Un-Natural Disasters:- The Tempest Template (or From Caliban to Taliban)

Picture Press Association:- waves break on Porthcawl harbour, South Wales - (Ben Birchall/PA Wire) 6 Jan 2014

A flood myth or deluge myth is a mythical story of a great flood sent by a deity or deities to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution. It is a theme widespread among many cultures, though it is perhaps best known in modern times through the biblical and Quranic account of Noah's Ark, the Hindu Puranic story of Manu, through Deucalion in Greek mythology or Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

 

On 16 August [2010] the World Bank announced it's aid package to flood hit Pakistan where over 20 million people have been affected by the disaster. The economic cost is expected to be huge. The World Bank has committed to provide  $900 million in financial assistance as well as conducting a Damages and Needs Assessment in flood-hit areas.

Today another Bretton Woods sister organisation the International Monetary Fund announced its own commitment to disaster relief in Pakistan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

According to the BBC News Website (21 August 2010) -

"The International Monetary Fund says the floods that have struck Pakistan pose a "massive economic challenge" and it will review the country's budget and financial prospects.

The IMF will start talks with Pakistani officials in Washington on Monday to assess how best to give help.

Tens of thousands more Pakistanis have been fleeing the floods, with the south now bearing the brunt."

Meanwhile to the north Russia is burning as wildfires threaten the grain supplies in the greatest heatwave on record, Moscow is enveloped in fog from the raging fires on the doorstep. 

Fires have destroyed crops on roughly 20% of the country's agricultural land lots, the result being that the food prices are clearly set to climb rapidly

All that's missing from the picture (you may think) are the plagues of locusts.....you'd be wrong though... because farmers across the Australian Outback have had to deal with this after millions of the grasshopper-like insects swept across four states earlier this year. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7098057.ece

As it happens, even the locusts are there too but what is going on, is it all global warming or what?

Well global warming is a bit of a tricky subject now as climate experts hurl accusations and abuse at each other from either side of the human cause/ Sun driven explanations of increasing temperatures and changing rainfall and other weather patterns.

In the US this "debate" has also degenerated into a mud slinging match between political supporters and opponents of Al Gore.

So something has happened to the global climate... some say it is caused by greenhouse gasses others say it is sunspots; some say the causes are mostly man made, while their opponents claim that natural events are causing changes to weather systems on Earth and on other planets in the solar system.

As Russia watches its essential bread basket go up in flames and Pakistan sees its people and their crops being washed away there was more disruption in China earlier this month when more than 1,300 people are reported to have died after flash floods and landslides struck north-west China and covered entire villages in water, mud, and rocks.

Given these disastrous changes in the weather which are causing unprecedented 'natural' events to take place in many different areas of the world how should we respond?

According to today's Hindustan Times ( Sun,22 Aug 2010)....... With worst ever geological disasters hitting China in 2010, questions are being raised over the strategy to construct mega dams to divert river waters.

China recorded more than 26,000 geological disasters in the first seven months of this year, nearly 10 times the number in the same period last year, Minister of Land and Resources Xu Shaoshi said.

There were only 10,500 geological disasters in China in 2009.

This year says the Hindustan Times several counties were hit by mudslides engulfing several multi-storey buildings burying the occupants alive.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/China-hit-by-26-000-geological-disasters-this-year/Article1-590208.aspx

Therefore as appeals from UNICEF UK and many other charities and NGOs drop on my doormat and appear in my inbox saying things like:-

Please donate now to UNICEF’s urgent emergency appeal to help save children in Pakistan. £30 could immunise 30 children against deadly measles. £50 could help provide 5 families with access to safe drinking water.

I am left to contemplate what all this means and wonder why Pakistan needs the World Bank, the IMF and now £30 or maybe £50 from me too, to save its people from the deadly aftermath of this terrible tragedy.

As I muse on that question I begin to notice a certain pattern in all of these disasters; and that is they are all taking place in parts of the world that America and NATO doesn't like; except the Australian locusts of course, which I think is the exception that proves the rule here.

