Friday, August 31

Miette's tear

from The City of Lost Children

Brockville's Grenville Christian College "has abruptly closed its doors amid allegations of sexual improprieties and cult practices." Former students of the residence school "paint a picture of a bizarre environment", including regular "breaking" sessions in which they were ordered from their beds in the middle of the night, and made to sit "in a dark room with a bright light shining on their face and accused repeatedly of being sinners by teachers and staff they couldn't see." ("I would feel physically ill and almost in a parallel existence, divorced from my body and mind, utterly frozen and in a state of shock.")

It sounds like the set-up to a joke, and it is: George Bush and Greg Palast visited the Gulf Coast two years after Katrina. Bush tells New Orleans, "We understand." Palast sees Blackwater "guys dressed like Ninjas" keep black residents from reentering their clean and dry public housing projects, and understands:

I wasn’t naïve. I had a good idea what this scam was all about: 89,000 poor and working class families stuck in Homeland Security’s trailer park gulag while their good homes were guarded against their return by mercenaries. Two decades ago, I worked for the Housing Authority of New Orleans. Even then, the plan was to evict poor folk out of this very valuable real estate. But it took the cover of a hurricane to do it.

Increasingly, there's analysis not too hard too find out there which demonstrates an appreciation that incompetence is the great, oversold attribute of the Cheney-Bush years. For instance, Rolling Stone's "Great Iraq Swindle":

It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government.... It's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too....

What happened in Iraq went beyond inefficiency, beyond fraud even. This was about the business of government being corrupted by the profit motive to such an extraordinary degree that now we all have to wonder how we will ever be able to depend on the state to do its job in the future. If catastrophic failure is worth billions, where's the incentive to deliver success?

Add to this the tens of thousands of US weapons which have "disappeared" in Iraq (Robert Gates is "deeply troubled" by the reports), and Afghanistan's latest record opium harvest, and perhaps the pattern becomes too vivid to ignore without the most determined act of will. (The UNODC's Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa says "No other country in the world has ever had such a large amount of farmland used for illegal activity, beside China 100 years ago." It's not a very long stroke that connects the China Trade of one century with the Afghan Trade of another, but there's still considerable reluctance to draw the connection.)

I've been meaning to write about Ron Paul for a while, and still probably will, but if he's of interest or concern to you there's a good thread on the RI board you should read. And I think this comment by chlamor bears repeating:

It reminds me of that old game show, "Concentration". When only a few squares were revealed, it was hard to tell there even was a message there. As more became visible, it was possible to recognize a coded word here and there, but it was still difficult to tease out any meaning. It wasn't until most of the squares had been uncovered that the message was revealed.

By cleverly selecting which bits to reveal, Paul and his supporters presented snippets of code that seemed easy to interpret: anti-war (sane foreign policy), anti-neocon (anti-imperialism), etc. Then we turn over some more squares, "international banker" obsession, black=criminal, anti-public education, anti-separation of church and state, etc, that suggested a more sinister message. A detailed overview leaves no square unturned, revealing a hero of the Bircher/Patriot mold who consistently panders to his loyal base, including it's more racist fringes. Turns out this "straight talker" uses deliberately deceptive language to send one message to his base and another to the rest of us. This defender of the Constitution has some radical alterations in store for that "hallowed" document. This lover of liberty counts overt fascists among his most dedicated fans.

It's not that I wouldn't consider supporting a message candidate, I'm just not willing to provide even temporary, tactical support to one whose message makes me want to vomit.

Ask not for whom the frog sings

"I'm not there. I'm gone." - Bob Dylan

I'm sure there are better things to think about, but lately I've been thinking about that Chuck Jones cartoon, One Froggy Evening.

You know how it goes. A building is being demolished, and a worker crowbars open the cornerstone, dated 1892, finding a live frog who bursts into "Hello My Baby." Immediately he imagines exploiting the frog's uncanny talent, but the frog will only sing for him, and that quickly becomes his curse. He buries it in the cornerstone of a new building, where it's found 100 years later and the cycle repeats. And all in under seven minutes.

What's so important about this? First of all, that it's a true story.

