Empire of the Odd

While bumming around the far reaches of the “Internets” I notice things, trends and patterns as they were, shapes of information defying description which help tailor my own posts (posts which shape and influence others thereby completing the cycle.) Some time ago I noticed and commented on a very odd thing. A whole bunch of pro-Scientology web logs had suddenly appeared, almost overnight!. I noticed that most of them were on one free service or another, most were worded in a similar fashion. I also noted that they were kind of bland. Like someone filtered all the passion, the heart out of an author’s writing, leaving a pale shadow of an otherwise interesting human being. Most web logs are very personal. Most, by their nature give some clue about the author, their passions, their dreams, their hopes. Their likes and dislikes. Most weblogs give authors a chance to rant, vent about things. These blogs were nothing like that. The authors didn’t seem to have any dislikes (with psychology being one telling exception.)

They had a strange stilted prose that suggested the blogs were anything but personal. They had a very narrow focus, basically the message was; “I am a Scientologist, I am successful and here are my opinions about two things; A) I think Scientology is the best! B) I think Psychology sucks ass.” There is very little about stuff outside of these two opinions. Little information about how these people lived, what they did for a living , movies they liked (that don’t happen to have Travolta or Cruse in them.) What books they read other than anything written by Hubbard. The writing on the blogs was generally pretty good. Not memorable, but well edited and proofed. For example, a typical entry on the Swirl blog;

“Befriended the Cat Next Door” I noticed last week that the neighbor next door has several cats. One of them is very friendly. I’ve been leaving milk outside by our door and one particular cat comes by and meows at the door. Yesterday, she approached me and let me pet her. Today she ventured into my office and is now laying on the floor next to my chair. She’s such a sweety. I haven’t figured out her name just yet. She hasn’t stood still long enough to let me read her tag.”

This was an exceptionally exciting thing to happen to this person, She apparently owned her own business, traveled extensively but we are not sure why, no photos ever show up on this blog (with the exception of the aforementioned cat.) Not too much was going on with this person, -ever! All of them are like that. They are boring– bland to the point of hopeless.

The strange bit is, they portend to depict extremely happy vibrant people. People who can see wonder in the world that us mere non-Scientologists simply can’t. People who are truly alive, truly free to think for themselves, unlike the rest of us poor slobs who just muddle along in frustration,. You-know, people like you and I. Most of them with the exception of “Bamball” had their comments turned off too. I suppose this was to prevent any unwashed “wogs” from horning into the party.

It is OK to utilize Internet resources for one’s own needs. I do it, you probably do it and Scientology is famous for doing it. One problem that Scientology keeps running into however is trying to blend into a culture they have little experience with. It’s less like blending and more like blundering. You cannot just walk into a culture and pretend to belong to it, when you don’t belong to it. If you think I’m joking, try wandering around downtown Clearwater Florida for a couple of hours. I have never seen such an out of place bunch of people in my life!

Scientology has done similar stunts in the past. Back around the late 1990s they issued a special church front-end package to their members and urged them to load the things on their computers. The package contained a net-nanny program that blocked many anti-Scientology web pages and an automated web page builder so that anyone could create their own cookie-cutter page on Scientology’s web site. Presumably they thought that by making thousands of identical pages they could steer traffic to places of their own choosing. None of these things had any long term effect on the Internet or critics other than as an annoyance.It was a kind of Internet attractive nuisance. Scientology brought a bunch of negative attention to itself by doing these and other things that were even less subtle (like trying to take down Usenet SIGs.)

Now don’t get me wrong, Scientologists are people too. Most Scientologists that I’ve met seem happy and content with their religion and their lives. I don’t agree with their complete focus on one group or their evident worship of L Ron Hubbard but that’s their trip, not mine. Hubbard’s opinion on psychology and his take on how the mind works are mind numbingly absurd (IMO) but it’s OK for people to believe in it. It is also OK for me to state categorically that Scientology does not resemble a religion, not in my world it doesn’t.

