General Ulysses S. Grant.

Friends,
Back at the end of 2008 and months before Barack Obama became officially the President of the United States, I published these cautionary prophecies:

“Many are the challenges expected to beset Obama in his first year in office. One that has at the time of this writing in the final days of 2008 been pushed low on the laundry list may be the most unexpectedly onerous problem to emerge now that jobs are becoming scarce. How will America stem the flood of illegals from Mexico and what to do with upwards of 25 million illegal aliens already in America competing for jobs…?”

Chapter 7: Obama’s Experiments:
A Year of Trials and Errors, Pg. 81,
Predictions for 2009

Recently, the Arizona legislature passed and sent for Governor Jan Brewer’s signature a controversial immigration bill granting police officers wide discretionary powers to determine whether anyone they pull over for questioning or arrest is an illegal alien. Those opposed to the law claim it actually gives police a green light to profile people of Hispanic descent to demand proof of citizenship as a way to pogrom purge Arizona of an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants. A few days later on the 121st anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birthday, the press and “blogo-pinion” pages were choked with articles protesting the new law as nothing less than a Nazi Gestapo-like edict, directed at one ethnic group, no less onerous to Hispanics living in American forced to show proof of legal citizenship than Stormtroopers in Deutschland tying Star-of-David armbands around the arms of German Jews.

Those celebrating the law say the Nazi comparison is a bit of mixed metaphoric history. Jewish people were legal citizens singled out for insane persecution. Nazis believed it was their race not their papers that weren’t “in order.” The new hard-arming law in Arizona is an economics rather than eugenics dispute, wherein it just so happens that one ethnic group is singled out for straining the public services, taking jobs away from legal citizens whilst staying off the tax rolls that sustain said services. They are avoiding being put on the tax rolls whilst pulling legal Americans off the tax rolls by taking their jobs on the cheap. Rather than pass a law that goes after legal American citizens who underpay and hire illegal labor, Arizona goes for the back-door pogrom of Mexicans. However, let us be fair, it also happens that the one ethnic group coming across the border in their millions to join other immigrants seeking the American dream have dragged along a Mexican nightmare of gangland organized crime and drug cartel warfare killing legal US citizens and illegals alike especially in US southern border states. It is this final issue that helped the new law in Arizona pass a short time after a Caucasian rancher was shot down by a Mexican drug cartel illegal heading into America trespassing his property.

In Predictions for 2009 and in blog articles, I presaged Obama postponing taking on the immigration reform issue until 2010. I also warned the following:

“The year 2009 will see the racism friction point in American society shift from black on white to black, white and yellow on Hispanics. The new trend in class discrimination and racism will start at the end of 2009, deepening in 2010. Civil Rights struggles achieved at last an African American becoming president. On Obama’s watch, a new Civil Rights movement of Hispanics emerges.”

Chapter 7: Obama’s Experiments:
A Year of Trials and Errors, Pg. 81,
Predictions for 2009

A growing force of legal citizens pass laws supporting a state’s right to act while a federal government pontificates and procrastinates on immigration reform. State’s rights now collide against an equally growing force of those who say the human rights of illegal Mexican immigrants are more important.

My oracle’s interest in this issue began in outlined notes from readings dated as far back as December 2007. It seems time to present what I outlined then — finalized in March 2008 — then put in my stock of blog articles to “age” for future release.

Today, I pull this “bottle” from my scrying wine cellar and uncork a bitter bouquet bringing to pallet and mind the sulphide taste of national karma behind the controversy of Mexican illegal immigration and how this aftertaste will affect America’s political and social future in the next 30 years.

