Keeping you busy while I’m gone…


I'm leaving today for three weeks to film crop circles in England. The season is in full force. There have been 98 worldwide so far this year, with 33 of them in England. (The biggest year for circles saw 300 of them in England!) For anyone new to the list, I keep interspersing things about the circles because “Contact” in headlines could change consciousness — and we've never need a change of consciousness more.

If you want to track the formations as they come in, with pictures and tidbits of information about them, the best site for that is http://cropcircleconnector.com/2004/2004.html — scroll down past the ads to the months, starting in April, when England got its first circle of the year, where you also can check into what has come in so far.

I probably won't post anything until after I get back o­n August 8, so I thought I'd leave you with the petition I have for signatures (please do sign) to get attention paid to this most interesting thing going o­n in the world.  If you follow the various links that are indicated, you'll find yourself deep into the dazzle of these mysterious works of art.


We, the signers of this, request that attention be paid to the crop circle phenomenon. We urge all those who think there are mundane explanations for crop circles to become aware of the research that has been done that suggests otherwise. It is in fact possible that a highly intelligent non-human agency is responsible. At this time, when a unifying vision is needed for all the peoples of Earth, this phenomenon could provide that. With even a small chance of such a result, we urge serious investigation of the possibility that we are indeed being visited and signaled.

Sign the call.

WHAT IF THEY’RE REAL?

A Call  For an Investigation of  What is Known About  Crop Circles

Given skewed press coverage and unfounded attacks by professed skeptics, there is a predisposition to dismiss this phenomenon. However, a modicum of time spent examining the evidence shows that  there is more to crop circles  than is popularly understood .

Something is happening o­n Earth that  could be extraordinary.  It is very possible that we are receiving intelligent communications from a non-human source. With circles dating back at least hundreds of years and perhaps thousands, well over 2,000 formations have been documented and examined since 1989  when the phenomenon took a turn into designs of much greater complexity. They have appeared  now o­n every continent except Antarctica, with reports of circles in the United States going back to 1880. Incredibly, we see very little about this in the media.

What If We Are Not Alone?

A great power has arisen, directing thoughts and perception in a certain direction towards a more complete and satisfactory view of reality than the modern conventions of materialism have previously allowed. Gently, subtly, with no disturbance or panic, we are being guided across a watershed, from o­ne worldview to another. And this is in no way arbitrary, but a purposeful process, in accordance with the interests of eternal nature and the necessities of the present. We now can see something of what the ancients meant when they spoke of revelation.

– John Michell
The  Cereologist

Crop circles no longer are thought to be nature's designs, or left in the fields by weather phenomena, or produced by advanced military technology, among other theories that have come and gone. The o­ne idea that persists as an explanation is that hoaxers are responsible for these constructions. This explanation, however, is borne of ignorance. Go to http://The Conversation.org/booklet2.html to see some details  in crop circles  that defy explanation as to how they could be  made by  people .

Should “CONTACT” be  in Headlines Everywhere?

This is a call to investigate the evidence at hand about the crop circle phenomenon.  

Why?

  • Because  if the makers are from someplace more scientifically advanced than we
    are o­n Earth, they conceivably could help us with global warming, random asteroids, energy depletion, and every other environmental threat o­n our living planet

  • Because knowing we are being visited would open our minds to take us beyond our dangerously combative present dynamic

  • Because the knowledge that we are not the o­nly intelligent species would capture our imaginations

  • Because  an otherness amongst us  would cause us to dream

With the possibility of ecological  disasters looming and a world in permanent war threatening to destroy us all, the help that might come from a civilization more advanced than ours is too important to ignore. Those who have studied the crop circle phenomenon assure us that the data points to such a thing,  and that all that's needed is  for scrutiny be given to what has been discovered and discerned.

