We will end this week's discussion on development in communities in US Foreign Economic Zones and MASTER PLAN goals of super-global corporate campuses and global factory concentration in our mid-size US cities like Baltimore knowing this is from where all bad development, frauds, corruptions originate and from here lies the 99% of WE THE PEOPLE'S focus in GETTING GLOBAL WALL STREET out of our people's government.
Now, if you are a member of SECRET SOCIETIES at a local level and not the global old world MERCHANT OF VENICE 1% ---you are being used and will be thrown under the bus so stop MOVING FORWARD. If you do not know what secret society/freemasonry history is from old world VENETIAN EMPIRE----then WAKE UP and learn because that is who controls our government and MOVING FORWARD MASTER PLAN is the global 1% not ours.
We spoke last time of development in Baltimore tied to what is surely a model of that old world VENETIAN EMPIRE SENATE BUILDING where only global merchant executives have the voice in politics----you know ---these are the people Europe and America had a REVOLUTION to send packing. We then rested on our laurels and allowed those pesky global 1% get control of our freedom and liberty once more.
PLEASE STOP BELIEVING A 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE CANNOT STOP AND REVERSE THIS --IT WILL BE EASY PEASY.
So here we have ABILITY ONE----that Federal agency for disabled connecting to LIGHTHOUSE and building a PALATIAL BUILDING on our Federal Hill ------let's look at what global freemasonry ties to our downtown development look like so far. Maryland Agency for the blind has done a great job in training our disabled blind----so it is not the service----it is the corruption of global 1% using social non-profits to gain money and power.
The Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc. - AbilityOne
www.abilityone.gov/media_room/documents/Seattle...The Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc. Our Mission: To create and enhance opportunities for independence and self-sufficiency of people who are blind, Deaf-
Latest News & Updates
Mission
King David’s Lodge exists to refine good men, making them into even better men, by a unique experience of initiation into the mysteries of Freemasonry – in much the same manner that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and a host of other inspiring leaders have been enlightened.
Vision
King David’s continues to stand as it has for over a century: a venerable lighthouse illuminating the Door of Freemasonry for people of goodwill within San Luis Obispo – people who may choose to become one of us, once they see that the door is close at hand.
The global 1% chooses the Oracle of Delphi because of its ties to APOLLO THE SUN GOD being supreme with this god's temple's being staffed with PEOPLE THOUGHT TO BE SEERS---VISIONARIES visited by KINGS AND EMPIRE-BUILDERS. Notice below how the temple is always built on a southern slope of a hill just as in Baltimore's Federal Hill.
This is a long article but it sets the mindset of a global 1% who think they are GODS OR KINGS---when they are only THUGS. PLEASE GLANCE THROUGH TO NEXT ARTICLE.
The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?
Read the full article as it appeared in Archaeology OdysseyJelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale • 05/01/2016
Read “Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale as it originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 2002. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in 2013.—Ed.
The world’s most famous (and powerful) oracle resided at Delphi, high up the slopes of Mount Parnassus in the Temple of Apollo. In ancient times, supplicants would wind up the mountainside, patiently hoping for words of wisdom from the priestess (called the Pythia) in the temple’s adyton (inner chamber). Corbis
Archaeologists are good at recovering things left behind by the past, such as buildings, incense altars, tools and relief carvings. What they are not so good at recovering are the ideas, feelings and emotions—the innerness—of sentient ancient beings. It’s one thing to examine a temple’s holy of holies; it’s another thing to understand what went on there and what people experienced. Sometimes, however, there’s an exception to the rule.
Numerous classical authors report that natural phenomena played an essential part in one of their most sacred religious rituals: the oracle at Delphi. According to the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.), for example, “the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed down in the depths … from which arises pneuma [breath, vapor, gas] that inspires a divine state of possession” (Geography 9.3.5). Over the past five years, a team of researchers—a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist—has put that claim to the test, making it much more likely that we will actually understand what happened at Delphi.
Tracing the enigmatic, mystical genesis of the Greek Olympiad, The Olympic Games: How They All Began takes you on a journey to ancient Greece with some of the finest scholars of the ancient world. Ranging from the original religious significance of the games to the brutal athletic competitions, this free eBook paints a picture of the ancient sports world and its devoted fans.
When ancient Greeks and Romans had to make decisions, they consulted the gods—by drawing lots, casting dice, interpreting dreams and analyzing such signs as sneezes, thunderbolts and flying birds. But for matters of the utmost importance, they sought to hear the words of the gods in the mouths of oracles.a
Pythias were virgins who dedicated their lives to prophesying on behalf of the god Apollo. The first Pythia is said to have been the goddess Themis, who is depicted on a fifth-century B.C. cup (shown here) sitting on a tripod and holding a bowl and a sprig of laurel (Apollo’s sacred tree).
According to Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.) and other sources, the Pythia was inspired by mysterious vapors, though these accounts have been largely ignored by modern researchers. Now, however, a team of archaeologists and geologists have proved that the Temple of Apollo sat directly above fault lines that likely released intoxicating carbon-based gases into the adyton. Was this the oracle’s secret?
Paradoxically, in male-dominated classical Greece the most influential voice, the Delphic oracle, belonged to a woman. The oracular temple was perched on the south slope of Mount Parnassus, surrounded by high cliffs, about 75 miles west of Athens. Getting to Delphi required either a long trek across the mountains or a sea voyage to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. However difficult the journey, thousands of visitors sought guidance from the holy woman, called the Pythia,b who spoke on behalf of the gods.
The Pythia dealt less in visions of the future than in right choices: where to locate a new colony, when to attack an enemy, how to lift a curse, whom to choose as leader, what offering to make to which god. No kingdom, city or private person could afford to make critical decisions without consulting the Pythia. Thanks to her prestige, Delphi became the richest and most famous Hellenic sanctuary. The Greeks called it the omphalos, or “navel of the world.”
How could a mere mortal command such respect? The answer lies in the belief that Apollo—the god of revelation and inspiration—used the Pythia as his mouthpiece, taking possession of her during oracular sessions. The Pythia would fall into a trance, and the words she spoke were supposedly those of Apollo, delivered in a voice very unlike her normal tones.
Most scholars believe the Delphic oracle was established around the eighth century B.C., when founders of new colonies would consult the Pythia before setting out for the western Mediterranean, North Africa, Asia Minor or the Black Sea. The origins of the oracle are recounted in a story about a goatherd named Koretas, who pastured his flock on the slope of Mount Parnassus. Koretas noticed that when the goats grazed near a certain fissure in the mountainside, they began to bleat strangely. Approaching the fissure, he was filled with a prophetic spirit. Eventually, a woman—the first Pythia—was appointed to sit on a tripod over the cleft and give prophecies. Before she could mount the tripod, however, a goat had to be sacrificed to ensure that the day was propitious.
Frank Ippolito
During the classical period, supplicants would line up at dawn to walk along the Sacred Way, a steep path snaking up through the sanctuary toward the Temple of Apollo. The priests and temple attendants determined the order of the queue, giving priority to state embassies and then working their way down through military commanders, athletes, poets and, last of all, mere heads of families concerned about a child or an investment. The supplicants filed past bronze statues, war monuments and treasure houses dedicated in the past by grateful visitors. It would have been late in the day by the time the ordinary men at the rear reached the terrace of the temple and viewed the famous inscriptions, “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”
From here the way led up a ramp to a great colonnade of Doric columns, and then through a double door into the temple itself. Inside burned a constant pinewood fire tended by women of Delphi. The final approach to the oracle led downward into a sunken space below the level of the temple floor, where the visitor would be confronted by a gold statue of Apollo and the omphalos stone that marked the sacred spot. The Pythia sat in a recessed inner sanctum called the adyton, a Greek word meaning “not to be entered.” Standing outside the adyton, visitors would ask their questions and await the response.
Unlike itinerant prophets and omen-interpreters, the Pythia derived her power from the place—she could only prophesy while seated in the adyton within the Temple of Apollo. According to Strabo, the pneuma arose from a small opening (chasma ges) in the adyton: “Over the mouth [of the opening] a high tripod is set. Mounting this, the Pythia inhales the pneuma and then speaks prophecies in verse or in prose. The latter are versified by poets on duty in the temple” (Geography 9.3.5.).
Strabo was not the only ancient source to describe the adyton and the intoxicating gas. The second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias told of a spring in the temple’s adyton that made the Pythia prophetic. Also, in On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, the biographer Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.), who served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, described an exhalation of vapor in the adyton that sent the Pythia into a trance.
Despite these testimonies, no serious scholar over the last 50 years has accepted the idea that the Pythia’s trance was caused by a gaseous emission.
Modern investigations began in the 1890s, when French archaeologists began to excavate the sanctuary at Delphi. They first moved the modern village of Kastri, household by household, from above the ancient sanctuary to the town of Delphi, west of the sanctuary. The French archaeologists uncovered the boundary wall of the ancient sanctuary, an entry gate, and the lower stretches of the Sacred Way. By 1893 they had reached the terrace of the Temple of Apollo—where they found that scarcely a stone remained in place above the floor. The columns had toppled, and the statuary had been carried off or destroyed. In the lower chamber, where the oracle once spoke, no trace of the ancient structure remained. Even the archaeologists’ attempts to reach bedrock were frustrated as water filled the excavated areas.
While the French team was excavating the temple, a young English scholar named A.P. Oppé published a report based on his visit to the site. Oppé proposed that the ancient sources had confused the fissure with a nearby gorge, and that the vapor was simply a fiction that had been passed down from source to source.1
In 1927, after a hiatus precipitated by World War I, a scholar named M.F. Courby published the French team’s final report of the temple excavations. He described the bedrock under the center of the temple as “fissured by the action of the waters”—suggesting that the ancient traditions of an opening in the rock may have been correct.2 By then, however, Oppé’s theory that the ancients simply misconstrued the facts had taken too strong a hold among scholars for the issue to be reconsidered. The final blow came in 1950: Pierre Amandry of the École Française d’Athènes stated definitively—or so it was widely believed—that exhalations of intoxicating gas could never have existed at Delphi. Only volcanic activity could produce such gas, Amandry (incorrectly) noted, and Delphi does not lie in a volcanic area.3 For almost half a century, debates about the geological origins of the oracle virtually ceased.c
The first step toward a modern reassessment of the evidence was made in the 1980s by geologist (and co-author) Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the senior member of our project in Delphi. De Boer was conducting surveys, under the auspices of the United Nations and the Greek government, to identify active fault lines. One area he studied was the south slope of Mount Parnassus, where he noted an exposed fault both east and west of the sanctuary of Apollo—though it could not be seen at the site of the temple, where it was covered by ancient construction and debris from rock slides. De Boer suspected that the fault did indeed run under the temple, but he gave the matter no more thought.
The acropolis in Athens is the most iconic remnant of the classical Greek world. Discover the site’s history and architecture in the article “Antiquity’s High Holy Place: The Athenian Acropolis” by Harrison Eiteljorg, now available online for free.
It was not until the summer of 1995 that Zeilinga de Boer encountered an archaeologist, co-author John Hale of the University of Louisville, who assured him, first, that he could not possibly have seen any such feature at Delphi and, second (after Zeilinga de Boer described the fault in detail), that this might be a discovery of major importance. We decided to continue investigations at Delphi, eventually adding a chemist (Jeff Chanton of Florida State University and the U.S. Geological Survey Magnetic Laboratory) and a toxicologist (Henry Spiller of the Kentucky Poison Center) to the team.
In 1996, with the support of Rozina Kolonia, the director of the Delphi Museum, we conducted a survey of the site and found that the sections of exposed fault on either side of the sanctuary were indeed part of the same fault—an active fault extending about 13 miles east-west along the southern flank of Mount Parnassus. We named this fault the Delphi Fault.
This egg-shaped stone—the very stone described by the Greek writer Pausanias, who visited Delphi in the second century A.D.—represents the omphalos, or “navel of the world.” According to Greek legend, Delphi was fixed as the center of the world when Zeus released two eagles, one from the west and the other from the east, which met in the sky above Delphi. The original omphalos stone, now lost, was probably an archaic cult object that supplicants draped with wreaths, resembling the wreaths carved in relief on this stone. Erich Lessing
In subsequent seasons we identified a second fault, extending approximately southeast-northwest. This fault could be traced along a line of springs running through the center of the sanctuary. The highest spring, above the temple, is called the Kerna Spring; its water is currently channeled westward to modern Delphi. Further down the slope, though still above the temple, a mass of travertine (a kind of limestone) deposited by calcite-rich waters indicates another spring. There is also an elaborate channel for a spring built into the southern foundation wall of the temple itself. Although this spring is dry today, the early 20th-century French archaeologists found it difficult to reach bedrock within the sanctuary because their holes kept filling up with water. Down the slope below the temple, yet another spring emerges from a cleft in the bedrock near the Treasury of the Athenians.
We have named this southeast-northwest fault the Kerna Fault, after its highest spring. In de Boer’s opinion, the Kerna Fault intersects the Delphi Fault at or near the site of the temple.
What the ancient authors described as a fissure (chasma ges) in the rock over which the Pythia sat was probably a small fracture extending up from the intersection of these two faults. Very likely, this is also what M.F. Courby, in his 1927 publication of the French team’s excavations, was describing when he wrote that the bedrock was “fissured by the action of the waters.”
Greek geologists had already identified the limestone under the temple as bituminous (oil-bearing), with a petrochemical content as high as 20 percent. These petrochemicals appeared to be a possible source of gases. But how exactly could they be released from the rock into the atmosphere?
The Delphi Fault is linked to one of Greece’s most geologically active features: the great rift, or graben, that today is filled by the waters of the Gulf of Corinth. This is a recent feature, geologically speaking, having formed roughly two million years ago. The rift continues to widen; as it does, motion occurs along faults and earthquakes are triggered. In 373 B.C., for example, earthquakes almost completely destroyed the Delphic temple on the north side of the gulf, as well as coastal towns on the south side.
As slippage occurs along the fault lines, adjacent rock masses are heated, vaporizing the lighter petrochemicals in the limestone and expelling gases upward along the face of the faults. Once faulting has opened such a pathway, gases continue to rise, although the volume would slowly decrease over time. We believe that this is exactly what happened at Delphi: The rock masses deep in the earth were heated, and they intermittently produced gases that rose up along the intersection of the two fault lines, eventually entering the adyton of the temple through one or more fissures over which the Pythia sat.
Read about the discovery in ancient Hierapolis of Pluto’s Gate, a site shrouded in misty poisonous vapors and considered sacred to the underworld deity Pluto.
Exhalations of gases from bituminous limestone have been observed by geologists studying underwater faults in the Gulf of Mexico. There light hydrocarbon gases—methane, ethane and ethylene, all of them intoxicants—have been found bubbling up from the rock below. Closer to Delphi, similar exhalations were detected near the Isthmus of Corinth, as well as on the island of Zakynthos.
We decided to test the spring water at Delphi, along with samples of the travertine rock that the ancient springs had deposited on the retaining walls and slopes around the temple. If significant quantities of gases had been emitted with the spring water, traces of these gases might be found in the travertine deposits. The very presence of travertine rock, formed from dissolved calcites in warm spring water, is evidence that the springs along the Kerna Fault had their origin at deep levels.
The water and travertine from the sanctuary of Apollo, which were analyzed by Jeff Chanton, revealed traces of the light hydrocarbon gases found in the Isthmus of Corinth and on Zakynthos. Could this explain the Pythia’s state of intoxication in ancient times?
Apollo sits on a carved ompholos stone—perhaps even a representation of the stone shown in the previous photo—on a coin (shown here) minted in Antioch in 225–223 B.C. Clearly, the Delphic oracle and its association with Apollo were well known throughout the ancient world in Hellenistic times. By the first century A.D., however, the Pythia’s powers were failing, perhaps because the volume of gases flowing into the adyton had decreased—and by the fourth century, the demise of the oracle was complete. American Numismatic Society
The ancient sources describe two distinct types of prophetic trance experienced by the Pythia. First, and more normally, she would lapse into benign semi-consciousness, during which she remained seated on the tripod, responding to questions—though in a strangely altered voice. According to Plutarch, once the Pythia recovered from this trance, she was in a composed and relaxed state, like a runner after a race. A second kind of trance involved a frenzied delirium characterized by wild movements of the limbs, harsh groaning and inarticulate cries. When the Pythia experienced this delirium, Plutarch reports, she died after only a few days—and a new Pythia took her place.
According to toxicologist Henry Spiller, both of these symptoms are associated with the inhalation of hydrocarbon gases. Spiller studies the effects of such inhalants on young people, known as “huffers,” who breathe in fumes from gas, glue, paint thinner and other substances because of their intoxicating properties. Perhaps the Pythia too was high on one of these hydrocarbon gases.
It may even be possible to identify the kind of gas. Plutarch—who, we recall, was a priest of Apollo at the Delphic sanctuary—noted that the intoxicating pneuma had a sweet smell, like expensive perfume. Of the hydrocarbon gases, only ethylene has a sweet smell—so ethylene was probably a component in the gaseous emission inhaled by the Pythia.
