Beach front property values suddenly decline
during California's newest war. Photo courtesy of
http://www.battlela.com/

In outer space, no one can hear you purr. . . .

Don't go see Battle: L.A. unless you're not embarrassed to have a good time. It's full of flaws in logic, plot and acting but it's a big movie in terms of action and special effects. Battle: Los Angeles breaks the mold of the usual disaster epic by going straight to the good stuff without wasting time on character development and story background. This movie is just a bunch of Marines figuring out how to kill something new and challenging. If you can't enjoy it from that viewpoint go eat a hamburger instead.

Hey, is that the guy
who . . . ? Naw, I guess not.
http://www.battlela.com/

Battle L.A. stars Aaron Eckhart as the guilt-ridden combat vet Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz; Bridget Moynahan as Michele the hot civilian chick whose sole task is to adore the heroic Nantz; Michelle Rodriguez as tough hot babe Tech Sergeant Elena Santos, the Rambella of the Air Force; and Ramon Rodriguez as 2nd Lieutenant William Martinez, victim of the most cliche'd role in military history. I recognized absolutely no one in the entire cast, although for a moment I thought I knew Eckhart from a role in Star Trek Voyager. Nope, that's not him. I immediately felt a good vibe from Eckhart/Nantz, however, since in the movie's opening minutes Nantz plows along the beach for his morning run, huffing and sweating while a group of younger Marines leaves him in the dust at a speed that allows them a normal conversation. Cripes, I hate it when that happens.

Toughest commando
a non-combat
Air Force occupa-
tional specialty
ever produced.
http://www.battlela.com/

Director Jonathan Liebesman wastes no time getting to the good part of the story. Instead of following the old Irwin Allen pattern of at least an hour of brutal introduction to characters and the reasons we're supposed to care if they live or die, Liebesman compresses that human sympathy section into about ten minutes, giving us a brief glimpse into the personal lives of modern Marines. Gosh, the Marine Corps looks like such a friendly and informal place, it's just a bunch of nice fellows and girls having fun in training. In the background we get constant updates over the local TV channels regarding the mysterious arrival of clusters of meteorites, coincidentally hitting the water offshore from the world's greatest coastal population centers.

If the human race doesn't see an attack like that coming we deserve all the hacking and slashing and blowing up that we get. In this story no one seems to realize what's happening, even after half of L.A. goes up in flames. With all the combat-ready hoopla these soldiers spout you'd think a platoon of infantry would know enough to spread out and stop talking in the combat zone, but there's none of that elementary tactical wisdom here. Along with superior firepower, the alien invaders also mastered the simpler things like ducking and taking the high ground. Our boys have to learn that through O.J.T.

Alien invaders present lucky Marines with completely
new things to break.
Photo courtesy of http://www.battlela.com/

There are so many technical issues in this movie that I will only skim a few. The basic premise for the invasion, for example, is that these interstellar invaders need liquid water to fuel their ships, and Earth is a rare jewel, twinkling through the darkness with the blue hue of mostly water. Never mind that an alien race with this sort of technology could find all the water they need in space, and probably would have figured out how to melt it by now -- everyone just accepts this pitiful explanation with a shrug and an OK. They're Marines, they kill stuff for a living, and they leave the big thinking to the guys on TV. Whoever wrote this story was in a hurry and just tossed in the water theory without much critical effort. I prefer another explanation, that these stalwart alien soldiers have arrived on Earth in search of cats, a truly abundant resource in Earth's cities but rare and precious to a culture totally lacking anything warm and cuddly that purrs.

Actually much of what happens in this movie could more easily be explained by the need for cats than by the need for water. An example is the mysterious glowing red hardware the Marines find guarding the underground command complex of the alien forces. We assume at first that these are sentry robots or proximity mines but they appear to totally disregard the Marines even though the alien soldiers went to a lot of trouble to install them. Clearly these contraptions were designed to capture cats, not battle humans.

