“If extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist and have reached a high level of technical development, one by-product of their energy metabolism is likely to be the
large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation. It is proposed
that a search for sources of infrared radiation should accompany the recently
initiated search for interstellar radio communications.”
~ Freeman Dyson, 1960
In recent months I have been made aware through prayer of some of the extent and particulars of human history. By now you should be aware that most of what is taught to the public about history is a set of lies. Some of the lies are more intricate than others.
So you have a vast set of lies surrounding the causes and parties responsible for the Spanish American war in Anno Domini (the year of our Lord) 1898. For a very long time the propaganda version of these lies was the only allowable narrative, but in the century and a quarter since then, some of the lies have been exposed. Oh, there is no evidence, at all, for the deliberate destruction of the USS Maine in the port of Havana. Gosh, maybe we should examine that matter more thoroughly? Maybe the grift surrounding the military supply and the bonanza of corruption possible with the acquisition of territories (Puerto Rico, Philippines islands, Cuba, etc.) from the Spanish empire should be included in the discussion?
Sure, as the terribly evil and vile men involved died off and faded into obscurity in many instances, the “official” history changed. The “revisionist” histories within the allowed window of discussion (the so-called Overton window) were included in bits and pieces. Eventually you can build up a picture of what “actually happened” despite the limitations of history.
Historiography
It is important to understand the nature of history as a topic. I will now do one of those rare things for this publication, and point you to a link. It is from The Imperator Knight who posts his detailed history videos on YouTube as TIKHistory. He reviews the important topic of primary and secondary sources, with his own innovative twists to which sources are best. I didn’t embed the video here because I don’t think it essential to view it before continuing.
Basically what TIK is saying is that he regards the people writing about an event at the time of the event, or very close to that time, along with films, photos, and audio recordings as being excellent, but not as good as very recent history books thoroughly analysing that evidence in the light of recent revelations, from a place of greater perspective and possible objectivity, and without as much or any of the lens of propaganda from the time. Whereas memoirs, written by persons involved, including key decision makers, tend to be a lot of bollocks because they want to justify their choices, their memoirs come out decades after the events so their memories may be cloudy, and they have an agenda different from today’s contemporary (recent history book writers who are) historians.
Naturally, you need not agree with his hierarchy of “goodness” for sources of information, but it is a useful topic to review. How do we know what we know about history? That is, how is history written? We call the study of that topic “historiography.” Like cryptography, which is the writing of secrets, historiography, or the writing of histories, is somewhat arcane knowledge.
It is well said, and by many people down through the ages, that “history is written by the winners.” And so it matters very much who is the author. Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) used to be regarded as a “great” historian with a mighty and detailed perspective on events, world history, and lots of book sales to his credit. He was also a freemason, an intellectual from a family with connexions to various socialist groups, and a key member of the Chatham House deep state “think tank” in its early years. So I would regard anything written by him as suspect, and any facts his books indicate as incontrovertible as very likely wrong or controversial.
The House of Hanover, currently masquerading under the sham designation “Windsor” which was chosen as a result of the virulent hatred for all Prussian and German connexions during the 1914-1918 war madness, should be perceived as the winner of many of the significant conflicts going back into the 18th Century. As my family were victims of their cruelty and perfidy, I shall not spend much time on the 1744-1746 conflict which led to our family being forced into exile from our Highlands family holding. I will say that the genocidal “clearances” were ugly, brutal, mean-spirited, and despicable, all the things that should be associated for all time with all members of the House of Hanover/Windsor.
The “Boer” wars were especially important to the control of wealth at the time they were fought. There are a lot of strange things in their timing and in the behaviour of key people on both sides. It seems likely that the freemasons played important roles on both sides, and that the outcome was chosen well ahead. Which rather makes the acts of heroism on both sides a bit of a sorry spectacle. Nevertheless, the British empire came away with control over the gold and diamonds of South Africa.
