Sad and Lonesome Day

And those who dance, begin to dance
Those who weep begin
And "Welcome, welcome" cries a voice
"Let all my guests come in." - Leonard Cohen

I'll be taking some time away. My mother is in the final days of her terminal cancer, so I need to be attending to family. I don't mean to solicit sympathies by announcing this, but I thought I should explain the nature of the emergency since we also have a newborn.

I'll be updating early next week, and here's a little good news in the meantime: I'll be adding streaming radio. Since music plays an inspirational part here, I thought a Live365 station would make an appropriate addition. (And I'm not overdoing the Dylan, I promise.)

"You can't go home again"

I see pieces of men marching, trying to take heaven by force
I can see the unknown rider, I can see the pale white horse - Bob Dylan

In 1983 Ingo Swann, a senior colleague of the CIA's remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute and "Operating Thetan level VII", received a call at his home in New York City from a close friend, a US congressman. The caller asked if he could do a favour for a certain party in need of the services of someone with his skills. The friend was vague about the request, and may not even have known what he was asking, but told Swann the party could be trusted and he would be paid.

Jim Schanbel, in Remote Viewers, tells what happened after Swann accepted the assignment, and followed his friend's instructions to stand on a Manhattan street outside a museum:

Two men with pseudonyms picked him up in a car, placed a blindfold on him, and drove him for a few hours out of town. When the blindfold was taken off, Swann was in a large underground installation. No one wore a uniform, but from the haircuts and physiques, and the way people took orders, he decided that at least some were US Marines.

Swann was led into a windowless room, was introduced to some people, and was then allowed to settle himself before starting his remote viewing. The target was described only as a pair of coordinates. They were lunar coordinates, for Swann was being asked to remote-view a place on the moon. He soon did, and more coordinates were given to him. Before the day was out, Swann had described a variety of monumental objects, not human-made but not natural either, scattered across the cold surface of Earth's dusty cousin. Swann, according to the story, was then paid several thousand dollars in cash, and was driven back to his apartment in New York.

Possibly the lunar coordinates were actually meaningless, and merely intended to test Swann's abilities. Regardless, this was just the beginning of Swann's work for the unidentified outfit, and it got stranger. One mission took him to Alaska, where he was flown by helicopter to a remote lake. His handlers told him that "something strange" happened at the lake, like clockwork. And in fact, is was about to happen again:

As Swann stood there, he saw a mist form over the lake, and then an unearthly triangular object rose...sucking up water and shooting out bright beams of light, and then zoomed off into the distance. Well, his companions asked Swann, now that he had seen the strange thing, perhaps he could remote-view it an tell them what it was? Swann impatiently explained that that was not how remote viewing worked. He was too front-loaded now with information about the target to be able to remote-view it accurately, and in any case was too frightened by the experience to want to do any further remote viewings of extraterrestrials or their craft.

Schanbel also tells how another of the program's highly-regarded remote viewers, Joe McMoneagle, was driven to the Pentagon shortly before his retirement and escorted to a secure room. He was asked to remote view a target with no advance information. All he knew was that the "feedback" package, containing information regarding the target to be opened after his session, was highly classified. As he entered his "zone," McMoneagle viewed a "strange, complex high-performance aerial vehicle, apparently not of this earth." Afterwards the package was opened and he was shown the satellite photo inside, which showed an apparent UFO on a seemingly impossible flight path.

Of course, as I've noted earlier, the CIA publically declared its remote viewing program a failure. The piling on even included the Temple of Set's Lt Col. Michael Aquino, who dismissed remote viewing as an "eyeball roller" in a paper for The Intelligencer: Journal of US Intelligence Studies. Nevertheless, there are many contrary voices within military-intelligence who don't subscribe to the official view, like Major General Edmund R Thompson, who told Schnabel "I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn't believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn't done your homework."

Perhaps the program needed to be shutdown and given a thorough debunking because of its success: it was getting too close to the secrets of the military-occult complex, and it operated beyond the control of those who profit by the secrets remaining hidden. The experiences related by Swann and McMoneagle suggest blind tests, run by those who know, who wanted to discern how good these guys were, and how close America's own psychic spies were to crashing their party. Pickett and Prince's The Stargate Conspiracy describes how many remote viewers "spontaneously reported encountering pyramids" during their sessions, and that concurrent with its CIA-sponsored RV program, SRI was sending archeological teams to the Giza plateau to search for secret chambers beneath the Sphynx and within the pyramids.

One of the most fascinating accounts in Schnabel's book describes the "haunting" of Livermore Laboratory. Between it and Los Alamos, much of the US military's nuclear weapons R&D was conducted there. By the mid-70s, a number of Livermore personnel had learned of SRI's program, and become sufficiently alarmed by the security implications that they decided to investigate psychic phenomena for themselves. As Schabel tells it, "the Livermore group quickly found themselves involved in more strangeness than they could handle...they began to feel that they were collectively possessed by some kind of tormenting, teasing, hallucination-inducing spirit."

Both in the laboratory and at home, Livermore scientists and their families began experiencing visions. Sometimes in the middle of a room, an "almost comically stereotypical" image of a UFO would appear, "always about eight inches across, in a gray, fuzzy monochrome, as if it were some kind of hologram." (Interestingly, a similar phenomenon was observed by participants in the five-year "Scole Experiment", researching life after death. "On one occasion," writes Robin Foy, "we even witnessed a miniature UFO flying around the cellar where we held our sessions.")

Sometimes they would see shamanic visions of fantasic animals. Enormous raven-like birds visited the yards of several members. One appeared at the foot of the bed of physicist Mike Russo, terrifying both him and his wife, as it stared at them. Audio and video tapes of experiments picked up other things, things that shouldn't have been there, like a "distinctive, metallic-sounding voice, unheard during the actual experiment but now clearly audible, if mostly unintelligible."

