Arauco: A Novel by John Caviglia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Masterfully written and totally engrossing, I found myself unable to put this book down. Even though it is a long novel I wanted it to go on longer as the world it conjures up is detailed and immersive. I felt myself transported back to those times in history and to that place in the long thin land now called Chile. Excellent characterisations and clearly exhaustive historical research combine with masterful storytelling to conjure a compelling vision of this clash of cultures that has been going on for hundreds of years. Five Stars!

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Bopping to Psybient sounds...

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Tear Down the Freedom Tower | TomDispatch

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Tear Down the Freedom Tower | TomDispatch

"If September 11th was indeed a nightmare, 9/11 as a memorial and Ground Zero as a “consecrated” place have turned out to be a blank check for the American war state, funding an endless trip to hell. They have helped lead us into fields of carnage that put the dead of 9/11 to shame."

When Phones Were Phones!

Do you ever pine for the days when mobile phones were just that, phones you could carry with you? Simple small, light single purpose devices that did a couple of things really well... make and receive phone calls and send and receive txt messages.

Not these expensive multi-purpose phone cum computer cum email cum TV cum DVD player cum Camcorder cum Camera cum Hi-Fi System cum everything devices. Not these mega expensive, mobile connected, everything, everywhere portable computing devices that also happen to do phone calls… and also happen to track your every move!!!

Pine for a world were word processing, voice recording, video recording and playing, music making and shopping and constant email contact didn't follow you everywhere you go? A world where you could walk down the street without bumping into people stumbling aimlessly around head buried in their 'Mobile Device'? A world where you didn't have to put up with white ear bud wearing, inanely smiling people living in a world of their own laughing at some in joke email or personal video message, or something, whatever!

Well I got fed-up of the multi-touch, multi-media world lately and decided to go back to the good old days of only 10 or so years ago. To my favorite mobile phones that I have owned over the last 30 years (and I have owned a lot and always had the latest)... the Ericsson T28 and the Ericsson R320.

Lovely phones, small, light, long battery life and great for voice calls and txting. Both have voice activated calling and great reception and the T28 is a brilliant and totally classic piece of design that has never been replicated. A button activated flip out mic and auto voice calling and just so small and light when compared to the expensive and relatively fragile iBricks most people carry around these days. A mere 83gms and 97 x 50 x 15 mm with 4 0r 5 hours of talk time and a massive 65 hours of standby time. These things don't need charging everyday like those multi-media iBricks tend to.

Picked them both up really cheap on eBay and their in great condition. Perfect to throw in the pocket and forget about until you need to call or txt someone and then to know that you will always have good reception and don't have to worry about holding them in a particular way or standing  close to the window or something equally daft that we have come to take for granted with those expensive multi-media mobile devices.

Maybe I'm just turning into a grumpy old man but I really don't know what the latest tech is adding to the world... maybe its just a tech addiction that feeds corporate coffers and has us throwing perfectly good devices away just so we can have the newest, greatest and latest Android or iPhone. I remember some technology wag saying many years ago that the only thing sure about the future was that the phone companies would make a lot of money... you only have to look at the high street proliferation of mobile phone shops and who are the global giants to see how right they were.

So I thought it was time to go back to the future and get rid of my iDevices and invest in some proper mobile tech. So I thought about which were my favorite phones of all time given I had been an early adopter and always had both personal and work provided mobiles upadted very regularly. The Nokia 8110 was good and the Motorola Razr to, but the Ericsson phones of the late 90's early 2000's were the best ever.

I think mobile phones reached an apogee at the Millennium and it has been all down hill since then.

The Ericsson R320 is actually my favorite ever phone, I had one one they came out in 2000 and kept it for years. It even has an infrared port (remember those :-) and can be configured for email and simple WAP browsing etc... but who needs those things. I just want a good reliable sturdy phone that is going to do the job it's designed for and both these classic retro Ericsson phones do the job, brilliantly!

The T28 has got to be the retro classic and in my opinion has yet to be bettered as a small, light basic mobile phone. Very Star Trek, actually! Born in 1999 it will live long and prosper :-)

I now use both and always carry the T28 when I go anywhere. Long live the real mobile phones from the time when phones were phones were phones...

