Laura Knight Jadczyk

Eíriú-Eolas Breathing and Meditation Program

2009-09-13T11:15:00.003+02:00

As some of you may know, we have recently released a breathing-meditation program on CD/DVD. For those of you who are familiar with the Cassiopaean transmission you will need no introduction as to the reason and impetus for this audio video program as it is clearly discussed in recent sessions posted on our public forum. In the photo below, you see us making the video out in the back garden. The program is in three parts, the first being the introductory talk. This post is that audio CD transcribed so that you can get an idea of our approach (which is science based) and why this program really works! "Eíriú-Eolas" is an Irish-Gaelic term that means "Growth of Knowledge". The Éiriú Eolas technique constitutes a revival of an antediluvian - and, until now, mostly forgotten - "techno-spirituality" - the spiritual techniques of human kind before The Fall as revealed by the Cassiopaeans. This is a modern revival of an ancient breathing and meditation program revealed as THE TOOL that will help you relax and gently work through past emotional and psychological trauma, release repressed emotions and mental blockages that stand between you and True Peace, Happiness and ultimately, a successful, fulfilling life. That's the blurb, so let's get to the science.

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“Right exercises”, Gurdjieff said once, “which lead direct to the aim of mastering the organism and subjecting it's conscious and unconscious functions to the will, begin with breathing exercises. Without mastering breathing, nothing can be mastered. At the same time, to master breathing is not so easy”.

Gurdjieff made a few other comments about breathing especially some interesting remarks about how one person who is more highly developed than another could breathe the same air and if you took the exhalation from the two individuals and compared them, assuming you had the type of instrument that could determine exactly what they exhaled, there would be differences. In other words, that an individual who was more highly developed in some sort of esoteric sense, was able to extract more from the same air than someone who had less esoteric development.

Now these were very interesting remarks. Gurdjieff also talked about some movement exercises that could change a persons breathing and help them to master their breath, but aside from these very brief remarks, he didn't give us much in the way of indications or clues about exactly how one was to go about mastering their breathing and therefore being able to master their will.

Breathing exercises are an integral part of yoga training and have been for centuries. It is claimed that mastering breath can produce almost instantaneous changes in an individual’s physiology and there have been many reports of yogis who mastered this kind of breath training; who could perform extraordinary feats of endurance or production of heat or even in some cases were said to be able to levitate or to be able to endure long periods of physical discomfort or exercise or exertion.

But as Gurdjieff pointed out that, on the way of the yogi, the yogi can acquire a great deal of knowledge about the physiology, about the breath, about how to produce certain substances within their bodies by controlling their breathing or other related methods and yet can do nothing because they have not developed sufficient will or faith: Will being the provence of the way of the fakir, faith being the provence of the way of the monk.

Gurdjieff's way was called the fourth way and as he described it, was a way of working on all three aspects at once so that they all developed simultaneously so that ultimately, the individual can move into the fourth aspect which was the development of the permanent or crystallized soul or astral body or both. Yet we come back to what Gurdjieff said, that right exercises which lead to the aim of mastering the organism begin with breathing exercises. Without mastering breath, nothing can be mastered. And of course at the same time, mastering breathing is not so easy. In this respect, I want to share my own experience with breath exercises with you.

So lets go back to sometime in the early to mid 1980's. I was a mother of four young children at that time, three of them in diapers. I had suffered extensive injuries during delivery of the last child and I was unable to walk for a period of 6 months. I was confined to bed and this was, in addition to the conditions of my life, an extremely stressful situation to find myself in . Those of you who have read my story in the now out of print book “Amazing Grace”, will be familiar with the circumstances. At some point I hope to get “Amazing Grace” back on the internet, so those of you who can't obtain a copy can read about some of my earlier experiences. I have received many letters from readers of this story that have encouraged me to think that it is helpful for other people to read about the experiences of someone who has made all the same mistakes that everybody else makes and has gone through many of the same experiences that everybody else experiences and how I dealt with them.

So in “Grace”, I described my own early experiences with breathing exercises, with meditation and the extraordinary results that very quickly came as a consequence of undertaking a very simple set of exercises. But first, I want to talk a little bit about why to do it.

A Dr. Richard Brown gave a talk in February of 2005 in which he talked about stress. He said that stress is a world wide epidemic. The number one disease of adults in the world is depression. Depression is the most extreme form of stress. He further said that if you have significant anxiety, you have twice the risk of a heart attack. If you have significant depression over time, you have four times the risk of a heart attack. He added that stress can also increase the risk of cancer at an early age. Well, we all know that we live in a stressful world. But here is a clue: the stress response is vital for survival in times of danger. The problem only comes in when it is turned on too much, too strong and too often.

Stress is the result of the sympathetic nervous system fight or flight response being over aroused, too much, too strongly and too often. Stress increases dangerous inflammatory factors called cytokines. It damages the hippo-campus, causes memory loss; stress can cause mood disorders, it can reduce the brain’s ability to repair itself. It can increase abdominal fat and it can interfere with thyroid function. It even increases the stickiness of the blood which can lead to blood clots, heart attacks or strokes.

So all of those things are the bad things about stress but lets go back to that idea that the stress response is vital for survival in times of danger. We need to think about the world we live in and the dangers we face. Obviously our stress responses are telling us something, individually, socially, globally. There is danger out there, there is danger everywhere and we all need to understand why that danger is there, why our bodies are responding to stress.

There are a number of factors that contribute to stress in our lives. For example our ancestors were not routinely exposed to the types of poisons that we encounter in our daily environment. We have not evolved the proper physiological machinery to break down these toxins.

Today humans are exposed to more toxic chemicals than at any other time in their evolution on this planet. The poisoning of our civilization is not the result of progress however. It originates in the lack of common consideration for other people. We can have progress. We can have industrialization but we can also have it so that it does not produce so many poisons and toxins in our environment. Quite often the heads of large corporations will admit that cleaning up after themselves, lower their profit margins.

Apparently man also did not evolve in a toxic psychological environment. Most human beings have little defense against psychopathology. But that's a whole other subject and we have covered that in depth and in detail in many writings on our website, so we are not going to go into that in great depth here.

Early in the 20th century, farmers didn't try to kill all of the insects in any given region and accepted the fact that insects would be more numerous in some years than at other times. During bad years, they sprayed some pesticides that were toxic to the insects but not very deadly to people. But during the 1940's, DDT and other related petrochemicals were developed into sprays for killing malaria carrying mosquitoes. These new pesticides were very effective, destroying many mosquitoes and also helpful insects and other species. DDT type pesticides were cheap and could be produced from plentiful crude oil supplies. Farmers, corporations and consumers were excited by this.

Now they could kill all the bugs, save all the crops and make lots of money. In the cities people were spraying DDT everywhere, If the first spraying didn't work, you could spray again, kill even more bugs. These people didn't realize that the bugs had tremendous reproduction capacities and some of them always survived and those that survived produced millions of baby bugs that were not affected by the poisons. So we are immersed in a poisonous environment because petrochemical toxins are fat soluble. They permeate all biological membranes including human skin, the skin of fruits and vegetables. Toxic chemicals saturate our food. They saturate the newspapers that you read and handle with your hands. The cars that you drive load the air with toxic chemicals. Computer chips that drive office machinery: if you set up a computer or television, you know, take it out of the box, set it up and turn it on, you can smell the toxic solvents evaporating off the equipment for weeks.

Poisons are everywhere. On the vegetables you eat, the office where you work, the schools where you study and even in your home. Nietzsche once said that if it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger but there is another saying: the straw that broke the camel’s back. Anybody can become overwhelmed by physiological stress. That's one of the main contributors to the stresses in our environment and, as I mentioned, human beings did not evolve in a toxic environment either physically or psychologically.

So we have psychological stressors, fear responses and we have physical stressors from the toxicity in our environment that makes us less able to withstand the psychological stress that we are subjected to, and we go round and round and round getting more and more stressed everyday.

We've talked a great deal about detoxing the body on our websites and of course our work is focused on detoxing the mind and the emotions, sorting out unhealthy programming from childhood, from society, from religion. Helping the person free up their creativity and face our reality with some equanimity and balance.

But clearly the storm of toxicity in our world has increased to such a pitch that we need stronger methods and techniques and that is what we are going to talk about today. Because there is something very simple you can do to alleviate the effects of stress. Well it's not exactly accurate to say simple because it does need application but in a certain sense it is simple: you can stimulate you vagus nerve. This is not the time and place to debate the issue of smoking versus anti-smoking. I'll just point out that nicotine induces the neurological structures of the body to create more acetylcholine receptors which greatly benefits stress relief and one might seriously ask a question – how is it that a government that has never been shown to do anything that is truly for the benefit for the people, could be considered to be doing a good thing by promoting the scare campaign about cigarettes and smoking, and inducing human beings to follow draconian laws in regard to something that has been shown over many years to be quite beneficial, and in fact it makes it very handy to have something that soothes stress get blamed for all the ills of society when, in fact, the majority of those ills are produced by industrial toxins and the poisons that are in almost everything in any room you are sitting in at any given moment!

From your computer to your telephone, to your television, your carpets, the paint on your walls, the materials your house is built out of, the clothing you wear, the skin and surface of your vegetables, in your meat. Just about every where you look, your entire environment is packed with horrible cancer causing toxins. And yet people are made to believe that if they just stop smoking, it will be all better while the industrial polluters laugh all the way to the bank with all the money they are making because they don't have to produce goods and services for human beings that are not toxic and not poisonous.

So ask yourself that question - is it really possible that a government that allows that kind of pollution to go on, that allows pharmaceuticals companies to poison your children with toxic chemicals placed in infant vaccinations and to give drugs to people that have been proven to be more detrimental than the condition for which those drugs were prescribed – can such a government really be looking out for your best interests when they tell you, “oh, if you just stop smoking, if we pass laws against smoking, if we make criminals out of smokers…” – are they really acting in your best interest? I think not.

Nevertheless as I said, the vagus nerve controls the relaxation response through the transmitter acetylcholine. Vagal nerve stimulation therapy using a pace maker-like device implanted in the chest, is a treatment that's been used since 1997 to control seizures in epilepsy patients. Now get this, they are using a pace maker-like device, surgically implanted in the chest to stimulate the vagus verve which controls seizures in epilepsy patients. This little gadget has been approved for treating drug resistant cases of clinical depression, but for god’s sake, don't smoke! Every two to five minutes, this little machine stimulates the vagus nerve causing your diaphragm to contract. It's recently been approved in the US for the treatment of depression. Works about as well as anti-depressants. However this little gadget is going to put you back by about $25,000 and it only stimulates the left vagus nerve and it only affects a small portion of the vagus nerve.

Vagus nerve stimulation may also be achieved by what is called a vagal manoeuvre. One of these vagal manoeuvres consists in just holding your breath for a few seconds. Another is dipping your face in cold water; coughing sharply; tensing your stomach muscles as if to bear down to have a bowel movement. Patients with supraventricular tachycardia, atrial fibrillation and other illnesses are being trained to perform these vagal manoeuvres to keep their heart beat regular.

Studies have been done on the effects of electronic vagal stimulation and these have shown that this little gadget induces the release of hormones such as prolactin, vasopressin and oxytocin. Oxytocin is know as the “cuddle” hormone. If a group of animals come together in a social context, they release a lot of oxytocin. It is also released during child birth and during sexual activity as well as during breast feeding. Serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, that is anti-depressants, activate oxytocin release.

So let’s think a little bit about this vagus nerve. If stimulating the vagus nerve is the key to sorting out your stress, I think we need to know just a little bit about where it comes from and what it does. The vagus enters the brain stem, it then splits into what's called an upper route that stimulates the thalamus that affects the cortex, which is the thinking part of your brain, and a lower path that goes into the limbic system or the emotional brain. So it goes into two directions: it can affect your thinking, your reasoning ability and your emotions and your feelings.

The limbic system comprises a number of anatomical functional regions. The hypothalamus takes car of the four 'Fs' - feeding, flight, fight and mating. The four 'F's' hmm. I count three 'F's' and an 'M'. I think somebody has been trying to censor .

In any event the amygdale is where you feel joy, humor and anger and in mammals, the amygdale is where all of the species-specific programmed actions come from, thus it's crucial for survival. And once again we want to go back to that idea that stress is a response to danger in the environment. It's the species specific programmed reaction. We need to think about the fact that all of us are feeling some sort of reaction to something in our environment that scares the hell out of us and it's species-specific to the majority of human beings. But there is a small minority that apparently do not feel this species-specific reaction to our world. In fact they contribute to creating it. I think that you should give that just a little bit of thought.

In post-traumatic stress disorder, the activity of the amygdala is seriously altered. This makes me think of the fact that there have been studies that show that the amygdala is defective or quite different in psychopaths and it's also been shown in some studies that the effects of a psychopaths on a normal human being causes post-traumatic stress disorder. So here you have an individual who has a defective amygdala, who alters the amygdala of their victims. I find that to be fascinating.

In any event, back to our vagus nerve. Both the right and the left vagus nerves descend from the brain in the carotid sheath, lateral to the carotid artery. Now the carotid artery as you know is that artery on the side of your neck where you can put your fingertips and you can feel your heart-beat there. It extends through the jugular foramen down below the head, to the neck, chest and abdomen where it contributes to the innervation of the viscera, that is, it's connected to your gut. The left and right vagus nerves ascend into the neck or descend from the brain between the trachea and the esophagus and this is where breathing is going to become very important.

Stimulating the vagus nerve, you can affect the high route from the thalamus to the cortex. When you affect the cortex in this way you produce what is called SMR, sensory motor rhythm. This is an activated pattern in the parietal cortex that is associated with the state of relaxed vigilance. In other words, it makes you very aware and very alert but at the same time you are relaxed and not stressed. Animals or humans exhibiting this SMR, show improve sleep, digestion, thinking, memory. Their brains also become much more resistant to seizures. It's also been said that this SMR prevents you from craving drugs and overeating. Well that sounds like an ideal thing to aim for.

Apparently you can achieve all these benefits by self stimulating the vagus nerve via controlled breathing exercises. Remember the left and right vagus nerves pass between the trachea and esophagus. Breath re-training that induces stimulation of the vagus nerves reduces sympathetic nervous system over arousal. It increases para-sympathetic nervous system activity - the relax, recuperate and regenerate system - and this calms you down.

The beneficial effects of controlled breathing on the vagus nerve occur primarily during exhalation. Supposedly, during exhaling, your heart rate decelerates and during the period of deceleration of the heart, the vagus becomes active. Shallow, rapid breathing patterns inhibit the vagus because the period of vagal activity is too short. By slowing down your breathing you create more vagal activity accentuating it's relaxing and regenerating effects.

There are other serious problems that can develop from wrong breathing and these are outline by Paul Ingraham, a registered massage therapist who has written extensively about these problems on the Internet. You might want to look him up and read his articles. In any event Paul tells us that human beings are born breathing deeply and diaphragmatically all the time, that is. they breathe naturally with their diaphragm, and virtually all self-imposed limitations begin with holding the breath.

Long before we ever think that it might be embarrassing to sing, we are already holding our breath. We do it because we sense just how dangerously expressive and vitalizing deep breathing is. In fact, part of the reason that singing is so expressive and beneficial to the organism is because it involves so much breathing.

Now this is interesting because one of the things that we have done at many of our workshops is to give our workshop attendees a bit of relaxation and entertainment and to get them to bond with each other: we have karaoke sessions! We've got this machine that supports four, five microphones and all these karaoke CD's that display the words on the television and you sing along and you have a full band and backup singers and everything! It's a lot of fun. Everybody has a secret rock star hiding away inside! But we've noticed that when people get together and sing, they breathe differently and they get a lot of catharsis. They get a lot of emotional relief from singing. You can sing one of those down home, good old boy, heart breaking songs about your lost love and re-experience all the emotions of some heart breaking experience you had at some point in your life and even maybe make yourself cry a little bit. And it is very cathartic. It's very releasing. But in any event, not only is breath the engine of the sounds that we make, deep inhalations and exhalations are inextricably linked with emotionality.

To the Chinese, breath had the metaphorical importance to we give to blood. To them, breath was life. To breathe was to be and to breathe deeply was to move your 'chi' or 'qi' depending on how you pronounce it which was your soul or at least the energy of your soul.

Ingraham further tells us that many common aches and pains particularly around the neck, the head and the shoulders ,may be caused by inefficient breathing. The connection between dysfunctional breathing and pain is straightforward in principle. If the diaphragm isn't doing it's job, the muscles in the upper chest try to take over. Unfortunately those muscles aren't built for routine respiration and they get exhausted and eventually injure themselves by taking over the job of the diaphragm.

The diaphragm is your primary breathing muscle. It's a thin, wide sheet of muscle that separates your thoracic cavity from your lower abdominal cavity. It has a high dome shape. When it contracts as it does when you breathe or should be doing when you breathe, it flattens out. In other words, it's like a plunger. Like a toilet plunger. It's like a high dome rubber thing and then when you smash it flat, it creates pressure. So it not only creates pressure on the lower part of the abdominal cavity, it creates a suction, a vacuum in the upper thoracic cavity which then causes your lungs to expand and you take in air. That's basically how breathing is suppose to happen. It is suppose to be done with the diaphragm. When the diaphragm contracts, that dome flattens and as it flattens it pushes down on the viscera, like a hydraulic plunger. Since the watery viscera, your intestines and so forth, cannot be compressed, they get out of the way and where do they go? They go out. The abdominal contents are forced down and out so that when you inhale with your diaphragm, your belly expands. That is, good breathing is usually described as abdominal breathing.

Now everybody in our culture is upset by the very idea of having a bulging belly. We spend our time going around sucking it in and keeping it flat and people naturally, as a result of social and cultural programming, tend to not want to breathe with their bellies, so they breathe very shallowly so that their belly won't move. This is a very bad thing. When people don't breathe well, they tend to breathe in reverse, that is the movement of their abdomen during respiration is the opposite of what is normal and healthy. Instead of letting the belly move outward during inhalation they try to suck it in and when they exhale and they are no longer in any danger of having their belly bulge out and make them look bad in profile, that's when the relax the belly. So everybody is breathing in reverse. In other words most people don't use their diaphragms to breathe.

Now the thing is, exhaling without the diaphragm is not a big deal. It's inhaling that's the problem Without inhaling with the diaphragm it's very hard work because somehow or other you are going to have to get the rib cage to expand so that you will create that vacuum so that lungs will fill with air. The only muscles that are really designed for serious rib lifting are the intercostals and they can only do so much. People end up recruiting the pectoralis minors, sternocleidomastoids and the scalene muscles. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The trouble is when you do it all the time. Imagine a handful of muscles the size of pencils trying to lift your rib cage several time per minutes all day long, everyday, day after day, week after week, year after year. That is the ultimate specific problem with not using your diaphragm.

Now, the scalene muscles are muscles that are on each side of your neck. It is like a triangle. If you reach up to just below your ear, turn your head slightly sideways, you'll feel a muscle that goes from just below your ear down forward and it's usually a very pronounced muscle, goes down forward and it connects to your collar bone almost at the middle of your neck, almost at that little hollowed place; that’s the sternocleidomastoideus. And then you can feel another one that comes down from there and kind of goes back and connects to the muscles, go across the back of your shoulders; that’s the trapezius. So you get these two muscles and it creates kind of a triangle. The scalenes are located in this triangular area, you can feel them in the deep hollow of this triangular area.

Okay now these muscles are pretty powerful for their size but they are not designed for lifting your rib cage several thousands times per day. They can get worn out, sensitive and rigid. I ngraham tell us that the scalenes are an emotional muscle group. That they have unusual sensitivity to emotional states and an unusual ability to generate controlled emotional states. Together with other throat muscles, the scalenes determine the pliability of the head body connection and the vitality of your voice. Given their privileged position and peculiar significance, the scalenes are powerful agents of change and release of emotional states. And also you need to consider that these muscles are controlling the neck and the neck is where the vagus nerve passes between the trachea and the esophagus.

Now to stop breathing with your chest and throat muscles - which many people do - you have to learn how to breathe with your diaphragm. This is a little bit hard because the diaphragm is a muscle you can't see and you can't feel it directly. It's this big sheet of muscle that divides your thorax from your lower abdominal cavity. To learn to use your diaphragm, you have to make results visible. Ingraham suggest that you find a good heavy book, lie down on your back with your knees up. Place the book on your belly and that means the part of the belly just below your belly button. Take a deep breathe. Now remember the object is not to move this book by tensing up belly muscles. The object is to move this book by pushing down on the viscera and having the viscera force the book to move up, okay? It's absolutely impossible to contract your diaphragm without your belly moving out. So if you are doing this correctly that book should move up and down.

Now usually if you start, you can get it to move about two inches. You want to work to the point where you can get that book to move at least four inches every time you contract your diaphragm and take a breath. The object is again, to move the book with your breathing, not by clenching some abdominal muscles and forcing that book to move up in the air. It must be done by the breathing. So you need to practice this. He also suggests breathing diaphragmatically once you've isolated the feeling with the book, in a swimming pool because this is a very good exercises for the diaphragm because the pressure of the water is equal all the way around your body and it's kind of like lifting weights with your diaphragm. You can strengthen the diaphragm this way.

Now we are going to come to the topic of what Ingraham calls 'bio-energetic' round breathing. He says that everybody is emotionally constipated unless of course you are a sociopath. Well we already have mentioned pathologies so we won't go off in that direction at this point. Most people repress most of what they really feel and really think and this begins in early infancy and if you think about it, in early childhood, whenever you felt like you were in trouble or whenever you felt stresses or whenever when something went wrong or you were been oppressed or punished or in some way in a situation that was unpleasant or uncomfortable, you were probably holding your breath. And as you grew older and you become aware of the socio-cultural norms of having a flat stomach, you were also repressing your breathing. So all through your life, you've learned to breathe the wrong way.

In any event, shallow breath and emotional constipation go together and they can only be fixed together. Obviously the best cure for shallow breathing is learning how to deep breathe. Ingraham recommends what he calls 'round' breathing that was pioneered in the psychotherapeutic context by Carl Jung and popularized by his student Alexander Lowen who called it 'bio-energetic' breathing. It's also similar to what the Chinese call round breathing.

Now let me tell you a little bit about this round breathing. Recently we had a very wonderful person who came to teach us a breathing technique that is been widely promoted and taught around the world by a certain Indian guru. This was a very interesting experience and we later did a little research on this kind of breathing because we thought that it was interesting that it was put together in exactly this way and let me say that that's because we were aware of other breathing techniques and other things. But in any event, this guru says that he was given this technique in a meditation or it was a revelation to him and this is what he should do to teach the world how to breathe this way because it produces emotional catharsis and has very fast results helping people to reduce their stress and to achieve emotional balance.

The breathing consist of several techniques that are well known to practitioners of yoga. One of our group members had learned this very techniques in yoga classes years ago and she even learned techniques that are considered to be advanced techniques according to this particular guru's series of classes or workshops. They teach a certain two or three techniques in the first series and then they teach what they call more advanced techniques in the second advance workshop and maybe even more advanced ones further on. But apparently the techniques that our group member learned in regular yoga classes were identical to these techniques that we were taught that are claimed to be a revelation by this guru. Now I don't want to say anything definitely negative about this, but there were a couple of problems that we had with some of the breathing techniques of this program, the first one being that, the claim being made that it was revealed. And then of course it was patented or copyrighted, or at least the name of it was. And the second one was there was a part of the breathing techniques that includes very, very fast hyperventilating breaths. We don't necessarily think that hyperventilation is the way to go and I'll explain a little further, why.

Let me first just say this about rapid breathing. When you exercise there is a strong metabolic demand for intense respiration. Your body needs oxygen and more urgently and it needs to get rid of carbon dioxide and other cellular respiration by-products. In that way, breathing fast and hard makes sense physiologically. However when you breathe hard just for the heck of it, something completely different happens. According to this guru and some other advocates of the hyperventilation system, you can begin to feel a vivid body awareness when you hyperventilate, and this fast breathing whips up an altered state in which emotions are heightened and it becomes very hard to hold on to the rigid limitations that define the edge of your comfort zone. According to them, breathing hard and fast, very, very fast, helps to expand your comfort zone by booting you out of it. Well that's all fine and good, however remember what we learned earlier, that when you breathe fast, you are not stimulating your vagus nerve. Remember, the beneficial effects of controlled breathing on the vagus occur primarily during exhalation. Shallow, rapid breathing patterns inhibit the vagus because the period of vagal activity is too short. By slowing down your breathing you create more vagal activity accentuating it's relaxing and regenerating effects. So, lets consider what does happens when you do this hyperventilation.

Hyperventilation type breathing tends to cause three allegedly harmless but definitely alarming side effects. Paresthesia, tetanus and tremors. Advocates of this particular system that include the hyperventilation phase and the round breathing, say these these experiences are harmless and they go away with practice. Paresthesia means altered sensation, usually in the form of tingling that starts around the mouth, the finger tips and then the toes. It advances and spreads throughout the body and as it advances it's usually accompanied by something that is very similar to tetanus, that is a sustained but mild contraction of muscles. The hands and feet can tend to turn into claws and supposedly your lips will feel like you've just had a shot of novocaine at the dentist. They say that it wears off quickly once you stop breathing and this is true - I've experienced it - and then they say that tremors maybe experienced in one part of the body or the other and this will also past rapidly.

These symptoms supposedly are produced by an altered mind body state that is both physical and psychological. I am not sure about that. I think this is all entirely physiological. I think that tetanus is a consequence of changes in blood chemistry. It's a very distinctive sensation and it may tend to produce what seem to be emotional releases but the question is, are these releases permanent and long lasting or are they just a temporary effect of having your mental state altered and you've been convinced by propaganda that once you've experienced this altered state of consciousness, it is suppose to have some kind of effect on you? You know, it's hard to say. The only thing I can say is that our breathing program is not based on any sort of hyperventilation or extremely fast, round breathing, though there are some sections of it where quicker breathing is going to employed but it's going to be employed in a very specific way and it's going to be very deep and there is going to be adequate exhalations so that the vagus nerve can be properly stimulated.

If you read my own account of what I experienced as a consequence of practicing deep breathing exercises in a meditative state, you'll see exactly what I mean. That there is no necessity to ever engage in these hyperventilation practices. I never did, and the emotional releases and the benefits that I experienced, far surpassed anything I've ever heard described by this people who claim that this hyperventilation is beneficial emotionally, mentally or physiologically. I just don't think that it is necessary. I think that you can get much faster results and my experience and the experience of others that I've worked with, show that you can get much faster and much better results with deep breathing, with regular breathing, with long periods of exhalation, with emptying the lungs completely and carefully each time you breathe and also using the proper meditation techniques.

So getting back to round breathing, as Ingraham said, round breathing is fast, deep, continuous breathing that is hyperventilatory and gets you all dizzy and emotionally vulnerable. We are not going to be doing that. We are going to be talking about a kind of round breathing that is not hyperventilatory. And the fact is, that doing regular, deep breathing exercises as I am going to teach you, you very well will become emotional at some point. Maybe not the first time but there will be deep emotional releases at some point in your exercises. Most people feel like crying. Feeling sad or angry and frustrated are common reactions. Some people may feel like they want to hit something. For most of us, oceans of sadness exist inside us. Oceans of pain because of the hurts that we have experienced and the hurts that we've done to others. This kind of things can be deeply released if you practice controlled breathing regularly.

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The Eíriú-Eolas Breathing Program is now available on QFGPublishing.com!! The set contains 1 DVD and 2 CDs. The Limited Special Edition comes with an autographed copy of the Prayer of the Soul. Grab a copy today!

Associated Content Takes Down SOTT Server

2009-06-22T13:00:00.004+02:00

SOTT has been shut down due to a legal demand by a gang called "Associated Content". It was sent to the hotmail account of one of the editors on June 20, which obviously we didn't get since sott email is received at sott(at)sott.net. Anyway, this morning we received the following from our server people:

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Please respond to the undersigned with your decision.

DMCA: 1. The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on _http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1375139/feminist_perspectives_on_natural_childbirth.html?cat=7

2. It appears on http://www.sott.net/articles/show/186797-Feminist-Perspectives-on-Natural-Childbirth

3. Please contact us at designated_agent@associatedcontent.com

We are: Associated Content, Inc. 88 Steele St. Suite 400 Denver, CO 80209 F: 720-214-0293

4. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

5. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

6. Tori Hyman, On behalf of Designated Agent, Associated Content

--

Tori E. Hyman 88 Steele Street, Suite 400 Denver, Colorado 80206 P: 720-214-1000 | F: 720-214-0293 associatedcontent.com

The question is, of course, what is "Associated Content"? I decided to do a little investigating. According to their site:

Associated Content is an Open Content Network. AC's platform enables anyone to participate in the new content economy by publishing content on any topic, in any format (text, video, audio and images), and connects that content to consumers, partners and advertisers.

* Sources benefit in three major ways beyond the opportunity to publish: fair payment compensation, online discoverability and distribution through our partner sites. Anyone can become a Source. Click here to learn more and sign up.

* Associated Content publishes authentic, useful and informative content on nearly every conceivable topic, produced by real people sharing real-world expertise from diverse perspectives. Search our library to see what we have, or create an RSS feed of content that interests you.

* The depth and breadth of our library is the perfect match for our partners who desire authentic content for their own websites or to advertise against at AssociatedContent.com. If we don't have the content you need, our Sources can quickly and affordably generate credible, engaging content on any topic. Click here to learn more about what we offer our partners.

Corporate History

Associated Content was founded by Luke Beatty in Denver, Colorado, in 2005. Luke, who developed search advertising and taxonomy solutions at WAND, Inc. before founding AC, envisioned a business that would open the content economy to the world by allowing anybody to publish content in any form. Today, with its vast library of unique multimedia content, diverse community of Sources and scalable platform, Associated Content provides consumers, brands, and publishers with a wide range of quality content.

Obviously, the sott editor who selected this article should have checked out this site a bit better and, having done so, would have determined that it is not a reliable source for information. (Do some research into "WAND, Inc." too, just for fun. Their legal disclaimer page is a gas!)

But, even more curious is that this "take down" notice came as it did, without warning. I have never been able to get a server to take down my own material that has been pirated with such a letter... so it is curious that others are able to do so so easily, without even demonstrating that they have taken the necessary steps to notify the object of their nefarious intentions. One wonders about the "connections" that Associated Content may have?

Looking a bit further, it seems that this person - Juniper M Russo Tarascio, the author of the article in question - is rather militant about his/her "rights" in the financial sense. See this Link and this one.

I think that what SOTT.net will do from here on out is to remove the text (and link) of any article we have received a complaint about, and replace it with the take-down notice so that our readers can know which sites to visit and which to avoid. With SOTT's growing readership, that should make some waves. But then, maybe it is SOTT's growing readership that is worrying somebody? Or am I being too conspiratorial?

It is, indeed, a "sign of the times."

UPDATE! SOTT.net has received an email from Juniper as follows:

Subject: DMCA Nazis and Other Stuff Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:05:46 -0500 From: Juniper **** To: sott(at)sott.net
Hi There,

I'm a SOTT reader and the author of the article "Feminist Perspectives on Natural Childbirth" that caused the recent brouhaha. I wanted to write to you guys and let you know that I was actually very happy when I saw that SOTT had published one of my articles. I was a little embarrassed since it wasn't one of my best (it was written at 2:00 am with a teething baby in my lap) but I actually had no problem whatsoever with SOTT reprinting the material.

I'm a freelance writer and I write for a number of "credible" sources, but I use AC for Op/Ed pieces, newsy bloggy stuff, and topics that are too political for other sources to publish. Writing for Associated Content is a labor of love-- I get paid all of about $3 per article on average. I really don't care if other sites want to republish my work, especially when they're sites that I support, like SOTT.

I have only had ONE article removed in over a year working as a freelance writer. SOTT links to Ning's removal notification, and to a forum where the members of the site defame me (without having the slightest clue who I am or how much money I don't make). Though SOTT cites that as evidence that I'm "militant" about copyright law, I'm actually not. I had the swine flu article removed from Ning only because it was a very hot topic and the reprint had surpassed my original copy on Google-- costing me about 10,000 pageviews. I get paid by pageviews, not by article, and I'm raising a family of three at well below the poverty line. I only bothered to have that ONE article removed because it was affecting my ability to earn a living.

SOTT's republication of my Natural Childbirth article didn't cost me a dime, because it was never a particularly popular article to begin with -- and because I never expected to make any "real" money on an op/ed piece like that. I really didn't care that it was republished, so please don't make me out to be a DCMA Nazi.

I'm really upset about the fact that SOTT- a website that I visit daily-- would be defaming me just because AC was bullying you guys with copyright law. For the record, I'm actually a fan and frequent reader of SOTT, and I was personally very happy to see that I was republished there.

This has been a lot of mess over an article that I was never even particularly fond of.

Before you defame or attack a writer, please make sure you ACTUALLY know who's looking at the other monitor. It hurts a lot to see a site that I respect call me "militant" about my financial rights, when I am neither militant nor financially well-off. I'm also cringing at the fact that anyone took the people at Ning seriously when they accused me of "profiting enormously" and being a money-grubber because I wasn't happy about losing pay to plagiarism. I've got rent to pay and a family to feed, but I'm by no means militant about DCMA.
You're welcome to republish this email, if you want. I don't want any other SOTT readers to think that I'm opposed to the SOTT's cause.

Cheers, Juniper Russo Tarascio

This information puts additional light on the situation and SOTT sincerely apologizes for any upset we may have caused Ms. Tarascio. What is important to note is the fact that Ms. Tarascio has informed us of the following curious fact:

SOTT's republication of my Natural Childbirth article didn't cost me a dime, because it was never a particularly popular article to begin with

In other words, it was Associated Content's sole decision to take this action in consideration of an article that was not even popular and had been receiving exposure on SOTT since January of 2009. How curious is that?

And The Beat Goes On

2009-05-05T13:57:00.002+02:00

There was a really snarky little comment posted to this blog yesterday that went as follows:

With all the things going on in the world right now, this is the best you can come up with? I am quite dissapointed Laura. You had us all by the edge of our seats with the Cass experiment, and now we get the joy of a post once in 3 months and it is so far out in left field. Anonymous

Actually, the link to the post about Sam Vaknin wasn't so far out in left field. As it happens, the makers of this documentary contacted me for info about Vaknin and I shared my research with them along with my opinion that Vaknin was a psychopath and not a narcissist. Apparently, the experts thought the same thing. Vaknin is that particular type of psychopath that I write about a great deal, so it's not so far out in left field. Geeze, I kinda feel like the Dixie Chicks who were told to "shut up and sing" after Natalie Mains' took a stand against Dubya and the Reich.

Fact is, I have a LOT of other interests and activities besides the Cs and esoterica. In addition to that, the past year has been a doozie for me, what with surgery, a protracted battle to recover my health, the Pepin Lawsuit, other life-threatening sickness in the family, the long and laborious clean-up after the January storm, and the ever present background of work on the second volume of "The Secret History of the World: The Horns of Moses". We are also back on track to making a series of videos after being side-tracked by my health problems, and SOTT will be resuming regular podcasts in the near future. But don't expect anything to be "the same" because we are always learning new things, trying new things, and sharing what we learn with our readers and listeners!

As for some of my other interests, I recently thought about posting about Crate Training for dogs. Since we had a litter of puppies in February (a really bright spot in our life which is all-too-often way too serious and grim, what with facing down lies and liars every day), I had to prepare a lot of paperwork for the new owners when time came to sell the little darlings. I have had such great results crate training my dogs I wanted to make sure that if the new owners of our precious little pups would do it right! A crate is NOT a punishment, it is a home, a den, the one place where the dog is in total charge of his environment. Unless, of course, he decides, like our eldest Sheltie did, to go around the house and collect items from everyone's room to store in there. He would collect socks, bras, slippers, and so on. He never chewed on anything, he just collected it! One day we found my reading glasses in there along with a book called "The Art of Thinking." The corners of the pages were damp so we figured out where he had stopped his perusal of the volume!

So, anyway, I think that a really thorough, practical guide to crate training is much needed. I'm not really happy with what is available on the net. (You can enjoy our dogs along with us by viewing my photo album of them HERE.) I gave up on the idea of writing this, though, due to time constraints and other more pressing issues. I just gave short lectures about the crate and its proper use to each new owner who came to collect their little bundle of joy.

As for my project to recover full health, it is still ongoing. I started on August 2nd of last year and I can report that my progress continues steadily. That will be apparent when we get our new videos out in mid-summer. In fact, the video project has become a bit more ambitious than just teaching people how to safely use a spirit-board type instrument for various purposes. But I don't want to give it away... just stay tuned for the announcement that the first set is ready!

Finally, just to respond to the snarky comment, the fact is, we do continue to have sessions with the Cs and even if we don't publish everything anymore, you can get the benefit of what we are learning by regularly visiting the Cassiopaea Forum (where I read and post almost daily) and reading SOTT.net daily! Our readership is really booming - we are currently averaging almost 900,000 hits per day, over 25 million hits per month! And, keep in mind, that even if I am not writing for daily publication, I AM working on a book that's gonna blow "mainstream history" out of the water!

Narcissism Support Resources: Sam Vaknin: Diagnosed Psychopath

2009-04-30T14:15:00.000+02:00

Narcissism Support Resources: Sam Vaknin: Diagnosed Psychopath

Comet Puppies

2009-02-07T13:06:00.009+01:00

A poster on our forum just reported the details of a new comet in our skies:

February 4, 2009: In 1996, a 7-year-old boy in China bent over the eyepiece of a small telescope and saw something that would change his life--a comet of flamboyant beauty, bright and puffy with an active tail. At first he thought he himself had discovered it, but no, he learned, two men named "Hale" and "Bopp" had beat him to it. Mastering his disappointment, young Quanzhi Ye resolved to find his own comet one day.

And one day, he did.

Fast forward to a summer afternoon in July 2007. Ye, now 19 years old and a student of meteorology at China's Sun Yat-sen University, bent over his desk to stare at a black-and-white star field. The photo was taken nights before by Taiwanese astronomer Chi Sheng Lin on "sky patrol" at the Lulin Observatory. Ye's finger moved from point to point--and stopped. One of the stars was not a star, it was a comet, and this time Ye saw it first.

Comet Lulin, named after the observatory in Taiwan where the discovery-photo was taken, is now approaching Earth. "It is a green beauty that could become visible to the naked eye any day now," says Ye.

Amateur astronomer Jack Newton sends this photo from his backyard observatory in Arizona:

"My retired eyes still cannot see the brightening comet," says Newton, "but my 14-inch telescope picked it up quite nicely on Feb. 1st."

The comet makes its closest approach to Earth (0.41 AU) on Feb. 24, 2009. Current estimates peg the maximum brightness at 4th or 5th magnitude, which means dark country skies would be required to see it. No one can say for sure, however, because this appears to be Lulin's first visit to the inner solar system and its first exposure to intense sunlight. Surprises are possible.

Lulin's green color comes from the gases that make up its Jupiter-sized atmosphere. Jets spewing from the comet's nucleus contain cyanogen (CN: a poisonous gas found in many comets) and diatomic carbon (C2). Both substances glow green when illuminated by sunlight in the near-vacuum of space.

In 1910, many people panicked when astronomers revealed Earth would pass through the cyanogen-rich tail of Comet Halley. False alarm: The wispy tail of the comet couldn't penetrate Earth's dense atmosphere; even it if had penetrated, there wasn't enough cyanogen to cause real trouble. Comet Lulin will cause even less trouble than Halley did. At closest approach in late February, Lulin will stop 38 million miles short of Earth, utterly harmless.

To see Comet Lulin with your own eyes, set your alarm for 3 am. The comet rises a few hours before the sun and may be found about 1/3rd of the way up the southern sky before dawn. Here are some dates when it is especially easy to find:

Feb. 6th: Comet Lulin glides by Zubenelgenubi, a double star at the fulcrum of Libra's scales. Zubenelgenubi is not only fun to say (zuBEN-el-JA-newbee), but also a handy guide. You can see Zubenelgenubi with your unaided eye (it is about as bright as stars in the Big Dipper); binoculars pointed at the binary star reveal Comet Lulin in beautiful proximity.

Feb. 16th: Comet Lulin passes Spica in the constellation Virgo. Spica is a star of first magnitude and a guidepost even city astronomers cannot miss. A finderscope pointed at Spica will capture Comet Lulin in the field of view, centering the optics within a nudge of both objects.

Feb. 24th: Closest approach! On this special morning, Lulin will lie just a few degrees from Saturn in the constellation Leo. Saturn is obvious to the unaided eye, and Lulin could be as well. If this doesn't draw you out of bed, nothing will. [...]

The reason I am mentioning this is because of an interesting synchronicity. Here is a skymap of the position of the comet:

As it happens, just a few hours earlier I was looking at this very area of the sky on my Starry Night astronomy program. The reason I was looking was because we had a litter of puppies born at our house in the early hours of Feb 5th and I was checking their birth times against the Starry night program to see what stars were rising - looking for naming ideas. As it happens, puppies number 3 & 4 were born just as Zubenelgenubi crossed the horizon - both males.

The mother is officially named Princess Jasmine and the father is Prince Aladdin - so the Arabic connection is already there. (They are not related except distantly; the male was named by the breeder at my request so they would be a "set.") We call her Jazzy and him Laddie. Not very creative, I know, but easy when you are calling them for dinner! They are Shetland Sheep dogs.

Jazzy and Laddie:

Jazzy's due date was Feb 7th, and the vet predicted three puppies, max. We all noticed how big she was getting - she really waddled! Anyway, she was spending a lot of time in her crate for a couple of days and we knew that the time was near. It was about 10 p.m. when the definitive signs came that delivery was going to be within a few hours. We had all our equipment ready - string, scissors, surgical gloves, towels, rubber syringes in case anybody got "stuck" - that sort of thing.

Jazzy was in her crate and I suggested dropping the curtain over it (a rug) so she could be private (thinking that this might hurry things along just a bit). So, she was there and we waited and waited, sitting around the table and talking. All of a sudden, Jazzy gave out a sharp yelp and came tearing out of the crate and ran around the kitchen like she was being chased by the devil. Joe said "Grab her, the baby's coming out!" She stopped and looked at us and, sure enough... We took a towel over to where Jazzy was standing, looking terrified and confused, laid her down on it, and took over for her since she obviously didn't have a clue about what to do. Our resident cardiac surgeon tied off the umbilical cord with expert surgical knots, snipped, and I had a little wet baby in my hands that we immediately put to nurse. Jazzy was looking at the little baby with extreme surprise!

We had to deliver the second one also, but after the two of them were cleaned up a bit and put to nurse, that must have kicked on the hormones and by then, Jazzy was figuring things out, so she handled the rest of them all by herself. I think she was just SO surprised when she had this bizarre stomach-ache-thing going on and then out popped a puppy! Humans have the advantage of being able to talk and explain things; we couldn't explain to Jazzy except by our actions; fortunately, she is smart and has some hard-wired instincts, so she caught on fast.

The first baby came at 5 minutes after midnight. Then the second at 12:53, (after this I went to bed and the rest of the details are from the girl's "nursing notes") Numbers 3 & 4 came between 2 and 2:30 a.m. and number 5 at 3 a.m. and 6 at 3:06!!!

As I said, the vet only expected her to have three with her first litter so, six was a big surprise. They are all pretty much equal size and vigor, doesn't appear to be a runt among them. There are three tri-colors and three sables; two males, four females.

I still don't have any idea what I am going to name them!

Genesis or Tragedy and Hope

2008-12-11T11:51:00.006+01:00

Last night I completed a book. I don't mean I wrote it, though it did involve a lot of writing, what I mean is that I put a lot of stuff between covers and it is now called a book - an album. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Well, let me explain.

A couple of months ago I decided that I wanted to put my book "Amazing Grace" - a story of my early life and awakening - back on the website but I also wanted to include a lot of photos that were not included in the print version because printing photos in a book makes the cost go too high. In order to include selected photos, that meant I needed to go through my photo collection. That presented problems.

You see, for over 30 years, I've been collecting photos. Some of these photos are those I have taken myself, but there was a whole LOT of them that I received as collections from various family members now deceased. In some cases, there were large boxes of photos - I mean like 12 x 18 x 10 inch boxes - that's a LOT of photographs! In other cases, I received albums that were partially complete, with envelopes of photos yet to be included, and the albums themselves were a mess, jumbled and poorly organized. Add to that the many photos I have taken myself since my children were born and we are talking about a box of photographs the size of a sea trunk! Going through it was NOT going to be a one day job!

But, I dragged the huge plastic storage container (so big it has its own wheels!) out of my closet down to the dining room and proceeded to unpack it onto the table. Then I started going through photos quickly, sorting them into piles according to type and family line. I really wish I had taken a photo of this process but... Anyway, I then started sorting them in to sub-piles... getting them organized according to chronology. My children came in to have a look and wanted to go through the photos but I stopped them saying that they couldn't be messing with my organizational efforts! I then realized that these photos were doing nobody any good at all packed away in a box for years and years and me telling the kids not to look at them because they might disorganize them! So, I resolve to do what I had been telling myself that I WOULD do for years and years and years: put them into albums!

That, of course, delayed the prospect of putting Amazing Grace onto the web! And putting the photos into albums was delayed by having to find appropriate albums and materials that could deal with the collection. I needed big albums of a certain type and certainly particular methods of installing some very old and delicate photos. After a week or so, the albums arrived and I was able to find some good double sided tape tabs and transparent photo corners, and so on.

At this point, a lot of other things were going on and I wasn't able to get to the project, so the stacks of photos and albums and tools sat on the dining room table waiting for me to "getaminnit" to work on it. Only I knew it wasn't going to be just a minute! It was going to be a project taking several weeks of daily work! The enormity of the task just overwhelmed me and, in addition to having to do other things, I also was finding excuses to NOT begin! Heck, I didn't know HOW to begin! How do you organize very old photos from different families that, only later come together? Do you just start putting them in strictly chronologically and hope that the viewer will be able to know who is who and how they connect? For example, I have a copy of a tintype taken in 1874 of the family of my paternal grandmother. Then I have photos of great grandparents on my maternal side, sisters of my great grandmother on my mother's side, and so on. If I just stick them in together because they are associated in a chronological way, and continue in that manner, the "stream of life" of any one particular family will be lost in the mixing!

So, I decided to modify the plan; what I would do would be to start with my father's family, proceed chronologically until the point in time when my parents married and then I would switch to my mother's family and bring them along to the same point. Then I would proceed from there strictly chronologically, mixing photos from the same time periods from both families.

Of course the plan was slightly complicated by the fact that I also had photos from the grandparents families and I had to follow each line chronologically (to some extent) until the grandparents met and married and produced my parents!

Believe me, this was NOT an easy task! Thankfully, at one point in my life, I sat down with my grandmother and boxes of photos and she had me write on the back of each one who was in the photo and the approximate time. Also, thankfully, someone performed a similar service on many other photos in my collection. My maternal grandmother also collected news articles and obituaries of family members, so that was available to provide chronological data. I also had a lot of information in my genealogy program and a big binder with plastic sheet protectors full of birth, marriage, and death certificates for many family members that I had been collecting for the genealogy project that was an obsession some ten or so years ago. Still, there were a certain number of important photographs about which I had little or no information. I had to resort to a tedious and exhausting process of scanning, blowing up and examining photographs for clues to who was in them and what period they came from!

Now, all of the above is just the logistics of this project. No wonder I didn't want to get started!

But, as it happens, Christmas is coming and we are going to need the dining room table - we can't eat in the kitchen forever - and I knew that I was NOT going to put all those stacks of photos back in the box after having gone to the trouble of going through them, sorting and organizing them! I knew I had to start. I had painted myself into a corner. So, two weeks ago, I sat down and began.

Oh, Lord! I didn't know it was going to hurt so much to organize the lives of my family! With each photograph I placed in the album, I knew I had to write a description so that my children could sit down and look at the album and know the details even if I am no longer there to describe who is who and what they are doing and why the photo was taken and what was going on in their lives in the background. And so, there was a LOT of writing going on. Some album pages are half text.

When I came to the photo of Aunt Minnie - my grandmother's aunt and my great aunt - as a young girl, I had to decide what to write about her. There she was with her kind, sort of clueless, face. She didn't know that she was going to marry an older man, that they would then have their only child later in life, that he would die soon after the child was born, and that the child would later be in an accident that transformed a laughing dancing little girl into a quadriplegic who lived that way for 40 years. Aunt Minnie didn't know that she was going to devote her life to caring for her invalid daughter.

Then, there was Aunt Lizzie - sister of Minnie - who the whole family knew as "Evil Aunt Lizzie." Was I going to write some text telling why she was considered to be an evil, manipulative bitch? Don't people say that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead? Well, I'm not afraid of the dead coming back to haunt me so I thought it was proper to tell the story of Aunt Lizzie and how her only child finally escaped her clutches only to die at a young age from a heart attack - probably because his mother made him feel endlessly guilty. (This woman dressed that boy as a girl until he was almost 5 years old! You should see the photos of him with his long ringlets!)

Then, there was my great-grandmother Laura, after whom I am named, the most beautiful of the sisters and the one that suffered the most, too. She didn't know that, when she married Mr. Reed in 1925 after 20 years being a widow, that two years later he would murder her! And the photos of my grandmother and her new husband and infant children (including my mother) did not give any evidence of this impending tragedy, though all the photos afterward are grim and unsmiling. It was a blow from which the family did not recover - even to this day. I felt obliged to explain what happened and to include the news article about the murder as well as copies of the marriage certificate in chronological order. How else to explain the "after" photos, their character, the faces, the obvious withdrawal of my grandmother from being photographed at all for almost 25 years.

There was a photograph of my father smiling impishly in his sailor suit before WW II. How to explain that his twin went on to have an illustrious military career, but that my father was so badly injured in an auto accident that he almost lost his arm (he did lose parts of it!) and was discharged from the Navy for medical reasons. There were photos of him before and after... and ever after, with one or two exceptions, when he was photographed it was with his left arm (the injured one), held jauntily in his pocket so that the fact that this arm was now several inches shorter than the other would not be noticed. Than certainly needed explaining!

And so on... I think you have the idea. It is a rare page in this album that only has a name and date under it; most of them have entire paragraphs of text beside each photo! So, it was a long process.

Anyway, last night I finally made it to 1949 and the end of the album. In a 150 page album, there were only 2 1/2 pages left blank at the end and I haven't even been born yet! (I also did not include a LOT of photos that were not of people because they simply aren't relevant to the story of the people!)

I took the finished First Album into the kitchen where everyone was having dinner to show that it was actually done, that we would soon be able to eat in the dining room! The kids pronounced the book to be similar to the book of Genesis in the Bible - the family history - but I could only say that it was more like Tragedy and Hope. It was the remembering and re-living the family history that was more the ordeal than the actual doing of the task. So much Hope followed by so much Tragedy, and then hope again. In the end, what is the lesson? What can we really learn from an accurate history?

Over and over again, when I consider this family history, I see that Hope is based on people just trying to do what is right according to their own understanding but the Tragedy comes in because their understanding is based on illusions or delusions; lack of accurate knowledge and sharing of information. Hope that is based on emotion based illusion seems to inevitably lead to tragedy. The evidence is right there in that 150 page photo album that displays the lives and times of a dozen or so families. And that reminds me of the saying of Santayana: Those that do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. This is true not only in a large, social sense, it is true in the context of families. We need to really know our history, know how we have been influenced by events of the past through our family members, and know their histories and what their choices led them to, so that if we don't like their history, we can find a way to change it in our own lives. As Gurdjieff wrote:

Faith of consciousness is freedom

Faith of feeling is weakness

Faith of body is stupidity.

Love of consciousness evokes the same in response

Love of feeling evokes the opposite

Love of body depends on type and polarity.

Hope of consciousness is strength

Hope of feeling is slavery

Hope of body is disease.

My family album - "Genesis" as we will now call it - is evidence that these words are so true. And with the knowledge that I have - and have now put into a form that can be passed on to my children - I hope that we can all become free of false faith, love and hope.

Ancient Israel, Religious Delusions and Growing Up

2008-11-18T10:55:00.008+01:00

It has been quite a long time since I've actually written a post here or, for that matter, anywhere else. The quick answer to those of you who have written to inquire is that I had major surgery to rebuild my right shoulder back in April and went into a serious health decline after, probably due to stress and years of neglecting my health. By mid-July, I knew I had to either give it up or do something serious and I started a program of rejuvenation on August 2nd which has been remarkably successful. After one month of following the program, I felt like I had dropped 15 years! After being in pain most of my life (I developed arthritis at the age of 9), it is great to go through most days pain free!

For the past few years I have been, little by little, handing over many of my website responsibilities to others. Signs of the Times has been in the hands of its international editors for some time now, so that by the time I went into the hospital, there wasn't much to worry about in that respect. Of course, there was the Higher Balance Institute/Eric Pepin lawsuit (and that is still running in the background) and that produced a certain amount of stress, mainly because it has been so extraordinarily costly. But, as I have pointed out, if I caved in to that silly temper tantrum, it would just encourage other, similar tantrums by other petty tyrants all over the internet. It IS about free speech and the right to comment on news and products and the people behind them, and letting Pepin and his gang get away with their nonsense would set a dangerous precedent for others.

But that's not what I want to talk about today. As it happens, during my convalescence, I was able to turn my attention back to my real loves: psychology, history and history of religion. (Believe it or not, my only real interest in politics is that it is history in real time!) I have been just glutting myself with reading and watching videos while in therapy.

Some months ago I pre-ordered (from amazon.com), Niels Peter Lemche's new book "The Old Testament Between Theology and History." After reading all the available books by Thomas L. Thompson, Philip R. Davies, Garbini, Mack, Cryer, Cline, Whitelam, Van Seters and others, I was anxiously awaiting the release of this volume. It arrived yesterday morning. For me, it was like being a child with a new pair of patent leather shoes! I actually took it to bed with me even though I wasn't going to read last night. (My husband, Ark, and I have been watching the old Perry Mason series every night - we find it to be very relaxing before going to sleep and with the new health kick I'm on, I'm all about relaxing at bedtime!)

This morning, I was up at 6:30 to get in some quiet reading time. At breakfast, (eggs laid this morning by our free range chickens!), Ark asked me what the new book was about. I told him that it was the new volume by one of my favorite scholars/authors and that the topic was the history of religion. He asked me if Lemche wrote "without mercy", (he knows what I like!) and I said, "yes, indeed! And that's why he's one of my favorite people!" Ark understood what I meant: I admire people who can be ruthless with themselves and constantly strive for my own personal objectivity. I don't always succeed, but I consider it a virtue to not be self-deceived as so many people are who want only to live without conscience.

What is interesting in the introduction to this book is that Lemche outlines briefly the development of his views of the Old Testament. In 1984, his book "Ancient Israel: A New History of Israelite Society" was published and it was quite a new thing in this particular field of study, being a synthesis of Israelite history and religion written from the perspective of social anthropology. The main thesis of this book was:

Israel emerged as the result of a social development within Canaanite society in Palestine in the last half of the second millennium BCE. It was not a consequence of an "Israelite" migration from the desert.
Israelite religion was "originally" a Canaanite religion. Only toward the middle of the first millennium did it assume the particular characteristics normally considered "Jewish" monotheism.
The Old Testament includes practiccally no historical sources older than, say, the sevent-sixth centuries BCE. It is accordingly not possible on the basis of the narratives in the Old Testament to reconstruct any Israelite history dating back before 1000 BCE. If such a history can be constructed, it demands the inclusion of written and archaeological sources not found in the Old Testament.
The idea of history in the Old Testament arose as a consequence of political catastrophes that hit the historical Israel toward the middle of the first millennium BCE.

It is interesting to me to note that this book was adopted by theological students and was translated into English in 1988. At that time, some scholars even thought that some of the ideas were obsolete! That means that there are a lot of theological types out there who are fully aware of this view of the Old Testament, but somehow that does not translate into knowledge generally disseminated among the "believers" - at least, certainly not in the large majority of American churches.

Here, allow me to digress a moment. The selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in the US presidential contest was a revelation. Before this "dark horse" appeared on the scene, many people - myself included - were simply not aware of the Dominionists and their evil Fascist agenda to take over the world and initiate the Eschaton, so to say. Those people are delusional and quite simply crazy as bedbugs. Unfortunately, the DSM-IV does not list religious convictions - no matter how crazy they are - as pathological. At least not the version I read last, the DSM-III. This version defines delusions as "false belief based on an incorrect inference about external reality." A delusion is an idea that is firmly sustained, despite "incontrovertible proof to the contrary." The "belief" that one interacts with "spirits" is defined as a "delusion of being controlled, in which feelings, impulses, thoughs or actions are experienced as being not one's own, as being imposed by some external force." (Never mind the reams of evidence that people do, in fact, interact with spirits quite often while there is no evidence that anyone ever interacts with "god"!)

Well, to me, that sounds like someone who's "got religion." But "religious context" is pointedly EXCLUDED from this diagnosis! The DSM-III went on to say: "This does not include the mere conviction that one is acting as an agent of God." That's Sarah Palin and her Dominionist crazies, alright. I always thought it was a bizarre contradiction that psychiatrists (as they express themselves in the DSM volumes) consider it acceptable to be deluded by religion but that it is pathological in any other context.

Anyway, back to Lemche. He goes on to explain the evolution of his thinking on the subject of the Old Testament and how, by the time of the fourth edition of his book some of the theses of the first edition had morphed into:

The concept of "Israel" appeared as the result of an ideological reorientation among the people who were deported from Palestine to Mesopotamia in connection with the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and the destruction of the state of Judah.
Jewish monotheism came into being in the postexilic period, in competition with other contemporary religious currents that confronted Jewish Yahwism both in Palestine and in the exile. The "old" polytheistic religion did not disappear with the exile but continued to exist down into the postexilic period.
The historiography of the Old Testament is hardly to be dated to the seventh or sixth century BCE. It is most likely a product of the postexilic period.

His changing perspectives were the result of the constant development of Old Testament studies including his own researches and examination of the wealth of material being brought to light through various scientific and soft-science disciplines. But this is an ongoing process. As Lemche notes, the theses above did not survive for long either! In 1997 he reformulated his views as follows:

"Ancient Israel" is an ideological concept created by modern historians and students of the Bible. It has only a peripheral relationship to the historical states of Israel and Judah in Palestine in the Iron Age.
Israelite religion as found in the Old Testament is already interpreted in the light of Judaism. Judaism appeared as a monotheistic movement among several other similar movements in the first millennium BCE. When it appeared, Judaism was able to construct a history of Israel as its national foundation myth.
Old Testament writings are mostly to be dated to the Hellenistic period. As a concept and as a canonical collection, the Old Testament hardly predates the appearance of Christianity.

Wow! Lemche made some serious leaps there! And he now says that if he were to present a new edition of his 1984 book, he would have to re-write 90% of it!

Well, anyway, this is what I talked about with my husband at breakfast this morning. I also talked about the fact that I really understand the progress Lemche made because my own emergence from Christianity has followed a similar pattern. In the beginning, I studied the Bible to have a "closer relationship" with the origins of my religion. As time went by, my love for truth trumped blind belief and, little by little I was compelled by merciless objectivity to admit the obvious: it was all a big fraud likely created and perpetrated and perpetuated by pathological individuals.

I really admire people like astronomer, Fred Hoyle, who could apply his scientific brain to the problem of religion at the age of about 14 and conclude that it was only sensible that religion should be subjected to the same standards of proof as anything else in our world, and was then able to blithely discard it as an issue. That was a special case, I think. More problematical are the people who are able to discard the "mysterious" in our world without even a backward glance and take up skepticism as their religion. You have to wonder what lack of emotional depth or soul animates such people.

It wasn't easy for me to come to many of the views I hold today regarding religions, the consensus reality that is inured in those religious beliefs, and True Reality which can only be seen by subjecting beliefs to the same kinds of tests and challenges that any hypothesis requires. Sometimes giving up our warm, comforting beliefs is a painful, protracted process; but then, so is growing up.

Anti-semitism, British Academia and the Israel Lobby

2008-08-30T13:00:00.001+02:00

I've been away from my blog for some time now due to health reasons. However, in lieu of being able to do any writing myself, I present you with an excellent and important piece by Joe Quinn:

Anti-semitism, British Academia and the Israel Lobby

Joe Quinn Sott.net Fri, 29 Aug 2008

Every year since 2002 the University and College Union (UCU), the largest trade union and professional association for academics working in further and higher education throughout the UK, has attempted to implement some form of boycott of Israeli academic institutions that have been shown to be complicit in the ongoing persecution of the Palestinian people. And each year, amid much acrimony and cries of "anti-semitism", boycotters meet with significant resistance from pro-Israeli members of British academia, and other institutions.

This year however, lowly Sott.net has inadvertently become involved in the melee.

In 2007, the congress of the UCU voted by 158 votes to 99 on Motion 30, which called for the UCU to circulate a boycott request by Palestinian trade unions to all branches for information and discussion. It called on lecturers to "consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions."

Motion 30 was amended:

Congress notes that Israel's 40-year occupation has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement.

Congress deplores the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students.

Congress condemns the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions.

Congress believes that in these circumstances passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.

Congress instructs the NEC to:

circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches for information and discussion;

encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;

organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists;

issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action.

actively encourage and support branches to create direct links with Palestinian educational institutions and to help set up nationally sponsored programs for teacher exchanges, sabbatical placements, and research.

In the end however, and after much pressure being brought to bear, the boycott effort was dropped on legal advice that it would be unlawful and could not be implemented, despite the fact that the motion merely called for individual branches to inform their members and debate the pros and cons of a boycott and decide for themselves how or if to proceed.

In May this year, a similar motion was tabled and passed at the UCU annual conference that again called on members to: "consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions, and to discuss the occupation with individuals and institutions concerned, including Israeli colleagues with whom they are collaborating."

What this amounts to is basically a call for UCU members to just think about the implications of ties with Israeli academic institutions that are involved in supporting Israeli government oppression of Palestinians. Once again however, the pro-Israel camp came out in force.

The point of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions is eminently defensible because its primary goal is to put pressure on the Israeli government to cease its brutal treatment of the Palestinian people and to adhere to international law. It has absolutely nothing to do with any anti-semitism among the supporters of the boycott in British academia. Of course, this does not stop the anti-boycott pro-Israel camp from repeatedly using the slur of "anti-semite" in an effort to intimidate those calling for a boycott.

Since the beginning of the boycott movement, several anti-boycott websites have sprung up, the most prominent of which seems to be engageonline.org.uk, operated by David Hirsh, lecturer at University of London's Goldsmiths College.

Engage was:

"created to arm people with arguments and facts that they could use to counter the propaganda of the boycott campaign within the Association of University Teachers. Engage grew from a being a resource for that particular and successful campaign into being a resource that aims to help people counter the boycott Israel campaign in general, as well as the assumptions and misrepresentations that lie behind it.

That's the background, now comes the unsavory part.

For the past few months, debate for and against the boycott has been raging on a private UCU member email discussion list (about 700 members) with the majority of members coming out in favor of the boycott. A selection of these private email exchanges were leaked to the Engage website (many can be read here), but one in particular must have seemed like a godsend to the anti-boycott pro-Israel camp.

Three days ago, in her defense of a colleague who was arguing for the boycott on the private discussion list, UCU member and lecturer Jenna Delich wrote the following:

John,

In support to your link this may be a long but also an interesting reading: http://www.davidduke.com/general/humanitarian-disaster_595.html No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves.

Jenna Jenna Delich

The article that Ms. Delich referenced was written by me in 2006 and entitled "Racism, not Defence, at the heart of Israeli politics" (original here). However, the link was to the web site of infamous white supremacist David Duke. Someone at Duke's site (or Duke himself) had apparently republished the article, without my permission or knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, the anti-boycott camp immediately pounced and, ignoring the most obvious explanation (that Ms Denlich had never heard of Duke and was simply posting a link to the article and not his website) decried the "obvious link" between the UCU and "perhaps the most notorious racist and anti-semite in the world".

[Note: the second link above is from a blog called "Harry's place", which appears to be run by someone who is either a member of the UCU or is closely associated with someone who is. "Harry" claims that his site offers a "democratic-left perspective". To get an idea of what "democratic-left" means to 'Harry', see this link]

I can't speak for Ms. Delich (although I strongly suspect my hypothesis above is accurate), but all contributors toSott.net deplore racism and everything that Duke stands for. A careful reading of our published works makes our position on Israel, Judaism etc. very clear to any normal, rational person, and nowhere will you find the merest hint of any real anti-semitism, racism, holocaust denial, white supremacy, or KKK membership for that matter. In fact, Sott.net was founded on solidly humanitarian ground and in response to the increasingly extremist beliefs and policies infecting the halls of power and the minds of far too many otherwise well-meaning people.

It is natural therefore that we would seek to speak out against Israeli government and military human rights abuses against Palestinians, and that we would strongly support the UCU boycott of certain Israeli academic institutions as a way to put pressure on the Israeli government to change its ways.

The best known case of a similar international boycott occurred during the Apartheid regime in South Africa when dozens of nations around the world implemented various types of sanctions and boycotts (including academic boycotts) that played an important role in the ultimate fall of the unjust system.

So if a broad boycott of South Africa was almost universally agreed to be righteous, why does the mere proposal of a simple boycott of Israeli academic institutions meet with such resistance? After all, the similarities between the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians and South African Apartheid have already been made clear:

"This is like apartheid": ANC veterans visit the West Bank

Veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle said last night that the segregation endured by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories was in some respects worse than that imposed on the black majority under white rule in South Africa.

Members of a 23-strong human-rights team of prominent South Africans cited the impact of the Israeli military's separation barrier, checkpoints, the permit system for Palestinian travel, and the extent to which Palestinians are barred from using roads in the West Bank.

After a five-day visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, some delegates expressed shock and dismay at conditions in the Israeli-controlled heart of Hebron. Uniquely among West Bank cities, 800 settlers now live there and segregation has seen the closure of nearly 3,000 Palestinian businesses and housing units. Palestinian cars (and in some sections pedestrians) are prohibited from using the once busy streets.

"Even with the system of permits, even with the limits of movement to South Africa, we never had as much restriction on movement as I see for the people here," said an ANC parliamentarian, Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge of the West Bank. "There are areas in which people would live their whole lifetime without visiting because it's impossible." [...]

Fatima Hassan, a leading South African human rights lawyer, said: "The issue of separate roads, [different registration] of cars driven by different nationalities, the indignity of producing a permit any time a soldier asks for it, and of waiting in long queues in the boiling sun at checkpoints just to enter your own city, I think is worse than what we experienced during apartheid." She was speaking after the tour, which included a visit to the Holocaust Museum at Yad Vashem and a meeting with Israel's Chief Justice, Dorit Beinisch.

One prominent member of the delegation, who declined to be named, said South Africa had been "much poorer" both during and after apartheid than the Palestinian territories. But he added: "The daily indignity to which the Palestinian population is subjected far outstrips the apartheid regime.And the effectiveness with which the bureaucracy implements the repressive measures far exceed that of the apartheid regime." [...]

In Hebron's main Shuhada Street, the South African delegation was plunged into a confrontation after one of the local settlers' leaders disrupted the tour by unleashing a barrage of abuse through a megaphone at one of the Israeli guides. Amid angry arguments, police arrested three of the Israeli guides.

Mrs Madlala Routledge exclaimed: "This is ridiculous. Why are they arresting our guides and leaving the man with the megaphone?"

Dennis Davis, a high court judge and one of the South African delegation's several Jewish members, told the extreme right-wing Hebron settlers' leader Baruch Marzel: "These provocations didn't come from us. I'm Jewish and I look at this and I say to myself, how can I feel fear from other Jews?"

Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC parliament member, said that the visit to Yad Vashem had been "extremely moving" because his mother had been a Holocaust survivor who lost many members of her family. "As you walk into Yad Vashem you see a quote that says in effect you should know a country not only by what it does but what it tolerates," he said. "So I found it very shocking to then come and here and see footage of teenagers heaping abuse on Palestinian children as they come out of school, and throwing stones at them. And that this should be done in the name of Judaism I find totally reprehensible.

"What the Holocaust teaches us more than anything else is that we must never turn our heads away in the face of injustice."

See also Gideon Levy's, Twilight Zone/'Worse than apartheid' in Haaretz

From the UK Guardian:

In October 2005, 13-year-old Iman al-Hams was shot and wounded by an Israeli army unit in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, despite being identified as a little girl, and wearing a school uniform. Iman was machine-gunned by the unit's commander. She had 17 bullets in her body, and three in her head, a Palestinian doctor told the Guardian. Iman is one of 654 Palestinian children to have been killed in the occupied territories since September 2000. Several were killed as they sat at their desks in class. Three and a half thousand children have been wounded. Over 300 are in Israeli prisons.

In South Africa's state of emergency of the mid-1980s, declared in response to a nationwide campaign of protest, 312 children were killed, over 1,000 wounded, 2,000 children under 16 were detained without trial, thousands more arrested, hundreds fled into exile, and a generation was marked for life. Noble Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu wrote about one child, Johnny, whom he saw after some time in police custody: "I wanted to cry, I was filled with a blazing anger against a system that could do this to a child ... Johnny's case alone ought to be enough to fill any decent person ... with revulsion and indignation."

Iman's is such a case, 20 years on. Archbishop Tutu has described the situation of the Palestinians under occupation as worse than South Africa under apartheid. In July 2004, the international court of justice ruled that Israel's 280 mile wall, the latest burden on Palestinians, was illegal. But Israel, like the old South Africa faced with international disapproval, simply ignored it.

Twenty years ago, 496 British academics responded to an appeal from the African National Congress leaders in exile after two academics were served with banning orders. They signed a letter calling for an academic boycott of South Africa. Today, some in the new generation of British academics feel they cannot accept Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the policies that brought the wall, and a new generation of children suffering like those South African children whose wounds of mind and body never healed.

Iman and Johnny will never go to college. But some of the Israeli soldiers implicated in crimes like the one that killed the little girl are university lecturers who serve in the occupation army reserve forces every year, and who otherwise go about their academic "business as usual" for the rest of the year. No Israeli academic institution has ever severed its organic ties with the military-security establishment in protest. None has issued a public statement condemning the grave violations of Palestinian human rights. This is part of the reason why Palestinians have called upon the world to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

And that is precisely the goal of the repeated attempts by the UCU to institute an academic boycott (of some nature) against Israeli institutions - to make a public statement condemning the Israeli government for its human rights abuses. Yet somehow, the debate is always twisted and turned around to allegations of "anti-semitism" - that if you support the boycott you are somehow motivated by a 'hatred of Jews because they are Jews'. The contention is clearly ridiculous. Those supporting the boycott and the vast majority of those that condemn the situation in Palestine and Israel are well aware that the Israeli government and the Jews of Israel and elsewhere are far from synonymous. Events leading up the Iraqi invasion, when Tony Blair ignored the mass public demonstrations and not only joined the US-led invasion but fabricated evidence to justify it gave the British public a stark reminder of just how impotent they are to influence government policy on the most important matters.

In Israel the situation is no different. A majority of Israeli citizens want peace (who wouldn't?) but their government continues its aggressive policies towards Israel's Arab neighbors, placing the lives of Israelis at risk, and public opinion be damned. How then can the anti-boycott camp in the UK and elsewhere reasonably insist that exerting academic, political or economic pressure on the Israeli government is tantamount to hatred of Jews? Clearly the boycott seeks to achieve the very same thing that a majority of ordinary Jews (at least in Israel) want - an end to the violence and peaceful cohabitation. The answer of course is that they cannot 'reasonably' make such a claim, and there is nothing reasonable about the tactics they use to silence the boycott campaign.

Jenna Delich posted a link to my 2006 article. She was unaware that the link was not to the original Sott.net article but to a reproduction (now removed at my request) on David Duke's site. She sought to share the content of the article, not the content of the site on which it appeared. The content of my article is in no way anti-semitic. My article draws conclusions that are backed by mainstream press reports (which I cite). My article attacks the Israeli government and its institutions and warns that (in my opinion) in the not too distant future the actions of the Israeli government may prove to be as much of a threat to the lives of Israeli Jews as they are now to the lives of Palestinians and Arabs in the Middle East. Clearly this is not anti-semitic.

Is anything that I say in my article actually wrong? Not in my opinion. However, if someone at Engage or Harry's Place, can point out the errors, I will be happy to accept them and make the necessary corrections/retractions. But I seriously doubt that this will ever happen, because such people are not interested in reasoned argument backed up with objective facts. Writers at Harry's place continue to claim that my article is "racist diatribe" and that "Jews were the target", despite the fact that the word "Jew" or "Jews" or "Jewish" do not appear in the article. My article is clearly directed at the Israeli government and its institutions, yet the anti-boycotters are determined to convince everyone, me included, that I, and anyone who agrees with my points, are attacking the Jews! Well, I'm sorry but I'm not buying it, because it is unmitigated nonsense. I don't care how much they try to convince me that I hate Jews, I will always reject such a charge. Why would I hate people I don't even know? Why would I hate people I DO know and love? I have several close friends of Jewish background, people I consider brothers and sisters. Are the anti-boycotters saying that the fact that I wrote an article that was critical of the Israeli government, means that I now hate my close friends?!

Jenna Delich is clearly not a racist, she is moved by the plight of oppressed people everywhere. This much is clear from her messages to the UCU list and support for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The anti-boycotters and Israel-firsters at sites like Harry's place are undoubtedly aware of this yet they choose to slander and defame Delich, casting her as a racist and "Neo-Nazi". They posted her picture on the Harry's place website and started a blog called the Jenna Delich archives at jennadelich.blogspot.com, which they state is:

"a repository of posts concerning the Sheffield-based UCU member who posts links to articles on the website of neo-Nazi and former Ku Klux Klan member, David Duke"

One mistake, one unintentional posting of a link to Duke's site, and Delich is now apparently someone who "posts links to articles on the website of neo-Nazi and former Ku Klux Klan member, David Duke." How's that for a smear job on an innocent woman? Do these seem like the actions of people who are interested in open and honest discourse on the plight of the Palestinian and Israeli people? Or are they the actions of people who, having no reasonable argument to put forth, resort to ad-homimen attacks and the blunt force instrument that is the cry of "anti-semitism". In doing so, are these people not in fact working against the expressed desire of the Israeli people for peace with their Palestinian and Arab neighbors? In thwarting the efforts to pressure the Israeli government to fulfill the wishes of the Israeli people for a peaceful settlement (which is being forestalled by continued Israeli oppression of Palestinians), how can these people claim to be defending Jewish interests? Clearly they are not, but they are certainly defending the interests of the corrupt Israeli government, in precisely the same way that the pro-war rantings of right-wing American 'patriots' defend only the interests of the corrupt Bush government and their lackeys.

If I criticize the US government (which I do, often) does that mean that I hate the American people? If I criticize the Irish government (which I do, often), does that mean that I hate the Irish people? Do I hate myself? Am I a 'self-hating Irishman'? Am I permitted to deny any association with, or that I am influenced by the real anti-semitism of the Nazi era on the basis that I was born many years later in a country many miles away with no exposure to anti-Jewish sentiment? If so, can I then claim immunity from the threat of being made guilty of anti-semitism by virtue of non-Jewishness and expect that my criticism of the Israeli government will be understood as just that - criticism is of the Israeli government - and not hatred of the disenfranchised Jewish people? Is it possible for a person to criticize or otherwise democratically agitate for the removal of a government without also wishing the demise of an entire population?

Is it possible that the vast majority of critics of the Israeli government are motivated by a sense of empathy with the suffering of the Palestinians, and outrage at the Israeli government as the source of that suffering, rather than a bizarre and unrelated hatred of Jews? And is it possible that those who refuse to accept this contention and instead condemn government critics as "anti-semites" do so because they themselves simply do not, or cannot feel such empathy for the oppressed? Is the problem here that we are essentially talking different 'languages'? If this is the case, and my own experience suggests that it is, then perhaps we should recognise it and 'draw the line'. Let the anti-boycott and pro-Israel camp continue to prevaricate and excuse the abuse of the innocent, and let the rest of continue to fight for justice.

