Walpurgisnacht

There's a woman, on my block,
She just sit there, as the night grows still.
She say Who gonna take away his license to kill? - Bob Dylan

April 30 used to mean to me only the deadline for Canadian income tax. Now, since beginning to explore here the topic of mind control, which opened up the field of Satanic Ritual Abuse, I've learned what else it means, and to more people than I could have imagined.

See, for example, comments here on the discussion board:

"My survivor friend got a note posted to the hood of her car two days ago, telling her to go to a certain place that night, where she would be picked up and taken to 'the festival.' ... she indicated that 'the festival' happens at the same time every year, and that she has attended at multiple times in the past. The note suggests that this is 'her time' eg she will be forced to initiate as a 'master,' which will involve killing a child.... It's Walpurgisnacht.... It's the night when they sacrifice somebody. They initiate new members the next day."

"Yes I'm familiar with Walpurgisnacht, and you are correct about what it is. These 'holy days' are always difficult times for me."

"It was about this time of the year when she invited all the kids in the program to have a slumber party at her house, to celebrate the end of the year... She told us not to tell anyone about what was going to happen and if we did, we would be killed, and so would she. I don't remember being told this, but somehow I knew we were going to a grave yard and something bad was going to happen...."

Since survivors are usually told by authorities, the media, and strangers on the Internet that they are delusional, and the crimes they've suffered are fictions encouraged by abusive therapists, I thought it may be good to remember something else that happened on another April 30: in 2000, the respected British paper The Independent published this article:

Satanic abuse no myth, say experts

A specially commissioned government report will this week conclude that satanic abuse does take place in Britain. It will say that its victims have suffered actual abuse and are not suffering from "false memory syndrome".

The report, ordered by the Department of Health, focuses on the experiences of 50 "survivors". Compiled by Dr John Hale, director of the Portman Clinic in London, and psychotherapist Valerie Sinason, it will reopen the debate which started a decade ago with testimonies from children in Nottingham, Rochdale and Orkney.

Its findings contradict the claims of a report ordered by the Conservative government in 1994, which concluded that satanic abuse was a "myth". It follows the growing concern of child protection agencies, and the Government, over organised child abuse.

Last week, it emerged that police were investigating the alleged sexual and physical abuse of up to 4,000 children in care homes and council-run homes in Devon. Ms Sinason, who has treated 126 ritual abuse survivors, said yesterday that in many cases children were tortured by being held under water or made to believe they had witnessed the murder of infants as part of the satanic ritual.

"Some children are born for the purpose of abuse and are not registered on birth certificates," she added. "The abusers use trickery to convince children they have taken part in murder. This increases the power of the abuser."

The report will point to the difficulty of bringing prosecutions because of the problems of putting abused children into the witness box. There are currently at least five cases involving ritual abuse in the hands of lawyers. Lee Moore, a barrister who founded the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, and was himself a victim of ritual abuse, said it was hard to persuade people to give evidence, particularly after the 1994 report claiming satanic abuse was a myth perpetuated by social workers.

The latest report was welcomed by Dr Joan Coleman, a Surrey psychiatrist who has spent 14 years treating victims. "A lot of children are born into satanic families who indulge in this ritual abuse," she said. "It's only now that child sexual abuse is being exposed that people are beginning to believe ritual abuse exists."

The report will be studied by John Hutton, the health department minister with responsibility for child protection. He is expected to order an investigation into its findings.

The report, it would seem, was shelved by an embarrassed government, which soon disappeared it down the memory hole.

Regardless of the report, regardless of the similarities of survivors' accounts and physical evidence, most people have filed away ritual abuse as "debunked." Jacques Vallee has written how, with respect to another phenomenon, "carefully contrived official 'explanations'...do not really explain anything, but...provide skeptics with an excuse for dismissing the story." There is an understandable psychological need to live in a world where such things don't happen, so it doesn't take much to persuade most that all child victims must be liars and all adult victims pathological. Undoubtedly people have been falsely accused of ritual abuse, but many more people have been falsely accused of non-ritual rape and murder. Have rape and murder been debunked?

In Linda Blood's The New Satanists she writes that above her desk is a sign: THERE IS NO DEFENSE AGAINST AN EVIL WHICH ONLY THE VICTIMS AND THE PERPETRATORS KNOW EXISTS. She adds, "We owe it to the victims of ritual abuse to recognize both their suffering and their courage and to make every effort to put a stop to the cruel and vicious activities of their abusers."

To those of you who find this an oppressive time, I'll pass along this advice from Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense and hope it doesn't sound too glib: "If the victim of an occult attack concentrates on mundane things he is a heartbreaking proposition for any sorcerer. What is the sorcerer to do if, at the time when he is operating the Black art, his victim is at the local cinema roaring at the antics of Charlie Chaplin?"

I know it's banal, but the banal is suggestive of the commonplace, and there may be power to be found in the commonplace when confronting the uncommon place.

That's no strategy to save the world, but first things first.

Whose hemisphere is it anyway?

Do you know this man?

That's Luis Posada Carriles, described by Gary Webb in Dark Alliance as a "veteran CIA agent with a history of involvement with drug traffickers, mobsters, and terrorists." He was investigated by the Justice Department in 1967 for "moonlighting" - so says a memo in his CIA file - for Santos Trafficante. (Posada had been supplying the Miami mob with explosives, silencers and hand grenades.)

The next year the agency transferred him to South America, where he went to work for Venezuelan intelligence. In 1973 Posada was placed under surveillance by the DEA when it received reports that he was the "main contact" in a major cocaine smuggling enterprise that involved elements of the Venezuelan government. A year later the DEA learned Posada was dealings weapons for drugs with a man believed "involved in political assassinations."

Officially, the CIA terminated its association with Posada in February, 1976.

Do you know what he did next?

It was midday on that Wednesday, October 6, 1976. The aircraft commenced the maneuver of revving its four engines, and cutting off the auxiliary ignition motors. A few minutes later it cruised along the runway and took off in a smooth but rapid ascent.

...

At 12:23 p.m. the cry of "Look out!" could be heard over the radio and seconds later the co-pilot informed: "There’s been an explosion and we’re coming down right now, we have a fire on board." The passenger plane was 28 miles from Seawell aerodrome and the radar screen showed it making a wide turn to the right to return to the terminal area.

After flying back 10 miles the crew asked for an immediate landing and just before 12:27 the co-pilot was heard shouting: "Close the door! Close the door!" Smoke was emanating from a section of the wing adjacent to the third engine. Nevertheless, the crew decided to release the landing equipment and utilize the flaps to increase the sustaining force of the glide and avoid a crash.

In these circumstances they were able to maintain control of the plane until a second detonation in the area of the toilets in the back part of the fuselage affected the control system by destroying or changing the configuration of the helm.

This provoked a violent lift of the plane’s nose that prompted the co-pilot to shout: "That’s worse! Stick to the water, Fello, stick to the water!" in the belief that the flight captain had shifted the controls toward himself in order to gain height.

A total silence reigned in the Seawell flight control tower: the profile of the CUT-1201 was lost for ever from the air controller’s radar screen as the plane nose-dived into the sea with 73 people on board.

Posada was arrested by Venezuelan authorities for the bombing of the airliner. (In Cocaine Politics, Peter Dale Scott writes that "Posada also had materials in his possession linking him to the assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, a month before the Cubana Airlines bombing.") He spent ten years in custody, only to escape shortly before his long-delayed trial.

And do you know where he surfaced?

El Salvador, where he served as second-in-command to old friend and terrorist Felix Rodriguez at the critical Iran/Contra cocaine resupply hub of Ilopango Air Force Base. "With men like Luis Posada...running things at Ilopango," Webb writes, "it's little wonder DEA agent [Celerino] Castillo was hearing rumors about drug trafficking." At a Guatemala City embassy reception in 1986 Vice President Bush asked the agent what he was up to, and "Castillo replied that he was investigating cocaine trafficking in El Salvador. He advised the vice president that 'there's some funny things going on with the Contras at Ilopango.' Bush, Castillo says, smiled at him knowingly and walked away." (From Cockburn and St Clair's Whiteout.)

In 2000 Posada was arrested in Panama for his role in yet another attempted assassination of Fidel Castro, this time during the 10th Ibero-American Summit. The plan called for the detonation of eight kilograms of C-4 plastic explosive in a public auditorium. Posada was pardoned by former Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso and fled to Florida.

If this world were irretrievably unjust that would be the end of the story, maybe punctuated by a few more explosions and kilos of cocaine. But we still have the odd glimmer of hope for happy endings. Or better yet, happy beginnings. And what happened next could be either.

Venezuela high court moving to extradite Miami Cuban militant

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela's Supreme Court has begun processing an extradition request for a Cuban militant believed to be seeking asylum in Miami, the court announced Thursday.

The Supreme Court began processing the request on Wednesday for the extradition of Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted in Venezuela for treason and for a 1976 Cuban airliner bombing that killed 73 people, according to a statement released by the tribunal's press office.

Posada, a Cuban native with Venezuelan citizenship, was tried and acquitted twice in Venezuela in the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing. He is wanted for escaping from prison in Venezuela in 1985 while awaiting a prosecutor's appeal in that case.

The Attorney General's Office in Venezuela announced Tuesday that steps were being taken to request Posada Carriles' extradition.