I have probably read more Scientology material than the average parishioner and calling this blend of pseudo- psychology and philosophical balderdash a religion is like calling Ufology a religion. In short, the Scientology web logs are exactly what they appear to be. A source of “good data” for us, the raw-meat general – wog public. More importantly, they served as a way to Googlebomb Scientology links all over the place. All the logs quite coincidentally had links to all the important Scientology web pages and very little else (I’m sure the people who wrote them have nothing else on their minds.)

Since then, Google and other search companies have relegated a  place for where their weighted algorithms are presumably hand written. Many Scientology web logs have become abandoned property. I’m sure the organization will make other attempts to further their stated goals of “clearing the planet.” I’m sure we will see many other tries by Scientology to bring the unruly Internet under their control. I cannot imagine why they would want to do that! People who are truly free need not worry about such things!

Enjoy these blogs, I sincerely doubt they will be around much longer. A short list of Scientology web logs (in no particular order.)
Help Yourself Last post, Monday, June 12, 2006
Racing Ponies Last post, Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Cat Servant Last post, Sunday, April 16, 2006
Equivoque Last post Apr 12, 2006
My Realm Last post,8/14/2006
The Lab Last post,Sep 1, 2006
Homeschoolmum Reviews Last post,Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Give Life a Little Swirl Last post,Sunday, November 19, 2006
Garden Girl Last post,Nov 7, 2006
My Life as Momkat Last post,Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Bamball Last post,Wednesday, July 13, 2005 And a really puzzling one;
My Life as a Mom “This blog is under review due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations and is open to authors only” (no date) Some active weblogs
My Eclectic Blog Good News Waterbug (this one was inactive from December of 06 until June of 07. I’s never shown much activity other than posting news items, all pro Scientology.
, Garters and Lace My Issues on Children

