Bye Bye Birdie, Bye Bye Jeff….

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

This afternoon, August 29, we received an email from a woman named Taryn Wright. She introduced herself as a blogger who exposes fake stories about cancer and various illnesses online and informed us that Jeff D’Antonio’s blog was fake. Before we put up her entire email, here’s a bit of background.

In 2010, we posted a story called Miracle Child  about Jeff D’Antonio’s childhood friendship with Jill, who died of breast cancer when she was 35. Before she died, she asked Jeff to adopt her daughter, Katie, and after she died, Jeff and his wife, Jenny did so. The story then jumps ahead to the winter of 2007-2008, when Jenny was  pregnant and went into early labor.  Jeff rushed her to the hospital through the blinding snowstorm. The upshot was that Jenny had suffered “placental disruption” and the baby was born three and a half months premature.

The physicians told Jeff and Jenny that the baby – Christina – would die within hours. Jeff wrote: He didn’t say “might die.” He didn’t say “maybe,” or “possibly,” or “probably.” He said she will die within hours. Her lungs were too underdeveloped, and there was no way for her to get enough oxygen to survive outside the womb. We begged him to tell us that there was still a chance, no matter how remote, but he was all but certain. He said it was only a matter of time.

We were heartbroken. After six years of waiting and hoping and praying for another baby, and coming this far along through a very long and difficult pregnancy, we just couldn’t believe we were going to have to say goodbye to her now. It was the most horrible moment of our lives.

In the story, Jill’s spiritual presence was pervasive and Jeff attributed that to the infant’s survival.  The story had all the hallmarks of synchronicity and spirit communication.

In fact, here was one of Jeff’s comments about the post:

Jeff D’Antonio says:

October 16, 2010 at 3:03 pm

Trish and Rob, thanks for sharing my story here.

I’m still a little shocked by what Christina said, and we still haven’t been able to get her to elaborate on it, but I do believe that her experience was real.

Jill and I were inseparable in life, and if it’s possible for her to remain here after her death and watch over me and my family, then I believe she would choose to do just that. That’s who she was, and the experience of knowing her for a lifetime has convinced me of it.

I always believed she was an angel, and that she was brought into my life for a reason. Now I’m all but certain of it.

We used the story in Synchronicity and the Other Side – p 68, A Healing Friendship. So I immediately read Taryn’s email to Rob:

Hi, my name is Taryn Wright and I write a blog exposing people who fake stories aboyt cancer and various other illnesses online. I’m sorry to tell you that the Jeff D’Antonio blog is fake.  There is no Jill, no Jeff D’Antonio, no Katie or the rest of the family. You can read more at my blog. 

If you have any questions, or want to tell me any information on “Jeff D’Antonio,” please feel free to email me back.

Thanks,

Taryn Wright

My first thought was, okay, someone has a beef against Jeff. This sort of thing had recently happened to my agent, Al Zuckerman, via twitter, where it was reported he had died. But Rob went to Jeff’s blog and read Jeff’s most recent post – August 27 – about how his adopted daughter, Katie, was going to be in a production of Bye-Bye Birdie at the Cheswick Theater. Rob Googled Cheswick Theater, but only found movie theaters by that name. But then he noticed a website for a Cheswick Company, which manufactures folk art and has a new product listed called  the Bye-Bye Birdie pin cushion Clamp E pattern. We’re not exactly sure what that item is, but it certainly appears it’s where Jeff came up with his idea for Katie’s new role.

Rob then went back to Jeff’s blog and found this:  his blog had been removed. Apparently someone who Taryn had contacted had written to Jeff, who realized the jig was up.

Click  the link in Taryn’s email. We did. She illustrates how the photos Jeff’s uses in his sidebars actually came from other sites: the rock climber, the kayaker, the lonely man on hilltop, thinking about life and all the rest of it.

Photos like this one, a couple who is supposedly Jeff and his wife and soul mate, Jenny.

The picture actually came from here.

