Tuesday, July 18, 2006

The Monotony of Evil



You cannot stand what I've become,
You much prefer the gentleman I was before.
I was so easy to defeat, I was so easy to control,
I didn't even know there was a war. - Leonard Cohen

Thanks for the suggested cold remedies. I took the raw onion cure (as well as, I must admit, heaps of echinacea, Benylin and Tylenol Ultra), and whatever may have worked or not, my head's cleared. Now, I'm merely nauseous. But that's just a symptom of the times, and there's not much to be done about that.

These are, after all, Simone Weil's times. Evil, wrote the socialist mystic, is monotonous: there is "never anything new, everything about it is equivalent.... It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part." This seems counterintuitive, or perhaps simply wrong, because the world today appears full of often lamentable novelty. But the novelty, evil's artifact, is an illusion.

We'd never seen anything like 9/11. Except we had, and didn't recognize it. We needn't go back to Gladio or the other false flags of suppressed history. Just two summers before, nearly identical mechanisms of terror and control were deployed upon the Russian people to consolidate the transfer of power to Vladimir Putin, who was facing his first election, and to provide the pretext to invade Chechnya.

After four apartment complexes had been demolished and 300 killed, residents of a fifth in the city of Ryazan discovered a huge bomb in their basement and called the local police. Initially, federal authorities claimed terrorists had been thwarted, but when the perpetrators were apprehended shortly thereafter by Ryazan police, and found to be agents of Russia's security service FSB, the story changed: it was now claimed to have been an "exercise," and the sack of explosive hexogen was said to have contained nothing but "sugar." (Disbelief, a documentary regarding the bombings and the revelation of state guilt, may be viewed here. The story of Ryazan begins at approximately the 36 minute mark.) In 2002, an incurious Duma voted against a parliamentary inquiry into the bombing campaign.

Not only by history's precedence, but by current events, 9/11 isn't really that extraordinary.

It's interesting to note how Western pundits who would likely dismiss as nonsense the mere suggestion of a 9/11 conspiracy have no problem at all assessing the Russian apartment bombings as state terror. David Satter, a fellow of the Hoover Institution and the Hudson Institute and former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times of London, wrote "The Shadow of Ryazan" with funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation, an abbreviated version of which was published by The National Review. It's funny how easily the generalized dismissals of conspiracy, such as how it meets a "psychological need," or that "something so big couldn't be kept a secret," vanish into one's political blind spots. That is, to the opinion makers, conspiracy can be the most reasonable explanation of events, so long as it's over there, and it's something they do. Satter finds the FSB guilty of waging a false-flag terror campaign against the Russian people and pronounces the Putin regime illegitimate, but don't expect him to be called a kook in a tinfoil hat for it.

The monotonous evil behind both the Moscow bombings and 9/11 is the tediously familiar, ceaseless appetite of the powerful for yet more power. Perhaps it's just as misleading to speak of "state terror" as it is to say "Bush Knew," as states are increasingly junior partners in the transnational equation of deep politics. Governments are the social clubs fronting the backrooms where the hard deals go down. As Peter Dale Scott writes in his important paper from last Fall entitled "The Global Drug Meta-Group," many 9/11 theorists create a false dilemma, suggesting the guilty party is either al Qaeda or the Bush administration, whereas elements of both were employed as assets by a deeper power network wired into narcotics and arms trafficking which has sometimes been called the Octopus. "In America few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government." It may be inconceivable to most, but I think it best accounts for the actions of a gangster elite. Though for the most part, the "elected" officials comprise the consiglieri, not the capos. (Why do you think so many of them are lawyers?)

Because evil aways wants more of the same, and there will always be less until there is none, it's easy to lapse into pessimism. Perhaps too easy. And perhaps that's where Weil returns.

Simone de Beauvoir writes of Weil, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, that "A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept: these tears compelled my respect much more than her gifts as a philosopher. I envied her having a heart that could beat right across the world."

Weil died in England in 1943 of tuburculosis, though her death was hastened by her refusal to eat more than the ration allowed her compatriots in occupied France. She wrote, "Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand."

Evil doesn't do empathy. We had better. Because if our hearts can beat around the world - if our consciousness can be elevated such that we see our isolation to be an illusion and our divisions a deceit of criminals who mean to crush us with them - then maybe the world will yet see some glorious novelty.

136 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff,
glad to see you are feeling better.
I have never heard of Simone but that is some compelling stuff. The points you and she make about evil are aspects I had yet to consider.

Considering her thoughts are 63+ years old I guess there is nothing new under the sun. I might have more on this topic shortly. So interesting.

BTW did you see Ran's post about animal behavior training? Ran doesn't speculate on how it could be used on humans (though that's the bent of the article) but he does ask how it could be used to control society albeit rhetorically. Seems to me, by ignoring protestors it already is being used.

7/18/2006 01:53:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Indeed. And Hannah Arendt, with her apt word 'banality.'

Scott Peck, in "People of the Lie," notes that a predominant behaviour of evil people is scapegoating. And who (am I scapegoating, projecting?) is less capable of insight, more willing to scapegoat, than GWB and his cadre of purblind neocons? Of course, our rabid wardogs would glibly aver that no one WANTS a president who is introspective, but that begs the whole question of the real nature of "leaders" and where it is they lead us. Narrow the path...wolf in sheep's clothing...and so on.

But all of us see what sort of sewer trout seem to always swim upstream in our body politic (PJ O'Rourkism, that, but a damn good one). "Good" people don't seem attracted to politics beyond the local (very local) level. The ones who make it to high office always tow with them a useful rail car full of skeletons, the better to ensure their venality.

Is the modern State evil, by definition? Are corporations? Both are soulless, and, in the American iteration, utterly solipsistic, without empathy or remorse unless mandated by attorneys or, in the case of States, war crimes tribunals. The very definition of a psychopath. And unlike Manson and Berkowitz, the State can muster armies and nowadays possesses nuclear firecrackers. Progress, indeed!

Summer colds are awful, and I'm glad your's is better.

7/18/2006 02:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Empathy is certainly required, but in and of itself, it's not enough. Unless it serves as a catalyst for genuine paradigmatic change, we will find ourselves on a dwindling, yet perpetual Trail of Tears. Evil doens't do Empathy, because that's what you're for, so long as that's your only response to its (Evil's) inexhaustible list of horrors.

7/18/2006 02:11:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Of course, most people, the vast majority, are not psychopaths. They hear of children, civilians being killed in Lebanon, and are naturally concerned. It is the task of Propaganda to thwart their natural empathy, and condition them to, if not accept, at least ignore such considerations. "Look at the big picture," which always involves seeing the jumbled mosaic of State criminality as "the truth." The more awful the reality on the ground, the more dissonant the cognition (Hiroshima, JFK, today), the more burdensome the propagandist's task.

"Avert thy eyes," they cry. Or, more simply, "censor the photos." No bloodied children, no dead troops. Because they know that normal humans do feel compassion, and all the triggers of compassion must be suppressed, erased.

And so the Bush puppets scorn calls for humanitarian intervention. What is a psychopath to make of cries for mercy? "Bleeding hearts--yecch." As if mercy was a disease that might lead to peace.

I'm glad to see your post end on a positive note, Jeff. Is that a biological effect of decreasing viral titres? The euphoria of feeling well again?

7/18/2006 02:16:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let me clarify what I mean by dwindling. The Trail of Tears, meaning the horrors inflicted by Evil for which empathic tears can and must be shed, will always ve there, hence perpetual. However, IMHO, at least in contemporary Western Culture, empathy (the shedding of tears and putting oneself in another's shoes) is an increasingly scarce commodity these days, hence a far fewer number (dwindling) even bother to walk the Trail of Tears paved with Evil's asphalt.

An acceptable sacrifice for the mitigation of anxiety psychotropically prescibed ever so ordinarily by your family doctor, I suppose.

Farenheit 451, anyone?

7/18/2006 02:28:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Of course, our rabid wardogs would glibly aver that no one WANTS a president who is introspective..."

And they would be utter idiots. Just two names would suffice to shut them up- Marcus Aurelius and Abraham Lincoln. Great leaders, both. They had their faults, of course, but they were "war-time" leaders who were successful BECAUSE of their philosophical, introspective sides.

7/18/2006 02:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

From http://www.isleofavalon.co.uk/GlastonburyArchive/messenger/sm-ccircles.html

The following suggestions have till recently been the province of extreme conspiracy theory and still are for many people. But we need to consider them because the evidence for their truth has been steadily mounting, and it would be a mistake to ignore it. There is more than a suspicion that the so-called HAARP project in Alaska, for example, has already developed technologies for projecting mind-forms onto human-beings from a distance. If into human minds with their biological basis, why not into plant forms? At the other end of the scale we are dealing with activities of unparalleled evil. The work of Preston Nicholls and Peter Moon on the so-called Montauk projects on Long Island, N.Y., indicates that scientists, working in association also with ‘black’ magical energies, have perfected technologies for concentrating the energies of human fear. Specifically by using children in an advanced form of paedophilia they have turned fear into a force which can affect physical reality directly. Using these techniques, so Nicholls and Moon maintain, they have used dark forces to break through the limitations of linear time so as to affect present events from the future.

In anthroposophical terms, if these facts are correct we are speaking here of something which extends far beyond the limits of an advanced Ahrimanic creation. We have indeed reached the time forecast by Rudolf Steiner of a far darker, far more perilous position. This describes a world where the forces of fallen Asuras are being directly employed by people who must to some extent know exactly what they are doing.

7/18/2006 02:35:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

By that logic, Uncle Joe was one of the greatest leaders of all time. He sacrificed 30 some odd million of his (or were they really "his") people for the liberation of Europe from the Evil Nazis.

7/18/2006 02:36:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Continuation of previous post:

[William Blake] made clear that Innocence is only truly viewed in terms of what it can become. Imagination is simply what Innocence can become after Experience. So there is in the last resort no such thing as lost Innocence, even though Blake knew that. there would come a time when, in his own words, "children would be born trembling". Even Innocence deliberately destroyed as Spirit with the aid of fallen Asuras reforms as Imagination in a realm beyond anything we can describe to ourselves as Spirit. If Asuras can destroy Spirit by fear then divine creation can by the sacrifice of substance heal and transcend this destroyed Spirit by Love. In terms of Steiner’s ‘Occult Science’, this amounts to the renewal of the sacrifice of the Thrones.

7/18/2006 02:37:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't know about president Aurelius, but Lincoln forced the nation to fight a very bloody war, over 400,000 dead, millions wounded and displaced, all because of his desire to "preserve the union." Not to end slavery: read his words carved in granite on the Lincoln Memorial (2nd inaugural address). And preserve the State he did, unconstituionally (re: Thomas DeLorenzo), and now we are left with his omnipotent, unassailable State, run amok.

Slavery would have ended on its own, since it was unconscionable. Not to sidetrack Jeff's thread, but mightn't an enforceable Tenth Amendment have spared us a lot of the madness of the past 40 years? If states (small S) could simply opt out of the National Security State, opt out of Leviathan, if its citizens voted to do so?

What's so wrong with democracy that it can never be allowed? (Or, in other words, if voting mattered, they'd outlaw it, which, de facto, they have).

7/18/2006 02:40:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff, people praise you for your writing, and rightfully so. But let me just say your photocollage work accompanying the postings is just as great.... top stuff!

7/18/2006 02:50:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It seems to me at times that the cognitive disonance has been reaching the peak of a long crescendo, and that, any day now, it will all just add up to more than the average person can take. How many conventional 'Truths' can a person, or society as a whole, maintain which directly contradict their own human empathy and direct experience of the world before a truly psychotic break occurs. Has it occured already?

7/18/2006 02:55:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mijo Filius says...

Jeff's post sparks a question that my wife and I have pondered for a number of years now, viz. how to actually affect change, and bring about a better society for all us humans on this earth?

Question: Would the non-violent resistence of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi even work in todays world?

We all know that both of them were felled by political assassination, Gandhi near the end of his career, MLK flush in the middle of it. Their progenitor was, of course, Henry David Thoreau, who merely ended up in jail. So the consequence of non-violent civil disobedience seems to be getting worse over time, while the effectivenesss of it...?

Question two: If the Palestinians had adopted such tactics to the Israeli occupation decades ago (it is almost certainly too late now), would the world's media have supported them, and our sense of collective shame then brought about a semblance of justice for them?

Of course, to lay down and die at the hands of one's attacker is certainly against Muslim teaching, as it also certainly is against Jewish doctrine. But then, I don't see many Christians, historically, having ever turned the other cheek either.

Maybe only nonviolent resistence works for Hindus or slaves. But then, what about Spartacus and the slave rebellion?

Which brings me almost full circle back to Weishaupt, oops. His Illuminati name was "Spartacus."

So, maybe the last poster was correct. What if Lincoln had allowed the U.S. to be rent asunder, by whomever? Maybe the world would have been a better place by now. Perhaps just the opposite. No one knows and no one can now.

My question goes to now. Would/will the tactic of non-violent resistence still work? Or is it too late?

Could it break our chains? Or, are we so in the throes of a psychopathic culture that there is no "conscience-at-large" to take note of such acts, no media that actually serves the people, no means whereby such acts can shame the governors of society into humane reform of the world we inhabit?

That is a very relevant question, I would suggest. And if the answer is no, then what?

Peace, love, and understanding mi famiglia,

~il Consigliere

7/18/2006 03:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Go easy on the Tylenol, Jeff: that stuff can be really dangerous in quantity or too often. Look it up!

7/18/2006 03:24:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

In reply to this:

Jeff's post sparks a question that my wife and I have pondered for a number of years now, viz. how to actually affect change, and bring about a better society for all us humans on this earth?

I've said this before, though you may find this a thread to follow for links and beyond:

Some ideas here, in great detail:

Environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically “out of sync”. He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here—only waiting to be formally organized.

amazon.com longer review

blog

http://biostate.blogspot.com/

Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms (and commodity reforms) designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g., water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This denotes democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions--while not removing more generalized civil rights protections of a larger national state.


Second point, all those interested in Lincoln parapolitics and the U.S. Civil War should really get a second opinion on it--in the book The Real Lincoln.

7/18/2006 03:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think I have something for the nausea. It cmes straight from Monty Python. There was an animated skit they did during the 70's (they did many, of which this was just one) werein there was a bottom half of a man's face, and this man was lathering up the botoom half of this face as if to shave, naturally. All of this lathering is very innocent and casual with the man humming la dee da da the whole time. You never see the man's eyes, just the bottom half of his face, his neck and his hands. He proceeds to pull out a straight razor and sharpens it nonchalantly. Once he completes the sharpening, he proceeds to lop off his head.

No more nausea.

7/18/2006 03:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Goodness, why point out the false dichotomy of Al Q/Bush or maybe Government/Corporados and then embrace the concept of "Evil" people?

Everyone in the room is Evil in the sense that we all do what is best for ourselves at the expense of others...oh yes you do!

and not inadvertant and insignificant Evil either, Evil fully within conscious grasp, if not looked at most of the time, and practiced as regularly as any heroin addict practises hir habit, and leaving real misery and death in its wake. (used a car lately?)

We all do what we think is best, for ourselves, for the group (which we identify with) and this is both Good and Evil depending upon where one stands in relation to that act....and thus a false dichotomy.

Like all dichotomies tend to break down to when examined with any nuance, including the original dichotomy of Self/World, so to avoid that trap is to see "Dr. Evil" as a merely unenlightened human being and thereby take back power from that bogey.

and a PS:, i tend to think that Evil is usually much more interesting than Good. Which is why it's still sticking around after all this time. Remember, in Heaven, nothing ever happens.

7/18/2006 03:50:00 PM  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

Some clarification.

shrubageddon's right, empathy can't be an end but ought to be the catalyst. Besides Weil I should probably have quoted Che Guevara who said, "at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." (Weil, though she'd been a pacifist, joined the Anarchist Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. She made it to the frontline but was a terrible shot, and so clumsy she was sent home before she got everybody killed.)

7/18/2006 03:57:00 PM  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

"Evil is usually much more interesting than Good."

I wish I could remember who said it now, but I read recently a twist on that that rang true for me. Something like this: the fictional representation of Evil is much more fascinating than its reality, and the reality of Good far more compelling than its fiction.

7/18/2006 04:00:00 PM  
Blogger owlindaylight said...

RE: False Flags, from ex-Delta Force operative Stan Goff's blog:

"The border of Southern Lebanon and Israel is a seamless web of intervisible Israeli outposts with night vision devices, tied together with ground surveillance radar, plowed-flat and raked daily to see footprints, and backed by quick reaction forces. Israelis routinely make incursive patrols into Lebanon. It is nearly impossible for an organized group of Hezbolla or anyone else to cross the border south, much less capture prisoners there. The very notion that this was an incursion INTO Israel is propped up solely by the credulity of the general public that knows nothing about military operations. In reality, the idea is as ludicrous as the Easter Bunny."

7/18/2006 04:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To the gentleman who said that we are all evil, in that we do what we want at the expense of others:

No children, hmm?

To my fellow anon, who wrote:

My question goes to now. Would/will the tactic of non-violent resistence still work? Or is it too late?

Could it break our chains? Or, are we so in the throes of a psychopathic culture that there is no "conscience-at-large" to take note of such acts, no media that actually serves the people, no means whereby such acts can shame the governors of society into humane reform of the world we inhabit?"

Salient question, yes. I would gently suggest that there is a false dichotomy, the same one that confronted the Jews of 1 C Israel. Is not the Messiah supposed to break the yoke of Rome? But JC came (I guess) to break the yoke of sin, and not some transient, mundane yoke.

But such other-worldliness does us little good back here in the "boot in your face forever" here and now. Ghandi, quite Christ-like in many ways, effected a liberation of his people from the British yoke, although, unfortunately, as with Yugoslavia after Tito, he could not rid India of sectarian strife.

And who can?

Can non-violence work today? Well, when the hunger strikers at Guano-tonamo DIED, it was called a provocation. In truth, the State fears this kind of action: how many times were they strapped down and force fed, IV tubes inserted, other desparate means employed to keep them alive? The State knows that hunger strikes carry enormous weight among the "non-psychopathic" citizenry.

The State also fears massive non-violent demonstrations, for obvious reasons. Look at Mexico City now. They have plenty of reasons for wanting us to think that non-violence is ineffective, but their fear belies the truth.

Formaggio,

7/18/2006 05:17:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Jeff is quite right about the normalization of evil; by making its incessant repetion “boring,” even the empathy endowed become, unwittingly of course, frustrated, impatient and, ultimately impotent, slowly convinced of the futility of resistance. I also very much like anonymous’ view of this phenomenon, especially since it points to a certain vulnerability in the indoctrination of insensitivity:

“It is the task of Propaganda to thwart their natural empathy, and condition them to, if not accept, at least ignore such considerations. "Look at the big picture," which always involves seeing the jumbled mosaic of State criminality as "the truth." The more awful the reality on the ground, the more dissonant the cognition (Hiroshima, JFK, today), the more burdensome the propagandist's task.”

This indicates to me that there may also be a point at which the subject just has “the Schnauze voll,” as they sometimes say in colloquial German (a nose or “beak” full) and just can’t fit the raw horror within the soothing lie anymore. The extreme hardcore denialists may have made crude attempts at humor and even songs of revelry in reaction to Haditha and the farmhouse rape and incineration stories ( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13883.htm ) when they came out ( http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/38084/ ), but most others, including many who had been lapping up the warm milk of acquiescence and forgetting, were jarred out of their programmed complacency enough to be truly shocked by the notion of American war crimes.

Those of us who despair of our chances to shake the somnambulant from their slumber should be rejuvenated by the possibility of unforeseen consequences on the road to tyranny. Even Goebbels miscalculated the efficacy of his Ministry’s “work”—although it came very late in the game, the trial and execution of the White Rose Society had the opposite effect from the one he intended. Empathy is not dead, and neither is hope, yet. Or, in the words of Norman Finkelstein:

“Conflict is rooted in injustice and if one demonstrates solidarity with the victims of injustice, all other differences that apparently divide us will dissolve.”

And, there are also ways of spreading dissonance that don’t require any medium at all, for those who “really want to do something”: http://www.freewayblogger.com/visitorsgallery.htm

7/18/2006 05:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Past is prologue:
Tripoli is under attack again- (Lebanon, not Libya). Thomas Jefferson himself once declared war on "the pirates of the Barbary Coast", and in 1801 the US fought a battle in a harbor of Tripoli...
Even the Knights of Rhodes (the Knights of Malta) once ruled Tripoli-

The piracy practiced by the Muslims was the scourge of the Mediterranean and especially of Christian commerce. The Knights of Rhodes, on their side, armed cruisers not only to give chase to the pirates, but to make reprisals on the Turkish merchantmen. With increasing audacity they made descents on the coast and pillaged the richest ports of the Orient, such as Smyrna (1341) and Alexandria (1365). However, a new Muslim power arose at this period -- the Ottoman Turks of Iconium -- and took the offensive against Christianity. Mahomet II directed his attention to the task of destroying this den of pirates which made Rhodes the terror of the Muslim world.

After Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, the Hospitallers (Knights of Rhodes) protected Christian Europe from the spread of the Ottoman Empire. They favored heavier galleys with high superstructures. The crew and complement of a large galley often numbered around four hundred men, the majority slaves...


Both Knights and Barbary pirates would run false flags up to fool ships, then show their true colors just before they blasted away...


"The degree of Knight of Malta is conferred in the United States as "an appendant Order" in a Commandery of Knights Templar."
-Albert G. Mackey, M.D., Thirty-Third Degree

At least three Knights of Malta have headed up the CIA: William “Wild Bill” Donovan, John McCone, and William Casey. Another Knight of Malta, James Jesus Angleton, for many years was the chief of the Counterintelligence Division at the CIA – as well as heading up both the Vatican and Israel “Desks” at the CIA...


http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07477a.htm

http://www.cindyvallar.com/barbarycorsairs.html

7/18/2006 06:43:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is a basic question that has come up here repeatedly in the last few days. It's not a new question either -- but it remains crucial:

Is humanity naturally inclined to evil -- or at least violence -- is war an inevitable part of the human condition, and is strong (or even repressive) government the only source of peace and security?

Or is humanity largely good -- or at least inclined to work things out peacefully and in a way where everyone goes away satisfied -- and is the inevitability of war and deprivation a lie fostered by those few who benefit by it?

Obviously the question has no simple answer, or we would all know what it was by now. Humans *do* have violent tendencies. Some humans *are* empathy-deprived -- and seem to get ahead in the world because of it. Crime and war *can* work to the advantage of those who perpetrate them.

And yet it is hard to avoid the suspicious that violence and sociopathy account for at most 20% of the human enterprise -- and that if we allow them to swamp out the other 80%, we really have been sold a bill of goods.

I also suspect we may be in the realm of self-fulfilling prophecy here. If we believe the world is naturally violent and threatening, we will feel a need to build up our defenses, choose violent and belligerent leaders, and leap to defend ourselves as the slightest hint of danger.

On the other hand, if we believe the world is naturally harmonious and self-regulating -- and that any events to the contrary are isolated occurrences to be controlled and eliminated like an outbreak of infectious disease -- we will find ourselves working for peace and understanding rather than for war and supremacy.

Sometimes the pragmatic solution is indistinguishable from the idealistic solution. In other words, suppose we all stop philosophizing and act as though the world as we would like to see it is identical to the world that really exists.

We might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

7/18/2006 06:55:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Simone weil, never heard of her before. How cool is she? Awesomely so.

"Sometimes the pragmatic solution is indistinguishable from the idealistic solution. In other words, suppose we all stop philosophizing and act as though the world as we would like to see it is identical to the world that really exists."

That works, to a point. But at some point the stuff that we are complaining about (so called evil, or just petty stupidity and selfishness) always interferes.

"Specifically by using children in an advanced form of paedophilia they have turned fear into a force which can affect physical reality directly. "

Sometimes simply through fear. Have no fear. When you get scared, figure out why, what you are really scared of and face it. The culture of fear is stronbg today, but not so strong that it can't be overcome by a few public examples of decency and courage.

As for the we are all evil stuff.

Its good to think like that, to know the underlying reality of life, but it isn't the whole story. There are always options, some cause more pain than others.

How you choose is what good and evil is really all about.

Blah someetimes Jeff you write so well that attempting to type anything in response just feels so silly and pointless.

Oh well, glad to hear the cold is gone. Echinacea is a better preventitive than cure actually. But its not something you should take regularly. There a nice little catch 22.

Dunno if those canadian herbs help a cold, but they do help deal with the nausea that this world can sometimes inspire.

7/18/2006 07:24:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just to clarify- the Barbary Coast's Tripoli is in Libya, and the Templar's Tripoli is in Lebanon.

What's in a name? It seems both Tripoli's are connected, and both have played host to Israeli false flags:

Two miles off the Libyan coast, the lights of Tripoli could be seen glistening in the southeast. Eight commandos slipped quietly into the waves and headed for shore. Once they reached the beach, the commandos left their cigarlike transporters submerged in the shallow water and headed inland, carrying a dark green Trojan cylinder six feet long and seven inches in diameter. It took two men to carry it.

A gray van was parked on the side of the road about one hundred feet from the water... The driver of the van seemed to be repairing a flat tire. He stopped working as the team approached and opened the back doors of the van. He was a Mossad combatant. Without a word said, four of the men entered the van and headed for the city...

In the apartment, the top section of the cylinder was opened and a small dishlike antenna was unfolded and placed in front of the window facing north. The unit was activated, and the Trojan horse was in place...

By the end of March, the Americans were already intercepting messages broadcast by the Trojan- the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world...

On April 14, 1986, one hundred and sixty American aircraft dropped over sixty tons of bombs on Libya.

After the bombing, the Hizballah broke off negotiations regarding the hostages they held in BEIRUT and executed three of them, including one American named Peter Kilburn. As for the French, they were rewarded for their nonparticipation in the attack by the release at the end of June of two French journalists held hostage in Beirut. (As it happened, a stray bomb hit the French embassy in Tripoli during the raid.)



http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/deception.html

7/18/2006 07:42:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Scott Peck also brings up an interesting inversion: asked constantly "why does evil exist," he notes that no one ever asks "why does goodness exist?"

Most people, he writes, have a model of the world as being basically good, with evil having somehow been introduced. But what, he asks, if the model is the mirror image of what is really the case: a fundamentally evil world, into which good has been introduced.

That, to me, sounds Manichean. Perhaps for my own sanity, I prefer to believe in essential goodness. Still, the question, "why does goodness exist," is an interesting one to try to field. Why indeed? Is there an evolutionary imperative towards goodness (framing the question as an evolutionary biologist might)? One could work the mechanics of that out: social organization is more highly evolved than solitary hunter-gatherer packs, and "goodness" works to enhance social utility, to the benefit of all members of the social organism.

But still...

Isn't there something good about goodness itself? Why does doing something good make one feel better about oneself? Is that the DNA talking? Or something more numinous, an echo of an eternal ... benevolent feeling. I lack the appropriate vocabulary.
My American operant conditioning has left me with a rich and complex lexicon of evil, but only a stumbling ability to describe the ideal. A form of moral aphasia, no doubt.

7/18/2006 11:01:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Fascinating responses all around. The question of good and evil in human nature has left Hobbes and Rousseau somewhere in prehistory as we dabble in institutionalized
behavioralism, from kindergarten socialization to CIA mind control (and worse.) And yet, the two old polarities still vie for acceptance. Two modern, scientific developments suggest a somewhat different scenario. The first is the famous Milgram study, which, although widely interpreted as "proof" of our sadistic nature, actually point to a limitless plasticity, a basic malleability in our nature; ethical behavior was just as easily induced as what we see in the world today.

The second new discovery comes from the study of our primate kin, where, it turns out, a "solid" ethical foundation was uncovered. With a very high statistical density, chimpanzees refused food if it would keep other chimps from receiving electrical shocks. Researchers were not themselves shocked by this discovery, according to the interpretation I listened to on the radio just today, because they believed that Darwin predicted our closest cousins would share our emotional responses and our innate ethical bearings. As I listened to this report, I couldn't help but wonder how it was that the scientists involved seemed to share this sunny assumption about us.

Such synchronicity--hearing that report, discussing this topic tonight--is itself heartening to me. Sure, we're manacled and mangled, but we have surprises for the bad guys (or the bad systems, if there are no “bad guys”) that we don't even know about yet. What we yearn for is, I think, nothing short of mass enlightenment, and I do believe it's going to happen. There is such a thing as the collective consciousness already; always has been, as "primitive" and powerful as a school of fish/flock of birds changing course simultaneously, outside what we understand as communication.

Remember when that image of the guy standing up to the tank in Tiananmen Square shot around the world--regardless of its propaganda value, that image resonated, instantly. Why couldn't a movement spring up centered around such electrifying, resonating images? Why would it be so impossible to imagine a collective dream growing in counterpoint to the destabilizing torrents of satanic angst with which we are daily bombarded? I posted a link to freewayblogger.com upfield, I think, which was in a similar vein.

The sort of spontaneous awakening I envision here doesn't need any traditional political structure to support it. It would be too immediate, too honest for such old games. Not to get all New Agey here, but there are untold powers and wonders of the human mind waiting to emerge--all that scary HAARP/Fear nightmare has to have an opposite face, and if the monkey news is any kind of sign, it'll be much stronger.

7/18/2006 11:46:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous 11:01 -

I've been convinced for a while that on a functional level morality is internalized evolution, and that evolution itself follows an arrow of symbiosis, or zero-sum games, or convergence on something vaguely like Teilhard's Omega Point.

As far as the first of those points goes, it's been my perception that much of evolution involves a process of internalization -- of organisms becoming able to do for themselves what they formerly depended on the environment to do for them. Instead of floating on the currents, you develop fins to swim. Instead of letting the sea water wash through you, you develop digestive and circulatory and respiratory systems. Instead of depositing your eggs in the mud, you tend and protect them or even let them grow inside you.

Intelligence is another form of internalization -- and a far more sophisticated one. For starters, it lets you plan out how to find food or shelter instead of stumbling upon them by chance or pre-programed instinct. But by the time you get to the human level, something far more interesting has developed -- the ability to run mental scenarios of what might happen as a result of various courses of action and choose the most promising.

At that point, you are already internalizing the simplest aspect of evolution. Instead of depending on survival of the fittest operating on an entire group to cull out successful strategies from unsuccessful ones, you are doing the culling yourself, within your own mind.

But survival of the fittest alone only serves to fine-tune existing capabilities. It does not account for evolutionary leaps -- phase shifts to entirely new ways of doing things, new levels of possibility, synergetic manifestations of emergent characteristics.

Morality, I believe, is an internalized awareness of opportunities for evolutionary leaps. Morality points away from personal survival and towards unrealized possibilities of altruism and symbiotic potential. It points away from the local group and towards the largest imaginable units -- humankind, Earth, the totality of existence. It points away from the present and towards the future.

And even beyond morality lies that ineffable sense of an ultimate Oneness (whether regarded as being or as becoming doesn't much seem to matter) that our moral choices and our evolutionary leaps lead us towards.

I don't presume to say whether making moral choices gives us a sense of accomplishment because it literally connects us with a Oneness outside ourselves, or merely because it enables our conscious self to resonate with the internalized Oneness within us. But then, that's probably a difference without a difference -- Macrocosm equals Microcosm, as above so below, and all that.

I do see fairly clearly, though, that the people who most often strike us as evil are those who resist evolution in the name of holding onto what they already have, resist identification with a larger whole in the name of present group affiliation, resist change in the name of imagining that their present condition is already perfect and sufficient.

And also that those who seem not precisely evil but certainly gone astray are those like the current lot of Christians, who are terrified beyond all measure of evolution and would rather see the world end tomorrow than change one jot from the world they already know.

7/19/2006 12:29:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Evil is as evil does. Is there a Cosmic Evil? No, is my belief and understnading. The evil that we meet is evil made by men, and it seems that there are those that work to amplify, exemplify and exalt evil. These are manifest of their own desires and response to their own paths.

Myself, I find that the Chinese and Indian cultures have generally thought through and written down many questions of cosmology and understandings of basic truths.

Gandhi talked about following your spirtitual journey while also perfoming the duties of a householder within the society. and in society today we do face troubles and must stand up to a great evil.


Sri Ramakrishna said:" Evil exists in God as poison in a serpent. What is poison to us is not poison to the serpent. Evil is evil only from the point of view of man." In other words, from the absolute standpoint, there is no evil, but from the relative standpoint evil is a terrible reality.
(http://userpages.umbc.edu/~achatt1/Bio/rama.html)

It is often held that Lao Tzu conceived the Tao as beyond good and evil, while Confucius moralized the Tao. But it is more accurate to say that when Confucius enters on the worldly task of creating order in the community through knowledge of good and evil, he leaves the realm beyond good and evil strictly intact. For he does not take the community as an absolute. For him Encompassing is a background, not a theme to work with; it is the limit and foundation to be considered with awe, not the immediate task. The essential difference is the difference between Lao Tzu's direct way to the Tao and Confucius' detour by way of the human order, hence the divergent practical consequences of the same fundamental view.

The Tao which Lao Tzu puts before and above everything else is for Confucius the One. But Lao Tzu immerses himself in it, while Confucius lets himself be guided by his awe of the One as he moves among the things of the world. At times Confucius also shows a tendency to shun the world; at the limits he too discloses the notion of acting by inaction and so keeping the world in order. Though the two philosophers look in opposite directions, they stand on the same ground. Their unity has been embodied by great historic figures, not in a philosophy that systematically embraced both sets of teachings, but in Chinese wisdom of a life illumined by thought.
(http://www.china-sd.net/eng/qiluculture/confucius/adversaries.htm)


And One equal two and One and One make three and from that come all things.

----
Onward to the utmost of futures!

Peace
Om
K

-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End




Peace,
K

7/19/2006 01:17:00 AM  
Blogger slomo said...

Luposapien said...

It seems to me at times that the cognitive disonance has been reaching the peak of a long crescendo, and that, any day now, it will all just add up to more than the average person can take. How many conventional 'Truths' can a person, or society as a whole, maintain which directly contradict their own human empathy and direct experience of the world before a truly psychotic break occurs. Has it occured already?

You may or may not follow astrology. I'm comfortable enough with it since I'm a believer in the fractal maxim of "As above, so below". In any case, if you're open to it, Bill Herbst has been talking about this exact thing in his recent newsletter:

So, having already witnessed the wholesale destruction of Saturn opposite Pluto in the first half of this decade (9-11, real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, class wars in politics, and the aggressive decay of social discourse), we have moved into Act Two of the melodrama, the dissolution phase of Saturn opposite Neptune. Much of what we collectively came to believe over the past 25 years is unraveling before our eyes as Saturn continues to assert its power of rejection. Does trickle-down economics work? Are free markets really the answer? Is the outsourcing of American industry and the corporatization of our society a wise strategy? Should religion and politics be merged? Will computers and technology transform society for the better? Is terrorism really the new scourge? Can the American military effectively police the world? Are environmental scientists correct concerning the harmful effects of human activity on the ecosphere? Could disease pandemics of immunoviruses sweep the planet? All these questions trace their origins to the 1980s, when they were seeded as new beliefs. They have all manifested to some degree. Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, the cycles with which these ideas took root are reaching their halfway points. By the end of this decade or shortly into the next, we should know which are true and which are false.

[...]

But reality can hold only so much fantasy. If we continue to huff and puff on our dreams (as humans have a marked tendency to do), the balloon of reality expands past its natural limits of elasticity, resulting in exaggeration and distortion. Reality is bent out of shape. Eventually, one of two consequences occurs: Reality contracts, slowly deflating our hyperextended dreams back toward pragmatism; or the balloon itself bursts, rending the fabric of reality as our overinflated vision collapses instantaneously. Either way, we come back to earth. The question is one of soft versus hard landings.

[...]

Besides exaggeration and distortion, the archetype field is now filling with other qualities of Saturn opposite Neptune. The two that seem most relevant from my viewpoint are exhaustion and disillusionment. Collectively, we are exhausted, spent, and tired to our bones. This exhaustion means not only loss of vitality and energy, but also loss of optimism, loss of hope. A cumulative weariness has set in, and with it, pessimism.

7/19/2006 01:23:00 AM  
Blogger slomo said...

I usually distrust Rense, but I was compelled to read the article Little Manchurian Candidates recommended by #1 Sniffer.

I don't have children, so I have no way of knowing whether the article rings true or not. If it does, it's shocking:

The following "story" and "comprehension" questions are representative of the anti-intellectualism that I found in the readers:

Once upon a time there was a little green mouse who hopped after a tiger onto a yellow airplane. The plane turned into a big red bird in flight, and the mouse turned into a blue pumpkin. The pumpkin fell to the ground and its seeds grew into pots and pans. Blah, blah, blah

1) "What color was the mouse?"

2) "Why do mice turn into pumpkins?"

3) "How do seeds grow?"

[...]

For one thing, [the author's daughter] had stopped reading her favorite books and stories at home. Before starting school, she had feasted on Grimm's Fairy Tales. Although she still begged us to read these to her, she now explained that she was not supposed to read them herself, according to her understanding from her teacher, because they contained big words and content in advance of her abilities.

[...]

When reviewing the school readers, I had noticed an impoverished vocabulary, composed mostly of three and four letter words. I brought this up with the teacher. She explained that the readers were integrated into a district policy that no more than five hundred new words be introduced to students during any grade level. The idea was to protect children from the dizzying and confusing effects of an overabundance of words and ideas.


Those of you who are parents: can you tell me whether this article ring true?

7/19/2006 02:00:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Slomo, Yes, it does. The original article was posted on the authors' own blog some months ago. My wife and I both read it and found that it confirmed our experience from our previous marriages.

Between us we had four children attending a variety of purportedly "excellent" public schools and very expensive, elite private schools, from K through 12. All but one of those four kids is out of college now.

Yes, it's true. What's more, our kids had similar observations and conundra, consonant with their ages at the time they were confronted with some of these anomalous, even bizarre, texts and "thought" problems.

