Catastrophic Success

I'm going down the river, down to New Orleans.
They tell me everything is gonna be all right,
But I don't know what "all right" even means. - Bob Dylan

I'd like to write about something else, but I can barely think of anything else.

Where does Hurricane Katrina's official death count stand now? Has it broken 100 yet? Let's not kid ourselves: counting those now dead and those surely soon to die, there are likely to be thousands, even tens of thousands of fatalities.

There's a Tuesday night conversation with a paramedic in Gulf Port, Mississippi reported on Free Republic. He described scenes of bodies hanging in trees and entire families found drowned in their homes. When told the official number of dead, "he got very quiet," then said "dude, we are picking up 30 at a time...thousands are dead. Why aren't they saying...? I guess I better shut up then - don't give my name."

Perhaps they'll be counted like the dead of Iraq, and we'll never know the truth, only believe it.

The magnitude of the devastation, and the rapidly deteriorating situation in New Orleans, seems finally to be dawning on the corporate media. Still, the lead story too often is "looting," like it too often isn't when the looters are CEOs stealing the necessities of someone else's life. We ought to remember Donald Rumsfeld's analysis of the tearing of another city's social fabric: "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases?'"

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is "very upset" an attempt to plug the breach in the levee was called off, and doesn't know by whom: "He said the sandbags were ready and all the helicopter had to do was 'show up'.... He was assured that officials had a plan and a timeline to drop the sandbags on the levee breach." He is still not sure who gave the order to cancel it. At another Press Conference, Nagin complained about being unable to reach the White House, as the White House said they were in constant communication, and FEMA representatives claimed everything were under control.

Since 2003, Washington has been diverting funds intended for the repair of the New Orleans' levee system and pouring them into the breach of Iraq. Nearly half of Louisiana's National Guard are also in Iraq, I suppose to fight the hurricane over there so we don't have to fight it over here. Instead of the protection of the Guard, the Gulf Coast is falling under the authority of Northern Command ("Defending the Homeland is Job #1") which, since it's creation in 2002, has been a violation of the spirit and the law of the Posse Comitatus Act. But nevermind that now, since martial law has made land in New Orleans.

There is something unnatural about this. I don't mean to suggest that the hurricane was driven by HAARP or scalar waves, though I could. Because as I've said before, we are entering a period of human history - the final period, if we don't watch ourselves - in which our speaking of the natural world means little more than a nostalgic conceit. That which used to be expressly "Acts of God" are being folded into the mission of the US military. Hurricanes are steered by winds in the upper atmosphere, and HAARP gives the Pentagon "strategic control over the upper atmosphere." Are we crazy for suggesting it's possible, or are they crazy for making it possible?

What I mean here by unnatural is both the half-measured response of federal authorities and the bizarre and inappropriate response of Bush.

Consider a President with an approval rating edging into the mid-30s. What has he been doing this week? Playing golf. Speaking before another military audience about the "War on Terror," suggesting a specious link between 9/11 and Iraq and comparing himself to Franklin Roosevelt. Visiting the South West. Posing with a huge cake and licking his fingers. Pretending to play the guitar. Getting on with his life, then cutting his month-long "working vacation" short by 24 hours. (And what has Dick Cheney been doing? When no one seems to know, I worry.)

Perhaps more disturbing than the evident lack of serious attention to the worst disaster - natural or otherwise - in modern American history is that, even as Bush's numbers bottom out, the White House is not compelled to make a serious effort to appear as though it gives a damn. Not only don't they care, but they no longer need to be seen to care. And that seems to me like another remarkable catastrophic success story.

Crash on the levee

High water risin', six inches 'bove my head
Coffins droppin' in the street
Like balloons made out of lead - Bob Dylan

Most North Americans grew up in a steady-state universe. When things were bad, they were also largely dependable. And that could be a grace, too, because even catastrophes observed rules we could live by.

We knew, if we paid attention in science class, that things would change. Eventually. We knew, maybe, that we were forcing some of them to change, by refusing to change ourselves. We knew we were living only a moment of history, but it was hard to conceive of living some other moment, in which perhaps the bad things did not respect human scale and expectation.

Still, here we are, in another moment, where dystopic hyperbole has leached into wire stories with headlines such as "Experts Expect Katrina to Turn New Orleans Into Atlantis." I'm expecting the storm to weaken enough that the worst-case will not be realized. I'm hoping so for the poorest of New Orleans, who "chose" not to leave because they couldn't, and have been sitting up all night in the Superdome. But Katrina is already the 11th hurricane this season; that's eight more than have ever before been recorded at this time of year. The storms are increasing in frequency and ferocity, and will continue to do so as the Gulf Stream fails. All that heat has to go somewhere.

Climate Change is a challenge to our frames of reference. We've known storms before, but storms like these, this often? We've known extreme temperatures, but we've never seen the glaciers retreat and the pack ice melt at such a pace and scale. The old assurances of how bad it can get have been breached, and projected extremes are edging out of the narrow band of conditions conducive to global civilization and perhaps even complex life. And it's not the environment alone that goes begging for precedents. (And I don't think it's a coincidence that it's not.) Politically, economically, metaphysically even, we're all suddenly in over our heads without having moved an inch. And perhaps we should have moved, because the flood was forecast years ago. But like the people in the Superdome, we had nowhere else to go.

The Eye of Isabel, Sept 2003


Water pourin' into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm going to do.
"Don't reach out for me," she said
"Can't you see I'm drownin' too?"

Threat assessment

Put your ear to the train tracks, put your ear to the ground,
You ever feel like you're never alone even when there's nobody else around? - Bob Dylan

Is Wayne Madsen's life at imminent risk?

Thanks to LibertyThink, by way of the RI discussion board, "ex-NSA analyst WAYNE MADSEN under threat of Assassination - flees Washington":

At Wayne Madsen's request we are putting this message to him from a source high in a United States Intelligence agency. Wayne is now in hiding and on the run after his source revealed that a private contractor assassination team had been hired to take him out.

This is the message Madsen received:

We have reason to think that a "project" will be undertaken against "someone" considered problematic now...not next week but NOW. That person is not specified but is in the US, in an apartment setting and lives alone. It is a "he" and he works via www. This information is specific to an intent but not specific to a person. The source is impeccable and you know my track record which have parallel sourcing. The "project" will be assigned to "parallel contractors" who will make any action appear random and witnesses would suggest Middle Eastern in source. Actions would be carried out in or near the home. We do not hear things like this often (almost never) and so far every warning of this type has been within 24 hours of action and these warnings have proven 100% accurate in the past. We do not know of any direct reason for someone to use this source to provide wrong or misleading information or for use by those who are "contracting" this action. Your recent work and profile make us tell you this directly.

Please respond with a note that all is normal there. Please consider the warning we received as it can be applied to many including yourself. It is possible that someone considers "us" linked in some way and that this warning may be a "deterrent" to work that some may not want completed. We have no reason to think this but I want to consider every possible angle and application to this warning. Please consider what can be done while taking any measures you think necessary to avoid this "project". We consider this warning as coming with the highest level "authenticity" and purity of motive, but the subject and message subject and its specifications were too unusual to be sure of intent.

I'm sure, if no harm befalls him, Madsen's many critics will level his survival as a credibility issue. But just as Hugo Chavez says "If anything happens to me then the man responsible will be George W. Bush" in order to pre-empt his assassins, let's consider that life is the enemy of our enemies, and always hope for it. Even if it means we look paranoid, and don't get to say I told you so.

Do like Elvis did

It will scramble up your head and drag your brain about,
Sometimes you gotta do like Elvis did and shoot the damn thing out. - Bob Dylan

I haven't been watching much television recently, but a couple of weeks ago we had digital cable installed. Now that we receive FoxNews and MSNBC, I know what American's are talking about when they talk about Aruba.

There needn't be a media conspiracy here, not beyond the ones we already know, to account for the obsessive-compulsive coverage of this Summer's showcase disappearances. While the Bush White House appears to jump the shark - it's falling in the ratings, but who's going to step up and cancel it? - sympathetic executives naturally counterprogram. The networks, staffed by intelligence assets and owned by oligarchs and arms peddlers, run instead homespun mysteries to consume the attention and care of the citizen-audience.

(Though sometimes, such stories may serve even as distractions from themselves. I recall tuning out as much as possible during the saturation coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey investigation. The story, I thought, had no great significance beyond its own tragedy, and the morbidity of the coverage left me only depressed and uninformed. I just didn't want to hear it. Now, from this station down the rabbit hole, I wonder whether I didn't hear enough. Or perhaps, hear it correctly.)

