Primed for another Chemical Weapons charade

Will there be another fake chemical attack soon, staged by the forces of ISIS or Al Qaeda still controlling Syrian territory in Idlib province? There have been at least three so far, the last one in Douma, outside Damascus last April. The OPCW inspectors who visited that site finally released their report (see below), which found neither evidence nor victims of any chemical attack. 100+ missiles were lobbed into Syria by the US, UK and France, as punishment, a day before they even arrived.

Whenever the jihadists are up against the wall, with the Syrian Army winning by conventional means, they fake a chemical weapons attack in the hope of giving Western powers an excuse to intervene. And they are all too willing for any excuse to play with their deadly toys.

The Syrian Army now needs to end this war, and cannot leave an important province in the hands of armed and murderous foreign fighters. The weakened terrorist forces have only two options – to surrender or play the chemical weapon card. This time they could create real casualties, from the ranks of captive young women and children taken during ISIS’s murderous assault on the Yazidi population of Iraq (older women and men were killed).

Here is the tell-tale timeline for that last so-called chemical gas attack, the one that launched a thousand missiles:

April 7 – alleged gas event in Douma, last outpost of insurgents around Damascus. Our media’s  information on this was unverified, coming from anti-government sources. The jihadist White Helmets made a short film, widely broadcast.

April 13 – America and its allies launch 100+ missile attack upon Syria as punishment, also making millions for the US arms industry.

April 14 OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) inspectors arrive at Douma to examine the scene. Their report was expected in “the usual” 3-4 weeks.

July 6 (12 weeks later) the OPCW issues its report, to a whisper of publicity, reporting that no evidence was found of a chemical weapons attack. Traces of chlorine were found at two locations. It’s a household chemical. They found no evidence on the ground, or residues in people, of chemical weapons, saying only that “the persons affected in the reported incidents may, in some instances, have been exposed to some type of non-persistent, irritating substance.”

The OPCW report is somewhat less than conclusive. Note the vagueness of “may in some instances,” which indicates a possibility not based on evidence, and limited to a few. In other words, some of “the persons” may have been exposed to a temporary irritant before the event, which was filmed on the spot by the White Helmets. Or they may have just been acting. The mention of “persons affected in the reported incidents” does not identify them as victims and suggests that only some of them may have been exposed to a temporary irritant. So the others, most of them, were not exposed to even anything temporary. What are they telling us, in this round-about manner? There is no mention or confirmation of any dead or damaged victims of the so-called attack, despite the media horror story we were fed, based on unverified information from the jihadists who, it would appear, stage-managed the entire event they filmed.

At that time, with the real Syrian army ascendant, gassing civilians near a hospital would have been a pointless military move, whether or not it was waving a red flag at Uncle Sam. Whatever the propaganda tells us of Assad, there is never any suggestion that he or his generals are that stupid.

On August 22^nd, Trump’s National Security advisor, John Bolton, appears to have given the cue to the jihadist insurgents for another false flag event by once again publically pronouncing that “…if the Syrian regime uses chemical weapons we will respond very strongly and they really ought to think about this a long time.” Suggestions keep appearing in the media that Assad will use chemical weapons in the battle for Idlib. They are laying the foundation for a fake attack. America, and perhaps Britain and France, will again be poised to send more missiles to an undeserving recipient and do whatever they can to prolong conflict in the Middle East and maintain healthy profits for their arms industries.

What surprises me is how they get away with it, and why so many of the mainstream media appear to believe the lies they are fed. If not then how do they sleep at night? ISIS and their associates are a truly unpleasant murderous bunch. If you did not look at the link to their  Yazidi genocide then take a look now. They are not deserving of continued tacit support and sympathy from our governments and media. It is past time for the conflict to end, though the enclave of armed fundamentalists in Idlib will continue to fight in any way they can, including the staging of terrorist attacks abroad. It’s what they do.

The US military establishment would hate to lose two of its favourite enemies, ISIS and Al Qaeda, and are terrified that Trump might make peace with Russia. Without enemies, how could the military and intelligence communities defend their ever-increasing budgets? As I have put it before, the voracious military establishments of America and Britain are threatened not by any enemy, but by the absence of one. Without an enemy to fear there is no perceived need to support the expensive, and destructive, military and intelligence communities that act like a state within a state.