One can't really characterize it as anything other then a massive conditioning process, away from family unity and loyalty, away from critical thinking skills, away from any kind of higher faith or even gnosis, down toward groupthink based on anxiety at being perceived as an outsider, and acceptance of the status quo, blind respect for authority, and conditioning to collective punishment.

It is downward social engineering. Even rap singer Coolio tuned into it some years ago, believe it or not, referring to it as the "dumbassification of America." The media, both print and electronic, certainly help hasten the process along.

7/19/2006 04:46:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A very fine, important post. And thank you for the introduction to Simone Weil.

According to the wikipedia entry, she experienced a religious ecstasy in the same church (the chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi) where Saint Francis of Assisi had prayed.

Would she have considered herself a 'socialist', or more an 'anarchist-syndicalist? Or something else. Such categories are not the most important aspect or her life, thought and actions - though I am interested in how her spirituality informed/animated her politics and vice-versa.

7/19/2006 06:09:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"In America few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government."

That would be terribly disconcerting if one had bought into the idea that the nation-state is the natural unit of political organization, and is wholly directed by its citizens, and that such a state of affairs is a natural and healthy form of government.

Viewed over the long term, the modern nation-state is the anomaly, not the norm. There seems to be this innate assumption on the part of most people that democracy and the rule of the Common Man will produce peace, yet I think it's no coincidence that the heyday of the nation-state coincided with the period of the World Wars, fascism and communism. This was a period characterized by the rejection of kings, and the embrace of democracy and dictators who rose up from the peasantry. When the mob are asked to rule, or when they're allowed to advance a gifted commoner such as Hitler or Stalin to absolute power, it's no surprise that wars, famines, economic collapses, etc., are the result. Offhand I can't think of any "man of the people" who rose to absolute power without causing immense misery.

The West in general, and the United States with it, are today returning to the more natural forms of government that our ancestors enjoyed. No-one can actually say this out loud, of course, no more than the Imperial Romans could characterize their Augustus as a King. Humans have a natural need for a ruling class, though, and if a society is to survive over the long term, that ruling class needs to be there.

-Sepka the Space Weasel

7/19/2006 06:17:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sepka, What makes you think that the "common man" is choosing his leaders anyway. From just the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections in the US that clearly is not the case.

Other elections are not immune either. Look at what happened to Senator MacClellan, or look down to Mexico last week. And here's another one from today (see below). The "ruling class" chooses itself even in a demonocracy, er uh, I mean democracy.

"Diebold Machines Rip Off McKinney Votes
Tuesday July 18th 2006, 1:29 pm

Last night, CNN told us Cynthia McKinney “enjoys solid support as she heads into the July 18 Democratic primary” in Atlanta, Georgia.

However, in America, 2006, it does not matter if a politician is supported by her constituency because elections are little more than smoke and mirrors, a crumbling facade slapped over the ugly face of dictatorship. Democratic Underground posted the following press release this afternoon:

FOR IMMEDITATE RELEASE Contact: Jocco Baccus
July 18, 2006
678-520-2088

DIEBOLD ELECTRONIC MACHINES MALFUNCTION, VOTE FOR OTHER CANDIDATE

(Decatur) After one hour of voting, the McKinney campaign has received numerous calls that the voting machines are malfunctioning. Voters casting votes for McKinney are reportedly having their votes switched by the machines for Hank Johnson. This is not a new problem with Diebold machines. Lawyers for the campaign have been alerted and said that If this situation is not corrected, Cynthia McKinney for Congress will be forced to take additional measures.

“A McKinney representative confirmed for me that these reports have been coming in all morning,” adds the blogger Joseph Cannon. “By every account, votes for Congresswoman McKinney have ‘morphed’ into votes for Johnson. So far, nobody has heard one anecdotal report of an intended vote for Johnson turning into a vote for McKinney.”

Anecdotal or not, this is how elections work in America now—same as they work in any other dictatorship.

Although the oft-cited Uncle Joe Stalin quote—”It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes”—is assumed to be an urban legend, it is applicable to America, circa 2006. Our ruling elite attempted to take down Cynthia McKinney for “assaulting” a Capital Hill cop, but that didn’t work out as planned, so now they will steal the election from her.

Question: will Cynthia McKinney’s supporters take to the streets and wage a civil disobedience campaign like the people of Mexico after the elite diebolded their election, or will they slump off and lick their wounds?

Follow up question: here in America, does the neocon Gestapo need kick in the door before people resist this sort of transparent fascism?

Don’t answer. I have a pretty good idea."

courtesy of Another Day in the Empire, Kurt Nimmo

7/19/2006 07:00:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Slomo, excellent extension of luposapian's comments, even if I care little for astrology or its speculations.

Starroute, thank-you



"Such synchronicity--hearing that report, discussing this topic tonight--is itself heartening to me. Sure, we're manacled and mangled, but we have surprises for the bad guys (or the bad systems, if there are no “bad guys”) that we don't even know about yet. What we yearn for is, I think, nothing short of mass enlightenment, and I do believe it's going to happen. There is such a thing as the collective consciousness already; always has been, as "primitive" and powerful as a school of fish/flock of birds changing course simultaneously, outside what we understand as communication."

Cuttlefish, I like this, and will add; To the degree that we create a common language that supports more correspondences between categories is the degree that we will surprise ourselves and the world. Also, realization maybe, but enlightenment is asking for a bit much.

P.S. Functionally speaking divisiveness is evil in that it is what takes things apart.

7/19/2006 07:56:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dear Jules and Jon,

Since you both had asked for some data, I went ahead and dug it up. Sorry I didn’t get to this sooner but I have a farm and a ranch to run. It looks like I actually understated the figures at the present time vis a vis priest pederasty.

The US Bishops’ own National Review Board places the number of abusive priests at 5,000. And that is solely in the US. There are currently 750 court cases pending in California alone, and there were 1,092 new cases filed in 2004 in the US.

Further, this article clearly identifies the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), as the locus of the cover-up as early as 1962, and quotes sources who name Cardinal Ratzinger as the more recent orchestrator of the Vatican’s pedophilia cover up through that same office (which an earlier astute poster reminded us was formerly known as the office of the Inquisition – so much for quibbling over names).

The text also details church canon law that addressed the issue of pedophilic priest sodomizers of children as early as 309 A.D. at the Council of Elvira (no t.v. host vampire jokes, please). So here it is all clearly stated, in one recent article:

'Everywhere I turned, I ran into sexual abuse'

“The real conspiracy in the Catholic church has nothing to do with the Da Vinci Code, says Patrick Wall - it's the cover-up of paedophile priests. Mark Honigsbaum meets the former monk who is leading a crusade to hunt down the perpetrators and bring them to justice

Patrick Wall, or Brother Wall as he used to be known, is feeling a little jetlagged. He has just arrived in London on the red-eye from Los Angeles and has two hours before he has to catch a train to Cardiff - in pursuit of a special sort of criminal.

"I can't tell you much about the perpetrator until I get to Wales and sue his ass," he says, fixing me with a look that could stop the Vatican bells. "Let's just say that there are in excess of 20 victims - boys and girls - and that the alleged abuse dates back to the late 1970s."

Wall is a former Benedictine monk turned international clerical sleuth, and this is his 200th case since joining the LA law firm of Manly, McGuire & Stewart. His job is to hunt down Roman Catholic priests retired by the Vatican in the wake of the sexual abuse scandals that erupted in Boston and other north-American dioceses in 2002. Many of those priests have effectively gone to ground.

Wall's job is to find them, verify their identities, and then serve them with affidavits setting out their alleged involvement in abuse, as the first stage in bringing suits for damages on behalf of their victims in the US courts. It's a tricky job, one that requires a close familiarity with clergymen - and the cunning of Philip Marlowe.

"You want to build up some sort of rapport with the perp [perpetrator] before you serve them, but it can be a little scary because you don't know if they'll have a Smith & Wesson or holy water," he says. "I guess you could call what I do clerical reconnaissance. The point is, I have to be absolutely certain we have the right guy. If we sue the wrong priest, I'm done."

Dressed in a loose-fitting shirt and jacket, Wall, who stands 6ft tall and weighs 18∫ stone, looks like an overfed American tourist. In fact, he's an ex-high school American football star, and before he became involved in trying to stamp out sex abuse in the church, his only ambition was to be a good priest, to teach theology and coach college football. That plan began to unravel in 1992 when, within weeks of taking his vows for the priesthood, Wall was invited to join the church's "sexual abuse response team".

"My job was to firefight cases of sexual abuse - basically, take the place of the perp and calm the waters," he says. "Our definition of success was that no one ever found out about it."

Over the next five years, Wall found himself being shuttled from parish to parish to replace other, similarly failing priests - including one who had abused more than 30 altar boys. "Everywhere I turned, I was running into perpetrators," he says. "In one month alone, we had seven cases against monks go public."

By 1998, Wall had had enough and resigned from the priesthood. Later, he went on to give expert testimony in other sexual-abuse cases. For this, he was accused by his former monastic employers of being "headstrong" - a charge he readily admits - and forging church documents, which he strongly denies.

Now Wall, along with two other former priests turned whistleblowers, has written a book called Sex, Priests and Secret Codes: the Catholic church's 2,000-year paper trail of sexual abuse. The book, he says, contains previously unpublished documents detailing the Vatican's longstanding awareness of the problem of sexual abuse. Its conclusion is that the recent scandals in the US, Ireland and Britain are nothing new, but simply the latest chapter in a story that stretches right back to the founding of the church. And the authors say they have found evidence of deliberate cover-up by the church.

Exhibit A is a hitherto secret document called Crimen Sollicationis - Latin for "the crime of solicitation" - issued in 1962 by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), an office attached to the Vatican. Described as a "blueprint for deception and concealment" by lawyers investigating the worldwide sex-abuse scandals, Crimen Sollicationis contains strict instructions for dealing with what the Vatican calls the "worst crimes" - such as allegations of paedophilia and bestiality. Rather than report these offences to the civil authorities, the CDF instructs bishops to investigate them "in the most secretive way" or face the "penalty of excommunication".

Then, in 2001, the CDF followed this document up with a second directive, which ordered bishops to send their reports directly to Rome, where they would be kept safely under lock and key along with other so-called Pontifical Secrets. Wall and his co-authors argue that it is this and not the Da Vinci Code that is the "real conspiracy" at the heart of modern Catholicism. They say it is no coincidence that the person responsible for the promulgation of the second document was none other than the head of the CDF, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

According to Wall and his co-authors, if early church documents are a guide, then the sexual abuse of minors by the clergy has been an "open wound on the body of Christ" for centuries. They say that, as early as AD309, the Council of Elvira, a gathering of bishops and priests from all over the Iberian peninsula who met to discuss theological issues and set canon law, signalled its concerns over paedophilia by ruling that any bishop, priest or deacon caught offending should be denied holy communion even at the time of death. By the eighth century, The Penitential of Bede, a medieval handbook of penances usually ascribed to the Anglo-Saxon theologian and early English historian Bede, had refined the punishments according to rank. Thus laymen caught sodomising children were to be excommunicated and made to fast for three years, while deacons and priests were similarly excommunicated but made to fast for seven and 10 years respectively (bishops were given 12 years of penance).

But the clearest evidence that the early church had the same problem with paedophilia as today comes from the Book of Gomorrah, an 11th-century tract written by St Peter Damian which, while condemning all forms of "immoral" sexual behaviour, holds priests who defile boys in special contempt. Such clerical offenders should not only be publicly flogged but also, writes St Peter, their tonsures should be "shorn" and their faces "foully besmeared with spit". Next, he recommends six months of imprisonment and fasting, followed by a further six months of prayer in solitary confinement. Even after their release, St Peter writes, offenders should never again be allowed to "associate with youths in private conversation or in counselling them".

It was not the only time that church insiders would make such a recommendation - one that contrasts starkly with the more recent practice of transferring priests to neighbouring parishes where they have been free to reabuse. In 1954, Father Gerald Fitzgerald, the founder of the Servants of the Paraclete, an order specialising in the counselling and care of priests with psychiatric problems, recommended that any priest who, as he put it, "tampered with the virtue of the young" should be reduced to lay status. Needless to say, his recommendation to bishops was ignored and, by the late 1960s, the Paracletes were providing psychotherapeutic services to so many priests with paedophiliac tendencies that they coined a shorthand term for the offence: "code 3".

For Wall and his colleagues, the clearest example of the breach of St Peter Damian's injunction to keep priests out of the way of temptation came at the trial in 1998 of Father Oliver O'Grady, a prolific abuser who had been moved from one northern California parish to another in an attempt to avoid scandal. O'Grady eventually admitted abusing 23 children between the ages of four months and 12 years and served seven years in a Californian state penitentiary. Despite repeated instances of sexual abuse, says Wall, the church has been reluctant to take responsibility and root out the problem.

"All the church cares about is keeping the scandal under control, so they can continue to raise money and grow the institution," says Wall. "If they truly had the interests of children at heart, they would never put that priest back into a ministry that could cause him to reoffend."

Meanwhile, the scandals continue to mount: in 2004, 1,092 new allegations were lodged against priests, and in California alone, there are currently 750 cases pending in the courts.

Moreover, despite the US Bishops National Review Board's own estimates that there are some 5,000 abusive priests in the US, to date only 150 have been successfully prosecuted - a reflection, in large part, says Wall, of a lack of cooperation from the church. In California, for example, the archdiocese has sought to block the disclosure of confidential counselling records on two priests saying it violates their First Amendment right on religious protection; in other sensitive cases, the Vatican has simply refused to accept the jurisdiction of the US courts.

Although Wall no longer has any faith in Roman Catholic institutions, he and his coauthors do not believe the church is beyond redemption. They dedicate their book to "all the people of God". Today, Wall is happily married to a therapist in California; together, they have a five-year-old daughter, Erin.

"I believe we will be tested by how we treat the widow, the orphan and the alien," says Wall. "In other words, if you have to choose between protecting the institution or protecting children, Christ would have chosen the children."

And with that, Wall, having long since made his choice, rises to his feet and, gripping my hand in his huge fist, announces he has a train to catch...”

Thursday May 4, 2006, The Guardian, London

It is neither Manichean nor needlessly divisive to identify "bad guys" and root them out where they exist. Would you leave them in place to commit atrocities on your children?

I used to believe that human nature in general, or at large, was the problem. I really don't think so anymore. I think the bulk of humanity are predictably self-serving, but basically good folks.

Problem is, they've been made dumb and dumberer by the media, and led down a subterranean path of ignorance, xenophobia, and aggression by, oh dear, pardon me for saying this, the ruling classes.

I have enjoyed much of the discussion above, and find myself in the surprising position of agreeing with most of it, even those with whom I have had previously heated exchanges. Maybe that is a good sign.

Hope I'm not simply succumbing to the dumbassifying social engineering.

Like Bob Marley sang:

Oh
Time will tell.
Think your in Heaven but you're living in hell.

Time will tell.

I am an optimist. But I'm also a realist. Those are almost diametrically opposed points of view. But then I don't believe in false dichotomies like left and right, so why accept that one either?

Pax et amor,

~MoFi Jolter

7/19/2006 08:10:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Who are the People of the Lie? Well, for one thing, they are people who tell lies, employing deceitfulness to whitewash acts which are evil. To wit:

From Antiwar.com:

"U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said there was no moral equivalence between the civilian casualties from the Israeli raids in Lebanon and those killed in Israel. 'I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts,' he added, while defending as 'self-defense' Israel's military action, which has had 'the tragic and unfortunate consequence of civilian deaths.'"

This argument is based on alleged intent: Bolton posits, without offering any evidence, that the Israelis did not intend to harm innocent civilians, but Hezbollah certainly did and does. Surely, however, he doesn't really believe the Israelis failed to foresee large numbers of civilian casualties as the inevitable result of their aerial bombardment. We all know they simply discounted this and went ahead anyway. Yes, avers Bolton, Lebanese deaths are "tragic," but they are less tragic than some others:

"It's simply not the same thing to say that it's the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their deaths, to fire rockets and use explosive devices or kidnapping versus the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense."

How does one gauge the desires of the Israeli leaders, the generals and the strategists, and those who carry out their orders? Bolton must be a mind-reader. It's impossible to know with certainty the motives and emotions that propel human action in any instance, but it's easy enough, in the case of the Middle East, to imagine some sort of hatred is involved, be it religious, ethnic, or nonsectarian.

Clearly, both sides are motivated by a fair degree of hatred, and if anyone wants to make the case that one party is ahead of the other in this regard, they are going to have a hard time of it. The idea, in this war more than most, is to terrorize the enemy and so demoralize them that they are either driven into the sea or the desert.

The real core of Bolton's argument, however, is unstated: it is the premise that state-sponsored terrorism is morally superior to the "privatized" Hezbollah brand, but this is unsupportable, in logic and by any rational ethical standard. It is, of course, the conceit of nations – that is, of their governments – that their terror is excusable, even liberating, while the same behavior engaged in by individuals or private groups is defined as a criminal act.

This conceit has been buttressed by various ideologies – Marxism and the various forms of racialism, including German national socialism – all based on the primacy of either class or race in determining human consciousness. The "class-conscious" workers were the vanguard of a Higher Truth, one that gave us the gulag and arguably the worst tyranny ever visited on humankind. The "race-conscious" Nazis gave us the Holocaust and the most destructive war in world history. In the Middle East, the same sort of tribalist "logic" allows both sides to disdain the moral arguments against attacking civilians."

7/19/2006 08:36:00 AM  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

Weil and The Godfather:

I started searching for Weil in the Godfather trilogy when I received a message from the American Weil Society stating that Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola had admitted to turning to Weil for inspiration while working on the script for Godfather III. I used this news as an excuse to revisit all three films. However, I found Weil's unmistakable presence only in the scene from the third film where Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) enjoys an Italian meal in Sicily with his ex-wife, Kay Adams (Diane Keaton).

Kay: You know this is dangerous for you, Michael. This is Sicily.

Michael: I love this country.

Kay: Why?

Michael: Well, all through history terrible things have happened to these people, terrible injustices. But they still expect that good rather than bad will happen to them.

Kay: Sort of like me and you, huh?

A paragraph from Weil’s most famous essay, Human Personality, lies behind this conversation:

"At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being."

7/19/2006 08:55:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

"Here I am stuck in the Middle,
Still goin no where"

To the William Blake and Montauk posters.. The battle of good and evil is taking place from the future and into the past.

My sense is that "the time travellers" have come and gone leaving those phosphorescent footprints in the sands of time. The allies for truth, freedom and love are in the library "discard" pile. Dig them up and share them. Great posts folks.

7/19/2006 10:23:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Today it is not nearly enough merely to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself without precedent…"

S. Weil (1942?)

7/19/2006 10:52:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry to be cynical, but I am of the opinion that Evil, as a human construct of behavioral perception, cannot be eradicated. In otherwords, the concept of Good is quite meaningless without its counterpart and Arch Nemesis, Evil. The Yin and The Yang, if you will, as the following indicates:

This Symbol(Yin-Yang) represents the ancient Chinese understanding of how things work. The outer circle represents "everything", while the black and white shapes within the circle represent the interaction of two energies, called "yin" (black) and "yang" (white), which cause everything to happen. They are not completely black or white, just as things in life are not completely black or white, and they cannot exist without each other.
While "yin" would be dark, passive, downward, cold, contracting, and weak, "yang" would be bright, active, upward, hot, expanding, and strong. The shape of the yin and yang sections of the symbol, actually gives you a sense of the continual movement of these two energies, yin to yang and yang to yin, causing everything to happen: just as things expand and contract, and temperature changes from hot to cold.


