Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Review: The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging

The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging by Noelle Cook
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspir...

Disclosure movement

Love has won Amy Carlson
I am most definitely a starseed!" Yvonne proclaimed in response. "I see and understand things differently."

There are a variety of starseed checklists because there are numerous kinds of starseeds. Each one has its own set of characteristics. The checklist for "Indigo Children" includes: "headstrong, creative, prone to addictions, an 'old soul,' intuitive or psychic, tendency to isolate, independent and proud, possesses a deep desire to help the world in a big way, wavers between low self-esteem and grandiosity, easily bored, diagnosed with ADD, prone to insomnia or nightmares, history of depression, looks for real friendships only, and easily bonds with other non-human living things." If you check fourteen or more items from the list, then you are "in fact an indigo." The comments section for the meme was filled with people identifying themselves as Indigo Children based on their responses.

My favorite list is a meme Yvonne reposted on Facebook that describes common "Ascension Symptoms." In Yvonne's theology, "Ascension" or "Dis-closure" is what happens when the world starts transitioning to 5D, a process that seems a lot like the biblical apocalypse from the book of Revelation.


Post-theosophy new age syncretism
Typically, that training isn't free. Nor are the different sacred items needed to activate your full starseed powers and ready yourself for Ascension. It's all quite involved and requires a series of classes, healing and channeling sessions, and the purchase of an assortment of items, elixirs, and ointments, each of which has a unique spiritual purpose.

You can see how all this works together with Love Has Won, the online spiritual group that Yvonne started following during the pandemic. Love Has Won is a descendant of theosophy, the I AM movement, alien religions, and several other New Age traditions. Its leader, Amy Carlson, picked and chose elements of all those versions of New Age faith and then added her own...


Plandemic
The changes reflect how the pandemic has remade the health and wellness and New Age spiritual communities. Now the Expo features some of the big-gest names in anti-government, anti-mask, and anti-vaccination activism. People shell out fifty dollars a ticket to hear television and film producer Del Bigtree talk about his movie Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe. His session sold out quickly. Bigtree would go on to become Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2024 presidential campaign spokesperson.

Audiences pay the same amount to hear British conspiracy guru Sacha Stone. Prior to the pandemic, Stone was a relatively benign wellness advocate. During the pandemic, Stone went hard into conspirituality when his anti-vaccination advocacy catapulted him to right-wing fame. Now Stone talks about how the Illuminati rule the earth and are trying to control humanity through vaccines that implant a soul-controlling nanochip with each injection. Like Del Bigtree, Sacha Stone is closely connected with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The closing event of the entire 2023 Expo is the world premiere of the film Plandemic 3: The Great Awakening, produced by anti-vaccination activist and conspiracy theory peddler Mikki Willis. The original plan-demic film-Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19-went viral on social media after its release in May 2020, especially after being pro-moted by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Despite being banned by mainstream social media platforms, it continued to spread online, becoming one of the most damaging sources of medical misinformation during the pandemic.

Prior to producing these films, Willis worked as a videographer for Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and did the same for Tulsi Gabbard's 2020 presidential run. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the foreword for the book version of Plandemic, which was published in October 2021. Here's what Kennedy had to say: "Mikki Willis is the Paul Revere of the rebellion against the burgeoning totalitarianism of the Biosecurity State. Willis' incendiary film, Plandemic, sparked the seeds of revolution in a billion open minds and ignited the dangerous global conflagration of critical thinking." In 2024, Willis worked for Kennedy's presidential campaign and produced the video introducing him to voters.


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Review: No One Left Behind: The Lt. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher Story

No One Left Behind: The Lt. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher Story No One Left Behind: The Lt. Comdr. Michael Scott Speicher Story by Amy Waters Yarsinske
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Sunday, December 28, 2025

Review: Love and Politics

Love and Politics Love and Politics by Judith Malina
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Introduction by Ira Cohen

Unique perspective
Pressing

Everything is intrusion. The cow on the field trespasses. The mote in my eye, Like the eyeball in its socket Presses against the lid, Seeking its space in the nothing, Where something seemed To be pressing against it, Scraping, adhering, piercing, lying still.