I found this consideration of the Mystery of the Missing Persons Coverage interesting; that "the most effective kinds of distraction or sublimation are those that echo or harmonize with the concerns they seek to distract us from."

People are disappearing, and not just in Aruba. They're being lifted right off their American feet and bundled off to Homeland gulags. Constitutionality isn't what it used to be, and what it used to be isn't what it presumed to be. Common sense is absent, mass demonstrations go unreported, and invisible ballots go missing. So maybe it's perfectly understandable why Americans should be trained to transfer their anxieties to Natalee Holloway or Olivia Newton John's boyfriend. There, their worries will be rewarded with neither demands nor expectations placed upon them. Unlike their political and even parapolitical concerns, which threaten to call people out of their armchairs, even if their worries haven't sharpened beyond a vague sense of dread.

What to do? Like Elvis, you can shoot out the television, but America has left the building. Left behind is an America-shaped void that a lot of people still want to call home, because it plays one on TV.

What do kids know?

While the world is asleep, you can look at it and weep
Few things you find are worthwhile
And though I don't ask for much, no material things to touch
Lord, protect my child - Bob Dylan

Sarah

Eight-year old Sarah Payne was snatched from a quiet street in West Sussex on July 1, 2000. Her body was found 16 days later, ten miles away. Paedophile Roy Whiting was convicted of her abduction and murder, and sentenced to life in prison.

Open and shut. Or maybe, both open and shut. Because there's this painting Sarah left behind, displayed in her classroom, which was reproduced in the London Sun four days after her disappearance: a man standing upon a 13-square checkered floor, between columns bearing Sarah's name. He wears what appears to be an apron of 33 studs, and holds an object in his left hand. His right sleeve is missing.



Investigator Ellis Taylor asks, "Where do we find black and white checkerboard floors, the number 13 and two columns? ... Who would wear an item of clothing with the right sleeve missing...wear aprons and revere the number 33?"

Maybe somewhere like this lodge, and someone like this brother:



Taylor writes:

There is a strong suggestion of paedophillia in this painting and it seems exceedingly strange that little Sarah met her death under just these circumstances. I ask you "Is this (when you consider Sarah's artwork) likely to have been the first time that she has suffered abuse?"

Taylor doesn't deny Whiting's guilt, but wonders whether the guilt deservedly rests wholly on his shoulders: "Is Roy Whiting carrying the can for others?"

"Rhonda"

In Cults that Kill, Larry Kahaner writes of eight-year old "Rhonda." Her mother contacted the juvenile division of the San Francisco Police Department because a young boy named Kevin had gone missing, and when Rhonda saw his image on television she said "My daddy and I picked up a little boy named Kevin the other day and he looks like him." (Rhonda's parents had been divorced for five years, and her father was already facing a charge of sexual abuse.) The mother asked investigators to speak with Rhonda, because she was "telling some really strange stories about devil worship and stuff."

Detective Sandi Gallant:

The story that stands out most in my mind was the one where she talks about being in a room and seeing a picture of a man with a moustache on the wall and seeing a swastika on the wall. She didn't call it that; she drew it for us. The people are in robes, and there are policemen present. She said they had blue uniforms, and she was sure they were policemen.

On this occasion, a man came into the room and brought with him a baby. The baby was given an injection. There is a fire going in the fireplace. They put the baby's legs in the fire. We just let her tell the story, but I did stop her every once in a while to ask questions. At that point, I said, "Did the baby make any noise?" She said, "The baby screamed."

Rhonda's father stood trial on a charge of incest. The jury wound up hung, six-six. "Afterward," says Detective Gallant, "some of the people on the jury said they had no problem with the sexual abuse, but they had a real difficult time with the Satanic ritual allegations."

In this drawing - apologies for the quality - two children are depicted lying on an altar as Rhonda kneels before them. ("all people is a round it!!") Her father is above, holding a baby's legs to a fire.



Rhonda told investigators her father placed her hands on a dagger, and forced her to stab the baby. "I saw worms come out," she said. Detective Gallant: "My first thought was that this kid was nuts. My second thought was: how is a kid going to know that the intestines - she described them as worms - are going to come out unless she actually has seen it or has seen something that looked like it?"

Below, Rhonda has drawn a dagger, flags and a swastika:



The latest from Ponchatoula reveals items inventoried from a Hosanna Church storage facility include weapons, flag pins, ministry pamphlets and a computer tower that "could be described as a copying station due to the multiple number of CD units it contains."

What do kids know?

Do you remember what Magnolia's child genius Stanley Spector tells himself, as the frogs begin to rain down? "This happens. This is something that happens."

Kids just know.

A multitude of sins

Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch:
The band is playing "Dixie," a man got his hand outstretched.
Could be the Fuhrer, could be the local priest.
You know sometimes, Satan, comes as a man of peace. - Bob Dylan

You'll have seen this by now - Pat Robertson on yesterday's 700 Club, describing his hope that the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, be met with extreme prejudice:

There was a popular coup that overthrew him. And what did the United States State Department do about it? Virtually nothing. And as a result, within about 48 hours that coup was broken; Chavez was back in power, but we had a chance to move in. He has destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and he's going to make that a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism all over the continent.

You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United ... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

I remember watching Pat Robertson, in the mid-1980s, solicit funds and prayers for his "Brother," Rios Montt, the fundamentalist monster of Guatemala. I don't recall hearing one word of censure towards his partner in gold profiteering, the former despot of Liberia, Charles Taylor.

America, in case you haven't noticed, has become a place of strange perversity. A place in which Robertson can fantasize aloud, before an impressionable audience of millions, about smuggling a nuclear device into the US Department of State, without fear of disappearing into the gulag from which Jose Padilla may never emerge. (And what was it he did, again?)

Disaffected Goths telling each other vampire stories - that's not Satanism. And Satanists, worshipping without doing injury to innocents or the world - that's not True Evil, however delicious it is to them to pretend otherwise.

In a world gone upside-down and inside-out, we're all dancing on the ceiling now. Don't be taken in by the surface of things. You want to see True Evil? Chip away at the paint darkening the windows of America's Hosanna Churches. You want to see a Wicked Man? Look at the desolate eyes peering out from behind his Halloween mask of Jesus.

It was Sinclair Lewis, in It Can't Happen Here, who predicted "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." Luciferianism, ritual abuse, child sacrifice - Hell came in a similar fashion.

"In the flash of this moment, you're the best of what we are." Bruce Cockburn wrote that 20 years ago about another place, and another people. In the flash of this moment, the best of what we are is Venezuelan. And may God damn those would kill it.

On the Job, on the Square

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level - Bob Dylan

It seems to me much of the speculation concerning the Stockwell atrocity still plays a version of Blame the Victim: What did Jean Charles de Menezes know that made him a target? Who did he know? If he wasn't a terrorist, what else was he that would provoke plainclothed Special Forces to restrain him and pump seven bullets in the back of his head?

Sometimes - often - it's in that direction the truth lies. (Poor Nick Berg, for instance, didn't simply get unlucky.) But I don't think so this time. This wasn't a hit to take out a Brazilian contract engineer. If it were, I imagine it would have been done either much more quietly, or with the foresight to plant damning evidence in his flat.

The very bloody and public murder seems a demonstration, but of what, and to whom? If there were a motive - if it wasn't just a bizarre sequence of tragic events (and anyone who's lived long enough should concede that such things happen, too) - then it has nothing to do with the unfortunate de Menezes. It must reside elsewhere, in a place that may seem to us like madness.

This is a British story, and Britain is a land that hasn't forgotten how weird it is. Drive a modern highway in southern England for any distance and you'll pass standing stones, ancient mounds, chalk figures and crop circles. More so than in the so-called "New World," secularism seems like a thin and flaking coat of paint slopped on some very old and strange things. This extends to crime stories, as elements of the occult often arise on British police blotters, but they just as often fade away, without resolution.

I think of The Guardian headline from last June, Children trafficked into Britain for sacrifice rituals; a BBC story from January, 2005: Dead sheep found in "occult star" ("the sheep were found on Sampford Spiney on Dartmoor with their necks broken and their bodies in a pattern sometimes associated with the occult"); and from last July: Occult link to drowned councillor. ("Detectives investigating the death of a Cornish parish councillor have confirmed they are looking at possible links with the occult. They believe 56-year-old Peter Solheim, from Carnkie, was interested in black magic.")

