“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him”

By Gary McGee

“Like they say in Zen, when you attain Satori, nothing is left for you in that moment than to have a good laugh.” –Alan Watts

The title of this article is a koan attributed to a 1st century Zen Master named Linji Yixuan. It’s obviously not meant to be taken literally, since killing is wrong. It’s a koan with shock-value, meant to jar us awake, a tool meant for self-exploration and self-interrogation. In this article we will attempt to dissect this curious koan and try to bring some clarity to it so that we can use it as a tool toward our own self-development.

The “road” is generally meant to symbolize the path to enlightenment. But it could also be interpreted as our own personal path, or even something as simple as the direction our life is going. The “Buddha” we meet on the path is our idealized image of perfection, whatever that might be. It’s our conception of what absolute enlightenment would look like. One could argue that the Buddha on the path is us, or at least our projection onto the world about what it means to be Buddha. But, and here’s the rub, whatever our conception of the Buddha is, it’s wrong!

Like it says in the opening of the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” What we’re “killing” is the idea that enlightenment is achievable. If we believe we have achieved enlightenment then we need to “kill” that belief and keep meditating. This is because there is no permanence. Permanence is an illusion. Everything is constantly changing.

Even if we think we have all the answers, those “answers” must still be questioned. This is the urgency inherent within the koan. A true master “achieves” enlightenment, “kills” it, and then keeps meditating. He or she does so in order to keep learning, to keep enlightening. Indeed, to reinforce the journey truly being the thing.

Every master knows that we are all Buddha disguised as the Self. We are all God in hiding. It’s just that some of us are playing the victim and some of us are free. Like Alan Watts asked, “Do you define yourself as a victim of the world, or as the world?” Most of us are walking tragedies, suffering in a cruel world. We all experience pain. We all have scars. But true masters flip the tables on tragedy and choose comedy instead, thus completely altering the power dynamic.

They choose happiness without reason. They choose laughter and joy over anger and spite. They honor their scars rather than resent them. They choose dancing rather than depression.

And this is precisely where the Fool and the Sage merge, where humor and wisdom coalesce. Up until the point we meet “Buddha on the road” we are victims of the world, but once we “kill” the Buddha we become the world. We become sacred clowns.

We become holy fools, with the power to keep the journey going despite wounds or set-backs or even enlightenment itself! This is the wisdom of the Fool/Sage –to fail (or succeed), to let go, to have a good laugh, and then to start all over again with our wisdom in tow.

“You must change in order to find your truest self,” writes Bradford Keeney in The Bushman’s Way of Tracking God. “And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring.” Yes! God is us. Buddha is us. This sacred energy is hiding inside us because we have been too boring. We need to shake ourselves awake. The world is not a frozen thought, but a dynamic feeling, a heroic expression, a comic guffaw. Our bones are too serious inside us. Even our funny bone is serious. We need to loosen up. Let’s not be serious, let’s just be sincere. Shake up your bones. Unloosen the straightjacket that society has strapped around your soul. Let’s hone ourselves into instruments that are sharp enough to cut God. And then let’s have a healthy enough sense of humor to laugh about it afterwards…

…Imagine you are a clown walking down the path toward sacred clownhood. You encounter me standing on one leg. You approach me to get a better look. I am trickster-fabulous with my coyote-throat and crow-tongue, with my Thunderbird wings and smoking-mirror skin. I am whispering unspoken truths to power when you draw near. You ask me my name and I open my moon-eye, keeping my sun-eye closed.

“I am Jester Guru,” I say, laughing and bouncing from foot to foot. “I am Slapstick Soothsayer. I am Wag & Sage. I am Blessed Buffoon. I am Charlatan Shaman. I am the Fool’s Philosopher. I am Prankster Pope. I am Mystic Muppet. I am Elder Funnyman. I AM THE HEYOKA WHO BEFUDDLES ALL HEYOKAS! I am the all singing all dancing Juggernaut Oracle, and I’m here to inform you that you have finally arrived.”

What do you do?!

The purpose of living - Alan Watts

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”

― Alan Watts

Files from the Academic Fringe: Pt. 1 — Scientism

by Joseph Allen

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

— David Hume

Pariahs make for enjoyable company. I’ve always run with the wild-eyed wayfarers who bark and snarl at edge of the herd, often at the risk of being trampled. That includes bespectacled eggheads who think the unthinkable.