Now, there is a good deal of evidence concerning ethylene intoxication, particularly from the early 20th century. In laboratory tests involving human subjects, the pioneering anesthesiologist Isabella Herb and other scientists studied the effects of light doses of ethylene. Ethylene worked twice as fast as nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and achieved similar effects with only half the quantity. In high concentrations, ethylene produced complete unconsciousness; in low concentrations, it induced a trance state. Ultimately, ethylene’s use as a medical anesthetic was discontinued because of its combustibility: A spark from electrical equipment in the operating room could ignite the ethylene canister, causing it to explode.4
From the evidence of “huffers” and the experiments with ethylene, we know that subjects normally react to inhaling small quantities of these gases by entering a benign “out-of-body” trance. They can remain seated and answer questions, but their tone of voice and typical speech patterns are altered. Recovery takes place as soon as the subject is removed from exposure to the gas, and complete amnesia about the trance follows. In a minority of cases (about one in six) in the ethylene experiments, subjects experienced delirium, or a “bad trip.” Experimenters had to use restraints to hold down those undergoing this delirium, which was accompanied by groaning, shrieking and a thrashing of the arms and legs.
Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the Pythia’s behavior survive from the golden age (seventh to fifth century B.C.) of the Delphic oracle. By the time Plutarch took office as priest of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle’s powers had significantly diminished. According to Plutarch, emissions of pneuma in the adyton were slight and unpredictable, leading to the decline of the oracle itself. He suggested that whatever produced the pneuma in the rock below the temple had become exhausted, or that the fissures in the rock had been blocked up in the 373 B.C. earthquake. The Delphic oracle never recovered its former prestige after this earthquake, even though the temple was rebuilt.
The diminished flow of gas may not have been the only reason for the decline of the institution. Plutarch opined that the pneuma was merely a trigger for the prophetic trance, and that the Pythia’s lifelong training and psychological preparation played the most important role in her spiritual possession. In a memorable simile, Plutarch compared Apollo to a musician, the Pythia to a lyre, and the pneuma to the musician’s uncanny ability to produce music by touching the instrument. Perhaps there were socio-cultural reasons for the decline of the institution, or perhaps, as the gaseous emissions became less powerful, devoting one’s life to the oracle became less attractive.
Whatever the reasons for the oracle’s demise, we can no longer dismiss ancient traditions concerning its origins and power. Strabo, Plutarch and the others have been rescued by science from a century of calumny.
The House of Apollo: A History
The Delphic oracle appears often in Greek myth, even in the account of the repopulating of the earth after a great flood. The high god Zeus, distressed over mankind’s wickedness, sends a flood to cover the earth, but two pious human beings, Deucalion (Prometheus’s son) and Pyrrha (Prometheus’s niece), survive by climbing Mount Parnassus. With the ebbing of the flood, the two descend the mountain and come upon the Delphic temple site, where they hear a voice: “Veil your heads and cast behind you the bones of your mother!” Like many of the Delphic oracles, this one is initially enigmatic, but Deucalion and Pyrrha soon realize that the earth is their mother; so they throw rocks over their shoulders, and the rocks are transformed into men and women, saving humanity from perdition.
Erich Lessing
Another famous, or infamous, visit to the oracle was made by the young Oedipus—who, having been adopted as a baby, wanted to know the identity of his parents. (The third-century A.D. marble relief above shows Oedipus [center] sacrificing to the Delphic oracle in front of a statue of Apollo [left].) However, the Delphic oracle informed the young man that he would murder his father and commit incest with his mother. To foil the prophecy, Oedipus left Corinth, which he (erroneously) believed to be his native land. On his journey he killed another chariot-driver in a fit of ancient road rage—but unknown to him, the other driver was his father Laius, King of Thebes.
The oracle at Delphi was also consulted by non-mythical figures. In the sixth century B.C., King Croesus of Lydia, in western Anatolia, inquired whether he should attack King Cyrus of Persia. “If you attack,” replied the Pythia, “you will destroy a great kingdom.” Croesus attacked the Persians, suffered total defeat, and saw his kingdom absorbed into the Persian Empire. Croesus had destroyed a great kingdom—his own.
Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
More than a century later, the philosopher Socrates—shown above in a Hellenistic bust—reminded the Athenians at his trial in 399 B.C. that the oracle had declared him the wisest of men, a fact that did not save him from execution.
Photo: David Harris/Collection Israel Museum
After Greece was conquered by Rome, a number of Roman emperors posed questions to the oracle. Nero (54–68 A.D.) was warned to beware the 73rd year, and he was later assassinated by troops who made the 73-year-old Galba emperor in his place. Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), shown in the bronze statue above, ever the intellectual, wanted to know the birthplace of the poet Homer. (The Pythia’s answer: Homer was the grandson of Odysseus and born at Ithaca.) The oracle advised Diocletian (284–305 A.D.) to persecute Christians—which Christians avenged by destroying a number of oracle sites in the fourth century A.D. Finally, the envoys of the pagan Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 A.D.) received word of the oracle’s demise from the Pythia: “Tell the king the fair-built hall has fallen; Apollo now has no house or oracular laurel or prophetic spring; the water is silent.”
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The blind became associated with the global 1% and the vision of themselves as Greek/Venetian empire-builders because of the myths of ORACLE OF DELPHI as being A BLIND SEER--VISIONARY. This is why a global 1% freemasonry group would tie itself to an organization called LIGHTHOUSE and house non-profits for the blind.
THEY ARE BUILDING STRAIGHT FROM HISTORY BOOKS BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT THAT TALENT ---ONLY LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING.
Here we see that famous saying------ONCE BLIND, BUT NOW HE SEES.
Sight in Oedipus the King Essay
...Once blind, but Now he Sees:
'However Tiresias is known to be a “seer”. The ironic part is that, Oedipus sees physically what is going on around him, but he is blind to see what is actually going on around him, and this the case for Tiresias, who knows what is going on around him and around Oedipus’s world, however he does not physically sees anything since he is blind'.
No one is more tied to global old world freemasonry and this vision of ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE by people thinking themselves great visionaries as ORACLES OF DELPHI----then the owners of our global hotel chains----MARRIOTT AND HYATT. When we listen to global Wall Street CLINTON/OBAMA 5% to the 1% shout against billionaires in Trump's cabinet remember they were silent during Obama----Obama being in the hands of CHICAGO'S PRITZKER-----Baltimore is filled with Marriott global chain hotels and ever variation of small, mid-size travelling destinations while all local motel/hotel venues are pushed out of business----if a US city deemed Foreign Economic Zone is filled with global tourism industry to the exclusion of all-----then WE THE PEOPLE will have no rights, not voice, no representative GOVERNMENT.
'U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, center, and Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson (left) at the Wold Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit in Dallas, Texas April 6, 2016'.
Who does our US city hall listen to? These global corporate executives like Johns Hopkins, Pritzker, JP Morgan, UnderArmour because they are the SENATORS OF A FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE CITY STATE as in old world VENETIAN EMPIRE-----this is why our community associations and 5% scrape, deceived, grapple to be in these low-level city POLITBUROS once our local US city halls.
Who does our US city hall listen to? These global corporate executives like Johns Hopkins, Pritzker, JP Morgan, UnderArmour because they are the SENATORS OF A FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE CITY STATE as in old world VENETIAN EMPIRE-----this is why our community associations and 5% scrape, deceived, grapple to be in these low-level city POLITBUROS once our local US city halls.
We discussed how the global 1% are pushing to EARLY RELIGIOUS CULTS taking over today's religious institutions ----
JEWISH, MUSLIM, HINDI, CATHOLIC, AND PROTESTANT---these are the 5% to the 1% religious players MOVING FORWARD to a ONE WORLD RELIGION LOOKING LIKE THIS.
Commerce Secretary, Marriott CEO Call for More Data-Sharing to Enhance Security
Dan Peltier, Skift - Apr 07, 2016 7:30 am
@djpeltier
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, center, and Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson (left) at the Wold Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit in Dallas, Texas April 6, 2016. WTTC / Flickr
It will take both the public and private sectors working together to see that security data is regularly shared in a transparent fashion.
— Dan Peltier
U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker called on partner governments to make greater efforts to share data, including passenger name records, to enhance security and bolster confidence among travelers.
“Partner governments must significantly advance their willingness and capabilities to collect, use, and share information to screen travelers,” Pritzker said Wednesday at the World Travel & Tourism Council’s Global Summit in Dallas, Texas.
Citing privacy concerns, many countries in Europe have been reluctant to share passenger name records, although a proposal to enhance such information is under consideration. After the recent terrorist bombings in Brussels, European governments’ lack of data-sharing has come under greater scrutiny.
Prtizker pointed to the shortfalls of the lack of data-sharing among governments.
“We must develop international systems to share data, including passenger name records, so that we can expedite processing of known and trusted travelers,” Pritzker said. “We also need to ensure that our governments are taking advantage of systems already in place, such as checking documents against Interpol’s lost and stolen passport records. These changes are important not only to the visa waiver program but also to making legitimate travel as smooth and efficient as possible across all nations.”
During Pritzker’s tenure at the Commerce Department, which began in 2013, 17 U.S. airports implemented kiosks and mobile technology to expedite the international arrivals process. She also helped expand the visa waiver program to its current 38 member countries and lobbied to lower visa wait times for countries, including Brazil and China, with citizens of the latter country now eligible for 10-year visas.
Some 40 million more people globally visited another country in 2015 compared with 2009, including a significant increase in visitors to the U.S. Pritzker is worried a rollback of the visa waiver program would deter many international travelers from making U.S. trips.
“Everyone in this room understands how tourism is negatively impacted when visitors do not feel safe,” said Pritzker. “Hospitality and national security are not mutually exclusive. We cannot afford to let security challenges stop the great progress we have made in recent years. Providing a welcoming experience while ensuring safety and security requires all of us to work together.”
“Just as the private sector is making destinations and attractions more secure, our government is also evolving our policies and programs. One of the ways we are doing this in the United States is by strengthening and expanding the Visa Waiver Program. But we cannot do it alone. This program is at risk, and we need your help. We must develop international systems to share data, including passenger name records, so that we can expedite processing of known and trusted travelers.”
Public and Private Sector Collaboration
Arne Sorenson, Marriott International CEO, joined Pritzker on stage at the summit and said the private sector shares equal responsibility with governments to be transparent and share security data.
“It’s going to be about information,” Sorenson said. “How do we make sure we are capturing that through the private sector and among governments and identifying as quickly as possible those who pose no threat in travel?”
“We facilitate that travel and roll out that red carpet of welcome for them. How do we identify where the risks are? Governments also have information, and so does the private sector. How do we make sure we pull together this highly collaborative process and voice that says to the rest of the world, ‘You’re welcome, and we trust you?'”
Sorenson expressed admiration for how President Obama supports the travel industry. “When you look back over the eight years of the Obama administration, we had the State Department saying ‘I don’t want to be blamed for the risk.’ It requires the head of state to say ‘there is more we can accomplish by promoting travel and tourism.’
“The challenge with the visa waiver program is the phrase. A better phrase is ‘trusted traveler.’ How do we make sure we identify those folks who pose absolutely no risk to our safety? How does this industry also become an incredible advocate for security and safety while promoting travel?”
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So is there a difference between one global 1% and their freemasonry groups and another? Of course---they are fighting it out for control of each of what will be a few dozen US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as the US is dismantled and made a colonial entity ------so a global Johns Hopkins controls development and which global 1% it wants to fill Greater Baltimore and indeed all of Maryland's Foreign Economic Zones-----just as we see Trump and his associates like DeVos---doing the same and they all do this while pretending to be the most devout of Chistians------the DeVos and Amway are of course tied to old world MERCHANTS OF VENICE
The International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind (IBTC) was established in 1990 by the National Federation of the Blind gives vender-free advice on all access technology for the blind
Trump is not going to stop MOVING FORWARD US CITIES AS GLOBAL ECONOMIC ZONES------he is simply going to allow his BFFs in the world of global freemasonry get in on the economic activity----and yes, this is an organized TAG TEAM and yes they are all THUGS.
'is a 33rd degree Mason'.
codex magicaExclusive Intelligence Examiner Report
Texe Marrs
Are Amway Corporation and its founders tied in with the Masonic Order? Many people have written me expressing their concerns about Amway. Evidently, whether deliberate or not, there does appear to be some type of connection between the organization and Freemasonry. The first Amway building had a Masonic square and compass symbol on the front facade. The luxurious Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan_where Amway has its international conventions for its distrib-utors_was built right onto a huge Masonic temple. The architecture of this hotel is integrated so that many Masonic symbols carved in stone are visible at the river side of the structure.
In 1988 I was the keynote speaker at a national Sunday School leaders conference held at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. Strangely, when I checked in, the desk clerk inexplicably assigned me to room 666!
Was this just coincidental, or did someone at the hotel know that the topic of my talk was to be "The Coming New Age Antichrist, 666?"
It felt odd and eerie entering a hotel room on the sixth floor with the number 666 prominently displayed on the door. But I had Jesus with me in my heart, and prayer as my weapon. I figured the devil had a lot more to worry about than me, and I certainly wasn't going to let him intimidate me.
Protected by the Holy Spirit from intimidation, I slept like a baby. So did Wanda, my precious wife. The next morning, we arose early, and Wanda and I went for a brief and invigorating walk outside along the river front of this mammoth and impressive hotel. There, I observed the pagan Masonic symbols, architecture, and Egyptian statues.
Back inside the hotel, in the grand lobby, I saw a shiny, brass metal plaque on a pillar. It had inscribed on it the names of dignitaries who had previously stayed at the hotel. I studied the names carefully and noticed that among them were England's Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip; the Netherlands' Queen Julianna and Prince Bernard; and former U.S. President Gerald Ford.
Then, a surprise: Amidst all these well-known VIP names was the name of another, lesser-known personage. Right there on the list was a "Chief Holy Eagle." I immediately recognized the potential New Age and Masonic meaning of the name of this so-called dignitary, Chief Holy Eagle.
Regardless of its Masonic connections, certainly the promotional emphasis within Amway is ungodly. There is nothing wrong with making money, but to combine the things of God with an all-out hunger and campaign for mammon is unbecoming.
Amway's spiritual philosophy is, in my opinion, perfectly in tune with the
Rich DeVos, a founder of Amway, is one of America's richest men. This is the cover of DeVos' Inspirational audiotape, Selling America. Notice the blatantly Masonic signal DeVos appears to be sending with his hands.
so-called prosperity gospel. Advocates of this false gospel claim that if you consistently think positive and speak positive, God will make you fabulously rich. This is a horrendously false teaching and must be rejected by true Christians. Bible believers well know and accept that any true child of God must be willing to accept hardship, persecution and deprivation if that be God's will.
The pep rallies of Amway and similar commercial groups whip up emotions of a greedy nature and cause listeners to focus first and almost exclusively on money and success. But the Bible tells us to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Yes, the "positive" crowd may add in a little spirituality and may occasionally sprinkle in some Christian lingo, but it's too often an afterthought, an aside. How sad and pitiful—and how devoid of true riches and prosperity—is their message.
Perhaps this is why I am
now so often besieged by folks telling me of New Age visualization and meditation, nature worship, and other New Age practices taught and encouraged by their Amway distributors. Whether this (officially) comes from the top down I do not know, but it does exist.
I am sure that Amway has its good points. Certainly, its supporters will respond to this article and vigorously defend the company. Recently, I received a letter from Amway's headquarters in which the company denies that its head, Rich DeVos, is a 33rd degree Mason. Perhaps Amway has an explanation for its retaining the Masonic symbols and architecture on its Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. My comments here should, therefore, be read with caution and without making a hasty judgment.
Moreover, I realize that there are many fine, sincere people involved in distributing and selling Amway products. I make no rash judgments about their motives, nor do I question the depth of their faith. My purpose is to simply cause Christians to reflect on the true meaning of the Gospel and compare that with the principles of mammon which I believe are strongly espoused by Amway and other multilevel marketing organizations.
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The problem for WE THE PEOPLE is this------our low-level freemasonry member REALLY BELIEVE the higher level folks care for them and will take care of them when they could not care less. This is the difference between our 5% to the 1% and those at national level who are falling into being that 1% to the 2%----CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA/NOW TRUMP.
'At each degree of Masonic initiation, Masons take a deadly oath, and swear allegiance to Masonry above God and country. This is the unifying cohesion of Globalism. Under pain of death, they swear never to reveal the secrets of Freemasonry – not even to their wives'.
These global 5% to the 1% stay loyal to death we are told----this is what has our US governance at national, state, and local level and they will never do anything for the 99%----they are MOVING FORWARD no matter what.
What percentage of Americans are tied to freemasonry? Regions of our nation are heavier than others----Baltimore is almost 100% freemasonry----ergo the complete capture and installation of political leaders. It is what has 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE so divided no matter black, white, and brown and it is deliberate---those old world MERCHANTS OF VENICE FREEMASONS could care less about those 5% to the 1%.
Bringing all this back to our local US cities and development-----those local players are being trained to be LEADERS-----while simply following orders from global Wall Street----they will not change.
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY CANNOT REMAIN A PLACE OF FREEDOM AND LIBERTY WITH WE THE PEOPLE HAVING CONTROL OF GOVERNANCE UNTIL WE UNDERSTAND WHO THESE FOLKS ARE AND THE GOALS SET BY GLOBAL 1% LEADERS.
It really is no great big secret ------one has only to educate themselves in global history and economy to know to where ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE leads. It doesn't end well for 99% of people.
A comment from a lower-level freemason:
Past Master of a Masonic Lodge and Member in other Masonic bodies
Written 26 May 2015 ·, I've been a Freemason for 27 years, and participate actively.
For those who are unaware, the "33rd Degree" is part of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which is an organizations that exists within Freemasonry that that Master Masons may join if they choose to. The "degrees" of the Scottish Rite are not higher than the Third degree, despite the numerical appearance.
With that out of the way, a Mason who has received the 33rd Degree of the Scottish Rite knows two things:
1. What happens during the 33rd degree. Obviously, you wouldn't know about it if you hadn't seen it, which most people haven't.
1a. While the Scottish Rite is a large organization, it still only comprises a fraction of Masonry's population. Accordingly, a 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason knows what goes on within the Scottish Rite in general.
2. More importantly, someone with the 33rd Degree knows that Degrees do not go higher than the Third. This plays off my opening remark; many people, including Masons, really don't know the significance of the Scottish Rite relative to Craft Masonry. It's not uncommon to hear a less experienced Mason reference someone and say "That guy is a 32nd Degree Mason" (much more common to run in to and sounds important). It's also not unusual to hear people self-refer as "32nd degree Masons" earlier in their Masonic career.
This happens because the numbers sound higher and people don't fully appreciate/understand the egalitarian nature of the Fraternity and that the Third degree is the heart of everything.
I have several friends who been nominated for and received the 33rd degree in the Scottish Rite. These men have great experience and knowledge; they fully appreciate that they are equals with everyone in Masonry, despite receiving a high honor. Two of those friends were very close with a now-deceased Member of my Lodge. This now-deceased Brother was one of the oldest "33rd Degree" guys around and was prominent in everything he did. When the one friend had stopped attending meetings for personal issues, this older Brother spoke with him and asked him to come back when he could. He told him that his Bleu Lodge was the cornerstone of the Fraternity and that everything we did was built from that foundation. The friend knew this, of course, and hearing his old mentor say it inspired him to return and become active again.
In conclusion: Third Degree Masons are taught that we are all equal; 33rd Degree Masons know it.
We see here the Governor of Missouri is tied to ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE---we saw Cheney tied to MONTANA----our Big Sky state tied to these same groups----Bush tied to Texas and Florida-----Erhlich/O'Malley/Hogan as well-----all executive offices MAYORS AND GOVERNORS have total power of appointments.
They are neither Republican RED STATE nor Democratic BLUE STATE----they are ROYAL GLOBAL % PURPLE ----killing our US Democratic Republic to being that colonial economic entity.
Trump Appoints Globalist Freemason as Ambassador to China!
VigileaksDecember 8, 2016
Rich Koele / Shutterstock.com
Globalism-Supporting Masonic Governor Branstad Must Not Be Given U.S. Senate Confirmation! Who is Advising to Deceive President Trump?The definite objective of a world state controlled by the Masonic ring, and the utilization of gold and international finance as principal instruments for its realization, appear prominently and with clear definition. International Freemasonry is a major globalist player with infrastructre in place for world government.
April 27, 2012, was a very “special” day for the Masons of the Scottish Rite in Des Moines. Governor Terry Branstad and two members of the Iowa House of Representatives took the degrees of the Scottish Rite and became 32 degree Masons. Senator Charles Grassley was also in attendance. Jay Simer took the Masonic photos, followed by a write up and more pictures on the Scottish Rite Blog.
And now! 32nd Degree Mason, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, formally accepted the offer to become President Trump’s China ambassador.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – “President-elect Donald Trump has announced his choice of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to be the next U.S. ambassador to China. Trump announced his pick of Branstad on Wednesday at a Manhattan fundraiser.”
While we all know and love President-elect Trump, he has not been a politician and is incredibly naive in critical areas. He has repeatedly emphasized no one owns him, yet the Masons are now owning him!
AP continues, “A Trump transition spokesman confirmed that Branstad had accepted the nomination. Branstad aides didn’t respond to questions Wednesday about the matter.
“Branstad will face a U.S. Senate confirmation process that could take weeks as Trump himself prepares to be sworn in as president. When Branstad resigns as governor, he’ll be replaced by Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds, making her the first female governor of Iowa.”
The Masonic Branstad will join Trump at a rally in Des Moines on Thursday. “Globalism not Americanism” continues to make inroads with our beloved and unwitting President-elect Trump.
Photo By: Jay Simser
At each degree of Masonic initiation, Masons take a deadly oath, and swear allegiance to Masonry above God and country.
This is the unifying cohesion of Globalism. Under pain of death, they swear never to reveal the secrets of Freemasonry – not even to their wives.
Therefore, no matter what Masons claim about their good works or intentions, they cannot be believed.
They are the proven diabolical globalist enemy of Christianity and America. Globalism-promoting Masonic Governor Branstad must not be given U.S. Senate Confirmation! To do so is “Globalism not Americanism.”
President Trump! If none of these Republicans supported you in the Presidential election – and even if they did – why do you think they will support you now? These Masons remain true to their Masonic oath on penalty of death!
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When Obama and Clinton neo-liberals sent all that Federal funding to global IVY LEAGUE universities tied to global Wall Street this is what guided those decisions-----and we see them in our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones controlling global Wall Street Baltimore Development----as Johns Hopkins does all our public universities.
Global HEINZ CONDIMENT KING John Kerry running as our people's Democratic Party leader-----GET RID OF THESE 5% TO THE 1% PLAYERS. This is why we have no real information coming from any sources---our public universities used to operate in public interest now controlled by global private IVY LEAGUES....
George Bush and John Kerry are Skull and Bones - Mason
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Uploaded on Dec 3, 2008George Bush and John Kerry are Skull and Bones - Mason
'Evidence suggested that Morgan’s abduction was carried out by members of a secret organization known as the Masons. Americans soon came to believe in the existence of a Masonic plot to overthrow society from within; the country’s very existence, many proclaimed, was now in jeopardy'.
Here we see the history of freemasonry tied to the fall of the Venetian Empire in 1500s-----the important thing to remember is this----
THEY ARE NOT AS POWERFUL AS THEY SELL THEMSELVES------PEOPLE AT LOWER LEVELS ARE NOW JOINING BECAUSE THEY THINK IT IS THE ONLY PATHWAY TO HAVING A BUSINESS OR JOB.
Yes, many of our US Presidents were global freemasons but that was when they were working to grow our American economy-----then they went empire-building and no longer worked for 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE----this is the source of all those BUSINESS-FRIENDLY GLOBAL WALL STREET PLAYERS AND POLICIES.
'Freemasonry is thought to have originated in England and Scotland sometime in the 1500s as a trade organization made up of local stoneworkers, but it soon took on a philosophical air'
THERE IS OUR TIE TO GLOBAL WALL STREET CLINTON.
'In the years between America’s founding and 1826, Masonry had only grown more powerful, especially in New York. Gov. DeWitt Clinton was not only a Mason but had also been the grand master of the Grand Lodge of New York and the highest-ranking Mason in the country. By one estimate, more than half of all publicly held offices in New York were occupied by Masons'.
'The crime had exposed a powerful group, shrouded in secrecy, manipulating the law for its own purposes'.
Here is the problem for US citizens IF MOVING FORWARD continues to control all development-------all of those RESEARCH FACILITIES an Obama and Clinton neo-liberal funded are all led by just those global Wall Street old world freemasonry groups and all future tracking will be members-only into what will become those 2% to that global 1%-----and this is why they are going global students----and global university leaders----these old world freemason groups are global.
Right now these narrowed admittance pathways are not installed completely but it is coming very soon ----next decade as economic crash sends our public universities into private hands----as UMMS into hands of global Johns Hopkins----these real estate ANCHORS taking all of downtown and communities nearby will all be gone and become part of that global Johns Hopkins corporate campus.......that is one huge global corporate campus-----and this is for what our local community association players no doubt all tied to low-level freemasonry ----are scratching, undermining, with no ethics,morals, no US Rule of Law -----rising to city council and appointed committees all work toward.
.
University of Maryland, Baltimore tripling biopark site on west side
Project could cost $800M if it gets city planning approval
Jun 22, 2009, 12:00am EDT Updated Aug 13, 2009, 1:35pm EDT
Julekha Dash Staff
Leaders of Baltimore’s west side biotechnology park are plotting a major expansion to include three 10- to 14-story office towers that would make the project three times bigger — and more costly — than originally planned.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore BioPark will take its revised master plan to city planning officials in the fall after meeting with members of the West Baltimore community. The $800 million plan calls for 2 million square feet of commercial space, potentially making it larger than the biotech park in Baltimore City’s east side. That project near Johns Hopkins Hospital calls for 1.2 million square feet of life sciences and retail
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This is why both REAL right wing conservative Republicans and REAL left social Democrats were both shouting in the 1990s-----stop those pesky global Wall Street pols CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA-----
People have been piling into these local groups as pathways to having a job or business and this is how all the PAY-TO-PLAY fraud and corruption sends hundreds of millions of dollars in our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones.
This is what makes our local citizens fearful of standing up -----don't be a member of these groups---be a CITIZEN WITH RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS-----not someone destined to just do what you are told.
The Mysteries of the Masons In 1826, a shadowy cabal kidnapped a man who had threatened to expose the rites of the secretive brotherhood. American politics were never the same again.
By Andrew BurtIllustration by Lisa Larson-Walker
To this day, nobody knows the true fate of Capt. William Morgan. A failed businessman and citizen of generally low repute, Morgan was abducted from his home, in the town of Batavia, New York, in the early morning of Sept. 11, 1826. He soon found himself in a Canandaigua jail cell, about 50 miles away, imprisoned for a debt of $2.65. The whole ordeal was doubtless confusing to Morgan, a man best known for his drinking. It likely became even more confusing when a stranger paid his bail. But that man had no intention of setting him free. Morgan emerged from the jail only to be forced into a carriage, reportedly screaming out “murder” while he was being dragged away.
What would become of America’s great experiment in democracy without the presence of the founders?
This is the last anyone ever saw of Morgan, about whom little else is certain. Some said that he was not really a military captain, while others claimed that he had earned that title in the War of 1812. Others asserted that both theories were technically true: That he fought the British in 1812 as a pirate seeking plunder and was granted a pardon for his misdeeds by the president after the war. What we do know is that whatever happened to him, trapped inside that northbound carriage and fearing for his life, Morgan never came back.
Over the next few years, the details of Morgan’s abduction would slowly come to light, setting off a political firestorm and giving rise to the first third party in American politics. Evidence suggested that Morgan’s abduction was carried out by members of a secret organization known as the Masons. Americans soon came to believe in the existence of a Masonic plot to overthrow society from within; the country’s very existence, many proclaimed, was now in jeopardy. What began as an obscure crime in upstate New York would spark one of the first episodes of political hysteria in American history, laying the foundation for a long line of political crusades to come.
The story of Morgan’s disappearance begins in the summer of 1826, when a new era was dawning in the nation’s history. Fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, the last of America’s founding generation was dying off—a turning point highlighted by the deaths of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the Fourth of July that year. What would become of America’s “great experiment” in democracy without the presence of the founders?
In upstate New York, then on the outer edges of America’s frontier, two men were occupied with a different question: how to secure personal fame and fortune. The first was David C. Miller, the publisher of Batavia’s Republican Advocate. Miller’s was an opposition paper, pitted against the policies of New York’s governor, DeWitt Clinton. Though he’d run the journal for more than a decade, he was still a struggling newspaperman searching for higher circulation. The second was William Morgan, who had moved his family restlessly throughout the countryside, working first as a brewer, now as a stoneworker, hauling his wife, Lucinda, and two young children from one failed venture to the next. Only two years earlier, Morgan had written of his desperation: “The darkness of my prospects robs my mind, and extreme misery my body.” The two men made an odd pair, but what they lacked in common background they shared in common circumstance—and now in common goals. Over that summer the two hatched a plan to expose to the world the inner workings of the secret society of Freemasons.
How, exactly, the two first came into contact is not known, but neither was held in high esteem by his community. According to one source, Miller was known to be a man “of irreligious character, great laxity of moral principle, and of intemperate habits”; much worse things were said about Morgan. Not surprisingly, both men harbored deep-seated animosity toward Freemasonry, which served as a symbol for the establishment class.
Freemasonry is thought to have originated in England and Scotland sometime in the 1500s as a trade organization made up of local stoneworkers, but it soon took on a philosophical air. The triumph of reason began to be a focal point of the organization, as did dedication to deism, or the Enlightenment belief that the existence of God is apparent through observation and study rather than miracles or revelation. Over the centuries, the fraternity of Masons would expand throughout the world, as would its ceremonies and rituals, which involved strange symbols and oaths—in addition to its more benign emphasis on civic-mindedness, religious tolerance, and communal learning. The group met in secret.
Masons were overwhelmingly men of middle- and upper-class status—doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—who had the time and leisure to join what amounted to a social club for the well-to-do. Many of the founding fathers had been Masons, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—indeed, 13 of the 39 signers of the Constitution claimed membership in the fraternity. In the years between America’s founding and 1826, Masonry had only grown more powerful, especially in New York. Gov. DeWitt Clinton was not only a Mason but had also been the grand master of the Grand Lodge of New York and the highest-ranking Mason in the country. By one estimate, more than half of all publicly held offices in New York were occupied by Masons.
Miller first hinted at some type of forthcoming revelation in an article published in the Advocate in August 1826. He had discovered the “strongest evidence of rottenness,” he wrote, evidence that compelled him and an unnamed collaborator, “to an act of justice to ourselves and to the public.” This bombshell was a book, to be compiled by Morgan and printed by Miller, detailing Masonic rituals and misdeeds at the highest levels of power. Morgan wasn’t a member of the Masons, but he had convinced other Masons that he was and had been granted access to a neighboring Masonic lodge. Morgan was thus able to witness the Masons’ ceremonies, recording their doings in a manuscript.
News of Miller and Morgan’s impending publication soon began to spread and Masons in neighboring counties began to worry about the disclosures. Reported one Mason at that time: “[I] never saw men so excited in my life.” Committees of Masons were quickly organized to investigate the revelations, and “everything went forward in a kind of frenzy.”
Groups of concerned Masons began harassing Miller and Morgan with prosecutions for petty debt, with the tacit cooperation of the county sheriff, who briefly placed Morgan in jail. Strange men, thought to be Masons from other counties, now began to make suspicious appearances in the villages of Ontario County, putting not just Miller and Morgan on edge but entire towns too.
On Sept. 8 a group of Masons attempted to destroy Miller’s offices. Capping a night of drinking at a local tavern, a group of several dozen men descended onto the print shop. There they found that Miller had convened a posse of his own, equipped with firearms and ready to fight. The Masons retreated, and Miller was safe—for the time being. Two nights later, Miller’s office suddenly erupted into flames, though the fire was detected early and no serious damage was done. Cotton balls dipped in turpentine were reportedly found throughout the print shop.
On Sept. 11 the conflict escalated. A half-dozen Masons showed up at Morgan’s home with an arrest warrant. The charges: petty larceny for stealing a shirt and tie, lent to Morgan by the owner of the town’s tavern, which Morgan had failed to return.
Soon Morgan was being whisked away in a carriage, though reportedly without worry. He apparently thought that testifying that he had simply forgotten to return the items would get him off the hook. He was right. The charges fell through and he was released—only to be immediately arrested again for the outstanding debt of $2.65. This time, the charges stuck.
Morgan spent the following night in jail. The next day, he was forced into the carriage that sped northward out of town, never to be seen again.
The crime had exposed a powerful group, shrouded in secrecy, manipulating the law for its own purposes.
That wasn’t the end of the ordeal: A group of Masons soon came back for Miller. On Sept. 12 roughly 70 armed Masons rallied at a tavern while a constable presented the publisher with a warrant for his arrest on questionable charges and conveyed him to the nearby town of Le Roy. Luckily for Miller, his lawyer and an armed posse from Batavia followed along, carrying him back home when the charges fell through.
As Miller and his crew returned to Batavia, the story of his arrest spread throughout the neighboring villages and towns. It was loose ends like Miller, and the family that Morgan had left behind, that would cause the Masons the most trouble. The fate of Morgan’s wife, Lucinda, for example, would help to stoke up sympathy and support for Morgan’s plight, deepening the public’s anger over the Masons’ crimes. The mother of two small children now no longer had a husband to depend on.
But the Morgan affair wasn’t just about the disappearance of one man. The crime had exposed the existence of a powerful group, shrouded in secrecy, manipulating the law for its own purposes. The story of Morgan’s kidnapping, as it was told and retold throughout the coming weeks, focused on how the elite Masons had turned the public interest into a private one and how the government itself may have been perverted in the process.
Two weeks after the abduction, a series of heavily attended public meetings was held. Though the meetings were initially called to solve the mystery of Morgan’s fate, they were equally about calming the public’s fear. There was no guarantee, after all, that what happened to Morgan could not happen to others.
As a result of the Batavia meetings, a panel was established, the so-called Committee of Ten, which began sending agents into neighboring towns to investigate the abduction, gathering facts and taking down testimony. Soon neighboring towns followed suit with committees of their own, all tasked with shedding light on the crime. These public meetings were people’s meetings, and they convened people’s committees: No government authorities were called in because none, many suspected, could be trusted.
The committees were created to calm the public’s sense of fear, but in fact they helped to deepen it. Throughout the months of October and November, citizen representatives of the committees traveled throughout upstate New York spreading the story of Morgan’s abduction, serving to confirm the wild stories local newspapers were already printing about the kidnapping. Those who initially didn’t believe what they read now heard witnesses attest to the truth of the affair. Meanwhile, speculation about Morgan’s fate was becoming more and more sensational. One version of the kidnapping ended with Morgan being murdered in some sort of occult Masonic ceremony, with his throat slit “from ear to ear” and his tongue cut out with a knife.
