Hovering high overhead, the UFO and its otherworldly occupants scan the Earths communications -- silently awaiting word that they have finally intercepted the secret information that has eluded them all week. Yes that's right! They are waiting for this weeks exciting issue of the newsletter of conspiracies, secrets, the paranormal and MORE - Conspiracy Journal is here once again to inflame your senses and question your beliefs.

The Republican National Committee has recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.

The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American
Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among us.

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:

    " If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.

As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:

    " Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."

Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."

The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."

But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:

    " The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."

But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"

In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism." The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk radio show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," and "We The People: A Call To Take Back America." His new book, "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy," based on four years of research in Jefferson's personal letters, begins shipping this week from Random House/Harmony.

Source: Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm

Although he's a tenured Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor, Peter Hagelstein leads a life of exile.

He has never made full professor. He no longer has a lab. Barely anyone came to a lecture he gave about his research a year and a half ago.

Virtually all of Hagelstein's problems stem from his study of cold fusion, a type of nuclear reaction that -- if it exists at all -- might have the power to create unlimited, clean energy, essentially on a tabletop. Fifteen years ago, two University of Utah chemists claimed they created such a reaction, an announcement quickly denounced as quackery. Today, cold fusion is as scientifically scorned as UFOs.

Now the soft-spoken Hagelstein, who won accolades in the 1980s for conceptualizing a laser critical to Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" defense plan, and cold fusion have a shot at mainstream science again. Three months ago, the US Department of Energy quietly agreed to examine what cold fusion supporters say is increasing evidence -- culminating at a conference at MIT last summer -- that the reaction exists and is reproducible. If the agency agrees, it will likely mean an injection of both funding and legitimization for the forgotten research.

The Department of Energy review is focusing attention on a small band of scientists, including Hagelstein, who continue to work on cold fusion long after its public demise. There are an estimated 100 to 200 of these researchers in the world, many suffering from stagnated careers or damaged reputations because of their refusal to give up on a concept the vast majority of scientists say doesn't exist.

"It's not that we have kept quiet as much as no one has looked at what we were doing," said Hagelstein, a reserved but passionate man given to nervous laughter. "We are getting good and powerful results -- we want our name cleared."

Cold fusion defies known physics. Even its supporters remain at a loss to fully explain it. Still, if it exists and is reproducible, it could revolutionize the world, decentralizing energy production so that each home could have its own inexpensive power source without damaging the environment.

"This whole story is one our grandkids will learn about," said Edmund Storms, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who has built his own cold fusion lab next to his New Mexico home. "It has the drama, the conflict and it has hopefully the potential to save mankind."

It looked like an experiment a high school chemistry student could do.

Using power from a car battery, chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced they had recreated the energy source of the sun, stars, and hydrogen bomb by packing atoms together so tightly they appeared to fuse in the contraption. The room temperature experiment gave off more energy than it consumed, the researchers said, amounts that couldn't be explained away by current theories.

Within hours, scientists the world over rushed to replicate the work. Finding an energy source through fusion had consumed researchers for 40 years before the announcement, with little to show for it. Unlike fission, which splits atoms to produce energy and is used in nuclear reactors, cold fusion seemed to produce no dangerous byproducts.

But confusing results trickled in. Researchers at Moscow University said they reproduced the results. Princeton researchers said they couldn't.

At MIT, Hagelstein, a theoretical physicist, felt obligated to see if it could be true.

Growing up in smog-choked Los Angeles, he became impassioned at a young age about saving the environment. He remembers bicycling to the beach with a thick layer of smog above him, and the frustration he felt when, as a member of his high school ecology club, he could do precious little to fix it.

Though painfully shy, the 49-year-old boyish-faced scientist has a fierce and unshakable trust in himself: He will not stop work on anything unless he is satisfied it is or isn't true. And Hagelstein needed to decide for himself whether cold fusion actually made sense. Within weeks of the Pons/Fleischmann announcement, he submitted four papers to the journal Physical Review Letters theorizing on what might have happened.

Eight months later, a US Department of Energy panel recommended against any special funding for cold fusion. Scientists around the world, deeply angry at their lost time and what they saw as grandstanding by Pons and Fleischmann, went back to their methodical grind. Few bothered to look at cold fusion again and many still see it as one of the biggest scientific fiascoes in history.

But Hagelstein wasn't done with his calculations. He thought the government's review was too brief. And in many ways, cold fusion reminded him of his work on the X-ray laser in the late 1970s. Then an MIT graduate student, he was told the X-ray laser was a pipe dream, an impossibility. But after spending five years working through nights and weekends, he finally came up with a scheme that held up under mathematical scrutiny. His work earned him a prestigious scientific prize.