While doing some spring cleaning recently, I came across a stack of notepads which accompanied me to the academic fringe back in 2012. While my neighbors stocked up on beans and bullets—or magic Mayan crystals—I was burning gas and brain cells in search of seekers who say “fuck the consensus!” Well, I found them.

What sort of people openly defy accepted dogmas? Who are the loons gathered under the banners of Scientism, Creationism, Racism, and Skepticism?

This four-part series documents my perspective as a lurking outsider among in-crowds on the outskirts of academia. We begin at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, which hosted the Consilience Conference.

It takes nerve to proclaim that nucleotides and neural patterns will answer the ultimate questions in life. Christian fundamentalists attack the notion, as do Muslims, Marxists, and lit professors (each for their own reasons). Despite faint protests by local churches, this disturbing idea was batted back and forth for three days as I sat in my squeaky wooden seat, scribbling notes next to Scientism’s finest minds.

It was April 2012. Spring was in full bloom. The dusty old auditorium was filled with prominent anthropologists and geneticists, ecologists and neurologists, and one stunning engineer. They all sang the same chorus, first intoned by the godfather of Evo Psych himself, E.O. Wilson:

“[E]volutionary biology encompasses the social sciences and the humanities and thus unifies knowledge about human behavior and culture.”

Everyone sang in harmony, that is, except one feisty Italian philosopher who beat his drum as he pleased.

I’d only found out about the event at the last minute, and left Nashville some time after 2 AM to arrive just in time for hot coffee and cold muffins. To my surprise, Massimo Pigliucci came and sat down at my table. It was a weird coincidence. More than ten years earlier, this biologist turned philosopher was a central figure in The Rationalists of East Tennessee, which met near Knoxville’s Sunsphere on Sunday mornings. I attended fairly frequently, telling friends I was going to First Atheist Church.

In those days Pigliucci was infamous for his outspoken criticism of Creationists and their Seven Day spiel. He was a wise-cracking Euro who, having tumbled into the trenches of biblical literalism, was unwilling to let fools remain comfortable in their superstitions. Predictably, he pissed off a lot of Southern Baptists.

The conference’s honoree, E.O. Wilson, had provoked a much larger firestorm decades earlier. He began his career as an entomologist, obsessed with the ultimate conformist organism: ants. Wilson’s scope was much broader than bugs, however. In 1975 he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which framed human characteristics such as altruism, aggression, and sexual behavior in terms of genetically inherited survival mechanisms. Darwin is in the details.

The academic left was appalled by Wilson’s vision of shaved apes tossing turds around a concrete jungle. As if in defiance of irony, angry mobs of unshaven “progressives” descended on Wilson like a pack of Pan troglodytes, calling the professor a “misogynist” and a “racist” for applying neo-Darwinian principles to unequally endowed human populations. One heckler even doused him with a pitcher of water at an AAAS conference, about which Wilson bragged:

“I believe…I was the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea.”

Today, Wilson’s contribution to evolutionary theory has gained consensus in many intellectual circles. The popular media have generally embraced evolutionary psychology—albeit with politically correct omissions—as a groovy new way to trip on sex, drugs, and neurological God modules. ‘Cause we’re just, like, apes in an antfarm or whatever?

E.O. Wilson’s 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge made him a rock star among scientists who dig Scientism. The manifesto proposes the ultimate synthesis of science and the humanities. Instead of academic turf wars between hostile departments, there should be an orgy of information exchange. Take a guess as to who’ll be hitting it from on top.

The reasoning behind Consilience goes like this:

Math determines physics, which determine chemistry, which determines biology, which determines neurological activity, which determines psychology, which determines religion, art, politics, and all the glories and blunders of human history. Knowledge is power. If scientists can calculate and manipulate the basic laws of human nature—and with diligence, the rest of the known Universe—why shouldn’t artists and prophets just bend over and let the Devil take the hindmost?

Welcome to Wilson’s world.

Imagine that every dream which bubbles to the surface of human consciousness—every love poem, prophecy, or vivid hallucination—is immediately caught in the web of scientific inquiry. These sacred visions are then picked apart, analyzed, and deposited into the great Database of Approximate Omniscience, for what ultimate use we do not yet know.

Wilson and company made it sound fantastic. During more charming moments, the creaky university auditorium had the feel of an old church. I usually turn to scientists for a sober perspective, but these guys were intoxicating.

During his keynote address, E.O. Wilson claimed that universal wisdom will only be obtained if organized religions give up, or at least “tone down,” their creation myths. Ultimately, the human need for religion—and truth—could now be fulfilled by the scientific worldview, particularly evolutionary narratives.

And the crowd went wild.

* * *

Between lectures I kept seeing a tiny Mennonite in a big black bonnet weaving through the swarms of coffee-starved academics. I approached her to ask her opinion, half-expecting the pre-industrial outfit to be a joke. It wasn’t. She was a full-blown Mennonite who’d traveled hundreds of miles to learn more about morality and evolution.

“That trip must have taken forever in a horse-drawn buggy,” I remarked. She laughed. I cracked a few more jokes, mostly at the expense of these godless machine-dwellers.

“Be careful, Joseph,” she said with an ominous smile. “I think thee are a truth-teller. It may get thee into trouble.”

 

To my surprise, her religious sensibilities weren’t at all threatened by the event’s Scientistic tone. If God is greater than the facts of science, why should He worry about what scientists say? My new friend had caught some dirty looks from the eggheads in attendance, though. I guess nothing riles the nerd herd like orthodox religion.

Every speaker who touched on spirituality seemed to take it for granted that otherworldly experiences are nothing more than a perceptual glitch. Divinity is an illusion; Consilience holds scientific analysis to be the highest authority. It bothered me back then, and it bothers me now. Darwin is a patron saint in my personal cathedral, but some of his totalitarian acolytes make my skin crawl.

Massimo Pigliucci had his qualms, too, but for reasons more reasonable than mine. Standing in front of E.O. Wilson’s passionate supporters, Pigliucci hacked into Consilience with his Italian accent and sharp philosophical knives. With the professor’s approval, I paraphrase:

Consilience rests on the faith that higher orders can be deduced from lower orders, such as predicting future brushstrokes from an artist’s brain waves. But science is limited to the tools of deduction and induction, and powerful as they may be, neither will lead to absolute truth.

Mathematics—the engine of science—is a form of logical deduction. Citing Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Pigliucci argued that there is no internal justification for mathematically derived theories. To deduce facts from a premise, one must assume the premise is true. Take this premise, for example:

All philosophers get off on goading an audience. Massimo Pigliucci is a philosopher. Therefore Massimo gets off on goading an audience.

To accept the last statement through pure logic, we must first assume that all philosophers are prone to pissing on parades. Logic cannot prove its own premise. Deductive reasoning is a serpent sucking his own tail.

Induction has the advantage of empirical evidence, but according to Hume’s Problem of Induction, this isn’t enough. To draw a conclusion from a collection of facts, one must assume that there are no undiscovered facts which contradict that conclusion, and that previously observed facts will remain the same over time. To extend my example:

Every philosopher we know gets off on goading an audience. We therefore conclude all philosophers get off on goading an audience. 

But it’s possible that crowd-pleasing philosophers exist somewhere; or that a contrary philosopher will lose his taste for provocation. We can never be sure we have all the facts. Inductive reasoning is a woman trapped in a frat house who believes that all dudes are bros.

Since science is ultimately grounded in deductive and inductive reasoning, Pigliucci concludes, the scientific method will never arrive at absolute truth despite its obvious power. Certainty is impossible. Therefore Wilson’s ambition to unify all knowledge is futile, or as Massimo put it: “greedy reductionism.”

The crowd hissed and grumbled throughout Pigliucci’s talk. A few challengers quivered with rage during the Q&A. Judging by the the devilish grin on Massimo’s face, I can safely conclude that this philosopher gets off on goading an audience.

I enjoyed a few drinks with Pigliucci at the reception, where a surprisingly hot academic kept throwing herself at his… philosophical mind. I left the Consilience Conference reassured of two things:

First, even the most dispassionate intellectuals crave the warm resonance of group consciousness. Whether people gather around a microscope or a Eucharist, the herd instinct always manifests—which is great news for shepherds!

And second, mammalian females tend to admire any wolf who tears into the herd—which is great news for wolves!

