A Parakeet
I once kept parakeets. This was a long time ago, two decades to be exact ... but it still bothers me to this day to think I participated in a barbaric act such as imprisoning a sentient, autonomous being.
The fact it was already too late for the birds does not exonerate me. True, their fate was sealed the moment they were either captured in their natural habitat or hatched in captivity. But then I gave the trade my money. I supported it, and even though my input was 3 birds worth of cash, it is the small amounts that add up to amounts that lure the greedy into the business.
The only good thing to come from this is this, that the birds helped me understand a part of human nature I would otherwise not have known had I not identified it in them.
The birds never forgot or let go, contrary to what scientists tell us about the intellects and memories of so called lower creatures. If a mouse passed through the room, they would seek a hiding place and if they did not find one, they would bury their heads in the sand, so to speak. They would thus get their bird selves into the most constricted of positions that were definitely not healthy for them.
What's worse is they could remain like this for what seemed like an eternity if nothing was done to free them from the spell.
Giving them treats they liked didn't help. Only fooling them into believing the fiend had been destroyed did the trick.
And so it was that on such occasions I would take a black or grey sock rolled into a ball, hold it out of sight of the birds as I took a stick and went to the corner I felt was the preferred escape route of the mouse, started beating at the earth and then, throwing the rolled sock down, I would pick it up then make it visible to the parrots, throw it on the sofa in plain sight of the birds and go at it with the stick, then pick it up a last time to show the birds it was done for, then throw it onto the floor at the entrance to the room where it would lie motionless.
Looking up at the birds, the relief I would see was palpable. Soon, they would be their cheery selves, dancing to their own whistling, teasing each other and feasting on the treats I spoilt them with.
All people are like the birds in that, some, like me, moreso than others.
When I see something that bothers me, I never let go until the issue has been resolved, and if it is an argument, it does not matter whether I have won or not. Both results equal resolution.
I can relax and go on to some other concern.
And so it is that today I have set aside a whole valuable day to deal with an issue that has been bothering me for weeks. It pertains to technology I am convinced does not exist and if it does then it does not do what they say it does but makes a semblance of this.
Simply put, I do not think it is what they say it is.
I have not had anyone bring forth arguments that have convinced me that the technology I have in mind does indeed exist and yesterday a friend who knew I remained unconvinced went off on a web search to bring to me what they felt was the most convincing proof of the existence of the technology.
I read the text and found it preposterous, and I knew I just had to take time off and debunk the belief otherwise it would not go away and I will find no peace.
My friend had found a piece that actually used as examples some of what I said would be proof positive the technology in question exists, for example the widespread use of V2K to help deaf people hear and an application of the same method to help blind people see.
My argument was that if the technology already existed then we would have seen a proliferation of gadgets that helped blind people see and deaf people hear. Given there was no such devices in circulation, the conclusion can easily be drawn no such devices exist.
Dr. Patrick Flanagan
The device that was supposedly there already to prove me wrong is called the neurophone and it was invented by Dr. Gills Patrick Flanagan when he was but a teenager. It was principally a "Nervous System Excitation Device" and he patented it on July 16, 1968 (Patent 3393,279).
The article that I read concerning said device is located here http://www.flanagan-neurophone.com/english_information/Dr__Patrick_Flanagan/dr__patrick_flanagan.html, and you are advised to check it out for yourselves so that what I state further down can be verified ...
I will cut a long story short, cut to the chase in fact I will make it very very short because it does not need lengthy treatment to prove it is fraudulent.
According to the linked article, Patrick calls the process by which his neurophone device operates "neuroception". This is the process by which electrical messages identical to those sounds generate are ferried via the body's nervous system to the point in the brain at which they are "heard".
Problem is Patrick used the scientific method to develop the device and in fact used himself as the guinea pig that helped him make the final breakthrough. But then he has no firm knowledge of why his device works which is odd.
In science, "why" a device works is not a requirement to know when it is known "how" it works. The explanation to one is found in the other and vice versa. The calculations, formulas that get us the answer, etc., are found in both and used interchangeably. And if knowledge of why a device works is not firm then it is not known how that device works.
But this story gets weirder because, along the way, knowledge of how the device works is mysteriously discovered and explained in detail at the patent link here http://www.google.com/patents/US6470214 ... and surprise surprise ... The US Airforce owns the patent now.
Talk about putting carts before horses and the system's subordinates taking charge ... or so it seems.
There are such scientists as so called magicians who get answers in ways many would not understand but ask them how they got the result and they will give an explanation, even when it (the explanation) will be hard to understand by other scientists and non scientists alike.
