Monday, June 26, 2006

Crimes of Aspiration



And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine - Bob Dylan

Around the time of the 2002 Academy Awards, a screenwriter somewhat estranged from Hollywood told me he felt like flying a plane into the Kodak Theatre. (Whoopie Goldberg was hosting, so he probably wasn't the only one.) He had no flight experience, no access to an aircraft, no history of violence. He wasn't "operational" - just some guy who happened to be pissed off and briefly indulged in a dark fantasy. But by the seeming logic of last week's Miami arrests, Whoopie and the motion picture establishment don't know how close they came to becoming a stain and a ruin among smouldering Bob Mackie originals.

It's a stretch to call the Miami 7 amateurs. Like even mediocrity requires talent, being an amateur takes avocation. If they had been true amateurs, they would have sought explosives and weapons' training from their make-believe "contact," rather than new boots and uniforms. These guys were playing paintball al Qaeda. They were no more amateur terrorists than a daily regime of lip-syncing and air guitar might make me an amateur musician.

Miami and South Florida, of course, do not want for terrorists, but they are the amateurs who have been made operational by the true professionals who dream the dark fantasies of empire into being. It is these deadly amateurs who become the empire's tactical expression. Robert Parry does a nice job detailing US national security's hypocrical embrace of mass murderers such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada. (Though "national security" means very little when nations are essentially meaningless.) And after the Cubans have come others, like Atta and Al-Shehhi, who landed in the old Iran-Contra milieu and helped supersize it into the "War on Terror."

The case of the Miami 7 also implies the domestication of the terror threat - we have seen al Qaeda, and it is us - but as with Katrina, which saw resourceful whites "scavenge" supplies while blacks "looted," race and poverty remain defining characteristics of the ruling class's scaremongering. It can no longer be said, even fallaciously, that "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here," because they are here already, and they're looking like the poorest and darkest of us.

Just as America's policy towards the Middle East and the Muslim world has not been composed of false steps but rather calculated provocations, so too it's war at home, with the disappearance of the middle class and the ongoing projects of disenfranchisements. That the sharpening of tensions breeds resentment and violence should surprise no one, least of all those wielding the sharpener. And the violence needn't be more than an impractical thought to be treated as a credible threat.

In the June issue of Harper's, Ben Metcalf wrote:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

Let me be clear that I have no wish to perform such a deed in fact, nor do I want anyone else to destroy bodily what is, at least in the technical sense, a fellow human being. (Let me be equally clear that the above qualification, although true, is intended primarily as a legal ploy and should in no way be attributed to my claimed pacifism, which today's prosecutor might find a way to use against me. I would also like excused from the proceedings my personal feelings for George W. Bush, embarrassment and rage, as they could probably be turned to my disadvantage as well.) In truth, I bring neither a message nor a promise of violence. I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if I were to slaughter the president of the United States with my bare hands.

Ben Metcalf was allowed to write that, and it probably didn't hurt that his name is Ben Metcalf and his magazine is Harper's. Someone with another name, writing farther afield from the mainstream, might have had the knock on the door by now. America's affluent white liberals may feel better entertaining the fantasia that their thought crimes make them enemies of the state, but it would appear they are still far too comfortable to make the enemies' list.


By the way, my family and I are moving to a new home over the next couple of days, so while we pack-up and unpack my time online will be disrupted. I hope not by much.

68 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ahhh, 'Crimes of Aspiration' indeed, behold the omnipetence and power we the peopl, er, of government for and by lawyers
Associated Press: Gov't Break a Law? Change It
The White House is nearing an agreement with Congress on legislation that would write President Bush's warrantless surveillance program into law, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said Sunday.

[Article continues, Constitution ends.]

6/26/2006 06:55:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I sometimes find the thought of dark forces pulling the strings a comfort...

Because if the truth is really that all of this mess is just the cumulative, compounded effect of mankind's inherent selfishness, short termism and greed then we truly are fucked.

Because if there really is no one in control of all this insanity, there will is no chance to stop any of it.

6/26/2006 07:03:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Are there any great parallels between the "Red Scare" of Communism with McCarthy and what may end being call the "Black Scare" of terrorism?

6/26/2006 07:56:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The "Sears tower Plot" from Jeb Bush terror-tory of Miami, FL hits all the real suspects involved in the 9-11 plot on the American side: Goldman Sachs, AIG, Kroll, Marsh and McLellan, and (Miami based) Greenberg Traurig lawfirm, so close to the Bush family crimes.

For details on these groups intersections with the Sears Tower and with 9-11, see this post on how U.S. state terorrists are still attempting to down their failed Sears Tower hit of 9-11:

9-11 & Sears Tower Plot of Goldman Sachs,Kroll,& AIG: NO bomb, infiltrate,Silverstein link
04:58 Jun-23 (2 comments)
link here

6/26/2006 09:26:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

We in 'relaxed and comfortable' Australia have been spared any uncertainty on this front by new laws against sedition
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/hows-this-for-sedition/2005/10/23/1130005997719.html
http://www.vicpeace.org/sedition/
which apply to all such sentiments.

But its okay, apparently, artists will still be able to poke fun, we're assured the laws will not be applied in such cases.

Just so long as you're not serious.

6/26/2006 09:42:00 AM  
Blogger lemme howdt said...

These days the law can be anything they say it is, like alice's conversations in wonderland. All the sharp witty puns are now tiny pin-pricks oozing throught the pores of a fairly ugly reality. But whose reality?

If we choose to accept their sovereignty over us, then we get what we deserve. The debate game hasn't even made it to the playing field, but already the control mongers are issuing the rules of how the new game will be played. Believe me, they will not even be on the field.

There are light forces that counterbalance dark forces. Independence is there for the taking - freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose - no, i don't think so janis. It becomes a matter of who do we hold accountable - i can only speak for me, but i account for my time, my space and my interest. It is one of the reasons i am here, reading RI. (even if it is v. 2.0) I enjoy the climate, the philosophy and the attentiveness. Still being 'allowed' to speak thoughtful thoughts is important, because we will think those thoughts anyway and they will clutter our brains unless we can get them howdt.

6/26/2006 09:44:00 AM  
Blogger Ted Fleming said...

Longdead, if you haven't seen "Good Night, and Good Luck" yet, see it now. I think it might help answer your question.

6/26/2006 10:09:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It always killed me that Murrow said "Good Luck." I take it to mean "cuz you're going to need it."

