The Red, White and Gray (Part Two)

I can't forget but I don't remember what - Leonard Cohen

Weird didn't begin with America, though its been advantageous for some to presume otherwise. Still, America has been weird since before its beginnings.

Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 manuscript, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of the America, describes his conquestador voyage up the Mississppi. Near the Ozarks his party encountered the Avavares tribe, who warned de Vaca that the area is home to a little man with indistinct features whom they called "Badthing." Badthing, de Vaca was told, terrorized the people by entering their homes unbidden at night and performing various surgeries upon them:

He would thrust his hand through the gashes, draw out the entrails, cut a palm's length from one, and throw it on the embers. Then he would gash an arm three times, the second cut on the inside of the. elbow, and would sever the limb. A little later he would begin to rejoin it, and the touch of his hands would instantly heal the wounds.

De Vaca and his men laughed off the stories of "Mr Badthing," which caused some indignation in the tribe, who then produced for De Vaca's examination many subjects who had reputedly been seized and operated upon by the entity, and bore the corresponding scars. De Vaca then launched into a pitch for Christendom, explaining that Badthing was a demon, and "that if they would believe in God our Lord and become Christians like us they need never fear him, nor would he dare come and inflict those wounds." He promised that Badthing would not return while he was in the land, which "delighted them and they lost much of their dread."

Whatever the truth of "Badthing" - a rationalist editor has interpolated "self inflicted?" following the description of the wounds - the story shares much with modern-day abduction accounts. Well, that's America, and it always has been. But it's never been only America. With different cultural presupositions, Zanzibar's sodomizing demon "Popo Bawa" would likely be called an anal probing extraterrestrial. (The disingenuous skeptics of CSICOP explain him away with the same wave of the hand they reserve for abduction accounts: sleep paralysis.)

And yet some alleged cases of sleep paralysis also manifest themselves as waking nightmares. One such story is told by Nick Redfern in On the Trail of the Saucer Spies. "Tammy," a 57-year old grandmother and manager of a restaurant in El Paso, fell down a now-familar rabbit hole more than 30 years ago. And if she'd been sleepwalking at the time, she was wide-awake for the aftermath.

About two in the morning on March 6, 1973, Tammy was returning to her Waco apartment from her waitressing job at a diner 30 miles out of town. About halfway home she began to "feel strange" - dizzy, lightheaded and overcome with vertigo - as the car was engulfed in a bright glow, and the headlights and engine cut out. In a field maybe two hundred feet to Tammy's right she noticed a pale pink dome-shaped object, and from it, two small humanoids were approaching. Panicking, she meant to flee, but her arms and legs were unresponsive. "The next thing she knew," writes Redfern, "dawn was breaking, and she was sitting in the front passenger seat of her car."

After arriving home groggy and scared, and sleeping the entire day, Tammy chose to keep the imprecise though terrifying incident to herself. But she began having vivid dreams of surgical examinations on cold surfaces, conducted by small figures with "thin faces and cheeks," and a "deep, continuous, resonating hum" emanating from a large mechanical "eye" hoving over the examination table. She dreamt of being dressed and carried to her car, and placed in the passenger seat, and "a man in military uniform sitting in the driver's seat looking intently at her."

Over the next several weeks her dreams changed, becoming nightmarish and apocalyptic, resembling the "warning" transmissions contactees often report. Tammy saw "Earth in the near future reduced to ruins" from a combination of environment and military crises, including a manufactured virus that devastates the Middle East and was now "spiraling out of control." Most ominous, she saw visions of a "disturbing afterlife in which various gray-like entities of several types fed - vampire-style - on human souls."

Certainly a disturbing episode for Tammy, but if that was it then she probably should have sought a referral to a good sleep disorder clinic. But three weeks following there was a knock on her apartment door, and a man in a brown suit whom she said "could have passed for a marine - a big guy, very short hair" - announced he was conducting a police "survey." Standing in her doorway he began to fire off questions relating to vehicular crime, and when he asked "Are you concerned about being kidnapped from your car?" she slammed the door in his face and shouted she was going to call the police.

In the following weeks, she was visited on three occasions by two military men out of uniform. "They were real friendly with me," she tells Redfern, "and identified who they were and where they were from - Kirkland Air Force Base." Acknowledging Tammy's previous caller had been "with us," they apologized for his aggressiveness, then admitted that they knew about her abduction experience (though "they never mentioned the word abductions like you hear today - just kidnappings") and asked if she could discuss it with them, as it was a matter of national security.

The pair told Tammy that since 1971, such incidents were seeing an alarming increase in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, and as a result, the military had established a project to monitor contactees. Once she consented to participate, the two "reeled off a number of truly strange questions":

Since the "kidnapping" had Tammy felt the urge to become vegetarian? Was she an adherent of Buddhist teachings? Did she believe in life after death, or had her views on the subject changed or been modified "since the kidnapping"? And most disturbing of all: Was she of the opinion that after death "we would all be judged by a higher power?"

Tammy then began to share with them her apocalyptic dreams, and the two "expressed deep concern" as they told her that other contactees were having similar dreams. They also confided that while some on the project believed the kidnappers to be extraterrestrials, others had concluded they were "demonic beings whose point of origin was somehow connected with the realm of the dead and the afterlife, and that the creatures derived sustenance from the human life force - namely, the soul."

The men asked Tammy if she would consent to a physical examination at Kirkland, and she agreed. And though they met twice more, probing her thoughts on "life after death, and - notably - her views on life after death in the animal kingdom," the examination never happened. (Or at least, not to a conscious Tammy.) After their visits stopped, she never heard from them again, though for several more weeks she experienced unnerving "countless interruptions" on her telephone line from "strange, rapid, and unintelligible voices."

What sense can we make of this? First, as Redfern also notes, Tammy's two men and their disturbing inquiries and revelations are quite similar to that of the two DoD scientists who approached theologian and Fortean researcher Ray Boeche 20 years later (discussed here). Boeche wrote that they informed him of an "obsessive effort" to contact and control non-human intelligences, and the methods "had grown to encompass the use of...satanic rituals/ritual magic along the lines of that espoused by Aleister Crowley, including human sacrifices." And though my hypothesis is virtually identical, it's always important to question the integrity of "whistleblowers," especially when they appear to blow your own whistle. "Since the best disinformation is mostly truth," I wrote last August, "if this communication were disinformative, could this addition [an unconvincing list of victims of psychotronic weapons experiments] have been the poison pill to misdirect a researcher already sniffing around the Military Occult Complex?"

