WE ARE STAR STUFF, WE ARE GOLDEN



Thank you, Hubble

THE ALIENS ARE COMING!! THE ALIENS ARE COMING!!

Are they here or are they hype?

By Jean Bush

Fundamentalist Christians believe that when the Rapture occurs, the ones true to Christ will be raised up unto heaven and taken to be seated on the right hand of the Lord.

The Jehovah's Witnesses believe that only 100,000 of them, out of millions of believers, will be taken up to see heaven.

The Muslims that everyone will be resurrected for judgement into either paradise or hell.

The Hindus believe that Krishna will guide their souls to perfection life after life after life.

And the Jews?  Well, they believe in  themselves!  They are the "Chosen People" after all! 

And what does any of this have to do with aliens? Well, according to the following video, we have to watch out for the invasion and Dr. Micheo Kaku, who has studied the problem thoroughly, suggest ways in which we can prepare for this most certainly coming event.

President Reagan even dreamed of unification under the guise of an alien threat.



And most of us grew up on decades of flying saucer movies like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and most recently "Independence Day."   Are we being prepped for a possible threat from outer space?  Is the "Star Wars" program created and designed to save us?  Should we look to the skies and pray for salvation?

Perhaps that is exactly what the New World Order is planning for us, via Project Blue Beam.

Each of the above religions will hear and see their own prophets guiding them and ordering their compliance in the name of their God.   The Alien invasion will unite the world for the coming threat and bring all mankind into "unity" for our salvation.  

http://educate-yourself.org/cn/projectbluebeam25jul05.shtml

Perhaps this is even closer then you think.

A possible answer:

Like the ever whirling earth swinging around it's orbit, the NWO is ever busy spinning its web of lies, deceit and terror ensnaring us ever more tightly in its grip.   To use the heart of a person's faith against them is the ultimate betrayal.   If there is a God how could He let this happen and will He save us in the end?  If there is not, what does it matter?

What matters is that we stand up in our beliefs, whatever they are, and fight and resist this horrifying invasion of our mind and hearts and souls.  For in the end, we all swing into that great unknown.

"I'd Rather live my life as if there's God, and die to find out there isn't, than to live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."



The Speed of Life: Why Time Seems to Speed Up and How to Slow it Down

Steve Taylor, New DawnWaking Times

I’m six years old, in the car with my parents and brother, travelling back from our annual two week holiday in Conwy, North Wales. It’s dark and the journey seems to take forever. I lie in the back seat, watching the orange streetlights and the houses pass by, and wonder if we’re ever going to get home.

“Are we nearly there yet?” I ask my father.

“Don’t be silly,” he says. “We only set off half an hour ago.”

My mum plays the ‘Yes/No’ game and ‘Twenty questions’ with us to make the time pass faster. We listen to the radio for a while. Then I fall asleep. When I wake up it seems like I’ve been in the car for an eternity and I can’t believe we’re still not home.

“Are we nearly there yet?” I ask again.

“Not far now,” says my father.

We play some more games and finally I recognise the streets of our suburb of Manchester. I feel bored and miserable and tell myself that I’m never going to spend as long in a car ever again.

The journey from Conwy to Manchester took two hours when I was a child and still takes roughly two hours now (although slightly less due to improvements in roads). I made the journey again a few years ago and couldn’t believe how short it seemed now, from my adult perspective. Those two hours – which seemed like an eternity when I was 6 – were nothing. My girlfriend was driving, and we chatted, listened to tapes, watched the Welsh countryside give way to the urban sprawl of north-west England, and we were back in Manchester almost before we knew it. It was a little frightening – what had happened to all the time that two hours contained when I was six years old?

A year or so ago I made another journey which gave me an indication of how much more quickly time is passing to me now. This was a 15 hour plane journey, from Singapore to Manchester, which also seemed to last forever. I’m not a very good flyer and it wasn’t a very good flight: we flew into two typhoons over India and it was rocky almost all the way. I hoped I’d be able to ‘kill’ some of the time by sleeping but it was impossible. Every time I drifted off my anxiety woke me up again. Failing that, I hoped I’d at least be able to make the time pass quickly by distracting myself with the in-flight entertainment or with books and magazines, but my mind stubbornly refused to move from the moment to moment reality of the situation. I was aware of every minute passing, and as a result time seemed to drag horribly. Every time I checked the clock – which was every few minutes or so – less time had gone by than I expected.

My subjective sense of how long that journey took is, I realised recently, very similar to my sense of how long my childhood journey to Conwy took. To me they seemed to involve roughly the same amount of boredom and impatience and to last for roughly the same amount of time. This suggests that what was two hours to me as a child is equivalent to 15 hours to me as an adult – which means, rather frighteningly, that time is now passing around seven times faster than when I was a child.

This story appears to fit with most people’s experience. Most of us feel that time moved very slowly when we were children and is gradually speeding up as we grow older. We’ve all remarked on it: how Christmas seems to come round quicker every year; how you’re just getting used to writing the date of the new year on your cheques and you realise that it’s almost over; how your children are about to finish school when it doesn’t seem long since you were changing their nappies…

Questionnaires by psychologists have shown that almost everyone – including college students – feels that time is passing faster now compared to when they were half or a quarter as old as now. And perhaps most strikingly, a number of experiments have shown that, when older people are asked to guess how long intervals of time are, or to ‘reproduce’ the length of periods of time, they guess a shorter amount than younger people.

