Steeleye Span

First example:

Canal Defence Light (CDL) was a British "secret weapon" of the Second World War.

It was based upon the use of a powerful carbon-arc searchlight to dazzle and confuse enemy troops. A demonstration had shown that the use of a vehicle mounted searchlight both disoriented the units facing it and masked activities behind the searchlight.

The searchlight was mounted in an armoured turret fitted to a tank. Initially the Matilda tank was used replacing its normal turret with a cylindrical one containing the searchlight (the light emitting through a vertical slit) and a machine gun. This was later replaced by the US M3 Grant which was superior in several ways; it was a larger roomier tank, better able to keep up with tanks such as the Sherman and it had a hull mounted gun which was unaffected by the replacement of its normal turret with the searchlight turret.

The light could be varied in two ways to further enhance any effect.

• Addition of blue or amber filter would make the light source seem further away or closer respectively.
• the operation of a shutter would create a flickering effect.

The project was shrouded in secrecy. It was tested during Exercise Primrose in 1943 at Kilbride Bay with the result that it was determined to be "too uncertain to be depended upon as the main feature of an invasion".

Second:

As the abuse memories began to surface when we explored the roots of the ADD, Jim was often aware of a very bright light in the middle of the surfacing images. When I asked him to focus on the light, Jim began to repeat the same phrases again and again. One such session revealed the following set of phrases:

Your mommy loves you, no matter what anyone else says. You just fell down. Your knee is only a little scraped. Those bruises happened when you fell. Poor Jim, mommy helped you fix your knee and made it better. No matter what anyone else says, you know this is true. Your mommy loves you every day, more and more. And when you look at your knee remember your mommy loves you. Your mommy loves you more and more each day."

It took me a moment to realize that he had been told to look at a bright light while classically-formulated hypnotic suggestions were told to him after he experienced abuse. Because of this, I realized that it would be necessary to uncover all of the hypnotic suggestions that had been given to him during or after abuse.

Third:

The word, "hypnosis", comes from the term "neuro-hypnotism" first used by the Scottish physician and surgeon, James Braid, around 1841. He coined that term to differentiate his techniques from those of Franz Anton Mesmer, who named his practice "Mesmerization". It is from Braid that we get the tradition of inducing a hypnotic state by having the subject stare at a bright light.

Fourth

According to Mr Tomlinson a strobe flash gun was to be shone in the face of Milosevic's driver in a tunnel causing his car to swerve and crash.

Fifth, Keel:

The mechanism—the light flashes—can be subjective, seen only by the percipient, or objective, seen by others and even photographable. The subjective flashes must be caused by radiation which by-passes the eyes and optical nerves and is received directly by the brain. Objective flashes are masses of energy moving through the visible spectrum.

If you review the thousands of UFO contact reports you will find that many of them begin with the appearance of an entity holding some kind of "flashlight" which is shone directly at the witness. In cases in which the percipient was taken aboard a saucer, a light flashes and he is told his picture has just been taken. In other instances, some of which have already been described, the entity approaches the witness and suddenly flashes a light at him which causes paralysis. Woodrow Derenberger was among the very few contact claimants who did not describe such flashes. In trying to nail down the exact chronological order of events in the contactee experience, I found that the witnesses observed the flash first and then they saw the entity approaching with some kind of flashlight. A second flash paralyzed them or rendered them unconscious. The phenomenon takes yet another form. The witness is stepping out his door, or getting out of his automobile, when there is a sudden burst of light "like a flash gun going off." No photographer or camera is visible. There is no sudden paralysis or ill effects. The witness just scratches his head in bewilderment and goes about his business. However, those who see these flashes have usually had psychic experiences previously.

Underpopulation

There is an idea commonly put about by the business and intellectual elites that the earth is over populated, that there is no way in the long term to support the current mass of humanity and, to be blunt about the matter, that they heartily wish most of us were dead.

The environmentalist movement, with their talk about tough choices and changing minds has enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon.

In reality two things are responsible for the current state of the environment. One is the way of life we have adopted, which would be unsustainable even if there were only five hundred million people on the earth, or indeed five million for that matter. The other is, unpopular though the idea will be, underpopulation.

The lack of people means a lack of pressure to support natural resources such as fish stocks at levels which produce the highest harvests, lack of pressure to make much potentially productive arable land fertile and a lack of labour in the third world, not to mention a lack of higher food prices which would encourage third world producers to produce and first world producers to produce without massive subsidies.

I've even heard it suggested that lower population would lessen unemployment, even though our economy is based on services and would lose money with less people to provide services to.

A true overpopulation crisis would imply the efficient use of resources wasn't enough to sustain us, but African farmers produce nothing because of American subsidised imports, Caribean sugar plantations close down and revert to jungle because of European beet production.

