Sync Log: Heavy Traffic

This is the kind of Synchronicity I hate...

I was out for a walk on Friday evening and was thinking about the rash of recent daylight UFO sightings. The sky was still light and there was a tremendous amount of air traffic overhead, most of it coming and going to Newark. 

The Secret Sun Best of the Zer0's: TV

    

OK, here's the TV list, in no particular order. There certainly was a lot to pick from in the past ten years- in many ways the Zeros were to TV what the 70s were to movies. 

I've had high hopes for TV rescuing the concept of authorship as well as thoughtful sci-fi. In some ways it's done just that, but the economic iceberg is looming in the distance. 

As the Internet and video games take up more of our time, less money is available for quality TV. Certainly the glory days of actors in last-rated series living like pashas is long gone. But there are a lot of encouraging signs, so keep your fingers crossed for the Teens. 

Fringe - Well, as I write this there's talk that Fringe is on the verge of cancellation. Just as with Sarah Connor, it's future is in doubt just as it found its footing. And just like SCC, the first season had its ups and downs for me. 

I hated the cold, grey New York ambiance (particularly since it was supposed to take place in Boston) and the nauseating corporate teamwork ethic with all of those big fancy FBI sets. I hated the Charlie Francis character and was thrilled when he was killed off. F-S1 was definitely a case of too much money spoiling the broth (as it did with CBS' XF move, Threshold). 

But I loved the themes being explored, even though the show didn't really catch fire until the second half of the first season. Then of course they did what all genre shows should do and moved to Vancouver. They also trimmed down the supporting cast and shifted the focus from Olivia to the Peter and Walter's tortured father-son dynamic. 

They also scaled down the Massive Dynamics elements of the Mytharc for more specific threats. Excellent moves all around. But a move to Thursday and the disruptions of post-season baseball has thrown the show off its ratings bearings, and now there's cancellation talk. Sigh. Well, here's hoping for a third season. 

Maybe JJ Abrams has enough juice to twist Fox's arm. There is hardly any sci-fi on the networks anymore, and way too many lawyers and cops.

 

Carnivale - What a incredible show this was. The idea was to bring a bit of a David Lynch vibe back to series TV, but that seemed to be discarded pretty quickly in favor of a Baroque Apocalypticism that acted as a direct critique of the maniacal kill-craziness emanating from the neo- and theo-cons in control of Washington. This was good, old-fashioned good vs. evil storytelling, with a mysterious young drifter with healing powers and a power-mad Evangelist looking to bring some Hell up to Earth. 

Aside from the Lynch and Terrence Malick vibes, there was a heavy X-Files influence (particularly in the cinematography). As with Rome, Carnivale looked to the past to find parallels of the present. You had the rise of radio acting as a conduit for tent revivalists, foreshadowing the billion-dollar Evangelical media empires of today. You had the wandering carnies mirroring the beaten-down and atomized counterculture. You saw a lot of desert as well, mirroring the myriad apocalypses being played out in deserts across the oceans. 

 The only weak spot in the series was the hasty ending, brought about by necessity. The costly show never got the kind of numbers The Sopranos earned and it was dumped to make room for Big Love, the Mormon polygamy soap-opera hit.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - Sigh. You know what's killing network TV? Impatience. Execs expect shows to explode straight out of the gate, when many legendary shows had awkward beginnings. Sarah Connor didn't really find its legs until the second season, and when it did it garnered a diehard following who are still out there trying to bring the show back. 

 I mean- I get it. Economics are hard to argue with. The show was never a big ratings earner and wasn't owned by the network. But Fox faced a fork in the road- either save Sarah or Dollhouse and they bet the farm on Dollhouse. 

How did that work out for them? 

Well, DH earned some of the lowest ratings in the history of network television week after week after week until a red-faced Fox finally cut its losses. But there's also a part of me that thinks it's for the best. It's better for a show to go out with fans wanting more. 

The second season was so intense (who would have thought Brian Austin Green could make for a credible badass?) it would have been hard to top in the third. Maybe knowing the axe could fall lit a fire under the writers' asses that wasn't there in the good-not-great first season.

