Sunday, March 2, 2014

Red Haired Mummies of China

ARCHEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

In the Takla Makan Desert in central Asia, mummies of non-Asian peoples were found. The mummies are dated to be 3,800 years old.

Builders along the Silk Road were know as the Tocharians 2,000 years ago. Were they related to the Mummy People?




 
from BurlingtonNews Website


A Tocharian man with red-blond hair; his clear European features still visible after nearly 3,500 years in his desert grave in China.
Recent excavations in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang province have uncovered more than 100 naturally mummified corpses of people who lived there between 4,000 and 2,400 years ago, indicating that the Aryan race of red and blonde hair with blue eyes lived in this area at one time.

The bodies were amazingly well preserved by the arid climate, and according to the New York Times:
"...archaeologists could hardly believe what they saw."
The mummies had long noses and skulls, blond or red hair, thin lips, deepest eyes, and other unmistakably Aryan features. Dr. Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania said,
"Because the Tarim Basin Caucasoid corpses are almost certainly representatives of the Indo-European family, and because they date from a time period early enough to have a bearing on the expansion of the Indo-European people from their homeland, it is thought that they will play a crucial role in determining just where that might have been."
One such mummy of a teenaged girl with blond hair and blue yes, found in a cave, has become quite a tourist attraction in Beijing. She has been nicknamed "The Lady of Tarim" and she is on display to throngs of museum visitors in the Chinese capital.

Apparently she was a princess or a priestess of some kind over 3,000 years ago, for she was buried in fine embroidered garments of wool and leather, along with beautiful jewelry, jars and ornaments of gold, silver, jade and onyx. Her remains are in such a remarkable state of preservation that the dead girl looks as if she were just sleeping.




A Tocharian female mummy with long flaxen blond hair, perfectly preserved in ponytails. Items of weaved material, identical to Celtic cloth




One of the most famous Tocharian mummies found, the so-called "Beauty of Loulan"; and her face, to the right, as reconstructed by an artist.




Close-up of a Tocharian male, and to the right is a swastika decoration found on a clay bowl recovered from the Tocharian grave sites. The swastika was part of the original Indo-European language, meaning "well being". It seems that this symbol was universally accepted as such.





A search of a museum reveals a young woman with an overbite, which is European in nature, and a elderly man with reddish hair.

They also find woolen textiles woven into twill and tartan patterns in blue, white, and red. Similar to the Celtic tartans from Northwest Europe. Scientific reconstruction of the heads of the mummies produces a face that strongly resembles ancient Celts and Saxons.

The mummy people used the wheel long before it was known in China, and may have played a role in introducing it to Chinese civilization.

There are 3,000-year-old rock engravings similar to ones in Bulgaria and the Ukraine. The characters have long noses, long faces and round eyes. According to the ancient Chinese, the European nomads had red hair, bluish-green eyes and had long noses.




DNA EVIDENCE

In, The World's first DNA PCR investigation of Biological Evidence from an Alien Abduction, by Bill Chalker, Anomaly Physical Evidence Group (APEG)
we find that a Sydney, Australia abduction experience from 1992, with biological evidence, became the subject of the world's first DNA PCR "alien abduction" related investigation, yielding intriguing results that have suggested fascinating new lines of investigation and speculation... (For the complete story click HERE.)

The original DNA work was done on the shaft of the hair recovered from an ET by the abductee. Anomalies were found in the root of the hair. Two types of DNA were found depending on where the mitochondrial DNA testing occurs, namely confirming a RARE CHINESE TYPE DNA in the hair shaft and indicating a rare possible BASQUE/GAELIC type DNA in the root section.

The hair sample seems to show it contains 2 deleted genes for CCR5 protein and no intact gene for normal undeleted CCR5 - this CCR5 deletion factor has been implicated in aids resistance.

The nature of these genetic findings has lead to some interesting possible connections with ancient cultures, myths and archaeological finds such as the strange Taklamakan mummies in China (tall European like peoples with red hair.... some of whom had blonde hair) - see above insert.
 



MYTHOLOGICAL AND LEGENDS

The stories of the female Basque God Mari and the Gaelic Irish tales of the Tuatha da Danann. The Tuatha tales describe powerful gods with orange or blonde hair and other unusual attributes.

Mari - the neolithic Goddess of Old Europe and the primary deity in Basque mythology - has many manifestations, including "as a tree that looks like a woman or a tree emitting flames", "a white cloud or rainbow, or a ball of fire in the air", a "sickle of fire, as which she appears crossing the sky" and "seen enveloped in fire, lying down horizontally, moving through the air".

