UP IN YER FACEBOOK, BUDDY

On a thread that asked what can be done about nuts with guns I began”Each person lives in a different world, their version of reality if you will…” when I realized I had the makings of a blog post to express, so here we are.

Thirty years ago I was friends with a group of folks occupying three adjacent houses communally in a South Austin neighborhood. Two marriages, graduations and other things to do split us up until a 25^th anniversary gathering brought many of us back together for the first time. I realized then how extreme our different directions actually were despite our copacetic coexistence in the eighties.

I had dropped out of a nine year yuppie track at IBM and most of them, ten to fifteen years younger, were preparing to climb into it. There was only one out of forty among them who even wanted to share a joint. It was the starkest example of subverting individual potential into service of the American dream I’d ever experienced … a veritable who’s who of international nuvo riche…I was a fish out of water.

A year later I was searching for traces of the woman I never quite got over and tried Facebook out of last-ditch desperation. I haven’t found her, but I did find a plethora of people I’d known in the past who friended me when they saw I’d joined. One of them was part of that communal group who it appears has gone yet another route to the American dream. After several months of increasingly volatile Glenn Beck informed posts, my friend, “Codger”, peaked out by making his profile picture a gunsight and defying anyone to show evidence that Palin/Beck/Fox had anything to do with the Tucson massacre way before anyone had, just as Palin herself had removed gunsights from her web site.

By pointing out how inflammatory he was being, his cadre of tea party crones came down on me with personal attacks as incoherent as Loughner’s web postings. I unfriended Dodger this morning and will hopefully remain out of the line of their fire. This confrontation also found saner heads who’d known Codger from childhood and were worried about his sanity … thus the thread this post is an attempt to address.

The only solutions to gun violence is to cease manufacturing them … as clear and impossible as outlawing war in a civilization believing in ownership. Although I detest all reasons for guns with exception of subsistence hunting, I cannot help but share the sentiments of citizens who cannot trust a government who clearly does not trust its people, as demonstrated by the furor over wikileaks exposure of government duplicity.

The best fix I have heard of for gun violence is, like all law enforcement and medicine in western civilization, pathological, not preventative. It is to digitally code every bullet so that the anonymity of the shooter disappears. The effectiveness of such a change is bound to have a preventative aspect for crimes where detection is inevitable.

But if you’re around the bend enough to spray a group of anonymous people with automatic gunfire, getting caught is no consideration … in most cases the nuts have offed themselves … unless, of course, they are in the employ of a crime boss or a warring nation. These aberrations have plenty examples of killing being a justifiable solution to problems, no matter how loose the connection between three office buildings being imploded justifying two national wars of annihilation and being fired from your office job justifying going back to the office and putting everyone out of their miserable jobs with a machine gun.

I can imagine no solution to mass domestic murderers except better friends unafraid to intervene, a partial fix is coded ammo and less available firearm capacity.

REMEMBERING

What It's All About

Don't let nostalgia cause short term memory loss

•

Protecting
the
United States of America
from
ever
having
to
walk
anywhere.

THE PLOT (PROPHESY) THICKENS (SICKENS)

Somewhere between learning from experience that the government lies about cannabis and UFOs and witnessing multiple videos of the free fall speed collapse of the only three steel buildings to ever do so, all on the same day, I have been sure of the government’s duplicity and have theorized on a long range ultimate agenda hidden behind the distractions of its public corruption and ineptitude. I have read extensively into the same material Dan Brown has completely bastardized for his popular novels, Howard Zinn's Peoples History of the United States drew from and the dearly departed Robert Anton Wilson so deftly skewered with hilariously scrambled conspiracies in his Illuminatti Trilogy. I guess you could call me a conspiracy theorist. It’s okay, I don’t mind. I prefer not being so dependent I fear to doubt.

Such suspicions were rather idle speculation until I began questioning the ultimate reason mankind finds itself at the threshold of self-extermination through the insane intentional refusal to adapt to the nature of its place of birth. Daniel Quinn showed me the historical transition from hunter-gatherer to totalitarian agriculture as the turning point, but I still failed to grok a reason for it. I suppose I have my daughter to thank for discovering what I have come to propose is the justification that converted relatively symbiotic humans into the scourge of the Earth — the mythology of mankind’s inheritance of Earth’s stewardship from its creator as our special gift is the backbone belief of every monotheistic religion since it permitted man’s slaughter of great swaths of nature to establish his food supply in greedy exclusivity over sixteen thousand years ago. Concentration around the new food depots in cities further cut off man from his natural environment until we come to the war on everything period in which we now exist suspended by our own petard.

That seems to cover how mankind began operating as master of all it surveyed, and I can kind of see how believing man superior to his environment could surface as the genocidal behavior exhibited by small pockets and huge armies of terrorists against their fellow man, but I’d yet found no ingrained mythos in my admittedly shallow research into Xianity and its roots in mythology back to the forcing underground of Paganism.

And then one day on Facebook during heated comment banter with my old buddy Roger about the difference between racism and anti-Semitism someone comes up with,

I see the United States as being an Israelite nation. Being that the US is a ruminate of the Tribe of Manasseh. Both Ephraim (England) and Manasseh (the United States) were son's of Israels son Joseph. We are God's chosen people...however, we have been allowed to go our own way, until we are at the point of blowing ourselves off the planet...then ... and only then, will God intervene. That Is the only way man will learn that his way will not work, and thru that learn to accept God and his Word. So yes, we need to protect the country of Israel because the United States was born from her.

Who knew? Am I the only one who missed this detail? Ah those crazy myths. There’s a set for the masses surveyed and a set for the masters of all they survey. If that tidbit didn't match current events in the unreasonable leniency being shown the genocidal Israeli treatment of Palestinians I wouldn't have even noticed that quote, much less posted on it.

HERO

I guess this speech will knock anyone off the fence they ride hoping to rationalize remaining a convenient inhabitant of the invisible prison I speak of so often. I hereby commend to you another unique example of what I call heroes.

Hat Tip once again to Pisces Iscariot at Far Queue

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PICKLED BRAIN

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

—Volaire

Someone challenged my perception of the invisible prison within which western civilization lives by saying, “The whole thing is in your mind.”

I could only reply, "That’s the difference between you and me: it’s in my mind, so I can think about it while it is your mind and you can’t.”

Recipe for Pickled Brain — or — Thinking About What We Think With

Test for Ripeness:

1) Can answer all questions likely to be asked within 40 miles of home.

2) Hasn’t asked a question arising from curiosity for the last five years.

3) Takes authority to represent truth from pulpit, podium or plutocrat.

4) Never read a book voluntarily.

Preparation for Pickling:

1) Sever nerve paths capable of reporting unique experiences to conserve the energy normally required to ignore such messages for use in healing injuries caused by the same mistakes endlessly repeated.

2) Surround organ with an environment about which certainty is impenetrably dense.

3) Fill container with a fluid mixture of faith, trust, hope, belief and wishful thinking as a cushion against any latent instinctual resistance to the container.

4) Put on a shelf to ferment for the rest of life in isolation, within warehouses full of mindless millions pickling in their juices in the invisible prison.

Serving Instructions:

1) After aging long enough for all the heresy and doubt to be leeched, the once clear cushioning fluid will gel and turn as opaque as a proven fact. It is nowready to serve reliably.

2) Care must be taken to release the gas pressure of desiccated curiosity extracted in the fermentation process before handling individual brains.

3) Served individually they are digestible as paper pushers, bean counters, assembly lines and lifetime retail clerks. Not recommended for dealing with the vagaries of nature.

4) Served in mindless masses they delight the palate of the democratic process, tax base, demographic retail, preemptive war fodder, righteousness of the mostest and other forms of mob rule by deception of the willingly ignorant.

•

I always wondered how the active verb, “ignore,” lost all sense of personal responsibilitly when the adverb form “ignorant” was applied while “unaware” serves a more precise definition of the condition of not knowing. Ignorant always carries the major context of having willingly and knowingly ignored that of which they are ignorant and their situation is self induced.

•

A sure sign one is outside the invisible prison is inquiries begin searching for something truer than the answers that form the prison walls. Certainty is the border patrol around comfort zone zapping any illegal curiosity. Labels conclude the curiosity of the taught and are springboards into the unknown for those actually learning.

•

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
—Leo Tolstoy

IMAGINE THAT …

There is a land that thrives on the profit from production and celebrates the convenient use of real, verifiable weapons of mass destruction that constantly kill three times more of its own citizens every month than were victimized in the world trade center on 9/11/01 and exploited as justification for an, as yet ongoing, vengeful genocide of over a million residents of two countries not at war with it. In this land twenty-seven thousand individuals kill themselves using these weapons every year, taking fifteen thousand collaterally damaged innocent bystanders with them every year, and knowingly release a chemically poisonous gas as an afterthought killing an additional sixty-three thousand by respiratory failure every year, year after year like clockwork, give or take a couple thousand rounded off and rubbed out statistics. The lands being reduced to rubble in retribution just so happen to be rich in the energy required to maintain the suicide/murder pact agreed to in the land that loves cars. Imagine that…

•

My friend Rita began losing her eyesight and muscle strength as she grew older to the point that when she plowed into a curb one day I had to tell her she should stop driving, to which she replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t get hurt, I have this big old Cadillac to protect me!” I’m so fed up with the leaf-blower version of responsibility so rampant within my culture I feel like publishing an angry post about the hundred and eighty pounds of rich, black, fertile leaf mold I just harvested for the spring garden from the pile I raked last fall — with the rake I walked three miles to Callahan’s to purchase — but I can’t. Just thinking about learning to live the alternative to cultural crises calms me down.

HAWK EYED

The constant screeching of the predator birds

Demonizes their prey with provocative words

Feeding their babies who feast on such fishes

Feast on the faith filled’s most fervent wishes

Feast on sheep drowsing in gullible herds

The constant screeching raises the pitch

Blaming painted enemies for theivery by the rich

Lying about what our troops do

To an “enemy” just like you

Keeping a news fed nation’s trigger finger on itch

I see it on the street when e’er I go to town

Hawk eyes glaring from beneath many a frumious frown

At life long fellow neighbors

Who dtd them no harms or favors

But always wore that terrorist’s gown

The white wash of what just leaked

From the ass of the eagle beaked

Condemns them all, demands recall

From innocent nations held in thrall

By corporate nations until oil peaked

THE REAL WAR

All the different reasons we declare war against one another, whether they’re as small as feuds between personalities or as great as ideological confrontations of corporations enlisting half the world‘s population in a war against the other half, are all mere skirmishes within the ranks of our corporatized civilization’s war machine set on establishing dominance over the nature of the universe as it manifests here on Orth within and without we Orthlings' hides.

Being cells in the body of the living planet, the upright Orthlings’ aggressive antagonism toward and ignorance of the well being upon which our own health depends is as though one’s left thumb nail set about converting the rest of the body into toughened keratin to set things to rights for its own good.

In the spectrum of Orthlings’ reality tunnels from scientific atheists to religious zealots there rarely arises anyone arguing against the so obvious sawing off of the limb from the tree of life whereupon we all perch oh, so precariously.

The method employed by the inciters and maintainers of our civilization’s war against nature may seem more familiar in a much more recent series of events, still being played out, that went into overt motion within the memory of anyone older than four orbits of Orth around Ra, to wit:

Needing a cheaper source of energy to enable its agenda to own lead all of Orth in the future, the corporation, Usuki Inc., made the decision to covertly provoke a war against the weakest of the planet’s energy rich corporations. It sacrificed three thousand of its own employees to rouse the remaining three hundred million to revenge. While the terror reigned, the flames enraged and the dust to which the Temple of Gold had been reduced was still settling, corporate security, in the first competent action since allegedly being caught off guard with forbidden airspace penetration by remote controlled drones terrorist hijacked ornithopters crashing into the temple twenty four minimims earlier, found the identification cards for all of the terrorists amongst the powdered rubble of stone, office equipment and three thousand Orthlings — the only things left in tact. And surprise of surprises — they all happened to be from the alliance of corporations with just the energy resource Usuki Inc. needed.

The stooge Usuki Inc. hired to be its political branch CEO lumped scattered, independent dissident groups together by his declaration of a war of retribution against All Kinda terrorists, to define the enemy and of the battle weary corporate grounds of Aghastfistan to be the beleaguered arena for their strategic war.

For protection of their own employees from the same torture they wreaked upon the enemy, their lawyers defined Usuki’s mercenaries to be “legal combatants” in a war of retribution, occupation and usurpation against any Aghastfistanis who objected, defined by the lawyers as “illegal combatants.” As impossible to justify as the war is, none of the corporations that suck up to Usuki have sucked up their guts and objected, lest they be declared “All Kinda” terrorists as well. And thus the demonization of employees of enemy corporations was successfully inserted into the mythology of Usuki’s employees’ belief system.

The much earlier example of this stragedy scenario was enacted soon after the dawn of the upright Orthlings by an embryonic corporation in the form of totalitarian agriculture needing to morally justify wholesale annihilation of vast areas of naturally evolved life forms. To get relatively symbiotic hunter-gatherer-gardener culture to accept such apparent desecration of their environment a two part fable was forged into their mythology. The first was that all of the nature with which the Orthlings had thrived by communing was a creation of an omniscient being who granted ownership to his exceptional creations, the upright Orthlings. The second part depended on this exceptional superiority to justify the demonization of the traditionally revered spirits of nature by morally prohibiting their sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It was just such evil spirits they were to blame for the instinctual sense of evil they felt when felling a forest for a freshly furrowed field.

