Unconscious Kingdom (Part One)

The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say - Bob Dylan

This narration opens Lars von Trier's Riget ("The Kingdom"):

The Kingdom Hospital rests on ancient marshland where the bleaching ponds once lay. Here the bleachers moistened their great spans of cloth. The steam evaporating from the wet cloth shrouded the place in permanent fog. Centuries later the hospital was built here. The bleachers gave way to doctors and researchers, the best brains in the nation and the most perfect technology. To crown their work they called the hospital The Kingdom. Now life was to be charted, and ignorance and superstition never to shake the bastions of science again.

Perhaps that arrogance became too pronounced, and their persistent denial of the spiritual. For it is as if the cold and damp have returned. Tiny signs of fatigue are appearing in the solid, modern ediface. No living person knows it yet, but the gateway to the Kingdom is opening once again.

When the gateway opens, what comes through are phantom ambulances, the undead, child ghosts - etheric manifestions that affront the materialist reductionism of the Kingdom's staff, who believe their beliefs represent the highest expression of humanity's ascent from superstition. But their rationalism is finally ineffectual to support their pinched worldview against the chthonic onslaught - much like the real-life experience of the Livermore Laboratories scientists who found they "couldn't go home again" - and turned to despised ritual, trance and voodoo-like sacrifice in order to meet and bargain with the otherworldly elements that had erupted in their world.

But the message of The Kingdom's preamble is that the otherworld is what our world was before it was our world. That is, that we are inheritors of strange and ancient lands. Our ancestors, the first inheritors, knew; but for the better part we have forgotten. Though not all, and some perhaps not the best of us.

Our fully-human forefathers who lived before history left ubiquitous traces of their inner lives on cave walls and rock faces. Remarkably, across enormous distance and time the imagery remained conspicuously familiar, and religious. From all inhabited continents, and from the Upper Paleolithic to traditional cultures which until our own time contributed in isolation to the collective body of sacred art, we find the same recurring abstract geometric patterns, and similar depictions of shapeshifters in various stages of transformation. (It's interesting to note how now, after the "end" of history, the shapeshifter figure occupies again the shadows of our consciousness at the borderland of worlds. A recent example is the pseudo-documentary "Brandon Corey Story," a slick piece of disinfotainment that exploits our authentic apprehensions by fabricating evidence upon legitimate suspicions.)

Graham Hancock devotes much of his recent Supernatural to cave art, with particular attention paid to the finding of palaeoanthropologist David Lewis-Williams that its imagery appeared to be the language of universal trance states:

At some stages of the visionary experience subjects in laboratory tests report seeing displays of specific kinds of abstract geometrical patterns. What is interesting is the evidence that such patterns are universal and culture-free. Once we have entered a state of consciousness that has been altered deeply enough - itself a universal neurological capacity for the human race - it seems that everyone, everywhere experiences visions containing very much the same combinations of patterns and shapes.

Whether achieved by the ingestion of psychoactive drugs, spirit dancing or some other ritual, the trance-state of a shaman is essentially the same phenomenon regardless of time and place, as it is an unequivocally human event. Displays of geometric patterns are often followed by scenes of hybrid animals and impressions of great and alien intelligence, leading to the message the shaman sought to carry back to his people from the spirit world. If Lewis-Williams is right, then much cave art is an iconography of these altered states, and perhaps traditional cultures' own attempt at their interpretation.

I think this is important as well as interesting, because despite our modern and post-modern embarrassment, the spirit realm - and whatever we may mean by that - has spoken to humanity since before we had words to respond. That so many now live as though spirit didn't exist doesn't mean that spirit isn't still talking to us. If we don't again raise spirit to consciousness, then we have no discernment regarding this bug in our ear, loudly buzzing. (Also, I believe this to be important because caves may not only be our heritage but also our inheritance; if not literally, then quite possibly near enough.)

The German soldiers in Afghanistan who desecrated human remains by securing a skull on their vehicle's towing winch, and the one who held it next to his penis for a trophy photograph - is this learned behaviour? The ritualized pederasty found around the world, from ancient times to the present - how have disparate cultures come to the same religious sex practice? These are deeply buried things that are rarely brought to consciousness. Which is why I believe characters like Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory merit some attention, and why art has attributes which may inform us more about our predicament than plodding Reason.



