It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, September 14, 2020
UK SCIENTISTS COLLABORATE WITH SYRIAN REFUGEES TO PRODUCE REUSABLE PPE
The UK government has sent more than £760,000 in funding to support The People’s PPE project
A team of UK scientists and artists have collaborated with Syrian refugees to produce reusable personal protective equipment (PPE), which is to be distributed in Jordan.
The initiative, titled “People’s PPE”, has been organised by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
It involves academics from the University of Sheffield, the London College of Fashion, the University of the Arts London (UAL), and researchers from two universities in Jordan – Al Albayt University and the University of Petra.
The project, which has received £766,675 in funding from the UK government, is offering refugees in the Zaatari camp in Jordan the opportunity to take on small-scale manufacturing jobs by producing reusable masks, shields and gowns amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The PPE is being made using materials that are low-cost, locally sourced and recyclable.
Moh’d Al Taher, associate external relations officer at UNHCR, explained that the project is helping to support the Syrian refugees in the camp by creating “livelihood opportunities”.
“The cooperation with the University of Sheffield and London College of Fashion, UAL, has resulted in training many Syrian refugee women in the Zaatari camp with skills in developing PPE,” he said.
“These skills created livelihood opportunities for refugees and supported the refugee community.”
Al Taher added that the UNHCR “plans to cover the needs of the camp community with PPE by using high-quality and low-cost materials”, using “innovative solutions” in doing so.
(Aya Musmar/Petra University/PA) The 3D-printed face shields being as part of The People’s PPE were designed and produced using iForge, a collaborative workspace at the University of Sheffield run by engineering students.
Professor Tony Ryan, director of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the university and principle investigator for The People’s PPE, stated that the initiative is “about empowering refugees in a moment of health crisis”.
“I’ve spent years working with the people of Zaatari and learning from their incredible resourcefulness and creativity,” the professor said.
“Faced with a global pandemic, we are working together to design and produce the protective equipment the refugees and their host community need to stay safe, while reducing plastic waste, creating jobs and building resilience within the camp community.”
Inside the courtroom battle against the deadly rhino horn trade
We are working with conservation charity Space for Giants to protect wildlife at risk from poachers due to the conservation funding crisis caused by Covid-19. Help is desperately needed to support wildlife rangers, local communities and law enforcement personnel to prevent wildlife crime
A poached rhino can be seen in Africa(SaveTheRhinoInternational)
Poachers used a silenced hunting rifle to kill this black rhino for its horn while it drank at a water hole in South Africa.
Around the world, one rhino is killed every 10 hours. To stop this slaughter, either consumer demand for their horn must be eradicated, or poachers must be stopped from killing them. Those are the intractable options.
Charity Save the Rhino is committed to changing how rhino horn is perceived in South East Asia - where most trafficked horn ends up, and where it is prized as a symbol of power and wealth.
However, enacting a cultural change could take decades. That’s too long for some species of rhinoceros, such the Javan and Sumatran, who are on the path to extinction.
With consumer demand unlikely to disappear any time soon, and a black market continuing regardless, the survival of rhinos hinges on innovative strategies to prevent poaching.
One of the most important is what happens inside the courtrooms that trial rhino horn hunters and traffickers.
Shamini Jayanathan is a criminal barrister working in illegal wildlife trafficking in Africa, with a focus on prosecutions. She tells The Independent: “The only way to tackle and deter the killing of rhinos is through the courts. Arrests and seizures of horn represent only a disruption to criminal operations, not an end.”
Ms Jayanathan explains that because the rhino is such a highly protected animal, many African countries rightly have high minimum prison terms for related cases. But as a result, every defendant pleads not guilty, meaning there is no incentive to cooperation. Trials can last years, with hearings delayed or endlessly postponed, running up costs and zapping time and momentum.The Covid-19 conservation crisis has shown the urgency of The Independent’s Stop the Illegal Wildlife Trade campaign, which seeks an international effort to clamp down on illegal trade of wild animals(ESI)
“The biggest enemy to rhino horn cases is delay,” says Ms Jayanathan. “And as the legal maxim attests, justice delayed is justice denied. There is ongoing, vital work in the courts to speed up criminal trial process, to ensure the prosecution case is strong at the start of the case, and that the sentence at the end is proportionate to the crime.
The Independent’s Stop the Illegal Wildlife Trade campaign, which was launched earlier this year, seeks an international effort to clamp down on poaching and the illegal trade of wild animals.
South Africa is home to nearly 80 per cent of the world's remaining rhinos. It has been hit hard by wildlife crime, with more than 1,000 rhinos killed there each year between 2013 and 2017.
In March 2017 the South African government created Skukuza Regional Court close to the edge of one of its most famous nature conservancy, Kruger National Park. Read more
Hailed as a hugely positive step for the effective and swift handling of trials for rhino poachers and traffickers, Skukuza’s two senior prosecutors had backgrounds in organised crime cases and extensive knowledge of wildlife crime-related law.