All the violence within the ranks any of the corporate civilizations set on owning and exploiting the nature of Orth is the karmic result of individual’s deeply intuitive acknowledgement that they are contributing to a war against universally inexorable natural forces which thwart their warp at every twist in the path to extinction. It is not really a war when the deaths at the hands of the aggressors encourage once innocent collateral damage to rise up against them whether it is other Orthlings or the entire body of Orth.

DOES NOT WORK WELL WITH OTHERS

It was the verdict of a two-day battery of psychological tests given him to judge his fitness to work for the earth moving machinery manufacturer known as Caterpillar. In his last semester, with nothing but liberal arts electives on his class schedule, Russ indulged himself in the perks being showered upon graduating electromechanical engineers in the age of the punch card Fortran computer industry’s embryonic stirrings before Silicon Valley was a sparkle in Douglas Englebart’s eye. Trip to Pratt & Whitney in Florida, to Boeing in Seattle, ah yes, this was what it was all about.

He had snorted at the verdict with the understanding that his four-year stint in the Marines before college were experiential evidence that he could work well with others under the direst of circumstances. He’d hated the whole enlistment for the blatant bullying psychology boot camp employed in shaping the minds of killing machines and so spent the rest of his stint observing the culture maintained within the indoctrinated mindset of such unquestioning patriotism. He took the best offer from the best company and entered the private sector as an acquisitive yuppie apolitically against the Viet Nam War.

Several years later, when his eldest entered school he began to recognize a parallel indoctrination in public education as he watched her, and recalled himself, dumbing down her beautiful natural curiosity to satisfy the demands of obedience to the certitude of authority in their idea of what constitutes correct answers to twelve years of probationary examination. The difference between the purpose of the simple military, “my country right or wrong” ethic and the “my truth right or wrong” being pushed by the public education system was one of magnitude not only in scope, but in inscrutability.

The military shouldn’t question orders or they might hesitate fatally and become wasted fodder — at least that’s the modern justification for the withdrawal of direct human participation in the slaughter of humans by the use of drones as we, the “legal combatants,” methodically rub out beings we deem “illegal combatants,” along with the smudge of acceptable collateral annihilation of the civilian population amongst whom they live cravenly hide.

Citizens shouldn’t question authority or they might — what — think for themselves — become an enemy of the state — become unexploitable — invulnerable to usery? The National Security Agency protects the authority of the government by hiding its ways, means and purposes from the very people being manipulated into sycophantic obedience while claiming the secrets are kept from the always potentially envious enemy jealous of our superior standard of living. He could only conclude that they consider citizens to be a likely enemy; if they knew. He never liked secrets.

The correlation of these two parallel Pavlovian processes piqued his curiosity about the human vulnerability to considering information transmitted by words as more valid in describing experience than one’s own information transmitted by bodily sensations. To vanquish all foes was the purpose of the military’s mindless obedience, but what was the purpose the military enforces and protects so mindlessly — against what?

Such ponderings lead him to a conversation with a gorilla named Ishmael who asked him to find the myth of his culture. How had man felt justified in departing from the relatively symbiotic ways of the hunter-gatherer to begin disrespectfully wiping out all local lifeforms to establish agriculture and the ensuing urban aggregation around the food getting places?

He felt like a cicada molting in the spring as he slowly detected the cicatrix of a shell within which he’d lived his entire life. The discovery reawakened observations of the natural world he’d long denied for their stark contrast to the cultural norm of going along to get along. The expansion of his vision formed cracks in the wall of the invisible prison the myth of western civilization is. The husk hangs clinging to his memory of civilization while he carefully extracts his natural genetic memory from the muffled existence it had survived.

He found that, ultimately, he did not work well with others and Caterpillar’s psychological testing was spot on; he would have eventually ceased cooperating with the purpose of an earth moving equipment manufacturer, just as he has the purpose of the earth owning corporation known as western civilization, US branch office.

CONVERSATION ACROSS TIME

It seems it’s that part of a cycle that seems to swing my way every six or seven years which, after at least ten such occurrences, I’ve come to call the Big Sad. The phrase “sadder, but wiser” describes the accumulation of experience for one dedicated to understanding the condition of the civilized human that seems to rob individuals of their genetic potential. In such a funk, I cannot seem to articulate my thoughts with the intention of “selling yeast” when I feel like a rolling pin flattening the most pneumatic of wishful thinking, so I here construct a conversation across the history of western thought with a dash of eastern insight for flavor to describe my thoughts in the words of others who have influenced me:

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.”

“The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out,” replied the proverbial zen master.

“If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.” Samual P. Ginder, Capt. USN

“As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.“

“If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.”

“Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.”

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”

“It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of our nation worthwhile.”

‘Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

“If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.”

