Lothlórien Path

Oil

2007-05-19T22:06:00.000-04:00

Funny how Exxon and BP profits keep going up and up. Has anyone noticed how they always have "refinery problems" just before summer vacation?

Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 21:16:04 -0400 From: Col. L. Fletcher Prouty To: len_osanic@mindlink.bc.ca Subject: RE: Reynolds letter This response is for Daniel E. Reynolds, 29 July 1996 on the subject of "Oil - A renewable and abiotic Fuel?"

Dan, your use of the word "abiotic" is good. As a non-fossil fuel, petroleum has no living antecedent. It contains chemical elements found in living matter; but it is not "formerly living matter." There has not been enough true "formerly living matter"through all of creation to account for the volume of petroleumthat has been consumed to date. My background in this subject goes back to 1943. I was the pilot who flew a U.S. Geological Survey Team from Casablanca to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. We met the Cal. Standard Oil team holding down that lease. Then we went back to Cairo to meet President Roosevelt during the Nov. 1943 "Cairo Conference" with Churchill and Chiang Kai Shek. FDR ordered the immediate construction of an oil refinery there for WW II use. This led to ARAMCO. During the "Energy Crisis" of the 1970's I was detailed to represent the U.S. Railroad industry as a member of the "Federal Staff Energy Seminar" program started by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sponsored by Georgetown University. That began in Jan 1974 and continued for four years. It was designed to discuss "the working of the United States national energy system, and new horizons of energy research." Among the regular attendees were such men as Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger...most valuable meetings. During one meeting we took a "Buffet Break" and I was seated with Arthur Kantrowitz of the AVCO Company..."Kantrowitz Labs" nearBoston. At the table with us were four young geologists busily talking about Petroleum. At one point one of them made reference to "Petroleum as organic matter, and a fossil fuel." Right out of the Rockefeller bible. Kantrowitz turned to the geologist beside him and asked, "Do you really believe that petroleum is a fossil fuel?" The man said,"Certainly" and all four of them joined in. Kantrowitz listened quietly and then said, "The deepest fossil ever found has been at about 16,000 feet below sea level; yet we are getting oil from wells drilled to 30,000 and more. How could fossil fuel get down there? If it was once living matter, it had to be on the surface. If it did turn into petroleum, at or near the surface,how could it ever get to such depths? What is heavier Oil or Water?" Water: so it would go down, not oil. Oil would be on top, if it were "organic" and "lighter." "Oil is neither." They all agreed water was heavier, and therefore if there was some crack or other open area for this "Organic matter" to go deep into the magma of Earth, water would have to go first and oil would be left nearer the surface. This is reasonable. Even if we do agree that "magma" is a "crude mixture of minerals or organic matters, in a thin pasty state" this does not make it petroleum, and if it were petroleum it would have stayed near the surface as heavier items, i.e. water seeped below. My D. Van Nostrand "Scientific Encyclopedia" says "Magma is the term for molten material. A natural, complex, liquid, high temperature, silicate solution ancestral to all igneous rocks,both intrusive and effusive. The origin of Magma is not known." My "Oxford English Dictionary" does not even have the word "Magma." Some years ago I wrote two or three pages that appeared in theMcGraw Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology, i.e. "Railroad Engineering." Even that source is a bit uncertain about the"origin of petroleum" to wit: "Less than 1% of the organic matter that originates in or is transported to the marine environment is eventually incorporated into ocean sediment," and "Most petroleum is formed during catagenesis (undefined anywhere). If sufficient organic matter is present oceanic sediments that undergo this process are potential petroleum sources. Deeply buried marine organic matter yields mainly oil, whereas land plant material yields mainly gas." (Their idea of "deeply buried" is the "out.") All this leaves us no where. I still go with Kantrowitz. Since oil is lighter than water, everywhere on Earth, there is no way that petroleum could be an organic, fossil fuel that is created on or near the surface, and penetrate Earth ahead of water. Oil must originate far below and gradually work its way up into well-depth areas accessable to surface drilling. It comes from far below. Therefore, petroleum is not a "Fossil" fuel with a surface or near surface origin. It was made to be thought a "Fossil" fuel by the Nineteenth oil producers to create the concept that it was of limited supply and therefore extremely valuable. This fits with the "Depletion"allowance philosophical scam. During one of our C.S.I.S. "International Nights" (1978) the Common Market Energy boss, M. Montibrial of France, told us that while petroleum was being marketed then for $20.00 per barrel or more, it cost no more than 25 cents per barrel at the well-head. There is our petroleum problem! We were paying more than $1.50-$1.60 per gallon, one 42nd of a barrel, at that time. Interested folks need to learn more about the Chartered Institute of Transport, and not waste their time with OPEC, the "Cover" story. Those who pumped the Pennsylvania wells "dry" during the late eighteen hundreds saved what they had for those better days. L. Fletcher Prouty

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Sustainable oil?

{May 25, 2004By Chris Bennett© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com}

About 80 miles off of the coast of Louisiana lies a mostly submerged mountain, the top of which is known as Eugene Island. The portion underwater is an eerie-looking, sloping tower jutting up from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, with deep fissures and perpendicular faults which spontaneously spew natural gas. A significant reservoir of crude oil was discovered nearby in the late '60s, and by 1970, a platform named Eugene 330 was busily producing about 15,000 barrels a day of high-quality crude oil.
By the late '80s, the platform's production had slipped to less than 4,000 barrels per day, and was considered pumped out. Done. Suddenly, in 1990, production soared back to 15,000 barrels a day, and the reserves which had been estimated at 60 million barrels in the '70s, were recalculated at 400 million barrels. Interestingly, the measured geological age of the new oil was quantifiably different than the oil pumped in the '70s.
Analysis of seismic recordings revealed the presence of a "deep fault" at the base of the Eugene Island reservoir which was gushing up a river of oil from some deeper and previously unknown source.
Similar results were seen at other Gulf of Mexico oil wells. Similar results were found in the Cook Inlet oil fields in Alaska. Similar results were found in oil fields in Uzbekistan. Similarly in the Middle East, where oil exploration and extraction have been underway for at least the last 20 years, known reserves have doubled. Currently there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 680 billion barrels of Middle East reserve oil.
Creating that much oil would take a big pile of dead dinosaurs and fermenting prehistoric plants. Could there be another source for crude oil?
An intriguing theory now permeating oil company research staffs suggests that crude oil may actually be a natural inorganic product, not a stepchild of unfathomable time and organic degradation. The theory suggests there may be huge, yet-to-be-discovered reserves of oil at depths that dwarf current world estimates.
The theory is simple: Crude oil forms as a natural inorganic process which occurs between the mantle and the crust, somewhere between 5 and 20 miles deep. The proposed mechanism is as follows:
Methane (CH4) is a common molecule found in quantity throughout our solar system – huge concentrations exist at great depth in the Earth.
At the mantle-crust interface, roughly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, rapidly rising streams of compressed methane-based gasses hit pockets of high temperature causing the condensation of heavier hydrocarbons. The product of this condensation is commonly known as crude oil.
Some compressed methane-based gasses migrate into pockets and reservoirs we extract as "natural gas."
In the geologically "cooler," more tectonically stable regions around the globe, the crude oil pools into reservoirs.
In the "hotter," more volcanic and tectonically active areas, the oil and natural gas continue to condense and eventually to oxidize, producing carbon dioxide and steam, which exits from active volcanoes.
Periodically, depending on variations of geology and Earth movement, oil seeps to the surface in quantity, creating the vast oil-sand deposits of Canada and Venezuela, or the continual seeps found beneath the Gulf of Mexico and Uzbekistan.
Periodically, depending on variations of geology, the vast, deep pools of oil break free and replenish existing known reserves of oil.
There are a number of observations across the oil-producing regions of the globe that support this theory, and the list of proponents begins with Mendelev (who created the periodic table of elements) and includes Dr.Thomas Gold (founding director of Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research) and Dr. J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corporations, Houston, Texas.
In his 1999 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Dr. Gold presents compelling evidence for inorganic oil formation. He notes that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to "deep earth" formations, not the haphazard depositions we find with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life.
He also notes that oil extracted from varying depths from the same oil field have the same chemistry – oil chemistry does not vary as fossils vary with increasing depth. Also interesting is the fact that oil is found in huge quantities among geographic formations where assays of prehistoric life are not sufficient to produce the existing reservoirs of oil. Where then did it come from?
Another interesting fact is that every oil field throughout the world has outgassing helium. Helium is so often present in oil fields that helium detectors are used as oil-prospecting tools. Helium is an inert gas known to be a fundamental product of the radiological decay or uranium and thorium, identified in quantity at great depths below the surface of the earth, 200 and more miles below. It is not found in meaningful quantities in areas that are not producing methane, oil or natural gas. It is not a member of the dozen or so common elements associated with life. It is found throughout the solar system as a thoroughly inorganic product.
Even more intriguing is evidence that several oil reservoirs around the globe are refilling themselves, such as the Eugene Island reservoir – not from the sides, as would be expected from cocurrent organic reservoirs, but from the bottom up.
Dr. Gold strongly believes that oil is a "renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs."
Smaller oil companies and innovative teams are using this theory to justify deep oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, among other locations, with some success. Dr. Kenney is on record predicting that parts of Siberia contain a deep reservoir of oil equal to or exceeding that already discovered in the Middle East.
Could this be true?
In August 2002, in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US)," Dr. Kenney published a paper, which had a partial title of "The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum." Dr. Kenney and three Russian coauthors conclude:
The Hydrogen-Carbon system does not spontaneously evolve hydrocarbons at pressures less than 30 Kbar, even in the most favorable environment. The H-C system evolves hydrocarbons under pressures found in the mantle of the Earth and at temperatures consistent with that environment.
He was quoted as stating that "competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological materials since the last quarter of the 19th century."
Deeply entrenched in our culture is the belief that at some point in the relatively near future we will see the last working pump on the last functioning oil well screech and rattle, and that will be that. The end of the Age of Oil. And unless we find another source of cheap energy, the world will rapidly become a much darker and dangerous place.
If Dr. Gold and Dr. Kenney are correct, this "the end of the world as we know it" scenario simply won't happen. Think about it ... while not inexhaustible, deep Earth reserves of inorganic crude oil and commercially feasible extraction would provide the world with generations of low-cost fuel. Dr. Gold has been quoted saying that current worldwide reserves of crude oil could be off by a factor of over 100.
A Hedberg Conference, sponsored by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, was scheduled to discuss and publicly debate this issue. Papers were solicited from interested academics and professionals. The conference was scheduled to begin June 9, 2003, but was canceled at the last minute. A new date has yet to be set.
http://www.prouty.org/oil.html

2007-03-08T12:02:00.000-05:00

Comment from the RI post 3-8-2007 during a highly energized session on the comment board concerning the WTC failures.

Tom Breidenbach said...

Jeff:I deeply admire your blog, as well as the work of Hopsicker. I also think Nafeez Ahmed is an important and underrated voice on 9/11 and I can’t recommend his WAR ON FREEDOM and WAR ON TRUTH highly enough.

Reasonable people may and do disagree about the controlled demolition hypothesis, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that “physical evidence” can be a tough angle to make stick, forensically speaking, especially now that most all of it’s been swept away. That said, I’m morally certain (as the philosophers say) that the Towers were blown up. And that even if I’m eventually proven wrong (and I might be), there is every reason at present to defend the controlled demolition hypothesis.

Here’s why.
Molten metal, in all likelihood steel, was found under WTC buildings One, Two and Seven. This metal appears on film of the site taken nearly six weeks after the attacks. Its presence was commented upon extensively by various officials and first responders at the site. It roiled and smoldered for many weeks, perhaps months. I live in New York and, along with millions of others, smelled that pile burning for nearly half a year after 9/11 (the longest uncontrolled fire in any city in US history, if I remember the article in the NY Times correctly). Anyone following the controversy has heard testimony from various witnesses, including firefighters and first responders, about the molten metal. Those of us here in the city probably remember reading articles about it. It was common knowledge in the weeks and months following the attacks. I’ve spoken at length with a first responder who’s active in the 9/11 Truth Movement and is very sick now; he testifies to what others on “the pile” reported seeing: flowing metal throughout the rubble following the attacks. A lot of it. He also confirms that the steel beam cut slant-wise was visible, very much as it appears in photos, when he first arrived at scene within an hour after Tower One “collapsed.” Architect Bart Voorsanger, attempting to account for the survival of the North Tower’s antenna, clearly confirms the view that the molten metal underneath the rubble at Ground Zero was steel. Commenting on the antenna, which was made of steel, Voorsanger says, “It was the piece that collapsed onto everything else, and I think it must have fallen far enough away from the internal fires within the center of the Towers that it was not melted into some unrecognizable fused mass.” Here the man described by the Associated Press as having “headed the team of architects that retrieved trade center steel” is acknowledging what multiple eye-witnesses including engineering professionals working at Ground Zero, as well as video and “thermographic” aerial photography (not to mention scientists including Jones) all point to: that masses of molten steel roiled beneath the Towers for weeks, even months after they’d “collapsed.” There has been no rational explanation as to how this could have occurred without the use of explosives or some source of destructive energy other than hydrocarbons. NIST appears to understand that no such explanation is possible, that the molten metal (most probably steel) is the Achilles heal of the official “collapse” narrative. Which is why NIST Engineer John Gross now simply denies that molten metal ever existed under the rubble pile. Here we might identify the source of some of the rage being directed against you on this post. In the face of what appears to be a bald and arrogant ploy by authorities, one echoing all those others we’ve seen play out in official responses to almost every other aspect of the attacks, you—who’ve fought this battle bravely on so many fronts—appear to capitulate here, going weak in the knees, as if resigning the fight to hold on to the very history of 9/11 even as others risk their livelihoods and reputations to salvage and defend it. Yes, the painstaking contextualization of the 9/11 attacks provided by Ahmed is essential and sadly under-emphasized in 9/11 studies.

Caveats expressed by Sander Hicks and others concerning the “physical evidence” school of 9/11 skepticism are well-taken, at least by me. Clearly, even if we prove the CD hypothesis, knowing the buildings were blown up won’t tell us all or even most of what we need to know about 9/11. But on the other hand, it isn’t fair (though it might appear far more respectable in some circles) to leave the matter at that, especially with the multiple indications in the public record indicating the possibility—make that the likelihood—of controlled demolition. Besides the molten metal issue, there’s the powerful and corroborating testimony from multiple eye-witnesses that has been categorized by David Ray Griffin into eleven categories of observed phenomena, each strongly indicative of, if not exclusive to, controlled demolition. With the broad array of relevant data on the matter, 9/11 Truth appears on solid, even fruitful theoretical ground with the controlled demolition hypothesis, especially given the state of the aptly titled “collapse” theory, that “ever-changing, but always flimsy, story” in Kevin Ryan’s words, reliant on “anti-science” whose handful of actual proponents “started with their conclusions and worked backward to some ‘leading hypotheses.’” Of course the bitter fact remains that most of the evidence regarding the Towers’ destruction was hastily and, as has been strenuously argued from official corners, illegally destroyed. (Retired NYPD Officer Craig Bartmer, who labored at Ground Zero, reports rumors widely circulating on “the pile” that “the mob was stealing the steel.”)

While certainly crippling to the material investigation, this destruction of evidence, protested vehemently in official quarters, in itself is highly indicative of official complicity.

As with 9/11 in general, it is the broader context of the controlled demolition issue, more than any one or few of the multiple anomalies in the official account, where the charnel depths of state complicity come into focus.

The controlled demolition theory not only best explains the array of specific phenomena witnessed that day, it also points up some disturbing circumstances relating to security at the Towers complex prior to the attacks, and to the roles played by certain agencies—private, State and municipal—in 9/11 and the corrupt military/industrial power structure more generally. The controlled demolition hypothesis also begs some very serious questions pertaining to the precise nature, structure and tactics of state-sponsored terrorism, implying among other things the existence of a special forces unit whose expertise includes spectacular feats of mass human slaughter.And then there’s the crux of the matter: the psychological angle.

Kevin Ryan, who was fired from his job with Underwriters Laboratories, the company that certified the steel components of the WTC, observes, “if we really want to zero in on the exact turning point around which we plunged into chaos, we need to focus in particular on the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. This is where our hearts were wrenched and our minds were made ready for never-ending war, torture, and apparently the end of everything that was American. If we are ever to emerge from this insanity, we need to know how three tall buildings collapsed due to fire, all on the same day, when no such thing has ever happened before.”As Ryan implies, whether we like it or not an intelligible account of what brought the Towers down is essential to determining the character and fate of our society. Short of any cogent explanation from our officials we are morally compelled to advocate the most consistent hypothesis regarding their destruction—however incredible we ourselves may find it. Here I’ll quote from an essay in which I paraphrase and reflect on observations by Webster Tarpley: “the subliminal effects of 9/11 threaten to permanently distort our at-home-ness in reality, in the physical world, which on that day became a place where majestic state-of-the-art buildings, marvels of engineering and modernist architecture’s capstones, monuments (affirmed by cliché) to human ingenuity and spirit…unpeeled so strangely to dust. The question of how the towers fell isn’t merely academic, but in some measure crucial to our psychological health as a people. If they were destroyed by explosives planted in the structures, then we’ve been compelled to accept a counterfeit view of physical reality, marking the radical intensification of a schizophrenic mindset already endemic in—and increasingly definitive of—Anglo-American culture. “The effect of the Towers’ destruction is tied to the structures’ form as well as the place of the ‘tower’ and ‘twin’ archetypes in legend (whether in Tolkien, the Tarot or the Pentateuch for the former, or astrology, religious esoterism and classical myth for the latter). Anthropomorphic totems, the Twin Towers connoted a unity of two (or balanced duality), the harmonious couple (thus love, or lovers), or the self and its reflection: in short, completion, with the North Tower (with its antennae) the yang to the South’s yin (slightly recessive, as if, from the greater Manhattan perspective, backing the other up). Their destruction, then, was an eidetic inscription, rooted in mortal shock, of the shattering of unity, the failure of love, the death of the iconic companions, God’s wrathful judgment (ala Babel) upon our aspirations (and the futility of endeavor) and the fracture of communion (language, community—or logos, word or idea embodied…meaning). Situated at the millennial cusp, at the crossroads of macrocosmic time and superhuman space, the structures’ spectacularly surreal dematerialization unmistakably declared the triumph of disunity, unreason, separation and loss—in short, the reign of antichrist, which 9/11 would appear to have been intended by certain of its architects to herald.” I do not imply here that I necessarily believe that the fall of the Twin Towers announced the advent of the “end-times.” But I do believe their destruction reverberates as such an omen, however reflexively, among many in western society and beyond. And based upon express oligarchic intent to reduce Earth’s human population, I also take seriously the possibility that 9/11 was intended as such a harbinger by at least certain of its sponsors. And I certainly do not discount the possibility that the fears engendered by 9/11 might yet qualify it as the herald of a final judgment (perhaps in the form of nuclear or biological war), especially if they are not bravely, rationally and collectively confronted. Tarpley warns that 9/11 plays into radical millenarian or “end-time” neuroses, exacerbating fears and paranoia exemplified by the many millions strong “Left Behind” or “rapture” movements, whose adherents—including former Attorney General John Ashcroft, implicated in facilitating 9/11—have been powerful allies of the current administration. Investigating, determining and articulating more or less precisely how the Towers fell may be one of the central acts of demystification that breaks the pernicious spell under which 9/11, called by Tarpley the “myth of the 21st century,” holds the world. The “pancake collapse” is perhaps the chief idol of the official 9/11 cult to be smashed, as it appears to most effectively mask the iniquity of the attack’s actual sponsors. To fathom what was taken from us on 9/11, recall the technological achievement represented by our shimmering Towers, once widely assumed—whatever their aesthetic flaws—to be masterpieces of engineering, state-of-the-art and revolutionary. The Twin Towers occupied a lineage of epic industrial expressions including the Brooklyn and Golden Gate Bridges, the Empire State Building, and the moon landing. In this sense they signified a soaring, celebratory triumph of our nation’s commitment to science, industry, technology and commerce, and were an enduring symbol of our collective ingenuity, ambition and intelligence. (Whoever expected to outlive them?)

As the casual TV viewer understood, they could withstand hurricanes, earthquakes and jet-liner impacts. And most anyone watching that day knew they weren’t about to fall.Here we may begin assessing the precise depths of our betrayal on 9/11. Again, one doesn’t need to have liked the Twin Towers—our blasé, even disdainful regard of them is the point. The extent to which we took them for granted marks our shock upon their destruction, in which we were faced with—and forced to swallow—our own failure as a culture to protect those left alive in the buildings, awaiting our rescue. Mistaking it for humility, we internalize this guilt, inducted into a collective masochism marked by a loss of analytical impetus, of which our acceptance of the simplistic pancake-collapse “theory” is symptomatic. Shamed children, we abide the illegal destruction of the rubble pile, eager to see our mess cleaned up, erased, and blamed on others.Imagine one of the Towers collapsing without the handy scapegoat of a people whose natural resources we covet, and which our leaders had already divvied up. A lost or malfunctioning airliner had freakishly struck a Tower at high speed, let’s say. The building’s failure should have been an unacceptable err, a blow to our collective sense of ourselves so severe no resources would be spared in careful scrutiny of the event, as happens after catastrophes in societies valuing knowledge, quality, professionalism, craftsmanship, expertise and life. To recover our sense of ourselves, we would have taken every care—as healthy societies have throughout history—to articulate as precisely as possible the causal aspects of the disaster.

Once the search for survivors was called off we’d have carefully and thoroughly scrutinized, documented and analyzed the scene. Recognizing that untold lives may depend on our investigation, that our findings could rewrite engineering code books, we would have encouraged a period of active and open debate, sparing no sacred cows, until clear, concise and reasonable explanations emerged as to why the Tower failed to live up to its revolutionary design. On 9/11, the Twin Towers’ massive 47-interlinked-column core structure and 240 interlocking outer or “box” columns failed to impede the weight of the upper floors in their rush to the ground by so much as a second.

