Unauthorized Science Podcast

Immanuel Kant wrote a lot of things, but if all you know is what you remember from Phil 101, you associate him with his Categorical Imperative: Every man embodies a value in his own right. Don’t use him as a means to your personal ends.

Kant was a creature of his time and spoke of our duty to “men”. Of course, today, every woman embodies a value in her own right. I know and love people who take this further. Animals are sentient beings, too, and we should not be eating them. We shouldn’t be separating calves from their mothers so we can harvest the mother’s milk for our latté.

Thanks for reading Unauthorized Science! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Then, where do we draw a line? Is it wrong to steal honey from the bees’ hive? Is it murder to swat the mosquito who wants my blood? Monica Gagliano has done a pretty good job convincing me that plants are sentient creatures in their own right. Should I avoid eating broccoli? Is monoculture a perversion of nature, manipulating the plant’s life cycle for utilitarian ends?

Perhaps I am left watching where I step, and eating only the fruit that has dropped from the tree. Or is the lesson less about participating in the web of life as an apex predator, more about carrying an attitude of reverence into our role and mission in a Gaian biosphere. Some native American tribes had a long tradition as stewards of nature, using their traditional knowledge of ecology to plant richly productive forests, greener and lusher than anything that Mother Nature would produce on her own. The Nuu-chah-nulth hunters of the Pacific Northwest would say to each seal, “Welcome, friend. You have come to give yourself to me. I am grateful for you coming. Do not feel that you have been taken in vain. I will see that your body is treated with reverence. I bless you and cherish your gift to me and my family.”

At the other extreme is Aleister Crowley, “Do as thou willst shall be the whole of the law.” There is a disturbing echo of Crowley’s dictum when we hear about the most powerful people in the world gathering at Bohemian Grove for the Cremation of Care ceremony.

This is the anti-religion religion: the individual in service only to his own whims and desires. Of course, if this is your philosophy, you don’t recognize a community. You have no need of other people who think this way, and are liable to use and abuse you for their own ends. The irony is that Crowley attracted a following, and that today there are “communities” of Satanists.

Where does trust come from in these communities? The Golden Rule, “Do unto others” seems a viable basis for a cooperative community. If I am a Christian, I want to be surrounded by other Christians who will treat me as kindly as I treat them. But if I am a Satanist, why would I want to surround myself with other Satanists, who would not hesitate to stab me in the back?

About ⅔ of the way through the previous century, as a Harvard undergrad, I took courses from Henry Kissinger and Alan Dershowitz. They were both brilliant lecturers, and I found their thought modes to be stimulating and challenging. Only later, as I gradually outgrew my own cerebral prison and recognized a heart within myself, was I able to diagnose the disease of these two mutant creatures.

Arrogant intellectuals. Heartless. Sociopaths, maybe — but not demons. Kissinger would calculate the risks and benefits of nuclear brinksmanship with intellectual detachment. Dershowitz would reduce relationships to algorithms as though jurisprudence and contract law were the ultimate significance of our human connections.

____________________As they looked in 1969_____________________

For decades of my life, I thought I recognized the disease from which such men suffered — unable to feel empathy and reduced to the syllogisms in their left brains. I could imagine them oblivious to the suffering of others, justifying actions that brought them power at the expense of others’ welfare. I thought I understood their affliction as an excess of rationality, scientific reductionism taken to a pathological extreme.

Now I am asked to imagine these two, and others like them, have been participating in Satanic rituals. Torturing infants to harvest their loosh. Cutting organs out of newborns on a sacrificial altar, drinking their blood. This is a different class of evil. I would have though it to be the polar opposite of the reductionist materialism and intellectual arrogance where my Harvard profs made their home.

We knew that 10% of humanity identifies as homosexual, and erotic feelings for the same sex are occasional visitors in almost everyone. We recognize that love can take many forms. But we thought that the conflation of sexual and sadistic pleasure was uncommon, characterizing only a tiny minority of our species. And sexual pleasure from murdering babies? We thought this was a perversion that could afflict only one person in a million.

How are we to think about the Royal Families and the billionaire bankers, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, the Bushes and (I must say I’m most perplexed by) Noam Chomsky? How can it be that so many of the powerful people in the world have this same horrifying, disgusting desire to mutilate babies for their own arousal? They can have anything they want, and what they want is an experience of Hell.

Maybe these people are so lost in their left brains that in order to feel anything at all they need extreme forms of live-action theater. Think of them as an extreme of the teenage girl who cuts herself and bangs her head against the wall as a rebellion against her inability to feel anything.

There’s another possibility. We are already almost two centuries into the Triumph of Rationalism in the West. (Triumph or Triumphalism?) We all grew up thinking that the world is made of particles that obey Laws of Physics. We have discarded God on top of a pile of lesser rubbish — the animism of the ancients, witchcraft of the Middle Ages, black magic, anything supernatural — they are all superstitions with no place in our world.

We Moderns have left all this behind, and our reward is gleaming cities, quantum physics, the Green Revolution, spacecraft that take close-ups of Saturn’s rings, marvels of genetic engineering, the Internet, artificial intelligence. These marvels are products of pure rationality, not magic, not superstition.

Hypothesis: Could it be that the century-long transformation of Western culture into atheist materialism was a product of social engineering? Could it be that a minority of uber-powerful Illuminati have convinced the rest of humanity that there is no such thing as magic so that they would have a monopoly on magic, to be used for themselves without risking our opposition?