The Hanovers were involved in the American civil war, through various freemason groups on both sides of the conflict. Several really key events, turning points in the war, can be traced to inaction or “error” on the part of freemason generals who later profited from positions with banks, railroads, and insurance companies in the post-war corruption.
The side of the American war 1861-1871 that wanted a constitutionally limited republic is the side which lost. The side that wanted plenary power and quickly enacted a corporation for the District of Columbia that has extensive powers beyond the constitution is the side that won. And Lincoln was a socialist as can be seen from his many speeches. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel does a reasonably good job of detailing the objectives Lincoln had for the war in his book Emancipating Slaves and Enslaving Free Men, which I acquired in hard copy the year it was published, Anno Domini 1996.
I mention these things as part of the context of current events. You think you understand the deep state? Great, please share about your understanding in the comments, and please please feel free to link to articles or essays in which you provide greater exposition. I’m very interested in knowing more.
But I don’t think you can understand the deep state of today, and the problems we face, if you don’t trace the machinations back to the time before the House of Hanover was installed on the throne of England with the coronation of George the first in 1714. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who is one of the “inventors” of the calculus (the other being Isaac Newton) is one of the people involved in research in Venice regarding the geneaology of the descendants of the Winter queen of Bohemia and electress of the Palatinate, Elizabeth Stuart, among others, that led to the replacement of Queen Anne (house of Stuart) by George (house of Hanover). Tracing all the promises made and quasi-kept from that day unto the present might help you understand somewhat the difficulties we face and the punishments upon us that have been and are being inflicted by those who have (or claim) temporal power these days.
Singularity
There is a concept in physics called a singularity, and it is surrounded by horizons. You may have heard of this idea of a black hole, which is a very powerful sink of gravity, or “gravity well” to use a metaphor, and which is also a very powerful source of energy. This topic fits in with the opening quote from Freeman Dyson and the graphic of a Dyson sphere beginning to surround a star to capture as much energy from it as possible. It also relates to our particular time in history as follows:
We are living before the end of the American empire. It will probably later come to be known by some other name such as “the Anglo-American empire” or the “North Atlantic empire” because we don’t really know its true nature. We know enough to be sure that the fall of the current empire is certain, and that the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 is related. So, what do I mean about “event horizon” in this context?
Consider the following metaphor. You are on a highway in a place where mileage to the next location is provided on highway signs along your path. Let us say that you are on Interstate 70 in Kansas and you are heading West. After you get out of Topeka, you will begin seeing signs for Junction City and for Salina. If you are a very careful driver or navigator, you may see a sign indicating the distance to Denver. After Salina, you will see signs indicating the distance to Limon, Colorado, and to Denver. But you won’t see any indication of the distance to, say, Rifle, or Grand Junction, Colorado, or Richfield, Utah. Denver is a sort of geographical singularity, in that you won’t be given information about what lies beyond it on the highway signs until you actually get past it. It represents an “event horizon” in the sense that you are not well informed about what is on the other side of that eventuality.
If the end of the American empire is a metaphorical Denver, then our knowledge about what happens afterward, and our knowledge about what will be revealed only after the cia, fbi, and nsa archives are opened and exposed to our close inspection, is very limited. And if the mi6 outfit and the Hanoverians are still in power it may not be the case that the fall of the district of corruption results in the complete availability to inspection of the aforementioned archives. So, we are feeling our way around in the dark, to some extent.
But there are some facts we know, simply because all alternative explanations are outside the realm of physical possibility. Nobody but the cia, fbi, and military had access to the means and the opportunities and no other group had the motive to murder John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Further to this point, because of the excellent film by Oliver Stone on the topic in 1992, there has been a large amount of information declassified and released. Even though presidents, including Trump, have refused to fully declassify all the information that congress passed a law that Clinton signed which requires it, we know a great deal. Many people who have held high political office in the United States have betrayed their obligations to the law and to the constitution, so we know that they are not actually independent actors. They are puppets, and you can see their strings being pulled from time to time.