Think about it. Those two words, indicating his departure, say volumes. If nothing else, it purveys an underlying cynicism that we face a seemingly insurmountable challenge, and luck will be required to prevail.

6/26/2006 12:51:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

harry said...
I sometimes find the thought of dark forces pulling the strings a comfort...

Because if the truth is really that all of this mess is just the cumulative, compounded effect of mankind's inherent selfishness, short termism and greed then we truly are fucked.

Because if there really is no one in control of all this insanity, there will is no chance to stop any of it.

7:03 AM



Harry, Harry, Harry......haven't you heard the good news........He Has Risen.

Seriously, Harry, apparently all we need is Love and The Internet.

6/26/2006 12:54:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't you think you're being too hard on the US government?
After all, they have standards to keep.
If someone's planning to bring down the Sear's Tower, the US just wants to make sure that they're competent enough to actually do the job before they turn a blind eye to their activities.

Seriously though, you did nail it here:
"The case of the Miami 7 also implies the domestication of the terror threat - we have seen al Qaeda, and it is us - but as with Katrina, which saw resourceful whites "scavenge" supplies while blacks "looted," race and poverty remain defining characteristics of the ruling class's scaremongering. It can no longer be said, even fallaciously, that "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here," because they are here already, and they're looking like the poorest and darkest of us."

Believing that these guys are the 1st example of American born terrorists could only work in a country of short attention span, short memory halfwits. It totally ignores Tim McVeigh & his army of white NRA loving Christian Identity spouting rightwing racist dickheads who have been planning the same sort of shit in their basements for years & years & years.
It's also pretty much typical US crime-busting.
You can see it in the way small time drug dealers get carted off to the hoosegow by the wheelbarrowful while the big guys chortle & guffaw & wallow in all that lovely cash.

Yep, all in all, I'd say that it's business as usual here in the US house of mirrors where up is down & black is white & contradictions & lies are the philosophical glue that hold the huge shambling behemoth together.

6/26/2006 01:22:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You write about the Miami arrests but are strangely silent about the ones in Toronto. Does Canada have more stringent libel laws? Or is the U.S. to blame for the "broad strata" of suspects in Toronto also?

6/26/2006 01:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, come on. Canada and the U.S. are one and the same. Canada just so happens to be the Bullpen for this latest War on Terror Pyops Adventure.

6/26/2006 02:27:00 PM  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

"You write about the Miami arrests but are strangely silent about the ones in Toronto."

Good point. And while we do have more stringent libel laws, that hasn't been a factor. The Toronto arrests happened just as I began having troubles posting to the original blog site. By the time I began posting again, the story was a bit stale.

6/26/2006 02:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Where does it all end? From the "It Can't Happen Here" Dept:

The Fire-bombing of Dresden

We fled into another cellar overcrowded with injured and distraught men women and children shouting, crying and praying. No light except some electric torches. And then suddenly the second raid began. This shelter was hit too, and so we fled through cellar after cellar. Many, so many, desperate people came in from the streets. lt is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. lt became more and more difficult to breathe. lt was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mothers hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub.
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
Now rny rnother possessed only a little bag with our identitiy papers. The basket with the twins had disappeared and then suddenly my older sister vanished too . Although my rnother looked for her immediately it was in vain. The last hours af this night we found shelter in the cellar of a hospital nearby surrounded by crying and dying people. In the next morning we looked for our sister and the twins but without success. The house where we lived was only a burning ruin. The house where our twins were left we could not go in. Soldiers said everyone was burnt to death and we never saw my two baby sisters again.
Totally exhausted, with burnt hair and badly burnt and wounded by the fire we walked to the Loschwitz bridge where we found good people who allowed us to wash, to eat and to sleep. But only a short time because suddenly the second air raid began (February14th) and this house too was bombed and my mothers last identity papers burnt. Completely exhausted we hurried over the bridge (river Elbe) with many other homeless survivors and found another family ready to help us, because somehow their home survived this horror.
In all this tragedy I had completely forgotten my l0th birthday. But the next day my mother surprised me with a piece af sausage she begged from the "Red Cross". This was my birthday present

6/26/2006 02:50:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

-about the "Tim McVeigh & his army of white NRA loving Christian Identity spouting rightwing racist dickheads" comment-
I guess you don't know about Elohim City being run by an FBI informant, or Andreas Strassmeir, or McVeigh's "washout"...

hmmm- I guess that I too would like to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if I were to firebomb-
or at least smack, a few of the posuers... er, posters here with my bare hands.

;o

6/26/2006 03:17:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey folks,

It should be obvious now how the game is being rigged. People in high places are looting all of us on the bottom and finding scapegoats among us they can then frame up to blame for what THEY are doing.

Well, it is time folks to get some "God" in your life. And by God I don't mean Jesus or Allah or Buddha. I mean, it is time to start having trust in a higher good and go out into the world and go after your dreams before you lose that opportunity.

They completely dropped the mask on this Miami 7 thing. Hell, this administration just went into a country on lies and killed at least 50,000 people.Yet they want to paint everyone else a criminal if we don't go along.

Time to acknowledge what is really going on... they intend to frame you up just like they do everyone else.

6/26/2006 03:50:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ya know, for a site that purports to pride itself on delving into the weird, I am more than a wee bit disappointed in the apparent lack of stones, the mega-shrinkage of cojones of late, as evinced by first Jeff’s, and now the commentors, failure to mention the deep backstory of the Liberty City 7 of aspirational (I guess that’s something even less than wannabe) terra-ists, to wit:

Why can’t anyone say the word? NUWAUBIANS. There, I said it. Those folks in Miami aren’t even CLOSE to being muslims. Hell, they aren’t even mudlims. They are Nuwaubians. Read Kurt Nimmo and Juan Cole’s columns from last Friday, not to mention the Wikipedia entry on the cult. It’s every conspiracy theory ever dreamed up by man or beast, rolled into one. Why are the msm, and the sometimes estimable RI all trying to sweep this under the rug? The leader of the cult, Dwigt Z. York, a.k.a. “The One”, a.k.a. “Father Jesus”, a.k.a. “Chief Black Thunderbird Eagle” of the “Moorish Cherokee Yamassee (sic)”, a.k.a. “the Mahdi” a.k.a. “Atum-Re”, a.k.a. Rev. Dr. Malachi Z. York 33°/720° [note the Masonic claims], says he is descended from the British “royal” Yorks. He has also “guided” a number of hip hop artists at one time or another, including among those listed in Wiki as Nuwaubians are: Doug E. Fresh, Afrikaa Bambataa, India.Airie, Erikah Badu, Da Bush Babees, Andre 3000, Common, Nas, the late Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and members of De La Soul and Mobb Deep and OutKast. Way back in the 60’s he claims to have written and produced cuts for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, as well as “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” by MacFadden and , and “Love Train” by the O’Jays.