I'm not kidding myself. I expect the likelihood of the US sending Posada to Venezuela to be on par with Michael Meiring's chances of being returned to the Philippines. But there's justice being done in the mere attempt. Because even if it fails, it's a further unveiling of the sham that serves as the bully's moral high ground. ("We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.")

Speaking of which - do you know this woman?



Secretary of State Rice has been criss-crossing Latin America this week in a bid to immunize against the spread of the Venezuelan infection. In an interview with Colombia's Casa Editorial El Tiempo she said "we have no problem with the Venezuelan people." But. And as usual, it's a big one:

...this is about the behavior of the regime, both in terms of its domestic -- where domestically, where it has had very bad relations with the press -- where the ability for people to oppose the regime, where there needs to be a sense that the democratic institutions are being protected, and the questions about the behavior and the activities of the Venezuelan regime in the region.

But this is not just an issue between the United States and Venezuela. This is an issue of what kind of hemisphere is this going to be. Is it going to be a hemisphere that is democratic and that is prosperous and where neighbors get along, where neighbors don't interfere in each other's affairs, where people fight drug trade and fight terrorism together actively? That's the kind of hemisphere that we're trying to build and I believe that we have the cooperation and the support of almost all of the states of this region who want to see the same kind of hemisphere.

Which hemisphere, again, is Luis Posada Carriles'?

The Candy Man Did

You can even eat the dishes.


In 1973, Sammy Davis Jr starred in a made-for-TV movie entitled Poor Devil. I watched it. (I was 12 - I thought Jack Klugman was funny.) Also watching was military PsyOp specialist and occultist Michael Aquino, who was delighted by the sympathetic portrayal of satanism - Davis portrayed a decent, hip demon - and by the care paid to details, such as a pentagram properly inverted. Aquino saw an opportunity to boost the Church of Satan's visibility by offering Sammy an honourary membership. Davis, who said he wanted "every human experience," took it a step further, and became for a time a practicing satanist.

Aquino devotes a chapter to the recruitment of Davis in his history of the Church of Satan, available in a .pdf hosted by the Temple of Set at xeper.org. Sammy tells his side in his autobiography Why Me? "Evil fascinated me," he admits. And what's more, and perhaps most significantly, the chicks "dug" the Baphomet pendant and the single long, red, fingernail he sported.

Davis got out when he realized that these kicks sometimes kicked back. "One morning after a 'coven' that wasn't quite fun and games, I got some nail polish remover and I took off the red fingernail." He reportedly told his valet, who after Davis's death told The National Enquirer, that "Those people were evil. I'm glad I'm free of them."

Interestingly, Davis writes of an earlier brush with Hollywood's occult underground. In the late 1960s, he accepted an invitation to a party thrown by actors whom he knew to be practicing occultists. The party became a ritual orgy, which concluded with a virgin's simulated sacrifice. Sammy was shocked to discover that the hooded figure leading the ritual was his own hairstylist, barber-to-the-stars Jay Sebring. In retrospect, perhaps it shouldn't have been such a surprise, as Sebring had previously invited Davis to visit the dungeon he'd constructed in his basement, and see the antique torture implements he'd collected.

The cat was always "a little weird," writes Sammy.



Sebring, you may recall, became a ritual sacrifice himself, when the Manson Family crashed Sharon Tate's party on Cielo Drive.


So now, with everything else in the world to write about, I'm writing about Sammy Davis Jr? I know, and I'm sorry. But I have two reasons.

First, I'm haunted by the image of the hooded figure of Jay Sebring. There's an Eyes Wide Shut moment for you. (" Bill," says Ziegler, "these were not just ordinary people.") Sebring was a celebrity stylist and successful entrepeneur, largely responsible for opening up the untapped and hugely profitable market for men's haircare products. Sammy thought he knew him. And even though he'd thought him "a little weird," he hadn't thought him that weird.

And Davis's story is, I think, suggestive of how elites can flatter themselves into an occult underworld that isn't all "fun and games." Davis wasn't looking for evil so much as he was looking for experience. (Hey - "the chicks dug it.") And because of his position, he likely thought he could afford it, and more importantly, that he had earned it. So he indulged himself, not just hedonistically, but also philosophically. And that can be an attractive indulgence for assertive personalities who have already attained a measure of power and position. One to be exploited.

Chicks or no chicks, Davis got out when he glimpsed just how heavy things could get. Some don't. And when they don't, they lend themselves to blackmail, and expose themselves - and perhaps more significantly, their offices - to criminal occult influence. Which seems something of the point to the elite paedophile rings run by Lawrence King and Craig Spence, apparently on behalf of elements of military-intelligence.

Christopher Lee, who co-starred with Davis in Poor Devil (Lee played Lucifer) was also a target for recruitment. Aquino writes that he'd been a fan, and had believed Lee to be a "behind-the-scenes backer of the 'satanic' movement." Until he read these comments from the actor in a March 1974 interview:

I am absolutely certain that there are thousands upon thousands of people today actively using black magic to get what they want. I'm sure they're responsible for much of the bad in the world, such as the wars in the Middle East [and] political corruption.... Black magic has a church-like hierarchy with leaders who want power over people. At the bottom are people who get conned into devil worshipping because they're lonely, insecure, or frustrated....

My roles in horror films brought me into contact with people who furthered my occult knowledge. I feel very much that it's my responsibility to persuade people to turn away from black magic...and I think my movies do just that by showing the true horror of evil.

"Some 'movement' supporter!" writes Aquino.

Broken news

Take a deep breath - feel like you're chokin'?
Everything is broken. - Bob Dylan

Know the feeling?

Even the news, once breaking, is now just broken. That's not to say there's been an interruption to the datastream. In fact, that's the problem. The datastream clips along without pause for either reflection or response, which is just fine for some. Today's bombshell becomes yesterday's bombshell, which means few people will still hear it exploding over tomorrow's bombshell. And with so many bombs going off, we should expect to be somewhat deafened, and perhaps a little shell-shocked. Perhaps a lot.

We're informed, whatever that means. But the datastream is unforgiving of analysis, and if we stop to mull over something we soon fall behind. But you know what? Maybe falling behind isn't the worst that can happen to us, if remaining current means we're destined to be ineffectually overwhelmed.

Here are three stories you probably know, which deserve deep analysis, but which will likely be buried by next week's calamities and outrages:

The latest episode of That's My Guckert! courtesy of Raw Story. Beyond his more than 200 visits to the White House, there are the questions of what he was doing there on days no press conference was scheduled, why he sometimes used uncommon entrances, and how he pulled off the David Copperfield-like tricks of signing in without signing out, and signing out without signing in. The story was picked up by AP and a rather bloodless version ran in The Washington Post, which is still something, since before the story broke the Post informed Raw Story it was "finished" with Guckert. But were does it go now? The story will not be led from the front; the mainstream still has a telling chill about this story. (And I refuse to regard Bo Dietl as in any way mainstream.)

The revelation that Neil Bush co-founded a Swiss-based ecumenical foundation with then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1999. Joining the two were assorted theologians as well as Bush's longtime business associate Jaman Daniel and Prince Hassan of Jordan, President of the Club of Rome. Bush, it needn't be said, is hardly regarded for his attention to religious causes. Neither is Ratzinger noted for his ecumenism. Curiously, the foundation is listed by Dun & Bradstreet as a "management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research," though an official claims the designation must be a mistranslation.

Sibel Edmonds' implication that "laundered drug money linked to the 911 attacks found its way into recent House, Senate and Presidential campaign war-chests," and "not a single newspaper" is covering her appeal in federal court. When Tom Flocco asked her how many Americans were named in the intercepts she had translated for the FBI, Edmonds replied, "There is direct evidence involving no more than ten American names that I recognized," and that "some are heads of government agencies or politicians." (Any editor think that could make a story?)

When everything is broken, it's hard to know where to start; which pieces to pick up first. But better anywhere than nowhere. Also, better anywhere than everywhere. Otherwise we're Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. There's no chance for quality control when the conveyor belt speeds up, if all we mean to do is keep up. Stuffing our heads isn't the same thing as feeding them.

Same as it ever was

Imagine you're a fifteenth century French peasant and your child is missing. Imagine you're not alone; the disappearances have been occuring for sometime. Now imagine the chief suspect is the local nobleman, the Marshal of France and champion of the Church, Gilles de Rais. What do you do?

Not much. After all, you're a peasant. Your word and your loss mean little in an age of aristocracy. Still, there are enough of you with similar stories and losses that authorities are compelled to proffer an explanation. According to the official account, the children have been delivered to the English, by order of the King, who are to train them as pages. Case closed, with mundane and plausible reasoning. ("Whether this relieved the parents is not recorded, but the disappearances continued.")

Actually the children, almost exclusively young boys, were victims of sex magick to summon demons to De Rais' service. Whether the magick worked is irrelevant; what matters is De Rais had sufficient belief to sacrifice scores. The precise number remains unknown. Dozens appears a certainty, and hundreds a possibility. (A figure as high as 800 has been alleged.) Many of the bodies were cremated in the castle over a slow-burning fire to minimize the smell, according to the testimony of Henriet Griart, one of de Rais' accomplices. Another - who, like Paul Bonacci of the Franklin Cover-Up, had himself been an abductee - claimed the ashes were then disposed of in the moat.

Imagine you're a parent in Florida and your child is missing. Imagine you're not alone; the disappearances have been occuring for sometime. Now imagine many of the missing children were supposedly in the care of the state. What do you do?