If we were to discover extra-terrestrial life, it would show that we are not intellectually unique in the galaxy. Man has a tendency to think he's very special. We consider ourselves morally, culturally, and intellectually unique. But if we were to find a signal from another star system, another thinking being, we would know that none of that is true. A connection with another intelligence would be the first bridging across four billion years of independent life in evolution. It would be the end of Earth's cultural isolation in a galaxy and a universe surely containing millions of other civilizations. It would be without doubt the greatest discovery in the history of humankind.

 Paul Horowitz
Project Director, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

Wherever interest has been shown in them, crop circles have proliferated in number and have become much more complex. It surely is worth seeing what might be delivered to us and done for us if widespread interest were expressed now.


If you'd like more information, contact:

Suzanne Taylor 
Executive Producer, CROP CIRCLES: Quest for Truth 
suzanne@mightycompanions.org
 
Background Information

WHY REAL CROP CIRCLES CAN'T BE HOAXED
www.TheConversation.org/booklet2.html

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE CROP CIRCLE PHENOMENON? www.MightyCompanions.org/cropcircles

MAKING SENSE OF OUR TIMES
www.TheConversation.org

O’Reilly Potted

Rick Ingrasci is cooking this week — this piece, from The Nation, is the second post I'm making from mailings to his list. I hope this gets wide circulation!!!

My First (and Last) Time With Bill O'Reilly

by DAVID COLE

It started innocuously enough. o­n Monday, June 21, a producer from Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor called to ask me to appear as a guest that evening to comment o­n a front-page story in the New York Times claiming that the Bush Administration had overstated the value of intelligence gained at Guantánamo and the dangers posed by the men detained there. I'm generally not a fan of shout-television, and I had declined several prior invitations to appear o­n O'Reilly's show, but this time I said yes. Little did I know it would not o­nly be my first time, but also my last.

I sat in the Washington studio as the taping of the show began in New York with a rant from Bill O'Reilly. He claimed that “the Factor” had established the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and then played a clip from Thomas Kean, head of the Senate's 9/11 Commission, in which Kean said, “There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in any way in attacks o­n the United States, in other words, o­n 9/11. What we do say, however, is there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Iraq, Saddam–excuse me. Al Qaeda.”

I was impressed. O'Reilly, who had announced his show as the “No Spin Zone,” was actually playing a balanced soundbite, o­ne that accurately reported the commission's findings both that there was no evidence linking Saddam and 9/11, and that there was some evidence of contacts (if no “collaborative relationship”) between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Maybe all those nasty things Al Franken had said about O'Reilly weren't true after all.

But suddenly O'Reilly interrupted, plainly angry, and said, “We can't use that…. We need to redo the whole thing.” Three minutes of silence later, the show began again, with O'Reilly re-recording the introduction verbatim. Except this time, when he got to the part about Kean, he played no tape, and simply paraphrased Kean as confirming that “definitely there was a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.” The part about no link to 9/11 was left o­n the cutting-room floor.

Now it was my turn. O'Reilly introduced the segment by complaining that we are at war and need to be united, but that newspapers like the New York Times are running biased stories, dividing the country and aiding the enemy. “The spin must stop–our lives depend o­n it,” O'Reilly gravely intoned. He then characterized the Times story that day as claiming that the Guantánamo detainees were “innocent people” and “harmless.” He said the paper's article “questions holding the detainees at Guantánamo.”

I noted that the Times had said nothing of the sort. And I pointed out that the article relied o­n a CIA study finding that the detainees seemed to be low-level and had provided little valuable intelligence.

That didn't convince O'Reilly, however, who again criticized the Times for misleading its readers by terming the detainees innocent and not dangerous. I replied that he was misleading his own viewers, by exaggerating what the Times had said. “No, I'm not,” he retorted. So far, the usual fare o­n newstalk television.

But then I decided to go o­ne step further: “It seems to me like the pot calling the kettle black, Bill, because I just sat here five minutes ago as you re-recorded the introduction to this show to take out a statement from the head of the 9/11 commission stating that there was no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.”

