Why UFO Research Has Always Been Clustered With "Paranormal" Research - It's A People Filter

9:04 that's the only explanation I can get is that that if they if people are here 9:10 from another civilization then they if they've understood the the 9:15 higher the higher the finer points of quantum of quantum physics and how to 9:20 couple that from particles into beings that can do what quantum what particles 

The best way to understand their approach is by considering something else ordered yet non-repeating: "quasicrystals." A typical crystal has a regular, repeating structure, like the hexagons in a honeycomb. A quasicrystal still has order, but its patterns never repeat. (Penrose tiling is one example of this.) Even more mind-boggling is that quasicrystals are crystals from higher dimensions projected, or squished down, into lower dimensions. Those higher dimensions can even be beyond physical space's three dimensions: A 2D Penrose tiling, for instance, is a projected slice of a 5-D lattice.

9:25 can do now when I was at wright-patterson we had the flying saucers it went up I think they covered the distance from 9:32 Columbus to Detroit in something like equivalent of about 20,000 miles an hour 9:39 I don't think anyone in the canoe in the ordinary aerospace business would have 9:46 had any knowledge of what they were even talking about if you mentioned quantum 9:51 physics or or wormholes are the type of things we know now because if you went 9:59 to CERN and talked to the particle physicists they would tell you certainly some of this was possible because they 10:06 see it all the time where they think they see mass they really see they 10:12 really see energy frozen in it in a time quantum and what they're seeing is not 10:18 is this is really a frozen bundle of energy and it moves back and forth 10:25 almost without any restriction 

I thought there were enough credible stories that I may not be able to 10:32 explain them but they weren't phenomenon that were people's imagination whatever 10:41 they saw was real but I couldn't explain how it how it was real what made it real but I think what they I think they saw 10:48 what they saw near st. Louis there was a fairly large triangular object seen and 10:54 it covered the distance down to south st. Louis in some in some of its 11:00 sightings it was moving relatively benign Lee but then it it literally jumped about 20 miles in a sec couple of 11:07 seconds and I've received a lot of phone calls from the local newspapers and TV 11:13 stations is how can that be and 

I said I don't know how it can be except if you 11:18 explain it through something like a quantum physics explanation of time and 11:24 space relationships it gave you time and space travel but other than that I don't 11:30 there's no way I know that I can put the biggest rocket engine I could think of 11:36 on it it still couldn't get there at that speed and the noise and the sounds 11:42 you would make doing something like that would wake everybody up for 10 miles and 11:47 it made no sound at all it's see it starts out at hover and it literally almost disappears and pops 11:53 over here so it's not like it's not like a cartoon where it goes whoosh it's 12:00 almost like it disappears and comes up over here at least that the descriptions 12:06 that some of the police officers gave to it a lot of combat pilots routinely go 12:13 up to 7 and 8 GS but that's a very specific direction that's from your head 12:19 downward along the axis of your spine if you were to take that what's called 12:24 eyeballs in which is when you accelerate the forces this way you literally would 12:32 have your eyeballs and compressed out of their sockets and you have brain damage so that the G's the do that might be in 12:40 the level of order of so no that's not physically possible for any even even insects to take that level 12:48 of acceleration even over a short period of time you might get in an automobile 12:53 accident you might get a hundred two hundred and fifty G's and that's when the car is completely crushed so that's 13:00 what happened would happen to a human being if that were a conventional force accelerator so it's not a conventional 13:06 force accelerator because if there's people in human beings in them or something being in them that isn't 13:13 crushed then it has to be a different way of doing it the hard part is to find 13:19 a way to physically do that 

you know there are people who have been experimenting with zero-point energy or 13:25 try to tap zero-point energy for years every once in a while someone will do it 13:30 accidentally they'll call it cold fusion but I don't think it's cold fusion I just think it's a zero-point energy tap 13:36 except for three people that I know no 13:41 one has been able to control it when it happens it happens for a short period of time 13:47 and it's almost always destructive it's like drilling a hole into the base of Grand Coulee Dam and all of a sudden 13:54 this jet of water comes out that literally has enough pressure to cut you in half without a valve on it you can't 14:02 shut it off does one guy that that that 14:07 a friend of mine actually visited in Ann Arbor Michigan that was I consider a mathematical genius that actually 14:14 figured out a way to control it he was so paranoid he divorced his wife 14:20 left his wife and children and went in hiding because he was terrified that someone 14:26 would would kill him for the knowledge that he had the ability to tap this whenever he chose to and control it we 14:33 don't know worried we haven't seen him in five years I don't worry is you know right now today you've got an energy 

14:39 problem with the price of oil what do you think would happen if you introduced 14:45 an ability to attempt zero-point energy represents about 40 to 50 megawatts of 14:53 power per cubic inch of space that's a lot of power 15:00 that's 4600 million watts of power and 15:07 if you could tap it at will then no one 15:12 would have to sell gasoline or oil anymore you would just tap into it it would be it would be like taking and 15:20 going out to the Great Lakes and taking out one drop and using it it would you'd 15:25 hardly miss it and since it permeates the whole universe and it continually 15:31 fluctuates as it as as that as the matter and antimatter interact it's not 15:40 like it's a steady lake it's um you see it's a pool the size of the universe so 15:45 you'd never for what we've used before you never even miss it the only thing this one guy claimed that happened is if 15:52 you bottle it and move it to another location and release it he sounded 16:00 exactly like mr. Spock he said you create a tear in the in the time time 16:07 domain of the of local space and actually caused a problem which he 16:13 claims he did and he will never do it again which is bottle and move it the other part is that you're knock it 16:19 doesn't work on conventional jet engines one has to create an actual zero point 16:25 energy engine to do that this one guy in Ann Arbor Mich Michigan had one running in his basement 16:30 not connected to any power source whatsoever sitting in the middle of a table and it had been running for a year 

Trust Neither Your Senses Or Your Ordinary Waking State

Consciousness Come After Language?