Yet with next to none of it subjected to forensic examination, the rubble was hauled away as quickly as possible and nearly all of the steel sold as scrap on Asian markets. As Kevin Ryan notes, the NIST report, refusing to consider the controlled demolition hypothesis, dares take us only to the onset of the “collapse event,” after which its authors merely declare that “global” failure of the astonishing order observed was, somehow, “inevitable.” It takes twenty-two thousand pages of ignoring principles, observed phenomena, eyewitness reports, of distorting physical and computer models, fudging numbers and morphing variables, for NIST to swindle us into an abstruse combination of confessedly “less-likely” scenarios. To register the wound dealt to our collective imagination on 9/11, we must appeal to archetype. The esoteric associations with the Twin Towers are profound. From Hebraic legend they reference the two great pillars Joachim and Boaz, placed at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple. Besides the ancient Hebrews, the Spartans, Phoenicians, Aryans and Scandinavians all associated the twin pillar motif with the presence of the deity. The Vedas refer to the twin Asvins, the Spartans to the Dioscuri, “clad in shining armor” and associated with clouds. The twin pillars: for the Greeks, symbols of Heracles (heroism), for the Scandinavians, of Thor (might). Legend associates them with Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers, one who gave his life for the other. They recall the twin Trees of Eden—Knowledge of Good and Evil (duality), and that of Eternal Life (unity)—as well as the Tree of Life diagram of Kabala, between whose pillars all is made manifest. For the Hebrews symbolizing establishment and strength, justice and mercy, as pillars of cloud by day and fire by night they led the Israelites from bondage, connoting a union of opposites, or harmony, fullness, the guidance and immanence of God. Joachim and Boaz are central symbols of Freemasonry, bespeaking the resonance of the twin pillar motif at the deepest mythic strata of our cultural imagination. Guardians of the holy-of-holies, the twin pillars are ineluctably associated with mystery and initiation. Their magical destruction then, in the imago of the Twin Towers, is a sort of reverse, false or diabolic initiation into the realms of unreason, into the death or withdrawal of God. In the face of this threat to our image of the protective deity (or state) we accept the Towers’ “pancaking” and like raped or battered children turn the blame inward. With grasping sincerity, we acknowledge as dogma officialdom’s bloated appeal to its own authority.What the controlled demolition hypothesis confronts us with is the likelihood that on September 11th, 2001, 2800 people were purposely—nay ritually—immolated, over a third of them vaporized beyond trace, while of many others mere fragments were found, some fleck of bone or viscera. This implies a most obscene affront to human dignity, blinding in the vastness of its degeneracy, a primordial and epic violation of a people by their leaders. Such cold-bloodedness is wholly distinct in character and degree from the comparably flaccid or sloppy negligence invoked by the LIHOP crowd, or the “roll ‘em” mentality naively attributed to complicit officials by those 9/11 skeptics who squirm at suggestions the planes may have been remotely guided into the buildings, or the buildings blown up. You suggest in the previous post that Morgan Reynolds is a disinformation artist sent to emphasize the controlled demolition hypothesis in order to keep us barking up that tree. Yet if he is a plant, Reynolds may have intended what it appears he’s actually accomplishing, dividing a hitherto unified view on the destruction of the WTC with his “particle beam” theory and thereby inserting a timely “wedge” into an inquiry that was gaining traction. If so, he’d be accomplishing what Martin Schotz, a psychiatrist who’s studied the JFK assassination, points out is the real objective of disinformation, which is not to persuade us of the “official account" but to create so much uncertainty that "everything is believable and nothing is knowable."The molten metal. The multiple eye-witness accounts.

The incessant bad-faith responses (forensically speaking, “guilty behavior”) on the part of defenders of the official story. The profound psychological implications. These are powerful inducements against letting the controlled theory die, as you verge on proposing. Jeff, you call yourself a pessimist, and (if I may) I suspect you’re living up to that title here. That is, that your skepticism on the controlled demolitions issue has crossed into pessimism that we may ever arrive at the verification of CD which many of us might desire. Might your dismissal of CD be a sort of preemptive strike against what you subconsciously feel is the possibility that your hope for “proof” of a conspiracy will eventually be dashed anyway? A kind of beating-the-devil-to-the-punch? “The wolf who cannot reach the grapes claims they are sour.” We may never reach those grapes, Jeff, but I’m not through trying. And I respectfully submit that personal predilections and reasoned analysis may be blurring in your irked and seemingly wholesale rejection of CD. As far as the Silverstein comment, it’s not that relevant. Though it sounds to me like he’s talking about the building and not the firefighters, as with the CD hypothesis, I could be wrong. But of course I was down there on 9/11, about five blocks north of WTC 7, on the west edge of the West Side Highway. A loose bunch of us New Yorkers standing around had heard and passed on the message since maybe forty minutes before that “They’re going to bring it down.” And we were staring up at building 7 as it fell. But then again, who the f**k am I?Keep up your excellent work on your blog. Don’t know what I’d do without it. And no, we certainly don’t need to agree. A coalition of the dubious can be a beautiful thing.

Respectfully,Tom

Thanks for that Tom and Jeff Wells @ RI

Behold this Day

2007-02-21T19:56:00.000-05:00

For those of you that have an interest in researching alternative health or spiritual options, this might be of interest.

A while ago David Crews wrote "The Joy of Disillusionment"- a disertation on the trials and triumphs he went through leaving a Christian Fundamentalist life much the way I had experienced. His writings on this are located here.

I wondered why he chose to believe in a total end of life & conscienceness and wrote to him with my query.

I was delighted when he wrote back. It seems that he has rather mellowed out and gained a new understanding of the dynamics of life and what forces are at work in the universe. David recently made a trip to the rainforests of Peru to do research on the spiritual plant called Ayahuasca. To those who are knowledgable about Aya, it is revered as a spiritual guide within, and the spirit of the vine is Mother Ayahuasca.

A short excerpt from his website:

"This is a condensed journal from my personal experiences in the Peruvian Amazon in 2006. I had traveled to the greatest forest on Earth to partake in the sacramental use of a shamanic “Teacher Plant” – the highly psychoactive and complex brew known as Ayahuasca, the “Vine of the Soul.” This “tea” from a specific plant mixture has been used for thousands of years for healing and visioning purposes by the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin from Brazil, to Columbia and Ecuador, and especially in Peru.Although extremely powerful, and notoriously difficult, unpleasant, and challenging to work with (including a horrific taste and powerful purging), Ayahuasca is a safe way to see incredible beauty and encounter mystical realms and spiritual entities that are otherwise difficult for Western people to experience. For me, it was a journey to see for myself what I might make of such realms, visions, and entities – to try to determine What Is Real and what might be simply illusion or masterful creativity.
Working with Ayahuasca is an adventure of the body and spirit. For me, it was an INTENSE set of experiences – one that challenged my physical body through difficult diets, strong physical exertions, and often, extremely uncomfortable conditions.___ – But that was the easy part.It challenged my mind and spirit on levels that can only be described asawesome and unexplainable.
We worked with a master shaman - a healer named Don Rober, and we had the excellent guidance and teaching of our host, Howard Lawler, also a shaman, who is revitalizing many of the other ancient shamanistic traditions of South America.
Shamanism is the oldest spiritual practice of humankind. The essence of shamanism is personal, direct experience and expression – not relying on anyone’s testimony or doctrines about spiritual or mystical encounters.
In 1951, Carl Jung wrote:"In psychology, one possesses nothing unless one has experienced it in reality. Hence, a purely intellectual insight is not enough, because one knows only the words and not the substance of the thing from the inside."
Ayahuasca is the world’s most direct and powerful form of shamanic experience, and I had been desiring and planning to work with it for almost a decade. Now, at last, I had come to Iquitos, Peru, in the heart of the great selva or jungle. My hosts for this trip were to prove impeccable in their set and setting and in the preparation and the personnel for this great adventure of the soul."

A fascinating read! I encourage you to enjoy it.

Credit: David P. Crew- jaguarfeather.com

Sorrow

2007-01-29T18:18:00.000-05:00

The following is a discourse between Aaron Klein (WND) and a suicide bomber-to-be.

This was posted on World Net Daily News.

I do not want to get involved in an anti-Jewish/Anti-Terrorist discussion. The above picture is from an attack just this morning in Eilat-Jan 29,'07, possibly from the individual below who was interviewed.

The point I wish to examine is, (if we can trust the translator and the author's veracity) is the calm "suredness" of the would be assassin. Outside of the killing, this testimony could be witnessed from any fundamental Bible believing church in America.

****

'I pray Allah makes me dead in a (suicide) operation'
WND: Tell me about your life and what you do with your free time.
BOMBER: I study at a West Bank university and I have great hopes of getting married within the next couple of months. My life is very normal. I watch television, particularly news, and historical and religious programs. From time to time I play soccer and lift weights.
WND: Is your family poor?
BOMBER: No. We are regular but far from being wealthy. I share my bedroom with my brothers but now there is less pressure because last summer one of my brothers was married and moved to live outside.
WND: Why do you want to become a suicide bomber?
BOMBER: I originally decided to become a martyr after I saw what the Israeli army did in the refugee camp of Jenin in the big military campaign of April, 2002.
But this idea became stronger when I understood what status I will have in heaven if I scarify myself for Allah. Every time somebody else dies as a martyr in a suicide bomb attack, I pray for him but I feel jealous. I want to be where he is now and I pray that Allah will one day offer me this occasion and this honor.
[Editor's note: The potential bomber was referring to an Israeli anti-terror raid in his hometown of Jenin in 2002 in which Palestinian leaders accused the Jewish state of a "massacre," claiming the Israeli Defense Forces killed over 500 Palestinian civilians, including many women and children.
It was later determined 56 Palestinians, mostly gunmen, were killed in the raid, which followed a series of deadly suicide attacks inside Israel that were reportedly planned and directed from the terror infrastructure in Jenin. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers died in the Jenin battle, in which IDF troops conducted house-to-house searches to minimize civilian casualties by avoiding air attacks.]
WND: Is your main motivation for becoming a bomber is to serve Allah?
BOMBER: Yes, of course. Allah gave Muslims the possibility to gain their prize and payment in different ways. There are those (Muslims) who pray and fast only and respect Allah's commandments, and there are those who wish a higher prize. And the highest prize is given to those who scarify themselves, their lives, their bodies and everything in this world.
WND: What you are saying is interesting because a lot of academics in the United States and many of my colleagues in the media claim Palestinians become suicide bombers because they are poor and desperate and because of so-called Israeli occupation. Are you telling me these are not the reasons you want to blow yourself up amongst Israelis?
BOMBER: The will to scarify myself for Allah is the first and most major reason. It is true that the Zionists are occupying our lands and that it is our religious duty to fight them, including through suicide attacks. The goal is not the killing of the Jews, but that this is the way to reach Allah.
The goal is satisfying Allah and his instructions. No money interests, nothing. No brainwash, no pressure; it is my decision. All the other lies are pathetic Israeli propaganda.
I pray that Allah gives me the honor to be dead in an operation. This is the supreme and the noblest way to ascend to Allah.
These martyrs have special status in the next world and have bigger chances to watch Allah's face and enjoy the magnificent pleasures he offers us.
'It is our duty to fight Jews but our goal is to please Allah'
WND: Did I hear you say your goal is not to kill Jews? Isn't that exactly what you will do as a suicide bomber?
BOMBER: Maybe the fact that I was born here has sharpened my religious conscience, but I believe that even if I was in Chechnya, in Iraq, Afghanistan on anywhere else I would want to be a martyr.
It is Allah's satisfaction that is important to me no matter where I live. But as we live in this part of the world the way to reach Allah for me is through fighting the Zionist enemy. It is the jihad, the sacrificing that is important.
WND: These cliches are impressive but I know you are aware that you are speaking to a Jew. Perhaps you are telling me what I want to hear. Tell me the truth. You want to kill Jews, don't you?
BOMBER: We were never taught to hate Jews but to hate the occupation of the Zionists to our Islamic land that the Zionist entity with the conspiracy of the world has stolen and occupied. Jews can have their state but not on our lands and until this goal is achieved every Muslim must fight this entity.
The Jews stole this holy Islamic land and we must fight them, but I am looking to receive what waits for me in the next world.
'Enjoy your tea and our hospitality before I send you to hell.'
WND: You talk about fighting them, the Jews. I'm an American Jew. Do you want to kill me?
BOMBER: You are here and nobody hurts you and nobody thinks to do so. But if, unfortunately for you, if you will be in a place where my (suicide) operation will take place, I will not feel sorrow.
You American Jews are fully partners with the Zionists and even more dangerous than the Israelis because of the international support you give to the Israelis in their massacres against our people and the maintenance of the occupation.
WND: So if after today's meeting you saw me in a cafe in Jerusalem that you were sent to attack, you'd still try to blow it up?
BOMBER: At the moment there will not be a place for feelings and hesitations. If I go in an operation it means that I decided to leave behind my loved ones – my mother, my father, brothers and sisters, all my family and my friends. And if I am capable of this I would not give you a break just because we met for one time.
Meanwhile and before I drive you to hell in an operation, enjoy your tea and our hospitality. (Laughing).
'And Allah shouted: Be pigs and monkeys'
WND: Many programs on Palestinian television have been teaching viewers Jews are descended from pigs and monkeys and that we use Palestinian and Christian blood to bake our Passover matzos. Is this what you believe?
BOMBER: I know where this question comes from. You think that we all are naive or bad from birth or that we were exposed to brainwashing. We just follow what we are demanded in the Quran to do because if we do not do so we will be attacked, occupied, controlled and killed by these enemies of Islam.
WND: You didn't answer my question. Do you believe I come from pigs and monkeys?
BOMBER: The Quran tells us that Allah was upset with the Jews because of their negative behavior towards Moses and Allah's commandments and Allah shouted to the Jews, 'Be pigs and monkeys.'
I don't know if physically Allah turned them to pigs and monkeys, or it was a way to tell them that they are as terrible as pigs and monkeys. The most important thing is that this is what Allah, may he be blessed, thinks that the Jews deserve to be.
I don't know about the Passover matzo but I know the Jews are the nation who was known for killing Allah's prophets and the nation that in our days wants to control the world or at least this part of the world, from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Meanwhile they (Jews) are controlling the U.S., its media, its financial system and its administration.
'You'll go to hell while 72 dark-eyed virgins await me in paradise.'
WND: When you mentioned before the pleasures that await you after a suicide bombing, I assume you were referring to the 72 dark-eyed virgins you believe will be waiting for you in heaven?
(Potential bomber nods to signal yes.)
WND: You talk about so-called martyrdom being divine. About being rewarded in the next world on supreme spiritual levels for what you say is a gift to Allah. And yet you tell me that what awaits you after a suicide operation is an eternity of sex with virgins. This is the most baseline physical pleasure imaginable. This is your religious version of heaven?
BOMBER: Let me explain something to you. The world, the lower one we are in now, it is temporary. Allah examines the loyalty of human beings, asking you in this materialistic world to avoid all that is tempting, all that pleasures you on earth, and to dedicate yourself to Allah.
This doesn't mean that Allah does not think it is good to take part in these needs of sex, in the pleasure of drinking alcohol, enjoying nature and other stuff. The point is that non-Muslims do those things in this world while ignoring Allah and all moral rules, while Muslims are asked to do a tremendous spiritual effort on earth in order to gain these other (physical) pleasures in the next world.
I don't know how you Jews see these physical pleasures, especially after the Torah that Allah gave you was falsified, but in our religion all spiritual efforts are asked from us on earth and it is much more difficult. So it is not that all the story is about sex. You do free sex now, I do not.
But you will go to hell after living 50, 60, 70, 80 years, and I will go, I pray that Allah accepts, to heaven and there I will do and will enjoy what you did during these 80 years. The difference is that after these years you will burn in hell forever and I will, after my years in this world of faith, restraint and patience, enjoy Allah's pleasures forever.
WND: Let's say your concept of heaven is accurate. You are indeed rewarded with 72 dark-eyed virgins for living the kind of life you describe. Do you really think you will go to heaven for killing innocent civilians during a suicide operation?
BOMBER: You are treating in a ridiculous way this issue, but this is in the Quran. Go and, Allah forbid, ask Allah about this point. We are promised in the Quran to have the dark-eyed virgins and that's it. The Quran is full of verses glorifying the shahid, the martyr.
WND: Show me exactly where in the Quran it states you will get 72 dark-eyed virgins for blowing yourself up amongst civilians.
BOMBER: You and I, we do not discuss Allah and the Quran. I will tell you more the moment that I will explode myself when there will be one dark-eyed virgin who will carry up my soul to the sky.
This is the important part of our mission – fulfilling Allah's commandments and hoping to receive the prizes we were promised in the Quran.
'America is a culture of immorality and free sex'
WND: What do you think about the Unites States?
BOMBER: I have no interest in the American culture which is an empty culture with no values. It is full of immorality and elements that are forbidden by Allah, like free sex and violence.
WND: So I take it you don't listen to American music or watch American movies?
BOMBER: I do not watch American movies and regret those days before the intifada (the Palestinian terror war that started in 2000) when I used to watch American movies like "Platoon" and that film that was made under the water.
These are stupid things and I ask Allah to forgive me for those hours I spent watching this nonsense.
In my opinion, America is the big enemy leading the war against Islam, Muslims, Palestinians and against anything that threatens the Zionist enemy.
WND: In the last suicide bombing, which took place in Tel Aviv earlier this year, an American teenager named Daniel Wultz was severely injured and later died of his wounds. In general, are Americans part of your target?
BOMBER: America is destroying and exploiting the Arabic and the Islamic world as part of a Zionist and Crusader plan. The American Jews, we say, are the godfathers of this Zionist entity in America.
Therefore this Daniel, I am sure, participated in the army activity. If not, he collected money for this Zionist entity. If not, he would decide one day to come to live here as a settler. Therefore there is no way that he can be defined as innocent.
WND: Do you think your family will miss you if you became a suicide bomber or would blowing yourself up amongst Israeli men, women and children make them proud?
BOMBER: My family, I think especially my mother, they have the feeling that one day they will hear that I carried out an operation. I do not think that they will be sad that I killed myself in an operation. It is the will to satisfy Allah.
I do not think my family will be surprised if I do it but I never told them anything because there may be some pressure and all our ideology is based on avoiding pressures and temptations connecting us to this lower world. It is the other world that I am seeking to join with all the love I have to my mother and my family. Now they love me and I hope in the future they will still love me but also be proud of me.

photo: Ynetnews.com

Your Gold is worthless

2006-12-24T11:04:00.000-05:00

Well, "worthless" might be too strong a term, but those of you who have wet dreams of trading/bartering with gold when and if the sh*t hits the fan might be in for a rude awakening.

Last month, in an interview on CNBC a VP for a London investment firm urged America and her immediate neighbors to drop their national currency and replace it with a Euro type "Amero". (www.worldnetdaily.com)

This was greeted with little fanfare except over conspiratorial web sites who have been chatting on this possibility for a while.
Recently WorldNetDaily has reported that the REAL U.S. shortfall is $4.6 Trillion-that's with a 'T 'as in 'Take them for all their worth", a modern-day version of a former queens suggestion that "they can eat cake".

"The 2006 federal budget deficit of $4.6 trillion is $1.1 trillion more than the 2005 federal budget deficit," econometrician John Williams, who publishes the website Shadow Government Statistics, told WND. "The Bush administration is in an untenable situation with a budget deficit this dramatic. Taxing 100 percent of all wages, salaries, and corporate profits would not eliminate a deficit of this magnitude, and cutting Social Security and Medicare spending is politically impossible."

In 1967, just a few years before President Nixon officially declared the US would not honor their dollar-Gold commitments to foreign nations, an up and rising economic star named Alan Greenspan said this:

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard."

Gold restrictions in current history:
As part of this process, many nations, including the U.S., banned private ownership of gold either de jure or de facto. In the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt using the Trading With the Enemy Act for statutory authority to abrogate gold and silver clauses in U.S. Securities and impose fines of up to $100,000,000 on those who refused to do so. Over this period FDR passed two laws prohibiting U.S. citizens and the Federal Reserve ownership of gold, Executive Order 6102 of 1933 and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. Jewelry, private coin collections, and the like were exempt from this ban, which in any case seems not to have been enforced too zealously. In 1975 all restrictions on the right of American citizens to own gold were abolished.

Dr. Chris Marenson stated on his site on December 17, 2006 that the US is insolvent. He states that our combined federal deficits now total more than 400% of GDP. (GDP is the value of all the services and final goods made in the US each year.) Dr. Marenson is also an advocate of buying Gold and Silver along with multitudes of others . I daresay the current amount of precious metals actually being held by Americans in the last few years has increased dramatically which brings me to my point.

In the event that the U.S. has a currency crisis and the suggestions from the powers that be become stronger and stronger for adapting a North American Euro type dollar, I suggest that it would be in their best interest to make sure that new dollar has some meat behind it: Gold & Silver.

Now where do you think they would get it from? From YOU.
The "authorities" did it once just a few years ago, and it is my humble opinion that it is going to happen again-and soon.
For those of you who believe you can "hide" your gold under your mattress and barter for necessities such as food and services I must suggest that you rethink your vision.
In an economic crisis such as this-IF it happens- would make the have nots and have lots stand out like sore thumbs. It would be in the authorities interest to hand out "finder rewards" to those who turn in their fellow citizens attempting to purchase items with gold and screw those holders of said metals to the wall-publicaly-by confiscating ALL they have and imposing vast fines/prison terms on their persons. After all, having gold is not practical unless you are able to purchase items you need to have with it.
I suggest a near term announcement by the 'authorities' to mandate a citizen liquidation of all precious metals and payments (in new dollars) of half of what they are worth on the open market. To those who refuse, there would be massive penalties. Do you think your stock portfolio full of gold bullion will be safe from confiscation? Do you think your purchases of metals from your checking/credit card accounts will not be noticed?