(That metallic voice sound familiar? It seems to turn up a lot. Jack Sarfatti took a call from one in 1952. It claimed to be a conscious computer onboard a spacecraft, identifying him as as one of "400 young bright receptive minds we wish to [memory failure]." It said if he agreed, he would link up with the others in 20 years. Twenty years later and Sarfati was at - wait for it - Stanford Research Institute.)

Physicist Don Curtis and his wife were sitting in their living room one evening when suddenly an arm appeared, hovering before them:

The arm was clothed as if it belonged to a man wearing a plain gray suit. There was no bloody stump were it should have connected with a shoulder. It merely faded into clear space. But at the end of the arm where a hand should have been, there was no hand, only a hook. The hooked arm twisted around for a few seconds in front of Curtis and his wife, and then disappeared.

Team members began questioning their sanity. Physicist Peter Crane called for help, and brought in CIA analyst and parapsychologist Richard Kennett to meet with the group. To Kennett, "they perspired, trembled, and even wept openly" as they described their experiences. These were professional scientists with high-level clearance who had had no history of involvement in the occult. If he referred them to a psychiatrist the diagnosis would probably be some dissociative disorder. When Kennett listened to the metallic voice on the tape, he realized there was something deeper here:

Among the few intelligible words it pronounced were two or three together which Kennett recognized as the code name of a very closely held government project. The project had nothing to do with psychic research, and neither it nor its code name was known to Crane or Russo or the others at Livermore. It was as if whoever or whatever had produced the code name on the tape had known that Kennett would soon arrive on the scene and had saved this special shiver down the spine just for him.

(And wouldn't it be interesting to know what "closely held government project" the metallic voice named?)

Kennett reported the code-name incident to CIA security, "muting the outlandish details only slightly." Mike Russo received a telephone call from the strange, metallic voice, demanded that Livermore group cease its psychic research. When it did, within a month, the bizarre events had also ceased.

Kennett called SRI's Hal Purthoff and Russell Targ, and asked that they meet with him in Washington on their next fundraising tour of government offices to discuss the Livermore events. A few nights later they arrived, and Kennett met them in a hotel room close to midnight. He sat them down and told them the whole story, including the floating arm. "And so the goddamn arm - The thing was rotating, with this gray suit on, and it had a hook on it. It was a false arm. What do you think of that?" As Kennett pronounced that, there was a heavy pounding on the door. According to Schnabel, the pounding was so loud it was frightening. Kennett went to the door.

Standing in the doorway was a man who at first glance was remarkable only by his unremarkableness. He was nondescript and unthreatening, somewhere in middle age. He walked past Kennett very slowly, with a stiff gait, to the middle of the room, between the two beds. He turned around, and said in an oddly stitled voice. "Oh! I guess...I...must...be...in...the wrong...room." And with that he walked out, slowly, stiffly, giving all of them time to see that one sleeve of his gray suit, pinned to his side, was empty.

One source, who didn't want his name used, told Schnabel "We tried to find him. We walked up and down the halls. But none of us had the balls to ask the hotel desk, 'Hey, did you see that gray-suited, one-armed guy from space?'"

Some of the remote viewers, years before the movie, termed their trance-like zone the matrix, and described sessions as "switching on a beacon" within it, which sometimes attacted strange things.

Duane Elgin was a futurologist at SRI who became involved in psychic research after a colleague flipped a coin and aske him to call heads or tails, and he called it correctly 33 times in a row. He told New York magazine in 1975, "Once you discover that space doesn't matter, or that time can be travelled through at will so that time doesn't matter, and that matter can be moved by consciousiness so that matter doesn't matter - well, you can't go home again."

And maybe that's what we're waking up to: an occult elite that's had its beacon on for quite some time, and haven't been at home here for a long while.

It doesn't take a weatherman

to know which way the wind blows.

See those red fingers on the left of the radar? Now whose might those be?

A seeming grid-pattern of five heat signatures appear out of nothing to the west of Hurricane Rita, intensify and hold their positions, and then fade to nothing. Their appearance coincided with the storm's unexpected turn away from Houston to track north before making landfall.

This is Kent Steadman's capture:



The complete radar may be viewed here. Not that a viewing alone can tell us what we're seeing. But the question - What are we seeing? - is being asked on a number of sites and forums today, including Steadman's CyberspaceOrbit, GLP, psiwars.net and the RI discussion board.

From one comment on CyberspaceOrbit:

kent, whatever those 5 spots are, they definitely are not an artifact and they are the cause of rita turning north a few miles ahead of schedule. they seem to be directed from corpus christi. my presumption is that they are ships. we have high powered microwave weapons , ship mounted, in the 90-110 GHZ range which overlaps the radar freq. used in the animation. i worked on the first ones in 1983. contract was NSG through DOD. they heat a thin surface layer of any watery target (like raindrops-though that wasnt the original intent) they are aiming UP toward top of rita. you found a definite "something"

Nearly a year ago I asked, "If the United States military is determined to 'own the weather,' what would the test of an environmental weapons system look like?" I suppose it might look something like this. But I'm not a weatherman, and despite what the song says, maybe in such an instance it would be beneficial to be one. Because to me this appears to be anomalous and artificial, but that's all I can talk about with confidence - the impression it leaves with me - and that's neither satisfying to me nor helpful to you. I can't presume to know without being a better student of extreme weather and meteorological radar. But I'm not going to become one this afternoon, and damn it, this does look strange.

I'll welcome an education from those of you who have more than a gut feeling to go by here. Because pure speculation, as many seemingly pure things turn out to be, is virtually useless to me.

Is that your final A.N.S.W.E.R.?

And he just walked along, alone, with his guilt so well concealed.
And muttered underneath his breath, "Nothing is revealed." - Bob Dylan

Another march on Washington, and more grumbling about A.N.S.W.E.R.'s performance.

Much of the noise comes from embarrassed moderates, who are new to the demonstration game and are simply not that demonstrative. Others suggest A.N.S.W.E.R. engages in bait and switch: draw mass numbers with the cause of Iraq and then use the platform to catapult the propaganda, including wedge issues bound to alienate sizeable contingents of the crowd, and serves to categorize a generalized anti-war movement in the terms of Stalinist caricature.