We usually become conscious of this speeding up around our late twenties, when most of us have ‘settled down.’ We have steady jobs and marriages and homes and our lives become ordered into routines – the daily routine of working, coming home, having dinner and watching TV; the weekly routine of (for example) going to the gym on Monday night, going to the cinema on Wednesday night, going for a drink with friends on Friday night etc.; and the yearly routine of birthdays, bank holidays and two weeks’ holiday in the summer. After a few years we start to realise that the time it takes us to run through these routines seems to be decreasing, as if we’re on a turntable which is picking up speed with every rotation. As the French philosopher Paul Janet noted more than a hundred years ago:

Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour.1

This speeding up is probably responsible for the phenomenon which psychologists call ‘forward telescoping’: our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have. Marriages, deaths, the birth of children – when we look back at these and other significant events, we’re often surprised that they happened so long ago, shocked to find that it’s already four years since a friend died when we thought it was only a couple of years, or that a niece or nephew is already ten years old when it only seems like three or four years since they were born.

As one 83 year old man told me, “I can never guess how long ago things happened. People ask me things like ‘When did so and so get married?’ or ‘When did so and so die?’ and I’m always way out. If I say it was two years it turns out to be 5 years. If I say six months, it’s two years.” The same holds true for national and international events, like the deaths of famous people, natural disasters and wars: studies have shown that people usually date these too recently as well. And perhaps this is because time is speeding up as we get older. Time is moving more quickly than we think. It doesn’t seem like four years since a friend died or a baby was born, or since a famous person died, because during those four years time has been speeding up without you realising, making every month and year shorter than the one before.

The Proportional and Biological Theories

So why do we experience this speeding up of time?

One popular answer is the ‘proportional’ theory, which suggests that the important factor is that, as you get older, each time period constitutes a smaller fraction of your life as a whole. This theory seems to have been first put forward in 1877 by Paul Janet, who suggested the law that, as William James describes it, “the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man’s life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life – a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length.”2 At the age of one month, a week is a quarter of your whole life, so it’s inevitable that it seems to last forever. At the age of 14, one year constitutes around 7% of your life, so that seems to be a large amount of time too. But at the age of 30 a week is only a tiny percentage of your life, and at 50 a year is only 2% of your life, and so your subjective sense is that these are insignificant periods of time which pass very quickly.

There is some sense to this theory – it does offer an explanation for why the speed of time seems to increase so gradually and evenly, with almost mathematical consistency. One problem with it, however, is that it tries to explain present time purely in terms of past time. The assumption behind it is that we continually experience our lives as a whole, and perceive each day, week, month or year becoming more insignificant in relation to the whole. But we don’t live our lives like this. We live in terms of much smaller periods of time, from hour to hour and day to day, dealing with each time period on its own merits, independently of all that has gone before.

There are also biological theories. One of these is that the speeding up of time is linked to how our metabolism gradually slows down as we grow older. Because children’s hearts beat faster than ours, because they breathe more quickly and their blood flows more quickly etc., their body clocks ‘cover’ more time within the space of 24 hours than ours do as adults. Children live through more time simply because they’re moving through time faster. Think of a clock which is set to run 25% faster than normal time – after 12 hours of normal time it has covered 15 hours, after 24 hours of normal time it has covered 30, which means that, from that clock’s point of view, a day has contained more time than usual. On the other hand old people are like clocks which run slower than normal, so that they lag behind, and cover less than 24 hours’ time against a normal clock.

Also from a biological perspective, there is the ‘body temperature’ theory. In the 1930s the psychologist Hudson Hoagland conducted a series of experiments which showed that body temperature causes different perceptions of time. Once, when his wife was ill with the flu and he was looking after her, he noticed that she complained that he’d been away for a long time even if he was only away for a few moments. With admirable scientific detachment, Hoagland tested her perception of time at different temperatures, and found that the higher her temperature, the more time seemed to slow down for her, and the longer she experienced each time period. Hoagland followed this up with several semi-sadistic experiments with students, which involved them enduring temperatures of up to 65C, and wearing heated helmets. These showed that raising a person’s body temperature can slow down their sense of time passing by up to 20%. And the important point here may be that children have a higher body temperature than adults, which may mean that time is ‘expanded’ to them. And in a similar way, our body temperature becomes gradually lower as we grow older, which could explain a gradual ‘constriction’ of time.

The Perceptual Theory

However, in my view, the speeding up of time we experience is mainly related to our perception of the world around us and of our experiences, and how this perception changes as we grow older.

The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes. This connection was verified by the psychologist Robert Ornstein in the 1960s. In a series of experiments, Ornstein played tapes to volunteers with various kinds of sound information on them, such as simple clicking sounds and household noises. At the end he asked them to estimate how long they had listened to the tape for, and found that when there was more information on the tape (e.g. when there were double the number of clicking noises), the volunteers estimated the time period to be longer. He found that this applied to the complexity of the information too. When they were asked to examine different drawings and paintings, the participants with the most complex images estimated the time period to be longest.

I have tested this myself with a simple experiment with music. During a course, I asked the participants to listen to two pieces of music. One was a mad, frenetic piano concerto byRachmaninov, with notes cascading at a rate of about 10 per second. The other was a piece of ambient music by Brian Eno, which floated gently and sedately across the room. We listened to the pieces for different periods of time and I asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed. If time perception is related to information, they should have experienced more time for the Rachmaninov piece. It contains a lot more information than the Brian Eno piece – many times more notes, tones and different instruments. All of this extra information should have stretched time.

And this is what the results showed. We listened to the Rachmaninov piece for 2 mins 20 secs, and the average estimate was 3 mins 25 secs. We listened to the Brian Eno piece for 2 minutes, while the average estimate was 2 mins 32 secs – still an over-estimate, but a lower one.

