very smart people figured it out... pay attention
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Resisting The Global Land Grab
very smart people figured it out... pay attention
How Those Using "Useful Idiots" Become "Useful Idiots" | how totalitarian movements come to power
From the brilliant Charles Hugh Smith: https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2024/07/how-those-using-useful-idiots-become.html
How Those Using "Useful Idiots" Become "Useful Idiots"
And that's how totalitarian movements come to power: the citizens
give up on the Establishment factions, as they've failed to solve the
problems being exploited by extremist groups.
Useful Idiots describes those who support or encourage
movements of mayhem in the misguided belief that these movements are
positive or necessary. The classic example (and no, V. Lenin did not
coin the phrase) are Western fellow-travelers who supported the
totalitarian Soviet regime out of naivete, idealism or sentimentality.
But there is another class of Useful Idiots: when powerful
factions are jockeying for supremacy in societies riven by chronic
crisis (economic stagnation, social discord, etc.), some of these groups
may cynically see extremist movements as Useful Idiots who can be directed to further the interests of the cynical group.
This is one of the implicit themes in the German TV series Babylon Berlin, a lavish, intricately plotted drama set in Berlin in the years before the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Netflix hosted the first three seasons for several years but gave it up a few years ago. The entire four seasons (season 4 was released in the US this year) are available on MHZ Choice, which serves up a wide range of European TV programming with subtitles.
Various factions are battling for influence in the wretched stew of poverty, political turmoil and postwar trauma of 1920s Berlin: there's the Communists, suitably ruthless; the gangsters running the seamy, thriving Berlin Underworld, also ruthless but in a more calculated, nuanced fashion; the Militarists, who seek to restore the Monarchy and Germany's military might by dispensing with Germany's troubled experiment with democracy, and the nascent Nazis, represented by the SA Brown Shirts street thugs loyal to the ideals of the Nazi party who organize street mobs to beat up their enemies: Communists and Jewish shopkeepers.
Lastly, there are the embattled police, trying to keep order and treat every miscreant fairly under the law, and the government of the Republic, trying to maintain a weak, debt-burdened democratic state against the forces trying to tear it down.
The Monarchist / Militarist Industrialists view the Brown Shirts as Useful Idiots who helpfully weaken the Communists and labor unions threatening their profits and political power. The Nazis also generate a general sense of uncertainty and chaos which the Militarists intend to use for their own purposes: the more dire the economic and social situation becomes, the greater the appeal of a restored monarchy and a powerful military to "restore order."
Unlike the characters in Babylon Berlin, we know how the struggle ends: it's the Militarist Industrialists who were the Useful Idiots of the Nazis, not the other way around. This is how those trying to use Useful Idiots for their own purposes end up being the Useful Idiots of those fomenting extremism.
We can discern the dynamic underlying this reversal. Once extremism is normalized, extreme polarization is also normalized, and those Establishment factions who started out seeking to position themselves as the restorers of order and prosperity are increasingly viewed as no longer up to the task: stronger medicine is now needed to restore order and right the sinking ship of state.
The extremists who were once small thorns in the side of the Establishment are now viewed as the only groups capable of doing "whatever it takes" to end the chaotic decline of civic order and the economy.
The citizens' loyalty to the Establishment factions is weak, while the fervent True Believers in the extremist camps are completely committed to the righteousness of their cause: only we can save the nation.
And that's how totalitarian movements come to power: the citizens give up on the Establishment factions, as they've failed to solve the problems being exploited by extremist groups.
Note to those currently in power: be careful about who you're encouraging as Useful Idiots: you might end up being the Useful Idiots in the endgame.
Play it as it lays, but play it carefully. Overconfidence and hubris can lead us into becoming unknowing Useful Idiots.
March 13 1989 - remember this CME? Today's CME 👇👇👇👇
The Great Québec Blackout
March 13, 2021: They call it “the day the sun brought darkness.” On March 13, 1989, a powerful coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetic field. Ninety seconds later, the Hydro-Québec power grid failed. During the 9 hour blackout that followed, millions of Quebecois found themselves with no light or heat, wondering what was going on?
