#61313 - 11/12/11 02:28 AM
Re: What are you reading right now?
[Re: PrinceOfBabalon]
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Wicked Satanist
member
Registered: 10/23/07
Posts: 244
Loc: Michigan
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Sounds delicious. If you could get them uploaded I'd love to take a look.
if it's OK with the moderators, I'll share on here.
I'm not a moderator but I am sure there will be no problems as long as the credit is given where credit is due. If the material is Copywritten, they need to be made known as well.
_________________________
Forever in Darkness,
Timothy
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#61980 - 11/28/11 08:27 PM
Re: What are you reading right now?
[Re: ceruleansteel]
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capcap
stranger
Registered: 11/25/11
Posts: 11
Loc: Australia
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I've been reading, "How to read a book" by Mortimer J. Adler.
I saw it in an antique shop on the book rack. The title caught my attention. At first I laughed, then put it back, being cautions not to waste money. But I was drawn back to it, because I could sense there was more to it. The tone seemed to say, "you think you know; but you don't".
Being a teacher who teaches young students, I am all to familiar with the 8 year old who knows everything I have to tell them already, so I thought that if this book has something to offer me it will be because I was a humble student and asking to be taught.
I recommend this book. Perhaps moreso to a Satanist than the average public.
The book is extremely slow reading, however there are also sections that were concisely poignant, and so far have stuck with me and influencing my life outside reading.
The goal of this book is to explicitly describe a method that is ideal (perhaps not even achievable completely). The method allows a reader to say "I understand" this book.
I enjoyed the slightly arrogant tone of this book because I find it funny, but also because I appreciate it when 'a teacher' who knows something, tries to convey knowledge 'to a student' who has no understanding, but ends up coming across as if he is saying nothing and repeating themselves.
It's hard to describe, but any one who is trained in a field will tell you, that the more trained they are the more they realise that they are only a novice.
Review it on amazon, and if it seems like your thing pick it up. It is an extremely slow read so take that into consideration.
The book could have been about 95% as effective while being half as long.
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#62688 - 12/16/11 06:16 PM
Re: What are you reading right now?
[Re: Sloan]
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dust-e sheytoon
member
Registered: 08/23/11
Posts: 206
Loc: NYC
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Currently reading: "God Is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens.
Rest in Peace Mr. Hitchens.
I just finished "The Eighth Tower" by John Keel, and I'm about to start,
"The Cycles of Heaven: Cosmic Forces and What They Are Doing To You" by Guy Playfair and Scott Hill. (Thanks for the recommendations, you know who you are!)
I'm also reading "The Secret History of the World" by Mark Booth, and
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture" by Harold Goldberg
_________________________
Fly for your lives! A great magician comes! He summons armies from the earth itself! ~ ArabianNights
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#62715 - 12/17/11 11:30 PM
Re: What are you reading right now?
[Re: capcap]
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Autodidact
member
Registered: 01/23/10
Posts: 428
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I've been reading, "How to read a book" by Mortimer J. Adler.
If you will search back, you will see this book has been recommended before on this forum.
I agree with your description, and, as you're a teacher, hope your students pick something up as well - if there's one thing this society needs, it's more critical thinkers.
_________________________
An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?
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#62728 - 12/18/11 02:12 PM
Re: What are you reading right now?
[Re: RAIDER]
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Michael A.Aquino
senior member
Registered: 09/28/08
Posts: 2480
Loc: San Francisco, CA, USA
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I'm reading "The Discoverers". This book is not about empires and battles, but about ideas ie; the creation of species, the seven day week.....and how ideas like these help shape our view of the world. Basically it's about man taking the reigns from Nature in terms of defining our experience of time, reality, and the world we live in...........pretty freakin' awesome book.
Daniel Boorstin is a savvy fellow; see this.
As to "how to read a book", I would think that depends upon the type of book it is: cookbook, Bible, novel, textbook, encyclopædia, etc. But where "informative" or "argumentative" books are concerned, and when I'm speed-sampling in a bookstore, I start with the dust-jacket flap, then to the table of contents, then Introduction. If my interest is retained, the first chapter [to find out what the author's contention is], and then the last chapter [to find out if he/she thinks it was proved]. If all these tests pass, I consider springing for the book and settling down with it. Here's one that passed: John A., by the way is a retired Army colonel, a good friend, and the original of the George Clooney character in The Men Who Stare At Goats.]
UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies and Realities
by John B. Alexander, Ph.D.
New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011
- reviewed by Michael A. Aquino, Ph.D.