Back when 7 Secrets came out, and later, Synchronicity and the Other Side, I emailed Jeff and asked for his snail mail address so that I could  mail him copies of the books. We’ve done that with people whose stories we have used and invariably, people have gladly provided a snail mail address. But Jeff  never responded. I figured it was a privacy issue.

Jeff’s blog wasn’t one that I read frequently. There was way too much drama and intensity and at some point, alarms went off in the back of my head about the whole scenario of Jeff’s life. It read like some Shakespearean drama. Granted, people experience unspeakable tragedies in their lives and learn to cope with those tragedies, somehow. But Jeff seemed… too heroic, the guy who always swept in to clean up the mess, to save the day, a comic book hero.  Yet, he grounded his story in his life as a high school science teacher who had issues with the  administration.

When a story like Jeff’s turns out to be bogus, when his entire life and six years of blogging turns out to be colorful fiction, it casts a disparaging light on synchronicity, spirit communication, and other experiences we have that don’t fit into the model of consensus reality. It’s fodder for skeptics, discourages people who experience meaningful coincidence and spirit communication and makes it easier for the to  dismiss it all as random silliness.  And it prompts Rob and me to be far more cautious in the future.

The bigger question, though, is this: Why would anyone perpetuate a lie for six years?  What motivates someone like this? Is Jeff Loughlin (his real name, a guy from Pennsylvania, not New Hampshire), mentally ill? Delusional? Does he just have too much time on his hands? Does he, in some part of himself, really believe the fiction he’s written?

Hey, Jeff. Hope you’re reading this.  After Jill’s death, you were smart to direct your followers to send money to a cancer organization rather than to you. After all, that might have prompted the feds to look into your activities. You weren’t so smart, though, when you showed Katie’s photo:

She is actually actress Annie DiBernardo.

Six years of a hoax and you got so cocky you forgot the cardinal rules of life in the 21st century: there are witnesses to everything and, with Google, even Hansel and Gretel can be found because all the cookie crumbs are recorded somewhere.

++

P.S. We sent Jeff the draft of this post and asked him to comment. He didn’t respond. The email didn’t bounce back, though, which suggests that he received it.

Taryn and her group are going to be featured on 20/20 in October.

Here is Taryn’s latest post on Jeff:  https://warriorelihoax.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/jeff-dantonio-revealed/

UPDATE ON JEFF THE HOAXER, where he denies he’s Jeff Loughlin from Pennsylvania

 

Posted in blogging fraud, Jeff D'Antonio, synchronicity | 33 Comments

Synchronicity of Isaac, Katrina, and the Repubs

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Trish and Rob

 

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Among Atlantic hurricanes, it was  the sixth most powerful since these things have been recorded, with an estimated  pressure of 902. Supposedly, it was a category 3 hurricane when it hit New Orleans – winds between 111 and 129 miles per hour.

By contrast, Hurricane Andrew, which hit Homestead in 1992, was a category 5 storm, with winds in excess of 157 miles per hour. Yet, Katrina was the costliest natural disaster and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in the U.S.  It killed over 1,800 people, the levees that surround the city failed, and the disaster cost more than $81 billion, nearly five times the cost of Hurricane Andrew.

Hurricane Katrina was probably the lowest point in George W. Bush’s presidency.  This was the president who, in a news conference about Katrina, said to Michael Brown, then the administrator for FEMA – Federal Emergency Management Administration, “You’ve done a heck of a job, Brownie.” Yet, it was obvious to anyone watching the TV coverage of the disaster that  Brownie hadn’t done his job at all. Brownie had been unconscious at the wheel, just like Bush himself.

Thousands of people were displaced, rescued from rooftops, and struggled to survive in the astrodome, deemed a shelter of last resort, that  was breached early on in the storm. And the most Bush could muster was a flyover several days after the hurricane. His  negligent incompetence is not something that the current Republican candidate wants the American people to remember. Bush, in fact, won’t even be at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. So, it looks as if nature will remind us, in a rather stunning synchro.

