Laura Knight Jadczyk

©Peter Grego

Impression of the 1178 lunar event

Last time I said I was going to talk about how much your "glorious leaders" really hate and despise you and how they are plotting your deaths while most of you are so screwed up that you not only do not see this, you actually dance blithely toward disaster for yourselves and your children. Well, I’m going to get there, but first, I want to tie up a few loose ends and reiterate a couple of points.

As I mentioned in my previous article on this topic, the Discovery Channel special Super Comet - After the Impact, places the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs in a modern setting, using the same type of cometary body assumed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, the same size, same impact location, and utilized all the computer modeling they have done on this past event to try to show what might happen (and to show what they think happened then).

Studies of the history of the Earth via various scientific methods show us that there are relatively long periods of "evolution" punctuated by rapid, overwhelming changes we call catastrophes. Many scientists have noted the periodicity of these punctuational events. What no one seems to know for sure is the mechanism that induces these definitely periodic catastrophes.

It is suggested that the periodicity of these events relates to galactic cycles and there is good evidence for this view presented by Victor Clube in his book The Cosmic Winter. (You can really forget the nonsense going around about "Planet Nibiru" and "Project Camelot"). He suggests that galactic tides induct giant comets into our Solar system and it is their disintegration products which interact strongly and directly with the Earth with variable results at different (and very frequent!) periods which results in the variations in the geological record. Clube demonstrates that the breaking up of a giant comet produces a wide range of debris from objects 10 km across, to hundreds or thousands of 1 km sized bodies, to multiple swarms of sub-kilometer sized bodies. Many of these bodies have sooty, black surfaces making them almost impossible to see and many of them are in an orbit very similar to the Taurid meteor streams, though a few may be in an orbit rotated about 90 degrees. Clube posits that many (if not most or all) of the asteroids in the Solar system split from a giant comet (or many of them) thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, and it is the streams of debris that pose the most serious and immediate threats to our planet.

For example, one of the large asteroids in an Earth-crossing orbit is named Hephaistos. It is about 10 km in diameter, about the same size as the asteroid that is depicted as striking the earth in the above-mentioned movie (the dinosaur extinction model). It is true that the effects of the impact of such a body would be felt globally, but it is not so clear that it would be exactly as "global" as depicted in the movie.

©William Hartmann

A painting showing how the alleged KT Impactor may have appeared.

Nevertheless, the connection between a single impactor and past mass extinctions has been made and popularized widely, and this may be unfortunate considering the issues of more frequent and less "global" events that Clube addresses.

The problem is, as Clube points out, a solitary large impact is, from an astronomical point of view, quite unlikely to be the only agency at work in such extinctions. Further, when one considers the details of the evidence, both astronomical and geological, many discrepancies in the single impactor scenario begin to emerge.

When the Alvarezes, pere et fils, came across the iridium layer at the K-T extinction boundary, announcing that iridium in those amounts could only be thrown up by the impact of a large meteorite, this shocking idea was taken up gleefully by the press and everyone was on the hunt for iridium.

Clube points out that there are several problems with the "single impact" interpretation of the presence of iridium at the extinction boundary. The first problem is that the concentration of the element is too high. Why? Well, because if it were a single, giant impactor, such an asteroid would excavate several hundred times its own volume of Earth crust material and blow it into the atmosphere mixed with its own material. This means that the iridium would be significantly diluted and would not precipitate on the planet in such concentrations as have been found. However, at many of the sites examined, it is noted that the iridium has been diluted by only 20 times its own volume (keeping in mind that the iridium in the comet/asteroid is already only a percentage of the total volume of the extraterrestrial body!)

Additionally, other chemicals associated with the alleged single impact event do not fit the stony meteorite theory very well. There is an abundance of rare elements such as osmium and rhemium; enormous and overabundant common elements such as antimony and arsenic. In respect of this finding, Clube points out that, after a January 1983 eruption of Kilauea, particles collected from the volcano were found to have high concentrations of arsenic, selenium and other elements found in high abundance at the extinction boundary. These volcanic particles were also found to be very rich in iridium. Clube suggests that the iridium anomaly may, therefore, be a big red herring. He notes: "…it is interesting to speculate whether, had a volcanic source of iridium been known in 1980, a meteorite impact would have been suggested" by the Alvarezes?

Probably not.

So, that was probably a good thing because it at least drew press attention to the matter since Clube also points out that there is an impressive amount of evidence that the extinction event was not just a process of evolutionary change and decay. Catastrophic changes - a profound ecological shock - took place across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, and the devastation was certainly sudden. So the Alvarez theory opened the door to consider that in a world that was tightly bound up in Uniformitarianism.

Among the interesting finds at this level of Earth’s history is that very large amounts of soot are also present at the extinction boundary. The conclusion is, of course, that global wildfires were raging during the extinction event. The movie tried to depict that with computer models (made on the assumption of a single large asteroid impact) which had the entire atmosphere of the earth heating up to the point where things just ignited spontaneously. That may not be exactly how things happen even with a very large meteor impact.

©Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa

The thin clay layer that marks the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks. This layer has been found at many localities around the Earth. It is a a thin layer of material all around the earth which contains a large amount of the rare element iridium, plus soot from widespread fires.

Another point that Clube makes is that there is not a trace of meteoritic debris in the form of stony inclusions in the sediments.

I won’t go into all the details; suffice it to say that it begins to look like the stray impact of a single 10 km wide asteroid is not the cause of the global extinction after all.

What is a realistic scenario?

Clube presents the evidence that this extinction event was an episode of bombardment of many, dozens, hundreds, thousands of cometary fragment and/or meteorite type bodies, some of them large, liberating copious amounts of meteorite dust in the Terran atmosphere, many of them exploding overhead in rains of fire. These swarms would be "swimming" in streams of comet dust - tons of it - which would also be loading the atmosphere and precipitating onto the earth over months and years. The high concentrations of iridium found at the dinosaur extinction boundary at several localities, and the absence of bulk meteoritic debris, are hard to explain in terms of a single big bang but easily understood in terms of zodiacal dust as a provider of the input. Added to this, there is increasing evidence for a multiplicity of impacts at the dinosaur extinction boundary, as well as at other points of global catastrophe such as the Permian - Triassic (P - Tr) extinction event. The swarm theory also easily accounts for the huge amounts of soot at the boundary. An Earth ablaze is within the capacity of an exceptionally intense swarm to produce, but probably beyond that of even a 10km wide single impactor. In short, the extinction of the dinosaurs may very well have been a complex, traumatic, and prolonged affair.

©Unknown

What the dinosaurs saw?

Clube proposes that the Earth itself is a storehouse of information about its interactions with the Galaxy, and that it is the Galaxy itself, and Earth’s position in it, that drives the cycles of extinctions mainly because the cycles of events best fit known galactic cycles.

The one thing that stands out from all of the evidence is the importance of very large comets that enter the Solar System and break apart, leaving streams of debris that interact with our planet for millennia after the parent body or bodies have been captured and torn apart by intra-solar system forces. That such bombardments of the earth have occurred at other times is becoming more widely known, witness the work of Richard Firestone, Alan West and Simon Warwick-Smith who have identified the Carolina Bays as "air impact" craters from overhead cometary explosions exactly like that of Tunguska. In fact, similar "craters" were found in the Tunguska region with the exact same morphology. This even has been dated to about 12,500 years ago and was global in extent and cataclysmic in effect. Life on Earth almost came to an end. What is frightening about this even is the sheer numbers of craters - upwards of 50,000 of them.

