Broken Arrows

I guess its surprising how many things, which aren't conspiracies, are still secrets. The reason, the narrative of our lives moves on, the press lose interest, and the story dies. So it only rang a vague bell when I read a story about 4 nuclear weapon carrying war-planes colliding over Spain in the 1960's.

Broken Arrows - Palomares 1966

By some miracle only 7 US airman were killed, and the nuclear bombs didn't explode (they weren't armed) ....... but the 'nuclear' wreckage was scattered wide and far, with three of the bomber's H-bombs landing in or around Palomares, the fourth landed about five miles offshore in the Mediterranean ... a reporting ban was assisted by the fact that Spain was so poor in 1966, that there was only one telephone in Palomares in 1966, and no running water, so a recovery operation remained secret.

The weapon from the sea bed was recovered. One of the other three was undamaged (its safety parachute had opened as designed) but two more fell 31,000 ft to the earth and split open, scattering waste in the form of radioactive dust over a largish area.

"What they decided to do was remove the contaminated dirt from the most contaminated areas," says science writer Barbara Moran, author of 'The Day We Lost the H-Bomb'. They literally scraped up the first three inches of topsoil, sealed it in barrels, and shipped it to a storage facility back in the US .... but they missed bits. And although there has been no evidence that the food or water supplies were ever contaminated (checks are made very year), the locals want the US to come back and do a proper job of finishing the clean up.

No one really knows how much plutonium was unrecoverable, as the US never admitted how much was lost, but there is still some out there, and locals want rid of it. A local barman summed it up, "Every time the story hits the media, it hurts tourism," he said. "A lot of people don't want to come here because they think the quality of life must be low, that cancer rates are higher, when that's not the case at all." ... discussions are apparently under way to get the final clean up completed.

Clark Kent - Super Blogger

This week its reported that Clark Kent (Superman's alter ego), is giving up his once-promising career in journalism.

George Reeve - Clark Kent and Superman

Apparently he will walk out in protest that hard news has given way to too many "soft" entertainment stories ....

 

Cuban Crisis Remembered

I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 well ..... not the news stories, but my parents reaction - my mother glued to the reports (which seemed to be constant), of where the Russian ships were believed to be, and where the USA fleet was waiting for them. I would come home from school to face parents who seemed drawn. We even had a school event where we had to sit under our school desks when the teacher blew a whistle (although I don't think it registered why) .... I don't think anyone under the age of fifty five, really realises that we actually were hours away from the end of the world as we knew it.

Cuban Missile Crisis Anniversary October 2012

Nowadays we assume that the US, China and Russia are not stupid enough to invade each other, but we are not as far away from those times as many people assume .... Iran, North Korea, and possibly Pakistan are all armed and dangerous, and either have, or will have the capability to strike out with nuclear weapons at a superpower, or a close ally, in their stupidity.

What's actually more worrying is that in the case of one of these 'rogue' nuclear nations, there would probably not be any 'hot line' diplomacy, we would just wake up to their actions, and have to either back down, or instantly retaliate e.g. Iran drops a few warheads on Israel, or the other way round (Israel has the same weapons, but is not usually considered a 'rogue state' outside of the Arab/Muslim countries), then either the US or Russia would either have to retaliate on their behalf, or just accept that this had happened, and try to negotiate with the 'victors' or 'aggressors' .... if the result was obliteration for the victim, the question is, would the superpower ally, really risk 'Armageddon' to honour the treaty?

Its the point we would all have to consider when relying on an allies nuclear umbrella .... yesterday Sudan  said it was attacked by Israel after an explosion at an arms factory, that it claims was caused by an Israeli air strike .... not for the first time.

Forcible Religious Conversion

A BBC story quoted a man called 'Sheikh Hassan Ghidan' (who is styled as a salafist scholar and preacher, who graduated from Cairo's influential Islamic university, al-Alzhar), as saying that he believes in changing society by teaching people at grass roots level, rather than through the violent jihad espoused by some other Salafists - but that he shares the same long term aims as them.

"The changes we seek are to apply the Islamic Sharia - the Islamic law to achieve social justice, and to establish an Islamic Caliphate, to liberate the occupied lands - lands occupied by non-Muslims, the lands which were originally Muslim."

He lists the following, as some of the lands that need to be re-taken 'Palestine, Iraq, Burma, Chechnya and Andalucia in Spain'.

This historical ignorance just makes me laugh, but doesn't surprise me .... the only land that can be said to be originally Muslim is the Saudi peninsular ... all the others were Christian or another religion, and were forcibly incorporated into an Arab Empire - there was only conversion by the sword after that - in fact its the only major religion that has gained its majority of followers by violent conquest, and its conversions almost entirely by violence (Sadly he Christians also did this in South America, but generally not elsewhere).

Islams Original Expansion and Expulsions

With the possible exception of the Sahel region of Africa and Malaya, Islam has almost never taken root via the intellectual winning of hearts and minds ever since. All the lands in this Salafist list, have either successfully repulsed an invasion, or thrown occupation out (Spain or Burma for example), and all have reasserted their native religions.  Others are an integral part of a non Muslim country such as Russia .... what's also interesting is that Iraq is now a Shia Muslim state now, and therefore to the Sunni crackpots, its also classed as non Muslim.

These Salafists are usually very violent men, with an agenda which our government should be addressing now with the Saudi's who continue to promote it ....... remember this is a major part of the Islam that the Saudi's export worldwide (including into the Balkans). One look at this map of the conquest years, shows that where the sword failed, Islam expansion stopped.

Islam is still only a force in those countries where Arab or Turkish armies suppressed the native religions .... maybe we should espouse a violent Christian creed, whose aim would be to 'liberate the occupied lands - lands occupied by non-Christians, the lands which were originally Christian' .... a list might include Bosnia, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt ... just a thought.

Multiverses and Multiple Earth's

I am currently reading a book by Iain Banks (not his alter ego of 'Iain M Banks'), in which unusually he has chosen to cross seed the story with what many would consider as Sci-Fi elements, in particular the fact that the main characters have the ability to transition between an infinity of parallel universes. As one character describes it to a 'non transitioner'

" ... there are infinitudes of worlds to work with. There are even an infinite number in which we are having exactly the same conversation as this right now [or in which you are reading this blog], worlds differing in only one tiny detail - which might be an atom of uranium in a deposit deep underground in Venezuela decaying a microsecond earlier than it did here, or a photon in the University of Tasmania taking one slit, not the other, in another running to the two slit experiment ....."

Multiverse and Multiple Earth's

Now I happen to think that this theory of a multiverse (or some variant on it), has something to commend it - it certainly explains some events that seem odd. For example, the occasional appearance of people who have claimed to be out of time i.e. from the past, or people who just disappear with no trace, after all the alternative is that millions of people worldwide are murdered, or are able to hide themselves every year.

Its my suspicion that we are all travelling (or transitioning) between multiple versions of Earth all the time, because the barriers between 'worlds differing in only one tiny detail', are no barriers to us. We are considerably more relevant than a photon for example .... but that while we can move between these closely related Earth's, where the difference is more than just an atom (and we are in fact unique within these closely related multi-verses), we can't cross over into those versions of reality, where there exists another version of us, or where the reality differs by too great a margin. e.g The Saxons won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, or the Mongols conquered Japan etc.         

To illustrate what I am talking about, when I was about 15 years old, I got up to go to school about 8:15 am, I saw no one in the house, and I walked to the bus stop (about a third of a mile away), in a cocoon of near total silence - I saw no cars, and none passed me on the normally very busy main road, and while I could dimly hear 'traffic noises', it was distant, and almost as though muffled through a heavy fog or snow (although it was only September). I got to the bus stop on a major road, no one was there, this despite the fact that this was the standard stop for school children, and should have been busy.

 

The Area Back Then - Now Very Changed

 

I stood at the bus stop (just where camera view was for R/Hand picture above, and opposite L/Hand picture bus stop), for about ten minutes, and became increasingly aware that something was 'wrong, or out of place' .... I felt dislocated. Across the road there was a very large horse chestnut tree (the whole area where I then lived had been part of the parked  garden estate surrounding Manley Hall, which had been occupied by a Lord Egerton until he became a bankrupt, so all the trees were mature), and as I stared, I became aware that it looked odd, as though it had been pruned. As soon as I had this thought, the sound suddenly cranked up, almost in a whoosh, people started appearing, and cars poured along the road again.

All this was so vivid an event, that even now, decades later, I can recall it with almost total clarity .... my only explanation, both then and now, was that I had moved to the very boundary of where I could transition naturally, and that the fact that a tree that was over a hundred years old, suddenly looked strange, was an indicator that I had been on the cusp of another version of the Earth. 

 

I don't attribute this to any mystical event, but rather the evidence of physics at work ..... and of course there are other explanations available for all of this, but the one detailed above, is the one that I have felt best fitted how it all felt at the time.

Additional:

By one of those strange coincidences that really make you wonder .... the BBC Radio 4 Extra is this week running a serialisation of  'Undone' written by Ben Moor .... which uses a sci-fi theme of parallel universes.