As of late tonight on August 28, the National Hurricane Center says that Isaac is a Category 1 hurricane and its eye is about 80 miles offshore of Louisiana. Already, tremendous storm surges have been recorded. Districts in New Orleans have been evacuated. The Army Corps of Engineers has rebuilt the levees since Katrina and are confident they will hold. By the time the eye comes ashore, it will be seven years to the day that Katrina devastated News Orleans and the Gulf coast.  And it will hit while the Repubs are carousing and celebrating their candidates in Tampa.

Granted, Isaac isn’t as powerful as Katrina, and things in New Orleans are much improved.  But given our recent experience with this storm, we know how sprawling it is and that it’s pregnant with rain.

In that video above, about 5 minutes and 30 seconds into it, is an exchange between Anderson Cooper and then Senator Mary Landreau. As she went on at great length, thanking various politicians for their help in this “disaster,” Cooper interrupted her and said something to the effect of: “Excuse me, senator. But there are dead bodies in the streets…and one of them has been lying there for 48 hours and rats are eating it.” You can hear the tension in Cooper’s voice. That confrontation made him famous. It came from his heart.

This period is particularly vivid for me.  Two days after the hurricane, I got a call from my editor at the time, Kate Duffy, who asked if I would do some radio shows about Katrina. I had a novel coming out in October, Category 5, about a hurricane that hits my fictional island, Tango Key, and because people were so eager for information, that novel apparently made me some sort of expert on hurricanes.

I did more than 20 radio shows in three days. It became a part-time job. I don’t think these shows resulted in the sales of more books. But it was infuriating – and fun – sparring with some of these ring-wing nuts who claimed that the loss of mangroves and the rampant construction along the Gulf coast and the failure of the levees had nothing to do with the damage in New Orleans. And, oh yes, Bush was not to blame.

So Republicans, party on as Isaac goes wherever it’s going, and hits whatever it hits on the Gulf coast, on the 7th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.   Party on, Romney, as your wife tries to convince the rest of us that she buys your shirts at Costco.

You are a political party composed of incompetent ideologues who seek to control women’s bodies, women’s reproductive rights, who cater to the one percent and hope to end any kind of government aid to the most vulnerable people in society. We won’t forget that.

You are the party who loves life until the infant is actually born and then, so sorry, you’re on your own. We won’t forget that.

You are the party that loves life so much you send innocents off to fight in horrid countries, in illegal wars. And then you  perpetuate a Pentagon budget that grows fatter every year, and when these soldiers return missing limbs, their minds blown apart by what they have experienced, you cut their health care and benefits. We won’t forget that.

You are a party that claims to want small government, but under your last Repub guy, we got the TSA and Homeland Security and we don’t even know exactly how many people they employ – a million? Twice that? We won’t forget that, either.

You are the party that plans to issue vouchers for Medicare – and then lie and say you’re going to save Medicare. In fact, you lie about nearly everything. We definitely won’t forget that.

You are the party of the old paradigm as it gasps for a final breath, a final grab at life and relevance.

You re the party that  for some reason reminds me of the 1973 star-kist tuna ad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-Wy_BRFElc

Sorry, Repubs. You are NOT the 100 percent prime fillet.

 

 

Posted in hurricanes, karma, politics, synchronicity | 13 Comments

A Dog’s Purpose

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Trish and Rob

In the years we have owned dogs, there have been countless times when I wondered what the dog was thinking and feeling or why he or she engaged in a particular behavior. Since we’ve always had cats with our dogs, I have wondered just as many times what our various dogs thought about the cats. And, of course, I’ve wondered what our dogs have thought of us.

W. Bruce Cameron has answered some of those question with his delightful book, A Dog’s Purpose. It’s the story of one dog’s spiritual evolution through several lifetimes, told from the dog’s point of view. As with humans, the dog’s name and circumstances change from life to life.

