Rigorous Intuition (v. 2.0)

Occupy Liberation

2011-11-08T07:10:00.007-05:00

The spirit of justice is nothing other than the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love. - Simone Weil

I heard Chris Hedges say, "true spirituality is always an act of rebellion." So I made this.

A collage of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, interfaith and post-religious services at Occupy Wall Street, the faces of Spanish Indignants, and images of police brutality and mass mobilization from Oakland, set to the music of Martyn Bennett's "Liberation."

All credit to the original videographers, the late Martyn Bennett, and the Occupiers and Indignants of the world.

We Are The Monsters We've Been Waiting For

2011-09-01T02:11:00.009-04:00

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks.... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks. - Schopenhauer

The Thing That Couldn't Die

Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness. - Nietzsche

They may be our Most Terrible Lizards, but they wouldn't be called the best and the brightest by even the hindmost fart-catcher in Abaddon's human centipede. They can turn blood into gold, playing Last Days' alchemists in the booming catastrophe and collapse sectors, but don't confuse the management of an habituated massacre with a meritocracy. They're the eschaton of open jaws at the close of the food chain, but for no other reason than a cold heart doesn't dwell upon the cruelty of its bite. We're the 99 and they're the One Percenters, and like the outlaw bikers who share the patch, they run the drugs and guns and kill for their club. They're the Killer Elite, but don't call them elite. No. Apparently, and with ironic perversity, that's me and my numerous tribe; over-educated beyond utility at the end of the Age of Useless Things.

And I mean that: the end of things. Capital has exhausted its first fuels, and now it's the creation of poverty, not of wealth, that makes the world go 'round. And naturally, when it's down to your own body, setting it alight before it's taken from you to stoke the engines of the Great Machine becomes the final impudence. Depending upon whether your nation is an appetizer or an entree on the globalists' menu, and how well the kitchen prepares its living parts, such an act may lead to revolution or a passing LULZ.It can go either way.

Over-educated, I mean that too. But it's not a sour boast after half a life being schooled for self-aware obsolescence. If you feel dumber for having watched Jersey Shore, then you too already know more than is good for you. America's public schools are made to fail on a budget comparable with the cost of air conditioning its imperial guard in Central Asia, with assets peeled off to private charters, and teachers discarded upon their broken unions. University, North America's new high school, is corporate funded and corporate branded and humanities' starved, with a deliberately crushing debt load upon students that corrals the choices of the less privileged towards machinery-sustaining, practical careers. The study of subjects that have not been sufficiently monetized and the accrual of empathetic knowledge are sniffed at as elitist pursuits, even as the student is financially wrecked by their mastery.

Terrible lizards. I don't really mean that. Not literally. Not yet. They might, after all, not be alien lizards in masquerade, but their ecocidal reptilian brains just happen to be terraforming a post-mammalian world best suited for the cold-blooded, and engineering a society denuded of human warmth, compassion and mindfulness. Lizards aren't what they were; lizards are what they're to be. This could be the prophetic consummation of transhumanism: the metaphor become flesh.

The Brain Eaters

"You know, we got ourselves into this. No one made us chew Chew-Z." - Philip K Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

It occurred to me last year, when the Gulf of Mexico began coughing up its lungs courtesy of Deep Water Horizon, how it's one of the attenuated consolations of life in Evening's Empire that BP's sole, unmitigated success was to hold up a camera to the ocean's injury so we could all together view another viral FAIL video. I can haz desolation!

Because you know, this is what we're good at. I mean, this is all we can do now. And from lackadaisical blogger to Spectator-in-Chief ("I want to know whose ass to kick"), gazing upon from afar with approbation, from the Mississippi Delta to Fukushima and the next sideshow horror, is about as good as we get. And even then, not for long. Gulf seafood is contaminated but officially safe. Japanese school children are passing radioactive piss but it's not a concern unless they continue to eat radioactive produce and drink irradiated water. Half-waking observation, and the dialing down of our expectations of "normal," are for the most part the extent of our response, and we seem to have lost the means and the imagination to do anything but. Perhaps that's what the mass, deranged mind of the Internet has taken from us, by taking us into itself. And perhaps that's even why it exists.

In other words: if our wired brains are experiencing more read/write errors than the factory warranty led us to expect, I don't believe it's all down to depleted Serotonin and Aspartame. (Though, lest we forget, there is that, too.) We know well enough now, by study and experience, how the Web's interruption system impairs focus, and compounds the cognitive switching cost of our online distractions. It's the subject of Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains:

When we adapt to a new cultural phenomenon, including the use of a new medium, we end up with a different brain.... That means our online habits continue to reverberate in the workings of our brain cells even when we’re not at a computer. We’re exercising the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading and thinking deeply.

Whoa! Just a sec there, Joey Google. Maybe I can't live in your Cloud after all. Maybe we should rethink this entrainment of our brains towards trivia, while we can still meaningfully think. Maybe a Kindle isn't worth my kingdom of books. Maybe librarians aren't the enemy, and bookless libraries aren't actually good for children. Maybe literate adults should cease slow dancing with their tablets upon the grave of Johannes Gutenberg. But I don't see it happening.

Anyway, Carr again:

Last year, researchers at Stanford found signs that this shift may already be well under way. They gave a battery of cognitive tests to a group of heavy media multitaskers as well as a group of relatively light ones. They discovered that the heavy multitaskers were much more easily distracted, had significantly less control over their working memory, and were generally much less able to concentrate on a task. Intensive multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy,” says Clifford Nass, one professor who did the research. “Everything distracts them.” Merzenich offers an even bleaker assessment: As we multitask online, we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”

Or let's try on Jean Baudrillard's words, from his 1985 essay "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened," and see if they fit us in 2011:

[E]ach cultural and factual set must be fragmented, disarticulated, in order to enter the circuits, each language must be resolved into 0/1, into binary terms, in order to circulate no longer in our memory, but in the memories, electronic and luminous, of computers.

Our culture digitized is no longer our culture, but that of our machines. Our machine culture replaces our own, imperfectly remembers us, and tells us to forget ourselves. Paradise to some. The future to all.

Steve Wozniak, a few weeks ago as I write this, said "we lost the battle to the machines long ago. We're going to become the pets, the dogs of the house." He said this optimistically. "Why are we going to need ourselves so much in the future? We're just going to have the easy life." Optimism and, if you can still stop and really think about it, a dash of madness.

"Once we have machines doing our high-level thinking," he continued, "there's so little need for ourselves and you can't ever undo it - you can never turn them off."

There's so little need for ourselves. Chew on that crazy for a moment, and then try digesting We're just going to have the easy life. What order of nonsense is he talking about here? How many do you imagine are included in Wozniak's "we"? If a dumb machine - "dumb" like the nematode parasite that turns its host ant into a berry-mimic to spread its kind in bird feces - if a parasitical technology could infect its host with thoughts to disarm its opposition, I imagine they would be thoughts like, "why are we going to need ourselves," "we're going to have the easy life," and "you can never turn them off."

My rewired brain has its benefits. It's helped me to make associate leaps with greater confidence, even if some times that confidence has been unwarranted. But outsourcing my working memory has come at a high cost. There's the atrophied recall and attenuated attention span, and I don't believe that's entirely attributable to age and enviro-toxins. If it's true, and I think it is, that I learned more reading one book at a time than trying to read all books at once, then I'm just a chump in the idiot's kingdom called The Information Age. I can blame whoever first flipped the switch on the unstoppable machines, but my mental decline by living better electronically is really nobody's fault but mine.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

"It is sweet to draw the world down with you when you are perishing." - Seneca, Medea

Anyway, what was I saying? Something about the Gulf.

Obama's best advice to Americans during that particular obscenity was that they should shop, swim and pray: one of those crystalline moments that said, yes, this President too is a Celebrity Apprentice to the Criminals Without Borders. Such a stand-up effort won't be forgotten when he leaves his office - an internship, really - and is initiated into Big Money, of which his presidency is merely a rite of passage: a pledge's gofer'ing for the inviolate fraternity of laundered capital. For Democratic presidents and Labour prime ministers, if they actually entered politics with even modest virtue and tepid vision for the public good, they have been richly rewarded for their abandonment. The sudden good fortunes of Clinton and Blair: this is what it profit a man. (By contrast, Jimmy Carter's post-presidency is perhaps an extended act of atonement to win back his soul.) Can there remain any doubt as to which career path Obama means to follow? Bill Clinton has earned more than $65 million dollars since leaving office for motivational "power within" speeches before business executives and similar peers who can afford him. Just imagine Obama's speeches. And his appearance fees. The American presidency is now just something that looks good on a resume, which can lead to a cash-for-life revenue stream.

And BP? Corporations in America may be persons under the law, but they're never persons of colour. If they were, so many would have been shot, hung, gassed or given the chair years ago.

There were many things Martin Luther had wrong. "Strong beer is the milk of the old" wasn't one of them. Another wasn't his revulsion at the Medieval Church's practice of selling indulgences: the tidy revenue stream of peddling Get out of Purgatory Free cards. A posthumous entitlement program for the wealthy dead, and an invitation to sin boldly for those who could afford it. (The poor, as ever, could pay only in the currency of their blood, sweat and souls.) Of course, this turned the teaching of Jesus of its head - rich man, eye of a needle, and all that - but no matter: the Church has made a custom of perp-walking its Christs in a parade of upside-down clowns for two millenia.

Luther's rejection of the selling of indulgences sparked the Reformation, but the practice hasn't stopped; it's merely been secularized. BP paid - or more accurately, promised to pay - an indulgence of $20 billion over four years to cover damages incurred by the sin of Deep Water Horizon. Not even enough to make 2010 a losing year for the company if the amount had been paid as a lump sum. In fact, its stock "surged" on the news that it had just bought its way out of purgatory on the cheap. "The fear was that the government was going to do something so drastic as to effectively push the company into bankruptcy," said oil and gas analyst Brian Gibbons. "Now they can come out of the meeting and say they have held BP accountable and hold up a $20 billion escrow account." That was last year. (Ancient history, and nobody studies history anymore.) This year, the company's bringing unabashed motherfucker back: BP now wants to stop payments based on future losses, saying "there is no basis to assume that claimants, with very limited exceptions, will incur a future loss related to the oil spill." BP points to returning tourists and the reopened federal fishing grounds, and points away from the fish so sickened by diseases and infections and environmental stresses that LSU Oceanographer Jim Cowan says, "I've never seen anything like this. At all. Ever."

And here's where the Medieval Church had it over on us. The rich could only buy their way out of Purgatory, not Hell. Purgatory was the place of temporal punishment, even if it were to last a million years. Hell was forever. And Hell for BP - break it up, bankruptcy, nationalization - was never a serious threat in an era of Too Big to Damn. Unlike, or God help me so it seems, the whole bloody natural world and its profitless life.

But what can you do, Mr President? You're only the titular head of a country that manufactures nothing anymore but weaponry, consent, and high fructose corn syrup. We'll miss our old world like we'll miss our old brains, but the longer it goes on, and the worse it gets, the more we'll become accustomed to it. Like the erasure of a hegemon's great cities to disasters natural and unnatural, its middle class, perhaps even its living memory of peacetime. That's the catastrophe of hope.

And don't think the Sadean few for whom the system works aren't loving the masochistic spectacle of good Democratic foot soldiers debasing themselves as New Deal Sonderkommando, immolating their Social Security on finance capitalism's pyre of a trillion dead presidents before freshening up with a whore's bath of Enjoy President Bachmann ooga booga. (Somehow, moving the goal posts never interfere with their end zone dance.) Maybe, when you're given the choice of Satan, or Satan's Little Helper, it's past time to crash the parties.

So it's the end of America, but it's not the end of the world. That's already happened. If by "world" we mean a viable, global civilization and hospitable biosphere, and if by "end" we mean the extinguishing of fruitful recourse, then we sped past that last resort way back in the Seventies. This may not yet be the final reel of Vanishing Point, but we're deep in the third act and going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street. And our Dodge Challenger is nearly out of road.

Some call this vanishing point, the "Singularity."

Eyes Without a Face

"It makes me nervous," Emily whispered; she held a magazine on her lap but was unable to read. "It's so - unnatural."

"Hell," Hnatt said vigorously, "that's what it's not; it's an acceleration of the natural evolutionary process that's going on all the time anyway, only usually it's so slow we don't perceive it. I mean, look at our ancestors in caves ... they evolved to meet the Ice Age; we have to evolve to meet the Fire Age, just the opposite. So we need that chitinous-type skin, that rind and the altered metabolism that lets us sleep in midday and also the improved ventilation...." - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The tides of aborted dolphins. The acidification of our oceans and the jellification of its life. The neurotoxicants stunting our children's brains. The nanoparticles "unexpectedly" entering the food chain. The vanishing bees. The excellent chance we'll have pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere by the end of this century that the planet will inexorably warm by 24 degrees, assuring a runaway greenhouse, and the recreation of conditions unseen here since the Hadean Era.

Peak oil, peak soil, peak water, peak food. (And if these play on your mind as at least abstract terrors, then congratulations: you too enjoy more leisure and learning than can possibly profit you at this time, in this culture.) Fondest, most desperate hopes aside, the exigencies of collapse are not calling forth the best behavior from those accustomed to bleeding every stone white. On the contrary, environmental policy, even the most egregiously half-assed, is the first out the window when "shared sacrifices" demand that the vested interests of capital defenistrate the public good. So the ground is fracked and the tap waters flame, and rather than saving what remains of the Amazon, we burn it into becoming the world's greatest emitter of methane.

Not a problem.

If the Singularity is near enough, then the transhumanists may yet have their abiotic rapture. And I'll hand it to them, there's a dark logic to it: perhaps the only way to successfully adapt to a murdered planet is to kill yourself.

"If you draw the timelines," said futurologist Ian Pearson, "realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem." Pearson is sometimes credited with the invention of that fouler of distinction between home and office, text messaging. And given how all the futurist fantasies of increased leisure time have panned out, no one should take comfort in the prospect that death itself need not encumber job performance. Even though pensionable age and benefits continue to be rolled back vindictively, there was always at least the promise of the peace of the grave.

And the dying planet? Those who would destroy it in order to save it are readying its zombie makeover with one word, or rather, prefix: nano.

"Emerging nanotechnology capabilities promise a profound impact on the environment," writes Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near. "This includes the creation of new manufacturing and processing technologies that will dramatically reduce undesirable emissions, as well as remediating the prior impact of industrial-age pollution." Kurzweil concedes there is the "downside" of introducing innumerable nano-particles, creating "new forms of toxins and other unanticipated interactions with the environment and life." But Singularitans embrace the risk because there's no other way forward. And they have to move forward, and not relinquish one victory of science over the natural world. After all, that's progress.

But before we disappear into simulation, let's get real. Technology won't revitalize the world that it is destroying, in part because the technology is controlled by the same sociopaths who profit by perpetrating the ruin. (Kurzweil himself has served on the Army Science Advisory Group, ASAG, helping to steer priorities for military research.) In other part because technology's end users - that's us, in the over-developed world - are made too comfortable by its benefits to act meaningfully to arrest its progression until everything is too far gone. And in last part because, should our most mad predatory bastards succeed - and if that seems unlikely, just think of how well things have worked out for them so far - they'll escape into their mesmerizing and seemingly superior upgrade. Only nostalgists would want to recreate the real thing, and Singularitans are not particularly prone to nostalgia. They won't be deploying nanotech to repair our global Titanic; they'll be piloting the Elect's anti-lifeboats into post-organic existence while the rest of us go down in steerage class. And by 2050 they may not need to travel all the way to Saturn orbit to skipper their yachts on methane seas.

That's a trip which bio-luddites - like the shaman cultivating plant wisdom; like too-comfortable me and, I suspect, virtually all my plugged-in peers - would never embark upon. Of course we needn't worry ourselves sick over how to decline the invitation: the greater, surviving bio-mass of our species will not be welcome on the voyage. (The other vanishing species? They can make their own ark.) But that’s no insurance against the harvesting of some valuable, stubborn minds to adorn their Cold Heaven. If, say, Shakespeare and Beethoven could have been uploaded to a stable format, forestalling their career-ending decomposition so they could remain contributing citizens of our culture, wouldn’t it be a crime against post-humanity to let them simply molder in the ground like "dumb matter"? Some futurists think so, and argue for the moral imperative of rescuing genius from the grave. In which case, in the event of compulsory resurrection, the only cause worth dying for may be the right to truly die.

And perhaps even Beethoven isn't safely dead yet. (Shakespeare, who can say?) Giulio Prisco, founder of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, which holds that the Singularity will offer credible substitutes for the promises of religion, writes, "I don't think resurrection is incompatible with our current knowledge of how the universe works":

Many rationalists have knee-jerk reactions when the idea of technological resurrection of the dead is mentioned. Perhaps they made a big effort to free themselves from religious superstition and are afraid of falling back into religion. But here we are talking about science and technology, not religion.

Sure we are. Sure we aren't.

The Singularity may be science, but it's unmistakably also mythology, as is evident from the ecstatic visions of Kurzweil, its preeminent mythologist. (Certainly Kurzweil is more than a mere mythologist, as there's no such thing as a mere mythology.) The "freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form" is, according to Kurzweil, "an essentially spiritual quest." The Singularity’s chief apostle sees the universe "waking up" as it is saturated by our intelligence, expanding to fill it at a speed possibly exceeding that of light. ("It will achieve this by reorganizing matter and energy to provide an optimal level of computation to spread out from its origin on Earth.")

Significantly, Kurzweil makes the same moral sidestep of the European conquerors before him who dreamt smaller dreams of coveting mere continents, and presumes an unintelligent void that beckons us to civilize it and turn it to our utility. And since, in Kurzweil's estimation, the universe is silent of the noise of other civilizations and that we have not be contacted by other intelligences, then "it is likely (although not certain) that there are no such other civilizations":

In other words, we are in the lead. That's right, our humble civilization with its pickup trucks, fast food, and persistent conflicts (and computation!) is in the lead in terms of the creation of complexity and order in the universe.

Or, in other words, we need to pick up the Earthman's burden, and develop the universe, reformatting it to maximize its computational potential, until the transhuman mind is imprinted upon every star and nebula. And however it ends, or even if it ever does, will be up to Kurzweil's godlings. "The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made," he writes in The Age of Spiritual Machines, "one which we will intelligently consider when the time is right."

But here we are talking about science and technology....

Even if Kurzweil has the future wrong, and the mysteries of consciousness continue to recede before the advance of technology, I'm afraid he has the present dangerously right. The Singularity Myth alarmingly justifies and sustains just about every wrong we are perpetrating upon the world right now, leading to its transcendent vision of a New Technopolis rising at the end of the Aeon of Biology. It's a promise bound to be held more desperately as the crises of biology deepens. And desperation for all, with opportunity for a privileged few, will mean a slaughterhouse for most.

In his paper “Religious Motifs in Technological Poshumanism,” Michael E Zimmerman writes:

For Singularity posthumans to be possible, many present and future humans might have to pay a very steep cost. In the name of a glorious posthuman future, one can imagine fanatical posthumanists justifying the extinction of mythic-Christian, post-Christian, and humanistic ideals such as individual liberty, self-realization, and outmoded personal and public morality…. If history is written by the victors, then the coming superhumans will surely find a way to justify the suffering involved in their origin, particularly given that those who suffered (that is, we humans) were not very evolved to begin with.

Since transhumanists are capable of recognizing the grave risks inherent to their God project - Kurzweil's "downside" of new toxins and unforeseen consequences - Zimmerman asks why they rush towards its culmination. “One answer,” he writes, “is that Earth’s biosphere is imperiled…. Technological posthumans would not be biologically based…thereby saving self-conscious life from extinction.”

And that seems to be the answer to so many questions, including those implied by the just smile and blow me sureties of our insatiable overclass. The Singularity may be near, but the end of our hospitable Earth is nearer, and all life forms requiring a temperate clime and low-toxic environment must rapidly adapt or die to our new and endless emergency. Unfortunately for us, the multiple maniacs driving the extinction are still crazy-rich, and are daily securing still more crazy for themselves. All we have are our overwhelming numbers, though as the crises inevitably crashes the population we may not even survive the century with that advantage. Our billions merely present the illusion of too big to fail. But the fact is, in the miserly new world, we're far too many to thrive.

At the Foresight Institute's 2002 "Brainstorming-Planning-Actionfest & Nanoschmoozathon," Leon Fuerth, former National Security Advisor to Al Gore, contended that "The majority of Americans will not simply sit still while some elite strips off their personalities and uploads themselves into their cyberspace paradise. They will have something to say about that. There will be vehement debate about that in this country."

First of all, has Fuerth paid attention to the state of vehement debate in his country?

Norway's terror attacks notoriously reminded Glenn Beck of Hitler. Not because mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik acted like a Nazi, but because his young victims were. ("Who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing.") A supposedly transformative president normalizes the criminal perversions of his predecessor and appears to have the fight in him only to beat the legacy of FDR into an unrecognizable pulp. Do Americans have nothing to say about that? I know Fuerth spoke nearly a decade ago, but I remember 2002, and that wasn't a stellar year for policy debate and the public square either. Though of course, like so much else, it's only gotten worse since.

John Steinbeck accounted for the failure of socialism in America by the underclass regarding itself not as the exploited poor but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Silly beggars. But they didn't come by that idea all by themselves. That's the conditioning of decades of political animal husbandry, and the dulling engorgement of mass instruction masquerading as entertainment.

The dimming of culture and diminution of the Western mind perpetuates society's preposterous illusions. If - oh, I dunno - Ted Williams, the homeless "golden throat" pitch-perfect for selling useless shit can make it (whatever that means, and however fleeting), then maybe we can go viral too. The truly accomplished, the acutely gifted, the deeply wise only prick the insecurities of the idiot class, and that's no way to keep the idiots useful, mollified and self-medicated. Especially since there are so many of them, and more every graduating cohort. A good thing, not coincidentally, for the monied few, who mean to separate the fools from their nickels and dimes. ("I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid," explained John Stuart Mill. "I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.")

Meantime, futurists are imagining escape pods for our top predators, and already delivering on their military applications.

A reading from the Warrior-Prophet Kurzweil, from the scripture, The Singularity Is Near:

Although [ASAG] briefings, deliberations, and recommendations are confidential, I can share some overall technological directions that are being pursued by the army and all of the US armed forces. Dr John A Parmentola, director for research and laboratory management for the US Army and liason to the ASAG...describes the Future Combat System (FCS), now under development and scheduled to roll out during the second decade of this century, as "smaller, lighter, faster, more lethal, and smarter." Dramatic changes are planned for future war-fighting deployments and technology. Although details are likely to change, the army envisions deploying Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) of about 2,500 soldiers, unmanned robotic systems, and FCS equipment. A single BCT would represent about 3,500 "platforms," each with its own intelligent computational capabilities The BCT would have a common operating picture (COP) of the battlefield, which would be appropriately translated for it, with each soldier receiving information through a variety of means, including retinal (and other forms of "heads up") displays and, in the future, direct neural connection. ...

The US Joint Forces Command's Project Alpha (responsible for accelerating transformative ideas throughout the armed services) envisions a 2025 fighting force that "is largely robotic," incorporating tactical autonomous combatants (TACs) that "have some level of autonomy.... One innovative design being developed by NASA with military applications envisioned is in the form of a snake."

One of the programs contributing to the 2020 concept of self-organizing swarms of small robots is the Autonomous Intelligent Network and Systems (AINS) program of the Office of Naval Research, which envisions a drone army of unmanned, autonomous robots in the water, on the ground, and in the air. The swarms will have human commanders with decentralized command and control and what project head Allen Moshfegh calls an "impregnable Internet in the sky."

"In the final analysis," said John Kennedy in his American University commencement address, "our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

So far. But Kennedy's final analysis may be invalidated sooner than we think. And what happens then, when asymmetrical warfare achieves its End State? Will it be everlasting peace, or endless conflict, when one combatant cannot be killed, or maybe even neither? The drone armies of Central Asia are a crude rendering of what's to come. The generals don't need the hollowed-out New Man of fascist steel. They just need the steel. And much worse is coming. Probably, worse is already here.

The future didn't go anywhere. it isn't even the future.

Attack of the Puppet People

Opening his eyes he saw a vast quantity of matter without limit; and he became arrogant, saying, "It is I who am God, and there is none other apart from me."

When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, "You are mistaken, Samael" - which is, "god of the blind." - The Hypostasis of the Archons (a.k.a., "The Reality of the Rulers"), Nag Hammadi Library

Nearly ten years ago saw the publication of philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom's paper, "Are You Living a Computer Simulation?" His conclusion: a strong maybe.

A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).

So, as though we didn't already have enough good reason to soil ourselves in the 21st Century, let us add the existential dread that we could be living in a simulation, and the risk that it could be shutdown at any moment. Compared to a runaway greenhouse effect, perhaps a frivolous worry, but in the Bostrom-edited anthology Global Catastrophic Risks, cosmologist (and a another transhumanist) Milan Cirkovic writes that until Bostrom is refuted, "it would be intellectually dishonest to neglect to mention simulation-shutdown as a potential extinction mode."

To this potential crisis at least, Kurzweil offers an answer, in The Singularity Is Near:

It might appear that there's not a lot we could do to influence this. However, since we're the subject of the simulation, we do have the opportunity to shape what happens inside of it. The best way we could avoid being shut down would be to be interesting to the observers of the simulation. Assuming that someone is actually paying attention to the simulation, it's a fair assumption that it's less likely to be turned off when it's compelling than otherwise.

According to Kurzweil, the key to holding the interest of our hypothetical system operator most likely entails demonstrating exponential scientific growth. "Indeed, achieving a Singularity of exploding knowledge may be the very purpose of the simulation." Well now, he would say that.

And by the way: I can imagine that the cosmic hubris of Kurzweil and the transhumanists, who regard the Singularity as "an essentially spiritual quest" - albeit one with military applications - and mean to "play God" if only within the specimen jar of a simulation, would have been known and named as something other than a blessed vision by the Gnostics of Nag Hammadi. The God Kurzweil aspires to be, they would likely say, is actually Yaldabaoth, Sakloth, Samael: the Chief Archon, the blind fool, the arrogant adversary of the Pleroma.

From "The Apocryphon of John":

...the power in him, which he had taken from his mother [Sophia], produced in him the likeness of the cosmos. And when he saw the creation which surrounds him and the multitude of the angels around him which had come forth from him, he said to them, "I am a jealous God and there is no other God beside me." But by announcing this he indicated to the angels who attended him that there exists another God. For if there were no other one, of whom would he be jealous?

Kurzweil is perhaps not such a futurist as to pass unrecognizable to the ancients.

To John Lamb Lash, whose Not In His Image is more a re-imagining of Gnosticism for this late age than a systematic of Mystery School teaching:

- the Archons are not only mind parasites - delusional nodes in the human mind, considered as quasi-autonomous psychic entities, if you will - they are cosmic imposters, parasites who pose as gods. But they lack the primary divine factor of ennoia, "intentionality," "creative will." They cannot originate anything, the can only imitate, and they must effectuate their copycat activity with subterfuge and stealth, lest its true nature be detected.

Even if we place the question of Simulation and the fear of its shutdown on the back burner, that the race towards Singularity has spawned such existential dreads is perfectly apt, since a Singularitan playing God apes a parochial and delusional Demiurge who can create only the mimicry of a universe and the soulless facsimile of a creature. The message in the bottle of Kurzweil's cosmic imitation is We had better make this simulation interesting. But there are other answers that may make more sense than Kurzweil's idea of what would hold our sysop's interest. And some of them are nasty.