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Saturday, December 27, 2025

Review: Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest Growing Faith

Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest Growing Faith Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest Growing Faith by Robert Spencer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: The Sinking of the Titanic by Bruce M Caplan

The Sinking of the Titanic by Bruce M Caplan The Sinking of the Titanic by Bruce M Caplan by Bruce M. Caplan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bulkheads as well as fire in coal from leaving port
K. Whiteman, of Palmyra, N.J., the Titanic's barber, was lowering boats on deck after the collision, and declared the officers on the bridge, one of them First Officer Murdock, promptly worked the electrical apparatus for closing the water-tight compartments. He believed the machinery was in some way so damaged by the crash that the front compartments failed to close tightly, although the rear ones were secure.

Whiteman's manner of escape was unique. He was blown off the deck by the second of the two explosions of the boilers, and was in the water more than two hours before he was picked up by a raft.

"The explosions," Whiteman said; "were caused by the rushing in of the icy water on the boilers. A bundle of deck chairs, roped together, was blown off the deck with me, and I struck my back, injuring my spine, but it served as a temporary raft.

"The crew and passengers had faith in the bulkhead system to save the ship and we were lowering a collapsible boat, all confident the ship would get through, when she took a terrific dip forward and the water swept over the deck and into the engine rooms.

"The bow went clean down, and I caught the pile of chairs as I was washed up against the rim. Then came the explosions which blew me fifteen feet.

"After the water had filled the forward compartments, the ones at the stern could not save her, although they did delay the ship's going down. If it wasn't for the compartments hardly anyone could have got away."


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Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Review: Better than Sex

Better than Sex Better than Sex by Hunter S. Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Narraged by Scott Sowers

...if you want to get elected, it is better to be Mean than to be Funny.


Casual racism
...As for fleet movements—they’re not essential in that every other ordnance (weapons, bombs, boats, etc.) except hospital ships is already in place over there … and they won’t really need hospital ships, anyway.
Not to take Saddam’s head … Shit, even a phoney head would look good for a South Lawn photo op on October 15. Who’s going to call the president a liar when he’s parading around in public with a rotting human head that he says is Saddam Hussein’s?
Not me, James. And probably not you either. Because there will be a certain resemblance. And you know how those sand-niggers are about using body-doubles. Hell, they all look alike, anyway …

...

And let me remind you that there are laws against kidnapping and brutalizing famous journalists—even if you are the next president. You could do that, but it would be wrong. Remember what happened to Tex Colson.… Indeed, putting me on a subhuman Arkansas chain gang might send a demoralizing message to many decent Americans of all ages, James, and would almost certainly get a Clinton administration off on a wrong karmic foot.


Jack Kennedy was a warrior. So was his brother, Bobby. They were more than just politicians: They were political professionals, high rollers. They saw the enemy as just another set of gongs to be beaten savagely. And they were very good boys to have on your side in a bad fight—and all fights against Richard Nixon were bad. He was criminally insane. George Bush was a punk, compared to Nixon. The quality of the opposition has steadily declined since the sixties.


That is the real lesson of presidential politics in the nineties. Never admit anything, except where you were born. Of course Bill Clinton never inhaled when he put the bong to his lips. Of course he never knew Gennifer Flowers.