Now as anyone who has read my posts before will know I hate conspiracy theories and have done my best to debunk a number of them over the years. As a practitioner of the newly created discipline of 21 century forensic history there has to be some credible evidence to support any theory proposed or discussed on my site.

So, in the light of that empirical commitment I want to suggest an explanation for the climate changes that are wreaking havoc across the globe that do not refer to either greenhouse gasses or sunspots as the primary cause.

What's more I will briefly suggest a scenario that could be seen as hiding beneath a smokescreen of the so-called climate debate, but one for which there is hard evidence and does not rely on pure conjecture.

The hypothesis to which I refer is that Pakistan, Russia and China are in fact being attacked with meteorological weaponry consistent with the Plan for a New American Century (PNAC) and the doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance  embodied there within. 

So here are a few points to consider on whether we could think the global warming debate is a red herring or not?

Firstly the US is certainly exploring the possibilities of controlling the climate in several regions of the world.

The corresponding technology is being developed in the framework of the High-Frequency Active Aural Research Program» (HAARP), the objective being to build a potential to launch droughts, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.

From the military standpoint, HAARP is supposed to create a novel type of weapons of mass destruction and an instrument of expansionist policy which can be used to selectively destabilize environmental and agricultural systems of target countries .

Technically, the system is known to be a set of sources of electromagnetic radiation affecting the ionosphere. It comprises 360 sources and 180 aerials having the height of 22 meters .

Altogether the station emits 3,600 kW towards the ionosphere, being the world's most powerful system of the kind.

The program which opened in 1990, is jointly funded by the US Office of Naval Research and the US Air Force Research Laboratory, and is implemented by several university laboratories.  http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20380

The stuff of 'conspiracy theories' perhaps? 

That is certainly what the Conspiracy Theory conspiracy theories claim of course, but there is undoubtedly some truth in the fact that HAARP does exist and here's a picture of it.  

HAARP weather manipulation from Alaska

Now we might say at this point, "hang on a minute, this is all slipping into the realm of pure fantasy, surely you cannot be seriously proposing that the United States is attacking Pakistan, Russia and China with non-lethal climate weapons, you must be raving mad?"

Well maybe, but we only need go back four years  to U.S. Senate Bill 517 and U.S. House Bill 2995, a bill that would allow experimental weather modification by artificial methods and implement a national weather modification policy, that does not include public oversight and which was “fast tracked” back in 2006.

This is hardly the stuff of fairy tales... as long ago as 1975, the US and Canada entered into an agreement under the auspices of the United Nations for the exchange of information on weather modification activity.

Artificial weather modification can impact all of us by reducing water supplies, changing agricultural crop production cycles, reducing crop production, and water availability.  Since most experimental weather modification programs use chemicals released into the atmosphere the public could be subjected increasingly toxic or unknown substances that could adversely impact agricultural crops and trees.

 

Trimethyl Aluminum (TMA) and barium are just two of the toxic chemicals used in recent atmospheric heating and testing programs according to NASA. 

The Alaska H.A.A.R.P. atmospheric heating program may have the capability of changing the Jet Stream which could also change our weather.

So the thought that has crossed my mind just recently when contemplating what has happened to Pakistan and various other places.... is this, what if a bunch of fundamentalist Christian madmen in Washington wanted to 'facilitate' biblical predictions by unleashing fires and floods against its 'foes' and as a means of achieving that vaunted goal of full spectrum dominance?

The economic effect of the floods on Pakistan are  eerily similar to the effects of the fires on Russia, in both countries food production has been seriously disrupted leading innevitably to shortages and rapid price inflation.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan--(AP) (August 22, 2010, 3:58pm) – The floods tearing through Pakistan’s breadbasket have further weakened this already unstable country, inflicting more economic pain on its people and threatening a key pillar of the United States-led war against Islamist militants — who stand to gain from the misery. http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/273633/floods-inflict-more-pain-pakistani

If the extremity of such a notion is bound to condemn it to the status of a conspiracy theory, which well it might.....then the empirical evidence for both the capability and the will to carry out such warfare retrieves it for conspiracy fact.

