Pocket podcast review: Jeremy Vaeni

Culture Of Contact, 10/23/07: Guest: Jeff Ritzmann. thumbs up

I'm a late-comer to Jeremy's podcast... I'd been reading his column in UFO Magazine for quite a while. Not sure how I found out that he had a podcast; I think another writer mentioned it. (Jeremy is so modest.) I have a hunch that increasing numbers of people are stumbling upon it, though, and deservedly so. It's among the best, if not, the best. Spotted with silly but witty humor, almost--dare I say it?--Dadaesque (my highest compliment). He asks better questions than Art, is more spontaneous and insightful than George, and does not devolve into self-indulgent, pseudo-intellectual rants like his buddies at the Paracast. The Jeff Ritzmann series is classic. Has Ritzmann written a book? He should, if he hasn't. He describes come of the most riveting tales of High Strangeness outside of Whitley Strieber's early books, and with more believability. (Not saying that I disbelieve Whitley Strieber; it's just that I believe Ritzmann more. Give him a listen--you'll see why.)

How do you describe an experiences that transcend our space-time framework and our current material paradigm? You really can't... but Jeff Ritzmann tries to, and damn near succeeds.

I haven't finished listening to the second podcast, but I do have a question that I have been pondering for about twenty years.... At what point did Human Abduction Syndrome cases become linked with the trappings of the classic UFO field? I'm not talking about the Travis Walton case... not talking about the Pascagoula, MS case of '73 (which I remember well). I'm talking Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and the late great John Mack. Those cases. Ritzmann convinces me that what he is experiencing almost cannot come from a physical scout party from another solar system "studying" Earth. It must come from somewhere stranger, and closer... and possibly, from an aspect of our human reality that has not yet been integrated into consciousness. As Jane Roberts/Seth said, we exist simultaneously on many dimensions, many planes, and what we consciously accept as our temporal consciousness is just a small sliver of our greater being. Ritzmann peaks at the man behind the curtain and shows us a bit of what else is out there.

Pocket podcast review: Jeremy Vaeni

Culture Of Contact, 05/20/08: Guest: Budd Hopkins. thumbs up

I have become a big fan of Jeremy Vaeni in recent weeks. Although he is an "experiencer," he has not let his experiences drag him off the deep end into muddled metaphysics, as some have. I've followed Budd Hopkins' work since Missing Time (which scared the crap out of me) and have noticed an ever-so-slight evolution of his perspective, away from the nuts-and-bolts/scary alien hypothesis toward something more nuanced. Perhaps, in time, he will conclude, as Jacques Vallée has, that "unknown aerial phenomena" cannot be accepted at face value. The slice of the world that we physically perceive is only that; much of reality escapes our perception, and the anomalies that we do perceive might well be a masquerade.

Pocket radio show review: John White

Coast to Coast, 03/26/08: Guest: John White. thumbs down

I was prepared to like this show; I downloaded it because George Washington is a historical figure I admire. However, there is a disturbing subtext to Mr. White's discussion, "George Washington and the Hand Of God." That George Washington believed that Providence guided his life and, indeed, guided the creation of the United States is beyond debate. However, I think that the Revolutionary children of the Enlightenment had a slightly more nuanced view of "God" than our current religious and political leaders. So I have to wonder why Mr. White is even bringing this subject up, now, when so much hinges on who, what, exactly, "God" is.

'Tis a dangerous thing to claim to act on the authority of God in our current era. Just ask the Iraqis... or, on the converse, the victims of 9/11.

I think that if George Washington were alive today (and I do think that he's watching over us), he would tell us, point-blank, "Yes, I do believe that Providence guided me, but he is not guiding you. You by your actions have forfeited the right to invoke God's authority for any reason, so stop doing it. And clean up your act--fast."

"God" evolves and changes according to our capacity to intellectually apprehend him. Our Revolutionary forefathers were intellectuals who were learned in both philosophy and the arts and sciences; they were multilingual, literate, and, on the whole, wise. Our current leaders? Ask George Washington who "God" is, and I would wager that his response would be more challenging than our current George's man behind the curtain who tells him to smite nations.

Pocket radio show review: Tracy Torme

Coast to Coast, 04/09/08. Guest: Tracy Torme. thumbs up

Tracy Torme is from what I regard as the "brick-and-mortar" school of UFOlogy: fact centered, with a quasi-scientific bent, and a dispassionate weighing of the evidence. There's really nothing wrong with that. His inclinations lead him to some interesting conclusions: He regards the Roswell crash as probably terrestrial in origin (Mogol balloon), yet he accepts Bud Hopkins' hypnotic regression work as prima facia evidence of hostile "alien" genetic experimentation. Tracy has been involved in the field for a while. I still have a transcript of a chat session that he did on CompuServe from the early days of the 'net. Bonus: Travis Walton is brought into the show briefly. I did drop my jaw when George Noory asked Tracy, "Are you related to Mel Torme?"