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Saturday, December 13, 2025

Review: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jerome Kagan Galen's Prophecy: Temperament In Human Nature

Kagan has given us painstakingly documented evidence that high reactivity is one biological basis of introversion (we'll explore another likely route in chapter 7), but his findings are powerful in part because they confirm what we've sensed all along. Some of Kagan's studies even venture into the realm of cultural myth. For example, he believes, based on his data, that high reactivity is associated with physical traits such as blue eyes, allergies, and hay fever, and that high-reactive men are more likely than others to have a thin body and narrow face. Such conclusions are speculative and call to mind the nineteenth-century practice of divining a man's soul from the shape of his skull. But whether or not they turn out to be accurate, it's interesting that these are just the physical characteristics we give fictional characters when we want to suggest that they're quiet, introverted, cerebral. It's as if these physiological tendencies are buried deep in our cultural unconscious.


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Saturday, November 29, 2025

Review: The Dominie Books

The Dominie Books The Dominie Books by A.S. Neill
My rating: 0 of 5 stars



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Review: If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left

If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left by Out Of Print
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The difference is that my interpretation presupposes the good intentions and psychological soundness of those involved (when I think other-wise, as in a few instances, I indicate as much). One need not have been suffering from any psychological disturbance to have been ap-palled by the prospect of nuclear war, or the conduct of the Vietnam War...


Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. ... Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

-The Education of Henry Adams

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Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Review: Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce

Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce by Brenda Maddox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent’s Search for Hope and Justice

Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent’s Search for Hope and Justice Chasing Evil: Shocking Crimes, Supernatural Forces, and an FBI Agent’s Search for Hope and Justice by Robert Hilland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book chronicling the career of former police officer and FBI Special Agent Robert Hilland includes several cases, first and most prominently that of murderer John Smith. What ties the cases together is that this is about Psychic John Edward and Agent Hilland's crime-solving partnership. That's a lot for me to take. I am a skeptic and while I have to say if all the experiences recounted here were my experiences, I certainly would be a believe in contact with spirits of the deceased. Now, I wish Joe Nickell was around to give an investigative side to the Hilland-Edward claims specifically as he has with Edward in "Hustling the Bereaved", etc.

Over the telling, Hilland gets his own spirit guide of sorts in Smith's wife and victim Fran. He even has photographic evidence, but we don't get to see it?

I flipped back and forward, checking photos 17 and 19. They were clear. But frame 18 looked like an entity had stepped in front of my lens as I snapped the picture. The shape of a head, a face. It was Fran, looking directly into the camera lens at me.


Well, I am reading an ARC edition, so maybe it will be printed in the final edition.

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Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Review: Brain Droppings

Brain Droppings Brain Droppings by George Carlin
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I'm happy to tell you there is very little in this world that I believe in. Listening to the comedians who comment on political, social, and cultural issues, I notice most of their material reflects an underlying belief that somehow things were better once and that with just a little effort we could set them right again. They're looking for solutions, and rooting for particular results, and I think that necessarily limits the tone and substance of what they say. They're talented and funny people, but they're nothing more than cheerleaders attached to a specific, wished-for outcome.

I don't feel so confined. I frankly don't give a fuck how it all turns out in this country-or anywhere else, for that matter. I think the human game was up a long time ago (when the high priests and traders took over), and now we're just playing out the string. And that is, of course, precisely what I find so amusing: the slow circling of the drain by a once promising species, and the sappy, ever-more-desperate belief in this country that there is actually some sort of "American Dream," which has merely been misplaced.


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Saturday, November 1, 2025

Review: Cults on Trial: A Cross-Examination of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Hitler… and Donald Trump

Cults on Trial: A Cross-Examination of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Hitler… and Donald Trump Cults on Trial: A Cross-Examination of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Hitler… and Donald Trump by Lance Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Narrated by Virtual Voice, which does a pretty good job on this one with only occasionally mispronouncing or oddly pausing.

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Review: The Holographic Universe

The Holographic Universe The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Mystical
The holographic model has been accepted by scientists as a possible explanation for various paranormal and mystical experiences, including telepathy, precognition, and psychokinesis.
But the most staggering thing about the holographic model was that it suddenly made sense of a wide range of phenomena so elusive they generally have been categorized outside the province of scientific understanding. These include telepathy, precognition, mystical feelings of oneness with the universe, and even psychokinesis, or the ability of the mind to move physical objects without anyone touching them.

