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Born in Istanbul on july 31st, 1923, Ahmet Ertegun might never have come to America, which he later called “the land of cowboys, Indians, Chicago gangsters, beautiful brown-skinned women and jazz,” if the Ottoman Empire had not suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Allies during World War I. Occupied by foreign forces, the empire began crumbling in the face of an all-out rebellion led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a former army major general who would become the father of modern Turkey.

In 1920, Ahmet’s father, Mehmet Munir (he added the surname Ertegun in 1936), a graduate of Istanbul University whose father was a civil servant and whose mother was the daughter of a Sufi sheik, was sent by the sultan to persuade Ataturk to lay down his arms. Switching sides, Mehmet decided instead to become Ataturk’s legal adviser. Two years later, Mehmet was sent to the international conference at which the Treaty of Lausanne was signed on July 24th, 1923, setting the borders of modern Turkey and extending diplomatic recognition to the new republic.

In 1925, Mehmet was named minister to Switzerland and moved with his wife, Hayrunisa; his two sons, Nesuhi and Ahmet; and his daughter, Selma, to Bern. In rapid succession, Mehmet served as ambassador to France (where Ahmet first learned to speak French, the traditional language of the court in Turkey) and then to the Court of St. James (where Ahmet was taught English, which he spoke with a French accent, by a governess who had worked at Buckingham Palace).


In 1932, when Ahmet was nine, his older brother took him to see Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington at the London Palladium.... Two years later, Ahmet was delighted to learn his father had been posted to Washington to serve as Turkey’s first ambassador to the United States during President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. Expecting to be thrust into an America he had only experienced through music, Ahmet was sent instead to the Landon School, an all-boys institution run like a British public school. He then attended St. Albans, whose graduates include Al Gore and George H.W. Bush’s father, Prescott. However, as Ahmet would later note, “I got my real education at the Howard.” Located in the heart of the black district, the Howard was the nation’s first theater built for black audiences and entertainers. At the Howard, the greatest stars of the day – Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton – performed. “As I grew up,” Ahmet would later say, “I began to discover a little bit about the situation of black people in America and experienced an immediate empathy with the victims of such senseless discrimination. Because although the Turks were never slaves, they were regarded as enemies within Europe because of their Muslim beliefs.”

..On Sunday afternoons, the brothers turned the Turkish Embassy into an open house where visiting jazz musicians would jam together in a huge parlor. According to Ahmet, his father soon began receiving letters from outraged Southern senators, saying, “It has been brought to my attention, sir, that a person of color was seen entering your house by the front door. I have to inform you that in our country, this is not a practice to be encouraged.” Mehmet responded by writing, “In my home, friends enter by the front door – however, we can arrange for you to enter from the back.”..

In 1946, Ahmet and his friends Herb and Miriam Abramson talked Waxie Maxie into putting up the money to start two labels: the gospel-based Jubilee, and Quality, which focused on jazz. After their first few records went nowhere, Waxie Maxie decided he wanted out. Somehow, Ahmet persuaded Dr. Vahdi Sabit, a Turkish dentist who had been a longtime family friend, to mortgage his home and loan Ahmet $10,000 to start his own label in New York. In 1947, Atlantic Records was born... When the Army called Herb Abramson up in 1953 to serve in Germany during the Korean War, Ahmet brought in the Billboard writer who six years earlier had coined the term “rhythm & blues.” Jerry Wexler, an intense, brilliant former street kid from Manhattan’s Washington Heights section, became a partner in Atlantic Records for $2,063.25...

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Michael Korda (born 8 October 1933) is an English-born writer and novelist who was editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.

Born in London, Michael Korda is the son of English actress Gertrude Musgrove and the Hungarian-Jewish artist and film production designer Vincent Korda. He is the nephew of film magnate Sir Alexander Korda and his brother Zoltan Korda, both of whom were film directors.[1] Korda grew up in the UK but received part of his education in France where his father had worked with film director Marcel Pagnol. As a child, Korda also lived in the United States from 1941 to 1946.[1] He was schooled at the private Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford.[1] He served in the Royal Air Force[2] doing intelligence work in Germany.[1]

The novelist Graham Greene was a lifelong friend. Korda met him on his Uncle Alex Korda's yacht..

