Thursday, September 14, 2006

Gosch, again



"You have an overactive imagination."
"These are just the facts, Rich. I mean, I haven't even begun
to let my imagination loose on this thing." -
Cutter's Way

Briefly, there's some movement on the story of the photographs left at Noreen Gosch's door.

A tip out of Florida is apparently prompting West Des Moines police to conclude that not only do the photos fail to depict Johnny Gosch, but they don't even show a crime scene. (First reports spoke of an "anonymous tipster," but that has since been spiked from the corporate news.)

The unattributed lead drew police attention to Nelson Zalva, a retired Florida sheriff's investigator currently employed by the State Attorney's Office, who claims, with remarkable imprecision, that "he investigated a case in either 1978 or 1979. He said he identified the boys in the photos. Zalva said they voluntarily posed for the pictures, but he couldn't recall why."

On apparently nothing more than the strength of Zalva's word, police in Des Moines appear ready, and relieved, to accept that the delivery of the photos was simply a cruel hoax.

Noreen has responded:

The West Des Moines Police released a statement, indicating that they received an anonymous note saying "there was an investigator in Florida who had investigated and identified the boys in the recent photo, which they appeared bound and gagged in 1979". They also stated this photo had been on the internet since 1979.

Unfortunately, this press release caused a media storm and much confusion because they neglected to also mention that the detective only saw the photo of the "THREE BOYS ON THE BED". At no time had he ever seen the photo of Johnny Gosch ... the black/white photo below. We also know that the internet as we know it ..... did not exist in 1979.

We want to let people know so this will answer the questions you all must have in your minds by now. This press release was issued incorrectly and prematurely by the West Des Moines Police.


Johnnygosch.com has also posted the following photograph which accompanied the other two left on Noreen's doorstep. (There may, in fact, be many more.) The man depicted, according to information accompanying the package, was a perp who abused Johnny and many others. Noreen handed it over to police, who remarked that the man is "dead and there is a device around his neck called a ligature." ("Dream's End" asks on the RI forum: "Was it already understood by the rest of you that the idea that this perp has a ligature around his neck brings us back to the JonBenet case?")





According to Noreen Gosch, the only photograph Nelson Zalva has claimed to ID is the colour picture of three boys bound and gagged on a bed. According to Zalva, he remembers the photograph well enough but can't remember the year, and reassures police that no crime was committed but can neither recall why, nor apparently produce evidence to support his claim. And perhaps most suspicious, there's the "anonymous tipster" who was both following the Gosch story and who also claimed to knew the details of an obscure case which came across the desk of a Tampa investigator nearly 30 years before. If there's nothing to the story and the boys were bound, gagged and photographed voluntarily all in good fun, then why the need for anonymity from the tipster who hooked up Zalva with the police halfway across the country?

Given Florida's record on missing, abused and murdered children - it was in a Tallahassee park that the CIA's predatory paedophilic cult the Finders were arrested - tips from state officials ought to be, shall we say, thoroughly vetted.

Coincidentally, Monday was Florida's eighth annual Missing Children's Day, which this year fell on September 11. Jeb Bush remarked, "We feel sorrow for the children we have lost and we also feel sorrow for the Americans and others, frankly, that lost their lives five years ago in the cowardly attacks on our country."

Bush added, "I'm not sure why God decided to bring these two acts together." But they do seem to go together, don't they?

76 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Pictures that were left for Johnnys Mother remind me of something from the Summer of 1989(I remember the year because it was around the time of the first batman film) The Tacoma News Tribune ran pictures of two young teens bound and gagged in a very similer fashion in the back of what looked to be a van. The pictures were found in the parking lot of a convenience store, but I do not remember any follow up. Not even an ID for the boy and girl in the photos. I remember it was pretty chilling for me since I was not too much older at the time. But the story seemed to disappear from the news, and even I had forgotten it until I saw these "new" old photos on the web.

In an unrelated or maybe related thing here is an article about a Florida Mother of a missing toddler who commited Suiced after that Bitch Nancy Grace grilled her on her show(if you can't tell I am not too fond of CNNs resident pit bull- she represents just about everything wrong with the legal system wrapped up in one pundit)
here is the link
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/09/13/D8K44SR01.html

Also it amazes me this happened in florida. Bush and CIA country, also wasn't florida the place where CPS "lost" about a thousand poor and orphaned children about 2 years ago? I was amazed at how quickly that left the News as well.
What is it about Florida and Texas?

9/14/2006 05:35:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"They also stated this photo had been on the internet since 1979."

- Just astonishing (this and all the rest of it). Can they possibly get away with this stuff?

Jeb Bush's remark is also decidedly weird, in an inimitably Bushian way:

"We feel sorrow for the children we have lost and we also feel sorrow for the Americans and others, frankly, that lost their lives five years ago in the cowardly attacks on our country."

- What on earth is the word 'frankly' doing in there? Why do the Bushes' statements so often sound as if they've been badly translated into English from a foreign language?

"Frankly"! Jeb Bush is surely protesting too much. It reminds me of the way liars keep saying "honestly" or "believe me" or "I really, really mean it".

9/14/2006 06:24:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous One,WTF,you mean we have been letting these sick fucks run around stealing our kids? Come now,Merican's are'nt that dummbed down are we?I wonder what ever became of those little fucks after the sunamie?Any one remember where Daddy and his new "son" where sitting and grabing pinkies?Time is running down,things are not looking good,this planet has to be near the tipping point,how much shit can you pile in one place before it completly flips on it's head?Jeff,I hope they have'nt turned DR. Camron's spawn loose on poor Canada,I belive the place where they did the MKULTRA was just up the street from the college,could this be our own little P2 left behind,later.

9/14/2006 07:01:00 AM  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

The Tacoma News Tribune ran pictures of two young teens bound and gagged in a very similer fashion in the back of what looked to be a van. The pictures were found in the parking lot of a convenience store, but I do not remember any follow up.

I don't recall what show I was watching, but I saw a report of this at the time and I've never forgotten it.

A woman parked her car next to a van in a convenience store parking lot and went inside. When she returned to her car the van was gone, and there was a polaroid on the ground taken apparently from within the van of two bound and gagged children: a young boy and an older girl. The photo was clearly left behind in order to be found.

I can't tell you how often I've thought of it since.

9/14/2006 08:11:00 AM  
Blogger sunny said...

Jeff, that photo is on the web, I've seen it recently. It caused me a couple of sleepless nights.

I didn't bookmark it, but I'll see if I can find it.

9/14/2006 08:44:00 AM  
Blogger sunny said...

Here is story concerning the possible indentification of the children.

9/14/2006 08:55:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The man depicted, according to information accompanying the package, was a perp who abused Johnny and many others. Noreen handed it over to police, who remarked that the man is 'dead and there is a device around his neck called a ligature.'"

This alleged "ligature" - can anyone actually SEE it in that photo? I certainly can't.

Also: "the man 'is dead'".

Well, what man? Does he have a name? If they know he's dead, then they must know who he is. So what's his name?

Secondly: even if he IS dead, that tells us precisely nothing about whether he was a perp or not. So the police's 'explanation' to Noreen Gosch is no explanation at all.

And who took the photo? The man depicted is apparently either:

a) a child-molester

or

b) a murder victim (or a suicide)

Or both.

So who took the photo? Why are the police apprently not interested in finding out? And who IS that guy?

9/14/2006 09:02:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jeff, what's with the photoshop effort? The image is exploitative. Next time try an empty swing or something. Don't let the darkness of this topic overwhelm your natural sensibility.

9/14/2006 10:06:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I found the following from the Des Moines Register last week. WARNING! The link is clearly a pedo. site.

"September 6th, 2006 at 8:39 am

I know that the photos sent to Noreen are not of her son, but were sent to her to prove a point. That she will jump on anything she gets to get into the media.

The photos came from a sicko pervert website called jacobstales.com aka steves gallery.
These photos have been in the news before. Nothing new here. If you go to that website, clik the gallery link, then click user galleries and select the user “peps” you will see that there is a gallery called “tied up”

Click that gallery and you will see the same photos.

Sad but true, I doubt that these are her son. This site is one of those pedophila owned whch has no boundries.

Maybe now someone will try to put an end to ths site.

The problem here is that you could send her a photo of a child, and she will say it’s johnny. She is messed up in the head and I think she needs to take a break and seperate herself from all these people that are trying to help her.

There is only one truth to what happened to Johnny, I believe she knows it and her husband and the WDMPD.
- Jon"

I foolishly viewed the site, wish I hadn't, but it does appear that the photo of the three might have been posed, as so many other pics from this site are from TV, etc., as claimed. Below is the reference to what her former husband, John Gosch, stated:

"ROBERT DORR ; WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Omaha World-Herald; NEWS; Pg. 17
February 9, 1999, Tuesday IOWA EDITION


The father of a Des Moines newspaper carrier who disappeared more than 16 years ago said he is skeptical of his ex-wife's statement that their son showed up at her apartment in 1997.

"Apparently, she's trying to get more publicity or whatever to get on a talk show so she could go where it's warm," John Gosch said of Noreen Gosch's testimony.

John Gosch said that if their son had returned to the Des Moines area, he probably would have gone to the couple's home, where John Gosch was living and where Johnny Gosch grew up, instead of his mother's apartment."

I also recall that there were allegations made against Gosch senior (can't find my files) stating that he was in on the kidnapping along with the original Jeff Gannon of the Des Moines Register.

More grist for the mill.

9/14/2006 10:19:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sunny, here's a better quality scan of the polaroid from crimeblog:

http://crimeblog.us/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/missingunknown.JPG

9/14/2006 10:41:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

So who took the photo? Why are the police apprently not interested in finding out? And who IS that guy?

bismillah, I'm in strong agreement with you today. Am I so out of touch with the average joe that they don't feel the same way about this? Doesn't this just scream "coverup"? Wouldn't this result in a flood of letters to the editor, phone calls to the local TV station, newspaper, police department saying "What's up with that?"

bismillah, I also loved your post about Jeb's discourse marker, "frankly". In normal conversation it means "this statement I'm uttering is blunt and honest." As you say, what is it doing there? Why would you need to be blunt or honest when you're expressing sorrow for missing and dead children? I also thought this may be unintentionally revealing:

We feel sorrow for the children we have lost

We being? FL CPS?

9/14/2006 10:59:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Frankly, Bismilla, it takes very real effort and concentration on the part of any of the Bush clan to try and express themselves in some way that sounds sincere.

It's obviously not for a want of words, or even some understanding of what they mean, it's the utter lack of ever having experienced any of the feelings or sentiments they are trying to express...and frankly, it shows!

9/14/2006 11:13:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"'We feel sorrow for the children we have lost'

We being? FL CPS?"

Jack: "I have lost both my parents."

Lady Bracknell: "To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

(Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest)

9/14/2006 11:15:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Having lived in very rural parts of both Tx and Fl, I will have to agree with the previous comment that there is something strange about both places. Seems like a prevalence of "bible thumpers and child humpers" to quote an earlier post. Maybe its the heat...maybe its the Bushes. :)

9/14/2006 11:24:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am having trouble with the following quote:


"Basically, what happened is someone, maybe it was one of the parents, found the photos and called the sheriff's office and deputies went out there, impounded the photos and the case was assigned to me for investigation," Zalva said. "I worked a long time on it, getting the kids identified."

Here's the problem: "I worked a long time on it, getting the kids identified." This doesn't ring true. First, the parent who called would obviously know their own child, and, second, the child would most likely know the other two. I would be interested to know what took "a long time" about this?

9/14/2006 11:26:00 AM  
Blogger sunny said...

Thanks Infernal Optimist. I had fogotten that Crimeblog is in fact where I saw the photo a couple of weeks ago.

silverfox said:
it's the utter lack of ever having experienced any of the feelings or sentiments they are trying to express...and frankly, it shows!

Bingo!!!!

9/14/2006 11:26:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Frankly" is one of Tony Bliar's favourite fillers.

9/14/2006 12:03:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bismillah said...
"Frankly" is one of Tony Bliar's favourite fillers.


And "uh" is one of Dubya's.

"Frankly" sounds more sophisticated, but "uh" sounds more downhome, don't you think?

9/14/2006 12:07:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The police would never lie...Hmmm. There was a headline in the Seattle Times (I think) about how the soon-to-be ex of a policeman or sheriff
(the name was Parnell or Purcell) discovered physical evidence (hair and fiber)from crimes stashed away in her husband's closet. All of this stuff was assumed to be locked away in the evidence room until her discovery. The weird part of this is, I've gone back and checked the papers online to leave a link, and I can't find the story (I only read the headline and the first part of the story thru the window of the paper vending box yesterday...god I wish I'd picked it up now...) I'll see if I can locate a copy...

9/14/2006 12:15:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"We feel sorrow for the children we have lost and we also feel sorrow for the Americans and others..."

Sometimes I guess...

From the wiki article on Robin Bush

At the time she became ill, Robin was the future president's only sibling (although Jeb Bush was born before she died) and a favorite playmate. His parents never told him that she was sick, although he was asked to stop playing with her. Only after her death did they disclose to him her illness, which had lasted longer than doctors expected it to and had led the Bushes on a frantic quest back East to find a specialist who could treat her. These efforts kept them away from their son for long stretches of time, and he was not present when Robin died, nor at her burial. In fact, George H.W. and Barbara Bush apparently played golf on the day of Robin's funeral.

Straining to feign emotion indeed!
-tlg

9/14/2006 12:43:00 PM  
Blogger ELFIS said...

Can anyone make out the book title of the tome next to the girl in the photo?

http://crimeblog.us/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/missingunknown.JPG

D'Oh! Never mind ... just read the last line of the info on this page:

http://www.tabloidbaby.com/Book/Companion/bound.html

"The woman in the photograph is seen with a book by V.C. Andrews, which Ms. Doel identified as her daughter’s favorite author."

9/14/2006 12:52:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"We feel sorrow for the children we have lost and we also feel sorrow for the Americans and others, frankly, that lost their lives five years ago in the cowardly attacks on our country."


I know Cuttlefish will thoroughly enjoy this. Imagine if he substituted "humans" for "Americans and others." The Ickeians would bust a nut or two, wouldn't they.

See, they really are Reptiles.

It would read:

"We feel sorrow for the children we have lost and we also feel sorrow for the Humans, frankly, that lost their lives five years ago in the cowardly attacks on our country."

9/14/2006 01:35:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Juno Jones wrote:

"...There was a headline in the Seattle Times (I think)..."

yeah, bizarro:

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=padilla13m&date=20060913&query=evidence+closet

9/14/2006 01:44:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

See, they really are Reptiles.

Shrub, read the Wiki article on Robin Bush posted byb anon. It actually is a little easier to believe they're shape-shifting reptiles than to believe they're human

9/14/2006 01:58:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Two points of interest. On the topic of missing child day and 9/11 falling on the same day -- check this out:

http://www.wflx.com/Global/story.asp?S=5392531

On the subject of the V.V> Andrews book in the photo, the plotline contains a raped and murdered little girl.

Have fun with the dots.

9/14/2006 02:09:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

TOTAL FLUFF AND DRIVEL

Except for the part wher Shrubbie says HE is a shape shifting reptilian with red eyes that glow at night!


This explains it all.

9/14/2006 03:30:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mickey Spillane writes

I KNEW IT

He is one of them.

9/14/2006 03:32:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Has Shrub been to all these places?

YES Dulce is his fav yo(50 cent terminology he now loves since we reprogrammed him.)

Underground Bases
We recently came across a very interesting list from a book called Entrances to Subterranean Tunnels "Underground Alien Bases" (UAB) ISBN: 0-938294-92-X (UAB) which purports to list
all the known underground entrances to bases. Here is where they are!

New York City
There is an entrance to the tunnels in New York City "in the vicinity of Midtown Manhattan that can be reached through an abandoned elevator shaft that only very few know about

The Nahanni Valley (Canada) Entrance
This covers 250 square miles in the southern end of the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada. It lies almost 550 miles due west of Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River of northwest Canada. Hot springs and sulfur geysers keep the valley warmer than the surrounding areas by about 30 degrees year -round (the valley is above 60 degrees latitude), making it perpetually mist-covered. This valley is inhabited only by animals as people entering the valley are usually found headless and quite dead. The Indian tribes of the area avoid this valley. (These tribes include the Ojibways, the Slave, the Dogribs, the Stoney, the Beavers and the Chipweyans.) This valley is often referred to as "the Valley of the Headless Men.

The Liyobaa Cave Entrance
This was sealed off by Catholic Priests who believed it to be an entrance to "Hell." "The village of 'Liyobaa' or to translate, 'The Cavern of Death,' was located in the province of Zapoteca, somewhere near the ancient village of 'Mictlan' or the village of the 'Underworld.

"The Cavern of Death was actually located in the last chamber of an eight chamber building or temple. This temple had four rooms above the ground and four more important chambers built below the surface of the Earth. This building was located in "Theozapotlan," and the tunnel entrance led one beneath a mountain.

The Maltese Cave Entrance
This entrance is located on the island of Malta, near the small village of "Casal Paula." (This village is built on the "Corradino" plateau, and overlooks the capitol town of Malta, "Valletta," as well as Grand Harbour.) In 1902, workmen digging a well in Casal Paula fell into a subterranean cavern. The well was being dug for a house on "Hal Saflienti," the main street in Casal Paula. The cavern the workers had fallen into connected with an entire complex of caves and tunnels. This entrance is known as the "Hypogeum of Hal Saflienti." (In Latin, "Hypogeum" is the name for an underground structure.) "The tunnels under the Hypogeum have been sealed off even since a school took 30 students into the caves and disappeared, guide and all. Search parties were never able to locate any trace of the people and children.

The Staffordshire, England Entrance
Somewhere in Staffordshire, England, a lonely field exists in which a laborer discovered a large iron plate beneath the dirt. The "hatch" was large and oval, with an iron ring mounted on it. This entrance led into the tunnels. The field is in a valley surrounded on almost all sides by woods. The laborer was digging a trench for some purpose. The incident was reported in "A History of Staffordshire" by Dr. Plot, who wrote the book in the late 1700s. It may be possible to find the entrance if it can be ascertained exactly which valley the laborer was digging in.

The Dulce, New Mexico Base
An underground Military Base/Laboratory in Dulce, New Mexico connects with the underground network of tunnels which honeycombs our planet, and the lower levels of this base are allegedly under the control of Inner Earth beings or Aliens. This base is connected to Los Alamos research facilities via an underground "tube-shuttle." (It can be assumed that such a shuttle way would be a straight-line construction. It should then be possible, by using maps and some deduction, to determine the most likely location of this base, especially since the general location is already known.) Beginning in 1947, a road was built near the Dulce Base, under the cover of a lumber company. No lumber was ever hauled, and the road was later destroyed. Navajo Dam is the Dulce Base's main source of power, though a second source is in El Vado (which is also another entrance). (Note: The above facts should also help to locate the base.) Most of the lakes near Dulce were made via government grants "for" the Indians. (Note: The September, 1983 issue of Omni (Pg. 80) has a color drawing of 'The Subterrene,' the Los Alamos nuclear-powered tunnel machine that burrows through the rock, deep underground, by heating whatever stone it encounters into molten rock, which cools after the Subterrene has moved on. The result is a tunnel with a smooth, glazing lining.)" (Note: Where would the molten rock go? And what has been done with this concept since 1983?)

Bechtel (BECK-tul) is a super secret international corporate octopus, founded in 1898. Some say the firm is really a 'Shadow Government's working arm of the CIA. It is the largest Construction and Engineering outfit in the U.S.A and the World (and some say, beyond)." "The most important posts in U.S.A. Government are held by former Bechtel Officers. There are over 100 Secret Exits near and around Dulce. Many around Archuleta Mesa, others to the source around Dulce Lake and even as far east as Lindrich. Deep sections of the Complex connect into natural Cavern Systems. (Note: The elevators, lights, and doors at Dulce Base are all magnetically controlled.)

The area around Dulce has had a high number of reported Animal Mutilations." The researchers at Dulce Base have also abducted several people from Dulce's civilian population and implanted devices of various types in their heads and bodies. (Note: Livermore Berkeley Labs (where?) began producing blood for the Dulce Base in the mid 1980s, and Human and Animal abductions slowed considerably. It may be worthwhile to check-out Livermore Berkeley Labs.) DELTA group (from the National Recon Group) is responsible for security of all Alien-connected projects. The DELTA symbol is a Black Triangle on a Red Background. Dulce Base's symbol is a Delta (triangle) with the Greek Letter "Tau" (t) within it, and then the entire symbol is inverted, so the triangle points down, and the "Tau" is also inverted. Christa Tilton (was abducted and taken to Dulce Base) She is the editor of "Crux" magazine, which deals with UFOs, abductions, etc. P.O. Box 906237 Tulsa, Oklahoma (zip ?????)

Bases in the United States Mt. Ranier, Washington State Mt. Lassen, Tehama County, California Death Valley, California Superstition Mountains, Arizona Mt. Shasta, California Brown Mountain, North Carolina Mt. Ranier Entrance.

A very active UFO base exists beneath Mt. Ranier. There are also said to be underground "vaults" containing records of the ancient Lemurians. (Note: F.L. Boschke wrote the book "The Unexplained" about the mysteries surrounding Mt. Ranier.) The ice cap of Mt. Ranier contains a maze of corridors and caves. In August of 1970, scientists climbed to the top of Mt. Ranier, and entered these caverns and tunnels. Evidence was found indicating that a small lake exists deep beneath the ice cap. It is possible that one could find a way to get beneath Mt. Ranier through these tunnels.
The Mt. Lassen Entrance Mt. Lassen in Tehama County, California is an entrance to a large underground city. Near the foot of Mt. Lassen is a town called Manten. A man named "Ralph B. Fields" lived (lives?) there, and found the entrance to the underground city. His friend "Joe" was with him. The cave entrance is in the side of the mountain, at a little over 7,000 feet above sea level, and is near a rock outcropping suitable for camping under.

Death Valley, CA. Entrance.
Local Indian legends speak of a tunnel that runs beneath the desert. (Note: The book "Death Valley Men," tells the story of 3 people who are supposed to have found an underground city connected with this tunnel, and who actually took treasures from it. The entrance to the Death Valley Tunnel is in the Panamint Mountains down on the lower edge of the range near Wingate Pass, in the bottom of an old abandoned shaft. The bottom of the shaft is collapsed, opening an entrance into a large tunnel system containing much treasure. These tunnels connect with the surface also through arches (like large windows) in the side of the mountain and they look down on Death Valley. They're high above the valley now, but they were once on the edge of the water, and were accessed by boats. The "windows" in the Death Valley side of the Panamint Mountains are about 4,500-5,000 feet above the bottom of Death Valley, and are across from Furnace Creek Ranch. From these openings you can see the green of the ranch below you and Furnace Creek Wash across the valley. (So, with high-powered binoculars or a telescope, you should be able to see the openings from the Furnace Creek Ranch, or Wash.) You can drive down Emigrant Canyon towards Death Valley. You can then park beside the road between Furnace Creek Ranch and the Salt Bed. (From here, the windows should be visible through binoculars.) Indian legends of the Paiutes Indians speak of the people who used to live in the Panamint's caverns.

The Mt. Shasta, CA Entrance
There are tunnels beneath Mt. Shasta that lead to a UFO base there, as well as tunnels that connect with the vast world-wide tunnel network. The Lemurian city "Telos" is said to exist beneath Mt. Shasta. William Hamilton has done much research on Mt. Shasta and the tunnels. He has privately published a book entitled "Alien Magic" 249 North Brand Boulevard, Suite 651 Glendale, CA 91203

The Brown Mountain Entrance
Brown Mountain is in North Carolina near Morganton. Morganton is "about 15 miles north of an actual highway marker which has been posted by the state providing any visitor the best view" of Brown Mountain. Brown Mountain is an area in which many strange lights have been seen. There are entrances that lead inside the mountain to an isolated (?) Alien base.

