Human Beings DO Live In A Simplified Narrative-Dream World...,

NYTimes |  Relations between master and disciple were always difficult. Mr. VandenBroeck already had some background in the occultist philosophy of Ouspenkyism and in the hardly less bizarre Chicago-based general semantics movement, which opposed traditional Aristotelian logic. De Lubicz for his part was suspicious and cryptic. Knowledge had to be worked for.

R. A. Schwaller was born in 1887. In his youth he worked as a chemist and studied art and theosophy. The aristocratic Lithuanian poet and occultist Oscar Milosz conferred the title of de Lubicz on Schwaller. At around the same time, Schwaller de Lubicz claims to have met the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli. Fulcanelli later became famous for his book ''Le Mystere des Cathedrales'' (1925), an alchemical reading of the symbolism of Gothic cathedrals.

Soon afterward, Fulcanelli (certainly a pseudonym) vanished mysteriously. De Lubicz claimed that Fulcanelli had not only pirated his (de Lubicz's) ideas on the symbolism of cathedrals, but had also attempted to make gold without fully understanding the procedure. This last had fatal consequences, and Mr. VandenBroeck tells us that, when de Lubicz visited Fulcanelli on his deathbed, the alchemist had turned black.

After World War I, de Lubicz was largely responsible for the formation of the Veilleurs (the Watchmen), a group dedicated to preserving higher values in a demoralized postwar world. The higher values were those of hierarchy and discipline. The elite of the Veilleurs sought to evolve to a higher state of being. The group's ambitions were esoteric and protofascist. Subsequently R. A. de Lubicz went to Egypt, where he spent years studying the temple at Luxor. ''Le Temple de l'Homme,'' published in 1958, was his exposition of the inner meaning of Pharaonic architecture, which boring mainstream Egyptologists with their profane readings had failed to penetrate. Finally, de Lubicz moved to Grasse, where Mr. VandenBroeck found him a couple of years before his death.

This is all quite interesting, but the reader has to work hard to extract the interest. The book is clogged with abstruse lectures on secret harmonies, mystical chemistry and whatnot. The style is rigorous, but the content is ultimately meaningless.

Eventually, Mr. VandenBroeck left the temple of mysteries at Grasse. It is to his credit that an important motive for his doing so was that he found de Lubicz's political ideas objectionable. It would have been even more to his credit if he had gone further and had recognized that most of de Lubicz's theories were junk. His ''archeology'' at Luxor failed to take account of the ascertainable circumstances of the temple's building. His ''history'' was a farrago of nonsense about racial destiny and the secret histories of Templars, tarot cards and so on. His ''geography'' had space for a manmade Nile and a Sphinx up to its neck in seawater. His ''science'' was an ill-tempered polemic against Darwin and Einstein. It is odd, then, to find Saul Bellow's foreword giving endorsement to de Lubicz as ''a source of revolutionary insights.''

 

 

Know What You Are Doing So That You Can Do What You Want

feldenkraisresourcesformusicians |   This description is marvelous because it captures the effect of integration through listening.61 Trough listening, something happens that Ephram does not ‘know’.
He is given a taste of the pre-symbolic Real for a moment. He does not speak, but instead acknowledges this internal, placeless ‘fnding’ (between visible activity) with chirruping laughter; this giddy delight and uncertainty refect the trauma of the Real and the way in which the senses are unifed in this domain. Nancy attempts to come to grips with the way in which laughter mediates the senses.

He states that, Laughter bursts at the multiple limits of the senses and of language, uncertain of the sense to which it is ofered […] Laughter is the joy of the senses, and of sense, at their limit. In this joy, the senses touch each other and touch language, the tongue in the mouth.62

Ephram’s laughter is like a cloudburst. Feldenkrais touches something deeper than just Ephram’s sensorium through touch and listening, and Ephram responds with laughter: he touches Ephram’s uniqueness.63 Feldenkrais states: ‘You know what that laughter is worth? Tat is Eureka!’ Later, when Ephram laughs again, he observes: ‘You see that laughter is priceless; you can’t buy it for all the money that you have in the world.’ Feldenkrais tacitly acknowledges that in this release, Ephram as a listening being has also withdrawn from him.64 Nancy might say that essential to listening is a ‘withdrawal and turning inward’.65 Laughter provides evidence of an essential independence that signals and derives from integration.66

Trough Ephram’s laughter, the external listeners assembled are exposed to a moment when Ephram is on a fulcrum of listening. It is not just that in Nancy’s terms he has become present to (him)self, but that he registers the trauma of the Real; Ephram’s laughter registers the possibility of change in his self-image. In Nancy’s terms this is the ‘reference’ (renvoi) of sound, ‘from a sign to a thing’.69

But what is this ‘thing’? Te making of ‘sense’ within Ephram’s sensorium is the jouissance of precisely that which does not make sense to him, a new self-image which cannot be immediately rationalized or assimilated.70 So when Nancy states that ‘a self is nothing other than a form or function of referral, a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self’, this can be considered only part of the story.71

One of the functions of FI is to bring the subject into an encounter with what is unknown, moving from the self that is known, founded in gravity and their own body image in the world, to a new image of the self.72 Ephram’s laughter bubbles up; it escapes what is presented to the world as a disabled boy. It is the resonance of an encounter with another self. His listening is an ongoing process of (re-)formation in the irreducible, intimate and non-linear temporal paradigm of ‘making the impossible possible’, as Feldenkrais has stated,73 and it is precisely this which is inscribed in the Lacanian Real.74

His outburst of laughter creates a symbolic cut in the Real that through its diferentiation signals the Real: it is like the tip of an iceberg that appears above the water, but in doing so it also signifes that below the water (apart from the rest of the iceberg, which is already integrated with the symbolic register) is the ocean’s void.75 In Nancy’s terms, Ephram is a paradigm of a ‘subject of listening [that] is always still yet to come’.76 With regard to Feldenkrais’s ‘listening for his next breath’, Nancy’s question is germane here: ‘What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all its being?’ – and one might add here: ‘listening to all his being’.77 In this spirit of enquiry we might listen with Feldenkrais and ask: ‘Is it indeed possible (or desirable) to listen to all of another person’s being?’

