Homeless Protesting Is Surrender: The Flaw in the Occupy Protests

When I was first asked point blank what I thought of the Occupy Wall Street protests, I said that I was sympathetic to their grievances, but that I thought that their movement was pointless. This is still essentially my position.


How does this relate to the Underworld? Several ways. I will explain.


The Underworld exists. Certain groups with deep pockets exist. There are some really Bad Dudes out there -- dudes who can kill presidents, take down towers, start wars, crash economies and impoverish Third World nations and get away with it.


How do we fight the Underworld? What are our weapons? What tools? What techniques?


According to our friends in Occupy, the answer is to move to a park somewhere in a public space, protest and be homeless. Occasionally have meetings and beat on drums, but that's about it.


Initially, the idea of such civil disobedience sounds sexy and edgy: after all didn't Jesus and the disciples live more or less homeless and hang out with throngs of people?


Welllll......sort of, but it was different.


Jesus was a carpenter. He had a trade. So did the disciples. So did Saint Paul. They lived poor and lived like beggars, sure. But they were also capable. They could do stuff.


The Occupy protesters appear, to me anyway, to be a varied assortment of folks who have been screwed by the industrial economy--college students, homeless people, veterans and the unemployed. The Underworld has left these poor people in the dust--in debt, without a home, without work and without dignity. They protest and bring themselves low, living like homeless people to make their point.


Our posture is important. If we are to stand up to the Underworld, how should we do so? If we strip ourselves of our possessions and live in a public park, refusing to move for routine maintenance and cleaning, wailing for hours on end our grievances against the Underworld, telling the whole world that we have been screwed, what do we look like?


We look weak. We look vulnerable. By bringing ourselves to the lowest, most abject level of poverty (and let's be clear, urban poverty is the most abject form of poverty) where we have nothing that we can use to sustain ourselves (we are land-less), where we are utterly dependent upon hand-outs from strangers in order to buy food mass-produced by the food industrial complex, we are admitting to everyone that hope is lost.


I'm not sure I'm comfortable with presenting myself in that way. Surely all hope is not lost. Surely we, as citizens, have skills, friends and networks where we could could hope to sustain ourselves in faith to each other. 


Will I have the same opportunities as other generations? No. But this does not mean that all hope is lost. Maybe living in poverty will make us better people. Maybe destroyed opportunity is a blessing in disguise. If there are no Joneses to keep up with, where will we be, and where will the Underworld be? 


If we are unable to live within the Underworld's consumer paradigm, then we are, at least in our minds, on our way to liberation. The Underworld knows it can control us if it keeps us hooked on buying its products, using its money and taking the "Mark" as it were.  Stripped of the ability to live in the world of endless Things, left more with our own things, we see the world more as it is, rather than the fantasy we have been sold by the corporations.


The most effective way to fight Wall Street greed is not to complain and whine before them day and night. That, to me, is highly ineffective and unwise. We can fight them by showing them we no longer need them. We can fight them by forming a parallel economy where we learn to do for ourselves and take care of ourselves, by learning new skills and ways of living.


When the Occupy crowd starts talking about soil quality and how typewriters are better than computers, and paper and pencil is a hell of a lot better than either typewriter or computer, I'll know that they're headed in the right direction. Until then, I'll have to stand in skepticism of their movement, although I sympathize with their grievances.

Doug Casey: An Overview Of War And Immediate Future

Link: http://lewrockwell.com/casey/casey102.html

1.  Writer:  Doug Casey
2.  Location: Lew Rockwell website
Title:  Learn to Make Terror Your Friend
(The title is inappropriate to the subject matter; it is appropriate to register the author, and his viewpoint, as contrarian, which is good)
3.  Outline

-------
There are points where I clearly differ with the author, but his point of view is well-developed and informative.
_______
I hope to outline this article and review it soon
RH January 8, 2012

Medieval Unaccountable Corporation Of London Ripe For Protest

This links to an article, dated October 31, 2011, in the online version of The Guardian (UK).

The author, George Monbiot, makes the following points:

1.  Almost none of the citizens of Great Britain "has any idea of what the Corporation of the City of London is and how it works."

2.  Known as "the Square Mile,"  divided into 25 electoral wards, in 21 of which corporations, not people, vote.

3.  There are four layers of elected representatives:  common councilmen, aldermen, sheriff, and Lord Mayor.

4.  The Mayor must first have served as alderman and sheriff.  It helps if he is rich, since he is supposed to make some kind of financial contribution.

5.  The Corporation "possesses a vast pool of cash, which it can spend as it wishes, without democratic oversight. As well as expanding its enormous property portfolio, it uses this money to lobby on behalf of the banks."

6.  The Corporation "handles issues in Parliament of specific interest to the City, such as banking reform and financial services regulation."

7.  "As Nicholas Shaxson explains in his fascinating book Treasure Islands, the Corporation exists outside many of the laws and democratic controls which govern the rest of the United Kingdom. The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker's chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City's rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London's mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile. There are, as if in a novel by China Miéville, two cities, one of which must unsee the other."

8. Clement Atlee is quoted as saying, "over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster." Monbiot goes on to say, "The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons."

9. The financial arrangements in the City of London allowed US banks to avoid rules set by the government.  "Lehman Brothers couldn't get legal approval for its off-balance sheet transactions in Wall Street, so it used a London law firm instead. No wonder priests are resigning over the plans to evict the campers. The Church of England is not just working with Mammon; it's colluding with Babylon." (There were protesters camped out at St. Paul's, and the Church was seeking to have them evicted.)

10.  The Corporation could not stand the strictures of a written constitution.  Which is why the British do not have one.