The massive Scientology cookie-cutter webpage site. Click any of the 16000 links and find out absolutely nothing about people from all over the world! Not my idea of a fun five days (assuming I looked at all 16,000 people pages for two minutes each.) A big list of Scientology blogs from http://orgsaroundtheworld.wordpress.com/scientology-blogs/ Scientology Blogs http://www.blognow.com.au/scientology/ http://scientology.blogspot.com/ http://whyihelp.blogspot.com/ http://blackfoot-whatsgoingon.blogspot.com/ http://takeawin.blogspot.com/ http://waterbug.typepad.com/ http://homeschoolmum.blogspot.com/ http://scientologylives.blogspot.com/ http://davidmiscavige.blogdrive.com/ http://davidmiscavige.blogspot.com/ http://equivoque.blogdrive.com/ http://momkat.blogdrive.com/ http://dianeticsofboulder.blogspot.com/ http://scientologymissionofboulder.blogspot.com/ http://gdnews.blogspot.com/ http://myscientology.blogspot.com/ http://church-of-scientology-of-seattle.blogspot.com/ http://scientologysurfer.blogspot.com/ http://scientologist.blogspot.com/ http://publicheroes.blogspot.com/ http://home.earthlink.net/~rekon2/ http://scientology.wetpaint.com/ http://silver-skater.blogspot.com/ http://jetteroheller.wordpress.com/ http://flashanswer.blogspot.com/ http://thechewy.blog.com/ http://orgsaroundtheworld.wordpress.com/ http://www.freedommagazineblog.org/blog/ http://scientology.tblog.com/ http://sk8erg.wordpress.com/ http://scientologyvm.wordpress.com/ http://fastpagemode.blogspot.com/ http://gettothechoppa.wordpress.com/ http://scientology-volunteers.motime.com http://wellequipped.blogspot.com/ http://educationquotes.blogspot.com/ http://spiritualquotes.blogspot.com/ http://bighappyfamily.blogspot.com/ http://thelab.blogdrive.com/ http://eclecticstuff.blogspot.com/ http://www.jbasoon.blogspot.com/ http://blogging-against-drugs.blogspot.com/ http://freedom-mag.blogspot.com/ http://churchofscientology.blogspot.com/ http://numnutzclan.blogspot.com/ http://www.angelfire.com/hero/garlic/butter/ http://swirl.blogdrive.com/ http://greatstuff.blogdrive.com/ http://bamball.blogdrive.com/ http://gardengirl.blogdrive.com/ http://chess_wizard0.tripod.com/scifi/ http://kiwiaussie.blogspot.com/ http://kidsoffdrugs.blogspot.com/ http://youth-rights.blogspot.com/ http://missionofthefoothills.wordpress.com/ http://creativexpression.blogsome.com/ Personal Sites: http://livingastherapy.blogspot.com/ http://livingness.com/blog/index.php http://ourearthlyrights.blogspot.com/ http://www.afreshopinion.com/ http://marcozna.wordpress.com http://views-on-the-news.blogspot.com/ http://johnalexwood.blogspot.com/ http://www.mysteriousperson.com/MYSTERIOUSPERSON/thezblog/ http://renaldfortin.spaces.live.com http://news-from-meat-street.blogspot.com/ http://lesweet.wordpress.com/ http://sheilamacd.wordpress.com/ http://artist4life.blog.com/ http://dorkdesign.blogspot.com/ Themed blogs http://thiscouldwork.com/ http://mybuzzpoint.blogspot.com/ http://aerospacebob.blogspot.com/ http://mycodeblog.blogspot.com/ Italian sites: http://scientology-italia-dirittiumani.blogspot.com/ http://scientology-italia-prevenzionedroga.blogspot.com/ http://scientology-italia-ministrivolontari.blogspot.com/ http://scientology-italia.blogspot.com/ http://pensaconlatuatesta.blog.tiscali.it/ http://agoralibero.blog.tiscali.it/ http://goodnewscity.blogspot.com/ http://www.casperize.com/ Scientologists on Social Networking Sites http://bluedot.us/users/turbotad http://www.garkoville.com http://www.myspace.com/photoserge http://www.myspace.com/psychiatrypsucks http://www.myspace.com/thetruthaboutpsychiatry http://www.myspace.com/shanluna http://www.myspace.com/dianeticsracing http://www.myspace.com/forevernewlyweds http://www.myspace.com/laurensweetland www.myspace.com/michaelduff Scientologists in Other Languages: http://religo.ch/ (German) http://youthforhumanrights.blogspirit.com/ (french) http://scientologue-geneve.blogspot.com/ (french) http://psy-confidentiel.blogspot.com/ (french) http://myscientologyswissblog.wordpress.com/ (German) Share and Enjoy!

You may not have noticed (but only if you’ve been living in a hermetically sealed shipping container). This month is the sixtieth anniversary of what’s politely termed the Roswell incident.

That incident unfolded like this. In July, 1947, New Mexico sheep rancher William Brazel showed up at the Roswell Army Air Field with some unusual debris in the bed of his pickup – weird leavings that he’d found in a pasture near the tiny town of Corona. This initiated a series of events that eventually became a drawn-out pot boiler about a crashed, alien spaceship. The plot line is simple: extraterrestrials came to visit, and accidentally destroyed their craft. The remains were efficiently collected and perfectly hidden by a government paranoid about security. According to the die-hard believers, the feds, even now, aren’t willing to fess up to the fact that aliens were on our front porch.

Now Roswell isn’t the only story about aliens come to Earth, although it’s certainly garnered more press than most. Admittedly, there’s some indication that its popularity, even among the UFO in-crowd, may be oxidizing somewhat. In a recent query to ten experts made by the Fortean Times web site, Roswell was mentioned only once as a “most interesting UFO case.” And that single mention was offered by Stanton Friedman, who, as the greatest proponent of the Roswell story, certainly has a dog in the fight.