Of course, I hope another gas attack is never staged, and that events move swiftly to an end of the conflict in Syria without further fighting or civilian death. I hope that the Yazidi captives are freed and able to rejoin and rebuild their communities. Most of all I look forward to the day when peace has comfortably settled into to the whole of Syria, from where my father’s parents emigrated to America over a century ago. I have been twice to the village where my father’s aunt’s descendants lived, as did that aged aunt when I visited Mishtaya, a village in the hills outside Homs mercifully unscathed by the war.

May there be an end to pointless conflict. Peace is not an unnatural condition for mankind. It was the norm for millennia before rulers imposed themselves upon developed and largely peaceful civilisation.

 

 

The wheel needs a whole new hub, not just another revolution.

 

Scientists consider conscious Universe!

Scientists are starting to think the unthinkable – is our Universe itself conscious, and stars volitional beings? “Veteran physicist” Gregory Matloff and I share more than our first names. You can read his original scientific paper here or get the essence of it and related thoughts in the NBC News story below – but first a paragraph from me.

My exploration of stellar consciousness let inevitably to that same conclusion. Here are my thoughts in the chapter on that subject in my book, published 2008.

“It seems apparent that Universe itself is but another level of higher mind – albeit the highest as far as we are concerned. Perhaps each of its countless billions of giant galaxies is the equivalent of a single neuron firing in our own brain. Its invisible mind might be filling the entirety of what we consider to be the empty space between galaxies – a space that is infused with the electromagnetic vibrations of everything else in the Universe. We are assured by modern astrophysicists that the Universe contains “dark energy,” a force which they are at a loss to define or explain, but whose existence is essential to their calculations, Could this indefinable “energy” be something to do with universal consciousness – a force unto itself with the ability to hold the cosmos together?”

that NBC news story ———————–  

Is the Universe Conscious?   Some of the world’s most renowned scientists are questioning whether the cosmos has an inner life similar to our own.

For centuries, modern science has been shrinking the gap between humans and the rest of the universe, from Isaac Newton showing that one set of laws applies equally to falling apples and orbiting moons to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff” — that the atoms of our bodies were literally forged in the nuclear furnaces of other stars.

Even in that context, Gregory Matloff’s ideas are shocking. The veteran physicist at New York City College of Technology recently published a paper arguing that humans may be like the rest of the universe in substance and in spirit. A “proto-consciousness field” could extend through all of space, he argues. Stars may be thinking entities that deliberately control their paths. Put more bluntly, the entire cosmos may be self-aware.

Continue reading this story…

 

My own work on the subject and its profound implications 

Sun’s corona, which I describe as the mind of this conscious being – an invisible energy field seen only during a total eclipse

The Mystery of Light

I gave this excellent little talk on light at the Odditorium in Brighton a couple of years ago and only discovered it to be online recently when a listener contacted me to ask about the tattoo mentioned in the talk. I sent him a picture of it and he sent me the link, which I now send to you. The curious events in their introduction occurred before my arrival so I cannot enlighten on that front.

The Mystery of Light with Gregory Sams

This episode starts with a crash, after an eclipse and power cut in the studio leave our presenters stumbling around in the dark while Mr Mounfield later reveals himself to be a Zoroastrian. It all proves however, to be a perfect link for their guest, Gregory Sams, who puts forward a compelling argument for the sun, stars and universe being far more intelligent than conventional science would have us believe.

The tattoo:

The smaller we go the greater life’s wonder.

I share just one of 91 extraordinary microscopic pictures of the living world. Each new one in the slide show had me in awe and then at No.13 I gasped, stopped looking and began this blog.

Within the human brain, we know that each tiny neuron is connected through its dendrites, axons and synapses to thousands of other neurons, and that these connections shift as different tasks are demanded of our organism. It’s a staggering scenario, and one I have never really been able to picture. Here we see this for real, in an extraordinary photo of “fresh” brain cells, newly formed from embryonic stem cells. Looking at this cell, I get visual support for a point I make in my book, Sun of gOd, about the bottom-up structure of our own organism. Each single cell in our body contains 5-10 million residents going about their business of eating, excreting, repairing, assessing, co-operating,  communicating with other cells, reproducing and so forth. There is no sign of a gang-leader determining what these individual characters do or when.

Here we see a brain cell looking like a miniature organism in its own right, ready to connect up with up to 10,000 other brain cells and exchange information, make decisions, learn new skills and much much more. Our brain has the structure of something organised from the bottom-up. Off on a wild tangent, looking at these fine filaments makes me wonder if they might also act as antenna connected to the activity of an energetic mind.