Of course, that fight for justice will not be easy, mainly because of the biased nature of the mainstream media. Did I just say that?? Yes I did, in fact, I already said it my infamous article:

"Yet the Israeli government does a very good job of convincing the whole world that it is the victim in the conflict. How can this be? Israeli control of the press? Could that ubiquitous "conspiracy theory" actually be closer to a conspiracy fact? I don't really care, all I want is for someone to explain to me how, in a situation where there is massive evidence that 1.4 million completely isolated Palestinian civilians in the Gaza strip are being systematically murdered and starved by the state of Israel with its shiny 21st century military and all the tax dollars and support America can muster, somehow the entire world believes that those 1.4 million dispossessed are "evil terrorists" and "only have themselves to blame".

Somebody, please tell me how it comes to pass, if not by control of the mainstream press, and very significant control at that."

Now, are the above comments anti-Semitic? If they are backed up by mainstream sources that show a clear bias towards Israel in the mainstream press, are they still anti-Semitic? If a meticulously researched scholarly paper by two eminent U.S. professors provides ample evidence for the existence of a very powerful Israel lobby in the US and in other nations, is it anti-Semitic to infer that said lobby could exert control over mainstream press corporations that report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that said lobby could have some connection to the Israeli government?

Can someone please explain to me how, if I draw this conclusion, it is evidence that I 'hate Jews because they are Jews'. How does making logical and reasonable deductions from verifiable facts make me anti-semitic? Or perhaps I am anti-semitic because I am challenging the logic of those supporters of Israel that want to label me anti-semitic?

Since we are on the topic of the mainstream press, I should note that the fracas over Jenna Delich's posting of a link to my article was picked up by the Jerusalem Post:

UK union posts link to anti-Semitic article

August 26 2008 Jonny Paul, London

A member of the British academic union that voted to reintroduce a boycott of Israeli academia has posted a link on the union's Web site to an anti-Semitic article on the Web site of former Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Jenna Delich, a member of the University and College Union, posted a message on the UCU Web site's activist list with a link to the article.

Delich's message was in support of a colleague who backs the boycott call. It reads: "John, in support to your link this may be a long but also an interesting reading: www.davidduke.com/general/humanitarian-disaster-595.html. No comment necessary. The facts are speaking for themselves, Jenna."

Note the title of the piece. Mr. Paul is apparently in agreement with the anti-boycott camp in the UK that critcism of the Israeli government in order to pressure it to end the human rights abuses in Palestine is "anti-Semitic".

The article, "Racism, not Defense, at the Heart of Israeli Politics," is an attack on the "Israeli oligarchs" and was circulated to hundreds of the union's active members. It was written by a 9/11 conspiracy theorist named Joe Quinn.

"9/11 conspriacy theorist"? Well, ok, I can accept that. I am of the opinion that the 9/11 attacks involved a group of people conspiring together.

In the article he writes: "There is much evidence to warrant an in-depth investigation of the role played by agents of Israel in the 9/11 attacks. Yet the ubiquitous, tiresome and completely baseless threat of being labelled "anti-Semitic," for criticizing the actions of the Israeli government effectively prevents all but the most courageous from following the leads. Coincidence? We think not...

I am not entirely certain whether Mr. Paul quoted this paragraph because he agrees with me that to label those who criticise the Israeli government as "anti-Semitic" is a baseless accusation, or if he thinks this paragraph is evidence of my alleged hatred of Jews.

"Just what level of power do Israeli interests wield in the halls of power in the US that any investigation into Israeli spying activities on US soil against US intelligence agencies can be so completely quashed? Would this constitute a level of power and control that would allow those interests to carry off a terrorist attack like 9/11 and have it blamed on 'Arab terrorists?'"

Again, I am not sure why Mr Paul chose this paragraph. Maybe he thinks I have a point. Maybe he read Walt and Mearsheimer's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, or maybe he read the Washington Post article of September 10th 2001 entitled, U.S. troops would enforce peace under Army study, and where it is stated:

Located at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the School for Advanced Military Studies is both a training ground and a think tank for some of the Army's brightest officers. Officials say the Army chief of staff, and sometimes the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ask SAMS to develop contingency plans for future military operations. During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, SAMS personnel helped plan the coalition ground attack that avoided a strike up the middle of Iraqi positions and instead executed a "left hook" that routed the enemy in 100 hours.

The cover page for the recent SAMS project said it was done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Maj. Chris Garver, a Fort Leavenworth spokesman, said the study was not requested by Washington.

"This was just an academic exercise," said Maj. Garver. "They were trying to take a current situation and get some training out of it."

The exercise was done by 60 officers dubbed "Jedi Knights," as all second-year SAMS students are nicknamed.

The SAMS paper attempts to predict events in the first year of a peace-enforcement operation, and sees possible dangers for U.S. troops from both sides.

It calls Israel's armed forces a "500-pound gorilla in Israel. Well armed and trained. Operates in both Gaza [and the West Bank]. Known to disregard international law to accomplish mission. Very unlikely to fire on American forces. Fratricide a concern especially in air space management."

Of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, the SAMS officers say: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

Of course, if Mr Paul is aware of this report by the elite of US military intelligence, I hope that he would agree with me that the Mossad is an Israeli government institution, and any criticism of it does not imply a concomitant hatred of Jewish people.

Quinn links to the Web site of convicted Holocaust-denier David Irving saying: "On the morning of 9/11 and just as the WTC towers were crumbling, the five Israelis were caught doing the 'happy dance' as they videotaped the Twin Towers fall." The piece closes with the claim: "Either someone does something about these sick psychopaths, or they, and their kind in Washington and around the world, will destroy us all."

Now here is where Mr. Paul snuggles up close to the defamers at Engage and Harry's Place and at the same time engages in some real sloppy journalism. All Mr. Paul had to do was click on the link on Duke's website to see that there is not and never has been a link to Duke's website on my original Sott.net article (or anywhere else on Sott.net). It should not have been difficult therefore for Mr. Paul to deduce that Duke reproduced my article rather than me "linking" to his site. Furthermore, if Mr. Paul had indulged in some responsible journalism he could easily have contacted me to verify whether or not I had given permission for the article to be posted by Duke or if I even knew that he had done so (I did not). So for some reason, I am not shocked that the Jerusalem Post went for the easy option of a poorly researched hit piece that supports the dubious claim that anti-semitism is on the rise in British academia.

Paul continues:

The link was discovered by Engage, a group of left-wing trade unionists and academics active in the anti-boycott campaign.

Now, the idea that Engage is "left-wing" has me perplexed. I thought that left-wingers were traditionally anti-war, bleeding heart liberal, humanitarian types. Engage was established to opposed the boycott which puts it firmly in the pro-Israeli government camp, with all that entails. Unless of course by "left-wing" Engage means Tony Blair's 'New Labour' type of 'left-wingism', in which case I fully understand, but I'm going to have to redefine my political 'isms.

Dr. David Hirsh, lecturer at University of London's Goldsmiths College and editor of the Engage Web site, said: "Since 2003 academic unions have been dominated by a campaign to exclude Israelis, and nobody else, from UK campuses. We have warned the [UCU] general-secretary on numerous occasions that this campaign has imported anti-Semitic ways of thinking into our union, she either didn't understand or didn't care. That the union is now circulating racist material should be understood as a manifestation of its institutional anti-Semitism; it cannot be written off as yet another random accident."

It is again unsurprising that Mr. Paul chose to quote from the Engage web site and its owner (I presume) David Hirsh. It was Hirsh who first revealed Ms. Delich's message and kicked off the sweeping generalisations that "the UCU is circulating links to David Duke's website on behalf of Delich."

Hirsh said Delich's e-mails on the activist list had already been the subject of two formal complaints to the union. However, the UCU judged that the evidence was unpersuasive.

And why might the UCU have judged that the evidence was unpersuasive? Could it possibly be that the evidence for Ms. Delich's racism or anti-Semitism was unpersuasive?

Dr. Jon Pike, a member of the UCU national executive but speaking in a personal capacity, said: "I'm not surprised that anti-Semitic material has again dropped into my inbox from the union activists' list. What is shocking is the failure of the union's internal procedures to do anything about this. UCU prides itself on being an anti-racist union. In fact, it is probably the most complacent public institution in Britain in relation to increasing anti-Semitism and the leadership turns a blind eye, or worse, to the racism in the union. Behind all this is the campaign of discrimination against Israeli academics which is fostered by some in the union and encouraged by the leadership."

Eve Garrard, senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Keele University in Staffordshire, said: "This is precisely the kind of thing which drove me recently to resign from the UCU. It has become a union which is complacent about anti-Semitism: It regards prejudicial hostility toward Jews, from within the union itself, as something too unimportant for it to bother with. I didn't feel able to remain in an institution which treats anti-Semitism indulgently, as a special exception to a generally anti-racist stance."

Below is one email that Ms. Delich posted to the activist list in April this year. (emphasis mine):

Like quite a lot of others I feel tired from getting bulks of messages on an hourly basis with this endless discussion going on, and have very rarely felt the need to say something. However, I now feel that I might add a few words.

First, I find the whole talk about anti-semitism as an attempt to shift the focus from attacking the IDEA of Zionism and the Israeli politics inspired by it, and subsequent terror it has brought on the Palestinian people. Not all people (in this case Jews) buy into one and the same idea (as we know, it wasn't even the case in WWII). Therefore, I don't [think] we could comfortably say that Zionism=Judaism, and therefore, all Jews are Zionists. We know that it isn't either true or correct. So, I can't see how attacking an idea may equate to attacking an entire nation or one people. I personally would strongly oppose if a member of my people spoke on my behalf trying to represent me if I did not agree with him. Nobody could have a carte blanche to speak in the name and on behalf of the entire nation. Thus, I don't think that we can box all Jewish people in a package labelled Zionism, and therefore consider one's opposition to the idea of Zionism as an attack on the 'entire package'.

So, why not try to focus on the real essence of the entire discussion:

Zionism and the official politics of Israel, and its effects on innocent Palestinian civilians who have been denied the basic human rights as a result of such a politics?

As to the boycott, I simply see the point of the boycott and similar actions as a way of political pressure to try and change the official politics of one government. We are all familiar with sanctions and even bombing of parts of the world (e.g. Libya, Iraq) that were endorsed by the International community in order to remove oppressive regimes and a certain politics that had far more severe/devastating effects on the entire civilian population of those countries (children, women, elderly etc.) than a boycott would have on Israel.

But how do you change one politics if you do not put pressure on the people of that country to make them stand against their government? And are you (or anybody in their right mind) prepared to support building a College on settlements that were once legally the Palestinian land? Would you allow anyone to come and build a shed in your garden, driving you out of there (although it would be only a very tiny piece of land), and them pride myself in having the most beautiful shed in the neighbourhood expecting others to admire its beauty, and praise and applaud the perpetrator? And what would you think of those neighbours who would dare applaud someone invading you garden?

As to the bullying, I could never see a political discussion to be deemed as bullying. However, for those who claim this to have been so it would be interesting to invite them to state the exact quotes that they find to constitute bullying. I always believe that claims have to be substantiated by hard facts (what, where, when,and who).

Regards JENNA DELICH

You can read a few more of the "racist" emails from Ms. Delich at this link (search for 'JENNA'). In all of them she comes across as a reasonable person who is motivated by the suffering of innocent people and anger at the Israeli government for meting it out. So where is the anti-semitism? Mr Hirsh explains:

"Anti-Semitism is routinely tolerated on the activist list when it is expressed in the language of hostility to Israel," Hirsh said. "Only a small group of Jews and anti-racists have been standing up against this culture on the list. Some have been excluded from the list on trumped up charges; others have been driven off the list by continual accusations of bad faith. Some have left the union because they cannot bear to pay their dues to what they consider to be an anti-Semitic organization."

So anti-semitism is "hostility to Israel". To be more specific, in the context of the debate within the UCU, for Mr Hirsh and the rest of the anti-boycott camp, "anti-semitism" is hostility to the Israeli government and it's policies towards Palestinians. This definition however diverges sharply from the working definition of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights which states:

"...criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-semitic."

The International Court of justice ruled in 2004 that the 'separation fence' is illegal, should be dismantled, and Palestinians should be compensated for damages. The Israeli government ignored the ruling and continued to build the wall, so the Israeli government is today in clear violation of international law and as a result is causing suffering to millions of people.

Would any other nation be criticized for similar flagrant disregard for international law and human rights? More importantly, has any other nation been criticized for similar flagrant disregard for international law and human rights? The answer is an emphatic 'yes'. Can we therefore criticize the Israeli government and bring pressure to bear on it by way of boycotts without being labeled anti-Semitic? The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and therefore EU law says that we can. As such, for all those who abhor the Israeli government's continuing brutal treatment of defenseless Palestinians, understand that you are not only legally entitled to criticize the Israeli government, you are also morally bound to do so.

Comment: Update: Within a few hours of posting the link to the mailing list, Ms. Delich responded:

I didn't realise who David Duke was nor did I hear of him. I just looked at the article not the website where it appeared. Apologies for picking up that website as I personallly am strongly against any racists, anti-semitists and the likes of them. I just found the article quite powerful, and none are saying that Joe Quinn (the author of the article) is a racist or anti-semitist, and the article is quite interesting. So, perhaps we should focus on the article itself and not where it appeared (if we look at it in a broader sense, the website itself appeard on Google and so did the article)? Anyone can put anything on their website... Sincere apologies once again though for picking the wrong website, but it's the article that I found interesting as it gives some amazing facts and it was not written by David Duke (who, I most certainly agree, has no place in UCU but is the author of the website and not the article).

Mr Hirsh at Engage and all of the other "left-wing" anti-boycott, pro-Israeli government defamation artists were surely aware of Ms. Delich's response, yet they chose to pursue their opportunistic and scurrilous manipulation of Ms. Delich's simple mistake in their efforts to perpetuate the Israeli government's continued persecution of the Palestinian people.

By their fruits you shall know them.

Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction

2008-07-02T10:56:00.001+02:00

©Unknown

How the Tunguska object may have appeared.

One hundred years ago today, on the night of 30 June and 1 July, one of the most extraordinary events in modern history occurred.

The first reports of a strange glow in the sky came from across Europe. Shortly after midnight on 1 July 1908, Londoners were intrigued to see a pink phosphorescent night sky over the capital. People who had retired awoke confused as the strange pink glow shone into their bedrooms. The same ruddy luminescence was reported over Belgium. The skies over Germany were curiously said to be bright green, while the heavens over Scotland were of an incredible intense whiteness which tricked the wildlife into believing it was dawn. Birdsong started and cocks crowed - at two o'clock in the morning. The skies over Moscow were so bright, photographs were taken of the streets without using a magnesium flash. A captain on a ship on the River Volga said he could see vessels on the river two miles away by the uncanny astral light. One golf game in England almost went on until four in the morning under the nocturnal glow, and in the following week The Times of London was inundated with letters from readers from all over the United Kingdom to report the curious 'false dawn'. A woman in Huntingdon wrote that she had been able to read a book in her bedroom solely by the peculiar rosy light. There were hundreds of letters from people reporting identical lighting conditions that went on for weeks... (Tom Slemen)

None of the people witnessing this strange phenomenon had any idea that, in the central Siberian plateau, just after 7:15 a.m. local time, the planet had been hit by a cometary impactor that exploded - as most such impactors do - in the atmosphere just above the Earth's surface.

There was, of course, a great deal of comment about the strange, glowing sky in newspapers and scientific journals at the time. A theory was proposed that icy particles had somehow formed high in the atmosphere and were reflecting sunlight. Another theory suggested that a strange auroral disturbance was involved. The Danish astronomer Kohl pointed out that several very large meteors had recently been observed over Denmark and he suggested that comet dust in the high atmosphere might account for the phenomenon. He was getting close, but in general, there was no agreement as to what had happened.

An Irkutsk newspaper dated 2 July 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.

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 stop his train for fear of derailment due to the tremors and commotion. In towns 300 to 400 miles away, hurricane-like gusts rattled doors, windows and crockery. This was followed within minutes by shock waves which knocked down horses and hurled people working on boats into the river.

Over 550 miles to the south of the explosion, a seismograph in the city of Irkutsk near Lake Baikal, close to the Mongolian border, registered strong earth tremors.

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 center of Siberia.

The closest observers of the explosion were reindeer herders asleep in their tents in several camps about 30 km from the site. They were blown into the air and knocked unconscious; one man blown into a tree later died of his injuries.

Early in the morning when everyone was asleep in the tent, it was blown up in the air along with its occupants. Some lost consciousness. When they regained consciousness, they heard a great deal of noise and saw the forest burning around them, much of it devastated.

The ground shook and incredibly prolonged roaring was heard. Everything round about was shrouded in smoke and fog from burning, falling trees. Eventually the noise died away and the wind dropped, but the forest went on burning. Many reindeer rushed away and were lost. [earthsci.org]

Thousands of reindeer, in the general area around ground zero, were killed. Many campsites and storage huts belonging to the herders that dotted the area were destroyed.

Rumors of an extraordinary event persisted, transmitted back by geologists and other researchers working in the area. These stories attracted the attention of a meteorite researcher, Leonard Kulik. But, it was not until 1927 that he could finally lead an expedition to the site of the 1908 explosion.

Kulik got off the Trans-Siberian railway at the Taishet station and on horse-drawn sledges they set off on an arduous three-day odyssey through 350 miles of ice and snow until he and his men reached the village of Kezhma, situated on the River Angara. At the village Kulik and his party of researchers replenished their supplies of food, then struggled on for a three-day journey across wild and unchartered areas of Siberia until they reached the log-cabin village of Vanavara on 25 March.

Kulik then tried to make headway through the untamed Siberian forests, or taiga as the Russians call it, but was forced to turn back after heavy snowdrifts almost froze the horses to death. For three days Kulik was forced to remain in the snow-bound village of Vanavara, but during this period he interviewed many of the Evenki hunters who had witnessed the Siberian fireball's arrival on this planet.

The tales of the sky being ripped open by a falling sun and of a great thunder shaking the ground made Kulik even more eager to penetrate the taiga to find his holy grail.

When the weather gradually improved, Kulik set out for the Tunguska Valley. When he finally reached the site of the mysterious explosion, he was almost speechless. From a ridge overlooking the scene, Kulik took out his notebook and scribbled down his first impressions of the damage wreaked by the cosmic vandal. Kulik wrote:

From our observation point no sign of forest can be seen, for everything has been devastated and burned, and around the edge of the dead area, the young, twenty-year-old forest growth has moved forward furiously, seeking sunshine and life. One has an uncanny feeling when one sees twenty to thirty-inch [thick] giant trees snapped across like twigs, and their tops hurled many yards away.

©Unknown
Aftermath of the Tunguska explosion

There were three further expeditions to the site of the Tunguska explosion, all of them headed by Kulik. In 1941, Hitler attacked Russia. The 58-year-old Leonid Kulik volunteered to defend Moscow, but was wounded by the Nazis. He was captured by German troops and thrown in a prison camp where he died from his wounds. [Tom Slemen]

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 including stations between Cambridge, 50 miles north of London, and Petersfield, 55 miles south. Interestingly, it took the meteorologists in England twenty years to make the connection between their records and the devastation in Tunguska. The wave trains were unlike any others which had been recorded up until that time but nowadays we know that they do resemble those obtained from a hydrogen bomb explosion. It seems that the impact had an energy of 30 to 40 megatons, the combined force of a few dozen ordinary hydrogen bombs.

According to John Baxter and Thomas Atkins, in their book The Fire Came By, the explosion resulted in an enormous "pillar of fire" and the blinding column was visible for hundreds of miles. The series of thunderous claps that followed could be heard for 500 miles or more.

©Unknown

What the Tunguska explosion may have looked like.

The noise of the explosion deafened those close to the blast. Following that, a searingly hot thermal current from the fire in the sky raced across the forests. Tall conifers were scorched and ignited and the fires burned for days. Residents of Vanavara, a small trading post about forty miles distant, felt the fierce draft of heat. Some individuals there were flung into the air as the shock wave arrived; pieces of sod were gouged up, ceilings collapsed, and windows were shattered.

©Unknown

Aftermath of the Tunguska explosion

As it happens, 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.

The scientific investigation undertaken by Kullik in 1927 revealed that near the center of the blast many of the trees were still standing upright, even though denuded of limbs and leaves. Further from ground zero the trees were blown down and seared, forming concentric circles with the bases of the trees all pointing in the direction of the center of the blast. All of this evidence pointed to the fact that the blast almost certainly occurred in mid air.

©Unknown

This image shows the directions of the blast

The occurrence, this century, of an impact with the energy of a really big hydrogen bomb does give one pause. Had the incident occurred today, it would probably trigger World War Three. Just a few hours earlier or later and the impact could have been over a major city or urban area. But that didn't happen. As noted, it was twenty years before anyone really had an inkling of what DID happen. That was partly due to the fact that the Russians in 1908 were somewhat occupied with politics. The previous year, 1907, Czar Nicholas had found himself faced with revolutionaries being elected in large numbers to the newly created parliament - the Duma. The eventual revolution began in 1918. One might even say that the Tunguska event was a harbinger of things to come. And maybe in more ways than anybody thinks.

©Unknown

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

Eighty-six years later, in July of 1994, there was another harbinger: the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy struck Jupiter.

©Unknown

If they were able to brush Tunguska off as a fluke, scientists were not so easily able to put aside the spectacle of a whole string of comets hitting another planet in our solar system, one after the other, as the planet spun in space. In the same year, a book entitled Hazards due to Comets and Asteroids was published in reaction to this, then impending, event. The book is a collection of papers which I have referenced before in this series. One of the papers in that book says:

Our understanding of the history of Earth and its inhabitants is undergoing a radical change. The gradual processes of geologic change and evolution, it is now clear, are punctuated by natural catastrophes on a colossal scale - catastrophes resulting from collisions of large asteroids and comets with Earth. It is, to use the popular term, a "paradigm shift."

This "new catastrophism," is not unlike the revolutions brought about by the heliocentric solar system of Copernicus, or Darwinian evolution, or the big bang. In retrospect, such revolutionary ideas always seem obvious. On reading the Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley remarked simply: "Why didn't I think of that." Now, looking at the Moon, we find ourselves wondering why it took so long to ask whether the process that cratered its surface is still going on. (Robert L. Park of The American Physical Society, Lori B. Garver of the National Space Society and Terry Dawson, a staffer for the House Committee on Science, Technology, and Space working for the Committee's then Chairman, Rep. George Brown )

Let me repeat that most important remark:

Our understanding of the history of Earth and its inhabitants is undergoing a radical change. The gradual processes of geologic change and evolution, it is now clear, are punctuated by natural catastrophes on a colossal scale ...

That may be the understatement of the millennium.

It has been suggested by a number of researchers that the current "climate change" issues are actually due to the earth moving through cosmic dust clouds and that all the hoopla about global warming is simply a cover-up of this fact. Astrophysicist Victor Clube suggests that it is a cometary cosmic dust cloud, left over from the break-up of a giant comet that, for a long period of the Earth's history, threatened and bombarded our planet with unspeakably horrible, civilization destroying fragments, i.e. the progenitor of the Taurid stream, including the Tunguska comet. Clube also argues that these events were the basis for the formulation of humanity's ideas about the cosmos, god and religion and even astrology. Over time, as the giant comet spent most of its mass in its Titanic fury, dying away to occasional less than civilization destroying bombardments, our conceptions of gods changed; the reality was tossed out the window in favor of fairy tales for both science and religion, not to mention astrology. He writes:

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)

This problem of the "status quo" and "thought police" is not a minor issue. In this series of articles that were kicked off by Mike Baillie's book New Light on the Black Death, we have repeatedly come face to face with the obvious fact that those in positions of power and authority lie to the masses of humanity as a rule rather than an exception.

Again and again in this series, we have discussed historical cometary bombardments, the consequences for humanity being dire enough to begin with, but which were then exacerbated and capitalized upon by pathological deviants, following which the facts were covered up by lies. Worse, again and again we have seen that the masses of humanity that suffer the most from these assaults and manipulations appear to be quite willing to be deceived even to their own death and destruction (if only someone will give them something warm and fuzzy to believe in and a scapegoat to blame). At present, we are observing this phenomenon playing out on the global stage in real time and again and again we shake our heads and ask "why?!" What is it about our world, our present day culture, the human beings that occupy our planet, that gives rise to this bizarre condition that lies are preferred over truth, death over life?

As I have pulled on the many threads that lead to and away from these matters, what I see repeatedly is a small group of people on the planet who rule over the masses of people, who do not have humanity's best interests at heart - another staggering understatement, but I'm on a roll so why stop now? What I see is the constant - and mostly successful - efforts of this small group driving to enforce totalitarianism in one guise or another - from politics to religion to all fields of science - on the entire world. And again and again they utilize disasters as a means to consolidate their power. Read Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine to get a good grip on exactly how this works now, and how it has always worked. There is nothing new under the sun!

Parallel to the growing awareness of pathology in power is the expanding research among a few maverick scientists and researchers showing plainly that cometary disasters are cyclic and it is altogether possible that there are still a few big bangs left in the Taurid meteor stream. It is also possible that there are new swarms of comets heading our way as recent "global warming" and "moon capture" events on the other planets seem to indicate. Something is definitely going on in our solar system and we need to know what it is. What seems certain is that if disasters are in our future, it will be seen by the elite as just another opportunity to use their Shock tactics to consolidate their power over the entire globe, never mind that there might be so few people left that it will only amount to being a big frog in a small pond - and possibly a frozen one at that.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrestles mightily with the problem, never quite reaching a complete explanation nor solution. After all she saw, all she experienced, all her research, in the introduction she wrote:

Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena - homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest - forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.

On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism. [...]

This book [...] was written out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognizable for human comprehension, unusable for human purpose. To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of "historical necessity," but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless, and unreal.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us - neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated attentive facing up to...reality.

In this sense, it must be possible to face and understand the outrageous fact that so small (and, in world politics, so unimportant) a phenomenon as the Jewish question and anti-Semitism could become the catalytic agent for first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of death factories. [...] or the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements avowed cynical "realism" and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality. [...]

The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man. (Hannah Arendt, Summer, 1950)

Hannah's comments and observations of our world, wrung from her own pain and experiences, have never been more poignant than today when we face exactly what she was describing: Global Totalitarianism rising like a mighty juggernaut with the end of humanity in sight. And never have we seen more clearly that characteristic of the authoritarian type Hannah also saw: "avowed cynical "realism" and ... conspicuous disdain of the whole texture of reality." If you want to see a stunning portrayal of this type of individual, get a copy of Lions for Lambs and watch Tom Cruise deliver a drop-dead performance.

Here at SOTT we regularly discuss the problem of pathological deviance and how pathology can drive an individual to seek power over others. We have brought forward the work of Andrzej Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology, and this goes a long way toward providing a framework in which the history of evil - particularly political evil - can be understood.

As far as I can tell, Hannah Arendt did not consider the problems of pathology and how it operates in society as a corrupting element, nor did she consider the factor that Judaism and its offspring, Christianity and Islam, could be the carriers of the disease of totalitarianism. In this sense, it is really important to come to the knowledge of how religions are created and by whom - generally pathological deviants - and how they are used, in combination with politics, to control masses of people. This, of course, takes us back to the problem of comets in our skies and impacting our planet.

As it happens, after pulling on so many threads relating to the topic, it occurs to me that comets may, indeed, have a great deal to do with the major social problem on our planet today: psychopaths.

One might reasonably ask: Is some evolutionary process at work here? Clearly, staggeringly large numbers of people die repeatedly when they place their trust in lies and liars. And nearly as often do the liars in power find themselves in difficult situations as a result of their over-reaching and ignoring facts. Obviously, if evolution is at work here, those individuals - and their offspring who believe lies are ultimately eliminated from the gene pool. What happens to those who, as Arendt suggests, try to comprehend, understand, and face the facts of our reality, remains to be seen. As she also states, this comprehension must not deny the outrageous, nor attempt to deduce the unprecedented from precedent.

You see, evolutionarily speaking, psychopaths should not exist. Throughout history it can be seen that human beings have needed to co-operate and care about one another in order to survive and produce a new generation that will carry on the processes of society. Most human dynamics are based on people trying to work out their problems and come to resolutions agreeable to the greatest number or, at the very least, in the interactions between two people. The issue of trust is paramount. Someone who betrays your trust is someone you cannot live or work with. Therefore, psychopaths, who are untrustworthy should have long ago become extinct. But that isn't the way things are. It appears, in fact, as if psychopathy has increased!

As we can observe throughout history right down to the present day, being the only psychopath in a group of trusting people can be a very good thing for the psychopath. As groups get larger, they can accommodate more psychopaths. It seems that when the number of people carrying the psychopathy gene is small enough, those few who carry it can achieve phenomenal breeding success. As Glenn Whitman explains it:

What's nice about this explanation is that it not only explains why psychopaths exist, but also why we're not all psychopaths. If there are few enough psychopaths in the population, then being a psychopath makes sense because you'll mostly have winning confrontations with nice people. But if there are too many psychopaths, then the gains from taking advantage of nice people will be swamped by the losses from confronting other psychopaths. In equilibrium, you'll get both psychos and nice folks, with each strategy generating approximately equal returns, and with the precise balance determined by the relative payoffs of different interactions.

The problem is, as noted, we are living in a time when psychopathy seems to have increased almost exponentially. Moreover, as Hannah Arendt notes - and this was never more true than today - the broad sweep of history indicates that the psychopaths are winning and that means destruction for all, including the psychopaths.

Which leads us to the problem: psychopathy being what it is and doing what it does, should certainly have brought the human race to total destruction a long time ago IF, as a taxon, it had existed throughout the development of humankind. And that suggests that it did not. In fact, the studies of Marija Gimbutas indicate that there was a time when psychopathy was not "at the top".

As far back as we can go with archaeological records; i.e. "hard science," we find that the worship of the Great Celestial Goddess was the act of veneration of the Universe and all within it as the living body of the Goddess-Mother-Creatrix. This goddess was symbolized by the double wavy lines of water - both the cosmic sea of potential/activation, as well as the life giving moisture that emanated from the body of the Goddess and all women as her representatives on earth; the oceans and seas, rivers and springs and wells.

She was the sky Goddess and the Earth was her womb and all upon it were her children. The "Son/Sun-King" died every year and was reborn in the passing of the seasons. Rites and rituals were enacted to insure the rebirth of the "Son-Sun" through the "womb of the Earth," the generative organ of the Cosmic Mother. There was a purity and innocence... a pastoral, Arcadian simplicity and symmetry to life. Men and women were equals in importance as the "Twin offspring" of the Goddess.

Women were honored and cherished in their three manifestations: the virgin-future-mother; the mother-nourisher; and the crone-mother of wisdom. Men were partners and protectors of women, thereby protectors of their own being since all were born and nursed by women. The male energy served the female because the female served the male; there was cycling energy, synergy, symmetry and balance.

The wavy lines of water, the Cosmic Sea of the Mother, were, at some point, corrupted into the symbol of the serpent; the woman became associated with the serpent instead of the Stars; and everything went downhill from there. This event is described in Genesis 3:19 where Adam is told by Yahweh: "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Here, the "dust" or the Earth, is denigrated and reviled as worthless in the same passage as woman, herself, is denigrated and reviled as the temptress. But, in the pre-existing Goddess religions, the earth out of which all life has been born is NOT dust, but alive - as the womb of the Goddess herself! And, judging by the massive evidence collected by Marija Gimbutas, this was the most ancient and worldwide order of thought, antecedent to and underlying all other myths, predating the male-dominated pantheons by many thousands of years!

The main theme of the Goddess symbolism is the mystery of birth and death and the renewal of life, not only human, but all life on earth and indeed, in the whole cosmos. Symbols and images cluster around the parthenogenetic Goddess and her basic functions as Giver of Life, Wielder of Death, and, not less importantly, as Regeneratrix, and around the Earth Mother, the Fertility Goddess young and old, rising and dying with plant life. She was the single source of all life and who took her energy from the springs and wells, from the sun, moon, and moist earth. This symbolic system represents cyclical, not linear time. In art this is manifested by the signs of dynamic motion: whirling and twisting spirals..." [Gimbutas, 1989]

At some point the goddess, or source of moisture and all life, was identified with the serpent-as-tempter and became the wicked Temptress herself. There is some difficulty in untangling the threads of the currently known symbolic systems of which there are now two: one reflecting a matriarchal-serpent culture, and the other an androcratic-militaristic-serpent culture. The man and woman, who were formerly united as the original "Twins of Creation," and who, in their union could "control" the serpent, became opposed to each other; unbalanced; antagonists, not partners. The benevolent "Son-King," the leader of the flock, was no longer sustained and supported by the female energy, channeled from the Goddess through the "Tree," in the body of the Goddess' representative on Earth, Woman, but instead became the male "killer" of the serpent AND controller/ oppressor of the Goddess, who became the exemplification of temptation and occasional consort of the serpent!

At some point, the ancients say that Eve betrayed Adam, Cain killed his brother, Abel, and psychopathy was let loose on our planet.

Who was this serpent? What are the clues that point to his appearance on the scene? Where? When?

Tunguska was the first key to this problem.

If it had not been for the cometary impact at Tunguska one hundred years ago today, and then the Shoemaker-Levy impacts on Jupiter eighty-six years later, our attention would not be drawn to certain aspects of our history that have been thoroughly covered up, nor the effects of those lies and distortions on our world today. Somehow, psychopaths and comets are inextricably bound together; it is even possible that the same cosmic forces that sent comets our way also "created" psychopaths. This is what I want to explore in the final installments to this series of articles.

Stay tuned, our next stop is the end of the Last Ice Age when the Cosmic Serpent appeared on the scene and the processes that have led to our involvement in the Sixth Extinction got underway.

Israel - Two Thousand Years of Lies - Sixty Years of State Terrorism

2008-05-15T11:24:00.000+02:00

A few years ago, when my book The Secret History of the World was published, I rashly promised that volume 2 would soon be completed and ready for publication. After all, I pretty much knew what I wanted to zoom in on - the topic of Moses and the creation of Judaism - and I already had a good hypothesis and had tons of supplementary support material. I even had a title: The Horns of Moses (triple entendre!) It should be a piece of cake, I thought. And so, I sat down to write.

I had a pretty good flow going, Moses was coming to life on the computer screen, and then... well, then I started to have doubts. I knew that I knew a lot about Moses from the theological point of view and from the point of view of a lot of alternative research. I even knew a lot of what the scholars knew - the people who spend their lives studying and analyzing the Biblical texts. But I still felt uneasy. So, I went searching for more source materials and discovered that there was a whole lot more I needed to read before I could complete this project. That's pretty much what I have been doing for the past year or two: reading stuff that nobody except specialists ever reads, and collecting piles of data.

What has been shocking to discover is exactly how much IS known among the scholars that is not known by the general public. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since I have discovered this to be true in other fields, but when the subject is the foundation of religion - stuff people believe in and stake their lives on and use to determine their actions in life - well, it's pretty bad.

In the process, I've learned a lot about the creation of Judaism which is pretty much the "foundation" of Western Society. Gee, don't you find that odd? A religion created by an obscure Middle Eastern tribe - basically a tribal god - somehow got elevated to be the "God of the Cosmos" and became the model for the Western view of "Godly being"? And this was done at the expense of the perceptions of spirit that were common to Western Europe before the imposition of the Middle Eastern gods. We are taught that Europe was a savage, uncivilized place; but is that true? How could it be true when there is so much evidence around us in the form of hundreds of thousands of megaliths, that the ancient Europeans did things that the Middle Eastern civilizations never did?

Well, anyway, as I branched out in my reading to include other references, I found that the creation of Christianity is closely associated - even in time, which could be a shocker for some - in some very interesting ways with the creation of Judaism; there is a direct link between the texts of the Old Testament and the Dead Sea Scrolls and a link between the Dead Sea Scrolls and certain ideas that became "Christian property"; and bit by bit, with horrifying sureness, I have come to realize that there is nothing more evil on this planet than the monotheistic religions born in the Middle East.

At some point, of course, I want to explore the role that cometary bombardment may have played in the creation of religion and then to examine the role religion has played in the fostering of lies and deceptions in our world. After all, today we consider - can't say I'm celebrating - the "birthday of Israel," an event that has brought more misery and suffering into our modern world than any other event since the Global Holocaust of World War II. In fact, the two events are so intimately connected that you could say that the Holocaust has continued as a consequence of the "Birth of the State of Israel." But there have most assuredly been other Judaism created holocausts throughout the two thousand year history of Western Civilization; the crusades and witch persecutions come immediately to mind.

Judaism supposedly created Israel, and Judaism also is the parent of Christianity and Islam, so the issue of Judaism and Ancient Israel, from which it supposedly emerged, are not trifling topics. The fact is, as a growing body of scholarship demonstrates, there was no "ancient Israel." The Hebrew Bible is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a historical document, and trying to understand the history of Palestine by reading the Bible is like trying to understand Medieval history by reading Ivanhoe. Niels Peter Lemche, a biblical scholar at the University of Copenhagen, writes:

For some years, a discussion has raged within biblical - particularly Old Testament - studies between a position called "maximalist" and a second position, usually dubbed "minimalist." This controversy is over the amount of historical information that can be found in the pages of the Old Testament: not much, the minimalist would say; a lot more, the maximalist would argue. [...]

And, of course, the "maximalists" are true believers... those who have controlled the study of the Bible for a very long time; those who created archaeology for the sole purpose of proving the history in the Bible is true; but archaeology is, little by little, becoming more scientific, and as it has done so, as it has freed itself from the control of True Believers, it has revealed that the Bible is not a historical source.

I approached the subject by first analyzing the biblical accounts of the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, and the sojourn in the desert - in short, the narratives in the books of Genesis through Numbers. After that, I compare the image of the past created by the biblical writers with ancient sources of information from the civilizations of Syria and Palestine in the Bronze Age, which is usually considered as the historical setting of the pentateuchal stories. It will be shown beyond question that there is very little correlation between the biblical portrait of the past and the nonbiblical evidence from actual Bronze Age cultures. We must conclude, however, not that the biblical authors were unsuccessful historians but that they were not at all interested in providing anything like a historical report of the past. They wrote for other reasons, and they used history as the vehicle for their message. When approaching the literature of the Old Testament, people of modern times must realize that the ancient authors did not write primarily for posterity, that is, for us, but for the benefit of their contemporary audience. They followed the moral and aesthetic expectations of their time; they would have had no idea of the rules that govern modern historical studies and interests. [...]

Is the Exodus narrative historical reflection or literary fiction?

If we insist that the Exodus narrative is not referring to a historical event, then we must be prepared to withstand opposition of a far more serious kind than was the case when we deconstructed the historicity of the patriarchal narratives.

Solid reasoning underlies this critical opposition. The social setting of the Exodus story is vastly different from that of the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, which deal with the fate of a particular family. [...]

Unlike the patriarchal narratives and the Joseph saga, Exodus does not describe the fate of a single family. Now the narratives turn to a larger question: the liberation of a nation. The string of narratives that began with Joseph's family migrating to Egypt ends with several hundred thousand people leaving it. The patriarchs are now no more than the distant ancestors of this nation. ... Later Israelites must accept the acts of that liberated generation [of the Exodus] as their own for the sake of national solidarity and continuity. They are part of the national heritage. A saying from the exile underscores the relationship between past and present: "The fathers ate sour grapes, and their children's teeth feel blunt!" (Jer 31:29) It reflects the idea that the liberation of their ancestors ("fathers") from Egypt provided freedom for generations yet unborn, that is, the "children." These children and those ancestors are one people. The Israelites perceive themselves as heirs, identifying with their deceased ancestors, their people. This also means that the ancestors have determined the fate of their descendants because every successive generation relives for itself the experience of its ancestors.

It is interesting to compare this concept - that the Exodus as the liberation of the Jews provided freedom for generations to come - with the concept of the vicarious remission of sins by the crucifixion of Jesus whereby future generations are "set free" by this act. They are, essentially, the same; peculiar Eastern ideas that have no place in a civilization that originally took personal responsibility quite seriously.

The liberation from Egypt is a critical moment in the history of Israel. A nation and its religion depend upon it. Without it, Israel's nationhood would have been a historical footnote, and its faith in Yahweh as the God of Israel would have remained insignificant. The Exodus represents more than a national liberation: it marks the birth of a nation and justifies that nation's very existence.

Two other events become important "foundation legends" for the Israelites: the revelation at Sinai, and the occupation of Canaan. The Exodus marks the beginning of the people and the source of its identity, but the people also need a religion and a land. Without both, the people cannot survive but will face annihilation. A national identity requires a concrete, physical space within which to develop. Without its religion, the people would wander aimlessly through the wilderness like ghostly figures.

At Sinai, Yahweh presents himself as the God who liberated Israel from Egyptian bondage - the very same God who at the beginning of history entered into an exclusive relationship with the patriarchs and promised them a beautiful land.

Keep in mind that the stories of the patriarchs were re-written by those who were seeking to create a new nation after the Babylonian exile and the promises of land were put into the mouth of God to show that the manufactured Exodus story was just a step in the fulfillment of God's plan.

Finally, at Sinai, Yahweh becomes Israel's God in concreto. A contract or "covenant" seals this bond between a people and its God. Thus, the law of Yahweh becomes the legal basis for the nation and for the Israelites' everlasting obligation to their God. Two principles of this covenant inexorably solidify their religious identity. First, the collective religious consciousness of the Israelites confirms that Yahweh is and always will be their God. Second, all Israelites must now and forever conform to the lay of Yahweh, in effect, Israel's "constitution." Thus, the law simplifies what it means to be an Israelite, under God's protection. And anyone who fails to obey is no longer a member of that people.

As for the land, the fulfillment of that promise lies in the future. Yet God makes a pledge at Sinai: if they adhere to the stipulations of the law, the people will inhabit the land and own it. This is not merely a story about a divine revelation; rather, it represents a program for the future of the Israelite nation. Until the people finally live in the "land," one cannot truly call the people "Israel."

In this way, the denial of the historicity of these bedrock elements of the Israelite historical narratives comes close to a denial of the very existence of the Israelite people. Thus, dismissing the Exodus narrative as a historical source is far more serious than taking a critical view of the historical content of the patriarchal tradition. [...]

Predictably, many conservative Christians and Jews become troubled by skeptical voices that question the historicity of the Exodus narratives. Both Christians and Jews consider themselves Israel's true descendants; therefore, to them, these criticisms represent "negative" or even heretical opinions. They do not view these theories as objective analyses of the Exodus or the revelation at Sinai; they see them as attacks on their own religious identities.

If, however, we disregard such concerns - it is after all not the purpose of a critical investigation to protect the presumed identity between the living and the dead members of a certain religious community - it is quite obvious that the Exodus narrative is largely made up of literary elements that closely resemble the ones already found in the book of Genesis. ... The book of Exodus represents a literary quilt, pieced together from the fragments of universal and timeless adventure stories and legends. These are examples of narrative art rather than specifically Israelite folk literature. Appreciating the utility of their plots and characters, the biblical authors appropriated these universal tales and reconstituted them with their own Israelite template. [...]

[W]e can see in the biblical stories images of a familiar narrative style, and perhaps that type of mimicry contributed some measure of credibility to an ancient historian's message. [...]

Exodus 1-19 represents a coherent narrative unit that describes the Israelite wanderings from Egypt to Mount Sinai. Yet many literary substrata appear within those chapters - individual vignettes strung together to create "scenes" within the larger Egypt-Sinai complex. The unit begins with Moses' birth and miraculous rescue and ends with his escape to Midian, where God outlines his future mission. The next contains the long section about the plagues that lead ultimately to Israel's liberation. Finally, a third pericope describes how the Israelites left Egypt and headed toward Sinai.

I would, of course, suggest that the story of the plagues of Egypt is a memory of cometary bombardment, but biblical scholars do not include such speculations in their analyses and so, are somewhat handicapped in interpreting what may or may not be historical.

Initially, this Exodus-Sinai complex seems like a coherent narrative unit. Yet upon further examination, the events and legislation at Mount Sinai represent the narrative's literal and figurative high points. The importance of the Sinai event is so profound that it disturbs the narrative balance of the Exodus-Sinai complex. Sinai simply disrupts the narrative that takes the reader from Egypt to Canaan. Without regard for the narrative consistency, Mount Sinai bursts into the Israelites otherwise uninterrupted march from the Sea of Reeds to the Jordan River.

For years, Old Testament scholars have recognized the narrative discontinuity between the Sinai complex and the Pentateuch's overall narrative scheme. They have based this observation not on the narrative itself but on such texts as the brief credo in Deut 26: 5-9

5 And you shall say before the Lord your God, A wandering and lost Aramean ready to perish was my father [Jacob], and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and he became there a nation, great, mighty, and numerous.

6 And the Egyptians treated us very badly and afflicted us and laid upon us hard bondage.

7 And when we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, the Lord heard our voice and looked on our affliction and our labor and our oppression;

8 And the Lord brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, and with great (awesome) power and with signs and with wonders;

9 And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Amplified Translation, Zondervan)

These brief recollections of Israel's early history, its liberation from Egypt, and its conquest of the promised land completely ignore the Sinai events. While Israel's life in and migration from Egypt remain pivotal topics, Sinai is never mentioned. Thus, almost sixty years ago, Gerhard von Rad suggested that the Sinai complex is not one of the original narrative components of the Pentateuch. For him, these are two originally independent narrative units, on the one side the Exodus and wilderness stories, and on the other the Sinai revelation. They were written independently and only later joined together. (See von Rad, "The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," in "The problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (trans. E.W. Trueman Dicken; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

For von Rad, the borderline between the Exodus narrative and the Sinai revelation is in Exodus 14 (Exod 15, the renowned "Song of the Sea," is an independent unit and not part of either complex). ... clearly, the Exodus narrative is related to the Passover, and Sinai to the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost). The two traditions merge much later. The inclusion of the Sinai revelation into the narrative string of the Exodus and wilderness stories must perforce be later than the composition of a credo text such as Deut 26: 5-9.

Of course, the late combination of two originally independent narrative units does not exclude further elaborations and additions, especially those which create smooth literary transitions between the Exodus and Sinai material. Each narrative complex carries its own religious meaning and background. They arose independently and came together at a later date. Consequently, we must consider their historicity separately. If we confirm the historicity of one complex, we cannot assume the historicity of the other.

Moses, the towering figure of the narrative, guarantees the fundamental unity of the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Moses himself functions as the glue that holds together the Exodus-Numbers tradition, each episode of which is inexorably linked to and defined by its hero. There is, however, reason to doubt that Moses is also the historical link between the Sinai revelation and its surrounding narrative complex. From a historian's vantage point, it might be questionable to see one and the same person as the center of two originally separate narrative units. This observation is important because it is almost impossible to separate Moses from either unit and consider him primary to one of them while secondary to the other. What is the Exodus narrative without Moses? Could Israel accept the tablets of the law from anyone other than Moses himself? Everything points to the narrative units' having been composed from the beginning with Moses in mind.

When they wrote their stories about Israel's past, the authors and the collectors of tradition saw Moses as more important than any of the narrative elements that they combined into the Exodus-Sinai wilderness complex. Thus, from the moment of its composition, Moses dominates the Exodus - Numbers complex. As a consequence of Moses' being an integral part of the narrative units in Exodus-Numbers, it must be concluded that he did not participate in any of the events recorded, which is a paradox since the narratives would not live without his presence. [...]

This uncertainty about Moses' identity surfaces again when we consider his many different roles. In some narratives he is portrayed with a multitude of characteristics, while other narratives characterize him more uniformly. The infant Moses' rescue from the river foreshadows his role as Israel's liberator, the figure of a prototypical ancient Near Eastern adventurer-hero. Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all knew of tales about such child prodigies, a noteworthy example being the Akkadian hero-king Sargon. [...]

The legendary tales of Moses and Sargon foretell the future greatness of two marvelous heroes. Their authors used the rescue theme to distance their heroes from ordinary people. In this way, the hero is allowed to transgress the social conventions that normal people must follow. Without this freedom, no hero would ever succeed in radically changing the fortunes of his nation. [...]

When we consider the several components of the image of Moses in the Pentateuch, his role as the creator and legislator of the Israelite religion is clearly central. At Sinai, Moses mediates the covenant between Yahweh and Israel and conveys the content of God's law to the Israelites. That Moses should also function as Israel's supreme judge and ruler with the same power as the later Israelite kings will, in light of his other functions, hardly come as a surprise.

Moses is simply the unifying literary component in the Egypt-Sinai wilderness complex. Thorough him the authors spin a red thread that connects all the different episodes belonging to this complex of narratives. Yet one question persists: does any of this relate to a historical person called Moses? As we already noted, the Exodus-wilderness complex on the one hand and the Sinai periscope on the other were originally two independent literary units. Unity between them was only reached by introducing the figure of Moses to both narrative complexes. Before that happened, these narratives developed independently; without Moses, their authors would hardly have succeeded in bringing them together.

It is frequently said that the history of Israel's origin and religion presupposes one central and historical individual and is totally unfathomable without that person. Thus, it is quipped that if there had been no Moses, somebody would have to invent one! They say that Israel's early history is inconceivable without a genuine architect The answer is easy: yes, they did in fact invent Him! [...]

Sinai presents another dilemma. Where exactly did God appear to the Israelites? The ecclesiastical tradition that connects the present-day Jebel Musa (the Arab name means "mountain of Moses") with the biblical Mount Sinai only partially conforms to the biblical tradition. In the late narrative that begins in Exodus 19, a mountain appears. However, the description of the journey as well as other hints preserved by the narrative - does not point in the direction of Jebel Musa... [but] rather leads toward the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula and, more precisely, to the oasis Kadesh-barnea.

[A]nother problem persists. The divine revelation at Sinai described in the Old Testament cannot be reduced to a part of the history of early Israel. Such a revelation simply goes beyond what is from a historian's point of view acceptable, because God cannot be the subject of historical reflection ... they must rely on empirical facts. By nature, the Sinai revelation is not a historical subject. [...]

[This] applies as well to the desert wanderings. They must also conform to the criteria and scrutiny of scientific research. ...

Already, problems arise. The census in Numbers describes a massive migration composed of several hundred thousand people, who wandered the desert for forty years. And yet the general description in the Old Testament of the Israelite's desert sojourn has little in common with living conditions in such a place; it rather looks like a snapshot of a religious procession within a settled culture. The number of participants is astonishing. How could so many people survive in the desert? Already the biblical authors were met with such questions and they knew very well how to answer them clearly and absolutely: God provides for his people! Literature can handle miracles, history cannot. The biblical authors interject an intriguing answer to Israel's desert dilemmas, namely, God. Repeatedly, God solves the wanderers' problems with a series of mighty deeds... [...]

So the depiction of the desert wanderings found in Exodus through Numbers is a tradition that does not relate historical circumstances of immigration or life in the desert. This narrative is no more and no less than a literary fiction that has only one goal, namely, to move the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan. Only the most dedicated believer clings desperately to the notion that hundreds of thousand of humans survived forty years in the desert: clearly a barren and inhospitable environment.

To justify the historicity of the desert wanderings, we must modify the number of refugees leaving Egypt and tone down God's miraculous deeds so that we can analyze the historicity of the events they describe. Ultimately, the results will do violence to the biblical descriptions. Why? Because they run counter to the biblical version that not a few persons but a whole nation took part in those events. [...]

If we reduce these stories in the usual, but unlikely, way - taking them to be the memory of only a very small and unimportant group of Asians who escaped from Egypt sometime in the late second millennium BCE - then we must conclude that the Old Testament narratives are unhistorical. The Israelite people never lived in ancient Egypt. The authors of the Biblical narrative may have borrowed from the remembrance of a small group of persons who once had been in Egypt. This group eventually might have become part of the Israelite nation and their tradition a part of the national heritage.

When scholars accept a "small group" hypothesis, they do so to bypass the many historical problems raised by this narrative. Consequently, it is impossible to prove that such a group of emigrants from Egypt ever existed. By drastically reducing the number of people involved in the escape from Egypt, Scholars have made them invisible to the historian. [...] Ultimately, the authors of the book of Exodus created the narratives as we know them. These writers - just like the authors of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis - created their own narrative universe. They wrote about places and events that never existed... they describe a literary world, not historical facts. [...]

[T]he Exodus and Sinai narratives were combined in a religious environment where the Law - the Torah - was already dominant, in other words, in an Israelite, or preferably Jewish, context. [...]

In other words, the stories were combined, glossed, adjusted, re-written, at a time when they were needed to underpin certain religious and political objectives, a time when the Law was already in place, undoubtedly after the Babylonian exile, or even later. Some experts suggest that these stories were created under Hellenic influences because quite a few of the Bible stories indicate borrowings from Hellenic sources and concepts.

In spite of the preceding observations, we cannot dispute every last historical connection for the Sinai narratives. Both the Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern sources provide circumstantial evidence of Yahwistic practice at Sinai, although the god Yahweh only later came into possession of a major temple in Palestine. The book of Exodus tells us how Yahweh reveals himself initially to Moses and then later to all of Israel. The revelations take place south of the border of ancient Palestine, where we should probably look for Yahweh's original home. Most of the Old Testament evidence appears in material dating from a relatively late literary period; however, other Old Testament passages refer to the mountain of God. As we noted previously, in 1 Kings 19 Elijah ventures into the desert and encounters God at Mount Horeb, evidently a second name for Mount Sinai. In Judg 5: 5 Yahweh is "the one from Sinai." In such texts, Yahweh is also seen as an immigrant from the south, ultimately from Edom or Seir.

Furthermore, Yahweh is mentioned outside the Old Testament narratives. Egyptian sources relate stories about an area known as "Shasu Yahweh", inhabited by Shasu peoples. According to the Egyptian sources from the second millennium BCE, the nomadic Shasu lived in Syria-Palestine, east of the Jordan, and on the Sinai Peninsula. In this context, Shasu Yahweh is located in the Sinai Desert. ...

Long before scholars began to interpret the Egyptian clues about Yahweh, many tried to find the historical background for Moses' visit to Midian, the first place Yahweh confronted Moses. Apart from the question of the historicity of Exodus 3, one unique feature stands out in this Moses-in-Midian story: if Yahweh appeared in Midian, then Israel's God lived in a foreign land and mingled with foreigners (the Midianites). Evidently this was the case.

Second Kings 5 provides an example of the important connection between Yahweh and a land: the Aramaean Naaman, who had converted to Yahwism, had to bring a "piece" of the land of Israel back to Damascus. On this piece of land he could continue to worship Yahweh. Thus it is only possible to worship Yahweh "in" (i.e. "on") his own land.

This is a curious fact. It reminds me of the legends of vampires that could only sleep in a box of earth from their native land. Connection?

Clearly, the Old Testament consciously connects Yahweh with the southern Palestine, indicating the originality of the information contained in these narratives. These historical kernels in the Exodus narratives suggest that either the Israelites lived in southern Palestine or Midianites (according to other biblical information, the Kenites) brought the worship of Yahweh to Palestine. Consequently, Yahwism spread throughout the region until finally Yahweh became Israel's national God. In support of such a theory scholars refer to the evidence that Moses' father-in-law was either a Midianite of a Kenite. [...]

Here I must interject a bit about the Kenites:

In the ancient Levant, the Kenites were a nomadic clan sent under Jethro to priest Midian. According to the Hebrew Bible, they played an important role in the history of ancient Israel. The Kenites were coppersmiths and metalworkers. Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, was a shepherd and a priest of the Kenites. The Kenites apparently assimilated into the Israelite population, though the Kenites descended from Rechab maintained a distinct, nomadic lifestyle for some time.

The Kenites were the descendants of Kenan, but have been understood as the descendents of Cain, the son of Adam and Eve who murdered his brother, Abel.

Moses apparently identified Jethro's god, El Shaddai, with Yahweh, the Israelites' god.[1] According to the Kenite hypothesis, Yahweh was originally the tribal god of the Kenites, borrowed and adapted by the Hebrews. (Wikipedia See also: Jewish Encyclopedia entry)

In other words, according to their own stories, the Jewish god is the God of Cain - the marked murderer - who slew his brother Abel. That leads to a whole other area of thought and we won't go there now, but it certainly gives us pause to think, to consider the "Mark of Cain" as being integral to Judaism. We certainly can take note of the fact that, in Christianity and Judaism, the curse of Cain and the mark of Cain refer to the Biblical passages in the Book of Genesis chapter 4, where God declared that Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, was cursed, and placed a mark upon him to warn others that killing Cain would provoke the vengeance of God.

What kind of god would protect a murderer that way? And does this suggest that the Jews writing the bible were fully conscious of this connection and wrote that part into the Genesis story to intimidate others? A sort of pre-emptive accusation of "anti-Semitism"? One even wonders if circumcision is the fabled "Mark of Cain"?

[T]he Old Testament authors knew that Yahweh once "came out of Sinai" and was a Midianite or Kenite deity. In the re-emerging biblical narratives, Yahweh remains the same, although he chooses another people as his own. [...]

Or the Kenites ARE the Jews.

This study demonstrates that the biblical portrayals of Israel's earliest history - set in the larger contexts of Mesopotamia, Syrian Palestine, and Egypt - are literary compositions rather than historical sources. The biblical authors consulted various ancient tales and legends, but did not approach them with a critical eye. ...

A literary analysis of the Pentateuch proves incontrovertibly that its narratives are not reliable sources for the study of antiquity; rather, they are works of art. Without regard for exact historical data regarding the development of their people, those writers used every weapon in their literary arsenal to create powerful and dramatic narratives. ... One cannot reconstruct Near Eastern history from these narratives; rather, we must be content with what they are: adventure stories and legends, crafted and written by late author-compilers to discuss "the old days" with their audience. Clearly, that audience did not measure the historic by historical standards. (Niels Peter Lemche: Prelude to Israel's Past, excerpts through page 63)

Well, that is damning enough when one considers the claims of the modern state of Israel - the lies they told and the myths they created - that justified their stealing the land of the Palestinians. What is even worse is that, by trying to impose the false image of an 'ancient Israel' that never existed on the land of Palestine, the true history of the land and the people has been not only covered up, it has been categorically denied. As Keith W. Whitelam writes:

The history of ancient Palestine has been ignored and silenced by biblical studies because its object of interest has been an ancient Israel conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization. [...]

The search for ancient Israel, in which I include for shorthand purposes second Temple Judaism, has consumed phenomenal intellectual and material resources in our universities, faculties of theology, divinity schools, theological colleges, seminaries, and departments of archaeology, particularly in the USA, Europe, and Israel. A quick glance through the prospectuses and catalogues of these institutions will reveal numerous courses on the history and archaeology of ancient Israel conducted in the context of the study of the Hebrew Bible from Jewish and Christian perspectives. This is just as true in 'secular' universities with departments of Religious Studies rather than faculties of theology. Interestingly, and revealingly, I have been able to discover very few courses on the history of ancient Israel in departments of History or Ancient History. It seems that ancient Israelite history is the domain of Religion or Theology and not of History. [...]

Biblical studies has been dominated from its inception by a concern for the history of ancient Israel as the key to understanding the Hebrew Bible. It has been of fundamental concern for Christian theology since Christianity is conceived of as a religion based upon revelation within history. Philip Davies has demonstrated, however, that the 'ancient Israel' of biblical studies is a scholarly construct based upon a misreading of the biblical traditions and divorced from historical reality. [...]

[T]here are so many facets of history that our political and theological histories do not address. ... Much of the data that pertain to these areas of study are still in unpublished form, hampering the realization of the project [of producing a factual history of ancient Palestine]. However, it is the network of connections in which these scholarly investigations are set which is the greatest hindrance. ...

The cultural and political factors that have dominated biblical studies discourse on ancient Israel have denied the development of a strategy for investigating such issues. Ironically, much of the archaeological work, the regional surveys and site excavations, which have contributed to the paradigm shift are coloured by the overwhelming search for ancient Israel, the material reality which, it is presumed, will help to illuminate the Hebrew Bible. ... It has been difficult to uncover or document sufficiently the subtle political and ideological influences which have shaped historical research in biblical studies. (Keith W. Whitelam: The Invention of Ancient Israel - The Silencing of Palestinian History.

But that is not to say that there aren't historical elements in the Hebrew Bible as we have already seen! In fact, if the historians and historians of religion would read their texts with an awareness of both Ponerology and Cometary bombardment of the planet at periodic intervals, what they are seeing that has been, until now, so puzzling, would suddenly begin to make perfect sense.

Considering Ponerology, yesterday I wrote an editorial that included a long quote from psychopathy expert, Martha Stout, in an effort to explain why so many people are susceptible to the machinations of psychopaths. In that article I mentioned Nachman Ben-Yehuda's exposure of the fraud of Masada, the myth created in the early part of the 20th century, that was utilized to unify (by terror and mind control) Jewish immigrants to Israel, and turn them into efficient killing machines so that they would not feel any pangs of conscience over dispossessing the Palestinians of their land and their lives.

If the reader will take a few moments (heck, it'll take an hour, but it's worth it!) to read The Masada Myth and The Masada Fraud - The Making of Israel Based on Lies , you will have an exact picture of how the Bible itself was written. It is composed of various texts that were written at various times with various political and social agendas similar to those behind the creation of the Masada myth. Some facts are retained, others are suppressed, and there are complete inventions superimposed on the whole. Voila! You have the Myth of Masada and in the same way, you have the Old Testament and the New Testament!

On the subject of mythmaking and religion, Burton Mack writes about this topic extensively in his analyses of the New Testament. Many of the scholars of the Old Testament also point to myth-making as the reason for its existence but Mack makes it pretty easy to understand. He writes:

That early Christians engaged in mythmaking may be difficult for modern Christians to accept. The usual connotations of the term myth are almost entirely negative. And when it is used to describe the content of the New Testament gospels there is invariably a hue and cry. That is because, in distinction from most mythologies that begin with a "once upon a time," the Christian myth is set in historical time and place. It seems therefore to demand the belief that the events of the gospel story really happened. And that means that the story cannot be "myth." It may help some to note (1) that mythmaking is a normal and necessary social activity, (2) that early Christian mythmaking was due more to borrowing and rearranging myths taken for granted in the cultures of context than to firsthand speculation, and (3) that the myths they came up with made eminent sense, not only for their times and circumstance, but also for the social experiments in which they were invested. [...]

Every culture has a set of stories that account for the world in which a people find themselves. These stories usually tell of the creation of the world, the appearance of the first people, ancestral heroes and their achievements, and the glorious beginnings of society as a people experience it. Terrain, village patterns, shrines, temples, cities, and kingdoms are often set in place or planned at the beginning of time. Scholars understand these myths as the distillation of human-interest stories first told in the course of routine patterns of living together, then rehearsed for many generations. Telling stories about one another is what we do. It belongs to the life and work of maintaining human relations and constructing societies. [...]

Epic is a rehearsal of the past that puts the present in its light. Setting the present in the light of an illustrious past makes it honorable, legitimate, right, and reasonable. The present institution is then worth celebrating.

And we saw exactly this process in the discussions of the making of the Myth of Masada.

Naturally, both the past and the present may be highly romanticized or idealized, for epic is myth in the genre of history. The stories of Gilgamesh in ancient Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations were epic. For the Greeks, Homer was epic. Pindar's poetry of illustrious family lines was epic on a small scale. The local histories of shrines, temples, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period were epic on a medium-sized scale. And the history of Israel, which, from the very beginning of the world aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, was epic for the Jews.

When the [alleged] second temple was destroyed in 70 C.E., the Jews had a problem on their hands. Not only their ancient history, contained in the five books of Moses, but an immense body of literature from the Hellenistic period documented their intellectual investment in the temple-state as the proper goal of human history from the foundation of the world. Christians also had a problem. They had no right to claim the history of Israel as their own. But early Jewish Christians had wanted to think of themselves as the people of God, heirs of the promises to Israel, or even the new Israel for a new day. ... All of the early myths about Jess were attempts to paint him and his followers in acceptable colors from the Israel epic. But these attempts were fanciful, ad hoc, and incapable of competing with the obvious logic of the Jewish epic. The Jewish epic was a history that aimed at the establishment of a temple-state in Jerusalem, not a Christian congregation. When the temple's end came, however, and the epic's logic was in total disarray, Christians had their chance to revise it in their favor. It was then that revising the Israel epic became a major focus for early Christian myth-making. [...]

And then, from the middle of the second century on, the fur really started to fly. Both Jews and Christians wanted to read the history of Israel in their favor, and each needed the Jewish scriptures as documentation for social formations that did not match the temple-state at the end of Israel's story. Two myths were devised then, and they are still playing havoc with what otherwise might be a reasonable conversation between Christians and Jews about the texts we sometimes call the Hebrew Bible, sometimes the Old Testament. [...]

Just as with each separate writing, so the Bible itself came together at a certain juncture of social and cultural history. The reasons for the selection and arrangement of writings in the Bible cannot be found in any of the individual books read separately. The reasons have to be taken from the Christian authors of the second to the fourth centuries. Only at the end of this period, when we finally catch sight of the Bible as we know it, will we see that it demands a particular way of reading the history of Israel, puts a special spin on the appearance of the Christ, and grants uncommon authority to the apostles and their missions. By then it will be clear to us that the book was important because it gave the church the credentials it needed for its role in Constantine's empire. We may then call it the myth of origin for the Christian religion. It will be the Christian myth in the form of the biblical epic that granted the Christian church its charter. It will be that epic that determines the Bible's hold upon our American mind. The Bible's mystique is oddly mis-named by calling it the "Word of God." We must come to see that, or we shall never be able to talk about the Bible in public forum when discussing our cultural history and its present state of affairs. (Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament)

We have to keep in mind that the event that triggered the creation of the Christian Bible which, ultimately, led us into the trap of the Judaic god of Cain, the murderer, was the conversion of Constantine which, very likely, was at a time of cometary bombardment and extreme social stress. (Do have a look at the list of Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls to get an idea of how these events have influenced our history, creating social chaos which is the ideal breeding ground for psychopaths and their ascent to power.)

Constantine became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire and called the first council of Christian bishops to meet in Nicaea in 325 CE. Constantine knew a unique opportunity when he saw one the same way that Shmaria Guttman saw that Masada was the ideal story to transform into a myth of Jewish ruthlessness.

When, finally, the Jewish scriptures and the "apostolic" writings were combined in a single book, the church was off and running; it had its story straight. The Hebrew bible could be used to claim extreme antiquity for the Christian religion, and served as the "Christian Epic." Having claimed all these texts, traditions, and ancient history, the Christian church achieved honor in the eyes of the Greco-Roman world. (Which is why they did it!) Without the Old and New Testaments together, the Christian church would not have had an appropriate pedigree in the eyes of 4th century people. And, of course, that history was amazing! Never mind that it was created by schizoidal psychopaths who wanted to create a Jewish Temple State in Israel with the help of the Persians, or that parts of it were used to justify the kingship of the Hasmoneans. It had been revised and adjusted so many times, that whatever history had ever been incorporated was now lost in layers of manipulative gloss.

Christianity was driven by two schizoidal urges: to continue the expansion of Christendom by whatever means necessary, and to "return" to the Holy Land where all the significant events of the founding of the religion were supposed to have taken place. The thrust of Christianity is thus, backward in time, inward toward a psychological repeating of the founding events, and toward a specific location: Israel.

There is a certain irony to this because the original claim that Christianity made on the epic that belonged to Israel was based on the fact that Jerusalem was desolated and destroyed, so of course, God had abandoned it and chosen a new people - Christians - on whom he would bestow his favoritism. It was the destruction of Jerusalem that made it possible for Christians to steal the Jew's epic "history" and interpret that destruction as God's desire to expand his territory to include the whole world. So why, one might ask, would Christians want to go back to Jerusalem? That's not logical.

But, not to worry: an explanation was soon forthcoming! It was declared that God logically wanted Christians to redeem Israel.

And so, finally, the Global Temple State had a chance to come into being under Christianity - the Catholic Church was positioned at the apex of power; even princes bowed to the pope. The power of God was in its hands and the intent was to shape the minds of all humanity from kings down to the lowliest serf.

The Christian church claims to represents the kingdom of God on earth and its whole rant is that people must prepare for a future life in heaven under threat of an apocalyptic alternative. How's that for mind control? The church can call society to task for not living up to God's standards, all the while pointing to some other time and place (never now, of course), when that kingdom of God will finally manifest.

But, the church itself is exempt from critique! The church has the Bible as its charter and the Bible has the universal plan, and the Bible is exempt from analysis. The fact is, without the Bible, and the belief in the bible by the masses of humanity as, at the very least, divinely inspired, the church would look pretty stupid. The Bible is the only object in the Christian religions that all forms of Christianity have in common. For almost 2 thousand years, the church has forced people after people into alignment with the Biblical epic and "history" and the history of Western Civilization that is the result of that ancient epic. The traditions and customs of culture after culture have been subsumed, eradicated, erased from collective memory, and those people have been forced to adopt the Epic of Israel as their own - as if it were their own history. To become a Christian means that one must accept this epic as the only one that matters. Saying "yes" to the Epic of Israel is the price one pays to become part of Western Civilization.

Additionally, the Bible functions as America's Epic, the dream of creating "One Nation, Under God, indivisible..." One doesn't even have to be a Christian to think that way. One only needs to think of America as the "flowering of Western Civilization" - but don't forget that the roots of that civilization are supposed to be firmly planted in Israel.

Are you getting the impression that Christianity was created to serve Judaism?

Well, that's not exactly the case. Israel was literally created by Christianity in order to fulfill the Christian apocalyptic agenda. As Keith Whitelam writes:

The production of a "master story" of ancient Israel has formed part of a theological enterprise conducted mainly in faculties of theology and divinity in the West.

The biblical epic of Israel seen through the lens of Christianity, is based on a worldview that is universalist in scope, monolinear in history, hierarchical in power, dualistic in anthropology, and it requires miracles, breakthroughs and other cosmic dramas at regular intervals to rectify social situations that have run amok.

The fact is, the adoption of the Epic of Israel by Western Civilization has created more problems throughout history than it has ever solved.

We cannot go on destroying other peoples and cultures in order to "save them." We cannot go on exploiting our planet because "God gave it to us to do with as we wish". And unless we, as a culture and civilization, really come to grips with the fact that we have believed a pack of lies for over 2000 years, we aren't going to get out of the mess we are in.

Criticism of the Bible has always been considered subversive. But, the fact is, the Bible is a masterpiece of invention, the product of energetic mythmaking very much like the making of the Masada myth, the sacrificing of Truth. And this sacrificing of Truth is what has shaped the soul of Western Civilization. As Burton Mack writes:

My own fantasy is to enter a hall and find high ceilings, lovely chandeliers, walls lined with bookshelves, wines in the alcove, hors d'oeuvres by the windows, and a wide table down the middle of the room with the Bible sitting on it. And there we are, all of us, walking around, sitting at the table, and talking about what we should do with that book. Some rules are in order. Everyone has been invited. Christians have not been excluded, but they are not the ones in charge. All of us are there, and all of our knowledge and expertise is also on the table. There are historians of religion, cultural anthropologists, and political scientists, but also politicians, CEOs and those who work in foreign affairs. The ethnic communities of Los Angels County are all well represented, as are women, the disenfranchised, the disabled, and all the voiceless who have recently come to speech. Merchants are there, and workers and the airline pilots. Everyone is present, and everyone gets to talk and ask questions. No one has a corner on what the Bible says. We blow our whistles if anyone starts to pout or preach. What we are trying to figure out is why we thought the Bible so important, whether it is so important, how it has influenced our culture, what we think of the story, whether we should laugh or cry at the "ending," how it fits or does not fit our current situation, and whether the story should be revised in keeping with our vision of a just, sustainable, festive, and multicultural world.

Wouldn't that be something?

Why can't we learn to talk about religion and culture in public as we look for ways to imagine and create the sane societies we desperately need in our multicultural world? If we want to do that, and I think we must, the taboo on the Bible that is now in place will have to be broken. [...] The taboo is the sign that we all are complicit in the unacknowledged agreement to let that story stand. It is time to find out whether we think that wise. (Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament?)

It's pretty easy to cast most of the blame on Israel for all the horrors of our world today; it's obvious. But we have to remember that it would all grind to a halt in an instant if Christianity would withdraw its support for the re-creation of Israel which they see as necessary to "initiate the Eschaton." One ought not to forget that it was the Bible Thumping British who started all this with the Balfour Declaration. Of course, one can think that there was blackmail - unusual and excessive pressure - exercised by the Zionists to get what they wanted. But that doesn't excuse the choices made by Western leaders under the influence of their own pathological, apocalyptic agenda.

And so, what we see, in the end, is a psychopathic minority at the top of all the governments of the world using the faith of Christians and Jews alike (and Muslims) to pursue their rapacious goals of seeking ever more power and plunder. They do not even realize that they, themselves, or their offspring, will soon find themselves with nothing. As Lobaczewski writes in Political Ponerology:

The following question thus suggests [itself]: what happens if [psychopaths seek] power in leadership positions with international exposure? ... Goaded by their character, such people thirst for just that even though it would conflict with their own life interest, ...They do not understand that a catastrophe [will] ensue. Germs are not aware that they will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body whose death they are causing.

It may be the birthday of the State of Israel, but there is no cause for celebration. Today Israel celebrates not the birth of nationhood but a 60-year-long campaign of ethnic cleansing of an innocent and defenseless people, justified by a 2000-year-old lie. Rather than celebrate, let us recognise and mourn the fact that the whole world has been made slaves to this Judeo-Christian doctrine of demons and subjects of the synagogue of the vengeful and wrathful god of Cain, the murderer, that seeks to rob us of our humanity, and let us resolve to no longer tolerate the public spectacle of wanton cruelty that is the US, UK-backed Zionist entity and its systematic brutalization and murder of the Palestinian people.

A Structural Theory of Narcissism and Psychopathy

2008-05-07T11:25:00.000+02:00

A Structural Theory of Narcissism and Psychopathy

©Unknown

The infant believes that mother/the breast/ food, everything, is part of itself; it experiences itself solely through neural input.

[T]the problem of group violence, is one of the most important issues facing society. Not only is this a most crucial topic for our American society but we are confronted with events that are occurring all over the globe, on all continents and in all countries...

So said Dr. Ernest Wolf in a talk given to the International Self-Psychology Symposium in Dreieich, Germany, in May of 2001, four months before 9-11.

This essay was recently brought to our attention, having been posted on the SOTT Forum for the express purpose of highlighting Wolf's description of Narcissistic Rage. Frankly, that was the best part of the essay; the rest was hopelessly muddled and naive.

Why?

Well, Dr. Wolf attempts to explain the causes of evil - individual and macro-social - using the framework of Heinz Kohut's theory of "Self Psychology" (or psychoanalytic psychology of the self). With all due respect to Dr. Kohut and Dr. Wolf, we think that this theory isn't bad if you are just talking about normal human beings who are born healthy and live in basically healthy environments. What this theory does not take into account is the role of pathogenic factors in our society - human beings who are carriers of abnormal psychopathological traits - who can infect groups and even entire societies, bringing pandemic evil on macro-social scales. More than that, it seeks to "spread the blame" over all people, to ignore the fact that moral evil and psychobiological evil are, in effect, interlinked via so many causal relationships and mutual influences that they can only be separated by means of abstraction. Yes, the body social must be weakened before it can succumb to an infection, but if there is no infecting pathogen, it will merely be weak and ineffectual.

In short, Wolf's essay amounts to little more than apologia for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Psychopathy and only adds to the confusion of our times when the problems pressed upon humanity by such types are nothing short of catastrophic.