Up until this point, the public effort to get to the bottom of the scandal was straightforward, if impassioned. A group of men had conspired unlawfully against Morgan and Miller, and if they were not brought to justice, nothing prevented the same crime from occurring again. Once the criminals had been locked away, everyone could move on—or so, at least, it seemed in the early days after Morgan’s disappearance. But this view would soon change.
Within a few months, the outrage over Morgan’s kidnapping transformed from public fear to political hysteria. Though clearly only a few Masons were guilty of any crime, it was the reaction of other Masons that convinced much of the public that they weren’t dealing with a simple crime but with a widespread conspiracy. Many Masons began publicly—and inexplicably—to defend Morgan’s abduction, and many of them were public figures to boot. “If they are publishing the true secrets of Masonry,” said one former member of the New York Legislature, we “should not think the lives of half a dozen such men as Morgan and Miller of any consequence in suppressing the work.” Another Masonic judge on the Genesee County court stated that, “whatever Morgan’s fate might have been, he deserved it—he had forfeited his life.”
The nascent anti-Masonic movement gained an expanded sense of purpose as the Morgan affair began working its way through the courts. In October, a group of Masons were indicted on charges of rioting and assault for the attempt to imprison Miller. In November, four other Masons were indicted for the conspiracy to abduct Morgan.
By January 1827, the trial was set to begin in Canandaigua, New York, where teams of lawyers, bankrolled by local Masonic lodges, assembled to represent the four Masonic defendants. The district attorney prosecuting the case had amassed a team of his own, which in the end would prevail—though the win would be more symbolic than substantive. The four defendants were sentenced to lenient terms, ranging from two years to one month in prison, convicted only of forcibly moving Morgan from one place to another against his will. What happened to Morgan in the end, and the larger conspiracy behind his abduction, was still conspicuously unsolved.
Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker
If the public wanted justice, this surely was not it. But the trial proved fulfilling in another sense, thanks in no small part to Judge Enos T. Throop. When it came time for him to read the sentencing statement to the four guilty men, Throop read much more than a simple description of their punishment. What he told the Masons, in front of a rapt courtroom, soon to be reprinted in papers across the state, revealed that their trial was about something greater than their offense alone.
Throop began by describing the four Masons’ crimes. Theirs was a “daring, wicked and presumptuous” act, he said, one that had “polluted this land.” The men had robbed the state of a citizen, left the victim’s wife and his children “helpless,” and somehow shielded the rest of the culprits from being brought to justice. But this act on its own was not even the “heaviest part of your crime,” as Throop explained:
Your conduct has created, in the people of this section of the country, a strong feeling of virtuous indignation. The court rejoices to witness it—to be made sure that a citizen’s person cannot be invaded by lawless violence, without its being felt by every individual in the community. It is a blessed spirit, and we do hope that it will not subside—that it will be accompanied by a ceaseless vigilance, and untiring activity. . . . We see in this public sensation the spirit which brought us into existence as a nation, and a pledge that our rights and liberties are destined to endure.The public’s outrage, in other words, was now no longer about one crime, or even the conspiracy to cover it up. It was about the “spirit which brought us into existence as a nation,” in Judge Throop’s words, and about the fear that this spirit was threatened.
What Throop saw in the public indignation was a dedication to America’s founding spirit. The citizens, it seemed, were willing to enforce the laws themselves, if that’s what it took to protect American ideals. What began as the public’s reaction to a local kidnapping was now evolving into a common dedication to protect America’s core values.
Freemasonry served as a compelling symbol for the real threat that many Americans were facing. The 1820s were a decade of great uncertainty, one in which industrialization posed profound challenges to American society. The rise of manufacturing threatened to reorganize the American labor force on a massive scale, as did immigrants and population booms in eastern cities.
“In fastening on Masonry as the foremost evil in the Republic,” writes historian Paul Goodman, “Antimasons were responding to the emergence of industrial society which clashed with the remnants of a pre-industrial order.” America, many thought, was entering an era of chaos, and one in which the principle of equality was fundamentally threatened.
With the trial now complete, the movement reached another turning point. Furious over the court’s inability to bring all of Morgan’s abductors to justice, alarmed members of the public began to advocate action in the political realm. In February, a joint meeting was held by the people of the towns of Batavia, Bethany, and Stafford, who resolved to “withhold their support at elections from all such men of the Masonic fraternity.” The people in the town of Seneca committed that “they would not vote for Freemasons, for any offices whatever.” And it wasn’t only Masonic politicians who found themselves under attack. Newspapers run by Masons, which many felt had been conspicuously silent on the Morgan affair, were also the target of the public’s ire. A meeting of the towns of Pembroke and Alexander passed a joint resolution to “discourage the circulation of any paper” that did not cover the Morgan affair accurately. In meetings throughout the towns of upstate New York, scores of similar resolutions followed suit. By February 1827, five months after Morgan had gone missing, the Anti-Masonic Party was born.
“I am not, never was, and never shall be a Freemason”
John Quincy Adams, campaigning in 1828And by the end of the year, the party was already sweeping the polls in New York. In the elections of 1827, for example, the party of the sitting U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, would elect 12 members to the New York Legislature while the Anti-Masons would elect a shocking 15. The following summer, just a few months before the national elections of 1828, Adams himself had openly aligned himself with the Anti-Masons by declaring that, “I am not, never was, and never shall be a Freemason”—proving that the party had jumped from a statewide political phenomenon to become a national one.
The 1828 elections marked a major turning point for the Anti-Masons. As the movement spread from New York to states like Vermont, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Maryland, Anti-Masonic candidates won seats in state legislatures across the country. At the federal level, the Anti-Masons became the first third party in the United States to send candidates to Congress, electing nearly a half-dozen members to the House of Representatives.
Perhaps more notably, the Anti-Masons gained the mantle of the opposition party in the 1828 elections. President Andrew Jackson, an avowed Mason himself, had ousted Adams and was now in power. The Anti-Masons now not only had a prominent political platform, in both state and national legislatures. They had a villain in the White House.
By 1830, the push for a national organization was under way, aided by opposition to Jackson and the growing sense that American society was fracturing. On Sept. 11 of that year, precisely four years after Morgan had been abducted from his Batavia home, the Anti-Masons held their first national convention in Philadelphia, with delegates from New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, Maryland, and Michigan in attendance. It was here that the party hatched its grandest plans for national influence—and, ultimately, where the seeds of the movement’s downfall were first sown.
With growing national power came increased opportunity, but divisions were already stirring within the Anti-Masons’ ranks. For many of the moderates in the party, some of whom viewed Andrew Jackson’s policies as a danger equal to, if not greater than, the threat posed by Masonry, the need to build coalitions with opposition figures outside the Anti-Masonic Party soon became clear.
The problem, however, was that a large number of Anti-Masons, zealous in their beliefs, did not have the stomach for compromise—they simply refused to deal with any politicians who would not denounce all of Freemasonry. Questions about the party’s ability to handle routine political tasks now began to be posed with increasing frequency. Would the Anti-Masons be able to strike political bargains at all? Would allying themselves with other Jackson opponents undermine their cause? Put simply, would compromise dilute the Anti-Masons’ strengths or would it make the party stronger?
In the face of such disarray, the delegates agreed to postpone major decisions, such as whom to nominate for the 1832 presidential election, until the following September, when the party would hold a national nominating convention, the first of its kind in American politics, and one that is emulated by political parties to this day. Instead of party leaders choosing whom the convention would nominate, delegates to the convention, each representing their local supporters, would elect the party’s candidates. This new type of convention was a way of bridging ideological differences within the party, of importing the democratic process into the party itself. At the same time, it underscored the party’s increasingly weakened leadership.
“You will become the Colossus of the republican government of your country”
Thomas Jefferson, on Anti-Masonic Party candidate William Wirt
The divisions between the moderates and the radicals in the party would only grow. One newspaper covering a local 1831 Anti-Masonic convention highlighted the now increasingly popular view “that Antimasonry had other and higher objects in view than the prostration of the Masonic fraternity.” Samuel Miles Hopkins, a longtime New York politician and one of the state’s most prominent Anti-Masons, declared that Andrew Jackson was a greater threat to the country than Freemasonry and that in the previous election he himself had voted for Masons rather than let pro-Jackson candidates win. By 1831, a year before the presidential election, the Anti-Masonic Party was rotting from within.
But rising tensions would not stop the ambitions of the party at large, which believed it had found the perfect 1832 presidential candidate in William Wirt, a Virginia politician and former attorney general, and one of the last vestiges of old-style American politics.
Wirt was a stern moralist and a devoutly religious man, and he had been tapped by Thomas Jefferson himself as a political heir. “You will become the Colossus of the republican government of your country,” Jefferson had once assured him. Wirt’s concern with America’s moral status echoed many of the Anti-Masons’ deepest concerns. It was the selfish pursuit of profit that Wirt thought was the animating evil of the times. The growing object of Americans of every stripe was simply “to grow rich: a passion which is visible, not only in the walks of private life, but which has crept into and poisoned every public body.” What Wirt identified as the flaws in American society were the same evils that the Anti-Masons saw in Freemasonry itself: a system in which the few benefited at the expense of the many.
There was one problem: Wirt had himself once been a Mason and had never explicitly renounced the order. Now, he was calling the entire conflict between Masonry and Anti-Masonry “a fitter subject for farce than tragedy,” and bemoaning the “wild and bitter and unjust persecution against so harmless an institution as Free Masonry.”
The most radical of the Anti-Masons were obviously outraged by Wirt. Increasingly sidelined, the radicals within the party watched as Wirt was selected to carry the Anti-Masonic banner in the fight against Andrew Jackson, allying with other elements of the opposition.
But by and large the rest of the party supported him, perhaps to a fault. Wirt would ultimately carry only the state of Vermont in the presidential election, winning Anti-Masonic counties in states across the country but falling severely short of any meaningful support at the national level. After Wirt’s failed candidacy, the Anti-Masonic Party “seemed as if by magic, in one moment annihilated,” wrote one 19th-century historian. Men “who had repeatedly most solemnly declared, they would never vote for an adhering Mason for any office whatever, in one day, ceased to utter a word against Masonry.”
And thus the party’s tenure in the national spotlight came to an end—though not without lasting effects. The fraternity that the party had set itself against was forever damaged. Over the course of the hysteria, Masons across the country resigned or denounced their membership, and hundreds of lodges were shuttered. “Lodges by scores and hundreds went down before the torrent and were swept away,” according to one Mason at the time. “In the State of New York alone upward of 400 lodges, or two thirds of the craft, became extinct.”
During Andrew Jackson’s second term, disparate elements of the opposition began to organize, realizing the strength of their combined power, if only they could achieve unity. It was with these goals in mind that the Whig Party, the predecessor to the modern Republican Party and the party of Lincoln, was born—a party composed of a wide variety of beliefs and many contradictions. The Whigs would slowly gain strength throughout the 1830s as former Anti-Masons and others gradually came into the new political fold.
But the rise of the Whigs did not mean the Anti-Masonic cause had passed. Throughout the following decade, a few politicians would make their names proclaiming the evils of Masonry. Some of them faded into obscurity, but others met with limited success. As late as 1836, Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens led an Anti-Masonic committee in the state Legislature that held public hearings on the threat of Masonry, interrogating Masonic witnesses and drawing some national attention. Stevens would ultimately rise to become a congressman, and later one of the U.S. House of Representatives’ most outspoken abolitionists during the Civil War.
In Massachusetts, Ohio, and Vermont, local groups of Anti-Masons met to purge their states of Freemasonry’s influence throughout the 1830s as well, and some still harbored national ambitions for their party. But cracks had emerged in the Anti-Masonic movement that were too big to plaster over, and no longer did the threat of Freemasonry captivate as large a political audience or maintain its wide appeal. The Anti-Masonic movement now operated on the fringes of American political discourse.
By the 1840s, the Anti-Masonic Party was dead and gone, its most loyal adherents dismissed as zealots. But it left behind a powerful legacy: The party established a pattern that future episodes of political hysteria would repeat across American history, from the Red Scares of the 20th century to the anti-Sharia movement of today.
Each movement claims to protect our nation from an existential threat. Each parlays fears of shadowy actors undermining our democracy into populist calls to action. During the period of McCarthyism, more than 13 million Americans—roughly 20 percent of America’s working population—signed loyalty oaths. Today’s anti-Sharia movement—which seeks to demonize Islam, the world’s second largest religion—has succeeded in banning Islamic law in several states. And while movements of political hysteria always claim only to want to rid society of a single, dangerous ideology, its partisans ultimately jeopardize the very values they claim to protect: that we are an open-society committed to the coexistence of many groups and belief systems, a country founded on the principles of freedom and equality for all.
As for the former Anti-Masons themselves, many of the movement’s leaders went on to bigger achievements even after the demise of their party. Millard Fillmore, a New York Anti-Mason from the start, became president in 1850. William Seward, another New York Anti-Mason, became Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, serving as a key member of the president’s wartime cabinet. William Morgan’s lonely widow, Lucinda Morgan, would herself go on to further renown. She moved west and reportedly remarried a man named Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons—a group that, like the Freemasons, would soon find itself the target of future political crusades.
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It's no accident that the US FED is tied to this goal of being THE ORACLE OF DELPHI-----as everyone in the world knows----these folks are NOT ALL-KNOWING ---THEY JUST CREATE SUCH A LEVEL OF CRONYISM to allow for systematic fleecing of a nations' wealth----WORLD BANK/IMF coming to US if we keep MOVING FORWARD.
THE BLOG
08/29/2016 11:00 am ET | Updated Aug 29, 2016
The Fight for a ‘People’s Fed’
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
When William Greider wrote his 1989 book about the Federal Reserve, it’s not hard to understand why he called it “Secrets of the Temple.” The Fed’s proclamations can make it seem as mysterious as the Oracle of Delphi. (To be fair, nobody has speculated that hallucinogens are involved, as seems to have been the case in Delphi.)
The Fed’s oracular sages gathered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week for the central bank’s annual retreat. But this year’s meeting was different: For perhaps the first time in history, some of the Fed’s leaders met with activists who are fighting to change it.
Actually, the Fed’s not as mysterious as it seems. Some of the its behavior can be explained by its hybrid nature as a publicly-created, but partly private, entity. It’s reportedly the only central bank in the world that is not fully public. As a result, the Fed’s leaders must struggle to accomplish their goals within a complex set of accountabilities, with multiple boards of directors that include many of the same bankers they are supposed to regulate.
What’s more, even casual utterances by the Fed Chair can roil global markets, so some of her proclamations must remain at least mildly cryptic out of necessity. Janet Yellen gave a lengthy speech last week that covered a number of topics, but this was the phrase heard around the world:
I believe the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened in recent months.
That comment, while noncommittal, provoked a great deal of commentary. Interest rate hikes are a tool for cooling down the economy when it’s “overheating.” That hardly seems to be the case right now. The “case for an increase” may be stronger than it was, but it’s still weaker than the case for waiting. (Economists Dean Baker and L. Josh Bivens have more.)
It’s worth noting that Janet Yellen is the Fed’s chair, not its CEO, and that the Fed’s monetary policy is set by committee. Yellen must satisfy both its public and private constituencies, which means navigating between public demands for accountability and a private-sector penchant for secrecy. She has a tough job.
The Fed has a governance problem. What’s the solution? Some right-wingers want to abolish it altogether, but that’s a terrible idea. Its current design is flawed, but abolishing it would mean surrendering our financial destiny to the bankers whose unchecked greed inevitably leads to fraud and collapse.
As the Oracle at Delphi reportedly once said: “Love of money and nothing else will ruin Sparta.”
Fortunately, there’s another option. The Fed could become a fully public entity, accountable only to the polity that created it. Economists have long fought to insulate the Fed from political influence. But, despite what some of its practitioners seem to believe, economics is neither a priesthood nor a physical science. Economics uses quantitative measurements but is riven by ideological divisions, theoretical arguments and subjective differences in perception.
The Fed can’t be managed by coolly objective technocrats, because such creatures don’t exist in the real world.
Public accountability is the goal of a “People’s Fed” proposal from Fed Up, the group that organized last week’s meeting between officials and activists. (Here are our own “People’s Fed” thoughts, from 2014.) Fed Up and its allies want the Fed to avoid taking steps that could harm the economy for working people, like a premature rate hike, and appoint leadership that more closely resembles our diverse population.
They also want the Fed to come up with better responses to the interrelated emergencies now plaguing the American majority — including racial and economic inequality, a weak job market, and declining wages. Ultimately, they want the Fed to be publicly governed.
These are not unreasonable requests. The Fed showed remarkable creativity when it responded to Wall Street’s existential crisis in 2008. It invented new fiscal tools, retroactively reclassified non-banking institutions like Goldman Sachs and GE Capital as banks so that they could be rescued and, as we learned through Bernie Sanders’ GAO audit, made enormous sums of money available for the bailout.
Today the middle class faces an existential crisis. Many communities of color are in danger. So are the young people who struggle with unemployment, under-employment and closed doors of opportunity. The Fed should act as forcefully and imaginatively in the face of their crises as it did for Wall Street’s.
Many of the officials who met with Fed Up’s activists expressed support, at least in principle, for the group’s goals. That’s commendable. But they are hamstrung by, among other things, their own institution’s structure.
As long as the Fed’s organizational culture is dominated by the financial sector, it cannot reflect the American people’s needs, hopes, and values. And as long as its ownership and accountability remain hazy, even an oracle won’t be able to tell us who it’s really here to serve.
Now, if you are a member of SECRET SOCIETIES at a local level and not the global old world MERCHANT OF VENICE 1% ---you are being used and will be thrown under the bus so stop MOVING FORWARD. If you do not know what secret society/freemasonry history is from old world VENETIAN EMPIRE----then WAKE UP and learn because that is who controls our government and MOVING FORWARD MASTER PLAN is the global 1% not ours.
We spoke last time of development in Baltimore tied to what is surely a model of that old world VENETIAN EMPIRE SENATE BUILDING where only global merchant executives have the voice in politics----you know ---these are the people Europe and America had a REVOLUTION to send packing. We then rested on our laurels and allowed those pesky global 1% get control of our freedom and liberty once more.
PLEASE STOP BELIEVING A 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE CANNOT STOP AND REVERSE THIS --IT WILL BE EASY PEASY.
So here we have ABILITY ONE----that Federal agency for disabled connecting to LIGHTHOUSE and building a PALATIAL BUILDING on our Federal Hill ------let's look at what global freemasonry ties to our downtown development look like so far. Maryland Agency for the blind has done a great job in training our disabled blind----so it is not the service----it is the corruption of global 1% using social non-profits to gain money and power.
The Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc. - AbilityOne
www.abilityone.gov/media_room/documents/Seattle...The Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc. Our Mission: To create and enhance opportunities for independence and self-sufficiency of people who are blind, Deaf-
Latest News & Updates
Mission
King David’s Lodge exists to refine good men, making them into even better men, by a unique experience of initiation into the mysteries of Freemasonry – in much the same manner that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and a host of other inspiring leaders have been enlightened.
Vision
King David’s continues to stand as it has for over a century: a venerable lighthouse illuminating the Door of Freemasonry for people of goodwill within San Luis Obispo – people who may choose to become one of us, once they see that the door is close at hand.
The global 1% chooses the Oracle of Delphi because of its ties to APOLLO THE SUN GOD being supreme with this god's temple's being staffed with PEOPLE THOUGHT TO BE SEERS---VISIONARIES visited by KINGS AND EMPIRE-BUILDERS. Notice below how the temple is always built on a southern slope of a hill just as in Baltimore's Federal Hill.
This is a long article but it sets the mindset of a global 1% who think they are GODS OR KINGS---when they are only THUGS. PLEASE GLANCE THROUGH TO NEXT ARTICLE.
The Oracle of Delphi—Was She Really Stoned?
Read the full article as it appeared in Archaeology OdysseyJelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale • 05/01/2016
Read “Was She Really Stoned?” by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and John R. Hale as it originally appeared in Archaeology Odyssey, November/December 2002. The article was first republished in Bible History Daily in 2013.—Ed.
The world’s most famous (and powerful) oracle resided at Delphi, high up the slopes of Mount Parnassus in the Temple of Apollo. In ancient times, supplicants would wind up the mountainside, patiently hoping for words of wisdom from the priestess (called the Pythia) in the temple’s adyton (inner chamber). Corbis
Archaeologists are good at recovering things left behind by the past, such as buildings, incense altars, tools and relief carvings. What they are not so good at recovering are the ideas, feelings and emotions—the innerness—of sentient ancient beings. It’s one thing to examine a temple’s holy of holies; it’s another thing to understand what went on there and what people experienced. Sometimes, however, there’s an exception to the rule.
Numerous classical authors report that natural phenomena played an essential part in one of their most sacred religious rituals: the oracle at Delphi. According to the geographer Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.), for example, “the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed down in the depths … from which arises pneuma [breath, vapor, gas] that inspires a divine state of possession” (Geography 9.3.5). Over the past five years, a team of researchers—a geologist, an archaeologist, a chemist and a toxicologist—has put that claim to the test, making it much more likely that we will actually understand what happened at Delphi.
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When ancient Greeks and Romans had to make decisions, they consulted the gods—by drawing lots, casting dice, interpreting dreams and analyzing such signs as sneezes, thunderbolts and flying birds. But for matters of the utmost importance, they sought to hear the words of the gods in the mouths of oracles.a
Pythias were virgins who dedicated their lives to prophesying on behalf of the god Apollo. The first Pythia is said to have been the goddess Themis, who is depicted on a fifth-century B.C. cup (shown here) sitting on a tripod and holding a bowl and a sprig of laurel (Apollo’s sacred tree).
According to Strabo (c. 64 B.C.–25 A.D.) and other sources, the Pythia was inspired by mysterious vapors, though these accounts have been largely ignored by modern researchers. Now, however, a team of archaeologists and geologists have proved that the Temple of Apollo sat directly above fault lines that likely released intoxicating carbon-based gases into the adyton. Was this the oracle’s secret?
Paradoxically, in male-dominated classical Greece the most influential voice, the Delphic oracle, belonged to a woman. The oracular temple was perched on the south slope of Mount Parnassus, surrounded by high cliffs, about 75 miles west of Athens. Getting to Delphi required either a long trek across the mountains or a sea voyage to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth. However difficult the journey, thousands of visitors sought guidance from the holy woman, called the Pythia,b who spoke on behalf of the gods.
The Pythia dealt less in visions of the future than in right choices: where to locate a new colony, when to attack an enemy, how to lift a curse, whom to choose as leader, what offering to make to which god. No kingdom, city or private person could afford to make critical decisions without consulting the Pythia. Thanks to her prestige, Delphi became the richest and most famous Hellenic sanctuary. The Greeks called it the omphalos, or “navel of the world.”
How could a mere mortal command such respect? The answer lies in the belief that Apollo—the god of revelation and inspiration—used the Pythia as his mouthpiece, taking possession of her during oracular sessions. The Pythia would fall into a trance, and the words she spoke were supposedly those of Apollo, delivered in a voice very unlike her normal tones.
Most scholars believe the Delphic oracle was established around the eighth century B.C., when founders of new colonies would consult the Pythia before setting out for the western Mediterranean, North Africa, Asia Minor or the Black Sea. The origins of the oracle are recounted in a story about a goatherd named Koretas, who pastured his flock on the slope of Mount Parnassus. Koretas noticed that when the goats grazed near a certain fissure in the mountainside, they began to bleat strangely. Approaching the fissure, he was filled with a prophetic spirit. Eventually, a woman—the first Pythia—was appointed to sit on a tripod over the cleft and give prophecies. Before she could mount the tripod, however, a goat had to be sacrificed to ensure that the day was propitious.
Frank Ippolito
During the classical period, supplicants would line up at dawn to walk along the Sacred Way, a steep path snaking up through the sanctuary toward the Temple of Apollo. The priests and temple attendants determined the order of the queue, giving priority to state embassies and then working their way down through military commanders, athletes, poets and, last of all, mere heads of families concerned about a child or an investment. The supplicants filed past bronze statues, war monuments and treasure houses dedicated in the past by grateful visitors. It would have been late in the day by the time the ordinary men at the rear reached the terrace of the temple and viewed the famous inscriptions, “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess.”
From here the way led up a ramp to a great colonnade of Doric columns, and then through a double door into the temple itself. Inside burned a constant pinewood fire tended by women of Delphi. The final approach to the oracle led downward into a sunken space below the level of the temple floor, where the visitor would be confronted by a gold statue of Apollo and the omphalos stone that marked the sacred spot. The Pythia sat in a recessed inner sanctum called the adyton, a Greek word meaning “not to be entered.” Standing outside the adyton, visitors would ask their questions and await the response.
Unlike itinerant prophets and omen-interpreters, the Pythia derived her power from the place—she could only prophesy while seated in the adyton within the Temple of Apollo. According to Strabo, the pneuma arose from a small opening (chasma ges) in the adyton: “Over the mouth [of the opening] a high tripod is set. Mounting this, the Pythia inhales the pneuma and then speaks prophecies in verse or in prose. The latter are versified by poets on duty in the temple” (Geography 9.3.5.).
Strabo was not the only ancient source to describe the adyton and the intoxicating gas. The second-century A.D. traveler Pausanias told of a spring in the temple’s adyton that made the Pythia prophetic. Also, in On the Obsolescence of the Oracles, the biographer Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.), who served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, described an exhalation of vapor in the adyton that sent the Pythia into a trance.
Despite these testimonies, no serious scholar over the last 50 years has accepted the idea that the Pythia’s trance was caused by a gaseous emission.
Modern investigations began in the 1890s, when French archaeologists began to excavate the sanctuary at Delphi. They first moved the modern village of Kastri, household by household, from above the ancient sanctuary to the town of Delphi, west of the sanctuary. The French archaeologists uncovered the boundary wall of the ancient sanctuary, an entry gate, and the lower stretches of the Sacred Way. By 1893 they had reached the terrace of the Temple of Apollo—where they found that scarcely a stone remained in place above the floor. The columns had toppled, and the statuary had been carried off or destroyed. In the lower chamber, where the oracle once spoke, no trace of the ancient structure remained. Even the archaeologists’ attempts to reach bedrock were frustrated as water filled the excavated areas.
While the French team was excavating the temple, a young English scholar named A.P. Oppé published a report based on his visit to the site. Oppé proposed that the ancient sources had confused the fissure with a nearby gorge, and that the vapor was simply a fiction that had been passed down from source to source.1
In 1927, after a hiatus precipitated by World War I, a scholar named M.F. Courby published the French team’s final report of the temple excavations. He described the bedrock under the center of the temple as “fissured by the action of the waters”—suggesting that the ancient traditions of an opening in the rock may have been correct.2 By then, however, Oppé’s theory that the ancients simply misconstrued the facts had taken too strong a hold among scholars for the issue to be reconsidered. The final blow came in 1950: Pierre Amandry of the École Française d’Athènes stated definitively—or so it was widely believed—that exhalations of intoxicating gas could never have existed at Delphi. Only volcanic activity could produce such gas, Amandry (incorrectly) noted, and Delphi does not lie in a volcanic area.3 For almost half a century, debates about the geological origins of the oracle virtually ceased.c
The first step toward a modern reassessment of the evidence was made in the 1980s by geologist (and co-author) Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, the senior member of our project in Delphi. De Boer was conducting surveys, under the auspices of the United Nations and the Greek government, to identify active fault lines. One area he studied was the south slope of Mount Parnassus, where he noted an exposed fault both east and west of the sanctuary of Apollo—though it could not be seen at the site of the temple, where it was covered by ancient construction and debris from rock slides. De Boer suspected that the fault did indeed run under the temple, but he gave the matter no more thought.
The acropolis in Athens is the most iconic remnant of the classical Greek world. Discover the site’s history and architecture in the article “Antiquity’s High Holy Place: The Athenian Acropolis” by Harrison Eiteljorg, now available online for free.
It was not until the summer of 1995 that Zeilinga de Boer encountered an archaeologist, co-author John Hale of the University of Louisville, who assured him, first, that he could not possibly have seen any such feature at Delphi and, second (after Zeilinga de Boer described the fault in detail), that this might be a discovery of major importance. We decided to continue investigations at Delphi, eventually adding a chemist (Jeff Chanton of Florida State University and the U.S. Geological Survey Magnetic Laboratory) and a toxicologist (Henry Spiller of the Kentucky Poison Center) to the team.
In 1996, with the support of Rozina Kolonia, the director of the Delphi Museum, we conducted a survey of the site and found that the sections of exposed fault on either side of the sanctuary were indeed part of the same fault—an active fault extending about 13 miles east-west along the southern flank of Mount Parnassus. We named this fault the Delphi Fault.
This egg-shaped stone—the very stone described by the Greek writer Pausanias, who visited Delphi in the second century A.D.—represents the omphalos, or “navel of the world.” According to Greek legend, Delphi was fixed as the center of the world when Zeus released two eagles, one from the west and the other from the east, which met in the sky above Delphi. The original omphalos stone, now lost, was probably an archaic cult object that supplicants draped with wreaths, resembling the wreaths carved in relief on this stone. Erich Lessing
In subsequent seasons we identified a second fault, extending approximately southeast-northwest. This fault could be traced along a line of springs running through the center of the sanctuary. The highest spring, above the temple, is called the Kerna Spring; its water is currently channeled westward to modern Delphi. Further down the slope, though still above the temple, a mass of travertine (a kind of limestone) deposited by calcite-rich waters indicates another spring. There is also an elaborate channel for a spring built into the southern foundation wall of the temple itself. Although this spring is dry today, the early 20th-century French archaeologists found it difficult to reach bedrock within the sanctuary because their holes kept filling up with water. Down the slope below the temple, yet another spring emerges from a cleft in the bedrock near the Treasury of the Athenians.
We have named this southeast-northwest fault the Kerna Fault, after its highest spring. In de Boer’s opinion, the Kerna Fault intersects the Delphi Fault at or near the site of the temple.
What the ancient authors described as a fissure (chasma ges) in the rock over which the Pythia sat was probably a small fracture extending up from the intersection of these two faults. Very likely, this is also what M.F. Courby, in his 1927 publication of the French team’s excavations, was describing when he wrote that the bedrock was “fissured by the action of the waters.”
Greek geologists had already identified the limestone under the temple as bituminous (oil-bearing), with a petrochemical content as high as 20 percent. These petrochemicals appeared to be a possible source of gases. But how exactly could they be released from the rock into the atmosphere?
The Delphi Fault is linked to one of Greece’s most geologically active features: the great rift, or graben, that today is filled by the waters of the Gulf of Corinth. This is a recent feature, geologically speaking, having formed roughly two million years ago. The rift continues to widen; as it does, motion occurs along faults and earthquakes are triggered. In 373 B.C., for example, earthquakes almost completely destroyed the Delphic temple on the north side of the gulf, as well as coastal towns on the south side.
As slippage occurs along the fault lines, adjacent rock masses are heated, vaporizing the lighter petrochemicals in the limestone and expelling gases upward along the face of the faults. Once faulting has opened such a pathway, gases continue to rise, although the volume would slowly decrease over time. We believe that this is exactly what happened at Delphi: The rock masses deep in the earth were heated, and they intermittently produced gases that rose up along the intersection of the two fault lines, eventually entering the adyton of the temple through one or more fissures over which the Pythia sat.
Read about the discovery in ancient Hierapolis of Pluto’s Gate, a site shrouded in misty poisonous vapors and considered sacred to the underworld deity Pluto.
Exhalations of gases from bituminous limestone have been observed by geologists studying underwater faults in the Gulf of Mexico. There light hydrocarbon gases—methane, ethane and ethylene, all of them intoxicants—have been found bubbling up from the rock below. Closer to Delphi, similar exhalations were detected near the Isthmus of Corinth, as well as on the island of Zakynthos.
We decided to test the spring water at Delphi, along with samples of the travertine rock that the ancient springs had deposited on the retaining walls and slopes around the temple. If significant quantities of gases had been emitted with the spring water, traces of these gases might be found in the travertine deposits. The very presence of travertine rock, formed from dissolved calcites in warm spring water, is evidence that the springs along the Kerna Fault had their origin at deep levels.
The water and travertine from the sanctuary of Apollo, which were analyzed by Jeff Chanton, revealed traces of the light hydrocarbon gases found in the Isthmus of Corinth and on Zakynthos. Could this explain the Pythia’s state of intoxication in ancient times?
Apollo sits on a carved ompholos stone—perhaps even a representation of the stone shown in the previous photo—on a coin (shown here) minted in Antioch in 225–223 B.C. Clearly, the Delphic oracle and its association with Apollo were well known throughout the ancient world in Hellenistic times. By the first century A.D., however, the Pythia’s powers were failing, perhaps because the volume of gases flowing into the adyton had decreased—and by the fourth century, the demise of the oracle was complete. American Numismatic Society
The ancient sources describe two distinct types of prophetic trance experienced by the Pythia. First, and more normally, she would lapse into benign semi-consciousness, during which she remained seated on the tripod, responding to questions—though in a strangely altered voice. According to Plutarch, once the Pythia recovered from this trance, she was in a composed and relaxed state, like a runner after a race. A second kind of trance involved a frenzied delirium characterized by wild movements of the limbs, harsh groaning and inarticulate cries. When the Pythia experienced this delirium, Plutarch reports, she died after only a few days—and a new Pythia took her place.
According to toxicologist Henry Spiller, both of these symptoms are associated with the inhalation of hydrocarbon gases. Spiller studies the effects of such inhalants on young people, known as “huffers,” who breathe in fumes from gas, glue, paint thinner and other substances because of their intoxicating properties. Perhaps the Pythia too was high on one of these hydrocarbon gases.
It may even be possible to identify the kind of gas. Plutarch—who, we recall, was a priest of Apollo at the Delphic sanctuary—noted that the intoxicating pneuma had a sweet smell, like expensive perfume. Of the hydrocarbon gases, only ethylene has a sweet smell—so ethylene was probably a component in the gaseous emission inhaled by the Pythia.
Now, there is a good deal of evidence concerning ethylene intoxication, particularly from the early 20th century. In laboratory tests involving human subjects, the pioneering anesthesiologist Isabella Herb and other scientists studied the effects of light doses of ethylene. Ethylene worked twice as fast as nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and achieved similar effects with only half the quantity. In high concentrations, ethylene produced complete unconsciousness; in low concentrations, it induced a trance state. Ultimately, ethylene’s use as a medical anesthetic was discontinued because of its combustibility: A spark from electrical equipment in the operating room could ignite the ethylene canister, causing it to explode.4
From the evidence of “huffers” and the experiments with ethylene, we know that subjects normally react to inhaling small quantities of these gases by entering a benign “out-of-body” trance. They can remain seated and answer questions, but their tone of voice and typical speech patterns are altered. Recovery takes place as soon as the subject is removed from exposure to the gas, and complete amnesia about the trance follows. In a minority of cases (about one in six) in the ethylene experiments, subjects experienced delirium, or a “bad trip.” Experimenters had to use restraints to hold down those undergoing this delirium, which was accompanied by groaning, shrieking and a thrashing of the arms and legs.
Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the Pythia’s behavior survive from the golden age (seventh to fifth century B.C.) of the Delphic oracle. By the time Plutarch took office as priest of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle’s powers had significantly diminished. According to Plutarch, emissions of pneuma in the adyton were slight and unpredictable, leading to the decline of the oracle itself. He suggested that whatever produced the pneuma in the rock below the temple had become exhausted, or that the fissures in the rock had been blocked up in the 373 B.C. earthquake. The Delphic oracle never recovered its former prestige after this earthquake, even though the temple was rebuilt.
The diminished flow of gas may not have been the only reason for the decline of the institution. Plutarch opined that the pneuma was merely a trigger for the prophetic trance, and that the Pythia’s lifelong training and psychological preparation played the most important role in her spiritual possession. In a memorable simile, Plutarch compared Apollo to a musician, the Pythia to a lyre, and the pneuma to the musician’s uncanny ability to produce music by touching the instrument. Perhaps there were socio-cultural reasons for the decline of the institution, or perhaps, as the gaseous emissions became less powerful, devoting one’s life to the oracle became less attractive.
Whatever the reasons for the oracle’s demise, we can no longer dismiss ancient traditions concerning its origins and power. Strabo, Plutarch and the others have been rescued by science from a century of calumny.
The House of Apollo: A History
The Delphic oracle appears often in Greek myth, even in the account of the repopulating of the earth after a great flood. The high god Zeus, distressed over mankind’s wickedness, sends a flood to cover the earth, but two pious human beings, Deucalion (Prometheus’s son) and Pyrrha (Prometheus’s niece), survive by climbing Mount Parnassus. With the ebbing of the flood, the two descend the mountain and come upon the Delphic temple site, where they hear a voice: “Veil your heads and cast behind you the bones of your mother!” Like many of the Delphic oracles, this one is initially enigmatic, but Deucalion and Pyrrha soon realize that the earth is their mother; so they throw rocks over their shoulders, and the rocks are transformed into men and women, saving humanity from perdition.
Erich Lessing
Another famous, or infamous, visit to the oracle was made by the young Oedipus—who, having been adopted as a baby, wanted to know the identity of his parents. (The third-century A.D. marble relief above shows Oedipus [center] sacrificing to the Delphic oracle in front of a statue of Apollo [left].) However, the Delphic oracle informed the young man that he would murder his father and commit incest with his mother. To foil the prophecy, Oedipus left Corinth, which he (erroneously) believed to be his native land. On his journey he killed another chariot-driver in a fit of ancient road rage—but unknown to him, the other driver was his father Laius, King of Thebes.
The oracle at Delphi was also consulted by non-mythical figures. In the sixth century B.C., King Croesus of Lydia, in western Anatolia, inquired whether he should attack King Cyrus of Persia. “If you attack,” replied the Pythia, “you will destroy a great kingdom.” Croesus attacked the Persians, suffered total defeat, and saw his kingdom absorbed into the Persian Empire. Croesus had destroyed a great kingdom—his own.
Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
More than a century later, the philosopher Socrates—shown above in a Hellenistic bust—reminded the Athenians at his trial in 399 B.C. that the oracle had declared him the wisest of men, a fact that did not save him from execution.
Photo: David Harris/Collection Israel Museum
After Greece was conquered by Rome, a number of Roman emperors posed questions to the oracle. Nero (54–68 A.D.) was warned to beware the 73rd year, and he was later assassinated by troops who made the 73-year-old Galba emperor in his place. Hadrian (117–138 A.D.), shown in the bronze statue above, ever the intellectual, wanted to know the birthplace of the poet Homer. (The Pythia’s answer: Homer was the grandson of Odysseus and born at Ithaca.) The oracle advised Diocletian (284–305 A.D.) to persecute Christians—which Christians avenged by destroying a number of oracle sites in the fourth century A.D. Finally, the envoys of the pagan Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 A.D.) received word of the oracle’s demise from the Pythia: “Tell the king the fair-built hall has fallen; Apollo now has no house or oracular laurel or prophetic spring; the water is silent.”
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The blind became associated with the global 1% and the vision of themselves as Greek/Venetian empire-builders because of the myths of ORACLE OF DELPHI as being A BLIND SEER--VISIONARY. This is why a global 1% freemasonry group would tie itself to an organization called LIGHTHOUSE and house non-profits for the blind.
THEY ARE BUILDING STRAIGHT FROM HISTORY BOOKS BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT THAT TALENT ---ONLY LYING, CHEATING, AND STEALING.
Here we see that famous saying------ONCE BLIND, BUT NOW HE SEES.
Sight in Oedipus the King Essay
...Once blind, but Now he Sees:
'However Tiresias is known to be a “seer”. The ironic part is that, Oedipus sees physically what is going on around him, but he is blind to see what is actually going on around him, and this the case for Tiresias, who knows what is going on around him and around Oedipus’s world, however he does not physically sees anything since he is blind'.
No one is more tied to global old world freemasonry and this vision of ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE by people thinking themselves great visionaries as ORACLES OF DELPHI----then the owners of our global hotel chains----MARRIOTT AND HYATT. When we listen to global Wall Street CLINTON/OBAMA 5% to the 1% shout against billionaires in Trump's cabinet remember they were silent during Obama----Obama being in the hands of CHICAGO'S PRITZKER-----Baltimore is filled with Marriott global chain hotels and ever variation of small, mid-size travelling destinations while all local motel/hotel venues are pushed out of business----if a US city deemed Foreign Economic Zone is filled with global tourism industry to the exclusion of all-----then WE THE PEOPLE will have no rights, not voice, no representative GOVERNMENT.
'U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, center, and Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson (left) at the Wold Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit in Dallas, Texas April 6, 2016'.
Who does our US city hall listen to? These global corporate executives like Johns Hopkins, Pritzker, JP Morgan, UnderArmour because they are the SENATORS OF A FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE CITY STATE as in old world VENETIAN EMPIRE-----this is why our community associations and 5% scrape, deceived, grapple to be in these low-level city POLITBUROS once our local US city halls.
Who does our US city hall listen to? These global corporate executives like Johns Hopkins, Pritzker, JP Morgan, UnderArmour because they are the SENATORS OF A FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONE CITY STATE as in old world VENETIAN EMPIRE-----this is why our community associations and 5% scrape, deceived, grapple to be in these low-level city POLITBUROS once our local US city halls.
We discussed how the global 1% are pushing to EARLY RELIGIOUS CULTS taking over today's religious institutions ----
JEWISH, MUSLIM, HINDI, CATHOLIC, AND PROTESTANT---these are the 5% to the 1% religious players MOVING FORWARD to a ONE WORLD RELIGION LOOKING LIKE THIS.
Commerce Secretary, Marriott CEO Call for More Data-Sharing to Enhance Security
Dan Peltier, Skift - Apr 07, 2016 7:30 am
@djpeltier
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, center, and Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson (left) at the Wold Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit in Dallas, Texas April 6, 2016. WTTC / Flickr
It will take both the public and private sectors working together to see that security data is regularly shared in a transparent fashion.
— Dan Peltier
U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker called on partner governments to make greater efforts to share data, including passenger name records, to enhance security and bolster confidence among travelers.
“Partner governments must significantly advance their willingness and capabilities to collect, use, and share information to screen travelers,” Pritzker said Wednesday at the World Travel & Tourism Council’s Global Summit in Dallas, Texas.
Citing privacy concerns, many countries in Europe have been reluctant to share passenger name records, although a proposal to enhance such information is under consideration. After the recent terrorist bombings in Brussels, European governments’ lack of data-sharing has come under greater scrutiny.
Prtizker pointed to the shortfalls of the lack of data-sharing among governments.
“We must develop international systems to share data, including passenger name records, so that we can expedite processing of known and trusted travelers,” Pritzker said. “We also need to ensure that our governments are taking advantage of systems already in place, such as checking documents against Interpol’s lost and stolen passport records. These changes are important not only to the visa waiver program but also to making legitimate travel as smooth and efficient as possible across all nations.”
During Pritzker’s tenure at the Commerce Department, which began in 2013, 17 U.S. airports implemented kiosks and mobile technology to expedite the international arrivals process. She also helped expand the visa waiver program to its current 38 member countries and lobbied to lower visa wait times for countries, including Brazil and China, with citizens of the latter country now eligible for 10-year visas.
Some 40 million more people globally visited another country in 2015 compared with 2009, including a significant increase in visitors to the U.S. Pritzker is worried a rollback of the visa waiver program would deter many international travelers from making U.S. trips.
“Everyone in this room understands how tourism is negatively impacted when visitors do not feel safe,” said Pritzker. “Hospitality and national security are not mutually exclusive. We cannot afford to let security challenges stop the great progress we have made in recent years. Providing a welcoming experience while ensuring safety and security requires all of us to work together.”
“Just as the private sector is making destinations and attractions more secure, our government is also evolving our policies and programs. One of the ways we are doing this in the United States is by strengthening and expanding the Visa Waiver Program. But we cannot do it alone. This program is at risk, and we need your help. We must develop international systems to share data, including passenger name records, so that we can expedite processing of known and trusted travelers.”
Public and Private Sector Collaboration
Arne Sorenson, Marriott International CEO, joined Pritzker on stage at the summit and said the private sector shares equal responsibility with governments to be transparent and share security data.
“It’s going to be about information,” Sorenson said. “How do we make sure we are capturing that through the private sector and among governments and identifying as quickly as possible those who pose no threat in travel?”
“We facilitate that travel and roll out that red carpet of welcome for them. How do we identify where the risks are? Governments also have information, and so does the private sector. How do we make sure we pull together this highly collaborative process and voice that says to the rest of the world, ‘You’re welcome, and we trust you?'”
Sorenson expressed admiration for how President Obama supports the travel industry. “When you look back over the eight years of the Obama administration, we had the State Department saying ‘I don’t want to be blamed for the risk.’ It requires the head of state to say ‘there is more we can accomplish by promoting travel and tourism.’
“The challenge with the visa waiver program is the phrase. A better phrase is ‘trusted traveler.’ How do we make sure we identify those folks who pose absolutely no risk to our safety? How does this industry also become an incredible advocate for security and safety while promoting travel?”
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So is there a difference between one global 1% and their freemasonry groups and another? Of course---they are fighting it out for control of each of what will be a few dozen US FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES as the US is dismantled and made a colonial entity ------so a global Johns Hopkins controls development and which global 1% it wants to fill Greater Baltimore and indeed all of Maryland's Foreign Economic Zones-----just as we see Trump and his associates like DeVos---doing the same and they all do this while pretending to be the most devout of Chistians------the DeVos and Amway are of course tied to old world MERCHANTS OF VENICE
The International Braille and Technology Center for the Blind (IBTC) was established in 1990 by the National Federation of the Blind gives vender-free advice on all access technology for the blind
Trump is not going to stop MOVING FORWARD US CITIES AS GLOBAL ECONOMIC ZONES------he is simply going to allow his BFFs in the world of global freemasonry get in on the economic activity----and yes, this is an organized TAG TEAM and yes they are all THUGS.
'is a 33rd degree Mason'.
codex magicaExclusive Intelligence Examiner Report
Texe Marrs
Are Amway Corporation and its founders tied in with the Masonic Order? Many people have written me expressing their concerns about Amway. Evidently, whether deliberate or not, there does appear to be some type of connection between the organization and Freemasonry. The first Amway building had a Masonic square and compass symbol on the front facade. The luxurious Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan_where Amway has its international conventions for its distrib-utors_was built right onto a huge Masonic temple. The architecture of this hotel is integrated so that many Masonic symbols carved in stone are visible at the river side of the structure.
In 1988 I was the keynote speaker at a national Sunday School leaders conference held at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. Strangely, when I checked in, the desk clerk inexplicably assigned me to room 666!
Was this just coincidental, or did someone at the hotel know that the topic of my talk was to be "The Coming New Age Antichrist, 666?"
It felt odd and eerie entering a hotel room on the sixth floor with the number 666 prominently displayed on the door. But I had Jesus with me in my heart, and prayer as my weapon. I figured the devil had a lot more to worry about than me, and I certainly wasn't going to let him intimidate me.
Protected by the Holy Spirit from intimidation, I slept like a baby. So did Wanda, my precious wife. The next morning, we arose early, and Wanda and I went for a brief and invigorating walk outside along the river front of this mammoth and impressive hotel. There, I observed the pagan Masonic symbols, architecture, and Egyptian statues.
Back inside the hotel, in the grand lobby, I saw a shiny, brass metal plaque on a pillar. It had inscribed on it the names of dignitaries who had previously stayed at the hotel. I studied the names carefully and noticed that among them were England's Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip; the Netherlands' Queen Julianna and Prince Bernard; and former U.S. President Gerald Ford.
Then, a surprise: Amidst all these well-known VIP names was the name of another, lesser-known personage. Right there on the list was a "Chief Holy Eagle." I immediately recognized the potential New Age and Masonic meaning of the name of this so-called dignitary, Chief Holy Eagle.
Regardless of its Masonic connections, certainly the promotional emphasis within Amway is ungodly. There is nothing wrong with making money, but to combine the things of God with an all-out hunger and campaign for mammon is unbecoming.
Amway's spiritual philosophy is, in my opinion, perfectly in tune with the
Rich DeVos, a founder of Amway, is one of America's richest men. This is the cover of DeVos' Inspirational audiotape, Selling America. Notice the blatantly Masonic signal DeVos appears to be sending with his hands.
so-called prosperity gospel. Advocates of this false gospel claim that if you consistently think positive and speak positive, God will make you fabulously rich. This is a horrendously false teaching and must be rejected by true Christians. Bible believers well know and accept that any true child of God must be willing to accept hardship, persecution and deprivation if that be God's will.
The pep rallies of Amway and similar commercial groups whip up emotions of a greedy nature and cause listeners to focus first and almost exclusively on money and success. But the Bible tells us to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Yes, the "positive" crowd may add in a little spirituality and may occasionally sprinkle in some Christian lingo, but it's too often an afterthought, an aside. How sad and pitiful—and how devoid of true riches and prosperity—is their message.
Perhaps this is why I am
now so often besieged by folks telling me of New Age visualization and meditation, nature worship, and other New Age practices taught and encouraged by their Amway distributors. Whether this (officially) comes from the top down I do not know, but it does exist.
I am sure that Amway has its good points. Certainly, its supporters will respond to this article and vigorously defend the company. Recently, I received a letter from Amway's headquarters in which the company denies that its head, Rich DeVos, is a 33rd degree Mason. Perhaps Amway has an explanation for its retaining the Masonic symbols and architecture on its Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. My comments here should, therefore, be read with caution and without making a hasty judgment.
Moreover, I realize that there are many fine, sincere people involved in distributing and selling Amway products. I make no rash judgments about their motives, nor do I question the depth of their faith. My purpose is to simply cause Christians to reflect on the true meaning of the Gospel and compare that with the principles of mammon which I believe are strongly espoused by Amway and other multilevel marketing organizations.
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The problem for WE THE PEOPLE is this------our low-level freemasonry member REALLY BELIEVE the higher level folks care for them and will take care of them when they could not care less. This is the difference between our 5% to the 1% and those at national level who are falling into being that 1% to the 2%----CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA/NOW TRUMP.
'At each degree of Masonic initiation, Masons take a deadly oath, and swear allegiance to Masonry above God and country. This is the unifying cohesion of Globalism. Under pain of death, they swear never to reveal the secrets of Freemasonry – not even to their wives'.
These global 5% to the 1% stay loyal to death we are told----this is what has our US governance at national, state, and local level and they will never do anything for the 99%----they are MOVING FORWARD no matter what.
What percentage of Americans are tied to freemasonry? Regions of our nation are heavier than others----Baltimore is almost 100% freemasonry----ergo the complete capture and installation of political leaders. It is what has 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE so divided no matter black, white, and brown and it is deliberate---those old world MERCHANTS OF VENICE FREEMASONS could care less about those 5% to the 1%.
Bringing all this back to our local US cities and development-----those local players are being trained to be LEADERS-----while simply following orders from global Wall Street----they will not change.
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY CANNOT REMAIN A PLACE OF FREEDOM AND LIBERTY WITH WE THE PEOPLE HAVING CONTROL OF GOVERNANCE UNTIL WE UNDERSTAND WHO THESE FOLKS ARE AND THE GOALS SET BY GLOBAL 1% LEADERS.
It really is no great big secret ------one has only to educate themselves in global history and economy to know to where ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE leads. It doesn't end well for 99% of people.
A comment from a lower-level freemason:
Past Master of a Masonic Lodge and Member in other Masonic bodies
Written 26 May 2015 ·, I've been a Freemason for 27 years, and participate actively.
For those who are unaware, the "33rd Degree" is part of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which is an organizations that exists within Freemasonry that that Master Masons may join if they choose to. The "degrees" of the Scottish Rite are not higher than the Third degree, despite the numerical appearance.
With that out of the way, a Mason who has received the 33rd Degree of the Scottish Rite knows two things:
1. What happens during the 33rd degree. Obviously, you wouldn't know about it if you hadn't seen it, which most people haven't.