The cartoon's premise is based upon a phenomenon "not only irrational but completely inexplicable":

There are more than 210 cases of frogs or toads found inside stones, lumps of coal, or within the trunks of large trees – from Europe, the United States, Canada, Africa, New Zealand and the West Indies. The earliest are from the late 15th century, the latest occurred in Australia and New Zealand in the early 1980s. On more than one occasion, the toads were seen by several independent witnesses. Sometimes these people were entirely ignorant that similar prodigies had ever been described. After a close study of some of the best attested cases of entombed toads, the immediate conclusion is that the legend of entombed toads cannot have been based on imagination alone. Certain remarkable details about the subterranean toads and frogs often recur: the mouth covered by a viscous membrane, the skin darker than usual, and the eyes shining brightly.

"Toads-in-the-hole" were seized upon by British clergymen in the mid-19th Century as living refutations of Darwinian Natural History. But like true anomalies - and true frogs - they proved squirmy things, and could not easily be plaster-castered into Victorian-era dogma. And when the demand exploded for entombed frogs, naturally hoaxes proliferated, which had the unintended and inevitable effect of subverting the doctrines for which the anomalies had been conscripted to illustrate. And this is a problem with attempting to exploit, or even simply explain, any supra-normal thing that falls into our lives.

In 1878 Esther Cox was 18 years old, described as plain and sullen, and lived with her family in Amherst, Nova Scotia. She had a nominal boyfriend named Bob McNeal, who invited her out for a buggy ride on August 28 and reportedly attempted to rape her at gunpoint. (The assault was interrupted when McNeal was panicked by an approaching vehicle.) He drove Esther home, petulantly with the top down in a driving rain, and left town that night. Several nights after that began the series of intense poltergeist activity that became known as the Amherst Mystery.

Having blown out the candle on the night of September 4 and retired to the bed she shared with her younger sister Jennie, Esther screamed that she felt a mouse rustling in the sheets. No mouse was found. The next night the same thing happened, except the rustling sound was heard to come from a box beneath the bed. Esther and Jennie pulled it out to the centre of the room, and were about to surprise the mouse when the box levitated a foot in the air. Their screams woke the house, and they were told they’d been dreaming.

Things quickly grew stranger. Esther had sudden, terrifying episodes of unaccountable swelling, accompanied by loud bangs that seemed to come from beneath the bed and bedding which floated across the room. A doctor was called for the following night, who witnessed the same manifestations as well as loud rappings all around the room, falling plaster, and a message scratched into the wall by an invisible hand: “Esther Cox, you are mine to kill.”

Colin Wilson, in Mysteries:

In December, the manifestations ceased when Esther became ill. But in January 1879, she told Jennie that a voice had warned her that the house would be set on fire by a ghost. The next morning, as the family laughed about the idea, a lighted match fell out of the air onto the bed. More lighted matches rained out of the air for the next ten minutes, but were all extinguished. That evening, a dress belonging to Esther was found burning under the bed. Three days later, a barrel of wood shavings in the cellar burst into flame and was extinguished with difficulty.

Paranormal endangerments began to follow Esther around the town. At her work in a neighbour’s restaurant a heavy box moved across the floor and a flying jackknife stabbed her in the back, and rappings echoed down the main street. News of the bizarre goings on had spread far enough that it drew a professional magician named Walter Hubbell to Amherst, and he moved into the family home to observe for himself. Hubbell was so impressed by what he witnessed – an umbrella moving furniture, for instance – that he saw immediately the potential to turn a fast buck. Having persuaded Esther to make a public demonstration, Hubbell rented an auditorium and filled every seat, like the construction worker did to showcase his frog. And just as in the Chuck Jones cartoon, nothing happened.

What’s interesting here is as much the nothing as the something. Whatever energies Esther's sexual trauma had unleashed, and however they were manifesting through her, they would not be commodified as a public amusement.

Imagine people keep saying to you, show me a sign, and you know you've seen it, but it's not by your conscious will that you can make the sign manifest for others. How long will it be before you start faking it; playing ventriloquist to your mercurial frog?