<->

Close Encounters and Close Encounter Scale

       In ufology, a close encounter is an event in which a person witnesses an unidentified flying object. This terminology and the system of classification behind it was started by astronomer and UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek, and was first suggested in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry.[1] He introduced the first three kinds of encounters; more sub-types of close encounters were later added by others, but these additional categories are not universally accepted by UFO researchers, mainly because they depart from the scientific rigor that Hynek aimed to bring to ufology.[2]

 The Hynek Scale of Three Kinds of Encounters

CE1 - First Kind:  Sighting of objects:  A sighting of one or more unidentified flying objects -- flying saucers, odd lights, aerial objects that are not attributable to known human technology.

CE2 - Second Kind: Observation of physical effects:  An observation of a UFO, and associated physical effects from the UFO, including:  heat or radiation, damage to terrain, crop circles, human paralysis (catalepsy), frightened animals, interference with engines or TV or radio reception, lost time.

CE3 - Third Kind:  Observation of "animate beings."  Hynek did not attempt to specify what these "animate beings" might be.


Bloecher Subtypes for CE3.  Proposed by UFO researcher Ted Bloecher.
   A:  An entity is observed only inside the UFO
   B:  An entitty is observed inside and outside the UFO
   C:  An entity is observed near to a UFO, but not going in or out.
   D:  An entity is observed.  No UFOs are seen by the observer, but UFO activity has been reported in the area at about the same time
   E:  An entity is observed.  No UFOs are seen, and no nearby UFO activity is reported.
   F:  No entity or UFOs are observed, but the subject experiences some kind of "intelligent communication."
   Subtypes D, E, and F may be unrelated with the UFO phenomenon.


Extensions of the Hynek Scale


CE4 - Fourth Kind:  Human is abducted by a UFO or its occupants.  Jacques Vallee proposed a broad view of this category, to include "cases when witnesses experienced a transformation of their sense of reality,"  so as to include non-abduction cases where absurd, hallucinatory or dreamlike events are associated with UFO encounters.


CE5 - Fifth Kind:  Bilateral contact events.  Steven M. Greer's CSETI group identified "joint, bilateral contact events produced through the conscious, voluntary and proactive human-initiated or cooperative communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.  May or may not be telepathic.  Source may be "extraterrestrial," or simply "otherworldly."


CE6 - Sixth Kind:  UFO incidents that cause direct injury or death.  On Michael Naisbitt's website.

CE7 - Seventh Kind:  Mating with extraterrestrials.  Black Vault Encyclopedia identifies "mating between a human being and extraterrestrial that produces a human-alien hybridisation, usually called a Star Child.

<= Wikipedia, "Close Encounters." December 20, 2011.>

Strange Encounter

       We will identify a Strange Encounter as any encounter which a person can observe or recall in a waking state, in which something remains "strange," that is, it remains in some significant way "incongruous, paradoxical, or contrary to prior experience or natural or physical laws, or impossible to adequate describe or recount."  This would include hallucinations, uncommon or disturbing dreams, encounters with highly unusual persons, events, or places, in which a sense of "strangeness" is present at the time or lingers in memory.

       This description is intentionally broad, in order to cast a wide net to capture as many significant encounters as possible.

       It is intended to compare and contrast with the Close Encounter, which applies primarily to aerial sightings of apparently physical objects and things, possessing material or energetic properties which would allow others to participate in the experience when they are properly located.  See the post on Close Encounters. 

       I hope to refine and improve this descriptive as the process proceeds.
< RH December 20, 2011.>

The Syndicate Considered

It seems that the Underworld has a sort of core, or core structure. As would be the case with any group that is semi-secret, or has something to hide, that core structure is more or less opaque to that which is outside itself, but can still, perhaps, be understood by thoughtful students of human nature. I think that the word Syndicate is appropriate here.

By common usage, the word syndicate refers to a person who is a "delegate of a corporation," or better, a "business partner." But the etymology of the word -- a very old word -- is that of "speaking the same thing," the idea of a close coordination of conscious intent. A coordinated group of men planning and working to the same -- in this case ulterior -- purpose.

Do syndicates exist? Undoubtedly they do. They are variously called corporations, clubs, businesses, unions, lodges -- even religious orders and synagogues and churches. They may be mostly benign, and even beneficial.

But are there syndicates in the Underworld? If the answer is yes, then that syndicate is not benign.

There is at least one real Syndicate in the real Underworld.

That fact will give rise to some interesting questions that must have real answers.

* * *

There is more to be said on the nature of syndicates, but this is a start.

<= RH, December 15, 2011 >

The Underworld Considered

I think that the term "underworld" is suitable for referring to what we face.

In modern parlance, it refers generally to people, institutions, and activities whose involvements vary from the shady, to the criminal, to the unknown. We typically think of gangsters, killers, con men, social parasites, and the like. And that is who I am thinking about.

In earlier times, it referred to a kind of shadow world with aspects beyond the grave, where there might be some comings and goings through the gates of death, supervised perhaps by a dark god or devils. I am also considering that.

  It does not appear to be confined to any location, race, ethnicity, social class, or even religion; although some of these seem to be more susceptible than others. For example, it often seems to prefer urban settings, and perceived centers of power.

  Its relation to mystical experience, or even to dark powers, remains unclear. It is often quite mundane and materialistic, in a practical sort of way.

  Men of intelligence and good will have acknowledged an underworld for thousands of years, and today it retains enough characteristics and similarity with the past that we can be pretty sure that there is some real continuity and substance to the assertion that an actual underworld exists, although parts of it are mysterious and some of it may never be seen. Nevertheless, it has probably operated, continuously, in some places for thousands of years.

  Sages, saints, and statesmen have studied it, pondered it, and dealt with it in various ways. I propose to continue the effort.

  That is the purpose of this website, even while operating under the eyes of watchful dragons.

* * *

Additions to this post may be made from time to time.

<= RH, December 15, 2011.>