The Telepathy Tapes have taught us that paranormal powers of the mind are often associated with trauma or brain damage. It is as though there are parts of our brains that filter out telepathic intrusions, precognition, and connections to the Akashic Record in order that we might function efficiently in the quotidian reality of our material world. The suppression of psi is an evolved feature of humanity, in that humans are far less telepathic than animals. (If you don’t take Sheldrake’s word for it, you can read Carl Safina.) And in modern Western man, homo technologicus, vestigial powers of the mind are suppressed almost entirely.

Perhaps there is a “rational” motive for torturing babies. In extreme pain, they detach from the body. They develop dissociative alters, and some of these alters have extraordinary psychic ability. Their torturers look for the most promising candidates, train and dominate them, learn from them what others are thinking, learn about distant realities and future events. Perhaps the children have psychokinetic abilities as well, and latter day Dr Frankensteins are manipulating events on the world stage through the power they assert over their child victims.

Another way to look at this: black magic is real. It is no accident that the most powerful people in the world engage in sadistic Satanism with babies. They are stealing the psychic powers of the babies and using them to enhance their own worldly power.

The world is our collective creation; all our minds together dream reality into existence. But some dreamers are more equal than others. There are those who, with powers of black magic, enhance their own ability to consciously, willfully prescribe large-scale events in our world.

Furthermore, they manipulate our beliefs to make us complicit in creating their sick world. The fictions in the mainstream media, as well as the truths that come out of Hollywood and sci-fi novels, are all part of a black-op project of mind control on a global scale. When we believe the stories they tell us, it helps those stories to come true.

This is the meaning of “predictive programming”. It’s not about “getting our tacit permission.” They are using the resonance of our minds to enhance the power of their own sick imaginations to realize their dystopian vision in bricks and mortar, flesh and blood.

Before last week, we might have conceived Jeffrey Epstein as the world’s most powerful blackmailer. Working on behalf of Mossad, he was tasked with getting kompromat on as many powerful Americans as possible, while simultaneously providing backing to enhance the ability of already-compromised people to rise to power. Epstein is the reason that the great majority of Democrats and Republicans of prominence will not name or condemn the Gaza genocide, and why Congress and each succeeding President send arms to Israel to enable their atrocities.

But Epstein’s stick was not without a carrot.

EscapeKey paints a portrait of Epstein the Hub, Epstein the Routing Table, Epstein the Switchboard. Yes, he was blackmailing powerful people, but he was also serving their interests. They came to him for introductions, for connections, for networking, even for advice. People sought out Epstein’s wisdom, and valued his opinions. Before his (maybe) “death”, he had become the architect of the New World Order and chief engineer of the Great Reset.

Epstein funded and promoted some of the most advanced research in evolutionary ecology at Harvard (Martin Nowak) and the gestation of thinking machines at MIT (Marvin Minsky).

Epstein was a private consultant to Harvard’s Larry Summers, to Goldman’s Kathryn Ruemmler, to SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. He hand-picked the next generation of leaders for the World Economic Forum.

Can we stretch our minds to imagine that such a tortured, perverted mind also had its particular genius?

In conclusion, as promised, the Giza Plateau.

The Great Pyramid is an icon, taunting us in our modern technology: “With all your precision tooling and your gigawatt power plants: Could you build me today?” There are other examples as well, mostly megaliths, structures that testify to an ancient technological civilization. Or three.

We could not cut the Stone of the Pregnant Woman (Baalbek, Lebanon) or lift its 1200 tons out of a quarry. We don’t know how to fit precision-cut stones into a wall that defies earthquakes as in Sacsayhuamán. We have no idea how 40,000 vases from Saqqara were precision-carved, inside and out, each from a single piece of hard, brittle granite or diorite. The giants of Easter Island and the underground city at Derinkuyu are within the capabilities of modern technology, but that doesn’t mean we know how the Ancients carved them.

In the Timaeus dialog, Plato wrote about the civilization of Atlantis, ending in deluge 9,000 years before his time. The Bible and Gilgamesh and native legends from the Americas and Australia all tell of a great flood in the deep past. Geologists tell us of a cataclysm or meteor impact that initiated the Younger Dryas, the end of the last Ice Age when sea levels rose precipitously.

In humanity’s deep past, at least 12,700 years ago, there was a previous technological civilization. They could do things that we don’t understand, but not with technology that was like ours. It seems they built with stone, not with metal and glass. There is no evidence that they used either fossil fuels or uranium for energy.

Psychotronics is the science of melding mental and material powers in a composite technology. Aspects are described in speculative terms by 20th century Soviet science, by Japanese authors, by our own CIA, by Jason Jorjani and Roger B Stone, by Jake Barber.

So here is the thought I want to leave you with: There are techniques involving mind and matter that are something between black magic and psychotronic machines. The ancients used these technologies to create all the megalithic relics at which we marvel. There is a subpopulation of humans today who know about this technology, and they are hiding it from the rest of us, while using it to lord over us.

Such are the disturbing possibilities that Jeffrey Epstein’s documents have invited us to explore.

All the religious and indigenous legends of the Great Flood include an element of divine justice. The Atlantean World (or Noah’s world) had become corrupted. People were arrogant and disconnected from the miracle that had birthed them. They violated that world, as they did violence to one another. God invoked a Great Reset so that mankind might make another start, perhaps this time to grow within Nature and not burn his bridges. It is easy to imagine what our present world has in common with Noah’s world.

Is there a morality embedded in the collective consciousness, or the mind of the Universe, whatever we call Him? Is our world a battleground between good and evil?

In one telling, “goodness” aligns with Kant’s morality. We are meant to care for one another, to care for our living planet with all its systems and species and ecospheres and individual beings. Evil is the temptation of selfishness, to treat other living beings as means to our personal ends, with no regard for their own wishes or their wellbeing.

