You overcome cognitive dissonance not through double think but lateral thought.

This little addition (for I put my name & code to the piece above) is for all those who grew up in a different generation from Gary and who would if they saw the movie "Wargames" think it was utter pants yet might want to get on the "Prove Alien Life" bandwagon.

If that doesn't apply to you, maybe best ignoring this rant. ;-)

Unless of course you agree with me that Gary Mc Kinnon has been stuck in a jar & labeled for something we instinctively feel doesn’t get you so much quality media-time & head-space.

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First off lets get your queries sorted before we (indulge me with the plural thing) send you off hacking into the US Space program.

*** you want to know what the USA knows about exobiology?

: you have no reason to presume the USA know more about exobiology than the Chinese [just giving another state as an example].

*** you want proof of the military use of space?

: we wouldn't have used space if it didn't have a military application, likewise we wouldn't have a treaty signed by all space going powers with the notable exception of Richard Branson agreeing not to militarise space if they hadn't already turned it into a shooting range.

*** you want to demonstrate skills which on the open market for these things would keep you in spare lungs as long as smoking crack remains hip?

: you're asking for cognitive dissonance, the only reason we know about tippy toppy scientists faking their deaths and working for loads of dosh in underground bases is the terrible woe and anxiety not being able to score decent drugs or enjoy sexual relations of their fantasies causes them and their families.

*** you expect to find proof that hitherto unknown to orthodox science and GCSE syllabus life-forms are either about to eat us or really keen to enlighten us to sharing the resources of the planet and genius of humanity without regard to ethnicity, creed, social origin, gender, or sexiness.

: We can't even communicate with each other let alone the great Simians beyond simple syntax and simple maths. Every time we talk to angels we go invent a religion. Do you really want to be responsible for a new religion?

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There will still be some left who wish waste their "hacking knack" with binary on supporting the Western myth of technological superiority against purely hardware opponents.

This is what I advise you to do coz “information wants to be free”.

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Hack Microsoft's Paul Allen's project for active SETI intercept, the "Allen Telescope Array in California" to be vague or [Latitude 40° 49′ 1.2″ North Longtitude 121° 28′ 12″ West to be precise]!

The complete array of 350 dishes each with six-metre antennas on one hectare of land is a joint concern of the SETI Institute & the Radio Astronomy Laboratory from the University of California, Berkeley, USA. It is not the largest such array yet built, nor the largest planned but is remarkable for the technology it uses, the sponsor it has and the obvious intent to be first with the novelty factor and know how to package it up and sell it you to......

...... or package you up and sell it to it.

Mr Allen's bid to get the copyright on ET was booted with 42 of the 350 dishes on the 11th of October 2007, the first intergalactic nostrils (or lack of them) they stuck their dirty fingernails up was the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy. Both galaxies seemed to take a Yahoo takeover bid attitude to their advances.

Q: How did all this bollox begin those of you with a slight sense of location might wonder?

A: Well the official story goes like this : On the 15th of August 1977 Jerry Ehman was sitting at his desk as duty astronomer at the aptly named "Big Ear" array then used by the SETI institute in Ohio. SETI is the name for organised efforts under the sponsorship of the US government and the now deceased Carl Sagon of NASA to "search for ET intelligence". As an organisation it has been all things to all people. For some it was waste of time, for others it approached blasphemy, for others it was conduit of disinformation, for some it's been a good research gravy train to jump on without any real fear of investors expecting results. Jerry Ehman was the first person known to have seen a 72 second signal come out of the printer whilst the array which consisted of a tray like receiver (not a dish) was focused at what we vaguely call the constellation of Sagitarius. The signal was at 1420 MHz & displayed several characteristics which suggested intelligence. [Exact position of Wow! from BigEar which is now a golf course. Know the right people. Do the initiations. Buy the degrees. Use the Fear. & maybe you'll get to stand on that golf course for that right moment with better equipment & hear it again! ,-) Right Ascension (On the positive horn): 19h25m31s ± 10s Right Ascension (On the negative horn): 19h28m22s ± 10s Declination (Is the same for both horns): -26d57m ± 20m - "This region of the sky lies in the constellation Sagittarius, roughly 2.5 degrees south of the fifth-magnitude star Chi-1 Sagittarii" .]

If you're not sure what suggests intelligence when it comes to extra-terrestials or the supernatural or even dare I say it archaeological structures, I can make it quite simple. You look for knowledge of place, time, & densely packed mathematical information which either (or both) expresses algebraic or geometric axioms or indicates constants or primes. Most of the time astounding intelligence is overlooked for its very simplicity. Very often people try and fake it but can only succeed in the trickery for one generation. It never ceases to amaze people who identify "pure intelligence" how it is overlooked or even destroyed by those who don't see it. Its secrets are thus kept sacred from the profane by its very obvious nature. Thanks to the enlightenment & to be frank the terrible baggage of putting hideous men in aprons and trusting them with silly handshakes we can all recognise "pi" & know what its useful for….,

& just to thank your lucky stars you didn't have to go to an ashram for ten years to learn it along with so much other stuff, like praying to Mecca a few times a day.

For a while the "Wow! Signal" was very very big news. Not only for the scientists who could see why the 72 seconds was obviously "weird" (& we mostly need explanations as to why it was weird) but also it became big news for ordinary people who by 1977 had flocked to see the movie "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" which brought Steven Spielberg into a similar relationship with the US space program & the US government which Stanley Kubrick had enjoyed before & undoubtedly resented to the end of his life.