This is a crucial question, and one fundamental to FI, because listening for Feldenkrais is a sensing through his hands of where someone else is stuck; where, through habit or injury, for example, the mind/body entity is momentarily incapable of utilizing a deeper intelligence to improve a function or action. Helping a person to fnd this intelligence within themselves is one of the primary functions of instrumental lessons and indeed of the Feldenkrais Method. Listening, then, as is shown in  Feldenkrais’s work with Ephram, is an enactivist engagement with intelligence and awareness, not just with presence to the world or the self (pace Nancy).

Feldenkrais’s ideal of listening is intimately connected to overcoming ‘resistance’, a term borrowed from Freud. In their book The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis defne this concept: ‘In psycho-analytic treatment the name “resistance” is given to everything in the words and actions of the analysis and that obstructs his gaining access to his un-conscious.’78 

Laplanche and Pontalis point out that while Freud first discovered that resistance was ‘an obstacle to the elucidation of the symptoms and to the progress of the treatment’, he realized that ‘resistance was itself a means of reaching the repressed and unveiling the secret of neurosis’ and that ‘the interpretation of resistance, along with that of the transference, constituted the specifc characteristics of his technique’ that was part and parcel of the possibility of a cure.79 Feldenkrais extends this in profound ways elaborated through the examples given in this study. 

Resistance is understood not merely as that which obstructs the change in the self-image; Feldenkrais ‘interprets’ this resistance as an active means of gaining access to Ephram’s motor cortex, rather than the psychoanalytic ‘un-conscious’.

Do You Know How Much Damage Faulty Sleep And Movement Habits Can Cause?

princeton |  I turned to Feldenkrais because a friend I respected a lot suggested it as a solution to my hand and arm pain (RSI). I went to ATM classes and took FI lessons from a local teacher in Princeton NJ. Though these whetted my curiosity, they did not solve my RSI problems.

I found an excellent teacher, Angel DiBenedetto, during a 5-month stay in Seattle. She learned from Moshe Feldenkrais, and is herself a trainer of other Feldenkrais teachers. Eight lessons from her (over a 3-month period) completely changed my view of my body. My hand was much better but still not 100%. Also, I sensed the tremendous potential of this method and wanted to go further. So I took 8-9 Feldenkrais lessons with another amazing teacher, Anat Krivine, during a subsequent 4-month stay in Israel. Anat is also a trainer of Feldenkrais teachers. It was very useful for me to learn from multiple teachers, since  no two teachers have the same perspective. One important thing that Anat finally made me realize and give up was my tendency to ask for "the best way to do X" which I think was limiting my learning. Furthermore, unknown to me, she had a special interest in scoliosis (sideways curve of the spine) which turned out to be relevant to my problems. By the end, my hand problems were completely gone and my scoliosis (which the medical profession thinks of as a skeletal problem, with no cure) much reduced. (See the links below for an explanation of scoliosis and the Feldenkrais approach to it.)

So what can you expect when you get Feldenkrais lessons from a good teacher? The immediate sensation is one of calm that you have never known. You may realize that you have lived in a background of muscular tension that you had never noticed until it went away. (Kind of like the change in background noise level you might notice if you moved from Manhattan to Montana.) This can be a powerful, even emotional experience. It is a good idea to  savor this calm right after the lesson, and to take a nap. You may feel great, but avoid the temptation to go out and do something strenuous. (Skip your usual exercise routine for a day or two.) The calm may dissipate over the next few hours and days, but in future sessions it will last longer and longer, until it becomes part of your everyday state.

The FI's implant new ideas into your body, and over the next few days and weeks it will slowly imbibe them and change. Do not be surprised if you find yourself doing things differently.

Another thought that might occur to you is that much of what you have known about pain is wrong. You will learn that often pain is caused by faulty movement patterns, not any kind of damage to the body. Thus pain can be produced and taken away at will, using simple change in movements. This knowledge is extremely empowering for people who have suffered from chronic pain.

(Update Aug 2008): During the year since I first wrote my page, I have continued to do ATMs every week, and felt continuous and noticeable improvement. However, I also slowly became more and more aware of the asymmetries still left over from my scoliosis. These were interfering with my enjoyment of activities I had newly started (Capoeira, rollerskating, and running). In Summer 2008 I got a few lessons from another excellent teacher, Reuven (Robbie) Ofir, in Manhattan. (I heard of him from a friend.) Robbie is also a Feldenkrais trainer and a former  head of physical therapy at a leading NYC hospital.  Robbie helped me work out some deep asymmetries and tensions  in my body. Robbie also taught me do ATMs at an even slower and gentler pace that I used to, which has taken my learning to a higher level. I feel truly great now.  But Robbie has helped me appreciate that there is no end to the process of improvement with the Feldenkrais method. (Encouraged by this, I also took my aged parents to Robbie for a few lesson, which helped them a lot. They are from India and Feldenkrais is unlike anything they have experienced.)  I plan to get an occasional FI or two in future years to continue this learning. In particular I plan to explore the use of the method in voice and music.

Triangular Fast Movers And Transmedium Vehicles

thedebrief  |  In an exclusive feature for The Debrief, U.S. military and intelligence officials, as well as Pentagon emails, offer an unprecedented glimpse behind the scenes of what’s currently going on with The Pentagon’s investigation into UFOs, or as they term them, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP).  