In 1996, a young environmentalist named Nicholas Gargari plunged screaming to his death from a cliff in the East Sussex town of Lewes. The walls of his home were found papered with torn Bible pages, and scrawled upon them was the message "God help me I have been cursed." (Though reputedly not in Gargari's hand.) Detectives learned from his friends that, shortly before his death, he had received a "cow's heart pierced with nails and a fetish entwined with a lock of human hair." Suspicion fell upon Gargari's unlikely friendship with a Satanic fascist named Alex Smith, who "attended the inquest and sat grinning at the bereaved sister and mother, displaying his inverted cross tattoos,and protected by a burly looking body guard." Under cross examination regarding his Far Right ties, Smith became verbally abusive, and needed to be physically ejected from the courtroom. Gargari's death could not be ruled either a murder or a suicide, and the Coroner recorded an open verdict.

In the same town of Lewes, six years earlier, a local scandal of sorts broke when it was revealed that a Satanist named Rosemary Barratt worked as a secretary inside Lewes Police Intelligence Unit. Barratt "had long fostered a deep interest in severe sado-masochistic sex, having relations with literally dozens of magical masters," seeking painful degradation while possessed by a spirit named "Absolon." Local Wiccan sources alleged that two police officers were members of a dangerous Satanic group conducting rituals atop limestone cliffs. The Chief Constable for Sussex, Paul Whitehouse, "refused to state whether he personally knew of Satanists inside his force, though he "did point out that it was not an offence to be a member of this type of organisation."

But before we go too far down that road, we should take a step back and examine another legal occult organization, because it's hard to talk seriously about the British police force without talking about Freemasonry. Unfortunately, for many people, it's hard to talk seriously about Freemasonry at all.

In his Inside the Brotherhood, Martin Short details the story of Chief Inspector Brian Woollard, whose distinguished career included 14-years with Special Branch attached to the Bomb Squad, royal protection, and armed personal detective to Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. Woollard's career effectively ended when he was posted to London's Fraud Squad. As Short writes, "it was there that he first sensed the power which Freemasonry seems to have over law enforcement in London."

Assigned to commercial fraud, Woollard was assigned a sensitive inquiry which involved tape recorded conversations describing police officers do favours for fellow Freemasons. Handing Woollard the case, his supervisor, whom Short calls "Grimm," said "I don't know which lodge you're in." When Woollard replied he belonged to no lodge, Grimm appeared surprised, and told him to complete the task in a week.

The recordings showed evidence of blackmail, and Woollard sent the tapes off for forensic testing. Grimm was apoplectic that the names of "innocent policeman" might be produced in court, and subjected Woollard to the tightest scrutiny of his career. Soon there was so much distrust the two officers could no longer work together, and Woollard moved to another section of the Fraud Branch. (Months later, he heard the case he left in Grimm's hands was closed with a decision of "no further action.") He was handed a case of public sector corruption involving inflated payments to building contractors, and soon found his work obstructed by police officers in his own department who belonged to the same lodge as subjects of his investigation in the building works department.

Woollard persisted until he was moved right out of the Fraud Branch, and was replaced on the corruption case by a Freemason. He was ordered by a Masonic supervisor to have a psychiatric evaluation regarding his delusion at seeing Masons everywhere. He was demoted to uniform, even though he hadn't had one for 20 years, and assigned to a station where all five officers above him in the chain of command were Freemasons. When some newspapers picked up the story of his humiliation by the Masonic fraternity, Woollard found his case files disappearing from a locked administrative room overnight. One long-serving, sympathetic constable reported that "everyone knew the theft was part of a Masonic plot to discredit Woollard."

Masonic plot. There are two words to get you laughed right out of the respectable Left, Right or Middle. But as it often goes with things many people find hilarious, when you peel away the ridiculous crust, there's not a great deal to laugh about.

In The Arcana of Freemasonry, Albert Churchward writes that "Freemasonry in all its degrees, from the first to the thirty-third, is the old Eschatology of the Egyptians - or the doctrine of final things":

The casual brother does not trouble his head about these things; the majority look upon Freemasonry merely as a sort of Brotherhood for social intercourse and charity. Up to a certain point these views are correct.... But there is a higher view. Freemasonry means much more than this. In Freemasonry we have many mysteries, handed down to us from remote ages.... This knowledge can be obtained only in one way, and that is by mastering the old writings of the Egyptians and the glyphs of the Stellar Mythos people...because by that, and that alone, can the origin and meaning of all that is attached to the term "Brotherhood of Freemasonry" be found.

The corruption and compromises Brian Woollard discovered could be said to be those of the "casual brothers." Petty crimes, unconcerned with Set and Horus and the doctrine of final things. But speculative Freemasonry is the core of the Craft, and its infusion of all layers of British authority presents opportunities for a different order of criminal behaviour.




In its investigation of David Myatt and the occult-fascist axis, the magazine Searchlight quotes a bulletin from Combat 18 which attempts to disavoy the encroachment of Satanists upon British neo-Nazism. "The Fuhrer would turn over in his grave," it reads. "Satanists are dirty scum who use this bullshit as a front for child molestation." The bulletin also called for the boycott of another Satanic fascist and Myatt associate, Stephen Cox, "alleging that he peddles illegal child porn movies."

Searchlight continues:

Cox, a close political ally of Myatt, runs the fraternity of Balder, another Satanist group, formed in 1990. Like the Order of Nine Angles, the Fraternity of Balder is dedicated to Aryan living and offers physical and mental training alongside an extensive political and Satanist library. During the 1980s Myatt lived alongside Myatt in Church Sutton and worked as a teacher.

Balder, which emphasizes male-bonding rituals, is the public face of Cox's Satanism. A more secret and sinister organisation is the Fraternitas Loki.... According to its own propaganda: the new order succeeding Ragnarok will not arrive without intervention of the Dark Twin: the ambivalent, bisexual, resourceful, daring and handsome Loki."

Its literature reveals the underground nature of its activities. "Unlike other matters in Balder the Fraternitas Loki is quite covert as was the case with the original Black Order of the closing years of WW2 and the esoteric war of post 1945 - a subterranean reality and unknown to all but a few.

Cox's portal to his more respectable front, the Arktion Federation, can be found here. The home page contains the "Important Notice" that, "although our work is concerned solely with European spirituality and heritage," Arktion is neither political nor racist. "If you read or hear of anything by an individual or group contradicting these facts please do not worry: it is merely an infantile and malicious lie by sad and sick minds. We pray they may recover from their illness and see the light of truth and human fellowship."

A link to the Fraternity of Balder - called the "Jarls of Baelder" - and information pertainting to the Fraternitas Loki is on the top menu.

Most interesting is Cox's lengthy biography. Along with "teacher," "author" and "philosopher," is listed "Freemason." And quite an accomplished Freemason he is:

[O]n the Summer Solstice of 1991 he was initiated into British Freemasonry in his Mother Lodge within the Masonic Province of Berkshire in the United Grand Lodge of England. Since then he has worked his way through the various officerships of the lodge to rise to have the honour to become the Worshipful Master of his Lodge in 1999-2000 (which is always a one year appointment in any lodge). In year 2000-2001 he served his Lodge as the Immediate Past Master. And then in 2001-2002, and again in 2002-2003 and for the 3rd., year 2003-2004 was appointed its Assistant Director of Ceremomies (a monthly duty), and its Preceptor of the Class of Instruction (a twice monthly duty).

He has written and delivered to the Class a number of unique lecture papers on the symbolism, mysteries, history and spiritual philosophy of different aspects of the three degrees of Craft Masonry with regards to the Emulation Ritual. He has also written a book of guidance for Stewards and newly raised Master Masons. He offers private tuition and meetings for officers of the Lodge to assist them in their progress and for newly made Masons and Stewards. Free tours of the Berskhire Masonic Centre and its lodge rooms and temple, with an introduction to Freemasonry, its history and symbolism are given by him to his students and friends from around Europe.

In October 2003 he was elected by the Lodge members to be Master Elect to serve as Worshipful Master of his lodge for a 2nd. time (for the year 2004-2005).

This suggests the hypothetical situation of a Masonic policeman being asked to investigate his own lodge's Satanic "Worshipful Master."

The Order of Nine Angles' A Gift for the Prince states that "human sacrifice is powerful magick":

The ritual death of an individual does two things: it releases energy (which can be directed, or stored - for example in a crystal) 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 it, it tends toward Chaos. This is simply another way of saying that human sacrifice furthers the work of Satan.

...

There are three methods of conducting an involuntary sacrifice: 1. by magickal means (e.g. the Death Ritual); 2. by some person or persons directly killing the sacrifice(s); 3. by assassination.

I haven't forgotten Jean Charles de Menezes. Nor that a motive to his killing, if there is one, most probably resides in a place that would seem to us like madness.

What we see in British Freemasonry is an occult organization with a political inclination towards the Right and even Far Right, with deep roots in both the Satanic and the law and order fraternities. One has the motive, the other has the means.

