Published on Friday, December 21, 2007 by Rapid City Journal (South Dakota)

Lakota Sioux Secede From US, Declare Independence
by Bill Harlan

Political activist Russell Means, a founder of the American Indian Movement,
says he and other members of Lakota tribes have renounced treaties and are
withdrawing from the United States.

“We are now a free country and independent of the United States of America,”
Means said in a telephone interview. “This is all completely legal.”

Means said a Lakota delegation on Monday delivered a statement of
“unilateral withdrawal” from the United States to the U.S. State Department
in Washington.

The State Department did not respond. “That’ll take some time,” Means said.

Meanwhile, the delegation has delivered copies of the letter to the
embassies of Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and South Africa. “We’re asking for
recognition,” Means said, adding that Ireland and East Timor are “very
interested” in the declaration.

Other countries will get copies of the same declaration, which Means said
also would be delivered to the United Nations and to state and county
governments covered by treaties, including treaties signed in 1851 and 1868.
“We’re willing to negotiate with any American political entity,” Means said.

The United States could face international pressure if it doesn’t agree to
negotiate, Means said. “The United State of America is an outlaw nation, we
now know. We’ve understood that as a people for 155 years.”

Means also said his group would file liens on property in parts of South
Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming that were illegally
homesteaded.

The Web site for the declaration, “Lakota Freedom,” briefly crashed Thursday
as wire services picked up the story and the server was overwhelmed, Means
said.

Delegation member Phyllis Young said in an online statement: “We are not
trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle
for our children and grandchildren.” Young was an organizer of Women of All
Red Nations.

Other members of the delegation include Rapid City-area activist Duane
Martin Sr. and Gary Rowland, a leader of the Chief Big Foot Riders.

Means said anyone could live in the Lakota Nation, tax free, as long as they
renounced their U.S. citizenship. The nation would issue drivers licenses
and passports, but each community would be independent. “It will be the
epitome of individual liberty, with community control,” Means said.

To make his case, Means cited several articles of the U.S. Constitution, the
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and a recent nonbinding U.N.
resolution on the rights of indigenous people.

He thinks there will be international pressure. “If the U.S. violates the
law, the whole world will know it,” Means said.

Means’ group is based in Porcupine on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

It is not an agency or branch of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Means ran
unsuccessfully for president of the tribe in 2006.

Lakota tribes have long claimed that the U.S. government stole land
guaranteed by treaties — especially in western South Dakota. “The Missouri
River is ours, and so are the Black Hills,” Means said.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1980 awarded the tribes $122 million as
compensation, but the court did not award land. The Lakota have refused the
settlement. (As interest accrues, the unclaimed award is approaching $1
billion.)

In the late 1980s, then-Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey introduced
legislation to return federal land to the tribes, and California millionaire
Phil Stevens also tried to win support for a proposal to return the Black
Hills to the Lakota.

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com

© 2007 The Rapid City Journal

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska — In what some scientists see as another alarming consequence of global warming, thousands of Pacific walruses above the Arctic Circle were killed in stampedes after the disappearance of sea ice caused them to crowd onto the shoreline in extraordinary numbers.

The deaths took place during the late summer and fall on the Russian side of the Bering Strait, which separates Alaska from Russia.

"It was a pretty sobering year — tough on walruses," said Joel Garlach-Miller, a walrus expert for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Unlike seals, walruses cannot swim indefinitely. The giant, tusked mammals typically clamber onto the sea ice to rest, or haul themselves onto land for just a few weeks at a time.

But ice disappeared in the Chukchi Sea this year because of warm summer weather, ocean currents and persistent eastern winds, Garlach-Miller said.

As a result, walruses came ashore earlier and stayed longer, congregating in extremely high numbers, with herds as big as 40,000 at Point Shmidt, a spot that had not been used by walruses as a "haulout" for a century, scientists said.

Walruses are vulnerable to stampedes when they gather in such large numbers. The appearance of a polar bear, a hunter or a low-flying airplane can send them rushing to the water.

Sure enough, scientists received reports of hundreds and hundreds of walruses dead of internal injuries suffered in stampedes. Many of the youngest and weakest animals, mostly calves born in the spring, were crushed.

Biologist Anatoly Kochnev of Russia's Pacific Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography estimated 3,000 to 4,000 walruses out of population of perhaps 200,000 died, or two or three times the usual number on shoreline haulouts.