Battle L.A. turned out to be a fun romp through a new version of the military's latest tactical training simulator -- not so much a movie as a video game someone else is playing. There's not much blood and gore and the Marines seem pretty much impervious to pain. The only real carnage you see is what's done to the aliens. Everyone else dies fairly neatly and without getting too upset. It's war as seen through the eyes of a Marine recruiting sergeant, an army of good-looking guys and gals out to save the world without getting too terribly dirty. There's no need to follow the Geneva Convention so anything goes, including ripping apart a living enemy soldier with your bare hands and punching individual internal organs into glistening goo as you discover what parts these fascinating enemies literally can't live without. Oo-rah! Buy yourself a ticket and let's go vicariously kill an unknown intelligent species! and save Earth's kitties for our own couches and alleyways.

Riding hundreds of pounds of delicious horse meat
into a city filled with hungry carnivorous zombies
wasn't the brightest idea this Georgia sheriff ever had.
Former Volvo salesman Ed Gruber, on left, is momentarily
stunned by this sudden good fortune.

In the promos for this series we saw something unforgettable -- a lone horse and rider heading into the city of Atlanta on the empty incoming lanes of a freeway jam-packed with deserted out-going cars. For that scene alone this series is worthwhile, but even though it's fun to watch it's less than I expected. What I expected from that promotional shot was what I saw -- a competent gunman in the tradition of the Old West, riding confidently into the concrete jungle just because he could. That's not the guy on this horse.

Recap of the Final Episode at the end of this article!

Every zombie movie needs a unique bit, because since the release of Night of the Living Dead when I was just a kid the story has been worked and reworked. It's always a cool story, even when it's done badly, but the best versions deal with the concept of a world-ending zombie plague in surprising new ways. What's surprising about The Walking Dead is that the hero turns out to be pretty much clueless, literally the last one to wake up to the horror of the world's ending.

In a coma for most of the dramatics, Sheriff Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) has no idea what happened to his planet while he was slumbering and struggles with things more experienced zombie fighters don't even think about twice. He worries about the feelings of the zombie dead and ponders whether it's morally correct to actually shoot one. Although this approach seems to be the unintentional result of writing for television and not a truly original artistic idea, it does give us an interesting new look at Zombie Armageddon. Everyone in the story who's still living doesn't seem to be very good at surviving. It's not the cream of the crop who survive, it's just the stuff that floats.

From the people trapped in the sky-rise department store who don't think to drop heavy objects off the roof onto the tightly packed zombie crowds; to the trailer park survivors at the quarry outside town who haven't thought to put up barricades; we're dealing with a bunch of heroes who really haven't quite made the jump to the new reality. The fun I find in this show is taking it apart and looking at what's wrong, and in that sense there's plenty to do. Out of Atlanta's population of 429,500 (the city proper) there appear to be only a couple of thousand zombies walking around. That's a very optimistic figure and should mean that if you drop enough stuff from the Home Improvement Department off that roof, the war will soon be over. At least shoot the zombie guy who's banging on the glass door with a big rock, because he's the only one who remembers how to use tools.

Faults in the logic of this story are too numerous to mention, but include the lack of weapons and ammunition in the Deep South. This is supposed to take place in Georgia. Knock open the door of any abandoned farmhouse in post-apocalyptic Georgia and you ought to find enough sniper rifles, shotguns, pistols, assault rifles and ammunition to outfit an Army platoon. And that's just the civilian side of Georgia. With all the dead soldiers laying around there shouldn't be a shortage of tools. In real life the combination of rural survivalists, local police forces, extremist militia and real military would have quickly dealt with the zombie plague and turned on each other already.

That's ok, it's just a story and I'm having fun watching it. The final episode of Season One airs tonight and I'll be here, filing away ideas for the end of the world.

Season One Final Episode Recap: TS-19, How do I Love Thee?

We entered this last story with the entire surviving group of survivors from the Quarry Run Trailer Park arriving at the Centers for Disease Control and realizing immediately it was a bad idea. Just as they're about to head off into the darkness and zombieland, the lone survivor of CDC, a pock-marked microbiologist named Jenner, opens the door. Pockmarks on a microbiologist aren't a good sign, and when Jenner says when the door closes it doesn't open again, somebody should have thought about that. But with zombies coming up behind you it's hard to be skeptical of an impregnable fortress.