He begins his first life in a litter born in the wild, where he and his litter mates are eventually taken to a chaotic dog rescue place. Here, he’s named Toby and learns how to exist in the Yard, a fenced area, with other rescued dogs. Cameron captures the pecking order  in such a situation and does it in a way that instantly pulls you into the emotional texture of Toby’s life.  When Toby’s mother escapes from the rescue place, you feel what Toby feels, betrayal, bewilderment, fear. When Toby is attacked by Spike, the local bully, you feel Toby’s horror and pain. You also feel what Toby feels when his leg is damaged beyond repair and he’s euthanized.

Toby is reborn as a golden retriever, and this lifetime really spoke to me; we own a golden now – Noah – and before him, owned another golden, Jessie. Both were rescue dogs. In this life, Toby’s name in Bailey and after an iffy start, he ends up with a family whose young son, Ethan,  is definitely his human. Bailey recalls his life as Toby, when he was always trying to define his purpose, and that quest continues in his life as Bailey.

“Living in the Yard has taught me how to escape through a gate. It had led me straight to the boy, and loving and living with the boy was my whole purpose in life. From the second we woke up until the moment we went to sleep, we were together.”

Bailey’s life has plenty of drama in it – a run-in with a skunk at the farm that Ethan’s grandparents own, a neighborhood bully tries to poison him, he and Ethan gets lost for several days in the woods,  Ethan’s father doesn’t particularly like him. After the family cat dies, Ethan buys his mother a new kitten and Bailey’s reaction  had me laughing out loud:

“He had no manners whatever and attacked my tail when I sat down often lunged out at me from behind the couch, batting at me with his tiny paws. When I tried to play with him, he wrapped his legs around my nose and bit me with his sharp teeth.” And his opinion on cats generally? “Dogs have important jobs, like barking when the doorbell rings, but cats have no function in a house whatsoever.”

Cameron is such a skillful writer that I was drawn fully into Bailey’s timeless life. He always refers to Ethan as the boy even when Ethan is college bound and has a girlfriend.  Bailey has dog friends, too, like Duchess, who lives in the neighborhood. One evening, Bailey heads over to Duchess’s house to see if she can play, but there wasn’t any sign of her “other than a fairly recent patch of urine-soaked snow. I thoughtfully lifted my leg on the area so she’d know I was thinking of her.”

Passages like that one leads me to believe that while Cameron was writing this novel, he entered that magical place all novelists strive for, where you are so plugged into your character and your story that it’s as if you’re channeling.  And now, I must return to Bailey. I’ve peeked ahead and know there’s at least one more life for this extraordinary soul.

 

 

Posted in books, dogs, synchronicity | 11 Comments

On the Flipside of Isaac

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Street in front of our house. And the rain is still falling. That little island is our mailbox.The UPS truck went by and created waves! White caps! Amazingly, we still have electricity and Internet.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 10 Comments

Lest we forget….

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Trish and Rob

In honor of the rain-delayed Republican National Convention, we’re presenting a couple of visual synchronicities (or pseudo-synchros) involving George W. Bush, the last Republican president. We feel it’s important to remind everyone of what happened the last time the Repugs held the White House – two long and costly wars, taking the nation from a surplus to a huge debt, to say nothing of the creation of big government Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, extensive wiring tapping of citizens, and water-boarding prisoners in defiance of international law.

The visual synchros: above, President Bush as commander-in-chief  ‘views’ the Korean DMZ. But the caps are on the binoculars. Moving ahead with blinders, the pic seems to say. In the lower one, not only was Bush reading A Pet Goat after being told about the attack on the World Trade Center, but the book is apparently upside down. Much like his presidency.

Well, of course, these pics might be photo-shopped. Other photos show the book right-side up. Maybe he realized his mistake after a few seconds and turned it around. Same with the binocs. We’ve all probably done that. But for Bush with the photographers on hand, he was caught looking silly. Whether actual photos or photo-shopped, they are symbolically close to the truth about the Bush years.

