I am a proud conspiracy theorist. Not really proud, more like contentious. But that’s not the point. I started watching Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory/ies on whatever channel, and his theme was the Bilderbergs. Going over the usual ground, they went into the familiar world slavery, mass starvation, etc…and Jesse addressed something called the “Georgia Guidestones,” these huge tryptichs which call for a world-wide population of 500 million people, among other things. Jesse’s show was postulating this as some kind of manifesto of the Bilderbergers, or something of that sort. OK, weird, but I thought that there was some kind of technicality that would keep Jesse from looking like a total tool, and we’d see that it was an amusing spin that we were supposed to take seriously, as in, “Well, our producers put a 15 foot cardboard mockup there, showing what it *could *be like.” But no, the thing has been there for something like 10-20 years, mysteriously paid for (big bucks, IIRC) and, on top of that, it’s unclear who owns the land where the thing is. Per Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
So, is there something about this that Wikipedia and I am missing? Does anybody here have any further information about it? I would have thought that Wiki would be comprehensive, but, who can say?
I realize that some of my pet conspiracy theories are just that, but, OTOH, this has my head spinning. Well, not really spinning, but you get the idea.
Any info will help in the battle for civilization!
Those things look awful tall for something that’s supposed to survive an apocalypse. Why didn’t they make a more stable structure, something wider and lower?
On the weird side, the stones advocate reducing the earth’s human population to some drastically small number like 500,000,000 or less… How would that happen exactly??? :eek:
My thoughts have always been that at the point in which a group of people would actually be using the Guidestones to recreate human civilization, we would have managed to reduce the human popular way below 500,000,000 through some apocalyptic holocaust. In other words, the 500,000,000 is intended as a guide line for how far the population should be allowed to expand.
Through attrition. We have a very good start going on that already. I have mentioned this on the Board before, but no one seems interested. I don’t understand why this doesn’t freak everybody out.
The languages on the stones are English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. Just for fun: What do you think of these choices? You’d want some combination of future readability and world-wide diversity.
I’d vote for English, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic for sure.
Russian would have seemed like a good choice in 1980, but less clear now with the fall of the USSR. However, it’s still spoken over a wide geographic area (up to Sarah Palin’s back door) so I’d probably leave it in.
Swahili will never be a major world language but I can’t think of a better choice to represent Africa.
An Indian language makes sense, but I might think about replacing Hindi with a Dravidian language.
Hebrew was probably chosen just for religious reasons. I think that slot should be given to another East Asian language - maybe Malay, Japanese, or Vietnamese.
Chinese would be a relatively bad choice because it’s so localized. This is one problem with picking languages based on population counts alone: If most of the speakers are in one dense, contiguous region, a single big plague destroys that language without much problem. I think this affects Swahili, Russian, and Hindi as well, especially Hindi.
Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hebrew are much better choices due to that factor. I’d also pick Indonesian because of the isolating effects of all those islands: Knock out a few, or even a majority, and you still have a lot of people who know it left alive and relatively unscathed. I’d also add one of the other languages spoken by people above the Arctic Circle, who are relatively cut off from the rest of the world and its disasters, and one of the non-English languages spoken in Australia, for the same reason.
these “guidestones” may be the equivalent of a canceled, written off project for a religious (occult, more specifically) organization. E.g. the followers of the occultist Elizabeth Clare Prophet expected a nuclear war in the end of the 80s (‘cause the spirits done told them so) and spent massive amount of money and headache preparing fallout shelters and so forth, some details are here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphant#History . When the war failed to materialize, from the standpoint of that organization this would be sort of the equivalent of Microsoft writing off “Microsoft Bob” as useless for anything but Mr. Gates’ matrimonial purposes. You write off the expense and you move on forward.
So the “guidestones” could be something pretty similar. Some rich occultists were preparing for some sort of a big media stunt or whatever other event in the context of which it would have made good sense and constituted a reasonable investment. But when for whatever reasons the event got canceled, the stones were left as a wasted sunk cost. As for the message written on them could be thought “chilling” by us if it weren’t for the fact that the same message is openly preached by “green” organizations world over. And nobody cares because everybody is too busy worrying about “Muslim threat” or “Republican opposition to healthcare”.
Swahili is widely spoken in East Africa. Hindi is the national language of India. Neither is particularly likely to die out as a result of a catastrophe when compared to, say, Spanish.
What are we thinking is the purpose of the inscriptions in Babylonic cuneiform, Sanskrit, Egyptian hieroglyphs and classic Greek?
And the earth could support more people than it does now.
A Rosetta Stone like scenario, in which future generations could use the inscriptions on the GuideStones in languages they do know to work out interpretations of even older dead languages. The earth might be able to support more people than it does now, but the quality of life might not be worth much. The 500,000,000 on the Guidestones is based on one calculation of how many people the planet could support with all of us having a standard of living similiar to the United States and Western Europe experiences now.
Spanish is spoken widely across two continents plus many, many outlying regions. How is it more vulnerable to catastrophe when compared to languages localized to only fractions of one continent with few speakers outside that region?
Some mystic (or just poorly-thought-out) notion that since those languages have survived so far they must be on the fast track to surviving another few millennia. The person forgot the convergence of historical factors (also known as blind luck) that lead to those languages not being wiped out at some point.
I think the most glaring omission from this record of National-Linguistic Collectives is the language of the Amazonian Indians (Arawak) and the Inuit and their language. After all…the only people who might survive the type of disaster that this Monolith was constructed for are those geographies of language within North and South America, who also might actually make it to past tense Georgia someday. but they would not speak English, nor write nor read it- they might have a pictographic written language… what good is it then? I don’t think this monument was constructed for the current location, it was meant to go somewhere else? Or maybe the architect is really that shortsighted?
