Skilluminati Research

“Tactical Biorefineries” aka Generating Electricity from Trash

Posted Jul 06, 2007

Yes, really. The machine to the left is designed to convert garbage into electrical energy. (Click here for an enlarged version of the pic.) You feed it "food, plastics, and paper" -- regular kitchen-level waste -- and this beast will process the garbage into fuel then convert the fuel into electricity.

From the Scientific American article:

It works via parallel processes. The waste is first sorted?already standard practice at Army field kitchens, its first potential home?and then run through an industrial-strength shredder. The "ugly-looking gruel" that results, Warner says, separates into more liquid organic materials that funnel into a biocatalytic vat, and more solid materials?plastics?that find their way to a gasifying chamber. Inside the vat, enzymes and yeast?with a leavening of antibiotics for safety?digest the organic gruel into ethanol. Inside the gasifier, the plastic pellets turn to gas at temperatures of 600 degrees Celsius.

"As the waste material is introduced you can produce your gas from the gasifier within an hour and you'll start getting ethanol at six hours. By about 12 hours you can displace the diesel fuel to less than 10 percent," Warner notes. "It's scaled to take in about 2,500 pounds of mixed waste per 24-hour period."

The Defense Technical Information Center has an extremely detailed and helpful collection of documents for the public. Among them is the following gem: DTIC Report on "Tactical Biorefineries" Also check out this PhysOrg Report -- a good introductory read.

Filed in: Future Tech

Tim Leary Talks Future Tech and Neo-Paganism

Posted Jul 06, 2007

David Jay Brown: As machines are comprised of earth-based products, Terence McKenna made the suggestion that it could be that through technological advancement the planet is organizing itself into a self-reflective conscious entity. What do you think of this idea?

TIMOTHY: That's fabulous. I'm a great admirer of Terence McKenna, and what he's doing. I must put a caveat here. All of our language is suspect as we move from a mechanical factory society, which is state-controlled, into a much freer cybernetic society. Now, all of us who grew up in the sixties have a terrible bias against technology, because technology was what was polluting the air, and grinding down the soil, and making a parking lot out of our planet. Much of this understandable contempt for technology has flipped over into a contempt for computers.

But there's a great difference between mechanical technology, which uses oil, metal, concrete, and is in material form, and the cybernetic technology which is invisible. Within two or three years of the computers, instead of the mainframe's enormous bar and building it will be as small as a cigarette box. So that the basic virtue and ethical goal in the cybernetic society is no longer big is better, and more is better, but smaller. Throughout, the lesson is learned from Hermes Trismagistus: as above, so below, as in the larger, so in the smaller.

The greatest wisdom is always housed in the smallest package. I think I even said that in the Psychedelic Prayers twenty-eight years ago. Look at the DNA code. The DNA code is invisible, and yet the DNA code has enough information to build you an Amazon rain forest, or build a hundred David Browns. I mean it's there. The point is certainly obvious. We've now learned that the atom is not just a bunch of billiard balls going around Bohr's solar system. The atom, we have every reason to expect, is charged with enormous miniaturized information. The fact that we can't decipher it is not the problem of the atom. That's what quantum physics demonstrates.

See, matter and energy are frozen clusters of quarks. Matter is simply information which is frozen, and then it dissolves. So the smaller the information unit, the more efficient, and the more kindly, because you don't have to chop down a forest of trees to build books. It can just be put on tiny little silicon chip. See, we've gone from carbon to silicon, because carbon is much more precious. Carbon is organic, whereas silicon is cybernetic. You want to have the silicon do whatever you can to spare the carbon, because the trees, bees and flowers are carbon based.

DJB: How do you feel about scientific progress these days, and what do you think is missing?