Of course, today’s Republicans are against big spending – except for defense, where they offered the Pentagon even more billions than they requested. While they boast that they are all about cutting the national debt, they want to add $5 trillion to it by keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich and giving the wealthiest Americans even more tax breaks. Go figure.

So how will the Repugs honor their last president and veep? They won’t. Neither Bush nor Cheney will be present at the convention. For shame, dishonoring their own past, while at the same time planning to return to their failed policies, such as de-regulating Wall Street – where greed nearly brought down the nation’s economy in 2008 as W was on his way out.

In the days before the convention, Tampa, Florida was under tropical storm warning, then a hurricane warning, which ultimately postponed the convention by a day. These warnings are looking very symbolic for the future of the U.S. under a Romney-Ryan administration.

Posted in politics, synchronicity | 7 Comments

The Economics of Happiness

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Trish and Rob

I ran across this fantastic trailer on  threads of the spiderwoman, Lauren Raines’ blog.  The filmmaker certainly nails the issues.

Posted in synchronicity | 6 Comments

Ghost in the Camera

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Here’s an incredible story about a teenage boy  who bought an old Polaroid camera at a garage sale because ‘it looked cool’ only to make an amazing discovery inside the camera. (Gabe Carlson alerted us to this story.)

***

A Kansas teen made a remarkable discovery recently after he’d purchased an old Polaroid camera at a yard sale. He bought the old camera because he thought it looked “cool.”

He paid a $1 for the dated camera, but wound up finding a treasure.

According to The Daily, 13-year-old Addison Logan was browsing yard sales with his grandmother, Lois Logan, last weekend. An old Polaroid caught his eye and he decided to buy it as he thought it looked cool.

“I found this Polaroid camera and it looked pretty old and cool, so I just bought it for a dollar,” Addison told ABC News.

After he got home, he began examining his find, and couldn’t figure out how to take a picture. So he did what any teen these days would likely do, he looked it up on the Internet. In his research, Addison realized older cameras needed film, so he opened the relic up to see how it worked. He found a developed photo inside, of two teens, a boy and a girl.

I opened up the cartridge to see if there was any [film] in it and I saw a full photograph in there,” Addison said.

He brought the snapshot to his grandmother to show her what he’d found. His grandmother was shocked when she saw the image. It was a picture of her deceased son.

“I thought he found it somewhere in the house,” Lois Logan said, reported The Daily. “He had no idea that that was his uncle.”

The picture was an image of Scott Logan, who had died in 1989 in a car accident, long before Addison was born. Lois Logan said the picture was taken about 10 years prior to her son’s death; the photo is estimated to have been taken sometime around 1979. She even recognized the girl in the image; it was Scott’s old girlfriend, Susan Ely.

Addison said he thought when he opened the camera the photo was of random people, and he was “just blown away.”

Blake Logan received a call from his son and he didn’t process the story right away.

“He told me what had happened and I kind of brushed it off and it didn’t really strike me – the significance of it – until I went home,” he told ABC News. “I was kind of in a state of shock.”

The Logans retraced their steps back to the house where Addison bought the camera to see if any clues surfaced, but the individual who sold the camera said he didn’t recall where he’d gotten it, or even how long he’d owned it. The man was not familiar with either person in the 30-year-old photo. In fact, it was said the neighborhood didn’t even exist then, reported the Wichita Eagle.

So how the photo ended up at that place and time where Addison would find it is a complete mystery.

The secrets held by the camera will remain unknown, but the family is amazed with the find. It is even more valuable because not many pictures of Scott remain in existence, the family had lost many of their photos in a flood a few years ago, reported the Los Angeles Times.

“It’s one of those things that it almost touches me the more I see how much it touches other people,” Blake Logan said. “When you have faith, you believe they’re always with you and when you see signs like this, it kind of reaffirms that.”

***

A good case of synchronicity and spirit contact, it seems, and definitely an example of the underlying reality that exists outside of time and space and cause and effect.

Here’s a link to the story.