That was around the time he did three years hard time for raping a 14 year old. More recently, in 2003, he was convicted of over 100 counts of aggravated sexual molestation and child prostitution on children as young as 4 years old, and sentenced to 135 years in federal prison. Why do the media, including this site, ignore these very interesting connections with the chumps in Liberty City? Sounds like another Nebraska Boys Town.

From Nimmo at http://kurtnimmo.com

“It has influences and borrowings from many sources—such as a white new-age Blavatsky-influenced movement like Astara, the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, the Shriners, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the revisionist Christianity and Islam of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the numerology of Rashad Khalifa, the ancient astronaut theories of Zecharia Sitchin, the alien cryptozoology of David Icke including the UFO mythology of greys and reptilians, more terrestrial cryptozoological stories like that of the chupacabra, the political theories of patriot mythology, modern scientific and pseudoscientific legends like those of Area 51, the Philadelphia Experiment, Project Blue Book, Montauk Project, and MJ-12, popular conspiracy theories such as those about the Illuminati or multiple clones of members of the Bilderberg Group, a paperback on fortune telling, and hollow earth theories.”

From Cole at www.juancole.com

“I just saw the spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations on CNN saying that the Miami cult members just arrested are not Muslims. I'd say that is a fair statement.

For one thing, they are vegetarians!

It seems pretty obvious that they are just a local African-American cult which mixed Judaism, Christianity and (a little bit of) Islam. It seems to be a of vague offshoot of the Moors group founded by Dwight York. I heard on CNN that one of them talked of being Moors. And Batiste, the leader, called whites "devils" in the tradition of the original Nation of Islam and York's Moors. Now CNN is saying one member said they practiced witchcraft [likely meaning Haitian voodoo or perhaps Santeria-like rituals]. One former member is called Levi-El, suggesting he might be associated with the Black Hebrew movement or an offshoot. Now a relative of one of the members, Phanor, said that they wore black uniforms with a star of David arm patch and considered themselves of the Order of Melchizadek. I wonder if it is "Seas of David" or "C's of David", with "c" meaning commando or some such?

This Seas of David group primarily seems to have been studying the Bible. The mother of one insisted that he is a Catholic. Then there is all that Jewish symbology and terminology, even in their names. Islam was nothing more for them but a set of symbols they could pull into their syncretic local culture. The group drew on poor Haitian immigrants and local indigent African-American youth. If this were the 1960s, they'd have been Black Panthers or Communists.”

Co-Intelpro (or whatever its latter-day S&B derivative might be) anyone?

By the way, RDR, you are half correct. Charlie Manson wasn’t a product of CoIntelpro. It was MK-Ultra.

Here are the wiki links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nuwaubian_Nation_of_Moors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malachi_Z._York

Rock on, news fans.

~Mojo

6/26/2006 04:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I guess this means meeting in Whistler is out of the question unless, of course, we want to go the way of the NUWAUBIANS.

Shit!! I was so looking forward to meeting Anonymous.

6/26/2006 04:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot:

And [masonic] brothers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have both spoken up publicly, or written, on behalf of "Malachi" Dwight Z. York in the past.

What a woild.

But what's that have to do with Whister?

6/26/2006 04:16:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

But what's that have to do with Whister?

Somebody please explain this to Anonymous. I have to run.

6/26/2006 04:21:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly -- that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around."

As above, so below.

6/26/2006 04:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Unca $cammy:

WTF?????????????????????

6/26/2006 04:43:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The following is very esoteric sex magic information that you will not find by studying Kabbalah, alchemy or any type of occult conspiracy theory. It is super duper double secret knowledge possesed by only the most sophisticated elite in the ranks of those skilled in the art of high level espionage:

"Eating queso alone perverts the true nature of the food and destroys its magical ability to turn enemies into friends, friends into lovers, and lovers into sexy naked lovers covered in bright-orange cheese dip.

Remeber: Dip safely, dip with friends."

6/26/2006 05:25:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"And when you dip with someone, you are dipping with everyone they have ever dipped with."

~Michael Valentine Smith

6/26/2006 05:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A nonchalant attitude towards sex magic and high level espionage -- a.k.a. "double-dipping" -- is inexcusable! You can't just "yada yada yada" away the POWER of queso.

There is "something wrong with that"

http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/seinfeld/video/index.html

6/26/2006 05:47:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To Anon 3:17:

You're one scary typist pal. Almost as scary as the 'terrorists' they arrested in Miami. So, after a hard day making anonymous, but cute, threats on the internet, do you fill your nights harassing single women with unwanted phone calls? Or has the advent of Caller ID stripped the thrill of anonymity from that little hobby?

Just because the Oklahoma Bombing may have been instigated /facilitated by the government doesn't mean that there isn't an army of bible toting redneck halfwits in this country who have been dreaming of doing their own 911 for years.

Just because the feds are corrupt fucks doesn't make their dupes innocent little babes.

Dig up some of the nifty old recruitment videos of
those lovely Christian Identity folks & chortle to the escapades of fat sweaty white guys as they discuss wacky antics similar to OK City & 911 long before they happened.

Watch their peckers harden everytime someone mentions 'race war.'

These fine examples of a tainted gene pool may have been provoked by the feds, but I'd bet it didn't take much provocation.

6/26/2006 06:13:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Richard and Anon 3:17, relax and have some cheese dip.

6/26/2006 06:38:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To anonyous 4:01:

Thanks for the links to Nuwaubianism. It's comforting to know that black folks are as screwy as white folks & as prone to make shit up whole cloth when the construction of a new religion is undertaken.

Although, with an intellectual pedigree like this :

Chariots of the Gods and the Rael’s embellishments on that book, conspiracy lit, UFO lit, the human potential movement, Buddhism and new-age, astrology, theosophy and Blavatsky, Leonard Jeffries and other Afrocentrics, Cayce, LaRouche, alternative medicine, self-help lit, Satanism, the Atkins diet, numerology and yoga, Torah, Gospels and Koran, Rastafarianism, the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation

how could they be wrong.