Unless we propose that there are no conspiracies and the behaviour of the United States government and its NATO allies is always open and honest and beyond reproach, then this hypothesis is at least as strong as the argument for greenhouse gasses or solar flares being at the root of these problems.

Pakistan has been turned over to the control by the IMF and World Bank though Wall Street's friends from Bretton Woods as the US government aid effort attests.

Washington, manages to give Pakistan $1-billion every year for its help in fighting the Taliban along the Afghan border.

But when it comes to humanitarian relief, the U.S. could only find a meager $70-million. War is the only priority it seems.

 

Aardvark On The Path

In Perspective- Christianity as a Historical Phenomenon

Forensic History A Brief Introduction

Those familiar with my previous posts will be aware that I have an interest in history and have developed an approach to the subject that I have dubbed 'forensic history'. I call it that because it attempts to encompass all 3 of the definitions of the term 'forensic' in a historical context i.e.:-

1. Relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation.

2. Of, relating to, or used in debate or argument; rhetorical.

3. Relating to the use of science or technology in the investigation and establishment of facts or evidence in a court of law: a forensic laboratory. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/forensic

The first precept of forensic history is that all history depends at least in part for its meaning upon where we start the clock. It is however saved from infinite regression by the existence and study of 'prehistory'.
This gives us a backstop against which forensic history rests and it is where the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, cosmology and a number of other sub-divisions of professional academia and the sciences kicks in.

Of course in a perfect world there would be a clean break between the historic and the prehistoric and it could be confidently stated that forensic history is both a post 9/11development and a product of the Information Age by which it was both 'born' and 'borne' ....so to speak.

This however is not a perfect world and no such neat divisions between history and prehistory really exist.

Forensic history therefore begins with the appearance of the first hominids and attempts to gather evidence from the fragments that they left, and as we have evolved over the past 5 million or so years.
Forensic History always ends yesterday, after which it becomes the latest 'news' of course .

The primary aim of forensic history at the outset was to falsify and refute conspiracy theories and to interrogate them on the basis of declared evidence, leading to theoretical assumptions about the plausible meanings of historical events.

As such the discipline aspires to keep faith with the methodologies of social science.

This approach is highly reactive to current events and its raison d'étre is to imbed such events in a historically cultural context, in that sense it is a first responder, an emergency history debate of the information age and most especially the 'blogosphere'.

For that reason the recent comments made by Pope Benedict XVI during his current historic 'state' visit to Britain have triggered a Forensic History response, that is to say a response with check-able facts.

The trip is the first to the UK by a Pontiff since John Paul II in 1982. It is also the first to be designated a state visit because the Pope has been invited by the Queen rather than the church.
Since both institutions are the subject of critical analysis on these pages of my Multiply site I want to temporarily suspend the deconstruction of British royalty, to focus on the common bond between Pope and Queen, their professed Christianity and their roles of heads of Churches and extensive communities of faith.

In order to contextualise this interesting collision of anachronisms, the first evidence I want to invoke is the ephemeral nature of these apparently ancient institutions and most particularly the phenomenon of the Christian church.
A small shift in historical perspective demonstrates I think, the relativity of the antiquities and distortions in the hall of mirrors that imbues the Church with a venerable but highly dubious authority


IS CHRISTIANITY A MODERN FAD?

According to the Old Testament Adam and Eve were created in 3760 BCE (Year 1 of the Jewish calendar). This from a biblical understanding of events was the origin of humanity.

We need not consider the Old Testament too carefully here, that would obviously mean taking on Judaism and Islam as well, which is far too ambitious a task for an already overstretched blog like this.
So we'll attempt to place the Christian Gospels in their historic context here as they appeared in what has since become known as The Holy Land in the disputed modern area of Palestine/Israel.