“What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men — each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature — are shot down wholesale.”

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

“A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.”

“For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into "the masses." And where is the David who can slay this giant?”

“Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.”

“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?“

“Nothing produces such odd results as trying to get even.”

“If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life
when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town.
A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.”

“Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like.“

“Future generations may regard the people of the First World nations as bona fide idiots—blithely driving SUVs and watering golf courses—and regard the people of Third World nations as aspiring idiots. I doubt future generations would understand. It is not that we are idiots; we understand. However, in the end we seem to have as much control over the current social trends as lemmings do over their fate.”

“Follow the money.”

“Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.”

"If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst."

“Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills.”

“Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.”

“…the television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.”

“I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.”

“War is God’s way of teaching American’s geography.”

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

“Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.”

“How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!

“The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection.”

“Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

“Humans -- who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals -- have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, wear them, eat them -- without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.”

“Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.”

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

“An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.”

“The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member,
but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

“Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.”

“What's done to children, they will do to society.”

“Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?"

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less
important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”

“It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would

occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.”

“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

“By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.”

“If you don't find God in the next person you meet,
it is a waste of time looking for him further.”

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.”

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”

When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange---my youth.
-Sara Teasdale, poet (1884-1933

The first several quotes are linked to their authors through the terminal punctuation. I will be linking the rest as the will permits but that's it for the month of February. I invite your comments as always and will reply to those I get. See you in March?

IN PRAISE OF "AVATAR"

While the status quotients take pot shots from specialized perches, an entire generation of still absorbent intellects “get” the big picture being painted in glorious praise of symbiosis with that without which we cannot live. In making his latest, greatest attempt to effect the paradigm of man’s meaning in the scheme of things, John Cameron has synthesized so many disparate fields into this movie, Avatar, that it represents the epitome of the term gestalt: the total that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Like the beautifully depicted symbiosis of the Na'vi with the other beings native to Pandora by the twining of opened nerve endings in a gesture of surrendering individuality for the benefit of both, the fields of technical expertise brought together for this production and the very real problems caused by civilization’s attitude toward the body from which it arises encompassed by the story is an entwining resulting in the benefit of all.

The grumblers remind me of the railroad fireman’s lament, diesel putting their stoking shovel out of work, as each of their fields are being drug kicking and screaming into the next generation. Another reenactment of Robert Persig’s Metaphysics of Quality explaining the mechanistic ratcheting effect civilization’s artificial establishmentarianism puts on the otherwise natural evolution of man’s understanding of the living universe in which we are a dependent part.

My love for movies is of a piece with my love of all expressions intended to be of benefit. I am interested in expressions of what I perceive to be intended harm as an opportunity to examine my desire to protect the oxen I’ve made so sacred I fear their goring in the alternative light of as yet considered viewpoints. Movies are a way to put a subject on the table.

When asked his take on Avatar, an author whose book I praised for his insight into the ecstasy of symbiosis with nature replied, exemplifying the blindness of pride in his initialed authority, “I have no answer, because I do not watch movies of this ilk.”

I called him on it with, “Wow, Kultur, you really are a snob aren't you? Or do all of your ilk go around calling out others' ilk just to fit in? How do you maintain ecstasy so far removed from its source — the oneness of us all? “

Confirming his condescending hubris he answered, “BTW. Ilk means type, sort, kind. Sorry about your hypersensitivity.”

An acquaintance asked with whom I’d gone to the movie I mentioned just having seen. When I said I’d gone alone, he replied. “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.” Hyperbole aside, was this guy implying friendlessness being the only reason for solitude? Or perhaps movies were, for him, just part and parcel of the more tedious dining, dancing, drinking ploy for which rohypnol is the latest keystroke shortcut means to an end? Who knows? In this day when dating means fucking and fucking means something being destroyed, who knows?

Well, I certainly got off on a tangent there, but it may emphasize how deeply I feel the movie, Avatar, can and may effect our possibilities of becoming symbiotic with the body upon which we now act like cancer cells. As all cures for rigid resistance to change in the aged, the natural regeneration of new know-nothing cells keep the possibilities for such a return perpetually open.

"DIRTY"

… was one of those words that never entered his vocabulary for the same reason “fabulous”, “incredible” and “awesome” dropped out. Words that were, or had fashionably become, so ubiquitous as to cease modifying the nouns or verbs with which they were linked in any meaningful way, became mirrors of the speaker by their opaqueness.

“Dirty” was one of his first introductions to how a freeborn boy could be wrong around people who had traded their freedom to choose for lip service allegiance to pop righteousness. The poop in his pants, the soil on his knees and the words he heard daddy say couldn’t all be dirty. People that found dirt always smelled like soap. So how come mother called aunt Donna, who took more baths than anyone in the world, a dirty minded woman?

