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News Briefs 28-04-2005

Ancient tomes, weird creatures, strange science and Marvel vs DC as the battle of evil vs good. It must be TDG news.

  • Scholars at a Welsh college believe they have unearthed their own version of the Da Vinci code with the discovery of a 400-year-old book entitled The Genealogy of Jesus Christ.
  • Remember those English scientists who are going looking for the Mongolian Deathworm? You can follow their progress on their blog.
  • The latest edition of New Scientist is now available online. Check it out here. This week’s lead story is The Theory Of Everything.
  • A San Fransisco artist has made searching for Bigfoot into a live-by-cam art installation.
  • On Saipan, the search for the mysterious “black magic woman” who tried to use magic to influence a judge continues.
  • Bush relies on technology to solve late in the day energy woes. I bet all those scientists who complained about his lack of science funding are saying “I told you so”.
  • A tabletop experiment created nuclear fusion – long seen as a possible clean energy solution – under lab conditions, scientists reported. But the amount of energy produced was too little to be seen as a breakthrough in solving the world’s energy needs.
  • Scientists say we can all read minds – the answer lies in “mirror neurons”.
  • The ivory-billed woodpecker, long feared extinct, has been rediscovered in a remote part of Arkansas. Another near squeak for biodiversity.
  • More fun with Googlesat and Area 51 – a whole heap of airstrips, targets and strange symbols.
  • Doctors in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, have reported a significant increase in deformities among newborn babies, most likely caused by wartime use of depleted uranium.
  • Texas A&M researchers have successfully cloned a horse.
  • Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pressed Congress on Wednesday to fund research into an earth-penetrating “bunker buster” nuclear bomb that U.S. lawmakers dropped from the budget last year. Yep, that’ll help those energy woes.
  • A Priest and Professor of Theology debunks cases of supposed possesion and exorcism. This is a “must read”.
  • The Pentagon’s Psychic Friend’s Network – a review of Jon Ronson’s “The Men Who Stare at Goats” by Michael Shermer.
  • All of human history can be written with four letters – DNA reveals a lot about human evolution, and some family secrets, too
  • “Peak Oil” is coming – maybe next year, maybe in 15 years – and when it does you can kiss your lifestyle goodbye.
  • Two seperate studies giving further evidence that environmental pollution could be damaging men’s fertility emerged yesterday.
  • More on those amazing papyrus scraps salvaged from a rubbish tip in Egypt. It seems the Number of The Beast isn’t 666 but 616. Which may mean Stan Lee is the Anti-Christ.
  • An intensive conservation effort is underway for the New Zealand Kakapo – a critically endangered, fat, green, musty-smelling nocturnal parrot which cannot fly but can climb tall trees. (See shadows, I remembered!)

Quote of the Day:

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debate.
Joseph Joubert

  1. Men Who Stare at Goats
    As one amazon reviewer says:

    “This is a true story.” That is the first line in The Men Who Stare at Goats, and it is an entirely necessary one. The rest of the book is just too weird to be believed; this means that Ronson is in his element, as he showed in his last book Them, a study of paranoid conspiracy addicts. Those suspicious folks were laughable, and indeed there are many, many laughs to be enjoyed in reading this new work. But each laugh is a sad one now, for Ronson details goony beliefs among those in power, those whom the government is paying to do our will.

    They feel that “America, the great superpower, needed to be defended by people who actually had superpowers.” Ronson has met with many of these warriors, found some who wanted to tell their stories and even brag about them, and with wonderful reportorial detachment has laid out the results.

    If you have an ounce of common sense, you will be dismayed to learn that our taxes are going to military and intelligence officials who are making sincere attempts to walk through walls, turn invisible, stop an animal’s heart by just staring at it, warp brains by subliminal stimulation, and more.

    The waste is stupid enough, but Ronson shows how the doctrines have been part of the reason for the debacles at Waco and Abu Ghraib. Laugh through this book, but see if each laugh does not make you a little more indignant over this stupidity.

    1. Subliminal attempts at magic
      From the way you make it sound, these people are unknowingly trying to trigger ceremonial magic to fullfill their craving for power. Their problem is that this is an energy that is only channeled via the spirit, not the soul or the dead, and this precludes all will to power or will to dominate.

      Actually, I would even go as far as saying that all attempts at domination is a kind of dark magic in a way or another.

    2. Kat,

      I hope you’re not ag
      Kat,

      I hope you’re not agreeing with the Amazon reviewer!

      Sincere efforts to study psychic phenomena is NOT laughable, and I abhor anyone who ridicules those who believe in psychic phenomena or are making serious, sincere attempts to research it.

