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Panzerben's Combat Diaries 23 for December  2004

Webmaster Stephen Peverley. steve@kingston-design.fsnet co.uk

Combat diaries email is: sharkley1@panzerben1.fsworld.cco.uk

UK Servers report our first half million hits!

469, 922 Hits in 9 months up to 8th December 2004

A Happy Mid-Winter Fire Festival to All!

Contents of Combat Diary 23 for December 2004

(please press the Chapter headings for access)

Chapter 1:    Lee Oswald as Fortean Man (Part 2)             Colin Bennett

Chapter 2:    Diana Cover-Up Turns Deadly                      Jeff Steinberg

Chapter 3:    Technology and Theology                            Toth-Fejel

Chapter 4:    Of Mice, Men, and In-Betweens                    Rick Weiss

Chapter 5:    A 50kg Nano Cadillac Just For You               Ralph Merkle

Chapter 6:    Back-Engineering the Mythologies               David Adair

Chapter 7:    The F117 Nighthawk Story (Part 2)                Jay Miller

Chapter 8:    The Not So Intelligent Designer                    Evan Ratcliff

Chapter 9:    Charles Fort and Postmodernism (Part 1)     Colin Bennett

Chapter 10:  AIDS: Heart of Darkness                                Jim Moore  

Chapter 11:  Black Triangles over America                       NIDS Report

Chapter 12:  Critiquing the Roswell Critics                       Stanton Friedman

Editorial

Editor Panzerben briefs his assault squad prior to yet another raid on the Sceptical HQ in Brentford Leisure Centre.

We at what has been called the “First Fortean Cyber Novel” are a bit pushed this month to give a full Introduction to this Diary 23 for December 2004, and we apologise for that. The Combat Team are splitting to the four corners of the world for the Mid Winter Fire Festival, and yours truly has to spend the next few weeks doing the final proofs to his new book from Headpress, An American Demonology. Therefore some of our usual features are missing.  We will be back in full force early in the New Year. Since therefore we are not waging war this issue, the atmosphere is rather like the football games played with the German Army in No Man’s Land in the First World War. When the whistles blow again, may the gods help all sceptical Brentfordians in the New Year. All attacks on us by the sane will be destroyed on principle.

Sorry, we haven’t even had time to put on some nice pictures of naked Combat Wives for our young audience. Shown in the last issue, these pictures (according to our spies, who are everywhere) left our enemies (and some of our friends) foaming at the mouth, which was of course the main objective. But the Combat Nubiles will be back in the New Year, together with a choice selection of pictures of Sceptical Wives we have received through the post. Of course there will be the universal Combat favourites such as  Paul Sieveking’s Diary (previously the Journal of Paul Sieveking). There will be Paul’s Neo-Edwardian recipes, memories of stair rods and Max Beerbohm, and sublime recall of nice English Bohemian brown-bread hippies of the Age of Festivals, Julie Felix & OZ Magazine. The entire whole-wheat depressing and suicidal English past will be here. Paul assures us that  there will be none of those dreadful modern distortions such as Existentialism, Surrealism, cyber politics, and technology from blue-chinned Postmodern Dagos beyond Calais who try to make Charles Fort into something more than a collector of curiosities for the child brides of the Home Counties.

Diana Melody Ash-Greenham of Ladbroke Grove, who wrote the episode of Paul Sieveking’s Diary has now moved on to our Military/Techno-Conspiracy section. Her place has been taken by Magonia Me Charlie (see photo below, supplied by the Brentford Polonius), a Brentford drifter rescued from the Leisure Centre by our Combat Sceptical Rescue Teams in an inspired state, as can be seen from the picture below. MC, as he is now known, has recovered so completely from his scepticism that we have given him a job at the Combat Diaries as writer of Paul Sieveking’s Diary.

Returning in the New Year will be the much-appreciated George Mensche’s Political Column, and Reports from our Belief Crisis Centre. By sheer popular demand, we are also planning a further series starring Prod and Tonto the two UFO “investigators” for the Fortean Times (our sister paper). We were going to lead them to pasture, but no less than 75 e-mails convinced us otherwise. Apparently there is now a web search for Prod’s mysterious girl friend, Vera Barraclough, a woman as mythological (some say) as the Brentford Griffin.