These questions and observations led him to see that using the word dirty was a kind of unconscious code with which the righteous could recognize each other as allies in finding wrong with actions outside what one must assume they consider their unnaturally sanitary soap box. It no longer mattered whether the modified noun was excrement, soil, reputation, sanitation, sex, ethics, money, job, habit, thought or language in comparison to how clearly it defined the accusing speakers, who were, ironically enough, always describing other than them selves. Imagine that.

His own meaning for “dirty” formulated when he began to feel dirty himself. Finding himself attending class with students who bragged on the obituaries of murdered residents of Carver Village and powerless to find anyone to believe it, or if they knew, to join him in opposing it, he dropped out of his new Mississippi high school and joined the Marines, both to get away and to learn to be more effective in opposing such lynchings. But he felt dirty, leaving such a mess.

Experience over four years of direct contact with and obedience to the military code of justice did nothing to expiate this stain of helpless cowardice he felt. Indeed, it only showed him the immensity of institutionalized enactment of the same kinds of atrocities against people of color in neighborhoods called nations. He talked to veterans returning from the Korean conflict who were just as shot loose from consensus reality as returnees from any of the admitted wars his country wages. If they were fit enough to retain in the service they were often recognizable by fresh material in the shape of rank chevrons removed from otherwise salty uniform sleeves. Chevrons awarded for ferocity in combat granted on the spot in the field. Chevrons taken away for inability to fold up their prize winning talents like the weapons they used by courts-marshal at home. He felt even more helpless to reconcile the increasing examples of other such duplicity dressed in the same flag. Dirty war is a term used by his country to describe resistance to its clean ones.

Over the fifty years since he left the service he tried joining only one more group he thought actually wanted to make the world better. When the company finally announced the product he’d helped engineer to fruition over nine years, he expected he’d begin work on a new project. Instead he was given the task of taking the material, design and performance capacity of his reliable new product to the point that it would break down as soon after warranty as possible to reduce the cost of making something for which the price remained the same, need expensive repairs earlier and increase product turnover. The duplicitous facade was everywhere.

He made a choice between wallowing in the dirty for dominating profit, like oil refinery towns love that smell of money in the air, or feeling the healthy remove from the trough of filthy lucre in the wilderness where the dirtiest he gets forking compost, cleaning chicken roosts and planting seeds feels like the epitome of clean. The word dirty never comes to mind.

IT'S ALL GEEK TO ME

So, when did the revolution happen?

First time I saw a geek, he was behind chicken wire in a dirt pit ravenously devouring anything the paid audience in the tent would throw in there with him. He bit chickens’ heads off and let ‘em run around spurtin’ blood everywhere. For a child of my tender years, with few adult standards yet, that was ultra peachy keen, a level of amazement now known as awesome. Tin cans, light bulbs, baling wire, razor blades; you name it, he could have eaten it right down.

It was forty-three years later when my girlfriend pointed one out to me passing on the sidewalk outside the exotic restaurant I’d taken her to to set the scene to pop the question. I was gazing around looking for some subject for casual conversation from which to smoothly segue into my spiel about the fitness of our bodies, our lifestyles and our futures when along comes the perfect example of unfit for any of that, so I stretched, yawned and in my best version of surprise remarked, “Wow, look at that nerd.”

I never even got started into my spontaneously improvised synthesis of the moment and my eternally practiced lines. The look on her face was her best version of WTF, LOL, “That’s not a nerd, that’s a geek.”

I gotta say, she stopped me in my tracks. For some strange reason I knew, with that distinction, I’d never be fit for life with her or anyone until I understood the difference. I got up from the table, kissed her on the cheek, gave her my credit card and disappeared from the world that ever saw me before.

My research has revealed that like the entire history of oppressed genius going underground and reappearing in a more sophisticated guise for their original purpose as anything from illuminati to Bohemian Grove to the Church of the Subgenius, the geeks of my youth had formed a literal underground union through the web of tunnels connecting the increasing number of pits the carnivals were so kind to dig for them. They realized over the years of considering their common experience that they had all become quite intuitive about electromechanical things and chicken heads. They taught their children to stay away from the opposite sex and anyone who appeared to be someone “…who would pay money to watch you bite the head off a chicken”, to study everything they could find about the cutting edge of gadgetry under the anonymity of various guises from queer in the fifties, square in the sixties, dweeb in the first part of the seventies melding into nerd toward the eighties until they began the silent revolution surfacing once more as geeks, wearing their weird like the latest fashion.