Red flags should rise whenever a military official or contractor confides much more than someone needs to know. From Tammy's account, it seems at least as important to her two visitors that she hear them out as it was that they hear her. And could their anticipation of her apocalyptic dreams be due to her dreams having been imprinted upon her hypnotically during the abduction event?

While I'm persuaded UFOs represent a genuine phenomenon of occult provenance and are of critical interest to certain institutions of Earthly power, I also think their facsimile has been employed as a screen to pursue other work in the deep black under cover of absurdity and "alien" misdirection. I think it's significant that numerous abductees since the mid-sixties have reported being subjected to mind control devices similar to Skinner boxes and John Lilly's isolation tanks onboard "alien craft." Lilly claimed that, as his isolation tank research became known, he was approached by military personnel who sought to use it "to coerce a change in belief systems" (according to Dr Helmut Lammers' MILABS: Mind Control and Alien Abduction). Lilly's ethics forbade him from testing his tank on anyone but himself and colleague Craig Enright. But since immersion in the tank dramatically increased suggestibility, it's easy to imagine the military taking up the work covertly when reading the words of "Delora,"daughter of a career Naval officer, who's had flashbacks of what she takes to be an underground alien/human facility: "I saw steel doors of elevators leading to underground areas. I saw 'capsules' with people in them, in a suspended state, both vertical and horizontal, in gas and also in liquid" (from MILABS).

Redfern also describes the case of "Alison," a 36-year old native of Arizona, who was subjected to at least five abductions between 27 and 31. Each event began with her pet dogs acting distressed, a deep humming, loss of electricity and a bright light enveloping her room. Then, semiconscious, she would sense "small shadowy figures" carry her onto a small craft for a gynechological exam, before returning her to another part of the house.

The final event was a significant departure:

On what Alison believes to have been the fifth abduction, however, the mysterious humming sound abruptly came to a halt only a few seconds after her cosmic visitors had entered the room. At that point, Alison recalled - not in a later dream on this occasion but in real time - she began to slowly regain her senses and the feeling of disorientation eventually eased and finally vanished. And so did the aliens. In their place were not a group of frail-looking alien "Grays," but a number of large and burly men in what looked like black fatigues.

According to Alison, one of the men screamed into a microphone something like: "What's happened?" Suddenly, the men backed away slowly and, as Alison began to regain her senses, one of them held his hand up "as if to say 'stay where you are,'" and uttered the word "sorry" in her direction. Alison made her way to the window in time to see the men jump into not a state-of-the-art alien spacecraft but a very terrestrial-looking black unmarked helicopter. At a height of several hundred feet, a powerful lamp was suddenly turned on that lit up the dark sky around her property.

Some may happily seize upon stories like Alison's to contend that all UFO sightings and entity encounters must be similar masquerades. But to do so requires a disservice to the volume of cases around the world, most of which were recorded long before any of us had the means to effect such magic. And still, there's the matter of motive. "Mind control" isn't an answer; rather, it's another question: control of whom, and for what? What's the purpose of implanting apocalyptic visions in abductees, probing Tammy for her thoughts on the afterlife, and conducting invasive gynecological and genetic work?

Even when the close encounters are with covert American power, there's nothing happy here. Because the dead intelligence at work appears as alien to us as though it were in sunken R'lyeh, dreaming.

Or can they even know what they do, and why, walking like ghosts in the skin of Mr Badthing?

Pattern of Force

I'm leaving, Captain, I must go
There's blood upon your hand
But tell me, Captain, if you know
Of a decent place to stand - Leonard Cohen

Only time right now for some quick thoughts on Haditha. Or rather, Haditha's elevation as Iraq's official, bad apple atrocity.

Even for those who try to pay attention to what filters through the fog of war crimes, these things tend to run together. Haditha isn't Abu Sifa where, according to Iraqi police, US forces "on a rampage" executed a family of 11, then bombed their house, burned their cars and slaughtered their animals. What more will we hear of Abu Sifa, now Haditha has become the representative and inevitable example of honour's exception?

Because along with Haditha comes Jesse Macbeth, allegedly a former Army Ranger and Iraq war veteran, whose claims that massacre was method rather than madness rapidly went viral on the Net. His story was unsubstantiated and exteme, yet plausible because it was extreme, and provided a template to the pattern of force on exhibit in Iraq. A pattern rarely admitted by the West's institutional media.

But Macbeth, it now appears, is the Pentagon's timely strawman to buttress its case for Haditha's exceptionalism, and to discredit influential anti-war voices such as Iraq Veterans Against the War. Whether unaware or not of his status as a COINTELPRO asset, it doesn't matter, because regardless, Macbeth became a lucky charm for those who refuse to believe the program of horror in which US troops are engaged, and there are many. Similar stories may now be said to have been "debunked," without examination or a straining of battlefield ethics.

It was a scandal 20 years ago when Ronald Reagan - the Bush family's post-Hinkley Zombie-in-Chief - honoured the SS dead at Bitburg, and by turn paid homage to the old fascist "anti-communist" front of the Republican Heritage Groups Council. It was, perhaps, merely a prefigurement of the Nazi stain in America's own blood cult, and what should be a crisis of conscience on Memorial Day.

On supposedly progressive forums I've seen many apologies for Haditha, and for the other Hadithas still cloaked in denial. Don't judge the troops too quickly, or too harshly, some write, because "Hell is full of heroes." Heaven, meanwhile, fills with children.

There is no decent place to stand, not in a massacre.

It's all in the game

"North America's getting soft, patron, and the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times, and we're going to have to be pure and direct and strong, if we're going to survive them." - Videodrome

Perhaps you've seen this:

Venezuela lawmakers blast video game

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- A U.S. company's video game simulating an invasion of Venezuela is supposed to hit the shelves next year, but it's already raising the ire of lawmakers loyal to President Hugo Chavez.

...

Pandemic describes Mercenaries 2: World in Flames as "an explosive open-world action game" in which "a power-hungry tyrant messes with Venezuela's oil supply, sparking an invasion that turns the country into a war zone." The company says players take on the role of well-armed mercenaries.

...

Lawmaker Gabriela Ramirez said "Mercenaries 2" gives a false vision of Chavez as a tyrant and Venezuela as being on the verge of chaos. She said the game could be banned under a proposed law aimed at protecting Venezuelan children from violent video games.

"Pandemic has no ties to the US government," says Greg Richardson, the firm's vice president of commercial operations. That's the sound of hairs splitting. Pandemic Studios is a Pentagon subcontractor through the aegis of the "Institute for Creative Technologies," launched by the US Army in 1998 with $45 million as a go-between with the entertainment and gaming industries. Pandemic is the developer of military training simulations such as Full Spectrum Command, commercially available as Full Spectrum Warrior for gaming on Playstation and XBox. ("A quantum-leap forward in battlefield simulation" says Game Informer. "Enlist Now" for updates.) "Within days of its release" in 2004, "gamers figured out the cheat code to unlock the Army-only version hidden on the commercial discs, featuring less flashy graphics but smarter opponents." (Gee, how careless can the Army get?)

The Pentagon is co-parenting Pandemic with its unlikely - or possibly inevitable - same sex sugar daddy: U2's Bono. His Elevation Partners spent $300 million last November to bring the Studio together with Bioware "to create the world's best funded and largest independent game development house." Now there's a cause.

America's New Flesh is machine-scarred from its generational incubation in immersive battlefields which are, like Bono sings, even better than the real thing. Meanwhile, the real thing becomes just another level of play, until you play it, survive it, and return with the Home Version. Diplomacy is never on the table, except as a a board game that fewer young people have the patience to engage. So it has to be Grand Theft Oil, when some "power-hungry tyrant" in Venezuela "messes" with America's petroleum. War is the last option. Play is the first.

Defending World in Flames, Pandemic publicist Chuck Norris says "although a conflict doesn't necessarily have to be happening, it's realistic enough to believe that it could eventually happen." Or, as in the words of Brian O'blivion, "The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena." It's been fought, and maybe decided, for this generation.

The Red, White and Gray (Part One)

My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip - Bob Dylan

Something went seriously weird in 1954. France, and not just France, saw hundreds of UFO sightings and encounters with bizarre entities in cases of high quality reported almost exclusively by local media - there was no national "contageon" of hysteria - told by multiple witnesses of impressive character. Jacques Vallee notes that all incidents consisted of "strange happenings...reported by normal people, who had normal occupations at the time of the sighting, were generally not known, had no interest in flying saucers and were seeking no publicity."

In Vallee's close analysis of some 200 of these cases, published in Charles Bowen's The Humanoids, he notes how four separate groups of witnesses who had never heard of each other made independent reports to different newspapers of a sighting on October 14 of a low-flying, reddish disc that caused cars to stall and headlights to fail. Celeste Simonutti reported encountering a luminous sphere on the evening of September 30, 12 metres in diameter and hovering a meter above the ground, which shifted through red and blue hues before accelerating vertically at extreme speed. Friends told Simonutti he must have seen a "flying saucer," and then had to explain to him what they meant. He'd never heard of them before. On the night of November 4, fisherman Jose Alves saw a bright object land near his position and three small, dark entities emerge and gather leaves, grass and water. They then re-entered the craft and it flew away. Alves too was told he'd seen aliens, but maintained he'd witnessed only "ordinary devils."

Several more examples from the French flap of 1954, all from October, as noted by Vallee, and by Richard Dolan in the first volume of his UFOs and the National Security State:

October 2: At 8pm, in Croix d'Epine, a man on his motor scooter saw a bright, oval object land off the road fifty feet from him. He saw short, dark shapes "like potato bags" moving around the object, which was the size of a small bus. It quickly took off, changing from orange to blue, then grayish-blue. The man fainted while telling his story. Two people in nearby villages independently reported seeing the object. (Dolan)

October 3: At dawn in Bresseuir, a fifty-five year old stockyard employee was going to work when he saw a small being wearing a diving suit standing near a circular craft about ten feet in diameter. The object swiftly took off. Shortly after noon, a man saw a circular craft between the towns of Montmoreau and Villebois-Lavalette. It seemed to be gliding on or near the ground, had luminous spots, and became illuminated when it took off. The man found flattened and scorched grass over an area 25-feet across. At around 7:30 pm, a crowd at a fair in Chereng saw a fast luminous object in the sky suddenly stop, give off sparks, and descend to ground level. As people ran to the spot, the object took off again. (Dolan)

October 5: In Loctudy a baker was drawing water from the well in the middle of the night when he noticed, some distance awa, an object about 3 metres in diameter from which emerged a dwarf who had an oval face covered with hair and eyes which were "as large as the eggs of a raven." The unknown individual touched the witness on the shoulder and spoke to him in a language he could not understand. As the young man called his boss, the dwarf went back into the craft and flew away. (Vallee)

October 9: A man on a bicycle in Lavoix saw a figure in a diving suit with very bright eyes aiming a double beam of light at him, which paralyzed him. The being then walked into the forest. In Carcassone, a man saw a metallic sphere in the road. The top half of the object was transparent, and he saw two human-shaped figures standing inside. The craft soon left at high speed. (Dolan) The individual seemed to have "boots without heels" and very bright eyes.... The entity had a very hairy chest and carried two "headlights" placed one below the other on his chest. (Vallee)

October 9: From the report of four children living in Pournoy-la-Chetive: "We were roller-skating, about 18:30, when all of a sudden we saw something luminous near the cemetary. It was a round machine, about 2.5 metres in diameter, which was standing on three legs. Soon a man came out. He was holding a lighted flashlight in his hand and it blinded us. But we could see that he had large eyes, a face covered with hair and that he was very small, about 1.20 metres. He was dressed in a sort of black sack like the cassock M. le Cure wears. He looked at us and said something we did not understand. He turned off the flashlight. We became afraid and ran away. When we looked back we saw something in the sky: it was very high, very bright and flew fast." (Vallee)

And as mentioned, it wasn't just France. In a populated neighbourhood of Tehran on October 12, a disc-shaped object was observed by multiple witnesses to descend close to the ground. Witness Chasim Faili "screamed when he thought he was going to be kidnapped." The operator of the craft was said to be "small and dressed in black." In Northern Italy on November 14, a farmer saw a bright cigar-shaped craft land, and three dwarfs in "diving suits" emerge and collect several of the farmer's caged rabbits. The farmer attempted to shoot but his rifle became so heavy he had to drop it and then found himself unable to move or speak as the entities went about their work and departed. Two young Venezuelans reported having been attacked on December 10 by four hairy dwarfs near a bright object which had landed near the Trans-Andean Highway. On December 19, also in Venezuela, a jockey saw six small entities loading stones into a disc-shaped object. He tried to run but was parlysed by a violet beam of light aimed by one, who then entered the object with the others and took off.