 

Posted in synchronicity | 15 Comments

Cone of Uncertainty

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Trish and Rob

The cone of uncertainty is the strange shape you see in the graphic above. It’s one of those terms with which most people in South Florida are familiar. It means the predicted path of a hurricane becomes less certain the farther out in time you go and if you fall within the cone, you need a keep an eye on the news and check in regularly with the National Hurricane Center. You’re not supposed to focus solely on the broken black line that is the predicted path of the hurricane. This hurricane, by the way, is actually Tropical Storm Isaac, which as of 11 PM on August 23, is not yet a hurricane.

But today, August 24, marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, a category 5 hurricane that slammed into Homestead, Florida, in 1992, with recorded wind gusts as high as 177 miles an hour. – 282 km/h.  Andrew was a small, compact storm that intensified rapidly.

I remember that I was in a drug store, picking up a prescription, when I saw a special weather alert about the storm on a TV behind the pharmacist’s counter. I saw the words Category 5 and that our area, just 70 miles north of Miami, fell within the cone of uncertainty. I rushed home and Rob and I started putting up our hurricane shutters – aluminum panels that took hours to install.

In those days, we had the Internet, but it was mostly message boards and bore little resemblance to the Internet in the 21st century. I don’t think the National Hurricane Center was even online back then. Hardly anything was online. Our daughter was just three at the time, so that night we all slept in one room, with the cats positioned in their usual spots. I heard wind and rain during the night, but nothing extraordinary. We woke up the next morning, still had electrical power, and our only damage was a downed papaya tree.

There wasn’t any news out of Miami until Dan Rather got down there a few days after the storm hit, then the full horror of the storm’s damage became apparent. At that time, it was the costliest hurricane ever and remains as one of the strongest to ever hit the U.S.

Now and then, in a grocery store, a coffee shop, restaurant, the gym, we meet someone who made it through Andrew by hiding in a bathtub, beneath a staircase, under a mattress. Someone who lost everything. After Andrew, people left the area in droves and moved farther north.

The hurricane seasons runs from June 1 to November 30, with a peak in late August and early September. So why would anyone, with any sense of weather history, schedule a convention on any coast in Florida during the peak? If Isaac, as a tropical storm or a Cat 1 hurricane, comes anywhere near Tampa during the Republican convention, as its predicted path indicates, any evacuations will be disastrous.

The locale of the convention is prone to flooding. With more than 70,000 delegates, protestors and media in attendance, where would that many people be evacuated to? Highways will be congested,  hotels will be booked solid, it takes hours just to get out of Florida and that’s if you have any gas in your car.

Andrew changed a lot of the construction laws in Florida, particularly in terms of roofs and windows. After all, if your roof goes, so does the rest of your home. If your windows shatter, you’re screwed. Now, if  you don’t have Andrew compliant roofs and windows, if your home isn’t constructed of concrete, your homeowners’ insurance is prohibitively expensive. After Andrew, more than a dozen insurance companies went bankrupt and many more fled the state.

After the 2004 hurricane season, when we were besieged by storms that seemed to crop up every two weeks, we bought a generator. It powered the fridge and a small TV and could charge cell phones, laptops. But we spent 10 days without electricity, in temps that reached the mid-90s during the day and not much better than that at night. I did a laundry by hand and put the clothes on the bushes to dry in the sun. When the heat became too much, we opened the fridge and just stood in front it, letting the cold air waft over us.

We live on a sentient planet. I first realized this when I saw Hurricane Andrew on a satellite photo and suddenly understood it possessed a kind of consciousness, that it, like all natural phenomena, spoke to us through signs and symbols. Right now the Republican party is in chaos, struggling to redefine itself, and how fitting that Isaac, whether it’s a tropical storm or a hurricane, will probably impact the convention in some way.

Like attracts like.

It’s going to be interesting. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

Posted in synchronicity | 8 Comments

Rape, Incest, the Repubs, and 2 Synchros

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Trish and Rob

the face of the Republican Party – and here’s why:

Rape.

Say it out loud. It’s a hard, definitive word, isn’t it? One syllable, a word you spit out because to hold it too long inside feels like a travesty, a violation, something so repulsive that you don’t want to be contaminated.

The legal  definition of rape  may differ from your personal definition, but in most places it’s defined as forcible sexual relations  with a person against that person’s will. However, before the 1970s, many courts in the U.S. viewed the element of force from the standpoint of the victim. A man would not be convicted of rape of a competent woman unless she had demonstrated some physical resistance. In the absence of physical resistance, courts usually held that the sexual act was consensual.

The italicized part of this paragraph illustrates how, before 1970, the victim – usually a woman – was viewed as guilty right from the start. Before 1970, any woman who brought rape charges against a man was sometimes advised by the police to not press charges because if it went to trial, her sexual history would be ripped open to public view.

Here we are in 2012, nearly 40 years after Roe v Wade made abortion legal, and we’re still having this conversation?  Todd Akin,  a six-term Republican Congressman from Missouri, now a candidate for the senate, actually said: “ If it’s a legitimate rape  the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

Huh?  A legitimate rape versus – what, exactly? An alleged rape? A pretend rape? An illegitimate rape? And the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down?  Never mind that his biological facts are wrong. From the NY Times: “There are no words for this — it is just nuts,” said Dr. Michael Greene, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School.

There are now calls for Akin to step down, to give up this race, to get out while the getting is good. That’s a distraction. The bottom line is that Akin and Paul Ryan, Romney’s VP running mate, co-sponsored a bill that would confer personhood on a fertilized egg, which means that even an egg fertilized during a rape is a person and to abort that egg is tantamount to murder. A woman who conceives a child during rape or incest  must carry that child to term.

Wow. It’s not enough that a rape victim is traumatized beyond belief. In the Republican scheme of things, if you’re impregnated as a result of this incomprehensible violation, you must carry that child to term and spend the rest of your life being reminded of  that violation every time your child nurses, every time you look into that child’s eyes.

Paul Ryan and Todd Akin are cut from the same cloth. They’re no different than Saudi men who can do anything to their wives because their women are chattel, owned and operated by husbands, brothers, fathers, men. When Romney chose Ryan as his running mate, it was a clear message that he doesn’t know that women now have the right to vote. And yes, Repubs, good luck winning an election without the female vote.

Today, August 21, in Tampa, Florida, the Republicans made this travesty part of their party’s official platform – no abortion, not even in the event of rape or incest.

Please, tell me why ANY  woman – why ANY man – would vote for candidates who hold such extreme and spiritually corrupt views about life.

Is there a synchro in all this? There are actually two. Both are dark tricksters:

Todd Akin is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Science, got that? You would think he would know that the female body doesn’t distinguish between friendly and hostile sperm.

And:  the current track for Tropical Storm Isaac, which is predicted to become a Cat 1 hurricane  by the time it hits Florida on Monday, is headed very close to Tampa. That’s the  location of the 2012 Republican convention – beginning on Monday –  where Romney will be officially nominated as his party’s presidential candidate.

Posted in politics, synchronicity | 20 Comments

The Fearless Journey

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Trish and Rob

Lauren Raines pointed out an old post of ours that helped her define the nature of synchronicity. So, with a little editing, we’re reposting it.

+++

Synchronicity is a kind of twilight zone of magic. It ís the border where our inner and outer worlds meet, the language of the unconscious. It’s certainly not something to be feared. In fact, the more frequently you experience it, the less fragmented you are as a human being–and that’s from Jung.

For centuries, man has recognized signs and symbols as meaningful. In the fourth century B.C., Greek philosopher Heraclitus saw all things as inter-related or following ëcosmic reason.í He believed that events were not isolated happenings, but had repercussions across the entire fabric of existence, that all things were linked by a web of organization created by Logos.

