In what might have been the best New York real estate deal since the Dutch bought Manhattan in 1626 for $24 usd/ $33 cad in trinkets, one of New York’s historic properties, which includes a 38-room Victorian mansion, a 10,000-square-foot guest home, a stone bowling alley, a carriage house, a gatehouse, and much more on 2,078 acres, has hit the market for $65 million usd/ $ 89,101,000 cad. The property last sold for just $500,000 usd / $685,600 cad in 1963, when Standard Oil president Walter C. Teagle sold the long-neglected property to brothers Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon family fortune. If it gets its asking price, it will more than triple the record for a real estate sale price in the Millbrook area, which currently stands at $19 million usd/ $26,053,000 cad.
The Hitchcock estate, also known as Daheim (“at home” in German), became infamous in the 1960s as the domain of Harvard psychologist-turned-LSD-evangelist Timothy Leary, who used the property for psychedelic experimentation for five years. Nina Graboi, an influential figure in the psychedelic movement, described the scene as “a cross between a country club, a madhouse, a research institute, a monastery, and a Fellini movie set.” Considered “the most dangerous man in America” by Richard Nixon, Leary hosted such counterculture luminaries as Allen Ginsberg and attracted frequent raids by the FBI, which eventually caused him to leave. The estate fell into disrepair but has undergone extensive renovations in recent years that have restored it to its former glory. Photo Credit Tyler Blodgett/ Heather Croner Real Estate Sotheby’s International Realty
Not since the British boarded the USS
Chesapeake off the coast of Virginia in 1807 had an American Naval
commander surrendered his ship in peacetime.
The ship was the USS Pueblo (AGER-2), a
177-foot Technical Research Ship (TRS) with a crew of 83 officers and
men. It was seized in international waters off the coast of North
Korea on January 23, 1968. The ship’s captain was Commander Lloyd
M. “Pete” Bucher, and his superior officer, with headquarters in
Japan, was Rear Admiral Frank L. Johnson, USN. The President at the
time was Lyndon Bayes Johnson.
At the time of the seizure, the Pueblo was disguised as a hydrographic vessel of the AGER (Auxiliary, General Environmental Research) type. Along with $1.5 million USD (about $11.9 million USD / $16,300,000 CAD in 2024 dollars when adjusting for inflation) in highly-classified SIGINT (signal intelligence) cryptographic equipment, the Pueblo also carried hundreds of pounds of U.S. Navy, Naval Security Group (NSG), National Security Agency (NSA), and other documents; also on the spy ship was a position devoted to monitoring Soviet telemetry.
The Pueblo was spying mainly on North Korean radar and the Soviet fleet.
One crewman died, and several others
were wounded, when North Korean gunboats opened fire on the
lightly-armed reconnaissance ship. After eleven months of sometimes
brutal detention and an American confession that was quickly
disavowed, the crew was released, along with the body of Fireman
Duane Hodges, USN.
During Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, he swore there would never again be a “Pueblo Incident.” Five months after election day, however, President Nixon faced his own North Korean crisis, when, for the second time in fifteen months, a small, isolated North Korea, which Nixon had described as a “fourth-rate power,” attacked a U.S. Navy EC-121 spy plane, killing everyone onboard.
Mission BX-6847 Flight Path — January 26 1968
On April 15, 1969, North Koreans celebrated the birth of Kim Il-sung, the leader and founder of the “Hermit Kingdom.” Birthday cheers were quickly replaced by the familiar shouts of “Down with U.S. imperialism” and “Liberate the South” when it was announced that MiG fighters had shot down a U.S. Navy EC-121 spy plane which North Korea claimed had intruded into its airspace. The shootdown, by one or two air-to-air missiles, took the lives of 31 Americans. Some of the debris also had what was reported as “shrapnel holes.”
Due to the EC-121’s proximity to Vladivostok, USSR, the main naval base of the Pacific Fleet in the Soviet Far East, the first vessels on the scene were Soviet; so the Nixon administration requested Soviet assistance to locate debris and possible survivors.
This four-day joint U.S.-Soviet search and rescue operation became a rare example of cooperation between traditional Cold War adversaries. In Air Reservist (magazine), the official publication of the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, the Russians were described as “improbable allies.”
Pueblo in Wonsan Harbor — close-up
One of the first Soviet vessels to arrive was the Steregushchiy, a large anti-submarine (ASW) ship; another was the Soviet destroyer Vdokhnovennyi. A lengthy version of this story, which will appear under the title “Improbable Allies,” relies heavily on the first-hand accounts of three Russian sailors aboard the Vdokhnovennyi, including Felix Gromov, the ship’s executive officer. Later, Admiral Gromov became the Commander-in-Chief of the entire Russian Navy! For the Silo, by Bill Streifer.
Bill Streifer is a freelance journalist on North Korean history and related topics. His co-author, Irek Sabitov, is a journalist and former newspaper editor in Ufa, Russia. Their article on the subject will appear in the Autumn 2019 issue of the U.S. Navy War College Review. He is also the only American on the Editorial Board of Vostok (“East” in Russian), a journal on the Orient, published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
Paul Jenkins – The West and a Workable New World Order?
From: Paul Jenkins
To: Global governance observers
Date: May 2, 2024
Re: The West and a Workable New World Order?
One can describe the so-called liberal world order as a set of ideas for organizing world democracies. While openness and trade, rules and institutions, and co-operative security have been the principles that have shaped the liberal order, it also required sovereign nation states to provide the foundation for the creation and development of a system of intergovernmental organizations, or system of global governance.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the system was designed primarily for the advancement, economically and politically, of Europe and the United States. Yet since 1945 the liberal world order has evolved, giving impetus to the steady increase in global economic integration to the benefit of many nations and people.
Advances in science and technology have been critical to the evolution of the liberal order, but there has also been a need for the structures of global governance to evolve and keep pace.
On the economic front, for example, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, following Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the dollar’s link to gold, gave rise to the creation of the G7. And the Asian Crisis of 1999 led to the creation of the G20.
Throughout the entire postwar period, however, tensions inherent between the sovereign authority of the nation-state and the need for collective global governance increasingly challenged the liberal order.
Indeed, the advent of the Cold War led to the liberal world order becoming hegemonic, organized around the economic and political strength of the United States with its dominance of global governance through the various institutions making up the global governance system.
But over the years, pushback took hold. As the benefits of global economic integration spread and the United States was no longer the singular engine of growth, both democratic and autocratic countries found voice and began to resist the principles that shaped the liberal order. Even core nations of the liberal order began to voice their concerns in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis as the market-based financial system failed to self-regulate (as had been advertised), and as the liberal order proved unable to provide social protection for those adversely affected by globalization.
Effectively, a new world order began to unfold, with the resulting slowing and even fragmentation [DS1][PJ2] of global economic integration.
At the same time though, virtually all nations, regardless of regime or stage of development, are facing the same challenges: Financial instabilities, rising inequality, weak productivity growth, climate change, spread of infectious disease, AI, cyber security and on and on.
These vulnerabilities represent global risks that can only be tackled and minimized through collective action. This in turn requires a new world order that treats the world as it is, not how we wish it to be.
What does this mean for the West, and in particular the United States and Canada?
The unique advantages of the United States are its open society, fair and law-based market economy, and allure for talent from around the world. To sustain these advantages, maintaining its wealth and its position as the centre of the free world, it cannot close its doors to further global economic integration.
Geopolitically, what might this look like?
John Ikenberry argues that the answer can be found in the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-intervention of the Westphalian system, the 1648 treaties that ended the Thirty Years’ War and established the modern nation state. The key insight of the Westphalian system is that all countries are vulnerable to the same global risks. The leap forward in mindset that is required is the acceptance that states are the rightful political units of legitimate rule.
For the West, and the United States in particular, this implies the need to accept these new realities, and in so doing, the need to work together to build a new world order that preserves their liberal democratic values, and those of its allies, while at the same time recognizing that the economic challenges they face are not unique to them.
The unfolding relationship between the United States and China will define whether we achieve a workable new world order.
The economic incentives are there for this to happen.
For China, the incentive is further progress in closing both its internal income gap as well as the gap between itself and the developed world. The payoff would be setting in place the foundation for a sustained rise in living standards for all its citizens.