In another telling, there are extraterrestrials or spirits or gods who are battling over the fate of humanity. The one who wants to enslave us is called Enlil or Zeus or Jehovah. The one who wants to facilitate mankind’s growth and empowerment is Enki or Prometheus or Lucifer. Yes, in this story the devil is the good guy.

I want the best of both these stories. Breaking the shackles, individual empowerment, ascending to the power of the gods is my aspiration. But my path is communal. I eschew black magic and seek to avoid harming any other being. I choose the slow path of discipline and meditation, leading through the siddhis to great powers of the mind, while lifting those around me on their parallel journeys.

Maybe you’ll join me.

Thanks for reading Unauthorized Science! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

“If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you…”

IF! By Rudyard Kipling

I don’t know anyone who could remain composed, speak with a soft and kindly voice in the face of the denunciation, lies, misunderstandings, and ad hominem attacks such as Robert F Kennedy Jr endured during yesterday’s Senate hearings. For example,

If it were me, despite 50 years of yoga and meditation practice, I would have been too paralyzed to speak coherently. In far less stressful situations than this, I have lost my rationality on many occasions.

And yet, I can see from a distance what might have been a perfect response, the response of a consummate martial artist who turns his opponent’s violent momentum into his own undoing. The response of an imperturbable Zen guru or an ascended master who radiates light and love at all times.

“Mr Sanders, Ms Warren — I hear you. Remember, that for the first 69 years of my life, I was a Democrat like you. I read the New York Times, I listened to NPR, I identified with progressives and democratic socialists who wanted the same things I wanted. I trusted the highly-trained doctors and scientists whose job it was to protect our health by their judgment.

I feel the righteous passion in your voices. At another time in my life, it might have been me saying those same things. I don’t blame you one iota for what you’re saying. I appreciate your commitment to the welfare of the people you represent. I appreciate your trust in the liberal news media and, above all, the scientific literature. When you have such trusted sources on your side, together with the consensus of the community of medical science, it’s appropriate to be sure of yourself, to be passionate in your defense of what you have every reason to believe are self-evident truths.

What I ask of you is a chance to sit down at leisure, in your office, on your schedule and with your staff scientific advisors present to help us both. I want a chance to show you the evidence that has convinced me that all those sources — the news, the medical journals, the scientific columnists have been misled by an insidious disinformation campaign, all funded by exorbitant pharmaceutical profits.

I believe in the liberal press, the pundits and, above all, the scientific journals. There is only one thing that I believe in more, and that is the data. The raw numbers from which scientists derive their analysis and the pundits interpret the scientists. It is the numbers themselves that dragged me from the faith that I had in trusted sources — the same sources you have trusted. It was inconceivable to me that all these sources could have been mistaken about the same thing in the same direction, marching in lockstep. It was inconceivable until it was proven to me beyond a reasonable doubt. It was proven by the numbers themselves. These are numbers so stark, so terrifyingly stark, that it doesn’t take a statistician to interpret them. They jump off the page and make you want to cry. They tell the story of a nation whose health has been sabotaged, whose reality has been subverted by those who profited from the sabotage.

I don’t have to tell you that America’s health has been declining for decades. You know that our life expectancy — the highest in the world when you and I were children — is now lower than any developed Western nation, lower than Chile and Albania and Poland, on a par with Cuba and China which were years behind us in the recent past.

I don’t have to tell you that we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and despite this, we rank 46th in infant mortality. Type 2 diabetes has always been a disease of portly, middle-aged people. In America, the rate of Type 2 diabetes among our children — yes children — is increasing at 5% per year, and has been increasing at that rate for decades.

You know that when the dust cleared and the COVID numbers were counted, America had one of the highest death tolls in the world — at 318 per 100,000. Sweden was widely derided because they never closed their schools or their restaurants or their places of worship, they never limited public gatherings even at the height of the pandemic. Life went on as before. Most people didn’t wear masks. The economy didn’t blink an eye. People accused the Swedish public health authorities of criminal malpractice, but in the end, their death rate was 247, more than 20% lower than ours in America. But Sweden is just the beginning. India’s public health system is a basket case, and people in the major cities are crowded on top of one another, many in unsanitary circumstances. India had a COVID death rate one eighth of ours in America. Subsaharan Africa has only rudimentary system of hospitals, but Congo and Nigeria each had COVID death rates one hundred times lower than the US. In our haughty superiority, are we willing to learn from these poor African nations? In large sections of Nigeria and Congo river blindness is endemic, and so the people get used to taking small, preventive doses of ivermectin every week. Yes, ivermectin. Horse paste. Our CDC told us, condescendingly, ‘You’all are not a horse. You’all are not a cow’. What was the consequence of that ad campaign?

The greatest controversy I have faced at HHS has been about vaccine policy. Almost everyone in this room believes that the COVID vaccines were a miracle of science. Developed in just 9 months, they were nevertheless remarkably safe and effective. We know this because trusted sources have told us again and again and again.

What they didn’t tell us was that in the Pfizer trials — the very data that Pfizer submitted to FDA in support of their successful bid for emergency authorization — in Pfizer’s own data, subjects were divided into a test group receiving the COVID vaccine and a control group of equal size receiving only an inert placebo. The executive summary said “95% effective”, and from that you would have been justified to think that for every death in the vaccine group, there were 20 deaths in the placebo group. In fact, more people died in the vaccine group than in the control group. Before the Pfizer vaccine ever left the test phase, we had reason to know that the vaccine was not 95% effective. Its effectiveness, in terms of avoided deaths, was in fact negative. In ordinary times, this would have been immediate grounds for FDA rejecting the petition, sending the Pfizer scientists back to the drawing board.

