synchrosecrets

Here’s a report of a mother and son both dying in car-related accidents within hours of each other. After reading the article, it seemed to me there was also another synchro of sorts within the story. Notice how many people were allegedly intoxicated. Is that part synchronicity or just part of the everyday world?

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WEST ALLIS, Wis. — A Wisconsin woman and her adult son were killed in separate traffic crashes just hours apart in a Milwaukee suburb, police said Monday.

Mary J. Moore, 45, died after she was struck by a vehicle on a street in West Allis. A friend was speeding her son, Thomas M. Olson, 22, to the hospital to see her when he struck three parked cars and overturned, West Allis Deputy Chief Charles Padgett said. Olson was killed in the crash about 5:30 a.m. Sunday.

Padgett said Olson knew his mother had been hit, but he wasn’t sure if Olson knew she had died.

“It’s emotional. We want to get there fast and sometimes disregard our safety,” Padgett said. “I use it to remind people that regardless of the circumstances, be aware of the speed.”

The driver of the car Olson was riding in was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. He and two other passengers suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

Moore was hit as she lay prone in the street. A motorist following the car that struck her told police it looked as though the vehicle hit a speed bump, according to the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s report. The witness did not realize that it was a person until getting closer, the report said.

Padgett said Moore had been drinking before she was hit, but it’s not clear how much. An autopsy on her body was expected to be done Monday.

The driver that hit Moore drove off, but officers later found and arrested the person they believe is responsible. That driver may also have been drinking, authorities said.

“In my 24 years (of law enforcement), I’ve seen a lot of strange things, but don’t specifically remember a case like this,” Padgett said.

When we first saw the movie trailer for The Raven, the film went on our radar as one to see at an actual theater. John Cusack, one of the most interesting and diversely talented actors around, plays Edgar Allan Poe, a writer with whom Rob shares a certain, shall we say, camaraderie.

Here’s the back story on Rob and Poe. At some point in the late 1990s, Rob became sort of obsessed with Poe. He read the short stories, found some strange synchronicities, started taking notes. The notes eventually grew into Romancing the Raven, a wonderful time travel adventure involving Poe, a young New York woman from the late twentieth century, and a romance that spans centuries.

When Rob handed me the manuscript, I think I read it in a couple of days. It pulled at me, the way good stories always do. One of his characters – Uncle Fids – was actually a friend of ours, an eccentric and lovable psychic whom Rob met because of The Rainbow Oracle,  a divination book that he co-authored with Tony Grosso.

In the book, there’s a terrific scene at a tribute in Central Park for John Lennon,  a spot Fids took us to the last time we saw him. “This man wasn’t just a visionary,” Fids said. “He was a prophet.” The three of us sat in the sunlight on one of the benches, staring at the emblem: Imagine. Rob uses that spot a bit differently in the book, but Uncle Fids is there, just as he was in real life.

So on the afternoon of mother’s day -a hallmark holidays, right? -we buy our popcorn and settle in for the movie. Here’s the IMDB synopsis: When a madman begins committing horrific murders inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s works, a young Baltimore detective joins forces with Poe to stop him from making his stories a reality.

But that summary isn’t quite accurate. The murders are practically duplicates of stuff that Poe has written and at this moment in his life, he’s broke, drinks too much, and is madly in love with Emily, whose wealthy father despises him. But when Emily is abducted at a costume ball by this serial killer, the story breaks wide open.

Cusack is terrific in whatever role he plays. He was great in the surreal Being John Malcovich, in the romantic comedy Must Love Dogs, the oddball High Fidelity,  and now, as the misfit Poe.  (And, oh by the way, I love this man’s politics.)

Poe died under mysterious circumstances  on October 7, 1849, at the age of 40. Four days earlier, he had been found on a park bench in a Baltimore, Maryland in great physical distress. The film leads you up to those final hours of his life and is a masterfully executed whodoneit.

The screenwriter obviously did his homework about Poe. I  mean, you would think this would be a given, but too many movies based on real people tend to bend those facts for fictional purposes. The last word that Poe uttered, in real life, was Reynolds. And it’s on that word that the film ultimately pivots.  It’s where speculative fiction must enter in because, in real life, to this day, no one knows who or what Reynolds was to Poe.