U.S. Army Space Intelligence Officer 35B3Y (Ret.)
John Alexander had every reason to not write this book. He had a exemplary reputation and international fame as an academician, a scientist, and an Army officer. In the first he was a sought-after participant in numerous scholarly think-tanks and commissions having to do with the sociology of national conflicts. In the second he was the principal pioneer in and advocate of “nonlethal” weaponry and tactics, which are continuing to evolutionize modern military effectiveness. In the third he won his John Wayne spurs in the Green Berets, then went on to become at least the second weirdest officer in the entire Army by investigating out-of-the-box concepts like mental telepathy, remote viewing, and staring down goats. Perhaps most remarkably throughout this Indiana Jones career, John’s outré activities were invariably sanctioned, indeed encouraged by the Pentagon. He always knew just how far to push the envelope without freaking out the government and getting himself retired early.
So why blow it now by opening up the real X-Files? UFOs are notorious as a career-wrecker and reputation-destroyer, except of course in Hollywood. If you even hint that you believe in them, you’re stamped a wacko, even if you’re President of the United States. Yet if you debunk them, you’re consigned to only a slightly lesser Dante circle as a closed-minded knuckle-dragger who is clueless about the mathematical-probability for intelligent otherlife in the universe.
So John knew what he was getting into. If you take on this topic, he warns in his Prologue, be prepared for lots of tomatoes from both sides of the fence, and don’t quit your day job. And welcome to “the Conspiracy” for the rest of your life.
The world’s greatest explorers, however, don’t look behind curtains, pry up rocks, and sail over the edge of the ocean for fame or fortune, but rather because like authentic artists they are driven to it by a restless obsession with the truth. Luckily for the rest of us, John happens to be the only human on the planet who has the resources, the smarts, and the communications skills to wrestle with this hydra and stomp it. Really, finally stomp it.
The first thing a UFO book needs in order to be taken seriously is an insurance policy - in this case nineteen testimonials right behind the front cover from a phalanx of multistar-generals, Nobel-level scientists, and aerospace industrialists assuring you that this is indeed a sound book. Unsurprisingly none of them goes quite so far as to personally shake hands with ET, except one or two space cadets whose tails are visibly wagging at this heretofore-only-dreamed-of vindication. Famous UFOlogist Jacques Vallee kicks off the volume with a Foreword, Tom Clancy adds his colorful blessing, and then John’s on his own.
This book isn’t a narrative or a history; it’s a briefing. It takes topic after topic, iterates the facts, and draws direct, deductive conclusions from them. If your time is even more limited in your personal Oval Office, each chapter ends with a summary of its essential points. You can eat this entire book in 30 minutes if you want to.
But I’m telling you now: once you get into it, you’re going to want to read every word, because there is no wasted verbiage here. Everything in the book is essential to its investigation’s being both authoritative and definitive. Nothing is ignored, nothing swept/left under the rug.
John begins with a tour of the Intelligence Community and Defense Department. Each agency, service, or office recites the same polite/cautious/safe mantra: “Of course we’re always interested in the concept, but it’s really not our job nor responsibility, and accordingly we don’t have any official opinion/position.” This was to be expected, but the significant thing here is that they’re saying it not just to the general public outside the FOIA Green Door, but to a respected/trusted one of their own.
Indeed that Green Door is now firmly shut, the consequence of about half of all FOIA requests continuing to demand UFO sneakrets. The overwhelmed recipients have adroitly dealt with this by at least officially declining to add any new X-Files to their libraries, allowing them to just rubberstamp-remail the Same Old Stuff instead.
John’s exhaustive interviews result in the book’s first surprise: that there is no Conspiracy, because there’s neither interest in nor tasking to run one. There was no Majestic-12 brain trust to be found, which the author considered so inconvenient to his research that years ago he started a real one of his own - the “Advanced Theoretical Physics Project”, revealed for the first time in this book and doubtless destined for its own spooky mythology henceforth.
There are actually two possible explanations for the government’s benign disinterest. The first, which is John’s not-unreasonable conclusion, is that decades of UFO encounters have not produced anything remotely threatening to the United States. Until one of H.G. Wells’ Martian war machines actually torches Los Angeles, there is no point in worrying about mere playful buzzing of startled 747s.
The other explanation is that there is no concern because the government knows the credible sightings are of our own UFOs: Black Program test aircraft to which no one’s going to fess up this side of the TS/MJ compartment. Curiously, John’s book omits investigation into this possibility. In this scenario, UFOs are created right here and flown by Earth creatures or remote control (as per today’s UAV “drones”). Attributing accidental sightings of such vehicles to ETs is thus just a popular fantasy resulting from sci-fi novels & films, serving to make those who speak appear foolish or fakes, and to dissuade community pillarpersons concerned about their careers and reputations from saying anything at all.