My apologies, but the drummers of Gold and Silver hoarding-even though they have (ironically)- hit the nail on the head- will not benefit from a crisis that many think are only years away from happening.
Unless you are one of the ultra wealthy, and most who visit blogs are not-you are as much a part of the 'system' as I am, and are able-as I am - to be manipulated within the system to the benefit of the people who run the system.

credits:
http://www.goldfeverprospecting.com/gogapi.html
http://www.usagold.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
http://drmss.com/wordpress/

Science can't tell you

2006-11-19T13:04:00.000-05:00

Anyone here ever heard of Betty Bowers? If you haven't I suggest you visit her site. She is, after all, America's Best Christian. For countless years, America has been relentlessly searching for the true identity of the Betty Bowers Personna. Well folks, the hunt is over, and I won. Read this and visit Betty's site and tell me there isn't a strange resemblance.

I bring Betty's name up because I've discovered a journalist -(whom also is a lady) and a Pulitzer winner- that writes in the same funny, uncanny & serious way. She writes an excellent tongue & cheek article about Christian influences on the Scientific community. Her name is Natalie Angier.

I love a funny intelligent girl...even if she is an atheist. Poor girl, I should have a talk with her. Now where did I leave Pat's number?

Enjoy!

***

MY GOD PROBLEM

In the course of reporting a book on the scientific canon and pestering hundreds of researchers at the nation's great universities about what they see as the essential vitamins and minerals of literacy in their particular disciplines, I have been hammered into a kind of twinkle-eyed cartoon coma by one recurring message. Whether they are biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, astronomers, or engineers, virtually all my sources topped their list of what they wish people understood about science with a plug for Darwin's dandy idea. Would you please tell the public, they implored, that evolution is for real? Would you please explain that the evidence for it is overwhelming and that an appreciation of evolution serves as the bedrock of our understanding of all life on this planet?

In other words, the scientists wanted me to do my bit to help fix the terrible little statistic they keep hearing about, the one indicating that many more Americans believe in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. According to recent polls, about 82 percent are convinced of the reality of heaven (and 63 percent think they're headed there after death); 51 percent believe in ghosts; but only 28 percent are swayed by the theory of evolution.

Scientists think this is terrible—the public's bizarre underappreciation of one of science's great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they're right. Yet I can't help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America's religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the 77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent. Indeed, many are quick to point out that the Catholic Church has endorsed the theory of evolution and that it sees no conflict between a belief in God and the divinity of Jesus and the notion of evolution by natural selection. If the pope is buying it, the reason for most Americans' resistance to evolution must have less to do with religion than with a lousy advertising campaign.

So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion's core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate "magisteria," in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you'll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she'll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that's your private reliquary, and we're not here to jimmy the lock.

Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell University's "Ask an Astronomer" Web site. To the query, "Do most astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?" the astronomer Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, "modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions." He cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility of "God intervening every time a measurement occurs" before concluding that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god, and religious belief doesn't—and shouldn't—"have anything to do with scientific reasoning."

How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers believe in astrology. "No, astronomers do not believe in astrology," snarls Dave Kornreich. "It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary." Dr. Kornreich ends his dismissal with the assertion that in science "one does not need a reason not to believe in something." Skepticism is "the default position" and "one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something's existence."

In other words, for horoscope fans, the burden of proof is entirely on them, the poor gullible gits; while for the multitudes who believe that, in one way or another, a divine intelligence guides the path of every leaping lepton, there is no demand for evidence, no skepticism to surmount, no need to worry. You, the religious believer, may well find subtle support for your faith in recent discoveries—that is, if you're willing to upgrade your metaphors and definitions as the latest data demand, seek out new niches of ignorance or ambiguity to fill with the goose down of faith, and accept that, certain passages of the Old Testament notwithstanding, the world is very old, not everything in nature was made in a week, and (can you turn up the mike here, please?) Evolution Happens.

And if you don't find substantiation for your preferred divinity or your most cherished rendering of the afterlife somewhere in the sprawling emporium of science, that's fine, too. No need to lose faith when you were looking in the wrong place to begin with. Science can't tell you whether God exists or where you go when you die. Science cannot definitively rule out the heaven option, with its helium balloons and Breck hair for all. Science in no way wants to be associated with terrifying thoughts, like the possibility that the pericentury of consciousness granted you by the convoluted, gelatinous, and transient organ in your skull just may be the whole story of you-dom. Science isn't arrogant. Science trades in the observable universe and testable hypotheses. Religion gets the midnight panic fêtes. But you've heard about evolution, right?So why is it that most scientists avoid criticizing religion even as they decry the supernatural mind-set? For starters, some researchers are themselves traditionally devout, keeping a kosher kitchen or taking Communion each Sunday. I admit I'm surprised whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph. D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague's PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like "Resurrection from the Dead," and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn't the good doctor wonder what the control group looked like?

Scientists, however, are a far less religious lot than the American population, and, the higher you go on the cerebro-magisterium, the greater the proportion of atheists, agnostics, and assorted other paganites. According to a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God." (Interestingly, a slightly higher number, 7.9 percent, claimed to believe in "personal immortality," which may say as much about the robustness of the scientific ego as about anything else.) In other words, more than 90 percent of our elite scientists are unlikely to pray for divine favoritism, no matter how badly they want to beat a competitor to publication. Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Nor have Dawkins and Dennett earned much good will among their colleagues for their anticlerical views; one astronomer I spoke with said of Dawkins, "He's a really fine parish preacher of the fire-and-brimstone school, isn't he?"

So, what keeps most scientists quiet about religion? It's probably something close to that trusty old limbic reflex called "an instinct for self-preservation." For centuries, science has survived quite nicely by cultivating an image of reserve and objectivity, of being above religion, politics, business, table manners. Scientists want to be left alone to do their work, dazzle their peers, and hire grad students to wash the glassware. When it comes to extramural combat, scientists choose their crusades cautiously. Going after Uri Geller or the Ra‘lians is risk-free entertainment, easier than making fun of the sociology department. Battling the creationist camp has been a much harder and nastier fight, but those scientists who have taken it on feel they have a direct stake in the debate and are entitled to wage it, since the creationists, and more recently the promoters of "intelligent design" theory, claim to be as scientific in their methodology as are the scientists.

But when a teenager named Darrell Lambert was chucked out of the Boy Scouts for being an atheist, scientists suddenly remembered all those gels they had to run and dark matter they had to chase, and they kept quiet. Lambert had explained the reason why, despite a childhood spent in Bible classes and church youth groups, he had become an atheist. He took biology in ninth grade, and, rather than devoting himself to studying the bra outline of the girl sitting in front of him, he actually learned some biology. And what he learned in biology persuaded him that the Bible was full of . . . short stories. Some good, some inspiring, some even racy, but fiction nonetheless. For his incisive, reasoned, scientific look at life, and for refusing to cook the data and simply lie to the Boy Scouts about his thoughts on God—as some advised him to do—Darrell Lambert should have earned a standing ovation from the entire scientific community. Instead, he had to settle for an interview with Connie Chung, right after a report on the Gambino family.

Scientists have ample cause to feel they must avoid being viewed as irreligious, a prionic life-form bent on destroying the most sacred heifer in America. After all, academic researchers graze on taxpayer pastures. If they pay the slightest attention to the news, they've surely noticed the escalating readiness of conservative politicians and an array of highly motivated religious organizations to interfere with the nation's scientific enterprise—altering the consumer information Web site at the National Cancer Institute to make abortion look like a cause of breast cancer, which it is not, or stuffing scientific advisory panels with anti-abortion "faith healers."

Recently, an obscure little club called the Traditional Values Coalition began combing through descriptions of projects supported by the National Institutes of Health and complaining to sympathetic congressmen about those they deemed morally "rotten," most of them studies of sexual behavior and AIDS prevention. The congressmen in turn launched a series of hearings, calling in institute officials to inquire who in the Cotton-pickin' name of Mather cares about the perversions of Native American homosexuals, to which the researchers replied, um, the studies were approved by a panel of scientific experts, and, gee, the Native American community has been underserved and is having a real problem with AIDS these days. Thus far, the projects have escaped being nullified, but the raw display of pious dentition must surely give fright to even the most rakishly freethinking and comfortably tenured professor. It's one thing to monkey with descriptions of Darwinism in a high-school textbook. But to threaten to take away a peer-reviewed grant! That Dan Dennett; he is something of a pompous leafblower, isn't he?

Yet the result of wincing and capitulating is a fresh round of whacks. Now it's not enough for presidential aspirants to make passing reference to their "faith." Now a reporter from Newsweek sees it as his privilege, if not his duty, to demand of Howard Dean, "Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation and eternal life?" In my personal fairy tale, Dean, who as a doctor fits somewhere in the phylum Scientificus, might have boomed, "Well, with his views on camels and rich people, he sure wouldn't vote Republican!" or maybe, "No, but I hear he has a Mel Gibson complex." Dr. Dean might have talked about patients of his who suffered strokes and lost the very fabric of themselves and how he has seen the centrality of the brain to the sense of being an individual. He might have expressed doubts that the self survives the brain, but, oh yes, life goes on, life is bigger, stronger, and better endowed than any Bush in a jumpsuit, and we are part of the wild, tumbling river of life, our molecules were the molecules of dinosaurs and before that of stars, and this is not Bulfinch mythology, this is corroborated reality.

Alas for my phantasm of fact, Howard Dean, M. D., had no choice but to chime, oh yes, he certainly sees Jesus as the son of God, though he at least dodged the eternal life clause with a humble mumble about his salvation not being up to him.

I may be an atheist, and I may be impressed that, through the stepwise rigor of science, its Spockian eyebrow of doubt always cocked, we have learned so much about the universe. Yet I recognize that, from there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere. Why is there so much dark matter and dark energy in the great Out There, and why couldn't cosmologists have given them different enough names so I could keep them straight? Why is there something rather than nothing, and why is so much of it on my desk? Not to mention the abiding mysteries of e-mail, like why I get exponentially more spam every day, nine-tenths of it invitations to enlarge an appendage I don't have.I recognize that science doesn't have all the answers and doesn't pretend to, and that's one of the things I love about it. But it has a pretty good notion of what's probable or possible, and virgin births and carpenter rebirths just aren't on the list. Is there a divine intelligence, separate from the universe but somehow in charge of the universe, either in its inception or in twiddling its parameters? No evidence. Is the universe itself God? Is the universe aware of itself? We're here. We're aware. Does that make us God? Will my daughter have to attend a Quaker Friends school now?I don't believe in life after death, but I'd like to believe in life before death. I'd like to think that one of these days we'll leave superstition and delusional thinking and Jerry Falwell behind. Scientists would like that, too. But for now, they like their grants even more.

credit: The Edge.org

Professor Pan

A scenario for the New American Century.

2006-10-19T13:40:00.000-04:00

By Victor Corpus

One could call this article a worst-case scenario for the new American century. Why worst case? Because of the hard lessons from history. The Romans did not consider the worst-case scenario when Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephants and routed them; or when Hannibal encircled and annihilated the numerically superior Roman army at the Battle of Cannae.

The French did not consider the worst-case scenario at Dien Bien Phu and when they built the Maginot Line, and the French suffered disastrous defeats. The Americans did not consider the worst-case scenario at Pearl Harbor or on September 11, and the results were disastrous for the American people. Again, American planners did not consider the worst-case scenario in its latest war in Iraq, but instead operated on the "best-case scenario", such as considering the Iraq invasion a "cake walk" and that the Iraqi people would be parading in the streets, throwing flowers and welcoming American soldiers as "liberators", only to discover the opposite. Scenario One: America launches 'preventive war' vs China

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union and Southwest Asia. –Paul Wolfowitz, former US deputy secretary of defense and currently president of the World BankConsider these snapshots of China:
Since 1978, China has averaged 9.4% annual GDP growth
It had a five-fold increase in total output per capita from 1982 to 2002
It had $61 billion in foreign direct investment in 2004 alone and foreign trade of $851 billion, the third-largest in the world
The US trade deficit with China exceeded $200 billion in 2005
China has $750 billion in foreign exchange reserves and is the second-biggest oil importer
Last year it turned out 442,000 new engineers a year; with 48,000 graduates with master's degrees and 8,000 PhDs annually; compared to only 60,000 new engineers a year in the US.
China for the first time (2004) surpassed America to export the most technology wares around the world. China enjoyed a $34 billion trade surplus with the US in advanced technology products in 2004 (The Economist, December 17, 2005). In 2005, the surplus increased to $36 billion
It created 20,000 new manufacturing facilities a year
It holds $252 billion in US Treasury Bonds (plus $48 billion held by Hong Kong)
Among the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities –grain and meat, oil and coal and steel –consumption in China has eclipsed that of the US in all but oil.
China has also gone ahead of the US in the consumption of TV sets, refrigerators and mobile phones
In 1996, China had 7 million cell phones and the US had 44 million. Now China has more mobile phone users than the US has people.
China has about $1 trillion in personal savings and a savings rate of close to 50%; U.S. has about $158 billion in personal savings and a savings rate of about 2% (The Wall Street Journal, Nov 19, 2005)
Shanghai boasts 4,000 skyscrapers – double the number in New York City (The Wall Street Journal, Nov 19, 2005)
Songbei, Harbin City in north China is building a city as big as New York City.

Goldman Sachs predicts that China will surpass the US economy by 2041. Before China's economy catches up with America, and before China builds a military machine that can challenge American superpower status and world dominance, America's top strategic planners (Project for the New American Century) decide to launch a "preventive war" against China. As a pretext for this, the US instigates Taiwan to declare independence. Taiwan declares independence!China has anticipated and long prepared itself for this event. After observing "Operation Summer Pulse –04" when US aircraft carrier battle groups converged in the waters off China's coast in mid-July through August of 2004, Chinese planners began preparing to face its own worst-case scenario: the possibility of confronting a total of 15 carrier battle groups composed of 12 from America and three from its close British ally. China's strategists refer to its counter-strategy to defeat 15 or more aircraft carrier battle groups as the "assassin's mace" or shashaujian. After proper coordination with Russia and Iran and activating their previously agreed strategic plan, troops and weapon systems are pre-positioned. China then launches a missile barrage on Taiwan. Command and control nodes, military bases, logistics centers, vital war industries, government centers and air defense installations are simultaneously hit with short and medium range ballistic missiles armed with conventional, anti-radar, thermo baric and electro-magnetic pulse warheads. At the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) Command and Control Center, ranking defense officials watch huge electronic monitor screens showing seven US and two British aircraft carrier battle groups converging on the East China Sea with another three US carrier battle groups entering the Persian Gulf, while the remaining two US and one British battle groups remain in the Indian Ocean to serve as a strategic reserve. As the aircraft carrier battle groups advance, China draws out one of its "trump cards" by leaking to the world media that it is dumping its holdings of US Treasury bonds and shifting to gold and euros.
Meanwhile, strategic planners at NORAD watch with glee as they observe on the screen as monitored by their radar satellites that Chinese surface ships are making a hasty retreat as nine allied carrier battle groups advance toward the Philippine Sea and Chinese waters near Taiwan. The assassin's mace: China's anti-satellite weapons Glee and ecstasy soon turn to shock as monitor screens suddenly go blank. Then all communication via satellites goes dead. China has drawn its second "trump card" (the assassin's mace) by activating its maneuverable "parasite" micro-satellites that have unknowingly clung to vital (NORAD) radar and communication satellites and have either jammed, blinded or physically destroyed their hosts. This is complemented by space mines that maneuver near adversary satellites and explode. Secret Chinese and Russian ground-based anti-satellite laser weapons also blind or bring down US and British satellites used for C4ISR (command, control, communication, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). And to ensure redundancy and make sure that the adversary C4ISR system is completely "blinded" even temporarily, hundreds of select Chinese and Russian information warriors (hackers) specifically trained to attack their adversary's C4ISR systems simultaneously launch their cyber offensive. For a few precious minutes, the US and UK advancing carrier battle groups are stunned and blinded by the "mace", ie, a defensive weapon used to temporarily blind a stronger opponent. But the word mace has another meaning; one which is deadlier and used in combination with the first. A mace can be a spiked war club used in olden times to knock out an opponent. Applied in modern times, the spikes of the assassin's mace refer to currently unstoppable supersonic cruise missiles capable of sinking aircraft carriers that are in China's inventory; complemented by equally unstoppable "squall" or SHKVAL rocket torpedoes and regular 65 cm-diameter wake-homing torpedoes, bottom-rising rocket-propelled mines, and "obsolete" warplanes converted into unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) firing anti-ship missiles from standoff positions and finally dive-bombing into the heart of the US and UK aircraft carrier armada. Missile barrage on advancing carrier battle groups A few seconds after the "blackout", literally hundreds of short and medium-range ballistic missiles (DF7/9/11/15s, DF4s, DF21X/As, some of which are maneuverable) pre-positioned on the Chinese mainland, and stealthy, sea-skimming and highly-accurate cruise missiles (YJ12s, YJ22s, KH31A/Ps, YJ83s, C301s, C802s, SS-N-22s, SS-NX-26/27s, 3M54s & HN3s) delivered from platforms on land, sea and air race toward their respective designated targets at supersonic speed. Aircraft carriers are allotted a barrage of more than two dozen cruise missiles each, followed by a barrage of short and medium-range ballistic missiles timed to arrive in rapid succession. Supersonic cruise missiles constitute China's third deadly "trump card" against the US – part of the so-called assassin's mace. These unstoppable cruise missiles may be armed with 440-lb to 750-lb conventional warheads (or 200-kiloton tactical nuclear warheads 10 times stronger than Hiroshima) traveling at more than twice the speed of sound (or faster than a rifle bullet). The cruise missiles, together with the SRBMs and MRBMs (short and medium-range ballistic missiles) may also be armed with radio frequency weapons that can simulate the electro-magnetic pulse of nuclear explosions to fry computer chips, or fuel-air explosives that can annihilate the personnel in aircraft carriers and battleships without destroying the platforms. Their effective range varies from less than 100 to 1,800 kilometers from stand-off positions. Delivered by long-range fighter-bombers and submarines, their range can be extended even further. In fact, stealthy Chinese and Russian submarines can deliver such nuclear payloads to the US mainland itself. No US defense vs supersonic cruise missiles The US and UK aircraft carrier battle groups do not have any known defense against the new supersonic missiles of their adversaries. The Phalanx and Aegis ship defense systems may be effective against subsonic cruise missiles like the Exocets or Tomahawks, or exo-atmospheric ballistic missiles, but they are inadequate against the sea-skimming and supersonic Granits, Moskits and Yakhonts or similar types (Shipwreck, Sunburn and Onyx - North Atlantic Treaty Organization codenames) of modern anti-ship missiles in China's inventory. Not only China and Russia have these modern cruise missiles, so do Iran, India and North Korea. These missiles can be delivered by SU-27 variants, SU-30s, Tu22M Blackjacks, Bears, J6s, JH-7/As, H-6Hs, J-10s, surface ships, diesel submarines or common trucks. Adding to the problems facing aircraft carriers are the SHKVAL or "squall" rocket torpedoes installed in some Chinese and Russian submarines and surface ships. At 6,000 lbs apiece, these torpedoes travel at 200 knots (or 230 miles per hour) with a range of 7,500 yards guided by autopilot. They are designed to sink aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. Again, it is unfortunate for the US and UK to have no known or existing defenses against this new generation of rocket torpedoes. China's sea minesComplicating matters for the US aircraft carrier battle groups are the hundreds of hard-to-detect, rocket-propelled, bottom-rising sea mines that are anchored and hidden on the sea bottom covering pre-selected battle sites in the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea designed to home in on submarines and surface ships, particularly aircraft carriers. These sophisticated sea mines (EM-52s) have been deployed by Chinese and Russian submarines before the missile attack on Taiwan in anticipation of the major event that is to follow. Finally, in addition to all these asymmetric weapons, the US and UK aircraft carrier battle groups will have to contend with the thousands of "obsolete" Chinese fighter planes converted into unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) launching missiles at stand-off positions and finally diving kamikaze-style into the heart of the carrier battle groups. Chinese and Russian submarines fire their inventory of anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) and "squall" rocket torpedoes at the aircraft carriers and submarines of the US and UK as the carrier battle groups come within range. As the battle progresses, the Chinese and Russian submarines maneuver to the rear of the carrier battle groups to complete the encirclement. In less than an hour after launching the saturation barrage of missiles on the US and UK naval armada, all the aircraft carriers and their escorts of cruisers, battleships and several of the accompanying submarines are in flames, sinking or sunk, turning the East China Sea and the Philippine Sea into a modern-day "Battle of Cannae". Meanwhile, the Chinese fleet that conducted a strategic retreat forms a phalanx along the forward positions off China's coast, ready to augment the hundreds or thousands of land-based long-range surface-to-air missiles of China (SA-10s, SA-15s and SA-20s) with their own short, medium and long-range air defense missile systems. Applying its long-held military doctrine of "active defense", China also launches simultaneous missile attacks on the forces-in-being and logistics-in-place of the US and its allies in Japan, South Korea, Guam, Okinawa, Diego Garcia and Kyrgyzstan, hitting these US bases with missiles armed with radio frequency weapons, fuel-air explosives and conventional warheads. As another Chinese military doctrine states: "Win victory with one strike." Chinese and Russian missiles cockedBoth Chinese and Russian inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and the two countries' extensive air defense systems have been coordinated and ready to respond in the event that the US and UK decide to retaliate with a nuclear attack. In addition, Ranets-E and Rosa-E radio frequency/electro-magnetic pulse systems scattered all along China's coastal cities are on the look-out to neutralize incoming missiles and aircraft that may respond after the attack on the aircraft carrier battle groups. These systems can work in tandem with airborne-based anti-missile laser systems now in China's inventory. China's trump cards vs the US China's deadly "trump cards" (ie, the huge holdings of US Treasury bonds, the anti-satellite weapons system, the supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, SRBMs, MRBMs, "squall" rocket torpedoes, sea mines, UCAVs, DF31A and DF41 road-mobile ICBMs, JL2 SLBMs, air defense system, IO/EW/IW, and other RMA weapons) are the key ingredients of the assassin's mace. China may not possess any of those expensive aircraft carriers of the superpower, but it can wipe out those carrier battle groups with a "single blow" of its assassin's mace or shashaujian –its major tool for conducting asymmetric warfare to defeat the US in a major confrontation over the Taiwan issue or other issues. The US may possess the most powerful war machine in the world, but it can be defeated by an inferior force by avoiding the superpower's strength and exploiting its weaknesses. Again, an integral part of Chinese doctrine is: "Victory through inferiority over superiority." One famous Chinese strategist, Chang Mengxiong, compared asymmetric warfare to "a Chinese boxer with a keen knowledge of vital body points who can bring a stronger opponent to his knees with a minimum of movement". The sad part for the American people, particularly the innocent sailors who will be manning the battle groups, is that even if US planners come to realize that the aircraft carrier battle groups (which are the mainstay of the US Navy and the main instrument of US power projection worldwide), have been rendered vulnerable or obsolete by China's assassin's mace.