One more set of numbers I want to show you before we agree to a longer meeting to go over the data in detail, at your convenience, in your Senate office. VAERS is a joint project of FDA and CDC. For 40 years, VAERS has been collecting data, voluntarily submitted, about suspected side effects from vaccines. With hundreds of millions of vaccine doses every year, there were about 300 deaths nationwide reported to VAERS, a pretty consistent number, year after year. In 2020, there were 420 deaths from all vaccines put together. In 2021, there were more than 20,000 deaths reported to VAERS from the COVID mRNA vaccines. That’s 50 times as many deaths from the COVID vaccines compared to all other vaccines put together. Isn’t that something we’d want to look into together? Isn’t that something we want to avoid for the approval process in the future.

Senators, I am grateful to you for your independent thinking, and grateful that, like me, you are passionate about public health. I invite you — let’s sit down together, look at the numbers, and see if we can resolve the issues that separate us.

Whatever we decide together, you will always have my respect and my admiration. It is entirely appropriate that you oversee the work I am doing at HHS. It is part of your job. We’re on the same team. We share the same values and the same goals. I invite you — let’s sit down together and see if we can agree on the data and what they mean.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks for reading Unauthorized Science! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

Link to the original, including embedded references.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

Farrell tells the story of post-war American intelligence operations, confronting the USSR as a nuclear-armed enemy and simultaneously the Roswell incident, and other demonstrations that Somebody or Something is capable of penetrating our airspaces with technology that is way over our heads. The fear of the Soviets was transferred over toward a fear of the ETs, and a culture of paranoia was created, in which secrecy and crime were justified by the perceived need to respond to these powerful enemies.

While Farrell makes a plausible case for the attitudes that led to a breakaway civilization, he does not, in this Preface, address three questions that I find most interesting. (1) What technologies do we think they have? (2) Are they actually building cities and transportation and energy infrastructures based on this technology? (3) If so, where are they? Are they underground? Undersea? In Antarctica? On the moon? 

Farrell goes deeply into the motives and the culture of the Military-Intelligence bureaucracies that might have led to a breakaway civilization, and he talks about the criminal infiltration of the world’s financial systems that was necessary to pay for the effort. 

For detailed speculation about what they have and where they are hiding, we have less to go on. They are doing a good job of keeping secrets. There are some clues in Richard Dolan’s two short volumes, and other hints scattered on the Internet. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

Einstein wrote that “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Wigner wrote about the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the physical sciences.

There is an unstated assumption on which the scientific method is founded. But it’s not a necessary truth. It’s not a logical condition of existence. It is a scientific hypothesis that can be tested. Actually, it has been tested…and the results…?

[written version, mostly the same, with links and illustrations]

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. . . . Just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.

— Plato, the Timaeus

What we think of as the full “history of human civilization” is just the latest cycle of ascendance in a series. Humanity has flourished during the last 12,000 years — a “brief” period of stability in great, turbulent forces that reign in our sun and beyond.

This is the umbrella theme of Robert Schoch’s book, Forgotten Civilizations — a book which also includes references to a dozen other chapters of occluded science, well-documented experiments and observations that have been set aside by the scientific community because they don’t fit into the prevailing paradigm. The book is an invitation to a dozen research projects, but here I will try to summarize just one theme: cosmoclimatology.

* The stormy surface of the sun, 

* earth’s magnetic field and ionosphere, 

* the motion of our solar system through interstellar space,

* the seething black hole at the center of our galaxy

All these systems can erupt, periodically, in ways that are threatening to life on earth. In the ~2 million year history of hominids, there have been many worldwide calamities of celestial origin and more of geologic origin. The latest of these have destroyed civilizations and our memory of technologies that were once highly developed.

Robert Schoch’s wide-ranging book is a breath of fresh air for people like me who think that the scientific community has been willfully blind to diverse findings that would require a rethinking of established paradigms if they were accepted. I’ll focus here just on Chapters 7 through 9 (of 15). These discuss cosmoclimatology = influence of astronomical systems on the earth’s atmosphere. Our sun and even the galactic core have been subject to periodic disturbances that are associated with extinction-level effects on a living earth.

But first, let’s remember some reasons to take these possibilities seriously on a human time scale.

* The Carrington Event of September, 1859 was the result of a solar flare that happened to be pointed toward our planet. At the time, telegraph wires were the only widely-deployed electrical technology. The electrical disturbance caused by particles from the sun blew out telegraph systems and shocked the operators. A comparable event in 2023 could knock out computer systems globally and fry the transformers which are essential to power grids around the world. [Speculation in New Scientist]

* From about 1600 to 1800 was a Little Ice Age, with temperatures noticeably colder than anything we recognize in our lifetimes. In Europe and N America, there was a lot more snow, ice lasted longer into the spring, and growing seasons were shorter.

* The Egyptian Pyramids were built with technologies that we cannot reproduce in the 21st Century. Hollow stone vessels and core drill holes attest to a capacity to work with hard rock that today’s science cannot support or even explain. A thousand-ton foundation stone in Lebanon is ten times larger than any crane today could lift. [I referenced these and other anomalies in a 2021 article.]

* There are extensive, ancient tunnel systems in Europe, South America, and Asia. The best known are at Derinkuyu in Turkey.