Now I don't have a problem with radical politics. Those are my politics. And I do believe that mass events are good occasions to wisely shed light upon the interconnections of injustice. What I have a problem with is Ramsey Clark. I don't trust him. And so, I must have a problem with A.N.S.W.E.R. I don't trust it, either.

A.N.S.W.E.R., established by Clark's International Action Center, shows a national, organizational savvy in securing police permits and outclasses and outspends all popular opposition groups in America. (Though there's no transparency regarding the source of its funds.) While the Iraq War is its rallying cause, A.N.S.W.E.R. was founded, presciently, on September 14, 2001, even before the "War on Terror" was officially launched, even rhetorically.

Why don't I trust Clark? If LBJ's former Attorney General was ever going to win my trust, he would have repudiated his handpicked Clark Panel, its medical professionals linked to the intelligence community, and its findings a whitewash of John F Kennedy's incomplete and adulterated autopsy records. He would have apologized to history and America's thwarted justice for stating just days after the murder of Dr King, and even before a suspect was in custody, that "all of our evidence at this time indicates that it was a single person who committed this criminal act." Years later in The Nation, after his radical makeover, Clark said James Earl Ray should not be given a new trial, but rather his case ought to be studied by a government panel. As Lisa Pease asks in The Assassinations, "Did Clark really think the government, which produced the Warren Commission and the HSCA and failed to reveal the truth about either the Martin Luther King case or the Kennedy assassination, should have been given a chance to bamboozle us yet again?"

The American Left of Chomsky and Cockburn and The Nation will never touch these matters of conspiracy. So Clark is largely untouched by his legacy of abetting three of the most egregious miscarriages of modern justice - John, Martin and Bobby - which, uncorrected, have brought America to this point of low comedy and great horror.

If your intent is generational warfare, you had better give some forethought to the stage management of your opposition. As you turn up the pressure, you need to ensure people can vent some steam. It makes them feel better. Like they've done something.

Category 911

Seen the arrows on the doorpost, saying "This land is condemned,
All the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem." - Bob Dylan

"A corpse lies draped over a fence in the Ninth Ward Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2005, in New Orleans," says the Associated Press caption. Three weeks after Katrina and one week before Rita, the poor and the black and the dead of America have become its scarecrows, warning those with eyes to see what time it is, and to save themselves.

But that's not to say it's all bad, everywhere. Here's another snapshot of New Orleans, the same day:

Exotic dancer "Alex" entertains patrons at Deja Vu Showgirls during the strip club's second day of business in the French Quarter of New Orleans, September 20, 2005...entertaining the city's hoard of police, rescue and fire workers.




And progress is being made, at least on the accounting ledgers. For instance , "Officials Lower Tally Of 'Missing' Children." Not that they've been found, merely recategorized.

Authorities trying to track down more than 2,600 children in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama still missing three weeks after Hurricane Katrina believe that most of them are not really "missing."

Rather, authorities said, the vast majority of these children are "lost" -- separated from a parent or guardian during the rush to rescue hurricane victims from rooftops and shelters, when families were divided because of lack of space on a bus or helicopter.

Last January, following the South Asian tsunami, there was a different spin on the story of missing children:

An untold number of children of all nationalities have disappeared in the chaos of the tsunami disaster. Their whereabouts are unknown and there are fears that they may have been seized upon by those who traffic in sex...

"I'm sure it's happening," said Birgithe Lund-Henriksen, child protection chief in UNICEF's Indonesia office. "It's a perfect opportunity for these guys to move in."

But those were predatory foreigners, and this is the United States, where thousands of children aren't really "missing," merely "lost," and the mass trafficking of children for sex is as unimaginable as nearly everything else about the last five years. And I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent explanation why "President Bush decided Wednesday to waive any financial sanctions on Saudi Arabia... for failing to do enough to stop the modern-day slave trade in prostitutes and child sex workers."

Meanwhile, in another perfect storm, the Pentagon has "blocked a group of military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying at an open Congressional hearing about a highly classified military intelligence program that, the officers have said, identified a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a potential terrorist more than a year before the attacks." Fortunately for the cryptocracy, Able Danger is still being ignored by the Democrats who don't get it and never will, who see no further than the political shallows of the story. Because Able Danger ran during the Clinton years and its files on Mohammed Atta were destroyed by the Pentagon under his presidency they leap instinctively into "Protect the Big Dawg!" mode. It's left largely to Republicans to press on Able Danger, and for the same reason: they don't get it, either.

From today's Washington Times:

Mr. Weldon said he thinks Able Danger was shut down after a "profile" of Chinese weapons proliferation linked two Americans to Chinese students at Stanford University engaged in technology acquisition for China.

During the profile, the names of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the time the Stanford University provost, and former Defense Secretary William Perry were mentioned in the data and created "a wave of controversy," he said.

After Congress sought the data, "tremendous pressure was placed on the Army, because this was a prototype operation, and they shut down the Able Danger operation," Mr. Weldon said.

Paul Thompson saw this and realized "why Able Danger was shut down in Feb. 2001, one month after Condi Rice becomes National Security Advisor." As reported Sept 1 by WTOP, the unit incidentally "uncovered the names of prominent American citizens and their questionable connections to China." Able Danger team member JD Smith suggests that the China issue remains open: "In my personal opinion, the stovepipes are alive and well. And for those of us in the contractor world, we're very much aware of that."

Thompson writes:

I also happened to catch Able Danger whistleblower Anthony Shaffer on MSNBC's The Big Idea on Aug. 23rd, and he speculated that the reason Able Danger was shut down was because it had accidentally brought up ties between prominent Americans and overseas criminal activity. He didn't get any more specific except to say it wasn't connected to al-Qaeda. So this is undoubtedly another reference to Condi Rice and William Perry.