The interesting question arises, who are the puppeteers, and who is in charge of the puppet show? And, again, it is hard to be certain from this position in the flow of events, from where we are on the highway of history, as it were, but we can be pretty sure that the work of
in her publications and Uncensored that Venice and the Venetian “nobility” play a significant role. That’s why the Leibniz geneaology emerging from that part of Europe is of interest, to me. Perhaps more than one “true heir” and line of descent from Elizabeth Stuart were erased, or eradicated.Of course, I am only curious from a very academic standpoint in who should sit on the throne of England. I am a monarchist, of course, and I believe God has set one monarch over all of mankind, everywhere, who is Jesus Christ. Jesus lives. Jesus sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty from where he will come to judge the living and the dead. So, in my view, all earthly monarchs are usurpers. None of them *can* be king. Which doesn’t prevent them from claiming the title and using their earthly power to do a great deal of harm.
Anyone looking at his recent portrait has to see that upChuck the Third is not a believer in Jesus. Rather, he seems to worship the Enemy of all mankind. Ultimately, the evil realm is who upChuck obeys. Which is why, I believe, that rather than being public with that part of his coronation ceremony involving becoming the “defender of the faith” of the church of England, he chose to have his chair surrounded by ornate screens, and took some sort of oath, I believe to dark powers, in secret. You can look for details on the coronation ceremony to confirm this point, and you are welcome to be disappointed in how the official propaganda organs passed over these matters at the time.
In a very short span, the fall of the deep state will occur. And, as the Soviet archives became accessible and my friend Richard Ebeling and his wife Anna were successful in visiting them to copy out all the Ludwig von Mises personal papers that had been seized by the German military in 1938 and then seized by the Soviet military in 1945, so too will the fbi, nsa, and cia archives come to more public scrutiny. We’ll know a great deal more in a few years. So if you are reading this essay from AD 2026, you may think, “If only he knew…” and that’s what I mean about the event horizon.
I should mention that there is no need for you to lift a finger to be confident of the downfall of the deep state enterprise, of the house of Hanover, and of the current dark world order. You can see in their recent activities the desperation of their team leaders, smell the stench of their fear, and hear the cries and lamentations of their rank and file. There is nothing they can do to avert the collapse of their power. It has been ordained from on high.
Megastructures nearby
When I use the word “nearby” it depends on context. In this case, the context is our galaxy, and things nearby are less than 2,000 lightyears away. For reasons that I will discuss below, and have mentioned in past essays, I believe that the previous high civilisations of mankind are now living and working on planets and in star systems as far as 20,000 light years from Earth. So, two thousand lightyears is about 10% of the distance to the actual frontier of human activity.
The opening quote and image reflect the Dyson sphere technology that Freeman Dyson once wrote about in a paper that was published in 1960. Some people reading this essay may remember those halcyon days. The “search for extraterrestrial intelligence” was going on, and quite a lot of thought went into finding certain radio frequency signals, including the “Wow” signal, at certain wavelengths.
Unfortunately, due to budget constraints and lots of other issues, we don’t have access to a full recording of the Wow signal. It may be possible that someone else has such a recording, because the unpublished budgets of various military and espionage agencies include systems for monitoring radio traffic from Earth and from orbit, but they aren’t disclosing what they have. That part comes later, after they are routed in battle and many of them are destroyed.
Dyson, in his paper, and in the quote from it above, indicates that we can find evidence of large scale technological civilisations by looking at infrared light. You see, energy is important. At some point in time, having access to all the energy from our star, the Sun, would be very helpful to building our civilisation and carrying our sort of life to distant stars. So, erecting structures around our star to capture more sunlight would be useful. Dyson followed up on previous speculative literature on the topic and pointed out that heat is mostly wasted, or deliberately shed, and so there would be infrared light coming from the vicinity of stars that have other light signatures.
Very recently, some scientists undertook to establish in detail what we know about infrared light coming toward us from stars nearby. In particular, they wrote a paper that identifies 7 stars with unusual infrared light output. I have linked to the pdf of the article itself, from the Oxford university web site, which should present to you as a .pdf of the item published in the Monthy Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It does so using a very lengthy URL which includes a token because despite the best efforts of Aaron Swartz and other actually good people, access to published scientific papers and to textbooks is not universally available. Some knowledge seems to be worth killing to keep from general circulation. Which is another outcome of ending the American empire which will be welcomed in many quarters.
