Bad medicine (Part One)

There's a lion in the road, there's a demon escaped,
There's a million dreams gone, there's a landscape being raped. - Bob Dylan

This has been no holiday week for me - far from it - and between work and familyI haven't had the time to post without getting sloppy about it. But I want at least to introduce a subject to which I mean to return early in the new year.

The subject's still taking shape for me, which is fine, because it's partly about shapeshifting. And that isn't to say it's about Reptoid Shapeshifters from Outer Space, because it isn't, except maybe to reframe that instead as a dark slice of pure Americana.

Because I'm thinking, rather, about Navajo witchcraft: the "bad medicine" of, let's call them, "left-hand path" medicine men. Specifically, yee naaldooshi: the "skinwalkers."

Anthropologist Dan Benyshek of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, quoted in Colm Kelleher and George Knapp's Hunt for the Skinwalker:

Skinwalkers are purely evil in intent. I'm no expert on it, but the general view is that skinwalkers do all sorts of terrible things - they make people sick, they commit murders. They are grave robbers and necrophiliacs. They are greedy and evil people who must kill a sibling or other relative to be initiated as a skinwalker. They supposedly can turn into wereanimals and can travel in supernatural ways.

I find it interesting that the initiation fee of killing a close relative is similar to the blood price exacted for admittance into high Satanic circles, and also the generational sacrifice of one's own children to ritual bondage and mind control.

Then there's John Perkins, the National Security Agency-recruit and author of the favourite liberal limited hang-out Confessions of an Economic Hitman, who is also the author of Shapeshifting: Shamanic Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation, and leads workshops on the subject. Here's Perkins, in an interview with "Spirit of Maat":

For definitional purposes we can talk about Shapeshifting occurring on three different levels:

The first is cellular, and that is when a person of an indigenous culture shapeshifts into a plant or animal, or in our culture when a cancer grows in someone and then miraculously disappears.

The second level is personal Shapeshifting. That is when we decide to transform our personality -- and usually that means becoming more of what we most expect in ourselves. It might mean when a person honors themselves as a good writer or a better dancer or politician. It could also mean transforming an addiction.

...

During the process of writing the book Shapeshifting, I found that many people had the opinion that cellular shapeshifting, where people become jaguars and plants, was important years ago for indigenous peoples and cultures that had to escape from enemies in the forest, or hunt down buffalo and other animals -- but was not important in this day and age and probably doesn't occur anymore.

I disagree. I have seen a lot of very significant cellular Shapeshifting around the world. There are lamas in Tibet who fly across mountains and melt snow with the heat of their bodies, and shamans in the Amazon who become jaguars, and people in this country who miraculously get cured of cancers. I think cellular Shapeshifting is very important, because when we cellular Shapeshift, we realize that we really are one with everything.

Shapeshifting is not just Perkins' metaphor for adaptation and personal transformation. He believes - he claims to have witnessed - shapeshifting on a cellular level.

What am I trying to say? This is what I'm trying to say: we don't need to look to Alpha Draconis to find a culture of shapeshifting. Shapeshifting is as American as Cowboys and Indians, and even more so than Cowboys. Regardless of what we think about the subject, even if we say this cannot be so it can't be true, a living culture which holds such things both possible and essentially evil is indiginous to the United States, and in particular to the western lands which have seen so much bad medicine of late, from Los Almos to Jack Parsons and UFOs. And then there's the New Age shamanism of the NSA's Perkins.

Doug Hickman, a New Mexico educator, says in The Hunt for the Skinwalker that "the Navajo skinwalkers use mind control to make their victims do things to hurt themselves and even end their lives." Again, we've seen this before. Survivors of covert ritual abuse/mind control programs often need to have self-destruct alters reintegrated into their core personalities so they do not harm or kill themselves once the programming has been detected. I find such similarities more interesting, and possibly more important, than speculation as to whether human-to-animal shapeshifting is literally possible.

There's a ranch in Utah said by a local tribe to be "in the path of the skinwalker." After an embarrassment of weirdness terrorized its new owners in the mid-1990s - UFOs, boxy "chupas", cattle mutilations, orbs, anomalous entities and more (their first day, the family was visited by an oversized wolf that attacked a calf and could not be killed or even brought down by a point-blank barrage, whose tracks simply ended in the mud) - the property was purchased by a mysterious Las Vegas multimillionaire named Robert Bigelow, rumoured to have CIA ties. "Another rumor has it that the death of his son several years ago brought about his passionate interest in the paranormal." I'll have more to say about Bigelow and Skinwalker Ranch in Part Two.

Down the Scole Hole

It's gettin' dark, too dark for me to see
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door. - Bob Dylan

In the post "You can't go home again" we looked at borderland experiences described by veterans of military and intelligence sponsored remote viewing programs. In passing I mentioned the Scole Experiment: a five-year exercise in contact with disincarnate entities, based in the cellar of an English farmhouse (coined the "Scole Hole"), that saw similar psi phenomenon under exceptionally controlled circumstances. Just as scientists at Lawrence Livermore saw seemingly holographic and "almost comically stereotypical," images of eight-inch UFOs flit about their laboratory, so the Scole team "witnessed a miniature UFO flying around the cellar where we held our sessions." Reading Grant and Jane Solomon's The Scole Experiment, I see there's more. One of the independent researchers who sat in on the Scole sessions was Russell Targ, co-founder of Stanford Research Institute's remote viewing program.

The phenomena recorded in the Scole sittings was unusually rich and obtained under protocols anticipating the objections of skeptics. There was channelling of course, as well as spirit voices, noises, dancing lights, levitations and physical manifestations of alleged spirits. Also "apports" - the inexplicable materialization of dozens objects onto the session table, including an original pristine copy of the Daily Mail from January 4, 1944 and a tiny gold disc with hieroglyphics, "the source of which has not yet been identified." And remarkable captures on audio tape, photographic film and video.

Photographic experiments included independent investigators initialling and placing unopened and unexposed film in a sealed tub, sitting with the tub at a session, and then overseeing its development. Results included the imprinting of poetry, esoteric symbols and diagrammatic instructions to improve the transmissions.

The video experiments began in May 1997, and were dubbed "Project Alice" because they involved an arrangement of mirrors before a camera "to capture moving images sent from the spirit world," write the Solomon's. (Mirrors have long been used as an aid to receiving visions from other realms. John Dee's obsidian mirror, used by his scryer Edward Kelly in his Enochian work, is on display in the British Museum.)

For most of the experiments, the camera sat on its tripod in the dark positioned before two mirrors. At the end of the sessions the team often saw that the camera had repeatedly and impossibly zoomed in and out on its own accord, and the tapes contained weird scenes, smiling faces, vibrant colours and hints of body parts moving across the screen in a red light. One tape showed a pink and gold line running horizontally down the screen, which pivoted to reveal it was a square shape on edge. As it rotated, it was seen to contain an image. According to the Scole team, "this was a very clear view of an animated inter-dimensional friend, whose features, to say the least, were not exactly as our own." They called their new friend "Blue." His screen capture is the classic "grey alien" on the top left of this post. The pyramids on the right is from another spirit transmission, presumably some etheric vista.

Speaking of pyramids, some of what the alleged spirits of Scole had to say sounds remarkably similar to what "the Nine" - the supposed Great Ennead of Ancient Egypt - have been saying through various CIA-sponsored mediumships since 1952. That the purpose of our material lives is "to come to Earth for the experience," for instance. "Manu," described as a "powerful and extremely spiritual guide" who was always the first to speak, and who claimed to have "enjoyed many incarnations" including one in "what you now call South America," anticipates a "great awakening in many ways":

What we do is part of that plan. There are cosmic, pulsating energies coming to the Earth all the time. Everything is evolving, nothing stays still. At this time in his evolution, man is ready for these energies to come upon him and give him what he is thirsting for. So we shall give him the refreshing rain of knowledge, that he may drink from these waters, that he may know of his own spiritual self....