But, like we said, Wolf has provided one heck of a description of Narcissistic Rage. Since it really is good, let's take a look at it:

Talking about rageful behavior he [Kohut] observed that underlying the rage one often finds an uncompromising insistence on the perfection of the idealized other. The infant experiences itself still in a state of limitlessness power and knowledge, a state that we as outsiders deprecatingly call the child's grandiosity, its grandiose self.

If for a variety of reasons this infantile grandiose state of narcissism is prevented from maturing into healthy self-esteem we meet with what looks like an adult but really is a very shakily put together oversensitive and shame-prone narcissist.

The fanaticism of the need for revenge and the unending compulsion of having to square the account after an offense are therefore not the attributes of an aggressivity that is integrated with the mature purposes of the ego - on the contrary, such bedevilment indicates that the aggression was mobilized in the service of an archaic grandiose self and that it is deployed within the framework of an archaic perception of reality.

The shame-prone individual who is ready to experience setbacks as narcissistic injuries and to respond to them with insatiable rage does not recognize his opponent as a center of independent initiative with whom he happens to be at cross-purposes. Aggression, when employed in the pursuit of maturely experienced causes, is not limitless. However vigorously this aggression is mobilized, its aim is limited and definite: the defeat of the enemy who blocks the way to a cherished goal. As soon as the aim is reached, the rage is gone.

The narcissistically injured on the other hand, cannot rest until he has blotted out a vaguely experienced offender who dared to oppose him, to disagree with him, or to outshine him. It can never find rest because it can never wipe out the evidence that has contradicted its conviction it is unique and perfect. This archaic rage goes on and on and on. Furthermore, the enemy who calls forth the archaic rage of the narcissistically vulnerable is seen by him not as an autonomous source of impulsions, but as a flaw in a narcissistically perceived reality. The enemy is experienced as a recalcitrant part of an expanded self over which the narcissistically vulnerable person had expected to exercise full control. The mere fact, in other words, that the other person is independent or different is experienced as offensive by those with intense narcissistic needs.

Thus, not being in full control over self and over a narcissistically experienced world gives the afflicted individual an experience of utter powerlessness. Such powerlessness and the sense of helplessness via-a-vis the world are unbearably traumatic experiences that must be ended by any means whatsoever. The offending other must be wiped out.

Narcissistic rage occurs in many forms. They all share, however, a specific psychological flavor which gives them a distinct position within the wide realm of human aggressions. The need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims, which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury - these are the characteristic features of narcissistic rage in all its forms and which set it apart from other kinds of aggression.

Although everybody tends to react to narcissistic injuries with embarrassment and anger, the most intense experiences of shame and the most violent forms of narcissistic rage arise in those individuals for whom a sense of absolute control over an archaic environment is indispensable because the maintenance of self-esteem - and indeed of the self - depends on the unconditional availability of the approving-mirroring selfobject or of the merger-permitting idealized one." (Search for the Self, vol.2, pp.643 etc.)

Wolf has described narcissistic and psychopathic rage masterfully; if you've ever been the target of a narcissist or a psychopath, you know that already and you were nodding your head all the way through that description. The problem is that this description which hits so many nails right on the head is so mixed up with other irrelevant concepts or cross-concepts, that it's like trying to pick burrs out of a mohair sweater to sort it all out. He really captures the unbelievable persistence of the attacks of the narcissist and psychopath - what we call the "Energizer Bunny Effect".

However, at this point, I would like to make note of a particular distinction. I have known three people in my life, close to me, who were diagnosed as having been "narcissistically wounded". Yes, it is true that when these individuals were "triggered", they really wanted to wipe their target out of existence. Thing is, they got over it quickly and easily and that, in itself, was part of the problem. They could blow up at you, say the most horrible things, do horrible things, and then be over it in 30 minutes and say "Right! Jolly good! I feel so much better now, how about a dish of that strawberry shortcake?" Their lack of empathy is so complete that you are not only not considered to have suffered by being a target of their rage, you are also not considered to have any reason to be angry about it afterward.

Now, what does that remind you of?

One observer of the phenomenon nailed this one by pointing out that "Garden Variety Narcissism" is like dealing with a six-year-old. What it does not remind you of is the pathological persistence of the psychopath or the more severe forms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The question is, of course, what does behaving like a six-year-old have to do with "Group Helplessness" and the "Roots of Violence" and macro-social evil? Is this common to everyone? Can each of us become possessed by some primitive defense mechanism and go on a relentless rampage of revenge and retribution like kids playing cowboys and Indians until we are totally exhausted by the rage that possesses us or tired of the game? I doubt it, though certainly, as I have just said, there are those who have these characteristics: pathological deviants, and they are the pathogens of society that attack the body social when it is weakened. I'm not going to disagree that feeling powerless and helpless could very well be behind weaknesses of normal society - it can certainly be part of such a syndrome. But the drives and directives of pathogens are different from the drives and directives of the healthy flesh in any physical body, and so it is in the body social. A virus or a bacteria is not the same as a muscle cell or the cell of some organ in the body, even if that cell is run-down or aged or damaged in some way.

Wolf suggests that his (and Kohut's) interpretations of narcissistic rage are what is at the root of all violent behavior everywhere on every scale; it's in everybody, and it's only a matter of degree. And, ultimately, at bottom, it really is just a question of feeling helpless and powerless. At one point, Wolf even suggests that it was the feeling of helplessness that turned good Germans into murdering Nazis.

Similar dynamic conditions in Germany during the economic depression of the 1930's on top of a lost World War I provided an environment that was conducive to feeling helpless and their sense of importance and rightness threatened. In that state of weakened self one might easily experience an enhancement and strengthening of that self by putting on a uniform and, via marching with martial music under the leadership of a charismatically eloquent Führer, banish the experience of powerlessness. The whole Nazi movement can be seen as the narcissistic rage reaction of a whole people to their loss of national self-esteem.

Notice above that Wolf does, at least, give token acknowledgment to a difference between the masses feeling helpless and the "charismatic and eloquent" Hitler. But instead of following the revelation of his own remark, Wolf continues on with his theory all leading... well, where? What is Wolf's solution to the problem of group helplessness due to narcissistic wounding that he suggests is at the root of social violence? He writes:

What can be done? Our psychological reasoning would lead us to believe that in order to reduce the rage one must try to reduce the experience of helplessness and substitute gradually an experience of having some power. The first step would seem to be an effort to really listen to each other and try to understand the other's experience. To really feel one is being seen, being listened to most often leads to feeling understood. The experience of being understood is a self-empowering experience. We know that from working with individuals who, when they feel understood in treatment, they immediately grow stronger.

Wolf continues with his "All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" school of psychological explanation with blithe disregard for the reality of evil, both individual and macro-social. You can read the entire essay HERE, so there's no need for me to reproduce it now. If it weren't for the fact that he's written that fantastic description of narcissistic rage, we wouldn't even be talking about it since everything else he has written is so silly. But since that amazingly accurate description is in there, it did make me think in certain ways and I felt that it must be accounted for. How can a person get one thing so right and everything else so wrong?

The thing is, Kohut's interpretation of narcissistic rage DOES account for and describe the external behavior of exactly what it purports to describe: the rage of the narcissist - though there are distinct differences between this rage and that of the ordinary narcissist who is emotionally stuck at the age of Six. The serious narcissist really can and does persist in seeking to destroy his target no matter the cost, and he or she doesn't get over it in half an hour and look for a Strawberry tart. More than that, this destruction can really include physical destruction as severe as if the narcissist had taken a gun and shot his target. And this is what leads me to think that there are a lot of people who are being passed as "narcissists" who are really psychopaths. Since High level narcissism is a key component of psychopathy, and many experts today talk about NPD as being on the spectrum of psychopathy, we can come back to Kohut and Wolf's description of the rage of the narcissist and understand it to actually be the rage of the psychopath and their work as simply another attempt to divert and defuse the true exposure of psychopaths and psychopathy in our world.

If we go back and read the description of behavior provided by Kohut and Wolf, we see that they are essentially saying two things. First, in a fit of narcissistic rage, narcissists see other people as objects, not deserving subjects. In other words, they are completely egocentric, they have no empathy. Second, narcissists will pursue their goals with ruthless hyperactivity. In other words, they lack the normal human quality of inhibition in regard to pursuing their aims (which are inspired by simple drives and instincts such as aggression, sex, self-preservation, possessiveness, need for superiority, etc.).

What they are describing are actually the essential traits of a psychopath, not a "narcissistically wounded" individual. In a narcissist, not being in full control does not lead to "an experience of utter powerlessness". On the contrary, the narcissist identifies completely with those base drives and whims which control his behavior. Their awareness and their intelligence are fully in service in the pursuit of fulfilling whatever drive is acting at a given moment. In other words, narcissists, being completely self-centered are constitutionally incapable of self-awareness. They CANNOT get "outside their own skin" and into the mind and feelings of another. The only inferiority a narcissist feels is knowing that someone else has something (some possession, some prestige, some power) that he does not. And he will then use his typical ruthlessness and aggression to get it from his 'superior'.

In other words, what Kohut's model does NOT describe is the internal landscape of either the severe narcissist or the psychopath.

How can we know this? Well, we have already noted differences between the depth, intensity and term limits of "narcissistic" vs "psychopathic" rage. There are other traits from which internal motivations can be inferred and those motivations also do not correlate to being narcissistically wounded. Sometimes it takes a long time and is very difficult to gather the material to assess these traits, because it is the primary nature of the psychopath to lie (and that is not always true of the narcissistically wounded individual). But it can be done.

According to Robert Hare, Cleckley, Stout, Salter, Brown, Łobaczewski, and many other experts in psychopathy, a diagnosis of psychopathy cannot be made on the basis of visible behavioral symptoms to the exclusion of interpersonal and affective symptoms because such a procedure essentially makes psychopaths of many people who are simply injured by life or society, and allows the true psychopaths who have a well-constructed "mask of sanity" to escape detection. Based on a growing body of literature, many (or most) psychopaths grow up in stable, well-to-do families, and become white collar criminals who, because of money and position, never have their private destructive behaviors exposed to public view and repeatedly avoid contact with the justice system. These types, who do untold damage to society at large, are not "classified" under present diagnostic systems.

This diagnostic problem has raged for years concerning psychopathy, sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder (and a few related and/or overlapping disorders). The problem is that the symptoms are mistaken for the disease and one or another of the symptoms will be studied in isolation leading to all kinds of graphs and numbers. Then, another symptom will be latched onto and studied the same way, and the graphes and numbers may contradict the studies that concentrated on the first symptom. It's kind of like witch doctoring; person falls down and foams at the mouth, therefore person must be possessed by a devil; no awareness of the infectious agent Lyssavirus or the viral zoonotic neuroinvasive disease that causes acute encephalitis, i.e. Rabies.

The state of affairs regarding this Voodoo theory of psychopathy and NPD has gone on long enough and today I want to talk about a structural theory of psychopathy (and severe narcissism) that is by no means complete, but one has to start somewhere!

In order to explain these ideas, it is necessary to go back over some of Kohut's concepts and talk about what he got right: that amazing description of psychopathic rage. Let's begin there and try to to tease the various threads apart to see where they lead us. Kohut's work is described by advocates of his theories as follows:

Self psychology is a developmental psychology deriving its understanding of the developing psyche from contemporary infant research. In addition, self psychology maintains the concept that human psychological functioning is always embedded in social interactions. (Martin Gossmann, MD)

[...] Unlike Freudian theory, self psychology is not a drive model and does not view the Oedipal conflict as central in human motivation or pathology. [In Kohut's theory], the most serious psychological problems which result from injurious developmental experiences are expressed as uncontrolled anger, called narcissistic rage. [According to Kohut] Narcissistic rage arises from extreme fear and serves to bolster a threatened vulnerable self, giving a temporary sense of strength, cohesion, and self-esteem to a weakened and vulnerable self. Relationships, as well as creative, productive acts, provide needed self-object experiences of feeling valued and admired.

Since Kohut began publishing on empathy and self psychology in 1959, the theory has attracted increasing interest among psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as among students of the humanities, such as philosophy and anthropology. Besides providing a open system structure as the theoretical basis for the successful clinical application of psychoanalysis, self psychology is useful in guiding the clinician in their daily practice and conceptualization of psychotherapy and counseling. (David Wolf, PsyD)

You can see why Wolf took the ideas where he did when you read "narcissistic rage arises from extreme fear and serves to bolster a threatened vulnerable self" which is then supposed to give a "temporary sense of strength, cohesion, and self-esteem to a weakened and vulnerable self." Obviously, if rage arises out of fear in the individual, and strengthens the weakened and vulnerable personality, it should follow that extreme social fear could morph into rage also, thereby giving a temporary feeling of strength to a society. But, as we noted above, what is left out is the crucial element of the pathogen. The Germans felt helpless and powerless, sure, and this was a weakness of their body social, but it only became "narcissistic rage" when it was infected and exploited by Hitler and his Nazis. Harrison Koehli writes in his review of Martha Stout's book The Paranoia Switch:

Traumatic events overload our limbic system. The heightened response of our amygdala, which registers the emotional significance of the event, leads to a decreased response in the hippocampus, which usually prioritizes information and allows the higher brain centers to create coherent memories, based on their emotional importance. So, traumatic events do not get integrated by the higher brain centers as true memories, but instead leave us with non-integrated fragments of memory: isolated images and sensations. These memories can then be "triggered" by similar images. In this way, a backfiring car can trigger a war vet into a state of paranoia. His "paranoia switch" has been flicked.

"Most overwhelming of all are traumatic experiences caused not by accident (unintended explosions or car crashes), or by "acts of God" (earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.), but rather by the deliberate acts of other people, acts such as assault, violent abduction, rape - or terrorism. It would seem that, for whatever reason, we are hardwired to be most fearful of harm when it threatens to occur maliciously, at the hands of our fellow human beings, and this special variety of fear is the most contagious of all." (62)

As Stout explains later in her book, fear brokers maintain their power through the exploitation of human weaknesses. Ironically, it is often the very people we are genetically "programmed" to fear (i.e. psychopathic individuals), that exploit this fear by focusing it on an arbitrary and convenient group. Hitler used anarchists, communists, and Jews. Bush is using "terrorists", Muslims, and critics of his policies. [...]

Even though a terrorist attack directly affects only a very small portion of a population, the whole country can feel its effects. This phenomenon has its roots in our limbic system. "[T]he limbic system plays a dominant role in regulating our feelings, the accessibility of our memories, our motivations to act, our ability to make meaning of our experiences, and even our consciences" (77). "[C]onscience is a compelling feeling of obligation that is always based in our proclivity to bond with others... it is precisely our capacity to form emotional attachments that gives rise to moral character..." (75).

"[W]ith information from any or all of our senses, processed through the limbic system, we can perceive the internal state of another human being - her or his physiological and emotional status - to which we would otherwise be "blind." ... Not only does the limbic system allow us to perceive the emotions of others ... it functions, also, to align our emotions with those of the people around us, and vice versa." (78)

In this way, the trauma of a terrorist event is contagious. We are each affected by the emotional state of those around us; we all become traumatized. "[L]imbic resonance is one of the many reasons that personality, and especially character, should be primary considerations in choosing our leadership. For good or for ill, a high-profile leader can have a radiating emotional influence on large numbers of people" (83). [...]

When a leader chooses to exploit this contagion, rather than to calm and heal it, he is engaging in what Stout calls "limbic warfare." "If a leader chooses to focus the group's attention on the terrifying "others" - if he or she pounds the paranoia switch installed by trauma - the group's fear level is likely to remain over the top for a long time, and, whether or not he is competent, the leader's perceived authority will hold... [A]fter group trauma, large-scale social changes can be inaugurated, intentionally or not, by a handful of scaremongers who play to the anger and paranoia of a vulnerable population" (92-3, 95).

So we see clearly that macro-social evil, the helplessness of society, is not quite as simple as Wolf and Kohut would like us to think. Left to their own devices, it is unlikely that fearful people would get together and go into some kind of narcissistic rage and "temporarily" feel strengthened! What is needed is the pathogen, the driver, the infecting agent.

Pounding the "paranoia switch" over and over again was researched by Ivan Pavlov and he described the moment when everything "switched" as "transmarginal inhibition." Transmarginal inhibition, or TMI, is an organism's response to overwhelming stimuli. Ironically, the popular acronym TMI means too much information, which can be a common factor of transmarginal inhibition in today's culture.

Pavlov discovered that an organism's level of tolerance to various stimuli varied significantly depending on fundamental differences in temperament, a factor that is largely ignored today. He commented "that the most basic inherited difference among people was how soon they reached this shutdown point and that the quick-to-shut-down have a fundamentally different type of nervous system." This led him to pay increasing attention to the need to classify subjects according to their inherited constitution before applying experimental conditioning.

Which brings us back to the point about the differences between visible behaviors and internal states. A person can fall down and foam at the mouth not only if they have rabies, but also when they have a stroke. To confuse the scientific causes is just as damaging as if there was no science involved at all and treatment for one sickness was being used when another treatment is called for.

So, let's go to the very beginning at look at some of the ideas that Kohut's theories are based on.

The experts tell us that, as infants and toddlers, we all feel that we are the center of the universe, that we are omnipotent and omniscient beings. In the beginning, we perceive our parents as merely "extensions" of ourselves in the sense that when we are uncomfortable in any way, these shadowy figures, the landscape of our universe, act on our behalf. Thus it is that, at the earliest stages of development, the "response of the universe" to our needs becomes our deepest belief about ourselves and life itself - a belief inculcated before verbal skills are developed. This is a central idea in modern "attachment theory".

If, when we are hungry or cold or too warm, or lonely and in need of touching and comfort, the universe as mother responds immediately with the appropriate solution, our earliest and deepest sense of existence tells us that the universe is safe, that it is good, that it is responsive to us, that we have "power" over our selves and our environment, and this supports the development of a healthy type of infant narcissism (or a "secure" attachment). This becomes the fundamental platform from which we operate throughout our lives. We have learned that the universe is safe, that it is good to us, that we can reach out or cry out and the universe and all within it will provide. But then, of course, we have to grow up and learn that we are NOT the center of the universe, and it is this process of maturation that transforms healthy infantile narcissism into healthy adult self-esteem.

So far, so good.

We have here an individual that trusts the universe because the universe of the mother and others in the infant's life always responded positively and lovingly. No matter what happens to this child later in life, it can be predicted that the child will carry this "safe universe" inside and will always have it to fall back on.

Interestingly, quite often, narcissistic parents are rather good infant caregivers because, as long as the infant is totally helpless and dependent, they feel that they are being fully appreciated for their every effort. And, of course, since they are "playing house", they have an idealized image of the infant-mother bond in movie stills or great oil paintings that they try to act out so as to attract praise to themselves from those others who witness their great accomplishments as parental units!

This is fortunate for the child of the narcissist because, of course, as soon as they are old enough to tell mother or father "no" or disagree, or want to have their own way that opposes the will of the parent, the narcissistic wounding begins and they begin the process of dissociating and withdrawing into rich fantasy worlds.

The child also becomes VERY attentive to the environment so as to avoid the attacks of the narcissist and to try to get some love and attention (only normal) for the self. But getting love from a narcissist is like trying to hit a nonexistent target. So, the child of the narcissist gets very good at "reading reality" and adjusting their behavior accordingly because their life depends on it to a great extent. They also become great fantasisists because when they are not directly involved with the narcissistic parent, they are creating a world for themselves where they receive love and attention for whatever marvelous qualities. There is the danger, of course, of becoming a narcissist themselves, of passing on the infection. There is also the very real danger of becoming entangled with severe narcissists and/or psychopaths romantically because "crazy love" is the only kind they've ever known! In The Narcissistic Family, Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert M. Pressman write:

Links between the experiences of childhood and their sometimes permanent effect on adult behavior have long fascinated observers of human behavior. Of particular interest has been the impact of one's family of origin on personal development. In the last decade, the concept of the "adult child of alcoholism" (ACOA) has helped us to understand the nearly predictable effects of being raised in an alcoholic family system. As therapists, many of us have worked for years with individuals suffering from what appeared to be immutable low self-esteem, inability to sustain intimacy, and/or blocked paths to self-understanding. The concept of the ACOA opened a new door to the understanding of such problems. [...]

[A]long with the benefits of working with the ACOA and abuse models came a puzzle. What about individuals who had the traits of an ACOA but whose parents did not drink, or rape, or beat? True, there was dysfunction in their families, but the common thread was elusive. Among adult children of dysfunctional (but nonalcoholic and nonabusive) families, we found a body of personality traits previously identified with the ACOA model. These included chronic depression, indecisiveness, and lack of self-confidence.

Within this population we found common behavioral traits as well: a chronic need to please; an inability to identify feelings, wants, and needs; and a need for constant validation. This group of patients felt that the bad things that happened to them were well deserved, while the good things that happened were probably mistakes or accidents. They had difficulty being assertive, privately feeling a pervasive sense of rage that they feared might surface. They felt like paper tigers - often very angry, but easily beaten down. Their interpersonal relationships were characterized by distrust and suspicion (bordering on paranoia), interspersed with often disastrous episodes of total and injudicious trusting and self-disclosure.

They were chronically dissatisfied, but were fearful of being perceived as whiners or complainers if they expressed their true feelings. Many could hold their anger in for extremely long periods of time, then become explosive over relatively insignificant matters. They had a sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction with their achievements; this was found even among individuals who externally may have been viewed as very successful. The list of people included professionals who were obsessively involved in their enterprises, but were unable to achieve at a level at which they found satisfaction. In relationships, these individuals frequently found themselves in repeated dead-end situations. [...]

The principle clue was that in the absence of alcohol abuse, other forms of dysfunctional parenting (such as incest, physical abuse, emotional neglect and physical absence) seemed to produce the same symptoms. [...]

As we began to track common traits shared by the parent systems of the survivors, we identified a pattern of interaction that we labeled the narcissistic family. Regardless of the presence or absence of identifiable abuse, we found one pervasive trait present in all of these families: the needs of the parent system took precedence over the needs of the children.

We have found that in the narcissistic family, the needs of the children are not only secondary to those of the parent(s), but are often seriously problematic for the latter. If one is to track the narcissistic family on any of the well-known developmental scales (such as Maslow's or Erikson's), one sees that the most fundamental needs of the child, those of trust and safety, are not met. Furthermore, the responsibility of needs fulfillment shifts from the parent to the child. [...]

In this family situation, the child must be reactive to the needs of the parent, rather than the converse. In fact, the narcissistic family is consumed with dealing with the emotional needs of the parent system. [...]

Over time, these children learn that their feelings are of little or negative value. They begin to detach from their feelings, to lose touch with them. Often this denial of feelings is functional to the child, as to express them only adds fuel to the fire. Instead of understanding, recognizing, and validating their own needs, these children develop an exaggerated sense of their impact on the needs of their parent(s). Indeed, they become the reflection of their parents' emotional needs. The needs of the parent become a moving target on which they struggle to focus. Because they feel responsible for correcting the situation without having the requisite power and control to do so, the children develop a sense of failure. Moreover, they fail to learn how to validate their own feelings and meet their own needs. In time, the children undergo a semipermanent numbing of feelings. As adults, these individuals may not know what they feel, except for varying degrees of despair, frustration, and dissatisfaction. (Pressman, The Narcissistic Family, Lexington Books, 1997)

In short, the individual raised by a narcissist is trained to be a slave and is a walking target for other narcissists and/or psychopaths. That's the bad news. The good news is they can be helped. This kind of narcissistic wounding is fixable because, as mentioned above, for some strange reason, narcissists are often decent parents to newborn infants so that the child receives that particular foundation of trust for the universe that is so crucial in later life. Oh, of course, they later learn that trusting is bad, and this alternates with their feelings of trust in the way quoted above: holding back alternating with disastrous disclosure.

Now, let's look at another child; this one has very attentive - perhaps too attentive - well-educated, parents who believe rigidly in schedules and child-rearing practices based on "science" and designed to raise a good Christian, long-suffering, Spartan child who is intelligent enough, manly (or girly) enough, and not a cry-baby. Being a hard worker is valued, so the baby has to learn not to be a slacker right from the start!

With a parental attitude like that, a newborn infant can be psychologically destroyed in no time!

When a child is treated, at the very earliest stages of life, as an "object" to be "molded and shaped" by regimentation (as one form of infant abuse), a dreadful crime against the essential self, at the deepest levels of being, is committed. A child who is left hungry because it is not the scheduled feeding time will be conditioned to believe the universe does not provide nourishment in response to his cries. His protective "grandiosity" is shattered. As the authors above put it, "the most fundamental needs of the child, those of trust and safety, are not met." This leads to insecure attachment. A child who is not picked up and comforted when he is frightened, startled, or simply lonely and in need of being touched, is conditioned to believe that there is no point in reaching out or interacting with the universe in any way. His sense of being powerful is severely damaged. So it is that a child raised according to the Cartesian "man as machine" model, or the Christian "spare the rod and spoil the child" model has no sense of safety or sufficiency.

An infant subjected to abrupt and arbitrary "schedules," promoted by parents who, convinced by "medical and psychiatric theories," believe they are doing the "right thing," end up with severe injuries to the primal self. Such injuries can be severe and irreversible, following along the line of transmarginal inhibition. In some cases, there is actual brain damage if a child is left to cry too long, or traumatized too severely and too regularly. Congestive centers form in the cortex and primitive defense mechanisms (PDMs) can be triggered by anything that reminds the individual of the original trauma, most of which, remember, is pre-verbal. And yes, in many cases, the child may dissociate into an alternate personality that is grandiose and all-powerful; this dissociation may be repeated to the point where it takes over the life of the individual, and it is very likely true that such cases of narcissism are fueled by having been made to feel helpless and powerless. And such an individual can hold in vast oceans of rage because the main damage was done at the most primitive level of brain function.

The empathic support of our "primary objects", the parents, is crucial at these early stages. In its absence, our sense of self-worth and self-esteem in adulthood tends to fluctuate wildly between over-valuation of ourselves by regressing to the infantile narcissistic mode, or devaluation of ourselves as the helpless child slave of a sadistic, even if well-meaning, parent.

Such a child can grow up with a heavy sense of bitter disappointment and radical disillusionment with the universe as a whole. They are often unable to accept self-limitations, disappointments, setbacks, failures, criticism or disillusionment with grace and tolerance. Their self-esteem is inconstant and negative. There is a tendency to believe everything that happens to them is the result of outside events, or that everything is their fault, in some way. Sensitivity, or overexcitability, plays a large role in these reactions.

It seems pretty clear that any child who is neglected or abused at the earliest stages of development is going to have issues throughout their lives of some sort. Getting better depends on how long, how severe, the abuse and what kinds of corrections were made, how soon, and how consistently. And, most of all, it depends on the individual and their WILL to get better. But it is even more than that. Martha Stout writes in The Myth of Sanity:

Given the work I do, I naturally ponder whether there are any organizing systems of meaning and value - "good" ones or "bad" ones - that correlate with successful recovery from dissociative disorders, or any that militate against such an outcome. Are there souls, so to speak, for whom the prognosis is better than for others? And when I consider all my patients, over all the years, the answer is yes: there is in fact an astonishingly robust correlation between an individual's successful recovery on the one hand, and on the other hand, a person's preexisting conviction that she and she alone is responsible for something. This something could be an endeavor or a specific person, or is quite likely to be the conduct of her life in general. People who are compelled and organized by a sense of responsibility for their actions tend to recover.

And conversely, sadly, people whose directive meaning systems do not include such a conviction tend not to recover, tend to remain dissociatively fragmented and lost. ... [T]he difference is that of tenaciously assuming personal responsibility for one's own actions, and therefore taking on personal risk, versus placing the highest valuation upon personal safety, both physical and emotional, which often precludes the acknowledgment of responsibility. (If I acknowledge responsibility toward my child - or my friend or my ideas or my community - then I may be compelled to stick my neck out. I may have to do or feel something that will make me more vulnerable.)

Here, the psychology of trauma comes full circle, in that the original function of dissociation is to buffer and protect; and so by rights, patients who value self-protection above all else should be candidates for treatment failure...

A self-protective system of mind may express itself behaviorally in many ways. Three of the most common ways can be characterized as 1) action-avoidant dependency upon another person or upon a confining set of rules, 2) a preoccupation with reassigning blame, and actions and complaints that indicate a lack of perspective on one's own problems relative to the problems of others. 3) The third behavioral expression of a self-protective soul - acting upon a lack of perspective on one's own problems relative to those of others - is reflected in our society at large by the popular phenomenon of victim identification.

...A survivor of trauma is a victim, certainly; but "victim" does not comprise the totality of her, or anyone else's, identity. Helpers must support the healing process in both of its phases: the survivor must endure the discovery that she is a victim, and then she must take responsibility for being that no longer. Both parts are equally important, and in neither phase can self-protection be the primary goal. Enabling someone's longterm identity as a victim robs her of an important human right, that of being responsible for her own life. [...]

[W]e cannot simultaneously protect ourselves and experience life fully. These two desires preclude each other proportionately. To the extent that we try to protect ourselves, we cannot truly live; and to the extent that we truly live, we cannot place our highest value upon protecting ourselves. This lesson, is not new, but it is interesting that the theme reiterates itself right down to our neurological blueprints. Maybe there is no salvation for any of us outside of the meaning system provided by personal responsibility, despite all the daunting risks. Perhaps this is why we so doggedly look for examples of accountability in our role models, our parents, our leaders.

Now, what about a child whose every need is met at the early stages of life, whose family is not narcissistic, and who still manifests severe narcissism or psychopathy?

We now come to the point of bifurcation: the difference between narcissistic wounding and NPD/psychopathy.

Notice the characteristics of narcissistically wounded children: they grow up with a heavy sense of bitter disappointment and radical disillusionment with the universe as a whole. They are often unable to accept self-limitations, disappointments, setbacks, failures, criticism or disillusionment with grace and tolerance. Their self-esteem is inconstant and negative. There is a tendency to believe everything that happens to them is the result of outside events, or that everything is their fault, in some way.

When we try to use "narcissistic wounding" as the cause of all cases of narcissism, and shame and sensitivity as the intermediate step to the triggering of this "archaic rage", we run into severe problems both empirical as well as theoretical/logical.

Let's look at the logical problem: If the infant experiences itself in a state of limitless power and knowledge, a state called "grandiosity", how does that translate into an adult personality structure that is "shakily put together", oversensitive and shame-prone (i.e. psychoneurotic)? That's a pretty remarkable transformation. If the infant state is "prevented from maturing", as is suggested, then that must mean that it remains the same; it doesn't change. And if that is the case, then the adult narcissist must be exactly like that undeveloped baby: he or she experiences him or herself in a state of limitless power and knowledge, and does so against all evidence to the contrary; it is a rock solid structure; it is unshakable! There is no "oversensitive" nor is there any "shame-proneness" because sensitivity and shame are learned in the process of maturation.

Many traumatized individuals do seem to REGRESS to that narcissistic state when under stress or certain types of stress. When they do this regressing, it's called dissociating and the more you do it, the more likely you are to do it in the future and the easier and more automatic it becomes. (See Martha Stout's The Myth of Sanity.)

So, such a narcissist as Kohut is describing would be one where development was arrested or distorted at some stage of normal maturation - because SOME development has taken place to lead to the ability to feel shame, to be sensitive, to advance and to regress, to associate and dissociate. Therefore, attributing the narcissist's rage to compensatory reactions underpinned by "over-sensitivity" or "shame-proneness" would not be the same as attributing the narcissist's rage to a primal, infantile narcissism. In short, you can't have it both ways here. If there is an undeveloped infantile narcissism at the root of the rage, it cannot be partly developed because then there would not be infantile narcissism behind the rage.

And yet, there is that description of the narcissist's rage, the psychopathic rage, that everyone who has ever experienced it recognizes it! (Of course, that's what makes me suspicious of the whole theory and the people behind it, but I'm not going to go there right now.)

The bottom line is this, Kohut and Wolf must certainly be describing the REALITY of the narcissistic/psychopathic rage when Wolf writes:

[Kohut] observed that underlying the rage one often finds an uncompromising insistence on the perfection of the idealized other. The infant experiences itself still in a state of limitlessness power and knowledge, a state that we as outsiders deprecatingly call the child's grandiosity, its grandiose self.

If for a variety of reasons this infantile grandiose state of narcissism is prevented from maturing into healthy self-esteem we meet with what looks like an adult....

I think we have figured out by now that we can discard completely the twisted ending that goes: "but really is a very shakily put together oversensitive and shame-prone narcissist."

Then:

The fanaticism of the need for revenge and the unending compulsion of having to square the account after an offense are therefore not the attributes of an aggressivity that is integrated with the mature purposes of the ego - on the contrary, such bedevilment indicates that the aggression was mobilized in the service of an archaic grandiose self and that it is deployed within the framework of an archaic perception of reality. The shame-prone individual who is ready to experience setbacks as narcissistic injuries and to respond to them with insatiable rage does not recognize his opponent as a center of independent initiative with whom he happens to be at cross-purposes.

Here, we must discard "The shame-prone individual who is ready to experience setbacks as narcissistic injuries", but what are we going to replace it with?

Carl Frankenstein suggested that the person that becomes a psychopath goes into an "ego expansion" state where, in order to feel safe, his ego "incorporates" everything in the outside world as part of himself. He writes:

Psychopathy has been defined as constitutional inability to establish objective (positive as well as negative) relationships and effective human ties or as a constitutional deficiency in volition and emotion (in contradistinction to intellectual deficiencies).

Lack of identification; a poorly defined ego concept; a tendency to mirror others in behavior; absence of superego awareness, of anxiety, of guilt feelings and of neurotic reactions to conflict or frustration; shallowness of fantasy material; lack of concern for objective facts; weakness of the time concept are mentioned as the main characteristics of psychopathy in children. ...

It is also a well established fact that a phenomenology of psychopathic behavior in adults reveals additional and still more serious deviations. There we find moral indolence, often leading to brutal crimes; lack of control over sexual and/or material desires; hysterical fanaticism, seemingly for the sake of a truth, a principle, an idea, but actually reflecting an insatiable need to be the center of attention, admiration or fear; the same need producing the well-known swindler and impostor type; narcissistic excitability; or almost unlimited seducibility. Sometimes the vagabond, the sex pervert, the addict are included in the list of psychopathic types. (Frankenstein, Psychopathy: A Comparative Analysis of Clinical Pictures, Grune & Stratton, NY and London; 1959)

Notice that the problem of "objectivity" is mentioned twice above. We could also consider the "weakness of the time concept" to be a problem of objectivity. What seems to be mainly wrong with the narcissist and the psychopath is relational inability. Relational ability is what grows out of healthy narcissism in an infant that gradually turns into appropriate adult self-esteem as the infant learns to distinguish between itself and others. The healthy child matures and comes to have a "reasonable and accurate representation" of his own true worth in relation to his world, his reality. Deficiency in the process of growing from no ego at all to ego identification to self-esteem can interfere with normal processes of acquiring a healthy introject (inner self), superego formation (inner parent). Without these two elements, there is no anxiety, no guilt, no neuroses, etc. In short, there is nobody home. This is exhibited by the noted intellectual peculiarities of the psychopathic child: lack of concern for objective facts, inability to form proper time concepts, inability to accurately experience time, and shallow fantasy life. Psychopaths lack an inner psychic milieu.

All these are just different ways of saying that the problem with the psychopath, the narcissist, is an inability to relate oneself to the environment either outside of the self or inside of the self! The psychopath/narcissist then, is left being little more than a machine, a two-dimensional construct with no inner or outer self, a ghost, a vampire that cannot be seen in a mirror and casts no shadow. He disappears in the bright sunlight of truth and objectivity.

Both of these concepts return us to consider the infant stage where the infant fails for some reason to establish the difference between self and other. Everything "out there" may seem to the psychopath as an extension of the self, or that it exists only for the incorporation to the self potential. In a sense, it might be like an infant that believes that mother, breast, food, everything, is part of itself, for its own pleasure and never grows beyond this emotional, egoistic state. Frankenstein writes:

Learning means internalizing the non-ego, transforming reality contents into conceptual emotional and functional parts of the ego. The ego coordinates not only the contents of consciousness (by relating them to each other in varying contexts of meaning) but also its own functions (by relating them to each other as well as to the actual and potential contents of consciousness, according to their relevance in a given situation).

In other words, learning is like drawing a map inside yourself - in your brain - of everything that is "out there" and learning how to read that map so that you can effectively navigate reality. The extent to which that map accurately describes the external landscape (the same way a map of a geographical location actually shows you the features of the real place when you visit it), determines how objective that internal map is.

What seems to be another important feature is being able to know that the map is a map and the reality out there is not the map, but is the reality.

Psychopaths may not build maps of reality because it appears that they don't seem to know the difference between the map and reality. They do not seem to distinguish between what is outside and what is inside. The way a psychopath navigates reality may be so bizarre that we cannot even conceive of it.

Genes or Environment?

The issues of nature vs. nurture just don't seem to go away. There is the school that says all people are pretty much the same, and people who are badly treated as children, grow up to treat others badly; they learn from the adult examples set for them; they identify with the aggressors; this is the nurture school. The nature school says there is wide variation in inherited dispositions and that many people who are treated badly do not grow up to treat others badly, that those who do would have done so anyway, even if treated well, because they were born "bad." They also point out the not inconsiderable evidence that there are many narcissists and psychopaths that do not have the abusive backgrounds postulated by the nurture school.

Robert Hare, psychopathy expert, says that there are varying components of nature and nurture involved, but that nature - heritability - is the strongest factor. Opponents of this idea oppose it for the very simple reason that being inherited would mean that there is no cure. As Liane Leedom wrote to me privately:

"It is indefensible that many researchers proclaim that one of the most terrible of all conditions psychopathy, is genetic and yet give no word of advise (sic) to anyone about how to cope with this fact. When you meet a mother and her baby in person, it puts a very personal face on an impersonal and inhumane proclamation."

Well, that sounds noble and empathic and humanistic, but nature does not always submit itself to our demands for being humane; nature is often, as the old saying goes, "red in tooth and claw." If we are going to understand anything about our reality, we must build accurate, objective maps.

