The strange case of Paul Hellyer

Paul Theodore Hellyer, PC (born 6 August 1923) is a Canadian engineer, politician, writer and commentator who has had a long and varied career. He is the longest serving current member of the Privy Council of Canada, just ahead of Prince Philip.

As Canadian Minister of National Defence in the cabinet of Lester B Pearson, Hellyer oversaw the drastic and controversial integration and unification of the Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force into a single organization, the Canadian Forces.

Hellyer contested the 1968 Liberal leadership election, placing second on the first ballot, but slipped to third on the second and third ballots, and withdrew to support Robert Winters on the fourth ballot, in which Pierre Trudeau won the leadership. He served as Trudeau's Transport Minister, and was Senior Minister in the Cabinet, a position similar to the current position of Deputy Prime Minister.

In early September 2005, Hellyer made headlines by publicly announcing that he believed in the existence of UFOs. On 25 September 2005, he was an invited speaker at an exopolitics conference in Toronto, where he told the audience that he had seen a UFO one night with his late wife and some friends. He said that, although he had discounted the experience at the time, he had kept an open mind to it. He said that he started taking the issue much more seriously after watching ABC's Peter Jennings' UFO special in February 2005.

Watching Jennings' UFO special prompted Hellyer to read U.S. Army Colonel Philip J. Corso's book The Day After Roswell, about the Roswell UFO Incident, which had been sitting on his shelf for some time. Hellyer told the Toronto audience that he later spoke to a retired U.S. Air Force general, who confirmed the accuracy of the information in the book. In November 2005, he accused U.S. President George W. Bush of plotting an "Intergalactic War". The former defence minister told an audience at the University of Toronto:

    "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning... The Bush Administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

In 2007, the Ottawa Citizen reported that Hellyer is demanding that world governments disclose alien technology that could be used to solve the problem of climate change:

    "I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation...that could be a way to save our planet...We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough."

In an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today) in 2014, Hellyer said that at least four species of aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, with most of them coming from other star systems, although there are some living on Venus, Mars and Saturn’s moon. According to him, they "don't think we are good stewards of our planet."

Spin

via The Arcane Front

In the early 1990s, director/producer/new media artist Brian Springer learned that it was possible to pick up and record raw satellite feeds created by TV networks, including behind-the-scenes signals sent to TV shows’ control rooms that aren’t intended for broadcast (e.g., talk show sets during commercial breaks, people waiting to be patched in for an interview with a news anchor, etc.). Springer recorded these feeds through the 1992 American presidential election campaign and went on to create “Spin”, a most revealing behind-the-scenes probe into the media maneuverings of glorified handshakers and newscasters alike by way of unintended television…

Psychic Abilities and the Illusion of Separation

via IONS

One of the key missions at IONS is to bring awareness of and engagement within the noetic sciences to younger generations by supporting emerging scholars and explorers. As part of this effort, Chief Scientist Dean Radin recently gave a talk at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), an innovative university in San Francisco that offers accredited programs in counseling psychology, clinical psychology, consciousness, and transformation.

Below is an outline of Dean's presentation, entitled Psychic Abilities and the Illusion of Separation.

0:00 Illusions and our perception of reality

3:52 Classical and quantum reality

5:48 Hints about reality

8:50 Going beyond the usual senses

10:17 Telepathy experiments using the ganzfeld

22:52 Replication by skeptical scientists

25:26 Precognition studies

41:25 Strong evidence of precognitive psi

43:20 Controversy and skepticism

44:16 Consciousness as fundamental?

Don’t Let Them Tell You You’re Not at the Center of the Universe

Dennis Overbye via The New York Times

Misconception: The universe started someplace.

Actually: The Big Bang didn’t happen at a place; it happened at a time.

“Where did the Big Bang happen?” I am often asked, as if the expansion of the universe was like a hand grenade going off and the solar system and our Milky Way galaxy were shards sent flying.

The universe didn’t start at a place, it started at a time, namely 13.8 billion years ago, according to the best cosmological data. It’s been expanding ever since — not into space because the universe by definition fills all space already, so much as into time, which as far as we know is open-ended.

It is true that everything we can see now, out to 13.8 billion years of light-travel time, was once the size of a grapefruit, buzzing with hideous energies, but that grapefruit was already part of an infinite ensemble with no edge, except one made up of time. When we look out, we look into the past, the farther we look, the more deeply into the past we see. At the center is the present. Alas there is no direction in which we can look to see the future — except perhaps into our own hearts and dreams. All we know is right now.

So where is the center of the universe? Right here. Yes, you are the center of the universe.

When Albert Einstein married space and time in his theory of relativity back in 1905, he taught us that our eyes are time machines. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit, and so all information comes to us, to the present, from the past.

And so Einstein’s relativity teaches us that the center of the universe is everywhere and nowhere. It is the present, surrounded by concentric shells of the past. History racing at you at 186,282 miles per second, the speed of light, the speed of all information. Your eyes are the cockpit of a time machine, filmy wet orbs looking in the only direction any of us can ever look: backward. Everything we see or feel or hear — now that gravitational waves have been discovered — took some time to get here, and so comes to our senses from the past. The moon, hovering over the horizon, is an image of light that left its cratered surface traveling at the speed of light a second and a half ago. The sun that burns your skin is eight minutes and nineteen seconds in the past.