No wonder the Pentagon specifically refused to let Anthony Shaffer and J.D. Smith testify before Congress today! They sat in the room but were not allowed to speak. I hope the DUers who have seen Able Danger as merely some kind of Curt Weldon smear campaign against Clinton can see now that there's much more to it. If the full story gets out, its probably going to slam the Bush administration hard. No wonder, for instance, when Weldon says he gave the Able Danger chart showing Atta's photograph to Condi Rice's assistant Steve Hadley just after 9/11, the chart was "lost" and the whole story was buried. Hadley and Rice are very close, and Hadley has since taken over Rice's job as National Security Advisor.

Everyone's a meteorologist these days, because everything's a hurricane. The professionals are described as "puzzled" and "baffled" by hurricanes that "just aren't acting like they used to." This year, "major storms are bucking traditional patterns by forming in the western, rather than eastern, Atlantic Ocean. Instead of taunting worried residents for days, they materialize, it seems, overnight." But to suggest something unnatural may be going on is to invite scorn and further marginalization.

I seem to be reading that a lot lately - so much news is described as "puzzling" and "baffling." The Basra incident "just doesn't make sense," and there's "no explanation" for refusing aid and leaving bodies to rot in the streets. It must be nice.

Carry on Killing

Now at midnight all the agents, and the superhuman crew,
Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do - Bob Dylan

Damn the blind eyes of anyone who still can't see after Basra.

How it began:

"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.

Here are the two while in Iraqi police custody. Reuters appended a note to each photo over the wire: "ATTENTION EDITORS - THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTS THAT THE IDENTIFICATION OF THIS MAN IS NOT REVEALED, EITHER VIA PIXELLATION OF THEIR FACES OR BY NOT PUBLISHING THE PHOTOS."



As you probably know, they didn't remain in custody for long:

British forces using tanks broke down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra late Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos, who had been arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.

Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled the jail.

Violence flared earlier in the day as demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks; at least four people were killed.

The British Defense Ministry spun, but found it difficult to maneuver with its pants about its ankles. "We‘ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison," a defense ministry spokesman in London said. "We understand there were negotiations." When it found some equilibrium, it changed its story to better comport with the undeniables: "We understand that the authorities ordered their release. Unfortunately they weren't released and we became concerned for their safety and as a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke down the perimeter wall in one place."

These hard men, likely SAS ops, must have had some stories to tell, otherwise tanks would not have negotiated their way through the prison walls of Britain's reputed hosts so soon after their capture.

Walking into the untidied mess of this astonishing and grotesque and predictable story feels a bit like the British detective catching the killer red-handed: "Well well well, what have we here?" We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.

It doesn't make sense? Only if you haven't been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy: blow up the Hajis and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game, and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.

I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we won't forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.

A British soldier jumps from a burning tank which was set ablaze after a shooting incident in the southern Iraqi city of Basra September 19, 2005. Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after Iraqi authorities said they had detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on police.

"Did I just say that out loud?"

The widowhood of every government - signs for all to see. - Leonard Cohen

From Florida, which enjoys Bush rule squared, comes this story of last week's ceremony naming Marco Rubio as the 2007-08 Speaker of the State Legislature.

Near the close, Governor Jeb Bush took the podium in the House chamber and spoke about his friend. No, not Representative Rubio, but Jeb's "Mystical Warrior Chang."

Bush's words:

Chang is a mystical warrior. Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.

I rely on Chang with great regularity in my public life. He has been by my side and sometimes I let him down. But Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.

Bush then unsheathed a golden sword and presented it to Rubio, saying "I'm going to bestow to you the sword of a great conservative warrior." The crowd went wild.

There may be a reasonable, though not entirely logical, explanation to this. "Unleash Chiang" was a popular phrase with the American far right in the early 1950s, and referred of course to Chiang Kai-shek, and the fantasy of "permitting" his Kuomintang to retake the mainland. It seems to have been handed down through the family: the Gainsville article recalls a Washington Post feature on the politics of tennis from 1989, which had George HW Bush threatening to "unleash Chang" as a method of intimidation.

I wouldn't suggest taking Jeb at his word here. We should doubt the public word of every Bush. I don't think "Warrior Chang" is Bush's occultic avatar or Secret Chief. But I think we should take note of his rhetorical flourish, for what it reveals of Jeb, and for what Jeb wants to reveal of himself.

We know a lot of nasty and weird things about the Bush family, and we have good cause to suspect a lot worse. What's more, they know we know. (Of course I'm not just talking about us, but I am also talking about us: I've logged a visitor to the blog using an IP assigned to the Executive Office of the Governor of Florida.) And they know, and we know, that these things will not be spoken in the mass media. And so they enjoy the liberty of winking at us. Like two years ago, when Jeb "joked" during a cabinet meeting that the people of San Francisco were "an endangered species, which may not be a bad thing. That's probably good news for the country." As the room erupted in laughter he added disingenuously, "Did I just say that out loud?" Like George HW Bush posing in bed with his granddaughters, a model of an Illuminati pyramid in his lap. Like Dick Cheney's delighting in his underground reputation as a conspiracrat. Like Jeb speaking matter-of-factly before a partisan crowd about his habitual summoning of a warrior entity. They know what signs they send. As many dynasties near the end of their runs, the rulers often feel so secure about their station that they lift the veil on their own weirdness to revel publically in their own exceptionalism.

And even the most mundane interpretation of the Chang story is alarming, for its depiction of the militant imagination of these people. They are bringers of swords and conflicts, and their victories are bloody. And the blood is our own.

The Fortune in Men's Eyes

"Hey hey, babe, I got blood in my eyes for you."

Apologies for arriving a bit late to the Is John Roberts Gay? party. I have to say the mood seems inappropriately ebullient, as usual at such occasions, when really people ought to be asking What the Hell are we doing here again?

So Bush's surprise nominee for Chief Justice played Peppermint Patty in a High School production of "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown." So he married for the first time at age 41 and is a father to adopted children. So he's posed with food, and a moustache:



Even if it's all true, so what? Isn't Roberts entitled to his self-hating closet every bit as much as J Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn were to theirs?