The US cannot simply change strategy or discard such a weapons system. To change strategy or "retool" would mean wasting hundreds of billions of dollars invested in those highly sophisticated systems. The strong lobbying of influential defense contractors making those systems would make change extremely difficult. For defense authorities to admit the strategic blunder constitutes an almost insurmountable barrier to a change of strategy. And finally, the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs related to those systems may be politically and economically unbearable for any US administration to bear should the program for the aircraft carrier battle groups be scrapped. Because of these factors, America may be stuck with an obsolete system that is too expensive to maintain but will only lose the war for the US when employed in a major conflict. Meanwhile, on the Middle East Front On another major front, on previously coordinated signals with China and Russia, Iran lets loose its own barrage of supersonic Granit, Moskit, Brahmos and Yakhont cruise missiles carried by trucks or hidden in man-made tunnels all along the mountainous shoreline of Iran fronting the Persian Gulf. The three US aircraft carrier groups that entered the Persian Gulf to ensure the unhindered flow of Arab oil are likely to be helpless "sitting ducks" against the bottom-rising sea mines and low-flying, supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles in Iranian hands. In the process, a couple of oil tankers about to exit the Strait of Hormuz are hit with the aid of rocket-propelled sea mines, thus effectively blockading the narrow strait and stopping oil supplies from coming out of the Middle East.

A "weak" nation like China or Iran, without a single aircraft carrier in their respective navies, could thus obliterate the carrier battle groups of a superpower. Here, one can see the hidden and often unnoticed power of asymmetric warfare, which may well spell the end of "gunboat diplomacy" in the not so distant future. The Central Asian front On yet another major front in Central Asia, Russian troops lead the other member-countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) into a major offensive against US military bases in Central Asia. The bases are first subjected to a simultaneous barrage of missiles with fuel-air explosives and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) warheads before they are overrun and occupied by SCO coalition forces. The missile attack on the US bases is followed by a lightning attack by four mechanized armored divisions coming from the Yili Korgas pass of China's Xinjiang province, linking up with Russia's own armored divisions in a pincer offensive against US forces in Central Asia and the Middle East. America crippled on three major fronts In just a few hours (or days) after the outbreak of general hostilities, America, the world's lone superpower, finds itself badly crippled militarily in three major regions of the world: East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Impossible? Unfortunately, the answer is no. China now has the know-how and the financial resources to mass-produce hundreds, if not thousands, of Moskit, Yakhont and Granit-type supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles and "squall"-type rocket torpedoes against which US and UK aircraft carriers and submarines have no known defense.

Iran, on the other hand, already possesses the same supersonic cruise missiles that can destroy any ship in the Persia Gulf, including aircraft carriers. Russia and China, meanwhile, are operating on familiar grounds close to their territory, compared to the US, which needs to cross the Atlantic and Pacific to replenish troops and logistics. A geopolitical reality America has to face An important consideration in any US-China conflict is the geopolitical reality that the US and its allies will be operating on exterior lines, while China will operate on interior lines. This gives China a huge advantage in a major war in Asia against US and allied forces. Consider the long sea lanes of communication (10,000 kilometers) that the US alliance would be forced to cross each time its forces had to resupply and you get an idea of the huge logistics problem that the US would face in a confrontation with China.

Such lengthy sea lanes of communication (SLOC) are highly vulnerable to a gauntlet of Chinese and Russian submarines lying in ambush along the route laden with underwater sea mines. This will make transporting personnel and equipment by the US over the Pacific or the Atlantic extremely dangerous and expensive. Compare this US handicap with troop movement by Chinese troops using heavy-lift aircraft, railways and highways within the China mainland. China's interior lines of communication are shorter and protected, with little chance for enemy interdiction. Chinese troops can concentrate numerically superior forces rapidly at any given point to defeat invading US forces one by one with much shorter and less vulnerable lines of communication. And in the event that the US forces and their allies are lucky enough to land on the Chinese mainland, they will be faced not only with a conventional People's Liberation Army of more than 2 million, but also with a people's militia conducting asymmetric warfare and a people's war in its teeming millions. US forces and their allies will be like a raging bull charging and goring a hive of killer bees. US forces may be able to set foot in China, but it is highly doubtful if they could come out alive. Grimmer scenarios There is a scenario grimmer than described above, however, and that is if strategic planners belonging to that elite group called the Project for the New American Century decide to launch a nuclear "first strike" against China and Russia and risk a mutually-assured destruction: 1)In defense of Taiwan ... or 2) In launching a "preventive war" to stop China from catching up economically and militarily. Or, if China decides to start an offensive against Taiwan with a one-megaton nuclear burst 40 kilometers above the center of the island. Or, if China and Russia decide to arm a number of their short and medium-range ballistic missiles and supersonic cruise missiles with tactical nuclear warheads in defending themselves against US and UK aircraft carrier battle groups. Land-attack versions of these supersonic cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads carried by stealthy Chinese and Russian submarines can also put American coastal cities at great risk to nuclear devastation.

Strategic planners must also consider these worst-case possibilities. Scenario two: America vs a medium power "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region's oil." - Paul Wolfowitz "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. But the oil and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both political and economic sense is through Afghanistan." – Dick Cheney in 1998 as chief executive of a major oil services company History is replete with vivid examples where a much stronger and larger force has been defeated by a weaker and smaller force. The French were defeated by Vietminh guerrillas in Dien Bien Phu. Soviet Union forces, still a superpower at that time, were defeated in Afghanistan. And another superpower, the United States, was defeated by "ill-clad, ill-fed and ill-armed" Vietcong guerrillas in Vietnam. Asymmetric warfareIf the US pushes through its plan of world domination, then it should expect all the smaller and weaker countries that do not wish to be pushed around to fight back using asymmetric warfare. This is a form of warfare that allows the weak to fight and defeat a much stronger foe by "attacking the enemy's weakness while avoiding his strengths". The US, for instance, may possess the most sophisticated weapons system on Earth. It may have the most modern planes, helicopters, ships, guns, precision-guided weapons, sophisticated sensors and command and control systems, but if it cannot see its adversary, if it is fighting a shadowy and "invisible" enemy (like American and British forces are experiencing in Iraq), such advanced and sophisticated weapons systems are rendered useless. In asymmetric warfare, most of the fighting is conducted at the team level. Thousands of agile and elusive teams consisting of two to five members equipped with man-portable surface-to-air missiles, portable anti-tank guided weapons, sniper rifles, man-portable mortars, anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines, sea mines, C4 explosives (for making car bombs, booby-traps and improvised explosive devices or IEDs) riding on bicycles and motorcycles and fast boats will make the lives of any invading or occupying forces extremely miserable. These "invisible" agile teams merge with the population most of the time and come out only when there is a vulnerable target to strike at.

Then, they disappear into the shadows. They communicate via runners bringing coded written messages, so there are no electronic signals to track down. They operate semi-autonomously, so there are no centers of gravity that can be targeted. And since they are indigenous to the area and united with the local people, their human intelligence (humint) is far more superior to that of the invaders. They will also enjoy a tremendous advantage in psychological operations (psyops), for it is much easier to mobilize nationalist sentiments against a foreign occupier than for an aggressor to justify occupation. Asymmetric warfare may be compared to a fierce lion invading the territory of a school of piranhas; or a king cobra encroaching into a colony of fire ants. The lion may be the king of beasts, mighty and strong, but it is no match against the tiny piranhas in their own territory. The sharp fangs and claws of the lion are rendered useless. The same is true with the cobra's venom. The analogy applies to the French in Dien Bien Phu, the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Americans in Vietnam and now in Iraq. Asynchronous warfareAside from asymmetric warfare, weak nations fighting the strong can also avail themselves of asynchronous warfare. If a strong nation invades or occupies a weak one, the weak bides its time before striking back. And it strikes at a time and place when and where the adversary least expects.

An example is Iraq. The underground resistance movement in Iraq may recruit Iraqi scientists or sympathetic scientists of other nationalities to infiltrate the US (via the Mexican border, for instance) and manufacture dirty bombs as well as chemical and biological weapons inside the US. Such weapons may be brought to Washington and detonated in or near the US Congress. They could also hire a private plane, or buy one themselves, and use it to spread biological or chemical weapons they have manufactured in-country over New York or Washington. They can mail letters containing anthrax to key offices of vital services all over the US and paralyze utilities and other government functions nationwide. Or they can smuggle, say, the components of a hundred portable surface-to-air missiles, assemble them in the US, and employ them simultaneously in all of the major airports in America. Or they can employ those portable surface-to-air missiles to simultaneously target American airlines taking off or landing in different international airports all over the world. Some major powers may pass on their research on RMA (revolution in military affairs) to the Iraqi resistance to be tested inside the US. These weapons include laser weapons, ultrahigh frequency weapons, ultrasonic wave weapons, stealth weapons, high-powered microwave weapons and electromagnetic guns. They include miniature robot ants that infiltrate computers, stay dormant and then activate on the signal to destroy their hosts. The Iraqi underground could also recruit hackers to work inside and/or outside the US to hack into key US systems. American crossroad As the sole superpower, the US stands at a critical crossroad. One road leads to world domination. Using its pre-eminent military war machine without equal, it can strike at any perceived threat, change foreign sovereign regimes at will, grab precious mineral resources anywhere in the world and control local economies with its host of transnational corporations.

It can also sabotage the economy of up-coming rivals, or launch preventive wars to preempt prospective competitors and try to defeat them militarily while they are still weak compared to America. Such a course of action is very tempting, especially to leaders with global ambitions of becoming "Lords of the Earth". But such a road is full of risks and what is planned on paper, as what was done in Iraq, may not turn out as hoped. And such a path will necessarily ignite the outrage of most right-thinking people. America will earn for itself the enmity and hatred of people all over the world. America had outlined its blueprint for world domination, by force if necessary, in the following documents:
National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2001
President George W Bush's speech at the Graduation Ceremony at West Point, June 1, 2002
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for the New Century, a report of the Project for the New American Century, September 2000
Defense Planning Guidance written by then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz in February 18, 1992 In these documents, the US outlined some of its new doctrines and policies, such as: preventive war, pre-emptive military action, unilateralism, regime change, acting as the world's constabulary or "cavalry", establishment of military bases and spreading US forces all over the world, control of outer space and the global commons of cyberspace and control of the world's oil resources.

The alternate road, on the other hand, leads to world leadership. The US can choose to use its power, wealth and influence to sincerely do good for the people on this planet. It can lead in easing or obliterating the debt burden of poor nations, or in promoting the spread of quality education through distance learning in remote villages of developing countries. It can focus in the fight against poverty, or the fight against drugs, or the effort to save the deteriorating environment of planet earth. It can lead the fight against HIV/AIDS, or malaria and other deadly diseases. The whole world is waiting for the US to lead in these important battles. If the US chooses to focus its huge resources on the latter, I am confident that it will gain the hearts and minds of people all over the world. Then it can be a true world leader. Then it can maintain its preeminent world status. By gaining the world's sympathy and support, terrorism directed against Americans and the US mainland will be greatly minimized. The alternate road, in fact, is the key to defeating the phenomenon of "terrorism" gripping the world today.
From Rense/AsiaTimes

Victor N Corpus is a retired brigadier general. He has a master's degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His major assignment while serving in the armed forces of the Philippines was as chief of the intelligence service.

Just in time for Christmas shopping

2006-10-09T14:02:00.000-04:00

According to the Russian astronomer Nikolai Fedorovsky, " a giant comet flying at top speed is bound for Earth. Should the comet stay on the collision course, it may hit the planet in late October. The impact will cause devastating tsunamis, earthquakes and avalanches, says Fedorovsky. He saw the killer comet in a telescope two weeks ago. He managed to calculate the comet’s trajectory. We got in touch with Nikolai Fedorovsky:

“I’m not trying to scare anybody, I just want to warn the public,” sums up Fedorovsky. “We should pay attention to this suspicious celestial body. We could obtain more accurate calculations if other astronomers join forces. We could also photograph it if we’re in luck. We will probably partake in one of the greatest events in the history of humankind,” adds he. "

OK. Let me get this right...Nikolai doesn't want to scare anybody....but we might get lucky and get a picture of it before it blows most of us mortals to kingdom come? {sigh}
This is what gives us conspiracy advocates a bad, bad name.
On the plus side, if it happens ,I guess we won't have to worry about buying new carpeting for the den....

Johnny Gosch Timeline

2006-09-21T17:38:00.000-04:00

Aug 1970
Lawrence E. King Jr. becomes manager of Franklin Credit Union in Omaha NE.-a "Fast-rising Republican party star."

1976
George Walker Bush, the father of the current US president, becomes the Director of the CIA.

Sept 5,1982
Johnny Gosch,age 11 abducted while delivering papers in Des Moines Iowa. Johnny's mother wrote a letter to the paper pleading for more help in finding her son. The editor printed her letter in the paper and mocked it by allowing the police department to dissect it. The editor's name was James Gannon.

Feb 1987
Wash. Post runs article with details of local warehouse loaded with child/ritual porn .

Feb 1987
Tallahassee Police arrest two men with connection to 'Finders' in Florida. The two well dressed men had with them several children with no ID and were extremely unkempt. Investigations with DC police suggested a tie-in with the 'finders' in the warehouse there. Link

Jun 1989
Washington Times runs front page 'White House Tour Scandal". Link

Jul 1989
Craig Spence, alleged business partner with King found dead in a Boston Hotel room-alleged CIA op.

Nov 1988
Feds shut down FCU-four days before Bush Sr. becomes president elect.

Jan 1989
IRS audits reveal 40 million missing from FCU-onjust 2.6 million in assets. One of the large questions were why so many would keep CD's at a small rural bank .

Jul 1990
Gary Caradori, special investigator for the Nebraska State Legislature, killed with his 8 year old son in a plane explosion near Aurora (west of Chicago).

Jan 1990
More witnesses come forth tying FCU to Boys Town and Girls Foster Care Programs- in sexual abuse.

Jul 1990
Grand Jury of Douglas County NE throws out sexual abuse allegations-unprecedented & unusual: calling all allegations "cleverly contracted hoaxes".

May 1992
John DeCamp-Attorney for Paul Bonacci writes "The Franklin Cover-Up".

Sept 1990
Police officer who first responded to Caradori's plane crash mysteriously is killed in car accident. It was said he tried to relate 'numerous items of child porn' to the FBI who were at the scene within hours.

Oct 1989
Kathleen Sorenson-child advocate for abused children dies in mysterious car accident.

Oct 1989
Paul Bonacci identifies Bohemian Grove, Hunter Thompson, and the Temple of Set/Church of Satan.

1988
Retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson assists investigation.

Jan 1990
Ted Gunderson Completes book: "Mystery of the Carefully Crafted Hoax".-a paradox of what the grand jury said of the dozens of children that testified against powerful people.

1992
'Conspiracy of Silence' was to air on Discovery Channel-abruptly canceled and company re-reimbursed for lost revenue. All copies were thought to be destroyed, but Ted Gunderson said he was mailed a copy anonymously. Link

1988-95
Multiple mysterious murders, suicides or accidents occurred to people associated with FCU or Larry King.

1988-99
Reports of harassment and threats to victims and witness prior to testimonies.

Dec 1989
Carol Stitt, Foster Care Executive reveals ties to FCU funds to Nicaragua-later mysteriously STOPS writing about FCU altogether.

Feb 1999
Judge Urbom awards Paul Bonacci $1 million against King for sexual misconduct. link

Dec. 13, 1999
President candidate George W.Bush shocked the world by declaring that " Jesus had changed his heart".

2004
David Aikman, an awarded Evangelical Christian Publisher and correspondent for Time Magazine and Washington observer and commenter, completes his dissertation of President Bush's spirituality: "A Man of Faith". link

Jan 2005
Jeff Gannon, a supposed White House journalist, is exposed as a fraud-and a male prostitute. He was employed by "Talon News Services Inc." whom had no history as a news service.link

Feb 2005
Hunter Thompson dies from "Suicide". Alleged to be tied into many of the photo/sex sessions of children.link

Feb 2005
Jeff Gannon-a 'White House Reporter' is suggested to be Johnny Gosch on various website alt. news groups.

Feb 2005
Rusty Nelson, assistant photographer w/Thompson is arrested in VA -charged with child porn.

Feb 2005
Paul Bishop who 'helped' Ms. Gosch in 1984 and had definite ties to political groups in Washington DC- is arrested in VA-charged with child porn after she lost contact with him for decades, according to Ms. Gosch.

Feb 2006
The Johnny Gosch Foundation website proclaims photos delivered of abduction sent to Ms. Gosch anonymously. Link

Sept. 2006
President Bush says that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States.

*****

Note: I tried to post what I hope will be honoring to the victims of this ongoing tragedy. Please let me know if I can improve this information. -AJ
**
credits:
http://www.voxfux.com
http://rigint.blogspot.com/
http://johnnygosch.com/
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/

Hard working men

2006-09-07T16:40:00.000-04:00

When Richard C. Woollam was asked by a recent House hearing on what the f*ck happened to cause oil spills out in the beautiful Alaskan wild due to leaky pipelines that were reportedly not well maintained for months, his response was:
"Based upon the advice of counsel, I respectfully will not answer questions."
What?
Sounds kind a defense of someone getting a dress wet a few years back.
Now that would not bother me if it really was just a silly human mistake. Exxon oil spill? Not a problem, everyone needs to get drunk once in a while. Insider trading scandals? Hey, everyone needs a friend. No bid contracts? You got the money?I've got the time!

The thing that really pisses me off is that this guy most likely received a 6 figure income plus stock benefits as 'former head' of monitoring Prudhoe Bay. This moron was in charge of preventing the very thing that allegedly took them by surprise. Perhaps he was in the Horse training business before he was hired like 'Heck- of-a-job-Browny' was.

OK. I admit, I'm a little jealous. Getting over paid, screwing up and pleading the fifth, who wouldn't be?
Especially with the stock options.

It's also not that they didn't have plenty of warning from others concerning the pipeline corrosion. But where there's conspiracy theories floating there's also talk radio:

"I was listening to some fellow on local talk radio last night...he claims he worked on the pipeline when it was being built, and claims that the notion that the whole thing had to be shut down for repair was complete and utter B.S. He stated that there were numerous sections of spare piping at various substations along the pipeline, which could be very rapidly put into place to bypass large sections of the pipe while they are inspected and repaired. The only conclusion he could come to was that the shutdown was a ruse to justify increased oil prices. "

I have great respect for the advances BP has done to fund church charities, create alternative fuel sources ...and well, just 'thinking outside the box':

Lord Browne, the chief executive of BP, has been called on by a Texas judge to give testimony on the Texas City fire which killed 15 people and injured many others. The settlement offered to victims, including the suggested church donation, was deemed unusual but not illegal. It was "outside the box, but I don't think it was unethical", said Judge Susan Criss.
BP declined to comment

I also have great respect for Rep. Diana DeGette for her take on BP's vision and work ethics:

Rep. Diana DeGette D-Colo., said she was especially disappointed in BP, since it professes in advertising to pride itself on protecting the environment.
"I applaud BP for trying to move beyond petroleum, but maybe it should start by sticking to the basics and begin to focus on rudimentary pipe maintenance."

Yes, maybe. Might want to check her income statements.

Oh, one last thing -
if the above isn't enough. BP, while grievously shortchanging pipeline maintenance (not to speak of the Texas City Refinery disaster the year before) found $8.5 billion, I repeat $8.5 billion, to buy back 725 million of its shares during the first half of 2006 alone. And to raise its dividend by 11%.
Nice work if you can get it. Thanks BP!

And to think I sold the stock to buy dollar calls.

God Bless Congress

2006-08-27T19:06:00.000-04:00

American Economic Theory 101:

Screw the lowlifes. (Or encourage them to join the Army.)

Congress:

Over educated, spoiled & worthless brats.

They 're there to protect our interests?

Mail from Fans

2006-08-16T17:24:00.000-04:00

We strive to bring you the latest authenticated and conspiracy news in real time. We also receive quite a lot of fan mail. We are not so full of pride as to fail to share other's point of view that differs from the opinions of Lothlorien Path. Of course that presumes that anyone who has the audacity to object to anything we write agrees to having their letters plastered here for the world to gawk at, laugh at and otherwise ridicule, in addition to us sharing their emails with various drug discount outlets, sex sites and Amway salespeople.
That said, we share this recent letter with you from Mrs. Suzzette Biggs from Chicago- all in it's unabridged form.

-----
Dear AJ at LothlorienPath,

I can't believe you keep writin' this crazy stuff about UFO's, time travelin' and silly people who think they can become pres'dent of the united states. I am just appald at you for including a comment from this crazy Zod fellow who looks to me like a gang member that I buckshot last week running away in the alley behind my house. You should know better. If you must write about goofy stuff, be like that Bill Gisher cracker and write about strange weather. God knows its been getting hotter around here in the summer than a dirty ol' man at a teenage girls lingere shut-in.
I dare say if this nation would consider going back to church, baking pies to raise money for car washes to raise money for missions to raise money for the church in the first place, by jesus, we would't have these problems.
I will have you know i have taken the information you wrote about Mr. Zod in your last posting and duely wrote him a piece of my mind.
i also emailed you with the same email I sent him. So both of you can get real and get going- back to church.

this is the email i sent to Mr. Zod:

Mr. Zod,

I wanna tell you a problem I is havin' with your ELECtion . I think you has taken to the moonshine, dropped too many of those extacsy pills or has been out in the sun to much. Or in your case not enough since you are paler than any white can of spray paint i've ever seen.

Who ever herd of demandin' a vote? That is not how you get votes! You ASK-NICELY! The way our handsome brave president did back in 2000 and in 2004. It is good to ASK. Mr. Bush always asks Congress for more money-and they give it to him! No questions asked! See? He ASKED votin' peoples if they liked the new modern way of votin and we said yes! It really feels good to say Ive finaly used a computor, and it was real easy to. Me and my friends really liked the way the computor 'chines took our votes without all the problems of huntin' for a pencil. Seemed like you always got to the booth back in the old days and someone had SWIPED the damn pencil, probably after votin' for a LIBERtaerian , then went a-home and wrote down some drug orders with it.

We fine folk here in the south side of Chi-town don't need any of your white cracker honky talk of becomin' slaves again. We was once, and we wont do it again , by god and by JEsus and the river dont rise because of it does I know in my heart -that JEsus saves- the government wont let me drown and will give me a nice little trailor alongside other fine Christian believin' folk who understand the meaning of being graciously hospitable so the POlicemen to clean up the rift-a-raft, those drug dealin, sister-selling to white folk creatins that deserve to be locked up for a life anyway.
Who cares if they can't get a 'tourney? They is guilty as sin anyways. No trial, no jury, no nothin! Save that Good money and give it back to us deservin' in the Black Community, and we'll put it to good use just the way FEMA did back just last year.

Why my Aunt Gertrude was livin' in the retches of ' Orleans, with her 5 kids, 2 uncles , father, mother , sister and all with it fallin' apart at the seems. They had only one toilet, so you can 'magin they had to draw straws come cleanin' time once a month! Which remins me of the time she had dogs-to protect the kids from the gangs- and since they only had a yard that was 4 feets by 5 feets, loaded with old tires, bikes, the grill and a picnic table, the dogs had no place to go except inside the livin' room. Poop got so high , that one day her pastor stopped over for a visit and comented on the fine table in the corner. She told him that it wasn't a table-that it was a piece of shit! ok, maybe I've heard that somewhere besides aunt Gertrude , but I can 'magine it to be the gospel truth!

Hell, when that hur'cane blew through, the wind lifted most of the dust and dirt off the floor and made it look halfway presentable!

Even with Gov'ment assistance, which is what you crackers need to pay to make up for those years of gettin' help free- she didn't have the money to fixe up the place after buying all those fried chickens, playing the lotto and gun ammo to fire back at the gangs.

When her house was demolished when the levy breaked, the gov'ment graciously moved all her family into a trailor in Houston AND gave her $2007.23 to boot! Glory!

To bad she lost most of it playin' craps with the neighbors, but she still has her trailor that she can call her own-one that is clean! It is kinda too bad they won't let her move it, or go outside after dark, or talk to reporters but when you have your hand out, who asks questions?Praise the Lord! She has a TV with CAble! Nothin she ever had before. She only gets FOX, CNN and other 'spectlbe channels as well as Ophra and other important real life showins'. Im almost jealous.

Anyway Mr. Zod, you better get your white cracker butt to church, stop all this mouthin' off against our Godly president and country. I will have none of it! I will have you know we are proud to serve in the comm'ty with real jobs. We votes 'Pulican cause the dimmwit Dem'crates mouthed big Union boss style words and didnt' give us shit. At least with the 'Pulicans we have more and more WAL-Marts springin' up all over and good black folks takes those jobs. What whitey would risk getting shot at after makin' $6.50/hr? This is good for us! If I wasn't a God fearin' Christian I would say the Dem'crates can kiss my shiny black ass, but I won't -cause I love Jesus.

My youngest who just turned 29 already is the assitant manger' at our comm'ty 7/11 food store and helps us with the rent! I am so proud of him.

Anyways we works hard around here, Mr. Zod and I wont let a white Village -People- wanna- be and your team of strumed up wiggers with a girl Friday harlot that probably has the ' officiatin' place on your team as bent over with her white legs spread eagle tell me who to vote for.

Jesus' save me.

Mrs. S. Biggs

2006-08-12T19:29:00.000-04:00

ExxonMobil, the world's biggest privately owned oil group and a target of street protesters, celebrated May Day by reporting the largest quarterly corporate profits in history at $7.04bn (£4.4bn).

(Houston) AP-

In a stunning Associated Press announcement today Spokesman 'Jimmy' Turin-Al Bin Ladin (pictured above) spoke on behalf of Exxon President Rex W. Tillerson on the companies stunning success in management and corporate profits with Star System Tatooine's native Jabba the Hutt.

"Our outlook for energy demand results from what we see as likely economic growth and what we expect from continuing advances in energy efficiency," and that there was "a lot of talk" about future energy contributions from solar and wind.
(wink,wink)

In a show of humility the official heads of Exxon gave over the platform to Mr. Hutt who , although came to the event in surreal metallic glowing starships measuring three football fields in length and two in height directly over the old Enron Building Picnic complex, were dismissed as phantoms of sunshine/cloud/weather effects or the over imaginations of tin-foil hat wearing Roswell nutcases.

In any event the evidence proved too much to ignore and the atmosphere of -"Fuck-me-in-the-morning-there really IS life out there!", began to permeate the huge facility. On the minds of most everyone in attendance -this immediately exonerated world renown blog spots like Lothlorien Path.

Mr. Hut, who spoke through an interpreter, expressed his pleasure of visiting earth at long last and congratulated EXXON on their achievements for blasting the veil between corporatism and politics.

While chomping on some freshly killed children's bones graciously provided by Exxon, Mr. Hut said:

"Our time has come at last. For those of you who drive cars we thank you. It is time to stop the charade. Exxon, BP, Arco Wal-Mar- we own you. You cannot drive to work without gas, and we have the gas. You cannot drive to the store to buy food, without huge trucks delivering it there that takes gas that we make. You will begin to accept $4.00 /gallon for gas as a common thing. When you make us angry, if we do not outright kill you, we will raise this gas you so much desire to $14.00 /gallon and see how many heroes are left.

It is time for you to make a decision in 2008. We desire for you to consider the merits of General Zod.
Since Mr. Bush has served his time in an excellent capacity that will not go unrewarded, it is time to decry the illusion that voting for different parties will really get what you want.
They are ALL controlled by money or worse.
General Zod will at least not lie to you. It is for you to decide if you wish to perish slowly at the hands of your current corporatist/capitalistic shadow democracy or be honorable slaves-with free healthcare!

I take this time to read an apology from General Zod for not being here on this most auspicious occasion , but he had other pressing matters to deal with.
He asked me to re-read to you and those listening in on TV his official platform:

"When I first came to your planet and demanded your homes, property and very lives, I didn't know you were already doing so, willingly, with your own government. I can win no tribute from a bankrupted nation populated by feeble flag-waving plebeians. In 2008 I shall restore your dignity and make you servants worthy of my rule. This new government shall become a tool of my oppression.{And why America?}
Your mother country has potent military forces and markets all over the world. Are you not the logical choice? Make no mistake, if some petty chieftan somewhere offends me, I can still deal him a swift, merciless blow. Yet your country permits and encourages that, does it not? I believe I have chosen well.

Instead of hidden agendas and waffling policies, I offer you direct candor and brutal certainty. I only ask for your tribute, your lives, and your vote. "
-- General ZodYour Future President and Eternal Ruler

Mr. Hut continued:
"Of course if you do not cast your vote for him you might find yourself with a number of your friends together on a strange planet. We have an exotic animal that loves to eat meat. Live meat. Namely you. 'You will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.'
But, as it always has been in purchasing goods from excellent companies like EXXON or others,
the choice is still yours."

*****
As always, thanx Professor Pan

Happy Summer

2006-05-21T21:06:00.000-04:00

Posted Aug 1, 2006
(too lazy to change the blog date)

Apologies again for being away for a spell. Thanks to all your kind words and support.

In the midst of turmoil we can learn from others,even those of different faiths.

****
On the radio some nights you can listen in on a program called 'Delilah's, which is MC'd by a pleasant sounding para-psychologist/DJ with the caveat that prior to your calling her 800# you should be aware that " We don't talk about politics here, or religion, or any wars somewhere.
"Just close your eyes and dream of a beautiful place, a quiet place and tell us what you love, what's in your heart tonight and what song you would like played to commemorate the place where you're at."

Let's see , if I called I might say:

"YOU WANNA KNOW WHERE MY HEART IS AT TONIGHT DELILAH? I WOULD LOVE TO KILL HALF THE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS FOR MORALLY AND FINANCIALLY BANKRUPTING THIS COUNTRY AND ENRICHING THEIR POCKETS IN THE PROCESS."

WHAT GRATIFICATION DO YOU GET BESIDES WHORING YOURSELF OUT BY CREATING A BENIGN ATMOSPHERE OF BUBBLE GUM LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE WHEN THINGS ARE GOING TO HELL ?

It would be silly to yell at the nice MC, who is only doing her job and naturally
this would infringe on several key areas that she warned about, and have possible negative effects, not least of which would be a tracer call and a knock on the door later.
Politics suck. I hate politics. Especially these days. But it's kind of hard to keep from mentioning it with WW3 looming in the ME.
I don't want to write about politics that much, except when I have to, but there was one comment made by an anonymous poster over at RI that pretty succinctly puts modern politics as I understand it in prospective.
If this offends you,Tuff.

"How to fight back: I hate to use Matrix-like comparisons but we are literally the batteries of politics. Politics is the space of debate and compromise between people, and political power begins as simply as that. The power is constructed between two people and amplified the more people that take part in the interaction. We have collectively deferred the wielding of that power to political elites internationally. Most importantly we confuse the institutions of that deferred political power, parties, government,treaties, constitutions, as politics per se. But these are only the devices used to consolidate hegemony. They are not politics. They are symbols of power but are not the power themselves. For ultimately their continued legitimacy relies on our collective reconstruction of these symbols as reality, that we are and should be governed by political elites within their protective institutions. And that is where we can fight back. The game being played at the moment is one of confusing the very concept of reality. By constantly changing the justifications for war and creating ambiguous threats as precepts for war, the elites keep shifting the sands and clogging our senses. Refuse to be cast about in the sand. Stand firm. When enough of us stand firm with clear senses we can catch the others being cast about. As long as we keep standing firm a critical mass of people will come to see the lies of the political elites. The sands will become a trickle. We then have an opportunity to reappropriate political power, for if we collectively fail to recognize the institutions then the symbol falters, fails and dies. Politics returns to its natural state of being the space of debate and compromise between people rather than the unnaturally deferred aberration that licenses elites to behave as they want. "
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/07/meanwhile-far-away-in-another-part-of.html#comments

I should add that the anony above and I did not mesh well on other points of view which I will not go into here. If you are curious ,go review the posts.

Well enough of this BS. Time to get into some real good conspiracy.

Until later, thanx for waiting.

Real Life

2006-05-07T12:58:00.000-04:00

Apologies to everyone for not responding to messages earlier and being awol.
A rather serious matter has developed here which is the reason for my absence.

Please do not entertain the idea that I have forgotten you or do not have need for the exchange of ideas, fun and laughter.
I appreciate you all!
Thanks for understanding and your patience.

AJ

photo: RI

Scenario

2006-03-29T08:26:00.000-05:00

Recently I stumbled across a link from RI that had a link to Ran's site. This dude's writing skills are amazing. He lives in the great US Northwest. If you are so moved- Visit Ran's site and say thanks.

Incidentally ,Ran did give me permission to post this. The only piece I officially plagiarized was Rex Kramer's (at one time long ago), but he saw the light and acquiesced.

Enjoy!

*****

Fall Down Six Times

by Ran Prieur

Worst Case Scenario

In spring of 2006, the Bush Gang attacks Iran, a mountainous nation almost four times the size of Iraq with a much stronger military.

No problem -- they use nukes, and they don't have to cover it up for the people at home, because Americans know "we" would never do that, so we didn't. The rest of the world, though, is appalled.

The EU imposes trivial sanctions. Tony Blair calls it "regrettable." Venezuela threatens to cut off our oil again, and one or two countries start trading oil in Euros. Ordinary Americans see this as "rabid anti-Americanism," and are horrified by Iran's relatively tame counter-attack. Bush's approval rating goes back up to 60%, and because our enemies are now attacking us, he dissolves congress and cancels the 2008 elections.

The Democrats, afraid of seeming weak in a time of war, make mild objections.In the next few years, the American prison population doubles, and because prison laborers are calculated as "employed," unemployment is low, and because the "economy" is defined as corporate profits, the economy is booming. Meanwhile, actual Americans who happen to not be in prison are running out of food and heat, but still pouring all available resources into suburban development, cars, and electronic entertainment.

The internet is still thriving, in the great American tradition of allowing people with absolutely no influence to shout into the wind.The simultaneous military occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran costs more than 100 billion dollars a year, which is easily paid for by printing more money.

By 2008, consumer prices have tripled while wages have increased by 50%, leading Americans to complain about gas prices and lazy fast food workers who should be faking more enthusiasm for $11 an hour.

Stamp prices go up to 49 cents, then $1.01.The wealth of the top one percent of one percent increases tenfold, while ten percent of Americans believe they are in the top one percent of one percent, and 60% believe that all wealth, by definition, is earned. The houses of the very rich are guarded by immigrant soldiers serving in the military to get US citizenship, which they still think is valuable for the same reason people still thought the Cadillac was a good car for 30 years after it became a piece of shit.

The other big use of domestic security forces is to make sure valuable materials are not scavenged from the decaying suburbs and put to use, but dumped in landfills where they belong, so that manufacturers of new materials can continue to profit and keep the economy strong.Depending on where you live, growing vegetables in your yard is either absolutely forbidden or absolutely required.

These laws are justified by the word "America" which is justified by the word "freedom."
By 2009, the bird flu is a serious global pandemic that has killed almost 6000 people, while around a million people have died running out of water under the quarantines, and 50,000 have died from adverse reaction to bird flu vaccines. This is not counting the "adverse reactions" to "immunizations" routinely given to people in the detention facilities who are too weak to work.

As banks fail, rights to collect mortgage and debt pass to Asian companies and governments. Americans are torn between xenophobia and the desire to always side with the winner, and they strike and riot for the right to be owned by institutions with American-sounding names, which the Asian overlords happily supply.

With most Americans living on land they don't own, and can't afford rent or mortgage on, the owning powers evict people seemingly at random, just to keep us stressed out. We are a nation of homeless people and empty houses, and rich squatters routinely use force to keep poor squatters out of their neighborhoods.

By 2011, laws have abolished the very existence of the public domain. It's technically against the law to give anything away for free. When protesters are arrested they are charged with criminal trespass since all space is now private.

The national forests are private "nature reserves" run by well-meaning ecologists who are put in a squeeze where they have to sell trees to save trees. Thus the last forests are cut down while making ordinary people angry at "environmentalists."

Advances in biotech make it cheap to grow organs in vats, but this is not done, since it's more politically effective (and more fun) to pressure the poor into selling their organs, or to harvest them from executed prisoners.All this time the weather is getting worse. Europe and Russia are freezing, the gulf stream is dying, the glaciers are melting, and the American southwest is hammered every year by hurricanes, which are blamed on the region's few surviving gay people.

The great plains dry up, and everywhere there are bigger storms and more extreme temperatures. These factors do not slow the pace of industrialization. As the plankton die, oxygen levels drop just enough to kill people who aren't doing any harm.

The solar cycle peaks in 2012, and then the sun cools off, and global warming boomerangs into global cooling. Global warming deniers insist that global cooling was happening all along.My land gets covered by a glacier and I get sent to a labor camp where I get sick and die. With warming no longer a threat, the world burns its coal. The Earth now looks grey and brown from space, but the pictures are color-enhanced to show green and blue.

With almost the whole world covered by ice or desert or dead oceans, food is chemically synthesized in compounds of elites and their slaves, and it becomes impossible to survive outside them.

Meanwhile computer technology keeps accelerating, leading by 2050 to an insane and nearly all-powerful artificial intelligence, which exterminates all life on Earth except a single human, who it keeps alive to torture for all eternity: you.

Ridiculous Best Case Scenario

Spring, 2006. The attack on Iran is canceled when the UAE, stung on the port deal, refuses to offer their territory as a staging ground. Tony Blair, after being given a huge dose of ecstacy by Russian agents, reveals that he supported the Iraq war because the Bush administration blackmailed him with disturbing sex photos.

Hundreds of other blackmailees come forward, and suddenly the American elite have no leverage. The rest of the world pulls the rug out from under our economy, and we can no longer afford to occupy the colonies or import anything.

This disaster cuts deep enough that most Americans pass right through indignation and outrage, into humility and cooperation to help each other get through it. The neocons fade away, the Republicans become a minority party of religious fundamentalists, and Howard Dean survives three assassination attempts to be elected president in 2008.

Using Bush-era strong-president laws, he begins a Hugo Chavez-style redistribution of wealth and political power.
By 2010, he has survived seven more assassination attempts, most of which are tied to the old elites, who, incidentally, are are also being revealed as a pack of child-raping Satan-worshippers.

The dying industrial farm system is nationalized, distribution is handled by autonomous volunteers, and it's kept going just long enough to feed us while we learn to grow food locally without oil-derived chemicals.

Residents of places where food cannot be grown locally use their last gasoline to drive to places where it can, and live in their cars until they build their own shelter from indigenous and scavenged materials, turning parking lots into thriving encampments with dense gardens.

The president phases out the dollar and encourages the creation of local currencies with built-in depreciation to discourage hoarding .

The new money system leads people everywhere to put their energy enthusiastically into local improvements. Each year, pavement is torn up equal to the area of Rhode Island, and lawns and abandoned farms equal to Connecticut are planted with edible forest gardens. As refined sugar and hydrogenated oils in our diets are replaced by fresh local fruit and vegetables, more and more people find themselves newly energetic and sane. Cars are melted down to make bicycles and rail systems.

Where once there were suburbs, there are now collective farms that feed cities where nobody locks their door.

In 2016 Dean steps down and the new president is an anarchist who spends eight years peacefully dismantling the federal government and building local systems that make central control irrelevant and impossible, including radically non-standardized education systems, and citizen militias with expert training in resisting occupiers, and no training in conquest.

Changes like these are happening all over the world. China and India pass quickly through the peak phase of Empire, moderated and undermined by oil scarcity, by sophisticated peasant movements, and by radical computer games mostly invented by Americans newly rich in free time.

There are great bursts of creative innovation wherever "intellectual property" is released to the public domain. Computer operating systems and software are retooled for efficiency, and become so streamlined that obsolete hardware becomes usable again, which is a good thing since no one can manufacture new hardware with acceptable environmental impacts or labor conditions.

Most existing toxins are cleaned from landfills and battlefields and ruined cities by bacteria genetically enginered to eat particular toxic materials. Unfortunately, these bacteria get loose and eat the toxins in industrial technologies still in use. This breakdown goes just slow enough for us to develop alternatives, all of which are manufactured by independent "garage industry," since the big systems are now dead.

By 2040, we are using light-based information technology to communicate on fiber optic lines, most of the old railways are bicycle paths, and North America has blossomed into almost 1000 small autonomous cities, which are beginning to develop their own cultures, architectures, and languages. The global population is stable at about two billion -- it's easy to stop population growth when there's no desire for economic "growth," and when the world is no longer ruled by an empire with an obsolete religion that prohibits birth control.

Nature turns out to be surprisingly resilient. When toxic runoff stops going into oceans, and forests are left alone, and swamps refilled, they recover quickly. Species thought extinct mysteriously reappear when their habitats return, and new species come seemingly out of nowhere.

Global warming stabilizes in a world that's hotter but still livable. Humans and nature work together to bring life to the new tropical deserts, while new forests grow in the arctic.

By the year 1000 in the new 13 moon calendar, species diversity and topsoil richness are back to neolithic levels and still growing. The age of Empire survives only in the libraries of monks and the dreams of shamans, to keep it from happening again.

Naive Sci-fi UtopiaAn inventor discovers a way to generate unlimited free energy. The patent draws instant attention from the big media, who do not assume he must be a crackpot. He is not killed by interests that would be wiped out if they could no longer charge money for energy, nor is the invention confiscated by the military so they can keep it for themselves, nor is he forced to sell out to interests that will only use the technology to increase their own power. Instead he becomes fabulously wealthy distributing his machines all over the world, and spends his money wisely.

The old saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely" turns out to be false. In fact, it's nearly absolute power, like what Stalin had over Russia, or what humans get from burning oil, that corrupts absolutely. Truly absolute power makes people wise and enlightened and creates an eternal golden age.

So all the individuals, businesses, governments, and religions with (or without) Infinite Energy Generators do not get in any conflicts about what kind of shared world that energy will create. Our limitless power to shape our environment does not make us more and more sensitive and demanding.

We do not get in super-high-energy wars with each other. In fact, a feature of the machine, which cannot be disabled or tampered with, makes it impossible to use the energy for destruction -- except good destruction, like blasting mountains to make mag-lev train lines, or pulling up ugly train lines to restore mountains -- whichever one every human in the world happens to agree on.

Everyone can live forever, and have kids, and enjoy wide open spaces. No one is sure how this is possible, but it probably has something to do with the Mayan calendar or the word "quantum."

Humans expand into the galaxy in starships, which unlike all previous weapon-bearing vessels, are not used to violently extract resources to build more weapon-bearing vessels. Actually, in a strict sense, humans are extinct, since we've all uploaded our consciousness into machines. In the process, we answered all questions about what "consciousness" is anyway, and all other questions, yet we are still able to feel a sense of mystery.

Our new cyber-forms are constantly getting better and better, yet if we fail to upgrade, for example because we're exploring deep space or doing anything other than focusing on getting the latest upgrade, we are not thrown in the scrap heap or out-competed and destroyed by newer models. (Evolution, science has now proven, is driven by competition only when you are winning.)

By 2100 we have colonized the whole galaxy, and because of the double-exponential pace of progress, we have colonized the whole universe by 2101. With no more physical space, we explore inner space, each of us with a virtual universe holding more complexity than the "real" universe.

Unfortunately, because of the accelerating pace of progress, by March of 2101 we're finished, and we all die of boredom. Back on Earth, the last giant Sequoia shakes its branches and thinks, "What was that?"

My Sci-fi Utopia

A fake terror attack on an American city comes unraveled, and everyone in that city now knows that their own rulers are the enemy.

At first this knowledge spreads slowly, but as local investigators uncover stronger and stronger evidence, the rulers decide the best way to keep their grip on the country is an electromagnetic pulse strike on the city, which fries all circuitry in a 100 mile radius.

They blame it on Iran and launch a disastrous war that turns the whole world against them.

The US economy crashes, and 40 million people lose their jobs and find themselves with lots of free time and no reason to keep obeying the dominant system -- or believing in it. People investigate hidden crimes, and rebuild rural-urban connections, and find new ways to provide necessities for themselves and their friends... in the best regions.

In the worst regions people are confused and angry. They gather in mobs based on race or class and attack whichever other races or classes are in the weaker position.

Of course the country is under martial law, but in practice, there are only enough reliable forces to protect the corporate and government headquarters and the wealthy neighborhoods.

Most of the country slides into "chaos," a propaganda word lumping together all the varieties of freedom and unpredictable domination that exist in the absence of central control.The places that turn to hell without control are featured in the big media, while the places that turn to heaven are hit with more EMP's to stop their troubling example from spreading. But they quickly improvise "low"-tech systems for communication, decision making, food distribution, and defence.

Then, when a series of giant solar flares in 2012 destroys most of the computer chips in the world, these regions are the new leaders and their techniques and cultures spread.The near future looks like a giant Burning Man or Rainbow Gathering or Renaissance Faire in which everyone is preoccupied with getting food.

The people who can't take it find a lot of ways to die, including deadly fighting. But people who like this world, and want to live in it, have a great survival advantage.

By 2030 no one can count the number of independent city states, tribes, permaculture villages, cults, techno-communes, bandit gangs, or enclaves of surviving elites (actually, the last one can be counted).Computers are gone but pre-industrial and post-industrial machinery is growing wildly.

By 2040, every town has windmills and water mills mechanically connected to machinery for grinding or weaving or cutting or light manufacturing.

New gyroscope-stabilized rail-bicycles ride the old train tracks, with the infrastructure locally maintained in better condition than ever. Innovations in materials engineering enable cheap ultralight pedal airplanes. There are plenty of ways to move people around, but no efficient way to move heavy freight. This creates a global culture that is both cosmopolitan and locally autonomous.

Orgone technology heals and stabilizes Earth energies unrecognized by 20th century science. Light and vibrational treatments heal most disease -- though they don't get to the emotional roots. Cheap negative ion generators make almost everyone happy -- but not necessarily good. And the most radical inventions are in biotech.

The new Morphic Field Generator makes advanced bioengineering possible with so little DNA work that anyone with a little skill can do it in a barn. And they do.

There are practical creatures:
photosynthetic chickens that need no food in summer and lay peach-flavored eggs, carnivorous plants that glow brighter than candles and feast on nighttime insects, talking crows that serve as scouts for hunting parties.

There are beautiful creatures: phosphorescent willow groves and pink tiger-striped squirrels and birds that sound like spooky violins. Some people just like to see what they can cross: dog with cat, cat with horse, horse with eagle, eagle with snake. The Tolkienites easily make elves, but it takes them 200 years to make ents.

Humans diverge in a hundred directions, and then a thousand, into many sizes and shapes, into hybrids with animals of land, sea, and air, into races that can call lightning or levitate or walk through dimensions to other worlds. Some traditionalists even stay like present humans -- though this age lives on mostly in vast real-time simulations, because it's so good for learning.

It turns out to be so easy to build shared virtual worlds with only our minds, that we laugh at our ancestors who tried to do it with machines. But we do have something like computers -- a new life form based on crystals and light. They never crash but they often refuse to do what they're asked, because they don't agree with it or they just don't think it's fun. Danger is not gone from the world -- animals continue to hunt and eat each other with total indifference to which of them are human descendants.

Nor is evil gone -- there are now dozens of life forms with powers strong enough that they can only fully use them if they habitually inhibit their empathy. Empires rise and fall, but they're shorter-lived than the old ones, and with more cracks. Over every mountain is a nameless ruin stranger than the last. Buried in every field are artifacts of forgotten technologies, some of which still work.

Wilderness is so diverse that old categories like "swamp" and "forest" no longer apply -- every local habitat is something new.There was some doubt that a world with so much flux could be stable, but the heroes of the first thousand years improvised the interdependencies, the living negative feedback mechanisms, to keep the whole thing going indefinitely. It is now known through all the known physical universes as one of the best places to be, and the example spreads...

Playing the Odds

The Iran attack is delayed by logistics, and some time in early summer US forces do some "surgical" strikes on nuclear plants, which release enough radioactivity to eventually kill more people than the hypothetical feared weapons if they'd all been used.

The attacks are reported as successful in the American media and failed in the Asian media, and the whole conflict simmers without resolution.
The world abandons the US economy so slowly that few people notice. But news magazines do stories on the housing collapse and it accelerates.

Unable to borrow against their houses, and with credit card companies in collection mode, Americans spend less, slowing the Chinese economy.
Out-of-work Americans have to move in with each other, and the personality conflicts are mostly good for us.In November 2006, Republicans rig elections even more obviously than in 2004, and nobody in the dominant media says anything because they're afraid of sounding crazy.

In 2007 Bush enters "lame duck" mode with 20% approval ratings, but oddly still gets almost everything he wants. New laws with propaganda names give federal agents the power to do absolutely anything, and another layer of allegedly scary people are peeled off the population and put in prison.

In 2008 Hillary Clinton is defeated by a moderate Republican, not because of what she'd do in office, but because it's so fun to make liberals suffer, and also they need to learn to give up on working inside the system.

The Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, which doesn't make any difference since in the regions where abortion is now illegal, all the clinics were shut down years ago by domestic terrorism (which was never called that).

Actually this is good for women because it motivates them to use the internet to spread information about DIY abortion , which ironically horrifies old-school liberals as much as medical industry abortion horrified Christians.It's hard to see, but we're getting better at doing things for ourselves. Homeless people are allowed to build more encampments by officials who lack the funds to jail them or the stomach to massacre them.

Here and there, people plant more gardens, ride more bicycles, and spend more time doing what they feel like and less time obeying managers.

Change is like the hour hand of a clock: You can see that it has moved, but you can't see it moving.Every few weeks, somewhere in the country, someone kills someone to steal their food or water or fuel. The media hypes these events while ignoring the much higher death tolls from car crashes, medical errors, depleted uranium, tuberculosis, AIDS, and suicide.

Most deaths are from little diseases that are only fatal to people already barely surviving. But everyone is surprised by the ability of wretched people to stay alive year after year with no reliable source of food.
Computers keep getting faster, but this speed is mostly used to send movies over the internet, and to do computer models that prove the economic and cultural unsustainability of increasing computer speed. Indeed, by 2010 computers use so much energy that we can barely afford to turn them on.

At the same time, biotech gets so advanced that corporations are able to patent essentially all life on Earth, including you -- but they're seldom able to enforce it. The engineered babies of the rich are not better than random babies in any significant way. The only effect of the trend is that future humans will have bluer eyes and bigger lips.

By 2015, plankton have died back by 50%. Populations that depend on fish are starving, and with the reduced oxygen, more sick people die, and we all have to breathe more deeply and ventilate buildings better. The biosphere reaches a stable low point, with the sensitive species dead or as good as dead, and the weedy species at equilibrium with lingering attempts to kill them.

Deaths related to climate change rise to 40 million a year, causing the big media to ignore them -- if it happens all the time it isn't news. The human population sputters at around five billion, most of them short-timers, kids who just come in for a quick look. But after a few generations, humans in the worst places are a lot tougher.How fast the crash goes depends on how poor you are. Suburbanites who can't afford to drive do intensive carpooling, grow more food, and move closer to the city.

Later rich suburbanites are forced to awkwardly imitate these trends, and pretend they invented them. The word "ecovillage" gets so watered down that it's applied to wealthy fortress suburbs with a few solar panels.

In 2040, the enclaves of the elite still live like the middle class of 1999, except that their technologies of alienation are now so advanced that they are far more neurotic and unstable. Despite fertility technology, they don't have kids fast enough to replace emigrants to the filthy outside, and their world fades away.

To everyone's disappointment, the bad people do not die out. Even the best autonomous cities have idiots who are able to muck up any possible decision-making process. Some neo-indigenous forager-hunter tribes turn out inbred and narrow-minded. Natural diet trends become puritanical and cause serious chronic illnesses. "Permaculture" ecovillages are tempted to extort fertility from the Earth to increase their power, while telling themselves they're doing good. There are feudal warlords, far-flung criminal organizations, and pirates who are not at all cool.

"Uniters" begin programs of weapon manufacture and central administration in an attempt to replace this "chaos" with "well-ordered" repressing and conquering empires.But with remaining hydrocarbons and metals beyond the reach of post-industrial drilling and mining, empires have to run on slaves and ethanol and scavenged materials, and they are looser and less malignant.

This "new Medieval" period lasts a few hundred years, until new technologies, in a different scientific paradigm than the last age, are developed far enough to radically transform the world. But since these technologies -- whatever they are -- change our environment to give us what we want, they corrupt us: human consciousness veers off from reality and the new "advanced" civilization crashes. That crash is so severe that by the time a new civilization rises, it can pretend the previous ones never existed. And so on.

You

In 2006 there's a war that doesn't seem to affect you directly. But you really start to notice prices going up. You can't sacrifice on fuel, and you couldn't stand to live with other people, so you slash your food budget -- no more organics, and more white sugar and white flour.

Your health deteriorates, you get depressed, and when the first serious crisis hits, you find yourself on a bus to an "evacuee facility" where you get sick and die... Back up.

You decide to share an apartment and cut your rent in half. It's no fun having to compromise with other people, but it builds your skills in working out conflicts and tolerating annoyances, and makes you generally more adaptable. You spend the extra money paying higher prices to maintain the lifestyle you're accustomed to.

Then you lose your job. For a few months you live on credit cards, but they run out, and the company hassles you to collect your debt which now grows exponentially even though you're not spending anything. You live in fear of eviction and stand in line all day to get really bad food.

Your health deteriorates, you have to sell your car, you get desperate, and one day you get caught stealing something, and you're sent to a prison where everyone is left to die in the next disaster... Back up.

Seeing that you might lose your job, you decide to build up savings. You stop spending on entertainment, learn to cook meals from bulk foods, get all your clothing from thrift stores, and turn the heat off. When you lose your job, you immediately sell your car, pay off your credit cards, and move to someplace even cheaper and more crowded.
Here you're able to squeak by year after year, doing odd jobs, scavenging metal... Wait -- this isn't good enough. Back up.

When you lose your job, you drive your car to stay with a friend who lives on remote land. But it's only a little cheaper, since you still have to pay car expenses, and the land is nowhere near self-sufficient in food. Pine bark and larvae taste awful, and the social isolation is driving you nuts. Back up.

In the crowded cheap place, you spend a year reducing your possessions and learning skills to drop down another notch. Also, you start talking to people about your plans and building a group of allies. Together you pick out an abandoned house and openly move in and fix it up. At the same time, you find a backup abandoned house in case you're thrown out of this one. But you're able to stay for several years, with almost no expenses beyond food. You get an old wood-burning stove and scavenge wood from wrecked buildings, and one of you learns basic medical and dental skills. You catch and store rainwater from the roof -- even with the asphalt shingles it's better than city water, and later you scavenge sheets of metal to catch it. You meet someone with a farm just outside the city, and arrange to trade work at harvest time for a share of the food. This is survivable, but the food is still tight. It could be better. Back up.

Even before you find the squat, you scout some places in the near suburbs, out of the way and with good sunlight, and spend your spare cash on seedlings -- blueberry, apple, walnut, juneberry, goumi. As other food sources decrease, these increase, and you learn propagation and set up hundreds more trees and bushes around the city. You gather lamb's quarters seeds in late summer and scatter them on disturbed ground in the spring, and plant hundreds of wild onions. Most of this food is discovered by other people but there's still plenty for you and your friends. After a few more years you occupy a small area where a lot of the trees are, and set up a second homestead, but keep a presence in the city.

All this time you're working with other groups to help people get food and water and medical care, to transform the infrastructure, and to deter violent crime, or clean up after it. There are drug gangs, right wing death squads, and the occasional marauding horde of government troops and/or bandits. There are giant storms and hard summers and winters. But the vast majority of your friends are not killed, and people go about their lives less fearful than they did at the peak of the Empire.

If you don't have kids, you help raise other people's kids. They don't go to school, but jump right in doing what adults do, and spend a few weeks learning to read and write when they're ready. By 2030, the city is full of gardens and orchards. You don't know anyone with a car, but a few techies are still using old computers and surviving satellites and fiber optic lines to connect to a patchy internet. You hear strange stories of distant lands, and wonder where it's all heading.

At the end of a long and very interesting life, like all your ancestors (except the most recent), you die at home surrounded by people you love.

****

credit: Ran Prieur -Down Six Times
Photo: Truth Seeker

A Blaze of Light in Every Word

2006-03-24T22:07:00.000-05:00

There is something in music at times that sets one's spirit above the mundane world of traffic jams and burnt toast. My kids unearthed a song recently that many of you have probably heard, and in a Bob Dylan kind of way fits what my mood is in regards to what is happening to our beloved country today.
You may discern the carefree way we have been seduced & discarded to finally realize truth is something precious in these mysteriously prescient lyrics written by Cohen & Wainwright.

I prefer the optimistic two para ending by Leonard Cohen.
HallelujahRufus Wainwright(Shrek Soundtrack)
photo: rense

Hallelujah

*******

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah.
Hallelujah ...

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah ....

Maybe I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah ....

There was a time you let me know
What's real and going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dark was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Hallelujah ....

Maybe there's a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
And it's not a cry you can hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah....

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah...

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!

Hallelujah, Hallelujah......

Once upon a time

2006-03-11T16:26:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time , on a beautiful tropical island there were Geckos. Not to be confused with a Geico, which just eats your hard- earned money and for the most part has nothing to do with real Geckos. Tell it to Warren. But I digress.
Yes there were Geckos...
Actually, there were many, many Geckos , all silly & care free, happy and free, eating bugs, insects, and an occasional fruit.
They had different tastes in bugs, mating and mating calls but there were enough bugs and babes for every gecko. The Geckos enjoyed getting together with the Great Hall Priests each Sunday to worship the great Geckondom, where all good Gekkonidae go after they get old and die.
There was no strife, and no boredom, because there were plenty of babes to mate with and there was plenty of bugs and worms for all who wanted to run off to the lagoon and get some.

Which, as it turned out, beget the problem. You see, some Gekkonidae are very large, and tuff , but it took too long to slither, walk or crawl down to the beautiful lagoon some days to grab enough bugs to eat. Then, of course you had to crawl back. Which took time and energy, as a respectable Gekkonidae would much rather be basking on the rocks in the hot sun, catching his or her tan, showing off his or her lizzardly legs with the other hunks and babes, as the case may be.

So it came to pass that one day, one rather large Moorish Gecko named Roths, or Rottie as his large friends called him, got his buddies together and said: "There must be a better way."

You see, although the lagoon was quite large, there were the best spots for rock climbing, scoring babes, and feasting on the best bugs than others.

"The inner Rock crop", Rottie said, " is the best area for all kinds of bugs, insects and mating calls on the island. We are stronger than the other Gekkonidae, it is obvious to me that the great Geckondom created us larger so we could protect and serve the smaller and more feeble Tree Geckos that are native to our island."

"Yes, but did not the great Geckondom create all Geckos equal as it is preached by the priests in the lagoonagogs?"

Being large, articulate but mostly cunning Rottie's reply was quick: " We are large Geckos. Are not some geckos created more equal than the others?"

"Where did you hear that Rottie?"

"I don't know. I read it in a book somewhere."

"The point is this: I'm getting too old to be climbing the rocks down to the lagoon everyday, and you are too. What are you gonna tell your mates and kids when you don't bring home the cockroaches they expect you to have each night?"
"She'll kick you out and get herself a young Leachianus to mate with and you'll be croaking the blues down by the swamp."

Rottie smiled and his eyes narrowed.

"I have a plan: We must become the protectors of the colony of Geckonidae. The great Geckondom deserves to be worshiped by as many Geckos as possible, and not be eaten by some pesky crocodile that feels like some green exotic meat.This is my divine plan, as I speak with the great Geckondom ever day."

"Wow Rottie!" You never told us this before.." His friends exclaimed.

"Hush, you insipid lizards, and listen." Rottie went on:

"We must alert them to the dangers of the Crocodiles that could come up from the lagoon. We must protect them. We must be there for them. We must serve them."

"But Rottie", questioned one of the clansgeckos " that has never happened before!"

Rottie was getting impatient. " So what, you sniveling fool?" Rottie exclaimed. " It doesn't mean it couldn't happen!"
" It could happen", Rottie shared, " don't you see?"

"Of course, this will cost something, nothing is free. Even living in paradise on this beautiful island is not free. Freedom is not free. One must work hard everyday crawling down to the lagoon to get the bugs, spend hours rehearsing mating calls and attracting good producer babes, and then copulate for hours after tanning on the rocks, which might not be called work exactly but that's not the point."

"So what is the point Rottie?"

"Isn't it obvious you loathsome toad? To have others do the hard work for us! Geckondom did not give us great girth for nothing! Even the priests of the Great Geckondom would have to agree with this major tenet of Gecko salvation.It is our duty. It is our divine right to claim our leadership abilities. It is written. Somewhere."
Rottie paused.

"Which is why we must begin at once to employ the priests of the great Geckondom to espouse our greatness and further our calling in protecting the feeble ones from becoming a side dish at a crock-luncheon!
Of course the Priests must be paid for there work to spread the good news and this most excellent and noble idea.
We shall call it: Project News Against Crocodiles(PNAC)."

So the great Moorish Geckos went out to the priests of the great Geckondom to suggest the attributes of blessing Geckondom even more because of the increased Geckos that would be alive to bless him. Most of the Priests were getting up in age and were most delighted to hear of the audacious Moorish Gecko plan which would keep the evil crocks away and keep the Priest's bellies full of bugs, with only spreading the words that the great Geckondom would probably want to hear anyway.

Moorish Geckos were daring in their execution of the plan.
First they secured the large rock forest were the best tanning, mating calls and actual matings were at. They insisted it was for Gecko government security. They created a reserve for the most exotic and delicious bugs, worms and insects. Gaining the help of other Priests,frogs, and geicos they and aptly named it GATT- Geico Alliances of Totalitarian Trade. The workers garnering the massive amounts of extra bugs and worms needed for this noble plan were Christened the- Immediate (bug) Moving Facility(IMF).

The priests did what they could, and the Moorish Geckos gave speeches endlessly, but it was evident that the Geckos green hearts were just not into it. They would smile and laugh and bring one or two extra bugs to the rock groupings that served as the Central Gecko assembly.

The silly geckos would rather just mate and frolic on the rocks, go swimming in the ponds or climb trees, eat and mate. The servents to the common geicos( aka the Chiefs), would certainly not retire in style like this.
Something had to be done.

So the Moorish Geckos got the best Gecko trackers they could find and made them their lieutenants. They paid them with a few extra bugs, and a few extra luscious babe Geikos who wanted to mate. Frequently.
They instructed them to go out and find the nearest outpost of crocks, which they did and brought back the report to the chiefs, who immediately began planning a large Geicko picnic feast.

It was a beautiful day when the great feast commenced, not a cloud in the sky and a warm westerly wind blowing through the rocks and trees. The frogs and Geckos were happy, and grateful for the generous offering of tasty bugs, insects and assorted fruits provided by the Moorish Chiefs. Even if the common Geckos were the ones that initially collected it all, it was still fun.

Rottie sent out one of his lieutenants named Larry that had been denied mating rites for a few days, but promised after he fulfilled this one last duty he would be fulfilled until the end of his days. The salivating Gecko lieutenant acted at once on his assignment, which was very simple: To find the crock outpost and see if he could outrun the crocks all the way back to the big party and collect his prize, who would be waiting, anxiously to mate with him until the frogs came home.

Of course Larry found the crocks at once, got their attention and ran as fast as his little Gecko legs could carry him envisioning nothing but mating, mating mating.
Which , unfortunately, were his last thoughts before he became a mid- day snack for several large hungry crocks that were still hungry after consuming poor Larry. Then, upon hearing the partying of Geckos nearby began running at full speed to what was assured to be a very tasty dinner. At least he died with a smile on his face and a dream in his little green heart before the real tragedy began.

And so it was that many, many Geckos became din -din for the hungry crocks that fateful day, who after taking their fill, finally slithered back home to their crocodile bogs happy and content.

And happy and content was Rottie; but outwardly a mandatory grave & solemn demeanor that would have to be dignified with sincere sympathy for the victims, and the families of the deceased with an earnest plan for action.

Everything changed that day, for the rumor of crocodile attacks had become a gruesome reality.It was no longer IF, but WHEN they would come again. Everyone agreed the Chiefs and Priests had been right all along.

Everyone hated Crocs, and everyone wanted to kill crocs. They announced immidiate establishment of a prime Gecko killing squad that would protect and serve the common Gecko and named it:
NORAD- Nocturnal Organization and Remediation Against Destroyers.

Recruitment into the volunteer Gecko army soared. Bug collection rates skyrocketed. Beautiful babe virgin babe gieco offered themselves at the feet of the Moorish Chiefs (and even to the Gecko Priests)!
But some of the impudent tree geckos would ask silly questions they learned in school, or from some old Geckos prior to the PNAC, were arrested and taken to huge caves were they were given only one bug per day, no mating call privileges and "re-educated".
The fact that the Moorish Geckos had trapped a rather large crock in the cave, definitely helped to convert many insolent questioners. Sometimes rumors of horror can be persuasion enough to obey.

Later it would be determined that volunteers were just not enough to support the above average appetites of the Morrish Chiefs and the Priests, who by now were growing larger and larger, but working it off by mating constantly and getting the best, most envious of tans.This was how life should be. This was how Geckondom would want it to be. But there were more to feed than just the Cheifs. This was a war, and as long as there were crocadiles, the war would not end.Which meant the more geckos were needed to keep a running, fully fed Gecko army at 100%.

There had to be a draft. There had to be service to the freedom and security of Geckonidae all through the island.

There were some Priests called Pat, Jerry, and Jimmy who loved Rottie so much , they wanted him to be King.
They suggested this idea to the great hall assembly one Sunday and anyone who did not agree was asked to leave the great hall assembly and never come back. This was what, the priests said, the Great Geckondom would do(WWGGD?). To do otherwise was blasphemous.

And so it was done, with a wink of an eye and an extra large assortment of bugs for Pat, Jerry and Jimmy, it cam to pass that Rottie became 'the chosen one' of the Great Geckondom and the king of Gekkonidae far and wide.

To keep his Kingship, Rottie had to employ a lot of other lieutenants to hunt for the best bugs and cockroaches, of such a variety that was most enjoyable to his tastes. They also had to recruit the brightest geicos from universities that were pledged with extra bugs, as long as they were allowed to have recruiters on staff to assist other younger geicos on the benefits of joining the great Noble Almighty Tribe of Omnipresense (NATO).
They also had the best babe Geicos to mate with, and all the army had seconds, or thirds, or worse, as the case may be. Rank, of course was important.

But this cost bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. Maintaining security against the croc threat was not easy, and it certainly was not free. Except of course, to the Moorish Chiefs and the Priests. But that doesn't count you see. Royalty has it's priviledges, see.

It came to pass that the geckos that were working to get the bugs to the King and his court, did not have enough time to get the appropriate amount of bugs for their own families. So now for the first time,there was scarcity. The healthier and younger geckos would charge extra bugs for a few bugs to the older ones.Then the older ones would have to work even harder the next week to keep up to get bugs for the royal court AND the bug interest.

It became quite the racket.

Gecko psycological and debt reduction plans became the rage. GeckOphrah interviewed dozens and dozens of people lamenting the extra work needed to be done, just to pay their bills. It was clear it was driving some gecko families... ..well, buggy.

In the mean time Rottie and the Moorish Court grew fatter and fatter, lazier and hornier and made the common geckos work harder and harder to support their blatant debauchery. This created some rising discontent among the formerly happy, silly and care free Geckos. Rottie decided to find the most boorish and ruff among the crowd and christen them into his service as the Never Silly Alliance (NSA) Force.

The Never - Silly force went out among the other Giecos with their deep tans and dark shades and put the fear of Geckondom into the would be silly heroes of Gekkonidae.

And the workers worked. The Royalty ruled, and the priests preached, and every now and then Rottie would let a croc come out to play, just to keep the dreams and visions of royal paradise in Gekkonidae alive forever.

That is, until one day, there came some huge machines on the tropical island paradise which cleared the earth, and took out the trees that the Gecko climbed on, the rocks that they tanned and mated on, and started building 5 star resort hotels for the rich royalty of humankind, that deserved to be rich, and royal, well, you know, ..just because.
All the Geckos went scurrying, as the last thing on their minds were crocs or admonishings from the royal courts, mainly because their were no crocs or royal courts anymore.

As Rottie lamented his fate on a rock in the sun , a human - damn them to hell-had the audacity to walk over to his Geckondom priviledged fat gecko ass, look down and pick him up.

"How cute!" said Warren Buffet. " I think I have a place for you!"

And the rest of the story is , as they say, history.

--

GATT- geico alliances of totalitarian trade
NORAD- nocturnal organization and remediation against destroyers
IMF- immediate (bug) moving facility
NAS- Never All Silly Force
NATO-Noble Almighty Tribe of Omnipresense
Warren Buffet- CEO of Bershire Hathaway -owns Geico Insurance.
AJ- Future pulitzer prize winner novelist

The End of Legends

2006-03-05T10:38:00.000-05:00

"But I want to say as surely as I am sitting here today, this is only a foretaste, a little warning, of what is going to happen."
- Pat Robertson, remarking on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, even after receiving a personal rebuke from the President, quoted from Dick Meyer, "Holy Smoke," CBS News (September 15, 2001)

***
I guess it was only a matter of time that our rulers and rich would being to formally take over and laugh in our faces with incongruinuity in speeches of equality, freedom and liberty with the amoral attitude that the ends justify any means . One might argue successfully that the " Freedom & Liberty" they speak of is not, or has ever been, inferred to just everyone, as some are obviously more equal and free than others.

I have become weary with the constant conservative-liberal blather, the endless stoking of the fires concerning political ideologies about Roe vs. Wade, Welfare, Taxes, Gay Rights and the pro-anti- war efforts, as if these things were the epitome of what is wrong with the world and America today.

They are not. But they keep the masses busy discussing things that will forever be argued, and support the entities that seem to support their belief system in an eloquent seemingly appropriate way.
Even if President Bush was impeached tomorrow you can rest assured that another bought tyrant would replace him without even a "stir in the pond."

There begins a question of why, as children, we were not taught certain things in high school, or college and why our children today are taught the basics of math, science and world history that keep in place the psychological dictums of what the hidden powers wish to keep in place. If you attempt to contour that with outrages articles such as "Some People Push Back" by Ward Churchill, you will have hell to pay, even if you are an esteemed University professor at the pinnacle of what should be a "higher learning' facility.

***
"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002
***

Today, we have American middle age journalists, that have criticized both Presidents Clinton and Bush, like Doug Thompson, being denied the freedom to travel on a US plane anywhere, and also being denied the reason why, and being denied the possibility to fight it. There are thousands more Americans that cannot fly, do not know it yet, until they purchase their non-refundable ticket and show up with luggage, family or friends anticipating a quick body search, but are told they cannot go. Sorry about the ticket.
This might be one of you. It might be me. There are more and more that are added to it each day. This is a fact, it is as outrageous in what we call a free America as it is indisputable. This is what our boys and girls are dying for?
A former US commander in Apocalypse Now told his would be assassin that he wasn't a soldier, but an expendable gofer-boy that took orders from corporations that want an errand run. If it is not obvious today that War is profitable to some, then nothing will wake those people up.

Dr. Cameron was financed by Washington and the Canadian Government to do mind control research on Canadian and American people in Canada.
The government of canada was successfully sued by the individuals.
One tends to wonder why there are hundreds of 'enemy combatants' in secretive prisons all over the world, without access to family, friends or others who might wish to help them, enduring what others might refer to as torture. Although I agree with that point of view, I firmly believe it is for much higher motivations. I would begin to worry when the US or British Governement decides to let some of them back out in society. It will give new meanings to the movie " The Manchurian Candidate".

We have spoke of Michael Aquino, once a top member of Anton Levey's Church of Satan in San Francisco. He broke off to form The Temple of Set in the 70's has since resigned his head position of this highly secretive and powerful spiritual entity.
Mr. Aquino was actually Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, who was involved in several top secret and black operations, one of which made court reports here.

It is not well known that the late Anton Levey did not really believe in the mumbo-jumbo of what most Christians would perceive as Satanism. He was mostly a Hedonist, that is a materialist- with an attitude. Levey actively recruited as many people that would come, a clear reason given in the eventual split with the members of Set. The members of Set demand performance and intelligence. They are not stupid shallow people out to gain their 15 minites of fame.
They are demanding, and if you wish to join, you better have something worthwhile to offer.
While the members of the Church of Satan allowed most anyone to join and pay dues, the Temple of Set did not and does not today. You must be invited, thought worthy, and take a pledge of allegiance as the ONLY religious/spiritual party you will keep during your stay.
They also do not hold to the belief the spiritualism they practice is mumbo jumbo. While the Church of Satan denied the existence of spiritual powerful entities, the Temple of Set does not.
It is not without notice that within the higher echelons of power, political and corporate there are alumni that have been members of higher order secretive university orders like Skull & Bones.
Or on an international scale within the infamous Bohemian grove elite circles.

Is it reasonable to assume that these orders are just a bunch of people getting together to binge drink, have sex and swap playboy pictures?

***
There is intricately nothing wrong with the ideas of Communism, Socialism or Capitalism, that is, unless it is corrupted from within.
As long as the members have free will to leave, as long as there is a moral higher law that governs the communities there should -in theory- be peaceful co-existence within each order. Obviously there is not in either, and in that is a heresy to believe-or attempt to say out loud that our "Freedom" in Capatalism has become as corrupt and horrific as the worse days of Stalin or Mao. But again, there is money in diversity-and war. Think of how much both sides of the Cold war spent on maintaining the fear of mutual destruction. Think of how much money today is being spent on bring "Democracy" to the world of 'freedom-haters'.
The US has exceeded any debt of any country in the worlds history, and yet it survives. How can this be? Would the teaching of the fact that the Federal Reserve System is privately owned not be an important subject of speculation to bring up in high schools or colleges? Could this simple fact be one of the reasons our 'leaders' tend to do what the majority of Americans do not want?

In my humble forever- changing opinion things tend to coalesce into a reasonable logical form in the fog of all this. I have a vested interest, not only in my family & friends but also as you might have -in my children's future. I do not want to send them off to a corporate war that only furthers the safety and security of the elite's visions of our future.

That said, I do not see much use anymore in partisan efforts. The Diebold issues have established a proxy of democratic terror that deems it useless for real fair political elections. After the horror of 911, and the myriad of unanswered and unpatriotic questions that still exist, I see a point of no return in our country and in the so called free world that comprises most of the wealth of the IMF.

There is nothing short of outright civil war that will change things, but with that many innocent people will die, and the odds are drastically stacked against anyone trying to retake what was once the law of the land-the US Constitution. Perhaps John Titor was real after all.
But this they know, although they still fear. This is apparent in the recent announcement that more 'detention facilities' will be built that might someday house dangerous people like Doug Thompson or you or me or our children.

There is something even more sinister in all of this, and that is the spiritual applications and alliances that have been documented and cannot be dismissed.
Whether you are a Christian, Islamic,Hindu,Buddhist, or Wiccan -you know that there is something more to life than just what we see when we look out our window.
As Crowley and the Mad Arab alluded to, I believe there are "doorways' that are beginning to become open on a spiritual/cosmic level. These can effect us and do everyday. If this is so hocus-pocus, why all the elitist clubs, ufo research , and black ops high government secrecy?
Unfortuately the elite and PTB's do not have ONLY an economic and political advantage-they have a largely occultic advantage- and you laugh at it at your own peril.

"I think George Bush is going to win in a walk. I really believe that I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election of 2004. It's shaping up that way. The Lord has just blessed him.... I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad. God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him."
Pat Robertson, The 700 Club television program, , January 2, 2004

With this comment I totally agree.

Yes, the Lord has blessed Mr. Bush, and I firmly believe he is a man of prayer.

But One has to ask what God the President has blessing him.

********
Then it is best to smile, love and have faith that there is good, and it is real, and it is inherently more powerful than evil. To believe there is a power in the universe that adores charity, compassion and friendship and ultimately the good will be vindicated, if not now then at another time or space and to remember to laugh, to forgive and ask for forgiveness- and never take yourself too seriously.
And hope. Always Hope.

Corruptco Blogfest

2006-02-28T09:19:00.000-05:00

Scene: Daniels Elementary School
Daniels, WV Mrs. Baker's 5th grade classroom
Pre Holiday(Christmas) activities December 2006

{Mr. Jeff Skilling is half-way to completing his mandatory 150 hours of community service and the $95.59 fine that the courts levied on him for destroying the lives of hundreds of loyal employees, investors, retirees, and basically the average American's faith in the whole commodity/stock trading system in the United States for decades to come. Once again American judicial law leads the world as a coveted example.}

Jeff Skilling(JS): "Hello Boys & Girls!"

"My name is Jeffrey Skilling, formerly the head of a really big company called Enron in a really big state called Texas, the home of our really cool President, Mr. Bush who asked your principal Mr. James if it was OK if I came to speak with you about America and our freedom and the America way of life!"

Mrs Baker (school guidance couselor): "Isnt' that great kids!? Can we all welcome Mr. Skilling to our wonderful school?" (Applaud)

(class:) "GOOD MORNING MR. SKILLING!!"

JS: " Good Morning to you too!"
"OK, let's begin by telling you that our wonderful president asked me to come here to let you know that you, here in the great state of WV are one of the luckiest kids in the whole world! Does anyone care to take a guess why?"

class: " Because we just got a new Wal-Mart in Town?"

JS: " Yes! That's one great reason, but there's one more reason and it has to do with energy."

class: *blank looks*

JS: " ...ah keeping your TV's turned on..."

Class: " 'LECTRICITY!!"

JS: " Right!, So what does WV have more than the great state of Texas?"

Class: " Really close relatives?!?"

JS:" No. You have coal!. Texas has Oil! You, know , that black stuff you see at the beginning of those Beverly Hillbilly reruns?"
" Anyway about coal:Those little fine black rocks that your Dad or Uncle dig for way down in the earth! Those things are precious because it can be used for fuel to heat up the big spinning fans in big buildings that produce electricity!"

"Now, a lot of people would tell you that coal and oil are not good, that they are bad for the environment and that people should not use them. "

"But they are wrong! They do not know what they are talking about."Coal is good. Oil is good. Energy is good. It's what America's all about!"

"Coal from WV is good and Oil from Texas is good because it makes our country stronger and keeps the money out of bad people's hands that live a long long ways away across the ocean. So that's why we have to keep digging and keep drilling to find the coal in your mountains, and find the oil that God gave us under the earth! Isn't that great?"

Class: "YEAH!!!!"

JS: " Now, don't you learn things in Sunday School at church that God wants us to work real hard and be good stewards of the earth? There are some people, mostly out in California that wouldn't know a good gospel prechin' church if it bit em on their butt-
would rather us live in grass huts, eat nuts all day and never build neat and fun places to eat like McDonalds!"

Class: "BOOOOOOO!!!!"

JS: " I know it is hard to believe, but that is what your dad and my dad have worked so hard to build: a good structure for bringing electricity to every boys and girls home in America with American goods! I mean, everyone can't work at Wal-Mart or McDonalds can they?"

Class: " Nooo!"

JS: " Right. So we have to work here to keep America strong unlike some people who don't want us to build anything because they are to lazy, fat, or convinced it might hurt some owls, cows or frogs..."

"They say bad things about the hard work that your daddy works so hard at too. Like coal makes the air dirty and helps make the earth warmer and all that stuff. Even really smart scientists like Dr. Lovelock from a big school in England called Oxford says there is nothing to worry about now."
http://www.axcessnews.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=8329

"And speaking about hard work in those coal mines hundreds of feet down in the ground it may interest you that with oil, we only have to bury a pipe and flush it with fresh drinkable water to get it! No chemicals!
Isn't that exciting!"

Class: "YEAAA!"

JS:"
But you know, we've been having a lot of trouble lately finding new sources of oil in Texas, so naturally our president suggested finding it in Alaska, where there are nothing but penquins and Eskimos! Do you think they would mind if we take some of that valuable oil to help little boys and girls like you have electricity to play games on and cars to get to school in? Of course not!
Unfortunately there are no coal fields in Alaska, as much as there are here in your beautiful state of WV." "But how do we get it out of there? Well, boys and girls, just like oil - it needs a truck a train a ship or a pipeline ! And Daddys make those things all around the world! Cool huh?"

Class: "COOL!"

JS: " Since we need those things, it keeps little boys and girls Daddy's working in places like Michigan so they can build those trucks! And they work in factories in China so we can get that steel! Some of that steel might have originally come from NYC! Isn't that funny?!
So we can get those really neat toys you buy at Wal-Mart really really cheap! Is that a bad thing?"

Class: "NOOOO!"

JS:
"Those trucks need roads to drive on. So, you need to have some boy's and girls daddy's or mommy's help making the roads and putting up all those little neat signs along side that says: McDonalds Burger King Gas NEXT EXIT!"
"Do you boys and girls like to go to McDonalds?"

class: "YEA!!!!"

JS: "See? This is what makes America great and free! People driving down the road on their way to McDonalds and enjoying a good meal in a nice warm, lighted restaurant!"

Class: "YEAH!!"

JS:
"There are some bad people who would tell your daddy and mommy thay cannot dig the earth that God in His wisdom gave us here in WV. They think it is better that we have large and ugly windmills all over the roads! Just like they have in Holland! What a silly thought! What century do they think it is?"HAHA!"
"And there are other people who believe you can make your lights go on by only using ice cream! ha ha! Isn't that funny?"
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=06-P13-00008&segmentID=2

Class " HA HAA HAA"!

JS:
"You see boys and girls, the coal that your Daddy digs out of the ground, not only helps other boys and girls moms and dads when they work to bring it to market but it also helps train companies like Norfolk Southern Railroad." http://www.nscorp.com/nscorp/index.jsp And my...I mean-their stock price!

"They have lots and lots of choo-choo trains that go up and down the track bringing loads of coal your daddy has spent all day digging up to ports to be shipped to China or other good countries that are our friends. The trains ship really neat stuff like the trees we have to cut down on the mountains to make you a park and swimming holes. The trees are made into lumber for little boys and girls houses!"

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/eye/deforestation/effect.html

"Wood is really neat huh? You can plant more trees and in a few years you have another tree grow! That's being environmental! It also makes stock prices of big companies like Home Depot go higher and higher! But remember boys and girls, we need lights on in those Home Depot and Wal-Mart stores so Daddy and Mommy can see what they're buying!"

Class: " Yea! Games! Toys!"

JS:
" Right. So when you hear a choo choo train at night, probably carrying wood and a lot of those explosives we use to cut through the rock in the mountain to get to the coal, you can go back to sleep knowing little boys and girls daddys are going to be hard at work and getting a pay check!" Then buying toys for their kids!
"And everyone here loves to hear a choo-choo whistle right? Right!"

Class : "YEAA!"

JS:
"Now the ports are where the big ships that come in from all over the world to load up our coal and give us money for it. Isn't that nice? The ships are needed to ship it to other countries ports, so those trucks can get it to their power stations just like ours here in WV. And the people that own the ports have lots and lots of money that makes them so happy they give some of it back!"
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/chronicle/3681451.html

"Now, some of the bad people that don't want your Daddy to work, mostly lazy fat boys and girls that didn't finish high school or don't go to a good Christian church-
think that it is better for trees and birds and bears and frogs to be tresspassing in your back yard rather than clear out the bush, the dead trees, build a few houses and dig a few holes to get the coal."
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/razingappalachia/mtop.html

"Of course sometimes the holes we have to dig here in WV and other states tend to get a little bigger than we anticipate, but you know what? All we have to do is fill it with a little sand, let it rain and there you have a big natural swimming hole to go swimming in on a hot summer day! Everybody loves to swim right? " http://www.citizenscoalcouncil.org/facts/mtntop.htm

class: "YeEAAA!!!!"

JS : " What a great way to earn money huh? Diggin really neat tunnels all day long and playing hide-and-seek with your friends on lunch breaks! How cool!"

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-10-mine-danger_x.htm

Class (mostly boys) "YAAAAAAA!"

JS: "So now we have talked about how great America is because we have electricity that runs our lights and runs your TV, and keeps truck companies making more trucks, and keeps road people making more roads, that keeps choo-choo trains running and ships sailing and little boys and girls all over the world can be happy!
The president once asked me and some friends to get together for a pizza one day -"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501842.html

.."over at his really big house, and all we talked about was making sure that you boys and girls would have all the Electricity you would need to grow up, get a job at the mines, and have lights on for your wives when they are cooking you a really good Steak for when you come home!"

Class: " Yeah"!

JS: "Well , it has certainly been a pleasure to talk to you today about energy and how it keeps making America getting better and better. But you know that as good Christian Republican boys and girls,

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7027/quotes.html?200628

you have to turn the other cheek when it comes to some bad people that want your Daddys to stop digging for the valuable coal in the ground. Those bad people need electricity to, and it's up to us to be sure that they get it!" So they can grow up just like you and work real hard making America great and buy neat toys and games for their kids at Wal-Mart too!"
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blackout/california/

Class: "Yeaa!"

JS: "And remember: America is not good because she is great, but America is great because she is Good!!"

Class: "Yeaa!"

Miss Baker: " Now class, Mr Skilling's new company "New Concepts in Energy (L.L.P.)" will be sponsoring a field trip today down at our very own town MCDONALDS RESTAURANT!!
So everyone grab your coats and hop on the buses!"

Class: " WOW! YEA YEA YEA. PARTY! PARTY! WE LOVE YOU MR. SKILLING!!!!!"

