The Autumn People
"Who'd believe us?"
"I believe you."
"You do? But we're not grown ups!"
"That's why I believe you."
Learning about the Autumn People in Something Wicked This Way Comes
The autumn months are never a calm time in America. Autumn is a very Traditional period, a time of strong Rituals and the celebrating of strange annual holidays like Halloween and Satanism and the fateful Harvest Moon, which can have ominous implications for some people.... There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings.
So wrote Hunter S Thompson in Hey, Rube, his final collection before his sudden death after one more football season. Autumn's always been the favoured time for nature and unnatural men to give the planet a radical makeover through contagion, flood and war. The seasonal decay and its vectors of disease just makes best sense of our Will to Catastrophe, and we're more inclined to believe the worst, because we feel ourselves most vulnerable to those who could do their worst. If the world appears to be falling apart faster than usual, and our bodies with it, then it must be back-to-school time.
Because it's Autumn, I'm still ill, and the longer post I want to write will have to wait. But here's what I'm thinking about, when I'm not thinking about how crappy I feel.
Ahmadinejad's rise and role in Target: Iran reminds me of the drive to privatize water in a city like Detroit. Seemingly oddly so, but not actually, as both have been directed by much the same interests.
Would there be such fatalist expectation of a strike on Iran if Mohammad Khatami were still president? Try as Fox might, the reformist advocate of a "Dialogue Among Civilizations" could not be made to put on the Hitler mustache. If the United States wanted a diplomatic solution and a rapprochement with Tehran, he was their man. But it didn't, and he wasn't. In 2003 the Swiss ambassador to the US carried a proposal from Khatami to negotiate a resolution to all outstanding issues, including Iran's nuclear program and a two-state solution to Israel and Palestine. Washington's reaction was to censure the Swiss ambassador.
In Detroit, as in many cities and nations ruled by kleptocrats who are aliens to their own citizens, infrastructure has been starved of public funds, and tens of thousands have found themselves without water. Why? To make circumstances so dire that any solution offered will be taken as an escape from institutionalized misery. And the only solution the rulers offer is privatization.
Spurning Khatami's overtures and the season of conciliation from Iran toughened its hardliners, but it wasn't a missed opportunity for Washington. It was the last thing they wanted, while Ahmadinejad is just the devil they needed. ("US Focus on Ahmadinejad Puzzles Iranians," reads a New York Times headline today. “The United States pays too much attention to Ahmadinejad," an Iranian political scientist is quoted. “He is not that consequential.”) Why? To sharpen the tensions to such a point that opinion makers determine the situation cannot be allowed to continue. And the only solution the rulers offer is violence.
posted by Jeff Wells at 9/25/2007 09:13:00 AM
86 Comments:
Oh my god, i KNOW. It is so obvious. I watched the news last night and talking heads were talking about how Ahmadinejad is like Hitler (Glen Beck) and the whole homosexual thing....
It's all just so flamboyantly obvious propaganda being catapulted like a huge steaming turd. And we get to watch as Bush will try to sell us on the 'war' in Iran that he's already begun. And obviously Ahmadinejad will put on the Hitler moustache and play his part.
I want to scream again. And again and play moonlight sonata backwards 'till my ears bleed. It's all so disgustingly horrible watching it unfold.
I just finished Transformation of America by Cathy O'brien and Mark Phillips interestingly enough (well to me anyhow...what with your autum pervert observation, Jeff...Hmmmmmm)
And obviously Ahmadinejad will put on the Hitler moustache and play his part.
Please explain...do you mean that he is a witting dupe and part of the show? If so, what's in it for him? Bush gets an aquifer in Paraguay for playing the stooge, but what does Ahmadinejad get?
I know you were asking fletcher, shrub, but for myself, no; he's not a cognizant actor. He doesn't need to be. The rejection of conciliation by Washington handed the initiative to the fundamentalists and made his rise inevitable.
I'll have to find out more about the privatization of water situation in Detroit. Thanks Jeff for that. In the metropolitan Detroit area the Catholic element has dramatically weakened in the last 20 years. Schools have closed, churches shut down and demolished, and hospitals merged with the secular business element. Instead of St. Joseph's Hospitals it's Henry Ford Hospitals.
There is a bizarre story that you do not hear in Detroit about Hamtramack (Pole Town). George Bush Sr. visited this small town located in the center of Detroit. Pope John Paul II did as well and so did a rare tornado that damaged a part of that town and knocked out power to a significant part of Detroit for days. Detroit rarely is victim to tornadoes. Hamtramack has been a traditionally Catholic town until these exceptional visitors came. Now the eastern European flux have arrived and they have passed a law in Hamtramack to allow for the public prayers to be broadcast by speakers five times a day at the newly built mosque. A president, pope and tornado and we have a Muslim mosque built in a small city USA in their wake. You must admit that it is rather strange. ??
He doesn't need to be. The rejection of conciliation by Washington handed the initiative to the fundamentalists and made his rise inevitable.
I agree with this assessment. I have pondered if it goes any deeper than that....but it was a fleeting consideration on my part for the reasons I stated above. It wouldn't make any sense for Ahmadinejad to sell out unless he was a mind-controlled subject....but as you say, why bother to go to all that trouble when you can get the same thing without all that trouble.
He's also a useful tool to disparage dissent in the United States....just like bin Laden...or, should I say, the bin Laden videos and associated diatribes. A dissenter will generally agree on a number of points raised by both of them....but to agree with them is conventionally perceived as siding with the enemy.
They are quite crafty (the incestuous U.S. Corporate-Government-Media Combo)...you've got to give them that.
Hey, it needs to get worse before it can get better.
Btw, how about replacing the word "privatization" with the more accurate "fiat privileged rentseeking."
Kiss all the pretty ones goodbye
Give everyone a penny that cries
You can throw all my tranquil pills away
Let my blood pressure go on its way
For my autumn's done come
Lee Hazlewood
Eve..this one's for you..
Ahmadinejad or jam and a hide.
The "hide" might just be the old English hide which is a hill. Imagine that. Hiding on a hill.
No really imagine it.
Richard..I'm still haunted by your suggestion that there are UFO's hiding behind every star. That's just sick and now I'm infected.
And seque into the infection part one to injure the immune system followed by part two the avian flu pandemic. Like Movie Girl says, all's well in Chi ca go..
Reporting from Detroit.
This debacle between the Water Department in Detroit and the suburbanite representatives want to control the water system is a many decades old battle. Representatives from the counties surrounding Detroit want the majority control of how the Detroit Board of Water Commissioners run the Water Department located in Detroit, Wayne County. They claim they have to control the water system that flows from Detroit's through their own systems.
But it seems that the suburbanite representatives fall into the category of customers which purchase the water at a wholesale price. However the suburbanite county water departments charge a surcharge which can be more than 100 percent mark up to it's own customers. The suburbanite county representatives are claiming that the prices are Detroit's fault. But Detroit water prices are lower than the average price for big cities USA.
Broken mains are the reason why people go without water for a time. Some people have suspected terrorism for some of the water main breaks but this is strictly speculation. But yeah this is a big political fight in these parts. Detroit having one of the nations largest Water Departments.
The harvest moon also signals Sukkot -- aka the Feast of Tabernacles - which traditionally is a good time for me.
Ahmadinejad -- I forget, is he the Great Satan now or just the mini-Satan? This 15-minute hate on this guy (American-educated and groomed) is so bizarrely ahistorical it's almost entertaining. (And okay, I admit, calling him "I'm-in-a-jihad" is funny.) It's vaudevillian, the melodrama is so corny. An entire nation, and its relationship with "us" (meaning, them), completely ripped free of any historical context that might explain why they have a right to be a little ticked off.
-- africkinamerican aka "The Author"
Or maybe he's not american-educated. I'm thinking of someone else.
I find myself seeking out Glenn Beck now, in much the same way I can't resist poking my tongue into a sore tooth.
Tonight he compared the Iranian leader to Hitler.
Imagine that, eh?
Not that I'm a great fan of Islamic fundamentalism, but it is an analogy that grows sillier with each retelling.
My attitude could be best summed up by a protester's sign that said, "I don't want American Imperialism or Islamic Fundamentalism."
It's kind of how feel each election day; I don't want the Democrat or the Republican.
But then he went on to interview Michael Hirsh from Newsweek who, if his facial expressions were any indication, had pretty much the same disdain for Mr. Beck's asinine posturing as I do.
Initially Mr. Beck got Mr. Hirsh to agree with his assessment of the Iranian leader, but then Mr. Hirsh said, "But you have to put this into perspective."
He then started to launch into some qualifiers that apparently would blunt Mr. Beck's simplistic Hitler analogy when Mr. Beck suddenly blurted out, "Oh, I've got to go," effectively cutting off Mr. Hirsh & his qualifiers at the pass.
He then went to a commentator whose opinion was lock-step in line with his own.
Kind of curious that one.
&, because y'all seem to have such trouble with skepticism, I'm going to beat my same old drum with a brand new stick.
The nature of belief is a funny thing, whether it is conspiratorial, religious, etc.
Researcher Chris O'Brien was told of an enigmatic 6 1/2 inch crystal skull rancher Donna Koch discovered while riding the fence line of her newly acquired ranch. The 'alien" looking artifact was, to say the least, well received amongst the 'alternative views" crowd.
As Mr. O'Brien says, "The reported strange phenomena that seemed to surround the skull still have no obvious explanations. Exploding tires, sickened babies, bashed-in heads, broken video cameras, and various other "unexplained phenomena" have been associated with the skull. One rather well-known investigator who sat with the skull for 8 days, claimed to have channeled an amazing amount of information, which she attributed to the skull. Stories of Lemurian scouts, settlers, and other skulls waiting to be found here were communicated to eager believers."
Then the truth hit the fan.
A man named Brad Chavez,a professional glass-blower whose family owned the ranch bordering the Koch ranch , contacted Mr. O'Brien.
It turned out that the crystal skull, all new agey claims aside, was made by Mr. Chavez. Mr. Chavez had been making crystal skulls, at the glass blowing company where worked, to sell in New Mexico for the annual Day of the Dead Festivals. The buried skull was considered by Mr. Chavez to be flawed so he buried it on his parent's ranch as a sort of personal talisman.
So how does one explain the impressions of the true believers other than self-delusion?
Another interesting fellow is Crop Circle true believer Michael Glickman, who believes that crop circles "are gateways between the Earth and another dimension." He also says that there "is a record...of continuing inventive genius which is beyond man's capacity by a factor of hundreds of thousands."
Mr. Glickman apparently believes that his cherished crop circles could not be man-made.
As circlemaker John Lundberg reports, "Glickman maintains that the demonstration formation we created for the Daily Mail in 1999 is genuine. I explained that I had designed the formation and, with a team of 6 plus a journalist and photographer from the Mail, created the formation opposite Avebury stone circle. In terms of proof beyond the testimony of all those involved, the farmer was paid a handsome fee for the use of his land and would verify as much. We were all booked into a hotel in Cherhill and they probably have a record of it. I have all the original construction diagrams, and the photographer took several photos of us creating the formation."
All of this 'proof' is, of course, utterly useless against Mr. Glickman's 'belief.'
Another crop circle favored by Mr. Glickman is one known as the Bythorn Mandala.
Mr. Glickman describes the man who claims responsibility for this enigmatic formation, Julian Richardson, as being "pathological" and "pathetic" and to believe that this disreputable gentleman created such a wonderful formation borders on "high surrealism."
He believes this even though Mr. Richardson has produced photos of the formation half completed(he did it in two shifts) as well as his working diagrams.
In a 1995 interview, Mr. Glickman, along with his writing partner Patricia Murray, had this to say when asked if there was any "sequential development" to crop formations:
Murray: "Oh yes! If you were to put them in a time-line, you would see steady development. They never could have landed what they landed in '95 in the fields, in '85. We weren't prepared then."
Glickman: " I get the feeling we literally would have died."
Murray: "We would have gone into shock-trying to make sense of of it in our world."
Glickman: "We would have died."
Interviewer: "Really?"
Glickman: "There are energies of power which we cannot comprehend and we could not have confronted. For example, the Spider's Web or the Asteroid Belts of the last couple of years-I think we can only except these big formations because we saw Barbary Castle in 1991.
Now, if this all seems unrelated, you must excuse my apparent obtuseness but, to me, all of the above isn't that different from much of what I read here, even down to the pathological inability to say, "I was wrong."
Just because I approach what I read here with the same skepticism that I approach CNN or Fox or my local newspaper, for that matter, I magically become a conspiracy heretic; deluded promoter of the "established view."
If this lopsided hoo-ha is an example of the rigor y'all want me to think is on display here, then y'all will have to excuse my unrestrained chortling.
In other words, "Kiss my grits."
Marcello Truzzi had this to say about skepticism:
"...organized skepticism is a fundamental norm in science. However, the term skepticism is properly defined as doubt, not denial. It is a position of agnosticism, of non-belief rather than disbelief..."
Now, I've read a lot of "conspiracy theorists" whose research skills leave a lot to be desired. Jim Marrs comes to mind, as well as David Icke. In Mr. Marrs case, I think his criteria for publication includes anything told to him by a guy in a bar. & Mr. Icke, well, let's just say isn't even that fucking careful.
When I initially read the put/call option wolf cry, I was sorely tempted to post it here & then watch the ensuing hand wringing with glee, but I didn't really see the point other than malice. But, in the end, someone else did it for me.
As far as the nuke story goes, I just didn't find it very compelling. Just because the military has a neatly typed protocol for handling nukes doesn't mean they actually follow it. Hell, most corporations have Mission Statements that read like they're gatherings of angels sent to sprinkle the fairy dust of prosperity on us all, am I supposed to buy that one too?
Even Mr. Whitley "I've been anally probed & liked it" Streiber had a post at his website at the beginning of August, singling out the weekend of August 18-19, when the White House was supposed to be nuked. He based this on the anniversary of the burning of the White House, the supposed fact that a lot of Islamic videos being released showed the White House burning, & an enigmatic symbol in a crop circle that he interpreted as symbolizing the atomic bomb.
After reading it, I must admit, I felt somewhat compelled to rigorously clog the White House switchboard with cries of "The nukes will be falling. The nukes will be falling."
But then, alas, I came to my senses.
BTW, everything above that is in quotation marks-they look like this (")-was said by SOMEBODY ELSE. Everything that isn't in quotation marks-they look like this (")- is mine.
'Kay?
What made you think about 'the autumn of Detroit's water,' Jeff? Just curious.
IC said in previous thread:
Mark,
Have you checked out those further links at the bottom of that page, where they blow Amy Goodman's and NPR's covers?
"That" page? Which one? My previous news linked pages? I would like to read it. I looked and looked... or did you mean the Sourcewatch.org pages?
(Though it's enough for me to see A.G. sponsor Chip Berlet on her show to attack David Ray Griffin (without notifying her 'guest' Griffin of the format change). Amy Goodman is a tool. I've read arguments about A.G. and her East Timor coverage that made her reputatio, as not all it was seemed--with her being in strange protected situations of reportage that didn't make much sense on the surface if the surface was all there was. It makes the whole Amy Goodman Blair Witch Project questionable.
The desperation for 'opposition opinion leaders' can lead people to snatch up any offered governmental tool of the week, if they are marketed as such over the airwaves--a point I think Jeff warns about on many occasions as well--though he uses it as an argument against everyone which leads to a view like Shrub's.
I don't think, like Shrub does, the whole world is just mirrors upon mirrors. Just a part of it is. :-) And just follow the organization of it and you'll be able to tie in a lot of the mirrored mirror world back to Mockingbird style things:
1. the Alex Constantine link once more.
2. Good chart of the 'left media' side of the octopus.
Another Detroit and pedophilia link for ya, Jeff:
"In his day-to-day life John David Roy Atchison appeared to be your typical family man: a successful federal prosecutor and girls basketball coach who accompanied his wife and three children to youth sporting events on weekends.
Online, though, Atchison, 53, was living a secret life as "daddy" who wanted to fulfill fantasies of changing diapers and taking care of little girls.
The two worlds collided this week when Atchison was arrested at an airport in Detroit, where prosecutors say he traveled from his home in Pensacola, Fla., intending on having sex with a 5-year-old girl.
His profile on hi5, the site where he first contacted the undercover officer in Michigan, displays 189 "friends" nearly all of whom appear to be underage girls, some purporting to be as young as 4.
...
After being arrested at the airport in Detroit, MI, Atchison [a Federal Prosecutor in Florida] has been suspended by a youth sports organization where he coached. Atchison's boss, Bush-appointed US Attorney Gregory R. Miller, was "deeply saddened" by news of Atchison's arrest and said his office is cooperating with the investigation.
Police said he discussed having sex with a 5-year-old girl in conversations with an undercover officer he thought was the girl's mother. He promised to be "gentle and loving" [to the person he trusted was the mom!] and bragged that he had "done it plenty." [!]
Halloween has come early. Trick or treat. My Gosch! Rest of the article at Raw Story and lots of comments.
Mark..I'm going to quote your link as I think it needs further discussion..................................
In his day-to-day life John David Roy Atchison appeared to be your typical family man: a successful federal prosecutor and girls basketball coach who accompanied his wife and three children to youth sporting events on weekends.
Online, though, Atchison, 53, was living a secret life as "daddy" who wanted to fulfill fantasies of changing diapers and taking care of little girls.
The two worlds collided this week when Atchison was arrested at an airport in Detroit, where prosecutors say he traveled from his home in Pensacola, Fla., intending on having sex with a 5-year-old girl.
His profile on hi5, the site where he first contacted the undercover officer in Michigan, displays 189 "friends" nearly all of whom appear to be underage girls, some purporting to be as young as 4.
"I adore everything about young girls, how they talk, think, act, look," he says. "Love to meet cute girls from anywhere."
Investigators say Atchison's MySpace profile uses abbreviations indicating he wants to meet adult or teen "babies," reports the Macomb Daily.
Atchison, who has been sitting in a Michigan jail cell since his arrest Sunday, tried to kill himself Thursday, but guards managed to sto him in time.
His MySpace profile, along with others that RAW STORY accessed Thursday, indicates Atchison would like to meet "DL [diaper-loving] girls needing a Daddy to pamper, spoil, change and take care of them."
A Yahoo profile for fldaddy04 -- the same screen-name Atchison used on MySpace -- says his favorite quote is, "What a cute little butt!"
His hobbies are listed as: "surfing, skiing, diving, boating, young girls, petite girls, skinny girls, TB/AB [teen baby/adult baby] girls, girls of all ages who like to dress and act young, and girls who like girls."
The assistant US Attorney from Pensacola Florida was active on Internet message boards catering to infantilism -- a fetish whose practitioners like to act like babies or little girls. On one message board, a woman describes being in "LG [little girl] mode" when "wearing wet or poopy pants never worries me and I'm quite happy to wait until Daddy is ready to change me."
Atchison replied as "fldaddy04, "[T]hat's exactly what I like in a little girl."
After being arrested at the airport in Detroit, MI, Atchison has been suspended by a youth sports organization where he coached. Atchison's boss, Bush-appoionted US Attorney Gregory R. Miller, was "deeply saddened" by news of Atchison's arrest and said his office is cooperating with the investigation.
Police said he discussed having sex with a 5-year-old girl in conversations with an undercover officer he thought was the girl's mother. He promised to be "gentle and loving" and bragged that he had "done it plenty."
..........................................
Do you get the impression that this is so over the top that there must be an ulterior motive? A myspace comment as above doesn't require reading between the lines to figure this guy out. Apparently, the Gulf Breeze press is burying the story and parents are being told not to bring it up at the PTA... Here's a link to a couple of Kill 33 stories where members are told they must do certain disreputable deeds on threat of death to family members. Compartmentalized activity guided by a hidden hand to illicit certain outcomes..
http://www.mardigrassecrets.com/index.html
Ew."wearing wet or poopy pants never worries me and I'm quite happy to wait until Daddy is ready to change me."
ew ew ew ew ew ew.
anyhow,
After seeing Ahmadinejad give his speech at the UN yesterday, I realized I had made an off the cuff observation and not fully utilized my intuition rigorously enough. This guy isn't the caracature of the "crazy dictator" he's been painted as, by some (like the ridiculous Glen Beck)
Here was a man who (dispite his own country's problems) eloquently, point by point pointed a finger at the US and the "human rights" violations in high places...consequently I couldn't help but see all kinds of veiled allusions to CIA mind control and satanism...perhaps because Traceformation of America was still fresh in my mind, perhaps clouding my perception of things...
Also, Bush has been silent as of late regarding Ahmadinejad. Maybe he'll bring him up at a later time once everyone forgets the valid accusations made yesterday.
Ahmadinejad seemingly made masonic hand gestures while speaking of creating a new fraternity called "the Coalition for Peace" I don't know, it was kind of inspiring.
I really don't know "what he gets" out of playing his part.
Fundamentalist as his whole diatribe was, it almost made sense.
His religious wrap up of his speech was interesting too. He made a "hopeful" prediction for the future, based on the appearance of some "perfect human being" wow...like Muad'ib?
Hey Richard,
Six thumbs up from Shrub on your latest post. My sentiments, exactly.
"I know you were asking fletcher, shrub, but for myself, no; he's not a cognizant actor. He doesn't need to be. The rejection of conciliation by Washington handed the initiative to the fundamentalists and made his rise inevitable."
So are the "PTB" the true cognizant actors in this sub-cosmic re-run?
"cognizant" correlates with such terms as awareness, realization, perception, mindfulness...
If only....
The suffering and "horrible unfolding" are reflections of a woeful lack of cognizance on all of our parts. Pointing it out is just pointing. Every single one of us is Hitler, Bush, Ghandi, Britney,...
I see your point, Muddy Elephant, and I agree with it.
How about purposeful versus cognizant?
"Every single one of us is Hitler, Bush, Ghandi, Britney,..."
and Cheney, too? what about Jesus? Am i Jesus too?
I don't know...
Is it childish to believe that there is a thing that we can actually define as "evil" and something we can define as "good"?
It seems that everyone who goes to college and takes Philosophy 101 suddemnly gets the idea that "There's no such thing as good or evil, it's ALL relative.."
It's all holographic, though...
And cognizance, or semi-ignorance are they not different from purposefulness? Unless the purpose is to spread ignorance and indifference.
A cremation of care, perhaps?
we don't know that Ahmadinejad isn't cognizant of his purpose. It's all just intuition. And irrelevant. What ultimately matters is that we intend to bomb his country, no?
In what may seem a bizarre twist, I’m going to second Shrub’s cheers for your comment, Richard. It only seems bizarre on the surface—I’ve always advocated keeping an open mind, a great part of which means suspending one’s belief (and disbelief) in order to achieve a wider perspective.
But this is where things get tricky.
If you start out with an underlying belief system, say the classic materialist view that informs the Amazing Randi’s Skeptic™ shtick, or the lunatic fringing of conspiracy theorists and para-explorers, well then it’s not exactly an open mind that you bring to the subject at hand. You end up painting with too wide a brush; distinctions are lost and the possibility of separating the wheat from the chaff is thrown out the window with the baby and its corrupted bath water.
It still ends up as an exercise in either/or-ism. Can we really feel so confident that there’s no difference between Christopher Simpson and David Icke? And if we are, what does that say about our method?
I recently quoted Dr. Tart’s rationale for TASTE, which is a great example of a methodology which allows for clear distinctions in murky subjects, so I’ll rewind the tape a bit to see if it still plays here:
TASTE is an online journal devoted to transcendent experiences that scientists have reported. It lets scientists express these experiences in a psychologically (and professionally) safe space.
Science is a wonderful profession: I've worked at it for almost 40 years, and love it. As a process for gathering and refining knowledge, it is so useful! But the process is practiced by people, not machines, and we are each affected by the conscious and unconscious hopes, habits and fears of our individual histories and cultural heritages. As Aldous Huxley so nicely put it, each of us is simultaneously the beneficiary and the victim of our culture.
Science and Scientism
As scientists, we have discovered a body of precisely observed factual data about the world, created a lot of good theories that make sense of much of that data — and we are part of a cultural heritage of scientism. Sociologists coined the term "scientism" back in the 1940s, when they realized that many scientists unthinkingly accepted many scientific theories as simple, unquestioned Truths, just like believers in any "ism," and thus we often acted like any prejudiced "believer," especially outside our immediate areas of expertise.
I’ll spare you my suggestions for how we might go about incorporating a little Maybe Logic into our agnosticism, since we’ve been through all this before, and I’ll also forego any lessons in examining our epistemologies, since that would assume that I know what I’m doing better than you do—a logical fallacy if ever there was one—but maybe we can still apply Jeff’s credo to the current round of the Old Game in Iran.
What is it that we don’t know that might hurt them? Can we find any rigor to guide our intuition?
I liked that bit of deconstruction that Jeff performed on the intractability meme in this run up to war:
In 2003 the Swiss ambassador to the US carried a proposal from Khatami to negotiate a resolution to all outstanding issues, including Iran's nuclear program and a two-state solution to Israel and Palestine. Washington's reaction was to censure the Swiss ambassador.
But this only demolishes the overt explanation. It’s still on the level of refuting the propaganda of Goebbels and the State Department, which is great, but it doesn’t get at the real deal pushing us headlong into the abyss.
If WWI was not about making the world safe for democracy or being honor bound by dangerous alliances, but instead a contest for marketshare—Metternich’s chickens coming home to roost--and if WWII was not about Saving Private Ryan but Saving Private Power—a thesis with which I pretty much agree, as it jibes with Davis’ Shadow of the Swastika and all the confirmed conspiracies that we know about--then what is under the surface of all this talk of who’s wearing the moustache?
If there’s anything at all that we’ve learned it’s that the public rationales for war and the history book renditions of cause & effect are either digressions from the truth or outright lies. So, what are I.G. Farben & Friends up to this time? We could look at Putin (Gerhard Schroeder’s “peerless democrat”) and his defiance of Washington (which actually resonates with many Europeans who haven’t swallowed all that happy globalization crap), or even Russia’s economic links to Iran, but I think the undisclosed endgame in the Second Anschluß is...China.
This is my intuition, and here’s my rigor.
First off, it’s not being discussed by any of the Talking Heads, a good clue if you catch my drift. Second, there’s lots of unfinished business with China. The ghosts of Chiang Kai-shek and Douglas McArthur might be able to help us out if anyone believed in spiritual congress, but failing that approach, we might turn to AntiWar.Com’s China Syndrome: ON MAKING REALITY CONFORM TO PRECONCEPTIONS , by Joseph Stromberg who wrote, on April 10, 2001 (knock yourselves out, numerologists):
…important figures in the US northeastern political, economic, and intellectual elite convinced themselves by the late 1890s that an aggressive politically-backed push into Asian markets was the sovereign remedy for all that ailed American society...
This path is pretty much free of Skull & Bones-driven reportage (although it’s certainly open to that interpretation…), so you won’t have to feel like you’re in league with the sweaty nerds in their mothers’ basements when you read it, and it has the added attraction of combining the occult with the mundane, high weirdness and business as usual. (You’re going to have to read those spookier elements into it, but they’re doubtless there—just ask the spooks.) It’s really more a matter of what’s been occluded and occulted than “occult,” but the words are obviously related.
Fact is that China has always been a sort of secret partner with the Corpo-Elite; almost all of the Cold War theatrics were conducted along the American-Russian axis. Why, then, was so much of George Kennan’s postwar roadmap—Policy Planning Study 23—directed toward Asia? All that talk of resources being hoarded by the West and the eventual need to abandon the "empty phrases" of human rights and democracy when the vast yellow hordes finally realized they’d been had…or that Mao & Co. had long-standing contracts with the Western Powers That Be.
Another Road to China is through OpenDemocracy.Net, where I found that awesome link last year detailing Kissinger’s Metternich fetish--Sankaran Krishna’s brilliant Looking into America's Dark Places and which just happens to be running the China angle now with a series of articles and blog posts like these:
The root of slave labour in China
and
The Siege of Foshan
(Many more can be found under "Section 3 of 3: Blog posts" at the bottom of the page.)