The records from ancient Ireland describe a whole series of invasions. The "Lebor Gabala Erren" ("The Book of the Taking of Ireland"), compiled during the 12th century A.D. describes the coming of the mysteriousTuatha de' Danann or Tribe of Danu. They were apparently tall, blond or red-haired strangers, "expert in the arts of pagan cunning", who supposedly interbred with the locals, while teaching them many kinds of useful skills.

The Lebor Gabala records their dramatic entrance to Ireland as follows:
"In this wise they came, in dark clouds from northern islands of the world. They landed on the mountains of Conmaicne Rein in Connachta, and they brought a darkness over the sun for three days and three nights. Gods were their men of arts, and non-gods their husbandmen."

A gold ship model from 1st century BC
Broighter, Ireland.


There are many stories of aerial ships or "demon ships" ("loinger demnacda") in the Irish annuals.

According to the mythic tales the Tuatha de' Danann were advanced enough to arrive in western Ireland (near modern Connacht) by air. They divided into two social classes:
  1. "gods" as teachers of medicine, smithing, communication or druidry
  2. "non-gods" as farmers or shepherds
Although no one knows for certain what the Tuatha looked like, descriptions, such as of their female war-leader Eriu, indicate tall attractive people with pale skin, high foreheads, long red hair and large blue eyes.

Other descriptions indicate blonde, golden hair with blue eyes. The blonde haired woman in the 1957 abduction of Antonio Villas Boas also had red body hair (pubic hair). She seems remarkably like Peter's female visitor, of which DNA testing was done, and the description of Eriu.

If the Tuatha cross-bred with local humans, they would have left hybrid descendants who look somewhat like themselves.

Bill Chalker/APEG reports the following:

Many abduction cases exist where alleged biological evidence has been reported. Such events lend themselves to an established forensic DNA profiling technique, which could help establish the credibility of such claims.

Since most abduction cases imply a measure of unwanted assault on the victims of such experiences, a forensic approach towards verification of the alleged perpetrators is desirable. Since DNA is the only building block of life that we know, biological specimens recovered in alleged abduction cases would provide researchers with a clear point of comparison.

A key claim by many abduction researchers is that abductions involve some form of genetic agenda. This scenario would require compatibility between aliens and humans. The claims of sexual encounters are alleged to add further support to this scenario. This very element amongst the extraordinary range of fantastic claims made about abductions is one of major stumbling blocks to the credibility of abduction claims.

Mainstream science argues that if alien life exists it is unlikely to be compatible with human life. Hence any claims to the contrary, such as alien abductions, are regarded as absurd. Therefore this limited and focused DNA profiling technique goes to the very heart of one of key claims behind the alleged alien abduction agenda. It provides an opportunity for testing the credibility of such claims.

If such claims are true then there should be some compatibility in the DNA of alleged alien specimens, but some possible anomalies may be evident that would perhaps not be readily reconciled with measures of human DNA variability. One established way of undertaking this is to undertake such analysis with the goal to establish a precise DNA base sequence of mitochondrial hypervariable region I, spanning nucleotides 16,000 to 16,400 of mitochondrial DNA.

Such DNA is present in hundreds of copies within each human cell, and therefore acts as an easily amplified genetic marker for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), even in moderately degraded samples, i.e. measuring the DNA variability beyond the documented "human consensus" of the region of DNA hypervariability.

This technique has been tested in one abduction case to date, in an investigation undertaken by this writer of a biological sample - a blonde hair - implicated in the abduction milieu of a Sydney man,Peter Khoury, during 1992:
  • "Strange Evidence", International UFO Reporter (IUR), Spring, 1999 issue, Volume 24, No 1, pgs. 3-16, 31.
  • "UFO ABDUCTIONS & SCIENCE - A CASE STUDY OF STRANGE EVIDENCE", Australasian Ufologist, Vol.3, No.3, 3rd, 1999, pgs. 43-56.
The original analysis confirmed the hair came from someone who was biologically close to normal human genetics, but of an unusual racial type - a rare Chinese Mongoloid type - one of the rarest human lineages known, that lies further from the human mainstream than any other except for African pygmies and aboriginals.

There was the strange anomaly of it being blonde to clear instead of black, as would be expected from the Asian type mitochondrial DNA. The original DNA work was done on the shaft of the hair. Fascinating further anomalies were found in the root of the hair. Two types of DNA were found depending on where the mitochondrial DNA testing occurs, namely confirming the rare Chinese type DNA in the hair shaft and indicating a rare possible Basque/Gaelic type DNA in the root section.

