uh.., when we get to see corzine perpwalk?

cafeamericain | Much of the financial press picked up this story from the Wall Street Journal, Money From MF Global Feared Gone. Much of the mainstream media in the US and the UK these days is just a conduit for sound bites from the monied interests.

"Nearly three months after MF Global Holdings Ltd. collapsed, officials hunting for an estimated $1.2 billion in missing customer money increasingly believe that much of it might never be recovered, according to people familiar with the investigation.

As the sprawling probe that includes regulators, criminal and congressional investigators, and court-appointed trustees grinds on, the findings so far suggest that a "significant amount" of the money could have "vaporized" as a result of chaotic trading at MF Global during the week before the company's Oct. 31 bankruptcy filing, said a person close to the investigation."

And as we have heard, quite a bit of that money was also diverted in the last few days into the pockets of MF Global's bank, JP Morgan, which still reportedly holds much of it. Now whether they are legally entitled to keep that money is another matter. But this entire charade has been cloaked with a public relations campaign using terms like 'missing,' 'vaporized,' and 'mystery' to describe the customer assets as if no one really knows where the funds had gone, which the CFTC has explicity stated months ago is not the case. And that the handling of the bankruptcy and the method of ordering customers with creditors is in violation of the CFTC's rule 190, as is evident from the precedents and intentions which established it.

What the press apparently has not yet heard or is not reporting is that vulture funds are now contacting the MF Global customers, however they may have obtained their names, and are offering them 85 cents on the dollar for their claims. Most of the claim holders are reported to expect or to have been payed 72 cents on the dollar as things now stand. The Wall Street Journal certainly casts gloom on their prospects for a full recovery and hopes of justice, based on the report from an unnamed source.

This is creating a difficult position for these much abused customers because of the need to settle their income tax obligations for 2011. Until they can prove the funds are not 'recoverable' they bear the responsibility for their tax obligations on the full amount. But if they settle with the vulture funds they can take the loss and move on, capitulating to the despair and the anxiety of having been cheated and abused by the partnership between government and Wall Street.

ta loco..., self-guided bullets on top of autonomous drones...,

io9 | There was a time when increasing the distance between yourself and a sharp shooter bent on your extermination would significantly improve your chances of survival. But that time is coming to an end.

Government engineers have designed a bullet that can aim itself, correcting its own path mid-flight in order to connect with targets over a mile away. Is this the future of armed warfare?

The formidable projectile was designed by engineers Red Jones and Brian Kast of Sandia National Laboratories. And while this bullet is technically a prototype, preliminary tests cleary demonstrate that it has the potential to revolutionize the design of smart ammunition. Here's how it works:

Your traditional small-caliber projectile has grooves — called "rifling" — that cause it to spin and fly true as it passes through the air. The physical principles behind this behavior are the same ones governing the flight of a spiral pass in a game of football. Fist tap John.

american jews confront internal rancor over israel

CNN | When the editor of a Jewish newspaper here wrote this month that the Jewish state might consider assassinating an American president, his column made national headlines and provoked a Secret Service inquiry.

The most striking criticism came from the Jewish community itself, which collectively held its nose and harshly denounced the column by Andrew Adler, who is also the owner of the weekly paper, the Atlanta Jewish Times. Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman called Adler's words "irresponsible and extremist."

Adler apologized and resigned as editor, but some see the episode as the latest example of an increase in divisive, over-the-top rhetoric within American Jewish communal life, revolving largely around the hot-button issue of Israel and its policies toward the Palestinians.

The tensions have provoked Jewish groups across the country to launch programs aimed at lowering the political temperature in their own religious communities.

Israel is not "one of the great unifying factors" that it once was in the Jewish community, said Samuel Freedman, author of "Jew vs. Jew: the Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.”

"Since the Lebanon invasion and the First Intifada, it has become a dividing line,” he said, referring to the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation in the late 1980s. “It's probably deeper now than I've ever seen it."

Tensions within American Judaism are rising as some Jews detect an "existential threat" to Israel, with Iran's nuclear aspirations and Islamist parties coming to power during the Arab uprisings, he says.