There are miles of underground tunnels, living quarters for tens of thousands of people, space for gatherings, for cooking, for keeping livestock, all in 7 layers going down to 85 meters below the surface. Schoch states the obvious: Such underground cities were not built with hand shovels, and there must have been powerful motivation to move living quarters underground. A natural hypothesis is that before the 12,000-year time frame for which we have historic records, there was a highly developed technological civilization and there were long periods of ultraviolet or cosmic ray or other condition that compelled whole communities to seek refuge underground.

End of the last ice age

The Younger Dryas is the name geologists give to the end of the last ice age. There were two dramatic events, about a thousand years apart, with a return to freezing conditions in between. There are competing theories for the cause of the sudden warming; Schoch believes that the ice age ended with a series of solar storms. One of the pieces of evidence that he cites is vitrification of (human-carved) stone monuments. Vitrification means melting of stone, creating a glass-like consistency on the surface. He has found forts in Scotland, stones on the Giza Plateau and elsewhere in Egypt that show signs of vitrification. He takes this as evidence, (1) that the monuments and the Pyramids themselves are much older than the Egyptian dynasties (~5,000 years) and, in fact, older than the Younger Dryas (~12,000 years); and (2) that there were severe solar outbursts, sending tongues of plasma into space from the sun’s atmosphere, touching down on earth and causing these vitrifications locally. Also part of this story: People lived in underground cities to escape dangerous levels of radiation on the earth. Smaller mammals also were able to burrow underground, but the extinctions of sloths, mammoths, and sabre-tooth tigers during this period occurred because large mammals could not hide underground.

By jp.morteveille - jp.morteveille, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1707170 

The solar storms melted glaciers the world over, causing flooding which imprinted mankind’s mythic history, including Noah’s flood, the story of Gilgamesh, Manu and Matsya, and countless indigenous legends. 

Schoch talks about the solar cataclysm as causing a die-off of humanity. The most technically advanced groups tended to live near the seacoast, which was suddenly under a hundred meters of water, and their economies were more fragile, depending on trade with distant lands for the essentials of life. Only primitive peoples survived. Thus began a global dark age, from which civilization began to re-emerge only 6,000 years later in the Indus Valley, the Yangtze Valley, the Nile Valley, and the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.

Sunspots, solar storms, and earth’s climate

Sunspot activity is approximately cyclical with a period of 11 years. The sun’s magnetic field varies on a 22-year cycle, reaches a minimum and flipping direction when sunspots are at a maximum. The average 11-year cycle can vary by a year or two. There have been 24+ recorded cycles since sunspots were first tracked in 1755. 

Sunspots are magnetic storms on the sun’s surface, unrelated to the energy generation that is occurring at the sun’s core. They appear dark because they are slightly cooler than the average 5800o surface temperature, but sunspots are fringed by areas where temperatures are hotter than 5800o, and indeed the hotter temperatures more than make up for the cooler sunspot temperature. During periods when sunspots are more numerous, the earth is warmer, but it is not because of luminosity from the sunspot fringes. Rather, magnetic storms on the sun send plumes of ionized gas which increase the earth’s high-up magnetic field and deflect cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are an important mechanism for seeding clouds in the lower atmosphere, so fewer cosmic rays lead to lower cloud cover (albedo, reflecting sunlight back into space) and more of the sun’s radiation reaching the earth. [Mackey, 2009] 

Reading this chain of reasoning, I am reminded what an MIT colleague told me long ago: computer models of the world’s climate future are woefully inadequate. Atmospheric, oceanic, geological, and astronomical systems interact in more ways than we can model, and some of the key inputs have not yet been quantified. 

The sun moves

We think of the sun as motionless at the center of the solar system. 99.8% of the mass of the solar system is in the sun. We may correct this to say that the sun goes around the fixed center of mass of the solar system, which is always a few solar diameters outside the sun. But this is not accurate, either. It is true for two bodies that they orbit stably and predictably about their common center of mass. But for a system of three or more bodies, the motion is complex. It is chaotic in the technical sense of the word: long term prediction is impossible because the motions are too sensitive to tiny variations in the present measurements — the butterfly effect. 

In the present case, the sun moves in an epitrochoid, returning near its starting place about every 20 years, but the motion never repeats itself exactly. When the sun is swinging through the smaller circles, the acceleration churns up more motion, and magnetic storms are more likely. At present (2023) we are approaching a sunspot maximum (higher earth temperatures) and finishing a tightly-wound epicycle. 

In the short term, up to a few hundred years, we can predict the sun’s motion accurately; but we don’t yet know enough about the effect of the orbit on solar storms or the effect of solar storms on the earth to draw conclusions about the probability of events that might affect us.

100,000 year cycles in earth’s climate

This plot comes from a comprehensive 2016 article, published prominently in Nature, which reconstructs a two million year history of Earth’s average temperature. The source is mostly abundance of 18O in ancient ice cores from glaciers that are that old. 

This plot comes from a 2013 document compiled by the Australian Academy of Science, looking at a shorter period of 800,000 years. The methodology is not clearly specified

As you can see from differences in these two graphs, determining the temperature hundreds of thousands of years ago is not an exact science. There are, however, some points of consensus.

* There is a cycle of approximately 100,000 years

* We are near the high-temperature peak of the latest cycle

* These peaks arise suddenly (“suddenly” might mean several thousand years) and they subside more gradually

* The amplitude of these cycles is about 10oC. For comparison, global warming since 1900 is only about 1oC.