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This image shows numerous craters in Robeson County, North Carolina

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Arial photo the Carolina Bays craters

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The largest crater in this particular image is approximately 1.4 miles across

Companion Star?

Clube mentions the companion star hypothesis briefly, noting that "Certainly the companion-star hypothesis adopts the central mechanism of the galactic one, namely the creation of comet showers through regular comet cloud disturbances." He then dismisses this as facing "insuperable problems." The "insuperable problems" are the proposed orbital periods for the hypothesized companion star and his idea that there would be far more cratering if the motive mechanism was a companion star. He may be entirely correct and his theory of galactic tides and comet birth in the cold, dark reaches of space certainly deals with the main elements of what we know about our celestial environment. As he notes:

The astronomical framework, grounded in celestial observations, is the basis for the theory of terrestrial catastrophism described here. … It is in our view essential , if one is to arrive at a true picture, to take account of all the relevant evidence: "hard evidence" in the geologist’s sense has to be coupled with some respect for hard astronomical facts as well. Put another way, we do not need a 1 - km asteroid to land in our presence to demonstrate the amount of kinetic energy it will release. In particular, the correct picture must explain recent as well as past events in the terrestrial record. Thus the giant comet, and indeed the historical record, are essential elements in the quest for overall truth. It is this inextricable linkage between the very recent and the very remote past which lends urgency to the study: if we get the grand picture wrong, the next set of old bones in the ground could be ours.

We have presented some good evidence in this series of articles that Clube’s ideas are very likely correct or darn close: the earth has been repeatedly and regularly showered with extraterrestrial debris of some sort, and these showers have been generally disastrous from local scales, to regional, national, and even continental. It seems clear from the evidence that history itself is not a process of evolution, but more often, devolutionary as each cosmic crisis has either resulted in "survival of the lucky," as opposed to the fittest, and the more recent ones have been amplified or utilized by ruling elites to pursue their own agendas. On other occasions, the Earth has suffered insults that have hardly turned a head in the human population. Tunguska was one such event.

Tunguska

Just after 7:15 a.m. local time on 30 June 1908, in the central Siberian plateau, there took place an impact of ferocious intensity. Yet so isolated and vast is this region (half as large again as the USA), it was almost twenty years before the Western world became aware of the event.

©Unknown

How the Tunguska object may have appeared.

On the night of 30 June and 1 July, the sky throughout Europe was strangely bright. Throughout the United Kingdom, over 3000 miles from the point of impact, it was possible to play cricket and read newspapers by the glow from the night sky. From Belgium came descriptions of a huge red glow over the horizon, after sunset, as if a great fire was raging. This strangely bright sky was seen throughout Europe, European Russia, Western Siberia and as far south as the Caucasus mountains. Photographs were taken at midnight or later, with exposures of about a minute, in Sweden, in Scotland, and as far east as the university city of Kazan, on the banks of the river Volga….

Much comment was excited in newspapers and learned journals at the time. Some thought that icy particles had somehow formed high in the atmosphere and were reflecting sunlight. Others considered that a strange auroral disturbance was involved. The Danish astronomer Kohl drew attention to the fact that several very large meteors had recently been observed over Denmark and thought that comet dust in the high atmosphere might account for the phenomenon. But there was no agreement as to what had happened.

Over 500 miles to the south of the fall, a seismograph in the city of Irkutsk near Lake Baikal, close to the Mongolian border, registered strong earth tremors.

Nearly 400 miles south-west of the explosion, at 7:17 a.m. on 30 June, a train driver on the Trans-Siberian express had to halt the train for fear of derailment due to the tremors and commotion.

Fierce gusts of wind were felt in towns 300 to 400 miles away.

In an Irkutsk newspaper dated 2 July it was reported that, in a village more than 200 miles from the Tunguska river, peasants had seen a fireball brighter than the sun approach the ground, followed by a huge cloud of black smoke, a forked tongue of flame and a loud crash as if from gunfire.

"All the villagers ran into the street in panic. The old women wept and everyone thought the end of the world was approaching."
[…]

Local Siberian newspapers carried stories of a fireball in the sky, and a fearful explosion, but by the autumn of 1908 these stories had died out, and they went unnoticed in St. Petersburg, Moscow and the west. The region was arguably one of the most inaccessible places on Earth, in the centre of Siberia. … However, rumours of an extraordinary event persisted, transmitted back by geologists and other intrepid researchers working in the area. These attracted the attention of a meteorite researcher, Leonard Kulik,… It was not until 1927 that an expedition … led by Kulik, finally penetrated to the site of the 1908 explosion.
[…]

The energy of the explosion has been calculated from the extent of the flattened forest and from the small pressure waves which arrived at the speed of sound and were recorded on barographs around the world. … The wave trains were unlike any others which had been recorded up until that time but resemble those obtained from a hydrogen bomb explosion. It seems that the impact had an energy of 30 to 40 megatons, about that from a few dozen ordinary hydrogen bombs….

The date of fall (30 June) corresponds to the passage of the Earth through the maximum of the Beta Taurid stream. From this and its trajectory, it appears that the Tunguska object was part of the Taurid complex. Probably the Earth passed through a swarm within the stream.

©Unknown

Aftermath of the Tunguska explosion

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Aftermath of the Tunguska explosion

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This image shows the directions of the blast

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This diagram shows the area of damage in Tunguska as compared to the size of Washington D.C.

The occurrence, this century, of an impact with the energy of a hydrogen bomb does give cause for some concern, and it is interesting to speculate on whether one’s historical perceptions would be quite the same had the bolide struck an urban area or a city. As it happens, however, the Tunguska impact is fairly trivial:

In this year, on the Sunday before the Feast of St. John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon had first become visible a marvelous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who were sitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase its horns were tileted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the divisin a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and, to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole lengthe, took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes, and are prepared to stake ther honour on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the above narrative.

This curious report is written in the chronicles of the medieval monk known as Gervase of Canterbury. The year of the event was AD 1178 and the date, 18 June on the Julian calendar, converts to the evening of 25 June on the modern Gregorian one. If real, it is clear that some extraordinary event on the Moon is being described and the meteorite expert Hartung proposed that what was observed and recorded 800 years ago was the impact of a body on the Moon. The flame, he suggested, was the writhing of incandescent gases, or sunlight reflection from dust thrown out of the crater. The blackish appearance of the Moon along its whole length was a temporary suspension of dust buoyed up by a transient atmosphere. […]

Hartung deduced that if there was a crater, it would be at least 7 miles in diameter, possess bright rays extending from it for at least seventy miles, and would lie between 30 and 60 degrees north, 75 and 105 degrees east on the Moon. …

As it happens, there is one crater with the predicted characteristics exists, a crater named after the seventeenth-century heretic Giordano Bruno. This crater is located at 36 degrees N and 105 degrees E, within the predicted area. It is 13 miles in diameter and is distinguished by its remarkable brightness, and by the brilliant system of rays which extend several hundred miles out from it. […]

©Unknown

Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon has a diameter more of more than 13.6 miles or 22 kilometers

©Unknown

Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon

It should be noted that NASA has attempted to debunk Hartung’s theory, saying:

Such an impact would have triggered a blizzard-like, week-long meteor storm on Earth — yet there are no accounts of such a storm in any known historical record, including the European, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese and Korean astronomical archives.

