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How scientists cheat

2010-08-05T02:56:00.000+03:00

Models, Hypotheses and Logic in Science

[...]"the logic of science," said John Stuart Mill, "is also that of business and life," and science, said T. H. Huxley, is "organised common sense." Indeed, scientific philosophy does produce much the same conclusions as common sense.

Faced with unexplained observations, a scientist is advised to devise a model. In some fields this model can be a physical object but, on many other occasions, the word model is interchangeable with hypothesis. In the philosophy of science the two words have somewhat different meanings but here the distinction is unimportant. If a hypothesis successfully predicts the outcome of many critical experiments, then it is proved beyond reasonable doubt and has become a theory.

The term beyond reasonable doubt, again brings out the analogies between scientific and legal investigations. Scientific logic is the logic of investigation and decision making everywhere. No theory is ever actually proved, it is only not disproved while lawyers use the phrase "beyond reasonable doubt" to recognise that the guilt of a defendant is never proved with absolute certainty. Guilt is proved only beyond reasonable doubt.

Models

A model is a set of axioms or postulates which, it is thought, might fairly describe the nature of the phenomenon being studied. Model building is like using an intellectual version of a child's construction kit; scientists gather a set of axioms and concepts (the component parts of a hypothesis), assemble them into a model and compare its behaviour with that of nature. Models are valuable because they can be used to predict the outcome of experiments and scientists compare these predictions with observation. They may discard a new model immediately if it fails to predict existing results. More usefully, the predictions of a model will guide the experimenter's hand, enabling him to design investigations to differentiate two or more opposing ideas. The model(s) failing to predict the outcome of the test being discarded in favour of those that do.

Philosophers of science point out overarching or general models, called paradigms, ideas that are very wide-ranging and provide the framework for the formation of many more specific models. An example might be Newton's mechanics, a paradigm whose ideas are contained in lots of narrower models from fields as diverse as atomic theory and cosmology.

Classic Scientific Logic

There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said. Hermann Bondi (Quoted by Magee (1973))

Model building is the classic description of scientific method expounded at length by Karl Popper in his famous books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1968) and Conjectures and Refutations (1972). His approach, often called the hypothetico-deductive method, is accepted as a major feature of scientific logic. Popper is often thought to have regarded falsification as the centre of scientific logic but this is an error. To him falsification was extremely important and the elaboration of this principle was his own major contribution. However, he also held that all ideas, even his own, could and should be subject to reasoned, rational criticism. This principle of critical rationalism originated in ancient Greece, not with Popper, but to him it, not falsification, was the central scientific principle. Thus, it is necessary to be clear about the meaning of these two words, rationality and criticism.

The philosophy of rationality is the philosophy of the enlightenment. It originated much earlier but was elaborated in the 17th and 18th century by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and others in response to the growing success of science. Rationalism incorporates the principles of logic and certain ideas about the universe. It holds, for example, that there is only one single reality, hence that a person cannot simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs about the world. It follows that to assert one theory is to simultaneously reject all competing theories. To assert otherwise is, in the strict meaning of the word, irrational. Further, a rational belief must be based on sufficient reason and that a rational believer should proffer reasons that are sufficient to justify holding his view. Rationality asserts that, to hold any belief, one must equally accept all the logical deductions that flow from it. The process of testing ideas by experiment depends on this principle, it leads to the conclusion that inconsistent experimental results undermine a theory.

Rationalism does contain different streams of thought, one split being into subjective and objective rationality. The latter is exemplified by Popper and asserts that the external world is real and that science seeks that reality. Objective rationalisty is the traditional system and remains the foundation of science, it reject all authorities other than observation and reason but does accept that no certain conclusions can ever be drawn. Subjective rationalists include pragmatists and naturalists, who note that lack of certainty and conclude that ultimate reality must reside in humans themselves - their motives, objectives and beliefs. The subjective/objective distinction was made by Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (1947), who attacked subjective philosophies noting how they can rationalise any act, for example, "I have to consider my own best interests," or "I was just following orders". Thus subjective rationality can maintain bizarre social practices, such as witchcraft, or become the tool of authoritarian social attitudes. Such social impacts led Horkheimer to reject all subjective rationality, adding that the, "denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render." Both in science and elsewhere, people who use the word rationality normally mean objective rationality.

Coming now to the meaning of criticise - to find fault with. This is word that does have quite negative overtones but finding fault is exactly what scientists are asked to do with theories - hypothesis testing is a negative logic. However, they are not asked to give just any criticism, it should be rational, reasoned criticism. The three practical characteristics, of such criticism were summed up by Bertrand Russell (1935, p66) in his description of reason, "in the first place it relies upon persuasion rather than force; in the second place it seeks to persuade by arguments which the man using them believes to be completely valid; and in the third place it uses observation .... as much as possible and intuition as little as possible." The first of these rules out the use of inquisitorial methods, the second rules out the use of propaganda and the third rules out appeals to the emotions or self-interest of the audience.

The implication of this is that critically rationalist debate requires certain behaviours from participants, generally that they be seriously seeking the truth. Thus, they must present all arguments they believe to be valid and may only present arguments they believe to be valid; both facts and opinions must be reported honestly. To enable criticism, such presentations must be open and available to all. A further facet of critical rationalism is, "the principle of sufficient reason", decisions are not made arbitrarily but must be founded on reasons that are stated and adequate to justify the verdict.

Critically rational debate in science, involves relevant experiment and the last idea surviving after a period of such debate becomes knowledge. We can never be sure that a piece of knowledge is true, because a better idea or contrary observation may come along later. Nevertheless such knowledge is the closest we can come to knowing external reality. Because doubt can always be expressed, it is often useful to think of knowledge as a contrast concept to a guess (Harré (1972)). Knowledge is the product of a rationally considered choice between alternative hypotheses, rather than choosing between them by guesswork. Thus, one may not randomly choose two alternatives from three, then conduct a rational debate to decide which of these two is correct. Such a mixing of rationality with irrationality is simply irrational.

These principles of critical rationalism generate the ethical imperatives of science. Popper suggested that they separate random ideas from knowledge, pseudoscience from science; modern scientists agree. It is evident that many human dialogues are not critically rationalist. In many situations the aim of participants in dialogue is to "win," whatever that may mean in their circumstances. Accordingly, in Popper's hands, critical rationalism became more than a scientific principle, he saw it as the alternative to all authoritarianism and it guided his political thinking. To him these principles underlay the freedom of speech and democracy upon which western society prides itself. Science is often held up as a bastion against authoritarianism because of this.

Today Popper's ideas are widely accepted. So much so that they are offered as advice to prospective research students. For example, Phillips & Pugh (1987), begin their advice to students by demolishing an older scientific philosophy, the idea that science starts with the gathering of disparate facts by entirely objective and dispassionate researchers:-

The myth of scientific method is that it is inductive: that the formulation of scientific theory starts with the basic raw evidence of the senses - simple unbiased unprejudiced observation. Out of these sensory data, commonly referred to as "facts" - generalizations will form. The myth is that from a disorderly array of factual information an orderly, relevant theory will somehow emerge. However the starting point of induction is an impossible one.

They point out that even scientists are human and begin with their own prejudices:-

There is no such thing as an unbiased observation. Every act of observation is a function of what we have seen or otherwise experienced in the past. All scientific work of an experimental or exploratory nature starts with some expectation about the outcome. This expectation is an hypothesis. They provide the initiative and incentive for the enquiry and influence the method. It is in the light of an expectation that some observations are held to be relevant and some irrelevant, that one methodology is chosen and others discarded, that some experiments are conducted and others are not. Where is your naive pure and objective researcher now?

Then, crucially, they go on - all scientists start with a hypothesis, a model, but they must never think they have proved it - they must try to disprove it :-

Hypotheses arise by guesswork, or by inspiration, but having been formulated they can and must be tested rigorously, using the appropriate methodology. If the predictions you make as a result of deducing certain consequences from your hypothesis are not shown to be correct then you must discard or modify your hypothesis. If the predictions turn out to be correct then your hypothesis has been supported and may be retained until such time as some further test shows it not to be correct. Once you have arrived at your hypothesis, which is a product of your imagination, you then proceed to a strictly logical and rigorous process, based upon deductive argument - hence the term "hypothetico-deductive".

Prejudices may govern how a hypothesis is created but it is illegitimate to display the same prejudice when comparing its predictions with data. A scientist should permit criticism of his ideas and accept disproofs, even of his own models, when they are there.

Probable and Improbable Hypotheses

Not all models are equal. Apart from well thought out concepts, a whole range of improbable or downright silly notions could be created to account for a set of observed results - Heath Robinson could have worked on scientific theories had he so chosen. How one model is chosen for test, and another deemed silly, is for the judgement of scientists but the verdict should not be random. Intuition, guesswork, prejudice, analogy or any other thought process may help conceive a model but, once devised, there is little reason for the judgement of its reasonableness to be personal and absolutely none for the interpretation to be inexplicable or secret. Scientists can articulate the reasons to consider one model, while dismissing another. There are analogous situations.

[...]Great scientists may be distinguished by their insight into how to eliminate unworkable models. This is scientific strategy but it is a phase of reasoning almost never recorded. During their training, scientists do not read books explaining the principles used to reduce the number of hypotheses to be considered. Even so, practising scientists must surely use such principles, possibly subconsciously. Analysis of this thinking is quite disparate. Most thought has been due to philosophers of science, with their demarcation criteria, and to sociologists of science, who simply ask the workers concerned. In both cases their studies are little read by practising scientists, some will be reviewed later. It is strange that this stage of reasoning is so little recorded. Not only is it perfectly possible to make a record but, at times, scientists have an evident duty to do so.

[...]Three Stages of Scientific Method

The hypothetico-deductive method can be seen as requiring three phases in a scientific thought. These phases are -

1. Laying down, or brainstorming, of all possible explanations of an observation. As many hypotheses as possible can be created here as this gives the best chance of the "correct" model being among those considered. The inclusion of incorrect models should be unimportant.

2. A judgement or strategy based screening of the various models to decide between those worthy of being tested and those that can be discarded on some general principle - some demarcation criterion. For this stage to work, it should be regarded as permissible to criticise the ideas put forward in stage 1. The models surviving this stage are likely to be those for which a reasonable … priori (or prima facie) case can be made.

3. Test of surviving models against empirical observation, either by reference to available data, or by designing new and critical experiments.

The three stages need not be executed consecutively. A new hypothesis may be advanced at any time, even after attempts have been made to test other hypotheses. No theory is ever proved. All theories are open to challenge and criticism may be advanced at any time.

Moreover, there is no reason why a new hypothesis should not be proposed by anybody, including people not deemed to be "expert". Non-experts, people without considerable training, would find it difficult to produce a theoretical novelty that could not be dismissed by reference to established experimental data or a demarcation criterion. Even so, there is no logical barrier to them doing so. The task of criticising theories seems easier than that of devising them and may well be within the capabilities of non-experts but, in practice, the difficulty of the task is not the only fence an amateur would have to jump. Even if his new theory, or his criticisms, met all scientific criteria, the non-scientist may not be listened to by professionals. Even well-established scientists find it difficult to get new theories heard against earlier alternatives.

Of the three stages, generally only the third is found in the scientific literature. The processes going on during the first two stages are rarely recorded. This is unfortunate as the agenda of science, its operational timetable, is laid down during those earlier periods. The exclusion of a concept from that agenda is just as important as the inclusion of another, and more capable of invalidating scientific conclusions. Exclusion, at any stage, is equivalent to saying a theory is wrong. No experiment can ever be done without some form of screening process having been performed but the scientific literature explains these stages only after the event or, more probably, does not explain them at all. When it does, the presentation is a sanitised representation of what may have been a messy process.

To put it another way, and more baldly, it is during those first two stages of a scientific programme that decisions are made as to how research funds will be allocated. In the real world, those decisions largely prejudge the outcome of scientific inquiry, yet there is little study of their formation and only the most opaque of records.

Gatekeepers and the Management of Science

Whatever system of philosophy is adopted, science poses certain unavoidable management problems. Its fields are highly specialised and proper, effective decisions depend upon access to technical knowhow. Such expertise is normally available only from the scientists themselves. To ensure such knowledge is available during administrative decisions, certain scientists, are appointed to decision making positions involving, for example, deciding what projects should receive research funds, which individuals will be appointed or promoted, or what papers will be published. The scientists chosen for these roles have often distinguished themselves in some way and are the elite of science. These gatekeepers play a key role in scientific management.

Scientific gatekeepers decide what is, or is not, science. Their corporate decisions define science in an administrative and practical way, marking out the area of human endeavour called science. Something in the nature of gatekeeping exists for all subcultures and the role is a key and often very powerful one. Most professional subcultures try to select gatekeepers so as to avoid their having any personal vested interest in the decisions they will take. However, science is different in this regard. Because of its highly technical nature, science selects its gatekeepers solely from the field being gatekept. As a result, virtually every gatekeeping decision in science is taken by an individual with a very definite self-interest in its outcome. Also, there is almost no definition of gatekeeping responsibilities and virtually no public accountability for the way gatekeepers discharge their roles. Scientific gatekeeping decisions are taken anonymously, even those affected are kept ignorant of the identity of the person who made it and the rationale he used.[...]

It is most disturbing. The gatekeepers of a field are its existing experts. They can exclude views, not merely because those views lack sense, but simply because they "disagree" with them, and in this context "disagree" can have a range of meaning running from "disagree," through "can't reply," to "I'm jealous." In "disagreeing", gatekeepers can and do turn their back on reasoned explanations. This administrative state of affairs flies in the face of Popperian logic, the principles of critical rationalism, openness and freedom of speech. In effect, science is subject to authoritarian government by gatekeepers.

Chronological Order Dictates Merit

It seems that what matters about a theory is not whether it is right or wrong but whether it was proposed first, second or third etc. (Who proposed it also matters, if the innovator is himself already a gatekeeper things are different.) The first theory in a field is advocated by its first workers. Those workers are taken to be experts. New hypotheses are assessed, anonymously and without unaccountability, by the same men who, now acting in the role of gatekeeper, have a vested interest - an interest in thwarting any ideas that threaten to replace those from which their own influence flows. Those "experts" have complete freedom to reply to the alternative in a rationalist way, simply ignore or patronise the upstart idea or perhaps even steal it. If a good argument is available to rebut an alternative theory, they will no doubt present it in their reply. But even if the newly developed theory is plainly superior, the "expert" gatekeeper is in no way obliged to accept or even consider it. New theories can simply be stifled by gatekeeper disinterest.[...]

Weakness of the Hypothetico-deductive Method

Popper's basic idea, of model (or hypothesis) falsification based on critical rationalism and its concomitant antiauthoritarianism, is the accepted base of scientific logic. It is a testing protocol linking scientific ideas to experimental reality. This link, connecting theory, through experiment, to reality, is the reason for the great success of science as a philosophy but it is not a perfect link - it has weaknesses. The main problem is in the early phases of the process. Firstly, science makes almost no record of how it decides which models or theories it should test. Secondly, and compounding the first problem, in the real world scientific judgement is clouded by the personal subjectivities and deviations of scientists themselves. Thus it is that the initial development and selection of models to be tested, a process not necessarily linked to experiment at all, that remains the major logical difficulty inherent in the paradigm of falsification.

Robert K. Merton enunciated principles of scientific ethics which included Universalism, the belief that ideas must be considered without regard for their origins or who proposed them and this is implicit in Popper's logic. However, that cannot mean all theories must be translated into experiment, that would be impractical. To put it baldly, again, the problem is how to decide which research projects to fund. Especially, how this is decided when sociological observation indicates that the advice given by scientists themselves is hampered by personal subjectivities and deviations from logic. It is necessary to have some ground, some demarcation criterion, to decide before experiment, which theories are most likely to be correct.

In law, similar problems can arise. On the basis of the law and the evidence before him, a judge must often try a case but be unsure of the right decision. If the case is a criminal case, the benefit of this doubt will go to the defendant. In a civil action a judge may be forced to take some kind of practical line. He does not have the luxury of scratching his head for ever, he must decide on the balance of probability. He will need to find a rationale, even if it is not perfectly logical. This may lead the judge to error but it is unlikely it will lead him to fraud - he must give an open account of his judgement and explain the case and how it relates to the law. If he gets these things wrong his judgement is subject to appeal. What is more, a judge should never try a case in which there was any hint of a personal interest.

In one role, a scientist can scratch his head and vacillate between two theories for ever, or stick to a wrong theory purely to save face. There will always be some argument to put. Set against a great mass of often conflicting experimental data, no opposing scientific theory will ever be completely perfect. But gatekeepers are the judges of science and for scientists in this things are different, at the end of the day they must decide. When they go home at night, they must have made funding decisions, or job appointment decisions, or publication decisions. They must decide - whether or not they are sure. A rationale must be found even if it is not perfectly logical. However, although he is forming a judgement, the gatekeeper is not in nearly the same position as a judge. He is not subject to the discipline of explaining his decisions or recounting any scientific law or principle. What is more, he would not be deciding the issue at all unless he had a vested interest in its outcome. For the gatekeeper the temptation to follow the easy route of his interests or relativism must be very real.

In these circumstances problems arise, more for everyone else than for the gatekeeper. There are logical approaches, demarcation criteria, for selecting without experiment those theories most likely to be valid and therefore to reward funding. But how can anyone be sure the gatekeeper follows them? The observer is in a predicament. Strictly, the problem should be addressed by the administrators of science but, [...] they are content. That is not surprising - they are the gatekeepers.

Reducing the number of models - Demarcation Criteria

We will now turn to the question of which hypotheses are scientific. How to choose from a range of possibilities those hypotheses that are worthy of attention and deserve to be pursued. Philosophers of science address this problem by laying down demarcation criteria. A new theory should then be tested against the chosen criterion. Those ideas which satisfy the demarcation criteria would be most likely to be productive and most attention would be payed to them. The following sections present a series of demarcation criteria, though it may not be complete.

Popper

The main demarcation criterion associated with Popper is falsifiability - in order to be scientific, a hypothesis should be falsifiable - it should make predictions that can be tested by observation or experiment. By tested, Popper meant some of its predictions must be such that, at least in principle, the contrary could be observed. This was his primary demarcation criterion and was seen by him as very important. On this basis, for example, he criticised the various schools of psychiatric thought because each could accommodate all observations. As a result the ideas did not compete with one another and attempts to distinguish them could not be informative. This test separates the hypotheses inherent in an act of faith - religion for example - from a scientific hypothesis. The statement, "God created the heavens and the earth," cannot be contradicted by observation. Therefore, Popper would not see it as a scientific hypothesis, whether or not it is believed true.

The idea is that only models which can, in principle, be falsified are scientific - others need not be considered. It is useful to view this assertion from a different perspective. Popper is saying that, to be meaningful, a scientific theory must deny something. The idea must prohibit some observations from being made; this is extremely important, because Popper's logic is purely negative, it asserts that the actual meaning of a theory lies not in what it asserts about the universe but what it denies. Some philosophers go further, arguing that any statement has meaning only in what it denies. Thus, even a sentence as simple as, "this paper is white," actually means, "this paper is not, not white." I.e. it is not green, not blue etc.

Falsifiability is the first example of a strategy, or general principle, for reducing the number of models. It is probably the most widely discussed demarcation criterion and shows at once that asserting a scientific theory is equivalent to denying alternatives.

Popper listed two other criteria besides falsifiability. Firstly, a good, new theory should, "proceed from some simple, new, and powerful unifying idea," (Conjectures and Refutations). It should, in principle, be able to unify a body of knowledge that would otherwise be a set of disparate facts. Secondly, Popper held that it should pass some tests. A good new theory should make at least one successful prediction not apparent from existing theory. This seems rather restrictive but is not as bad as sounds. Popper would not have demanded that a theoretical astronomer build a radio telescope before publishing a new theory. Predictions explaining data within existing knowledge do meet this criterion.[...]

2.16 Metaphysical Logic and Scientific Logic

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. (Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays)

The distinction between science and metaphysics is significant because there seems to be a significant difference between the logics of metaphysics and science. Science seeks to disprove a hypothesis and a persistent failure to do so leads to its acceptance. This is the negative logic of falsification. Metaphysics is not quite like this; before the existence of a postulated entity should be accepted, there needs to be positive reason to require the existence in question. For example, the postulate of life on Mars is a postulate of existence. It may be believed or not but well-justified belief would require positive supportive evidence, such as Martian roses.

In laying down theories, scientists do not normally distinguish science from metaphysics. That may be unfortunate, much of the philosophical disputation between confirmation and elimination of theories might be removed if this were done. Metaphysical logic seems to be largely the positive logic of confirmation, while scientific logic seems largely the negative logic of falsification.

Popper's hypothetico-deductive model applies to the scientific parts of theories but not so obviously to their metaphysical elements. It is generally a very difficult, or even universally impossible, task to disprove a metaphysical postulate. Even though it seems very unlikely, it would be difficult to actually prove that there is no life on the moon.

However, it is only when a metaphysical idea has supportive evidence that it becomes important. As an example, consider the atomic theory of matter. As every schoolboy knows, the idea of atoms was originally advanced by the Greeks but in this form the idea was metaphysical speculation unsupported by evidence. The idea of atoms was merely a conjecture, unproven, unlinked to any body of experimental evidence, and irrelevant to any possible course of action. Agnosticism was a rational view of the debate about atoms until Dalton's chemical laws, based as they were on observation, began to require them for chemical interpretations. The observations that positively required atoms also made them relevant, and they began to influence men's actions. In the twentieth century, photographs of atoms have been obtained, and disbelief has become irrational.

In logic, then, you just cannot win. Theories need positive evidence for the entities whose existence they postulate. Then they need negative disproof of competing theories.[...]

Occam's Razor - the Coherence Criterion

A principle stated in correspondence by Dr. John Maddox, as Editor-in-Chief of Nature is that a hypothesis should be "grounded on previous understanding or observation." To take his example, in the nineteenth century there might have been competing hypotheses about the make up of the moon. One school of thought arguing the moon was made of rock, another school advancing the view that it was green cheese. As he says, even without experiment intelligent scientists would not have considered the green cheese hypothesis, because it was founded upon no present knowledge or observation. There are other, rather trite, reasons to reject the green cheese model. Cheese is a dairy product made by men from milk, in turn produced by lactating mammals. The green cheese hypothesis implies that men and other mammals are at large within the solar system, giving the green cheese hypothesis some very complex, improbable and unsupported implications.

The existence of such complex ramifications is a general reason for rejecting, or at least downgrading, a hypothesis without experiment. All this boils down to Occam's razor - hypotheses involving the least possible departure from the existing body of knowledge are most likely to be correct. Hypotheses that pick up well-established ideas from related areas inherit much of their supportive evidence, much as an organism inherits many characteristics from its evolutionary forebears.

Occam's razor is related to the idea of coherence with existing knowledge. To understand coherence one may think of all knowledge as being cut into a large number of small pieces much like a jigsaw puzzle. To reassemble the picture we must examine a piece to see if the pattern on it fits in with, or coheres with, the pattern on those pieces we have already assembled in that area. For a new piece of knowledge fits comfortably in place, the shape of knowledge painted onto it should form a continuous pattern with, or cohere with, surrounding pieces.

A new claim to knowledge or a hypothesis which fails to cohere with surrounding knowledge is an extraordinary claim. Its acceptance would demand the revision of knowledge within those surrounding areas and, consequently, its acceptance demands extraordinary evidence.

Coherence, or Occam's razor, is a well known and important principle but two important caveats should be stated. Firstly, the coherence criterion must be used with care and moderation, applied rigidly it produces closed systems of thought. The pieces of the jigsaw already assembled may actually be in the wrong places. Secondly, the existing body of knowledge means exactly what it says and knowledge is well-founded belief (Popper). The existing body of knowledge does not mean the existing body of hypotheses. To be of any real value, a new idea must compete with existing suppositions used to explain the same data set. It is diametrically wrong to demand of a new hypothesis that it be consistent with the ideas it sets out to replace.

Hypothesis Testing and Probability

Many years before Popper, Bayes investigated the branch of mathematics applied to formal hypothesis evaluation and now known as Bayesian statistics. A scientific investigation links experimental results with the probability assignments attached to particular hypotheses. Before any experimental test is performed initial probabilities (known as antecedent probabilities) must be assigned to the various hypotheses. As experimental data become available these antecedent probabilities are adjusted up or down depending on whether the observations support or do not support the corresponding hypothesis. The theorem used to adjust the probabilities is known as Bayes' theorem. Some fields can use the procedure quite formally. For example, in medical diagnostics, antecedent probabilities reflect the incidence of a disease in the population. In practical science Bayes' theorem has little formal use because of the general difficulty giving objective numerical values to the antecedent probabilities. Accordingly, the theorem is neither stated nor used here. Even so, scientists must intuitively use Bayes' theorem, assigning antecedent probabilities by judgement.

Mathematicians have investigated the fallacies arising in Bayesian statistics, some of which help to clarify points made earlier. A hypothesis is meaningful only if it partitions the possibility space; for example, the hypotheses that a dice will fall as a five or as an odd number are both meaningful in that they can both be wrong - it may fall as a four. On the other hand, the hypothesis that the dice will fall with a number uppermost is not meaningful because all possible outcomes are numbers - the hypothesis cannot be falsified because it fails to partition the possibility space. This failure is what philosophers of science mean when a hypothesis is described as vacuous.

A hypothesis may be "academic" (in a pejorative sense); whether it be true or not will make no difference to actions or beliefs flowing from the statistical analysis. The distinction is important for doctors making a diagnosis - only if two diseases require different treatment, is the physician concerned to know which his patient suffers from. Returning to the example of the dice, whether it falls as a five or not will affect my actions only if I am playing snakes and ladders or have some other link to this test. For most people, the outcome of throwing dice is academic and uninteresting. In science, this pejorative form of the word academic means that whether a hypothesis is true will have no effect on perceptions of the world or how people act.

Finally, note again that a hypothesis set should be well chosen and, without overlap, cover all possible explanations. It is hard, in science, to prove that a hypothesis set does entirely cover the possibility space. The proper response to this problem is to contemplate the possibility that all the considered hypotheses are wrong. It remains very wrong to use a hypothesis set that is known not cover the possibility space.

Assessment of Antecedent Probabilities

Much of the intuitive Bayesian statistics used by practising scientists consists of the assignment of antecedent probabilities to any suggested hypotheses. This is the statistical equivalent of initial hypothesis screening [...]. If a hypothesis fails to cohere with existing knowledge, it is right to assign it a low antecedent probability. Only very clear evidence supporting it, and contradicting more cohering hypotheses, will bring its probability assignment up to a point where it would be accepted.

Invalid criteria such as relativism and self-interest will intrude on the intuitive assignment of antecedent probabilities. They will lead to the assignment of a low antecedent probability to a correct hypothesis and vice versa. However, unless the correct theory is actually assigned an antecedent probability of zero, this should only slow things down. The objective application of Bayes' theorem would steadily improve the probability assigned to the correct hypothesis as experimental data became available. (In Bayesian statistics, antecedent probabilities can, in principle, be assigned randomly but still ultimately produce good knowledge. This may be how some sciences arose from areas we would today classify as mythology. Alchemy for example led to chemistry and astrology to astronomy.) Only if the correct hypothesis is dismissed entirely will Bayesian statistics fail. If the antecedent probability assigned to a correct hypothesis is zero, Bayes' theorem will keep the probability at zero no matter what the outcome of experiment and the remaining ideas will become a closed system of thought. This seems to be true of the intuitive Bayesian scientist, just as it is of the formal statistical process.

Intuitive Bayesian statistics are applied both by individuals and by the community of scientists. Both levels will assign intuitive antecedent probabilities to hypotheses and both, being human, will err. [...] In general, the scientific community is too willing both to assign a probability of zero to dissenting ideas and to assign a probability of one its own beliefs.

The Origins of Uncertainty

It is universally accepted, and implied by use of probability theory in hypothesis testing, that no scientific theory can be known, with total certainty, to be true. Scientific certainty is lost in two general ways - uncertainty in the outcome of experiments and uncertainty in their interpretation. Our certainty in the outcome of experiments is greatly increased by care in its execution and repetition by other groups or on analogous systems. Unfortunately, these hardly improve our confidence in the interpretation of the results.

Clearly repeat experiments and studies on related systems has a role in ensuring validity of results but there are also structural and social reasons for such studies. If an experiment is cheap, quick and already within the laboratory's range, it is quite easy to perform a series of studies around a theme. Moreover, results that accord with earlier data are theoretically uncontroversial and, if the field already understands a technique, other workers are less likely to obstruct publication by raising queries about the validity of the observations. Thus, a large body of publication can quickly accumulate that hinges round one basic experiment.

For purposes of interpretation it is important to realise that, for all its size, that body of papers only amounts to one experiment. Failing to recognise this is to act like the man Wittgenstein mentions in Philosophical Investigations, who purchases several copies of the morning paper to reassure himself that what he reads there is true. Committing this fallacy is both a common individual fault and also structurally embedded in modern scientific administration. Of course, scientists do not buy many copies of their morning paper, but they do publish many copies of the same, or very similar, experiment; then they point to the "mountain of evidence" supporting their ideas.

Experiments report reality much as newspapers report news. The hypothesis used to explain their outcome is the impression of reality they give. Like a newspaper article, the scientific observations may be clear and accurate, or misleading and inaccurate. Because observations may be inaccurate, they need to be reported in a way that enables other workers to replicate them. Because the observation may be misleading, even though accurate, the generated hypothesis should be confirmed by data which is as unrelated to the original observations as possible. Reverting to Wittgenstein's analogy, his man would have been well advised to read another newspaper, one which employed a different reporter who, himself, employed different sources for the news he reported.

This point has been made by many philosophers of science; for example, in the nineteenth century, Whewell, adopted it as a criterion of induction, referring to it as the consilience of hypotheses. Although we no longer think there is a logic of induction, his point remains valid as a means of increasing our confidence in a theory. On the same lines, Popper asserted that a hypothesis supported by data of two or more distinctly different types should be preferred to an alternative able to explain only a narrow domain of data.

In summary, repetition offers confidence that the published data are accurate but those scientists who believe that repetition of data can support ideas are buying too many copies of the morning paper. No matter how many times an experiment, or its close siblings, are repeated - one hundred times or one thousand papers - repetition adds no assurance that any particular interpretation of that result into a hypothesis is valid. If another idea will explain the data from one such experiment, then it will equally apply to any number of repetitions. Assurance of interpretation can come only by comparing the success of competing hypotheses in interpreting data from disparate areas. The more dissimilar are the sources of data used the better, providing only that they do fall within the range of application of the hypotheses in question. Modern scientific administrations fail to recognise this fallacy, a failure linked closely to the procedures they use for quality assessment.

Quality Assessment - Peer Review and Citation Analysis

Science managers and gatekeepers base many policies and decisions on quality assessments. Consequently, how quality is defined, maintained and assessed, is a pivotal issue for modern science - it is also one of the few areas in which scientific practice overlaps with scientific philosophy. In principle assessment of quality in research programmes should include a rational assignment of the antecedent probability of the underlying ideas. In practice, however, the methods adopted simply abandon rationality and one of them jumps head first into Wittgenstein's fallacy, buying as many copies of the morning paper as leaders in a field might find convenient. Assessments are made at several levels, for example of :-

* Research projects before they are funded.

* The value of work before it is published in the scientific literature.

* The worth of researchers before they are appointed to posts.

These prospective evaluations are usually made by peer review. Referees, anonymous experts in the field, are selected by scientific authorities. The expert will then write a report, which is taken to be an objective evaluation of the work in question, but that report is unlikely to make any attempt at explanation and it may not be seen by the scientist concerned, who will have little or no opportunity to reply if he does see it. Besides these initial screening steps, post hoc assessments are also made of :-

* The "success" of published articles in terms of their scientific impact when set against competing articles.

* The "success" of published scientists in terms of their scientific impact when set against competing workers.

* The "status" of institutions and journals.

Sometimes such assessments are made by committees of experts but one of the most important tools used for the appraisal is citation analysis, a tool developed over the past twenty to thirty years.

A scientific paper does not stand alone, it builds on what has gone before, using other workers ideas, techniques and results. To place the work in context, the scientific article ends with a list of relevant publications showing where the ideas it used came from[...]. These are citations and they interested an American named Eugene Garfield. His Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) notes every scientific paper published and, from their citation lists, constructs a computer database, called the Science Citations Index (SCI). Scientists can use the SCI to find all papers citing any earlier article. It has proved to be a very valuable research tool, enabling workers to research a topic forward through the literature, whereas traditional abstracting media permitted only a backwards search.

The SCI is also used in quality assessments. Using it, one can easily determine how often, or whether, a paper is cited by subsequent publications, a process called citation analysis. The argument is that rarely-cited studies cannot have been very important. In making this count, the ISI itself carefully avoids the term "quality", preferring to call the resulting measure the "impact" of a paper, but scientific institutions do take this impact as a measure of quality. Journals and institutions can also be ranked according to the impact of articles published during a given period. Journals even tout their impact rating when advertising to libraries for sales or soliciting the scientific community for new papers.

This way of assessing quality means that the citation practices of authors influence the assessment of the work done by their contemporaries and colleagues. If a scientific theory is not mentioned by establishment figures, and the articles which propose it are not cited by them, the theory is automatically assessed as of low quality, even if no reason for disregarding it has been given. By contrast, if scientists go to great lengths to rebut an incorrect theory, that theory will be assessed as being of high quality, even if most observers regarded the theory as absurd from the outset.

Whatever its value as a management tool, quality assessment by citation analysis is clearly prone to Wittgenstein's fallacy. Moreover, its practical implications for the assessment of theories are clear. Under that process, ignoring, or not citing, a theory is the same as rejecting it. For their part, scientists are well aware of the quality assessment procedures used and the implications of their actions. When a scientist disregards a theory, he knows the result this will have for its assessment and presumably intends that outcome. In short, a scientist who chooses to ignore a theory, is broadcasting a message about that theory - namely that he rejects the theory as of low quality. The message thus broadcast may be implicit but the scientist knows it is sent, he knows who receives it and he knows how they will interpret and act upon it.

Both citation analysis and peer review are highly questionable as methods of quality assessment and amount to little more than statements of establishment opinion[...].

© Copyright John A Hewitt.

[Source: John A Hewitt - A Habit of Lies - How Scientists Cheat : http://freespace.virgin.net/john.hewitt1/pg_ch02.htm]

jesus is buddha

2010-07-26T21:42:00.002+03:00

Recent epoch-making discoveries of old Sanskrit manuscripts in Central Asia and Kashmir provide decisive proof that the four Greek Gospels have been translated directly from the Sanskrit.

A careful comparison, word by word, sentence by sentence shows that the Christian Gospels are Pirate-copies of the Buddhist Gospels. God's word, therefore, is originally Buddha's word.

[...] The main Buddhist sources are Mûlasarvâstivâdavinaya (MSV) and the Saddharmapundarîka (SDP). The Sukhâvatîvyûha is the source of Luke 10:17. The first words of Jesus are from the Prajnâpâramitâ. There are a few other Buddhist sources, and of course the numerous quotations from the Old Testament, but the main sources are, without any shadow of doubt, the MSV (parts of which, again, prove more important than others), and the SDP.

[...] The Sanskrit TRi-RaTNaS becomes the Latin TRi-NiTaS.

[...] 1. Matthew 1:1 runs:

biblos geneseôs, ´Iêsou Khristou, huiou Daueid, huiou ´Abraam.

Book of descent, of Jesus Christ, of son David, of son Abraham.

Commentary:
One person cannot possibly be the son of two different fathers belonging to two widely different periods of time. The son of David, the son of Abraham not only has two fathers. He is also the son of Man, of mary, of Joseph etc.
The original source solves the intentional paradoxes.
The source is the introduction to the MSV.
Ma-hâ-Maud-gal-yâ-ya-nam, becoming the Math-thai-on le-go-me-non, Matthew 9:9, introduces the MSV by relating the legend of the vamsas = biblos of the kula, genitive, kulasya = geneseôs of the Sâkyas in Kapila-vastu, alias Ka-phar-naoum.

The genitive form of ksatriyas, son of a king, is ksa-tri-yas-ya. These four syllables in Greek become ´Iê-sou Khris-tou. As will be seen , when comparing the Greek and the Sanskrit, all the syllables and consonants of the original Sanskrit have been preserved. This means, in this case, that the - sou of ´Iêsou represents the genitive ending of ksatriyasya, namely -sya. Moreover, the `I represents the y.
There are , to be sure, several Sanskrit originals behind Jesus. More about this later on. Normally Sanskrit ksatriyas becomes ho Khristos in the Greek. Th article ho is there in order to imitate the three syllables of the original. So, as a rule, Sanskrit ksa-tri-yas is translated as ho khris-tos. Such a ksatriyas is also anointed. Thus the Greek represents not only the sound but also the sense of the Sanskrit perfectly. The sense is, of course, at the same time assimilated to that of the Messiah.

The ksatriyas is, in Q, the son, Sanskrit putras, of the king, called deva. He is, therefore, a deva-putras, a son of the king. Sanskrit devas also means god. He is , therefore also the son of god. This is nicely assimlitated to the king Dauid. So the deva- , god and king, is nicely assimliated to the king David.
Note also, that the Greek has no word for “of”. It says “son David”. The reason is clear. It has to have four syllables only, as does the Sanskrit.

Finally, he is the son (of) Abraham. The Sanskrit original is Brahmâ. The ksatriyas descends from the world of Brahmâ. He is, as such, one of the numerous sons of Brahmâ. Thus it is easy to see that the son of Abraham - a chronological absurdity - was originally the son of Brahmâ.

[...]So, to sum up: The Sanskrit original of the intial eight words of Matthew, runs, in simplified Romanization:
kulasya vamsas ksatriyasya deva-putrasya brâhmanasya .

The total number of syllables, is of course, the same in both sources.
The reader who consults the first few pages of the MSV (being here SBV I) will easily be able to make further identifications.
Let me only add, that the ksatriyas was supposed to be the next king of Kapilavastu. He was the son of a king. But things turned out otherwise.
So, we have the son of a king who never became a normal king. He did, however, become a king of Dharma.
Just like o khristos.
This is, in brief, the secret of Christ.

[Source: www.jesusisbuddha.com]

The Economics of War

2010-07-02T23:17:00.001+03:00

It has often been said that war is the health of the State – but the argument could also be made that the reverse is more true: that the State is the health of war. In other words, that war – the greatest of all human evils – is impossible without the State.