The details are often bizarre, and bizarrely shared: the boots without heels; the seeming demonstration of elemental collection (rocks, water, rabbits); the paralysing "flashlights" worn on the chest; sack-like apparel or "diving suits"; and strong and very hairy dwarves with large, bright eyes, speaking an unknown language (strikingly similar to the "extremely hairy" dwarves with round eyes "larger than is the norm with us," reported by Brazilian policeman and abductee/initiate Jose Antonio Da Silva in 1969).

Significantly, Dolan notes: "none of the sightings included descriptions of what are now called 'Grays.'" It wasn't until the 1960s, and only in the United States, that identifiably "gray aliens" began appearing in encounter records. In the years since, their image and their associate disinformation fables (Roswell and Dulce, for instance) have come to so dominate the subverted consciousness that some ufologists simply remove the ongoing and troublingly bizarre "non-gray" encounters from their ET equation. Debunkers also. Susan Clancy can make her shallow arguments for sleep paralysis and the archetypal simplicity of the gray's minimalist face, but has nothing to say about bug-eyed hairy dwarves dressed like monks, because the troubling variety has been excised by those who mean to exploit a phenomenon beyond their control and massage its perception.

More later.

Fitzgerald's Witnesses

I looked way up my chimney hole,
I even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.
They got away. - Bob Dylan

In 1917 the posthumous, final volume of Charles Taze Russell's Studies in the Scriptures appeared, entitled - promisingly - The Finished Mystery. The book was published without the blessing of the board of his Watchtower Society, and would become one of its curses. Because the final revelation from the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses included the breaking news that the Christian church would be destroyed in 1918 and the world would end in 1920. When neither happened, a new edition of the book was released with what-he-really-meant-to-say revisions to the text.

Russell's early years were influenced by Nelson Barbour, an evangelist who had prophesied that Jesus Christ was destined to return bodily to Earth in 1873. When he failed to appear, Barbour issued a revised due date of 1874. After that too passed he smartly announced that Christ had, indeed, returned, but invisibly.

And maybe Karl Rove really has been indicted, invisibly, and Bad Santa Patrick Fitzgerald is filling our stockings out of season, and Jason Leopold and TruthOut haven't been suckered or compromised as artfully this year as Tom Flocco was flamboyantly last year, when he was serving up increasingly fabulist accounts - his and Sherman Skolnick's poetry slam conspiracy theories - of the Grand Jury expanding the scope of its investigation to include 9/11 and the indictments of Bush and Cheney. (It would appear that Barbara Olson is soon to begin her second year in custody somewhere on the "Polish-Austrian" border. Where's the mainstream media?)

Fitzmas, if it ever comes, is a religious holiday, because those whose heads make fine dance floors for its sugar plum fairies live by the faith that Fitzgerald will serve up more than failed pornographer Scooter Libby. Fitzianity demands nothing from its adherents except patience and wants nothing more than their speculation. God forbid that they should do something.

And the sham promise of this slave religion is nothing more than a few yellow cards to offenders long after the game has already been called in their favour. What kind of basket is that to carry all the rotton eggs of this wrecking crew? If Rove ever is indicted, so what? The Bush-by-proxy Reagan White House saw the most indictments in US history, and yet it's remembered fondly as a late golden age. Of course, this Bush White House won't be remembered that way, but it no longer matter who remembers what anymore. After all, American politics isn't exactly a popularity contest.

Chomsky's critique of "conspiracy theory" - at least those which pertain to conspiracies that hold no interest for him, such as JFK's assassination - is that their focus is personalities rather than structures of society. That's so wrong it's almost backwards, particularly here. Either those with big hopes for Fitzgerald's efforts believe certain heads must roll to set America right again, or they're just looking for the therapeutic benefit of striking back. And personalities are all we can touch through institutional justice. The deep politics embedded in the structures of power are removed from discussion and correction, and will, if left alone - as they usually are - continually renew themselves. It can spare a few heads for a Fitzmas because it's not a real guillotine.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The City of Lost Children opens with a young boy watching with wonder as Santa Claus climbs out of the fireplace, brushes soot from his coat and kindly offers him a toy. A sweet scene. But then the boy's gaze returns to the fireplace, as another Santa, and more behind, enter the room, and the charm suddenly becomes a horror.

Beware of Santas bearing gifts.

Just resting my eyes

Just a brief note to say I'll be away this week, disentangling my mind for a while without electronic stimuli. (Or rather, none to which I'm consenting.) It seems a long time since that's happened, and I feel like it needs to happen now.

Please consider this an open thread. Have a good week, and I'll see you next Monday.

Manifestations

"The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore. I know what the disease wants. It wants to turn me into something else." - The Fly

Last year, California and Florida. Yesterday:

Doctors puzzled over bizarre infection surfacing in South Texas

If diseases like AIDS and bird flu scare you, wait until you hear what's next. Doctors are trying to find out what is causing a bizarre and mysterious infection that's surfaced in South Texas.

Morgellons disease is not yet known to kill, but if you were to get it, you might wish you were dead, as the symptoms are horrible.

"These people will have like beads of sweat but it's black, black and tarry," said Ginger Savely, a nurse practioner in Austin who treats a majority of these patients.

Patients get lesions that never heal. "Sometimes little black specks that come out of the lesions and sometimes little fibers," said Stephanie Bailey, Morgellons patient.

Patients say that's the worst symptom — strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors. "He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers, white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Lisa Wilson, whose son Travis had Morgellon's disease.

While all of this is going on, it feels like bugs are crawling under your skin. So far more than 100 cases of Morgellons disease have been reported in South Texas. "It really has the makings of a horror movie in every way," Savely said.