Indeed, it quickly became apparent to the ever growing number of scientists who came to embrace the holographic model that it helped explain virtually all paranormal and mystical experiences, and in the last half-dozen years or so it has continued to galvanize researchers and shed light on an increasing number of previously inexplicable phenomena.


Real 'Sybil' Admits Multiple Personalities Were Fake - NPR
https://share.google/cjRuJ9q7o6s25nxbY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley...

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Placebo
...treatment include migraine headaches, allergies, fever, the common cold, acne, asthma, warts, various kinds of pain, nausea and seasick-ness, peptic ulcers, psychiatric syndromes such as depression and anxiety, rheumatoid and degenerative arthritis, diabetes, radiation sickness, Parkinsonism, multiple sclerosis, and cancer.

Clearly these range from the not so serious to the life threatening, but placebo effects on even the mildest conditions may involve physio-logical changes that are near miraculous. Take, for example, the lowly wart. Warts are a small tumorous growth on the skin caused by a virus. They are also extremely easy to cure through the use of placebos, as is evidenced by the nearly endless folk rituals-ritual itself being a kind of placebo-that are used by various cultures to get rid of them. Lewis Thomas, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, tells of one physician who regularly rid his patients of warts simply by painting a harmless purple dye on them. Thomas feels that explaining this small miracle by saying it's just the unconscious mind at work doesn't begin to do the placebo effect justice. "If my unconscious can figure out how to manipulate the mechanisms needed for getting around that virus, and for deploying all the various cells in the correct order for tissue rejection, then all I have to say is that my unconscious is a lot further along than I am," he states.


Visualization: control of future, 221-23; healing, 83, 188-89; Sufis and

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Raw synchronicity

Jungian dream interpretation

Pauli jung nature of the psychedelic
Years later the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent Meier a copy of Life magazine containing a double-page photograph of the partially destroyed hospital, and it was identical to the drawing she had produced nine years earlier. The symbolic and highly personal message of her dream had somehow spilled beyond the boundaries of her psyche and into physical reality. 24 Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurrences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Since he could not conceive how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or series of events in the physical world, at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, an acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science.

When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the subject entitled The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche). But now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established, some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look.* Physicist Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection-more precisely a correlation between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden."

Another physicist who takes synchronicity seriously is F. David Peat. Peat believes that Jungian-type synchronicities are not only real, but offer further evidence of the implicate order. As we have seen, according to Bohm the apparent separateness of consciousness and matter is an illusion, an artifact that occurs only after both have unfolded into the explicate world of objects and sequential time. If there is no division between mind and matter in the implicate, the ground from which all things spring, then it is not unusual to expect that reality might still be shot through with traces of this deep connectivity...


D Scott rogo
McKenna
Lucid dreaming
Rupert Sheldrake
Part I - Mind, Memory, and Archetype: Morphic Resonance and the Collective ...
https://share.google/e1kkAAC5M52dB8BP2

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Review: In Guns We Trust: The Unholy Trinity of White Evangelicals, Politics, and Firearms

In Guns We Trust: The Unholy Trinity of White Evangelicals, Politics, and Firearms In Guns We Trust: The Unholy Trinity of White Evangelicals, Politics, and Firearms by William J. Kole
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Evangelicals

Politically, the evangelicals among whom I used to find a home are a force to be reckoned with. Multiple surveys show 80 percent of evangelicals faithfully vote, making them far and away the most dependable electoral bloc in the nation. Their numbers and their turnout have cemented their status as influencers and kingmakers in presidential elections and congressional midterms alike. It's difficult to win the White House without the blessing of the religious right, and in red states, it's practically impossible to gain or defend a US House or Senate seat without their backing.


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Review: The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging

The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging by Noelle Cook My rating: 4 of 5 stars ht...