During its first year, the ‘rhino court’ - as it became known - brought more than 90 poachers to justice, with a 100 percent conviction rate. Prison sentences ranged from 12 to 40 years. Elsewhere in South Africa, fewer than 25 per cent of similar convictions resulted in sentences longer than 10 years, according to Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries.
Rhino poaching also declined. Last year in South Africa there was a reported 594 rhinos killed for their horn, down from 769 in 2018. And the data detailing where rhinos were killed suggests that poachers had begun to avoid Kruger to hunt in other provinces - likely deterred by the ‘rhino court’.
However, Skukuza Regional Court has been closed since August last year, amid unexpected plans to move it almost 100km away from Kruger.
Save the Rhino’s Emma Pereira says that moving the court could have dire consequences for rhinos. “Skukuza’s proximity to Kruger is really helpful in terms of rangers being able to quickly get there to give evidence that can help secure convictions. Moving it might mean it would take much longer for a ranger to travel there and back, something many just won’t be able to do."
Activists created a petition to fight the plan, and the Department of Justice and Correctional Services has halted the decision for now, as stakeholders question how the upheaval would benefit rhinos.
Crispin Phiri, spokesperson for the department, says “the court plays an important role in conserving our environment in so far as rhino poaching is concerned”, and confirmed “a moratorium to get a proper briefing on what the understanding is and the motivation for moving the court”.
Most working in wildlife crime agree that Skukuza is a model that works, and one that needs replicating in countries that have a population of rhino, or act as trafficking transit corridors.
To protect rhinos and other wildlife at risk from poachers, The Independent is working with Space for Giants, a conservation charity that has extensive expertise in strengthening the judicial and conservation authorities in six African countries.
Between 2016 and 2020 Ms Jayanathan led Space for Giants' team of legal professionals training prosecutors, investigators and magistrates so trials run smoother and legal processes are more effective. She says: “In Kenya - where we collaborated with prosecution services and the judiciary, Kenya Wildlife Service and other partners - we have seen a steady rate of convictions of wildlife criminals, including rhino horn traffickers.
“Rhino cases are inevitably hard fought because the penalties are so high. But progress is being made. In Kenya, in the courts we have worked in, we have reduced the average time for criminal procedures from 32 months to 11 months, and we have also seen a reduction in rhino horn crime.” Read more
Pereira agrees that strengthening the judicial process is a vital part of the fight to save rhinos, to act as both punishment and deterrent.
“Save the Rhino is working with partners to develop learning among the legal system, such as how evidence is collected, and making it standard across the board,” she says. “Often, when it comes to rhino horn cases, evidence is not as well understood by judiciary, or courts are not able to trace people to give evidence.
“The picture is slowly getting better; there have been some large fines for people who have done the damage to rhinos - but we are seeing a lot of corruption too.
“It takes a mental toll on those dedicated to protecting rhinos - especially on rangers who are having to work overtime as a result of Covid. The fight to save rhinos a long, hard slog.”
Donate to help Stop the Illegal Wildlife Trade HERE
RIP
Diana Rigg: An immensely powerful actor – and undoubtedly the best Bond girl
Whether in James Bond, The Avengers or Game of Thrones, the actor wielded an immense, innate power on screen. Clarisse Loughrey pays tribute to the late, great star
Avengers star Diana Rigg, who has died at the age of 82, at Cannes Film Festival in 2019(AFP/Getty)
Diana Rigg wasn’t just the best Bond girl – she transcended that label entirely. As Contessa Teresa “Tracy” di Vicenzo, she became the only woman to officially call herself Mrs James Bond – his total equal in elegance, confidence, and daring. Perhaps that’s why things couldn’t last. She might have overtaken him.
Not long after Rigg’s Tracy marries George Lazenby’s Bond, in the closing scenes of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), she’s gunned down by Blofeld’s henchwoman. It’s one of the few moments of genuine sentiment in the series, as he cradles his lost love in his arms and whispers: “She’s having a rest. There’s no hurry, you see, we have all the time in the world.” On her death, at the age of 82, it’s a scene many of her fans might find themselves impulsively drawn back to.
Diana Rigg and George Lazenby in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’(Rex)
Rigg wielded an immense, innate power on screen – she was never the one left lingering in the shadows. You can see it in the first moments she turned up as Emma Peel on TV’s The Avengers in 1965 – she was billed as a replacement for Honor Blackman, who’d left the show to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964). There she was, dressed in a leather catsuit and wielding a fencing sword. Her voice was raspy (thanks to a 20-a-day cigarette habit), but oh-so deliciously confident, like the cat who got the cream.
All the show’s flirtations, sexual innuendos, and outright objectification made Rigg an instant sex symbol. She had no idea how to respond to all the fan mail suddenly piling up. Eventually, she got her mother to reply to the more lascivious ones with: “My daughter’s far too old for you. Go take a cold shower!” But Rigg, as she karate-chopped her way through 51 episodes, always came off as coolly controlled and in charge – it helped make Emma Peel one of the great feminist icons of the Sixties.
