Book Launch, Wed Dec 17

Don't show me no picture show or give me no book to read - Bob Dylan

Well this says everything anyone needs to know about how together I am. I'm having a book launch on Wednesday, December 17, and I haven't posted anything here about it.

Conspiracy Culture bookstore, 7 to 9 pm, 1696 Queen St. W. Toronto. More details here.

Hope to see you there. Or maybe, hope to see you first.



A genuine update coming. Honest.

My Barack Pages

Memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow - Bob Dylan

Just because there's a Democrat in the White House is no reason to stop reading Lovecraft.

From "The Shadow in the Attic":

There was a moment that was as if the Earth had taken a half turn backward or something of that kind, and I had not gone along with it but were suspended somewhere far out in space at the instant before plunging into orbit of my own - and then the moment passed, the Earth resumed its regularity of turning, the room lightened, the flame in the lamp steadied.

It was the longest moment for some, lasting eight years, since the done-deal that was Gore's Florida flipped columns. Old certainties, even among cynics, of how bad things could get, suddenly seemed wretchedly naive as the Earth staggered like a drunk, with Dick Cheney its designated driver. As kleptocracy and high crime compounded illegitimacies and low comedy, many millions - conservative Republicans and conspiracy debunkers among them - came to feel themselves in a strange place, with unlikely companions and no sure footing, and entertaining hypotheses they had once thought unimaginable. And as the years dragged, it became difficult to conceive of anything different, or to reflect upon what "different" might even mean.

And now, it would seem, the moment has passed. The Earth has resumed its kinder, gentler course, and the shadow in America's attic has been dispelled by - I dunno; shall we call it a thousand points of light? Democrats can awake from a nightmare and fall into a dream, and conspiracy theory can once more become the property of the "patriot" right.

I think the worst of conspiracy theory - actually all theory, and no conspiracy - must be the unfalsifiable, post hoc prediction. If you haven't seen it yet or don't know what I'm talking about, you will, as theorists retool their cottage industries to react to a Democratic administration. Fintan Dunn calls it the "Red Coup gambit" of the New World Order, absurdly describing Obama as an "undercover Marxist ideologue." Webster Tarpley gets in on the action with his book The Postmodern Coup, which shoe-horns Obama into his meta-analysis as the next, inevitable Manchurian Candidate of the Brzezinski faction. Alex Jones, like some Star Trek energy entity that feeds on pure hysteria, is whipping up a new batch to keep those cards and letters coming. ("Congressman, are you feeling the dread many of us are feeling right now?")

But it's neither that complicated nor so ridiculous, is it? Real history, even in the living of it, isn't a seamless narrative that enfolds all events into a single narrator's construct. As recently as September, I thought there was no clear path for an Obama victory. Still, the election didn't need to be staged, not with a vetting process designed to winnow out all contenders who don't know what and to who they owe, who might do something, even by chance, that could divest the true rulers of their rule. (And McCain didn't actually run to lose, not really, though the creepiest incompetent campaign in American history might as well have been managed by Kid Gleason.) That Obama could be taken for a progressive, even in the beltway sense of the term, is a testament to the polish of his blank slate and the desperation of an orphaned Left anxious for a win, even if it means their loss. To whom the coming surge in Afghanistan, the likely deferral of a meaningful withdrawal from Iraq (one that might include private armies and troops that have had the "combat" redefined out of them), the appointment of Rahm Emanuel and other "moderates" will smell like...victory.

Last Thursday, as President Elect, Obama received his initial briefing of classified intelligence pertaining to national security. Friday, CNN's Candy Crowley asked "whether anything's given you pause," to which he replied "I'm going to skip that." Whatever he heard, and however long he paused, I'm fairly certain he didn't hear anything like what Evo Morales means to brief him:

Bolivian leader Evo Morales on Thursday accused the US government of encouraging drug-trafficking as he explained his decision to banish the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).... "The worst thing is, it did not fight drug trafficking; It encouraged it," the Bolivian leader said, adding that he had "quite a bit of evidence" backing up his charges.

Presidential Minister Juan Ramon Quintana presented a series of documents and press clippings at a news conference, which he described as "object data" that had influenced Morales' decision to suspend DEA activities last week.

Quintana said Morales was ready to present the evidence to incoming US president Barack Obama "to prove the illegality, abuse and arrogance of the DEA in Bolivia."

When Bill Clinton entered the presidency, he sought some back-channel answers to questions not addressed in his classified briefing. His Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell wrote in Friends in High Places:

Clinton had said, 'If I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs?" Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting.

