Thoughts on Mind-Controlled Troopers and Star Gates...

The recruitment of psychos and psychics and fake physics.

What follows here is some projection based upon some calculations. It’s entirely speculative but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed out of hand. If you like these sorts of thought exercises please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

I was among the people who saw Stargate in theaters opening day. Yes, I was only six years old. But this wasn’t altogether unusual for me. I saw Starship Troopers in theaters when I was nine for my birthday party. Yeah, my parents weren’t always super involved once my mother got sick. Yikes.

But yes, over the years I’ve become persuaded that the bugs from Starship Troopers were, in fact, innocent and that this is more or less how fascism happens. Rico — who looks very German notwithstanding his name — is from Buenos Aires.

One of the more interesting side plots is the use of psychic ability to get animals and people to do things. One of our heroes — Carl — tells Rico that he “can’t do human… yet.” But of course he does do humans later.

How much is this psychic stuff really real and how much of it just works on weaker minds like a marketing funnel? If there aren’t psychics maybe there should be.

These are the sorts of things I wonder about as I get older.

My father and I used to go to science fiction movies after he got off work and I’ve taken to reexamine much of the early science fiction themes as I’ve gotten older.

His youth was a highly imaginative time — he was, after all, born in 1953 — and the U.S. government certainly helped along some of the early science fiction writers whom they found all kinds of ways to back through covert and overt means. This sort of thing continues to this day and not just in this country. It’s worth poking around the Creative Futures project, where a partnership between Coventry University and the MoD’s defence science and technology laboratory has included science fiction writers.

“Stargate… put that name down in your books!”

What I find particularly interesting is when things in the science fiction world spill out into the real one. You might wonder, as I do, where the line between the real world and the fake world really is and whether the defining feature of the Trump years is the surreality of every day life.

Does America really have $500 billion to spend on AI? Probably not. Or was that photo op in January really about former(?) CIA man Larry Ellison of Oracle towering over Sam Altman and Masa Son?

How likely is it that there’s really $500B for AI infrastructure? It seems impossible to be spending that kind of money. The United Kingdom’s economy is only $3 trillion.

And where will all that infrastructure come from? Who actually makes the stuff? Maybe from Tripp Lite, which makes a lot of that infrastructure’s key components

“By the mid-1960s, Seid had taken over as Trippe Manufacturing’s president. In the decades to come, the company, now called Tripp Lite, became a pick-and-shovel business of the digital gold rush. The company sells the power strips that supply electricity to computers and the server racks, cooling equipment and network switches that make data centers run. Business surged with the shift to cloud computing and the proliferation of vast data centers.”

But be careful because Tripp Lite — like most AI infrastructure wares — manufactures everything in China. They even sued the Trump Administration when the first tariffs against China went into effect.

There’s been some reporting that Softbank has been slow to deliver the money and so, too, Larry Ellison. But maybe what Stargate is really about is liberating Microsoft from Sam Altman by pretending that Altman could move Open AI to Oracle?

Stargate is “a new American company that will invest $500 billion at least in AI Infrastructure in the United States and create over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately,” Trump said. “Stargate! Put that name down in your books,” Trump said.

But Stargate was already in our books and on the silver screen. Stargate — the movie — has more or less always commanded my attention. At my grandparents’ house I’d watch the TV series. My mother and grandfather lived for a spell in Egypt — my mother went to the University of Cairo — and there’s something alluring about there being all this ancient knowledge that was lost. It suggests, for example, that it might be rediscovered.

But is that really true? How would you know? This idea that our ancestors could travel to far away worlds is deeply appealing. All you need is a worm hole and some military guys. You don’t even need Elon Musk and his rockets blasting off.

Our own time has created this idea of “machine elves” and interdimensional beings visiting us at Joshua Tree or down in the Amazonian. In this telling everyone who darts off on that ayahuasca trip is, in effect, really on a trip, communing with some other world beyond our own. But I think they are really just on drugs.

Still everyone loves a good adventure story, especially when it is set in a desert world. This is, of course, the premise of the villains of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Colonization. Taking. Assimilating. Stargate’s director is the German-born Roland Emmerich so he would, undoubtedly, have understood this stuff, especially given the role of Germany in Egyptology and post-World War II Egypt.