OpenDemocracy.Net is also running a more straightforward account of this Iran/Sarajevo/Polish border pretext for the Never-Ending War: America and Iran: the spark of war, which includes this analysis:
…The fourth development is the convening by the Bush administration of a meeting of permanent members of the United Nations Security Council in Washington on 21 September directed against Iran. The principal aim is to intensify and strengthen the sanctions already in place against Iran on account of its nuclear-power programme; the US will also seek backing for its blacklisting of the Pasdaran-e Inqilab (Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) on the grounds that it supports terrorism.
This combination of events does not - any more than the pre-existing tensions outlined in the previous column in this series - mean that war between the United States and Iran is inevitable. It is the case, however, that public and media discourse in the US is moving in the direction of "preparing" citizens for that possibility. Such a situation opens out the field of potential dangers, among which is one or more relatively small incidents could precipitate a full-blown conflict.
Such an incident might be engineered by Israel, by US forces entering Iranian territory or waters, or (perhaps more likely) by radical elements within the Revolutionary Guards seeking to regain their diminishing status within Iranian society. If a crisis did develop rapidly to the point of major US air-strikes on Iranian targets, ultra-radicals on both sides would be delighted. For Washington's neo-conservatives, it would be a near-ultimate vindication. But what would happen when the balloons popped?
(That “preparing the public" link to the TelegraphUK includes this prediction/admission/sneak-peek into coming attractions from the inevitably anonymous “intelligence source”: "A strike will probably follow a gradual escalation. Over the next few weeks and months the US will build tensions and evidence around Iranian activities in Iraq.")
…internal dissent over the drive to war also means that a sudden, large-scale attack by the United States on Iran remains unlikely. What becomes more plausible by the week is that a spark might start a conflagration - a war not entirely by accident but not by direct design either. And once it started, there would be little prospect of turning back.
In this dangerous environment, it may be that international leadership is the best hope of leading a process that offers a route away from confrontation. Amid the feverish rhetoric, almost the only actor who is championing the diplomatic option and cooling the temperature is Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). ElBaradei's initiative in securing agreement with Iran on 27 August 2007 over a timetable for resolving the disputed nuclear issues provoked intense opposition among leading western states, but it may represent the basis of a way forward. It will need to find support among the political power-brokers if this perilous moment is not to end in another devastating war.
So, while the world watches the moustache instead of the Washington-Beijing tickertape, when will ElBaradei be morphed into Neville Chamberlain? More importantly, since the “political power-brokers” all work for the same interests which sponsored the first two rounds of World At War, where do we get off thinking we can derail the train of History?
Muddy,
I realize that the powerlessness I'm projecting at the end of this spiel either confirms your point or contradicts it, depending on your POV, but even if your contention is true, I'm at a loss as to how we might achieve some sort of solidarność with our Iranian & Chinese (and every other boxed set) brothers to stop the War Machine when we've been so carefully and deeply divided.
Is it any wonder that American firms are providing surveillance technology for the Chinese government to keep track of their serfs? (See the end of the last thread, Drew's link for more.)
What sort of Meta-Concert did you have in mind? Can we you-tube a world-wide rejection of violence and hegemony?
"He's also a useful tool to disparage dissent in the United States....just like bin Laden...or, should I say, the bin Laden videos and associated diatribes. A dissenter will generally agree on a number of points raised by both of them....but to agree with them is conventionally perceived as siding with the enemy. "
well said, Shrub...and if he's playing into that..the coming police state...I don't know. I mean i don't know IF it's really coming or IF he's part of the plan....
and then there's THIS little nugget....
Do You Write Like a Terrorist?
By Noah Shachtman September 24, 2007
You might think your anonymous online rants are oh-so-clever. But they'll give you away, too. A federally-funded artificial intelligence lab is figuring out how to track people over the Internet, based on how they write.
The University of Arizona's ultra-ambitious "Dark Web" project "aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web," the National Science Foundation notes. And that analysis, according to the Arizona Star, includes a program which "identif[ies] and track[s] individual authors by their writing styles."
That component, called Writeprint, helps combat the Web's anonymity by studying thousands of lingual, structural and semantic features in online postings. With 95 percent certainty, it can attribute multiple postings to a single author.
From there, Dark Web has the ability to track a single person over time as his views become radicalized.
The project analyzes which types of individuals might be more susceptible to recruitment by extremist groups, and which messages or rhetoric are more effective in radicalizing people.
The research comes with risks, according to the NSF.
Dark Web also uses complex tracking software called Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find the corners of the Internet where terrorist activities are taking place. But according to [Arizona's] Hsinchun Chen, sometimes the terrorists fight back.
"They can put booby-traps in their Web forums," Chen explains, "and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines." This online cat-and-mouse game means Dark Web must be constantly vigilant against these and other counter-measures deployed by the terrorists.
The Arizona group has been at this sort of research for a while, now -- sifting through more than 900,000 Islamist web pages. Here's a report Xeni filed last year for NPR on the Dark Web project. And here's a meaty blog post from Dancho Danchev on related projects.
Strangely, the Arizona AI lab's website seems to be down right now. But, thanks to the magic of Google, you can read a whole bunch of the the group's "Dark Web" research papers here. As the Star notes:
In one study, Chen found terrorist Web sites and U.S. government sites are equally sophisticated on the technical level. But terrorist Web sites are about 10 times richer in multi-media content like pictures and video and also about 10 times more effective in creating a community. Terrorist sites are quick to provide answers and instruction when their users ask questions, he said.
IC, I disagree with Randi's "skeptic" schtick as much as I disagree with the true believers.
When you think of it they're not all that dissimilar.
Randi's position could be summed up as "I don't believe it, so therefore it ain't," while the true believer's position is "I believe, so therefore it is."
Neither side seems particularly interested in proof, either for or against.
Notice I'm not arguing with Mark's Palast video post about artificial scarcity as seen through big oil's eyes.
I've read a bit of Palast, & he understands what qualifies as proof. He gets documents, he gets tapes & videos, etc.
He understands that extraordinary, or out of the ordinary claims, demands extraordinary proof.
I understand that it isn't always possible but so much conspiracy theory is awash with blind conjecture & hot air.
Can anyone tell me of any of the army of conspiracy researchers who saw 911 coming?
I don't know of one, which is why predictions rub me the wrong way. They seem to be driven more by ego than anything else.
In the end, most of these predictions seem no more plausible than the "Islamic ninja terrorists are gonna invade America" crapola that was permeating the American mindset immediately after 911.
To me it's just silly & totally unrealistic.
As silly as Glenn Beck saying that the Iranian prez "scares the hell out of me."
Personally, I see the Iranian prez as a misinformed none to intelligent loon, but so is GW.
Mr. Beck, in his commentary last night, also said that since the Iranian prez started his UN speech with references to peace & protecting the family, that was a sign that he was "pure evil."
Now, I'd have loved to have been sitting next to the Glennster so I could point out to him that that was the essence of George Bushes "lets invade Iraq" UN speeches. GW only wanted peace & to protect his American family too.
So doesn't that make him "pure evil" also?
Of course, I'm not sitting next to Beck so all I'm left with is sputtering impotently at my tv screen.
Richard,
That's a very good critique of Randi & the Believers. I also share your question about the possibility of prediction, but if that's true--that we can only hope to figure out what the hell happened after the fact, if at all--then what avenue is left open?
I came to RI originally because I grew frustrated at the tone and result of the conversations at Information Clearinghouse--it was more or less conventional politics with a lot of bickering and hand-wringing that left me feeling the same sort of impotent rage you describe watching Glenn Beck spout his gibberish. Here at least there seemed to be other alternatives & perspectives.
But after those first heady months of High Weirdness with the Profis, it occurred to me that the only real alternative to talking about what's wrong with the world was to go completely outside all the structures in place. That's why I've spent so much time investigating the implications of rebuilding the world without any sort of revolution.
I still like what we do here, and I even indulged in a sort of intuitive prediction of my own just now with regard to China's role in the coming mess, but it's all increasingly resembling a sort of remote viewing for me (if you'll pardon the expression.)
Fletcher,
How could our friendly banter here be construed as "terrorist"? Subversive, alienated, okay, but "terrorist"?! Has anyone here even remotely suggested violence as an answer to violence?
Very curious.
I think that the autumn pervert observation may be an ancient one. This behavior going back for thousands of years. Maybe not with every civilization but this is not unique to our times. This could be understood as part of the reason for the post here. This stuff going on way before our time too. That to disbelieve that is not wise or realistic.
I saw (actually mostly just heard because reception here in my mountain retreat isn't clear enough to include much discernable video) an interview with Ahmadinejad yesterday... and the person translating was a woman, thereby giving him a female voice. I wonder if he and his countrymen found this more offensive than the late night talk shows who photoshopped him in "gay" bondage gear. In any case, I found both to be an apt reflection of American affrontery and a general comment on our rather abraisive nature.
The most ironicle thing I think in this entire Ahmadinejad/Iran melodrama is probably that without the Bush administration's encessant saber rattling the little, bearded, bizzaro Fonzie, who is rather unpopular in his own country, would certainly have already been voted out by now and Iran which (partially thanks to and despite us helping to kill off an entire generation of their people) has an extremely youthful population and tends to lean pro-west would have almost certainly become what Lebanon once was... the Jewel of the Middle East as far as the West is concerned, as well as a friend and ally and in a great position to help create a stable and pro-western Iraq. But, of course, where would the profit be in that? Or the benefit to Saudi Arabia and Israel?
---
On skeptism...
I dig it. We need more of it here. Lately, actually there was always a seed of it but recently it seems to have grown... some folks hereabouts automatically dismiss anything mainstream, accepted or scientific out of hand but are at the same time willing to give a pass as far as fact-checking goes to anything 'alternative' in nature. We need more rigorous intuiting I say.
On the other hand, these mysterious put options, if you get your news from say financial sites as opposed to conspiracy sites had many explanations and were probably simply a hedge or a novel way to loan/launder money (none of which was lost). Seriously though, why would the bad guys use the market to gain wealth when they can simply make it out of thin air? That's backwards thinking. Even if you remove the top dogs with their own money printing presses from the equation, the next level down folks still have no need to use such barbaric methods to generate wealth because being wealthy they are in a position to consolidate tangibles as soon as the inevitable economic downward spiral takes place. Using terrorism to make market gains is... pardon the phrase, Bush League.
---
Older stuff...
Are magic mushrooms really illegal in all 50 states? They're available on e-bay so I found this rather strange. They're also growing all around where I'm living. Hmm.
---
IC: Highly efficient solar conversion technology is certainly a good thing in that is lessens the burden on the environment and also keeps money out of the pockets of those seemingly hell bent on enslaving us all and it is certainly "free" in the sense that it requires no cost or work beyond the initial, there are a couple of things that need to be mentioned in connection...
First, the suppression of easilly obtainable nearly unlimited energy doesn't stop at generation, it also goes to storage. Battery technology which is required for nearly all of the 'friendly' energy generation models such as sun, wind, tide, heat, is held back and what is available is for the most part expensive and environmentally offensive. This is not insurmountable because there are kinetic ways to store energy, however it is yet another sumbling block set in the path to make things more difficult.
Second and more imporantly imo, is that solar power is tethered to the sun and thereby tethered to places which receive an adequate amount of sunlight. In my eyes, the freedom which may be available via "free" energy is in the possibility of escape. Think for a moment on the potential of near boundless energy. You could quite literally go anywhere... the most inhospitable places, the desert, underground, the sea, under the sea, the sky, even space, and use energy to tailor your environment to be comfortable as well as supply (grow/raise) all that you would need to sustain yourself. You (and others) may find this rather unnatural use of energy to bend the immediate surroundings to our requirements distasteful, but I think everyone can agree that it would undoubtedly allow everyone complete and utter freedom and provide the final fallback position if someone should encroach on that freedom - the ability to pick up and go anywhere else where nobody is in a position to restrain such freedom.
That said, I still puzzle over the fact that we're living on a monsterous dynamo battery planet which itself is spinning at high velocity, with a moon also spinning and revolving and also exerting enough gravity to raise entire oceans, both of which are revolving around the sun which itself is rotating around the galactic core and all of it is expanding out at a ridiculous speed and we can't manage to tap into the tiniest fraction of any of these forces, which is all it would take to power everything forever?
---
More to come...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Try the Urantia Book or Urantia Foundation. These guys were publishing books of biblical proportion on aliens in that timeframe. Your name doesn't ring any bells but 60's cults seems strangely refreshing. hehe
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jeff thinks that because he saw them in a movie the "Autumn People" must be real.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
What a douchebag you are Jeff. Even more so those who think cropcircles are real too!!!!!
wooo hooo!!! that is unbelievably S.T.U.P.I.D. The people who designed them, strapped boards on the feet and went into the fields and made them, then they told everyone in the world that they made them... but that's not good enough for morons like you, oh no! You STILL believe in them. That's the very definition of insanity.
Dear god get some help, see a therapist and take your meds.
To Shrub, Jeff, Et al. RE: Ahmadinejad.
I think the evidence points more toward "cognizant, purposeful actor" than anywhere else.
Remember: He has been identified as the leader of the "student movement" that took over the US embassy in 79. Gary Sick (in October Surprise) and others have revealed that at least the latter half of the "crisis" was a fraud... and there is evidence emerging that the whole thing was a put up job.
All you have to do is watch a compiliation tape of the "444" days to see what I mean.
And after all, the emabassy in Tehran, like most embassys in that part of the world, is really just the local CIA station.
It's the post-modern, post-colonial seventies. The Shah is dying. He is well known to be a US puppet, and his seret police, SAVAKK, are among the most brutal (CIA trained) torturers the world has ever seen. The whole middle east, not to mention Iran, would loose their shit-- would be much harder to manage-- with another obvious puppet in the Peacock Throne.
So what to do? if you are the boys in the back room, and you have billions to spend, a lot of covert operational, public relations/psychological ops training, and you want to keep Iran?
