that there are no absolute truths.

He and other cardinals will sequester themselves inside the Sistine Chapel in a few hours.

Thousands of pilgrims and tourists are expected to converge on St. Peter’s Square to watch the chapel chimney for the white smoke that will tell the world the church’s 265th pontiff has been elected.

At a Mass on Sunday, an Italian cardinal told believers that “The new pope has already been chosen by the Lord. We just have to pray to understand who he is.”

Comment: Of course! The conclave is NOT about a bunch of power-mad psychopaths getting together and choosing the best person to continue the millennia-old deception, rather, it’s all about listening for the sweet murmurings of the lord as he informs the world who his “chosen one” is. The zinger of a Rat in robes wants us all to believe that relativism is evil, which is just another way of saying that using your god-given ability to detect horse hockey when you smell it might expose the liars. Just put your trust in the Catholic Church - a monolithic propaganda and deception machine - and believe that absolute truths really exist, specifically the “absolute truth” that the Pope is god’s spokesman on earth. Thankfully, the lord really does work in mysterious ways. We can see his plans for this screwed up planet in the mysterious orbit of a meteorite…

The Bush presidency is not conservative. It is populist and radical, says Jeffrey Hart, its policies deformed by the influence of Christian extremism

Sunday, April 17, 2005

During the 2000 Republican primaries, in the third televised debate, the candidates were asked by a panelist to name the political philosopher who had most influenced them. Most replied in a conventional way, Tocqueville always a safe bet. No one would say Machiavelli, of course. But George W. Bush answered “Jesus Christ.”

Silence. That answer wavered in the air like a knuckle ball, the panelists were afraid to whiff.

Too bad, because Jesus teaches little or nothing about politics. His focus is inward, to the purity of the soul.

No doubt Bush meant that to be a good man is to be a good president. But that would have been a subject for debate. Jimmy Carter was widely thought a good man, as was the first George Bush. Neither ranks high as a president. Franklin Roosevelt was thought deceptive and disingenuous, but was elected four times and usually ranks in the top 10 among presidents.

One thing everyone can agree upon about Bush is that as president he has brought religion into politics in a way unknown to recent memory. And he has owed both of his electoral victories to his Evangelical Christian base. This indispensable base has profoundly affected his policies, foreign and domestic.

The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.
[…]

Whatever happened to separation of Church and State? Will the day come when non-believers are once again burned at the stake? Stay tuned…

I did want to mention that I’d read in the paper the other day about how US citizens will now need a passport to re-enter the US from Canada, of all places.

Editorial: Passport to irritation / O Canada! Americans overreact for security
[…]Actually, it’s not clear why Canada, a respectable, efficient nation and a good neighbor, can’t be trusted to keep terrorists out of its own country. And why the insistence on passports for U.S. travelers coming from Mexico, when that border is porous?

[…]A traveler who is admitted to France can go on to Germany, a fellow European Union member, without the formality of showing a passport. France and Germany are not immune as targets in the war on terror, but they trust their safety to something more than a fortress mentality.

Get ready to hand over your passports, because this is America. We can only hope that making a great show of security isn’t the main point of the xercise.

So, let’s add this to the lengthing list of controls being implemented by the Patriot Act. This biblical quote comes to mind:

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, have he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” [Revelation 13:16, 17]

A few articles that deal with the subject, “The Beast and His Empire” and “Is Bush the Antichrist?” make for some interesting reading. A friend told me that the new regulations state that you cannot store more than six months of food in your house because that is what terrorists do. How do you measure six months of food? Will we be put under surveillance if we buy a really big freezer?