What we are seeing here is really another attempt to muddy the waters, to promote the "dimensional" model because it can be shown to be more "humane." Of course, Dr. Leedom also has a vested interest in this point of view because her claim to fame is that she was married to a psychopath who ruined her good name and left her with a child that could possibly be a psychopath! So, of course, she claims that she wants to figure this problem out to "save my child." Leedom wants psychopathy to be dimensional and not categorical. She has pointed out that there are similar issues with the mentally retarded; they, too, are a continuum although some are clearly more dysfunctional than others. Is there a cut-off point where you can say this retarded person is categorically different from that one for some listed reasons? One retarded person may score very low on a test, but be more functional than another retarded person who scores higher on the test. And there are idiot savants:

Savant syndrome describes a person having a developmental or mental handicap of some sort with extraordinary mental abilities not found in most people. This usually means (but not in all cases) a lower than average general intelligence (IQ) but very high narrow intelligence in one or more fields. Savant syndrome skills involve striking feats of memory and arithmetic calculation and sometimes include unusual abilities in art or music. (Wikipedia)

Retardation is, in fact, a very useful model to compare to NPD and psychopathy (and other related and overlapping personality disorders) since it could be said that the afflicted individual is certainly retarded in a specific respect and there are also dimensional aspects to the condition. There is Down's Syndrome (Mongolism) which is genetic and Cretinism caused by a thyroid deficiency which leads to brain damage. There can be any of a number of reasons for this thyroid deficiency including injury at birth, lack of nutrients in the diet, illness such as diphtheria, etc.

There is retardation caused by hydrocephalus which leads to brain damage, (and you can go in several directions looking for the cause of a specific case of hydrocephaly); there is Microcephaly that can be the result of any of a number of factors from intrauterine infections and pelvic irradiation of the mother during the early months of pregnancy. Genetics are suspected to be involved, but the role is not clear.

There is mental retardation caused by Phenylketonuria, a rare metabolic disorder. In PKU the baby appears normal at birth but lacks an enzyme needed to break down phenylalanine, an amino acid found in protein foods. When this condition is undetected, the phenylalanine builds up in the blood and leads to brain damage. The resulting mental retardation may be moderate to severe, depending on the degree to which the disease has progressed before it is discovered and corrective measures taken. PKU is thought to result from metabolic alterations involving recessive genes, and 1 person in 70 is thought to be a carrier.

Also, "Dr Gecz, a senior researcher who is based at the Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide, has collaborated with an international research team to reveal that various mutations of a small part of the X chromosome lead to mental retardation."

So, as we can see, there are a number of etiological factors involved in mental retardation, but the bottom line is still that the brain is unable to develop normally in rather specific ways and this is the definition of retardation. The brain is RETARDED.

And we come back to our question: Is there a cut-off point where you can say this retarded person is categorically different from that one for listed reasons?

I think that our brief review of mental retardation indicates that, yes, retarded individuals can be categorically AND dimensionally different from one another and this can be crucially important in terms of how their care is managed. There is more than one kind of genetic retardation and there is more than one kind of mechanical retardation, but in all cases, retardation is still the defining factor and that will never change; it is incurable, though that does not mean it is not manageable or that it does not need to be managed, and that we do not need to do research to try to prevent such tragedies. But certainly, as human beings, we do not for an instant consider it acceptable to do away with those who are mentally retarded or have been mentally damaged by some mechanical means just as it is not acceptable to consider doing away with those who are born with physical handicaps.

The problem is that the same approach needs to be taken toward psychopathy, NPD and related and overlapping personality disorders. For all we know, various "overlapping" personality disorders are merely variations of emotional retardation in the same way there are variations of mental retardation; psychopathy is just one of them like Down's Syndrome is one form of mental retardation, one that happens to be genetic.

Therapists will argue that no definition of the clinical state of an individual can be exact because each individual is so different; each individual is a "mixture" of different clinical pictures. It will be argued that a thorough and exhaustive analysis of the individual is far more important than a comprehensive, abstract, structural frame of reference such as a definitive diagnosis. Such a therapist is constantly on the lookout for unifying rather than differentiating concepts, he looks for the common human needs and drives, the psychodynamics, and the mechanics of the thing - brain structure and chemistry - rather than looking for the essentials of a specific structure of behavior deviation. That's like a doctor looking for all the unifying concepts of retardation between an individual with Down's Syndrome and another with PKU. Certainly, they are both retarded and there may be similar symptoms that look the same on the outside, but they are dynamically different from the inside and how you arrange the care of the two individuals may be heavily reliant on which diagnosis is given. This brings us to the point of view articulated by Carl Frankenstein who writes:

[W]e believe that only with the help of concepts of structure, of structural tendencies and structuralization can human behavior be made intelligible; that structure and dynamics, far from being contradictory or mutually exclusive concepts, supplement each other insofar as each means both the condition and the result of the other; that the various forms of pathologic behavior differ from each other not only in the dynamics, the intrapsychic relations and processes, but also in the relative role of structural versus environmental determinants and of structurization versus modification; and that no clinical statements is meaningful, unless it is based on a preceding analysis of "discriminating essentials," that is, on clinical phenomenology. [...]

For the pragmatically oriented clinician, a psychopath is but an incurable patient with some form of dissocial behavior patterns. For us, incurability is not an essential element of definition but only the necessary outcome of the operation of certain structural and dynamic factors. These factors, though present in many behavioral pathologies, constitute, in their specific constellation, the essence of psychopathy. (Frankenstein, Carl, Psychopathy: A Comparative Analyisis of Clinical Pictures, Grune & Stratton, NY, London, 1959)

Clinical psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski, refers to these neuroanatomical structures as the human "instinctive substratum". Lobaczewski writes:

In order to understand humanity, however, we must gain a primary understanding of mankind's instinctive substratum and appreciate its salient role in the life of individuals and societies. This role easily escapes our notice, since our human species' instinctive responses seem so self-evident and are so much taken for granted that it arouses insufficient interest. A psychologist, schooled in the observation of human beings, does not fully appreciate the role of this eternal phenomenon of nature until he has years of professional experience.

Man's instinctive substratum has a slightly different biological structure than that of animals. Energetically speaking, it has become less dynamic and become more plastic, thereby giving up its job as the main dictator of behavior. It has become more receptive to the controls of reasoning, without, however, losing much of the rich specific contents of the human kind.

It is precisely this phylogenetically developed basis for our experience, and its emotional dynamism, that allow individuals to develop their feelings and social bounds, enabling us to intuit other people's psychological state and individual or social psychological reality. It is thus possible to perceive and understand human customs and moral values. From infancy, this substratum stimulates various activities aiming at the development of the mind's higher functions. In other words, our instinct is our first tutor, whom we carry inside all our lives. Proper child-rearing is thus not limited to teaching a young person to control the overly violent reactions of his instinctual emotionalism; it also ought to teach him to appreciate the wisdom of nature contained and speaking through his instinctive endowment.

Notice particularly this point: "Energetically speaking, [the human instinctive substratum] has become less dynamic and become more plastic, thereby giving up its job as the main dictator of behavior. It has become more receptive to the controls of reasoning."

Nearly all creatures other than man have well-developed and powerful instinctive drives. Some of them stand and walk within a short period of birth; they can find their way to a source of food; all kinds of marvelous "hard-wired" behaviors exist in myriads of creatures that are only hinted at in man because of this plastic substratum that relies more on training than hard-wired behaviors to help man survive.

Now, suppose a condition - either trauma or genetically caused - that either prevents the proper development of the human instinctive substratum, or restricts it to a more dynamic, less plastic role, or even produces one that is more like that of our animal cousins in the evolutionary tree? Imagine the emotional nature of a crocodile in a human being? Gives an all-new meaning to the "Reptilian Brain," doesn't it? Given a retarded or damaged instinctive substratum, it is highly possible - even probable - that psychological deviations will manifest even to the extent that a person's emotional development either is or appears to be completely frozen in the earliest infantile state. Such cases are likely beyond the ability of current medical science to help and, in many cases, can lead to anti-social, violent and/or criminal behavior. Keep in mind that a normal instinctive substratum for an animal is not normal for a human being and we can only infer what is inside from behaviors. What strikes me as important here is that the apparent behaviors of Narcissistic/ Psychopathic Rage are dynamically similar to the emotional behaviors of certain animals in certain states driven by instinct. And notice that I am focusing on emotions here, not intelligence.

But here is the rub: when considering a grown up psychopath, there are highly complex neurological circuits that have developed apace in the process of learning what works to get his needs and demands met. A complex and even brilliant intelligence is harnessed in service of a restricted or deviant emotional nature. But that apparent internal infantile core of being nothing but a hunger at the center of a bundle of neurological inputs and outputs is static - it never changes. In other words, there is no core self, just a sort of black hole that wants/needs to suck everything into it.

And here we come to the reason for the insatiable rage.

Under the influence of this internal structure - this ever-present, never fulfilled, hunger - the psychopath is not able to appreciate the wants or needs of other human beings, the subtle shades of a situation or to tolerate ambiguity. The entire external reality is filtered through - made to conform to - this rigid and primitive internal structure, in the service of primitive drives.

When the psychopath is frustrated, i.e. doesn't get what they want, satisfaction of the hunger is denied or delayed, what they seem to feel is that everything in the world "out there" is against them while they are only good. This may, of course, translate into actual thought loops of being good, long-suffering and only seeking the ideal of love, peace, safety, beauty, warmth and comfort that comes with satiation (never mind that they can never achieve it), but the most fundamental thing about it is that "the infant experiences itself still in a state of limitlessness power and knowledge, a state that we call its grandiose self". That is, when a psychopath is confronted with something displeasing or threatening to his hunger, that object (person, idea, group, whatever), is placed in the "all bad" category the same way that a newborn infant reacts to a negative trauma or denial of wants or needs: a mindless, instinctive, screaming rage that is designed to be so unpleasant (possibly evolutionarily so) that the caretaker immediately does whatever is necessary to bring the infant's rage to an end, to satisfy the hunger (for whatever).

In short, if we are positing that the psychopath's inner reality is structurally similar to that of a newborn infant - or at least apparently similar - then we must also realize that the rage is also structural. Whatever triggers it MUST come into compliance, the infant/psychopath cannot be denied; the rage, the crying, the fit, whatever, will continue until the infant either gets what is wanted/needed or is so exhausted that it cannot strive any longer. And, of course, with a grown up psychopath, this structural rage has far more support and possibilities (including utilizing a very complex brain) for sustaining it for a very long time: as long as necessary for THAT OBJECT of the rage to be incorporated as was originally desired.

The bottom line is: there is never even an instant when the psychopath feels "traumatized" or "shamed" or "helpless" - the structural grandiosity is ever present along with the rage/rejection of denial.

When dealing with a grown up psychopath, things get a bit more complicated, of course, because, as mentioned above, the brain has continued to grow and develop without the concomitant emotional maturation (and this can vary from individual to individual, though the structure remains the same). If the brain of the psychopath is forced to face mounting evidence that some choice or act of his/hers has created a problem or made a situation worse, this must be denied by the brain, driven by the emotions, as part of the self and projected as coming from "out there."

The internal structure of the psychopath will admit to no wrong (it cannot), nothing bad, no errors and so, anything that is defined as "bad" is naturally - structurally - projected onto someone or something else. And keep in mind that this is not because they choose to do that, it is because they cannot do otherwise. There is nothing at the core but a hunger connected to neural inputs and outputs, wrapped up in emotional grandiosity and eternal perfection; that is the way they are made.

As a consequence of having such a primitive core structure coupled with a complex - and in some cases, brilliant - brain, psychopaths become masters of projective identification. That is, they project onto and into others everything that is bad (remembering that "bad" changes according to what the psychopath wants at the moment - that's part of the structure), and seek in manipulative ways to induce in that other person what is being projected, and seek to control the other person who is perceived as manifesting those "bad" characteristics. In this way, the psychopath gains enjoyment and feels "in control" which amounts to getting "fed" or "nurtured" in some way.

Keep in mind that what the psychopath considers to be good has nothing to do with truth, honor, decency, consideration for others, or any other thing other than what the psychopath wants at any given moment. In this way, any violation of the rights of others, any foul, evil deed, can be perpetrated by a psychopath and he will still sleep like a baby (literally) at night because he has done nothing wrong!

©Usha Sutliff

USC researcher Adrian Raine: "There's faulty wiring going on in psychopaths. They're wired differently than other people. It's literally true in this case."

It is from these pathological elements that stem all kinds of antisocial, violent and criminal behavior, so to apply the maxim that "violence and aggression mainly occur because deep down, narcissists feel hurt and helpless" (which is what Dr Wolf's paper boils down to) is to naively give pathological individuals a way to manipulate us via our sympathies. Certainly, much violence IS committed by individuals who have been psychologically wounded during their development, but they do not necessarily meet the criteria for NPD. Clarity and consistency in terminology is something that is desperately needed in this area.

Now, let's turn again to Andrew Lobaczewski's work "Political Ponerology", where he has delineated a categorical and dimensional model of psychopathy and its various sub-categories, for a more reasonable answer to this problem of group violence, which he identifies as a matter of societal maladjustment taken advantage of by pathological elements within a society.

If various circumstances combine, including a given society's deficient psychological world-view, in order to force a particular individual to exercise functions which do not make full use of his talents, said person's professional practice would be no better, and often even worse, than that of a worker with satisfactory talents; he would feel cheated and inundated by duties which prevent him from achieving self-realization. His thoughts would often wander from his duties into a world of fantasy, or into matters which are of greater interest to him; in his daydream world, he is what he should and deserves to be. Such a person always realizes it if his social and professional adjustment has taken place in a downward direction; at the same time, however, he fails to develop a healthy critical faculty concerning the upper limits of his own talents. His daydreams allow him to "fix" an unfair world, "all you need is power". Revolutionary and radical ideas find fertile soil among people in downward social adaptations.

Some people, on the other hand, achieve important posts because they belong to privileged social groups or organizations which have gained power; their talents and skills are therefore not sufficient for their duties, especially the more difficult problems. Such persons then avoid the problematic and dedicate themselves to minor matters quite ostentatiously. A component of histrionics appears progressively in their conduct. Tests indicate that their correctness of reasoning deteriorates after only a few years' worth of such activities. In order to maintain their position, they direct their attacks against anyone with greater talent or skill, removing him from the appropriate posts and playing an active role in degrading their social and professional adjustment, which of course engenders a feeling of injustice.

Upwardly-adjusted people thus favor whip-cracking governments which would protect their positions.

Upward and downward social adjustments, as well the qualitatively improper ones, result in a waste of any society's basic capital, namely the talent pool of its members. This simultaneously leads to increasing dissatisfaction and tensions among individuals and social groups; any attempt to approach human talent and its productivity problematics as a purely private matter must therefore be considered dangerously naive. Development or involution in all areas of cultural, economic and political life depend on the extent to which this talent pool is properly utilized. In the final analysis, it also determines whether there will be evolution or revolution. [...]

In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviants create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. Some inspirational role of the essential psychopathy in this network also appears to be a common phenomenon. They are aware of being different as they obtain their life-experience and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals. Their world is forever divided into "us and them"; their little world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world full of presumptuous ideas and customs in light of which they are condemned morally. Their sense of honor bids them to cheat and revile that other human world and its values. In contradiction to the customs of normal people, they feel non-fulfillment of their promises or signatures is customary behavior. They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals. This dichotomy of worlds is permanent and does not disappear even if they succeed in realizing their youthful dream of gaining power over the society of normal people. This proves that the separation is biologically conditioned.

In such [pathological] people a dream emerges like some youthful Utopia of a "happy" world and a social system which would not reject them or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving reality would dominate, where they would of course be assured safety and prosperity. Those "others", different, but also more technically skillful, should be put to work to achieve this goal. "We", after all, will create a new government, one of justice. They are prepared to fight and to suffer for the sake of such a brave new world, and also, of course, to inflict suffering upon others. Such vision justifies killing people, whose suffering does not move them to compassion because "they" are not quite conspecific. They do not realize that they will consequently meet with opposition which can last for generations.

Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has a deforming effect on his personality: it engenders trauma and neurosis. This is accomplished in a manner which generally evades sufficient conscious controls. Such a situation then deprives the person of his natural rights: to practice his own mental hygiene, develop a sufficiently autonomous personality, and utilize his common sense. In the light of natural law, it thus constitutes a kind of illegality--which can appear in any social scale--although it is not mentioned in any code of law.

We have already discussed the nature of some pathological personalities, e.g. frontal characteropathy. Essential psychopathy has exceptionally intense effects in this manner.

Something mysterious gnaws into the personality of an individual at the mercy of such a [pathological] person and is then fought like a demon. His emotions become chilled, his sense of psychological reality is stifled. This leads to de-criterialization of thought and a feeling of helplessness, culminating in depressive reactions which can be so severe that psychiatrists sometimes misdiagnose them as a manic-depressive psychosis.

Many people evidently also rebel much earlier and start searching for some way of liberating themselves from such an influence.

Many other life situations involve less mysterious results of many other psychological anomalies upon normal people (which are always unpleasant and destructive) and their carriers' unscrupulous drive to dominate and take advantage of others. Governed by unpleasant experiences and feelings, as well as natural egoism, societies thus have good reason to reject such [damaged] people, helping to push them into marginal positions in social life, including poverty and criminality.

It is unfortunately almost the rule that such behavior is amenable to moralizing justification in our natural world-view categories. Most members of society feel entitled to protect their own persons and property and enact legislation for that purpose. Being based on natural perception of phenomena, and on emotional motivations instead of an objective understanding of the problems, such laws are in no position to safeguard the kind of order and safety we would like; those others perceive them as a force which needs to be battled.

Such a social structure dominated by normal people and their conceptual world easily appears a "system of force and oppression" to individuals with various psychological deviations. Psychopaths reach such a conclusion as a rule.

If a good deal of injustice does in fact exist in a given society, pathological feelings of unfairness and suggestive statements can resonate among those who have truly been treated unfairly. Revolutionary doctrines may then find approval among both groups, although their motivations will actually be quite different.

A recent SOTT editorial discussed "Learned Helplessness" as a phenomenon being experienced by many of the normal human beings on this planet who are struggling to survive the global pathocracy that is currently consolidating its control.

This state of learned helplessness no doubt applies to many of the mainstream researchers in the psychological disciplines. The knowledge of psychopathy and ponerology is what "opens the cage door", yet it seems the heavily conditioned psychologists and psychiatrists of the mainstream are too afraid to "go there" - to step out of the cage and really see where this knowledge could lead them. Thus there are endless attempts and theories to fit the square peg of psychopathy into the round hole of "humanist dogma" that insists on the uniform nature of the core Self for every single human-looking being. Sometimes this wishful thinking can fuel a more egotistical attitude - Lobaczewski refers to this as the "egotism of the natural world view":

Moving further, we often meet with sensible people endowed with a well-developed natural world view as regards psychological, societal, and moral aspects, frequently refined via literary influences, religious deliberations, and philosophical reflections. Such persons have a pronounced tendency to overrate the values of their world view, behaving as though it were an objective basis for judging other people. They do not take into account the fact that such a system of apprehending human matters can also be erroneous, since it is insufficiently objective. Let us call such an attitude the "egotism of the natural world view". To date, it has been the least pernicious type of egotism, being merely an overestimation of that method of comprehension containing the eternal values of human experience.

Today, however, the world is being jeopardized by a phenomenon which cannot be understood nor described by means of such a natural conceptual language; this kind of egotism thus becomes a dangerous factor stifling the possibility of objective counteractive measures. Developing and popularizing the objective psychological world view could thus significantly expand the scope of dealing with evil, via sensible action and pinpointed countermeasures.

The objective psychological language, based on mature philosophical criteria, must meet the requirements derived from its theoretical foundations, and meet the needs of individual and macrosocial practice. It should be evaluated fully on the basis of biological realities and constitute an extension of the analogous conceptual language elaborated by the older naturalistic sciences, particularly medicine. Its range of applicability should cover all those facts and phenomena conditioned upon cognizable biological factors for which this natural language has proved inadequate. It should, within this framework, allow sufficient understanding of the contents, and varied causes, for the genesis of the above-mentioned deviant world views.

Elaborating such a conceptual language, being far beyond the individual scope of any scientist, is a step-by-step affair; by means of the contribution of many researchers, it matures to the point when it could be organized under philosophical supervision in the light of above-mentioned foundations. Such a task would greatly contribute to the development of all bio-humanistic and social sciences by liberating them from the limitations and erroneous tendencies imposed by the overly great influence of the natural language of psychological imagination, especially when combined with an excessive component of egotism.

We at sott.net have been charting the disastrous global trajectory for years, and our research has made clear the role that psychopaths and those in the spectrum of pathology - such as narcissistic personality disorder - play in maintaining that trajectory. A unified approach to the problem of pathological individuals is desperately needed within mainstream psychology. Lobaczewski has shown us the first step - the formulation of an objective psychological language in conjunction with a dimensional and categorical model of the psychopath and its related disorders. This work was accomplished via the efforts of many researchers. But, at the present time, there are many, many researchers who seek to use psychiatry for control of others, usually normal people who are diagnosed by external behaviors while the preternaturally deceptive psychopath is not apprehended because his mask of sanity is too good.

It is not group helplessness that leads to narcissistic rage, it is narcissistic rage that produces group helplessness, as Martha Stout has shown above. And a helpless group can be driven to any evil, even to their own destruction.

That's where it looks like it is heading.

Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

2008-04-17T06:09:00.000+02:00

Astronomy books and papers far too numerous to cite offer the assurance that "no one has ever been killed by a meteorite." (John S. Lewis, University of Arizona)

©Julian Baum

Over the past few years, while sott.net has been tracking the increasing flux of fireballs and meteorites entering the earth's atmosphere, we have been, by turns, amused and horrified at the ignorant reactions and declarations that issue from academia and the media regarding these incursions. A few years ago, we read that "this is a 'once in a hundred years' event!" Not long after it was a "once in a lifetime" event. Still later, after a lot more incidents it became a "once in a decade" event. More recently, it has been admitted in some quarters that meteorites hit the ground (as opposed to safely burning up in the atmosphere) several times a year! And of course, we have discovered the fact that the governments of our planet are well aware that there are atmospheric explosions from such bodies numerous times a year. We have also learned in this series that the frequent reports of unusual booms and shaking of the ground is often due to such overhead explosions. Yet the media steadfastly refuses to honestly address this issue, though we have noted a plethora of recent articles presenting opposing academic arguments designed to put the populace back to sleep, to reassure them that there is nothing to worry about, that such things only happen every 100,000 years or so, and certainly, the Space Watch Program is going to find all the possible impactors and take care of things.

Recent articles we have covered on SOTT.net include:

Top Scientists Want Research Free From Politics

Leading U.S. scientists called on Congress Thursday to make sure the next president does not do what they say the George W. Bush Administration has done: censor, suppress and falsify important environmental and health research. [...]

Among the more than 15,000 government scientists signing onto the statement are Harold Varmus, preesident of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Anthony Robbins, professor of medicine at Tufts University and former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

"Although surely the worst, the Bush Administration is not the first, nor will it be the last administration to mistreat and misuse science and scientists," Robbins said. The White House itself has been directly involved in the suppression and falsification of science, Robbins stressed.

But interference from the White House is just part of the problem, said Francesca Grifo, a former government researcher and now a director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Industry lobbyists are all over government agencies, trying to influence research that will impact their corporations, she said. "These special interest groups are being given access at the highest level."

"Government scientists have had their findings subjected to censorship and misrepresentation," said Kurt Gottfried, professor of physics at Cornell University and a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The public and Congress have often been deprived of accurate and candid scientific information."

"The pursuit of science in an open society has had a long and fruitful tradition in America," Gottfried said. "Unfortunately, this tradition has been violated in recent years by the government itself."

Another: Government's funding framework breeds scientific conformity

Here is a list of beliefs in the biomedical and climate sciences that must not be questioned if you're applying for a government grant:

- That global warming is caused by humans;

- That AIDS is caused by a virus;

- That radiation, cigarette smoke and other toxins are dangerous in proportion to their strength, no matter how small the dose;

- That heart disease is caused by saturated fats;

- That cancer is caused by mutations.

This is part of a list offered by a University of Washington professor of surgery, Donald W. Miller, who is a heart surgeon at the VA Medical Center in Seattle. Miller believes that all the above ideas may be false, and ought to be tested. [...]

But much of science runs on government money. Some people find the stink of bias only in private money, and see government as free of it, but they are mistaken. Government likes certain beliefs. To get its money, you have to get the approval of the scientists it selects, and you are less likely to get it if they think your idea wrong.

What that means, Miller says, is that "If you say low doses of radiation aren't bad for you, or that global warming is due to variations in the sun, you can't get funded."

He says this happened to University of California scientist Peter Dues-berg, who challenged the viral theory of AIDS, and to Harvard's Willie Soon, who challenged the pollution theory of global warming, and to others. In a paper published in 2007 in the Journal of Information Ethics, Miller argued that conformity is built into the system of government grants. [...]

In 2005, in the scientific journal Cellular and Molecular Biology, Pollack made an argument similar to Miller's. American science, he wrote, has become "a culture of believers" whose rule is, "just keep it safe and get your funding."

For science, the result has not been good. [...]

Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, argued famously that science progresses in revolutionary bursts, in which the "dominant paradigm" is overturned. But what if the supporters of the dominant paradigm are the people vetting your application?

We most certainly can see that the issue of meteorite, cometary and asteroid impacts on our planet, and their true potential danger to each and every one of us, must be added to this list of unfunded research.

This is a very bad and dangerous state of affairs. As Victor Clube wrote in his letter to SOTT.net:

First, I should say your references to the (cosmically complacent) paleoclimate community and to my otherwise unread narrative report to the USAF european office strike a very considerable chord with me. After all neither Ms Victoria Cox nor your good self can be aware how very much Bill and I had reason to appreciate the timely injection of USAF funds at a time when the line of research we championed appeared to be successfully closed down by the UK scientific establishment. Thus we were both in turn obliged to relinquish our career posts at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh on account of this line of research - which gave rise to our reincarnation at a more tolerant haven namely my alma mater (Oxford).

Also, whilst I broadly accept your commentary regarding the role of "national elites" in the face of near-Earth threats, I am quite certain the elites in practice currently know VERY "much LESS than they let on" and that the situation for humanity is dire. Any comfort you may draw from the opposite opinion seems to me to be entirely misplaced. Thus although the globally modest efforts to assess the NEO threat with telescopes by a few semi-enlightened national administrations (eg USA) or by a few private enterprises (eg Gates) are certainly to be commended, I look upon this aspect of the NEO threat as basically intermittent and therefore more or less symbolic so far as generally more urgent and still largely undetected low mass NEO flux (which is demonstrably climatological in its effect) is concerned. This particular threat (evidently responsible for our planet's evolving glacial/interglacial condition during the past 3 million years) is of course _fundamentally_ ignored by the current Body Scientific and hence by most of humanity as well.

And so, it seems, we here at SOTT.net, and some brave souls with the good of humanity at heart, are on their own, opposed by the governments that are supposed to be in place to look after the interests of their people.

Of course, the question arises: what led to this general and overall blindness on the part of the people we look to for interpretation and explanation of our reality? How can the people who write textbooks, teach in schools, even at the highest level, be so ignorant? The consequences of this ignorance are, after all, detrimental to everyone for many reasons, not the least of which is simple survival in a rather hostile environment.

The events that have been covered so far in this series have led us to understand that there have been many times when it is highly probable that the earth - or parts thereof - was bombarded with meteorites or exploding aerial cometary fragments. These events occurred, and were probably related to, periods of great stress on the environment and humanity as a whole. Climate changes brought floods, droughts, extreme temperatures, crop failures and famine. These pressures may have caused lowered disease resistance for given populations, and it is also conjectured that extra-terrestrial bombardments may have carried disease pathogens. Impacts or crustal disturbances could have placed stresses on the geological structures so that outgassings from fissures, the ocean, or lakes may have poisoned large numbers of people, not to mention the record of tsunamis that is now called into question. Do we know, for example, that the Christmas tsunami-causing earthquake near Malaysia was not impact induced? No, we don't. And we can't trust either our governments or the news media - or even most of academia who owe their livelihoods to the government - to tell us the truth.

Why do they lie to us?

Well, the main reason is rather simple: it's all about control. All of these things, taken together, place intolerable stresses on the human social organism and, as is typical for human beings, this brings on a crisis of faith, demands for answers, demands for protection that governments simply find it too expensive to provide.

When the world shows itself to be a hostile environment, when the environment suggests that there is no god and humanity is cast adrift in an uncaring cosmos, most people cannot tolerate this; they desperately need to restore their belief in something "out there" that is going to save them, and if there is no one to save the, that means that someone has to be blamed for the disasters: a scapegoat. The corrupt governments do not want to be blamed, so they seek to blame someone else and convince the masses that this object of derision is the chief cause of all terrors. And the masses invariably buy into these maneuvers because, of course, if you can find someone or something to blame for calamity, you can continue in your illusion that "God is in his heaven and - but for the evil acts of the chosen scapegoat - all would be right with the world." Otherwise, the tension and anxiety of having no control (even vicarious, via prayer or ritual) over the hostile environment, would be unbearable. I'm sure that you notice that this also relieves the individual of any responsibility as well, so this approach works in all kinds of situations.

We are going to examine this problem in some depth further on, but for now, I would like the reader to become acquainted with the facts. What I have prepared for today is The List, by no means exhaustive, of all the incidents I have been able to uncover of meteorite, asteroid, or cometary impacts that have caused death and destruction, property damage, or were near misses. Major parts of The List are extracted from the work of John S. Lewis, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Codirector of the NASA/University of Arizona Space Engineering Research Center, and Commissioner of the Arizona State Space Commission, in specific, his books entitled Rain of Iron and Ice and Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth. In this latter volume, he writes:

The most intensively studied impact phenomenon, impact cratering, is of limited importance, due to the rarity and large mean time between events for crater-forming impacts. Almost all events causing property damage and lethality are due to bodies less than 100 meters in diameter, almost all of which, except for the very largest and strongest, are fated to explode in the atmosphere. ... [W]e are forced to conclude that the complex behavior of smaller bodies is closely relevant to the threat actually experienced by contemporary civilization.

Based on the data he collected, Lewis noted that:

[O]n the century time scale, firestorm ignition and direct blast damage by rare, strong, deeply penetrating bodies are the most common threats to human life, with average fatality rates of about 250 people per year. ... On a 1000-year scale, the most severe single event, which is usually a 10 to 100 megaton Tunguska-type airburst, accounts for most of the total fatalities. On longer time scales, regional impact-triggered tsunamis become the most dangerous events. ...The exact impactor threshold size for global effects remains poorly determined. [...]

Perhaps most interesting is the implication that the large majority of lethal events (not of the number of fatalities) are caused by bodies that are so small, so faint, and so numerous that the cost of the effort required to find, track, predict, and intercept them exceeds the cost of the damage incurred by ignoring them. [Lewis, 1999]

Unfortunately, Prof. Lewis did not have to hand the information presented by Mike Baillie in his book New Light on the Black Death, nor did he consider the global events of 12000 years ago revealed by the work of maverick scientists, Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith. If he had added the estimated numbers of fatalities from those events into his calculations, it might not have decided that the small, faint, and numerous bodies were so easily ignored. I think that if ALL the data were plugged in, the average deaths per year would be a lot higher than 250. Regarding impacts from history, Lewis writes in Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth:

Many ancient sources from many cultures treat comets as literal, physical harbingers of doom. Such phenomena as the burning of cities and the overthrow of buildings and walls by aerial events are mentioned many times in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese records, but there is no evidence of physical understanding of the nature of the bombarding objects or their effects until quite recently. [...]

There is indeed a language problem in understanding the ancient reports, but it is largely a matter of the lack of an appropriate technical vocabulary in the older writings. [...] In certain locations and periods, especially in medieval Europe, all unusual heavenly events were interpreted as signs sent by God. Therefore, the surviving accounts are strongly biased toward explaining the moral purpose of these events, not their physical nature. Such fundamental information as exact date and time, exact location, place of appearance of the phenomenon in the sky, its duration and physical extent, luminosity, precise nature of the damage done, and the like were generally regarded as unimportant, and therefore rarely recorded for posterity. [...] Even in 20th century newspapers, bolide explosions may be described (and indexed) as "mysterious explosions," aerial blasts, aerolites, aeroliths, bolides, earthquakes, fireballs, meteorites, meteors, shocks, thunder, and so on. [...]

Reports of meteorite falls, often with consequent damage, extend back to the fall of a "thunderstone" in Crete in 1478 BC, described by Malchus in the Chronicle of Paros. The earliest Biblical source is the account of a lethal fall of stones in ... Joshua 10:11. [...]

Other ancient reports in the West are found in the writings of Pausanius, Plutarch, Livy, Pindar, Valerius Maximus, Caesar, and many others. The report of a great fall of black dust at Constantinople in 472 BC, perhaps the result of a high-altitude airburst, is documented by Procopius, Ammianus Marcellinus, Theophanes, and others.

Colonel S. P. Worden has called to my attention the following passage in The History of the Franks, written by Bishop Gregory of Tours:

"580 AD in Louraine, one morning before the dawning of the day, a great light was seen crossing the heavens, falling toward the east. A sound like that of a tree crashing down was heard over all the countryside, but it could surely not have been any tree, since it was heard more than fifty miles away... the city of Bordeaux was badly shaken by an earthquake ... a supernatural fire burned down villages about Bordeaux. It took hold so rapidly that houses and even threshing-floors with all their grain were burned to ashes. Since there was absolutely no other visible cause of the fire, it must have happened by divine will. The city of Orleans also burned with so great a fire that even the rich lost almost everything."

Astronomers who have sought documentary evidence of ancient astronomical phenomena (eclipses, comets, fireballs, etc.) have found that East Asian records are far superior to European records for many centuries. Kevin Yau has searched Chinese records and found many reports of deaths and injuries (Yau et al., 1994). The Chinese records of lethal impact events include the death of 10 victims from a meteorite fall in 616 AD, an "iron rain" in the O-chia district in the 14th century that killed people and animals, several soldiers injured by the fall of a "large star" in Ho-t'ao in 1369, and many others. The most startling is a report of an event in early 1490 in Ch'ing-yang, Shansi, in which many people were killed when stones "fell like rain." Of the three known surviving reports of this event, one says that "over 10,000 people" were killed, and one says that "several tens of thousands" were killed.

On 14 September 1511, a meteorite fall in Cremona, Lombardy, Italy, reportedly killed a monk, several birds, and a sheep. In the 17th century we find reports of a monk in Milano, Italy, who was struck by a meteorite that severed his femoral artery, causing him to bleed to death, and of two sailors killed on shipboard by a meteorite fall in the Indian Ocean.

In addition to these shipboard fatalities, there have been several striking accounts of near disasters involving impacts very close to ships. Near midnight of 24 February 1885, at a latitude of 37 degrees N and a longitude of 170 degrees 15 minutes E in the North Pacific, the crew of the barque Innerwich, en route from Japan to Vancouver, saw the sky turn fiery red: "A large mass of fire appeared over the vessel, completely blinding the spectators; and, as it fell into the sea some 50 yards to leeward, it caused a hissing sound, which was heard above the blast, and made the vessel quiver from stem to stem. Hardly had this disappeared, when a lowering mass of white foam was seen rapidly approaching the vessel. The noise from the advancing volume of water is described as deafening. The barque was struck flat aback; but, before there was time to touch a brace, the sails had filled again, and the roaring white sea had passed ahead."

A strikingly similar event occurred only 2 years later on the opposite side of the world. Captain C.D. Swart of the Dutch barque J.P.A. reported in the American Journal of Meteorology 4 (1887) that, when sailing at 37 degrees 39 minutes N and 57degrees W, at about 5 pm on 19 March 1887, during a severe storm in which it was "as dark as night above," two brilliant fireballs appeared as in a sea of fire. One bolide "fell into the water very close alongside the vessel with a roar, and caused the sea to make tremendous breakers which swept over the vessel. A suffocating atmosphere and perspiration ran down every person's face on board and caused everyone to gasp for fresh air. Immediately after this, solid lumps of ice fell on deck, and everything on deck and in the rigging became iced, notwithstanding that the thermometer registered 19 degrees C."

On 20 August 1907, the steamship Cambrian arrived in Boston from England with an equally extraordinary tale to tell. When the ship was several hundred miles south of Cape Race, Newfoundland, steaming along under a clear sky, a brilliant fireball appeared near the northeastern horizon and "rushed across the sky like a rocket. The next moment it passed over the topmast of the liner with a tremendous roar and plowed up the sea about fifty yards from the boat. The upheaval of the water was terrific, but the ship was not damaged." The report of this event was carried in the New York Times.

Next, according to the Times, on 13 September 1930, a fireball plunged into the sea near Eureka, California, barely missing the tug Humboldt, which was towing the Norwegian motorship Childar out to sea. It requires little imagination to appreciate that such an event, if it were to strike a ship, should easily cause fatalities, or even the loss of the vessel with all hands. [Lewis, 1999]

Now, that just gives you a taste of what is to come. (I would like you to notice the highlighted mention of the fall of chunks of ice.) So, without further ado, here is:

THE LIST: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls

10,000 - 11,000 B.C. - The earliest disaster we know of from our historical or mythic records is, of course, the legendary Deluge of Atlantis. The description of the end of Atlantis given by Plato in the "Timaeus" and "Critias" dialogues bears striking resemblance to what many scientists are now agreed would be the inevitable result of an oceanic impact by a disintegrating comet or large asteroid. The resultant 'tsunami', or tidal waves, would easily reach 2000 ft. high as they approached land, wiping out any and all coastal settlements. The deluge traditions, of which there are literally hundreds worldwide, appear in this light to be variations on Plato's account, and could even be actual observation-based tales, eye-witness accounts of the same, or similar, events. This is very likely the event discussed by Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith in The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture. As I have discussed in my book, The Secret History of the World, the North and South American continents in the Western Hemisphere fit all the descriptions of "Atlantis," and it is very likely that the event that led to the extinction of about 30 species of large mammals about 12,000 years ago was the source of the legends of Atlantis and probably the legends of a global deluge: Noah's Flood. Let's look at some descriptions of what such an event can do.