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was once asked what the central defining characteristic of the free market was – i.e. since every economy is more or less a mixture of freedom and State compulsion, what institution truly separated a free market from a controlled economy – and he replied that it was the existence of a stock market. Through a stock market, entrepreneurs can achieve the externalization of risk, or the partial transfer of potential losses from themselves to investors. In the absence of this capacity, business growth is almost impossible.

In other words, when risk is reduced, demand increases. The stagnation of economies in the absence of a stock market is testament to the unwillingness of individuals to take on all the risks of an economic endeavour themselves, even if this were possible. When risk becomes sharable, new possibilities emerge that were not present before – the Industrial Revolution being perhaps the most dramatic example.

Sadly, one of those possibilities – in all its horror, corruption, brutality and genocide – is war. [...] in its capacity to reduce the costs and risks of violence, the State is, in effect, the stock market of war.

[...] We can imagine an unethical window repairman who smashes windows in order to raise demand for his business. This would certainly help his income – and yet we see that this course is almost never pursued in real life in the free market. Why not?

[...]If you want to hire an arsonist to torch the factory of your competitor, you have to become an expert in underworld negotiations. You might pay an arsonist and watch him take off to Hawaii instead of setting the fire. You also face the risk that your arsonist will take your offer to your competitor and ask for more money to not set the fire – or, worse, return the favor and torch your factory! It will certainly cost money to start down the road of vandalism, and there is no guarantee that your investment will pay off in the way you want.

[...]How does this relate to war and the State? Very closely, in fact – but with very opposite effects.

The economics of war are, at bottom, very simple, and contain three major players: those who decide on war, those who profit from war, and those who pay for war. Those who decide on war are the politicians, those who profit from it are those who supply military materials or are paid for military skills, and those who pay for war are the taxpayers. (The first and second groups, of course, overlap.)

In other words, a corporation which profits from supplying arms to the military is paid through a predation on citizens through State taxation – and under no other circumstances could the transaction exist, since the risks associated with destruction outlined above are equal to or greater than any profits that could be made.

Certainly if those who decided on war also paid for it, there would be no such thing as war[...] However, those who decide on war do not pay for it – that unpleasant task is relegated to the taxpayers (both current, in the form of direct taxes and inflation, and future, in the form of national debts).

[...]Those who decide on war and those who profit from war only start wars when there is no real risk of personal destruction. This is a simple historical fact, which can be gleaned from the reality that no nuclear power has ever declared war on another nuclear power. The US gave the USSR money and wheat, and yet invaded Grenada, Haiti and Iraq. (In fact, one of the central reasons it was possible to know in advance that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction capable of hitting the US was that US leaders were willing to invade it.)

[...]The “risk of retaliation” in economic calculations regarding war should not be taken as a general risk, but rather a specific one – i.e. specific to those who either decide on war or profit from it. For example, Roosevelt knew that blockading Japan in the early 1940s carried a grave risk of retaliation – but only against distant and unknown US personnel in the Pacific, not against his friends and family in Washington. (In fact, the blockading was specifically escalated with the aim of provoking retaliation, in order to bring the US into WWII.)

The power of the State to so fundamentally shift the costs and benefits of violence is one of the most central facts of warfare – and the core reason for its continued existence. [...] if the person who decides to profit through destruction faces the consequences himself, he has almost no economic incentive to do so. However, if he can shift the risks and losses to others – but retain the benefit himself – the economic landscape changes completely! Sadly, it then becomes profitable, say, to tax citizens to pay for 800 US military bases around the world, as long as strangers in New York bear the brunt of the inevitable retaliation. It also becomes profitable to send uneducated youngsters to Iraq to bear the brunt of the insurgency.

[...]Thus the fact that the State externalizes almost all the risks and costs of destruction is a further positive motivation to those who would use the power of State violence for their own ends. Once you throw in endless pro-war propaganda (also called “war-nography”), the emotional benefits of starting and leading wars funded by others can become a definitive positive – which ensures that wars will continue until the State collapses, or the world dies.

[...]If the above is understood, then the hostility of anarchists towards the State should now be at least a little clearer. In the anarchist view, the State is a fundamental moral evil not only because it uses violence to achieve its ends, but also because it is the only social agency capable of making war economically advantageous to those with the power to declare it and profit from it. In other words, it is only through the governmental power of taxation that war can be subsidized to the point where it becomes profitable to certain sections of society. Destruction can only ever be profitable because the costs and risks of violence are shifted to the taxpayers, while the benefits accrue to the few who directly control or influence the State.

This violent distortion of costs, incentives and rewards cannot be controlled or alleviated, since an artificial imbalance of economic incentives will always self-perpetuate and escalate (at least, until the inevitable bankruptcy of the public purse). Or, to put it another way, as long as the State exists, we shall always live with the terror of war. To oppose war is to oppose the State. They can neither be examined in isolation nor opposed separately, since – much more than metaphorically – the State and war are two sides of the same bloody coin.

[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/]

The Slave's Revenge

2010-07-02T11:41:00.000+03:00

If the slave cannot escape, and is beaten if he does not work hard, then his vengeance will always take on a more subtle form. The slave will perform his work slightly more slowly – not enough to be punished, but enough to irritate his master. The slave will pretend to be less intelligent than he really is, so that when he loses or breaks things, he will be more likely to escape punishment, since he is pretending in effect to be a child.

[...] the slave will also do what he can to promote any negative habits his master may have. If his master likes to drink, the slave will always be on hand to refill his cup. If his master has a tendency towards jealousy, the slave will innocently “mention” that he saw his master’s wife chatting with another man.

If the slave is particularly cunning, he will also do everything that he can to inflate his master’s ego. He will sing his master’s praises, claim joy in “knowing his place,” thank the master for everything he does, and remain fanatically “loyal.” This hyperinflation of the master’s ego inevitably creates pettiness, vanity, hyper-irritability, and unbearable pomposity.

In other words, the slave will always turn his master into an unhappy man – who is constantly annoyed, who cannot experience love, and who engenders no respect from those around him – particularly his children. (One of the worst aspects of being a slave-owner is that it turns you into a terrible and abusive father.) As a result of the slave’s passive-aggressive manipulations, the master becomes prone to violence – verbal and physical – self-abusive habits, crippling self-blindness, and sinks into a bottomless pit of discontent and misery.

This is the vengeance of the slave. All slaves are Iago. And, for the most part, all children are slaves. As you were.

[...] the great danger for the slave is his capacity to become addicted to the dark “satisfactions” of passive-aggressive vengeance. By enslaving his master, the slave gains a sense of control – and also re-creates in his master his own experience of enslavement. It is a subtle cry of hatred – and plea for empathy. [...]A slave can only hope for freedom by making owning slaves unbearable for his master. Not only might the slave’s endless passive-aggressive noncompliance and provocation provoke suicide on the part of his master – but his master’s miserable existence might also serve as a warning for others who might wish to own slaves.

[...]However, as mentioned above, the greatest danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to the sense of control that comes from manipulating his master. In other words, the great danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to his slavery. If a slave begins to believe his own master-destroying propaganda, then in the absence of masters, he will create them.

[...]Most of us are raised as slaves. Our opinions are rarely sought, rules are rarely explained – and moral rules never are – we are shipped off to schools where we are treated disrespectfully; our subservience is bought with rewards, and our independence is punished with detentions. Scepticism and curiosity are scorned and belittled, while empty abilities like throwing balls, learning dates, sitting still and “being pretty” are praised and elevated.

Lies about our history become cages for our futures. Lies about our own intelligence and originality lead us to the petty enslavement of “good citizenship” – and horrifying fairy tales about life in the absence of coercive or religious control scare us back into our slave pens the moment we even think of glancing outside to the green and beautiful hills beyond our bars.

Collective punishments turn us against each other; the “kibbles and whips” of the classroom reward us for laughing at each other to gain the favor of the teacher; terrifying and brutal “morality” is inflicted upon us. We are punished for not treating those in authority with “respect” (do they treat us with respect?) – and we are bred for a life of subservience, fear, productivity and dependence as surely as fattened calves are bred for veal.

Where in the past we were not taught to fear the priests, but rather the imaginary devils the priests warned us of, now we are not taught to fear our politicians, who can debase our currency, throw us in prison and send us to war – but rather we are taught to fear each other. We are taught to imagine that the real predators in this world are not those who control prison cells, national debts and nuclear weapons, but rather our fellow citizens, who in the absence of brutal control would surely tear us apart!

The entire purpose of state education is to make sure that we never truly “leave” our childhoods: that we spend our lives trembling in fear of imaginary predators, begging for “protection” from those who threaten us with the most harm.

[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/]

necessity of the state

2010-07-02T08:15:00.000+03:00

Logically, there are four possibilities as to the mixture of good and evil people in the world:

1. All men are moral.
2. All men are immoral.
3. The majority of men are immoral, and a minority moral.
4. The majority of men are moral, and a minority immoral.

(A perfect balance of good and evil is practically impossible.)

In the first case (all men are moral), the government is obviously not needed, since evil cannot exist.

In the second case (all men are immoral), the government cannot be permitted to exist for one simple reason. The government, it is generally argued, must exist because there are evil people in the world who desire to inflict harm, and who can only be restrained through fear of government retribution (police, prisons et al). A corollary of this argument is that the less retribution these people fear, the more evil they will do. However, the government itself is not subject to any force or retribution, but is a law unto itself. Even in Western democracies, how many policemen and politicians go to jail? Thus if evil people wish to do harm, but are only restrained by force, then society can never permit a government to exist, because evil people will work feverishly to grab control of that government, in order to do evil and avoid retribution. In a society of pure evil, then, the only hope for stability would be a state of nature, where a general arming and fear of retribution would blunt the evil intents of disparate groups. As is the case between nuclear-armed nations, a “balance of power” breeds peace.

The third possibility is that most people are evil, and only a few are good. If that is the case, then the government also cannot be permitted to exist, since the majority of those in control of the government will be evil, and will rule despotically over the good minority. Democracy in particular cannot be permitted, since the minority of good people would be subjugated to the democratic control of the evil majority. Evil people, who wish to do harm without fear of retribution, would inevitably control the government, and use its power to do evil free of the fear of consequences. Good people do not act morally because they fear retribution, but because they love virtue and peace of mind – and thus, unlike evil people, they have little to gain by controlling the government. In this scenario, then, the government will inevitably be controlled by a majority of evil people who will rule over all, to the detriment of all moral people.

The fourth option is that most people are good, and only a few are evil. This possibility is subject to the same problems outlined above, notably that evil people will always want to gain control over the government, in order to shield themselves from just retaliation for their crimes. This option only changes the appearance of democracy: because the majority of people are good, evil power-seekers must lie to them in order to gain power, and then, after achieving public office, will immediately break faith and pursue their own corrupt agendas, enforcing their wills through the police and the military. (This is the current situation in democracies, of course.) Thus the government remains the greatest prize to the most evil men, who will quickly gain control over its awesome power – to the detriment of all good souls – and so the government cannot be permitted to exist in this scenario either.

It is clear, then, that there is no situation under which a government can logically or morally be allowed to exist. The only possible justification for the existence of a government would be if the majority of men are evil, but all the power of the government is always controlled by a minority of good men (see Plato’s Republic). This situation, while interesting theoretically, breaks down logically because:

1.The evil majority would quickly outvote the minority or overpower them through a coup;
2.There is no way to ensure that only good people would always run the government; and,
3.There is absolutely no example of this having ever occurred in any of the brutal annals of state history.

The logical error always made in the defense of the government is to imagine that any collective moral judgments being applied to any group of people is not also being applied to the group which rules over them. If 50% of people are evil, then at least 50% of people ruling over them are also evil (and probably more, since evil people are always drawn to power). Thus the existence of evil can never justify the existence of a government.

If there is no evil, governments are unnecessary. If evil exists, the governments are far too dangerous to be allowed to exist.

Why is this error so prevalent?

There are a number of reasons, which can only be touched on here. The first is that the government introduces itself to children in the form of public school teachers who are considered moral authorities. Thus are morality and authority first associated with the government – an association that is then reinforced through years of grinding repetition.

The second is that the government never teaches children about the root of its power – violence – but instead pretends that it is just another social institution, like a business or a church or a charity, but more moral.

The third is that the prevalence of religion and propaganda has always blinded men to the evils of the government – which is why rulers have always been so interested in furthering the interests of churches and state “education.” In the religious world-view, absolute power is synonymous with perfect virtue, in the form of a deity. In the real political world of men, however, increasing power always means increasing evil. With religion, also, all that happens must be for the good – thus, fighting encroaching political power is fighting the will of the deity.

[...]people generally make two errors when confronted with the idea of dissolving the government. The first is the belief that governments are necessary because evil people exist. The second is the belief that, in the absence of governments, any social institutions that arise will inevitably take the place of governments. Thus, Dispute Resolution Organizations (DROs), insurance companies and private security forces are all considered potential cancers that will swell and overwhelm the body politic.

This view arises from the same error outlined above. If all social institutions are constantly trying to grow in power and enforce their wills on others, then by that very argument a centralized government cannot be allowed to exist. If it is an iron law that groups always try to gain power over other groups and individuals, then that power-lust will not end if one of them wins, but will continue to spread across society virtually unopposed until slavery is the norm.

The only way that social institutions can grow into violent monopolies is to offload the costs of enforcement onto their victims. Governments grow endlessly because they can pay tax collectors with a portion of the taxes they collect. The slaves are thus forced to pay for the costs of their enslavement.

[...]It is very hard to understand the logic and intelligence of the argument that, in order to protect us from a group that might overpower us, we should support a group that already has overpowered us. It is similar to the statist argument about private monopolies – that citizens should create a governmental monopoly because they are afraid of private monopolies. It does not take keen vision to see through such nonsense.

[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/]

The Lesser Evil

2010-07-02T06:12:00.001+03:00

An objective review of human history would seem to point to the grim reality that by far the most dangerous thing in the world is false ethical systems.

If we look at an ethical system like communism, which was responsible for the murders of 170 million people, we can clearly see that the real danger to individuals was not random criminals, but false moral theories. Similarly, the Spanish Inquisition relied not on thieves and pickpockets, but rather priests and torturers filled with the desire to save the souls of others. Nazism also relied on particular ethical theories regarding the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the moral imperative to serve those in power, as well as theories “proving” the innate virtues of the Aryan race.

Over and over again, throughout human history, we see that the most dangerous instruments in the hands of men are not guns, or bombs, or knives, or poisons, but rather moral theories. From the “divine right of kings” to the endlessly legitimized mob rule of modern democracies, from the ancestor worship of certain Oriental cultures to the modern deference to the nation-state as personified by a political leader, to those who pledge their children to the service of particular religious ideologies, it is clear that by far the most dangerous tool that men possess is morality. Unlike science, which merely describes what is, and what is to be, moral theories exert a near-bottomless influence over the hearts and minds of men by telling them what ought to be.

When our leaders ask for our obedience, it is never to themselves as individuals, they claim, but rather to “the good” in the abstract. JFK did not say: “Ask not what I can do for you, but rather what you can do for me...” Instead, he substituted the words “your country” for himself. Service to “the country” is considered a virtue – although the net beneficiaries of that service are always those who rule citizens by force. In the past (and sometimes even into the present), leaders identified themselves with God, rather than with geography, but the principle remains the same. For Communists, the abstract mechanism that justifies the power of the leaders is class; for fascists it is the nation; for Nazis it is the race; for democrats it is “the will of the people”; for priests it is “the will of God” and so on.

Ruling classes inevitably use ethical theories to justify their power for the simple reason that human beings have an implacable desire to act in accordance to what they believe to be “the good.” If service to the Fatherland can be defined as “the good,” then such service will inevitably be provided. If obedience to military superiors can be defined as “virtue” and “courage,” then such violent slavery will be endlessly praised and performed.

The more false the moral theory is, the earlier that it must be inflicted upon children. We do not see the children of scientifically minded people being sent to “logic school” from the tender age of three or four onwards. We do not see the children of free market advocates being sent to “Capitalism Camp” when they are five years old. We do not see the children of philosophers being sent to a Rational Empiricism Theme Park in order to be indoctrinated into the value of trusting their own senses and using their own minds.

No, wherever ethical theories are corrupt, self-contradictory and destructive, they must be inflicted upon the helpless minds of dependent children. The Jesuits are credited with the proverb: “Give me a child until he is nine and he will be mine for life,” but that is only because the Jesuits were teaching superstitious and destructive lies. You could never imagine a modern scientist hungering to imprint his falsehoods on a newborn consciousness. Picture somebody like Richard Dawkins saying the above, just to see how ridiculous it would be.

Any ethicist, then, who focuses on mere criminality, rather than the institutional crimes supported by ethical theories, is missing the picture almost entirely, and serving mankind up to the slaughterhouse. A doctor who, in the middle of a universal and deadly plague, focused his entire efforts on communicating about the possible health consequences of being slightly overweight, would be considered rather deranged, and scarcely a reliable guide in medical matters. If your house is on fire, mulling over the colors you might want to paint your walls might well be considered a sub-optimal prioritization.

Private criminals exist, of course, but have almost no impact on our lives comparable to those who rule us on the basis of false moral theories.

Once, when I was 11, another boy stole a few dollars from me. Another time, when I was 26, I left my ATM card in a bank machine, and someone stole a few hundred dollars from my account.

On the other hand, I have had hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from me by force through the moral theory of “taxation is good.” I was forced to sit in the grim and brain-destroying mental gulags of public schools for 14 years, based on the moral theory that “state education is a virtue.” (Or, rather: “forced education is a virtue” – my parents were compelled to pay through taxes, and I was compelled to attend.)

The boy (and the man) who stole my money doubtless used it for some personal pleasure or need. The government that steals my money, on the other hand, uses it to oppress the poor, to fund wars, to pay the rich, to borrow money and so impoverish my children – and to pay the salaries of those who steal from me.

If I were a doctor in the middle of a great city struck down by a terrible plague, and I discovered that that plague was being transmitted through the water pipes, what should my rational response be – if I claimed to truly care about the health of my fellow citizens?

Surely I should cry from the very rooftops that their drinking water was causing the plague. Surely I should take every measure possible to get people to understand the true source of the illness that struck them down.

Surely, in the knowledge of such universal and preventable poisoning, I should not waste my time arguing that the true danger you faced was the tiny possibility that some random individual might decide to poison you at some point in the future.

[...]The violations that I experienced at the hands of private criminals fade to insignificance relative to even one day under the tender mercies of my “virtuous and good masters.”

[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/]

Human Farming

2010-07-02T04:27:00.001+03:00

The Matrix is one of the greatest metaphors ever. Machines invented to make human life easier end up enslaving humanity - this is the most common theme in dystopian science fiction. Why is this fear so universal - so compelling? Is it because we really believe that our toaster and our notebook will end up as our mechanical overlords? Of course not. This is not a future that we fear, but a past that we are already living.

Supposedly, governments were invented to make human life easier and safer, but governments always end up enslaving humanity. That which we create to "serve" us ends up ruling us.

The US government "by and for the people" now imprisons millions, takes half the national income by force, over-regulates, punishes, tortures, slaughters foreigners, invades countries, overthrows governments, imposes 700 imperialistic bases overseas, inflates the currency, and crushes future generations with massive debts. That which we create to "serve" us ends up ruling us.

The problem with the "state as servant" thesis is that it is historically completely false, both empirically and logically. The idea that states were voluntarily invented by citizens to enhance their own security is utterly untrue.

Before governments, in tribal times, human beings could only produce what they consumed -- there was no excess production of food or other resources. Thus, there was no point owning slaves, because the slave could not produce any excess that could be stolen by the master. If a horse pulling a plow can only produce enough additional food to feed the horse, there is no point hunting, capturing and breaking in a horse.

However, when agricultural improvements allowed for the creation of excess crops, suddenly it became highly advantageous to own human beings. When cows began to provide excess milk and meat, owning cows became worthwhile.

The earliest governments and empires were in fact a ruling class of slave hunters, who understood that because human beings could produce more than they consumed, they were worth hunting, capturing, breaking in - and owning.

The earliest Egyptian and Chinese empires were in reality human farms, where people were hunted, captured, domesticated and owned like any other form of livestock. Due to technological and methodological improvements, the slaves produced enough excess that the labor involved in capturing and keeping them represented only a small subset of their total productivity. The ruling class - the farmers - kept a large portion of that excess, while handing out gifts and payments to the brutalizing class - the police, slave hunters, and general sadists - and the propagandizing class - the priests, intellectuals, and artists.

This situation continued for thousands of years, until the 16-17th centuries, when again massive improvements in agricultural organization and technology created the second wave of excess productivity. The enclosure movement re-organized and consolidated farmland, resulting in 5-10 times more crops, creating a new class of industrial workers, displaced from the country and huddling in the new cities. This enormous agricultural excess was the basis of the capital that drove the industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution did not arise because the ruling class wanted to free their serfs, but rather because they realized how additional "liberties" could make their livestock astoundingly more productive. When cows are placed in very confining stalls, they beat their heads against the walls, resulting in injuries and infections. Thus farmers now give them more room -- not because they want to set their cows free, but rather because they want greater productivity and lower costs.

The next stop after "free range" is not "freedom." The rise of state capitalism in the 19th century was actually the rise of "free range serfdom." Additional liberties were granted to the human livestock not with the goal of setting them free, but rather with the goal of increasing their productivity.

Of course, intellectuals, artists and priests were - and are - well paid to conceal this reality. The great problem of modern human livestock ownership is the challenge of "enthusiasm." State capitalism only works when the entrepreneurial spirit drives creativity and productivity in the economy.

However, excess productivity always creates a larger state, and swells the ruling classes and their dependents, which eats into the motivation for additional productivity. Taxes and regulations rise, state debt (future farming) increases, and living standards slow and decay. Depression and despair began to spread, as the reality of being owned sets in for the general population. The solution to this is additional propaganda, antidepressant medications, superstition, wars, moral campaigns of every kind, the creation of "enemies," the inculcation of patriotism, collective fears, paranoia about "outsiders" and "immigrants," and so on.

It is essential to understand the reality of the world. When you look at a map of the world, you are not looking at countries, but farms.

You are allowed certain liberties - limited property ownership, movement rights, freedom of association and occupation - not because your government approves of these rights in principle - since it constantly violates them - but rather because "free range livestock" is so much cheaper to own and so more productive.

It is important to understand the reality of ideologies. State capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, democracy - these are all livestock management approaches. Some work well for long periods - state capitalism - and some work very badly - communism.

[...]The recent growth of "freedom" in China, India and Asia is occurring because the local state farmers have upgraded their livestock management practices. They have recognized that putting the cows in a larger stall provides the rulers more milk and meat.

Rulers have also recognized that if they prevent you from fleeing the farm, you will become depressed, inert and unproductive. A serf is the most productive when he imagines he is free. Thus your rulers must provide you the illusion of freedom in order to harvest you most effectively. Thus you are "allowed" to leave - but never to real freedom, only to another farm, because the whole world is a farm. They will prevent you from taking a lot of money, they will bury you in endless paperwork, they will restrict your right to work -- but you are "free" to leave. Due to these difficulties, very few people do leave, but the illusion of mobility is maintained. If only 1 out of 1,000 cows escapes, but the illusion of escaping significantly raises the productivity of the remaining 999, it remains a net gain for the farmer.

You are also kept on the farm through licensing. The most productive livestock are the professionals, so the rulers fit them with an electronic dog collar called a "license," which only allows them to practice their trade on their own farm.

To further create the illusion of freedom, in certain farms, the livestock are allowed to choose between a few farmers that the investors present. At best, they are given minor choices in how they are managed. They are never given the choice to shut down the farm, and be truly free.

Government schools are indoctrination pens for livestock. They train children to "love" the farm, and to fear true freedom and independence, and to attack anyone who questions the brutal reality of human ownership. Furthermore, they create jobs for the intellectuals that state propaganda so relies on.

The ridiculous contradictions of statism -- like religion -- can only be sustained through endless propaganda inflicted upon helpless children. The idea that democracy and some sort of "social contract" justifies the brutal exercise of violent power over billions is patently ridiculous. If you say to a slave that his ancestors "chose" slavery, and therefore he is bound by their decisions, he will simply say: "If slavery is a choice, then I choose not to be a slave." This is the most frightening statement for the ruling classes, which is why they train their slaves to attack anyone who dares speak it.

Statism is not a philosophy. Statism does not originate from historical evidence or rational principles. Statism is an ex post facto justification for human ownership. Statism is an excuse for violence. Statism is an ideology, and all ideologies are variations on human livestock management practices. Religion is pimped-out superstition, designed to drug children with fears that they will endlessly pay to have "alleviated." Nationalism is pimped-out bigotry, designed to provoke a Stockholm Syndrome in the livestock.

----

[...]Like all animals, human beings want to dominate and exploit the resources around them. At first, we mostly hunted and fished and ate off the land - but then something magical and terrible happened to our minds. We became, alone among the animals, afraid of death, and of future loss. And this was the start of a great tragedy, and an even greater possibility...

You see, when we became afraid of death, of injury, and imprisonment, we became controllable -- and so valuable -- in a way that no other resource could ever be. The greatest resource for any human being to control is not natural resources, or tools, or animals or land -- but other human beings.

You can frighten an animal, because animals are afraid of pain in the moment, but you cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, or with torture or imprisonment in the future, because animals have very little sense of tomorrow. You cannot threaten a cow with torture, or a sheep with death. You cannot swing a sword at a tree and scream at it to produce more fruit, or hold a burning torch to a field and demand more wheat. You cannot get more eggs by threatening a hen - but you can get a man to give you his eggs by threatening him.

Human farming has been the most profitable -- and destructive -- occupation throughout history, and it is now reaching its destructive climax. Human society cannot be rationally understood until it is seen for what it is: a series of farms where human farmers own human livestock.

Some people get confused because governments provide healthcare and water and education and roads, and thus imagine that there is some benevolence at work. Nothing could be further from reality. Farmers provide healthcare and irrigation and training to their livestock.

Some people get confused because we are allowed certain liberties, and thus imagine that our government protects our freedoms. But farmers plant their crops a certain distance apart to increase their yields -- and will allow certain animals larger stalls or fields if it means they will produce more meat and milk. In your country, your tax farm, your farmer grants you certain freedoms not because he cares about your liberties, but because he wants to increase his profits. Are you beginning to see the nature of the cage you were born into?

There have been four major phases of human farming.

The first phase, in ancient Egypt, was direct and brutal human compulsion. Human bodies were controlled, but the creative productivity of the human mind remained outside the reach of the whip and the brand and the shackles. Slaves remained woefully underproductive, and required enormous resources to control.

The second phase was the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted some capacity for freedom, ingenuity and creativity, which raised their productivity. This increased the wealth of Rome, and thus the tax income of the Roman government - and with this additional wealth, Rome became an empire, destroying the economic freedoms that fed its power, and collapsed. I'm sure that this does not seem entirely unfamiliar.

After the collapse of Rome, the feudal model introduced the concept of livestock ownership and taxation. Instead of being directly owned, peasants farmed land that they could retain as long as they paid off the local warlords. This model broke down due to the continual subdivision of productive land, and was destroyed during the Enclosure movement, when land was consolidated, and hundreds of thousands of peasants were kicked off their ancestral lands, because new farming techniques made larger farms more productive with fewer people.

The increased productivity of the late Middle Ages created the excess food required for the expansion of towns and cities, which in turn gave rise to the modern Democratic model of human ownership. As displaced peasants flooded into the cities, a huge stock of cheap human capital became available to the rising industrialists - and the ruling class of human farmers quickly realized that they could make more money by letting their livestock choose their own occupations. Under the Democratic model, direct slave ownership has been replaced by the Mafia model. The Mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends thugs around once a month to steal from the business "owners." You are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity - and thus the taxes you can pay to your masters. Your few freedoms are preserved because they are profitable to your owners.

The great challenge of the Democratic model is that increases in wealth and freedom threaten the farmers. The ruling classes initially profit from a relatively free market in capital and labor, but as their livestock become more used to their freedoms and growing wealth, they begin to question why they need rulers at all.

Ah well. Nobody ever said that human farming was easy.

Keeping the tax livestock securely in the compounds of the ruling classes is a three phase process.

The first is to indoctrinate the young through government "education." As the wealth of democratic countries grew, government schools were universally inflicted in order to control the thoughts and souls of the livestock.

The second is to turn citizens against each other through the creation of dependent livestock. It is very difficult to rule human beings directly through force -- and where it can be achieved, it remains cripplingly underproductive, as can be seen in North Korea. Human beings do not breed well or produce efficiently in direct captivity. If human beings believe that they are free, then they will produce much more for their farmers. The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on the payroll of the farmer. Those cows that become dependent on the existing hierarchy will then attack any other cows who point out the violence, hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership. Freedom is slavery, and slavery is freedom. If you can get the cows to attack each other whenever anybody brings up the reality of their situation, then you don't have to spend nearly as much controlling them directly. Those cows who become dependent upon the stolen largess of the farmer will violently oppose any questioning of the virtue of human ownership -- and the intellectual and artistic classes, always and forever dependent upon the farmers -- will say, to anyone who demands freedom from ownership: "You will harm your fellow cows." The livestock are kept enclosed by shifting the moral responsibility for the destructiveness of a violent system to those who demand real freedom.

The third phase is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened livestock cling to the "protection" of the farmers. [...]

[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/]

Love

2010-07-01T19:51:00.001+03:00

Mythological Love

Our whole lives, we are surrounded by people who claim to love us. Our parents perpetually claim to be motivated by what is best for us. Our teachers eternally proclaim that their sole motivation is to help us learn. Our priests voice concern for our eternal souls, and extended family members endlessly announce their devotion to the clan.

When people claim to love us, it is not unreasonable to expect that they know us. If you tell me that you love Thailand, but it turns out that you have never been there, and know very little about it, then it is hard for me to believe that you really love it. If I say that I love opera, but I never listen to opera – well, you get the general idea!

If I say that I love you, but I know little about your real thoughts and feelings, and have no idea what your true values are – or perhaps even what your favourite books, authors or movies are – then it should logically be very hard for you to believe me.

This is certainly the case in my family. My mother, brother and father made extravagant claims about their love for me. However, when I finally sat down and asked each of them to recount a few facts about me – some of my preferences and values – I got a perfect tripod of “thousand yard stares.”

So, I thought, if people who know almost nothing about me claim to love me, then either they are lying, or I do not understand love at all.

I will not go into details about my theories of love here, other than to say that, in my view, love is our involuntary response to virtue, just as well-being is our involuntary response to a healthy lifestyle. (Our affection for our babies is more attachment than mature love, since it is shared throughout the animal kingdom.)

Virtue is a complicated subject, but I am sure we can agree that virtue must involve some basics that are commonly understood, such as courage, integrity, benevolence, empathy, wisdom and so on.

If this is the case, it cannot be possible to love people that we know very little about. If love requires virtue, then we cannot love perfect strangers, because we know nothing about their virtues. Love depends both on another person’s virtue, and our knowledge of it – and it grows in proportion to that virtue and knowledge, if we are virtuous ourselves.

Throughout my childhood, whenever I expressed a personal thought, desire, wish, preference or feeling, I was generally met with eye rolling, incomprehension, avoidance or, all too often, outright scorn. These various “rejection tactics” were completely co-joined with expressions of love and devotion. When I started getting into philosophy – through the works of Ayn Rand originally – my growing love of wisdom was dismissed out of hand as some sort of psychological dysfunction.

Since my family knew precious little about my virtues – and what they did know they disliked – then we could not all be virtuous. If they were virtuous, and disliked my values, then my values could not be virtuous. If I was virtuous, and they disliked my values, then they could not be virtuous.

And so I set about trying to create an “ethical map” of my family.

It was the most frightening thing I have ever done. The amount of emotional resistance that I felt towards the idea of trying to rationally and morally understand my family was staggering – it literally felt as if I were sprinting directly off a cliff.

Why was it so terrifying?

Well, because I knew that they were lying. I knew that they were lying about loving me, and I knew that, by claiming to be confused about whether they loved me, I was lying as well – and to myself, which is the worst of all falsehoods.
Love: The Word versus the Deed

Saying the word “success” is far easier than actually achieving success. Mouthing the word “love” is far easier than actually loving someone for the right reasons – and being loved for the right reasons.

If we do not have any standards for being loved, then laziness and indifference will inevitably result. If I have a job where I work from home, and no one ever checks up on me, and I never have to produce anything, and I get paid no matter what, and I cannot get fired, how long will it be before my work ethic decays? Days? Weeks? Certainly not months.

One of the most important questions to ask in any examination of the truth is “compared to what?” For instance, if I say I love you, implicit in that statement is a preference for you over others. In other words, compared to others, I prefer you. We prefer honesty compared to falsehood, satiation to hunger, warmth to cold and so on.

It is not logically valid to equate the word “love” with “family.” The word “family” is a mere description of a biological commonality – it makes no more sense to equate “love” with “family” than it does to equate “love” with “mammal.” Thus the word “love” must mean a preference compared to – what?

It is impossible to have any standards for love if we do not have any standards for truth. Since being honest is better than lying, and courage is better than cowardice, and truth is better than falsehood, we cannot have honesty and courage unless we are standing for something that is true. Thus when we say that we “love” someone, what we really mean is that his actions are consistent, compared to a rational standard of virtue. In the same way, when I say that somebody is “healthy,” what I really mean is that his organs are functioning consistently, relative to a rational standard of well-being.

Thus love is not a subjective preference, or a biological commonality, but our involuntary response to virtuous actions on the part of another.

If we truly understand this definition, then it is easy for us to see that a society that does not know truth cannot ever know love.

If nothing is true, virtue is impossible.

If virtue is impossible, then we are forced to pretend to be virtuous, through patriotism, clan loyalties, cultural pride, superstitious conformities and other such amoral counterfeits.

If virtue is impossible, then love is impossible, because actions cannot be compared to any objective standard of goodness. If love is impossible, we are forced to resort to sentimentality, or the shallow show and outward appearance of love.

Thus it can be seen that any set of principles that interferes with our ability to know and understand the truth hollows us out, undermining and destroying our capacity for love. False principles, illusions, fantasies and mythologies separate us from each other, from virtue, from love, from the true connections that we can achieve only through reality.

In fantasy, there is only isolation and pretence. Mythology is, fundamentally, loneliness and emptiness.

Imagination versus Fantasy

At this point, I think it would be well worth highlighting the differences between imagination and fantasy, because many people, on hearing my criticisms of mythology, think that they are now not supposed to enjoy Star Wars.

Imagination is a creative faculty that is deeply rooted in reality. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a mere species of intangible wish fulfillment. It took Tolkien decades of study and writing to produce “The Lord of the Rings” – and each part of that novel was rationally consistent with the whole. That is an example of imagination. If I laze about daydreaming that one day I will make a fortune by writing a better novel than “The Lord of the Rings” – but never actually set pen to paper – that is an example of fantasy. Imagination produced the theory of relativity, not fantasizing about someday winning a Nobel Prize.

Daydreams that are never converted into action are the ultimate procrastination. Imagining a wonderful future that you never have to act to achieve prevents you from achieving a wonderful future.

In the same way, imagining that you know the truth when you do not prevents you from ever learning the truth. Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of knowledge. If you are going the wrong way, but do not doubt your direction, you will never turn around.

As Socrates noted more than 2,000 years ago, doubt is the midwife of curiosity, and curiosity breeds wisdom.

Fantasy is the opposite of doubt. Mythology provides instant answers when people do not even know what the questions are. In the Middle Ages, when someone asked “Where did the world come from?” he was told: “God made it.” This effectively precluded the necessity of asking the more relevant question: “What is the world?”

Because religious people believed they knew where the world came from, there was little point asking what the world was. Because there was little point asking what the world was, they never learned where the world came from.

Fantasy is a circle of nothingness, forever eating its own tail.
Defining Love

If people fantasize that they know what is true, then they inevitably stop searching for the truth. If I am driving home, I stop driving when I get there. If people fantasize that they know what goodness is, they inevitably stop trying to understand goodness.

And, most importantly, if people fantasize that they already are good, they stop trying to become good. If you want a baby, and you believe that you are pregnant, you stop trying to get pregnant.

The question – which we already know the answer to – thus remains: why do people who claim to love us never tell us what love is?

If I am an accomplished mathematician, and my child comes to me and asks me about the times tables, it would be rude and churlish of me to dismiss his questions. If I go to my mother, who for 30 years has claimed to love me, and ask her what love is, why is it that she refuses to answer my question? Why does my brother roll his eyes and change the subject whenever I ask him what it is that he loves about me? Why does my father claim to love me, while continually rejecting everything that I hold precious?

Why does everyone around me perpetually use words that they refuse to define? Are they full of a knowledge that they cannot express? That is not a good reason for refusing to discuss the topics. A novelist who writes instinctually would not logically be hostile if asked about the source of his inspiration. He may not come up with a perfect answer, but there would be no reason to perpetually avoid the subject.

Unless…

Unless, of course, he is a plagiarist.

What We Know

This is the knowledge that we have, but hate and fear.

We know that the people who claim to love us know precious little about us, and nothing at all about love.

We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to create obligations within us.

We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to control us.

And they know it too.

It is completely obvious that they know this, because they know exactly which topics to avoid. A counterfeiter will not mind if you ask him what the capital of Madagascar is. A counterfeiter will mind, however, if you ask him whether you can check the authenticity of his money. Why is this the one topic that he will try to avoid at all costs?

Because he knows that his currency is fake.

And he also knows that if you find that out, he can no longer use it to rob you blind.

Obligations

If I own a store, and take counterfeit money from a con man, but do not know that it is counterfeit, then I am obligated to hand over what he has “bought.”

In the same way, if I believe that I am loved – even when I am not loved – I am to a degree honour-bound to return that love. If my mother says that she loves me, and she is virtuous, then she must love me because I am virtuous. Since she is herself virtuous, then I “owe” her love as a matter of justice, just as I owe trust to someone who consistently behaves in a trustworthy manner.

Thus when somebody tries to convince you that they love you, they’re actually attempting to create an obligation in you. If I try to convince you that I am a trustworthy person, it is because I want all the benefits of being treated as if I were a trustworthy person. If I am in fact a trustworthy person, then I must understand the nature of trust – at least at some level – and thus I must know that it cannot be demanded, but must be earned. Since earning trust is harder than just demanding trust, I must know the real value of trust, otherwise I would not have taken the trouble to earn it through consistent behaviour – I would have just demanded it and skipped all the hard stuff!

If you demand trust, you are demanding the unearned, which indicates that you do not believe you can earn it. Thus anyone who demands trust is automatically untrustworthy.