We are caught in the Jet Stream created by the perpetual tension between the two polar opposites, and the variations therein. That Jet Stream is Human History, recorded, or otherwise.

That's a bitter pill to swallow, but I believe it's an accurate assessment.

7/19/2006 11:59:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sepka -

Ain't nothing natural about kings or ruling classes. They go back to only somewhere about 4000 BC, maybe 4500 BC at most. Societies were getting more complex then, elaborate redistribution networks were being created in order to support a greater population density, and there was a need to get large number of people together to do grueling labor on things like irrigation works.

All of that required clear lines of authority, backed up by coercive force -- which at the time meant god-kings and aristocrats. It worked, in a brutal sort of way, but it wasn't pretty and it certainly wasn't natural. It also wasn't adequate to the even more complex societies we maintain today -- which is why things have inevitably moved on.

Hitler and Stalin were able to be monsters because they had the model of several thousand years of frequently-monstrous royalty behind them. We are able to perceive them as monsters only because the hazy mystique of divine right has been stripped away. To go back to that now -- to have divine-right kings with all the lethal resources of a Hitler or Stalin would be monstrosity piled upon monstrosity.

7/19/2006 12:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i do have 2 kids all grown and another now only 3.5 years. i spend a good deal of my daily effort upon caring for others and virtually full-time trying to be "Good".

But, regardless of my effort and desire, some will see me as Evil...part of many problems rather than their solution....overpopulation, working an Establishment job, driving a car, enjoying the various fruits of the Empire...and this is not their error because they are as qualified to define Evil as I am. I just do what is best for me and my fam and my gang and my kindred spirits and I think that Cheney and his evil henchmen do pretty much the same thing, and even moreso, believe they are Uber-patriots and vanguards of human excellence.

So the dichotomy is less useful the more you pick at it, and worse, it blinds.

Very salient is the notion of Good being more interesting the more you know about it, and Evil the opposite.

7/19/2006 12:36:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This blog churns vociferously on many matters, but take a moment to appreciate one small voice that spoke out in real time - thank you Denis:


Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress:
(1) calls upon the President to: (A) appeal to all sides in the current crisis in the Middle East for an immediate cessation of violence; (B) commit United States diplomats to multi-party negotiations with no preconditions; and (C) send a high-level diplomatic mission to the region to facilitate such multi-party negotiations; (2) urges such multi-party negotiations to begin as soon as possible, including delegations from the governments of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt; and (3) supports an international peacekeeping mission to southern Lebanon to prevent cross-border skirmishes during such multi-party negotiations.

Rep. Kucinich’s speech, delivered on the House floor on Tuesday, July 18.

Mr. Speaker, We make war with such certainty, yet we are befuddled how to create peace. This paradox requires reflection, if we are to survive. Making and endorsing war demands a secret love of death, a fearful desire to embrace annihilation. Creating peace requires the mirror of compassion, putting ourselves in the other person’s place, in all their suffering, with all their hopes, and to act from our heart’s capacity for love, not fear.

The fight against terrorism in the 21st century is beginning to have the feel of the fight against communism in the 20th century: Conjuring of enemies, scapegoating and wanton destruction. Our war on terror has become a war of errors as we blindly exercise our capacity for war making.

We have not yet begun to explore our capacity for peacemaking, so we are reduced to a predatory voyerism: creating war, watching war, being aghast at war, impotent to stop ourselves.

We are the most powerful nation, but even we do not have the power to reserve for ourselves, or to grant to our allies, an exemption from the laws of cause and effect.

The fate of the world lies in the balance. And until we consciously choose peace over war, life over death, the balance is tipping toward mutually assured destruction. ++

7/19/2006 12:48:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let us hope Mr. Kucinich will not be flying in small planes anytime soon.

7/19/2006 02:06:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

But, But, But.......that's exactly what Mr. Blair said he wanted on C-SPAN last night in front of Parliament. A International Peacekeeping Force to help pave the way for Private Investment in Palestine.

Hmmmmm......Bosnia, anyone?

It's tried and true, that's for sure.

7/19/2006 02:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ain't nothing natural about kings or ruling classes. They go back to only somewhere about 4000 BC, maybe 4500 BC at most. Societies were getting more complex then, ...

i dont know, maybe they are a sort of scaling up of more local manifestations of authority, like the stronger or smarter, the 'breadwinners', elders, chiefs. which seems to be pretty much as naturally ocurring as gravity. I have experimenteed with a lot of intelligent and like-minded collectivists in my day, and some sort of authoritarian mechanism always seems to be necessary to carry out any project of size. (though it doesnt seem to be necessary to add in the coercive element, there is always an implicit coersion in the form of ostracism and these experiments have never been of the life or death variety, which may explain that)

So perhaps as society becomes more complex, the mechanisms for control keep pace in terms of sheer power balance as well as a similarly complex system.

just a notion, fwiw

7/19/2006 02:33:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I believe the bible was deliberately mis-translated to read 'love of money is the root of all evil' from 'love of power is the root of all evil.' Why do I say this? Because money is an inanimate object, a tool. Power, on the other hand, is a state of being ascendant over some other individual or population. Unless you ARE G-d, you have no right whatsoever to rule over anyone else. I have never met a single person who wanted or was enamored by power who wasn't fundamentally evil on many levels.

7/19/2006 03:21:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Even in a truly democratic society, where people were all highly informed, this would still be a problem. The very fact that a person DESIRES to be in power indicates that they should not be trusted with that power. How do you go about choosing a just leader when the only people who could really be trusted with the job have no desire to seek it? Of course, this pre-supposes that there is even a need for such a person any longer (if there ever truly was the need).

7/19/2006 03:51:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's been a lot posted here on pedophilia and the RCC clergy, all of it perhaps a degression.

Whatever the case, it's an issue which I take very deeply to heart and feel compelled to respond to.

First, I shake my head at how this topic dichotomizes and divides beyond what reason should allow.

We all too easily fall into a mud-slinging match in which Team A takes up the "RCC is evil" role while Team B takes on the "RCC ain't entirely so bad" role.

Not that I mean to fault anyone. Nor do I wish to claim superiority.

I've been half-Catholic, and precisely, more or less, that, my entire life. I was baptized at birth, and subsequently raised protestant, from age 5, after my parents left the Church. (I resist the urge to use quotation marks. "The Church" or simply the Church: either way, it sounds the same.)

Through a troubled adolescence, I read very widely, and came under the influnce of Chesterton and others of his ilk. I was enraptured by sacred music, with an odd affinity for requiem masses (Mozart, Verdi, Lloyd Webber, they were all the same to me).

Subsequently I was confirmed in the Catholic church, and then entered a Benedictine monastery.

To this day, even as an ex-monk, I cling passionately to the good in the Benedictine order, its history and ideals.

In all my years in the monastery, as it happens, I witnessed very, very little of what might be called sexually abnormal, let alone psychopathic, still yet illegal or immoral.

Most of our gay monks had gone in the 1970s, following a shake-up (more or less purely internal, to my understanding) within the abbey.

We did, in my time there, have one young monk who apparently showed an abnormal interest in children.

I'm not mincing words here. That's all I ever knew. He was asked to leave the abbey just before he would have taken solemn vows. Subsequently, a cryptic word or two from the abbot suggested to me that this young man had been released on the mere hunch, or suspicion, or fear, that he might have been a problem down the line. The abbey was looking out for itself. End of story.

For my part, I've always very straightforwardly been interested in adult women. End of story. No need to lie about that, under an alias, posting anonymously. Most monks and priests in today's RCC, I more than suspect, are plagued by the same "problem," if such it is.

Celibacy hurts us on these terms. These alone. Past tense, in my case, since I have in fact managed a healthy heterosexual sex life since leaving.

All of this has been more than a bit rambling, I suspect, and so forgive me, please, anyone reading. Dutch courage at five AM is the only thing that ever gets me writing: no apologies for it, either.

In summary, if such can be made:

The Roman Catholic Church (RCC) is far from being as categorically, systematically evil as is all too widely supposed.

Neither, at the same time, is it all that damn pure.

We're talking about something approaching a billion people here (the worldwide Catholic population), a figure which should invite an all-too-obvious point of comparison:

China. Is it evil? Or are most Chinese simply ordinary, decent people, going about their lives as best they can, no more prone to pedophila, or any other evil, than you or I am?

But is its government committed to dishonorable/treachorous/evil ends?

Who can judge?

I don't wish to offer any platitudes. Rather, I'd just like to suggest that the Catholic Church is a rather bigger, vaster, more complex entity, with ALL that that implies, than either its more vigorous detractors or more ardent supporters seem prepared to understand, let alone admit, let alone begin to engage, on whatever terms.

Meanwhile, the Middle East burns. If you haven't already been there, do please turn to http://www.iamthewitness.com and educate yourself on the truly sinister history of Zionism.


Pax omnibus:
Peace to all of you out there!

7/19/2006 04:33:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was also raised a Catholic. In fact, I had two uncles who were priests. I'm not a Catholic any longer, but rather an Agnostic.

I will say this, though. The Catholics search out, embrace and welcome suffering, and in so doing they create a steady supply of contrite and faithful victims. Offer it up to the Lord, they say, as though the more suffering you have endured, the greater your standing with their God.

The nuns were brutal in grade school. I'll never forget my first days in first grade when Sister Lagory asked ever so nicely for us to bring in our bolo bats without the balls attached. We all did so like faithful little servants. Not too long afterward the purpose of the bolo bats was revealed. Jimmy Kelly was the first victim (offer it uo, baby). She brought him up in front of the class and asked him to put out his hands. She then proceeded to pull out one of the bolo bats and smack the living shit out of his hands until they turned beet red and tears ran down his face. She then made him kneel in the corner and pray to the Virgin Mary for forgiveness the remainder of the class.

Nice touch.

7/19/2006 08:18:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff, if that is your real name:

You said, "[M]any 9/11 theorists create a false dilemma, suggesting the guilty party is either al Qaeda or the Bush administration, whereas elements of both were employed as assets by a deeper power network wired into narcotics and arms trafficking which has sometimes been called the Octopus."

In reality, "Al Qaeda" has no actual existence except as a fictional PR creation. So its "elements" couldn't have been, and werent, "employed by a deeper power."

But there was a "deeper power" at work on 9/11, all right, and it included zionist Israel, and Mossad. Exactly what happened is impossible to say. (It's a secret!) But it's very clear what some of the things are that DIDN'T happen. Especially, TWO airplane impacts didn't cause THREE towers to fall down.

The towers fell down because they were wired with explosives before the planes hit. I don't think any educated person could read Steven Jones's article on this point and not get the realization that 9/11 wasn't done by Muslims AT ALL. And, that it WAS done by people who want us to THINK it was done by Muslims.

So I find your posting to be an example of the topic indicated in the title. It is truly evil to commit mass murder, and even more evil to commit mass murder and then blame it on someone else (a whole culture, actually). And your posting is evil because you are, deliberately, furthering that very coverup. And your posting is monotonous, because you've been doing this evil coverup number for a long time now.

7/19/2006 08:58:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

much food for thought, mojo, and the ex-monk...much food for thought.

in a different vein, however--talk about your little manchurian candidates-in-waiting! Israeli children signing the bombs going into lebanon:

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

7/19/2006 09:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

mojo: "The US Bishops’ own National Review Board places the number of abusive priests at 5,000. And that is solely in the US."

this statement of the Guardian's is misleading. the report (found here: http://www.nccbuscc.org/nrb/nrbstudy/nrbreport.pdf ) states that

"Church records indicate that 4,392 were accused of engaging in sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002. This number represents four percent of the 109,694 priests in active ministry at that time.
...
[In the footnotes, concerning these stats:] "The survey results...include allegations of abuse that were 'not substantiated' and allegations for which no investigation was conducted."

[Also fromt he footnotes, further into the report:]

"Charges that the Vatican promulgated a policy of secrecy for dealing with allegations of sexual abuse by priests are, however, without basis. Although some have claimed that a 1962 Vatican document, CRIMEN SOLLICITATIONIS, instituted a policy of secrecy for cases involving clerical abuses of a minor, the document clearly was intended to apply only to the limited situation of allegations that the priest had used the sacrament of reconciliation to facilitate or conceal the abuse. Because priests are prohibited from discussing anything learned in the confessional, CRIMEN SOLLICITATIONIS established special procedures for these limited incidences. It appears that few, if any, of US bishops had even heard of the document until 2003, when it was unearthed by plaintiff's attorneys."


mojo: "There are currently 750 court cases pending in California alone..."

this is an ESTIMATE they've passed along as fact:

"Laurence E. Drivon, a Stockton attorney [for the abused]...estimates there are at least 750 cases pending in the state [of California]."

(http://www.bishop-accountability.org/usccb/natureandscope/dioceses/stocktonca.htm)


mojo: "...there were 1,092 new cases filed in 2004 in the US."

again, very misleading, and it cannot but seem intentional. from a SFTimes article on these "new" cases:

"Nearly 1,100 credible accusations of child sexual abuse -- MOSTLY FROM INCIDENCES DECADES AGO -- were lodged against Catholic clergymen last year, according to a report released Friday by the U.S. bishops." [emphasis mine, of course.]
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/19/MNGE1BECPE1.DTL)

so these aren't "new" incidences at all, it appears.

anywho--i appreciate your references to the council of elvira and the writings of st damien and bede the venerable: i'll do some more research into this and patrick wall's book. thanks for the reply-- jon

7/19/2006 10:48:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mofti Jor-El writes...

To say that the number of new cases filed against perpetrator priests is misleading because the allegations involve perpetration from previous years, now THAT is misleading.

It is exactly the nature of child abuse, particulary child abuse perptrated under cover of the mantle of "divine authority" and all the trappings that go with it, that is not likely to be reported until years or even decades later. Especially if we are talking about pre-pubescent victims.

As far as accepting the Bishop's demurral on the cover up, no way. I quoted the article that referenced their report to show that even that organization most likely to be biased in favor of priests gave the number 5,000 as an estimate.

Remember, it was the American Bishops who thought that priests shouldn't even be disciplined until the had committed a SECOND reported offense. The first molestation was to be a freebie.

This position taken by upper ranking clerics in a worldwide organization that claims to speak for God on earth?????

I am sorry, boys and girls, but anybody who thinks that kind of position is defensible, well, please, stay away from young people and children, will you? Thanks. And that includes you folks over at the Inquisition.

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Really, though, what the hell are you trying to defend? It sure isn't anything that Jesus said, stood for, or died for.

And you can take that to the bank.

Pun intended.

He overturned the tables on the money lenders. What do you think he would have done to pederasts?

To the anonymous poster of 8:48 who addressed "Jeff, if that is your real name:" Good opening salvo, which I assume was meant as satirical. The rest of your post is pretty right-on. I applaud your courage in calling a spade a spade.

I would simply add that there are many Israelis, albeit fewer now than in decades past, who disagree completely with their government, and the actions it carries out on behalf of whomever or whatever force(s) of evil moves the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and their ilk, who move the Bushes and Blairs, Sharons and Olmerts of this world, and their ilk.

So don't tar all Israelis with the same brush, and certainly not all Jews. That is a dangerous trap in which to fall, and it is indeed a lie.

Yes, the Israelis are living on land violently stolen from its inhabitants and occupied by force. So is everyone else in the United States. Just ask any American Indian.

It's the continued refusal to render justice that is the problem. All the more so when the refusal by the powerful to give justice to the weak is made exponentially worse by the "ethnic cleansing" (I really hate that euphemism), more honestly called incipient Genocide, that is being undertaken against the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iraqi peoples.

Now that is not merely a War Crime. It is a crime against all humanity, each one of us included.

Time to wake up and make a change.

To get back on topic...how can such change occur, for it can and it will. It must.

Peace, love, and understanding,

Your family member,

~Morft Jolie

7/19/2006 11:21:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

starroute,
Your vision is breathtaking; the way in which you paint our emergence as an enlightened species as an inevitable evolutionary outcome is so refreshing, so inspiring that it makes the approaching Singularity a thing to be eagerly anticipated. It puts the joy back into George Harrison’s 1971 expression of “all things must pass,” as opposed to the gritting and gnashing of teeth with which we have been enduring this sick and twisted age. Bravo!

Sounder,
To your addition of:
“To the degree that we create a common language that supports more correspondences between categories is the degree that we will surprise ourselves and the world” I’ll add that these correspondences, correlations and convergences will surprise us, in a most pleasant and unexpected way, but I feel you’re not really allowing yourself to be buoyed by the optomism of these thoughts of yours. When you continue by saying, “Also, realization maybe, but enlightenment is asking for a bit much,” it’s as if you’ve sat back down and said, “well, yeah, it’d be nice, but…” Make no buts about it, it’s going to happen, and probably a good deal sooner than we can imagine. A few weeks ago I was talking to a person who had recently become discouraged with the rate of progress that his Bohm Dialogue group was making—something rather technical, to me at any rate, about the “tuning” or “harmonizing” necessary to realize David Bohm’s vision of transcending from being 'stuck' in the explicit order of the universe to actually being able to direct the implicate order, to consciously create/improve our reality—to which I advised not giving up hope, that help was at hand.

There are things happening in the physics of consciousness that bode very, very well for us all, even the misguided persons who have chosen the dark spiritual path that so horrifies us. There are individuals and groups of scientist/mystics who are making progress which is no longer just theoretical in the pursuit of this dream of effecting what we now stubbornly still call “reality” through consciousness alone, not “amplified” as the other side is apparently attempting through their murderous perversions and atrocities. Why is it too difficult to conceive of the positive force of life winning over the cruelty and darkness which is so antithetical to that life force? I mean, if we’re willing to entertain the notion that these men-turned-monsters are really doing these unspeakable things to children (and the rest of us, at one remove), then why wouldn’t we be willing to entertain the possibility that reality might also be effected by persons who are informed by love and wisdom? (If anyone is interested in the science of this, I’ll share the links I have—it’s a growing, glowing field.)

Shrubageddon,
I can understand the cynicism about the prospect of eradicating Evil, but isn’t the transcendent power of love precisely its ability to subsume Evil by acknowledging, accepting and, oddly, loving it, or at least the people who practise it? Evil can’t, by definition, contain love (which I’m making synonymous with Good here), but don’t Jesus, the Buddha and every enlightened soul worthy of the name somehow manage to kiss their Judases and sort of “swallow” them by loving them as themselves? I realize that kissing a Republican might present an unsavory prospect, but isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? In Jane Jensen’s fine novel on this topic, “Dante’s Equation,” (1st chapter available at http://www.janejensen.com/denov.html) there’s a memorable scene where a zadik (holy man in the Yiddish tradition) is wrestling with the sadistic Nazi who sodomized his son (in front of him, no less) and the zadik becomes, for a time, the persecutor. Evil in Jensen’s vision can’t be fought with, exactly, but one can leave it on the low, shit-strewn level where it belongs while advancing toward a higher plane. If such a thing is possible for individuals, why not whole societies?

