DailyGrail - 08 Sep 2009

Q: Occult America traces the ways in which occult and magical movements shaped our nation—politically, intellectually, religiously, culturally, and even commercially. Why did the U.S. prove to be such fertile ground for occult movements? What are some primary examples of how the occult influenced American identity and vice versa?

Mitch: Alternative religious movements were entwined with America from its earliest days. In the mid-1600s, just as Europe was experiencing a backlash against occult and esoteric spiritual movements, the American colonies were developing a reputation for religious liberalism. When the town of Philadelphia was a cluster of only a few hundred houses, it hosted faiths ranging from Quakerism to the Mennonites to mystical offshoots of the Lutheran church. The year 1694 marked a turning point for the colonies (and, in many ways, the modern spiritual world) through what initially appeared a very modest event: At that time the first intentional mystical community reached North America when the esoteric scholar Johannes Kelpius led a small sect out of Central Germany to the Wissahickon Creek near Philadelphia. His magical brotherhood practiced its own forms of astrology, alchemy, numerology, Kabala, and esoteric Christianity. News of their “Tabernacle in the Forest” spread back to the Old World and served as a magnet for other occult and esoteric movements. By the early 1700s, admirers of Kelpius formed a new and larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. In 1776, the Shakers – who were once considered a very mysterious sect – broke ground on a settlement outside Albany, New York. That same year the nation’s first “spirit channeler,” a 24-year-old woman who called herself the Publick Universal Friend, began to preach across New England. Beginning in the early 1800s, a region of Central New York called the “Burned-Over District” became suffused with Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and various occult experiments. These movements helped solidify early America’s role as a safe harbor for religious innovation and eventually made the nation into a launching pad for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that swept the globe in the twentieth century.

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Phillip D. Collins, co-author of The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship is back, this time to discuss predictive programming in literature by certain elites on route to their dangerous fantasies about a ‘New World Order’: “Predictive programming works by means of the propagation of the illusion of an infallibly accurate vision of how the world is going to look in the future” which author Michael A. Hoffman calls “scientific inevitablism”. This will be a fascinating program, to be sure. Tell a friend.

Listen at:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Stephen-Hand/2009/09/05/Rethinking-Our-Way-Back-To-Thought

Jonathan Tirone - Sept. 7 2009

The dollar’s role in international trade should be reduced by establishing a new currency to protect emerging markets from the “confidence game” of financial speculation, the United Nations said.

UN countries should agree on the creation of a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members, the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development said today in a report.

China, India, Brazil and Russia this year called for a replacement to the dollar as the main reserve currency after the financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market led to the worst global recession since World War II. China, the world’s largest holder of dollar reserves, said a supranational currency such as the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights, or SDRs, may add stability.

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Gary Horne - September 06, 2009

The elite think our mistakes are more serious and see us as needing their benevolent care, since we don’t have their level of “sophistication”. Such arrogance is the road to tyranny, as warned by writer C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

For the sake of benevolence, the Elites in Power are willing to implement by force the Elites in Towers’ utopian fantasies. The Benevolent Eliteness accepts the advice of intellectuals with little or no critical scrutiny. The blind acceptance of global warming is one example. As a result, unrealistic grandiose schemes are proposed which always seem to result in the need for more Benevolent Elitenesses.

Abstract and pdf.

Excerpt:

V.2 Seat of power

Having identified important shareholders in the global markets, it is now also possible to address the following questions. Who holds the power in an increasingly globalized world? How important are individual people compared to the sphere of influence of multinational corporations? How eminent is the influence of the financial sector? By looking in detail at the identity of the power holders featured in the backbones, we address these issues next.

Michael Heiser - 2 Sept. 2009

Although the name Erich von Däniken may be more familiar, Zecharia Sitchin is arguably the most important proponent of the ancient astronaut hypothesis over the last several decades. One cannot go into a Barnes & Noble and not find his books prominently displayed in the New Age section. Why? Because both Sitchin and his readers have cast him as something von Däniken is not: a scholar of ancient languages and texts. Sitchin’s name therefore carries academic authority in defense of the idea that extraterrestrials visited earth millennia ago, spawning the human race through genetic manipulation and fostering civilization’s major advancements, including Judaism and Christianity. That may sound silly, but tens of millions of readers take it seriously. But should they?

One of the advantages Sitchin has had over his career is the fact that few people could question his “translations” of ancient Sumerian tablets or the Hebrew Bible, or some obscure Aramaic text. He had readers over an academic barrel, not because his work was academically sound, but because these fields are so arcane. Realistically, how many people do this sort of work?

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James Corbett
The Corbett Report
01 September, 2009

In a move sure to send shockwaves through the online activist community, Jonathon Elinoff—activist, researcher, and the filmmaker behind the Core of Corruption documentary series—has released a video archive of dozens of network news broadcasts detailing controversial and suppressed news stories.

The archive, compiled over a period of several years, features actual network news coverage of the Trilateral Commission, the shadow government that went into operation on 9/11, the Bohemian Grove and numerous other topics that the nightly news almost never mentions. Many of the videos (if not all) are being released online for the first time.

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Washington, DC Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Following his United Nations General Assembly interruption of November 22, 1948 in Paris calling for “one government for one world” to outlaw war, former Broadway actor and WWII B-17 bomber pilot World Citizen Garry Davis-whose brother, Bud, was killed at Salerno-supported by an original group consisting of Albert Camus, L’Abbé Pierre, Robert Sarrazac, and Albert Schweitzer, (full list below*), and endorsed by Albert Einstein, declared The World Government (of World Citizens), on September 4, 1953 from the City Hall of Ellsworth, Maine.

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Swallowing the Camel - August 31, 2009

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the first public appearance of Bob Lazar.
If you’re at all interested in UFOs, you’ve probably seen video clips of Lazar chatting calmly and matter-of-factly about his experiences with extraterrestrial spaceships warehoused in the Nevada desert. In his Dan Dreiberg glasses and cheap shirts, he gives the impression of being an extra on the set of Office Space. But don’t be fooled - he’s one of the most significant figures in the entire history of ufology. His revelations about a top-secret test site close to Area 51 firmly established Dreamland as ground zero for UFO research, alien conspiracy theories, and profoundly retarded TV shows.

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Andrew Cusack - 15 August 2009

PERCHED AMID THE bluegum trees on the slopes of Devil’s Peak in Cape Town is the memorial to one of the most brilliant & cunning men the world has ever produced. Cecil John Rhodes may have been born in Bishop’s Stortford, England, but his worldly glories all emanated from the Cape of Good Hope, and so it’s appropriate that his memorial stands here in Cape Town. His first commercial enterprise in South Africa was founding the Rhodes Fruit Farms (now Rhodes Food Group) which still exist on the road from Stellenbosch to Franschoek, and has since expanded throughout the Western Cape, and to the Transvaal and Swaziland. But it was his creation of the diamond monopoly De Beers out of the Kimberley mines that made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Ten years after being elected to the Cape Parliament, he was made Prime Minister of the Cape in 1890, but his catastrophic and illegal attempt to seize the independent Transvaal in 1895 forced his resignation from politics in disgrace.

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I’m Canadian myself, and can attest to the truth of what is said in the video. The way I look at it, having health care taken care of through taxes isn’t any more “socialized” than paying for the fire department or the police department.

A Rigorous Intuition post after a long hiatus.

Broadcast March 6, 1989 with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb.