Darkness Falls

Let's blow this place to kingdom come, let Con Edison take the blame - Bob Dylan

Things fall apart. Other things are pulled apart. The distinction means little to those caught in the collapse, but perhaps those of us who haven't fallen yet may still find a place to stand by discerning one from the other.

Every week, the world becomes a little more like Godard's Weekend. We're becoming inured to the degradation of infrastructure, public institutions and personal ethics. Thousands of New Yorkers are entering their second week without electricity, and in St Louis a quarter of a million residents and businesses are not far behind. Unheard of midnight temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (103 Fahrenheit) are being recorded. Wires are melting, grids are stressing and networks are failing. Our increasingly frequent and violent electrical storms just don't feel right, and don't tell me different. The global climate is changing more rapidly than even the gravest recent projections, and temperatures are creeping up towards creating our own extincition-level conditions. ("If the ambient temperature is higher than 40C (104F), the human body will eventually reach 40C unless there is a cooling mechanism. At a sustained body temperature of 40+C, a human will die.") The planet is already facing its greatest extinction event in 65 million years: "We're losing life on Earth and we're losing the diversity of life on Earth," says Dr Anne Larigauderie. "Everywhere we look, we are losing the fabric of life." So it may be in death that we at last rejoin the natural realm.

That's not to say this is natural. There are still the unnatural men of whom Chaplin spoke in The Great Dictator - "machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts" - who have always been capable and ammorally fit to attempt to profit by the overthrow of every good thing. They were never going to leave to chance - to nature - their place in the new order, if this order is finished.

For what it's worth - and I think the assumption of military influence falls short of "hard evidence" - there's this to consider:

Last night, July 23, 2006, a violent storm developed and passed over homes in eastern Richmond, Virginia. Commercial electrical power was lost from approximately 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. One home was equipped with a Light Emitting Diode (LED) lighting system mounted in the ceiling throughout the house. The system includes a 120 watt, 18 volt @ 7 amp solar panel mounted on the roof feeding into a Charge Controller regulator and into a bank of wet cell 12 volt batteries. The LED lighting system was completely isolated from the conventional electrical system. The LED system in made up of banks of three LEDs in series. Those three series arrangements are then wired in parallel with the batteries. All LEDs are designated either 40,000 MCD or 50,000 MCD. Hundreds of other LEDs in the house, but not in this system, were not effected - we believe because they were not subjected to the antenna effect found in the lighting system. During the storm, 46 Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) throughout the house were burnt and fused together internally and destroyed. It is significant to know the LEDs were burnt/fused together internally, not burnt open as you might expect.

The LED lights were turned on and operating in the living room and kitchen at the time of the event and though considerably more LEDs were involved fewer were damaged and lost. Many LEDs not destroyed were noticably weakened and light output reduced. During the latter part of the storm, in complete darkness outside, an indicator on the solar cell charge controller indicated electrical current was flowing from the solar cell panel on the roof into the batteries. Twenty minutes after the observation it abruptly stopped. It is significant to realize there was no sun radiation (it was night), but another type of radiation was hitting the solar panel and the entire system. We believe this is hard evidence of external military forces affecting electrical systems and power grids in the United States and is an indicator of a much larger event against the American people.

Israeli forces are dropping cluster bombs and incendiaries upon fleeing Lebanese civilians, and under orders to bomb ten buildings in southern Beirut for every Hezbollah rocket that strikes Haifa. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed has learned "from a credible and informed source that a former senior Labour government Minister, who continues to be well-connected to British military and security officials, confirms that Britain and the United States 'will go to war with Iran before the end of the year.'" And with the conscience of a serial killer who exploits her multiple dead in ritual, the Secretary of State says that extreme violence signals the "birth pangs" of a "new" Middle East.

While last Friday, Adamo Bove, a lead investigator into the Italian probe of the rendition of Abu Omar, "apparently jumped to his death." Also Friday, an unnamed Citibank employee fell to his death at its Canary Wharf UK headquarters, a "suspected suicide." And the same day, the chopped-up remains of Opus Dei financier Gianmario Roveraro were found under a bridge, though "police have made no link" between the order and his murder, though the last he had been seen alive was when leaving an Opus Dei meeting. (Roveraro had once said that his part in Opus Dei was "not concerned with finance -- finance is not Catholic or masonic, it is just finance.") And freeway snipers have begun stalking America again before midterm elections, this time in California and Indiana. (Whether they, too, will be caught "like a duck in a noose" remains to be seen.)

Beirut is no more a natural disaster than New Orleans continues to be, where families are now expected to dig their own graves, and no less a product of deep politics than the Pearl Harbor of Lower Manhattan. When cities become ruins, when they go dark and lose the capacity to provide for their people, it's usually on account of choice. It's because someone, an enemy within or without, wants to shoot out the lights and drive a soft urban populace into despair and barbarism. (Military recruitment hit a 30-year low in the mid-90s, and now, as the US economy sharply worsens for those near the bottom and their options further narrow, recruitment soars. But which is more to be desired by the rulers of this new, hard age: economic opportunities for the most poor or more bodies for its Army of Darkness?)

If it looks like social engineering, maybe it is.