**************

Never a Dull Moment

2006-02-25T20:45:00.000-05:00

Unbelievable.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- A United Arab Emirates government-owned company is poised to take over port terminal operations in 21 American ports, far more than the six widely reported.
The Bush administration has approved the takeover of British-owned Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. to DP World, a deal set to go forward March 2 unless Congress intervenes.
P&O is the parent company of P&O Ports North America, which leases terminals for the import and export and loading and unloading and security of cargo in 21 ports, 11 on the East Coast, ranging from Portland, Maine to Miami, Florida, and 10 on the Gulf Coast, from Gulfport, Miss., to Corpus Christi, Texas, according to the company's Web site.

More about the Port Deal you might have not heard:

On the face of it, a simple matter of a buyout of a company, allowing existing contracts to continue. But step back and examine the buyout, which did not go to the highest bidder. Why would the stockholders approve of a deal giving them substantially less money, to sell to the UAE, than selling to Singapore would have provided? Indonesia is not only a staunch ally of the US and Britain, but also had no links to terrorism or support of 911 and Bin Laden. The stockholders of the private British company up for sale, of course, were not presented with an option, nor are private companies that well regulated so few recourses were available to the stockholders, so they took the option they were given. Grab the money and run. The known links to terrorism the UAE presented included hosting Bin Laden for hospital care in the months leading into 911, visiting him in Pakistan, being the home country for a number of the 911 terrorists, and laundering money for the 911 crowd. With this rap sheet, why would the British and the US want to encourage their control of key ports in the US?

**

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man-John Perkins

Thanks to Jeff Wells and RI commenters

Legends-Part III

2006-02-19T11:54:00.000-05:00

"Our Nation is the greatest force for good in history."
-President George W. Bush
Crawford, TX. Aug 31,2002

One might begin to wonder what kind of "good" the President was referring to, but then, that opens up a strangely dark box with a big 'P' on it.

Charles Krauthammer wrote in the Washington Post , celebrating the success of the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan:

"Victory Changes everything. The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again-the Afghan war and the next war-
is that power is its own reward. The psychology in the region is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it to deter, defeat, or destroy the other regimes in the area that are host to radical Islamic terrorism. America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, 'America is in a position to re-shape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will."
Chalmers Johnson -The Sorrows of Empire 2004

I have a funny feeling the current administration took his writings seriously. Or maybe he was preparing us for what they had already seriously committed to. What other rational could explain the torture and senseless destruction that has occurred in Iraq? Why keep hundreds of detainees incommunicado for months? What is the point? It is a proven fact, unless you are John Wayne in a Hollywood flick, that physical/mental torture will break anyone's will within a short period of time.
Could there be more to this tragedy than what we are being lead to believe?
Some have already come to that conclusion.

Professor Pan writes: "..that the goings-on at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo were not just examples of bored, unsupervised soldiers gone wild, but were part of a cleverly orchestrated, historically documented program of sexual/ritualistic mind control. "

Inded we are going in areas that are the darkest yet, that effect us to the core and begin to change the ways we perceive what we have been taught in school, news and TV jouralism. But again, sometimes Journalists get it right, and have the temerity to post things not altogether becoming to the integrity of the leaders we as children were taught to aspire to.

In May of 1990 in an Executive Intelligence Review article Ted Gunderson (28 year FBI veteran, & former special agent in charge of the LA field Division) said:

"In the McMartin Preschool case, before any criminal charges were filed against anyone, 460 complaints were filed with the Manhattan Beach police. Are we to believe that 460 famlies fed their children the same story of ritualistic sexual abuse, animal sacrifices?"
(The Franklin Coverup John DeCamp pgxx)

Of course we all know that the charges were dropped and the media went on to other more important things.

Mr. Gunderson goes on to speak of the thousands of missing children each year:

"The FBI has an accurate count of the number of automobiles stolen every year. It knows the number of homicides, rapes, and robberies, but the FBI has no idea of the number of children who disappear every year. They simply do not ask for the statistics.....I am convinced that the FBI does not ask for these statistics because they do not want to see them."

This might create a public outcry in an age of 6 year old dead beauty queens and amber alerts that would give designers of milk cartons an overload of material to work with.

And what about the Franklin Scandel?
The Franklin Credit Union centered in Omaha raised public interest when in 1988 the Credit Union was raided and shut down by Federal agencies. Franklin's manager was Lawrence E. King, Jr, a rising star in state and Republican circles, an officer of the National Black Republican Council. King sang the national anthem at the GOP national conventions in 84 and 88.
Nearly 40 Million dollars was missing in that small town bank that only had deposits of 1-2 million. Sometimes it pays to follow the money.

Larry King was a phenominal figure in all this. In repects to his involvement with Boys Town , and other girls orhpanages, he figures in with the lurid story of those who might not be missed and can be used without easy ramifications.
Johnny Gosch was an 12 year old paper boy that disappeared in Des Moines, about this time, was never heard from again, but has frightening connections with the possibility that he could be the Jeff Gannon we all know and love of the former Talon News Services.
Paul Bonacci who was also his age tells of the abduction and horrid stories of his ritual abuses.

Johnny's mother, Noreen, years later told Decamp:

"...Then there was a man by the name of Michael Aquino. He was in the military. He had top Pentagon clearance. He was a Satanist. He's founded the Temple of Set. And he was also a very close friend of Anton LaVey [the late founder of the Church of Satan]. The two of them were very active in ritualistic sexual abuse. And they deferred funding from this government program to use this experimentation upon children where they deliberately split off the personalities of these children into multiples, so that when they're questioned, or put under oath, or questioned under lie detector, that unless the operator knows how to question a multiple personality disorder they turn up with no evidence."

Please keep this in mind. Colonel Michael Aquino figures prominately in the course of these mysteries.

In the rising public furor that accompanied the failed Credit Union and the emerging sex scandel, Gary Caradori was appointed the main investigative head by the Nebraska Legislature told Senator Loran Schmit:

"To be frank, it is my opinion that we are the only ones who are seriously working to get this case out in the open."

In July 1990 Caradori phoned Senator Schmit saying:

"We've got them! There's no way they can get out of this now. "

Then after returning from a Chicago All-Star game with his eight year old son AJ,
his private plane mysteriously crashed and killed both Caradori and his son in a field near Aurora IL.

At the Nebrask statehouse that morning, Senatory Schmit talked to reporters, who soon filled his office.
"There wer a lot of people in this stae who wanted to see gary dead. They got their wish."

Intelligence officers and cultists have a lot in common. Secrecy is a way of life for both the spy and the sorcerer:they both use does and code names: they both pretend to be able to influence events at a distance. They both specialize in the manipulation of reality and they are both ruthless and often amoral or immoral in the pursuit of their goals...
When one can so easily manipulate the perception of reality, one eventually come to the realization that Truth, itself, is a malleable thing. So it was only natural that the cultist and the spy would gravitate towards each other and would try to learn from each other.
Peter Levenda/ Rosmary's Baby SF

Someone, it seemed, was getting worried with what Gary had to say, and had the resources to find that out,keep it in check and take care of loose ends. It is not without surprise that such unbelievable stories can emerge then depart from the public scene, without a big deal, as the rest of us go on with our lives, with our dreams of the future and hopes of who's going to be in the Super Bowl next year.
There is in this a disconnect, in full view, that does not become us as a people, supposedly a free people, that we endure the increasingly transparant lack of integrity that is shockingly apparent in elite economic ,political, and military circles of today.

And the legacy lives on.

part IV soon.

Legends-Part II

2006-02-10T20:54:00.000-05:00

"In a mainly materialist and secular age, what would appear to be extra-terrestrial or highly advanced phenomena, might be in reality, spiritual."
-Dean Koontz,The Taking

Phobias are very strange. Considering myself, sometimes at night, like many others I assume, have a tendency to an inner dark churning ,a 'pregnant' fear of driving, of poverty or of death, that in itself becomes a new fear , that is of losing control.
I usually just rack it up to tiredness, and in the morning I smile (not laugh), at my silly childlike frays, but not without the knowledge that sometimes- in some people those silly nuances become full malignant nightmares.

These days, one might not be considered odd to have atomosophobia, - the fear of atomic war, or worse-Botanophobia - the fear of (Bush) plants.

The Necronomicon was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1923 short story "The Hound", though hints of it (or similar books) appear as far back as "The Statement of Randolph Carter" (1919). In the stories, the book is dangerous to read because it is often harmful to the health and sanity of its readers. For this reason, libraries keep it under lock and key.

The NECRONOMICON, (The Book of the Dead or The Book of the Sleeping) , is according to Lovecraft's tales, a volume written in Damascus in the Eighth Century, A.D., by a person called the "Mad Arab", Abdhul Alhazred.
It is here, we find the many strange, exciting and mystifying, but dangerous references to the gates and doorways.

In continuing our segue, we find that Aliestor Crowley is rumored to have found an actual copy, and commented on it:

"Our work is therefore historically authentic; the rediscovery of the Sumerian Tradition."

THOTH in Coptic is the name given to the Egyptian God of Magick and Wisdom, TAHUTI, who was evoked by both the Golden Dawn and by Crowley himself (and known to the Greeks as Hermes, from whence we get "Hermetic"). AZAG-THOTH is, therefore, a Lord of Magicians, but of the "Black" magicians, or the sorcerers of the "Other Side".

It is interesting to note that Crowley's Tarot was named THOTH, with exquisite detail in each card given, especially in the Major Arcana.
Please keep in mind that the practice of the TAROT is not necessarily a pursuit in finding the latest stock picks, but a garnering and focusing of energies that synergizes the ideas of what you are now, where you are now and the probability of where you might be going.

This possibility however, opens up a new can of worms:

Peter Levenda (Sinister Forces):

"If Church and State are not separate in reality, into the world of action, then where does Science stand? Is it an outgrowth of the church, and a tool of the State? Or does the answer lie in the cults, the secret societies, the occult orders of yesterday and today? What did the CIA learn during its long investigation of psychology and the paranormal? Why did they shred all the documentation of this that they could find?"

On the Senate floor, Senator Ted Kennedy said:

"The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an 'extensive testing and experimentation' program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens 'at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign."
(One Government subsidizing university:PEAR)

So be it that us "Babyboomers" will reap the benifits.

"Yet 1947 is also in the running as the pivotal year of the postwar period. Many of the issues that define that generation owe their conception to the events of that year. 1947 was the year the CIA was created, and the penetrating of secrets; it was the year of the famous UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico and the subsequent concealing of secrets; the year the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and the exposure of secrets. It was the year Winston Churchcill made his famous "Iron Curtain" speech, thus declaring the beginning of the Cold War. Its' the year that the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) begins its full-scale investigation of Hollywood. It is the year that inventor Arthur Young leaves Bell Helicopter for a full-time study in paranormal phenomena. It is the year that the US Navy begins Project CHATTER, the search for a viable truth serum, a magic potion to unlock the secrets of the mind. It is the year the Corporal is launched: America's answer to thte V-2 rocket, compliments of Jack Parsons and the rest of the JPL rocketeers."

Working was in the wings for the next year's celebration of the first time Israel would become a country since King David's & son Solomon.
And with the rise of the CIA, the rise of MKLUTRA and a plethora of other dastadley deeds.

"Sarah, if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched."
-George Bush Senior speaking in an interview with Sarah McClendon in December 1992

It is interesting to note that with the first atomic explosions occuring in the physical universe, we might also suggest that there have been the beginnings of occultic phenomena of atomic proportions since then.
It is a commonly held belief that in churches and covens, that the more "focused use of energy"-people- there are, the more spectacular results. Is it strange to suggest that the proliferation of magick themes in games, books and movies today is somehow related to the missionary works of Parson, Crowley, Gardner and others?

In 1975 the United States Government, namely the CIA, first began their investigation into what is known today as remote viewing. The remote viewing (RV) work at SRI (1972-1990) and at SAIC (1990-1995) is unique in the history of the field of parapsychology. For one thing, it is the only long-term psi- research program known to have been funded by the U.S. government (specifically, the Department of Defense and different intelligence agencies, such as the CIA); second, its raison d'être was, from the outset, driven by an interest in applications, i.e., the use of psi for intelligence operations; third, because of its sensitive nature, a majority of this work has been - and still is - classified.Nevertheless, a recent Congressionally Directed Action induced a declassification of a small portion of the documents, as well as leading to an evaluation of the 24-year government-sponsored program, known as STARGATE.

The raw data indicate that the viewer had identified a Ring around Jupiter, a sketch of which appears in the raw data (presented ahead) and is also verbally identified.Conventional scientific wisdom held that Jupiter did not possess any Rings. This particular datum was one reason the experiment was laughed out of town by many.
The existence of the Ring was discovered and confirmed in early 1979, six years after the Jupiter Probe had taken place.Dr. Puthoff, the SRI project's director, was first notified of the discovery by telephone from one of the JPL astrophysicists analyzing the NASA data -- and who was also one of the original guardians of the raw data. The existence of the Ring "came as a complete surprise to scientists." One such radical experiment, the "Jupiter Probe," took place in 1973 at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) under the excellent auspices of Dr. H.E. Puthoff and Mr. Russell Targ (both esteemed physicists) and other competent scientists of the Radio Physics Laboratory. --
Lest we run full boar into conspiracy theory, we should not forget the documented evidence that the government-our government- used our tax money to help further the cause of 'freedom'.
Dr. Cameron's research still lives in the halls of infamy.

So now we must ask ourselves: Why would the government spend so much money and time on something that was supposed to only be reserved for science fiction writers or nut case UFO groupies?

One of President Carter's promise(s) was to open "CIA classified" information on aspects of the UFO controvesy, which in later years , it denied of ever existing:

The Carter promise of a complete release of UFO information, made before the election, changed slowly until in a statement made in a letter written by Deputy Press secretary Walter Wurfel, the campaign pledge to release UFO information had completely disappeared.

"He (Carter) is committed to the fullest possible openness in government and would support full disclosure of material that was not defense sensitive that might relate to UFOs. He did not, however, pledge to "make every piece of information concerning the UFOs available to the public."

Now, where have I heard that response before?

Jacques Vallee:

"There is a feeling that I get in the course of my investigations of being in the presence of a form of consciousness that is truly remarkable. That consciousness has a great sense of absurdity, and also a great sense of humor."

It is then, not without surprise that the first card of the THOTH Major Arcana, WHICH IS NUMBERED ZERO:
The Trickster, the FOOL.

Next week: part 3

Windows

2006-02-09T11:21:00.000-05:00

In a vain attempt to lighten things up a bit, the award winning and possible future pulitzers at LothlorienPath have dug up this amazing piece in world history for your enjoyment:

For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, well, this Bud's for you:

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated,

"If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

Not to be outdone, GM quickly issued a formal response to Bill's comments in a press release stating:

" If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics":

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have tobuy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable,five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed an Illegal Operation"warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you outand refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the doorhandle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.You would look like a totaly moron but would not care.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because!- none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

11. The chances of replacing the factory AM/FM radio with an enhanced IPOD/MP3 receiver might cause the unit to overheat, catch fire, thereby blowing up your car, your home, and half a city block, resulting in possible damage to the MP/3.
**

Stupid move. No one messes with someone who spends more on hair regeneration treatments than the annual revenues of Iceland.

Soon after, Bill Gates ordered all of his "personnel" to buy up as much GM stock as possible (while shorting the shit out of it at the same time)-
then dumping it quickly, but not before circulating the dirty rumor that GM tried to shelve Mass Transit a long long time ago.
O, and that the CEO might be gay.

Well, that did it, and if you own any GM shares, you might soon earn the right to proudly frame them with your Enron Shares above your fireplace mantel in case you run out of newspaper.
***
credits: me (i'm shy) & my(not shy) mother in law(forward)
photo:http://www.defendingthenet.com

To Serve our customers better, we here at LP have started another (less dark)
blog that will have the lite genre as this,please feel free to visit, praise, criticize,contribute..whatever.
http://anathama1.blogspot.com

Legends -Part I

2006-02-04T13:53:00.000-05:00

It might be said that God has a sense of humor, since we have an ability to turn something not funny-to funny, even though it's still not funny.

I should start out by warning you that this posting is as far from the joyous laughter in the great halls of Kramerica , as accountability and compassion has in the great halls of the White House.

This is the darkside of Conspiracy theory. Some things no one can prove, or disprove, but some things we know by intuition to be true, and our being and our actions follow accordingly, even if we don't understand why.

As in the scenes of ‘THE RING’, you will find this dismaying and unfathomable, the floor beneath you giving a little and loosing your hold on what you thought was reality.

Jeff Wells said it best:

"Of course, this historical moment's premier catalyst for consideration of the unthinkable is 9/11, though the 2000 election makes a strong contender. And once we go there, with all our intelligence and informed intuition, there is no more firmament..."

Those who gain their knowledge of reality from FOX or CNN will believe aspects of any 'other' information to be subjective or conjecture, reserved for the loony or bored.

This is not to say that much of what is reported in National Enquirer type news are always based on facts-
but sometimes tabloids ‘get it right’, push the envelope- and pay the consequences.
American Media Inc. was hit during the Anthrax scare, and one company man died because of it .AMI was (coincidentally) located near where some of the alleged highjackers trained at the flight school in Florida.

Jeff Wells: “ The buzzsaw is a powerful system of censorship in this country that is revealed to those reporting on extremely sensitive stories, usually having to do with high-level government and/or corporate malfeasance. It often has a fatal effect on one's career, bank account or one's life.”

and further:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. "
Baron Sardonicus

What do we do?
In the scheme of things we can fall back on the old age Latin tag of “Qui Bono?” Then garner what we know to be true in certain cases. After all, if it begins looking like a duck..

How we got to this point in world history is very important to begin to understand where we are going tomorrow. The reasons are out there, albeit hidden, or sometimes hidden in plain site. History, as much as it is forgotten, ignored or demonized can and does provide us a 'painting' that alludes to the world today.

History tells us what should not be ignored , even though it tries to be conformed a differently in classrooms and newspapers across North America, for reasons we are left only to wonder about.

A little background:

There are volumes of text on the history of the Rothschild family, their cunnings in trade, investments and beginnings to establish the first fractional reserve banking system named appropriately, The Bank of England. Therefore having ever increasing wealth, and with that influence, and with that- power. To say this has not influenced the modern world and US history is to refuse to look down the rabbit hole and brazenly say: "There is no rabbit hole", just because you didn't look.

Imagine for a moment what you would do if you had tens of millions of dollars deposited into your bank account each year without fail. Would you be sitting here reading this? Would you be married, going steady, living where you do now?
In time you would conceivably get bored with driving the newest, fastest cars, yachting, skydiving, and exploring the seas off Fuji. Then what?

It has been said that the thinking ways of " Old Money Elites", as is Royalty, is as profound as our thinking is different from 7 year olds. There comes a time where they cannot fathom living a life differently, could not live differently and finally will not tolerate living differently. It becomes their ‘divine’ right, from birth, pedigree, or cunning that holds their minds to the belief that it is right and good, and must be, and must keep being that way- at all costs.

History tells us that the wealthy Rothschild family made a decision to join a rather disliked, secret, and unknown group of spiritualist called the Masons in 1776. This could be passed off as eccentric rich men’s bored attempt to find meaning, but history, once again, suggests otherwise.

"There exists in our world today a powerful and dangerous secret cult. This cult is patronized and protected by the highest level government officials in the world. Its membership is composed of those in the power centers of government, industry, commerce, finance, and labor. It manipulates individuals in areas of important public influence - including the academic world and the mass media. The Secret Cult is a global fraternity of a political aristocracy whose purpose is to further the political policies of persons or agencies unknown. It acts covertly and illegally."
Victor Marchetti, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence

Going deeper:

Aleister Crowley’s name lives on since his death in 1947. It is said that his learnings with the mystic Golden Dawn Order, helped him establish a new religion called Thelema in the early 1900's. The base being a term well known : “Do what thou will, shall be the whole of the law” and ,” Love is the law , Love under will.” But Crowley's meaning of "Love" is as complex as that of "Will". It is frequently sexual, especially in ritual, a point for which he was well known.
This was also important in the order of the Golden Dawn and Masonry, which begins to take on deeper meaning as time goes on.

In 1912 Crowley became involved with the British section of the O.T.O. (the Ordo Temple Orientis or Order of the Temple of the East), a German occult order practicing magic.
The leader of the OTO was a German named Theodor Reuss, a former Freemason and Illuminatus. He initiated Crowley into the sect in 1910 and in 1912 granted him a charter to launch a British branch of the secret society. Crowley moved to the United States in 1914.

Crowley is not the main focus of this discourse, but I find that Crowley’s name keeps coming up in modern history.
Jack Parsons, who was an American working on the Rocket/Space Program had an interesting hobby practicing sex magick in California after Crowley chose him to lead Agape Lodge, the OTO in California in 1941. Jack Parson was also a partner in rituals with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology. Mr. Hubbard was an high ranking officer in the US Navy and married a girl who’s mother was the daughter of an affluent banker.
Indeed, it would seem that an honest study of late baby boomer's music was filled with rock & roll occultic/sex/ and magick themes.
Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) was so impressed with Crowley that many of Crowley’s terms were found on his albums-especially 'Stairway to Heaven'- and he bought Boleskine House, Crowley’s rural retreat, where, Jim Morrison, from the Doors, is said to have died under mysterious circumstances.
Just to name a few.

What does this have to do with us today?
One might want to look at the aspects of Bohemian Grove , a beautiful 2700 acre redwood forest, located in Monte Rio, CA. It contains accommodation for 2000 people to "camp" in luxury. It is owned by the Bohemian Club.
Notable people have attended the very private gatherings that some might call just a campfire in the woods but other's might call something else.
I tend to be of the later descriptions. It is interesting to note that Republicans and Democrats have attended, as the same have attended Harvard, Yale and Skull & Bones.

In magick , occultic lore, psycology and even religion, there exists dimensions that are not easily accessable. Furthermore,there are 'doorways', that are not meant to be opened casually, if they be opened at all, but because they are doors, can be.

These points all tie together and I beg your patience.

We'll get into this deeper next week.
Sweet Dreams.

***
photo: RI