Korda moved to New York City in 1957 where he worked for playwright Sidney Kingsley as a research assistant and then later as a freelance reader in the CBS story department.[1] In 1958 he joined the book publishing firm Simon & Schuster, beginning as an assistant editor, which included the task of reading slush pile manuscripts for Henry Simon..

Korda was a major figure in the book industry, publishing numerous works by high-profile writers and personalities such as William L. Shirer, Will and Ariel Durant, Harold Robbins,[1] Irving Wallace,[1] Richard Nixon, Richard Rhodes and Ronald Reagan. Korda was a major part of Simon & Schuster for more than forty years. In the autumn of 1994, he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer. In 1997 he wrote Man to Man, which recounted his medical experience. In 2000, he published Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, about the world of publishing...

Michael Korda was married to Carolyn "Casey" Keese from 1958 until their divorce in 1978.[1][6] They had one child together, Chris, a musician and founder of the Church of Euthanasia.

Later in 1978, Korda married Margaret Mogford, a former fashion model and the former wife of photographer Burt Glinn

Hungarian-born Alexander Korda was a hustler, master filmmaker, and once employed Winston Churchill. He’s now the subject of a monthlong season at the British Film Institute

Alexander Korda, left, with his brother Vincent Korda. (Courtesy BFI National Archive)

LONDON — He was Britain’s first film knight, honored in 1942 for his contribution to cinema. He was the man behind films such as the moody iconic thriller “The Third Man,” starring Orson Welles, and produced and directed in the United States, Europe and Britain.

Seventy-seven years later, Sir Alexander Korda is being remembered throughout January with a British Film Institute season of some of his best-known films, big hits across the world in the 1930s and 1940s.... it is argued that the filmmaker was knighted not just for his cinema work, but also for his shadowy behind-the-scenes activities.

Much of that was due to his relationship with the future British prime minister Winston Churchill, whom Korda employed as a screenwriter during the 1930s when Churchill’s political life was in the doldrums.

Korda — who worked closely with his two brothers, Vincent and Zoltan — was born Sandor Kellner in 1893 in an isolated Hungarian village. The young Kellner attended the local Jewish school until he was 8 years old.. As an adult, Korda, who died in 1956, claimed to be a member of the Hungarian Reformed Church, and Zoltan was the only one of the three brothers to have a Jewish funeral. But probably, where necessary, Korda flourished his Jewish background — not least in his endlessly tricky dealings with such Hollywood heavyweights as Sam Goldwyn and UK Jewish film grandee Michael Balcon (grandfather of actor Daniel Day-Lewis).

...Colonel Claude Dansey, who had served with Churchill in the same regiment during the Boer War, introduced the two men. Dansey had become head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in Rome, and the general conclusion is that Korda himself was “born to be a spy” — manipulative, duplicitous, multi-lingual, and with a taste for intrigue.

So in 1937 Dansey arranged with Korda that London Film Productions would provide cover for his agents in Europe, an arrangement which lasted throughout the war years. The secret agents were able to work in European capitals while pretending to be screenwriters or film researchers.

British intelligence may well have had a shadowy hand in Korda’s early film success; in return, he played a part in persuading America to join the war, by making a well-received “propaganda” film, “That Hamilton Woman,” said to be Churchill’s favorite film. It will also be screened during the season...

What happens when a crazy team of merry pranksters engages in outrageous street theater antics inspired by the Dada and Situationist traditions in order to hack into the media and draw attention to unpopular, important ideas about environmental sustainability, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom?..

Vermin Supreme is the world's most interesting presidential candidate. He's well know for promising a free pony to every American should he be elected and for turning anti-gay politicians gay by sprinkling glitter on them. He was the subject of my first feature-length documentary, Who Is Vermin Supreme? An Outsider Odyssey, and the Church of Euthanasia's official Church Clown before he escaped the Church and was deprogrammed.

NEOPAGANISM

Because the focus of much conspiracy research has been dirverted to the Federal Reserve, UFOs, “the Jews” and even the Jesuits, it has failed to apprehend the most important development of occultism in modern times and the source of transhumanism.

Until recently, occultism was dominated by societies like the Golden Dawn, or Aleister Crowley’s OTO. While the influences of these societies are still central, they have proliferated in entirely new ways. While once associated with solemn candlelit rituals and dark incantations performed by robed mystics, occultism has a new face, and it’s the pranksterism of a bizarre parody religion called Discordianism, founded by a close friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kerry Thornley.