Having read "The Devil is a Gentleman" by J.C. Hallman, America is filled to the brim with screwballs not much different than these guys.

6/26/2006 07:04:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good point. And while we do have more stringent libel laws, that hasn't been a factor. The Toronto arrests happened just as I began having troubles posting to the original blog site. By the time I began posting again, the story was a bit stale.

I completely missed that connection. Though I didn't voice them at the time, I apologize for having harboured doubts of foul play in your blog troubles. But, at least for me, that juxtaposition is just too uncanny to consider mere happenstance regardless of the cause.

6/26/2006 08:04:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I sent this email to MSNBC.


Dear MSNBC:

How stupid does our government think we are? Few of us believe this is a terrorist plot. What we do believe is the government has again come up with spin to justify their spying on U.S. citizens. Who is behind this? Karl Rove? He thinks he's off the hook, so he is back to his shifty ways?

Many of us, on a forum I belong to, were worried about a possible plot on the Sears Tower early in June. However, the people we believed were formulating the plot were members of our own government, just like 9/11. (By the way, many of us know that associates of Larry Silverstein bought the Sears Tower.) I don't for a minute believe that these people in Florida were cooking this up. Probably one of the government shills that watch our forum thought it would be a good opportunity for misinformation and diversion.

By the way, how convenient for it to happen in Florida, where the 2000 election was stolen, where storm troopers mistreated protesters in Miami, where a computer programmer came up with a program to steal the 2004 elections, courtesy of Diebold and others. Florida is becoming a police state far faster than the rest of us.

You, the media, are feeding this monster. You should be informing us, protecting us, but you give us the rhetoric and spin of the government. Wake up! Tell us the truth, the real truth!

Sincerely,

6/26/2006 08:30:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It seems to me that we weren't supposed to hear about these people until after an attack occured. They seem like a modern SLA/terrorist hybrid. Maybe someone actually did their job.

6/26/2006 09:32:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anecdotal Evidence:

One night, about 8 months ago, I was standing in a Wal-Mart parking lot (yeah I'm one of those low rent dumbfucks who are cutting their own throat by sucking at Sam Waltons shriveled pecker...in my whiny & defensive defense I'll plead 4 kids & my job caring for Mentally Retarded folk only pays $20,000 a year because you Christian fucks who supposedly run this conglomeration of disparate loonies aren't particularly loose with the damn purse strings. I guess that the whole
""Truly, I say to you,as you did it to
one of the least of these,my brethren,
you did it to me" thing-a-ma-bob escaped you American pseudo-dwellers on everyone of God's words....

....but I digress....

....as i was saying, about 8 months ago i was standing in a Wal-Mart parking lot loading my groceries & my diapers, well not my diapers my kids diapers, into my car when a guy in Army fatigues walks up to me and says, "Hey big fella, do you have a cigarette?" I give him one then return to loading. So he's standing there smoking & staring up at an incoming plane (the Wal-Mart is on a flight path of a local airport), kind of mumbling to himself, "that planes coming in way too low. way too low."
I look at the plane. It looked like the same approach I'd see a hundred times.
He then asks me if I'd ever been in the military.I said no. He then names some obscure weapon that I never heard of & starts saying "Man, if I had one of those I could bring that fucker right down. Teach those assholes a lesson." He then begins air-shooting with his invisible plane shooting rifle.
I think "Great, another looney." ( A few months before that I had some old toothless guy with shotguns in his gunrack call me over to his truck & ramble on about how he has the "tuberculocanosis & when he "gets a cold, he can't sneeze like other people," he has to "squat down & shit my pants.")
So I say to this guy, "C'mon man, why the fuck would you want to do that for. these people just want to get home. hell, they probably had as shitty a day as you did. Not to mention all the people in this parking you'd kill."
He says, "Nah, it'd serve the dumbfucks right.
It doesn't matter anyway, I'm the only one who's really alive in this parking lot anyway."
He then turns & wanders off into the night.

So, should i have called the FBI?
He sounds about as together on his mass slaughter plans as the "Miami 7"?
Hell, at some point during his babbling harangue he asked me for a ride. Should I have said "Sure," & then drove him to the nearest police station?
I live in PA & there's an old joke about PA that goes: 'In Pennsylvania you have Pittsburgh & Philly & then Arkansas in between.'
I live in the Arkansas part.
Do you think those cops would have cared?
If, instead of white, the guy would have been black or middle-eastern, would they have cared more or less?
Who gets to make the decisions?
Bush?
I wouldn't let him match my socks.
I think America needs to be very fucking careful about what she accepts & why she accepts it, but, as usual, I know she won't & the bullshit castle we're building here is about to get another level added.

Maybe that's what that anoying phrase "let's take it to another level' really means...let's take our bullshit to another level in this bullshit castle we've studiously built out of our own bullshit.

6/26/2006 11:40:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anecdotal Evidence:

One night, about 8 months ago, I was standing in a Wal-Mart parking lot (yeah I'm one of those low rent dumbfucks who are cutting their own throat by sucking at Sam Waltons shriveled pecker...in my whiny & defensive defense I'll plead 4 kids & my job caring for Mentally Retarded folk only pays $20,000 a year because you Christian fucks who supposedly run this conglomeration of disparate loonies aren't particularly loose with the damn purse strings. I guess that the whole
""Truly, I say to you,as you did it to
one of the least of these,my brethren,
you did it to me" thing-a-ma-bob escaped you American pseudo-dwellers on everyone of God's words....

....but I digress....

....as i was saying, about 8 months ago i was standing in a Wal-Mart parking lot loading my groceries & my diapers, well not my diapers my kids diapers, into my car when a guy in Army fatigues walks up to me and says, "Hey big fella, do you have a cigarette?" I give him one then return to loading. So he's standing there smoking & staring up at an incoming plane (the Wal-Mart is on a flight path of a local airport), kind of mumbling to himself, "that planes coming in way too low. way too low."

I look at the plane. It looked like the same approach I'd see a hundred times.

He then asks me if I'd ever been in the military.I said no. He then names some obscure weapon that I never heard of & starts saying "Man, if I had one of those I could bring that fucker right down. Teach those assholes a lesson." He then begins air-shooting with his invisible plane shooting rifle.