There’s something kind of thrilling and exciting about that spirit of adventure. You might even get to fight Nazis.

***

But, it would seem, that it’s far better to recruit Germans than to fight them.

So, too, with the Stargate Project, the secret U.S. Army effort to establish a unit at Fort Meade and SRI International to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. Interestingly it was formed the very same year that Oracle was. Is this a coincidence?

That coincidence makes me wonder: Might AI itself be a form of “remote viewing” for the modern age? A “fake because” that hides more sensitive ways of knowing?

Imagine searching something and having it tailored directly for you. That’s the promise of AI. But of course a sophisticated operator might be able to directly send people messages without them even knowing that the messages came from a higher authority.

Imagine the power of communicating directly with highly suggestible people and how AI can be used — plausibly — to deny any such communications and you begin to get a sense of the misdirection or direction possible.

That’s tremendous power, especially if you target specific people which presumably you could do. So let’s say you had superior technology maybe you’d blame the psychics.

You can’t talk about the NSA, where Jim Simons, who passed away one year ago today, was busy breaking the Russian codes.

Did Jim Simons Ever Really Leave the NSA?

So while you can’t talk about the NSA you can go on Joe Rogan and that’s what the octogenarian Hal Puthoff, who formerly worked on the Stargate Project, did. Is this the new declassification program? “The only thing secret about the remote viewing program is that it was secret,” Puthoff admits. Indeed.

And when Puthoff talks about how they can’t tell you what they discovered from the aliens,

According to Puthoff — a very German name which means “plant” (is Puthoff a plant?) — Carter discussed how a Soviet airplane crash landing in Africa was found with supernatural forces. They found it “within three miles.” Sure, Jan.

Add to that the involvement of Uri Geller, an “Israeli illusionist,” and of Pat Price, the police commissioner and Scientologist who died of a heart attack in a Vegas hotel room and you get sense that things maybe weren’t entirely on the up and up.

Still why did Jimmy reveal the use of remote sensing? That’s curious indeed. Might it have been misdirection? What was the former president trying to do? And how should we take a former U.S. president claiming he personally saw a UFO? Might Carter have wanted more people look up in the skies than down at their phones? Maybe people would be more comfortable coming forward talking about the things that they saw if a former U.S. president said that he, too, saw things.

I have a different thought: "We need a way of talking about things without telling people how we know them.”

What’s the real deal with billionaire Robert Bigelow who funded a lot of Puthoff’s “research”? Is the Budget Suites magnate related to the famous Mormon convert Nahum Bigelow whose daughters went on to marry Brigham Young, the leader who took over from Joseph Smith?

How Mormon is Bigelow himself? I’m not the only person wondering about Bigelow’s religious views if Reddit is any indication. Might Bigelow — who owns lots of real estate and hotels — cynically encouraged a lot of UFO stuff to get people to come to the Mountain West and spend money? Might the sorts of people who are drawn to the Mormon corridor and to Mormonism generally be so credulous that they, too, see aliens?

In this understanding you can think of the Budget Suites as the less violent option of the Mountain Meadows shakedown. It’s better to pay the toll that way as you go on your road trip. Or perhaps Bigelow is genuinely curious about what comes after death, given that his family has experienced so much of it. Or perhaps his unlikely alliance between Harry Reid and him were just two Mormons grifting off of the military industrial complex? And might that explain why all the Bigelow Airspace employees were laid off right as Bigelow himself became one of the largest donors to the Republican Party and Ron DeSantis?

What is a compelling state interest is collecting all these reports and of course, finding people who are naturally intuitive.

The recruitment of psychics is what took place in the past. Today, though, its about the recruitment of psychos, or of genuinely strange minds who can be, plausibly or not, funneled interesting minds.

We will tackle my friend, Laura Loomer, and her uncanny ability to sweep bad behavior around Trump. She claimed National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s scalp as well as a number of other people’s careers in the second term. Was she tipped off? If so, by whom? Or did she come by it honestly?

Of course Loomer is increasingly the best journalist in the country — and vitally useful at identifying the sort of people who are compromised around President Donald Trump.

I’d argue that Laura’s very moxie and self-admitted occasional madness makes her ideally suited to expose frauds.

The TV show Homeland suggests it’s precisely the people who are strangely wired who are the best able to keep our country safe.

More attention is warranted.