One thing you do not do, should you want sympathetic treatment in the press, is suggest either the involvement of a satanic cult or the state's collusion in the disappearances. (Consider the treatment accorded Noreen Gosch by The Des Moines Register after she alleged both.) Maybe you commend the governor's office, which declared victory in November, 2002, because it had located a third of the missing children. Perhaps you're relieved that Florida recently became the first state to fully privatize its child welfare services. Or maybe you worry that by reducing public oversight, more children are likely to "fall through the cracks."

And how do you do respond if you're a parent in Texas, and read this story dated April 15, entitled "School officials fear satanic crimes"? Do you smirk at the credulity and irrational fear of your neighbours, even though the ritual murders of the Matamoros drug cult remain close in time and place? ("Before we knew it," said the sheriff, "we were digging up another one and another one and another one.")

A satanic scare is sweeping the Rio Grande Valley – at least according to school officials and counselors who warn that devil worshippers are snatching children and cutting up their bodies.

The corpses are never found because the killers pulverize the body parts, turning them to dust, said Ruben Garcia, 35, a drug counselor who warns of such dangers at forums for parents and students.

Cult leaders "are very organized," Mr. Garcia said. "They know exactly what they're doing. Like anyone with a criminal mind, they think about everything."
...
"If large numbers of children were disappearing, we would be aware of that," said Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. "We are not aware of any satanic cult kidnappings or ritualized murders that are occurring in the Valley at this time."

It was just one week before the discovery of the Matamoros slayings that the "FBI's top expert on child abuse claimed that there is no such thing as Satanic ritual human sacrifice." Similarly, prostitutes were disappearing from Vancouver's East End for years before police admitted a problem, let alone a pattern, and recovered the remains of dozens of victims from the Port Coquitlam pig farm of Robert Picton. Underclass victims are still largely invisible.

Aleister Crowley attributed the charges against de Rais to the product of conspiracy theory, and the sarcastic tone with which he dismissed the aristocrat's crimes against children is still the dominant voice:

The main accusation against Gilles de Rais is therefore just this general accusation against anyone in Christendom who exhibited any desire for knowledge. Only, in his case, it was concentrated and exaggerated to fantastic lengths by some factor or other on which I feel it useless to speculate. The one thing of which I feel certain is that 800 children is a lot.

I don’t know over how many years these practices were supposed to have spread. As I think you must all feel sure by now, I know nothing whatever of my subject.

But scientific experiment in those days was always a very prolonged operation. They thought nothing of exposing some unknown substance to the rays of the sun and moon for periods of three months at a time, in the hope that in some mysterious way the first stage of some dimly—visaged operation might be satisfactorily accomplished. And even if they sacrificed a child every day, it would have taken a matter of two and a half years to dispose of 800 children. Besides, it must have taken more than a few minutes to kidnap a child with the secrecy obviously required. Did the disappearance of the first four hundred, say, put no parents on their guard?

Crowley, naturally, selects the high-end figure of 800 victims to render the incredible crimes that less credible. And, of course, parents were on guard. Unfortunately for them and their children, they were peasants, so that didn't count for much. It was only when de Rais overplayed his hand and kidnapped a prominent priest that the testimony of 110 witnesses could see something like justice done.

In Psychic Self-Defense, advocate of the right-hand path, the Christian occultist Dion Fortune, writes "It may not generally be realised, but there is just as much danger of corruption in a Black Lodge for boys and youths are there is for women":

In ancient times, and among primative peoples, human sacrifice was a common incident in connection with occult practices. It is not unknown in Eastern Europe even at the present day. The nursery story of Bluebeard has its origin in the practices of the infamous Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France and comrade of Joan of Arc, who slaughtered innumerable children and youths in connection with his magical experiments. I have never heard of a case in England, but there have been at various times some curious killings reported from the United States which look suspiciously like ritual murders, but in the absence of adequate information it is impossible to come to a final conclusion upon them.

I think we can say that, since Fortune's time, adequate information has been forthcoming to conclude that a number of America's "curious killings" are indeed ritual murders. And provisionally, I think we can add that sometimes, they are perpetrated with the indulgence of state apparatus.

In political terms, magick's left-hand path has a decidedly rightward bent. Nazi fetishism among cultists is well-known and hardly surprising. And philosophically, the left-hand path aggrandizes the self, while the worth of much of humanity is denied beyond their simple utility, rendering it amenable to fascist elites.

Luciferianism has always been a religion of the aristocracy, distinct from the low magic and superstitions of the underclass, and scornful of the "herd morality" of the dominant faiths which preach humilty, charity and self-sacrifice. And significantly, to keep turning the wheel of torture, Luciferianism also appeals to those who aspire to aristocracy and hope to gain its favour.

For an example of this appeal, here's an excerpt from The Book of Darkness, an official work of the OrdoTempli Satanis:

Given the premise that there is, indeed, a natural aristocracy at work in the population, the question must be raised: how should this aristocracy comport itself? By what strictures should it govern its own behavior?

At the onset, it should be remembered that it is unreasonable to assume the natural aristocracy would act according to the same restrictions and under the same assumptions as the Masses. Being possessed of abilities, inner drives, and creative forces totally beyond the ken of the ordinary masses, the natural aristocrat cannot be expected to lower himself to the level of the ordinary citizen. Indeed, it is the aristocrat who is called upon by society to engage in the grandest acts of self-sacrifice by being forced into the role of leader and driving impetus for society as a whole.

No rational person, and certainly not the Satanic aristocrat, would think of engaging in such self-sacrifice (or indeed, in self-sacrifice of any kind) without expecting to receive something in return.... The Satanic aristocracy sees the masses as tools; means by which the ends envisioned may be achieved. To this point of view, it must be added that individual suffering, as such, is irrelevant. The ends are all that matter to the Satanist; the means are chosen based on totally utilitarian and logical decisions.
...
On the other hand, this should not be taken to mean that the Satanist will go out of his way to sustain the life of any individual, merely for its own sake. If one of the masses must be sacrificed in order to achieve a worthwhile goal, then the Satanist should have no qualms about doing so.

De Rais died more than 500 years ago. That seems a long time ago. But there are just over a dozen generations separating our day from his. That's not so many.

Secular modernity is a comfort to some, that dispells chthonic darkness and the superstition of our ancestors. But it's wafer thin, and just beneath it rests ages of living hermetic tradition transmitted by secret societies and elite orders from which are recruited future leaders for the cryptocracy. Aristocrats and their mystery religions remain with us, as does their inclination to regard the "herd" with utilitarian disdain.

Carrying Moon's water?

I wrote that Maurice Strong stepped down as UN envoy to Korea because of his ties to a businessman linked to the oil-for-food scandal. It was a huge oversight of mine that I neglected to identify the businessman as Tongsun Park, a principal in the old "Koreagate" affair, and that Tongsun Park leads to Sun Myung Moon. (It may be the time to dig out a book from 1980 by Robert Boettcher entitled Gifts of deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean scandal.)

Learning that Strong's Baca sanctuary sits atop one of the world's largest aquafers reminds me of Moon's purchase of 600,000 hectares of arid land in Paraguay's Chaco. Below it rests the "Guarani aquifer, the largest resource of fresh drinking water in the world, where Moon's associates claim he wishes to build an ecological paradise." Which also reminds me of the direction Strong is said to have received from a mystic, that "Baca would become the center for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes" to come. (A collapse which, we saw, Strong suggests would be in the planet's best interests.)

Baca's fresh water aquifer is North America's largest. Interestingly, environmentalist Strong "intended to pipe the water to the desert southwest, but environmental organizations protested and the plan was abandoned. Strong ended up with a $1.2 million settlement from the water company, an annual grant of $100,000 from Laurence Rockefeller, and still retained the rights to the water."

We regarded how, at age 18, Strong came under the wing of the Rockefeller clan. (The Rockefeller patronage of Moon has also been noted, and bears further attention.) The recently-deceased Laurence was well-known for his patronage of esoteric research, particularly UFOs and crop circles. It is frequently noted that crop circle phenomenon bears a strong association with large aquifers. For instance: "Crop formations in England overwhelmingly appear over shallowly-buried parts of a giant chalk aquifer. England has the world’s deepest chalk aquifer."

From "The Day of Declaration", our consideration of Maitreya:

Those who are muttering "crop circles - WTF?" should consider that they were important enough to "New Age enthusiast" Laurence Rockefeller that he became a leading patron of circle research (as well as of population control), advocating the promotion of the benign, alien intelligence theory of their origin. Asking "Why?" does not seem like an unreasonable question.

So what do we have? Two huge post-apocalyptic sanctuaries resting atop enormous aquifers. Two billionaire globalists, one a New Age mystic and the other a cultist who has insinuated himself into the leadership of the America's conservative evangelical movement, both patronized by the Rockefellers. UFOs and crop circles. Welcome to our world.

"Some people call me Maurice"

The Pompatus of Love, Maurice Strong


Maurice Strong isn't often in the news, but he's frequently behind it. So his stepping down as special UN envoy to Korea while his ties to a businessman implicated in the oil-for-food scandal are investigated provides a good opportunity for us to wonder just who this character is.

The broad strokes: The Canadian Strong is an oxymoronic billionaire socialist who serves as Special Advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and as Senior Advisor to the President of the World Bank. He is also, among many other things, Chairman of Strovest Holdings, Chairman and Director of Technology Development Corp, Director of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum ["Davos"] and Chairman of the Earth Council. Strong's former appointments include Secretary General of the World Bank and Director of the Rockefeller Foundation. He is a leading Bilderberger, and member of the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and Club of Rome.