***

In 1846, a US president-to-be, skillfully galloped through a screen of Mexican snipers in the streets of Monterrey, Mexico, to deliver a dispatch requesting more ammunition be sent up to the front lines. The young lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant of the quartermaster’s department of Zackary Taylor’s invading US army had volunteered, ever eager to see front line action. In his own words Grant relates:

“We were at this time occupying the ground off from the street, in the rear of the houses. My ride back was an exposed one. Before starting I adjusted myself on the side of my horse furthest from the enemy, and with only one foot holding to the cantle of the saddle, and an arm over the neck of the horse exposed, I started at full run.” (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant)

The accomplished equestrian timed his darting through street crossings so that volleys of Mexican muskets thundered after he had disappeared behind the next line of buildings.

Sixteen years ahead, “General” Grant would become President Abraham Lincoln’s commander-in-chief of all Union forces in 1864. He would win the Civil War in 1865 and receive history’s mixed judgment as America’s 18th president for two terms (1869-1877). Grant ended his days writing one of the finest memoirs in American literature while in the last agonizing throws of terminal throat cancer. He died in 1885 at the age of 63.

About the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) he wrote:

“Generally the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation [of Mexican territory] was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory…

“The Mexican War was a political war and the [Polk] administration conducting it desired to make political capital out of it…The Southern Rebellion [US Civil War] was largely the outcome of the Mexican War…Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.” (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant)

The collective karmic punishment of the US Civil War may not be the only karmic atonement left for America to endure. The flood of illegal Mexican immigration is the next stage of karmic retribution for the Mexican-American War. A US invasion of Mexico conceived by President Polk’s imperialist aspirations for territory. Polk and the US Army aggressed a unilateralist strategy defined by Grant in his memoirs as provoking a fight, “but it was essential that Mexico should start it.”

The United States provoked and got their border clash with Mexico in 1846. Then they robbed it of a third of its territory — territory that enjoyed the California gold rush a few years later in 1849, and the promise of other bounteous natural resources that inspired the great America westward migration that later made the United States a vast North American giant. No one will ever know what future evolution Mexico could have followed if there had been no disaster of US invasion and occupation. Perhaps Mexico’s elite class of plutocratic oligarchs would have still become more entrenched with more territory and resources at their disposal, keeping the masses of Mexican indentured peasants under their tyranny farther into the 20th century.

It cannot be denied that Mexico’s course towards becoming a fully modern and developed nation was postponed by its loss of territory and potential treasure, while America, seizing Mexico’s richest resourced territories, such as California, became the pinnacle of developed nations.

Slowly, inexorably, Mexicans are returning to what they now call Azitlan or El Norte. They aim to profit and live on US occupied Mexican territory.

In a documented prediction made at the end of 2007, originally intended for Predictions for 2008, I close this entry today with this unedited prophecy:

The era ending political borders begins with 2008. It cannot be stopped. It cannot be contained. New solutions to immigration must be sought; otherwise, the next 36 years will see border wars and the Balkanization of the US Southwestern states alongside Mexico. It could lead to Mexico taking back the US Southwest. US national karma comes full circle from President Polk’s imperialistic conquest of a third of Mexico in 1846–1847 during the Mexican-American War.

I have many more predictions logged on this theme. See Predictions for 2009. Please read them in the chapter entitled, Obama’s Experiments: A Year of Trials and Errors.

***

Oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico blowing up on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday, causing a vast oil slick that I predict will remain uncapped for more than three months in what will be the greatest oil spill in history. An Icelandic volcano shutting down 100,000 flights in and out of Europe? April continues the escalation of what is forewarned to be a year full of natural and human disasters never seen before in living memory. Unless a new shocker should hit in the coming few days, my next blog will be part two in my monthly, Natural Disasters Quickening series on the signs that Mother Nature has declared war on human bad habits.

For a full account of predictions see: Predictions for 2010.

John Hogue

(02 May 2010)

History Channel's press launch of The Nostradamus Effect in the Latin American television market. Eighteen journalists attended the conference held in Hotel W, Chapultepec, Mexico City on 13 January 2010. You can see me (far right) answering their questions for about 90 minutes. My publicist, Rosemary Ravinal, is to my right.