Read more »

The Entity

Of all the supernatural things which could happen, probably the creepiest is the "night visitor." Late at night you wake up, knowing something's in the room with you, and then it makes physical contact. Doesn't have to be a lot of contact to be scary -- anything will do. This isn't an experience to which most people respond well.

While many people would consider The Entity -- the story of Doris Bithers -- to be creepy entertainment, those of us who've had the experience see it much differently. This isn't an uncommon event and could be as much a part of the UFO abduction experience as any contact with aliens. People make contact with lots of things in this way, including other people. Talk to people "in the industry" and you'll hear all sorts of stories no one wants to put into print. Few of them have been told as often or as well as the Doris Bithers story, which I'll not go into in detail.

While the movie may over-dramatize certain things in the story, it's pretty hard to over-dramatize something this unusual. Even if the real thing doesn't include all the special effects in the movie, the real thing is enough to make you decide never to close your eyes again at night. Of course that solution only lasts until you fall asleep. People who actually deal with these intrusions or visitations find other ways to work them out. It's very possible that this sort of phenomenon inspired such wonderful things in human history as The Spanish Inquisition -- which some say responded to sexual predation upon humans by supernatural beings called incubi or succubi.

The Entity Movie

My own experience of similar things caused me to do what I do when unusual things happen, and start talking to other people about them. It's probably not cool to do this a lot and I've stopped now, since professionals who don't have the experience tend to think you're crazy. Along the way I did meet many people with the same sort of experience, some who were petrified of it and wanted it to end, some who had come to terms with it and found it sexually exciting and even humorous, and some who considered themselves responsible for the experiences others had.

When these visitations first happened to me, I considered them all hostile. After enough contact with anything it gets to be kind of familiar and you stop panicking. I realized that whatever it was, it wasn't actually doing me any harm. I decided that instead of fighting off whatever was happening, I'd let it progress and find out what it was about, if it was possible to do that.

As it turned out, some of the things that visited me were hostile and violent and might even be considered demonic. They certainly had the marks of that. Other things weren't like that -- once I got past the fear it was easy to see they were friendly, but in disturbingly sexual ways. After a brief struggle with moral concerns I realized I was complaining that sexually ravenous women were visiting me in bed at night, and to me that seemed silly to argue about.

Such things don't happen to me any longer, possibly because I explored the possibilities thoroughly and decided that physical relationships were more important to me than astral ones. I do believe in the reality of both, and there's no clear border between them. Everyone feels these things on some scale; some people become vastly more sensitive, like Doris Bithers.

If you want to get a glimpse of what it's like when you do understand that reality is illusion and illusion is reality, this is a great movie to study. In a world where walls aren't physical barriers, you draw quite a bit of attention from unusual things.

The Doris Bithers story didn't end with the movie, and even the intervention by the paranormal investigators didn't stop what happened. For a look at what happened later in the story visit the following link:

Ghost Theory: The Entity – Interview with Doris Bither’s son

Looks like we'll need some bigger guns. Photo provided by Rogue Studios.

In "Skyline", the 2010 edition of the classic alien invasion movie, jetsetters high on success, drugs, alcohol, and penthouse suites battle for survival as mysterious alien beings attack the world and in this case, Los Angeles. But most of us don't need to be concerned because if you pay close attention you'll notice the aliens only seem to be interested in people who maintain specific grooming and fashion standards. OK, every now and then they take somebody who's old or overweight, but mostly they just want the people who hit the gym regularly and look good. Also, no kids allowed on the ships, this ain't a family cruise.

Skyline seems to have been universally panned by the critics, and although I do see the reasons for that I still enjoyed it and recommend it for people who can lower their cinematic standards and just wallow in a good spectacle. Don't look for wisdom or good tactical decisions because you won't find any of that. This is a classic Irwin Allen style disaster movie with much better special effects.

Eric Balfour plays the lead role as Jarrod, someone with a camera and undisclosed talents which make him somehow indispensable to best wealthy buddy Terry, played by Donald Faison. Jarrod brings along his girl friend Candice, played by Brittany Daniel, and anyone else in the movie is just cannon fodder. People show up for awhile and seem important but then they get eaten by aliens. If you think Balfour looks familiar, he's the singer from Born As Ghosts and played a lead role in a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003. Faison you'll know from the TV sitcom Scrubs. Brittany Daniel didn't even look familiar.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS . . . .

Read more »

The topics in Empty Force: The Ultimate Martial Art: The Power of Chi for Self-Defense and Energy Healing are the things I've argued about with other martial artists and curious onlookers for decades. If you've not had the experience these authors talk about, you have no idea that any of this is real. Very few people can demonstrate the craft, and even fewer care to demonstrate. If you run into someone with genuine ability and have a personal encounter with the force of chi, you aren't so skeptical any more. Even if you don't buy the official explanation, you know something unusual has happened.

I took up this practice almost twenty years ago, just thinking that the only way to prove it true or false was to experience some of it myself. Even though I was warned away from it by experts who consider training without a teacher to be dangerous and learning any of the secret methods independently to be impossible, I thought, eh, what the heck. I might as well give it a good try.

At this point I'd like to partly agree with the experts who warned me off. Some of this is dangerous, and in ways you don't expect so it's hard to prepare for trouble. It's a new level of experience and brings new problems with it. But it certainly is possible to do on your own, if you're willing to devote yourself consistently to daily practice and independent study and take advantage of occasional courses and seminars. Lots of good teachers wander through the country teaching, and even though they don't know everything they usually have a piece or two which you'd otherwise miss.

In this book, now reprinted as Empty Force: The Power of Chi for Self-Defense and Energy Healing the techniques of Dong Jing are presented sensibly and without mysticism. Several different training approaches are offered in detail, and none will be difficult to learn. Stay with any of them for a few years and you'll have experiences of your own to puzzle over. A few lucky souls might develop a little faster than that, but the system weeds out the impatient people quickly. It's boring, painful, time-consuming and at first very unrewarding. Most westerners quit before they ever get noticeable results, and even in the East masters look for special people to train because they know that unless you can "eat the bitter" it's just a waste of time.

Click on the image below for a sample page of "Empty Force."

Qigong,
The Secret of Youth:
Da Mo's Muscle/Tendon
Changing and Marrow/
Brain Washing Classics

I came across this book about the Yi Jin Jing and Shii Soei Ching in a strange way. If you've read much of my blog you may know that some unusual things have happened to me from time to time. This was one of them, although actually when it happened it didn't seem all that strange. I had become accustomed to strange things.

Literally what happened was that something woke me up in the middle of the night about twenty years ago -- just a feeling that something odd was going on, that creepy feeling you get that something or someone is in the room, and almost always that's just silly. This time, that feeling woke me up, and I opened my eyes and looked around to see if anything was happening for real, and there actually was. To my right, beside the bed, a fellow was standing and staring at me with an impish grin. Not that he appeared to be real or solid -- in fact he wasn't, and seemed to be composed entirely of green light. If you could produce a green laser hologram image of a person, I suppose it would look like that. All the details were there and he was fully life-sized -- an Asian looking fellow of middle age, slightly balding and wearing an odd headband and what looked like a martial uniform of some sort. After I shook my head a couple of times and forced myself completely awake, he was still there. I thought, well, I ought to be polite at least, so I said out loud, "Oh! Hello, there!" He didn't respond, except that maybe he grinned a little wider. We looked at each other for a little while and after fifteen or twenty seconds he faded out, kind of like the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, and I went back to sleep no more confused than usual.

In the traditions I follow, these things aren't random events or meaningless hallucinations. It may take awhile, but if you keep looking you do find the meaning behind the event, and a few months later when I was looking through the martial arts and chi kung training section at Barnes & Nobles and trying to find something pertinent to the questions I had, I picked up a book. While flipping through it I found a picture of the same fellow I'd met that night. He was Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming, the author of many books on Shaolin and Tai Chi Chuan, and a follower of Jou Tsung-Hwa, someone I already knew from other strange things. Dr. Yang had written many books but this one was the first that I'd come across, and that made it special.

