10 tones of Coke being captured along with their freighter has got to hurt someones bottom line !
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/sp...99484.html

Quote:Spanish police seize 10 tonnes of cocaine in record haul at sea
Spanish police seized almost 10 metric tonnes of cocaine in their largest-ever haul of the drug on the high seas.
Authorities intercepted a vessel carrying the drug concealed in a shipment of salt en route from Brazil to Europe, police said on Monday, 12 January.
Footage shows officers using shovels and digging with their hands to remove the drug from beneath the salt.
Thirteen people on board were arrested, and police recovered 294 bales of cocaine and a handgun.
The international effort also involved the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Brazil's Federal Police, Britain's National Crime Agency and French and Portuguese authorities.

Suck it up cupcakes. 

Is it still necessary to make such posts in Jan 2016? When can we move this from paranormal to normal?

Currently I’m actively practicing remote viewing, psychokinesis and dermo-optical vision/seeing/mindsight/whatever and precognition and synchronicities. Yes you can practice having synchronicities, I will leave that one for you to figure out.

Remote viewing is divination or one could say free-association/somatic free writing and kinesthetic association. We could even say clairvoyance. I’m talking about the actual protocols and training.

Psychokinesis training involves pretty much the same as RV and seeing. Some might be going now ‘wow that’s a leap’ or where is the facts/data or evidence. Yes yes yes….

It’s interesting that with all of the above the teachers and researchers all promote long practice. I’m taking about years and hours long sessions with levels of progression. Lot’s of weird silly practical exercises, the same children would be given to do and I was. Apparently the synapses need time to grow and new connections must form or existing ones must strengthen. I was given drugs for that as also. Most curious. Yes, very interesting.

That is not thee interesting bit however. Why is practice needed at all? 

Usually these topics involve a fair bit of consciousness mambo jumbo that will state consciousness is nonlocal. There is a contradiction with the requirement of physical practice for an action that is apparently nonphysical. Perhaps the microtubules are quantum antennas, who knows?

Three papers on nascent spines that form synapses. What is notable is 3 days.

Quote:Rapid functional maturation of nascent dendritic spines
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2800307

Dendritic Spine Initiation in Brain Development, Learning and Diseases and Impact of BAR-Domain Proteins
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8468246

Stably maintained dendritic spines are associated with lifelong memories
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4724802

Here's my full title for this opinion piece: 
"Any Explanation Other than Paranormal. Nullifying the Extraordinary."

I've been watching a lot of those paranormal and ghost-chasing reality shows lately. I've been watching Ghost Hunters in particular because I thought they were fairly professional and had some good techniques. They eliminated a lot with reasonable explanations. What they are usually left with is compelling, but unexplained, evidence of something that could be paranormal.

Now, when checking out reviews of programs and the documentation of evidence, the debunkers would always explain away the paranormal evidence with any other "rational" explanation they can come up with, no matter how unlikely it may be. The odds were never too great or astronomical to reject any theory or idea that could explain away the paranormal. Bigfoot research and UFO studies are treated much the same as ghost hunting.

I admit, I will debunk much of the evidence in many of these paranormal shows as I watch them, and it can be comical if it wasn't the same old tired BS all the time. However, some evidence is undeniable IMO, and still the debunkers will take long shots and clutch to the most unlikely "rational" explanations. In some ways their theories are as far out as any paranormal ones when the odds take them out of the "realm of possibility". 

If pigs could fly, until you see a flock of them, yet even then you can rationalize that away with something. They are telling you don't believe your own eyes, don't believe that recorder or camera or gizmo. Disregard all the precautions you take to keep the data untainted, because you can never do enough to the debunker's satisfaction when any other explanation could be used. Then, if that fails, you are accused of faking it.

By E.O. Trump has cut credit card interest rate (some as high as 29.9%) down to a more manageable 10%.. That should really help those who are living from pay check to paycheck and especially those who have been trying to pay off their ever increasing credit card debt.

After reading Trevor Paglen's Society of the Psyop brilliant essays I think he captures the spirit of the current moment better than anyone else I can think of so far.