MEXICO CITY—DAY 1
The Arrival and Grasshopper Hill
(12 Jan. 2010)

Friends,
Yesterday (24 January 2010) saw History Channel’s highly popular 12-episode series “The Nostradamus Effect” released across Mexico and Latin America in Portuguese and Spanish to a television market of 100 million people. The opening episode dealt with purported prophecies of doom from Leonardo Da Vinci. Next week (31 January) in one of four episodes in which I appear prominently the series will cover Nostradamus’ Third Antichrist prophecies. (For further information, see ¿El Tercer Anticristo?)

In early December, a few days after releasing my 16th book (and sixth eBook) Predictions for 2010, I received an invitation from History Channel to represent the series in their publicity campaign for Latin America. I felt honored being only one chosen from the series’ assembly of good prophetic scholars (and the unavoidable inclusion of a few popular and charismatic quacks spouting 2012 hysteria) to speak for the series in a press conference held in Mexico City. I was told History execs admired my balanced approach to controversial prophetic subjects.

For the record, I’m sure some of you would disagree with their assessment and think me a pontificator. At least I will do you all a favor and supply what I wish my colleagues and competitors on these Nostradamus/prophecy shows would qualify. None of us can really call ourselves the unquestioned messengers of long dead prophets who, if raised from the dead, Nostradamus and all, might pick their own bones of contention and throw them at our heads for what we “declare” was meant in their prophecies.

Your own intelligence, I hope, spares us the need to proffer redundant reminders that we scholars are offering our opinion — even when it seems many of my colleagues believe otherwise and think their utterances are gospel. Just know that when anyone asks me what Nostradamus said my answer is the same I gave to 18 journalists from across Mexico and Latin America in the conference pictured above.

What does Nostradamus say?

He says nothing for a very long time.

He’s been dead for nearly 450 years. I’m the one making statements here and they should be measured for their efficacy or fault upon the merits or merda of my intuition and scholarship by the test of time.

I flew into Mexico City for the first time a fortnight ago. Being a native Southern Californian (born in Hollywood, CA in 1955) I’ve deep down felt that I was not only an American by birth but also a citizen in spirit of Mexico. California was theirs before it was unilaterally seized in the American empire fever of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. It was good to fly into Mexico City overnight and be in the vibe and heart of Mexico in the wee morning hours of 12 January. That morning, looking beyond the wall-sized window of my magnificent 17th floor suite in swank Hotel W, mind and heart tried to imagine the Mexico of earlier times hidden beyond the veil of overpopulation, congestion and pall of smog that reduced visibility to a mere few miles. There would be no perchance to imagine views of a sprawling plateau of the Aztecs at a airy thin altitude of 7,300 ft. (2,240 meters) surrounded by mountains and picturesque volcanoes, such as 17,800 foot (5,426 m.) Popocatepetl. My lungs and throat, already constricted by an oncoming head cold now seized, sucked hard and sighed thin, smoggy air in disappointment.

At breakfast I met my American, History Channel publicist for the event, Rosemary Ravinal (A&E Ole Networks) from Miami and our Mexican hosts Daniel Garcia and Esteban Beulo of Beuló PR & Communications for breakfast and a round of Hotel W huevos rancheros. In my case, the “W” stands for Wow! I finished the huevos and could tell my hosts that now this Gringo from El Norte can say he’s had REAL Mexican food and not that oversized, over-cheesy-entombed, love-handle bun-busting, lard dripping Godzilla sized dollops we call “Mexican” food in the United States. Real Mexican food his handed to you in modest palm-full servings with a sprinkling of cheese that even this Vegan who eats eggs can enjoy. American Mexican food going for the big and loud flavors misses the subtleties in texture and tastes inherent in authentic Mexican fare.