This case confirms the utility of the DNA forensic approach, however the real challenge ahead for researchers is to determine if these anomalies are both valid and significant. To do this, researchers in the controversial area of abductions should cooperate with a testing program focused on this specific area of DNA profiling. Testing of a significant number of legitimate samples would provide an opportunity for validation of the unusual anomalies found to date. The further results would add to the database of biological evidence of alleged alien specimens.

Such a strategy could help to determine if aliens are a biological reality and if indeed any are visiting our planet and abducting humans. Perhaps such information could also provide for an interesting perspective on the many stories of Nordic type beings implicated in UFO abduction and contact cases.

The Anomaly Physical Evidence Group (APEG) has been formed to focus attention on biological strategies in abduction investigations. Preliminary funding has facilitated a small laboratory presence addressing this exciting area.

The APEG can be contacted through this writer at P.O. Box 42, West Pennant Hills, NSW, 2125, Australia or via bill_c@bigpond.com

Further funding of this research is encouraged. Please contact Bill Chalker for further details.

Anyone who believes they have legitimate biological evidence implicated in UFO and abduction experiences are encouraged to contact the APEG through Bill Chalker. Any such evidence will need to be assessed for its potential as credible evidence warranting the cost, resources and time involved in this DNA focused study.
 


Yuya, Egyptian nobleman from 1400 BC, father of Tiy, the wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Yuya's blond hair and Nordic facial structure have been well preserved by the embalming process; Alongside, his equally blond haired wife, Thuya, great grandmother of Tutankhamen

Ancient Civilization of a Red Haired Race Found in Peru
Chaucilla, Peru.
 
The earliest art: the Woman from Willendorf, present day Austria,
dating from 30,000 BC.
Late Paleolithic period



How far does man really go back... and where has this man gone to now. Has he moved on to the stars? Has he made claim to the Inner Earth? Does he walk among you?

Highly advanced civilizations have been here before us. They have peaked to their highest level just to be destroyed by some great catastrophe. But for each race that has died out another has taken its place with a selected few holding on to the memories and sacred knowledge of the past race.

Who man is and where he came from has always been the eternal question... Did we come from the stars... or we molded from clay?

Maybe the answer is yes to both. In our vanity we think we have discovered some of the great truths of science and technology... but in fact we are just beginning to re-discover the wisdoms and technologies of races past. The answers to who we are and what our future holds is found by studying our past civilizations. Life is cyclic and so are the Ages of Man.

The purpose of this site is to uncover some of the mysteries and hopefully answer some of our eternal questions. If nothing else... at least uncover the lies that have kept mankind bound in darkness.

How far does 'intelligent' man go back. Some claim over 1 billion years...maybe even further. But in order for us to do an intelligent study we need to throw away the 'myths' of our preconceived evolution i.e. Lucy was not on man's evolutionary scale. Evidence shows that Lucy was an Ape... just as the Java Man was. Although these two examples have been proven as a hoax, some do not want to recognize their mistakes and still go on in search of the 'missing link' between them and man.

Another theory that does not hold water is the 'Out of Africa' Theory.



Skull Dates 1.8 Million Years Old
The moment is indelibly burned into Dato Zhvania's memory.

The archaeological site at the medieval town of Dmanisi, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south-west of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, had already revealed some of its secrets.

He did not know it yet, but in his hands he held the almost perfectly preserved skull of the most ancient human being ever found in Europe - 1.8 million years old.
More extraordinary still, it was about to throw into question all accepted theories about the migration of our ancestors out of Africa. (See Craneos Insolitos)
 


Lemuria (MU) Cradle of Civilization
Churchward goes on to mention that the white people were the dominant group on Mu, (This can be as the rule of thumb in the Israelite tradition as well, through the Tribe of Dan) . In all probability, represented the priestly and patrician class of its population.
"Besides these", he goes on to say, rather enigmatically, that "there were people of other races - people with yellow, brown or black skins. They, however, did not dominate."
This he culled from the Lhasa Record, among many others. According to these ancient manuscripts, the Muvians were great navigators and sailed all over the world - much as the Atlanteans are purported to have done and later Phoenicians, being also a great maritime nation.

They were also reputed to have been great builders, too - another thing they had in common with the Atlanteans and Israelites.

 


OFF WORLDERS AND THE RED HAIRED RACE

I have had scientists and researchers contact me on this site, saying if you could only 'drop the UFO' it would give you more credibility.

They like what I have to say and my theories - but... In answer to this, out of good consciousness I can not drop the theory of UFO and off world visitors - however I do believe that 're-defining alien' should be considered.