Now I want to get back to the remaining 78 photos. SEE THEM ALL HERE

While writing the book to which I refer above, Sun of gOd, Discover the Self-Organizing Consciousness that Underlies Everything, it became increasingly apparent that consciousness had to pervade everything, once we extend its reach beyond the human brain. In the early stages of that recognition came the discovery  of how an animal cell’s inner residents work together.

 

 

Thomas Paine, a talk

I delivered a 20 min talk last Saturday night at the Thomas Paine Hotel in his birthplace, Thetford, to a party of Paine fans who celebrate his birth each year. It wasn’t recorded so I am posting the laptop rehearsal.

                                              (click) The final practice run 

NOTE to the video
Thomas Paine, it you didn’t know, was one of the most important characters of the last three centuries, initiating the concept of the nation state, a body of people who governed themselves instead of being ruled by a king or other ruler. As we know, it didn’t quite work out as he pictured it in Common Sense, the book which turned a tax-motivated protest into the American War of Independence, selling half a million copies in the first six months of 1776. He turned the tide of the war from defeat to victory later that year, with a pamphlet that began “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

His next momentous book was conceived while building a revolutionary iron bridge in England, from whence he fled the hangman’s noose to Paris, writing his next major work while immersed in the French Revolution.

In my talk I refer to those two other books.
The Rights of Man  “Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.” – – – “The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.”

The Age of Reason “The word of God is in the creation we behold.”

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church”

He connects these themes: “It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights.”

the after-dinner talk.   click

 

Common Sense

For any fans of Thomas Paine, or my first book Uncommon Sense, I highly recommend a listen to Melvyn Bragg’s excellent coverage of Paine’s world-changing book “Common Sense,” published in 1776. This 48-page publication was responsible for solidifying that which began as a tax protest into the American Revolution for independence. It also helped trigger the French Revolution and set the stage for the world’s first nation states. It was the best-selling book of the 18th century and, were sales scaled up to today’s population, they would have achieved 150 million. It is an amazing story.

LISTEN HERE:  Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – originally broadcast “In Our Time” on Radio 4 by Melvyn Bragg 21 Jan, 2015

 

 

My own book was originally titled in tribute to Thomas Paine and recently republished in 2014, retitled The State Is Out Of Date, We Can Do It Better

The wheel needs a new hub, not just another revolution

 

The OTHER Drug Problem

The real drug problems rarely make headlines – those caused by pharmaceuticals designed to be addictive. We recently discovered that opioid painkillers claim the lives of 312 Americans every week, compared to 285 lost to murder. Since 2000 these drugs have killed three times as many Americans as were killed in Vietnam. A further 160 die each week from overdosing on heroin, most having become addicted via prescribed opioids. Yet nobody is fighting a war against them, while Big Pharma pockets big profits and markets them freely. Competition to Big Pharma is suppressed by law enforcement agencies spending vast sums of taxpayers’ money in the War on Drugs. Sometimes major drug enforcement agencies work with drug cartels, enforcing monopolies and suppressing free enterprise in the unlicensed drugs trade. For more on opioid painkiller killers, here’s the Forbes coverage.

FOR insight on the drugs problem, here’s a paragraph from “The Drugs Problem,” a chapter in The State Is Out of Date, We Can Do It Better. 

Society does have a problem with drug use. It is a serious problem that is getting worse. For some reason, though, the perception of this problem is focused entirely on the very small range of drugs that are being used illegally. We cannot ignore the very real problems faced by those who are using drugs prescribed by doctors. Their lives can be damaged and sometimes destroyed as a result of diagnostic error, their own abuse of the prescribed stocks (few recreational drug users have a month’s supply in a bottle), or just years of being dependent on pharmaceuticals with known side effects. These legal drugs must be obtained through controlled channels, but these channels translate into a multi-billion dollar industry throughout the world—the real drugs trade. While we condemn it when drug barons bribe and seduce judges, police, and politicians, we think nothing of the lobbyists employed by the pharmaceutical industry in Washington DC, who number more than three for every single Congressman or Senator.

The most successful, and profitable, pharmaceutical drugs are those which do not cure, but instead create a lifelong habit for the user…”

the wheel needs a new hub, not just another revolution

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Is wealth inequality the primary problem?