TIMOTHY:There's been a wonderful surge of new and imaginative science in the last ten or fifteen years. Prigogine's system theory, for example. Sheldrake's morphogenetic resonance, and the notion of the hundred monkeys. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Terence McKenna. I could go on listing. All of these wonderful intuitions growing out of science have been landmarks. There's just one little slip you have to add to it that makes it all click, and that is that all of these wonderful thinkers and prophets are talking about information. See, another thing I must say is that the key to information theory and quantum philosophy is the notion that there are no laws of the universe. That's such a typical Victorian British Empire piece of shit, because the Judeo God is up there--he's the judge, and he's emitting laws and commandments, of all things.

DJB: How do you see the process of evolution working?

TIMOTHY: The way that evolution works at the level of astro-physics, or at the organic level, and even the level of human knowledge, is that it's all based on algorithms. I won't go into the details, but algorithms can be summed up as: if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if--then. So, if the sunlight is such, if the temperature is this, if the water level is this, if the meteorological stuff is this, and if there is enough nitrogen--Click--then it happens in every island around, all the leaves turn green. See, they're programmed that way.

DJB: Have you thought about Bell's Theorem, how the mechanism of nonlocality occurs?

TIMOTHY: This notion of the non-locality of cause--Bell's Theorem and all that--seems kind of mysterious, unless it's all information, of course. If you program an algorithm, you don't set laws; you're the program, and if the program is if, if, if, if--then, the same thing's going to happen on the other side of the galaxy if it's going to happen here. That's the non-locality of cause. It's totally comprehensible and inevitable if you understand it's all information chains and codes, and they all pop up if, if, if, if--then. This is not in any way a reductionist perspective. Another one of the problems of a soft philosophy and hard philosophy is reductionism.

There's no reductionism here because if you've played around with algorithms, like fractals for example, you realize that you never know what's going to happen. They asked Fredkin--who's the great prophet of all this--"Are you saying that God is some crazed computer hacker in the sky, who's writing all these programs for stars, and atoms?" If there are two of you, and one of me, and you're hydrogen, and I'm oxygen, we get water, see? But, if that's the if.

Fredkin said, "Well, I don't know about trying to identify the intelligence that set these algorithms up; we're too crude right now to speculate, but I'll tell you one thing about it. Whoever he, she, it, or they were who wrote these algorithms, they're surprised as hell every time because?quick?oh my god?look what they're doing now!" If you've ever seen how a fractal program operates, you know that these incredible forms develop, and yet they always come back to the basic forms of cosines, which are like the linings of the esophagus, which are like the clouds.

See, coastlines and coast-like phenomena are wonderful, because they are a way of miniaturizing information. If you took a coastline and pulled it out, it'd be like ten miles long, but not if you crunch it together, like the DNA code is. It's a way of miniaturizing and packaging. Now, the notion of algorithms account for non-locality of cause. Whether it's Bell's physical experiments, or Sheldrake's hundred monkeys. It's so comforting to know that everyone is right. It's just that we can improve the theories, and make Sheldrake and Bell more precise and comprehensible.

Filed in: Future Tech

Omni Interview with Stanley Milgram

Posted Jul 06, 2007

Yes....that Stanley Milgram. Hated for all the wrong reasons, endlessly inventive and subversive -- Stanley Milgram is our kind of mutant. His infamous obedience experiment is what he's most known for, but as this article shows, it could actually be one of his least interesting experiments. Since it's a pdf, typing out excerpts is a bitch, but I'll do a quickie anyways -- then you can get on down to downloading this puppy. Enjoy.

We all have a ritualized way of communicating with one another, says Milgram. Many of these social conventions mask the real person. Style fogs substance. The Cyranoid provides one means of studying these masks, finding how permeable they are, and discovering where the mask ends and where the real person begins. And since Milgram believes that showing is better than telling, he clicks on a videotape.

The TV screen revealed an ordinary setting. Two students, a man and a woman, sat at a table, talking about the woman's proposal for a psychology project. She was an earnest young graduate student. So was the man. But he was also a Cyranoid, a repeater of words. Everything he said was being fed to him over a wireless electronic hookup inserted in his ear. The other end of the hookup was on the opposite side of a one-way mirror, where Milgram himself sat hunched in front of a microphone, watching and listening to the young people talk. He was talking to the woman through the Cyranoid.

He'd ask, for example, "And what was the purpose of this study?" and a split second later the Cyranoid in the next room would repeat those words, using his own voice and inflections. The woman never realized that the words coming out of the mouth of the man in front of her were being formed by another mind, and that she was in fact talking to someone she could neither see nor hear.

Things got more complicated. Milgram stepped away from the microphone, and another person took his place, continuing the conversation through the Cyranoid. The woman never noticed the difference. Then another person took the mike -- in the span of a few minutes, the woman spoke to three people.

"It's a way of testing person perception," he explains. "It would be interesting to see, for instance, wether or not anyone would notice if you had an 85 year old woman speaking through the body of a 15 year old boy. Or you could test prejudice. Put a black man in a white man's skin."

DOWNLOAD the OMNI INTERVIEW with STANLEY MILGRAM

Filed in: Social Control

1980 Jaques Vallee Interview with Omni Magazine

Posted Jul 06, 2007

A BIG THANK YOU to Pirx for providing us with this scan. If you're unfamiliar with Jacques Vallee, start right here. If you are familiar with Vallee, you don't need any further introduction. What follows is some choice excerpts from the interview, concluded by a link to the original scan in .pdf format. Enjoy.

Omni: Why do you think people are bored?

Vallee: While the public is becoming increasingly interested in the subject, it is bored with the obsolete question of wether UFOs are real or not. It's a little bit like asking if Jesus Christ existed or not. You'll find ten scholars on any campus who will "prove" to you that Jesus never existed, and you will find ten more who will "prove" that he did, all using the same documents. It's an interesting question for those few scholars, but it's not an interesting question for the rest of us, because -- historically, socially, culturally and so on -- Christianity has been a fact of life for centuries.

In a particular society, if enough people believe in something, then that something exists. To paraphrase one of the founders of modern sociology, "If men believe something to be real, then it is real in it's consequences." The expectation is there. That's what I've called conditioning. Wether the conditioning comes from an outside source or wether it comes from Earth, from the old human culture, or even from the collective unconscious as Jung suggested -- wherever it comes from, the expectation is there. We expect social changes to come from this belief, maybe even historical changes. That's the new perspective I've tried to explore in this book [Messengers of Deception], through a total departure from the methods I've used before.

Omni: Didn't it subsequently irritate you when you heard so many UFO supporters arguing about the numerous cover-ups that were going on? There's always a UFO fan who goes on about how the Air Force has secret files.

Vallee: That was characteristic of UFO believers in the United States, especially in the Fifties, when a group called National Investigation Committe on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and its leader, Major Donald E. Keyhoe, were trying to get congressional hearings to expose the "coverup." It seemed to me there were much better things to do, such as study the phenomena itself.

When I was compiling the catalog of landings that is the appendix to my book Passport to Magonia, I found that I had much better access to the files of the air force than to those of the UFO groups. Those groups were allegedly set up by citizens anxious to reveal the truth, but they have never published their data, for purely egotistical reasons. If you go through my catalog, you'll find more cases of UFO landings from the Air Force than you will from any one of the amateur UFO groups. So that says something.

Omni: With all these possibilities in mind, what are your plans for the future?

Vallee: In a sense, I'm just beginning. There is a tremendous sense of excitement about this. I finance my own research now, having left all the groups I ever belonged to. I find I can cover much more ground with my own resources and my spare time. I now work with a very small group of scientists. I try to control the information very critically. And I try to work only on cases that have not been publicized, have not been reported to newspapers, and have not been looked at by the UFO groups.

DOWNLOAD JACQUES VALLEE'S OMNI INTERVIEW

EXTRACTING WATER FROM AIR: A PATENT AND A PROJECT

?People have been trying to figure out how to do this for years, and we just came out of left field in response to Darpa," said Abe Sher, chief executive officer of Aqua Sciences. ?The atmosphere is a river full of water, even in the desert. It won't work absolutely everywhere, but it works virtually everywhere."

Sher said he is ?not at liberty" to disclose details of the government contracts, except that Aqua Sciences won two highly competitive bids with ?some very sophisticated companies."

He also declined to comment on how the technology actually works.

?This is our secret sauce," Sher said. ?Like Kentucky Fried Chicken, it tastes good, but we won't tell you what's in it."

Ever since we first read about Abe Sher and Aqua Sciences, it's been a priority mission to reverse-engineer the miraculous "Water from Air" machine. Aqua Sciences made the news for their "mobile freshwater generation systems," which they're selling to FEMA, DARPA, and the US Military. After all, on a planet where over a billion people are constantly ill because they can't access safe, drinkable water -- selling something like this to the highest bidder is just unforgivable.

But we're not down with the "bitch and whine" activist crowd -- Abe Sher will do what Abe Sher will do. And what we will do, is put Abe Sher outta business. Towards that end, we're going to "open source" our project to some extent, starting with sharing a patent we tracked down. Bizarrely, the second half of the diagrams on this patent are hand-drawn, horribly and illegibly. This is most odd, because it indicates those images were substituted after the patent was accepted and filed -- it's highly unlikely that the US Patent Office would have accepted something so amateur to begin with. Strange happenings afoot.

DOWNLOAD PATENT 7,053,934 -- "Device for Collecting Water from Air"

Filed in: Future Tech

Manuel De Landa on “Policing the Spectrum”

Posted Jul 06, 2007 1 comment

"Unlike the analyst, who deals only with simple forms of camouflage, the spy operates in a veritable hall of mirrors, in which several levels of intrigue and dissimulation interact. And unlike the intelligence analyst, whose performance can be evaluated by his failure or success in making patterns rise to the surface, the activities of spies and counterspies take place in such deep secrecy that making a rational evaluation of their performance is often impossible. This has tended to create an aura of "mysticism" around espionage agencies, giving spies the feeling of belonging to a secret caste of initiated individuals who have exclusive access to "esoteric" knowledge. Their successes and failures can only be judged by people having access to this inner sanctum."

"For this reason the photoanalysts at the CIA and the cryptologists at the NSA have to operate in a very different environment than their colleagues in think tanks like the RAND Corporation. RAND was originally created in 1946 as a mathematicians' think tank, designed to apply the tools of Operations Research and game theory to the problems of warfare, and it has remained pretty much a technocrat's stronghold ever since. Analysts at the CIA/NSA, on the other hand, must work together with clandestine operators, in charge of sabotage, assassination and psychological warfare, and with spy managers, who put together and maintain networks of infiltrators and informers. The atmosphere of excessive secrecy created by these two characters affects in many ways the performance of the analytical component of the intelligence agency. This is not to say that the work of the analyst is unrelated to the world of secrecy and security measures. Rather, it is as if there were two kinds of secrecy, one with a valid military function and another that has a negative effect on the internal workings of the war machine."

"Almost without exception secret service organizations have thrived in times of turbulence and, conversely, have seen their power vanish as turmoil slows. For this reason they survive by inciting social turbulence, spreading rumors and inventing imaginary enemies, fifth columns, and bomber and missile gaps. They need to keep society in constant alert, in a generalized state of fear and paranoia, in order to sustain themselves. This has led to the development of a gigantic "espionage industry," whose entire existence is based on a bluff few governments dare to call:

The agencies justify their peacetime existence by promising to provide timely warning of a threat to national security.... Over the years intelligence agencies have brainwashed successive governments into accepting three propositions that ensure their survival and expansion. The first is that in the secret world it may be impossible to distinguish success from failure. A timely warning of attack allows the intended victim to prepare. This causes the aggressor to change its mind; the warning then appears to have been wrong. The second proposition is that failure can be due to incorrect analysis of the agency's accurate information.... The third proposition is that the agency could have offered timely warning had it not been starved of funds. In combination, these three propositions can be used to thwart any rational analysis of an intelligence agency's performance, and allow any failure to be turned into a justification for further funding and expansion."

DOWNLOAD "POLICING THE SPECTRUM"

1 comment

Filed in: 5GW Project 2008