The answer: Steal fire from the socialists and nationalists by organizing a succesful "Islamic" revolution. After all, they were working in that very medium in Afghanistan that very year.
So they fly the Ayatollah in from the Paris Hilton, (if'll you'll forgive the suggestion), and arrange the "takeover" of the embassy, essentially a Marine barracks/ and CIA station that did not need to be taken over if it didn't want to, certainly not by "students".
It all serves a few functions nicely: The Iranians have the carpet pulled out from under them.
The voices for secular, rational, moral government are swept aside or into prison by the Ayatollah's people, but the region can feel like "here is a regime with good anti-american bona fides. (Meanwhile of course as we learn from Sick first and then later the "Iran-contra affair" we are all happily trading lots of guns and rockets with these people all the while).
And back at home, the "decade of nightmares", including seriel killing, staglflaltion, "malaise", oil-shocks, gas-lines, etc. etc and on and on, is topped off with this ultimate humiliation, this shameful hobbling of a gentle Goliath suffering badly from "Vietnam Syndrome".
Mr. Malaise, Jimmy Carter, sends "Desert One" in for the big rescue, only to reveal a military infrastructure so degraded that the choppers crash into each other on take off.
Carter, in my view, colludes, obeys his masters in all that ensues, in every failed reform, and is a bloody-handed participant in the death of American Liberalism.
And who waits in the wings for his cue? Whose entrance, i.e., inauguration, features a split screen with the newly released hotages waving a tearful hello?
Some of us, in 1980, burrow our heads in the heady militarism of father Reagen's sure calm, his law and order swagger. We are far too demoralized even to look up when he begins in earnest the brutalizing of the Republic with the blunt object of military spending. "It it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with". And so it goes.
First time as tradgedy, second time as farce. On the assumption that it may still matter, I vote let's not get pulled in for one second. The idea that Ahmadinejad is a soverign leader, (or Osama Bin Laden, for that matter-- check out his 2004 address for glaring examples of obvious Beltway speechwriters) and that his idiotic roleplaying is conducted without constant contact with his DC handlers is simply laughable, preposterous, beyond any serious consideration.
This is not to say that I am forgetting that "There are really people who hate us out there". I am only proposing that the ones in a position to do anything about it are either killed or controlled.
Think about it. "There are no gays in Iran". David Duke invited to a Holocaust deniers confab. His boasts about 3000 centrifuges. His whole schtick, fabricated in Langley and other hubs of great theater, is to scare teh hell out of whover is dumb enough to believe he isin;t a washigton tool, in this case NY Jews, who are being manipulated into taking on an updated "blood libel"... ie it, it is really the "israel lobby" that controls US foreign policy, and which will take us into war with Iran.
Blame the Jews, as so many upstanding citizens of my fairly wide aquaintence do. I'm talkiing a few scholars and public intellecutals here.
And meantime, we've lost a group of people who would ordinarily be the first to see through a fraud like 9-11, their critical thinking blunted by the guns put up to Israel's head (with the full endorsement of the Israeli ruling class, as well as the Palestinian).
Behind "the hoopla of partisanship", wrote Walter Karp about congress, "the two parties worked together in collusive harmony." Indispensible enemies, all.
Friendly...That tears it. From whole cloth rented sacks of funerary windings pylons and pyres of fire and ice.
So you think you've got it goods and all. You are lily dipping. Look up... Look way up... We did this. Take your Flash Gordian kyot and Brenda too. See where it gets you.
thanks, frendlyfascism:
"RE: Ahmadinejad.
I think the evidence points more toward "cognizant, purposeful actor" than anywhere else.
Remember: He has been identified as the leader of the "student movement" that took over the US embassy in 79. Gary Sick (in October Surprise) and others have revealed that at least the latter half of the "crisis" was a fraud... and there is evidence emerging that the whole thing was a put up job.
All you have to do is watch a compilation tape of the "444" days to see what I mean.
And after all, the embassy in Tehran, like most embassy's in that part of the world, is really just the local CIA station."
I think you have a point there. Another point you might find enlightening is that it's probably true since the CIA itself stepped out of the woodwork to deny it, i.e., to 'legitimate him'? Catch-22 either way for them there I guess: if they stayed silent, people would talk. If they said something, which they did, they look like they are defending him! In a strange way by issuing that denial, they are.
Back to 1979.
U.S. had just lost Afghanistan in 1979 to a "socialist military coup". (And the U.S. was in Afghanistan, authorized by Carter, months before the USSR was there. Though the Afghan military attempted to have some independence for a while...)
Even further back.
Throughout the 20th century, the British Empire funded the Islamic mullahs as cooperating against local secular autonomy movements they despised. Certainly with US/UK intelligence/oil coteries working together on stopping the oil flowing out of Iran in the 1950s, a bit of all that strategy of sponsoring religious warriors against their national secularists rubbed off on the U.S.ian strategy? CIA's Kermit Roosevelt and all that?
After all, as TENC (The Emperor's New Clothes newswebsite, is that still around?) noted years ago, the U.S. was meeting with other invasion leaders in Rome pseudo-secretly after 2001's invasion of Afghanistan with the intention how to plan to introduce Sharia law, not secular Western law into the area:
"The IDLO, Backed by the US and Iran, Planned Islamic Rule for Afghanistan
U.S. and Iran agree: Sharia, or Muslim religious law, is 'all you need...'
by Jared Israel
[Posted 26 May 2003]
Summary:
If you have gotten the impression that the US is opposing Muslim extremism, the following will be shocking. At the end of 2002, the US, Iran and other powers convened a meeting in Rome to plan the creation of a new Muslim religious government for Afghanistan. A key official at the meeting announced that Muslim religious governments were in general a good idea for "developing" countries. There is overwhelming evidence that the sensational news of this shocking meeting was suppressed.
In the following text Jared Israel examines the nature of the Rome meeting and the purpose of its sponsor of record, the IDLO, and deals with the 64 dollar question: why is the US covertly creating Muslim extremist states while publicly opposing Muslim extremism?
Contents:
1. Top legal group backs Sharia but the news isn't fit to print
...
While doing research on the U.S.-led Empire's support for Muslim extremism in Iraq and Turkey, I chanced upon an important Associated Press (AP) dispatch whose contents were never made public.
Based on that AP dispatch, and some of my own research, this is what I know:
On the 16th and 17th of December, 2002, the powerful IDLO (International Development Law Organization) held a conference in Rome, ostensibly to discuss reforming the Afghan legal system.
This conference, or 'Roundtable' as it was called, was followed by a second conference, sponsored by the Italian government.
The AP reported that after the second conference, the director-general of the IDLO made a statement to the press. He said the conference had endorsed the use of Sharia, or Muslim religious law, as a sound basis for any modern legal system!
Nobody has published this news!
========================================================
2. Roundtable for Islamism [1]
========================================================
Searching the Web, I located the IDLO Website. There I learned a bit more.
According to a pre-conference mission statement, the purpose of the Roundtable conference was to help a commission trying to reform the Afghan legal system, laying the basis for a democratic, pluralistic society.
This sounds nice, but I have noticed that every time an Empire-controlled organization uses a nice word like 'democratic,' there's a catch: they are about to do something bad to ordinary people.
The IDLO Website has no report about the actual content of the discussions at the Roundtable. But we can get an idea from the mission statement and list of participants.
The mission statement begins:
"Afghanistan, an Islamic nation with a rich legal history, is in the process of ending decades of conflict and has entered a new period of reconstruction." [1A]
'Reconstruction' sounds nice, like 'democratic'. So where's the bad thing that's about to happen to ordinary people?
It's hidden in the phrase, "Islamic nation." For you see, the central issue during those "decades of conflict" was: should Afghanistan be defined in religious terms? Should it be governed by Sharia, Muslim religious law? Which in Afghanistan, and some other places, means domination by the harsh and repressive landlord class associated with Muslim fundamentalism.
Moreover, this conflict didn't just happen. The U.S. and its imperial allies in Europe and the Arab world put the whole financial/military/technical power of an Empire into empowering Islamic fundamentalism, and mujahideen terrorists, in Afghanistan. [2]
It would be nice to believe this policy has changed. Dream on. It is obvious from the list of participants that the IDLO Roundtable took as its starting point that Muslim religious law, Sharia, should govern Afghanistan.
Thus among the 60-odd participants were *none* of the teachers, professors, lawyers, judges or government officials who worked in the *secular* government that ran Afghanistan throughout the 1980s.
Instead there were officials from the current US-installed Muslim fundamentalist government, riddled with former mujahideen terrorists.
There were IDLO and UN officials.
There were government representatives from the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, *and Iran*! (Germany and Japan sent one representative each but Iran got three!)"
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/idlo.htm
So it's not far fetched what friendlyfascism mentions at all. They are doing it behind the scenes to this day.
How this intersects with oil is soon apparent:
The Brits were doing it long before the U.S. was. They co-operated on Iran in the 1950s to demote secular nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister who had nationalized US/UK oil. Why? So Iran could start to pump it for a change.
As Palast writes, the US/UK were refusing to pump oil out of the area like they said they would--artificial scarcity and all that--and were just sitting on their possessions to keep the price up after the oil glut after WWII.
However, Mossadegh and Iran had had enough of that artificial scarcity. So did Iraq under Saddam after the eight year war in the 1980s which is why Saddam got so hated all ofa sudden after being 'our man in Baghdad' for so long.
When you pump the oil to develop your country in the Middle East, you run the risk of being toppled because you ruin the well-preserved artificial scarcity and price structure internationally and you drop the price for the international US/UK oil majors who as Palast notes want to "enhance OPEC" instead of challenge it:
When the British Foreign Office fretted that locking up oil would stoke local nationalist anger, BP-IPC agreed privately to pretend to drill lots of [phantom symbolic "Potemkin village"] wells, but make them absurdly shallow and place them where, wrote a company manager, "there was no danger of striking oil." This systematic suppression of Iraq's production, begun in 1927, has never ceased. In the early 1960s, Iraq's frustration with the British-led oil consortium's failure to pump pushed the nation to cancel the BP-Shell-Exxon concession and seize the oil fields.
Britain was ready to strangle Baghdad [as they had done with the U.S. in Iran, toppling Iranian democratic gov't in the 1950s for same attempt to get out from under 'de-developmental' policies of the oil companies holding the contracts there]...
The OPEC cartel, controlled by Saudi Arabia, capped Iraq's production at a sum equal to Iran's, though the Iranian reserves are far smaller than Iraq's. The excuse for this quota equality between Iraq and Iran was to prevent war between them. It didn't.
To keep Iraq's Ba'athists from complaining about the limits, Saudi Arabia simply bought off the leaders by funding Saddam's war against Iran and giving the dictator $7 billion for his "Islamic bomb" program.
In 1974, a U.S. politician broke the omerta over the suppression of Iraq's oil production. It was during the Arab oil embargo that Senator Edmund Muskie revealed a secret intelligence report of "fantastic" reserves of oil in Iraq undeveloped because U.S. oil companies refused to add pipeline capacity. Muskie, who'd just lost a bid for the Presidency, was dubbed a "loser" and ignored. The Iranian bombing of the Basra fields (1980-88) put a new kink in Iraq's oil production.
Iraq's frustration under production limits explodes periodically.
...
In other words, there is nothing new under the desert sun. Today's fight over how much of Iraq's oil to produce (or suppress) simply extends into this century the last century's pump-or-control battles.
In sum, Big Oil, whether in European or Arab-OPEC dress, has done its damned best to keep Iraq's oil buried deep in the ground to keep prices high in the air.
Iraq has 74 known fields and only 15 in production; 526 known "structures" (oil-speak for "pools of oil"), only 125 drilled.
And they won't be drilled, not unless Iraq says, "Mother, may I?" to Saudi Arabia, or, as the James Baker/Council on Foreign Relations paper says, "Saudi Arabia may punish Iraq." And believe me, Iraq wouldn't want that.
The decision to expand production has, for now, been kept out of Iraqi's hands by the latest method of suppressing Iraq's oil flow -- the 2003 invasion and resistance to invasion.
And it has been darn effective.
Iraq's output in 2003, 2004 and 2005 was less than produced under the restrictive Oil-for-Food Program.
Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002. That suggests an interesting arithmetic equation.
Big Oil's profits are up $89 billion a year in the same period the oil industry boosted contributions to Mr. Bush's reelection campaign to roughly $40 million.
Back to Iran.
Did anyone else catch how Ahmadinejad was 'strangely' (sic) pushed by default by the U.S. (seeing instability and legitimation to invade perhaps?) at the time of his election, because the U.S. was refusing to fund or help out other 'dissident' candidates as they tend to do?
Ahmadinejad a new toady for Iran?
The "New Saddam"? <---Watch that on the old Saddam. Thanks for the memories. It helps to have one here.
http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html
(The only difference of opinion I have in that Flash presentation (besides the obvious silly idea that Al-Queda had something to do with the WTCs or the Pentagon attacks except as a media pretext--after all the FBI says they have no tangible evidence bin Laden was involved in 9-11), I would question whether the real Saddam is still alive with his perfect teeth somewhere smiling...The guy they executed looked more like one of his doubles with the bad teeth. It was such a TV production propaganda around him why would it be true that it was Saddam? (Link has more to explore if you want).
Mark,
Thank you. I look forward to looking through the links, and all the quotes and anaylisis are great. And it was a nice surprise to see you finish with the Saddam piece... I really look forward to that link, because the thing struck me as phony from the get go, the official, shaky cam cutting off and then somehow the unofficial, shaky cell phone cam getting international play.. escaping from the green zone, as it were, and that spooky little room they "did" him in. I've only looked at it once or twice, but damned if his body doesn't pass through a blind spot on the drop.. and anyway, its easy enough to stage a hanging for the movies. Look how nicely Harold did it in Harold & Maude-- it was his whole schtick (with the help of the producers, of course).
ericswan, I can;t claim to have untied the whole knot, but I've read enough comic books to know who the super-secret bad guys end up being in these tortured, ham-fisted epics... nothing in politics happens by accident, said Roosevelt, and no Flash Gordon adventure ever wrote itself...
Don't underestimate the intelligence community! They get off on this stuff because THEY CAN...