The Return of the God Helmet

By Thad McKraken via Disinformation

I’d completely lost track of what was going on with Michael Persinger’s “God Helmet” but in stumbling on a few new articles I got the gist. As with much controversial research into altered states of consciousness or psi, what apparently went down is that someone (who probably had an enormous confirmation bias) tried to replicate the results and failed (likely on purpose). So in the court of popular/scientific opinion, that was it. Nothing to see here. Except that scientists in Brazil have just effectively replicated his results so you know, game on:

“A team of neurotheology researchers have replicated and confirmed the results of the iconic “God Helmet” experiment. The apparatus, originally developed by renowned neuroscientists, Stanley Koren and Michael Persinger, generates weak magnetic fields around the test subject’s temporal lobes, and elicits a distinct set of experiential phenomena in the participant’s brain, including: altered mystic states, visions of God, and the feeling of a sensed God-like presence. This new independent study confirms that the effects from the God Helmet experiment are not due to suggestion or suggestibility in subjects, and provide the first scientific verification of the technique’s direct influence on the brain. 80% had feelings of a “sensed presence”, and the other 20% had either minor effects or none.

The authors of the study, which was published in the Journal Of Consciousness Exploration and Research, write, “The God Helmet places four magnetic coils on each side of the head, above the temporal lobes. Some subjects exposed to these fields reported having ‘spiritual experiences’ during our tests. These subjects included atheists, as well as religious believers. 80% of the subjects reported the ‘presence’ of ‘nonphysical beings’ in the room where the experiments were conducted, including the ‘presence of God’ in a small number of subjects.”

“Thus far, about 20 or so people have reported feeling the presence of Christ or even seeing him in the chamber (The acoustic chamber where the experimental sessions took place),” says Koren in a recent interview. “Most of these people used Christ and God interchangeably. Most of these individuals were older (30 years or more) and religious (Roman Catholic). One male, age about 35-years-old (alleged atheist but early childhood Roman Catholic training), saw a clear apparition (shoulders and head) of Christ staring him in the face. He was quite ‘shaken’ by the experience. I did not complete a follow-up re: his change in behavior. [What] we did find with one world-class psychic, who experiences Christ as a component of his abilities, was we could experimentally increase or decrease his numbers of his reported experiences by applying the LTP pattern (derived from the hippocampus) over the right hemisphere (without his awareness). The field on-response delay was about 10 to 20 sec. The optimal pattern, at least for this person, looked very right hippocampal. By far most presences are attributed to dead relatives, the Great Forces, a spirit, or something equivalent. The attribution towards along a devil to angel continuum appears strongly related to the affect (pleasant-terror) associated with the experience. I suspect most people would call the ‘vague, all-around-me’ sensations ‘God’ but they are reluctant to employ the label in a laboratory. The implicit is obvious. If the equipment and the experiment produced the presence that was God, then the extrapersonal, unreachable and independent characteristics of the god definition might be challenged.”

Read the rest here, or read the entire documented study here if you’re more inclined.
Of course I probably wouldn’t be posting this if I didn’t have something to say about it that no one else has mentioned, so here goes. The God Helmet and all the attention it got is sort of backassward. Why? Because Persinger’s entire design is, at least loosely, based on the work of Robert Monroe as far as I can tell. I’ve yet to see anyone mention this.

Back in the 70s Monroe developed what he referred to as hemi-sync technology that syncs the hemispheres of the brain to help induce a sleep paralysis state, which is the gateway to astral projection. Of course, Monroe’s techniques accomplish this via calculated sound patterns broadcast into headphones. All Persinger did was go, hmmm, maybe we could do similar shit with electromagnetic pulses because that would be more science-y.

What’s funny about this is that in all the studies I’ve read on the God Helmet, Monroe’s techniques seem quite a bit more effective. But he wasn’t a scientist working for an academic institution so no one in that capacity officially took him seriously. He was a successful businessman who started spontaneously having out of body experiences and spent his own money establishing a non-profit to study them. Plus he was a best selling author of new age books. Of course, all of that stuff “isn’t real” so there’s no reason to study it. At least, according to mainstream science. The exact same shit I ran into as a psychology student. So what Persinger really did was find a less effective way to accomplish what someone else had already figured out. Except now it appealed more to the materialist set.
Science has a hard time explaining how meditation can demonstrably change brain patterns, but if you forcefully fuck with them externally by manipulating neurology with lasers or some shit, then hey, we’re onto something. We could maybe turn that into a weapon. It’s even more embarrassing that the God Helmet was philosophically used as a “gotcha” for materialists who claimed, “Science just explained out of body experiences, man. It’s just brain chemistry, morons. Nothing to see here.” As a psychedelic advocate my response to this has always been, ummm, obviously spiritual states of consciousness can be induced by manipulating brain chemistry. It actually supports the receiver model of consciousness.