Freedman also sees broader trends at work, including the fading line between private and public talk dissolving in the era of blogging and tweeting. The Atlanta Jewish Times incident, he says, is a reminder that words that sound bold in private will "resonate really differently when they are out in public."

Ethan Felson, vice president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, says emotions have been much more "intense and destructive" lately as ideological camps within the American Jewish community harden their views over the contentious U.S. presidential campaign, tensions between Israel and Iran, and issues from health care to marriage.

"This is going to be a brutal year," he says. "We're looking at a scorched earth political environment."

it suits israel that we never forget nuclear iran...,

The Independent | Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West's (or Israel's) forces attack.

Given the nature of the theocratic regime, the repulsive suppression of its post-election opponents in 2009, not to mention its massive pools of oil, every attempt to inject common sense into the story also has to carry a medical health warning: no, of course Iran is not a nice place. But ...

Let's take the Israeli version which, despite constant proof that Israel's intelligence services are about as efficient as Syria's, goes on being trumpeted by its friends in the West, none more subservient than Western journalists. The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story.

In fact, we don't know that Iran really is building a nuclear weapon. And after Iraq, it's amazing that the old weapons of mass destruction details are popping with the same frequency as all the poppycock about Saddam's titanic arsenal. Not to mention the date problem. When did all this start? The Shah. The old boy wanted nuclear power. He even said he wanted a bomb because "the US and the Soviet Union had nuclear bombs" and no one objected. Europeans rushed to supply the dictator's wish. Siemens – not Russia – built the Bushehr nuclear facility.

And when Ayatollah Khomeini, Scourge of the West, Apostle of Shia Revolution, etc, took over Iran in 1979, he ordered the entire nuclear project to be closed down because it was "the work of the Devil". Only when Saddam invaded Iran – with our Western encouragement – and started using poison gas against the Iranians (chemical components arriving from the West, of course) was Khomeini persuaded to reopen it.

All this has been deleted from the historical record; it was the black-turbaned mullahs who started the nuclear project, along with the crackpot Ahmadinejad. And Israel might have to destroy this terror-weapon to secure its own survival, to ensure the West's survival, for democracy, etc, etc.

For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel is the brutal, colonising, occupying power. But the moment Iran is mentioned, this colonial power turns into a tiny, vulnerable, peaceful state under imminent threat of extinction. Ahmadinejad – here again, I quote Netanyahu – is more dangerous than Hitler. Israel's own nuclear warheads – all too real and now numbering almost 300 – disappear from the story.

fighting sanctions with sanctions

Reuters | Fighting sanctions with sanctions in a test of strength with the West over its nuclear ambitions, Iran warned on Friday it may halt oil exports to Europe next week in a move calculated to hurt ailing European economies.

The Tehran government grappling with its own economic crisis under Western trade and banking embargoes, will host a rare visit on Sunday by U.N. nuclear inspectors for talks that the ruling clergy may hope can relieve diplomatic pressure as they struggle to bolster public support.

Since the U.N. watchdog lent independent weight in November to the suspicions of Western powers that Iran is using a nuclear energy program to give itself the ability to build atomic bombs, U.S. and EU sanctions and Iranian threats of reprisal against Gulf shipping lanes have disrupted world oil markets and pushed up prices.

Amid forecasts Iran might be able to build a bomb next year, and with President Barack Obama facing re-election campaign questions on how he can make good on promises - to Americans and to Israel - not to tolerate a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic, a decade of dispute risks accelerating towards the brink of war.

The U.S. Treasury Department said on Friday it would send its undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, David Cohen, to Britain, Germany and Switzerland next week to talk about how to enforce sanctions against Iran's central bank. Fist tap Dale.

massive ordinance penetrator: not so much...,

AFP | The US military has concluded that its largest conventional bomb is not capable of destroying Iran's most heavily fortified underground facilities suspected to be used for building nuclear weapons, according to The Wall Street Journal.

But citing unnamed US officials, the newspaper said the military was stepping up efforts to make it more powerful.

The 13.6-ton "bunker-buster" bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea, Friday's report said.

But initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, would not be capable of destroying some of Iran's facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them, the paper noted.

In a report issued in November, the International Atomic Energy Agency said intelligence from more than 10 countries and its own sources "indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device."