* Most of the time, the earth trends much colder than the climate to which we are accustomed

The cycles of ~100,000 years are apparent, but there is no agreement about the driver behind them. The “norm” is for all of Canada and the northern half of the USA and Europe to be covered in thick sheets of ice that we now associated with the extreme Arctic and Antarctic regions. As recently as 12,000 years ago, New York was under a two-mile thick ice sheet. Hard to imagine, and yet this was “recent” history. Anatomically modern humans have been around for 300,000 years and most of this time has been what we would call an “ice age”. 

There is a meme that is driving climate panic: “the earth is hotter than it has been in 100,000 years.” The statement is true, but we can see it in a different context. We are near a cyclic peak in temperature that had nothing to do with humans or CO2 emissions until industrial mining of fossil fuels pushed the temperature up 1 extra degree. The warm temperatures of the last 10,000 years have enabled a remarkable flowering of human civilization, which has only recently become a blight upon the ecosphere. We must expect that the long-term trend is for dramatically colder temperatures, and it is arguable that human activity has already delayed a return to ice age conditions. 

More worrisome than the cyclic changes are the extraordinary events, solar outbursts that we don’t know how to predict. The largest recent solar ejection occurred in July, 2012 (as reported by NASA). The event was bigger than Carrington in absolute terms, but it was pointed in a different direction, and missed planet earth. We know little about the causes of the more energetic events, and less about the statistical distribution of their strength and frequency. 

Shifting magnetic pole

Compasses have not always pointed north. The earth’s magnetic poles flip every 200,000 to 300,000 years, but the most recent reversal took place 780,000 years ago. This was a time when early hominids were alive; but the entire 300,000 tenure of Homo sapiens in our modern form has not known a pole flip. 

A pole flip is preceded by a weakening and then disappearance of the earth’s magnetic field. Without a magnetic field to deflect cosmic rays, radiation levels at the earth’s surface can be dangerously high. Cosmic rays seed clouds, increasing the earth’s albedo and cooling the planet. They would also deplete the ozone layer that protects the earth’s surface from the sun’s UV rays.

The magnetic field of the earth has been weakening in the two centuries for which data have been recorded. The effect seems to be accelerating, and the poles are also drifting in position at an increasing rate. Since 2000, the north magnetic pole has shifted about 1,000 km. From Canada, it has crossed into the Eastern hemisphere, headed for Siberia. There are alarmist books and videos on the web, and there are official assurances from NASA and NOAA. Schoch takes the position that we really don’t understand enough to say definitively whether a pole shift is presently underway. But he quotes extensively from Russian geophysicist-catastrophist Dr Alexey Dmitriev. 

“There is a growing probability that we are moving into a rapid temperature instability period similar to the one that took place 12,000 years ago…This high-energy atmospheric phenomena, which was rare in the past, is now becoming more frequent, intense, and changed in its nature…These fundamental processes of change create a demand within all of Earth’s life organisms for new forms of adaptation. The natural development of these new forms may lead to a total global revision of the range of species, and life, on Earth…it is evident that we are faced with a problem of the adaptation of humanity to this new state of the Earth.” — A. Dmitriev

The center of our galaxy

Like most (possibly all) galaxies, our Milky Way sports a black hole at its center. Ours contains the mass of about 4 million stars, and as it swallows up gas and whole stars, it shoots out particle beams which appear to us as cosmic rays. Paul Laviolette has been the foremost advocate of the view that violence at the center of our galaxy, 30,000 light years away, can have major impacts on conditions in our solar system and on the earth’s surface.

Center of the Milky Way, photographed as Saggitarius A

“It is proposed that outbursts of cosmic ray electrons from the Galactic Center penetrate the Galaxy relatively undamped and are able to have a major impact on the Solar System through their ability to vaporize and inject cometary material into the interplanetary environment. It is suggested that one such ‘superwave’, passing through the Solar System toward the end of the last Ice Age, was responsible for producing major changes in the Earth’s climate and for indirectly precipitating the terminal Pleistocene extinction episode.” 

Note that this is not inconsistent with Schoch’s hypothesis of solar storms ending the ice age. The superwave from the galactic core can bombard the sun, precipitating solar storms. 

LaViolette then goes on to cite evidence for this hypothesis from isotope levels in 12,000-year-old ice cores, as well as astronomical observations. Particle beams from the center of the galaxy have the potential to disrupt our environment in many different ways

* Creating comets, increasing risk of meteor impacts

* Stimulating the sun to heightened activity, which would warm the earth

* Showering Earth with cosmic rays, which would cool the earth

* Damaging the ozone layer which protects life on the surface from the sun’s UV

* Seeding clouds that cause cooling

Interstellar dust clouds

Our galaxy is a big family of objects, some condensed like planets, stars of various types and black holes; some dispersed like nebulae and clouds of gas and dust. Roughly speaking, we are all in orbit around the galactic center, but every object is on its own path, attracted to whatever happens to be passing by.

At present, our solar system is on the verge of entering a dust cloud located in the direction of the constellation Hercules, traveling at a relative velocity about 20 km per second. The dust is very diffuse, finer than the best vacuums we are able to create on earth; nevertheless, it is tens of thousands of times denser than the surrounding interstellar medium. (The story was first presented 45 years ago by Alfred Vidal-Madjar in the Astrophysical Journal.)

Normally, the interstellar medium is kept out of the solar system by the positive pressure created by discharge from the sun. Even in quiet times, the sun is sending streams of particles out in all directions, the solar wind, which pushes out the interstellar medium somewhere beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. 

The collision velocity with the dust cloud is likely to create pressures that can overcome the solar wind. What happens when this dust enters our solar system, traveling at high speed? The most likely effect (according to Jeffrey Winters and (again) Dmitriev and LaViolette) is to bombard the sun, increasing solar activity and warming the earth, while increasing surface UV and cosmic rays to levels that would be unhealthy for life. 