OCBBM | The Features of Consciousness - I. Spatialization. The first and most primitive aspect of consciousness is what we already have had occasion to refer to, the paraphrand of almost every mental metaphor we can make, the mental space which we take over as the very habitat of it all. If I ask you to think of your head, then your feet, then the breakfast you had this morning, and then the Tower of London, and then the constellation of Orion, these things have the quality of being spatially separated; and it is this quality I am here referring to. When we introspect (a metaphor of seeing into something), it is upon this metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly renewing and 'enlarging' with each new thing or relation consciousized. In Chapter 1, we spoke of how we invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others. The word invent is perhaps too strong except in the ontological sense. We rather assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in others. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This we shall call spatialization. Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever — except by analog. You cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in side-by-sideness. (leading to other problems and limitations previously noted (Bearden's 4th Law of Logic)) This spatialization is characteristic of all conscious thought. If you are now thinking of where in all the theories of mind my particular theory fits, you are first habitually 'turning' to your mind-space where abstract things can be 'separated out' and 'put beside' each other to be 'looked at' — as could never happen physically or in actuality. You then make the metaphor of theories as concrete objects, then the metaphor of a temporal succession of such objects as a synchronic array, and thirdly, the metaphor of the characteristics of theories as physical characteristics, all of some degree so they can be 'arranged' in a kind of order. And you then make the further expressive metaphor of 'fit'. The actual behavior of fitting, of which 'fit' here is the analog in consciousness, may vary from person to person or from culture to culture, depending on personal experience of arranging things in some kind of order, or of fitting objects into their receptacles, etc. The metaphorical substrate of thought is thus sometimes very complicated, and difficult to unravel. But every conscious thought that you are having in reading this book can by such an analysis be traced back to concrete actions in a concrete world. 2. Excerption. In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' anything in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of actual behavior j and in actual behavior we can only see or pay attention to a part of a thing at any one moment. And so in consciousness. We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it. And this is all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of our actual behavior. Thus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring. Or, if you think of the city which you are now in, you will excerpt some feature, such as a particular building or tower or crossroads. Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are then thinking of yourself. In all these instances, we find no difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were. Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them. The variables controlling excerption are deserving of much more thought and study. For on them the person's whole consciousness of the world and the persons with whom he is interacting depend. Your excerptions of someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him. If you like him, the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the unpleasant. The causation may be in either direction. How we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of world we feel we are living in. Take for example one's relatives when one was a child. If we excerpt them as their failures, their hidden conflicts, their delusions, well, that is one thing. But if we excerpt them at their happiest, in their idiosyncratic delights, it is quite another world. Writers and artists are doing in a controlled way what happens 'in' consciousness more haphazardly. Excerption is distinct from memory. An excerpt of a thing is in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories. If I wish to remember what I was doing last summer, I first have an excerption of the time concerned, which may be a fleeting image of a couple of months on the calendar, until I rest in an excerption of a particular event, such as walking along a particular riverside. And from there I associate around it and retrieve mem-ories about last summer. This is what we mean by reminiscence, and it is a particular conscious process which no animal is capable of. Reminiscence is a succession of excerptions. Each so-called association in consciousness is an excerption, an aspect or image, if you will, something frozen in time, excerpted from the experience on the basis of personality and changing situational factors. 3. The Analog 'I'. A most important 'feature' of this metaphor 'world' is the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog 'I', which can 'move about' vicarially in our 'imagination', 'doing'things that we are not actually doing. There are of course many uses for such an analog 'I'. We imagine 'ourselves' 'doing' this or that, and thus 'make' decisions on the basis of imagined 'outcomes' that would be impossible if we did not have an imagined 'self' behaving in an imagined 'world'. In the example in the section on spatialization, it was not your physical behavioral self that was trying to 'see' where my theory 'fits' into the array of alternative theories. It was your analog 'I'. If we are out walking, and two roads diverge in a wood, and we know that one of them comes back to our destination after a much more circuitous route, we can 'traverse' that longer route with our analog 'I' to see if its vistas and ponds are worth the longer time it will take. Without consciousness with its vicarial analog 'I', we could not do this. 4. The Metaphor 'Me'. The analog 'I' is, however, not simply that. It is also a metaphor 'me'. As we imagine ourselves strolling down the longer path we indeed catch 'glimpses' of 'ourselves', as we did in the exercises of Chapter 1, where we called them autoscopic images. We can both look out from within the imagined self at the imagined vistas, or we can step back a bit and see ourselves perhaps kneeling down for a drink of water at a particular brook. There are of course quite profound problems here, particularly in the relationship of the 'I' to the 'me'. But that is another treatise. And I am only indicating the nature of the problem. 5. Narratization. In consciousness, we are always seeing our vicarial selves as the main figures in the stories of our lives. In the above illustration, the narratization is obvious, namely, walk-ing along a wooded path. But it is not so obvious that we are constantly doing this whenever we are being conscious, and this I call narratization. Seated where I am, I am writing a book and this fact is imbedded more or less in the center of the story of my life, time being spatialized into a journey of my days and years. New situations are selectively perceived as part of this ongoing story, perceptions that do not fit into it being unnoticed or at least unremembered. More important, situations are chosen which are congruent to this ongoing story, until the picture I have of myself in my life story determines how I am to act and choose in novel situations as they arise. The assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a particular thing is all a part of narratization. Such causes as reasons may be true or false, neutral or ideal. Consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing. The thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth, purpose and cause inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in consciousness. But it is not just our own analog 'I' that we are narratizing; it is everything else in consciousness. A stray fact is narratized to fit with some other stray fact. A child cries in the street and we narratize the event into a mental picture of a lost child and a parent searching for it. A cat is up in a tree and we narratize the event into a picture of a dog chasing it there. Or the facts of mind as we can understand them into a theory of consciousness. 6. Conciliation. A final aspect of consciousness I wish to mention here is modeled upon a behavioral process common to most mammals. It really springs from simple recognition, where a slightly ambiguous perceived object is made to conform to some previously learned schema, an automatic process sometimes called assimilation. We assimilate a new stimulus into our conception, or schema about it, even though it is slightly different. Since we never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in exactly the same way, this process of assimilation into previous experience is going on all the time as we perceive our world. We are putting things together into recognizable objects on the basis of the previously learned schemes we have of them. Now assimilation consciousized is conciliation. A better term for it might be compatibilization, but that seems something too rococo. What I am designating by conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space what narratization does in mindtime or spatialized time. It brings things together as conscious objects just as narra-tization brings things together as a story. And this fitting together into a consistency or probability is done according to rules built up in experience. In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations compatible with each other, just as in external perception the new stimulus and the internal conception are made to agree. If we are narratizing ourselves as walking along a wooded path, the succession of excerpts is automatically made compatible with such a journey. Or if in daydreaming two excerpts or narratizations happen to begin occurring at the same time, they are fused or conciliated. If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the same time, you automatically conciliate them by having the tower rising from the meadow. But if I ask you to think of the mountain meadow and an ocean at the same time, conciliation tends not to occur and you are likely to think of one and then the other. You can only bring them together by a narratization. Thus there are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such principles are learned and are based on the structure of the world. Let me summarize as a way of 'seeing' where we are and the direction in which our discussion is going. We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space. Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first. This has been a difficult chapter. But I hope I have sketched out with some plausibility that the notion of consciousness as a metaphor-generated model of the world leads to some quite definite deductions, and that these deductions are testable in our own everyday conscious experience. It is only, of course, a beginning, a somewhat rough-hewn beginning, which I hope to develop in a future work. But it is enough to return now to our major inquiry of the origin of it all, saving further amplification of the nature of consciousness itself for later chapters. If consciousness is this invention of an analog world on the basis of language, paralleling the behavioral world even as the world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things, what then can we say about its origin? We have arrived at a very interesting point in our discussion, and one that is completely contradictory to all of the alternative solutions to the problem of the origin of consciousness which we discussed in the introductory chapter. For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

 

Vision Neither Directly Or Accurately Reports Reality

frontiersin |  Sensory perception is often the most striking proof of something factual—when we perceive something, we interpret it and take it as “objective”, “real”. Most obviously, you can experience this with eyewitness testimonies: If an eyewitness has “seen it with the naked eye”, judges, jury members and attendees take the reports of these percepts not only as strong evidence, but usually as fact—despite the active and biasing processes on basis of perception and memory. Indeed, it seems that there is no better, no more “proof” of something being factual knowledge than having perceived it. The assumed link between perception and physical reality is particularly strong for the visual sense—in fact, we scrutinize it only when sight conditions have been unfortunate, when people have bad vision or when we know that the eyewitness was under stress or was lacking in cognitive faculties. When people need even more proof of reality than via the naked eye, they intuitively try to touch the to-be-analyzed entity (if at all possible) in order to investigate it haptically. Feeling something by touch seems to be the ultimate perceptual experience in order for humans to speak of physical proof (Carbon and Jakesch, 2013).