It detailed 12 suspicious areas such as testing explosives in a steel container at a military base and studies on Shahab-3 ballistic missile warheads that the IAEA said were "highly relevant to a nuclear weapon programme."

Iran, which has come under unprecedented international pressure since the publication of the report, with Washington and the EU targeting its oil sector and central bank, rejected the dossier as based on forgeries.

Meanwhile, doubts about its bomb's effectiveness prompted the Pentagon this month to secretly submit a request to Congress for funding to enhance the bomb's ability to penetrate deeper into rock, concrete and steel before exploding, The Journal noted.

The Defense Department has spent about $330 million so far to develop about 20 of the bombs, which are built by Boeing Co., the report pointed out.

The Pentagon is seeking about $82 million more to make the bomb more effective, The Journal said.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in an interview with The Journal Thursday, acknowledged the bomb's shortcomings against some of Iran's deepest bunkers.

He said more development work would be done and that he expected the bomb to be ready to take on the deepest bunkers soon.

"We're still trying to develop them," Panetta said.

keeping work wet worldwide

Guardian | Iran's nuclear scientists are not being assassinated. They are being murdered. Killing our enemies abroad is just state-sponsored terror – whatever euphemism western leaders like to use. On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn't armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.

Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.

"On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead," bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. "I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly." On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear" – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: "I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes."

These "men on motorbikes" have been described as "assassins". But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: not just assassinations but terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.

Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance ("such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim"); moral distance ("the kind of intense belief in moral superiority"); and mechanical distance ("the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim").

the future of warfare

globalguerillas | Here's the future. Courtesy of Northrop Grumman. It's an autonomous aircraft/drone that has a full weapons bay (4,500 lbs). Say that word again: autonomous. That's the breakthrough feature. This also means:

It can make its own "kill decision." Again and again and again. That decision is going to get better and better and cheaper and cheaper (Moore's law has made insect level intelligence available for pennies, rat intelligence is next).

It isn't vulnerabe to a pilot in Nevada directing it to land in Iran. Oops.

It will eventually (sooner than you think) be the "Queen," making decisions for thousands of smaller swarmed (semi-autonomous) drones it lays on a battle zone (aka "city").

In sum: It allows an unprecedented automation of conventional violence.

Granted, it will be possible for small groups to put together systems like this on the cheap. For offensive or defense reasons.

However, I'm much more worried about their ability to automate repression, particularly if combined with software bots that sift/sort/monitor all of your data 24x7x365 (already going on).

the mixtape of revolution

NYTimes | DEF JAM will probably never sign them, but Cheikh Oumar Cyrille Touré, from a small town about 100 miles southeast of Dakar, Senegal, and Hamada Ben Amor, a 22-year-old man from a port city 170 miles southeast of Tunis, may be two of the most influential rappers in the history of hip-hop.

Mr. Touré, a k a Thiat (“Junior”), and Mr. Ben Amor, a k a El Général, both wrote protest songs that led to their arrests and generated powerful political movements. “We are drowning in hunger and unemployment,” spits Thiat on “Coup 2 Gueule” (from a phrase meaning “rant”) with the Keurgui Crew. El Général’s song “Head of State” addresses the now-deposed President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali over a plaintive background beat. “A lot of money was pledged for projects and infrastructure/Schools, hospitals, buildings, houses/but the sons of dogs swallowed it in their big bellies.” Later, he rhymes, “I know people have a lot to say in their hearts, but no way to convey it.” The song acted as sluice gates for the release of anger that until then was being expressed clandestinely, if at all.

During the recent wave of revolutions across the Arab world and the protests against illegitimate presidents in African countries like Guinea and Djibouti, rap music has played a critical role in articulating citizen discontent over poverty, rising food prices, blackouts, unemployment, police repression and political corruption. Rap songs in Arabic in particular — the new lingua franca of the hip-hop world — have spread through YouTube, Facebook, mixtapes, ringtones and MP3s from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya and Algeria, helping to disseminate ideas and anthems as the insurrections progressed. El Général, for example, was featured on a mixtape put out by the dissident group Khalas (Enough) in Libya, which also included songs like “Tripoli Is Calling” and “Dirty Colonel.”