I think "Great, another looney." ( A few months before that I had some old toothless guy with shotguns in his gunrack call me over to his truck & ramble on about how he has the "tuberculocanosis & when he "gets a cold, he can't sneeze like other people," he has to "squat down & shit my pants.)"

So I say to this guy, "C'mon man, why the fuck would you want to do that for. these people just want to get home. hell, they probably had as shitty a day as you did. Not to mention all the people in this parking you'd kill."
He says, "Nah, it'd serve the dumbfucks right.
It doesn't matter anyway, I'm the only one who's really alive in this parking lot anyway."
He then turns & wanders off into the night.

So, should i have called the FBI?

He sounds about as together on his mass slaughter plans as the "Miami 7"?

Hell, at some point during his babbling harangue he asked me for a ride. Should I have said "Sure," & then drove him to the nearest police station?

I live in PA & there's an old joke about PA that goes: 'In Pennsylvania you have Pittsburgh & Philly & then Arkansas in between.'
I live in the Arkansas part.

Do you think those cops would have cared?

If, instead of white, the guy would have been black or middle-eastern, would they have cared more or less?

Who gets to make the decisions?

Bush?

I wouldn't let him match my socks.

I think America needs to be very fucking careful about what she accepts & why she accepts it, but, as usual, I know she won't & the bullshit castle we're building here is about to get another level added.

Maybe that's what that anoying phrase "let's take it to another level' really means...let's take our bullshit to another level in this bullshit castle we've studiously built out of our own bullshit.

6/26/2006 11:47:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mental Note to Self:

Preview clicky really means publish...preview clicky really means publish....preview clicky really means publish.....




Sorry.

6/26/2006 11:57:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's a headline for y'all:

"Bush ignores laws he inks, vexing Congress"

I guess this is more of Bush & his need to be "deniable" about every statement.

I can hear the debate now:

Congress: But you signed it.

Bush: No I didn't.

Congress: Yes you did.

Bush: No I didn't.

Y'know, I don't think I'm naive enough to believe that America will undergo some great awakening & actually start living up to that freedom truth & justice jazz that's taught in every high school civics class across the country...

...but I do hope that the dysfunctional yoo-hoos that play fast & loose with the Constitution suffer from the same size & frequency of headaches that they afflict me with.

Oh sacred & holy aspirin bottle
be mine.

6/27/2006 12:30:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Richard, you wrote:

"He then turns & wanders off into the night.

So, should i have called the FBI?"

He WAS the FBI, and he was trying to make you the leader of the next nitwit squad, the Pennsarkansasylvania 7.

You aren't by any chance a Nuwaubian, are you?

6/27/2006 02:44:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The future comes as it always has, never quite living up to it's advance billing yet always bringing in tow more profound surprises and curious changes than even the most imaginative proponents of either wonder or doom could ever concoct.

I have tried to fathom that for more than half a century now. What we expect rarely arrives as anticipated or when it does it is never half so important or timely in our affairs as we imagined.

Meanwhile in some unnoticed corner some entirely new and unexpected development or event precipitously appears and we are never quite the same for it afterwards.

It is always the unexpected that rocks us back on our heels and raises our awareness of our continuing ability to still surprise ourselves as a species.

Over time it seems, at least to me, that our ability to generate surprises has for the most part generally gravitated to the positive side of the scales by way of the far less surprising and intentionally negative actions precipitated on our part....hmmm?

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki it seemed we couldn't really sink any lower on the negative side of things than perhaps to simply spread the threat of that kind of nightmare around the entire globe, which of course was exactly what we did...hmmm?

But let's face the facts, shall we? It wouldn't really have been all that surprising if we'd blown ourselves to bits that way. The genuinely surpising thing is that we didn't and still haven't.

Now it can be said with some degree of certainty that our science and particularly that of physics has essentially lost it's grip on "reality".

Some are even beginning to bewail the fact that there may be no possible way for us to ever imagine any kind of model to explain the bizarre nature of what the physicists have seemingly uncovered.

In any sociey so dependent on science and technology to keep it afloat a little problem like that cannot help but spread into all the other areas of life and so it seems it has.

We are indeed living in changing times and "letting go" of what must be let go of and left behind is never easy, but there is no other way to go forwards otherwise.

Our conversations continually bounce back to the greater question of "consciousness" or how it's presence or absence might account for what we experience and more importantly how we happen to experience it.

The tale of the Dutch fakir Mirin Dajo a few posts back dredged up a memory of mine from many years ago quite out of the blue.

I cannot say what connects the two beyond my own inner workings, my mental file of peculiarities, if you will, that my intuition has granted some deeper meaning to than I have yet to find. Somehow that memory strikes me as being connected to Dajo's performance...

In the early days of lasers, when there was much experimentation and investigation simply for its own sake, an experiment was devised and conducted to see just how small and tightly focussed a laser beam could be made to determine just how small a hole it could burn through a block of steel.

I don't recall the exact dimensions but it was sufficiently miniscule that the experiment was conducted and filmed under another relatively new invention, an electron microscope.

Now when the laser was turned on an obvious hole developed in the solid surface of the steel just as one might expect. When the laser was turned off, however, the edges of the hole briefly shimmered and in less than a blink of an eye the hole itself simply dissappeared without a trace.

This was repeated many more times but always with the very same results.

Now some explanation had to be forthcoming about what was quite obviously seen and filmed.

The steel despite the very high magnification appeared quite solid, grey and steel-like in every way.

The hole the beam made through it was most definitely round and cylindrically shaped as it penetrated into the block's interior which also appeared to have similarly solid, grey, steel-like walls, yet when the laser was turned off the steel seemed to quite magically "flow" or simply "shiver" right back together.

The best hypothesis that was proffered at the time seemed to be that the atoms in the steel had simply gotten out of the way of the beam.

"Migrated", if you will, as the beam arrived and then simply "migrated" back when it was stopped.

Just how that might fit with the rigid crystaline model we generally apply to metals in general and steel in particular wasn't addressed.

Now it strikes me that everything, including objects like ourselves, are all about 99.999% space with the exceedingly small remainder being pure energy travelling so fast that it only gives the appearance and qualities we generally ascribe to surfaces or so-called solid matter. "Behaves like" rather than is, if you will.

Now the tiny beam of laser light is still composed of the same kind of basic energy that the steel itself is. In it's case it looks like a beam to us, just as the energy that creates the steel makes it look like what it appears to be to us.

Perhaps owing only to the scale involved those two forms of energy were able to "relate" to one another in some fashion whereby the least disruption of what either was doing at the time could simply be accommodated rather than one taking precidence over the other?

Now it is quite difficult to say that energy at that level isn't somehow "purposefull" or that the construction of the kinds of successive frameworks it gives rise to, particles, atoms molecules and so forth don't all follow a kind of calculated logic that appears to us as chemistry, or behaves like what appears to be physics or is measurable to a certain extent by what appears to be our mathematics.

Nevertheless it is all mostly space and extremely fast moving, infintessimally small, little bits or bundles of energy constantly dancing about that only appear to be what they seem to us and our senses which are of course also made from the very same stuff.

Now most of us know this quite well. We might even say that we "believe it" but the real truth is we don't, or we can't, or we won't.

The very idea that we are nothing but a veritable and continuously swarming infinity of energy bits so small that if they were all gathered together in one place they'd be far less than the size of any pinhead is simply too duantng a proposition.

That that continual swarming constantly builds and rebuilds our own image in spacetime and essentially moves it about in accordance with our general expectations of what and where we think we are or what we believe we are doing in it is perhaps the greatest hurdle for our intelligence and imagination to make.

Because if that anylysis is correct, the energy that forms us and the reality we percieve intimately knows what we expect or desire or anticipate from it, be it good or bad, well before we can experience it at the level where we seemingly find ourselves actually viewing and experiencing it.

If that energy field that creates us physically isn't actually "us", at all but something once again that only appears to be us, what might we be said to be if not some conscious non-corporeal form or "idea" of ourselves that the energy flows into to give it it's sense of existence, growth, or the singular ability to understand, create and manipulate even it's own ideas and concepts in spacetime?

Now no one can say that whatever the form of communication that exists between the consciousness or portion of consciousness each of us may be within the energy field that continually makes us material, or appear to be material with material properties, is simply a one way street.

Or that the real difference between being a physical being or simply becoming the "energy construct" (which we also are) doesn't allow for the posssibility of some subtle "shift" of modes between them that explains Dajo's phenomenon.

What I'm suggesting here is that Dajo stumbled onto a way to directly communicate with the energy field which allowed or made it move more in accord with it's own quite natural properties for a moment rather than the ones normally associated and behaving as Dajo's body.

A kind of self-induced quantum state where the steel blade was also an energy construct which Dajo's own energy field simply "migrated" out of the way of and then migrated back. Never actually letting it pierce him at all, just temporarily co-existing alongside and all around it.

Of course this is somewhat speculative, but it is also within a realm of a possibility we still have a difficult time believing. That may in the end be the key to how it works. It seems that it did for Dajo. It's difficult to doubt the sincerity of the belief of anyone willing to demonstate it the way he did.

6/27/2006 04:05:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Richard,

I implore you to quit smoking and lead a healthier lifestyle......and quit shopping at Wal-Mart.

6/27/2006 09:03:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Autism is our evolutionary future.

6/27/2006 09:04:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Autism is our evolutionary future."

I am starting to think there may be some truth to this statement.

Do you have any links that explore this hypothesis?

6/27/2006 09:30:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is it possible that our government LEARNED something from Negativland's 'culture jamming' experiment, misstating lies and making sure the press picks it up. Could be our only defence.

6/27/2006 10:13:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Class action law suit against the administration, anyone? Causing 'un-due mental distress'. Just think of the PTB as a cigarrette company.

6/27/2006 10:26:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

harry said...
"Autism is our evolutionary future."

I am starting to think there may be some truth to this statement.

Do you have any links that explore this hypothesis?


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5488463


I listened to this segment on the way home from work yesterday, and it activated an on going dialogue in which my wife and I have been engaged.

It seesm to us that Autism is a flourishing phenomenon.....to the point where it is no longer a phenomenon. It's going mainstream, as the segment indicates, and Autistics seemed to be perfectly equipped for the dawning Machine Age.

For example, this statement from the linked segment:

Amanda Baggs, 25, has autism. And like some people with autism, she doesn't speak. Instead, she communicates by typing -- with two fingers and fast -- on her keyboard. The computer's voice speaks her words.

"We perceive the world differently," says Baggs through a computer. "We think differently. And we respond to the world differently. And that goes for all of us not just some of us."

Partly because she doesn't speak, doctors have called her low- functioning. It's a label Baggs says she doesn't put much stock in.

"Oh, good grief, yes. The only label I've ever formally gotten is low-functioning," she writes. "I don't believe in functioning levels. High- functioning and low and all that crud is mostly illusions in peoples' heads."

Sometimes Baggs wears a T-shirt that says: "Not Being Able to Speak is Not the Same as Not Having Anything to Say."

Baggs has a blog where she writes thoughtfully and passionately about autism. "The main theme of the blog," she says, "is that all people are valuable."

The Internet has provided a community for autistics.

"Many of us have a lot of trouble with face to face interaction and are also extremely isolated," Baggs says. "Like a lot of autistic people, I rarely even leave the house. A lot of us have trouble with spoken language, and so a lot of us find it easier to write on the Internet than to talk in person. There's a lot of us where we might not be able to meet anywhere else but online, and so that's been a lot of where we've organized."

6/27/2006 10:34:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To Anon 2:44:

You said:

"You aren't by any chance a Nuwaubian, are you?"

Nah! I joined the Fuckubians instead. Their retirement plan was better.

6/27/2006 11:06:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As a young teen, I vividly remember a particular family trip to the beach. I was laying flat on my back on a towel in the sand when my brother nudged me and said "hey, look, there's a gorilla loose on the beach." I sat up and looked, and I'll be damned if it wasn't the hairiest motherfucker I'd ever seen. He was so hairy, you couldn't see any skin except for some small patches around the eyes.

To make matters worse, this hairy son of a bitch was wearing a fuckin speedo!! Can you believe that shit? He looked like some kind of comical circus act, and you couldn't help but chuckle.

Then the guy falls out and has a seizure, as if just the sight of him wasn't enough of a spectacle. And, to make matters worse, the whole damn beach crowds around the poor sap to gawk at the unconscious, flapping and floundering man-beast, thus depriving him of well needed oxygen and ventilation. Perhaps it was Heat Stroke. Afterall, it was 90 freakin degrees and the guy was wearing a fur coat.

The things we remember.