In addition to the seven stars showing signs of possible megastructures, or some other source of infrared light that is not consistent with well-understood phenomena, there is also Tabby’s star. The seven stars are between 466 light years and 894 light years. Tabby’s star is a previous candidate about 1,470 light years from Earth.
Rather than showing excess infrared light, Tabby’s star shows a complex pattern of light dimming which suggests some object or set of objects is coming between Earth orbiting telescopes and the star. That kind of pattern is sought out in the search for exoplanets, planets that are in orbit around other stars than our Sun. But, such dimming is usually much simpler, and consistent from one period of time to another. Tabby’s star’s dimming pattern suggests that some very large space structure is intermittently eclipsing the light from the star.
So we have eight candidates for large space structures built around stars not that far from here. Given a potential human life span of over a thousand years, it would be possible to reach some of these objects in a few generations time with a sufficiently large expedition. If suspended animation or life extension technology is conceived and implemented that provides for the possibility of thousands of years of lifespan, even at only 20% or 40% of the speed of light, we can conceive of reaching all these objects in a single person’s life.
Ockham’s razor
The question then arises, what sort of beings should be considered as likely candidates for these megastructures? Should we imagine strangely shaped creatures, with wings, beaks, or tentacles?
There is a sort of animal that has a persistent interest in going over the horizon in search of new vistas and possibilities. It has a large brain, much of which seems to be involved in activities we don’t understand, and some of which is largely dormant of activity based on various types of scan. It has been found to use tools for at least 400,000 years based on the most recent information on structures found in the Levant. And it has spaceflight. I refer, of course, to human beings.
The scholastic and religious philosopher, William of Ockham suggested that it is not wise to multiply entities unnecessarily. This observation is often called Ockham’s razor in his honour. It is a way of cutting to the core of a situation, as it were, and not dwelling on fanciful possibilities.
A couple of years back I encountered a committed flat earther. He had a lot of details about how the sky works and what makes seeming inconsistencies go away. So I asked him about time zones, about my experience of being on different continents, and he explained that there are seven suns. To me, that is an example of someone who has not applied Ockham’s razor. Given the circumstances I was in, I didn’t challenge his views, I simply made a few mental notes and went about my other activities. But the thought has crossed my mind a few times.
We can measure the Sun. We can measure its light, its sunspots, its apparent size in the sky. We can look at its light in many wavelengths from radio waves to infrared to visible to ultraviolet to x-ray to gamma ray parts of the spectrum. Rather than seeing seven variations on this theme, we see one. There is only one star in our immediate vicinity, about 93 million light years from Earth.
As I’ve mentioned previously, you don’t have to believe what I believe. You are free to believe whatever you wish to believe. But if you are looking for a species that is capable of travelling in space, that is interested in building large structures for various reasons, and that has conceived of large structures to capture the light surrounding our local star, you have to look no further than a mirror.
Timeline of Mankind
The people involved in archaeology and palaeontology are a bunch of strange and quirky individuals. You get a sense of that fact in the first two Jurassic Park films. I studied physical anthropology at Columbia University under one of the leading people in the profession at the time. Quirky is the most dignified of the words that come to mind.
Graham Hancock and other researchers, many other researchers, have found that the accepted narrative of events in archaeology - the study of artifacts created by people down through the last few hundred thousand years - is not consistent with the evidence. Even estimates of the age of mankind in the fossil and anthropological record, including by palaeontologists, has changed a great deal in my lifetime.
We were taught fifty years ago that humans like us came into existence about 200,000 years ago, and that human history began around 6,000 years ago, in Sumeria. Neither figure is correct. There are buildings that were made out of wood 400,000 years ago, and wood happens to be one of those things we can date very accurately with various carbon related techniques.