Canadian UFO Bases
Entrances at Lake Ontario possible underwater UFO bases/cities. Toronto Tunnels leading to subterranean city. Newfoundland Condemned Iron Mine connects with tunnels. Lake Ontario "Lights" Orange-colored spheres have been seen coming out of/diving into Lake Ontario. The area of highest activity is between Oakville and Toronto. There may be a connection to the Lakeview Hydro-electric plant, as many of these UFOs have been seen heading in that direction. (Note: "The Great Lakes Triangle" by Jay Gourley would be interesting reading for more information about UFOs, etc. in the Great Lakes area.)

Toronto Entrance
There is a small opening to the underground tunnels off Parliament Street in downtown Toronto. (The entrance is between two apartment buildings, and leads to the tunnels via the sewers.) The underground city (abandoned?) beneath Toronto has its center beneath Gerrard Street and Church Street. Above this area, strange magnetic effects have been observed. (Note: This corner of Gerrard & Church streets has a higher accident rate than anywhere else in Toronto. It is believed that underground equipment utilizing powerful magnetic fields (which have caused many strange magnetic effects in houses near this intersection) are responsible for the bizarre equipment failures that often are the cause of these accidents.) The Indians near Toronto have legends of these tunnels.

Newfoundland Iron Mine Entrance
After one of the Iron Mines in Newfoundland Province had been dug deeper than any other, strange happenings caused the mine to be shut down. The mining town in which this mine is located is near the Newfoundland-Quebec Border. This mine, having been condemned, is off-limits, and the police DO enforce this. Sneaking in late at night seems to be the only way to gain entrance.

BRAZIL
One tunnel in Brazil is near Ponte Grosse in the state of Parana. (Fruit orchards were seen here.) Another entrance in Brazil is near Rincon, state of Parana. Also, in the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, near the city of Joinville there is a mountain containing an entrance to the tunnels. (Santa Catarina is an area alive with subterranean activity, including strange 'singing' from underground.) Another entrance in Brazil is in the state of Sao Paulo near Concepiao. Still another entrance in Santa Catarina near Gaspar has subterranean fruit orchards. "The states of Santa Catarina and Parana, Brazil are honeycombed by a network of Atlantean tunnels that lead to subterranean cities."

9/14/2006 03:37:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

911 and numerology.

Anyone with a brain not in reptilian mode (not naming names here begins with s)

The kid angle fits.



Anyone can see they use the occult to further their desires.

9/14/2006 03:41:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous (of course) 3:37 said:
New York City
There is an entrance to the tunnels in New York City "in the vicinity of Midtown Manhattan that can be reached through an abandoned elevator shaft that only very few know about


Wow. That really pinpoints it. I know exactly where that is. Now we can blow up the whole thing and expose the Powers that Be and show the masses what dupes they've been.

Give yourself a pat on the back for figuring it out... or rather, reading the book that claims to figure it out and then regurgitating it here.

If you're going to keep post these long-ass cut/paste jobs, at least make them interesting or relevant to the original post.

9/14/2006 03:46:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A spectre haunts the democratic nations -- the spectre of TECHNOFASCISM. All the powers of the espionage empire and the scientific establishment have entered into an unholy alliance to evoke this spectre: Psychiatrist and spy, Dulles and Delgado, microwave specialists and clandestine operators.

Where the high priests do as thou wilt


A mind is a terrible thing to waste -- and a worse thing to commandeer.

9/14/2006 03:52:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Billy you grumpy old fart.
Laugh you beatlmaniac.

Short enough for your attention span?

9/14/2006 03:54:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I missed cutting and pasting the black hole btwn yo ass Billy Bob Shrubibobb.

9/14/2006 03:57:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Alright, Shrub, I’ll rise to the bait, although this time I might appear to be on the other side of the sticky Icke line. It’s all the fault of the Scots, on two weirdly opposite levels. The first is brilliantly described by our friend Joe Bageant, unparalled skewer-er of American idiocy, in a piece that you guys have to read called Drink, Pray, Fight, Fuck, in which Joe talks about a certain element in American society, one that still primarily infests Appalachia, but whose influence has infected the entire country: the desecendants of the Reivers, the "land pirates" of the marches along both sides of the Scots/English border. Now, Joe gives a pretty good account of the original Reivers, but the best is certainly a great book by George Macdonald Frazier called The Steel Bonnets. What Joe gets just right is what all those rednecks who climbed out of that gene pool are like, and he should know: he lives among them, a native, so to speak. Introducing his hillbilly neighbors, Joe writes:

You may not meet them among your circle of friends, but there are millions of Americans who fiercely believe we should nuke North Korea and Iran, seize the Middle East's oil, and replace the U.S. Constitution with the Christian Bible. They believe the United States will conquer the entire world and convert it to our notions of democracy and fundamentalist Christian religion. And that will happen says my Christian neo-conservative friend Dave Henderson, "when we elect a man with the balls to use our nukes."

Joe goes on to describe the Reiver (or “Borderer”) influence on the rest of the country:

Americans have always described themselves in Borderer terms and values, such as "fierce, liberty loving," "individualistic," "freely religious," and "fighting to defend our way of life." With the neo-conservative takeover of American politics, this has intensified, and we see a supercharging of these themes in the forms of fanatical religiosity, hatred of government, bellicose piety, and in a new twist, the technological fist of Jesus smiting the swarthy godless heathen in the name of a crude-oil-stained flag.

Like I said, you gotta read the rest of Joe’s essay; it’s just brilliant. So, that’s the one side, the unthinking rednecks who actually inform so much of Americanism. They’re like some kind of Icky history cardboard cut-outs instead of “real people.” On the other side, you’ve got this other thing coming out of Scotland, the Scottish Enlightenment, starring Adam Smith and other famous economic hitmen and realpolitikers. The case for the influence of these self-righteous psychos is made in a book modestly entitled How the Scots Invented the Modern World: the true story of how western Europe’s poorest nation created our world and everything in it, by Arthur Herman. I haven’t read that one, but there’s a discussion of it—the history of what I would call reptilianism, although I’m sure Mr. Icke wouldn’t see any tails there…or, well, he probably would, but that’s beside the point—at a website called Open Democracy, free thinking for the world.

The discussion there is an essay by Tom Nairn called The Free World’s End? In which he traces the urge to reptilate in the form of neo-liberal and neo-conservatism and how these folks have got the whole fucking world in the gunsights. Nairn’s main focus is a critique of Timothy Garton Ash’s book Free World, which “seeks to conserve the global status quo through a comforting subordination to American power. His wide-ranging survey suggest that the new century is not going to embrace any such outcome” Interestingly, Nairn starts off with a quote from Robert Musil which casts suspicion and doubt on the idea of there even being any kind of plan behind history, much less the creepy, murderous sort of conspiracy hijinks that we’re always on about here at RI:

“Progress itself is not something that unfolds in a single line. Along with the natural weakening an idea suffers as it becomes diffuse, there is also the criss–crossing of influences from new sources of ideas. The innermost core of the life of every age, an inchoate, swelling mass, is poured into moulds forged by much earlier times. Every present period is simultaneously now and yet millennia old. This millipede moves on political, economic, cultural, biological and countless other legs, each of which has a different tempo and rhythm. One can see this as a unified picture and elaborate it in terms of a single cause by always keeping to a central perspective...but one can also find satisfaction in the exact opposite. There is no plan in this, no reason: fine. Does this really make it any uglier than if there were a plan?”
(Robert Musil, “Notes for Readers Who Have Eluded the Decline of the West”, 1921.)

But then Nairn looks at another historian-dude’s view of Joe Bageant’s kinfolk who arrives at quite different conclusions:

Anatol Lieven’s incisive account of American nationalism in America Right or Wrong has become the indispensable reference–point. As he makes clear, the furnace–blast following 9/11 was no mere lapse, or half–hearted return to the familiarity of war, the shock–effect of a single moment. Lieven analyses “not only the strength of this nationalism and its alternation between messianic idealism and chauvinism, but also its highly unreflective character”. Americans still find it hard to “step outside American national myths and look at the nation with detachment, not as an exceptional city on a hill, but as a mortal nation among other nations...” (p 222). After 2001 the messianic Creed – a mixture of Enlightenment motifs with Christian fundamentalism – and “right–or–wrong” chauvinism achieved critical mass as never before, and generated a chain reaction or historical pattern “whose consequences could be sinister indeed” (p 221).
Sinister patterns achieving critical mass? That sounds like a Rigorous discussion to me, alright.

So, you’ve got willing and unwilling dupes, lambs, and footsoldiers on one side and ruthless, cold, scaly-skinned beings on the other (the narco-traffiking pedophiles who drink so much ink around here) and they all come out of (divergent) Scottish traditions. And that’s without even getting into any Scottish Rite hooliganism…

9/14/2006 04:04:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

True 99 percent are convinced by the greatest propaganda effort ever.

Goebbels would have loved the tv.

So mob rule says NUKE EM.

Since lots of the people in WTC 911 rescue ops are dead or dying the first salvo has been fired.

MINI NUKES.

Cool.

I got my pottasium tabs.

Just hope ground zero is not too close.

9/14/2006 04:12:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lets use dogs as test subjects.
For NUCLEAR FALLOUT.
They metabolize faster than us humans.

By HEIDI EVANS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Maryland Firefighter John Gilkey with his dog, Bear.
Fourteen search and rescue dogs have died since their exposure to toxic rubble from the Sept. 11 terrorist attack - including eight from cancer, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. But researchers believe there is no connection between the deaths and the chemicals they were exposed to.

Despite the study's findings, some of the owners whose dogs have died still blame the toxic brew the dogs immersed themselves in during the hunt for survivors and remains.

"We can't find any link at this point that ties the 14 deaths to events of Sept. 11," said Dr. Cynthia Otto, the study's lead researcher. "Some have passed away, but the causes of death are no different than in the control group. That is good news."

Otto's team, which has been monitoring the health of 97 dogs who worked at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, did find "significantly higher" antibodies in the search dogs in the first year after the terrorist attack.

The elevated presence of antibodies, she explained, showed the dogs had been exposed to foreign substances that pressed their immune systems into higher gear.

Although Otto was heartened to find the vast majority of dogs were in good health, given the exposure and the blood changes in the first year, questions remain about possible long-term effects.

"I don't think these dogs are completely out of the woods," she said. "That is why we need to monitor these dogs until the end of their lives - for the dogs' sake and for people's sake. If there is a problem in the dogs down the line, there is a good chance a similar problem could be found in people."

Among the canine deaths was Servus, a 12-year-old Belgian Malinois police dog, who had to be carried out on a stretcher from Ground Zero after he fell into a hole face down, his snout and lungs filled with concrete dust and ash. He died of pancreatitis, Otto said.

And Anna, a 4-year-old German shepherd who spent three days crawling on her belly trying to scent any survivors, was put down Aug. 2, 2002, ravaged by an unusual bone-eating fungal infection.

"Anna had been to the vet two months before she was deployed, and her blood work and X-rays were fine," said Sarah Atlas, a New Jersey emergency medical technician and Anna's handler. "I know the university did everything they could to help her, and they say that Anna was probably genetically predisposed to the disease, but in my heart I know what I feel."

John Gilkey, a Maryland firefighter, lost his 10-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever, Bear, to hepatitis last September. The dog's liver tests were not normal before the eight nights he spent on the World Trade Center pile, and blood tests and a biopsy showed disease soon afterward.

"I was surprised," Gilkey said, when he got the medical results. "But to be perfectly honest, I don't think Bear was made sick by the World Trade Center." Fighting back emotion, Gilkey added, "Bear and I had 21 months together after the diagnosis. I miss him terribly."

Dr. Philip Fox of Manhattan's Animal Medical Center, who has been monitoring the health of 30 New York City police dogs who worked at the World Trade Center, agreed with Otto's findings.

"These dogs have not been inundated by suspicious or debilitating diseases that we were afraid might occur," Fox said.

