by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

The insurance industry, like other arms of finance, was centered in New York, until, in the late 1800s, an industry-wide failure, a massive default where claims went unpaid, made it so that no one would buy insurance from a company with a New York address. So the industry moved en masse to Hartford... Connecticut, my hometown.

A very pleasant 2-hour drive away (as long as you avoided rush hour), with a dear university friend living in the City, I visited New York regularly. Once while we were walking down some street in lower Manhattan, my buddy noticing a fortune-teller's sign in a window, took us up the building's front stairs and into her parlor. There the gypsy (a bad word, "Roma" is politically correct) read his palm. After he paid, when she offered to read mine, I replied, "I don't want to know."

I don't even like to look at the weather forecast. I certainly don't want to know my future. Speaking of knowing the future...

Wernher von Braun was in charge of the Nazi's rocket program. His V1, the "flying bomb," was fully operational. But it flew horizontally and therefore (thanks to radar, England's secret weapon) could be intercepted by allied aircraft. His V2 flew steeply up, into the stratosphere, and then steeply down, making interception impossible. Luckily for the allies, including New York City, it was never fully deployed, its development interrupted by the end of the war.

At the end of the war, when the Soviets were coming from the east and the Americans (and British) were coming from the west, any Nazi with anything to trade ran to the west. No one wanted to be captured by the "Slavs." Von Braun was captured by the Americans, and in the early 60s (after some initial program failures that were someone else's fault) von Braun was put in charge of NASA. His Saturn V rocket put our man on the moon.

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, like von Braun, builds rockets. Musk's SpaceX has completely replaced NASA as the means of delivering satellites and things into outer space.

Elon, you may have noticed, is quite enthusiastic about colonizing the planet Mars. Apparently now is the time, as, based on planetary orbits, we are entering a window where the journey between our planets will be its shortest; we're lining up.

It just so happens that Wernher von Braun was also interested in colonizing Mars. A novel he wrote on the subject, Mars Project has been in the news lately. The weird, newsworthy item about the book is that in it von Braun named the leader of the Mars colony "Elon."

Physicists are perplexed by the fact that we never see time flowing in reverse. This despite the fact that there's nothing to stop it from doing so, not one law of science. But studies may have encountered the phenomenon. Tests measuring brain electrical activity have shown that there is a knowing-before-the-fact. The brain anticipates what will appear on the screen (a pleasurable or a discomforting image) a fraction of a second before it appears.

In the world of the arts, there are therapies (Family Constellations among them) whose effectiveness is said to be based on the adult person involved in the therapy sending back comfort and understanding to their traumatized, confused younger self.

Sure. Why not? There are enough striking synchronicities in my life to convince me that there is some intelligent web behind the seemingly unguided happenings in my life, maybe not all of them, and maybe, at times, a very gossamer web. The meaning of these coincidences is another question, but coincidences themselves make obvious, to me at least, that there is more going on than meets the eye.

And there are, I have no doubt, highly intuitive people, who can divine, who can read that web. My dear friend Veronica is one of them.

After the local Waldorf school closed and Veronica lost her teaching position, she was looking for a new source of income. With a master's degree in the field, she wanted to expand the small therapy practice she had with children, and she has. But, knowing that building a practice takes time, I advised her to pursue other ends as well, ends that would pay the rent in the short term, particularly reading Tarot cards.

Over a decade ago she walked away from an acclaimed, lucrative career as a reader of Tarot, mostly because she became frustrated at not being able to offer her clients any practical way to move forward, to improve what she saw for them in the cards: "They just kept coming back with the same issue."

Necessity being what it is she let it be known, and the news spread on the gossamer web, that she was reading Tarot again, and clients (Zoom is a wonderful thing) began arriving.

Incorporating the therapies she has studied over the last decade, she now practices "Therapeutic Tarot," offering her clients a way towards a brighter future.

I'm happy for them and for her... and for myself as now I can stop loaning her money to pay her rent.

A super-genius friend of mine would take the fact that von Braun named the leader of his Mars colony Elon as further evidence (for him there is so much) that this world is a "clown show," that a malevolent spiritual force is screwing around with us, preventing the arrival of the paradise that would result if we all just learned to share.

Such considerations are above my pay grade. But if there is a misguided Gnostic Demiurge ruining everything, then my community-building internet project is at war with it.

Lokkal is all about sharing: information and profits. Lokkal is a local internet eco-system (like Facebook and Instagram are global eco-systems). It's not a "website." It's a platform, an internet common, a curated digital town square, like the Yellow Pages robustly reborn.

We, the residents, can present our city to the planet better than remote, global, commercial interests. And, keeping advertising dollars circulating in our community (redistributing the wealth, dollars that are currently being extracted from our community by remote, global, commercial interests: Facebook, Google, et al.) will bring us much closer to paradise.

I think that von Braun time-traveled. Seeing in the future another rocket man with dreams of colonizing Mars named Elon, he named the hero of his novel Elon. Or maybe he saw further, to an actual Mars colony, under the beneficent rule of Mr. Musk. Or maybe Elon traveled back in time and whispered in von Braun's ear while he was writing his novel. Or maybe there is a gossamer quantum web. And maybe, with my Lokkal project, I am just a little ahead of my time.

Read more here. And, please, contribute by clicking the Start button up top or the Donate button below.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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