Why has rap — an American music that in its early global spread was associated with thuggery and violence — come to be so highly influential in these regions? After all, rappers are not the only musicians involved in politics. Late last week, protests erupted when Youssou N’Dour, a Senegalese singer of mbalax, a fusion of traditional music with Latin, pop and jazz, was barred by a constitutional court from pursuing a run for president. But mbalax singers are typically seen as older entertainers who often support the government in power. In contrast, rappers, according to the Senegalese rapper Keyti, “are closer to the streets and can bring into their music the general feeling of frustration among people.”

Another reason is the oratorical style rap employs: rappers report in a direct manner that cuts through political subterfuge. Rapping can simulate a political speech or address, rhetorical conventions that are generally inaccessible to the marginal youth who form the base of this movement. And in places like Senegal, rap follows in the oral traditions of West African griots, who often used rhyming verse to evaluate their political leaders. “M.C.’s are the modern griot,” Papa Moussa Lo, a k a Waterflow, told me in an interview a few weeks ago. “They are taking over the role of representing the people.”

the 99% declaration

incarceration (NOT EDUCATION) acts as a hidden foundation for this country...,

NewYorker | A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic —the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

is magical thinking rooted in fear of death?

The full documentary can be viewed here.

the fire of the sun (my 5000th post!)

Scribd | There were others who have claimed to have met Fulcanelli. First of all there is Jacques Bergier (1912-1978). Bergier, together with Louis Pauwels, is in fact the creator of the whole Fulcanelli legend of modern times. The legend began with the publication of "Le Matin des Magiciens" ('Morning of the Magicians', in English published as "The Dawn of Magic"), written by Bergier and Pauwles andpublished in 1960. In this book, of which it is said that it single-handedly started the New Age Movement, Fulcanelli is described as an Alchemical Adept who warns of the evils of atomic energy. As a matter of fact, Bergier identified the alchemist as Fulcanelli (in all probability) in a work entitled "Faire del'Or", Bergier claims that in the summer of 1937 he was visited in a Parisian laboratory at the offices of the Gas Board in Paris by a mysterious stranger. From 1934 to 1940 Jacques Bergier worked with André Helbronner, a brilliant physicist - on researching nuclear physics. Helbronner -with the help of several industrialists- had created a nuclear research laboratory. The visitor immediately had identified himself as an alchemist.

The following account is taken from The Morning of the Magicians , published in London in 1971:“M. André Helbronner, whose assistant I believe you are, is carrying out research on nuclear energy. M.Helbronner has been good enough to keep me informed as to the results of some of his experiments,notably the appearance of radio-activity corresponding to plutonium when a bismuth rod is volatilized byan electric discharge in deuterium at high pressure. You are on the brink of success, as indeed are several other of our scientists today. May I be allowed to warn you to be careful? The research in which you and your colleagues are engaged is fraught with terrible dangers, not only for yourselves, but for the whole human race. The liberation of atomic energy is easier than you think, and the radio-activity artificially produced can poison the atmosphere of our planet in the space of a few years. Moreover, atomic explosives can be produced from a few grammes of metal powerful enough to destroy whole cities. I am telling you this as a fact: the alchemists have known it for a very long time.”Bergier was warned by the unknown alchemist against the dangers of nuclear energy, eight years before the first atomic tests that were carried out at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Until the hour of his deathin 1978 Bergier remained convinced that the enigmatical visitor was no other than Fulcanelli (Robert Amadou claimed that Bergier identified Fulcanelli in 1983 as Schwaller de Lubicz - see "L'Enquete deRobert Amadou" p10 -) . Following the experiments of Bergier and Helbronner, it is claimed that the American "Office of Strategic Services" (O.S.S., forerunner of the C..I.A.), established in 1942 under Roosevelt, tried to find and locate Fulcanelli at the end of the War. The Americans, as well as other allied intelligence agencies, wanted to gather as many expert scientists as possible to prevent them from passing to the enemy, the Sovjet Union. This claim is allegedly confirmed by Canseliet. For these agencies Fulcanelli seems to have been a real person at the end of the War in 1945. But he remained untraceable….