And if more information slows down time, perhaps part of the reason why time goes so slowly for children is because of the massive amount of ‘perceptual information’ that they take in from the world around them. Young children appear to live in a completely different world to adults – a much more intense, more real and more fascinating and beautiful one. As the psychologist Ernest Beckerwrites, in childhood we experience a “vision of the primary miraculousness of creation,” and our perceptions of the world are “suffused… in emotion and wonder.” This is one of the reasons why we often recall childhood as a time of bliss – because the world was a much more exciting and beautiful place to us then, and all our experiences were so intense. Children’s heightened perception means that they’re constantly taking in all kinds of details which pass us adults by – tiny cracks in windows, tiny insects crawling across the floor, patterns of sunlight on the carpet etc. And even the larger scale things which we can see as well seem to be more real to them, to be brighter, with more presence and is-ness. All of this information stretches out time for children.

However, as we get older, we lose this intensity of perception, and the world becomes a dreary and familiar place – so dreary and familiar that we stop paying attention to it. After all, why should you pay attention to the buildings or streets you pass on the way to work? You’ve seen these things thousands of times before, and they’re not beautiful or fascinating, they’re just… ordinary. As Becker describes it, we “repress” this intensity of vision. “By the time we leave childhood,” he writes, “we have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience.”3 Or as Wordsworth puts it in his famous poem ‘Intimations of Immortality’, the childhood vision which enabled to all things “apparelled in celestial light,” begins to “fade into the light of common day.”4 And this is why time speeds up for us. As we become adults, we begin to ‘switch off’ to the wonder and is-ness of the world, gradually stop paying conscious attention to our surroundings and experience. As a result we take in less information, which means that time passes more quickly. Time is less ‘stretched’ with information.

Old and New Experience

And once we become adults, there is a process of progressive ‘familiarisation’ which continues throughout our lives. The longer we’re alive, the more familiar the world becomes, so that the amount of perceptual information we absorb decreases with every year, and time seems to pass faster every year.

There are two basic reasons why this happens. On the one hand, as we grow older there is progressively less newness in our lives. The life of a 20 year old woman is still full of new experiences. She’s still discovering new kinds of music, food, literature and other new hobbies and interests. She might be experiencing her first serious romantic relationship, learning to drive, flying and going abroad for the first time, discovering new towns or the countryside close to where she lives and so on. When she has these new experiences she is free of the de-sensitising mechanism; she perceives the ‘raw experience’ of the world and processes a large amount of perceptual information.

The same person at the age of 30 might still be having a few new experiences. She might be having a baby, going abroad to another country she’s never been to before, learning a new language, or starting a new job. But by the time she reaches 40 the world contains much less unfamiliarity. Her life probably consists mainly of the repetition of experiences which she’s had hundreds or thousands of times before. She works at the job she’s had for the last 20 years, goes home to the same house she’s had for the last ten, devotes her free time to the same hobbies and interests she discovered when she was 20, goes away at weekends to the same countryside, to the same foreign country every year, and so on. Because of this the de-sensitising mechanism has a greater hold over her. She’s hardly ever free of it, which means that she absorbs much less perceptual information.

But if this was the only reason why our perceptions become less fresh – and why time speeds up – as we get older, there wouldn’t be much difference between the time perceptions of a 40 and a 60 year old person. Most of us use up almost all of our ‘stock’ of new experience by the time we reach middle-age, and so there would be no real reason why time should appear to move faster for a person at these different ages. However, the second reason why our perceptions become less fresh is probably that as we get older all the experiences we’ve already had become more familiar to us. Not only do we have fewer new experiences, but the experiences which are already familiar to us become progressively less real. In William James’ words, “each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine.”5 As well as experiencing lots of new things, a woman at the age of 20 is still quite ‘fresh’ to the phenomenal world around her – but over the next 20 years, she’ll look at the same street scenes and the same sky and the same trees thousands of times, so that more and more of their realness will fade away.

Incidentally, this link between time and information can explain other aspects of time too. One of the ‘laws’ of psychological time which I set out in my book Making Time is that “time seems to slow down when we’re exposed to new environments and experiences.” This is because the unfamiliarity of new experiences allows us to take in much more information. Another of the laws is that “time goes quickly in states of absorption.” This is because in states of absorption our attention narrows to one small focus and we block out information from our surroundings. At the same time there is very little ‘cognitive information’ in our minds, since the concentration has quietened the normal ‘thought chatter’ of the mind. On the other hand, time goes slowly in states of boredom and discomfort because in these situations our attention isn’t occupied and a massive amount of thought-chatter flows through our minds, bringing a massive amount of cognitive information.

Slowing Down Time

On the positive side though, if we know why time speeds up as we get older we aren’t powerless against it. If we know that this is caused by familiarity, then we make an effort to expose ourselves to as much newness in our lives as possible – not just new environments through travel (although this is very important), but new challenges, new situations, new information, ideas, hobbies and skills. As the expansion of time which we often experience when we go to foreign countries shows, newness and unfamiliarity stretch time. If we regularly expose ourselves to unfamiliarity, we can experience more time in our lives, and so effectively live for ‘longer.’

If you spend all the years of your adult life doing the same job, living in the same house in the same area, doing the same things with the same people in your free time, then it’s inevitable that you experience a swift passage of time. But if you change jobs regularly, regularly travel to new places, keep investigating new ideas and giving yourself new challenges, time will pass more slowly to you. In this way, it’s possible for a person who dies before the age of 40 (like the French poet and explorer Arthur Rimbaud, who I wrote about recently in New Dawn) to live for ‘longer’ than a person who dies at the age of 80.