There are now a large array of techniques for dating things going back through time. Tree rings of living trees give us dates going back thousands of years because every year the tree produces another ring of material. There are trees that are over 4,000 years old, and there are stumps of dead trees which have overlapping tree rings - you can see the same pattern in the same species of great bristlecone pine, for example, in the same forest. So we can get tree ring data back to maybe 6,000 years.
Ice cores give us data going back about 800,000 years. Carbon 14 decay works well to date things back to about 50,000 years. Fluorine absorption, oxygen isotope ratio scale, uranium-lead dating, rubidium-strontium dating, and many other techniques exist. We have dozens of things we can do with physical artefacts to establish their probable dates.
Then we have the history of our people, which I believe dates back to about 8,000 years in China and India. We know that humans were building large structures in what is now Turkey at places like Gobekli Tepe about 11,500 years ago. We know that there was a great flood at the end of the Younger Dryas geological era involving the melting of the vast ice sheets over Europe and North America that raised sea level by about 400 feet.
In that time, we developed, or rediscovered, writing. We have written histories for events going back thousands of years. At the Dead Sea, in a place now called Qumran, we found scrolls that include every book of the Old Testament bible except the book of Esther, and a number of scriptures that are not included in contemporary canon. It is interesting to note that the most complete scrolls are character for character identical to the current copies we have of those same books, which means that for about 2,300 years or more the exact same letters were used to denote each of these books, down through the centuries. That is a level of data hygiene and longevity that should be the envy of computer technologists.
Also about 2,300 years ago we know that a guy named Archimedes was living in a city called Syracusa the remains of which are on the island of Sicily. From a detailed light spectrum examination of a palimpsest - a paper used to copy out prayers again and again to help in memorisation - we know that Archimedes understood calculus. We also know he was murdered by a Roman centurion after the evil ugly nasty Roman republic conquered Syracusa. His death certainly set back progress in mathematics and science by several hundred years. For example, it would be a further 1900 years (from his death around 211 BC until the calculus dispute of Leibniz and Newton around AD 1700) before calculus was re-discovered, or at least more widely published, once again.
Since calculus helps us in physics, astronomy, chemistry, some types of financial calculation, and a great many types of design technologies, we should certainly be aware of the importance of keeping knowledge of it alive as we go through this interesting period of transition. Then we come to this quote:
Create ships and sails capable of navigating the celestial atmosphere and you
will find men to man them, men not afraid of the vast emptiness of space.
~ Johannes Kepler, letter to Galileo, AD 1610
That was written down only 400 years ago. At the time, about 80% of the population of Europe was involved in agriculture, with another 10% or so involved in trade, commerce, logistics, and mechanical enterprises, and another 10% of aristocracy, clergy, monks, nuns, archivists, and “professionals” involved in legal, medical, and design activities. Today about 2% of the population of Europe or North America are involved in agriculture, and far more people are aware of trades, crafts, academic pursuits, and matters like astronomy and space technology.
We are about to break out into space in a big way, build settlements into the surface of the Moon, in free orbit around our planet, in the L3 point on the far side of the Sun in our orbit, on the surface of Mars, and elsewhere. We have a keen understanding of rocket engines, nuclear rocket propulsion systems, ion engines, and solar sails. We also have lots of ways to raise the temperature on Mars to free up water vapour and expand its atmosphere very rapidly so that we can live and work there without pressure suits (in about 80 years) and without supplemental oxygen in about 280 years.
Now, if you simply put 400 years into 400,000 years you find that there are about a thousand times when civilisation at the level it was when Shakespeare was being published, when Europe had not yet fallen into the Thirty Years war over power and religious controversies, and when settlements in North America by European countries were beginning to thrive, grew and prospered and became more thoroughly industrial and technological.
Now, it happens that we can eliminate about 28 of those thousand episodes because we are pretty sure that there were no spacefaring humans on Earth going back to around 11,500 years ago, except for the most recent 400 year period. That still leaves 972 other possible 400 year periods.