Strong wasn't born to privilege, but was cultivated by David Rockefeller whom he met at 18, when he took a job as assistant pass officer in the Security Section of the United Nations. A year later Strong was an investment analyst, and at 25 he became vice-president of Dome Petroleum.

What else is Maurice Strong? An environmentalist and patron of New Age beliefs and religious syncretism. He and his wife have been developing tens of thousands of acres in Colorado as a model "international spiritual community," called the Baca, of which the Manitou Institute forms a part.

In other words, Strong is the stuff of nightmares for revanchist conspiracy theorists who hear the whirr of the UN's black helicopters: a gilded Rockefeller socialist linked to the Lucis Trust; a proponent of one world religion and government.

For instance:

In 1978, a mystic informed Hanne and Maurice Strong that "the Baca would become the center for a new planetary order which would evolve from the economic collapse and environmental catastrophes that would sweep the globe in the years to come." The Strongs say they see the Baca, which they call 'The Valley Of the Refuge Of World Truths ,'" as the paradigm for the entire planet and say that the fate of the earth is at stake. Shirley MacLaine agrees - her astrologer told her to move to the Baca, and she did. She is building a New Age study center at the Baca where people can take short week-long courses on the occult! Apparently, the Kissingers, the Rockefellers, the McNamaras, the Rothschild's, and other Establishment New World Order elitists all agree as well, for they do their pilgrimage to the Baca - where politics and the occult - the New World Order and the New Age - all merge. Watch Maurice Strong and watch the Baca!

I have to say, this is a curious place for me to be. Because much of what Strong espouses, I could say I support. I'm a socialist, I'm an environmentalist, I'm ecumenical in spirit. But I think to get at the heart of the mystery of our age, we need to take off our left or right blinders, and quit gaming our parapolitics to match our politics. As Jacques Vallee has written, most UFO researchers omit the most compelling evidence because it doesn't match their presumption of extraterrestrial origin. Similarly, I think watching Strong has merit, regardless of who else is watching him.

And perhaps it's worth noting here that Strong's Baca Grande is reputedly an active site for observing both UFOs and spirtitual manifestations.

For instance, from 1996:

A fourth witness in the Baca looked up and saw an "egg-shaped" sphere that instantly shot over the mountains. The witness had the distinct impression that the object reacted to her "seeing it." One has to wonder if folks are simply witnessing real extra-mundane phenomena, or indulging their wishful thinking. I can't help but think they are seeing something unusual. There were no known reports to the sheriff's office of these possible early fall overflights of the valley.

It's very tempting to jump to conclusions concerning these "orange lights" hanging over the San Luis Valley. They are so common, I'd bet we miss a lot of them. They blend into the sky so effortlessly.

Baca Grande also appears a magnet for military attention:

Multiple witnesses observed an extremely low-flying gunmetal colored 4-engine jet power cargo plane. One witness called it "C-17" which he thought was a new NATO plane that is "replacing the C-4." The plane arrived at tree-top level from the north, made a dangerous low left-hand turn, just above the treetops on N.Crestone Creek. Plane "seemed unusually quiet fro a jet," and was between 100 and 200 feet in altitude.

Strong has said that "we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse." Again, largely, I agree. One teeny distinction between us: Strong is one of those in a position to effect its collapse.

Here's Strong, thinking dangerous thoughts aloud at the conclusion of an interview with WEST magazine in May, 1990 entitled "The Wizard of the Baca Grande":

Each year the World Economic Forum convenes in Davos, Switzerland. Over a thousand CEOs, prime ministers, finance ministers, and leading academics gather in February to attend meetings and set the economic agendas for the year ahead. What if a small group of these word leaders were to conclude that the principle risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? Will the rich countries agree to reduce their impact on the environment? Will they agree to save the earth?

The group's conclusion is "no." The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?

This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about a world collapse. It's February. They're all at Davos. These aren't terrorists - they're world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world's commodity and stock markets. They've engineered, using their access to stock exchanges, and computers, and gold supplies, a panic. Then they prevent the markets from closing. They jam the gears. They have mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davros as hostage. The markets can't close. The rich countries...?

The journalist adds, "and Strong makes a slight motion with his fingers as if he were flicking a cigarette butt out of the window. I sat there spellbound.... He is, in fact, co-chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum. He sits at the fulcrum of power. He is in a position to do it."

Many who have come to read between the lines of the official fable of 9/11 stop reading once they read of PNAC and The Grand Chessboard. I used to as well. But I've been persuaded that the deep truths of 9/11 run deeper, just as the planning and facilitation of the attacks are older than Dick Cheney's regency. And Strong's words strike me as making as compelling a case for self-indictment as PNAC's "new Pearl Harbor."

Certainly the neoconservatives are important players in the drama. (Lest we forget, Strong will now be advising Paul Wolfowitz in the latter's new role as President of the World Bank). But the neocons may themselves have been played, and too blinded by their imperial overreach to know they've become useful idiots of another agenda which will mean America's ruin. An agenda which intends to reboot the world.

I've said it before, but there's something about Luciferians that bears repeating: they think they're the good guys.

The difference it makes

CSPAN's decision to record for future broadcast a lecture by David Ray Griffin got me wondering what the United States would look like if most Americans knew their own government colluded in the attacks of 9/11. Then I realized, it wouldn't look very different at all. Since according to polling data, a good many already do. They know many other things, too, for all the good it's done.

Most Americans acknowledge, and have known for some time, that elements of their own government conspired to kill their president. But what difference has it made?

The decision of the Martin Luther King Jr wrongful death civil trial was for a conspiracy, which included elements of the US government. And what difference has that made?

The Iraq war was founded on a lie so brazenly wicked George Bush could even joke about it after the fact. ("Nope, no weapons of mass destruction under here!") What difference has the truth meant to America, and to Iraq?

Many Americans already suspect that those sworn to their defence actually conspired in the murder of their wives, husbands, children, parents, friends and fellow citizens on 9/11. And - so what? The bitter knowledge has simply become part of the great tapestry of American dissonance. It's joined the cottage industry of conspiracy infotainment, because High Crimes in the United States are simply fodder for dark amusement, not for solving. And certainly not for justice.

A testament to how bizarre the American experience has become is that the story of 9/11 as a black op was told even before 9/11occurred, in the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen. There's no need to suggest that Chris Carter had advance knowledge. He was simply in tune with the I wouldn't put it past them zeitgeist informed by generations of murderous lies. Not only at the end of the day, but before the day, Occam's Razor cut in favour of complicity.

"Remote access; somebody on the ground's flying your plane."


The problem isn't that enough people don't know the truth. They do, and about many things. Enough people know enough. The problem is that too many people are still too comfortable to act upon it. So the knowledge is compartmentalized, filed away with a shrug and a "But what are ya gonna do?" And that's just how the High Cabal likes it: we know enough to know of what they're capable, and yet we do nothing. So we continue to play their game of intimidation, in which they tip their hand as a mechanism of control.

The system must crash, and the comfort level diminished, before justice will ever be done. The good news is that's what's happening. That's also the bad news.

White smoke, dark skies

So Opus Dei has its Pope, and St Malachy of Armagh is either right again, or just lucky. Like I've said before about the curse of living in interesting times, at least they're interesting.

I wrote a little here about Opus Dei and why it deserves our distrust. If you don't yet, I suggest familiarizing yourself with the content of the Opus Dei Awareness Network. Opus Dei has been an organ of fascism (by the 1960s Franco's cabinet was stacked with Opusdeistas, and they rose again under the Aznar government), and has amassed for itself a Templar-worthy fortune, and an international network of influence that rivals, or perhaps complements, that of Freemasonry. ("Many of its 85,000 worldwide members work in legal, medical, financial and media professions," according to today's Los Angeles Times. In a post last week I considered the Masonic cultivation of similar segments of society.) Its ritualized mortification of the flesh and psychological self-battery, as well as the inference of unspoken agendas, is highly suggestive of a mind control cult. You don't need to believe The De Vinci Code to believe this bunch deserve a close watch.

While Ratzinger is not a member of Opus Dei, he is its man. He has been a longstanding champion of the Order, and the two Opus Dei cardinals, Julian Herranz of Spain and Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne of Peru, are reported to have been enthusiastic supporters of his candidacy.

It's true, Ratzinger was a Hitler Youth, but I find better reasons to regard him as a discouraging choice. Membership was compulsory after 1941, so his joining wasn't even a "youthful indiscretion" on the order of Robert Byrd's flirtation with the KKK, let alone an act worthy of Kurt Waldheim. The boy was forced to join the Hitler Youth, but no one made the man support Opus Dei.

And it's not what is known about Opus Dei that is the most disturbing, but as with many secret orders, it is what remains unknown, and surmised. Since 1982, it is the Pontiff's "personal prelature" - answerable not to local bishops, but to the Pope alone - so its power and influence, and potential for excess, are certain to increase. (And it's worth noting that the 1982 measure was coincident with the exposure of the Masonic infiltration of the Vatican.)

It's possible the infiltration of Freemasonry into the Vatican was stymied by Pope John Paul II's patronage of Opus Dei. While the two organizations may appear at odds, that may be largely for exoteric consumption. They may be unlikely bedfellows, but bedfellows just the same, if it's possible to speak of unlikely bedfellows and the priestly class without sniggering.