A second way in which we can slow down time is by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful’ of our experience. There are some people who seem to be as affected by familiarity than others, and see the world with something of the fresh, first-time vision of children all through their lives. These are the kind of people – sometimes seen as eccentrics by those around them – who often begin sentences with phrases like ‘Isn’t it strange that…?’ or ‘Have you ever wondered…?’ They’re the kind of people who might stop in the street to gaze up at a beautiful scene of the sun breaking through clouds or a silver moon above the rooftops; or they might stare intently at the sea, at flowers or at animals, as if they’ve never seen them before. Poets and artists often have this kind of ‘child-like’ vision – in fact it’s this that usually provides the inspiration for their work. They often have a sense of strangeness and wonder about things which most of us take for granted, and feel a need to capture and frame their more intense perceptions. These people will be less affected by the first time law of psychological time than others; time may well speed up for them, but perhaps not to the same degree.

And in a sense, we can cultivate this attitude simply by making a conscious effort to be ‘mindful.’ Instead of focusing our attention on the ‘thought-chatter’ in our heads or on tasks or distractions like TV or computer games, we should try to live in the present, to give our attention to the experiences we’re having and to our surroundings. When you’re having a shower in the morning, for example – instead of letting your mind chatter away about the things you’ve got to do today or the things you did last night, try to bring your attention to the here and now, to really be aware of the sensation of the water splashing against and running down your body and the sense of warmth and cleanness you feel. Or on the way home from work on the bus or the train – instead of mulling over all the problems you’ve had to deal with at work or daydreaming about the attractive girl you met last night, focus your attention outside you; look at the sky, at the houses and buildings you pass, and be aware of yourself here, walking amongst them.

Mindfulness means stopping thinking and starting to be aware, to live in the here and now of your experience instead of the ‘there and then’ of your thoughts. It stretches time in exactly the same way that new experience does: because we give more attention to our experience, we take in more information from it.

In other words, to some extent we can control time. It doesn’t have to speed up as get older. Some of us try to extend our lives by keeping fit and eating healthy food, which is completely sensible. But it’s also possible for us to expand time from the inside, by changing the way we experience the moment to moment reality of our lives. We can live for longer not just in terms of years, but also in terms of perception.

About the Author

STEVE TAYLOR is an author and lecturer who lives in Manchester, England. This article is based on his new book Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, published in Australia by Allen & Unwin. The book has been described by Dr. Stanley Krippner as “a major landmark in our understanding of how human beings experience time.” Steve is also the author of The Fall: The Evidence for a Golden Age and the Dawning of a New Era, described as “astonishing work” by Colin Wilson. Steve can be contacted at essytaylor@yahoo.com. His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com.

Footnotes:

1. Quoted in W. James, The Principles of Psychology, (New York: Dover Press, 1950) Chapter XV.

2. Ibid.

3. E. Becker, The Denial of Death, (New York: Free Press, 1973), p.50.

4. W. Wordsworth, Poems, (London: Penguin, 1950), p.71.

5. James, op.cit.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 104 (Sept-Oct 2007).

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THE CELEBRATION

By Jean Bush

It was a shifting night of eyes and things;

Of smokey fires and spells to sing.

Where witches dance and fairies prance

And night takes flight upon its wings.

October wind, chilled too soon,

Blows beneath the misty moon.

Drifting clouds like ragged shrouds

Enhance the coming gloom.

Within the woods a cat-like tread;

A hung still moment of nameless dread.

A flash of light then blackest night,

And there stood they, the walking dead.

A crackling fire they quick surround

And dance a dance of leaps and bounds.

Black hair flying, voices crying,

The dancers from the graveyard mounds.

The moon casts forth a deathlike sheen

On these creatures from a madman’s dream.

But to childhood’s ghosts they drink a toast,

And celebrate this Halloween.

THE WITCHING HOUR

By Jean Bush

Shadow, shadow on the wall;

Merry monsters in the hall.

Ghostly goblins gently peek

At little children faking sleep.

The night is strange as low it roams

Around the snugly lighted homes.

The young ones feel its magic power.

The clock has struck the children’s hour!

Grabbing costumes from the wall,

Then down the stairs and past the hall

To children’s promised midnight feast

As grownups fall for trick or treat.

Grinning faces laughing merry;

Crouching shadows dark and scary.

Late this night there are no dreams

For this night’s name is HALLOWEEN!

HANK’S NIGHT TRIP TO HELL OR HOW HE STOPPED SCREAMING AND LEARNED TO RUN

By that talented but crazy gang at Alien-Earth.org

           

        It was a dark and stormy night and Hank was driving down a lonely stretch of road. It was the middle of night and though he had driven this road many times before something just didn't seem quite right. It was a strange feeling, but he just shrugged it off. The visibility was terrible. Not only was there driving rain, but there was a dense fog as well. Suddenly he...

... had a strange craving for an orange smoothie, but all that was in the car was a cooler full of pints of blood that he was transporting to the hospital. As he rounded a blind curve he saw an overturned truck. Skidding to a stop, he pulled to the side of the road. Despite the driving rain, the blinking back lights of the truck told him the accident just happened. Opening the door, he gingerly made his way to the cab of the truck, and peered inside. What he saw made him.....

...cringe in disgust and horror. There before him laid a man with a gaping hole in his stomach with cockroaches crawling out of it. He noticed a strange marking on the man's forehead. Upon closer examination...

recognized it to be the symbol from The Alan Parson's Project album cover Eye in the Sky. He couldn't remember the exact name for the ancient symbol although he was fairly certain it was Egyptian. Instinctively knew it inappropriate for the grisly sight before him and before the rising bile reached his throat he grabbed his cell and began running back to his car. Fuck, only 1 bar available.

As he attempted to dial 911 a bolt of lightning struck his car. The blast from the explosion lifted him off his feet throwing him to the shoulder of the road and sent him rolling down the soggy embankment. It was hen his body finally rested he discovered he blinded by the flash and realized everything was silent...he couldn't even hear the rain that had suddenly become painfully torrential. "That's not rain" he thought to himself, "its hail"

Frantic, he kept punching 922 instead of 911.

