RUSSIA: EVERYTHING CHANGES AND EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME…

Russia has in the last 12 years changed almost unrecognisably from that grim, despairing place following the fall of communism. The turning point was, in many respects, when Vladimir Putin took over from the vodka-sozzled rule of Boris Yeltsin. Yet 12 years on it’s clear now that Putin is the natural successor, not to Boris Yeltsin, but to Leonid Brezhnev. In many ways it is like other westernised societies in its big cities and the lifestyles of their inhabitants, but in other ways Russia appears to be going back to its cold war past.

Inwardly state brutality is now employed as the response to those who do not do its bidding or who criticise its ways, as seen early on with the murder of journalist Anya Politkovskaya.  Its rule of law is used by the State to crack down on its opponents in any shape or form as with the utterly pointless and heartless imprisonment of 3 harmless members of punk rock outfit Pussy Riot. The intimidation of businessmen and the targeting of opposition politicians like Yevgenia Chinikova and Alexie Navalny, illustrates that Putin’s Russia is increasingly a place of political intolerance.

Laws have been passed aimed at curtailing freedoms and preventing the free exchange of ideas not in synchrony with the state’s own desired version of the world.. Corruption is rampant and foreign enterprises are increasingly reluctant to invest in or relocate to Russia, as BP is finding out to its peril.

Then there are its vast security apparatus. The KGB was always a chilling embodiment of the dark security state. It would be wrong to say it is now back for it never really went away; it’s just emerging from the shadows with a changed acronym – the FSB. Like the KGB before it, and the NKVD, OCPU, GPU and Cheka before that, the FSB is increasingly the hammer used by Putin’s state to beat, smear and intimidate its opponents into submission.

The FSB’s lineage is long and sinister; stretching back to Lenin and his director of secret police, “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, his notorious remark “We represent in ourselves organized terror” embodied Communism’s legalized murder of untold millions of its citizens.  Whilst it would be wrong to equate modern Russia as currently being organised and run through a comparable level of state terror, its direction of travel over the past few years is not towards a more tolerant and open society, but instead back towards where this past lies.

Externally too, Russia under Putin, is steadily becoming more intransigent and bitter. Its invasion of tiny Georgia bore all the hallmarks of a crass, bullying and arrogant regional power. It’s blocking of any moves to deal with the situation in Syria verges on political perversion. It is as if there is no limit to the cost in blood it will see others pay if it means snubbing the West or holding on to its naval facilities in that ruined country.

 

Like all politicians, Putin plays to his home gallery. Although suspicions are that he rigged the last election, it is one he would still have won, relying upon a vast non-urban vote which sees him as having brought, with some legitimacy, stability and a measure of prosperity to their vast country. Yet, not unlike a paranoid dictator, nothing can be left to chance, the outcome to the game of democracy must be guaranteed beforehand.

 

When Putin came to power in 2000 there was a sense of optimism; here was a man to lead Russia into the modern age out of the chaos of the post-communist era. To an extent this has been done by the ruthless exploitation of Russia’s vast natural resources. Yet there has been minimal investment in the modern technological and industrial infrastructure to support a long term economy. Perhaps this is not something to worry about today. Tomorrow, though, will come.

 

But Putin has other plans. With his KGB background Putin has more in common with the old USSR. For him, democracy is at best a tool to legitimise the exercise of central power, at worst a frustrating threat to the ruler’s prerogative to do as he pleases for as long as he likes. Putin’s problem though, is that now too many Russians are part of the modern world, especially those in its cities, and scorned as liberals and elitists. Russia’s urbanised citizens are increasingly part of a new, challenging world the state cannot control, cannot banish by decree and does not appear to understand.

 

Earlier this month tens of thousands demonstrated against the Government on the streets of Moscow. They are part of the wave of the future that threatens to wash away the huge, crumbling dam wall of state control. Yet unlike the demonstrations elsewhere in Europe, where angry mobs vent their fury at the austerity they knew was coming and which has been introduced by the Governments they voted into power, the demonstrators on Russia’s streets require real, true courage. They do not have legions of lawyers and barricades of human rights legislation to ensure their safety. Russia’s demonstrators show their resolve in the face of a state machine that cares not for their rights or well-being; their only shield being their access, still in place, to social media, the internet and the world's savage media spotlight of which even Putin must for now remain as least slightly wary.

Russia’s history of the last 100 years is unique in terms of the terrors visited upon them by their rulers. It is now at a cross roads. Putin would drag them back towards the past. Those on its streets are engaged in a brave and high risk attempt to stop him from doing so…………….

 

 Also see "Putin - Not a punk rock fan"

2012 STARMAP OF DOOM: ALIENS, ASTEROIDS AND DOOMSDAY: ITS ALL IN THE MIND

The date is the 21 December 2012. That is when an event, momentous in its implications for the human race, is due to occur and which will entail a catastrophe in 2013 and 2014.

This is according to a “researcher” and author of these sorts of doomsday scenarios, called Marshall Masters, who used to work for CNN. Along with several books, Masters has produced a slick video viewable on line, in which he talks through his predictions and beliefs. Briefly, in his video Masters seems to be claiming, that a comet or sort of rouge nomadic planet called Planet X (or the Destroyer, Hercobulus, Nibiru amongst other names), is heading towards us and will pass earth in a sort of “near miss” on 21 December this year.