Deep Thoughts with Shrubageddon.

6/27/2006 12:30:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5118778.stm

"I am TIRED of these motherfucking snakes!"

Or am I in love with these motherfucking snakes! I can't decide!

Snakes are bad...snakes are bad...

6/27/2006 12:38:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

EZ board seems to be down.

Lets hope its not more of the same "technical difficulties" this blog ahs been experiencing!

6/27/2006 01:11:00 PM  
Blogger messianicdruid said...

I saw a training film at work once where we were told to count the number of times the ball was passed by the team in white shirts. There were two teams of four people, one team wore white t-shirts the other wore no shirts. They walked in circles, passing between and around one another for about fifteen seconds and passing the bastketball back and forth to their team mates. About half-way through the film somebody in a gorilla suit walks through from left to right. After the film the instructor asks "How many times did the ball get passed?" There were many different answers, averaging about 12 times. He then asked, "Did anything else happen during the film" I was the only one to put up my hand. He said, "What did you see?" I said, "A person in a black gorilla suit walked through the players from left to right." He said, "That's right". Everyone else in the class said it did not happen, and that they did not believe it, so they replayed the tape. The class was shocked.

{My son graduated from Pittburg State, whose mascot is a gorilla, so seeing one at a ball game is not unusual for me}

classic misdirection...

6/27/2006 01:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

to Shrubageddon:
Thanks for your concern. Currently on my 2nd month smoke free . I know, in the world of nicotine addiction, that isn't much.

The Wal-Mart thing , on the other hand, won't be ending in the forseeable future. My wife's job will be outsourced to India as of December 8th & she wants to start her own business soooooooo money will be even tighter than it is now. Anyway, Wal-Mart provides an unparalleled opportunity to get cheap food & see oodles of well-armed , batshit crazy rednecks.

& to Alice, if your reading this:

You said some really nice things about me a few threads back & I'd just like to say thank you. I realized that I'm probably the dumbest guy on this comment board so honesty & humor is about all I've got to offer. So, once again, thank you.

6/27/2006 01:28:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

One other thing I didn't know, apparently Robert Anton Wilson is on his deathbed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-krassner/robert-anton-wilson_b_23608.html

"My friend Bob Wilson--the prolific writer who has been balancing for decades on the cusp of cult following and mainstream awareness--has recently been on his deathbead, surrounded by family and hospice workers in what were his final days, but he suddenly seemed to be changing his mind.

On June 19, he sent this haiku with one syllable missing:

Well what do you know?
Another day had passed
and I'm still not not.

And then, on June 21, he e-mailed this message:

Surprise!
I'm still alive
and doing business on ebay."

6/27/2006 01:35:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

messianicdruid,

Interesting post. I'm curious, though, do you work for a Corporation? The reason I ask is because Corporations are classic cases of Misdirection. Today's Marketers are Yesterday's Shamans.

It somewhat reminds me of the story of Columbus and The Indians from What The Bleep Do We Know where the Indians couldn't see Columbus' ships anchored several hundred yards offshore because their visual cortex had no reference for this newly presented reality. The Shaman was able to see the ships only after focusing and meditating on the anomolous waves and ripples in the water. He then, via their trust in him, guided them in their visual discovery of the ships.

6/27/2006 01:40:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

Snakes are bad...snakes are bad...


Especially when some of us are growing Watermelons out of the side of our's.

Either way, you need to keep up.......we've moved from snakes to gorillas, in case you haven't noticed.

6/27/2006 01:51:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My favorite Henry Rollins lyrics:

If I listened to everything they said to me I wouldn’t be here
If I took the time to bleed from all the tiny little arrows shot my way I wouldn’t be here
The ones who don’t do anything are the always the ones who try to put you down
You could spend your entire life in the nowhere land of self doubt
When you start to doubt yourself
The real world will eat you alive

It’s time to align your body with your mind
It’s hero time
It’s time to align your body with your mind
It’s time to shine

I’m talking to you. hero time starts right now

If you think you’ve got 100 extra years to mess around you’re wrong
This time is real. your time is now. it’s hero time.

Hard times are getting harder
The liars are acting strong
You better get a grip on yourself
Or you won’t be around too long

No such thing as spare time
No such thing as free time
No such thing as down time
All you got is life time

I got grace in times of friction
I got truth in times of fiction
I got no time for the hype
Suicide? sorry man I’m not that type

No time for drug addiction
No time for smoke and booze
Too strong for a shortened life span
I’ve got no time to lose
Shine

6/27/2006 02:11:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

MR. SCHULTZ: Who were you with on Saturday in Lincoln Park?

THE WITNESS ROBERT PIERSON: I was with a fellow known as Gorilla who headed a motorcycle gang, and another fellow by the name of Banana, and other members of the motorcycle gang...

MR. SCHULTZ: Now, calling your attention to Monday, August 26, 1968, did you have occasion on that day to go to Lincoln Park?

THE WITNESS: Yes, sir, I did.

MR. SCHULTZ: Who did you meet with, please?

THE WITNESS: Fred Jordan.

MR. SCHULTZ: After meeting with Fred Jordan, did you have occasion to have a conversation with him?

THE WITNESS: Yes, I did. Jordan brought me over and introduced me to Abbie Hoffman. He said, "Abbie, this is Bob. He will be one of your bodyguards. He handles himself well."

"Hoffman shook my hand, said that he was glad to have me with him, and at that time Jordan also pointed out two other men that were bodyguards for Hoffman.
I said to Hoffman that last night's confrontation was a pretty good one. And Hoffman said to me last night, "They pushed us out of the park, but tonight, we're going to hold the park." He then said that, "We're going to-" and he used a foul word, "F-up the pigs and the Convention."

MR. SCHULTZ: What was the word, please, will you relate it?

THE WITNESS: He said "fuck."

6/27/2006 02:49:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Either way, you need to keep up.......we've moved from snakes to gorillas, in case you haven't noticed."

Yes, but this snake can change colors - I bet it uses sex magic to do that.

You show me a gorilla that can practice sex magic. Oh, wait...I know one.

Gorillas are bad....gorillas are very bad!!

6/27/2006 03:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

well, Richard Nixon kind of looked like a gorilla to me when he did that jowls thing...

anyway, thanks for the earlier comments about the Chicago 7, friends- and I didn't know that Skolnick was involved in the court cases:

Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, and the others who became the "Chicago 7", and persons connected with them in the National Mobilization to End the War in Viet Nam, were funded by federal money, channeled to them through pass-through organizations connected with the government.