To give credence to 'off world' visitation let me offer the following statements and hopefully you will then understand my stance on this issue.

The UFO crash in Roswell has always been a touchy subject for government officials - but touchy or not - truth never goes away and through the years, more and more evidence has come forth to prove that this was an actual event taking place in 1947.

What we do know is the following:
In July 1947, a piloted, maneuverable aerial vehicle, originating off world was recovered with most material going to Wright Patterson Field. Witnesses to the event were heavily intimidated, some of whom I have personally spoken too. And the craft was reversed engineered .

Years after, in 1953, a CIA sponsored Robertson Panel, recommended that the media be used disinformationally to deflect attention from the subject. Media is still being used for this as could be evidenced in the televised 2005 Peter Jennings Report. Civilian UFO groups were infiltrated by CIA according to the Panel's suggestion and private citizens involved in UFO research were illegally spied upon.
What we believe is that the government began investigating, no later than 1958, the possibility that the off world race behind the Roswell crash was one 'parallel' to our own and 'connected' to human life from 'antiquity'. That they may be instead of 'little green men' none other than our 'ancestors' .

From this same period, NASA was formed for space exploration and the 'Brookings Document' speculated that our 'discovery of alien artifacts on MARS, THE MOON and VENUS' was inevitable.

By 1966 the presence of a past celestial race became a CERTAINTY, when Soviet lunar probes photographed regular structures in the SEA OF STORMS and the BLAIR CUSPIDS were discovered in the MOON'S SEA OF TRANQUILITY, the latter being the first landing spot of the APOLLO MISSIONS.

Astronomers' records make it conceivable that limited government study of off world artifacts began decades prior.

It is impossible that the government did not have awareness of our MARTIAN CONNECTION by 1961. Government awareness of the Martian connection continues to be evidenced in the dissembling over the discoveries of the Viking probes in 1976, as well as subsequent Mars probes.

There is every indicator that all world governments know about them and have taken the issue very seriously. HOWEVER, it is debatable as how much information they have and to what influence they would have with it. Elected officials seem to have little knowledge of the subject and are blocked in every instance that they try to gain more.

The military, the intelligence agencies, and the president (by virtue of executive privilege with the NSA) are therefore in a unique position of power in their isolated knowledge of the subject, and potentials for exploitation are immense.

It would seem that the 'off world' visitors reason for being here are little known at this time. It does seem that there is no hostile intent, being that if there were, we would have known it by now. We can base this on their actions. They evade when pursued, fire only when fired upon, and despite unquestionable superiority do not exploit their advantage in any discernible attempt for invasion or conquest.

They are plainly 'unfriendly' towards military buildup. They are monitoring our industrial and military capacity .

We do have abductions and contacts.

One of the purposes of contact seem to be to establish ambassadors between us and them, the indications being that the 'off-worlders' are in the process of gradually preparing our world for a more open relationship with them. Surgery of the abductees seem to be to assist the reproduction program and to secure implants, the probably purpose of the latter being for location in subsequent visits and communications.

Although, there may be other 'off-worlders' out there, it seems the most likeliest candidates for the intelligence behind the crafts we seem to be seeing most, besides our governments black op projects, would be the race historically called 'the gods', under a variety of names, depending upon religion and geography, would be such terms as Anunnaki, Elohim, Nefilim, Watchers, TUATHA DE DANAAN, and the like.

At this time, little or no real evidence, supports any other type of 'off-worlder' visiting us then those of a human type. The greys may be biogenetically engineered clones. - Although we can not rule out other races coming from other worlds - or what we may find in the interior of our planet.

What we do know about this race of TUATHA DE DANAAN is that there was an early generation, along with Earth's human race that appears to have been created initially to be mining slaves and was all but wiped out in a cosmic catastrophe which we refer to as THE FLOOD, approximately 6 to 13, 000 years ago. Many among this early extraterrestrial community became corrupt and subverted our race into criminal behavior like their own.

Survivors from both their race and ours eventually met again, beginning with their re-education of our race in the arts of civilization and the ELIMINATION OF HUMAN SACRIFICE.

At least thee or four generations or different races of technologically advanced people are listed in the CELTIC MYTHOLOGY, with counterparts in other world myths, as well as our own primitive Earthbound race, which they (DANAAN and FOMORIAN) conquered with extreme ease and ruled over in peace for some time before being torn apart themselves by Civil War.

At one point, their fear of our potential to rival them caused them to disperse us over the Earth and 'confuse our speech' . Man became embroiled in their conflicts, which appear to have been between two central gods, political parties or races or combination thereof.