Well, we know from our current survey that this is not necessarily so. There could have been impacts on the earth that no one knew about - witness Tunguska - and it doesn’t necessarily follow that an impactor on the moon would trigger a blizzard of meteors on Earth.

Back to Clube:

It is the fate of all species to become extinct and most manlike species have already done so. Over and above extinction, large population fluctuations take place in nature, sometimes within a few years. The controlling factor is often climate, and Earth’s climate, in turn, can be greatly affected by its astronomical surroundings.

It has been suggested that the current "climate change" issues are due to the earth moving through cosmic dust clouds. It could even be that such things as "chemtrails" are a result of such dust loading in the upper atmosphere.

The two and a half centuries which lay between the Gervase chronicle of 1178 and the onset of the Black Death in Europe in 1348 saw ‘an acute crisis developing in human affairs’. One chronicler at least reports of the most immediate cause of the plague in 1345 that "between Cathay and Persia there rained a vast rain of fire; falling in flakes like snow and burning up mountains and plains and other lands, with men and women; and then arose vast masses of smoke; and whosoever beheld this died within the space of half a day…" There seems little doubt also that a worldwide cooling of the Earth played a fundamental part in the process. The Arctic polar cap extended, changing the cyclonic pattern and leading to a series of disastrous harvests. These in turn led to widespread famine, death and social disruption.

In England and Scotland there is a pattern of abandoned villages and farms, soaring wheat prices and falling populations.

In Eastern Europe there was a series of winters of unparalleled severity and depth of snow. The chronicles of monasteries in Poland and Russia tell of cannibalism, common graves overfilled with corpses, and migrations to the west.

Even before the Black Death came, then, a human catastrophe of great proportions was under way in late medieval times. Indeed the cold snap lasted well beyond the period of the … plague. A number of such fluctuations are to be found in the historical record, and there is good evidence that these climatic stresses are connected not only with famine but also with times of great social unrest, wars, revolution and mass migrations.

In spite of their traumatic effects, these global coolings probably amounted to no more than about a degree in average summer temperatures as compared with today: even relatively minor climatic effects have had a profound influence on human history. A major climatic cooling amounting to several degrees. With the modern dependence on ‘green revolution’ crops, finely tuned to give a high yield under a narrow range of climatic conditions, the onset of such a ‘winter’ would cause the population of the world to crash in the course of a decade, or even a single year. Such events are completely outside normal experience and their existence is not generally recognized, even though they represent a hazard vastly more horrific than any of the more familiar catastrophes such as earthquake, famine or flood. … More to the point though, civilization is in the presence of a hitherto unrecognized cosmic phenomenon which could plunge it without warning into a Dark Age.

What can be done?

Unfortunately the extent and epoch of the next cosmic winter depend for the moment on a number of imponderables which lie outside the scope of existing knowledge: it is not now possible to make an accurate assessment of what the future has in store. This is clearly not a satisfactory state of affairs. Nor can we expect that Nature will hold back on account of our ignorance or lack of preparedness. However, in view of the seriousness of cosmic winters for human survival, and noting the vast expenditures to the tune of many billions of dollars on a whole variety of preparations for all manner of lesser hazards and calamities, both man-made and natural, disease and nuclear war not excluded, one must surely note also that not a single cent of taxpayer’ money is currently devoted to their study. […]

The first step must therefore be one of exploration. An asteroid in a Taurid orbit, carrying 100,000 megatons of impact energy, coming out of the night sky, would be visible in binoculars for about six hours before impact. By the time it was a naked-eye object it would be at most half an hour from collision. In its final plunge it would be seen as a brilliant moving object for perhaps 30 seconds. One needs more time than this to prepare for the [Cosmic] Winter. A thorough exploration of the Earth’s surroundings, and the discovery and tracking of probably tens of thousands of bodies, is therefore a first requirement. This is technically feasible.

Complementing such an observational programme, a fresh exploration of the past, armed now with the new astronomical understandings, is also necessary; not just for its own sake but also to arrive at a better understanding of the risks. .[…]

To go from mere statistical projection to detailed forecasting, then, a generation of exploration, both of the Earth’s environment and of our history and prehistory, will be necessary. As we have remarked, such studies cannot be seen only as an academic game: there is nothing academic about a 1,000 megaton impact, and the modern prospects for nuclear error, not to mention nuclear meltdown, exacerbate the issue.

And if the sirens should sound, what then? It may be marginally within the capacity of present day technology to divert a small asteroid, given enough warning, though not a swarm of them… But at least, unlike our forebears, we have a chance to act: we need no longer be helpless in the hands of the gods. The main problem at the moment is to be aware that there is a problem.

Three thousand years ago, in accordance with age-old practice, the kings of Babylon were still employing astronomer-priests to give warnings of cosmic visitations. A thousand years ago, the emperors of China were still relying on similar skills, while in Europe the Pope saw messages in the sky and urged Holy War. But this latter was an aberration; for the last two and a half thousand years have seen the decline and fall of the sky gods, and the growing presumption that the cosmos is stable and regular. The shift of paradigm has been unconscious, convenient, insidious and thorough. Probably, the rediscovery of a lost tradition of celestial catastrophe could not have been made through analysis of ancient texts alone; a key had to be provided, and it has been, by the paraphernalia of modern science. It is a salutary lesson both on the capacity of human reasoning to get it wrong for long periods of time, and on the essential unity of knowledge.

It would be naïve to think, however, that one merely has to point to deep-seated cracks in the structure of modern knowledge to have scholars setting to and constructing a better framework within which mankind might plan his future. There is considerable intellectual capital invested in the status quo, enough to ensure that those with an interest in preserving it, the ‘enlightened’ and the ‘established’, will continue to present the cosmos to us in a suitably non-violent form. The history of ideas reveals that some will even go further and act as a kind of thought police, whipping potential deviants into line. For them, temporal power takes precedence over the fate of the species. (Clube, The Cosmic Winter)

Famed astronomer, Fred Hoyle, friend and colleague of Clube, made some interesting remarks in his book: "The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion" along the same lines.

Science is unique to human activities in that it possesses vast areas of certain knowledge. The collective opinion of scientists in these areas about any problem covered by them will almost always be correct. It is unlikely that much in these areas will be changed in the future, even in a thousand years. And because technology rests almost exclusively on these areas the products of technology work as they are intended to do.

But for areas of uncertain knowledge the story is very different. Indeed the story is pretty well the exact opposite, with the collective opinion of scientists almost always incorrect.

There is an easy proof of this statement. Because of the large number of scientists nowadays and because of the large financial support which they enjoy, uncertain problems would mostly have been cleared up already if it were otherwise. So you can be pretty certain that wherever problems resist solution for an appreciable time by an appreciable number of scientists the ideas used for attacking them must be wrong.