Hippocrates, born twenty years after Heraclitus died, expressed similar thoughts. ìThere is one common flow, a common breathing. Everything is in sympathy. The whole organism and each one of its parts are working together for the same purpose. The great principle extends to the most extreme part, and from the extremest part returns again to the great principle.î

The Roman scholar Agrippa referred to a Fifth Essence, something beyond earth, air, fire and water that held existence together. He also called it the World Soul, which penetrates all things and is a thing in itself. Agrippaís contemporary, Plotinus, wrote, ìChance has no place in life, but only harmony and order reign therein.î

In the Middle Ages, this idea was known as the unus mundus, one world, and referred to a collective knowledge that exists independently of us, yet is available to us. In this cosmology, the source of meaningful coincidence is separate from our conscious awareness and egos, but itís where our psyche and the external world touch.

For physicist and writer  F. David Peat ís, synchronicity is a bridge between mind and matter:  “Synchronicities open the floodgates of the deeper levels of consciousness and matter which, for a creative instant, sweep over the mind and heal the division between the internal and the external.”

Physicist David Bohm  referred to this inner world, this primal soup that births everything in the universe  ñ space, time, consciousness – as the implicate order.  “Every action starts from an intention in the implicate order,” he wrote. “The imagination is already the creation of the form.” In other words, imagination and reality are ultimately indistinguishable. Bohm called our external reality the explicate order because it unfolds from this deeper order of existence. In Bohmís view of the universe, everything is part of a continuum.

Robert Lanza, an M.D. and professor at Wake Forrest University School of Medicine, goes even farther than Bohm  in his book Biocentrism. Lanza makes a convincing argument that consciousness is everything. Remember the koan? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? According to Lanza, it doesn’t. In his cosmology, neither the tree nor the forest exist if a consciousness isnít perceiving it.

This isn’t New Age happy talk about the unity of man and the universe. It’s science that begins at the quantum level.  So where do UFOs, aliens and abductions belong in these cosmologies? Well, in Lanza’s worldview, if you open that door in your consciousness, then these entities and experiences exist for you.

In the Jungian worldview, these experiences symbolize archetypes that have become active in your psyche. In Bohm’s worldview, these things may be a holographic phenomenon. Astrophysicist Jacques Vallee, one of the world’s most respected UFO researchers and model for the character La Combe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, seems to agree. He said the behavior of UFOs is the behavior of an image, or a holographic projection.

Yet, as Michael Talbot addresses in his brilliant book, The Holographic Universe, UFOs and aliens can’t be just psychic projections of the unconscious, not with all the physical evidence left behind  ñ like the scars and incision marks of abductees. “Given that quantum physics has shown us that mind and matter are inextricably linked, I suggest that UFOs and related phenomena are further evidence of this ultimate lack of division between the psychological and physical worlds. They are indeed a product of the collect human psyche, but they are also quite real.” He theorized that the phenomenon wasn’t subjective or objective, but ‘omnijective,’ something humans haven’t yet learned to comprehend properly.

Physician and near-death researcher Kenneth Ring recognizes parallels between NDEs, abduction experiences, and the mythic realities through which shamans journey. Again, this is not a New Age belief system. It’s science, the study of consciousness and the nature of reality.  Whitley Strieber, author of a number of bestselling books about the abduction phenomenon and one of the most articulate voices among abductees, said that these encounters “may be our first true quantum discovery in the large-scale world: The very act of  observing it may be creating it as a concrete actuality, with sense, definition, and a consciousness of its own.”

All that said, some people are trapped in a fear of the unknown, who say that synchronicities cannot be trusted. That such experiences are manipulated by malignant forces that are controlling you and everything else in the universe, or that the aliens or the shadow people or some other hidden, terrifying forces are running the show. Fear and divisiveness have always been the favored weapons of petty tyrants. Hitler knew that. Mussolini knew it. Dick Cheney knows it.  Don’t fall for it. We write our scripts from the inside out, from the fabrics of our consciousness, from the fundamental tenets of our belief systems, whatever they are.

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