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QUICK TEST FOR DISINFORMATION “It is the nature of disinformation to be a captious brew of both true and false statements, cleverly interwoven so that the average reader cannot tell which is which without further research. Quick Test for Disinformation and Fraud Does it paint the Star Visitors in a bad light? Does it pick a particular star race to disparage? Does it insinuate bad motives for why the Star Visitors are here? Does the writer claim to channel one or more Star Visitors bearing superior-tone, sensationalized, and/or highly-politicized messages, often in overly-florid “metaphysical” language? While not comprehensive, the above Quick Test will in my estimation filter out about 95% of the disinformation and phony writings on the Internet and in pop magazines. in the light, Richard Boylan, Ph.D. <><><><><><><><><><><>” I’d say this is more than not comprehensive, it’s not even a bit scientific.This is not a good thumbnail test of anything, other than somebody’s biases about the little space brothers. How do we know that person is telling the truth about the Star Visitors? We can tell because he’s saying nice things about them! If-ever-is -heard,-a-discouraging-word we KNOW it’s disinformation! What kind of crappy circular reasoning is that? To sum-up, if anyone makes a statement about the “Star Visitors,” like “they all have big noses” or something than that person is producing disinformation. In fact ANY statement that is puts the Star Visitors in a bad light is probably disinformation. Richard Boylan, (Ph.D) also proclaimed that the plot TV show Alien Nation is about to really happen Share and enjoy!

By William Booth

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 8, 2007; Page A01

ROSWELL, N.M., July 7 — Attention, all aliens. Come on down. Because, seriously, this is your crowd. About 50,000 of your closest admirers are expected this weekend for the Roswell UFO Festival, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the nearby crash landing of a flying saucer — and, naturally, the ensuing government coverup.

A weather balloon? Please. We are not fools.

At least that’s the thinking here. Not up on the latest ufology? The debate today is all about “disclosure,” meaning not if, but when. When is the government finally going to open its top-secret files to reveal its voluminous data on the sightings, abductions and close encounters dating back to at least July 5, 1947. “The anomalies.” Here in the desert Southwest. And probably Mars.

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I suppose that I’m a stick in the mud, however this Roswell Festival thing makes me a little sick in the old hamburger pit. For those of you who (quite reasonably) don’t know what the Roswell thangs all about, here is the situation in as few words as I can manage.

Pure bullcrap!

The story goes like this.

In 1947 some New Mexico sheriff called a local Army Air base regarding some junk that had turned up on a local ranche’s property. Nothing too spectacular, some metal foil and that kind of thing. A couple of people from the base too took the day off drove out to the ranch and recovered some of the stuff.

Then ended up making at least two trips, someone at the base (a so-called plainclothes man) accompanied them and they managed to clean up the mess. The so called flying disk craze was just taking hold and so the following statement was issued;

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County. The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office. Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

Now mind you, they didn’t find anything resembling an aircraft. What they found was more like pieces of a balloon but not one they recognized.

Someone writing the press release probably asked “what the hell do we call this?”
Aw hell, I dont know!” came the reply, Call it a flying disk!]

And so they did, and the “fun” began.

The term “flying disk” was likely designed to take interest away from whatever the men had recovered, it didn’t; work very well.

Only a few weeks before Kenneth Arnold described some crazy looking things he saw briefly on a civil aviation flight over Mount Rainier. They flew with a motion looking like saucers skipped on water.â

Newspaper reports shortened this to “flying saucer.” Interest in science fiction ideas like people visiting from another planet was increasing at the time and the report that an Army base had captured a flying saucer began to generate interest.

Someone (presumably from higher headquarters) decided this was not a good thing and issued a counter story claiming that the men had in fact recovered a weather balloon. It is very unlikely that it was a weather balloon, what the Army was loath to admit is they were engaged in top-secret operations involving the US atomic program. And this stuff was top-top secret. So secret that most of the guys on the base probably didn’t know about it.