 

Rome (Season One) As an amateur Romanophile, I was terrified this was going to be some dry Masterpiece Theatre-style snoozefest, and boy, was I surprised. Rome around the time of the changeover from Republic to Empire was a rollicking free-for-all of sex, violence and devious politicking, and you need to fight past jaded American palettes to put that across on screen. This BBC/HBO coproduction did that in spades. 

Rome had lots of killing, screwing and dirty dealing from the all-time masters of those dark arts. Not surprising, seeing that the legendary John Milius was one of the series' execs. But the center of gravity was the great Irish Shakespearean actor Ciarán Hinds, known around these parts as "BEST-CAESAR-EVER." 

Hinds must have really done his homework, because he completely embodies the endless contradictions and superhuman charisma of Julius Caesar like no one ever before. 

There was a lot of loose talk about Bush as Caesar during the early Zeros and it pissed me off more than I can say. For one thing, Caesar fought his own battles. For another, Caesar never pretended that war was anything but a form of organized larceny. 

The second season suffered badly without Hinds. That center was missing and the producers filled it with a lot of secondary storylines. The real Augustus was a very interesting character himself, but we saw too little of him as an adult. 

And probably better for it; the actor who played Octavian/Augustus as a teenager was excellent, but the adult version was an irritatingly wispy little nothing. James Purefoy was wasted as Antony; his story should have been front and center in the second season. 

Oh, well. We got a lot of entertainment value out of Vorenus and Pullo, played by future gods Kevin McKidd and Ray Stevenson.

The 4400 - As I was licking my wounds over the cancellation of X-Files, along came this surprise from Vancouver, exec-produced by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by a gaggle of former Deep Space Nine hands and future V showrunner Scott Peters. 

It does the mass alien abductee bit a la Taken, but changes the aliens to future humans (but we all know they're just alien stand-ins). After a mass return, the 4400 abductees begin to manifest superhuman powers, which drives the government to create a special branch of Homeland Security to deal with the aftermath. 

 The show worked in a loose synthesis of standalone and serial, meaning the main story would usually be resolved within the hour and a the various subplots would surround it from ep to ep. In a nutshell the basic idea was 'X-Files meets X-Men'. 

There were also strange undercurrents of Scientology in the Jordan Collier storyline, something we see more of in V. The show seemed to be a cable hit until Heroes came along and told pretty much the same story with a much higher production budget and a much sexier cast. 

The 4400 seemed to wilt, and its fourth and final season was an erratic jumble that started off strong, sagged in the middle (including a blatantly obvious "bottle episode") and recovered only to be axed. Well, for a while it gave me a jolt of Vancouverian nostalgia, as well as some tasty, politically-charged sci-fi.

The X-Files (Season Eight)- My favorite of the LA years, by far. After two seasons of relentless high concept and comedy, Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz brought the XF  back to first principles and reversed a ratings slide that put the costly show's future in doubt. Some Mulder diehards moaned, but the fans who signed up for the ideas explored in the X-Files - as well as the dark power of the MOTWs - love Season Eight. 

The season was cut neatly in half: after a taut two-part opening (which Carter cut into a feature film for a theater screening for the cast and crew), Season Eight offered up a string of back-to-basics, old-school XF (with Terminator's Robert Patrick on-board as the new agent) and then switched over to a serial format for the second half, featuring the Mulder death/rebirth storyline and the beginning of the super-soldier mythology (which is based on a very real DARPA program). 

It all ended with a nail-biting Terminator-esque two-parter which was meant to send Mulder and Scully off to the movies. It didn't work out that way. Fox enticed Gillian Anderson to stay on with a huge raise, and Carter signed back on at the last minute. 

Season Nine has its charms (and its advocates), but dragging out the Mytharc - after so much effort had been spent resolving it - muddied the effect of Season Eight's epic, cathartic power. Worse still, no one wanted to watch anti-government conspiracy yarns in the aftermath of 9/11. Nine was also bogged down by Monica Reyes' hasty hetero makeover (almost certainly a network order), leaving the SRR slashgirls to make do with all of those long, meaningful glances for their YouTube music videos.

True Blood - As with Rome the first season was much better than the second, but in True Blood's case it was still pretty damn good. True Blood serves up more of the new-model vampire-superhero archetype (a la Twilight), but throws in a shapeshifter, a Maenad, and a lead character with strange psychic powers (played by Anna Paquin, who played a faintly similar character in the X-Men movies). 