"Damn it," he said, "what the fuck is wrong with me! Guy died in an accident, the marks on his head were from banging it on the steering wheel!"

He laid on his back, letting the hail pound the hell out of him. Finally it stopped. He slowly sat up, feeling for broken bones. As he crawled out of the ditch, feeling dismay at losing all those blood pints and not getting paid for them, a car pulled over, the driver honking the horn.

"Hey buddy, you OK?"

Dear God, it was a woman. Finally something he could deal with. He limped to her car as she rolled down the window and...

"Are you alright?" Her attempt at concern didn't coincide with the eerie look of her face and the bright red lipstick haphazardly applied. Maybe he was traumatized and his vision was still skewed from the lightning blast or possibly a concussion. Maybe she wasn't really concerned at all.

"What? I can't hear you." he said as he slowed his pace.

He read her lips as she asked again "Are you alright?" This time he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be large canine incisors.
"What the hell?" he thought to himself, "This is surreal.  I'm living a shitty B movie." Then he saw her car door open and... and a foot clad in a spike high heel shoe appeared. That foot was attached to a long, shapely fishnet clad leg.

She got out of the car and said again, "Are you alright?"

Snapping out of his reverie at this strange, but hauntingly beautiful woman, he managed to say, "I think I'm ok, but I really need a ride."

"This truck crashed. I think the driver's dead, murdered."

Stepping closer to him, her long, black hair swirling around her shoulders, her breasts straining at the satin halter-top, she smiled.

Hank thought that was the reddest lipstick he had ever seen. As she approached him, her little pointy teeth showed through the smeared lips. That WAS lipstick, wasn't it??

Smiling invitingly, she said softly:

"It's been a rough night."

Gripping his shoulders, she leaned toward him when suddenly they heard a strange shrieking from the truck's trailer.

Startled both Hank and lipstick woman turned their heads towards the overturned truck.  "Damn" said the lipstick woman. Without further hesitation Hank started running back toward the wreck.

The mysterious woman seemed to be beside herself as if she were thoroughly enjoying the torturous cries emitting from the wreckage. Hank turned around and yelled for her to help him and watched her rapid, unnatural approach as though she was moving without the use of her legs...levitating even. "I've got to keep a clear head" he said to himself as once again he found this entire episode surpassing the surreal of earlier.

She was immediately by his side and didn't hesitate to throw off the wreckage as if she were the Terminator. Her lack of emotion upon seeing the carnage of what was inside the trailer should have surprised Hank, but he found this whole night growing stranger and stranger.  Wrenching open the double doors, a horrific site greeted their stunned eyes:

Bodies. Bodies of babies and children, torn from limb to limb covered in blood. The few that were crying and screaming were surrounded by strange mewling sounds.   OMG!  Kittens!  Dozens of tiny, yowling kittens.   Hank staggered back as the little creatures flew out of the truck, hissing and spitting, fur on end.

As they ran past the hauntingly beautiful woman and into the strange dark, she lifted her fishnet clad leg and gently brought her black spiked heel down on one of them.  The little kitten squirmed and struggled as she pressed it firmly to the ground.

“Stop that,” he cried, hurrying toward her.   She smiled and pressed harder.  

Hank stood in front of her, fists curled at his side.  He’d never struck a woman before but wondered if she’d even feel it.   The kitten, crying pitifully, stopped struggling and lay panting under her lovely but cruel foot.   Suddenly she shrugged and stepped away.  The kitten didn’t move.   Hank bent down and scooped the shivering little ball of fur into his hand.   Still panting, the kitten lay still, eyes closed.   

As he stroked and calmed it, the kitten opened its bright green eyes and stared at him.  All at once, it reared back, opened its jaws and bit down on his hand, sucking voraciously.   Yelping, Hank tried to pull the kitten off but it clung to his bleeding flesh, biting and sucking.  Feeling the blood draining from his hand he grabbed the creature by its head and ripped, pulling skin and blood with it.  He flung it to the ground where it hissed at him and ran off into the woods.

The smiling beautiful woman slunk over and offered to kiss it all better.   He jerked his hand away from her as she reached for him when suddenly a sudden movement from the cab made them jerk around.....

Staring at the cab, they watched as the driver’s side door began to open. How could this be? The driver was dead, wasn't he? They began to hear a snarling, unearthly sound as what appeared to be hand pushing the door open.


A grotesque, scaly creature crawled out, appearing half human and half reptile, with blood dripping from its fangs and holding the driver's head in its other claw-hand. Suddenly it let out a loud bellow and growled in a gravelly voice, "Ah, been holding that in for the last few miles."
Slapping his forehead, Hank immediately understood the dangers of picking up hitchhikers. Backing away, they watched the horror shamble toward them.
Cracking open the driver's skull, the creature sucked the brains in great slurping gulps.

Wiping its mouth and dropping the head to shatter on the street, it said.......

..."Now my children, grab that human man and bring him to the blood ritual. Our master awaits us for this is the night of the celestial harmonic awakening."

Hank tried to run but...
Something caught his eye and reached out to touch the screen before him....

He looked at his hands and he was in black and white.....

OMG..... I'm a character in a fricken movie!

He turned back toward the carnage and to his utter disbelief found himself falling into a faint.  Falling onto the road, he turned on his back and looked up, but saw only utter darkness.

Hank suddenly felt something cold and wet on his face. Someone had thrown a glass of water in his face and woke him up. He felt tremendous relief because it had all been a horrible and strange nightmare.

But just as the cobwebs were clearing from his head, his stomach tied up in knots and the terror returned as he realized that he was bound to an altar. He tried to scream, but no sound came out of his mouth. He looked up and saw...