A second world conflagration, apparently nuclear, occurred at some later time (perhaps 4,000 year ago), which may have extended to our Moon and Mars, the latter a base of theirs for at least, the last 450,000 to half a million years if the historian Berossus' dating and that of the Cydonia complex are correct. The conflict went into abatement under terms, but never fully concluded.

Though communications between the space races and our own continued, they were severely curtailed and went underground. Man's civilization degenerated, his science becoming all but nonexistent for hundreds of years. The DANAAN (a collective convention-name to avoid confusion), always jealous of their technology and secrets, were demonized by the various religions that guarded the traditions established by them long ago, since corrupted by man through ignorance.

From active persecution by the Church of contactees between their race and ours in the Dark Ages, man progressed to the point that he dealt with the problem through ridicule or derision by Science instead, in time ascribing the space races to personifications of psychological projections (archetypes), bedtime fables, and sanitized surrogates such as fairies, the boogeyman and Santa Claus.

The DANAAN themselves are reported to be an aristocratic race of hunters, scientists and poets, preferring their privacy and able to make themselves invisible but keeping touch with the human race. Having fought wars of their own in the pat, they are opposed to them now. Their architecture is a marvel in mathematics and engineering beyond our own capacity to do anything more than appreciate.

'MUSIC' is their principal MAGIC - meaning the controlled use of sound waves HARMONICS to lift and move massive objects possibly up to and including planet sized bodies, though the technology probably has its limits. Their megaliths serve a variety of functions, being used for geodetic markers, recorders of mathematical measurements, observatories, and in some cases as military strongholds (at least at one time)

Everything about them is simultaneously simply but complex. Their graphics communicate on at least three levels at the same time, being pictorial, mathematical and verbal. The verbal also communicates on at least two levels at one, almost invariably incorporating puns and double entendres.

When they interact with man, it is through their dreams and in riddles, a pattern consistent with Yahweh in the Bible and a variety of identical gods in all cultures, seeming to prefer inspiring from behind the scenes to any kind of direct communication. When overt contact is necessary, they assume the guise of the Virgin Mary, the Corn Mother, angels, kachinas, or whatever is appropriate for that culture. There is a strong circumstantial evidence for this race's continual intervention on a number of levels in man's development from the crudely physical to the artistic, scientific and esoteric.

They cover their tracks with hypnosis and probably drugs or some other high technology, to cloud the memories of their visitants. Their rituals and ways of life derive from a worship of the harmony of nature and the mastery of the mind of man over it.

There has never been a time in mans history that these people were absent and nothing occurring in today's UFO and abduction phenomena has not been recorded throughout. The only difference today is that there is much more evidence of the encounters, and contact is becoming increasingly visible.

They mythical record the world over speaks of is a Golden Age in which man and the gods (angels) freely and openly interacted, and all such records have prophesied that a time would come when a new Golden Agewould occur, all former secrets being revealed.

Given the tremendous increase of activity on the part of this ancient race, and especially its ongoing and intimately personal nature on a large scale it is not unreasonable to assume that we are presently undergoing the transition into that new Golden Age.
Enoch, 39:1 - "In those days shall the elect and holy race descend from the upper heavens, and their seed shall then be with the sons of men."
There is unquestionably a move on the part of the Danaan to unilaterally disarm the world's military forces. While the common man's reaction to nuclear or environmental threats may have been dulled into a coma, the Dannaan have not.

The frequently reported imagery of nuclear war seen by abductees makes sense, in that light. It would appear that the Danaan are working privately, on an individual grass roots bases, to inform people in opposition to the disinformation the government is spreading and they are in the process of disarming the greatest oppressive power block in the history of man, which is consistent with what they have always done.

Where the Danaan originated from is the question - not 'do they exist and that they are here.' For that, I have already explained and the answer - if you haven't figured it out yet - is 'yes' .

Evidence appears equally strong for their planet of origination being inside or outside our solar system, though simple logic would favor the former. The Danaan could have begun on Mars and moved to Earth in antiquity, the evidence being that the ruins on that planet are a half million years old, or Mars may merely be one of their bases.

Possible pole shifts on Earth further confuse the question of whether this race may have started on Mars or Venus. The demolished remains that comprise the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, mythically referred to as Tiamat, are another credible possibility.

Given our limited understanding of the planets, it is also possible that they came from an outer body in our system. An Upper, Lower, and Middle World being common to most mythologies, available myths can be read as indicating that a white race originally came to the Middle World of Earth from the Upper World of Venus, and established another colony of their own on (or in) the Lower Worlds of Mars, all of which have served as homes at various times.