Yes, there’s graphic violence in this film. But that certainly fits with Poe’s stories and adds to the general eerie world Poe inhabited, in his own head.  Cusack brings that madness to life on the screen.There are some wonderful twists and turns and surprises in the plot. Rob and I kept whispering to each other, He’s the killer, no that guy is the killer…. And we were wrong.

Rob’s only criticism of the movie was that Poe was depicted as being more athletic than he probably was in real life. In one scene, he races through a foggy woods on horseback; Rob leans toward me and whispers, “No way.”

I had read some reviews of the movie. The Palm Beach Post reviewer thought it was too slow and gave it a B. I guess if you compare it with X-Men or to the trailer we saw for the next G.I Joe movie,  then yes, it’s slow. One review I read said the film was okay, but “creatively bankrupt.” Huh?

We are all critics. What moves me may not move you. What speaks to me, may not speak to you. But to say that the move is creatively bankrupt tells me that whoever wrote this has never created anything. Every writer, artist, actor, entrepreneur,  filmmaker- every person engaged in a creative endeavor – creates from his or her own experience and imagination. Cusack’s interpretation of Poe as a man, a writer, a guy whose lover has been kidnapped by a serial killer duplicating what he writes about in his stories, is pitch perfect.

But if you’re looking for car chases, lasers,  shoot outs, and terrorists with nukes, don’t bother with this movie. The Raven is a film that engages you intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually,  but deep within that dark archetypal night of the soul when your worst nightmares whisper, What if, what if…

Cusack did for Poe in film what Rob does for him in Romancing the Raven. Am I prejudiced? You bet. But don’t take my word for it. See the film. Read the book.  You decide.

Archaeologists have made a fascinating discovery in a mostly unexplored city of Xultun in Guatemala. It’s a small building whose walls display murals of a brightly adorned Mayan king, and also the Mayan long count calendar.

The article in the Washington Post, unfortunately, was written as if it were revealing substantial new information about the calendar, which it isn’t. The article in a somewhat breathless manner, informs us that the new find destroys any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.

Actually, the Mayans never predicted the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012, but the end of this phase of the long-count calendar, and the beginning of a new calendar, which initiates a new world.  Of course, in dumbed-down popular culture terms, the end of the world means the end of the world…or no tomorrow.

But all along students of the Mayan long count calendar have said the end of the calendar is a symbolic ending of the Third World and beginning of the Fourth World. The Hopis have a slightly different account of the number of worlds in their mythology, but have also said we are reaching the end of the Fourth World and the beginning of the Fifth World.

There are plenty of signs that we are in a time of great transition, moving from the old ways of stagnant state religions to a more personal spirituality in which we all active participants rather than looking to a spiritual hierarchy and depending on the word of religious texts that have been altered over the centuries to serve the religious power structures.

The crashing of the economies around the world in recent years along with the degradation of the environment have pushed us to the brink. Many are seeing a new future beyond the oil economy, beyond the forever wars, and that precarious future has led to an ardent defense of the powers that be, of the old ways of doing things.

It’s why some people talk about the U.S. Constitution in the same manner they relate to the bible. They twist the Constitution to their own liking just as they manipulate the bible, while referring to both as if they were written in stone. It’s all about fear the fear that if they give an inch, everything they believe is no longer relevant. It’s a last ditch stand and might continue on for awhile. But eventually the blinders will fall away.

There are lots of predictions of catastrophes coming, both natural and man-made that might alter the make up of the planet, in terms of geography, economics,  political entities, and demographics. Such events indeed might be coming. Yet, it’s highly doubtful that there will be one big bang on Dec. 21 of this year. It’s a continual process taking place day by day, month by month, year by year, and yet one day it will appear that the shift to the new world came dramatically and swiftly.

See you there!

…to an Irving Berlin piece. This video is really great. I  first saw it on DJan’s blog.

Before 1967, interracial marriage in certain states in the U.S. was illegal.  Yes, you read that correctly. Whites and blacks weren’t permitted to marry each other. From Wikipedia:

 “Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967),^[1] was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared Virginia‘s anti-miscegenation statute, the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924“, unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.”

Now here we are in 2012, with another civil rights issue – the right for gay people to legally marry. Legal marriage means you’re able to partake of the same benefits that married heterosexuals do in terms of tax benefits, health insurance, Social Security, raising families and all the rest of it. It’s not just legal recognition, but the emotional and spiritual acceptance that comes from such a union.