Pocket radio show review: Gerald Celente

Coast to Coast, 04/28/08. Guest: Gerald Celente. meh

Gerald Celente promotes a trends analysis product on his website for which he charges $100 per year subscription, which raises a red flag for me. Still, his views are interesting, and possibly accurate. I confess to always listening to his C2C appearances. He believes that we are headed for a depression greater than the Great Depression. Is he correct? Who knows? Looking at the recaps of his past appearances, however, Mr. Celente seemed focussed on "terrorism" as the major trend after 9/11. He did not shift his emphasis to the economy until 2006. I agree with him that the devaluation of the dollar is 800-pound gorilla in the room that no one is talking about. But I don't think that his predictions or trends analyses are any more informed than a well-read observer.

Pocket radio show reviews: Jay Wedner and Lynne McTaggart

A review of podcasts, recently listened to....

Whitley Strieber's Dreamland, 03/01/08. Guest: Jay Weidner. thumbs down

Stopped listening about five minutes into the show after Weidner begins rambling about the Freemasons. Should have skipped it earlier during the "2012" speculations. I have never been able to follow any line of inquiry involving wormholes, stargates, modern alchemy, 2012, Illuminati, light beings, or related ilk. Unfortunately, this is what Strieber's once-excellent podcast tends to devolve to lately.

Coast to Coast, 02/14/08. Guest: Lynne McTaggart. thumbs up

This stuff is real; it works; and it may be civilization's path forward. Halfway through this podcast, and so far, George Noory asks intelligent questions and stays awake.

Who loses if Obama wins? The Psychic Twins!

Terry and Linda Jamison, aka "The Psychic Twins," boldly predicted on two recent Coast to Coast AM broadcasts (June 1, 2007 and February 7, 2008) that Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic primary, to compete with the Republican nominee Rudy Giuliani, win the Presidency, and serve one term. I don't know how they could have possibly been more wrong. It wasn't that I was hoping that they would be (though I voted for Obama in the primaries); I am always on the lookout for a modern-day Edgar Cayce. But the Psychic Twins ain't it.

They seem nice enough ladies... but I'm not sure that they will be invited back on Coast to Coast, except maybe to spin why and how they failed so miserably to buck the conventional wisdom by actually predicting something *different* from what two-thirds of politically savvy seers might have done in 2007. I am so glad that I never had that psychic reading from them--I put my name on their waiting list. I will go out on a limb here by predicting that I might move up the list fairly quickly as others drop off, unless, of course, the Jamison twins intuit that I am writing this blog.

This is not to disparage genuine psychic precognitive ability, which is quite rare and valuable when it's authentic, and authenticated, but the true test of a "psychic" is when said psychic actually predicts the future and not, as most do, point to some past vague muttering in the past, post facto, and say, "See? Four months ago, I predicted that a hurricane will strike the Southeast sometime this summer."

Other things about the June 2007 interview disturbed me, and I am glad that I can now toss them out with the rest of their insights... In particular, the Twins insisted that the Iraq war was unfortunate but necessary; in fact, they both emphasized several times that this war was predestined to serve as some sort of vague psychic cleansing of the Middle East. No, Mmes. Jamison, the Iraq war was directly caused by the decision of one hubristic man who, had he not been elected President in 2000, this essay would not have been written. A war of choice, begun by a fool, supported by the blind. While life, and the world, operate in this fashion, I don't think that karma does, and it is paternalistic to assert otherwise.

Who knew that Obama would clear so many things up?

awakened this morning by what I mistook for a ghost

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Originally uploaded by an0nym0usmuse

It sounded like the distinct rustling of bedclothes; maybe Donald Fagen's "bright nightgown." Others, I learned later, had heard a sound like a train roaring, or da boom of a passing sound system. I just heard a sharp rustle. Waking up, the room was still. Nothing had moved. I saw nothing. I half expected to see something.

For most of my life until adulthood, I was terrified of the dark. I never knew what infantile experience triggered this fear, unless it was the visit by my uncle in my room a day or so after his death in a car wreck, when I was three years old. I overcame my fear by hiking the woods around my house in the dead of night when I reached adolescence. So now, I suppose, if a ghost were to appear, I'd be in a better frame of mind.

But it wasn't a ghost; wasn't anything that I could see. Couldn't get back to sleep, though. It was 4:30, an hour before I was supposed to wake up, and it's an hour I lost.

Of course, as my news-savvy readers have probably figured out, my "ghost" was the Illinois earthquake, which I think was kinda neat. I'm not completely civilized; I still live "in" nature, so the experience wasn't an intrusion. Just wished it had happened an hour later.

I actually delight in things like earthquakes, storms, tornadoes. Civilization sees such events as "bad," but I see it as a natural balance reasserting itself. And in my life, actions, and choices, I prefer to cast my lot with nature.