For the last two years, the Department of Defense’s newly revamped “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force” (or UAPTF) has been busy briefing lawmakers, Intelligence Community stakeholders, and the highest levels of the U.S. military on encounters with what they say are mysterious airborne objects that defy conventional explanations. 

Along with classified briefings, multiple senior U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter say two classified intelligence reports on UAP have been widely distributed to the U.S. Intelligence Community. Numerous sources from various government agencies told The Debrief that these reports include clear photographic evidence of UAP. The reports also explicitly state that the Task Force is considering the possibility that these unidentified objects could, as stated by one source from the U.S. Intelligence Community said, be operated by “intelligences of unknown origin.” 

Significantly, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and head of RAND corporation’s Space Enterprise Initiative has—for the first time—gone on record to discuss some of the most likely explanations for UAP. 

 His responses were surprising.

Overwhelmingly, everyone The Debrief spoke with said the most striking feature of the recently released UAPTF intelligence position report was the inclusion of new and “extremely clear” photograph of an unidentifiable triangular aircraft.

The photograph, which is said to have also been taken from inside the cockpit of a military fighter jet, depicted an apparent aerospace vehicle described as a large equilateral triangle with rounded or “blunted” edges and large, perfectly spherical white “lights” in each corner. Officials who had seen it said the image was captured in 2019 by an F/A-18 fighter pilot. 

Two officials that received the report said the photo was taken after the triangular craft emerged from the ocean and began to ascend straight upwards at a 90-degree angle. It was indicated that this event occurred off the eastern coast of the United States. Several other sources confirmed the photo’s existence; however, they declined to provide any further specifics of the incident. 

Regarding the overall theme of the recent report, officials who read it say the report primarily focused on “Unidentified Submersible Phenomena,” or unidentified “transmedium” vehicles capable of operating both under water and in the air. 

The three officials we spoke with said the report suggested the UAP Task Force appears to be concerned that the objects being termed as UAP may be originating from within the world’s oceans. Strange as this may sound, the idea of “USOs” or “unidentified submersible objects” is not something exclusive to the current UAPTF.

Do These Patents Describe Operable Technologies Or Are They Simply Weaponized Patents?

It's been a year since I touched on this subject, prolly time to hit it a lick and a promise again....,

thedrive |  The War Zone reported on a series of strange patent applications the U.S. Navy has filed over the last few years and questioned what their connections may be with the ongoing saga of Navy personnel reporting incidents involving unidentified objects in or near U.S. airspace. 

We have several active Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Navy to pursue more information related to the research that led to these patents. As those are being processed, we've continued to dig through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) Public Patent Application Information Retrieval database to get as much context for these patents as possible.

In doing so, we came across documents that seem to suggest, at least by the Navy's own claims, that two highly peculiar Navy patents, the room temperature superconductor (RTSC) and the high-energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG), may in fact already be in operation in some manner. The inventor of the Navy's most bizarre patent, the straight-out-of-science fiction-sounding hybrid aerospace/underwater craft, describes that craft as leveraging the same room temperature superconductor technology and high energy electromagnetic fields to enable its unbelievable speed and maneuverability. If those two technologies are already operable as the Navy claims, could this mean the hybrid craft may also already operable or close to operable? Or is this just more evidence that the whole exotic 'UFO' patent endeavor on the Navy's behalf is some sort of ruse or even gross mismanagement of resources?

Make sure to read our last feature on this bizarre topic to get up to speed on critical background information before continuing on. 

At the heart of these questions is the term “operable.” In most patent applications, applicants must assert proof of a patent’s or invention’s “enablement,” or the extent to which a patent is described in such a way that any person who is familiar with similar technologies or techniques would be able to understand it, and theoretically reproduce it.

However, in these patent documents, the inventor Salvatore Pais, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division's (NAWCAD) patent attorney Mark O. Glut, and the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise's Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Sheehy, all assert that these inventions are not only enabled, but operable. To help me understand what that term may mean in these contexts, I reached out to Peter Mlynek, a patent attorney. 

Mlynek informed me that the terms “operable” or “operability” are not common in patent applications, but that there is little doubt that the use of the term is meant to assert to the USPTO that these inventions actually work:

 

Frank Capra Never Imagined Vaccines And Reproductive Services

alt-market |  I have to look back at Event 201 to really gauge the state of the game, because what the elites planned and what has happened do not completely match up. For those not familiar, Event 201 was a type of “war game” held by globalists from the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The scenario? A pandemic outbreak of a coronavirus which would spread like wildfire and kill a predicted 65 million people. The simulation was held only a couple of months before the real thing happened at the start of 2020.

In the year since the outbreak, the globalists have attempted to enforce nearly every plan that was outlined during Event 201, including using social media to censor or restrict any news or information outside of the establishment approved narrative (Yes, narrative control was discussed at the event in great detail). Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has consistently and excitedly applauded the pandemic crisis as a “perfect opportunity” to institute the “reset” that the globalists have been talking about for years.

Unfortunately for them, the virus has not been anywhere near as deadly as they appear to have hoped. With a death rate of well below 1% for anyone outside of a nursing home with preexisting conditions, the establishment has now been forced to pump up infection numbers as a means to terrorize the populace because the death numbers are not enough to convince people to willingly hand over their freedoms. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) for Covid 19 not counting nursing home deaths with preexisting conditions is only 0.26% of those infected.

There is a propaganda meme being passed around these days that tries to exaggerate the danger of death from Covid, and it goes a little something like this:

“Covid has killed more people that the Vietnam War and the Gulf Wars combined in a single year, therefore your freedoms are forfeit…”

This is an idiotic talking point but luckily no one is buying it. Over 40% of Covid deaths are people that are already sick and on the verge of dying anyway (And no, refusing to wear masks is not the same as endorsing “death panels”, because a death panel is about socialists refusing treatment to people at risk because of their age. No one is suggesting that old people be refused treatment, and they always have the option of staying under quarantine if they fear they will become infected. They are already retired and receiving social security, perhaps if we are going to stimulate then the bailout money should go to those most at risk so that the rest of us can continue on with normal life?)

Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from diseases and illnesses including the flu, common colds and pneumonia, yet, the prospect of abandoning the Bill of Rights, submitting to economic shutdowns and wearing a muzzle on our faces wherever we go was never brought up before.

Why should we ask 99.7% of Americans or the world to accept medical tyranny just to make .26% of the population feel safe? People who question the mandates are called “selfish”, but even if I was one of the people susceptible to the virus, I would NEVER demand that 99% of the population bow to totalitarianism at the off chance that I might live a little while longer. Now THAT would be selfish.

As more and more studies and data are released, the mask mandates are also coming into question. Though Big Tech has sought to suppress or censor studies that run contrary to the mainstream narrative, this has only led more people to question the motivations of governments pushing the mandates. After all, the mainstream media keeps saying that we should “listen to the science”, but they ignore or censor the science. So, if the pandemic response is not based in science, then it must only be about control.

Many Americans are not as stupid as the elites think. They see the inconsistencies in the rhetoric and the data and they are increasingly prone to refuse to comply. This might be why the establishment is suddenly rushing out at least two Covid vaccines in the span of half a year; they have to get the vaccine phase of the Reset underway before too many people jump from the panic bandwagon.

The vaccine rush and the claims of effectiveness of 94% to 95% from Pfizer and Moderna are suspect. The average effectiveness of most vaccines is around 50% or less, and these are vaccines with hundreds of trials and years of usage. Somehow, Pfizer and Moderna were both able to produce a vaccine for a SARS type virus when multiple governments tried for over a decade to produce vaccines for SARS in China and were unsuccessful, and they were able to achieve 95% effectiveness?

Many people are not buying the vaccine story, and this is perhaps why the elites are jumping headlong into vaccination so fast. Consider this fact:

Numerous polls indicate that at least 1 in 3 Americans plan to refuse the Covid vaccine when it is released to the general public. 60% of Americans have stated in polls that they will not take the vaccine unless it is proven to be at least 75% effective.

Here I think we have our explanation for the vaccination bonanza. The elites know that a third of Americans (and probably Europeans) will not take the vaccine regardless of any propaganda they dish out. They also know that 60% of Americans are unlikely to take the vaccine unless they can show an effectiveness rate of at least 75%. Neither Moderna nor Pfizer have actually produced any evidence that their vaccines are capable of prevented severe illness or death from Covid, so, their effectiveness rate is based on “projections” of success according to their minimal trials. Meaning, the effectiveness rate of 95% is completely arbitrary.

Why did they go with such a high number instead of a more realistic 50% to 60%? Because the polls say they need an epic effectiveness rate in order to convince Americans to take the vaccine. I think it is really as simple as that.

Americans are skeptical of the vaccines for a number of reasons. The reality that they are minimally tested and rushed out in less than a year is one reason . The fact that the government and the media have been caught censoring or lying about Covid data is another reason. People just don’t trust the elites, and who can blame them? Who would trust a cabal of psychopaths to inject them with an unknown viral cocktail? Maybe their intentions are not so pure?

Sidney Powell For President - Accept No Substitutes....,

In case you missed it...

My favorite person in this fight for America, @SidneyPowell1, was on the @RealRLimbaugh show today hosted by @MarkSteynOnline.

If you didn't hear it live, I've broken down the audio and copied out some highlights just for you.

THREAD 👇🏻

The total interview was just over 15 min. With Twitter's video length limit, I cut it into 2:00 chunks.

Time stamps in the comments are based on the total audio length. 

find threads are easier to get through than video, so hope this is helpful to someone.

Q :15 – What’s the problem with Dominion Voting Systems?

@SidneyPowell1
A :20 – “The system was specifically created and designed by Venezuelan money and interests to rig elections for Hugo Chavez.”

:40 – “It has been used to rig this election to make it appear the votes were for Mr. Biden when Donald Trump won overwhelmingly, and I am in the process of collecting evidence through a firehose, to the point it feels like a tsunami now.”

1:11 - “100 Dominion employees have even taken any affiliation with Dominion off their LinkedIn account, and Dominion is scrubbing the names of people like crazy.”

1:40 - This all came out because their math experts identified the algorithm that was being run. It was changed to run 67% for Biden – votes were injected by that number in the hundreds of thousands.

2:09 - The exact same number of Biden votes were injected 3 times in Wisconsin and 2 times in Michigan (or vice versa) about 20 minutes apart.

2:21 The people who say that there’s no evidence of fraud are the people who want to cover up the fraud for their own interests.

2:28 Evidence is coming in showing that people who bought these Dominion systems for their state got special benefits on the side.

Sidney Powell Doesn't Strike Me As A Woman Prone To Empty Conversation....,

americanthinker |  We are learning more by the day about corrupt voting machines and software, and a scheme, as Trump attorney Sidney Powell describes, “organized and conducted with the help of Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media and even the media companies.”

It was less than a year ago that Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden were concerned about these voting machines, yet today this is all “conspiracy theory.” Was there foreign interference in the election via corrupted voting machines? Were U.S. votes routed through servers in Spain and Germany? Election interference was of great interest to congressional Democrats during Trump’s first term, yet they seem to have no interest in such interference today.

Where are the Republicans? Where are so-called conservatives? Where is the outrage? Where are Trump’s friends? Does he have any these days?

How ironic that George W. Bush was quick to congratulate “president-elect” Joe Biden. Bush barely 'won" his election in 2000, while his opponent Al Gore fought for 37 days before the U.S. Supreme Court forced his concession. But Bush felt it reasonable to fight dimpled and hanging chads in one single state, yet scoffs at Trump fighting multi-state fraud?