By the way, here's a story that may deserve attention, while we keep this under consideration:

DNA switch developed to interface living organisms with computers

Researchers at the University of Portsmouth have developed an electronic switch based on DNA - a world-first bio-nanotechnology breakthrough that provides the foundation for the interface between living organisms and the computer world.

The new technology is called a 'nanoactuator' (shown in the image above) or a molecular dynamo. The device is invisible to the naked eye - about one thousandth of a strand of human hair.

The DNA switch has been developed by British Molecular Biotechnology expert Dr Keith Firman at the University of Portsmouth working in collaboration with other European researchers.

Dr Firman and his international team have been awarded a €2 million (£1.36m) European Commission grant under its New and Emerging Science and Technology (NEST) initiative to further develop this ground-breaking new technology.

But the DNA switch has immediate practical applications in toxin detection, and could be used in a biodefence role as a biological sensor to detect airborne pathogens.

The future applications are also considerable, including molecular scale mechanical devices for interfacing to computer-controlled artificial limbs.

'The possibilities are very exciting. The nanoactuator we have developed can be used as a communicator between the biological and silicon worlds,' Dr Firman said.


Our next cave walls may be silicon, and they may be inside us.

Nearly There

Sorry for the interruption; I'm working on a new post that will be up today, I promise, even if I have to upload it mid-sentence.

Still rundown here, and trying to take care of myself. On top of which, our furnace has been out for a week and tag-teams of repair crews haven't been able to fix it. I can't get any heat to my office - we have space heaters, but in this part of the house they throw the breakers - and I'm tired of being cold.

Back soon.

Just a Drive By

Still sick here, so just pointing out a couple of updates elsewhere, that coincidentally both point, in part, to Florida.

Noreen Gosch has posted an "urgent announcement" identifying one of the other bound boys in the photograph left at her door as David Leonard Johnson, kidnapped from Lynnwood, Washington in 1985 (three years after Johnny's disappearance). She writes that David's mother, Patricia Johnson Holm, had contacted her three weeks ago but had not sought additional publicity. "Since that time she has seen the interview the Florida Detective [Nelson Zalva] did with Fox TV/Greta Show and is shocked that the detective is again trying to discredit the photo and both of our sons. She has now reconsidered and is willing to share her story and the photo."

Maybe I'm going about searching the wrong way, or I'm wrong to presume there would be something online, but I can't find anything on an abduction of a David Leonard Johnson. Still, Noreen has supplied contact information for Patricia Holm - her phone number, even - which is far more than Nelson Zalva has provided to support his sketchy tale.

Also, Daniel Hopsicker has an interesting follow-up on the seizure of Florida flight school owner Wally Hilliard's private plane with 43 lbs of heroin onboard just three weeks after Mohammed Atta's enrollment. It was Central Florida's biggest drug bust, but the Justice Department declined to persecute Hilliard's pilot, Diego Levine-Texar, for "lack of evidence," though he ignored agents demands that he drop his cell phone which had to be pried from his hand at gunpoint. The affidavit of the arresting agent read, "Based on my experience I know that narcotics traffickers maintain frequent contact with one another while transporting narcotics… I believe Levine-Texar attempted to contact other accomplices as to the presence of agents and other law enforcement officials." Information about Levine-Texar, we're told, is considered "sensitive." Hopsicker notes in Welcome to Terrorland that Hilliard himself was feeling so cocksure after the bust that he shouted out to his employees when the DEA visited his mainstenance facility "Make sure all the heroin and cocaine gets hidden!"

A frequent flier on the flight school drug runs - 39 weeks in a row - Edgar Valles-Diaz, was arrested. Each flight originated in Venezuela, stopped over in Fort Lauderdale and continued on to New York City. A member of the jet's flight crew stated that "When we landed in New York Valles-Diaz would be met by his 'boyfriend.' He gets picked up at the airport by an Uzbek named Igor Rabaev, his heroin connection from Central Asia."

Hopsicker writes that Rabaev "is a prominent member of a Russian Mob family which uses the Uzbek capital of Tashkent as a transshipment point for heroin from Afghanistan.... 'Igor Rabaev is a name to be conjured with in certain circles,' a former U.S. covert operative in Central Asia told us."

Sound like Sibel Edmonds' global criminal network? ("You get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one.") Read more here.

Under the Weather

I was hoping to post an update this morning, but another Fall cold is forcing me to lie down for a while first. So please use this as an open thread and I'll get back as soon as I can.