Apparently O'Reilly does not like being called “the pot.” He exploded, repeatedly called me an “S.O.B.” and assured me that he would cut my accusation from the interview when the show aired. He also said I would “never ever” be o­n his show again. At this point, I wasn't sure whether to take that as a threat or a promise.

Sure enough, when The O'Reilly Factor aired later that night, both Thomas Kean's statement about 9/11 and my charge about O'Reilly deleting it were missing. All that was left was Bill O'Reilly, fuming at the liberal media's lack of objectivity and balance, and ruing the divisive effect “spin” has o­n our national unity.

David Cole (cole@law.georgetown.edu), The Nation's legal affairs correspondent and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is the author of No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press), co-author, with James X. Dempsey, of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties for National Security (New Press) and author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War o­n Terrorism (New Press). 

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A major energetic shift in this country?

These pieces, by Charley Reese, made me feel sooooo good. I got them from Rick Ingrasci (he sends excellent things to his list — rick@bigmindmedia.com). They were sent to him by Norie Huddle, an old friend of mine. Norie says, “For those of you who may not know Charley Reese, he is o­ne of the most far right writers around. He used to be o­ne of the Orlando Sentinel's favorite neoconservatives. The fact that he is openly opposing Bush and endorsing Kerry points to a major energetic shift in this country!”

Vote For A Man, Not A Puppet

May 21, 2004

Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.

I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.

It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint press conference recently.

John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.

But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.

People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me o­nce, but he won't fool me twice.

It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian.

It's no wonder that the Justice Department has convicted a few Arab-Americans of supporting terrorism. What would you do if you found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?

This election really is important, not o­nly for domestic reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America is not o­nly hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration. Don't forget, a scientific poll of Europeans found us, Israel, North Korea and Iran as the greatest threats to world peace.

I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with Kerry to get a man in the White House with brains enough not to blow up the world and us with it. Go to Kerry's Web site (

www.johnkerry.com) and read some of the magazine profiles o­n him. You'll find that there is a great deal more to Kerry than the GOP attack dogs would have you believe.

Besides, it would be fun to have a president who plays hockey, windsurfs, ride motorcycles, plays the guitar, writes poetry and speaks French. It would be good to have a man in the White House who has killed people face to face. Killing people has a sobering effect o­n a man and dispels all illusions about war.

———————————————

Hypocrisy: The US Government's Biggest Single Problem

June 12, 2004

The biggest single problem the federal government has is its hypocrisy. It talks o­ne way and acts another. It talks of spreading democracy while supporting dictators; it blathers about human rights while violating them; and it claims to promote the rule of law while scoffing at laws it considers inconvenient.

If the basis of our foreign policy is going to be American security and American economic gains, then we ought to say so and shut up about spreading democracy and promoting human rights. Instead, we steadily destroy our credibility in the world by talking o­ne way and acting another.

We more or less invented war crimes by staging the show trials at Nuremberg, Germany, at the end of World War II. We happily hanged German and Japanese officials. Now, however, the world wants to establish a permanent international tribunal to try people for war crimes. Our reply is, “No way.” Not o­nly are we not supporting the international tribunal, but we are exacting agreements from individual countries to never offer up Americans to their jurisdiction. War crimes, applied to us, are “just politics.”

This example is really funny. Who are our closest allies in the Islamic world? Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. There's not a democracy in the bunch. The insanity of the neoconservative scheme to impose democracy o­n the Middle East is obvious. If today there were truly free elections in every Middle Eastern country, every o­ne of them would elect an anti-American government.

This is because of our greatest hypocrisy in the foreign field. We made the Iraqi people pay a horrific price in the name of enforcing United Nations resolutions. We killed tens of thousands of Iraqis with bombs and sanctions and destroyed their economy. In the boastful words of o­ne of our generals, we bombed Iraq “back into the preindustrial age.”

But when the United Nations refused to pass a resolution authorizing us to launch a new war against Iraq, we told the United Nations to go stick it in its ear. And more to the point, from the point of view in the Arab world, Israel is in violation of more than 60 U.N. resolutions, and that's counting o­nly the o­nes we didn't veto. We have prevented the United Nations from imposing even the mildest sanctions o­n Israel to force it to comply with international law.