Failed former Republican primary candidate Chris Christie suggests it may soon be time for Trump to “move on.” What a show of support. No wonder his candidacy failed.

Another loser, Mitt Romney, joined the chorus. I would not be a bit surprised if Romney had the 2012 election stolen from him in the same way as is happening to Trump today. Yet like most establishment Republicans, Romney prefers to give a “statesman-like” concession speech rather than soil his wingtips in a street fight to claim what is legitimately his. Interestingly, the Romney family has financial ties to voting machines.

World leaders have been quick to call and congratulate the assumed president-elect, the café-au-lait crowd happy to see the America-first president sent packing in exchange for another sap in the White House willing to pay the credit card bills of their freeloading nations. Trump is learning who is friends are.

There are a few exceptions. Leaders from Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Slovenia, and North Korea have not offered Biden their congratulations, prudently waiting to see how this plays out. Perhaps they know more about a recent U.S. raid on a voting machine server facility in Frankfurt, Germany that might reveal an international conspiracy to switch votes in our recent election. Perhaps, as in the case of Mexico's leader, they know the smell of a stolen election when they see it

Has Jim Woodward Conquered Gravity And Built An Inertial Drive?

wired  |  Every spacecraft that has ever left Earth has relied on some type of propellant to get it to its destination. Typically a spacecraft moves by igniting its fuel in a combustion chamber and expelling hot gases. (Even more exotic forms of propulsion, such as ion thrusters, still require propellant.) That’s why humans have remained stuck so close to home. A spacecraft can only accelerate as long as it has fuel to burn or a planet to loop around for a gravitational assist. Those methods can’t even carry a vehicle all the way to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbor, in any reasonable amount of time. The fastest spacecraft ever built, the Parker Solar Probe, which will hit speeds over 400,000 miles per hour, would take thousands of years to get there.

Woodward’s MEGA drive is different. Instead of propellant, it relies on electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust. The stack of crystals, which store tiny amounts of energy, vibrates tens of thousands of times per second when zapped with electric current. Some of the vibrational frequencies harmonize as they roll through the device, and when the oscillations sync up in just the right way, the small drive lurches forward.

This might not sound like the secret to interstellar travel, but if that small lurch can be sustained, a spacecraft could theoretically produce thrust for as long as it had electric power. It wouldn’t accelerate quickly, but it could accelerate for a long time, gradually gaining in velocity until it was whipping its way across the galaxy. An onboard nuclear reactor could supply it with electric power for decades, long enough for an array of MEGA drives to reach velocities approaching the speed of light. If Woodward’s device works, it’d be the first propulsion system that could conceivably reach another solar system within the lifespan of an astronaut. How does it work? Ask Woodward and he’ll tell you his gizmo has merely tapped into the fabric of the universe and hitched a ride on gravity itself.

Sound impossible? A lot of theoretical physicists think so too. In fact, Woodward is certain most theoretical physicists think his propellantless thruster is nonsense. But in June, after two decades of halting progress, Woodward and Fearn made a minor change to the configuration of the thruster. Suddenly, the MEGA drive leapt to life. For the first time, Woodward seemed to have undeniable evidence that his impossible engine really worked. Then the pandemic hit.

On a clear night in March 1967, Woodward was stargazing on the rooftop of Pensión Santa Cruz, a hotel in the heart of Seville, in Spain. The 26-year-old physicist was struggling with his chosen profession and had taken a break from graduate work at New York University. He found himself drawn to fringe research topics, particularly those having to do with gravity, which he knew would make it hard to get a job. “It became clear to me simply by looking at the physics department around me that a bunch of people like that were unlikely to hire someone like me,” Woodward says. So he decided to try something else. He had picked up flamenco guitar as an undergrad and even performed in clubs in New York. Inspired by his aunt, a CIA officer who had learned to play the instrument while stationed in Madrid, he headed to Spain to pursue a career in it.

At the time, the space race was only a decade old and satellite spotting was a popular sport. As Woodward gazed up from atop his Spanish hotel, he saw a speck of light arcing across the sky and mentally calculated its path. But as he watched the satellite, it began deviating from its expected trajectory—first by a little and then by a lot.

Everything Woodward knew about satellites told him that what he was seeing should be impossible. It would take too much energy for a satellite to change its orbit like that, and most satellites weren’t able to shift more than a couple of degrees. And yet, he had just seen a satellite double back with his own eyes. He didn't conclude that engineers at NASA or in the Soviet Union must have secretly achieved a breakthrough in satellite propulsion. Instead, he believes he saw a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin. “Critters at least as clever as us had figured out how to get around spacetime far better than we are capable of doing,” Woodward says. That changed the question, he says, from if it was possible to how.

Never one to doubt the power of the human intellect, especially his own, Woodward reckoned he could build a similar interstellar propulsion system if he put his mind to it. “If somebody figured out how the hell to do something like that, they probably aren’t an awful lot smarter than I am,” Woodward recalls thinking at the time. “So I thought maybe I should devote a little time to trying to do that.” It was a project that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Woodward completed his master’s degree in physics at NYU in 1969, and he left to do a PhD in history at the University of Denver shortly after. His decision to pivot from physics to history was a pragmatic one. As a master’s student, he spent a lot of his time combing through old scientific journals in search of promising gravitational research that had been abandoned or hit a dead end so he could pick up the torch. “I was doing the history of science already, so I might as well get a degree in it,” Woodward says. “It was an obvious thing to do.” As an academic historian, he’d enjoy the job security that comes with uncontroversial research and still have the freedom to study fringe gravitational topics as an avocation. He accepted a position in the Cal State Fullerton history department in 1972.