Is this a hint about the original purpose of those ancient tunnels and underground cities, found all over the planet (mentioned at the beginning of this article, and described by a German husband-and-wife team)?

Postlude

It is a major theme in evolutionary history that natural selection takes place at a rate faster than geological and ecological changes. This results in species being too-well adapted to whatever specific conditions happen to prevail at the time. Over and over, species have suffered extinction when conditions changed and they were no longer well-adapted. So evolution has found pathways to robustness, insurance against change. For example, our genome contains inactive copies of genes that were useful in the past and retained because they may again be useful some time in the future.

For hundreds of thousands of years, our human culture has been diverse and robust. But presently, capitalism has driven our world toward global integration, complex supply chains for essentials of life, just-in-time delivery schedules, combined with complex, global trade networks. Our world economy is very efficient and very fragile, becoming more so every year. Thinking about our vulnerability to unpredictable cosmic events may help motivate us as a species to step back toward more diversity, more local self-sufficiency, more innovation. The human future may depend upon it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

It was never easy to question the election machines or the electronic systems that tally our votes, but now it has become much harder. Dominion Voting Machines has sued Fox News Network on the grounds that they were not sufficiently skeptical of Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell when the latter claimed they had evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen from their client, Donald Trump. A judge handed down a partial summary judgment for the plaintiff, and Fox has settled for more than ¾ of a billion dollars — an amount far greater than the total dollar value of Dominion’s sales over its entire history. 

From this time forward, the derisive moniker “Trumpster” is attached to anyone who questions computerized voting, added to the time-worn “conspiracy theorist”. Worse, there is a risk of financial ruin to any mainstream outlet that publishes on the subject.

I first became involved in the Election Integrity movement in November, 2004. A handful of activists online exchanged evidence that the Presidential election had been rigged, in Ohio and elsewhere, for G W Bush over John Kerry. I was teaching a statistics course at the time, and proud to crunch numbers for the group. We all thought this was big news, and the New York Times would gobble it up.

The Times didn’t gobble. The Times didn’t ignore us. They created a hit piece and dismissed our concerns without ever talking to me (as statistician) or to the lawyers, scientists, and professors who spoke for our nascent movement.

Gradually, over the ensuing years, we came to realize that the press wouldn’t come near our issue, that the DNC didn’t want to talk to us, and the Democratic think tanks inside the Beltway were taking their cues from the party. We watched as one election after another showed surprising departures from exit polls, almost always Republicans doing better than expected.

Perhaps this story is news to you — after all, as I say, it has not been widely reported. In 2016 I published a four-part series at OpEdNews summarizing what I knew about electronic corruption of American elections [One, Two, Three, Four]. 

2016 followed a pattern we knew well. It seemed that operators on behalf of Trump stole just enough votes to squeak by Hillary Clinton in the electoral college.

But 2020 was a surprise to all of us. We learned that Trump was not an ordinary Republican. He was not a team player, and the usual oligarchs and plutocrats couldn’t count on him to stay in line. They wanted him out.

Was the 2020 election stolen from Trump? Our movement doesn’t have an answer. Our forensic methods rely on exit polls, but exit polls were worthless in 2020 because more than half the voters voted by mail, and the election day voters were skewed toward Republicans, because Democrats tended to be more spooked by COVID, more likely to vote in advance. Telephone polls did not indicate a consistent disparity, but they are less reliable than exit polls. Also because of COVID, the tabulation process was even more hidden from public supervision than previously. Widespread use of mail-in ballots created new opportunities for corruption, while delayed scanning of mail-in ballots aroused suspicions.  

When elections were stolen from Gore (2000) and Kerry (2004), they sat down and kept their mouths shut. When Bernie was cheated out of the 2016 Democratic nomination, he kept mum and threw his support to Hillary; and, of course, when a few months later Hillary lost to The Donald under questionable circumstances, she was in no position to make a fuss. All of these people knew exactly what had happened (there are different sources for this in each case), so the silence of all these victims was deliberate.

But shutting up was never Trump’s strong suit. So, after 2020, we had loud allegations of a stolen election. During all those years when the Democrats had strong claims that they had been cheated, they chose silence, but with far weaker evidence, Trump was not shy about crying foul.

My movement — a few hundred people around the country who follow Election Integrity and make a study of it — my movement was deeply split over the 2020 election. I was with the minority, who welcomed the call from Giuliani and Powell to examine the election process more closely. We, the minority, feel that opening the black box is necessary if we are ever to have honest elections. We’re willing to take the short-term risk that Trump may benefit from the process in this case in order to have more transparency in the long term. The majority of our members are staying silent about the 2020 election, or even citing evidence to refute Giuliani and Powell. I think they believe that the weakness of Trump’s case creates a bad precedent if Giuliani argues for close scrutiny and then the scrutiny turns up no foul play. But some are also open about not wanting to offer their influence and reputations in a cause that might benefit Trump. 

Dominion vs Fox

This is the context for Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Fox gave Giuliani a platform to make his charges that he had evidence in his back pocket that would overturn the election. Some of his complaints were about the software company, Dominion. In March, 2021, Dominion sued Fox for defamation.

Dominion is a relatively new name in the field of voting machines. Perhaps you are familiar with the three giants from previous years, Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S. Diebold and Sequoia were swallowed by Dominion, and ES&S remains an independent competitor, though Dominion acquired some of their intellectual property. Dominion was taken private in 2018. 