Clinton might have curried the Deep State's favour in Mena, but it withheld its deeper secrets from him and his Arkansas capo as from middle managers just passing through without a legitimate need to know. (The seeming otherworldliness of the Bush/Cheney years is largely accounted for by the broad, intuitive dread that Cheney knows.) Obama doesn't even display Clinton's idle curiosity, though he and his Chicago Mafia do show some of his hubris. Should he change in office, and light a lamp in America's shuttered rooms, he may feel the Earth take a half turn backwards, while its true rulers decide what to do with him.

Afterwords and Forewords

The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's gettin' shallow and weak - Bob Dylan

News, some good and some meh, before shaking out the mothballs.

Happily, and no thanks to me, the Rigorous Intuition book has at last gone to press. It wound up running about 500-pages, words and art, plus index. (And most of all, I'm thrilled about the index. Better books than mine are made useless without them.) It can be ordered directly from Trine Day, or through Amazon or Indigo, and I'm sure elsewhere. I'm planning for a launch at Toronto's Conspiracy Culture, and it would be fun and probably scary to see some of you there, or wherever else the book leads me.

Though I'm not so thrilled about this: my bill-paying gig has gone under, for the second time in four years, and almost certainly for the last. The economy's never great for magazines, and especially not now, or so the money people say.

But the consequences of both are complementary. The weight of the book has finally lifted, and Frank's daily deadlines won't distract me again from the work I think I should be doing instead. And so I'll be posting here with more regularity, adding long-deferred enhancements to the site and the forum, and drafting a proposal for a book that would take me away from the desk and into the field for some original research.

And if you're able and so inclined, I've at last fixed the Paypal link in the bar to the right.

A proper, content-heavy post is forthcoming.

Attention Deficit World Order (Part Two)

"Judgement day," he said, in a mocking voice. "Ain't no judgement day, old man. Cept this. Maybe this here judgement day for you." - Flannery O'Connor, "Judgement Day"

I wish I could blame all my bad blogging upon writer's block, but it's not just the words that have been lacking; it's been any sensible thought to penetrate America's strange dreamtime. And unlike Sarah Palin, I'd rather say nothing when that's all that I know. And that's just sad, because as novel as these events seem, they are still all recurring dreams, though we greet them like goldfish seeing the world anew every time we circle the bowl.

Perhaps the truest and most essential thing Michael Moore ever said, he said at the Oscars. We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times. But I dunno; maybe he's spent too much time since that night playing a character in a false narrative, because on the eve of Congress's campy read through of an early draft proposal for a trillion dollar grift - a fictitious fix to a fictitious crisis of fictitious money - Moore advised Americans to "call or e-mail Senator Obama" and "call your Representative in Congress." So that's how it works. How about rather, as soon as you discover you've already seen the movie, walk out of the theatre and demand your money back?

Is this the way the world ends? European astrologers at the turn of the 16th century forecast devastating floods for the year 1524. One result, as the date approached, was a "Great Fear," as recorded by Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo. Another, for Venice, was a tremendous investment in public works in order to prevent the silting up of the city's lagoon. (Sadly, the careful consideration of Renaissance engineers of the city's effect upon its environment had been forgotten by the mid-20th Century, when channel dredging and groundwater extraction saw Venice rapidly sink 20 centimeters in 20 years.) And a further effect was an increased popularity of satirical doom singers. One Venetian cantastorie going by the name of "Master Pegasus Neptune" predicted "conjunctions of cheese and lasagna," and comically prophesied that "In those days cats and dogs will be enemies, swords will cut better than radishes, fields and mountains will be out in the open, and the taverns will be well frequented." We might add, that in these days, the stock market will crash, and the stock market will rally.

That's not the end. Hell, that's not even the world.

Perhaps this is more like it? From a dispatch last week by Dr. Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, aboard the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi in the Arctic Ocean:

We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.

Days later, the British research ship the James Clark Ross reported counting "about 250 methane plumes bubbling from the seabed in an area of about 30 square miles in water less than 400 metres (1,300 feet) deep off the west coast of Svalbard." Deeper plumes at three times the depth were found near by.

If the thawing permafrost and warming oceans lose the integrity of their methane sinks, if the billowing chimneys of Arctic methane represent their tipping point, then the climate is soon to run away from a tolerable mean. A feedback loop even more catastrophic than Reaganomics will have been initiated. But as with Reaganomics, a happy ending can't be written for us.