As before, most medical professionals refuse to recognize the disease, calling it instead "Delusional Parasitosis." And what do I know? Perhaps they're right. Perhaps Travis Wilson was delusional, and his mother as well, when she tried and failed to remove a spaghetti-like fibre from a lesion in his chest. ("I knew he was going to kill himself, and there was nothing I could do to stop him," Lisa Wilson said.)

One sufferer, "Ever Hopeful", writes "I came down with Delusions of Parasitosis in 2001.... Oddly enough, my delusions, although mostly microscopic, are completely capable of being photographed."

Below is an image of one of the "starfish" she plucked from a lesion. "They don't really look like starfish," she says, "but I didn't want to call them spiders (staying away from the insect and arachnid vocabulary - somebody might think I really believed they were spiders)."



Austin Nurse Ginger Savely says, "Believe me, if I just randomly saw one of these patients in my office, I would think they were crazy too. But after you've heard the story of over 100 (patients) and they're all — down to the most minute detail — saying the exact same thing, that becomes quite impressive." Sound familiar? To me, it sounds like Dr Corydon Hammond's "Hypnosis in Multiple Personality Disorder: Ritual Abuse" - the Greenbaum Speech:

When you start to find the same highly esoteric information in different states and different countries, from Florida to California, you start to get an idea that there's something going on that is very large, very well coordinated, with a great deal of communication and sytematicness to what's happening.

According to the Morgellons Foundation, it has received reports of cases in every state, though the majority are clustered in California, Texas and Florida. There's much speculation, based in part upon the research of Will Thomas, that the disease is precipitated - and almost literally, precipitation - by the fall of aerosol polymer fibres allegedly found in chemtrail samples.

Regardless, both chemtrails and morgellons share something else: they both manifest things that shouldn't be, before our eyes and in our flesh, and are perhaps representative of either thought-forms of a fear that's only in our heads, or the expression of a eugenic will-to-death that is in the heads of others. Which is it? That artless debunker of 9/11 strawmen Benjamin Chertoff says there's nothing to worry about. Who's worried now?

Vanishing Act

When the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men
Just remember that death is not the end
And you search in vain to find just one law abiding citizen
Just remember that death is not the end - Bob Dylan

Afraid I don't have time today to discuss these, but some stories need attention:

From Wednesday's Mirror the headline, "Have 200,000 AK47s Fallen Into the Hands of Iraq Terrorists?" (also see this thread on the RI discussion board):

Some 200,000 guns the US sent to Iraqi security forces may have been smuggled to terrorists, it was feared yesterday.

The 99-tonne cache of AK47s was to have been secretly flown out from a US base in Bosnia. But the four planeloads of arms have vanished.

Orders for the deal to go ahead were given by the US Department of Defense. But the work was contracted out via a complex web of private arms traders.

And the Moldovan airline used to transport the shipment was blasted by the UN in 2003 for smuggling arms to Liberia, human rights group Amnesty has discovered.

It follows a separate probe claiming that thousands of guns meant for Iraq's police and army instead went to al-Qaeda.

Amnesty chief spokesman Mike Blakemore said: "It's unbelievable that no one can account for 200,000 assault rifles. If these weapons have gone missing it's a terrifying prospect." American defence chiefs hired a US firm to take the guns, from the 90s Bosnian war, to Iraq.

But air traffic controllers in Baghdad have no record of the flights, which supposedly took off between July 2004 and July 2005. A coalition forces spokesman confirmed they had not received "any weapons from Bosnia" and added they were "not aware of any purchases for Iraq from Bosnia". Nato and US officials have already voiced fears that Bosnian arms - sold by US, British and Swiss firms - are being passed to insurgents. A NATO spokesman said: "There's no tracking mechanism to ensure they don't fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some may have been siphoned off." This year a newspaper claimed two UK firms were involved in a deal in which thousands of guns for Iraqi forces were re-routed to al-Qaeda.

The Moldovan airline is Aerocom, and yes, it's one of Victor Bout's.

It's always a bang-your-head-against-the-wall moment, reading again the play the incompetence theory receives, even from some of the Administration's harshest mainstream critics. But then, even to talk of an "administration" may be misdirection at this point, given how little representative government means in the United States these days, and how much of "national security" has been privatized into a global gangland of drugs and guns.

Like the tens of billions of dollars that have been "lost" in Iraq, planeloads of arms don't just "vanish"; not when the Pentagon contracts the work to an international criminal of Bout's untouchable stature. But Bout's name isn't likely to be mentioned in whatever coverage this story receives, before it sinks like so many others beneath the media's frothing triviality.

Meanwhile, a decision's been reached in the trial of Toledo priest Gerald Robinson. And it's guilty:

The Rev. Gerald Robinson appeared stony-faced as the jury's guilty verdict was read, and he blinked repeatedly and glanced at his lawyers before being led away in handcuffs.

...

The crime occurred in the sacristy adjoining the hospital chapel in downtown Toledo on the Saturday before Easter in 1980. Investigators said the nun, Margaret Ann Pahl, 71, was strangled and then stabbed, with nine wounds on her chest forming the shape of an inverted cross, a well-recognized Satanic symbol.

An altar cloth was draped over her half-naked body, which was posed as if she had been sexually assaulted.

"It was about how he could humiliate her the most," prosecutor Dean Mandros said in closing arguments. "He left a message for everyone to see … maybe to God himself."

After the sentencing one of Robinson's tearful supporters "turned to Claudia Vercellotti, a local leader of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests [SNAP], who had helped reopen the case, and told her, 'I hope you rot in hell!'"

From SNAP's statement on the Robinson conviction:

More than ever, police and prosecutors have the tools and the will to go after horrific crimes, even when the defendants are seemingly powerful individuals or institutions.

When victims and witnesses stay silent, nothing changes. When victims and witnesses speak up, at least sometimes a child is protected, the truth is exposed, and justice is done.

The murder weapon, Robinson's letter opener:


Finally, from an email, a follow-up on the reopening of the investigation into the Atlanta Child Murders:

Dekalb County Police Chief Louis Graham...the man who reopened the investigations last year, is mysteriously stepping down. And of all the people who the county is getting to find a replacement...is none other than Lee Brown, the original supervisor of the Atlanta PD, who was in office during the murders and the subsequent investigation.

SNAP is right in part. Police and prosecutors have the tools. The will is another matter. Some do, individually. But institutionally? That's still the domain of those who don't.