Perhaps sometimes, the occult elite's horrification of their dumb, useless eaters doesn't require the elegance of programmed assassins and useful idiots. Perhaps sometimes, it's as simple as walking up to a man and shooting him seven times in the head. Because random acts of violence are now public policy. And what energies are released by that? Which dark entities are drawn down?

Sometimes, all it takes is a handshake.

The Liminal State of the Nation

George Russell, "Bathers"

Apologies for the gap between posts; time's been short this weekend. A lengthier update is in the works, and should be posted early Monday AM.

In the meantime, there's "Cheney's 'Spoon-Benders' Pushing Nuclear Armageddon", "Unbelievable tales from London" and perhaps Irish mystic George Russell's 1918 The Candle of Vision.

In chapter 18, "The Architecture of Dream," Russell concludes his reflection on airships he sighted in the mid-1890s with this provocative thought:

As for these visions of airships and for many others I have been unable to place them even speculatively in any world or any century, and it must be so with the imaginations of many other people. But I think that when we begin speculation about these things it is the beginning of our wakening from the dream of life.

This - and I mean, everything - is taking on the buzz of a between time. A border between sleep and waking life, while our systems recalibrate to interpret new data. Not everyone is on the same clock: while many are waking, many others are falling asleep. And I'm not knocking it: sleep is a wonderful gift and defense mechanism, and there's much these days which offend our beautiful minds. If we can't process it, our senses are inclined to go offline. It takes a force of will to fight sleep. And sometimes, we may wish we hadn't.

In the liminal state, it's hard sometimes to tell who is doing which. Maybe that's not for us to know - I dislike the presumption of screaming Wake Up! Besides, soon enough, things should get too noisy for even the soundest sleeper. If things don't, then maybe it really has just been a bad dream after all.

Nine Angles of Separation

"Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left." - HP Lovecraft

(I'm indebted to "Qutb" and others on the Rigorous Intuition discussion board for this thread of several weeks ago, which should be consulted for further information.)

In the mid-90s, in an essay entitled "Death Before Dishonour," British neo-Nazi political philosopher David Myatt wrote:

To live and act like an Aryan - that is, with nobility of character - means upholding and living by this principle of Death Before Dishonour. Nothing else is more important - not personal happiness, not personal love, not personal comfort and wealth. This principle expresses the spirit, or ethos, of the Aryan warrior, and to be Aryan means to live like such a warrior, for however short a time.

Also, in "The Divine Revelation of Adolf Hitler":

Quintessentially, the revelation of Adolf Hitler has rendered all other religions obsolete. For this is the first and most important revelation of the cosmic Being - of the purpose of the cosmic Being. Other religions now belong to the past; they are historical curiosities.... All these religions are earth-bound; they do not seek to fulfil a Destiny among the stars, bringing more life, more consciousness.

At about the same time, Anton Long, Grandmaster of the British-based "traditional" Satanic group the Order of Nine Angles, wrote:

We uphold human culling as beneficial, for both the individual who does the culling (it being a character-building experience) and for our species in general, since culling by its nature removes the worthless and thus improves the stock. Naturally, there are proper ways to choose who is to be culled - each victim is chosen because they have shown themselves to be suitable. They are never chosen at random, as they are never "innocent."

Two years ago, in "The Perspective of Islam," radical theoretician and al Qaeda apologist Abdul Aziz wrote:

The majority of Westerners condemn martyrdom operations on the basis of the Western perspective, using Western criteria, failing to understand the Muslim belief that this life of ours is only a means, a test, and thus failing to understand that many Muslims are willing to give up their own lives in order to do their Islamic duty, trusting as these Muslims do in the judgement of Allah.... Our life here on this planet we call Earth is only an opportunity - never to return - to gain entry into Jannah and that one of the best means to gain such entry is to strive, and if necessary die, in the Cause of Allah.

What do these people have in common? Everything. They - and many more, besides - are the same person. Let's call him, for simplicity's sake, David Myatt. But what he is, there's nothing simple about that.



Combat 18 is a neo-Nazi org formed in 1991 to provide hooligan muscle for the racist British National Party. (Its "18" numerically represents "AH," the initials of Adolph Hitler.) Myatt has described himself as its political philosopher.

There's much suspicion, on the both the left and right, that Combat 18 "was created by Britain's internal security service MI5 to discredit the BNP while acting as a honey trap, or sting operation, designed to attract the most violent neo-Nazis in Britain into a single organization, where they could be monitored more easily." Its leader, Charlie Sargent, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1997 for the murder of another member, was also an alleged Special Branch informant.

Combat 18 splintered, with Myatt founding the most radical faction, the National Socialist Movement, which remained loyal to purported informant Sargent.

In 1999 NSM member David Copeland conducted a racist nail-bombing campaign which killed three people and injured 129. Myatt's "A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution" was particularly formative to Copeland's thinking. In a profile of Copeland, BBC's Panorama determined:

...the man whose ideas had more influence than most on Copeland was David Myatt from Worcestershire, founder member of the NSM and its first leader. He once said the Nazi movement needed people "prepared to fight, prepared to get their hands dirty, and perhaps spill some blood."

And though Combat 18 splintered under suspicion of members' motives and loyalties, it isn't quite finished yet being a bloody nuisance. A headline yesterday from Northern Ireland (where Combat 18 is reputed to be used by MI5 to infiltrate Loyalist paramilitaries): Neo-Nazis have threatened me, says Ulster assembly member John Dallat, who has received threats from Combat 18 to burn down his house and torch his office.



The Hexagon archives records an encounter with the unnamed leader of the "Order of Nine Angles" - apparently Myatt - who supposedly co-authored a book with associate "Christos Beest" which likened the ONA "to a modern equivalent of the German Thule Society, precursor of the Nazi Party and responsible for a number of assassinations of dissenters...the reader is lead to believe that the group are busy 'culling human dross.'"

Hexagon, while refusing to disclose the name of the leader, found "a nucleus of four middle aged men surrounded by up to ten younger aspiring acolytes, again all male. The group uses homosexual rites and although they may well have contact with the far right are highly unlikely to be capable of carrying out numerous murders as darkly hinted at."

In The Song of a Satanist, "Stephen Brown" - yet another Myatt pseudonym - writes:

Most Satanists cannot publish an autobiography, or even have a biography which relates their life in detail while they still live, for the simple reason that it would probably render them liable to prosecution by those asinine guardians of the even more stupid system of 'Law'. (Plus the fact that most wish to continue their sinister esoteric work in secret, to aid the sinister dialectic.) If this threat does not exist, then their life has not been Satanic enough.

Another demonstration of the convergence of fascism and occultism is found in the ONA's Temple 88, which is described as an instantiation of the "aryanist and national-socialist ideas/ideals of the Order of Nine Angles." The writings of "Temple 88" are recommended for higher initiates, having "reached the seventh stage (Saturn) of the septenary Tree of Wyrd," who are "assumed to be able to judge and understand why the usage of national-socialism and aryanism is implemented in the Order of Nine Angles ideological structure."

And what are the Nine Angles? A ceremonial means to manifest the "Dark Gods." And perhaps not surprisingly, here's where things get Lovecraftian:

The details that Lovecraft gives regarding 'calls' and rites are mostly fanciful and only in a few places does he inadvertently reveal the truth - for example, in his mention of the trapezohedron and 'Azathoth'. The key to travel along the passages between the star nexions is the Nine Angles and the key to the Nine Angles is the crystal tetrahedron which is activated by voice vibration. 'Azathoth' as described by Lovecraft, is a symbolic and distorted re-presentation of the intersection, in acausal space-time, of these astral star passages: a kind of galactic vortex or node. Those who journey there never return the same. Along the star passages the shells of long dead civilizations lie strewn. The Nine Angles (the key to contact both physical and astral) are re-presented in the septenary Star Game and it is through this symbolic re-presentation that the magick of the Dark Gods is made manifest. The rest, to the uninitiated, is sheer terror.

(Lt Col Michael Aquino has authored the Lovecraftian "Ceremony of the Nine Angles" for the Temple of Set, but disavows Myatt and the ONA's public embrace of human sacrifice.)

And since we've come this far, let's remind ourselves: according to the ONA, where do these "Dark Gods" reside?

The acausal universe itself may be described as that aspect of the cosmos bounded by acausal time and possessing more than three spatial dimenions; the causal universe may be described as that aspect of the cosmos bounded by causal, or linear, time and possessing three spatial dimensions at right angles to each other. The entities known to esoteric tradition as the Dark Gods are beings which exist in the acausal universe. Other such beings probably exist in the acausal realm, but the Dark Gods are known to us through having, at various times in our evolution, 'intruded' into our spatial universe.