This near miss will apparently cause a sudden shift in the earth’s pole which will result in all sorts of terrible things happening (that part of the prediction would no doubt be true). Although Masters doesn’t give much detail in his video, this is a pretty well-worn doomsday scenario that mistakenly assumes that there would be a very sudden pole reversal which would momentarily leave Earth without the magnetic field that protects us. We would be left to the mercy of solar flares and sun storms and that would toast anyone wandering around without sunscreen, or not hunkered down in a bunker.

As he goes on to explain, the confirmation that this is all imminent is drawn by Masters from his analysis of a crop circle in 2008 near Avebury, which is not far from Stonehenge in the UK. If you stand at Avebury on 21 December then, so Masters believes, a second sun will appear in the sky. This is the arrival of our rogue Planet X.

In his video he talks of friendly and hostile aliens. Masters says he believes the Avebury crop circle was created by an alien intelligence to warn us of this event. These aliens are apparently the good guys, because they are warning us about the alien “bad guys” who will return at the time of this event. These bad guys are known as the Anunnaki, and apparently live on Planet X and are a reptilian super race.

There is cross over here with David Icke, who also has his reptilian fixations. Both think we are a genetically engineered slave race created by these Alien bad guys.  These doom-filledpredictions appear to be broadly drawn from the ancient creation myths of Babylon and Mesopotamia.

Masters call on others to support his contentions. Not scientists or astronomers, who would add some weight to his wild theories if they could confirm the approach of planet X on or about 21 December 2012. Instead Masters falls back on the predictable like the Mayan calendar. The Mayan Calendar also been used to claim 21 December is a special date.  Masters doesn’t mention that the Mayans believed a year was 360 days long and did not know about leap years. However the Mayan calendar already has great traction with new agers and Doomsday scenario junkies – indeed, the current theories to do with the arrival of Planet X may have been cast so as to conveniently dovetail with the Mayan’s calendar to add more weight to the theories.

Masters also resurrects the ghost of infamous American psychic Edgar Cayce in building support for the 2012 doomsday event. Cayce made lots of predictions, most of which never came true. Cayce never spoke specifically about 2012, but rather his predictions were supposedly going to happen by the year 1998. Perhaps he was being advised by mischievous spirits who deliberately confused him. Anyhow, being 14 years too early is not a matter to bother Masters and he merrily quotes Cayce as evidence for his 21 December theories.

Masters unfolds his prediction in his video, which comes complete with the normal pseudo-scientific trapping, such as pictures of shining pyramids and spaceships flying over them and the drawing of conclusions based upon the most circumstantial and flimsy of “facts”; the sort of stuff to get any conspiracy theorist’s pulse racing.

Inevitably, he discovers “evidence” of a Government cover-up (in the form of no real evidence of it – a sort of logic that is equivalent to saying that invisible teapots must exist if you can’t see them (paraphrasing Bertram Russell for a moment), taking the adverse inference to almost cosmic lengths. He claims that incontrovertible evidence of this was that an internet site hosting pictures of the Avebury crop circle site vanished (that’s the evidence of Government interference) and then reappeared again without explanation. It’s all very mysterious to the goggling Mr Masters but not to casual observers.
Masters voices over all this in clear, unemotional tones which lending some respectability to the incredulous predictions he makes. Bespectacled, balding and with the air of a lecturer, he intones like a scientist talking about his research into DNA.  For all that, Masters is genuine in what he believes yet is but one of many taken in by the tantalizing attraction of the pseudo-scientific.  Mixing ancient creation myth with selected extracts of modern science (in this case what would happen in the “almost impossible” scenario of a very sudden polar shift or the terrifying consequences of a major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault line say) a superficially compelling alternative is put forward to the normal scientific narrative.

Masters is “sure” of a government cover up. With a mind set in lock down on this point, Masters would see any attempts to argue there wasn’t as confirmation of his views. In one unintentionally hilarious quip, he sanctimoniously tells “religious fundamentalists” that they have got it wrong, believing that his fictions trump theirs.

Whilst much of it is so obviously far-fetched to make serious questioning all but a waste of time, there were 2 questions that intrigued me.

 
1. Why would aliens communicate via Crop circles? Why not just land your space ship on the White House lawn, and hold a press conference. That, or some other similar display of power, would leave no room for doubt.

2. Why haven’t astronomers and scientists noted the approach of Planet X? It must be well within their range by now if it’s got to be here by 21 December. After all, it was amateur astronomers (not Governments) who, back in 1994, discovered that the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet was going to collide with Jupiter. Presumably astronomers would spot incoming Planet X.

I’ve asked this question more than once. Why do people believe this stuff? What neurological or psychological constructs in our minds predispose us to accept as a form of reality those scenarios which, with a little clear though and analysis, we would soon see through?

Is this some residue from our most primitive past? As we developed the capacity for thought and as our brains and minds developed, so too we would have started to dream. For primitives confronting visions and scenes that seemed very different to the grimness of the short brutal lives we lived in those early millennia, this must have been difficult to understand or explain. How did we make sense of those dreams, how did we link them to our realities? Perhaps, therein is the basis of our earliest beliefs, myths and original religions as we sought to explain these strange nightly visions. It may be that we are not just naturally gullible then – perhaps, neurologically, in a way we don’t yet understand, we can’t help ourselves but naturally want to believe these fantastic tales.

Scientist Carl Sagan wrote an excellent book about the compelling power of pseudo-science, which he called the Demon Haunted World. Whilst he is long gone now, he would be saddened to know that, even in the 21 Century, demons, aliens and monsters still seemingly remain alive in our minds to walk with us all the days of our lives.