WOO FILES: HELL ON EARTH AND PORK IN THE WOODPILE

I've recently come across two intriguing stories in my online wanderings that I felt deserved a mention here. 

First from the Daily Mail in the UK comes word that Oxford researchers are conducting studies that could literally create a close approximation to Hell on Earth (click here for a glimpse of what this might look like). This could be achieved in three ways. First, we could extend convicts’ lives so that they could serve out incredibly long sentences for particularly vile crimes. Alternately, we could alter their perception of the passage of time to make a short time span feel like decades or centuries. This process would be achieved either chemically, via pharmaceuticals, or by uploading the convict’s mind in to a digital simulation and running it a million times faster than normal, “thus enabling a criminal to serve a 1000 year sentence in eight and a half hours”. Of course, this brings up the possibility of sentencing some criminals to an virtual ETERNITY of infinite suffering. The article suggests:

If these technologies are developed, one crime that could ever justify eternal imprisonment was something that would endanger mankind. ‘Suppose there was some physics experiment that stood a decent chance of generating a black hole that could destroy the planet and all future generations,’ said Dr Roache. 'If someone deliberately set up an experiment like that, I could see that being the kind of supercrime that would justify an eternal sentence.’

Frankly, the fact that there are scientists who are even thinking of going down this particular avenue of research is a sign of the End Times.

Our next example of Woo in the News is somewhat less troubling... if you're not too sensitive about the issue of human origins, that is. Because, according to Eugene M. McCarthy, PhD, it is apparently possible that the human race is actually a hybrid race that resulted from the cross-breeding of chimpanzees and… something else. 

At his comprehensive and fascinating website, Macroevolution.net, McCarthy presents a shockingly bizarre hypothesis in astonishingly convincing fashion. He writes: 

One fact, however, suggests the need for an open mind: as it turns out, many features that distinguish humans from chimpanzees also distinguish them from all other primates. Features found in human beings, but not in other primates, cannot be accounted for by hybridization of a primate with some other primate. If hybridization is to explain such features, the cross will have to be between a chimpanzee and a nonprimate — an unusual, distant cross to create an unusual creature. Looking at a subset of the listed traits, however, it's clear that the other parent in this hypothetical cross that produced the first human would be an intelligent animal with a protrusive, cartilaginous nose, a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, short digits, and a naked skin. It would be terrestrial, not arboreal, and adaptable to a wide range of foods and environments.

So, apparently, the other half of the equation is...PIGS!!! Hell, I dunno folks… I’m just the messenger. I should note, however, that this ingenious theory does have its critics. But I'll leave it for you to decide.

PARADIGM SHIFT: WOO IN THE NEWS FROM DRUDGE

Reading today’s Drudge Report, we’re treated to a plethora of bizarre news stories, including one about an upcoming Amy Winehouse “hologram” tour, and Newt Gingrich’s plan to save the world from North Korean nukes AND giant solar flares. But perhaps the most intriguing stories involve a breakthrough in mind-reading technology as reported on by FOX News (which turns out to be not quite so groundbreaking as the headline suggests). From the article:

"There’s a wide variation in how people’s brains work under a scanner – some people have better brains for fMRI – and so if you were to pick a participant at random it might be that their reconstructions are really good, or it might be that their reconstructions are really poor, which is why we averaged across all the participants,” Cowen said. For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information. “This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said.

The images in question:

Now, we do have to keep in mind that the images in this article were created a full two years ago – the paper based on the findings being published just now – so who knows what advances have been made in the interim?

Another intriguing report in today’s Drudge involves this report from Extreme Tech, which describes upcoming trials in human suspended animation. From the article:

At a hospital in Pittsburgh, surgeons are now allowed to place patients into a state of suspended animation. If a patient arrives with a traumatic injury, and attempts to restart their heart have failed — if they’re on the doorstep of death — they will have their blood replaced with a cold saline solution, which stops almost all cellular activity. At this point, the patient is clinically dead — but if the doctors can fix the injury within a few hours, they can be returned to life from suspended animation by replacing the saline with blood. Or at least, that’s the theory.

I, for one, would be very happy if Drudge stuck to bringing us woo-based news, because his politics are annoying as it gets, and frankly suck donkey balls through a straw.

THE WOO FILES: KOOKY LINKS FOR NON-FINKS!

If this blog is attracting the type of reader that I have hoped for, then a great many of you will be interested to read this first, excerpted chapter from Dr Rick Strassman’s DMT and the Soul of Prophecy. Entitled “The Hebrew Bible Prophet and the DMT Volunteer”, it travels some very intriguing territory, crossing over and dipping into various apparently contradictory domains and disciplines to emerge with some truly unique and intriguing insights into both ancient theology and cutting edge psycho-pharmaceuticals. I, for one, am looking forward to reading the rest of Strassman’s tome.

***

Is it possible that human beings don’t come from Earth, and that sunburns and pain during childbirth prove this "fact"? Can it be that there is an alien message embedded on our genetic code? Are we living in a hologram? Or is our species simply experiencing an epistemological breakdown that will precipitate a full-blown ontological crisis? Read this article, then YOU be the judge!

***

If you'd like to see an example of what I'd refer to as poor paracultural scholarship - the kind of stuff that gives honest, intellectually rigorous truth-seekers a bad name with hoi polloi - look no further than Sky Blimps, Gravity's Rainbow, Predictive Programming and Thomas Pynchon, by Paul McGuire. Apparently, the fact that Pynchon's novel features blimps (it's set in World War II and yes, blimps were used extensively in the British theater, where most of the novel takes place) is evidence that... well, that the world is about to end in a massive apocalypse, and every Christian and Jew needs to get right with God before it happens! Of course! How did I not see this before!?

THE WOO FILES: SATAN STATUES AND UK UFO INFO

When news first broke of an alleged plan by an New York-based Satanic Temple to erect a statue in honor of their main goat next to the Ten Commandments monument at Oklahoma's state capitol, all the usual right-wing finger-sniffers started quaking with outrage, which caused all the usual left-wing "cooler than thou" douchebags to start snorting through their latte foam. My own favorite headline relating to this story - which spread like syphilitic wildfire through the nation's newsrooms - was the following: SUPPORT GROWING FOR SATANIC MONUMENT AT OK CAPITOL.  Anyway, if you want to donate funds to help get this monument built, you can do so here.

***

If you're going to be holding super-secret, heavy-duty, occult-tinged Eyes Wide Shut "mansion orgies" - complete with extreme BDSM fetish kink and "art shows" that involve knife-play and bloodletting - you might want to try not telling Business Insider about it, afterwards. It kind of ruins the whole elitist mystique of the thing, knowing that it's going to spend weeks as a "recommended reading" sidebar selection on Slate.com where a bunch of fucking nobodies can "read all about it."

***

There was a bunch of UK UFO info dumped by the British government and featured in THE WEEK a few months ago, so I thought I'd share a link featuring the highlights with y'all. Of special interest are the tales of "Faceless Goons", UFOs appearing during the Falklands War, and copies of Top Secret minutes of the MoD's Flying Saucer Working Party of 1950-52, which were opened at the Public Record Office, now the National Archives. The file was annotated by one worried official who feared it might fuel cover-up conspiracies. They wrote: "Oh dear! This makes our line 'no interest' in [flying saucers] look suspect." THE WEEK also covered UFO story, this one of a more recent vintage. It details a pilot's revelations about how a rugby ball-shaped UFO flew "within feet" of his A320 Airbus at 34,000 feet, shortly after takeoff from Heathrow Airport in July 2013.