"They all had lung irritation, eye irritation and coughing in the first few weeks, but they seem to be clinically healthy almost three years later, except for a couple of animals who died of cancer that would be expected, given their age and breed."

9/14/2006 04:17:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The researchers are afraid of being killed by people who might not like them being so independent as to say there is a fucking link.
So they say no link.
Yea right.

9/14/2006 04:19:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

They also stated this photo had been on the internet since 1979.

Reminds me of the Beavis and Butthead "In A Gadda Davida Killer" Thing, where the cops link Beavis to a 1969 killing. When asked how a boy who wasn't born yet could commit the murders, police said "He's very clever".

9/14/2006 04:41:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just wanted to make sure everyone (especially Jeff) saw this. It's a little off topic... but at the same time totally related, of course.

Dubai Ruler Sued in U.S. over Enslaving Small Boys

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/09/dubai_ruler_sue.html

9/14/2006 05:46:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can tell you that photo of the three boys looks very legit to me. My son is the same age Johnny Gosch would be. Pictures I made of him in 1982 have that same sort of faded, slightly pinkish cast. The clothes and hair were very much the same styles. I believe that is a real photo taken around that time.

People are still trying to debunk this. Why?

9/14/2006 06:30:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anonymous idiot at 4:12 pm wrote: "MINI NUKES. Cool. I got my pottasium tabs. Just hope ground zero is not too close."

You won't have to worry about the radiation, numbnuts. The "pottasium" [sic, it's spelled with one t, not two] will kill you.

It's Iodine you take prior to being exposed to radiation, to protect the thyroid from taking up radioactive I.

Potassium slows the heart, and enough of it will stop it.

Happy camping.

9/14/2006 06:39:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's Iodine you take prior to being exposed to radiation, to protect the thyroid from taking up radioactive I.

Is that what Oppenheimer ingested when he was heading up the Manhattin Project?

9/14/2006 06:43:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Mexico piles on..

http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=34710

9/14/2006 08:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrub:

Yes.

9/14/2006 09:16:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Mojo.. I can't believe you have never heard of zeolite. Moses used it. They capped Chernobyl with it. I use it in my garden and fully expect to survive Armagedden. Zeolite will cleanse the air, water and earth and can be expected to work for 10,000 years.

9/14/2006 09:18:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shubagedon raises interesting point. Is I123 or I131?

9/14/2006 10:08:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Shrublefish, yo yo
Don't be readin' no Joe
We all bein' be in
nukey North Korean
Irritatin essence
Timely coalescence
sHruBBaBubBub
2 jErKs inna cLub
oNe gottsa sPenD
dIpSHrubBa's pAy sTub

9/14/2006 10:22:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Joseph Eclair Pierre René Shrub (July 27, 1970–July 16, 2013) was one of the most prolific writers in America during the early twenty-first century. His style and personality during later life complemented the nickname he received in childhood, "Stupid Schlemiel." Known for his strange lack of knowledge on virtually any subject, his strongly held views on his own obsessive need for attention were expressed at length in a series of famous blog comments, 'The Dunciad,' still cited as textbook examples of idiocy.

9/14/2006 10:34:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anyone read this??? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5346430.stm

9/15/2006 12:49:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What has happened to the comments here? Not long ago, it was a place to find intelligent, researched writing: A learning and enlightening experience. Unfortunately, it is now a mishmash of off-topic, back biting, vulgar remarks way too personal between the recent "regulars." I guess the disinfo agents have taken over to stop the flow of exchanged on-topic ideas. Sorry, Jeff.

9/15/2006 01:25:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hey jeff
did you hear about the Dubai royal family members being sued for child trafficking? From the independent:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1603710.ece

would love to get your take on it!

9/15/2006 02:00:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks pmp for posting that link! I thought i was going crazy that I couldn't find it. Padilla! (slaps forehead)that's the name...

ericswan, I have a friend who just went into remission, she's been using zeolite and swears by it...

9/15/2006 04:05:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"So, you’ve got willing and unwilling dupes, lambs, and footsoldiers on one side and ruthless, cold, scaly-skinned beings on the other (the narco-traffiking pedophiles who drink so much ink around here) and they all come out of (divergent) Scottish traditions. And that’s without even getting into any Scottish Rite hooliganism…"

In the opening few minutes of Alex Jones' film in Bohemian Grove, when he made it past security, past multiple guard shacks, and was actually first within the Bohemian Grove, on the video, you can hear the lilting Scottish bagpipes among the redwoods welcoming the Grovers on their first day there as they assemble.

Perhaps its a double meaning for some there. Wonder who set up the soundtrack. I like bagpipes myself, though in that context with what I was reading and know about the whole Scottish parapolitical thing, it was chilling video confirmation in some sense. At least that is how I interpreted it. It may be nothing, I agree, though I wanted to mention it. Enough said.

And on Bush family close friends the Emirs of Dubai (who are or were the hunting friends of Osama bin Laden), the UK-Independent article notes:

"The suit was filed in federal court in Miami, because the Maktoums have vast horse farm holdings in Florida - part of a multi-billion dollar investment they have in the US, ranging from sporting pursuits to hotels, residential buildings, health care facilities and Dubai Ports World, the company that tried unsuccessfully to take over six leading US ports last year."

As for the Osama/Dubai link involved in this see this:

PORTGATE & 9-11: Bush vows to give U.S. ports to Osama's Hunting Partner, Emir of Dubai which reads in part there:

Bush wants to sell off U.S. ports to State of UAE because its bribe for "UAE-US NAFTA" style agreement, instead of security; & UAE's Emir is a hunting companion of Osama bin Laden; Bush claims he will veto Congressional attempts ***to stop sale** of U.S. ports to Osama bin Laden's hunting partner.

The Emir of Dubai, and the head of the family that owns Dubai Ports is an associate and *hunting* companion of Osama Bin Laden.

...

"The United States' trade relationship with the UAE is the third largest in the Middle East, after Israel and Saudi Arabia. The two nations are engaged in bilateral free talks that would liberalise trade between the two countries and would, in theory at least, allow companies to own and operate businesses in both nations....The fact that no politicians and almost no media wants to even explore this simple fact is telling. Here we have a major US security scandal with the same country we are simultaneously negotiating a free trade pact with, and no one in Washington is saying a thing. The silence tells you all you need to know about a political/media establishment that is so totally owned by Big Money interests they won't even talk about what's potentially at the heart of a burgeoning national security scandal.

...looks like between all of us, we can come up with a real connection between this Dubai and bin laden, and this is heavily indicting on Bush considering his insistence that he will VETO (link to rawstory.com) any attempt to stop this deal.

Bush is squirming on this hook and with his connections to the House of Saud, and the Bin Ladens, this is looking even worse. Selling us out to the terrorists?

George Tenent says in sworn testimony before the 911 Committee that we couldn't bomb Usama Bin at his hunting camp in Afhganistan because "you might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process, which I'm sure entered into everybody's calculation in all this".

In other words, that is saying that the whole UAE/Dubai emir network is part of the CIA groups connected around the Bush family and a whole lot else. The child slavery is only scratching the surface. Look below for the "postmodern pro-British slave labor emirate" that the shiek has created.

The UAE royal family, (you know, the guys who OWN Dubai World) used to hunt frequently (yes, frequently) with Usama Bin Laden, right up until 9/11 are now to be handed control of our most important ports?

Oh, one other thing: Even after the U.S. had a price on his head, and even after Bill Clinton personally requested that he be held, the UAE released Bin Laden to leave the country after he secured medical treatment there.

Right. Hand over control of our ports to these pigs. What a great fu**in' idea.

State terrorists making crony financial policies for themselves.

And from the BBC article version:

"Dubai's ruler has been accused of enslaving thousands of young children for camel races in a class-action lawsuit filed in the US. The action claims Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, his brother Hamdam and 500 others are responsible for abducting and trafficking the children."

Are we surprised?

"The case was filed in Miami where Sheikh Mohammed and his brother, Sheikh Hamdam bin Rashid al-Maktoum, have property.

The two, along with the other 500 defendants who the suit says are as yet unknown, face nine counts.

They include engaging in slavery, conspiring to engage in slavery, engaging in or facilitating child labour, battery, assault, infliction of emotional distress and wrongful death.

The use of child camel jockeys was banned in Dubai 13 years ago.


Laws, laws laws. Do the criminal psychopathic elite do anything except laugh at them?

However, all forms of social progress are means of limiting and boxing in the criminality and psychopathic idiocy of elites.

Perhaps the Emirs will make a deal with the Bush family to purchase Florida to get this out of their hair.

I'm sure the Bushes would prefer working under the emir as well. Why? Look at the Disneyland fascism that Dubai has become,
exactly like Bush's Florida:

This is an article I remembered from Mother Jones, entitled "Dubai: Sinister Paradise". Before getting into that, note this dynamic about Dubai:

Dubai generally refers to

* one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates on the Persian Gulf, or

* that emirate's main city, sometimes called "Dubai City" to distinguish it from the emirate.

Dubai is the most populous and second largest emirate (in terms of size) in the United Arab Emirates after Abu Dhabi. Dubai is distinct from other members of the UAE in that revenues from oil account for only 6% of its gross domestic product.

A majority of the emirate's revenues are from the Jebel Ali Free Zone (JAFZ) [2] and now, increasingly, from tourism [and on the opposite side, international mafia run prostitution, money laundering, and child kidnapping/slavery as well, to boot].

In February 2005, the construction of Dubai Waterfront was announced [6], it will be 2½ times the size of Washington D.C., roughly seven times the size of the island of Manhattan. Dubai Waterfront will be a mix of canals and islands full of hotels and residential areas that will add 500 miles of man-made waterfront. It will also contain Al Burj, another one of the tallest buildings in the world.

Dubai has also launched Dubiotech. This is a new park to be targeted at Biotech companies working in pharma, medical fields, genetic research and even biodefense [i.e., state bioterrorism].

A computer image of the 'Burj Dubai' in the United Arab Emirates, which will be the world's highest building when completed in November 2008.

July 14, 2005

The narration begins: As your jet starts its descent, you are glued to your window. The scene below is astonishing: a 24-square-mile archipelago of coral-colored islands in the shape of an almost finished puzzle of the world. In the shallow green waters between continents, the sunken shapes of the Pyramids of Giza and the Roman Coliseum are clearly visible.

In the distance are three other large island groups configured as palms within crescents and planted with high-rise resorts, amusement parks, and a thousand mansions built on stilts over the water.

The "Palms" are connected by causeways to a Miami-like beachfront chock-a-block full of mega-hotels, apartment high-rises and yacht marinas.

As the plane slowly banks toward the desert mainland, you gasp at the even more improbable vision ahead.

Out of a chrome forest of skyscrapers (nearly a dozen taller than 1000 feet) soars a new Tower of Babel. It is an impossible one-half-mile high: the equivalent of the Empire State Building stacked on top of itself.

You are still rubbing your eyes with wonderment and disbelief when the plane lands and you are welcomed into an airport emporium where hundreds of shops seduce you with Gucci bags, Cartier watches, and one-kilogram bars of solid gold.

You make a mental note to pick up some duty-free gold on your way out.

The hotel driver is waiting for you in a Rolls Royce Silver Seraph. Friends have recommended the Armani Hotel in the 160-story tower or the seven-star hotel with an atrium so huge that the Statue of Liberty would fit inside, but instead you have opted to fulfill a childhood fantasy. You always have wanted to be Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Your jellyfish-shaped hotel is, in fact, exactly 66 feet below the sea surface. Each of its 220 luxury suites has clear Plexiglas walls that provide spectacular views of passing mermaids as well as the hotel's famed "underwater fireworks:" a hallucinatory exhibition of "water bubbles, swirled sand, and carefully deployed lighting." Any initial anxiety about the safety of your sea-bottom resort is dispelled by the smiling concierge. The structure has a multi-level failsafe security system, he reassures you, that includes protection against terrorist submarines as well as missiles and aircraft.

Although you have an important business meeting at the Internet City free-trade zone with clients from Hyderabad and Taipei, you have arrived a day early to treat yourself to one of the famed adventures at the Restless Planet dinosaur theme park.