Enjoy!, Tom

ps: I recently picked up a job lot of T28's, some T28 World, T28s and T28sc models and plan to refurbish them, so if any of you fancy a great little classic 'retro' phone that does what a good mobile phone should then just drop me an email at tom@ravenred.net or call me on my R320 at 07519 839 604
... going cheap to good homes :-)

And Now For Something Completely Different!

All around the western world Governments are downsizing their standing Armies. In the UK, which is currently fighting 3 wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, the plan is to reduce the Army by 17,000 troops. Officially they will be replaced by a "more deployable" reservist force of accountants, managers and other corporate workers, part time soldiers. Unofficially they will be replaced by drone killing machines and Mercenaries!

Did you know that there are now more 'Private Contractors' in Afghanistan than regular US soldiers? Given there are over 100,000 troops that is an awful lot of mercenaries. The West is in the process of 'outsourcing' it's fighting forces and in the US, as always, they are also in the process of civilianising their Military or at least removing the line between the two. Its not just the heads of the CIA and US Military forces that are swapping jobs, there are now thousands of CIA operatives and State Department 'civilians' deployed around the world in our multiple Theaters of War.

Meanwhile those 'savings' made by telling serving soldiers, many just back from War, that they are losing their jobs will be increasingly pumped into new Drones, UAV's, RFID chips and other technologies of Net Centric Warfare (or Network Enabled Capability as it is known in the UK and NZ). The same announcement of job losses in the UK Army was accompanied by more talk of beefing up our CyberWarfare capability!

That means lots more fresh faced kids straight out of school and many years of PlayStation and XBox training will be heading to the Cyber-warfare Training Facilities and ending up piloting drone killing machines from thousands of miles away as they kill real people in the real world.

The Echalon of UKCANZAUS (That's UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States) will continue to police the globe and carry out remote assasinations and capture/kill missions wereever and whenever it feels like it on this blue planet of ours. Empire gone mad? Terminator come true? The Military-Industrial-Media Complex running amok?

Meanwhile the US and Europe threaten to default on their massive debts, created mainly by their expensive Wars, and Financial Armageddon is just around the corner.

What a weird and surreal world we live in.

Imagine! - A World of Drone Wars, Weather Weapons and Nano-Tech Spies

Imagine a world where a silent Reaper drone flies overhead in the darkness high above some foreign land. It's pilot sitting comfortably in daylight some many thousands of miles away in Hancock Air Base near Syracuse in front of his monitor, watching that foreign land drift by from high above in infrared. The target acquired a squeeze on his PlayStation trigger releases a small pod from beneath the Reaper which falls rapidly then is slowed by the deployment of a small black parachute. The pod drifts to the ground outside the target town and on hitting the dirt splits open. A swarm of tiny bio-nan insects burst out from the pod; a merging of nano-tech machine and biological Bee.

The swarm immediately appear on the pilots distant monitor and he reaches for the control that will direct them to their target deep inside the town. His monitor now displays the lead nanoBee's image of the world in addition to that from the Reaper drone, allowing him to maneuver the Bees through the dark streets of the town to a small house behind high compound walls. A group of people out walking notice the insects flying by but think nothing of it. Meanwhile packed in the nanoBees pollen sacks is a pheromone virus programmed to illicit a specific set of behaviors within what will soon be their human hosts.

The swarm splits into multiple groups and quickly finds multiple entry points into the house and via heat signatures visible from the Reaper drones surveillance cameras the remote pilot sends them into close proximity to the human targets. When within 3 feet of the target the nanoBees release their invisible payload into the air and quickly depart the scene.

The targets start to argue and quarrel among themselves. Voices are raised, guns are raised... they shoot each other!

You might think this is a nice science fiction story, or at least the beginnings of one, but its not! It's highly probable that this kind of thing is happening right now in Pakistan or Yemen or anywhere else that the CIA and US Government decide that they want to carry out their 'War on Terror'. We have all heard about the Reapers and the guided bombs, the 'targeted killings' or assassinations carried out using drones in and over supposedly sovereign nations. But they are pretty indiscriminate, lead to lots of bad press when civilians become 'collateral damage'. But the only story we would hear, if we heard one at all, would be of terrorists killing each other given the above scenario. What if the payload was something more sinister, a nano-tech virus that killed perhaps or just some plain old chemical or biological weaponry?