The US had dropped atom bombs on Japan little more than a year before; in the summer of 1947 the bomb was still a closely guarded secret. Everyone know what it was, few people knew how it worked. Apparatus was being developed to determine if anyone else in the world was setting off test explosions, other people in the world really wanted to not only know how they worked but have a few of their own. They were looking at the ruins of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and said “We really want one of these!”

So we waited nervously for the signs that someone else had the bomb. This was done secretly and according to information released since then, it involved instruments lofted…

via balloon.

Now it’s pretty darn obvious that I like simple answers over complex ones. To me, a military PR screw-up, something that happens from time to time is far  FAR easier to believe than strange star voyaging aliens just happened to crash one of their *aircraft* in some sheep rancher’s field The first is inevitable in any military organization. The other thing is so unlikely that it is almost not worth talking about.

But, this week in Roswell, a lot of people are talking about it. Amid a carnival-like atmosphere too! Fun and frolic for the whole family! You won’t learn anything new but the hot dogs and beer will be good, and you will spend your hard earned cotter.

Wow, no one saw that one coming! Party on!

Share and enjoy!

BLT Research Team INC. Submitted by the Odd Emperor

BLT Research! Nope, they are not doing useful work on the best sandwich in creation. BLT is all about researching those pesky crop circles.

PURPOSE: The BLT Research Team Inc.’s primary focus is crop circle research – the discovery, scientific documentation and evaluation of physical changes induced in plants, soils and other materials at crop circle sites by the energy (or energy system) responsible for creating them and to determine, if possible, from these data the specific nature and source of these energies.

They also intend to publish their results.

This is all quite laudable, I approve of scientific research so long as it’s real science and not driven by some already accepted conclusion. Crop circles are real (duh!) but the agents creating them are not always clear. We know for a fact that people can and many times have made crop circles. It has been demonstrated, hoaxers have come forward. We don’t always know who made every circle but we can pretty much establish (or at least postulate) that all of them were made by humans.

So why all the fuss? Can we not establish that crop circles by definition are created by people using rudimentary tools, as demonstrated?

Then we can go have lunch! I know what I’m having!

“Well no,” says the die hard cerealoligest (that is what crop circle investigators dub themselves.) You cannot disprove non human entities didn’t come millions of miles to tromp pictures in wheat fields, (which conjures a ridiculous image of aliens, with spacecraft parked nearby, making circles using the plank and pole method favored by seasoned cerealoligest hoaxers ) Since aliens might have made some of the pictures we must take copious notes and samples of all circles to find the evidence.

Yah sure! You can’t PROVE that some schmuck from the local pub didn’t make them either.

Seems like a colossal waste of time to me. I’m hungry! What’s for lunch?

Inducted April 11, 2007

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0704/steorn.html

Wednesday, 4 July 2007 17:26

An Irish company will today reveal controversial technology that allegedly defies basic laws of physics to produce free power.

Steorn, which is based in Dublin, claims to have discovered a method of creating clean, constant energy, which it claims could end the global fuel crisis.

Called Orbo technology, it is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and has yet to be conclusively proven.
Advertisement

Last year, Steorn placed an advertisement in the Economist magazine and challenged the world’s scientists to test its claims.

The company picked 22 of the world’s leading scientists from Europe and the US for the review, which started in January and is not expected to be completed before the end of the year.

Steorn is contractually obliged to publish whatever the scientists conclude in full.

Today the invention will go on public display for the first time with a live working demonstration to be streamed on the internet from 6pm tonight.

Steorn Chief Executive Sean McCarthy has said the demonstration will involve a ‘very simplified version’ of the technology and it will be open to the public from Thursday 5 July to Friday 13 July at the Kinetica Museum at Spitalfields Market in London.

Sceptics can view the device lifting a weight from four different camera angles online.