There is a famous, mid-70s case from North London called the Enfield poltergeist. (An excellent documentary can be viewed here). Over more than a year, the manifestations included heavy furniture being tossed about, objects materializing and dematerializing before witnesses, including police officers (and Lego bricks tossed in the face of an incredulous journalist), and the levitation of 11-year old Janet Hodgson. But Janet and her older sister were also mischievous, and bored by the routine of investigation, and so amused themselves by playing tricks. Like hiding the tape-recorder of one of the investigators, and claiming the poltergeist had taken it. (The recorder caught them plotting on tape.)

Asked about such pranks today, Janet explains that she and her sister did indeed play practical jokes - because they were so fed up of being tested all the time. They had become like animals trapped in a zoo, constantly being asked to perform tricks for gawping onlookers.

People would turn up expecting inexplicable things to happen, and when nothing happened, the girls decided to play the occasional prank.

But, crucially, Janet estimates that only about one or two per cent of the many hundreds of separate paranormal phenomena that took place in the house were faked by her and Margaret - and these were minor things like balancing a chair on top of a door and pretending that the poltergeist had done it. Besides, in many cases, it would have been physically impossible for the two young girls to have faked the evidence. How does a 12-year old girl rip out a fireplace, or make a chair levitate in front of police officers?

"I would have been more worried if they hadn't played around from time to time." said investigator Guy Lyon Playfair. "It means they were behaving like normal kids." But their adolescent play served as the easy out the so-called skeptic always looks for in such stories: the excuse to look no further.

A lot of what passes for UFO evidence these days is also bored play and fabrication, with Youtube the playground. For instance, the recent hoax supposedly shot on a Caribbean beach.

Sometimes when the frog sings, it sings only for you. You can try humming a few bars, but it won't sound the same.

Tuesday, August 21

The new and better heart

Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World

Let's not say we're surprised: the long-delayed Hosanna Church ritual abuse/child sex case is falling apart. A victim and a witness have apparently recanted, and another who still asserts that she was abused is not expected to testify because she is only seven years old. Meanwhile, the "more sensational aspects" of the allegations against the accused will be downplayed at trial by both sides. "It is not against the law to worship the devil," said Assistant District Attorney Don Wall. No, it isn't. But if the motive for a crime is unmentionable, the likelihood of justice becomes improbable.

Tony Blair's friend, millionaire banker Nicholas Lethbridge has had a great fall. Formerly of the Saudi International Bank, the World Bank and the investment firm Babcock and Brown, Lethbridge died last week from injuries sustained at his 11th century estate in the south of France. "It is believed he fell after getting up early to make himself a cup of coffee...tragically crashing through the balustrade and down a stairwell." Well, these things happen. And with some frequency within the circles of a certain kind of money.

The creation of "wet artificial life" is expected within three to 10 years. While Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife, concedes there are legitimate concerns of unleashing something that could "run amok," it will still be a "very long time" before that's a problem.

"The guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a satanic demon.... How seriously do we need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization is under the possession of such a spirit, worshiped through money and power? How much are fallen angels actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology? Is a great war between the good and evil angels being acted out on Earth? We hardly know how to think or talk about such possibilities since they are so alien to the official, standard models of Western history."

- Rupert Sheldrake, in Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness

Friday, August 17

Angels in the library

from Wings of Desire

Just several recent stories that suggest a cascading of novelty, in case you missed them while staring into this abyss.

Scientists from Russia, Germany and Australia have found that inorganic dust in plasma exhibits characteristics of self-organization, attraction and reproduction: "all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter."

A team of German physicists investigating "quantum tunneling" have reportedly broken the speed of light.

Scottish physicists have found a way to reverse the Casimir effect - the attraction between two surfaces in a vacuum - "solving" the mystery of levitation.

And perhaps it is an Alternative Reality Game after all: Oxford Professor of Philosopher Nick Bostrom has set the odds at one-in-four of our universe being a sophisticated simulation.


"If the morphogenic field is not subject to the inverse square laws that indicate decreased influence over distance, then I can't see why it couldn't be located at the conclusion of a cosmological process. One of the things that's always puzzled me about the Big Bang is the notion of singularity. This theory cannot predict behavior outside its domain, yet everything that happens and all our other theories follow from it. The immense improbability that modern science rests on, but cares not to discuss, is the belief that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment. If you can believe that, then it's very hard to see what you can't believe."