Society of the Psyop, Part 1: UFOs and the Future of Media (excerpts):

Quote:We once looked at pictures. Then, with the advent of computer vision and machine learning, pictures started looking back at us. Now, something even stranger is happening.

Generative AI, Adtech, recommendation algorithms, engagement economies, personalized search, and machine learning are inaugurating a new relationship between humans and media. Pictures are now looking at us looking at them, eliciting feedback and evolving. We’ve entered a protean, targeted visual culture that shows us what it believes we want to see, measures our reactions, then morphs itself to optimize for the reactions and actions it wants. New forms of media prod and persuade, modulate and manipulate, shaping worldviews and actions to induce us into believing what they want us to believe, and to extract value and exert influence.

What does it mean to live in a media environment that knows our wants, needs, vulnerabilities, emotional ticks, kinks, and cognitive quirks far better than we do? That notices which kinds of stimulus induce what kinds of precognitive responses, and uses machine learning to develop, A/B test, and deploy custom-generated cognitive injections designed to manipulate us even further, all without us consciously perceiving what’s happening?

And what does it mean to live in a media environment where this is all-pervasive: not only news and websites, videos and movies, but driving assistants in cars, AI-generated customer service representatives, search engines and chatbots, virtual HR managers, gas-station pumps, smart houses and phones, and even washing machines … a media landscape where your refrigerator, vibrator, and toothbrush collude with insurance companies, advertisers, political campaigns, and big retailers, using computer vision, machine learning, and biometric feedback to influence your behavior and worldview?


...

How did we get here? This three-part essay traces a brief history of media, technologies, and techniques that take advantage of the malleability of perception, capitalizing on quirks in human brains to shape reality. It is a story about the manufacturing of hallucinations and the fact that, under the right conditions, hallucination and reality can become one and the same.

.....

[excerpt from Part 2]

Magic

We can think of magic as a type of media. One that operates in the world of preconscious perception, playing with associations, expectations, symbols, and other forms of media to alter perception, to influence behavior, to affect the physical world, and to produce any number of other effects. To study magic is to study the quirks, foibles, and everyday hallucinations that characterize human perception, and to use those gaps between reality-as-it-is and reality-as-it-is-perceived as a vehicle for making supernatural-seeming interventions into perceived reality.

As a form of media, magic operates in a perceptual landscape of associations and forces that have little to do with reason or logical perception. Lionel Snell (a.k.a. Ramsey Dukes), an early progenitor of “chaos” and “postmodern” magic, observes that

    our brains have evolved a non-logical data processing facility which is, in its own way, every bit as useful and sophisticated as reason but which we tend to play down or analyze away because its casual connections seem so tenuous. This facility, which I called “feeling,” acts much faster than reason and seems to process vast amounts of data in parallel rather than sequentially like a logical thought.

Snell explains that what we call “feeling” or “intuition” is the result of our having unconsciously internalized and classified huge amounts of perpetual “patterns” with varying levels of abstraction and complexity. For example, we may have preconsciously learned that walking alone at night and seeing a group of loud drunken men in the distance “goes with” danger, that green meat “goes with” feelings of sickness, or that shuffling a deck of cards “goes with” randomness.

....

The CIA’s staff magician was neither a spiritualist nor a postmodernist. John Mulholland (born John Wickizer) was a master illusionist, public intellectual, and stage magician. Born in Chicago in 1896, Mulholland’s fascination with magic began at the age of five when his mother took him to see a performance by the legendary Harry Kellar.

For Mulholland, magic had little to do with the supernatural. He was highly skeptical of claims about the paranormal. Far from involving some kind of otherworldly conjuring, for Mulholland, magic

    is the pretended performance of those things which cannot be done. The success of a magician’s simulation of doing the impossible depends upon misleading the minds of his audiences … A performance of magic is largely a demonstration of the universal reliability of certain facts of psychology.