We can analyze the quality of our perceptual experiences by standard methodological criteria. By doing so we can regularly find out that our perception is indeed mostly very reliable and also objective (Gregory and Gombrich, 1973)—but only if we employ standard definitions of “objective” as being consensual among different beholders. Still, even by meeting these methodological criteria, we cannot give something in evidence about physical reality. It seems that knowledge about the physical properties of objects cannot be gained by perception, so perception is neither “veridical” nor “valid” in the strict sense of the words—the properties of the “thing in itself” remain indeterminate in any empirical sense (Kant, 1787/1998). We “reliably” and “objectively” might perceive the sun going up in the morning and down in the evening; the physical relations are definitely different, as we have known at least since Nicolaus Copernicus’s proposed heliocentricism—it might also be common sense that the Earth is a spheroid for most people, still the majority of people have neither perceived the Earth as spherical nor represented it like that; one reason for this is that in everyday life contexts the illusion of a plane works perfectly well to guide us in the planning and execution of our actions (Carbon, 2010b).

Limitations of the Possibility of Objective Perception

The limitations of perception are even more far reaching: our perception is not only limited when we do not have access to the thing in itself, it is very practically limited to the quality of processing and the general specifications of our perceptual system. For instance, our acoustic sense can only register and process a very narrow band of frequencies ranging from about 16 Hz–20 kHz as a young adult—this band gets narrower and narrower with increasing age. Typically, infrasonic and ultrasonic bands are just not perceivable despite being essential for other species such as elephants and bats, respectively. The perception of the environment and, consequently, the perception and representation of the world as such, is different for these species—what would be the favorite music of an elephant, which preference would a bat indicate if “honestly asked”? What does infrasonic acoustics sound and feel like? Note: infrasonic frequencies can also be perceived by humans; not acoustically in a strict sense but via vibrations—still, the resulting experiences are very different (cf. Nagel, 1974). To make such information accessible we need transformation techniques; for instance, a Geiger-Müller tube for making ionizing radiation perceivable as we have not developed any sensory system for detecting and feeling this band of extremely high frequency electromagnetic radiation.

But even if we have access to given information from the environmental world, it would be an illusion to think of “objective perception” of it—differences in perception across different individuals seem to be obvious: this is one reason for different persons having different tastes, but it is even more extreme: even within a lifetime of one person, the perceptual qualities and quantities which we can process change. Elderly people, for instance, often have yellowish corneas yielding biased color perception reducing the ability to detect and differentiate bluish color spectra. So even objectivity of perceptions in the sense of consensual experience is hardly achievable, even within one species, even within one individual—just think of fashion phenomena (Carbon, 2011a), of changes in taste (Martindale, 1990) or the so-called cycle of preferences (Carbon, 2010a)! Clearly, so-called objective perception is impossible, it is an illusion.

Illusory Construction of the World

The problem with the idea of veridical perception of the world is further intensified when taking additional perceptual phenomena, which demonstrate highly constructive qualities of our perceptual system, into account. A very prominent example of this kind is the perceptual effect which arises when any visual information which we want to process falls on the area of the retina where the so-called blind spot is located 

Interestingly, visual information that is mapped on the blind spot is not just dropped—this would be the easiest solution for the visual apparatus. It is also not rigidly interpolated, for instance, by just doubling neighbor information, but intelligently complemented by analysing the meaning and Gestalt of the context. If we, for example, are exposed to a couple of lines, the perceptual system would complement the physically non-existing information of the blind spot by a best guess heuristic how the lines are interconnected in each case, mostly yielding a very close approximation to “reality” as it uses most probable solutions. Finally, we experience clear visual information, seemingly in the same quality as the one which mirrors physical perception—in the end, the “physical perception” and the “constructed perception”, are of the same quality, also because the “physical perception” is neither a depiction of physical reality, but is also constructed by top-down processes based on best guess heuristic as a kind of hypothesis testing or problem solving (Gregory, 1970).

Binaural Beats Exist Solely As A Consequence Of The Interaction Of Perceptions Within The Brain

amadeux  |  If two tuning forks of slightly different pitch are struck simultaneously, the resulting sound waves and wanes periodically. The modulations are referred to as beats; their frequency is equal to the difference between the frequencies of the original tones. For example, a tuning fork with a characteristic pitch of 440 hertz, if struck at the same time, will produce beats with a frequency of six hertz.

In modern investigations tuning forks are replaced by electronic oscillators, which can supply tones of precisely controlled pitch, purity, and intensity. Beats are produced when the outputs of two oscillators tuned to slightly different frequencies are combined electrically and applied to a loudspeaker. Alternatively, the signals can be applied individually to separate speakers and the beats will still be heard. The result is the same whether the tones are combined electrically and then converted into sound, or converted into sound separately and then combined.

A quite different phenomenon results when stereophonic earphones are used and the signals are applied separately to each ear. Under the right circumstances beats can be perceived, but they are of an entirely different character. They are called binaural beats, and in many ways they are more interesting than ordinary beats, which in this discussion will be called monaural.

Monaural beats can be heard with both ears, but one ear is sufficient to perceive them. Binaural beats require the combined action of both ears. They exist as a consequence of the interaction of perceptions within the brain, and they can be used to investigate some of the brain’s processes.

The physical mechanism of monaural beats is a special case of wave interference. At any instant the amplitude of the resulting sound is equal to the algebraic sum of the amplitudes of the original tones. The signals are reinforced when they are in phase, that is, when the peaks and nulls of their waves coincide. Destructive interference diminishes the net amplitude when the waves are in opposition. The pure tones used in these experiments are described by sine waves’ the resulting beats are slowly varying functions similar to, but not precisely conforming to, a sine wave.

A beat frequency of about six hertz, as in the example given above, would sound something like vibrato in music (although vibrato is frequency modulation rather than amplitude modulation). If the interval between frequencies is made smaller, very slow beats can be produced, down to about on per second, to perceive. Rapid beats, up to about 30 hertz, are heard as roughness superimposed on the sound, rather like a Scotsman’s burr. With still greater intervals beats are not heard; the two tones are perceived separately.

Beats are rarely encountered in nature because in nature sustained pure tones are rare. They abound, however, in mechanical devices. In an airplane, jet engines operating at slightly different speeds may produce a very strong-beat, often recognized only as a feeling “in the pit of the stomach.” Acoustical engineers can filter out the whine of the engines, but the slow vibrations are difficult to suppress. Occupants of apartment houses may be annoyed by beats produced by machinery, such as two blowers running at different speeds, but they will have a hard time finding the source.