How Patrick's device worked should have been the first thing he knew before even making the gadget. This is what was supposed to have guided him to its creation. The hit and run process hinted at in this example is almost impossible because of the complexity of what was being undertaken. Dr. Flanagan's middle name was high organisation otherwise he would not have made anything worth looking at so it is strange to picture him making something he doesn't know exactly how it works.
The answer to what Patrick's device really does lies in analysing a term that is used frequently in the first linked article, and it is from this that we can also find the term that represents what scientists working on this issue really wanted to do, and the fraud Flanagan perpetrated becomes obvious. This term is "induce".
What the scientists want to do is open a direct path to the inner ear and communicate with it in real time but the best they have managed to do is induction and there is a big difference between the two processes as I will explain.
Radio waves come in frequencies. The frequencies that are produced to cause sleep have a specific value and this varies from individual to individual. There is a mean frequency that when beamed to a group will cause the most to fall asleep.
These frequencies have to be known beforehand and a device capable of producing them has to be made for the purpose. Though these devices can cause someone to fall asleep almost immediately the communication is not real time even if the immediacy of effect is there. There is pre-programing involved. The frequency has to be set first.
This is the basis of induction.
What Flanagan did can also be considered induction. He caused perception of sound to occur then lied about the method. You see, in order to be useful as a hearing or sight aid, a device has to be able to transmit what is being heard on the fly, as someone is speaking. It cannot cause side effects such as brain damage. Such a device would act like a microphone that converts sound into electric signals similar to those that are produced between the ears and the point where the signals are made into audible sound within the brains.
Transmitting actual audio on the back of a radio frequency that gets picked up because it is of such an intensity it cannot but vibrate organs within the body, including the whole entire head, to create actual audible sound on the rebound is real time but forced hearing.
There is actually a scientific name for this ... and it is not Tinnitus.
It is not just radio frequencies that can cause sounds to be heard this way but ultrasound as well.
Instead of coming clean on this hazardous method, Patrick said something that made people conclude the technology had become classified and he was under instructions not to reveal how it worked. We can deduce thusly because, obviously, the conclusion had already been made he had invented a chip that converted sounds to electronic signals similar or identical to those created between the ears and brains.
Here is how we prove this assertion.
People calling themselves targets of covert warfare are complaining of their thoughts being read. The technology required to do this would simply need to reverse the order of transcription that occurs in flanagan's device provided it could pick the bodily or thought transmissions, which is hard because thought occurs in almost all brain communications with tissue. It is attenuated in all but the part that generates conscious. And, to make matters or communication worse, the conscious part lies within these other organs.
If we conclude this technology does not exist, we would have to look to induction as the way this is being done and we find that, because the technology exists to blank or disrupt the mind using radio frequencies or ultrasound, and the method exists to force voices into the head of someone, people capable of maintaining a lucid voice within their heads can have thoughts implanted into their heads and, with the help of another reality, this thought can seem to be their own.
This reality is called memory which is, unlike most people believe, not stores of information but information reconstructed. How do we prove this?
Well ... People have been known to lose and regain memory even when the retrieval mechanism is intact. If memory is destroyed then it cannot be retrieved but if the mechanism that reconstructs memory suffers damage and fails in its function, memory is restored when it is fully operational again ...
Stay with me on this one ...
If you get your own thoughts disrupted or blanked out and a thought is implanted, it's reconstruction instructions are immediately noted and once it is reconstructable, it becomes your memory.
Remember or know there is nothing about awareness that is a whole picture and current. What we know are reconstructions based on expectations left by what has just been that we follow on to root our selves in reality as we go on saving reconstruction instructions.
If you see a nude man walking on the streets and point him out to another, his movement from one place to the next will be the expectation and it will be changing with the moment so that the next instant you will not point to where you just saw him but where and how you expect him to be.
If the nude man is lying dead in a pool of blood then the same applies.
It works in much the same way that your television monitor constructs an image from tiny dots but on a much more grander and dynamic scale.
Thoughts once artificially induced are then re-told to the unwary subject who firstly believes they are their own intimate thoughts and is as such liable to fall for the "we can read your thoughts" lie.
It is actually not perfect science. Blasts and internal thought disruptions will be intermittent but the end result can be that the target will think they thought pretty much the same thing that those forcing the voice into their person transmitted, otherwise the rates of transmission and disruption will have to be increased the next time around, including the size of the headache.
Thus a system stubbornly forges ahead with the same need to fake stuff, in this and many similar cases convincing many who matter that it has technology that it does not really have, destroying lives in the most gratuitous of manners if you do not fall for the lie it pays to be seen in a better light than you really are, for such are but vain pursuits, and transient are the rewards.