All Tumbling Down

Here come the events all tumbling down - Nice Cave

Overwhelmed yet? For quite some time it's been impossible to keep current with our condition, which is either falling into or being drawn towards something we've yet to see. Without much comment, here are some snapshots of where we are.

You may know that Israeli President Moshe Katsav is facing indictment for the rape of two female staffers. Earlier this week in Moscow after a brief public appearance with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Vladimir Putin remarked "Say hello to your president. He really surprised us." The New York Times notes that the microphone "was quickly turned off as reporters were ushered from the room," but Putin was overheard to continue. "He turned out to be quite a powerful man. He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him."

Diplomats on both sides are said to have responded with laughter and continued with their meeting. The generous interpretation is that Putin was simply making a coarse joke. Putin has always thrived on generous interpretations, from the Moscow apartment bombings to his kissing the belly of an adolescent boy. Even after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and the suspension of 100 NGOs including Amnesty International, the prevailing assumption appears to remain that whatever he said, he didn't mean it, and whatever he did, he didn't do it. What was he thinking? is not so terrible a question if it is left unanswered.

In Toronto this week, a notorious former teacher-predator of Canada's premier school for privileged boys received an extraordinary pardon for his years of molestation and rape. Abuse by Clark Noble and other staffers at Upper Canada College has been an "open secret" for years, though tolerated by authorities and families as a seeming "rite of passage" through private school and into positions of leadership in business and politics. (UCC alumnists include the late Lord Kenneth Thomson, Conrad Black and Michael Ignatieff.) One poster remarks on the RI forum that "it seems that sex assault is part of elite school curriculum all over," and another: "Maybe thats why the powerful send their kids to elite schools, the abuse is part of the training."

And regarding Iraq, there's been a lot of noise how James Baker's "Bipartisan Study Group" has weighed in and assessed the mission as a failure, and what a blow this must be to the Bush White House.

"Staying the course" is not an option, but it never was the intent. The Iraq project has always envisioned the dissolution of the country into three "federal states" - sectarian bantustans ruled by obliging strongmen - but to get to that point a united Iraq, that had never seen a civil war, needed destabilizing. To that end, the US and UK mission has truly been a catastrophic success. Now, it's the time for the neocon berserkers to take one on the chin, and the "grown-ups" to move in and complete the job in such a way that it appears they're simply cleaning up an unfortunate mess. "Few officials in either party are talking about an immediate pullout of U.S. combat troops. But interest appears to be growing in several broad ideas. One would be some kind of effort to divide the country along regional lines...."

Don't be fooled again, or for the first time.

Necromocracy (Part Two)

"I have to question whether there is an evil force in the world and whether or not I have been influenced by it." - Jeffrey Dahmer.

Much like Gilles de Rais, the sixteenth century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory is notorious for tearing apart young children to satisfy her sex-magical appetite. Her taste was for girls, more than 600 of them, and she was able to consume so many of them because it was only late in her career that she turned her desires to the daughters of her own kind. Down the hill, beneath her castle, villagers had "often claimed to have heard screams emanating from within this place, and they spoke of disappearing girls and of murder, but no one had dared approach the regal, 50-something countess until now. Word had come to the king that she had kidnapped or killed nine girls from good families."

Naturally she'd had help. Servants and hirelings were employed in abduction and torture, including Elizabeth's own childhood nurse Ilona Joo, who admitted to having killed 50 girls by her own hand. Some claimed to have been forced to act against their will, and some others instructed their mistress in black magic. ("Thorko has taught me a lovely new one," she wrote her husband, Ferencz Nadasdy. "Catch a black hen and beat it to death with a white cane. Keep the blood and smear a little of it on your enemy. If you get no chance to smear it on his body, obtain one of his garments and smear it.")

Twenty-one judges tried Bathory and her accomplices, though in deference to her station she was accused of simple criminal acts, while her common help faced the more scandalous charges of vampirism, witchcraft and occult ritual. They were convicted and tortured, then beheaded or burned alive, but Bathory was again protected by her class and its cognitive dissonance at the atrocities of nobility. She did not even receive a formal decision of guilt, but was under "castle arrest" for the rest of her life, its entrances and windows walled up except for food and circulation. The court declared a life sentence suitable so she could "find time to repent."