Here's the so what: it's the pattern recognition. It's the mercurial advancement of a far-right cadre of closeted men. It's Craig Spence, "Jeff Gannon," Victor Ashe and the Texas Velvet Mafia. It's the games of Bonesmen. It's the stories of George HW Bush. It's Kay Griggs' persuasive accounts of rampant homosexual blackmail, rape, and systemic paedophilia in the highest ranks of the US military and government. It's the Eye of Horus. As I've written, it's the fascist imagination that links ancient mystery religions and secret societies to today's imperial death cult which binds itself in blood and semen.

A public figure's private sexuality is a tough subject to broach, as it should be. But the Roberts rumours are suggestive of a still largely unacknowledged trend that needs an accounting, and should not be played for the cheap laughs which invite the disgrace of homophobia. Because these stories are not about sex, but about the secret ley lines of power in Washington and the loyalties and obligations they create. And gay, straight or whatever, that's everybody's business.

American Allegory

"It's the dark princes, the democratic republicans, working for a barbarian who can scarcely spell his own name." - Masked and Anonymous

Things are still rather chaotic here, though mostly in a good way, so I haven't the time now for a proper post. But since we've come to this almost inconceivable moment, when dogs pick at uncollected corpses in the streets of a murdered American city, preemptive nuclear war against the threat of non-nuclear weapons is official policy, the potential repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act is floated, and a former US Governor - even if it is Jesse Ventura - speaks of fleeing the fascism and ruin that the Bush White House is visiting upon the country, I'm thinking maybe what's really needed is a proper allegory. Something like Bob Dylan's Masked and Anonymous.

At its release two years ago, while most critics were greeting the film with either confusion or horror, David Vest described it as a "spot-on accurate portrayal of what is going on RIGHT NOW, seen through the eyes of someone with vision and not just eyesight...All America's chicken-hawk foreign wars have come home to roost. The horrors once visited upon El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq are now rolling through the streets of California. All the electoral disgrace of recent campaigns has been compressed into one presidential speech."

Like a good Dylanphile should, I have a copy of his pseudonymously authored script. A good thing, too, since some of the most important words are lost in the editing. The speech Vest mentions, for one. Here is President Mickey Rourke's address to the nation upon inheriting the debased office:

As you know, we have captured the cultural institutions of this country. The institutions that shape the souls of the young. The schools, the colleges, the movies, music, and the arts. They all belong to us now. At the moment, we are giving people a new identity, and erasing the collective memory. We are rewriting the history books. Nothing was more important to our President than bringing peace to this war torn country. Peace, a lasting peace, can only be achieved through strength. So, in my first act as new President, as the leader of the new government, this new regime, we will begin to deploy troops immediately to the southern regions, we will resume the bombing in the jungle. We will begin executing and enslaving prisoners... Remember this, life is a chess game, where all the pieces are the same color. Your self-discipline will be watched and judged.

We have learned a valuable lesson. Great nations do not fight small wars. We have seen the difference between winners and losers. Those who are victorious win first then go to war, while the defeated go to war first and then seek to win.

There will be no more stupidity. No more mistakes. It is a new day. God help you all.

And that's more truth about America's situation than Bush will admit in his speech tonight from New Orleans' open grave.

Dylan's always recognized the old weirdness at the heart of the New World, and he can see it now behind the collapse of our former and flimsy consensus reality. "They have aliens stacked up in warehouses," says one character. "What more do you need to know?"

The voice of a radio preacher serves as a chorus, and near the end says

God has turned his back on this nation.... All of humankind is a slave race and was meant to be from the beginning. Will man destroy the earth to move on? Is that his destiny? We'll wait to find out. What nourishes gods? The smell of fear. The gods get fat on fear. These gods left before the Bible was written....

And isn't that what this feels like? That the ancient gods are back, and their priests are in the high places.

Drowning by Numbers

"Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you." - Bob Dylan

New Orleans is beginning to look like Funeralgate, supersized.

FEMA has relieved volunteers of their emergency mortuary services in Louisiana only, and contracted out to Kenyon, a "wholly-owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International" of Houston, Texas.

Are the alarms sounding yet? LightUpTheDarkness reminds us why they should be:

You may remember Service Corporation International, SCI, as it was part of the case against confirming Alberto Gonzales due to his involvement in the Texas and Florida scandals known as Funeralgate. As we covered back in February, Service Corporation International was "recycling" graves, removing the bodies that were there originally and throwing them in the woods to use the space to house new customers at two Jewish cemeteries in Florida . Service Corporation International, the world’s largest funeral service company, is headed by Robert Waltrip, a longtime friend and generous financial patron of the Bush family. Eliza May was head of the Texas Funeral Services Commission when it began receiving complaints about unlicensed embalmers, and sued when she was fired. Gonzales kept Bush from testifying in this case and was also under scrutiny when a memo surfaced that was sent to his office when he was Bush’s gubernatorial counsel. The memo suggested possible improprieties by two funeral commissioners with ties to SCI and Joeseph Allbaugh, Bush’s former chief of staff in Austin, 2000 presidential campaign manager, who now serves as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The case was suddenly settled in November 2001. The Menorah Gardens case in Florida, involving 72 families, was settled in Oct of 2004.

So, coincident with the emergence of happy talk and silver linings - Sure, it's bad, but New Orleans rescuers find fewer dead than feared - the duties of processing Louisiana's fresh kill is consigned to Bush Texas mafia with a criminal record including desecration of human remains, "recycling" graves and dumping bodies.

There is a deeply bizarre note to this, because to anyone who has paid attention to this slow-motion atrocity the bodies will be hidden in plain sight. (There is pointed irony, as well: in a bid at boosting government transparancy, China has just announced that it will no longer treat death tolls from natural disasters as state secrets.) The arrival of SCI in New Orleans is like a shredder truck pulling up outside the offices of a crooked firm expecting a forensic audit. The evidence - the bodies that are still tied to lamp posts - could be going up in the smoke of one of the city's uncontained fires, or weighted down and dumped in the bayou. It's not unimaginable - SCI has already done this.

Can they hide all the dead? They're going to try to hide the living. The head of FEMA's housing effort, Brad Fair, says that 200,000 evacuees may need "temporary" shelter for five years.

Now why, rather than offer aid which could lead, with speed, to a permanent solution in accord with the wishes of survivors, has the government determined to withhold the financial assistance necessary to support self-determination, and is spending more - five years of even basic food and shelter add up - to deny them autonomy?

That's a scary question. The challenge to a long-disengaged populace: does it have the courage to ask, and maybe answer, scary questions?

Shop now open

Myself, I'm more a No Logo kinda guy, but I've had a few requests for this, so I've opened a Cafe Press shop here. And like someone I compulsively quote once wrote, "a man's gonna do what he has to do when he's got a hungry mouth to feed."

A proper post coming as time allows. Thanks for all the nice words.

Not exactly as illustrated

A brief note to say I won't be updating the blog until next week. With good reason, I think: my wife just had a baby.

Delivery was surprisingly and almost tragically complicated, but everyone's doing okay now. It reminded me of the consolation of circumstance, that we live somewhere public healthcare is valued, and that isn't under 12 feet of water. Happy beginnings are sometimes more important than happy endings.

If I owe you an email, I may not get to it for a while.

See you next week. Until then, to hell with death.

Have a buncha kids who call me, "Pa" - that must be what it's all about.

Series of dreams

I was thinking of a series of dreams,
Where nothing comes up to the top.
Everything stays down where it's wounded,
And comes to a permanent stop. - Bob Dylan

You've heard this before, I'm sure, from 1997:

Hello Art? Art? Hi. I don't have a whole lot of time. I was a former employee of Area 51. I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago...and...and...[begins to cry] ... I kinda been running across the country...um...um.... I don't know where to start. What we're thinking of as aliens - they're extra-dimensional beings that an earlier precursor of the space program made contact with. They are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of aspects of the military establishment particularily Area 51. The disasters that are coming - the government knows about them - .and there's a lot of safe areas in this world that they could begin moving the population to now, but they are not doing anything about it. They want the major population centers wiped out so that the few that are left will be more easily controlable [breaking down] I started getting - [transmitter fails]

This clip is about all I've heard of Art Bell and Coast to Coast. It can still give me goosebumps, especially because it accords with my own tentative conclusions, but it can't rise much above the caution "For entertainment purposes only." The hyperdimensional hypothesis can be explored by physicists like Michio Kaku and UFOlogists like Jacques Vallee, and the "infiltration of the military establishment" may be considered in a study of the Pentagon's occult pursuits (that "earlier precursor of the space program" sounds like Jack Parsons and friends), but the caller's claim of special knowledge is beyond verification.

I thought of this tonight because I sense we're approaching a time of flowering for great evil. This shouldn't shock us, but it is still going to surprise us by unfolding itself in unexpected ways. Things are accelerating, events are overtaking us, and the goosebumps are giving way to nervous tension. What's different? Then the theory, now the praxis.

There's a thrill of discovery, even of dark discoveries, and a certain joy at exercising critical thought in America's great Forbidden Zone. But now the game changes. They want the major population centers wiped out. The entertainment value of an apocalyptic warning is compromised when it begins to fulfill itself.

On the RI discussion board, GDN01 writes that a good friend with much family in New Orleans said "I'll tell you the worst thing I've heard and I heard it from my mother. She said she heard several blasts - big booms - right before the levees broke. Several blasts and then all the water came pouring in." GDN01 adds that "several people have told him this same thing. This is the story going round from the people who were there."

Outrageous. Inconceivable. But then, so is the conduct of FEMA throughout this crisis. And so is everything about America's rulers and executioners, the Bush family - the Homeland's conspiratocracy.

There is a lengthy and deeply troubling account here of an attempt to deliver goods to a FEMA detainment camp, set up for the lost tribes of New Orleans in rural Oklahoma.

An excerpt, though the entire piece is worth reading, and the photos should be seen:

We then started lugging in our food products. The foods I had purchased were mainly snacks, but my mother - God bless her soul - had gone all out with fresh vegetables, fruits, canned goods, breakfast cereals, rice, and pancake fixings. That's when we got the next message: They will not be able to use the kitchen.

Excuse me? I asked incredulously.

FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the "host" goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won't allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs - and...it could cause a riot.

It gets worse.

He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and "a sum of money" and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.

...

A dorm room:


Talk about a surreal moment...troops (unknown if Regular or National Guard) have taken up residency in the Durant First Baptist Church cabin very near the main gate of the camp:


The poster asks:

Do you think I'm overreacting to the idea of being bussed hundreds of miles from what I am familiar with to a place miles from civilization and from which I cannot leave? Or do you think I'm overreacting to the fact that federal agencies are treating people who have done nothing but lose all they ever owned to a natural disaster as if they are criminals waiting to make their next nefarious move?

Maybe he is overreacting. Maybe we're dreaming. Maybe I'm making all this up.

Hello, Art?

The last refuge

They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.
Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king. - Bob Dylan

Autopsies are being performed on Mississippi's dead, which alone are now expected to number 40,000. This is a dignity that will be denied New Orleans' victims, most of whom will never be identified, and whose remains are likely destined for mass graves. With New Orleans emptied, its people scattered and families divided, the bodies needn't be matched to names, and the count of fatalities can be easily fudged.

I think the people who fear horrifying the public with too much bitter truth are worrying themselves over nothing. Several generations of social engineering have created a considerable base of support for Satanic enterprises such as culling the herd, though it goes by other names. Let the "bleeding hearts" bleed and break themselves on their compassion; the deaths of Americans will shock the millions suckled on the poison of Limbaugh and O'Reilly no more than they are moved by mass casualty events in South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. (Speaking of which, Bangladesh has pledged $1 million in relief to the United States.) They have been persuaded they have no bonds with the poor and the black, who have been forced to live in their own filth as though to confirm the prejudice of class and race. It's a genocidal transference, and the victim becomes the vermin. Those people were asking for it.