Why do people demand trust?

To rob others.

If I want to borrow money from you, and I demand that you trust me, it’s because I am not trustworthy, and will be unlikely to pay you back.

In other words, I want to steal your money, and put you in my power.

It’s the same with love.

Love and Virtue

If I am virtuous, then virtuous people will regard me with at least respect, if not love. Corrupt or evil people may regard me with a certain respect, but they will certainly not love me.

Thus being virtuous and refusing to demand love from anyone is the best way to find other virtuous people. If you are virtuous and undemanding, then other virtuous people will naturally gravitate towards you. Virtue that does not impose itself on others is like a magnet for goodness, and repels corruption.

The practical result of true virtue is fundamental self-protection.

If my stockbroker consistently gets me 30% return on my investments, is there any amount of money that I will not give him, other than what I need to live? Of course not! Because I know I will always get back more than I give.

It’s the same with real love.

If I am virtuous, then I will inevitably feel positively inclined towards other virtuous people – and the more virtuous they are, the more I will love them. My energy, time and resources will be at their disposal, because I know that I will not be exploited, and that they will reciprocate my generosity.

If you and I have lent money to each other over the years, and have always paid each other back, then the next time you come to me for a loan, it would be unjust for me to tell you that I will not lend you anything because I do not think you will pay me back. Your continued and perpetual honesty towards me in financial matters has created an obligation in me towards you. This does not mean that I must lend you money whenever you ask for it, but I cannot justly claim as my reason for not lending you money a belief that you will not pay me back.

In the same way, if you have been my wife for 20 years, and I have never been unfaithful, if a woman calls and then hangs up, it would be unjust for you to immediately accuse me of infidelity.

A central tactic for creating artificial and unjust obligations in others is to demand their positive opinion, without being willing to earn it. The most effective way to do this is to offer a positive opinion, which has not been earned – to claim to love others.

If, over the past 20 years, I have rarely paid back any money I have borrowed from you, it is perfectly reasonable to refuse me an additional loan. I may then get angry, and call you unfair, and demand that you treat me as if I were trustworthy, but it would scarcely be virtuous for you to comply with my wishes. Indeed, it would be dishonest and unjust for you to ignore my untrustworthiness, because you would be acting as if there was no difference between someone who pays back loans, and someone who does not.

When we act in a virtuous manner towards others, we are creating a reservoir of goodwill that we can draw upon, just as when we put our savings into a bank. A man can act imperfectly and still be loved, just as a man can eat an occasional candy bar and still be healthy, but there is a general requirement for consistency in any discipline. I could probably hit a home run in a major-league ballpark once every thousand pitches, but that would scarcely make me a professional baseball player!

If I act in a trustworthy manner, I do not have to ask you to trust me – and in fact, I would be very unwise to do so. Either you will trust me voluntarily, which means that you respect honourable and consistent behaviour, and justly respond to those who do good, or you will not trust me voluntarily, which means that you do not respond in a just manner to trustworthy behaviour, and thus cannot be trusted yourself.

If, on the other hand, I come up to you and demand that you trust me, I am engaged in a complex calculation of counterfeiting and plunder.

The first thing I am trying to do is establish whether or not you know anything about trust. The second thing is to figure out your level of confidence and self-esteem. The third thing is figure out if you know anything about integrity.

An attacker will always try to find the weakest chink in your armour. If I demand trust from you, and you agree to provide it – without any prior evidence – then I know that you do not know anything about trust. Similarly, if you do not require that your trust be earned, then I know that you lack confidence and self-esteem. If you are willing to treat me as if I were trustworthy when I am not trustworthy, then it is clear to me you know very little about integrity.

This tells me all I need to know about your history. This tells me that you were never treated with respect as a child, and that you were never taught to judge people according to independent standards, and that every time you tried to stand up for yourself, your family attacked you.

In other words, I will know that you are easy prey.

I cannot create an obligation in you unless you accept that I have treated you justly in the past. As in all things, it is far easier to convince a weak person that you have treated him justly, than it is to actually treat people in a just and consistent manner. If I can convince you that I have treated you justly in the past, then you “owe” me trust and respect in the present.

“Love” as Predation

Imagine that we are brothers, and one day you awake from a coma to see me sitting by your bed. After some small talk, I tell you that you owe me $1,000, which you borrowed from me the day of your accident. I tell you that because I am a kind brother, and you are in the hospital, you do not have to pay me back the thousand dollars – I would just like you to remember it, so that the next time I need to borrow $1,000, you will lend it to me.

You might look in the pockets of the jeans you wore the day of your accident, and you might look around your apartment to see if there was $1,000 lying around, but there would be no real way to prove that I had not lent you the money. You would either have to call me a liar – an accusation for which you have no certain proof – or you would feel substantially more obligated to lend me money in the future.

If you call me a liar, I will get angry. If you accept the obligation without ever finding the $1,000, you will feel resentful. Either way, our relationship is harmed – and by telling you about the $1,000, I have voluntarily introduced a complication and a suspicion into our relationship, which is scarcely loving, just or benevolent.

This is the kind of brinksmanship and deception that goes on all the time in relationships – particularly in families.

When our parents tell us that they love us, they are in fact demanding that we provide for them. They are basically telling us that they have lent us $1,000 – even if we cannot remember it – and thus we owe them trust in the future, if not $1,000 in the present!

In other words, our parents spend an enormous amount of energy convincing us that they “love” us in order to create artificial obligations within us. In doing so, they take a terrible risk – and force us to make an even more terrible choice..

Brinksmanship

When somebody tells you that they love you, it is either a statement of genuine regard, based on mutual virtue, or it is an exploitive and unjust demand for your money, time, resources, or approval.

There is very little in between.

Either love is real, and a true joy, or love is false, and the most corrupt and cowardly form of theft that can be imagined.

If love is real, then it inflicts no unjust obligations. If love is real, then it is freely given without demands. If a good man gives you his love, and you do not reciprocate it, then he just realizes that he was mistaken, learns a little, and moves on. If a woman tells you that she loves you, and then resents any hesitation or lack of reciprocation you display, then she does not love you, but is using the word “love” as a kind of hook, to entrap you into doing what she wants, to your own detriment.

How can you possibly know whether the love that somebody expresses towards you is genuine or not?

It’s very, very simple.

When it is genuine, you feel it.

What happens, though, when a parent demands love from us?

Well, we must either submit to this demand, and pretend to respond in kind, or we must confront her on her manipulation – thus threatening the entire basis of the relationship.

Would someone who truly loves us ever put us in this terrible position?

Society and Religion

The principle of inflicting a good opinion in order to create an unjust obligation occurs at a social level, as well as at a personal level. Soldiers are supposed to have died “protecting us,” which creates an obligation for us to support the troops. The mere act of being born in a country creates a lifelong obligation to pay taxes at the point of a gun, in order to receive services that we never directly asked for. John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country,” is another way of saying, “One of us is going to get screwed in this interaction, and it ain’t gonna be me!”

The same thing occurs in the realm of religion, of course, as well. Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, you will be punished if you do not obey, Hell is the destination of unbelievers etc. etc. etc.

All of these emotional tricks are designed to create an obligation in you that would not exist in any reasonable universe.

“Sacrifice,” in other words, is merely demand in disguise.

[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/archive/2008/09/11/book-on-truth-the-tyranny-of-illusion.aspx]

Parrents attitude toward children

2010-07-01T19:45:00.000+03:00

Integrity

Integrity can be defined as consistency between reality, ideas and behaviour. Consistency with reality is not telling a child that daddy is “sick” when he is in fact drunk. Consistency with behaviour is not slapping a child for hitting another child. The value of this kind of integrity is also well understood by many, even if imperfectly practiced, and we will not deal with it much here either.

It is consistency with ideas that causes the most problems for families – and the most long-term suffering for children throughout their lives.

When you were a child, you were told over and over that certain actions were either good or bad. Telling the truth was good; stealing was bad. Hitting your brother was bad; helping your grandmother was good. Being on time was good; failing to complete chores was bad.

Implicit in all these instructions – moral instructions – was the premise that your parents knew what was right and what was wrong; what was good, and what was bad.

Do you think that was really true? Do you think that your parents knew what was right and wrong when you were a child?

When we tell a child that something is wrong – not just incorrect, but morally wrong – there are really only two possibilities. The first is that we actually know what is right and wrong in general, and we are applying our universal knowledge of right and wrong to a specific action committed by the child.

This is how it is always portrayed to the child. It is almost always the most dangerous lie in the world.

The second possibility is that we are telling our child that his actions are “wrong” for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with morality whatsoever.

For instance, we might tell a child that stealing is wrong because:

1. We are embarrassed at our child’s actions.
2. We are afraid of being judged a poor parent.
3. We are afraid that our child’s theft will be discovered.
4. We are simply repeating what was told to us.
5. We enjoy humiliating our child.
6. Correcting our child on “ethics” makes us feel morally superior.
7. We want our child to avoid behaviour that we were punished for as children.

... and so on

Assuming they are not terrified, most children, on first receiving moral instructions, will generally respond by asking “why?” Why is stealing wrong? Why is lying wrong? Why is bullying wrong? Why is hitting wrong?

These are all perfectly valid questions, akin to asking why the sky is blue. The problem arises in the fact that parents have no rational answers, but endlessly pretend that they do.

When a child asks us why something is wrong, we are put in a terrible bind. If we say that we do not know why lying is universally wrong, we believe we will lose our moral authority in the eyes of our children. If we say that we do know why lying is wrong, then we retain our moral authority, but only by lying to our children.

Since the fall of religion, we have lost our way in terms of ethics. As an atheist, I do not mourn the loss of the illusions of gods and devils, but I am alarmed at the fact that we have not yet admitted that the fall of religion has not provided us an objective and rational moral compass. By failing to admit to the fact that we do not know what we are doing ethically, we are perpetrating a grave moral error on our children.

Basically, we are lying to them about being good.

We tell them that certain things they do are right or wrong – yet we do not tell them that we do not know why those things are right or wrong. If our child asks us why lying is wrong, we can say that it causes people pain – but so does dentistry – or we can say “you don’t like it when someone lies to you” – which would be an incentive to not get caught, not to refrain from lying – and so on. Every answer we come up with leads to more questions and inconsistencies. What do we do then?

Why, then, we must bully them.

This does not mean hitting them or yelling at them – though sadly all too often this is the case – because as parents we have a near-infinity of passive-aggressive tactics such as sighing, acting exasperated, changing the subject, offering them a cookie, taking them for a walk, claiming to be “too busy,” distracting or rejecting them in a million and one ways.

These kinds of innocent questions about morality represent a kind of horror for parents. As parents, we must retain our moral authority over our children – but as citizens of modernity, we have no rational basis for that moral authority. Thus we are forced to lie to our children about being good, and about our knowledge of goodness, which transforms virtue from a rational discipline into a fearful fairy tale.

In the past, when religious mythology was dominant, when children asked “Where does the world come from?” parents could reply that God made it. Despite the superstitious ignorance of those who even now make the same claim, most modern parents provide the scientific and rational explanation of where the world came from, or at least send their children to the Web, an encyclopaedia, or the library.

There was a time, though, when the question of where the world came from was very difficult to answer. When religious explanations were becoming less and less credible, but scientific explanations had not become completely established, parents had to say – if they wanted to speak with integrity – “I don’t know where the world came from.”

By openly expressing their lack of certainty, parents not only acted with honesty and integrity, but also stimulated their children to pursue a truth that was admittedly absent from their world.

Alas, we suffer similar difficulties today, but about a far more important topic. The religious basis for ethics has fallen away from us, and we lack any credible or accepted theory to replace it. For a time, patriotism and allegiance to culture had some power to convince children that their elders knew something objective about ethics, but as government and military corruption have become increasingly evident, allegiance to a country, a state or a military ethos has become an increasingly fragile basis for ethical absolutes. Even our cherished theories about the virtues of democracy have come under increasing pressure, as gargantuan governments continue to separate themselves from the wishes of their citizens and act in a virtual “state of nature.”

Religious explanations of virtue have failed not just because we no longer believe in God, but also because it is now completely self-evident that when most people refer to “truth,” they are really referring to culture.[...]

Too Harsh?

I have often been accused of being too harsh on parents. “Parents do the best they can under difficult circumstances; you cannot judge the practical instructions of parents according to some abstract and absolute philosophical standard. My parents were not philosophers – they were simply telling me the truth that they believed, that they thought was accurate.”

The wonderful thing about applying philosophical concepts to our own lives is that theories are very easy to test. Discussing a philosophical theory about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire is a largely theoretical exercise, since we cannot go back in time and test it.

Theories about our families, however, are very easy to test, assuming that we have access to the relevant family members.

It is my firm belief that most human beings are absolutely brilliant. I have come to this conclusion after decades of studying philosophy and having the most amazing conversations with countless people. I am now certain that parents know exactly what they are doing – and a relatively simple test can prove this to the satisfaction of any rational person.

A Practical Exercise

Sit down with your parents and ask them what the capital of Madagascar is – or some other piece of trivia that they are unlikely to know. They will very likely smile, shake their heads and say, “I don’t know.” They will not avoid the question. They will be more than happy to help you look it up. It will be a trivial fact-finding interaction.

After you have established what the capital of Madagascar is, ask them: “What is goodness?”

I absolutely guarantee you that there will be an instant chill in the room – there will be an enormous amount of tension, and your parents – and probably you – will feel a very strong desire to change the subject, or drop the question.

Why is that? Why is it that when you ask your parents to explain what goodness is, the tension in the room spikes dramatically?

Well, for the same reason that Socrates was introduced to a grim libation called hemlock.

There is terror in the face of the question “What is goodness?” because authority figures claim the right to tell us what to do based on their superior knowledge. If we decide to learn karate, we submit ourselves to the judgment and instruction of somebody who is an expert in karate. If we become ill, we submit our judgment to a doctor, an expert in the field. In other words, when we lack knowledge, we defer to those who claim greater knowledge.

Our parents claimed the right to instruct us on good and bad based on their great knowledge of ethics, not based on their power as parents. Our fathers did not say to us: “Obey me or I will beat you.” Although that terrible sentence might have come out of their mouths at some point, the basis of their ethics was that we owed them obedience as a just debt, and thus could be punished for failing to provide it. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is a staple of moral instruction the world over, both religious and secular. However, the honour that we are supposed to bestow upon our parents must be based upon their superior knowledge and practice of virtue – otherwise the word “honour” would make no sense. If we were thrown in jail, we would obey the prison guards because they held power over us, not because we “honoured” them. If a mugger presses a knife to our ribs, we hand him our wallet – obey his wishes – not because we honour him, but because he has the power to harm us.

By using the word “honour,” parents are claiming that we owe them allegiance due to their superior knowledge and practice of virtue.

Currently, the foundational “ethic” of the family – the entire basis for the authority of adults – is that parents know right from wrong, and children do not. Metaphorically, the parents are the doctors, and the children are the patients. Parents claim the authority to tell their children what to do for the same reason that doctors claim the authority to tell their patients what to do – the superior knowledge of the former, and the relative ignorance of the latter.

If you are unwell, and put yourself in the care of a doctor, and follow his instructions, but find that you do not get better – but in fact seem to get worse – it would be wise to sit down with that doctor and review his abilities – particularly if you cannot change physicians for some reason. Since following his instructions is making you worse, you must ask: “Why should I follow your instructions?”

It would be logical to begin by asking the doctor to confirm his actual credentials. Then, you might continue by asking what his definition of health is, to make sure that you were both on the same page. Then, you would continue to drill down to more specific questions about the nature of your illness, the nature of his knowledge of the human body, and his understanding of your ailments and the methodology by which he came up with your cure.

This is the conversation that you must have with your parents regarding the nature of virtue and their knowledge of it. Your parents were the moral doctors of your being while you were growing up – if, as an adult, you are happy and healthy, full of joy and engaged in deep and meaningful relationships, it is still worthwhile to examine the knowledge of your parents, since you may have children in time, and will yourself become a “doctor” to them.

If, however, you are not happy and fulfilled as an adult, then it is essential that you examine your parents’ ethical knowledge. If your health regimen has been established by a quack who has no idea what he is doing, you will never be healthy as long as you follow his instructions, since one can never randomly arrive at the truth.

If a madman passes himself off as a doctor, when a patient asks for his credentials, he will smile, spread his hands, and say, “Well of course I don’t have any!” His openness about his lack of knowledge and credentials establishes his relative innocence.

However, when the patient asks for a doctor’s credentials, if the doctor evades the question, or becomes hostile, or dismissive, then clearly the “doctor” is fully aware of what he is doing at some level. A man who commits a murder in a police station may claim insanity; a man who murders in secret and then hides the body has the capacity for rationality, if not virtue, and thus cannot claim to be mad.

The fact that your parents will do almost anything to avoid the question “What is goodness?” is the most revealing piece of knowledge that you can possess. It is the fact that blows the cage of culture wide open. It is the horrifying knowledge that will set you free.

You will not just benefit from examining your parents. You can also sit down with your priest, and examine him with regards to the nature of the existence of God (this is a useful conversation to have with religious parents as well). If you are persistent, and do your research in advance, you will very quickly discover that your priest also has no certain knowledge about the existence of God – and will become very uncomfortable and/or aggressive if you persist, which you should.

Is it wrong for a priest to say that he only believes in God because he “has a feeling”? In terms of truth, not exactly – in terms of integrity, absolutely.

The fundamental problem is not that the priest claims the emotional irrationality of “faith” as his justification for his belief in God, but rather that the existence of God was presented to you as an objective fact, and also that you were not allowed the same criteria for “knowledge.”

These two facets of the falsehoods you were told as a child are essential to your liberation as an adult.

Fiction as Facts

[...]A counterfeiter necessarily respects the value of real money, since he does not spend his time and energies creating exact replicas of Monopoly banknotes. The counterfeiter wishes to accurately reproduce real money because he knows that real money has value – he wishes his reproduction to be as accurate as possible because he knows that his fake money does not have value.

Similarly, parents present their opinions as facts because they know that objective facts have more power and validity than mere opinion. A “doctor” who fakes his own credentials does so because he knows credentials have the power to create credibility.

Recognizing the power of truth – and using that power to reinforce lies – is abominably corrupt. A man who presents his opinions as facts does so because he recognizes the value of facts. Using the credibility of “truth” to make falsehoods more plausible simultaneously affirms and denies the value of honesty and integrity. It is a fundamental logical contradiction in theory, and almost unbearably hypocritical in practice.

Thus it always happens that when grown children begin to examine their elders, they rapidly discover that those elders do not in fact know what they claimed to know – but knew enough about the value of the truth to present their subjective opinions as objective knowledge. This hypocritical crime far outstrips the abuses of mere counterfeiting, or the faking of credentials, because adults can protect themselves against false currency and fake diplomas.

Children have no such defences.[...]

Is Ignorance Hypocrisy?

The argument is often made that parents are not aware of all the complexities of their own hypocrisies, and thus are not morally responsible for their inconsistencies.

Fortunately, there is no need for us to rely on mere theory to establish the truth of this proposition.

If I tell you to take Highway 101 to get to your destination, and it turns out that this takes you in the exact opposite direction, what would be a rational response if I were truly ignorant of the fact that I was giving you really bad directions?

Well, I would first insist that they were the correct directions, since I genuinely believe that they are. However, when you sat me down with a map and pointed out exactly why my directions were so bad, I would see the truth, apologize profusely, and openly promise never to give out bad directions again – and buy a whole bunch of maps to boot, and spend some significant amount of time studying them.

However, if I got angry the moment that you brought up that I had sent you in the wrong direction, and refused to look at any maps, and refused to admit that I was wrong, and kept changing the subject, and kept distracting you with emotional tricks, and got more and more upset, and refused to tell you how I came up with my directions – and ended up storming out of the room, you may be unsure of many things, but you would not be unsure of one thing at least.

You would no longer imagine that I was ever interested in giving good directions.

In the realm of the parent-child relationship, this realization comes as a profound and terrible shock. This realization lands like a nuclear blast over a shantytown, radiating out in waves of destruction, smashing down the assumptions you have about all of your existing relationships.

The moment you realize that your parents, priests, teachers, politicians – your elders in general – only used morality to control you, to subjugate you – as a tool of abuse – your life will never be the same again.

The terrifying fact that your elders knew the power of virtue, but used that power to control, corrupt, bully and exploit you, reveals the genuine sadism that lies at the core of culture – it reveals the awful “cult” in culture.

A doctor who fakes his credentials is bad enough – how would any sane person judge a doctor who studies the human body not to heal it, but to more effectively cause pain?

A fraud is still better than a sadist.

What can we say, then, about parents and other authority figures who know all there is to know about the power and effectiveness of using moral arguments to control the actions and thoughts of children – who respect the power of virtue – and then use that power to destroy any capacity for moral integrity in their children?

In movies, terrorists almost invariably kidnap the wife or child of the hero in order to enforce his compliance with their wishes. His virtues – love and loyalty – are thus turned into the service of evil. The better he is, the worse he must act. The more he loves virtue, the more he is controlled by evil.

And thus do the best become the worst.

And thus are children raised.

And this was your instruction.

[...]

The Contradictory Appeal

When your father says, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” he is invoking both a principle and a person. The principle is that all mothers and fathers are honourable, and so deserving of respect. The person that he is invoking is himself and your mother specifically – thy mother and father.

Logically, this makes no sense.

Saying, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” is like saying, “Honour all the women who are my wife.” If I must honour all women, then I will automatically honour your wife, since she is a woman. If I must honour your wife, then there is no point saying that I must honour her as a woman, because that would involve honouring all women again. It’s one or the other.

If you must honour the category “father” and “mother,” then you must respect all mothers and fathers equally. Showing preference for your own parents would be unjust.

If you must show preference for your own mother and father, then the category of “mother” and “father” is irrelevant. It must be for some other reason, then, that you should honour these particular individuals.

If you should bestow honour upon your mother and father as individuals, and for no objective principle, then what is really being demanded is not honour, but obedience towards individuals in the guise of honour as a principle.

This basic logical contradiction, while complicated to discuss syllogistically, is something that every child instinctually understands. When our mother demands that we respect her, do we not feel contempt, frustration and despair? Demanding respect is like demanding love, or hijacking an aircraft. It is commanding a destination, rather than respecting the free choices of individuals.

We cannot imagine someone hijacking an aircraft on its way to Vladivostok and demanding, “Take me to Vladivostok!” People hijack planes because the plane is not going where they want to go.

[...]

The Open Cage…

I’d like you to imagine a man standing in the middle of a large meadow. You spend some time watching this man, and it doesn’t take you very long to notice that he paces back and forth in a small square, about 10 feet on either side. That’s all. Just 10 feet.

After a few hours of watching him do this, you walk up to him. When you reach forward to shake his hand, however, your fingers are burned by a strong electrical shock from an invisible barrier.

Startled – and hurt – you cry out. The man looks up.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I just ran into this invisible wall which gave me a hell of a shock!” you cry.

He frowns. “I didn’t see anything.”

You blink. “Really? You’ve never heard or seen or felt this invisible barrier?”

He shakes his head slowly. “What invisible barrier?”

“The one that surrounds you – the one that keeps you penned in this little 10 foot square!”

“What little 10 foot square?” he demands. “There’s no little 10 foot square! I can go wherever the hell I want!”

“No you can’t!”

“Who the hell are you to tell me where I can and cannot go? I decide that!”

“I’m not telling you where you can and cannot go – I’m just telling you what you are actually doing!”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“Well, I’ve been watching you for the past few hours, and you’re standing in the middle of this great big meadow, and yet all you do is pace back and forth 10 feet.”

“I can go anywhere I damn well please!” the man repeats angrily.

“You say that, but all you do is pace around and around in a little 10 foot square! If you can go anywhere you please, why don’t you just try taking one extra step?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he growls. “Now get the hell off my damn property!”

“Wait – I can show you!” You reach down and pick up some grass. You throw it towards the man. A few feet away from his face, the blades of grass burst into flame and evaporate. You do this several times, proving definitively that there is in fact an invisible force field that surrounds him, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet.

“Do you see?” you ask eagerly. “Do you see that you are in an invisible cage?”

“Get the hell off my property, you madman!” he cries, shaking with rage.

“But you must know that you are in an invisible cage,” you cry out. “You must know that, because you never try to go outside these walls. You must have at one time tried to break free of this cage, and were burned by the electric shock, which is why you never take more than a few steps before turning around! Don’t you see?”

He pulls out a gun, screams that he has a principle of shooting trespassers, and, quite sensibly, you run away.

This is the great paradox of attempting to teach people what they already know. Everybody claims complete freedom, but paces back and forth, trapped in a little square. Everyone is surrounded by the invisible cages of culture and mythology, and denies it completely. The evidence of these cages is very clear, because people always turn back just before they hit them. But then they deny that these cages exist.

Everybody acts as if they are perfectly free, and perfectly enslaved at the same time. Nobody admits to being in a prison, but everyone shuffles around in an invisible 10 x 10 cell.

In the same way, everyone tells you that they are free, but in fact everyone is trapped in little tiny cells of allowable conversation. Everybody tells you they love you, but strenuously avoids talking about what love is, or what about you they love.

Everyone tells you to be good, but they have no idea what goodness is – and will savage you for even having the temerity to ask the question.

Everybody talks about the truth, but the real truth is that nobody can talk about the truth – what it is, how it is defined, how it is verified, and its value.

Responsibility

If the man in the meadow were put into his cage when he was a toddler, he would have discovered the limits of his confinement – painfully – when he was very young. It is entirely conceivable that he would end up just avoiding his invisible prison bars, to retain his illusion of freedom, and repress the pain of imprisonment. If you cannot escape your prison, then you might as well imagine that you’re free.

The man is not responsible for being put in the cage when he was a toddler, and he is not responsible for his resulting repression, and he is not responsible for not testing the bars of his cage, but instead turning away before he touches them.

There are two things, however, that he is responsible for.

The first thing that he is responsible for denying is clear and tangible evidence that contradicts his belief. There are two primary pieces of evidence: the grass that bursts into flame, and the fact that although he says he is free, he never takes more than a few steps in any direction before turning around.

The second thing that he is responsible for is shutting down the conversation when it makes him uncomfortable.

The essence of wisdom is learning the value of “staying in the conversation,” even when it makes you uncomfortable.

Especially when it makes you uncomfortable.

[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/archive/2008/09/11/book-on-truth-the-tyranny-of-illusion.aspx ]

Transmutation of Oxygen into Sulphur

2010-06-28T21:04:00.001+03:00

In the building of saltpeter, or potassium nitrate, the nitrogen of the air took a major part. How was the oxygen of the atmosphere affected by the interplanetary discharges?

It has been observed since ancient times that lightnings are attended by an odor of sulphur. In the twelfth book of the Odyssey, Homer says:

“Zeus thundered and hurled his bolt upon the ship, and she quivered from stem to stern, smitten by the bolt of Zeus, and was filled with sulphurous smoke.”

Again, in the Iliad: “When beneath the blast of father Zeus an oak falleth uprooted, and a dread reek of brimstone ariseth therefrom,—then verily courage no longer possesseth him that looketh thereon. . .”

And: “[Zeus] thundered horribly and let loose the shimmering lightning and dashed it to the ground in front of the horses of Diomedes, and a ghastly blaze of flaming sulphur shot up, and the horses, terrified, both cringed away against the chariot.”

The same observation is put into a scientific prose by Pliny: “Lightning and thunder are attended with a strong smell of sulphur, and the light produced by them is of a sulphurous complexion.” The second part of Pliny’s sentence is also correct: pioneer work on electrical discharges in modern times was produced using globes of sulphur in rotation. Sulphur is one of the best insulators and static electricity, when accumulated on it, discharges in electrical sparks toward objects brought close to it.

Electrical discharges produced without the help of sulphur are also accompanied by the smell of it. This odor was referred to by Benjamin Franklin who, comparing lightning and electricity, wrote to the Royal Society in London that both phenomena are attended by a sulphurous smell. This he mentioned among twelve other properties which suggested that lightning is an electrical discharge. No importance was attributed by him or by anyone else since to this sulphurous smell. The smell of ozone is different from the smell of vaporized sulphur or sulphurous compounds, and the supposition that the ancients were unable to distinguish between the two disregards the fact that besides the smell of ozone a sulphurous smell follows an electric discharge.

This suggests to me that sulphur is actually produced from the air by the passage of an electrical discharge. The quantity of sulphur must be detectable in a careful laboratory experiment.

Quite possibly the detection of sulphur produced by a strong electrical discharge, by means other than smell, has already been fulfilled. A very strong discharge of electricity passing through the air formed solid sulphur. The bolt of electricity that fell upon the plain of the Pentapolis was of a magnitude sufficient to cause a transmutation of elements on a great scale. It rained “brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” The overturned plain became full of sulphurous deposits—"the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt [probably potash], and burning” —and when later in another great upheaval the plain became covered by the Dead Sea, sulphurous springs continued to flow into the valley of the Jordan and into the Dead Sea from submerged strata and from the springs on the shores.

At the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the seventh century before the present era, when every fifteen years Mars was approaching dangerously close to the Earth, Isaiah prophesied “the day of the Lord’s vengeance,” in which day “the streams [of Idumea] shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch.” A curse upon man and his land was that “brimstone shall be scattered upon his habitation.” “Upon the wicked he shall rain pitch, fire and brimstone, and a horrible tempest.” This eschatological vision was alive with Ezekiel in the days of the Babylonian Exile. He spoke about “an overflowing rain, and great hailstones [meteorites], fire and brimstone.”

These stories of sulphur raining from the sky and the fearful expectations built upon them could be taken as fictions of an imaginative mind, were not the smell of sulphur an indication of its presence in the air following the passage of a discharge, and were not also the presence of sulphur deposits around the Dead Sea, thrust in deep below the ocean level, a substantiation of the story of the cataclysm.

Is the atomic source of sulphur generated by a discharge in oxygen, or does the nitrogen of the air participate also in the building of sulphur? It seems more probable that two atoms of oxygen are smashed into one atom of sulphur. If the atomic weight of sulphur obtained by electrical discharge will be found to be more than 32 (that of sulphur is 32.06) it might be due to the presence of some atoms of oxygen of the atomic weight 17. This heavy oxygen is the product of a nitrogen atom transmuted by the bombardment of alpha particles. We must reckon with the possibility that a proton from broken atoms of oxygen or ozone or nitrogen enters the new combination, or that electrons which cause the perturbation are able by themselves to change the atomic weight of the elements.

[Source: Immanuel Velikovsky - In the Beginning ]

monoatomic elements

2010-06-21T20:38:00.000+03:00

Transition Group Elements

— Description —

There is a group of elements found in the middle of the periodic table known as the "transition group elements":

1) One category of these is called the precious elements:

Silver, and the "light platinum group" ( palladium, rhodium, and ruthenium). These are called 3d transition group elements.

Gold, and the "heavy platinum group" ( platinum, iridium, and osmium). These are called 4d transition, group elements.

2) Another category of these are the non precious elements:

Copper, cobalt and nickel. These are called 2d transition group elements.

These elements are known as "transition group elements". They are in an uncertain state as regards their positive or negative electro-charge behavior, hence the name "transition". Their valence. electron orbitals are always half filled or half empty. (Electrons in the outer shells of an atom are referred to as valence electrons. Different orbital states for electrons can hold only certain numbers of electrons. ) Elements with fewer electrons in the outer shells tend to be electro-positive, and those with more electrons in the outer shells tend to be electro-negative.

These transition elements possess a unique property in that the electrons in the Partially filled outer orbitals can interchange under the right conditions with electrons in the partially filled inner orbitals (d). This is the underlying basis of catalytic reactions. (A catalytic reaction is a chemical reaction that occurs much more rapidly than normal without the catalyst itself participating in the reaction.)

Transition Group Elements

Atom Clustering and The Monoatomic State

Most atoms cluster in groups of at least two or more atoms. However, the transition group elements, because of their unique properties, can be found already existing, or can be created and are able to remain, in a stable single atom state. This is achieved by having no nearest neighbor closer than four angstroms and, therefore, by not being able to chemically bind with other atoms. This is called a "monoatomic" state.

In this state, these atoms interact in two dimensions, in a unique continuous linear movement between a strong repulsive force when close enough to each other, and a strong attractive force when moved apart at a certain distance. Only when the repulsive force is overcome, will these atoms aggregate to form a metallic union.

In metals, during the process of going from a many atom state to a monoatomic state, there is a disaggregation of the metal-metal bonds and a loss of the properties characteristically assigned to the description of a metal. Different transition elements have different critical atom cluster size which determine their metal characteristics and behavior. These characteristic physical properties are lost at different rates depending on the element involved. (For example, the critical cluster size for rhodium is five atoms; for iridium it is nine atoms.

Two or more atoms, up to thirty-three, of the same transition group element, when clustered together, are called "metal-metal" bonded. In these cluster sizes, they can not be called truly metallic. It takes a twelve atom cluster before they become electrically conductive. It takes thirteen atoms for their true metallic properties to begin to appear. It takes a cluster of thirty-three atoms before they become fully metallic, and will grow all by themselves. At thirty-three form a "face center cubic", a first basic growth structure of three dimensions solidly formed like a cube. In all these quasi metallic and fully metallic states, the atoms interact in three dimensions. In the monoatomic state, they are referred to as non-metallic and they interact in two dimensions.

In the monoatomic state, these elements have unique and consistent behavior. This is their true elemental state.

Transition Group Elements

Superdeformed Nuclei, High Spin Low Energy in the Monoatomic State:

In the monoatomic state, the atoms of the transition group elements lose their chemical reactivity and change the configuration of the nucleus. This change in nuclear configuration seems to cause the electrical change that pacifies the chemical effect. It may be considered as the mono-atom internally compensating for the highly reactive chemical state.

The nuclear configuration changes because there is a correlation between the nuclear orbitals and the electron orbitals as to how full they are. In the nucleus, totally filled orbitals (harmonic) exclude the partially filled orbitals (anharmonic) by pushing them away. The nucleus almost divides into one filled, and one half filled. This is known as the "liquid drop" theory.

This condition is unique to these atoms. The newly shaped nucleus is called "superdeformed". Nuclear physicists have recently confirmed that these atoms will change their proton and neutron configurations when they have no nearest neighbor to di-pole and di-pole react with. They can observe one atom at a time in linear accelerators.

A normal nucleus is shaped non spherically (deformed) at a vertical (length) to horizontal (width) ratio of 1.3 to 1. It is very stable and is held together by the strong force. It takes one million electron volts to knock a proton out of the nucleus!

The nucleons of these monoatomic elements adjust their positions in the nucleus, such that the ratio of their length to width becomes 2 to 1. These "soft" nuclei (those having a number of protons within a certain range and half filled orbitals) deform more easily than normal nuclei. 0nly ten electron volts are needed to cause a superdeformed nucleus to break apart, and this can be done with a mere DC arc! (See discussion of gamma emission below.)

The presence of a superdeformed nucleus is directly correlated to a change in its spin state; it passes from a low spin state to a high spin state. It has been found that the nuclei of these elements have a higher total energy in a low spin state (their internal temperature is higher) than when they are in a high spin state (their internal temperature is lower). This causes the mono-atom to seek the high spin state because that state has the total lowest energy. Furthermore, this high spin state will continue to exist until such time as a nearest neighbor atom is able to transfer energy into the nucleus and convert it back to the higher energy low spin state. (This is called "pinning" in the superconducting industry.)

[...]

David Hudson's Discoveries

David Hudson discovered that the monoatomic state can exist naturally and remain in a stable state in the transitional group elements. (ORME) He also discovered that in this state, the atoms can join to become a many atom resonance coupled system of quantum oscillators, resonating in two dimensions, indeed perfect superconductors, at room temperature. (S-ORME)

Hudson discovered that the precious elements, in the group of transitional elements, could be found in a monoatomic form in certain ores and that by a chemical method, he could separate them out from these ores. The high spin low energy state is stable and naturally maintained. it needs no external manmade manipulation. The internal temperature of the atom is measured to be almost zero degrees Kelvin .(approximately three degrees). This is a naturally cold state. It is, in fact, a perfect superconductor.

Hudson also discovered that he could prepare these mono-atoms from commercial metallic forms of the transitional group elements as well, and maintain them in this state by removing the chemical and crystalline energy. This is achieved by providing another element that is highly reactive and which has a chemical affinity for the transition element. When they react, they form a compound of the two elements. Through a process of replacement chemistry, hydrogen is exchanged for the reactive metal. The hydrogen transition metal compound is chemically removed from the solution and the hydrogen is thermally annealed from the sample. It is inherent in these precious elements to convert to the high spin state if this particular sequence is followed. This process is permanent and does not have to be continuously applied. It is also infinitely less expensive than the traditional refrigeration process.

[Source: http://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/new/hudson.htm]

SUPERDEFORMATION OF NUCLEI [“New Radioactivities,” Walter Greiner and Aurel Sandulescu, Scientific American, March 1990, pages 58-67]:

“An atomic nucleus can spontaneously restructure itself, occasionally ejecting rare clusters of protons and neutrons.” These clusters can be any number of nucleons, e.g. 14 or 24; but the emission of a cluster of nucleons other than say an alpha particle (a He nucleus composed of two protons and two neutrons) is much rarer than alpha emission. “The structure of the nucleus arises from two types of interactions: strong and electromagnetic. As a result of the strong interaction, or nuclear force, protons bind to neutrons and to each other. The nuclear force binds nucleons very tightly but acts over a very short range. To separate two neutrons that are one fermi [10-15 meter] apart, for instance, requires an energy of about one million electron volts [1 Mev]. On the other hand, only about 10 electron volts is needed to dissociate two nucleons that are 10 fermis apart. As a result of the electromagnetic interaction, or Coulomb force, protons repel other protons. Although the Coulomb force is weaker than the nuclear force, it acts over a much longer range. If two protons are one fermi apart, the Coulomb force is about 100 times weaker than the nuclear force. Yet at a distance of 10 fermis, the Coulomb force is about 10 times stronger than the nuclear force.”

[...]

The nuclei of different elements consist of shells occupied by a certain number of protons and neutrons, much in the manner of the electron shell structure surrounding the nucleus. “If the shells of a nucleus are completely filled, as are those of calcium and lead, the nucleus is stable and consequently spherical.” “Stable nuclei usually consist of a ‘magic number’ of protons or neutrons; that is, they have 2, 8, 20, 28, 40, 50, 82, 126, or 184 protons or neutrons. Nuclei that have double magic numbers are particularly stable -- for example, calcium-48 (20 protons and 28 neutrons) or lead 208 (82 protons and 126 neutrons).” The Pauli exclusion principle “holds that a proton cannot occupy an energy state filled by another proton. The same is true of neutrons. As a result, each proton fills one energy state, starting with the state that has the least energy and filling as many states as there are protons. The neutrons fill another set of energy states.”