Back in the 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the University of New Mexico led an expedition to Alaska to look for human remains. He didn't find human remains; he found miles and miles of icy muck just packed with mammoths, mastodons, and several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Alaska, the members of the expedition watched in horror as bulldozers pushed the half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animal tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades "like shavings before a giant plane". The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death, most of them "pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric catastrophic disturbance."[Hibben, Frank, The Lost Americans (New York: Thomas & Crowell Co. 1946)]

The killing fields stretched for literally hundreds of miles in every direction.[ibid.] There were trees and animals, layers of peat and moss, twisted and tangled and mangled together as though some Cosmic mixmaster sucked them all in circa 12000 years ago, and then froze them instantly into a solid mass. [Sanderson, Ivan T., "Riddle of the Frozen Giants", Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960.]

Just north of Siberia entire islands are formed of the bones of Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the freezing Arctic Ocean. One estimate suggests that some ten million animals may be buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousands upon thousands of tusks created a massive ivory trade for the master carvers of China, all from the frozen mammoths and mastodons of Siberia. The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were found in its mouth.

What kind of terrible event overtook these millions of creatures in a single day? The evidence suggests an enormous tsunami raging across the land, tumbling animals and vegetation together, to be finally quick-frozen for the next 12000 years. But the extinction was not limited to the Arctic, even if the freezing at colder locations preserved the evidence of Nature's rage.

Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, confessing, "no one knows the answer." He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time. [Simpson, George G., Horses, New York: Oxford University Press) 1961] The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth, the saber-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. These creatures didn't die because of the "gradual onset" of an ice age, "unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question." [Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., "Bestiary for Pleistocene Biologists", Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967]

Massive piles of mastodon and saber-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida. [Valentine, quoted by Berlitz, Charles, The Mystery of Atlantis (New York, 1969)] Mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountain glaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.

This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct at the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska, the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the American camels. It is obvious that the cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres, and that it was not gradual. A "uniformitarian glaciation" would not have caused extinctions because the various animals would have simply migrated to better pasture. What is seen is a surprising event of uncontrolled violence. [Leonard, R. Cedric, Appendix A in "A Geological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge", Special Paper No. 1 ( Bethany: Cowen Publishing 1979)] In other words, 12000 years ago, something terrible happened - so terrible that life on earth was nearly wiped out in a single day.

Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks encased in the Siberian permafrost present an "insuperable difficulty" to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, "even if they died in winter." [Lippman, Harold E., "Frozen Mammoths", Physical Geology, (New York 1969)] Especially when many of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly. Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form, states: "Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of the animals and their full stomachs ... the animals were robust and healthy when they died." [Farrand, William R., "Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology", Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17, 1961] Unfortunately, in spite of this admission, this poor guy seems to have been incapable of facing the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of the Pleistocene. Hibben sums up the situation in a single statement: "The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period, which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive." [Hibben, op. cit.] [Quoted from The Secret History of The World]

Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith write:

"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 slammed 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 Carolina Bays date to this time. The Carolina bays are mysterious land features often filled with bay trees and other wetland vegetation. Because of their oval shape and consistent orientation, they are considered by some authorities to be the result of a vast meteor shower that occurred approximately 12,000 years ago. What is most astonishing is the number of them. There are over 500,000 of these shallow basins dotting the coastal plain from Georgia to Delaware. That is a frightening figure.

Let me repeat: there are over 500,000 of these shallow basins.

©Unknown

Carolina Bays

Unlike virtually any other bodies of water or changes in elevation, these topographical features follow a reliable and unmistakable pattern. Carolina Bays are circular, typically stretched, elliptical depressions in the ground, oriented along their long axis from the Northwest to the Southeast. [T]hey are further characterized by an elevated rim of fine sand surrounding the perimeter. [...]

Robert Kobres, an independent researcher in Athens, Georgia, has studied Carolina Bays for nearly 20 years in conjunction with his larger interest in impact threats from space. His recent, self-published, investigations have profound consequences for Carolina Bay study and demand research by academia as serious, relevant and previously unexamined new information. The essence of Kobres' theory is that the search for "debris," and the comparison of Bays with "traditional" impact craters, falsely and naively assumes that circular craters with extraterrestrial material in them are the only terrestrial evidence of past encounters with objects entering earth's atmosphere.

Kobres goes a logical step further by assuming that forces associated with incoming bodies, principally intense heat, should also leave visible signatures on the earth. And, finally, that physics does not demand that a "collision" of the bodies need necessarily occur to produce enormous change on earth. To verify that such encounters are possible outside of the physics lab, we need look no further than the so-called "Tunguska event."

At the epicenter of the explosion lay not a large crater with a "rock" in it, as might be expected, but nothing more than a number of "neat oval bogs." The Tunguska literature generally mentions the bogs only in passing, since the researchers examining the site failed to locate any evidence of a meteorite and went on to examine other aspects of the explosion. (The Secret History of The World)

Now, how many human deaths ought we to assign to this event? As Firestone, et al discuss, it was global in effect and the evidence of a sharply reduced population of not only animals, but humans, is there in the geological record. But what was the total human population? What kind of numbers can we plug into Lewis' calculations? Frankly, we don't know. Undoubtedly, multiplied millions of human beings perished at that time along with the extinction of many animal species. One thing that seems certain is that if these numbers were included in Lewis' assessment, it would make a significant change in the "average number of deaths per year". Though, of course, this was a very big event, and those don't happen every year, or even every century. They happen on a scale of thousands of years and there hasn't been one like that for 12000 years.

3195 B.C. - Eco-disaster as shown in tree rings. What evidence is there then that something unusual happened around 3100 BC other than the Mayan year zero supposedly relating to 3114 BC?

- Newgrange construction. - Flood in paleoclimatic data. - Stonehenge number one - The unification of Egypt - Methane peak (fires). - Cold time according to bristlecone pines. - The coastal menhirs in Brittany. Although anyone of these in itself would not be unusual, the timing of them within a frame of only 100 years, is what makes us suspect that something unusual was going on. The next 1000 years or so were very restless time globally.

The postulated bombardments and dust-veils at around 3195 BC, another narrowest tree-ring date, would have wreaked havoc on both the local and global climate, and any and all cultures affected would have taken many decades, maybe even centuries, to recover. The sheer terror that 'multiple-Tunguska-class fireballs' would have instilled into the peoples of those times would have understandably motivated them towards building some form of observatories to help predict future meteor showers/storms as a matter of perceived urgency.

Stonehenge may very well have been built to help in the watch for comets. And, yet again, we have no numbers of human fatalities to plug into the calculations but they must have been enormous.

3123 B.C. - 29 June - Germany - 'The clay tablet that tells how an asteroid destroyed Sodom 5,000 years ago'

A clay tablet that has baffled scientists for more than a century has been identified as a witness's account of an asteroid that destroyed the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah 5,000 years ago.

Researchers believe that the tablet's symbols give a detailed account of how a mile-long asteroid hit the region, causing thousands of deaths and devastating more than one million sq km (386,000 sq miles).

The impact, equivalent to more than 1,000 tons of TNT exploding, would have created one of the world's biggest-ever landslides.

The Old Testament story describes how God destroyed the 'wicked sinners' of Sodom with fire and brimstone but allowed Lot, the city's one good man, to flee with his family.

The theory is the work of two rocket scientists - Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell - who have spent the past eight years piecing together the archaeological puzzle.

At its heart is a clay tablet called the Planisphere, discovered by the Victorian archaeologist Henry Layard in the remains of the library of the Royal Palace at Nineveh.

Using computers to recreate the night sky thousands of years ago, they have pinpointed the sighting described on the tablet - a 700 BC copy of notes of the night sky as seen by a Sumerian astrologer in one of the world's earliest-known civilisations - to shortly before dawn on June 29 in the year 3123BC.

Half the tablet records planet positions and clouds, while the other half describes the movement of an object looking like a 'stone bowl' travelling quickly across the sky.

The description matches a type of asteroid known as an Aten type, which orbits the Sun close to the Earth. Its trajectory would have put it on a collision course with the Otz Valley. [In Germany; in other words. In short, the story wasn't about Abraham and Lot in Palestine!]

'It came in at a very low angle - around six degrees - and then clipped a mountain called Gaskogel around 11 km from Köfels,' said Mr Hempsell.

'This caused it to explode - and as it travelled down the valley it became a fireball.

'When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures which pulverised the rock and caused the landslide. But because it wasn't solid, there was no crater.'

The explosion would have created a mushroom cloud, while a plume of smoke would have been seen for hundreds of miles.

Mr Hempsell said another part of the tablet, which is 18 cm across and shaped like a bowl, describes a plume of smoke around dawn the following morning.

'You need to know the context before you can translate it,' said Mr Hempsell, of Bristol University.

Geologists have dated the landslide to around 9,000 years ago, far earlier than the Sumerian record. However, Mr Hempsell, who has published a book on the theory, believes contaminated samples from the asteroid may have confused previous dating attempts.

Academics were also quick to disagree with the findings, which were published in A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels's Impact Event.

John Taylor, a retired expert in Near Eastern archaeology at the British Museum, said there was no evidence that the ancient Sumerians were able to make such accurate astronomical records, while our knowledge of Sumerian language was incomplete.

'I remain unconvinced by these results,' he added.

2345 B.C. - Eco-disaster focused in the Levant as shown in tree-rings.

The French archaeologist, Marie-Agnes Courty, presented a paper at the Society for Inter-Disciplinary Studies' July 1997 conference at Cambridge University, in which she first detailed the findings of excavations at a site in northern Syria, at Tell Leilan. This was the first time ever that an archaeological excavation had been initiated where the main purpose was to examine the stratigraphical record of the area with a view to searching for evidence of 'scorched earth' due to a suspected episode of extra-terrestrial 'fireball bombardment'.

She and her team found much evidence of microscopic glass spherules typical of melted sand and rock which is caused by the intense heat resulting from an asteroid impact or air-burst. She recommended further excavations there and at other sites. It would make sense that attention should be focussed on sites once occupied at dates where the tree-ring chronologies show evidence of abrupt climate changes - as at Tell Leilan in northern Syria, where the 'burn event' has now been dated by Courty as immediately prior to 2345 BC, a 'narrowest tree-ring' date.

Another with no human fatality numbers included in the calculations.

Scientists have found the first evidence that a devastating meteor impact in the Middle East might have triggered the mysterious collapse of civilisations more than 4,000 years ago.

Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile- wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs. Today's crater lies on what would have been shallow sea 4,000 years ago, and any impact would have caused devastating fires and flooding. The catastrophic effect of these could explain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline around 2300 BC. - The crater's faint outline was found by Dr Sharad Master, a geologist at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on satellite images of the Al 'Amarah region, about 10 miles north-west of the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates and home of the Marsh Arabs. (Robert Matthews Science Correspondent, The Telegraph - London 11-4-1)

1628 B.C. - "The Exodus" - Biblical scholars have been debating the date of the so-called Exodus for hundreds of years. The most recent researches have indicated that there was no exodus as depicted in the Bible, it was all made up by post-exilic priests - to create a "history" justifying their elite status and privileges. More than that, based on historical knowledge of how things were done in those times, they probably were not even related to any of the people "carried away to Babylon" in the first place. And so, it seems logical to speculate that the background information contained in the Exodus story - and other related stories in the Bible, such as the collapse of Jericho and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - were legendary stories of events that occurred around the time of the eruption of Thera which has been fairly securely fixed around 1600 B.C. plus or minus 50 years. Mike Baillie reports that whatever happened at this period of history that includes this monstrous eruption, it was global in effect as is shown in the tree-ring chronologies. In other words, more was going on than just a volcanic eruption. Again, no numbers of fatalities to plug into the calculations though there are many ancient reports of plague and mass death and Egyptian records report many strange sky, weather, and plague phenomena.

1159 B.C. - Collapse of Shang and Mycenean cultures. Collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean region. Wikipedia tells us:

The Bronze Age collapse is the name given by those historians who see the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, as violent, sudden and culturally disruptive, expressed by the collapse of palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia, replaced after a hiatus by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Age period of history of the Ancient Middle East.

Mike Baillie points out that a series of impacts/overhead explosions, would more adequately explain the longstanding problem of the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 12th century BC. At that time, many - uncountable - major sites were destroyed and totally burned and it has all been blamed on those supernatural "Sea Peoples." If that was the case, if it was invasion and conquest, there ought to at least be some evidence for that, like dead warriors or signs of warfare... but for the most part, that is not the case. There were almost no bodies found, and no precious objects except those that were hidden away as though someone expected to return for them, or didn't have time to retrieve them. The people who fled (extra-terrestrial events often have precursor activities and warnings because a comet can often be observed approaching for some time) were probably also killed in the act of fleeing and the result was total abandonment and total destruction of the cities in question.

John Lewis did not include this in his calculations either.

207 B.C. - Scientists Say Comet Smashed Into Southern Germany In 200 BC

A comet or asteroid smashed into modern-day Germany some 2,200 years ago, unleashing energy equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs, scientists reported on Friday.

The 1.1-kilometre (0.7-mile) diameter rock whacked into southeastern Bavaria, leaving an "exceptional field" of meteorites and impact craters that stretch from the town of Altoetting to an area around Lake Chiemsee, the scientists said in an article in the latest issue of US magazine Astronomy.

Colliding with the Earth's atmosphere at more than 43,000 kms per hour, the space rock probably broke up at an altitude of 70 kms), they believe.

The biggest chunk smashed into the ground with a force equivalent to 106 million tonnes of TNT, or 8,500 Hiroshima bombs.

"The forest beneath the blast would have ignited suddenly, burning until the impact's blast wave shut down the conflagration," the investigators said.

"Dust may have been blown into the stratosphere, where it would have been transported around the globe easily... The region must have been devastated for decades."

The biggest crater is now a circular lake called Tuettensee, measuring 370 metres (1,200 feet) across. Scores of smaller craters and other meteorite impacts can be spotted in an elliptical field, inflicted by other debris.

The study was carried out by the Chiemgau Impact Research Team, whose five members included a mineralogist, a geologist and an astronomer. [...]

Additional evidence comes from local discoveries of Celtic artefacts, which appear to have been scorched on one side.

That helped to establish an approximate date for the impact of between 480 and 30 BC.

The figure may be fine-tuned to around 200 BC, thanks to tree-ring evidence from preserved Irish oaks, which show a slowing in growth around 207 BC.

This may have been caused by a veil of dust kicked up the impact, which filtered out sunlight.

In addition, Roman authors at about the same time wrote about showers of stones falling from the skies and terrifying the populace.

The object is more likely to have been a comet than an asteroid, given the length of the ellipse and scattered debris, the report says.

44 B.C. - Pliny states that there were "Portentous and protracted eclipses of the sun occur, such as the one after the murder of Caesar the dictator...." Yet there were no solar eclipses visible from anywhere in the Roman Empire from Feb. of 48 B.C. through Dec. of 41 B.C., inclusive. There was a spectacular daylight comet in 44 B.C., perhaps the most famous comet in antiquity. A dust veil occluded the sky over Italy in the spring of 44, and has often been attributed to an (unconfirmed) eruption of Mt Etna. There are sulfate deposits in the Greenland ice cores for this year and there is tree ring evidence from North America, where dendrochronology points to a climatic change in the late 40's B.C. What hit and where it hit, has yet to be determined, and whether or not there was death and destruction somewhere on the globe, is unknown.

John S. Lewis does not include this event in his calculations.

60 - 70 AD - The destruction of Jerusalem.

The story Josephus tells of the sixties is one of famine, social unrest, institutional deterioration, bitter internal conflicts, class warfare, banditry, insurrections, intrigues, betrayals, bloodshed, and the scattering of Judeans throughout Palestine. ... There were wars, rumors of wars for the better part of ten years and Josephus reports portents, including a brilliant daylight in the middle of the night! (Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, 1988, 2006)

We recognize that brilliant daylight at night from the Tunguska event. Josephus gives several portents of the evil to befall Jerusalem and the temple. He described a star resembling a sword, a comet, a light shining in the temple, a cow giving birth to a lamb at the moment it was to be sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple, armies fighting in the sky, and a voice from the Holy of Holies declaring, "We are departing" (Josephus, Jewish Wars, 6). (Obviously, the voice was apocryphal.)

Some of these portents are mentioned by other contemporary historians, Tacitus for example. However, Tacitus, in book five of his Histories, castigated the superstitious Jews for not recognizing and offering expiations for the portents to avert the disasters. He put the destruction of Jerusalem down to the stupidity or willful ignorance of the Jews themselves in not offering the appropriate sacrifices.

Thus there was a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city [Jerusalem], and a comet, that continued a whole year... (Josephus, Jewish Wars 6.3)

In short, it very well may be that the eschatological writings in the New Testament, the very formation of the Myth of Jesus, was based on cometary events of the time, including a memory of the "Star in the East." The destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem may very well have been an "act of God," as reported by Mark in his Gospel.

312 - Italy - A team of geologists believes it has found the incoming space rock's impact crater, and dating suggests its formation coincided with the celestial vision said to have converted a future Roman emperor to Christianity. The small, circular Cratere del Sirente in central Italy is clearly an impact crater, said the geologists because its shape fits and it is also surrounded by numerous smaller, secondary craters, gouged out by ejected debris, as expected from impact models.

Radiocarbon dating puts the crater's formation at about the right time to have been witnessed by Constantine and there are magnetic anomalies detected around the secondary craters - possibly due to magnetic fragments from the meteorite. It would have struck the Earth with the force of a small nuclear bomb, perhaps a kiloton in yield. It would have looked like a nuclear blast, with a mushroom cloud and shockwaves.

476 A.D. - I-hsi and Chin-ling, China - "Thundering chariots" "like granite" fell to ground; vegetation was scorched.

526 - Great Antioch earthquake

...those caught in the earth beneath the buildings were incinerated and sparks of fire appeared out of the air and burned everyone they struck like lightning. The surface of the earth boiled and foundations of buildings were struck by thunderbolts thrown up by the earthquakes and were burned to ashes by fire... it was a tremendous and incredible marvel with fire belching out rain, rain falling from tremendous furnaces, flames dissolving into showers ... as a result Antioch became desolate ... in this terror up to 250,000 people perished. (John Malalas quoted by Jeffreys, E., Jeffreys, M. and Scott, R. 1986, "The Chronicle of John Malalas", Byzantina Australiensia, Australian Assoc. Byzantine Studies 4, Melbourne.)

536 - 545 - reduced sunlight, mists or "dry fogs, crop failures, famines in China and the Mediterranean, and plagues."

The Praetorian Prefect Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator wrote a letter documenting the conditions.

All of us are observing, as it were, a blue coloured sun; we marvel at bodies which cast no mid-day shadow, and at that strength of intensest heat reaching extreme and dull tepidity ... So we have had a winter without storms, spring without mildness, summer without heat ... The seasons have changed by failing to change; and what used to be achieved by mingled rains cannot be gained from dryness only.

Procopius of Caesarea, a Byzantine, wrote:

And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year, and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed.

John of Ephesus, cleric and a historian, wrote:

The sun was dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months; each day it shone for about four hours; and still this light was only a feeble shadow ... the fruits did not ripen and the wine tasted like sour grapes.

In the wake of this inexplicable darkness, crops failed and famine struck. And then, pestilence. But here we mean "pestilence" as Jacme d'Agramaont, a doctor writing in 1348 described it in reference to the "Black Death".

... Agramont said nothing concerning the term epidemia, but he extensively developed what he meant by pestilencia. He gave this latter term a very peculiar etymology, in accordance with a from of knowledge established by Isidore of Seville (570=636) in his Etymologiae, which came to be widely accepted throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. He split the term pestilencia up into three syllables, each having a particular meaning: pes = tempesta: 'storm, tempest'; te = 'temps, time', lencia = clardat: 'brightness, light'; hence, he concluded, the pestilencia was 'the time of tempest caused by light from the stars.' [Jon Arrizabalaga, see Part One]

During the time of Justinian, this "pestilence" ravaged Europe, reducing the population of the Roman empire by a third, killing four-fifths of the citizens of Constantinople, reaching as far East as China and as far Northwest as Great Britain. John of Ephesus documented the progress of this "pestilence" in AD 541-542 in Constantinople, where city officials gave up trying to count the dead after two hundred thirty thousand:

The city stank with corpses as there were neither litters nor diggers, and corpses were heaped up in the streets ... It might happen that [a person] went out to market to buy necessities and while he was standing and talking or counting his change, suddenly the end would overcome the buyer here and the seller there, the merchandise remaining in the middle with the payment for it, without there being either buyer or seller to pick it up.

This was also the time assigned to the legendary King Arthur, the loss of the Grail, and the manifestation of the Wasteland. Although scholars place the historical King Arthur in the fifth century, the date of his death is given as AD 539. According to Mike Baillie, the imagery from the Arthurian legend is in accordance with the appearance of a comet and subsequent famine and plague: the "Waste Land" of legend. Ireland's St. Patrick stories feature a wasteland as well. And although St. Patrick is credited with ridding Ireland of snakes, we might consider that there never were snakes in Ireland, and that snakes and dragons are images associated with comets.

Until that point in time, the Britons had held control of post-Roman Britain, keeping the Anglo-Saxons isolated and suppressed. After the Romans were gone, the Britons maintained the status quo, living in towns, with elected officials, and carrying on trade with the empire. After AD 536, the year reported as the "death of Arthur", the Britons, the ancient Cymric empire that at one time had stretched from Cornwall in the south to Strathclyde in the north, all but disappeared, and were replaced by Anglo-Saxons. There is much debate among scholars as to whether the Anglo-Saxons killed all of the Britons, or assimilated them. Here we must consider that they were victims of possibly many overhead cometary explosions which wiped out most of the population of Europe, plunging it into the Dark Ages which were, apparently, really DARK, atmospherically speaking.

©Unknown

Flag of Wales

The mystery of the origins of the red dragon symbol, now on the flag of Wales, has perplexed many historians, writers and romanticists, and the archæological community generally has refrained from commenting on this most unusual emblem, claiming it does not concern them. In the ancient Welsh language it is known as 'Draig Goch' - 'red dragon', and in "Y Geiriadur Cymraeg Prifysgol Cymru", the "University of Wales Welsh Dictionary", (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1967, p. 1082) there are translations for the various uses of the Welsh word 'draig'. Amongst them are common uses of the word, which is today taken just to mean a 'dragon', but in times past it has also been used to refer to 'Mellt Distaw' - (sheet lightning), and also 'Mellt Didaranau' - (lightning unaccompanied by thunder).

But the most interesting common usage of the word in earlier times, according to this authoritative dictionary, is 'Maen Mellt' the word used to refer to a 'meteorite'. And this makes sense, as the Welsh word 'maen' translates as 'stone', while the Welsh word 'mellt' translates as 'lightning' - so literally a 'lightning-stone'. That the ancient language of the Welsh druids has words still in use today which have in the past been used to describe both a dragon and also a meteorite, is something that greatly helps us to follow the destructive 'trail of the dragon' as it was described in early Welsh 'riddle-poems'. [...]

The exact nature and sequence of events in the mid-6th. century A.D. that gave rise to the period we refer to as the European 'Dark Age' is still a matter for speculation amongst historians and archæologists. Over the past 20 years or so, certain paleo-climatologists have begun comparing notes with archæologists and astronomers, and interestingly, in the absence of written records, many have begun to look a little more closely at mythology in their efforts to corroborate the findings of their researches. While much of this recent bout of inter-disciplinary brainstorming has focussed on the 6th.C. AD start of the European Dark Age, earlier dates are also of great interest to those embroiled in this veritable 'paradigm shift'.[...]

In recent years certain astronomers have increasingly come to appreciate that encoded in the folklore and mythologies of many cultures are the accurate observations of ancient skywatchers. Almost all tell of times when death and mass destruction came from the skies, events that are often portrayed as 'celestial battles' between what they variously depicted as 'the Gods'. And curiously the imagery in these 'myths' have many common features, even between the mythologies of cultures widely spaced in time and location.[The European 'Dark Age' And Welsh Oral Tradition]

Out on the Asian steppes, whatever happened in AD 536 caused political upheaval. The horse-based economy of the warlike Avars foundered, and their vassals, the cattle-herding Turks, overthrew them. Driven from the steppes, the Avars joined forces with the Slavs in Hungary on the borders of the Roman empire.

Gildas, who was writing at approximately 540 AD, says that the island of Britain was on fire from sea to sea " ... until it had burned almost the whole surface of the island and was licking the western ocean with its fierce red tongue."[5] . In "The Life of St. Teilo" contained in the Llandaf Charters, of St. Teilo, who had recently been made Bishop of Llandaf Cathedral in Morganwg, South Wales, it says:

" ... however he could not long remain, on account of the pestilence which nearly destroyed the whole nation. It was called the Yellow Pestilence, because it occasioned all persons who were seized by it to be yellow and without blood, and it appeared to men a column of a watery cloud, having one end trailing along the ground, and the other above, proceeding in the air, and passing through the whole country like a shower going through the bottom of valleys. Whatever living creatures it touched with its pestiferous blast, either immediately died, or sickened for death ... and so greatly did the aforesaid destruction rage throughout the nation, that it caused the country to be nearly deserted".

St. Teilo is recorded as having left South Wales for Brittany to escape the Yellow Pestilence, and that it lasted for some 11 years.

In 540, in Yemen, the Great Dam of Marib, dating from around the seventh century B.C., one of the engineering wonders of the ancient world and a central part of the south Arabian civilization, broke and began to collapse. By 550 AD, the dam was a complete loss and thousands of people migrated to another oasis on the Arabian peninsula, Medina. The Arab tribes, traumatized by the environmental disasters around them, began to think of conquest for the sake of survival. In 610 AD, a new leader unified them: Muhammad.

Although a great many historical changes happened in the seventh century, such as the Roman war with Persia, the rise of Islam, rebellion and civil war in the Roman empire, and the advance of the Slavs driven by the Avars, it can be said that the seeds of these changes, the destruction of the old that made way for the new, can be traced to the environmental catastrophe of 536 AD.

John Lewis does not include any estimates of the death and destruction occurring at that time in his "average number of annual deaths by comets."

580 - France - Great fireball and blast; Orleans and nearby towns burned.

588 - June 25 - China - "Red-colored object" fell with "noise like thunder" into furnace; exploded; burned several houses

616 - Jan. 14 - China - Ten deaths reported in China from meteorite shower; seige towers destroyed

679 - Coldingham, England - Monastery destroyed by "fire from heaven" as reported in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

764 - Nara, Japan - Meteorite strikes house.

810 - Upper Saxony - Charlemagne's horse startled by meteor; throws him to the ground.

1064 - Chang-chou, China - Daytime fireball, meteorite fall; fences burned.

1178 - 18 June on the Julian calendar, 25 June, Gregorian

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. (Gervase of Canterbury)

1321- 1368 - O-chia district, China - Iron rain kills people, animals, damages house.

1347 - 1348 - Black Death - The Black Death - not included in John Lewis' calculations - killed about half the population of Western Europe. The effects of this event were possibly global though the number of deaths worldwide is unknown.

1348 - 25 Jan. - Earthquake in Carinthia, 16 cities destroyed, fire fell from heaven; over 40,000 dead. John Lewis does not include this event in his calculations.

1369 - Ho-t'ao, China - "Large star" fell, starts fire, soldiers injured.

1490 - 3 Feb. - Ch'ing-yang, Shansi, China - Stones fell like rain; more than 10,000 killed.

1492 - Ensisheim, Alsace - 280-pound meteorite landed; in the same year Columbus reported "a marvelous branch of fire" that fell into the sea as he crossed the Atlantic.

1511 - 14 Sept. - Cremona, Lombardy, Italy - Monk killed with several birds, a sheep.

1516 - May - Nantan, China - "During summertime in May of Jiajing 11th year, stars fell from the northwest direction, five to six fold long, waving like snakes and dragons. They were as bright as lightning and disappeared in seconds". Many of them were recovered by local farmers in 1958 when China needed steel for the "Great Leap Forward" advocated by Mao Zedong. They have coarse octahedral structure and contain 92.35% iron & 6.96% nickel, belonging to IIICD classification of Wasson et al (1980)'s. Most Nantan meteorites weight 150 to 1500 kg. Due to the humid condition, smaller pieces buried in soils of lower valleys have been extensively weathered and oxidized into limonite.

1620 - Punjab, India - Hot iron fell, burned grass; made into dagger knife, two sabres.

1631 - Fall of Magedeburg, Germany

[A] grand storm-wind picked up, the town was inflamed at all possible places, so that even little aid (rescue) was of help (appreciated). ... then I saw the whole town of Magdeburg, except dome, monastery and New Market, lying in embers and ashes, which raged only about 3 or 3 1/2 hours, from which I deduced God's strange omnipotence and punishment. (Geoffrey Mortimer, German Life and Letters 54:2, "Style and Fictionalisation in Eyewitness Personal Accounts of the Thirty Years War")

A "second sun" was seen on and around May 29, 1630, and on May 20, 1631, one year later, Magdeburg fell as described above. The standard historical description of the Fall of Magdeburg goes pretty much as follows:

The fall of Magdeburg horrified Europe. The city had been starved and then was bombarded unmercifully. The artillery shelling grew so bad, the town caught on fire. Over 20,000 of the citizens perished in the siege and the cataclysm that ended it. The city itself was burned to the ground. The cruel and pointless devastation marked a new low, an act abhorred by a generation well accustomed to horrors.

1639 - China - Large stone fell in market; tens killed; tens of houses destroyed.

1648 - Ship near Malacca - Two sailors reported killed on board ship en route from Japan to Sicily.

1654 - Milano, Italy - Monk reported killed by meteorite.

1661 - 9 August - China - Meteorite smashes through roof; no injuries.

1670 - 7 Nov. - China - Meteorite fall, breaks roof beam of house

1761 - Chamblan, France - House struck and burned by meteorite.

1790 - 24 July - Barbotan and Agen, Gascony, France - Meteorite crushes cottage, kills farmer and some cattle.

1794 - 16 June - Siena, Italy - Child's hat hit; child uninjured

1798 - 19 Dec. - Benares, India - Building struck by meteorite

1801 - 30 Oct. - Suffolk, England - "Dwelling-house of Mr. Woodrosse, miller, near Horringer-mill, Suffolk, was set on fire by a meteor, and entirely consumed, together with a stable adjoining."

1803- 4 July - E. Norton, England - White Bull public house struck, chimney knocked down, grass burned, flight of object nearly horizontal.

1803 - 13 Dec - Massing, Czech. - Building struck by meteorite.

1810 - July - Shahabad, India - Great stone fell five villages burned; several killed.

1823 - 10 Nov. - Waseda, Japan - Meteorite strikes house.

1825 - 16 Jan. - Oriang, India - Man reported killed, woman injured by meteorite fall.

1827 - 27 Feb. - Mhow, India - Man struck on arm, tree broken by meteorite.

1835 - 13 Nov. - Belley, Dept. de l'Ain, France - Fireball sets fire to barn.

1836 - 11 Dec. Macaé, Brazil - Several homes damaged, several oxen killed by meteorite.

1841 - Chiloe Archipel, Chile - Fire caused by meteorite fall.

1845 - 6 May - Ch'ang-shou, Szechwan, China - Stone meteorite damages more than 100 tombs.

1847 - 14 July - Braunau, Bohemia - A 37-lb iron smashes through roof of house.

1850 - 17 Oct. - Szu-mao, China - Meteorite falls through roof of house.

1858 - 9 Dec. Ausson, France - Building hit by meteorite.

1860 - 1 May - New Concord, Ohio - Colt struck and killed by meteorite.

1868 - 8 Aug. - Pillistfer, Estonia - Building struck.

1869 - 1 Jan - Hessle, Sweden - Man missed by few meters.

1870 - 23 Jan. - Nedagolla, India - Man stunned by meteorite. (Don't know if this means the man was "amazed" or if he was hit and physically knocked senseless.)

1871 - 8 Oct. - Great Chicago Fire. See Comet Biela and Mrs. O'Leary's Cow (Another item that John Lewis has not entered into his calculations.)

1872 - Banbury, England - Fireball fells trees, wall

1874 - 30 June - Chin-kuei Shan, Ming-tung Li, China - Thunderstorm; huge stone fell, crushed cottage, killed child.

1876 - 16 Feb - Judesegeri, India - Water tank struck by meteorite.

1877 - 3 Jan. - Warrenton, Missouri - Man missed by few meters.

1877 - 21 Jan. - De Cewsville, Ontario - Man missed by few meters.

1879 - 14 Jan. - Newtown, Indiana - Leonidas Grover reported killed in bed by meteorite. (possible hoax in Paducah Daily News).

1879 - 31 Jan. - Dun-le-Poelier, France - Farmer reported killed by meteorite.

1879 - 12 Nov. - Huan-hsiang, China - Rain of stones; many houses damaged; sulfur smell.

1881 - 19 Nov. Grosliebenthal, Russia - Man reported injured by meteorite.

1887 - 19 March - Barque J.P.A., N. Atlantic - Fireball "fell into water very close alongside".

1893 - 22 Nov. - Zabrodii, Russia - Building struck by meteorite.

1897 - 11 Mar - New Martinsville, West Virginia - A man was reportedly struck, a horse killed, and walls pierced.

1906 - 4 Nov. - Diep River, S. Africa - Building struck

1907 - 5 Sept - Hsin-p'ai Wei, Weng-Li - Stone fell; whole family crushed to death

1907 - 7 Dec. - Bellefontaine, Ohio - Meteorite starts fire, destroys house.

1908 - 30 June - Tunguska valley, Siberia - Two reportedly killed, many injured by Tunguska blast.

1909 - 29 May - Shepard, Texas - Meteor drops through house.

1910 - 27 April - Mexico - Giant meteor bursts, falls in mountains, starts forest fire.

1911 - 16 June - Kilbourn, Wisconsin - Meteorite struck barn

1911 - 28 June - Nakhla, Egypt - Dog struck and killed by meteorite

1912 - 19 July - Holbrook, Arizona - Building struck; 14,000 stones fell; man missed by a few meters

1914 - 9 Jan. - W. France - Meteor explosions break windows

1914 - 22 Nov - Batavia, New York - Meteorites damage farm

1916 - 18 Jan. - Baxter, Missouri - Building struck

1917 - 3 Dec - Strathmore, Scotland - Building struck

1918 - 30 June - Richardton, N. Dakota - Building struck

1921 - 15 July - Berkshire Hills, Mass. - Meteor starts fire in Berkshires

1921 - 21 Dec. - Beirut, Syria - Building hit

1922 - 2 Feb. - Baldwyn, Mississippi - Man missed by 3 meters

1922 - 24 April - Barnegat, New Jersey - Rocked buildings, shattered windows, clouds of noxious gas - overhead explosion of comet fragment.

1922 - 30 May - Nagai, Japan - Person missed by several meters

1924 - 6 July - Johnstown, Colorado - Man missed being hit by 1 meter

1927 - 28 April - Aba, Japan - Girl struck and injured by "dubious" (?) meteorite

1929 - 8 Dec. Zvezvan, Yugoslavia - Meteor hits bridal party, kills 1

1930 - 13 Aug. - Brazil - The "Rio Curaca event." Brazlilian "Tunguska event"; fire and "depopulation" - "An ear-piercing "whistling" sound, which might be understood as being a manifestation of the electrophonic phenomena which have been discussed in WGN over the past few years; the sun appearing to be "blood-red" before the explosion. The event occurred at about 8h local time, so that the bolide probably came from the sunward side of the earth. If the object were spawning dust and meteoroids-- that is, it was cometary in nature--then, since low-inclination, eccentric orbits produce radiants close to the sun, it might be that the solar coloration (which, in this explanation, would have been witnessed elsewhere) was due to such dust in the line of sight to the sun. In short, the earth was within the tail of the small comet. There was a fall of fine ash prior to the explosion, which covered the surrounding vegetation with a blanket of white.

1931 - 10 July - Malinta, Ohio - Blast, crater, smell of sulfur, windows broken in farmhouse; four telephone poles snapped, wires down; overhead cometary fragment explosion

1931 - 8 Sept. - Hagerstown, Maryland - Meteor crashes through roof in Hagerstown

1932 - 4 Aug. - Sao Christovao, Brazil - Fall destroys warehouse roof

1932 - 10 Aug - Archie, Missouri - Homestead struck, person missed by less than 1 meter

1933 - 24 Feb. - Stratford, Texas - Bright fireball, 4-lb metallic mass falls, grass burned

1933 - 8 Aug. - Sioux Co., Nebraska - Man missed by a few meters.

1934 - 16 Feb. - Texas - Pilot swerves to avoid crash with fireball

1934 - 18 Feb - Seville, Spain - House struck, burned.

1934 - 28 Sept. - California - Pilot escapes fireball shower (one assumes this means he performed evasive maneuvers)

1935 - 11 Aug. - Briggsdale, Colorado - Man narrowly missed by meteorite

1935 - 11 Dec. - 21h local time - British Guyana - Lat: 2 deg 10min North, Long: 59 deg 10 min West, close to Marudi Mountain. A report from Serge A. Korff of the Bartol Research Foundation, Franklin Institute (Delaware, USA) suggested that the region of devastation might be greater than that involved in the Tunguska event itself. Eye-witness accounts were n accord with a large meteoroid/small asteroid entry, with a body passing overhead accompanied by a terrific roar (presumably electrophonic effects), later concussions, and the sky being lit up like daylight. A local aircraft operator, Art Williams, reported seeing an area of forest more than twenty miles (32 kilometers) in extent which had been destroyed, and he later stated that the shattered jungle was elongated rather than circular, as occurred at Tunguska and would be expected from the air blast caused by an object entering away from the vertical (the most likely entry angle for all cosmic projectiles is 45 degrees).