Finally, to Anonymous, who writes, with an astounding level of certainty, that there was a “’deeper power’ at work on 9/11, all right, and it included zionist Israel, and Mossad,” and that 9/11 “WAS done by people who want us to THINK it was done by Muslims.” I’ll buy the obvious part, that whoever did it wants us to think it was the work of Muslims—wasn’t that the official story, after all? Is it not also possible that the mysterious power also wants us to suspect that Israel and the Mossad were also involved? I mean, the guys dancing by the van on the Jersey shoreline, and the Israeli companies which absconded shortly after the fireworks, and the news of the detention of the 146 Mossad agents posing as art students were all clues as clumsily left behind as the miracle wallet floating down from the sky, weren’t they?

7/20/2006 01:56:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

No, they weren't.

What did Binyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Prime Minister answer when asked what he thought about 9/11?

He said, "It's good....I mean, it's bad, but it's good for Israel."

It's on video. You can watch it yourself. Kind of supports the case being made, don't it?

7/20/2006 04:12:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Dear Cuttlefish,
When I was young some people thought I was crazy- in the clinical sense, however time, circumstances, and my competence at work have successfully created a space from which I am able to continue my ‘crazy’ obsession. Back then the expression of my obsession came through physics. I switched to philosophy and study of consciousness as I realized that a new physics without better discernment would be abused just as is the current physics. Well, also the fact that my conceptions of physics did not correspond with the abstractions of the current expressions at all. To think that abstractions of abstractions will produce a proper picture of reality, I’m still laughing.

I will agree that with you that my somewhat acerbic personality may inhibit my ability to project optimism, yet I assure you that I am within the most optimistic class of people.

Cuttlefish, I enjoy your voice immensely and would appreciate a critique from you in regards to the essay called New Outlook Society that is on my blogspot.

As to enlightenment, I consider it to be a trope dangled in front of folk that mostly serve to polish the ego. Also because I have no desire to transcend anything, I prefer integration. I will be happy for time to prove me wrong as to the distinction placed between realization and enlightenment.

7/20/2006 06:50:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/0720/pornography.html?rss

50% of child pornography from US - report

20 July 2006 11:18

An internet monitoring group has said it has received a record number of reports of online child pornography in the first six months of 2006.

Half of all content traced back to the United States.

The Internet Watch Foundation said it had received 14,313 reports between January and June, up almost a quarter from the same period in 2005, involving 4,908 cases where investigators found potentially illegal content, an increase of nearly 50%.

IWF chief executive, Peter Robbins, said that 2006 saw a record number of websites confirmed to contain evidence of child abuse.

The report said the increase did not necessarily mean there were more illegal websites being set up, but could reflect a greater public intolerance and knowledge of where to report such sites.

Just over half of all the child abuse content had been traced to the US, with 15% traced to Russia, 12% to Japan, 9% to Spain and 0.2% in the UK.

Despite warnings to relevant authorities around the world, some websites with child abuse remained accessible for up to five years, according to the IWF.

One website, first reported to the IWF in 1999 and which had been reported 96 times since, was still up and running despite 20 alerts to the relevant authorities.

The IWF said the new information underlined the need for unified international efforts, 'transcending borders and legal jurisdictions'.

7/20/2006 07:11:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

While I am completely opposed to any form of child abuse, exploitation, assault, et cetera there is one thing about methods of enforcement "transcending borders and legal jurisdictions" that really bothers me.

And that is how ardently it is supported by Alberto Gonzales and the current US administration.

As if they were actually opposed to child exploitation. As if the UN was.

Isn't this really just a way of sugar coating a very bitter pill that is really a push for an international police state.

Methinks yes.

7/20/2006 07:44:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not for the faint of heart:

Here is the actual face of the war on Lebanon:

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

See the reality of it.

7/20/2006 08:01:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrubageddon,
I can understand the cynicism about the prospect of eradicating Evil, but isn’t the transcendent power of love precisely its ability to subsume Evil by acknowledging, accepting and, oddly, loving it, or at least the people who practise it? Evil can’t, by definition, contain love (which I’m making synonymous with Good here), but don’t Jesus, the Buddha and every enlightened soul worthy of the name somehow manage to kiss their Judases and sort of “swallow” them by loving them as themselves? I realize that kissing a Republican might present an unsavory prospect, but isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? In Jane Jensen’s fine novel on this topic, “Dante’s Equation,” (1st chapter available at http://www.janejensen.com/denov.html) there’s a memorable scene where a zadik (holy man in the Yiddish tradition) is wrestling with the sadistic Nazi who sodomized his son (in front of him, no less) and the zadik becomes, for a time, the persecutor. Evil in Jensen’s vision can’t be fought with, exactly, but one can leave it on the low, shit-strewn level where it belongs while advancing toward a higher plane. If such a thing is possible for individuals, why not whole societies?



Well, I think that's the point. Good and Evil, and the variations therein, are in a constant state of conflict; one in which they are joined at the hip. Both are necessary to balance the other and to provide necessary perspective. Afterall, how would we know Good without the yardstick of Evil?

In the perpetual struggle between Good and Evil for the Upper Hand, one does subsume the other, only to be subsumed itself, by the other......and on and on it goes in perpetude. I think the Yin/Yang Symbol shows this quite nicely. One could clearly make the case that Jesus, and thus Christianity, have long since been subsumed by Evil. I certainly believe that is the case. Christianity ended when Constantine made it the official religion of Rome, but some would go further and say it was when it split from Gnosticism. Either way, it's been a tool of Evil ever since, IMHO.

But, don't get me wrong. My assessment of it doens't mean we should just fold our hands and sit passively by, because it's a constant that in order to even perceive Good, there must be Evil, and therefore, since it's the way of things, why bother. I don't think we have any choice. We are all part of the process, and we play our part, wittingly, or unwittingly.

It's rather humbling and daunting, if you think about it.

Ultimately, I think we are programmed, as a species, to Self-Destruct. Self-Annihilation is the natural conclusion of all of this. How else can you explain the impending Nuclear Armageddon. It will happen. I'd bet you, but what's the point. We won't be around to settle it if it happens in our lifetime.

7/20/2006 09:24:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sounder,

If I didn't know better, I'd say you sound an awful lot like Phaedrus. Especially your comment about desensitivity training.

Of course, Phaedrus is too old now for children running about, but your comments and descriptions about yourself do strike a memorable chord.

7/20/2006 09:29:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
Not for the faint of heart:

Here is the actual face of the war on Lebanon:

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

See the reality of it.



How could anyone defend this?

Yeah, I can feel Starroute's New World just around the corner.

Meet The New World.......Same As The Old World.......but now with Blackberries and Body Cutters.

7/20/2006 09:40:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

On The Hypocrisy of Evil:

Bush Vetoes Stem Cell Bill As Promised

Jul 19, 2:19 PM (ET)
By MARY DALRYMPLE

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush cast the first veto of his 5 1/2-year presidency Wednesday, rejecting legislation to ease limits on federal funding for research on stem cells obtained from embryos.

"This bill would support the taking of innocent human life of the hope of finding medical benefits for others. It crosses a moral boundary that our society needs to respect, so I vetoed it," Bush said at a White House event where he was surrounded by 18 families who "adopted" frozen embryos that were not used by other couples, and then used those leftover embryos to have children.

"Each of these children was still adopted while still an embryo and has been blessed with a chance to grow, to grow up in a loving family. These boys and girls are not spare parts," he said.
___________

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ says:

Minimum number of confirmed CIVILIAN deaths in Iraq:
39,250.

This number is likely far lower than the actual body
count, which some studies estimate to be well over
100,000.

I guess the "taking of innocent human life" is only OK when it serves BushCo's economic and political
interests. After all, that's much more important than
the 'hope of finding medical benefit for others".

But, hey, maybe we can find a way to extract stem-cells from all the "spare parts" of children you can find lying around in Iraq and Lebanon and Afghanistan.

Black is White, Up is Down, Freedom is Slavery. Round and round.

7/20/2006 10:01:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

What do prostitutes and priests have in common? They first see these professions as a way to avoid doing work.

7/20/2006 10:27:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrub,

I usually find your posts rather annoying, but I appreciate the link to "from israel to lebanon." Those girls signing the bombs sure look "aryan" to me...

7/20/2006 10:43:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
Shrub,

I usually find your posts rather annoying, but I appreciate the link to "from israel to lebanon." Those girls signing the bombs sure look "aryan" to me...



If you find my posts annoying, it obviously indicates you are a Jesuit, Zionist, Rothschild, Illuminati, Knight of Malta Reptilian Spook.

7/20/2006 10:59:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A priest is just a pimp for a prostituted god.

7/20/2006 11:04:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrubageddon said -

Yeah, I can feel Starroute's New World just around the corner.

Hey, why is my name being taken in vain here? Or are you really responding to IC's take on what I said and not to what I actually said?

I'm far more of a "jam every other day" kind of person myself. The past can look golden and nostalgic, the future bright and alluring -- but at any given moment, we're stuck right here with all the problems of the moment, and that generally sucks.

Call it the human condition, if you will. The ability to serve as conscious agents of evolution may be a great thing in the abstract, but in practice it means that we're constantly comparing *How Things Are* to our visions of *How Things Should Be* -- and that ain't so hot, because the reality never lives up to the dream.

For the faint of heart, that's a reason to despair. For the fanatics, it's a license to wreak bloody mayhem on the world in the name of improving it. For the con artists, it's a lure to dangle in front of the gulls.

And even for those of us who are trying to stay sane and on track, it means that life is always going to present a lot more pain than joy and a lot more failures than successes.

So let us be of good cheer, knowing that even the pain and failure is a sign of something positive, and that the best we can do in this realm of intermediacy is keep failing until we get it right.

7/20/2006 11:29:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Anonymous (not sure which—can’t you anons find a less amorphous anonymity? It makes responding to you feel like addressing some vast and vaguely Greek chorus) said...
“No, they weren't.

What did Binyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Prime Minister answer when asked what he thought about 9/11?

He said, "It's good....I mean, it's bad, but it's good for Israel."

It's on video. You can watch it yourself. Kind of supports the case being made, don't it?”

Well, no, it really don’t. Did Netanyahu make his remarks to a camera hidden behind his bathroom mirror, or to one somewhat more “public”? And doesn’t it make you just a little suspicious that the news of the Mossad art student ring was broken by the hard-hitting, independent Faux News? How do you know when you’re being fed and when you’re “discovering” something they didn’t want you to find? Certainty in these morasses of dis- and misinfo is like looking at a distant valley by standing on the other side of the mountain and peering through a tunnel.

Sounder,
I’ve read that post and I want to chew on it a bit before I respond; it was quite thoughtful and deserves better than a shoot-from-the-hip response like the one I made just now to the handle-less person.

Shrubageddon,
Sorry to have muddied your waters, if that’s what I’ve done.

7/20/2006 12:53:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrub said, "Christianity ended when Constantine made it the official religion of Rome, but some would go further and say it was when it split from Gnosticism."

Your history sucks, Shrubby. Constantine converted, yes, but didn't make Christianity the official religion of the empire: sacrifices to Jupiter and Mars went on for decades after his conversion. Besides, by the time it *did* become officially the state religion, at the end of the 4th century, it was already out of sinc with the majority of the western bishops that would make up the bulk of the latin rite church, the papacy (there is no "Vatican" as of yet) being in Rome and not Constantinople. The point? Constantine's Arian Christianity was more alike the modern-day Orthodox churches than Roman Catholicism, while the western church gets blamed for Constantine Christianity altogether. While the majority of your fellow Americans won't get WHY your pseudo-history makes any difference in the long run, it makes ALL the difference in reality.
On the another point, how much do you really even know about gnostic "Christianity"? You can't simply stumble thru the "gospel" of Thomas and think yourself an expert, after all. In short, at its core it isn't "Christianity" at all, and its adepts--who started "splitting" from Christianity in the first century on their own accord (1John2:19)--said so themselves, when they *did* speak coherently.

7/20/2006 01:10:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrubageddon,
Sorry to have muddied your waters, if that’s what I’ve done.


Nah, you didn't muddy my waters. They were already muddied, and, afterall, we share the same waters.

I like what you have to say, and agree with most of it, especially the part about thinking we have a handle on the truth, and the effect it has on anyone who thinks they do.

The last part of my response to you was speculation on where this crazy rocket called human destiny will land, is all. I allow myself to go there.....I realize a lot of people can't, for emotional and mental reasons, but if enough people don't allow themselves to go there, I feel certain that what I have posited as our destiny will come to fruition.

And, Starroute, I meant no offense. I suppose I'm not clear on your position. It seems somewhat enigmatic, but that's just fine with me, cuz I like enigmatic. I suppose I ought to, cuz this whole thing we discuss every day is one big freakin enigma, and perhaps it's not meant to be cracked.

I noted unbridled optimism in Cuttle's take on your post and I sought to counter it with unbridled pessimism. I figured I owed as much since I brought up the Yin/Yang stuff.

As with Cuttle, I like what you have to say, even when I'm not sure what you're saying sometimes.

7/20/2006 01:27:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tertullian said...
Shrub said, "Christianity ended when Constantine made it the official religion of Rome, but some would go further and say it was when it split from Gnosticism."

Your history sucks, Shrubby. Constantine converted, yes, but didn't make Christianity the official religion of the empire: sacrifices to Jupiter and Mars went on for decades after his conversion. Besides, by the time it *did* become officially the state religion, at the end of the 4th century, it was already out of sinc with the majority of the western bishops that would make up the bulk of the latin rite church, the papacy (there is no "Vatican" as of yet) being in Rome and not Constantinople. The point? Constantine's Arian Christianity was more alike the modern-day Orthodox churches than Roman Catholicism, while the western church gets blamed for Constantine Christianity altogether. While the majority of your fellow Americans won't get WHY your pseudo-history makes any difference in the long run, it makes ALL the difference in reality.
On the another point, how much do you really even know about gnostic "Christianity"? You can't simply stumble thru the "gospel" of Thomas and think yourself an expert, after all. In short, at its core it isn't "Christianity" at all, and its adepts--who started "splitting" from Christianity in the first century on their own accord (1John2:19)--said so themselves, when they *did* speak coherently.

1:10 PM



Oh, come now. It became the de facto religion of Rome when Constantine converted regardless of the absense of an official decree as to such.

Needless to say, my point still holds. Any possibility for true paradigmatic change as the result of the alleged actions and words of the man called Jesus were dead on arrival. It went mainstream, regardless of the various splits, and thoroughly immersed itself in the unnundating web of establishment.

It was usurped, the timing of which is mere trivia, by Evil forces, and it has been used repeatedly to justify brutal genocidal murder ever since.

7/20/2006 01:42:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Governments are the social clubs fronting the backrooms where the hard deals go down."

... and trans-national corporations and banks finance the show. Their interests are not those of the individual, except that the more individuals there are, the more money & power there is.


The Western scientific vision of a mechanical universe has created a philosophical or conceptual alienation from our own inherent spiritual nature...

These problems stem in part from a fivefold increase in economic output since 1950 that has gushed human demands on the ecosystem beyond what the planet is capable of sustaining. The continued quest for economic growth as the organizing principle of public policy is accelerating the breakdown of the ecosystems regenerative capacities and the social fabric that sustains human community...

-David Korten

The stem cells vrs. dead Arabs question pales when considering the coming body count, IMO.
I think we face either mass sterilization or mass culling, and this makes Roman Catholicism's decrees against birth control a huge problem that pales the issue of pedo-priests.

2006: 6,525,486,603 people
2026: 7,961,586,278 people
2046: 9,049,767,965 people


"Devils Advocate" arguement:

Many posts here about evil are emotional and sweet, but hey poster- if you've had a kid, not only have you replaced yourself, but until you die there are TWO chomping mouths where there used to be one. As the planet dies and all of its creatures suffer, just WHO wears the true face of evil?

Humans need more than just ZPG (Zero Population Growth), they need a serious reduction in breeders. Until we get that, the evil of war is of no relative consequence.


http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html

7/20/2006 03:19:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

In short, at its core it isn't "Christianity" at all, and its adepts--who started "splitting" from Christianity in the first century on their own accord (1John2:19)--said so themselves, when they *did* speak coherently.

Things are a little more complicated than any of the comments here would indicate.

For an excellent historical examination check out Walter Bauer's "Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity."
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Resources/Bauer/

7/20/2006 03:46:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i think the church fathers would have agreed with bauer, for the most part. wasn't it jerome who said the christian world woke up one day only to find itself aryan? that some 70% of bishops claimed to be aryan? 70%! neither do i believe that simply because "the majority" view was largely gnostic that that view was the "correct interpretation" of jesus' message. after all, "narrow is the way", is it not?

besides, no one here believes that "the majority" view concerning a whole HOST of topics--be it the gov't, the war on terror, 9-11, etc.--is the correct, right? the whole premise of RI is that it takes *rigorous intuition* to arrive at the truth, ipso facto making it the possession of a few. so why would i believe that simply b/c the majority of self-styled christians in the 1st few centuries were gnostic, gnostic christianity must be the "correct" one? if i claim that it is, i am left with the conundrum of finding *which* of the myriad gnostic christianities was the "true" interpretation of jesus' teachings, something impossible to do today, 2000 years after the fact.

at any rate, "truth" is exclusive, despite what anyone says. there is only one truth, or we should coin and use another word for truth, like colbert's "truthiness". perhaps it has never been more obvious to me than now, reading john decamp's "franklin coverup" for the first time.

7/20/2006 05:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is no Good or Evil just SITUATIONAL ETHICS and a lot of untested individuals passing judgement on those who have been and obviously failed.

Why do we in the West persist in the illusion that evil doers wear black? In my world they all wear Brooks Brothers.

Jeff great writing as per se but your Vassar education lacks .......

somewhere in the Blahsphere a mouse farts.

7/20/2006 05:57:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff,

Something that you will probably find interesting, from BBC News:

US 'worst' for online child abuse.

7/20/2006 05:59:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Luposapien said...
A priest is just a pimp for a prostituted god.


Indeed.

7/20/2006 07:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Miro Flojet writes:

Of course former (and wannabe again) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netenyahu's statement reflects his true feelings when he said about 9/11 that same day: "It's good......I mean it's bad. But it's good for Israel.

It's called a "Freudian slip", o glowing squid.

And the five dancing Mossad agents taking photos from on top a white van and laughing as they watched the twin towers burn from across the Hudson river were reported to the FBI by numerous local residents in Bergen County, New Jersey.

The story first appeared for two days in the local paper, the North Bergen County Record, as the FBI was "investigating" it. The FBI actually arrested all five men, but the investigation was shut down and the men given a flight out of the country at either Colin Powell's or Richard Clark's request. Both men blame the other.

The men later appeared on an Israeli talk show and laughed and bragged about their "adventure," of course denying any involvement in 9/11.

Faux Fox news didn't break nothin', except maybe their own record for how many lies can be uttered in the span of one minute of air time. It is true they did have a story about it on their website, after the legwork had been done, but it was pulled and the link was scrubbed in December of 2001.

You really need to hire a fact checker, Iris Cutfish, because you seem to have quite a problem with facts.