      The worry is that it’s the US Military who are seriously researching psychic phenomena to be used in war and espionage, and this is no laughing matter.

      The only joke is the reviewer and their arrogant pretentious attitude.

  2. Oxyrhynchus papyrus texts
    You can buy various “texts from excavations” from the Egypt Exploration Society. They have a US customer page, and a UK customer page. It doesn’t appear these latest Oxyrhynchus papyrus texts are available yet, but it seems likely that, when they do become available, this is where you’ll be able to find them.

    1. Merlyn and the beast
      Don’t you find it interesting that Merlyn is the guardian of the Multiverse? Like Devil and the Astral perhaps? I am always wary of the multiverses and their guardians, like the guardian of the treshold whose function is to keep an individual within the limit of his fears.

      1. Merlyn
        Hi Richard,

        >>like the guardian of the treshold whose function is to keep an individual within the limit of his fears.

        I don’t know if there’s any similarity, but a term I’m more familiar with is ‘the dweller on the threshold’. And with regard to that, it’s nature, rather than it’s function, is to keep an individual within the limit of his fears. More simply put, fears are linked to each other and form a cage.

        From my point of view, many of your past comments have touched on the subject of this “dweller”. It’s that amalgam of acquired bits and pieces – self-definitions, thoughts, beliefs, fears, reactions, etc. – which, when blended together, form an artificial consciousness – or “personality”, as we like to call it, that most people think of as “me”.

        You’ll probably get a kick out of this — one of the technical terms in this same cosmology is “glamour(s)”, meaning astral/emotional misperception(s) of reality.

        I don’t know if I’ve ever responded to one of your comments before, but I have been paying attention. 😉

        Kat

        1. Dweller on the treshold
          Hi Kat,

          Perhaps is the term Dweller better coined in English than Guardian.

          It still can be referred to as a guardian as this psychic entity which does not belong to the incarnate as such but that rather possesses it, reason why humanity has no real will, intelligence or love of its own, appears to the ‘multiverse’ traveler as the most monstrous entity for the one who having separated itself from his false identity would seek to go beyond the sphere of his inexperience. It would appear then within the form that would be most likely to trigger fear and prevent the initiate from escaping his powerlessness.

          We tend to personalize entities, the same way we would personalize the concept of God. It might be advantageous to consider that the reality behind the energies of entities is rather permeating in nature and that the form by which it may manifest is only a vehicle that has for purpose to convey a specific impression adapted to the need of the moment. Entities are not a personality; they are complex energies that can penetrate the dimensions that their reality allows them to. They can never penetrate dimensions that are subtler in energy quality than their own. This is why it is so important for man to elevate his own mental vibration and leave his old consciousness behind.

          If we had a real identity, we would create a personality on the fly to effectively support the quality of our mental energy that is best appropriate for a particular communication need. We do this to a limited level though. For instance, we might not use the same personality when talking to an animal, to a very young child or to an adult.

          When concepts that touch values that condition our psychology or ideologies that touch our belief systems and false impression of security within the collective structure, our reaction is not the expression of a centered mind that radiates one’s reality but rather the reflection of a mind possessed with the energies that support the karmic laws of the human experiment that defends its hold upon the one who talks by forcing its own vibration to take over, using emotions and insecurity to neutralize any chance the ego of being enlightened by the forces of life, by his own source.

          This is the Guardian or Dweller on the threshold.

  3. fat, green, musty-smelling…..
    …..mmm, reminds me of someone I know who is, as we speak, writing his memoirs.
    Or so he says.
    It could be another “Lolita” for all I know.
    Great story about the kakapos thanks “Cernig”, they are cute little guys.

    I loved the story about the woodpecker and saw a news item on TV.It is a stunning looking bird, and so large!
    We don’t have them here.I wonder why all woodpeckers have red hair.Maybe it is something to do with all that peck peck peck all day.

    The Peak Oil story reminded me of what Kat said the other day about this being the optimum moment now for oil production and it will taper off.
    What’s going to happen with all the SUVs?
    Or shouldn’t I ask.

    As far as M.Scott Peck is concerned, I never knew what people saw in his books,even The Road Less Travelled.
    I read one about him visiting all the old stone monuments in Britain and slept most of the way through it.
    He is not a writer.

    Yes “Cernig” what the world needs now is more bunker buster bombs, particularly “nukular” bombs.You can never have enough bunker busters.No young person should even consider starting a family unless he/she has acquired a goodly number of nukular bunker busters, they are a necessity of life.

    Then to segue into deformities in children…goodness me,why are we worrying about that…happens in every generation.

    Don’t mind me..I’m busy listening to the glug glug glug.

    Thanks mate,

    shadows

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