This being HBO, we get a good serving of sex (it could probably be a touch more generous) and a ton of humor. I didn't hit Dragon*Con this past year so I'm not sure how True Blood is being received with the fan community, but I'm willing to bet it's going over pretty well. There's a lot of theorizing out there about the vampire archetypes running rampant in the culture, but the problem is that the vampires in True Blood and Twilight don't have a clear antecedent in cultural tradition- they're very much of a new wrinkle (and they're very different from each other as well). 

I get the feeling that the Twilight vampires could easily be aliens a la Strieber's Hunger novels, while the True Blood vamps are a bit more grounded in the supernatural. More on all of that later.

Justice League Unlimited - Pure geekgasm. I'm pretty sure it went down like this- Warner execs told the boys that the Justice League toon was a massive moneymaker, so as a bonus they were given a lot of money and carte blanche to do two more seasons for Cartoon Network. From there the Tooniverse boys pulled out every obscure character and storyline they loved as kids, wrote them down on little slips of paper and pulled them out of a hat. On top of that they threw in a government conspiracy mytharc that would never fly on WB Kids. 

 From then on JLU gave us Mister Miracle, Hawk & Dove, the Viking Prince, Booster Gold, Captain Atom, the Question and a host of even more obscure characters. All kinds of juicy subtexts were gleefully pumped in resulting in a sync-o-licious semiotic stew. The icing on the cake is the gorgeous animation that's just a notch below feature-quality. A nice little gift to the hardcore fanboys. Like me.

 

Torchwood: Children of Earth - My first reaction on watching a Season One episode of Torchwood? Horror. The show seemed to be a blithe and airy celebration of broad-spectrum invasive surveillance, using alien invasion as a pretext. The Torchwood gang poked and prodded into the most intimate details of people's private lives, all in a day's work. La la la. I'd heard it was the British take on The X-Files, but seemed to me its moral opposite. 

 I've not watched much of it since - until Children of Earth, that is. In this series the Torchwood writers show how all of that flashy technology cuts both ways, and the full brunt of it is thrown against the agents by a brutal and corrupt Prime Minister and his cold-blooded stooges. Ah, that's more like it. Stirring, sobering sci-fi. I'm not sold on the new Doctor Who yet- as I've said before, I'm not a big fan of jokey, fannish sci-fi. Old school Who was quite literate actually, but that was a whole other world ago. But Torchwood picks up the old Who baton with Children of Earth, and produces five hours of television the great Nigel Kneale (of Quatermass fame) would have been proud to sign his name to. I can't wait for Season Four.

Firefly - This is an anomaly for me- as a middle-aged heterosexual male, I fell between all of the cracks in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's demographic targets. And not only did I deeply resent Dollhouse for getting Sarah Connor canceled, I thought the show's politics were an abomination. So I'm not necessarily a natural candidate for the Browncoat Nation. 

 So why did I like Firefly so much? I think it was the chemistry. The cast clicked in such a way that dialogue sparkled that might otherwise inspire cringing with different actors. It didn't hurt that there were two X-Files alums in the main cast - Adam Baldwin (aka Knowle Rohrer) and the adorable Jewel Staite (who guest-starred in the harrowing 'Oubliette')- or that Morena Baccarin's Brazilian beauty was in full flower (unlike her tomboy look in V ). 

 I don't know if there were more than 13 quality episodes to squeeze out of the premise (plus a feature film), but it makes for one hell of a fun little ride. And a prophetic one. In Firefly, Whedon presents a galaxy ruled by the Alliance - a conglomeration headed by the US and China - and we're now waking up to discover that the US and China are now a single, contiguous economy. 

Certainly, China's pop culture is now startlingly similar to ours. I heard a segment on NPR a while back detailing how China's workers were addicted to the same TV shows we watch in the States - the genre material in particular.

The Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism is waiting for you to take the next step in your synchro-journey. Come level up.

And don't forget the all-night 90s lotus party over at SHRR. We're presently up to 1998.

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Stairway to Sirius: Ground Zero Blues

As much as anyone who wasn't actually in Manhattan that day, I was deeply traumatized by 9/11. Nearly every single one of my friends was in the city that day and the day before my best friend told me he had terminal cancer. My son's football coach was killed as was his friend's father. All told, seventeen people from my town died in the event. 