If a civilization has already achieved Singularity and boasts the computational power to run a simulation as complex as our reality - and N.B.: "Physicists Believe Our Universe Is One Big Hologram, And They May Have Spotted the Pixels" - then what would be served by running a simulation for the purpose of itself attaining Singularity? Wouldn't that involve a measure of been there, done that, and how interesting would that be? If interesting is the criteria, then the purpose could be nothing more than entertainment. What if, rather than running us in a program to conduct hard research, the sysop is instead playing an extraordinarily sophisticated game of Sims? (Or worse, World of Warcraft?) Sound crazy? Think of how much of our own technology and computing power is dedicated to amusing ourselves. Would that amount be likely to fall in a transhuman future of virtually limitless tech? A devilish idea, but if devilish is reasonably descriptive of our predicament then perhaps we need to examine all possibilities for how we got here. Given history's bloody futility, it could even be Okham's answer.

Though, having just written that, maybe it's better that we forget the whole thing.

Just my opinion. But if this is a simulation, and we're still here only because the syspop is closer to winning an XBOX achievement than we are of achieving the Singularity, then here is a knowledge which we may safely say is not power. There's no hope for us there, because there's no us there, and all things being equally futile, I'd rather remain an ignorant fiction than a self-aware sim. Because "You see, children, we're bits of programming for entertainment purposes only" probably isn't the best myth to live by.

But then, given how we've been living, and judging by the body counts both human and otherwise, the civilized West hasn't a good record of choosing the best myths. Neither Apocalyptic Dominionism ("Go forth and subdue the world before God destroys it"), nor the lesson from the legendary Great Hunter of conventional anthropology ("You're a bestial predator; go forth and fulfill your destiny"), are congruous bedrock upon which to construct a supremely interesting society, fit for both us and the viewing pleasure of our hypothesized, extraordinarily evolved sysop.

Five Million Years to Earth

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in - William S Burroughs

Let's begin with the system operator, and let's for once succumb to optimism. Because maybe we should hope for better than a mere amusement from an intelligence sophisticated enough to run the simulation which is our universe. And perhaps, for the sake of our own mental health, we really, really ought to. (If someone or something is playing us, it's probably best for us to believe that the civilization capable of doing so will also have evolved a comparable emotional intelligence. Or at least an emotional intelligence far surpassing our own.) In which case, the program may be more ambitious that our beating one another to death as we destroy the world itself. Because really, as we can see, where's the challenge in that? Maybe the simulation's purpose is actually to see us - not just humanity, but all life - fulfill a novel and exquisitely ethical condition.

And now let's forget about the sysop. Simulation is unverifiable - at least currently - and there's nothing to be done about it anyway - at least currently - so we should probably attend rather to the principle implied by the question of making an interesting simulation. Which is really about building a better myth for us to live by.

So if humanity has a plot, where was it along our way that we dropped it? When did This isn't the way it's supposed to be become our signature insight?

I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What's happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?

John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

Zerzan continues: "If machines can be human, humans can be machines. The truly scary point is the narrowing of the distance between the two." The very point, that singularity, which transhumanists honour and hasten towards.

But it's not just our time that has seemed out of time; every generation raises up witnesses to its own wasting sickness. Add it up, and you have history. ("Defeat has been unconsciously the quest of all religions, all philosophies, and all sciences," writes Charles Fort in Lo! "If they were consciously trying to lose, they would be successes.")

For young Americans it may be the surrender of Hope and Change for more of the same, only worse. (Petronius, courtier to Nero, could have warned them: "Just as dumb creatures are snared by food, human beings would not be caught unless they had a nibble of hope.") For those a little older it may be the sense of reality out of joint engendered by 9/11, a stolen election or two, or any of several politically expedient murders. For an Ogoni of the Niger delta it may be the day Shell came to lay its pipeline or the one when the mercenaries first came for those who objected. An Aztec in a time of drought must have wondered why the rains wouldn't come - hadn't the priests sated Tlaloc with the tears and blood of children? Or the ruling classes of the early Roman Empire who, "vexed by fickleness and boredom and by the constant change of their designs," were rendered empty by their own hollow mastery of the world:

They strive to attain their wishes by every available means, instructing and compelling themselves to dishonest and difficult acts. And when their labour is without reward, it is the fruitless disgrace that tortures them - they are not grieved to have desired evil things but to have desired in vain. Then remorse for what they began lays hold of them, and the fear of beginning again, and thence creeps in the agitation of mind which can find no relief - because neither can they rule nor can they obey their desires. And then comes the hesitency of a life failing to clear a way for itself, and the dull wasting of a soul lying torpid amidst forsaken hopes.

Seneca, On Tranquility of the Mind

We could go back further. So far that we leave history for prehistory, even leave humanity for proto-humanity, to find our great departure from the way we might feel it's supposed to be. And our guides should be those defeated religions, philosophies and sciences that have told us there is no other way.

We now know humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor less than four million years ago, or about 16 million years less than paleontologists believed as recently as the 1980s. That's ridiculously recent - more recent by millions of years than our common ancestors learned to walk upright (an adaption actually abandoned by the Great Apes) - but that's one messy implication of holding 99% of our DNA in common.

As problematic as that's been to natural scientists, it's been nothing but a boon to Social Darwinists, who are less scientists than rear-view projectionists "from the more cruel time of capitalist society." (Or so writes William Irwin Thompson in The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light.)

"Survival of the fittest" were Herbert Spencer's words, not Charles Darwin's, but the meanness of Spencer's philosophy was justified by his fallacy of drawing economic and political instruction from Darwin's study of the red tooth and claw of nature, including predation upon the weak and the rewarding of aggression with food and sex. Eliminating the weak, wrote Spencer in Social Statics, was "the whole effort of nature.... If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die." Let's call him drummer emeritus of the Tea Party's Ghost Dance at the end of America. In his introduction to Spencer's The Principles of Ethics, Libertarian academic Tibor R Machan explains that "what Spencer did for libertarianism is what Marx did for communism - provide it with what was to be a full-blown scientific justification, on the model of proper science prominent in his day." Without Spencer, Ayn Rand might be best known, if at all, as a pedantic hack with a pathological crush on serial killer William Hickman. ("A wonderful, free, light consciousness.... He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.") Without Spencer or Rand, John Stossel might be just another selfish prick talking shit to his drinking buddies, rather than "Americas favorite investigative reporter." ("We grow up learning that some things are just bad: child labor, ticket scalping, price gouging, kidney selling, blackmail, etc. But maybe they're not.") Without the easy victory of these sociopathic influences, we might merely be living in an oligarchy. As it is, welcome to the sociopatholigarchy.

That the warlike chimpanzee - an animal which might just as soon bite off your face as blow you a kiss if you look at one the wrong way - is considered our closest relation, both Spencer and America's post-American sideshow of Objectivist cruelty would seem to be vindicated. And if self-interest is the only law, and I got mine holds illimitable dominion over all, then maybe we should do our children a favour and stop teaching them to share and start instructing them to steal. Monkey see, monkey do.

But it's not true. In fact, the chimp isn't our only closest relative. There's one other, precisely as close to us, and that example may be more instructive to those still seeking a better myth to live by.

Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and brutally take their enemies' lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a sort of picnic. It ends with adults from different groups grooming each other while the chldren play. Thus far, lethal aggression among bonobos is unheard of.

Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy

Bonobos were first catalogued by Western science in 1929, which is shockingly late for a large mammal. Even more surprising is the scant attention they have received since, despite our close relation, their shrinking numbers, and their matriarchal, egalitarian and orgiastic societies. (They're smart, too: "the bonobos...defied expectations by beating the group of chimpanzees in intelligence tests, because the chimps were too busy fighting among themselves for dominance.") We needn't romantisize them as the Great Ape Hope to believe bonobos have at least as much to teach us about ourselves as the over-familiar chimp. Perhaps more so if, as de Waal speculates, "the bonobo may have undergone less transformation than either humans or chimpanzees, and could most closely resemble our common ancestor."

Herbert Spencer could have made the chimpanzee Exhibit A in his case for Social Darwinism. But if the species had been known to naturalist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, he might have called the bonobo as witness for the defense of his Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution: "The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history."

And not just humanity. According to Kropotkin, who founded his research upon the fruits of his exploration of climatically-stressed Siberia,

As soon as we study animals -- not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains -- we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.

Kropotkin was well-aware of the risks in the willful misuse of Darwin, and warned his readers against "the economists who know of natural science but a few words borrowed from second-hand vulgarizers," who "raised the 'pitiless' struggle for personal advantages to the height of a biological principle which man must submit to as well." On the contrary,

man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle -- has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.

And in common with the bonobo, Kropotkin is today little known, little studied and representative of an endangered order.

Similarly, Elaine Morgan's Aquatic Ape Theory has been relegated to the margins of serious science for some 40 years, and yet it tells a compelling and fresh narrative of our hominization with a relevance lacking in the orthodox version of down from the trees and onto the savannah.

Morgan contends that when the heat waves of the Pliocene Period scorched Africa, erasing great swaths of forest, the apes who tried to make a home of the new, dry grasslands were wiped out by its larger and more numerous predators. There were a few, however, who escaped to the coasts, where the water provided shelter from the big cats who could not venture far without drowning.

It was this adaptive immersion, says Morgan, that made hairless bipeds of our ancestors (but for their exposed heads to shield them from the sun), and "the vestigial hairs that remain...are arranged quite differently from the hairs of the other primates.... The arrangement of the hairs follows precisely the lines that would be followed by the flow of water over a swimming body." (The Descent of Woman) Interestingly enough, the one sport at which women consistently surpass men in stamina is long-distance swimming. Interesting, because to Morgan it was the female who led the adaptive charge: her breasts swelling for the nursing baby (and not for the sexual excitement of the male); her hair lengthening, to which her helpless and slow-to-ween infant could better cling; and the enlargement of her buttocks and the forward migration of her vagina (a trait common to all mammals which have returned to water):

When she first took to a littoral life she had nothing in the way of padding. Her vagina was in the normal quadruped position, just under where her tail would have been if she had one; it was normal also in being exposed, flush with the surface for easy access.... But sitting on the beach was a very different matter [from sitting in trees]....

...

Once you begin to realize that practically all land mammals use the rear approach to sex, and practically all aquatic mammals use the frontal or ventro-ventral approach, then you are bound to suspect that the connection must be more than fortuitous.

Against Morgan's telling stand "the legend of the jungle heritage": the Tarzan-like character "who came down from the trees, saw a grassland teeming with game, picked up a weapon, and became a great hunter." This narrative, writes Morgan, "has taken root in man's mind as firmly as Genesis ever did."

Almost everything about us is held to have derived from this. If we walk erect is was because the Mighty Hunter had to stand tall to scan the distance for his prey. If we lived in caves it was because hunters need a base to come home to. If we learned to speak it was because hunters need to plan the next safari and boast about the last.

In place of orthodoxy's harsh grassland hunt, Morgan invites us rather to a Pliocene splashpad with the welcoming words "Come on in. The water's lovely."

But is it true? Did drought and predation drive our prehominid mothers into the coastal shallows and make humans of us? Is the convention wrong, and I'm not a son of the Great Hunter of the savannah after all? Is the matriarchal, egalitarian bonobo closer to us, and more instructive, than the brutal, mercurial chimpanzee? Is Kropotkin's mutual aid the greater truth of evolution rather than Spencer's survival of the fittest?

Maybe. Probably. I don't care. At this distance literalism, even factuality, may be as meaningless as for the seven days of creation. When we consider the manifold atrocities committed in the service of discarded and, to our understanding, manifestly fallacious mythologies, Is it true? seems neither a pressing nor even a necessary question to be asked by this particular species at this given moment. In the realm of myth, Is it true? is to miss the lessons of humanity's birth and death stories. And for good or ill, whether a story is true or not has no bearing upon the use to which we put it, and it's that utility we need now above all. So rather than Truth, let's have Creative Fiction: a new draft of the human story that can extricate us from the narrative dead-end into which we've written ourselves.

Nevertheless, our culture does bear the scars of that which was ripped from it long ago by civilizing violence, and we have seen our civilization act with similar cruelty - sometimes consciously and sometimes not, and yet always - upon indigenous cultures even to this day. History may, in part, be the erasure of prehistory: the suppression of a distant egalitarian and matriarchal heritage based upon the natural laws of collective aid and the survival of the most sociable. History may actually be jealous to keep that knowledge from us.

William Irwin Thompson writes, in The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light:

For hundreds of thousands of years the culture of women and women's mysteries had been the dominant ideology of humanity. The hominization of the primates in the shift from estrus was a feminine transformation. The rise of a lunar notation and the beginnings of an observed periodicy upon which all human knowledge is based was a feminine creation. Agriculture and the rise of sedentary villages and towns were feminine creations. But civilization and warfare were not; they spelled the end for the Great Mother.... So recent, so revolutionary is that struggle that to this day men have not forgotten, and the slightest stirring of the ancient mother can send them running for their swords and guns.

Thompson then quotes CS Lewis, who names, and owns, in Surprised by Joy our civilization's still anxious state of perpetual revolution:

...in the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.

If you feel like This isn't the way it's supposed to be, then I think you're right, but I also think it wasn't always thus. And those who say "Socialism is fine in theory, but it goes against human nature," may be mistaking our current sick and misinstructed selves for our natural state. Or maybe soon, under the Singularity, be mistaking the transhuman for the human.

Crack in the World

"There was nothing left of Earth. They had leeched away the last atoms of its substance. It had nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs towards the Sun." - Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

Know what? I've come to believe that the human calamity will frustrate all understanding until we arrive at the conclusion that we are truly ruled by maniacs. Then everything else begins to fall into tragic place.

Because it gets worse. I'm not suggesting a gang of sociopaths have hijacked civilization and are making it bend in service of their desires. I'm saying that civilization itself is insane, and is bending us toward madness in order to feed it, even if it kills us.

The chief predicate of civilization - empire - is growth, which visits mad, bloody mad violence upon all that would impede its advance. In what's often called progress, though better called conquest, the movement of civilization is towards subjugating the natural realm and converting its life and riches to dead, base elements to fuel itself. Bound and determined to feast, madness calls to madness, and opportunistic, privileged sociopaths rise to maintain the consuming machinery of the sociopathologarchy, not sparing a thought to the consequences, other than perhaps a nod to bleeding hearts who want to make the machine sustainable.

To control creatures of conscience, a system without conscience needs to dull the capacity for empathy in the great mass of its unreflective subjects and provide crumbs of comfort for the balance. And so it sustains itself by exploiting our worst and our weakest attributes: desperate selfishness ("college kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago"), and desperate hope ("I didn't say change you can believe in tomorrow"). It diminishes attachments to the Earth, and creates euphemisms like oil and gas - poultry and pork - that foster alienation towards the objects of our consumption. Nevertheless, fossil fuel deposits remain giant graveyards, and we're still drowning in its undead biology.

"In what evolutionary terms," Morgan wonders in The Descent of Woman, "are we to explain the Marquis de Sade, and the subterranean echoes that his name evokes in so many human minds?" Foucault offered something of an explanation in his history of insanity, Madness and Civilization:

Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros: it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.

To Foucault, Sade's totalitarian egoism and radical refusal of solidarity with others was a liberation from the prison of civilization. I would say instead that rather than a breach with civilization, Sade represents stark continuity with its own germane madness. "They wept. No one was moved": is this an extract from an Abu Ghraib interrogation report, or The 120 Days of Sodom?

The evolutionary terms of Sadism may be the evolution of a New Man: unnatural men: Machine Men with Machine Minds and Machine Hearts. The old Nazi project, in other words, but it's not just old Nazis anymore. (Headline: Rich "may evolve into separate species": "Advancements may lead to a divide between the classes and eventually could lead to the super-rich evolving into a different species entirely, leaving his not-so-rich counterpart behind.") Or as Hervé Kempf put it more succinctly, in his How The Rich Are Destroying The Earth, "Naive comrades, there are evil men on Earth."

Tricorned tea partiers may snap the safety off their loaded Bibles when they hear someone conflating "libertine" and "libertarian," suggesting they are at least as much the children of the Divine Marquis as of Paul Revere. And yet it's a doctrine of devils, acclaiming merciless ego and self-interest over solidarity and renunciation of excess. It's not by chance that, in this perhaps gravest economic crisis, and with historic cognitive dissonance, America's populist revolution is radically individualist rather than collectivist, championing the Survival of the Fittest rather than a philosophy of Mutual Aid, and preaches the upside-down Gospel of Social Darwinism while denying legitimacy to Darwin's actual teachings.

The Tea Party may be a sideshow, but its fun house mirror still reflects the pernicious, egoistic spirit of the age, even in science, especially in transhumanism. And perhaps spirit is more than metaphor here.

In his important trialogue with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham published as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness, Rupert Sheldrake wonders:

As in Goethe's Faust, the paradigmatic scientist sells his soul to the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power. The guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a satanic demon, a fallen angel called Mephistopheles.

How seriously do we need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization is under the possession of such a spirit, worshiped through money and power? Milton describes Mammon in Paradise Lost:

Even in heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific; by him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their Mother Earth
For treasures better hid

This is an accurate description of our whole civilization. How much are fallen angels actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology? Is a great war between the good and evil angels being acted out on Earth? We hardly know how to think or talk about such possibilities since they are so alien to the official, standard models of Western history.

We hardly know how to think or talk, but if they have their spirit guides, than so must we, and we had better call upon them soon. (Or as Harry Perkins, Prime Minister of Great Britain and steelworker from Sheffield, tells Sir Percy Browne in A Very British Coup, "Remember, I have ancestors too.")

Yet we're told that we don't. We're taught nature is dumb, and supernature is dumber, and that neither want to nor can tell us anything like wisdom. We're instructed to envy the greedy, disdain the gentle and make it on our own - or not - even though caring for one another has always meant survival for the underclasses. Dumbed down and pauperized, the superfluous middle class has become the new poor, and the old poor is now the new disappeared. And before we know how the grey jelly in our skulls receives transmission from potential allies in nature and maybe behind nature - after we forgot to listen for them - we're crashing the receivers with microwaves, neurotoxins, and shortly with nanobots. We will have literally fucked ourselves in the head. Once that happens, perhaps our only hope will be that the bastards choke on our bones.

About 10 days ago Jack Layton, the federal leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, died suddenly of cancer. (Another occasion for me, and by far the saddest, to reflect upon how much the god of this world must truly hate the NDP.) On Layton's deathbed he composed a letter to Canadians - a "manifesto of social democracy," Stephen Lewis called it in his eulogy - that ended with the words, "My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world."

I loved the man, but...

As a political subject, I'm very susceptible to the hypnotic suggestion that nothing could possibly matter more than an NDP victory - you should have seen me during the last election, I was so cute - but I do know, once I snap out of it, that it's really too late for it to mean that much. Change by increment won't do it now, not when anger, fear and despair are valid and appropriate responses, and perhaps simply a demonstration of attention to this late time and place. Now, we need everything. In the 19th Century, a socialist who said such a thing would have been derisively called an Impossibilist by the reformers, who sought to work within the system for incremental change. (What became of them is today's Labour Party. How'd that work out?)

Stephen Coleman writes:

Like other terms of political abuse which have been absorbed into our political vocabulary, the term ‘impossibilism’ tells us as much or more about the labellers as it does about the idea being described.... The Possibilists regarded socialism as a progressive social process rather than an "all-at-once" end. Those who regarded capitalism and socialism as mutually exclusive systems and refused to budge from the revolutionary position of what has become known as ‘the maximum programme’ were labelled as impossibilists.

William Morris was one. "The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless," he wrote, "because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side." If Morris was on to something then, I'd say he's right on top of it now. The vast, wide-spreading, grasping organisation has become the doom of the world, and it's not going to check itself. Who can stop it?

Let's not say it's impossible. Let's ask if it's necessary.

RI board back up

2010-09-14T01:25:00.003-04:00

Whew.

Thanks to all for your patience and good wishes, and thank you Justdrew for your efforts.

rigorousintuition.ca service interruption

2010-09-10T22:42:00.007-04:00

If you're wondering what happened to take it offline, there's an unknown sql issue that was hammering the server. The provider's help center helpfully suggested I try googling for assistance. I don't know how long the interruption will last; it may be several days. All depends upon how soon I can find a database expert.

Monday Night Update: We're almost there, thanks to Justdrew.

Tuesday Morning Update: We're back, though the server is currently unsteady.

Hey hey, we're the monkeys

2009-09-03T13:22:00.010-04:00

He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him

- JK Huysmans, À Rebours

Here we come…

Write about what you know, they say, except what I don't know is much more interesting. So what am I supposed to do?

For instance. Lately I've been less impressed by the fact it's only three years till the end of the Mayan's Fifth Sun than that it's been eleven since the final episode of Seinfeld. Or eight months since my last post. (Is it nine yet?) Or, until Father's Day, that it had been four weeks since I'd visited my tumble-down dad. He told the hospital staff he'd thought only old people broke their hips. A 79-year old widower, whose kids launched their lifeboats years before he went down with the house, said that. The things that must slide by in the blink of his eye. Some more things that I don't know.

One thing I do know is that I'm going to miss Betelgeuse. The star has “mysteriously” shrunk by 15% in only 15 years. That's considerable: a loss of radius equivalent to the orbit of Venus. And it's quickening. Because modern astronomy is so young - we haven't even marked the centenary of the embarrassingly late discovery that the Milky Way isn't the sum of the universe - astronomers can't be sure of what it is exactly that they're observing, so what it means remains uncertain. But what it may, credibly, mean is that the star is rapidly burning through its last reserves of carbon and approaching the end its short life, in which case we could see it supernova during our much shorter, yet main sequence, human lifespans.

Betelgeuse is just four or five hundred light years away, the red giant nearest the Earth, and only six or seven million years old. (Its precise distance and date of birth being two more of those things that neither I nor astronomers know.) It appeared above, completing the constellation of Orion, as the first hominines appeared below, creating the evolutionary branch that differentiates us from chimpanzees. Australopithecus was obsolesced by increasingly sophisticated models of symbologic acuity, able to connect the dots of the night sky into pictograms of their world. And in due, deep time, Orion became our superlative, celestial representation.

When Betelgeuse dies - if it hasn't died already, and we're just belated mourners awaiting the public viewing - its luminosity is expected to increase ten thousand fold, outshining the Moon, before diminishing over several weeks until its shell passes from unaided sight. And when that happens, Orion dies as well. And even for the billions whose night vision has been impaired by electric light, that’s some kind of collateral damage.

To the first humans who saw the heavens as a storyboard, what must it have meant for them to recognize their own form in the sky's most magnificent pattern? If the records we have are suggestive of the accounts that we’ve lost, it meant a great deal, and perhaps even entrained human consciousness to believe us a most favoured and peculiar beast. And if that's true, then its suddenly not being there will mean something for us as well. Even if many of us can’t see it any longer on a cloudless winter night.

We don't need to swallow Robert Bauval whole to admit the barefaced as above, so belowness of the Giza complex. Like Washington’s Federal Triangle was laid out upon the blueprint of the constellation Virgo to create an auspicious sacred space, the three principal pyramids create a fair facsimile of the three stars of Orion's belt, with the southern shaft of the Great Pyramid’s King’s Chamber aligning to the belt’s brightest star, Al Nitak. Though of course he wasn't Orion then. He was Osiris himself, and Sirius wasn't his companion dog star but rather his wife, Isis. And his seasonal course retold the story of his perpetual murder by Set and his perpetual resurrection by Horus.

When I was a teenage evangelical I learned the fanciful doctrine of the “Gospel in the Stars,” that God had arranged the heavens like a dispensational chart to forewarn illiterate antediluvians on the plan of redemption. Virgo, the Virgin Mother, holds a branch: “a familiar Old Testament name for the Messiah.” Aquarius with his water pitcher represents the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon the elect. That sort of thing. And Orion depicted the risen Christ himself, triumphant, foot crushing the serpent’s head.

Until Betelgeuse fails. Then Horus fails, and Set buries Osiris once and for all time. Christ and the Great Hunter lose his red, right shoulder, taking the colour out of space, and the dots which remain above our heads reconnect to depict another form. One in which we won’t recognize ourselves.

Perhaps for the stars to come right, some stars for us have got to go out.

People say we monkey around

And there’s Lovecraft again, several dismaying assumptions ahead of us, implausibly relevant.

But there's more bad news for us, and for those nearly us, playing out our options on Team Hominid. (And what a lonely and denuded bench since we made a last supper of the last Neanderthal.) The UN has called this the Year of the Gorilla, when it is rightly the Year of the Jellyfish, so we should know that for the Great Apes the signs are truly dire. Almost entirely because their survival depends upon our selfless forbearance, which we are too inclined to dispense grudgingly, sparingly and belatedly.

In the Earth’s current extinction event, precipitated by humanity’s going viral, the species most at risk are those that are most complex: the ones that have appeared most recently. The ones most like us. Three per cent of all fish and amphibian species are considered “threatened”; four per cent of reptiles; eleven per cent of birds; and 24 per cent of all mammals. The happy accident of our genus, the late Cretaceous wipe-out of the top of the food chain that left our shrew-like ancestors huge boots to fill, is being undone by our calamitous footprint. It's not the end of the world, but it maybe the end of the Cenozoic Era as we know it.

Nature doesn’t need our two-hanky sentiments to see this for a tragedy. If chimpanzees were in our place, they might try to kill us all, too. They’re that much like us. In her concluding note to Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, Jane Goodall writes that in her 45-year study of chimpanzees she has witnessed "emotions similar to those we label happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and so on.... They care for each other and are capable of true altruism. Sadly, also like us, they have a dark side: they are aggressively territorial, and may perform acts of extreme brutality and even wage a kind of primative war." One part of our heritage Goodall never saw was the calm, premeditated manufacture and stockpiling of weapons. Out of his wild and into ours, Santino, the 30-year old chimp incarcerated in a Swedish zoo, recently did just that. "These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," says Mathias Osvath of the University of Lund. "It implies they have a highly developed consciousness, including life-like mental simulations of days to come."

After her pet chimp/life-mate Travis chewed through her friend's face, Sandra Herold sobbed on the Today show that she couldn't understand what had happened: "Chimpanzees share 98 per cent of their DNA with humans." He could brush with a Water Pik, surf the web and use the toilet - how could he be so vicious? They could probably even travel by night bus to Winnipeg and tear somebody’s head off, but they lack our facility for imaginative violations. (Even with opposable thumbs I doubt chimpanzees would think to pluck out someone’s eyes, stuff the sockets with live maybugs and sew the lids shut. It took humans, precisely three Vichy militiamen, to conceive of that.) As Edmund Kemper put it, in a jailhouse reminiscence of his own career in atrocity: "I'm sitting there with a severed head in my hands, talking to it, and I'm about to go crazy... [But] wait a minute: I've seen paintings and drawings of Viking heroes, talking to severed heads, taking them to parties, carrying enemies in leather bags - part of our heritage." So I don't know: does the answer to Sandra Herold reside in the 98 per cent DNA common to both species, or in the unshared two?

"Life is a hideous thing," begins Lovecraft's Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His family, "and from the background behind it peer daemonical hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." The facts poor Arthur uncovered took the shape of a mummified ape wearing a locket which bore the Jermyn family arms: his own great-great-great-grandmother. (So Sir Wade's reclusive Congo bride hadn't been the daughter of a Portuguese trader after all.) Impossible, over five generations, but over five thousand it's evolutionary canon. "If we knew what we are, we should do as Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night." Family tree? You're swinging in it.

Lovecraft's story first appeared in the March, 1921 issue of The Wolverine. Five years later, while America assessed the damage of its own monkey trial, Stalin's Bride of the Monster-like whim for an army of atomic supermen set "Russia's top animal breeding scientist," Ilya Ivanov, on the task of crossing humans with apes. "I want a new invincible human being," Stalin reportedly ordered, "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat." On a budget of $200,000 – considerable funding for a Soviet scientist in 1926 - Ivanov traveled to West Africa to conduct his first experiments in cross-breeding humans and chimpanzees. Though Stalin’s dreams could be as big and as ugly as Lovecraft’s, and he had more will and obvious resources to avail their manifestation, Ilya Ivanov was no Wade Jermyn, and he had no better success when he returned to Georgia to continue his monkey insemination project, after which the stink of his failures inevitably condemned him to the Gulag. Stalin didn’t have the patience for it, nor the sophistication of our own culture’s various devolution projects, but perhaps the unfinished story of human speciation is just another tragedy that, in due time, produces comedy.

Yet despite evidence and ominous portents, our presumed end has often been thought transcendent and divine. Maniacs and the criminally religious have been beatified for seeking God's face, while a few, like Albert Fish who believed the voice holy that told him to make a Eucharist of children, get the electric chair. There’s always been an urgency about the endeavor, but since the 20th Century’s premature triumphalism of positivists it’s taken on a neurotic urgency for those who might ask, What Would Arthur Jermyn Do? Though that annihilating question didn’t exhaust itself on the descent of man, but also implicates the character of God, and all pretenders to the Throne who would claim credit the way Zodiac would claim the souls of his innocents.

Significantly, it wasn’t that the existence of God was in doubt, so much as the benevolence and soundness of the divine mind. The terrible proposition of the 20th Century wasn’t What if there’s no God? but rather, What if there is?

Come and watch us sing and play

“Our little brains,“ rants a feverish character in Frank Belknap Long’s 1928 short story “The Space Eaters,” “what can they know of vampire-like entities which may lurk in dimensions higher than our own, or beyond the universe of stars?

Suppose they had shape unknown on Earth? Suppose they were four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional? Suppose they were a hundred-dimensional? Suppose they had no dimensions at all and yet existed? What could we do?

They would not exist for us? They would exist for us if they gave us pain. Suppose it was not the pain of heat or cold or any of the pains we know, but a new pain? Suppose they touched something besides our nerves – reached our brains in a new and terrible way? Suppose they made themselves felt in a new and strange and unspeakable way? What could we do? Our hands would be tied. You cannot oppose what you cannot see or feel. You cannot oppose the thousand-dimensional. Suppose they should eat their way to us through space!

Long described himself as agnostic, and wrote that he "always shared HPL's skepticism ...concerning the entire range of alleged supernatural occurrences and what is commonly defined as 'the occult.'" In other words, he, like Lovecraft, regarded cosmic horror as purely a pulp genre rather than also a metaphysical suspicion. Yet Lovecraft has become the avatar of our doom-struck age because the arguments for such fantastic pessimism have basis, even if only imaginatively so, in science sounder and stranger than Ilya Ivanov’s.

By the mid-twenties, physicists were demolishing Enlightened assumptions about the fundamental states of matter, and though the quantum revolution was still too young to rewrite the textbooks - those "pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science,” in Thomas Kuhn's phrase – its early outrages were known well enough for materialists like Lovecraft and Long to lift them for the premises of their pulp fiction. The weird science informed the weird tales, but the authors themselves could remain untouched and observe the world for their own purposes as old school Newtonians. (Not all artists could. Wassily Kandinsky wrote that “the collapse of the atom model was equivalent, in my soul, to the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly the thickest walls fell. I would not have been amazed if a stone appeared before my eye in the air, melted, and became invisible.”)

In 1926, Schrödinger published his theory of wave mechanics, while Heisenberg began work on what was to become the Uncertainty Principle. Lovecraft wrote “The Materialist Today” in the same year. "The Call of Cthulhu" also, though it wasn't published for two more years. His thin tract is frightening in its own right.

All is illusion, hollowness, & nothingness - but what does that matter? Illusions are all we have, so let us pretend to cling to them - they lend dramatic values and comforting sensations of purpose to things which are really valueless & purposeless.

Illusions have always mattered - our facility with illusion is the greatest achievement, and perhaps even the point, of our biological speciation - but a science of collapsed wave functions, uncertainty and entanglement suggested that illusions are of paramount concern to physics as well. New physics and ancient intuitions were sources for Lovecraft's weird fiction dream quest - "non-Euclidian geometry" was the signature of the Great Old Ones - but the first mythographer of hyperspace remained resolutely materialist. (Shortly before Houdini's death in 1926, he hired Lovecraft to write a never to be completed book entitled The Cancer of Superstition.) Nevertheles, the shattering of the atomic model prompted a re-evaluation of scorned, occult studies such as alchemy, and non-locality and its spooky actions meant even astrology could merit another look. Early in the course of his own revolution in the science of consciousness, Jung saw the virtue in both. And the later discovery of the double helix suggested the Sumerian-derived alchemical caduceus of Hermes had all along been modelling unaware the structure of DNA.

As the science has grown only weirder, its congruence with Lovecraft's weird fiction has become ever more apparent. Earlier this year, researchers studying gravitational waves in the depth of space may have discovered holographic noise - the "graininess" that comprises our space/time - while the first "tunable electromagnetic gateway or "hidden portal" has this month been scientifically described:

While the researchers can't promise delivery to a parallel universe or a school for wizards, books like Pullman's Dark Materials and JK Rowling's Harry Potter are steps closer to reality now that researchers in China have created the first tunable electromagnetic gateway.

The work is a further advance in the study of metamaterials, published in New Journal of Physics (co-owned by the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society).

In the research paper, the researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Fudan University in Shanghai describe the concept of a "a gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities" like a "'hidden portal' as mentioned in fictions."

The gateway, which is now much closer to reality, uses transformation optics and an amplified scattering effect from an arrangement of ferrite materials called single-crystal yttrium-iron-garnet that force light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation in complicated directions to create a hidden portal.

McKenna's alien spores and Crick's directed panspermia were foreshadowed in Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth. The mysterious, deep-sea "bloop" from 1997 of a massive and unknown organic source, "possibly a many-tentacled giant squid," was provocatively heard near Lovecraft's coordinates for the sunken city of R'lyeh. The proliferation of cephalopods and jellies in our ever more alien seas, and our skies and fields as well. And then there's the uncanny and ugly efficacy of his imagined grimoire. Because it's not the science only with Lovecraft: it's the myth, magick and religion as well, because his fiction is a conversation with archetypes, and like all fiction that matters, is evocative, which can be about as magical as it gets. (And all grimoires, lets remember, are no less imaginative works.) Whether something exists in itself may now be rightly dismissed as a meaningless question, for gods no less than for a quantum of information. And Lovecraft's myths are acutely resonant in postmodernity, because the dread of his cosmos is its radical indifference to such haughty apes as ourselves.

In 1926, the same busy year for Lovecraft, Einstein wrote his letter to Max Bron from which is cribbed the famous misquote that God doesn't play dice with the universe. His actual words were that quantum mechanics "does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'Old One'. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

In 1938 Einstein helped a young German Jew emigrate to California. Theodore Gottlieb had seen men eaten alive by dogs in Dachau, where he'd signed away his family fortune for a single Mark, and was to lose much of his family to the Nazis, including the mother rumoured to have been Einstein's lover.

Gottlieb became Brother Theodore, exponent of "stand-up tragedy." ("The best thing is not to be born. But who is as lucky as that? To whom does it happen? Not to one among millions and millions of people.") Einstein balked at the implications of his own discoveries. (Lovecraft would think the fuss over his fiction foolishness, too.) Last March, Scientific American asked Was Einstein Wrong? A more timely question may be, was Brother Theodore right?

We’re the new generation

Time flies. Into tall buildings.

I was four years old when John Kennedy was publicly executed, and I was inconsolable all weekend because my cartoons were preempted. Last November I travelled to Dallas for the 45th anniversary commemoration and JFK Lancer conference, and during a Jim Marrs lecture on Obama’s Illuminati-bred socialism I fell inconsolable all over again. Reading Crossfire was my first occasion to have good reason for my doubts and for why I shouldn't get over them, but now Marrs’ cornpone dialectics made me wish I were back my hotel room eating mesquite chips and drinking Texas-bottled Dr Pepper made with real cane sugar. The quiet of a November 21st on Dealey Plaza's grassy knoll was more of an education than another Discovery Channel documentary, but aside from the remarks of consequential researchers such as John Judge and Dick Russell, the funery burlesque of the 22nd was more disheartening than a month of Shark Week.

By 1968 my favourite shows were Mr Dressup and The CBS Morning News. So when our Grade 3 teacher wrote "Robert F. Kennedy" on the blackboard and told us to copy it while she stepped into the hallway to collect herself, I knew why she was crying. I'd woken up as well to the blanched scenes of grief from the Ambassador Hotel.

I didn’t cry on September 11th. Though like Lovecraft's New York detective Malone, I promptly "acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in." No, I cried the next Tuesday, when Mr Dressup died. I could have imagined commercial airliners striking the twin towers. But that, I didn’t see coming. A stroke; possibly a stress-induced casualty of the Twin Towers' second-hand smoke. It was hearing on the radio report the familiar, tinkled theme that set me off.

I'm not saying it's all about me. I'm saying, I'm all about it. My own, private Long Count is measured in decorated caskets and bulletins of grim tidings. I suppose that's the inescapable condition for all who share the communion of where were you when, but I don't think that's something to be celebrated.

Eight summers ago, George W Bush sat in a Sarasota classroom looking like a mannish boy draped in his dad's old suit on picture day. Ten summers before that, Paul Rubens was down the road in a darkened theatre choking the chicken out of America's singular boyish man, Pee Wee Herman. Only one of them has a criminal record for his public indecency but neither could get elected president. And I think it's appropriate to speak of them in the same breath, now that they're both returning to the stage.

My own stage, with respect at least to the vigor of the dissenting culture, I’d characterize as acceptance, having idled a long while at grief and anger. Good research and analysis still happen, significant stories still break, but like most deserving things they either fly beneath the radar or someone somewhere has switched off the media’s transponders.

The Truther wars are over, and Loud, Dumb and Misguided hold illimitable dominion over all. The moment for justice has passed, and the truth movement has become an Alex Jonestown. Regardless of how the best and most nuanced work doesn’t deserve it, 9/11 skepticism now wears the clown nose of National Chauvinists suiting up for the Red Chinese on the Mexican border and Obama’s FEMA guillotines. (The noise on the right is now amplified mainstream by the opportunistic likes of Glenn Beck, who keeps his armchair militia in a perpetual state of apprehended Apocalypse while ridiculing the real ruin of the world.) Serious questions and connections re September 11th have been berated and beaten down for the quick confirmation thrill of slapstick forensics which sustained controlled demolition’s imaginary crime. Since first viewing Jones’ The Obama Deception, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt have been “nonstop researching the Internet...for information for at least a month all day every day." Pratt is so changed, his “first rap album is going to be called Infowars.”

Mr Dressup – Ernie Coombs - was a lovely man. Pee Wee Herman was always more creepy than funny. Atlas shrugged, but Jesus wept.

And we've got something to say

Though I won't say I'm having a mid-life crisis. I turned 50 in July, and even with the unearned benefit of a North American life expectancy that would be unaccountably optimistic. The crisis is the same companion I’ve had since reading Lovecraft and Marrs and seeing the Kennedys shot, though I’m finding it more companionable at this time of life. Art Spiegelman, in In the Shadow of No Towers, wrote “I can no longer distinguish my neurotic depression from well-founded despair.” I would have said the same when he wrote that five or so years ago. But now, I’m no longer depressed. I just despair heartily.

But neither is the Earth middle-aged. It’s already about a third as old as the universe, and it took nearly all of that time to turn out overreaching hominids. If we fail, then Earth’s highest iteration of enfleshed consciousness fails with us. (Until we educated ourselves right out of nature, we knew well enough that consciousness doesn’t demand the medium of meat to manifest.)

The planet will be here for five or so billion years before it's cinders and ashes, but most of that time it will be essentially barren. Right now, the acidiphying seas bloom with jellies and tentacled things. Life goes on, but reduced, and reversing direction towards simplicity. Even with that, a biosphere habitable for all but the simplest extremophiles ought to be done by a tenth of the Earth's projected remaining lifespan. And that’s without an assist from our compounding calamities, and the odd but inevitable asteroid impact. We'll be the end of the line for biological complexity, not because we’re as good as it gets, but because there’s not enough time left on the clock, after the rise and fall of the great reptiles and the higher apes, to say third time's the charm.

In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, James Lovelock writes that the proximate cause of this prognosis is the “ineluctable increase in heat from the sun":

Our star, like all stars, burns hotter as it ages, and in 500 million years the radiant heat from the sun will be about 6 per cent greater than now.... [slowly enough to give] ample time for adaptation and further evolution. Already we have a new photosynthetic process due to the evolution of a new class of plants, which biochemists call C4, able to live at much lower carbon dioxide abundances.... [T]his evolutionary step might enable the contemporary biosphere to continue for another 100 million years. Beyond that, further genetic changes would surely extend the lease of life, but given the fundamental limitations of mainstream biology and the inevitability of perturbations, it is difficult to see life extending beyond 500 million years.

Lovelock regards the Earth's carrying capacity for our species to be overtaxed on the order of several billion souls, which will trigger a corrective and unprecedented culling by one means or another as early as this century. This hard truth-telling by the light of his science has marked him, particularly among anti-NWO-styled "patriots", as an apologist for elitist eugenics and mass murder. But to do so is to not distinguish deserved pessimism from wishful thinking, or even wishfulfilment. And there's an irony about this, as Jones' Infowars is content to use Lovelock's words to trash the inefficiencies of renewable energy and the green economy as "verging on a gigantic scam," while remaining in full denial of his gloomy rationale for so doing. Jones prefers the analysis of Spencer Pratt - "It's mind-boggling trying to say there's global warming right now" - and Steven Anderson, Arizona's please taze me bro so I can post it on Youtube pastor who hates the environmental stewardship nearly as much as he hates Barack Obama. ("Let that stupid whale die," says Anderson. In church, yet. "God’ll create a new one in the Millennium and I’ll look at it for a thousand years and Al Gore will be burning in hell!")

Lovelock is 90 this year. That's about three times the life expectancy in AIDS-stricken Swaziland, and barely a flutter of coronal muscle to the brainless immortal turritopsis nutricula. But everything that dies has first to live. (Even if, upon death, the remains are converted to fuel for corpse-eating robots, as a Defense Department-funded project envisions.) Like now. I’m listening to Blossom Dearie sing "Peel Me a Grape," realizing it’s maybe 15 years since I sat 10 feet from her piano at Toronto's lost Top o' the Senator. I left intent to become her lyricist. (I sent her a pastiche of Dave Frishburg and she graciously pretended I hadn't.)

Dearie was 82 when she died a few months ago. The week earlier, Lux Interior of the Cramps passed away at 63, marking another kind of wrong.

The Cramps threw a free concert in 1978 at the State Mental Hospital in Napa, California. “Somebody told me you people were crazy,” said Lux, “but I don’t know about that. You look alright to me.” The same year I voluntarily committed myself to a religious institution, where the Lord taught us different songs. It took another five years or so for me to suspect the likes of Steven Anderson's god might not be the Phantom of the Paradise, since none of his best show tunes were originals.

We're too busy singin'

And maybe that's the question behind all questions: who writes the songs that make the whole world sing?

And you know, maybe it actually is Barry Manilow. When I was in Dallas itching to be a Pepper, it was his old jingle that did the let's all go to the lobby dance in my head. Before Manilow met fanilow, he was catapulting the propaganda for McDonalds ("you deserve a break today"), Kentucky Fried Chicken ("finger lickin' good!") and State Farm Insurance ("and like a good neighbor"). It doesn't matter what you think of Mandy, if you're a child of North America, Manilow's intrusive earworms have made you do things, and made you think it was you deciding to do them. In other words - William Irwin Thompson's words - we're trapped in a commercial from which there is no escape.

Of course Barry was only punching the clock at America's ersatz pop bottling plant, but just following orders shouldn't cut it as an excuse there, either. Manilow and his fellow corporate minstrels would probably become physically ill if confronted with the enfleshed consequence of their art of persuasion: the child obesity, the diabetes, the cancer and the heart disease. Wordsmiths like Himmler and Eichmann didn't have the stomach for seeing their own words made flesh, either.

America may romanticize the singer-songwriter, but it's the factory system that weaned Manilow which produced the country's great songbooks: composers toiling in the sweatshops of Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building and Motown, performing their labour to create an audience and then manufacture its consent. (Or the beats-for-sale of "urban contemporary" that can make a recording artist of a real housewife of Atlanta, so long as the voice modulator is turned up to 11). True, original talent - the diamond in the rough - becomes a commodity only when it's machined, polished and sold. Students of politics will recognize the process.

America doesn't elect singer-songwriters to high office, though its culture industries are happy to write for the wurlitzer and play let's make believe otherwise. (Come to think of it, it's perhaps apt that a contracted murder is also known as a "hit.") Obama, like so many succesful candidates before him, even had his own song. He didn't write it, but he sure knew how to sell it. Though some weren't buying.

"Expectations got fueled," Joan Didion wrote last December. "The spirit of a cargo cult was loose in the land":

I couldn't count the number of times I heard the words "transformational" or "inspirational," or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade's war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see. It became increasingly clear that we were gearing up for another close encounter with militant idealism—by which I mean the convenient but dangerous redefinition of political or pragmatic questions as moral questions—"convenient" because such redefinition makes those questions seem easier to answer, "dangerous" because this was a time when the nation was least prepared to afford easy answers.

Yes we can and Hope we can believe didn't sound quite like the Sixties; they sounded more like the Seventies' tin-eared counterfeits you would hear on Quinn Martin productions whenever a crime trail might lead Cannon or Barnaby Jones to a go-go club. There was nostalgia, though not for the dangerous and authentic historical moment, but for the regurgitated mush of the first nostalgia.

And they earned Obama the White House: perfect for a relaunch of that establishment hit factory which hadn't topped the charts since Let's Roll! and Bring 'Em On (Get it on). But Obama is a President like Franklin Roosevelt only in the sense that the Monkees were a pop group like the Beatles. A radical departure from "beltway consensus" was as unwise, to his producers and Chicago entourage, as letting Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork write and perform their own material. Iraq, Afghanistan, Bernanke, Blackwater: a new house singer may bring his own interpretation, but the song remains the same.

Sometimes presidents, like their prefab pop equivalents, balk at their impotent glamour and attempt to find their own voice by trying out original material. It took Kennedy some time to find his, so who knows, Obama may yet decide to do the same. But if he’s attempting to emulate the smart Beatle by provoking the CIA director to launch into a "profanity-laced screaming match" at the White House over a probe of the agency's use of torture, then God help him. Because America's musical isn't a lone nut show, and some nutty lyrics are being written to some ominous music.

During a period of pauperization, the people with a little who have been told all their lives that they have a lot and now risk losing even that are those most inclined to learn the Horst Wessel song. Fascism may be more voodoo than economics, but as Klaus Theweleit writes, “susceptibility to fascism is explicable in terms of the economic degradation of large sections of the middle classes.” And Glenn Beck is mobilizing the Freikorps.

Stupify, scare and starve the middle class long enough and they'll become the perfect mob to torch the least hope for their own best interests. Television, radio or the web will tell them how, because apparently in the United States today, where Vietnam is still the name of an American tragedy and not a South Asian holocaust, there's none more hive-minded than the "rugged individualist" who believes the ad copy written for him. The Ku Klux Klan, let's remember, didn't burn crosses until they saw it depicted in Birth of a Nation. And the art of persuasion has come only a long way since.

We get the funniest looks

But then there are other songs, no less important for all the noise of modern life that render them barely audible.

In folklore, magick and religion, an opening to other realms or an approach to the divine is frequently initiated by ceremonial music and dance, or sounds resonating at particular frequencies. Familiar stuff ("If life is vibration, then music must not be incidental to it"), but not exactly the top of the pops. And perhaps to its credit, it never was.

"It was the weirdest music you ever heard...indescribable," says Mikmaq Mary Rose Julian, describing her family's introduction to the fairy realm in an isolated woods of Nova Scotia. "I asked my oldest 'Do you hear it?' She said yes, and I really panicked then because, you know, I wasn't hearing things."

Julian yelled for her kids to get in the car, then sped away, warning them not to look back. Yet her daughter still glanced out the rear window:

They were, like, just holding hands, jumping around in a circle sort of thing. And another one came out of the woods and they grabbed him, and they kept - they were singing. It was that noise that we heard. It was likethe were singing and dancing all over the place, in a circle. Just over there....

Of course it's effortless to think nothing of this story, even though this story has been repeating since forever in the places where our domesticated world encroaches upon the feral wood. "This was well-appreciated by the Ancient Greeks," says Phil Hine in The Pseudonomicon, "who designated such frontier places as sacred to the wild gods who might well visit terror or transformation upon those who strayed into them." Lars von Trier knows it, too. It's why we have the word "panic," after all.

"As sure as you are sitting down I heard the pipes there in that wood" [on the Hill of Tara], the Reverend Peter Kenney of Kilmessan tells Walter Evans-Wentz in The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. "I often heard it in the wood of Tara. Whenever the good people play, you hear their music through the field as plain as can be."

And they're called the good people, remember, to not risk incurring their offence and inviting horror. The same way it's always a good life in Peaksville, Ohio.

Walkin' down the street

The Earth has its song, too. And it always closes out the show.

If not the least of our worries, then perhaps the likelihood of huge solar storms – to peak, wouldn't it just, in 2012 - may be the more prosaic. Because if we’re right, or perhaps just not completely wrong, about the South Atlantic Anomaly, the tremendous new holes in our magnetic shield - breeches in our planet’s offworld levees - may grant greater privilege to still wilder things that sometimes manifest in visible light.

And not light only. Since the transfer of energy is vibration, we may also experience it as sound. The Earth’s electromagnetic field is a power trio - a soaring ionosphere, fronting a rhythm section of north and south poles, creating an electrodynamic resonating cavity that finds a frequency of 10 hertz. Coincidentally, the same same alpha brainwave frequency for humans and all animals. The sky losing Orion and the Earth changing its tune are not auspicious prospects for the life we call life.

In 1926 HP Lovecraft wrote The Silver Key, in which Randolph Carter "lost the key of the gate of dreams." It was a hard loss for someone accustomed to Lovecraft's imagined landscapes peopled by oddly-robed figures and gibbering ghouls who saw "Earth's gods dancing by moonlight." But by the age of 30, the custom of waking life "had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions." Well-meaning and wise men explained to him the workings of the material world, and he came to be chained to it. But Carter's chains have shown themselves to be one of the weakest of Lovecraft's fictions.

I think of them when what became of the dinosaurs crosses my path: a subway pigeon pecking through litter and pools of piss and purple Slushee. Its ancestors have been bird-like far longer than my own have been man-like; longer even than ape-like. (And the folk knowledge of ancestry predates Darwin and scientific theory. In his Maps of Time, David Christian quotes a Portuguese missionary to West Africa in the early 17th century, Father Alvares, that "there are heathen that claim to be descendants of this animal [the chimpanzee], and when they see it they have great compassion: they never harm it or strike it, because they consider it the soul of their forefathers.... They say they are of the animal's family.") Beneath the K/T boundary that marks humanity's most fortuitous extinction event ever, we're represented by Cretaceous rodentia too slight for the appetites of the feathered theropods.

Yay, team.

"There is no such constellation...." - Lars von Trier, Antichrist

Book Launch, Wed Dec 17

2008-12-16T16:35:00.002-05:00

Don't show me no picture show or give me no book to read - Bob Dylan

Well this says everything anyone needs to know about how together I am. I'm having a book launch on Wednesday, December 17, and I haven't posted anything here about it.

Conspiracy Culture bookstore, 7 to 9 pm, 1696 Queen St. W. Toronto. More details here.

Hope to see you there. Or maybe, hope to see you first.

A genuine update coming. Honest.

My Barack Pages

2008-11-08T00:03:00.002-05:00

Memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow - Bob Dylan

Just because there's a Democrat in the White House is no reason to stop reading Lovecraft.

From "The Shadow in the Attic":

There was a moment that was as if the Earth had taken a half turn backward or something of that kind, and I had not gone along with it but were suspended somewhere far out in space at the instant before plunging into orbit of my own - and then the moment passed, the Earth resumed its regularity of turning, the room lightened, the flame in the lamp steadied.

It was the longest moment for some, lasting eight years, since the done-deal that was Gore's Florida flipped columns. Old certainties, even among cynics, of how bad things could get, suddenly seemed wretchedly naive as the Earth staggered like a drunk, with Dick Cheney its designated driver. As kleptocracy and high crime compounded illegitimacies and low comedy, many millions - conservative Republicans and conspiracy debunkers among them - came to feel themselves in a strange place, with unlikely companions and no sure footing, and entertaining hypotheses they had once thought unimaginable. And as the years dragged, it became difficult to conceive of anything different, or to reflect upon what "different" might even mean.

And now, it would seem, the moment has passed. The Earth has resumed its kinder, gentler course, and the shadow in America's attic has been dispelled by - I dunno; shall we call it a thousand points of light? Democrats can awake from a nightmare and fall into a dream, and conspiracy theory can once more become the property of the "patriot" right.

I think the worst of conspiracy theory - actually all theory, and no conspiracy - must be the unfalsifiable, post hoc prediction. If you haven't seen it yet or don't know what I'm talking about, you will, as theorists retool their cottage industries to react to a Democratic administration. Fintan Dunn calls it the "Red Coup gambit" of the New World Order, absurdly describing Obama as an "undercover Marxist ideologue." Webster Tarpley gets in on the action with his book The Postmodern Coup, which shoe-horns Obama into his meta-analysis as the next, inevitable Manchurian Candidate of the Brzezinski faction. Alex Jones, like some Star Trek energy entity that feeds on pure hysteria, is whipping up a new batch to keep those cards and letters coming. ("Congressman, are you feeling the dread many of us are feeling right now?")

But it's neither that complicated nor so ridiculous, is it? Real history, even in the living of it, isn't a seamless narrative that enfolds all events into a single narrator's construct. As recently as September, I thought there was no clear path for an Obama victory. Still, the election didn't need to be staged, not with a vetting process designed to winnow out all contenders who don't know what and to who they owe, who might do something, even by chance, that could divest the true rulers of their rule. (And McCain didn't actually run to lose, not really, though the creepiest incompetent campaign in American history might as well have been managed by Kid Gleason.) That Obama could be taken for a progressive, even in the beltway sense of the term, is a testament to the polish of his blank slate and the desperation of an orphaned Left anxious for a win, even if it means their loss. To whom the coming surge in Afghanistan, the likely deferral of a meaningful withdrawal from Iraq (one that might include private armies and troops that have had the "combat" redefined out of them), the appointment of Rahm Emanuel and other "moderates" will smell like...victory.

Last Thursday, as President Elect, Obama received his initial briefing of classified intelligence pertaining to national security. Friday, CNN's Candy Crowley asked "whether anything's given you pause," to which he replied "I'm going to skip that." Whatever he heard, and however long he paused, I'm fairly certain he didn't hear anything like what Evo Morales means to brief him:

Bolivian leader Evo Morales on Thursday accused the US government of encouraging drug-trafficking as he explained his decision to banish the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).... "The worst thing is, it did not fight drug trafficking; It encouraged it," the Bolivian leader said, adding that he had "quite a bit of evidence" backing up his charges.

Presidential Minister Juan Ramon Quintana presented a series of documents and press clippings at a news conference, which he described as "object data" that had influenced Morales' decision to suspend DEA activities last week.

Quintana said Morales was ready to present the evidence to incoming US president Barack Obama "to prove the illegality, abuse and arrogance of the DEA in Bolivia."

When Bill Clinton entered the presidency, he sought some back-channel answers to questions not addressed in his classified briefing. His Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell wrote in Friends in High Places:

Clinton had said, 'If I put you over at Justice, I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK. And two, are there UFOs?" Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting.

Clinton might have curried the Deep State's favour in Mena, but it withheld its deeper secrets from him and his Arkansas capo as from middle managers just passing through without a legitimate need to know. (The seeming otherworldliness of the Bush/Cheney years is largely accounted for by the broad, intuitive dread that Cheney knows.) Obama doesn't even display Clinton's idle curiosity, though he and his Chicago Mafia do show some of his hubris. Should he change in office, and light a lamp in America's shuttered rooms, he may feel the Earth take a half turn backwards, while its true rulers decide what to do with him.

Afterwords and Forewords

2008-10-29T06:50:00.004-04:00

The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's gettin' shallow and weak - Bob Dylan

News, some good and some meh, before shaking out the mothballs.