When the outermost shell of either protons or neutrons is not filled, and the number of protons and/or neutrons depart from the ‘magic numbers’, the nuclear structure is unstable. This can result in superasymmetric fission of the element. “Superasymmetric fission produces two fragments that differ greatly in mass and charge. The emission of the smaller of these two fragments produces radiation known as cluster radioactivity. The cluster is usually several times larger than an alpha particle.” What physicists call “the collective model holds that the outer part of the nucleus can deform when the outer nucleons move with respect to the nucleons of the inner nucleus. [Thus] this collective motion, or deformation, derives from the liquid-drop model. Cold fission can also be expected, as a nucleus splits into two ‘unexcited’ nuclei.” “Unlike the ordinary (hot) process, the energy released in cold fission does not excite the emitted nuclei into high-energy states. The nuclear fragments from cold fission are therefore more spherical and less elongated than the nuclear fragments from ordinary fission.”

[...]

QUANTUM SIZE EFFECTS IN RAPIDLY ROTATING NUCLEI [Y. R. Shimizu and R. A. Broglia, Physical Review C, April 1990, pages 1865-1868.]:

“It has been conjectured that the usual Cooper instability will not exist any more in small particles containing a reduced number of fermions, like, e.g., metallic particles. Therefore, superconductivity should disappear for particles in the quantal size effects (QSE’s) regime, when the energy difference between two discrete one-electron states is comparable to the energy gap of the superconducting state. This means that small superconductors with fewer than about 104 to 105 electrons as well as, e.g. atomic nuclei should be strongly affected by quantal size effects.” “The transition from pair-correlated to normal system with increasing angular momentum involves the coupling between the bands associated with the ground state and the excited states representing fluctuations in the pairing field. The understanding of the role played by pairing fluctuations in nuclei, which is one of the central questions of high-spin physics...”

[Under magnetic fields in the range of 700,000 gauss, it has been observed that high-spin states allow for transferring energy from nucleus to nucleus without loss of energy. This implies the existence of high-spin states (even without magnetic fields) which may lead to superconductivity. Example: The (relatively high temperature, 93 oK) superconductor, Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YBa2Cu3O7), is formed by repeated healing and cooling of the compound. This heating and cooling results in water vapor from the atmosphere bleeding into the compound to combine hydrogen and oxygen elements in such a way that some of the copper is left in a monoatomic state, and thus available for superconductivity. In this respect, the implication is for an asymmetric high spin nucleus, arranged in a line some 6.3 Angstroms apart, resonating in two dimensions, to perpetuate the wave and achieve superconductivity. The atoms seem to space themselves automatically, and form the nuclear equivalent of Cooper Pairs. The nucleons screen the electrons, allowing them to pair, and thereby losing their particle aspects -- the fermions thus become Bosons (Bose Condensation). What one achieves is a nucleus with light flowing, instead of electrons.]

[Source: http://www.halexandria.org/dward477.htm]

teaching vs meta-teaching

2010-06-10T19:56:00.000+03:00

[...] you cannot use the word ‘teacher’ for martial arts uh? It’s impossible. ‘Teacher’ is for school, you teach; in Japanese this is Kyoshi, ‘master’ is Shisho – a master. The master never teaches, he transmits, he doesn’t say ‘a, b, c, d… you put your hands like this…’ A master pushes you to develop the more deeply how to see things, the art of looking and observation – because if he teaches and explains to you everything he shuts down your capacity to survive and to adapt yourself, for a warrior this is impossible and, if you apply this to Ninjutsu, it’s more deeper. You cannot teach, if you teach it’s like a condemnation if you want, you put him in a place where he cannot do anything. It’s like if you help someone to eat, you always cut up his food and after he always waits for that, because humans are like this, we take automatism very quickly. So first, there is no teacher – teacher is for fixed things, sports things, school; this is reason why the word Ryu cannot be translated as school, because primary master and foundator of ryu never acted like teacher, he never had a dojo. He was the dojo: wherever place he goes.

[Source: COMBAT MAGAZINE INTERVIEW with DR. KACEM ZOUGHARI]

Workoholism

2010-06-02T06:01:00.000+03:00

[...]First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

[...]From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times, with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system persisted in Russia until 1917, and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

[...]Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

[Source: Bertrand Russell - In Praise of Idleness (1932)]

The Nature of Law

2010-06-01T14:29:00.002+03:00

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. What Is Law ? What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. Each of us has a natural right--from God--to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two.

For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups. Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. [..]

Property and Plunder

Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor; by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is the origin of property. But it is also true that a man may live and satisfy his wants by seizing and consuming the products of the labor of others. This process is the origin of plunder. Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain -- and since labor is pain in itself -it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it. When, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor. It is evident, then, that the proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this fatal tendency to plunder instead of to work. All the measures of the law should protect property and punish plunder.

But, generally, the law is made by one man or one class of men. And since law cannot operate without the sanction and support of a dominating force, this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws. This fact, combined with the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law. Thus it is easy to understand how law, instead of checking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds. Victims of Lawful Plunder Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter -- by peaceful or revolutionary means -- into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.

Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the power to make laws! Until that happens, the few practice lawful plunder upon the many, a common practice where the right to participate in the making of law is limited to a few persons. But then, participation in the making of law becomes universal. And then, men seek to balance their conflicting interests by universal plunder. Instead of rooting out the injustices found in society, they make these injustices general. As soon as the plundered classes gain political power, they establish a system of reprisals against other classes. They do not abolish legal plunder. (This objective would demand more enlightenment than they possess.) Instead, they emulate their evil predecessors by participating in this legal plunder, even though it is against their own interests. It is as if it were necessary, before a reign of justice appears, for everyone to suffer a cruel retribution -- some for their evilness, and some for their lack of understanding.

The Results of Legal Plunder

It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking. In the first place, it erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice. No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are "just" because law makes them so. Thus, in order to make plunder appear just and sacred to many consciences, it is only necessary for the law to decree and sanction it. [...]

[...]Can the law -- which necessarily requires the use of force -- rationally be used for anything except protecting the rights of everyone? I defy anyone to extend it beyond this purpose without perverting it and, consequently, turning might against right. This is the most fatal and most illogical social perversion that can possibly be imagined. It must be admitted that the true solution -- so long searched for in the area of social relationships -- is contained in these simple words: Law is organized justice. Now this must be said: When justice is organized by law -- that is, by force -- this excludes the idea of using law (force) to organize any human activity whatever, whether it be labor, charity, agriculture, commerce, industry, education, art, or religion. The organizing by law of any one of these would inevitably destroy the essential organization -- justice. For truly, how can we imagine force being used against the liberty of citizens without it also being used against justice, and thus acting against its proper purpose?

[...]Law Is Force

Since the law organizes justice, the socialists ask why the law should not also organize labor, education, and religion. Why should not law be used for these purposes? Because it could not organize labor, education, and religion without destroying justice. We must remember that law is force, and that, consequently, the proper functions of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force. When law and force keep a person within the bounds of justice, they impose nothing but a mere negation. They oblige him only to abstain from harming others. They violate neither his personality, his liberty, nor his property. They safeguard all of these. They are defensive; they defend equally the rights of all.

Law Is a Negative Concept

The harmlessness of the mission performed by law and lawful defense is self-evident; the usefulness is obvious; and the legitimacy cannot be disputed. As a friend of mine once remarked, this negative concept of law is so true that the statement, the purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign, is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent. But when the law, by means of its necessary agent, force, imposes upon men a regulation of labor, a method or a subject of education, a religious faith or creed -then the law is no longer negative; it acts positively upon people. It substitutes the will of the legislator for their own wills; the initiative of the legislator for their own initiatives. When this happens, the people no longer need to discuss, to compare, to plan ahead; the law does all this for them. Intelligence becomes a useless prop for the people; they cease to be men; they lose their personality, their liberty, their property. Try to imagine a regulation of labor imposed by force that is not a violation of liberty; a transfer of wealth imposed by force that is not a violation of property. If you cannot reconcile these contradictions, then you must conclude that the law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.

[...]Proper Legislative Functions

It is not true that the legislator has absolute power over our persons and property. The existence of persons and property preceded the existence of the legislator, and his function is only to guarantee their safety. It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person. Since law necessarily requires the support of force, its lawful domain is only in the areas where the use of force is necessary. This is justice.

Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self- defense. It is for this reason that the collective force -- which is only the organized combination of the individual forces -- may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose. Law is solely the organization of the individual right of self-defense which existed before law was formalized. Law is justice.

[Source: Frederick Bastiat - The Law]

NLP Presuppositions

2010-05-28T10:51:00.001+03:00

People always take the best option they have
The map is not the teritory
Every behaviour has a positive intention
Everyone already has all the resources they need
What one can do, another can do
If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got
The one with the widest range of choices controls the system
The meaning of your communication is the response you get
You can't not communicate
There is no failure, only feedback

aquatic ape theory

2010-05-11T11:35:00.000+03:00

[...]Humans are so accustomed to erect locomotion that it takes a specialist to appreciate what a bizarre and costly adaptation it was. Owen Lovejoy commented: " "For any quadruped to get upon its hind legs in order to run is an insane thing to do. It's plain ridiculous." As a gait it is far more unstable than quadrupedalism; it takes very much longer to learn, greatly extending the period when the female is burdened with the task of carrying the infant; it is a deplorably ineffective defence posture, exposing the most vulnerable organs of the body to the risk of damage or evisceration; unlike in quadrupeds damage to one leg or foot can be crippling rather than a temporary inconvenience. For bipedalism to become as efficient as it is today required extensive remodelling of the body, affecting the cranium, spine, pelvis, legs, feet, and consequent adaptations in the muscles and other organs. After five million years of these modifications, the spine is still the first organ in our bodies to deteriorate due to wear and tear, and bipedalism is the direct cause of vascular disorders such as varicose veins and haemorrhoids, and of obstetric disorders that throughout most of history have been life-threatening.

[...]The original assumption concerning human nakedness, that the hominids shed their body hair to avoid overheating, offered no valid reason why they would have been more at risk from overheating than other species sharing the same habitat. It ignored the fact that depilating an animal on the savanna raises its core temperature, rather than lowering it The argument that nakedness must have been a necessary concomitant of sweat-cooling is invalidated by the example of the thick-coated but efficiently sweat-cooling patas monkey. The progressive shortening of body hairs until they were functionally useless was not an extrapolation of any existing primate trend. Russell Newman convincingly argued that hairlessness must have preceded the move to the savanna; but the feature is no more frequently encountered, and no more easily explained , in a forest habitat than on the open plains. Human skin also differs from that of primates in respect of its greater thickness and elasticity, a radical transformation of the skin glands, and the way it is connected to a layer of fibrous tissue and a fat layer, described by John Napier as "one of humankind’s greatest unsung hallmarks" and found elsewhere only in aquatic species. William Montagna after years of exhaustive research into all aspects of primate skin, reported in 1972 that the problem of human nakedness continued to defy solution.

[...]While speech is unique to humans, the physical modifications that made it possible are not. Humans but not apes can consciously exert control over the volume of air they inhale, how long they hold it, and how quickly they exhale it. The only other mammals known to be capable of this are diving mammals. It was an essential precondition of speech and the lack of it in apes is an entirely sufficient explanation of why they cannot be taught to speak. Another feature found in adult humans but no other land mammal is the descended larynx which has lost all connection with the palate. This arrangement has several disadvantages and it has been persuasively argued that it is a main factor contributing to the phenomenon of SIDS (crib deaths). One possible advantage to an aquatic hominid could have been that it facilitates mouth-breathing and makes it possible to inhale large volumes of air very quickly. The theory that it evolved in order to make speech possible, or was a precondition of speech, has now been invalidated. Professor Tecumseh Fitch of M.I.T. in Boston has examined a little girl of four years old in whom the larynx has never descended, but her speech is indistinguishable from that of any other child of her age.

[...]Homo has been described as an obese species; even the slimmest human has the potential for obesity since humans inherit ten times as many adipocytes as would be expected in a mammal of our size. The percentage of fat in a human neonate is greater than that of any other newborn land mammal . It is more than in the harp seal or the sealion, and about six times as much as in a baboon. After birth the baby - despite the high energy requirements of its growing brain – continues to devote roughly 70% of its growth potential to increasing this fat deposit, reaching peak adiposity of around 25% of its body mass by the age of nine months. These facts would not be predicted. either as part of the inheritance from early arboreal ancestors nor as adaptations to a life on the plains of Africa.

[...]The attribute of fat to which least attention has been paid is that it provides buoyancy. The amount of fat in diving mammals is liable to vary according to whether they are surface feeders, or deep divers for whom too much buoyancy would be an embarrassment. It is worth noting that a human baby – apart from adapting happily to the water if introduced to it early enough – will float, whereas a chimpanzee or gorilla infant would sink.

[Source: http://users.ugent.be/~mvaneech/Morgan.html]

Elaine Morgan site, withe her latest book available for free download: http://www.elainemorgan.me.uk/

equality before the law

2010-04-26T22:55:00.001+03:00

"From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only want to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time."

- F.A. Hayek in THE CONSTITUTION OF LIBERTY, as quoted by Joan Kennedy Taylor in 7 Libertarian Review 30, at 33 (December, 1978).

Let us examine a favorite Patriot factual setting to see what happens when legal equality is forced on objects that belong, out in the practical setting, in their own class, free to commingle with other similar objects sharing the same approximate attributes, orientation, velocity, and dimensions. Why are bicycles, pedestrians, and buggies discouraged from using interstate highways where automobiles and huge semi's reign supreme at accelerated velocities? Because as a matter of practical concern, although, ARGUENDO, each form of transportation is legally entitled to some right-of-way access, in the practical setting each form of transportation operates best in its own protected path and status, free from each other's unique requirements. Do railroads really belong on automobile highways?

Even though both are particular forms of transportation that carry freight and people, by their nature they belong on separate tracks or paths. To have all forms use the same highway path, by legally forcing non-discrimination in effect between different forms of transportation ("It just isn't fair that I cannot use my bike on that highway!"), although initially it sounds legally impressive to get rid of discrimination, this actually creates hard damages out in the practical setting when high velocity vehicles weave their way around buggies and bicycles that non-discrimination legislation has forced into using the same track or status; bicycles and pedestrians belong on their own bicycle/pedestrian paths, sharing that path with transportation forms that operate under similar characteristics, and under similar velocity parameters. Not all particular forms of the same general classification belong in the same status or path, and when forced to cross over and commingle with each other, then damages occur.

Customized legislation (or DISCRIMINATION as some would characterize it by trying to cast an illicit derogatory inference on the subject even before the substance is addressed on its merits), providing for each particular form of transportation to operate in its own ideal tract and setting, at its own maximum velocity, prevents the damages that are caused by reason of improvidently commingling different particular forms. Correct PRINCIPLES OF NATURE, however invisible, operate across all factual settings, transparent to the particular application vicissitudes then under discussion.

And just as men and women were designed by their Creator to operate at different velocities and accomplish different objectives down here, although both are mammalian vertebrates and share similar dimensions, forcing both particular genders into the same track and status to accomplish legal equality will actually secondarily create hard damages out in the practical setting.

"The two sexes differ in structure of body, in the functions to be performed by each, in the amount of physical strength, in the capacity for long-continued labor, particularly when done standing, the influence vigorous health upon the future well-being of the race, the self-reliance which enables one to assert full rights, and in the capacity to maintain the struggle for subsistence. This difference justifies a difference in legislation and upholds that which is designed to compensate for some of the burdens which rest upon her."
- MULLER VS. OREGON, 208 U.S. 412, at 422 (1907).

"...history discloses the fact that women have always been dependent upon man. He established his control at the outset by superior physical strength, and this control in various forms, with diminishing intensity, has continued to the present. As minors, though not to the same extent, she has been looked upon in the courts as needing special care that her rights may be preserved... Though limitations upon personal and contractual rights may be removed by legislation, there is that in her disposition and habits of life which will operate against a full assertion of those rights... Differentiated by these matters from the other sex, she is properly placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessarily for men, and could not be sustained."
- MULLER VS. OREGON, 208 U.S. 412, at 421 (1907).

"A doctrinaire equality, then, is the theme of the [Equal Rights] Amendment. And so women must be admitted to West Point on a parity with men; women must be conscripted for military service equally with men... girls must be eligible for the same athletic teams as boys in the public schools and state universities; Boston Boys' Latin School and Girls' Latin School must merge (not simply be brought into parity); life insurance commissioners may not continue to approve lower life insurance premiums for women (based on greater life expectancy) -- all by command of the Federal Constitution."

- Paul Freund of Harvard University in HEARINGS BEFORE SUBCOMMITTEE #4 OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, page 611, 92nd Congress, First Session [Discussing House Joint Resolutions 35 and 208 "The ERA"] (March and April, 1971).

[Source: Mercier - Invisible Contracts]

money and fictions

2010-04-07T05:57:00.003+03:00

An obligation to pay money generally is enforced by an action of assumpsit, and to that extent is referred to a contract, even though it be one existing only by fiction of law. But such obligations when imposed upon the members of a corporation may very very largely. The incorporation may create a chartered partnership the members of which are primary contractors, or it may go no farther than to impose a penalty; or again, it may create a secondary remedy for a debt treated as that of the corporation alone, like the right to attach the corporation's real estate; or the liability may be inseparable from the local procedure; or the law may be so ambiguous as to leave it doubtful whether the liability is matter of remedy, and local, or creates a contract on the part of the members that will go with them wherever they are found (McClaine v. Rankin). In the present case we think that there can be no doubt of the meaning of the California statute. It reads: 'Each stockholder of a corporation is individually and personally liable for such proportion of its debts and liabilities,' etc., as we have stated, and supposes the action against him to be brought 'upon such debt.' Civil Code, 322. This means that by force of the statute, if the corporation incurs a debt within the juris- [232 U.S. 221, 236] diction, the stockholder is a party to it, and joins in the contract in the proportion of his shares.

A fiction of law is stated from Lectric Law Library on the net as follows:
The assumption that a certain thing is true, and which gives to a person or thing a quality which is not natural to it, and consequently establishes, a certain disposition, which, without the fiction, would be repugnant to reason and to truth. It is an order of things which does not exist, but which the law prescribes or authorizes. It differs from presumption because it establishes as true, something which is false; whereas presumption supplies the proof of something true.

The law never feigns what is impossible. Fiction is like art; it imitates nature, but never disfigures it. It aids truth, but it ought never to destroy it. It may well suppose that what was possible, but which does not exist; but it will never feign that what was impossible actually is.

Fictions were invented by the Roman praetors who, not possessing the power to abrogate the law, were nevertheless willing to derogate from it under the pretense of doing equity. Fiction is the resource of weakness which, in order to obtain its object, assumes as a fact what is known to be contrary to truth: when the legislator desires to accomplish his object, he need not feign, he commands. Fictions of law owe their origin to the legislative usurpations of the bench.

It is said that every fiction must be framed according to the rules of law, and that every legal fiction must have equity for its object. To prevent their evil effects, they are not allowed to be carried further than the reasons which introduced them necessarily require.

The law abounds in fictions. That an estate is in abeyance; the doctrine of remitter, by which a party who has been disseised of his freehold and afterwards acquires a defective title, is remitted to his former good title; that one thing done today, is considered as done at a preceding time by the doctrine of relation; that because one thing is proved, another shall be presumed to be true, which is the case in all presumptions; that the heir, executor, and administrator stand by representation in the place of the deceased are all fictions of law.

Now notice that Assumption is the word used to describe how fiction operates. The word presumption is the opposite, see opening paragraph for this sentence "It differs from presumption because it establishes as true, something which is false; whereas presumption supplies the proof of something true."

Now lets use this material from Black's 3rd Edition Law book and a case to wit:
Fiction. Derived from Fictio in Roman Law, a fiction is defined as a false averment on the part of the Plaintiff which the defendant is not allowed to traverse, the object being to give the court jurisdiction. Black's Law Dictionary 3rd Ed. (1969)

[Source: http://www.atgpress.com/inform/gov037.htm]

oaths of office

2010-04-03T00:25:00.001+03:00

[...] you , when calling yourself a "state citizen" are an integral part of a corporate body and you yourself take on the character of a legal entity called a "person". All statutes are private corporate law and they all address a "person" and not a man. [...] Now you know why they refer to you as person.

[...] What was the American before he "resided" in a State? Wasn't he a "free white person?" See Works of John Adams, 213 and Thayer, Cases on Constitutional Law,note on page 459, stated in part:

"The proper english meaning of the term `citizen' imported membership of a borough or local municipal corporation. The usual word for a man's political relation to the monarch of the state was `subject'. . . . The word `citizen' is not found in any of our state constitutions before that of Massachusetts (1780); . . . In the Declaration of Independence (1776), we read it once, `He has restrained our fellow citizens,' etc. and once in the Articles of Confederation."

[...] The oath thus states in part; I, ......... do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support, obey, and defend the Constitution ...

Now we go to the paper called the Constitution of the United States. The two main parts that this oath apply are Article VI and the 14th Amendment Paragraph three. Remember that the oath is to a contract that they have to abide by and nothing else. You are not involved nor mentioned in the oath and with good reason. So let's see what they are abiding with.

First is the oath to Article VI. United States Article VI protects the debt owed to the creditor King by each debtor colony.

Article VI, U.S. Constitution.

1. All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid as against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation. [The King's money and debt is protected and this is their solemn oath they take.]

2. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made [the treaty of 1606 and 1782 made with the King], or which shall be made [Jay's treaty of 1792 with the King], under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; [despite anything to the contrary Treaties are part of the Constitution and reign supreme]; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

To prove these treaties are the "Law of the Land" here is what the HAMILTON v. EATON, 1 N.C. 641 (1796), HAMILTON v. EATON. 2 Mart., 1. U.S. Circuit Court. (June Term, 1796.), had to say.

"[...] in 1789 was adopted here the present Constitution of the United States, which declared that all treaties made, or which should be made under the authority of the United States, should be the supreme law of the land; and that the judges in every state should be bound thereby; anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary not withstanding. Surely, then, the treaty is now law in this State, and the confiscation act, so far as the treaty interferes with it, is annulled."

Evidence what was stated by the same court; that those that join the State are "SUBJECTS" not sovereigns:

"By an act of the Legislature of North Carolina, passed in April, 1777, it was, among other things, enacted, "That all persons, being subjects of this State, and now living therein, or who shall hereafter come to live therein, who have traded immediately to Great Britain or Ireland, within ten years last past, in their own right, or acted as factors, storekeepers, or agents here, or in any of the United States of America, for merchants residing in Great Britain or Ireland, shall take an oath of abjuration and allegiance, or depart out of the State."

[...]So lets go to the 14th Amendment and see if they are following their oaths to obey and defend the contract of the corporations (state and federal).

But before we do we must set the stage for the reason the judges are only following their oath to the contract, which is in no way directed to you as you are not a party to the contract and never were. I will get to the Bill of Rights later.

Bouviers Law Dictionary defines Insurgent as, "One who is concerned in an insurrection. He differs from a rebel in this, that rebel is always understood in a bad sense, or one who unjustly opposes the constituted authorities; insurgent may be one who justly opposes the tyranny of constituted authorities. The colonists who opposed the tyranny of the English government were insurgents, not rebels."

As a side note , the 1933 trading with the enemy Act did not, I repeat, DID NOT make you the enemy of the United States despite what anyone says or writes about it. What it did was make you the enemy of the banks and that's why the banks were closed for 6 days so the President could issue them licenses to deal with the enemy, A.K.A. the American people. Your ancestors were already the enemy starting 1863, therefore, you too are the enemy and there is nothing you can do about that unless you want to declare war against this government who is the conqueror. [...]

Now we go to Article 149 of the Lieber Code or General Order 100 of President Lincoln, who, prior to this, through 12 Stat 319, made you the enemy of the "State". That 1863 statute was never repealed and exists in Title 50 Sections 212, 213 and 215 as well as in Title 28 sections 2461 to 2465 seizure. If you do not believe me go and pull those Title 50 sections and go to the source law. Also note what Title 50 is named. So they still, unbeknownst to you, operate under this General Order 100. This is the part that they use against us today because remember, WE ARE STILL THE ENEMY INSURGENTS when attacking any laws of government. Read carefully.

The Lieber Code of 1863, SECTION X.--Insurrection-- Civil war--Rebellion.

"149. Insurrection is the rising of people in arms against their government, or portion of it, or against one or more of its laws, or against an officer or officers of the government. It may be confined to mere armed resistance, or it may have greater ends in views."

Now, "when we go against one or more of its laws", and that is the income tax laws, the Registration laws, the Driver license laws or any one of the multitude of laws they make, we are in insurrection because we are, remember, the enemy. When we defy an officer collecting revenue by any means then we are going "against an officer or officers" and are therefore considered dangerous and an insurrectionist.

In comes the 14th amendment paragraph to which the judge took his oath to obey. It states- "No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof."

Please note the passage "or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof". This is a key part because the judges are bound by oath to obey Article VI as to the debts to be paid and this paragraph three. You might see that paragraph four states that we cannot question the debt. We are a declared enemy under 12 Stat 319 and a declared enemy of the banks under section 5 b of the Trading with the Enemy Act that was not repealed with the rest of the act. Then if the judge, in ruling in the enemy's favor in any revenue laws, would be violating his oath of office. So you cannot complain that they are not following the oath of office. If ruling against the IRS they would then be violating their oath to protect the status quo of the corporation.

[Source: http://www.atgpress.com/inform/gov066.htm]

Social Security

2010-04-02T01:56:00.002+03:00

Social Security
I fail to understand how the American people could have been so dumbed down as to not see that the Social Security system is fraudulent and that it is based on socialism, which is the redistribution of wealth, right out of the communist manifesto. The Social Security system first, is fraud, it is insolvent and was never intended to be. It is used for a national identification number, and a requirement to receive benefits from the conquers (king).

The Social Security system is made to look and act like insurance, all insurance is governed by admiralty law, which is the kings way of binding those involved with commerce with him. "The Social Security system may be accurately described as a form of Social Insurance, enacted pursuant to Congress' power to "spend money in aid of the 'general welfare'," Helvering vs. Davis [301 U.S., at 640]

"My judgment accordingly is, that policies of insurance are within... the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction of the United States." Federal Judge Story, in DELOVIO VS. BOIT, 7 Federal Cases, #3776, at page 444 (1815).

You need to know and understand what contribution means in F.I C. A., Federal Insurance Contribution Act. Read the following definition.

Contribution. Right of one who has discharged a common liability to recover of another also liable, the aliquot portion which he ought to pay or bear. Under principle of "contribution," a tort-feasor against whom a judgement is rendered is entitled to recover proportional shares of judgement from other joint tort- feasor whose negligence contributed to the injury and who were also liable to the plaintiff. (cite omitted) The share of a loss payable by an insure when contracts with two or more insurers cover the same loss. The insurer's share of a loss under a coinsurance or similar provision. The sharing of a loss or payment among several. The act of any one or several of a number of co-debtors, co-sureties, etc., in reimbursing one of their number who has paid the whole debt or suffered the whole liability, each to the extent of his proportionate share. (Blacks Law Dictionary 6th ed.)

Thereby making you obligated for the national debt. The Social Security system is one of the contractual nexus' between you and the king. Because you are involved in the kings commerce and have asked voluntarily for his protection, you have accomplished the following. You have admitted that you are equally responsible for having caused the national debt and that you are a wrong doer, as defined by the above legal definition. You have admitted to being a Fourteenth Amendment citizen, who only has civil rights granted by the king. By being a Fourteenth Amendment citizen, you have agreed that you do not have standing in court to question the national debt. Keep in mind this is beyond the status of our country and people, which I covered earlier in this paper. We are in this system of law because of the conquest of our country.

Congress has transferred its Constitutional obligation of coining money to the federal reserve, the representatives of the king, this began after the Civil War and the overturning of the U.S. Constitution, as a result of CONQUEST. You have used this fiat money without objection, which is a commercial benefit, supplied by the kings bankers. Fiat money has no real value, other than the faith in it, and you CANNOT pay a debt with fiat money, because it is a debt instrument. A federal reserve note is a promise to pay and is only evidence of debt. The benefit you have received is you are allowed to discharge your debt, which means you pass on financial servitude to someone else. The someone else is our children.

When you go to the grocery store and hand the clerk a fifty dollar federal reserve note you have stolen the groceries and passed fifty dollars of debt to the seller. Americans try to acquire as much of this fiat money as they can. If Americans were aware of this; it wouldn't matter to them, because they don't care if the merchandise is stolen as long as it is legal. But what happens if the system fails? Those with the most fiat money or real property, which was obtained with fiat money will be forfeited to the king, everything that was obtained with this fiat money reverts back to the king temporary, I will explain in the conclusion of this paper. Because use of his fiat money is a benefit, supplied by the king's bankers; it all transfers back to the king. The king's claim to the increase in this country comes from the original Charter of 1606. But, it is all hidden, black is white and white is black, wealth is actually debt and financial slavery.

For those that do not have a Social Security number or think they have rescinded it, you are no better off. As far as the king is concerned you are subject to him also. Why? Well, just to list a couple of reasons other than conquest. You use his money and as I said before, this is discharging debt, without prosecution. You use the goods and services that were obtained by this fiat money, to enrich your life style and sustain yourself. You drive or travel, which ever definition you want to use, on the king's highways and roads for pleasure and to earn a living; meaning you are involved in the king's commerce. On top of these reasons which are based on received benefits, this country HAS BEEN CONQUERED!

I know a lot of patriots won't like this. Your (our) argument has been that the government has and is operating outside of the law (United States Constitution). Believe me I don't like sounding like the devils advocate, but as far as international law goes; and the laws that govern War between countries, the king/queen of England rule this country, first by financial servitude and then by actual Conquest and Military Occupation. The Civil War was the beginning of the Conquest, as evidenced by the Fourteenth Amendment. This Amendment did several things, as already mentioned. It created the only citizenship available to the conquered and declared that these citizens had no standing in any court to challenge the monetary policies of the new government. Why? So the king would always receive his gain from his Commercial venture. The Amendment also eliminated your use of natural rights and gave the Conquered civil rights. The Conquered are governed by public policy, instead of Republic of self-government. Your argument that this can't be, is frivolous and without merit, the evidence is conclusive.
Nothing has changed since before the Revolutionary War.

All persons whose activities in King's Commerce are such that they fall under this marine-like environment, are into an invisible Admiralty Jurisdiction Contract. Admiralty Jurisdiction is the KING'S COMMERCE of the High Seas, and if the King is a party to the sea-based Commerce (such as by the King having financed your ship, or the ship is carrying the King's guns), then that Commerce is properly governed by the special rules applicable to Admiralty Jurisdiction. But as for that slice of Commerce going on out on the High Seas without the King as a party, that Commerce is called Maritime Jurisdiction, and so Maritime is the private Commerce that transpires in a marine environment. At least, that distinction between Admiralty and Maritime is the way things once were, but no more. George Mercier, Invisible Contracts, 1984. [...]

----

You would probably say that [ the Social Security Act ] is a Insurance plan for your old age retirement. Is it? Let's examine what takes place. Money is taken out of your wage reimbursement and is supposedly put into a trust fund until you retire. What actually happens is that this money is placed into the treasury as your payment on the national debt and an IOU for this amount goes into the trust fund. When you make a claim for your Social Security benefits, the money is then borrowed from the bankers, thereby perpetually increasing the national debt your children will have to pay. This was part of the new deal, the United States agreed to borrow every dollar the government uses from these same bankers. When you receive a Social Security payment from the government you have not received your money, you have received further benefit from the government. If you'll look on your wage check stub, you will find the initials F.I.C.A., which is the amount that you pay for your supposed Social Security insurance. What does F.I.C.A mean? It means Federal Insurance Contribution Act. What about the word Contribution. Through your public school training and the context in which this word is used you would think it means your payment for your insurance. Does it? What do lawyers, judges and the federal government say Contribution means? You can find their definition in Blacks Law Dictionary, it reads as follows:

Contribution. Right of one who has discharged a common liability to recover of another also liable, the aliquot portion which he ought to pay or bear. Under principle of "contribution," a tort-feasor against whom a judgement is rendered is entitled to recover proportional shares of judgement from other joint tort-feasor whose negligence contributed to the injury and who were also liable to the plaintiff. (cite omitted) The share of a loss payable by an insure when contracts with two or more insurers cover the same loss. The insurer's share of a loss under a coinsurance or similar provision. The sharing of a loss or payment among several. The act of any one or several of a number of co-debtors, co-sureties, etc., in reimbursing one of their number who has paid the whole debt or suffered the whole liability, each to the extent of his proportionate share. (Blacks Law Dictionary 6th ed.)

So you see when you went to the Social Security office and asked for your Social Security number and you then signed the Social Security application you said that you were a tortfeasor and that you were equally responsible with the other tortfeasors for the national debt. The bankers, in 1933 increased their return on their money in several ways. First, what was just covered, the Social Security scam. The money you pay out is a tax, payment on the national debt. Second, once the gold was removed in 1933 and the silver in 1967, the only money printed was the bankers fiat money. The definition of fiat is as follows:

"Money composed of otherwise essentially valueless things that neither have a commercial use nor constitute a claim against anyone, but do have a special legal qualification. The money is not the material bearing the stamp as authority but the stamp alone." (Blacks Law Dictionary 6th ed.)

When the bankers did this they further enslaved you. The bankers have a total monopoly on the commerce in this country. They have given you the privilege of discharging your debt without actually paying your debts. Here is the definition of discharge:

"Settlement of a debt is discharged and the debtor is released when the creditor has received something from him. It may be money or its equivalent. (Barrons Law Dictionary)

Contribution: "Right of one who has discharged a common liability to recover of another also liable, the aliquot portion which he ought to pay or bear." (Blacks Law 6th ed.)

The loss of your sovereign status has all been done by contract. A contract can override any pre-existing law including the Constitution of the United States. Your rights and your sovereign status have been lost through the contracts you've been involved in (in relation to your status) with these bankers. Contracts do not have to be written down on paper. The contracts you have been involved in (in relation to your status) for the most part have been silent contracts. You can have a silent contract as long as you have the three components of a contract present, offer, acceptance and consideration. The bankers have offered you fiat money which has no value. The benefit you receive is that you can buy real property with this fiat money without being put in jail for stealing. The bankers offered this money through the government, you accepted and used this money without objection, which proves your consideration. Because of your acceptance and consideration of this silent contract (without your objection), the bankers have a right to compel you to preform to any stipulations that they might add to protect their investment. Since you are the collateral (your labor) which is the surety for the contract, they have a right to protect you. That's why all these laws and acts of Congress came about after 1933. Why do you think you have to have car insurance, drivers license, building permits, seat belt regulations and the coming Health Plan?

These regulations are compelled performance, because you have to comply as long as you receive the benefit of discharging your debt, and if you refuse you can be locked away in jail for the public welfare. Why? Because you might damage another tort-feasor. This is just one benefit (silent contract) there are many others that are offered through the government. I've covered one which was the Social Security benefit. The benefits offered by government serve another purpose, but to the same end. They have been offered to remove any claim you might have had to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This began when the Fourteenth Amendment was passed.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

You would say that this was done to emancipate the Negro. That's what you've been told, but that is not the only reason. Joseph Seligman told us one reason, which was to increase the national debt. Another reason was to create a federal citizen. The Negroes were given their United States citizenship by Congress's enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment. Anything that is created by government, can be regulated and controlled by government, through its insular capacity. Another reason was that part of the Fourteenth Amendment made it illegal for a United States citizen to challenge the Validity of the national debt. The government's part in this was to offer benefits to the American people. Thereby, making it possible for the American Citizen to become a citizen of the United States. The acceptance of these benefits changed your status from a large C Citizen (proper noun), to a small c citizen, which made you subject to the government. If you'll look at the Constitution you'll see that prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, Citizen was a large C and after the Fourteenth Amendment this changed to a small c. Another way your status changed was by your signing government forms that used the metaphor United States citizen. For example on your 1040 form or W2 form or passport etc., you were asked if you were a citizen of the United States (the word of in law means belonging to) small c, because you didn't know the words United States was a metaphor, you said sure and signed the forms. Even if you hadn't received any benefits from the government you were now a small c citizen and subject to the government, because of the declaration you made when you signed these forms. As I said earlier there are a multitude of benefits offered by the government. These include all of the Social programs, being a registered voter, having bank accounts, having insurance, working for government created corporations, the benefit of police protection etc.. just to name a few. What this means is that you no longer have the same status as our forefathers. The Constitution before the Fourteenth Amendment no longer applies to you. The only rights you have are those granted to you by your king (government). Any rights that are granted to Fourteenth Amendment citizens can be taken away. For example, the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. Because of public policy this right is going to be taken away to protect the tortfeasors (co-sureties for the national debt). Have you noticed how the government has said that this is a health issue? The bankers are losing to many co-sureties, and the tax money they pay in. The bankers required all of these entitlements and enacted these laws to protect their subjects and to increase the amount of taxes being collected.

[...]Because you are a registered voter and receiving monetary benefit from the government, which is provided by the bankers, you are obligated to abide by any statute that Congress might pass in favor of the bankers. When you use federal reserve notes you are involved in a silent contract between you and the bankers. The bankers are the suppliers, the government and the United States citizens are the receivers. Anyone around the world that has received this fiat money for payment or is involved with the banking system's are also receivers of this benefit. This fiat money creates increased perpetual debt with its use, the bankers hidden interest is for you and the government to never be able to pay off your debt. They loan this money out with the understanding that the debt can be paid off. This is impossible because you cannot pay off a debt with fiat money which is discharging the debt and passing it to someone else. Have you been reimbursed for your labor when you are paid with fiat money? No. What do you receive when you receive fiat money? Don't you receive a debt note? A tax is required on the valueless money you were paid for your labor, just as if you were paid real money. The difference being you can't pay a debt (tax) with fiat money. Your labor and your property are being transferred for the payment of these taxes. Your labor is being required to pay a tax for the use of money that has no value. So don't you go in the hole every time you receive and accept fiat money for payment for your labor? Sure you do, think about it, this is the most ingenious scam ever devised. Just as soon as people start refusing to accept the federal reserve notes the whole system would crumble. It is only your faith in the security of the dollar that gives it its buying power. The debt cannot be paid off and the fact that it's in the bankers interest to loan out more fiat money, because they receive real property in return, the bankers will do anything to continue this fraud. When you no longer have enough labor to satisfy the debt, your property is then transferred through bankruptcy. This is a classic no-interest contract, it is illegal and the bankers and anyone in government that are involved should be jailed. What completes this trap? The government has made it law, that the only money that can be used is the fiat money the bankers print and distribute. Thereby, you are being forced to be a party to a silent contract where your consideration is based on coercion.

You might ask, do I have a remedy? You bet. Can you be compelled to enter a contract? No. Can you be bound by a contract where there is fraud involved? No. So what's your remedy? Study these issues and study, study and study some more. Then! Quit receiving voluntarily, government benefits that you are not compelled (forced) to. Learn how to object to these benefits when you are compelled by government to accept them, thereby, reserving your common law right under God to be a freeman and a freeholder of your property while maintaining your Sui Juris status. Here is the definition of Sui Juris:

"Possessing all the rights to which a freeman is entitled; not being under the power of another, as a slave, a minor, and the like." (Bouviers Law Dictionary 1914 ed.)

[Source: James Franklin Montgomery - full text is available on http://www.atgpress.com/kifap/indexjm.htm]

The Civil War

2010-04-02T01:55:00.001+03:00

Early on in our history the king was satisfied with the interest made by the Bank of the United States. But when the Bank Charter was canceled in 1811 it was time to gain control of the government, in order to shape government policy and public policy. Have you never asked yourself why the British, after burning the White House and all our early records during the War of 1812, left and did not take over the government. The reason they did, was to remove the greatest barrier to their plans for this country. That barrier was the newly adopted 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The purpose for this Amendment was to stop anyone from serving in the government who was receiving a Title of nobility or honor. It was and is obvious that these government employees would be loyal to the granter of the Title of nobility or honor.

The War of 1812 served several purposes. It delayed the passage of the 13th Amendment by Virginia, allowed the British to destroy the evidence of the first 12 states ratification of this Amendment, and it increased the national debt, which would coerce the Congress to reestablish the Bank Charter in 1816 after the Treaty of Ghent was ratified by the Senate in 1815. [...]

After the War of 1812 was concluded the Treaty of Ghent was signed and ratified. In Article 4 of the Treaty, the United States gained what was already given in the Treaty of Paris 1783, namely islands off the U.S. Coast. Also, two men were to be given the power to decide the borders and disagreements, if they could not, the power was to be given to an outside sovereign power and their decision was final and considered conclusive. In Article 9 it is admitted there are citizens and subjects in America. As you have seen, the two terms are interchangeable, synonymous. In Article 10 you will see where the idea for the overthrow of this country came from and on what issue. The issue raised by England was slavery and it was nurtured by the king's emissaries behind the scenes. This would finally lead to the Civil War, even though the Supreme Court had declared the states and their citizens property rights could not be infringed on by the United States government or Congress. This was further declared by the following Presidential quotes, where they declared to violate the states rights would violate the U.S. Constitution. Also, history shows that slavery would not have existed much longer in the Southern states, public sentiment was changing and slavery was quickly disappearing. The Civil War was about destroying property rights and the U.S. Constitution which supported these rights.

[...] In this divisive issue, the true attack was on our natural rights and on the Constitution. The core of the attack was on our right to possess allodial property. Our God given right to own property in allodial was taken away by conquest of the Civil War. If you are free this right cannot be taken away. The opposite of free is slave or subject, we were allowed to believe we were free for about 70 years. Then the king said enough, and had the slavery issue pushed to the front by the northern press, which so formed northern public opinion, that they were willing to send their sons to die in the Civil War.

The southern States were not fighting so much for the slave issue, but for the right to own property, any property. These property rights were granted by the king in the Treaty of 1783, knowing they would soon be forfeited by the American people through ignorance. Do you think you own your house? If you were to stop paying taxes, federal or state, you would soon find out that you were just being allowed to live and pay rent for this house. The rent being the taxes to the king, who supplied the benefit of commerce. A free man not under a monarch, democracy, dictatorship or socialist government, but is under a republican form of government would not and could not have his property taken. [...]

Civil War and The Conquest that followed

The government and press propaganda that the War was to free the black people from slavery is ridiculous, once you understand the Civil War Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The black people are just as much slaves today as before the Civil War just as the white people are, and also we find ourselves subjects of the king/queen of England. The only thing that changed for black people is they changed masters and were granted a few rights, which I might add can be taken away anytime the government chooses. Since the 1930's the black people have been paid reparations to buy off their silence, in other words, keep the slaves on the plantation working.

[...] All Americans are feudal tenants on the land, allowed to rent the property they live on as long as the king gets his cut. What about self-determination, or being able to own allodial title to property, which means the king cannot take your property for failure to pay a tax. Which means you did not own it to begin with. The king allows you to use the material goods and land. Again this is financial servitude.

"The ultimate ownership of all property is in the state; individual so-called `ownership' is only by virtue of government, i.e., law, amounting to a mere user; and use must be in accordance with law and subordinate to the necessities of the State." Senate Document No. 43, "Contracts payable in Gold" written in 1933.
The king controlled the government by the time the North won the Civil War, through the use of lawyers that called the shots behind the scenes, just as they do now and well placed subjects in the United States government. This would not have been possible if not for England destroying our documents in 1812 and the covering up of state documents of the original 13th Amendment.

According to International law, what took place when the North conquered the South? First, you have to understand the word "conquest" in international law. When you conquer a state you acquire the land; and those that were subject to the conquered state, then become subject to the conquers. The laws of the conquered state remain in force until the conquering state wishes to change all or part of them. At the time of conquest the laws of the conquered state are subject to change or removal, which means the law no longer lies with the American people through the Constitution, but lies with the new sovereign. The Constitution no longer carries any power of its own, but drives its power from the new sovereign, the conqueror. The reason for this is the Constitution derived its power from the people, when they were defeated, so was the Constitution.

The following is the definition of Conquest:

"The acquisition of the sovereignty of a country by force of arms, exercised by an independent power which reduces the vanquished to submission to its empire."
"The intention of the conqueror to retain the conquered territory is generally manifested by formal proclamation of annexation, and when this is combined with a recognized ability to retain the conquered territory, the transfer of sovereignty is complete. A treaty of peace based upon the principle of uti possidetis (q.v.) is formal recognition of conquest."

"The effects of conquest are to confer upon the conquering state the public property of the conquered state, and to invest the former with the rights and obligations of the latter; treaties entered into by the conquered state with other states remain binding upon the annexing state, and the debts of the extinct state must be taken over by it. Conquest likewise invests the conquering state with sovereignty over the subjects of the conquered state. Among subjects of the conquered state are to be included persons domiciled in the conquered territory who remain there after the annexation. The people of the conquered state change their allegiance but not their relations to one another." Leitensdorfer v. Webb, 20 How. (U.S.) 176, 15 L. Ed. 891.

"After the transfer of political jurisdiction to the conqueror the municipal laws of the territory continue in force until abrogated by the new sovereign." American Ins. Co. v. Canter, 1 Pet. (U.S.) 511, 7 L. Ed. 242. Conquest, In international Law. - Bouvier's Law Dictionary.

What happened after the Civil War? Did not U.S. troops force the southern states to accept the Fourteenth Amendment? The laws of America, the Constitution were changed by the conquering government. Why? The main part I want you to see, as I said at the beginning of this paper, is watch the money and the commerce. The Fourteenth Amendment says the government debt can not be questioned. Why? Because now the king wants all the gold, silver and copper and the land. Which can easily be done by increasing the government debt and making the American people sureties for the debt. This has been done by the sleight of hand of lawyers and the bankers.

The conquering state is known as a Belligerent, read the following quotes.

Belligerency, is International Law
"The status of de facto statehood attributed to a body of insurgents, by which their hostilities are legalized. Before they can be recognized as belligerents they must have some sort of political organization and be carrying on what is international law is regarded as legal war. There must be an armed struggle between two political bodies, each of which exercises de facto authority over persons within a determined territory, and commands an army which is prepared to observe the ordinary laws of war. It is not enough that the insurgents have an army; they must have an organized civil authority directing the army."

"The exact point at which revolt or insurrection becomes belligerency is often extremely difficult to determine; and belligerents are not usually recognized by nations unless they have some strong reason or necessity for doing so, either because the territory where the belligerency is supposed to exist is contiguous to their own, or because the conflict is in some way affecting their commerce or the rights of their citizens...One of the most serious results of recognizing belligerency is that it frees the parent country from all responsibility for what takes place within the insurgent lined; Dana's Wheaton, note 15, page 35." Bouvier's Law Dictionary

Belligerent, In International Law.
"As adj. and noun. Engaged in lawful war; a state so engaged. In plural. A body of insurgents who by reason of their temporary organized government are regarded as conducting lawful hostilities. Also, militia, corps of volunteers, and others, who although not part of the regular army of the state, are regarded as lawful combatants provided they observe the laws of war; 4 H. C. 1907, arts, 1, 2." Bouvier's Law Dictionary.

According to the International law no law has been broken. Read the following about military occupation, notice the third paragraph. After the Civil War, title to the land had not been completed to the conquers, but after 1933 it was. I will address this in a moment. In the last paragraph, it says the Commander-in- Chief governs the conquered state. The proof that this is the case today, is the U.S. flies the United States flag with a yellow fringe on three sides. According to the United States Code, Title 4, Sec. 1, the U.S. flag does not have a fringe on it. The difference being one is a Constitutional flag, and the fringed flag is a military flag. The military flag means you are in a military occupation and are governed by the Commander-in-Chief in his executive capacity, not under any Constitutional authority. Read the following.

Military Occupation
"This at most gives the invader certain partial and limited rights of sovereignty. Until conquest, the sovereign rights of the original owner remain intact. Conquest gives the conqueror full rights of sovereignty and, retroactively, legalizes all acts done by him during military occupation. Its only essential is actual and exclusive possession, which must be effective."

"A conqueror may exercise governmental authority, but only when in actual possession of the enemy's country; and this will be exercised upon principles of international law; MacLeod v. U.S., 229 U.S. 416, 33 Sup. Ct 955, 57 L. Ed. 1260."
"The occupant administers the government and may, strictly speaking, change the municipal law, but it is considered the duty of the occupant to make as few changes in the ordinary administration of the laws as possible, though he may proclaim martial law if necessary. He may occupy public land and buildings; he cannot alienate them so as to pass a good title, but a subsequent conquest would probably complete the title..."

"Private lands and houses are usually exempt. Private movable property is exempt, though subject to contributions and requisitions. The former are payments of money, to be levied only by the commander-in-chief...Military necessity may require the destruction of private property, and hostile acts of communities or individuals may be punished in the same way. Property may be liable to seizure as booty on the field of battle, or when a town refuses to capitulate and is carried by assault. When military occupation ceases, the state of things which existed previously is restored under the fiction of postliminium (q.v.)"

"Territory acquired by war must, necessarily, be governed, in the first instance, by military power under the direction of the president, as commander-in-chief. Civil government can only be put in operation by the action of the appropriate political department of the government, at such time and in such degree as it may determine. It must take effect either by the action of the treaty- making power, or by that of congress. So long as congress has not incorporated the territory into the United States, neither military occupation nor cession by treaty makes it domestic territory, in the sense of the revenue laws. Congress may establish a temporary government, which is not subject to all the restrictions of the constitution. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 21 Sup Ct. 770, 45 L. Ed. 1088, per Gray, J., concurring in the opinion of the court." Bouvier's Law Dictionary

Paragraph 1-3 of the definition of Military Occupation describes what took place during and after the Civil War. What took place during the Civil War and Post Civil War has been legal under international law. You should notice in paragraph 3, that at the end of the Civil War, title to the land was not complete, but the subsequent Conquest completed the title. When was the next Conquest? 1933, when the American people were alienated by our being declared enemies of the Conquer and by their declaring war against all Americans. [...]

The following are excerpts from the Senate Report, 93rd Congress, November 19, 1973, Special Committee On The Termination Of The National Emergency United States Senate.

Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency....Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens.

A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency....from, at least, the Civil War in important ways shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency.

In Title 12, in section 95b you'll find the following codification of the emergency war powers: The actions, regulations, rules, licenses, orders and proclamations heretofore or hereafter taken, promulgated, made, or issued by the President of the United States or the Secretary of the Treasury since March 4, 1933, pursuant to the authority conferred by subsection (b) of section 5 of the Act of October 6, 1917, as amended (12 USCS, 95a), are hereby approved and confirmed. (March 9, 1933, c. 1, Title 1, 1, 48 Stat. 1)

It is clear that the Bankrupt, defacto government of the united States, which is operating under the War Powers Act and Executive Orders; not the Constitution for the united States, has in effect issued under its Admiralty Law, Letters of Marque (piracy) to its private agencies IRS, ATF, FBI and DEA, with further enforcement by its officers in the Courts, local police and sheriffs, waged war against the American People and has classed Americans as enemy aliens.

The following definition is from BOUVIER'S LAW DICTIONARY (P. 1934) of Letters of Marque, it says: "A commission granted by the government to a private individual, to take the property of a foreign state, or of the citizens or subjects of such state, as a reparation for an injury committed by such state, its citizens or subjects. The prizes so captured are divided between the owners of the privateer, the captain, and the crew. A vessel to a friendly port, but armed for its own defence in case of attack by an enemy, is also called a letter of marque."
Words and Phrases, Dictionary

By the law of nations, an enemy is defined to be "one with whom a nations at open war." When the sovereign ruler of a state declares war against another sovereign, it is understood the whole nation declares war against that other nation. All the subjects of one are enemies to all the subjects of the other, and during the existence of the war they continue enemies, in whatever country they may happen to be, "and all persons residing within the territory occupied by the belligerents, although they are in fact foreigners, are liable to be treated as enemies." Grinnan v. Edwards, 21 W.Va. 347, 357, quoting Vatt. Law.Nat.bk. 3, c. 69-71.
So we find ourselves enemies in our own country and subjects of a king that has conquered our land, with heavy taxation and no possibility of fair representation.
The government has, through the laws of forfeiture, taken prize and booty for the king; under the Admiralty Law and Executive powers as declared by the Law of the Flag. None of which could have been done with the built in protection contained in the true Thirteenth Amendment, which has been kept from the American People. The fraudulent Amendments and legislation that followed the Civil War, bankrupted the American People and put the privateers (banksters) in power, and enforced by the promise of prize and booty to their partners in crime (government).

The following is the definition of a tyrant.
Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary defines tyrant as follows: "1. An absolute ruler; one who seized sovereignty illegally; a usurper. 2. a cruel oppressive ruler; a despot. 3. one who exercises his authority in an oppressive manner, a cruel master."[...]

So we pick up with paragraph 4, which describes the taxation under Military Occupation and that you are under Executive control and are bound under admiralty law by the contracts we enter, including silent contracts and by Military Occupation.

Notice the last sentence in paragraph 5, Congress may establish a temporary government, which is not subject to all the restrictions of the Constitution. See also Harvard Law Review - the Insular Cases. This means you do not have a Constitutional government, you have a military dictatorship, controlled by the President as Commander-in-Chief.[...]

A Military Flag

And to further confirm and understand the significance of what I have told you, you need to understand the fringe on the United States flag. Read the following.
First the appearance of our flag is defined in Title 4 sec. 1. U.S.C..

"The flag of the United States shall be thirteen horizontal stripes, alternate red and white; and the union of the flag shall be forty-eight stars, white in a blue field." (my note - of course when new states are admitted, new stars are added.)
A foot note was added on page 1113 of the same section which says: "Placing of fringe on the national flag, the dimensions of the flag, and arrangement of the stars are matters of detail not controlled by statute, but within the discretion of the President as commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy." 1925, 34 Op.Atty.Gen. 483.

The president, as military commander, can add a yellow fringe to our flag. When would this be done? During time of war. Why? A flag with a fringe is an ensign, a military flag. Read the following.

"Pursuant to U.S.C. Chapter 1, 2, and 3; Executive Order No. 10834, August 21, 1959, 24 F.R. 6865, a military flag is a flag that resembles the regular flag of the United States, except that it has a YELLOW FRINGE, bordered on three sides. The President of the United states designates this deviation from the regular flag, by executive order, and in his capacity as COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF of the Armed forces."

From the National Encyclopedia, Volume 4:
"Flag, an emblem of a nation; usually made of cloth and flown from a staff. From a military standpoint flags are of two general classes, those flown from stationary masts over army posts, and those carried by troops in formation. The former are referred to by the general name flags. The latter are called colors when carried by dismounted troops. Colors and Standards are more nearly square than flags and are made of silk with a knotted Fringe of Yellow on three sides...use of the flag. The most general and appropriate use of the flag is as a symbol of authority and power."

"...The agency of the master is devolved upon him by the law of the flag. The same law that confers his authority ascertains its limits, and the flag at the mast-head is notice to all the world of the extent of such power to bind the owners or freighters by his act. The foreigner who deals with this agent has notice of that law, and, if he be bound by it, there is not injustice. His notice is the national flag which is hoisted on every sea and under which the master sails into every port, and every circumstance that connects him with the vessel isolates that vessel in the eyes of the world, and demonstrates his relation to the owners and freighters as their agent for a specific purpose and with power well defined under the national maritime law." Bouvier's Law Dictionary, 1914.
Don't be thrown by the fact they are talking about the sea, and that it doesn't apply to land. Admiralty law came on land in 1845 with the Act of 1845 by Congress. Next a court case:

"Pursuant to the "Law of the Flag", a military flag does result in jurisdictional implication when flown. The Plaintiff cites the following: "Under what is called international law, the law of the flag, a shipowner who sends his vessel into a foreign port gives notice by his flag to all who enter into contracts with the shipmaster that he intends the law of the flag to regulate those contracts with the shipmaster that he either submit to its operation or not contract with him or his agent at all." Ruhstrat v. People, 57 N.E. 41, 45, 185 ILL. 133, 49 LRA 181, 76 AM.

I have had debates with folks that take great issue with what I have said, they dogmatically say the constitution is the law and the government is outside the law. I wish they were right, but they fail to see or understand that the American people have been conquered, unknowingly, but conquered all the same. That is why a judge will tell you not to bring the Constitution into his court, or a law dictionary, because he is the law, not the Constitution.

You have only to read the previous Senates report on National Emergency, to understand the Constitution and our Constitutional form of government no longer exists.

[Source: James Franklin Montgomery - full text is available on http://www.atgpress.com/kifap/indexjm.htm]

The United States is still a British Colony

2010-04-01T04:02:00.004+03:00

The United States is still a British Colony

The trouble with history is, we weren't there when it took place and it can be changed to fit someone's belief and/or traditions, or it can be taught in the public schools to favor a political agenda, and withhold many facts. I know you have been taught that we won the Revolutionary War and defeated the British, but I can prove to the contrary. [...] I too was always taught in school and in studying our history books that our freedom came from the Declaration of Independence and was secured by our winning the Revolutionary War. I'm going to discuss a few documents [...]. The first document is the first Charter of Virginia in 1606. In the first paragraph, the king of England granted our fore fathers license to settle and colonize America. The definition for license is as follows.

"In Government Regulation. Authority to do some act or carry on some trade or business, in its nature lawful but prohibited by statute, except with the permission of the civil authority or which would otherwise be unlawful." Bouvier's Law Dictionary, 1914.

Keep in mind those that came to America from England were British subjects. So you can better understand what I'm going to tell you, here are the definitions for subject and citizen.

"In monarchical governments, by subject is meant one who owes permanent allegiance to the monarch." Bouvier's Law Dictionary, 1914.

"Constitutional Law. One that owes allegiance to a sovereign and is governed by his laws. The natives of Great Britain are subjects of the British government. Men in free governments are subjects as well as citizens; as citizens they enjoy rights and franchises; as subjects they are bound to obey the laws. The term is little used, in this sense, in countries enjoying a republican form of government." Swiss Nat. Ins. Co. v. Miller, 267 U.S. 42, 45 S. Ct. 213, 214, 69 L.Ed. 504. Blacks fifth Ed.

I chose to give the definition for subject first, so you could better understand what definition of citizen is really being used in American law. Below is the definition of citizen from Roman law.

"The term citizen was used in Rome to indicate the possession of private civil rights, including those accruing under the Roman family and inheritance law and the Roman contract and property law. All other subjects were peregrines. But in the beginning of the 3d century the distinction was abolished and all subjects were citizens; 1 sel. Essays in Anglo-Amer. L. H. 578." Bouvier's Law Dictionary, 1914.

The king was making a commercial venture when he sent his subjects to America, and used his money and resources to do so. I think you would admit the king had a lawful right to receive gain and prosper from his venture. In the Virginia Charter he declares his sovereignty over the land and his subjects and in paragraph 9 he declares the amount of gold, silver and copper he is to receive if any is found by his subjects. There could have just as easily been none, or his subjects could have been killed by the Indians. This is why this was a valid right of the king (Jure Coronae, "In right of the crown," Black's forth Ed.), the king expended his resources with the risk of total loss.

If you'll notice in paragraph 9 the king declares that all his heirs and successors were to also receive the same amount of gold, silver and copper that he claimed with this Charter. The gold that remained in the colonies was also the kings. He provided the remainder as a benefit for his subjects, which amounted to further use of his capital. You will see in this paper that not only is this valid, but it is still in effect today. If you will read the rest of the Virginia Charter you will see that the king declared the right and exercised the power to regulate every aspect of commerce in his new colony. A license had to be granted for travel connected with transfer of goods (commerce) right down to the furniture they sat on. A great deal of the king's declared property was ceded to America in the Treaty of 1783. I want you to stay focused on the money and the commerce which was not ceded to America.

This brings us to the Declaration of Independence. Our freedom was declared because the king did not fulfill his end of the covenant between king and subject. The main complaint was taxation without representation, which was reaffirmed in the early 1606 Charter granted by the king. It was not a revolt over being subject to the king of England, most wanted the protection and benefits provided by the king. Because of the kings refusal to hear their demands and grant relief, separation from England became the lesser of two evils. The cry of freedom and self determination became the rallying cry for the colonist. The slogan "Don't Tread On Me" was the standard borne by the militias.

The Revolutionary War was fought and concluded when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown. As Americans we have been taught that we defeated the king and won our freedom. The next document I will use is the Treaty of 1783, which will totally contradict our having won the Revolutionary War.

I want you to notice in the first paragraph that the king refers to himself as prince of the Holy Roman Empire and of the United States. You know from this that the United States did not negotiate this Treaty of peace in a position of strength and victory, but it is obvious that Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John Adams negotiated a Treaty of further granted privileges from the king of England. Keep this in mind as you study these documents. You also need to understand the players of those that negotiated this Treaty. For the Americans it was Benjamin Franklin Esgr., a great patriot and standard bearer of freedom. Or was he? His title includes Esquire.

An Esquire in the above usage was a granted rank and Title of nobility by the king, which is below Knight and above a yeoman, common man. An Esquire is someone that does not do manual labor as signified by this status, see the below definitions.

"Esquires by virtue of their offices; as justices of the peace, and others who bear any office of trust under the crown....for whosever studieth the laws of the realm, who studieth in the universities, who professeth the liberal sciences, and who can live idly, and without manual labor, and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he shall be called master, and shall be taken for a gentleman." Blackstone Commentaries p. 561-562

"Esquire - In English Law. A title of dignity next above gentleman, and below knight. Also a title of office given to sheriffs, serjeants, and barristers at law, justices of the peace, and others." Blacks Law Dictionary fourth ed. p. 641
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay as you can read in the Treaty were all Esquires and were the signers of this Treaty and the only negotiators of the Treaty. The representative of the king was David Hartley Esqr..

Benjamin Franklin was the main negotiator for the terms of the Treaty, he spent most of the War traveling between England and France. The use of Esquire declared his and the others British subjection and loyalty to the crown.

In the first article of the Treaty most of the kings claims to America are relinquished, except for his claim to continue receiving gold, silver and copper as gain for his business venture. Article 3 gives Americans the right to fish the waters around the United States and its rivers. In article 4 the United States agreed to pay all bona fide debts. If you will read my other papers on money you will understand that the financiers were working with the king. Why else would he protect their interest with this Treaty?

I wonder if you have seen the main and obvious point? This Treaty was signed in 1783, the war was over in 1781. If the United States defeated England, how is the king granting rights to America, when we were now his equal in status? We supposedly defeated him in the Revolutionary War! So why would these supposed patriot Americans sign such a Treaty, when they knew that this would void any sovereignty gained by the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War?

If we had won the Revolutionary War, the king granting us our land would not be necessary, it would have been ours by his loss of the Revolutionary War. To not dictate the terms of a peace treaty in a position of strength after winning a war; means the war was never won. Think of other wars we have won, such as when we defeated Japan. Did McArther allow Japan to dictate to him the terms for surrender? No way! All these men did is gain status and privilege granted by the king and insure the subjection of future unaware generations. Worst of all, they sold out those that gave their lives and property for the chance to be free.

[...]Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, but the document read, Capitulation at Yorktown. Did Cornwallis surrender, or did they just quit fighting because the king, made the necessary capitulations to the colonist demands? Well, did Cornwallis surrender his arms, in other words, did he and his troops lay down their arms and leave unarmed? No. Did Cornwallis surrender his colors, the king's flag? No. Anyone that knows anything about War andConquest, knows the flag of the surrendering enemy has to be Surrendered; if not, you just fought a battle, and did not win the war. Was Cornwallis and his army allowed to return to England armed and with their colors? Yes. Were British subjects allowed to retain their lands and possessions in America? Yes Was the king removed from his throne and his laws defeated, by his removal? No. Tell me again America, we won the Revolutionary War?

[...]All the Treaty did was remove the United States as a liability and obligation of the king. He no longer had to ship material and money to support his subjects and colonies. At the same time he retained financial subjection through debt owed after the Treaty, which is still being created today; millions of dollars a day. And his heirs and successors are still reaping the benefit of the kings original venture.[...]

A new war was declared when the Treaty was signed. The king wanted his land back and he knew he would be able to regain his property for his heirs with the help of his world financiers. Here is a quote from the king speaking to Parliament after the Revolutionary War had concluded.

(Six weeks after) the capitulation of Yorktown, the king of Great Britain, in his speech to Parliament (Nov. 27, 1781), declared "That he should not answer the trust committed to the sovereign of a free people, if he consented to sacrifice either to his own desire of peace, or to their temporary ease and relief, those essential rights and permanent interests, upon the maintenance and preservation of which the future strength and security of the country must forever depend." The determined language of this speech, pointing to the continuance of the American war, was echoed back by a majority of both Lords and Commons.

In a few days after (Dec. 12), it was moved in the House of Commons that a resolution should be adopted declaring it to be their opinion "That all farther attempts to reduce the Americans to obedience by force would be ineffectual, and injurious to the true interests of Great Britain." [...]. What were the true interests of the king? The gold, silver and copper.

The new war was to be fought without Americans being aware that a war was even being waged, it was to be fought by subterfuge and key personnel being placed in key positions. The first two parts of "A Country Defeated In Victory," go into detail about how this was done and exposes some of the main players.

Every time you pay a tax you are transferring your labor to the king, and his heirs and successors are still receiving interest from the original American Charters.

The following is the definition of tribute (tax).

"A contribution which is raised by a prince or sovereign from his subjects to sustain the expenses of the state.

A sum of money paid by an inferior sovereign or state to a superior potentate, to secure the friendship or protection of the latter." Blacks Law Dictionary forth ed. p. 1677. [...]

Another Treaty between England and the United States was Jay's Treaty of 1794. If you will remember from the Paris Treaty of 1783, John Jay Esqr. was one of the negotiators of the Treaty. In 1794 he negotiated another Treaty with Britain. There was great controversy among the American people about this Treaty.

In Article 2 you will see the king is still on land that was supposed to be ceded to the United States at the Paris Treaty. This is 13 years after America supposedly won the Revolutionary War. I guess someone forgot to tell the king of England. In Article 6, the king is still dictating terms to the United States concerning the collection of debt and damages, the British government and World Bankers claimed we owe. In Article 12 we find the king dictating terms again, this time concerning where and with who the United States could trade. In Article 18 the United States agrees to a wide variety of material that would be subject to confiscation if Britain found said material going to its enemies ports. Who won the Revolutionary War?

[..]Now, to the so-called 1783 Paris Treaty, wherein the king's possessions were turned over to us without his losing the War. Benjamin Franklin spent almost the entire war traveling back and forth from France and England working out the terms of the Treaty, excuse me GRANT, from the king of England. Let me see, we did not win the War, we did not dictate the terms of surrender, the king's barrister's along with the esquires chosen from America, Franklin, Jay and Adams, wrote the document. A document wherein the king's law remained in force, and he GRANTED lands to his new Corporation, the United States. However, he did not grant to his Corporation the rights to the minerals existing and all to be found in the future. As I have said before, he declared in his Charters, ownership to all minerals, and that he was to receive a portion of the gain/profit in this country forever. Also, how can the king do anything else but give fee simple title, when his law provides for only him to have allodial title. Did he change his law? NO. Could he change the un-revocable Trust his Charters established for all his heirs and successors? No. No, and could not, without destroying his throne, his Crown (corporation) and his law, thereby conquesting himself. You see that is the only way under the king's law to own land by allodial title, via conquest, as the conqueror. This is why no country has defeated the king of England and his Crown, because if his law exists wherein the Corporate Charter was created, and the king and his heirs remain, the king's Crown and Charters remain in force.

[Source: James Franklin Montgomery - full text is available on http://www.atgpress.com/kifap/indexjm.htm]

Einstein's Rise to Fame

2010-03-24T10:19:00.006+02:00

With regard to the politics that led to Einstein's fame Dr. S. Chandrasekhar states:

In 1917, after more than two years of war, England enacted conscription for all able-bodied men. Eddington, who was 34, was eligible for draft. But as a devout Quaker, he was a conscientious objector; and it was generally known and expected that he would claim deferment from military service on that ground. Now the climate of opinion in England during the war was very adverse with respect to conscientious objectors: it was, in fact, a social disgrace to be even associated with one.

And the stalwarts of Cambridge of those days - Larmor (of the Larmor precession), Newall, and others - felt that Cambridge University would be disgraced by having one of its distinguished members a declared conscientious objector. They therefore tried through the Home Office to have Eddington deferred on the grounds that he was a most distinguished scientist and that it was not in the long-range interests of Britain to have him serve in the army.... In any event, at Dyson's intervention - as the Astronomer Royal, he had close connections with the Admiralty - Eddington was deferred with the express stipulation that if the war should have ended by 1919, he should lead one of two expeditions that were being planned for the express purpose of verifying Einstein's prediction with regard to the gravitational deflection of light.... The Times of London for November 7, 1919, carried two headlines: "The Glorious Dead, Armistice Observance. All Trains in the Country to Stop," and "Revolution in Science. Newtonian Ideas Overthrown."

Dr. F. Schmeidler of the Munich University Observatory has published a paper titled "The Einstein Shift - An Unsettled Problem," and a plot of shifts for 92 stars for the 1922 eclipse shows shifts going in all directions, many of them going the wrong way by as large a deflection as those shifted in the predicted direction! Further examination of the 1919 and 1922 data originally interpreted as confirming relativity, tended to favor a larger shift, the results depended very strongly on the manner for reducing the measurements and the effect of omitting individual stars.

So now we find that the legend of Albert Einstein as the world's greatest scientist was based on the Mathematical Magic of Trimming and Cooking of the eclipse data to present the illusion that Einstein's general relativity theory was correct in order to prevent Cambridge University from being disgraced because one of its distinguished members was close to being declared a "conscientious objector"!

[Source: Bryan G. Wallace - The Farce of Physics]

Specialization

2010-03-17T07:13:00.003+02:00

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially-integratable-techno-economic advantages accruing to society from the myriad specializations are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized, or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of warfaring.

All universities have been progressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever expending inventory of experiences. Children are enthusiastic planetarium audiences. Nothing seems to be more prominent about human life than its wanting to understand all and put everything together.

One of humanity's prime drives is to understand and be understood. All other living creatures are designed for highly specialized tasks. Man seems unique as the comprehensive comprehender and co-ordinator of local universe affairs. If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it. What nature needed man to be was adaptive in many if not any direction; wherefore she gave man a mind as well as a coordinating switchboard brain. Mind apprehends and comprehends the general principles governing flight and deep sea diving, and man puts on his wings or his lungs, then takes them off when not using them. The specialist bird is greatly impeded by its wings when trying to walk. The fish cannot come out of the sea and walk upon land, for birds and fish are specialists.

Of course, we are beginning to learn a little in the behavioral sciences regarding how little we know about children and the educational processes. We had assumed the child to be an empty brain receptacle into which we could inject our methodically-gained wisdom until that child, too, became educated. In the light of modern behavioral science experiments that was not a good working assumption.

[...]Now let us examine more closely what we know scientifically about extinction. At the annual Congress of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as held approximately ten years ago in Philadelphia, two papers were presented in widely-separated parts of the Congress. One was presented in anthropology and the other in biology, and though the two author-scientists knew nothing of each other's efforts they were closely related. The one in anthropology examined the case histories of all the known human tribes that had become extinct. The biological paper investigated the case histories of all the known biological species that had become extinct. Both scientists sought for a common cause of extinction. Both of them found a cause, and when the two papers were accidentally brought together it was discovered that the researchers had found the same causes. Extinction in both cases was the consequence of over-specialization.

[Source: Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth]

Radiodecay rates

2010-03-09T21:21:00.000+02:00

[...]When John L. Anderson and George W. Spangler, of the University of Tennessee, demonstrated some 20 years ago (1974) that the Poisson distribution in the decay rate of radiocarbon could be altered by impressing +90 volts across a monolayer, the late inventor of the radiocarbon dating technique, Nobelist Willard Libby, was aghast that environmental influences could have such an effect. And there have been a fair number of other examples in the literature which have not been given very much publicity, and understandably so. Imagine the unique if not unsolvable problem of determining the time for which an atomic clock is set prior to its having been reset.

To explain: Consider that Earth might have a negative electrostatic potential of something like 10 million volts. If, perchance, some cosmic event reduced this potential by about one million volts, it could have a profound effect on radiodecay rates. There is a voltage gradient surrounding the potential well of the nucleus of an atom, and the zero, or ground, voltage is the electrostatic potential of the environment, considered to be that of the charge on the Earth itself. If this charge were reduced by that ten percent--the one million volts--then, for a specific example, the 4.5-billion-year radiodecay halflife of uranium might be reduced to mere minutes or possibly even seconds, not to mention all the other radionuclides, and up to and including a number of so-called stable elements. For in my book, there are no stable elements, just those with unmeasurably long halflives.

If such an event took place, however briefly, our atomic clocks could be reset to a new time. The number of extinctions and mutations and other subsequent effects would be incalculable on whole genera of taxonomic plants and organisms. The surviving quantitative chemist would have the exciting task of recalculating all of the atomic masses because of the redistribution of the isotopes.
[...]There was an event about 65 million years ago, which according to the late Luis Alvarez and his colleagues at UC Berkeley, brought the Mesozoic period to an end. This event is postulated as a sizeable asteroid which struck the Earth and brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs, including innumerable other animals down to a weight of 50 lbs. or less. If this asteroid carried an electrostatic potential which even fractionally altered that of Earth, or else caused the Earth to lose part of its charge to space, then we could expect a corresponding change in radiodecay rates. This event was the last of the five major known catastrophes which have affected the geological history of Earth. What perchance do we do with the 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth which is based on radiodecay rates? We create more myths.

[...] In 1931 Fernando Sanford of Stanford University wrote in his book, Terrestrial Electricity, about electrical charges he believed to exist on both the Earth and the Sun, and discussed stable groupings of charged atomic particles--electrons and protons--and how their various combinations would lead to certain instabilities. At the time neutrons were unknown, albeit suspected, having been finally discovered a year later, in 1932, by James Chadwick of Cambridge, for which he received the Nobel Prize.

Sanford, himself, thought that the most stable combinations of atomic particles would also be the most numerous, which in today's parlance means that of the various combinations of protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei only a limited number would be long-lived and stable. We are fully aware of this now and consider it mundanely obvious and self-evident, but in Sanford's day this was an advanced and radical idea. In terms of numbers, a quick run-down through a recent copy of the Table of Isotopes shows that out of some two thousand-odd isotopic combinations of the 110 known chemical elements most are radioactive and only some 273 stable isotopes exist with which to build a world.

Nevertheless, a rigorous study of the stable isotopes gives one the feeling that, given enough eons of time, even these will eventually decay and return to the energy state from which they came, or at least arrive at some equilibrium between free-energy and its condensed form, matter. As I'd said earlier, by some great leap of faith, there are no stable elements. I'd venture to say that we're a long, long way from any such kind of equilibrium. But, even at our present position in time and space during this ages old process we have relied far too heavily and for far too long on the dictum: Everything is as it was.

Robert Gentry of Oak Ridge National Labs, a geochemist specializing in "radiohalo" dating techniques. After a protracted study of these halos, which he said "provide the only means for studying the radioactive transformation of elements" in Earth's history, Gentry was led during the mid-1960s to ask in retrospect: Can the Earth's age be measured by radioactive dating of its rocks? Was the Earth actually as old as the universe? Were the Earth's elements in fact synthesized in some gigantic primeval nuclear event?

It was around the turn of the century, for example, that the age of the Earth was put on a more quantitative basis with the theoretical explanation of pleochroic halos. Also known as radiohalos, these colored microscopic rings are found in many minerals, and are caused by the disintegration of radioactive elements with the emission of alpha particles (helium nuclei), forming minuscule concentric circles around these radiodecay sites through each decay stage. Early studies indicated that the respective sizes of these tiny rings were an indication of the respective ages of the minerals, but later work showed that varying-sized halos surrounding many uranium-decay sites seemed to indicate varying decay rates throughout Earth's history.

However, this finding was suppressed, because as every good scientist knew radiodecay rates were inviolably constant [...] and then, of course, radiohalos were henceforth used as added proof of the extreme age of the Earth. [...] Gentry's questioning of the different sized halos led to his exhaustive study of this pleochroism, and he concluded that such radiohalos do not in fact support the concept of a constant decay rate.

His impeccably careful work led to his reporting in 1967 that four polonium nuclides were found to be orphans. These parentless polonium radioisotopes showed no evidence of the usual parental thorium or uranium decay series, or that either of these necessary precursors had ever been anywhere nearby. And, even when thorium and uranium coexisted in the same mineral, it appeared as if all were created at the same time, but unaccountably long after the mineral itself had crystallized.