But never mind that. There are millions of lives lived right now in apocalypse. Zimbabwe - does that look like the end of the world? Another world at least, where children are eating toxic, indigestible roots to stave off hunger, though malnutrition will kill them if relief isn't sent "very fast." What percentage of Wall Street's "rescue" would it take to rescue them? What percentage of Henry Paulson's personal wealth of $700 million? It's crazy that it seems crazy to ask. But that's Zimbabwe, and Mugabe's small time grifters aren't hooked up with the global syndicate. There's no need to know, and since so much of news is supposed to be news you use, they lose.

And we do too, if we don't know this Zimbabwe story, from last April:

American film maker Randall Nickerson is currently visiting southern Africa to make a documentary that follows up an incident that happened at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in 1994, when 62 children aged between eight and 12 reported seeing a UFO and “strange beings” during their morning break.

Those children are now young adults scattered around the globe. Nickerson is tracking them down and interviewing them about the experience. “Their stories have not changed at all,” he says. “Not what you would expect if they had made it all up.”

So what exactly happened on that day in 1994 at the school in Ruwa just east of Harare? “It was morning break and they were out in the school yard playing,” says Nickerson. “They saw one main silver craft that had four others around it,” says Nickerson. “It came down on a hill beyond the school yard that was out of bounds. The boundary was the edge of the school yard, then it was bush and the hill.

“They ran to the edge of the school yard to see what this thing was. They saw this small creature walk around on top of the craft while another came down to check out the children. He was all in black, with a very tight suit. The children said he had big eyes ‘like rugby balls’.

“The children had direct eye contact with this creature. There seems to have been some kind of communication with the children about the state of the world — what we are doing to the planet, the destruction we are causing, although not all the children got this message. Some of the children were traumatized, others were excited. The young children were the most traumatized as they were at the front of the group.

African UFO researcher Cynthia Hind was at the school the next day. One little girl told her "I swear by every hair on my head and the whole Bible that I am telling the truth." Harvard's John Mack soon followed, and interviewed dozens of witnesses with whom Nickerson is now following up.

One is Isabelle:

He was just staring, and we like, tried not to look at him, because he was quite scary.

MACK: What was scary about him?

His big eyes I think. I think - I think they want people to know that we're actually making harm on this world and we mustn't get too technoledged [sic]

MACK: What gave you that feeling?

I don't know.

MACK: But it came to you when you were with the strange beings?

Yeah. When he was looking at us. It came through my head. My conscience I think.

MACK: Had you been a person who thought a lot about what we were doing to the world?

No. Only after this.

I don't know what happened at Ruwa, but something real, really did, which means it has more authenticity than John McCain's David Blainesque "suspension" of his campaign, upside down, above the head of David Letterman, and more weight than the Treasury Department's rationale for the figure of $700 billion. ("It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number.") If we can't explain it or understand it, maybe we should fight the impulse to ignore it. As well as real, it could be important. Or maybe just kill us.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of Australian pilot Frederich Valentich's disappearance, whose last words before his microphone captured an unidentified sound of grinding metal was "That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it's not an aircraft."

Driving home in a company van the evening of March 17, 1978, Englishman Ken Edwards saw a strange figure on top of an embankment. As Peter Hough tells it in Visition, The being was tall and broad, with a head like a goldfish bowl, and its arms appeared to sprout from the top of its shoulders. It descended the steep hill at an impossible right angle to the ground, and before walking across the road and straight through a chain link fence as if it wasn't there, turned to face the van and shot narrow beams of light from its eyes into the cab. A power surge burned out all of its major components, Edwards' watch stopped, and he showed Hough marks on his hands that had been clutching the steering wheel which resembled sunburns. He soon began complaining of stomach pains, and was found to be riddled with cancer, and died at 42. Maybe he would have anyway, if he and something unknowable hadn't crossed paths, but like Barbara, his widow, told Hough, "A thing that can burn skin, stop watches and destroy an expensive radio might well be capable of bringing harm to a human being."

Last July 20, Vince Weiguang Li delivered an Edmonton newspaper that carried a lengthy feature on the Windigo, "a terrifying creature in native mythology that has a ravenous appetite for human flesh. It could take possession of people and turn them into cannibalistic monsters."

Li abruptly quit his job and took a bus across the Canadian prairie, where he beheaded and cannibalized 20-year old Tim McLean. "I just don't know what to think of it, quite frankly," says the piece's author, and Windigo expert, Nathan Carlson. He'd documented numerous cases of people believing they were "turning Windigo" who would beg to be killed "before they started eating people." At Li's first courthouse appearance, the only words he spoke were a soft, "Please kill me."