On the other hand, beats are used to advantage where frequencies must be determined precisely. Electrical engineers compare the output of a test oscillator with that of a standard oscillator by detecting the beats produced when their signals are combined. The tuning of pianos is another process that depends on beats. Typically the piano tuner will first listen for the beats produced by a tuning fork of 440 hertz and the A above middle C, and tighten or loosen the A wire until the beats slow to zero. He then strikes the A key and the D key below it and tunes the latter wire until 10 beats per second are heard. That frequency is produced by the interaction of the A string’s second harmonic, or second multiple (2 x 44 0 = 180), and the D string’s third harmonic (3 x 290 = 870). In this fashion, key by key, the piano is tuned; in theory it could be done even by someone who is tone-deaf.

Binaural beats were discovered in 1839 by a German experimenter named H. W. Dove, but as late as 1915 they were considered a trivial special case of monaural beats. It was argued that each ear was hearing sounds intended for the other. This extraneous result could be eliminated by placing the tuning forks in separate rooms, with the subject in a third room between them, and guiding the sounds through tubes to each ear. It was necessary to carefully seal each tube to the head, however, and another objection was raised; that sound presentation to one ear could be conducted through the skull to the other.

Bone conduction is well established, and indeed some hearing aids operate on this principle, although sound is attenuated a thousandfold from ear to ear. The possible contribution of bone conduction to the perception of binaural beats is eliminated, however, by the use of modern stereophonic earphones. Such earphones have padding, often liquid filled, to insulate the head from the sound source, and are designed explicitly to prevent conduction effects. Indeed, stereophonic recordings played through earphones can sound unnatural because the instruments seem too isolated.

The difference most immediately apparent between monaural and binaural beats is that binaural beats can be heard only when the tones used to produce them are of low pitch. Binaural beats are best perceived when the carrier frequency is about 440 hertz; above that frequency they become less distinct and above about 1,000 hertz they vanish altogether. No person I have tested reports hearing beats for frequencies above 900 hertz. Experimental conditions, particularly the intensity of the sounds and the type of earphones used can affect the results, however, and other investigators report detecting beats produced by tones up to almost 1,500 hertz. At the other end of the scale beats also become elusive. Below about 90 hertz the subject may confuse the beats with the tones used to produce them.

J. C. R. Licklider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a technique when he was working at Harvard University to measure a spectrum of binaural beats [see upper illustration on page 102]. He adopted the frequency of one oscillator until the interval was large enough so that the beats seemed “rough”; then he noted the frequency of the unchanged reference oscillator. Next he changed the setting of the reference oscillator and repeated the procedure. In this way the range of perception of each subject was recorded.

Another distinguishing characteristic of binaural beats is their muffled sound. Monaural beats produced with sounds of equal intensity pulse from loudness to silence, as their wave form would suggest. Binaural beats, on the other hand, are only a slight modulation of a loud background. I have tried to estimate the depth of the modulation, and it seems to be about three decibels, or about a tenth of the loudness of a whisper. In order to help subjects recognize these relatively faint effects I usually present signals with monaural beats and then suddenly change to the binaural mode. With tones of about 440 hertz it usually takes two or three seconds for the subject to recognize the binaural beats.
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If The Conscious Mind Is Fitted To The Photon Interaction, What Is The Subconscious Mind Fitted To?

What You Call Your Conscious Mind Is Fitted To The Photon Interaction

The Conscious Mind is Fitted to the Photon Interaction What is normally referred to as the "conscious, thinking mind" is simply a functioning temporal (rigorously, chronotopological) mechanism that is painfully built up in the individual's awareness (his mind in the greater sense of both thought and awareness, whether monocular or multiocular) by training, conditioning and experience. Its functioning is largely conditioned by one's 90% or so attention to visual stimuli (to the partial reality remaining after photon interaction has been invoked, and to the memory-collated ordering of vast numbers of such photon interactions) and by one's cultural conditioning - which itself has been almost exclusively conditioned and shaped by the monocular photon interaction at base root. Thus, since the beginning of man, (Bearden radically overstates the case here. It would be more accurate to say that since a time definite in the western epoch) his conscious, rational mind has been trained and constructed to function almost exclusively in basic correspondence with the photon interaction, and his experiential reality consists of the partial reality stripped from fundamental reality by photon interaction. All "perceived differences," e.g., are created by this deep mind-set. As has been previously pointed out, ⁶ the solitary human problem responsible for all man's inhumanity to his fellow man is directly dependent upon man's almost exclusive detection, observation, perception, and conception of "difference" between humans, these "differences" being due exclusively and totally to the fitting of men's conscious minds to the photon interaction's monocular separation of spatial reality from nonspatial reality, i.e., to ∂/∂T (L³T) => L³

Such well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, photon interaction also is responsible for the scientist's well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, the present imperfect and incomplete three laws of logic, as presented by Aristotle. The depth of that devotion and enslavement is evidenced by the fact that the resolution of such paradoxes as Heraclitus's problem of change have eluded the best minds of humanity for several thousands of years. Indeed, these paradoxes cannot be resolved by the conscious, rational mind in its present state, for it has been most firmly constructed and fitted to function in accordance with the photon interaction.⁷ One cannot hope to resolve any logical paradox by using only those same logical methods that found the situation to be paradoxical in the first place!

The Limits Of Western Mentality REDUX (Originally Posted 10/27/07)

The Conscious Mind is Fitted to the Photon Interaction What is normally referred to as the "conscious, thinking mind" is simply a functioning temporal (rigorously, chronotopological) mechanism that is painfully built up in the individual's awareness (his mind in the greater sense of both thought and awareness, whether monocular or multiocular) by training, conditioning and experience. Its functioning is largely conditioned by one's 90% or so attention to visual stimuli (to the partial reality remaining after photon interaction has been invoked, and to the memory-collated ordering of vast numbers of such photon interactions) and by one's cultural conditioning - which itself has been almost exclusively conditioned and shaped by the monocular photon interaction at base root. Thus, since the beginning of man, (Bearden radically overstates the case here. It would be more accurate to say that since a time definite in the western epoch) his conscious, rational mind has been trained and constructed to function almost exclusively in basic correspondence with the photon interaction, and his experiential reality consists of the partial reality stripped from fundamental reality by photon interaction. All "perceived differences," e.g., are created by this deep mind-set. As has been previously pointed out, ⁶ the solitary human problem responsible for all man's inhumanity to his fellow man is directly dependent upon man's almost exclusive detection, observation, perception, and conception of "difference" between humans, these "differences" being due exclusively and totally to the fitting of men's conscious minds to the photon interaction's monocular separation of spatial reality from nonspatial reality, i.e., to ∂/∂T (L³T) => L³

Such well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, photon interaction also is responsible for the scientist's well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, the present imperfect and incomplete three laws of logic, as presented by Aristotle. The depth of that devotion and enslavement is evidenced by the fact that the resolution of such paradoxes as Heraclitus's problem of change have eluded the best minds of humanity for several thousands of years. Indeed, these paradoxes cannot be resolved by the conscious, rational mind in its present state, for it has been most firmly constructed and fitted to function in accordance with the photon interaction.⁷ One cannot hope to resolve any logical paradox by using only those same logical methods that found the situation to be paradoxical in the first place!