Also in Combat Diary 24 for January 2005, we have Patricia Farson’s amazing report on FT’s Uncon 2004, which was a complete disaster (because it is Xmas, we won’t mention the embarrassingly low number tickets sold for the whole weekend). There will be also an appreciation of the second great Magonia Magazine full spread on the Combat Diaries. Certainly we send Xmas greetings to all the lower-middle-class white-collar Protestant ledger-clerks of suburban Brentford who, full of nail-biting guilt, slaver over our unique and fiery brand of intellectual sex. However, quite a few do indeed drift to our side to take the wafer of True Belief, such as Magonia Me Charlie. We will also have more news on the Quorn Food Panic in Brentford Leisure Centre, where consumption of such is leading to a new type of affliction called Crisis of Belief. This causes the kind of Sceptical Dementia seen in Magonia Magazine, a definitive Brentford product if ever there was.

Colin (Bad Man) Bennett

Meantime, thank you all for overcoming your need to disbelieve in December of the year 2004.

Combat Diary HQ

Portobello Road

Notting Hill,

London

“couldn’t lead a empty pig to a full trough” (George Mensche)

“Should hung drawn and quartered” (The Strutting Tuffty)

“F****** B******  S*** C***” (The Fried Slice, FT editor, or

Manager or front, or general dog’s body – we don’t quite know which)

“From Intellectual Sex God save us” (The Brentford Polonius)

 The Leader

Meantime, don’t forget the Bad Man’s new article on cargo cults as a model for alien intelligence in Area 51 section of Phenomena Magazine

  Xmas 2004 Commentary by George Mensche

Well Combat Viewers, after you have sabotaged the Peasant’s Lantern, and spewed up all the genetically-modified Xmas poop and the Quorn Turkey over the fused fairy lights on the boring Xmas tree, here are no less than twelve deeply subversive Combat Chapters for you, written by the kind of first-class minds Viewers won’t find on any Xmas tree. They say it is all about the birth of a saviour. Well, if this is being saved, I wished I’d gone to Canada with our Fred.

By the way, there is on sale down the Edgware Road a small device that produces a white-out snow storm over all the mincing clowns, camp ponces, principal boys, and men in frocks of the British TV-culture nightmare. Once the kitsch peasant-shit is sabotaged give the kids Josephus, Aristotle and Herodotus, anything pre-saviour to take the treacle out of their gills. Mix with the computer-games and stand well clear.

Keep smiling!

       Xmas 2004 Commentary by Betty Baxter

The independent figures complied by UK Servers show that the Combat Diaries of the Alternative Fortean Times is now one of the world’s biggest counter-culture web sites, and growing by the month. Whilst we are not primarily a UFO site, we overlap all Ufological interest sectors and in the New Year we will be featuring new sections containing the latest information concerning abductions, encounters, and research. We will continue to analyze and interpret the ideas of Charles Fort, who has not been served well at all in the U.K. We have here everything that no other web magazine covers: Postmodernism, Cyber, Metatheatre, Media and Web Theory, the latest UFO reports, and all aspects of what author Eric Davies calls “Techgnosis.” In addition, we will continue to be controversial, absurd, anarchic, cheeky, and insulting, if only to avoid the disasters that po-faced straight-laced sceptical dead-heads have wrought upon our sister paper, the Fortean Times. From what out Intelligence agents have gleaned from many sources, the fate of this once-great magazine is now said to be uncertain, mainly for the reasons we have been pointing out for months.

Meantime, we intend to keep and develop our shit-kicking in-your-face style which judging by the e-mails is much appreciated in the face of deeply conservative British culture. We get surprisingly little opposition. A few miserable pot-shots from the dead Magonian English in a tin chapel in Brentford, plus one or two sneers from the Fortean Times, who lost the entire Fortean plot years ago.

We intend also to come out more regularly each month instead of averaging one issue every 6 weeks or so. In the New Year we will have a small full-time staff, and this will help us give a better edited product and correct mistakes that have been made under pressure.  We are also trying to construct proper search, link structures, and archival structures. We are also mulling over possibility of an e-mail chat line, but this will take time and resources.

As the figures above show, it is going to be an exciting year 2005 for the Combat Diaries of the Alternative Fortean Times. We use young people who are anything but politically-correct, with fresh modern ideas, so them coming in, folks!