Offscreen, she found herself at the centre of the burgeoning pay equality movement after she demanded a pay rise, having discovered that a cameraman on the show earned significantly more than her. She found few allies in the industry. The press tore her to shreds. But she still managed to nearly triple her pay. Although it’s a story often recounted, it’s strangely at odds with how Rigg talked about herself. “I’m portrayed as this tough broad, but I’m not,” she told The Guardian in 2014. Her relationship with feminism was complicated – in 1969, she famously declared that “women are in a much stronger position than men”.
Diana Rigg and ‘Avengers’ co-star Patrick Macnee(Getty)
But Rigg, in truth, never thought she’d become any kind of pop culture icon. She struggled with post-Avengers fame and would hide in the bathroom to avoid the attention of crowds. She left the show after two years.
Born in Doncaster, Rigg was the daughter of an engineer. When she was two months old, her father moved the family to Bikaner, India, after he was hired as a railway executive. She spoke Hindi as her second language during that time. Eight years later, Rigg and her family returned to England, where she attended boarding school and later trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Rigg as Lady Olenna Tyrell in 'Game of Thrones'(HBO)
Though she made her professional debut in a Rada production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle in 1957, the greatest of Rigg’s stage successes came in the Nineties, when she won her third Tony for playing Medea in a 1994 Broadway production, alongside roles in Mother Courage, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Phèdre. Beyond Bond, her film roles included A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1968), Theatre of Blood (1973), The Great Muppet Caper (1981), and Evil Under the Sun (1982).
Many, of course, will know her from the great role of her later years: the sly, peevish Lady Olenna Tyrell on Game of Thrones. It earnt her four Emmy nominations. In a world of swords and dragons, Rigg was a memorable presence because of how much fun she seemed to be having. As she said at the time: “The older you get, I have to say, the funnier you find life. That's the only way to go.”
Air quality is so bad in Washington that it broke the monitoring system
While fires are destroying homes and lives, those in safety still aren’t quite as protected as they might think. According to the Seattle Times, air quality has been so bad that it broke the monitoring system.
“As of Sunday morning, air quality readings throughout Eastern and Central Washington, as well as Seattle, showed very unhealthy to hazardous levels of air pollution for everyone,” said the update.
For anyone suffering from the after-affects of the coronavirus, COPD, lung cancer, asthma, and other breathing challenges, the air is downright dangerous. Children and the elderly are especially at risk.
On the West Coast, the problem is that the air is simply “sitting” on the state. There is weather on its way that should help calm things down.
“But the Washington Department of Ecology says it will be Monday before Western Washington sees improvements,” said the report.
“Do not rely on dust masks for protection,” the CDC also says. “Paper ‘comfort’ or ‘dust’ masks commonly found at hardware stores are designed to trap large particles, such as sawdust. These masks will not protect your lungs from the small particles found in wildfire smoke. Read more on choosing and using respirators to protect your lungs from smoke and ash.” N95 IS THE ONLY REAL PARTICULATE RESPIRATOR
See the graphics below:
The smoke is not clearing as fast as we hoped, but help is on the way. You can see the cleaner marine air out off the coast – it just has a huge amount of smoke to push out before it can reach us. It will be Monday before W. WA sees major improvements. https://t.co/Pcx2t495tWpic.twitter.com/A6o6mctTZE—
Here's a smoke model forecast for the next 36 hours. It shows improvements expanding across eastern WA Monday. Unfortunately some spots in southeast WA & the ID Panhandle may not reap these benefits. Confidence is low on where the smoke goes through the week. #wawx#idwxpic.twitter.com/xuY3zoNi8J — NWS Spokane (@NWSSpokane) September 13, 2020
The. West. Coast. Is. On. Fire. And the air quality is horrific and dangerous everywhere today — and there really isn’t anywhere accesible for people to go to escape. And it’s only getting worse. #ActOnClimate and VOTE! pic.twitter.com/EDImUENQCT — Erin Schrode (@ErinSchrode) September 13, 2020
It's bad out there. Air quality is very unhealthy to hazardous across most of W. WA. The silver lining is that this is as bad as it should get, although clearing won't start until Sunday (Monday for E. WA). Stay indoors, stay safe. Forecast – https://t.co/2u6VAV6Dy8pic.twitter.com/mTTPBDv4J3
QAnon conspiracy theorists attend a Trump rally (Screen cap).
In the previous four installments of this series, I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by the group of rabid online Trump supporters known as QAnon. According to my friend, initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by the mortal enemies of Donald Trump. He insisted that when Trump is re-elected in November we can all look forward to the abolition of the income tax, the development of “free energy” for all and the public unveiling of thousands of grateful kidnapped children rescued by Trump’s private army of “white hats” from cages squirrelled away in these Satanist-controlled underground dungeons.