It is possible that they came from Sirius l, Orion or the Pleiades, but the evidence of their use of three stage rockets in ancient Egypt would seem to indicate their technology at that time insufficient to navigate farther than the closest planets.

The ancient race could have originated within our system and later developed sufficient technology to conquer the stars, or come from beyond and suffered dire setback due to unforeseen catastrophe, having to rediscover their technology afterwards. Indeed, given the various American Indian legends of the gods weeping for their 'sunken Red Land' the multiple references to space as a vast ocean and numerous occult connections, it is likely that Mars was the original 'island' of Atlantis that 'sank beneath the waves', with the name LATER apply to any similar global catastrophe which followed on our own planet.

We know just as little about where this race is presently based. Mars, as well as the moon, seem to be active bases. Evidence strongly indicates that they may be living beneath the surface of Mars and probably have for a long time.

It is time for all truths to be revealed. Fear is born out of ignorance and knowledge dispels fear. Questions have been sufficiently studied to make its conclusions known.

First CIA Director Rear Admiral Hillenkoetter, who was in on the entire study from the very beginning, stated in his opinion in 1960 that:
"THE PUBLIC HAS A RIGHT TO KNOW. It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings... through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense."
If there was once reason to withhold information regarding UFOs from the public, it has since operated to our own detriment to continue doing so.

The vacuum of ignorance has led people to speculate on the ugliest possible conspiracy scenarios, or to find dangerous if not actively hostile alien beings behind the phenomenon where none exist.
"IT IS SELF EVIDENT THAT THE PUBLIC BE TOLD THE TRUTH", Carl Jung wrote to Donald Keyhold, "because ultimately it will nevertheless come to light. There can hardly be any greater shock than the H-bomb and yet everybody knows of it without fainting."
Timothy Good said,
"Our leaders are presented with an awesome dilemma.

Such an admission would lead to a deluge of questions, some of which simply cannot be answered without disclosing vital defense interests; alarming casing of missing aircraft; abductions; genetic experiments; and bizarre cases that will remain beyond our comprehension for centuries to come.

In this respect I am fully in sympathy with the current official policy."
The best we can expect of the government, on this matter, is that they open all of its files and assume a cooperative attitude with researchers and press - in other words, the secret government be abolished and a genuine democracy be restored.
 

(VIDEO) Masturbating in Coffins & Other Bizarre Rituals of the Ăśber Elite


Abby Martin goes over the strange rituals of secret societies, remarking on the Yale fraternity 'Skull & Bones' calling out the surreptitious behavior of two the society's most famous members including George W Bush and John Kerry.

New age of global unrest in full swing as industrial civilization transitions to post-carbon reality.

If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession.
But this hasn't happened. And it won't.
Instead the post-2008 crash era, including 2013 and early 2014, has seen a persistence and proliferation of civil unrest on a scale that has never been seen before in human history. This month alone has seen riots kick-off in Venezuela, Bosnia, Ukraine, Iceland, and Thailand.
This is not a coincidence. The riots are of course rooted in common, regressive economic forces playing out across every continent of the planet - but those forces themselves are symptomatic of a deeper, protracted process of global system failure as we transition from the old industrial era of dirty fossil fuels, towards something else.
Even before the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, analysts at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of thedanger of civil unrest due to escalating food prices. If the Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) food price index rises above 210, they warned, it could trigger riots across large areas of the world.

Hunger games

The pattern is clear. Food price spikes in 2008 coincided with the eruption of social unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Cameroon, Mozambique, Sudan, Haiti, and India, among others.
In 2011, the price spikes preceded social unrest across the Middle East and North Africa - Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Libya, Uganda, Mauritania, Algeria, and so on.
Last year saw food prices reach their third highest year on record, corresponding to the latest outbreaks of street violence and protests in Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, China, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and elsewhere.
Since about a decade ago, the FAO food price index has more than doubled from 91.1 in 2000 to an average of 209.8 in 2013. As Prof Yaneer Bar-Yam, founding president of the Complex Systems Institute, told Vice magazine last week:
"Our analysis says that 210 on the FAO index is the boiling point and we have been hovering there for the past 18 months... In some of the cases the link is more explicit, in others, given that we are at the boiling point, anything will trigger unrest."
But Bar-Yam's analysis of the causes of the global food crisis don't go deep enough - he focuses on the impact of farmland being used for biofuels, and excessive financial speculation on food commodities. But these factors barely scratch the surface.