First we must reach out to man's higher aspect and then filter down to his everyday life and the choices he makes. Only that way will change come about.... As you think of the people of this Earth, and the very Earth itself, so you help to activate these ancient vibrations that are coming forward at the moment. The age is right for this to happen.

The Scole Experimental Group assumed that the entities with which they made contact were spirits of the dead, curious themselves to make contact, who formed a complementary team on the other side. The researchers assumed they were who they said they were, because of the benign nature of the contact, and the fact that some channelled voices would transmit messages from loved ones containing information only the contactee could possibly know.

That's a lot to assume. I can think of two other explanations, besides a hoax, for the same phenomenon. For instance, perhaps the contactee influenced events by subconsciously transmitting the private knowledge to the medium. (It's difficult to describe the margins of innate human psi and the occult, because even occult workings demand a willing human partnership. Perhaps a genuine medium would also be sensitive to incarnate spirits.) Also, many UFO contactees describe having their minds read. Maybe something similar is going on when a "spirit" claims to be someone familiar to the contactee and backs it up by sharing private information.

The Scole team travelled to California and demonstrated their results in nine separate sessions. One was a "scientists session" for NASA and representatives of Stanford University. The Scole team did not know who was going to attend or where the session would be held, and before the demonstration began the scientists searched the room, a basement gymnasium. A Native American materialized during the session, dancing and chanting, and drums which were mounted high on the wall began to beat. Then familiar spirits appeared, calling some of the scientists by name though their identities were unknown to the Scole team, and explained to the group that the area was an ancient sacred site, and the peoples who had lived there long ago were influencing the session.

"Interestingly," the Solomons write, "some of the astrophysicists later started a group of their own."

In its report on its five-year project, the Scole Group commented that

Our understanding of what Manu told us is that humanity has consciously or unconsciously been sending out a signal asking for help for our world for some time and that many loving beings have heard our plea. They are now coming in response to our request to aid us in any way they possibly can. It seems that the many dimensions are bound together with the common thread of love. This love transcends all other things. What a truly wonderful notion that is.

Well, that's one way to look at it. Another is that there are supra-mundane entities as interested in opening gateways into our reality as there are humans keen on opening channels into theirs, and willing to say and do anything to achieve it. I suppose it would be wrong to presume them all to be Lovecraftian nightmares, but it may be more prudent then throwing open the door and saying "Welcome, brother."

I like this advice from Emmanuel Swedenborg, so I'll quote it again:

When Spirits begin to speak with a man, he must beware that he believes nothing they say. For nearly everything they say is fabricated by them, and they lie: for they are permitted to narrate anything, as what heaven is and how things in the heavens are to be understood, they would tell so many lies that a man would be astonished.

The Scole spirits say the crossing is getting easier, and more people will begin to see them and understand their own spiritual lives. Maybe. Or maybe, it's a cookbook.

Back to black

In his defense of the end of the pretense of constitutional rule, Dick Cheney says "you know, it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four years." Of course he's right. And since Cheney warned Americans last year that a vote for Kerry was inviting another 9/11, maybe that's how he means it to be heard this time, too: the veiled threat of a protection artist.

Remember the claims of Ground Zero firefighters, contradicting the official account, that they had actually recovered the black boxes of Flights 11 and 175? Mike Bellone and Nicholas DeMasi said the boxes were seized by federal agents, who then told them to keep quiet about it. They didn't, though their story never even rippled the mainstream's consensus fabrication. (But I wonder what the world would sound like if everyone bullied into silence by one method or another found their voice at the same time.)

Now comes corroboration from Dave Lindorff, a Counterpunch fixture who has perhaps the best insight over there on the darkness and the weirdness of America's present condition. (Alexander Cockburn, Whiteout aside, has a awful Chomskyite blindspot when it comes to deep politics, let alone high weirdness.)

Lindorff writes:

A source at the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that has the task of deciphering the date from the black boxes retrieved from crash sites-including those that are being handled as crimes and fall under the jurisdiction of the FBI-says the boxes were in fact recovered and were analyzed by the NTSB.

"Off the record, we had the boxes," the source says. "You'd have to get the official word from the FBI as to where they are, but we worked on them here."

That federal authorities, across agencies, perpetuate a lie regarding the recovery of the World Trade Center black boxes strongly suggests that both the voice and the flight data recorders contained information that would seriously damage, if not outright deflate, the Great Myth to Make War By. (I say "contained" because I expect they were effectively destroyed shortly after falling into federal hands.) As Lindorff writes, the data could prove "whether [the hijackers] were getting outside help in guiding them to their targets."

Will we ever know what was on the recorders? Probably not. But as I've said before, we already know enough. We haven't answered the how, and likely never will, but I think we have the who and the why.

Ironically, tragically, it's the how - the popular mechanics of the stage magician's craft - that consumes most of the fuel of the "9/11 movement." As it was meant to, so the perpetrators could grandfather their innocence with the passage of time and opportunity for justice.


Afraid that'll be it for me until next week. I have a lot of subjects on the go, but no time at the present to get to them. However you observe them or don't, happy holidays.

The Cocaine Coup and the Coca Revolution

The word mercy's gonna have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves - Bruce Cockburn

I get many emails telling me I'm too negative. It's hard for me to disagree. Though what I want to be is just negative enough: neither stricken by paralysis nor buoyed up by cheap hope. That's a tough one.

So when good things happen - when real blows land against the empire and the last become first, at least for a while - they need acknowledgement. If only for the good of clearing my own head. Even sometimes at hope's "limited hangout" of electoral victory. Especially in Bolivia, when an indiginous man who talks like this is elected president:

When we speak of the "defense of humanity," as we do at this event, I think that this only happens by eliminating neoliberalism and imperialism. But I think that in this we are not so alone, because we see, every day that anti-imperialist thinking is spreading, especially after Bush's bloody "intervention" policy in Iraq. Our way of organizing and uniting against the system, against the empire's aggression towards our people, is spreading, as are the strategies for creating and strengthening the power of the people.

As Evo Morales begins to exercise his unambiguous mandate, it will be interesting, and quite likely disheartening, to watch how Bolivia suddenly becomes a topic of great concern in certain quarters; even possibly a crisis of national security demanding intervention.

Here's an early example from Jim Kouri, a Vice President of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, who's written an opinion piece entitled "Bolivian Thug Becomes President." He predictably bloviates that the win "will increase the destabilization of the South American continent," and that Morales is an "ally of the drug cartels and traffickers."

The continent enjoys far greater stability today - and in the mental health sense of the word, too - than in the days of death's head satraps employing the methods of the School of the Americas and answerable to none but Washington. And in an interview with Luis Gómez of Narco News, former Bolivian guerrilla leader and presidential candidate Felipe Quispe makes distinctions between coca and cocaine that undoubtedly would be lost on Kouri:

Coca has been, ancestrally, a sacred leaf. We, the indigenous, have had a profound respect toward it... a respect that includes that we don't "pisar" it (the verb "pisar" means to treat the leaves with a chemical substance, one of the first steps in the production of cocaine). In general, we only use it to acullicar: We chew it during times of war, during ritual ceremonies to salute Mother Earth (the Pachamama) or Father Sun or other Aymara divinities, like the hills. Thus, as an indigenous nation, we have never prostituted Mama Coca or done anything artificial to it because it is a mother. It is the occidentals who have prostituted it. It is they who made it into a drug. This doesn't mean that we don't understand the issue. We know that this plague threatens all of humanity and, from that perspective, we believe that those who have prostituted the coca have to be punished.