Happily, and no thanks to me, the Rigorous Intuition book has at last gone to press. It wound up running about 500-pages, words and art, plus index. (And most of all, I'm thrilled about the index. Better books than mine are made useless without them.) It can be ordered directly from Trine Day, or through Amazon or Indigo, and I'm sure elsewhere. I'm planning for a launch at Toronto's Conspiracy Culture, and it would be fun and probably scary to see some of you there, or wherever else the book leads me.

Though I'm not so thrilled about this: my bill-paying gig has gone under, for the second time in four years, and almost certainly for the last. The economy's never great for magazines, and especially not now, or so the money people say.

But the consequences of both are complementary. The weight of the book has finally lifted, and Frank's daily deadlines won't distract me again from the work I think I should be doing instead. And so I'll be posting here with more regularity, adding long-deferred enhancements to the site and the forum, and drafting a proposal for a book that would take me away from the desk and into the field for some original research.

And if you're able and so inclined, I've at last fixed the Paypal link in the bar to the right.

A proper, content-heavy post is forthcoming.

Attention Deficit World Order (Part Two)

2008-10-02T05:42:00.005-04:00

"Judgement day," he said, in a mocking voice. "Ain't no judgement day, old man. Cept this. Maybe this here judgement day for you." - Flannery O'Connor, "Judgement Day"

I wish I could blame all my bad blogging upon writer's block, but it's not just the words that have been lacking; it's been any sensible thought to penetrate America's strange dreamtime. And unlike Sarah Palin, I'd rather say nothing when that's all that I know. And that's just sad, because as novel as these events seem, they are still all recurring dreams, though we greet them like goldfish seeing the world anew every time we circle the bowl.

Perhaps the truest and most essential thing Michael Moore ever said, he said at the Oscars. We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times. But I dunno; maybe he's spent too much time since that night playing a character in a false narrative, because on the eve of Congress's campy read through of an early draft proposal for a trillion dollar grift - a fictitious fix to a fictitious crisis of fictitious money - Moore advised Americans to "call or e-mail Senator Obama" and "call your Representative in Congress." So that's how it works. How about rather, as soon as you discover you've already seen the movie, walk out of the theatre and demand your money back?

Is this the way the world ends? European astrologers at the turn of the 16th century forecast devastating floods for the year 1524. One result, as the date approached, was a "Great Fear," as recorded by Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo. Another, for Venice, was a tremendous investment in public works in order to prevent the silting up of the city's lagoon. (Sadly, the careful consideration of Renaissance engineers of the city's effect upon its environment had been forgotten by the mid-20th Century, when channel dredging and groundwater extraction saw Venice rapidly sink 20 centimeters in 20 years.) And a further effect was an increased popularity of satirical doom singers. One Venetian cantastorie going by the name of "Master Pegasus Neptune" predicted "conjunctions of cheese and lasagna," and comically prophesied that "In those days cats and dogs will be enemies, swords will cut better than radishes, fields and mountains will be out in the open, and the taverns will be well frequented." We might add, that in these days, the stock market will crash, and the stock market will rally.

That's not the end. Hell, that's not even the world.

Perhaps this is more like it? From a dispatch last week by Dr. Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, aboard the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi in the Arctic Ocean:

We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.

Days later, the British research ship the James Clark Ross reported counting "about 250 methane plumes bubbling from the seabed in an area of about 30 square miles in water less than 400 metres (1,300 feet) deep off the west coast of Svalbard." Deeper plumes at three times the depth were found near by.

If the thawing permafrost and warming oceans lose the integrity of their methane sinks, if the billowing chimneys of Arctic methane represent their tipping point, then the climate is soon to run away from a tolerable mean. A feedback loop even more catastrophic than Reaganomics will have been initiated. But as with Reaganomics, a happy ending can't be written for us.

But never mind that. There are millions of lives lived right now in apocalypse. Zimbabwe - does that look like the end of the world? Another world at least, where children are eating toxic, indigestible roots to stave off hunger, though malnutrition will kill them if relief isn't sent "very fast." What percentage of Wall Street's "rescue" would it take to rescue them? What percentage of Henry Paulson's personal wealth of $700 million? It's crazy that it seems crazy to ask. But that's Zimbabwe, and Mugabe's small time grifters aren't hooked up with the global syndicate. There's no need to know, and since so much of news is supposed to be news you use, they lose.

And we do too, if we don't know this Zimbabwe story, from last April:

American film maker Randall Nickerson is currently visiting southern Africa to make a documentary that follows up an incident that happened at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, in 1994, when 62 children aged between eight and 12 reported seeing a UFO and “strange beings” during their morning break.

Those children are now young adults scattered around the globe. Nickerson is tracking them down and interviewing them about the experience. “Their stories have not changed at all,” he says. “Not what you would expect if they had made it all up.”

So what exactly happened on that day in 1994 at the school in Ruwa just east of Harare? “It was morning break and they were out in the school yard playing,” says Nickerson. “They saw one main silver craft that had four others around it,” says Nickerson. “It came down on a hill beyond the school yard that was out of bounds. The boundary was the edge of the school yard, then it was bush and the hill.

“They ran to the edge of the school yard to see what this thing was. They saw this small creature walk around on top of the craft while another came down to check out the children. He was all in black, with a very tight suit. The children said he had big eyes ‘like rugby balls’.

“The children had direct eye contact with this creature. There seems to have been some kind of communication with the children about the state of the world — what we are doing to the planet, the destruction we are causing, although not all the children got this message. Some of the children were traumatized, others were excited. The young children were the most traumatized as they were at the front of the group.

African UFO researcher Cynthia Hind was at the school the next day. One little girl told her "I swear by every hair on my head and the whole Bible that I am telling the truth." Harvard's John Mack soon followed, and interviewed dozens of witnesses with whom Nickerson is now following up.

One is Isabelle:

He was just staring, and we like, tried not to look at him, because he was quite scary.

MACK: What was scary about him?

His big eyes I think. I think - I think they want people to know that we're actually making harm on this world and we mustn't get too technoledged [sic]

MACK: What gave you that feeling?

I don't know.

MACK: But it came to you when you were with the strange beings?

Yeah. When he was looking at us. It came through my head. My conscience I think.

MACK: Had you been a person who thought a lot about what we were doing to the world?

No. Only after this.

I don't know what happened at Ruwa, but something real, really did, which means it has more authenticity than John McCain's David Blainesque "suspension" of his campaign, upside down, above the head of David Letterman, and more weight than the Treasury Department's rationale for the figure of $700 billion. ("It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number.") If we can't explain it or understand it, maybe we should fight the impulse to ignore it. As well as real, it could be important. Or maybe just kill us.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of Australian pilot Frederich Valentich's disappearance, whose last words before his microphone captured an unidentified sound of grinding metal was "That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it's not an aircraft."

Driving home in a company van the evening of March 17, 1978, Englishman Ken Edwards saw a strange figure on top of an embankment. As Peter Hough tells it in Visition, The being was tall and broad, with a head like a goldfish bowl, and its arms appeared to sprout from the top of its shoulders. It descended the steep hill at an impossible right angle to the ground, and before walking across the road and straight through a chain link fence as if it wasn't there, turned to face the van and shot narrow beams of light from its eyes into the cab. A power surge burned out all of its major components, Edwards' watch stopped, and he showed Hough marks on his hands that had been clutching the steering wheel which resembled sunburns. He soon began complaining of stomach pains, and was found to be riddled with cancer, and died at 42. Maybe he would have anyway, if he and something unknowable hadn't crossed paths, but like Barbara, his widow, told Hough, "A thing that can burn skin, stop watches and destroy an expensive radio might well be capable of bringing harm to a human being."

Last July 20, Vince Weiguang Li delivered an Edmonton newspaper that carried a lengthy feature on the Windigo, "a terrifying creature in native mythology that has a ravenous appetite for human flesh. It could take possession of people and turn them into cannibalistic monsters."

Li abruptly quit his job and took a bus across the Canadian prairie, where he beheaded and cannibalized 20-year old Tim McLean. "I just don't know what to think of it, quite frankly," says the piece's author, and Windigo expert, Nathan Carlson. He'd documented numerous cases of people believing they were "turning Windigo" who would beg to be killed "before they started eating people." At Li's first courthouse appearance, the only words he spoke were a soft, "Please kill me."

On McLean's myspace page, under Who I'd like to meet, he posted "an alien, the wolfman, frankensteins monster, a vampire...."

The Tuesday after the market dropped 777 points, the front page of a Toronto newspaper headline told me there's a "monster lot of fear out there."

Ooooh, I'm scared.

Attention Deficit World Order (Part One)

2008-08-10T22:22:00.004-04:00

"Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension."

- HP Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House

The more things strange, the more I want to stay the same.

Suddenly, just when it seems UFOs are everywhere, I'd rather be nowhere. America's late-term, lame-duck housecleaning of suspicious suicides and self-inflicted gunshot wounds is in full swing, and I'd just as soon clean the porch. And I've never wanted to clean the porch. Now a new, "optimistic" estimate gives the world 100-months to forestall the tipping point of a runaway greenhouse effect, but I prefer to focus on the short term, and speculate idly upon how much ass next year's Watchmen adaptation will or will not kick.

I've been struggling for a year and a half with writing an introduction to my book. A year and a freaking half. I haven't been able to account for the missing time to my publisher, though I don't need a hypnotist to tell me where it's all gone. I have been good at stammering apologies and repeating vain promises, and revisiting false starts and bad ideas. (And naturally the blog suffered, because how could I justify spitting out posts like watermelon seeds while using the book for a spittoon?)

Maybe, in another year and a half, I'd have something to say. Maybe if I kept looking I'd eventually find a place to start. But I think it's more sensible to say I can't do it, and instead write my conclusions and stick them at the front. (And maybe even squeeze a blog post out of it at the same time.)

So here it is: they've won. Or let me rephrase that, since there will never be universal agreement as to who "they" are: we've lost.

Because life is short, even if I get another turn after this one, I'd rather not waste half of it relearning all the secret wrongs done to the world that I can't undo. So I need to know what, if anything, we get out of knowing what they get away with. And if it's so we may better "organize," then good luck and God bless us playing catch-up, since the priesthoods and kingly classes have had a 10,000 year head start.

I suppose it counts for something, that so many have been able to recognize the holes in the FBI's posthumous stitch-up of Bruce Ivins for the anthrax attacks. That we haven't jumped when they say jump to the conclusions of guilt and case closed may be some comfort to his family and colleagues, who watched Ivins break under the relentless There can be only one ethos of America's Lone Gunman. But all our reservation of judgment amounts to nothing but a sympathy card - an e-card at that - against the prosecution of a dead man who can be tried and convicted now only because he is dead and undefended.

Stalin's show trials, what was it do you think that they showed? Not that Zinoviev and Kamenev and the other Old Bolsheviks were "terrorists" and "sexual deviants" (though it is instructive how often the prosecuting state conjoins the two). Rather, they demonstrated Stalin's rule by absolute whim. That loyalty and service, innocence or guilt, afforded no protection. It was irrelevant if Soviet citizens were convinced that justice was served by their state. They just needed to note that if they demurred, there was nothing they could do about it.

Senator Patrick Leahy has a speaking part in The Dark Knight. It looks like his mouth talking, but it sounds like his ass. "We're not intimidated by you thugs," Leahy stares down the knife-wielding Joker who's crashed a political fundraiser. It was The Dark Knight's only moment for which I could not suspend disbelief, since two hundred billion particles of finely-milled anthrax were enough to erase the Senator's initial qualms concerning the Patriot Act. But I won't judge him, except as a character in a superhero movie, because I wasn't there and it wasn't me. Most of the time we don't make ourselves targets by our objections to their plans, because there's not much we could do to impede them. And besides, as the Joker later says, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying."

I don't have a reasonable doubt that Edgar Mitchell is telling the truth about his being briefed by government officials on Roswell and alien visitation to Earth. I have considerable doubt they were telling him the truth. Because I don't think it's part of the plan to tell the truth, of which, almost certainly, even the highest and darkest government officials would have only partial knowledge. If "disclosure" ever comes, its purpose may not be to persuade us of a lie, but rather to tell a terrifying joke.

Master of our Domain

2008-06-12T14:03:00.012-04:00

Half the people had turned into squealing pigs, the other half were cooking - Nick Cave

There's a Kids in the Hall sketch in which Mark McKinney plays a loner who's injured his toe. By the swelling, the pus and the change of colour he knows it needs attention, but he can't get motivated to go to the hospital, because "as it is, I'm fascinated by the process!" His leg has gone numb below the knee, and he can stick a fork in it and not feel a thing. "Now that," he says, "is interesting!"

Here's the thing.

In the dying days of Hillary Clinton's campaign, a wistful and perhaps at last unhinged Bill liked to say how there comes a time when we know we have more yesterdays than tomorrows. For civilizations, too. And the borrowedness of our moments of plenty should be, finally, achingly manifest.

Agricultural soils are being eroded at a rate 10 to 40 times that of soil formation. (Iowa alone has lost half of its topsoil in the last 150 years.) The ingestion and absorption of industrial toxicities has contributed to an endocrine disruption that's resulted in a 40% decline in sperm count in 50 years. And the atrocities of global industry has so contaminated the milk of Inuit mothers that it can be categorized as hazardous waste.

Energy and food are being priced out of reach of the poor. (I mean our poor: the genetic detritus of developed nations. The rest? Let them eat mud cakes. It may be the end of the world as we know it, but it’s still the world they have always known.) Like a deleted scene from Children of Men, a pray-in was held five weeks ago at a San Francisco Chevron station to beseech God for lower fuel prices. Gas has risen about 40 cents since. Demand for cheap and "green" biofuels is devastating forests, and stealing food and habitat from the other poor. Besides other things, Soylent Green is fuel efficient.

Climatologists are throwing out their most pessimistic forecasts, since reality has already outstripped them. More carbon dioxide is being discharged into the atmosphere now than even the worst-case scenario in last year's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "We're seeing events predicted for the end of the 21st century happening already," Adelaide University's Barry Bock told the Canberra conference Imagining the Real Life on a Greenhouse Earth, and anticipates a temperature rise of six degrees. Such a spike would mimic the conditions of the Permian Extinction of 251 million years ago, which came as close as anything has to eradicating all life on Earth. "Oxygen isotopes in rocks dating from the time suggest that temperatures rose by six degrees, perhaps because of an even bigger methane belch [the release of the ocean's methane hydrates] than happened 200 million years later in the Eocene":

Sedimentary layers show that most of the world's plant cover was removed in a catastrophic bout of soil erosion. Rocks also show a "fungal spike" as plants and animals rotted in situ. Still more corpses were washed into the oceans, helping to turn them stagnant and anoxic. Deserts invaded central Europe, and may even have reached close to the Arctic Circle.

One scientific paper investigating "kill mechanisms" during the end-Permian suggests that methane hydrate explosions "could destroy terrestrial life almost entirely". Acting much like today's fuel-air explosives (or "vacuum bombs"), major oceanic methane eruptions could release energy equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.

I don't know if time's speeding up or we're winding down, but Nostradamus doesn't seem of much use anymore. The last few months have felt, to me, like the closing of a door. Ahead is another door, only one, and we have no choice but to walk through it.

As it is, I'm fascinated by the process! Which, I suppose happily enough, can still appall me.

Conspiracies, too, fascinate, and are the reality of parapolitical culture, but conspiracy culture is its reality television. Even if someone does bust the conspiracy wide open! as Alex Jones has promised that so many of his broadcasts would do, justice would be served to the same extent The Bachelor is genuinely searching for true love. Seven years gone since September 11, and the singular accomplishment of "9/11 Truth" appears to have been the creation of another Great American Pastime. Sirhan could not have killed Robert Kennedy, but four decades later he's still in prison. And even when an American Court found the federal government and its agencies to be co-conspirators in the death of Martin Luther King, the judgment left no mark upon the guilty.

The Internet is often thought an egalitarian blessing by those who would hold high criminals accountable, yet the only accounting rendered is online. I don't think the guilty regard this as an unfortunate development. I think we've been corralled into cyberspace, taken as freedom its "free speech zones," and adopted its virtual and vulnerable bantustans as our "domains." (Appropriately so called, since its mastery entered mass culture as a euphemism for masturbaton.) We can win the blog wars, but we may as well have been playing World of Warcraft for all the difference it will make when the power goes out and we lose our connection. The connection for which we may have forsaken many others of much higher worth.

So this is my dilemma, and my paralysis. It's not every day you get to spectate the real-time collapse of a planetary civilization and biosphere. (Or, I suppose I should say, I remember a time when it wasn't.) But watching this unfold with fascination feels complicit and worse than if I were blithely ignorant, and analyzing it at this seeming late stage futile and ridiculous. What's important now, what's more important than ever, are the close-to-home matters: being a good father and husband, and learning how to best cushion the crash of our coddled urban lives.

That's why I'd lost my words. I'm getting them back, and I'll be posting with regularity again, which feels good because I'm a writer and I don't know what else to do with them. But my regard for them has changed.

It's like Harvey Pekar says, in the August issue of American Splendor:

"I thought about it and I realized that i might be part of the last generation that has experienced 'normal life' for some time... I try to think of positive things, you know, like I'm happy about what's been happening with my writing. But in the face of the upcoming disaster everything seems futile."

I'd have rather posted something else, but I couldn't write anything until I'd written this.

I needed to look away for a while...

2008-05-09T16:55:00.004-04:00

...and I'm finding it harder than expected to look back.

I'm working on a lengthy post that touches a number of subjects but it hasn't jelled for me quite yet. I'm hoping to have it up in this space soon. (That's the illustration for it.) Regardless, there's always the forum.

Time keeps on slipping

2008-04-17T13:44:00.005-04:00

I have lots to cover, and lots to pull together for the next post. Which I was hoping would have been last week. Early next, more likely now.

Blogger apparently blinked out on the last entry and began refusing comments. I don't imagine there was much left to be said, but I apologize for that.

See you in a few days.

On edit: It's no longer early in the week, but it will be today.

On edit, again: Predictably, I was wrong. I'm hoping today will be different.

The Deep Ones and the Madness of Crowds

2008-03-27T16:50:00.012-04:00

The Deep Ones

I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground - HP Lovecraft, The Crawling Chaos

The Overlords of Childhood's End hide their true form for the first 50 years of their benevolent space brother stewardship, calculating that a half century of alien new order will be sufficient to overthrow millennia of religious patterning and superstition. It almost is. But there is still shock at their appearance: barbed-tail, horns and leathery-wings, like the demons of discarded faiths. The classic imagery of a demon had been a prefigurement imprinted upon humanity at the revelation of its doom, and cast back through race memory as an instance of reverse causation.

It would be bad enough if Clarke were right, though his godlike aliens had the grace of intellect and empathy even as they took Earth into receivership. Lovecraft's gelatinous, slobbering gods, not so much. And it's Lovecraft I worry about, and his Deep Ones dreaming.

Narrating the IMAX documentary Deep Sea, Johnny Depp's first words are to assure us we're not watching science fiction, and the creatures are not from another planet. The creatures are jellyfish, and the assurance that this is our own world fails to comfort me. Their biomass now surpasses ocean vertebrates, and are found in staggering quantities where they have never been seen in number before, because we have sickened the waters with overfishing and the climate is trending towards conditions unseen since the Carboniferous Era.

Complexity is the product of cooling, a process observable on every order of scale. The world we recognize and of which we're a part is the product of a climate mild enough to encourage diversity and intricacy. Brainless and simple jellies thrive in warm waters, and catastrophic warming means devolution of the seas back into primordial soups. The new plague of jellies appears as a harbinger of the end of the world we know from out of the world we didn't: from out of Deep Time. From slime, back to slime.

Billions of luminescent mauve stingers, "in a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep," wiped out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm last November. "In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it," said Northern Salmon's Managing Director John Russell. "It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing." This is more than three months old and you may have already forgotten the report, but is there a rival to this horror in all of Lovecraft's fiction? More than three months on and I still can't shake it, and it's at least worthy of the signs and wonders of a blind idiot god.

Translucent, mutable and iridescent, 98% water and almost entirely not there, a jelly is perhaps as close to a phantom as a creature can be and yet still belong to the material realm. In this respect at least it transcends the material, and gives great metaphor for the ineffable and alien yet familiar Other. Which may partly account for why they're seen these days in even less likely places than off the coast of Ireland. The sky above, for instance.

In October 2005, Bolivian Gustavo Ponce reported something above the town Oruro that was so foreign to his frame of reference that at first he refused to believe what he was seeing:

"It was a very strange and shiny figure that could be seen through the binoculars. I went ahead and took out my camcorder to videotape the UFO in the sky. As the camera zoomed toward the object, I could how it was breaking down into a shape resembling a jellyfish or something like it. It was very strange."

He added that the object was flying over the eastern part of the city and that it was the first time he had ever seen such an object, having never had previous visual contact with a UFO. [Newspaper] La Patria visited Ponce's home to see the images captured by his camcorder, attesting to the fact that the shining object broke down into a full circumference, adopting the shape of a jellyfish.

Last June, a "jellyfish-shaped UFO" was seen over Shanghai. And from Sidney, British Columbia:

I stepped outside at 9:10 PM, to have a smoke and saw a bright orange ball of light heading south directly at me on September 9, 2007. My wife came out and we watched it pass overhead. I grabbed the binoculars and we both had multiple turns viewing it. My wife describes it as an "orange jellyfish" that I agree with looked like that to me too but it had a structure to the leading edge of the sphere like a crescent. It was very brilliant, pulsated and jiggled slightly. It looked like a glowing orange jellyfish and flew south over Sidney at a increasing rate of speed dimming from view.

Four days later, while Greg Lauver was driving through the Colorado town of Durango:

While driving through town on US Highway 550 on September 13, 2007, I saw an object like a glowing diamond filled with countless strands of yellow-white light at 4:50 PM. Each strand was a string of countless beads of gleaming white, all of which floated in a transparent medium which permitted the sky color to pass through yet also glowed faintly due to its contents. It reminded me of a spectacular back-lit picture of a live jellyfish by National Geographic.

Then most recently, and famously, the Stephenville UFO.

Witness Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan describes his January 12, 2008 encounter:

I watch this thing in the police video and it appears to be some type of aerial object that is round. It changes from white to these different colors. The police officer says, ‘Keep watching,’ and I watched for approximately another eight minutes. And then this thing, right in front of my eyes, changes and it looks almost like a jellyfish. I compare it maybe even to a parachute – and now a very bright white. The green and blue and red is no longer flashing. It holds that shape for probably two minutes. And then to my surprise, it changes vertically like a line straight up and down.

The deeper a Lovecraft protagonist delves towards the realm of the Deep Ones, beneath the banal surface order of things, the closer he draws to madness. There's no bargaining; no appeal to reason or mercy. It's a doomed commitment to seek out pitiless truth that will either kill the hero or render him senseless. Devotion to the dumb lords is no escape. Devotion's only reward is the privilege of being eaten first.

The Madness of Crowds

Foremost among the living objects were inky, jellyfish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped.... - Lovecraft, From Beyond

Prey evolve adaptive strategies for species' survival. It's in the predators' interest that they do. The prey is their feed pool, their life, and if they drive it to extinction then it becomes their doom as well. Prey needs to thrive for the health of the predator. And if the prey cannot adapt fast enough then the predator must, suppressing its appetite in ways that sometimes create bizarre codependencies.

According to the theory of endosymbiosis this is a story written in our Deep Biology, in the nucleated cells of nearly every living thing. In our mitochondria.

What doesn't kill us makes us...different. In their Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors, authors Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan write "imagine the ancestor of our mitochondria: a ruthless attacker, capable of breathing oxygen when it was around, or maybe even doing without it if necessary":

The ancestors of mitochondria invaded and reproduced within our other bacterial ancestors. At first the occupied hosts just barely kept alive. But when they died, they took the invaders with them. Eventually only cooperators were left. The invaded victims and tamed mitochondria recovered from the vicious attack and have lived ever since, for 1,000 million years, in dynamic alliance.

In the long run, the most vicious predators, like the dread disease-causing microbes, bring about their own ruin by killing their victims. Restrained predation - the attack that doesn't quite kill or does kill only slowly - is a recurring theme in evolution. The predatory precursors of mitochondria invaded and exploited their hosts, but the prey resisted. Forced to be content with an expendable part of the prey (its waste) instead of the entire body of the prey, some mitochondria precursors grew but never killed their providers.

In this primitive example the predatory proto-mitochondria knew a good thing when they ate it, and adapted to the point of domestication, the resultant symbiant becoming the conveyor of two independent sets of DNA in virtually all living things on Earth. However, Margulis and Sagan allow that the story is still being written, and may not end happily ever after. Some cancers, they write, may represent a "sort of atavistic return to the original state of prokaryote animosity." And through his study of the behaviour of mitochondria in cancerous tissue, Philip John of the University of Reading has concluded that "mitochondrial rebellions have not been permanently quelled."

Political animals are still animals, and politics as practiced at the top of the food chain may be just another instance of restrained predation, whose signature distinction is merely that it is happening to us. This would be intra-species predation, at least for now ("humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time," says evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry), but that too is found in nature. Here is the unnatural: if humanity does eventually bifurcate into sub-species, it will be only biology's punctuation to the division of class, effected 6,000 years ago by the global emergence of an urbanized, priestly patriarchy whose rule is typically equated with "civilization."

Paedophile rings that cater to the elite are great practitioners of restrained predation, preying typically upon orphans, their own and the children who fall between the cracks, such as those of Boy's Town in the Franklin scandal and Jersey's dungeon-like Haut de la Garenne, from which kids were reportedly "loaned out" to wealthy yachtsmen for "rape cruises." They don't need all the children, or so many that the lattice of their privilege and appetite would draw attention. (The Pale Man leaves the ones who don't touch his banquet table; some are taken, and some are left by the hungry black car of The Reflecting Skin.) They take enough to feed well, but not enough to be noticed by those who have already been told there is nothing to see. (And I think it deserves noting that it was the hysterical overstatement of the numbers of victims by the likes of Ted Gunderson, who speciously contended that upwards of a million American children a year go missing, which 20 years ago helped consign ritual abuse to the domain of urban legend.)

So predators inhibit their appetites to avoid detection. But when they are above detection, they had better do so anyway in order to preserve the feed stock. That they didn't, may be one of the measures of the Nazis' madness. If they had killed Europe's last Jew they would have destroyed themselves as surely as the Onceler who chopped down the last Truffula tree, because their machineries would have lost the lubricant of Jewish blood. And perhaps it's because they didn't, that they won and are still with us.

(One other thing: in so far as the predator class operates with seeming inhumanity, it becomes easier for their natural prey to imagine that they may be other than human. This may account for both the truth and the lie of Icke's reptillian "secret," and how it could ever find currency.)

John Lamb Lash, in his Gnostic reinterpretation of sacred history, Not In His Image, puts it this way (and though I normally balk at the use of "Illuminati" to talk about anything but Weishaupt's Bavarian order, I do like Lash's application of it to describe the followers of a deviant shamanic path who falsely employ initiatory knowledge to social control):

Around 4000 BCE, with the rise of urban civilization in the Near East, some members of the Magian order chose to apply certain secrets of initiation to statecraft and social engineering. They became the advisors to the first theocrats of the patriarchal nation-states, but in fact the advisors were running the show. Their subjects were systematically programmed to believe they were descended from the gods. The Illuminati inaugurated elaborate rites of empowerment, or kingship rituals. These rituals were in fact methods of mind control exercised on the general populace through the collective symbology and mystique of royal authority. Kingship rituals were distinct from the rites of initiation that led to instruction by the Light and consecration to the Great Goddess. Their purpose was not education and enlightenment, but social management. Gnostics refrained from assuming any role in politics because their intention was not to change society but to produce skilled, well-balanced, enlightened individuals who would create a society good enough that it did not need to be run by external management....