$192,000 in federal money and $85,000 from the Carnegie Foundation, acting as a conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency, were funneled to Hayden, Davis, et al., through a front calling itself the Chicago Student Health Organization. To maintain the deep "cover" of this latter group, stories were planted in the press describing the group as being "communist" inspired or directed.

Another $193,313 was funneled to the "7" from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity by way of or through subsidiaries of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C., an alleged "liberal" think tank posing as a left wing group, but acting as a conduit for the C.I.A.....


http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/skolnick-chicago7.html



“Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.”
-abbie hoffman

6/27/2006 03:18:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Best wishes for the great, TO META THERION (the transcendent beast.) otherwise known as Robert Anton wilson. I was just looking at the bottle of Guinness I kept that he drank from back in the day. I hope he can get some relief without Tsarist agents roughing him up

I hope the ol' trout is okay, the world would be small with out him.

6/27/2006 07:59:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, Samuel L. Jackson is a genius to combine the fear of snakes with the fear of flying. How do you suppose Quetzacoatl feels?

Harry & Shrubaggedon wrote:
"Autism is our evolutionary future."

I am starting to think there may be some truth to this statement.

Do you have any links that explore this hypothesis?


Here's a link to a video about savants
My sister sent it to me (coincidentally) after having seen some program about people who were blind, developmentally delayed but also musical geniuses. She was particularly impressed by a man who couldn't count to three, but could pick out 10 notes played simultaneously. Try it on a piano or synthesizer. . . it sounds like noise. Most people can only pick out two or three notes. I can barely pick out one note, and that's with musical tutelage. I am not the woman of the future.
I also recommend renting the sci-fi movie Cube.

6/27/2006 11:28:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, and the ability to communicate primarily through music (I have also read about children who were non-verbal, but able to communicate through poetry)
This reminds me of the Heaven's Gate leaders, Do and Ti, who believed that in the future, people would communicate musically. Music is a universal language. Everyone "gets" the "blues."

6/27/2006 11:43:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

silverfox -

After reading your dissertation on reality way back up there at 4:05 AM, it strikes me that the only possible answer to "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

Is "One."

6/28/2006 12:20:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To silly rabbit:

The story about savants that you mention was on 60 minutes this past Sunday. It was quite moving. This jaded cynical dick of an old man felt a tear well up at the sight of that little kid bouncing with joy on the stage after his performance.
I work with guys who aren't much different mentally than the British gentleman who couldn't count to three but could pick out 10 simultaneously played musical notes.. They just lack his musical gift.
I'm also a jazz fan & the British gent kicked ass.
Also, when they showed the two young kids, both blind & mentally handicapped, talking to each other using the keyboard of their teacher's piano....made my damn spine tingle.
There was a section when Leslie Stahl was interviewing the young boys teacher & she asked him if he had any idea how they did this. He told her that he thought that these children had direct access to the part of the brain that understands music. He gave as an example a dream he had where he composed & played an entire concerto that was amazing & beautiful, etc., only to have it fade on awakening. These kids can just directly go to this place where he composed his concerto without having to be asleep.
Fascinating stuff.
Best thing that I've seen on 60 minutes in a long while.
But then Andy Rooney had to come on with his oversized eyebrows & completely ruin my mood with obsessive thoughts of lawnmowers & hedge-clippers.
Oh well, what can one do?

6/28/2006 12:39:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

One thing that I've learned from working with the mentally handicapped is how to live in the moment. You see, they don't do things like anyone else does so they force you to pay attention all the time.
I learned this while working with MR folk who ran the gamut from relatively bright to profoundly retarded. The only thing they shared was their predilection to violence.
I'm not talking Hell's Angels with broken pool cues violent, but they could hurt you.
I found that one good unexpected smack to the mouth or a kick in the balls goes a long way towards curing a short attention span or a day-dreamy nature.

6/28/2006 12:52:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Richard, I presume you are talking aobut your own short attention span or dreamy nature being cured by a kick in the nuts, not one of your charges'...

If y'all think autism is the (d)evolutionary wave of the future then you are probably right in sync with BillandMelinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

BillandMelinda want to add twenty, count 'em 20, new vaccines to the roster for third world boys and girls the world over.

If they have their way developmental disability will indeed be the wave of the future.

Got Thimerosal?

6/28/2006 02:24:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous One,with rates like 1 in 250,it's a sure bet something is in it for someone in the biz of vaccines.And the part of Warren Buffet and Billy and wife,they could never be involved in anything strange? Didn't Larry King sing for these sick fucks a few times down the road? Don't worry folks,things are spining so fast now people can't keep track of what went on in their life 2 hours ago.I wonder who will be served up to the sacrifice today and I wonder if anyone will even notice.Some how the PTB will end up on the top of the heap,but what will they have once they get there?Times are about to get tuff,keep our mind strong,good night and good luck,later.

6/28/2006 06:40:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So many people have blogs who really shouldn't, and then there are people who really have something to say, and really should have blogs, but don't. Richard, are you listening? And, btw, thanks for citing the lyrics you quote!

I'm in Germany right now, been here since the beginning of June and will be here until August, and it's amazing how refreshing it is just to be out of the US. Life just somehow seems more upbeat, more positive, more hopeful. And this in Germany!! Of course, the Germans are playing well in the World Cup, so everyone has that look like someone just went down on them and gave them multiple orgasms, but still...

I've spent several years of my life in Germany but never felt like I could live here full time, as there was just always some feel of hope and promise in the US that I missed. And yet, with things in my personal and professional life actually going well for like the first time ever, I find that feeling just doesn't seem there anymore. It's really disheartening.

6/28/2006 07:48:00 AM  
Blogger messianicdruid said...

Dear Shrubaggeddon, Yes, and I don't know of any co-workers who are aware of it.

Blindness and Deafness are widespread...

www.gods-kingdom.org/WebLog/WebPosting.cfm?LogID=240

6/28/2006 12:09:00 PM  
Anonymous wolfet said...

The home of the infamous european toxic clan, psycho urban fraggers that pawn the virtual return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory battlefields.

7/19/2010 08:27:00 PM  
Anonymous justpub said...

Just Pub, a dumb return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory comic strip by feuersturm.

7/19/2010 08:27:00 PM  

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