So from where would Earth-UFOs have come, who would be playing with them, and why should this be of serious intelligence interest? A short Mulder & Scully sidebar is necessary before we get to the piece de resistance of John’s book:
The story begins in Nazi Germany (where else?), wherein first the Luftwaffe and later the SS sponsored a number of capers into experimental technologies. The most [in]famous and successful of these were of course the V1] & V2 guided missiles. Less well-known but quite verified were the breakthrough jet and rocket fighter aircraft, the ME-262 and ME-163. Secret to the point of legend was a program entitled “the Bell”, whose purpose was to develop a new propulsion system based upon reaction to the Earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields by a twin-counterrotating gyroscope spinning at speeds so extreme as to require specially-developed liquid coolant, somewhat similar to that required by Cray supercomputers. Hence the “Bell” was not an antigravity device per se, but rather one which overcame gravity through generation of a powerful gyroscopic field. The intended eventual application of this system was an aircraft engine utilizing this same “plasma torus” principle, which would have required a circular vehicle to house the centrifuge, and of course - since it would be gyroscopically-driven - neither wings nor tail: a “flying saucer” capable of tremendous speeds and instantaneous direction-changes. Just coincidentally the Germans happened to be working on several such saucer designs before V-E Day brought all this to a halt.
Yet another German research project had to do with long-range disruption of enemy aircraft electronics.[Cf. U.S. Arny Air Forces, Luftwaffe Secret Technology, extract in Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point (NY: Broadway, 2001), pages #70-71.] And so we have neatly punched the tickets of all of the elements of John Alexander’s confirmed sightings and instrument detections/disruptions.
Following V-E Day there was a mad scramble by the various Allies to gobble up as much German technology as they could find, even if they didn’t yet know what some of it was. The U.S.A. got the lion’s share through Operation Paperclip, most notably Wernher von Braun and his V2s, but also such gonzo aircraft as the Horton 229 Flying Wing, leading to the American Northrop YB-49 and eventually to the B2 Stealth Bomber.
The German flying saucer technology went first to Canada, where in 1953 the Avro Company was revealed to have been working on a hopefully 1,500-mph saucer driven not by the Bell device but just a large VTOL conventionally-powered fan. After a few frustratingly-comic years of the poor Avrocar floundering around barely off the ground, Canada was only too happy to dump its flying saucer program on the United States in 1954, whereupon it was reenergized as Project Silver Bug. Its proposed Y2 saucer would be driven by a much more powerful radial-flow gas turbine (RFGT) engine, still absent the Bell technology. Project Silver Bug quietly faded from public view in the late 1950s, which is not the same thing as saying the fat lady sang over its grave.
So we now have the footprint of the UFO sightings and encounters for which John Alexander’s UFOs needed an explanation: Black technology, still Black, and much of it potentially far more bizarre than Stealth.
But this historical hot rod show is really just the teaser. The big question raised, and conclusively answered by John’s book has rather to do with humanity’s conspicuous need for real ETs, indeed to the extent that almost any conceivable phenomenon can be interpreted as evidence of their presence here and interest in us [or at least our cattle and crop-fields].
Humans are social creatures, and societies need bonding devices: fear to unify the community, hope for a messianic or utopian rescue from an increasingly-discouraging future, and religious belief to order morality. ETs fit conveniently into all three equations. If they’re coming to eat or exterminate us, we need to shelve our petty planetary squabbles and unite to survive. If they’re nice chaps who can cool global warming, pacify the Middle East, and save the whales, the sooner they touch down the better.
The third need is the most intriguing, so much so that John’s wife Victoria conducted a special survey regarding it preparatory for this book: What effect would arriving ETs have on Earth’s mainstream (and humancentric) religions? The somewhat surprising answer from her research: not much. Believers would just tend to assign the newcomers an additional supporting role in God’s master plan. Chaos would not ensue. Indeed, as the book continues, it is the atheists who would be most confounded by a Close Encounter, since they have tended to relegate ETism to surrogate-religion status.
So the emerging picture from UFOs is not one of are-They/aren’t-They-here, but rather of a global phenomenon of human psychology: a PSYOP campaign without anyone actually running it. Much like the traditional circus coming to town, it thrills us, scares us, and certainly alleviates boredom. John Alexander isn’t about to stare it down; like everyone else, he’s having way too much fun with it.
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