One of Mulholland’s professional hobbies was using his knowledge of trickery and deception to question the claims of psychics, mediums, and charlatans purporting to have access to the supernatural. His 1938 book Beware Familiar Spirits set out to refute the extravagant claims of spiritualists and mediums. In 1952, he wrote an article for Popular Mechanics debunking the UFO phenomenon.

In early 1953, Mulholland disappeared from public life. He closed up shop at The Sphinx and canceled most of his professional commitments. On the record, Mulholland had concerns about his health. In reality, the magician had accepted a position in the CIA’s newly formed MKULTRA program.

(The security clearance process had gone slowly due to the agency’s nervousness about Mulholland’s “sexual proclivities.”) As he transitioned from public figure to clandestine operative, his income from performing and publishing was replaced by a stream of checks from an obscure organization with a mailbox at Southern Station, Washington D.C. named “ChemrophyI Associates.”

...

Mulholland’s experience debunking the supernatural made him useful to the agency. The CIA had become fascinated by the possibilities of hypnosis, ESP, telepathy, and other parapsychological phenomena. Mulholland became their internal reality check. By 1955, Mulholland was traveling around the country to meet and assess psychic test subjects engaged in an early version of “remote viewing,” a man who claimed that a copper-lined Faraday cage gave him enormous psychic abilities, and other X-Files-inflected occurrences.

In 1956, the CIA gave Mulholland another task: investigating UFOs.

UFOs had taken to the skies. And the CIA knew all about them. Because the CIA created them.

.....

When we examine the media environment we’re currently in, we find everywhere the core figures in this extended essay: the psyops officer, the CIA’s AI researcher, the chatbot therapist, the covert-ops magician, the ghost plane, and the UFO. These figures are avatars of media in the age of AI, figures whose interventions prey upon the fact that neither our perceptions nor the information we take in from electronic sensors corresponds precisely to the world “out there.” And the gap between what we sense and what we perceive can be filled with all sorts of prompt injections and adversarial hallucinations. These avatars all take for granted that reality isn’t some objective thing out there but is rather a complex mess of the material, the imaginal, the perceptual, and the imperceptible—all of which can be manipulated.

...

And everywhere is the figure of the UFO, the iconic figure of psyops and the weird. Those strange objects on the edge of perception, simultaneously real and unreal, physical and psychological, threatening and alluring. Prompts for the imagination, for collective storytelling and speculation, producing communities of believers, debunkers, charlatans, and intelligence gatherers of all stripes. The endless energy and impossible physics they promise point to a world without scarcity, a world without capitalism. Above all, they hold out the promise of a transcendental truth so powerful that it could rewrite the rules of reality, a transcendental truth whose revelation seems imminent but never seems to arrive.

Quote:Disclosure
by Hari Kunzru

On the day before Grusch testified, I was in Berlin, sitting on a stage in an art gallery. Hanging over my head was a confusing and weirdly compelling mirrored sculpture. As the crowd filed in, it was hard to concentrate, because I was aware of my own reflection, shattered and refracted above me. Titled PALLADIUM Variation #5, the sculpture was created by the artist Trevor Paglen, whose work is based on meticulous and conceptually sophisticated research into the contours of the secret state.

Paglen had asked me to come and talk about disinformation, secrecy, belief, and the UFO revival. With us was Mark Pilkington, a writer and publisher who lives somewhere near a stone circle in the west of England with a shed full of analog synthesizers and shelves of books on what is usually called “the Unexplained.” Pilkington knows, I think it’s fair to say, a suspicious amount of practical information about how crop circles are made, which means that he may (or may not) be responsible for blowing thousands of Nineties British raver minds. He is also one of the most judicious and perceptive UFO researchers in the world and the author of Mirage Men, which makes the case that military counterintelligence officials have manipulated the UFO community, stoking paranoia as a way to obfuscate their aerospace research.

Pilkington and Paglen have both interviewed the same former special agent for the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base, in Albuquerque. As the agent introduces himself in a film Paglen exhibited alongside PALLADIUM, his face fills the screen. “My name is Richard Doty,” he says, with just the hint of a smile. “And my favorite color is gray.”