Ah Yes…, By Its Loud Squeal, We Know A Bad Piglet Got Caught Under The Gate

justsecurity |  Dear U.S. Attorney Durham:

On May 13, 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed you to review the origins of the 2016 Justice Department investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. At some point, this review turned into a criminal investigation of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to undermine our democracy.

The need for your appointment was hard to understand at the time it was made, since the Justice Department’s independent Inspector General was already conducting a similar investigation that began in March 2018 into the same issues.  On December 9, 2019, the Inspector General issued his report and concluded that the 2016 Russia investigation had had a legitimate purpose and that there was no evidence of political bias against President Trump in how the investigation had been initiated or undertaken.

We are now in the closing stages of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Longstanding Department policies issued by the past three Attorneys General who served during an election year make plain that Department actions should not be taken in an election year that could influence or affect an election.  George J. Terwilliger III, who served as deputy attorney general under Attorney General William Barr in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, said in 2016, “There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election.”

I strongly urge you to follow this policy and not to issue any report, or bring any indictments, resulting from your investigation in these closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

Any public action by the Justice Department in this pre-election period that is associated with your investigation – which by its very nature involves actions taken during the Obama-Biden Administration – is bound to be used by President Trump for partisan political purposes to promote his re-election effort against Vice President Biden.

In testifying during his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Barr was asked whether there are “policies in place that try to insulate the investigations and the decisions of the Department of Justice and FBI from getting involved in elections?” Barr said yes and explained that the party in power has “their hands on the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political party.” But that is precisely what would occur here if a report is issued on your investigation of the Russia investigation or if indictments are brought at this critical stage of the presidential election.

You should not permit your long and distinguished career in the Justice Department to be permanently tainted, or your personal integrity to be irreparably impugned, by what would plainly be an effort to use your investigation to influence or affect the 2020 presidential election.

I Want To Live Under The Sun And High In The Clouds...,

mashable |  “We have better topographic data from Pluto than we do from Venus,” says Darby Dyer, the current chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Advisory Group, with a frustrated chuckle. “NASA and the majority of planetary scientists have bought into the notion that Mars is the most likely place to have water and evidence of life. Overturning that paradigm is a tough battle, but we’re fighting it.”

Dyer is 62; the days when Venus was thought to be a swamp planet are within her living memory. She also remembers being in grad school at MIT in the 1980s, on the day Ronald Reagan canceled a NASA mission that was going to take an orbital radar to Venus. 

“There were people crying in the corridors,” she says. “Ph.D.s whose whole theses vanished in an instant.” The Venus community gathered its energy and pushed back enough to create one final mission, planned for 1986, which was delayed by the Challenger shuttle explosion until 1989. That was Magellan. 

Still, even with that Magellan data and our limited Earth-based spectroscopy, what wonders and mysteries we’ve been able to uncover. There are the strange dark patches, large enough to affect the planet’s weather, which may be where those microorganisms are hanging out. A 2020 study says that Venus’ volcanoes are still active, erupting as we speak.

And it’s only been four years since a groundbreaking study that suggested we might have been right all along about Venus being covered in liquid water; we just got the wrong era. Turns out Venus had oceans between 4 billion and 1 billion years ago — way longer than liquid water existed on Mars, and more than enough time for it to develop life. 

“If you had water for 3 billion years, life probably arose on Venus before it did on Earth,” says Dyar. “Maybe they had trilobites in those oceans; maybe they got as far as whales.” 

We may raise CO2 in the atmosphere to the point where it threatens the threads of human civilization, but only a growing sun can boil the oceans and burn the land, creating enough CO2 to dominate the atmosphere for a full-on runaway greenhouse effect. 

But! It’s also possible that Venus was slammed by multiple impacts, including a possible former moon, which might explain why the whole place is spinning upside-down and so slowly. You know what would help us figure it out? More data. 

Right now we don’t even know what Venus’ core is made of, or whether it has tectonic plates like Earth, or whether there’s evidence of old oceans to be found in the atmosphere, or exactly what kind of organisms have clung to it like mushrooms thriving in the radioactive ruin of Chernobyl’s old reactor. 

It won’t be dinosaurs, but life on Venus may well have, uh, found a way. 

The question is: How soon can we?

Mitch, Go Head On And Ninja Turtle SCHLAP The Taste Out Of Andrew Cuomo's Mouth

CTH  |  The biggest of all the bigger financial issues around the economic shut-down will ultimately come down to a battle this spring/summer over a massive bailout for state governments to replace their missing revenue.  States like California, New Jersey, Illinois, Connecticut & New York have been struggling with financial issues for years.

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”  ~ Rahm Emanuel

Long before the Wuhan Virus those states were near financial collapse.  The only thing keeping them afloat was as expanding economy, and new revenue as a result of President Trump’s economic policies (making bigger pies).

The economic shut-down in those specific states makes their preexisting financial trouble exponentially worse.

Not only will CA, NJ, IL, CT and New York demand a bailout, a very massive bailout to cover their revenue shortfall, but they will almost certainly use the wuhan virus as an excuse to cover and bail-out preexisting budget deficits.  Governor Andrew Cuomo hinted toward his intention weeks ago.  He sees this as an opportunity to get federal money.

So when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell throws a bucket of ice water in the face of blue state governors who were anticipating to “make money” by forcing the country to subsidize their overindulgent spending habits, obviously Cuomo is apoplectic.

For several decades, and particularly since 2008, the issue of unfunded liabilities has been a growing problem for the Blue State governors.  One reason Obamacare was created was to address this issue on the union and healthcare side. However, the underlying over-spending by state legislators/governors was never addressed.

The solution of allowing states to declare bankruptcy has been a part of that discussion for years. However, every Blue state governor knows if they declare bankruptcy they will never sell another bond again…. which means no investment… which means they will implode.