You also have a particular, and oddly professional journalist quality, knack for doublethink inducing doublespeak.

You claim that "conspiracies" only exist in the minds of the unravellers of them, and that nothing so organized could exist. But you then hew to a way more highly improbable position by claiming that every mistake any of these mad killers have ever made is actually a highly organized disinformation effort to throw everyone off the track of the real bad guys.

I guess you thought that's what O.J. Simpson was doing with the disguise and the ten grand in cash when he hightailed it for the Mexican border -- trying to make people think he had brutally slashed his ex-wife and the waiter to death because....oh I get it now....because he actually hadn't done it.

O, it's so clear now.

And in case you missed it, for those who can handle the awful truth, go look at this site:

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

After you've vomited into your martini, come back with another nonsensically glib remarke about "the approaching singularity" or other fantasies spun by Terrence McKenna, R.I.P., and admittedly so on his part, in order to sell books and get pussy.

Gee, he was a Catholic, after all.

your pal,

~Mitre J. Fool, a.k.a. Mr. O.J. Fliteo [not]

7/20/2006 10:55:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrub -

And no offense taken. I realize I can seem enigmatic at times -- partly as the result of leaning over backwards to avoid misplaced concreteness in areas where concreteness is the enemy of truth, and partly just because the blog-comment format encourages epigrams over long, detailed arguments.

That plus the fact that RI encourages me to talk about things I've never tried to talk about to anyone but my immediate family, and for which there isn't necessarily a good, contemporary English vocabulary.

But I think that's what we're all doing here, in our own ways -- trying to find a common vocabulary and common metaphors to discuss things that the culture hasn't generally allowed as part of the public discourse. It's an interesting process.

7/20/2006 11:04:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Om Joltfire writes...

Shrubageddon wrote to Starroute:

"As with Cuttle, I like what you have to say, even when I'm not sure what you're saying sometimes."

O, ArbustoMegiddo, that's the nature of doublespeak and the ensuing doublethink.

It confuses the rational filters with its lack of inherent logic and then attempts to lay on a smear of "warm and fuzziness", all the while the BIG LIE seeps into your unconscious in order to rework your tapes to leave you bewildered and believing bullshit.

~Jim Olefort

7/21/2006 12:01:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Enough talk. Let's do something about it.

7/21/2006 02:09:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, Mister Joe Film Rot From Joliet -- or whatever your name is.

Been overdosing a bit much on 1984, have you?

The fact is that not everything you fail to understand is necessarily either doublethink or a Big Lie. It might instead be simple truths stated in a language you're not prepared to understand.

Being quick to reject any statement that could for one second make you feel positive about the state of existence you find yourself trapped in is certainly an effective reality filter, well designed for keeping out whatever might upset your equilibrium.

I can't open your eyes for you, but I can offer one bit of 'doublethink' as an exercise for the reader.

Here are two statements:

- Life sucks.

- Life is beautiful.

Now, pretend for just a moment that both of those are true -- simultaneously and in every detail.

And consider what light that awareness might shed on whatever is rotten in the state of Joliet.

7/21/2006 02:39:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jim F. LeToro writes...

Ah, but Starry-eyed Root, there's the rub...Life decidely does NOT suck. Lies suck.

Life is, in fact, o so beautiful.

I have no problem accepting unresolvable paradoxes when they express a higher truth.

Here's one:

Everything, every event, from the infinite, of which we can not fully conceive or experience, or from galactic nebulae down to a mote of dust or a quark's own little quarkettes, not to mention the unfolding of a flower, the dew drop on its petal, and that flower's death and decay into new earth from which other life may arise... to the workings of your mind, my mind, a swish free throw by Dwayne Wade or a clunker by Shaq, and that cloud that just passed in front of the sun or the moon, and all of its rainbow-refracting droplets, all of that... are known and determined by the will of God.

At the same time, without any contradiction, each one of us, you, I, from J. Lo Ferimto or Jooli Merft to Romeo F. Jilt and Tom "O.J." Lifer, each have our own unfettered FREE WILL with which to think and to choose and to act, each and every moment of our lives.

And, I will be so bold as to state that there is not even any inherent paradox there.

Now that is not doublethink. That is a transcendant reality, poorly expressed in mundane language.

You don't have to accept it if you don't believe it or understand it. That is surely your choice.

But the moral consequences of your thoughts and deeds exist nonetheless, as do mine.

On the other hand, to base a false conclusion on a false premise, and one which is stated or presented in a deceptive manner, whether with inherent non-logicality (as in three-form logic, such as in the non sequitur statement "chairs are enthusiastic") or with illogicality or duplicity of expression, THAT, my dear, is doublespeak, and it often leads, predictably so, to doublethinking.

And yes we are, in this society in the present time, inhabiting a culture of an "Orwellian", as in 1984, nature, designed by humans in order to influence and ultimately try to determine the thought forms and patterns, and thus the deeds that follow, of those other people whom they would have be their slaves, metaphorically or literally.

Sorry if that disturbs your slumber, or your new age reverie.

Deny it if you must. That is certainly your choice to make.

We apparently inhabit different versions of "consensus" reality. No surprise there either. There are approximately 6 billion of those, and that's just among humans. I am sure the animals, the plants, the rocks and stones, the clouds, planets, stars, et cetera, each have versions of their own. Just for starters.

I am exercising my free will right now. As before, when I happen to notice a pattern, and I have the opportunity, I will call a someone out on it, when through that person doublespeak or doublethink rears one of its dangerous hydra-heads to the unwary.

You may not be a perpetrator, but merely a victim who has internalized the technique to such a degree that it comes out so frequently in what you write, as it does with Iridescent Cuttlefish.

I cannot say, other than to note that you both do it with an almost professional elan, and rather consistently. And whenever I mention it, you usually retreat into the "O poor me. I just have no facility with words" or "It's so late and I'm just tired."

But, really, I tend to think that is just a bit of an artful dodge, by someone, and I mean both of you, who write with a professional caliber of artful dodginess.

Just my humble observation, and nothing more than my expressed opinion, which at last check, for the moment anyway, since we are not in India or China, I still (barely) have a right to express, for the benefit of others, should they perceive any value in it.

If not, no harm, no foul.

Lucky for Shaq.

So I will ask you my not quite rhetorical question:

What's so scary about
Peace, Love, and Understanding....

~Jim LeTroof, also known as Femori Jolt,
~the artist formerly known as Tim Joe Rolf

7/21/2006 04:14:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

J. Roomi felt....

It’s the rule that drunks have to argue,
fall upon one another and get into fights.
The lover is worse than that. He falls into a hole.

But down in that hole he finds a gold mine
worth more than any money or power.
Of what sort of love is that gold?
The lover who finds it is the king of kings,
Secure from death and not caring for the golden crown.

The dervish in his patched coat, the pearl in his pocket.
Why should he be ashamed to beg from door to door?

Last night the moon came along drunk
and dropped its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing with the nightbird
and to eat sugar with the parrot.

Surrendering, I fall upon your path, Beloved,
my heart sighing, then shattered.
I have nowhere to fall but up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Let me not fall into danger.

Here’s the new rule that’s been born:
Break all the wineglasses
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

~Jalal ud’din Rumi, 13th century

7/21/2006 05:40:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Empty cans, people. Empty cans...

7/21/2006 09:27:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My metaphor can beat up your metaphor!

7/21/2006 09:28:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Humans need more than just ZPG (Zero Population Growth), they need a serious reduction in breeders. Until we get that, the evil of war is of no relative consequence."

What an idiot.

7/21/2006 09:37:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Part I (sorry!)
Wow! And again wow! I’m bewildered and beflustered at the acrimonious accusations directed my way vis-à-vis my view of 9/11 and conspiracism in general. Yikes, even! If I might make my as yet unstated position on these matters a bit more understandable, I’d like to start by declaring that it’s not my intention to change anyone’s opinion on anything; I have enough to do with forming my own. The only point I was trying to make about 9/11 is that there is certainly more there than meets the eye and that it’s helpful, to me, at least, to remain as skeptical as reason would allow.

Let’s start with the obvious: 9/11 was an inside job. There is just no way that half-trained pseudo-pilots could have penetrated the most protected airspace in the world and in so doing give the people who profited most the exact pretext they prayed for in the PNAC’s blueprint for solidifying American hegemony. I remember very clearly pushing a stroller through the half-deserted streets of the village in a certain Eastern European country in which I was living at the time when I saw the image of a plane crashing into one of the towers on a TV in the window of an appliance store. I remember thinking, oh, another summer blockbuster I must have missed, not that I ever catch any of them anyway, but life in a small village in that part of the world is pretty far removed from American movies. We didn’t even have a movie theater. But then I noticed that there was a news caption underneath, and as I struggled to translate the tiny print I realized that it wasn’t a faked reality, that it really had happened. The funny thing for me was that my initial impression has never quite gone away; it still strikes me as an obvious production, rather than an actual occurrence.

I also remember the walk back to our Soviet-style apartment house. I remember thinking, fuck! This is it. The rabid reactionaries who took control of the US 444 days after their psychic twins had taken the hostage-like bargaining chips (in preparation for their end of the biggest October Surprise ever) have begun the final chapter in the road to Orwell’s dystopia. I don’t know how many days or weeks later I heard the first American planes overhead on the way to Afghanistan, as things became quite muddled at this point. Not that I was all that eager to get back to the States, where my friends had been telling me in very surreal phone conversations that fighter jets were circling over O'Hare Airport and that rednecks were pulling turbaned Sihks out of 7-11s and shooting them in the streets, but I had to leave the country I was in and yet couldn’t get back into the States, and since the US embassy was closed, things were a bit crazed. Through all those weeks and months, however, I felt certain that any day now the real conspiracy would be revealed.

Apparently, Anonymous, you find it suspicious that I’m still waiting. Interestingly, Jeff’s Coincidence Theorist’s Guide to 9/11 is what first brought me to R I, and I still think it’s the finest piece written anywhere since on what my original impression was correct in assuming was a production of some kind. Now, Thompson’s timeline is great, if perhaps voluminous to a fault, but the tone of Jeff’s piece, the skeptical, look-how-many-ways-this-thing-is-tied-to-all-these-other-conspiracies-of-the-national-security-state feel of the thing fit my frame of mind like a glove. Having dabbled in Illuminati knick-knackery off and on since I first read Wilson in 1978, I have, of course, considered them as the prime movers in this odd circus, but something else from Wilson has also stuck with me even more strongly, which is that in the world of secret narratives and deep disinformation much is revealed but little is discovered.

Someone here, I think, said something about Bill Hick’s first day on the job for the president scenario—you know, the lights come on in the screening room after the film where JFK’s cranial Rorshack splat is seen from a strange new angle, followed by, “Any questions?” being asked by very unelected representatives—and that, for me is probably the most plausible scenario. Everyone knows the Military/Industrial/Surveillance Complex has been running this country for a long time, officially since 1947, but probably even earlier. I have only recently begun to seriously consider adding Occult to the Complex because it always just seemed a little silly before, a little too Rense & Icke, like all that Thule Society stuff with Hitler, when anyone could see that it was the corporations running the swine. Honestly, I’m also uneasy with the whole occult thing because it’s so repulsive to me, which isn’t a rational excuse for discounting it, but still…yuck!
(second half forth-coming...)

7/21/2006 11:08:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Part II (very sorry!!)

So here’s where I seem to be pissing you off so severely: the whole eternal, evil Jew thing, which, you have to admit, is a staple of the Rense & Icke Show, seems, I don’t know, too easy, too stupid, too pat, too much like a vindication of fucking Hitler. I don’t like Nazis. It also seems sort of contrived—how is it possible that Netanyahu, or Silverstein for that matter, could be off-script on televised interviews? Freudian slips happen when people are talking to each other, not history. I have more to say on the topic of Zionists letting themselves be used as patsies, but I want to hurry up and get to my central point here before everyone falls asleep: 9/11 isn’t The Big Lie. Just as the pod and the Jews are diversions, I’m convinced that 9/11 itself is a smaller lie than keeps us from considering The Really Big Lie.

Very quickly then (sorry!), here it is: America is also a lie. Our entire history is fake, more so than Howard Zinn ever dreamed. George Washington was the richest man in America, as well as the author of the original organized plan to steal the Indians’ land. Manifest Destiny is the polite expression, not of American exceptionalism, but of brutal, planet-fucking American imperialism, except that it’s not really American at all. Transnational means just that; the corporotacracy’s only allegiance is to itself. Now, maybe you’re right about who’s behind the corporotacracy—the 13 families and all—but it doesn’t matter in the end because it’s The Real Conspiracy, or better yet, What’s Really Being Hidden that is where our focus should be.

We’re constructing the dystopian nightmare that Orwell and Huxley prophesied, but we could just as easily be building an equally brilliant utopia, the cornerstone of which is free energy. Free, locally-generated, decentralized autonomy-ensuring, unlimited, ecologically-safe energy. We also are being denied antigravitational technology which would revolutionize transport, architecture, space flight and more. We have the capacity to fix our dying biosphere, but instead we’re pouring more poison into it. And why? Because the power-mad are greedy, and if they weren’t suppressing all this stuff, we’d soon discover that the whole economy of scarcity that is the foundation of their wealth and the world’s poverty is also a lie. We could practice economies of abundance, right here and right now without disturbing the environment or wasting our dwindling natural resources. The problem is that we would all be rich and free, and that is a picture that sickens and frightens those sick bastards as much as it brightens our hopes and imaginations.

As you know, big lies work because no one believes that the ruling classes could be so evil as to do such a thing—they’re still human, right? Maybe. The Big Lie also works by diverting attention away from itself with “smaller” horrors. Consider this: the best and brightest minds on the planet don’t believe the official 9/11 story. To the extent that they also believe that if those responsible were effectively neutralized, removed, then the world could function smoothly again, right? Who’s got time for utopian conspiracies when they’re busy thinking about who made some buildings fall down as a pretext for a worldwide police state? And if the whistle-blowers were ungagged? And if some thugs came forward and confessed? If BushCo were impeached? Would the money be taken out of politics? Would Ted Stevens, next in the line of succession, make a better president? Would the spineless whores masquerading as the opposition party ever do anything counter to “American interests”? I find it most telling that even after 60 years of fascist propaganda, including its centerpiece, the discrediting of Socialism (the “failure of Socialism,” and “how we won the Cold War”) and the complete marginalization of the Left, the so-called political discourse in the US has been moved so far to the right that Nixon’s policies can only be viewed as “liberal” by today’s standards. And consider the phrases in circulation again, this time in the “9/11 movement”. It’s not just at Rense that you see “Jewish bolshevism” and “godless communism.” The right wing has infiltrated everything because, to paraphrase the famous phrase, the Germans lost the war, but the Nazis won the world. This is why Jeff linked that Nazi Hydra thing http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/noon.html
Lastly, Anonymous, consider one more scenario: if your favorite conspiracy, which is, not to be too boastful about it (really, I can see you’ve got some serious ego investment here) ever so much smaller than mine, were to be exposed and all the Illuminati devils impaled on lampposts, would the fascist nightmare be over? Would ethics return to capitalism? Of course not. Capitalism is the nightmare; capitalism is fascism. 9/11 has given us a very scary world which might just blow itself up, but it’s not The Big Lie. In fact, it might be the most brilliant stroke of propaganda ever: a pretext for world dominion and a diversion from that dominion at the very same time.

7/21/2006 11:09:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"OT" ...? or can anything really be OT under an Octopus...?

make of this what you will... more disinformation or a heartbreaking msg, I cannot tell ... the "donation" button on the front page does concern me a bit;

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

7/21/2006 12:59:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I will add this. I have no compassion, whatsoever, for the soldiers representing the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. I implore them to lay down their arms, and I will fully support any movement/actions to mitigate the prosecutorial consequences of my suggested action. They are witting, and unwitting mercenaries for The Plutocracy, and I only support those who refuse to support the Evil Elitists.

So, screw the "End The War: Bring Home Our Troops Home" propagandistic paraphanalia. If the gung ho studs want a real fight, let them turn their guns on Israel's Military and neuter those Bastards, once and for all.

What a bunch of Pussies.....dropping bombs on kids from miles away.

It's a tremendous show of cowardice. Anyone with any honor would refuse to partake in such cowardly acts, but as we can see, very few do. I conclude that there are very few men/women of honor and dignity.

I will say, this is where Progressivism fails. It stops short of what I have suggested, and as such, it reveals it complete hypocricy, and its archilles heal.......the heal of The Jackboot upon the defensless.

I hope you found that "annoying" Anonymous, because I find it more than annoying that innocent men, women and children are perishing at the hands of these cowardly bullies on a daily basis.

7/21/2006 01:48:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A bit off topic, but what the hell. Looks like lawmakers in a certain falus-shaped southern state are a little worried that people might actually be excersizing critical thought:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0717-22.htm

7/21/2006 02:14:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hah! Make that 'Phalus'. (Now, how often do you hear that?) Ah well, as I've always said, if you can't laugh at yourself, then everyone else will.

7/21/2006 02:17:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, and while your at it, can I get another 'L' with that?

7/21/2006 02:19:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Luposapien said...
Oh, and while your at it, can I get another 'L' with that?


Sure thing.....and, here's an apostophe and an "e" as sides.

7/21/2006 02:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

#1 sniffler, if there is little distinction between satanism and catholicism (while you didn't say so directly, your extremely disgusting view of western history seems tantamount to saying so), then why the *parody* of catholicism among satanists? why the hatred of the eucharist and the cross and the mass and the virgin mary, if these are impotent--what was it you said? "..solid spiritual knowledge which was overly empowering was left out by design..."--shadows of religiousity?

after all, the 'guys at the top' are one and the same guys at the top, right? can the 'all-powerful inner circle' do nothing more than *parody* what your average joe-sixpack does when he goes to sunday mass? is that the "monotony [and banality] of evil"? i don't get your logic...

7/21/2006 02:36:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Quote:

But there was a "deeper power" at work on 9/11, all right, and it included zionist Israel, and Mossad. Exactly what happened is impossible to say. (It's a secret!) But it's very clear what some of the things are that DIDN'T happen. Especially, TWO airplane impacts didn't cause THREE towers to fall down.

I think there is more than enough information to make a case for the Israeli involvement, as well as the fictive quality of Al-Queda ("the [data]base" of the CIA, literal translation] as only a media invention.

Thierry Meyssan's 9-11: The Big Lie is a book good on the fictive quality of Al-Queda as a media invention.

I think Jeff has a constitutional fear of being called anti-semetic, because this is the only parapolitical issue he absolutely refuses to get into.

I think it should simply be called honestly "anti-ethnic supremacist" which is fine by me. I'll accept that latter with pride.