All of a sudden, if you were watching for it, nerds came out of their cloisters on prom night and got laid by the same drunken cheerleader as the quarterback, while he was finding how much better Zelda4TX looked without her horn rimmed glasses, hackers became synonymous with Robin Hood, the world wide web spread faster than a billion spiders, a guy in Peoria could schlep down to his basement in his altogether, bomb an entire village on the other side of the world with a sophisticated computer game while the coffee perks and be done in time to drink it fresh with toasted bagels, the president tweets.

The other day, someone asked me what I thought it would be like if geeks ruled the world. I looked at him with the smile of sardonic irony I’ve practiced for those spontaneous moments when people appear to be talking in their sleep.

2009 — ORDO AB CHAO

Adam Weishaupt

My last post was about my hopes for restoring some sane order out of the chaos of the Bush Administration in the future, that void from whence cometh all change to beings here in the eternal present. This one is about the other face of speculation: my fears.

I am watching David Icke’s latest movie, Big Brother: Big Picture and am pimp slapped back to the real possibility that an Illuminati controlling the agenda of world affairs will have its way so long as people believe they have enough freedom to spare a bit more for government security against growing real or alleged terrorism. His PROBLEM, REACTION, SOLUTION description of the chain of events leading to a tightening of populations’ adherence to the shadow agenda is the forerunner of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine by outlining numerous examples of crises, either natural or man made, used to hold government’s services hostage to people’s capitulation to stricter control: national ID, ID chip, insurrection control, presently being perfected in Iraq. Okay, Okay. I’ll quit enumerating. He and Alex Jones keep reminding me of those things out there that are so necessary to forget when you want to take up the cause of the latest, greatest political messiah breaking the control of that shadowy, black ops, X files government.

Whatever change nature produces from an unknown void we call the future, our reactions are the result of experience digested throughout our existence in the unavoidable present, while unabsorbed change passes on to the unknown void we then call the past like clouds that didn’t rain.

Just as the Tao may be observed by finding the thing that does not change amidst nature's profusion of variety, the illuminati agenda may be observed as the nature of government’s variety; that thing that does not change amidst civilization's plethora of social systems; those issues that keep being pressed from the top down no matter how passionately rejected by voters when the other party was pushing the same thing.

I have accumulated sufficient experience of government lying from the blatant Warren Commission coming to their fantastic one-bullet conclusion without benefit of crucial evidence buried in a 75 year time capsule for “national security” to the Keane Commission concluding three imploded buildings were the result of two planes; from witnessing two separate UFOs and observing government and public reaction to such claims to observing three imploding buildings and observing Bush and his staff lie us into a war in Babylon for revenge; from researching the war on drugs and meeting the friendliest enemy anyone could hope to find being persecuted on behalf of every business threatened if cannabis were decriminalized.

Despite these experiences and my own observations that the left and right illusion perpetuated by the government somehow always serves the purposes of a third party by filling the public coffers with welfare budgets under the liberals and draining them with corporate subsidies under the conservatives, I think I saw something about Obama that is above all this. Despite learning that he attended the Bilderburger Group gathering while still vying with Hillary Clinton last year I passed it off as his playing all the necessary games to get his foot in the door … and then he was gonna rape all the white wimmin. No, seriously. As president, I think he has enough support and transparency that, even if he were a Nixon/Bush nincompoop, he couldn’t betray his promises without massive unrest. But because he is Barack Obama and I want to go with my most positive feelings, I think he could very well upset this Mafioso protection racket control of our neighborhood and set the keynote in the paradigm shift it will take to rescue this planet — the old world order of evolving with our environment.


It is our lack of self-reliance and localized sustainability that makes us into herdable sheeple dependent on the source of the problem to solve it for us. The symbol of a 32nd degree mason has the words Ordo ab Chao beneath a two headed eagle. The new world order, whose creation the shadow puppeteer agenda intends, can only be implemented by creating and maintaining the chaos from which the people look to the perpetuating perpetrators to solve. Happy people aren’t afraid of or need help changing anything.

The most positive thing to be drawn from these considerations is that the closer one is to living symbiotically with the planet, as indigenous people do, the less dependent on and controllable by the big brother shepherds we are — and the less power they have over others.

"DISOBEDIENCE IS ESSENTIAL TO DEMOCRACY …"

Once again, Howard Zinn nails the conflect between government and the people and lays a curative agenda before President Barack Obama who he trusts will listen if the sense it makes is brought to him by the people as convincingly as their favor of him. Democracy Now! is the best use made of any medium you can name. Relevant and immediate, revealing and immersive, Amy Goodman and company are the eye in the back of the two handed/party shell shuffler hiding the pea behind the mainstream facade of National Security, God and American exceptionality.

AS IF… (part 2)

Best Newspaper You'll Never Buyclick the pic

V.A., “DON’T LOOK, DON’T TELL!”

There is a new report on the reason the Department of Veteran’s Affairs fears adding up the suicide rate of returning Iraq vets. Hold on to your hats.

If you think sacrificing the lives of our troops defending, not freedom, mom or apple pie, but the lie George Bush told to get the man who got away from his daddy is unacceptable, hang on to your tranquilizers.

This report from CBS on 11/8/08 shows the results of their investigation into the suicide rate of PTSD sufferers when told by the head of the VA that they haven’t been able to put those numbers together yet. Well folks, turns out this is yet another one of those things kept under wraps for “National Security” which we have all come to realize indicates some traitorous strategy or incompetence by the government must be covered up or they’ll be out of jobs.

Taking the low estimate of 3309 US deaths due to combat alone in Iraq divided by the 276 weeks we’ve been destroying the country and we get an average of 12.3 deaths/week, an apparently acceptable number to people in suits debating everything else because they’re not there. That is the reported deaths directly attributed to combat. That is in no way acceptable and must cease.

Now lets talk about the ones who don’t catch a bullet or an IED, the ones who live with the memories of carrying out orders that have resulted in 1,284,105 deaths of Iraqis. I will let you calculate the horrible rate/week those 12.3 US troops died to kill the enemy.

Had enough? Here’s the killer. CBS found that, using only totals from the 45 states that responded, in 2005, there were 120 suicides by Iraq veterans per week, 18.2 per day!

For every soldier or marine that dies in combat ten commit suicide either over there or returning to the VA denial that it even exists much less is a combat related phenomenon.

In the age range of 22-27 the suicide rate is four time that of non veterans. 28% of all returning vets suffer PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).

Veterans make up 11% of the population whole, but 25% of the homeless population.

WHAT! THE!! FUCK!!!

OUT IN THE BOONIES

Once again Leslie Hawes’ honesty and artistry with word and color has inspired a comment to her post "Boonie" that has since expanded as it evoked the source of my deep sympathy for the trauma suffered by veterans of combat. The comment was

How dare he remind us of our helplessness in preventing our government from sacrificing generations of the country’s less privileged youth to exploit big business interests abroad by surviving the death bath they were sent to deal out to strangers in a strange land? What gall he has in displaying his unwillingness or disability to contribute to the “American Way of Life” he has learned to see his defending of to be the obviously oblivious source of his traumatized condition. His audacity at holding a tin cup out to collect his unpaid and unpayable due from the ones he was told he was defending causes city councils to propose the banning of his activities to protect the sensibilities of folks who want to forget that time he never can. Our impotent discomfort at his existence is our share of his trauma, and he has enough for everyone.

A touchy subject. Thank you for bringing it to the surface, Leslie. Hiding our shame only makes it fester into a new war.

Although my four years in the military fell three years after the Korean War and three years before the Gulf of Tonkin hoax got us into the Viet Nam big time, I shared the lives of war heroes who, upon returning to the United States, discovered they no longer fit into civilian life, or the civil part of military life during peacetime for that matter. All around the base I could see salty uniforms with sleeves showing the brighter colors where combat awarded rank insignias had been stripped from steely eyed veterans who just couldn’t stay sober or out of fights with townies and officers. The seriously traumatized ones I knew who just didn’t resign themselves to life in the bosom of the military, if not dishonorably discharged, rejoined society to land in the constant care of their loving families or not so loving asylums and jails, in the boondocks hoarding armament and hate, in the job of belligerent criminal or cop, or life on the street.

The government and the military refuse to admit responsibility for or even the existence of such a record, preferring instead of mental health care to malign them with dishonor as whiners and malcontents. The latest program to utilize graduates from Shell Shock U is called Blackwater, Bush’s high priced cannon fodder. The field research data gained by sending troops into combat with arms and armor varying from hard-ons behind hate speeches to depleted uranium behind remote underground bunkers by radar is improving the equipment of our burgeoning law enforcement here at home. With such equipment and the addition of a missing ingredient in Iraq: hometown knowledge, they should have no trouble quelling any protest against the occupation from the folks who don’t really need so much security, just like the field studies showed.

Just stretch your mind between Boonie, who doesn’t want any more killing and cannot contribute to the way of life that affords its preemptive genocidal wars, and any one of the anonymous Darth Vaders hiding their tiny penises behind great big guns and Kevlar cod pieces arm in arm by the hundreds wherever Boonie’s younger, less experienced kindred spirits arise against the walls of the trash compactor. Two career paths from the same school of thought.