Empire of the Odd

Red Queen at the West_Coast_Chemtrals Yahoo group just linked to this,it’s a pretty insightful article. I wonder if anyone over there actually read it!

This was by Paul Kimball of Redstar Films

“With Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith less than a week away, perhaps the time is right to pose the following question?” he says “- Is Exopolitics the Dark Side of the Ufological Force?

Yes.

It threatens to corrupt everything that is good within ufology – it undermines the search for the truth; it turns the scientific and historical methods on their heads; it is populated by dark characters of questionable repute, in the form of Whistleblowers (the late William Cooper being perhaps the most notorious, a ufological Darth Maul without the nifty wardrobe; Bob Lazar, Philip Corso, Michael Wolf also qualify – the list goes on and on); it replaces evidence with dark conspiracy theory”. More.

Frankly, I didn’t know what Exopolitics was. Exo=outside? Politics on the outside? WTF!
Then I checked Wikipedia

Exopolitics is the politics related to what should happen if intelligent extraterrestrial life is found and we are able to communicate with it. The people of the world and their governments will need to determine how to manage those interactions. The development of policy guidelines for dealing with extraterrestrial beings and territory has been considered by authors such as Michael Salla and Alfred Webre.

Politics?… with aliens? Come-on!

To my utter shock I found Kimble to be absolutely correct! He basically says Exopolitical types are leading at UFOlogy off a bottomless cliff.

Well DUH!

But it’s not just Exopolitical types (I love the word”¦FREAKS!) that cause havoc in UFO circles. It’s all the crazed, closed minded, nutty yahoos out there who believe that they *know* the freaking truth, which they will shovel down your throat without allowing a single word of debate. The types that make assertion after assertion without coming up with any good evidence (you know who you are.) When you call them on it, they lie and pretend to be the victim. “Ohhh stop evil skeptical man. Stop-stop! You’e upsetting my fantasy existence with your skeptical talk.”

Exsopolitics is a bunch of crap. If UFOs have any reality (or realty) they certainly are not going to conform to our customs and notions of courtesy. Those are cultural biases that no other animal on this planet shares. Not unless they already come from our culture or they are so inferior that they need to come down to our level. This is kind of like a bee keeper dressing up in a bee costume and doing a wiggle dance.

Strangely enough if one only paid attention to UFO testimony, one might think that this is exactly what is occurring.

But true believers will have none of this. They will continue to lie, cheat and deceive just like they’ve been doing for many generations. People will flock to them because their message resonates powerfully to those sorry enough to tune in. Cranks will write endless and banal tomes describing in loving details the sexual habits of the blond amazon women from planet AAUUNNIK while others will extol on how harmful our technology is to the environment. It all goes nowhere very fast, right off that bottomless cliff to la-la land.

I hope the ride is a pleasant one. Other than that I really hope some of the nutcases that scream and yell at skeptics can get professional help – soon!

The Odd Emperor

I love this kind of crap! Who are these people kidding? This is the MOD for a yahoo group called UFO-Central

Description

A warning in advance, this group thinks “outside of the box”. So if you can’t do this, don’t bother joining. This is a group for extraterrestrials, starseeds, hybrids, indigos, whomever you may be, to converse and meet with one another. To exchange views, to teach, to talk, to meet, whatever you may desire. The sky is the limit for this group, you may talk about whatever you wish here. Just please keep it polite and mannerly please. Flaming, badmouthing, and most importantly sceptics are not allowed here. This group was created for those who believe, we do not need to be told how or what to believe in. If you don’t believe in such things, then this is not the group for you. If you are not sure what to believe however and are simply curious, if you are polite you are welcome to join us here.

Yeah right, they think outside the box unless someone has a better explication than aliens. That would be bad, that would be skeptical and we don’t want to be skeptical do we?

These are the kind of morons that really tic me off because they sit around and pretend to be open minded and free thinking. Instead they demonstrate how narrow and closed minded they really are. And prejudiced, don’t forget that one.

So what they are really saying is “please don’t disturbed our fantasy world-building with your silly questions regarding the validity of our assertions. We realize that our reality cannot stand up to the real world and we acknowledge that we have no proof or logical arguments to contribute which may back up our beliefs. You as a skeptic have truckloads of counter arguments and logical assertions which may disturb our fantasy existence and make us angry at you. Our fantasy world is important, please do not disturb.

The Odd Emperor

It suggests a clear slide of our culture into a middle ages kind of ignorance. I shutter at what the future might bring for the industry. Not that this is anything new. Stuff like this is as old as the hills, modern times had just made it propagate faster.

***

NEWS ANALYSIS
By Olga Kharif

Scaring Up Paranormal Profits
Interest in the spirit world and UFOs is growing, and entrepreneurs are making money from it by providing high-tech ghost-hunting gear

To the right person, it would be downright eerie. Electronics equipment — electromagnetic-field detectors, white-noise generators, infrared motion sensors — jumping off store shelves for no apparent reason. Groups of otherwise sensible people paying good money to spend a night in a soon-to-be-closed movie theater. Folks on the Internet trolling for brass dowsing rods and crystals that ward off negativity. This is the lucrative business end of the paranormal.

— More

…Good gravy! How the heck did I get on this mailing list?

***

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***

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I watch and chuckle at UFO updates, a private email forum which has some heavy hitters in the UFO ‘biz.” . Recently there was an amusing exchange between Christopher Allan, a British critic who’s written a few things about Roswell and other celebrated UFO events and me buddy, Alfred Lehmberg, highly decorated combat veteran, warrior poet and all around strange guy.
The two of them exchanged verbiage about the ETH for a time, Lehmberg wound up his argument (such as it was) with this.

“Mr. Allan, it’s obvious that you would never find what you would
accept as ‘acceptable evidence’ — you’ll keep raising the bar
or chasing your retreating evidentiary horizon in sputteringly
obtuse denial.. always demanding higher acceptance levels like
other moopy klasskurtxians in your avian camp. If instead you
would pause to examine, seriously, www.ufoevidence.org for a
huge catalog of multiple physical trace databases, CUFOS, NICAP,
STURROCK and others, all available forensics… e.g.photos of
plaster casts of landing gears, soil changes… a virtual
_museum_ of data that the SETI “they can’t get here” partisans
should rub their anti-empirical beaks in. Ted Phillip’s work
alone, around _5000_ cases, is abundant to stun the “no
evidence” partisans… _if_ they got off their lazily assumptive
buns and started chasing the data, instead of “engaging in a
sociopolitical inebriate frenzy,” and driving that data, as they
must.

Think of that!”

I’m often amused at this mindset. Mr. Lehmberg in his ever charming and insulting way is trying to tell Allen that eventually, nothing plus nothing equals something. And so nothing plus a million nothings equals something important.

It goes like this.“Since many people see UFOs and a few encounters have traces we can conclude that Klatu and the Robot Gort or (insert your favorite aliens here) have indeed visited planet Earth. We should all stop looking for evidence (because we have a whole lot of it.) and begin writing learned articles on alien sociology and reverse engineer their spacecraft so we can all have free energy and take trips to the Pleiades.

According to Mr. Lehmberg and so many people in the UFO ‘biz’, we should allow the data to drive our conclusions. He’s very mistaken. Data alone is irrelevant. Look at any UFO cult, ask the followers of Rael, of Hubbard, of Do. All of them allowed data alone to drive their conclusions. It resulted in the untimely deaths of several dozen Haven’s Gate followers. Data alone is a very poor substitute for evidence which is (I hope) what Mr. Lehmberg meant.

Conclusions should never be data driven, they should always be *evidence* driven or fact driven.

Some helpful terms.

Data;
Factual information, especially information organized for analysis or used to reason or make decisions.

Evidence;
A thing or things helpful in forming a conclusion or judgment: The broken window was evidence that a burglary had taken place. Scientists weigh the evidence for and against a hypothesis.

Note that data is factual *information,* not fact itself. I.E. someone so states that this information is a fact but does not necessarily provide *evidence* as to the nature of the data. Factual information could be fact or fiction considering its source. Data therefore could be a (and often is) a systematized lie., a distortion or a falsehood. Allowing data to drive a conclusion is allowing the *originator* of the data to drive the conclusion. This is in effect, allowing others to drive you.

In the realm of rampant belief it’s easy to believe and i’ts easy to find data to back up a belief. Really anything will do. Some words in an old book, thoughts written down by a drug crazed guru or the mindless blathering of TV advertising All of this is data which could be true or false depending on the credentials of the person issuing the data.

Mr Allen tossed the towel at this point quite understandably!

“Looks like it is heads you win, tails I lose.

I am bowing out of this debate. Your thinking is on a level far
too high for me to contemplate. My mind is truly numbed,
confused and flummoxed by it all.

A former editor of FSR once advised me to quit ufology and get
some mental relaxation by taking up carpentry or gardening.

Whilst risking possible backache from the latter, I now propose
to do just that.

CDA”

Mr Lehmberg responded;

“I think that’s, largely, a self-inflicted flummox, Sir. It’s not
one I’ve, in any way, provoked. Might I suggest worm farming? we’ll see you when you come back from the moors.”

Such is the state of intelligent research in the UFO biz. As I said; it always brings a chuckle.

This is SO close to real life….
or at least life in the Odd Empire.