It's a gas

The recent cases illustrate not just an explicit link between civil unrest and an increasingly volatile global food system, but also the root of this problem in the increasing unsustainability of our chronic civilisational addiction to fossil fuels.
In Ukraine, previous food price shocks have impacted negatively on the country's grain exports, contributing to intensifying urban poverty in particular. Accelerating levels of domestic inflation are underestimated inofficial statistics - Ukrainians spend on average as much as 75% on household bills, and more than half their incomes on necessities such as food and non-alcoholic drinks, and as75% on household bills. Similarly, for most of last year, Venezuela suffered from ongoing food shortagesdriven by policy mismanagement along with 17 year record-high inflation due mostly to rising food prices.
While dependence on increasingly expensive food imports plays a role here, at the heart of both countries is a deepening energy crisis. Ukraine is a net energy importer, having peaked in oil and gas production way back in 1976. Despite excitement about domestic shale potential, Ukraine's oil production has declined by over 60% over the last twenty years driven by both geological challenges and dearth of investment.
Currently, about 80% of Ukraine's oil, and 80% of its gas, is imported from Russia. But over half of Ukraine's energy consumption is sustained by gas. Russian natural gas prices have nearly quadrupled since 2004. The rocketing energy prices underpin the inflation that is driving excruciating poverty rates for average Ukranians, exacerbating social, ethnic, political and class divisions.
The Ukrainian government's recent decision to dramatically slash Russian gas imports will likely worsen this as alternative cheaper energy sources are in short supply. Hopes that domestic energy sources might save the day are slim - apart from the fact that shale cannot solve the prospect of expensive liquid fuels, nuclear will not help either. A leakedEuropean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) reportreveals that proposals to loan 300 million Euros to renovate Ukraine's ageing infrastructure of 15 state-owned nuclear reactors will gradually double already debilitating electricity prices by 2020.

"Socialism" or Soc-oil-ism?

In Venezuela, the story is familiar. Previously, the Oil and Gas Journal reported the country's oil reserves were 99.4 billion barrels. As of 2011, this was revised upwards to a mammoth 211 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and more recently by the US Geological Survey to a whopping 513 billion barrels. The massive boost came from the discovery of reserves of extra heavy oil in the Orinoco belt.
The huge associated costs of production and refining this heavy oil compared to cheaper conventional oil, however, mean the new finds have contributed little to Venezuela's escalating energy and economic challenges. Venezuela's oil production peaked around 1999, and has declined by a quarter since then. Its gas production peaked around 2001, and has declined by about a third.
Simultaneously, as domestic oil consumption has steadily increased - in fact almost doubling since 1990 - this has eaten further into declining production, resulting in net oil exports plummeting by nearly half since 1996. As oil represents 95% of export earnings and about half of budget revenues, this decline has massively reduced the scope to sustain government social programmes, including critical subsidies.

Looming pandemic?

These local conditions are being exacerbated by global structural realities. Record high global food prices impinge on these local conditions and push them over the edge. But the food price hikes, in turn, are symptomatic of a range of overlapping problems. Globalagriculture's excessive dependence on fossil fuel inputs means food prices are invariably linked to oil price spikes. Naturally, biofuels and food commodity speculation pushes prices up even further - elite financiers alone benefit from this while working people from middle to lower classes bear the brunt.
Of course, the elephant in the room is climate change. According to Japanese media, a leaked draft of the UN Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change's (IPCC) second major report warned that while demand for food will rise by 14%, global crop production will drop by 2% per decade due to current levels of global warming, and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of the century. The scenario is based on a projected rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius.
This is likely to be a very conservative estimate. Considering that the current trajectory of industrial agriculture is already seeing yield plateausin major food basket regions, the interaction of environmental, energy, and economic crises suggests that business-as-usual won't work.
The epidemic of global riots is symptomatic of global system failure - a civilisational form that has outlasted its usefulness. We need a new paradigm.
Unfortunately, simply taking to the streets isn't the answer. What is needed is a meaningful vision for civilisational transition - backed up with people power and ethical consistence.
It's time that governments, corporations and the public alike woke up to the fact that we are fast entering a new post-carbon era, and that the quicker we adapt to it, the far better our chances of successfully redefining a new form of civilisation - a new form of prosperity - that is capable of living in harmony with the Earth system.
But if we continue to make like ostriches, we'll only have ourselves to blame when the epidemic becomes a pandemic at our doorsteps.