It's my observation that the worst abuses in the Church, even its Luciferian excesses, have been perpetrated under the cloak of conservativism. John Paul II and his "enforcer," Cardinal Ratzinger, targetted liberation theology and the progressive strains of Catholicism, while their coddled "conservative" clergy continued, largely unchecked, in the molestation, rape and ritual abuse of young children. While Ratzinger has condemned gay relationships as "deviant and evil," he has been an enabler of sexual abuse, by "accusing the media of exaggerating the extent of paedophilia in the American Church."

That this man is now Pope, and the secret society Opus Dei his legionaires, I wonder whether our already interesting times are about to become unbearably fascinating.



Now, about the 12th Century Prophecy of Malachy, which is said to have predicted the succession of 112 Popes to follow Celestinus II:

265 John Paul I (1978) 109 De medietate Lunæ (of the half of the moon)
Hist.: Albino Luciani, born in Canale d´Agardo, diocese of Belluno, (beautiful moon) Elected pope on August 26, his reign lasted about a month, from half a moon to the next half...

266 John Paul II (1978-2005) 110 De labore Solis (of the eclipse of the sun, or from the labour of the sun)Hist.: Karol Wojtyla was born on May 18, 1920 during a solar eclipse. He also comes from behind the former Iron Curtain (the East, where the Sun rises). He might also be seen to be the fruit of the intercession of the Woman Clothed with the Sun labouring in Revelation 12 (because of his devotion to the Virgin Mary). His Funeral occurred on 8 April, 2005 when there was a solar eclipse visible in the Americas.

267 ??? 111 Gloria olivæ The Benedictine order traditionally said this Pope would come from their order.

The Benedictine Order is also known as the Olivetans. Ratzinger assuming the name Benedict appears to me to be a nod at the Malachy Prophecy, and perhaps its self-fulfillment.

Malachy called Number 112 Petrus Romanus - "Peter the Roman" - and wrote this:

In persecutione extrema S.R.E. sedebit Petrus Romanus, qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis diruetur, & Judex tremêdus judicabit populum suum. Finis.

In extreme persecution, the seat of the Holy Roman Church will be occupied by Peter the Roman, who will feed the sheep through many tribulations, at the term of which the city of seven hills will be destroyed, and the formidable Judge will judge his people. Finis.

"Finis" doesn't need translating, does it?

Ratzinger is 78, so it may not be long before we see Petrus Romanus. What we see after that, we'll see.

Presidente Quixote

You want to know something? There's good magic, too. Venezuela's decision to print and distribute a million free copies of Don Quixote strikes me just that way: a banishing ritual of beautiful dreams that are only said to be impossible.

"To some extent, we are followers of Quixote," said President Hugo Chavez, as he encouraged Venezuelans to "feed ourselves once again with that spirit of a fighter who went out to undo injustices and fix the world."

I'm awaiting now Donald Rumsfeld to weigh in, as he did a couple of weeks ago regarding Venezuela's recent arms purchases, and say "I'm just asking, what in the world is the threat that Venezuela sees that makes them want to have all those books?"

One of the most heartening things of the Venezuelan miracle - and let's call it that - has been the symbology of the 1999 constitution. The sight of a mobilized populace, largely dark-skinned and underclass, waving copies of their own constitution, must make the hearts of oligarchs quail. It's easy to forget that history's most celebrated constitutions are revolutionary documents, but it's easy to see that the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is making living history.

Dawn Gable writes:

Article 132 states that everyone has the duty to fulfill his or her social responsibilities through participation in the political, civic, and community life of the country with the goal of promoting and protecting human rights as the foundation of democratic coexistence and social peace. Article 133 repeals forcible recruitment into the armed forces, but recognizes everyone’s duty to perform civilian or military service as may be necessary for the defense, preservation, and development of the country.

Article 135 says that the state’s obligation to the general welfare of society does not preclude the obligation of private individuals to participate according to their abilities. These duties describe participation much beyond the electoral process. They compel the public to see themselves as not so much the governed masses, but as active builders of their own society.

Meanwhile, the multi-generational campaign of intentionally dumbing down the populace, of encouraging public disengagement with the processes of governance, continues apace in the United States. There's something about a literate and educated citizenry that frightens tyrants even more than the right to bear arms. And when an informed and mobilized people compose a militia, it's the inclination of tyrants to back down.

Americans retreating from the public square and inhabiting purely private space has been called "cocooning." But cocoons are temporary utilities of metamorphosis. If you never come out to unfold new wings, and dry them in the sun, it's not a cocoon. It's your tomb.




By the way, to whoever purchased a copy of TechGnosis off my Amazon wishlist, thank you very much. It just arrived, totally unexpected. I wish I could thank you personally, but I hope you know that I am surprised, delighted and grateful.

"Knowing I live in a dark age"

Knowing I live in a dark age before history, I watch my wallet
and am less struck by gunfights in the avenues
than by the newsie with his dirty pink-chapped face
calling a shabby poet back for his change. - Milton Acorn

You may know the film Blue Velvet.

If you do, you know the scene between Jeffrey and Sandy in the car, parked outside a church. They'd been playing junior detectives since Jeffrey found a severed ear in a field, and now Sandy wants to hear what he learned in the apartment of the mysterious Dorothy Valens. Jeffrey's learned a lot; some of it about himself. What he's learned of others, he tells Sandy.

Dorothy's husband Don and their young son have been kidnapped by a man named Frank. ("I think he is holding them to make her do things for him.") The ear had been Don's, and was cut off as a warning for Dorothy to stay alive. ("I think she wants to die.") Frank deals drugs. Something Jeffrey doesn't discover until later is that Frank has some of the police force working for him.

When he's finished, Jeffrey turns to Sandy and blurts out, with comic anquish (this is, after all, David Lynch): "Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?"



It’s 7 am, I pick up the phone. Half asleep, "Hello?"…An oddly familiar male voice says: "Is Twee there?" "Who?" slowly, enunciating, he says: "Twee". "No!" I half yell, not knowing why. Who is this person waking me out of a sound sleep and asking for, did he say Twee? Yes. Asshole. I look at the screen, there is no number listed, it says "Restricted". Oh, great. I roll over and go back to sleep. [From the email of a survivor of ritual abuse/mind control, reproduced with permission.]

"Why are there people like Frank?" The question isn't terribly penetrating. Not these days.

Think of what Frank Booth has made of himself in the nearly 20 years since the film's release. He's a congressman, he's a doctor, he's a judge, he's a Vice President. Frank Booth has done well for himself.

"Why are there people like Frank?" Because there can be people like Frank. Because people like Frank, who employ the police, get away with it. Because they are the government.

To Jeffrey's question, Sandy responds by recounting a dream:

In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren't any robins, and the robins represented love. And for the longest time, there was this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed that love would be the only thing that could make any difference. And it did. So, I guess it means that there is trouble until the robins come.

One way of solving the philosophical problem of evil is to do away with good. Because good is the singular problem for people like Frank.

Rather than ask why such people exist, a better question for our dark age may be, Why are there people like Sandy? That's the question that troubles the Franks, who trouble the world. They see the good and despise it as weakness, yet it remains a mystery to them. For the suckers they assume a display of sham piety, but they regard themselves as raised above the slave moralities of meat puppets, who still believe in justice. (The Bolivaran Revolution, perhaps, is a mystery the Franks find inexplicable and ridiculous, as they must have found Che Guevara's words, that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.")

And I have a low bar when it comes to doing good. I mean simple things. Like calling someone back for change. Like not killing innocent people. Like not harming children.



"Twee" I start to raise my voice. "I know who Twee is, oh God, I know who Twee is!"

That phone call, it was no accident, no wrong number. I am "in session" with my therapist. My head has been spinning and I can’t get clear, I can’t get out of whatever has turned my thinking to mush for over a week. Finally, near the end of my hour, it starts to come. Twee is 3. Corroboration from narrative memory: mother never let me forget how I couldn’t pronounce my r’s and l’s as a child. How clever. I remember the doctor asking "And how old are you?" Holding up 3 fingers I say, proudly, "Twee". "Ah, then, that is what we will call you."

Sometimes I feel as though I'm hiding in Dorothy Valens' closet, seeing more than I was prepared to see, wondering how I got there, and why. And knowing, if I can't come up with some good answers, soon, then there's that later scene with Frank, where he looks over the car seat, takes a hit of gas and murmurs "You're like me." Without good answers, I'll have nothing to say to that.



"Lie down here now little girl." He says, guttural, thick, German.

His stubby fingers point. I am on the table and my arms are being clasped in the leather buckles. "What is your name?" He asks. I am so young, but somehow I know to say "Twee". "Watch." He points to the ceiling. I see a picture above me, it is just a black line on a white background, it is like a movie, it is made with light. There are wires on my head. I am terrified. The table begins to turn. I do not know how it is done, how is the table turning? "Watch!" He yells. I stare at the ceiling as it begins to turn around too. If I try to look away the pain starts, searing pain in my temples, down my legs, my toes? I can’t really feel them. I don’t know where they are. The black line begins to make a blurry picture. It is all I know, it is all I can see, the tornado. There is fatigue, and nausea, and I want it to stop, please stop. I cannot make my eyes stay anymore. I start to cry, but I know better because the searing pain comes quickly again.