Alan Parsons! Older and bearded but nonetheless, it was him alright and he was wearing a necklace with that eye symbol from his album which was also burned into the forehead of the dead? truck driver. He couldn't move, not a muscle but his mind was racing and among other things thought it was sleep paralysis. Please dear god, let it be...

a real nightmare! Let me just wake up in my own bed. God, what did I do to deserve this shit???

"Alan," he pleaded, "I used to have all your albums. I love your work, Man, just get me out of this."

Alan just pulled his hood over his face and stood silently back.

No answer from the All fucking Mighty, either, however, a rustle of clothing caught his ear. Looking over, he was surrounded by more cloaked and hooded figures. The one closest to him had the fetid smell of death.

Raising their arms, the figures began to chant..........

"Wake up, wake up, wake up" he kept repeating to himself. He'd once read that you could talk to yourself in the dreamscape and even force yourself to awaken. Why was it so difficult to scream? If he could just scream.... then whoosh!! His breath was knocked out of him and then he heard the low purring of his cat Willy. He was awake!! He must be! There wasn't a single morning in 5 years that Willy had not awakened him by pouncing on his chest and purring in his ear.

It was just a dream - a dream within a dream. Relieved and in dire need of reality Hank jumped out of bed grabbing Willy in the process and headed for the kitchen. He never needed a pot of coffee like he did this morning. After filling up Willy's bowl he determined a quick shower was in order. Anything to get rid of the clammy feeling and help shake off the nightmare. Using up the time while the coffee brewed was a great idea. He didn't want to ponder too long or too much on that damn weird dream.

Calm restored and a jolt of caffeine energy provided adequate stimulus to get dressed and out of house. He had a deadline to meet and today, work would be a blessing.

Heading out the door and snatching his keys from the little catch-all table he once again acknowledged normalcy and gave a little sigh of relief. "Goddamn nightmares!" he thought and then chuckled out loud.

Driving down the familiar road with music blasting from his favorite rock station felt fucking fantastic. The song was cut short the music was interrupted for an emergency weather bulletin - Severe thunderstorm with dangerous lightning - limited visibility due to an unnatural fast moving fog bank - advising the listening audience to take shelter. Being only a few miles from the office Hank decided to disregard the warning, when suddenly, the sky darkened and it started to rain. He turned on the windshield wipers but to no avail. Apparently, he had driven directly into the storm. The visibility was terrible. Not only was there driving rain, but there was a dense fog as well. Suddenly he....

The Green Cult's Poisonous Materials

By Ted Twietmeyer
5-22-11

Back in the eighties a directive was issued by television networks to Hollywood: "Get rid of any show with a tree in it." This exact statement came from an actor on the eighties television show "Greatest American Hero." Any television series with outside scenes had to go including Little House on the Prairie, Greatest American Hero and other shows with outdoor scenes. These shows were canceled without revealing why trees in outdoor scenes were no longer acceptable. Perhaps occasional chemtrails inadvertently filmed in the background sky in outdoor scenes was the reason.

Ratings didn't make any difference to network dictators. The patriotic, creative, crazy and humorous Greatest American Hero was #1 in the ratings charts even in it's third year, and still it was canceled. Mind-numbing sit-coms replaced good fun and humor. Family dramas like Little House were now history. You probably have about as much love for sitcoms as I do.

On television shows today, how often do you see the color green? Next time you stare at the silver screen look for the color green. Other than on nature documentaries, green is usually seen only in commercials which talk about removing grass stains. Rarely do actors wear green or will you find green on any television program. Why this is the case is unknown, even with today's green movement everywhere in society.

I related the following story in an older essay but it bears repeating here. A brilliant retired scientist I know, who worked for DuPont, was in college back in the sixties. He earned his PhD in ecology. A movement to "save the planet" was beginning about that time. Only children born in the fifties or earlier are likely to remember the sixties era. Contrary to some opinions, the entire mother Earth thing started back at that time with the hippie generation, not by Al Gore of today or anyone else.

When the ecological scientist worked at DuPont in the eighties he was worked in a totally unrelated area of technology ? breakthrough trend monitoring of bearing failure of gas turbine generators which power DuPont chemical plants. I worked at a company which designed and manufactured instrumentation for his project. When I asked him in 1984 why he wasn't working in the ecology field, he replied: "When I was in college everyone was into ecology. By the time I graduated no one cared about the environment anymore."

Will today's green movement also die a quiet death like the first movement? Not likely, considering that billions of dollars are created by the recycling industry.

So what about this Green Cult? What is the definition of a cult? Most people tend to associate cults with particular religions. Cults are often strict and tell members what to do with little choice. However, these organizations can exist outside of religion.


Merriam-Webster defines a cult in this way [1]:

formal religious veneration, worship

1.
a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also: it's body of adherents (rules)

2.
a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also: its body of adherents

3.
a system for the cure of disease on dogma set forth by its promulgator

4.
a) a great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement or work (as a film or book) especially: such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad

b) the object of such devotion

c) usually small group of people characterized by such devotion

We find many striking parallels when comparing today's ecology movement to the above dictionary definition. The green movement has a religion-like veneration by it's followers. This obsession captures and brainwashes the minds of even the smartest people. This green cult has given us over-priced fuel-efficient cars among many things. In reality, these vehicles provide only marginally better mileage than a big vehicle made in the nineties. Everyone today raves whenever a vehicle gets 30MPG, as though this has never happened before. Before SUVs became popular 30MPG was not uncommon.

Decent mileage isn't new, unless you're only about 10 years old and grew up in the SUV era. Case in point as I've mentioned in another article ?




I own a 1998 non-electric, non-hybrid Buick Park Ave. which actually gets 30 MPG or more on the highway. It travels about 460 miles on one tank of fuel. This Park Ave. does not have a puny 1.2L engine typical of hybrid vehicles, but has a big 3.8L engine with plenty of room inside. I drive 36 miles each way to work five days a week but fill it only once a week. And the best part ? you don't feel beat up after being in the car almost an hour in the morning and another hour at night. A significant percentage of miles are city driving, too.