“It was the biggest geomagnetic storm of the Space Age,” says Dr. David Boteler, head of the Space Weather Group at Natural Resources Canada. “March 1989 has become the archetypal disturbance for understanding how solar activity can cause blackouts.”
It seems hard to believe now, but in 1989 few people realized solar storms could bring down power grids. The warning bells had been ringing for more than a century, though. In Sept. 1859, a similar CME hit Earth’s magnetic field–the infamous “Carrington Event“–sparking a storm twice as strong as March 1989. Electrical currents surged through Victorian-era telegraph wires, in some cases causing sparks and setting telegraph offices on fire. These were the same kind of currents that would bring down Hydro-Québec.
“The March 1989 blackout was a wake-up call for our industry,” says Dr. Emanuel Bernabeu of PJM, a regional utility that coordinates the flow of electricity in 13 US states. “Now we take geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) very seriously.”
What are GICs? Freshman physics 101: When a magnetic field swings back and forth, electricity flows through conductors in the area. It’s called “magnetic induction.” Geomagnetic storms do this to Earth itself. The rock and soil of our planet can conduct electricity. So when a CME rattles Earth’s magnetic field, currents flow through the soil beneath our feet.
Québec is especially vulnerable. The province sits on an expanse of Precambrian igneous rock that does a poor job conducting electricity. When the March 13th CME arrived, storm currents found a more attractive path in the high-voltage transmission lines of Hydro-Québec. Unusual frequencies (harmonics) began to flow through the lines, transformers overheated and circuit breakers tripped.
After darkness engulfed Quebec, bright auroras spread as far south as Florida, Texas, and Cuba. Reportedly, some onlookers thought they were witnessing a nuclear exchange. Others thought it had something to do with the space shuttle (STS-29), which remarkably launched on the same day. The astronauts were okay, although the shuttle did experience a mysterious problem with a fuel cell sensor that threatened to cut the mission short. NASA has never officially linked the sensor anomaly to the solar storm.
Much is still unknown about the March 1989 event. It occurred long before modern satellites were monitoring the sun 24/7. To piece together what happened, Boteler has sifted through old records of radio emissions, magnetograms, and other 80s-era data sources. He recently published a paper in the research journal Space Weather summarizing his findings — including a surprise:
“There were not one, but two CMEs,” he says.
The sunspot that hurled the CMEs toward Earth, region 5395, was one of the most active sunspot groups ever observed. In the days around the Quebec blackout it produced more than a dozen M- and X-class solar flares. Two of the explosions (an X4.5 on March 10th and an M7.3 on March 12th) targeted Earth with CMEs.
“The first CME cleared a path for the second CME, allowing it to strike with unusual force,” says Boteler. “The lights in Québec went out just minutes after it arrived.”
Among space weather researchers, there has been a dawning awareness in recent years that great geomagnetic storms such as the Carrington Event of 1859 and The Great Railroad Storm of May 1921 are associated with double (or multiple) CMEs, one clearing the path for another. Boteler’s detective work shows that this is the case for March 1989 as well.
The March 1989 event kicked off a flurry of conferences and engineering studies designed to fortify grids. Emanuel Bernabeu’s job at PJM is largely a result of that “Québec epiphany.” He works to protect power grids from space weather — and he has some good news.
“We have made lots of progress,” he says. “In fact, if the 1989 storm happened again today, I believe Québec would not lose power. The modern grid is designed to withstand an extreme 1-in-100 year geomagnetic event. To put that in perspective, March 1989 was only a 1-in-40 or 50 year event–well within our design specs.”
Some of the improvements have come about by hardening equipment. For instance, Bernabeu says, “Utilities have upgraded their protection and control devices making them immune to type of harmonics that brought down Hydro-Québec. Some utilities have also installed series capacitor compensation, which blocks the flow of GICs.”
Other improvements involve operational awareness. “We receive NOAA’s space weather forecast in our control room, so we know when a storm is coming,” he says. “For severe storms, we declare ‘conservative operations.’ In a nutshell, this is a way for us to posture the system to better handle the effects of geomagnetic activity. For instance, operators can limit large power transfers across critical corridors, cancel outages of critical equipment and so on.”
The next Québec-level storm is just a matter of time. In fact, we could be overdue. But, if Bernabeu is correct, the sun won’t bring darkness, only light.