SJ/ET/LDS/AAT/SF

The whole Vatican-ET meme we talked about last week seems to be a lot more serious than these jokey news stories let on. A quick Google search on 'Vatican' and 'Extraterrestrial' gave me more than a million hits. Do they know something we don't, or is this all just a diversion on the part of a few eccentric old Jesuits? 

Secret Sun Best of the Zeros: The Movies

The Zeros were a decade in which memes from the underground bubbled up into the mass media and took over the mainstream in a way I would never thought possible. Twenty years ago topics like secret societies and sacred symbolism were purely fringe stuff. Today, they're literally kids' stuff. 

Winter needs more holidays.

Well, New Year's Eve is coming and from there on in a bleak expanse of cold, gray, short days. Christmas was wonderful (the snow stayed thick on the ground after the storm) but now there's a very February kind of rain falling out there - cold, hard, assaultive drops going out of their way to make you feel like shit. 

Richard Dawkins, Ancient Astronaut Theorist?

 

I don't know how I didn't hear about this earlier*, but Ben Stein coaxed a fascinating confession out of Darwinist rock star Richard Dawkins- that it's possible that life could have been seeded here from an intelligent civilization from elsewhere in the Universe. 

Secret Star Trek: The Second Coming of Sisk-O-Bama

The gift that keeps on giving...

The grand final of the Norway missile/rocket event is not only fascinating because of its proximity to the Nobels and the weird synchronistic emanations that resulted from it, it also struck as being strangely familiar visually...

 

The Siren: The Lovely Bones

Like several other films before it, Peter Jackson's new film The Lovely Bones features one of the central mysteries of the Secret Sun-o-verse, Elizabeth Fraser's heart-ripping cover of Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren'. 

Secret Solstice: The Lost Symbol of Ra

 

Wayne Herschel has been looking at the same memes and symbols in an ancient context that we've been seeing pop up like mushrooms in the media lately. Ancient or modern, it all points to the stars. Maybe it's no accident that so much of the symbolism lately has to do with the space program- maybe they've figured out the real meaning of the ancient mythology, using computers and telescopes. 

Herschel looks at the Key of Solomon here. Somehow this seems very appropriate for this interim between the Solstice and Christmas. 

Enjoy.

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: Bonus Picture Parade

Well, it's been quite a week here on The Secret Sun. The Stairway to Sirius, Revisited series looked at the reemergence of symbols familiar to longtime readers, starting with the weird Norwegian aerial event, and ending with the retrieval of a pylon from the gateway of the ancient Alexandrian temple of Isis, herself identified with the star Sirius. 

In between we looked at a whole host of topics- Will Smith, Barackobamun, Indiana Jones, Masonic tracing boards and of course, the 17 meme.

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: The Moscow Pyramid

 

The excitement of the Norway "missile" was such that a lot of people overlooked another event that may or may not have occurred at the same time - a pyramid-shaped UFO floating above Moscow in footage taken on a cell-phone (allegedly). 

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: Up from the Depths

There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. 

There is nothing kept secret that will not come to light. - Luke 8:17

This whole semiotic/synchronistic adventure started in Norway, with a strange aerial display and a host of symbolic aftershocks in its wake. It should be no surprise then that on the 17th we found ourselves in the ancient waters of Egypt, lifting up a stone pillar from the Gate of the Gods.

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: IndiAnnunaki Jones

 

No matter how far afield things might get here sometimes, I want to reiterate that The Secret Sun is a pop culture blog, that explores esoteric topics in the context of entertainment. So why do I cover political topics here? 

Well, I agree with the late Frank Zappa, who said American politics is the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex. 

Rihanna: She is the Darkness

 

Marilyn Manson called- 

he wants his video back 

Rihanna is one of these divas who are so preternaturally gifted and so heart-stoppingly gorgeous you wonder if she was grown in a lab somewhere.

Astronaut Theology: I Don't Know

 

Since the dawn of time, there have been reports of strange objects flying over heads. Since the 19th Century, with the advent of photography and motion pictures, we've had hundreds of thousands of images captured of this strange objects. Are they extraterrestrial spaceships? 