For the United States, the incentive is in preserving its strength as an open society and its vision of the world that has considered the interests of others. In many respects, it remains uniquely capable of playing the central role in sustaining the global economic system.
The challenge in re-imagining such a new world order is geopolitical. The task is to renew global governance with today’s realities in sharp focus.
Paul Jenkins. Mister Jenkins is a former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada and a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute.
Theodore “T.R.” Roosevelt, Jr. was an American politician, author, naturalist, soldier, explorer, mason and historian who served as the 26th President of the United States.
When one thinks of U.S. Presidents and UFOs several of our Chief Executives come to mind. Firstly, there is President Eisenhower purportedly meeting aliens at Edwards Air Force Base in 1954.
Then there is JFK’s memo to the CIA asking for disclosure on UFOs ten days before his assassination.
More humorously but perhaps true is the story of Richard Nixon treating comedian Jackie Gleason to a view of dead alien Grays at Homestead Air Force Base in 1974. But what about Teddy Roosevelt?
Is anyone in the UFOlogy Community even aware of a documented UFO sighting over the 26th US president’s home, Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, New York on August 1, 1907 when he was in his second term of office?
According to an old clipping found by UFOlogist Kay Massingill from a newspaper called the D.C. Evening Star dated August 2, 1907, two events of a mysterious nature occurred in the town of Oyster Bay in a twenty-four hour period and both concerned Mr. Roosevelt.
In the latter, the town librarian Miss Denton opened up the library on the morning of the 1st and discovered a beautiful mahogany chair donated by Teddy to the museum from his days as Governor of New York had split down the backside sometime the night before. More peculiar was the fact that on the reverse back of the chair was the Bald Eagle Seal of the United States of America and it was split in half! An ominous sign indeed! Was it an omen?
However, the main event occurred the evening before between the hours of 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. when a brilliant white light was seen to hang motionless over Sagamore Hill.
According to the dispatch, it was a light “considerably larger than a star” and hung about 300 feet in altitude over the house according to numerous witnesses. It was an “intense white light” and after 11 p.m. it began to fade to a spark and then extinguished. Meanwhile in the library a short distance away, a chair associated with Sagamore Hill’s occupant was coming undone in a most mysterious way.
The home on Sagamore Hill
Was Mr. Roosevelt home the night of the UFO sighting? The article doesn’t say and we’ll probably never know but it is known that Sagamore was called Roosevelt’s Summer White House and it was the middle of summer.
So the main question to ask is why! Why would a ball of light attend to Mr. Roosevelt in the heat of 1907? Two clues can be found concerning his agenda as President that year.
One clue was his December 3, 1907 Annual Address to Congress. The speech is mundane for the most part dealing with anti-trust actions, railroads, the Department of Agriculture, conservation, unions and such but near the end of it Roosevelt begins to lay out the groundwork for creating the world’s most dominant modern navy. It seemed Roosevelt had a great grasp of what was happening in the world concerning Japan, Germany and China and their eventual rise on the world’s stage. He specifically recommended dredging Pearl Harbor to make it a world class naval base and increasing Alaska’s defenses. Did he know something about the world no one else did? His maneuvering just months after the Sagamore Hill incident directly led to America’ emergence as the modern world’s greatest Suprerpower. Did he have help from E.T. whispering in his ear? During his tenure America’s Navy grew from 5th to 3rd in the world in size.
The second clue is the very interesting coincidence of the Second International Peace Convention held at The Hague, Netherlands that year from June 15 to October 18, 1907 which was during the Sagamore Hill sighting. That convention was the brainchild of none other than Teddy Roosevelt! It was an attempt to codify the rules of war – particularly naval warfare. More importantly, it was seen as the world’s first attempt at an international governing body – a forerunner to the League of Nations and the United Nations.
So one could ask if possibly aliens (or time travelers for that matter) were attempting to lay out the groundwork for (or interfere with) the earth’s direction in the 20th and 21st centuries and might they have been in contact with our Presidents long before Mr. Eisenhower’s 1954 encounter? To see the complete newspaper clipping go to http://www.worldufowatch.com/historical_newspaper_clippings
For the Silo, Robert Spearing- publisher of www.worldufowatch.com From Filer’s Files 04-2015