On May 8, North Carolina voters approved a state constitutional amendment that declares marriage is only between a man and a woman. It’s the 30^th state with this kind of constitutional provision. The amendment states that such a marriage is the only “domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized by the state.”

It essentially writes discrimination into the state’s constitution.

Two days later, President Obama gave an interview to ABC News in which he stated that he personally believes gays should have the right to legally marry. He’s the first president to ever support gay marriage. Never mind that he should have done it long before now; at least he took the calculated political risk and came out in favor of it.

For opponents of gay marriage, the issue is all mixed up and entangled with religion.  In the U.S. Congress, amendments about gay marriage were actually tacked on to a defense bill at 11:30 at night. Someone  cited Leviticus in the Old Testament, which considers homosexuality an abomination punishable by stoning.

Really?

One day my neighbor and I were talking about this very issue and she cited the same chapter and verse in Leviticus that Congresswoman Scott did. I just stood there, mute with shock that I was hearing this from a woman in the 21^st century.  And this comes from he woman who takes care of our dog and cats when  we’re out of town.  I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it.

“Tell me you’re kidding,” I said. “Tell me you don’t really believe this.”

“It’s in the Bible, Trish.”

In other words, it’s written in stone and if I don’t get with the agenda, I’m part of the problem.

As a lapsed Catholic of many, many years, I vaguely recall the Old Testament, which we were taught in Catechism – i.e., Brainwashing 101 for children.  I remember listening to a nun talking about a fiery, angry god who “punished” his children when they “sinned.” And wow, there was a long list of sins, everything from disobeying your parents, lying, not attending church on Sundays, and  saying goddamn.

As a practicing Catholic, I was expected to confess periodically so I could receive communion.  So the priest would ask, “What sins do you need to confess?”And my mind would empty, a kind of panic would sweep through me. Hey, I was ten or eleven years old. I couldn’t think of anything, so I would make up sins – thus committing another sin! – and then dutifully say the 5,000 prayers to compensate for my evil life.

But here are members of Congress citing the Old testament while discussing legislation. Big disconnect. Whatever happened to the separation between church and state? What’s the deal, anyway? Why should anyone give a damn about who marries whom? How do gay couples  who marry and raise families present any “danger” to heterosexuals and their families?

I’m reminded of Shirley Jackson’s brilliant short story, The Lottery,  first published by The New Yorker in 1948. The plot is simple. In a small town of about 300 people, an annual ritual ensues to “ensure a good harvest.” One adult is stoned to death by the rest of the townspeople. People don’t like doing it, but they feel compelled to do so because it’s what you do if you live in this town. This same idea is used in slightly different ways in Hunger Games,  The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, The Matrix, Majority Report.

In much the same way, the Republican party has turned into an extremist bunch who seem to believe they are the country’s moral compass when it comes to gay marriage, women’s health, a woman’s right to choose, and a host of other privacy issues. They cite the Old Testament and extoll the virtues of family life while dismantling the very foundation of what a family means – love, tolerance, acceptance.

They tear apart food programs for the poor, medical care for the poor and the elderly, the sick and the vulnerable, because they refuse to raise taxes on the top 2 percent of earners. These issues fall under civil rights. The constitution, after all, says that we are all created equal. That should mean  that we have the right to marry whoever we love.

Now here’s the twisted synchro, a glaring trickster: before North Carolina voted to ban same-sex marriages, the Democrats had chosen Charlotte, North Carolina as the site of the Democratic National Convention of 2012, where Obama and the VP will be officially nominated. And despite the state’s ban and Obama’s much publicized proclamation about his support of gay marriage, the convention will still be held there.It’s as if the universe is inviting us to recognize that the new paradigm needs an enemy in order to evolve. In the Fifties, we needed the Russians and the Berlin Wall. Now we apparently need  discrimination against blacks, women, and gays before we can reach the ideal – acceptance.

Go figure.

I’m always amazed that when we put energy into a project – a proposal, a book or novel –  we suddenly receive emails that pertain to what we’re writing about. Law of attraction, synchronicity, whatever it is, the last few days have been filled with it.

 This afternoon I received an email from Kerry, who lives in Costa Rica now (one of our favorite countries) and was a fan of my books back in the 1980s, when I was first starting out.  She had Googled me, found the website for my fiction, and sent me an email. During our exchange, she dropped by the blog and read one of the UFO stories then sent her recollection of an experience she had in 1970. The Air Force base she mentions lies about 135 miles East of Roswell, New Mexico.