Rather than bleeding hearts, we need big hearts. Heavy, swollen hearts, that just can't bear anymore. And because they can drive us to action, rather than to the dead end of cheap sentiment, hearts like those can become weapons.

The late Canadian poet Milton Acorn, who wrote "Take this heart to grow a man around," also wrote this:

Doctor listened with his stethoscope
To my inner machinery, and said
"You've got a big heart; thumping out time
All around your chest."

I said, "Yes I know
Since every undeservedly aimed blow
Ever driven at anyone has hit it.

"It's swelling all the time with hope
For this one, that one, others popping out
From wombs firing like machine-guns;
Each new person jumped and mugged for profit,
Learning language by hearing himself cursed
For being here and ever having done
Anything except for a bully's gain:
Starting with the crime of birth.

"Doctor: it's for a bomb I need this big heart
To smash those liars into a great squashed stain
When the pressure jumps too much, and it blows apart."

Back to the Presidio

And ahead, to the Roman Catholic Church.

The Presidio is one of those cases that many people have in mind when they claim that Satanic Ritual Abuse has been "debunked." There were seemingly wild accusations that hundreds of children had been sexually tortured; there was the implication of military involvement, including the tabloid sensationalism of a lieutenant colonel leading a Satanic cult; and yet, finally, the legal procedure went nowhere.

This is from a lengthy and persuasive San Jose Mercury News article by Linda Goldston, published July 24, 1988, entitled "Army of the Night":

Larry and Michelle Adams-Thompson had noticed changes in their daughter's behavior after placing her in Gary Hambright's class four or five times in September and October of 1986. The girl, who turned 3 in October, had begun having nightmares and would wet herself when frightened. Her parents believed it was just "a bad stage" she was going through until they heard about the Tobin boy in January. The girl was taken to a therapist at Letterman Army Medical Center in February. In therapy, the girl talked about being sexually abused by Hambright and by a man named "Mikey" and a woman named "Shamby" whose identities were unknown. On Aug. 12, 1987, the Adams-Thompsons were shopping at the PX at the Presidio. Suddenly the girl ran to Larry Adams-Thompson and clutched his leg. He looked up and saw a man whom he knew as Lt Col. Michael Aquino.

"Yes, that's Mikey," the 3-year-old told Adams-Thompson. After being taken outside, the girl added, "he's a bad man and I'm afraid." As they were leaving the parking lot, the Adams-Thompsons saw Aquino's wife, Lilith. Larry asked the child if she knew the woman.

"Yes, that's Shamby," the girl said.

The family went home and called the FBI.

When interviewed by authorities the next day, the girl identified Gary Hambright from a photo lineup and said she had been driven to Mikey and Shamby's home by Hambright. There, she said, she was abused by Hambright, Mikey and Shamby in a room with black walls. She said that she had been photographed. She said Hambright and Mikey were dressed in women's clothes and Shamby was dressed in man's clothes.

The investigators drove her to Leavenworth Street in San Francisco. The girl was asked to identify any of the houses that she had been to before. While walking past 2430 Leavenworth, the girl identified the house as the one where she met "Mikey" and "Shamby." It was the Aquino's' house.

...

The criminal case is closed, but by June, the parents of 23 children had filed $55 million in claims against the Army, the first step toward filing a civil suit against the government alleging negligence that led to the abuse.

Last December, the Army reassigned several people connected with the case, including Lt. Col. Walter Meyer, the director of personnel and community activities and John Gunnarson the director of child development services responsible for supervising the day-to-day operations of the center. Diana Curl, the day care center director, resigned. In late June, Gary Hambright was "still trying to decide where he wants to settle," said assistant federal public defender Nanci Clarence, one of Hambright's attorneys Clarence said he is "in and out" of San Francisco.

The case that so many did not want to believe is still very much alive in the nightmares and sexual acting out that continue for many children, in the jarring statements that come suddenly out of nowhere, such as the 4 year old girl who sat at her kitchen table a few months ago and told her mother she wanted to kill herself with a knife. Others say they hate themselves. One 6-year-old girl was playing with modeling clay at school one day when she suddenly started stabbing it. "Mr. Gary is bad and I'm bad because I let him do it," she told her teacher.

"People keep telling us we've got to let it go just forget about it and go on," said parent Gretchen Runyan. Two of the Runyans' four daughters were among the victims, both had confirmed cases of chlamydia.

"Three weeks ago, our youngest daughter was having nightmares and our other daughter was closing out the whole world, going to her room and sitting there, with no radio, no TV, no nothing. Tell me it's over."

I read Goldston's article last night for the first time, and posted it on the RI board. The reply from "Human" contained a startling thread of continuity that may lead to the cover-up of ongoing abuse in the Catholic Church. ("Human" had originally posted this research on Democratic Underground in March, in a "Gannongate Wrinkles" thread, but I thought it important enough to bear repeating here.)

"Human" begins by quoting Dave McGowan's "Pedophacracy" regarding the Presidio case:

Aquino and some of his defenders have consistently claimed that no one was ever prosecuted in the case due to a lack of evidence. This is cited as proof that the entire affair was no more than a "witch hunt." Of course, the failure to prosecute the federal charges could have been due to the fact that, at the time, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco handling the case was Joseph Russoniello. Russoniello would later be identified by reporter Gary Webb (of the San Jose Mercury News) as a player in the Contra cocaine smuggling operation led by Lt. Col. Oliver North and company, just as witnesses would later identify Lt. Col. Michael Aquino as an operative in the very same sordid affair.

After detailing some of Russoniello's favours to military intelligence, "Human" presents this find from "In Catholic Circles" of Spring 2005:

The Sexual Abuse Crisis

The president of the USCCB appointed a new chairman and five new members to the National Review Board, the USCCB-sponsored group of laypeople charged with monitoring the hierarchy's response to the sexual abuse crisis. Nicholas P. Cafardi, dean of Duquesne University Law School, Pittsburgh, and serving board member, was named chairman until the conclusion of his term in June, 2005.

The new members, appointed for three-year terms ending October 2007, are: Dr. Patricia O'Donnell Ewers, educational consultant and president emeritus of Pace University, New York; Dr. Angelo P. Giardino, vice president for clinical affairs of St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, Philadelphia; Mr. Ralph I. Lancaster, Esq. of Pierce Atwood, Portland, Maine; Judge Michael R. Merz, United States Magistrate Judge; Mr. Joseph Russoniello, Esq. , senior counsel and resident in the San Francisco office of Cooley Godward, LLP. One member, New York attorney Pamela Hayes, resigned her position early after conservative Catholic groups alleged that she made contributions to prochoice organizations.

"Human" remarks:

So, after all of that, basically what I'm pointing out is that a longtime CIA/FBI asset in the legal profession, Russoniello, who prosecuted (covered-up) the Peoples Temple / Jim Jones situation, who was implicated in the CIA Contra Cocaine scandle, who failed to prosecute Satanist Michael Aquino for his role in child abuse in California (which ties in directly to Offutt Air Base/Franklin Coverup/Gosch case), is now responsible for looking into pedophilia in the Catholic Church.

Saying a case was "debunked" means little, if the judiciary itself needs debunking.

I'm reminded of Martin Short's study of Freemasonry, Inside the Brotherhood, and the observations of an informant called "Badger," who had been a Freemason for 35 years and a master of seven lodges. "For years," Short writes, "he was convinced that Freemasonry was a worthwhile institution. As he became more elevated in the Masonic hierarchy he gradually came to realize it was not."

According to "Badger":

Freemasonry is a mechanism of social control. It's a feudal pyramid.... Have you ever thought why the police are so cultivated by Freemasonry? I have met scores of policemen throughout my Masonic career, but I haven't met a single fireman or postman. There must be some firemen and postmen in Freemasonry but nowhere near as many policemen, lawyers, local government officials and businessmen.

Mechanisms of social control are evident, too, in the church and military intelligence, which also function as feudal pyramids instilling hierarchic loyalties. Perhaps it's because these loyalties are known to cross medical and legal professions, and potentially conflict with professional oaths, that elements within Freemasonry, the Roman Catholic Church and Military Intelligence have all been accused in recent years of collusion in Satanic Ritual Abuse. And perhaps it is also why so few cases have been successfully prosecuted at the highest level.


By the way, and for what it's worth (and considering the source, it may not be much), there are rumblings here of an imminent strike on Iran. Imminent as in Friday at the latest. And there is this message from a day earlier, from someone calling herself "GI Wife," who claims the US military in Germany is in lockdown, "Just like the week before the Iraq invasion. That means "ready to go", cancelled leave, stay close to base, and all those other little restrictions that make me so mad."

So who knows? Certainly not me. But we'll know soon enough.

Also, Kos is reporting today that contrary to his repeated claims, Jeff Gannon, or James Guckert, "never served in the United States Marine Corps, according to the Personnel Management Support Branch located at Marine Corps Base Quantico." Unless, I suppose, he served under yet another name.

"It's all in the egg"

"My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings." - Aleister Crowley

Okay, here's where things get weird.

First, a few examples of what I'm talking about, before I try talking about it.

Copper Medic

In his book Confrontations, Jacques Vallee devotes a chapter to "Copper Medic," what he describes as his favourite case of UFO visitations. He writes that "what attracted the interest of local unfologists wasn't so much the repeated sighting of a small, egg-shaped UFO on the Chapin's property as the strange material they claimed to have recovered at the site."