Anyway, I don’t want it to seem like I’m shitting on the God Helmet here. I actually find this sort of thing incredibly fascinating and am glad someone else picked up the torch. While everyone else is jizzing their pants over the potentialities of Occulus Rift and the theoretical idea that we could upload our brains into computers I’m like, errr, aren’t the potentialities of this sort of technology roughly a billion times more compelling? Occulus Rift will do little more than serve capitalism, while if honed, this sort of technology could serve to destroy it. Once people figure out that they can get greater kicks manipulating their brain chemistry on the cheap than they ever will at the mall (or in a church), the whole charade crumbles.

On a final note, if you’re reading about the God Helmet and thinking, I really want to try it, keep in mind that it would probably cost you quite a bit of money and time to build one. And it most likely wouldn’t work nearly as well as Monroe’s hemi-sync sound patterns, which you can pick up right now for a mere $75 bucks. Less than a decent bag of weed. Does it work? Yep, I tried it, my mom tried it, my brother tried it. Worked for all 3 of us, although I delved in a bit further and had much more profound results (some of which you can read about in my book super cheap), which is something that’s maybe a bit more difficult to explain.

You know what else is funny? I saw Duncan Trussell live in Seattle months back, and he just so happened to mention that he’d experimented with Monroe’s tech as a teenager. It worked for him as well, but you know, also scared the living crap out of him (same deal with me, really). This is all my way of saying that Monroe’s techniques are incredibly repeatable, but yet another thing that mainstream science refuses to tackle on principle alone. Instead I suppose we’ll have to settle for stuff like the God Helmet. At least it’s a start, and on a plus note, it looks freaking awesome from a fashion perspective. Just once I’d like to roll into a show and find a bunch of young hipster kids rocking something like that. Just once. I don’t have to buy my drugs from the bar man, I’m bombarding my brain with good vibes from inside this stylish sci-fi headwear. That’d be some real progress. Oh and hey, it could potentially shut down the drug trade as well, which is precisely why capitalism will never let it catch on.

A brief history of false flag attacks

By James Corbett

via Waking Times

In naval warfare, a “false flag” refers to an attack where a vessel flies a flag other than their true battle flag before engaging their enemy. It is a trick, designed to deceive the enemy about the true nature and origin of an attack.

In the democratic era, where governments require at least a plausible pretext before sending their nation to war, it has been adapted as a psychological warfare tactic to deceive a government’s own population into believing that an enemy nation has attacked them.

In the 1780s, Swedish King Gustav III was looking for a way to unite an increasingly divided nation and raise his own falling political fortunes. Deciding that a war with Russia would be a sufficient distraction but lacking the political authority to send the nation to war unilaterally, he arranged for the head tailor of the Swedish Opera House to sew some Russian military uniforms. Swedish troops were then dressed in the uniforms and sent to attack Sweden’s own Finnish border post along the Russian border. The citizens in Stockholm, believing it to be a genuine Russian attack, were suitably outraged, and the Swedish-Russian War of 1788-1790 began.

In 1931 the Japan was looking for a pretext to invade Manchuria. On September 18th of that year, a Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army detonated a small amount of TNT along a Japanese-owned railway in the Manchurian city of Mukden. The act was blamed on Chinese dissidents and used to justify the occupation of Manchuria just six months later. When the deception was later exposed, Japan was diplomatically shunned and forced to withdraw from the League of Nations.

In 1939 Heinrich Himmler masterminded a plan to convince the public that Germany was the victim of Polish aggression in order to justify the invasion of Poland. It culminated in an attack on Sender Gleiwitz, a German radio station near the Polish border, by Polish prisoners who were dressed up in Polish military uniforms, shot dead, and left at the station. The Germans then broadcast an anti-German message in Polish from the station, pretended that it had come from a Polish military unit that had attacked Sender Gleiwitz, and presented the dead bodies as evidence of the attack. Hitler invaded Poland immediately thereafter, starting World War II.