We can do a bit more work on this topic, because we are pretty sure that something happened in the last 100,000 years or so that nearly wiped out mankind. Genetic bottlenecks have been identified that suggest fewer than 10,000 people like us (homo sapiens) existed on Earth. Calamities like the Toba supervolcano of 76,000 or so years ago probably also set back any sort of human civilisation. The geological record is full of big events, and we can guess our way back into the distant past if we wish.
But, about 150,000 years ago someone in China was making steel pipe. Which suggests a level of technology that is difficult to understand if “human civilisation” began 6,000 years ago in Sumeria. Presumably some scholars of history are poorly informed, or deliberately lying, about the age of human civilisation. Maybe both.
There’s a very nice speech in “Serenity,” one of my favourite films. It is the film that functioned as the sequel to and apotheosis of the television show, “Firefly” which is also worth watching when you get some time. The crew is confronted with the existence of a planet named Miranda about which “the cortex” has no information. Terraforming failed, a black rock, but there had been efforts to recruit settlers over a decade before. In the speech, captain Malcolm Reynolds says that “half of history is hiding the truth.”
Well, I’ve studied history for a very long time. It was one of my three concentrations as an undergraduate. I’ve done extensive independent reading on the topic. It is my considered opinion that far more than half of history is hiding the truth in one way or another. And, to quote another Malcolm Reynolds line, “I do not hold to that.”
Revelations in prayer
There is a just God and a living God who governs the affairs of mankind. God the Father Almighty is the creator of the heavens and the earthly realm. The heavens are the spiritual realm and the earthly realm is everything you see, including the vastness of the Milky Way galaxy, and many galaxies beyond.
Jesus is the truth, the life, and the way. None come to the Father except through Jesus. Jesus lives and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and comes from there to judge the living and the dead. God knows the truth of all things. Jesus knows the truth of all things.
What’s more Jesus told us that all the secrets would be revealed. “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops.” Luke, chapter 12, verses 2 and 3.
We live in those times. We have been seeing it my entire life. The truth about the JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X assassinations has been coming out, especially since the House select committee on assassinations. The truth about nsa spying on Americans came out thanks to Edward Snowden. The horrifying perfidy, betrayal, corruption, abuse of power, murder by suicide, and disgusting perversions of Hillary Clinton have come out, though not everyone seems willing to look directly at them. Clinton’s escapades were particularly exposed by Julian Assange, which is one reason he is being slowly tortured to death in British custody.
The Anthony Wiener laptop makes the Hunter Biden laptop look tame in comparison. At the time of its release, it seemed to me that the Biden laptop was being used to “admit to lesser crimes” and cover up the earlier Wiener laptop revelations. In fact, I think the actual laptop from hell is not the one written about in Laptop from Hell by Australian author Miranda Devine (does that name seem curious?) but is the one showing the Frazzle Drip video. Both sets of revelatory information are worth understanding, in my opinion.
The Pentagon papers, the Chelsea Manning revelations, the recent Boeing whistleblowers, and many many others have been exposing supposedly secret information. It turns out that in my studies of mathematics, I became interested in cryptography. Friends suggested that I look closely at some software for it back in 1992, and I began teaching others to use it right away. And at no time have I ever supposed that any encryption I did use was unbreakable.
Yet, for some reasons, the most advanced nuclear power on Earth has its secrets being revealed left and right, every month of every year, for decades. I see the hand of God in these events.
So, it makes sense to me to simply ask in prayer. And, as I’ve mentioned in previous essays on the topic, and in this essay, you are free to believe what you wish to believe. I believe what I have been told.
A summary would be: God brought mankind to this world 480,000 years ago. Mankind first visited Mars 320,000 years ago. We built a space elevator, a beanstalk of a sort, 310,000 years ago. We began exploring the galaxy in large numbers, moving over a million persons a year into space habitats, obeying God’s commandment to fill the earthly realm. Our species, and the other hominids on planet Earth back then, the hobbit sized homo floresiensis and the neanderthal and denisovan are out there in the stars, as far as 20,000 light years from here.