If the laws changed allowing states to declare bankruptcy, internally the blue states would collapse… there would be a massive exodus… people would flee the rust and collapse…. housing values would plummet overnight in Blue states…. business would leave… unemployment would skyrocket…. it would be statewide chaos.

The ultimate result would be smaller populations within the Blue state misery zones.

Human Supremacy - A New Political Axis of Man's Possible Development?

jacobin |  Populism involves the exclusion of elements from society not considered a part of the “people,” usually cultural “others” and the ambiguously defined “elites” or “anti-nationals.” A nationalist populist discourse, as in the Indian case, differentiates between who belongs to the nation and who does not. Hindutva’s “people” is imagined as a religious and ethno-cultural Hindu community which excludes Muslims and liberal elites.

In addition to delimiting the authentic “people,” this form of populism typically relies on a leader who claims to be the sole representative of the people and the embodiment and authority of the popular will. Modi is a paradigmatic example of such a leader.

At an event hosted by the Indian diaspora in Houston, the “Howdy Modi?” rally, Modi’s answer to the rhetorical question was revealing: “Modi is nothing by himself. I am only a common man working on the orders of 1.3 billion people. So, when you ask, ‘Howdy Modi?’ I can only answer, ‘everything in Bharat is good.’” Despite the pretensions of humility, Modi understands the populist logic well: to ask the question how is Modi is precisely to ask how is the nation.

Additionally, this form of populism is a political style which involves a whole repertoire of staged, mediatized performances by the leader that are transmitted to wider audiences through media. Part of the performative rhetoric of such populist leaders centers around some kind of a pervasive crisis or threat. With Modi and the BJP, there is ever present specter of “Urban-Naxals,” “terrorists,” “anti-nationals,” “Tukde-Tukde Gang,” and “Khan Market Gang,” all of whom are portrayed as trying to undermine the integrity of the nation, and in effect polluting the purity of the people.

Why Pumpkinhead-Pencilneck Schiff So Smug?

spectator |  However many Ukraine whistleblowers there may or may not be, Cockburn’s source says that at least one of the (purported) seven has nothing to do with Ukraine at all. Instead, it’s claimed that this whistleblower reported a call between Trump and the Saudi ruler, Mohammed bin Salman. He or she is said to have had ‘concerns’ about what was said on the call about the president’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner. Kushner himself is known to have a very close relationship with MBS. Cockburn has previously written that Kushner may have been what Cosmo would call an ‘oversharer’ when it came to MBS. Unfortunately, it’s claimed that what he was sharing was American secrets: information Kushner had requested from the CIA would (allegedly) be echoed back in US intercepts of calls between members of the Saudi royal family. One source said this was why Kushner lost his intelligence clearances for a while.

According to Cockburn’s source about the seven whistleblowers, there’s more. It is that Kushner (allegedly) gave the green light to MBS to arrest the dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was later murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A second source tells Cockburn that this is true and adds a crucial twist to the story. This source claims that Turkish intelligence obtained an intercept of the call between Kushner and MBS. And President Erdogan used it to get Trump to roll over and pull American troops out of northern Syria before the Turks invaded. A White House official has told the Daily Mail that this story is ‘false nonsense’. However, Cockburn hears that investigators for the House Intelligence Committee are looking into it. Who knows whether any of this is true…but Adam Schiff certainly seems to be smiling a lot these days.

Exemplars or Mutant Fakirs?

wikipedia |  David Goggins (born February 17, 1975) is an American ultramarathon runner, ultra-distance cyclist, triathlete, motivational speaker and author. He is a retired United States Navy SEAL and former United States Air Force Tactical Air Control Party member who served in the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War. He is a former world record holder for the most pull-ups done in 24 hours. His self-help memoir, Can't Hurt Me, was released in 2018. 

wikipedia |  Dean Karnazes (English: /kɑːrˈnɛˈzɪs/ car-NEH-zis; born Constantine Karnazes; August 23, 1962), is an American ultramarathon runner, and author of Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, which details ultra endurance running for the general public.^[3][4]

When Will the Sub-Two Hour Marathon Happen in Open Competition?

wired |  On Saturday morning in Vienna, Austria, Eliud Kipchoge, the world's finest marathoner, became the first person in history to run 26.2 miles in under two hours. His time of 1:59:40 required him to maintain an average pace of just under 4:35 per mile. That is, to put it mildly, soul-searing speed. Even a supremely fit person would struggle to run at so aggressive a clip for more than five or six minutes in a row. On Saturday, Kipchoge held it for just shy of 120.

But Kipchoge's performance will not be recognized as an official world record. The event was not an open competition; it was held for Kipchoge and Kipchoge alone. What's more, a rotating cast of pacers shielded him from wind throughout the run, and a bicycle-riding support team was on hand at all times to deliver him water and fuel. It was not so much a race, in other words, as an exhibition event designed for speed. A one-man, all-or-nothing time trial.

Psyche - Foundation of Our Level II Constructions

Forbes |  NASA is preparing to explore a world made of metal. Confirming that the exciting Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration-led Psyche mission is now entering the build phase, NASA’s probe is now set to visit a mysterious asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It could be nothing less than the exposed core of a dead planet, with some suggesting that it could be worth a staggering $10,000 quadrillion.

What is asteroid Psyche?

While most asteroids are rocky or icy bodies, Psyche is thought to be a stripped planetary core, a very rare object in the solar system. While NASA missions like InSight drill into Mars to discover the origins of planets, Psyche offers an opportunity to inspect and study a planetary core up close. It appears to be the exposed iron-nickel core (just like Earth’s) of a proto-planet, a small world that formed early in the solar system's history, but never reached planetary size—much like Vesta and Ceres, which NASA's Dawn spacecraft explored. Could asteroid Psyche be the heart of an early planet as big as Mars that lost its rocky outer layers? Was it involved in violent collisions? NASA will help planetary scientists find out, and so tease-out lessons for how the solar system’s planets likely formed.

Elven Queen Plumbing The Abyssal Reaches Got Me Wanting To Live Forever...,

Quantamagazine |  Furey has gone further. In her most recent published paper, which appeared in May in The European Physical Journal C, she consolidated several findings to construct the full Standard Model symmetry group, SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1), for a single generation of particles, with the math producing the correct array of electric charges and other attributes for an electron, neutrino, three up quarks, three down quarks and their anti-particles. The math also suggests a reason why electric charge is quantized in discrete units — essentially, because whole numbers are.

However, in that model’s way of arranging particles, it’s unclear how to naturally extend the model to cover the full three particle generations that exist in nature. But in another new paper that’s now circulating among experts and under review by Physical Letters B, Furey uses C⊗O to construct the Standard Model’s two unbroken symmetries, SU(3) and U(1). (In nature, SU(2) × U(1) is broken down into U(1) by the Higgs mechanism, a process that imbues particles with mass.) In this case, the symmetries act on all three particle generations and also allow for the existence of particles called sterile neutrinos — candidates for dark matter that physicists are actively searching for now. “The three-generation model only has SU(3) × U(1), so it’s more rudimentary,” Furey told me, pen poised at a whiteboard. “The question is, is there an obvious way to go from the one-generation picture to the three-generation picture? I think there is.”

This is the main question she’s after now. The mathematical physicists Michel Dubois-Violette, Ivan Todorov and Svetla Drenska are also trying to model the three particle generations using a structure that incorporates octonions called the exceptional Jordan algebra. After years of working solo, Furey is beginning to collaborate with researchers who take different approaches, but she prefers to stick with the product of the four division algebras, R⊗C⊗H⊗O, acting on itself. It’s complicated enough and provides flexibility in the many ways it can be chopped up. Furey’s goal is to find the model that, in hindsight, feels inevitable and that includes mass, the Higgs mechanism, gravity and space-time.

Already, there’s a sense of space-time in the math. She finds that all multiplicative chains of elements of R⊗C⊗H⊗O can be generated by 10 matrices called “generators.” Nine of the generators act like spatial dimensions, and the 10th, which has the opposite sign, behaves like time. String theory also predicts 10 space-time dimensions — and the octonions are involved there as well. Whether or how Furey’s work connects to string theory remains to be puzzled out.

So does her future. She’s looking for a faculty job now, but failing that, there’s always the ski slopes or the accordion. “Accordions are the octonions of the music world,” she said — “tragically misunderstood.” She added, “Even if I pursued that, I would always be working on this project.”

Peace With Russia? Hollywood Made A Blueprint For That Azz....,

wikipedia |  President Kennedy had read Seven Days in May shortly after its publication and believed the scenario as described could actually occur in the United States. According to Frankenheimer in his director's commentary, production of the film received encouragement and assistance from Kennedy through White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who conveyed to Frankenheimer Kennedy's wish that the film be produced and that, although the Pentagon did not want the film made, the President would arrange to be visiting Hyannis Port for a weekend when the film needed to shoot outside the White House.^[7]

The story is set in the early 1970s, ten years in the future at the time of the film's 1964 release, and the Cold War is still a problem (in the 1962 book, the setting was May 1974 after a stalemated war in Iran). U.S. President Jordan Lyman has recently signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, and the subsequent ratification by the U.S. Senate has produced a wave of dissatisfaction, especially among Lyman's opposition and the military, who believe the Soviets cannot be trusted.

A Pentagon insider, United States Marine Corps Colonel "Jiggs" Casey (the Director of the Joint Staff), stumbles on evidence that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by the charismatic Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, intend to stage a coup d'etat to remove Lyman and his cabinet in seven days. Under the plan a secret Army unit known as ECOMCON (Emergency COMmunications CONtrol) will seize control of the country's telephone, radio, and television networks, while Congress is prevented from implementing the treaty. Although personally opposed to Lyman's policies, Casey is appalled by the plot and alerts Lyman, who gathers a circle of trusted advisors to investigate: Secret Service White House Detail Chief Art Corwin, Treasury Secretary Christopher Todd, advisor Paul Girard, and Senator Raymond Clark of Georgia.

Casey uses the pretense of a social visit to General Scott's former mistress to ferret out potential secrets that can be used against Scott, in the form of indiscreet letters. Meanwhile, the alcoholic Clark is sent to Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, to locate the secret base, and Girard leaves for the Mediterranean to obtain a confession from Vice Admiral Barnswell, who declined to participate in the coup. Girard gets the confession in writing, but is killed when his return flight crashes, while Clark is taken captive when he reaches the secret base. However, Clark convinces the base's deputy commander, Colonel Henderson, a friend of Casey's and not party to the coup, to help him escape. They reach Washington, DC, but Henderson is abducted during a moment apart from Clark.

Lyman calls Scott to the White House to demand that he and the other plotters resign. Scott initially denies the existence of the plot, but then tacitly admits to it while denouncing the treaty. Lyman argues that a coup in America would prompt the Soviets to make a preemptive strike. Scott maintains that the American people are behind him. Lyman is on the verge of confronting Scott with the letters obtained from Scott's mistress when he decides against it and allows Scott to leave.

Scott meets the other three Joint Chiefs, demanding they stay in line and reminding them that Lyman does not seem to have concrete evidence of their plot. Somewhat reassured, the others agree to continue the plan to appear on television and radio simultaneously on the next day to denounce Lyman. However, Lyman first holds a press conference, at which he demands the men's resignations. As he is speaking, Barnswell's hand-written confession, recovered from the plane crash, is handed to him. Copies are given to Scott and the other plotters, who have no choice but to call off the coup. The film ends with an address by Lyman to American people on the country's future.