Yesterday's Papers

Yesterday's papers are such bad news - Jagger & Richards

Just some loose ends before the weekend.

A few days ago I received an email from Pamela Perskin, a victim's advocate and co-author of Cult and Ritual Abuse: Its History, Anthropology, and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America. She's asked me to pass on a link to "an online research vehicle designed to measure experiences of ritual abuse internationally."

For survivors who might be interested in the project, here is a link to the "Extreme Abuse Survey," which will be active for the next three months.

Perskin added:

The results will be available at no charge to anyone interested in the empirical data for further research. We will also be publishing the initial findings in our forthcoming book, Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations. This is a compilation of original chapters by an array of international experts in the field including Carl Raschke, Valerie Sinason, ESue Blume, Jeanne Sarson and Linda McDonald, Sandra Buck, Ulla Froehling, Thorsten Becker, Fran Yoeli, Carol Mallard, Sarah Nelson, Alison Miller, Tom Ball, Lorna Brown, Randy Noblitt and myself, among others and reflects the experiences of clinicians, law enforcement officers, attorneys, journalists, clergy, and survivors in the US, Canada, Germany, Israel, South Africa, and Australia. We are hoping for as wide a dissemination of the survey as possible in order to collect data that are reflective of the universality of this experience that we hypothesize.


I recommended Sara Scott's The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse in Tuesday's post. An earlier, academic paper of Scott's, "Here Be Dragons: Researching the Unbelievable, Hearing the Unthinkable" can be read online here, in which she describes the "collision between the lived experience of the researcher [and] that of her informants" with "the 'discourse of disbelief' surrounding the subject of ritual abuse." I know some of you have been reading her for a while but she's a late discovery for me, and I'm finding her feminist scholarship a fine polish remover for the evangelical and far-right gloss that too often accrues to the subject. Significantly, Scott notes that "the survivors in my sample had been abused in all white contexts in the UK and USA, and often described their abusers as extremely Right-wing and racist. I have chosen the term 'ritual abuse' in part because it leaves open the possibility of connecting experiences across race and culture, whereas a focus on Satanism or Satanists reduces the possible phenomena for analysis to a specific cultural context."


Thanks to Joseph Cannon for continuing to beat the drum on behalf of Daniel Hopsicker, 9/11's most substantial and excoriated researcher. He links to Hopsicker's video presentation on Mohamed Atta's "strange and spooky associate" Wolfgang Bohringer, which corroborates evidence provided by Atta's girlfriend Amanda Keller before Keller herself was spooked into retracting her story. "At the time of Hopsicker's interview with Keller," writes Cannon, "he did not know about Wolfgang Bohringer, whom Amanda knew only by the first name. She pronounced that name in a correctly Germanic fashion - "VOLF-gahng" - imitating the way she heard it."


Report of a dramatic UFO sighting this week over Istanbul has me again turning to Jacques Vallee, and this passage from Messengers of Deception:

Manifestations are not spacecraft in the ordinary 'nuts and bolts' sense. The UFOs are physical manifestations that cannot be understood apart from their psychic and symbolic reality. What we see in effect here is not an alien invasion. It is a control system which acts on humans and uses humans. However, we still need to discover the source of the manifestation.

My conjecture remains that covert human agencies have discovered the power of the control system and both mimic it and attempt its exploitation through techno-occultic means, but that the system transcends human provenance and is resistant to regulation. So once again, we're not talking ETs here, but something both stranger and more familiar.


Finally, those interested in issues of consciousness, particularly the entanglement of minds and reincarnation, and also those who think it's all woo-woo nonsense and distraction, ought to take an hour and watch the recent documentary The Boy Who Lived Before (discussed here). If we're more than fragile bags of meat and water, what changes about our world?