About four years after the initial Pons/Fleischmann experiment, Hagelstein became convinced that cold fusion experiments showed that a new kind of physics was at play -- results were fleeting and not always reproducible, but he believed they were valid.

His life changed. Although Hagelstein developed and teaches graduate-level quantum mechanics and numerical modeling classes, and recently wrote a textbook, he keeps a focus on cold fusion.

He spends his time methodically poring over mathematical equations that might explain cold fusion, and visiting laboratories that are working on it. Once a particular pathway proves a dead-end -- a process that can take weeks or months -- he moves to another.

Many critics think he is wasting time on a foolish subject. Yet many people have the same word to describe Hagelstein: Brilliant, blessed with clarity and an incredibly creative mind.

"These are smart people" studying cold fusion, said Mildred Dresselhaus, an MIT institute professor who served on the Department of Energy review board that recommended against funding cold fusion work. "What are the reasons they are still doing it?"

Cold fusion became a joke. Books were written on the debacle, with titles referring to voodoo science and grand hoaxes. Scientific journals routinely rejected work by cold fusion researchers. Tenure came for Hagelstein, but only barely: There were complaints about his cold fusion work.

"In the beginning we were pioneers, but to take the sustained abuse over time, it can be devastating," Hagelstein said -- about his cold fusion colleagues, not himself. Speaking in a slow, measured voice, he refuses to indulge in regrets or blame. "We knew it was going to be tough."

What science rejected, pop culture embraced. A software company, a snowboard maker, and even an Iowa rock band adopted cold fusion's name. It became the subject of the 1997 movie "The Saint."

Cold fusion research was funded for several years overseas after the US panel condemned it, and today, cold fusion researchers say they continue to get private money -- although how much is hard to quantify.

To other scientists, this is the natural course of bad science: It doesn't get much public funding, and eventually goes away. Some of these critics are eager for the new Department of Energy review in hopes it might silence cold fusion advocates for good.

"If this was really happening, there would not be a way from stopping them from going forward," said Frank Close, an Oxford theoretical physicist who wrote a book about the cold fusion episode. "I have no doubt there are wonderful things in nature we have yet to discover, but that does not mean every random fluctuation in the data is the holy grail you are looking for."

So over time, cold fusion scientists have become members of a small, close-knit culture unto themselves. They visit each other's labs. They have their own newsletters. They have their own conferences. And every year, their results get stronger, the group says, results that cannot be explained away by error or any other reason other than a new nuclear process.

Last August, at the group's 10th annual conference, organized by Hagelstein at MIT, results were the strongest yet. (At the 11th annual conference in France this fall, researchers expect even more reproducible results.)

"By the end of the conference, we had officially crossed the threshold," Hagelstein said. With the cold fusion community's help, he drafted a letter to the US Department of Energy asking for a new review hearing, a chance for someone to look at the community's work. The department agreed to a meeting, and later, to an official review.

The review won't be finished until at least the fall, and in the cold fusion community, concerns are surfacing. What if the review board is stacked with cold fusion detractors? Maybe the review will not be in-depth enough to take into account what cold fusion supporters say is evidence of a strange, new physics.

Hagelstein and his colleagues intend to keep pursuing their work even if the Department of Energy sides against them again. He is resolute. But sometimes, he sounds weary.

"The day I know it's wrong, I'm dropping it," Hagelstein said, almost sounding like he yearned for that time. "If someone can explain to me (it's not real), I would stop."

Source: The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2004/07/27/heating_up_a_cold_theory/

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Articles this issue:

The Kensington and Heavener Runestones: Dispelling the Myth
The Vikings were possibly the first Europeans to set foot in the New World in 1012 AD. But were they also the first white men to discover Minnesota and Oklahoma? Based on current archaeological evidence, Viking explorations into the North American interior seem unlikely and many of these stones now appear to have been a hoax perpetrated for profit or were actually 19th-century boundary markers.

Nevada's Haunted Goldfield Hotel
Located halfway between Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, the once magnificent Goldfield Hotel now stands dark and empty, an imposing four-story building in a town that time has left behind. Even though the hotel is the most prominent symbol of Goldfield's former glory, it is also considered to be one of the most haunted buildings in the United States.

Mind over Machine: New Discoveries on the Power of Consciousness
Conventional science tells us that the mind has no direct power over matter. However, The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory has determined that the mind does indeed influence physical processes. With decades of hard experimentation to back them up, they argue for a view of reality that is much more mysterious than what current science holds to be true.

Plus, The Dark Fairies of Stéphane Lord

Columns:
Mysteries of Science - Easter Island's Walking Stones

Urban Legends - Setting the Stereotype of the Serial Killer Straight

Archaeological Finds - Ötzi the Iceman's Profile Completed

http://www.mysteriesmagazine.com