One of the pieces of so-called “evidence” provided by my friend was a YouTube documentary called “Out of Shadows,” which took the internet by storm in April. Perhaps the most impactful propaganda film of the past few years, “Out of Shadows” is a thinly-disguised QAnon recruitment video that mixes small slices of truth with a whole lot of lies to confuse the viewer into believing various bizarre theories promoted by QAnon. In this final installment, we conclude our analysis of “Out of Shadows,” delve into the Jeffrey Epstein mystery and explain why QAnon is the catfish scheme of all catfish schemes.
The strange case of Jeffrey Epstein is left for the very end of “Out of Shadows.” What the filmmakers choose to report regarding the Epstein affair is intriguing. Why does the documentary spend so much time talking about the known or alleged crimes of the convicted sex offender who died in a Manhattan jail cell last year, but never mention that the name of Donald J. Trump appears in Epstein’s infamous little black book, alongside those of Bill and Hillary Clinton? (Trump’s name and contact information are listed on page 85.)
As you no doubt know, Epstein was a wealthy financier with endless connections to the rich and famous (including businessmen, politicians, scientists, Hollywood stars and royalty) who ran a child sex ring operation out of his luxurious “temple” in the Virgin Islands. On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested for trafficking underage girls in Florida and New York. On Aug. 10, while incarcerated in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, Epstein won the “Most Improbable Suicide of the Year” Award after he was found dead in his cell under suspicious circumstances.
An informant who told New York Post reporters he had spent several months in the same “special housing unit” at the MCC where Epstein died claimed, “There’s no way that man could have killed himself. I’ve done too much time in those units. It’s an impossibility.” The informant said that the height from floor to ceiling in those cells “is like eight or nine feet. There’s no way for you to connect to anything. You have sheets, but they’re paper level, not strong enough. He (Epstein) was 200 pounds — it would never happen. … There’s a steel frame, but you can’t move it. There’s no light fixture. There’s no bars.”
Whatever really happened in that cell, there are a lot of powerful people in the world whose lives were made much easier the second Epstein checked out of existence. The real point, however, is this: Instead of focusing on real-world methods of preventing other Epsteins from torturing innocent children, Team QAnon wastes its time searching for Satanic, Illuminati-related symbols hidden in the décor of celebrities they dislike.
For example, in one episode of the aforementioned “Rick B2T” QAnon talk show, Rick’s anonymous buddy “Gene” flashes a photo of Ellen DeGeneres sitting on the set of her daily talk show. On the wall behind DeGeneres, to the right, one can see a series of horizontal lines; to the left is a mural that depicts a row of palm trees. “Gene” then flashes a photo of Epstein’s mosque-like temple, the walls of which are decorated with a series of horizontal lines. The temple is surrounded by palm trees. A horrified expression darkens the face of “Rick B2T,” immediately after which he snarls, “Can you believe that? Her set is Epstein Island! That is just sick!”
Horizontal lines.
Palm trees.
Based on these uncanny symbols, one can only conclude the obvious: Ellen DeGeneres is involved in sex trafficking, just like Epstein
One wonders how Rick would react if he ever encountered a real Satanic symbol.
If these QAnon people could take a step back from their own weird neuroses, they might realize that there’s absolutely no evidence connecting Epstein to Satanism or the Illuminati. (In fact, there’s no evidence connecting the historical Illuminati to Satanism either.) The Epstein story is sordid enough without having to drag ancient secret societies into it. These are red herrings that merely deflect attention from the real story, which is that Epstein’s sex trafficking ring was being used to collect blackmail material against some of the most powerful people on the planet.
Epstein’s victims have spoken in depth about his camera [surveillance] system and artist Maria Farmer has described how he had a room at the front of his $75 million Upper East Side mansion full of screens.
Court documents show that other victims told officials that Epstein had his private island in the Caribbean wired up too, as well as his mansion in Palm Beach.
Some have speculated that Epstein could have made his $650 million fortune by blackmailing his powerful friends, such as Prince Andrew and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Among the others who Epstein knew were former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, magicians David Blaine and David Copperfield, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and Michael Jackson.
And in an interview with New York Times journalist James B. Stewart, Epstein claimed to know a “great deal” about his powerful friends, some of his knowledge was “potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.”
How did Epstein get this complex operation up and running in the first place? Was this elaborate intelligence-gathering plot funded by the money he made as a hedge fund manager? If not, who gave Epstein the resources to get this show on the road in the first place? And how did these blackmail schemes affect the national policies enacted into law by the politicians mentioned in the article above
QAnon as a form of MindWar
The sources upon which QAnon draws are relatively obscure. For example, the tall tales being spread by Team QAnon in YouTube videos like “Out of Shadows” and “The Underground War, Happening Now” sound suspiciously like the horror stories made up by Special Agent Richard Doty and his psychological warfare military cohorts in the 1980s and 1990s. The apparent purpose of those tales was to deflect the attention of a UFO researcher namd Paul Bennewitz away from sensitive intelligence operations being deployed at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, as well as the adjacent Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility and Coyote Canyon Test Area. This long, complicated, and ultimately tragic story has been documented by Greg Bishop in his excellent 2005 book, “Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth.”