The Devil You Know (Part Two)

"The leading actor hurried by in the costume of a monk." - Bob Dylan

Continuing on.

Satanic Ritual Abuse and occult crime negate themselves for many progressives who might otherwise now be inclined to believe the worst of Earthly Powers. This is because the charges are a challenge to secularist and reductionist assumptions, and come cloaked in layers of ridicule and the seeming superstitions of the reactionary right, against which they have struggling all their political lives.

Or let me break it down this way. As a youth I had a fundamentalist conversion experience from which I spent the next ten years recovering. (It's told, as a lie, in my novel Anxious Gravity.) I was already of the left, and a conservative faith was not an easy graft, with presumptions of ideology always in my face. But the inner tensions were worse, and eventually things just blew apart. Recovery for me meant jettisoning much of the conceptual and cultural ballast of my faith in order to save its largely ineffable core.

Before I knew any better, "Satanic Ritual Abuse" sounded like a scratchy record from my past that I'd left in my parents' basement when I moved out. It was the ghost of an abandoned paradigm: the fear of a backward-masked planet. But I kept reading, until finally I knew something worse. Worse than the devil I'd known, who had sensational publicists in "anti-cult crusader" Bob Larson and "former high priest" Mike Warnke.

On his ministry broadcasts Larson regularly works up a nice head of froth over satanism, but privately he's on friendly terms with frequent guests, including satanist and esoteric fascist Boyd Rice. There's a fascinating interview with Rice here that presents a window on their relationship. Asked whether he thinks Larson is a "repressed Satanist" Rice replies enthusiastically "That's what I'm always telling him! I'm always saying, 'Bob, you're Satanic, you're just presenting it in a convoluted way, because you're going on the air and taking advantage of these weak, confused people, and they're giving you their money.'" Meanwhile, Warnke is a manic preacher and "America's number one Christian Comedian" who claims to have led a murderous Satanic cult of 1,500 members in the mid-60s, yet is almost certainly an abusive and pathological fraud.

The evangelists found a perfect foil in Anton LaVey, who could pass the bucket with the best of them, and obligingly inhabited the caricature of the devil-on-earth right down to the plastic horns and cat suit. But better the devil you know, because this devil whom both sides pimped was little more than a Halloween spook, and a figure of titilation at a safe distance for sheltered Christians who liked to receive their vicarious kicks under cover of "testimony."

I expect, for many, Satanic Ritual Abuse is not a serious subject because the devil they know is not a serious figure. Unlike the devil they don't.

There are at least 2,635 place names in America sharing the words Devil, Diablo or Diabla. Loren Coleman writes that "Europeans coming to America were quite taken with the sinister experiences they had or they would hear about from the Native Americans already here, and these colonists started giving the name Devil to all the locations that were tied to unexplainable phenomena." Places like South Dakota's Hill of the Little Devils, about which Lewis and Clark were told by plains Indians was inhabited by "midgets" who would kill anyone who approached their "spirit mound." (Clark wrote that the Omahas, Otoes, and Sioux were so afraid that "no Consideration is Suffecient to induce them to apporach the hill"); Oklahoma's Devil's Promenade, where generations of glowing, orange orbs have been observed; the barren circle of North Carolina's Devil's Tramping Ground; and the Devil's Highway, Route 666, which links skinwalker accounts to more modern American mytholgies of Roswell and the Trinity atomic blast.

An American folly has always been the thought that the nation resides in a "New World." Large numbers of immigrants were drawn to the novelty of America by the prospect of shedding the superstitions of the Old, but Europeans also found ancient wild things of spirit that had not yet been domesticated by generations of dogma and forgetfulness. And because we are also spirit and not altogether perfect and wise, they found perfect and ignorant hosts.

It's been said that Bush's backwash base would still support him even if he ate a baby on television. But he does effectively just that everytime he praises the bloody course of his war which has already claimed a quarter million innocent lives. He's feeding something older than America, a parasitical demon which is also devouring the host, whether he knows it or not.

There is a Satanic criminal underground, trading in flesh and guns and drugs, but there is another network underlying it and unconcious of itself. The ritual child abuse of Ponchatoula's Hosannah Church appears unconnected to a broader conspiracy, so how did these seemingly unsophisticated, small-town parishioners come to adopt an ancient, secret tradition of sex magick? Ritual abuse happens in churches in part because that's where ritual happens, and like it or not, humanity appears hardwired for ritual.

When Prescott Bush robbed Geronimo's grave and carried his skull home to Yale as a trophy, was he fully conscious of partaking in a universal warrior cult that finds power in the remains of the worthy dead?

"America is a nation of prayer," said Prescott's grandson last Thursday, asking Americans to "humbly recognize our continued dependence on divine Providence." Someone better acquainted with America said "that god you been prayin' to is gonna give ya back what you're wishin' on someone else."

Route 666

It's five in the morning, the post I've been drafting still isn't ready and I can't keep my eyes open any longer. So here's something else, while I get my act together:

2 Murders and Missing Cash in Iraq

The killing of Fern Holland, a young human rights worker from Oklahoma, remains as unsolved and mysterious as it was when her body was found riddled with bullets on a desolate stretch of road near one of Iraq's southern holy cities in March 2004.

Now, federal investigators in the United States are grappling with a second mystery: what happened to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash issued by U.S. government authorities to Holland and Robert Zangas, a press officer who died in the same incident, in the days before their deaths?

Financial records from the American- run compound in Hilla, the south-central Iraqi city where Holland and Zangas were based, have disclosed that much or all of that money - issued for things like programs to train Iraqis in the workings of democratic governance and the building of women's rights centers that Holland was establishing in Iraq - was either missing or improperly accounted for immediately after their deaths.

Investigators are trying to determine whether that money was stolen as part of the web of bribery, kickbacks, theft and conspiracy that they have laid out in a series of indictments and court papers describing corruption by U.S. officials in Hilla in 2003 and 2004, according to officials involved in the inquiry. That corruption case, centered on reconstruction efforts, has led to four arrests, and more are expected.

Holland was the first US civilian to be murdered in Iraq. Two months later, the second was Nick Berg. For what it's worth, which may not be much, both were alumnists of Oklahoma University, where Berg's email account found it's way to Zacharias Moussaoui.