- Terence McKenna, in Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness

"A liturgy for which no one need be initiated to the meaning of the words and phrases."

No need to be nervous

The city fathers they're trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere's horse
But the town has no need to be nervous - Bob Dylan

In 1924, Christian occultist Dion Fortune purchased some property at the foot of Glastonbury Tor - arguably Weird Britain's weirdest place - and named it Chalice Orchard. This became the first meeting place for what became her occult fraternity The Society of the Inner Light, the basic workbook of which remains Fortune's 1936 text, The Mystical Qabalah.

A couple of weeks ago, and almost naturally at Glastonbury, MI5's 9/11 Truther David Shayler publicly declared that he was the Messiah, as well as the reincarnation of King Arthur and Leonardo da Vinci. Though unlike Jesus, who left it at the question "Who do men say that I am," Shayler couldn't repeat himself fast enough on British television. ("Do I sound mentally ill?") Television, of course, happily obliged.

Shayler claims he arrived at this conclusion after studying the Qabalah, seeing a crop circle that resembled a pattern he had drawn as a child, and reflecting upon a chain of psychic events that made sense of the apparent botch of his life. Reportedly, his study was aided by "mushrooms & a plant, can't remember their names, something beginning with A."

Dion Fortune is regarded by occultists today as a bit of a moralizing fuddy duddy, whose magic was not exactly Crowley's sex and drugs and rock and roll. In Sane Occultism, Fortune compared a magician who performs sex workings to a fisherman who employs tamed cormorants, kept hungry to catch fish, but which have rings about their necks to prevent them from swallowing. The fish are plucked from their bills and stuffed into the pockets of the "fisher of souls." "The occultist who works with sex always has his cage of human ringed cormorants," she writes. "The poor creatures do not wear very well, and have to be constantly replaced." As for attaining higher consciousness through drugs, Fortune warned that "it is one thing to unloosen the girders of the mind, and quite another to get the rivets tightened up again, and unless one is prepared to go through life rattling like a cheap motor-car it is unwise to seek this method of development, speedy and effectual though it is."

Perhaps if Fortune had been of another generation, and had the benefit of the West's newfound ethnobotany and etheogenic anthropology, she might have made exception for the place of the shaman in traditional culture. Though since she was adamant that "it is an axiom of occult science that no price may be charged for any form of occult work," it's certain she would have looked askance upon the instant karma of shamanic tourism, and self-induced higher consciousness for the price of a dose.

Something else Fortune wrote is that "an unwilling victim is a nuisance." That is, smart attackers of the psyche will exploit flaws of character to the point where the victims become complicit in their own destruction. This is a tactic as true for what Fortune would call the "black lodge" as it is of any dark actors.

Post 9/11, the first significant book I read that took me behind the scrim of mere politics was Brisard and Dasquie's Forbidden Truth. These days it's a work that's more liable to be dismissed as a "limited hangout" than read, since it contains no hint of controlled demolition, no mention of Building Seven, no suggestion of exotic weaponry. Its value to me was to make plain the convergent interests of parties which supposedly are forever at each others' throats, if their press releases are to believed. One example was the news, to me, that the first international arrest warrant made by a state against Osama bin Laden had been logged by Libya in 1998, stemming from the murder of two German intelligence agents in 1994. During this time, David Shayler headed MI5's Libya desk for counter-terrorism, which is where he learned of an MI6 plot to subcontract a Qaddafi assassination plot to the al Qaeda-affiliated Jama al-Islamiya al-Muqatila. (Though the February, 1996 bombing attempt failed, it managed to kill several of Qaddafi's bodyguards.) Shayler quit in disgust, took his information public, such as he could, and was eventually sentenced to six months for breaching the Official Secrets Act. (Significantly, al Qaeda and the Libyan jihadists are never mentioned now whenever the UK media refer to the assassination plot. It appears better that it be regarded as a straightforward MI6 "inside job" than as evidence for collusion between security agencies and bin Laden's network.)