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My first husband was Air Force and I remember when we were stationed at Holloman AFB New Mexico.  Reading your blog brought it all back to me.

We had taken a camper high into the Mogollon Mountains. This was about 1970 or so, and we camped near a hanging lake.  At night the stars were almost bright enough to read by.  About 9 PM we were watching the sky when we saw lights moving at tremendous speeds and stopping and changing directions almost instantaneously.

We witnessed what appeared to be a dog fight in the sky between about 6 sources of light over a 30 minute period.  It scared us to death, and I remember it as though it were yesterday.  Several Air Force officers were with us, and when we got back to base we found out that some dead sheep had been found eviscerated on the White Sands Missile Range.

Two of the officers were pilots and they watched the exhibition,  fascinated. They confirmed that no jet they had ever flown could perform like what we were watching.

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How many more incidents like this were never reported?

What are we to make of this double image of  Queen Elizabeth, which is her official Diamond Jubilee photograph? It’s an interesting view with the reflection leaving an interdimensional impression. She is peering at us in a quite regal pose, but also looking away into another world.

Note the Knights of Templar cross on her sternum, which – thanks to the mirror – appears on both sides of her body, one below her left breast, the other below her right breast. No wonder mirrors are considered magical tools!

What interests me most about the photo, however, is the crown. The two images don’t appear to be identical. Look at the top of each one. The crown in the mirror seems level, while the one in the foreground appears uneven with peaks and valleys. An optical illusion, right?

Who is that woman?

This tale of synchronicity comes from Dale Dassel of Georgia who is a long-time BIG, BIG fan of all things related to Indiana Jones – the movies, the books, the gear, the computer games, all of it. I’m not going to tell how many times he has read my Indiana Jones novels since his early teens because you would not believe me.

For the past two and a half years, Dale has been writing an Indiana Jones saga himself based on the computer game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.  In doing so, Dale imagined actress Julianne Moore portraying the leading lady, Sophia Hapgood. He even enlisted another big, big Indy fan, Danish artist Christian Guldager, to create a cover for his novel, and on that cover is a recognizable image of Julianne Moore as Sophia. While Dale can never sell this novel, he can post it on fan sites. He plans to finish it by June, the 20th anniversary of the release of the game.

So, with all that in mind, here is the synchronicity that he encountered.

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Today I remembered a recent synchro that I’d forgotten to tell you about. Last month I was browsing Amazon.com for books about Atlantis when my search results brought up Mystic Places, the first volume in the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series published in the late 80′s.

I remember the TV commercials for the series as a kid, and how badly I wanted to order the set (my parents refused at the time). So I ordered a mint-condition copy at a reasonable price and then surfed over to Youtube to see if the vintage commercial was available. Naturally it was, but I was delighted when I watched it for the first time since 1988 because it opens with a very familiar redhead: a 20-something Julianne Moore, my very own Sophia Hapgood!

I watched the TV spot several times, and it synched up with my childhood memory quite well, since I did recall the pretty redhead. Of course I had no idea who she was back then because Julianne wasn’t famous and I’d never seen her in any films until The Fugitive in 1993.

Here’s where the synchro gets really interesting. A couple of weeks after receiving the book from Amazon, I happened to pull out my Fate of Atlantis  game manual to re-read and examine pictures of the stone disks & symbol alignments. At the very end of the booklet is a small bibliography list of books recommended for further reading.

Mystic Places was right in the midst of it! A few days after that, I was re-reading the Wikipedia article about the game, where I was astonished to find that Mystic Places was the very book which inspired Hal Barwood on the subject of Indy’s Atlantean quest. Indeed, the very first chapter in the book covers the subject of Atlantis. But the Julianne Moore connection to the Time-Life commercial for the book is what gets me.

The universe never ceases to amaze me.

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Dale was tuning in when he imagined Julianne Moore for the role and also when he ordered the book that he discovered inspired the game. It all came together. What you focus on with intent and desire is what you get.

Occasionally, I have dreams that have no images, no strong emotional context, but are idea-based. Such dreams might involve the repetition of a phrase over and over again. It’s as if my dreaming self is telling me to remember. Don’t forget. Wake up, write it down. Rather than multi-dimensional, these dreams can feel very two-dimensional  - like the image above.