On McLean's myspace page, under Who I'd like to meet, he posted "an alien, the wolfman, frankensteins monster, a vampire...."

The Tuesday after the market dropped 777 points, the front page of a Toronto newspaper headline told me there's a "monster lot of fear out there."

Ooooh, I'm scared.

Attention Deficit World Order (Part One)

"Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension."

- HP Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House

The more things strange, the more I want to stay the same.

Suddenly, just when it seems UFOs are everywhere, I'd rather be nowhere. America's late-term, lame-duck housecleaning of suspicious suicides and self-inflicted gunshot wounds is in full swing, and I'd just as soon clean the porch. And I've never wanted to clean the porch. Now a new, "optimistic" estimate gives the world 100-months to forestall the tipping point of a runaway greenhouse effect, but I prefer to focus on the short term, and speculate idly upon how much ass next year's Watchmen adaptation will or will not kick.

I've been struggling for a year and a half with writing an introduction to my book. A year and a freaking half. I haven't been able to account for the missing time to my publisher, though I don't need a hypnotist to tell me where it's all gone. I have been good at stammering apologies and repeating vain promises, and revisiting false starts and bad ideas. (And naturally the blog suffered, because how could I justify spitting out posts like watermelon seeds while using the book for a spittoon?)

Maybe, in another year and a half, I'd have something to say. Maybe if I kept looking I'd eventually find a place to start. But I think it's more sensible to say I can't do it, and instead write my conclusions and stick them at the front. (And maybe even squeeze a blog post out of it at the same time.)

So here it is: they've won. Or let me rephrase that, since there will never be universal agreement as to who "they" are: we've lost.

Because life is short, even if I get another turn after this one, I'd rather not waste half of it relearning all the secret wrongs done to the world that I can't undo. So I need to know what, if anything, we get out of knowing what they get away with. And if it's so we may better "organize," then good luck and God bless us playing catch-up, since the priesthoods and kingly classes have had a 10,000 year head start.

I suppose it counts for something, that so many have been able to recognize the holes in the FBI's posthumous stitch-up of Bruce Ivins for the anthrax attacks. That we haven't jumped when they say jump to the conclusions of guilt and case closed may be some comfort to his family and colleagues, who watched Ivins break under the relentless There can be only one ethos of America's Lone Gunman. But all our reservation of judgment amounts to nothing but a sympathy card - an e-card at that - against the prosecution of a dead man who can be tried and convicted now only because he is dead and undefended.

Stalin's show trials, what was it do you think that they showed? Not that Zinoviev and Kamenev and the other Old Bolsheviks were "terrorists" and "sexual deviants" (though it is instructive how often the prosecuting state conjoins the two). Rather, they demonstrated Stalin's rule by absolute whim. That loyalty and service, innocence or guilt, afforded no protection. It was irrelevant if Soviet citizens were convinced that justice was served by their state. They just needed to note that if they demurred, there was nothing they could do about it.

Senator Patrick Leahy has a speaking part in The Dark Knight. It looks like his mouth talking, but it sounds like his ass. "We're not intimidated by you thugs," Leahy stares down the knife-wielding Joker who's crashed a political fundraiser. It was The Dark Knight's only moment for which I could not suspend disbelief, since two hundred billion particles of finely-milled anthrax were enough to erase the Senator's initial qualms concerning the Patriot Act. But I won't judge him, except as a character in a superhero movie, because I wasn't there and it wasn't me. Most of the time we don't make ourselves targets by our objections to their plans, because there's not much we could do to impede them. And besides, as the Joker later says, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."

I don't have a reasonable doubt that Edgar Mitchell is telling the truth about his being briefed by government officials on Roswell and alien visitation to Earth. I have considerable doubt they were telling him the truth. Because I don't think it's part of the plan to tell the truth, of which, almost certainly, even the highest and darkest government officials would have only partial knowledge. If "disclosure" ever comes, its purpose may not be to persuade us of a lie, but rather to tell a terrifying joke.

Master of our Domain

Half the people had turned into squealing pigs, the other half were cooking - Nick Cave

There's a Kids in the Hall sketch in which Mark McKinney plays a loner who's injured his toe. By the swelling, the pus and the change of colour he knows it needs attention, but he can't get motivated to go to the hospital, because "as it is, I'm fascinated by the process!" His leg has gone numb below the knee, and he can stick a fork in it and not feel a thing. "Now that," he says, "is interesting!"

Here's the thing.

In the dying days of Hillary Clinton's campaign, a wistful and perhaps at last unhinged Bill liked to say how there comes a time when we know we have more yesterdays than tomorrows. For civilizations, too. And the borrowedness of our moments of plenty should be, finally, achingly manifest.