In the best Wikipedia tradition the introductory paragraph on the History of Christianity throws up all these lovely links from which we can reap lots of further evidence if we chose:- Christianity began spreading says Wiki, initially from Jerusalem, and then throughout the Near East, ultimately becoming the state religion of Armenia and Ethiopia in 325, of Georgia in 337, and then the State church of the Roman Empire in 380. Becoming common to all of Europe in the Middle Ages, it expanded throughout the world during the Age of Exploration. Christianity has thus become the world's largest religion.^[1] 

The first vehicle for this rapid spread was of course the Roman Empire. Early Christian cults such as the Godfearers (or 'Fearers of God') are considered to be of significant importance to the popularity of the early Christian movement.

The Romans appear to have 'gone native' in Palestine and the newly emergent Christian sects comprised of both dissident Jews and Judaefied gentiles

They represented a group of gentiles who shared religious ideas with Jews, to one degree or another. However, they were not converts, but a separate gentile community, engaged in Judaic religious ideas and practices, (see Noahidism for the modern parallel).
These partially assimilated gentiles were the proto-Christians out of which early Christianity began to emerge and flourish they were known as proselytes and proselytism has remained a central feature of Christianity ever since. A righteous proselyte was a gentile who had converted to Judaism, was bound to all the doctrines and precepts of the Jewish economy, and was considered a full member of the Jewish people.
They if male were to be circumcised and both sexes immersed in a mikvah before they could celebrate Passover.

A gate proselyte was a "resident alien" who lived in the Land of Israel and followed some of the customs, but had not converted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_centers_of_Christianity

So here we have it so far, between roughly 2,000 and 1,700 years ago gentiles influenced by but frequently not fully integrated into Jewish society began to fan out throughout the Roman Empire carrying with them the seeds of an early Christianity.
Their Messianic message of redemption through the trinity enjoyed increasing popular appeal in the pagan world, especially amongst women who were treated as equally spiritual beings with souls and the promise of eternal life in their own right.

The adoption of Christianity was however patchy and for centuries it sat side by side with pagan symbols and beliefs in societies that were clearly hedging their bets.

The similarities with the current New Age belief systems and the pragmatic eclecticism of 21st century 'spiritualism' in the West are clear I think.

Those many ancient monuments in Europe that have both Pagan and Christian symbols are no different in form to those who now adorn themselves with Pentacles and Yin-Yang designs...the mass production of totemic merchandise creates a symbolic cross-fertilisation of spiritual identities, both now in our own epoch and then in the past I believe.

What we are dealing with here however is in historical terms a very recent development. Contrary perhaps to popular belief Christianity is not an 'old time religion' at all, depending of course where we start the clock. As indicated above all history is relative.

The implication here however,is that if God really did send his only begotten son to save us all it was very much an afterthought on his part. Perhaps he was waiting for the Roman Empire to come along to establish his European franchise who can say, but he waited a very long time.

In order to truly contextualise the origins of those ideas that developed into modern Christianity we need to see where it fits into a timeline of human evolution.

It is reasonable I think to set it within a context of human society in the Middle East where it is my contention that it represents a fairly recent development.

Indeed from this perspective the very Judaism out of which Christianity emerged is itself not terribly old, even in human terms 5,760 years ago, i.e. Judaic Year 1... is not a very long time at all.

To illustrate the point just consider the proto-township of Tell Abu Hureyra in modern day Syria where there were two separate periods of settlement, with a period of abandonment between.

An Epipalaeolithic settlement was established here around 11,500years ago emerging from the Natufian culture in a northeast expansion from their earlier settlements in the southern Levant
 It consisted of a small number of round huts, probably constructed from degradable materials such as wood and brush, with the settlement housing a few hundred people at most.

During this time most food was obtained from hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. Huts contained underground storage areas for food. The main animal hunted was gazelle during its annual migration. Wild plants harvested during that early period included einkorn wheat and emmer wheat and two varieties of rye. The townsfolk of early Abu Hureyra were experimenting with farming and were also hunter gatherers, pragmatists and eclecticists just like us.