Meantime, here are some good Xmas reads for you. The Lantern Slide Girl will appear in a collection of stories late next year, entitled Breakout of the Fictions.

The artwork below is by Christine Rhone.

  Belief Crisis Centre News

Above we see on the left a typical Quorn Food Belief Crisis Victim rescued from the Brentford Leisure Centre. Right, we see this same person (Magonia Me Charlie) after treatment in the Combat Diaries Belief Crisis Detox Centre. He now writes for us, not Magonia Magazine. Others are heading our way, like Protestants secretly planning to take the wafer. They read us secretly by torchlight and oil-lamps in locked garages and bathrooms. They read us by rushlight and candle in catacombs, and ditches.

Please press the headings below for access

   Metatheatre: Lantern Slide Girl (part 1)

    NICAP: Strange, Disc-Shaped Objects (part 1)

   NICAP Remembered A Commentary by Betty Baxter

     Book Review

Politics of the Imagination

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jpeg 20nailing down water, October 11, 2004

Reviewer: peterpeccoleman from Ilkley, West Yorkshire United Kingdom

Lao Tzu said that "We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want". This is the human condition and plays within the work of Charles Fort and his leading translator Colin Bennett.
Fort is falsely seen as simply a collector of odd stories. Of inexplicable falls from the sky, spaceships, weird human behaviour - anything that didn't fit with consensus "reality". This view condemns Fort into an earlier version of Ripley and his "Believe it or not" sideshow - candyfloss for the brain. Funfair fodder.
Fort devoted his life to something much deeper, much darker, much more dangerous. In short he took on the establishment, in all its forms, and challenged how we had filled the "emptiness" of Lao Tzu's clay pot with "facts" and "reality". Fort's vast collection of "unholy" events simply made a nonsense of "reality". And it is as a commentator rather than a collector that makes Charles Fort one of the most important, if still largely ignored, men of the 20th Century. Equally Bennett arrives as the most important commentator on Fort in the 21st Century.
We occupy a left brain, yang world to the exclusion of the fancy called imagination. We are told as children that "it" (the dream, the present worry or whatever) is "just your imagination" - a worthless thing outside of reality and not to be concerned with. We are cajoled to "be objective" and ignore the wholly unreliable subjective world.
Bennett talks about having "the strength of nerve to doubt if there is such a thing as a fact". Indeed given that so many so called "forteans" deride Bennett for his "unscientific approach", it does take some nerve to stand apart from the crowd.
Equally unpopular with the materialists is the notion that "when we imagine we create a form of life" - that doesn't fit with "the facts". The difficulty is, as Bennett continues, "the very absurd and often grotesque playfulness of many incidents Fort describes is insulting to all our ideas of the universe being a a serious design with proper purpose". And again "thus we do not consider "factual objectivity" so much as what is 'allowed'"
We have developed a collective amnesia, choosing "the latest whatever" in preference to something from yesterday or many years ago. Just as the orgasm "tricks" us into reproducing so our collective amnesia "fools" us into forgetting the depth of stuff that doesn't comply with consensus reality. We forget and in forgetting we lose so much. Thankfully Fort lives on with help from people like Bennett.
Michael Bywater wrote a piece for The Independent back in February 2000 (probably well forgotten)entitled "Thank God for other worlds". To quote a little of it, talking about dreams - "A fugue, an escape, a retreat into a parallel world? I don't know. I have lived 'there' as long as I have lived 'here'; I am as at home, as known, as acknowledged in the precipitous streets in that eiderdown world as I am here. Sometimes I feel the door closing: it can happen in either world and all I know is that if I cannot get back, cannot move between the two, I will be more than bereft. I will be the subject of a catastrophe.
Take away our dreams and our intellectual history would be unrecognisable. Imagine if we had never dreamed. What would there be to hint that things are not all or entirely as they seem. What would mutter to us of worlds within worlds? How would humanity have developed if nobody had ever woken laughing, or found themselves cast up on the tidal shores of a new day with their cheeks wet with inexplicable tears?"
It is difficult to review "Politics of the Imagination" by Colin Bennett. It ranges far and wide and deep. I need to re-read it. But I know that this is a very important book. The stuff under discussion is elusive and strange. It's like trying to nail down water, but it's worth the effort and I would urge anyone who thinks or wonders beyond the confines of so called reality to get their hands on this book. It's a mind changer. Go get.