Farmers of African rice are outcompeted by USG sponsored giveaways, and we all know they wouldn't give something away if it had a marketable value.

We also often hear that we are wiping away our environmental capital, and modern extensive agriculture techniques make this partly true but very misleading. Nature didn't give us a capital to use up, our predecessors created it. They spent their lives, more than they knew, on higher fish stocks, higher water tables and thicker top soil.

Men spent centuries digging leaf mould, bone meal, coal ash and excrement into the soil. Laying hedges to break wind and stop the erosion of top soil, to create new soil with their leaves, to hold water in the land with their roots.

The oldest building in Britain isn't stone henge. It's a tree. There are those who will quibble about my classification of a tree as a building, as there are those who say the pyramids aren't buildings, but this tree, which to the naked eye looks more like a forest, has been entirely shaped by man and due to man's efforts has long outlived its likely natural lifespan, not to mention those of all the humans who have tended it. It's a normal lime tree, grown into a copse through the cultivating efforts of dozens of generations of coppicers.

Even fish stocks have us to thank for their former high levels, fed by the siltation caused by land clearance and arable farming. The food production increases in Egypt brough about by the Nasser dam were cancelled out by the almos total destruction of their fisheries as the dam stopped silt from the Ethiopian highlands reaching the sea. The antiquity of the Ethiopian civilisation can be shown by the fact that Egypt, from earliest times, was reliant on the Nile silt, which in turn depended upon cultivation of the land around it's upper courses in Abyssinia.

Even before the advent of arable farming, humanity had long been sedentary and had planted the seeds of those plants he found useful so that they would be in greater plenty in future years. Hunter gatherers weren't nomads. They stayed in one place and, as has generally been the case with humans, shaped the land around them. They essentially created the species we eat today, both plants and animals, things we have no reason to thank nature for.

Primitives were like us, and they and their successors created the productive land we have today. They weren't nomads wandering about the place in yurts, abandoning each area as it became exhausted only to move onto the next patch until they killed they too. They didn't practice slash and burn like some loin cloth wearing Mayan savage, or some weak chinned aristocrat looking to encourage grouse numbers.

Mankind made the earth a suitable environment for himself and hasn't so far finished. That's the great work of mankind that we should be continuing, not reversing.

A word on fish. We have already passed peak fish. A properly sustainable fishing industry would produce more fish than we do now, but current practices such as dredging up breeding grounds on the sea floor have done damage. The logical conclusion would be a moratorium on fishing for a few years, which may seem unrealistic but is less unrealistic than the annihilation of 90% or more of the human race. Well, hopefully, at least. Then go back to fishing with more sustainable practices and higher yields.

Ultimately I would like to see global populations reach ten milliards. This should be doable by extending the lives of those in countries which have shorter life expectancies. Populations should increase enough before higher standard of living reduces birthrates.

I would like to see India continue to rebuild its ancestral water storage to maximise use of the monsoons and replenish the water table. I would like to see money spent on sand dams to create more usable land in Africa. I'd like to see western subsidies dropped and west African grain allowed into our markets. I'd like to see those hedges destroyed by fickle EU CAP policies replanted. I'd like to see those parts of the Amazon left as unused grass land replants with trees, the Maya nuts and other edible species, and populated with people so as to cultivate the land and revivify it.

The spectre that haunts our race is that of abandonment. Of the lights going out and the cities becoming empty. The Saxons arriving in the cities of the Romans and Welsh which they thought were built by giants, but which had been abandoned even by the degenerate remnant of Welshmen hiding away in their hillforts and coastal fastnesses. The empty cathedral of Simon Stylites, once holding 15,000 people and now gone, with dozens of surrounding settlements which still stand empty today because of the shifting of trade routes. The empty homes of south-western America, the population dead because of bad land management. The mounds of the Cahokians, the empty lands above the Exe, the Great Zimbabwe, the Canarian pyramids, the megalithic Baalbek and Lexis, the dried oases of the Tarim. The dead Mycenae and Hattusas. The Pope and some peasants squatting in the Forum. The European farmland abadoned after the black death, so much of it taken over by the wildwoods that carbon in the atmosphere dropped enough to cause the mini-ice-age.

Well and such collapse now would be global. We will either do what we were born to do, tame the earth, fill it up, spread life over its surface and wrest life from the dust, or we will continue on our current path, with doesn't just use resources but destroys them, which causes most damage with least people and which will ultimately make us a cancer which destroys both its host and itself.

Tory, because you're worth it

Italian money is lira

Nonono. Is Euros. Was lira. See also Turkish lira, Egyptian lira, French Livre.

That £? "L"!