It is not known what if any religious customs this community followed at the time but they lived and thrived in a settlement nine and a half thousand years before the claimed birth of Christ.  That is also of course somewhere around 5,000 years before the Jewish Year 1 when these people were fashioning tools from stone and bone and weapons that were capable of bringing down a gazelle in full flight. These were highly sophisticated people.

After a period of abandonment, a Neolithic settlement was established at Abu Hureyra, perhaps 10 times as large as the earlier settlement and one of the largest at that time in the Middle East.
Mud-brick houses were constructed and a large mound was built up under the settlement mainly from the remains of old houses. An increasingly wide variety of plants was cultivated and examination of human skeletons has shown various deformities that have been associated with laborious agricultural work, particularly the grinding of grain which was primarily although not exclusively women's work. Animals were also herded during this latter phase of urbanisation.
Pottery was used from around 5,300 BCE and weaving of cloth began some time before that.

The settlement was finally abandoned around 7,000 years ago.

I think Tell Abu Hureyra puts the arrival of Christianity into a historical and geographical context and since today is also Yom Kippur it is significant I think that we have even placed Judaism as a relatively modern phenomenon.

However some recent research suggests that some of our dates for farming at Abu Hureyra may be too conservative.

Hitherto, the earliest archaeological finds of domestic cereals in southwestern Asia have involved wheats and barleys dating from the beginning of the Holocene, 11–12000 calendar years ago.

New evidence from the site of Abu Hureyra suggests that systematic cultivation of cereals in fact started well before the end of the Pleistocene by at least 13000 years ago, and that rye was among the first crops.
The evidence also indicates that hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra first started cultivating crops in response to a steep decline in wild plants that had served as staple foods for at least the preceding four centuries.

The decline in these wild staples is attributable to a sudden, dry, cold, climatic reversal equivalent to the ‘Younger Dryas’ period.
At Abu Hureyra, therefore, it appears that the primary trigger for the occupants to start cultivating caloric staples was climate change.

It is these beginnings of cultivation in the late Pleistocene that gave rise to the integrated grain-livestock Neolithic farming systems of the early Holocene.  http://hol.sagepub.com/content/11/4/383.abstract

Epilogue

So the final comment in this brief contribution to the forensic history of Christianity (and incidentally all the Abrahamic religions) is that Pope Benedict XVI is merely the most recent manifestation of the Roman Empire's enduring spiritual and propagandist influences.

He is literally the mouthpiece for the spirit of Imperialism and his recent invitation from the British Queen is symbolic of the pressure these outmoded imperialist ventures are under, as they metaphorically attempt to scratch each others backs - in the face of the stress caused by widespread incredulity regarding their respective legitimacy and their rapidly waning influence and authority.

The Pope the Queen and the social order they each represent are redundant and useless. The Catholic Church is fatally undermined by its own corruption as is (in different ways) the Anglican Church that the Queen heads up as 'protector of the faith'.

The lessons we need to take heed of have their origins long before Christianity arose in the Middle East or the Jews laid claim to Israel.

Both Judaism and Christianity are new fangled belief systems that can be historically pinned down to a specific period of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history, when the modern age of global imperialism first began.

We now quite rightly turn our attention to the implications of climate change as the real prime mover in the history of evolution and we can safely ignore the wittering of the 83 year old Pope and the 84 year old Queen..... not because of how ancient they are but because of how recent and temporary they are.

As Stephen Hawking points out in his new book ' The Grand Design':-

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

So the world doesn't need the Pope's skewed views to continue its progress into the future, any more than the territories of the British Isles and the anachronistic British Commonwealth - needs advice or guidance (or anything at all for that matter) from the Queen.

This post represents a forensic historical approach to the meaning of the Pope's visit to Britain in the context of the cultural evolution of the regions covered by the Roman Empire -  the crucible of the Roman Catholic Church is thus viewed here from a world-historical perspective.

Like any blog it is merely a rough outline of a much larger discourse on the meaning if historical events within a particular frame of reference,- and for reasons outlined above I have chosen here to call that framework forensic history.