It is not a case of who is paying their “fair share” of taxation but a case of taxation itself not being fair. That massive extraction, by the state, of wealth produced by human activity is at the root of our civilization’s troubles, and underwrites all its wars. Why do we think it okay that we cannot choose how to deploy half of the wealth we create? The answer simply lays in finding another way of doing things we are already doing.

Outrage has been prompted by Oxfam’s estimate that the richest 1% will soon own 51% of the world’s wealth. A predictable “steal from the rich and give to the poor” response rallies public support and thereby diverts blame from the state for its inability to deliver the services for which we pay them well. The problem is inherent waste and inefficiency, not who pays how much tax. Politicians won’t actually squeeze much out of their super-rich masters but we’ll  support taxes implemented in the name of wealth redistribution and call if fair play. Taxation is the taking of money against the threat of damage for non-compliance – always has been. It’s rather like mugging, and not a lot gets sprinkled back. Over 70% of taxation is not upon our earnings anyway, but in every pound we spend; each cup of coffee, pair of shoes, drop of petrol or alcohol, massage, rent payment and watt of electricity bears the burden of a heavy state. Wealthy consumers already pay a lot more taxes on that account. If we doubled income taxes on the super-rich the extra revenue would not even cover the interest owed to bankers by our state for creating the money that prevented other bankers from going bankrupt as a result of immoral dealings. Don’t expect it to dent the deficit, and know that many of the wealthiest 1% have fingers, hands, and heads in governments across the world and would be less assured of their wealth without that leverage and control.

Were the answer to every problem “more taxation” then we would soon have 0.0% control over how we deploy our wealth, instead of just 50%.  Only 10 of those 50% in taxes is eventually spent within the category of “redistribution of wealth,” which is neither an underlying purpose of taxation, nor a priority. Are we truly incapable of re-distributing our own wealth, voluntarily, to organizations with genuine charitable credentials and goals in tune with our own?

The combination of all levied taxes sees half or more of the total wealth created by people and companies sucked into the state to fund its spending. The state overspends and borrows the excess from banks, to be repaid by our future wealth creation (which must constantly increase for the scheme to work). It works for the central banks who create that money, literally, out of thin air. It’s smoke and mirrors.

“The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” William Paterson, founder in 1694 of the Bank of England,

The state is not a necessary evil and society will not collapse into dog-eat-dog savagery without them sucking out its lifeblood to preserve order. 98% of us are caring human beings who cherish the idea of living in peace and harmony with each other. We are good at doing that. Then some 2% of us are sociopaths who see the rest as a resource to be used and exploited, having no compassion for starving babies or tortured grandmothers of their own or any other race. Unsurprisingly, politics is a common career choice for sociopaths.

In our system sociopaths sometimes get to the very top. Historical examples abound, with our own era witnessing pre-planned wars waged on false pretenses destroying the lives of countless millions. That 98% cannot imagine a human being behaving so badly is the greatest strength of the 2%, and underpins the “Big Lie.” Adolf Hitler described this in Mein Kampf as a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Even after seeing “facts which prove” they “doubt and waver,” assuming there is “some other explanation.”

Politics is not even the main game in town, though it often appears to be the only one. Examples abound of civilization self-organizing without the need of top-down control by force. In our current system, democratic or otherwise, we too often find scum rising to the top and calling the shots. In a free system we develop means to eject the scum and let cream rise to the top. The feedback loop of customer reviews does just this at Tripadvisor, Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, and other new age businesses. We can do it. We have the technology, and I’m off on a tangent here which could stretch into an entire book but will not since it is already written.

TAXATION EXPLAINED, by Jean Baptiste Colbert, 17th century finance minister to Louis XIV :
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”

Talk of social engineering, climate management, and wealth redistribution is all about reducing the hissing.

the wheel needs a new hub, not just another revolution

Strangled for selling single cigarettes, allegedly

Eric Garner was killed by NY police who suspected him of selling “loosies” on the street – cigarettes sold singly, not in packs. The policeman who choked him to death was acquitted of any wrongdoing, triggering mass protests across America.

In “The State Is Out Of Date – We Can Do It Better” I recall a cigarette-related event witnessed in Morocco many years ago that opened my eyes to the obstacles to free enterprise imposed by the state.

From Chapter 20, The State of Business:    An early insight into this restrictive climate came to me some years ago at a cafe in Marrakesh, where I noticed a young man standing on the corner each evening with a pack of twenty cigarettes, selling them singly to passersby. The customers were able to better manage their habit by buying the cigarettes singly. The young man was able to set up his own business as a retailer for the cost of a pack of cigarettes—an almost inconceivable concept in our developed “free” democracy. The bridge is great between the skills we need to manage our own enterprise, and those needed to do so according to the requirements of the state. Many are unable to cross this bridge, despite having all the skills that nature demands to interact in this way with society. 

Police accused Eric Garner of practicing the “free” part of “free enterprise” and killed him while enforcing regulations imposed to keep us safe. He had proclaimed his innocence of that victimless crime. Michael Brown was confronted in Ferguson Missouri for jaywalking and shot dead – for ignoring street-crossing rules. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against regulation or the policing of it – it is an essential part of community. What we need is connected regulation generated from the bottom up and voluntarily adhered to by those who want to enjoy the social facilities, connections, and benefits that accompany respect for that regulation. Such self-government would evolve along with society without creating volumes of victimless crimes and monsters like the War on Drugs or the Common Agricultural Policy.

Earlier in the book we look at coercion, the basic tool of every sovereign power, and see that refusal to pay a parking ticket could ultimately lead to one’s death.  As it happens, suspicion of unlawful cigarette selling was enough for Eric Garner.

From Chapter 8 of The State Is Out Of Date, titled Legitimizing Coercion:   “How does the state use coercion on us? Using a simple example like a parking fine, let us say that you absolutely refuse to pay this ticket or spend time in the court process trying to prove, say, that the police had blocked you from returning to your car in time due to a security scare. Anyway, no way are you going to pay a hundred dollars, pounds, or whatever to this uncaring and unresponsive state-sanctioned collection agency. Neither will you run and hide, accept losing your freedom and going to jail, nor will you let anyone impound your car or in any way take your money from you. So what does the state do? They will get your money, and they will coerce you into paying it; assuming that you are a relatively sane person, you will abandon your righteous determination and pay them.

Why? Because coercion ultimately means that if you are not willing to pay the fine or go to jail or run away, you can be killed. Shocking, isn’t it? Of course the state has bailiffs and ways of seizing your hundred whatevers before it comes to this. But if you really did not want them to collect their fine and either had no assets or had made them inaccessible, then the state would come to put you in prison for non-payment. If you did not go into hiding or sought to successfully resist this, actively defending yourself from being seized or stunned or gassed, then they would by some means eventually overcome and incarcerate you, or you would avoid going to prison on account of being dead. They will never say, “Well played, mate, we acknowledge your determination as righteous and will no longer press you to pay the fine imposed by our courts.”

Coercion may have been the only means to deal with threats such as Napoleon and Hitler who were, in essence, fighting other rulers for dominion over territory and the people within it. Horrifying to think, but had they won we might be looking back at them as great  historic figures; a likely outcome when victors write the history. William the Conqueror got away with it, they did not. No visceral hatred of the English ever sent hoards of French or German people streaming onto cross-channel ferries armed with muskets and pickaxes. You need armies and governments to do that, or to protect us from governments and armies that do that. The more we spend on defense and security the more war and insecurity we will experience.

the wheel needs a new hub, not just another revolution

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Shot by police for threatening suicide

In the chapter of my book entitled Victimless Crimes I write of an imaginary situation where the police might shoot somebody for threatening suicide. Seeing it as an amusing concept, I never imagined it actually happening.

It happened in Utah when Jose Calzada, 35, called a suicide prevention hotline last Tuesday at 4am and threatened to kill himself. Seven hours later he was shot and killed by police, according to law enforcement. They shot him four or five times, just to be sure.

Quick-thinking detective Matt Gwynn explains: “Often police go into these situations with an ingrained mentality of looking at citizens as threats to the safety of the officers and thus feel empowered and justified to use lethal force as the suicidal person has already threatened to kill someone, themselves.”

It is not the first time police have shot those who admitted to thoughts of suicide. Earlier accounts in the original story here, at The Free Thought Project 

From The State Is Out Of Date, chapter 17

The state has various ways to protect us from doing things that it thinks are not good for us. It can take our money away in fines, confiscate our property, put us in jail, get us fired or liquidate our business. Hell . . . there are even situations where it can kill you to protect you from yourself. Even the right to take your own life is an offense in most parts of the world. I have this mad image in my mind of a crouching policeman shouting “Don’t jump or I’ll shoot!” to a would-be suicidée about to leap from the window ledge of a high-rise.

the wheel needs a new hub, not just another revolution

Order online,or from any bookstore.