Then there is the account of Frater Albertus, the German alchemist Albert Richard Riedel, who had information which descended from independent sources on an alleged alchemical transmutation performed by Fulcanelli in 1937! The transmutation supposedly had been performed in Bourges in the presence of Ferdinand de Lesseps II and the famous physicist Pierre Curie (Together with his wife, Marie, they were awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 on account of their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize.) This information descends from Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges, from the article "The Fulcanelli Mystery". There's something wrong about this story since Ferdinand de Lesseps II died in1894 and Pierre Curie in 1906. Weidner and Bridges furthermore state that Frater Albertus "does not supply us with the source of his information." When Canseliet was asked to confirm Albertus' claim heclaimed to know knothing of the incident. Canseliet stated that he only knew that both De Lesseps and Curie belonged to Fulcanelli's large circle of friends (Canseliet in an interview with Frater Albertus in1976). Finally, I want to refer to page 3 - without any further comment - where it is stated that Jean-Julien Champagne was a friend of Ferdinand Jules De Lesseps, one of the sons of the famous Ferdinand Marie De Lesseps, builder of the Suez-Canal. Ferdinand Jules was an alchemist.

"According to the thread skilfully left by Eugene Canseliet who was the unique disciple of FULCANELLI, we devoted ourselves here to a true investigation which led us to inquire into the alchemical but also into the scientific spheres of the years 1880-1920. It appeared slowly but clearly that the one who was dissimulated behind the pseudonym of FULCANELLI, was also a prestigious member of the Institute. Indeed, a great number of his reports and communications were retained by the Academy of Science. It is thus by no means surprising that he was in contact, according to the own testimony of Eugene Canseliet, with the scientists of his time, such as the elderly Chevreul, Marcellin Berthelot or even Pierre Curie, but also with the popular politicians of his time, whom he was meeting at his friend's Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man at the origin of the famous Suez Canal!" Patrick Rivière - "Fulcanelli Sa véritable identité enfin révélée" - Both claims indicate that Fulcanelli was still on the scene in the late 1930's, which would suggest that Jules Boucher was right ….. And so the Fulcanelli phenomenon continues, "his"works venerated by an audience which seem to read his writings from a reverential perspective. And don't we all just love a mystery?

pseudoscience in naziland

Propagander | The Nazis did accomplish a remarkable series of scientific advances. Willy Ley explains, in part, how come. Nazi research science to have been strictly on the shotgun technique; if you shoot enough holes in the unknown, something's apt to drop in your lap. And the Nazis tried everything—anything, no matter how wild!

When things get so tough that there seems to be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle, the Frenchman a woman and the American the Bible.

The German tends to resort to magic, to some nonsensical belief which he tries to validate by way of hysterics and physical force. Not every German, of course. Not even a majority, but it seems to me that the percentage of people so inclined is higher in Germany than in other countries. It was the willingness of a noticeable proportion of the Germans to rate rhetoric above research. and intuition above knowledge, that brought to power a political party which was frankly and loudly anti-intellectual. The Nazis not only burned books they disliked, they also classified theoretical physicists with "Jews and Marxists."

Small wonder the pseudoscientists experienced a heyday under such a regime — but it would be a mistake to believe that these pseudosciences which l am going to describe, originated with the Nazis. They existed, and to some extent even flourished, before Hitler. But then they were hemmed in by the authority of the scientists—after Hitler had become Führer it was almost the other way round.

When speaking about German pseudoscience I am not thinking so much of the usual run of astrologers, fortune tellers, theosophers and devotees to occultism. Of course there was a theosophical society—or rather a few branches hurling noncompliments at one another—there were astrological magazines and presumably astrological societies. There were struggling clairvoyants, mostly struggling among themselves by way of the printed word and resulting lawsuits—I won't judge, but I should think that they should have known the outcome — and there was an occultistic magazine vainly trying to make peace and "advance the cause."

Representatives of all these groups existed in Germany before World War I and began to flourish during World War I. They kept flourishing during the inflationary period, received a slight setback during the few years of mild prosperity in the Twenties, and flourished again dur­ing the years leading up to Hitler. Under Hitler they did not do so well and some groups were even outlawed. If my information is correct, the astrologers found themselves among the outlawed groups, although everybody inside Germany as well as outside knew that Hitler and Himmler had a personal astrol­oger, reportedly a man whose name happened to be Führer, a Dr. W. Führer who also was "Plenipotentiary for Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics."

The pseudosciences I have in mind are not these internationally distributed permanent fads, but some which originated in Germany and while not completely unknown elsewhere, had a special appeal to Germans in about the same sense in which it might be said that the pyramidologists are a British prerogative.

Much of their appeal must have been based on semantic connotations; it is difficult even to translate the names of these "sciences" properly.

The most important of them were Pendelforschung — Pendulum Re­search, Hohlweltlehre — Hollow Earth Doctrine, and Welteislehre — usually abbreviated as WEL, translatable approximately as World Ice Doctrine. But before devoting any space to these more outstanding "achievements" I have to clean up a few minor but not less surprising matters.

In the days before the Nazis became important the term "Ariosophy" could be seen occasionally in some newspapers. Then, one day, there was a small ad, announcing a lecture on Ariosophy by a man whose name I forget. It was stated that he was a disciple of the founder of Ariosophy, Dr. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. It was also stated that priests would not be admitted to the lecture.

The lecturer, who tried hard to look like Albrecht Dürer, the famous but long-dead German painter, began his lecture with the Statement that there were several human races but that skin color is not the most important criterion for distinguishing the races. Then he launched into an explanation of the hidden importance of language, saying that figures of Speech contain deep truths which, in everyday usage, are usually overlooked. People say, for example, "I can't stand that man's smell — remember, the lecture was in German, where that figure of Speech is used to express personal dislike for somebody, a dislike lacking specific rational reasons — well, that just indicates the otherwise forgotten fact that the various races have different smells, in short it ex-presses revulsion at the other man's race.

By that time the lecture had got around to the word Man —- in Ger­man Mensch — and he pointed out that there was a rare word manschen which means to mix—something unsavory—and with a long Jump from linguistics into the Bible manschen and Mensch were connected. Humanity, it turned out, was the result of a—forbidden—mixture of angels and animals. Each person has a small percentage of angel and a large percentage of animal. The races indicate roughly what the percentages are, a "true race" consists of indi­viduals of about the same percentage which seek each other out. Obviously any small Community is apt to harbor individuals of about the same "race"; pure Aryans, like, for exam­ple, the inhabitants of mountain villages in Norway, may. be as high as one per cent angel.

You can easily see how and where such dream-reasoning fitted into the Nzai philosophy; to my surprise no Party Group or Nazi Community ever erected a statue in honor of Dr. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels — whose real name may have been Ignaz Donnerwetter.

The Ariosophers could at least quote a few Biblical passages in sup-port of their ideas—they stated that their founder had been a Catholic priest before "he saw the light." The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft — Society for Truth — and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril. Yes, their convictions were founded upon Bulwer-Lytton's "The Corning Race." They knew that the book was fiction, Bulwer-Lytton had used that device in order to be able to tell the truth about this "power." The subterranean humanity was nonsense, Vril was not, Possibly it had enabled the British. who kept it as a State secret, to amass their colonial empire. Surely the Romans had -had it, inclosed in small metal balls, which guarded their homes and were referred to as lares. For reasons which I failed to penetrate, the secret of Vril could be found by contemplating the structure of an apple, sliced in halves.

No, I am not joking, that is what I was told with great solemnity and secrecy. Such a group actually existed, they even got out the first issue of a magazine which was to proclaim their credo. (I wish I had kept some of these things, but I had enough books to smuggle out as it was.)

nazis: the occult conspiracy

black sun rising

vril hanebu

Vril, the Power of the Coming Race is a 1871 science fiction novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, originally printed as The Coming Race. Many early readers believed that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called "Vril" was accurate, to the extent that some theosophists accepted the book as truth. A 1960 popular book speculated on a secret Vril Society in pre-Nazi Berlin.

The Coming Race by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton

whatever became of hans kammler? - REDUX

Originally posted May 16, 2010.

buzz saw one of the four panels - believers see ET...,

What Buzz saw:


What Believers are told and what they then see:

them clinique lab coats ain't no joke!!!