 I don't know. 

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: Divine Interventionism

The basic story of I Am Legend is this - an Army microbiologist named Robert Neville is working to reverse a plague that wiped out most of the Earth's population, and left many of the plague's survivors in a feral, cannibalistic state, totally lacking in higher brain function.

 

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: I Am (That I Am) Legend

"Hey honey, look at that 

crazy blue spiral in the sky!"

In the previous entry in this series I mentioned the strange synchronicities that coincided with Barackobamun's Nobel speech, as well as Will Smith's appearance at the Nobel festivities at a time when I was struggling through an analysis of his 2007 film, I Am Legend. 

The Deathbed of Corporate Media

Dark, quiet, haunting- the REAL Hellboy

I turned off Hellboy Potter Hellboy II: The Golden Army just around the point they left Diagon Alley. Now, it may be a fine film if you're into Willow or Labyrinth-type fantasy movies but has less than zero to do with the dark, moody Hellboy comics I love so dearly. 

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: Will Smith Gets Sirius

 

The Smiths meet the "evolutionary flashpoint"

We saw Barackobamun making his appearance in Norway preceded by that strange aerial phenomenon, which may or may not have been a failed missile test. The funny thing is that I'd actually considered ignoring the blue spiral story when it first appeared. 

Why?

 

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: Part 1

Synchronicity - significant coincidence - is a powerful thing. I've come to realize just how powerful it is and how unacceptable that power is to many people, even though they experience it themselves. A lot of people dismiss it (as a lot of you are aware of) and others strain for agency; acausality (or apparent acausality) contradicts everything we're conditioned to believe.

 

TVOD: Fringe Pierces the Veil

At a point when lesser shows begin to bleed away their mojo, Fringe continues to conjure up the numinous counter-reality of a dream within a dream.

 

Unidentified "Catherine Wheel" over Norway

UPDATE: Scroll down for info on the missile theory. This may be entirely terrestrial but loaded with interesting semiotics nonetheless...

UPDATE: Don't forget the Scandinavian ghost rocket scare of winter 1946, which occurred shorty after the Babalon Working. Another fascinating sync- Richard Branson just unveiled his Space Ship Two in Mojave, CA, where Parsons and Hubbard decamped after the Working. So many rockets...did I mention I've been researching the Djed pillar lately?

Strange lights over Norway this morning, just before Obama's Nobel acceptance. From the Sun:

Chief Scientist Erik Tandberg, at the Norwegian Space Centre, said that he too was "totally amazed" by the spiral.

He agreed with many other experts that the spiral pattern could have been caused by a missile from Russia — something the Russian military have strongly denied.

Dr Tandberg said: "I agree with everyone in the science community that this light was the weirdest thing. I have never seen anything like this ever.

"It may have been anything from an exploding missile whose launch went wrong - to a comet or other celestial object that for some reason has been behaving strangely.

"If it was a missile - most likely from the launch base in Pletsevsk in Russia or one of the Russian submarines or even from the European Space Agency base in Kiruna - then we are talking about a rocket launch that has gone wrong.

"The spiral suggests the object came off course and balance and entered the spiral movement. Leaking rocket fuel could account for the blue light.

"But I know that the military have denied this explanation. So we could be looking at an entirely new natural phenomenon."

Meanwhile, Nick Pope, former UFO analyst for the Ministry of Defence, yesterday added that the Norwegian sighting was a "real mystery".

He said: "My first thought was this was a meteor, a fireball, or debris from an old satellite burning up in the earth's atmosphere.

From the Examiner:

The appearance of the enormous light spiral in northern Norway may be a sheer coincidence and unrelated to his upcoming speech in Oslo. Alternatively, the mysterious spiral of light may be a sign from an unknown intelligence that Obama’s acceptance speech may be a catalyst for major global changes that lie ahead. With much speculation that the Obama administration is poised to make some kind of announcement concerning extraterrestrial life soon, the light may be sign for him to boldly go where no U.S. President has gone before.

Either way it's pretty stunning. As I've said many times I'm always skeptical of night light UFOs, but this is something else altogether. My gut instinct said "projection" when I was looking at it at first, but my second thought had it that this was very strange indeed.