It is therefore a mistake to have anything to do with popular ideas for solving uncertain issues, and the more respectable the ideas may be the more certain it is that they are wrong. […]

Another big one for the book is the origin of life, which according to respectable opinion happened here on the Earth. Imagine the Earth’s history to be represented by a single day. Then the origin of life did not occur in the last 20 hours because there is fossil evidence that life has existed over the last 20 hours. Nor did life originate in the first 3 1/2 hours, because in this early period the Earth was so heavily bombarded by missiles from outside that even rocks were pulverized so violently as to be unable to preserve their integrity. So life, if it originated on the Earth, did so between 03:30 a.m. and 04:00 a.m. We therefore ask for the evidence that the amazing biochemical miracle of the origin of life happened in this comparatively brief window in the Earth’s history. A few sedimentary rocks have survived from it, but they have unfortunately been heated so much that any fossil evidence of life and its origin which might have existed have been lost. Thus the evidence for the respectable popular belief is nil.

This is one remarkable aspect of the popular belief, that it is founded on nothing.

The other remarkable aspect is the intensity of the opprobrium one incurs if one denies it. Only a little biochemical knowledge is needed to see this is yet another situation to set the cats in an uproar.

Biology is replete with them. We are told that natural selection acts to spread small advantageous mutations and operates to suppress disadvantageous bones. But small changes must be frequent if a species is to go anywhere much, in which case the bad and the good are superposed on each other, and how then does natural selection manage to separate them? With the bad generally accepted to be more frequent than the good, all natural selection can do, in simple replicative systems at any rate, is to minimise the rate at which things get worse.

You would think this problem would have been addressed with some care, but as far as I can see it never is. The fossil record of the last 500 millions years provides a serious indictment of biological thinking on evolution. It provides ample evidence of small changes and little or none of big changes. So if evolution is correct, as I suspect it to be, the big changes occur swiftly and the small changes slowly, the big changes so swiftly that they cannot be captured by the random moments revealed by the fossil record. As a physicist might put it, evolution takes place through a sequence of delta-functions, not smoothly as according to respectable scientific academies it is supposed to do.

More than a century ago Alfred Russell Wallace noticed that the higher qualities of Man are acausal, like the Universe itself. Where human qualities have been honed by evolution and natural selection there is very little difference between one individual and another. Given equivalent opportunities for training, healthy human males of age 20 will hardly differ in their abilities to run at pace by more than 10 percent between the Olympic runner and the average.

But for the higher qualities it is very much otherwise. From enquiries among teachers of art, Wallace estimated that for every child who draws instinctively and correctly there are a hundred that don’t. The proportions are much the same in music and mathematics. And for those who are outstanding in these fields the proportions are more like one in a million. Having made this point Wallace then made the striking argument that, while the abilities with small spread like running would have been important to the survival of primitive man, the higher qualities had no survival value at all.

Perhaps this is not entirely true? Perhaps "higher abilities" had survival value in terms of those individuals who could "read the handwriting on the wall" in a scientifically observational way? Or, more speculatively, perhaps higher abilities could ensure survival by warning an individual that catastrophe was on its way thereby enabling them to act in preparation to survive?

Over a span of 12 years spent in the Amazon and in the forests of the East Indies, Wallace is said to have discovered 30,000 new species off his own bat. He lived by shipping his specimens to an agent in London who then marketed them to museums. During most of the time, when he wasn’t writing epoch-making papers on biological evolution, he lived with primitive tribesmen. Wallace therefore knew a great deal about the modes of survival of primitive man, probably more than anybody else of his generation and probably more than anybody does today. His views on the matter therefore carry weight. What he said was that in his experience he never saw a situation in which an aptitude for mathematics would have been of help to primitive tribes. So little numerate were they that in 12 years he saw only a few who could count as far as 10.

His conclusion was the higher qualities, the qualities with large variability from individual to individual, had not been derived from natural selection.

Abilities derived from natural selection have small spread. Abilities not derived from natural selection have wide spreads.

[…]

I think the higher qualities must be of genetic origin, the same as the rest. The mystery is that we have to be endowed with the relevant genes in advance of them being useful. The time order of events is inverted from what we would normally expect it to be, a concept that is of course gall and wormwood to respectable opinion. The objection is that it explodes one’s concepts, raising all manner of new ideas. Which is exactly what respectability dislikes, because it is only in times of stagnation that respectability flourishes.[…]

Already in 1813, in a lecture to the Royal Society of London, William Wells described the process of evolution by natural selection. In the early 1830’s it was being asked how this process might go in detail. Could it explain evolution on a large scale, as in the well-known picture of evolution occurring like a branching tree? General opinion was that it could not, and for a reason that was good and which was never answered in the enthusiasms of the later Darwinian movement.

It was observed that plants and animals always, or almost always, have limited habitats, usually with quite sharp boundaries in which they thrive and outside which they do not.

Why, if evolution could produce very large differences like those between horses, bears and primates, could it not produce the much smaller differences that would serve to enable species to extend their limited habitants?

Why did each species not have the plasticity (as it was called) to spread itself all over the world? The fact that this emphatically was not what happened suggested that, while by selection each species fine-tuned its abilities within the range accessible to it, the range in every case is small, far smaller than would be needed to produce the difference between horses and bears. (Hoyle, The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion)

Hoyle’s remarks quoted above certainly raise a lot of questions, but the one that immediately comes to my mind is: are human beings with "higher faculties" mutations? A related question might also be: are psychopaths also mutations in the other direction? But I don’t want to divert onto that topic just yet, we’ll save it for another article. Again, I want to reiterate what I wrote in the previous article:

If short-period bombardment of our planet by comets or comet dust is a reality (as it increasingly appears to be); and the effects of such an event are deleterious in the extreme; and if we are in fact overdue for a repeat performance of such a visitation (which also appears to be the case); what effect might public awareness of this have on the status quo on the planet at present? Would the bogus "war on terror" not become instantly obsolete and would people across the planet not immediately demand that their political leaders reassess priorities and take whatever action possible to mitigate the threat? And if those political leaders refused to do so and it became known that that this grave threat to the lives of billions was long-standing and common knowledge among the political elite (with all that that implies), what then? Revolution? One last hurrah before the 6th extinction?

Who knows. We only know that this knowledge, in its fullest explication, is being suppressed and marginalized. The reasons for the psychological games and ploys may be interesting to investigate. so that is what we will look at next: Why is Humanity so Deaf, Dumb and Blind?

We’ll be coming to that!

©Signs of the Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the Earth has encountered a cosmic swarm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short, the Hammer of God struck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The moderator said: "So?"

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

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

Can we say "Ostrich with head in sand"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, right.

How to demonstrate to the average person that our world is run by pathological deviants?

Two years ago, we attended a luncheon and planning meeting at my daughter’s school. The meeting was to discuss a series of special events to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the College. The school began as a Catholic institution, but in 1905, when France passed legislation that separated Church and State, the school had to make some adjustments in order to receive government funding. And so, though it is nominally a Catholic school, it must follow the national educational guidelines which include tolerance for all faiths.

So, even though the school is secular, one of the attendees of this luncheon was an Abbe from Toulouse who belongs to the order that founded the school and which still keeps ties with it, though not religious ones. He has a Ph.D. in Medieval history. The headmistress of the school has degrees in history, and her former teacher and mentor was also present, being invited to give special lectures on Egypt as part of the 150th Anniversary programs. We were there because my husband had been invited to give a scientific lecture.