The parallels between QAnon’s tales and Doty’s military-funded disinformation campaign — including such oddities as subterranean battles between the American military and otherworldly creatures — are remarkable. Are such cover stories endlessly recycled with slight new twists whenever necessary? After all, why dream up new cover stories when the old ones will do? Who even remembers these obscure details from the ’80s and ’90s?
Perhaps the real secret behind QAnon is connected to the identity of the one military official who has actually endorsed the anonymous “whistleblower” in public. That lone endorser is retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely. On Oct. 14, 2019, Vallely appeared on Mike Filip’s “AmeriCanuck Internet Radio of Canada” talk show and made this provocative statement:
QAnon is tied to information that comes out of a group called “The Army of Northern Virginia.” This is a group of military intelligence specialists, of over 800 people that advise the president. The president does not have a lot of confidence in the CIA or even the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] much anymore. So he relies on real operators, who are mostly special-operations type of people. This is where “Q” picks up some of his information.
Before you leap to the conclusion that Vallely is just some random nutjob flapping his lips on the radio, let’s refer to his official biography on the U.S. Army Pacific website:
Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely is a 1961 West Point graduate who retired as Deputy Commanding General for the US Army Pacific in 1991. A veteran of two combat tours in Vietnam, he is a graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces as well as the Army War College.
Throughout his 32-year military career, Maj. Gen. Vallely served in many overseas theaters to include Europe and the Pacific Rim Countries. He has served on US security assistance missions on civilian-military relations to Europe, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Central America with in-country experience in Indonesia, Columbia, El Salvador, Panama, Honduras and Guatemala. …
Vallely commanded the 351st Civil Affairs Command from 1982-1986, including all Special Forces, Psychological Warfare, and Civil Military units in the Western US and Hawaii. He developed and designed the Host Nation Support Program in the Pacific for the Department of Defense and the State Department.
Since his retirement from the military, Vallely has served as a military analyst for the FOX News Channel and is a guest on many nationally syndicated radio talk shows. He co-authored the book Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror (2004).
A military officer of this caliber publicly endorsing at least “some” of QAnon’s information as being authentic, and flat-out stating that President Trump was forming his policy decisions on the same intelligence sources upon which QAnon’s posts are based, caused waves of excitement to ripple through the Q community. No longer did they have to rely on faith alone. Here, at least, was “proof” that QAnon was no mere hoaxer.
Yet how many of these QAnon devotees are aware of the fact that Vallely collaborated with Lt. Col. Michael Aquino on the very same “From PSYOP to MindWar” paper quoted in “Out of Shadows”?
In the film, Kevin Shipp is quoted as saying that Aquino “wrote a paper called ‘MindWar,’ and ‘MindWar’ was about psychological operations against populations, including the American domestic population, using Satanist techniques and tools.” At that moment, the filmmakers flash the title page of the paper on the screen. One can clearly see Paul Vallely’s name listed above Aquino’s name (though it’s misspelled as “Paul E. Valley”). Is it not curious that the filmmakers don’t point out that the one former high-ranking military officer who has endorsed QAnon as authentic is in fact the same military officer who commissioned Aquino to write “From PSYOP to MindWar” in the first place?
In the later 1970s, Psychological Operations (PSYOP) doctrine in the U.S. Army had yet to emerge from the disappointment and frustration of the Vietnam War. Thus it was that in 1980 Colonel Vallely, Commander of the 7th PSYOP Group, asked me, as his Headquarters PSYOP Research & Analysis (FA) Team Leader, to draft a paper that would encourage some future thought within the PSYOP community. He did not want a Vietnam postmortem, but rather some fresh and innovative ideas concerning PSYOP’s evolution and application.
I prepared an initial draft, which Colonel Vallely reviewed and annotated, which resulted in revised drafts and critiques until he was satisfied, and the result of that was this paper: From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory.
Colonel Vallely sent copies of it to various government offices, agencies, commands, and publications involved or interested in PSYOP. He intended it not as an article for publication, but simply as a “talking paper” to stimulate dialogue. In this it was quite successful, judging by the extensive and lively letters he received concerning it over the next several months.
That should have been the end of MindWar: a minor “staff study” which had done its modest job.
With the arising of the Internet in the 1980s, however, MindWar received an entirely unexpected — and somewhat comic — resurrection. Allusions to it gradually proliferated, with its “sinister” title quickly winning it the most lurid, conspiracy-theory reputation. The rumor mill soon had it transformed into an Orwellian blueprint for Manchurian Candidate mind control and world domination. My own image as an occult personality added fuel to the wildfire: MindWar was now touted by the lunatic fringe as conclusive proof that the Pentagon was awash in Black Magic and Devil-worship.
Now that this absurdly comic opera has at least somewhat subsided, I thought that it might be interesting to make a complete and accurate copy of the paper available, together with an Introduction and some historical-hindsight annotations to place it in reasonable context. After all it did — and perhaps still does — have something worthwhile to say.
I agree with Aquino. His and Vallely’s blueprint does indeed have something important to say. Let’s return to their original paper for a moment:
… the MindWar operative must know that he speaks the truth, and he must be personally committed to it. What he says is only a part of MindWar; the rest — and the test of its effectiveness — lies in the conviction he projects to his audience, in the rapport he establishes with it. And this is not something which can be easily faked, if in fact it can be faked at all. “Rapport,” which the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms defines as “unconstrained relations of mutual confidence,” approaches the subliminal; some researchers have suggested that it is itself a subconscious and perhaps even ESP-based “accent” to an overt exchange of information. Why does one believe one television newsman more than another, even though both may report the same headlines? The answer is that there is rapport in the former case; and it is a rapport which is recognized and cultivated by the most successful broadcasters …. For the mind to believe its own decisions, it must feel that it made those decisions without coercion. Coercive measures used by the MindWar operative, consequently, must not be detectable by ordinary means.
Consider this: “Out of Shadows” strategically creates a special rapport with its targeted audience by first presenting accurate — though relatively little known — information about such real-life government conspiracies as Project Paperclip and MK-ULTRA. Then it begins to push all the fear buttons to which any devoted evangelical Christian is likely to respond (i.e., accusations of Satanism in public schools, Hollywood movies and U.S. intelligence agencies), leaving out any information that would connect Trump or QAnon supporter Paul Vallely to the “black hats” (i.e., Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Aquino, respectively), and caps all that off by ramming home the obvious conclusion: Despite what the mainstream media says, QAnon has been right all along.
The final punchline goes unsaid because, after all, the viewer’s mind “must feel that it made [its decision] without coercion.” But the decision is inevitable: If QAnon is right, who must you vote for in November of 2020?
In other words, if it’s not already clear to you, “Out of Shadows” employs the very same “MindWar” PSYOP techniques supposedly reviled by the filmmakers themselves. That same statement applies just as much to all the other related QAnon material I’ve cited here. As mentioned earlier, the true warrior accuses his opponent of the offenses he himself is enthusiastically committing.
Seeing as the dominant QAnon narrative — that Q drops are a secret way of informing the public that Trump is the literal savior of the world, taking down the evil cabal of Satanist paedophiles that currently run the show — is based on only tidbits of suggestive evidence and links, I thought I’d put forward a counter-narrative — similarly backed by just suggestive evidence and links, because hey if that’s the standard of proof needed ….
What if there is a secret, far-right group consisting of an association of white supremacists, Nazis, mobbed up millionaires, and generally fascist-leaning RWNJs [Rightwing Nutjobs] — and QAnon is a psy-op they created to build an army of useful idiots, who would help spread their message so that eventually a large portion of the population would be compliant when the American putsch goes down?
This “alternative narrative” might not be quite as fanciful as Taylor suggests. In fact, the evidence for the preceding scenario is infinitely stronger than the evidence that Donald Trump has literally saved Americans from being eaten by underground demons.
When I emailed my friend a brief, gently worded but highly skeptical analysis of the QAnon material he had sent me, he responded by sending me an image of an eagle soaring through a fiery Q accompanied by a single sentence: “God Bless America, Where We Go One We Go All.” This is a quote from John F. Kennedy that has been appropriated by QAnon as an all-purpose motto, slogan and battle cry. (JFK might be the only Democrat in history considered untainted enough to quote among the QAnon crowd. Ironically, if JFK hadn’t been assassinated in 1963, QAnon would now be accusing him of worshipping Satan and having sex with children in some random D.C. pizza joint.)
The fact that my friend — unable to counter my arguments with anything remotely based on rationality — felt it necessary to respond to my message with nothing more than an empty slogan preselected by QAnon tells you almost everything you need to know about the cult-like qualities of this new American religion.
This reminded me of a telltale moment during a 2000 primary-season debate among the Republican presidential candidates. At one point, the candidates were asked to name a particular book that had changed their lives or somehow informed their point of view. Every candidate gave an intelligent, reasoned response — except George W. Bush, that is. This is what he came up with (I am paraphrasing): “The Holy Bible! Yes, sir! I can’t explain my personal philosophy any better than that. There’s nothin’ I can say to explain my heart to all of you if you don’t feel the Word of God in your own heart.”
In other words, Bush had no intelligent answer to offer, so he fell back on invoking the Bible merely to avoid using his gray matter to formulate a semi-reasonable response. To claim that these words were mere “platitudes” would be an understatement. Bush’s response was nothing more than a clumsy attempt to deflect attention away from his obvious ignorance and illiteracy. As we know now, that didn’t stop him from winning the nomination and then the presidency (thanks of course to the Supreme Court). Why not? As Buckminster Fuller once observed, “Human beings will always do the intelligent thing, after they’ve exhausted all the stupid alternatives.” Bush was just another in a long line of stupid alternatives. QAnon is the latest one, perhaps the stupidest of the lot.