Remember the recent Utah "meteor" event? Let's read that one over, as well as the story of how Cybele was accepted into the Roman Pantheon under similar circumstances. Yacarete gets star of the day.

UPDATE: Here's a Catherine Wheel firework. Remember the links made between the name Catherine and Hathor ('House of Horus") previously and the eye-like shape of this very odd event.

Katherine can be broken down to Ka-Hathor-Ein or Ka-Athyr-Ein -- ein being the Greek suffix mean "to have" or "to be," and Ka meaning spirit or life force. Ka-Hathor-Ein would translate into "To Have the Spirit of Hathor." Saint Catherine is identified with the Sinai, which also housed the Cave of Hathor. The name "Kate" is the diminutive for Katherine.

UPDATE II: This is interesting- the Norwegian Space Centre mentioned in the Sun piece is on route 161- scroll down for a 17 heavy post just before this.

UPDATE: This is why I first thought it was a projection- the perspective seems very flat. It could well be- maybe the syncs are a little too convenient to actually be syncs ( a commenter asks if this is viral marketing of some kind). Either way, it certainly livens up a gloomy-ass day. As always, we should keep our minds open and our eyes sharp. The event is never quite as fruitful as its aftershocks....

UPDATE: More shots here, and the Sun page has added some reader photos. I've been scanning the comments on various sites and just as I would expect there's a lot of skepticism about this event and/or whatever might be behind it ( a lot of talk about HAARP and Blue Beam and the rest of it).

Which really speaks to my skepticism over the "staged UFO contact" meme- it might have worked 30 years ago but people are way too cynical these days to buy into it, and those who aren't are too religious to see aliens as anything other than the bad guys from their various eschatologies. Human beings are essentially xenophobic, don't forget. Some antropologists have argued that that fear is hardwired into us through evolution.

UPDATE: More pix here. Was this a Russian missile test? That seems to be the prevailing consensus (click here for a simulation of the missile effect). Reader i604 mentions that the Dmitri Donskoi sub has been testing missiles (the RSM56) in the region- a subtle message to the Nobel crowd? The missile being tested is meant to defeat anti-missile shields. Hmmm.

Let's run the symbols- the Donskoi is a Typhoon class sub- Typhoon is allegedly unrelated to Typhon, which is by sheer coincidence the Greek name for Set, god of storms. There's another Typhoon sub out there- the 830 TK 17 Arkhangelsk ("archangel").

UPDATE: Jason reminds us that today is the 44th anniversary of the Kecksburg UFO incident. You see? The ripples are always larger than the splash....

UPDATE: Reader Ryan weighs in with this stunning factoid:

On Tuesday evening, December 8th, thousands of physicists around the world cheered as CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashed together subatomic particles at the highest energies ever reached by a human-made accelerator and the giant ATLAS detector observed the products of the record-breaking reactions whizzing through its sophisticated tracking devices.

Interesting times we live in...

UPDATE 2100 EST: Another Ryanian link:

The United States has not exactly been shut out of the action at the new collider, as Dr. Kim pointed out. It contributed $531 (=9 CK) million to the project, and about 1,700 of the 10,000 scientists who work on the giant particle detectors in the collider tunnel are Americans, the largest of any national group (Italians are next).

9? Check. 17? Check.

UPDATE: Says it all, no?

UPDATE: Henrik at RedIce has a big piece on the event, and quotes an article that namechecks Doctor Who, strangely enough. Andre is on the case of another strange nightlight object in Russia, StrangeEye is running the numbers and memery in an epic post, DarkStar has a plethora of info on HAARP which also Jesse Ventura is covering in his new Conspiracy Theory show.

There's also an avalanche of interesting info in the comments section. Dig in!

UPDATE: Like this, again from StrangeEye:

According to the OFFICIAL HAARP web page at U Alaska, Tromsø, Norway also just so happens to be the home of EISCATand the Ionospheric Heating Facility - another HAARP-Like antennae array that is part of the 5 nation EISCAT project (European Incoherent Scatter Radar).

Scatter Radar and Ionospheric Heating (essentially a TESLA SHIELD - see patent by BAE Systems) can produce the vortex design witnessed in the videos and pictures.

The Ionosphere, in a TESLA SHIELD and the BAE Systems patent, is heated to the point where it becomes PLASMA.

PLASMA is the matter state, phase, of an energized and ionized gas (ie: atmosphere) in which it becomes elctrically conductive and can be effected by magnetic fields. It also begins to emit light through electrical discharge.

The EISCAT Ionospheric Heating Facility at Tromsø, Norway has all the technology necessary to produce such an atmospheric event.

VERY interesting...

UPDATE 12/10 1300 EST: Well, well - yesterday was the 44th anniversary of the Kecksburg UFO flap and the 44th President Barackobamun mentioned the word "war" 44 times in his Nobel speech. Now that is damn interesting...

UPDATE 1435 EST: BBC reports that the Russians have admitted there was a failed missile launch in the region. Man, if that's true that is some exotic technology. Damn. Faye Hawker (I kid you not) reports here. Well, in semiotic terms this has been a grand slam, that's for certain.

UPDATE 1902 EST: Interesting logo synchery from the NY Times...

...and here's another.

UPDATE 2242 EST: Hoagland and Bara see this event in a considerably darker light. Link courtesy of Through the Looking Glass.

UPDATE: Liz at Starworlds has a very cool collection of spiral imagery.

Breaking Open the Pinchbeck

All of the recent talk about 2012 kicked loose a connection I'd been processing subconsciously, but hadn't yet been able to nail down. 

Three Men and a Smokin' Synchronicity

There's a new book coming out in February with the backbreaking title The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down. 

The book promises to blow the lid off the John Edwards scandal, something we've not seen too much of lately, but seems to have resurfaced in the wake of the Tiger Woods scandal. 

"Get the Hell of My Way!"

 

We all know Frank Miller is the scourge of weaklings, panty-waists and namby-pamby bleeding-hearts everywhere. So when he tells all you do-gooder, uptight, busybody censors to back off and let him write and draw what he damn well pleases? 

Well, I pity the fool who doesn't listen.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice trailer

Similar establishing shots to the Percy Jackson film, only showcasing the Chrysler Building as opposed to the Empire State. Interesting.

Bonus factoid: Nic Cage's birthday is 1/7. According to the wiki Google maps link, the Chrysler's zip code is 10017 and sits on 40.7517º North.

UPDATE: Interesting timing dept.: "Nicolas Cage's ex-girlfriend is suing the actor and his former business manager, claiming she is owed more than $13 million and a house the actor promised her."

When Mythworlds Collide: Doctor Who goes 2012

 

 ...well, almost.  

The Fourth Doctor and his companions come across an ark sent into space to avoid an oncoming solar storm set to wipe out all life on Earth. Oddly prophetic; We're hearing some rumblings in the underground that the current space craze is in fact in preparation for the solar apocalypse in 2012, and that the elite will all be whisked off to Mars to sit out the cinderization of the planet.

 

Stairway to Sirius, Revisited: The Real Lost Symbol

Ancient Astronaut Theory is just that - a theory. We obviously don't have access to the ancient astronauts themselves, so it's up the various researchers to present their theories based on the evidence as well as the gaping holes in orthodox theories of human civilization and evolution.

 

CERN Watch: Universe B

 

  The new Vanity Fair* has an article on CERN, which trumpets the site's inherent practical uselessness in the subheadline. Something to the effect of CERN being an 8 billion dollar Sharper Image-type toy for happy-go-lucky quantum physicists.

 

Secret Sun Picture Parade: Clowns in Space

Well, another week, another batch of seemingly unrelated images grabbed from the memestream and stitched together with a fistful of snark from yours truly...

Secret Sun Picture Parade: Taylor Stardust

Taylor Swift continues to fascinate- we saw her Astral Anointing recently and here we see her wielding stardust in the palm of her hand.

Nightmares in Camelot: The Special Ones

  

Bruce Rux explained on his epic Binnall of America interview-a-thon that the original Outer Limits series was a clearinghouse for UFO contact narratives, including many that had never been disseminated. 

Get Ready to Cringe: Battle of the Network Stars

 

I admit it- I'm easy to entertain. Why? Well, I think growing up in the 70s had a lot to do with it. Certainly everything marketed to kids was cut-rate and depressing, and the adults didn't have it much better themselves.