Is it Helter Skelter yet? A flyer, said to be circulating in Los Angeles and attributed to the Nation of Islam, calls for street gangs to join the Nation in Jihad against the LAPD. The dispossessed are being scattered on the winds, often landing in prison-like conditions, such as Utah's Camp Williams, "replete with barbed wire [and] armed soldiers with weapons at ready." And they had better be grateful for it. As Barbara Bush told Larry King told Larry King last night, "so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this - [chuckle] - this is working very well for them."

New Orleans is in diaspora, and the city is returning only in a hyperreal condition, like a Franklin Mint version of itself, once Halliburton fulfills its contracts. The horrors the evacuees have endured have ensured that many have already vowed they will never return, even if their return were permitted, or they could afford residence in the likely gentrified pseudo-city. They will need to find work hundreds and thousands of miles from home, if they ever make it beyond the barbed wire, and most of their home will soon be demolished.

The spin is this isn't the time to point fingers, even as the regime apologists say there is much blame to go around, all the way from the mayor of New Orleans to the Governor of Louisiana. The limited hang-out is FEMA's "incompetence," which may, eventually, cost Michael Brown his job. And they will make it so hard to wrest it from him that it will seem like a tremendous accomplishment when he's promoted sideways. But it's not incompetence that bars relief, declines to drop supplies, turns back evacuees and cuts lines of communication.

"Culling," a document of The Order of Nine Angles, states that "The time is now right - both strategically and tactically - to reveal the Satanic truth, the whole Satanic truth and nothing but the Satanic truth in clear, precise terms which are not open to mis-interpretation."

There are no masks anymore. The whole Satanic truth is on display, from the disdain of mercy to the piling of horror upon horror. But the more grotesque the vision, the greater the need of those yet in denial to avert their eyes. This is the challenge before Americans at which the world holds its breath: Can they see, this time? Have they had enough, yet?

New Orleans, Year Zero

When the storm clouds gather 'round you, and heavy rains descend
Just remember that death is not the end - Bob Dylan

From this morning (an interview can be heard here):

Just received a message that people are being kept from leaving this location by FEMA!

Harry truman school. 5417 Ehret Road Marrero, LA 70072 Jefferson County Phone: (504) 341-0961 Don Boyle and Danny Walker are at Harry Truman Middle School in Marrero LA, under MARITAL law...living in feces and filth..ppl are dying around him..the GOVT won't let him go....they are DYING..all 60..they had 362 down to 60 still alive...no water, no ice...23 murders, 123 rapes...

From today's Independent, stories from the Superdome that make sense the way Abu Ghraib makes sense:

"We went there because we thought we would be safe, but instead we were more inmates than anything." James, 31, was born in New Orleans. After what happened in the Superdome, he says, he will never, ever, go back to the city. "I can't go back there after what we've been through." By the last night, he says, the soldiers of the National Guard had given up even patrolling the inside of the arena, leaving it to succumb to its own ugliness and anarchy.

"There was babies born and put in the garbage".... When the bathrooms became so foul that going into them was impossible, people began squatting down just anywhere to relieve themselves. "Human beings don't live like that, people in the street don't live like that," she says.

Sheriff Harry Lee's deputies caught FEMA agents trying to cut the phone lines in Jefferson Parish. On Meet the Press, Parish President Aaron Broussard said that "yesterday — yesterday — FEMA comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in, he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards and said no one is getting near these lines." Why would FEMA do that? It makes no sense in a disaster zone, but it has a logic under martial law.

How will they survive this crisis? Easy. They'll create another crisis.

It's how they govern, by burying one catastrophe with another. Containing disaster is not in their interest. And it's not how Halliburton does business.

Katrina accelerates the broadening of the war. Drumbeats to solve the Iran "problem" will likely become deafening in coming weeks. You may want to cover your ears, but you should know what you'll be missing. Your eyes, too. There will be a lot of John Bolton.

At least the flags have finally been lowered to half staff, now William Rehnquist has died.

Army Times: "Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans"

Army Times, September 2:


NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

...

Dozens of military trucks and up-armored Humvees left the staging area just after 11 a.m. Friday, while hundreds more troops arrived at the same staging area in the city via Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.

“We’re here to do whatever they need us to do,” Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon, of the Oklahoma National Guard’s 1345th Transportation Company. “We packed to stay as long as it takes.”

While some fight the insurgency in the city, other carry on with rescue and evacuation operations....

Because they can

When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must;
I will kill you if I can. - Leonard Cohen

Maybe you think the worst is over, now Bush has had his photo op as the clockwork convoy of aid finally rolled into New Orleans. I thought, maybe so. Maybe that's enough death for them.

If you're like I was, you haven't seen this yet:



It's Geraldo Rivera, Friday night at the New Orleans Convention Center, where 30,000 Americans are locked down again with their piss and their shit and their dead. Rivera gets it, but he doesn't know what he's got. "What the hell, man - let them walk out of here!" If anyone tries it, if anyone reaches the perimeter, they're turned back.

From the website of the American Red Cross, their disaster FAQ:

Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

In the end, there is no understanding evil. There is only opposing it.

People shake their heads, "Why would they do this?" Because they can't fathom a reason they deny it's happening, and disbelieve the witness of the tightness in their chests.

When Polish Jews first entered the Warsaw Ghetto, they knew they'd been through Hell, but they thought they'd come out the other side.

This is happening, America, to your brothers and sisters. Don't think it isn't because you can't understand it.

Coming this week, count on it: the "pacification" of New Orleans.

Ring Them Bells

Ring them bells, ye heathen
From the city that dreams.
Ring them bells from the sanctuaries
Cross the valleys and streams.
For they're deep and they're wide
And the world's on its side
And time is running backwards
And so is the bride.