As I've noted in an earlier post, the "acausal universe" recalls Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds, in which he writes that "anyone who can tap into the fourth spatial dimension (or what is today called the fifth dimension, with time being the fourth) can indeed become invisible, and can even assume the powers normally ascribed to ghosts and gods." And interestingly, one of the things David Myatt may be said to be with some assurance is a student of physics.



In 2000 Myatt reputedly converted to Islam, and quickly became an advocate for al Qaeda "martyrdom operations." Though as he had often done, Myatt hid his previous associations by assuming an alias. He became "Abdul Aziz."

This story from February 16, 2003, entitled "Midland Nazi turns to Islam," was one of the first to make the connection between the "Koranic scholar," the neo-Nazi and the occultist:

A "Satanic Fuhrer" who urged neo-Nazis to fight a race war has turned full circle to become an Islamic fundamentalist.

Midland-based David Myatt, 51, was the political guru behind white supremacist group Combat 18 and has been the leading hardline Nazi intellectual in Britain since the 1960s.

Now the self-confessed Pagan and Adolf Hitler worshipper hails al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden as his inspiration and praises the World Trade Center attacks as acts of heroism...supporting suicide missions and urging young Muslims to take up Jihad.

"Turning full circle" always sounded to me like a lot of fuss to create the appearance of motion, while returning to one's starting point.



Is Myatt an agent provocateur, a shit-disturber who can't settle upon a radical philosophy, something more, or something less? It's difficult to assess motive, but consider that he has been arrested numerous times for such things as writing and disseminating "practical terrorist guides" on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. These cases have always been dropped due to "lack of evidence." Does he enjoy protection? The record is suggestive that he does. And if it appears so, then we should ask the next question: Why?

One Muslim internet user told the Sunday Mercury that Myatt, who has an IQ of 187, had convinced other users he was an Islamic scholar with his eloquent arguments backed with Koranic verses. He said: "After September 11 Abdul Aziz's messages started to become more extreme.

"But because he wrote with authority, many less-knowledgeable Muslims thought he was a holy man and began supporting his fundamentalist views. When his true identity was revealed by other users on the site, he changed his online name to Abdul bin Aziz and then al Haqq."

Myatt may seem to have flitted from one politico-religious philosophy to another, but there is a terrible thread of continuity and rigour through his life and writings that suggests he is much more than a disingenuous provocateur. Naziism and Islamicism have served, in turn, as modalities of disruption for what remains at core an occult working to sow general chaos and division - the necessary passage of "Helter Skelter" to break down the Old Order, before the founding of the New.

So again: whose interests are served by there being a David Myatt? Is he is own man - or men - or does he belong to someone else? Or is it something else - an intelligence service perhaps, or something, say, acausal?

Doom Days

Whatever's coming, there's no place else to go
Waiting for the moon to show - Bruce Cockburn

Remember William Shatner as Don, the young husband, in the Twilight Zone episode "Nick of Time"? He and his wife grab a booth in the diner of a strange town while their car is being repaired. A devil-headed, coin-operated "Mystic Seer" sits on the table. Don asks it, light-heartedly, if anything interesting ever happens around here, and it answers with a card that reads "It is quite possible." He asks more pointed questions, and with each vague answer that yet seems uncannily accurate, Don freezes with fear and obsession. He can't move.

I thought of it for some reason yesterday morning, reading that The Charleston Post and Courier has picked up the "nuke drill to go live" story:

For the past week, conspiracy theorists have been spinning an elaborate tale of how the U.S. government will turn a terrorism drill in Charleston into a nuclear attack. Why? To give the country a reason to invade Iran, of course.

If this makes no apparent sense, then your other car isn't a black helicopter, and you've never mistaken Crab Bank at low tide for a grassy knoll.

...

One Web site says the idea is that the exercise was intended to "go live" and be used for cover for a real attack. For proof, they say terrorism drills were planned in the United States on 9/11 and in London on 7/7.

Will an American city burn this summer? It is quite possible. That's as definitive as our Magic 8 Ball gets about such matters. Will the Fort Monroe exercise "go live"? It is quite unlikely. Especially now.

When the other shoe drops, it probably won't be the one we're expecting. But you know what? After all our studious anticipation, we'll know enough to know it's a shoe, and who dropped it. And there's also this: there is the possibility that public expectation - raising our own terror alert over "chatter," suspicious movements and exercises - could possibly forestall synthetic terror events. Why not? It's the same logic Tom Ridge applied to measure the success of Homeland Security. It can never be verified but I have to wonder what might have not happened if, before 7/7, someone had got wind of the drills and posted "Look out, London: the morning of July 7 there's an 'anti-terror' simulation of simultaneous detonations of three bombs at the following stations." (A "fear-mongerer" might have added "OMG, Giuliani's going to be in town!") If the news of the drill had entered public conciousness beforehand to the degree that Fort Monroe's drill has in Charleston - this was a front page story - it's difficult to imagine the bombings proceeding as planned. And so, when no bombs exploded, those who had sounded the alarm would likely think they'd gotten excited over nothing, and might be reticent to do the same again. In such a scenario, this is the price of success: ignorance.

So we shouldn't be shy on Thursday, after the world hasn't blown up more than usual on Wednesday, about sharing what we see, next time we see an ominous convergance of opportunities. It's not forecasting - we've already done that to the limits of our knowledge when we say Americans can expect 90% probability of more of the same - it's saying This is probably nothing, but - Heads up. We're not crying wolf here. After all, we know there is a wolf, and we know him well enough to know he'll strike again when he has the chance and the need. But perhaps, the closer we observe him, and the more vocal we are about it, the more we reduce his chances. His need - there's not much we can do about that.

There may be some magical thinking involved in this. If you don't want doomsday to come, assign a date to it. But given the times, we could do worse.

Now go back to the diner in the Twilight Zone. Do you see Don's problem? He's been overwhelmed, to the point of paralysis, by what might be. Can you relate? Sometimes I feel like I've spent the past four years in that booth, asking questions - the Mystic Seer is now cable-ready - and catching my breath at some answers. Don gave his power to the little box, rather than gain power - that is, true knowledge - from it. And much of the problem is the quality, and integrity, of the "Mystic Seer." Including, and especially, "inside sources."

"Mystic Seers" of a sort are a common feature of UFO close encounters. Contactees often report being presented with confusing apocalyptic imagery, sometimes seemingly projected onto a screen, the meaning of which they don't understand. They are assured they will know when the time comes, and that when the time comes, they'll know what to do.

But as often noted in earlier posts, whether the occupants of a particular UFO are genuine alien entities or black ops technicians, their conduct and communication appears to be both tricksterish and disinformative. While many minor "prophecies" may be said to be fulfilled, the promised Transformative Event - armaggedon or ascension to a higher plane of Being - always seems to recede into the future. The date eludes us.

"The Aviary, the Aquarium, and Eschatology" is a nearly 10-year old essay by Vince Johnson, a UFOlogist and self-described "unabashed secular humanist," who nevertheless concedes that non-secular aspects of the phenomenon merit attention. For instance, he writes of data received from Dan Smith, a "theologically-oriented researcher" reputed to have congressional and intelligence sources privy to "the grave concern by high government officials about an impending metaphysical catastrophe." Most fascinating, Johnson quotes an extract from a paper by Ray Boeche, a Lincoln, Nebraska, theologian and Fortean researcher.

Boeche writes:

To all interested researchers:

The following is an edited version of material given to me in late 1991 - early 1992, by two scientists who claim to be working in weapons research and development for the Department of Defense.

I am not in a position to comment on the truthfulness or accuracy of the information. The two men who have spoken to me do, in fact, exist, and for all intents and purposes seem to be who and what they claim. The very nature of the claims makes verification difficult, if not impossible.

Divulging this information was the result of a moral dilemma, when these two individuals, both Christians, became alarmed at the course their research efforts into psychotronic weapons was taking under the direction of their (unnamed) superiors. They described an obsessive effort to contact and attempt to control what they referred to as "non-human intelligences" (NHI), and to harness these NHI for military and intelligence uses.

The efforts had progressed well past attempts at practical applications of David Bohm's theories, and had grown to encompass the use of, according to their statements, "satanic rituals / ritual magic along the lines of that espoused by Aleister Crowley, including human sacrifices."

These gentlemen stated their concerns that, even when they were apparently able to harness or channel these forces or abilities for "good" uses, the force would "turn," and ultimately all of those subjects involved suffered varying degrees of negative effects from contact with these forces. They are convinced that what is being tapped into in all instances is evil, and that this research should cease.