Historians recognize a split in the Magian order, but do not understand either its origin or its consequences. Within the order, the telestai [spiritual initiates] were given the title of vaedemna, "seer," "wise one," as distinguished from the priest, the zoatar, who officiated openly in society and advised Middle Eastern theocrats on matters of statecraft and social morality.... So arose the first theocratic city-states in the Fertile Crescent. Urban populations required social control, and the Illuminati assumed the role of planners and controllers - more often than not, hidden controllers.

...

The Illuminati program was (and still is) essential to patriarchy and its cover, perpetrator religion. While it cannot exactly be said that the deviant adepts known as Illuminati created patriarchy, they certainly controlled it. And still do. The abuse of initiatory knowledge to induce schizophrenic states ("entrainment"), manipulate multiple personalities in the same person ("platforming"), and command behaviour through posthypnotic suggestion (the "Manchurian candidate" technique) continues to this day, with truly evil consequences for the entire world. If we accept that the Mysteries were schools for Gaian coevolution dedicated to the goddess Sophia, they could not have been run by the Illuminati, as some contemporary writers (who believe they are exposing the Illuminati) have supposed. Everything the Gnostics did in the schools was intended to counterbalance and correct the machinations of the deviant adepts. Initiation involved melting the ego boundaries in preparation for deep rapport with nature, not lowering of ego consciousness so that the subject could be "sectioned" and behaviorally programmed using the power of suggestion, imprinting, and other psychodramatic methods. These behavioral modification tools of the Illuminati were strictly forbidden in the Mysteries overseen by Gnostics.

This, I think, is the deep context in which we should situate the perpetual travesty machine of American politics. Here too, restrained predation "doesn't quite kill or does kill only slowly." Here, rather, it "keeps hope alive."

All through the Bush years, scores of non-Republicans have anticipated the brutal full-flowering of traditional dictatorship with all the trappings: martial law, mass internment and the cancellation of elections. Through much of the Clinton years, many non-Democrats looked for the same. It didn't come (though some are still waiting). It's as if they've not only expected the worst, but sought it, to put them out of their misery. But the worst exceeds their expectations, and their misery is to be protracted indefinitely.

The Kennedys and King, the October Surprise and Mena, anthrax and Wellstone, Gore and Kerry, Florida and Ohio: you might think that would be enough to make most Democrats say You know what? This isn't working out. But elections are paced like the Olympics, and in another four years the Jamaican bobsledders may really have a shot. Hey, anything's possible. And so long as people believe that, and that anything means everything they want, the cycle repeats and self-perpetuates.

The great assassinations of the Sixties were decapitation strikes, never intended to kill the host or to extinguish hope. It's only the hopeless who are dangerous. Hope must be encouraged, because you don't need to do anything to have it, and it keeps the prey from becoming wise to its own nature and seeking extraction from the cycle. Hope makes it possible to write and believe such things as "Al Gore will save the planet but Barack Obama will save this country." Hope that the system works, even if it is just a digestive system.

Restrained predation upon the Democratic Party may be at an advanced stage of domestication, but it also mimics molecular endosymbiosis with the injection of alien organelles in the form of the Trojan horse DLC to which, of all the contenders, both Clinton and Obama are closest in tactics and ideology. Funny how that happened.

And how did that happen? I think there's an institutional instinct at work, in the Deep Context, that maintains the insectival social engine of power. Does Obama know his role? That may be irrelevant, because the volition and cognition of the individuals who form the living manifestation of the system may be grossly overstated. They have given themselves to the system, the system has groomed them and raised them above all others, and they instinctively know what the system requires.

Is it hopeless? Thank Christ, yes, so get used to it. There's a liberation to hopelessness, in knowing what can't be done (or more typically, politically, be done for you), which I personally find preferable to another four years of huffing one's own jenkem. There's no salvation within the political cycle of death and rebirth, consumption and excretion - jellies eat and shit through the same simple hole, which could also be a reasonably sophisticated media analysis - and to hope for such a savior is to be the doomed hero of Lovecraft's fiction.

Perhaps it's not be so far from the Deep Ones to Deep Politics. You could say it all comes out right in the end, but you know what comes out in the end.

2008-03-24T07:18:00.001-04:00

Updating today.

On edit: It's been the longest day.

Seriously: today.

The Deep Ones and the Madness of Crowds (Part One)

2008-03-07T04:54:00.007-05:00

"I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground" - HP Lovecraft, The Crawling Chaos

The Deep Ones

The Overlords of Childhood's End hide their true form for the first 50 years of their benevolent space brother stewardship, calculating that a half century of alien new order will be sufficient to overthrow millennia of religious patterning and superstition. It almost is. But there is still shock at their appearance: barbed-tail, horns and leathery-wings, like the demons of discarded faiths. The classic imagery of a demon had been a prefigurement imprinted upon humanity at the revelation of its doom, and cast back through race memory as an instance of reverse causation.

It would be bad enough if Clarke were right, though his godlike aliens had the grace of intellect and empathy even as they took Earth into receivership. Lovecraft's gelatinous, slobbering gods, not so much. And it's Lovecraft I worry about, and his Deep Ones dreaming.

Narrating the IMAX documentary Deep Sea, Johnny Depp's first words are to assure us we're not watching science fiction, and the creatures are not from another planet. The creatures are jellyfish, and the assurance that this is our own world fails to comfort me. Their biomass now surpasses ocean vertebrates, and are found in staggering quantities where they have never been seen in number before, because we have sickened the waters with overfishing and the climate is trending towards conditions unseen since the Carboniferous Era.

Complexity is the product of cooling, a process observable on every order of scale. The world we recognize and of which we're a part is the product of a climate mild enough to encourage diversity and intricacy. Brainless and simple jellies thrive in warm waters, and catastrophic warming means devolution of the seas back into primordial soups. The new plague of jellies appears as a harbinger of the end of the world we know from out of the world we didn't: from out of Deep Time. From slime, back to slime.

Billions of luminescent mauve stingers, "in a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep," wiped out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm last November. "In 30 years, I've never seen anything like it," said Northern Salmon's Managing Director John Russell. "It was unprecedented, absolutely amazing. The sea was red with these jelly fish and there was nothing we could do about it, absolutely nothing." This is more than three months old and you may have already forgotten the report, but is there a rival to this horror in all of Lovecraft's fiction? More than three months on and I still can't shake it, and it's at least worthy of the signs and wonders of a blind idiot god.

Translucent, mutable and iridescent, 98% water and almost entirely not there, a jelly is perhaps as close to a phantom as a creature can be and yet still belong to the material realm. In this respect at least it transcends the material, and gives great metaphor for the ineffable and alien yet familiar Other. Which may partly account for why they're seen these days in even less likely places than off the coast of Ireland. The sky above, for instance.

In October 2005, Bolivian Gustavo Ponce reported something above the town Oruro that was so foreign to his frame of reference that at first he refused to believe what he was seeing:

Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

2008-02-07T17:10:00.000-05:00

Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much - Bob Dylan

Reposting the earlier segments together with new material. As it should have appeared in the first place.

People are crazy

I've been thinking a lot this week about last week's leaked internal memo from Associated Press. Frank Baker, AP's LA assistant bureau chief, issued the directive that "Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal." I've been thinking how right and how proper this is.

What should US cable news be doing, other than leading the hour with live updates from Britney Spears' custody hearing? Put another way, what does US cable news do better that it should be doing instead? The answer, my answer, is nothing. It's perfectly tuned by the lords of the manor to service the land of genetically modified bread and circuses. What has it ever demonstrated to justify a higher expectation?

But the failed expectations are not the media's alone. Most responsibility rests with the broken subjects of America's broken media. Does Clinton versus Obama really merit more attention and sober analysis than Spears versus Federline? I don't see why it should. One pair speak of "change," and the other of mood swings, but it's the same, leveled spectacle.

Did the Clinton team hack the New Hampshire vote? Bradblog makes its usual strong case for electoral fraud, but I'm finding it hard to get my indignant mojo working. Because here's the thing: even when the system works as advertised it contemptuously defrauds and disenfranchises citizens who take their politics like detached spectators. Obama and Clinton are two contenders in a fight club of closed ranks and consensus brutality with interchangeable corners. The outcome of this contest for advancement upon our lives - American lives and everyone else with a seat at the arena - will mean just as much as who wins the Super Bowl or the Oscar, should we have any emotional investment in the outcome of those contests. Because the only change to be registered will be how we feel about it. That's supposed to be enough, and it's been that way long enough that for many, it is.

Most everyone loves a good breakdown. At least ever since breakdowns have become public spectacle, and we can revel in celebrities' madness at physical and emotional distance. But even if we're so emotionally removed from the circus that we don't care whether the fallen idol is a danger to herself, we still care should she become a harm to others. So we're relieved when Britney loses visitation rights, so her crazy train can keep chugging along without running over her children. Unfortunately, there's no court that can slap the wrists America's already slashed, whose own breakdown would be far more entertaining with a restraining order.

Times Are Strange

Crazy people see things. Most everyone who's not crazy knows that. You'll likely remember than when it's your turn to see something, and be circumspect about to whom you tell it.

People have been seeing things in America since it was known by other names and hosted other nations. In the early 15th Century, in present-day New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, the first wave of Spain's explorer-conquerors were reportedly astonished to find indigenous people with apparent preemptive knowledge of Roman Catholicism, who had even crafted their own crosses and rosaries. The Europeans were told that a pale figure known locally as the "Blue Lady," had appeared to them many times in recent years, floating above the ground in an azure haze, preaching a foreign faith in their own language. When friars carried the story back to Spain in 1635 it was received with interest by the Inquisition, which was just then trying an abbess named Maria de Jesus Agreda.

About a dozen years earlier, after having put on on the blue habit of the Franciscan order, Maria Agreda had begun experiencing ecstatic visions and "raptures," and told her cloistered sisters tales of her more than 500 out-of-body travels to a distant land where she preached to "savages." She eventually wrote a book detailing her spiritual journeys, and she soon came to the attention of the heresy-hunting Inquisition. The story of the "Blue Lady," and the rapidity with which the Spanish were able to pacify and baptize the inhabitants of the lands she had visited, earned Sister Maria both an acquittal and a place in the court of King Philip. Regardless of the century, secular power always stands ready to recruit magicians, miracle workers and devils to its side.

Maria Agreda's etheric adventures and xenoglossia were understood by both the native North Americans and Spanish Catholics as religious events (the only question for the Inquisition was whether they were divine or infernal). Four hundred years later, what once could be called only either miraculous or fraudulent may be regarded as perhaps another category of the merely human.

Similar to Maria Agreda's recruitment by King Philip and John Dee by Queen Elizabeth, Robert Monroe's astral navigations were weaponized by the Pentagon, which schooled itself in his Virginia institute for bilocation. In Journeys Out of the Body, he writes of "raising himself out of the physical" and whoring about on the astral plane, eventually having "sex" - a "giddy electrical-type shock" - with with a female friend who, the next week, volunteered the information that she had had an erotic dream about Monroe the same night, in which he had given her "a detailed physical examination." In 16th Century Spain Monroe would have been called an incubus, and he would have been burned alive.

Robert Bruce describes witnessing his nephew Matt's first real-time OBE in his book Astral Dynamics, during a two-week visit coaching the boy on projection.

A few days before he was due to leave, while meditating late at night, I clearly saw Matt's projected real-time double float through the wall and come into the room I was sitting in. He waved cheerfully at me and I slowly waved back at him, without breaking my entranced state - no mean feat in itself - immensely pleased that Matt had finally managed to get out of his body. Matt floated about the room, seemingly having some difficulty with movement and directional control, but apparently thoroughly enjoying himself. He soon floated out of my sight and that was the last I saw of him that night.

Bruce writes that the next morning, Matt "vividly remembered" floating through the wall, seeing his uncle sitting below and the two waving at each other. And if we can believe his account, the fact that Bruce himself was in an altered state would have heightened his receptivity to seeing things, which makes me wonder whether the "Blue Lady" first manifested herself among entranced shamans.

Which returns me to America's ongoing manic episode. Which is the greater crazy: to see things, or to pretend that you don't?

All the truth in the world

In movies, America breaks for monsters. In real life, not so much. But since America recognizes itself largely by the false images of pop mythology, it thinks it would know a monster when it sees one, and so never sees one.

Remember the boy's birthday party video in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs? It was perhaps the film's singularly true fright, and one of its many wrong notes. The alien was glimpsed only fleetingly in the street, and what most impressed was the shock and confusion of the young witnesses. But what is this amateur video from Passo Fundo, Brazil doing making breaking news on US television? Where is the anchor's disarming happy talk and cynical drops of pop culture bombs? ("Plan 9 from Passo Fundo? Some Brazilian youngsters think so -.") I can't imagine the circumstance, not even an unambiguous alien invasion, that would see a newscaster state "all initial opinions are that this is genuine." In our world, the video would go straight to Youtube and the six-foot tall hominid alien would be dismissed as some joker in a green monster suit. Which, of course, is what he was. And the anchor can't see that only because she's in Shyamalan's world.

January's striking UFO flap in Texas, centered over Stephenville, was never serious news, though credible witnesses included a county sheriff who presumably has a stake in maintaining a sober reputation. ("It’s a bit bewildering when upstanding citizens insist they’ve seen a UFO," admits Noel Williams, who also wants to pretend it's just a movie. "They may otherwise be reputable, but their close encounters are probably as fictitious as films like The Day the Earth Stood Still.") If it had occasioned more than novelty profiteering, that would have at least been different. Even for Stephenville. In 1897, the town was reportedly visited by the famous cigar-shaped "mystery airship," and contact made with its pair of apparently human occupants, who identified themselves as contract employees performing a test run for "certain New York capitalists." Perhaps it was a hoax. Perhaps, this was a test run of then black technology controlled by the day's elite. Or perhaps, as has often been the case with extraordinary encounters, contactees are told a story that makes some sense to their cultural markers.

Over the summer of 1692, Gloucester, Massachusetts endured a flap of "ghost militia" sightings - a raiding party of a dozen seeming Frenchmen with the properties of phantoms who were heard to converse in an "unknown tongue." They only menaced; never actually harming residents or property, and no evidence of their campsites were found.

Near the end of July, Gloucester's Ebenezer Babson came upon three of the men when he was gathering his cattle in the woods. Cotton Mather's ecclesiastical history and proto-Forteana of New England, the Magnalia Christi Americana, describes Babson's putative ambush when, creeping within 40 yards of the party, he took aim, fired and nothing happened. He fired 12 times, and still nothing. Then they three turned and slowly began approaching him in an unthreatening manner. They didn't even "take any notice of him, than just to give him a look; though he snapt his gun at them all the while they walked toward him, and by him: neither did they quicken their pace at all , but went into a parcel of bushes and he saw them no more." Returning home, Babson tested his gun several times, "and yet it did not once miss fire. After this, there occurred several strange things; but now, concluding they were but spectres, they took little further notice of them."

Anyone familiar with the literature of contact events will recognize the sudden and inexplicable failure of mechanical devices, notably of those which could inflict damage.

In our world, which may not be ours after all so much as also theirs, the monsters won't get the attention of cable news by walking down the street of a South American city. They won't even hold Larry King's attention by buzzing Texas towns with strange craft, or by hovering over an O'Hare Airport terminal or the Channel Islands. Monsters must go for our culture's big value targets fraught with myth and symbolism. So it's New York City that must be razed, drowned, frozen, nuked, crushed and trampled over and over again.

Signs was shooting in rural Pennsylvania in September, 2001 when monsters from the deep politic attacked New York City. Crop circles can't hold a boxcutter to that spectacle, nevermind that they too are more than a movie and the sum of its many hoaxes. Strange things are allowed to happen in the countryside. It's always been expected, just as it's also more easily tuned out.

Take 1964's "Solway Spaceman." Picnicking with his family six miles out of town, James Templeton snapped a photograph of his youngest daughter Elizabeth picking wildflowers. When developed, the picture also showed the image of a large man in a strange white suit, someone the family was quite sure had not been there. After taking the picture to the police and the Ministry of Defense, "which expressed interest," Templeton was contacted by two men he assumed to be Ministry officials. They picked up Templeton and traveled together to the site, where he was questioned queerly and then left him stranded. They also refused to provide their names, identifying themselves only numerically, one as "9" and the other as "11." Templeton, now 87, is still unsettled about his own, private 9/11, and hopes there may be something in Ministry files to account for it.

Adds up to one big lie

If all the world's a stage, then America must be it's favourite long running production. The Mousetrap, say. And as with The Mousetrap, I don't think I'm giving anything away to say the detective did it.

Britney Spears is not a distraction. That's what politics, and America's national bipolar disorder, is for. Her current boyfriend, photographer Adnan Ghalib, is a British Pakistani who "earned his expertise in weaponry fighting abroad in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Macedonia." Billy Bush, the co-host of Access Hollywood, is George W Bush's first cousin. Not only will John McCain be the Republican nominee, he could have been the Democratic nominee as well, since he was "very close" to crossing the aisle in 2001. Ann Coulter has pledged to campaign for Hillary Clinton, and Rush Limbaugh has defended both Clinton and Barack Obama by acknowledging no substantial difference on "national security" between them and the Bush legacy. In his words, "they are not going to surrender the country to Islamic radicalism or the war in Iraq." Obama's vague sermonizing about the future recalls Jacques Vallee's messengers of deception, and how the "space brothers" have yet to tell us one thing we don't know, and have yet to make good on a single promise. If the Spears' drama distracts from the Audacity of Remulak, then perhaps, when you think about it, it's not such a bad thing.

The salvation-model politics of hope and change finds its happy opposite in the doomsong of Alex Jones, for whom martial law is always one broadcast away. Both come from the same fraudulent dichotomy of salvation and damnation, in which the future redemption or Armageddon never quite arrives. The harder truth may be that this is our destination. And they're not coming for us; they're here already, and they've always had us.

Take Back America. Maybe America belongs to others, and that's what they're doing.

Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown II

2008-01-28T07:48:00.000-05:00

People are crazy and times are strange - Bob Dylan

[Not done yet; I'll try to wrap it up tonight.]

Times Are Strange

Crazy people see things. Most everyone who's not crazy knows that. You'll likely remember than when it's your turn to see something, and be circumspect about to whom you tell it.

People have been seeing things in America since it was known by other names and hosted other nations. In the early 15th Century, in present-day New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, the first wave of Spain's explorer-conquerors were reportedly astonished to find indigenous people with apparent preemptive knowledge of Roman Catholicism, who had even crafted their own crosses and rosaries. The Europeans were told that a pale figure known locally as the "Blue Lady," had appeared to them many times in recent years, floating above the ground in an azure haze, preaching a foreign faith in their own language. When friars carried the story back to Spain in 1635 it was received with interest by the Inquisition, which was just then trying an abbess named Maria de Jesus Agreda.

About a dozen years earlier, after having put on on the blue habit of the Franciscan order, Maria Agreda had begun experiencing ecstatic visions and "raptures," and told her cloistered sisters tales of her more than 500 out-of-body travels to a distant land where she preached to "savages." She eventually wrote a book detailing her spiritual journeys, and she soon came to the attention of the heresy-hunting Inquisition. The story of the "Blue Lady," and the rapidity with which the Spanish were able to pacify and baptize the inhabitants of the lands she had visited, earned Sister Maria both an acquittal and a place in the court of King Philip. Regardless of the century, secular power always stands ready to recruit magicians, miracle workers and devils to its side.

Maria Agreda's etheric adventures and xenoglossia were understood by both the native North Americans and Spanish Catholics as religious events (the only question for the Inquisition was whether they were divine or infernal). Four hundred years later, what once could be called only either miraculous or fraudulent may be regarded as perhaps another category of the merely human.

Similar to Maria Agreda's recruitment by King Philip and John Dee by Queen Elizabeth, Robert Monroe's astral navigations were weaponized by the Pentagon, which schooled itself in his Virginia institute for bilocation. In Journeys Out of the Body, he writes of "raising himself out of the physical" and whoring about on the astral plane, eventually having "sex" - a "giddy electrical-type shock" - with with a female friend who, the next week, volunteered the information that she had had an erotic dream about Monroe the same night, in which he had given her "a detailed physical examination." In 16th Century Spain Monroe would have been called an incubus, and he would have been burned alive.

Robert Bruce describes witnessing his nephew Matt's first real-time OBE in his book Astral Dynamics, during a two-week visit coaching the boy on projection.

A few days before he was due to leave, while meditating late at night, I clearly saw Matt's projected real-time double float through the wall and come into the room I was sitting in. He waved cheerfully at me and I slowly waved back at him, without breaking my entranced state - no mean feat in itself - immensely pleased that Matt had finally managed to get out of his body. Matt floated about the room, seemingly having some difficulty with movement and directional control, but apparently thoroughly enjoying himself. He soon floated out of my sight and that was the last I saw of him that night.

Bruce writes that the next morning, Matt "vividly remembered" floating through the wall, seeing his uncle sitting below and the two waving at each other. And if we can believe his account, the fact that Bruce himself was in an altered state would have heightened his receptivity to seeing things, which makes me wonder whether the "Blue Lady" first manifested herself among entranced shamans.

Which returns me to America's ongoing manic episode. Which is the greater crazy: to see things, or to pretend that you don't?

Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown I

2008-01-15T16:30:00.000-05:00

People are crazy and times are strange - Bob Dylan

People are crazy

I've been thinking a lot this week about last week's leaked internal memo from Associated Press. Frank Baker, AP's LA assistant bureau chief, issued the directive that "Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal." I've been thinking how right and how proper this is.

What should US cable news be doing, other than leading the hour with live updates from Britney Spears' custody hearing? Put another way, what does US cable news do better that it should be doing instead? The answer, my answer, is nothing. It's perfectly tuned by the lords of the manor to service the land of genetically modified bread and circuses. What has it ever demonstrated to justify a higher expectation?

But the failed expectations are not the media's alone. Most responsibility rests with the broken subjects of America's broken media. Does Clinton versus Obama really merit more attention and sober analysis than Spears versus Federline? I don't see why it should. One pair speak of "change," and the other of mood swings, but it's the same, leveled spectacle.

Did the Clinton team hack the New Hampshire vote? Bradblog makes its usual strong case for electoral fraud, but I'm finding it hard to get my indignant mojo working. Because here's the thing: even when the system works as advertised it contemptuously defrauds and disenfranchises citizens who take their politics like detached spectators. Obama and Clinton are two contenders in a fight club of closed ranks and consensus brutality with interchangeable corners. The outcome of this contest for advancement upon our lives - American lives and everyone else with a seat at the arena - will mean just as much as who wins the Super Bowl or the Oscar, should we have any emotional investment in the outcome of those contests. Because the only change to be registered will be how we feel about it. That's supposed to be enough, and it's been that way long enough that for many, it is.

Most everyone loves a good breakdown. At least ever since breakdowns have become public spectacle, and we can revel in celebrities' madness at physical and emotional distance. But even if we're so emotionally removed from the circus that we don't care whether the fallen idol is a danger to herself, we still care should she become a harm to others. So we're relieved when Britney loses visitation rights, so her crazy train can keep chugging along without running over her children. Unfortunately, there's no court that can slap the wrists America's already slashed, whose own breakdown would be far more entertaining with a restraining order.

[MORE TO COME]

Where do we go now but nowhere?

2008-01-04T00:04:00.000-05:00

one more doomed time and without much hope
going round and around to nowhere - Nick Cave

The genius of the Christian Hell isn't the suffering; it's the suffering in perpetuity.

Most faiths that incorporate into their theologies a place of punishment make it a way station where the souls can be purged of wickedness or impurities or bad karma before they can resume their progress, not a place of torment for the eternally damned. In such underworld afterlifes, the suffering may be great but it has an end and a rehabilitative purpose. In the Christian Hell, the suffering is without end and wholly punitive. Think of it as differing philosophies of incarceration. If nobody gets out of here alive, nobody gets out of there dead or alive.

I can't help it. Hell is what I think about when I think about the Iowa Caucuses. When I think of Hillary or Obama and Mitt or Huck I see only Titanic's deck chairs being rearranged on the bottom of the ocean. The familiar vain hope of another election cycle has turned desperate and evangelical, as though Hell were still only where we might end up, Ron Paul forbid. And Paul's millenarians, who regard him as America's latest last chance, keep doomsday watch against the blue helmets and detention camps of some imagined mongrel-socialist "New World Order." But that's to miss the more profound disorder, and the passing of each tipping point that locks us into its deeper circles.

It could have been another inside joke of the archly ironic universal mind that found Arlen Specter in Rawalpindi when Benazir Bhutto was struck down by her own magic bullet. If nothing else it does have good comic timing, but we've all seen its routine before and heard all the punchlines. Ever since the Roman Republic cut down the Gracchi brothers you'd think the assassination of another patrician reformer should cease to astonish, and perhaps at last it has. We've been living this hell long enough we should expect it, as Bhutto herself almost certainly did.

Our dying oceans incubate slime and bloom strange with jellyfish, North America's birds are disappearing on the order of tens of millions, and amphibians the world over are tumbling to extinction. It's 2008, the "Year of the Frog" to "generate public awareness and understanding of the amphibian extinction crisis which represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity." But to too many, 2008 will be a triumph of sorts simply because Bush and Cheney will be out of office by its end. "Change" and "Hope" are great vote multipliers, but to imagine that merely outlasting a term limit could be something like a victory is to misunderstand the meaning of public office in a deep criminal state, and to misapprehend our intractable circumstance whose closest analogy may be damnation.

Let the mystery be

2007-12-24T18:42:00.000-05:00

Iris Dement

Still low with the flu, but my spirit is lighter than it was last post and I wanted something up here to reflect that.

New content next week. Have a safe and encouraging holiday.

It came upon a midnight clear

2007-12-19T09:37:00.000-05:00

Gottfried Helnwein, "Epiphany I: Adoration of the Magi"

Blogging has been suspended until the new year to accommodate the seasonal influx of illness and spiritual anguish. But there's always fresh meat on the discussion board.

"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it a thousandfold more hideous."

And a Merry Christmas to you, too, Mr Lovecraft.

Note: I closed comments last night because my identity was being hoaxed by two blogger accounts fraudulently created in my name. I'm reopening comments now, with the notice that l will not be posting further to them (I've since made an exception, and commented at Dec 22 09:17:00 AM), and the warning that if I am hoaxed again the accounts will be traced and complaints will be filed.

The things that don't add up

2007-12-06T16:27:00.000-05:00

"Well what do you think they're going to say?"

Alex Cox introduces The Parallax View

Like Margo Timmins, I'm just thinking of some things that don't have to add up to something. Say, eight dead in an Omaha shopping mall massacre an hour after Bush left the city, while Cheney shopped the ammo aisle of Mack’s Prairie Wings in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion, caused by a collision of a French munitions ship and a Norwegian vessel chartered to carry relief supplies to Belgium. Eleven thousand people were killed and injured. It wasn't until 1945, and another war, that humanity triggered a bigger bang, and this time on purpose.

As well, today marks the 45th anniversary of a near-collision at 18,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico between a B-29 and an exceptionally fast something. It was detected first by radar, and with each radar sweep the object drew closer to the aircraft by 13 nautical miles or 5,240 miles per hour. Radar operator Sidney Coleman alerted Captain John Harder, who asked him to recalibrate his equipment. Coleman did, and found the radar returns correct, as four other blips appeared, one rapidly accelerating towards the B-29.

The assistant radar operator rushed towards a right window and made visual contact in the expected position, "a blue lit object streaking by the plane...circling around it." Other sets of blips appeared on all three radar sets, and other members of the flight crew confirmed visual contact with "blue-white lights streaking at a fantastic speed":

Captain Harter was studying his radarscope; he noted that forty miles behind the B-29, at the relative position of 6 o'clock, a group of five object was cutting the flightpath of the B-29, and turned as to follow the B-29 from behind. They were heading straight to the B-29 at fast speed, then slowed down when they were closing in on the B-29. The remained right there at the back of the B-29 for ten seconds.