Indeed, after a soothing night's sleep under the sea, you are aboard a monorail headed for a Jurassic jungle. Your expedition encounters some peacefully grazing Apatosaurs, but you are soon attacked by a nasty gang of velociraptors.

The animatronic beasts are so flawlessly lifelike -- in fact, they have been designed by experts from the British Museum of Natural History -- that you shriek in fear and delight.

With your adrenaline pumped-up by this close call, you polish off the afternoon with some thrilling snowboarding on the local black diamond run. Next door is the Mall of Arabia, the world's largest mall -- the altar of the city's famed Shopping Festival that attracts 5 million frenetic consumers each January -- but you postpone the temptation.

Instead, you indulge in some expensive Thai fusion cuisine at a restaurant near Elite Towers that was recommended by your hotel driver. The gorgeous Russian blond at the bar keeps staring at you with almost vampire-like hunger, and you wonder whether the local sin scene is as extravagant as the shopping?..

The Sequel to Blade Runner?

Welcome to paradise. But where are you? Is this a new science-fiction novel from Margaret Atwood, the sequel to Blade Runner, or Donald Trump tripping on acid?

No, it is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010.

After Shanghai (current population: 15 million), Dubai (current population: 1.5 million) is the world's biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and what locals dub "supreme lifestyles."

Dozens of outlandish mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under construction or will soon leave the drawing boards.

A sattelite photo of 'Jebel Ali Palm Island,' the second Palm Island to be built off the coast of Dubai.

Eventually, three palm-shaped artificial islands will be built in the Dubai area.

The first one, 'Jumeira Palm' is almost completed.

A satellite photo of 'Jebel Ali Palm Island,' the second Palm Island to be built off the coast of Dubai.

Eventually, three palm-shaped artificial islands will be built in the Dubai area. The first one, 'Jumeira Palm' is almost completed.

Under the enlightened despotism [with a stress on despotism, keep reading] of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly.

It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. [and Orwell].

Multibillionaire Sheik Mo -- as he's affectionately known to Dubai's expats -- not only collects thoroughbreds (the world's largest stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long Project Platinum which has its own submarine and flight deck), but also seems to have imprinted Robert Venturi's cult Learning from Las Vegas in the same way that more pious Moslems have memorized The Quran. (One of the Sheik's proudest achievements, by the way, is to have introduced gated communities to Arabia.)

Under his leadership, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board into which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, "cities within cities" -- whatever is the latest fad in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: Everything must be "world class," by which he means number one in The Guinness Book of Records.

Thus Dubai is building the world's largest theme park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and the first sunken hotel among other firsts.

Sheikh Mo's architectural megalomania, although reminiscent of Albert Speer and his patron, is not irrational. Having "learned from Las Vegas," he understands that if Dubai wants to become the luxury-consumer paradise of the Middle East and South Asia (its officially defined "home market" of 1.6 billion), it must ceaselessly strive for excess. [and have direct 'investment access' into the international CIA pedophilia child circuit assuredly as well].

From this standpoint, the city's monstrous caricature of futurism is simply shrewd marketing. Its owners love it when designers and urbanists anoint it as the cutting edge. Architect George Katodrytis wrote: "Dubai may be considered the emerging prototype for the 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities that extend out over the land and sea."

Moreover, Dubai can count on the peak-oil [hyperbole] epoch to cover the costs of these [equal] hyperboles. Each time you spent $40 to fill your tank, you are helping to irrigate Sheik Mo's oasis.

Precisely because Dubai is rapidly pumping the last of its own modest endowment of oil, it has opted to become the postmodern "city of nets" -- as Bertolt Brecht called his fictional boomtown of Mahoganny -- where the super-profits of oil are to be reinvested in Arabia's one truly inexhaustible natural resource: sand. (Indeed mega-projects in Dubai are usually measured by volumes of sand moved: 1 billion cubic feet in the case of The World.)

Al-Qaeda and the war on terrorism deserve some of the credit for this boom. Since 9/11, many Middle Eastern investors, fearing possible lawsuits or sanctions, have pulled up stakes in the West. According to Salman bin Dasmal of Dubai Holdings, the Saudis alone have repatriated one-third of their trillion-dollar overseas portfolio. The sheikhs are bringing it back home, and last year, the Saudis were believed to have ploughed at least $7 billion into Dubai's sand castles.

Another aqueduct of oil wealth flows from the neighboring Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The two statelets dominate the United Arab Emirates -- a quasi-nation thrown together by Sheik Mo's father and the ruler of Abu Dhabi in 1971 to fend off threats from Marxists in Oman and, later, Islamists in Iran.

Today, Dubai's security is guaranteed by the American nuclear super-carriers usually berthed at the port of Jebel Ali. Indeed, the city-state aggressively promotes itself as the ultimate elite "Green Zone" in an increasingly turbulent and dangerous region.

Meanwhile, as increasing numbers of experts warn that the age of cheap oil is passing, the al-Maktoum clan can count on a torrent of nervous oil revenue seeking a friendly and stable haven. When outsiders question the sustainability of the current boom, Dubai officials point out that their new Mecca is being built on equity, not debt.

Since a watershed 2003 decision to open unrestricted freehold ownership to foreigners, wealthy Europeans and Asians have rushed to become part of the Dubai bubble. A beachfront in one of the "Palms" or, better yet, a private island in "The World" now has the cachet of St. Tropez or Grand Cayman.

The old colonial masters lead the pack as Brit expats and investors have become the biggest cheerleaders for Sheikh Mo's dreamworld: David Beckham [English footballer who plays for Real Madrid; captain of English national team from 15 November 2000 to 2 July 2006] owns a beach and [aging rock star] Rod Stewart, an island (rumored, in fact, to be named Great Britain).

An Indentured, Invisible Majority

[The "Utopian Dystopia"]

The utopian character of Dubai, it must be emphasized, is no mirage. Even more than Singapore or Texas, the city-state really is an apotheosis of neo-liberal "values".


On the one hand, it provides investors with a comfortable, Western-style, property-rights regime, including freehold ownership, that is unique in the region. Included with the package is a broad tolerance of booze, recreational drugs, halter tops, and other foreign vices formally proscribed by Islamic law. (When expats extol Dubai's unique "openness," it is this freedom to carouse [and cathouse]-- not to organize unions or publish critical opinions -- that they are usually praising.)

On the other hand, Dubai, together with its emirate neighbors, has achieved the state of the art in the disenfranchisement of labor. Trade unions, strikes, and agitators are illegal, and 99% of the private-sector workforce are easily deportable non-citizens.

Indeed, the deep thinkers at the American Enterprise and Cato institutes must salivate when they contemplate the system of classes and entitlements in Dubai.

At the top of the social pyramid, of course, are the al-Maktoums and their cousins who own every lucrative grain of sand in the sheikhdom. Next, the native 15% percent of the population -- whose uniform of privilege is the traditional white dishdash -- constitutes a leisure class whose obedience to the dynasty is subsidized by income transfers, free education, and government jobs.

A step below, are the pampered mercenaries: 150,000-or-so British ex-pats, along with other European, Lebanese, and Indian managers and professionals, who take full advantage of their air-conditioned affluence and two-months of overseas leave every summer.

However, South Asian contract laborers, legally bound to a single employer and subject to totalitarian social controls,, make up the great mass of the population. Dubai lifestyles are attended by vast numbers of Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Indian maids, while the building boom is carried on the shoulders of an army of poorly paid Pakistanis and Indians working twelve-hour shifts, six and half days a week, in the blast-furnace desert heat.

Dubai, like its neighbors, flouts ILO labor regulations and refuses to adopt the international Migrant Workers Convention. Human Rights Watch in 2003 accused the Emirates of building prosperity on "forced labor." Indeed, as the British Independent recently emphasized in an exposé on Dubai, "The labour market closely resembles the old indentured labour system brought to Dubai by its former colonial master, the British.",

"Like their impoverished forefathers," the paper continued, "today's Asian workers are forced to sign themselves into virtual slavery for years when they arrive in the United Arab Emirates. Their rights disappear at the airport where recruitment agents confiscate their passports and visas to control them"

In addition to being super-exploited, Dubai's helots are also expected to be generally invisible.

The bleak work camps on the city's outskirts, where laborers are crowded six, eight, even twelve to a room, are not part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury without slums or poverty. In a recent visit, even the United Arab Emirate's Minister of Labor was reported to be profoundly shocked by the squalid, almost unbearable conditions in a remote work camp maintained by a large construction contractor.

Yet when the laborers attempted to form a union to win back pay and improve living conditions, they were promptly arrested.

Paradise, however, has even darker corners than the indentured-labor camps. The Russian girls at the elegant hotel bar are but the glamorous facade of a sinister sex trade built on kidnapping, slavery, and sadistic violence. Dubai -- any of the hipper guidebooks will advise -- is the "Bangkok of the Middle East," populated with thousands of Russian, Armenian, Indian, and Iranian prostitutes controlled by various transnational gangs and mafias.

(The city, conveniently, is also a world center for money laundering, with an estimated 10% of real estate changing hands in cash-only transactions.)

[Criminal Arab Mafia don] Sheikh Mo and his thoroughly modern regime, of course, disavow any connection to this burgeoning red-light industry, although insiders know that the whores are essential to keeping all those five-star hotels full of European and Arab businessmen.

But the Sheikh himself has been personally linked to Dubai's most scandalous vice: child slavery. [This was from a 2005 article]

Camel racing is a local passion in the Emirates, and in June 2004, Anti-Slavery International released photos of pre-school-age child jockeys in Dubai. HBO Real Sports simultaneously reported that the jockeys, "some as young as three -- are kidnapped or sold into slavery, starved, beaten and raped." Some of the tiny jockeys were shown at a Dubai camel track owned by the al-Maktoums.

The Lexington Herald-Leader -- a newspaper in Kentucky, where Sheikh Mo has two large thoroughbred farms -- confirmed parts of the HBO story in an interview with a local blacksmith who had worked for the crown prince in Dubai.

He reported seeing "little bitty kids" as young as four astride racing camels.
Camel trainers claim that the children's shrieks of terror spur the animals to a faster effort.

Sheikh Mo, who fancies himself a prophet of modernization, likes to impress visitors with clever proverbs and heavy aphorisms. A favorite: "Anyone who does not attempt to change the future will stay a captive of the past."

Yet the future that he is building in Dubai -- to the applause of billionaires and transnational corporations everywhere -- looks like nothing so much as a nightmare of the past: Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of Araby.

This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.

It sounds like a whole state version of the slave labor culture on the luxury cruise lines.

Consumerism is the new fascism.

"Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in," says Ballard,...[at least the mindless kinds of it.]

9/15/2006 04:07:00 AM  
Blogger Vanished friend said...

Jeff, you might want to update this blog post with information regarding the photos being on -- if not FROM -- that sicko site circa June. See the forum's Gosch thread for more details. Perhaps you could save the colored brand-less version of the "b&w" photo in a photobucket account and post it?

9/15/2006 07:21:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The same story as Gosch, south of the U.S. Border. The PRI political network in the Mexican Congress is the main contact it seems for the pedophile network there, though it runs through a selct business elite and hotel managers in the tourist areas who organize it.


MEXICO:
Ties Between Elites and Child Sex Rings "Beyond Imagination"

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Sep 13 (IPS) - The complicity in Mexico between child sex rings and the political and business elites "goes beyond what we can even imagine," says activist Lydia Cacho, who faces death threats and was even thrown briefly into prison for revealing those ties in a book.

"What we have just seen is only the tip of the iceberg," Cacho told IPS, after the local media aired Tuesday recordings of telephone conversations between two prominent politicians and a hotel owner now in prison, and a wealthy local businessman.

The number of Mexican politicians and businessmen involved in child pornography and sex rings "would shock us if we knew the real extent of the phenomenon," said Cacho.

In one of the illegally taped conversations broadcast Tuesday, which apparently date back to 2004, the governor of the state of Veracruz, Fidel Herrera of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and Emilio Gamboa, head of the party's bloc in the lower house of Congress, can be heard talking on friendly terms with textile mogul Kamel Nacif.

Nacif, a Mexican of Lebanese origin, who in the obscenity-laced conversation can be heard asking Gamboa to block a gambling bill to be debated by Congress, is suing Cacho for libel.

In her 2004 book "Los demonios del Edén" (The Demons of Eden), Cacho -- who is a journalist and writer as well as the director of a women's shelter in Cancún -- links Nacif with Jean Succar, a Lebanese-born hotel owner who is in prison facing charges of arranging paedophile parties in that Mexican resort town.

In another of the anonymously recorded conservations leaked to the press and broadcast Tuesday, Nacif can be heard talking with Succar.

Succar, under arrest in Mexico since July, after he was extradited from the United States, can be heard asking Nacif for a seven million dollar loan to purchase a hotel in Cancún, to which Nacif responds in the affirmative.

Later, the two exchange information on "the girl from Miami," who they refer to as "putita" (little whore), and who they say they have paid 2,000 dollars. Succar asks Nacif when it would be best to bring the girl to Cancún, and the latter responds that "next week, you son of a b***h, but you bring her to fornicate."

In Cacho's book, Succar is identified as the head of a ring of adults who subjected underage girls to sexual abuse in Cancún, in which Nacif allegedly took part.

Succar was arrested in February 2004 in the United States on child abuse charges and was extradited to Mexico in July, where he also faces charges for money laundering and organised crime.

"Los demonios del Edén" contains the personal accounts of minors who talk about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of a ring in which prominent figures were allegedly involved. The youngsters describe how the hotel owner sexually abused them himself, set up a prostitution ring to allow others to abuse them, and photographed them in order to sell the pornographic images on the Internet.

A 2004 study by researcher Elena Azaola, which estimated that some 17,000 children under the age of 18 are victims of the sex trade in Mexico, is also based on interviews with minors who managed to escape, as well as visits to establishments where underage girls and boys are forced to work as prostitutes.

The two PRI politicians, Herrera and Gamboa, denied [it's a lie, based on the tape, see above] having any illegal ties with Nacif, and said they did not even know Succar.

From their point of view, the airing of the tapped phone conversations was a low political blow aimed at their party.

The PRI, which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, came in third in the Jul. 2 presidential and legislative elections.

[Pedophile linked Mexican Congressman] Gamboa is one of the lawmakers who have approached Felipe Calderón of the conservative governing National Action Party (PAN) over the last few days, since he was confirmed [with hideous vote fraud continuing and likely about to split Mexico in two] as president-elect by the electoral court.

Javier González, a leader of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) legislators, said the leaked conversations between Nacif and the PRI politicians showed that the political system "is rotten."

The PRD argues that its candidate, Andrés López Obrador, lost the elections to Calderón because of fraud.

Cacho agrees that corruption is rife. "Many businessmen like Nacif have amassed huge fortunes in exchange for dark favours to politicians."

So far, no direct link between politicians or prominent businessmen and child porn or sex rings has been proven. But there are suspicions, which are fuelled by Nacif and his web of contacts.

Cacho, who has been under police protection since last year, when she began to receive death threats, was referred to in earlier leaked conversations, between Nacif and Mario Marín, governor of the state of Puebla, near the capital.

In the tapped conversations, Marín, a member of the PRI, can be heard telling Nacif that "I just gave a bump on the head to that old witch."

The two men also discussed how they had the activist arrested and thrown into a cell with "nutcases and dykes (lesbians)," so that she would be raped
-- something that did not occur, because in the prison, "the prisoners themselves and the guards protected me," the writer said in an earlier conversation with IPS.

The tapes, which were sent to the press anonymously and broadcast in February, were apparently recorded in December 2005, after Cacho was thrown into jail for 30 hours, after a grueling 20-hour drive from her home in Cancún to Puebla.

The activist was arrested in connection with the libel suit brought against her by Nacif.

But when the news of her arrest broke, the rights watchdog Amnesty International, the World Organisation Against Torture, the Inter-American Press Association and other international groups raised an outcry, and Cacho was released on bail.

After the scandal triggered by the leaked phone conversations in February, in which the governor of Puebla and Nacif -- who owns factories in that state -- are heard discussing actions to teach Cacho a lesson, the Supreme Court initiated an investigation to determine whether or not Marín had engaged in criminal activity. (FIN/2006)

http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=34710

9/15/2006 09:06:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

J. Robert Oppenheimer, (1904–1967) the Supervising Scientist of the Manhattan Project was giving a lecture at Rochester University seven years after the first atomic weapon was successfully detonated.

One student asked: “Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?”

Dr. Oppenheimer’s answer was short but extremely telling. Dr. Oppenheimer said: “Well – yes. In modern times, of course.”

Dr. Oppenheimer years earlier had described what he was thinking when he witnessed the first modern atomic explosion. His thoughts had gone to the Hindu Bhagvad Gita which states:

"Of a thousand suns in the sky if suddenly should burst forth the light, it would be like unto the light of that Exalted One.” (Bhagvad Gita XI, 12)

“Death am I, cause of destruction of the worlds, matured and set out to gather in the worlds there." (Bhagvad Gita XI, 32)

However, in answering the question Dr. Oppenheimer was not referring to the Hindu Bhagvad Gita but rather an ancient Indian text known as the Mahabharata. That which had occurred in Japan in 1945 was reminiscent of a far more ancient episode, one as early as 2450 BC in the regions of the upper Ganges.

The text reads:

...a single projectile charged with all the power of the universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as ten thousand suns rose in all its splendor......it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas....the corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours all foodstuffs were infected......To escape from this fire. The soldiers threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and their equipment...

The Epic of Gilgamesh ca. 2500 BC contains a strikingly similar account of a day when "the heavens cried out, the earth bellowed an answer, lightning flashed forth, fire flamed upwards, it rained down death. The brightness vanished, the fire was extinguished. Everyone who was struck by the lightning was turned to ashes."

9/15/2006 01:17:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I thought, perhaps, there hadn't been enough acrimonious bickering on the pros and cons of controlled demolition in the comments here, so....

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2006/09/14/911-the-wingnuts-v-the-sheeple/

9/11 - The Wingnuts v. The Sheeple
By RU Sirius
September 14th, 2006

Those who believe that 9/11 was an inside job are wingnuts — rank amateur investigators and their sycophantic followers. They can’t tell a rumor from a piece of evidence, or a piece of evidence from conclusive proof.

Those who believe that 9/11 was not an inside job are sheeple — brainwashed dupes who have a psychological block against accepting unpleasant facts.

As a 9/11 conspiracy agnostic, I suppose I can live with both of those characterizations. (Oh wait, I forgot — agnostics are gutless weasels who are afraid to take a stand.)

Both sides in this hostile exchange follow their own stream of evidence. Both sides say the evidence presented by their opponents is incomplete, misconstrued, or just downright false. Primary representatives of each point of view are characterized as sleazy opportunists with suspect connections. In other words, it’s pretty much like all other political debates that happen during polarized times, but a bit weirder….

….The one paragraph that really leaped out at me when reading Debunking [Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts, published by Popular Mechanics] blows a pretty big hole in the theories based on the planned demolition of the World Trade Center that seem to dominate most of the conspiracy theories. It reads, “The collapses of the three World Trade Center buildings are among the most extensively studied structural failures in American history. In the five years since 9/11, they have been the subject of lengthy investigations and engineering school symposiums, together involving hundreds of experts from academia and private industry, as well as the government.”

I asked Reagan if he could substantiate these claims or provide us with some links that could help us to do so. He sent along the following message, including links: “The American Society of Civil Engineers website has a research library. Search under ‘World Trade Center’ and you will find numerous papers studying the collapse of the buildings. This link (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm) describes the range of experts participating in the NIST investigation. On another site, The Bazant paper (http://www.iti.northwestern.edu/research/wtc/) is especially instructive. He is one of the world’s leading civil engineers.

I’ll suggest that those who are in search of “The Truth” in this matter would do well to read Debunking with an open mind, and to also follow the leads Mr. Reagan has provided. I would also suggest that those who dismiss all possibilities of government collusion would not be harmed if they admitted to themselves that relegating some of the well-documented fuckups and fiascoes of the American security establishment to incompetence does sometimes seem to stretch the boundaries of credulity.
_________________
Let the shouting commence!

9/15/2006 02:28:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Let the shouting commence!"

.

9/15/2006 05:39:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Avatars
The Internet is a complex phenomenon that does not lend itself to an all-inclusive interpretation. Its main feature is exactly the fact that it allows the expression of a wide range of human interests. There is no aspect of life that is not in some way represented in its fertile and "indeterminate" universe.
So we want to clarify that our reading is absolutely partial and it has arisen from observing several contact points, several striking analogies between this modern phenomenon and others that are placed in a very different and ancient time.
We refer to the orgiastic rites and specially to Dionysian rites and to all the phenomena connected to the cult of Dionysus in the Classical and Hellenistic age.
At the risk of appearing schematic, we intend to briefly describe the two phenomena, ancient and modern, and then examine analogies and differences in detail.
In our opinion the analogies are so relevant that it's worthwhile bringing them to your attention.

The Internet

The Internet presents a really blatant and resounding contrast between a hypertecnological and modern network on the one hand and the emergence of deep, archaic and not very "rational" emotions on the other.
The Internet arose for military aims. Originally, it was called Arpanet and connected American military structures.
If this is the origin, the development and the diffusion it has all over the world are connected for completely different reasons, which are more related to instinct than to technology and rationality.
One of the most widespread Internet phenomena is represented by the "chats", virtual communities, where thousands of people meet "on line", that is to say in real time, and communicate through the net.
Textual and graphic "chats" exist.
In the former, communication takes place through written messages that can be sent to single interlocutors or to groups of people who meet in virtual places called "channels". Every user joins the chat through a nickname that identifies him.
In the graphic chats a "real" virtual setting appears on the screen, made up of places where the users move and are represented by personalized graphic symbols, called "avatar", a word deriving from Oriental religions and that means "embodiment or manifestation of the divinity".
Avatars consist of images, drawings, icons used by the participants to represent themselves.
In these kinds of chat an illusion of movement, space and physicality is created.
In such a context, a series of quite peculiar phenomena emerge.
For example, in the Internet not only in the chats but also in the newsgroups and in the mailing lists -so-called "flame wars" occur; these are characterized by furious, long-lasting quarrels and denote the onset of uncontrolled, archaic emotions. Apparently, this type of behavior is produced by the kind of communication taking place in the Internet and even involves who appear to be sensible and well-balanced people in real life. In this respect, it is not unusual to run into inflamed disputes with reciprocal insults and paranoid ideas between respectable professionals who let themselves go with obscene language and personal offence.
Besides aggressiveness, often expressed in an unrestrained way, other deep emotions arise from using Internet and chats, like, for example, emotions connected with sexuality.
The most obvious and well-known expression is cybersex, sexual intercourse with on-line users. In any case in Internet sexuality is often explicitly expressed, frequently without considering social conventions and a sense of modesty.
Some people believe that there are easily identifiable conditions at the root of this phenomenon, which will be described by studying the analogies with ancient rites.

Dionysian rites

However difficult it may be, we will try to give a brief definition of Dionysus and its rites, pointing out that they were not the only orgiastic rites of ancient time, but definitely the most well-known.
Maybe the main feature of Dionysus is elusiveness. Scholars considered him from then on as the god of vegetation, of damp elements, and only later of wine; of the invasion of the divine into the everyday; of perpetually recurring life; of joy, of pain, of madness and the absurd.
In fact, these various elements, apparently unconnected, seem to be linked to a sort of religious and cultural associative chain. Originally, Dionysus seems to have been the god of shrub vegetation, that is of plants like the fig tree, vine, almond tree, which give fruits but not through the laborious work in the fields, which brings joy through the lifeblood. In this sense Dionysus is connected to a whole series of celebrations during winter and spring, where not only nature's reawakening was celebrated, but also the opening of the earth and the return of the spirits of the dead.
During these celebrations, they carried wooden phalluses in procession, they celebrated the marriage of the god to the wife of the archon or head king, they carried masks that copied the spirits of the dead.
In this sense, the joy given by the wine and the fall of limits was intrinsically accompanied by the worrying fall of boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead, between reality and madness. There are two faces to unrestraint - euphoric and worrying, cheerful and insane. The masks of Dionysian celebrations gave forth to theatre, another great phenomenon, linked to the god, distinguished by illusiveness.
Dionysus represents diversity, the other one who inevitably lives itself, is the place of the biggest contradictions - identity and diversity, presence and absence, imaginary and real, absolute and nothing, power and fragility, life and death, identity and passage. Since he unites the most untenable contradictions in himself at the same time, he really is the mad god par excellence.
Rites were celebrated in the mountains, at night, in the torchlight. They played musical instruments, which induced excitement: drums, flutes. The faithful, especially women, wore masks, danced round and round, shaking their heads, dressed in animal skins (both as prey such as the fawn, and as hunters such as the panther).
At the height of the excitement, they threw themselves on the sacrificial animals, tore them to pieces and ate them raw.

Analogies

Now let's try to describe the most obvious analogies.

1) Limitation of sensorial experience and specific features of communication

The description made by an author of the environment in which the netsurfer is plunged is evocative:
"You sit almost motionless, relaxed, your eyes focused on a glowing screen - the only source of light in an otherwise dark room. Your fingers tap lightly as your mind converges on the words and images that float before you. At times it seems like there is no difference between your thoughts and those images.
At times it seems the distinction between inner and outer worlds almost disappears. At times, time itself evaporates. You are a computer user immersed in cyberspace. All melts into a new reality that transcends the rules of conventional reality. Like a Zen master in meditation, you have become one with the virtual universe".
Communication occurs in writing, without seeing the others. The whole non-verbal communication is missing, substituted by the so-called "fancines", symbols made up from the characters of the keyboard, which represent smiling, sad, amazed, mute "fancine":
:-) :-( 8-X :-X
In chat there is a lag in communication, given by the time necessary to type the message and by the number of communications the user is engaged in. These asynchronies in communication stimulate projected experiences, fantasies that some people have compared to the situation that is created in the psychoanalytic setting.
In ancient times the limitations of sensorial experience were obtained by celebrating the rites at night, by torchlight, in isolated places, and above all by going away from the normal habitat, from relatives and from work activities.
They used rudimentary instruments to create the same situation of using a single source of light to attract attention in totally dark surroundings.

2) Identity Flexibility and Anonymity

Chat users are anonymous and use nicknames or avatars.
Anonymity makes it possible to express parts of ourselves that are usually hidden or repressed in real life.
The use of female pseudonyms by males is frequent, as is assuming sexual roles that are different from the real thing.
Anonymity means the user considers the other user not as another person but, in a certain sense as a part of his own inner word.
In ancient rites anonymity was obtained partly by separation from the familiar environment, and partly by using two kinds of disguises, masks or animal skins. One of the main components of the cult was men disguising themselves in women's clothes, beginning with the god himself.
In "Bacchants", Penteus, who is the most rational opponent of Dionysus, begins to show the first marks of madness just when he decides to disguise himself as a woman, apparently to better spy on the scandalous rites.
We were amazed by the use of the term "avatar" that has a clear religious origin in Internet.
In fact, the faithful of the ancient rite didn't disguise themselves generically, but took on the identity of mythical characters, like satires, and somehow took part in divinity, achieving a state of exaltation.
This was not simple anonymity, but rather the assumption of a new identity in a group situation.

3) Equalization of the Social Status

In Internet every user can express himself independently of what role he has in reality. What counts is how he/she presents himself and acts on the net.
Someone defined this aspect of the Internet as "net democracy".
Everyone could take part in Dionysian rites, whether they were a slave or free, young or old, man or woman. In theatre too, strongly connected to the rite of Dionysus, access was free and without divisions between the different social categories. It is useful to emphasize how great the subverting was given the severity of the social divisions at that time compared to now.

4) Stretching of Temporal and Spatial Boundaries

The common temporal and spatial coordinates are altered in Internet's virtual universe. In chats, it is possible to communicate on line with people who live in different places and time zones. A Japanese person from Osaka who has just got up can converse with an Italian in Rome who is about to go to bed.
In the absence of technical instruments, in ancient time the representation of mythical events from the past on stage in the theatre and in the Dionysian procession gave the illusion of overcoming temporal boundaries, linking past and present.

5) Alteration in the state of consciousness

"Under the right conditions, cyberspace becomes a dream world, not unlike the world which emerges when we sink into sleep.
This doesn't mean that these virtual experiences should be dismissed as whimsical mental meanderings with no value or purpose. Quite the contrary. Psychology clearly has established the necessity of nocturnal dreams for maintaining emotional health and promoting personal growth. The same may be true of virtual dreaming. Cyberspace is not simply an "information super-highway," It can offer the human psyche much more than facts. Virtual space can flex the boundaries of conscious and unconscious realities. It can tell us something about the meaning of "real." "
In the rite, alteration in the state of consciousness was achieved through wine and the use of specific drugs, by rhythmic, deafening music, by dancing, by running, practiced until exhaustion.

6) Access to Numerous Relationships

With regard to ancient rites, their character as group ceremonies should be stressed. Religious exaltation was not reached in a status of individual ecstasy, like in the Christian religion for example. The characteristic of the Dionysian cult was to reunite people connected by some kind of affinity, almost as a sect, whereas the other cults were practiced under state control by the whole population, without special distinctions.
In the "chattic" rites, the modern faithful gather in different channels, according to common interests and special affinities.
On this subject, it is useful to notice the stunned comment of a user: "Everywhere I go in cyberspace, I keep running into the same kind of people!"

7) Addiction

The above considerations explain why it is not rare for Internet use to lead to addiction. Many cases are already quoted in scientific literature. The case of a young man who stayed connected to the Internet for three days running without a break is from this period.
Something like this can be described as far as the Dionysian rites and the theatre that arises from them are concerned.
Lucianus tells the story of an addiction to the theatre. The citizens of Abdera lose their judgment after a performance of Andromeda by Euripides.
It was summer; after the performance, they were taken by a high fever, which turned into in hemorrhaging and sweating after seven days. Then they began to invent tragedies, speak in verses, scream and sing. The whole town was full of these pale, emaciated playwrights, until winter and the intense cold stopped everything. Andromeda had taken hold of their minds and Perseus was in the spirit of everyone.
From what we can deduce from this description, it was literally a form of being possessed by demon entities like Medusa, which had affected the audience.

8) Proselytism and epidemics

In Internet, proselytism is testified by its rapid spread. It is absolutely impossible to make a census of the net, because the amount of users increases continuously, also because of a sort of "evangelism".
Dionysus was the only god who had a form of proselytism, unlike all the others.
Both in the mythical age and in the historical one, missionaries who tried to spread the Dionysian cult are described.
Maybe its main feature was that it was epidemic.
According to scholars from the last century, Dionysus took no part in Greek rationality and he was the carrier of a type of madness interpreted in medical terms as collective hysteria.
The scholars believed he was foreign, that he came from barbarian countries, but Myceneun archives proved that from XII century BC, he was a Greek god.
The epidemics consisted of sudden madness. It especially hit women and led them to leave the cities.

9) Transgression

In the case of the Dionysian rites, the goal of transgression was to overcome the Greek religion's main cornerstone, the impassable distinction between man and god, the bronze sky (as Pindarus says), which separates mortals from immortals and that it is grave ubris to cross. Instead, the faithful achieved enthusiasm, that is to say the merging with the god that they felt inside.
The transgression of the Internet faithful can be identified in the attack on rationality and the limits imposed by the role and by social conventions.
In both cases, transgression is shown by the expression of aggressiveness, by using obscene language and above all by overcoming the limits of rational thought.
For example magic was in force in Dionysian comedy: animals and objects spoke and acted by their own will or to serve men, without following rational laws.

10) Opposition

Obviously opposition is linked with all the above forms of transgression.
In Internet there are crowds of net guardians. They take it upon themselves, with varying perseverance and modes, to ensure that morality and law are respected, like inflexible censors.
In Internet there are pages and pages of methods to unmask impostors and defend yourself from immoral, improper or criminal behavior.
The list of the opponents to the Dionysian cult is impressive and the punishments received by those who oppose it are even more disturbing.
Things are not much better for those who embrace it but the difficulties faced are worse for those who do not embrace it.
The punishment for opponents is represented by the impious and cruel form of what the guilty do not want to do in the pious form prescribed by the god.
The daughters of King Minia refuse to follow Dionysus, because they want to continue to work on the loom with excessive zeal and they don't want to leave their marital lives. They have hallucinations, see their work instruments covered in ivy. They go crazy and draw lots to choose which son to devour.
The pirates who kidnap Dionysus for a ransom see him turn into a bear and into a lion, without lifting a finger, limiting himself to a smile. Terrified, they throw themselves into the sea and turn into dolphins.
In another case, god's punishment is represented by a suicide epidemic among Athenian teenagers.
In several cities, Dionysus was represented by a double statue, with two identical pictures representing the Mad and the Healer of the madness. The only way to recover from divine foolishness was to live with it and be reconciled to it, not to get rid of it through exorcism.
One well-known opponent is Pentheus, Dionysus's cousin and opponent. He wants to retain his manly manners and lucidity. In order to watch the orgies unseen, that are not as obscene as he believes, Pentheus lets Dionysus disguise him as a woman, goes to the mountain, but is spotted and torn to pieces by his mother, who has gone mad and mistakes him for a wild beast.
On this occasion the observer not only alters the phenomenon being observed, but loses his life too.
Dionysian worship was both painful and orgiastic, as witnessed by songs of the grape harvest that mourned the splitting of the bunches of grapes as well as the god's death. Still in 691 AD, farmers cried "Dionysus" as they pressed the grapes and the Council of Constantinople forbad them to do so and ordered them to cry "Kyrie eleison" instead. Still in this period the wine-pressers wore masks that represented Sileni and Satyr. The wine like shed blood was a fine representation of the joyous and at the same time cruel character of life itself, more evident in all its most intense manifestations, when contradictions are clearer and more extreme.
The Dionysian cult was also repressed in Rome. Titus Livius recounts that the orgiastic rites had spread "like an epidemic" and that the followers had gathered in secret sects. Thousands of persons were indicted as betrayers of the country and pedophiles and were executed. The charges seemed to have been trumped up by the police and the whole episode looks very much like other witch-hunts.
Here is the speech of the consul Postumus: "Do you think, Quiriti, that these young men can become good soldiers and defend your wives and children? They have sworn an obscene oath, have raped children, and have been raped in turn."

Differences

Before examining the differences between the two phenomena, we would like to emphasize that they are both interesting and attractive and we do not express any moral criticism upon them. Let us try to understand the differences between them, beginning from the most obvious.
On the one hand, the rites were part of a religious, cultural, artistic world; on the other hand, they had a consistent and organic unity. They had a beginning and an end, performed a mythological plot, that everyone knew.
The rite included a growing paroxysm that had a cathartic effect and ended the rite. The believers were numbed into a post-hypnotic sleep.
The participants knew that during the rite they would lose all sense of time and space, but within a ritual with well-defined boundaries of time and space.
The mythological masks worn by the members were limited in number, codified and shared by the group. The individual could not choose any mask arbitrarily.
Internet is part of the social context from the technical point of view, but the phenomena we are examining are inconsistent and casual. They also lack internal coherence. Anybody can switch on or off at any moment. There is no plot and everyone can choose a different rite, like in a large supermarket. The masks (avatars) can belong to every time and context and we are impressed by their eclecticism.
From this point of view, the other orgiastic phenomena in the modern world, like discos, soccer matches and rock concerts, are different from Internet, since they have a defined setting and clear roles like the ancient rites. In these phenomena, the alteration of the state of awareness is balanced by stated rules. Similarly, in psychoanalytic sessions the setting is a necessary accessory for free association.
The phenomena mentioned also remind us of the ancient rites because they involve a physical expression of feelings; while in Internet there is a sort of "amputation" of the bodily side of the experience. We observe that in Internet the users are isolated in their homes and that their group is merely virtual. In this isolation, the other users are seen as non-human beings, as internal objects, not as real persons. Being non-human, they can be sexually and aggressively abused.
The lack of setting, plot and consistency can perhaps explain some aspects of Internet, such as addiction and delinquent behavior, which are so hard to control.
For example, people in Internet express pedophilic wishes and fantasies, feeling protected by anonymity and virtual "unreality", while the same people would perhaps not act out these drives in reality.
Users can risk losing their identity and become prisoners of their masks, like Pirandello's Henry the Fourth. This character takes part in a carnival cavalcade, where everybody wears disparate masks, goes mad, is no longer able to recover his past identity and spends twenty years out of reality.