Kouri walks his readers right up to "regime change": "should [Morales's] coca policy show an increase of cocaine on US city streets, his regime will be seen as a national security threat and rightly so."

Funny, that. Or rather, like so many things these days, it would be funny if it didn't mean people's lives. Because on July 17, 1980, "los Novios de la Muerte" - narcotics traffickers and mercenaries recruited by fugitive Nazi and CIA asset Klaus Barbie - overthrew the democratic government of Bolivia in the "Cocaine Coup." Cocaine production increased dramatically and America was flooded with the cheap drug. In his essay on the drug war's shills in Kristina Borjesson's Into the Buzzsaw, 25-year DEA veteran Michael Levine writes that "there are few events in history that have caused more and longer-lasting damage to our nation." Bolivians could say the same.

Levine made headlines two months prior to the coup when his DEA sting netted Bolivian cartel leaders Roberto Gasser and Alfredo Gutierrez outside a Miami bank. He had paid them $8 million for the then-largest ever seizure of cocaine. Just a few weeks later Gasser and Gutierrez were released, thanks to pressure from the CIA and the State Department, and weeks after that both men and their cartels became principal financiers of the coup, and were rewarded by the new regime with squads of neo-Nazis to bully their competition.

And then there's Sun Myung Moon. Robert Parry remembers that one of the first international well-wishers who travelled to La Paz to congratulate the putschists was Moon's right hand Bo Hi Pak, former publisher of The Washington Times and "Koreagate" principal, who declared "I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world's highest city." Later disclosures from the Bolivian government strongly suggested that Moon's organization had heavily invested in the coup, and Parry writes that in 1981 "war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were often seen together in apparent prayer." Lt. Alfred Mario Mingolla, an Argentine intelligence officer recruited by Barbie, described Ward as his "CIA paymaster." His monthly salary was drawn from the offices of Moon's anti-communist umbrella organization, CAUSA. (As we've seen, Moon still has a huge stake in South America, having purchased the land above the world's largest fresh water aquifer, in Paraguay. These people play a long game.)

"Meanwhile," Parry adds, "Barbie started a secret lodge, called Thule. During meetings, he lectured to his followers underneath swastikas by candlelight." Old habits, hardly dying, and a polyglot web of fascist patrons unashamed to profit by the labours of their Nazi lieutenants.

And here's another would-be funny thing: there were no American headlines about all of that. None at all.

But maybe that's enough talk for now about a coup, while there's a revolution going on.

The King of Terror

False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin,
Only a matter of time 'til night comes stepping in. - Bob Dylan

The only commentary some stories require is the sound of one's head striking the desk. For instance:

Zarqawi "captured, but let go"

BAGHDAD: Iraqi security forces allegedly caught terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi but released him because they did not realise who he was.

Deputy Interior Minister Hussein Kamal said on Thursday that the Jordanian-born leader of al-Q'aida in Iraq was in custody some time last year, but he would not provide further details, CNN reported.

The report could not be confirmed, but a US official said in Washington that American intelligence believed it was plausible. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

That reminded me of a Newsweek story from last April, which "revealed" how bin Laden sent two envoys to Iraq to assess the resistance in the summer of 2003, eventually endorsing Zarqawi as the "prince of Al Qaeda in Iraq."

Like the palid "strangers" of the film Dark City who are forever recasting reality, our masters of war are forever erasing distinctions and disappearing details. Little things, like deaths and resurrections, vanishing accents and the regeneration of amputed limbs. To any who pay attention to the changing narrative, the spin must sound like magic realism.

Zarqawi was first a prince of Ansar al-Islam, a vicious strategic counterweight to the authority of Saddam's central government that operated in the Kurdish lands of Iraq's former "no-fly" Northern Zone. Its founder is Mullah Krekar, who lives in Norway. Joern Holme, head of Norway's domestic intelligence service, says it's "incredible" that Krekar still resides in the country despite his links to groups identified as security risks, and despite a two-year old expulsion order. Neither has the United States sought Krekar's extradition.

Here's an interesting AFP item, now nearly three years old:

Ansar al-Islam leader threatens to document his links to US

DUBAI, Feb 1 2003 (AFP) - The suspected leader of a Kurdish Islamic extremist group threatened in an interview published Saturday to produce evidence of his contacts with Washington prior to the September 11 suicide hijackings.

"I have in my possession irrefutable evidence against the Americans and I am prepared to supply it ... if (the United States) tries to implicate me in an affair linked to terrorism," Mullah Krekar, who is believed to front Ansar al-Islam, told Al-Hayat newspaper.

He dismissed as "fabrications" reports linking his group to Al-Qaeda, saying they were designed to justify a strike against Iraq.

"I had a meeting with a CIA representative and someone from the American army in the town of Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan) at the end of 2000. They asked us to collaborate with them ... but we refused to do so," he said.

Also:

"The Mullah claims he had a secret meeting with the CIA and US military personnel in Iraqi Kurdistan last year. Could this explain why US intelligence agencies were reportedly so concerned about Powell raising Ansar al-Islam as one of the key connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda?"

All this while Zarqawi functioned as his second-in-command, and chief actor on the ground in Iraq.

There are many "princes" of terror with shifting histories, and an inexhaustible supply of disposable "second" and "third" in commands. It's a shell game, like Dark City's Shell Beach that which proved to be just a fading poster on a brick wall. The wall needed smashing to find the truth.

In other words, who is the King of Terror?

Distractions, or something else?

Why would I want to take your life?
You've only murdered my father, raped his wife,
Tattooed my babies with a poison pen,
Mocked my God, humiliated my friends. - Bob Dylan

Since at least the mid-90s I've become pretty good at tuning out American celebrity crime. I don't mean merely the crimes committed by celebrities, but crimes of celebrated notoriety.

JonBenet Ramsey's was the first of the victim's faces I remember shutting out. It wasn't that I thought the case such a distraction; I just didn't want to look. Maybe now, with this as with other cases, it's time we take a second look, or perhaps a first. Thanks to this thread on the RI discussion board for the suggestion. (And not just Ramsey, but let's also examine with new vision the weird and disturbing practice of child beauty pageants.)

John Ramsey of course was a deep imbed of the defense establishment, having been a naval officer and later president of Access Graphics, then-owned by Lockheed Martin, which was rumoured to have been involved in highly classified work for the Pentagon. That's enough right there to raise some natural suspicion. The evidence of longstanding sexual abuse raises another. ("If she had been taken to a hospital emergency room, and doctors had seen the genital evidence, her father would have been arrested," said forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht.)

From The Konformist, some points about the ransom note:

The author knew of John's business activities and a recent huge bonus he had received. The amount demanded for ransom was $118,000, the identical amount to his bonus. The money, the note said, was to be in $100,000 in $100 bills and the rest in $20 bills, placed in "an adequate size attaché case" (the note had an accent mark on the e for attaché, just as there is on the second e of JonBenét.) The note had details of Mr. Ramsey's career in the Navy, describing a year he spent in the Philippines at Subic Bay, called in the note the SBTC, as though the writer referred to the place often by those initials. It also had phrases such as "The delivery will be exhausting," "Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter," and "we are familiar with law enforcement countermeasures and tactics," the kind of jargon popular in military memos. Finally, the note referred to him as "John" 3 times in the last paragraph, but only as Mr. Ramsey in the formal opening. Based on this evidence, it was clear that the writer of the note was a sophisticated person with a military background and intimate knowledge of John Ramsey's life.