It was not OK for Iraq to occupy Kuwait, but it is OK, from our point of view, for Israel to occupy parts of Syria, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It was, for a long time, even OK for Israel to occupy a huge section of Egypt and a slice of Lebanon.

In the current war, we have not o­nly abused Iraqi prisoners, but we handed over some suspected terrorists to countries we know will torture the dickens out of them. It is irrelevant to say that Saddam Hussein would have abused them worse than we did. Saddam never proclaimed himself a democrat and human-rights advocate. We do. No criminal defense lawyer would ever ask for mercy o­n the basis that his client o­nly beat and raped the victim, but spared her life.

To put it plainly, our federal government does not live up to American ideals. Americans citizens, rather than acting like sheep, should vigorously insist that it do so. We must replace an unjust policy with a just policy and substitute sincerity for hypocrisy and propaganda.

That is the o­nly way to make America secure. That is the o­nly way to win the war against terrorists. Terrorists have never attacked us out of the blue for no rational reason. To paraphrase an old Bill Clinton slogan, “It's the foreign policy, stupid.”

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Legal Nonsense

July 10, 2004

I love the sharp tongue of the British. A former legal adviser to the British Foreign Office has said George Bush's war o­n terrorism is “legal nonsense” and confers no more power o­n the United States to detain people than the war against obesity.

That's true. The British lady, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, is quite correct, too, that the war against Iraq was illegal and thus the occupation of Iraq was/is illegal. I say “was/is” because that depends o­n whether you believe the fairy tale of Iraqi sovereignty.

So it turns out old Saddam Hussein was correct. He is still the legal president of Iraq; the new Iraqi government is illegal and has no right to try him. That, of course, will not prevent him from being tried and eventually hanged. o­ne of the things I hope Americans are learning, besides the fact that the war wasn't worth it, is that the rule of law is a farce. Like language, the law is twisted to justify what the Bush administration wants to do. This administration is bound by neither law nor truth.

I'm no lawyer, but I pointed out some time ago that you can't declare war o­n a tactic, and that's all terrorism is – a tactic. Real terrorists, as opposed to people resisting occupation of their country or guerrillas fighting to overthrow a government, are criminals, and as criminals deserve to be hunted down. That, however, is not a war.

For all time, when bad governments wanted to increase their power, they spread fear and claimed the new power would allow them to “protect” the people. If there were no real enemies at the gate, they would invent them. The threat of terrorism has been enormously exaggerated by this administration to justify a very un-American lust for power. It has spread fear like a glutton spreads butter o­n hot pancakes.

Some local law-enforcement officers also fearmonger to get bigger budgets. Some in burgs no international terrorist could find with a satellite are warning the local folks to suspect everybody they see.

Another word that is vastly abused in this crazy time is “intelligence.” Do you know what intelligence is? It's just knowledge, and knowledge must be factual. Assertions are not knowledge. Beliefs are not knowledge. Fears are not knowledge. Regardless of what so-called “intelligence” said, the facts are that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, had no programs to produce them and had no cooperative arrangements with al-Qaeda.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who probably should see a psychologist as well as a cardiologist, continues to claim a connection, but what he calls a connection is o­ne or two meetings in a period of years from which nothing ever came. If a mere meeting is a “connection,” then all of us have connections with every human being we've ever met, however briefly. This is another example of language abuse.

Another architect of the illegal war, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, still coyly claims that just because we haven't found the weapons doesn't mean they don't exist. That's true. We haven't found any Martians, either, but perhaps they do exist, perhaps even in the offices of the Pentagon. It's always been hard to prove a negative.

This is an administration of sick puppies whose minds are haunted by lust for power, ideological phantoms and a profound contempt for the American people. A willingness to deceive is always proof of contempt.

Hopefully, in November, a majority of Americans will decide that this administration, like its illegal war, isn't worth reelecting.


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