Furthermore, the ratio of the lead radiogenic decay end-products, Pb206 and Pb207, were found to range from both an empirically and theoretically expected maximum to up to three times more than that expected maximum, giving an apparent extraordinarily young age for the mineral--something like thousands of years instead of millions much less billions of years. Uranium-lead dating is the mainstay of geochronologists in calculating the geological age of granite and other plutonic rocks by the decay rates of U235 and U238 to their final products, Pb207 and Pb206, respectively, through the serial emission of alpha radiation. The oldest rocks found give an approximation of Earth's age at about four and a half billion years. Uranium halos are easily identified by the respective eight and seven concentric rings of the U235 and U238 decay series, and by the 125 relative diameters of the halos themselves. This size may approach as much as 80 (a mere three thousandths of an inch in diameter) due to the energetic 11.7 MeV (million electron volts) alpha particles from the polonium daughter-product, Po212. Each succeeding member of a series is somewhat more energetic than its predecessor, and typically has a much shorter half-life.

Geochronologists also use the ratios of the respective stable lead isotopes, Pb206 and Pb207, as how much of one there is compared to the other, where a ratio of 20:1 denotes the high end of the scale and very young minerals, while 4:1 signifies those over three billion years old. However, Gentry had found ratios that were three times as high as the theoretical maximum for the youngest rocks, and other researchers also have reported halos with diameters of up to 150, all of which point to either some extraordinarily recent paroxysms of nature, or an equally strange physico-chemical separation of decay products, or else there is something fundamentally askew in the age-dating process. Gentry has been silent on this point, expressing no conclusions, but has let the data speak for itself. And there has been a strange quiet in the halls of geochronology for some 20 years now.

Another questioner has been the late Ralph Juergens, a civil engineer and science writer in Flagstaff, Arizona, who pressed the point even further and asked: What role might environmental electrification play in setting the rules for nuclear stability, radiodecay rates, and energies of particle emissions in decay processes? What if the Earth's state of electrification were altered, even if only temporarily? Juergens answered his own questions by postulating that since radiohalos are found only in plutonic rocks, such as granite, the ultimate solution to this seemingly complex problem may require the consideration of physical forces which are well-known but seldom mentioned during a geologist's training. These forces are electrical in nature, and are inherent both in nuclear events and the environmental Earth.

Within the nucleus of a U238 atom there is a potential well of some 9 MeV which has to be overcome before any particles can escape. But, alpha emissions are known to get through measuring only 4 MeV by a process known in wave mechanics as "tunneling." This doesn't necessarily mean that helium nuclei actually had 13 MeV and lost most of this energy in escaping from the uranium source. And yet these events are rare, because of a given number of such uranium atoms only half of them will make it out of this potential well every 4.5 billion years, which is how the 4 1/2 -billion year "half-life" term is derived.

However, the subsequent daughter-products do so at a much faster rate, as the next three radiodecay isotopes in the series make it through their half-lives in about 332,000 years, and the following four zip on their way to the stable isotope of lead in a mere 142 days. The observed positively charged 4-MeV alpha radiation energy is totally due to electrostatic repulsion measured in the region outside of the potential well. And, since we can't directly measure the potential at the bottom of this well within the nucleus itself, inferring it from experimental accelerator studies, there therefore has to be some zero potential against which these energetics are measured, and it is this selfsame zero that Juergens argued is identical with the electric potential of our planet--Earth potential--which is highly negative, perhaps tens of millions of volts. (It should be remembered that any potential above some negative value--no matter how negative--is still positive with respect to the lower voltage.)

It has to be said at this point that the concept of an Earth potential is still considered hypothetical as there is no direct way that we can measure this background electrical or electrostatic charge from on the site of the Earth itself. It would be expected that any spacecraft leaving Earth would carry some residual charge with it, but traveling through the ionizing solar radiation of interplanetary space would completely dissipate that charge and any subsequent landing on either the Moon or another planet wouldn't cause a spark discharge from the spacecraft to the planetary body due to some potential difference, except for what is created by the retro-rocket fire of the spacecraft itself. Only by carrying a sealed experiment on such spacecraft specifically designed to measure potential differences between planetary bodies would we be able to at least indirectly determine such differences in electric potential. But, if indeed such differences do exist in reality, any measurements that might involve megavoltages could have their own peculiar technical problems.

Nonetheless, if, as Juergens speculated, a sudden drop lowered Earth potential by about a million volts, perhaps in the vicinity of ten percent, an escaping alpha particle would be accelerated to about 6 MeV from the nucleus of U238. Theoretically this could have the effect of reducing the half-life of uranium from 4.5 billion years to one measured in barely seconds. Juergens stated, "On this basis, any abrupt lowering...could be expected to produce rampant radioactivity, with consequent lethal or at least strongly mutational effects on all forms of life."

Nuclear binding forces may not be altogether insensitive to such environmental changes; nevertheless Gentry's data indicate Earth's potential may be critical to radioactivity, and hence to the entire dating game. If the Earth's own magnetic field is related in any way to its electropotential, then during certain epochs of time there must have been some changes taking place, as we know that there seem to have been some forty-odd reversals in magnetic polarity over the last few eons which had strong enough remanence to be measurable. A precipitous collapse of the Earth's field for one reason or another would surely affect any potential Earth might have and cause an equally precipitous outburst in radiodecay radiation.

At the moment I'd be a trifle skeptical that such released radiation would be inimical to all forms of life, as most radioisotopes are rather sparse and widely scattered on Earth's continental crust, and perhaps only those areas of large ore deposits of radioisotopes would be adversely affected. It could engender the odd pleochroic halos found by Gentry and others, but it would leave an unsavory and idiopathic problem for the geologists to explain. But, the greatest effect of even a partial collapse of Earth's magnetic field would probably be an intense cooling, particularly in the frigid latitudes surrounding the magnetic poles.

This phenomenon associated with magnetic behavior is known on a laboratory-scale as Giauque-Debye adiabatic demagnetization, where the collapse of a magnetic field induces a cooling effect by slowing or even stopping thermal molecular motion with no net gain or loss of energy. On an planetary-sized scale the cooling effect due to a rapid reduction or collapse of a magnetic field could freeze the atmosphere itself in the vicinity of the magnetic poles, causing the air itself to precipitate as snowflakes in a blizzard. The effects would be far-reaching and would lead to some interesting and almost indecipherable myths.

Such a phenomenon could in some measure explain why the mammoths of the northern tundra of not more than ten thousand years ago were suddenly frozen where they were otherwise peacefully grazing in a relatively lush and verdant environment. Additionally, it is also known that some of the males died and were frozen in a tumescent state, a condition known to occur in male mammals which have suffocated. If the air itself were chilled into a liquid rain or frozen into snowflakes there would have been none to breathe. Moreover, a huge atmospheric vacuum-like hole would have been created which would have been filled by the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere, causing an unprecedented tornadic wind vortex of super-hurricane strength to fill the airless void, picking up most everything in its path--including sizeable animals--and depositing them in heaps throughout the currently frozen north. Such mysterious hecatombs of animal bones, ranging from the Canadian archipelago to the Alaskan tundra and throughout the Siberian wastes, are well-known to paleontologists. Could such a phenomenon have occurred, or more to the point did such a thing indeed happen? And, if it did, what was the cause?

[Source: Frederic B. Jueneman - Raptures of the Deep]

Are we high ?

2010-03-07T16:46:00.002+02:00

During deepsea dives, the nitrogen in breathable air has been replaced with an inert gas, usually helium, to avoid the ravages of nitrogen narcosis--the so-called "raptures of the deep." Nitrogen under elevated partial pressure increases its concentration in the blood, forms clathrates, or solution hydrates, and displaces oxygen, all of which contribute to a narcotic condition in brain activity. A similar environment under an ocean of air, such as exists today and--as here argued--an atmosphere that was far more massive in the past, would have contributed to a gradual lessening over the eons to a more mild sort of nitrogen narcosis that would have brought early mankind out of a primitive instinctual dreamlike state and into the present epoch of a more sentient intelligence. Perhaps in at least this one respect Lamarck was right. But it seems that we have still some way to go.

[...]Up until some 20 years ago I tended to resist the idea of nitrogen being responsible for the deepsea diving condition known as nitrogen narcosis--more commonly romanticized as "raptures of the deep"--despite its being known for more than a century to cause a drugged condition. But very soon thereafter I became convinced by a number of reports from clinical research that the phenomenon itself was due to the pressure-induced formation of a certain class of nitrogen-containing neuro-clathrates, which in physio-chemical terms means it acts as a neurological blockade, or in other words a narcotic. Such clathrates are considered rather loose associations of nitrogen with water molecules, which themselves are something of a chemical anomaly by existing as stable hydrates in a solution. But under the hyperbaric environment of deepsea diving I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a reversible chemical transformation was actually taking place, where the nitrogen and water molecules combined in such a way as to mimic the narco-neurological effects of nitrous oxide, N2O, known more prosaically as "laughing gas."

A couple of the so-called noble gases that also form clathrates-- krypton and xenon--were found to have a similar narcotic effect. Both of these gases are several times more soluble in water than nitrogen. And, curiously, despite the profound chemical inertness of these gaseous elements, xenon has been made to combine with oxygen to form perxenic acid, one of the most powerful--albeit unstable--oxidizing agents known. Under the pressures encountered in deepsea diving a trace quantity of a clathrate-forming gas may have an unusually high partial pressure with attendant anesthesia, and narcosis. This is why the special gas mixtures used by deepsea divers and caisson workers have the nitrogen replaced by helium, which doesn't form any nerve-blocking clathrates but merely gives one's voice a higher "Mickey Mouse" pitch.

[...]I'm not sure when I first became convinced of the idea of nitrogen in our atmosphere being responsible for a low-level form of nitrogen narcosis affecting lifeforms on our planet, but over the past two decades this conceptual algorithm still seems to fit. Studies made during the early 1970s at the University of Washington and Northwestern University almost appear to confirm that mankind has been wandering around in a dreamlike wakefulness. These studies clinically demonstrated that the nitrogen in the air we breathe--again, comprising some 78% of the Earth's atmosphere--appears to reduce our comprehension and productiveness by nearly ten percent.

However, these limited-term clinical tests were conducted on subjects who had been exposed all their lives to the normal constituents of our atmosphere, where for just a short time they were deliberately and experimentally conditioned to a helium substitute in place of nitrogen. Notwithstanding, 80% of the group responded with an almost ten percent increase in mental activity. It is qualitatively within the realm of probability that a much longer exposure to a non-anesthetic atmosphere--perhaps from birth--would be instrumental in arousing our dreamlike wakefulness to something of a hyper-consciousness that would raise our minds above the psychosomatic mists which now seem to stem in part from our natural environment.

[...] Was it always like this, where the nitrogen in the air we breathe constituted more than three-quarters of the atmosphere, or argon almost one percent? Did our ancestors in gray antiquity awaken to the dawn of consciousness because of our atmospheric components or in spite of them, or was there some climatic or catastrophic change which roused our forebears out of their animal-like stupefaction? And, perhaps of more immediate importance, what are the physio-chemical differences which separate intellectual genius from us lesser mortals? We must determine if these differences are indeed due to a metabolic uptake of nitrogen at a normal atmospheric pressure of 1.0332 Kg/cm2 (29.97 inches of mercury in everyday parlance).

[...] We're living at the bottom of an ocean of air. Throughout history we have become enraptured with some strange pursuits in this deep. It might be misplaced logic to emphasize the narcotic effects of nitrogen on humankind, but we have been far too submissive in accepting without question our primordial environment as the only unchallenged alternative, and nothing should be that sacrosanct. Appeals by certain environmentally sensitive factions to return to the pristine gardens of Earth, besides being entreaties to revert to a land that never was, seem to be a craving for the soporific of forgetfulness. Whatever we make of our environment, we will always be in constant conflict with it. We can never go back even if we wanted to, because we don't know how. And, if nitrogen does indeed prove to be the principal rapturous culprit in our oceanic air--all 5.2 x 1018 kilograms of it--we'll find a way to replace it with something more acceptable and amenable to our needs, as for example building domed cities. Or, at least we'll try, for mankind will always do what our species thinks must be done.

[Source: Frederic B. Jueneman - Raptures of the Deep]

Oil reserves formation

2010-03-06T17:34:00.000+02:00

Of the 4.6-billion-year geological history of Earth, lifeforms are thought to occupy a time slot only during the last 30% of this period, with the most development just in the last 15%, or some 700 million years, known as the great Phanerozoic epoch, comprising the older Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the more recent Cenozoic eras. It was some time during the Paleozoic era of a half billion years past that oil deposits are considered to have been formed.

These deposits of oil are invariably found in sedimentary rock formations, and for this reason they are co-associated in their combined and respective origins. The most cogent arguments stem from the thoughts of 19th century antiquarians, involving the simultaneous settling of mud and silt along with the conversion of animal and plant matter into petroleum products under anærobic conditions over many, many moons. However, over the last century we've found so much coal, gas and oil, and suspect the presence of much more potential deposits than what we've located thus far, that there ain't been enough dinosaurs and plants to give their all for even a fraction of the amounts recoverable. This would mean that the plantlife of the carboniferous period of some 250 million years ago would have soaked up an extraordinarily enormous amount of carbon dioxide from the primordial atmosphere, at far higher concentrations than that in which animal life could survive. Unless--to satisfy our argument--the partial pressure of oxygen was also appreciably higher to compensate for the stifling effects of CO2.

At least 20 years ago (1972) a retired Texaco engineer, Leon Gaucher, published what I consider one of the best answers to date on this problem--separate and distinct from the inorganic theory of cosmologist Thomas Gold of Cornell, who himself theorized that petroleum was actually manufactured in the Earth's interior through the heat-catalyzed combination of carbon and hydrogen. In the well-known water-gas shift between hydrogen and carbon dioxide to form water and carbon monoxide, Gaucher hypothesized that these reaction products generated the raw materials for the formation of hydrocarbons. Gaucher surmised that Earth's primordial atmosphere contained a predominant measure of carbon dioxide. He also thought that the necessary hydrogen was gleaned from the solar wind and from interstellar space. In my view, it's more likely that hydrogen was already present in copious quantities in Earth's primordial air mass.

The equilibrium reaction between the principal raw materials, namely carbon monoxide and hydrogen, over the still cooling surface of a primordial Earth at 500°C--the present surface temperature of Venus--would be catalyzed in the forward direction to form equally copious amounts of methane and water. And, as Earth continued to cool, the presence of volcanically generated catalysts in the hydrogen-laden reducing atmosphere would promote the synthesis of additional methane, all sorts of saturated and unsaturated hydrocarbons, as well as oxygenated compounds, with many promoted by the presence of lithospheric metallic oxides. This, in effect, would be Nature's ancient version of the Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, which human ingenuity developed circa 1923.

The remarkable feature about this versatile reaction, according to Gaucher, is that it would be initiated spontaneously and is highly exothermic--generating lots of heat, and is therefore self-sustaining. In the range of 400°C down to 180°C, as Earth continued cooling, all manner of long-chain hydrocarbons would be produced. Gaucher himself thought that such reactions would take place over millions of years, but, again, in my view, and depending on the equilibrium conditions, such complex reactions might just take thousands if not mere hundreds of years, and possibly less. In fact, under a near ideal condition where the atmosphere is well-mixed and fairly homogeneous, a catalyzed reaction at one stage of synthesis would take but moments to exothermally flare throughout Earth's entire air mass.

The most rapid acoustically-induced kinetic reaction of which I'm aware--the cystallization of supercooled liquid phosphorus--propagates at something like three kilometers per second. A reaction at this rate would translate into a conflagration of the entire atmospheric envelope in something under two hours. Such a runaway conflagration would effectively blow away the greater part of the atmosphere into space as a chemically-induced planetary nova. With a lessened atmospheric overburden acting as both a heat sink and insulating blanket, the planet would cool more rapidly, which is--for all the kinetics freaks reading this--strictly according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, where the energy radiated is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature.

With this cooling would come the condensation of considerable water formed by the reaction between hydrogen and the oxides of carbon, and the subsequent development of the oceans and seas. Therefore, if the amount of water is in any way indicative of some fraction of the petroleum deposits, then there is an awfully large quantity of oil yet to be found, and we shouldn't have much of an energy crisis emanating from that source.

[Source: Frederic B. Jueneman - Raptures of the Deep]

Ancient earth atmosphere

2010-03-06T02:26:00.003+02:00

A couple of years ago the aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready-- designer of the Gossamer aircraft--attempted to physically recreate a pterodactyl, known taxonomically as Quetzalcoatlus northropi, by reconstructing this 65-million-year-old bird-like dinosaur with modern lightweight materials, aluminum and mylar. I affectionately referred to this artifact by the pseudo-scientific name, Q. alcoa-duponti, but as things turned out this initial attempt was an aerodynamic failure. Later attempts were somewhat more successful.

For many years paleontologists have considered the pterodactyl as a glider, unable to actually fly because of its unusual body size, the adult approaching some 150 kilograms (330 lbs.), and an insufficient wingspan--some 12-15 meters--to carry that weight. Somehow, it doesn't seem practical--even for a dyed-in-the-wool evolutionist--to claim that such a creature had to laboriously climb up a cliff or a tree and then launch itself into a power glide to capture its prey.

It was perhaps 10 years ago or so that two Canadians, paleobiologist Dale Russell and aeronautics engineer Parvez Kumar, using computer simulations found our friend the pterodactyl could indeed fly by flapping its rather ungainly wings in an atmosphere 50% more dense than what we currently enjoy, raising a most interesting singular question of conjecture: Did planet Earth have a much more massive primordial atmosphere than what had been even previously suspected?

[Source: Frederic B. Jueneman - Raptures of the Deep]

Logical Levels

2010-02-01T10:05:00.000+02:00

[...]Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell developed his "theory of logical types" in an attempt to help resolve the types of problems which can arise from self-referential paradox and circularity. According to Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind) "the central thesis of (the theory of logical types) is that there is a discontinuity between a class and its members. The class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class, since the term used for the class is of a different level of abstraction - a different Logical Type - from the terms used for members".

[...]Anthropologist and communication theorist Gregory Bateson applied Russel's theory of logical types as a means to help explain and resolve a number of issues relating to behavior, learning and communication. Acording to Bateson, the notion of different logiacal types was essential to the understanding of play, higher level learning and pathological thinking patterns. Bateson believed that confusions of logical types were largely responsible for what we have been calling "limiting beliefs" and "thought viruses".

As an example, Bateson pointed out that "play" involved distinguishing between different logical types of behavior and messages. Bateson noted that when animals and humans engage in "play" they often display the same behaviors that are also associated with aggression, sexuality, and other more "serious" aspects of life (such as when animals "play fight", or children "play doctor"). Yet, somehow, animals and humans were able to recognize, for the most part, that the play behavior was a different type of class of betavior and "not the real thing". According to Bateson, distinguishing between classes of betavior also required different types of messages. Bateson referred to these messages as "meta messages" - messages about other messages - claiming that they too were of a different "logical type" than the content of a particular communication.

[...]Bateson pointed out that this ability to learn patterns or rules of a class of conditioning procedure was a different "logical type" of learning and did not function according to the same simple stimulus-response-reinforcement sequences used to learn specific isolated behaviors.

[...]According to the Neuro-Logical Levels model, [...]

ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS determine the external opportunities or constraints a person has to react to. Answer to the questions "where" and "when".

BEHAVIOR is made up of the specific actions or reactions taken within the environment. Answers to the question "what".

CAPABILITIES guide and give direction to behavioral actions through a mental map, plan or strategy. Answers to the question "how".

BELIEFS and VALUES provide the reinforcement (motivation and permission) that supports or denies capabilities. Answers to the question "why".

IDENTITY factors determine overall purpose (mission) and shape beliefs and values through our sense of self. Answers to the question "who".

[Source: Robert Dilts - Sleight of mouth]

(In)Congruence

2010-02-01T09:46:00.000+02:00

[...]Incongruence is usually experienced as an inner conflict with yourself. Often it seems like there are two sides of yourself. It's like there are two "yous." You have a part of you that wants to do something and a part that objects to it. It could be two behaviors, two beliefs, two belief systems, or even two aspects of your identity. Sometimes, when you're struggling with belief and identity conflicts, one "part" is not even aware of the other part. The result is confusion about yourself.

[...]Incongruity can result from imprint experiences, modeling significant others, conflicts in hierarchy of criteria, and life transitions and passages.

[...]When you are working with someone who has conflicting beliefs, you will often observe an asymmetry in body posture. It's not as subtle as skin color changes or other minimal physiological cues and is usually quite easy to see. You know you're dealing with two dissociated parts when the person is gesturing with the left hand as she discusses one aspect of the problem and the right hand for the conflicting aspect. It's interesting to note that often the right hand (which relates to the left brain, in most right handed people who have normally organized eye accessing cues) has intentions that deal with relationships and being worthwhile as a person in contexts that involve others. The left hand (which relates to right brain functions) tends to relate more to the individual being her own person and having a rich, full life. This kind of conflict might be defined as the difference between an "other-oriented" part and a "self-oriented" part. You might also find an "excitatory" and "inhibitory" conflict where you have one part that has great ideas and wants to move ahead while the other part wants you to hold back.

[Source: Robert Dilts - Beliefs]

Imprints

2010-02-01T09:27:00.001+02:00

An imprint is a significant event from the past in which you formed a belief, or a cluster of beliefs. Every form of healing, whether physical or psychological, that I know of gives credence to the fact that present behaviors are often created or shaped by past behaviors and past events. What's important to us as NLP practitioners about past experiences is not the content of what happened, but the impression or belief that the person built from the experience.

The notion of imprinting comes from Konrad Lorenz, who studied the behavior of ducklings when they hatched. He discovered that baby ducks would imprint a mother figure in the first day or so of life. They did that by sorting for movement, so that if something moved just after they hatched from their eggs, they followed it and it "became" their mother. Lorenz would move, and the ducks would follow. He found that if he reintroduced them to their real mother later, they would ignore her and continue to follow him. In the morning, when he got up, he would go outside and find the ducklings curled up around his boots, instead of in their own nest. He once reported that a ping pong ball rolled by one of the eggs when it hatched and the emerging duckling imprinted to the ping pong ball, making it the "mother." Later in life, the duck would shun others of its own species at mating time and try to mount various kinds of round things.

Konrad Lorenz and his colleagues believed that imprints were established at certain neurologically critical periods, and that once the critical period had passed whatever had been "imprinted" was permanent and not subject to change. Timothy Leary investigated the imprint phenomena in human beings. He contended that the human nervous system was more sophisticated than that of ducklings and other animals. He established that under the proper conditions, content that had been imprinted at earlier critical periods could be accessed and reprogrammed or re-imprinted. Leary also identified several significant developmental critical periods in human beings. Imprints established during these periods established core beliefs that shaped the personality and intelligence of the individual.

The primary critical periods involved the establishment of imprints determining beliefs about biological survival, emotional attachments and well-being, intellectual dexterity, social role, aesthetic appreciation, and "meta cognition," or the awareness of one's own thought processes. Thus, health problems might stem back to core beliefs and supporting behaviors established during the biological survival critical period, while phobias could have their roots in the emotional well-being period. Learning handicaps might derive from imprints formed during the critical period involving intellectual dexterity, and so on.

[...]Imprints can be significant "positive" experiences that lead to useful beliefs, or they can be traumatic, or problematic experiences that lead to limiting beliefs. Typically, but not always, they involve the unconscious role modeling of significant others. Compare the duck's behavior with human behavior using child abuse as a point of comparison. Research validates that often people who have been abused as children unconsciously get into relationships, as adults, that repeat their childhood experience. For example, often women who have been abused as children marry men who abuse them as adults. Males who were beaten as a child may abuse their own children. If they were beaten by their mothers, they may get into relationships where they are somehow the lesser person. Research shows that women who were beaten by their mothers are apt to be more violent with their own children than those who weren't. Imprints are one explanation of this phenomena. People abused as children can imprint that this is the typical behavior associated with fathers, mothers, husbands or wives. At the time the ducklings were hatching out of the eggs they didn't say, "Gee, that's a strange looking mother; I'd better check things out." Their brains were probably saying, "This is how mothers are,"--human beings do the same sorts of things.

[...]An imprint is not necessarily logical. It's something that's intuitive, and it typically happens at critical developmental periods. In childhood most of us don't have a real sense of self identity, so we pretend we're somebody else, and we often take on the role model--lock, stock and barrel. We can end up like the ducklings that weren't very discriminating about what they would accept as a mother. Who you are as an adult is, in many ways, an incorporation of the adult models you've grown up with. Your model of being an adult has the features of past significant others; features that have been stuck in early ways of believing and behaving that you made a part of yourself at an early age.These beliefs and behaviors emerge when you reach a certain age and are not a child anymore.

[...]The hardest part of changing any belief system is the fact that the imprint is likely to be out of conscious awareness. Your most significant behaviors are usually the ones that are most habitual. Those are the behaviors that you're least consciously aware of.

[Source: Robert Dilts - Beliefs]

Gotterdammerung

2010-01-30T18:22:00.002+02:00

[...]The end of the Second World War in Europe, at least as normally recounted, does not make sense, for in its standard form as learned in history books that history resembles nothing so much as a badly written finale to some melodramatic Wagnerian opera. [...]To appreciate how badly written a finale it truly is, it is best to begin at the logical place: in Berlin, far below ground, in the last weeks of the war. [...]Generaloberst Heinrici, commander of the vastly outnumbered Army Group Vistula that faces the massed armies of Marshal Zhukov poised less than sixty miles from Berlin, is pleading with his leader for more troops. The general is questioning the disposition of the forces he sees displayed on the battle map, for it is clear to him that some of Germany's finest and few remaining battle worthy formations are far south, facing Marshal Koniev's forces in Silesia. These forces were thus, incomprehensibly, poised to make a stiff defense of Breslau and Prague, not Berlin. The general pleads for Hitler to release some of these forces and transfer them north, but to no avail. "Prague," the Fuhrer responds stubbornly, almost mystically, "is the key to winning the war." Generaloberts Heinrici's hard-pressed troops must "do without."

One may also perhaps imagine Heinrici and the other assembled generals perhaps casting a doleful glance at Norway on the situation map, where thousands of German troops are still stationed, occupying a country that had long since ceased to be of any strategic or operational value to the defense of the Reich. Why indeed did Hitler maintain so many German troops in Norway up to the very end of the war? These paradoxical German troops deployments are the first mystery of the badly written finale of the war in Europe. Both Allied and German generals would ponder it after the war, and both would write it off to Hitler's insanity, a conclusion that would become part of the "Allied Legend" of the end of the war. This interpretation does make sense, for if one assumed that Hitler were having a rare seizure of sanity when he ordered these deployments, what possibly could he have been thinking? Prague? Norway? There were no standard or conventional military reasons for the deployments. In other words, the deployments themselves attest his complete lack of touch with military reality.

[...]But on the Allied side of the Allied Legend, things are equally peculiar. In March and April of 1945, US General George S. Patton's Third Army is literally racing across southern Bavaria, as fast as is operationally possible, making a beeline for:
(1) the huge Skoda munitions works at Pilsen, a complex all but blown off the map by Allied bombers;
(2) Prague; and
(3) A region of the Harz Mountains in Thuringia known to Germans as the Dreiecks or Three Corners," a region encompassed by the old medieval towns and villages of Arnstadt, Jonastal, Wechmar, and Ohrdruf.

One is informed by countless history books that this maneuver was thought to be necessary by the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHEAF) because of reports that the Nazis were planning to make a last stand in the "Alpine National Redoubt", a network of fortified mountains stretching from the Alps to the Harz Mountains. The Third Army's movements, so the story goes, were designed to cut off the "escape route" of Nazis fleeing the carnage of Berlin. Maps are produced in old history books, accompanied in some cases by de-classified German plans some dating from the Weimar Republic! - for just such a redoubt. Case settled. However, there is a problem with that explanation. Allied aerial reconnaissance would likely have told Eisenhower and SHAEF that there were precious few fortified strong points in the "National Redoubt". Indeed, it would have told them that the "Redoubt" was no redoubt at all. General Patton and his divisional commanders would most certainly have been privy to at least some of this information. So why the extraordinary and almost reckless speed of his advance, an advance the post-war Allied Legend would have us believe was to cut off the escape route of Nazis fleeing Berlin, who it turns out weren't fleeing, to a redoubt that didn't exist? The mystery deepens.

Then, remarkably, in a strange twist of fate, General Patton himself, America's most celebrated general, dies suddenly, and, some would say, suspiciously, as a result of complications from injuries he sustained in a freak automobile accident soon after the end of the war and the beginning of the Allied military occupation.

[...]Matters are not helped by events on the other side of the world in the Pacific theater, for there American investigators would uncover similarly strange goings on after the war ended. There, after Nagasaki, the Emperor Hirohito, overriding his ministers who wanted to continue the war, decided that Japan would surrender unconditionally. But why would Hirohito's ministers urge continuance of the war in the face of overwhelming Allied conventional arms superiority, and, from their point of view, facing a potential rain of atomic bombs? After all, "two" bombs could just as easily have turned into twenty. One could, of course, attribute the ministers' objections to the Emperor's intentions to "proud samurai traditions" and the Japanese sense of "honor" and so on. And that would indeed be a plausible explanation. But another explanation is that Hirohito's cabinet ministers knew something. What his ministers probably knew was what American intelligence would soon discover: that the Japanese, "just prior to their surrender, had developed and successfully test fired an atomic bomb. The project had been housed in or near Konan(Japanese name for Hungnam), Korea, in the peninsula's North." It was exploded, so the story goes, one day after the American plutonium bomb, "Fat Man", exploded over Nagasaki, i.e., on August 10, 1945. The war, in other words, depending on Hirohito's decision, could have "gone nuclear". By that time, of course it would have done Japan no good to prolong it, with no viable means of delivery of an atomic weapon to any worthwhile strategic American targets. The Emperor stood his ministers down. These allegations constitute yet another difficulty for the Allied Legend, for where did Japan obtain the necessary uranium for its (alleged) A-bomb? And more importantly, the technology to enrich it ?

[...]Finally, a curious fact, one of those obvious things that one lends to overlook unless attention is drawn to it: the atomic bomb test that took place at the Trinity site in new Mexico was a test of America's implosion-plutonium bomb, a test needed to see if the concept would actually work. It did, and magnificently. But what is immensely significant - a fact missing from almost all mainstream literature on the subject since the end of the war - is that the uranium bomb with its apparatus of a cannon shooting the critical mass of uranium together, the bomb that was actually first used in war, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was never tested. As German author Friedrich Georg notes, this tears a rather gaping hole in the Allied Legend:[...]Why was the uranium bomb of the USA, unlike the plutonium bomb, not tested prior to being hurled on Japan? Militarily this would appear to be extremely dangerous.... Did the Americans simply forget to test it, or did others already do it for them?

[...]So, what exactly did the German pilot Hans Zinsser see on that night of October, 1944, as he flew his Heinkel bomber over the twilight skies of northern Germany? Something that, had he known it, would require the previous badly written Wagnerian libretto to be almost completely revised. His affidavit is contained in a military intelligence report of August 19, 1945, roll number A1007, filmed in 1973 at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Zinsser's statement is found on the last page of the report:

     47. A man named ZINSSER, a Flak rocket expert, mentioned what he noticed one day: In the beginning of Oct, 1944 I flew from Ludwigslust (south of Lubeck), about 12 to 15 km from an atomic bomb test station, when I noticed a strong, bright illumination of the whole atmosphere, lasting about 2 seconds.
   48. The clearly visible pressure wave escaped the approaching and following cloud formed by the explosion. This wave had a diameter of about 1 km when it became visible and the color of the cloud changed frequently. It became dotted after a short period of darkness with all sorts of light spots, which were, in contrast to normal explosions, of a pale blue color.
     49. After about 10 seconds the sharp outlines of the explosion cloud disappeared, then the cloud began to take on a lighter color against the sky covered with a gray overcast. The diameter of the still visible pressure wave was at least 9000 meters while remaining visible for at least 15 seconds.
     50. Personal observations of the colors of the explosion cloud found an almost blue-violet shade. During this manifestation reddishcolored rims were to be seen, changing to a dirty-like shade in very rapid succession.
   51. The combustion was lightly felt from my observation plane in the form of pulling and pushing.
     52. About one hour later I started with an He 111 from the A/D at Ludwigslust and flew in an easterly direction. Shortly after the start I passed through the almost complete overcast (between 3000 and 4000 meter altitude). A cloud shaped like a mushroom with turbulent, billowing sections (at about 7000 meter altitude) stood, without any seeming connections, over the spot where the explosion took place. Strong electrical disturbances and the impossibility to continue radio communication as by lightning, turned up.
     53. Because of the P-38s operating in the area Wittenberg-Mersburg I had to turn to the north but observed a better visibility at the bottom of the cloud where the explosion occured (sic). Note: It does not seem very clear to me why these experiments took place in such crowded areas.

In other words, a German pilot had observed the test of a weapon, having all the signatures of a nuclear bomb: electromagnetic pulse and resulting malfunction of his radio, mushroom cloud, continuing fire and combustion of nuclear material in the cloud and so on. And all this on territory clearly under German control, in October of 1944, fully eight months before the first American A-bomb test in New Mexico.

[...]In a nutshell: the Allied Legend about the German failure to obtain the atom bomb because they never had a functioning reactor is simply utter scientific nonsense, because a reactor is needed only it one wants to produce plutonium. It is an unneeded, and expensive, development, if one only wants to make a uranium A-bomb. Thus, there is sufficient reason, due to the science of bombmaking and the political and military realities of the war after America's entry, that the Germans took the decision to develop only a uranium bomb, since that afforded the best, most direct, and technologically least complicated route to acquisition of a bomb.

[Source: Joseph P. Farrell - Reich of the Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons and the Cold War Allied Legend]

Silent weapons for quiet wars

2010-01-30T14:31:00.002+02:00

[...]In order to achieve a totally predictable economy, the low-class elements of society must be brought under total control, i.e., must be housebroken, trained, and assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from a very early age, before they have an opportunity to question the propriety of the matter. In order to achieve such conformity, the lower-class family unit must be disintegrated by a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and the establishment of government-operated day-care centers for the occupationally orphaned children. The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class. With such an initial handicap, even bright lower class individuals have little if any hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life. This form of slavery is essential to maintain some measure of social order, peace, and tranquility for the ruling upper class.

[...]From the time a person leaves its mother's womb, its every effort is directed towards building, maintaining, and withdrawing into artificial wombs, various sorts of substitute protective devices or shells. The objective of these artificial wombs is to provide a stable environment for both stable and unstable activity; to provide a shelter for the evolutionary processes of growth and maturity - i.e., survival; to provide security for freedom and to provide defensive protection for offensive activity. This is equally true of both the general public and the elite. However, there is a definite difference in the way each of these classes go about the solution of problems.

The primary reason why the individual citizens of a country create a political structure is a subconscious wish or desire to perpetuate their own dependency relationship of childhood. Simply put, they want a human god to eliminate all risk from their life, pat them on the head, kiss their bruises, put a chicken on every dinner table, clothe their bodies, tuck them into bed at night, and tell them that everything will be alright when they wake up in the morning. This public demand is incredible, so the human god, the politician, meets incredibility with incredibility by promising the world and delivering nothing. So who is the bigger liar? the public? or the "godfather"? This public behavior is surrender born of fear, laziness, and expediency. It is the basis of the welfare state as a strategic weapon, useful against a disgusting public.

Most people want to be able to subdue and/or kill other human beings which disturb their daily lives, but they do not want to have to cope with the moral and religious issues which such an overt act on their part might raise. Therefore, they assign the dirty work to others (including their own children) so as to keep the blood off their hands. They rave about the humane treatment of animals and then sit down to a delicious hamburger from a whitewashed slaughterhouse down the street and out of sight. But even more hypocritical, they pay taxes to finance a professional association of hit men collectively called politicians, and then complain about corruption in government.

Again, most people want to be free to do the things (to explore, etc.) but they are afraid to fail. The fear of failure is manifested in irresponsibility, and especially in delegating those personal responsibilities to others where success is uncertain or carries possible or created liabilities (law) which the person is not prepared to accept. They want authority (root word - "author"), but they will not accept responsibility or liability. So they hire politicians to face reality for them.

Big Bang as Genesis

2010-01-30T12:26:00.000+02:00

[...]Just as the Ptolemaic cosmology was yoked to the theology of medieval Catholicism, so the Big Bang is today entangled with religious and theological ideas. It is used to support those concepts, and religion in turn is marshaled in defense of modern cosmology. Once again, as four hundred years ago, some theologians attempt to define which scientific concepts are permissible and which are not. The new scientific revolution, like the Copernican revolution, is not an attack on religion as a whole, but on the entanglement of science and religion--the idea that religious authority can dictate or reject scientific doctrines, or that the evidence of science can be used to bolster religious authority.

[...]So we should not be surprised that today cosmology remains entangled with religion. From theologians to physicists to novelists, it is widely believed that the Big Bang theory supports Christian concepts of a creator. In February of 1989, for example, the front-page article of the New York Times Book Review argued that scientists and novelists were returning to God, in large part through the influence of the Big Bang. A character in John Updike's 1987 novel Roger's Version is cited as typical of the trend. The character, a computer hacker, says, "The physicists are getting things down to the ultimate details and the last thing they ever expected to be happening is happening. God is showing through, facts are facts . . . God the Creator, maker of heaven and earth. He made it, we now can see, with such incredible precision that a Swiss watch is just a bunch of little rocks by comparison."

Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow echoes the same theme in his widely noted God and the Astronomers: the Big Bang of the astronomers is simply the scientific version of Genesis, a universe created in an instant, therefore the work of a creator. These ideas are repeated in a dozen or more popular books on cosmology and fundamental physics.

Such thinking is not limited to physicists and novelists, who could perhaps be dismissed as amateur theologians. Ever since 1951, when Pope Pius XII asserted that the still-new Big Bang supports the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, Catholic theologians have used it in this way. The pope wrote in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, "In fact, it seems that presentday science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial 'Fiat lux' [Let there be light] uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of the chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies. . . . Hence, creation took place in time, therefore, there is a Creator, therefore, God exists!"