The same people who wait on the edge of the seat for the next “Q” message to drop have probably watched the popular reality TV show “Catfish” and laughed at the unwitting dupes who find themselves falling in love with an online phantom too good to be true. Urban Dictionary defines the word “catfish” as: “A fake or stolen online identity created or used for the purposes of beginning a deceptive relationship.”
What better word could be used to describe QAnon’s relationship with his/her/their followers? If divine intervention allowed these devout, evangelical Christians to see who was actually posting these “Q” messages, they would no doubt vomit into their Wheaties in the morning. Would they still hang on Q’s every word if they could suddenly teleport into a glass-lined office building — perhaps on Madison Avenue or in the Virginia suburbs — filled with a team of tattooed, hipster-aged “influencers” hired by the Trump campaign to comb through decades-worth of obscure conspiracy theories and rebrand them as ultra-right-wing horror stories aimed at the gullible and downtrodden? I doubt it.
In the final analysis, based on almost 30 years of experience researching conspiracy theories, I can only conclude that QAnon is the ultimate catfish scheme for the 21st century.
P.T. Barnum uttered some wise words in this context. (Maybe you’ve heard them.)
Media manipulation has spilled out well beyond the borders of Hollywood. The real battleground for the minds of Americans is Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, 8kun, etc. That’s why we’re now seeing books and documentaries (like “Out of Shadows”) that claim to reveal the influence of Hollywood. Hollywood now borders on the obsolete. People are more entertained by cat videos on TikTok. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: When something is rendered obsolete, it becomes an art form. Rather than producing art, Hollywood itself is the art form. Grist for the conspiracy mill. That’s why I subtitled my first book “Conspiracy Theory as Art Form.” Conspiracy theories are an art form, and they’re now being used to create elaborate fictions deployed to support those in power.
We’re told this is a free country. If so, everyone has the right to vote for whoever they want in this year’s election. If your informed research leads you to vote for Donald Trump, feel free. I would suggest, however, that if you vote for Trump for any of the following reasons, you’ve been had: Because you think he’s a devout, Satanist-exterminating Christian; Because you think he’s going to screw over a secret cabal of cultish “black hats” by abolishing the income tax; Because you think he’s going to reveal the existence of Tesla-derived free energy to the world at some point after November of 2020; Because you think he’s liberating thousands of sexually abused children locked up in Illuminati conclaves hidden within or below U.S. military bases; Because you think he’s going to save your flesh from being masticated by the blood-spattered fangs of subterranean beasts.
I may not know much, and there aren’t too many words I could ever utter that one might actually take to the bank, but I can guarantee you this:
President Donald J. Trump is not going to prevent you from being eaten by demons.
Gavrilo Princip, conspiracy theories and the fragility of cause and effect
A hundred years ago this day in Sarajevo, disgruntled nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired a shot. An Archduke and his wife died, the world mourned and fulminated, and in a rash of misunderstanding and patriotic throes the nations of Europe went to war with each other, a war that in its calculated butchery exceeded all that [...]
A hundred years ago this day in Sarajevo, disgruntled nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired a shot. An Archduke and his wife died, the world mourned and fulminated, and in a rash of misunderstanding and patriotic throes the nations of Europe went to war with each other, a war that in its calculated butchery exceeded all that came before it and changed the course of history. Even today the fields of Ypres and the current of the Marne call out to us and demand an explanation. How could a lowly nobody like Princip change everything?
When you read the story of the shots that led to World War 1, what strikes you is how staggering the gulf between cause and effect was, how little it takes for history to change, how utterly subject to accidental and unlikely events the fickle fortunes of men are. Reading the story of Princip and the Archduke, one sometimes gets the feeling of being no more than wood chips being cast adrift on the roaring river of history.
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The dark comedy of the assassination of the Archduke and his wife is succinctly narrated in skeptic and writer Michael Shermer's highly readable book "The Believing Brain", and the story is as good an example of the roots of conspiracy theories as any other. It sheds light on human psychology and illuminates conspiracy theorizing in all scientific quarters, ranging from creationism to climate change denial.
Shermer recounts how, on that fateful day, six conspirators waited in the shadows to carry out their deed. When the Archduke's motorcade passed close by, the first two conspirators failed to take any shots because of the crowds and an inadequate line of sight. The next conspirator managed to throw a bomb at the Archduke's car but it simply bounced off and fell into the car behind. The two conspirators quietly disappeared while the third tried to commit suicide by ingesting cyanide but simply vomited and was captured by the police. Unlucky Princip and the other two insurgents gave up and sauntered away. Meanwhile the Archduke made it all the way to the city hall and gave a speech, expressing outrage to the mayor that he had just been subjected to an assassination attempt.
Since the Archduke had just expressed outrage at an attempted assassination, he should have known better than to drive back the same way he came. However it seems that only one of the generals in his entourage suggested taking an alternative route back. But in the heat of the moment, for some reason this timely advice was not communicated to the driver who decided to again drive back through the city center. While this was happening Princip had purportedly given up and was hanging around a bakery, maybe enjoying a pastry. However when he saw the car return on the same route the opportunity was too good to pass; more so since the transmission seemed to be jammed and the driver could not back up. The rest is very much history.