Doty is an extraordinarily slippery character. He claims to have conducted “deception operations” as part of a local counterintelligence operation to protect the base. His job was to get in with the UFO research community and play both sides, telling some people that their information was fake, while hinting to others that they were on the right track.

Quote:I've had a cold, and as a cold Traditionalist, that means I’ve been sitting on the couch in my dressing gown, sipping herbal tea with honey in it. (The Zealots from The Church of New Colds would have me masking up and gaffer taping plastic sheets over my doors and windows, but they are odd people).

Naturally, it stands to reason that the first time I’ve been ill in years happens to be the same week the world decides to set itself on fire.

Or at least pretend to, but we’ll get to that.

Maduro has been kidnapped. Iran teeters on the edge of an old-fashioned colour revolution with a new Shah waiting in the wings, there’s talk of British troops on the ground in Ukraine and a US invasion of Greenland.

The New Year has dawned on a world bursting into chaos.

But is it genuine chaos? Or contrived chaos?

Regular readers know I would tend towards the latter. Fundamentally, I cannot reconcile the two worlds with which we are presented.

On the one hand, we have a set of nation-states wholly in concert on almost all the broader issues. They all work together to promote pandemics and climate catastrophes; they synchronise in passing near-identical legislation to tackle the same non-existent or heavily exaggerated problems.

They all have central banks “printing” fake money, they all have so-called “free-market” capitalism (in reality, a construct of state-protected monopolies that siphon public money into the private sector).

They all agree to pretend that Covid is a thing and the vaccines are safe and the climate is changing and the internet will be nothing but snuff films and child pornography if they don’t put a digital surveillance chip in everyone’s brain as soon as possible.

Central bank digital currency, digital identity, genetically modified food…All of this is resolved supranational policy.

They tell the same lies to serve the same ends. They are all the same.

And yet, on the other hand, we’re told they cannot work out a single territorial or political conflict or disagreement in anything but the most crude, base or violent ways.

Nowhere is the clash of apparent cooperation vs reported conflict more apparent than nuclear war – or rather the lack thereof. India and Pakistan went to war (briefly). Both reportedly have nukes, neither used them. The US is seizing Russian tankers in the Caribbean and the UK is considering putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine.

Is anyone talking about Nuclear war? What happened to Mutually Assured Destruction? When did that stop being a consideration?

The only explanation I can think of is that there is an agreement – either tacit or explicit – that these conflicts will be allowed to go so far and no further.

And that makes them fake. Unquestionably, irrefutably, fake.

If you can agree not to have a nuclear war, you can agree not to have a war at all. Any war you end up having, logically speaking, is a war both sides want to happen.

I come back to this quote from Orwell a lot, because I’m not sure it’s possible to better express the thought:

Quote:The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading.
George Orwell, 1984

I have a feeling there is a grander pattern embedded in this chaos that will emerge before the end of the year, something along postnational lines, arguing that statehood generates conflicts that globalism would solve.

I’m still coughing and spluttering between sentences, so I’m being quick. We’ll go into this in more detail when my brain is less crowded.

Didn't realize Russia's Ghost fleet is this huge. Now I see why Trump is so interested in more icebreakers.

"U.S. Navy SEALs just carried out a rare direct action against Russia’s shadow fleet, triggering a high-stakes naval standoff. This video explains why sanctioned oil tankers are suddenly being seized, how Russia, Iran, and Venezuela use them, and why enforcing sanctions at sea risks direct great-power confrontation."

It's snowing in Nashville and these guys are feasting , real Reality TV !


You got some nice looking birds there in Nashville.

Quote:Greenland finds itself at the center of a lot of geopolitical attention. US President Donald Trump’s push to control it has sparked tension with NATO ally Denmark and reinforced Europe’s growing wariness that the US is no longer interested in their security. But why is the world suddenly so interested in this remote island in the far north? And what do the people in Greenland want for their own future? 00:00 Why Greenland's location matters 06:45 Melting ice opens economic opportunities 11:22 The complicated history with Denmark 12:48 What Greenland wants