The Limits Of Western Mentality

The Conscious Mind is Fitted to the Photon Interaction What is normally referred to as the "conscious, thinking mind" is simply a functioning temporal (rigorously, chronotopological) mechanism that is painfully built up in the individual's awareness (his mind in the greater sense of both thought and awareness, whether monocular or multiocular) by training, conditioning and experience. Its functioning is largely conditioned by one's 90% or so attention to visual stimuli (to the partial reality remaining after photon interaction has been invoked, and to the memory-collated ordering of vast numbers of such photon interactions) and by one's cultural conditioning - which itself has been almost exclusively conditioned and shaped by the monocular photon interaction at base root. Thus, since the beginning of man, (Bearden radically overstates the case here. It would be more accurate to say that since a time definite in the western epoch) his conscious, rational mind has been trained and constructed to function almost exclusively in basic correspondence with the photon interaction, and his experiential reality consists of the partial reality stripped from fundamental reality by photon interaction. All "perceived differences," e.g., are created by this deep mind-set. As has been previously pointed out, ⁶ the solitary human problem responsible for all man's inhumanity to his fellow man is directly dependent upon man's almost exclusive detection, observation, perception, and conception of "difference" between humans, these "differences" being due exclusively and totally to the fitting of men's conscious minds to the photon interaction's monocular separation of spatial reality from nonspatial reality, i.e., to ∂/∂T (L³T) => L³

Such well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, photon interaction also is responsible for the scientist's well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, the present imperfect and incomplete three laws of logic, as presented by Aristotle. The depth of that devotion and enslavement is evidenced by the fact that the resolution of such paradoxes as Heraclitus's problem of change have eluded the best minds of humanity for several thousands of years. Indeed, these paradoxes cannot be resolved by the conscious, rational mind in its present state, for it has been most firmly constructed and fitted to function in accordance with the photon interaction.⁷ One cannot hope to resolve any logical paradox by using only those same logical methods that found the situation to be paradoxical in the first place!

Just A Different Way Of Thinking About The Fabric Of Reality

phys.org  |  By shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci numbers at atoms inside a quantum computer, physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter. The phase has the benefits of two time dimensions despite there still being only one singular flow of time, the physicists report July 20 in Nature.

This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu.

The approach's use of an "extra" time dimension "is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter," says Dumitrescu, who worked on the project as a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City. "I've been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting."

The best way to understand their approach is by considering something else ordered yet non-repeating: "quasicrystals." A typical crystal has a regular, repeating structure, like the hexagons in a honeycomb. A quasicrystal still has order, but its patterns never repeat. (Penrose tiling is one example of this.) Even more mind-boggling is that quasicrystals are crystals from higher dimensions projected, or squished down, into lower dimensions. Those higher dimensions can even be beyond physical space's three dimensions: A 2D Penrose tiling, for instance, is a projected slice of a 5-D lattice.

Dumitrescu spearheaded the study's theoretical component with Andrew Potter of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Romain Vasseur of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Ajesh Kumar of the University of Texas at Austin. The experiments were carried out on a quantum computer at Quantinuum in Broomfield, Colorado, by a team led by Brian Neyenhuis.

The workhorses of the team's quantum computer are 10 atomic ions of an element called ytterbium. Each ion is individually held and controlled by electric fields produced by an ion trap, and can be manipulated or measured using laser pulses.

Each of those atomic ions serves as what scientists dub a quantum bit, or "qubit." Whereas traditional computers quantify information in bits (each representing a 0 or a 1), the qubits used by quantum computers leverage the strangeness of quantum mechanics to store even more information. Just as Schrödinger's cat is both dead and alive in its box, a qubit can be a 0, a 1 or a mashup—or "superposition"—of both. That extra information density and the way qubits interact with one another promise to allow quantum computers to tackle computational problems far beyond the reach of conventional computers.

There's a big problem, though: Just as peeking in Schrödinger's box seals the cat's fate, so does interacting with a qubit. And that interaction doesn't even have to be deliberate. "Even if you keep all the atoms under tight control, they can lose their quantumness by talking to their environment, heating up or interacting with things in ways you didn't plan," Dumitrescu says. "In practice, experimental devices have many sources of error that can degrade coherence after just a few laser pulses."

The challenge, therefore, is to make qubits more robust. To do that, physicists can use "symmetries," essentially properties that hold up to change. (A snowflake, for instance, has rotational symmetry because it looks the same when rotated by 60 degrees.) One method is adding time symmetry by blasting the atoms with rhythmic laser pulses. This approach helps, but Dumitrescu and his collaborators wondered if they could go further. So instead of just one time symmetry, they aimed to add two by using ordered but non-repeating laser pulses.

More Of The Less...,

aeon  |  Calling these numbers imaginary came later, in the 1600s, when the philosopher René Descartes argued that, in geometry, any structure corresponding to imaginary numbers must be impossible to visualise or draw. By the 1800s, thinkers such as Carl Friedrich Gauss and Leonhard Euler included imaginary numbers in their studies. They discussed complex numbers made up of a real number added to an imaginary number, such as 3+4i, and found that complex-valued mathematical functions have different properties than those that only produce real numbers.

Yet, they still had misgivings about the philosophical implications of such functions existing at all. The French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy wrote that he was ‘abandoning’ the imaginary unit ‘without regret because we do not know what this alleged symbolism signifies nor what meaning to give to it.’

In physics, however, the oddness of imaginary numbers was disregarded in favour of their usefulness. For instance, imaginary numbers can be used to describe opposition to changes in current within an electrical circuit. They are also used to model some oscillations, such as those found in grandfather clocks, where pendulums swing back and forth despite friction. Imaginary numbers are necessary in many equations pertaining to waves, be they vibrations of a plucked guitar string or undulations of water along a coast. And these numbers hide within mathematical functions of sine and cosine, familiar to many high-school trigonometry students.

At the same time, in all these cases imaginary numbers are used as more of a bookkeeping device than a stand-in for some fundamental part of physical reality. Measurement devices such as clocks or scales have never been known to display imaginary values. Physicists typically separate equations that contain imaginary numbers from those that do not. Then, they draw some set of conclusions from each, treating the infamous i as no more than an index or an extra label that helps organise this deductive process. Unless the physicist in question is confronted with the tiny and cold world of quantum mechanics.

Quantum theory predicts the physical behaviour of objects that are either very small, such as electrons that make up electric currents in every wire in your home, or millions of times colder than the insides of your fridge. And it is chock-full of complex and imaginary numbers.

Imaginary numbers went from a problem seeking a solution to a solution that had just been matched with its problem

Emerging in the 1920s, only about a decade after Albert Einstein’s paradigm-shifting work on general relativity and the nature of spacetime, quantum mechanics complicated almost everything that physicists thought they knew about using mathematics to describe physical reality. One big upset was the proposition that quantum states, the fundamental way in which objects that behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics are described, are by default complex. In other words, the most generic, most basic description of anything quantum includes imaginary numbers.

In stark contrast to theories concerning electricity and oscillations, in quantum mechanics a physicist cannot look at an equation that involves imaginary numbers, extract a useful punchline, then forget all about them. When you set out to try and capture a quantum state in the language of mathematics, these seemingly impossible square roots of negative numbers are an integral part of your vocabulary. Eliminating imaginary numbers would highly limit how accurate of a statement you could make.