He said the animals only started appearing on shore for extended periods in the late 1990s, after the sea ice receded.

"The reason is the global warming," Kochnev said.

The reports match predictions of what might happen to walruses if the ice receded, said wildlife biologist Tony Fischbach of the U.S. Geological Survey.

"We were surprised that this was happening so soon, and we were surprised at the magnitude of the report," he said.

Scientists said the deaths of so many walruses — particularly calves —is alarming in itself. But if the trend continues, and walruses no longer have summer sea ice from which to dive for clams and snails, they could strip coastal areas of food, and that could reduce their numbers even further.

No large-scale walrus die-offs were seen in Alaska during the same period, apparently because the animals congregated in smaller groups on the American side of the Bering Strait, with the biggest known herd at about 2,500.

The jellyfish, covering an area of around 10 square miles , engulfed the Northern Salmon Company's cages off the Ireland's northeastern coast, suffocating 100,000 farmed fish.

You might recall a similar scene in the movie "Sphere" where the aliens get thousands of jellyfish to swarm around a human diver. This is one more recent example of large numbers of creatures banding together to do out of the ordinary things, like what we saw in the film "Happy Feet".

By Michael Clark

The folk magic and witchcraft that I am about to describe may surprise some people. In East Anglia today as elsewhere there are to be found groups of Modern witches, some of whom call themselves Wiccans and some Traditional Witches They practise different forms of Pagan Witchcraft. Many practice it communally in a Coven or Order. Their principal objective of these covens apart from companionship is spiritual, intellectual or social development. Most people probably assume that most the witchcraft of the past in East Anglia was similarly Pagan and collective and developmental in character. However this is not the case.

Not long ago, within living memory, a different type of witchcraft was being practised in East Anglia. It was a folk or popular witchcraft. The Witch would initiate herself or himself and would tend to work alone. The magic was operative by nature. Its principal objective was attaining power over other humans particularly those of the opposite sex as well as domestic and wild animals.

The evidence for this folk witchcraft is scattered around in many written and spoken sources. These include general county and regional books and magazines, county folklore collections, folklore publications and oral history tapes, to name a few. Although this is evidence is fragmentary and difficult to find, taken collectively it speaks of goals and methods of achievement markedly different to the witchcraft of today. It is from a collection of such material made by me over several years that the substance of this talk is composed.

I have excluded from consideration, material prior to 1734. This was the year when capital execution for witchcraft ceased to be possible in England, although witchcraft remained a felony. The methods employed in extracting confessions from witches of earlier times were on the whole barbaric and would not be admissible as evidence in a court of law today.

Nonetheless the resemblance of later material to that emanating from the era of the Witch Trials is striking. I leave readers to draw their own conclusions. I have also omitted material after 1950 and the beginning of the modern witchcraft revival.

How did East Anglian Folk Witches practice their craft? What follows is a brief description culled from my research notes.

Blotting Out The Sun


(The New York Times) WILLS POINT, Tex., Aug. 29 — Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

IBM is the first ever to harness "true" self-assembling nanotechnology resulting in two generations of Moore's Law chip performance improvements in a single step... This is one of the major technology "hurdles" that had to occur in order to be on track for circa 2012 being the time period that computing power exceeds human brain processing power (theoretically making it possible for true AI and the advent of singularity level events).

May 4, 2007 -- IBM claims the first-ever application of self-assembling nanotechnology to conventional chip manufacturing. The company says it has harnessed the natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and tooth enamel to form trillions of holes and thereby create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip...

credit

Here is the latest update on the massive global bee colony die off (colony collapse disorder or CCD) that has stumped experts from around the world. Already over half the Bees in North America are dead or missing. Where have all the bees gone?

The leading suspect in the bee die-off is a widely used bug spray made especially for biotech crops, like corn, soy, canola, and cotton...

An insecticide is suspected of causing a colony collapse disorder that has killed millions of honeybees worldwide and up to half of the 2.5 million colonies in the United States. The chief suspect, say many scientists, is imidacloprid, the most commonly used insecticide on the planet.

The potent chemical can be sprayed on plants or coated on seeds, which then release the insecticide through the plants as they grow.

Research has shown that in sublethal doses imidacloprid and other neonicotinoids can impair honeybees' memory and learning, as well as their motor activity and navigation. Recent studies have reported ``anomalous flying behavior'' in imidacloprid-treated bees, in which the workaholic insects simply fall to the grass or appear unable to fly toward the hive.