At this point, I should be forgiven for exclaiming "Whoomp, there it is!" since what these two DoD scientists told Boeche 14 years ago conforms with my working hypothesis of the convergence of satanic ritual, UFOs and military intelligence. And yet, do you hear me whoomping? It's always important to question the integrity of official sources, but I think it's most important when they appear to tell us what we want to hear.

Johnson writes that Boeche, smartly, "was at a loss to explain why the two DoD scientists were still working on projects they found to be morally repugnant, and if they really wanted to blow the whistle on this activity, why did they reveal it to an obscure UFOlogist and not The New York Times or "Nightline." Was it disinformation? If so, what was the motivation?

Boeche's contacts also supplied a list of victims of psychotronic weapons experiments. (For instance: "Female, white, 20-25 yr., allegedly death by remotely transmitting and creating head trauma equivalent to crushing of right anteriorportion of the skull.") For me, intuitively, this list does not have the ring of truth, as does the rest, since I've already seen evidence for the rest from so many different sides. And since the best disinformation is mostly truth, if this communication were disinformative, could this addition have been the poison pill to misdirect a researcher already sniffing around the Military Occult Complex? (It is quite possible, says the Mystic Seer.)

Johnson, by the way, adds: "if there really is such a thing as 'black magic,' and government scientists are experimenting with it, I suspect that they could be blindly running the same risks in dealing with such unknown forces as the 19th-century scientists who thought nothing of casually handling radium and other radioactive materials."

Stranger things have happened. And don't you just hate that?

The steam is turned on

Something is burning, baby, are you aware? - Bob Dylan

No time for a proper post today, but I want to throw this out there. From Berlin Diary, this is William Shirer's journal entry for August 10, 1939:

How completely isolated a world the German people live in. A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it. Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland over Danzig, here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is being maintained. (Not that it surprises me, but when you are away for a while, you forget.) What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion, and so forth. This is the Germany of last September when the steam was turned on Czechoslavakia.

For perverse perversion of the truth, this is good. You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.

"It is time for European nations to show their mettle" is the headline of today's editiorial from The Decatur Daily: Mettle, naturally, with respect to the clear and present danger of Iran's hypothetical future aggression. (Some headlines Shirer quotes from the summer of 1939: "Poland - the runner amok against peace and right in Europe" and "Warsaw threatens bombardment of Danzig - unbelievable agitation of the Polish arch-madness.") The Decatur editorialist remarks that "the United States should not have a monopoly on the prevention of wars of mass destruction." (Unspoken, of course, is that it should have a veto.) And if it takes tactical nuclear weapons to prevent such a war, then so be it. "All options," once again, are on the table. And just as with Iraq, the military option is pegged the reluctant "last resort."

Michael Ruppert is persuaded an Iran strike is not going to happen, and its threat serves as a distraction. Myself, I'm persuaded Ruppert's skillset makes him an excellent investigator, but not a particularly good forecaster. (In 2003 he wrote that Bush would be impeached "just as surely as" was Nixon.) Shirer wrote in his journal that most Germans with whom he spoke were opposed to the war, feared it, and didn't really expect it to come. But it came. It only takes a few people in key positions to make a war happen, regardless of how insane a misadventure it seems to everyone else. Those people are still there, and when positions open, they are filled with their own kind. I've seen nothing to suggest that real men no longer want to go to Tehran.

As Shirer could have written, This is the America of 2003, when the steam was turned on Iraq.

There's a Law

I fell with my angel down the chain of command
There's a Law, there's an Arm, there's a Hand - Leonard Cohen

There's lots of talk, as there should be these days, about Martial Law, because it's coming to America just as surely as another attack. I think we can say that safely now, if we haven't been saying it already for years. In 2003, General Tommy Franks said he doubted that the Constitution would survive a WMD attack. The doubts should have since been erased: "the US military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States.... [T]he new plans provide for the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations."

But when it comes, will Americans recognize it?

I don't know if you recall it, but I remember an old SCTV episode parodying a New Year's Eve special for 1984. Everything was normal until the stroke of midnight. Then suddenly, the message: "Please Stand By." When programming resumed it was drab, mad and Orwellian: Eugene Levy, for instance, hosting a game show called Doublethink, in which contestants try to guess whether choco rations have gone up or down, for the prizes of razor blades and shoe laces.

Say "Martial Law" to people, and often their first thought is detainment: multitudes of dissenters being hauled off to FEMA camps, disappearing into an American Gulag. For others, it's soldiers in the streets. For some, military courts.

I'm not denying the essence of those fears - the Gulag is already real enough for Jose Padilla - but that's my point: the fears have already been realized. Padilla and many others have vanished. The soldiers are in the streets. A formal declaration of martial law seems almost a quaint nod to constitutional formalities, when we consider the violence these people have already done to the constitution.

There will be no "Please Stand By" for America. No on/off toggle for totalitarianism will be thrown with Martial Law, and those expecting one may find themselves saying "Hey, this isn't so bad." America is passing through gradations of grey, the next nearly indistinguishable from the last. It's only in stepping back, in comparing now to then - five years ago; 10, 25 or 50 - that you realize how your eyes have adjusted to the dark.

After the shock of a mass casuality event, and during the aftershocks of martial law, what will be the chief tone Homeland Security will want to set? It will be reassurance. Why? Because FEMA may have many camps, but it doesn't have enough to hold everyone. For the few to maintain power, the many need to participate in their own subjugation. They must be self-contained. And so, Michael Chertoff will attempt to alleviate the psychological sting of martial law, while he rubs the poison in, and invite Americans to "go about their business." (Privacy fears unjustified, Chertoff said this week.) It will be a soft sell of "temporary" measures, dictated by a supposed self-necessity. Americans will be encouraged to pretend that things are normal, or normal enough, and that the measures, while serious and unfortunate, don't affect them. And to keep it that way, many will watch what they say and watch what they do, and become detainees under self-monitored house arrest.

And this is going to happen, unless something else happens, fast. What that might be doesn't particularly matter. But to forestall their intention it must be as big as their own, and as beautiful as theirs is bloody.

Thursday the FBI issued a warning to police that al Qaeda - the CIA's "Database," the late Robin Cook called it, a month before his untimely death - may attempt to use "fuel trucks as weapons to attack Los Angeles, New York and Chicago." Just the day before, a truck carrying explosives was vaporized, and cratered a highway in Utah. I wonder in which direction it was heading?

Things go sliding

Things are going to slide in all directions
Won't be nothing you can measure anymore - Leonard Cohen

Is this what it's like when things fly apart?

90 miles an hour down a dead-end street. That's what it feels like I'm doing, just reading the news today. Oh, boy.

There's four-star General Kevin P. Byrnes, near retirement, suddenly relieved as commander of US Army Training and Doctrine Command, headquartered at Fort Monroe, Virgina. The cause was initially vaguely described as "personal conduct," and later refined to "sexual misconduct."

Where's the story? Four-star generals are not relieved for such reasons. Not for any reason, for that matter: "an Army spokeswoman...said records...show no cases in recent history in which a four-star general has been relieved of duty for disciplinary reasons." Listening to Kay Griggs (and though I have problems with some of her analysis, I still find her find-hand testimony convincing and corroborative of what we've learned elsewhere), sexual misconduct would seem to be a common rite of passage up the chain of command in the US military. It's the accusation, and not the practice, which leaves an indelible stain upon a reputation.

So why Byrnes? The Pentagon does not lightly make examples of its officer corp, let alone its four-star generals. As "glooperoo" writes on the RI forum, Byrnes commanded "the military institutions associated with formulating standards of conduct and training soldiers in that conduct." And one of the top military intelligence officers in Iraq when the scandal of Abu Ghraib broke, Major General Barbara G. Fast, recently took command of the US Army Intelligence Center, which operates under the authority of Byrnes' former US Army Training and Doctrine Command.

I don't know what Byrnes' dismissal means, but I know it doesn't mean what it says. And when generals' heads start rolling, it usually means some folks in civvies have gone way beyond nervous.

And if that's not enough, Fort Monroe is holding a little exercise this month:

FORT MONROE, Va. -- Here’s the scenario…A seafaring vessel transporting a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the warhead off the ship to detonate it. Is this really a possibility?

Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) here is planning its next exercise on the premise that this crisis is indeed plausible.

Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried out as an internal command post exercise.

And there's this modified, limited hang-out with a half-twist: a classified intelligence unit called "Able Danger" identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al Qaeda cell in 1999, but "failed to tell law enforcement." Former co-chair of the Kean Commission, Bush family fixer Lee Hamilton, huffs that "had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation." It always seems too little, and then suddenly, it's too late.