The discovery and development of quantum mechanics upgraded imaginary numbers from a problem seeking a solution to a solution that had just been matched with its problem. As the physicist and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose noted in the documentary series Why Are We Here? (2017): ‘[Imaginary numbers] were there all the time. They’ve been there since the beginning of time. These numbers are embedded in the way the world works at the smallest and, if you like, most basic level.’

Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program

mysteriousuniverse |  The entire saga of the US military's modern investigations into UFOs has been clouded in confusion, obfuscation, and a whole alphabet soup of acronyms—AATIP, AAWSAP, UAP, etc.—which have enabled the Pentagon's avoidance of actually answering the real question: is there something weird going on or not? Since the story of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program broke in 2017, the Pentagon's story has gone from acknowledging that AATIP investigated "unidentified aerial phenomena" (UAPs, not UFOs, which is rather important to them), to saying AATIP had nothing to do with UAPs. Add to this the strange list of AATIP funded projects and the former head of AATIP starting a side-project with Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge and you've got the dumbest possible byzantine labyrinth that could maybe lead to "soft disclosure."

This week, however, Popular Mechanics reported that they had obtained leaked documents dating to 2009 which show that not only did AATIP investigate UFOs, but investigated them as possibly otherworldy or interdimensional phenomena and continued to do so beyond 2012, the year AATIP was "officially" shuttered. Furthermore, AATIP took an interest in the paranormal phenomena at Utah's famed Skinwalker Ranch with an interest in harnassing whatever's going on there for defense purposes. Paranormal weaponry, that's just what we need, right?

The leaked documents come from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS). The centerpiece is a 494-page "Ten Month Report" compiled by BAASS for the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP), the contracting division of the broader AATIP program. Bob Bigelow, the billionaire founder of Bigelow Aerospace, is a well-known figure in the UFO world. Bigelow's private research group the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) was stationed at Skinwalker Ranch for years after the billionaire purchased the property. Bigelow Aerospace's involvement with AATIP has also been well-publicized.

In 2008, BAASS was awarded a $10 million contract by AAWSAP for a guaranteed year with a 5-year option. According to Popular Mechanics,  the "Ten Month Report" was one of many such reports given by BAASS to AAWSAP through the duration of the contract. Throughout the document, it is clear that what is being investigated is not an unknown foreign weapons system. From the Popular Mechanics piece:

● Overview of the BAASS Physics Division’s efforts to conduct research on advanced aerospace vehicles, including the development of standardization for measurement of physical effects and signatures associated with UAP.

● Overview of BAASS research for measuring and gleaning the effects on biological organisms from UAP.

● Mention of Skinwalker Ranch in Utah as a “possible laboratory for studying other intelligences and possible interdimensional phenomena.”

● Strategic plans to organize a series of intellectual debate forums targeted to broad audiences pertaining to the “potential disclosure of an extraterrestrial presence.”

● Mention of BAASS program dubbed “Project Northern Tier,” which involved securing documents related to instances where dozens of UFOs flew over restricted airspaces of facilities housing nuclear weapons.

● Project databases of UAP-related materials compiled through various partnerships, and the intent to expand these databases by coordinating with foreign governments.

● Summaries of multiple UAP events both inside the U.S. and in foreign countries.

● Photographs of UAPs provided by various sources, including foreign governments.

Investigating Unknown Material Collected In The Field

ufos-scientificresearch |  The Journal "Progress in Aerospace Sciences" is an "...invitation only international review journal, designed to be of broad interest and use to all those concerned with research in aerospace sciences and their applications in research establishments, industry and universities." 

Volume 128, January 2022 contains an article by authors Garry P. Nolan, Jacques F. Vallee, Sizun Jiang, and Larry G. Lemke. Its title is "Improved instrumental techniques including isotopic analysis, applicable to the characterization of unusual materials with potential relevance to aerospace forensics." The article was made available on line on 9 December 2021. Many thanks to researcher Jonathan Davies for pointing me to this article. 

Contents

The introduction spells out that precisely identifying unknown material is an issue, in a number of areas, e.g. medicine, space exploration, and military intelligence. 

The first section of the article reviews analytical processes which are currently in use, e.g. mass spectrometry and x-ray spectroscopy. The second section "Basic approaches for the initial characterization of unknown materials" reports on the material analysis using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) and Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS.) These determine the masses of atomic components of the material. Other analytical processes are also discussed. 

Council Bluffs, Iowa, a case study

Section 3 "Investigating unknown material collected in the field: A Case Study" concerns an incident on the 17 December 1977, which occurred in Council Bluffs, Iowa. At 1945 CST "...a red, luminous mass was observed by two Council Bluffs residents, as it fell to Earth near the northern city limits..." At the scene the witnesses found an area "...covered by molten metal that glowed red-orange, igniting the grass. Police and fire brigade personnel who attended the scene within 15 minutes all saw the mass, estimated at 35-55 pounds. An investigation was conducted with three initial thoughts in mind. These were, an industrial accident, an aeronautical malfunction or a meteorite (despite there being no cratering.)  After investigations, it was concluded that it was not re-entering space debris; not falling material from an aircraft, not a meteorite, nor was it a hoax.  It was also noted that two witnesses of the eleven witnesses, described a round object hovering in the sky, edged by red blinking lights. 

The retrieved material had three components, namely "solid metal, slag and white ash inclusions in the slag." Vallee provided a piece of the original material for further testing. "...our initial conclusion was that sample components were consistent with a terrestrial origin." A recently developed Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging" (MIBI) instrument was used which is capable of measuring a broader range of isotopes. Using this instrument investigators concluded that "All isotopic ratios were similar between the samples and did not show any statistically significant deviations from expected terrestrial normal except for 57Fe..." However, there was a suggested conventional explanation for this 57Fe deviation.

Speculative conclusions

Section 5, "Speculative conclusions" includes the statement:

"Our experience with the Council Bluffs case study shows how difficult such a determination can be, even when abundant evidence is collected within minutes of an event, supported by reliable testimony from multiple witnesses and in well-defined meteorological conditions."

The authors speculate about the hovering, round object edged with red lights;  that "Such an object might have ejected the mass of material observed by the other witnesses and recovered by police." They note that "The materials from Council Bluff show no evidence suggesting it was (sic) been engineered or designed. The material would not be expected to form naturally, and has been shown does have unusual inhomogeneity."

It Will Be Impossible For The 4th Reich To Fight Everyone, Everywhere, All At Once...,

thecradle  |  During his speech on 13 July, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s message was clear: No one would be allowed to operate in maritime oil and gas fields if Lebanon was barred from its right to extract energy resources off of its own coast.

The Karish incident early this month was arguably both an espionage raid and a highly accurate political-military security message in its own right.

In its daring operation, Hezbollah calculatingly dispatched three drones of varying sizes and types, flying at different heights, over the disputed Karish gas field. And the resistance group intentionally made it possible for Israeli radar networks to detect the aerial unmanned vehicles in order to gauge Israel’s response capabilities.

Israeli reactions varied between those who considered the drones a serious threat, and those who downplayed the danger, possibly to preserve their military’s prestige that has systematically eroded over years of conflict with Palestine and Lebanon.

And while it is true that Israeli air defenses were eventually able to shoot down the unarmed aircraft after great effort and technical difficulties, as revealed by the Hebrew press, this is only one small part of the story…

The reason Hezbollah sent three different types of drones to Karish was to activate Israeli and American air defense and electronic jamming systems in the region (even their air force), and to test their ability to move, coordinate, and respond within a given time frame. The exercise also intended to test the extent to which these systems are linked to each other.