Mr McCarthy said the company had decided against using the technology to illuminate a light-bulb as the use of wires would attract further suspicion from a scientific community that has already dismissed the device.

The company stumbled upon the technology while working with wind turbines to power remote surveillance CCTV cameras for ATM.

Steorn claims the so-called free energy would be able to power anything from mobile phones to cars, providing a potential solution to the global energy crisis.

Mr McCarthy revealed that if the technology is validated in scientific tests, the company plans to licence it over the internet to any company who wants it for ‘a very small fee’.

Mac Tonnies is a Kansas-based writer of post-cyberpunk science fiction (recently published by the redoubtable Rudy Rucker). He’s also the author of the book After the Martian Apocalypse, a speculative search for life on the Red Planet, as well as the originator of a “cryptoterrestrial” philosophy that ambitiously seeks to explain (with “balanced skepticism” a phenomenon  UFOs that’s been around at least as long as religion. He’s also the owner/operator of Posthuman Blues, an irreverent yet entirely serious blog examining, how shall we put it weird science, imprinted with endorsements from Bruce Sterling and John Shirley.

A Ballardian philosophy ties it all together. Mac’s existential probing into the nature of the interface between man and machine, an analysis of the posthumanism which we have blundered into (the\˜blues part, it seems, derives from the fact that we’re not quite there yet), is based on respect for the work of J.G. Ballard.

It’s one of the more provocative excavations of a meme that remains largely unexplored in comparison to the more well-trodden trails in Ballard’s strange fictional jungle.

Simon Sellars

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Via BBC NEWS

Popular culture quickly embraced flying saucers

By Finlo Rohrer
BBC News Magazine

It’s 60 years since the term flying saucer was coined and the most celebrated “extraterrestrial” episode – Roswell. Alien believers are dismissed as cranks, but even the earthly explanations of objects in the sky are fascinating.

Sixty years ago Kenneth Arnold saw something which changed his own life, the life of millions of others and impacted on popular culture like a shockwave.

Flying his plane near Mount Rainier in US state of Washington he observed a line of strange objects either crescent-shaped or disc-like, flying with the motion of a saucer skimming on water.

Arnold’s sighting, quickly picked up by the press, was followed a fortnight later by the revelation of perhaps the most notorious episode in the history of UFOs, at Roswell in New Mexico.

Having announced it had recovered a “flying disk”, the Army airfield backtracked and referred only to a weather balloon.

What followed was perhaps one of the greatest conspiracy theories of all time, involving post-mortem examinations of swollen-bellied grey aliens, the cloning of sophisticated extraterrestrial technology and an epic cover-up. Or not, as the case may be.

In the 60 years since 1947’s first major wave of sightings, thousands of ordinary people have claimed to have seen inexplicable objects in the sky.

When the Ministry of Defence released papers on its own investigations into the phenomenon in 2006, it was revealed more than 10,000 eyewitness accounts had been collected.

And for every sceptic who prefers explanations of weather balloons and freak atmospheric conditions there is someone who genuinely believes intelligent life is visiting the planet.

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Total Disinformation Awareness 

Submitted by the Odd Emperor with thanks to James Gilliland.

This is a video repository or more precisely, a paranoid video repository. Mostly videos saying Jews are evil and that kind of thing. Nothing really exceptional other than the way this page has been put together. Around TEN or so little java audio players pop up on the main page doing not so good things to my web browser. Crashing it most of the time. Most of you seem to use Internet Explorer which opens the site more or less OK.”Open” this case means punch in the URL and go get lunch. (I’m on a pretty fast pipe too.)

The web author might try to be a little discerning to his intended audience, (which from the material seems to be toothless-sixgrade-education types raging at The Man all day in their doublewides- make that lunch and dinner.) Most of those guys don’t have PCs that will handle this page in any case.

I suppose if oneâ’s not too discerning about the material they publish it is a bit much to expect them to be discerning about how they put it up.

Inducted April 3, 2007