1936 - 14 Mar. - Red Bank, New Jersey - Meteorite through shed roof

1936 - 2 Apr. -Yurtuk, USSR - Building struck

1936 - 19 Oct. - Newfoundland - Fisherman's boat set on fire by meteorite

1938 - 31 Mar. - Kasamatsu, Japan - Meteorite pierces roof of ship

1938 - 16 Jun. - Pantar, Phillipines - Several buildings struck

1938 - 24 Jun. - Chicora, Pennsylvania - A cow struck and injured

1938 - 29 Sep. - Benld, Illinois - Garage and car struck by 4-lb stone

1941 - 10 Jul. -Black Moshannon Park, Pennsylvania - Person missed by 1 m

1942 - 6 Apr. -Pollen, Norway - Person missed by 1 m

1940s - Qatar - A crater, believed to have been created by the impact of a falling meteor, found near Dukhan. Sheikh Salman bin Jabor al-Thani, head of the astronomical department at Qatar Scientific Club, said yesterday the club believed that the meteor had hit Qatar in the 1940s. The club started a search for evidence three years ago because of stories of a "falling star" told by people of that era. The club took the help of Google Earth in the search. They succeeded in locating five craters, which were just visible on the surface.

1946 - 16 May -Santa Ana, Nuevo Leon - Meteorite destroys many houses, injures 28

1946 - 30 Nov. -Colford, Gloucestershire, UK - Telephones knocked out, boy knocked off bicycle

1947 - 12 Feb. -Sikhote Alin, Vladivostok - An iron meteorite that broke up only about 5 miles above the earth rained iron. It produced over 100 craters with the largest being around 85 feet in diameter. The strewnfield covered an area of about 1 mile by a half mile. There were no fires or similar destruction like that found at Tunguska. Shredded trees and broken branches mostly. A total of 23 tons of meteorites were recovered and it's been estimated it's total mass was around 70 tons when it broke up.

1949 - 21 Sep. - Beddgelert, Wales - Building struck

1949 - 20 Nov. -Kochi, Japan - Hot meteoritic stone enters house through window

1950 - 23 May. - Madhipura, India - Building struck

1950 - 20 Sept. -Murray, Kentucky - Several buildings struck

1950 - 10 Dec. - St. Louis, Missouri - Car struck

1953 - 03 Mar. -Pecklesheim, FRG - Person missed by several meters

1954 - 07 Jan. -Dieppe, France - Meteorite-building explosion, smashed windows

1954 - 28 Nov. -Sylacauga, Alabama - Mrs. Annie Hodges struck by 4-kg meteorite that crashed through roof, destroyed radio

1955 - 17 Jan. -Kirkland, Washington - Two irons break through amateur astronomer's observatory dome; one sets a fire.

1955 - one of the few documented case of a person being hit by a meteorite occurred. (Source - need more details)

1956 - 29 Feb. -Centerville, S. Dakota - Building hit

1959 - 13 Oct. -Hamlet, Indiana - Building hit

1961 - 23 Feb. -Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia - Loading dock struck

1961 - 6 Sept. -Bells, Texas - Meteorite strikes rook of house

1962 - 26 Apr. -Kiel, FRG - Building hit

1963 - Massachusetts - meteorite fell (need more details on this one.)

1965 - 24 Dec. - Barwell, England - Two buildings struck and a car struck

1967 - 11 Jul. -Denver, Colorado - Building struck

1968 - 12 Apr. -Schenectady, New York - House hit

1969 - 25 Apr. -Bovedy, N. Ireland - Building hit

1969 - 7 Aug. -Andreevka, USSR - Building hit

1969 - 16 Sept. -Suchy Dul, Czechoslovakia - Building hit

1969 - 28 Sept. -Murchison, Australia - Building hit

1971 - 8 Apr. -Wethersfield, Connecticut - House struck by meteorite

1971 - 2 Aug. -Havero, Finland - Building hit

1973 - 15 Mar. -San Juan Capistrano, California - Building hit

1973 - 27 Oct. -Canon City, Colorado - Building hit

1974 - 18 Aug. -Naragh, Iran - Building hit

1977 - 31 Jan. -Louisville, Kentucky - Three buildings and a car struck

1979 - 7 Jun. -Cilimus, Indonesia - Meteorite fell in garden

1979 - 22 Sept. - The Vela Incident (sometimes known as the South Atlantic Flash) - The flash was detected on 22 September 1979, at 00:53 GMT, by a US Vela satellite that was specifically developed to detect nuclear explosions. The satellite reported the characteristic double flash (a very fast and very bright flash, then a longer and less-bright one) of an atmospheric nuclear explosion of two to three kilotons, in the Indian Ocean between Bouvet Island and the Prince Edward Islands at 47° S 40° E. Hydrophones operated by the U.S. Navy detected a signal which was consistent with a small nuclear explosion on or slightly under the surface of the water near the Prince Edward Islands. The radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, also detected an anomalous traveling ionospheric disturbance at the same time. "There remains uncertainty about whether the South Atlantic flash in September 1979 recorded by optical sensors on the U.S. Vela satellite was a nuclear detonation and, if so, to whom it belonged."

1981 - 13 Jun. -Salem, Oregon - Building hit

1982 - 8 Nov. -Wethersfield, Connecticut - Pierced roof of house

1984 - 15 Jun. - Nantong, PRC - Man missed by 7 m

1984 - 30 Jun. -Aomori, Japan - Building struck

1984 - 22 Aug. -Tomiya, Japan - Two buildings hit

1984 - 30 Sept. - Binnigup, Australia - Two sunbathers missed by 5 m

1984 - 5 Dec. -Cuneo, Italy - Strong explosion, building flash; windows broken; daytime fireball "bright as Sun"

1984 - 10 Dec. -Claxton, Georgia - Mailbox destroyed by meteorite

1985 - 6 Jan. -La Criolla, Argentina - Farmhouse roof pierced, door smashed; 9.5-kg stone misses woman by 2 m

1985 - 26 June - Hartford, Conn. - a 1,500-pound slab of ice, six feet long and eight inches thick flattened a picket fence. The ground shook with the impact. A 13-year-old boy and his friend were standing 10 feet away.

1986 - 29 Jul. -Kokubunji, Japan - Several buildings hit

1988 - 1 Mar. -Trebbin, GDR - Greenhouse struck by meteorite

1988 - 18 May -Torino, Italy - Building struck

1989 - 12 Jun. -Opotiki, New Zealand - Building hit

1989 - 15 Aug. -Sixiangkou, PRC - Building hit

1990 - 7 Apr. -Enschede, Netherlands - House hit by believed fragment of Midas

1990 - 2 Jul. -Masvingo, Zimbabwe - Person missed by 5 m

1991 - Tahara, Japan - Meteorite struck deck of car-transport ship; made crater

1991 - 31 Aug. -Noblesville, Indiana - Meteorite fall missed two boys by 3.5 m

1992 - 14 Aug. -Mbale, Uganda - Forty-eight stones fall; roofs damaged, boy struck on head

1992 - 9 Oct. -Peerskill, New York - Car trunk, floor pierced by meteorite

1994 - 18 Jan. - Cando, Spain - an explosion that occurred in the village of Cando, Spain, in the morning of January 18, 1994. There were no casualties in this incident, which has been described as being like a small Tunguska event. Witnesses claim to have seen a fireball in the sky lasting for almost one minute. A possible explosion site was established when a local resident called the University of Santiago de Compostela to report an unknown gouge in a hillside close to the village. Up to 200 m³ of terrain was missing and trees were found displaced 100 m down the hill.

1994 - 16 July - Fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy begin impacting Jupiter.

1994 - 20 Oct. -Coleman, Michigan - Meteorite penetrated roof of house (1997)

1995 - Neagari, Japan - Meteorite penetrated car trunk

1996 - 26 Nov. - Honduras - According to the Associated Press: "A meteorite slammed into a sparsely populated area of Honduras last month, terrifying residents and leaving a 165-foot-wide crater, scientists confirmed Sunday. Near San Luis, in the western province of Santa Barbara.

1997 - 11 Apr. -Chambrey, France - Meteorite penetrated roof of car; set fire

1998 - 13 Jun. -Portales, New Mexico - Meteorite penetrated barn roof

1998 - 12 Jul. -Kitchener, Ontario - Meteorite falls 1 m from golfer

2000 - January - Canada - a 150-tonne meteoroid lit the skies over Whitehorse, and exploded over a lake about 100 kilometres south of the city. The Tagish Lake meteor produced a treasure of information about a rare kind of meteorite.

2000 - January - Iberian peninsula - ice chunks weighing up to 6.6 pounds rained on Spain for 10 days causing extensive damage to cars and an industrial storage facility. At first, scientists thought the phenomenon was unique to Spain. During the past three years, however, they've accumulated strong evidence that megacryometeors are falling all around the globe. More than 50 falls have been confirmed, and researchers believe that's a small fraction of the actual number, since others may hit unoccupied areas or melt before discovery. Most megacrymeteor falls occur in January, February and March. Megacryometeors show the telltale onionskin layering seen in hailstones. They also contain dust particles and air pockets found in hail. But they are formed in cloudless skies, a notion that defies research on hail formation.

2001 - 25 July to 23 Sept. - Kerala, India - red rain sporadically fell; staining clothes with an appearance similar to that of blood. Yellow, green, and black rain was also reported. The rains were the result of the atmospheric disintegration of a comet, according to a study conducted at the School of Pure and Applied Physics of the MG University by Dr Godfrey Louis and his student Santosh Kumar. The red rain cells were devoid of DNA which suggests their extra-terrestrial origin. The findings published in the international journal 'Astrophysics and Space Science' state that the cometery fragment contained dense collection of red cells.

2002 - 6 June - asteroid/comet explosion over the Mediterranean. Estimated at five to 10 meters in diameter, it released a burst of energy comparable to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

2002 - 24 Sept. - near Bodaibo (Bodaybo), near Irkutsk, Siberia - 1:50 am - Eye-witness accounts of the event reported a large luminous object falling to Earth near Bodiabo in Siberia. Hunters in the region have also reported the existence of a crater surrounded by burnt forest suggesting that an impact event had occurred. The event was detected by near-by geophones as a moderate-earthquake. The event was also detected by a U.S. anti-missile defense military satellite. Some attempts were made to define the magnitude of the explosion. US military analysts calculated it was between 0.2 - 0.5 kilotons, while Russian physicist Andrey Olkhovatov estimates it at 4 - 5 kilotons. Information about the event appeared in the mass media and among scientists after only a week. Another report says it occurred on the 25th of September at 10:00 p.m.

2004 - June - Auckland, New Zealand - Meteor crashes through roof of home, damages sofa. The meteorite was a four billion-year-old 1.3 kg rock. "There was this huge bang and a cloud of dust and debris went through the front room. I thought a car had hit the house." In the only account in New Zealand of a meteorite crashing into a house, the chunk of space rock punched a hole through the roof of the Archers' home, bounced off their couch, ricocheted off the ceiling and back on to the couch before ending up on the floor.

2004 - 3 Sept. - a small asteroid exploded in the stratosphere above Antarctica depositing sufficient micron-sized dust particles to cause 'local cooling, and much speculation as to the possible effects on the ozone layer.

2006 - 1 Feb. - Canada - In Calgary on February 1st, 20 people reported seeing a fireball, an exceptionally bright meteor, streak across the sky just before 7 a.m., lasting for several seconds before breaking up into fragments. It was estimated that remnants of the meteorite landed about 400 km south of Calgary somewhere in Montana about two minutes after it appeared as a ball of fire.

2006 - 1 Feb. - Bangladesh - A 'meteor' from outer space fell with a big bang on a field in Singpara village of sadar upazila yesterday afternoon creating panic and curiosity among people. No one was reported hurt. On information Superintendent of Police Khandker Golam Farooq rushed to the spot and asked his companions and villagers to dig the earth near the house of one Fazlur Rahman from where smoke was still emitting. To their amazement they found a lead-like black material three feet below the earth. Hot and weighing 2.5kg, the triangular material looked like a mortar shell, witnesses said. The meteor was kept in custody of the Thakurgaon Police Station.

2006 - 17, 20 Feb. - Scotland - The hunt is on for the crash sites of two meteors near Stirling Castle. Scientists have been spurred into action by reports of spectacular "balls of fire" falling in the area. If discovered, they would be the first meteorites confirmed to have hit north of the Border for almost 100 years. The incidents, reported by several witnesses, were on the evenings of Friday, February 17 and the following Monday, February 20. "Although meteorite falls are rare everywhere, Scotland seems to have escaped remarkably lightly. There have only been four meteorites recovered from Scotland, compared with more than 18 from England and Wales. Statistically, we are overdue another one."

2006 - 12 April - Australia - A Perth astronomer says a spectacular light show in the sky 12/3 was a meteor. Sightings were made as far south as Albany and inland through the Wheat Belt. It lit up the countryside for hundreds of kilometres around the south-west of Western Australia." Witnesses say the the sky lit up about 9:00pm AEDT, and the light was followed by a thundering sound that shook buildings.

2006 - 4 May - TEXAS - Astronomers said a large meteor shower crossed straight over El Paso just before 9:45 p.m. Thursday the 4th of May. One meteor was so large that it cast an orange glow against the mountain. "The animals were going wild, the horses were bucking and dogs were barking and howling and then, all of a sudden right above my house, there was a big bright light and then just 'Bang!' And it lit up the five acres that are around us, and then I covered my eyes like this because it was bright and when it got past I saw there was a tail and it just went 'Shhhh' toward the Hueco Mountains."

2006 - 2 June - Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Canada - a fireball was spotted estimated to be some 20 miles above the Earth's surface. A sonic boom was heard in the Lake of the Woods area of Minnesota, so there may be some pieces of the meteor that survived the fall.

2006 - 7 June - Norway - A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, June 7th, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle. 'I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke. I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away.' The meteor struck a mountainside in Reisadalen. The country's leading astronomer said he expects the meteor to prove to be the largest to hit Norway in modern times, even bigger than the 198-pound Alta meteorite of 1904. 'If the meteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may be able to compare it to the bomb.'

2006 - 25 June - Pennsylvania - Residents of the Tuscarawas Valley who heard a deafening boom about 12:40 a.m. Monday the 19th and stepped outside likely saw what one person described as "a marvelous fireball with red streaks in the sky." It probably was a meteor falling through the atmosphere. Numerous callers reported a large red fireball. Several said their homes shook. New Philadelphia police said they received reports from several callers who witnessed the fireball or heard the boom. One woman described it as "a blue light that lit up the sky and went down." Police in Dover said multiple callers reported they heard a loud bang and something rattled their windows. Air Traffic Command in Washington, D.C. confirmed that Cleveland's control center was checking into a meteor shower that occurred within its air space.

2006 - 10 July - South Africa - An ice ball that landed in Douglasdale, South Africa, might be one of the first 'megacryometeors' recorded in Africa. The ice ball, which landed on the pavement in suburban Douglasdale last week, was about the size of a microwave oven. The impact of the ice ball's fall created a small crater on the pavement, which was covered with pieces of broken ice. Despite sharing many chemical characteristics with hail, ice balls are formed under clear-sky conditions. Ice balls have been recorded since the 19th century. They have the potential to damage people, buildings and cars, but no injuries were reported as a result of this one.

2006 - 14 July - Norway - At 10:20am a bus driver from Ås, south of Oslo, was sitting in the outhouse at his holiday cabin near Rygge on the 14th of July when he heard an enormous blast. Right after that, some particles from a meteor that exploded over the Oslo area rained down just outside. He said he didn't think too much about the surprising blast at first, dismissing it as probably coming from an exercise at a nearby military air station at Rygge. But he said the blast and the rumbling it caused was terrible. He was just hooking the door when he heard a new noise, a whistling sort of sound, followed by a new bang on some aluminum plates lying near the outhouse. Sure enough, it was particles from a meteor that exploded somewhere over the Oslo Fjord area on Friday morning. Astronomers confirm Martinsen's remarkable discovery of meteorite particles on his property. "This is Norway's 14th meteorite, but we've never heard about a meteorite landing so close to a person before." -- A family from Moss, south of Oslo, came home from their summer holidays to find a meteorite in their garden. It's another remnant of the meteor that exploded over the Oslo Fjord area on the 14th of JUly. Astronomers in Norway are calling the discovery of meteorites around southeast Norway "incredible," and urge local residents to keep looking for more. "Two branches on our plum tree were broken. I lifted them up and there lay this stone." It had made a hole measuring about seven centimeters in his lawn.

2006 - 12 Sept. - New Zealand - A small piece of rock that has been found in a paddock in New Zealand may be a piece of the meteorite that streaked across the sky there Tuesday the 12th, panicking residents who flooded emergency hotlines. A farmer found a 10cm by 5cm piece of "almost weightless" rock in his field today near the town of Dunsandel, south of Christchurch. It has been sent to New Zealand's National Radiation Laboratory for analysis. The meteorite tore across the sky over the northern half of the South Island in the afternoon, leaving a bright, burning trial behind it and causing a sonic boom that rattled houses and shook the ground. It then apparently erupted into a fireball, sending forth a thick puff of smoke. People were sent running from the homes and offices when they heard the boom, fearing buildings could collapse. The sonic boom was registered on earthquake-detecting equipment. The boom meant the meteorite was probably travelling "very low". It was probably about the size of a basketball as it shredded through the sky and became a "terminal fireball" at a speed of about 40,000kph. "If this had happened at night, it would have lit up the whole countryside."

2006 - 10 Oct. - A fire that destroyed a cottage near Bonn and injured a 77-year-old man was probably caused by a meteor and witnesses saw an arc of blazing light in the sky, German police said on Friday. Burkhard Rick, a spokesman for the police in Siegburg east of Bonn, said the fire gutted the cottage and badly burnt the man's hands and face in the incident on October 10.

2006 - 1 Dec. - NASA reports - Meteoroids are smashing into the Moon a lot more often than anyone expected. - That's the tentative conclusion of Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, after his team observed two Leonids hitting the Moon on Nov. 17, 2006. "We've now seen 11 and possibly 12 lunar impacts since we started monitoring the Moon one year ago," says Cooke. "That's about four times more hits than our computer models predicted."

2007 - January - Altai Region, Russia - Another expedition arrived to the Altai Republic to search for meteorite, which has fallen this January, and to talk with people, who witnessed this event. Expedition crew will visit Uglovsky and Egorievsky districts, where an unknown celestial body has fallen. - Later report: Russian social science and research expedition "Kosmopoisk" has sent four meteorite fragments found in Altai to Moscow laboratory. Research, carried out in field, showed that there exists high probability that two stones out of four are real meteorite fragments. The expedition found a meteorite crater 1.5 kilometer away from their camp, but nasty weather prevented them from detailed studying of said crater.

2007 - January - Tampa, Florida - a 200-pound chunk of ice streaked through the clear Florida sky and landed in the back seat of a really nice red Ford Mustang. The car was totaled.

2007 - 4 Jan - Authorities were trying to identify a mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a house in eastern New Jersey. Nobody was injured when the golf-ball sized object, weighing nearly as much as a can of soup, struck the home and embedded itself in a wall Tuesday night. ... Approximately 20 to 50 rock-like objects fall every day over the entire planet, said Carlton Pryor, a professor of astronomy at Rutgers University. "It's not all that uncommon to have rocks rain down from heaven," said Pryor, who had not seen the object that struck the Monmouth County home. "These are usually rocky or a mixture of rock and metal."

2007 - 10 January - Russia - a meteorite fell in January in the Altai Territory in southern Siberia and searchers found an extraterrestrial substance which could be meteorite fragments. "We have collected about 50 samples, and vitreous threads (traces of comet substance) were discovered in the first of them using a microscope." Local motorists and residents witnessed the impact of a fiery ball, which eventually ended in a loud sound resembling an explosion.

2007 - 24 Jan. - Virginian, U.S. - Giles County residents were a little shaken after a tremor-like event, others say they heard a loud "thunder-like" sound. Virginia Tech researchers say they received several calls about a meteor sighting the same time of the tremors. The bizarre incident took place around 8pm. Researchers say the seismic station in Giles County did get a very short but intense seismic signal.

2007 - 31 Jan. - Turkey - Police were inundated with calls from scores of people from Didim to Bodrum after they heard a big bang and a flash of light across the skies. The flashing green, yellow and red lights were from a meteorite which crashed through the earth's atmosphere and landed in Yesilkent. A startled man revealed that the rock had smashed a hole in the ground at the Green Park Complex, at Yesilkent, narrowly missing him by ten metres. Police reported that people from Bodrum, Milas and Didim had heard a bang and seen the flashing light across the skies at about 5:30pm.

2007 - 4 Feb. - Midwestern U.S. - Scores of people all over the Midwest and Upper Midwestern United States reported seeing flames and fiery explosions in the sky Sunday night. From southeastern Wisconsin to as far as Des Moines, Iowa and St. Louis, people reported seeing balls of fire, possibly meteors, streaking across the sky on Sunday night. "We had a pilot reporting seeing a meteor". Reports came from residents in central Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

2007 - 15 Feb. - Ohio - Something happened at around 9 p.m. that a lot of people heard. But nobody seems to have any idea what it was. "It" was a loud bang, something loud enough to be heard all over the county, and loud enough to make small objects move in houses. Rumors range from an earthquake to a meteor strike, a sonic boom to something ice-related. While we may never know for sure, at least one scientist believes the meteor could be the answer. There's no evidence to suggest an earthquake could have caused the bang, especially not over the range specified. One man said he saw a meteor with a relatively long trail, with red, green and gold coloration. It was headed east to west and lasted about three seconds; after it faded, the sonic boom washed over him. "I saw it first. It was the most eerie, cool, scary, wonderful thing. You just see this dragon tail going across the sky. All of a sudden, everything goes boom."

2007 - 22 Feb. - Rajasthan, India - Three people were killed and four injured in a mysterious blast in a village in India's northern Rajasthan state Thursday that villagers claim was caused by a meteorite, news reports said. Residents of Banchola village in Bundi district, about 200 kilometres south of Rajasthan capital Jaipur, said the victims were sitting with some iron scrap in an open field when an "object" fell from the sky and hit them, IANS news agency reported.

2007 - 23 Feb. - Panama - Panamanian geologists found a meteorite at Rio Hato, a coastal town west of the capital Panama City. The meteorite fell onto Rio Hato's beach on Friday. The landing was witnessed by a security guard, who described it as a ball of fire crashing down from the sky onto the sand. The 4.2 kg red object, measuring 20 cm in diameter, was to be X-rayed for more details. The meteorite shows burn marks on its exterior, and appears to be mainly carbon-based, in contrast to most meteorites, which mainly contain iron.

2007 - 15 Mar. - What Richard Yip-Chuck saw fall into a farmer's field Sunday evening looked like a long, white ball with orange sparks shooting off the back. The Holland Landing resident was driving along Hwy. 7 with his wife, Ele, and sons Kyle, 12, and 10-year-old Dylan, when they saw what looked like a fireball plummet to earth.

2007 - 29 Mar - Flaming debris of a possible meteor almost hit a plane - The pilots of a Chilean passenger jet reported seeing flaming debris fall past their aircraft as it approached the airport at Auckland, New Zealand. The captain "made visual contact with incandescent fragments several kilometres away". The pilots reported the near-miss to air traffic controllers, reportedly saying the noise of the debris breaking the sound barrier could be heard above the roar of his aircraft's engines.

2007 - 10 May - Spain - Fireball spotted across central Spain. Scientists think some fragments may have fallen to earth in the Ciudad Real area. A fireball fell across the centre of the country on Thursday night with sightings in Cuenca, Toledo, Ciudad Real and Valladolid. Scientists believe it was a meteorite and say it's quite a normal phenomenon, possibly a fragment from a comet which fell from earth orbit.

2007 - 14 May - Hubbardton, Vermont - Recorded as a 2.1 temblor on the Richter scale, a quake hit at 4:10 a.m. One Hubbardton resident who said he was wide awake at 4 a.m. said he not only felt the earthquake, he saw what caused it. He said he saw something in the sky to the northeast of Lake Hortonia. He believes he saw a meteorite and that's what triggered the earthquake. "It was like a streak of fire. I've heard meteorites hit before and that was what it sounded like. It was no earthquake, it was a meteor."

2007 - 26 May - Woburn, Mass. - Meteorite punched a hole through a warehouse roof.

2007 - 7 June - Norway - A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, June 7th, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle. 'I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke. I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away.' The meteor struck a mountainside in Reisadalen. The country's leading astronomer said he expects the meteor to prove to be the largest to hit Norway in modern times, even bigger than the 198-pound Alta meteorite of 1904. 'If the meteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may be able to compare it to the bomb.'

2007 - 10 June - Sri Lanka - The strange objects that lit the night skies on June 10 have now been confirmed as meteors. "This is the first time that meteors of such magnitude have fallen in Sri Lanka. The shockwaves and vibrations have been heard throughout the country, from Galle to Puttalam. A Senior Consultant believes that two large meteoroids entered the atmosphere, the larger one splitting into two and the smaller one into about 25 fragments. The loud explosions were some of the particles exploding, probably about 50 to 100 km above the ground. In Kovinna, Andiambalama, at 9.05 p.m. on the 10th, a woman had noticed something unusual in the western sky. A bright light, almost as large as the full moon, appeared to be moving towards her in a wide arc. Alarmed by thoughts of terrorist air attacks, she called out to her neighbour. Together they watched fearfully as the glowing object drew closer, landed on the roof and vanished completely. A few minutes later the air vibrated with a loud explosion. The next day they discovered that parts of the asbestos sheets on the roof were charred and cracked. A few pieces of rock and sand were scattered around the damaged area. Similar incidents were reported around the country that night. Several people in areas such as Puttalam, Maho and Bingiriya also noted the appearance of the bright light in the sky as well as the loud explosion. In Kimbulapitiya a woman watched a flaming object land on a house and heard the booming sounds soon afterwards. In Campbell Place, Dehiwala, the roofs of two buildings were damaged, and a loud noise was heard. "24 asbestos sheets were broken."

2007 - 6 July - Cali, Colombia, S. America - an incoming object broke apart in the lower atmosphere with a trio of ferocious explosions that shattered windows and shook the ground violently. Moments later, stones rained from the sky and pelted homes in the poor barrios surrounding the city. Some smashed through the roofs of homes. Recovered objects were chondritic (rocky) meteorite.

2007 - 26 July - Iowa - 5:30AM - A Dubuque woman said she is lucky to be alive after a 50 pound chunk of white ice crashed through the roof of her home, landing about 15 feet away from where she was standing. She said it sounded like a bomb exploded when the massive ball of ice hit her roof. Other large chunks of ice fell from the sky in this northeast Iowa city, tearing through nearby trees. Dubuque had clear skies at the time the ice fell.

2007 - 1 August - India - Hotipur (Sangrur) village near Khanauri hit the headlines when a meteorite fell in the fields on Wednesday night, leaving many villagers baffled. The police have taken possession of the 8-cm meteorite to hand it over to a three-member team of Geological Survey of India. Curious villagers queued up in the fields to see the "heavenly object", while the farmer, who was the only witness to the fall of the "fireball", said, "I got scared of the big fireball that was coming my way at 8:45 pm on Wednesday night. I ran for cover as I felt that it will fall on me." (May be hoax.)

2007 - 11 Aug. - 12:09 am - Representatives with the Sonora Police Department and both the Tuolumne and Calaveras County Sheriff's Departments say they fielded numerous calls early in the morning in regards to a "loud boom," and "structures shaking." There were several calls from residents who reported seeing "a blue light," just before the "loud boom." The incident reportedly occurred at 12:09am. The Police Department notes that it also received a call from a resident in Tuolumne, in which a female reported seeing what she thought was fireworks, and then something spiraling over her house. Early indication from the law enforcement agencies is that the loud boom was somehow the result of a meteor shower.

2007 - 15 Sept. - Peruvian Highlands - The meteorite's impact sent debris flying up to 820 feet (250 meters) away, with some material landing on the roof of the nearest home 390 feet (120 meters) from the crater. Nearby residents who visited the impact crater complained of headaches and nausea.

2007 - 3 Oct. - Minnesota - Shortly after 2 p.m., people across the Twin Cities reported seeing a "metallic" object or "flaming ball" falling from the sky. Broadcasters and emergency dispatchers got hundreds of calls from people who saw the object traveling from the northeast to the southwest. Residents of Lyon County in far southwestern Minnesota reported a loud boom that might have been connected with the sightings in the Twin Cities. A man who lives near the town of Amiret says it shook his house and sounded like a sonic boom from an F-14 breaking the sound barrier at close range. Coincidentally, at the same time, drivers in the Twin Cities metro were dodging debris in the middle of Interstate 94. Some drivers said the debris fell from the sky shortly after 2:00 p.m. Wednesday.

2008 - 31 January - Didim - POLICE were inundated with calls from scores of people from Didim to Bodrum after they heard a big bang and a flash of light across the skies. A startled Abdullah Arıtürk revealed that the rock had smashed a hole in the ground at the Green Park Complex, at Yeşilkent, narrowly missing him by ten metres.

2008 - 19 Feb. - An apparent meteor streaked through the sky over the Pacific Northwest early Tuesday, drawing reports of bright lights and sonic booms in parts of Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Although a witness reported seeing the object strike the Earth in a remote part of Adams County, in southeast Washington, it still has not been found. People in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia reported seeing the bright fireball streaking across the sky about 5:30 a.m. At least one person said the object exploded on impact in eastern Washington and another report from southeastern Washington said someone felt tremors from the blast.

2008 - 5 Mar. - The Physics and Astronomy Department at Western has a network of all-sky cameras in Southern Ontario that scan the sky monitoring for meteors. Associate Professor Peter Brown, who specializes in the study of meteors and meteorites, says that Wednesday evening (March 5) at 10:59 p.m. EST these cameras captured video of a large fireball and the department has also received a number of calls and emails from people who actually saw the light.

2008 - 8 Mar. - Turkey - A resident of Yaka said he heard a loud roaring noise at around 11:20 a.m. on the day the meteorite fell, sounding as if "a plane had crashed."

"We were amazed to find such a small stone after that thunderous sound. It was black and about 40 centimeters in diameter, weighing three kilograms at most," another said, adding that the meteorite opened a small crater in the ground and created a cloud of dust.

2008 - 10 Mar. - Sudbury, Canada - great balls of fire were seen falling from the sky - While most sightings were reported around 1:30 p.m. near Sudbury, Hagar, Highway 69 North and North Bay, Wayne Lachance spotted something in the sky earlier in the morning. Lachance was driving home to Massey after a night shift at Vale Inco Ltd. when something caught his eye around 7:30 a.m. "I thought it was a real bright star," he said. "It was getting brighter and coming down with sparks." Lachance arrived home and looked outside his bedroom window to see "spirals of smoke" falling.

2008 - 13 Mar. - Meteorite videotaped hitting the Moon.

2008 - 6 April - Argentina - The space rock reportedly crashed late Sunday somewhere in Entre Rios Province, some 260 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, reports the daily Clarin, which quoted a witness, Milton Blumhagen, a student and astronomy buff: "For three or four seconds I saw an object in flames, changing color until it turned blue when it approached the ground.'' A fire department source said the impact was felt for miles around. No damage was reported.

~~~

As I said, this list is not exhaustive, though I am exhausted from transcribing and pulling the data together! In addition to updating this list from other sources over the next few days, I hope that readers will send in their finds and we can have the most complete list available anywhere, excluding, of course, the classified data that we won't be getting from our governments.

Meanwhile, of course, we begin to understand why Bill Gates - formerly a regular guy turned elitist - has invested in his Seed Bank.

Ah, the joys of being at the top and the perils of being at the bottom of the pyramidal hierarchy on this planet!

Good Lord Willing and the Creek Don't Rise - An Update for SOTT Readers

2008-04-13T18:02:00.002+02:00

In response to my last article, Letters From The Edge, which included a recent missive from Victor Clube, author of The Cosmic Serpent and The Cosmic Winter, I stated:

We aren't talking about a giant asteroid here that is going to create a global wave of firestorm destruction like the movies depict! It's not Planet X or Nibiru! It's NOT the End of the World (at least not for everybody, but certainly for those who aren't prepared and happen to be in the line of fire!) But yeah, it might be somewhat like the Black Death with the loss of half the population of one or more continents, or the great Chicago Fire or Tunguska or even all of these rolled into one; but all of those events were survivable had the victims been informed and prepared. Yes, there are those who, even had they been informed and prepared would not have survived in any case, but we choose the optimistic path: Knowledge Protects. And we are trying our hardest to give you that knowledge.

One reader commented on the article as follows:

What I've picked up so far is that the formation of true community where people share perspective, information, knowledge and material resources such as pooled labor and the fruits of such (cash) is one of the main ways that persons can create the situation where they can survive such a cosmic disaster. Knowledge of what's really happening being another--which among other potential benefits, prevents paralyzing fear and panic--enabling persons to Think in real time as some thing happens. Therefore, sharing and spreading knowledge of what's really happening to encourage greater awareness and the formation of such community groups being another.

Would you please write an article/articles where you share other ideas/suggestions on how to survive such a possible/probable cosmic event as described?

Needless to say, we all need to help SOTT stay online for such an article to come out.

I'm trying to get there.

What's so interesting is that I was also doing that in the Wave Series when the attacks from another pack of cyberpaths began. Coincidence? Not likely, even if the attackers are unaware of what is driving them. As we have pointed out, people's emotions can be used to drive them anywhere a clever manipulator wants them to go. That is not to exclude conscious "agents of attack and diversion" either, but let's keep it simple and assume that most people are unaware of how easily they can be - and are - controlled.

Over the past 20 years or so, I have learned a lot from those types of individuals, painful though those lessons were, and what I have learned is that, when possible, it is important to continue to focus as completely as possible on putting the needed information together and getting it out there for you, our readers, while giving as little air time to the attackers as possible. One has to have nerves of steel and be free of all self-importance in order to be able to ignore the attacks and attackers. Of course, those attacks have had an impact on us, personally - including our health - as well as the website. Think of how many people will have a knee-jerk reaction and refuse to read the very information that could save their lives because of the accusation "cult"?! A cunning slander that does more damage to the people it puts off than it does to us, actually. It's also very sad that the very people that we seek most to help - the masses of normal, decent human beings, the lost sheep of society - can be so easily sidetracked and diverted from their own best interests and induced to serve the interests of a pathological elite structure that cares nothing for them, their children, or their future. As Andzrej Lobaczewski wrote:

A normal person deprived of privilege or high positions goes about performing some work which would earn him a living; but [pathological deviants in power] never possessed any solid practical talent, and the time frame of their rule has eliminated any residual possibilities of adapting to the demands of normal work. If the law of normal man were to be reinstalled, they and theirs could be subjected to judgment... they would be threatened by a loss of freedom and life, not merely a loss of position and privilege. Since they are incapable of this kind of sacrifice, the survival [their rule over humanity] becomes a moral idea. Such a threat [their exposure and overthrow] must be battled by means of psychological and political cunning and a lack of scruples with regard to those other "inferior-quality" people. [...]

[True majority rule] is a nightmare vision [for the pathological elites].

The biological, psychological, moral, and economic destruction of this majority is thus a "biological" necessity. Many means serve this end, starting with concentration camps and including warfare with an obstinate, well-armed foe who will devastate and debilitate the human power thrown at him, namely the very power jeopardizing pathocrats rule. Once safely dead, the soldiers will then be decreed heroes to be revered in paeans, useful for raising a new generation faithful to the pathocracy. [Ponerology: The Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes]

But, there are times when it is simply necessary to mount a defense.

Miyamoto Musashi, also known as Shinmen Takezō, Miyamoto Bennosuke, or by his Buddhist name Niten Dōraku, was a Japanese swordsman famed for his duels and distinctive style. Musashi, as he is often simply known, became the legendary founder of the Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū or Niten-ryū style of swordsmanship and the author of The Book of Five Rings, a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy that is still studied today. My son recently wrote about the present situation:

Musashi never backed down from a fight, whether he knew he could win or he knew he could lose, and it doesn't matter who, what, when or where, there is no such thing as an unimportant battle.

Ideally you should choose your battles, but sometimes, the battle chooses you. A mosquito might be a small creature, easily squashed, but it can carry a lethal disease, it can kill, regardless of its size. So some might argue to ignore the mosquito, let it bite you and others, as usually it can be more or less harmless, but sometimes, it can kill, and so, in times when a lethal diseases that is carried by mosquitoes is rampant, you should squash a mosquito, to protect yourself and others.

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children."

He is right. This is not just about sott.net. This lawsuit could set a precedent for everything that everyone says and does on the internet. Do not underestimate the power of a precedent that may be set in Federal Court. The freedoms of every single forum on the net are threatened by this suit. The freedoms of many alternative websites - if not most of them - are threatened by this law suit. If they don't realize that, then they aren't paying attention. If they do realize it and still do not come to our aid, I think we can safely assume that they are not on the side of Freedom and Truth. It's not even necessary for any of them to agree with anything we say to support this battle against Suppression.

I don't agree with my attackers, but they have the right to say what they want about my work. Unfortunately, most of my attackers don't really talk about my work, they attack me personally, vindictively, and even illegally, in the sense that they DO defame and libel me in a way that is not just an exercise of their right of Free Speech.

I don't want to go too far in that direction at the moment. Suffice it to say that, as long as we have an attorney who can take care of such things for us, giving us a modicum of peace of mind, and the financial support to pay that attorney and survive, I will be able to concentrate, to do the research and present it in clear, understandable articles for everyone. We are thankful for all the support thus far, but we have by no means reached the "comfort zone." We hope that all of you will spread the word on the net in every way you can and let people know what we are trying to do here, that we are totally reader supported, and everything we research and write is made available for free to everyone. We don't carry advertising, we don't have "pay per view" material, and we cater to no one and nothing but the Truth, or as close to it as we can get.

I'm confident that our readers will do all that is necessary to keep the lighthouse burning and the next installment of the Comet Series is underway, good lord willing and the creek don't rise!

New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection

The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets

Cosmic Turkey Shoot

Wars, Pestilence and Witches

Thirty Years of Cults and Comets

Comet Biela and Mrs. O'Leary's Cow

Tunguska, the Horns of the Moon and Evolution