And then there's Laci Peterson, a name I've successfully blocked until now.

Matt Dalton, Scott Peterson's former attorney, has written a book titled Presumed Guilty, which argues the case that Laci and her unborn child were ritual slayings.

Here's Dalton, interviewed by MSNBC:

When I talk to witnesses and I read reports from witnesses and seems to indicate that Laci was being followed by two men cussing at her. A woman eight months pregnant is being followed by two men cussing at her. The witness described it and it stood out in her mind because it was so outrageous what she was seeing. At the same location, screaming is heard. At the same location, a suspicious van speeds off. And it's the same van sitting in front of her house 45 minutes before. That's what I think happened to Laci Peterson.

...

I know from my investigation that several of these satanic cults were found in the Berkeley area. I know from my investigation that seven pregnant women have suddenly disappear in that area. That's an incredible number of people, of pregnant women, to disappear over a three-year period in that general area. That's incredible.

The other thing that I thought was incredible is that Evelyn Hernandez, eight months pregnant, disappears from that area on May 1st, according to the satanic calendar and the Satanists that's called the grand climax, a day of sacrifice. December 24 of the same year, Laci Peterson apparently abducted. Personal property found in the street. Laci Peterson is found in the same San Francisco Bay that Evelyn Hernandez is found in. Laci Peterson has no hands, no feet. Her head is missing. The baby appears to have be removed and handled by somebody, in my opinion. I think that's incredible that two of the seven women that had disappeared, disappeared on satanic days.

Blaming the devil is an old and comic gambit, and even though I've learned enough to say Satanic Ritual Abuse is real, and operates cloaked by a screen of disbelief and enjoys the above-the-law patronage of establishment figures crosswired with military-intelligence "national security," I hope I also know enough not to embrace every "could it be...Satan?" defense. Still, I think aspects of cases such as Ramsey's and Peterson's invite sober re-examination now that such dark possibilities no longer seem so ridiculous.


By the way, I apologize for the irregular posting. It's not for want of trying. I have several drafts on the go, but December is proving a hard month and I'm teetering on burn-out. It'll probably be slow around here until the New Year.

The Lone Conmen

Two eyes took the aim behind a man's brain
But he can't be blamed:
He's only a pawn in their game - Bob Dylan

I got suckered yesterday by a logo. Nothing special about that besides the irony that the logo was No Logo, which sold me a copy of No War by Naomi Klein ("and others," though that addendum is dark blue on a black background). I didn't realize until later Klein's only contribution - and apparently without her consent - was "Baghdad Year Zero", an essay published more than a year ago in Harper's and available free online.

Besides the need to be smarter about my discretionary spending, I'm glad it also reminded me of Klein's reporting from Iraq. She's very good when describing the neoconservatives "apocalyptic glee" at the destruction of a society to accomodate their extreme makeover - "Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts" - but I think she falters when framing for the big picture, as do most left critics of the war, by not having a deeper field of vision. She doesn't see behind the neoconservatives, to clusters of elite power which owe no allegiance to nation-states, and whose purpose all along has been calamity and the ruin of America.

Klein writes:

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded.

Well, yes; that particular hallucination of a Chicago School hot house on the Euphrates has been well dashed, having served it's purpose to rally Milton Friedman's infernal optimists to the Great Crusade. But like so many crusades, this one was sponsored by cynics for undisclosed ends. Iraq's kingdom of ghouls did not arise entirely by chance or surprise, and not without encouragement. Reconstruction remains impossible because the forces of occupation both inspire insurrection - that's about as far as Klein goes - and also impersonate it. (And shortly after the outrage at Basra who was found dead in the same city, a suspected suicide, but Captain Ken Masters, only the officer "responsible for the investigation of all in-theatre serious incidents.") British examples are good here, to remind us that the double game is international and Anglo-American, demonstrating a trans-national bond and common interest that goes deeper than simply bending to the will of a Donald Rumsfeld.

Iraq is viewed almost entirely as a neocon project, but the backstory to the war includes the purposeful bankrupting of America, which has weakened the state from the inside while the Iraq war has not only created more enemies, but left it more vulnerable to attack.

The neocons are the Lone Gunmen of Iraq. They're the patsies who'll eventually take the fall for its failure, which will actually mean success to the real players who've allowed them the liberty to play their hand. Like Oswald, these patsies aren't innocents, but neither should perfect blame be laid at their feet. And like Oswald, when their heads are offered to the public the public will be expected to sigh with relief that the beast has been slain and all is right again in the land.

But they're not up for the chop yet. A few more acts need to be played before they've unintentionally exhausted their use in the hastening of the collapse of American power. (Idealogues blinded by the beauty of their ideas are easily manipulated to the service of contrary ends.) The car bombing of Lebanon's Gibran Tueni and the heavy hand pointing to Syria is one suggestion of the next act, and the timetable for a nuclear Iran is another.

Prince Hassan of Jordan said on Sunday that the US had run out of goodwill in Iraq, and that "only the horror of an all-out civil war, with perhaps a million more dead, could bring an uncertain end by arms to this ongoing tragedy."

I'd say don't give them any ideas, Prince, but you're not telling them anything they don't already know.

My baby needs a shepherd

I tell myself I´ll find her but I know I never will
My baby needs a shepherd, she´s lost out on the hill - Emmylou Harris

Remember Katrina? It was in all the papers. On television, too. Americans got to watch their own die in real time again, though this time with commercial interruptions.

As of two weeks ago, there were still 6,644 missing and unaccounted for, nearly 700 of them children. [On edit: it appears I underestimated by half. A headline today: "Hunt continues for 1,300 children lost during Katrina."]

Here's one of them:



Tia was last seen at the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, on September 10, 2005. She left the Astrodome with an adult male. They may be traveling in a white 4-door Cadillac sedan. Tia was last seen wearing a pink short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and flip flops. Tia's ears are pierced.

Perhaps not what you expected. Sometimes it seems, in America, attractive young white girls can vanish too, without much of a fuss being made. And why would that be?

I suppose it depends on the circumstances. If Tia Frazier had vanished on Spring Break in Aruba rather than into a Texas Cadillac, maybe then Americans would know her name.

From the board of a New Orleans radio station:

Last seen leaving Astrodome with much older man, likely unscrupulous.....

ANYONE knowing or having seen or having ANY info pls CALL COLLECT 985-369-6458 or email: ellenqqq@yahoo.com

Tia, if you're reading this -- it's Miss Ellen ... your Aunt Trish and I have been keepin' in touch about you and will move heaven and earth to get you back! You can live with her or me until...whenever. BABY...PLEASE CALL HER OR ME!

We both love you! xo* Both praying!

Miss Ellen & Aunt Trish

So why doesn't a producer for the Larry King Show call Miss Ellen and Aunt Trish? Why doesn't MSNBC invite a former FBI profiler on air to talk about the meaning of a "much older man" and a "white Cadillac sedan"? Where is Tia Frazier, and why does no one but her family seem to care?

Now here's another something about which more people should care, and hardly anybody knows. (I know it only thanks to this thread on the RI discussion board.)I'm talking about the proposed rules regarding "Protections for Subjects in Human Research" filed by the Environmental Protection Agency on September 12. As is commonly the case these days with rules, regulations and legislation that boast "protection" in the title, the reality is its inversion.