About 200,000 years ago, people from here met a species about 7,000 light years from Earth and were asked to bring an embassy of them to our planet. God was against this idea. The people in charge didn’t obey God. The ambassadors were very destructive and the presence of demons on Earth was the result. The space elevator fell into the sea West of Sumatra. And there was a war in space.
Those beings that came here and all the others of their kind have been wiped out. Mankind fought alongside angels in winning the victories out there, just as mankind has fought alongside angels in battles here on Earth. (You might want to look at the books of the Maccabees which detail some of these battles.)
Some of those stars showing evidence of large space structures actually have megastructures around them. Some of those structures were built by people whose ancestors once lived on Earth. Some of those structures were built by other intelligent life not descended from hominids. It is a big universe, and there’s a lot going on in it, all the time.
So, I pray: Eternal Father, please help us free the slaves, stop the wars, end tyranny, cast out all demons, translate the Gospels into every language, care for the young and the old, the sick and the dying, with dignity and respect, out of a place of humility, and carry the Gospels to the farthest stars in every direction, and to all souls in between. Please help us with guidance, resources, ingenuity, endurance, fortitude, and patience. Please show us the little fires so we may pass by them. Please bring love into our lives so we remember what we have to live for. Amen.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.
Thanks for all your great writing, Jim, it's very much appreciated.
fwiw I tried the link to the RAS paper identifying the seven stars and got the following: "Your session has timed out. Please go back to the article page and click the PDF link again." Also no luck trying to find it via sci-hub or libgen.
Comments on the multitude of interesting points in this essay:
1. "Jeffrey Rogers Hummel does a reasonably good job of detailing the objectives Lincoln had for the war in his book Emancipating Slaves and Enslaving Free Men,..."
There is a never-ending argument about the root cause of the 1860s War. The popular opinion has been shaped to believe that it was over slavery. Yet Lincoln's campaign arguments with Douglas indicates that he was not opposed to slavery. It wasn't made an issue in his campaign. What occupied Lincoln's mind was keeping the Union together.
Rogers seems to be arguing (and I agree) that economics and financial greed emanating from the large financial centers such as in New York led to laws made by Union-majority Congress to divert money to themselves from the lucrative cotton industry that the South had going in its trade with Britain, the leading clothing manufacturer of the time. Britain, back then, was still "the enemy".
The leading Freemason in America at the time was Albert Pike, and he was from South Carolina. I don't know how that factors in, but it is an interesting factoid.
2. "There is only one star in our immediate vicinity, about 93 million light years from Earth."
Oops, a mind-typo. Light from the sun takes about 8 to 9 minutes to reach earth. Instead of light-years, miles would be correct. No problem; even Donald Rumsfeld has admitted DoD mistakes.
3. "The people involved in archaeology and palaeontology are a bunch of strange and quirky individuals. "
I concur from my reading of the history of Maya archaeology. None of the archaeologists that I have eoncountered down here in Belize seemed quirky, but when Lisa Lucero of the U. of IL, Champaign-Urbana, put me onto Michael D. Coe's book Breaking the Maya Code, it was extraordinary to me that one dominant Brit in the field, Sir Eric Thompson, insisted that of the three writing systems, the Maya petroglyphs were of a kind that turned out to be wrong. All along, in the Soviet Union, Yuri Knorosov, having a dusty desk at the U. of Lenningrad figured out the correct system, but his ideas were not accepted in the West; these "Communists" - you can't trust them. Anyway, it took 50 years - a full half century - before Thompson died and Canadian anthropologist David Kelley, who was the leading American champion of Knorosov's work prevailed. Maya research was also revolutionized, according to Coe, by a Russian woman, Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Russians have been major contributors to research on the Maya civilization.
4. I have a somewhat different take on the origin of us (homo sapiens sapiens) from homo sapiens, but these comments are already too long; I'll keep it for later. Hint: the apostle Paul says that there are only two people, Adam and Christ, in their own category. I would argue that both resulted from some genetic modification to become differently human.