Other facts clearly define the green movement as a cult. It has a body of adherents (rules) people are being forced to follow whether beneficial or economical or not. For example, the banning of filament-type light bulbs in Europe.

In an article I wrote a few years ago, I compared today's energy efficient light bulbs to a simple filament light bulb.



In an energy efficient CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lamp) virtually nothing is recyclable. It's made of numerous toxic compounds which cannot be melted and re-used again. Toxic white phosphor dust lines the lamp's glass tubing. Two milligrams of mercury are inside the tubing of every lamp. A circuit board often burns out, which requires discarding the entire lamp and buying another one (with more mercury.) No one has yet to find an efficient way to dispose of, or reuse these toxic materials. If you break an ordinary light bulb, you simply sweep and vacuum up the glass pieces and you're done.. According to the EPA, if you break a CFL you must follow hazardous material guidelines.

Below is a comparison of lamp technologies from my article in 2008. Nothing has changed:



Yet ordinary light bulbs are being banned everywhere, even though these are manufactured with 100% recyclable components. Is this a case of saving power today, and then using that saved power in the future to dispose of these toxic lamps? And there will be billions of these lamps in the near future. Where will they all go? Into a landfill to contaminate soil and groundwater?

Which would YOU rather buy now that you see the bigger picture? The green cult claims to have answers to everything about energy savings and environmental protection. Yet this same cult incrementally takes more and more decisions away from everyone, dictating more and more about what you will do and how you will live day and night. This cult is just another version of the frog in the pot. The green movement's body of adherents are simply rules.

Consider that flat panel television you just bought. You can conveniently hang it on the wall or stand it up on a table. But what do you really know about the material inside it? What happens when it quits and you must replace it, because repair costs are high? You probably don't realize that the organic liquid crystal material is toxic to people. Display manufacturers who make glass LCD panels for products clearly state this in their data sheets for manufacturers this way:

"Caution should be taken not to get the liquid crystal fluid in one's mouth or hands if a panel is broken. If this occurs, immediately wash with water."

Something is wrong about this fluid. You'll also see this statement about LCD fluid in a web search several times:

"Never swallow the fluid. The toxicity is low, but caution should be exercised at all times."

The above statement is contradictory at best. Caution regarding what? Further, the EPA's website states that insufficient data is available from manufacturers on toxicity." Why won't the EPA test liquid crystal fluid themselves to get the answer? Considering the proliferation of LCD panels in recent years this should have been done a long time ago.

What will happen when millions of these big LCD screens quit over time and become obsolete, ending up in landfills? Thrown into a landfill, broken glass panels will allow the liquid crystal fluid to seep into groundwater possibly poisoning forever. But no one appears to care about it right now. Not even a whimper about this issue from greenies who watch their Sunday sports or surf the web using LCD panels. This demonstrates yet again just how one-sided the green movement really is.

Billions of dollars of revenue for numerous recycling industries depend on the green movement. Even cults or ecological movements always comes down to the almighty dollar.

We clearly see green movement actions matching the definition of a cult by Merriam-Webster. A person, idea, object, movement or work is one of the dictionary's definition of a cult.

Let's look closer at how the green movement meets the dictionary's definition of a cult:




Person? Al Gore's name and others are synonymous with the green movement.


The idea? Saving energy, the Earth, the ecology and controlling what people buy and do.

Objects? Light bulbs, vehicles, televisions, appliances and anything else than can be replaced. The obsessive idea of thinking green all the time day and night is inherent part of the movement.

Movement? A growing mentality designed to permeate all of society and industry.

There is just one requirement for anyone wanting to participate in the green movement: Get your wallet out and start paying for the privilege to boast about being green. Most likely anything you already own won't satisfy the latest green requirement for using it. Does not the green movement require the same monetary sacrifice religious cults require of their members? Sometimes property is used to make a payment to a cult, showing the required sacrifice has been made which proves brainwashing is complete. Perhaps it could be called the price of admission.

Mainstream media has not missed the chance of hopping on the wacky and contradictory Eco-bandwagon. Here's a segment from CNN's current main web page showing their endorsement for this fad:




Green supercars to dream about. (We know these vehicles don't exist and may never be allowed to be produced.) A story titled "Tread lightly when you camp" (outline added by author.) Most people go camping to relax, enjoy themselves and relieve stress. But greenies want everyone to worry, worry, worry. Imagine one of these people out in the wilderness, going camping after climbing a mountain: What am I doing wrong? Oh no - I breathed too hard climbing this mountain and created too much carbon dioxide! Did I just step on an ant or was that a termite? Did I just scare a bird away? If I drive my tent stake into the ground will it kill earth-worms below? On and on the guilt trip goes. Where it stops, no one knows.

Defecating in the wilderness - there's a hot topic for greenies. Did I bring enough trash bags with me? What if I get the runs out here ? can I pull a bag out in time and open it to catch my excrement? What happened in pre-toilet, pre-outhouse days wasn't all that long ago in human history. We all know what people did at the time to relieve themselves. Certainly when camping or hiking it's considered good practice to dig a hole and bury excrement. Or bury it afterward if there isn't time to dig the hole first if mother nature is screaming and not just calling. Nature will do the rest for you. But greenies today shake and tremble at such a thought, thinking that when they drop their pants or unzip their fly, they fear their waste might kill some poor helpless stinging or biting insect.

Greenie people almost worship CFL light bulbs, and some of these fanatics have found their way into government positions to force their beliefs upon the population. But who will pay for dismantling these fluorescent lamps and recycling them? How many watts of energy and how much money will that require? No will ever care about this issue until a recycling fee is forced upon the buyer at the cash register. It's only a matter of time before this happens, and Europe will probably be the first to do it.

Hybrid vehicles are another great example of green madness. It's dangerous to crush, puncture or burn any lithium battery. These batteries have been proven in laboratory testing to ignite and burn like a road flare, or violently explode. Lithium batteries must be hand disassembled to reuse lithium metals. Today there are countless different sizes and shapes of lithium batteries, and specialized robot machinery will be required to take apart each type of battery. It's only a matter of time before a car accident crushes or shorts out a high power lithium battery bank in a hybrid or all-electric vehicle. Imagine an all-electric car, packed with batteries from front to back and a fire suddenly starts - and your inside.

Is there any automotive history regarding failed protection of a critical automotive component? Everyone thought the Ford Pinto was the greatest thing since sliced bread - until it was found in the early seventies rear collisions at speeds as slow as 25MPH could rupture the gas tank and ignite it with deadly results. This happened in several accidents, killing six people. [2] Now imagine potentially explosive batteries in an all-electric car packed in the back, just waiting for a rear-end or front-end collision.

Tire balancing weights have been replaced with new non-lead tire weights. While these tiny lead weigh only a few ounces, there remains about 8.7Kg of lead and other heavy metals in every car battery. In any given vehicle there are gallons of toxic antifreeze, oil, grease, transmission fluid and power steering fluids, along with gasoline or diesel fuel. Greenie luminaries usually rant about non-green items we use everyday that must be replaced according to them ? which will cost you and me money.

Remember the great air-conditioning refrigerant replacement drive years ago when freon was banned? Freon was blamed for damaging the ozone layer without any real evidence. But the freon lie was never exposed for what it was ? these same new refrigerants present in your home, business or vehicle also damage the ozone layer.

It seems that no one bothered to inform the public about this minor detail, but I have discovered that many licensed and certified refrigeration technicians already knew about 20 years ago how the new refrigerant will still damage the ozone layer. People everywhere believed the mainstream fear mongers and rushed out to scrap their refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, vehicles, etc... and buy the newest models. But the freon story doesn't end with just refrigerant replacement.

Older piston-type compressors were used in refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners for more than fifty years. These were replaced with new simpler and more reliable scroll-type compressors right about this time. Usually an expensive compressor failing is what forces people to scrap refrigeration appliances. It should be acknowledged that scroll compressors have just one moving part which greatly improves appliance reliability, uses less energy and lengthens product lifetimes. Chemical companies certainly knew that a new generation of appliances would require more refrigerant and boost their business, too. Unless an appliance or vehicle develops a leak, refrigerant never wears out and never needs replacing. Demonizing freon was highly effective to increase sales, and drove up stock prices for both appliance manufacturers and chemical companies.

Lead was used in electronics for the past century, yet the general public doesn't know how that was demonized like freon. For the past century, lead-tin solder was commonly used to connect wires and electrical components in everything electrical and electronic starting in the early 1900's. Now thoroughly demonized lead-tin solder has been replaced with a more expensive alloy, thanks to a standard developed in Europe known as RoHS, which stands for Restriction of Hazardous Substances. [4]

Of course, the RoHS list of banned materials also includes lead. A replacement solder lead-tin is an alloy made of Indium-tin. It's not only an exotic compound but also very expensive. Even though Indium is considered one of the rare metals from our Earth, that doesn't make any difference. Indium is now being sacrificed around the clock on the high altar of green. Indium is not cheap, and costs about $350/lb and is still increasing in price for the past few years to this date. This metal costs even more than silver. [5]

In 1998, a big $300 million dollar communications satellite known as Galaxy 4 was crippled in orbit when the electronics malfunctioned. After engineers analyzed the data from the satellite's processors, the fault which disabled the satellite was traced to fine, whisker-like growth created by lead-free solder on a circuit board shorting out critical electrical signals.



Dendrites growing on a circuit board caused short circuits and failure, similar to what caused loss of Galaxy 4 [6]

This type of failure is called dendritic growth, which is dendrites growing on circuit boards. This never happened with lead-tin soldered circuitry, but in the satellite it was caused by lead-free solder, made of an indium-tin alloy. You won't hear greenies talk about massive failures and other reliability problems related to the wide-spread use of lead-free solder.

If you manufacture electronic equipment and want to ship product to the European Union, it must be certified lead-free and meet the RoHS standard or it won't be allowed into the country. Only exception to the RoHS regulation are electronic systems used for research only. Shipping cartons and documentation must be clearly labeled "For research use only" and can only used shipped to a non-consumer destination such as a university.

By definition, the green movement's demands and actions show it functions exactly like a cult. But this movement is worse than a religious cult, since people in the western world don't have any option not to participate. With the green cult, rules and regulations are now forced upon everyone in the civilized world by invisible manipulators and social engineers. It can all be summed up with just one word: Brainwashing.

Some greenies need to get a life and stop trying to live through fads, texting, facebook, chatting, cell phones and dumping guilt on people. They need to develop healthy, real, in-person human relationships. This is what all human beings need to thrive and it's built into our DNA. Or perhaps they simply need to fix the relationship they already have. Greenies should stop believing green brainwashing and be honest with themselves and know it isn't real. The green movement is the biggest lie ever promoted by industry to make billions of dollars and backed by all the world's governments.

Ted Twietmeyer

tedtw@frontiernet.net


Source material:

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult

[2] http://www.autosafety.org/ford-pinto-fuel-fed-fires

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93acid_battery

[4] http://www.bis.gov.uk/nmo/enforcement/rohs-home

[5] http://www.metalprices.com/pubcharts/Public/Indium_Price_Charts.asp

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SilverSulfideWhiskers1.jpg