In these perverse times, officially bumping back the date of recognition for Atta et al is viewed as good news for the Bush camp, because hey, 9/11's back, but now it's Bill Clinton's fault. (Clinton's fault, Bush's fault: these aren't serious positions. The fault lies far deeper, beneath the sham spectacle of "partisan politics," and only a few heads, such as Dick Cheney's, ever come bubbling to the surface of public life.) Coincidentally, it was Tommy Franks, mastermind of Osama bin Laden's Tora Bora getaway, who commanded Able Danger, and let Atta take his own powder.

Cascading novelty and truth seepage (the CIA told the Dutch to back off bombmaker Abdul Khan). Crises converging upon a singularity (Iran removes the remaining UN seals on its Isfahan nuclear facility), while a man who really likes the Longhorns is beseiged in his bolt hole by one mother's holy fury.

Is it starting to feel a lot like 2012, or what?

Seeing things, saying things

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it. - Bob Dylan

Talk isn't cheap, not if you have something to say that most folks don't want to hear.

It seems a North American condition that many consumers of accounts of High Weirdness and conspiracy want the material to be for entertainment purposes only. They become campfire tales intended to raise goosebumps, but all that follows the telling is the falling asleep. What's more, unless people know enough to seek out the more serious and harder-to-find treatments of the subjects, they will know only such winking bastardizations. If you've ever seen a US network documentary on UFOs or the JFK assassination you may know what I mean.

Other than our time and attention, an entertainment may make no further demands upon us. And that's where most people seem happy to leave issues of the paranormal and parahistory. Thrill me, scare me, but don't change me. But a sincere telling of an honest account contains a uneasy challenge: If this could be true, what does it do to my assumptions of the world?

August 21 will mark the 50th anniversary of the "Hopkinsville Incident." You probably know about it, even if you don't think you do. About 7 PM Billy Ray Taylor, a guest of the Sutton family, went to the well behind the Sutton farmhouse to draw some water. He ran inside and excitedly reported a silvery saucer shooting flames "all the colors of the rainbow" had passed over head, stopped, and descended into a gully 300 feet behind the farm. No one took him seriously; no one even went outside to take a look.

Then, about an hour later, all hell broke loose.

[T]he family dog began to bark loudly outside. As customary in this rural area, Lucky and Billy quickly went outside to find the reason of the dog's concern. The dog actually hid under the house and was not seen anymore that evening. At a short distance from the front door, both men were stopped dead in their tracks by the sight of a glowing hovering light, which came towards them and allowed them to see that it was in fact a 3 and a half feet tall creature, advancing towards them with hands up, as if to surrender. The bizarre creature would be described as having "two large eyes with a yellow glow, more on the sides than in the human face, a long thin mouth, large bat-like ears, thin short legs, and unusually long arms with large hands ending in claws."

From Billy Ray's description; Police Chief Russell Greenwell


Both men instinctively unloaded their shotguns at the entity, no farther than 20 feet from them. Though they said there was no way they could have missed it, it merely "did a back flip, stood up again, and fled into the woods."

No sooner had the two men reentered the house before the creature, or another like it, appeared at a window. They took a shot at him, leaving a blast hole through the screen. They ran back outside to see if the creature was dead, but found no trace of it. Standing at the front of the house, the men were terrified by a clawed hand reaching down from the roof in an attempt to touch them. Again, they shot, but the being simply floated to the ground, and scurried into the cover of the woods. The two men sought the protection of the house again, only to find themselves under siege from these little men. For a time, the entities seemed to tease the family, appearing from one window to another. Taking pot shots through the windows and walls, their weapons seemed totally ineffective against the creatures.

After three hours of fear turning into sheer panic, with three children crying or shrieking, the Sutton family decided to make a break from the house, and get help at the Police station at Hopkinsville. The farm was located nearer to Kelly, but the nearest police were in Hopkinsville. Family members took two vehicles to the Police Station in Hopkinsville, and reported their strange tale to Sheriff Russell Greenwell. Finally persuading the policemen that they were not joking, the policemen agreed to visit the Sutton house. Arriving at the farm, police found no trace of the creatures, but did find numerous bullet and rifle holes in the windows and walls. Greenwell was in charge of the twenty plus officers at the scene, and reported that the Suttons seemed sober, and were genuinely frightened by something. After a canvas of the neighborhood, reports were entered of the "hearing of shots being fired," and the observation of "lights in the sky."

The police left the farm at approximately 2:15 AM, having found no hard evidence of the creatures, though "a luminous patch of grass was observed where one of the creatures was shot off a fence." Police Chief Russell Greenwell later stated that he and other investigators sensed a "weird feeling" to the area that night, and said that "something scared those people. Something beyond reason" Soon after, "Mrs. Lankford was lying in bed watching the window when she noticed a weird glow; the glow was one of the creatures staring inward with its hands on the window screen. Calling quietly to the rest of the family, she remained perfectly calm. Lucky Sutton, however, grabbed his gun and again shot at the creature through the screen. No effect. The creatures continued to make their appearance throughout the rest of the night, never doing anything overtly hostile and only seeming to show curiosity. The last creature was seen at half an hour before sunrise, at about 5:15 AM."

A "bowl-shaped depression" is still visible in the gully where the object was said to have landed. Dorris McCor, who now lives at the site (the farmhouse has long since been demolished), says "Back when we were kids nothing ever grew on that spot... no weeds or trees or nothing. It hasn't been until the last several years that anything started growing over it again."

The entities, described as "shining, as though nickel-plated," rapidly became known as "little green men." The sober family, whose sincerity and inarticulate trauma impressed investigating officers, was quickly characterized as a clan of drunken hillbillies: ur-caricatures for lazy skeptics to skewer.

One official who had interviewed the family the night of the event, concluding "No evidence of intoxication. Witnesses deemed credible. Consider as possible sighting," returned a few months later, "partly out of curiosity, partly because I felt guilt for being part of this family's nightmare":

Billy Ray refused to talk to me. It seems his reputation in the town had been ruined, going from a well respected Baptist to a shunned alcoholic. He was held up as an example of what happens to people who tell the truth. After talking to other family members, I was hesitantly told that the aliens came back that same night, almost seeming to taunt the family before leaving. The family was confused as to why it was being torn apart by the same people it went to for help. I never spoke to or heard from them again.

I think about this now as I pass though Kentucky on my way back out. I never saw the official report from that night again. It doesn't exist. 41 years have passed, the document can no longer be classified, and so it is dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Fair is foul, and foul is fair in America. Just don't get in the way.

Hopkinsville, having hounded the family in life, now observes the occasion of their trauma with a "little green men" festival. ("What actually occurred on that fateful night is still a mystery, but we are determined to celebrate its occurrence.") Events scheduled include a screening of Plan Nine from Outer Space, a Kids' alien costume competition and an "Out Of This World" Karaoke Contest.

(And by the way, it is silly to think of these clawed, naked creatures as sophisticated space travellers. If that's the only answer besides hoax or hysteria than the community may as well make sport of it. But this story alone should debunk the assumption that UFOs must be of extraterrestrial origin. The entities' arrival at the Sutton farmhouse was not a technological achievement; it was a daemonic fact. And perhaps, since they were not seen departing or entering the UFO, we shouldn't assume they arrived upon it. Maybe it's more esoteric than that: could the UFO's own violation of our reality have somehow called forth the entities to rush into the gap it had momentarily created? And note: like all other UFO observations, Billy Ray Taylor's was of an aerial phenomenon - they are seen in the near atmosphere, not outer space. So maybe the creatures weren't so far from home after all. Maybe in some sense, given the weird heritage Peter Levenda documents for that part of America in Sinister Forces, they were already home.)

Of course, things needn't get this weird before victims and witnesses become convinced that things will go easier for them if they would just shut up.

In August of 1965, Green Beret Lt Col Daniel Marvin, author of Expendable Elite, and then a captain known as "Dangerous Dan," was asked by his commanding officier to meet a CIA official outside the headquarters of the 6th Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Another Special Forces captain, also trained in assassination, joined them outside the building.

"First the Company man took me aside," Marvin says in Kent Heiner's Without Smoking Gun, "showed me his badge, his ID card. Then he asked me if I would volunteer to kill a man, a United States citizen, a naval officer, for treason and espionage." Marvin was due for a tour in Vietnam, and assumed he was being asked to kill an American overseas. He agreed - he admits he "had a reputation," but will neither confirm or deny that he'd previously carried out such assignments - and asked for the name. Lieutenant Commander William Pitzer, he was told, and it was imperative he be terminated before his forthcoming retirement. As the conversation progressed, Marvin learned that Pitzer was stationed in the United States. At Bethesda's National Naval Medical Center, where John F Kennedy's autoposy had been performed.