As the Organic Consumers Association lays it out, children are protected from the testing of pesticides and chemical with these exceptions:

1. Children who "cannot be reasonably consulted," such as those that are mentally handicapped or orphaned newborns, may be tested on. With permission from the institution or guardian in charge of the individual, the child may be exposed to chemicals for the sake of research.

2. Parental consent forms are not necessary for testing on children who have been neglected or abused.

3. Chemical studies on any children outside of the U.S. are acceptable.

The EPA document can be found here. Here's a relevant extract:

Sec. 26.408 Requirements for permission by parents or guardians and for assent by children.

(a) In addition to the determinations required under other applicable sections of this subpart, the IRB shall determine that adequate provisions are made for soliciting the assent of the children, when in the judgment of the IRB [Institutional Review Board] the children are capable of providing assent. In determining whether children are capable of assenting, the IRB shall take into account the ages, maturity, and psychological state of the children involved. This judgment may be made for all children to be involved in research under a particular protocol, or for each child, as the IRB deems appropriate. If the IRB determines that the capability of some or all of the children is so limited that they cannot reasonably be consulted or that the intervention or procedure involved in the research holds out a prospect of direct benefit that is important to the health or well-being of the children and is available only in the context of the research, the assent of the children is not a necessary condition for proceeding with the research. Even where the IRB determines that the subjects are capable of assenting, the IRB may still waive the assent requirement under circumstances in which consent may be waived in accord with Sec. 26.116(d).

(b) In addition to the determinations required under other applicable sections of this subpart, the IRB shall determine, in accordance with and to the extent that consent is required by Sec. 26.116, that adequate provisions are made for soliciting the permission of each child's parents or guardian. Where parental permission is to be obtained, the IRB may find that the permission of one parent is sufficient for research to be conducted under Sec. 26.404 or Sec. 26.405.

(c) In addition to the provisions for waiver contained in Sec. 26.116, if the IRB determines that a research protocol is designed for conditions or for a subject population for which parental or guardian permission is not a reasonable requirement to protect the subjects (for example, neglected or abused children), it may waive the consent requirements in subpart A of this part and paragraph (b) of this section, provided an appropriate mechanism for protecting the children who will participate as subjects in the research is substituted, and provided further that the waiver is not inconsistent with Federal, State or local law. The choice of an appropriate mechanism would depend upon the nature and purpose of the activities described in the
protocol, the risk and anticipated benefit to the research subjects, and their age, maturity, status, and condition.

I would add to the OCA list the exception, as found in paragraph (a), that children are also exempted from protection against testing if the Review Board determines that testing is "of direct benefit" to the children and "available only in the context of the research." I guess that's what they call a safeguard.

"Comments must be received on or before December 12, 2005." After that I suppose it's shut up and deal with it time.

And still: where is Tia Frazier, and the much older man in the white Cadillac?

Toora loora loora lo
First the seed and then the rose
Toora loora loora li
My kingdom for a lullaby

"I wish that hadn't happened"

What good am I if I know and don't do,
If I see and don't say, if I look right through you - Bob Dylan

Jack Houck is a retired defense consultant who spent 42 years with Boeing Aerospace as a systems consultant. He is also a "researcher of paranormal phenomena," who has been throwing "psychokinesis parties" for 25 years.

Houck dates his interest in the paranormal to the mid-70s, when he learned of Stanford Research Institute's remote viewing program, and was encouraged by SRI's Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ to conduct his own experiments. The results persuaded Houck of the reality of remote viewing and the significance of psi research, and ever since he has been instructing thousands around the world, many in defense industries, "how to use the power of your mind" to perform PK feats such as metal bending. Including, yes, spoons.

Here Houck describes his "first PK Party":

[W]e were sitting in a circle and I had passed out my grandparents antique silverware --- it has all been dedicated to science now. There was a lot of giggling and laughter because I do not think people believed that this was really going to happen. I don't think that I thought it was going to happen either. However, I was testing this conceptual model and had to follow through with the experiment. All of a sudden a fourteen-year-old boy had the fork he was holding begin to have the head slowly fall over. He started screaming and yelling; he jumped up out of his chair. That got everyone's attention so that everyone in the room saw the fork bending over. As I looked around the room, everyone's eyes were huge as they stared at this boy's fork. I like to call this an instant, belief system change. All of a sudden, other people found that the silverware they were holding became soft in their hands. They later described it as if the metal became a little warm and felt like putty in their hands. It seems to lose its structure for a few seconds. The metal stays soft for between five and thirty seconds. Here they were, finding what is normally nice hard silverware becoming soft and structureless in their hands. Most of the people in the room then began to wildly bend up the silverware. They were screaming and yelling, and this was a real peak emotional event occurring in my living room. In the middle of all this pandemonium I reached back to my dining room table and grabbed the big steel rod, handed it to the fourteen-year-old boy and said, "Bend this!!" He looked at me and said "I can't do that." Then I said "Don't ever say can't --- that is like putting a block in your mind." He agreed to try and started rubbing his hand up and down the steel rod. After about five minutes I again heard him yelling. He was jumping up and down in the middle of the living room. With no more force than simply moving his hands while holding the rod over his head, he bent that rod into a 270 degree turn. The next day I rushed over to the Sears store and bought all the rest of the rods that size in their bin and took them into the laboratory. We had the head metallurgist try to physically bend one of the similar rods. He was a big man, about 200 lbs. He was not able to bend the rod until he finally bent it over his knee, using all his might --- red faced and all. Seeing the difference between the young man doing it with no apparent effort at the PK Party, and the big metallurgist using a tremendous effort to bend it physically, really impressed me.

Retired Major General Albert Stubblebine, then commanding officer of the US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), was an attendee of Houck's parties, and was so impressed he added it to the itinerary of a retreat for senior INSCOM staff officers at a conference facility near Leesburg, Virginia. Jim Schnabel tells the story in his book Remote Viewers:

Someone handed out spoons and forks, and Stubblebine gave a short talk on how it was done, and then 25 to 30 colonels and generals stood around holding these eating utensils and staring at them, waiting for something to happen.

At one point, a somewhat skeptical colonel turned his head to say something to a colleague, and as he did, his fork suddenly drooped into a ninety-degree angle. Everyone looked at him and his fork, at which point the fork bent back up, then down again, and finally settled into an angle of about forty-five degrees. The colonel whose fork it was put the thing down, shaking his head, evidently unsettled. He was a Christian, and later would denounce the entire thing as the trickery of the devil.

"I wish that hadn't happened," said the colonel.

I don't think there can be true comprehension of how America got here from there, without assuming that sentiment has been often thought and voiced in the halls of the cryptocracy.

Psychokinesis should be only a mild offense to the psyche of someone raised with the convensions of either mainstream faith or anti-faith, and I don't mean to suggest that spoonbending is the work of the devil. But other things colonels and Christians have found themselves mixed up in could certainly be described as such. Mind control, for instance. Think of brainwashing and hypnotism in the alleged service of national security: of being able to take a life in your hands and make of it an experimental marionette like Candy Jones, or a programmed patsy as Sirhan Sirhan almost certainly was. I have to think that somewhere in the beta-testing of human subjects, consciences were appalled at the successes - "I wish that hadn't happened" - but because success was the only condition, just as with an unwise black magician, the work continued, and was refined. Subjects became younger, methods became harsher to better imprint more elaborate and deviant programming. "And I really wish that hadn't happened."

We should be able to see how this happens. Acting against one's conscience in a relatively small matter can set up a logic which justifies actions more terrible in order to see the "pay off" for the first offense. And the way is eased, naturally, in a military culture where private conscience is expected to stand down for "national security." (Though over time that mask has slipped, and it has become simply what it is: horror and high crime.)