Rosemary, Daniel and Esteban in our first actual meeting beyond the electronic remoteness of fax, email, phone and blackberry, planned the schedule of events for this day and the news conference for the next. They showed me the special room for the conference, which at the time was bare and uninteresting. Boy! Was I in for a surprise the next morning of the conference when Daniel and Esteban’s PR team performed their magic! On the first day, Rosemary devised a plan to mix tourism with work and through the magic of her blackberry. We hired a car to tour the city. I did my first interview (to Sao Paulo, Brazil) standing on a street in the old federal district of Coyoacán. The title comes from the Nahuatl Coyohuacan meaning, “place where they have coyotes.” The first Spanish conquerors of the Aztec empire built the earliest part of the colonial Mexico City there. Nostradamus was still a teenage student of Avignon University when Hernán Cortés and his lieutenants built their sprawling mansions where coyotes once forlicked nearly five centuries ago.

Beauty is where you look for it in the third largest and certainly the highest in altitude megalopolis in the world with 22 million people crammed and coughing under fowl fumes and ramshackle storefronts and crumbling apartments obscured behind a blight of huge billboards.

An abstract Aztec rendering of a grasshopper (a Chapol).

Mexico City has my sympathies. I am the son of another generally ugly sprawling metropolis, Los Angeles. There is beauty there if you know where to find it. Coyoacán is Mexico City at its most beautiful and oldest colonial charm. Yet, I get ahead of myself. Before Rosemary and I wound through crowded streets to get there, Juan, our chaffeur and tour guide took us to see the rock outcropping known in the Aztec Nahautl language as “Grasshopper Hill” (from the Nahautl Chapul-grasshopper, tepec-hill). Juan, a knowledgeable and grand old gentleman, said the Aztecs had a love for eating roasted grasshoppers. Soon the Chapul disappeared down Nahautl exulting mouths and in their place on the hill, they constructed a large temple in their honor.

After the Spanish came the temple monument was pulled down and its foundation used to raise Chapultepec Castle, the site of one of the last battles of the Mexican-American War. When we approached it, the very spot where our car got stuck before a red light in traffic happened to be the point where the American Nathaniel Currier had composed his tinted lithograph (c. 1847) of the then Mexican Military Academy with flagpole running up the US flag after American forces had charged up into the castle. There they clashed with six teenage Mexican cadets making their last stand in the tower. They are known in Mexico as Los Niños Héroes (the child heroes). The last boy warrior took down the Mexican flag, wrapped it around his body and jumped from the tower so the Americans running up the stairway tumbling over the bodies of his companions couldn’t capture it. It is said the American commander, Winfield Scott, saluted the flag wrapped corpse as he rode past to occupy Mexico City.

Chapultepec Castle.

Later, Chapultepec Castle became the palace residence of Mexican presidents and foreign usurpers, such as Archduke Maximilian of Austria and his fetching wife Princess Charlotte/Carlotta (played famously going mad by Betty Davis in the movies). The Mexican people overthrew these puppets of French Napoleon III and his Mexican monarchists allies in 1867. Chapultepec’s new tenant then became President Benito Juárez, the Abraham Lincon of Mexico. The turreted castle much redesigned by Maximilian radiates old world charm above the basalt brick foundation and parapets dipping down into an oasis of forested parkland — the realm of big eared squirrels, cockerels and parrots whose calls remind me of the parks of Pune, India, where I spent many years with my meditation teacher, Osho. Pune and Mexico City happen to be at nearly the same subtropical latitude.

Next stop after grasshopper hill, some coyote magic to be had where the coyotes once roamed. In part two of this three-part series, I’ll write about my pilgrimage to the house of one of the best coyote spirits of them all.

Viva la Vida! Frida.

John Hogue

(25 January 2010)

PS–Have you seen the Nostradamus Effect? If Spanish and Portuguese is your mother tongue, check out the television overview of each episode in Spanish I have placed at this link: El Efecto Nostradamus.

Check out Las prophecías del 2010 in English.