Even after Princip's arrest World War 1 was not foreordained. Nothing is. But as Barbara Tuchman recounts in her marvelous book "The Guns of August", an almost surreal comedy of errors and a mountain of human stupidity on the part of Europe's leaders and diplomats followed the Archduke's murder and led to the Great War. But part of Shermer's motive in recounting Princip's story is to illustrate the absurdity of most conspiracy theories. A lot of conspiracy theorists, including those who deny climate change or evolution, try to convince everyone of some grand machinations going on in the highest reaches of government/industry/secret syndicates that lead to reality being either hidden from the public or being shamelessly manipulated for nefarious ends. But Princip's story tells us how messy reality is; the assassination almost failed, and at every turn its success or failure depended on events that ultimately were a function as much of chance as anything else. Anyone who believes in well-oiled conspiracy theories flawlessly functioning in the dark has simply ignored the great role of historical contingency in the operation of human affairs and the natural world.
But the murder of the Archduke provides us with another valuable window into the fickle nature of history and the minds of conspiracy theorists. This window illuminates the fact that staggeringly important events can result from trivial causes. Even a relative nobody like Gavrilo Princip or Lee Harvey Oswald can change history because of the unpredictable effects of chance and circumstance. But the problem is that the human mind being what is, it looks for causal patterns that are as large as the effects they produce. We find it easy to accept the incalculably evil Nazis as the cause of World War 2 but find it hard to swallow the lowly Princip as the pivotal cause of World War 1. We find it even harder to accept the inconsequential Lee Harvey Oswald as the causal factor for the murder of the consequential John F Kennedy. In the face of disparate differences between cause and effect our mind resorts to what Shermer calls “patternicity” and “agenticity”. Since we believe that the agents responsible for historic effects should be as major as the events themselves, we start conjuring them up to soothe our psychology. So, since Oswald does not fit the right profile as an agent for JFK’s assassination we start invoking the CIA, the Cubans, the Mafia and LBJ as more plausible agents, even if the evidence implicating these entities is thinner than the other evidence. The pattern fits, but only in the comfortable confines of our minds.
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It is this inability to grasp the disparities between cause and effect that leads to some of the most prominent conspiracy theories involving science, including climate change and evolution denial. For instance, consider some of the questions that both camps raise when confronted with the evidence: How can puny humans cause the global climate to change? How can “microevolution” be responsible for “macroevolution”? How can minor policies that we undertake today be useful for ameliorating the untoward influences of climate change tomorrow? Even when the mountain of evidence is monumental, conspiracy theorists will try to discredit the entire edifice based on tiny details. Transitional fossils? Too sparse to say anything about evolution. Melting of ice sheets? Too inconsequential to say anything about global climate change. Bacterial change (as demonstrated massively through the patient experiments of Richard Lenski)? Too minor to account for change in higher animals. Conspiracy theorists either cannot accept or actively deny the role of simple details in the larger picture, although the former trait is definitely widespread.
But the tiny details matter. Over the ten decades following that unfortunate day in June, it is science itself that has provided some of the answers to these conspiracy theorists. Not that the evidence will make most of them change their mind, but we have found for instance the sensitive dependence of natural phenomena on initial conditions, a finding which is at the heart of chaos theory; as demonstrated by the famous “butterfly effect”, even slight changes in initial conditions can lead to enormous changes in the outcome. There is an entire science of complex systems now devoted to such effects. Through physics we have also discovered the ultrasensitive dependence of the features of the known universe on the slightest differences in the values of the fundamental constants; change the strong force in nuclei by one percent and it may make the difference between a universe with or without life. As recounted in the recent book “The Butterfly Defect”, we have also realized the complex web of interdependencies between both natural and human events that globalization has stitched together; for instance a recent natural catastrophe in Hong Kong affected the shipping and distribution of a significant percentage of hard drives around the world because the major manufacturers of these drives happened to be located there. And none of these phenomena are really predictable; they are really the product of chance and contingency.
Science therefore has now provided at least some justification for what the human mind always suspected, but what some human minds refuse to believe; that small changes can lead to big changes, that these small changes can be random and unpredictable, that fickle accidents of history can affect both the human and the natural worlds. Today as we contemplate Princip’s actions and the rupturing of world affairs that followed, it is wise to also contemplate this web of interconnections and to use it as a bulwark against those who would deny its implications and instead try to foist their own deterministic prejudices upon its gossamer threads. As the old proverb goes, we now know and can even rationalize how for want of a horseshoe an entire kingdom can be lost. Whether we find this fact fascinating or heartbreaking, we need to accept it as a fact at the heart of reality itself
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Ashutosh Jogalekar
Ashutosh Jogalekar is a chemist interested in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. He is fascinated by the logic of scientific discovery and by the interaction of science with public sentiments and policy. He blogs at The Curious Wavefunction and can be reached at curiouswavefunction@gmail.com.
(@EcologyWA) 