1a. While the Scottish Rite is a large organization, it still only comprises a fraction of Masonry's population. Accordingly, a 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason knows what goes on within the Scottish Rite in general.
2. More importantly, someone with the 33rd Degree knows that Degrees do not go higher than the Third. This plays off my opening remark; many people, including Masons, really don't know the significance of the Scottish Rite relative to Craft Masonry. It's not uncommon to hear a less experienced Mason reference someone and say "That guy is a 32nd Degree Mason" (much more common to run in to and sounds important). It's also not unusual to hear people self-refer as "32nd degree Masons" earlier in their Masonic career.
This happens because the numbers sound higher and people don't fully appreciate/understand the egalitarian nature of the Fraternity and that the Third degree is the heart of everything.
I have several friends who been nominated for and received the 33rd degree in the Scottish Rite. These men have great experience and knowledge; they fully appreciate that they are equals with everyone in Masonry, despite receiving a high honor. Two of those friends were very close with a now-deceased Member of my Lodge. This now-deceased Brother was one of the oldest "33rd Degree" guys around and was prominent in everything he did. When the one friend had stopped attending meetings for personal issues, this older Brother spoke with him and asked him to come back when he could. He told him that his Bleu Lodge was the cornerstone of the Fraternity and that everything we did was built from that foundation. The friend knew this, of course, and hearing his old mentor say it inspired him to return and become active again.
In conclusion: Third Degree Masons are taught that we are all equal; 33rd Degree Masons know it.
We see here the Governor of Missouri is tied to ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE---we saw Cheney tied to MONTANA----our Big Sky state tied to these same groups----Bush tied to Texas and Florida-----Erhlich/O'Malley/Hogan as well-----all executive offices MAYORS AND GOVERNORS have total power of appointments.
They are neither Republican RED STATE nor Democratic BLUE STATE----they are ROYAL GLOBAL % PURPLE ----killing our US Democratic Republic to being that colonial economic entity.
Trump Appoints Globalist Freemason as Ambassador to China!
VigileaksDecember 8, 2016
Rich Koele / Shutterstock.com
Globalism-Supporting Masonic Governor Branstad Must Not Be Given U.S. Senate Confirmation! Who is Advising to Deceive President Trump?The definite objective of a world state controlled by the Masonic ring, and the utilization of gold and international finance as principal instruments for its realization, appear prominently and with clear definition. International Freemasonry is a major globalist player with infrastructre in place for world government.
April 27, 2012, was a very “special” day for the Masons of the Scottish Rite in Des Moines. Governor Terry Branstad and two members of the Iowa House of Representatives took the degrees of the Scottish Rite and became 32 degree Masons. Senator Charles Grassley was also in attendance. Jay Simer took the Masonic photos, followed by a write up and more pictures on the Scottish Rite Blog.
And now! 32nd Degree Mason, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, formally accepted the offer to become President Trump’s China ambassador.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – “President-elect Donald Trump has announced his choice of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to be the next U.S. ambassador to China. Trump announced his pick of Branstad on Wednesday at a Manhattan fundraiser.”
While we all know and love President-elect Trump, he has not been a politician and is incredibly naive in critical areas. He has repeatedly emphasized no one owns him, yet the Masons are now owning him!
AP continues, “A Trump transition spokesman confirmed that Branstad had accepted the nomination. Branstad aides didn’t respond to questions Wednesday about the matter.
“Branstad will face a U.S. Senate confirmation process that could take weeks as Trump himself prepares to be sworn in as president. When Branstad resigns as governor, he’ll be replaced by Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds, making her the first female governor of Iowa.”
The Masonic Branstad will join Trump at a rally in Des Moines on Thursday. “Globalism not Americanism” continues to make inroads with our beloved and unwitting President-elect Trump.
Photo By: Jay Simser
At each degree of Masonic initiation, Masons take a deadly oath, and swear allegiance to Masonry above God and country.
This is the unifying cohesion of Globalism. Under pain of death, they swear never to reveal the secrets of Freemasonry – not even to their wives.
Therefore, no matter what Masons claim about their good works or intentions, they cannot be believed.
They are the proven diabolical globalist enemy of Christianity and America. Globalism-promoting Masonic Governor Branstad must not be given U.S. Senate Confirmation! To do so is “Globalism not Americanism.”
President Trump! If none of these Republicans supported you in the Presidential election – and even if they did – why do you think they will support you now? These Masons remain true to their Masonic oath on penalty of death!
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When Obama and Clinton neo-liberals sent all that Federal funding to global IVY LEAGUE universities tied to global Wall Street this is what guided those decisions-----and we see them in our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones controlling global Wall Street Baltimore Development----as Johns Hopkins does all our public universities.
Global HEINZ CONDIMENT KING John Kerry running as our people's Democratic Party leader-----GET RID OF THESE 5% TO THE 1% PLAYERS. This is why we have no real information coming from any sources---our public universities used to operate in public interest now controlled by global private IVY LEAGUES....
George Bush and John Kerry are Skull and Bones - Mason
NAUnURCASH
Start at:
Uploaded on Dec 3, 2008George Bush and John Kerry are Skull and Bones - Mason
'Evidence suggested that Morgan’s abduction was carried out by members of a secret organization known as the Masons. Americans soon came to believe in the existence of a Masonic plot to overthrow society from within; the country’s very existence, many proclaimed, was now in jeopardy'.
Here we see the history of freemasonry tied to the fall of the Venetian Empire in 1500s-----the important thing to remember is this----
THEY ARE NOT AS POWERFUL AS THEY SELL THEMSELVES------PEOPLE AT LOWER LEVELS ARE NOW JOINING BECAUSE THEY THINK IT IS THE ONLY PATHWAY TO HAVING A BUSINESS OR JOB.
Yes, many of our US Presidents were global freemasons but that was when they were working to grow our American economy-----then they went empire-building and no longer worked for 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE----this is the source of all those BUSINESS-FRIENDLY GLOBAL WALL STREET PLAYERS AND POLICIES.
'Freemasonry is thought to have originated in England and Scotland sometime in the 1500s as a trade organization made up of local stoneworkers, but it soon took on a philosophical air'
THERE IS OUR TIE TO GLOBAL WALL STREET CLINTON.
'In the years between America’s founding and 1826, Masonry had only grown more powerful, especially in New York. Gov. DeWitt Clinton was not only a Mason but had also been the grand master of the Grand Lodge of New York and the highest-ranking Mason in the country. By one estimate, more than half of all publicly held offices in New York were occupied by Masons'.
'The crime had exposed a powerful group, shrouded in secrecy, manipulating the law for its own purposes'.
Here is the problem for US citizens IF MOVING FORWARD continues to control all development-------all of those RESEARCH FACILITIES an Obama and Clinton neo-liberal funded are all led by just those global Wall Street old world freemasonry groups and all future tracking will be members-only into what will become those 2% to that global 1%-----and this is why they are going global students----and global university leaders----these old world freemason groups are global.
Right now these narrowed admittance pathways are not installed completely but it is coming very soon ----next decade as economic crash sends our public universities into private hands----as UMMS into hands of global Johns Hopkins----these real estate ANCHORS taking all of downtown and communities nearby will all be gone and become part of that global Johns Hopkins corporate campus.......that is one huge global corporate campus-----and this is for what our local community association players no doubt all tied to low-level freemasonry ----are scratching, undermining, with no ethics,morals, no US Rule of Law -----rising to city council and appointed committees all work toward.
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University of Maryland, Baltimore tripling biopark site on west side
Project could cost $800M if it gets city planning approval
Jun 22, 2009, 12:00am EDT Updated Aug 13, 2009, 1:35pm EDT
Julekha Dash Staff
Leaders of Baltimore’s west side biotechnology park are plotting a major expansion to include three 10- to 14-story office towers that would make the project three times bigger — and more costly — than originally planned.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore BioPark will take its revised master plan to city planning officials in the fall after meeting with members of the West Baltimore community. The $800 million plan calls for 2 million square feet of commercial space, potentially making it larger than the biotech park in Baltimore City’s east side. That project near Johns Hopkins Hospital calls for 1.2 million square feet of life sciences and retail
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This is why both REAL right wing conservative Republicans and REAL left social Democrats were both shouting in the 1990s-----stop those pesky global Wall Street pols CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA-----
People have been piling into these local groups as pathways to having a job or business and this is how all the PAY-TO-PLAY fraud and corruption sends hundreds of millions of dollars in our US cities deemed Foreign Economic Zones.
This is what makes our local citizens fearful of standing up -----don't be a member of these groups---be a CITIZEN WITH RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS-----not someone destined to just do what you are told.
The Mysteries of the Masons In 1826, a shadowy cabal kidnapped a man who had threatened to expose the rites of the secretive brotherhood. American politics were never the same again.
By Andrew BurtIllustration by Lisa Larson-Walker
To this day, nobody knows the true fate of Capt. William Morgan. A failed businessman and citizen of generally low repute, Morgan was abducted from his home, in the town of Batavia, New York, in the early morning of Sept. 11, 1826. He soon found himself in a Canandaigua jail cell, about 50 miles away, imprisoned for a debt of $2.65. The whole ordeal was doubtless confusing to Morgan, a man best known for his drinking. It likely became even more confusing when a stranger paid his bail. But that man had no intention of setting him free. Morgan emerged from the jail only to be forced into a carriage, reportedly screaming out “murder” while he was being dragged away.
What would become of America’s great experiment in democracy without the presence of the founders?
This is the last anyone ever saw of Morgan, about whom little else is certain. Some said that he was not really a military captain, while others claimed that he had earned that title in the War of 1812. Others asserted that both theories were technically true: That he fought the British in 1812 as a pirate seeking plunder and was granted a pardon for his misdeeds by the president after the war. What we do know is that whatever happened to him, trapped inside that northbound carriage and fearing for his life, Morgan never came back.
Over the next few years, the details of Morgan’s abduction would slowly come to light, setting off a political firestorm and giving rise to the first third party in American politics. Evidence suggested that Morgan’s abduction was carried out by members of a secret organization known as the Masons. Americans soon came to believe in the existence of a Masonic plot to overthrow society from within; the country’s very existence, many proclaimed, was now in jeopardy. What began as an obscure crime in upstate New York would spark one of the first episodes of political hysteria in American history, laying the foundation for a long line of political crusades to come.
The story of Morgan’s disappearance begins in the summer of 1826, when a new era was dawning in the nation’s history. Fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, the last of America’s founding generation was dying off—a turning point highlighted by the deaths of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the Fourth of July that year. What would become of America’s “great experiment” in democracy without the presence of the founders?
In upstate New York, then on the outer edges of America’s frontier, two men were occupied with a different question: how to secure personal fame and fortune. The first was David C. Miller, the publisher of Batavia’s Republican Advocate. Miller’s was an opposition paper, pitted against the policies of New York’s governor, DeWitt Clinton. Though he’d run the journal for more than a decade, he was still a struggling newspaperman searching for higher circulation. The second was William Morgan, who had moved his family restlessly throughout the countryside, working first as a brewer, now as a stoneworker, hauling his wife, Lucinda, and two young children from one failed venture to the next. Only two years earlier, Morgan had written of his desperation: “The darkness of my prospects robs my mind, and extreme misery my body.” The two men made an odd pair, but what they lacked in common background they shared in common circumstance—and now in common goals. Over that summer the two hatched a plan to expose to the world the inner workings of the secret society of Freemasons.
How, exactly, the two first came into contact is not known, but neither was held in high esteem by his community. According to one source, Miller was known to be a man “of irreligious character, great laxity of moral principle, and of intemperate habits”; much worse things were said about Morgan. Not surprisingly, both men harbored deep-seated animosity toward Freemasonry, which served as a symbol for the establishment class.
Freemasonry is thought to have originated in England and Scotland sometime in the 1500s as a trade organization made up of local stoneworkers, but it soon took on a philosophical air. The triumph of reason began to be a focal point of the organization, as did dedication to deism, or the Enlightenment belief that the existence of God is apparent through observation and study rather than miracles or revelation. Over the centuries, the fraternity of Masons would expand throughout the world, as would its ceremonies and rituals, which involved strange symbols and oaths—in addition to its more benign emphasis on civic-mindedness, religious tolerance, and communal learning. The group met in secret.
Masons were overwhelmingly men of middle- and upper-class status—doctors, lawyers, and businessmen—who had the time and leisure to join what amounted to a social club for the well-to-do. Many of the founding fathers had been Masons, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—indeed, 13 of the 39 signers of the Constitution claimed membership in the fraternity. In the years between America’s founding and 1826, Masonry had only grown more powerful, especially in New York. Gov. DeWitt Clinton was not only a Mason but had also been the grand master of the Grand Lodge of New York and the highest-ranking Mason in the country. By one estimate, more than half of all publicly held offices in New York were occupied by Masons.
Miller first hinted at some type of forthcoming revelation in an article published in the Advocate in August 1826. He had discovered the “strongest evidence of rottenness,” he wrote, evidence that compelled him and an unnamed collaborator, “to an act of justice to ourselves and to the public.” This bombshell was a book, to be compiled by Morgan and printed by Miller, detailing Masonic rituals and misdeeds at the highest levels of power. Morgan wasn’t a member of the Masons, but he had convinced other Masons that he was and had been granted access to a neighboring Masonic lodge. Morgan was thus able to witness the Masons’ ceremonies, recording their doings in a manuscript.
News of Miller and Morgan’s impending publication soon began to spread and Masons in neighboring counties began to worry about the disclosures. Reported one Mason at that time: “[I] never saw men so excited in my life.” Committees of Masons were quickly organized to investigate the revelations, and “everything went forward in a kind of frenzy.”
Groups of concerned Masons began harassing Miller and Morgan with prosecutions for petty debt, with the tacit cooperation of the county sheriff, who briefly placed Morgan in jail. Strange men, thought to be Masons from other counties, now began to make suspicious appearances in the villages of Ontario County, putting not just Miller and Morgan on edge but entire towns too.
On Sept. 8 a group of Masons attempted to destroy Miller’s offices. Capping a night of drinking at a local tavern, a group of several dozen men descended onto the print shop. There they found that Miller had convened a posse of his own, equipped with firearms and ready to fight. The Masons retreated, and Miller was safe—for the time being. Two nights later, Miller’s office suddenly erupted into flames, though the fire was detected early and no serious damage was done. Cotton balls dipped in turpentine were reportedly found throughout the print shop.
On Sept. 11 the conflict escalated. A half-dozen Masons showed up at Morgan’s home with an arrest warrant. The charges: petty larceny for stealing a shirt and tie, lent to Morgan by the owner of the town’s tavern, which Morgan had failed to return.
Soon Morgan was being whisked away in a carriage, though reportedly without worry. He apparently thought that testifying that he had simply forgotten to return the items would get him off the hook. He was right. The charges fell through and he was released—only to be immediately arrested again for the outstanding debt of $2.65. This time, the charges stuck.
Morgan spent the following night in jail. The next day, he was forced into the carriage that sped northward out of town, never to be seen again.
The crime had exposed a powerful group, shrouded in secrecy, manipulating the law for its own purposes.
That wasn’t the end of the ordeal: A group of Masons soon came back for Miller. On Sept. 12 roughly 70 armed Masons rallied at a tavern while a constable presented the publisher with a warrant for his arrest on questionable charges and conveyed him to the nearby town of Le Roy. Luckily for Miller, his lawyer and an armed posse from Batavia followed along, carrying him back home when the charges fell through.
As Miller and his crew returned to Batavia, the story of his arrest spread throughout the neighboring villages and towns. It was loose ends like Miller, and the family that Morgan had left behind, that would cause the Masons the most trouble. The fate of Morgan’s wife, Lucinda, for example, would help to stoke up sympathy and support for Morgan’s plight, deepening the public’s anger over the Masons’ crimes. The mother of two small children now no longer had a husband to depend on.
But the Morgan affair wasn’t just about the disappearance of one man. The crime had exposed the existence of a powerful group, shrouded in secrecy, manipulating the law for its own purposes. The story of Morgan’s kidnapping, as it was told and retold throughout the coming weeks, focused on how the elite Masons had turned the public interest into a private one and how the government itself may have been perverted in the process.
Two weeks after the abduction, a series of heavily attended public meetings was held. Though the meetings were initially called to solve the mystery of Morgan’s fate, they were equally about calming the public’s fear. There was no guarantee, after all, that what happened to Morgan could not happen to others.
As a result of the Batavia meetings, a panel was established, the so-called Committee of Ten, which began sending agents into neighboring towns to investigate the abduction, gathering facts and taking down testimony. Soon neighboring towns followed suit with committees of their own, all tasked with shedding light on the crime. These public meetings were people’s meetings, and they convened people’s committees: No government authorities were called in because none, many suspected, could be trusted.
The committees were created to calm the public’s sense of fear, but in fact they helped to deepen it. Throughout the months of October and November, citizen representatives of the committees traveled throughout upstate New York spreading the story of Morgan’s abduction, serving to confirm the wild stories local newspapers were already printing about the kidnapping. Those who initially didn’t believe what they read now heard witnesses attest to the truth of the affair. Meanwhile, speculation about Morgan’s fate was becoming more and more sensational. One version of the kidnapping ended with Morgan being murdered in some sort of occult Masonic ceremony, with his throat slit “from ear to ear” and his tongue cut out with a knife.