This is the lesson that I’ve learned:
Don’t be afraid when the tide has turned,
Cast off the old flesh, grow the new,
And keep your power just for you.

I found, sixteen years ago - through the Chaos Magick current, coupled with a rapidly growing interest in shamanistic magick - the means to express myself and develop my own way, which I tagged ‘Bestial Magick’.

UFO stories gain speed and legitimacy in America over the last few days and weeks: (1) Giant UFO seen over O'hare by ground crews and covered up, Chicago Tribune and CNN break story. (2) Arizona Governor Symington comes forward and announces on CNN that he witnessed the "Pheonix Lights" mass UFO sightings and believes it was an alien spacecraft, devulges that he undertook a private investigation. (3) France's space agency opens up its secret X-Files— three decades of research into UFO sightings, including police reports, witness sketches and maps that scientists used to search for logical explanations behind mysterious phenomena in the skies. Similar mass incidents reported...

"Clairsentience [From the French clair, “clear,” + sentience, “feeling,” ultimately derived from the Latin clarus, “clear,” + sentiens, derived from sentire, “to feel”] is a form of extra-sensory perception wherein a person acquires psychic knowledge primarily by means of feeling.[1]"(wikpedia)" ( the present wikpedia entry)

By Tristram Burden

Robert Anton Wilson (de)ceased on January 11, 2007. Considered brilliant and at times insane by many, among his many mindfucks he fearlessly introduced the 23 meme into popular consciousness. While the 23 Current has taken on a life all of its own, Uncle Bob's Most Marvelous Magi Trick may have been to let that one loose to plague a thousand minds, probably more. He almost single-handedly popularised Discordianism and edged it into the important magickal movement it is today. Without Uncle Bob, would there be Chaos Magick, or a wave of modern shaman's delivering human consciousness back from the brink of a potential over-scienced and under-psy-enced dark age?

It was his works I discovered when I began receiving weird vibes about Sirius, and his books I was guided towards soon after executing a gung-ho magickal operation to receive illumination about Truth. Uncle Bob blew my mind with a fierce wind of cross-cultural meta-narratives about mysticism and occultism. He made the broad connections between maps and phenomena which most brains only garner the vaguest hint towards, let alone full synthesis and processing into erudite, witty, funny and perpetually enlightening prose.

I haven't met one person who wasn't changed in some way by reading Robert Anton Wilson's work – which could be a testament to a sheltered life, or a bona-fide indicator of just how important this man was: in bridging the gap between the 1960s counter-culture and the future of occultism; in filtering out the dogma and the bullshit that occultism often carried along with it, breaking down a wall that precipitated a flood of fresh occult thought that wasn't weighed down by the pseudo-religious and sometimes impenetrable jargon that hung over mid-20th century occultism from the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

That he'd fallen ill late last year initiated a wave of concern all over the planet. He was pronounced dead 4:50am on January 11, 2007. He wrote about his experience of polio as a child, and his consistent sufferance of post-polio syndrome, with his trademark mixture of comic tragedy. That it should claim his life, despite his heroic advocacy of life-extension and virtual immortality, is a kick in the face to all optimism everywhere. But the anecdotal evidence that he maintained his humour throughout his final days on this earth, is further testament to just how switched on he was.

From his very early writings about drugs (republished as Sex, Drugs and Magick (New Falcon Press, in its sixth printing in 2000) Uncle Bob was an iconoclast. Picking away at the faults of the state and its systems and always championing the overlooked virtues of common sense. But it was the Illuminatus Trilogy, written with Robert Shea in 1975, that cemented him as a voice and mind to be taken seriously (or not, depending on your side of the fence), and his subsequent chronicles of the synchronicites and madness that led him to write that book, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, that secured his position as man deep in touch with his own genius.

By Mogg Morgan (c)

The literary vocabulary is peppered with metaphors of food and eating. We talk of 'good taste', 'to savour something' or of 'food for thought'. In this article I hope to show that this use of language is not accidental and in fact leads us to the heart of poetry. The contention that the mental feelings of enjoyment are indebted to bodily or physiological feelings may be difficult for some people to accept. We are inclined to draw a strict dividing line between mind and body; but this has not always been so, nor need it be in the future.