Berg was allegedly in Iraq on the business of repairing communication facilities, notably a radio tower near Abu Ghraib, and had as a business partner Aziz al-Taee, an Iraqi-emigre linked to Russian mafia. One of Berg's killers is heard to say "Do it quickly" in Russian.

I'm rambling, but here's the thing: Iraq has meant a massive transfer of wealth, much of it "lost" on the grey market. It's what pirates do, and they honour flags only for their convenience. Every last death in Iraq can be attributed to the profit-taking, though some, like Holland's and maybe Berg's, more directly than others.


By the way, if you saw the AP story on the weekend claiming Hugo Chavez seeks a referendum for a 25-year term and thought What the hell?, it was a hell of AP's design. Here's the truth.

Bodies of Intelligence

Oh when there's too much of nothing,
No one has control - Bob Dylan

I'll need to finish my thoughts from Thursday's post over the next day or two, because there seem to be some wheels coming off as some stars come right that, for however long, may shine light again upon some of Washington's most secret dark places.

First, as DailyKos convincingly argues, the true scandal of the Duke Cunningham hooker story is likely the gender of the hookers. There are some very carefully parsed statements regarding Brent Wilkes' Watergate "hospitality suites," such as the claim of the lawyer for Shirlington Limo's Chris Baker that his client was "never in attendance in any party where any women were being used for prostitution purposes."

Cunningham staked out ground in Congress as a particularly gross character, describing his 1998 prostate operation as "just not natural, unless maybe you’re Barney Frank.” Frank noted that Cunningham "tends to frequently blurt out stuff on gay issues. He seems to be more interested in discussing homosexuality than most homosexuals." Two years earlier Cunningham had baited Frank on the Massachusetts Democrat's own hooker scandal, cutting him off in debate with "Would you like to talk about prostitutes and basements?" (Interestingly, it was only the Barney Frank angle that found any traction in the press and with the general public following The Washington Times' flap of child hookers on the Hill stories in 1989.)

But Cunningham is himself deeply and unhappily closeted, according to Chris Crain of The Washington Blade:

Cunningham, who is married with grown children, has admitted to romantic, loving relationships with men, both during his Vietnam military service and as a civilian. That was the remarkable story that this publication reported two years ago, when Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign leader, inadvertently outed Cunningham at a gay rights forum.

Birch never mentioned Cunningham’s name, but she talked about a rabidly anti-gay congressman who asked to meet privately with her in the midst of a controversy over his use in a speech on the floor of the House the term "homos" to describe gays who have served in the military. Alone with Birch and an HRC staffer, the unnamed congressman shared that he had loved men during his life. In telling the story, Birch offered up a few too many details about the closeted congressman.

As for Porter Goss, Cannonfire does an excellent job of linking his abrupt resignation to an ongoing investigation of the Cunningham fiasco through CIA Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo's ties to Brent Wilkes.

The CIA, of course, is the genuine Mac Daddy of Capitol Hill prostitution. If Craig Spence could talk, he would, and so he can't. The Agency's interest in prostitution as a tool of blackmail and political leverage happened before at the Watergate, and may have even be closer to the truth of Nixon's fall than the "second-rate burglary." So to the degree Goss and Foggo may be involved, I think it's safe to assume it wasn't for their own personal "stress management."

Also, coincidentally or not, Jeff Gannon chose this of all weeks to acknowledge publically for the first time that yes, in fact, he is a gay man. The admission came during the panel session of the Equality Forum, and was apparently so difficult for him he had trouble forming the words, even before a largely gay audience.

Gannon was asked where he slept during his White House overnights, but he was saved from responding by the moderators. It was the decent thing to do.

The Devil You Know (Part One)

They're whispering his name
through this disappearing land
But hidden in his coat
is a red right hand - Nick Cave

Nineteen-year old Italian Benjamino Evangelista emigrated to the US in 1904 and changed his name to Benny Evangelist. Two years later he began having ecstatic visions - "my own views and signs," he said, "that I see from 12 to 3 AM" - and they lasted for 20 years. He wrote it down in one of America's many "received" books, which he titled The Oldest History of the World Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Michigan. The first volume, self-published in 1926 and out-of-print until September, 2001, left the history at the time of Noah.

It was the only volume Evangelist lived to complete. On the morning of July 3, 1929, he was discovered slumped in the chair of his home office, his severed head at his feet and the floor littered with copies of The Oldest History in the World. Upstairs, his wife Santina was found hanging across the bed, only sinews connecting her head and neck, and clutching in one hand their murdered 18-month old son Mario. In another room lay the butchered remains of their three other children, Angelina, Margaret and Eugenis, ages seven, five and four.

The Detroit Free Press of July 5, 1929 ran a story headlined "Massacre of 6 in Cult Family Baffles Police":

Evangelist was a man of mystifying history on the religious side of his life. More than 20 years ago he founded the "Union Federation of America," a weird religious theory in his own somewhat warped mind, and, having been "appointed by God," he wrote the "bible" of that faith.

...

Several pieces of women's undergarments, each tagged with the name of its owner, police point out, reveal that the so-called mystic indulged in practices of "voodoosim," or devil worship. Such garments, "voodooism" has it, can lead to the finding of a missing person, when they are properly handled by one versed in the mystic arts of that belief.

...

"Evangelist, no doubt, was insane," Father [Francis] Beccheniu said [who was to bury the family the following Saturday], "Of that I am sure, although he was shrewd and seemed to have quite a lot of intelligence in other matters. Mrs. Evangelist was more of a fanatic than her husband on the subject of religion, and she did not display the intelligence revealed by him. "I do not believe Evangelist was sincere in practicing the creed he had established. Rather, I believe he founded the mysterious cult with all of its weird props and practices, with the sole idea of making money."

The previous day's breaking story of the murders adds colour regarding Evangelist's cult:

Eight or ten wax figures, each hideous and grotesque to the extreme, and each presumably representing one of the "celestial planets," were suspended on the altar in a circle by wires from the ceiling. Among them was a huge eye, electrically lighted from the inside, which Evangelist referred to in his bible as "the sun."

The walls and ceiling of this "religious sanctum" were lined with light green cloth, which bulged out in places like the walls of a padded cell. In a window of the basement, which was on a line with and visible from St. Aubin avenue, a large card bore the words: "Great Celestial Planet Exhibition."

Evangelist and his family undoubtedly were killed while the "prophet" was in his office after having "read the signs" from the celestial bodies, for his bible states that he "saw them from 12 to 3 a. m."