To be sure, these views are by no means unanimous within the Catholic Church. The present pope, John Paul II, is far more cautious in mixing science and religion. In his own address on the subject, he repeatedly apologized on behalf of the Church for the persecution of Galileo and reaffirmed the autonomy of religion and science. Addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1981 he paraphrased Galileo, saying that the Bible "does not wish to teach how heaven was made but how one goes to heaven." It is therefore not up to religion, he argues, to judge one or another cosmological theory. Yet in the same address, John Paul II favorably quotes from Pius XII's earlier speech and contends that the question of the beginning of the universe is not one that can be solved by science alone--to do so requires "above all the knowledge that comes from God's revelation."

[Source: Eric J Lerner - The Big Bang Never Happened]

Cosmology and Ideology

2010-01-30T10:36:00.000+02:00

There has always been an intimate relation between the ideas dominant in cosmology and the ideas dominant in society. It would be astonishing if that relationship had come to an end in our present enlightened times. Not that cosmologists directly derive their theories from social or political ideas--far from it. But what sounds reasonable to them cannot but be influenced by events in the world around them and what they and others think about it.

So it is certainly no coincidence that the period during which the Big Bang was in eclipse, from around 1957 to 1964, corresponds to the time of the most vigorous expansion of postwar recovery and a resurgence of confidence in progress. The Big Bang's golden age in the seventies, on the other hand, corresponds to the end of the postwar boom and a new decade of growing pessimism. In fact, the links between cosmological and social ideas were made explicit by both cosmologists and political writers of the period.

In the late sixties and the early seventies the postwar recovery ended in all the market economies. Real wages peaked in the United States and Western Europe, and somewhat later in Japan. In the Third World, per capita grain production, the best overall indicator of food supply and living standards, reached 340 kilograms per year and stopped rising, only to remain there for the next twenty years. While the food supply had increased by 50 percent from the depths of the late forties, it only recovered the levels of 1913.

As the seventies wore on, the economic problems facing the entire world, east as well as west, became more obvious. As had happened before, new markets were being saturated and increasing pressure was put on wages and living standards worldwide, as industrialists strove to maintain and increase their companies' profitability.

Almost as soon as this cessation of growth began to manifest itself, social ideas that justified the situation as inevitable started to circulate. In 1968 the Club of Rome, bringing together industrialists and academics, championed the idea of zero growth: the earth is finite, the universe is running down, it is impossible to continue the increase in living standards. The two oil crises were interpreted as warnings of the exhaustibility of finite resources-- a logic that must appear quaint to oil producers who now go to war in a struggle against a persistent glut.

Many writers used the Big Bang cosmology and the idea of universal decay to buttress the argument that consumption has to be restrained. In his 1976 book The Poverty of Power Barry Commoner begins from the cosmological premise that "the universe is constantly, irretrievably becoming less ordered than it was", and concludes that, given this overall tendency, Americans must make do with less in order to postpone the inevitable day when total disorder reigns on earth. The faltering universe of the Big Bang became a metaphor for the faltering economy--both equally inevitable processes, beyond the control of mere mortals.

Nor were cosmologists and physicists immune from the influence of such analogies. In the popular 1977 account of the Big Bang, The First Three Minutes, Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg concludes by contemplating the philosophical lessons of this universe, which will end either in the icy cold of final decay and infinite expansion, or in the fiery collapse to a new singularity: "It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. As I write this I happen to be in an airplane at 30,000 feet, flying over Wyoming en route home from San Francisco to Boston. Below, the earth looks very soft and comfortable--fluffy clouds here and there, snow turning pink as the sun sets, roads stretching straight across the country from one town to another. It is very hard to realize that this all is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

For Weinberg, as for others, the universe of the Big Bang is irreconcilable with human progress. The end may come billions of years from now, but in the end all that the human race accomplished in aeons will be nothing, of no consequence. Progress, then, is an illusion, as it was for Augustine sixteen hundred years ago. The only question is when it will stop--now, or at some point in the future. It is thus no surprise that the Big Bang flourished simultaneously with the social ideas, like zero growth, that deny the reality of progress, and with a growing economic crisis that, at least in the short term, had stalled that progress. Once again, cosmology justified the course of events on earth.

But there is probably no better example in this century of the interaction of social ideology and cosmology than the development of the inflationary universe in the eighties. Nineteen eighty, with the coming to power of conservative administrations in America and elsewhere, marked the end of a period of fashionable pessimism and the beginning of a decade of speculative boom. Alan Guth arrived at his idea of cosmic inflation just as the worst monetary inflation of the century was coming to a climax. He concluded that the universe is a "free lunch" just as the American economy began its own gigantic free lunch--a period of speculation which rewarded its wealthy participants while actual production stagnated.

Throughout the decade, the rise of financial speculation in Wall Street was shadowed by the rise of cosmologists' speculations in Princeton, Cambridge, and elsewhere. As Witten and his colleagues were acclaimed by the press as geniuses for theories that produced not a single valid prediction, so men like Michael Milken and Donald Trump earned not only far greater fame but also incomes that peaked, in Milken's case, at half a billion dollars per year for paper manipulations that added not a single penny to the nation's production.

In the realm of finance, fortunes were built on a tower of debt. A speculator would borrow four billion dollars to buy a company, sell it for five billion to another speculator, who would, in turn, break it up to sell it in pieces for six billion dollars--all on borrowed money. All involved reaped handsome profits and were hailed as geniuses of financial wizardry--until their indictments.

The result of this was an actual decline in living standards both in the U.S. and throughout the world: by the end of the eighties real family income in the U.S. had dropped by 10 percent and was at the same level as it had been twenty-five years earlier, despite the fact that most families by now had two incomes.

Obviously, the small-scale speculators of cosmology did not, in any conscious way, imitate the large-scale speculators of Wall Street. Yet, as in every other epoch, society's dominant ideas permeated cosmology. If the wealthiest members of society earned billions by mere manipulation of numbers, without building a single factory or mill, it didn't seem too strange that scientific reputations could be made with theories that have no more relation to reality. If a tower of financial speculation could be built on debt--the promise of future payment--then, similarly, a tower of cosmological speculation could be built on promises of future experimental confirmation.

There was, however, a more direct relationship between the development of the economy over the past decade and the development of cosmology and science generally. The eighties saw a slashing, particularly in the U.S., of the amount of money devoted to nonmilitary research and development and a drastic slowing of technical advance.

To a large extent, this intensified a tendency evident in the seventies and even in the sixties. Since 1960 there has not been a single major qualitative breakthrough in physical technology.
The thirty years before 1960 saw a series of fundamental developments: television in the thirties; the transistor, computer, radar, and, of course, nuclear energy in the forties; the development of space travel and the laser in the fifties. In the subsequent three decades there have been dramatic improvements in all these areas, particularly in computers, but not a single qualitatively new, functional idea. Only in biology has genetic engineering brought about a qualitative advance.

This is a profound change for modern society: not since the beginning of the industrial revolution 250 years ago has there been a similar period of three decades without major technical advances. Such technical stagnation has a deep impact on science and technology. An advancing society, which requires and thus supports fundamental work in science and technology, continually generates challenges for the pure sciences and provides the materials needed to meet those challenges. Thus the problems arising from the development of electricity and electrotechnology in the late nineteenth century led directly to the study of nuclear structure and eventually to the release of nuclear energy. When technological progress slows or ceases, that crossfertilization of theory and experiment, thought and action, begins to wither and scientists begin to turn to sterile speculation.

The slowing of technology is, today, directly linked to the growth of financial speculation. Five billion dollars invested in buying, say, Hughes Aircraft, is five billion dollars that the buyer, General Motors, will not put into new factories or new research. To the extent that the world market appears to be saturated, as it does today, then profits are easier to make through speculation than in production. What use is new technology if new factories aren't profitable? The diversion of financial resources from technical advance has pushed thousands of scientists away from the challenges of the real world into the deserts of speculation.

Fortunately for science, even the perfection of existing technologies, such as the computer, requires a broad base of scientific research. But it is fundamental research--investigations whose findings don't seem to be immediately useful--that suffer first when technological development slows. Today those areas are clearly cosmology and particle or high-energy physics--where the link between science and technology, theory and human progress, has been broken almost completely. It is here that, as in postclassical Greece, the stagnation of society has led to the return of mathematical myths, a retreat from the problems of base matter to the serene contemplation of numbers.

Today cosmologists often pride themselves on the isolation of their work from the everyday world and from any possible application. They and their particle theorist colleagues give their hypothetical entities whimsical and comical names to flaunt their belief that their activity is, at base, an elaborate and difficult game, the "free play of the mind." In a society beset by growing crises, a world of poverty, crime, drugs, and AIDS, a world without progress, the pure realm of mathematics offers a serene cloister.

[Source: Eric J Lerner - The Big Bang Never Happened]

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

2010-01-29T17:14:00.000+02:00

[...] one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions. To a great extent these are the only problems that the community will admit as scientific or encourage its members to undertake. Other problems, including many that had previously been standard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies.

[...] once it has achieved the status of a paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place. No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific development at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature. [...] the act of judgement that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgement leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature AND with each other.

[...] Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are men who, being little commited by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

[...] Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution ? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both ?[...] Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit.

[...] Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm defense. [...] whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step inside the circle. [...] As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice - there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community.

[...] cumulative acquisition of novelty is not only rare in fact but improbable in principle. Normal research, which is cumulative, owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved with conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence. (That is why an excessive concern with useful problems, regardless of their relation to existing knowledge and technique, can so easily inhibit scientific development.) The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not, however, just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly. Unanticipated novelty, the new discovery, can emerge only to the extent that his anticipations about nature and his instruments prove wrong.

[...] To the extent, as significant as it is incomplete, that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms. In the partially circular arguments that regularly result, each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent. [...] since no paradigm ever solves the problems it defines and since no two paradigms leave all the same problems unsolved, paradigm debates always involve the question: Which problems is it more significant to have solved ?

[...] What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. [...] Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigm-determined. Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that the paradigm has partially determined.

[...] Both scientists and laymen take much of their image of creative scientific activity from an authoritative source that systematically disguises - partly for important functional reasons - the existence and significance of scientific revolutions. [...] As the source of authority, I have in mind principally text-books of science together with both the popularizations and the philosophical works modeled on them. [...] All three record the stable OUTCOME of past revolutions and thus display the bases of the current normal-scientific tradition. To fulfill their function they need not provide authentic information about the way in which those bases were first recognized and then embraced by the profession. In the case of textbooks, at least, there are even good reasons why, in these matters, they should be systematically misleading. Textbooks [...] have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them.

[...] Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist's sense of his discipline's history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts' paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are re-written, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative.

[...] And Max Plank, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it".

[...] paradigm debates are not really about relative problem-solving ability, though for good reasons they are usually couched in those terms. Instead, the issue is which paradigm should in the future guide research on problems many of which neither competitor can yet claim to resolve completely. A decision between alternate ways of practicing science is called for, and in the circumstances that decision must be based less on past achievement than on future promise. The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.

[Source: Thomas S Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]

The World of Free Energy - by Peter Lindemann

2010-01-06T18:44:00.000+02:00

The World of Free Energy

by Peter Lindemann, D.Sc.

In the late 1880's, trade journals in the electrical sciences were predicting "free electricity" in the near future. Incredible discoveries about the nature of electricity were becoming common place. Nikola Tesla was demonstrating "wireless lighting" and other wonders associated with high frequency currents. There was an excitement about the future like never before.

Within 20 years, there would be automobiles, airplanes, movies, recorded music, telephones, radio, and practical cameras. The Victorian Age was giving way to something totally new. For the first time in history, common people were encouraged to envision a utopian future, filled with abundant modern transportation and communication, as well as jobs, housing and food for everyone. Disease would be conquered, and so would poverty. Life was getting better, and this time, everyone was going to get "a piece of the pie." So, what happened? In the midst of this technological explosion, where did the energy breakthroughs go? Was all of this excitement about "free electricity", which happened just before the beginning of the last century, all just wishful thinking that "real science" eventually disproved?

Current State of Technology

Actually, the answer to that question is NO. In fact, the opposite is true. Spectacular energy technologies were developed right along with the other breakthroughs. Since that time, multiple methods for producing vast amounts of energy at extremely low cost have been developed. None of these technologies have made it to the "open" consumer market as an article of commerce, however. Exactly why this is true will be discussed shortly. But first, I would like to describe to you a short list of "free energy" technologies that I am currently aware of, and that are proven beyond all reasonable doubt. The common feature connecting all of these discoveries, is that they use a small amount of one form of energy to control or release a large amount of a different kind of energy. Many of them tap the underlying aether in some way; a source of energy conveniently ignored by "modern" science.

1) Radiant Energy.

Nikola Tesla's Magnifying Transmitter, T. Henry Moray's Radiant Energy Device, Edwin Gray's EMA Motor, and Paul Baumann's Testatika Machine all run on Radiant Energy. This natural energy form can be gathered directly from the environment (mistakenly called "static" electricity) or extracted from ordinary electricity by the method called "fractionation." Radiant Energy can perform the same wonders as ordinary electricity, at less than 1% of the cost. It does not behave exactly like electricity, however, which has contributed to the scientific community's misunderstanding of it. The Methernitha Community in Switzerland currently has 5 or 6 working models of fuelless, self-running devices that tap this energy.

2) Permanent Magnets.

Dr. Robert Adams (NZ) has developed astounding designs of electric motors, generators and heaters that run on permanent magnets. One such device draws 100 watts of electricity from the source, generates 100 watts to recharge the source, and produces over 140 BTU's of heat in two minutes! Dr. Tom Bearden (USA) has two working models of a permanent magnet powered electrical transformer. It uses a 6-watt electrical input to control the path of a magnetic field coming out of a permanent magnet. By channeling the magnetic field, first to one output coil and then a second output coil, and by doing this repeatedly and rapidly in a "Ping-Pong" fashion, the device can produce a 96-watt electrical output with no moving parts. Bearden calls his device a Motionless Electromagnetic Generator, or MEG. Jean-Louis Naudin has duplicated Bearden's device in France. The principles for this type of device were first disclosed by Frank Richardson (USA) in 1978. Troy Reed (USA) has working models of a special magnetized fan that heats up as it spins. It takes exactly the same amount of energy to spin the fan whether it is generating heat or not. Beyond these developments, multiple inventors have identified working mechanisms that produce motor torque from permanent magnets alone.

3) Mechanical Heaters.

There are two classes of machines that transform a small amount of mechanical energy into a large amount of heat. The best of these purely mechanical designs are the rotating cylinder systems designed by Frenette (USA) and Perkins (USA). In these machines, one cylinder is rotated within another cylinder with about an eighth of an inch of clearance between them. The space between the cylinders is filled with a liquid such as water or oil, and it is this "working fluid" that heats up as the inner cylinder spins. Another method uses magnets mounted on a wheel to produce large eddy currents in a plate of aluminium, causing the aluminium to heat up rapidly. These magnetic heaters have been demonstrated by Muller (Canada), Adams (NZ) and Reed (USA). All of these systems can produce ten times more heat than standard methods using the same energy input.

4) Super-Efficient Electrolysis.

Water can be broken into Hydrogen and Oxygen using electricity. Standard chemistry books claim that this process requires more energy than can be recovered when the gases are recombined. This is true only under the worst case scenario. When water is hit with its own molecular resonant frequency, using a system developed by Stan Meyers (USA) and again recently by Xogen Power, Inc., it collapses into Hydrogen and Oxygen gas with very little electrical input. Also, using different electrolytes (additives that make the water conduct electricity better) changes the efficiency of the process dramatically. It is also known that certain geometric structures and surface textures work better than others do. The implication is that unlimited amounts of Hydrogen fuel can be made to drive engines (like in your car) for the cost of water. Even more amazing is the fact that a special metal alloy was patented by Freedman (USA) in 1957 that spontaneously breaks water into Hydrogen and Oxygen with no outside electrical input and without causing any chemical changes in the metal itself. This means that this special metal alloy can make Hydrogen from water for free, forever.

5) Implosion/Vortex.

All major industrial engines use the release of heat to cause expansion and pressure to produce work, like in your car engine. Nature uses the opposite process of cooling to cause suction and vacuum to produce work, like in a tornado. Viktor Schauberger (Austria) was the first to build working models of Implosion Engines in the 1930's and 1940's. Since that time, Callum Coats has published extensively on Schauberger's work in his book Living Energies and subsequently, a number of researchers have built working models of Implosion Turbine Engines. These are fuelless engines that produce mechanical work from energy accessed from a vacuum. There are also much simpler designs that use vortex motions to tap a combination of gravity and centrifugal force to produce a continuous motion in fluids.

6) Cold Fusion.

In March 1989, two Chemists from Brigham Young University in Utah (USA) announced that they had produced atomic fusion reactions in a simple tabletop device. The claims were "debunked" within 6 months and the public lost interest. Nevertheless, Cold Fusion is very real. Not only has excess heat production been repeatedly documented, but also low energy atomic element transmutation has been catalogued, involving dozens of different reactions! This technology definitely can produce low cost energy and scores of other important industrial processes.

7) Solar Assisted Heat Pumps.

The refrigerator in your kitchen is the only "free energy machine" you currently own. It's an electrically operated heat pump. It uses one amount of energy (electricity) to move three amounts of energy (heat). This gives it a "co-efficient of performance" (COP) of about 3. Your refrigerator uses one amount of electricity to pump three amounts of heat from the inside of the refrigerator to the outside of the refrigerator. This is its typical use, but it is the worst possible way to use the technology. Here's why. A heat pump pumps heat from the "source" of heat to the "sink" or place that absorbs the heat. The "source" of heat should obviously be HOT and the "sink" for heat should obviously be COLD for this process to work the best. In your refrigerator, it's exactly the opposite. The "source" of heat is inside the box, which is COLD, and the "sink" for heat is the room temperature air of your kitchen, which is warmer than the source. This is why the COP remains low for your kitchen refrigerator. But this is not true for all heat pumps. COP's of 8 to 10 are easily attained with solar assisted heat pumps. In such a device, a heat pump draws heat from a solar collector and dumps the heat into a large underground absorber, which remains at 55° F, and mechanical energy is extracted in the transfer. This process is equivalent to a steam engine that extracts mechanical energy between the boiler and the condenser, except that it uses a fluid that "boils" at a much lower temperature than water. One such system that was tested in the 1970's produced 350 hp, measured on a Dynamometer, in a specially designed engine from just 100-sq. ft. of solar collector. (This is NOT the system promoted by Dennis Lee.) The amount of energy it took to run the compressor (input) was less than 20 hp, so this system produced more than 17 times more energy than it took to keep it going! It could power a small neighborhood from the roof of a hot tub gazebo, using exactly the same technology that keeps the food cold in your kitchen. Currently, there is an industrial scale heat pump system just north of Kona, Hawaii that generates electricity from temperature differences in ocean water.

There are dozens of other systems that I have not mentioned, many of them are as viable and well tested as the ones I have just recounted. But this short list is sufficient to make my point: free energy technology is here, now. It offers the world pollution-free, energy abundance for everyone, everywhere. It is now possible to stop the production of "greenhouse gases" and shut down all of the nuclear power plants. We can now desalinate unlimited amounts of seawater at an affordable price, and bring adequate fresh water to even the most remote habitats. Transportation costs and the production costs for just about everything can drop dramatically. Food can even be grown in heated greenhouses in the winter, anywhere. All of these wonderful benefits that can make life on this planet so much easier and better for everyone have been postponed for decades. Why? Whose purposes are served by this postponement?

The Opportunity

What is starting to happen is that inventors are publishing their work, instead of patenting it and keeping it secret. More and more, people are "giving away" information on these technologies in books, videos and websites. While there is still a great deal of useless information about free energy on the Internet, the availability of good information is rising rapidly. Check out the list of websites and other resources at the end of this article.

It is imperative that you begin to gather all of the information you can on real free energy systems. The reason for this is simple. Focus on what you can do now, not on how much there still is to be done. Small, private research groups are working out the details as you read this. Many are committed to publishing their results on the Internet.

If we stand up and refuse to remain ignorant and action-less, we can change the course of history. It is the aggregate of our combined action that can make a difference. Only the mass action that represents our consensus can create the world we want. Nevertheless, free energy technology is here. It is real, and it will change everything about the way we live, work and relate to each other. In the last analysis, free energy technology obsoletes greed and the fear for survival. But like all exercises of Spiritual Faith, we must first manifest the generosity and trust in our own lives

The Source of Free Energy is INSIDE of us. It is that excitement of expressing ourselves freely. It is our Spiritually guided intuition expressing itself without distraction, intimidation or manipulation. It is our open-heartedness. Ideally, the free energy technologies underpin a just society where everyone has enough food, clothing, shelter, self-worth, and the leisure time to contemplate the higher Spiritual meanings of Life. Do we not owe it to each other, to face our fears, and take action to create this future for our children's children?

The Philosophers' Stone

2009-12-29T10:47:00.000+02:00

How to Transmute the Elements by Engineering the Geometry of Standing Waves

A series of experiments has been carried out in Japan proving that chickens fed a diet deficient in calcium produced, as the end product of their biological processes, more calcium than they were ginven to live on. The conclusion is that the chickens created the calcium they needed by transmuting potassium.

This discovery challenges the basic concepts of science, and the more critically a discovery challenges the foundations of scientific belief, the less it is examined at all. But if potassium can be transmuted into calcium (and by chickens, no less), we had best construct a new model of the atom to explain how this might be possible. So let's get started, at the level of the subatomic particles that seem to be giving theorists so much difficulty.

After observing that light travels in straight lines to cast sharp shadows, Isaac Newton deduced that light beams could exist only if radiant energy possessed the characteristics of atomic particles. But Sir Isaac went on to pass beams of light through prisms observing the spectrum of colors projected. The fractioning of light into colors is possible only if radiant energy possesses the properties of waves. The problem became a matter of determining whether light was particulate or wavy in nature. Theorists decided that the ultimate elemental substance was both particle and wave, depending upon what it happened to be doing with itself when observed. Then realists proceeded to advance science without caring what light was. Nevertheless, the problem for the philosophers remains. The properties of particles categorically exclude the properties of waves, so how is it possible for an elemental substance, whatever it is, to manifest both properties in successions?

After the greatest scientists since Newton have given up, all a lay person has to do is take a couple of cartons of quarter-inch ball bearings to a billiard parlor, rent a table, and spread balls on the baize.

After you have managed to arrange them with a mathematically random distribution, you will see that each ball is equally distant from its neighbours Absolute chaos is identical to perfect order.

Now try to rearrange the balls so that groups are allowed, but the groupings are mathematically random. Eventually the pattern formed by the balls will follow a density of distribution described by the Bell Frequency Curve of random statistics. The Bell Frequency Curve is a sine-wave form; on a plane surface it is manifest as regular clusters, with small groups of roughly equal numbers being roughly equal distances apart. The smaller groups congregate into larger groups until the entire field can be described as a single sine-wave form of low frequency. Once again, you prove that utter disorder is identical to total organization.

If the balls are small enough and numerous enough in relation to the area you have to spread them on, you will discover the aggregations of particles will assume the pattern of a spiral generated by phi, the ratio between successive numbers in a series extended by adding consecutive numbers together; it is the ratio of 1:1.1618. All natural growth eventually fallows the form of a spiral generated by a phi ratio, from the distributions of atoms to the distributions of stars in galaxies. (In other words, the spiral structure of gas clouds in interstellar space is not necessarily due to the process of gravitational contraction and centrifugal force, as proponents of the Nebular Hypothesis of stellar generation would have us believe. The spiral structure is an inevitable consequence of random distribution.)

You can perform this experiment at less cost by making pencil dots on a large piece of paper, but you will be bothered by con- stant erasing until you get the dots distributed properly. With pencil and paper, however, you can perform the converse experiment. Draw lines at random, each line representing a wave front. If you have enough lines on enough paper, and enough randomness, the result will look exactly like the random distribution of balls on a billiard table, as the intersections of lines form groupings of density.

Whether you perceive a ball to be an atomic particle or an aggregation of particles depends upon the scale of your frame of view. Whether you perceive an aggregation to be a particle or a wave depends upon the scale of your resolution. At the limit of resolution, all structures register on all instruments of measurement as particles. And all structures that cannot be resolved sharply by the instrument of measurement register as waves. So the nature of the ultimate element is determined by the instruments of measurement; all we can really know about it is what our instruments measure. Whether you choose to interpret reality as waves or particles depends entirely on what you want to do. The manifestations of energy - i.e., motion - yield measurements as waves; the manifestations of static material yield measurements as particles.

As it happens, everything is moving. Therefore, all events yield accurate measurements only as wave functions. The use of the laser for measurement establishes the wave as the elemental unit of space, time, motion, and energy.

As when Pythagoras studied music, harmonics is still taught from the model of a vibrating string. A plucked string vibrates back and forth as a unit, forming a standing-wave structure, emitting vibrations through the air to be heard as a musical sound. The tone is the fundamental frequency of the standing wave.

As the string vibrates as a unit, it also divides itself into two halves along its length, and each half vibrates as two individual standing waves independently of the fundamental wave. The frequency of the half lengths is twice the frequency of the fundamental, and the sound emitted is the second harmonic overtone, an octave higher than the fundamental.

And at the same time as the string vibrates as a unit and as independent halves, it also divides its length into three equal parts, each third vibrating independently to emit a sound three times the frequency of the fundamental, called the third harmonic overtone. At the same time, the string also divides itself into fractional lengths of quarters, fifths, sixths, and so on to the elemental molecular unit of vibration, generating successively higher harmonic overtones all the way. The distribution of energy among the overtones determines the unique sound characteristic of each instrument. This is the way harmonics is taught.

Only one thing is wrong with the course of study: The instructors got it all backward, just as electricians are taught that electricity flows in the opposite direction from the way it really flows. Now all the musicians and acoustic engineers will protest; everyone can see the vibrating string, and the course in harmonics describes exactly what you see doesn't it? No, what is really happening is random motion. Whether or not you can hear the vibrations of a musical string above the audible threshold, the string is always vibrating due to the random molecular agitation of heat. (As far as the string is concerned, the extra vibration it gets from being plucked is just more heat.) Molecular motion along the string arranges itself into increasingly longer sine waves according to the Bell Frequency Curve of random distribution, until all the various fractional vibrations come into phase to generate the fundamental frequency. Fractions which do not coincide with the lower harmonics travel back and forth along the length of the string as moving waves until they come into direct opposition, transforming them into electromagnetic radiation. It's the loss of energy through electromagmetic transformation that causes the molecular vibrations to die down.

Electricians continue to learn their subject backward because which way the current flows makes no difference to the wiring; and besides, alternating current flows both ways. So what difference does it make whether harmonics is taught as division or integrations. Well, as long as you believe electricity flows from positive to negative, you will never be able to discover and implement electronics.

If you learn harmonics by dirtributing ball bearings on a pool table, the way Pythagoras did after he was initiated into the higher dimensions and forswore beans, you will discover how the universe unfolds.

An infinite number of particles distributed and moving randomly through infinite space will divide themselves along a fundamental axis; one half moving in one direction and the other half moving in the opposite direction. This flow corresponds to gravity and antigravity. The reason we rarely see antigravity is that all particles belonging to the opposite pole have already departed in the other direction, and very few are left around here.

Each half of the universal particles traveling in opposite directions along the fundamental axis will divide into two groups again, moving in opposite directions along a plane at right angles to the gravitational axis. This secondary harmonic corresponds to the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The second harmonic will also subdivide into another pair of equal and opposite accelerations that can be represented as a cylinder parallel to the centrifugal-centripetal plane. The tertiary harmonic corresponds to the precessional forces.

Like the conventional view of the musical string, the universe can be described as subdividing itself successively until the ultimate particle is reached whatever that ultimate particle is.

Of course, the universe does not really divide itself in this manner any more than the musical string does. It assembles its harmonics from random motion to coherent undertones. We proceed to analyze from the fundamental to the overtones only because it is convenient for our habit of thinking. We shall never know where the universal fundamental axis is, nor what the ultimate particle is, because in an infinite universe we must always find ourselves exactly in the middle of an infinite extension in both directions of whatever dimension we happen to be considering. What we call gravity, centrifugal-centripetal, and precessional forces are merely arbitrary conventions established for the convenience of our habitual mode of perception.

Once we perceive that all parts of space contain an indefinite number of particles moving at random to form the force fields we are familiar with, we understand how to engineer field energies directly. You see, one phase of precessional acceleration proceeds in the same direction as antigranty. To invent an antigravity engine, therefore, all you have to do is amplify the centrifugal harmonic until the antigravitational phase of the precessional harmonic exceeds the acceleration of gravity, and then eliminate the gravitational phase. This is exactly what Professor Eric Laithwaite calculated; he failed only because of errors in arithmetic. Other engineers have found the errors and corrected them. Whether or not the Laithwaite Engine worked, the fact remains that all antigravity engineering and all other field engineering can be reduced to the geometry of harmonics generated by random particles.

An infinite universe defined by an infinite number of randomly moving particles establishes the scientific principle of parity, meaning that energy will be equal in all directions and at all locations. In current physics, the concept of the cosmic hologram is still not accepted, so panty is limited to equality of motion in all directions.

When all the vectors of the gravitational-fundamental vibration and the centrifugal-centripetal secondary harmonic and the precessional tertiary harmonic and all the other harmonics are integrated into a resultant, the trajectory of any given particle must follow the course of a spiral vortex with a phi generator. Therefore, any part of space you choose as a frame of reference will be defined by a fundamental field vortex, subdivided into an indefinite number of harmonic overtone vortices.

A vortex can spin in only one direction. Parity demands that for every vortex there must be a countervortex. This is why all dynamic structures are created, like men and women, in equal and opposite numbers.

Two vortices spinning in the same direction flow in opposite directions along their interface, Therefore, if pushed together. they will annihilate each other. This is why when particle meets antiparticle, they are transformed into radiant energy. The closer two vortices spinning in the same direction are pushed together, the more energy is brought into opposition along their interface. Therefore, all vortices rotating in the same direction will tend to move away from each other until they are spaced equally apart.

Conversely, two vortices spinning in opposite directions are flowing in the same direction along their interface. Therefore, they tend to merge. But they are not drawn together so much as pushed together by the pressure of similar vortices.

It is evident that the mechanics of vortices determines the force physicists call charge. Spin determines polarity.

Physical experiment has proven conclusively that electrons and protons are monopoles. The fact that electric charge is monopolar while magnetic charge is dipolar is one of the problems in the search for a Unified-Field Theory. If the vortex model is valid, however, electrons and protons should be dipolar, depending on which way they are oriented. But protons always repel each other, so all respectable physicists are convinced the vortex model is mistaken.

But protons do not always repel each other! When they come close enough together, they cleave together with greater force than any glue known. Physicists call this attraction the nuclear force, and they are unable to explain why it can be so powerful, but only over extremely close distances, within the nucleus of the atom. The answer is self-evident by a simple experiment. If you float a number of bar magnets in a fluid medium, and enclose the experimental setup in an electromagnetic field, the field will align all the magnets in the same direction and they will repel each other like protons. But if the magnets are small enough, and are brought closely enough together, the mutual attraction of their opposite poles will overcome the force of the external field keeping them aligned - and they will flip, one relative to the other. With opposite poles tightly together, they will cleave together most tenaciously over a short distance. But once separated beyond the critical distance, the external field will align them in the same direction, and they will repel each other again. Scientists have come to perceive the electromagnetic field aligning particles in an atom as the electromagnetic field, so when particles flip and join in the nucleus with a thousand times more force than the attraction between proton and electron, a radically new force is postulated.

As it happens, Immanuel Velikovsky proposed an equivalent hypothesis to explain why planets in the Solar System do not collide. You see, if there is mutual gravitational attraction among the planets, they must clump together over the course of time. But observations prove that the planets maintain the greatest possible distance from each other. When an extreme condition is maintained indefinitely, you cannot explain it as accidental; there must be a physical force keeping the planets apart. Unfortunately, it was Velikovsky who proposed this hypothesis, and no scientist who is not independently wealthy and careless of reputation can afford to prove anything that Velikovsky said.

Field forces are defined, by many criteria, so physicists may be on firm ground when they establish a nuclear force distinct from the electromagnetic force - but the experiments proving electrical particles to be monopolar do not contribute to that support.

When harmonic calculations are transferred to spaces of more than one dimension (the musical string is the standard object lesson), the same principles are assumed to be valid. As a consequence, spherical harmonics is interpreted as a circular wave expanding from a point of origin on the global surface, and the harmonic ratios are measured along a radius. This conception works very well as far as it goes, but as you will learn, plane harmonics has some extremely practical differences from linear harmonics.

A plane cannot exist as a vibrating structure unless it has at least three sides. The triangle, therefore, must be established as the fundamental unit of plane harmonics. When the sides of an equilateral triangle are bisected and joined, the result is four triangles, just as a square makes four squares when its sides are bisected and joined. The operations of plane harmonics apparently observe the rules of plane geometry.

William H. Whamond, writing in Pursuit, pointed out that if the sides of a polygon are not of a ratio that mutually reinforces each other's vibrations, the plane structure will disintegrate. All equal-sided polygons maintain their sides by mutual reinforcement, but all those which cannot be triangulated in harmonic ratios must collapse under pressure. It is surprising that Buckminster Fuller was able to build a career without realizing the function of harmonics in maintaining basic stability of structure.

Whamond went further to point out that although stabilizing the dimensions of diagonals may be sufficient for practical structures, theoretical requirements are not satisfied unless the diametric vibratiom reinforce the perimetric vibrations to establish the polygon's rigidity through and through. The simplest polygon generated by a mutually harmonic reinforcement of both sides and center is the hexagon. This is the probable reason why six acquired a reputation for being the perfect number among the ancient philosophers, and why a circle's circumference was accepted as being three times its diameter. although every wheelwright knew better.

If you draw a grid of squares, and then draw all the diagonals, you will find yourself with a grid composed of two sets of squares. One set is rotated forty-five degrees from the other, and their dimension are related to each other by a ratio of the square root of 2. This self-evident transformation assumes engineering significance when harmonic structures extend into higher dimensions.

As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, not only is the triangle the basic unit of plane space, but the principle of triangulation also establishes the tetrahedron as the basic unit of solid space. Like the triangle, however, the tetrahedron maintains its structure only by the triangulated rigidity of the mutually reinforcing vibrations of its sides. In order to possess internal stability, the tetrahedron must be doubled, one intersecting another, with points aligned on a polar axis.

To establish stability, tetrahedrons must always be manifest in mutually opposed and supporting pairs in this way. When this geometrical structure takes form from universal vibrations, however, it is not the simple pair of tetrahedrons it appears to be at first sight.

If lines are drawn joining all the points of the paired tetrahedrons, you have a cube. If lines are drawn between the centers of each face of the cube, they form the edges of an octahedron.

If circles scribed around the bases of the two tetrahedrons are divided into five equal arcs and all the points joined by lines, a symmetrical polyhedron defined by twenty equilateral triangles is defined. If all the points are joined by lines through the center of the icosahedron, twenty equal tetrahedrons will be defined. The space defined by an icosahedron is stabilized by mutually reinforcing resonance around all sides, along all edges, and through all diameters. Like the hexagon, the twenty faceted icosahedron is the perfect solid.

Now, bisecting all the lines forming an icosahedron produces a twelve sided symmetrical polyhedron called a dodecahedron - the solid projection of the five-pointed star circumscribed by a pentagon. All ratios of the dodecahedron approximate the values of various mystical triangles, but they are incommensurate with the icosahedron by integers; the internal structure of the dodecahedron is irrational, like pi, phi, root 2, root 3, root 5, etc. As you know, the diagonal of a square is related to its sides by root 2 and the diagonal cross of a square is also the negative of the square. The dodecahedron is the negative of the icosahedron. In this context, the octahedron is the negative of the cube. Because a tetrahedron is the elemental unit of solid space, no other polyhedron can function as its inferior negative, so the tetrahedron is rotated 180 degrees to function as its own solid negative. Lines drawn from the points of a tetrahedron to its internal center form a linear structure called the Miraldi angle, resembling a caltrop, this is the true negative of the tetrahedron, but the field rotation required to transform a tetrahedron into a caltrop projects the structure into fewer dimensions.

Now, the relationship between a square and its diagonals is a 45-degree rotation on plane space, which is the projection of a rotation of 90 degrees in hyperspace. The relationship between the tetrahedron, the octahedron, the cube, the dodecahedron, and the icosahedron is also established by a definite rotation through hyperspace. The notes of a musical scale are also defined by a definite rotation of energy through hyperspace, which transforms one frequency into another. As an illustration, rotation through hyperspace transforms the wavelength of the side of a square to the wavelength of its diagonal. The ratio of the side to the diagonal is the same as the ratio between G and C on the musical scale.

You have just made a discovery sought by philosophers throughout history; the regular Platonic solids are related to each other as musical notes on a hexatonic scale. Extend the sides of the dodecahedron until they meet, and you have the frame of a pair of tetrahedrons exactly twice the size of the pair you started with to continue the scale on the second octave. You have discovered the Music of the Spheres.

Parity is not satisfied by the creation of nuclear particles in the form of equal and opposing standing-wave vortices. The axes of the pair, you see, are both aligned in the same direction; that is a manifestation of directional preference. In order that axes be balanced in all directions, particles must congregate in groups of six; three pairs of mutually opposed particles with the axis of each pair at right angles to the other two. This assemblage puts each vortex at the vertex of an octahedron.

The octahedron is not stable because each pair of vortices grind gears against the other two. But if the equatorial pair of particles move away from each other along the polar axis, the six can mesh together like two pairs of crown gear clusters fitted at right angles to each other.

The vortex model suggests that the basic particle is likely to be composed of three pairs of finer particles bound together in the harmonic structure of an octahedron. The geometry of the three pairs bears a striking correspondence to the characteristics of the elusive quark. Charm, beauty, and color appear to he manifestations of angle in hyperspace; axial angles account for fractional electric charge.

The octahedron still does not quite satisfy parity. The polar pinions of the crown gear clusters are both spinning in the same direction; this will give the octahedron a net charge. If four more pair of vortices, forming the negative of the octahedron, are spaced in a cube arrangement between the vertices of the octahedron, all the gears will spin in the right direction, all spins will be equally opposed, and all axes will be balanced in all directions. The cube-octa is the likely conformation of the neutron. Proof will be slow coming because at least half the particles are in the quantum field at the instant any measurement is made; this is why the quarks are so damned elusive.

The cube-octa contains fourteen particles. If struck, it could collapse, with twelve arranging themselves around one in the center, in the form of a dodecahedron, while the fourteenth spins free into orbit. The transformation is remarkable similar to what appears to happen when a neutron is converted by impact into a proton and an electron.