Meanwhile, a larger blip had appeared on the radarscopes. This blip made a motionless half inch spot on the radarscopes, a size impossible to any known plane. The group of five objects pacing the B-29 then turned, and started to accelerate. The entire crew saw on their radarscope that the group of five approached the huge motionless blip and seemed to merge into it. Now, only the large blip remained on the scope. In a moment, the huge blip took speed.

Coleman called Harter on the intercom and told him that he and Bailey clocked the huge blip. Coleman said: "You won't believe this. It was making over 9000 miles per hour." Harter replied: "I believe it, all right. That's just what I figured."

Nothing links the two events except the calender, that they both actually happened in our world, and within the orbit of the military.

Last weekend in Oakville, Ontario, a man named Steve Remian was shot to death by police in a possible suicide-by-cop. Remian had recently returned East from British Columbia, and was still driving with BC plates when he was chased from a donut shop brandishing a pistol and confronted in an affluent park.

Last March, Remian's name surfaced in the trial of Robert Pickton, the BC pig farmer charged with the murders of six Vancouver prostitutes but who has confessed to 49. The jury heard that a suitcase belonging to a Steve Remian was recovered from Pickton's bloody workshop, and his DNA had been recovered from a blanket that also contained the blood of a missing woman. A friend has been quoted as saying Remian "was stunned" to learn he had been tied to the case, though Vancouver's Missing Women's Task Force issued a statement that he "was not a suspect nor was he a person of interest in relation to any of their investigation." Yet Remian had once been charged with sexual assault (the charge was dismissed, though an accomplice was convicted), and a freezer containing the remains of two victims was found to bear an unknown palm print. The RCMP has compared it only to Pickton's.

From the start, the prosecution built its case upon a portrait of Pickton as the lone maniac, though the farm was a "constant buzz of activity, with people and vehicles coming and going all the time." Frequent parties at "Piggy Palace" included bikers wearing Hells Angels' colours and the mayor of Port Coquitlam, who says he attended a "get to know you" event in 1996 when he was on the school board, the year victims Tanya Holyk and Olivia Williams vanished. It's always been all about Pickton, though he told police "I'll take the fall for everything. I'm the head-honcho and you've got me."

Pickton implies that there were others involved, but no snuff films as was whispered about, no Hells Angels on the periphery, though they were often at his home. He's being gallant, he implies, taking the fall, now that police had him in their cross-hairs, in jail.

Remian is dead, Pickton will take the fall, and whoever else may be involved remains protected. And meanwhile, in Edmonton...

On November 18, Jennifer Lopez fled with her husband George DeJongh and her three boys rather than hand them over to their grandfather for a court-ordered period of 90 days. The grandfather is California Republican Congressman Gary Miller. DeJongh and her family had contended that Miller's son Brian had molested the children, an accusation the congressman denies, though Brian Miller pled guilty in 2000 to charges of spousal and child abuse and served four years probation and performed 224 hours of community service. (Congressman Miller claims his son pled guilty only because he wanted to put the case "behind him," and has since "learned to control his temper.") That a court would reverse custody and award care to a convicted abuser "speaks for itself," though perhaps what it says is more complex than Congressman Miller's spin.

Six days later, early on the morning of November 24, Miller's daughter Elizabeth "died unexpectedly." I haven't seen a cause of death yet, though an early report has medical examiners "waiting on the results of toxicology tests." Reportedly, Elizabeth was "the one family member who refused to testify against Jennifer Lopez."

While on November 5 17-year old Benjamin Stanford disappeared, his car abandoned on the emergency lane of an interstate, the passenger side door open. On November 13 his body was found with a gunshot wound to the head. The coroner has ruled it a suicide, though he was shot behind the ear, and his cell phone and car keys were not recovered. Stanford was the grandson of Jim Preuitt, Democratic State Senator and former Chair of the Rules Committee, and his family is not accepting the verdict. It is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in his death.

I'm not suggesting there is a link between the deaths. Only the obvious: that innocents are pawns of power, and power knows no natural decency. Like the Duke says in Pasolini's Salo, "the bourgeoisie has never hesitated to kill its own children."

And then there are other things that don't add up, or at least not all by themselves, which is how such stories are told. A Blackwater veteran of Iraq who has been charged for possession of child pornography, and a Senate aide arrested for attempting to arrange a lunchtime encounter with a 13-year old boy. An article in the Idaho Statesman detailing eight more allegations against Larry Craig states that Craig's "denials began June 30, 1982, when CBS broke news of a scandal alleging gay sex between congressmen and underage pages. The following day, before any public allegation that he was involved, then-Rep. Craig issued a denial. Craig married a year later and adopted the three children of his wife." Trent Lott's liasons have been corroborated by Hustler's editorial director Bruce David, who claims to have sources other than expensive escort Benjamin Nichols, but may not publish because of Lott's resignation. "Our whole reason for doing this is to get them out of power," says David. (Presumably, since Dennis Hastert has also resigned, we won't be hearing more of the former wrestling coach's unusual relationship with live-in chief-of-staff Scott Palmer and deputy Mike Stokke.)

But that is to miss the point, of this story and so many like it. It's not the hypocrisy, stupid: it's about the nature of power itself, who is allowed a measure of it, and what they have over their heads.

Thanks to Lisa Pease for forwarding Gaeton Fonzi's Reply from a Conspiracy Believer to Vincent Bugliosi for his "tautologically strained" Reclaiming History. Fonzi was one of the principal staff investigators of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and his account, The Last Investigation, should be on every shortlist of essential titles pertaining to the JFK assassination. Bugliosi both lists The Last Investigation as a source and dismisses it as biased because Fonzi "had long been a conspiracy theorist.” Fonzi never was. "I went from an agnostic to a conspiracy believer," he writes, on the weight of evidence he had a hand in uncovering. (Most significantly, and convincingly, the identification of the CIA's David Atlee Phillips as Veciana's - and hence Oswald's - "Maurice Bishop.")

Bugliosi is a strange one. He could hardly make the claim that his own JFK book is unbiased scholarship. Rather, it's a prosecutor's case for Oswald as the lone gunman. Yet he was an early champion of reopening the RFK case against Sirhan Sirhan, and contributed some important investigative work that undermined the official account:

In 1975, Vincent Bugliosi, who was then working with Schrade to get the case reopened, tracked down the two police officers depicted in the photograph. To that time their identity had been unknown. Bugliosi identified the two officers as Sgt. Charles Wright and Sgt. Robert Rozzi. Both Wright and Rozzi were sure that what they observed was not only a bullet hole, but a hole containing a bullet.

If the hole contained a bullet, then it would have been the ninth bullet, since seven bullets had been recovered from victim wounds and the eighth was to have disappeared into the ceiling (necessary to account for acknowledged holes in the ceiling tiles). So any additional bullet presented a serious problem for those wishing to state there was no conspiracy.

In a declaration filed with the courts, Bugliosi stated:

"Sgt. Rozzi had told me and he told me unequivocally that it was a bullet in the hole and when I told him that Sgt. Rozzi had informed me that he was pretty sure that the bullet was removed from the hole, Sgt. Wright replied 'There is no pretty sure about it. It definitely was removed from the hole, but I do not know who did it.'"

Shortly after the assassination, the LAPD removed the doorjambs and ceiling panels in the Ambassador Hotel and booked them into evidence. One has to wonder why someone would tear off a doorframe or book a ceiling panel into evidence if it contained no evidence of bullets.

Bugliosi is also major figure in Turner and Christian's important The Assassination of Robert F Kennedy, passionately arguing there was a "conspiracy mosaic" behind Sirhan's conviction, and in the same year defended KCOP-TV in televangelist Jerry Owen's libel suit that the Los Angeles station had falsely accused him of a relationship with RFK's conspirators.

In his closing argument (Owen, by the way, won the case, and the TV station was found guilty of slander), Bugliosi contended that "not too long ago, anyone who uttered 'conspiracy' or 'CIA' was chalked off as a 'conspiracy buff':

But recent revelations, your Honor, have indicated that there is a little more credibility to the word "conspiracy." If there is a conspiracy here it could possibly involve people in the highest levels of our government, or people out of the government who had substantial political interests inimicable to Senator Kennedy. And if it was a conspiracy, it most likely was a conspiracy of considerable magnitude, and someone like Owen would have been a lowly operative.

Yes, that's Vincent Bugliosi talking.

So how do we explain him? How could he be so right about Sirhan and RFK - not to mention the stolen election of 2000 - and so wrong about Oswald and JFK? Maybe he's in someone's keep; maybe he's too smart to be so stupid. Or maybe, here, he's just sincerely wrong. I'm often told off in shrill emails that I must be a shill, because how can I possibly not see what they see? (And I think, in every instance, they've had something to do with controlled demolition, Ron Paul or the International Jewish Conspiracy©.) So perhaps Bugliosi, like Chomsky, just doesn't see this, and it will have to remain a mystery to me why they can't. Because I believe that it's possible for intelligent people to sincerely arrive at conclusions I believe profoundly wrong. That may lead me sometimes to naive assumptions, but I also believe it hubris to think otherwise.

And as long as it took me to post about Marvel Zombies, I feel I still didn't get to the point.

Zombies are perfectly nihilistic monsters, but zombie stories needn't be. If they're parables then they're certainly not. And if that's what Marvel Zombies is, then its apparent nihilism is something else: a Twilight of the Gods. (Nietzsche gets the rap of nihilism too, but he's exhilaratingly not.) Heroes need to die if we're ever to do anything ourselves, and they can't die heroically if we're ever to be free of them.

Finally, I'm reopening the comments to unregistered readers. Let's see how that goes.

America Ate My Brain (Part Two)

2007-11-29T17:12:00.000-05:00

There ain't no Jesus gonna come from the sky
Since I found out, I know I can cry - John Lennon

'Nuff Said

Even when there's nothing funny about it, satire's a funny thing. The better it's executed, the fewer people you can expect will get it. This affords satire a particular value under tyranny as a vehicle for dissent, when dissent can endanger life or livelihood if the wrong people get it.

Even when those who can read the intended meaning remain few, there can be a much larger crowd who are merely entertained by its dressing of transgressions. ("Swift says we should eat Irish babies." - "Duuude!") This can make satire commercially viable, because its narrow purpose is compensated by mass appeal, which also disseminates subversion far more broadly.

I think this is what's going on with Robert Kirkman's Marvel Zombies. Marvel, the corporation, may care only about the bottom line (a hard cover compilation has sold out an unprecedented four printings), and major advertiser the US Army may be simply happy to reach a young male readership with an appetite for destruction. They may not even give a thought to the text, let alone the subtext, but we should pay attention to both.

Since 2005 the zombie story arc has ranged over several comics titles but remains quite simple to summarize: a zombie virus is carried to New York, which quickly infects the superheroes of the Marvel universe, who methodically devour all life on Earth. When they've exhausted the planet, they take to space and extinguish life there as well. The End. Though the end hasn't been written, there can be no coming back from that.

It's supposedly set in an "alternate reality," though that doesn't spare us or the familiar heroes the degradation of say, Spiderman feasting on Aunt May or the Hulk snapping off the head of the Silver Surfer. And to many readers of American politics, the last seven years feel very much as well like an alternate reality, so that disclaimer doesn't carry much comfort anymore.

There is a lot of unredacted horror here. Hank Pym, Giant Man, keeping his uninfected friend the Black Panther alive so he can cut away fresh meat when the urge strikes. ("You want to know something really scary?" he confesses. "I like the way flesh tastes. Really, I do. If I were to somehow find a cure for whatever's going on with us - if things went back to the way they were - or as close as they could get...I think I'd still eat people.") Spiderman, tormented as ever, agonizing in the moments his head clears after a feed. ("I ate my wife - my aunt! - Why?! Why did I do that?!") Call them "alternates," but there can be no looking at these characters the same way. And honest to God, it's about time.

Publishing success stories are rare in comics these days, and while Marvel Zombies is one it also has its detractors. ("There comes a point where death isn’t funny anymore," says a reader. "I cannot trust in a hero anymore!" says another.) And here I think is the subtext: your heroes are dead. Or worse: undead.

There are a lot of monstrous metaphors available to describe America's descent from pulp fiction superhero to real world arch-villain, but perhaps the most apt is the zombie. There's the relentless and insatiable consumption of goods, fuel and lives which devours entire nations without thought or apology - Iraq's genetic future may be "for the most part destroyed" - and threatens even the viability of life on the planet. It even eats brains. Consider the occupation's targeted slaughter of Iraqi intellectuals.

A vampire would be preferable. I could see trying to talk things out with one. Probably not successfully, but there's at least the vain hope. A zombie? First of all, it's already dead. And last, I'm only food. Do you explain yourself to your breakfast?

There's no coming back from Iraq. There's no homecoming for Captain America. And don't wait for a hero, because he's only going to eat you.

America Ate My Brain (Part One)

2007-11-16T05:26:00.000-05:00

Tell me great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in? - Bob Dylan

Face Front, True Believers

So it's 1966, and I'm six years old, and I buy my first comic book: X-Men number 21. And I can remember 41 years later because I've long since catalogued it, sealed it with a cardboard backing and filed it by title and number in an oblong archive box.

I'd explain, to anyone who couldn't understand, or to whom I'd embarrassed myself trying to be understood, that they were "investments." But only people as foolish with money would fall for that, and they probably had comparable indefensible collections themselves. The stories were always for reading, even after I could read between them.

But I couldn't yet, in 1967, when I became a paid-up member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society. The flexi-disc still plays, and if I ever write a letter again I still have the stationary. I wanted to be a hero too, and so I wished I'd been born an American. I told my mother, and she never tired of reminding me.

Steve Ditko appointed my adolescence with fantasies of vigilantes and loners above the law: the Übermensch who was also everyman. I didn't know, and it wouldn't have meant anything to me if I had, that Ditko was devoted to the philosophy of Ayn Rand, which he explored and evangelized in his comic titles. In Alan Moore's Watchmen, Moore took Ditko's "Mister A" - "an absolute insane fascist but done absolutely straight" - to his mad end with the character Rorschach. Ditko didn't get it. ("Oh yes - he's the one who's like Mister A, except Rorschach is insane.")

Stan Lee was always a bit seedy and very much a huckster, but he knew that he was and worked it, and to a kid raised on Silver Age comics he seemed on our side, and the comics industry seemed as disconnected from the real powers of this world as its readers. Neither was true, long before the scandal of his former partner in Stan Lee Enterprises, Peter Paul. He now styles himself a "whistleblower," and panders to the American right and its Clinton fixations, and accompanying blindspot to the bigger picture and the Clintons place within it. But by the time he'd turned 27 Paul was the President of the Miami World Trade Center, had been employed by four major intelligence agencies and "was recruited by operatives of our government for a plan to embarrass Castro" by defrauding Cuba of millions of dollars worth of coffee. He pled guilty on a charge of conspiracy, and served time for cocaine trafficking and trying to enter Canada on a false identity. In 2000 Paul was the largest contributor to Hillary Clinton's Senatorial bid, and he threw her a Hollywood gala reputed to have cost nearly $2 million. Two days later, the Washington Post reported Paul's criminal past and Clinton denied even knowing him.

There's a video online of Lee in Paul's office, shot by Paul, of the two meeting with Stanley Myatt., who has been variously described in the press as "a CIA assassin, a consort of Italian and Russian mafiosi, a Wall Street scam artist, a loan shark, and an informant for the FBI and the DEA." In Paul's memorandum of 2005, he says he was introduced to Myatt

in 1978 at the direction of the FBI in order to obtain Paul’s assistance in resolving an anti-Castro effort involving an international coffee deal for which the government through Myatt in the end induced Mr. Paul to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to send wire messages in furtherance of the scheme perpetrated by others to defraud the Cuban government. (Exhibit A). Since then, Myatt has been the root cause of Mr. Paul’s entire "criminal" history from 1978 to 1983 and is responsible for his guilty pleas to three separate felonies arising out of government/Myatt sponsored anti-Castro, anti-Communist covert operations. At all times since 1978 Myatt has been enabled and encouraged by the government to abuse the authority of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Parole Office, and Treasury Department.

Once a Marvel reader came to political consciousness, it didn't take a decoder ring to know that Lee's own leaned grievously to the right; far enough to make a costumed hero of a military industrialist, and to make his costume iron, as though his enfleshment was a weakness to be overcome, and then give him a sidekick called "War Machine." In the movie adaptation of Iron Man to be released next Spring, his origin has been updated to include a kidnapping by jihadists. Two US Air Force F-22 Raptors and a Global Hawk make supporting appearances, which "shows they really went out of their way for us"; or so director John Favreau tells it on this Youtube posting of the Air Force News Agency.

Eventually, the Nick Fury-wannabes of this universe saw the upside in recruiting Lee's original, and making the comic universe another front in the war on adolescent imagination. As though admitted an arrested development to their own fighting force, in 2005 the Department of Defense partnered with Marvel to launch a custom imprint for troops deployed to the Middle East. The event at the Pentagon "coincided with 'Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day,' so plenty of youngsters were on hand to get the first copies of the special comics":

"That's really cool. They said that they're trying to help all the people [in the military]," said 11-year-old Kaitlin Lee, who was visiting the Pentagon with her younger brother and sister and their soldier dad. Kaitlin explained that it's good for the superheroes to show support for the troops because some kids want to be like their favorite superheroes.

She used her 6-year-old brother, Josh - who was holding tight to his own "Spidey" - as an example. "Like Josh here," she said. "He wants to be like Spiderman and [Spiderman] wants to help out [the troops]. So it's just kind of showing that we would like to help out too and we want to show [the troops] that we care."

The bracketed additions "for sense" are the Army's own.

The fifth issue, released last month to soldiers serving with Centcom, depicts Captain America striking an iconic pose with Avengers assembling behind him, overshadowed by and armed and masked enemy. And at a glance, through the menacing figure's eye slits, he's obviously depicted with a complexion by which Centcom identifies the enemy.

Marvel's privileged relationship with the Pentagon, as tacit incubator and explicit feedlot for its slaughterhouse, makes its latest phenomenal success of particular grim interest.

And in the second part, I'll get to the point.

The Unnameable

2007-11-05T07:17:00.000-05:00

"There are things all around. Things you never see because you don't have the words, you don't have the names. you only learned the 26-letter alphabet.

"Here are some names for things...." - Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

Speaking the World

There are only, maybe, 350 members of the Pirahã tribe, but its language is confounding linguists for all that it lacks. There are no subordinate clauses and no past tense; no words for colours and hardly any for time. The language contains no numbers.

The debate amongst linguists about the absence of all numbers in the Pirahã language broke out after Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.

The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."

Gordon's work revived interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism: that our language sculpts the way we think about the world, and that without a word for something, we can't think of it. This is the premise of Orwell's Newspeak: to greatly reduce the vocabulary by stripping it of words and constructs which could describe rebellion and even an alternative to Big Brother, in order that it become impossible to even think of such things.

Linguist Daniel Everett, who spent seven years living with the Pirahãs and says "their thinking isn't any slower than the average college freshman," devoted eight months trying to teach them simple Portuguese numbers used by Brazillians, but "in the end, not a single person could count to ten." In Gordon's Science article "Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence From Amazonia" he asks, "Is there any case where not having words for something doesn't allow you to think about it?" And then answers, "I think this is a case for just that."

Clifford Pickover in Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves reflects upon vocabulary's role in shaping his world when he studied entomology, and learned insect orders and names for body parts:

When I had names for everything, I perceived insects so differently, remembered insects so differently, and communicated about insects so differently. The names helped focus and consolidate my attention in strikingly new ways. Certainly, before I knew the names, I could see that one bug had large wings and another did not, or one had a hypognathous jaw and another did not, but I doubt that my mind was tuned to manage, compartmentalize, and take note of this new information. Before I knew the words, did I wonder why the insects were different or did I just accept that a bug is a bug?

"Need to Know"

Boundary experiences are so-called in part because they transgress the boundary of our ability to describe them. They transcend concepts which can be accommodated by our language, and even introduce a new language that cannot be wholly translated back into our native tongues once the experience ends.

DMT may introduce "three dimensional 'glyphs' of pure meaning which defy my every attempt to describe them." Terence McKenna regarded these encountered objects as a "new dispensation of the logos. They are holding out the possibility that language need not be processed by the ears, that language can become, under certain radical situations of neurological perturbation, visible." And with some frequency, the DMT experience includes failed attempts at communication and instruction by encountered entities. ("The two beings seemed to be trying to attract my attention, and to communicate something to me, but I could not understand. It was as if they were trying to make me understand where I was.")

UFO contactees also often have difficulty finding words, post-encounter, to accurately describe experiences which occurred out of their familiar time and space and sometimes with no seeming reference to their own language. They may be shown texts of strange symbols, the meaning of which is evident in the moment but afterwords, attempting to reconstruct the event in their natural syntax, the symbols are entirely foreign and beyond translation.

Dr Mario Pazzaglini authored a 16-year study of "received" text entitled Symbolic Messages, He told Greg Bishop that the symbols "are so spatial that they transmit tremendous amounts of information at one blast":

And you may not always be able to relay that information back as a reported word, but as an internal experience, it's pretty rich. So if the symbols continue in that vein, they'll be very valuable. We are well built for that, because biologically we have this system called "entrainment." If you and I are talking, we just look at each other and there's tremendous amounts of information passed besides what's passed verbally. So you have some feelings about me, I may have some about you, and you may at some point visualize what you think I am, which will encode information about me (not necessarily what I look like) and all that stuff is going on. So that's what might be the value of these symbols - that they're not trying to communicate to us (if that's what they are doing) the particular thing that the symbol is supposed to be saying, but there's a whole downloading of experience and possibility that is going on that we're not even aware of yet. Certainly the culture is different for this phenomena existing.

"Almost overnight," just 50,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans began acting differently, by demonstrating abstract thought in the creation of art and religion. People were talking, not just communicating by gesture and intonation, and things had names. Categories were being defined and ideas were shaping words, filling our ancestors' heads and animating their lives. And now, 2,000 generations later, are our vocabularies rich enough to paint in abstract the real world? Or have we lost or abandoned concepts along the way, as Oldspeak, that could help us see that which may be all about us, but for which we have no meaningful words, and so can't see?

When Tim Russert attempted to dispatch the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich with a question regarding his close encounter, Kucinich replied "It was an Unidenfied Flying Object, okay? It's unidentified - I saw something." Except "UFO" is not a contentless placeholder. UFO is identified with little green men, ET and Mars Attacks. There is no meaningful way to speak about the subject in the English language without reference to its debased and comic acronym, and if language shapes our view of reality, then it may take an effort of will or a boundary experience of our own to see that there is more to the phenomenon than a punchline.

Having the wrong word may be even more a hindrance to our perception of reality than not having a word at all. And that misperception, about UFOs and much else, is almost certainly managed to some measure to keep our vision blurry.

Budd Hopkins shared a story in 2003 about the late UFOlogist Allen Hynek, who got to know Donald Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford. On one visit to Washington, Hynek met Rumsfeld in his office and said, "I have been in this for years looking at the UFO phenomena. I feel like at this point in my life I am in a position of 'need to know' what you know or what some agency might know that I don’t know. I have a 'need to know' I feel." Hopkins said that Hynek told him "Rumsfeld stood up and pointed a finger at him and said, "You have no 'need to know' and then sat down again. That was the end of it."

There are a lot of things we can't know with certainty about that story, not least of which is whether it actually even happened. But we can know that for some things we don't know their true names, and until we do we won't know them, or even see them.

Splendid Isolation

2007-10-24T12:38:00.000-04:00

I'm putting tinfoil up on the windows
Lying down in the dark to dream
I don't want to see their faces
I don't want to hear them scream - Warren Zevon

Illness

Symptomatic of Capgras Syndrome is the delusion of doubles: that those closest to you, or your familiar objects, have been replaced by impostors and replicas. Tony Rosato, a Toronto comic actor who put in time on SCTV and Saturday Night Live, served two years in prison for criminally harassing his wife on account of it. (Last month he was remanded to a psychiatric hospital after a conditional discharge.)

In his testimony, Rosato repeated his worries for his family, and his contention that his wife Leah had been replaced by twins or triplets and that their baby was a changeling. The judge, in ruling Rosato to be in need of psychiatric care, cited Leah's alarm at Tony's claims that her family was connected to a paedophile ring, and his fear of entities he called "astral attackers."

In Taboo: Sex, Religon and Magick, psychotherapist Christopher Hyatt tells of a patient he treated in the 1970s. One day she came to him with a troubling dream of being carried into a church by a priest and raped upon the altar. Within a week she had suffered a "complete psychotic break" and was hospitalized. Hyatt, noting that her father was a deacon in a nearby church, diagnosed that "the breaking of the taboo (even in a dream) so overpowered my patient that her mind literally broke down."

Could be. Probably. She was Hyatt's patient, and to me she's just an anecdote in Hyatt's book. But as I read it, I thought something that should have been considered, if only to rule it out, was that the dream was the manifestation of a suppressed memory of abuse, whether sexual or merely assuming a sexual expression, and his patient's psychotic break was the result of the dissociative effort of denial.

More evidently, Rosato is an ill man. But his strong delusion doesn't necessarily render crazy each of his unhealthy obsessions. There are, evidently, paedophile rings, and many individuals considered wise and well have themselves described astral attacks. Rosato isn't sick for mentioning them, but applied to his circumstance he is almost certainly wrong.

All of which makes me wonder about our own sick circumstance.

In October, 1963, a US Army private first class named Eugene Dinkin, working in Metz, France as a crypto operator with top secret clearance, picked up indications that "a conspiracy was in the making by the 'military' of the United States, perhaps combined with an 'ultra-right economic group." (The quote is from a declassified FBI report of April 3, 1964.) One of his duties as a code breaker was to decipher traffic that originated with the OAS, though he contended he first became alerted to a conspiracy by a study of subliminal "psychological sets" in Stars and Stripes and certain Hearst papers which, writes Lisa Pease, he believed "were deliberately maneuvered to set up a subconscious belief on the part of one reading these papers to the effect that President John F. Kennedy was 'soft on communism.'" He became convinced an attempt would be made on the president's life in Texas in late November, and that it would be pinned on the Left.

Alarmed, Dinkin wrote Robert Kennedy and then, realizing the warning had little chance of reaching the Attorney General, abruptly left his unit, going AWOL to try to contact ambassadors in nearby Luxembourg. On Nov 6 he showed up at the UN press office in Geneva. He couldn't find an American correspondent and so told his story to the editor of the Geneva Diplomat. On Nov 13 he was "hospitalized" by the US army in a closed psych ward and kept in virtual isolation until the assassination. On the evening of Nov 23 he was interviewed by a Secret Service agent who said that since Dinkin was in a psych ward he would be giving the government "absolutely no information."

He was transferred to Walter Reed in December and, in his words, "began receiving 'therapy' to help me understand that my warning of the assassination had been 'coincidental.'" He was told if he didn't improve he would be electro-shocked. Naturally, he feigned cooperation, "improved" and was released. His story, because it's told by a sick man, goes unmentioned by the Warren Commission.

Metaphor

In Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag writes that "the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking." But then ani difranco says we're 90% metaphor, which is a nicer thought than biology's animated sacks of blood and water, so perhaps it's alright after all. Though that still doesn't make us alright.

Capgras remains a rare condition in the material world usually precipitated by head trauma, but in the deep world it's a pandemic afflicting us metaphors. Many of us now know we're in a strange place that only resembles our home, and those who don't may no longer recognize us. (I know I've lost friends because of this; because they couldn't fathom where I was going or didn't want to come along. It makes me wish sometimes that when I told my wife, "You know, I've been thinking of starting a blog," that she'd replied, "You know, I don't think that's such a good idea.")

The canyon that's being carved in the West between underclass and overclass, and into which the middle class is being made to tumble, reifies the syndrome of the unrecognizable familiar. We have rulers who look like us, and appear to talk to us about what we're told are our concerns and values, yet whose experience and environment and whose own values are so alien to our own that they may as well be aliens themselves. In turn neither do they recognize themselves in us, and only grudgingly and for their own ends use the power of state with egalitarian beneficence. You could call them reptiles, but just as truthfully you can call them Morlocks. And if you do then you must know what they eat.

Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry says that "humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells." He expects the emergence of "a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass":

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims. Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Clearly Dr Curry has an acute case of Capgras-by-proxy. The onward-and-upward progress ideal upon which he mounts his projection bears only tangential resemblance to the future that is already squatting on our present. Decades before the worst-case scenarios it appears we've already entered a greenhouse gas feedback loop, while according to a study released this week by the Energy Watch Group world oil production peaked in 2006, and extreme near-term shortages can be expected to herald war and social breakdown.

Like Curry, HG Wells had it backwards, too. In our world, for whatever foreseeable future remains of it, it's the Molocks with their appetites and devil machines who are equipped to thrive. The ruling class won't be living a soft and pasty fantasy life for 100,000 years. They'll show, unambiguously, their goblin face.

Yet it's hard to argue with Curry's expectation of a "dim-witted underclass." Since there is a correlation between higher education and liberal and progressive values, a "dimming-down" has been long in the works by those who hold neither, but hold much else.

Mark Morford writes today of the horror in the heart of an Oakland high school teacher nearing retirement, who "says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain":

[He] simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

Morford adds that their discussion then turns to "the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens." Perhaps the lack of need is, from the perspective of Morlocks, a need for lack among its overstocked herd of the tazed and confused.

In Nightside of Eden Kenneth Grant, Outer Head of the Typhonian OTO and founder of the Cult of Lam, writes that "the Mysteries, the true Gnosis, are of a predominantly psycho-sexual nature." If so, and if this is a time of mystery and revelation, perhaps we should expect more manifestations of psycho-sexual disturbance, both by way of illness and metaphor. And perhaps that's what we're seeing sometimes, when we can bear to look.

Blow'd Up Real Good (Part Two)

2007-10-12T15:22:00.000-04:00

What can you see?

from Antonioni's Blow Up

I must be something of a disappointment as a conspiracy theorist, because I don't know what the fuck is going on.

I mean, I have an inkling. Like David Hemmings in Blow Up, the closer I look the worse things appear, and it doesn't take a Dante to know that everything is going to Hell. Though perhaps it takes a Nostradamus to believe we know how, and when, because maybe he just made shit up, too.

The End has been a long time coming and its anticipation has been with us from the beginning, so perhaps abductees and channelers and psychonauts have been on strangely familiar ground when entities and "spirit guides" and the chemistry of nature have reportedly told them that "Earth time is desperately short" (as Arthur Shuttlewood related he was told, in his Warnings from Flying Friends.)

Albert Bender, arguably the first "Men in Black" contactees, was warned of a pole-shift due in 1953. Knud Weiking, supposed voice of "Orthon," claimed he'd been told there would be a nuclear holocaust on Christmas Eve, 1967. Alarms raised of the Earth's imminent incineration, flood, or "cleansing" are not just facts of the fringe, but also of mainline contactee religions. (As virtually every religion is.) Perhaps one example is the closely guarded and apocalyptic "Third Secret" of Fatima, which the "Beautiful Lady" shared with her three young contactees.

It's a game tricksters play, whether human or not quite so, as John Keel experienced during the Mothman flap. He was warned of a catastrophic plane crash by an "Asian-looking character" calling himself Apol, seated in the back of a black Cadillac. He went on to say the Pope would soon be assassinated, followed by three days of darkness and worldwide power failure. There were many other warnings from other strange sources and allegedly channeled spirits that something dreadful was about to happen, but none which pointed unambiguously to the dreadful thing which did, except perhaps for a lucid dream Keel was told six weeks earlier by a Point Pleasant resident of "a lot of people drowning in the river and Christmas packages floating everywhere in the water." For the most part, wrote Keel, the "contactees would be manipulated, used as robots to propagate beliefs and false frames of reference, and then be discarded to sit in the darkness and wonder why the world was not as they had imagined it."

Does this trade in fear and false prophecy sound familiar? Or maybe rather, does it feel familiar, because it's not something I've often heard discussed.

Fritz Springmeier, the "Christian Identity" white supremacist, convicted bank robber and victim-triggering expert in "Illuminati mind control," published in a mid-90s newsletter that "The leadership in both Russia and the U.S. are preparing for war. From 8:00A.M. to 6:00P.M. on June 6, 1996 the proper alignments will occur to detonate numerous nuclear devices." Then in 1999, he wrote "Over two weeks ago, this author was given inside information that the New World Order had pulled all their key people -- specialists, and so forth out of San Diego, CA. These people were given a secret high-level briefing which told them to leave San Diego by April 3 [1999] and that their reason to leave was that Russia was going to drop nuclear bombs on San Diego, Seattle, NYC...."

On his October 18, 2001 broadcast, Alex Jones said "Within 2 years I'm predicting...that you're going to see a suitcase nuke in this country. You're probably going to see a release in a few years of something communicable. And I am predicting that you will see a lot of conventional bombings in the next year or so." In March 2005 he predicted Arnold Schwarzenegger would "save children at a school shooting, or there'll be some type of bombing, and he will land by helicopter and run in and direct things. I predict it - I see it all aligning. I see it all coming together. I see their plan, clear as day." More soberly, on August 10, 2006 he announced "There is a 90% chance we are gonna see bone-shattering mega-attacks in the United States, Canada, or England or Israel in the next couple months - by mid-October. We're talking about the total end of America, total martial law. I am predicting you will have huge terrorist attacks in the Western world by, at the latest, late October."

More recently, last August, there was the so-called Kennbunkport Warning issued by Webster Tarpley, alleging "massive evidence" for a "new 9/11 terror incident...over the coming weeks and months." A number of its signatories, including Cindy Sheehan and Cynthia McKinney, have since claimed their endorsements were forged and their support for its claims misrepresented, while critical readers of the Statement have been labeled "divisive" and "COINTELPRO" by Tarpley and his supporters.

I've been guilty of it, too. I've been suckered by channeled "insiders" who predicted the other shoe was about to drop. I don't want to be again. Conspiracy research is not a prophetic art. We can see clearly enough to make out the broad strokes on the big canvas, and we can tell it's not going to be a pretty picture, but we're kidding ourselves - actually, entertaining ourselves - if we believe we know how it's all going to turn out. Or that some Unnamed Other is going to come along and tell us, rather than trick us.

Fixing dates for the end of the world and bouncing with goosebumps from one fabricated scenario to the next is imposing a false narrative upon a story that has yet to be told. And the temptation is great, in part because many of the plot points are whispered suggestions of the storyteller who'll never tell us the whole story, but simply means to give us a good fright. This seems to hold, whether the story is Springmeier's "insider's" or Shuttlewood's "flying friend's."

It's a perverse fact of the conspiracy industry that it incubates credulity within those who claim to "Question Everything." But that's the nature of industry, to nurture its market, and the nature of conspiracy, to place every honest and dangerous inquiry into disrepute.

What can you see now?

Blow'd Up Real Good (Part One)

2007-10-01T17:04:00.000-04:00

The atrocities over there, the interior paralysis over here -
Pleased with the better deal?
You are clamped down.
You are being bred for pain. - Leonard Cohen, "S.O.S. 1995"

Situation Serious, But Not Too Serious

"That's not the way the world really works anymore," so goes one of the signature quotes of our time, which doesn't much seem like our time. "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." But I don't know anymore what is meant by that way, and if the world ever worked like it.

Of course it was shocking, and shockingly true (and shockingly relevant, given the current pre-war show with Iran), but empires aren't alone in reality creation. We do it all the time, or we should, if we take ownership over the life of our minds. If we don't, then we're as good as "owned" in the Fortean sense of property, and pwn'd in the cyber slang of having our asses hacked and handed to us in an attachment.

Sometimes - perhaps most of the time in America and its decadent outposts - our reality is little more than a lifestyle choice. Opposition to empire amounts to which news network you watch, taking conspiratainment in a nightclub routine, and couch-dissenting with court jesters like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

In last week's interview with Bolivia's Evo Morales, Stewart wisecracked that in America elections were "a little rigged," to laughter, as if the joking acknowledgment of an historic tragedy were a revolutionary act. Morales' reality isn't satisfied by a punchline, and so he replied, though most guests likely wouldn't have imagined to thoughtfully follow-up on the quip. "So, if it's rigged," he said, to cheers and applause and Stewart's dumbfoundedness, "something needs to be done to change that."

Jeremy Thorpe, then leader of Britain's Liberal Party, was on trial in 1979 for conspiracy to murder his former gay lover, whose allegations of their affair was tarnishing Thorpe's career. The presiding justice was roundly castigated for his Old Boy bias, and was almost instantly immortalized in Peter Cook's satire "Entirely a Matter for You," which ends with the instruction to the jury, "you are now to retire, carefully to consider your verdict of 'Not Guilty.'" In this documentary clip, Terry Jones says of the Thorpe sketch "it still seems relevant, in the wake of the Hutton Report."

Yes it does. But here's the problem: jokes notwithstanding, Jeremy Thorpe was still found innocent, David Kelly is still dead, and presidential elections are still rigged. So maybe laughter isn't the best medicine to cure our world of empire.

In other places, the realities people choose can save them, kill them or free them, and sometimes all of the above. If you're a Buddhist monk, your excommunication of the "pitiless soldier kings" of Burma and their families may be a deadlier weapon than the one which may end your incarnation.

Freak Out

Freelance author Paulette Cooper was born into one hell of a reality, in Auschwitz, to parents who didn't survive the camp. In 1971 her first book was published, entitled The Scandal of Scientology, and included an interview with the disaffected L Ron Hubbard Jr, which revealed for the first time to a general readership the relation of Hubbard Sr to Aleister Crowley, and of Scientology to the occult. The Church had already sued Cooper for an article she'd written that appeared in London's Queen Magazine in December, 1969, which was also the month she received her first death threat, so of course they sued again. And neither did it end there.

Cooper found herself frequently followed, and multiple attempts were made to break into her apartment. Her phone was found to be tapped, and calls were often obscene and menacing. Anonymous hate mail piled up. She soon felt compelled to move to a residence with higher security, and her cousin Joy took over her apartment. Soon after, Joy opened the door to an unexpected delivery of flowers, and the deliveryman "unwrapped the flowers and there was a gun in it," Paulette told a Clearwater City Council hearing on Scientology in 1981:

And he took out the gun and he put it at Joy's temple and he cocked the gun, and we don't know whether it misfired, whether it was empty and it was a scare technique, what happened, but somehow, the gun did not go off. And he started choking her, and she was able to break away and she started to scream. And the person ran away.

And so she called a detective and he said, "It's a very wild attack because there doesn't seem to be any motive for it." There was no attempted rape, there was no attempted robbery, and why should somebody just suddenly try to kill her....

Then things got crazy.

About a week or two later at my apartment, I received a visit from the FBI. And they informed me that the public relations person from Scientology had claimed that she had received a couple of bomb threats and asked -- and had named me as somebody likely to send bomb threats.

Cooper didn't take the accusation very seriously, and consented to be fingerprinted. On May 19, 1973, she was indicted on three counts of sending bomb threats through the mail. (This is one of the letters.) And it came to that because, although she testified before a grand jury she had never before seen the letters, somehow, her fingerprints were found on them. ("I felt like a grand piano had just hit me on the head. I -- I fainted sitting up; the whole room just turned upside down and I didn't know what to do. And the, of course, the lawyers wanted more money.")

It wasn't until 1977 that the FBI, by its seizure of Scientology documents, learned that the Church had entirely forged the bomb threats to discredit its critic, and had crafted a project called "Operation Freakout" to either drive Cooper to suicide or a mental institution. Part of the plan consisted of a Scientology volunteer impersonating Cooper and making verbal threats towards the President and Henry Kissinger, and a second volunteer reporting them. Another named Jerry Levin moved into Cooper's building and befriended her during her darkest months, and reported back to the Church such things as "She can't sleep again...she's talking suicide. Wouldn't this be great for Scientology!"

Cooper very nearly lost her reality, because Scientology's reach was not exceeded by its means and intent to destroy it. And if we indwell our philosophies and make them our life rather than our lifestyle, we may evoke the same order of determined forces and find similar life and death consequence. If not, then we're more likely to merely freak ourselves out by paranoid invocation and commend ourselves as "info guerrillas."

A hard choice. But property doesn't have to choose.

2007-10-01T02:49:00.000-04:00

Post coming later today.

Lousy bronchitis.

The Autumn People

2007-09-25T09:13:00.000-04:00

"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.

Missing Time

2007-09-22T09:14:00.000-04:00

"I'll show you the life of the mind!"

from Barton Fink

I've been here, sitting up with a cold/sinus infection/God knows what, that's temporarily robbed me of the ability to put two paragraphs together. A new post will be along early in the new week.

It's going to happen very soon. The great event that will end the horror. That will end the sorrow. Next Tuesday, when the sun goes down, I will play the Moonlight Sonata backwards. This will reverse the effects of the world's mad plunge into suffering for the last 200 million years. What a lovely night that will be. What a sigh of relief, as the senile robins become bright red again, and the retired nightingales pick up their dusty tails, and assert the majesty of creation!

Leonard Cohen

"Grassroots Wisdom"

2007-09-14T16:43:00.000-04:00

"Daniel Boone wasn't looking for unemployment insurance"

from A Face in the Crowd

A few brief observations to follow-up Tuesday's post.

1. In my experience, people who describe themselves as apolitical are those most likely to repeat right-wing talking points, and call it "telling it like it is."

2. Binary thinking is a mind cancer that retards insight, and unfortunately flourishes in conspiracy culture. "The beginning of wisdom," said Terrence McKenna, "is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on." But popular conspiratology is a pathological neat freak that abhors disorder and complication, which is why it can never rise above the level of entertainment and become an agent of change and justice. It's not meant to. And so it thrives.

3. Winning the battle for popular opinion might mean something if opinion in America were not so cheap, malleable, and effectless.

4. Embracing a minority position is not an admission of futility or failure. "When great changes occur in history," said this guy, "when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."

5. "Big government "/"small government" is an unhelpful construct, and I'm sure a great favourite around Lonesome Rhodes' cracker barrel. Rhetoric notwithstanding, the US government is shrinking, withdrawing from many aspects of social spending and corporate oversight and privatizing longstanding public trusts. Even the military is increasingly evermore an umbrella of private contractors and a fist for private interests, though still under the cover of "national security." It's not the size, it's what you do with it. Or, to those who want it drowned and the others who can no longer recognize their own best interest, what you want done to it.

6. With exceptions that probably could be counted on the knuckles of one finger, the Left simply does not exist in Washington. (And I mean a Left that would be recognizably such beyond America's borders.) The Democratic/Republican duopoly is the control system's imitation of representative government and a substitute for ideological choice that rarely rocks the perpetual ruling class and its conspiratocracy. And when it does, they haven't been shy about letting us know.

7. Since I've long held the view that the neocons were intentionally set loose as berserkers to move the goalposts so they could later be scapegoated for 9/11 and Iraq, and the "true conservatives" could return in glory, I'm not particularly surprised that 9/11 Truth's Big Tent has become a conservative circus and a Texas Republican is acclaimed as the anti-war candidate.

8. Initially, and to the credit of its first generation of leadership, the truth in "9/11 Truth" referred to its absence from the official record, and the need for an independent accounting. (A recent echo of this is heard in the title of 9/11: Press for Truth.) Now, it means the Revealed Truths of the vying catechisms of "Inside Job": almost exclusively demolition, missiles and TV fakery. So it isn't enough anymore to say the Official Story is a lie, though it is, since the popular unofficial stories are as well. And perhaps told by the same storyteller.

No One Saw the Carny Go

2007-09-11T12:22:00.000-04:00

And the dwarves were given the task of digging the ditch
And laying the nag's carcass in the ground - Nick Cave

Fairytale of 9/11

Six years later, and another Tuesday, and it seems as though much of America and the world is still obsessed with the spectacular failure of Britney Spears last Sunday night on MTV.

How could this have happened? How many people in suits needed to be asleep at how many switches during rehearsals, to which Spears would show up hours late with a frozen margarita in hand? How could the breathtaking crash and burn have gone unanticipated by those whose business it is to do just that? The warning signs were flashing like a Christmas tree, and the chatter was incessant, hinting at a "Big Wedding" in Vegas. Most alarmingly, how could the VMA's producers have stood down for the three vulnerable minutes which would draw the most viewers and set the tone for the entire broadcast?

Somewhat surprisingly, mainstream sources can be found alluding to hidden and unspoken forces at play beneath the surface. The Washington Post, for instance, whispers of ratings which have been "sinking steadily since 2001," with last year's audience less than half of that six years ago. "MTV President Christina Norman called this year's version of the show a 'total reinvention,'" and the Post expected that the fiasco of "the Spears appearance likely will goose the ratings." [And the numbers are in: "A wobbly Britney Spears on your TV show is better than no Britney Spears. Ask MTV. Evidence comes from the network's surprisingly high-rated Video Music Awards, which soared in viewership 23% over last year's numbers, giving the show 7.08 million viewers. It was the highest-rated cable show among 12-34 viewers--5.0 million--this year. Moreover, MTV.com set records. On Monday, the day after the event, MTV posted its best daily traffic ever--2.6 million unique visitors--40% higher than a year ago."] A catastrophic success, as another showman once called another show.

But perhaps most damning for the network's complicity in Spears' public humiliation is its choice of Sarah Silverman to immediately follow her on stage, who then, predictably, "proceeded to bury her." Her caustic routine heavily underscored Spears' embarrassment - "25 years old and she's already accomplished everything she is going to accomplish in her life" - and winked at still stunned viewers that MTV was in on the joke.

Gossip blogger Perez Hilton put it bluntly: "MTV is the one that put Silverman on after Britney. They knew what they were doing!!!" While Kayne West, who knew for whom Bush's priorities were elsewhere during Katrina, has also intuited the meaning of September 9, 2007: "They exploited Britney in helping to end her career."

Now, a hard-line MTV MIHOPer would want to take Spears out of the picture all together, saying that wasn't really her (you know: distinguish between "Fat Britney" and "Skinny Britney") and ask simply, "Who benefited?" (Loose Change-like, there is already a revised video seriously analyzing the "physical evidence" for a loose heel. You can practically see the squibs.) But of course she had her own motive and intentions and naive expectations of benefit, which were used against her, and she believed herself to be in command of the situation, when in fact the situation was entirely out of her control.

Spears is a main-sequence star who has burned through her talent. As a credible performer she is spent, but as an unself-aware freak-for-hire she remains a precious, exploitable commodity. Which is why MTV let it happen on purpose.

A day earlier, Fox could have averted or ameliorated another live train wreck when Geraldo Rivera and Alex Jones crossed bullhorns. It didn't, and both Rivera and Jones got a chance to blovate to their bases with studied exasperation about "anarchists" and the "New World Order." It may not have been made to happen, but I doubt that any of the principals in this media circus were sorry that it had.

The Big Top

And speaking of circuses, I'm not fond of Big Tents. Whenever I hear the call to come together beneath one my inclination is to walk away briskly in the opposite direction. I won't say it's good that I want to do this every single time. Just most of the time, when it's the best.

Maybe it's partly a Canadian thing. Canada doesn't quite yet have America's circus culture of political action Big Tops, though there's still the call to conglomeracy, and the incomprehension when the invitation goes unanswered. The Liberals, when it suits them - naturally at election time - try to seduce the social democrat vote of the NDP to join their big tent on the left, though to many New Democrats the Liberal left looks indistinguishable from the right. The NDP, in turn, invite the Greens to join their not-quite-so big tent, but the parties' core values are not concomitant, and its best and most honest argument remains the elimination of competition. Because admission to the Big Tent is almost always unconditional surrender.

September 11th saw a Big Tent hastily erected that spanned the entire United States, sheltering virtually every American. Bush was polling in the 90s, and House and Senate Democrats made an even greater virtue of submission, particularly after its leadership received reprimanding letters accompanied with billions of finely-milled anthrax spores. "Bipartisanship" is as much a lie in American politics as partisanship is to the Democratic leadership, so long as the Big Tent advances a single agenda.

Six years on, and of course America has more than one Big Tent. It has two. And though they appear in opposition to one another, their competition is an illusion. They're both cynically run by the same circus family, and exist for entertainment purposes only.

Step Right Up

In a press release announcing his decision to oppose the House resolution on 9/11, Dennis Kucinich writes that "if Congress really wanted to honor the memory of those who died on September 11, we would cause the full truth to be told to the American people." Kucinich is also sponsoring two congressional hearings this Fall into certain "financial issues" of September 11, and is the only presidential candidate who would think of - and dare to - ask a roomful of voters, "How many of you believe that the whole story of 9/11 has not been told?" And yet Kucinich is decidedly not the preferred choice of most full-throated activists under the "Inside Job" Big Tent. Why is that? Six years on, who's running this circus?

Listen to the amplified voices of New Truth and pay attention to where they've pitched their tent. If you're not already there yourself by conscious choice, it may surprise you. They'll tell you that "Left" and "Right" are fictions woven by the same enslavers, and then launch into uncompromising, nativist rants against foreigners (the Mexicans are coming), denial of environmental crises (an affront to property rights and individualism), internationalism (paranoid fear of the "blue helmet"), taxation and gun control. And listen attentively to some others, influential yet off the main stage, and you'll hear Larouchian tropes, "Patriot" and militia jargon, coded speech about "international bankers" and the necessities of historical "revision." ("Suspecting what the Israeli/Palistine conflict is really about," posts "Killtown", "the strong evidence Israel was involved with 9/11, and seeing how 9/11 was faked in general, it makes me wonder how much of the Holocaust was true or not.... WingTV seems to think the Holocaust was a major hoax like 9/11 was along with Judicial-Inc.")

In 2007, the largest tent for "9/11 Truth" in America is led and dominated by conservatives, far-right "Patriots" and Libertarians. So naturally it follows the choice for President is not Kucinich, who would "take our guns" and do something righteous with federal power instead of abolish it, but Ron Paul, even though his position on 9/11 is better described as blowback than "inside job." ("I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback," said Paul.)

The depth of Paul's support is debatable, but it's almost implausibly broad. From Kucinich's base of support - one Kucinich campaign worker writes that she's trying "to figure a way to bring these democrats to Dennis Kucinich. He is Ron Paul on steriods. That's what I tell them anyway." - to white nationalist "9/11 Truth" activists on Stormfront (I won't link to Stormfront, but it's not difficult to find):

Anyone who doesn't vote for Paul on this site is an assclown. Sure he doesn't come right out and say he is a WN, who cares! He promotes agendas and ideas that allow Nationalism to flourish. If we "get there" without having to raise hell, who cares; aslong as we finally get what we want. I don't understand why some people do not support this man, Hitler is dead, and we shall probably never see another man like him.

Pat Buchanan's book "Where the Right Went Wrong" is a prime example of getting the point across without having the book banned for anti semitism. The chapters about the war in Iraq sound like a BarMitzvah, but he doesn't have to put the Star of David next to each name for us to know what he means. We are running out of options at this point, and I will take someone is 90% with us versus any of the other choices.

Not to mention if Paul makes a serious run, he legitimizes White Nationalism and Stormfront, for God's sake David Duke is behind this guy!

There have been concerns expressed about what Paul may believe regarding race. Of greater concern to progressive Americans should be what he undoubtedly and unabashedly embraces: the end of much social spending and corporate regulation, such as it still exists in the United States. The vision of governance, and what public office can and should do, is the inversion of progressive values and the exclamation point to the end of the New Deal. Paul's radical Libertarianism would make him a privateer's wet-dream president: Grover Norquist's ideal henchman, holding the federal government beneath the bathwater while it drowned.

Now, Paul seems like an honest enough guy, and appears to hold his positions with integrity. But in politics, integrity is a commodity that intentionally obfuscates policy with character. And it is also a tactic common to populist fascist movements of the last century. That's not to equate Paul with Hitler or Mussolini or Peron. There are many good reasons why the comparisons are absurd. But it bears reminding that fascism is populist: its voices the loudest; its tents among the biggest; its appeal, appallingly broad.

I want to be the minority.

2007-09-07T05:12:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the extended absence. New post on the way.

On edit: Back on Tuesday.

Friday, August 31

2007-08-31T13:29:00.000-04:00

Miette's tear

from The City of Lost Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask not for whom the frog sings

2007-08-28T11:37:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colin Wilson, in Mysteries:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, August 21

2007-08-21T11:43:00.000-04:00

The new and better heart

Guy Maddin's The Heart of the World

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, August 17

2007-08-17T13:31:00.000-04:00

Angels in the library

from Wings of Desire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No need to be nervous

2007-08-15T16:46:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author, Author

2007-08-09T16:38:00.000-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, August 6

2007-08-06T07:56:00.001-04:00

Harmonic patterns in salt

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

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

- Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous

Tuesday, July 31

2007-07-31T10:26:00.000-04:00

[On edit: Duty demands that I beg off posting for the rest of the week. Back on Monday.]

"One day you can tell all this to anyone who's willing to listen. No one will believe you. Despite the fact that anyone who makes the slightest effort can see what is waiting at the future."

Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg

Bergman directed his first film, Kris ("Crisis"), in 1946, the same year hundreds of "Ghost Rockets" rained down on Sweden. There was probably nothing otherworldly about this, so long as we set aside the proposition that we ourselves may not be of this Earth. Most likely, the flap was the result of experiments or demonstrations conducted over the Baltic by the Soviet Union's own German engineers. An urgent message July 16 to the Swedish War Department states "some highly placed officials believe the phenomena are Russian rocket experiments either purely for research or for War of Nerves. Staff very nervous about release of info to United States and United Kingdom for fear Russians will cry 'West Bloc'. This office urges greatest protection this information."

Sweden was an incidental proving ground, but everything about Iraq reeks of intention.

Shortly, America's first robot squadron will be deployed there. Each "Reaper," the size of a jet fighter, can carry 14 Hellfire missiles, or four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs, and will be piloted from a console 7,000 miles away in Nevada. For ground-force support, Lockheed Martin is developing the robotic MULE. A Lockheed promotional video can be viewed here ("it will allow soldiers to use technology to perform a number of dull, dirty and dangerous jobs, freeing troops to focus more effectively on the success of their mission"). But naturally, "the most ambitious of the future combat systems" is the robot soldier "with a 'conscience,' which is being designed to look and fight, and in some respects think, like a human soldier.". And encoding ethics into a "new breed" of robot fighters is extremely important, we're told, because possibly "the abuses at Abu Ghraib would not have happened with autonomous robots, immune to human depravity."

An elderly cult leader in Australia named Kenneth Emmanuel Dyers, founder of "Kenja," has been"hounded to his death" over charges of child sexual abuse. Last year he was ordered to "stand trial on 22 child sex offences, but the NSW District Court deemed him unfit for trial in May and ordered a mental health assessment." During Dyers "trademark" meditations, which he called "energy conversion sessions", he allegedly took children as young as 12 into "private rooms, ordered them to strip and molested them." Claims of abuse date back at least 20 years. (A 1999 conviction was overturned on Dyers' appeal to the High Court in 2002.)

"This is a terrible tragedy," said an official statement released by Kenja, "and those that have participated in the attacks on Ken should feel a terrible guilt for their responsibility in this."

Dyer was a former military policeman and Scientologist, and critics have noted "significant similarities between Kenja and Scientology, including vocabulary and teaching material."

About Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake: I have to keep checking myself, because I don't want to make a game of Clue out of this. Not least because we're missing so much of the game board, but mostly because it's indecent to turn such fresh tragedy into a mind game. There are many curious aspects to this story, and it's appropriate, I think, to bring them forward, but on the whole I mean to resist the temptation to connect the dots, because there is still far too much space between them.