If you're interested in the Asian Internal Martial Arts, then you know that there are many layers to practices like Shaolin kung fu and Tai Chi Chuan. Some people practice them purely from a physical approach. Others choose something more esoteric, the system which is based upon energy instead of physical strength. Not everyone believes the energy practice is real -- some very masterful fighters completely disregard it. The people who are interested in the internal side of the practice tend to not be involved in fighting, and you could argue the reason for that in all sorts of ways. My argument is that the internal side is about something else, something which used to be called enlightenment. Compared to that, fighting isn't very interesting or even very difficult. Enlightenment is the hard part, and it certainly isn't what most people think it is.

Da Mo's system of enlightenment training is still one of the best and the most direct. Finding out what it is, well, that's tough. It's been kept secret for a very long time. We live in a fortunate period of history, when those secrets are available to anyone who has the curiosity to seek them out. They're in this book, and anybody with the ability to read and think could put them into practice and judge the results for themselves. Very few people will, because there's a price. The book's cheap, but the discipline involved is beyond the reach of most human beings.

This isn't a book everyone should read. Probably out of a population of six billion people, about six hundred are qualified to understand and practice what's written here. Those six hundred people will be seriously looking for this book, if they haven't found it already. Everyone else would be bored, confused, and probably very shocked at what the monks were actually doing behind those monastery walls.

Do an internet search for information on the crystal skulls and you'll quickly find articles which discount the skulls as fake relics and depict the stories surrounding them as urban legend. Most of those articles probably were written in a couple of hours after a brief search for information on the internet. The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls: A Real Life Detective Story of the Ancient World, written by Chris Morton and Ceri Louise Thomas, gives an entirely different side of the story. To get the information presented here, the authors spent years traveling the world, consulting experts, visiting the skulls and their caretakers, and interviewing people directly involved in their discovery and subsequent use. Though many do believe the skulls to have been officially discredited, this book contains the real information which gave rise to the legends and the arguments.

Many of us who work with crystals know that something very unusual happens on occasion. Although it's not a dependable event, when it does happen there's no denying it was real. Unexplained flows of energy, strange electrical effects, and mental interactions all do occur with crystals, which some mainstream scientists have pointed out do share many of the fundamental characteristics of living things. Crystals certainly seem alive at times.

Skepticism is a good habit to have, but skepticism without research and open-minded testing is only ignorance. If you aren't too set in your beliefs to actually read this book, you'll enjoy it. Maybe you'll even want to test some of the crystalline concepts on your own.

Click on the picture below to expand the image of this excerpt from the book:

Years ago when I bought 72 Consummate Arts Secrets of the Shaolin Temple it was newly printed and hard to find. It was also a lot cheaper than it is now. At least for the time being, the book is available on Amazon, and when 72 Consummate Arts disappears from there it'll probably still be available to the good hunter/gatherer/shopper who's willing to search.

My copy of this book was printed in Beijing in 1992, compiled by Wu Jiaming, translated by Rou Gang, and revised by Yang Yinrong. This is a very popular book in The People's Republic of China but not famous at all in the West, where such things are still looked upon as magical and silly. In China people train to actually do these things. Most of the books about wushu kung fu are published only in Chinese and the western resources we do have are pitiful primers in comparison, often written by people with very sketchy knowledge. We think we've got all the good knowledge over here in the west, but most of the Orient's storehouse of wisdom hasn't even been translated to English. Tibet and China both must have tons of volumes westerners haven't even seen yet. All that material isn't a collection of bright and shining gem amongst the trash, but I'm sure we're missing some really good stuff.

This book is a great example of what we're missing and will certainly be totally misunderstood by nearly every westerner who reads it. We don't think in the traditional Chinese way and don't have the same foundation of knowledge. We're technical. We believe in hardware, strength, and intellectual prowess.

Our first mistake when reading this book: skipping the little introductory section on Four Step Exercise. Eh, that's just a warm-up, let's get to the real stuff. Back up, that is the real stuff, essential to all the rest of it, and every system of internal training has a counterpart to it that westerners find equally pointless and boring and skip. If you don't do this training you don't get the rest of it.