Dan Marvin and William Pitzer


Marvin says that the Agency official was obviously irritated that the target's name had been disclosed to a man who no longer had an operational "need to know." He also says that the man knew he could count on Marvin to "forget" both his name and Pitzer's. The official then turned around and headed [toward the other captain], who had been waiting some 40 feet away, just out of earshot.

On the evening of October 29, 1966, Lt. Commander Pitzer was found dead in Bethesda's Naval Medical School of a gunshot wound to the right temple. The death was quickly judged a suicide.

Why did the CIA believe it had just cause to kill the man?

A few days after the [Kennedy] assassination, a [Bethesda] colleague, Dennis D. David, found Pitzer working on a 16-mm film, slides and black and white photos of the Kennedy autopsy. David noted that those materials showed what appeared to be an entry wound in the right frontal area with a corresponding exit wound in the lower rear of the skull.

Jerrol F. Custer, an X-ray technician at the hospital, later stated that Pitzer had photographed the proceedings, including the military men who attended the Kennedy autopsy. It was also rumoured that Pitzer had copies of Kennedy's autopsy photographs.

Needless to say, the whereabouts of Pizter's rumoured photographs and film is unknown.

The Special Forces Association is reportedly mounting a campaign against Marvin and his publisher Trine Day, because it takes exception to his breaking the fraternity's omerta. on dirty secrets which are supposed to remain hidden even within the world of black ops. In the introduction to Without Smoking Gun Marvin writes that "the compartmentalization of various aspects of covert operations impairs every effort to pull all the pieces of the puzzle together.... Super-secret - and sometimes heinous - activities on behalf of our government are thereby masked, permitting total independance of operations [and] affording higher authority total immunity from prosecution."

When you learn some big scary truth about the world, it's always prudent to keep it to yourself. Even better: forget about it. This is as true for a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel who learns of a domestic hit, as it is for a family in rural Kentucky beseiged by creatures which should not exist, as it is for a naval officer who by chance had hard evidence that Kennedy's head wounds did not match the official autopsy report. It's only because some people have chosen to talk regardless, sacrificing their careers, their respect and their lives, that we know as much as we do.

Seeing things and remaining quiet about them will change nothing, not even ourselves. But saying things - having the courage to testify to our own forbidden knowledge - could be the way the world changes.

Dem Bones, Dem Bones

From Alexandra Robbins' Secrets of the Tomb:

One of President Bush's first appointments was 1968 Bones clubmate Robert D McCallum, Jr, to the $125,700-per-year position of assistant Attorney General, civil division, the largest litigation component in the Justice Department. The division represents the federal government in significant domestic and policy cases such as fraud, international trade, patents, bankruptcies, and foreign litigation.

You've probably already seen the morning buzz that McCallum is likely to be named acting deputy Attorney General, which will make him - how 'bout that? - the only official with oversight of special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's Plame investigation, the scope of which is reputed to have broadened beyond Plame, as that single thread is deeply woven into the administration's tapestry of crimes.

This presents an interesting quandry for the Democrats who, by nature or necessity of groupthink, treated Skull and Bones as an unspeakable non-issue during the unaccountable ascension and performance of a certain Bonesman, class of '66, who assured them he had their backs. Those who did not snap to their senses with Kerry's concession 12 or so hours after more violence was done to the myth of representative government are unlikely now to even recognize their contradictions, even as they begin bloviating freely about how awfully mysterious and suspicious it seems.

Even though Bush's falling numbers register a consensus dissastifaction with his "New Reality," there is still a dominant Crisis? What Crisis? mentality as America continues its catastrophic sleepwalk. Would another Saturday Night Massacre wake it up? So many massacres have failed to, we shouldn't hold our breath. We should scream.

The hour when the ship comes in

Like the stillness in the wind
'Fore the hurricane begins
The hour when the ship comes in - Bob Dylan

There's something about Hope, that for me, doesn't go down easily, and burns on the way back up.

It's the pasturized, hollowed-out passivity to it - or what passes for it - that makes me scrunch up my lips and shake my head Hell no. It's the same idle dream that tricksters and daemons, both human and other than human, have encouraged us to entertain for millenia. It's Maitreya; it's Hillary in '08; it's our benevolent Space Brothers; it's Disclosure; it's the lottery; it's the Rapture. It's the pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, or when a Democrat is returned to the White House. It's even the fatalistic anticipation of Doom, and the Final Release.

However it's tarted up, the message is always the same: Just wait. Just a little bit longer.

Hope, remember, was Bill Clinton's hometown. And if that's hope, if all we have is Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, then please God, give me naked, howling despair. Which, I must say, has its place. If we howled naked more often we might be ahead of the game by now, or at least know what game this is.

That's the emasculating Hope of the devils who honour the Dr King they killed by psychic-driving I had a dream to the vanishing point of I'd like to buy the world a Coke. The Dr King of "Beyond Vietnam" is not safe, cannot be contained by Happy Thoughts for the better tomorrow forever dangled in our faces, and will never have his portrait hung in the hall of his murderers. That's a Dr King who must be killed daily, because the next time he marches he's going to carry Hell behind him.

It's a Hope that tells us to empty our pockets of all valuables, and sit on our hands and wait. For what? For whatever you like. Just wait. Wait until your ship comes in. Then - ooh man! - it's gonna be sweet.

So it may seem peculiar that I find an example of authentic hope in a song titled When the Ship Comes In. In some measure we're only as strong as our metaphors, so do we really need to wait for another damn ship? But that's not this metaphor which we ought to celebrate:

A song will lift
As the mainsail shifts
And the boat drifts on to the shoreline.
And the sun will respect
Every face on the deck,
The hour that the ship comes in.

Do you see? We're not waiting on the shore, scanning the horizon for the ship and our salvation. We're on the ship. It's ours. The deck is overrun with whistleblowers, blowing whistles, and the communications room is tapping out messages to those still on land who don't know what all the hubbub's about.

Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touchin'.
And the ship's wise men
Will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watchin'.

Maybe this is just the vanity of cattle, to think we must be of exceeding importance to those who would slaughter us, but I don't think we know yet how much we must scare them. If we had no power, then history - and alright: parahistory - would not be the record of our being separated from it. All sinister forces share the trait of vampirism: they draw strength by consuming our blood, our fear, our minds, our awe. So perhaps, in some sense, it really is all about us.

In the early hours of August 8, 1993, several cars pulled to the side of a road between Belgrave and Fountain Gate near Melbourne, Australia. A massive, radiant object which should not have been there was sitting in the adjoining field. Kelly Cahill and her husband, and the rest who happened by randomly, exited their vehicles to better regard the weird sight. (Cahill's account is supported by the other witnesses.)

Kelly's description of the preliminary scene, which sets up a typical abduction account, from Hair of the Alien:

I'm standing there and we are looking at this thing. All of a sudden there is a black figure in the field. It's about seven feet tall... It started coming towards us, only slowly, and it had big red eyes. It sounds stupid, but it had great big round red eyes, like huge fly's eyes, and they were red like, not like a reflection of red, but like burning red, like....fluorescent stop lights....

All of a sudden I started screaming out.... Now this has really got me baffled because of the fact that a human being doesn't know this, so I don't even know how I came out with this, but I started saying, "They've got no souls." And then I started screaming: "THEY'VE GOT NO SOULS!"

And maybe that's our power: We do. Maybe that's what they've been coveting all this time, from the incubi and succubi to alien "genetic hybridization." Maybe that's what our more mundane demons mean to kill within us. Maybe that's really what we're talking about when we talk about mind control and ritual abuse.

Let's have no false hope about this. I won't say they can't kill us all, because they can. Perhaps they even mean to. And I can't promise that the ship will come in. The hour may never arrive, or we may not live to see it. But if we're ensouled and know it then we can make our enemies quail, because we're on a good ship with some wind at our backs. Even if it seems sometimes as though we're sailing in circles, that's far better than standing on the beach in wet shoes with our hands thrust purposefully in our pockets.

And we're not sunk yet.

Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.




By the way, Fintan Dunne has thoughtfully published a list of "CIA Internet Fakes." He writes, "We do not contend that everyone associated with these websites are knowing intelligence operatives. Some have been professionally manipulated, others merely misled. In any event these are promoting the psyop agendas and disinformation themes of the covert controllers. This is also not meant to be a fully comprehensive listing of all the fake websites."

It's really quite the list. And honestly, given some of the cans of worms lying open around here, I can see why he might include Rigorous Intuition, and think I'm at best misled. But Buzzflash? CooperativeResearch? Narconews? Riverbend? The only site I see missing is his own.

There are psyop agendas and disinformation themes. But someone who sees them everywhere can't help but make me wonder: What's his agenda?