Up until this point, the public effort to get to the bottom of the scandal was straightforward, if impassioned. A group of men had conspired unlawfully against Morgan and Miller, and if they were not brought to justice, nothing prevented the same crime from occurring again. Once the criminals had been locked away, everyone could move on—or so, at least, it seemed in the early days after Morgan’s disappearance. But this view would soon change.
Within a few months, the outrage over Morgan’s kidnapping transformed from public fear to political hysteria. Though clearly only a few Masons were guilty of any crime, it was the reaction of other Masons that convinced much of the public that they weren’t dealing with a simple crime but with a widespread conspiracy. Many Masons began publicly—and inexplicably—to defend Morgan’s abduction, and many of them were public figures to boot. “If they are publishing the true secrets of Masonry,” said one former member of the New York Legislature, we “should not think the lives of half a dozen such men as Morgan and Miller of any consequence in suppressing the work.” Another Masonic judge on the Genesee County court stated that, “whatever Morgan’s fate might have been, he deserved it—he had forfeited his life.”
The nascent anti-Masonic movement gained an expanded sense of purpose as the Morgan affair began working its way through the courts. In October, a group of Masons were indicted on charges of rioting and assault for the attempt to imprison Miller. In November, four other Masons were indicted for the conspiracy to abduct Morgan.
By January 1827, the trial was set to begin in Canandaigua, New York, where teams of lawyers, bankrolled by local Masonic lodges, assembled to represent the four Masonic defendants. The district attorney prosecuting the case had amassed a team of his own, which in the end would prevail—though the win would be more symbolic than substantive. The four defendants were sentenced to lenient terms, ranging from two years to one month in prison, convicted only of forcibly moving Morgan from one place to another against his will. What happened to Morgan in the end, and the larger conspiracy behind his abduction, was still conspicuously unsolved.
Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker
If the public wanted justice, this surely was not it. But the trial proved fulfilling in another sense, thanks in no small part to Judge Enos T. Throop. When it came time for him to read the sentencing statement to the four guilty men, Throop read much more than a simple description of their punishment. What he told the Masons, in front of a rapt courtroom, soon to be reprinted in papers across the state, revealed that their trial was about something greater than their offense alone.
Throop began by describing the four Masons’ crimes. Theirs was a “daring, wicked and presumptuous” act, he said, one that had “polluted this land.” The men had robbed the state of a citizen, left the victim’s wife and his children “helpless,” and somehow shielded the rest of the culprits from being brought to justice. But this act on its own was not even the “heaviest part of your crime,” as Throop explained:
Your conduct has created, in the people of this section of the country, a strong feeling of virtuous indignation. The court rejoices to witness it—to be made sure that a citizen’s person cannot be invaded by lawless violence, without its being felt by every individual in the community. It is a blessed spirit, and we do hope that it will not subside—that it will be accompanied by a ceaseless vigilance, and untiring activity. . . . We see in this public sensation the spirit which brought us into existence as a nation, and a pledge that our rights and liberties are destined to endure.The public’s outrage, in other words, was now no longer about one crime, or even the conspiracy to cover it up. It was about the “spirit which brought us into existence as a nation,” in Judge Throop’s words, and about the fear that this spirit was threatened.
What Throop saw in the public indignation was a dedication to America’s founding spirit. The citizens, it seemed, were willing to enforce the laws themselves, if that’s what it took to protect American ideals. What began as the public’s reaction to a local kidnapping was now evolving into a common dedication to protect America’s core values.
Freemasonry served as a compelling symbol for the real threat that many Americans were facing. The 1820s were a decade of great uncertainty, one in which industrialization posed profound challenges to American society. The rise of manufacturing threatened to reorganize the American labor force on a massive scale, as did immigrants and population booms in eastern cities.
“In fastening on Masonry as the foremost evil in the Republic,” writes historian Paul Goodman, “Antimasons were responding to the emergence of industrial society which clashed with the remnants of a pre-industrial order.” America, many thought, was entering an era of chaos, and one in which the principle of equality was fundamentally threatened.
With the trial now complete, the movement reached another turning point. Furious over the court’s inability to bring all of Morgan’s abductors to justice, alarmed members of the public began to advocate action in the political realm. In February, a joint meeting was held by the people of the towns of Batavia, Bethany, and Stafford, who resolved to “withhold their support at elections from all such men of the Masonic fraternity.” The people in the town of Seneca committed that “they would not vote for Freemasons, for any offices whatever.” And it wasn’t only Masonic politicians who found themselves under attack. Newspapers run by Masons, which many felt had been conspicuously silent on the Morgan affair, were also the target of the public’s ire. A meeting of the towns of Pembroke and Alexander passed a joint resolution to “discourage the circulation of any paper” that did not cover the Morgan affair accurately. In meetings throughout the towns of upstate New York, scores of similar resolutions followed suit. By February 1827, five months after Morgan had gone missing, the Anti-Masonic Party was born.
“I am not, never was, and never shall be a Freemason”
John Quincy Adams, campaigning in 1828And by the end of the year, the party was already sweeping the polls in New York. In the elections of 1827, for example, the party of the sitting U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, would elect 12 members to the New York Legislature while the Anti-Masons would elect a shocking 15. The following summer, just a few months before the national elections of 1828, Adams himself had openly aligned himself with the Anti-Masons by declaring that, “I am not, never was, and never shall be a Freemason”—proving that the party had jumped from a statewide political phenomenon to become a national one.
The 1828 elections marked a major turning point for the Anti-Masons. As the movement spread from New York to states like Vermont, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Maryland, Anti-Masonic candidates won seats in state legislatures across the country. At the federal level, the Anti-Masons became the first third party in the United States to send candidates to Congress, electing nearly a half-dozen members to the House of Representatives.
Perhaps more notably, the Anti-Masons gained the mantle of the opposition party in the 1828 elections. President Andrew Jackson, an avowed Mason himself, had ousted Adams and was now in power. The Anti-Masons now not only had a prominent political platform, in both state and national legislatures. They had a villain in the White House.
By 1830, the push for a national organization was under way, aided by opposition to Jackson and the growing sense that American society was fracturing. On Sept. 11 of that year, precisely four years after Morgan had been abducted from his Batavia home, the Anti-Masons held their first national convention in Philadelphia, with delegates from New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, Maryland, and Michigan in attendance. It was here that the party hatched its grandest plans for national influence—and, ultimately, where the seeds of the movement’s downfall were first sown.
With growing national power came increased opportunity, but divisions were already stirring within the Anti-Masons’ ranks. For many of the moderates in the party, some of whom viewed Andrew Jackson’s policies as a danger equal to, if not greater than, the threat posed by Masonry, the need to build coalitions with opposition figures outside the Anti-Masonic Party soon became clear.
The problem, however, was that a large number of Anti-Masons, zealous in their beliefs, did not have the stomach for compromise—they simply refused to deal with any politicians who would not denounce all of Freemasonry. Questions about the party’s ability to handle routine political tasks now began to be posed with increasing frequency. Would the Anti-Masons be able to strike political bargains at all? Would allying themselves with other Jackson opponents undermine their cause? Put simply, would compromise dilute the Anti-Masons’ strengths or would it make the party stronger?
In the face of such disarray, the delegates agreed to postpone major decisions, such as whom to nominate for the 1832 presidential election, until the following September, when the party would hold a national nominating convention, the first of its kind in American politics, and one that is emulated by political parties to this day. Instead of party leaders choosing whom the convention would nominate, delegates to the convention, each representing their local supporters, would elect the party’s candidates. This new type of convention was a way of bridging ideological differences within the party, of importing the democratic process into the party itself. At the same time, it underscored the party’s increasingly weakened leadership.
“You will become the Colossus of the republican government of your country”
Thomas Jefferson, on Anti-Masonic Party candidate William Wirt
The divisions between the moderates and the radicals in the party would only grow. One newspaper covering a local 1831 Anti-Masonic convention highlighted the now increasingly popular view “that Antimasonry had other and higher objects in view than the prostration of the Masonic fraternity.” Samuel Miles Hopkins, a longtime New York politician and one of the state’s most prominent Anti-Masons, declared that Andrew Jackson was a greater threat to the country than Freemasonry and that in the previous election he himself had voted for Masons rather than let pro-Jackson candidates win. By 1831, a year before the presidential election, the Anti-Masonic Party was rotting from within.
But rising tensions would not stop the ambitions of the party at large, which believed it had found the perfect 1832 presidential candidate in William Wirt, a Virginia politician and former attorney general, and one of the last vestiges of old-style American politics.
Wirt was a stern moralist and a devoutly religious man, and he had been tapped by Thomas Jefferson himself as a political heir. “You will become the Colossus of the republican government of your country,” Jefferson had once assured him. Wirt’s concern with America’s moral status echoed many of the Anti-Masons’ deepest concerns. It was the selfish pursuit of profit that Wirt thought was the animating evil of the times. The growing object of Americans of every stripe was simply “to grow rich: a passion which is visible, not only in the walks of private life, but which has crept into and poisoned every public body.” What Wirt identified as the flaws in American society were the same evils that the Anti-Masons saw in Freemasonry itself: a system in which the few benefited at the expense of the many.
There was one problem: Wirt had himself once been a Mason and had never explicitly renounced the order. Now, he was calling the entire conflict between Masonry and Anti-Masonry “a fitter subject for farce than tragedy,” and bemoaning the “wild and bitter and unjust persecution against so harmless an institution as Free Masonry.”
The most radical of the Anti-Masons were obviously outraged by Wirt. Increasingly sidelined, the radicals within the party watched as Wirt was selected to carry the Anti-Masonic banner in the fight against Andrew Jackson, allying with other elements of the opposition.
But by and large the rest of the party supported him, perhaps to a fault. Wirt would ultimately carry only the state of Vermont in the presidential election, winning Anti-Masonic counties in states across the country but falling severely short of any meaningful support at the national level. After Wirt’s failed candidacy, the Anti-Masonic Party “seemed as if by magic, in one moment annihilated,” wrote one 19th-century historian. Men “who had repeatedly most solemnly declared, they would never vote for an adhering Mason for any office whatever, in one day, ceased to utter a word against Masonry.”
And thus the party’s tenure in the national spotlight came to an end—though not without lasting effects. The fraternity that the party had set itself against was forever damaged. Over the course of the hysteria, Masons across the country resigned or denounced their membership, and hundreds of lodges were shuttered. “Lodges by scores and hundreds went down before the torrent and were swept away,” according to one Mason at the time. “In the State of New York alone upward of 400 lodges, or two thirds of the craft, became extinct.”
During Andrew Jackson’s second term, disparate elements of the opposition began to organize, realizing the strength of their combined power, if only they could achieve unity. It was with these goals in mind that the Whig Party, the predecessor to the modern Republican Party and the party of Lincoln, was born—a party composed of a wide variety of beliefs and many contradictions. The Whigs would slowly gain strength throughout the 1830s as former Anti-Masons and others gradually came into the new political fold.
But the rise of the Whigs did not mean the Anti-Masonic cause had passed. Throughout the following decade, a few politicians would make their names proclaiming the evils of Masonry. Some of them faded into obscurity, but others met with limited success. As late as 1836, Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens led an Anti-Masonic committee in the state Legislature that held public hearings on the threat of Masonry, interrogating Masonic witnesses and drawing some national attention. Stevens would ultimately rise to become a congressman, and later one of the U.S. House of Representatives’ most outspoken abolitionists during the Civil War.
In Massachusetts, Ohio, and Vermont, local groups of Anti-Masons met to purge their states of Freemasonry’s influence throughout the 1830s as well, and some still harbored national ambitions for their party. But cracks had emerged in the Anti-Masonic movement that were too big to plaster over, and no longer did the threat of Freemasonry captivate as large a political audience or maintain its wide appeal. The Anti-Masonic movement now operated on the fringes of American political discourse.
By the 1840s, the Anti-Masonic Party was dead and gone, its most loyal adherents dismissed as zealots. But it left behind a powerful legacy: The party established a pattern that future episodes of political hysteria would repeat across American history, from the Red Scares of the 20th century to the anti-Sharia movement of today.
Each movement claims to protect our nation from an existential threat. Each parlays fears of shadowy actors undermining our democracy into populist calls to action. During the period of McCarthyism, more than 13 million Americans—roughly 20 percent of America’s working population—signed loyalty oaths. Today’s anti-Sharia movement—which seeks to demonize Islam, the world’s second largest religion—has succeeded in banning Islamic law in several states. And while movements of political hysteria always claim only to want to rid society of a single, dangerous ideology, its partisans ultimately jeopardize the very values they claim to protect: that we are an open-society committed to the coexistence of many groups and belief systems, a country founded on the principles of freedom and equality for all.
As for the former Anti-Masons themselves, many of the movement’s leaders went on to bigger achievements even after the demise of their party. Millard Fillmore, a New York Anti-Mason from the start, became president in 1850. William Seward, another New York Anti-Mason, became Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, serving as a key member of the president’s wartime cabinet. William Morgan’s lonely widow, Lucinda Morgan, would herself go on to further renown. She moved west and reportedly remarried a man named Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormons—a group that, like the Freemasons, would soon find itself the target of future political crusades.
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It's no accident that the US FED is tied to this goal of being THE ORACLE OF DELPHI-----as everyone in the world knows----these folks are NOT ALL-KNOWING ---THEY JUST CREATE SUCH A LEVEL OF CRONYISM to allow for systematic fleecing of a nations' wealth----WORLD BANK/IMF coming to US if we keep MOVING FORWARD.
THE BLOG
08/29/2016 11:00 am ET | Updated Aug 29, 2016
The Fight for a ‘People’s Fed’
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
When William Greider wrote his 1989 book about the Federal Reserve, it’s not hard to understand why he called it “Secrets of the Temple.” The Fed’s proclamations can make it seem as mysterious as the Oracle of Delphi. (To be fair, nobody has speculated that hallucinogens are involved, as seems to have been the case in Delphi.)
The Fed’s oracular sages gathered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week for the central bank’s annual retreat. But this year’s meeting was different: For perhaps the first time in history, some of the Fed’s leaders met with activists who are fighting to change it.
Actually, the Fed’s not as mysterious as it seems. Some of the its behavior can be explained by its hybrid nature as a publicly-created, but partly private, entity. It’s reportedly the only central bank in the world that is not fully public. As a result, the Fed’s leaders must struggle to accomplish their goals within a complex set of accountabilities, with multiple boards of directors that include many of the same bankers they are supposed to regulate.
What’s more, even casual utterances by the Fed Chair can roil global markets, so some of her proclamations must remain at least mildly cryptic out of necessity. Janet Yellen gave a lengthy speech last week that covered a number of topics, but this was the phrase heard around the world:
I believe the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened in recent months.
That comment, while noncommittal, provoked a great deal of commentary. Interest rate hikes are a tool for cooling down the economy when it’s “overheating.” That hardly seems to be the case right now. The “case for an increase” may be stronger than it was, but it’s still weaker than the case for waiting. (Economists Dean Baker and L. Josh Bivens have more.)
It’s worth noting that Janet Yellen is the Fed’s chair, not its CEO, and that the Fed’s monetary policy is set by committee. Yellen must satisfy both its public and private constituencies, which means navigating between public demands for accountability and a private-sector penchant for secrecy. She has a tough job.
The Fed has a governance problem. What’s the solution? Some right-wingers want to abolish it altogether, but that’s a terrible idea. Its current design is flawed, but abolishing it would mean surrendering our financial destiny to the bankers whose unchecked greed inevitably leads to fraud and collapse.
As the Oracle at Delphi reportedly once said: “Love of money and nothing else will ruin Sparta.”
Fortunately, there’s another option. The Fed could become a fully public entity, accountable only to the polity that created it. Economists have long fought to insulate the Fed from political influence. But, despite what some of its practitioners seem to believe, economics is neither a priesthood nor a physical science. Economics uses quantitative measurements but is riven by ideological divisions, theoretical arguments and subjective differences in perception.
The Fed can’t be managed by coolly objective technocrats, because such creatures don’t exist in the real world.
Public accountability is the goal of a “People’s Fed” proposal from Fed Up, the group that organized last week’s meeting between officials and activists. (Here are our own “People’s Fed” thoughts, from 2014.) Fed Up and its allies want the Fed to avoid taking steps that could harm the economy for working people, like a premature rate hike, and appoint leadership that more closely resembles our diverse population.
They also want the Fed to come up with better responses to the interrelated emergencies now plaguing the American majority — including racial and economic inequality, a weak job market, and declining wages. Ultimately, they want the Fed to be publicly governed.
These are not unreasonable requests. The Fed showed remarkable creativity when it responded to Wall Street’s existential crisis in 2008. It invented new fiscal tools, retroactively reclassified non-banking institutions like Goldman Sachs and GE Capital as banks so that they could be rescued and, as we learned through Bernie Sanders’ GAO audit, made enormous sums of money available for the bailout.
Today the middle class faces an existential crisis. Many communities of color are in danger. So are the young people who struggle with unemployment, under-employment and closed doors of opportunity. The Fed should act as forcefully and imaginatively in the face of their crises as it did for Wall Street’s.
Many of the officials who met with Fed Up’s activists expressed support, at least in principle, for the group’s goals. That’s commendable. But they are hamstrung by, among other things, their own institution’s structure.
As long as the Fed’s organizational culture is dominated by the financial sector, it cannot reflect the American people’s needs, hopes, and values. And as long as its ownership and accountability remain hazy, even an oracle won’t be able to tell us who it’s really here to serve.
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