I may be wrong, but I doubt there are great wizards in the Pentagon. I imagine, instead, a bunch of sociopathic punks playing with the Necronomicon and thinking they're they have the power, seeing something about it seems to work but not understanding why, or how that could be a bad thing. Meanwhile, the silent witnesses and conflicted perpetrators mutter to themselves, "I wish that hadn't happened."

Sembler for the Defense

There's a retired businessman named Red
Cast down from heaven and he's out of his head - Bob Dylan

For the longest time I was meaning to write something about Mel Sembler. Too long as it happens, because a lot of good things have been written about him in the meantime. Last month's "Ambassador de Sade", for one instance, and this thread on the RI forum for another.

(Which reminds me, before I turn belatedly to Mel, if you don't often visit the board you may want to rethink that, because there have been some fascinating threads of late, such as this consideration of the Bush/military/mind control backstory to the family of Mary Kay Letourneau, and this conversation concerning Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut.)

I'm sure you know who Sembler is, and the mind control atrocity called Straight Inc. he and wife Betty perpetrated on American youth in Florida for nearly two decades. Straight bent itself out of shape in the early '90s and became the "Drug Free America Foundation" only after, finally, exposure and public outcry at its virtual "psychic murder" of kids in its alleged care for addiction recovery. Though it no longer directly treats addicts it still influences US drug policy, and survivors who haven't killed themselves or lost their minds are still living with the trauma of their "treatment," including repeated rape with objects such as curling irons. Arthur Trebach, author of The Great Drug War, said in a recent interview that he "got a call two days ago from a man in Texas who sent his son to Straight, Inc. ten years ago":

The father told me it was an awful mistake, that they imposed sexual activities on the young man, that they peed on him. According to the father, his son still refuses to talk about his experience at Straight, Inc. Dad said his brother, a drug counselor, had recommended the place as the best in the country.

...

There are political connections here. Straight, Inc. was endorsed by George Herbert Walker Bush, who visited the place with Nancy Reagan and Mel and Betty Sembler and Joe Zappala, who are, as best as we can determine, the founders of Straight, Inc. Both Sembler and Zappala were heavy contributors to the elder Bush's campaign, and both were rewarded with ambassadorships. I saw Ambassador Sembler give a speech in Australia in which he proudly said he founded Straight, Inc. and held it up as a model. More recently, Mel Sembler was the co-chair of finance for the Republican National Committee for the 2000 election.... And Jeb Bush last fall declared a "Betty Sembler Day" in Florida, commending her for her work with drug abuse control, especially with Straight, Inc. Betty claims she has the ear of the president.

Sembler, of course, enjoyed a second ambassadorship at the pleasure of another President Bush. He was sent to Rome, though he can't speak Italian. This White House has a penchant for making excruciatingly inappropriate appointments, doling out ambassadorships to party and family bagmen whose only qualifications are the size of their bags. Sembler's reward with the Italian Job looked to be more of the same. But let's remember the parapolitical bonds between the American and Italian far right and their institutions of control. Witness, for example, Michael Ledeen's history with SISMI and P2 (of which Silvio Berlusconi was a member), and the coincident Italian connection to the Niger forgeries. (By the way, Cooperative Research has a couple of interesting entries in it's Iraq timeline pertaining to visits Ledeen paid to Sembler in Rome the year before the invasion.)

The easy assumption has been that Sembler's Italian ambassadorship was just another prestigious sinecure for a faithful flunky. That should be dispelled by this story (via Joshua Marshall):

Mel Sembler of St. Petersburg, a Republican fundraiser and former ambassador, is chairman of the legal defense fund for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney.

...

A longtime political supporter of Cheney, Sembler was recruited to join the effort by Barbara Comstock, a Washington lawyer and friend of Libby, Comstock said.

Sembler will head what Comstock called "a distinguished and bipartisan group of friends, colleagues and former government officials" who have formed the Libby Legal Defense Trust.

So to recap, the former ambassador to Italy is chairing the defense fund of a White House official implicated in a scandal that began with the delivery of forged documents to his embassy.

And then there's the other covert constellation finding alignment: the Bush and Cheney backroom man who founded a mind control treatment program that tortured young people with acts of sexual degradation has come to the rescue of Cheney's former chief of staff, and author of a novel of sexual sadism, bestiality and paedophilia which depicts the rape of children in a bear cage.

Sembler's a busy Bush factotum. He's also recently joined the board of an extremely flush new bank starting up in Florida, a state said to be popular with international crime because of its proximity to the United States. CEO of the American Commerce Bank, "Texas tycoon" Donald A. Adam, said, rather queerly, that "You want to touch every tentacle you can within the state, because of its enormity and its mass." I don't know whether I'm reading too much Casolaro into those remarks, or Adam is reading too much Lovecraft.

Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show

He's a great humanitarian, he's a great philanthropist,
He knows just where to touch you, honey, and how you like to be kissed. - Bob Dylan

A travel advisory ought to be issued whenever Neil Bush boards a plane for Southeast Asia. What should we do when he's in the company of Sun Myung Moon?

Thanks to John Gorenfeld for the story that Silverado's billion dollar Bush has joined the "Lord of the Second Advent" on his 100-day world tour, ostensibly to promote the usual over-the-Moon agenda of peace, love and understanding.

Last Wednesday Team Moon touched down in Taiwan to launch a "global peace campaign" and promote the formation of "ideal families." Moon declared that "'spirits' have arrived on Earth to watch human beings' every move," and that "those who stray away from the heavenly way will be punished." Next stop was the Philippines - The Manila Bulletin generously described Bush as a "peace leader" - where President Gloria Arroyo "praised Moon for his global peace efforts and God-centered, family-centered economic and social initiatives."

Neil, we know, is following Poppy's lead: Moon led his father across South America in the mid-90s, stuffing a hundred grand in his pocket for his trouble, which naturally was no trouble at all for either man.

Also along for the latest ride is Washington Times President Joo Dong Moon, and that should remind us of the part the Moonie paper played in breaking, and then stifling, the Craig Spence White House call boy scandal that was linked to the office of Vice President Bush on this notorious front page. As I wrote last February, "did the Times initially play this story as big as it did in order to win influence? In other words, Look - we got the goods - what you gonna do about it? The Times said it had the names of Spence's clients, and that they included politicians, as well as military, media and business figures. Blackmail, it's called in impolite circles. This could explain why the scandal was made to go away virtually overnight, the names undisclosed. Because, they did something about it."

Given Neil's publicized appetites, it doesn't take a great leap of imagination, or even a particularly sordid imagination, to wonder what might remain hidden by a friendly publisher with his own intelligence apparatus and Asian power base. That is, assuming the Bush boy gives something in return.

The Moon junket isn't Neil's first unlikely foray into the politics of religion. He works Capitol Hill as a lobbyist for Scientology, and still needing clarity is the story that he co-founded a mysterious Swiss-based ecumenical foundation with the future Pope Benedict XVI in 1999. As I noted back in April Neil Bush is hardly regarded for his attention to religious causes, nor Ratzinger to ecumenism. (Also from the April post: "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.")

Superficially it would seem as though brother Neil has picked up the religion brief for the Bush family. (Or perhaps that should be the "Religion: Other" brief, as a part of George still glibly plays the role of prelate to evangelical America.) But perhaps that would be to confuse the things of Moon, Hubbard and the Vatican with the things of spirit. The three kingdoms move vast sums of wealth, are latticed with networks of international crime and intelligence and command the loyalties of hundreds of millions of people, some compelled by various degrees of mind control.