👇👇👇👇TODAY:
CME IMPACT: A CME struck Earth today, July 25th, at 1422 UT. We're not sure, but this could be the halo CME launched toward Earth by a dark plasma eruption on July 21st. G1-class geomagnetic storms are possible in the hours ahead as Earth moves through the CME's magnetized wake. CME impact alerts: SMS Text
MAJOR FARSIDE SOLAR FLARE: The biggest flare of Solar Cycle 25 just exploded from the farside of the sun. X-ray detectors on Europe's Solar Orbiter (SolO) spacecraft registered an X14 category blast:
Solar Orbiter was over the farside of the sun when the explosion occured on July 23rd, in perfect position to observe a flare otherwise invisible from Earth.
"From the estimated GOES class, it was the largest flare so far," says Samuel Krucker of UC Berkeley. Krucker is the principal investigator for STIX, an X-ray telescope on SolO which can detect solar flares and classify them on the same scale as NOAA's GOES satellites. "Other large flares we've detected are from May 20, 2024 (X12) and July 17, 2023 (X10). All of these have come from the back side of the sun."
Meanwhile on the Earthside of the sun, the largest flare so far registered X8.9 on May 14, 2024. SolO has detected at least three larger farside explosions, which means our planet has been dodging a lot of bullets.
The X14 farside flare was indeed a major event. It hurled a massive CME into space, shown here in a coronagraph movie from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO):
The CME sprayed energetic particles all over the solar system. Earth itself was hit by 'hard' protons (E > 100 MeV) despite being on the opposite side of the sun.
"This is a big one--a 360 degree event," says George Ho of the Southwest Research Institute, principal investigator for one of the energetic particle detectors onboard SolO. "It also caused a high dosage at Mars."
SolO was squarely in the crosshairs of the CME, and on July 24th it experienced a direct hit. In a matter of minutes, particle counts jumped almost a thousand-fold as the spacecraft was peppered by a hail storm energetic ions and electrons.
"This is something we call an 'Energetic Storm Particle' (ESP) event," explains Ho. "It's when particles are locally accelerated in the CME's shock front [to energies higher than a typical solar radiation storm]. An ESP event around Earth in March 1989 caused the Great Quebec Blackout."
So that's what might have happened if the CME hit Earth instead of SolO. Maybe next time. The source of this blast will rotate around to face our planet a week to 10 days from now, so stay tuned. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text
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Gravitational Wave Researchers Cast New Light on Antikythera Mechanism
MINOAN computer a million years ago
Gravitational Wave Researchers Cast New Light on Antikythera Mechanism
University of Glasgow
Techniques developed to analyze the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer.
Astronomers from the University of Glasgow have used statistical modelling techniques developed to analyze gravitational waves to establish the likely number of holes in one of the broken rings of the Antikythera mechanism – an ancient artifact which was showcased in the movie Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
While the movie version enabled the intrepid archaeologist to travel through time, the Glasgow team’s results provide fresh evidence that one of the components of the Antikythera mechanism was most likely used to track the Greek lunar year. They also offer new insight into the remarkable craftsmanship of the ancient Greeks.
- Ancient Marvels: Ten Amazing Inventions Created Before Their Time
- Ancient Greek Science and Technology – From Antikythera to Pharos
Discovering the Antikythera Mechanism
The mechanism was discovered in 1901 by divers exploring a sunken shipwreck near the Aegean island of Antikythera. Although the shoebox-sized mechanism had broken into fragments and eroded, it quickly became clear that it contained a complex series of gears which were unusually intricately tooled.
Decades of subsequent research and analysis have established that the mechanism dates from the second century BC and functioned as a kind of hand-operated mechanical computer. Exterior dials connected to the internal gears allowed users to predict eclipses and calculate the astronomical positions of planets on any given date with an accuracy unparalleled by any other known contemporary device.
Inscriptions found on the Antikythera mechanism led to a number of breakthroughs in the creation of the “theoretically” rebuilt Antikythera device. (Tony Freeth et al. / Nature)
Reassessing the Mechanisms Specifications
In 2020, new X-ray images of one of the mechanism’s rings, known as
the calendar ring, revealed fresh details of regularly spaced holes that
sit beneath the ring. Since the ring was broken and incomplete,
however, it wasn’t clear how just how many holes were there originally.