In 1954 the Israelis hired a number of Egyptian Jews to plant bombs in American and British cinemas, libraries, and other civilian targets to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood or other malcontents. The plan, known as the Lavon Affair, was part of an effort to convince the British to retain their military presence in the occupied Suez Canal zone. Several bombings took place, but the British were ultimately forced out after Nasser nationalized the canal in 1956.

In 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff authored a document called Operation Northwoods calling for the US government to stage a series of fake attacks, including the shooting down of military or civilian US aircraft, the destruction of a US ship, sniper attacks in Washington, and other atrocities, to blame on the Cubans as an excuse for launching an invasion. President Kennedy refused to sign off on the plan and was killed in Dallas the next year.

In August 1964 the USS Maddox, a US destroyer on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, believed it had come under attack from North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats, engaging in evasive action and returning fire. The incident led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing President Johnson to begin open warfare in Vietnam. It was later admitted that no attack had occurred, and in 2005 it was revealed that the NSA had manipulated their information to make it look like an attack had taken place.

In June 1967 the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty, a US Navy technical research ship, off the coast of Egypt. The ship was strafed relentlessly for hours in an apparent attempt to blame the attack on Egypt and draw the Americans into the Six Day War, but amazingly the crew managed to keep it afloat. In 2007 newly released NSA intercepts confirmed that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship, not an Egyptian ship as their cover story has maintained.


In the fall of 1999, a wave of bloody apartment bombings swept through Russian cities, killing 293 people and causing widespread panic. Although blamed on the Chechen terrorists that the Russians were fighting in the Second Chechen War, FSB agents were caught planting the exact same type of bombs as in the other blasts later that month. The government claimed that the bomb was part of a security exercise and Vladimir Putin came to power as the next Russian President on the back of the terror wave later that year.

In 2001, attacks in New York and Washington are blamed on Al Qaeda as a pretext for invading Afghanistan. In the months leading up to the event, American negotiators had warned Afghanistan’s Taliban that they were interested in securing right of way for proposed pipeline projects, and the US would achieve this with either a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs. The Bush administration’s first major national security directive, NSPD-9, a full-scale battle plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, including command and control, air and ground forces, and logistics, was drafted and sitting on the President’s desk to be signed off on September 4, 2001, seven days before the 9/11 attacks. The invasion proceeded as planned in October.

These are but a few of the hundreds of such incidents that have been staged over the centuries to blame political enemies for attacks that they did not commit. The tactic remains in common use today, and will continue to be employed as long as populations still blindly believe whatever their governments tell them about the origins of spectacular terror incidents.

'Epidemic of food riots' could trigger society collapse by 2040, warn scientists

via RT

With the global demand for food on the rise, our society could collapse as soon as in 2040 due to fatal food shortages and "unprecedented epidemic of food riots," if counter measures are not taken, researchers have warned.

Food security experts and analysts in the field of the economics of sustainable development were asked to develop the worse-case scenario illustrating a "plausible, relatively-severe production shock affecting multiple agricultural commodities and regions."

According to a report from Lloyds of London prepared with the help of Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute, "the global food system is under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalization and heightening political instability."

Researchers say that the food system is becoming “increasingly vulnerable to acute shocks,” driven by the world’s population growth and shifts in consumption patterns as countries develop. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that global agricultural production will need to more than double by 2050 to close the gap between food supply and demand, the report, supported by UK's Foreign Office says.

"A shock to the global food supply could trigger significant claims across multiple classes of insurance, including (but not limited to) terrorism and political violence, political risk, business interruption, marine and aviation, agriculture, environmental liability, and product liability and recall," the report warns, adding that these losses could be aggravated by the potential for a food system shock to last for years to come.

The Director of the Global Sustainability Institute, Dr. Aled Jones, told Insurge Intelligence that "based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots."

"We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend," he said.

"In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption," Jones added.

Resources for the UFO enthusiast

I want to get right to the meat of the matter without a big preamble.

I do not 'believe' in UFOs. I don't much believe anything.

I am convinced, though, that an intelligent person who sits down and takes a hard look at the available information will, if he or she overcomes cognitive dissonance, come away convinced that there is something going on.

I want to use this article to link to various resources that a putative explorer of this topic can use to arrive at his or her own conclusions about the matter.