Scary science-fiction?, conspiracy theory mumbo jumbo? well believe me these nanoBees or 'cyborg insects' actually do exist and have already been used for surveillance, possibly a lot more. I know, I have seen them.

As far back as the 70's the CIA was developing micro-UAVs in the form of Dragonflies - see this 2007 Wired article for more info. Micro-UAVs and bio-nan Hi-MEMS have become increasingly sophisticated over the last 40 years. They are a here and now reality in 2011 and in use in the AFPAK theater among other places, including for domestic surveillance.

Well my post of yesterday must have touched a nerve as today I lost my job, out-of-the-blue! No way I can prove they were related but I'm expecting the disruptive patterns I unleashed with my first nano-tech/scalar weapons post - and no doubt this follow-up too - to get worse before they get better.

I'll keep you posted on any further developments and stay tuned for more on this fascinating and clearly sensitive subject!

In the meantime check out Killer Drones Take The Place of War on Truthout

Nanotech Is Now! - Hidden Technologies

One thing we can be very sure of is that what we see and hear in the News these days is definitely not what is really going on. Yes events get reported but more often than not the connections between these events and the true causes, effects and meaning is lost in the swirl of propaganda and spin.

I firmly believe that many of the events we are witnessing around the world these days are the result of a major war being fought with Scalar Weapons and Nanotechnology.

Scalar Weapons are weapons that can create severe weather events and also create earthquakes. In development since at least the late 19th Century and the time of Nicola Tesla and later Wilhelm Reich, these weapons have been in use by the major global power groupings for some time now and are responsible for many if not all of the severe 'natural disasters' we have been witnessing around the planet. As far back as 1997 the then US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, said the following

“Others [terrorists] are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves… So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations…It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our [counterterrorism] efforts.”

Secretary of Defense William Cohen at an April 1997 counterterrorism conference sponsored by former Senator Sam Nunn. Quoted from DoD News Briefing, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Q&A at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, University of Georgia, Athens, Apr. 28, 1997.

The other major set of current weapons technology that remains deliberately hidden from the vast majority of humanity are the significant breakthroughs in nanotech and biotech that has led to the creation of some pretty scary nanotech viruses and 'bionan' combinations of organic and machine components at a level of miniaturization that renders it practically invisible. One not quite so invisible manifestation of this are the killer swarms of cyborg insects being developed by the US Army as an adjunct to their other larger drone killing machines capable of remote control from 1000's of miles away by young men brought up on a diet of violent video games. These things are real and a quick trawl of the internet will bring up lots of info about these 'drones', 'uav's', 'cyborg insects'!  What is less visible and much harder to find information about are the engineered nanotech viruses and bionan pheromones. Imagine a world were these things can be released into the air or the water supply and they are capable, depending on their programming, of altering peoples thoughts or actions at a mass level. None lethal but very valuable to a military or government seeking to control a population or just steer them in a particular direction.

Corporations and the rich elite have kept these powerful technologies secret so that they can consolidate their grip on them and plan and implement a future world were we are even more their obedient slaves than we currently are.

Scalar weapons were originally in the hands of the Russian Mafia who inherited them from a collapsing soviet bloc and also the Yakuza in Japan and the US Mafia - these days indistinguishable from their respective national Governments - and the Israeli State and others have also obtained and developed very powerful scalar and nanotech weapons. In fact the Isrealis are at the forefront of unmanned peopleless warfare and the use of 'robots' of all shapes and sizes to do their killing for them. Barbara Ehrenriechs recent article on TomDispatch "The Fog of (Robot) War" is a great intro to this subject and the roots of its genesis in the modern world of warfare.

Have you wondered if the recent double whammy in Japan of the Earthquake/Tsunami and Nuclear 'accident' where more than they seemed? Whether the 'Bird Flu' was really just a naturally occurring virus? Whether freak floods in China and Tornadoes and floods in the USA where really just unusual weather events? The list could go on and on...

Well here's a thought for you. If the elites really do have scalar weapons and nanotechnology, which is highly likely given the years of research and the billions pumped into it, then would they not use it to further their agendas? whatever those might be?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately and doing a bunch of research so expect a few more posts on the subject were I get into some more specific details and also speculate on what might be here already or just around the corner in this scary new world of drones, weather weapons and bionan.