Second mistake: westerners will read this book and think it's superstition. Those who train in these concepts will train in purely physical ways, from a western viewpoint; pass very few of the level tests included in the practices; and conclude that it's really all about being strong, tough, and limber and the stories were exaggerated. If you don't train in the Four Steps, don't live the lifestyle, don't follow the rules, you just get strong. Probably you'll also get badly hurt. If you follow the steps and make those changes in your life, you'll be going far beyond anything westerners know as physical training. A typical commando in the western military spends six months in training; some of these Consummate Arts require ten, and masters may train for forty.

Third mistake: westerners will think that they personally couldn't do any of this. Wrong again. The old systems were not based on body type or innate athletic skill. If you do the work you get the benefits. You may decide you don't want to spend your life training in a skill you probably won't ever use, and that's understandable. Getting a taste of it has been satisfactory for me, and I've gone on to things less martial but ultimately more important, or at least so I hope.

Many unusual skills and training methods are described in the book and most of them you probably haven't heard of or seen even in fancy chop-socky movies. Every now and then I hear of somebody who does these things and I say, oh yeah, I remember that one, or I see part of the old training in a documentary and I recognize where it came from and where it leads. Nice to at least understand what's behind it. I haven't run out of years yet, maybe I'll take up one of the arts and see what happens in the rest of my life. Everybody needs a hobby.

The Tao of I Ching:
Way to Divination

I always think that everyone knows about the I Ching but I'm usually wrong when I think that my favorite subjects have gone mainstream. Although I'm not sure what the public view of the old Book of Changes is, it probably isn't right or accurate. The I Ching has more to do with logical observation of the world than with mystical processes. Many seem to think it's something like a horoscope or book of philosophy, but it's really something else. I consider it a practical way to look at the probable future and I've used it for most of my life. It helps me chart a course through difficult times.

I knew the book (people who use the I Ching often get into the habit of talking about the book as a living person) for some years before I took up electronics as a vocation, and when I started learning about computers and binary code I immediately saw the connection. Hey! That's computer code! Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, there's a story now that fifteen years or so ago a guy saw that connection and wrote an algorithm based on the 64 hexagrams, punched it into a computer and let it run. The algorithm is supposed to have charted the course of human history and run to a stop in the year 2012. I don't actually have any evidence that the story is true, but it's an interesting idea.

The I Ching: Or,
Book of Changes,
Wilhelm/Baynes

Although there are many good hardcover and paperback versions of the I Ching I will only recommend two. The first on the list is Jou Tsung Hwa's The Tao of I Ching. In this book you'll find the musings of a math teacher who took up the ancient mysteries as a hobby after he was diagnosed as dying of heart disease. In his last few months he intended to enjoy himself and learn some of the things he hadn't taken time to do before. Those old things cured his heart disease and set him on a new adventure. He includes in this book some of the old illustrations of the I Ching and explains how to use them intuitively rather than depend totally on the written interpretations. Jou also writes about the Plum Flower Mind I Ching, which is a very brief version of the I Ching based on observation of the physical world. That should appeal to any literalist who doesn't believe in the supernatural. Sherlock Holmes would have loved the Plum Flower Mind I Ching.

Read more »

I'll just tell you the legend as I first heard it, since there's no solid factual foundation for most of the Star People concept. Many of the criteria are subjective and the Star People I've met share only a few fundamental qualities or life events. Those I know each derived complex stories from their triggered memories, but only superficially similar. Some based the tale in outer space, and some in ancient Egypt. The idea is intriguing, that a colony of space travelers -- humans -- crash-landed here a hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts and began the technological civilization we know today.

People were already here, since human civilizations have colonized this galaxy's habitable worlds for millennia and our species is scattered everywhere. The humans indigenous to this world had no advanced culture in the terms that the crashed ship's crew knew it. Faced with quick genetic dissolution in what were to them the ignorant hordes of savages around them, the scientists among them devised a patch. The patch was something that would continue after the artifacts and memories of the ship and its people were gone. Hidden in the DNA of the ship crew's descendants were packets of encoded information, designed to open at critical times in the lives of those who carried them, and guide their actions in ways which would carry on the culture of the ship. Over time the information has become sketchy and distorted, so those of us who receive the message interpret it in different ways, with only a few common points which seem solid. One of those common points is the memory of the crash itself.

Read more »