Source: The Guardian

Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images ofYahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.
Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users'privacy".
GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.
The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.
Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.
The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.
Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.
One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.
"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."
The agency did make efforts to limit analysts' ability to see webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.
However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they were allowed to display "webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target".
Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA'sXKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.
Bulk surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because "Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets".
Programs like Optic Nerve, which collect information in bulk from largely anonymous user IDs, are unable to filter out information from UK or US citizens. Unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorisations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search.
There are no such legal safeguards for searches on people believed to be in the US or the other allied "Five Eyes" nations – Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
GCHQ insists all of its activities are necessary, proportionate, and in accordance with UK law.
The documents also show that GCHQ trialled automatic searches based on facial recognition technology, for people resembling existing GCHQ targets: "[I]f you search for similar IDs to your target, you will be able to request automatic comparison of the face in the similar IDs to those in your target's ID".
The undated document, from GCHQ's internal wiki information site, noted this capability was "now closed … but shortly to return!"
The privacy risks of mass collection from video sources have long been known to the NSA and GCHQ, as a research document from the mid-2000s noted: "One of the greatest hindrances to exploiting video data is the fact that the vast majority of videos received have no intelligence value whatsoever, such as pornography, commercials, movie clips and family home movies."
Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem forGCHQ, as one document delicately put it: "Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography." 
The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naĂŻve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.
GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest, but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.
The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective Optic Nerve users that "there is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable about such material are advised not to open them".
It further notes that "under GCHQ's offensive material policy, the dissemination of offensive material is a disciplinary offence".
Once collected, the metadata associated with the videos can be as valuable to the intelligence agencies as the images themselves.
It is not fully clear from the documents how much access the NSA has to the Yahoo webcam trove itself, though all of the policy documents were available to NSA analysts through their routine information-sharing. A previously revealed NSA metadata repository, codenamed Marina, has what the documents describe as a protocol class for webcam information.
In its statement to the Guardian, Yahoo strongly condemned the Optic Nerve program, and said it had no awareness of or involvement with theGCHQ collection.
"We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity," said a spokeswoman. "This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December.
"We are committed to preserving our users' trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services."
Yahoo has been one of the most outspoken technology companies objecting to the NSA's bulk surveillance. It filed a transparency lawsuit with the secret US surveillance court to disclose a 2007 case in which it was compelled to provide customer data to the surveillance agency, and it railed against the NSA's reported interception of information in transit between its data centers.
The documents do not refer to any specific court orders permitting collection of Yahoo's webcam imagery, but GCHQ mass collection is governed by the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and requires certification by the foreign secretary, currently William Hague.
The Optic Nerve documentation shows legalities were being considered as new capabilities were being developed. Discussing adding automated facial matching, for example, analysts agreed to test a system before firming up its legal status for everyday use.
"It was agreed that the legalities of such a capability would be considered once it had been developed, but that the general principle applied would be that if the accuracy of the algorithm was such that it was useful to the analyst (ie, the number of spurious results was low, then it was likely to be proportionate)," the 2008 document reads.
The document continues: "This is allowed for research purposes but at the point where the results are shown to analysts for operational use, the proportionality and legality questions must be more carefully considered."
Optic Nerve was just one of a series of GCHQ efforts at biometric detection, whether for target recognition or general security.
While the documents do not detail efforts as widescale as those against Yahoo users, one presentation discusses with interest the potential and capabilities of the Xbox 360's Kinect camera, saying it generated "fairly normal webcam traffic" and was being evaluated as part of a wider program.
Documents previously revealed in the Guardian showed the NSA were exploring the video capabilities of game consoles for surveillance purposes.
Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, faced a privacy backlash last year when details emerged that the camera bundled with its new console, the Xbox One, would be always-on by default.
Beyond webcams and consoles, GCHQ and the NSA looked at building more detailed and accurate facial recognition tools, such as iris recognition cameras – "think Tom Cruise in Minority Report", one presentation noted.
The same presentation talks about the strange means the agencies used to try and test such systems, including whether they could be tricked. One way of testing this was to use contact lenses on detailed mannequins.
To this end, GCHQ has a dummy nicknamed "the Head", one document noted.
In a statement, a GCHQ spokesman said: "It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.
"Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.
"All our operational processes rigorously support this position."
The NSA declined to respond to specific queries about its access to the Optic Nerve system, the presence of US citizens' data in such systems, or whether the NSA has similar bulk-collection programs.
However, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said the agency did not ask foreign partners such as GCHQ to collect intelligence the agency could not legally collect itself.
"As we've said before, the National Security Agency does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the US government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself," she said.
"The NSA works with a number of partners in meeting its foreign intelligence mission goals, and those operations comply with US law and with the applicable laws under which those partners operate.
"A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights. Those procedures govern the acquisition, use, and retention of information about US persons."
Source: The Guardian