And, when you put it all together, as this exhaustive post did, there is a very clear connection to Israel on all levels of the 9-11 operational network: check out this latest post at the Portland IMC on Israeli complicity in 9-11:

Project Throwing Star: 150 points that specific Israelis and Bushes responsible for 9-11

Bracked numbers indicate individual complicty of particular Israelis --- 150 EVIDENCE POINTS show Bush family/Israel CONDUCTED TERRORISM ON WTC hit from 1976-2001 --- Project Throwing Star: 150 evidence points that specific Israelis are responsible for 9-11 with Bush family, built from serious treasonous infiltration by an Israeli double agent fifth column in the U.S., connected with infiltration by Jewish organized crime and Mossad drug dealing; this is a list of ISRAELI NAMES who can definitely be implicated either as ACCESSORIES BEFORE THE FACT or ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT in the 9-11 strikes. However, the list has nothing to do with "Israel the state" or "Zionism" or "anti-Zionism." Ideologies or whole states in abstract are unable to have legal cases built against them. Only people can. --- All specific Israelis mentioned below are accused of facilitating or carrying out the 9-11 attacks. --- This list concentrates on particular interlocks between Israeli and U.S. citizens individually responsible for 9-11 events. Individual Israeli citizens are hardly the only group involved in 9-11, because it depended upon high treason of the Bush family, most of Bush Administration, high treason of U.S. military, and espionage by NATO. Other key institutions on U.S. side of operation would be Committee on the Present Danger, CSIS, and Team B. Avoid throwing collectivist guilt trips; go after invididual criminals. See an int'l organized crime, drug-running, terrorism network of both Israel and United States for what it is--a separate, parasitical, self-destructive, self-interested cabal eroding both these states, instead of loyal. The evidence is overwhelming, and the death penalty is too good for them.

here

7/21/2006 02:37:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Humans need more than just ZPG (Zero Population Growth), they need a serious reduction in breeders. Until we get that, the evil of war is of no relative consequence."

Crude perhaps, but not "idiotic".
For example, 300 dead in Lebanon after one week just doesn't compare to more than 16,000 children dead from hunger-related causes every DAY--one child every five seconds.(www.bread.org)
Another 16,000 die daily from disease. Then there's global warming, pollution, vanishing species, over-consumption... all directly related to human overpopulation.


Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.
-Agent Smith

7/21/2006 04:05:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cassandra, in Greek legend you will recall, was condemned to know the future but to be disbelieved when she foretold it. Hence, the agony of foreknowledge combined with impotence to do anything about it.

7/21/2006 04:17:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This seems like a moment when some Dylan would be apt:

Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you,
Not out of spite or anger
But simply because it's true.
Now, I hope you won't object to this,
Giving back all of what you owe,
The fewer words you have to waste on this,
The sooner you can go.

Nothing is better, nothing is best,
Take heed of this and get plenty of rest.

Nothing was delivered
But I can't say I sympathize
With what your fate is going to be,
Yes, for telling all those lies.
Now you must provide some answers
For what you sell has not been received,
And the sooner you come up with them,
The sooner you can leave.

Nothing is better, nothing is best,
Take heed of this and get plenty rest.

(Now you know)
Nothing was delivered
And it's up to you to say
Just what you had in mind
When you made ev'rybody pay.
No, nothing was delivered,
Yes, 'n' someone must explain
That as long as it takes to do this
Then that's how long that you'll remain.

Nothing is better, nothing is best,
Take heed of this and get plenty rest.

Copyright © 1968

7/21/2006 05:03:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So, what exactly is "The Big Lie", again? I seemed to have missed the definition.

7/21/2006 05:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

M-O-J-O F-I-L-T-E-R writes...

First things first: There is one Big Lie floating around on this website that I would like to shine some light upon. And that is the hurling of veiled anti-Semitic invective against anyone who would attempt to reveal the actual persons who are, or have been, behind so much political and economic exploitation in the world for lo these past several centuries.

And Iridescent Cuttlefish, you engage in this BIG LIE shamelessly, and continuously.

In all of my writings I have never, not once, blamed, nor even cast aspersions upon Jewish people, or the Jewish faith, nor residents of Israel, nor even the imaginary concept of a Jewish “race” for any crime, for anything whatsoever. N.B. the Arabs are at this point are ethnically more Semitic than the majority of the world’s Jews.

In fact, I have EXPLICITLY stated, on multiple occasions, that to blame Jews, or even Israelis per se, even for the occupation of Palestinian lands, is not only morally wrong, but a LIE. The issue is the deliverance, or refusal to deliver, justice from the hands of the powerful to those of the weak and displaced.

Nor have I ever blamed Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Rastafarians, nor even beleaguered Muslims for the world’s problems. Nor will you ever hear me do so.

That is because I believe that sincere faith, practiced from the HEART, coupled with the use of our intelligence, or discriminative awareness, is our greatest hope for the global spread of social JUSTICE which must prevail in order for humanity to survive as recognizably human.

So, to state that by identifying the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bushes, et alii as being chief among the most major, known, current, problem children in our human family is somehow equivalent with being against Jews, or any other religious group, is a pernicious, execrable, and damnable lie. And you, Irie Cutfish, are the person who keeps writing it over and over and over.

Now I have written poems and even screeds making light of David Icke and pointing out his numerous shortcomings and errors. Yet you also persist in bringing him up, and now again Jeff Rense, from both of whom I have always explicitly dissociated myself. Not that this should even have been necessary, for anyone who reads and thinks about what I have written can see that we have quite differently informed views of reality and Reality. For starters, Icke is an atheist. I am not. And I have NEVER in my entire life written nor spoken about “bloodlines.” What a crock. So, enough already with this line of pure bullshit.

Secondly, enough with the ad hominen attacks. You and Starroot have repeatedly impugned everything from my sense of humour to the size of my genitalia, my degree of “enlightenment”, my motivation in writing what I write, the purported smallness of my world view, my IQ, my imagined social life, ad nauseum. None of these attacks is even worthy of an informed response.

Simply to quote an old Yiddish adage: You should be so lucky.

I have never engaged in any sort of personal attack on either of you. Quite the contrary. I have always be complimentary when I feel you have posted something that is true, thoughtful, and honestly expressed. And I have criticized YOUR WORDS, and the way you manipulate them in a manner to confuse people and lead them astray.

Do you and the powers that be really fear intelligent, informed, faithful people who are motivated to act from their hearts, and with intelligence, THAT MUCH?

I guess the answer is yes.

Thirdly, on the issue of the “conspirators behind the conspirators”, your favorite artful dodge, you both attempt to dissuade people from looking at historical facts and examining them critically and thoughtfully in order to elicit and discern meaningful patterns which might lead to intelligent conclusions. And which could then inform intelligent, effective action, whether locally, or globally. Best to start small, Confucius said. Things grow.

Instead, you wave your arms and shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, saying that to look behind the veils is to be a slave, that to identify actual perpetrators is to be fooled by the “real culprits”, et cetera and so on. Such talk is all doublethink and doubletalk floating in a haze of smoke and mirrors, mind-numbing, doped up pabulum for the gullible.

An analogy for what you do would be to tell people that they can climb Chomolungma (Everest), without ever having to traverse the arduous miles between base camp and the peak. In fact, you would mislead them to believe they can go directly to the summit, without ever even making it to base camp. More than that, if they swallow your little pill of lulling lies, they can float above the summit and do epic acrobatics in midair, all on a new age wish. And further, you allege that people like me are keeping them from this wondrous reality.

Well, as one of my children used to say: “Caca poo poo.” That’s what you are feeding people with such lines of duplicitous fantasy.

Now don’t all you fantasy and scifi lovers come at me with bared teeth. I like a good yarn as well as the next person, just not if it is to be used to enslave people. Myths have great power. That is why I am opposed to this extemporaneous mythologizing of reality by people who seem to serve those who would, in fact, walk on our corpses to the top of Chomolungma if we were to allow them, and there dance on our skulls.

I would rather that we all get to be dancers. But not in some Hollywood-produced degenerate retro-futuristic rave on ecstasy, like the idiotic scene of “New Zion” in the Matrix sequel.

There are 6 billion human dancers on this planet, and each has the same God-given right to existence as the next. But we also have duties: of care, of justice, of respect, of human stewardship, of humility, of honesty.

And it is those issues, or their manifest lack in certain places, that I am addressing and have attempted to address in my writings.

As far as building a better future, yes, that is our required task. Not knowing me, Irie and Star, you have fraudulently tried to make me out to be some kind of cloistered Luddite.

But, my dears, you do not know the nature and state of my solar and wind power systems. You do not know how many hormone-free and anti-biotic free cattle and chickens I graze, nor the quality or flavor of the milk and eggs. You do not know what kind of gmo-free, organic crops and orchards I tend. You do not know the source of my water or what air I and my family breathe.

You really know so very little, next to nothing, about which you presume to speak.

BUT, if the state or the federal government want the GPS co-ordinates of my wells for future reference, so they can expropriate them, or contaminate them at some point, and if they want me to put RFID chips in all of my livestock, or if via blown over pollen they want to contaminate my fields with GMO corn and then make me pay royalties for my now-ruined crops, if they refuse to allow me to sell my excess cleanly-generated power back to the grid, but rather try to charge me exorbitant fees for such an audacious prospect, well then, you would say “Don’t worry, be happy. It’s all in your mind. Have a pillow fight. Have some ‘shrooms and forget about it. Watch t.v.”

You would tell me it is fruitless to deal with the bureaucratic nuts and bolts of this corrupt system and to try to change it one step at a time. And you would tell me and others that to seek to acquire the knowledge of who has their hands on which levers is fruitless, dangerous, futile and “unenlightened.”

Well that is just one more monumental, insidious, life denying, corrupt and damnable lie.

And you persist, in the midst of this double-talking double-thinking to foment to false paradigm of left vs. right, so-called “conservative” vs. “liberal”, capitalist vs. communist.

Well, I am here to tell you that there is no such thing. Each ideology is infected with fatal flaws, allowing it to be set up in oppostion to its counterpart. Stop getting sucked in to identifying with false labels and all the baggage full of horseshit, bullshit, and chickenshit with which it comes stuffed. See people as they are, what they do, versus what they say. See things in themselves, not through politically-motivated linguistic labels.

There is deep truth in that, or my name ain’t...............

Let me see, am I done yet?

Oh yes, STOP calling me “Anonymous.” I have a handle, and I frequently use anagrams of that handle, just for fun. If you are both so all-fired enlightened, how come your omniscience hasn’t picked up on that one?

And to the “Anonymous” who keeps saying that the earth is overpopulated, resources are scarce, and that having wars and killing Arabs, or anyone else, is therefore somehow not a problem but a good thing: Your premise and the conclusions drawn are damnable lies. So, please, go fuck yourself for a good time. And then, crawl under a rock and die. Please.

And to Shrubageddon, who has written several times over the past few weeks that he doesn’t support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even hurled vicious invective at them, I say to you: That is “trolling” of the worst sort. You are hypocritical, at best.

Of course we must support our sons and daughters and sisters and brothers in uniform. Supporting them means ending this incipient, ENGINEERED, global conflict, and bringing them home to their families where they belong, away from the killing fields, then helping to heal them from the horror in which they have participated. You would call them names and wish them ill, Shrub? Shame, shame, shame, shame on you.

While I don’t usually recommend websites, I will recommend three today:

The first is Henry Makow’s current posting at www.savethemales.ca Here he tells it like it is. Glad you got smart and dropped the Jesuit Black Pope schtick, Henry. Henry’s a very bright man, but he’s still learning. And while I don’t know him, I do believe he has a good heart. Keep the faith, bro’.

So that’s: http://www.savethemales.ca/001643.html

for the current article. Although there may be a hidden agenda even in that, where Henry seems to be apologizing for Bush and Rice in their alleged struggle against the “Bankers’” push for global war now. This strikes me as glib, at best, Henry. Possibly quite worse. Perhaps Henry is simply an optimist, and desperately grasping at straws. But, overall, it’s a good post nonetheless.

The second I would recommend, with a caveat that it is hard to see without sobbing:

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

This shows the real face, or rather the consequences of, real evil. And yes, Israel’s 23 years of genocidal attacks against Lebanon are unmitigatedly evil. As is the United States’ 15 year long genocidal war against the Iraqi peoples. That’s just a very small part of what’s going on today, of course. We’ve covered a lot of history in these pages before.

And here’s one more, about what some noble Hasidic Rabbis are doing, and have been doing for years. Their organization is called Neturei Karta and their website is:

www.nkusa.org

God bless them.

As far as where Jeff Wells stands, that is yet to be determined. From what I can see, though, the indications are pretty spotty. He’s young yet. People’s consciences and consciousnesses can grow and strengthen with time. I have certainly appreciated the forum, for whatever good it may do.

As for one tiny last bit of metaphysics, I disagree with the Manicheans who claim that there is an exact balance of good and evil in the world, and who use the yin yang mandala to illustrate their thesis. Let’s take a cosmic perspective: What is “evil” or “good” to a galactic cluster? Or to the moon? Or to interstellar space? I would suggest that the concepts don’t apply.

What is good on earth? Well, compassion, for one. We can act compassionately to ease someone’s suffering. If someone has a broken leg because they fell off a horse, we can set it and splint it and give them something to ease the pain temporarily. But the broken leg, while the cause of pain and suffering, is not “evil.” And the good that is done by acting compassionately toward the person with the broken leg does not in any way depend on “evil” for its inherent goodness. So that argument falls by the wayside quite easily.

Iif the person fell because the horse was tired from being unfed and unwatered, then that is biology. Why the horse went unfed or unwatered would go to the moral quality or qualities behind the person, and the horse’s, pain and suffering. Now if the person fell off of the horse because a psychopath shot the horse in order to disable and rob the person then, yes, that is evil. But, as demonstrated, evil is in no way necessary for good to exist. It just provides a lot more opportunities for it to manifest, and serves as a constant testing ground for the wary and unwary alike.

If the horse is struck down by lightning, without any human intervention, then that, in my antiquated, antediluvian, luddite, cloistered, unenlightened view, is an act of God. Call it karma if you like, if by that you mean some kind of higher moral causation that isn’t spun out of pure fantasy, because moral causation does run deep. But I would defy any man who claims reliably to know how it operates in the divine sphere, if you will.

Call God the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, or aLlah. Or the One, or Peace, or Love, or the Fullness, if you wish. Language and names are not the issue. It is in your heart where the reality resides and can be perceived.

There is a story from the Qur’an, retold in Rumi’s Masnavi [Mathnawi i mathnawi], where Moses hears a shepherd praying to God, crying “O, dear God. I love you like my little sheep. You are so beautiful and dear to me. Thank you God for giving me my life and these sheep to tend.” And then the shephard starts moaning in a reverie of prayer.

Moses comes up to him and criticizes him, upbraiding him for praying in such an unorthodox manner and not, as Moses thinks he should, according to doctrine.

The shepherd’s face falls, and he prostrates himself and begs forgiveness. And his habitual manner of praying ceases. Moses walks away feeling smug and satisfied.

Suddenly, God’s voice rings out to Moses: “What have you done? This man, this shepherd was one of my favorites, my most beloved. His prayer was like the sighing of the wind.”

Moses: “But I..........

God: “How COULD you........??????????” [I am paraphrasing].

It is now Moses whose face falls, and it is he who repents of his hubris.

It is in this vein that I very humbly suggest:

Choose your spiritual joy. Then use it well in this world. Have faith, and cultivate wisdom.

Why ARE some of you so afraid of Peace, Love, and Understanding?

There is nothing to fear but God’s judgment on a squandered life.

And that said, I do have an actual life to lead, and much work to do, and other beings to provide and care for.

God be with you.

Vaya con Dios.

Ho. Mitakuye Oyasin. All of our relations!

Your friend ~ Mojo Filter, also appearing as:
Mijo Lofter, a.k.a.
Mofo Jilter, alias
Jormo LeFit, the artist formerly known as
Flote Miroj, né
Jim Olefort, whom you may remember knew
Jooli Merft and her spouse Firmo J. Lote,
from their neighborhood koffeeklatsch circle, with
Fomi Jolter, Jomo Trifle, Roof Jiltme, J. Romeo Flit,
Tom Jo Lifer, Leo Jim Fort, Jermot Foil, Jemol Frite,
and Jim Toolref, who owns the hardware store
where Jo from Tile,
and her aptly named helper, J’moof Tiler work.
They did the new kitchen floor for
Mofti Jor-El and Morft Jolie,
whose guru is Om Joltfire,
who wears chapeaux designed by the artist
Miro Flojet, whose work is exhibited in the gallery on
Floor J, Room J, in the Time/Flite building,
where the curator is Rolof J. Time, who also markets furs by
J. Lo teFirmo, whose ex is Tjomi Ferol,
whose dentist is Rojo E. Flimt,
who is friends with Jim Fretolo who,
along with his wife Romi Jofelt
just got back from the wedding of
T.J. Romefoil and his girlfriend Melt For Joi

Peace and Love,

~Mojo Filter

7/21/2006 06:13:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Addendum from Mojo Filter:

Btw, “Don’t worry, be happy. It’s all in your mind. Have a pillow fight. Have some ‘shrooms and forget about it. Watch t.v.” ain't Orwell's 1984

It's Huxley's Brave New World.

Both are relevant.

7/21/2006 07:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

PPS from Mojo Filter

And to the “Anonymous” who keeps saying that the earth is overpopulated, resources are scarce, and that having wars and killing Arabs, or anyone else, is therefore somehow not a problem but a good thing, and to whom I wrote: Your premise and the conclusions drawn are damnable lies. So, please, go fuck yourself for a good time. And then, crawl under a rock and die. Please.

I should have added: Just follow your own advice. Thank you. One less psychopath.

7/21/2006 07:15:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And to Shrubageddon, who has written several times over the past few weeks that he doesn’t support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even hurled vicious invective at them, I say to you: That is “trolling” of the worst sort. You are hypocritical, at best.

Of course we must support our sons and daughters and sisters and brothers in uniform. Supporting them means ending this incipient, ENGINEERED, global conflict, and bringing them home to their families where they belong, away from the killing fields, then helping to heal them from the horror in which they have participated. You would call them names and wish them ill, Shrub? Shame, shame, shame, shame on you.


Ah, Mr. Filter reveals himself. The only way to keep the jackasses from signing up is to make the act of signing up and serving despicable and unpopular. No other way will change it.

Have you no mercy, sir? Do you not care about the childen, women and men being blown to bits by these bastards? The Plutocracy counts on them to pull the fuckin trigger, and as you have clearly stated ever so implicitly, the Plutocracy is thoroughly entrenched.

You know what, Einstein? You know where you start? You say no!!! I'm not going to kill innocents on your behalf. So, I say fuck you to all the studly soldiers who don't have the balls to say "no." You want my respect, then step up and act honorably and say "no."

Yeah, unlike you, I have High Expectations, and I refuse to accept we arent't capable of resisting.

You, sir, are an apologist of the worst sort, and you obviously have no intention or motivation to change the staus quo. In fact, your stance is so completely balless and complicit, it's laughable in the face of your persistant blathering about the Bad Men up to this point.

I don't support killing innocent women, children and men, and that includes rejecting those who pull the trigger. If they wish to atone and seek forgiveness for their transgressions and renounce what they have done and speak out against it and implore other soldiers, active and inactive, to do the same, then I welcome them with open arms and call them brother and/or sister. Otherwise, they are dupes of Evil, and I refuse to support them.

If you assert we should support them, then you sir, are as much a dupe of the PTB, as they are, and anything you have posted previously, or will post subsequently must be taken with a grain of salt.

I believe in accountability and responsibility for one's actions. It's sad that you have such low expectations.