One such dream I recall oddly enough featured the Supreme Court. There were no images of court members, not any issues before the court, not even a gavel pounding the bench. Only the words: Supreme court decision. Except ‘decision’ came out slurred in a non-sensical word. But later, when I said it quickly to myself, I realized it sounded very close to ‘decision.’

Supreme court decision. I remember wondering what could this mean, and thinking what a boring dream, and thinking that while I was dreaming!

There was one other element in the dream: the color green. So as some part of me was spewing out, Supreme court decision  over and over again, I thought of the meaning of green, and tried to analyze the dream while it was taking place. I thought that green might indicate an important court decision related to the environment.

I also thought of green light, as in the court giving the go-ahead. I thought maybe it related to the issue of the moment, the national health care program and the mandate that every adult buy health insurance. But that decision isn’t expected until sometime in June. So why was I dreaming about a decision is early April?

I forgot about the dream until April 16 when we were driving home from Orlando after a visit with daughter Megan. I don’t know why it came to mind, but I mentioned it to Trish.

An hour later, we arrived home and picked up the mail and newspaper. There on the front page of that day’s paper was a detailed analysis of the health care issue before the supreme court.  As a former journalist, I always glance at the by-lines of articles. When I looked at this one, I smiled. The name at the top of the article was Laura Green.

There was my color. A synchro. Why I picked up on it at week or so in advance is just one of the mysteries of the dream world.

The man in the photo is a resident Bugarach, France, who is saying, “Don’t come to my village for the end of the world.”

Okay. We won’t.

But apparently thousands think it’s the place to be Dec. 21 when the Mayan Calendar runs out of days. The reason is that the French village of 200 is nestled at the base of a peculiar mountain that is attracting the throngs who hope aliens will save them from the end of the world.

According to The Inquisitr, the pilgrims, already more than 20,000, believe that when Doomsday arrives, aliens will appear in UFOs at Pic de Bugarach to rescue all people awaiting them. They will be flown off and relocated for the dawning of a new age. BBC reports that for years, there have been rumors circulated on Internet that Pic de Bugarach is home to powerful aliens and that on apocalypse day, December 21, the top of the mountain will open and the UFOs will emerge to rescue those gathered in the area.

The mountain is called the “upside-down mountain” because, according to geologists, its top layer is an overthrust from the Iberian plate, and is older than the bottom ones. According to French tradition, the mountain inspired Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The local authorities have grown nervous about the goings-on in the area, fearing the possibility of a mass action such as suicide. They have asked the French government to move troops into the area for security. According to The Independent, more than 100,000 are expected to come to the mountain in time for the 21 December “beaming up” of believers aboard UFOs.

BBC reports that a special parliamentary committee has warned that the sects may commit mass suicides in 2012 if the spaceships do not come to save them. A report alleges some people have bought land in the mountains and are planning to building bunkers where they may survive the expected catastrophe at the end of the world.

The mayor says the villagers are worried about these goings-on: “We’ve seen a huge rise in visitors. Already this year more than 20,000 people have climbed right to the top, and last year we had 10,000 hikers, which was a significant rise on the previous 12 months. They think Pic de Bugarach is ‘un garage à ovnis’ [an alien garage]. The villagers are exasperated: the exaggerated importance of something which they see as completely removed from reality is bewildering. After 21 December, this will surely return to normal.”

Not to outdone by the French, some American travel agents apparently are offering special one-way deals  to Amageddon.

We are weary of the Dec. 21 hype – and have been so for some time – but we couldn’t pass up this one. After all, you don’t hear much about upside-down mountains.

When I was in college, I read Ayn Rand’s  Atlas Shrugged. For those of you haven’t read it, here’s a summary from Wikipedia:

Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the United States. Rand’s fourth and last novel, it was also her and contains Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction.

The book explores a dystopian United States where many of society’s most productive citizens refuse to be exploited by increasing taxation and government regulations and disappear. They are led by John Galt. Galt describes the strike as “stopping the motor of the world” by withdrawing the minds that drive society’s growth and productivity. In their efforts, these people “of the mind” hope to demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed, that civilization cannot exist where every person is a slave to society and government, and that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sees society collapse around her as the government increasingly asserts control over all industry.