(Crap I Drew on my Lunchbreak by Jin Wicked.)

The Odd Emperor reads a lot, some people seem to disbelieve just how much the Odd Emperor reads.

Today for example; over my Imperial breakfast I was perusing someone’s newsgroup and found myself at the Art Bell page. At the bottom was one of their ubiquitous ads is link for water products.

When you follow the link you come to http://www.energels.com/ . The page says in part.

“Counter Clockwise Molecular Spin of Water Molecules is the KEY! Diseased Cells Spin Clockwise Healthy Cells Spin Counter Clockwise!”

Well, that’s news to me! It’s news to physics people too but let’s not get into science shall we?

Or shall we? Clicking on Click Here For the EnerGels.com website takes one to http://www.energels.com/main.htm  (or it once did!). Here one is treated to a sales pitch for energy mugs and “energy eggs,” in the links section is some information on the bogus scale (sorry EœBovis Scale.) There is a link labeled scientific evidence.

So like any chump I clicked there. http://www.energels.com/evidence.htm

Here is some of what I read.

 Every atom, molecule, or substance has its own unique oscillation pattern, or vibration, which can be measured in electromagnetic wavelengths. (Ciccolo, “Domenica del Corriere”, February 18, 1988) (Beneviste)

 Water is a Carrier of information; as a solvent it is the best known conductor of vibration, with information transfer possible without direct contact. (Ciccolo)

 Water possesses the ability to store information that has been impressed upon if from a given vibration for long periods (Engler and Kokoschinegg, 1988), as can be measured by specific electromagnetic wavelengths found in water; thus even after harmful physical substances are removed, their negative energy vibrational patterns, or “signatures” still remain, which can be traced back precisely to the original substances. (Ludwig)(Beneviste, in “Natur-Wissen”)

Water can transfer such information from vibrational patterns, or “memory”, to other systems, including living organisms. (Ludwig)(Felsch)

Water revitalization allows water in a higher vibrational state to transfer, or share, its higher frequencies, which act to balance out low energy and negative information. (Ciccolo)

• Water can retain the vibrational memory of a substance even after it is diluted beyond Avogardro’s number, where no physical traces of the substance remain. (Beneviste)

 Water quality can also be evaluated by the amount of ultra-violet light it absorbs. “Poor” quality water will absorb higher amounts of UV light, while “good” quality water absorbs low amounts. (Ludwig)

 The minimum specific warmth and the maximum structural potential of water is measured at 37.5 degrees C, or the normal human body temperature (98 degrees F); this finding indicates that water at this temperature is at a maximal structure point to acquire a large amount of information. (Felsch)(Engler and Kokoschinegg, 1988)

None of these claims make very much sense. Water has vibrational patterns? These can be “negative and positive.” Negative water can affect people in negative ways. Positive water can pass on  positive influence to other water by simply being in the vicinity? This all has something to do with molecular spin?

With the exception of the UV claims ( I can believe that ultra pure water will probably fluoresce less in UV light simply because it has less particulate matter.) none of these claims seem a have more than a shadow of substance.

But all are actually published in I assume scientific peer reviewed journals? Let’s find out!

1) Ciccolo, “Domenica del Corriere”, February 18, 1988
Sunday of the Courier, this seems to be an Italian supplement paper.

‘La Domenica del Corriere’ was an illustrated Sunday supplement to the Italian newspaper ‘Corriere della Sera’. The front and back coverpages were well-known for being richly and colorfully, if somewhat fancifully at times, illustrated with newsworthy event of the week. The inside pages were also richly illustrated with photographs and advertisements along with some text articles here

This was back in the 1920s however. The contemporary paper seem so obscure that ve found nary a reference to it, outside of the same magical water stuff and some UFO reports.

Big surprise.

Somehow, this does not seem to fulfill the requirements of a peer review or scientific journal.

2) Ludwig)(Beneviste, in “Natur-Wissen”) No reference to date.
Here is a typical reference, one of literally hundreds on the Internet. Not one (so far) actually cites the source of the quote. http://www.puregoodness.info/grander.htm

“Wolfgang Ludwig, physicist and advisor to World Research Foundation goes into detail by saying that water possesses the faculty to store information and that has been impressed upon it previously on a given frequency level and to transfer such information to other systems. He states that contaminated water can be purified chemically and freed of bacteria, but it will still possess electromagnetic oscillations in certain wavelengths: these can be traced precisely to the contaminants. Therefore, even after purification, water contains certain signals that can be detrimental to the health. Yes, water has memory.”