This meant that Hezbollah had to intentionally leave the drones exposed as easy targets for these systems.

On 25 July, during a live TV interview on Al Mayadeen channel, Nasrallah revealed for the first time that over the “past few years” Hezbollah’s drones “went to occupied Palestine and returned dozens of times without being shot down.”

He then went on to explain their modus operandi in the Karish operation:

“Our two goals of sending the drones are, one, we want to show that we can take this step (escalation), and two, we want the Israelis to fire on that front (near the gas fields). What we did is that we made(forced) the Israelis to open fire…Surely, they fell into the trap…The Air Force planes, F35, and F16, were used to shoot down a drone but could not shoot down the second, so they used the naval surface-to-air missiles (Barak) to shoot down the second. As for the third — let me reveal new information — they did not shoot it down at all, it was of a small type, it went on track and ran out of fuel and fell into the sea, that’s why (the Israelis) only speak of two drones that were shot down.”

A secondary aim of the drone operation was to deliver a message to foreign companies operating in the disputed gas fields.

 

Workers aboard the production vessel were meant to hear and witness the sound and sights of explosions, and the warplanes maneuvering in the skies above them, to alert them to the fact that they were operating in violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial waters, and that these operations would continue to be unsafe.

 

Unlike Land And Air Operations - The U.S. Remains Dominant In Submarine Warfare

Why did the U.S. military authorize, aid, and abet Pelosi's little junket to Taiwan?

1. Pelosi traveled on a military jet flown by military pilots.
2. Military aircraft flown by military pilots only fly with military orders.
3, Military orders are signed by military officials in a chain of command.
4. The Commander in Chief of the Military is Brandon Shartypants and, without the need to revoke her passport, Brandon could simply issue an order and send it down the chain of command. One phone call and done!
5. Notwithstanding the false claims that the administration has done what they can to stop her but can’t, the Chinese know all the above and see this is another pack of lies from the US. As such it is evidence that this is a provocation sanctioned the President (Commander in Chief).
6.Since this is a military-sanctioned trip the Chinese believe it is an unreasonable and unnecessary provocation not to mention an insult to their intelligence.
7. If Pelosi were sincere in her desire to merely visit and meet with people in her civilian capacity, and flew on an airplane flown by any of the various civilian airlines, nothing would made of it.
8. Because the Chinese (and the Russians) are certain that the US administration is incapable of telling the truth and always and everywhere has ulterior motives, they will not just sit idly by as the incident unfolds.

China is working to grow its naval strength by the day, but they are nowhere near the operational efficiency of the US Navy. In particular, they have no response to US attack submarine dominance.

The Chinese strategy is to quickly roll out new weapons and make them effective in operation – this can take many years to get right, and essentially means the first block of any new weapon is little more than a prototype. The Chinese are at least a decade away from being able to decisively counter a determined US naval attack or defence if Taiwan is prepared to fight.

The history of naval/air war is very straightforward and simple. The winner is always the country that strikes first (the Pacific War being a rare exception, but there are of course reasons). That way, you get to wipe out the most effective ships/air fields of your enemy in your first blow.

If China wishes to grab Taiwan militarily, then it has to take the initiative. But right now, the US/Taiwan is on high alert to blunt any frontal assault. Taiwan will have sealed its bunkers and the US will have a range of attack submarines in place.

Now is literally the worst possible time to provoke a direct conflict, and no doubt this is what Xi has been told by his military advisors. They should have played things down, and picked a moment of their own choosing. Whatever happens now – and I think war is still a very strong possibility – China has lost the initiative and this is usually fatal when it comes to non-land based warfare.


There are a decent number of attack (SSN) and missile (SSBN) submarines currently around China and the Chinese government knows this reality. There are always SSBNs near China (being the most important part of the nuclear triad), but I would not be surprised if the overall submarine count was increased in anticipation of a possible confrontation for this visit.

Besides Mk 48 torpedoes (still quite dangerous to surface ships), these submarines can also launch sea-skimming anti-ship missiles (UGM-84 Harpoons) from their torpedo tubes. Whatever one can say about some of the other weapon systems the US has, sea-skimmers like the Harpoon are very effective.

These submarines, among the most capable in the world, greatly limit China’s freedom to adopt military options. China probably has limited knowledge of the location of these boats, creating a tactical advantage for defense. However, since the Chinese government does know these submarines are out there, I can only imagine the Chinese public’s sentiment if a grand amphibious assault were shredded en route to Taiwan.

(Taiwan itself also has similar anti-ship missiles and these can cover much of the distance between the island and the mainland, also further complicating a Chinese amphibious assault.)

In any case, because submarines probably were deployed ahead of time, it may be that China never really had a politically viable military option. 

Col. McGregor Could Be A Wee Bit Out Of His Depth On This One

realclearpolitics |  Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday said "posers" are in charge of America's foreign policy and lamented the lack of statesmen that advance the interests of America. Macgregor argued that the U.S. is not prepared and the military does not have the "logistical infrastructure" for war with China.

"We are grossly overstretched," Macgregor said. "We don't have the logistical infrastructure and frankly it is an old adage that everyone should remember."

"A ship's a fool to fight a fort. You have to fight China from the sea. We can't win that. China can observe everything we throw at it and the Chinese are happy to sit there, let us travel thousands of miles to reach them and then sink us," Macgregor said.

MACGREGOR: We have to admit this is probably the most reckless and irresponsible administration in living memory. We don't have anyone that qualifies as a statesman. Statesmanship involves advancing American interests at the least cost of the American people.

None of that is in play here. We are dealing with a group of posers. People who are posturing, posturing is not statesmanship. The American people need to understand something that no one has bothered to tell them. That during World War II, Taiwan was the unsinkable aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese armed forces. All the major invasions of China were launched from Taiwan. Beijing will not allow Taiwan to become a garrison state for American armed forces or Japanese armed forces or any foreign power.

If they think that we are going to ally ourselves with Taiwan, if they think we are going to intervene to defend that island in the event of a dispute then we will be at war with China for the reasons that I just outlined. And we are not prepared for that.

We are grossly overstretched. We don't have the logistical infrastructure and frankly it is an old adage that everyone should remember.

A ship's a fool to fight a fort. You have to fight China from the sea. We can't win that. China can observe everything we throw at it and the Chinese are happy to sit there, let us travel thousands of miles to reach them and then sink us...

The Biden administration and its predecessors treated everything that the Russian government said for the last 15 years about Ukraine with complete contempt. They are repeating that process.

We see how well that's worked in Ukraine. The Russians were always serious. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in this war in Ukraine that we should have acted quickly to stop and now we are provoking the Chinese over an issue that is at least strategically important to them.

The Entire Western Political Establishment Has A Hard-On For War With China

Ms. Nancy Project Manager knows for a fact that the US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2022 is a plan to integrate Taiwan with US Department of Defense [sic] in its operations. The plan is fully funded. Appropriations already committed and disbursed to Taiwan's private- and public-agents are not public knowledge.

sputnik |  The Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK House of Commons is planning to visit Taiwan later this year, probably in November or early December amid mounting tensions in UK-China bilateral relation and rising insecurity in the Taiwan Strait, The Guardian newspaper reported on Monday, citing sources.