I enjoyed her characters and the love story between Dagny Taggart and the mysterious John Galt. Then I reached the very long speech that Galt made – 27 or 30 pages – on capitalism and profit and thought, Huh? Why didn’t an editor cut this sucker to two paragraphs?

At the time, I didn’t understand enough about capitalism to realize that speech formed the core of Rand’s dangerous belief system. In a nutshell,  her take on capitalism is that there should be no government regulation. None. The free market regulates itself  and when government tries to regulate it, creativity is stifled and profits nosedive.  And oh, there are no free lunches – no Social Security, no Medicare, no welfare, no health care for the poor. Forget all that.

I re-read the book about ten years later and hated it. I didn’t know at the time that a man named Alan Greenspan was a student of Rand’s; Greenspan served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. After 9-11, he’s the one who encouraged Americans to use their homes as ATM machines, to refinance and use that additional money to bolster the economy by shopping.

Like economist Milton Friedman, Greenspan was a proponent of a self-regulating market, a term I never really understood. I mean, is a market  a human being with a conscience? Does a market know the difference between right and wrong? Greenspan – like Friedman, like Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, like Congressman Paul Ryan – believes in trickle down economics.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term: the upper one percent in the U.S. shouldn’t have their taxes raised because they are the job creators, the ones who supposedly hire you and me and all the rest of us. And because they are the job creators, the belief says, we – the middle class, the poor, the elderly – should be the ones who pay higher taxes. Huh?

Congressman Paul Ryan is the author of the infamous Ryan plan for how to put the country back on track to a brighter economic future. The core of it? Cut social services across the board – i.e., scrap Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and give the very rich a new tax break, and get rid of government regulations on everything, so that the oil companies and insurance companies and banks will have higher profits. And really, don’t worry about it, all you peons out there, because the market self-regulates.

Well, once it became public knowledge that Ryan – a Catholic – was a proponent of Ayn Rand, an atheist,  some Catholic bishops denounced him. So now Ryan, no surprise, suddenly doesn’t embrace Rand’s teachings.

What is so puzzling is that even though the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of trickle down economics, of the Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand economical view, even though the self-regulating market on Wall Street turned out to be enormously greedy, this philosophy is still advocated as an answer to economic woes.  But don’t take my word for it. Read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.

“Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.”

The bottom line, I think, is that as we move deeper into 2012, many of us are becoming even more aware of how the old paradigms no longer work. It’s time to turn Rand’s form of capitalism, based on personal greed at the expense of everyone and everything else, on its head. It’s part of that dying belief system. Politicians who advocate cutting social safety net programs that protect the most vulnerable in society, who propose banning contraception and overturning abortion, who believe that corporations are people, who propose doubling the interest rates on student loans, who think it’s okay to drill oil wells a mile deep in the ocean,  who believe that torture is just fine…it’s time for these guys to hit the road, Jack.  Their worldview is broken.

It’s up to the rest of us to put the pieces together in a new way that is beneficial for all people, not just the privileged few.

Our post, Atlas Shrugged Turned on Its Head, brought comments from a couple of individuals who wanted to know what system we advocated if capitalism is so corrupt. Here’s the answer.

This documentary is stunning. It’s narrated and financed by a visionary named Foster Gamble, who rejected his path as a scion of the Proctor & Gamble fortune and chose to seek another more equitable path. Here you will learn about new energy and its connection with ancient wisdom, a hint about the meaning of crop circles, while the last half deals with the forces fighting to maintain the status quo and how they do it.

As Daz says, Thrive should be shown everywhere, and quickly. There’s a synchro in here for us, too, given the proposal we’re working on now. But more on that later. Here’s the movie, courtesy of You Tube.

If you follow us on Twitter, we apologize for any direct message that reputedly came from us about how you are the subject of a nasty rumor. Do NOT click that link. Our twitter account was hacked after our synchro books editor’s twitter account was hacked and we responded to her. Sigh.  The hack was actually clever: nasty rumors about you. Really?? Rumors? Who did I piss off?

These idiots apparently have a lot of time on their hands and enjoy stirring up mischief. At any rate, we corrected the problem and apologize to anyone who was affected.

If you were hacked, you should:

1. Report it to twitter. We couldn’t find a link for that.

2. Disable all associated accounts – and change the passwords on those accounts and on your twitter account.

3. Test your new passwords.

4. Tell the hackers to get a life.