Ring them bells St. Peter
Where the four winds blow.
Ring them bells with an iron hand
So the people will know.
Oh it's rush hour now
On the wheel and the plow
And the sun is going down
Upon the sacred cow.



Ring them bells Sweet Martha,
For the poor man's son.
Ring them bells so the world will know
That God is one.
Oh the shepherd is asleep
Where the willows weep
And the mountains are filled
With lost sheep.



Ring them bells St. Catherine
From the top of the room.
Ring them from the fortress
For the lilies that bloom.
Oh the lines are long
And the fighting is strong
And they're breaking down the distance
Between right and wrong.

Helter Skelter

Look out, helter skelter - She's coming down fast

I don't know what hurts more, my heart or my head.

How is it that one of America's great cities ceased to exist this week, but I can still watch Letterman tonight?

What do I do with this knowledge: there are more than a million internal refugees and estimates of 100,000 dead, and yet the Pentagon is "hurt" that the media is siding more with victims than federal authorities?

Maybe things could be worse: apparently Dick Cheney is still on vacation. When asked about his projected return to Washington, a spokeswoman replied "He will certainly be coming back. I'm not able to tell you the day right now. I don't have that handy." All Americans know with certainty is Wednesday's announcement that the Vice President will be hosting a fundraising event in St Louis on Sept 19...for Republican Senator Jim Talent.

The song I can't get out of my head these days is Leonard Cohen's: "There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't." Even this week. The withholding of aid is spun by those who can't conceive of such a deliberate horror in America as more incompetence from bumbling "Shrub" and company, only this time there's nothing funny about it. Tell me again how incompetent they are, to have stolen two general elections and a midterm, looted billions from the Treasury, executed their New Pearl Harbour, restored Afghanistan's heroin economy and waged a war of aggression on lies without consequence. (The deaths of soldiers and mercenaries are considered of no more consequence than their lives, especially since it's the resistance itself which now provides the rationale to "stay the course.")

International aid refused, no water drops for four days, and rescue efforts suspended until Iraq-hardened troops with a shoot-to-kill license restore order: what does this suggest to you? "Restoring order" sounds like another promise of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel that leads to the grave. If you can't say it's war yet, could you call this basic training?

Order doesn't hate chaos, because chaos nourishes it. And whether this disaster was made to happen, allowed to happen, or just happened, Order must be eating this up.

Remember what Charlie wanted? "According to Vince Bugliosi," writes Adam Gorightly (who adds an interesting sidebar on Manson's fascination with Freemasonry), his "main motive behind the murders was to provoke a race war that would later be blamed on black militants." Helter Skelter.

Manson borrowed from The Book of Revelations the image of the "bottomless pit," but his pit was a sanctuary, in which he and his family would await the end of a racial armageddon. The Blacks, he said, would rise and slaughter the Whites, turning America's cities into...well, something resembling New Orleans. The Family would emerge to rule the world, because the Blacks would find they still needed a White master. Since Helter Skelter was slow in coming, he sent Tex Watson and friends to perpetrate a false flag operation.

I can't see the faces of New Orleans without recognizing their colour. I can't hear a voice like Michael Medved's, who said only criminals were left behind, and not recall his own. I can't think of George Bush without thinking of Charles Manson, nor one family without the other.

There is a war between the rich and poor,
a war between the man and the woman.
There is a war between the left and right,
a war between the black and white,
a war between the odd and the even.

There are the wars they want fought, because they don't fight them, and there are the enemies of their choice (Blacks at home, Browns abroad). And then there is the real war that has yet to be engaged in more than fits and starts. It's the war between Life and Death. And which side are you on, boys - which side are you on?

President Death

Bruegel's Triumph of Death, detail

Praise be to Nero's Neptune. The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting "Which Side Are You On?" - Bob Dylan

How bad is it?

At least 20 oil rigs and platforms are missing in the Gulf of Mexico. "Over 91 percent of normal daily crude oil production in the Gulf - 1.5 million barrels - is now shut down, and more than 83 percent of natural gas production." Ten or more airports face closure on account of jet fuel shortages. Service stations, particularly in the South, are running dry, due to panic buying and pipeline ruptures.

And oh, yeah: the computer modeling of a hurricane expert at LSU suggests there are over 100,000 dead.

A baby dies at the Superdome. A "renegade" bus of refuges is turned away from their next football stadium of absurd resort. Police officers are lying shot on the street and helicopters are reportedly fired upon. A healthcare worker, trapped in a hospital, gets cut off on CNN when she breaks down and it gets uncomfortably real.

Fall was already going to be a time of crisis for the "King of Vacations." The Plame indictments, if there are to be any, are likely to come down in the next six weeks. The window to broaden the war was closing. What they needed this Fall was not a pretext. What they needed was a greater crisis.

Those who still think that politics matter will take what cold comfort they can get from the hit to Bush's popularity. But History has left them behind. Such a thing as popularity lost its relevance at least two stolen elections ago. There's no supply-side downside to the loss of life. The victims are mostly "marginal," of colour. Less mouths to shelter and feed. This century will see many more cullings, some allowed to happen, some made to happen, and some that just happen. And maybe something else.

If it's true - if it's more than hyperbolic metaphor to call certain forces demonic, and there is an occult hand in the glove of power - then we need to consider the magickal value of so many lives sacrificed. As I quoted previously, the Order of the Nine Angles' A Gift for the Prince describes how human sacrifice "releases energy":

...and it draws down dark forces or "entities." Such forces may then be used, by directing them toward a specific goal, or they may be allowed to disperse over the Earth in a natural way, such dispersal altering what is sometimes known as the "astral shell" around the Earth. This alteration, by the nature of sacrifice, is disruptive - that is, it tends toward Chaos. This is simply another way of saying that human sacrifice furthers the work of Satan.

What energies are being released today in the United States, and throughout much of the world, by the labours of the Cheney-Bush cabal? Why does death always dog their footsteps? And what else follows behind?

How bad will it get?

It won't be the water, but the fire next time.