Many articles about Internet describe delinquent behavior and methods to repress it.
As mentioned above, guardians are appointed to prevent and punish such behavior, especially by teenagers.
It is worth nothing that many of these activities were performed during orgiastic rites (phallic exhibitionism, obscene language, harsh derision, use of masks in order to disguise oneself and commit forbidden acts). However, they had an assured place and were not only allowed but also prescribed. All through ancient times, the authorities never persecuted orgiastic rites, with the exception of the episode reported by Titus Livius. They were allowed in the Alexandrian period and in the Roman Empire, that is to say under despotic governments.
Another difference is the role assigned to religion and sacred things. In Internet, so secular and rational at its beginnings, the sacred dimension was kept out but has come back in an indirect way.
One of the places of the Palace, a graphic chat line, is called Ades. The participant-observer wears the mask of Hercules taming Cerberus. Masks are called avatars, i.e. manifestations of gods. The feeling of being a god and creating one's own identity is often described.
Initiation ceremonies were common in ancient rites; in the Palace there is a passage from being a guest to becoming a member and then a secret ceremony to become a wizard.
We would like to end by quoting an interview with Jim Bumgardner, the creator of the Palace.
"I first met Jim up at Nrutas, the room at the Palace Mansion that looks like the surface of a moon orbiting Saturn. I was hovering up among the stars, while jbum was down on the surface of the moon, apparently whispering to one of the wizards.
"Jbum, the Palace is great. Nice work!" I said.
"Thanks, AsKi."
"So jbum, what's it like walking around inside your own creation?
"Like being God, only worse. I don't get to visit any nuns."
I LOLed. Well, I thought, this jbum certainly has wit and a sense of humor. Later I discovered that Bumgardner is renowned for these attributes. He's the kind of guy who shows up at Harry's Bar wearing the name and avatar of the Pope; who is partial to his prop of a 1950s female model wearing a white dress and playing an accordion..."
How can we not think of some disconcerting and unexpected manifestations of gods during the Dionysian rites?

9/15/2006 06:19:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pope forgets about Inquisition.
Starts new crusade.

9/15/2006 06:33:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"We feel sorrow for the children we have lost and we also feel sorrow for the Americans and others, frankly, that lost their lives five years ago in the cowardly attacks on our country."


My guess is that Jeb Bush repressed a bunch of words after the "frankly" - words that he was about to say and then didn't. Words like - "frankly, people who are much, much more important than some random rugrats".

In other words - I'm gonna work 9/11 in at every opportunity.


To counteract this - point out how 9/11 is another glaring example of Bush failure.

Even if 9/11 is (so far) actually an example of success from their point of view, it's a failure from a sound human point of view.

9/16/2006 12:00:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There has been so much verbiage produced about how cyberspace is so incredible, supernatural, intelligent, and wonderful, how it's a continuation of ancient rites, blah, blah, blah.

While the Internet can be very useful (hypertext links, access to books and videos, etc.), all this "scholarship" ignores the strong possibility that these "rituals" it cites are merely poor substitutes for the real thing. For example, looking at pictures or videos or virtual representations of forests online is a poor substitute for walking through a real forest, breathing real forest air, getting some real sun and shade, etc. Even closer to rock bottom, you can't eat a virtual reality sandwich. If you try to do it long enough, you will starve to death.

And all these people cutting and pasting such incredibly long drawn-out verbiage (repeating half-truths endlessly, world without end, amen!) show a know-nothing disdain for the hypertext link, one of the Internet's genuinely useful features.

9/16/2006 02:05:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

anon 2:05

I was looking for full-truths in your missive, but did not even find as much half-truth as in that 'long cut and paste job'.

It may be the case that enjoyment is easier to find if you have a framework for understanding that welcomes analogies such as are presented by anon 6:19.
Such as;
"In the case of the Dionysian rites, the goal of transgression was to overcome the Greek religion's main cornerstone, the impassable distinction between man and god, the bronze sky (as Pindarus says), which separates mortals from immortals and that it is grave hubris to cross. Instead, the faithful achieved enthusiasm, that is to say the merging with the god that they felt inside.
The transgression of the Internet faithful can be identified in the attack on rationality and the limits imposed by the role and by social conventions."

Enthusiasm is a felt need within us all. It reflects a need to connect with a larger expression, maybe Truth itself. Because social conventions inhibit the direct connection with felt experience, our stretching towards truth can be expressed in both positive and negative ways. Positive expressions can provide substance to our forms of understanding, (limited though they may be). While negative expressions simply provide the pretext for the institutional power structures to call out the cops. Apollo and Dionysus are co-dependent in this case.

Dualism depends on being able to put everything in its proper place. Hard boundaries, fixed categories and no continuum to muddy the waters, make the job of authority figures much easier. And yet our sub-conscious knowledge keeps bubbling up looking for a suitable framework on which to hang. When we find/create that framework maybe we will begin to look less like drowning people gasping for air.

9/16/2006 07:31:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

I am operating on a higher wavelength.
NO tinfoil hat stops the brainmapping/tracking from NSA blackop satellites.

9/16/2006 08:42:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

McVeigh a very special ops/fallguy man said he was chipped.
The snuffed his ass ASAP.
I hear they chip seal and other special op personnel.
This tracking system is up and running.

They will try to sell us on all getting chipped or RFI'd.

To prevent abductions.
Chip em when they are born.

Here is another story from rural Missouri.


Sep 16, 6:57 AM EDT

Mo. Mom's Throat Slashed, Newborn Taken

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD
Associated Press Writer



Newborn Kidnapped, Mother's Throat Slashed



LONEDELL, Mo. (AP) -- A woman slashed the throat of a new mother in a rural Missouri home Friday and fled with her 1-week-old daughter, the Franklin County Sheriff's Department said.

The 21-year-old mother, who was in serious condition in a St. Louis hospital, told police she did not know the attacker who had knocked on her door to use the telephone, Maj. Mike Copeland said.

Stephenie Ochsenbine's 1-year-old son was also in the house at the time, but was unharmed. Her boyfriend, James Woods, was at work at the time, Copeland said.

He said the attacker stabbed Ochsenbine several times and slit her throat. Ochsenbine passed out. When she awoke, she discovered the baby missing and went to neighbor Pat Bearden's home to call police. She may have been unconscious for some time, police said.



"She was standing there with blood all over her and said, 'Somebody stole my baby,'" said Bearden, who called 911.

He also said there were signs of a struggle in the house and that evidence supported Ochsenbine's story.

"Presently there's nothing to indicate the family had anything to do with it," Copeland said.

He also said there was no motive but noted a hand-painted sign on aluminum siding in the couple's front yard celebrating Abby's birth.


Copeland said the FBI had joined the investigation, and it was unlikely the suspect was still in the area.

Residents of Lonedell, a small town about 45 miles south of St. Louis, were shaken by the attack.

"Everyone around here is holding their child a little bit tighter tonight," resident Miste Morton said.

9/16/2006 08:51:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Motives.

Crazy wannabee barren mother?
Occultic ritual?
Family Feud?
Mom did it?
Pa did it?

9/16/2006 09:56:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

If all I said was a lie, Sounder, then go ahead and lock yourself up with only a computer for company and get all your life and nutrition from cyberspace.

9/16/2006 12:10:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anon: 2:05

"And all these people cutting and pasting such incredibly long drawn-out verbiage (repeating half-truths endlessly, world without end, amen!) show a know-nothing disdain for the hypertext link, one of the Internet's genuinely useful features."

You are so right! First, because the C&P's (cut & paster's), no matter how enamoured he/she is with the article (or in our case, lifting whole chapters), is violating basic writing rules. To wit, have a thesis and use references to support said thesis, usually no more than two sentences. If one quotes a whole passage, it must be pertinent and concise and used sparingly.

Second, while posting an opinion is a different genre than writing a formal essay, we still need to follow some universal agreements about the writing format. The use of linking, for example, spares the reader tedious scrolling through unwanted verbage. The poster might consider originating an opinion of his/her own with the usage of no more than two quoted sentences from a link to further support that opinion. Then provide that link so that if the reader is interested, he/she can then decide to pursue it. In our case, the poster reverses that premise and uses some other author's words predominately with an accompanying original sentence or two.

I'm going to assume that our C&P poster just didn't know any better, but now he/she does. The whole point of writing is to bring forth an idea that's clear and concise without boring one's readers or nearly plagiarizing another author. It's similar to having traffic signals for drivers - it helps relieve congestion and having to wait inordinately for some "cars" to move.

I won't go into the issues of spelling and grammar - that's seems hopeless, but I will say that poorly constructed writing often hints to a poorly constructed thought process.

9/16/2006 12:45:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You've gotten really good with the Photoshop, Jeff.

9/16/2006 02:50:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

OK, self-righteous minions.

Is it "verbiage" or "verbage"? The one who wouldn't "go into issues of spelling and grammar" (and I quote here) - "that's seems hopeless" - seems to think it is "verbage". And I wasted far more of my time on such pointless bitching than I did on the cut-and-paste.

Just say what you want. Say it any way you want. I have time. Nothing better to do.

9/16/2006 02:53:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I mostly don't give a shit about proper writing techniques -- but the discussions around here have shown a distressing lack of discussiness lately, and that does bother me.

Would it be too much to ask to have people batting ideas back and forth -- with supporting facts only as needed to actually support arguments -- instead of endlessly riding their pet hobby horses?

Getting off topic is not necessarily a bad thing -- some of my favorite threads here have had two or three different themes winding in and out and resonating with one another. But that only seems to work if those who add an additional theme do it in a way that is intensely felt and deeply personal. Anything else just craps up the signal-to-noise ratio.

9/16/2006 05:34:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To Anon. 2:53

It's a deliberate misspelling and
mispronunciation of verbiage that assimilates it to the word
"garbage". Compare content-free. More pejorative than
"verbiage".

Hope that helps you in your quest for understanding. As far as your time-management bitchiness, you're on your own.

You do know the meaning of the word "pejorative?"

To: Starroute

Apparently, you do care about proper writing techniques. The lack of "discussiness" is no more than a lack of a clear thesis. Or, perhaps the gasbags have just run out of air.

You requested that writers write, "...with supporting facts only as needed to actually support arguments...." Is this not a proper writing technique? D'uh?

Are you confused about the difference between a thesis and a theme? I would hope that the content be, "...intensely felt and deeply personal...," why else bother? Yet, that has nothing to do with a thesis or a theme. Changing subjects is allowed by use of new paragraphs only if the new subject falls under the umbrella of the thesis.

What you so astutely refer to as, "Anything else just craps up the signal-to-noise ratio," is just either bad writing in that it is confusing and not made clear, or unclear thinking.

9/16/2006 06:56:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Could be we're fresh out of "discussiness" because there's a very long thread going on the discussion board about the same thing.

9/16/2006 07:28:00 PM  
Blogger Tsoldrin said...

Just pointing out the obvious but... upon magnification all four boys from both photographs appear to be distressed and have been crying. Also, the bindings appear all to be of the same type and applied in the same way. By no means proof positive for a court of law, but it's noteworthy imo, especially considering the other oddities involved.

9/17/2006 06:17:00 PM  
Anonymous wolfet said...

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

7/19/2010 10:23:00 PM  
Anonymous justpub said...

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

7/19/2010 10:24:00 PM  

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