If the proton has the geometry of a dodecahedron, it will be a charged particle, so every proton will seek another proton as a mate. This may be why hydrogen is a diatomic molecule. After the neutron collapses, parity is not reestablished absolutely until the helium atom is formed. This would explain why helium is monatomic, with all the properties of an overgrown neutron.

Now that we have our electrons, protons, and neutrons straightened out, let's put them all together!

Niels Bohr described the atom as a miniature Solar System, with the nucleus serving as a Sun, orbited by electron `planets'. The Bohr model is represented in all popular scientific literature despite the fact that any child can see it must be impossible. You see, if you have electrons orbiting in all directions around a nucleus, they are bound to collide; and on the atomic time scale, eventually is something sooner than a microsecond.

The atomic traffic problem was solved by gaving each electron a different radius to orbit, but this solution won't work, either. An electron's wavelength is defined by its orbit. If every electron has its own orbital radius, each electron will manifest a different wavelength. This does not happen.

Erwin Schrdinger resolved the problem by proposing that electrons were standing waves, but his equations required three dimensions for each electron. Although the standing-wave equations were accepted, the necessity for multiplied space was not. As a consequence, mathematical physicists are still searching for a model that will make the atom possible! They have given up seeking a model that can be represented as a mechanical structure, and physics builds increasingdy complicated and abstract equations.

The model of solid harmonics indicates that the node of the electronic standing wave revolves around the equator of the hydrogen nucleus. The node requires only half the quantum orbital space it has, so another electron can share the same shell to form a helium atom. To maintain parity, each moves to a polar hemisphere separated by the equator, and revolves in opposite directions.

Space is insufficient for a third electron, so the lithium atom must start another shell. The second shell has enough area for eight electrons, so the surface of each hemisphere is divided harmonically into successive halves, thirds, and quarters. Apparently the equatorial division establishes a hemispherical sector that is never crossed. The eight facets form the sides of an octahedron (the ubiquitous octahedron again) and each facet has just enough room to hold an electron; each facet is a quantum unit of space relative to the frequency of the electron. When the octahedron is complete, the atom is electrically neu- tral, as all octahedrons with their gears running smoothly are supposed to he, Neon is almost as inert as helium, but parity must be observed; and a second octahedron is laid over the first with the spins of each electron aligned at a different angle. The fourth orbital shell has sufficient radius for its surface to hold many more electrons. If you move the eight electrons to the vertices of the octahedron harmonic structure, so that each hemisphere is covered by a square pyramid with the equatorial cleavage separating them, you will find enough room to add another electron to the center of each facet, defining a cube- octa. The total of electrons will he eighteen; this is the number of electrons proven to be established in the subsequent shells in the generation of the Periodical Table of Elements. The electrons of each shell align their axes to balance parity.

But apparently it is a long way from helium to the next perfect atomic geometry. If the equatorial cleft is retained throughout the generation of elements, the model of heavier atoms will assume the dumbbell configuration of the electromagnetic field surrounding a bar magnet. (Structural weakness at the waist may be the reason that atoms heavier than bismuth break spontanenusly.)

To illustrate how the geometry works in prarctice, the atom of carbon has a pair of miter caps, one over each polar hemisphere. There is space for two more electrons in each hemisphere to complete the octahedron. When it takes the electrons attached to hydrogen atoms, the hydrogen nucleus is going to stick out as a lump. In order to maintain parity, the angles at which the hydrogen atoms will join the carbon atom to form methane conform to the points of a tetrahedron. This fact is taken for granted in stereochemistry today, but established authorities put down the first chemist who suggested that molecules had solid structures, quite different from the empirical formulas used to describe them.

The oxygen atom is capped by three-sided pyramids with room for one more electron in each hemisphere. Parity allows a 120-degree angle between the hydrogen nuclei, and so water forms ice crystals in a hexagonal geometry.

Outside of the innermost shells, electrons do not orbit the nucleus of their atoms at all; they orbit the space of their octahedronal facet at a constant radius. This geometry makes it possible to avert collisions and maintain a constant frequency of orbit, regardless of an electron's distance from its atomic center. When atoms are excited by absorbing radiation, a rotation in hyperspace causes the shells to move out to a greater radius from the nucleus to the positions calculated from experiment.

You have been taken along this line of superficial physics and chemistry to give you a basis for the possibility that all molecular structures are generated from the elementary geometry of the Platonic solids, with the elements combined in various combinations of harmonically integrated angles, like crystals. If this is so, then each chemical element and compound will resonate in sympathy to a specific geometric solid. Furthermore, each solid structure can be excited and modulated by musical sound. This is not a novel concept, but the very basis of alchemy.

Now, each solid can be transformed into another structure by a regular rotation through the hyperspace of the quantum field. Each chemical atom is also transformed by a rotation of its geometrical structure in hyperspace. Therefore, by employing tuned vibrations it is theoretically possible to transform lead into gold (or gold into oil, which is considerably more valuable these days).

Fitting experimental data to the theory of solid harmonics is a task requiring professional competence. Even if the essential concept is correct, coflicting data is turning up day by day inspiring many false starts.
In the meantime, back at the bench, we have discovered the Philosophers' Stone. If a birdbrain can transmute the elements, so can engineering geniuses - as soon as we figure out how those stupid chickens did it.

[Source: T.B.Pawlicki - How to transmute the elements by engineering the geometry of standing waves]

Forged Origins of the New Testament

2009-12-29T01:47:00.000+02:00

What the Church doesn't want you to know
[...]The majority of modern-day Christian writers suppress the truth about the development of their religion and conceal Constantine's efforts to curb the disreputable character of the presbyters who are now called "Church Fathers" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. xiv, pp. 370-1). They were "maddened", he said (Life of Constantine, attributed to Eusebius Pamphilius of Caesarea, c. 335, vol. iii, p. 171; The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, cited as N&PNF, attributed to St Ambrose, Rev. Prof. Roberts, DD, and Principal James Donaldson, LLD, editors, 1891, vol. iv, p. 467). The "peculiar type of oratory" expounded by them was a challenge to a settled religious order (The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Religion, Literature and Art, Oskar Seyffert, Gramercy, New York, 1995, pp. 544-5). Ancient records reveal the true nature of the presbyters, and the low regard in which they were held has been subtly suppressed by modern Church historians. In reality, they were:

"...the most rustic fellows, teaching strange paradoxes. They openly declared that none but the ignorant was fit to hear their discourses ... they never appeared in the circles of the wiser and better sort, but always took care to intrude themselves among the ignorant and uncultured, rambling around to play tricks at fairs and markets ... they lard their lean books with the fat of old fables ... and still the less do they understand ... and they write nonsense on vellum ... and still be doing, never done." (Contra Celsum ["Against Celsus"], Origen of Alexandria, c. 251, Bk I, p. lxvii, Bk III, p. xliv, passim)

Clusters of presbyters had developed "many gods and many lords" (1 Cor. 8:5) and numerous religious sects existed, each with differing doctrines (Gal. 1:6). Presbyterial groups clashed over attributes of their various gods and "altar was set against altar" in competing for an audience (Optatus of Milevis, 1:15, 19, early fourth century). From Constantine's point of view, there were several factions that needed satisfying, and he set out to develop an all-embracing religion during a period of irreverent confusion. In an age of crass ignorance, with nine-tenths of the peoples of Europe illiterate, stabilising religious splinter groups was only one of Constantine's problems. The smooth generalisation, which so many historians are content to repeat, that Constantine "embraced the Christian religion" and subsequently granted "official toleration", is "contrary to historical fact" and should be erased from our literature forever (Catholic Encyclopedia, Pecci ed., vol. iii, p. 299, passim). Simply put, there was no Christian religion at Constantine's time, and the Church acknowledges that the tale of his "conversion" and "baptism" are "entirely legendary" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. xiv, pp. 370-1).

Constantine "never acquired a solid theological knowledge" and "depended heavily on his advisers in religious questions" (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Edition, vol. xii, p. 576, passim). According to Eusebeius (260-339), Constantine noted that among the presbyterian factions "strife had grown so serious, vigorous action was necessary to establish a more religious state", but he could not bring about a settlement between rival god factions (Life of Constantine, op. cit., pp. 26-8). His advisers warned him that the presbyters' religions were "destitute of foundation" and needed official stabilisation (ibid.).

Constantine saw in this confused system of fragmented dogmas the opportunity to create a new and combined State religion, neutral in concept, and to protect it by law. When he conquered the East in 324 he sent his Spanish religious adviser, Osius of Córdoba, to Alexandria with letters to several bishops exhorting them to make peace among themselves. The mission failed and Constantine, probably at the suggestion of Osius, then issued a decree commanding all presbyters and their subordinates "be mounted on asses, mules and horses belonging to the public, and travel to the city of Nicaea" in the Roman province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. They were instructed to bring with them the testimonies they orated to the rabble, "bound in leather" for protection during the long journey, and surrender them to Constantine upon arrival in Nicaea (The Catholic Dictionary, Addis and Arnold, 1917, "Council of Nicaea" entry). Their writings totalled "in all, two thousand two hundred and thirty-one scrolls and legendary tales of gods and saviours, together with a record of the doctrines orated by them" (Life of Constantine, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 73; N&PNF, op. cit., vol. i, p. 518).

The First Council of Nicaea and the "missing records"
Thus, the first ecclesiastical gathering in history was summoned and is today known as the Council of Nicaea. It was a bizarre event that provided many details of early clerical thinking and presents a clear picture of the intellectual climate prevailing at the time. It was at this gathering that Christianity was born, and the ramifications of decisions made at the time are difficult to calculate. About four years prior to chairing the Council, Constantine had been initiated into the religious order of Sol Invictus, one of the two thriving cults that regarded the Sun as the one and only Supreme God (the other was Mithraism). Because of his Sun worship, he instructed Eusebius to convene the first of three sittings on the summer solstice, 21 June 325 (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Edition, vol. i, p. 792), and it was "held in a hall in Osius's palace" (Ecclesiastical History, Bishop Louis Dupin, Paris, 1686, vol. i, p. 598). In an account of the proceedings of the conclave of presbyters gathered at Nicaea, Sabinius, Bishop of Hereclea, who was in attendance, said, "Excepting Constantine himself and Eusebius Pamphilius, they were a set of illiterate, simple creatures who understood nothing" (Secrets of the Christian Fathers, Bishop J. W. Sergerus, 1685, 1897 reprint).

This is another luminous confession of the ignorance and uncritical credulity of early churchmen. Dr Richard Watson (1737-1816), a disillusioned Christian historian and one-time Bishop of Llandaff in Wales (1782), referred to them as "a set of gibbering idiots" (An Apology for Christianity, 1776, 1796 reprint; also, Theological Tracts, Dr Richard Watson, "On Councils" entry, vol. 2, London, 1786, revised reprint 1791). From his extensive research into Church councils, Dr Watson concluded that "the clergy at the Council of Nicaea were all under the power of the devil, and the convention was composed of the lowest rabble and patronised the vilest abominations" (An Apology for Christianity, op. cit.). It was that infantile body of men who were responsible for the commencement of a new religion and the theological creation of Jesus Christ.

The Church admits that vital elements of the proceedings at Nicaea are "strangely absent from the canons" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. iii, p. 160). We shall see shortly what happened to them. However, according to records that endured, Eusebius "occupied the first seat on the right of the emperor and delivered the inaugural address on the emperor's behalf" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. v, pp. 619-620). There were no British presbyters at the council but many Greek delegates. "Seventy Eastern bishops" represented Asiatic factions, and small numbers came from other areas (Ecclesiastical History, ibid.). Caecilian of Carthage travelled from Africa, Paphnutius of Thebes from Egypt, Nicasius of Die (Dijon) from Gaul, and Donnus of Stridon made the journey from Pannonia.

It was at that puerile assembly, and with so many cults represented, that a total of 318 "bishops, priests, deacons, subdeacons, acolytes and exorcists" gathered to debate and decide upon a unified belief system that encompassed only one god (An Apology for Christianity, op. cit.). By this time, a huge assortment of "wild texts" (Catholic Encyclopedia, New Edition, "Gospel and Gospels") circulated amongst presbyters and they supported a great variety of Eastern and Western gods and goddesses: Jove, Jupiter, Salenus, Baal, Thor, Gade, Apollo, Juno, Aries, Taurus, Minerva, Rhets, Mithra, Theo, Fragapatti, Atys, Durga, Indra, Neptune, Vulcan, Kriste, Agni, Croesus, Pelides, Huit, Hermes, Thulis, Thammus, Eguptus, Iao, Aph, Saturn, Gitchens, Minos, Maximo, Hecla and Phernes (God's Book of Eskra, anon., ch. xlviii, paragraph 36).

Up until the First Council of Nicaea, the Roman aristocracy primarily worshipped two Greek gods-Apollo and Zeus-but the great bulk of common people idolised either Julius Caesar or Mithras (the Romanised version of the Persian deity Mithra). Caesar was deified by the Roman Senate after his death (15 March 44 BC) and subsequently venerated as "the Divine Julius". The word "Saviour" was affixed to his name, its literal meaning being "one who sows the seed", i.e., he was a phallic god. Julius Caesar was hailed as "God made manifest and universal Saviour of human life", and his successor Augustus was called the "ancestral God and Saviour of the whole human race" (Man and his Gods, Homer Smith, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1952). Emperor Nero (54-68), whose original name was Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (37-68), was immortalised on his coins as the "Saviour of mankind" (ibid.). The Divine Julius as Roman Saviour and "Father of the Empire" was considered "God" among the Roman rabble for more than 300 years. He was the deity in some Western presbyters' texts, but was not recognised in Eastern or Oriental writings.

Constantine's intention at Nicaea was to create an entirely new god for his empire who would unite all religious factions under one deity. Presbyters were asked to debate and decide who their new god would be. Delegates argued among themselves, expressing personal motives for inclusion of particular writings that promoted the finer traits of their own special deity. Throughout the meeting, howling factions were immersed in heated debates, and the names of 53 gods were tabled for discussion. "As yet, no God had been selected by the council, and so they balloted in order to determine that matter... For one year and five months the balloting lasted..." (God's Book of Eskra, Prof. S. L. MacGuire's translation, Salisbury, 1922, chapter xlviii, paragraphs 36, 41).

At the end of that time, Constantine returned to the gathering to discover that the presbyters had not agreed on a new deity but had balloted down to a shortlist of five prospects: Caesar, Krishna, Mithra, Horus and Zeus (Historia Ecclesiastica, Eusebius, c. 325). Constantine was the ruling spirit at Nicaea and he ultimately decided upon a new god for them. To involve British factions, he ruled that the name of the great Druid god, Hesus, be joined with the Eastern Saviour-god, Krishna (Krishna is Sanskrit for Christ), and thus Hesus Krishna would be the official name of the new Roman god. A vote was taken and it was with a majority show of hands (161 votes to 157) that both divinities became one God. Following longstanding heathen custom, Constantine used the official gathering and the Roman apotheosis decree to legally deify two deities as one, and did so by democratic consent. A new god was proclaimed and "officially" ratified by Constantine (Acta Concilii Nicaeni, 1618). That purely political act of deification effectively and legally placed Hesus and Krishna among the Roman gods as one individual composite. That abstraction lent Earthly existence to amalgamated doctrines for the Empire's new religion; and because there was no letter "J" in alphabets until around the ninth century, the name subsequently evolved into "Jesus Christ".

How the Gospels were created
Constantine then instructed Eusebius to organise the compilation of a uniform collection of new writings developed from primary aspects of the religious texts submitted at the council. His instructions were:

"Search ye these books, and whatever is good in them, that retain; but whatsoever is evil, that cast away. What is good in one book, unite ye with that which is good in another book. And whatsoever is thus brought together shall be called The Book of Books. And it shall be the doctrine of my people, which I will recommend unto all nations, that there shall be no more war for religions' sake." (God's Book of Eskra, op. cit., chapter xlviii, paragraph 31)

"Make them to astonish" said Constantine, and "the books were written accordingly" (Life of Constantine, vol. iv, pp. 36-39). Eusebius amalgamated the "legendary tales of all the religious doctrines of the world together as one", using the standard god-myths from the presbyters' manuscripts as his exemplars. Merging the supernatural "god" stories of Mithra and Krishna with British Culdean beliefs effectively joined the orations of Eastern and Western presbyters together "to form a new universal belief" (ibid.). Constantine believed that the amalgamated collection of myths would unite variant and opposing religious factions under one representative story. Eusebius then arranged for scribes to produce "fifty sumptuous copies ... to be written on parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient portable form, by professional scribes thoroughly accomplished in their art" (ibid.). "These orders," said Eusebius, "were followed by the immediate execution of the work itself ... we sent him [Constantine] magnificently and elaborately bound volumes of three-fold and four-fold forms" (Life of Constantine, vol. iv, p. 36). They were the "New Testimonies", and this is the first mention (c. 331) of the New Testament in the historical record.

With his instructions fulfilled, Constantine then decreed that the New Testimonies would thereafter be called the "word of the Roman Saviour God" (Life of Constantine, vol. iii, p. 29) and official to all presbyters sermonising in the Roman Empire. He then ordered earlier presbyterial manuscripts and the records of the council "burnt" and declared that "any man found concealing writings should be stricken off from his shoulders" (beheaded) (ibid.). As the record shows, presbyterial writings previous to the Council of Nicaea no longer exist, except for some fragments that have survived. Some council records also survived, and they provide alarming ramifications for the Church.Some old documents say that the First Council of Nicaea ended in mid-November 326, while others say the struggle to establish a god was so fierce that it extended "for four years and seven months" from its beginning in June 325 (Secrets of the Christian Fathers, op. cit.). Regardless of when it ended, the savagery and violence it encompassed were concealed under the glossy title "Great and Holy Synod", assigned to the assembly by the Church in the 18th century. Earlier Churchmen, however, expressed a different opinion.

The Second Council of Nicaea in 786-87 denounced the First Council of Nicaea as "a synod of fools and madmen" and sought to annul "decisions passed by men with troubled brains" (History of the Christian Church, H. H. Milman, DD, 1871). If one chooses to read the records of the Second Nicaean Council and notes references to "affrighted bishops" and the "soldiery" needed to "quell proceedings", the "fools and madmen" declaration is surely an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

Constantine died in 337 and his outgrowth of many now-called pagan beliefs into a new religious system brought many converts. Later Church writers made him "the great champion of Christianity" which he gave "legal status as the religion of the Roman Empire" (Encyclopedia of the Roman Empire, Matthew Bunson, Facts on File, New York, 1994, p. 86). Historical records reveal this to be incorrect, for it was "self-interest" that led him to create Christianity (A Smaller Classical Dictionary, J. M. Dent, London, 1910, p. 161). Yet it wasn't called "Christianity" until the 15th century (How The Great Pan Died, Professor Edmond S. Bordeaux [Vatican archivist], Mille Meditations, USA, MCMLXVIII, pp. 45-7).

Over the ensuing centuries, Constantine's New Testimonies were expanded upon, "interpolations" were added and other writings included (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. vi, pp. 135-137; also, Pecci ed., vol. ii, pp. 121-122). For example, in 397 John "golden-mouthed" Chrysostom restructured the writings of Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century wandering sage, and made them part of the New Testimonies (Secrets of the Christian Fathers, op. cit.). The Latinised name for Apollonius is Paulus (A Latin-English Dictionary, J. T. White and J. E. Riddle, Ginn & Heath, Boston, 1880), and the Church today calls those writings the Epistles of Paul. Apollonius's personal attendant, Damis, an Assyrian scribe, is Demis in the New Testament (2 Tim. 4:10).

The Church hierarchy knows the truth about the origin of its Epistles, for Cardinal Bembo (d. 1547), secretary to Pope Leo X (d. 1521), advised his associate, Cardinal Sadoleto, to disregard them, saying "put away these trifles, for such absurdities do not become a man of dignity; they were introduced on the scene later by a sly voice from heaven" (Cardinal Bembo: His Letters and Comments on Pope Leo X, A. L. Collins, London, 1842 reprint). The Church admits that the Epistles of Paul are forgeries, saying, "Even the genuine Epistles were greatly interpolated to lend weight to the personal views of their authors" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. vii, p. 645). Likewise, St Jerome (d. 420) declared that the Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, was also "falsely written" ("The Letters of Jerome", Library of the Fathers, Oxford Movement, 1833-45, vol. v, p. 445).

The Shock Discovery of an ancient Bible
The New Testament subsequently evolved into a fulsome piece of priesthood propaganda, and the Church claimed it recorded the intervention of a divine Jesus Christ into Earthly affairs. However, a spectacular discovery in a remote Egyptian monastery revealed to the world the extent of later falsifications of the Christian texts, themselves only an "assemblage of legendary tales" (Encyclopédie, Diderot, 1759). On 4 February 1859, 346 leaves of an ancient codex were discovered in the furnace room at St Catherine's monastery at Mt Sinai, and its contents sent shockwaves through the Christian world. Along with other old codices, it was scheduled to be burned in the kilns to provide winter warmth for the inhabitants of the monastery. Written in Greek on donkey skins, it carried both the Old and New Testaments, and later in time archaeologists dated its composition to around the year 380. It was discovered by Dr Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-1874), a brilliant and pious German biblical scholar, and he called it the Sinaiticus, the Sinai Bible. Tischendorf was a professor of theology who devoted his entire life to the study of New Testament origins, and his desire to read all the ancient Christian texts led him on the long, camel-mounted journey to St Catherine's Monastery.

During his lifetime, Tischendorf had access to other ancient Bibles unavailable to the public, such as the Alexandrian (or Alexandrinus) Bible, believed to be the second oldest Bible in the world. It was so named because in 1627 it was taken from Alexandria to Britain and gifted to King Charles I (1600-49). Today it is displayed alongside the world's oldest known Bible, the Sinaiticus, in the British Library in London. During his research, Tischendorf had access to the Vaticanus, the Vatican Bible, believed to be the third oldest in the world and dated to the mid-sixth century (The Various Versions of the Bible, Dr Constantin von Tischendorf, 1874, available in the British Library). It was locked away in the Vatican's inner library. Tischendorf asked if he could extract handwritten notes, but his request was declined. However, when his guard took refreshment breaks, Tischendorf wrote comparative narratives on the palm of his hand and sometimes on his fingernails ("Are Our Gospels Genuine or Not?", Dr Constantin von Tischendorf, lecture, 1869, available in the British Library). Today, there are several other Bibles written in various languages during the fifth and sixth centuries, examples being the Syriacus, the Cantabrigiensis (Bezae), the Sarravianus and the Marchalianus.

A shudder of apprehension echoed through Christendom in the last quarter of the 19th century when English-language versions of the Sinai Bible were published. Recorded within these pages is information that disputes Christianity's claim of historicity. Christians were provided with irrefutable evidence of wilful falsifications in all modern New Testaments. So different was the Sinai Bible's New Testament from versions then being published that the Church angrily tried to annul the dramatic new evidence that challenged its very existence. In a series of articles published in the London Quarterly Review in 1883, John W. Burgon, Dean of Chichester, used every rhetorical device at his disposal to attack the Sinaiticus' earlier and opposing story of Jesus Christ, saying that "...without a particle of hesitation, the Sinaiticus is scandalously corrupt ... exhibiting the most shamefully mutilated texts which are anywhere to be met with; they have become, by whatever process, the depositories of the largest amount of fabricated readings, ancient blunders and intentional perversions of the truth which are discoverable in any known copies of the word of God". Dean Burgon's concerns mirror opposing aspects of Gospel stories then current, having by now evolved to a new stage through centuries of tampering with the fabric of an already unhistorical document.

The revelations of ultraviolet light testing
In 1933, the British Museum in London purchased the Sinai Bible from the Soviet government for £100,000, of which £65,000 was gifted by public subscription. Prior to the acquisition, this Bible was displayed in the Imperial Library in St Petersburg, Russia, and "few scholars had set eyes on it" (The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, 11 January 1938, p. 3). When it went on display in 1933 as "the oldest Bible in the world" (ibid.), it became the centre of a pilgrimage unequalled in the history of the British Museum.

Before I summarise its conflictions, it should be noted that this old codex is by no means a reliable guide to New Testament study as it contains superabundant errors and serious re-editing. These anomalies were exposed as a result of the months of ultraviolet-light tests carried out at the British Museum in the mid-1930s. The findings revealed replacements of numerous passages by at least nine different editors. Photographs taken during testing revealed that ink pigments had been retained deep in the pores of the skin. The original words were readable under ultraviolet light. Anybody wishing to read the results of the tests should refer to the book written by the researchers who did the analysis: the Keepers of the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum (Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus, H. J. M. Milne and T. C. Skeat, British Museum, London, 1938).

Forgery in the Gospels
When the New Testament in the Sinai Bible is compared with a modern-day New Testament, a staggering 14,800 editorial alterations can be identified. These amendments can be recognised by a simple comparative exercise that anybody can and should do. Serious study of Christian origins must emanate from the Sinai Bible's version of the New Testament, not modern editions. Of importance is the fact that the Sinaiticus carries three Gospels since rejected: the Shepherd of Hermas (written by two resurrected ghosts, Charinus and Lenthius), the Missive of Barnabas and the Odes of Solomon. Space excludes elaboration on these bizarre writings and also discussion on dilemmas associated with translation variations.

Modern Bibles are five removes in translation from early editions, and disputes rage between translators over variant interpretations of more than 5,000 ancient words. However, it is what is not written in that old Bible that embarrasses the Church, and this article discusses only a few of those omissions. One glaring example is subtly revealed in the Encyclopaedia Biblica (Adam & Charles Black, London, 1899, vol. iii, p. 3344), where the Church divulges its knowledge about exclusions in old Bibles, saying: "The remark has long ago and often been made that, like Paul, even the earliest Gospels knew nothing of the miraculous birth of our Saviour". That is because there never was a virgin birth.

It is apparent that when Eusebius assembled scribes to write the New Testimonies, he first produced a single document that provided an exemplar or master version. Today it is called the Gospel of Mark, and the Church admits that it was "the first Gospel written" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. vi, p. 657), even though it appears second in the New Testament today. The scribes of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were dependent upon the Mark writing as the source and framework for the compilation of their works. The Gospel of John is independent of those writings, and the late-15th-century theory that it was written later to support the earlier writings is the truth (The Crucifixion of Truth, Tony Bushby, Joshua Books, 2004, pp. 33-40).

Thus, the Gospel of Mark in the Sinai Bible carries the "first" story of Jesus Christ in history, one completely different to what is in modern Bibles. It starts with Jesus "at about the age of thirty" (Mark 1:9), and doesn't know of Mary, a virgin birth or mass murders of baby boys by Herod. Words describing Jesus Christ as "the son of God" do not appear in the opening narrative as they do in today's editions (Mark 1:1), and the modern-day family tree tracing a "messianic bloodline" back to King David is non-existent in all ancient Bibles, as are the now-called "messianic prophecies" (51 in total). The Sinai Bible carries a conflicting version of events surrounding the "raising of Lazarus", and reveals an extraordinary omission that later became the central doctrine of the Christian faith: the resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ and his ascension into Heaven. No supernatural appearance of a resurrected Jesus Christ is recorded in any ancient Gospels of Mark, but a description of over 500 words now appears in modern Bibles (Mark 16:9-20).

Despite a multitude of long-drawn-out self-justifications by Church apologists, there is no unanimity of Christian opinion regarding the non-existence of "resurrection" appearances in ancient Gospel accounts of the story. Not only are those narratives missing in the Sinai Bible, but they are absent in the Alexandrian Bible, the Vatican Bible, the Bezae Bible and an ancient Latin manuscript of Mark, code-named "K" by analysts. They are also lacking in the oldest Armenian version of the New Testament, in sixth-century manuscripts of the Ethiopic version and ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Bibles. However, some 12th-century Gospels have the now-known resurrection verses written within asterisks Ñ, marks used by scribes to indicate spurious passages in a literary document.

The Church claims that "the resurrection is the fundamental argument for our Christian belief" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. xii, p. 792), yet no supernatural appearance of a resurrected Jesus Christ is recorded in any of the earliest Gospels of Mark available. A resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ is the sine qua non ("without which, nothing") of Christianity (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. xii, p. 792), confirmed by words attributed to Paul: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain" (1 Cor. 5:17). The resurrection verses in today's Gospels of Mark are universally acknowledged as forgeries and the Church agrees, saying "the conclusion of Mark is admittedly not genuine ... almost the entire section is a later compilation" (Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. ii, p. 1880, vol. iii, pp. 1767, 1781; also, Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. iii, under the heading "The Evidence of its Spuriousness"; Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. iii, pp. 274-9 under heading "Canons"). Undaunted, however, the Church accepted the forgery into its dogma and made it the basis of Christianity.

The trend of fictitious resurrection narratives continues. The final chapter of the Gospel of John (21) is a sixth-century forgery, one entirely devoted to describing Jesus' resurrection to his disciples. The Church admits: "The sole conclusion that can be deduced from this is that the 21st chapter was afterwards added and is therefore to be regarded as an appendix to the Gospel" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. viii, pp. 441-442; New Catholic Encyclopedia (NCE), "Gospel of John", p. 1080; also NCE, vol. xii, p. 407).

"The Great Insertion" and "The Great Omission"
Modern-day versions of the Gospel of Luke have a staggering 10,000 more words than the same Gospel in the Sinai Bible. Six of those words say of Jesus "and was carried up into heaven", but this narrative does not appear in any of the oldest Gospels of Luke available today ("Three Early Doctrinal Modifications of the Text of the Gospels", F. C. Conybeare, The Hibbert Journal, London, vol. 1, no. 1, Oct 1902, pp. 96-113). Ancient versions do not verify modern-day accounts of an ascension of Jesus Christ, and this falsification clearly indicates an intention to deceive.

Today, the Gospel of Luke is the longest of the canonical Gospels because it now includes "The Great Insertion", an extraordinary 15th-century addition totalling around 8,500 words (Luke 9:51-18:14). The insertion of these forgeries into that Gospel bewilders modern Christian analysts, and of them the Church said: "The character of these passages makes it dangerous to draw inferences" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Pecci ed., vol. ii, p. 407).

Just as remarkable, the oldest Gospels of Luke omit all verses from 6:45 to 8:26, known in priesthood circles as "The Great Omission", a total of 1,547 words. In today's versions, that hole has been "plugged up" with passages plagiarised from other Gospels. Dr Tischendorf found that three paragraphs in newer versions of the Gospel of Luke's version of the Last Supper appeared in the 15th century, but the Church still passes its Gospels off as the unadulterated "word of God" ("Are Our Gospels Genuine or Not?", op. cit.)

The "Expurgatory Index"
As was the case with the New Testament, so also were damaging writings of early "Church Fathers" modified in centuries of copying, and many of their records were intentionally rewritten or suppressed. Adopting the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-63), the Church subsequently extended the process of erasure and ordered the preparation of a special list of specific information to be expunged from early Christian writings (Delineation of Roman Catholicism, Rev. Charles Elliott, DD, G. Lane & P. P. Sandford, New York, 1842, p. 89; also, The Vatican Censors, Professor Peter Elmsley, Oxford, p. 327, pub. date n/a). In 1562, the Vatican established a special censoring office called Index Expurgatorius. Its purpose was to prohibit publication of "erroneous passages of the early Church Fathers" that carried statements opposing modern-day doctrine. When Vatican archivists came across "genuine copies of the Fathers, they corrected them according to the Expurgatory Index" (Index Expurgatorius Vaticanus, R. Gibbings, ed., Dublin, 1837; The Literary Policy of the Church of Rome, Joseph Mendham, J. Duncan, London, 1830, 2nd ed., 1840; The Vatican Censors, op. cit., p. 328). This Church record provides researchers with "grave doubts about the value of all patristic writings released to the public" (The Propaganda Press of Rome, Sir James W. L. Claxton, Whitehaven Books, London, 1942, p. 182).

Important for our story is the fact that the Encyclopaedia Biblica reveals that around 1,200 years of Christian history are unknown: "Unfortunately, only few of the records [of the Church] prior to the year 1198 have been released". It was not by chance that, in that same year (1198), Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) suppressed all records of earlier Church history by establishing the Secret Archives (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. xv, p. 287). Some seven-and-a-half centuries later, and after spending some years in those Archives, Professor Edmond S. Bordeaux wrote How The Great Pan Died. In a chapter titled "The Whole of Church History is Nothing but a Retroactive Fabrication", he said this (in part):

"The Church ante-dated all her late works, some newly made, some revised and some counterfeited, which contained the final expression of her history ... her technique was to make it appear that much later works written by Church writers were composed a long time earlier, so that they might become evidence of the first, second or third centuries." (How The Great Pan Died, op. cit., p. 46)

Supporting Professor Bordeaux's findings is the fact that, in 1587, Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) established an official Vatican publishing division and said in his own words, "Church history will be now be established ... we shall seek to print our own account"Encyclopédie, Diderot, 1759). Vatican records also reveal that Sixtus V spent 18 months of his life as pope personally writing a new Bible and then introduced into Catholicism a "New Learning" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. v, p. 442, vol. xv, p. 376). The evidence that the Church wrote its own history is found in Diderot's Encyclopédie, and it reveals the reason why Pope Clement XIII (1758-69) ordered all volumes to be destroyed immediately after publication in 1759.

Gospel authors exposed as imposters
There is something else involved in this scenario and it is recorded in the Catholic Encyclopedia. An appreciation of the clerical mindset arises when the Church itself admits that it does not know who wrote its Gospels and Epistles, confessing that all 27 New Testament writings began life anonymously:

"It thus appears that the present titles of the Gospels are not traceable to the evangelists themselves ... they [the New Testament collection] are supplied with titles which, however ancient, do not go back to the respective authors of those writings." (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. vi, pp. 655-6)

The Church maintains that "the titles of our Gospels were not intended to indicate authorship", adding that "the headings ... were affixed to them" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. i, p. 117, vol. vi, pp. 655, 656). Therefore they are not Gospels written "according to Matthew, Mark, Luke or John", as publicly stated. The full force of this confession reveals that there are no genuine apostolic Gospels, and that the Church's shadowy writings today embody the very ground and pillar of Christian foundations and faith. The consequences are fatal to the pretence of Divine origin of the entire New Testament and expose Christian texts as having no special authority. For centuries, fabricated Gospels bore Church certification of authenticity now confessed to be false, and this provides evidence that Christian writings are wholly fallacious.

After years of dedicated New Testament research, Dr Tischendorf expressed dismay at the differences between the oldest and newest Gospels, and had trouble understanding...

"...how scribes could allow themselves to bring in here and there changes which were not simply verbal ones, but such as materially affected the very meaning and, what is worse still, did not shrink from cutting out a passage or inserting one." (Alterations to the Sinai Bible, Dr Constantin von Tischendorf, 1863, available in the British Library, London)

After years of validating the fabricated nature of the New Testament, a disillusioned Dr Tischendorf confessed that modern-day editions have "been altered in many places" and are "not to be accepted as true" (When Were Our Gospels Written?, Dr Constantin von Tischendorf, 1865, British Library, London).

Just what is Christianity?
The important question then to ask is this: if the New Testament is not historical, what is it? Dr Tischendorf provided part of the answer when he said in his 15,000 pages of critical notes on the Sinai Bible that "it seems that the personage of Jesus Christ was made narrator for many religions". This explains how narratives from the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharata, appear verbatim in the Gospels today (e.g., Matt. 1:25, 2:11, 8:1-4, 9:1-8, 9:18-26), and why passages from the Phenomena of the Greek statesman Aratus of Sicyon (271-213 BC) are in the New Testament. Extracts from the Hymn to Zeus, written by Greek philosopher Cleanthes (c. 331-232 BC), are also found in the Gospels, as are 207 words from the Thais of Menander (c. 343-291), one of the "seven wise men" of Greece. Quotes from the semi-legendary Greek poet Epimenides (7th or 6th century BC) are applied to the lips of Jesus Christ, and seven passages from the curious Ode of Jupiter (c. 150 BC; author unknown) are reprinted in the New Testament.

Tischendorf's conclusion also supports Professor Bordeaux's Vatican findings that reveal the allegory of Jesus Christ derived from the fable of Mithra, the divine son of God (Ahura Mazda) and messiah of the first kings of the Persian Empire around 400 BC. His birth in a grotto was attended by magi who followed a star from the East. They brought "gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh" (as in Matt. 2:11) and the newborn baby was adored by shepherds. He came into the world wearing the Mithraic cap, which popes imitated in various designs until well into the 15th century. Mithra, one of a trinity, stood on a rock, the emblem of the foundation of his religion, and was anointed with honey. After a last supper with Helios and 11 other companions, Mithra was crucified on a cross, bound in linen, placed in a rock tomb and rose on the third day or around 25 March (the full moon at the spring equinox, a time now called Easter after the Babylonian goddess Ishtar). The fiery destruction of the universe was a major doctrine of Mithraism-a time in which Mithra promised to return in person to Earth and save deserving souls. Devotees of Mithra partook in a sacred communion banquet of bread and wine, a ceremony that paralleled the Christian Eucharist and preceded it by more than four centuries.

Christianity is an adaptation of Mithraism welded with the Druidic principles of the Culdees, some Egyptian elements (the pre-Christian Book of Revelation was originally called The Mysteries of Osiris and Isis), Greek philosophy and various aspects of Hinduism.

Why there are no records of Jesus Christ
It is not possible to find in any legitimate religious or historical writings compiled between the beginning of the first century and well into the fourth century any reference to Jesus Christ and the spectacular events that the Church says accompanied his life. This confirmation comes from Frederic Farrar (1831-1903) of Trinity College, Cambridge:

"It is amazing that history has not embalmed for us even one certain or definite saying or circumstance in the life of the Saviour of mankind ... there is no statement in all history that says anyone saw Jesus or talked with him. Nothing in history is more astonishing than the silence of contemporary writers about events relayed in the four Gospels." (The Life of Christ, Frederic W. Farrar, Cassell, London, 1874)

This situation arises from a conflict between history and New Testament narratives. Dr Tischendorf made this comment:

"We must frankly admit that we have no source of information with respect to the life of Jesus Christ other than ecclesiastic writings assembled during the fourth century." (Codex Sinaiticus, Dr Constantin von Tischendorf, British Library, London)

There is an explanation for those hundreds of years of silence: the construct of Christianity did not begin until after the first quarter of the fourth century, and that is why Pope Leo X (d. 1521) called Christ a "fable" (Cardinal Bembo: His Letters..., op. cit.).

[Source - Tony Bushby - Forged Origins of the New Testament, Nexus Magazine Volume 14, Number 4 (June - July 2007]