The principles of Discordianism are mockery. But it’s jocularity hides a more sinister agenda, which is the prejudice that nothign is sacred, underlying their bigroty towards “traditional religions.”

The principles of Discordianism were in part developed in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, speculative fiction novels co-authored by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. But Discordianism began with Greg Hill (aka Malaclypse the Younger or Mal-2) and Kerry Thornley (aka Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst or Lord Omar), who were drawn together by their common interest in humanism, atheism, black magic, hypnotism and their own deranged sense of humor. The Discordian Society was founded after the 1965 publication of its first holy book, the Principia Discordia.

According to historian Carole Cusack, the modern pagan revival is largely understood to be the result of the influence of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, whose rituals were developed with Aleister Crowley.[1] Whenever something goes wrong, pagans will typically pronounce, “Hail Discordia!” in reverence of the goddess of chaos of Discordianism. Margot Adler in Drawing Down the Moon, which provided the first comprehensive look at modern nature-based religions in the US, credits Thornley for being the first to coin the word “pagan” to refer to the various occult movements who paraded themselves as “nature” religions.

The modern popularization of the terms “pagan” and “neopagan,” as they are currently understood, is largely traced to Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, co-founder of the Church of All Worlds (CAW), which was heavily influenced by Discordianism. CAW was influenced by OTO member Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. In the science-fiction novel, a Martian-raised human named Michael Valentine Smith founded The Church of All Worlds, preached sexual freedom and the truth of all religions, and is martyred by narrow-minded people who are not ready for his teachings.”[2]

..Garrison suspected that the Discordian Society itself was a CIA front. What especially incriminated Thornley was his public celebration on the announcement of JFK’s murder, and the fact that he would introduce himself as follows: “I’m Kerry Thornley. I masterminded the assassination—how do you do?”[4] Garrison finally charged Thornley with perjury after he denied he had been in contact with Oswald since 1959. The perjury charge was eventually dropped by Garrison’s successor Harry Connick, Sr., father of the successful singer and movie actor Harry Connick, Jr.

THE SINGULARITY
R.U. Sirius became a leading figure in the transhumanist movement. He was editor of H+ Magazine, published by Humanity+, after it changed its name from the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), following a rebranding effort. Notable contributors include Michael Moorcock, Woody Evans, John Shirley, James Hughes, Douglas Rushkoff and Rudy Rucker.

The WTA was founded in 1998 by Nick Bostrom and David Pearce. Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher at St. Cross College of Oxford, and holds a PhD from the London School of Economics. Bostrom is the author of over 200 publications, on the theme of transhumanism, and has been listed in Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list.

Nick Bostrom founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). A fellow of IEET is David Eagleman, an American neuroscientist and writer at Baylor College of Medicine, who worked with James Eagan Holmes, the infamous orange-haired perpetrator of the Aurora Shooting in Colorado.

Bostrom is also on the advisory board of Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI, formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence), where Ray Kurzweil, the modern-day prophet of transhumanism, is one of its directors. A non-profit organization founded in 2000, MIRI advocates ideas initially put forth by I. J. Good and Vernor Vinge regarding an “intelligence explosion,” or Singularity, which MIRI thinks may follow the creation of sufficiently advanced AI.[38]

MIRI’s Director of Research was Ben Goertzel, an American author, mathematician and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. An advocate of psychedelics, Goertzel is also on the Advisory Board of the Timothy Leary Archive maintained by Michael Horowitz, father of Wynona Ryder. In 1996 Goertzel together with Francis Heylighen founded the Global Brain Group to study the global brain emerging from an increasingly intelligent Internet.

The MIRI’s advisory board includes PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Foresight Institute co-founder Christine Peterson. Christine Peterson, who coined the term “Open Source,” is co-founder of Foresight Institute, which focuses on promoting nanotechnology, making technology information available to all, and enabling space settlement. In 2006, the MIRI, along with the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford, the Center for Study of Language and Information, KurzweilAI.net, and Peter Thiel, co-sponsored the Singularity Summit at Stanford. The 2012 Singularity Summit was held at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, in San Francisco.[39]