Says the voice-over to Channel 4's Shayler report: "The path from mainstream whistleblower, to 9/11 conspiracy theorist, to now self-proclaimed Messiah could, arguably, be a wish come true for the secret services that once tried to gag him."

Ever since I read Forbidden Truth I've recognized the awkward implications of Shayler's whistleblowing to Western gamesmanship. But ever since I paid attention to Shayler the conspiracy theorist, I've considered him part of the problem of "9/11 Truth." And that is, the predilection to look for confirmation and even leadership from within the camp of state terror itself.

I don't mean that Shayler has necessarily played the spook all along. (And in fact, the more I consider the present situation, the less likely I think it.) What I do mean is that Shayler, like every figure who comes in from the cold, deserved to carry about with him a cloud of suspicion, especially within the conspiracy counterculture which so quickly embraced him as a hero and provided a bridge to a new life after he'd burned all his others. But instead, and because of his inside pedigree, Shayler was rewarded by becoming a much-in-demand speaker, a familiar talking head (though perhaps confirming the "maxim which states that any 'conspiracy theorist' who gets on telly a lot is definitely a knob"), and the voice of the 7/7 documentary Mind the Gap and 9/11 and the British Broadcasting Deception.

But blowing a whistle, no matter how well, did not confer upon Shayler special insight into the events and affects of September 11. "The twin towers did not collapse because of planes and fire," he said last Fall. "They were brought down in a controlled demolition. The Pentagon was most likely hit by an American missile, not an aeroplane." Any insight he might have brought as an insider to covert gamesplay was effectively quashed once New Truth dropped the parapolitical ball and stopped talking about al Qaeda in any meaningful fashion. He still had a platform and his new identity, but his opinions were just as potentially groundless as the worst of ours.

And then Shayler came out as a no-planer ("the only explanation is that they were missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes"), and last summer, "for some inexplicable reason," he introduced The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the discussion during a Q&A following a screening of Mind the Gap. Remarked one observer, "I'm loathe to cast aspersions on anyone but for a moment I thought 'add "no planes" to "Zionists own the media and are the prime movers behind everything" is this trying to sabotage this movement or aid it?' For a moment, I thought, is this what the others really think? For tis not just daft but untrue."

If that had been the end of it, that should have been the end of him. But now, as well, he's the Messiah. And perhaps perversely, at last I can believe he's sincere. Damaged, persecuted and harassed, perhaps - a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, even - but also a willing victim who has nursed his martyr complex until it metastasized into a psychic fugue: not the Higher Consciousness of We Are All One, but the hyper-inflated ego of I Am The One. To "the intelligence services that once sought to gag him," he hasn't proven much of a nuisance after all.

Perhaps 9/11 Truthers who now feel victimized by Shayler ought to ask themselves how much of a nuisance they themselves have really been to the black lodge, and what part the "Truth" movement's own flaws played in calling forth such a catastrophically flawed spokesman.

Author, Author

Ev'rybody's doin' somethin', I heard it in a dream.
But when there's too much of nothing, it just makes a fella mean.
- Bob Dylan

This isn't what I've been meaning to post for days now, but it seems I need to post this before I can clear my head of it.

One afternoon in Los Angeles in the winter of 1976, the week he began compiling his notes on various branches of the UFO cult "the Order of Melchizedek" for what became Messengers of Deception, Jacques Vallee stood curbside at Sunset Boulveard and hailed a taxi. He looked downstream at the rush hour traffic, raised his hand towards several oncoming cabs, and one swerved into the curb lane and stopped for him. After a short ride, during which Vallee did not discuss his current research, he paid his fare and accepted a receipt. He stuffed it in his wallet and thought nothing more of it, until two days he noticed it was signed Melchizedek:

I cannot afford to write this story, because I cannot expect anyone to believe it. At the same time I cannot sweep it under the rug. There is only one Melchizedek listed in the LA phone book, and I have the receipt signed by the driver right in front of me. [Reproduced in the book: "2-21-76 Receive $6.25 for taxi fare from Roosevelt Hotel to 3321 S La Cienega, Red & White Cab #98 M. Melchizedek."] It was this incident that convinced me to put more energy into understanding the nature of such coincidences.