It's not the strange material which attracts my interest, but the description of the UFO. In the first incident from 1969 the Chapins, who were then in their mid-60s, had just killed a rattlesnake. Jane Chapin was going to photograph the body "when she suddenly saw something behind the tall grass, among the trees":

She thought it was a trailer, then realized it was oval, about the size of a VW Beetle. It appeared cream-colored to her. Clint, who saw it from a different perspective, thought it was gray. Both saw how the object lifted up, paused for a brief moment, then disappeared at amazing speed. An oval depression, smaller than the object itself, was found in the ground, as if a large weight had rested there.

The Chapins had several more encounters over the years, sometimes losing consciousness, vomiting and urinating, when they would be hit by an "invisible barrier" radiating waves of heat. Their last encounter was in 1980, shortly before Clint's fatal heart attack. Jane wrote Vallee about it:

We were looking at a road that had been cut through our property and we turned to go down the road, west, and there was a skinny thing in the road, and his egg was not 25 feet from us... and he took four steps toward us and my hand fell on my gun and he turned around and walked back. He was in a gray suit, and he left no print or prints of the egg. Clint could not move either... the thing vanished, then the egg went up in the air and turned west, and we both looked at the back of the egg and it opened like a horse trailer door. He was four-foot tall and skinny, maybe 90 pounds. I don't know what he wants... well, maybe he will take me to where Clint is.

One of the local investigators reported, of one appearance, that the object "rose up off the ground a few feet, then took off like a shot up the canyon, swaying but not striking small trees as it went." But Jane Chapin admitted to Vallee she had lied: the object had flown off into the trees, passing through them as though they didn't exist. When he asked why she hadn't told that to the local investigators, she replied, "I could see they wouldn't believe me if I told them the truth. They were such nice people. I didn't want to shock them."

Lonnie Zamora

Zamora's sighting is one of the most famous in UFO literature. On April 24, 1964 Zamora, a police officer in Socorro, New Mexico, investigated a sudden, loud roar from an unpopulated gully. "I could see dust fly up," he recalled. "I thought there was something that night have blown up, since there’s a dynamite shack over there." He drove his patrol car to the top of a hill to check it out. About a half mile away, he saw a white object that appeared from the distance to be a car turned upside down, and two figures who looked to be four feet tall. Zamora radioed he was going to investigate, and drove a bumpy road on which he temporarily lost sight of the object. He stopped on a Mesa, got out and and looked down.

In the gully about 20 feet below him, the “thing” sat silent. The two figures had disappeared. Zamora advanced closer.

"It was egg-shaped with one end, which I figure was the front, sort of tapered," Zamora says. "It was white and smooth, with no windows or openings of any kind. It was sitting on legs about four feet tall and seemed to be about the size of a car."

A sudden roar from the "egg" almost deafened Zamora. Thinking it might explode, the officer turned and ran for some bushes. Glancing back, he saw the object rise straight up. He dove into the bushes and covered his head, then peeked up.

"There was no noise," he says. "It was about 20 feet off the ground, just hovering. There were markings in red letters about a foot high on the side. It looked like a crescent with a vertical arrow pointed upward inside the crescent and a horizontal bar beneath that."

When State Policeman Sam Chavez arrived on the scene, he and Zamora entered the gully, and found a smouldering mesquite bush and six imprints in the ground where the "egg" had resisted. Zamora's character was judged unimpeachable, and there was no credible accusation of a hoax. He also made no claims for what he had seen. Three years later he told a reporter, “I’d like to know what the hell it was. I wouldn’t say it was from space or from here either. If it’s a new plane. It sure is good. All I know is I saw the thing and that’s it.”

Levelland and White Sands

On the night of November 2, 1957 near Levelland, Texas, independent witnesses repeatedly saw oval and elliptical objects near roadways. One witness was "Sheriff Weir Clem, who was searching the roads as a result of earlier reports and saw a reddish oval cross the road, illuminating the pavement." Within a few hours of the Levelland reports, "an Army jeep patrol at White Sands, N.M., reported an egg-shaped UFO that descended to a point about 50 yards above the bunker used during the first atomic bomb explosion, and a major wave of UFO sightings continued for 2-3 weeks."

The Worcester Egg

Early morning February 3, 2000, Georgina Wells saw an "extremely bright," yellow-glowing egg shape from her bedroom window. It began a slow descent, seemed to land out of sight, and then "came back into view and was really bright again and shot off into the sky and vanished. I have never seen anything go that fast before." Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of this report is that Wells claims a helicopter was monitoring it the entire time. "I stood up and watched it," Wells says. "It was not a police helicopter with its spotlight as there was no light-beam."

So what's with all the eggs?

There are many more examples. (And not just of the exterior appearance of UFOs. Abductees often describe rounded, milky interiors.) Still, I don't want to get carried away with this. Some UFOs, after all, have also been called "cigar-shaped." If Freud had been a ufologist, I expect he would have said that sometimes a cigar-shaped UFO is just a cigar-shaped UFO. But in the popular imagination, UFOs are principally "disc-shaped." And to speak of discs evokes manufacture, as though they were cobbled together with nuts and bolts, even if those nuts and bolts are cast from exoterran metals. So analogies are important in themselves, because they can restrict or liberate our assumptions of the true - as opposed to the black budget - phenomena.

What's more, regarding UFOs as egg-like also may render less myserious some of their observed, bizarre attributes. For instance, on numerous occasions, UFOs have been seen dividing into several equal-sized and identical parts, and recombining into a single unity. It beggers our understanding how a manufactured craft could be engineered to accomplish such feats, and perhaps just as significantly, what would be the purpose. However, we do see something like it in the natural world, in something as commonplace as cell division. But we may not think to look there if we get hamstrung by the paradigm that UFOs, if they exist at all, must be spacecraft. We'll be more likely to see correspondences in nature if we adopt the analogy of an egg, rather than a "disc."

And there may be something more, still.

Back to Crowley

Remember Lam, and Aleister Crowley's "Amalantrah Working"? Using sex magick with his partner and psychic sensitive Roddie Minor, Crowley claimed to have opened a dimensional portal, through which passed Lam, whose portrait appears an archetypal grey, though Crowley drew him "from life" in 1918, many years before the greys entered our cultural consciousness. Before Lam appeared, Minor channelled messages from a spirit-wizard called Amalantrah, who told Crowley to "find the egg." Ian Blake, who has much of interest to say about Crowley, Lam, and the egg metaphor here, writes that "one of the earlier versions of the Amalantrah Working ended with the sentence, 'It's all in the egg.' During the final surviving version of this Working, in reference to a question about the egg, Crowley was told: 'Thou art to go this way.'"

Kenneth Grant, Crowley's last student, who was given the portrait, is author of "The Lam Statement." Grant's purpose was to "regularize and to examine results" of contact with Lam, by "entering the Egg of Spirit represented by the Head." As Blake writes, "in the late 1980s ... Grant allegedly received 'strong intimations' to the effect that Crowley's portrait of Lam 'is the present focus of an extraterrestrial - and perhaps trans-plutonic - energy which the OTO is required to communicate at this critical period.'"

The Typhonian OTO, which follows Grant's teachings, "is concerned with effective transmissions and communications from 'outerspace' for the purpose of opening Gateways. The Typhonian 'deities' denote specific operations of psycho-physical alchemy which involve essences or elixirs secreted (thrown out and/or considered unclean) by the human organism."

And we should note that the purpose of Jack Parsons' "Babalon Working" was a birth, Using Enochian sex magick and his "elemental" partner Marjorie Cameron, Parsons was intent on collapsing our reality by introducing into it the incarnation of "Babalon." ("Wicked" in the angelic language said to be given Elizabethan John Dee.)

In a letter to Crowley, quoted in Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons, he wrote "For the last three days I have performed an operation of birth, using the air tablet, the cup, and a female figure, properly invoked by the wand [penis], then sealed up in the altar. Last night I performed an operation of symbolic birth and delivery."

And from his poem, "The Birth of Babalon":

What is the tumult among the stars that have shone so still till now?
What are the furrows of pain and wrath upon the immortal brow?
Why is the face of God turned grey and his angels all grown white?
What is the terrible ruby star that burns down the crimson night?
What is the beauty that flames so bright athwart the awful dawn?
She has taken flesh, she is come to judge the thrones ye rule upon.
Quail ye kings for an end is come in the birth of BABALON.

Is it any more bizarre than the thought of extraterrestial spacecraft, to consider that Crowley and Parsons may have succeeded, the portal widened, and the ritual birth represented by egg-like manifestations? Well, yes, because it presumes the efficacy of magick, which is a big leap for most of us. But perhaps, even though it's more bizarre, it's also more likely.

One final thought. Lonnie Zamora repoted seeing "markings in red letters about a foot high on the side. It looked like a crescent with a vertical arrow pointed upward inside the crescent and a horizontal bar beneath that." To those who regard UFOs as nuts and bolts spacecraft, perhaps these markings would be regarded as the designation of an extraterrestrial authority. Their "flag." But it's quite anthropomorphic to presume aliens would think in such terms.

But if we consider ritual magick, the symbol resembles a "sigil," used for the invocation of angelic and demonic entities. I haven't searched yet for a crescent with a vertical arrow within it and a horizontal bar beneath it. But I wonder what the implications would be if one were found.

Discussion Board now open

And it's right here. (I'll add a link to it shortly on the sidebar.)