The Jupiter we see, glowering orange at the zenith these nights, is about 414 million miles out there as of this writing, or 37 minutes away in the past. The light from the center of the Milky Way, hiding behind the thick star clouds and dust lanes of Sagittarius, takes 26,000 years to get here. While it was on the way the first primitive ice age villages grew into skyscrapered metropolises. Your lover, brushing your lashes with his or her breath, is a nanosecond gone.

This is more than poetry. Mathematically, in Einsteinian terms, all the information and history available at any one place in the universe is known as a light cone. Everybody has one and everybody’s is slightly different, which means in effect that everyone’s universe is a little different.

There will always be some piece of information that has reached your lover but not yet you, let alone E.T. over in the next galaxy. It gives a new definition to being alone with your thoughts.

As T.S. Eliot put it:

    We think of the key, each in his prison

    Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

As a result every spot in the universe is unique. There will always be a piece of it you haven’t seen yet and a piece that you have seen but that nobody else has. There is no place to stand if you want to claim universal knowledge. We all need each other in order to overlap our knowledge. We don’t have to stay in our prisons. Working together and sharing, we can know everything.

Or as Bob Dylan once put it, “I’ll let you be in my dreams, if I can be in yours.”

“We are the death merchant of the world”: Ex-Bush official Lawrence Wilkerson condemns military-industrial complex

Ben Norton via Salon

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is tired of “the corporate interests that we go abroad to slay monsters for.”

As the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Wilkerson played an important role in the George W. Bush administration. In the years since, however, the former Bush official has established himself as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy.

“I think Smedley Butler was onto something,” explained Lawrence Wilkerson, in an extended interview with Salon.

In his day, in the early 20th century, Butler was the highest ranked and most honored official in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. He helped lead wars throughout the world over a series of decades, before later becoming a vociferous opponent of American imperialism, declaring “war is a racket.”

Wilkerson spoke highly of Butler, referencing the late general’s famous quote: “Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

“I think the problem that Smedley identified, quite eloquently actually,” Wilkerson said, “especially for a Marine — I had to say that as a soldier,” the retired Army colonel added with a laugh; “I think the problem is much deeper and more profound today, and much more subtle and sophisticated.”

Today, the military-industrial complex “is much more pernicious than Eisenhower ever thought it would be,” Wilkerson warned.

In his farewell address in 1961, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously cautioned Americans that the military and corporate interests were increasingly working together, contrary to the best interests of the citizenry. He called this phenomenon the military-industrial complex.

As a case study of how the contemporary military-industrial complex works, Wilkerson pointed to leading weapons corporations like Lockheed Martin, and their work with draconian, repressive Western-allied regimes in the Gulf, or in inflaming tensions in Korea.

“Was Bill Clinton’s expansion of NATO — after George H. W. Bush and [his Secretary of State] James Baker had assured Gorbachev and then Yeltsin that we wouldn’t go an inch further east — was this for Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, and Boeing, and others, to increase their network of potential weapon sales?” Wilkerson asked.

“You bet it was,” he answered.

“Is there a penchant on behalf of the Congress to bless the use of force more often than not because of the constituencies they have and the money they get from the defense contractors?” Wilkerson continued.

Again, he answered his own question: “You bet.”

“It’s not like Dick Cheney or someone like that went and said let’s have a war because we want to make money for Halliburton, but it is a pernicious on decision-making,” the former Bush official explained. “And the fact that they donate so much money to congressional elections and to PACs and so forth is another pernicious influence.”

“Those who deny this are just being utterly naive, or they are complicit too,” Wilkerson added.

“And some of my best friends work for Lockheed Martin,” along with Raytheon, Boeing and Halliburton, he quipped.

Wilkerson — who in the same interview with Salon defended Edward Snowden, saying the whistle-blower performed an important service and did not endanger U.S. national security — was also intensely critical of the growing movement to “privatize public functions, like prisons.”

“I fault us Republicans for this majorly,” he confessed — although a good many prominent Democrats have also jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon. In a 2011 speech, for instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity” for U.S. corporations.

Wilkerson lamented, “We’ve privatized the ultimate public function: war.”

“In many respects it is now private interests that benefit most from our use of military force,” he continued. “Whether it’s private security contractors, that are still all over Iraq or Afghanistan, or it’s the bigger-known defense contractors, like the number one in the world, Lockheed Martin.”

Journalist Antony Loewenstein detailed how the U.S. privatized its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in another interview with Salon. There are an estimated 30,000 military contractors working for the Pentagon in Afghanistan today; they outnumber U.S. troops three-to-one. Thousands more are in Iraq.

Lockheed Martin simply “plans to sell every aspect of missile defense that it can,” regardless of whether it is needed, Wilkerson said. And what is best to maximize corporate interest is by no means necessarily the same as what is best for average citizens.

“We dwarf the Russians or anyone else who sells weapons in the world,” the retired Army colonel continued.

“We are the death merchant of the world.”