Brenda, of the keen intellect and polite demeanor—this one’s for you, Love! (No need to respond, girlfriend; we've already read your mind.)
Strange indeed, Tsoldrin, that with all this energy swirling around us, no one seems to have figured out a way to tap into it, instead relying on the same zero-sum extraction from natural resources that the first hominids employed in the quest for fire.
While supporters of the orthodoxy would quote us chapter & verse in defense of the entrenched energy monopolies:
“It can’t be done! The sacrosanct Second Law, handed down unto Sir Moses states that the universe contains only a finite reservoir of matter, and that all systems decay, and that you can never engineer a synergy of parts which produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts…or else we’ll cut your funding! Don’t you realize what’s at stake?! You’re challenging our paradigm with your crazy notions!”
more open minds would point to the politics of entropy as the reason for the current 18th century state of the art. Most of us have read Lindemann, de Palma, Tesla, Schauberger, Keely, etc—all of whom asked just the same question you have. Steve Kaplan’s explanation for the lack of progress is as good as any:
• The opposition of the scientific establishment, threatened by the overturning of ruling paradigms in physics and their economic stake in existing technologies and pet research ventures (for example, the failed "hot fusion" program).
• The opposition or benign neglect on the part of governments.
• The failure of the press to investigate properly both promising scientific developments and the vested interests which oppose progress.
• The inability of the environmental movement to consider new alternatives.
• The ignorance and apathy of the general public.
If you want specifics, from an insider, on why the scientific community acts like some sort of secret priesthood which has no qualms with acting as the Bringer of Death but can’t countenance anything so radical as to be free, try Bibhas De on
• the Quantum Racket : In terms of the power it wields, Quantum Theory is today the Pentagon, if Washington DC were the world of physics. It is a formidable place that you dare not criticize.
and
• The hidden nature of the photon : The photon is a finite structure in empty space, made entirely of static magnetic field. The exact structure can be determined by computation from mathematical expressions I have provided. I have also provided the expression for the mass of magnetic field. The exact mass, and thence the corresponding energy of the photon, can then be calculated from the structure. This is the new view of photon:
~~First, sound reasoning.
~~Then, scientific logic.
~~Finally, the clarity of daylight.
Q. OK, so the mass of the photon is something some people are beginning to think about. But structure?! Does anybody else think in terms of a structure of the photon?
Yes. British physicist Myron Evans and French physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier have proposed that associated with the photon, there is a magnetic field component that is parallel to the direction of propagation. This essentially amounts to invoking a structure of the photon - in terms of magnetic field!
Q. Strange that within the mainstream physics establishment we do not hear about these developments which seem to be of far greater import than String Theory and such that we are being bombarded with!
Strange does not even begin to describe the situation. Swedish physicist Bo Lehnert, French physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier and Welsh chemist Myron Evans have sought to give specificity to the obscure concept of photon. Why have you never heard of these interesting developments with regard to the photon? Because the obscurantist physics establishment keeps them in the deep background through benign neglect.
Q. What are some of the ramifications of the new ideas?
The ramifications are limited only by one’s imagination. Consider, for example, this: A photon spinning about various axes may form various particles.
This last part about photons being able to form “various particles” depending on which axis they spin upon is not just about “free” energy, but the transmutation of matter—anything into anything, with no loss of energy.
For those who can’t reconcile this with the received wisdom of the entropy dogma, Sepp’s answer provides enough light to see the other side of the energy cycle. (Destruction [entropy] is merely one half; creation [syntropy] keeps the universe growing…forever.)
The practical question is simply that renewable resources would challenge the death grip of the war pigs—Jeff Vail phrases it more politely, but there it is:
The free market will ignore solutions that can’t turn a profit. Any firm that fails to follow this simple maxim won’t be in business for long. The corollary to this maxim is that the free market will ignore any solution that cannot be controlled, either through property interests (enforceable intellectual property, monopoly licenses, etc.) or because economies of scale demand centralized operation. This means that free market innovation is structurally incompatible with a huge portion of the universe of possible energy solutions.
I have a link, btw, for a new solar conversion panel that works in cloudy, temperate areas just fine, strangely enough, by just copying those clever plants.
There is also positive energy coefficient housing, you know…it actually acts like a contributing, very much living part of the ecosystem…no waste products, etc.
What a nightmare all these things must be for those trying to keep the old lid on! How we're going to look back on these days one bright day in the future and laugh and cry (providing there is one, of course.)
Belliosto,
As I read this, I sit here in NY admiring the full moon alongside Hudson's River wearing a Hamtramck FD Fire/Rescue tee shirt.
Odd? Coincidence? Synchronistic event? Or merely my desire to manipulate my holographic existence?
I've been lurking about for a very long time and now it's time for my words too, to be heard by all who will listen.
Do not be afraid of what is inevitable, the future. If you fear you will be lost in the transcendence, which is coming soon. Birth is the begining of the dying process, after all.
The Israelis were lighting up the Syrian's radar installations for certain reasons and many other things, some openly known but most not, have been in play as well. It's a game long in the making. The demons need more souls and they will have them.
I'm sure you're all feeling a bit apprehensive. I wish I could allay your fears, but I cannot.
The comfort you seek must come from within and it is there, deep inside each and every one of you. Granted it will be more easily accessed by some here than by others. You must trust your own spirit and you'll not be dissappointed .
Preparing foodstuffs and stockpiling weapons for your survival in some cases may help you remain here for a short while longer, but only that. This life of flesh and blood we live is temporal.
Words read, written or spoken will not help you to find your way to that place of deafening silence where truth lay and the fortitude of assurance is to be found.
Some called my son Jesus. His life was sacrificed exactly eighteen months ago, but that was not enough to appease the hungry ghosts.
They thrive upon your fear and sufferings and you must cheat them of their usually easily obtained reward.
The time has come for all to find inner peace, if you want your soul to survive. Take as much time every day to seek out your power as you do to materialize your words here, and you may have time to become aware of yourself before it's time for you transcend this material world to the etheral.
Blessings to all truth seekers.
Well IC I've dropped the polite demeanor, maybe being rude and an ass will work.
Yes I am familiar with that page on crop circles and it is just another steaming pile of shit. Even on it's own terms it is clearly false and written by a delusional moron much like you. Same for Bibhas de, good God I AM sooooooo impressed by a geocities website from yet another nutcase that thinks he can overturn almost a hundred years of physics. Nothing screams NET KOOK quite like that does it?
My God you people are sick.
Thank you i am whom i am. I'm guessing you are trying to scare me. you wrote... Words read, written or spoken will not help you to find your way to that place of deafening silence where truth lay and the fortitude of assurance is to be found. hmmm maybe in the constellations thank you very much. I know for a fact in any major university that words written, spoken, and read will help to find the place where truth lies. If you take that argument to a public forum you would never win that debate. Let alone in private.
Oh! Whoa! 40! 40! and here you're old! Old heart!
42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50! 52!
You're lost!
You fool! The taste of death. So you will know it when it comes again. soon.
That was taken from the short video presentation. Mr. Dark does not like the diary that was written about him and his people. Are you Mr. Dark too i am whom i am?
Brenda. Thank you very much for introducing the subject of crop circles. No one else has brought that up unless you are referring to some link or another that not many actually follow.
Regardless, I agree with you. We're all a little sick these days but I'm sticking to my story that these lung infections are being spread by chemtrails in a two parter. First, to lower the immune system and second the "coup de gras". The Strassian nightmare has come at last.
Friendly..As I was scrolling on through, I noticed the "444" and immediately (if not sooner) reminded me how much I hade Dick Cheneys's two doors down neighbour Lou Dobbs. Speaking of slick sctick, the numbering down of "how many days" have these people been held captive in the embassy. Talk about your Chinese Water Torture.
I AM Whom I AM...You are the downside of Internet blogging. You are offensive. Why did you bother to sign up to blogger at all? Your profile reveals that you have only been blogging for what 24 hours? The upside is that we here in blognovia share what we can excepting communicable disease which is carefully taken care of by TPTB.
Maybe Tom Cruise knows something we don't know. He's building a multimillion dollar underground bunker that can sustain life for years.
Hubbard would be proud. Apparently Tom has been tipped off that the earth will be invaded by aliens. I've got news for you Tom. The aliens are dimensional.
How long will it take before we hear that snippet on CNN. Half an hour?
From Paul Levy- The Artist as Healer of the World
“The inner voice of the daemon is making itself known to us, which is to say that a living, creative spirit, with both destructive and constructive potentiality, is revealing itself to us. This spirit will continue to manifest "demonically" and destructively, however, as long as we lack the courage to engage with it. The inner voice of the daemon can potentially become our ally, however, if we get into conscious relationship with what it triggers in ourselves. If we do not become "touched" by the daemon, to quote Jung, "no regeneration or healing can take place…if by self-assertion the ego can save itself from being completely swallowed, then it can assimilate the voice [of the daemon], and we realize that the evil was, after all, only a semblance of evil, but in reality a bringer of healing and illumination. In fact, the inner voice is a 'Lucifer' in the strictest and most unequivocal sense of the word." Lucifer, the morning star, is the "bringer of the light." If we have a strongly enough developed sense of self, we are able to objectify and enter into conscious relationship with the daemon, thereby saving ourselves from being swallowed and possessed by it. Paradoxically, relating to our daemon as a separate, autonomous "other" - an actual living being - is the very way we integrate the daemon into ourselves. We are then able to metabolize and assimilate the daemon so as to receive its blessing in support of our spiritual unfoldment. When consciously embraced and related to, instead of manifesting as a destructive demon or devil obscuring our path, our daemon introduces us to our calling and helps us find our true vocation, which is what we are here to do. Thus, hidden in the daemonic is our creative genius. This is why Jung said, "the daemonic is the not yet realized creative."
http://www.awakeninthedream.com/indexx.html
Also, from The Wounded Healer:
“It should be noted that Jacob was wrestling with the angel in the first place because he would have been killed otherwise. The more powerful archetypal forces that wound us and become activated in us through our wounding literally challenge us to the core of our being to connect with, become intimately acquainted with, and step into more empowered aspects of ourselves, or else. Talking about his own personal experience of living out this deeper, archetypal pattern, Jung said "I would wrestle with the dark angel until he dislocated my hip. For he is also the light and the blue sky which he withholds from me." The dark angel who wounds us is at the same time the Luciferian agent who is the bringer of the light. There is a secret tie between the powers that wound us by seemingly obstructing our true nature and the very true nature that they appear to be obstructing.
Through our wound we become introduced to the realization that we are participating and playing a role in what Jung calls "a divine drama of incarnation," in which we step out of identifying ourselves in a personal way that is separate from others, and we step into, as if stepping into new clothes that are custom tailored just for us, a "novel" role which requires a more all-embracing and expansive identity. We realize we are all sharing in and playing roles for each other in a deeper, mythic, archetypal process that is revealing itself to us as it acts itself out through us. We find ourselves instruments being moved by a greater, invisible hand, as if something vast, with more volume than our previously imagined selves is incarnating through us. To recognize this is to have a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but rather, it is a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal/archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.”
irredescentcuttlefish said,
Fletcher,
How could our friendly banter here be construed as "terrorist"? Subversive, alienated, okay, but "terrorist"?! Has anyone here even remotely suggested violence as an answer to violence?
Very curious.
Ummmmmm, okay, i wasn't suggesting it was. I just thought that the effort to do this along with all the other so-called mechanisims for "smoking out the terrorists" (all part of the effort to further enslave us) I realize that the term "terrorist" is interchangable with "subversive" or "enemy combatant" to the shadow government and these incresingly ridiculous internet witch hunters. But I see this as a frightening whiff of the future. A future of complete submission to "the internet 2!" ha ha!
So obviously i realize that no one on RI would advocate violence....
I would employ more non-violent means. Like force fields and healing powers.
Or could UFOs (manmade ones) spraying a fruity cocktail of LSD & E whilst playing gay acid trance disco house jungle breaks over the heads of the army or over the heads of "enemy combatant" protesters not have a dramatic effect too?? Or playing moonlight sonata backwards...
and crop circles for sure. he he. sorry..I haven't had my coffee yet.
Okay, I have my coffee now
and I can't believe Brenda called Jeff a "douchebag".
wow...hostile...
Simon and Garfunkel comes to mind.
Like a rat in a maze,
The path before me lies...
Good stuff Sounder but Jung had a synthesis to the obelisk that not many archetypes could swallow.
Fletcher...Appreciate your comments. Language is a point of law and possession is a ass.
If your words are your own, you own your words.
This comment has been removed by the author.
words be nimble words be quick, words resemble walking sticks. Plant them they will grow...watch them waiver so...
I'll always be a word man. better than a bird (Byrd) man...
Brenda,
So, vitriol is going to “win” the day for you and your point of view? I wonder if you came by this interesting notion from the gods of mainstream science—as seen in their expressed desire to “burn” the works of Rupert Sheldrake—or if it’s your own special addition to our wonderfully open-minded, highly rational, and coolly impartial scientific edifice? I suppose burning books is at least an improvement over burning the scientists themselves, but could we open up the discussion of how science works just a little more, with maybe even a little less violence?
I do admire your outrage at the suggestion that some “geocities nutcase” could overturn a century of…orthodoxy.
Hannes Alfvén on Bibhas De: "…(Bibhas) De predicted the existence of a ring around Uranus which was discovered several years later (see B. De, 1978). This is the only time an essential new feature of the solar system has been predicted by a theory of solar system formation..."
I’m also feeling the tug of some very heavy déjà vu--we've been through all this stuff many, many times...so refreshing indeed to break new ground.
Now to the heart of the matter. You are aware that paradigms have been overturned before, right? That whole revolutions have occurred, almost always accompanied by the old guard being carried kicking and screaming off the noble, impartial field? If I started talking about Thomas Kuhn, would you immediately condemn it as another steaming pile of things beneath your contempt? Just in case you might actually be interested in the search for “objective truth,” here’s a nice link that discusses his contributions to our understanding of how scientific models come and go.