Agricultural soils are being eroded at a rate 10 to 40 times that of soil formation. (Iowa alone has lost half of its topsoil in the last 150 years.) The ingestion and absorption of industrial toxicities has contributed to an endocrine disruption that's resulted in a 40% decline in sperm count in 50 years. And the atrocities of global industry has so contaminated the milk of Inuit mothers that it can be categorized as hazardous waste.

Energy and food are being priced out of reach of the poor. (I mean our poor: the genetic detritus of developed nations. The rest? Let them eat mud cakes. It may be the end of the world as we know it, but it’s still the world they have always known.) Like a deleted scene from Children of Men, a pray-in was held five weeks ago at a San Francisco Chevron station to beseech God for lower fuel prices. Gas has risen about 40 cents since. Demand for cheap and "green" biofuels is devastating forests, and stealing food and habitat from the other poor. Besides other things, Soylent Green is fuel efficient.

Climatologists are throwing out their most pessimistic forecasts, since reality has already outstripped them. More carbon dioxide is being discharged into the atmosphere now than even the worst-case scenario in last year's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "We're seeing events predicted for the end of the 21st century happening already," Adelaide University's Barry Bock told the Canberra conference Imagining the Real Life on a Greenhouse Earth, and anticipates a temperature rise of six degrees. Such a spike would mimic the conditions of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, which came as close as anything has to eradicating all life on Earth. "Oxygen isotopes in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch [the release of the ocean's methane hydrates] than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene":

Sedimentary layers show that most of the world's plant cover was removed in a catastrophic bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a "fungal spike" as plants and animals rotted in situ. Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic. Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.

One scientific paper investigating "kill mechanisms" during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely". Acting much like today's fuel-air explosives (or "vacuum bombs"), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

I don't know if time's speeding up or we're winding down, but Nostradamus doesn't seem of much use anymore. The last few months have felt, to me, like the closing of a door. Ahead is another door, only one, and we have no choice but to walk through it.

As it is, I'm fascinated by the process! Which, I suppose happily enough, can still appall me.

Conspiracies, too, fascinate, and are the reality of parapolitical culture, but conspiracy culture is its reality television. Even if someone does bust the conspiracy wide open! as Alex Jones has promised that so many of his broadcasts would do, justice would be served to the same extent The Bachelor is genuinely searching for true love. Seven years gone since September 11, and the singular accomplishment of "9/11 Truth" appears to have been the creation of another Great American Pastime. Sirhan could not have killed Robert Kennedy, but four decades later he's still in prison. And even when an American Court found the federal government and its agencies to be co-conspirators in the death of Martin Luther King, the judgment left no mark upon the guilty.

The Internet is often thought an egalitarian blessing by those who would hold high criminals accountable, yet the only accounting rendered is online. I don't think the guilty regard this as an unfortunate development. I think we've been corralled into cyberspace, taken as freedom its "free speech zones," and adopted its virtual and vulnerable bantustans as our "domains." (Appropriately so called, since its mastery entered mass culture as a euphemism for masturbaton.) We can win the blog wars, but we may as well have been playing World of Warcraft for all the difference it will make when the power goes out and we lose our connection. The connection for which we may have forsaken many others of much higher worth.

So this is my dilemma, and my paralysis. It's not every day you get to spectate the real-time collapse of a planetary civilization and biosphere. (Or, I suppose I should say, I remember a time when it wasn't.) But watching this unfold with fascination feels complicit and worse than if I were blithely ignorant, and analyzing it at this seeming late stage futile and ridiculous. What's important now, what's more important than ever, are the close-to-home matters: being a good father and husband, and learning how to best cushion the crash of our coddled urban lives.

That's why I'd lost my words. I'm getting them back, and I'll be posting with regularity again, which feels good because I'm a writer and I don't know what else to do with them. But my regard for them has changed.

It's like Harvey Pekar says, in the August issue of American Splendor:

"I thought about it and I realized that i might be part of the last generation that has experienced 'normal life' for some time... I try to think of positive things, you know, like I'm happy about what's been happening with my writing. But in the face of the upcoming disaster everything seems futile."

I'd have rather posted something else, but I couldn't write anything until I'd written this.

I needed to look away for a while...

...and I'm finding it harder than expected to look back.

I'm working on a lengthy post that touches a number of subjects but it hasn't jelled for me quite yet. I'm hoping to have it up in this space soon. (That's the illustration for it.) Regardless, there's always the forum.