Initial analysis by Antikythera researcher Chris Budiselic and
colleagues suggested it was likely somewhere between 347 and 367.
Now, in a new paper published in the Horological Journal,
the Glasgow researchers describe how they used two statistical analysis
techniques to reveal new details about the calendar ring.
They show that the ring is vastly more likely to have had 354 holes, corresponding to the lunar calendar, than 365 holes, which would have followed the Egyptian calendar. The analysis also shows that 354 holes is hundreds of times more probable than a 360-hole ring, which previous research had suggested as a possible count.
Professor Graham Woan, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Physics & Astronomy, is one of the authors of the paper. He said: “Towards the end of last year, a colleague pointed to me to data acquired by YouTuber Chris Budiselic, who was looking to make a replica of the calendar ring and was investigating ways to determine just how many holes it contained.
“It struck me as an interesting problem, and one that I thought I might be able to solve in a different way during the Christmas holidays, so I set about using some statistical techniques to answer the question.”
The Antikythera Mechanism (Fragment A – front); visible is the largest gear in the mechanism, approximately 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) in diameter. (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Statistical Probability and Gravitational Waves
Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments. His results showed strong evidence that the mechanism’s calendar ring contained either 354 or 355 holes.
At the same time, one of Professor Woan’s colleagues at the University’s Institute for Gravitational Research, Dr Joseph Bayley, had also heard about the problem. He adapted techniques used by their research group to analyze the signals picked up by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which measure the tiny ripples in spacetime, caused by massive astronomical events like the collision of black holes, as they pass through the Earth, to scrutinize the calendar ring.
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo and nested sampling methods Woan and Bayley used provided a comprehensive probabilistic set of results, again suggested that the ring most likely contained 354 or 355 holes in a circle of radius 77.1mm, with an uncertainty of about 1/3 mm. It also reveals that the holes were precisely positioned with extraordinary accuracy, with an average radial variation of just 0.028mm between each hole.
Bayley, a co-author of the paper, is a research associate at the School of Physics & Astronomy. He said:
“Previous studies had suggested that the calendar ring was likely to have tracked the lunar calendar, but the dual techniques we’ve applied in this piece of work greatly increase the likelihood that this was the case.
It’s given me a new appreciation for the Antikythera mechanism and the work and care that Greek craftspeople put into making it – the precision of the holes’ positioning would have required highly accurate measurement techniques and an incredibly steady hand to punch them.”
Professor Woan added:
“It’s a neat symmetry that we’ve adapted techniques we use to study the universe today to understand more about a mechanism that helped people keep track of the heavens nearly two millennia ago.
We hope that our findings about the Antikythera mechanism, although less supernaturally spectacular than those made by Indiana Jones, will help deepen our understanding of how this remarkable device was made and used by the Greeks.”
The paper, titled ‘An Improved Calendar Ring Hole-Count for the Antikythera Mechanism: A Fresh Analysis’, is published in Horological Journal.
Top image: Antikythera Mechanism on display at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Source: Joyofmuseums/CC BY-SA 4.0
This article was first published under the title, ‘Gravitational Wave Researchers Cast New Light on Antikythera Mechanism’, and has been lightly edited, with spelling Americanized.
- The Antikythera Mechanism: Who Designed the World’s Oldest Astronomical Computer?
- Huge Study Tracks The Global Evolution of Ancient Military Technology
👉👉👉The Antikythera Mechanism: Who Designed the World’s Oldest Astronomical Computer?
Since
its discovery in a shipwreck near Greece in 1900, an ancient metallic
astronomical clock, called the ‘Antikythera Mechanism’ still baffles
scientists.
Something We Were Never Meant to See
Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1941. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. [Library of Congress]
... Thus began my journey down the rabbit hole and into the den of other people’s secrets that became the setting for my book. The secrets I uncovered soon involved more than just murder, suicide, baby-selling, and a founding father’s family. They also involved bigamy, blackmail, debt, rape, incest, guillotining, corpse-skinning, child abuse, mental illness, and (not to be outdone by any of that) elk-poaching.
OMG: https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/something-we-were-never-meant-to-see
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