1.> Let's talk about Ben Rich. Rich was the second director of Lockheed Skunkworks from 1975-1991. He oversaw the development of the stealth fighter, the F-117A nighthawk. Before his death, Rich made several statements which might be called eyebrow-raising.

Aerospace journalist James Goodall, who wrote for publications such as Jane’s Defense Weekly, Aviation Week and Space Technology, and Interavia, specializes in the history, development, and operations of the world’s only Mach 3 capable, manned air breathing aircraft, the SR-71 family of aircraft. He is also an author, as well as the Associate Curator at the Pacific Aviation Meseum, HI. He was also the restoration manager at the Museum of Flight in Paine Field, Everett, WA.

He alleges that he spoke to Ben Rich shortly before Rich's death:  “About ten days before he died, I was speaking to Ben on the telephone at the USC Medical Center in LA. And he said, ‘Jim, we have things out in the desert that are fifty years beyond what you can comprehend. They have about forty five hundred people at the Lockheed Skunk works. What have they been doing for the last eighteen or twenty years? They’re building something.'”

Jan Harzan, a senior executive with IBM, along with Tom Keller, an aerospace engineer who has worked as a computer systems analyst for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discusses a talk Ben gave some time ago. On March 23rd, 1993 at a UCLA School of Engineering talk where he was presenting a general history of Skunk Works, he said this:

“We now know how to travel to the stars. There is an error in the equations, and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars and it won’t take a lifetime to do it. It is time to end all the secrecy on this, as it no longer poses a national security threat, and make the technology available for use in the private sector. There are many in the intelligence community who would like to see this stay in the black and not see the light of day. We now have the technology to take ET home.”

Here is video of Jan telling his story:

2.> Paul Hellyer. Hellyer was Canada's Minister of Defence under Lester B. Pearson from 1963 to 1968. As Minister of Defence, he 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. Under Pierre Trudeau, he served as Transport Minister, and was Senior Minister in the Cabinet, a position similar to the current position of Deputy Prime Minister.

Here's what he has to say: “Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about the direction we were heading and offered to help. Instead, some of us interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after." 

"Trillions of dollars have been spent on black projects which both congress and the commander in chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.”

”In one of the cases during the cold war, 1961, there were about 50 UFOs in formation flying South from Russia across Europe. The supreme allied commander was very concerned and was about ready to press the panic button when they turned around and went back over the North Pole. They decided to do an investigation and they investigated for three years and they decided that with absolute certainty that four different species, at least, have been visiting this planet for thousands of years. There’s been a lot more activity in the past two decades, especially since we invented the atomic bomb.”

Whaaaaaat?

No, don't worry, Hellyer isn't "disclosing" anything. He became a UFO enthusiast much later in life. This is a hobby for him.

Here's a video of him speaking:

3.> Various NASA astronauts.

What does Brian O'Leary former Astronaut and Princeton Physics professor have to say?

“There is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, that civilizations have been monitoring us for a very long time. That their appearance is bizarre from any type of traditional materialistic western point of view. That these visitors use the technologies of consciousness, they use toroids, they use co-rotating magnetic disks for their propulsion systems, that seems to be a common denominator of the UFO phenomenon”

What about Edgar Mitchell?

“Yes there have been crashed craft, and bodies recovered. We are not alone in the universe, they have been coming here for a long time.”

Gordon Cooper?

 “In my opinion I think they were worried that it would panic the public so they started telling lies about it. And then I think they had to tell another lie to cover their first lie, now they don’t know how to get out of it. Now it’s going to be so embarrassing to admit that all these administrations have told so many untruths, it would be embarrassing getting out of it. There are a number of extraterrestrial vehicles out there cruising around.”

4.> Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee:

“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, by other civilizations. Who they are, where they are from, and what they want should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not be the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.”

5.> Senator Barry Goldwater , Chairman of the Senate intelligence committee

“This thing has gotten so highly-classified…it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified”

6.> Various military personnel with verified backgrounds: UFOs near nuclear missile silos?

7.> Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter in a letter to Congress:

"Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense." (source)

8.> John Podesta:

"It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the real nature of this phenomenon"

Podesta wrote the forward to Leslie Kean's book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record

Here's Kean on the Colbert report:

Here she is being interviewed by physicist Michio Kaku: (see him here:)