While I appreciate its colour, I don't use the term "Bush Family Evil Empire." The Octopus is the family business, but I think the Bushes should be regarded more as its trusted lieutenants than its first crime family. Moon owns 600,000 hectares in Paraguay's arid Chaco, below which sits the worlds largest aquifer. And as it's not just about oil, it's not just about water, either. It's about drugs and guns, as well. That's the business of the Octopus. As Paraguay's former "drug czar" said, "The fact that they came and bought in Chaco and on both sides of the Brazilian border is very telling. It is an enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades and indeed the available intelligence clearly shows that the Moon sect is involved in both these enterprises." This should inform our reading of recent headlines such as US military presence in Paraguay irks neighbors.

The Bush Family presents the most recognizable face of the Octopus, having risen, more than once, to the highest purportedly-public office in the United States. But what again is the correlation between ceremony and power?

They have a seat at the table, but it's not their table.

Spirit of the Beehive

"Original title Al Azif - azif being the word used by the Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons." - HP Lovecraft, from his History of the Necronomicon.


One thing I find both fascinating and instructive is the collation of correspondences between what could be called boundary experiences. I hope to do some analysis of this in a forthcoming post - something of a follow-up to our earlier study of Fatima - but in the meantime, here's a brief data dump of one such correspondence.

Marian apparitions

"We would follow the children and kneel in the middle of the field. Lucia would raise her hands and say, 'You bade me come here, what do you wish of me?' And then could be heard a buzzing that seemed to be that of a bee. I took care to discern whether it was the Lady speaking." - Fatima witness Maria Carreira, quoted in Heavenly Lights.

"I heard a sound, a din, such as a great fly makes inside an empty water pot." - Manuel Marto, Fatima witness and father of Jacinta and Francisco.

"Mr Manuel Marto explained to us that, during the entire duration of the appearance, those present heard an indefinable sound, like that which is heard next to a hive, but altogether more harmonious, even though words were not heard." - Italian priest Humberto Pasquale, investigator of the Fatima event.

"On July 13, I was at Cova da Iria. She [Lucia] knelt.... While Lucia was listening to a response, it seemed there was a buzzing sound like that of a cicada." - Fatima witness Antonio Baptista.

UFOs

Traveling slowly, the object reversed its course and with an undulating motion headed for the small cleared area amongst the trees where the sandpit was situated. The intensity of the noise disturbed David so much that his friends said he placed his hands over his ears and called out for it to stop. However, David does not recall doing this. The UFO began to settle down for a landing and the noise became a buzz, the children claimed. - From Three small boys witness UFO landing - Port Coquitlam, BC

Roland McMahon, a 10-year old boy, saw a silver colored UFO 15 ft in diameter, with a windowed cupola on top, hovering 10 ft over the farm area. "On its bottom there was a green triangular area, with a dark red area inside that they boy said resembled a human shaped profile." It made a buzzing noise like an electric motor. When Mrs. McMahon, who also saw the object, drove into the driveway, it flew away, kicking up dust with a wind. It was in view for about 15 minutes. From Humanoid Sighting Report, August 18, 1975

At about 2230 Dec 30 1972, Ventura Maceiras, an illiterate night watchman, was listening to the radio outside the wooden shack that is his home, when suddenly the transistor radio began to fail. Impact adjustment did not work, so he switched off. He noticed a humming "like angry bees." Looking up, he saw a bright light hovering over a nearby grove of eucalyptus trees. He could see an enormous object in the midst of the light, whose color changed from orange to purple. At the center of the object, he could see a round cabin with windows, and through the windows, two figures. - From Occupant Database

Two fishermen, Charles Hickson, age 45, and Calvin Parker, age 19, were near the banks of the Pascagoula River the evening of October 11, 1973, when they saw an oblong-shaped UFO. It emitted a brilliant blue light and made a sound similar to that of bees. An aperture appeared in the object and three beings exited the craft by floating in the air through the opening. The men were taken into the interior of the UFO by two semi-transparent beings, approximately four and a half feet tall, who emitted a faint buzzing, like that of bees. - From Heavenly Lights

In 1954 Mr. P. Petit and his employee, Mr. Tillier, with shop owner Mr. Pecquet, saw an oval object on the ground in Corrompu, France. When it took off the lights of a tractor went out. It measured about 4.5 meters (15 feet) in length and emitted a bright light similar to a welder's torch. It came back, turned, and flew off toward the southwest. It reportedly made the same noise as a swarm of bees. - Source, Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia.

Valdair Alcântara Maciel, who works as a security guard at the Pesqueiro do Rubinho, a fishing place, claim that he saw yesterday (may 26 1999), at 03:30 AM, a UFO in a area of the Itapeti Mountain, in Mogi das Cruzes, São Paulo's municipal district. To him the evidences are the marks left on the ground. It is a circle with approximately 2,4 meters diameter, with the marks of 4 "feet" and a smaller circle in the midle.... He say that the object had a red color and made a "buzz" noise. - From UFO lands in Mogi das Cruzes, Sao Paolo

Report - Sept. 1950; Korea, Navy planes on mission approached by two large discs, radar jammed, radio transmitter blocked by buzzing noise each time new frequency tried. - From NICAP's EM case list

Fortean entities

One particularly memorable subject, who was up-front about what she had seen, was an older woman who said she had encountered Mothman in her backyard. Her property was close to the boundaries of the TNT area and, hearing a buzzing or humming sound coming from the back of her home, she went out to investigate.... Other witnesses...told of glowing red eyes and a buzzing or humming sound. - From Return to Point Pleasant

Angelica Barrigon Varela and co-worker Remedios Diez were on their way to work at a local factory along the wall that divided the railroad tracks and the street when they heard a loud buzzing sound coming from the area of the tracks. Looking in that direction they beheld a bizarre creature floating and balancing itself above the railroad tracks. It appeared to be wearing a monk-like smock or coat, dark green in color that emitted intermediate flashes of light under the light rain. The humanoid itself was dwarf-like with white pale features and stared at the witnesses fixedly. The face was oval shaped and the eyes were like two deep black holes. It appeared to lack any legs below the knees as the smock hung in mid-air. - From Humanoid Sighting Report, January 16, 1975

DMT trip

20—30 seconds : a buzzing starts in the ears, rising in tone and volume to an incredible intensity. Its like cellophane being ripped apart (or the fabric of the universe being torn asunder). Your body will vibrate in sympathy with this sound, and you will notice a sharp blood pressure rise. 30 seconds—1 minute : You break through into DMT hyperspace. - From Notes on the Visual Stages of a DMT Trip.

A powerful buzz on the same frequency as the light oscillation grew in my head. The more I inhaled the more profound and intense the buzzing became. Each gasp of vapor stoked up the effect until my head was swarming with noise and light. - From DMT: Not like any other experience.

Near Death Experience

"Finally I stopped moving through the tunnel and had a good chance to look at it. The tunnel looked like a large vent pipe used on clothes dryers. The light was not primarily inside the tunnel but from the outside shinning in. During the trip inside the tunnel I heard a loud buzzing sound which hurt my ears. I wondered what supported the tunnel. Now I began walking looking for the ending of this tunnel." - Account of a Near Death Experience.

Astral projection

"I was meditating (i’m so good at it now! I can actually keep a blank mind) and I heard the buzzing noise (bumble bee buzzing). And I was like 'oh my gosh i’m projecting right now??'... I will hear buzzing, my body felt as if it was rising, although I could feel my body on my bed." .... "The buzzing – I will feel electic vibes going across my body. It sounds like a bee, but it narrows to a mosquito buzzing sound. - Accounts of astral projection.