So, there we were at the dinner table with all the teachers and administrators of this small, private, French college - some 20 people - and the issue of America and George Bush came up. I noticed that the subject was being handled carefully out of consideration for me, the only American at the table. The Abbe, however, was not so concerned with my finer sensibilities and pronounced, with a snort, that the Neocon administration was exactly like the Inquisition!

I’m sure he was deliberately trying to goad me, but he was surprised when I agreed with him and even mentioned that I had written exactly that myself.

The subject of the Inquisition and its characteristics and how we can use historical models to spot what is going on and what is likely to come so we can teach others is what I really want to talk about here. Sure, we can study the history of the planet and figure out that comets, meteors and asteroids are bad news on a regular cycle, but it’s a little trickier to do the same thing with society - human issues. But human issues are very important here for a very good reason: the Human Cycle seems to Mirror the Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes. It is altogether possible that if we could ameliorate the evils of this Earth, man’s inhumanity to man, a different outcome could manifest. No, I’m not so dumb as to think that we could "create our own reality" and not experience any catastrophe at all, but remember, a disaster is only a disaster when you are not adequately prepared for it. So, being prepared for whatever may come is always a good idea. And nearly without exception, every Cosmic Catastrophe that I have been able to track has been associated with great human evil running amok on the planet at the time. There is definitely a statistical connection.

With comprehensive psychological knowledge, we can analyze history with a different eye, see how the dynamics operated, and extract principles that can be applied anywhere, anytime. And the time for applying the principles extracted from a study of the Inquisition is now.

Unfortunately, trying to use historical examples or psychology or anything else as "evidence" to explain what is going on in our world today is about as problematical as it is for psychical researchers who spend their lives trying to prove one tiny little paranormal event occurred - to get that hard, rock-solid, indisputable proof that no one can reject. Our world is so corrupted by the deviants that people actually believe that black is white, white is black, good is evil and evil is good: witness George Bush bringing democracy to the Iraqis by force!

Just this morning I read a news item that nearly made me drop my teeth in amazement that people can say and do what they say and do and be so totally unaware of what they are saying and doing and its implications: that their minds have been totally corrupted by pathological material. Keeping in mind the idea that one can study history and extract principles and make predictions, read the following article:

Passengers May Be Sued in Imams’ Removal

Six Muslim men removed from a plane last fall after being accused of suspicious behavior are suing the airline and threatening to sue the passengers who complained - a move some fear could discourage travelers from speaking up when they see something unusual.

The civil rights lawsuit, filed earlier this month, has so alarmed some lawyers that they are offering to defend the unnamed "John Doe" passengers listed as "possible defendants" free of charge. They say it is vital that the flying public be able to report suspicious behavior without fear of being dragged into court.

"When you drive up the road towards the airport, there’s a big road sign that says, ‘Report suspicious behavior,’" said Gerry Nolting, a Minneapolis lawyer. "There’s no disclaimer that adds, ‘But beware if you do that, you might get sued.’"

The six imams were taken off a Phoenix-bound US Airways flight on Nov. 20 while returning home from a conference of Islamic clerics in Minneapolis.

Other passengers had gotten nervous when the men were seen praying and chanting in Arabic as they waited to board. Some passengers also said that the men spoke of Saddam Hussein and cursed the United States; that they requested seat belt extenders with heavy buckles and stowed them under their seats; that they were moving about and conferring with each other during boarding; and that they sat separately in seats scattered through the cabin.

The plane was cleared for a security sweep, nothing was found, and the jet took off without the imams.

The Muslim clerics say they were humiliated, and are seeking unspecified damages from the airline, the Minneapolis airport and, potentially, the John Does.

Omar Mohammedi, the New York City attorney for the imams, said the intent is not to go after passengers who raise valid concerns about security. But he suggested some passengers may have acted in bad faith out of prejudice.

"As an attorney, I have seen a lot of abuse by the general public when it comes to members of the community creating stories that do not exist," Mohammedi said.

He denied the imams were talking about Saddam, and said that their seats were assigned and that they requested extenders because their seat belts didn’t fit.

Some fear such lawsuits could weaken what has become the first line of defense against terrorism since Sept. 11 - an alert public. At airports and train and subway stations around the country, travelers are routinely warned to watch for unattended bags and suspicious activity and to notify authorities.

Ellen Howe, spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees security at all U.S. airports, would not comment specifically on the imams’ lawsuit. But she said the TSA counts on passengers to help the agency do its job.

"’See something, say something’ is certainly a common mantra in this day and age," Howe said. "We would always remind passengers to be both vigilant and thoughtful."

In reaction to the imams’ lawsuit, Congress has taken steps to legally protect passengers who report suspicious activity. Earlier this week, the House approved an amendment to a rail transportation security bill that would make passengers immune from such lawsuits, unless they say something they know is false.

Mohammedi said he has not yet identified any of the complaining passengers. An airport police report listed a passenger and two US Airways employees as complaining about the imams. All three had their names blacked out before the lawsuit was filed by invoking a Minnesota law that allows it, airport spokesman Pat Hogan said.

Nolting said he has been contacted by several potential John Does.

Passenger Pat Snelson, who lives in a Twin Cities suburb, said he and his wife were not among those who reported suspicious behavior. But he said his wife noticed the men praying, and he saw them moving around the cabin while others were boarding.

"These guys were up to no good," Snelson said. "We think the airport people did a real good job in taking care of it."

Bomb-sniffing dogs examined the men and their baggage. FBI agents and other federal law enforcement officers questioned the men for several hours before releasing them.

Billie Vincent, a former director of security for the Federal Aviation Administration, said he is troubled by the mere attempt to identify the passengers who raised concerns.

Airline passengers "are your eyes and your ears," said Vincent, who now owns an aviation security company. "If attorneys can get those names and sue them, you put a chilling effect on the whole system."

Did you get the connection to the Inquisition in the above article?

Not everyone would, of course.

I admit that reading it almost rendered me speechless, but my mind was sure going! I thought "Whoah! It just staggers the mind to read something like that in the daily news, published as though such attitudes and events were the most normal thing on Earth!" Sure, a thousand FACTS and all the knowledge I have in my head of psychology and history and so on went racing through my mind, but how in the Hell am I supposed to convey all that all in one neat package when it has taken me years to acquire it? How can I show you, the reader, how the above article is as grave a warning signal about our future as the jetliner that was barely missed by a meteorite the other day?

But I am going to try. It’s Story Time, boys and girls.

This may seem a bit long, but believe me, it’s worth it! You will acquire YEARS of hard-won knowledge in whatever time it takes you to read the following selections from my memory and databanks.