The following years were to see a brief respite in the depiction of extra-terrestial life. All of a sudden they were benign, caring & almost cuddly (as a later Spielberg movie E.T. best exemplifies). This was an important shift in popular Anglo-Saxon culture whose effects are dare I write it "hard wired into your minds" even now. Naturally the allegorical role played by "aliens" or "extra-biological entities" as symbolic of inner social problems or wider geopolitical problems remained the strongest. The latest batch of movies such as "Independence day" clearly stand in the cultural flow of the Hollywood B movies of the 1950's with their implicit codified warnings of the "red Soviet menace".

The actual EBE (extra-terrestial biological entity or alien) doesn't get far in our European cultures.

That might seem strange considering more citizens of the USA than people live in Scotland claim to have been abducted or at least to have had the shit put up them or at least their rectum interfered with by some type of alien. But the omniscience of aliens in our culture doesn't mean they 've actually got far into our mind.

What I'm trying to write could well be exemplified by how the loftiest contemplation of vegetarianism & imperialist warfare combined with what now appears a very low and base conviction of eugenics which was HG Well's book "war of the worlds" has come down to us.

That work which typified the last phase of an "invasion literature" genre which with thinly veiled paranoia dealt with twin obsessions - the threat of China & a unified German Empire proved so versatile through the 20th century. Let us not forget how it passed through Orson Welles' radio readings (the realism of which caused wide-scale panic as stunned American listeners thought it was a genuine news broadcast not reporting the Soviet nuclear strikes or land invasion they feared on their homeland but the damn red Martians taking advantage!). & then to its latest version starring the Scientologist Tom Cruise.

Yet remarkably few people to my knowledge have read the actual text. Therein one finds the Martian alien with no digestive tract, who survives by absorbing blood (from humans) & feeling no need for sleep or sex, spends its days happily building tripods and flying machines in its pit. A work of excellent fiction by a man of his time has provided so much of today's mythology.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds
 http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/36

If only several million (& I do not exaggerate) people would see the "grey alien" who is wholeheartedly believed to sustain its self, whilst not out abducting sheep, doing deals with the US federal government, studiously only hassling US Americans [Europeans who report 3rd encounters overwhelmingly report non-greys], utterly dedicated to building underground bases, by floating around in jars is nothing more than HG Well's creation with a more humanoid shape & less tentacles.

So even before we set our ears to ET, we know we won't like what it looks like.

If he doesn't fit into Roddenberry Star Trek make-up or Scientology L Ron Hubbard's galactic money making scam, it will be a missing link from our dark past of Tara doing battle with a big nasty egg laying insect.

To return to the point, no matter how sincere the cuddly Spielberg years of E.T. were, we trust the cinema of Spielberg more as a documentalist of the Holocaust. Carl Sagen the dead scientist, who with remarkable ignorance & poor taste & no small part international snobbery (not the real kind which insists there is a middle class & everyone who has a mortgage or can afford rent is in it now), started the insidious public relations exercise which was SETI must now be seen as one of the greatest idiots of his time.

Paul Allen's hopes of his name being attached to the Sat Array which is finally or primarily associated or identified with the discovery of ET intelligence or to give it its official status kicking the ball off on the First Contact Scenario are as vapid as U”’s Bono and his hope that appearing with Tony Blair & Bill Gates made one iota of difference to the history of poverty.

Intelligence as I quite probably write poorly, is awareness of location, time & name where name might be the integer or value assigned to final residual constant or prime manipulation. The residual constant implies permanency & thus that the time element is, to put it rather less than logically or theoretically: not fleeting.

There has been very little of lasting pure intelligence about either Microsoft or the US concept of world hegemony or welfare when its activity and existence is examined in those terms.

Where do you want to go today?
What's your freedom for?

Well, we mostly went there & had it. It is 24/7 business, information saturation, depleted raw materials, toxic waste, an abuse of the potential of that wonderful invention of CERN - the internet, a perversion of the possibilities -

Do you really believe the USA is a hegemonic structure which is winning wars not only on its streets but in Iraq, Afghanistan and outer space?

Information wants to be free.

We mostly have nothing to be scared of whatever name we give the "ET trope". Be it angel, demon, blob, fairy, elf, entity blaa blaa.

To the contrary we have long had good reason to be afraid of what our society identified as intelligent in the last century & quite blithely collaborated with, & acquiesced to, in the name of a short few generations of prosperity.

Oh! If only we could encourage all the clever clogs of science to look to outer space, and all the billionaires to go there - our future would be better assured.

Why not! Ask your ministry of investment & black budgets to say it's putting secret military industrial complex money not into biotech, human enhancement, chimeras, solar system exploration, harry potter invisibility suits, new viruses.., or even let's get real & spill the beans!!!! .....bales of coke or smack :- to put that hard earned cash (how is it made?) into listening for ET with free open software & chirpy quite clever volunteers who never get too big for their boots, sensible shoes or sandals.

Or to put it a different way :

Stranger to think that as Paul Allen turned on his SETI array, the first Malaysian astronaut Dr Sheik Muszaphar Shukor, 35, had not only become the first Malaysian to fly into space (with Soyuz to the International Space station) but was the first Muslim known to have celebrated the first "Hari Raya Aidilfitri" end of Ramadan feast in orbit.
 http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,144577,0...html?
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Raya

Don't worry yourself hacking the Americans for their space propaganda.
Just wonder how a Muslim faces Mecca & prays to the Lord of the Worlds when in space?


.:. it's not God's representatives on Earth that worry me, it's Earth's representatives in Heaven .:.
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As always a pleasure to think someone other than a Google compatible algorithm might have read what I wrote.


Gary’s had enough! That jar they put him in, isn't worth the labelling.


 http://freegary.org.uk/