7/21/2006 07:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mojo Filter repents: not to leave it on that note,

"J. Rumi felt"....

It’s the rule that drunks have to argue,
fall upon one another and get into fights.
The lover is worse than that. He falls into a hole.

But down in that hole he finds a gold mine
worth more than any money or power.
Of what sort of love is that gold?
The lover who finds it is the king of kings,
Secure from death and not caring for the golden crown.

The dervish in his patched coat, the pearl in his pocket.
Why should he be ashamed to beg from door to door?

Last night the moon came along drunk
and dropped its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing with the nightbird
and to eat sugar with the parrot.

Surrendering, I fall upon your path, Beloved,
my heart sighing, then shattered.
I have nowhere to fall but up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Let me not fall into danger.

Here’s the new rule that’s been born:
Break all the wineglasses
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

~Jalal ud’din Rumi, 13th century
Divan i Shamsi Tabriz

7/21/2006 07:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Forgive me for saying so...

to use the profanity of which you are so fond:

Shrub, you are so completely full of shit it's up to your eyeballs and coming out of your ears.

Around the Fourth of July you wrote that our servicemen should turn their weapons on each other and frag one another.

Now you promote them killing Israelis.

You are just another form of Manifest Evil, and a loudmouthed one who speaks out of his asshole, to boot.

Killing people with guns is ballness, my dear Eunuch.

Promoting hatred and violence, which you do so often, is the very root of the problem.

You are nothing more than a male cardboard cutout of Star and Irie.

You lie and you lie and you lie within lies.

Call me when you get real.

Until then, frag yourself.

~Mojo

7/21/2006 07:35:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mea culpa, mea maxissima culpa, Mojo repents again:

Once more into the breach.

I would really rather leave this with fonder words, to wit:

"J. Rumi felt"....

It’s the rule that drunks have to argue,
fall upon one another and get into fights.
The lover is worse than that. He falls into a hole.

But down in that hole he finds a gold mine
worth more than any money or power.
Of what sort of love is that gold?
The lover who finds it is the king of kings,
Secure from death and not caring for the golden crown.

The dervish in his patched coat, the pearl in his pocket.
Why should he be ashamed to beg from door to door?

Last night the moon came along drunk
and dropped its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing with the nightbird
and to eat sugar with the parrot.

Surrendering, I fall upon your path, Beloved,
my heart sighing, then shattered.
I have nowhere to fall but up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Let me not fall into danger.

Here’s the new rule that’s been born:
Break all the wineglasses
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

~Jalal ud’din Rumi, 13th century
Divan i Shamsi Tabriz

7/21/2006 07:39:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh, and I will add, Mr. Filtratrion Device, that you are quite duplicitous in bearing false witness against your neighbor. Thats one of the Ten Commandments from that One and Only God of your's, Maestro, so you better start begging forgiveness.

This was the first time I mentioned anything about supporting the troops on Rigorous Intuition, which leads me to believe you recognize it from another board you've been charged with monitoring. You're not as smart as you think, but now I'm convinced there's a high probablilty you are a spook.

Jesus Christ Almighty, is no place safe from these crazy spooks? What kind of person would do such a thing? An Evil person, that's who.

7/21/2006 07:40:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrub,

Speak into the mirror, boy.

You are talking to yourself.

7/21/2006 07:42:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Anonymous, Dude, what's with all the invective? Why do you feel that I'm attacking you and talking about your genitalia? This is the third time you've declared that I have nothing to say, no point to make, and am just glibly perpetuating the Big Lie--all of which started when I was so bold as to suggest that the firmness of your convictions might leave you unable to perceive some further twist to the Plot. I bear you no ill will whatsoever. Okay, I made some half-hearted attempts at levity, simply because you responded with such vehemence to my casual observation. I know everyone is getting tired of us here, but I'll very, very briefly restate my position, one last time.

I only mentioned Rense & Icke because your Rothschild & Pike schtick was exactly theirs--I do have a beef with them, but not with you. Next, I was not reintroducing "the false dichotomy of left/right"--my point was that we are living in late stage capitalism, which, severed from the thin veneer of concepts like "honor" and noblesse oblige which somewhat tempered its depredations during its feudal adolescence, has now focused its energies on eating its young. Do check out that Nazi Hydra link--these people not only survived the war, they won it. The interests they represent, the ones who directed the CIA's interventions around the world, are, to me, the ones who sit at the apex of Evil. And I did concede that it's possible they are your illumined ones. My point here is that it doesn't really matter who "they" are--like the mythical hydra, if they were decapitated, it would change nothing, since it's the system they've built which is responsible for mankind's misery.

I did not accuse you of anti-Semitism; I merely suggested that I was uneasy about how Jews appear to be letting themselves be used as targets of so much righteous wrath. Something doesn't smell right about the whole thing, from the Jewish banking cabal to the Mossad involvement in 9/11 to the savagery of Israel in the (ongoing, worsening) crisis in the Middle East.

You repeatedly claim that I'm abusive and that I'm spreading disinformation. You, sir, are the excitable party with the very pointed agenda. If you are as interested in the truth of which you claim to be in sole possession, then go back and consider what I've written, as opposed to either ignoring or distorting what I've said. Failing that, just ignore me, as I'm certain that's going to be my approach toward you if you persist in this unwarranted hostility. And have a splendid day--you seem to have isolated yourself rather rigorously, and this is an institution which will allow you to enjoy your solitude. shanti.

7/21/2006 07:58:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mojo replies to Irie...

Ahh....projected hostility onto the "other" with suddenly soft words that deny most of what you previously wrote. You do it so well.

The velvet glove which hides the iron fist.

Check my pulse.

Am I excited?

I don't think so. How does my saying "it's just an opinion, I could be wrong, my memory is not perfect," et cetera & cet show me to think I am in possession of "the" truth.

I agree that there are many layers. I agree that "Nazi" consciousness, so to speak, is behind the present wars. That just happens to include the Rothschilds and the central bankers, some Jews, some satanists, some inverted Christians, luciferians, muslim apostates, sikhs, atheists, the list goes on.

You somehow seem to try to the "Nazi" sobriquet as some sort of polemical magic want to immediately exculpate a fair number of the guilty individuals behind the morass in the world today.

Tat tvam asi.

7/21/2006 08:10:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Corregida:

That should have read "you somehow seem to try to wield the 'Nazi' sobriquet as some kind of magic wand..."

M.F.

7/21/2006 08:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

a weary Mojo begs his leave....

Dear Irie,

As I wrote to you previously, I do not know what is in your heart.

Only you and the Almighty know that.

And, as before, I would suggest that there is where you, me, anyone should look for good answers to some very knotty problems.

Just don't abandon your critical thinking skills along the way.

If that is the message of a "spook" then shiver me timbers, matey.

Here are some better words:

No reward do I ask of you.
God is Witness to all things,
and has full knowledge over all that is hidden.

with that, I wish you peace.

~Molto Jerif

7/21/2006 08:21:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Monotonous, yes, and always in plain view.

7/21/2006 08:35:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, Moj -

Certain things are starting to become clear. It appears that what I took to be several different anonymi who'd ranted at me over the last few months were all you, starting with the one who accused me of being a disinfo agent. (On behalf of the Illuminati, I think, though that was a while ago and I could be misremembering.)

And when I responded variously, depending on the situation or my mood, either that I might not have written as clearly as I ought, or that the person responding in this way might be reacting to their own projections and not to what I'd actually written, you took it all personally and concluded that I was making a focused effort to persecute you.

I'm feeling distinctly rueful now that I put so much effort into those responses. I find it difficult enough to communicate effectively with people who have some interest in and sympathy towards what I'm saying. There's no reason that I should be twisting myself into knots in an attempt to talk to somebody who was obviously determined from the start to view me as an enemy.

I still have no clue as to what your real problem with me is -- except for my refusal to share your obsession with the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers. But I'm coming to think that it isn't worth the trouble to try to find out -- that whatever it is, it's your problem and not mine, and therefore something you're going to have to resolve on your own.

Good luck on your quest.

starroute

7/21/2006 09:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fihi ma fihi writes...

Still at the confabulation, Star?

No one ever accused you of persecution. Just a few stupid insults. Don't glorify yourself.

You, just like Irie, won't deal with a reasoned analysis of the polemical techniques you consistently use to obfuscate and mislead the reader who may be less sophisticated than you.

But lies are lies, however you try to hide behind them. And to make, for one tiny example, the kinds of glib b.s. statements that Irie made when trying to rationalize away Netanyahu saying 9/11 was good for Israel, or Silverstein admitting that they "pulled" WTC 7, by claiming that people don't make Freudian slips in public.... Well, I just had to laugh...

Tell that story to George Dubya when he makes public statements about "Obstetricians can't practice their love with women," or Newt Gingrich's mother telling Connie Chung on camera "just between us" that "Hillary Clinton is a bitch."

Amazing what people can and do say, and have said, for the camera.

Vanity, the oldest sin.

Just a parting nugget.

You see the hypocrites avert your faces from you in disgust. How then, when they are seized with misfortune, because of the deeds which their hands have sent forth? Then they come, swearing by God, "We meant no more than goodwill and conciliation!"

Those men - god knows what is in their hearts. So keep clear of them, but admonish them, and speak to them a word to reach their very souls.

Peace

7/22/2006 02:35:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I did not equate Catholicism with Satanism and wouldn’t."

very well, then, sniffler--i *completely* rescind my comment, as (truly) that was exactly what i had taken you to mean. yes, there is power in catholicism, and in the truth. about cardinal law: i have been oft reminded since the scandal broke of how dante placed clerics in hell and yet never wavered in his belief in the church... it has been no secret that scoundrels have often sought--not b'c they cared a wit about the faith--the sanctuary of mater ecclesia from which to do evil, but alas, we're back at jesus' parable of the wheat and the tares.
yes, history is a dark and bloody ground, but only because it contrasts so marvelously with goodness and faith and power and light and charity, without which we'd never know it was dark to begin with. and again, you are right in how you end: we've nothing to fear from Truth Himself.

pax et charitas vobiscum, fratres.

7/22/2006 02:46:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Fihi ma fihi writes...

#1 Sniffer: Nice exegesis. Thorough, logical, incisive, and even poetic in its expression. I like your opening explanation of the rhetorical device of the "straw man argument" so often used by posters on this site to deflect the arguments or defame the commentors that they don't want people to hear. Have at it. I wish you strength. It's a tough slog, to put it mildly. There are more jackals and vultures hereabouts than around a zebra carcass on the savannah in drought.

Jon: Nicely put. Charity and peace to both of you, brothers.
_____________________

JBD: Another hydra head rears up from one of the stumps! Hercules says hello.
_____________________

So leave them to babble and play with their vanities until they meet that Day of theirs, which they have been promised.


Shalom. Salaam. Shanti Om

7/22/2006 03:19:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Masnavi i masnavi writes...

JBD, Star, Shrub, and Irie: Your complete and utter silence on the current wars and the ongoing deaths of thousands upon thousands of children, innocent men and women, not to mention the destruction of their homes and the earth on which they and their agriculture, industry, and cultural existence sits, all at the hands of the Israeli, US and British military, in the continuing campaigns of genocide against Arab and muslim peoples, speaks volumes upon volumes upon volumes.

If you actually cared even one half thimbleful about the displacement into homelessness of already over half a million Lebanese, and the incipient humanitarian disaster there, not to mention the decades long human disasters in Iraq and Palestine, just for starters, then you would at least have mentioned this in your replies, rather than engaging in irrelevant and meaningless drivel.

If you had any shred of empathy for even a few of these millions of displaced, injured, diseased, and war-torn, suffering human beings, then you might have met me and others on that same ground of empathy, where we stand. You had ample opportunity, but not one of you did so.

But then, as Jeff wrote in the post which opened this string:

Evil doesn't do empathy.

And you, new hydra-head JBD, you have the gall to conflate my posting on these matters with the horrific genocide underway, and the temerity to joke about it, calling my response "disproportionate", equating or analogizing this debate with actual the slaughter of human beings? You think that's funny? That is, indeed, evil, in my personal opinion. Shame on you, and the horse of total relativism on which you rode in. You wear your agenda like a shield.

So I will mention again the harrowing photos which tell in a small way what is going on now at:

http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/

and the beautiful Rabbis of Neturei Karta at:

www.nkusa.org

Men of great conscience and courage.

.

To Moses did we give Nine Clear Signs. Ask the Children of Israel. When he came to them, Pharaoh said to him, "O Moses! I consider you, indeed, to have been worked upon by sorcery!"

Moses said, "You know well that these things have been sent down by none other than God Almighty as eye-opening evidence. And I consider you, indeed, o Pharaoh, to be one doomed to destruction."

.

7/22/2006 04:14:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
This is going to piss everyone off but I don't care. First Haditha now the rape, murder and burning of this woman and the slaughter of her family and all of the other "incidents" we hear and don't hear about. I am sick of this. The American troops are not defending my freedom or the freedom of America. They are murdering for BushCo. I don't care how many of them want to be there, want to "fight for our freedom" or are there for the promise of college tuition money. Everey soldier needs to turn their weapon on their superiors right now and force their way back home or they can all just die in that fucking desert of a country. Fuck the troops. I don't support anyone there.

6:51 PM
Shrubageddon said...
Amen, Anonymous 6:51.

We just got back from Home Depot and they announced over the PA System that enlisted me defending our country get 10% off for July 4th weekend.

I'm sick of this shit.


Mojo was both right, and wrong. I did indirectly make reference to Supporting The Troops as the above post indicates. I wasn't the Anonymous Poster, but I did say Amen to his post. I still say Amen to it, and I stand by my words. So long as you support the troops, you facilitate the Evil.

7/22/2006 09:26:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And, Mojo, talk about Double Speak and Double Think, you apparently are quite adroit at the craft yourself.

If I hear you correctly, we should Support The Troops and prostrate ourselves before the Evil Rothschilds and The Illuminati and beg and implore them to bring our "Fighting Boys" home. Now that's comical.

Or, we should all bow our heads in prayer to your One True God and ask him to bring our "Fighting Boys Home," God helps those who help themselves be damned. Once again, Slapstick Comedy at its best.

Oh, and on the subject of Free Will, what if we collectively choose to Eschew Free Will? Hmmmm....no more Free Will with one wave of the hand. If it's not that easy, or not possible to do that, then it's really not Free Will, is it now? It's kind of like Democracy in the Middle East. If you Democratically elect Hamas, it not Democracy. I'm sure you'll find a way to rationalize it back into existence.

7/22/2006 09:37:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Bombs dropping everywhere-- Look-Out!
Curious and curiouser-By George.

I have seen the enemy-and it is US.

Seriously though, Cuttlefish I wonder what you think about the New Outlook Society essay on my blogspot.

7/22/2006 11:10:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Anonymous is a troll. Disagreement is fine, healthy even, depending on where it goes. So look where it went: every time the sanctimonious fraud enters the thread, the thread frays, discussion is replaced by serial recrimination and explanation; hijacked.

He's good, but he's a troll. He does what he accuses others of (the attacking, the lying, the disingenuous response alternating with no response to any number of points made.) It finally dawned on me when he climbed back up on his high horse and demanded that we state our "opinions" on Israel's recent actions, as if any intelligent, sane person could have any opinion on this nightmare other than that it is murder most foul. I used to piss off my mates over at ICH (before poor Tom lost his comment fields) by feeding the trolls sometimes; it's just hard to resist when they offer up their bacon so easily, as Anontroll did just now with me when he equated Newt calling Connie a bitch with Silverstein and Netanyahu just "letting it slip" that some seriously sinister Jews were behind 9/11.

The proof is in the pudding--look back over the past two of Jeff's posts at the effect this guy has had on the discussion. It’s the classic pattern: topic, tangent, topic restated, trollish flare-up, topic dies. So what’s in it for you, Anontroll? You don’t like our opinions, you don’t want to consider what others are saying, and we obviously think you’re a repugnant fellow— so why do you come here, to spread the light of your profound thoughts? The intense camaraderie, the brotherly love?

Sounder,
Didn’t you see my response, or did you think I wasn’t serious with my praise? Or, did you want something a little more labor intensive, like an analysis with commentary, as opposed to my largely emotional response? I know I said I didn’t want shoot from the hip when responding to your essay, but I thought I had given it at least a modicum of measured response there. I’ll go back when I can, if you like…

7/22/2006 11:44:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

sniffler,

you are a gracious communicator and an astute observer of the current status quo. truth be told, cardinal law's re-appointment to a posh, do-little job in rome always bothered me, much like the vatican's banking scandal back in the 80s and its tie-in to P2 (of all things!) and the like. as well as, as you said, the heirarchy's newly-discovered aversion to the death penalty, when we *all* know JPII's first catechism allowed for it (albeit in 'exceptional' circumstances) and went thru an embarrassing update a few years later.

"Part of this ancient evil 'defanging' of our spiritual knowledge mentioned above has been to falsely teach us that acting aggressively is always evil, or that acting passively is always good...[and without which] things like 911 wouldn’t have been possible...."

indeed, brother. indeed.

7/22/2006 10:58:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Guys,

Jesus and I had a discussion at the IHOP this morning. The waiter served him to me on one of the specials. Two pieces of bacon formed the symbol of a cross. The pieces of bacon spoke to me and identified itself as Jesus. He said that to Support The Soldiers was To Support Satan and Satan's Ways. He said we must reject and shun all those who continue to kill innocent children, men and women when continually implored to refrain. He said embrace them with open arms when they announce the error of their ways and renounce the ways of Satan. Then, and only then must we offer support, otherwise, our support will be used to perpetuate the abominable violence and murder. He said this is quite obvious. Satan asks you to murder, and you say no. Not a difficult concept, especially if the majority adhere to it.

After we finished, I ate him, but his words will resonate with me forever.

Peace (The Real Variety),

Shrubageddon

PS: The salt in the Bacon left me with an unquenchable thirst.....and the aquifers are running dry.

7/23/2006 09:59:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

I'm impressed Jeff. You let the posting go way past "80" and voila'..we actually got somewhere.

The microscope changes nothing. The observer sees what an observer does.

7/23/2006 12:07:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
The purpose of Israel is to protect something. Almost all of the Jews have no idea what that something is, but it the ultimate reason why they are the Chosen People.

On the day they realise what it is, the entire world will be a different place.

Just ask the Torah True Jews of the Neuturei Karta (www.jewsagainstzionism.com) about that. They believe the secular state of Israel is an abomination.

Israel was given the land of Canaan only on condition that its people follow G-d's laws(see Deuteronomy).

Coveting your neighbor's land, killing him to get it and worshipping a piece of dirt instead of the Most High are three of the 10 commandments the Zionists violated just to create the state of Israel. G-d will judge them accordingly.

7/23/2006 05:42:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

And evil does FAKE EMPATHY quite well actually.

Have you ever looked into the truth about Mother Teresa? Google "MOther Teresa fraud", start there. She was fake empathy incarnate.

Fake charities are a huge component in the super weathy controlling this planet as well.

6/18/2009 10:19:00 PM  
Anonymous wolfenstein 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 08:57:00 PM  
Anonymous justpub said...

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

7/19/2010 08:58:00 PM  

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