Aristotle in his Poetics speaks of 'Catharsis' which is also a medical term meaning cleansing or purging; a crucial component of the medical practice of his time. Aristotle was a physician as well as a philosopher and in the system of healing he practiced, which was based upon the Humours, Catharsis would have brought the sick person back to a state of psycho-somatic equipoise or isonomia

The similarities between Greek ideas and those of ancient Indian aesthetics are so striking that it is highly probably that they derive from a common source.

The man who set himself on fire in Chicago on November 4, 2006 was unknown to the people who found him and the news that reported the incident. I'm friends with someone who new the man, this person told me his name is Malachi Ritscher. Below is the Chicago Sun Times news story about his suicide. I'm posting Ritscher's suicide note below, called "mission statement", with links to other stuff he posted about why he immolated himself next to the Flame of the Millenium sculpture in Chicago.

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Man sets himself on fire on Kennedy
Drivers watched as he dies near 'Flame' sculpture

November 4, 2006
BY ANNIE SWEENEY Staff Reporter

As horrified Friday-morning commuters watched, a man apparently doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire along the Kennedy Expy. near a 25-foot-tall Loop sculpture titled "Flame of the Millennium."

A homemade sign was found near his charred body that read, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," said State Police Lt. Lincoln Hampton. Police are reviewing a videotape that also was found near the body.

The death of the man, whose identity has not been released, was being treated as a suicide, authorities said.

Witnesses told police they saw the man ignite himself just before 7 a.m. near the southbound Kennedy's Ohio Street exit, Hampton said.

The Chicago Fire Department was called to the scene to help extinguish the fire, which was set at the base of the seven-ton sculpture along the Kennedy.

An Illinois Department of Transportation worker was among those to witness the incident, according to a preliminary report.

A can of clear liquid smelling like gasoline also was recovered, the report said.

"Battle for Azeroth"

What is the secret to the World of Warcraft that six million people and counting already know?

A record-breaking number of people are logging on every day to enter the World of Warcraft: a Massive Multiplayer Role-Playing Game that has men and women, young and old, glued to their computer monitors all around the world.

In the new book The Battle for Azeroth, gaming experts, developers and best-selling science fiction authors explore every corner of the Warcraft universe. A number of essays explore the alchemy of turning illusionary "gold" to real money, like author Jerry Jackson declaring that Azeroth has an economy even Alan Greenspan would be proud of, from supply and demand among Warlocks to buying and selling gold on eBay. Author James John Bell's essay "Underworld of Warcraft" follows the trail of “Chinese Farmers” to uncover a global movement of hackers laundering virtual gold for millions in cold hard cash - exploiting over a 100,000 Chinese gamers by paying them as little as 25 cents an hour to farm the gold...

Those poor Egyptians! Over the centuries maligned, misunderstood and capriciously misrepresented, their tombs pillaged, their sacred sites violated and, as if that weren't enough, being made to endure plagues, the drowning of their army and a cannon ball smashing into the face of the Sphinx. Not much of a reward for being what Herodotus described as the most religious people on earth.

Nor have they fared any better at the hands of their admirers. Occultists, for instance, have accorded them few favours, consistently misappropriating their mythology, their symbolism and, at least until Champollion, their hieroglyphic script. And all too often done in order to impress people afflicted by a naive fondness for what seems old and mysterious, as well as deliciously exotic.

A question frequently put to me by newcomers to magical practice is whether there is a reliable way of distinguishing subjective experience from what exists independently of their perception of it. In other words, how can they be sure that what they witness during a particular ritual, even when it impinges on their surroundings, is something other than the product of their own - or the group's - creative imagination.

A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong is a new book published by Canongate Books. Myth is one of the most important subjects for those of us who are interested in spirituality, as myth is a way of describing spirit. For me, there is no difference between spirit and vision, for to encounter spirit, is to encounter a vision of the spirit. Myth is a way of describing the vision, of bringing it into the world, so it can be seen through the world.

-THE-GAIAN-MIND- Eco arts and education center in Long Beach, CA faces redevelopment and seeks support save its facility.

Peter Levenda poses a series of provocative questions in the Introduction to his utterly fascinating new book, Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, the first volume in a series of three. "To what degree does mysticism (including occultism, religious organizations, and secret societies) influence politics? Can it be demonstrated that there is no real separation of church and state, despite most Americans' belief?" Can it be revealed that the "world's political leaders are motivated by (at times bizarre and outrageous) religious or spiritual convictions, thus threatening" the "very nature of the American way of life?"