Four hundred years later, Bathory remains one of pop culture's favourite monsters, and her name evocative of decadant aristocrats playing at sex and death. Yet her husband, who predeceased her by ten years before the revelation of her crimes, died with even more blood on his hands, but is remembered as something else.

In 1578 Nadasky became the chief commander of Hungary's armies in its war against the Turks, who called him "the Black Prince" on account of both his bravery and his cruelty. (For instance, It's reported that when his troops captured the village of Urmisz he instructed that its priest be beheaded and its women and children raped and burned alive.) Nadasky was notorious for his imaginative methods of torture, which he shared with his apprenticing wife, but his "excesses" were on the battlefield against Muslim invaders and their allies, rather than in the comfort of home against his "own kind," and that's a distinction that is usually enough to tell a national hero from a homicidal maniac.

The sixteenth century seems so long ago we might as well be talking of a different planet and a different species, but we're not, and it's still us. If we had film from the time to view, rather than oil paintings and engravings, we'd recognize ourselves more readily. (Elizabeth's uncle was the famous Stephen Bathory, King of Poland, who hosted occultist-spy John Dee and his scrier Edward Kelly on their visit to the continent. Dee's Enochian magick, relaunched into the world by Aleister Crowley, is so established in the backstory of our culture that it's a key plot point of the "Lonelygirl15" saga, arguably Youtube's greatest viral phenomena.) We should also recognize ourselves from much more distant times. The fossil record of modern humans begins 196,000 years ago. From that point until now, there is nothing that physically distinguishes us from our prehistory. About 50,000 years ago, with the flourishing of art, adornment and symbolic representation, our ancestors' interior lives begin to look familiar. It's all sex and death, which is to say, religion. And if it's primitive, then so are we still.

From a statement of Vietnam war veteran Sgt. Larry J. Cottingham, January 24, 1973: "There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears but as the men were wounded they thought it was bad luck and got rid of them. Scalps were a kick for a time also but there were lice in the hair and they got rid of those too and it didn't last long." Those were modern American boys, adorning themselves like "savages" with fetishes made from the flesh of the enemy.

In New Orleans, a young veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan and Katrina named Zackery Bowen left a five-page suicide note and jumped off a bridge after dismembering his girlfriend and cooking her head and legs in the apartment the shared above a voodoo shop. His victim-lover, Addie Hall, came to national attention last year for flashing her breasts to police cars. ("Female survivors of the storm were urged by government rescuers to flash their breasts in order to receive help in Katrina's immediate aftermath.") Friends of Bowen say he "displayed both pride and bitterness" over his experience of war. ("Somewhere overseas there had been an incident concerning a child that weighed heavy on him, said Donovan Calabaza, another bartender at Buffa’s, 'but we really didn’t get into it.'" Other times Bowen "would grow angry and distraught...talking of how the government [had] 'messed him over.'")

In little more than three years in Iraq, there are more than 600,000 dead who shouldn't be. As with the victims of most serial killers, they remain unnamed and unmissed except by their loved ones, and the occasional justice allegedly undertaken on their behalf means persecuting the odd accomplice rather than the perpetrator. The logic of madness that compells the maniac to kill is the same that drives the maniac state towards mass murder and genocide. The more dead by their hand, the more power they accrue, and it's not a simple equation of slaying one's enemies. It's about the alchemy of turning lives into spent fuel.

Moonshadow

Trouble in the water, trouble in the air
Go all the way to the other side of the world
You'll find trouble there - Bob Dylan

About a year and a half ago (here and here), I referred to Sun Myung Moon's purchase of 600,000 hectares of Paraguay's Chaco for the stated intention of erecting an "ecological paradise." Moon's land sits atop the Guarani Aquifer, the Earth's largest resource of fresh drinking water, and also happens to be an "enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades," according to Paraguay's drug czar from 1976-89. "The available intelligence clearly shows that the Moon sect is involved in both these enterprises."

Now, apparently, the Reverend is again keeping familiar company:

The Governor of Alto Paraguay, Erasmo Rodríguez Acosta has admitted to hearing that George Bush Sr. owns land in the Chaco region of Paraguay, in Paso de Patria. Acosta says that rumor has it that Bush owns near to 70 thousand hectares (173,000 acres) as part of an ecological reserve and/or ranch. However, the governor said he had no documents to prove the rumor. Acosta said that some stories credited the land to the Fundación Patria, which Bush would be a member of. The spokespeople of the organization were not available to comment. Supposedly, Timothy Towell , the U.S. Ambassador in Asunción (the capital of Paraguay) is the present administrator of the land. First accounts signaled that Bush had acquired 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) in the Chaco zone of Fuerte Olimpo, near the Bolivian Border. A spark of the interest in this property may have been Jenna Bush's private visit to Paraguay with Unicef, which started Saturday, October 7, 2006. Supposedly Jenna will travel to the ranch to "observe" several indigenous villages are located on the property.

The original Oct 11 story from Paraguay, in Spanish, can be found here. There's a second story from Prensa Latina that identifies the purchaser as George W rather than George HW Bush, but the Chaco purchase strikes me as more likely an initiative of the father than of the son. Bush Sr, let's remember, tootled around Latin America in 1996 as Moon's lapdog and praised him in Buenos Aires as "the man with the vision." (Moon's foresight might have included blackmail, specifically the office of the then Vice President with the Craig Spence call boy scandal. Influence, by any means necessary.) Still, keeping Moon's company is a Bush family enterprise, as Neil accompanied the Reverend last year on his 100-day "global peace campaign."

Paraguay, of course, has been a recent source of alarm to the region for its allowance of its tri-border territory to become a US military beachhead. Now, with the reports of the Bush purchase of an "ecological reserve" alongside Moon's, we have good reason to suspect that US national security has again been seconded to the Bush family business.

Necromocracy (Part One)

"Across history, other nations had gone insane. Other movements had been evil or tried awful wizardries. But none perpetrated murder with such dedicated efficiency. The horror must have been directed not so much at death itself, but at some hideous goal beyond death."

- David Brin, The Life Eaters

When I was taught history in high school, Athens was a favourite historical analogue for the United States. Both were considered accidental empires and, for the most part, benign necessities of their dangerous times. (For America, this was the period of its so-called soft power, even though its application often felt hard as hell away from home. But Mossadegh and Allende could tell you better.) The self-celebrating mythology of America's global reach was always democratic, and its extended aspects - its colonies, though they would never be called such - were assumed to be dependencies by choice. America's Athenians were regarded as individuals, and its military the champion of an individual's liberty. Unlike the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, whose subjects and armed forces were thought more comparable to the severe and undifferentiated Spartans.

But in wartime, and in a time of re-mythologizing war, America's mythmaking undergoes a radical makeover to favour Sparta and the 300 of King Leonidas. It's too tempting a story to resist, because no matter its overwhelming might, it seems that for the good of its soul America must also, at least in its fiction, regard itself as the underdog. (You could perhaps sense something of this in the relish with which supporters of the Iraq war recounted America's "abandonment" by its traditional allies and the United Nations. "Going it alone" never felt so good.)

A new film treatment of the Battle of Thermopylae, 300, will be released early next year, and it looks like just the ticket to introduce the legend of Sparta to America's popular culture of perpetual war. Particularly appropriate, since Persian arms are once again the perceived enemy, and the few who stand against them now are Rumsfeld's 150,000. (And that reminds me: do you remember reading how, "in the summer of 2001, when security agencies were regularly warning of a catastrophic attack by Al Qaeda, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s office 'sponsored a study of ancient empires—Macedonia, Rome, the Mongols—to figure out how they maintained dominance,' according to the New York Times"?) This latest, and most extreme version is based upon the work of graphic novelist Frank Miller, of the admirable Sin City, but who is also an unabashed propagandist for the White House shooting script. His next project is Holy Terror, Batman!, in which bin laden targets Gotham City and the Dark Knight "kicks al Qaeda's ass."

An inspiring defeat is sometimes worth more to a military and its masters than a sure victory, just as allowing an attack to happen can be of greater long-term benefit than its prevention, and through the centuries the blood of 300 soldiers has probably nourished a thousand campaigns. Perhaps, recalling this post, some of the same soldiers, over and over again. General George Patton was persuaded he was one, as dramatized here ("I fought in many guises, many names. But always me.")

Reincarnation aside, there's a certain necromancy here, in romanticizing the deaths of those long dead in order to stir the living to want to join them. A similar working was accomplished with the 3,000 dead of 9/11 who, though representing many nations, after death all somehow became alchemical Americans. Not only by the Let's Roll! stage-management of their unoffered sacrifice were many thousands more inspired to enlist, die and suffer grievous injury, but their blood is deemed sufficient to cover that of 655,000, and the murderers of Iraq and their enablers still enjoy untroubled sleep.

Call it what you want, but that's some strong magic.


By the way, this may be old news to some, but if you haven't viewed BBC's nearly three-hour documentary from 1992 on Gladio and NATO's secret fascist armies, please do. You can find it in three parts on Google Video. The first segment establishes the context of history and the prominent role played by future CIA wizard James Angleton, and features interviews with William Colby and Licio Gelli; the second examines the Bologna railway station bombing, and the third the Brabant Massacres and the assassination of Aldo Moro. Perhaps because it's another British production from the early 90s, or because it's a history that's largely unknown to North America, or because William Colby appears in both shortly before his likely murder, it has a strong Conspiracy of Silence vibe about it. And I mean that in the best possible way, about the worst possible truth.

Housekeeping

I hope to have a meaningful post up later today, but I also need to make time for some overdue maintenance updating the archives and the links, mending some broken buttons, maybe refreshing the radio playlist: those kinda things. But making time is hard, since it may not even exist, and the best I can usually do to simulate the act is losing a night of sleep.

And I still mean to pack up and move blog and forum to a new home, and add a number of new features I'm excited about, but the time I need to make that happen I haven't found yet. But soon, I hope. And hope does exist, even if time doesn't.

Fight the Real Enemy

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches
I'll recruit my army from the orphanages - Bob Dylan

In the United States, in the forshortened weeks before its next post-modern election, every action appears to have an equal and opposite distraction. Telling one from the other, that's the hardest thing.

This time, the Democrats may do just well enough to revive faith that the system works and that its workings are of consequence. (Like Jonathan Richman sings in "Walter Johnson": "Boys, this game's no fun if you don't get a hit once in a while.") Simone Weil wrote that "imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life," and if we can't imagine a better world than this then we can be certain one will be imagineered for us. A bipartisan soft tyranny that rules by mass delusion will concede the odd happy ending, that is actually neither.

The quote is from Weil's essay "Some Thoughts on the Love of God." They're wartime words, written during the worst of it, and imagination and storytelling remain our best means to interpret our attenuated circumstance that already passes understanding.

And everywhere is war. Fourteen years ago, Sinead O'Connor's storytelling on Saturday Night Live sounded to many like hateful babbling, but I expect today it would sound to more like fearless love. The Pope's picture was remembered, but not the child's. Maybe now, because we know more, it would be.

Mark Foley, we know, had been the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, which was formed to provide federal assistance to the National Center of the same name. Its Board of Directors includes Floridian cocaine smuggler Hank Asher who founded the corporation which purged his state's voter rolls in 2000. In 2003 he was hired to help identify potential terrorists for Florida's Department of Law Enforcement. ("This has been highly controversial, largely because of Asher's alleged past links to drug smuggling.") Foley himself played a leading role in suppressing the hand recount. So what are such men with such histories, and in such a state as Florida, doing orbiting about the issue of missing and exploited children?

(And it may be more curious still. A poster on the RI forum links Foley with Bush family favourite Mel Sembler's juvenille mind control enterprise "Straight," and connects Straight to Paul Bishop of the Johnny Gosch snake pit.)

"Don't get distracted - stay focused" - a lot of Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow Democrats will be saying that more than usual this month. Many of them think Foley represents a distraction, albeit a happy one. But perhaps it's the election itself that distracts Americans with a shiny hoax battlefield, away from the real war they would know better if they would heed the dis-ease of their storytellers.

Mending

Wish I wasn't, but I've been sick, and I need to rest a little more. But don't let that stop you; please use this as an open thread, and I'll see you in a few days.

Slaughterhouse 5.0

Put your ear to the train tracks, put your ear to the ground
You ever feel like you're never alone
Even when there's nobody else around? - Bob Dylan

Once you admit mind control to your ambit of the real world, it's a different world. The worms won't go back in the can. No wonder the subject is usually given wide berth by critics of government and even many students of deep politics, notwithstanding documentation of government ambition, survivor testimony and dark history.

Reading the news begins to resemble a classic exercise in religious exegesis, with every schoolhouse massacre inviting the old question of free will or predestination. But the new lords of determinacy are not the gods of our fathers.

If our world includes programmed assassins, and has for at least 40 years, what programming can we say with confidence is both out-of-reach and ethically out-of-bounds for the programmers? If, say, the People's Temple of Naval Intelligence asset Jim Jones was a social experiment in mind control, then to what end? More pointedly, was it deemed a success? Should we expect a rollout of the supersized beta version? And how will we know when it's Jonestown Time?

Something just snaps, and unassuming men go to war on children with intent to molest and murder. "Troubled by a rash of school shootings," says Reuters, "President George W. Bush next week will bring together law enforcement authorities and education officials to try to determine what the federal government can do to stop the problem."

We should always admit the reality of random acts (or perhaps rather, fractally speaking, the appearance of random acts), but violence serves the violent, and cui bono? is always a valid question so long as we keep our ears to the train tracks.





By the way, here's some other news that strikes me as somewhat important:

Antimatter discovery could alter physics
Particle tracked between real world, spooky realm

The discovery that a bizarre particle travels between the real world of matter and the spooky realm of antimatter 3 trillion times a second may open the door to a new era of physics, Fermilab researchers announced Monday.

The incredibly rapid commuting rate of the B sub s meson particle had been predicted by the Standard Model, the successful but incomplete theory aimed at explaining how matter and energy interact to form the visible universe. After 20 years of trying, scientists have now confirmed the rate, providing strong evidence for the theory.

To Know Better

Put your hand on my head, baby, do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know better standin' around like furniture. - Bob Dylan

I was afraid I'd lost the link - I'd bookmarked it several broken computers ago - but here's a small item from The Hill of March 3 of last year that's stuck with me ever since:

Protester cuffed after porn tirade

A woman was arrested for disruption of Congress on Tuesday afternoon after she stood up in the Senate visitors gallery and began shouting wildly about child pornography during debate over the bankruptcy bill.

At a few minutes before 5 p.m., when Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) were debating an amendment, the woman rose and shouted, “You don’t know who’s a pedophile,” according to a Democratic staffer whose office abuts the chamber.

“You don’t know who has a child pornography site,” she continued. As police were removing her from the chamber, she began shouting names. “George Bush, John Kerry, McCain from Arizona — those are the sites you should check.”

The woman, who appeared to be roughly in her 50s or 60s, continued to scream, kick and resist for some time as she was removed to a hallway and handcuffed. A Senate employee who works in the gallery said the woman “had been in there all day and I think even yesterday.”

Capitol Police did not release the woman’s name. Disruption of Congress is a misdemeanor offense.

That's it, and that's all I know. And I expect most Hill readers filed it under news of the weird and forgot about it. Perhaps that's what it deserved. The unknown protester could have been mentally ill, and only incidentally correct, when she disrupted the Senate with the shout "You don't know who's a pedophile," but she would still be closer to the truth than the many more who are treating the scandal of the predatory Floridian co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children as an "isolated incident," when it so evidently isn't.

"I think we're entering a very, very dangerous period," said Foley in 2002 regarding the sexual exploitation of children by "more mature people...who should know better." He should have known, but perhaps the entitlements he enjoyed in one of Washington's concentric rings of privilege led him to think he was as untouchable as those in the innermost circle. (The Franklin Cover-Up tells a similar story of stepped justice, in which certain perpetrators are within the reach of the law and public disapprobation, and some are not.)

But we need to know better, too, and contextualize Foley in terms unadmitted by opinion makers and our best wishes. Because this goes deeper than politics; even deeper than Florida's alarming knack for losing children. It's about power, earthly and other-worldly, and its corruption of institutions both secular and religious. Pope Benedict is implicated in the institutional cover-up of his church's abusive priesthood. Sai Baba, India's most revered "living god" whose teachings and magic tricks have won him influence over tens of millions of people including members of the British Royal Family and many others in the West, including the creator of Gumby, is himself an alleged paedophile. One victim, Tal Brooke, writes in Lord of the Air that he wondered whether the sex was not an indulgence so much as the wellspring of Baba's seeming occult authority: "Think what kind of unsuspecting gold mine Baba might have in the Veda School lads. Several hundreds kids disciplined severely into celibacy whom Baba uses as a kind of sperm-bank. Even then, [fellow victim] Phil told me that he quite frankly suspected that such was the source of Baba's powers."

Foley, of course, is now effectively powerless, and waving the pilfered crutch of alcoholism to account for his actions. Still, there's no natural accounting for how endemic this practice appears among humanity's presumptive elites and their wannabes. Yet however often Congress is disrupted by a scandalous resignation or a shout from the visitors' gallery, it endures.