Sure, you can find many other links which would demonstrate that Kuhn was a steaming pile of shit, a wild-eyed maniac, etc., etc., but at some point the person throwing the fecal matter around becomes the maniac, not the one who tries to understand how science works. Anyway, here’s a little sample from that link:
Scientific Change
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions periods of normal science and revolutionary science are clearly distinguished. In particular paradigms and their theories are not questioned and not changed in normal science whereas they are questioned and are changed in revolutionary science. Thus a revolution is, by definition revisionary, and normal science is not (as regards paradigms). Furthermore, normal science does not suffer from the conceptual discontinuities that lead to incommensurability whereas revolutions do. This gives the impression, confirmed by Kuhn's examples, that revolutions are particularly significant and reasonably rare episodes in the history of science.
If you don’t care to get your hands dirty, here’s a Reader’s Digest version of Kuhn’s work:
Kuhn argued that science is not a steady, cumulative acquisition of knowledge. Instead, science is "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" [Nicholas Wade, writing for Science], which he described as "the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science." After such revolutions, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another" [Wade].
Although critics chided him for his imprecise use of the term, Kuhn was responsible for popularizing the term paradigm, which he described as essentially a collection of beliefs shared by scientists, a set of agreements about how problems are to be understood. According to Kuhn, paradigms are essential to scientific inquiry, for "no natural history can be interpreted in the absence of at least some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism." Indeed, a paradigm guides the research efforts of scientific communities, and it is this criterion that most clearly identifies a field as a science. A fundamental theme of Kuhn's argument is that the typical developmental pattern of a mature science is the successive transition from one paradigm to another through a process of revolution. When a paradigm shift takes place, "a scientist's world is qualitatively transformed [and] quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory."
Kuhn also maintained that, contrary to popular conception, typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers. Rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate. Most are, in essence, puzzle-solvers who aim to discover what they already know in advance - "The man who is striving to solve a problem defined by existing knowledge and technique is not just looking around. He knows what he wants to achieve, and he designs his instruments and directs his thoughts accordingly."
During periods of normal science, the primary task of scientists is to bring the accepted theory and fact into closer agreement. As a consequence, scientists tend to ignore research findings that might threaten the existing paradigm and trigger the development of a new and competing paradigm. For example, Ptolemy popularized the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, and this view was defended for centuries even in the face of conflicting evidence. In the pursuit of science, Kuhn observed, "novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation."
And yet, young scientists who are not so deeply indoctrinated into accepted theories - a Newton, Lavoisier, or Einstein - can manage to sweep an old paradigm away. Such scientific revolutions come only after long periods of tradition-bound normal science, for "frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken." However, crisis is always implicit in research because every problem that normal science sees as a puzzle can be seen, from another perspective, as a counterinstance and thus as a source of crisis. This is the "essential tension" in scientific research.
As I say, these are just samples, doorways into the discussion—Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability between scientific paradigms is actually the meatiest bone, but explaining that notion would require too much patience on everyone’s part here. If you’re really interested, go read the link, but I have a feeling that’s not your motivation.
Well, actually, it’s more than a feeling. Everything you’ve written is so combative; unlike your previous comments, you seem quite clearly not to be seeking to understand the world anymore, but instead to cram your understanding down the throats of all those morons who are too stupid to see the world the way that you do. How is calling us stupid going to change our minds about things we've already discussed so many times?
This is not to say that you shouldn’t argue passionately for something you believe in (I know I often do), but let’s not call such efforts an impartial search for truth when such behavior is obviously a crusade to defend your faith, in this case in the infallibility of our fine scientific establishment.
I do have one small question, though. How do you justify the actions of those brilliant men of science in their acquiescence to the demands of their paymasters—building all those weapons of mass destruction, all those terrible refinements in the art of brutality, when they could have dedicated their work to the study of livingry for the betterment of mankind and the earth?
It’s just a paycheck?
Ethics have no place in science, just as Max Planck once declared that “Science has nothing to do with Nature” when he assured the Führer that Schauberger’s plans for relieving human misery were foolish and “unscientific”?
How is it that at Nuremberg we declared that soldiers still had a moral duty to mankind, regardless of their orders or the pressures they faced, and yet our most brilliant minds can work on any sort of nasty technology they care to, free from the constraints of conscience or any other responsibility to anything at all beyond their bank accounts, their priceless reputations and the imperatives of "national security"?
In your world, can a war criminal receive a Nobel Peace prize?
Tell you what, in return for your patience and your tolerance of my wacky, steaming-pile-of-shit views, I’ll do you the favor of giving you this link to some science guys (well, actually, it’s a woman of science—Marni Dee Sheppeard—and her blog is called Arcadian Functor) discussing a heretical new theory that seems to contravene the sacred Speed of Light and their assertion that all scientists should sign the new Declaration of Academic Freedom (now why would they need such a thing?)
In and among Arcadian Functor’s posts on VSL (the aforementioned, highly heretical Variable Speed of Light theory)--here, here, and here--we find this gem which reminds us again of how much we think we know:
At a seminar here yesterday we heard that as recently as the 1920s people still believed that the Milky Way was the entire universe, with the sun sitting at its centre. A mapping of globular clusters in the Milky Way soon indicated that the sun lay on the periphery of the galaxy, and it was finally recognised that the strange spiral nebulae were in fact distant galaxies, not unlike our own. The same seminar concluded, on the observation that accelerated publication rates had not produced as many major breakthroughs in the last two decades, that technology had finally caught up with observations over the electromagnetic spectrum and that we may well have seen most of what there is to see. Naturally there was some dissent. To believe that in a mere 80 years humanity can go from a relatively trivial understanding of the cosmos to complete comprehension is hubris.
Today we are just beginning to observe the so-called Dark Matter in the skies. The luminous baryonic matter is a small fraction ($\frac{\pi - 3}{\pi}$) of the matter we imagine is out there. No doubt this is only another small step in the evolving vision of our mind. A Theory of Everything can never be more than a theory of what little we have known before.
And just for grins, here’s another one to some internet crazies who think the current scientific set up is a complete fraud and a moral sewage pit (I can’t help myself--you are just so attractive when your veins pop out like that.)
But seriously, folks, should we really continue to celebrate the work of Oppenheimer & Teller and suffer visionaries like Bucky Fuller to be castigated as fools and madmen?
Fletcher,
I get your point, but I think (pray?) that I’m beyond that particular fear. The fiction that we enjoy some sort of anonymity is just that—we only use these stupid screen names because it suits us, in some strange, unaccountable fashion. If you really want to get scared silly about the whole thing, to really see the levels on which our identities are known and processed in the institutionalization of surveillance, go to ICAMS and read their chilling pdf.
Or take this piece of advice from Revisiting the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse:
Jones, a computer science prof and president of Electronic Frontier Canada, a watchdog group, knows that Internet anonymity, in its purest form at least, is an illusion. With the right resources, and determination, Internet transmissions can usually be traced. The U.S. Secret Service can demand the logs and records of anyone — and it will.
Personally, I think that most of what we know about the shadow government has been intentionally leaked to frighten us away from the kind of psychic integration that Sounder is suggesting. All the spook-talk, all the CIA operations…all the conventional conspiracy theory is designed to frighten and discredit any potential opposition, even if a great deal of it is true. The over-the-top stuff is just so their operatives can have a good chuckle when they read the frantic scribblings of the disgruntled ants in The Colony.
We know we’ll never be able to elect “representatives” who have any chance of making meaningful policy changes, and that’s just as well, anyway, since the only place meaningful change can take place is within and between us. (And, of course, in those wacky hobbit holes that are the physical interface between us and our environment…the spiritual and the material.)
Regarding Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes:
I met Ray Bradbury quite a while ago at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference. He was a very perky, upbeat guy back then, zipping around everywhere in his tennis whites, showing off his hairy legs. Hardly the kind of guy to break a sweat over the Autumn People, one would think. Apparently, he really loves life. I heard him read a little story about a character who had a close call with death, and in that poetic (almost flowery) prose of his, Bradbury, reading, said he'd rather repeat any moment of his life again—any moment, no matter how painful—rather than accept death.
Now, when I heard this I thought Bradbury was being kind of smarmy—and maybe even insincere. I'd had a childhood marred by severe asthma and episodes of grotesque violence. My first thought was: When I die, I sure as hell won't be begging God or whatever spiritual beings are on-call to send me back to earth so I can experience my bouts of suffocation and extreme terror all over again. As I grew older and found myself gravitating toward gnosticism, I began to think Bradbury had flatly gotten it wrong. The endless cycle of human incarnation is something to be transcended through gnosis (if that's at all possible...). Rather than begging to replay the worst episodes of our lives, in lieu of facing death, maybe we should be a bit less craven and clingy, and more spiritually courageous.
I'm probably not being fair to Bradbury here.... After all, he was the one who came up with the Autumn People meme in the first place. And it seems such an apt meme for describing some of the players in current world events, as Jeff was pointing out. Are there certain people (or entities) that actually feed on our suffering? I think so.
Here's my brief take on that situation from the book I've just published, Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (which would surely piss off our friend Brenda in a thousand different ways, were she to ever bother reading it [E-mail me, Brenda, and I'll send you a free copy. You too, Drew...]):
“One interesting thing to note about these alien sightings we’ve been talking about—in 1918, 1947, and 1974—is that they’ve all tended to occur towards the end of American involvement in foreign wars. I think there’s a reason for that…” Lloyd says. “When Aleister Crowley first summoned the Lam in 1918, some 16 million people had recently died in World War I, and an additional 20-odd million were dead or dying from the Spanish Flu Pandemic. For the Lam, that translated into quite an abundant energy banquet. At least one of them, as you know, had enough surplus energy to crossover into our realm to sit for a portrait. And in 1947, after World War II, it was much the same story: 60 million dead—about three percent of the world’s population. Again, the Lam feasted on human fear and suffering. When Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard summoned them that second time around, they had energy enough to arrive in style, piloting their flying saucers. When one of those pilots ran out of juice over the skies of Nevada, the result was the Roswell Crash. Since then, the Lam come and go as they please, but I think you’ll find they always appear most readily after times of earthly turmoil.”
“Like in 1975, after the fall of Saigon in the Vietnam War,” Gordon concludes.
“With a big assist from the ‘Killing Fields’ of Cambodia, courtesy of the Khmer Rouge,” Lloyd appends. “This cycle of war and subsequent alien contact seems to happen every 28 years or so. I’d expect the next cycle to start up sometime just after the turn of the new millennium. Which has me wondering: Could all this be intended? Are we being harvested? Is each new generation being mown down like a crop of winter wheat so the aliens can energetically devour us?”
“God, Lloyd, could you get any more depressing?” Twinker complains.
“Yeah, you’re even worse than that guy who wrote War of the Worlds—Orson Welles,” Skip says.
“H.G. Wells,” Gordon corrects him. “Orson Welles adapted it into a radio script.”
“I thought that was George Orwell,” Skip argues, still trying to show-off his half-assed knowledge of literature.
“George Orwell wrote 1984—”
“—which might also be considered germane to our conversation,” says Lloyd, “especially the coda: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face… for ever.’ But let’s not go there. What I’m really curious to know is: Did the Lam plan this state of perpetual warfare from the very beginning? And if so, is our government collaborating with them?” Lloyd has apparently only begun to get depressing.
Hey IC,
RE: Bibhas De predicting the existence of a ring around Uranus which was discovered several years later...
Remember Ingo Swann's 'Jupiter Probe'?
In April, 1973, four months before Pioneer 10 made the first flyby of Jupiter, Ingo Swann remote-viewed the planet and saw "a band of crystals, like the rings of Saturn, very close within Jupiter’s atmosphere. The Pioneer probes didn’t see it, and Ingo was mocked, but in 1979 as Voyager 1 passed close to Jupiter it reported back exactly that. The Jovian Ring was one of the larger surprises in astronomical history, and Ingo had seen it six years earlier.”
Remote-viewing... a new theory of solar system formation... whatever works. What doesn't work is telling creative thinkers they're not allowed to think creatively.
You're so sexy when you're mad, Brenda. I find it irresistable.
Hey Derek!
When I read that Ingo Swann-ring-thing in your book, I immediately thought of Mr. De...and then wondered what role Hal Putoff might have played in both "visions." De is also something of a mystical poet-type; his uncle is or was a famous holy man, while Mr. Puthoff might be something of a flim-flam man, unless that's just my suspicion of people working for the CIA. (Not that Nick Cook seemed to mind...)
Circles within circles, you know.
Jeff,
Today I listened to Mr. Dream’s End talk about the two of us sitting in a tree on the Grassy Knoll.
You were described as saturnine. And while I am crazy about your intuition, Well, Jeff I have to agree. The comments made me happy once upon a time when I saw they pleased Michael. But I can’t see that Eve pleases Michael with her intuition any longer. I think St. Michael is pleased not with the Wit, but with the prayer.
The child is still in danger but his brother’s keeper is divorced from reality. There’s nothing immaculate about brainwashing.
So I’m saying goodbye Jeff (and everyone). This will be my final post here. I’m going back to Traditio – from whence I came….where I believe I can love Tomorrow in spite of what I know today.
Traditio.com
We don’t look around to understand what’s up,
We look up to understand what’s around.
Cheers,
Et en Arcadia Ego Eve
**Also know as Borne Roomy (Forestville)– the power behind the Passion that moved Heaven and St. Marries**
Navy to fix 'swastika' gaffe
The U.S. Navy will spend up to $600,000 [to hunt down people looking at the image, just kidding] to alter a barracks.
Why "swastika" is in quotes I don't know. It either is a swastika or isn't it. And it is.
The question is that of intent or intentional meaning and whether it is changed afterwards doesn't touch that issue.
Given many Third Reich rocketry engineers (via Project Paperclip) were in locations like avionics-heavy Southern California from immediately post WII, and given major ongoing occult architectural issues in the U.S.A. in military and public buildings, it's hardly "far fetched" (in quotes) to make such an assumption. Particularly when the whole national capital of the U.S.A. is a geomantic occult paradise (It's hardly the U.S.: Paris over multiple generations has been slowly constructed as a secondary Luxor, replete with pyramids (actually the pyramidal base of the Eiffel Tower as a substitute) and oblisks in the same general locations; other archaeoastronomical lines of sight mark out certain days when the sun perfectly rises or sets down certain roadways, in both Paris and D.C., so says 10 years of puzzling about Paris and other locations at the link above.)
So all in all, such a strange and minor concern with symbolism over reality for a country with over 300 military bases worldwide OUTSIDE its own borders and occult architectural signifiers everywhere you (don't know to) look.
It would be easier and more economical to close the 300 military bases to spread democracy across the world though a truly Democratic Anschluss is not what the neocons have in mind. And much easier upon reflection to have "swastika" without quotes.
US Navy to Alter "Swastika" Building Due to Web Maps
Thu Sep 27, 2007 5:13PM EDT
See Comments (7)
Your tax dollars at work: The US Navy will be spending about $600,000 to redesign or camouflage [?] a 1960s barracks building in San Diego because of complaints that it looks like a swastika when viewed from the air. In the past this might have been a problem only for the occasional air traveler who happened over Coronado island, but with the advent of aerial mapping and visualization tools like Google Earth, everyone can see anything from the sky. In fact, many people have made a game out of finding oddities in satellite photos [like Cheney did I guess inventing "massed Iraqi troops and tanks on the Saudi Arabia border" in 1990 back before the Gulf War I, that didn't exist--as (un)reported by most U.S. media].
...
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/46586
Never could spot irony when I saw it, but...from Traditio.com, sort of randomly...
More Modernism from Ratzinger
"Now it appears that Ratzinger is behind another one of these New Order apologies to the Church's enemies. You know the Modernist breast-beating. Instead of being recognized for the civilizing force it has been for 2000 years, the world's leading supporter of science, law, the arts, etc., without which all of Europe would be barbarians, the Novus Ordo apparatus is now apologizing to all those barbarian elements! First, it was the foul-mouthed libertine Luther, who called the Roman Catholic Church "whore-church of the devil," "arch-whore of the devil," and "stench-church of the devil." Now Ratzinger wants to apologize for the Holy Inquisition.
Most of what people think they know about the Inquisition has been proven by historians to be a lie. The Church does not have to apologize for the Papal Inquisition, the most just and benign tribunal of its time, in the opinion of historians. It protected the rights of defendants and established a level of Christian jurisprudence that the far more death-dealing Protestant countries of the time were far from attaining. More false information has been circulated against the Church on the topic of the Papal Inquisition than on any other topic. Many Catholics, including (it seems) the New Vatican, have simply accepted the common misconception and unhistorical myth for purposes of "political correctness."
When the Albigensian heresy arose, with its undermining of the moral basis of human society by subverting oaths, denying the right of the state to punish criminals, forbidding marriage and procreation, and encouraging suicide, especially by starvation, the Papal Inquisition, a system of ecclesiastical courts for trying and punishing heresy, was established in 1230, with jurisdiction over Catholics and fallen-away Catholics only. These courts were commissioned to seek first the reformation of the heretics by warnings or slight penances, which most accepted. Their scrupulous rules of procedures protected the accused with more safeguards than defendants in modern courts receive today.
Even the Spanish Inquisition (as distinguished from the Papal Inquisition) did not proceed against sincere followers of any religion, but only against those Spaniards, Jews, and Moors who, having once been members of the Catholic Faith, pretended to be Catholics, but had actually given up their faith and become involved in treacheries against Spain. Circa 1492, the top Jews in Spain had wormed their way into high positions of Church and State by pretending to be Christians. These false Marrano Jews, as they were called, were working with the Muslims across the strait of Gibraltar to overthrow Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, and turn a Christian country into a Moslem country. Queen Isabella reacted in time and instituted the Spanish Inquisition, which was constituted to inquire who were the false Marrano Jews were who were working in Church and in State to betray both. The Spanish Inquisition was not a mad rampage where millions were killed indiscriminately, but a careful rooting out of traitors who were about to betray and perhaps destroy Spain first, and then Christian Europe.
Wow. I can't even make a Spanish Inquisition joke out of that stuff. Wow², even.
Good luck, Et en Arcadia Ego Eve! I think I might have to leave for a while, too, but I'm thinking I'd rather hang with the Druids than that bunch...although I do miss the chants and my grandad's K of C sword.
IC
(They don't seem to mind the swastikas too much there, either, Mark. Oh, that Amy Goodman/NPR outing link was on the sourcewatch page, I think, or maybe Robinson's democracy endowment watchdog site...sorry for the laxity. Painkiller's wearing off again, you see.)
I happen to like swastikas but it's the one that rotates clockwise. That brand spanking new American embassy in Baghdad, is such a large swastika that it covers 104 acres. God bless America.
I listened to the Presidential debates for black Americans this evening. Paul distinuished himself from the others by stating he would end minimum wage which he felt would dry up all those jobs that illegals are taking. For a doctor, I thought it was interesting that he supports alternative medicine as insurance companies, and pharmeceuticals have corrupted Washington.
If I were a voting American and not just a faux satellite American, I would look to Dodd as the last great white hope.
Derek..I posted this link before but Crash missed it..
http://www.mardigrassecrets.com/index.html
I visited your blog and bookmarked. I'm not sure that I have a handle on your "first person singular" but bong away.
IC.. sounds like you are going through some tough times. Hang in there.
Thanks, Derek and Eric, (and IC and Eve,-- happy travels Eve)
Come on people; let’s pull it together. Find a thematic center that explains the nature of our condition more effectively than the current good vs. evil program. When I look up to understand I may well be projecting my insecurities. I may be setting up resonance patterns with negative elemental forces. The patterns have a long pedigree and are very effective in maintaining achiever type people within its grasp. On the one hand there is the church and their need for a common doctrine. On the other hand, many people feel the need to define and control their own internal mental states. Both groups have the same challenge and that is; how does one add or give to the whole vs. living a life that takes from the whole? Some of the early intuitionists were freaks, perfectible’s that considered themselves above the law. And they did things to prove it. They would kill and rob without compulsion. They were representing a negative polarity expression of Lucifer. And yes, the Bishops of the time were also often negative in their use of the fixed principle or Ahriman. The cycles of repression and rebellion will end as we learn of the creative value of positive polarity expressions in contrast to the coercive element within negative expressions.
Are you thinking your thoughts or are your thoughts thinking you?
"Spiritual maturity exists when there is no difference between thought itself and the action that accompanies it. If there is a discrepancy between the two, then one is practicing self-deception and projecting a false image of oneself." -B.K.S. Iyengar-
One definition of one who has matured as a warrior is that, "where fear resides, thought becomes action."
One of my favorite quotes is from the Fantastic Four. A woman is falling from a building, and Johnny sees the event unfolding and immediately gets into position to leap off after her. His sister says, "Don't even think about it!"
As he leaps, Johnny simply says, "I never do."
Twelve
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
Fourteen
Look, it cannot be seen - it is beyond form.
Listen, it cannot be heard - it is beyond sound.
Grasp, it cannot be held - it is intangible.
These three are indefinable;
Therefore they are joined in one.
From above it is not bright;
From below it is not dark:
An unbroken thread beyond description.
It returns to nothingness.
The form of the formless,
The image of the imageless,
It is called indefinable and beyond imagination.
Stand before it and there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Stay with the ancient Tao,
Move with the present.
Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao.
Sixteen
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.
The way of nature is unchanging.
Knowing constancy is insight.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted, you will act royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.
Forty-three
The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
That without substance can enter where there is no room.
Hence I know the value of non-action.
Teaching without words and work without doing are understood by very few.
To step outside of one's ego - to become an observer (almost as a separate entity) can help to open the "eyes" of self. One can often see their own delusions mirrored in another individual they encounter - and if one is open to such things, this can trigger an awareness of self. Our teachers come to us in many forms - and often our teachers do not even realize they are such.
If our first teacher is our own heart - then it is imperative that one learns to truly "know" one's self. By doing so it is possible to face our deepest fears and our darkest side - which is the root (for me) of delusion. Identifying the cause within one's self leads to a cleansing of self.
And for Brenda, some of us just view life through different thoughts. We chose the scenic route instead of traveling the short route of point a to point b in never ending cubes that the thought police want you to stay trapped in.
"The scientist knows what he is looking for and a shaman can tell him where to look for it to begin with" - Crow Shaman
movie girl
The swastika is an ancient Indian symbol of immutable good luck. “Swastika” is an Anglicization of the Sanskrit word svastika, which means well-being or good luck. Used by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains for thousands of years, it became widespread in Tibet as well.
The swastika has also appeared in most other ancient cultures of the world. For example, the counterclockwise variant of it, adopted by the Nazis, is also the letter “G” in the medieval Northern European Runic Script. The Freemasons took the letter as an important symbol, since “G” could stand for God, the Great Architect of the Universe, or Geometry.
The swastika is also a traditional symbol of the Old Norse God of Thunder and Might (Scandinavian Thor, German Donner, Baltic Perkunas). Because of this association with the God of Thunder, the Latvians and Finnish both took the swastika as the insignia for their air forces when they gained independence after the First World War.
In the late nineteenth century, Guido von List adopted the swastika as an emblem for the Neo-Pagan movement in Germany. The Germans did not use the Sanskrit word swastika, however, but called it instead “Hakenkreutz,” meaning “hooked cross.” It would defeat and replace the cross, just as Neo-Paganism would defeat and replace Christianity.
Sharing the anti-Christian sentiment of the Neo-Pagan movement, the Thule Society also adopted the Hakenkreutz as part of its emblem, placing it in a circle with a vertical German dagger superimposed on it. In 1920, at the suggestion of Dr. Friedrich Krohn of the Thule Society, Hitler adopted the Hakenkreutz in a white circle for the central design of the Nazi Party flag. Hitler chose red for the background color to compete against the red flag of the rival Communist Party.
The French researchers Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, in Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) (1962), wrote that Haushofer convinced Hitler to use the Hakenkreuz as the symbol for the Nazi Party. They postulate that this was due to Haushofer’s interest in Indian and Tibetan culture. This conclusion is highly unlikely, since Haushofer did not meet Hitler until 1923, whereas the Nazi flag first appeared in 1920. It is more likely that Haushofer used the widespread presence of the swastika in India and Tibet as evidence to convince Hitler of this region as the location of the forefathers of the Aryan race.
http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/advanced/kalachakra/shambhala/nazi_connection_shambhala_tibet.html
Re: Hunter Thompson's comments on pedophiles, etc. He has quite a spectacularly perverted appearance in DeCamp's *The Franklin Cover-Up.*
I got's some catching up to do's !
Anyone got some decent links on chemtrails? it's something i cannot grasp at the mo...can't see the info for the disnfo.
I have been as sick as a puppy with aids for months. not saying it's chemtrail related, i mean, that would NEVER happen in england. we're too proper.
lorra lorra luv.
J Man -
You feel better, huh? That’s nice. You look real pretty, laying there all nude and contented. Wonder how many married guys will look at your picture and beat-off. . .then stare unhappily at their dumpy carnivore wives?
laughed my spleen in two.....dumpy carnivore wives!
I recommend reading:
"Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China" by Dr. David A. Palmer (Columbia University Press, 2007)
At the risk of trying to have some dialogue about something somewhat real (and therefore maybe completely non-tangible or not real at all)
I was having a conversation with some friends yesterday and My friend asked about Iran and why we were so intent on going to war and i said something like, "well, it's really Israel that wants war w/ Iran and we're like deep into Israel's pocket...or vice versa..." and then we got into a fairly logical conversation about the history of Israel after WWII and the Palesinians and it was all so precognative...our conversation seemed to be a rehashing of overly obvious historical certainties. And the conversation just sort of flowed without any of us even really thinking about what we were about to say. I even remarked how rehearsed the conversation seemed. Automatic in a way.
This disturbed me in a way i am not sure i can express.
Almost like it was analogous to the progression of this conflict, like the autopilot of disaster, that once started cannot disengage.
It reminds me of a William Stafford poem about hitting a deer in the road.
General medical advice free for the taking to Jeff and IC:
"[Jeff and]IC.. sounds like you are going through some tough times. Hang in there."
VIBE Machine Interview With Gene Koonce
Interview with the inventor of the VIBE Machine in Greeley, Colorado....VIBE machine DVD Gene Koonce Interview
There are many of these all over the world now--that may make electromedicine more difficult to destroy by the allopathic medical lobby and industry (like its previous incarnations suffered).
Nothing touches you. You sit away from it. No wires. Though the field is attuned to particular 'healthy frequencies' of the human body that are known. Particularly ill people have a different intracellular frequency. The lower that frequency, the more likely you will be diseased and an inefficient metabolizers. That's why I think this is like an electronic form of dialysis for the whole body, really.
I've experienced it myself on many occassions and was amazed as its bioelectric and 'pep me up' effects that were pronounced for a day or so afterward.
After watching the short 18 minute video, you can get a link where they are all over the world right now.
IC, there are several in Wisconsin...
Jeff, you Canadian Ministry of Health in Ottawa is doing studies on it right now.
Sounder few people go out of their way to do good. Most of us live our lives somewhat as existentialists and we usually just go with the flow with our situations. We want others who we care about to be secure when traumatic events affect our lives. To lighten the load and encourage an easier path for survival. But few people refuse this path choosing to go out of their way for righteousness sake. This to benefit the lives of others they care about. This is not always routine.
I appreciate your writing about the daemon within and this wounding by the dark angel. But we cannot know whether the wounding is by a dark angel or not. I can manifest in my mind that I am a dark angel and project this image with much parody. Or that a(the) dark angel has influenced me and I am freely choosing to live my life by its influences day by day. This to me is rather conformist and immature.
I think as we live our lives going with the flow and not going out of our way for righteousness sake, we set our selves up for a consequence reward. We all pay the consequences for what we do. If we apply righteousness in our lives we actually have a lot more control of what may be reality than just leaving things to chance by going with a flow. This can be catastrophic and a destruction of what you have built up for yourself in this life even enslavement to ideals that are harmful to yourself. Ignorance tends to destroy. Mischievous arrogance usually is most popular.
Yeah, ericswan, tough times indeed, although it’s no dark tea-time of the soul, but instead the premature discorporation* of that tattered entity from the weak vessel my alien DNA gave me as some sort of cosmic prank. Still, it has been an eventful journey; although I’m not sure I’m seeing eye-to-eye with old Fred’s “what doesn’t you makes you stronger,” I will say that pain does grant you access to perspectives (and perceptions) you might not come by otherwise.
Mark, your VIBE theory really resonates with me—you know how I go in for all that sympathetic vibratory universe stuff and the wave-like structure of matter, etc—so I’m going to look into it. A new friend from the discussion board also recently sent me this vegetable heart health link, which has similar undertones. (Ever read the first chapter of Lost Science? Mesmer's "shock therapy" sounds something like what you're describing.)
Funny that we’re talking about this, as just this morning I had a painful sort of epiphany in this arena.
I was stretched out in the MRI coffin yet again, which is an excruciation for me, not on account of the narrow confines which bother most folks, but because when they start up the magnetic imaging fields, my arm throbs in synch with it, steadily building a kind of anti-orgasm that staggers description. Now, I’m full of opiates when this is going on, and I’ve practiced meditation techniques which take me outside of myself in normal circumstances, but in the vibrating coffin none of that matters.
Today, instead of closing off the pain which was knocking so insistently at my mind’s door, I decided to try an experiment and just let it in, looking it square in its many eyes. Weirdly enough, I ended up in much the same place as I did through meditation: I sort of amputated my arm, psychically speaking. It became insensate. Three hours later I still can’t feel it at all, even though I can still move it a little, so I know that some nerves are working in there.
The mental landscape I discovered through the embrace of pain was not exactly No-Mind—I was definitely still thinking, just not in words. No syntax, no subject/object/verb..no language at all. Just images, each folding into the next like visual, morphing matroyshka origami. The language of dreams, I suppose—the “thoughts” were definitely thinking themselves.
So here we are speaking of symbols (the swastika and others); we’ve long considered the significance of symbols, semiotics…and maybe even a symbiosis of those things outside and within us. Where are those archetypes located, anyway?
In my mean machine dream, the galactic spiral kept recurring, seemingly tying all the soft parade cars together. That particular image is very, very deeply embedded in both the structure of reality and the edifice of human culture. Even counter- and conspiracy culture: the spiral, the double helix, the octopus, the swastika…and now I’m thinking of that other weird occultic design, the Black Sun described by Joe Farrell in his classic book by that name.
When you go looking for that image, you end up finding the cousin of the octopus, the vortex (well, you will if you skip ahead to…why, Chapter 13, naturally) which can be as earthly as plans to re-green Eden or as ethereal as gravity-defying Æther science, which then brings us back to discorporating again.
We’d all like to disincorporate the world, but maybe this vorticular, venticular, corpuscular change begins at home, inside each of us.
For an ironic, satirical and ideally cynical take, there’s always Uncle Frank:
* ABSOLUTELY FREE
Narr.:. (I don't do publicity balling for you anymore...)
The first word in this song is discorporate.
It means: to leave your body
Discorporate & come with me
Shifting; drifting
Cloudless; starless
Velvet valleys & a sapphire
Sea: wah wah
Unbind your mind
There is no time
To lick your stamps
And paste them in
Discorporate
And we will begin...wah wah!
Flower power sucks!
Diamonds on velvets on goldens on vixen
On comet on cupid on donner & blitzen
On up & away & afar & a go-go
Escape from the weight of your corporate logo!
Unbind your mind
There is no time
Boin-n-n-n-n-n-g
To lick your stamps
And paste them in
Discorporate
And well begin
Freedom! freedom!
Kindly loving!
You'll be absolutely free
Only if you want to be
Dreaming on cushions of velvet & satin
To music by magic by people that happen
To enter the world of a strange purple
Jello
The dreams as they live them are all
Mellow yellow
Unbind your mind
There is no time
Boin-n-n-n-n-n-g
To lick your stamps
And paste them in
Discorporate
And well begin
Freedom! freedom!
Kindly loving!
You'll be absolutely free
Only if you want to be
You'll be absolutely free
Only if you want to be
Re: shrub, fletcher, IC, sounder, movie girl,and all...
"we don't know that Ahmadinejad isn't cognizant of his purpose. It's all just intuition. And irrelevant. What ultimately matters is that we intend to bomb his country, no?"
Definitely. Cognizance/Purpose aside we live in this world. There's that old PKD quote:"reality is that which when you stop believing in it doesn't go away"
This is pretty much why,IMO, we all read/comment on this blog--thanks as always Mr. Wells and everybody who contributes/reads.
So, on to purpose... perhaps intention or volition.
Here's kindasorta where I'm coming from
-basic thermodynamic concepts
-chaos theory
-gravity
-path of least resistance
-tendency towards equilibrium
-conservation of energy
-taoism
-zen
The "true purpose" of any system is an increase of entropy, chaos.
The way I see it, chaos is harmony, balance.
Whether we are cognizant of it or not, we are all seeking harmony, equilibrium.
Deep down, Hitler was seeking harmony--he just thought his way to do it was the best.
Deep down, Bush is seeking harmony.
Deep down, Ghandi was seeking harmony.
Deep down, Britney is seeking harmony.
Even by not seeking harmony we are still seeking harmony.
Like it or not,we are all a part of this cosmic entropy.
The "real" purpose of my comments is to say: we must continue to examine, analyze, uncover, argue, etc... But whenever possible, allow yourself to live with no particular intention.
We all have volition, intentions, desires. Just let them be what they are. We all have to work and put food on the table. So we do our work.
If you do or don't reach conclusions--let them go, move on. The non-delusional worldview is to have no particular worldview at all.
Does anybody have an opinion on the 21st century myth that atomic bombs don't work? I keep getting little nudges that we have been lied to and that the nuclear winter is a pipe dream.
I always though the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rather melodramatic. The question is, were they cognizant actors, purposeful actors, or both? They were definitely over the top.
Haha ha..... ha!
Shrub: that was pretty damn funny. In a.... morbid kinda way.
Damn Shrub, now that was funny.
Damn Shrub, now that was funny.
I give full credit to the Made In China Vibe Machine I just purchased at Wal-Mart. It's The Bomb!!
Yeah I.C. wow man. I'm sorry. I hope that you get better soon.
Birds flying in a perfect circle around the head? Another experience of pushing the body to maximum speed as a sprinter. A feeling of nausea and falling down on your back and watching the birds fly around you. I'm not boasting but I remember seeing this in cartoons. It is a real experience.
I recently went through some serious pain. I had suffered a peptic ulcer. Damn bloody painful. A pillow over my mouth and I just finally let it out man. I was relieved that I could scream in agony. However I did not go to the hospital after the third attack. I changed my diet, avoided all the usual stuff you are supposed to, ingested a multi herb L-Glutamine capsule mix with a vitamin E capsule. I healed myself without a doctor's assistance. I took the brunt of the first attack because I was not sure whether taking an antacid was safe. It is. Water is safe too.
Hang in there man. Maybe the best thing about the fifth vital sign (pain) is that it may lessen and disappear. I think you will appreciate the lyrics of this song by the powerhouse trio from Tor- Ont-Toe boomp boompa tiishh Rush. Pain can be so humiliating.
Unstable condition
A symptom of life
In mental and environmental change
Atmospheric disturbance
The feverish flux
Of human interface and interchange
The impulse is pure
Sometimes our circuits get shorted
By external interference
Signals get crossed
And the balance distorted
By internal incoherence
A tired mind become a shape-shifter
Everybody need a mood lifter
Everybody need reverse polarity
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to deviate from the norm
An ounce of perception
A pound of obscure
Process information at half speed
Pause, rewind, replay
Warm memory chip
Random sample, hold the one you need
Leave out the fiction
The fact is, this friction
Will only be worn by persistence
Leave out conditions
Courageous convictions
Will drag the dream into existence
A tired mind become a shape-shifter
Everybody need a soft filter
Everybody need reverse polarity
Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to elevate from the norm...
Vvvvv...vvv...vv vital signs by Ar Ewe Ase Eigch
May I be forgiven please...
spending my time sleep walking
moving my mouth but not saying a thing
hoping the changes would take by working their way from the outside in
i was in love with an idea
preoccupied with how life should appear
spending my time at the surface repairing the holes in the shiny veneer
there are so many ways to hide
there are so many ways not to feel
there are so many ways to deny what is real
and i just showed up for my own life
and i'm standing here taking it in and it sure looks bright
i'm going to live my life inspired
look for the holy in the common place
open the windows and feel all that's honest and real until i'm truly amazed
i'm going to feel all my emotions
i'm going to look you in the eyes
i'm going to listen and hear until it's finally clear and it changes our lives
there are so many ways to hide
there are so many ways not to feel
there are so many ways to deny what is real
and i just showed up for my own life
and i'm standing here taking it in and it sure looks bright
oh the glory of God is man fully alive
oh the glory of God is man fully alive
there are so many ways to hide
there are so many ways not to feel
there are so many ways to deny what is real
and i just showed up for my own life
and i'm standing here taking it in and it sure looks bright
Sara Groves - just showed up for my own life
Nyarlathotep - Cortometraggio animato
Michele Botticelli
Un cortometraggio animato tratto da una storia di H.P. Lovecraft
Google Video
This is must see T.V. at Google Video! In my opinion.
SCTV - Count Floyd's Scary Little Christmas Promo (it may be very funny too)
sctv 01-06 soylent green
synchronized chaos tv must see!
sctv 01-09 bonus movie
synchronized chaos tv shocking!
Happy Holidays and a very merry Christmas to all. I am ahead of myself. A thousand pardons.
"Has anyone here even remotely suggested violence as an answer to violence?"
IC-(sorry for the late post)
Yes I have.
You can see where this is going. At that moment you will have to make a decision, and not just one of many moments in time but a combination of all.
You can acquiesce or fight.
Near me, in a large Eastern US city we have a retired Senator ,I will not name that lives in a new Condo overlooking a beautiful 10 story overlook of the bay and city. It is truly impressive. The Condos cost over a million. The disparity of the constituants and the "elected" (if you still believe) is unreal.
They have no way of relating, sharing, or caring. Why would they?
Forgive me, perhaps I am not as evolved as you are, but I will choose to fight.
Muddy Elephant wrote:
"The "real" purpose of my comments is to say: we must continue to examine, analyze, uncover, argue, etc... But whenever possible, allow yourself to live with "no particular intention."
That is what I call "Surrender".
SOUNDER,
"Love your Daemon"
Paul Levy comes very close to helping us understand that it "All" is an expression of our Divinity.
BELIOSTO,
"...Few people go out of their way to do good."
I think I am one of those people who have gone out of their way to do good, for I have "given up" a lot of things in my life to be where I am (Haiti) It is somewhat like giving up oneself to become oneself. I could never do the work I do and live the way I live (free of ties that bind), if I was not conscious of my relationship to the Source and to the Life Mother Earth continuously brings forth.
I think sometimes we have to let go of trying to figure it all out and surrender. Surrender to Love and to the gift of Life.
Righteousness is a word that I believe is the source of all evil. Haven't humans been destroying each other for eons to prove who is the most "righteous?" Especially, in religon. Not that I condemn evil, for it will exist as long as we give credence to its existence. It comes down to HOW we chose to experience evil and how we choose to "judge" what it evil and how we will allow it to affect our way of Being.
It is really impossible for humans to only do good and not do evil for both are necessary for our salvation. Salvation defined as "saving ourselves" from ourselves.
SOUNDER,
I haven't had enough electricity lately to stay on line long so as to visit you on your blog site. Will do soon.
EVE:
WHAT?????//
MOVIE GIRL,
Thanks for those sentiments and reminder……
BELIOSTO,
That was quite a ride
IC,
Whether anyone will tell you this or not, I feel compelled to let you know that reading everything you have written and following your vision has made a huge difference in my life. You are projecting light and a way of life that is necessary if we are to continue....and you have done it in spite of the pain you must suffer.
Thank you for your inspiration and perseverance...
SHRUB,
HEY guy, you are HOT, as always….
Brenda,
"Do unto others.........."
THE PLAN!
Robin Williams, wearing a shirt that says "I love New York in
Arabic.
Robin Williams' plan...
"I see a lot of people yelling for peace but I have not heard of a plan for peace. So, here's one plan."
*1) "The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini,
Stalin, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic, Hussein, and the rest of those "good ole boys", we will
never "interfere" again.
*2) We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany , South Korea , the Middle East, and the Philippines.
They don't want us there, anyway. We would station troops at our borders. No one allowed sneaking through holes in the fence.
*3) All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of whom or where they are. They're illegal!!! France will welcome them.
*4) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit!!!! No one from a terrorist nation will be
allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.
*5) No foreign "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home, baby.
*6) The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing nonpolluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil
in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for a while.
*7) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don't like it, we go someplace else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)
*8) If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.
*9) Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island someplace. We don't need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.
*10) All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us "Ugly Americans" any longer. The Language we speak is ENGLISH..learn it...or LEAVE...Now, isn't that a winner of a plan?
*"The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, 'you want a piece of me?' "
Amen!
Surrender,
The Tee Shirt and the last part of it, about the Statue of Liberty, are atributable to Robin Williams, but the rest isn't. Anyhow, this misrepresentation has been floating around the Net for quite some time now, and is pretty much old hat. Isn't it interesting that we refer to it as the Net....appropriate, I would say, wouldn't you?
Here's the link supporting the Robin Williams thing is an Urban Myth.
It doesn't help a cause, or doesn't bolster your intent, to subscribe to these Net Legends. I firmly believe you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I also believe you shouldn't throw food everywhere and see what sticks.
Surrender, am I this Hot?
This comment has been removed by the author.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kf14yshBzXg
Brenda, I was involved with a woman like you, once, but never again. She did this to me. Fortunately, I'm recovered.
The home of the infamous european toxic clan, psycho urban fraggers that pawn the virtual return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory battlefields.
Just Pub, a dumb return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory comic strip by feuersturm.
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