The roots of coincidence and conspiracy in American politics, crime, and culture are investigated in this analysis that exposes new connections between religion, political conspiracy, terrorism, and occultism. Readers are provided with strange parallels between supernatural forces such as shaminism, ritual magic, and cult practices, and contemporary interrogation techniques such as those used by the CIA under the general rubric of MK-ULTRA. Not a work of speculative history, this exposé is founded on primary source material and historical documents. Fascinating details on Nixon and the "Dark Tower," the Assassin cult and more recent Islamic terrorism, and the bizarre themes that run through American history from its discovery by Columbus to the political assassinations of the 1960s are revealed.

The intel gathering needed to identify and track travel of "global agitators" from around the world speaks to the rise of a global police state unseen at this level in past confrontations around globalization issues. The collaboration of national police agencies, like The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, South Korean National Police Agency, and others is cause for serious concern. One question that is raised here: should the security apparatus of democratic countries collaborate with foreign states with an intention to violate their own citizens and others civil liberties?

Tens of thousands of farmers and activists in Korea have threatened a series of protests against Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders claiming the forum is a privileged club for rich nations that have turned a blind eye to the poor.

Korean police have barred almost 1,000 members of some 20 citizens‘ organizations around the world, from entering the country to prevent protests during the APEC summit in Pusan, South Korea this month.

The 998 banned people have records of staging anti-globalization protests during past Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summits, the National Police Agency said as it continued preparations to clear the way for APEC meetings Nov. 12–19 and a summit of leaders of the 21 member economies on the last two days.

The 21 members of APEC are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.

This is the third and final installment of a three part essay by author and mage John Michael Greer exploring the occult history and origins of the "mind-body problem".

At the dawn of the eighteenth century, as Part Two of this article showed, the worldview of Newtonian science - an understanding of the experienced world that defined it in terms of particles of dead matter obeying rational laws, overseen at a distance by an abstract, equally rational God - had become the dominant ideology in Britain and an important presence in the broader world of European scholarship and science. As an ideology, it was closely associated with the political compromise born in the aftermath of the English civil wars of 1640-1660, and cemented by the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, when the Stuart dynasty (restored in 1660 as part of the original compromise) was finally driven from the British throne once and for all.

In the aftermath of 1688, the Newtonian worldview became deeply entrenched in British educational and cultural institutions, at least in part because its image of a universe governed by laws rather than arbitrary powers served to support the new political ideology of a society governed, at least in theory, on the same basis.(18) Still, even in England, it was not the only game in town, and in the broader context of European thought the Newtonian synthesis was only one of many different theories of the nature of the universe. In France, at that time the intellectual center of Europe, Cartesian writers fiercely assailed Newton for allowing "occult properties" such as action at a distance into his system. Paracelsian and other alchemical theories remained prominent in the Germanspeaking states of central Europe well into the eighteenth century, (19) and the traditional science based on Aristotle's writings remained a major presence in the educational system for many years to come. In addition, new currents in religion interacted freely with the scientific debates of the age.

Around Halloween, our viewing schedules (for those of us not too proud to admit to having one) start to congeal with 'occult content'. While once limited to re-screenings of Hammer Horror classics and occasional worthy-but-boring local news stories about 'white' witches, recent broadcasts have been a little closer to the bone. A character in a cartoon I saw yesterday, on being offered the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the Wicked Witch of the North, asked "Will I get to hurt people, or is it just dancing round a fire at the Equinox?". Ever since the re- birth of the modern craft, Wicca has been on a mission to 're-claim' the term 'witch', polishing off so many of the rough edges that it now has practically no shape left at all. Has it been a victim of its own success - after all, witchcraft is no-longer frightening, even for children? In an age when even Scooby Doo knows that Wicca means wise (and probably a bit pompous and self-righteous), has the rehabilitation of witchcraft gone too far?

Occult publisher and bookseller Mandrake of Oxford reviews the 2005 fifth annual Witchraft Seminar in England. This review can be found in the e-newsletter Mandrake Speaks #165 (mandrake-subscribe@yahoogroups.com). Send an email to same if you'd like to become a regular subscriber to this free transmission.

A common theme of modern thought, repeated endlessly in popular nonfiction and cocktail-party chatter, claims that myths are entirely a thing of the past: that our present culture has managed to leave myths behind, and we no longer have any myths of our own. This is not always presented as a good thing. Indeed, just as the death of myth has been proclaimed far and wide, its absence has been loudly mourned.