According to the newspaper, the trip was initially scheduled for the beginning of the year, but it was postponed after one member of the delegation tested positive for COVID-19. The new delegation of the UK lawmakers, who may embark on the visit to Taipei in November-December, is likely to be headed by committee chairman Tom Tugendhat.

 

The visit of the UK parliamentary delegation is meant to signify London's support for Taiwan, which Beijing considers an inalienable part of its territory, The Guardian said, stressing that this would occur amid growing friction between the UK and China.

 

Last week, candidates for the Conservative Party leadership, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, outlined their tough stance on China. Meanwhile, Chinese ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang accused some UK politicians of "peddling the fallacy of the so-called China threat."

 

Tensions over Taiwan have been mounting in recent weeks following the reports about a possible trip to Taipei by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The reports have sparked a major backlash from Beijing, which condemns any official contacts between the US and Taiwan.

 

The Chinese side has repeatedly claimed that by pursuing the trip Washington would infringe on the one-China principle and jeopardize US-China bilateral relations. Moreover, Beijing stated that it stands ready to act decisively to defend its state sovereignty and territorial integrity, while warning that the US would bear full responsibility for all the consequences resulting from the visit.

Senator Bob Menendez SUBSTANTIVELY Poking The Dragon In Its Eye

responsiblestatecraft  |  America’s Taiwan policy hasn’t changed much in the past 40 years. For many experts, that’s a good thing. They argue that Washington’s careful balancing act between Beijing and Taipei, enshrined in part in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, has kept tensions low and allowed Taiwan to transform from a notorious dictatorship into a full-fledged democracy.

But Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) aren’t satisfied with the status quo. The pair recently introduced a bill, known as the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, that they touted as “the most comprehensive restructuring of U.S. policy towards Taiwan” since 1979. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Menendez chairs, is set to take up the proposal on Wednesday.

Some of the bill’s most notable changes to U.S. policy include increasing military support for Taiwan, expanding Taipei’s role in international organizations, and laying out a harsh package of sanctions to be applied if Beijing engages in any “significant escalation in hostile action” toward the island.

Experts who spoke with Responsible Statecraft said these policies are likely to provoke a sharp response from China, further stoking tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

“These moves are provocative,” said Lyle Goldstein, the director of the Asia Engagement Program at Defense Priorities. “I think this is a very delicate period for Taiwan, and this kind of move would be very foolish.”

According to Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute, the bill would undermine America’s traditional “One China policy,” under which Washington recognizes Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China and acknowledges that Chinese leaders consider Taiwan to be part of their territory.

“The document plays with words to seem as if no fundamentals have changed, but One China is in effect gutted,” Swaine said. “The One China policy has led to strong limits being placed on political, diplomatic, and military contacts with [Taiwan]. This bill, if passed and implemented by the administration, would add greatly to the existing erosion of such limits.”

Neither Menendez nor Graham responded to requests for comment about the bill and its potential consequences.

The proposed legislation comes amid a sharp increase in U.S.-China tensions, in part driven by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s planned visit to Taiwan (she left for Asia this weekend). Beijing said its military will not “sit idly by” if Pelosi follows through on the trip, which would be the first by a House speaker since 1997. And, in a call with President Joe Biden, Chinese leader Xi Jinping cautioned that “[t]hose who play with fire will perish by it,” according to Beijing’s readout of the meeting.

Biden and the Pentagon appear wary of the visit, but neither have gone so far as to say that Pelosi should cancel it. In an apparent reaction to China’s threats, the USS Ronald Reagan has begun sailing toward the Taiwan Strait, and Beijing has massed air power in the area, according to the South China Morning Post. While officials do not expect a direct confrontation, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters that DoD “will do what is necessary to ensure a safe conduct of their visit. And I’ll just leave it at that.”

Deterrence and its discontents

Some of the concern about the bill centers around its military provisions. While experts approved of measures that would help fast-track arms sales, some expressed concern over the proposal to drop previous commitments to only provide Taiwan with defensive weapons, replacing them with a pledge to send “arms conducive to deterring acts of aggression by the People’s Liberation Army.”

When it comes to military strategy, “deterrence” is in the eye of the beholder. The bill focuses on equipping Taipei with a wide range of weapons — possibly including long-range missiles capable of striking mainland China — that could discourage Beijing from making a move on the island. But for Goldstein, true deterrence could only be achieved through painstaking, time-intensive investment in infrastructure that would help Taiwanese forces hold strong against a Chinese invasion.

“Building Taiwan into a fortress involves hardening — that is, pouring concrete, digging deep into the earth,” he said. “That’s the best way to defend Taiwan, but most people prefer to talk about fancy weapons systems.”

Eric Gomez of the Cato Institute was less critical of the weapons provisions, praising the bill’s general focus on “asymmetric defense.” But Gomez worries that the legislation risks pushing U.S. policy toward selling Taiwan “whatever it asked for.”

Call Xi Jinping And Tell Him That His Hot Breath Not The Same As "Playing With Fire"

RT  |  A group of Democrats and Republicans have introduced a bill that would authorize the Biden administration to create a new military aid program for Taiwan. Modeled after the 1940s Lend-Lease Act that allowed the US to arm the allied powers during World War II, the bill resembles legislation recently passed to boost weapons supplies to Ukraine.

Introduced by Representatives Michelle Steel (R-California) and Jimmy Panetta (D-California) in the House, and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) in the Senate, the ‘Taiwan Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act’ would authorize the president to lend or lease weapons and military equipment to Taiwan, which Taipei would pay for over a 12-year period.

The bill’s name and wording closely follow that of the ‘Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act’, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in May after passing Congress with almost no resistance.  

“Taiwan is our greatest partner in the Indo-Pacific region, and their continued sovereignty is essential to challenging the New Axis of Evil,” said Blackburn, referencing an often-maligned term used by former President George W. Bush to group America’s foreign enemies together. 

America’s official position on Taiwan, however, is ambiguous. Since the 1970s, Washington has recognized, but not endorsed, China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, a policy designed to discourage both a Chinese invasion and a formal declaration of independence by Taipei. 

The US does provide military aid to Taiwan, but the passing of this act would lift any limits, as the Ukrainian bill did for aid to Kiev. The original Lend-Lease Act, passed in 1941, allowed the US to provide arms to Britain, France, and the Soviet Union without formally entering the war. Although the Allies were supposed to pay for this aid, the US also accepted the lease of bases for its military instead.

Tensions between the US and China have soared in recent weeks, with Taiwan at the center. Biden stated in May that the US would take military action to prevent a potential Chinese takeover of Taiwan, a statement that broke with decades of strategic ambiguity over the island. While his aides swiftly backtracked, a potential visit to Taiwan by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – which Pelosi refused to confirm or deny even as she departed the US for Asia on Friday – has further inflamed the situation. 

With Chinese President Xi Jinping warning the US not to “play with fire,” both China and Taiwan held military drills this week. Should Pelosi go through with her visit, she would be the highest-ranking US lawmaker to visit the island since Newt Gingrich, who was also house speaker at the time, traveled to Taipei in 1997.