In this year, on the Sunday before the Feast of St. John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon had first become visible a marvellous phenomenon was witnessed by some five or more men who were sitting there facing the moon. Now there was a bright new moon, and as usual in that phase it’s horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance. The present writer was given this report by men who saw it with their own eyes, and are prepared to stake their honour on an oath that they have made no addition or falsification in the above narrative. [Report of the medieval monk Gervase of Canterbury, AD 1178 cited by Clube and Napier in The Cosmic Winter]

Clube and Napier suggest that what was seen was the impacting of one or more asteroids on the surface of the Moon, 800 years ago similar to what happened on Jupiter back in 1994. Two and a half centuries lay between the Gervase chronicle and the onset of the Black Death in Europe in 1348. More than that, this was preceded by an acute crisis in human affairs. One chronicler reported that the cause of the plague was that there was a "vast rain of fire" between "Cathay and Persia. The fire burned up mountains and plains and whoever beheld it died within a half a day.

Not long after, the Arctic polar cap extended changing the rainfall patterns which led to devastating famines. In England and Scotland there were abandoned villages and farms, soaring wheat prices and declining population from starvation and disease. The chronicles of monasteries in Poland and Russia speak of cannibalism, so many corpses that they were buried together in overflowing common graves, and mass migrations to the West.

There are a number of such fluctuations to be found in the historical record, and there is good evidence that these climatic stresses are connected not only with famine but also with times of great social unrest, wars, revolution and mass migrations. [Clube and Napier, p.274]

Let us now look at what else was going on between the asteroid/meteorite impacts on the Moon and the coming of the Black Death, all of which preceded the Maunder Minimum - a mini-ice age.

"Kill them all, god will know his own."

A chronicler reported that Arnold Amaury, the monk who led the Albigensian Crusade, uttered this catchphrase outside the city of Beziers on July 22, 1209. His crusaders had asked him how to tell the Catholic believers from the Cathar Heretics.

Arnold’s instructions were followed, and the entire population of Beziers - some 20,000 men, women and children - were indiscriminately murdered.

No one really knows if Arnold really said what was reported, but what is known is that such an ideology was the essence of the crusade against the Cathars, and such ideology has arisen among human beings again and again throughout history, even to the present day in the halls of government of the United States. The consequences are always and ever the same - something that the current administration does not seem to realize - proving the saying that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

There are many parallels between those times and the present that might serve us well to examine.

On the 10th of March 1208, Pope Innocent III issued a summons to all Christian nations to take up arms against fellow Christians. He declared that the destruction of these heretics was not only justified, but that it was a dire necessity because the heretics who inhabited an ostensibly Christian land were "worse than the very Saracens." This appeal came four years after a Crusader army had captured and pillaged Constantinople, still another Christian land, though one which claimed to be the true seat of original Christianity. The Eastern church considered the church at Rome to be an upstart, a Frankish invention of Northern Germanic invaders that had nothing at all to do with the Christianity of the historical Jesus.

The new enemy of the church at Rome was one of the greatest princes in Christendom, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse. Raymond was a feudal sovereign whose authority extended over a very large section of what is now known as France, but was then known as Languedoc.

Raymond’s crime was that he ruled a country where the authority of the church was in decline, and he wasn’t doing anything about it.

The declared aim of the crusade was to overthrow a prince of unquestioned legitimacy, who was more inclined to support his people than the church. The church in Rome saw that its continued existence in the Midi of France depended upon putting the country under the control of an alien, external government that would crush rebellion and would not rebel against the church itself.

In short, the Church’s aims were Imperialistic. Imperialism is always a bad sign. The chief characteristic of pathological deviants, psychopaths in particular, is that they always want to pull the "big con," to take what belongs to others, has been rightfully earned or worked for by others, and do it without working themselves, by psychologically and emotionally manipulating others to get it for them.

The Cathars were pacifists who embraced tolerance in a period when tolerance was not what the church needed in its overweening ambition to rule the Western World. The heresy grew during a period of change and experimentation and expansion of horizons. Crusaders to the Holy Land had returned bringing new ideas, understandings that life could be organized differently and that those who lived or worshiped differently were human beings too - and interesting and valuable to an eclectic society at that. The spread of such ideas led to extreme dissatisfaction with the Medieval Catholic Church which was erected on a foundation of large corporate monasteries and churches lording it over huddled masses of cold and hungry peasants and even aristocrats desirous of making it to heaven. The Catholic Church was basically a large corporation selling salvation and everybody else was supposed to be cogs in the wheel of this great mechanical "control of salvation" organization.

Catharism began to thrive in those areas that were growing democratic: merchant cities of Italy, and trading centers of Champagne and the Rhineland, and independent cities of the Languedoc in France. Catharism was ideally suited to the tolerant, protective feudalism of Languedoc, and for that reason, it had to be destroyed.

In the north, women were excluded from inheritance, and everything went to the eldest son. Younger sons and daughters who were unable to marry heiresses or heirs, were grist for the Catholic monastic factories, a system designed to incrementally increase the power of the Church. In the Languedoc, women had rights, could inherit and manage their own properties, and fiefs were divided among children. This naturally led to a more democratic spread of property, and prevented enormous power from being gathered into the hands of any one person or group of persons. It also, in a way, weakened the Languedoc because no one person or small group of persons could mobilize all the men of a region to go to war for personal ambition or greed. This is always and ever the weakness of a real democracy.

It was in the Occitan language that troubadour poetry flowered. In the fertile lands of Languedoc, love of a spiritual kind was revealed. Troubadours sang of courtly love, games of deferred pleasure, exalted sublimation of physical desires to spiritual goals, and even, in some cases, what seemed to be adulterous fulfillment. The ethos of amorous longing, of exalted spiritual women revealed the different mold of the Languedoc mind.

At the same time, beyond the Loire and the Rhine, the northern nobles were singing about swords dripping with blood, and viscera being scattered and exulted over, all the while masking this barbarity in a strange mix of rapacious piety rather like the present day Christians who back George Bush.

The towns of the Languedoc were governed by consuls and Roman law formed the basis of all local legislation. The consuls were elected from among the city nobility and bourgeoisie, and the burgher was the knight’s equal. The Count of Toulouse lacked any legal authority in his own city, and was only obeyed so long as he respected and upheld the local common law. Every burgher had the right to buy, sell, or engage in barter without paying any duties or taxes on such transactions. There were no restrictions placed upon marriages and resident aliens enjoyed full citizens’ rights regardless of their nationality or creed. Such free towns were the centers of the country’s social life and the election of a consul was a great public event with processions, pomp and circumstance.

The Rhone and Garonne rivers carried merchandise and raw materials through the land, and Marseilles, Toulouse, Avignon and Narbonne were major seaports. There was a relaxation of the traditions of caste, and Jews and Arabs mixed freely in the melting pot towns of Languedoc. The spirit of independence from princely power was strong in the Midi.

Being predominantly commercial cities, the towns of the Languedoc were quite opulent and modern compared with the cities of the North such as Paris, Troyes or Rouen. The cities of the south had universities that taught medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astrology, and more. The works of the Arab philosophers were censored in Paris, but available in Toulouse. Arab doctors and merchants came to Languedoc, and the "infidel" was not regarded as a "natural enemy." Jews were fully integrated into public life and were held in high regard by the general populace. In some towns, Jews were consuls or magistrates.

One thing is certain, life in the Languedoc was more secular than anywhere else, and as a result, life in general flourished to a higher degree than in those places under the jackboot of religious intolerance. The cities of the Languedoc were centers of culture and great industry and prestige.

Poetry, literature, and music also flourished and became a part of daily life as much for the bourgeoisie and the common man as for the nobility. The Poetry of the Languedoc is not only the most ancient in European history, but also the most sublime in terms of inspiration. It seems that the Occitan language was the tongue par excellence of literature. Even today, no one can think of the South of France without recalling the troubadours. The phenomenon of an aristocracy passionately devoted to spiritually inspirational poetry, that dedicated their lives to living out the ideals of that age and milieu, is unmatched by any other group or period of history. The prosaic northerners might have thought the Southerners had gone off their rockers, but then the northern nobility’s highest ambition was to help their king put on his underwear.

The nobility of the Languedoc had a different idea of honor than sacrificing his life for his king, or tying his shoes. In spite of the opulence of their surroundings, the southern aristocrat had a certain disdain for the material things of life, combined with a high regard and even exaltation of personal virtues that was possessed of a great and noble WILL. The adoration of the Lady was a declaration of free will; a proof that, even though one is giving, and giving all, it is being given to a private deity of one’s own free choice.

It is very likely that the Lady of the Languedoc was merely a symbol of something much deeper and was directly related to the knowledge that was held by the Cathar perfecti. One thing for certain is this: the nobility of the Languedoc were not only permitting heresy, but were its most famous and dedicated supporters and defenders.

Although mystery surrounds the origin of Catharism, recent research indicates that it was connected to the Gnosticism of the Bogomils of the Byzantine Empire. This tradition may relate directly to the Esoteric Christian tradition revealed by Georges Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Boris Mouravieff, and may actually be a conduit of legitimate transmission of the original teachings of the man around whom the Jesus myth was formed. It is suggested that he was only another in a long line of followers of this ancient tradition that was also present in the Megalithic societies.

The fact is, the so-called Cathar Heresy was really a rival religion that was rapidly gaining ground in Europe, and it claimed to be the original Christianity. These believers were not dissidents; they were fully conscious of belonging to a faith that was more ancient than the Church at Rome itself.

Some modern historians have theorized that Catharism was not a heresy due to the simple fact that it was a completely different religion that had nothing at all in common with Christianity as we know it.

The so-called Cathar heresy was predicated upon the question of Good and Evil. The irreducible bone of contention between the Cathars and the Catholic Church was the role and power of Evil in the life of human beings.

For the Cathars, the god of Judaism, was an evil Archon of Darkness. They rejected entirely the Old Testament as being the work of this evil god. The Cathars considered worldly authority, based on so-called Divine Sanction such as the Church claimed, to be a fraud.

The Cathar God was a god of light who ruled invisible consciousness and did not meddle in human affairs. The God of the Cathars simply didn’t care if you got into bed before getting married, associated with or intermarried with Jews or Arabs, black or white, and whether or not you were a woman or a man. For the Cathars, it was material life, pursuit of material things, money, power and possessions, that was the hallmark of Idolatry.

The Cathars believed that it was a free choice for every person as to whether or not they wanted to renounce the materialistic life for a life of self-denial so as to purify oneself of material desires and thus "ascend" to a different world - an Edenic like state of purity. The only "hell" the Cathars admitted was that if a person did not choose to purify themselves, they would reincarnate over and over again until their material desires and passions were burned away in the sufferings of material life. In short, to be damned was to live again and again in this vale of tears we call Earthly life.

Good grief! What kind of religion doesn’t try to control people with fears of hellfire and damnation?

Such Gnostic Dualism isn’t new; it is a notion that has been shared by other creeds throughout history. For the Cathars, however, the unique crossroads of choice lay within each and every human being. It was in the human consciousness that the divine spark was found - the "Kingdom of Heaven within" - and this spark was a remnant of an earlier, angelic state of existence that had the potential to be redeemed. It was there, in everyone, waiting to be set free from the cycle of reincarnation.

Now, what was so evil about this?

It should be obvious. If such ideas were true, the sacraments of the Catholic Church were null and void, and the Church itself was a fraud, a cruel hoax played by those who were only seeking power (what a concept!). If such ideas were true, the status of human beings could never be looked at the same way again. If everybody believed, as the Cathars did, that a king in one life could be a serving wench in the next, a Jew in one life could be an Arab in the next, and that women could be highly evolved spiritual beings - even leaders - it put a whole different spin on how humans ought to behave toward one another.

One of the more serious charges against the Cathars was their repugnance against swearing oaths. It’s hard to understand this now, but it can be compared to the idea that a modern earthly contract has no binding power when issues of morality and ethics come into the picture. The swearing of oaths, especially oaths of fealty, was the contractual underpinning of a feudal society. It gave a "sacred weight" to the controllers of the hierarchy, the Catholic Church. If an individual broke an oath, he could be condemned by the authority of the Church to Hell. Kingdoms, estates, bonds of service, all were created, transferred, and maintained by the mediation of the Church. You could say that "swearing oaths" was medieval Corporatism.

The Cathars believed that linking the activities of business and government to the Divine was an exercise in Wishful Thinking if not out and out blasphemy. From their point of view, god was detached from such things and any idea that he was either interested, or cared about the business and government doings of human beings was a fanciful house of cards. For anyone to claim that they had the power to control human dealings by threatening the wrath of God just on their say-so was hubris in the extreme.

Catharism taught that man and woman were one. A human being was reincarnated over and over again - as peasant, king, boy, girl, master, servant - but what really mattered was one’s divine, immaterial, androgynous - or rather, sexless - spiritual self. That did irreparable damage to the Catholic church’s teachings about the sinful state of women, the exclusion of women from inheritance, the "fall of man" via the temptation of Eve, and so on.

In short, Catharism was one of the greatest threats to the Powers That Be that has ever existed - then and since. The church, and kings and rulers who relied on the Church to control people and to give weight to their contracts, could not allow such a heresy to spread. Spurred on by the Catholic Church in its unholy alliance with power-seeking aristocrats, the might of Feudal Europe fell upon Languedoc in a righteous fury. In a certain sense, you could say that it was a war between spiritual freedom and spiritual corporatism. Western Civilization had reached a crossroad similar to the crossroad that the Cathars taught existed within the hearts of individual humans: a return to consciousness of Angelic realms, or a new cycle of repeating again and again the pain and suffering of existence in this vale of tears we call Earth.

Historian R. I. Moore has noted that the years around 1200 were a turning point that led to the "formation of a persecuting society". Choices were made then that are still reverberating in human society.

And it is clear what choice was made then.

We are facing a similar choice today.

When the Corporatist Church and Nobility went after the Democratic Cathars, the people of the Languedoc did not go down without a fight. But, as it is in all times, those who fight for the rights of free will for all are hindered by their very humanity; they are unable to achieve the single-minded rapacity that denies humanity to others so as to be able to mercilessly destroy them. (This, of course, is where accurate psychological knowledge would come in very handy. One cannot treat a genetic psychological deviant as a human with a soul, but one should, of course, treat them with the consideration that one gives to a rare species of animal.)

Pope Innocent III needed an explosive incident that would fire the public imagination and justify a declaration of war. The Pope had no army, and crusades were, essentially, volunteer operations. The Pope couldn’t force anyone to fight, and so the idea was to persuade the landed nobles with their retinues of soldiers to agree to join in. This incident was provided by the murder of Peter of Castelnau which was blamed on Count Raymond. There are very good grounds, according to the historical experts, to think that Raymond had nothing to do with the murder of the Papal Legate, that it was s set-up just like the alleged "Muslim extremist" attack on the World Trade Center in our own times has been used to launch a war against Islam.

A propaganda campaign was launched. Papal emissaries, carrying Peter’s bloodstained habit from place to place, expiated on the tragedy of a country abandoned to the ravages of heresy. This was the equivalent of showing the falling of the Twin Towers on television over and over again accompanied by inflammatory rhetoric against Islam. Just as we see in the present day - and so it has been throughout history - fantastic slanders were created and spread about the Cathars as they were about the Jews and later the Templars and now the Muslims. They were said to consume the ashes of dead babies and to indulge in incestuous orgies. The Cathars were accused of homosexuality and sodomy. The heretics were said to desecrate communion chalices and to declaim blasphemies against the saints, declaring they were all damned. You might call it Medieval Psy-ops and COINTELPRO.

The propaganda efforts were so successful that volunteers to "kill ‘em all" streamed in from all quarters. Not only knights with no lands, and hopes of acquiring a fief of their own, but also peasants and burghers.

Crusades in general had long formed a part of the social structure of the Western European aristocracy. It was a way to grab land and plunder. The thing that made Crusades so popular was the approval of the Church. Those who went to war "for the Church," were convinced that, by practicing a profession - that of warrior and murderer - that, under different circumstances would contribute nothing to their salvation, they were not only serving God, but were saving their own souls. Crusaders enjoyed indulgences, privileges, and could win forgiveness for the most heinous sins while grabbing property, plunder, fame and fortune.

What a deal! Sounds like the Christian backed Bushies and Halliburton in Iraq.

Another lure to the Crusades was that it was a handy way of getting out of debt. A Crusader’s goods and property were sacrosanct for the whole period of his absence, and his creditors could touch nothing no matter how much he might owe them.

Sounds like the deals offered to the Bush cronies who stand behind him, eh? Too bad he isn’t as generous to the average foot soldier.

The faith of the Crusaders who could exterminate fellow human beings for the Glory of God may seem contemptible to us now, but is what America is doing in Iraq any different? It seems that, to such minds, ordinary human morality cannot be considered when God’s interests are at stake. Never mind that "god’s interests" are surprisingly blood-thirsty and similar to the interests of whoever happens to be in power. Thus it is when a religion is based on a construct of human imagination.

Catholic Faith among the masses in the Middle Ages was deep, sincere, and violent in its attachment to external manifestations. It was a period of "mundane religions," since the urge to perceive God as more or less human and concrete with a special interest in his chosen human beings was a vigorous movement. When the Church had outlawed the sublime mysticism of the ancient Celts (which was surprisingly similar to the beliefs of the Cathars, by the way), they also took over the related myths and legends, transforming them into Saints and stories of martyrdom for Christianity rather than the other way around which it actually was, in many cases.

The world of the Medieval Christian was filled with the lives of Saints and readings from sacred books which took the place of theatre, cinema, magazines, and what we would call best sellers. Literature that was NOT religious in character, was almost unknown, and generally reserved for the pleasure of a small elite. The creative energy of the entire society was wholly focused on religious life. The frantic urge to incarnate the Divine, to make it concrete, suggests a very deep materialism; a high regard for the values of the physical world mixed with contempt for human life. Those who were listeners to the words of the envoys of the popes undoubtedly thought that a mutilated crucifix was more distressing than a mutilated human body.

And so, a heresy that was opposed to the massive Corporate constructions of faith - cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and royal power granted by that faith - was opposed most strenuously by those who clung most frantically to their religious customs as though they were a national heritage.

In short, the papal emissaries had little trouble working up the anger and indignation of large audiences, and the Cathars became "God’s Enemies."

The war against the Cathars, then, was a war that symbolized a particular view of God and the Universe that was held by those whose motives of sentiment and passion were peculiarly brutal and Corporatist.

Throughout the merciless Crusade against the Cathars, it seems that it became more and more clear that the presence of heretics in Languedoc was merely an excuse. The real aim of the Church, the French Crown, the Crusaders, was genocide and grabbing of plunder via the destruction of the entire country and its aristocracy. The destruction of Catharism was only achieved by the obliteration of everything that made up the living traditions of the Languedoc.

The story of the crusade against the Cathars is a terrible story of the triumph of the Evil Archon of Darkness over the Light of the Spirit and Freedom. We have lived, ever since, in that persecuting society that was formed by Western Christendom at that time.

The creation of the Inquisition.

Many people think of the Inquisition as something that was started to eliminate witches and Devil worship, and the word conjures images of the rack and iron maidens and all kinds of bizarre and twisted torture equipment. Sure, torture was a big part of the Inquisition, but not as much as some people might think.

You have to remember that the Inquisition began during a period of history when human life was treated so casually by some that cutting off noses or ears or hands, or gouging out eyes was not unheard of as a legal punishment.

After years of brutal massacres, of destruction of the land, of some of the most horrible events ever to bear witness of man’s inhumanity to man, Pope Gregory IX decided that it was only results that counted. He intended to wipe Catharism from the face of the earth. He must have sat up at night to create the bizarre system that was put into place to deal with heresy.

First, he created special papal legates who were granted wide powers of prosecution similar to what we have today in the Homeland Security nonsense, and sent them out all over Europe. The men chosen for this task were clearly psychopaths, and their mission was to spread terror all over Europe.

Gregory staffed the episcopal palaces of the South of France with psychopathic bishops who offered a cash bounty to anyone who betrayed a heretic. The inducements to betray one’s neighbor were surely tempting in the best of times. But in a time when starvation and destruction was everywhere after more than 20 years of the rampaging of the Crusading armies, it was well-nigh impossible to resist. The terms were that the property confiscated from the heretic was divided between the informer, the church and the crown. Naturally, in a land that was financially devastated, where people were displaced and starving after years of being battered by this same church and crown, there were a lot of individuals offering up their neighbors for blood money.

Robert le Bourgre, which means "the bugger", suggesting the contempt in which he was held by the people, terrorized formerly peaceful northern France. Another legate, Conrad of Marburg found unsuspected heretics everywhere in the Rhineland. Thousands were sent to the stake, often on the same day that they were accused. Again, sure sounds like Bush and his private torture chamber at Guantanamo.

Conrad rode about on his mule with two assistants, bringing terror to every village and town they approached. Apparently, even the regular clergy saw through this nonsense and finally decided to do something about it. On July 30, 1233, a Franciscan friar, driven to act in the name of justice, intercepted Conrad and murdered him.

And that was the living end for the Pope. He was NOT amused and he was not going to be denied his Imperialist ambitions. He turned to the Dominicans.

In the spring of 1233, papal inquisitors were appointed in Toulouse, Albi, and Carcassonne. These inquisitors were succeeded in an unbroken line for 600 years. Thousands of people were summoned to testify before inquisitors. The questions were repetitive, designed to plant doubt in the mind of the person being interrogated as to what, exactly, the inquisitor knew, and who had told him.

Hmmm… Sounds like "Total Information Awareness," doesn’t it?

A person suspected of Cathar sympathies was not always informed of the charges hanging over his head; if apprised of t