"And your little dog, too"

Something about that movie though, well I just can't get it out of my head
But I can't remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play. - Bob Dylan

The "Base Program"

"Dad, Dr Black, and other mental programmers often used movies and storybook themes and characters to create alter-states and systems of alter-states in the minds of their child victims," writes Kathleen Sullivan in Unshackled: A Survivor's Story of Mind Control. "The Wizard of Oz was known among programmers as the "base program" movie for children of my generation":

Each year, Dad forced me to watch the movie on television, even though I cried and begged him not to make me. This was before the VCR was invented. The Wicked Witch of the West and her monkey soldiers always frightened me, as did the tornado that lifted and carried Dorothy in her house from Kansas to the Land of Oz.

"The annual televising of Judy Garland's The Wizard of Oz was celebrated as a grand holiday around my house," Cathy O'Brien similarly notes in TranceFormation of America. Sue Ford, writing as "Brice Taylor," shares a similar story in Thanks for the Memories. And for what it's worth, Mark David Chapman also "looked forward to the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz on TV." It may not be worth much, because so did I, and millions of others. I even looked forward to hiding behind the couch when the flying monkeys appeared. However, Chapman's inner life was governed by a council of "little people," possibly inspired by Oz's munchkins. In the second book of Sinister Forces, Peter Levenda writes that Chapman "was so enthralled with this movie that when he went to New York City to kill John Lennon, he bought a still of the film that he left propped up in his hotel room." Interestingly, his little people abandoned him once he'd killed Lennon. In Chapman's words, quoted by Colin Ross in Bluebird, "the movie strip broke."

As we know, there's much more to Oz programming than simply its viewing. Sullivan continues:

Later, Dad hypnotically imprinted the identities and personalities of several of the movie's characters onto a succession of blank slate alter-states that he'd created through unusually severe torture. Several of these alter-states were later used on black ops.

Sullivan's "scarcrow" alter was programmed to believe she had no brain, leaving her extraordinarily suggestible to whoever triggered it. Her "cowardly lion" compartmentalized her fear. "Tin man" was most highly prized by her handlers: a male-alter who didn't have a heart.

Her Oz-programmed alters were conditioned to identify Washington, DC with the Emerald City. The phrase "over the rainbow" was used to dissociate her from her normal life, "with the symbolic rainbow hypnotically bridging them," and the phrase "there's no place like home" was used to return her to it. Cathy O'Brien writes that one of her Washington Secret Service escorts "linked arms with me like Dorothy did with her companion when walking the Yellow Brick Road." This would have appeared to be normal behavior...but to me it was a signal to 'stay the course.'"

Whenever I refer to O'Brien and her book I feel obliged to note my reservation. She's clearly endured abuse, but I think there's good reason to believe her traumatic memories have been intentionally contaminated - "scrambled" is how Kathleen Sullivan puts it - in order to discredit, contain and lead the emerging voices of a generation of mind control survivors who were breaking from their programming. (Yet, ten years ago, she improbably wrote about Dick Cheney's "oversized penis." And, as we saw....)

And this not only has the ring of truth, but makes an awful sense:

Much of The Wizard of Oz lends itself to themes commonly used by perpetrators. For example, nearly all MPDs/DIDs have suffered the loss of pets during ritualized torture. And all of Baum's character Dorothy's nightmarish experiences "over the rainbow in Oz" stemmed from her desire to risk her own life to protect her threatened pet. Abusers use this lesson to condition the victim to drop all resistance and cooperate or "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog (or child) too."

The "Wizard of Oz" letter

Bush watchers have called the death of George W's younger sister a formative event in his life. He was seven, and the attachment he felt to Robin may have been the strongest in his young life. Before she died of leukemia, the nature of her illness was hidden from him. The day after she died, his parents golfed. Barbara claims the impact of her loss upon her son has been "exaggerated."

Bush's piety and vulgarity is not the straightforward hypocricy of a Nixon. He contains both, and undoubtedly more we can't see, within a painfully fractured personality. Describing Bush's first meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, The Globe and Mail's Lawrence Martin wrote that "the Canadian side, while aware of the president's penchant for religiosity, had been expecting to talk more about softwood lumber than the Ten Commandments. The Canadians didn't expect the morality play. Nor did they expect that, almost in the same breath, Mr. Bush would be filling the air with the f-word and other saucy expletives of the type that would surely leave the Lord perturbed."

Disturbingly, and further suggestive of a generational sickness, Bush's sexual vulgarity appears to have a parental component. Asked at the Republican Convention in 1988 [the second convention at which Omaha's Larry King - paedophile, pimp, Satanist and Bush confidant - had been invited to sing the national anthem] "When you're not talking politics, what do you and [your father] talk about?" He replied, "Pussy."

A recent signature event that should have told everyone that America had gone not only terribly wrong, but also awfully weird, was Bush's performance last year before the Kean Commission. (Or rather, before the two commissioners briefly admitted to the White House.) Remember his "Wizard of Oz letter" - so-called by a Republican strategist - that laid out the conditions of his testimony? Foremost was the unprecedented insistance that he would testify only in the company of Dick Cheney.

I don't know if George Bush is truly over the rainbow, but he's certainly under control.

If you recall the first explanation for Bush's flight to Omaha on September 11, and for sometime after until it became inconvenient, it was that the Secret Service had received a threat to Air Force One ("Angel is next"), "using code words known only to the agency's staff."

On September 12, Ari Fleisher told reporters “we have specific and credible information” that Air Foce One was a target. The next day he was asked to confirm the substance of the threat, and whether it used code words. Fleisher replied,“Yes I can. That’s correct.” White Soon after on FoxNews, Condoleeza Rice also confirmed the threat included secret codes, and told Tony Snow “It’s not clear how the code name was gotten. We’re a very open society and I don’t think it’s any surprise to anyone that leaks happen.”

One virtue of Webster Tarpley's 9/11 Synthetic Terror is his collation and analysis of the warning, the use to which it was put, and how it was made to disappear:

In the short term [the threat provided] a cover for the reasons that had actually caused him to flee across the country. However, the “Angel is next” story contained an explosive potential for the longer term, since by pointing toward the existence of highly-placed moles within the administration who had access to top secret code words and procedures, it threatened to explode the official myth of 9/11 which was then taking shape.

As Bush gathered momentum with his “war on terrorism”…the need to protect the coherence of the official myth became paramount. It was at this time that the threat story began to be denied, not by officials speaking on the record, but by mysterious, anonymous leakers.

Most observers, even most skeptics of the official account, readily adopted the quiet and anonymous denial, happy to spin a specious and simple "Bush ran scared" story, rather than follow up the implications of a Seven Days in May scenario in which the President was threatened by a mole in the White House at least to make him stay away until the Dark Actors had finished their moves before he mounted the stage to play the part for which he'd been cast. (It may have been just one of Bush's lessons that day. A story Daniel Hopsicker has rescued from the memory hole is a possible early morning assassination attempt upon the President, using the same ruse which got Afghan Northern Alliance leader Shah Masood killed just two days before.) Another fixture of the literature of mind control survivors is the staged attempt upon their lives, which reinforces a pattern of dependence upon their abusers.

The "Wizard of Oz letter" revealed, even to a hardened conventionalist like Eleanor Clift, that "Cheney is a co-president or worse, the puppeteer who pulls Bush’s strings." It's worse than that. Bush isn't in Kansas anymore. He's in Nebraska.

I have the button, but I regret the cheap slogan, "Bush knew." Bush knew? What part of Bush knew what?