Vallee, who is both a computer scientist and a UFOlogist, invested his energy in Information Theory, which led to his model of an Associative Universe.

Time and space may be convenient notions for plotting the progress of a locomotive, but they are completely useless for locating information.... What modern computer scientists have now recognized is that ordering by time and space is the worst possible way to store data. In a large computer-based information system, no attempt is made to place related records in sequential physical locations. It is much more convenient to sprinkle the records throughout storage as they arrive, and to construct an algorithm for retrieval based on some type of keyword.....

The Melchizedek incident that I experienced on February 21, 1976 suggested to me that the world might be organized more like a random database than like a sequential library. Since there is only one person named Melchizedek in the LA phone book, I have to conclude that mere coincidence cannot explain this incident. Alternative explanations are equally inadequate, unfortunately. I did not discuss my research with the driver, so a hoax is out of the question. There could be a well-organized conspiracy against me, of course, to put lady taxi drivers on my path with names related to my current reading interests, but the motivations of such conspirators would be rather obscure! Fortunately, another avenue of explanation exists.

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing events by association. Modern computers retrieve information associatively. You "evoke" the desired records by using keywords, words of power: you request the intersection of "microwave" and "headache" and you find 20 articles you never suspected existed. Perhaps I had unconsciously posted such a request on some psychic bulletin board with the keyword "Melchizedek." If we live in the associative universe of the software scientist rather than the sequential universe of the space-time physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events.

If it isn't yet clear, then yes, this too is about Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. Or rather their Second Life, in limbo and online. Or perhaps not even that. Because their existence, even virtual existence, appears irrelevant to the dizzying links-within-links radiating from their absent centre.

If our universe functions associatively - which we might expect, if both it and our consciousness are holographic - then our dwelling upon a subject may be the equivalent of an evocation: a calling forth of information both useful and irrelevant. If we are using the associative tools of computer science to enhance our cosmic file request, what we conjure up could appear both miraculous and terrifying. Or a conspiracy so vast, with ourselves in the middle of it, that we can hardly conceive it. Though it is our conception, our meta-fiction, unaware.

Some things - some stories, places, and names - are simply strange attractors. Invoking them is to create a gravity well, a distortion of reality, in which everything else seems to run towards them. The Johnny Gosch case may be many things, but it is also that. The distortions can be abetted by human tricksters, deluded or disinforming, but synchronicities and oddities abound which cannot be explained by them, unless you're the kind of person who can broodingly conclude Vallee indeed was the target of a well-orchestrated conspiracy to put in his path unusually-named cabbies related to his research. Thinking "Gosch" triggers a cosmic Googling, and suddenly, Gosch is everywhere you look. And it doesn't just seem like that; that's how it is.

Remember how Jeff Gannon became so strangely enmeshed in the Johnny Gosch story, it became plausible to imagine they were the same person? And how that apparent twinning was exploited as evidence they were identical, rather than allegorically congruent? The recurrence of "JG" for instance: Johnny Gosch, Jim Guckert and Jeff Gannon. (And we may as well add now "Jon Gaskell.") That the incidental anagram of someone acquainted with Jeff Gannon became the lynch-pin to a theory linked to Gosch - well, naturally. That's precisely the kind of plausibly weird synchronicity the universe loves to toss back at us when we dwell on such things. But in such cases, the strangeness is greater than the sum of the conspirators, unless we regard the universe as a co-conspirator. And perhaps we should.

There are conspiracies, and mysteries, and horrors. But if you feel like you're in a Thomas Pynchon novel, then congratulations: you wrote it.

Monday, August 6

Harmonic patterns in salt

Enjoying a long weekend while working on a proper post, hopefully for tomorrow.

"It is necessary to regard the universe as consisting of vibrations. These vibrations proceed in all kinds, aspects and densities of the matter which constitutes the universe, from the finest to the coarsest; they issue from various sources and proceed in various directions, crossing on another, colliding, strengthening, weakening, arresting one another, and so on."

- Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous