The new incarnation of NICAP has opened up a free online reading library. They currently have eleven titles primarily from the heyday of ufology in the 1950s and 1960s. Worth checking out
http://www.nicap.org/onlinebooks.htm
This isn't a Spooky Paradigm story on the face of it. Or is it? It's a conspiracy story, and Edmond's allegations have floated in the world of alternative politics for several years, but now that she has broken her silence and named names (something she did in front of the Congress, only to have the US government give her an unprecedented gag order) it is happening now, and if even the allegations here are true, it is the story of the decade. And as of a day later, not a single US news source is covering this story after it splashed big in the UK.
I don't know how much you know about Sibel Edmonds, so here are two links. One is to the story itself in its most recent iteration.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3137695.ece
The other is from a blog that has been heavily following this story for years.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5518
I will note that she had to go to a non-US paper to spill this, and a day later, no US media sources are touching it. Her story damns both GOP and former Clinton officials, but many in her naming of names are tied to Bush I, Bush II, Reagan, or are otherwise sympathetic or instrumental to the neocon cult. She names the names, or rather puts their pictures up to get around the gag order, as discussed at this link
http://letsibeledmondsspeak.blogspot.com/2008/01/sibel-names-names-in-pictures.html
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2008/01/bombshell-sibel-edmonds-speaks.html
To wit (from the BradBlog post)Foreign intelligence agents from Turkey, Israel and Pakistan enlisted
the support of high-level US officials in order to acquire a network of moles
deep inside of sensitive American military and nuclear agencies, including "PhD
students – with security clearance [at] Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New
Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear
deterrent."
● Members of the diplomatic community were given lists of potential
"moles" at the sensitive installations. Edmonds tells the Times: "the lists
contained all their 'hooking points', which could be financial or sexual
pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access
to."
● Well-known US officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal
US nuclear secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard on a
wiretap discussing "nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force
base in Alabama," in which the agent allegedly is heard saying: "We have a
package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000."
● Nuclear secrets were then subsequently sold by foreign agents to
America's enemies, including Iran, North Korea and Libya.
● Pakistani officials involved in the nuclear black market network have
significant cross-over with al-Qaeda and 9/11. Officials such as the chief of
ISI, Pakistan's spy agency, allegedly sent $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed
Atta, and aides of A.Q. Kahn --- who had used the stolen secrets to develop
nuclear weapons for Pakistan --- met with Osama bin Laden "weeks before
9/11...to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device."
● Elements of the US government have repeatedly shut down
investigations into these crimes under the guise of protecting "certain
diplomatic relations."
● The US government has been aware of all of the above information
since at least 2001.
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has been the top global headline, for obvious reasons. But one aspect of the story, interest, and coverage has been somewhat baffling: the specific manner of her death.
No one disputes that shots were fired at Mrs. Bhutto and her vehicle. No one denies that a suicide bomber then attacked killing twenty more people. But much of the focus has been on the exact nature of Mrs. Bhutto's death, and analyzing autopsy, eyewitness, and video evidence relevant to answering that question. This report from CNN is a good example of how much of the media, particularly television, is dealing with the issue. Here's another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq-DwHXx4oI&eurl
Ok, so what? She was killed in the attack, which everyone admits was complex and multicomponent. Does it matter much if she was killed by a bullet or a shockwave or shrapnel from the explosion? The CNN and other reports suggest that it is a matter of transparency, and makes the government and/or ISI look guilty. There is some truth to that, but other coverage goes beyond that noting that government officials immediately destroyed evidence at the crime scene, starts talking to sources pointing the finger at the Pakistani military, looks at who is most likely involved, or puts the whole Pakistan mess in a larger context. I want to thank Cernig in particular for coverage of this event.
So what's with the fixation on video of the shooter, on the autopsy results, etc.? Yes, part of it is that it catches the Pakistani government out in potentially conducting a cover-up (and for the record, that sounds likely to me). But I have to wonder if some of this comes from the grand-daddy of all assassination memepools in the modern era, the one that gave us an entire subculture devoted to analyzing every detail, the one that gave us the term "lone gunman," the notion of a government assassination investigatory committee, the murder that has come to dominate the identity of its victim, JFK. Have we been taught to look for the grassy knoll, the movement of the head back and to the left (note that in the Bhutto case, this is mirrored by attention to her head and scarf, the movement of which are evidence for a bullet impact)?
Maybe we have, and maybe its a good thing. When another government is involved, the mainstream press is at least open to not simply acting as court stenographers, and what would be called a conspiracy theory if suggested about a domestic event can be propagated without ridicule. This time, the right-wing isn't using the conspiracy theory slur, just attacking Bhutto herself as feudal and corrupt. As Jodi Dean notes in Aliens in America, conspiracy theorizing is a rational response to decentralized information flow.
Update: I'm not the only one making the connection, either the general analogy, or looking at the media treatment. That last one is a good read, as in this excerpt Now, notice that no one in the mainstream press is screaming, “Conspiracy theory! Conspiracy theory!” in response to the suspicion that Pakistani intelligence agencies might have been behind the Bhutto killing. On the contrary, the mainstream press is actually treating such a conspiracy as a viable possibility.
Yet, whenever someone suggests that U.S. intelligence agencies might have been involved in the JFK killing, the immediate attitude of the U.S. mainstream press is exactly the opposite: “Conspiracy theory! Conspiracy theory!”
UPDATE: I call it a "laser"
Not exactly on topic, but a fun and awesome blog on material culture and spirituality. Check it out.
According to a much ballyhooed article from the Daily Mail in the last few days
Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.
The initiative was revealed by 82-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican "exorcistinchief," to the online Catholic news service Petrus.
"Thanks be to God, we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on," he said.
"Too many bishops are not taking this seriously and are not delegating their priests in the fight against the Devil. You have to hunt high and low for a properly trained exorcist.
The PR office of the Vatican denies the account.
I suspect someone has spoken out of turn here, and that the denial is closer to reality. But the Vatican has shown renewed interest in the topic including introducing exorcism classes.
An interesting essay by Geoff Olsen at Common Ground uses UFOs as an example of how hard it is for many people to think outside of the box (to use a spent marketing term).
I don't fully agree with everything there, and I get so tired of the use of quantum mechanics to wave anything into possibility, but the core truth is that when faced with an even slightly deniable experience that fits outside of the expected, so many people will dive for the exits of convoluted but familiar explanations.
For me, I feel this effect in people the most with politics. Not just party politics but the bigger picture. You can present people with basic facts, and if they mean the world they know is slipping away or untenable, they won't flip out, they simply ignore it. It helps of course if there are billion-dollar companies that aid and abet in making it easy to ignore the world.
I got tired of the limited space for books on the side of the blog page, so I added an aStore, a bookstore that orders through Amazon. But I have far more space to put up scads of titles and products.
For the most part, I'll only add books and other products that I am familiar with and can describe and give some guidance on. This will include noting a book's shortcomings if need be.
So far I've added about 20 volumes on UFO culture. That's pretty much most of what is out there, and I've noted the relative utility and topics of each. Categories I'll be adding soon will be case studies, ghost hunters, and Spooky Paradigm theory.
The address for the store, also found in the suggested reading sidebar, is
http://astore.amazon.com/spookparad-20
Feel free to browse.
As you may have heard, Japan's government has become something of a laughing stock this week, after chief cabinet minister Nobutaka Machimura answered a question about UFOs at a press conference with an answer that he believes in them. After an initial 24 hours of excited stories and posts, it became clear that no one in the "debate" was being very serious. The eventual insertion of Godzilla into the dialogue was not the first clue.
Nonetheless, this has been the year of politicians talking about UFOs. As I noted in an update on my post concerning US presidents and UFOs, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich says he saw a Black Triangle years ago, and in his discussion of that incident joked about Exeter, a location with a link to UFOs that is not common knowledge. I wonder if that's how he won over his wife.
When Kucinich's UFO story hit the press, Bill Richardson also noted that he considers the Roswell Incident and UFOs serious business, at least as tourism. He has promoted Roswell in the past, including providing a foreword for the book The Roswell Dig Diaries.
Earlier this year, Wonkette visited the issue, at least historically, concerning George Bush I, the CIA, Jimmy Carter, and UFOs.
I suspect some of this is of course chance and happenstance. But since the O'Hare case last year, UFOs have gotten more credibility in the large mainstream media than the issue has had since probably the 1960s, pre-Condon. All without, and I think not coincidentally, a major presence in the entertainment media. The more divorced the issue is from fantasy and entertainment, the more credibility it has.
Once again, I am reminded of George Carlin's take on this, with his comparison of the media portrayal of Christianity vs., for example, UFOs. Nifty.
And what reminded me of this? Mike Huckabee, a major contender for the Presidency of the United States (AKA the commander of the most powerful and planet-annhilating military in human history) and his conversation with his God in 2004.
Update: Looks like Hillary Clinton has followed in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and her husband in invoking the (fictional) threat of alien invasion to promote global unity.
Missed this back in November. Hotspot map from CUFOS, based on population, courtesy of strange maps
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/11/01/196-ufo-hotspots-map/
R. Lee recently wrote about "The Desire to Debunk" where she criticizes what she sees as a compulsive need by some to debunk/skeptically inquire (!) accounts of the paranormal, strange animals, etc. She asks why people are compelled to debunk/attack the accounts of others.
I can't entirely agree with that point of view. If you do think that scientific inquiry is an important or the most important way of understanding reality, then these anomalies should be quite interesting. They should be examined, and if necessary, explained in ways different from the explanations offered by those that report the anomalies in the first place.
But where I agree with her is that too often, that isn't what debunkers/skeptics do. In many cases, a minimal amount of time is spent by the would-be debunker to basically say "Well, that's just obviously garbage and nonsense." Or to come up with a daft explanation that is as scientifically supportable as the original paranormal explanation (the Michigan swamp gas UFO explanation by Hynek comes to mind). Typically, such treatments are filled with scorn and hyperbolic "I wish I ran Something Awful" style humor (example: the Iron Skeptic, who is better known for his condescending and juvenile style than his increasingly thorough, though still at times lacking, research).
At that point, which is a common occurrence, I agree with R. Lee that such behavior borders on the pathological. Not all debunking falls into this category. Some is well thought out and takes on tough questions. A skeptical analysis can convincingly get to the core of a particular problem with precision and elegance. But where does the more scornful and less thoughtful approach come from, and why is it quite common?
It's an exercise in making the debunker feel better about themselves, in my humble opinion.
I would link it to what Christopher Hayes calls "The Credulous Style. In his essay "9/11: The Roots of Paranoia," he takes much of the 9/11Truth community to task for a failure found in other parts of the Spooky Paradigm: unfalsifiability. That some claims (in particular some of the engineering claims) about the destruction of the WTC do not hold up to testing, and yet they continue to exist and thrive. He concludes that the claims of that movement, or at least the more visible MIHOP claims, are without merit and wrongheaded.
But Hayes goes on to point out that a substantial amount of the reason for the existence of this movement falls on the authority-friendly attitude towards inquiry. Playing off of Hofstadter's famous "Paranoid Style," Hayes argues that the complete failure of the media and other institutions to question narratives from the government and other authorities has made the paranoid style a rational choice. As he puts it
So it's hard to blame people for thinking we're not getting the whole story. For six years, the government has prevaricated and the press has largely failed to point out this simple truth. Critics like The New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann might lament the resurgence of the "paranoid style," but the seeds of paranoia have taken root partly because of the complete lack of appropriate skepticism by the establishment press, a complementary impulse to the paranoid style that might be called the credulous style. In the credulous style all political actors are acting with good intentions and in good faith. Mistakes are made, but never because of ulterior motives or undue influence from the various locii of corporate power. When people in power advocate strenuously for a position it is because they believe in it. When their advocacy leads to policies that create misery, it is due not to any evil intentions or greed or corruption, but rather simple human error.