I was unable to find a direct reference to Natur-Wissen. Now this seems to be a derivative of Naturwissen, or Natural Science. The German – Natural Science appears to be a homeopathic publication, once again; this is not exactly a scientific journal. http://www.lebens-energie.de/\

3) Engler and Kokoschinegg, 1988 No publication referenced.

4) Felsch, no reference to any publication. Some reference that reads. “Dr. Horst Felsch, director of the Civil Environmental Laboratory in Fieberbrunn, Germany.” Cannot verify this, reference is only listed in magical water sales text.

This is not an exhaustive search to be sure, simply a quick check of references. I’m curious enough to run over to the Imperial Library and cross check these names in conventional published sources.

I find that outside of homeopathic water sellers, these people don’t seem to exist. I got a couple of hits in other branches of homeopathic products but no reference to papers in conventional journals.

One might conclude from all of this that fake water products need fake scientific citation to be effective. Since magical water products seem to be belief based the idea that science is invoked where there appears to be no science is repugnant. I think that the magical water’“industry” such as it is should rethink this tactic of citing obscure to non-existent sources and calling them’ “scientific.” For people who have already bought into this stuff, it’s not needed. The people who are somewhat skeptical are going to associate spurious citation with a phony product.

The undecided? They might be swayed by a bunch of bogus psudo-scientific bleatings but using such a tactic underlines how dishonest the purveyors of these products really are. If one is going to sell a belief based product, stick to personal testimonies. Don’ try to encase your claims in a thin sheet of science (paper-thin in this case.) The people who check this stuff out are not only going to realize how bogus the product really is but how ethically bankrupt the people behind the product.

The big UFO buzz today seem s to be a piece written by By Aaron Sakulich in The Triangle, the student paper of Drexel University (this might give you an idea of how little there is going on in the Foreatian realms. )

This is one of the most well known and most historically important cases of alien abduction of all time, mainly because it’s all baloney runs the tickler

Sheeze, sounds like an Odd Empire rant. Not a very professional way to topic an article. The Betty and Barney Hill abduction case is significant more on how it influenced the believer public than if it were an actual case of a medical examination by forces unknown.

It’s probably not all baloney. Betty and Barney Hill were probably on the road that night and they probably saw something. What happened later is unclear. Neither of them had any clear recollection of events following the initial sighting, they both reported that several hours on the road were unaccounted for.

So, could it have been aliens? Possibly but highly unlikely. Something traumatic may have occurred but the only evidence of what was pulled out via a series of hypnotic regression sessions. Pretty flimsy evidence in the best of circumstances. Hindered in this case because Barney Hill (apparently) did not remember much except a strange feeling he’d been violated. Betty talked about strange creatures and spacecraft. Eventually she came up with details of the craft (not really saucer shaped at all) and even descriptions of “star maps.”

I wouldn’t call this baloney, I would say that it’s probably confabulation. Confabulation of a real traumatic occurrence. What really happend cannot be discerned in the data thus far, that’s The Odd Emperor’s opinion and he’s not afraid of admitting ‘“I don’t really know what happened” but that’s why he’s the Odd Emperor.

But I digress and my Internet connection just opened back up so, on the piece itself

Writes Aaron Sakulich
What actually happened to the Hills that night? Hell if I know. But I know what didn’t happen: They were not, absolutely not, kidnapped by space aliens.

OK, how do you  know that?. That may be your opinion but so stating that they were absolutely not abducted by aliens smacks of some goober trying to sell holistic mineral water or snake-oil.

“Did space people decide to use the publicity from this case as a starter’s pistol, the green light to start kidnapping people en masse? Or did the publicity from this case create other abductions in the same way that this case was created from TV shows and books that Betty Hill had read? I’m no statistician, but even I can see that the second option is the one that makes the most sense.”

This I agree with. On the one hand its not a good idea to to analyze motivations of an extraterrestrial culture, do they even have culture?If so, could we understand it?
Researchers in the field remind me of the blind men and the elephant. We can all make predictions and observations based on the tiny piece we know but we don’t  know the dimensions of the puzzle yet. Even if UFOs and related phenomena are simply tricks of the human mind it’s going to take generations to understand how it happens at all. If it’s caused by an outside agency we may well be faced with trying to understand something that is by it’s very nature, incomprehensible to us.

It’s a very steep and slippery- slope, most people don’t seem to be comfortable with rappelling down it but the tools are all there, if one hazards to pick them up.

“satirical”

adj : exposing human folly to ridicule; “a persistent campaign of mockery by the satirical fortnightly magazine” [syn: satiric]

Used in a sentence, “The Odd Empire is a satirical web page.”

“factual”

adj.
1. Of the nature of fact; real.
2. Of or containing facts.

Used in a sentence;
Red Queen’s web page is supposed to be a factual source of information on anomalous happenings in the US State of Oregon.