It was the worst mass murder in Detroit's history. Theft was not a motive; valuables were untouched. And it remains unsolved today.

What's the point of rehashing such a tragic though long-cold case? The trance-like authorship of the text, the occult aspect of the crime, the media's inadequacies, the singular brutality, "baffled" police and the impotence of justice: it's America. It always has been America.

Another cold case, this from Sonoma California, but only 20 months old: "Tantalizing clues in pair's slaying" read the headline in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle. Sheriffs have released evidence - a sign of some desperation - from the murder scene of a young engaged couple killed camping on a beach in hope of comparing "our evidence to people's suspicions," says Lt. Dave Edmonds. The evidence includes pictures of devil faces carved or burned in nearby driftwood and enigmatic journal pages in several different hands mentioning leprechauns and the toothfairy and containing text like, "At the Driftwood Inn, alone again, outside of myself and placid as hell."

The two murder victims were shot in the head, likely at close range while they slept. There was no sign of a robbery: "None of the couple's belongings, including Christian literature and camping gear, had been disturbed." Reverend Chris Cutshall, father of victim Lindsay, age 22, says "We have no idea at this stage whether these drawings have anything to do with the case. But we believe their deaths were satanically motivated anyway. These were great kids who were serving the Lord, and they didn't have any enemies other than the evil one."

It's easy to discount such remarks as simply a grieving father finding consolation and meaning in setting his religious template upon his daughter's mysterious death. American evangelicals seem to invite such discounting. And that so many seem to want there to be a vast satanic conspiracy, as though one provides an inverted confirmation of the sureity of their own faith, makes it easy for those who wish to do so to dismiss allegations of ritual abuse and occult crime as the product of religious hysteria, confusion and ignorance. But the unsolved murders in Sonoma remind me of the still unsolved 1974 murder of student Arlis Perry, found stabbed in a Stanford sanctuary with a tall candle in her vagina and another between her breasts, which in turn recalls the 1980 killing of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl in a hospital chapel, an inverted cross stabbed into her torso, for which Father Gerald Robinson is at last standing trial. (In an interview with the prosecution, "Robinson said he was stunned when he walked into the sacristy and [fellow hospital chaplain Rev. Jerome] Swiatecki turned around and said, 'Why did you do this?' Robinson said he did not know why the other priest pointed the finger at him.") Also, the Sonoma murders were cited by Richard Hamlin in his recent trial, referring to the satanic rituals he claims wife Susan described to him. Many took place, he said, on Goat Rock, close to the murder scene.


It's very late and I haven't actually reached the point of this post. But I'm too tired to make much sense to carry on right now, so I'm afraid I'll need to wrap this up later.

In the Air

Oh if there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now - Bob Dylan

One thing this blog has taught me is the fallacy of original thought. Or I suppose, to sharpen the point and turn it on myself, I mean the fallacy that my own thought might be original. A comment to Friday's post, for instance:

In one of Colin Wilson's works...he speaks of certain cases of people with brains that are largely fluid, covered over with a thin layer of cortex. While most people with this condition are severely retarded, there are known instances of such people showing normal or above normal intelligence. Wilson goes on to speculate on the idea of the brain not as an organ of thought, but as some sort of receiver for thought that arises outside of the body. The idea's an odd one, yet in many ways attractive for the number of loose ends it ties up.

I haven't read that from Wilson but I'm familiar with the study he cites, and it's been helping to inform for me a concept of the brain as a receiver of non-localized consciousness. It seems conducive to a holographic model, and it could contribute to an understanding of a number of psychic and even religious phenomena such as mind reading, possession and reincarnation. (For example, perhaps rather than evidence for rebirth, a child's memories of a past life are the result of ego confusion brought about by signal error. Or, to use the radio jargon that's appropriately spooky for this metaphor, when a "strong signal [is] in the proximity on the low bands, it will cause crossmodulation and create a 'ghost' signal.")

I still think it's still a good idea, though I no longer think it's my own. And a good thing, too. Because perhaps the actual fallacy here is not original thought, but independent thought.

I was just thinking that. Maybe we don't need to put our heads together. Maybe instead, we need to imagine our skulls as durable cabinets protecting the circuitry that receives the signals pulsing all around us.

When ideas come of age they're simply in the air. Inventors and great minds, suddenly and seemingly independent of each other, appear to tap into the same ineffable thoughtstream. Great artists are often recognized by the clarity of their manifestations of universality. In Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home, singer Liam Clancy says about Bob Dylan that "it wasn’t necessary for him to be a definitive person – he was a receiver – he was possessed," while producer Bob Johnson says Dylan's work isn't to Dylan's fault or credit: "He’s got the holy spirit about him – you can look at him and see that."

If we're potentially co-authors and participants in ideas that are "out there," then perhaps we can also intuit and anticipate the bad ideas that come of age to work mischief. Because it doesn't always take a secret lodge or a Grove cabin for dark elements to conspire together; it only requires a compatability of unspoken means and motive, up and down the chain of unaccountability. Once the pieces are in place, the commands needn't be explicit and top-heavy and the conspiracy needn't even be self-conscious. For instance, I don't think for a moment that Tony Blair "gave the order" for the murder of David Kelly, though I can well imagine that, on hearing the news, Blair immediately recognized the hand of statecraft and perhaps even his own numb complicity.

Maybe this is what accounts for the 9/11 synchronicities of The Lone Gunman pilot. Rather than Chris Carter being tipped off, perhaps he tapped in.

Many of us have been intuiting spoilers to the story arc of the Iraq War for years: The death squads and black ops creating untenable chaos, sectarian strife and intentional failure to the bogus "mission" of democracy, with the objective of generating the "regretable inevitability" of partition. "Civil War" was talked up, because the End Game for Iraq was always division into impotent colonial Bantusans. We just knew it.

It seems like the End Game has arrived, because suddenly partition, which "just months ago was largely dismissed as a fringe thought," is now being described by the usual suspects in the Pravdas of this empire as being the "surest - and perhaps now the only - way to bring stability to Iraq." And just as The Washington Post chimes in, Joe Biden shows up in The New York Times with an editorial contending that Iraq should be split into three separate ethnographic regions.

If we lack independent thought, then so do they. And if we can see it coming, then maybe we can do something about it before it arrives.