The quality of your comments has been exceptional, and I've thought it a pity that they be tied only to my posts. And while there are a lot of discussions boards, there are not many welcoming to these topics (and increasingly less so, it would seem). And those that are, are not of the quality your comments deserve. So I've created the RI discussion board.

Many of you send me terrific news items. I'd encourage you to post them to the board instead so they get a wider viewing. Most of what I write on the blog seems to be longer-form stuff, and if I don't happen to be writing about what you send me, the item may not get disseminated, and that's also been a regret of mine. Hopefully, the discussion board can be a good venue for that.

So let's see how it goes. Post away, if you like. Unless there's heavy trolling or spamming, moderation will be zero.

(And I should add, I've set the board up to accept unregistered users, in case you want to bypass that process.)

"If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself"

You're on your own, you always were,
In a land of wolves and thieves.
Don't put your hope in ungodly men,
Or be a slave to what somebody else believes. - Bob Dylan

I know, I called a moratorium on Dylan lyrics. But it has been four days, and he's already said everything.

"Trust Yourself" is the best advice when wading into America's deep, weird end. Especially since, whenever we get over our heads in the bizarre black ops swamp of protected ritual abuse, it seems there's no avoiding Ted Gunderson. But is there any trusting him?

I don't know what to think about Gunderson. Or maybe I do, but I don't want to think it out loud. It would nice to assume the best intentions of everyone who takes up the cause of exposing these crimes. But because of the nature of the crimes, the names of the criminals, and simple human nature, I think it's prudent to assume several circles of disinformation before we reach something like the truth. And that makes me wonder, where do we find Gunderson?

One place we find him is in The Last Circle by "Carol Marshall" (real name Cheri Seymour): a samizdat sequel of sorts to the work which cost Danny Casolaro his life. "Unknown to me at the time," she writes, "I had taken a quantum leap in the direction of the Octopus when I contacted Ted Gunderson."

Here's Seymour's telling of her first meeting with Gunderson:

On November 30, 1991, Ted Gunderson opened the door at his Manhattan Beach home and ushered us into a small living room cluttered with toys. He made no explanation for the toys scattered around the floor and the couch, but offered coffee and donuts, then proceeded to eat most of the donuts himself. I had expected someone dripping with intrigue, instead he was classic in the sense of an investigator; rumpled shirt and slacks, nervous movements, distracted behavior. We sat on the couch bunched together amongst the toys. Gunderson pulled a kitchen chair up in front of us, leaned over and began stuffing his mouth with cheese and crackers, all the while talking, his body in perpetual motion. He was a big, handsome man with an aging face and tossled silver hair. He seemed entirely unaware of his appearance or the appearance of his home, but his pale eyes were intelligent and probing. Intuitively, I knew he was more than he appeared to be.

A young woman, perhaps early thirties, entered the room brushing long blond hair, still wet from the shower. Her faded jeans and sun-drenched appearance reminded me of friends I'd known growing up in Newport Beach. Gunderson introduced her as his "partner," as she seated herself silently on the floor next to him. The flush on her face brought a fleeting prescience to me that they had been making love shortly before the meeting.

The woman was Jackie McGauley, the first parent to believe her child was abused at the McMartin Daycare, the case with which Gunderson's name is most closely associated.

Two years ago McGauley wrote the following about her former boyfriend, which was quoted this past March 29 in an open letter from Barbara Hartwell to Noreen Gosch:

When I threw Ted Gunderson out of my house and figured out my damages, I found I was over $30,000 in debt. I was a single mother of 2 young children, only receiving $300 per month in child support. I was very ill the entire time Ted was in my house. Needless to say, the kids and I were destitute. I was unable to be very involved in the issue. Survival for me and my kids was all I could manage. Some of you know how desperate my situation was and helped me.

In the mid 90s Cheri Seymour, who had been around the last 2 of the years I was with Ted, approached me to join her in writing a book. Frankly, I was scared. I refused and asked her not to use my name in the book.

Cheri wrote the book, based on her experiences and documents gathered during that time. That book is The Last Circle. Cherie used a pen name, Carol Marshall. From what I hear, Cherie has had a rough time and had to go into hiding. I doubt I would have lived if I had worked with her on this project.

Gunderson has responded to Hartwell's letter, including McGauley's comments, here.

I'm not interested in the he said/she said. What I find most worrying is beyond dispute: Gunderson inserted himself into the life of a vulnerable woman at a time of great emotional distress. (A woman half his age - Gunderson was born in 1928 - and though I don't know if that matters, I think it deserves a mention.) It may have been crazy love, it may have been a love of control, it may have just happened. But it appears to me inappropriate and possibly exploitive. And appearances would seem to be important in such a line of work.

Perhaps this wouldn't bother me if we didn't already have the example of so-called Monarch deprogrammers becoming intimate with their subjects. For instance, "ex-CIA" Mark Phillips and Cathy O'Brien, Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler. I can't assess their intentions, and whether they represent another covert layer of control. I'll just say I imagine that accessing certain programming must be a great temptation for some men.

But of more concern than Gunderson's girlfriends are his business partners. One, Michael Riconosciuto, whom Casolaro dubbed "Dangerman," had personally modified the stolen PROMIS software to create backdoors to spy into the networks of end users. (His affidavit in the Inslaw case can be read here.) Seymour spoke also to Riconosciuto for The Last Circle, and he described for her the role the security firm Wackenhut has in the Octopus's self-financing international guns-for-drugs trade. (Riconosciuto had served as Director of Research for the Wackenhut facility at the Cabazon Indian reservation, where he'd made the alterations to PROMIS.)

Seymour writes:

One of the most surprising, and disturbing, documents I found in Michael Riconosciuto's hidden files was an envelope with a notation on it, handwritten and signed by Ted Gunderson, which read as follows:

"Michael: Raymond is arriving at LAX, 7:55 p.m., Air Canada via flight 793 from Toronto. Will have to go through Customs. This will give us another member for our drug/arms operation. Only problem [is] Raymond will probably be using instead of selling. Sorry I didn't get to D.A. office. I tried to call, but no answer. By the time I fought the traffic to the bank and did my banking, it was too late. Will be home tonight (818) 880-6238. T.G."

Then there is Robert Booth Nichols, a figure linked to both the CIA and the Mafia, who became Casolaro's highest-placed source on the Octopus. Seymour writes of a 71-page transcript of a series of tape recorded interviews between Riconosciuto, Gunderson and Nichols at Nichols' Marina Del Rey apartment in 1983:

In reading the transcript, it appeared that Gunderson and Nichols were interviewing Riconosciuto for recruitment into a drug/sting operation. Riconosciuto later verified that he was, in fact, being recruited into the overseas Lebanon drug operation by Gunderson and Nichols because of his (Riconosciuto's) undercover experience in the drug trade. ... Nichols later confirmed to me that he (Nichols) had indeed interviewed Riconosciuto with Ted Gunderson in 1983 and the transcript was legitimate, though he wouldn't state the purpose of the interview.

Here is how Seymour ends her telling of her own interview of Nichols:

Nichols studied me for the longest time, then walked over to the window and lit a cigarette. He finally commented that the CIA can cover up anything it wants, even a president's murder. He wanted to show me the power of the Octopus. "Nothing is as it appears to be," he said.

Somehow, that statement rang true. He then noted that he'd read my first book, the one I had sent him, then handed me a book entitled, "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate." He told me to read it, appraising me silently. Inwardly, I recalled a conversation with J.M. [Jackie McGauley], in which she related a conversation she'd had with Ted after a dinner engagement with Nichols. Nichols had reportedly stated to Ted that he headed a 200-man assassination team. Jackie had been too frightened to elaborate on this conversation, but had pointed out that Nichols once worked in the MK-ULTRA (Manchurian Candidate) program during the Vietnam war. This program was part of the "Phoenix Project." Interestingly, numerous publications had mentioned that Earl Brian had also participated in the Phoenix Project during the war.

Nichols' sister was allegedly a professional hypnotherapist, and Nichols himself was reportedly trained in the art of hypnotism. According to Riconosciuto, they all called themselves "The Chosen Ones," wore skull and crossbones rings, and shared a common interest, if you could call it that, in the old German SS occultism, its tribal and inner circle rites.

So here's my question: why is Ted Gunderson, self-styled enemy of Satanic Ritual Abuse, a longtime friend and partner of Robert Booth Nichols, a reputed veteran of MK-ULTRA and student of Nazi occultism? (Interestingly, when then-FBI agent Gunderson had run a background check of Nichols, he reportedly found him to be "squeaky clean.")

Issues can be black and white, but never people. Motives can be muddied, and feet can be planted in different, and even seemingly contrary, worlds. It may not make someone particularly bad; it may just mean someone is complicated. Though sometimes, the contradictions can make them especially dangerous.

So who is Ted Gunderson? I don't know. Hell, I don't even know who Cheri Seymour is, or if that is her real name. (And the scene in which she describes Nichols screening her a "director's cut" of the Zapruder film does make me, at least, question the soundness of her judgement.) But shouting "Disinfo agent!" and "COINTELPRO!" can make one feel a bit like a character in John Carpenter's The Thing, suspecting everyone, not knowing who's the monster. Still, they weren't imagining the monster. Are we?

And who am I? I know the answer, but you probably don't. So like I've quoted before (and it's the Buddha, not Bob Dylan, this time): "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."

I hope Noreen Gosch remembers Paul Bishop, and keeps her guard up.