Defamation lawsuits are hard to win. The plaintiff has to prove (#1) that the defendant made false statements, (#2) that defendant knew they were false, and (#3) that plaintiff lost money because of defendant’s statements. 

The case against Fox was unusual in that almost all the objectionable statements were made not by Fox broadcasters but by Giuliani and Powell, who were interviewed on air. If you care about my opinion, my opinion is that a news network has a right, probably an obligation, to give the President’s lawyer an airing, whether or not the President’s lawyer is telling the truth. Sometimes the Fox interviewers challenged Giuliani and Powell to produce evidence, sometimes they seemed swept away by the audacity of their charges.

Dominion’s case against Fox is based largely on their claim that Fox “omitted a context for the content”, and thereby left viewers with the impression that Giuliani’s claims were more credible than they really were.

Personally, I find it mystifying that Giuliani and Powell puffed so boldly about all the affidavits and the physical evidence that they had in their back pocket. They folded their tent completely a few days later. Was it all bluff and bluster? Or did they actually have some evidence and they were reined in, one way or another, by the powers that really control our elections?

January 6, I think, is no parenthesis

In my opinion, the reporting on January 6 has been part of the propaganda campaign to discredit anyone who questions America’s election machinery. The word “insurrection” is absurdly inappropriate. People who were invited as speakers and journalists filming the event have been jailed and intimidated. Habeas corpus has been denied to hundreds of people who were guilty, at worst, of a misdemeanor.

I know people who were in the Capitol on January 6, and based on what I’ve heard and read, I believe that January 6 was a mostly peaceful demonstration, and the disorderly behavior was instigated by agents provocateurs from the FBI.

For years, my people in the Election Integrity movement have been asking, when will the public get out in the street and demand an honest vote count? On January 6, we got what we wished for, but most of my colleagues in Election Integrity wanted nothing to do with the protestors.

The summary judgment order

Before a trial begins, it is customary for both sides to ask the judge to rule in their favor — no trial necessary. This is called a “summary judgment motion” and the threshold for summary judgments is a high bar. The judge will rule summarily for the defendant if he finds that, even if everything the plaintiff claims is true, there is still no case that can be made against the defendant. Much more rarely, the judge will rule summarily for the plaintiff if he finds that there are no relevant facts in dispute and all the claims made in defendant’s pleadings are judged to be an insufficient defense.

The judge is not permitted to base his summary decision on disputed facts; if facts are in dispute, then the case must go to trial. Either side has a right to ask for a jury. 

In this case, the judge made a partial summary judgment ruling in favor of the plaintiff. He ruled that plaintiff’s burden of proof #1 had been satisfied — that Fox had indeed made false statements. How could he presume to know this? In the decision, he seems to have conflated #1 with #2. #1 means that the claims were false; #2 means that the defendant believed them to be false. The judge cites internal memos in which Fox expresses doubts about what Giuliani and Powell are saying. Logically, it is possible that the claims were true but that the defendant believed them to be false. The judge did not seem to consider this possibility. Nor did he account for the obvious: that reporters and different managers within Fox had different opinions about the veracity of Giuliani’s claims. I dare say that the decision to give Giuliani a platform was based on a combination of factors, including his inherent newsworthiness as the President’s lawyer and the red meat that draws viewers to Fox News. 

The settlement

Last week’s news was that Fox settled Dominion’s claim without a court hearing. I can understand that Fox was shy about going to trial after the judge’s Summary Judgment order signaled that he was sympathetic to the plaintiff’s case. But in court, Dominion’s first burden of proof would be that the election was not stolen — something I claim is impossible to know, given the lack of paper trails and statistical evidence. Dominion would also have to prove that Fox knew at the time that the election was not stolen. And then Dominion would have to establish the amount of their damages. 

How much revenue did Fox’s broadcasts cost Dominion? This is a question that a jury would be asked to decide. The amount of the settlement, $787 million, represents 45 times the revenue in their peak year. Dominion would have to prove not just lost revenue, but lost profit. Because Dominion is privately held, its profit figures are not public knowledge, but even if their profit margin is as high as 50%, it means that Dominion would have to prove that they lost 90 years’ worth of profit because of Fox’s broadcasts.

It doesn’t make sense to me that Fox was afraid that if they didn’t settle for $787 million, then a jury might find damages greater than this. Something else is going on. Does Fox have secrets that they did not want to come out in a court proceeding? Did they fear adverse publicity that would affect their ratings? Or were they being pressured by the same forces that have stifled the Election Integrity movement over the years?

This week, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, who had attracted their biggest audiences, and was still growing in his reach. Carlson is quoted in the Summary Judgment Order as having broadcast on the subject of the putatively stolen election, but he was far less involved than Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo. Dobbs and Bartiromo were not fired. My guess is that Carlson has stepped out of the party line once too often, interviewing Democrats RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, COVID dissidents Dr Peter McCullough and Dr Simone Gold, and Pfizer-slayer Ed Dowd.

The Future

My reading is that this is the final nail in the coffin of the Election Integrity movement. No matter how unexpected the results, no matter how opaque the vote tallying process, no one will ever again dare to question the reported results of an American election.

For historical context of vote theft in America, read Vote Scam, by James and Kenneth Collier.For a blow-by-blow account of vote theft in the 21st century, read Code Red by Jonathan Simon.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

I love my country enough to hold it to a high standard. My loyalty is to the American people, and not to the crimes committed in the name of the people. Let us as Americans support the countries of the world that are organizing for an end to American militarism and economic domination. Let us welcome a new and less domineering role for the USA in an emerging peaceful, multipolar world.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mitteldorf.substack.com