"Our whole education is just one long humiliation" - Bergman

Monday, July 30

2007-07-30T04:22:00.000-04:00

"I sat back down and pretended I never saw anything"

Elemental spirit encounter, Nova Scotia

Ron Rosenbaum made an interesting observation over the weekend regarding the suicide notes of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake: "If she were being harassed why not name her nemeses in her last words, rather than leave a note described by the cops as suggesting a peaceful loving farewell? I guess you could say she might be trying to protect Jeremy, her boyfriend who later seems to have killed himself over her death, but according to police his note didn’t mention any enemies either, and if not why not?"

If they had become paranoid, why is the paranoia conspicuously absent from their supposed final statements? Why, if Theresa had believed herself persecuted, did she not call out her persecutors, if only to say Look at what you made me do? Nor did Jeremy lash out at those who had hounded his lover to death. Maybe, to someone who knows more than I about the psychology of suicide, that's nothing strange. To me, it is.

Mysterious sparkly goo falls in North Carolina, and boulders of ice in Iowa.

A 152-page report on the O'Hare UFO has been released by the National Aviation Center on Anomalous Phenomena.

I won't have much time this week for blogging, but a subject I'd like to explore soon is the congruity between the occult concept of an egregore and Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance. So if you're game, don't wait for me.

oh and one more thing
you aren't going to like
what comes after America? - Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

Friday, July 27

2007-07-27T10:20:00.000-04:00

"Mrs Buttle are you alright?"

Terry Gilliam's Brazil

Pat Tillman's cluster of three bullet holes in the forehead from about 10 yards away meant the "evidence did not match up with the scenario as described," according to an army medical examiner in 2004 we're just discovering. But the story now goes that he was asking for it:

It has been widely reported by the AP and others that Spc. Bryan O'Neal, who was at Tillman's side as he was killed, told investigators that Tillman was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat (expletive) Tillman, damn it!" again and again.

But the latest documents give a different account from a chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman was killed.

The chaplain said that O'Neal told him he was hugging the ground at Tillman's side, "crying out to God, help us. And Tillman says to him, `Would you shut your (expletive) mouth? God's not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling -'"

Pinned under hostile fire, Tillman goes George Patton on a cowering comrade and gets fragged for his overwrought bluster. And yet: "No evidence of enemy fire was found at the scene. No one was hit by enemy fire, and no government equipment was struck."

It's all so very Lindsay Lohan. She wasn't driving: "it was the black kid." And the pants she was wearing with the cocaine in the pocket? "Those aren't my pants!" The thing is, when it's the military that's drunk and barreling down the freeway, boasting "I can do whatever the fuck I want," it can.

Also:

Adding to Iowa's surfeit of weirdness, Burlington City Council candidate Keith Jacobs reports "an oval-shaped craft about 50 feet long and 40 feet wide, with a blue light on the bottom cruising about 400 to 500 feet above the ground. It had no identifying marks, no wings, no propellers and no means of propulsion such as rockets or jets."

"I would say it was some sort of antigravity device," Jacobs said. "About four seconds was all I got a glimpse of it, and it shot off fast."

The craft sped across the sky in a northwest direction, descended slightly revealing a black or dark gray checkered top, then curved west and shot off in the direction of the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant, Jacobs said.

(Mention of the ammunition plant reminds me that Mothman's favourite haunt was a WWII munitions dump, called the "TNT area.")

And another sighting from the UK, with photo and video at the link: "a couple were mesmerised as seven red lights flew silently and at great speed above their house in the early hours of the morning":

"There were seven lights flying fast over the house. Two of them were flying round each other. They were flying very close together, closer than planes. They were going so fast I couldn't focus on them.

"I ran inside and got my camcorder. I thought they could be helicopters but when I zoomed in I was scared to death. They were glowing red in the middle. I'm a very logical person. We are not into the paranormal at all. I thought people would think we were barmy if we said we saw UFOs."

No one moved; Thor's whirling hammer slowed, then dropped. In the silence, Chris knew his left femur had shattered - along with most of the bones in his hands - leaving him perched on one leg. Yet his sole regret was that he could not emulate an aged Jew he had heard spoken of by some concentration camp survivors.

Standing in front of the grave he had been forced to dig for himself, the old man never begged, or cried to the SS, nor slumped in despair. He just turned from his murderers, dropped his pants, and said aloud in Yiddish as he bent over, "Kish mir im toches."

As more guards rushed to grab his arms, Chris met Thor's icy gaze.

"Kiss my ass," he told the towering Aesir. "I don't believe in you."

- David Brin, The Life Eaters

Thursday, July 26

2007-07-26T06:36:00.000-04:00

"It was one of these coincidences..."

P2 Grandmaster Licio Gelli describes his prison break

A body has been found at sea which may be that of Jeremy Blake.

Remember the Johnny Gosch story by Des Moines journalist Tim Schmitt published in the alternative weekly Pointblank, and how Pointblank went out of business the same day? Pointblank's founder and editor was Jon Gaskell, Anna's younger brother, who was immediately handed the job of editing its replacement, Cityview, while Schmitt, who had been Pointblank's managing editor, was fired. Gaskell has apparently since claimed that the Gosch story was an "April Fool's joke," allegedly intended to whip "conspiracy theorists into a lathered frenzy." (From a Gaskell email: "It was an April Fool's prank. Those are some pretty strange people.")

Because Theresa read and recommended this blog I feel a particular burden to do right by her memory, so I want to proceed with caution and decency in all of this. There is contradictory information out there. I heard yesterday that the suicide note had been handwritten. So it's important for me to reaffirm my ignorance here: I don't know what happened. And Theresa's life may contain more abiding mysteries than the end of it.

From May 31, Theresa speaks with Father Frank Morales on politics and conspiracy. (In the event that link goes dead, I've copied it here).

Interesting formation of lights in the UK skies. "Three had formed a triangular shape and one was to the right. Then another one came hurtling towards the rest at what looked like a very fast speed. But as it neared them it suddenly slowed and stopped altogether."

Top US intelligence officials now say "Al Qaeda's safe haven in northwestern Pakistan is largely inaccessible to outside forces and unlikely to be eliminated soon by the U.S. or Pakistani military." So who's going to bomb who "back into the Stone Age" now?

"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it." - Simone Weil

Imitation of Life

2007-07-25T07:03:00.000-04:00

Somebody better investigate soon - Bob Dylan

Some things that have come to me, some word of mouth, since yesterday's post.

Theresa's "suicide note" was short and vague, and found typed on a computer. That is, it was not handwritten.

She had no history of pill popping, and her cause of death is still officially undetermined.

The one witness to Jeremy's alleged walk into the sea, the woman who called the police, now can neither be located nor identified.

His body has still not been recovered.

It took 72 hours to notify Jeremy's family of his disappearance. The newspaper was notified first.

Friends are having a "hard time imagining the two committing suicide," reports the New York Post. "Suicide would never be on their to-do list," said Blake Robin. "The narrative of the wallet and the clothes under the boardwalk, it's like somebody writing a cliché, it's not them. It would be embarrassing to them. It seems too calculated for the most uncalculated people. I can see some teenager in Idaho who listens to Marilyn Manson doing this, but not them."

They broke a lease eight months short of term when they recently left LA. Allegedly they were being harassed by a recently-arrived neighbor, a Scientologist, and were receiving no help from authorities.

The Los Angeles Times is now reporting the story, and on the couple's "paranoia" of Scientology:

According to several friends and art world peers, the two believed they were being stalked and harassed by Scientologists, an abiding fear that soured old friendships and made some of their respective working relationships difficult.

Christine Nichols, a colleague and friend of Blake's since 1998, produced two art exhibitions, two books and a record in conjunction with the artist through the New York art gallery she co-founded, Works on Paper Inc. Nichols dates the couple's rising sense of "paranoia" to around 2004, two years after Blake created an album cover for alternative-rock star Beck, who is a practicing Scientologist.

"They thought Scientologists were really harassing them," Nichols said. "They would say, 'They are following us, harassing our landlord.' I did not see any evidence of that. But it got to be something that was huge to them -- a 'You're either with us or against us' thing where if you didn't believe them, you weren't on their side. The story they had woven in paranoia and conspiracies took over part of their lives. A lot of us couldn't understand that acting out."

Two other art world sources corroborated Nichols' characterization but declined to speak on the record out of concern that Blake may still be alive.

One thing I missed from the LA Observed article speculating on Duncan's death: the first intimation of Jeremy Blake's disappearance came from an unnamed "ex-girlfriend of Blake."

Which reminds me. I've been looking at some of the art of Anna Gaskell, Blake's ex-girlfriend and subject of Duncan's disturbing warning in her May post. (""Stop accepting payoffs from [Des Moines businessman and guardian Jim] Cownie immediately, get your younger brothers away from him, get a lawyer using only your own money, and have the lawyer get Cownie to answer a few questions about your mother and father.")

From the Guggenheim catalogue:

Anna Gaskell crafts foreboding photographic tableaux of pre-adolescent girls that reference children's games, literature, and psychology.... In untitled #9 of the wonder series, a wet bar of soap has been dragged along a wooden floor. In untitled #17 it appears again, forced into a girl's mouth, with no explanation of how or why. This suspension of time and causality lends Gaskell's images a remarkable ambiguity that she uses to evoke a vivid and dreamlike world.

Gaskell's girls do not represent individuals, but act out the contradictions and desires of a single psyche. While their unity is suggested by their identical clothing, the mysterious and often cruel rituals they act out upon each other may be metaphors for disorientation and mental illness. In wonder and override, the character collectively evoked is Alice, perhaps lost in the Wonderland of her own mind, unable to determine whether the bizarre things happening to her are real or the result of her imagination.... Gaskell addresses this psychologically loaded subject matter with images of girls wandering in a gothic mansion illuminated by candlelight. Here the psyche in question has been fractured and fraught with terror by a perverse father's look, a voyeuristic gaze.

We don't want to see things that aren't there. But when they're there, are we crazy for seeing them?

More, from Ron Rosenbaum:

According to sources I checked with in the New York City Police Department and the City Medical Examiner’s Office, the death of Theresa Duncan which has been almost without exception called “a suicide” in the local papers has not yet been officially ruled a suicide. It may well still be. To my knowledge no evidence has come to light suggesting murder or accidental death. But the authorities aren’t commenting , awaiting, for one thing, toxicology reports on Duncan they say may not be available for at least two weeks.

Rosenbaum adds that he has additional information on Jeremy Blake's reported death and other aspects of the case, and hopes to post them soon.

After the Ambulances Go

2007-07-24T02:31:00.000-04:00

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life." - Simone Weil

The image above was posted by Theresa Duncan on her eclectic blog The Wit of the Staircase, July 10. Later that day, Theresa's boyfriend of 12 years, Jeremy Blake, discovered her body in their East Village apartment, an evident suicide. ("A bottle of pills and alcohol were found near Duncan's body [and] she left a suicide note saying that she was at peace with her decision and loved Blake and her family deeply.") A week later, a man was seen walking into the ocean at Rockaway Park, and not walking out. Blake's wallet and clothing, and his suicide note, were found beneath the boardwalk.

Duncan and Blake were both career artists and filmmakers. Theresa was also a game designer, a culture critic and a reader of this blog. "Paranoia seems to us an absolute patriotic duty at the moment," she wrote a year ago, "and Rigorous Intuition is like the incredibly symbolically twisted and bizarre dream you wake up from to realize that the scenario thrown up from the unconscious is actually the expression of some very simple truth you had been desperate to avoid facing." It was last May that Theresa faced hers, and posted "The Trouble with Anna Gaskell," in which she described an ongoing campaign of harassment against herself and Jeremy, and the long shadow cast by Des Moines' businessman Jim Cownie, "a major Republican donor with ties to the Midwest's Heritage Groups, founded by the ultraconservative Adolph Coors."

Cownie became the legal guardian of New York-based artist Gaskell and her siblings following the early deaths of her parents (her father was Cownie's business partner). While an undergraduate she dated Jeremy Blake for about a year. It was during that time that Blake got to know Cownie as well.

Cownie has an oddly vast collection of firearms--an entire out building devoted to them in fact.... Then there were the mobster "friends" in Las Vegas who comped Mr. Wit [Jeremy] and Ms. Gaskell with an eye roll and a groan when they mentioned Cownie's name at the front desk, as he had instructed them to do. In addition to the Gaskell orphans, Cownie has four or five children of his own. The oldest male Cownie child, then a teenager, even bragged to Mr. Wit during one visit "My Dad's going to get me in the CIA!"

Once the harassment of The Wits [Jeremy and Theresa] began, these disparate old Anna Gaskell anecdotes, which up to the late summer of 2006 had been completely unknown to me, began to suddenly bob up in Mr. Wit's memory. Mr. Wit's recollection was further jarred after we repeatedly witnessed Ms. Gaskell's brother Zach mysteriously pacing in front of our Venice California home. Then there were the many cars with Iowa license plates following us around Los Angeles at the time. (We took photos of these, naturally.) Mr. Wit during this time also suddenly remembered that busy Cownie often travelled to South Dakota to attend some of the Midwest's more unsavory biker rallies. But I guess being friends with ex-con bikers and Vegas mobsters doesn't necessarily point to somebody who would, like, hire thugs to harass, threaten or--wow--maybe even kill people.

...

To add the final dessert topping to this apocalyptic art world sundae, Mr. Wit says that normally dour Cownie frequently made jokes about child molestation as a "training" tool. This wouldn't be so fucking spooky, friends of the Staircase, if Des Moines wasn't the land of the Project Monarch/U.S. Intelligence rumored disappearance of Johnny Gosch and the odd resemblance of poor little Johnny to Bush White House gay hooker-psychological operative Jeff Gannon.

She concludes with advice for Anna Gaskell: "Stop accepting payoffs from Cownie immediately, get your younger brothers away from him, get a lawyer using only your own money, and have the lawyer get Cownie to answer a few questions about your mother and father."

When news of the deaths of Duncan and Blake were posted on Metafilter, a clue to the cause of their presumed suicides was Theresa's "paranoid screed," in which many of the "bugbears of the psy-ops crowd were put on Duncan's mental merry-go-round and given a real strong spin." The words "psy-ops crowd" were linked to the RI forum.

I don't know how I could begin assessing from here, tonight, the merits of Duncan's story and the legitimacy of the verdict of suicide. I do know it would be indecent to try. We enjoy mysteries. We even revel in the great mysteries that may mean either our destiny or our doom. But God help us if we become a mystery. And I don't want to make one now of Theresa Duncan.

I've known people who've had dead cats hung at their doorstep; who've been poisoned and burgled, and received death threats all because of the work they do and the privileged interests they challenge. I know they're not making shit up, because I know them. But if you didn't know them, to hear them talk sometimes, you might want to think they were. Because maybe it would be better if they were a little deluded than that they were describing the world. Even if you did know them, for their sakes you might want to think so, too.

But both harassment and the delusion of harassment are real, and a paranoid screed can also be one's patriotic duty. Murders and suicides happen all the time, as do murders that mimic suicide, and less frequently the reverse. Advocating for justice and truth and a closure to mystery does not mean forever contending that death must come by another hand. And sometimes we ought to be adamant that we simply don't know.

Two days before her death, on Sunday, July 8, Duncan wrote that she had another political essay in the works and would post it later. She'd entitled it, "The Devil and Dick Cheney." What would she have said? We don't know.

Monday, July 23

2007-07-23T01:57:00.000-04:00

"If only someone could stop talking and do something instead."

from Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice

Here's what I'm thinking.

Instead of extended silences between my posts, I'll try every weekday morning to throw together a few links, thoughts and videos to freshen this space, give some attention to the RI forum and make me feel like I'm not such a bad blogger. (And thanks again to Chris for the idea.)

And so:

Keep an eye on Kosovo. US-sponsored "unilateral independence" looms for the Balkan Route's distribution hub of Afghan heroin. The purpose of "failed states" is to create the conditions for criminal windfall, and the Russian and American standoff on Kosovo resembles a turf-war between New York and New Jersey families.

US corporations finance Colombian terror and evade prosecution

The mystery of Norway's Hessdalen Lights has reportedly been "solved." Scientists have concluded "the phenomenon is not UFO-related" (that is, they're not nuts-and-bolts vehicles), but are "luminous balls containing some form of energy" (that is, we don't know what they are).

"In the summer of 1963 comedian Red Skelton was loafing alone on a beach in California when, according to what he later told reporter Dick Kleiner (Newspaper Enterprise Association), he lapsed into a semitrance for about an hour. Upon recovering full consciousness, he discovered a terrifying message written in his own hand in the notebook he always carried with him. He doesn't remember writing it or even thinking the words. The message was, 'President Kennedy will be killed in November.'" - John Keel, Operation Trojan Horse

Blackshirts and Skins

2007-07-17T12:11:00.001-04:00

Well, I fin'ly started thinkin' straight
When I run outa things to investigate.
Couldn't imagine doin' anything else,
So now I'm sittin' home investigatin' myself!
Hope I don't find out anything . . . hmm, great God! - Bob Dylan

I always get a rush from The Ghosts of Cable Street and the story of London's eastenders beating back the blackshirts. But it's not 1936 anymore (it's not even 1986, I tell myself sometimes, still listening to the Men They Couldn't Hang), and fascists wear all colours these days. They don't make it as easy for us. These days, some days, we even need to check the labels on our own shirts.

Post-war covert history has largely been one of de-legitimizing and destroying leftist and even moderate governments and opposition groups. We've seen the assassinations, the coups and wars; the economic arm-twisting; the corruption and blackmail. Since the murder of Rabin, "Israeli society, despairing of peace, has undergone a rightward radicalization." In the Arab world the process has been compounded by the elimination of even secular options, creating conditions in which the only effective vehicle for change is aligned with individuals, ideologies and finances indebted to international fascism.

This shouldn't be news to anyone here. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has spawned most "Jihadist" groups, was founded by Hassan al-Banna, an admirer of Hitler, and became a wartime Nazi intelligence asset. Post-war, like many such assets, it was rolled into the Western intelligence matrix. Swiss Nazi Ahmed Huber established the Al Taqwa Bank, which dispersed to bin Laden and others CIA monies seeded in the financial proxy of international terror and intelligence, BCCI.

Now where does antisemitism, and legitimate critique of Israel, fit in this complex picture?

There are at least two levels at play here for us. First to consider is politics and activism. The second is conspiracy theory.

Unapologetically I'm on the left, and I expect, to some degree or another and regardless of whether you even acknowledge it, you are as well. Broadly, or perhaps rather, ideally, taking the left implies an identification with the oppressed, the poor and the workers against the concentration of power and capital in the hands of an exploiting few. Israeli politics have taken a sharp right turn in the past 40 years, and the policies and consequences of occupation have been tragic and criminal. Perversely, and I believe intentionally for the right, the perpetuation of misery and exacerbation of tension has driven large numbers of both Palestinians and Israelis to rightward extremes. And it has carried many in the left along with it, unconsciously and uncritically, because the progressive options have already been eliminated by the fascists who play both sides.

Not all on the left lose their way on this. For instance:

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty, a Trotskyite faction in the Stop The War Coalition, objected to working with the Muslim Association of Britain due to its links to the Muslim Brotherhood, and argued that the left should be working with secular, progressive Muslim groups instead. The Weekly Worker newspaper took a similar stand, pointing out in one article that "At the same time as our secularist and Marxist comrades are being murdered by groups allied to the MAB, we are lining ourselves up as co-sponsors of demonstrations. This is like communists lining up with Nazis sympathisers on demonstrations during World War II, because we are both against British imperialism."

Then there's conspiracy theory. It was 9/11 that caused many on the left to immerse themselves in it for the first time. There we found a thriving subculture, welcoming us with literature and semi-familiar jargon, telling us that "left" and "right" were fictions that divided us from together fighting the "real enemy." They too believed 9/11 was an "inside job," so even though we didn't start out from the same place, we were now on the same side - weren't we? We could learn much from them, even from the "former insiders" and veterans of the CIA and MI6 who were happy to help us find our footing, even if we weren't always sure what they meant by "international bankers" and "New World Order" - right?

Think of how warmly David Duke was received by some supposed progressives after his CNN appearance with Wolf Blitzer. Consider what Tom Metzger, founder of White Aryan Resistance, says here: "Recruit radical people. Some of the best are on the left.... in most cases I am closer to the left. Anti-war, Anti Capitalist, pro environment and Nature, hate for the lying super rich or the lumkin proletariat, hatred of all present politicians..."

There is a subtle campaign of co-option within the subculture of conspiracy to lead nearly every issue of suppressed history and high crime back to a Jewish root. This is why the operational Arab element of the international fascist Mafia has, for many, been totally eradicated from the equation of "9/11 Truth," and the "smoking gun" has become a case of "insurance fraud" for a grasping New York Jew. If it's successful, the left option will again have been eliminated, and the only effective opposition to fascist power will be a fascist populism.

Antisemitism is as objectionable as any hate directed towards any people for simply being. But antisemitism has a special pedigree, not because Jews are special, but because they are the historic and still-favoured scapegoats of fascists. (Some of whom, of course, are themselves Jewish, but whose allegiance is rather to criminal power.) And sometimes, when we don't reflect on the pedigree of our own influences, we're unconsciously doing their bidding. And I'd rather do nothing, and it would be better if I did, than do that.

2007-07-17T03:15:00.000-04:00

I know, and I'm sorry. Working on a new post, but more pressing is the deadline for my already late manuscript. I'll rejoin you here when I can.

Signs of the Times

2007-07-03T07:09:00.000-04:00

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else...thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all. - Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics

I think the only people entitled to be shocked by the commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence are those who were shocked that Libby was sentenced in the first place. Or rather, that it was a second-tier player like Libby and not Rove or Cheney who appeared trussed and basted as the suckling pig of Democrats' scandalously disappointing Fitzmas. It's those constantly incredulous types who deserve the saucepan eyes at Libby's predictable catch and release.

Even so, the Internet reaction is as rich as it is predictable, and ineffectual. Instead of America's streets, America's chatrooms are filled, because its citizens have been given them for the appearance of a commons, and clatter with indignant typing. But 10 million people posting We're not gonna take it anymore! isn't a revolution. It isn't even a Twisted Sister song.

That's the bad news. The good news is it's a Leonard Cohen song.

What hath Bush wrought? If nothing else, he's made semiotics everybody's business, whether everybody realizes it or not. Under the Bush years, the signs by which Americans and much of the Western world have lived have become so evidently estranged from what they allegedly signify that they now suggest little more than the lies told by Power to maintain itself. "Freedom," "democracy," "justice": Everybody knows. Among other things, Bush is the Deconstruction President.

In The Trickster and the Paranormal, George Hansen has this to say:

It is commonly assumed that there is a simple, objective correspondence between the signifier and the signified even thought they are separate entities. It is assumed that language is only a set of names for things, events, and concepts. These assumptions are incorrect, but few recognize the extent of the implications. This lies at the heart of deconstructionism, and magic.

There is power in the act of naming, because it imbues meaning to a thing - or to an event or a concept - that has no necessary correspondence to the thing itself. This was evident even on the morning of September 11, when the event of the attacks receded behind their purported meaning even as they were still under way. And then soon after, the breathless reporting of Bush's confirmation that this means war, albeit against an abstract noun which would nevertheless cost at least hundreds of thousands of actual lives.

[Carrying On, Tues PM:]

From the start there was an institutional incuriousness about the attacks, as there so often is when the institutions themselves benefit by them ("Blair rejects 7/7 inquiry calls"; "Putin rejects public Beslan inquiry"). Naturally any circle of high conspirators would be reluctant to have any light shed on the criminal events they enabled, but there's a far broader circle of reluctance, that partakes of the Power that is enabled by the meaning of the crime. That is, those who stood to benefit by 9/11 were not limited to the relatively small number of perpetrators within the institutions of public life, because the perpetrators themselves partook of the larger circle of institutional power. Much of corporate media, including "alternative" corporate media, became co-conspirators after the fact simply by habit, because they inhabit and thrive within that outer circle. To acknowledge the possibility of a high crime of the magnitude of Kennedy's assassination or 9/11 would be an invitation, not to gentle reform, but to revolution. And institutional power sends out such invitations only when it sees how it can come out on top again.

Event and meaning is also an issue for the 9/11 Movement, which unfortunately has come to mirror some of the White House's most dumbed-down Manichaeism. For the leaders and proponents of the "New Truth" movement, as with the evangelists of the "Official Story," meaning has almost entirely effaced event. For some, the actual crimes of hijacked aircraft striking buildings have vanished all together, and in their place has been substituted "controlled demolition" and something, anything other than Flight 77 striking the Pentagon. Why? Because the actual event is perceived as of insufficient significance to support the sign of "Inside Job."

But that's a failure of political language which doesn't know the nuance of parapolitics, and it is one which allows those inside, to one degree or another, to define our terms for us. What does "Inside Job" mean? It doesn't mean Executive Branch; it doesn't mean, as with other empty jargon, "Bush knew." I've written before that many who push 9/11 as an Inside Job want to push Osama right out of the picture, but bin Laden is himself inside the security-narcotics-terror nexus, composed of factions that interpenetrate one another, which sometimes compete and sometimes strike strategic alliances depending upon what advantages they believe they can gain. Peter Dale Scott recently quoted a Russian general, who said that "9/11 changed the direction of the world in the direction desired by transnational oligarchs and and an international mafia." Scott also said, and I agree, that "I find it very hard to believe that the Bush administration either let or made it happen. It's clear that people within government were involved, but we should avoid condemning an entire administration."

I'd ask any who take exception to my position or to Scott's remark to ponder the course of 9/11 justice after the Bush administration leaves office, while the statecraft of clandestine power which preceded it, remains.

And since its sixtieth anniversary has arrived, complete with the posthumously-unsealed affidavit of Walter Haut, let's consider the sign of Roswell and its significant overshadowing of modern UFOlogy.

What is the meaning of the Roswell story? As told through back channels like Haut (Roswell's former Public Information Officer), the likewise-deceased Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso and Stephen Greer's "Disclosure Project," the meaning is not so much that aliens are here; it's that the aliens are here and we have them. The US military, according to its own covert stream of UFO disinformation, can shoot down alien craft, keep their dead occupants on ice, negotiate with their comrades and reverse-engineer their technology. The meaning of Roswell is not Fear them; it's Fear us.

The latest addition to the Roswell mythos may be the "dragonfly drones," about which Whitley Strieber recently gushed "I can only surmise that the appearance of the drones, and now the release of materials by Isaac, is a new step in the ongoing experiment that we call contact." (See also Linda Mouton Howe's "Earthfiles.") I was not impressed by the original photographs, and the subsequent materials strike me as a hoax in the tradition of UMMO and MJ-12. Whether the "drones" have official sanction or not, the hoaxers adopt and elaborate upon the sanctioned mythologies of Roswell and reverse engineering.

With respect to UFOs and matters of High Weirdness, my inclination is to give particular attention to the cases that frustrate analysis and appear to be absolute nonsense, because a phenomenon that is truly alien is unlikely to mimic human intelligence. In other words, I suppose, if there's to be weirdness, then bring on the weird. I'm less impressed by Roswell, however many deathbed confessions the military may produce, or "Isaac" and his scan of an alleged 1986 report from Palo Alto's supposed "CARET" ("Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology"), than I am by accounts from, say, a shaken Mexican policeman who claims he was chased by a flying humanoid; or by John Tasco who was approached one evening in 1957 by a pasty, bug-eyed dwarf in a green suit and a tam-o'-shanter cap who told him "We are peaceful people, we only want your dog." Such events are incursions of the truly alien upon our experience, and defy our attempts to infer meaning.

That's not to say hoaxes and disinformation can't be instructive. For instance, the Issac documents describing the alien tech. On the RI discussion board, "Attack Ships on Fire" points out how, "by drawing certain symbols on the CARET technology it somehow instills the means for the material to perform what the drawer wants." This is sigil magic, which returns us to the power of signs and of reading and meaning, and George Hansen's comparison of deconstructionism to occult science.

So, if the drones are a sanctioned hoax, the meaning it advances is Fear us; we too are sorcerers. And if it isn't, they may be anyway. But so may we, at least in the mundane sense of not adopting their meanings, which empower them, as our own, which disempower us.