Friday, June 08, 2007

Born Yesterday (Part One)



I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there,
Other times it's only me
. - Bob Dylan


There's a great Bill Hicks' bit about JFK. "You wouldn't believe the attitude in America," he says. "'Bill, quit talkin' about Kennedy, man. Let it go. It was a long time ago, would you just forget it?' I'm like, 'Alright. Then don't bring up Jesus to me.'"

Bill Hicks died in 1994. That's 13 years. He himself is already a long time ago by the way we measure things. Kennedy was not even 30-years dead when Hicks made the joke, and JFK was already ancient history. About the same time, researcher Mary Ferrell opened a symposium of assassination researchers in Dallas with these words (as recorded by Gaeton Fonzi in The Last Investigation):

As the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy descends on us, I am much concerned that we are on the threshold of a failure from which there will be no forgiveness.

We must win this struggle for truth...and do so very quickly, lest the assassination of President Kennedy flounder on some remote shoulder of highway, in a century whose history is on the way to the printer. In the next century, this case could be relegated to obscure questions on high school history examinations. Time is our most relentless and uncompromising enemy.

When Kennedy was killed Mary Ferrell was a 41-year old Dallas legal secretary. She devoted the remaining 41-years of her life to compiling research on the murder as her contribution towards the cause of justice. The year of her death, 66% of Americans were persuaded Oswald hadn't acted alone, but was part of a "larger conspiracy," but that's not the justice Mary Ferrell died without seeing.

What is the currency of popular opinion in our post-modern, fascist global hegemon? What has it mattered that two of every three Americans believe their own government is covering up the murder of their president? One in every three believe it aided or abetted the attacks of 9/11. If mere belief that something were true held the promise of a tipping point, shouldn't many tipping points have been reached by now in America? I mean, more than the point of no return.

Winning the battle for public opinion is a hollow victory, one the other side is happy to concede, because the long war they wage need not regard what we think of it.

June 19 will be the 25th anniversary of Roberto Calvi's murder, and for 20 of those years the legal finding was "suicide." A few days ago, all five of those standing accused in his death were acquitted. It wasn't a surprising judgement. None had actually hung him; none had ordered his murder. The worst that could be said of them was they were "enablers," connecting the dark powers who decided Calvi's death and his executioners, and the connections had been cut out of the heart of the prosecution. And the dark powers abide.

I was 22 I guess, and not very sharp, when I read Eugene Ionesco's play The Killing Game. There's an unknown plague ravaging a town; characters drop dead without warning. There are no symptoms, and no cure. I remember thinking how terrible such a circumstance would be, before it occurred to me, finally, that it was precisely our circumstance.

How old are you? I'll be 48 fucking years old next month. I remember nothing of the first four and little of the next ten. Then came the wanking, followed in quick succession by Marxism, Maoism, Evangelism and Christian Atheism. By the time I was 24 I'd thought I had it all figured out several times over, when actually the whole while I'd been nothing but a wanker.

How much time do we have? The world itself seems on the clock now, as we ourselves have been all along. How many more years do we have to figure it out, let alone do something about it once we have? The fact is, we've never had the time we need, even if we get ourselves off to a good start. Knowledge, the Qabalist says, is a false crown. Perhaps a paper birthday hat.

In The Filth, Grant Morrison has a character exclaim, before he knows what he's saying, "Imagine time itself as a weapon!" I think I get it now.

141 Comments:

Blogger monax said...

"Winning the battle for public opinion is a hollow victory, one the other side is happy to concede, because the long war they wage need not regard what we think of it."

profound...

6/08/2007 01:23:00 PM  
Blogger Billy Shears said...

I'm 29. Still a wanker, but I like to think that I am at least a little bit more aware of the fact that we are all just bits in a huge drama, the point of which is to keep us stupid and scared shitless while sucking out all of our real energy, so that whoever is behind the curtain (whether that curtain be in the shadows or in own minds) can stay there.

I'm old enough to realize that we're all fucked. But young enough to have not given up hope yet.

6/08/2007 01:52:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What day is your birthday, Jeff?

I'm a Cancer too.

6/08/2007 02:32:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm a Cancer too.

You're not alone.

We are all one big cancer devouring our host, Planet Earth.

6/08/2007 02:53:00 PM  
Blogger Joe Adams said...

Jeff says:
"What is the currency of popular opinion in our post-modern, fascist global hegemony?"
Keeping to your anology: Because the market is flooded with counterfeit bills. The most frightening thing about an idea is it can, at times, grow so large that one can no longer flush it down the toilet. One has no recourse but to set it in bronze and place it above the hearth - occasionally taking it off the mantle to break the ice at dinner parties. This seems to be their weapon of choice.
My greatest concern is that Santa has already left the building - leaving the elves alone with his toys. Hence, the countdown to the end of the world...

6/08/2007 03:02:00 PM  
Blogger sewall said...

Jeff, the tone of this post has me worried for you. Take care of yourself; you're brilliant. Console yourself with the bleak fact that every generation thinks it's witnessing the end.

I read every post on this blog, and I'm also a cancer.

6/08/2007 04:15:00 PM  
Blogger Jeff Wells said...

What day is your birthday, Jeff?"

July 13

Jeff, the tone of this post has me worried for you.

Thanks, but don't worry. I'm okay. I know it's a pessimistic post but I don't feel nearly as down as my worldview perhaps suggests I should.

6/08/2007 04:32:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Well you know, what can you do?

Its a bit depressing to look at the big picture and all those at the top of the Zionist pyramid who pull strings and people die.

I've relegeted myself to keeping as up to date as i can and to hell with those who turn a blind eye to whats happening all around us.

All i can do is look out for my loved ones and myself as best i can. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

Everytime i read a blog like this i go out and buy a few more rounds.

I know i'm a small fish in the sea and probably don't matter much.

I do hope to make a difference one day.

I know that day is coming and i will be ready when it comes.

6/08/2007 05:00:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

who can say
where the road goes
where the day flows
only time

Enya

I actually do not like that song much. But I shared the lyric anyway.

Because of injustice or the long length of days it takes to see justice prevail, men and women, in general, will want to do bad things to others. "Here's your dinner kids. Broth without any bread and be thankful you got that. Just remember who our president is." We can justify our own mean streak in ourselves because justice has been delayed for so long.

Injustices performed without retribution is the trickle down effect that ignites the forest fire. We become embittered as to harm others for simple petty reasons. "You're a Democrat. What do you care." We may be linked in any way to persons who have done bad things to others. Because of the gender of the person who commits iniquity we may be branded as the same. Especially if they get away with criminal acts. On and on it goes. Time contributes to this reality every time. No justice means more time for us to act and reason in unjustified ways.

6/08/2007 06:06:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

"The world is like a ride in an amusement park and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and around and around and it has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud. And it's fun - for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question; is this real? Or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, and they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because... this is just a ride."

Bill Hicks

6/08/2007 08:34:00 PM  
Blogger oldskool5150 said...

jeff=rules

keep it up

6/08/2007 10:19:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

"When I was back there in seminary school..."

6/09/2007 01:16:00 AM  
Blogger Dr. Bombay said...

Jeff,
As someone who turns 48 yrs. old
this year your post struck a nerve.
But remember, there's a big
difference between someone who
fears the future, and someone who
see's it as the natural progression
of a deeply flawed society. I count
you as a member of the latter camp,
as I do all of the fine people who
post here. We may, or may not,
be able to alter the future
but we will deal with it the
best way we know how.

6/09/2007 02:33:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Please read the dialogue that took place in the courtroom towards the end of the movie A Few Good Men. Jack Nicholson portrayed Col. Jessep who is sitting in the witness stand. The prosecutor Lt. Kaffe is portrayed by Tom Cruise. The Colonel is trying to defend the murder of a private. A murder committed by fellow Marines as a direct result of a command given by the Colonel to kill a Pvt. Santiago. It is the delusional Colonel that represents mischief. The end of the movie demonstrates the consequences suffered as a result of mischief. Do you consider the consequences to be unpopular? Outdated? How about ridiculous?

+Prosecutor Kaffe: If you gave an order that Santiago wasn't to be touched and your orders are always followed then why would Santiago be in danger? Why would it be necessary to transfer him off the base?
-Col. Jessep: Santiago was a sub-standard Marine. He was being transfered...
+That's not what you said. You said he was being transfered because he was in grave danger!
-That's correct.
+You said he was in danger. I said grave danger? You said is there any other kind?...
-I recall what I said.
+I can have the court reporter read back to you...
-I know what I said! I don't have to have it read back to me like I'm a...
+Why the two orders? Colonel?
-Sometimes men take matters into their own hands.
+No sir. You just made it clear just a moment ago that your men never take matters into their own hands. Your men follow orders or people die. So Santiago should have never been in danger at all. Should of he Colonel?
-You snotty little bastard.
#Defense Attorney: Your honor I'd like to ask for a recess.
+I'd like an answer to the question judge.
*Judge: The court will wait for an answer.
+If Lt. Kendrick gave an order that Santiago wasn't to be touched then why did he have to be transfered? Colonel? Lt. Kendrick ordered the code red didn't he! Because that was what you told Lt. Kendrick to do!
#Object!
+And when it went bad you cut these guys loose! You had Moccasin sign the phoney transfer! You doctored the log books!...
*Consider yourself in contempt.
+Colonel Jessep did you order the code red!
*You don't have to answer that question!
-I'll answer the question. You want answers!
+I think I'm entitled...
-Do you want answers?!
+I want the truth!
-You can't handle the truth!

-Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility that you could not possibly phantom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines! You have that luxury. You have that luxury of not knowing what I know. Santiago's death while tragic probably saved lives! And my existence while grotesque and incomprehensible to you saves lives! You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me on that wall! You need me on that wall! We use words like honor, code, loyalty! We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline! I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man, who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said thank you and went on your way! Otherwise I'd suggest you pick up a weapon and stand to post! Either way I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!
+Did you order the code red?
-I did the job...
+Did you order the code red!
-You're God damned right I did!

+Please the court I suggest the members be dismissed so we can move to an immediate Article 39(a) session. The witness has rights.
*Capt. Ross?
+Jack?
#Defense Attorney Ross nods.
*The members of the court will retire to an anteroom until further instructed.
Baliff: All rise.
-What the hell is this? Colonel what's going on? I did my job. I'd do it again. I'm going to get on a plane and go back to my base.
*You're not going anywhere Colonel. M.P.'s guard the Colonel.
M.P.: Yes sir.

6/09/2007 04:51:00 AM  
Blogger Qlipoth said...

Well, well - you're precisely one day younger than me, Jeff. (Born on July 12th, 1959.)

So... I'm no astrologer, but I've just looked up 'Cancer' in Wikipedia:

"Cancer rules the breasts and belly. Caesius likened the sign to 'the Breastplate of Righteousness" in Ephesians VI:14.'

So... I'm no fan of St. Paul, but I decided to look up Chapter VI of his epistle to the Ephesians:

"11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

14 Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;

15 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace..."


Which is food for thought, and worth an 'Amen'.

(Great post, by the way.)

- MacCruiskeen

6/09/2007 08:23:00 AM  
Blogger John Kirby said...

Dear Jeff,

Happy Birthday! Whether proving statistical theory or something more or nothing at all, I am yet another Cancer: July 19.

And I share your anxieties about time. I believe it was on this comments page that I was reminded of a harrowing quote from J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians:

What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one....

But while time is on Empire's side, in true dialectial fashion it is equally on ours. It is precisely because these crimes of state--especially the everyday crimes arising from the "dull compulsion of the economic" -- do in fact accumulate in the collective psyche, and awareness does spread over time, and resentment bubbles up to the surface, that Empire twists its hands into the reins and digs its knees into the flanks of history and free thought.

It was because the anti-globaliztion movement was picking up serious steam in the late nineties, and because the distinction between the two parties was once again revealed as non-existent under Clinton that America was given super-egregious cowboy Republican freak man Bush and more seriously, the world was given the events of 9-11 and the War on Terror.

It is the obvious desperation of Empire to stay astride the urge to freedom that gives rise to these acts of agent provocateurs, and it should also give rise to our best hopes...

Are your still doing the Amazon book buying thing? There are one or two I would love to get for you that I think would improve your mood, if you'll remind me how to make the purchase...

And here's a musical exceprt featuring Barbara Ehrenreich from our movie, The American Ruling Class starring Lewis Lapham.

http://youtube.com/?v=gDgFiW2xtf0

I think it will cheer you up.

Which brings to mind another paradox: What would you write about, and what would I put on film, were it not for the ravages of Empire? What would inspire us? Potholes? I suppose in Utopia we would all make love stories...

PS I found the best medicine for when I am in the identical mood you are/were in is to hang with your kids. After all, they are the best proof of Mystery...

6/09/2007 10:20:00 AM  
Blogger CuriosityShop said...

http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/42/love-warriors

Love Warriors

The dark never really wins!

From a mountain climbing Aries!

Hug someone today!

6/09/2007 10:31:00 AM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Jeff...wow - you are old. haha, just kidin.

7/13 is a good day to be born on:

http://www.ewtn.com/fatima/apparitions/July.htm

Jeff, now that you have provided the first secret (your age) will you also be providing the second and third secrets (your hieght and weight?). Or how bout just a pic?

6/09/2007 05:25:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Or maybe the size of his cock, stool sample and his favorite flavor icecream.

I hear you about the Time thing, Jeff. I feel the same way, and I'm five years behind you at 43.

Of course, there's the following, which is my favorite song about Time:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
Its good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.

6/09/2007 07:53:00 PM  
Blogger brenda said...

Jeff has good reason to worry. Global climate change isn't a train posing as a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a damn aircraft carrier. The "Greens" think if they buy a few florescent bulbs and drive a Prius that it will change it's course. They are delusional, "buying green" will have as much affect as throwing rocks at that aircraft carrier would.

Once we hit 2 degrees C above normal the poles will go, then Greenland, then the vast methane ice in the sea floors and from there it's just a matter of time before there are two venus's in this solar system.

Maybe some advanced race will terraform the former Earth and restore it. Maybe there will be a remnant of humanity on Mars. Who knows, but I assure you it won't be any of our progeny that will survive.

6/10/2007 03:37:00 AM  
Blogger Mark said...

I posted a weather wars related thread on the previous post, that is still going strong as well.

6/10/2007 03:57:00 AM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Jeff,

Please allow me to apologize for the filth with which a certain Shrubbery has brought to your honorable blog.

"you are just and fair, and we will return with a shrubbery...one that looks nice" (with not such a disgusting poopy mouth).

The only snakes with rigorous intuitions are Monty Pythons!

http://lorien.sdsu.edu/~carroll/shrub.html

And the only thing Eve is interested in seeing is Jeff's SMILE!!!

6/10/2007 02:16:00 PM  
Blogger Christopher said...

Whatever the merits or demerits or the 18th century Enlightenment it, as a project, has been abandoned by our society except in some narrowly-defined politically-approved area of inquiry. We have all the rites of humanism and democracy but they no more exist in fact than did the teaching of Jesus after the Church became a primarily political institution (those teachings did remain in an spiritual underground however). On the face of it, the situation is hopeless—there's no clear indication of change—all the current forces in power are very deeply entrenched.

A forum like this is useful to keep knowledge, curiosity, speculation, and intellectual excitement alive—and that's very important. I do believe in miracles because my own search has led me to see that the reality we see normally is just a small part of the reality we are capable of perceiving. If those of us who see reality differently from the masses have anything really positive to do it is to fully live out the implications of what we know wherever that leads and not just circle around ideas, new findings, new connections on the intellectual level.

The chief problem we face are not the power-mad players of the political/economic game or the routine disinformation and propaganda that is broadcast everyday but our own selfishness and narcissism. “They” (the oligarchs) are illustrations of the forces we carry within. Power may not be our particular hang-up or addiction but most of us have something that drives us towards the neo-autism that is gradually becoming the new social paradigm. For any hope to exist we have to work within and move out towards others—particularly those of us who share a similar point of view and sensibility. I don't see much of that happening, frankly—most of us are into self-gratification primarily whether through the usual vices or reading about the horrors that populate RI.

6/10/2007 02:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And the only thing Eve is interested in seeing is Jeff's SMILE!!!

If this isn't irony, then irony doesn't exist.

Surely you want to see Jeff's Tatoo (speaking of filth and defilement), no?

6/10/2007 03:39:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Shrubery! Beware of me...I am a witch and I will use my powers to make you SMILE!!! Now that would be ironic

"What is the sorcerer to do if, at the time when he is operating the Black art, his victim is at the local blog roaring at the antics of Et en Arcadia Ego Eve"

Some things are just wrong!!
http://www.danvebber.com/museum/artifacts/raccoon.jpg

(And poopy mouth is included)

:)

6/10/2007 05:41:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am a Virgo, Libra, and a rising Leo. Born under the sign of wind. Both my parents are Cancers.

Old Crone! Is there anywhere in this town where we could buy a shrubbery?

6/10/2007 06:45:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Old Crone: Who sent you?!

The knights who say Ni.

Old Crone: Ahh! No. never We have no shrubberies here.

6/10/2007 06:52:00 PM  
Blogger surrender said...

BRENDA

Well, you have written the BEST expression of Despair that I have read on RI.

You are buying into the "belief" that The Earth and Humanity and ALL of Life... will somehow cease to exist.

You have infintie choices and opportunties to create and celibrate Life.

Celibrate the Life you are living now and the despair diminishes and releases its hold on you.

It ain't over. yet...........

6/10/2007 08:20:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

What?????

No shrubberies???? If you don't understand why we must find shrubberies, then...

That must mean "You can't handle the TRUTH!!"

6/10/2007 08:23:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Who ordered the Code Red, Eve?

Thee Plane Boss, Thee Plane!!

Quick, Belliosto, what's your favorite color?

I Like To Watch, Eve.

6/10/2007 08:48:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Surrender,

My wife and I watched Children of Men last night, and I'm reading IC's suggested The Final Empire. It's difficult not to despair....you must admit...and I'm sorry, but belief in God isn't going to bail the human race out of this final climax, I'm afraid.

Anyone care to guess Shrubbery's sign? The first one to guess it right gets a free Hobbit House, via IC.

6/10/2007 08:53:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Eve,

You wouldn't happen to know Sabrina/Sabina, would you? She was a witch, also...nice woman, by the way. In fact, downright charming.

6/10/2007 08:57:00 PM  
Blogger Dr. Bombay said...

Brenda,
Your post was like a cold
glass of water splashed in my face
at 6 ay-em after a three day bender.
And your absolutley right, of
course. Splash away!
Arcadia ego, Shrub may have
a pottey mouth but you have to admit... he is {GULP} wry,witty
and clever as a priest.

6/10/2007 11:01:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

okay this is why we must find shrubberies. I can only explain the reason based on these writings and only on these writings alone. Thus is this dialog taken. Taken from within the woods. The woods from which the enchanter nearby resides.

King Arthur: Who are you?
Knight Who Says Ni: We are the Knights Who Say Ni!
King Arthur: no not the Knights Who Say Ni.
Knight Who Says Ni: The same!
Sir Bedevere: Who are be?
Knight Who Says Ni: We are the keepers of the sacred words, Ni, Pieng, and Nie Wom.
King Arthur: Those who hear them seldom live to tell the tale.
Knight Who Says Ni: The Knights Who Say Ni demand a sacrifice.
King Arthur: Knights of Ni, we are but simple travelers, who seek the enchanter, who lives beyond these woods.
All Knights of Ni: Ni, Ni, Ni, Ni!
King Arthur: ow, ow, ow.
Knight Who Says Ni: We shall say Ni again to you if you do not appease us.
King Arthur: Well what is it you want?
Knight Who Says Ni: We want...a shrubbery!
King Arthur: A what?
Knight Who Says Ni: Ni, Ni, Ni, Ni!
King Arthur: Ah! no please, please no more! We will find you a shrubbery.
Knight Who Says Ni: You must return here with a shrubbery or else you will never pass through this wood...a-live!
King Arthur: Oh Knights of Ni you are just and fair and we will return with a shrubbery.
Knight Who Says Ni: One that looks nice.
King Arthur: Of course.
Knight Who Says Ni: And not too expensive.
King Arthur: Yes.
Knight Who Says Ni: NOOOOWW! Go!

6/11/2007 02:52:00 AM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

The Code Red was ordered by meeee!! From the Woods via the Knights who say Ni! But Eve is an army of one, a witch having so much fun....my spell is a militarist manuveur via Camelot (or some might say a virus via Spamalot)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_%28computer_worm%29

Jeff...post your pic on 7/13 - and Boom shake the room!

http://www.jazzyjefffreshprince.com/images/freshprince-coderedalbumcover.jpg

6/11/2007 03:15:00 AM  
Blogger brenda said...

My post was not intended to be one of utter despair. Though at times I feel that way and that probably came through. I do not "buy into" a belief that global worming means the end of all life. I think it is possible and I think it explains some despondency from others.

The Earth has been warmer before without going over to a runaway greenhouse, but that was before mankind pumped billions of tons of CO2 into the air. So it is also possible that the worst will not happen. But no one knows for sure... you really want to roll that dice?

I don't know what the odds for the runaway greenhouse effect are. I'm not sure anyone does. But it's possible, that's all. It doesn't help much that we aren't bright enough to realize how important this is and do something before it really is too late.

6/11/2007 05:28:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

When I had my, ‘I got it all figured out, moment’, It was shortly followed by, Gee, I am no doubt, basically like other people, so they probably have this same sensation that I just had. (Is this the immanent god that Spinoza talks about?) Yet, as my dad had shown me, this world had some big problems. Six billion people having the sensation of the potential for ‘perfection’, when contrasted to the world’s issues, nearly contained more irony than my young mind could take. I decided that our ‘truths’ were social constructs, and that Truth may better be found outside of these constructs.

“How old are you?”

I am fifty, fifty-one on July 10. I suppose that while many people read and admire your work it happens to be the Cancer folk responding about the birthday bit.

Qlipoth, nice use of scripture. Not much up for religion, but those verses are beautiful.

Brenda, please read the Alexander Cockburn piece, Dissidents Against Dogma over at Counterpunch. Let us know if this changes your thinking at all.

6/11/2007 06:12:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

It doesn't help much that we aren't bright enough to realize how important it is to see that this Global Warming propaganda, and all the other lies, are designed to control rather than to free us.

And the people that push it, how bright are they?

6/11/2007 06:34:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

So it is just a game of musical chairs and the seven second delay is fair play when you play the stock market.

No thanks. I prefer to stand.

6/11/2007 08:08:00 AM  
Blogger Camillus O'Byrne said...

I am sure JW will agree with me that the comments are an equal part of what makes this blog the rare thing that it is. Insight, wonder, the best of what it is to be human. I have been watching for a while and just wanted to say ... very interesting. But of course, to Mr Wells a special thank you and many happy returns.

And make a couple of observations ...

We should not be afraid to dare to recognise our difference. All are not created equal other than in potential. Many, sadly, out of foolishness or knavery are content to aspire to such mean ends as we see littering the ugly spectacle that is History.

To be without hope is not necessarily to despair. In our present condition (as has ever been the case) the wise counsel giving up hope. Despairing implies the outcome matters. ""He awaits the outcome vast, with vast indifference"." Another quote from the same source comes to mind as relevant in the current discussion (I paraphrase) "Wickedness doth need the Good to give it sense, while Goodness is complete unto itself". Darkness is the absence of the Light, but not vice versa. James Blish knew some stuff.

It may be helpful to some to consider that Time is an artifact of consciousness. It's postulated "reality" must remain forever that ... postulated. At a certain point it is hard to see that that "reality" matters very much at all.

Best regards to all, Camillus O'Byrne

6/11/2007 09:37:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Strange experience here...I read all your comments just now and then received an email from my big brother (small "b", as it should be) telling me how scary this Fox-through-history piece is that he sent me, and I thought, wow, this is scary?! So then I wrote him back, but the whole time I was thinking about what you guys were saying and about how odd it was that you "strangers" were more familiar with what & how I was thinking than my own brother, to whom I'm actually very close. In the interest of following that thought to its logical conclusion and blurring the line between family & community, here's what I told him:

If that Fox thing is what I'm supposed to be afraid of, I'd just like to point out that this is, in fact, just exactly what's occurred. I'm not talking about what you refer to as my tin-foil perspective here(he does, btw, in a very loving kind of way) either. I'll give you a few examples. The standard Leftward rebuttal of history as we know it comes from Howard Zinn's A People's History Of The United States which is available online here or in the index of a massive compilation of such stuff at History Is A Weapon, whose front page reads thus:

History isn't what happened, but a story of what happened. And there are always different versions, different stories, about the same events. One version might revolve mainly around a specific set of facts while another version might minimize them or not include them at all.

Like stories, each of these different versions of history contain different lessons. Some histories tell us that our leaders, at least, have always tried to do right for everyone. Others remark that the emperors don't have the slaves' best interests at heart. Some teach us that this is both what has always been and what always will be. Others counsel that we shouldn't mistake transient dominance for intrinsic superiority. Lastly, some histories paint a picture where only the elites have the power to change the world, while others point out that social change is rarely commanded from the top down.

Regardless of the value of these many lessons, History isn't what happened, but the stories of what happened and the lessons these stories include. The very selection of which histories to teach in a society shapes our view of how what is came to be and, in turn, what we understand as possible. This choice of which history to teach can never be "neutral" or "objective." Those who choose, either following a set agenda or guided by hidden prejudices, serve their interests. Their interests could be to continue this world as it now stands or to make a new world.

We cannot simply be passive. We must choose whose interests are best: those who want to keep things going as they are or those who want to work to make a better world. If we choose the latter, we must seek out the tools we will need. History is just one tool to shape our understanding of our world. And every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.
(Enter History Is A Weapon.)



Now, Zinn is alright, but the story of the story goes much, much deeper, beyond politics, beyond conspiracy (although both are certainly contained within what is fashionably called the meta-narrative of man.) One of the most accessible versions of this is Wm Kötke’s The Final Empire (also online), although you can get the gist of it from just one short chapter, The Principles of Life .

You mention fear, brother...well, it is scary, this mess we’re in, but if FDR was right about just one thing it’s that we really do have nothing to fear but fear itself. The world as it is depends pretty much on the despair & distraction that are the main items on the menu today. This does not mean that it’s hopeless, however.

Not only do we have the means of restoring the health of the Earth and throwing off the shackles of statism and blind-eyed, worm-gutting consumerism, there are actually people doing just that right now. If we had the luxury of using the State to implement policy level solutions in the critical areas of energy, bio-diversity, toxin containment, economic & political stability, etc, we could turn this thing around within a few years. That won’t happen because the current system profits from our malaise, from the death spiral they’ve engineered, but there are people who are implementing the solutions at hand at the grassroots level anyway.

There are two important assumptions in that last statement—that we have the solutions and that grassroots level activity can make a difference—which you have to understand if you want your hope to be based on anything more “concrete” than your love of your children and of life itself. We do have the technology needed to fix the planet. When President Gas talks about putting money into research on ethanol & “switchgrass” alternative fuels, he’s giving you a line of the purest shit. We have the tech, and it’s for damned sure not biomass or any other such oil industry backed program.

When we talk about grassroots activity, it’s not as a measure of last resort, a last-ditch desperation, but as the most meaningful avenue of change. One reason for this is that any large scale, public works type of project can be very easily subverted from within. Look at the track record of the world’s revolutions, especially the socialist & humanist endeavors. We want peace & equity and we end up with Stalin & yet further hierarchies…just as the system demands. On the grassroots level, we have immediacy, we have people living in the new environments they create. One day we might be able to create stable, participatory & representative democracies, but not within the present climate and institutional structures. So, fuck ‘em. We build now instead and let the new systems grow up around us, from the bottom up.

For more on the new directions, see the following resources:

* also from Kötke's Final Empire, Chapter 16 THE RESTORATION OF THE LIFE OF THE EARTH on watersheds…reforestation & much, much more, as well as The Hero's Journey and GARDEN PLANET: The Present Phase Change of The Human Species

Speaking of watersheds, everyone should look into Mark’s Toward a Bioregional State for the structural frameworks

On the tech side, there’s the eco-tech world of Viktor Schauberger, which is a tree of many branches. It includes the modern day (quantum) Pythagoreans, the technologists & physicists of the bio-mimicry movement, the air car enthusiasts, and many, many more. Watersheds also play an important role in these applications. A good place to start is the front page of Alick Bartholomew’s website, which includes some important articles:

* Why is Water Important
*
Can We Replicate Viktor Schauberger´s Eco-technology?
*
Do Man's actions affect the World's Climate?
*
The Evolution of Earth & of Life - a Holistic View
*
Who was Viktor Schauberger? (3-part article from Nexus Magazine)

as well as the best link list on the net for this stuff.

For a quick overview of technical responses to the crises we face, Big Gav’s 200,000 UP post is a piece of art. In it, we find discussions of terraforming (why it matters where we replant trees) and one of several new breakthroughs in solar conversion efficiency (Tiny Quantum Computers in Bacteria = Efficient Solar Power: Scientists at Berkeley report a breakthrough in the riddle of how bacteria can convert sunlight to energy at efficiencies nearing 100%...)

To the question of whether we could or even should engage in terraforming, I’d like to point out that we already are! Chopping down the great forests, damming up the great rivers, changing the atmospheric composition through the introduction of industrial gases, and speeding up the process of desertification are all forms of terraforming. The only difference is that now we’d be doing it intentionally for the purpose of fixing things, as opposed to building fooking empires. Some argue that global warming is just another Peak Oil type scam, and that might even be true to the extent that it’s being exploited for political purposes, but the fact remains that we have altered the planet tremendously.

Another question is how we’d go about it. Since there is significant evidence to suggest that weather modification is being carried out in secret, it might be time we brought this subject out of its closet. While it’s true that weather is incredibly complex—just like the functioning of ecosystems—we do have the math for understanding it: chaos mathematics, the formula of the fractal. It's time to step beyond questions of "should we?" to "what else is there to do?"

(Oh, yeah, NewHeadNews has some good what-are-the-Nazis-up-to-now? stories...)

6/11/2007 05:02:00 PM  
Blogger FCS said...

That's how much they are in control. So much so that the state of public debate is metadebate - debate about what is debateable! The monumental task before people who wish to set things right is actually only the first step in doing so.

And you are cut off at every turn, even at this preliminary stage.

And the answer to that terrible question, "who?" turns out to be "ourselves" all too often.

6/11/2007 07:31:00 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

IC, your reminders of affirmative vectors from around the globe notwithstanding, your reference to FDR reminded me of a question I recently asked a class of university art students.

“Who was the American president at the beginning of World War Two? You know, he was our president during the depression. What was his name?”

I ask them these questions occasionally (name three countries in Africa, etc.), just to get a reality check of what they know and what they don’t.

The results are never pleasant. In this case 3 out of 14 knew it was Roosevelt. Though, um, two of them thought it was Teddy.

This goes back to Jeff’s entry and its tangential concern with popular ignorance. Ignorance isn’t stupidity – these kids can learn – but its roots seem deep in the culture. Positive change in a society seemingly indifferent to history and ideas?

It ain't easy to imagine.

6/11/2007 08:31:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

"Ignorance isn’t stupidity – these kids can learn – but its roots seem deep in the culture. "

Actually, it has been a calculated policy, instead of something like 'culture.' Just read Gatto's book the Underground History of American Education and you'll see that their ignorance is an institutionally created issue. My favorite bit in the Gatto book is the data he draws from U.S. Army admissions, showing that American IQ tests kept going down with the expansion of institutional forced schooling, over the 1910s-1950s, instead of up...

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/historytour/history1.htm

"Chapter Seven
The Prussian Connection

In 1935, at the University of Chicago’s experimental school where John Dewey had once held sway, Howard C. Hill, head of the social science department, published an inspirational textbook called The Life and Work of the Citizen. The title page clearly shows four cartoon hands symbolizing law, order, science, and the trades interlocked to form a perfect swastika. By 1935, Prussian pattern and Prussian goals had embedded themselves so deeply into the vitals of institutional schooling that hardly a soul noticed the traditional purposes of the enterprise were being abandoned.


...

The Prussian Reform Movement

The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus. Ask yourself which form of governance responds better to public opinion and you will realize what a radical chapter in European affairs was opened. The familiar three-tier system of education emerged in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen,1 where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command.

The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require.

From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations—to be problem solvers.

This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain.

Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people’s schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct [passive] attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths [and lies about their own society and] of history.

This universal system of compulsion schooling was up and running by 1819, and soon became the eighth wonder of the world, promising for a brief time—in spite of its exclusionary layered structure—liberal education for all.

But this early dream was soon abandoned.

This particular utopia had a different target than human equality; it aimed instead for frictionless efficiency.

From its inception Volksschulen, the people’s place, heavily discounted reading; reading produced dissatisfaction, it was thought.

The Bell-school remedy was called for: a standard of virtual illiteracy formally taught under state church auspices.

Reading offered too many windows onto better lives, too much familiarity with better ways of thinking. It was a gift unwise to share with those permanently consigned to low station.

Heinrich Pestalozzi, an odd2 Swiss-German school reformer, was producing at this time a nonliterary, experience-based pedagogy, strong in music and industrial arts, which was attracting much favorable attention in Prussia.

Here seemed a way to keep the poor happy without arousing in them hopes of dramatically changing the social order.

Pestalozzi claimed ability to mold the poor "to accept all the efforts peculiar to their class."

He offered them love in place of ambition. By employing psychological means in the training of the young, class warfare might be avoided.

A curiously prophetic note for the future development of scientific school teaching was that Pestalozzi himself could barely read.

Not that he was a dummy; those talents simply weren’t important in his work. He reckoned his own semiliteracy an advantage in dealing with children destined not to find employment requiring much verbal fluency. Seventeen agents of the Prussian government acted as Pestalozzi’s assistants in Switzerland, bringing insights about the Swiss style of schooling home to northern Germany.

While Pestalozzi’s raggedy schools lurched clumsily from year to year, a nobleman, von Fellenberg, refined and systematized the Swiss reformer’s disorderly notes, hammering the funky ensemble into clarified plans for a worldwide system of industrial education for the masses.

As early as 1808, this nonacademic formulation was introduced into the United States under Joseph Neef, formerly a teacher at Pestalozzi’s school. Neef, with important Quaker patronage, became the principal schoolmaster for Robert Owen’s pioneering work-utopia at New Harmony, Indiana.

Neef’s efforts there provided high-powered conversational fodder to the fashionable Unitarian drawing rooms of Boston in the decades before compulsory legislation was passed.

And when it did pass, all credit for the political victory belonged to those Unitarians.

Neef’s influence resonated across the United States after the collapse of New Harmony, through lectures given by Robert Owen’s son (later a congressman, then referee of J.P. Morgan’s legal contretemps with the U.S. Army3), and through speeches and intrigues by that magnificent nineteenth-century female dynamo Scottish émigré Fanny Wright, who demanded the end of family life and its replacement by [state controlled] communitarian schooling.

The tapestry of school origins is one of paths crossing and recrossing, and more apparent coincidences than seem likely.

Together, Owen and Wright created the successful Workingman’s Party of Philadelphia, which seized political control of that city in 1829.

The party incorporated strong compulsion schooling proposals as part of its political platform.

Its idea to place working-class children under the philosophical discipline of highly skilled craftsmen—men comparable socially to the yeomanry of pre-enclosure England—would have attracted favorable commentary in Philadelphia where banker Nicholas Biddle was locked in struggle for control of the nation’s currency with working- class hero Andrew Jackson. [WELL....er, it's more complicated than that...It's hard to call Jackson "working class" only his politics were, against the people who he felt stole the presidency from him in the late 1820s. And that Jackson campaign changed everything, and most elites hated it--forced everyone to start elite election campaigns around the country to rouse support....]

Biddle’s defeat4 by Jackson [once Masonic Grandmaster of the State of Tennessee] quickly moved abstract discussions of a possible social technology to control working class children from the airy realms of social hypothesis to policy discussions about immediate reality.

In that instant of maximum tension between an embryonic financial capitalism and a populist republic struggling to emerge, the Prussian system of pedagogy came to seem perfectly sensible to men of means and ambition.

-----

1 I’ve exaggerated the neatness of this tripartite division in order to make clear its functional logic. The system as it actually grew in those days without an electronic technology of centralization was more whimsical than I’ve indicated, dependent partially on local tradition and resistance, partially on the ebb and flow of fortunes among different participants in the transformation. In some places, the "academy" portion didn’t occur in a separate institution, but as a division inside the Realsschulen, something like today’s "gifted and talented honors" programs as compared to the common garden variety "gifted and talented" pony shows.

2 Pestalozzi’s strangeness comes through in almost all the standard biographical sketches of him, despite universal efforts to emphasize his saintliness. In a recent study, Anthony Sutton claims Pestalozzi was also director of a secret lodge of "illuminated" Freemasonry—with the code name "Alfred." If true, the Swiss "educator" was even stranger than I sensed initially. [I was going to mention this as well. Lots of that synarchic social movement was very much interested in educational design strategies to gain power and transform society in the next gereration via schooling in the way they wanted it.]

3 During the Civil War, Morgan sold back to the army its own defective rifles (which had been auctioned as scrap) at a 1,300 percent profit. After a number of soldiers were killed and maimed, young Morgan found himself temporarily in hot water. Thanks to Owen his penalty was the return of about half his profit!


4 I'm adding this note. It's hard to call it "Biddle's defeat" when his family is still powerfully inbred with the intergenerational ruling families of the United states. His brother 'opened Japan'. His family married into and sired Angier Biddle Duke, etc. Biddle's bank in Philadelphia was alley back door-to-back door to BROWN BROTHERS (future Brown Brothers Harriman, to which so much parapolitical international merchant bank plots come from, particularly the Bushes and Harrimans); if alleyways could talk; Brown Brothers helped to bail out Biddle's bank in the 1830s, to the embarrassment of all their friends and the whole country, it is said [cite: Partners in Banking, by John A. Kouwenhoven]; and the Bank of England bailed out "American" Brown Brothers as well, one of the few it intentionally saved in the global panic of 1837--which was likely contrived--though that's another story...

---
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7c.htm


Gatto's history is definitely a good book to read, if books are defined above as " "...offer[ing] too many windows onto better lives, too much familiarity with better ways of thinking." Raw material regime inclined readers will like the politics of coal in funding the American schooling movement.

Chapter Eight
A Coal-Fired Dream World


A dramatic shift to mass production and mass schooling occurred in the same heady rush. Mass production could not be rationalized unless the population accepted massification. In a democratic republic, school was the only reliable long-range instrument available to accomplish this. Older American forms of schooling would not have been equal to the responsibility which coal, steam, steel, and machinery laid upon the national leadership. Coal demanded the schools we have and so we got them—as an ultimate act of rationality.

...

Most of the anti-intellectual shift in schooling the young was determined by the attitudes and needs of prominent businessmen. The first exhibit for your perusal is the U.S. Bureau of Education’s Circular of Information for April 1872, which centers around what it calls the "problem of educational schooling." With whose interests in mind did the bureau view education as a problem? The amazing answer is: from a big business perspective. By 1872, this still feeble arm of the federal government is seen filled with concern for large industrial employers at a time when those were still a modest fraction of the total economy.

According to this Circular of Information, "inculcating knowledge" teaches workers to be able to "perceive and calculate their grievances," thus making them "more redoubtable foes" in labor struggles. Indeed, this was one important reason for Thomas Jefferson’s own tentative support of a system of universal schooling, but something had been lost between Monticello and the Capital. "Such an enabling is bound to retard the growth of industry," continues the Circular. There is nothing ambiguous about that statement at all, and the writer is correct, of course.

Sixteen years later (1888), we can trace the growth in this attitude from the much more candid language in the Report of the Senate Committee on Education. Its gigantic bulk might be summarized in this single sentence taken from page 1,382:

We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.

Once we acknowledge that planned economies of nation or corporation are systems with their own operating integrity, quite sensibly antagonistic to the risks educated minds pose, much of formal schooling’s role in the transformation that came is predictable. If education is indeed "one of the principal causes of discontent," it performs that subversive function innocently by developing intellect and character in such a way as to resist absorption into impersonal systems: Here is the crux of the difference between education and schooling— the former turns on independence, knowledge, ability, comprehension, and integrity; the latter upon obedience.



http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/8a.htm

6/11/2007 09:52:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Schauberger would have an explanation for this experiment with water. How about you?

http://www.stupidvideos.us/video.aspx/IDp~1666/Instant%20beer%20freeze/Extreme%20videos/

6/11/2007 09:55:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Am I reading this incorrectly, or are Sounder and IC in direct disagreement, above? Sounder's claiming that GW is propagandistic bullshit, whereas, IC presents us with his latest pet paper, The Final Empire. I'm still reading The Final Empire, ans I like it thus far....you really can't refute the facts....and they present a slew of them. The Final Empire asserts that we are a Civilization of Suicide and that we are on the brink of an irreversible ecological apocalypse. Is that propaganda, Sounder, or is it impossible for you and IC to tacitly disagree on paper, even though you both are nearly as close on worlviews as you both claim to be. Mark has no problem distinguishing himself from IC on the fine points, rather than implying they are one on everything.

Elephant raises a good point. If any meaningful change was possible, it would have to come from our childern, or their children, because our generations are tainted and poisoned. That's a tall, and most implausible challenge, considering the yoke of Civilization, and all its machinations.

Thanks, Dr. Bombay, for complimenting me on my Rapist Wit. Belliosto's in for it, now. I'm going to be on him like a bee to honey.

6/12/2007 09:06:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Our generation is on the verge of the most profound catastrophe the human species has ever faced. Death threats to the living earth are coming from all sides. Water, sunlight, air and soil are all threatened. When Eskimos of the far north begin to experience leukemia from atomic radiation and Eskimo mothers’ milk contains crisis levels of PCB’s, we must recognize that every organism on the planet is threatened.

Compounding this crisis is the fact that the prime forces in this affair, the civilized humans, are unable to completely understand the problem. The problem is beneath the threshold of consciousness because humans within civilization (civilization comes from the Latin, civis, referring to those who live in cities, towns and villages) no longer have relationship with the living earth. Civilized people’s lives are focused within the social system itself. They do not perceive the eroding soils and the vanishing forests. These matters do not have the immediate interest of paychecks. The impulse of civilization in crisis is to do what it has been doing, but do it more energetically in order to extricate itself. If soaring population and starvation threaten, often the impulse is to put more pressure on the agricultural soils and cut the forests faster.

We face planetary disaster. The destruction of the planetary life system has been ongoing for thousands of years and is now approaching the final apocalypse which some of us will see in our own lifetimes. Far from being a difficult and complex situation it is actually very simple, if one can understand and accept a few simple and fundamental propositions.


The above is from IC's The Final Empire. I highlighted the part I believe to be crucial. Please compare and contrast this with what Elepant so appropriately asserts. Ignorance is not stupidity. Sure, what the authors of The Final Empire present is simple, but that's not the problem....it's willful ignorance that's the problem, and the Empire of which they speak, a.k.a. Civilization, promotes and facilitates this predicament.

The collapse will happen....and there will be gnashing of teeth.

As Richard states on his blog:

We're riding a greased rail straight to hell
& laughing moronically
all
the

way

d

o

w

n


Sorry, Sounder, if I'm contributing once again to the death knell undertone, or overtone, of this blog, but what do you expect when confronted with such a daunting picture. At least I wasn't a "poopy mouth" about it. If I didn't know better, I couls have sworn (pun intended) that Jeff was Poopy Mouthed in this particular post. He used the F word.....God forbid. Ah...but fans often overlook the foibles of their idols in ironic fashion.

6/12/2007 10:42:00 AM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Shrubbery,

Please allow me to apologize on behalf of Jeff for using that poppy mouth on his blog. I'm sure he doesn't kiss his bebe with that poopy mouth and I'm sure he didn't mean it....was just distraught over contemplating his advanced age (hee hee). Sometimes I accidentally let the f bomb fly when I get a run in my panty hose, but then I quickly eat a tictac.

I want somebody to be on me like a bee on honey!!

6/12/2007 12:27:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Did I say poppy? I meant poopy!

Poppies put you in a deep sleep and I am the snow that wakes Dorothy up.

http://www.toto-lyoz.com/collectibles/crystal.jpg

6/12/2007 12:39:00 PM  
Blogger just_another_dick said...

It's all about being consistent Shrub.

I'm reading a great book right now entitled,“Influence: Science and Practice” by Robert B. Cialdini.

& while I realize it's probably written by one of those "rigid mechanics" favoring social scientists who are solely in thrall of "the owners," it's still quite amusing.

It turns out that humans prefer consistency over logic, hands down.
In fact, humans appear to be hardwired to favor consistency over logic.

For example, researchers asked their subjects to write essays on random points of view they did not hold. When interviewed months later, the majority now held the opinion they initially "made up." It appears that once a person commits an opinion to writing-even if it's a "made up" opinion-they soon adopt that opinion as their own. Some folk don't, but they're in the minority.

If you couple that with these experiments that show that "free will" may be a complete illusion:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/81bc32e4-d5e3-11db-99b7-000b5df10621.html

then I'm sure that whatever they mean for the human species, it can't be good.

Which brings me to my favorite internet quote of the day:

"My favorite conspiracy theory is the one that says the world is being run by a handful of ultra-rich capitalists, and that our elected governments are mere puppets. I sure hope it's true. Otherwise my survival depends on hordes of clueless goobers electing competent leaders. That's about as likely as a dog pissing the Mona Lisa into a snow bank.

The only way I can get to sleep at night is by imagining a secret cabal of highly competent puppetmasters who are handling the important decisions while our elected politicians debate flag burning and the definition of marriage.

It's the only explanation for how the governments of the world could be staffed with morons and yet everything still runs okay...sort of."

I'll conclude with my song lyric addition from Tool:

"My shadow's
shedding skin and
I've been picking
Scabs again.
I'm down
Digging through
My old muscles
Looking for a clue.

I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could've been.
I've been wallowing in my own confused
And insecure delusions
For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in.
I wanna feel the changes coming down.
I wanna know what I've been hiding in

My shadow.
Change is coming through my shadow.
My shadow's shedding skin
I've been picking
My scabs again.

I've been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what could've been.
I've been wallowing in my own chaotic
And insecure delusions.

I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in.
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I've endured within

My shadow
Change is coming.
Now is my time.
Listen to my muscle memory.
Contemplate what I've been clinging to.
Forty-six and two ahead of me.

I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be paranoid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through.

I choose to live and to
Lie, kill and give and to
Die, learn and love and to
Do what it takes to step through.

See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me.
Soften this old armor.
Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side.
Step into the shadow.
Forty six and two are just ahead of me."

& let's not forget, also from Tool:

"Our guilt,our blame ,
I've been far too sympathetic.
Our blood, our fault.
I've been far too sympathetic.

I am not innocent.
You are not innocent.
No one is innocent."

6/12/2007 12:41:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Eve,

Is it poppy mouth, or poopy mouth? If it's poppy mouth, then you have falsely accused me, because I don't recollect saying anything about Afghanistan.

Come to think of it, bee to honey was less appropriate than, say, fly to shit. Afterall, we were talking about shit mouth, unless, of course, it was poppy, then it would be the Taliban on Opium Production.

I have something for you that will hold you over until you find that bee. Here's a link:

www.dildo.com

6/12/2007 12:55:00 PM  
Blogger Dr. Bombay said...

Nature has tried hard to school
us, but the vast majority have
ignored her lessons. And now the
final exam is at hand, and the
vast majority will fail...

"Buy the ticket, take the ride."
H. Thompson

6/12/2007 01:02:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Shrubbery,

Jeff is a poppy head...but you are a poopy head. May I please educate you by introducing your poopy brain to "Dildo", perhaps Jeff has been there:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dildo

6/12/2007 01:21:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Eve,

Just for you, my little butterfly.

http://www.phototravels.net/czech-republic/cr-high-v/cr-highlands-v-009.html

6/12/2007 02:12:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Jeff, behold...I have succeeded in returning with a Shrubbery...one that looks nice! It's Shrubbery that exists in the enchanted woods....see, I knew there was a prince in there somewhere!

Czech mate ;)

6/12/2007 02:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Richard,

Thanks for the heads up. Scott Adams (Dilbert) had this to say on his blog about that. ;-)

Today I Will Improve Your Sex Life

I’m reading a great book called “Influence: Science and Practice” by Robert B. Cialdini. It’s full of research and anecdotes about how to influence people. It’s a real eye-opener.

One of the most potent forms of persuasion has to do with people’s innate need to be consistent. Studies show that people will ignore logic and information to be consistent. (In other words, we are moist robots.) According to the research, humans are hardwired for consistency over reason. You already knew that: People don’t switch political parties or religions easily. What you didn’t know is how quickly and easily a manipulator can lock someone into a position.

For example, researchers asked people to write essays in support of a random point of view they did not hold. Months later, when surveyed, the majority held the opinion they wrote about, regardless of the topic. Once a person commits an opinion to writing – even an opinion he does not hold – it soon becomes his actual opinion. Not every time, but MOST of the time. The people in these experiments weren’t exposed to new information before writing their contrived opinions. All they did was sit down and write an opinion they didn’t actually have, and months later it became their actual opinion. The experiment worked whether the volunteers were writing the pro or the con position on the random topic.

Most of the truly stupid things done in this world have to do with this consistency principle. For example, once you define yourself as a loyal citizen of Elbonia, you do whatever the King of Elbonia tells you to do, no matter how stupid that is. And your mind invents reasons as to why dying is a perfectly good life strategy.

This research provides a surefire method for readers of the Dilbert Blog to improve their sex lives. Go down to the local mall with a clipboard and pretend to be doing a research experiment. Offer $1 to attractive people who will write a paragraph describing how incredibly sexy you are. (Based on the research, you should offer a low dollar amount so people don’t think they did it entirely for the money.) Tell participants that the research has to do with handwriting analysis of people who are writing opinions they do not believe. Stop after you get 100 people to do it. That’s less than the cost of one meal at an upscale restaurant.

Give the participants your e-mail address and tell them they can get the results of the research study in a month if they contact you. According to the science, about two-thirds of the people who wrote a paragraph on your sex appeal will strongly believe it a month later, no matter how hideous you are. And a few of those people will remember to e-mail you for the results. You’ll still have to close the deal, but I think we can agree that I just did the hard work for you.

You’re welcome.


http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/today_i_will_im.html

6/12/2007 02:47:00 PM  
Blogger just_another_dick said...

Yeah Shrub, that's where I read about the book.

That's also where the quote came from.

Keeping with your sexing up RI theme Shrub, 2 young women began working with me this weekend. 19 & 22 years old & they are so effing hot you can here the air burn when they walk into the room. Oh to be 25 & single again.

just for about 24 hours or so, that is.

6/12/2007 04:38:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Richard,

My I just say....

I LOVE YOUR HETERO STYLE!!!

Keep sexing it up (you know in a PG-13 'let's die in each other's arms'...born yesterday kinda way).

Eve (a tropical storm hit my garden today)

6/12/2007 08:06:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

Hmm. A starcrossed male Shrubbageddon lion crossed with an Eve tigress gets...

"...the product of bizarre breeding, they do not exist in the [non-internet] wild...it's impossible to say if they could survive in the scorched plains or the steaming jungles..."

6/12/2007 08:26:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mark, that's 1 b, not 2.

If our (eve and Shrubbery's) progeny can't exist in the scorched plain or steamy jungle, it's because it's organically unconscious, unlike the frog or earth worm.

Eve, any Octupus in that garden?

6/12/2007 08:50:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Nope.....just Octopussy.

You made me your Czech mate, remember?

Cheers!

Eve (007 - Jeff knows)

6/12/2007 09:53:00 PM  
Blogger Sounder said...

When another person has good ideas or style I can enjoy much of what they say, (in my own way), and still not agree with them on some basic points. So what, i am not invested in ‘beliefs’ anyway. Intelligent people that think different than you are more helpful than are dull people that agree with you.

What does it take to ‘Be as a child, so as to enter the kingdom of heaven’? A distinction I see between the child and the adult is that the child has not yet developed an intellectual structure so as to explain the world. If we let the ‘kingdom of heaven’ represent ‘potential recognized’, (while still in this world), then one can say any intellectual structure provides consistency in your ‘picture’ of reality, but -being a mediator between the individual and reality it also ensures a less than direct and authentic experience.

Translation; We do better to learn by examining our experience rather than building intellectual castles to duke it out with all the other intellectual warlords.

6/12/2007 10:32:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Sounder...

Perhaps you have just captured a famous quote:

"I do not seek to understand that I may believe but I believe to understand"

Sort of like the Liger - if a child believes it exists - it is shown to her (so as with the handsome Shrubbery....if a woman believes he exists he comes to life).

I have had so much fun with this post...I can't wait to come back.

Who knew cautious pessimism could "breed" so much reckless optimism.

Eve

6/12/2007 11:17:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

The Final Empire asserts that we are a Civilization of Suicide and that we are on the brink of an irreversible ecological apocalypse. Is that propaganda, Sounder, or is it impossible for you and IC to tacitly disagree on paper, even though you both are nearly as close on worlviews as you both claim to be.


Shrub,


There's another possibility in there, beyond the the easy either/or. It seems to me that, like with so many other things, both are correct, even if they appear contradictory or mutually exclusive. For example, as Kötke demonstrates, we have raped the world pretty severely (the last figure I heard was 6 football fields of rainforest lost every day, along with all the species of flora & fauna--many as yet still unclassified), and yet this doesn't mean that the politicos aren't also using the current narrow definition of global warming for their client's purposes.

As to Sounder & me, well, our central agreement is on the notion that the categories we use to define what we know tend to influence what it is that we think we know (the opposite of Sokal's contention that it doesn't matter whether you're a reductionist materialist of a holistic dynamicalist, since "objective reality" is just out there, separate from our observation.) Beyond that, we've disagreed on lots of things, like ego death, for example, of which I'm all in favor.

Btw, Shrub, Kötke was at his most disillusioned when he wrote FE. In his most recent piece, THE HERO'S JOURNEY, he looks at our choice now as the biggest fork in the road of our evolution with a reasonable level of optimism:

The Gauntlet

The human species is faced with an ultimatum. Will the species die off or can a rabbit be pulled out of the hat over the long term? Inasmuch as humans live from other living things, we know that whatever humans may exist in two hundred years will be humans that have been able to keep their area of the planet alive.

We live in an era in which a number of things are occurring that have never happened to the species before. We live in a time of human-caused, mass, global, die-off of species. This is the third and largest mass die-off of species since life began on earth, the previous (and second) die-off being when the dinosaurs went down millions of years ago. Humans have also caused the ozone holes and the climate warming. But, we also now have planetary communication and through the internet we also have planetary communication available on an individual level. This is the first time that the human species as a whole can communicate. This is also the first time that humans are in control of evolution on this whole planet and the possible further manifestation of themselves. Humans are in control and the choices that they make in the next few generations will determine the course for the future of the species as well as the earth.

The Cultural Conditioning

Culture is hypnosis. A hypnotic suggestion can be given in deep trance or in light trance, a state of conscious attention such as watching television. In light trance the suggestion is repetitive over time. We have all had a world view suggested to us by our cultural conditioning. For example, we intellectually know that, except for native people, the rest of us in the American hemisphere and many other places on the planet are colonials. But, we don’t subconsciously hold this understanding because of culturalization. Since birth we have heard of "warlike" Indians. But intellectually we know that any country that is invaded will put up a vigorous response. Intellectually we know that, according to the historian Eduardo Galeano, up to 70 million native people were eliminated from the Americas by sword and pestilence yet we subconsciously view the holocaust of the Jews and Armenians as the only significant massacres.

In this manner our world view is created. The gold fish does not see the water. As our culture instructs us that wealth is security and is the purpose of life, we use up the earth more rapidly toward our demise. On a psychological level we identify with our material possessions and subconsciously assume our existence without these elements would be non-identity. Our needs toward greater ego-security also point toward our demise.

The Species Initiation

Now that the planet-wide human species, is by default, in control of the life of the earth we can understand what would be needed for the species to succeed to full maturity. The first order is to stay alive. To do that we must maintain that which feeds and shelters us. We must keep the earth alive and ecologically restore it even in the areas of dense human population today. Our reality view is, in fact, global now by default. Ozone holes, nuclear radiation, sea level rise, planet heating and the rubbing out of the living flesh of the earth are global phenomena.

Like the Six Nations Iroquois who frame each tribal decision to its effects on the seventh generation, we must create a reality frame as the life of the earth. Given our subconscious conditioning that is difficult, but in this case our intellect can lead us. If we can frame our cultural reality view as based upon the care of the earth and teach that to the children, then many other cultural values will flow from that.

A present day citizen of the earth, if they were a mature and responsible adult, would say that honorable actions would perpetuate the living earth for its sake as well as for the progeny of the human species. That commitment at the level of the whole species would signify the initiation of the species to maturity.

The Hero At The Portals of Initiation

The center does not hold.. Oil and the resources of the earth such as soil and forests are exhausting as the mass swells. Can the hero make it through the disintegration? Can small land based, self-sufficient communities make it through, some of them? Can they carry the universal value of life through with their culture? Can they create a culture that will spread in the future, that focuses on the highest development of each human as a person rather than the highest rung up the ladder of empire? This is what is being asked of the hero for initiation into human species maturity - nothing less than courage, the adherence to the culture of life over long periods of time and transformation.

All the elements that we need exist. We have examples of alternative buildings, created from local materials, with solar advantages that can heat and cool themselves with no outside energy inputs. We have a world-wide movement to Permaculture which can help us restore ecologies while producing more human food per acre than the industrial system. We have a wide and increasing selection of human development methods which can aid in the development of each individual to their highest potential - outside the materialist paradigm. We have planetary communication through the internet whose maintenance could require few resources.

When the hero can succeed at the matter of keeping the human species and the planet alive and see that as just a "housekeeping" duty, then we can get on with the truly challenging task of creating a positive and joyous human culture to which the hero is entitled.



The key here is not the technology to save us, but the will. And this is where elephant's thing about it being up to our descendants to fix our problems (as well as all that mainstream determinist science that follows about free will being an illusion) misses out on something very, very crucial. Self-awareness. We can talk about how people used to do this or that through history like some kind of blind automatons whose every action was strictly determined by material circumstance (which would still be incorrect, incidentally), but the fact is that our perspective has changed from the local to the global. Our awareness of our predicament (and of our awareness of our predicament) create feedback loops that were impossible when we were still swallowing the propaganda we were fed so unquestioningly.

The universe is not dead--mechanism as a way of understanding it is. John Searle explains with great skill why Skinner's behavioralism died in Mind: A Brief Introduction , but he gets himself into a bit of a pickle when he attempts to transcend dualism, as we see in this interesting puzzle from one review:

Searle does insist that the mind is not material nor reduceable to matter, but he does think the very existence of mind is attributable to matter.

Okay, it's not that great a mystery (Sounder certainly knows at least one solution) if we just conceded that we are more than the sum of our parts. Just like Nature; you don't have to call it "Gaia" in any literal sense in order to appreciate that it is a living, breathing system of systems which has grown out of life's propensity toward complexification. The materialists think that entropy is the Last Law because they haven't yet wrapped their minds around negative entropy.


How many of us would choose to the right thing, if once given the choice? Are we really so superior to the rest of the herd, the much-maligned sheeple, that we can be certain that they would not also make the right choice if they knew there was a choice to make? Why is it that such concentrated efforts have gone into dumbing down the populace and then using distraction, fear and the many pornographies of unmindfulness to keep them in line?

Because we are all human--debased, enlightened and all the stages in between--and the one thing we all share (at least potentially) is biophilia.


Anyone interested in an extremely good post not necessarily related to this discussion should check out Big Gav's recent Shockwave Rider, for another view of the issues of our time.

6/13/2007 01:26:00 AM  
Blogger quixotejunior said...

any plans on rebutting vincent bugliosi's "reclaiming history"?

6/13/2007 01:27:00 AM  
Blogger middleworld said...

Speaking of St. Paul, Jesus didn't want to start a religion, but Paul did. The "spiritual wickedness in high places" really sums it up.

It seems to be impossible for us humans to organize above the tribal level without "spiritual wickedness" overcoming those who are in power. Impossible. Paul quickly became like that of which he spoke.

Power corrupts. And whose fault is that? Buddha tried, Jesus tried. Those that followed, and preached as they did, essentially became evil. Power corrupts. The Framers tried, didn't they? Did the original Freemason's try? Did Lenin?

Where does the love go, once we leave the tribal level?

We do yearn for freedom and transcendence, but also for safety and comfort.

Perhaps fighting the spiritual wickedness of the power elite only feeds their malevolence and ultimately makes things worse. But it is so hard to be content, exploring consciousness, being a good father and a good boss, reading history and the philokalia. I want to have a bigger impact. I want to make everything better. Yet all I have is faith in a morality that transcends death. And that gets shakey.

6/13/2007 03:50:00 AM  
Blogger Camillus O'Byrne said...

I for one am no more “a sheeple but different” than one of the wolves that feed on them are.

The sheeple’s lack is not intellectual. The proximate cause of their behaviour is an emotional lack. There are some very “smart” sheeple. Someone like Oppenheimer was a genius of the first water but still, at bottom, just a sheeple. There are some sheeple that know exactly what’s going on. Not everyone in Nazi Germany didn’t know what the story was any more than many American sheeple don’t know what’s being done in their name now. Their problem isn’t just a dearth of data. There is no shortage of facts on which to make informed decisions if one only has the desire.

Rather, the sheeple’s identifying trait is their compulsive inability to do anything without looking over their shoulder to see if it meets with approval. From their parents, from their neighbours, from their priest, from society, from their latest Great Leader. Most people (close enough to 90% by my latest reckoning) need to feel part of the flock. Above all else they need to feel that warm glow of oneness with and approval from the crowd. They have a cellular craving to avoid Getting in Trouble. To be thought Odd or Different.

Just ask yourself how many people would stand up for a complete stranger being hassled or threatened or bullied or arrested or shipped off tho the death-camp? I’ll tell you how many – about 5 in a 100. 5 of the others are wolves and will look on with amusement or with calculation about how they can profit. 90 are sheeple and look around to see how they are supposed to react. If the approved reaction is to intervene, hell they’ll do that too as evidenced by their willingness to throw their lives away in Iraq, or Vietnam, or Waterloo, or Thermopylae. Sheeple can show great physical bravery, no problem.

But the ultimate lack is spiritual. Sheeple have no courage. No heart. The Spirit flickers feebly in their breasts. They think spirit is standing up with a tear in their eye for the national anthem. Most people don’t love Justice. They want Mercy. They would think the System was fine as long as they were on top, one of the beneficiaries. This is exactly the situation that exists in the industrial West. The average sheeple is a partner in the rape of the third world and the planet so they go along with it. They do benefit by one measure. If Tierra del Fuegans were on top 90% of them would behave in the exact same manner. Sad, but that's how it is.

Orwell understood this. Jesus understood this. Facts are the last thing the sheeple is interested in.

And it can be a very costly mistake to expect sheeple to act like a sheep dog. It’s not their fault. They just can’t be what they aren’t. The wolves understand this in their bones. Both wolves and sheeple are pretty straightforward creatures.

The interesting question is what is the real function of the sheep dogs?

Camillus O’Byrne

6/13/2007 06:37:00 AM  
Blogger middleworld said...

The sheep dogs work for the man.

If you have sheeple, and wolves, and sheep dogs, then you need THE man.

I guess man would be aliens and technology. Does that make the sheep dogs Aleister Crowley types?

Death is no escape.

6/13/2007 06:58:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

IC.. I figured out who you are. You must have reincarnated from the enigma code breaker of second world war fame.

Eve...stop your beating around the bush and get a room.

I don't like the term "sheeple". It may be a descriptive that others can grasp but it may be a cage filled with crocodiles.

There has never been a time in all history where the hero rises to the top, rules with the iron hand in the velvet glove. We follow the flawed in this spiral dance because we value choice or freedom over order and continuity.

Sleep well Richard. The universe is unfolding as it should.

6/13/2007 07:39:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To lifeasart . . .

And we are above all these sheeple? as we sit at our computers typing words of revolution, we too seem to look around to gage what the reaction should be to the disgusting injusties that are present. lets just blog? physical action is needed, but to what extent would this do anything at all? i agree with you, but don't enjoy the elitism that it implies. these sheeple need to be informed, not forgotten.....

It is cognitive dissonance...as a child would surpress a memory of abuse, so too will a "sheeple" deny the black operations of governemnt, it rocks the whole base that they operate from.....so lets get 'em young, spread the info to the growing minds, not attempt to destroy the misinformed growth of a 50 year old, about the world they live in. Jeff got in early enough it seems.... these "sheeple" are the mechanincs working on car that won't start, they keep fixing a few bits here and there, it works again, then breaks down...when in fact, what they have missed is the 10 elephant sex orgy on the bonnet that's weighing the car down. hmm.......

anyways.... RON PAUL 2008 ? ? ?

6/13/2007 07:54:00 AM  
Blogger CuriosityShop said...

Memorable quotes for
Born Yesterday (1950)
Paul: A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.

Harry Brock: What's a peninsula?
Billie Dawn: Shhhh.
Harry Brock: Don't gimme that "shush." You think you're so smart, huh - what's a peninsula?
Paul Verrall: It's a ...
Harry Brock: Not you, her.
Billie Dawn: It's that new medicine...

Harry Brock: Shut up! You ain't gonna be tellin' nobody nothin' pretty soon!
Billie Dawn: DOUBLE NEGATIVE! Right?
Paul Verrall: Right.

Billie Dawn: He always used to say, "Never do nothing you wouldn't want printed on the front page of The New York Times."

Harry Brock: WHAT'S GOIN' ON AROUND HERE?
Jim Devery: A revolution.

Harry Brock: Alright, let's get down to it... what'll ya take, Paul?
Paul Verral: I'll take a drink, please, if I may.
Harry Brock: Don't get fancy with me! I ain't met a guy yet didn't have his price.
Paul Verral: I have.
Harry Brock: I'm talkin' about big numbers!
Billie Dawn: You an' your big numbers, you don' watch out, you'll be wearing one across yer chest!

Harry Brock: How d'ya like that! He could've had a hundred grand. She could've had me. Both wind up with nothin'... Dumb chump!... Crazy broad!
Jim Devery: [raises a glass as a toast] To all the dumb chumps and all the crazy broads, past, present, and future, who thirst for knowledge and search for truth... who fight justice and civilize each other... and make it so tough for crooks like you...
[Harry stares at him angrily]
Jim Devery: ...AND me.

Billie Dawn: This country and its institutions belong to the people who inhibit it.
Paul Verrall: inHABit.
Billie Dawn: InHABit it.

Paul Verrall: Nobody's born smart, Billy. Do you know what the stupidest thing on Earth is? An infant!
Billie Dawn: Whadaya got against babies all of a sudden?

Billie Dawn: You're just not couth!
Harry Brock: Yeah? Well, I'm as couth as you are!
Billie Dawn: [with a sneer] Hmmmm...

US TV Schedule:Thur. June 21 2:00 PM TCM

http://www.realitysandwich.com/our_forgotten_future
Daniel Pinchbeck The future is not what it used to be. What does our future look like from this particular point in time? Scanning the distressing ecological data, we might find ourselves reminded of Marlene Dietrich¹s exit line to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil: "Your future's all used up." From the Oscar-nominated Children of Men to Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, recent portraits of what may be coming down the pike have distinctly faded to black - sterile, war-torn wastelands where huddled masses forage for survival. These visions reflect the images we see from today's Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. They suggest a darkening of the collective psyche, a reduced capacity to envision a way out from the encroaching crises that we intuit but lack the will or courage to confront. Novels and films of apocalypse function as avoidance mechanisms, allowing us to imagine global doom from a comfortably alienated vantage point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRUOq8osh9c
air sex

Here is a hilarious clip from the TV show Japanorama, featuring an “Air Sex” contest, in which contestants make love to imaginary partners, like a sex version of air guitar. Judging by their moves, it would seem the contestants aren’t drawing from experience!

Cheers!

6/13/2007 08:23:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Elephant wondered how we could have;

“Positive change in a society seemingly indifferent to history and ideas?
It ain't easy to imagine."

But such a worthy challenge. The seeming indifference can change with better models.

I have long thought that ‘learning’ is boring, for most, because current intellectual structures do not provide for a dynamic relationship between the individual and society. Intellect comes to be measured by how well one can parrot back consensual category treatments of the dominant worldview.

Little of the sub-conscious recognition’s are drawn into current conscious models; so there is little internal motivation to learn, (as the sub-conscious element feels insulted). External motivations then take over, corrupting ones felt experience. The result then is the sublimation of sub-conscious elements into un-consciousness, to surface later as shadow expressions.

To be alive is to be a conformist. While few attempt to conform with a dynamical relationship to reality, most conform to social expectations, with all its limitations. Saying, this thing appears like this to me; - helps as i walk on down the road, allowing the perspective to change as i walk on by. Better than saying to your social superior, ‘Yes,Yes,... If we just do such and so, because this is that, it’s for the ‘good’ of everyone, and we will make some good cash out of it also. Then you are invested, and your life work becomes protecting your investment.


Thanks to all

6/13/2007 09:52:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, EricSwan, lay off Eve. She has a Rapist Wit, just like me.....it must be our slavic roots.

6/13/2007 10:02:00 AM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

EricSwan is a bitter garden hoe:

http://www.snakegetters.com/pics/scarlet1.jpg

and Shrubbery is a knight....who "looks as if... as if he knows what I look like without my shimmy!"

Put me on your horse and take me to your room!

(and don't "Judge Scarlett"...just watch Scarlett - http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/topstories/news-article.aspx?storyid=78869)

6/13/2007 11:25:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Beautiful discussion going here, folks. I'd have to agree with a lot of what's been said here about the inability of the stuck ones (a very large group, of which even we who strive are still a part) to transcend our conditioning. Facts alone aren't going to do it; the spiritual dimension is one way of talking about the missing catalyst. Organized religion by definition can't provide it, because it only reaffirms the territorial imperative of its hierarchies, but there are other possibilities.

Jesus & the Buddha did attempt to give us a lifeline, and it's still there, if we can scrape the barnacled priests off it enough to see what it really looks like.

I have some connections with the local Thai community (Northern, Lao-border Thais, traditional, rural, Buddhist) and one of my friends from elsewhere has an even closer connection, in that his wife is Thai. I was discussing with him the karmic debt that America has been accumulating in that part of the world, and he expressed his cynicism about traditional Buddhism providing any meaningful context for our much needed transcendance by telling me the story of the Patriarch of Thai Buddhism recently blessing a battleship.

When I told my Thai friends this story they laughed and said, "What would the Buddha do?" which tells me that even though our institutions can be corrupted, the spirit that used to inform them still lives.

I happened to catch a segment of National Corporate Radio's Speaking of Faith the other day (one of the better shows they still air), and they were interviewing Pankaj Mishra, the Indian journalist who wrote An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, in which he said some very interesting things relating to our discussion here. I should first point out that he is a Hindu, not a Buddhist, so his perceptions are not those of the "true believer" but rather of an Indian who came to study the life of the Buddha by way of the Western thinkers who were influenced by him. (There's a podcast and other audio files of that interview here, btw--highly recommended.)

Mishra concludes that we can end suffering and that the lessons of the Buddha are of great service in this quest, but he cautions that this sort of movement isn't really something you join--the society we build in this fashion is much like what Buddhism (and Christianity, for that matter) started out as: egalitarian, with all power diffused & decentralized. The true paths are first inward, then moving outside of our own consciousness & concerns to focus on what can be done to make the world better--to relieve suffering--which is, surprisingly maybe, quite a lot.

Both focus points afford something to believe in which is not the glorification of the next Great Leader.

Wouldn't it feel great to build one of these in your neighborhood with your neighbors? Even better, to reach others in very different neighborhoods who also need such a spiritual/material dimension in their lives (whether they know it yet or not) by teaching them how to do it, like the carry-over principle of the biotecture crews?


ericswan,

Is there anything that's not an enigma? (I did actually have an uncle who was recruited into the Army's MI and force-fed Russian & cryptography...but that didn't turn out well for him. I was born 15 years and 11 months later--is there some numerological significance there in reincarnation cycles?)


Sounder,

Very sorry I still haven't finished my reply--I keep hunting for the right terms. Unlike writing here, which just flows (sorry, everyone), I'm very halting when talking about myself in this way...I'll see if I can't finish it tonight.

6/13/2007 02:31:00 PM  
Blogger just_another_dick said...

Shrub, I'm afraid I'm going to have to de-recommend the book I recommended yesterday.

While it is somewhat amusing to have such a fine & academically erudite collection of the irrational nature of human beings, its overall point seems to be nothing more than how marketing & sales folk can use our irrationality to sell us more shit we don't really need.

While this might be enough for salesmen, it's kind of getting on my nerves.

And while it may make me a more intelligent consumer I doubt that I'm in the target group of most advertisers since my consumption is pretty limited.

I do wonder how sociologists who use surveys to draw conclusions from are completely sure that the 'surveyed' aren't just making shit up to get rid of them.

Something I am quite guilty of doing.

I have trouble believing I'm alone at this.

Of course, I'm only half way through the book so this may change once again.

6/13/2007 05:32:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Btw, Shrub, Kötke was at his most disillusioned when he wrote FE.

See, I don't call that disillusioned....I call it stark, blunt, honest realism. Are you telling me he's somehow softened? Has he become a Pod Person like so many in Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Did he have to compromise his honesty in order to sell more copies to a wider audience?

Either way, I suppose he was still in his disillusioned phase when he wrote Garden Planet. Here's an excellent review. Note that Kotke doesn't assert that abundance is available regardless of population...as you seem to intimate.


By Scott Meredith "SeeOtter"

This short and deceptively simple book functions on a number of levels. I think readers will take from it largely what their prejudices confine them to, like the seven blind men feeling the elephant. But I'll unpack it just a little here according to my own blindness.

a. The book is a good overview of the scary terminal condition of Earth and humanity. Basic message: the earth is dying and we have the jury's verdict - the culture of Empire dun it.

b. A number of practical, specific methods are described for achieving self-sustaining communities that handle their own inputs and outputs comfortably within a bounded local watershed or bioregion. According to Kotke the solution will be intentional communities, sensitively cultivating a given watershed-bounded region according to principles of Permaculture and Jeavons biointensive gardening.

c. Beyond survival - Kotke whooshes us through a whirlwind tour of alternative practices in economics, medicine, child-raising, conflict mediation, language, etc. These are not described in huge detail, but enough info is given to pique curiosity and breadcrumb trails are offered for those who want to trace on to further education.

The overall tone of the book is a kind of bland "pessimism" about the prospects for industrial civilization, combined with an overall bubbly enthusiasm for the new world of localized non-material (but earth-grounded) pleasure and relative leisure that will emerge. One theme he stresses and restresses is that this vision is not some future thing, it is ALREADY HAPPENING, we have everything we need in place already.

Given the above, the average lefty, eco-hippy type (I don't mean that pejoratively!) would nod enthusiasticaly and say Yay Brother! Because it does seem to confirm and endorse a well-known alternative paradigm, philosophically somewhat akin to Daniel Quinn, but entirely lacking Quinn's irritating tone of superiority, bitterness, and smugness.

However, this IS tough love - Kotke is no fool. Unlike many alternative culture types who deny the reality of Dieoff, Kotke is very explicit that his alternative model not only cannot save industrial civilization (it is the antidote to that), but also that the present gigantically swollen world human POPULATIONS cannot be saved. Munch on the following quote for a moment:

"It is easy to fall into the trap of trying to "save the world". That is, people who are heavily conditioned by civilized culture try to find the silver bullet that will ave it. They try to find more energy, more efficient food production, population control and so forth so that conditions can be maintained just as they are. The information presented here, contrarily, indicates that there will be a massive die-off."

So don't let his "optimism" (justified on his own terms) lull you based on your own prejudices and assumptions. He doesn't give a hard number, but reading between the lines he probably would accept some of the estimates I've heard, that only maximum 1 billion or probably a lot fewer humans, maybe only a few scattered tens of millions, can achieve long-term sustainable continuity on earh, based on solar income alone.

So, combining the various elements of his thesis, we are looking at near extinction of the human race, followed by a long, slow and possibly very painful period of re-stabilization.

One aspect he doesn't cover at all, maybe because in his emerging world people are just going to be a lot nicer due to lack of birth trauma or whatever, is "security". Let's face it, human males are an irritable and violent bunch at the moment (whatever the origin of that nastiness). With all these huge nuke arsenals lying ready to hand, it's unclear to me how we can experience "massive die-off" without some of those alpha chimps beginning to throw stuff at one another. And when elephants fight, the grass is trampled.

Anyway Kotke's written a great book, tough-minded but ultimately hopeful. May it inspire you and your community to dig your own tunnel out of the military-industrial Matrix.


http://www.amazon.com/GARDEN-PLANET-Present-Change-Species/dp/1420823884/ref=pd_sim_b_1_img/105-2701429-0018038

6/13/2007 08:49:00 PM  
Blogger tazmic said...

Shrub,

I like the review. But I don't think not mentioning something counts as an intimation of it - IC hasn't spoken much about population...

However, the FE prognosis seems to be well covered within the UN's Agenda 21. Sustainable development, habitat communities, population control, global government etc. etc.

They've even gotten to the kids already:

http://www.agenda21now.org/

(I like the way america has slid off the globe!)

6/13/2007 09:46:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

1.

Richard said:

"While it is somewhat amusing to have such a fine & academically erudite collection of the irrational nature of human beings, its overall point seems to be nothing more than how marketing & sales folk can use our irrationality to sell us more shit we don't really need."

Maybe you would like a more critical film treatment to compare or compete with the book, which is what you're ogling for it seems?

"This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." - Adam Curtis, BBC filmmaker

The Century of the Self, 1 of 4
58 min

You can find the other 3 parts--each equally about one hour--by linking around once you click there.

Given the RI audience, perhaps others might feel more (un)comfortable with the political angle of what you are describing: the slow 20th century honing of "advertising techniques as mass politics", even as an intentional substitute for mass politics to encourage and manipulate aggregate mass irrationalities as the novel basis of a corporatized, irrational, ahistorical, impulsive, consumerist society that elites want--as opposed to appealing to deliberative mass democracy frameworks. As our 'internal combustion' dicussion ranged lately, democratic politics and other more beneficial material sourcing paths were increasingly challenging forces in the early 20th century.

For degradative corporatists to maintain hegemony, they had to erode and disengage such politics--as well as proactively engage only other far more (de)limited conceptions of humanity in the process.

The Curtis film series documents in a one-sided way the multi-generational proactive effects of treating people in this way over and over. The film starts with--with though leaves out--how it was meant to undermine mass democracies. Still, an interesting film for this proactive side of the analysis.

This corporatist anti-democratic solution, which Curtis's film explores in its 20th century archaeology on the subject, was to appeal and sell to mass individuals and short term irrationalities. This would be a corporate gatekept basis of a substitutionary social policy and even conception of what democratic politics, the state, or even human beings were entirely about.

This was a drastic shift away from deliberation, probity, saving behavior and a more politicized and participative populace--toward a corporate managerialism of aggregate short term consumers. By the 1980s, these techniques were even the basis of U.S. political campaigns, which brought about Reagan--and a little later in the U.K, Tony Blair...

Curtis reminds me of what George Orwell's concerns might have been, if Orwell he had lived beyond the 1940s to see that Big Brother was about to become Big Corporatism instead in Anglo-American 'Oceania,' keeping the same consumerist hooks of Victory Gin and chocolate rations, though held together by a closely watched database surveillance of consumerist encouragement as control mechanisms with the same taboo against "thoughtcrime" that anything could be different from how hierarchical it is.)

Quote from the introduction: it starts with "how those in power have used Freud's theories to control the [politically] dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. At the heart of the story is...[the] American nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays,....His influence on the 20th century was as almost as great as his uncle's. He was the first to take Freud's theories about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations for the first time how people could...want things they didn't need by manipulating their unconscious desires [intentionally]. [Note that Freud warned against it, instead of encouraged it. Freud disliked his nephew Bernays--and America in general actually--and was aghast that Bernays would take his ideas about human irrationalities as a recipe to mass produce it intentionally, as a social policy!]

Out of this would become a new political idea for how to control the masses."


[You might call it a corporatized 'mass politics of consumerism', invented in the USA simultaneous to the era as National Socialism in Germany. Actually, it is disappointing here since Curtis could have drawn out that Nazi era parallel more I think, since it directly touches on Bernays and how his high level "American" corporate mass manipulation techniques were used as the main mass manipulation techniques of the Nazis in Germany. Goebbels drew straight from Bernays' books on how to organize mass irrational enthusiasm in the German public and utilize that in their road to fascist power and endless public festivals of distraction and emotionalism.

Instead of the easy way out of "blaming the Germans as a culture, whew that's over and it's isolated"--which tends to go hand in hand in discussing the Nazis in most people, the Nazis in Germany only gained at most 35% support in the German parliament and were increasingly losing that--before the Nazis encouraged disbanding the parliament "just temporarily" (after the Reichstag Fire, that they assuredly set--they didn't want a democracy anyway and were quite open about it) and subsequently continued this 'emergency rule' by decree to outlaw almost all other alternative parties. (Important side note that still affects the present: the only other party the Nazis left legal in Germany was a very small and widely unpopular Jewish party, the Zionist Party, according to the research of Edwin Black in the The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine and in the books of Lenni Brenner, particularly [1] Zionism in the an Age of Dictators (1983) (which is free on the web) or [2] 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis by Lenni Brenner (2002), which will blow you out of the water, etc.)]

Back to Curtis:

"By satisfying people's inner selfish desires, one made them happy and thus docile. It is the start of the all consuming [corporatist crypto-fascist] self that has come to dominate our world today."

Like most Curtis films, it's an excellent surface introduction history (always skirting around very touchy issues that I keep putting in brackets above--like Bernays being intimate with the corporate leaders of international fascism, for instance, or that German Nazi were using Bernays as a playbook to introduce fascist hegemony. A companion book to this might be 'They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45', which is an intersting view of how this felt in Germany on the ground, published first in 1966.).

However, even in only keeping to his surface public politics views, Curtis does draw out a surprising continuity from the 1920s to the present on the theme of "elite encouragement of mass irrationality" as a political philosophy and control mechanism-- instead of a method of freedom for individuals.

As I did, you may find yourself surprised to the extent that mere corporate advertising campaigns and corporate planning has tremendously formed the backbone of many American "20th century political-cultural" events. Public culture and even politics were increasingly forms of well planned marketing and advertising campaigns appealing to irrationality in the Anglo-American world, a very constrained and delimited public identity since irrationality was all they wanted to see exhibited and could profit from and guide more readily.

In the US and UK, elites over the past several generations have learned to ride this beast of burden for maintaining their unsustainable and increasingly undemocratic corporate weal.

Curtis's films are really the "hidden history of Anglo-American fascism and how it was imported into Germany"--though Curtis would show British BBC restraint in saying that out loud, or going into the German connections of Bernays or the pro-British appeal policies of Hitler. Adding all that in sort of blows the whole lie of public history of the victors side of WWII out of the water, which even Curtis depends upon in his films (like in the other series of films "The Trap" where he utilizes the organizing theme of the "Cold War" as one of freedom versus communism, when it was closer to the crypto fascism moved to a new home, versus communism. Instead of coming out of so called 'human nature' (which, gee, always seems to change based on different principles, eh?), what I like about Curtis's films despite all my reservations about his narrative is that they document in a very cogent way how different elite-to-base forms of hegemony develop as a consumptive alliance--and attempt to disestablish other conceptions of humanity and political economy in the process.

Curtis's history of the intentional delimiting of conceptions of humanity to merely be adjunct of a corporate-consumerist political movement segways nicely into Curtis's other film series: "The Trap". That one gets into other political fellow travelers of this corporatized-individualized worldview of crypto-fascist Bernays --where the only public appeals 'allowed' were to mass aggregate irrationality and individuality. Old European aristocratic stock types come out of the woodwork liking implications of this 'new form' (sic) of 20th century politics like Austrian aristocrat Hayek.

The tarnished silver lining mentioned above of the continuing crypto-fascism (instead of Curtis's uncritical acceptance of "individual liberty and freedom") versus communism would have been a far easier way to film this next series. Though then of course, it would probably have just been a script tossed in a drawer somewhere.

In addition to reminding me of what might have happened to Orwell had he lived past the 1940s, Curtis reminds me of what happens to Alex Jones types of investigative journalism that attempt to work "within the system," so to speak, and which get watered down with towing the line of current consensus propaganda appeals as a consequence, as they attempt to merely stretch (instead of pop) the bubble.

Though if you're willing to read (or watch) between the lines, there are plenty of unsaid angles to explore in these films.

BBC - The Trap - What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom 1 of 3 - ...
59 min - Mar 30, 2007 -
"Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8349032228301471543

6/14/2007 01:07:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Shrub,

Yeah, Garden Planet was the next one after FE and is written with the same level of relative pessimism. The Hero's Journey is a short article that just came out this April, and while I find it far more optimistic (mostly because he learned in the meantime of many new technologies & approaches which could turn this around more quickly than he imagined), I don't think it's fair to say that he's "changed his mind" or that he did so to sell more books. He's not making money off any of this stuff.

We don't know what the true carrying capacity of the earth is. If the current passengers all used resources and caused pollution on the same scale as the Americans, it'd be over already. If we stopped these behaviors and repaired the biosphere...who knows? There are vast uninhabited areas on Earth--something like 85% of us live along the coasts of the oceans. If we grew our understanding of complex natural systems to match our technological "progress," I'd guess we could fit another 6 billion souls. It's not in how many, but how we live.

Responsible, equitable abundance (as opposed to reckless, greed-driven scarcity) is uncharted territory, except among some of our imagineers. Tsoldrin recommended Iain M. Banks' The Culture books a while back, which are good, but it's very, very hard to think beyond what we've known these past 10,000 years. Wade Frazier has some interesting thoughts.

6/14/2007 02:20:00 AM  
Blogger Mark said...

2.

Alright, let's talk "populationism."

On populationist views of environmental degradation, the archaeology of where that idea came from was the British East India Company's anti-cameralism. This private stock driven organization was the backbone of the corporatist British Empire, from ca. 1600-1858.

This state granted monopoly organization had the right to create its own private standing army of mercenaries as an 'outsourced state power'--sounds like Halliburton and Blackwater, eh?. This organization recruited and paid Malthus as the first chair of "political economy" in Britain, to spin his "mathematized morality" about his claimed origins of environmental degradation, gross population.

In other words it wasn't an airy debate couched on the level of ideas. "Malthus" was popularized intentionally because of political economic sponsorship and policy implications of this 'easy' form of social policy: just let 'em die and keep funneling profits out, it's the natural way. Anyone who disagreed with this assumption (or the BEIC's "solution" of a lower-than-Auschwitz starvation wage concentration camp work force) was hounded out of BEIC service, as Mike Davis's book on Late Victorian Holocausts in its sections on the British global empire so darkly documents. Such anti-camerialism was additionally the intentional policy 'inaction' that was the cause of the famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, while grain was being shipped out all the while--the same as British 'overseen' (or is that underseen) Indian famines.

Additional to Malthus, who looms so big in "British intellectual contributions" to world thought, the John Stewart Mill family worked for the BEIC, father and son. The Mill son was in charge of the BEIC's Intelligence branch and policy coordination, the BEIC's "CIA" so to speak.

The Mills'es and Malthus'es and Adam Smiths of the world (for Adam Smith worked for the BEIC as well) had a very political economic intent of their ideas to protect corporate monopoly of the BEIC with intellectual propoganda in an era when the corporate monopoly of the BEIC was under a lot of political attack within Britain. Smith was radically against such monoplies in his thought, though was encourged by the BEIC because how much it fit with their own jurisditional politics to leave everything alone and just let the BEIC sort out what is natural and proper. So they popularized thinkers who helped protect their corproate monopoly and its profits. "Populationism and natural famines and natural human dieoffs" looked good on the corporate balance sheet.

Malthus and the Mills were BEIC proxies, working as 'educators' at Haileybury, the "CEO corporate culture training/hazing camp" for landing a job in the global monopoly empire of the BEIC.

Adding in who sponsored and paid these 'thinkers', in my opinion, that explains a lot that is typically left out in approaching intellectual and policy ideas. It particularly explains 'populationism' and who really benefits from such policies. (Malthus as well seems to have been a plagiarist in the process--cribbed the ideas of the Venetian, Ortes, who died in 1791 I think if I remember correctly--though that's another story).

Let's notice that after the BEIC was over, populationism ideas increasingly became eugenics ideas--the "natural rightness of killing the unfit and poor", which was blamed exclusively on genetics instead of distributionary issues once more. So killing the poor and sterilizing starving criminals was still this populationist drive that was imported into eugenics.

Around WWI, such populationism and eugenics particularly around eugenicist Margaret Sanger (selectively remembered only for womens's rights and being pro-abortion--they tend to ignore her motivations were not these things, these were just eugenic methods she chose).

Around post WWII, with eugenics sort of discredited, populationism went into the "family planning" global movement, which still meant kill the brown people through holding out loans to their starving countries until they allowed in Western American-European foundations that encouraged sterilization and in some occasions vaccines through the World Health Organization that were actually filled with sterilization drugs without the recipient's knowledge. This was the era when Kennan wrote up his "let's toss out this democratic pretension" policy program for the State Department, which went hand in hand with a populationist concern in the Third World and how to maintain "the current frameworks of disparity" should be the only operative policy, he wrote.

By the 1960s, the same populationism started to get a green coating as environmentalism, particularly with the neo-eugenic Erlichs dropping their Population Bomb tract (which actually was the last year that world demographics fit their model <---DO WATCH THAT 20 min)--though the Erlichs continue to ignore this in their latest rehash a few years ago, One with Nineveh.) Instead, we have a completely different world for the past 40 years, though populationists still have a mantic desire to kill off people as if that innately does anything except carry on misdirected goals disconnected with what has been going on.

In the 1970s, such populationism started to be elaborated sociologically, though it was still a form of neo-populationism (Catton; Schnaiberg; O'Connor, etc.) as if population was a direct variable in the mix.

So, in the beginning such populationism had nothing to do with being spun as environmental concern--then and nor does it have it now. It's a green coated corporatist, racial, and eugenics movement from the late 1800s just finding a novel manner to phrase unchanging elite policies since the early 1800s.

And it goes on: look up the Club of Rome people:

"NEWSLETTER #64
August 17, 2004
Whoa, Dude! Are We Peaking Yet?
[by Dave McGowan]

"The Club of Rome, a non-profit global think tank, said in the 1970s that we'd hit peak oil in 2003. It didn't happen." So said Kevin Kelleher, writing for Popular Science magazine in August of this year. But it did indeed happen, according to Michael Ruppert and his band of resident 'experts,' who collectively insist that the planet is now at the point of 'peak' oil production. (Kevin Kelleher "How Long Will the Oil Age Last?" Popular Science, August 2004)

It appears then that today's 'Peak Oil' crowd has some pages in their propaganda playbook that were lifted directly from the Club of Rome, which raises the obvious question: what exactly is the Club of Rome?

Who is it that has handed Michael Ruppert and company the baton?

The initial membership list of the Club of Rome, as it turns out, contains some interesting [American Nazi] names:


DAVID ROCKEFELLER: Bilderberger, cofounder of the Trilateral Commission, former chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, scion of the world's most prominent oil dynasty, and all-around bad guy.

JOHN J. McCLOY: Former advisor to the Mussolini regime who had the honor of sitting in Adolf Hitler's private box at the Berlin Olympic games; later served as High Commissioner of Germany, during which time he signed an order freeing the majority of the Nazi war criminals that had been convicted at Nuremberg; still later, served on the infamous Warren Commission.

AVERELL HARRIMAN: Skull and Bonesman and high-level political operative through several presidential administrations; together with members of the Dulles family and the Bush/Walker family, established various business entities engaged in providing funding to Nazi Germany, even after the United States had entered the war.

Katherine Graham: Longtime publisher of the Washington Post and longtime CIA asset who once famously said, while speaking at the CIA's Langley, Virginia headquarters: "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

Quite a distinguished cast of characters, I have to admit -- although not necessarily the type of people whose lies and spin most dissidents/progressives would accept as good coin.

But guess what?

If you are buying (or selling) the 'Peak Oil' bullshit, then you already have."


My own view is that aggregate populations don't degrade the environment as individuals, because we consume based on forms of infrastructural issues and based on our own material and political choices instead of human degradation being hardwired as if we are cows forced to only eat grass.

1. Let's talk of the interesting inbred thinkers which we owe ideas of biological population modelling. This by the way was of course based on Darwin, though Darwin was highly indebted (he said so himself) to appropriating strangely the ideas of non-biologist Malthus--who got his ideas in turn from mathematic idiot savant Ortes.

Populationism a poor analogy for human consumption, even if it might work for other species, because it fails to capture how organizationally mediated is human consumption, instead of based on one-to-one correspondences with population scale. For humans, population scale is at most is just an indirect variable. The direct variables on environmental degradation are organizational, distributionary, and material/technical choice issues. Thus, in solving environmental degradation is solving misaligned organizational, material, and technical choice issues. Leaving these in place and still killing off people, for a hypothesis, would still leave such organizationally mediated frameworks of environmental degradation in place--less challenged and stronger.

Thus, the only 'benefit' of killing masses of people intentionally (another of my posts) accrues to corporatists wanting to shore up their unsustainable organization.

They know that mass immiseration in particular areas directs itself as political movements against the organization of degradative political economic arrangements, instead of setting up mass passive suicides. Though I repeat myself (read another post).

3.

As an interesting aside, there is a connection between Ortes and Marx. Even when we talk major critique from the supposed other side of the Ortes/Malthus corporatist viewpoint, in 'critical political economy,' Marx admitted his huge debt to Ortes as well, surreally.

Marx used Ortes discourse style of arguing based on external factors in self-checking mechanisms as well as Ortes sense of the innate unstoppable immiseration of the aggregate population--which in Marx's hand was converted into 'epochs of political economy' in his historiographic viewpoint.

Thus Marx openly admitted cribbing from Ortes' and it led to Marx's sense of developmental arguments and historiographic arguments.

More parapolitical:

3b. Marx was less open in plagiarizing from French socialist Victor Considerant, who wrote in the same decade as Marx in the 1840s onward. Marx takes nearly word for word, concept from concept, down to the reworded chapter headings, the work of Victor Considerant. [cite: see the short summary pearl of this, which is really strangely out of place, in the opening of Antony Suttons' book about the Federal Reserve. The other funny thing is that this massive Marxist plagiarism was known as soon as the first decade of the 1900s.]

3c. Far more interesting than lazy plagiarist revolutionaries being called the "world's greatest thinker", are royalist business connections of Marx's textiles magnate friend Engels, who paid 'professional revolutionary' Marx most of his life--and paid him very poorly at that.

3d. Marx additionally wrote several revolutionary tracts on the aristocratic Prussian estate of his in-laws, father in law being the head of the Prussian secret police. Hmm.... The parapolitical seeming double agent connections of Marx could fill a book.

3e. Marx was additionally related to Lion Phillips, hereditary business administration leadership off the 'state within a state' international electrical engineering combine, Phillips.

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Royal Philips Electronics N.V.), usually known as Philips, (Euronext: PHIA, NYSE: PHG) is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, founded and headquartered in the Netherlands. In 2006, its sales were €26.976 billion[4] and it employed 125,500 people in more than 60 countries[5]. Philips is organized in a number of divisions: Philips Consumer Electronics, Philips Lighting, Philips Medical Systems and Philips Domestic Appliances and Personal Care. Philips is the main sponsor of football club PSV.

...

The company was founded in 1891 by Gerard Philips [and his brother Anton Phillips], a maternal cousin of Karl Marx, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Its first products were light bulbs 'and other electrotechnical equipment'. Its first factory remains as a museum. In the 1920s, the company started to manufacture other products, such as vacuum tubes, In 1927 they acquired the British vacuum tube manufacturers Mullard and in 1932 the German tube manufacturer Valvo, both of which became subsidiaries. In 1939 they introduced their electric razor, the Philishave (marketed in the USA using the Norelco brand name). Philips introduced the compact audio cassette tape in 1963 and was wildly successful, though its attempt to set a standard for video cassette recorders, the V2000, was unsuccessful in the face of competition from the Betamax and especially VHS standards."


So think of Marx surreally if you shave with an electric razor, or play a cassette tape.

3f. Marx, according to his housekeeper, conducted strange private ceremonies by himself in darkened rooms in front of a row of lighted candles, with a Jewish phylactery (strange for supposedly a 'secular revolutionary' who abnegated his Jewishness and even considered himself a huge anti-Semite who wanted to see the destruction of the Jewish religion and all other religions. That is actually a Sabbatean principle, by the way. My assumption is that Marx and perhaps sections of his extended family introduced him to Sabbatean revolutionary dogma and practices. It would fit with a lot of the venues he finds himself within, particularly high political ones.

3g. Another strange thing is Marx's connections to Moses Hess are another mindbending occult link, which the Wikisurface link there keeps away from actually. [cite: get that from the sometimes data-lucid book Marx and Satan.]

So it's not enough the workers get repressed by bosses in many cases, they get manipulated by sponsored synarchic revolutionaries as well.

6/14/2007 02:37:00 AM  
Blogger Sounder said...

Mark, your post is representative of material that drives the assertions within my (peculiar) model of reality. That is, How do the conformists and the rebels interact so as to create this thing we call culture? But enough of that.

Kotke? Solar inputs alone? Talk about lack of imagination. Whatever.

6/14/2007 08:53:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Mark..Let's bring your pop con up to circus 2007. The leaders of the band have circled the wagons and Sun Moon and his cronies in Monsanto have picked up the baton. The precis is we can kill them off with nano tech. Flouride in their toothpaste, flouride in their water, flouride in the clouds, flouride everywhere. Now that we have them dumbed down, let's use up the world's food resources. Scarcity...HMMMM. How bout feeding food to cars. That should have a bottom feeder impact no? Think corn. Think scarcity.

6/14/2007 10:06:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Eve,

Would you care to be my interpreter, and translate the last two posts for me. I don't speak their language....and maybe it's not even language...maybe it's intelligence code (an oxymoron of there ever was one). I can't be sure, but it seems as though the message, if there is one, they are attempting to purvey, is that they just want a nice piece of ass.

Forever in me lady's debt,

Sir Shrubbery

6/14/2007 10:19:00 AM  
Blogger just_another_dick said...

"Maybe you would like a more critical film treatment to compare or compete with the book, which is what you're ogling for it seems?"

While I don't quite get that one Mark, I do appreciate the spirit of total hostility your "advice" is coated with.

Maybe we can put you in charge of the secret "green" police whose duties will consist of bashing over the heads the mass of folk who will neither read nor care about anything posted here, & then dragging their soon to be extinct carcasses into the consumer goods free world that they'd probably hate with the same fierce passion they love this consumerist one.

What no one here has answered with any certainty is the questions essential to getting the mass of humanity to just follow along with 'The Pied Pipers of Kotke/Progressiveness/& Gooey Green Goodness."

Namely:

a. Will there be football?

b. Will there be TiVo?

c. Will there be cell phones?

Until y'all solve these, all discussions about saving the world will be moot & confined to the "choir preaching to the choir" category.

6/14/2007 11:33:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yep....that's been my contention all along, Richard. Point B is nice and all....but how do you convince the lounging chimps to get off their barcoloungers and migrate to the sustainable utopia that awaits them, without a calamity?

Kotke sees this clearly....then ignores it with his baseless optimism in contradictory fashion. Empire forbids that migration...in fact, it is Anathema to Empire, therefore, Empire, and its vice-like grip, must fall before any such migration would take place....and therein lies the calamity and gnashing of teeth...because the beer and cheetoes won't flow freely, forever, and the lounging chimps are so thoroughly softened, they don't have the physical, mental or emotional tools to survive any kind of radical transition. They will wallow in their own detritus crying for mommy's tit and clutching the remote for dear life until the silverbacks decide to let the nukes fly and fry the planet.

6/14/2007 11:59:00 AM  
Blogger just_another_dick said...

Well Shrub, according to Cialdini, if you want folk to participate you'd best get them to write their commitment on paper in very specific terms.

"For instance, in one study, college students volunteered for an AIDS education project in the local schools. The researchers arranged for half to volunteer actively by filling out a form stating that they want to participate. The other half volunteered passively by failing to fill out a form stating that they didn't want to participate. Three to four days later, when asked to begin their volunteer activity, the great majority(74%) who actually appeared for duty came from the ranks of those who had actively agreed to participate. What's more, those who volunteered actively were more likely to explain their decisions by implicating their personal values, preferences, and traits. In all, it seems that active commitments give us the kind of information we use to shape self-image, which then shapes future actions, which solidify the new self-image."

So, in the world of paradigm change, the phrase, "In the beginning was the Word," takes on much new meaning.

Although, in a world populated by folk who "actively" rent 'Saw III,' & slavishly worship "the gangsta anti-hero," I'm not quite sure what new "self-image" their really attempting to "solidify."

6/14/2007 12:48:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I see they're playing the U.S. Open up your way this weekend...at Oakmont Country Club. They mentioned that some gratuitous rag declared Pittsburg as The Most Livable City in the U.S. Do you agree? I don't think they used sustainability as one of the criteria.

6/14/2007 12:58:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Sir Shrubbery,

Ahhhh....I have missed you!

Well, I don't have the luxury of time today to interpret code, but I will say that the garden hoe did remind me that I need to get toothpaste at the grocery store this afternoon. I do enjoy maintaining my gleaming white smile with all that crazy fluoride!

The comments today are quite intriguing, requiring much thought and contemplation....which leads me to this:

*****Might be time to sex it up*****

Tis I who remains in your debt…..
Eve

6/14/2007 01:01:00 PM  
Blogger just_another_dick said...

The Most Livable City?

Well Shrub, since Pgh. was recently blessed with 2nd place in the "Worst Air in the Country" category, I think that should answer your question.

Although having a girlfriend beating crack dealer living 2 doors down from my mom, whose clients like to cruise up at 2 a.m. cranking mega-bass throbbing gansta c-rap music should go even further towards "solidifying" my answer.

6/14/2007 01:16:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Mark’s dissection of the “science” of populationism is right on; his description of the difference between the current modes of production, distribution & consumption is also essentially correct. I do have a suggestion or two, however. Mark, is it possible that you could expand and explain these concepts a little more for the layman? I know it’s difficult not to use the terminology that has evolved to describe these things, but I believe that many of us simply aren’t getting this crucial difference in these modes that you understand so deeply as to be second nature & obvious. (I also realize that you’ve done this in TABS, but the slow version will help a much wider audience.)

The other tip is that when we speak of these conspiratorial intrigues, we open ourselves to the sort of criticism that you see in this article that David Neiwert wrote attacking Ron Paul for “right wing conspiracy theorizing”. Now, Neiwert is a jackass, and his attack on Paul reveals ever so much more about the complicity of the so-called Left in the swindle that is the two-party system in the US than it does about Paul’s deficiencies, but this article does illustrate how the system defends itself from those who dare to talk about blowback, imperialism and the racket that is the “free market”. By constantly casting tin-foil aspersions on those who talk about the New World Order, they obscure the fact that the Existing World Order is already a fraud, a sham and a vast, vast conspiracy. We apparently can’t use the word conspiracy anymore, which Kevin over at Cryptogon talks about in Tony Blair Calls for Media Regulation to Contain Pernicious Conspiracy Theories.

Neiwert's game goes like this. He calls anyone who questions the integrity of the "free market" or talks about blowback from our stomping through sovereign nations in pursuit of "American interests" a right wing conspiracy theorist, as we see in this passage:

Paul developed as one of his major ongoing themes the extremist belief that the Federal Reserve is an illegitimate authority, that our current monetary system is built upon a house of cards and is due momentarily to collapse.

Neiwert seems to be placing Chalmers Johnson in the same “right wing extremist” camp. The Federal Reserve has no constitutional authority! What Neiwert is really doing here is closing ranks with Rudy Guiliani and the other two-party whores at the Republican wing’s Torture Convention who cried, “Blasphemy!” at the notion of blowback that Paul was bold enough to introduce into the “debate”. As William Blum has many times noted, it doesn’t really matter which “party” is in office—the secret intervention in the affairs of sovereign nations at the behest of “American interests” proceeds at the same, internally consistent pace.

So, is Blum a "right wing conspiracy theorist," too? Neiwert and his true-blue Democratic party friends are just as complicit in the rape of democracy as their Republican counterparts. What moral high ground do they lay claim to by playing the “good cop” to the other side’s “bad cop”? When he gets all excited about New World Order accusations, he’s simply covering his fat ass for being part of the Old World Order which is already killing us all. When he waxes patriotic & misty-eyed about the free market, in passages like this:

The alternative-universe notion that the Federal Reserve system prints “funny money” based on no real foundation has floated about on the far right for years, and is a key component of some cult belief systems like Lyndon LaRouche’s. In reality, the modern international monetary system is based on the economic engine behind each kind of currency — the levels of supply and demand that a nation produces. It is, like all economic systems, essentially a mental construct, but it has very real grounding in the work of producing goods and services within each nation. The American dollar’s continuing strength abroad is a reflection of our nation’s output; indeed, it is still considered the basis of most international currency rates.

it’s enough to make make me reach for my bucket. (Yeah, I'm spreading myself pretty thin, Gav--what can I say?)


Sounder,

Kötke is not a religion. Nor is he the final repository of all knowledge—I, too, have been frustrated by what you call his lack of imagination. On the other hand, there is a good deal of worthwhile insight in his writing. That oft-cited Chapter 13 of FE contains some great synopses of several very large issues. The problem of mechanistic materialism, the politics of Darwin & Malthus, the promise of Goethean science and of the Pythagoras/Kepler/Galileo/Schauberger school of thought, as quick examples. In fact, in a strange loop back to Mark’s treatment of Marx, Kötke also lays this gem on us in Chapter 13:

In a social sense maturity is seen as self-regulation, that point at which we are not dependent upon parents or others to conduct our affairs. In the organic world beings also exhibit self-regulation. It is the self-regulation of each species that gives the eco-system its balance. Because each being lives according to its nature, the whole functions in resonance. The balance of the human population in a forager/hunter band is self-regulating. This ecological maturity is fundamental. The cosmos exists in balance; the life of the earth exists in balance. Within this we see by contrast that the theorists of empire culture invented ideologies of linear increase, ideologies of imbalance. When the new edition of the myth of linear increase was being formulated in Darwin's time, the rationalist philosophers searched for a motivating dynamic in the natural world. They looked for a cause of change, which they could hold up as the force for linear increase. Darwin and Malthus found the motor in population increase.

For Darwin, the balance of species is maintained mechanically by predators and starvation. As this flood of population continues it is the "survival of the fittest" that culls out the weak and selects the strong, whose descendants then become the new "evolutionary waves." Imbedded in this perspective is a total irresponsibility, a complete immaturity. No being is responsible to the whole. Each being is only obligated to fight others for its own survival. This pattern is in fact reflected in the culture in which we live. This is why we face planetary suicide. No one is responsible for the life of the earth. One simply struggles for the "individualist" power and wealth held out by the culture.

This scheme fit in with the theories of "free markets" propounded by Adam Smith in his tome, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). In Smith's theory, all people were completely rational. With many sellers and buyers in a free market, they would choose the best product at the least cost, thus constantly moving efficiency and social benefit forward as the inefficient died off. In this scheme, no one is responsible, "the natural order," "the hidden hand of the market," brings the "good things" to society.

No society was ever configured this way. Powerful social forces, cartels and monopolies set prices and control supply, but Smith was creating a myth not describing reality. This is similar to Darwin's myth of the population motor. The claim is made that it is not human directed, that it fits the pattern of the cosmos.
As this mythos expanded, "Social Darwinism" then became welded onto it. In the myth of Social Darwinism, human societies such as the imperial society of Britain rise to the top and humans within societies rise to the top because of their evolutionary superiority. Obviously there is no "top" to rise to in a cooperative forager/hunter band but in an imperial culture based in hierarchy this can seem to be "just common sense." We see the financial aristocracy born with the best medical care, fed with the best diets, tutored with the finest master teachers and finished at the best schools. Given the widest experiences of travel, entertainment, and sport because of inherited wealth and the mental reinforcement since birth that they are destined to rule, we can understand how they would readily adopt a social darwinist perspective. They could easily be persuaded that their kind was superior, while they stand on the necks of those who never had their advantages. In fact their class activly prevents others from having those advantages.

The linear thinker Hegel with his "dialectics" also thought he had discovered some kind of "natural" law. The "dialectic" is simply the clash of two opposing forces that result in a synthesis. As interpreted by Karl Marx in Das Kapital, the "dialectic" was focused on social changes in the imperial tumor body. The force of the class of industrial workers contradicts the force of the industrial ruling class. In Karl Marx's adoption of this theory, this would represent the thesis and antithesis. This contradiction of the ruling class and the working class is resolved in the synthesis, which in Marx's view would be the dictatorship of the industrial proletariat. In Hegel's linear dialectic, the synthesis becomes the new thesis and then a new antithesis arises. This is resolved into a new synthesis in order to keep the train of linear events going.

This culture bound theory looks good when applied to human social change within an industrial empire because the culture is based in competition/conflict, but this is an artificially created situation. If one tried to apply these linear theories to the natural life of the earth, they would not correspond to reality. The body of capitalist myth has allowed individuals in empire culture to believe that they have no moral responsibility, because, in their conditioned way of thinking, it is "natural" and "just common sense" that there be the rich and the starving, as that is how evolution progresses. Ignoring the dynasties of inherited capitalistic wealth and the power of an entrenched elite, people will say that it is natural for some to have more than others. Just as it is natural for the more highly evolved industrial societies to control and aid those less able to "modernize."

The body of Marxist myth can only work if there is industrialization. In this theory of imbalance, one accepts the cult of science and the poisonous and destructive process of industrialization as the path to utopia. Like the capitalist variety industrialist, the radiation poisoning and ecological degradation of Marxist lands is seen only as a "management" problem.


And then, a little further in this same chapter he gives us the “other side”:

All Is Mind

The philosophical materialists of the modern empire, including mechanist/reductionist science, Marxist and Capitalist political theory and even such things as modern industrial medicine, would have us believe that we are simply the manifestation of chemical reactions in the cells. In the estimation of the philosophical materialist, the knowledge that seeds have of when and where to germinate, the migration of birds, the complex self-regulation of organic bodies comes about because of chemical reactions. They assume that consciousness is a result of chemical reactions in the brain.

This, we would say is part of the whole accomplishment of empire culture to denature and de-sacralize life to the point of meaninglessness. If we are conditioned to experience our lives as only marginally meaningful, we certainly will invest little meaning in the life around us. The awe, mystery and wonder of the teeming life of our earth is reduced to a meaningless movement of substance.

Yet it is precisely the non-material that makes life real and meaningful. The test is in our awareness. Do we intuitively feel that our conscious awareness is some unexplained process of chemical and electrical reactions? It is joy, ecstasy, love and other feelings that make life worth living. In opposition to the dry pronouncements of science there is a rich fund of inherited wisdom. The large bulk of forager/hunters and aboriginals say they perceive a non-material, spiritual reality. They give varied impressions and descriptions of non-material dimensions.
Hindu yogis of ancient tradition, Hermeticists and others assert that All is Mind.


"All is mind" say the ancients. Form is created by the imaging power of consciousness. Form is created using consciousness as material. Consciousness is light. Form is congealed light vibrating at a lesser vibration than pure light.

When one looks out into the cosmos at night, one sees points of light. This light is the refraction of pure light striking the cells in our eyes. We know intellectually that the cosmos is full of pure light going in all directions from those stars but most of us cannot perceive that light that is not first refracted from something material. We see darkness.

How similar is Kötke’s concept here to what you’ve written about consciousness? He even uses the word “congealed” in the very same sense that you have.

Still, you’re right—he doesn’t have the whole picture either.

One very crucial element missing from this discussion is water. (Yeah, I know you’ve written extensively about the watershed framework for sustainability, Mark; I’m going after it’s most fundamental, elemental significance here.) The health of the planet depends directly on the health & distribution of water. This is why Schauberger is so important. Sure, implosion theory and the resultant technology is great stuff—free energy in the Tesla tradition—but it’s as the Water Wizard that Schauberger has the greatest significance.

I’m going to dig up some links on the process of reversing desertification here, because the other end of it—the control of water resources—is so conspiracy-tinged that it leaves us open to the facile defense of the Chip Berlets and David Neiwerts of this world. (Neiwert even drags Berlet into his article on Ron Paul for “authority,” btw.) As a quick example of how we could truly make Earth a garden planet again, try this one: Greening The Desert. (If that link doesn't work, you can get to it through this one--I’ll keep looking for the others I’ve got around here somewhere…)

Lastly, and hopefully tying all this together, this fixing-the-water-resources idea is one place where we can beat the apologists of empire/defenders of the f(r)ee market at their own game. Once we demonstrate the technical feasibility of increasing the earth's supply of clean freshwater, they'll say, "Nice idea but who's going to pay for it?" and then go on about the "DMV syndrome" (all large scale government projects--health care & the environment--are doomed to be as inefficient as the Department of Motor Vehicles).

We respond, not (only) by explaining how their free market is a rigged game, but by showing that we are creating far more wealth through increasing and purifying our water supply than we use in paying the workers to do it. This is part of Mark's Bioregionalism, as well as the Venus Project's Resource-Based Economy. We can also see a practical example of how this works in the success of the Green Belt Movement; not only were women and other traditionally disenfranchised people empowered politically throughthe process of reforestation, they were also given economic autonomy by the creation of a life-giving sustainable environment.

This is the exact opposite of the Owner's schemes of privatizing and severely limiting water supplies and then sending in the IMF slavers to mortgage the souls of the dispossessed with their "loans" and other tools of bondage. Slavery is slavery, regardless of what marketing specialists, economists and other liars might call it.

Freedom is easier. It's more "natural".

The Prophet Mohammed said: “The world is green and beautiful and God has appointed you his stewards over it”.

Are those the words of a "gutter religion"? Obviously, they constitute a form of blasphemy to the Pirates of the World Bank & Wall Street, but they are words to live by.

Speaking of words to live by, did any of you ever see this one: "Why Can't I Own a Canadian?"

6/14/2007 01:19:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

The U.S. anti-trust laws are certainly honored more in the breach than the observance if this really sticks. Protecting mass corruption, unsustainability, and ill health has become the novel (far more open) purpose to United States institutions:

Monsanto Buys Terminator Technology: U.S. approves take-over of world's largest cotton seed company

From the open publishing newswire: On June 1, 2007 the United States Justice Department gave the green light for Monsanto's $1.5 billion takeover of the world's largest cotton seed company, Delta & Pine Land (D&PL) -- the US company that developed and patented the world's first Terminator seed technology.

Terminator seeds are genetically engineered to be sterile after first harvest and were developed to stop farmers from saving seed.

"As the biggest seed company in the world, Monsanto stands to gain the most by incorporating Terminator technology into all its seeds, thus forcing farmers to buy new seed every year" said Lucy Sharratt, Coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.


From the book:

"As background, the four largest GM crops in the world are corn, canola, soya, and cotton. These four are either being designed to “handle” more excessive pesticides or actually to create their own, because of the innate ecological and biological rigors against supporting unecological monocropping strategies. The preponderance of Iowa’s agricultural area is covered in two of these four GM crops, corn and soya (both owned by the same company Monsanto93) in addition to Iowans being the ‘host’ for these massively polluting factory farming methods for pigs. According to the USDA Agricultural Census for 1997, fully 80.22% to 80.96% of Iowa is in these two crops (corn at 43.28% to 44.02% of agricultural land (depending on whether silage corn is included)); and soya at 36.94% of agricultural land).94 95 The state of Iowa should be renamed. Perhaps some merged name of Iowa and Monsanto would be appropriate, like “Io-Santo.” In short, Iowa is the most agricultural state in the United States in terms of land area used, and in this case for mostly only two crops, corn and soya. As a direct consequence of this unreflexive consumptive planning and monocropping, Iowa as we have seen is the core of various externalities....: it is the core of the animal and pesticide pollution in the United States; it is the core of Midwest soil erosion; it is without any wilderness areas designated; and it is an area where both genders have strong correlations with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer which is potentially related to heavy use of phosphate-based Glyphosate (Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready). Plus, Monsanto’s Glyphosate is a known endocrine disruptor.

93. A telling quote about this one company, Monsanto, and its consumptive power across the world: “Despite projections made five years ago by Monsanto and the White House that most countries would soon adopt biotech farming, basically only four countries are currently cultivating gene-altered crops (US, Canada, and Argentina, with 96% of total acreage; and China with 3%). In addition, only two crops, soybeans and corn, account for a full 82% of all global acreage, while two others, cotton and canola, account for 17%. In the year 2000, the seeds of one company, Monsanto, made up 91% of all GE crops, while, for all practical purposes only two other Gene Giants have products on the market, Syngenta (formerly called Novartis/AstraZeneca) and Aventis (now owned by Bayer).” However: “While total sales of agbiotech seeds and rBGH will amount to less than $5 billion this year, global organic food sales will be five times greater or $25 billion. While only four countries are growing GE crops on any scale, farmers in 130 nations are now producing and exporting certified organic foods and crops. At the current annual 24% growth rate of the organic sector in the US, organic farming will make up over 50% of US agriculture by 2020. And of course, if current consumer and regulatory trends continue, Frankencrops will be driven off the market long before organic becomes the norm.” This information is from Ronnie Cummins of Organic Consumers Association, writing in BioDemocracy News #39, http://www.purefood.org.


In other words, with Monsonto adding in GM-cotton to its global monopoly, its 91% stake in all GM crops from 2000, has probably shot up to more than 95% of global GM crops under one corporate boardroom, a handful of people. All one company, tied into the occult military industrial complex as well, an "agricultural I.G. Farben. "From a blog post:

MONSANTO: OR, HOW THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX DOES FOOD

MONSANTO: OR, BLUE BLOODED FRANKENCROPS

As an introduction, I relate this because it caused a flash of awareness in someone when I said it before: "the ideological and the material are not separate worlds. Different ideologies are connected to recommendations of different materials."

This can be seen clearly in the different interests of supply-sided corporate ideologies and their material choices.

Monsanto stands here as my hardly straw man--(1) since Monsanto controls around 90% of world GMO crops; AND (2) standing in as an example of aristocratic family money power durability in the present, since Monsanto Founder John F. Queeny (1859 --1930) named the company after his aristocratic wife, Olga Mendez Monsanto. Her Spanish father, Maurice Monsanto, was the son of Don Emmanuel Mendez de Monsanto, an aristocrat who had been knighted by both Queen Isabella II of Spain and King Frederick VII of Denmark. Her German mother, Emma Cleaves, was a daughter of a private secretary to King George IV of Hanover. These three Monsantos -- father, mother and daughter -- had abandoned Europe and had taken up residence on sugar plantations on the island of Vieques near Puerto Rico (now the infamous poisoned island the U.S. military bombs to smithereens for testing--despite it being populated with people) and on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, before moving to New York in 1878.

"A couple of historical factoids not generally known: Monsanto was heavily involved during WWII in the creation of the first nuclear bomb for the Manahttan Project via its facilities in Dayton Ohio and called the Dayton Project headed by Charlie Thomas, Director of Monsanto's Central Research Department (and later Monsanto President) [1] (http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev25-34/chapter2.shtml) [2] (http://books.nap.edu/books/0309050375/html/338.html) and it operated a nuclear facility for the federal government in Miamisburg, also in Ohio, called the Mound Project until the 80s. Also "In 1967, Monsanto entered into a joint venture with IG Farben" "It is the German chemical firm that was the financial core of the Hitler regime, and was the main supplier of Zyklon-B to the German government..." [3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben)[4] (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=3960); IG Farben was not dissolved until 2003. For a short Monsanto history see [5] (http://stlcin.missouri.org/history/peopledetail.cfm?Master_ID=1826). [Thanks to Disinfopedia for the grouped links.]

....

6/14/2007 03:19:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

Looks like a showdown building, since a U.N. meeting in 2006 kept up the complete ban on terminator technologies.

Terminator Seed Rejected In UN Meeting In Brazil!

From Multiple Sources
3-25-2006

Just an hour ago here in Brazil, the Chair of the UN meeting announced that governments have agreed to reject language that would have undermined the moratorium on Terminator.

Groups, communities and individuals across the world have joined together in this fight to ban Terminator and your action has been effective in this important first step.

The Ban Terminator Campaign will continued to monitor the meetings today and next week.

Terminator rejection - a victory for the people

A broad coalition of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples and civil society today celebrate the firm rejection of efforts to undermine the global moratorium on Terminator technologies - genetically engineered sterile seeds - at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Curitiba, Brazil.

"This is a momentous day for the 1.4 billion poor people world wide, who depend on farmer saved seeds," said Francisca Rodriguez of Via Campesina a world wide movement of peasant farmers, "Terminator seeds are a weapon of mass destruction and an assault on our food sovereignty. Terminator directly threatens our life, our culture and our identity as indigenous peoples", said Viviana Figueroa of the Ocumazo indigenous community in Argentina on behalf of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

"Todays' decision is a huge step forward for the Brazilian Campaign against GMOs," said Maria Rita Reis from the Brazilian Forum of Social movements and NGOs, "This reaffirms Brazils' existing ban on Terminator. It sends a clear message to the national government and congress that the world supports a ban on Terminator."

"Common sense has prevailed--lifting the Moratorium on the Terminator seeds would have been suicidal ­ literally," said Greenpeace International's Benedikt Haerlin from the Convention meeting. "This is a genuine victory for civil society around the world - it will go a long way to ensuring that biodiversity, food security and the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world are protected."

Terminators, or GURTS (Genetic Use Restriction Technologies), are a class of genetic engineering technologies which allow companies to introduce seeds whose sterile offspring cannot reproduce, preventing farmers from re-planting seeds from their harvest. The seeds could also be used to introduce specific traits which would only be triggered by the application of proprietary chemicals by the same companies.

At the CBD, Australia, Canada and New Zealand along with the ***US government (not a party to the CBD)*** and a number of biotech companies were leading attempts to open the door to field testing of Terminator seeds by insisting on 'case by case' assessment of such technologies.

This [Anglo-American corporate] text was unanimously rejected today in the CBD's working group dealing with the issue.

It still needs to be formally adopted by the plenary of the CBD.

Despite today's victory, there is no doubt that the multinational biotech industry will continue to push sterile seed technology.

'Terminator' will rear its ugly head at the next UN CBD meeting in 2008.

The only solution a total ban on the technology once and for all," concluded Pat Mooney of the Ban Terminator Campaign. Now all national governments must enact national bans on Terminator as Brazil and India have done.

---
http://www.rense.com/general70/term.htm


With Monsanto owning Posilac patents as well (bovine growth hormone in much U.S. milk; tied into lots of cow and human health difficulties--though hey, it makes the cows give more milk, they just die faster that's all), it's hard to find a better poster child for a psychopathic corporation than Monsanto.

THE CORPORATION [17/23] Unsettling Accounts
11 min - Feb 11, 2007

17. Journalists Jane Akre and Steve Wilson were fired by the Fox News television station they work for after refusing to change their investigative report on Posilac, a Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) made by Monsanto. Their research documents potential health and safety problems of drinking milk treated with the synthetic hormone, but threatened with legal action from Monsanto, Fox wants the negative effects played down. The court eventually throws out Akre's whistle blower lawsuit after deciding that the media is allowed to lie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw

6/14/2007 03:37:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're making me moist, Eve.

6/14/2007 03:52:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Just a little good old fashioned PG-13 diversion from Terminator Seeds.

Man (and woman) cannot live on Terminator Seeds alone ;-)

6/14/2007 04:19:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden, Eve.

6/14/2007 06:57:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

[The neocon Machiavellians are getting restless: they had their state terrorism "7/7" in London during a G8 meeting in Britain, in 2005; looks like "7/14" in Germany at another G8 meeting was just spoiled in Germany by alert police.]

newswire article reposts global 14.Jun.2007 14:59
imperialism & war

The German police force thwarts an attempted US [state terrorist] attack against the G8 [echoes of 2005?]

author: voltairnet.org (reposted and translated by Jody Paulson)
Possible attempt to get involved in an Iranian war?

I just saw this article on whatreallyhappened.com . Could any of our polyglot, German posters help out and see if this is true??

My French is pretty rusty, so let me know if I translated this article badly. I can't read German or Italian so I have no way to follow up on the original articles he cites.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article149043.html

The German police force thwarts an attempted US attack against the G8

Deutsche Press-Agentur and Agenzia Giornalistica Italia reported Thursday June 7, 2007 that German police had surprised "US security service men (Secret Service?) trying to smuggle C4 military explosives through a control point in Heiligendamm" where the G8 summit was taking place. After the bag containing the explosives was detected by the testing devices, specify the agencies, the American agents, dressed in civilian clothes, were immediately identified. German police refused to comment on this event (see dispatches below).

With the exception of an Iraqi episode in which British special forces were uncovered sowing terror disguised as Arabs [I did a radio commentary on this -- see below -- Jody], it is the first time that Western news services have reported the failure of a "False flag operation" in Europe.

On July 7, 2005, at the beginning of the G8 summit, an attack killed 56 and wounded more than 700. The summit's agenda was modified, the principal topics being abandoned to address the fight against global terrorism.

As we explained then, the terrorists introduced their explosives under the cover of an anti-terrorist exercise in an identical fashion (to read our articles "Attacks of London: the same scenario was going on simultaneously in the form of an exercise!" and "London joins again with the strategy of the tension", by Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, July 13, 2005.).

[i.e., same issue of an international G8 conference in Britain, expected to go mostly against US and UK, then voila "7/7" happens and the G8 join with Bush/Blair, thus it was probabaly another attempted attack on the G8 by Bush/Blair since the earlier 7/7 was assuredly was British state terrorism on its population from several witnesses and admittals of how preplanned everything was involving the 'terrorism' events--in the London subways and in the double decker bus.]

----------------
[Jody again. Here's my radio commentary from 2005:]
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/02/354070.shtml

INCIDENT AT BASRA

On Sept. 19, 2005, ****two British soldiers in wigs and dressed as*** members of the Shi'ite Mahdi Army, fired on Iraqi Police, killing one and injuring another. After a car chase they were arrested and taken into custody.

According to Sheik Hassan al-Zarqani, a spokesman for the Mahdi Army, "What our police found in their car was very disturbing -- weapons, explosives and a remote control detonator."

But the Brits from the Special Reconnaissance Regiment didn't stay in custody for long. Sources in the Iraqi Interior Ministry said that six Allied tanks were used to smash a wall in police headquarters to rescue the pair. This touched off a riot, causing Iraqis to lob Molitov ######### at the armoured vehicles.

You could have heard all about this incident if you scoured the papers -- albeit with a heavy pro-British spin. So why do I mention it on a commentary called "What they don't tell you?" Well, first off, most Americans haven't heard about it, or if they did the story was overpowered by dissembling and dramatic photos of a flaming soldier jumping from a tank.

Rest assured, however, the Iraqis haven't forgotten this story. Many have suspected foreign occupiers of perpetrating "insurgent" bombings all along.

More recently, a somewhat dubious Russian news site ( http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/66432 ) reports that a number of Iraqis caught two Americans in Arab dress trying to detonate a car bomb. The Americans were then said to have been whisked away by "Iraqi puppet police."

Given what happened in Basra, does anyone out there still believe that this whole adventure is to give Iraqis their freedom?

Some freedom. Freedom to install Western-approved government puppets, but not the sovereignty of incarcerating tow men who fire on your elected government's own police force while packing hi-tech explosives in their car.

http://jpaulson.blogspot.com

---
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2007/06/361023.shtml

Ranks right up there with the leak about Bush and Blair candidly discussing state terrorism a few years previously, discussing "we could paint a U.S plane with U.N. colors and have Iran fire on it" to get the Iran war started.

6/14/2007 07:02:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

The roots of my garden run deeper than time
My tears have watered the stitch that saved Nine
I will before midnight unlock the garden’s gate
for you to ‘be there’ if you are the Czech mate
click….click….wave….
Eve and save

6/14/2007 09:31:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Shrub.. The point I didn't make is that population control "circa" 2007 is nano quantum death. Death by one cell at a time. We should be living for a thousand years but that ain't happenin. Our lives are shortened by aging and aging is cellular. Attack the cell and you eventually take the whole life. Margaret Sanger would be proud. We are in a population control study group. Our best hope is that this is survival of the fittest. I have to wonder why Bush's feces are collected by government agents whenever he is out of the country.

6/14/2007 10:02:00 PM  
Blogger Sounder said...

IC, you are right, Kotke is not a religion. We all have our own ways of coming out of, or refining our conditioning. Kotke has excellent material and he certainly seems to be a step ahead of most other people.

Here's the thing; in today’s model the photon has no mass so Kotke can say that form is congealed consciousness, and maintain that the non-material 'makes life real and meaningful'. But if the photon has mass (a la Bibhas De), then form can be seen to derive from consciousness without need for the material, non-material dichotomy.

So put me in the camp called Formal Materialism.

The trick is to turn around the sense of causal origins as coming from gross elements of existence, towards seeing that the pieces that produce the gross physical are more likely to contain causal origins.
(Current thinking says that the non-material cannot have causal influence on the material, hence the resistance to looking for more subtle causal origins.)

So yes, I am still uneasy about considering that the fate of 5-billion people could hang on the concept of constant solar inputs. This seems to place being before consciousness and represents a somewhat static conception of reality.

6/15/2007 07:41:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Being is recursive not redundant. Why is it the materialists are rewarded for shortening the time/space of spiritualists? Why are war profiteers, environmental poisoners, political manipulators rewarded with every assault made against the spiritual continuum and where is all the gold taken out of the ground year after year, millennia after millenia? Where is it?

6/15/2007 08:30:00 AM  
Blogger Mark said...

Continued: potential terrorism by American plainclothes agents in Heiligendamm, plot seemingly spoiled by German police protecting the G8 and currently either spinning it or going into a complete denial mode it happened:

quoting this:

here are two links that confirm the incident:
http://www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=9424

"Sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that US security men tested [sic] German security by trying to smuggle C4 plastic explosive past a checkpoint at Heiligendamm.

German surveillance machinery detected the tiny stash in a suitcase in a car and the Americans in plainclothes then identified themselves. German police declined comment."
http://www.finanzen.net/news/news_detail.asp?NewsNr=535798

"US-Sicherheitskräfte haben die Gipfel-Kontrollen nach dpa-Informationen mit dem Transport einer geringen Menge Sprengstoff getestet. Der in einem Koffer versteckte Plastiksprengstoff vom Typ C4 sei von deutschen Beamten an einer Kontrollstelle in einem Auto entdeckt worden. Die G8-Polizeieinheit Kavala wollte den Vorfall vom Dienstag nicht bestätigen."

The German one states the US 'security forces' TESTED the Summit security by transporting a small amount of explosives. The plastic explosives of the type C4 which were hidden in a suitcase,were detected by German Officers at a checkpoint in a car. Interestingly enough, the special G8 police unit 'Kavala' denied to confirm the report.

So if the Americans got the C4 through into the G8 compound at Heiligendamm, would they have turned around and banged on the door of the security and turned themselves in? I don't see that happening.

I'll be interested to note exactly what kinds of arguments were going on there. There was already some form of surprise on Bush while he was there, that his D.C. Pentagon staff was being reshuffled without his seeming permission while he was gone. When he heard about it at the G8, he seems to have feigned illness and left the current meeting for the rest of the session, to see what was going on behind his back...

6/15/2007 04:28:00 PM  
Blogger acl said...

Mark

Is the stuff you mentioned about Marx above primarily sourced from Lyndon LaRouche?

6/15/2007 05:58:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes, Eve. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.

6/15/2007 07:34:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

"Mark, Is the stuff you mentioned about Marx above primarily sourced from Lyndon LaRouche?"

No. It's hardly that simple.

1. You might be interested in a contentious book supposedly written by hyperrich privateer revolutionary Jean Lafitte, which I reviewed at Amazon.com. (It's an extensive review where I basically give you some of what you want to know for free. If you want the book, other cheaper versions exist now, so don't believe the Amazon.com price list there.)


2. That interesting book Marx and Satan (though I found some evidential flaws on some very minor occult religious points, like concerning the status of the Pergamon altar presently, I remember, etc.), though for the most part that book is evidential based instead of interpretive. The author's claims about Satanism and Marx, which may be true for all I know, is simply that it makes a very hard case to be 'something' similar. However, I tend after reading the parapolitical work of Barry Chamish concerning non-Jewish (or really intentionally inverted ritualized Judaism) Sabbateanism and Israeli leaders, to think that that author instead may have touched on a Sabbatean angle.

4. Another website of interest I think might be Clifford Shack's website, who is Jewish like Chamish.

5. Another link to patrol around might be the virtual encyclopedia of parapolitical incunabula of Peter Myers, Canberra, Australia:

http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/index.html.

6. Or the occasional Marx discussion at someone I think I would not like to meet socially or someone whom I would not share any social politics with, though has interesting highly documented website at www.savethemales.ca dealing with parapolitical stuff.

7. The Phillips/Marx information came from a Dutch book, published in the past decade I think. I have just read the review since I don't read Dutch.

8. Lineage research, no, none of that came from EIR. They don't tend to do that. In the cases they do that I have seen in the book Dope, Inc., they just throw out a lot of family names to know, instead of peruse their relationships.

Lineage information mostly comes from myself and a very savvy British internet friend, as we both occasionally poking around in databases and old documents on nefarious elites.

9. Oh! How can I forget. The website "Project for the Exposure of Hidden Institutions" at:

http://www.pehi.eu/

10. I think I mentioned that Antony Sutton was another source of that, tucked away into the start of his book on the Federal Reserve as well as his book Wall Street and the Bolshevik revolution.

11. Don't blame the Larouchies, when the ex-Library of Congress head Billington came to the same conclusion about Marxist movement "coming out of Illuminized Masonry" in his magum opus Fire in the Minds of Men. However, the book in many ways reminds me of BBC's Curtis, as both are very thorough though somewhat surface only. Billington does get into secret society and revolutionary politics however. HOWEVER, it entirely leaves out synarchy, i.e., revolutionary politics and secret societies of the aristocratic 'right' (which books like Kris Millegan's on Skull and Bones gets into, with how certain 'right' families were sponsoring 'left' movements; major Banker Marxists in some senses were Bonesmen. The fortune that went to fund the American Marxist 'National Review" was from a banker Bonesman who was supportive of Marxism. Other Bonesmen collected Marxist revolutionary literature as a hobby, and then got tired of the U.S. and went to live in Switzerland by the 1940s). So Billington's view of revolution still sort of perpetuates this left/right thing unfairly, though for that one-eyed view it's a really in depth treatment. (For that other eye, there is Edith Starr Miller, and others like Craig Heimbichner (on the OTO), or Millegan on Bonesmen, or Des Griffin's or William Guy Carr's (the latter, Canadian Naval Intelligence family) both rather heavily documented works..).

---

In general it should tend to be obvious that what I am saying is that I agree with Mae Brussell, you have to read and pluck from lots of different authors across the political spectrum. Why? First of all, why not? Second, because any singular political ideology is a huge barrier to understanding a world full of intercompetitive subjectivities all attempting to gain the same positions of power over each other in equally biased ways of argumentation or strategy. I'm far more interested in the intercompetitive subjectivities so I simply read laterally for that, while noting nuggets of data sewn into fabrics of very different arguments--without necessarily accepting the ideological bent of the author in question.

For instance, Sutton is quite libertarian in his politics, and I personally am not, though that doesn't malign the fact that he is quoting from U.S. State Department records about the Russian revolutionary era--when no one else will touch these documents.

And it doesn't stop me from reading other libertarian authors views even if I disagree with them. I'm not reading them to agree or disagree with them. I'm reading them for the topics they discuss.

Typically (not always, thankfully) many writers in this 'genre' are more interested in 'assimilation' i.e., selective citation and filtering and down goes the memory hole with major difficulties.

The Larouche crowd does this, though I don't blame them for it. They have a perfect right to, don't they? I poke through for information instead of the way they hang the argument together.

(For one instance, I read up on though highly disagree with the whole premise of the otherwise astoundingly detailed Treason in America by Chaitkin (whose father was a U.S. activist laywer in the Great Depression who fought U.S. Nazism in court suits; son Chaitkin wrote George Bush the Unauthorized Biography with Tarplay; Tarplay has done monumental work on the 'stay behinds' NATO and Gladio, etc. which we occasionally touch here; Tarplay as well has probably written the best 9-11 book out there in my opinion, the only openly MIHOP argument (make it happen on purpose), Synthetic Terror.) Anyway in books like Treason in America the narrative from their point of view is there were 'good guy national private bankers (who just happen to be in line with EIR's political program, how unexpected to call them the good guys) versus an entirely separate group of evil British international bankers'. However, that treatment doesn't really make sense of other data like about Brown Brothers Harriman for instance in both 'movements' and far more financially powerful still to the present. BBH is the oldest "American" private (no stock, no explanation of monies in filings) international merchant bank. BBH by the way was the bank Bush chose to dole out and monitor the 9-11 hush money millions to the 9-11 victims' families. They sign over their future legal rights to get the money, so basically it's bribery to shut the hell up about state terrorism masked as compensation. One of the few who refused to accept the money was the widow Mariani, and BBH and Greenberg Traurig law firm came after her to attempt to impoverish her because she filed a RICO lawsuit against the treasonous cabal over complicity in 9-11.

In other words, some Larouche related works or viewpoints are more forced dialectical/interpretive than Marx on this sense of national developmentlism elites versus international elites. :-) You have to remember that EIR tend to be conservative pro-nationalist lefties, though as I think I said before I think it's pretty easy to separate 'author, content, and intent' from each other--if that's what you want to do by reading, that is.

Larouche is sort of a mixed bag,

1. very socially conservative
2. 'anti-corporate globalist' (which would tend to place him on the side of people who are not socially conservative)
3. a "New Deal" state-centric form of national economic liberal policy wonk
4. anti-Zionist
5. and watched closely by CIA proxies like "public-eye.org" who gatekept political discourse for us all (like from Chip "Alan Dulles" Barlet (who was sicced on David Ray Griffin when Griffin was invited to talk about 9-11 information on so called "Democracy Now" with someone who I don't trust Amy whaeverhernameisiforget, oh, Goodman--who didn't bother to tell Griffin his previous agreement to talk with her about 9-11 for an hour on "Democracy Now" was changed to an attack/debate venue instead of an interview--with that guy from Public Eye, Berlet (named instead of "Chip" he's named after Alan Dulles, of the Dulles family of CIA fame). Berlet spends his life chaperoning the U.S. on who to like and why, and who to hate and why. Screw Amy Goodman.

From the points above about EIR's many wedge issue potentials, I think you can see how easily EIR would hurt current arrangements of the cultural left or cultural right (meaning here, Christian Zionist, religious pro-Zionist, pro-corporate globalization; Particularly on the right, THAT HAD TO BE CONSTRUCTED OVER 30 YEARS, it wasn't a 'natural' relationship if anything is 'natural' in politics. It was very hard for the Republicans to do this, though they had lost their base by the 1960s because they were seen as just a bunch of bankers, so this banker crowd who spent 30 years funding and seeding their own base in a 'religious right' appeal don't like people coming along and "wedge issuing up" their current political arrangements of appeals and cross-associations--which is what EIR does. Larouche was thrown in jail days after GHWB came into power. Just a coincidence.

His social conservatism, appeal to conservative workers (which the Left doesn't like either), national policy oriented interest insted of Left/Right collusive coordinated globalism, pro-Christianity though anti-Zionist, and most of all his endless desire to run for the Presidency makes the U.S. political 'harvesting from the Christian Zionist Right" difficult for the Republican Party, and annoying for the secular minded neo-Marxist Left. To have a rightist conservative associated for FDR New Deal type programs just might give other 'screw the poor' Republicans (or Democrats actually) a bad name The trick in the USA is for the elites to maintain such a clientelistic framework where other political choices are non-existant, where the two mutually hating herd parties are run by the same wolves.

(Who remembers--or ever saw--that legal Presidential Green and Libertarian candidates Cobb and Badarnik were both ARRESTED, handcuffed, and taken to jail attempting to get into a 'closed shop' TV debate between the collusive Bonesmen Democrats/Republicans in 2004? Can't show the people an actual political choice, can we? It just might force the Dems or Repubs to change their policies to be representative to keep in power, how shocking would that be. That one of the rationales why I would characterize U.S. politics as perhaps the most airtight gatekeeping corruption ever created in a self-proclaimed 'democracy' where no one can independently count the votes in public and where all districts for the Congress are pretty much gerrymandered to hell to avoid local demographic competition as well.)

Thus, I see Larouche a contextual thing. They wouldn't care I bet except he kept running for President. He was/is a US political wedge issue that messes up the more hegemonic appeals and associations that there is a 'natural Right wing" association between how they have linked it all together currently, or there is a 'natural left wing' association either.

The current Republican party informally maintains itself as a Christian Zionist pro-corporate globalization party, which hey, is the "Left" platform as well.

In other words, for a 'fellow conservative Christian' to be appealing to economic worker concerns or Christianity without Zionism is a huge wedge into how the Republican Party fields itself. It would only split their already shallow base more, if the C word, choice, was offered.

I think the powers that be fear him because he talks pro-worker pro-nationalist policy and is very conservative in an age where most nation-states are run by pro-corporate globalizers setting up police states.

---

I would take it as a truism that most (not all) of the conspiritorial view of history literature comes from people who are, psychologically speaking, far more comfortable being selective assimilators.

Opposite to assimilators would be accommodationists--who attempt to endlessly test hypotheses for flaws aiming to demolish or alter them. I tend to do that. Thus they are more ecumenical about evidence, since they are not setting up an argument in stone and then only looking for assimilative evidence for it to prop it up.

---

I hope that helps. (I still think that there is a place for accident and iterative effects in history as well, mind you.)

I only mentioned Marx originally because it was a surreal tangent off Ortes and populationism theories: that Ortes influences a lot of people from Malthus, to Marx, to (through Malthus) Darwin, to Erasmus Darwin (eugenics).

---

AND if there is a section that you know of "Larouche, Inc." talking about the parapolitical Marx (the person), let me know! I'd be curious to cross compare what evidence they bring forward.

---

Coming at it from intellectual history and environmental issues, it was the double Ortes tie that fascinated me. Malthus assuredly cribs from Ortes on the corporate monopolist side, and on the revolutionary worker side Marx does as well--both accepting that Ortes was correct. (Yes, Marx inverts Hegel as well.)

Even Darwin was mostly inspired into evolutionary thought by Malthus (from Ortes), toward pondering the potential of a godless materialist evolutionary process of populations. Darwin actually hid his ideas like a guilty secret for 20 years in his musings because he came from a very Christian (though non-Anglican dissenting) background. Darwin wasn't an atheist, and he didn't want to give 'food for thought to atheists.' Darwin rushed finally into publication because most of his ideas were about to be pre-emptied by another brilliant biologist with far more biological/ecological South Seas experience than Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace.

---

The only thing that EIR does talk a lot about is the BEIC--because it fits into their nearly Manichean 'moral light vs. evil darkness' national political economy versus international political economy motif.

The one thing that I did pick up from the EIR/Chaitkin's Treason in America was all the information about Engels, instead of Marx. Marx is really quite secondary to Engels in lots of "Marxist thought." Marx dressed the part of revolutionary. Engels was a Marxist who ran a textiles factory with Belgian royalty partners and held a seat on the Liverpool Cotton/Stock Exchange. You tell me who deserves to be questioned more--Larouche, or Engels?

Engels is the actual one to watch, instead of poor sad impoverished revolutionary writer Marx (who saw several children of his die of starvation; others of suicide at a young age, some in suicide pacts with friends). "The League of the Just" secret society is the one to watch.

---

On the BEIC, you could pick up others who write about the international British drug economy. It hard to avoid: John Keay's book on the BEIC, very surface though; Carl Trocki or Mike Davis on the international implications of the drug trade in financing British imperialism; Davenport-Hines somewhat on BEIC, though mostly on drug history internationally; author of Forces of Habit (who I can't think of right now) is a good overview. All of those are for the offing if you wanted other views on the same, though frankly, I think EIR does a good job tying "past" BEIC politics to current politics and individuals and banks--which others are loathe to touch.

---

So the important thing: gets lots of different views on the same contentious topic and see what hangs together.

---

After all that, I suppose I can say that Mao was sponsored by Bonesmen heavy "Yale in China", in the 1920s?

The Antony Sutton like book "Wall Street and the Chinese Communist Revolution" has yet to be written...I would love to see it written. It's the only one he leaves out of his triptych Bolshevik, Hitler, and FDR researches. Perhaps he never even suspected it.

Just the odd Mao thing might be easy to dismiss, though it continues. After Mao's newspaper was closed by then current Chinese government, the Yalies in China took him in, gave him free space, and let him publish a Chinese revolutionary newspaper calling for toppling the current government for a Marxist communist state!

It was more than that: "Yale in China" was administered by Bonesmen from the start, and was known to be a front for U.S. intelligence in China during the WWII period.

The U.S. Navy (under General Marshall) basically held off the Nationalists to let Mao consolidate China.

The person who was Secretary of Defense during these moments in 1949 was the strange insert guy who was actually leader of the coup attempt against FDR back in the 1930s via the American Legion that was talked off in Jules Achers's book The Plot to Seize the White House.

And by the 1970s, who were the first Americans who "opened China", for Tricky Dick Nixon (himself sponsored into politics by a Bonesman, Prescott Bush)?

Why, it was two other Bonesmen: George H. W. Bush and a Bonesman henchman--who remains an implant in the State Department from the late 1970s to the 1990s, 'specializing' in China. That's Chapter 14, in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography--though you would have to know about the list of Bonesmen (from Millegan) to put two and two together, which Tarplay/Chaitkin didn't do as that book was published before Millegan's.

---

The Darwin-Wedgewood family of inbreds is another surprising core of a lot of hyperrich parapolitical people...The 'first Darwin' was the fellow dissenting co-religionist of the very rich Josiah Wedgewood. Like many dissenting religious personalities in the late 1700s and early 1800s, they increasingly turned to scientific methods as a form of progress rebellion and innovation against current frameworks of static caste groups in power. And of course first eugenicist was Erasmus Darwin, who basically warped his relation Charles Darwin's evolutionary biological views into a social caste eugenics view. strangely similar to Edward Bernays completely inverting the intention and drive of his uncle Freud who warned of human irrationality while his nephew Bernays encouraged American businessmen to let it flow like water.

----

And so:

Although it's been said, many times, many ways, that's the parapolitical lesson for today--for kids from 1 to 92.

6/15/2007 10:24:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

Treason in America (p. 297-8) has an interesting quote, on how elite power from their organizational positions can raise up a revolution for themselves to get popular backing it lacked before, by causing intentional destabilization.

This is from Engels' own pen, about how radical owners of factories like himself involved in the Anti-Corn Law League set about to intentionally encourage 'proletarian revolution'--by throwing people en masse out of work simultaneously because they were their bosses.

The same thing actually was attempted in the 'corporate oil strike lockout' in Venezuela, where the state oil company CEO's locked out the workers from the oil facilities and their jobs, 'forcing them to go on strike' because they couldn't get into work--hoping to cause economic destabalization in Venezuela from workers and from lost state finance, that would work against Chavez.

Engels mentions the same thing!

Since the textile manufactuers were the government of certain towns, they intentionally were doing nothing to stop the expanding unrest, and instead from their simultaneous positions as textile magnates were encouraging unrest--and attempting to direct it to their policy goals. This is hardly to deny the workers are being screwed over, just that the manufacturer's were intentionally screwing them over in hopes that any destabilization could serve their own ulterior and previous policy goals.


Such insurrections were allowed. Manufacturers themselves were coaching and leading worker meetings on 'where you should really direct your anger': toward the policy change that the manufactures leading the Anti-Corn Law League wanted for themselves.

Quoting 'History of the Corn Laws,' by Engels,

"...The great means in the hands of manufacturers to raise an insurrection against the Corn Laws, consisted in closing down their factories....[And inversely,] When an increase in wages was to be expected owning to the [actual] improvement in business, a manufacturer...suddenly reduced the wages of his workers, thereby compelling them to strike. The workers, to whom the signal for an insurrection was thus given, brought all the factories in [Stalybridge] to a standstill, which was easy for them to do since the manufacturers (all members of the Anti-Corn Law League), contrary to their custom, offered no resistance at all. The workers held meetings presided over by the manufacturers themselves, who tried to draw the people's attention [for the manufacturer's interest] to the Corn Laws....The insurrection [sic, more like a lockout with destabilization aims] spread to all the factory districts; nowhere did the urban authorities...who were all members of the Anti-Corn Law League, offer any resistance...."

Certainly quite a different view than horizontal class politics I think we have here, closer to 'hit the hornet's nest intentionally and then attempt to aim and guide angry bees where you want.' Lots of state terrorism has the same object of gaining quickly mobilized anger for certain political projects.

However, as Chaitkin writes, as long as the factory workers stayed dupes to mass actions encouraged and faciliated in their bosses/ manufacturer's clientelistic interest, they were tolerated and encouraged privately and publicly.

However, once they did attempt to act on their own interest and say "to hell with your Corn law politics, we want our jobs back," they were repressed quickly by armed mercenaries hired by their previously pro-'revolutionary' manufacturer leadership.

Chaitkin writes:

"When the project went awry because the workers demanded a restoration of their wages [instead of calling on government to remove the Corn Laws], Engels explained, the League created a special army to put down its dupes, who were quickly suppressed. Engels portrayed this vast experiment in social manipulation as [not a class conflict, though] a fight for the interests of the middle class [manufacturers], as against the workers and the landed nobility."

Pretty sneaky, eh?

Who benefited and set up such such social unrest and starvation, except in this case manufacturers who set it in motion attempting to get the UK to let in cheaper grain against local (aristocratically dominated) agricultural sourcing and power, by using the workers as pitiful dupes and pawns in a larger merchant game?

Chaitkin goes on to argue that Engels was only 'made' as a literary writer when he was utilized as a reviewer of (BEIC sponsored) Thomas Carlyle, which was mass printed in the British aligned press in Germany. As Engels said in a letter to Marx, "It is ridiculous that my article about Carlyle should have won me a terrific fame with the 'mass,' while naturally only very few have read the article about economy.' p. 299

6/16/2007 01:00:00 AM  
Blogger Dr. Bombay said...

Mark,
Good shit. Gee, how convenient
it would have been for Dickie to
off Bush while he was out of the
country. Who knows? Maybe Dick
could make G.W. look like just
one more "victim" in the war on
terror? Hey... its snowing in
Sweden. Which is kinda strange
cause its SUMMER in Sweden...

6/16/2007 01:13:00 AM  
Blogger acl said...

Thanks Mark, today should be slow so I'll have a chance to dig through this and also get back to you on the Larouche question.

My specific question was borne when I did a quick search for Ortes I found only LaRouche and JSTOR links, he doesn't even have a Wiki entry that I could find.

Thanks again though, you and IC astound me :)

6/16/2007 08:38:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mark,

Thanks for psoting the link to the BBC Documentary Series A Century of Self. Excellent material.

Whereas Benays may have been a filthy Bastard, I appreciate the white sauce he developed.

6/16/2007 01:22:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Conspiracy, Karma and Causation

Three threads to braid here. (Okay, not a manly metaphor, maybe, but you try having 3 daughters & see if it doesn’t affect your language…)

Conspiracy

Mark,

As acl and many others here have noted, you have both a remarkable grasp of the dynamics of control and the dynamics of change (TABS), as well as an even more amazing volume of information in your cranium, but I’ve got to ask you to respond to the criticism that I encounter whenever I go conspiratorial in my analysis. It’s that tin-foil thing. A meme contains a thousand pictures and like Pound’s ideogrammic language (for those not interested in crazy old Ezra [and a great alternative narrative it is!], try The Tapestry of Words from Gene Fowler’s awesome WAKING THE POET: Acquiring the deep seated crafts usually called 'talents'--for those who want the whole weirdness, try Lee Lady's Ezra Pound, Treason, Fascism, and Anti-semitism or Marshall McLuhan's vorticist dynamic to Pound. It also helps that they (Lady & McLuhan) actually knew Pound. Both are a little more even-handed [and much shorter] than Leon Surette's book, Pound in Purgatory which “explains” Pound’s madness like this:

“As the world spiraled toward war, Pound's program of economic reform foundered, and he gradually succumbed to a paranoid belief in a Jewish conspiracy”

Surette's argument is that conspiracy theorizing makes you crazy...so that we should never engage in it..even if there are conspiracies in the world, since they'll just make you crazy. This the catch-22 I was getting at with that reference to David Neiwert's hit-piece on Ron Paul, in which he trots out Chip Berlet for his authority.

It's the perfect cover: who dare call it conspiracy, when calling anything a conspiracy only calls your sanity into question? The circular "truth" goes the other way, too. Ron Paul is afraid of black people (which is deplorable, although hardly uncommon--especially in that party with which he associates); Ezra Pound & Henry Ford were anti-Semites--many, many dark & nasty (but purely imperial and thoroughly whitebread) connections have been very well hidden by throwing the old Protocol smokescreen across the trail.

The question is how to describe the mechanisms of control without wearing the shiny hat.


Karma & Causation

Sounder & ericswan are asking essentially the same question from different angles. Ericswan asks why the bad guys seem to be rewarded for their villainy while we suffer from the consequences of their bad acts. How is it that the karmic debts they accrue are “paid for” by us? Sounder is chasing the trail of causation from the immaterial to the material, wondering if perhaps the photon is the missing link in the chain. (I think David Bohm’s conversations with Einstein are also instructive here—a last minute attempt to get the old man to embrace his implicate/explicate order theory [very similar to the Hopi pre-manifest/manifest reality concept] as a solution to Einstein’s dilemma over non-locality…)

ericswan,

It could be that we just don't understand the mechanism of karma very well yet. I've found myself steadily, very much unintentionally, drifting into Buddhism over the years--not the dogma of Buddhism, which is an oxymoron, nor the proscriptions of the many and various sects--but simply in the notion of the gravity of karmic debt. The easily bearable lightness of being. Who's to say that we don't pay for what we do?

The Pentagon released a long-stalled report the other day that admitted that at least 40% of the soldiers returning from our latest adventures in imperialism are bady damaged, physically, mentally...and spiritually. If those are the Pentagon's figures, you can bet that the rates are even higher. Further, they admit that no attempt has been made to deal with the problem. Mental health specialists are leaving the military "in droves," frustrated by the system.

And what does this mean for the national psyche? Hundreds of thousands of former killing machines/broken humans are released into the civilian population--cut off from the matrix, they can't function. This is the societal level at which we pay. The lesson learned from the experience is the same one that vets have learned from every war. It's a racket. Those whose role is the cannon fodder realize they've been used. We who see their plight upon release from the killing fields realize that we're not designed to be aggressive after all. Darwin lied; his popularizers even more so.

Someone suggested that our efforts to fight the elite only strengthen them--maybe so. But there is another path, the one we've been discussing here all along. Instead of focusing solely on the misdeeds of the Machiavellis, which only (perversely) brands us as unhinged and actually serves to glorify them, the same as what happens to the Nazi hunters, maybe we should instead shift or at least share our focus with the alternativists. The Viridians. It's enough, I think, to accept the karmic formula of:

Human Alchemy

An alchemy, human alchemy
We stole them from their freedom to be sold
To turn their skins of black into the skins
Of brightest gold
An alchemy, human alchemy

We stoked the fires of trade with human coals
And made our purses from the flailed skins of
Purest souls
An alchemy, human alchemy

Other lands became a larder full of all the good things
All we had to do was go and take
Blood the colour rain that grew our wicked harvest
Black the colour icing on our cake
An alchemy, human alchemy

We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves
Although we held the whip, you knew we were
The real slaves
To alchemy, human alchemy

Alchemy, human alchemy


(XTC)


Causation

Maybe both questions can be addressed through Sounder’s hint about Bibhas De, a renegade scientist/poet whom I’ve been linking for a few years. In De’s very interesting page called simply The Photon, he lays out first the problem the photon represents (is it massless or not, or both and if so when?) and the strange case of obfuscation surrounding the nature of the photon in the scientific community. Here’s the intro:

OBFUSCATION

The power of obfuscation is real and consequential. We face it everyday from national leaders, politicians, diplomats et al. Serious and huge enterprises may depend on some obfuscation at the core. It then becomes all-important to maintain that obfuscation – even at great cost, even with dishonesty and dishonor. This need becomes greater and more urgent as the enterprise gets bigger and more unwieldy, and the stake becomes higher. Clarity becomes a serious enemy of the defenders of the enterprise. All this we all understand – there is nothing new here.

*****

Of what many may not be aware is that the idea of photon is such an obfuscation at the core of Quantum Theory – in much the same way as above. And Quantum Theory is a gigantic enterprise however you look at it – makingaliving-wise, bigmoneygrant-wise, bigphysicslab-wise, textbookselling-wise, heromaking-wise, facesaving-wise, anywise. It simply wouldn’t do to tear this down.

*****

So the idea of photon is kept artfully and deliberately obfuscated – as it has been for a hundred years. Every other issue in physics is researched and evolves. But not the photon. Never the photon. Every physicist will tell you that photon is one of the most important concepts of physics. No one can tell you what it is. Without obfuscation, that is.

*****

Who maintains this obfuscation?
The supersecret society of the Priory of the Dungeon
.

I can't recommend these pages strongly enough. Bibhas De's solution--transmaxwellian, transeinsteinian physics--not only lays bare the Universe Conspiracy, but also gives us some hints about what it is that they're hiding. The Golden Age. Transmutation of the elements. Anti-gravity. Hyper-sustainability. Not just "free" energy; free everything.

The photon is the key. Interestingly enough, it's also the catalyst, the protagonist, in the central miracle of life. Photosynthesis, where the four ancient elements dance the alchemical synergy of earth, water, air, and fire.

Once you've got through De's photon, try this. Clue: it's where Fritz-Albert Popp "legitimizes" Bibhas De and Rupert Sheldrake with biophoton emission. (From THE FIELD: The quest for the secret force of the Universe,by Lynne McTaggart.)

All this stuff is easy to read and...it makes you lighter. Promise.

6/16/2007 02:17:00 PM  
Blogger Tsoldrin said...

IC,

I don't think Ron Paul is afraid of black people. Well, let me clarify that... I actually think that on some level all humans have fear of other humans. I believe this is a throwback trait which helped us survive. An ability to predict what might happen when interacting with what is potentially the most dangerous creature - ourselves. That aside, from what I can tell of Paul, he treats all people as individuals and respects the rights and freedoms of each individual equally and in that regard seems very much 'color blind' - for someone his age, from a different era, I'd say he seems startlingly color blind.

The 'writings' which would appear to paint a different picture, and have been disavowed as ghostwritten I believe, I found to be discordant with pretty much everything else I've come across Paul say or write.

The 'guilt by association' with groups that might be racially insensitive I found rather disturbing and indicative of the true nature of these attacks. It seems to me that certain extremist left wingers want to paint anyone who owns a gun, has an american flag or uses the word 'patriot' in any bad light they can and playing the 'racist card' is their ace in the hole. It reminds me a lot of the ADL calling anyone who doesn't praise Israel enough an anti-semite and is really dishonest.

Taken together, I suspect these hits at Paul to be a concerted and desperate effort to whip the masses who pretend to be 'progressive' into line and keep them from defecting to schools of thought that emphasize thinking as individuals as opposed to following groupthink.

That's my thinking anyway, and may be biased because I like the things Ron Paul stands for... well mostly anyway... at least for short to medium term solutions... eventually I think we'll have to move towards a more communist/socialist structured society, as I imagine you yourself advocate in your utopian dreams, however I see that as very far off and beyond the length of my lifetime. :-)

6/16/2007 04:13:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

I have thought deeply about it and have come to the conclusion that I am not a cancer devouring this earth. However, I am my own advocate in a utopian garden dream.

......Now, on to the comic relief. Shrubbery, in this brilliant video you will observe the greatest white guy afro anyone has ever seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM0gFLrsI8M

6/16/2007 07:43:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Tsoldrin,

You might be right about that--I'm certainly not buying the rest of the bullshit that Democrats like Neiwert are selling in that hit piece I linked. On the other hand, I don't know if blaming that fear of the other on some ghostwriter exactly absolves him, either, especially when this fear is pointedly expressed toward black folks.

On another level, no matter how much I might admire some of Paul's initiatives (how many "liberals" are backing his hemp legalization bill or the one to get rid of the Fed?), I guess I'm wary at best of libertarianism, although even there some versions are sort of okay.

When R.A. Wilson formed his Guns & Dope Party (only half facetiously), I think he hit upon a populist coalition that might have a much greater appeal than any of the two party fronts:

We advocate
[1] guns for those who want them, no guns
forced on those who don't want them (pacfists, Quakers etc.)
[2] drugs for those who want them,
no drugs forced on those who don't want them (Christian Scientists etc.)
[3] an end to Tsarism and a return to constitutional democracy
[4] equal rights for ostriches.


Ostriches notwithstanding, guns & dope have a combined mass appeal that can't be easily over-estimated. (Your genial guide at NewHeadNews will give you a good perspective on one of those...)

One of my other favorite netfriends is a sort of green libertarian, and one of the leading lights of the Scottish independence movement is an anarcho-communist and brilliant sci-fi writer--both of whom I admire quite a bit. The green libertarian wrote one of very best posts ever recently--The Shockwave Rider, while the independent Scotsman is Ken Macleod, whose new book (The Execution Channel) is discussed in that thing from my friends at Zaadz that I've been linking recently--Macleod and '300' - Two Responses to the Darkness because it's just a great, short piece on the biggest political issues we face.

(Btw, thanks for that Iain M. Banks lead--his books that feature The Culture are exactly my cup of tea. Egalitarian abundance; the opposite of what we have now.)

As Mark has pointed out, though, we'd need 4 or 5 parties to really have any possibility of working coalitions, and that's not going to happen in the US any time soon. Still, an internet-driven Feingold/Paul ticket might just scare the bejesus out of the gatekeepers on both "sides".

6/16/2007 08:23:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

"how convenient it would have been for Dickie to off Bush while he was out of the country. Who knows? Maybe Dick could make G.W. look like just one more "victim" in the war on terror?
Hmm.

I never thought of it that way, thankfully. I was thinking it might have been a run up like Bush/Blair seeming coordination on hitting London on 7/7/05 during the previous G8. Though your idea fits with what might have been a failed Bush assassination attempt on 9-11, early morning.


September 9, 2001: Northern Alliance Leader Massoud Is Assassinated in Anticipation of 9/11 Attack

Massoud’s two assassins pictured just before their assassination attempt. One holds the rigged video camera. [Source: CNN]General Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, is assassinated by two al-Qaeda agents posing as Moroccan journalists. [Time, 8/4/2002] A legendary mujaheddin commander and a brilliant tactician, Massoud had pledged to bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan. The BBC says the next day, “General Massoud’s death might well have meant the end of the [Northern] alliance” because there clearly was no figure with his skills and popularity to replace him. [BBC, 9/10/2001; BBC, 9/10/2001] “With Massoud out of the way, the Taliban and al-Qaeda would be rid of their most effective opponent and be in a stronger position to resist the American onslaught.” [St. Petersburg Times, 9/9/2002] It appears the assassination was supposed to happen earlier: the “journalists” waited for three weeks in Northern Alliance territory to meet Massoud. Finally on September 8, an aide says they “were so worried and excitable they were begging us.” They were granted an interview after threatening to leave if the interview did not happen in the next 24 hours. Meanwhile, the Taliban army (together with elements of the Pakistani army) had massed for an offensive against the Northern Alliance in the previous weeks, but the offensive began only hours after the assassination. Massoud was killed that day but Northern Alliance leaders pretend for several days that Massoud was only injured in order to keep the Northern Alliance army’s morale up, and they are able to stave off total defeat. The timing of the assassination and the actions of the Taliban army suggest that the 9/11 attacks were known to the Taliban leadership. [Time, 8/4/2002] Though it is not widely reported, the Northern Alliance releases a statement the next day: “Ahmed Shah Massoud was the target of an assassination attempt organized by the Pakistani [intelligence service] ISI and Osama bin Laden.” [Radio Free Europe, 9/10/2001; Newsday, 9/15/2001; Reuters, 10/4/2001] This suggests that the ISI may also have had prior knowledge of the attack plans.

TWO DAYS LATER, SAME THING?

(6:00 a.m.) September 11, 2001: Bush Interview or Assassination Attempt?
President Bush has just spent the night at Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, Florida. Surface-to-air missiles have been placed on the roof of the resort (it is not known if this was typical of presidential security before 9/11, or if this was related to increased terror warnings). [Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 9/10/2002] Bush wakes up around 6:00 a.m. and is preparing for his morning jog. [New York Times, 9/16/2001; Daily Telegraph, 12/16/2001; MSNBC, 10/27/2002] A van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent arrives at the Colony Beach Resort, stating they have a “poolside” interview with the president. They do not have an appointment and they are turned away. [Longboat Observer, 9/26/2001] Some question whether this was an assassination attempt modeled on the one used on Afghan leader Ahmed Massoud two days earlier (see September 9, 2001). [Time, 8/4/2002] Longboat Key Fire Marshal Carroll Mooneyhan was reported to have overheard the conversation between the men and the Secret Service, but he later denies the report. The newspaper that reported this, the Longboat Observer stands by its story. [St. Petersburg Times, 7/4/2004] Witnesses recall seeing Mohamed Atta in the Longboat Key Holiday Inn a short distance from where Bush was staying as recently as September 7, the day Bush’s Sarasota appearance was publicly announced. [Longboat Observer, 11/21/2001; St. Petersburg Times, 7/4/2004]
[What was left out at that cooperativeresearch.org discussion was that the "interviewers in the white van" they were said to have known top secret security names....]

So: in my opinion one of the things that didn't go right on 9-11 was that Bush was meant to be assassinated with an unscheduled "Arab patsy interview team" that turned up at 6 a.m. (?) to interview Bush in Florida on 9-11-01. They (illegally) knew the names of Bush's security detail. They were not let in, though they were ALLOWED SIMPLY TO LEAVE! Surely, since Bush had placed surface to air missiles on his island resort roof that evening, you think they would at least question these people? Nope.

And remember the whole "Angel is next" thing that came out hours later, that showed truly the hand of a different group of traitors in the security network, someone was using closely held Air Force One codes to legitimate their threat on Bush that morning, so Bush stayed out of D.C. (District of Cheney) and flew off to Offut AFB--where other co-conspirators like Warren Buffett were waiting (officially "er, hosting a charity event"--at NORAD nuclear secure military base, at starting barely before the sun came up at 7 a.m.? Nope. Buffett invited a select WTC CEO to 'save' and she remarked on seeing the plane crash right into her office in the WTC...

Lest we forget sociopath Cheney was in control of everything. Did Cheney plan to kill off Bush on 9-11 as well?Would be damn convenient to throw a little additional 'terror on the side' to seat Cheney as President on 9-11 after the days events, get rid of the second grade Bush family, particularly if the fourth plane made it to (assuredly) destroy the Capitol dome and kill a lot of the legislature.

"Of course the order still stands, have you heard anything to the contrary?"

Cheney whipped around and basically screamed at his aide for questioning him when he would act to stop the fourth plane from approaching D.C.

--------

You're welcome, Shrub, about the film links. And Shrub said:

"Whereas Benays may have been a filthy Bastard, I appreciate the white sauce he developed."

haha. I think that was his aunt Bernaise Bernays. He just stole the recipe, buried her in the basement, grew mushrooms off her body, and mass marketed everything as his own invention.

To IC:

I sympathize, It's sort of like attempting to talk to 2D shapes (that enjoy 2D and would defend 2D with all their might). It's like the art of convincing them to let you throw them into a 3D world, eh? Most are understandably terrified to have that many 'solid parameters' of their 2D political world entirely melt away, like "formal institutions", "rule of law," "impartial justice," "no innocents in jail,", "leaders are elected and legitimate", etc. It's literally is a dimensional shift (even melt) of experience once you start to think about it. How 'what appears in public' can have simultaneous levels of public, private, and secret meanings--all equally real to different publics involved. It's a different layer of experience that most are (in my opinion) kept out of experiencing by years of 'curricular damage'. I was having a discussion with a friend about how the terms public, private, and secret fail to really capture what we are talking about as well. After all, when something is 'secret', it's still sometimes wide open on the public stage in the people involved (all those 'devil's hand signs' to only networked insiders, for instance, being conducted in public, though only for a different level of the public that can read the signs). And thus some 'secret' things are just a different form of public. Just as things that are 'private' have to be equally constructed that way through public laws and protections. The terms themselves, by their misleading sense that they are referents to three different categories of non-overlapping phenomena, set people toward the wrong expectations about things that are public, private, or secret. Perhaps it's more like public, pubvate, pubcret, if you see what I mean.

As for talking to people about it, some of the rhetorical tactics I have used:

1. there's always the reverse tables on the psychological angle, saying that they should pause to consider who benefits more psychologically, a conspiracy theorist or a conspiracy denier?

2. Related to that, sometimes I'll introduce the term "emotional slide", meaning the characteristic how people can talk analytically and rationally to weigh certain topics, though when others are introduced, there is a sudden shift of mental gear from analytic to emotional reaction instead of allowing the capacities of thought to continue in that direction. It's really a kind of willing dissociation technique to block potentially painful thoughts. I tend to agree on some who write about the neuroscience of dissociative states that it is hardly limited to people with "split personalities" that this is an example of it in actual life experienced by many. So in other words, if they can understand and watch their own emotional slides start to occur they may be more likely to learn to control them and hold open their analytic mind to topics typically that slide shut in their thinking.

3. Blunt examples can work with others if they are a 'hard data' kind of person. Just tell them to look up Project Northwoods if they think conspiracies don't exist. And if they come back after your discussion of it (or their reading of it) and say "well, that was an example of a failed conspiracy, so it isn't really valid." After complementing them they could have been a lawyer for a someone they knew were an attempted mass murderer, you might say "how do you know for sure that is so in all cases?"

4. That not everything is a conspiracy. It is something to research as another layer of 'public' reality however. This gets back to my sense of the layered sense of social reality above (as well as likely their own emotional slide issue whether they want to look at it at all).

5. If for those swayed by data aren't impressed by Project Northwoods, then nothing will impress them that there is more than 2D in reality. You might tell them to find the Alex Jones produced film JFK II, or just read Griffin's book on 9-11, etc.

6. for the hardcore "conspiracies don't happen" person you might mention that strangely huge chunks of the U.S. law code explicitly address it...

7. If it's a 9-11 discussion, mention that they do believe in a conspiracy only the don't know it. The "official story" is a conspiracy theory: that Osama and Al-Queda did it from a cave as a complete surprise. So they DO believe in a conspiracy that worked out in real life, right? So it's hardly that they disbelieve conspiracies, since they believe in some themselves.

8. You might be surprised how much 'debate' about conspiracies are premised on handy appeals to forms of logical fallacies. Chomsky is full of these when it comes to this topic, particularly http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/toc.htm

IC said:

"Surette's argument is that conspiracy theorizing makes you crazy...so that we should never engage in it..even if there are conspiracies in the world, since they'll just make you crazy."

This is touchingly rendered in what I think is the earliest sympathetic portrayal of a 'conspiracy theorist' in U.S. cinema. Jeff made a link to it once and I thank him for that. I sort of assembled some information and reviewed it here, particularly this paragraph:

Title: Watch free THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE BELL (1970), an allegory of Skull & Bones/Yale societies
Author: repost
Date: 2006.11.05 04:17
Description: Recruited by a secret society called the Brotherhood of the Bell when he was a college student, Prof. Andrew Patterson (played by Glenn Ford) is called upon many years later by a fellow society member to threaten a friend and respected colleague in order clear the way for an inferior candidate for an open position at the university. He goes through with it, and it leads to the death of his friend by suicide. Patterson, disgusted, then attempts to quit the society and expose it. However, in retribution, his seemingly successful life is disrupted as he learns that he was manipulated into a power position to serve as a puppet created, and thus subsequently easily destroyed, by the Brotherhood. The film is a fictional portrayal of real-life secret organizations such as Skull and Bones.

[Brotherhood of the Bell (1970) is]...[a] fine double morality play to ponder--both about secret societies in society at large, as well as about the existential and psychological position that 'conspiracy theorists' or individual conspiracy participants find themselves in the public eye, in attempting to escape or to proselytize to an ambivalent ignorant public about something hidden though equally real when public institutions, media airtime, friends, police, the district attorney, neighbors, and close relatives suddenly might be against them without anyone else knowing about it; the potential psychological toll it takes; and how the first line of easy defense for the "Brotherhood" is to paint...the person as "neurotic" or "funny" to a credulous public, when there is really something going on. I loved the early 1970s TV talk show host scene and the power of the media framing the whole thing by misconstrued association, and (surprisingly for a U.S. film, at the same moment, in a feint) vocalizing some seriously tabooed issues in America head on like the role of U.S. secret societies in perpetuating race, class, gender, religious, historical interpretation, academic privilege, and the part played by secret societies maintaining a "calm staged reality" behind the scenes in the USA."


IC said:

Ron Paul is afraid of black people (which is deplorable, although hardly uncommon--especially in that party with which he associates); Ezra Pound & Henry Ford were anti-Semites--many, many dark & nasty (but purely imperial and thoroughly whitebread) connections have been very well hidden by throwing the old Protocol smokescreen across the trail.

I'd tend to agree with Tsoldrin. Who is saying that? More appropriate why aren't they saying it about "Jim Crow e-voting" George W. Bush?

And, IC or Shrub, did you catch the sympathetic throwaway line in Edwin Black's Internal Combustion, concerning "Ford's anti-semetism"? Black mentioned something sympathetic and displaced the blame--something I never heard of and moreover would NOT have expected from Edwin Black. Though if he put it in there, he had cause to for some rationale. Black attempts to blame "Ford's anti-semetism" on Ford's majordomo for selectively vetting anti-semetic conspiracy material to Ford--with Ford just insularly some machine believing it more and more...? Wha? Black doesn't mention where he got that information.

Black additionally in good form keeps up the good lie about 9-11's official story's soundness taken as a matter of course instead of its swiss cheese quality analyzed throughout the book....

Edwin Black and Greg Palast I am sure would get into fisticuffs on their completely different perspectives on peak oil (Black: biotic oil, depletion real: Palast: biotic oil, depletion politically artificial, or hard to really know about). They would still agree on the biotic theme though, so throw in the abiotic oil people and you've have a real argument--who I think have more evidence on their side. Here's Palast's view:

Keeping Iraq's Oil in the Ground, Since 1927: Did U.S. invade to tap oil or to sit on it?
author: Palast's extra $89 billion a year question
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/06/341096.shtml

And on political administrating price:

newswire article reposts global 25.Nov.2004 21:21
corporate dominance | environment | imperialism & war
US Special Forces mem. admits U.S./U.N. set Kuwaiti Oil Fires in 1991
author: repost
During the past six years, the American Gulf War Veterans Association has received numerous reports from veterans stating that US forces--including Navy Seals, Marine Force Recon, and Delta Force--were responsible for the setting of the oil well fires at the end of the Gulf War. One veteran has now stepped forward and given a detailed account of how he and others in special teams, moved forward of the front, behind enemy lines ahead of US forces, set explosive and incendiary charges on the well heads, and remained hidden until after the charges were remotely detonated and US forces advanced beyond their position. "We were mustered into the briefing tent at which point a gentleman whom I first had thought to be an American... but I was concerned because he was wearing a UN uniform and insignias, began to brief us on the operation." We've had five, four other reports of people similar that have brought this to our attention. "A little known fact about the Gulf War is that one month before the Declaration of War on December 15th, 1990, Secretary of State, James Baker, signed the US Army report from the 352nd Civil Affairs Command on the New Kuwait (unclassified, and therefore available to those interested). This report describes in detail how extensively Kuwait will be destroyed, how the oil wells will be set on fire, and then how it will all be rebuilt 'better than before', with despotism, rather than democracy, even more strongly entrenched than it had been before. The report includes a list of US corporations who are to be assigned the profitable task of rebuilding Kuwait and extinguishing the oil well fires, as well as the Arab names they will be operating under." The Bushes corrupt scheme included driving from Kuwait competing energy companies such as the giant Deutsche Babcock conglomerate...
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/304515.shtml


If you don't want to read the Palast article above, you can watch Palast talk out his data in the talk "blood for NO oil", a segment of this talk (and of course in his book):
GREG PALAST: IS THE FIX IN FOR '08? / BLOOD FOR NO OIL Armed Madhouse Book Tour
59 min 9 sec - Sep 2, 2006
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6802228062297352475

----

And thanks IC for the link to "The Field" chapter on Popp.

6/16/2007 10:37:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

From some other IC links I have just perused VERY cursorily:

"If magnetic field were a mass, this would be the first time ever that we know of an instance where our body occupies the same space with another mass...

Might explain electromagnetic and infrared spectrum bleed reported as tangible evidence of some supposed paranormal (read that as "invisible mass") phenomena...

6/16/2007 10:51:00 PM  
Blogger Silverfox said...

In the field of alternative energy Stan Meyers was clearly the man who simply knew "too much".

A few minutes with this video snd you'll begin see quite cleary what some of that "too much" was for yourself.

You will also begin to understand how such information might indeed turn all the "Powers That Be" both upside down and inside out if it were ever practically and publicly applied.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PesZ4COZ9ew&mode=related&search=

6/17/2007 05:09:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have thought deeply about it and have come to the conclusion that I am not a cancer devouring this earth. However, I am my own advocate in a utopian garden dream.

Apparently, you haven't thought about it deeply enough, Eve. The mere fact that you went to the Grocery to purchase your mass produced fluoride toothpaste for your pearly whites, and you are posting to this here forum via an electrically powered computer produced and maufactured in a highly toxic way means you are connected to the grid, like it, or not. Sure, your reliance on and subserviance to the Beast we all feed may be less substantial on scale, but you are a contributor, nonetheless....as am I. The Beast is the aggregate behavior of Empire, and it is the Cancer that is devouring its host.

6/17/2007 10:17:00 AM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

But how will I entice you with a beautiful smile if I do not polish my lovely pearls with ULTRA whitening toothpaste? And how can I combat this artificially intelligent crazy toxic electronic typing machine if not by using it to reach you Adam Shrubbery with my infinate Eve love.

You know, it's not all about our bodily health - we have to live and make the best of the world we've been given at this time....preserving our mental health, and MORE importantly...our spiritual health (and that of those entrusted to us) with humor and love is a positive, symbiotic way to return what we may have to consume because of where we are in this historical moment. THEREFORE...I am not a cancer, I am a cure :)

Did you know that much wisdom can be found in anagrams? Shango showed me these riddles:

"A Lonely Wit - Aloha," or "A Holy Toenail Law"

Shrubbery, last night I dreamt of model airplanes...so here's a song for you my brother with the rapist wit. I'm gonna work out to it.

Love,
your **turn up the AC** sister with the 'reapist' wit ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrjOhQZWU7k

(a little 'Pop' music Jeff, happy Father's day!)

6/17/2007 11:29:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

......Now, on to the comic relief. Shrubbery, in this brilliant video you will observe the greatest white guy afro anyone has ever seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM0gFLrsI8M



Eve, my little cancer cell with the pearly white teeth and organic garden, that was indeed the most impressive white guy afro I have ever seen.

The following runs a close second....it's a happy little afro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDtQi7ZI3u4

6/17/2007 03:17:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This one's even better, Eve.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgHKgCvM5V0

6/17/2007 03:44:00 PM  
Blogger Dr. Bombay said...

All though I have been following
Ron Paul closely, I really have
not felt compelled to comment on
him and appear to be someone that
is totally partision. But I'm
neither Democrat or Republican.
I have been a registerd Independent
for all the years I have been able
to vote. But Ron Paul will get my
vote for one very important reason.
He is the ONLY canditate who has
made the connection between the
IRS, the "Federal" Reserve and the
NWO. The facts are that every week
the NWO reaches into your wallet
(in the guise of the IRS) and
steals a small chunk of your
hard earned cash to support their
agenda. Ron Paul is giving us a
road map to find our way clear
of the NWO, and it begins with
abolishing the IRS and the
NOT "Federal" Reserve. And as far
as the race issue is concerned,
Dr. Paul has delivered over
4000 babies and I will bet you
dollars to doughnuts that they
were not all lily white.

6/17/2007 04:04:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

Afros:

Bob Ross - Why I Don't Paint People
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOpF_ZGD4Ps
Bob Ross Has Issues
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lurt5FosdB4&mode=related&search=


Digital love:

All is full of love
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjAoBKagWQA&mode=related&search=
[interview on its creation]

"I close the door
I shouldn't burn yet
The But the wires get hotter
My palms are glowing

This is hot meat
This is metallic blood

This is hot meat
This is open sweat...


"This wasn't supposed to happen..."

6/17/2007 04:17:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

Now that's what I'm talkin bout....titanium white (the color of my smile)

Sir Shrubbery, we make a perfect couple. I promise never to violate the sanctity of our happy little cabin in our enchanted digital forest by covertly visiting bodybuilders in biker shorts.

To our marriage!!...now, shall we sex it up? ***Guess what color my "foundation" garments are today....it's a trick question, cuz ___________....hahaha!

6/17/2007 04:18:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

....I'm not wearing any.

Foundation garments goes beyond PG 13 though, Eve. That term is downright euphemistic.

6/17/2007 09:11:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Mark.. Is it possible for an intelligent person to believe in biotic oil? That's like believing in biotic coal which is generally full of fossils millions of years old. Peak oil, on the other hand, must have a mathematical relationship of the inverse is equal to the amount of carbon in the air and of the air.

It seems to me that the powers that be are doing their utmost to replicate and implicate all the powers we ascribe to the Creator. If you could read my mind .. move the storm clouds, heal the maimed.. raise the dead.

The suppression of ZPE or energy from the ether is just such a mechanism. Energy at right angles to the direction of space/time or how to occupy the same space/time simultaneously and be invisible.

Time spirals so that any point in the spiral can "see" the future and the past. This "seeing" is resonance.

6/18/2007 10:31:00 AM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

ooooopps!

Was that unlady-like of me? (regardless, that was a good fill in the blank...and quite accurate at the time - my foundation garments were flesh colored....exactly as depicted with the anxious gravity triumphant over the leaf)

I thought it would still be considered PG-13 since I have sworn sanctity to our magical (happy) little cabin…obscured within the Shrubbery of the enchanted afro forest.

If you prefer not to discuss my foundation garments...we can stick strictly to deep politics and I can put my leaf back on and find a tin foil hat :)

http://media.bluedistortion.com/cat-in-tin-foil-hat.jpg

6/18/2007 10:40:00 AM  
Blogger Mark said...

Hi eric, you said:

"Mark.. Is it possible for an intelligent person to believe in biotic oil? That's like believing in biotic coal which is generally full of fossils millions of years old. Peak oil, on the other hand, must have a mathematical relationship of the inverse is equal to the amount of carbon in the air and of the air."

I would hardly support oil's continuity regardless of whether its biotic or abiotic. There are so many other choices currently available--most from waste in biooil! It's estimated that you would get around 618 days of 'biocrude from waste' annually from the waste (and of course that's almost double the amount of used petroleum!) That is the plentitude of garbage spewed by the USA annually, that they could entirely go off international oil imports, as well as even START EXPORTING biocrude from waste. (info here at Commodity Ecology, Garbage thread, a ways down the page.)

QUOTE:

"This is tremendous," Baskis said in the Kansas City Star. "From the tests we've run in our pilot, we know that if we took all the agricultural wastes (in America) and converted them into oil we could make 12 billion barrels per year."

With the U.S. using, on average, 19.4 million barrels a day, such a full-scale conversion could take a big chunk out of the need to import our oil."


More than a 'big chunk'. It would entirely displace annual importation requirements and then leave almost a full year of oil to spare, annually.

Though back to the peak oil discourse. The peak oil discourse has built itself on the premise that it is "running out because it is [1] biotic as much as [2] general trends of consumption/production". However, point one is quickly dismissed. Much of the evidence of a biogeneic pathway has never really been demonstrated. However, there are known abiogenic pathways to oil production, which I summarized over at Commodity Ecology's energy thread. I'm starting to populate that larder. Just scroll down for it, or do a search for 'abiotic' in the whole page and you'll find it.

As for the second point about how peakers argue, on production/consumption, well there are those Exxon documents that say that the "real problem is oversupply that we can't sell it at the prices we want." Quoting comments from the below link:


http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/fs/5104.pdf

L.D. Hoopkins
TEXACO, March 7, 1996

"...the most critical factor facing the refining industry on the West Coast is the surplus of refining capacity, and the surplus gasoline production capacity. (The same situation exists for the entire U.S. refining industry.) Supply significantly exceeds demand year-round. This results in very poor refinery margins and very poor refinery financial results. Significant EVENTS NEED TO OCCUR TO ASSIST IN REDUCING SUPPLIES and/or increasing the demand for gasoline." [my emph.]
++++++++++++++++++++++

UPDATE ON BAKERSFIELD REFINERY CLOSURE - [Shell's most profitable US refinery]
==========================================================================

BAKERSFIELD, California (October 15, 2004) - Shell Oil Products has confirmed that it is negotiating with several parties for the possible sale of its oil refinery here.

Shell reconsidered its plans to close the refinery last April, in the wake of widespread public opposition.

** Critics charged the company was closing the plant as part of a strategy for driving up local gasoline prices **, and their complaints drew the attention of the Federal Trade Commission and the California Attorney General. Shell denied the accusations, saying it had planned to close the refinery because of declines in the availability of the local crude it was designed to process.
In April, Lynn Elsenhans, President and CEO of Shell Oil Products US, said the company would renew its efforts to sell the refinery but did not expect to meet with success. "We still believe that once potential buyers take a close look at the facility and its available crude supply, that they will reach the same conclusion that we have: That this refinery is not economically viable going forward for a number of reasons, including the cost and availability of the crude needed to run the facility," Elsenhans said then.

But a sale apparently isn't out of the question in the current economic climate. Since Shell announced its willingness to talk with prospective buyers, oil prices have soared to record highs and gasoline in U.S. markets is now routinely selling for $2 per gallon or more. Shell now says that more than 70 parties have contacted it about the possibility of buying the refinery and that more than 20 companies were serious enough to sign confidentiality agreements that allowed them to formally enter the sales process.

http://www.eyeforenergy.com/news.asp?id=367
=========================

CHEVRON - 1995 - Internal Memo
------------------------------
"A senior analyst at the recent API convention warned that if the U.S. petroleum industry doesn't reduce it's refining capacity, it will never see any substantial increase in refining margins..."
http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/fs/5103.pdf
========================

Posted on Fri, Sep. 02, 2005

Refinery fire [arson?] at root of higher gas costs

The recent rise isn't Katrina's fault, though local stations may be lifting their prices anticipating her impact

By Jeff Ballinger
The Tribune

Hurricane Katrina has little to do with the price of regular unleaded gasoline shooting up to more than $3 a gallon at some local stations, industry analysts and area retailers said Thursday.

In the wake of the hurricane's damaging hit on oil facilities in the Gulf of Mexico, oil prices Thursday hovered at $69 a barrel, near the highest-ever closing price on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

But the runup in California's price at the pump is linked more to a fire last week at a refinery in Martinez that interrupted production and distribution around the state, said Elaine Beno, a spokeswoman at the American Automobile Association.

[...]

[Michelle Duniven, manager of Atascadero Shell & Food Mart on San Gabriel Road] said prices have also climbed after Shell closed some refineries recently in the San Joaquin Valley.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news
/local/12543751.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
===============================


So stop buying it was "Katrina". That's PR cover. They are intentionally closing down refineries and consolidating them worldwide, Palast's "blood for NO oil."

And "oil production" statistics of course depends on trusting the oil corporations to honestly self-report--and they have lied to the world for the past 100 years about all sorts of things.

Palast's discussion of the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement to "not drill" to keep the price up, and to only drill in 1% of Iraq by agreement, should be more well known.

Another interesting book that throws into question the production statistics is summarized here.

Title: PEAK OIL? I think not! FREE Insider book: The Energy-Non Crisis, or, politic$ of $scarcity
2005.09.21 06:08

Description: FREE Insider book reveals high politics of $scarcity in USA energy Lindsey Williams, an ordained Baptist minister for 28 years, went to Alaska in 1971 as a missionary. The Transalaska oil pipeline began its construction phase in 1974, and because of Mr. Williams' love for his country and concern for the spiritual welfare of the "pipeliners," he volunteered to serve as Chaplain on the pipeline, with the subsequent full support of the Alyeska Pipeline Company. Because of the executive status accorded to him as Chaplain, he was given access to the shocking information documented in this book. Some government officials and concerned individuals urged Mr. Williams to put into print what he saw and heard, stating that they felt this information was vital to national security. Mr. Williams firmly believes that whoever controls energy controls the economy. Thus, The Energy Non-Crisis. Because of the outstanding public response that has been generated by this book, Lindsey Williams is in great demand for speaking engagements, radio, and TV shows....


The book's forward was written by
"Hugh M. Chance, Former Senator of The State of Colorado" I pass on the link hardly because I agree with its argued solution 'go get that hidden oil,' only to demonstrate that it is hidden away to keep the price up.

For environmental impact, oil it should be stopped, well, today.

There's plenty of other choices.

And there are many working alternatives.

Strangely, even Edwin Black's supposed" exposure book on the nefariousness of oil energy/technology politics leaves out

- the Stan Meyer (cold fusion like) split water patents for hydrogen on demand from water, "Joe Cells" seem to be based on his ideas in some ways, particular the use of that particular kind of stainless steel requirement.

- and Black entirely leaves out air engines.

Edwin Black's precious high priced Honda example as a 'working model' (which IC talked of before around here) is not really supposed to be consumer sold until 2010, Black says. Lots can happen in four years to disappear it like many other things started in the early 1990s he mentions.

I've love to have a long private chat with him about why he chose to perpetuate a gatekept discourse in his book about energy politics with some very extreme omissions.

You would think that the presumed murder mystery of Stan Meyer's water engine international patents would be document heavy enough for Edwin Black? Nope. Not a word about Stan Meyer in the whole book, or his various TV media appearances throughout the early 1990s, until he was "dead in jail" after attempting to make a oil-to-water conversion deal with a local autoseller in Ohio. Then he was thrown in jail and dead soon afterward, despite of course demonstrating to the patent office that everything worked fine.

6/18/2007 02:12:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

And sorry your kids are sick, Jeff. Hope they get well soon.

6/18/2007 02:20:00 PM  
Blogger et in Arcadia ego Eve said...

I'm fully dressed now and I've found my tinfoil hat - I think I'm ready to make a completely secular, historical/political comment totally unrelated to the Garden of Eden, Marian witchcraft or Monte Python....so here it is:

Watergate's 35th anniversary and, people still don't know that the break in was about the kiddie pics (not JFK pics). Everyone here knows that, yes?

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003599918

6/18/2007 03:40:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

That's the hunky dory surface view: "Novice reporter at the Washington Post Bags President"

Ignores that the Wash Post is the CIA "Mockingbird" flagship paper.

Title: Who rules the corporate media? OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD,CIA,state media since 1940s
Author: Alex Constantine
Date: 2004.03.26 03:26
Description: It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe - one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales - a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit--is a the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of Operation MOCKINGBIRD.


Ignores Woodward's family background. In other words, there was an intention to the fast rise at the paper that little article describes. I'd be skeptical that that little link explores it all.

[1] Another angle would be how Woodward's family which was high in the security services of the USA was sent in to
'get Nixon'; [2] another angle was to get rid of Nixon because he wanted the President to have jurisdiction over drug intelligence (i.e., all the money) instead of the CIA (cite: Hopsicker's book on that); [3] a third angle would be the long cherished dream of Nelson Rockefeller (denied twice the Republican Party candidacy in the 1960s), working to seat himself in the Vice Presidency instead by appointment, and then the Presidency by assassination or further removal. Though he made it to being the U.S. entirely unelected Vice President for Ford, Nelson failed to get to the Presidency like he wanted though...because three different Ford assassinations missed.

And some of RI's favorite rogues pop up in this as well:

Title: WOODWARD, Pentagon plant, Representative of People to Remove Nixon: why? "THE 25TH AMENDMENT TRICK"
Author: skolnick
Date: 2004.04.21 10:02
Description: THE 25TH AMENDMENT TRICK--USED IN TWO ATTEMPTS TO GET TO THE PRESIDENCY WITHOUT ANY ELECTION Queuing up to appoint President Nelson Rockefeller, via a SLOW COUP of appointments and assassinations, a technique that Bush has learned from well it seems. In 1973: plan was to remove VP Agnew first, appoint a crony, then remove Nixon next (suitably bribed), thus, having both appointed Pres & VP as appointees, after the JFK assassination; then kill off the Pres. appointee (Ford, who had appointed Nelson as VP). However, Ford survived 3 assassination attempts--messing the queuing all up. Did the Nelson Rockefeller scheme die with him, in 1979, after he basically appointed the whole administration of Trilaterals to Jimmy Carter's administration as a consolation prize to his failes slow coup? Or did it live on in the attempt to remove Gore in 1998? and then in Gore assassination attempts in 2000? And the attempts to vacate Cheney without vacating Bush? Something to keep in mind: this would be an entirely legal coup. Watch out. Since November 22, 1963 (murder of U.S. President John F. Kennedy by a Nazi inside cabal linked to Johnson, Lemnitzer, Nixon, Bush Sr.), American politics has been overshadowed by a gangster turf war. It was not taken seriously by voters for four decades. Voters might be well advised to rethink their decision to ignore this.

6/18/2007 04:38:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

I'm embarassed by the historical record of our time. This Keystone Cops routine with the crud rising to the top is mostly just obscene. It should all be redacted.

6/19/2007 01:11:00 AM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

ericswan,

Yes, our record is embarrassing, but then it's not really "ours," is it? I was reading something somewhere (oh, wait...I remember now: Stardance by Spider Robinson, one of your brighter BC neighbors) the other day that talked about the karmic balance between the worldkillers & the saints (who outnumber the former many times over) inevitably tipping toward the Light, despite the apparent victory of the Dark Ones. In its arrogance, the lid-less Eye cannot really fathom the tiny works of hobbits & men...until it's too late, and the Fat Ones boil in their own oil.

And speaking of oil, Mark is right to question why Black doesn't expand his focus to include all the alternatives which provide pathways away from the oil game. The Honda FCX is okay (especially the 2.0 version which uses solar power for the hydrogen conversion process), but it's a relatively expensive package, since you have to buy the car in order to get the home power plant (which is itself actually only the size and price of an air conditioner)...and, it still leaves energy in the control of some corporation, so that it's not truly decentralized.

Regardless of which technology we choose, decentralization of energy production is the ultimate goal, because this is where we find autonomy--this is where the old "market" shell game falls down. No more wars for oil; no more hoarding resources and pursuing hegemony as the empire's prime policy goal.

Solutions & alternatives are many, but even without them, the game can be exposed and defanged. The US congress just passed another status quo affirming energy bill whose only progressive element was a request for a modest increase in fuel efficiency--an average of 35 mpg. The Democratic congresswhores owned by the automakers (sorry, "representing the districts of the automakers") responded to this mild attempt to loosen the stranglehold by saying it wasn't "technically feasible". Where were the independent scientists & engineers when this defense was trotted out? Why, silent on the sidelines, of course.

You don't have to get into Pogue carburetors and radical fuel efficiency advances or the whole catalogue of suppressed technologies and applications to see how shallow this defense is. (Although some of that research is certainly very interesting, as seen in the New Energy Congress' Top 100 Technologies: June 19, 2007.) Here are a few quotes that tell us what we already know in this area:

"I don't think it is mere coincidence that the oil companies began adding lead to their gas in the 1930's after the emergence of the Pogue carburetor." Lead inhibits the catalytic property of the Pogue, rendering it nearly useless after just a short while of running.--Inventor J. Bruce McBurney

"One has to wonder why such a solution would not be implemented immediately into the mainstream market, if was so simple

'It's not chemistry, it's politics,' is what E.A. Cherniak, late Head of the Chemistry Department at Brock University in Ontario of told McBurney after receiving a phone call that turned him pale and scared him away from helping McBurney in 1987. Two years later he agreed to at least pen some kind of statement of endorsement, "but it is nothing compared to what he knew" laments McBurney. Professor Cherniak only went so far as to say, 'The concepts of Mr. McBurney are scientifically and technologically sound.'"


The game is so obvious, so hotly defended with the usual tinfoil aspersions that it makes you wonder who all is actually in on the current swindle:

He (McBurney) also has approached Green Peace and other environmentalist groups, because of the great boon this technology would be to the environment. He offered to turn all the rights to the technology over to them so that their bylaws would not have conflict in endorsing a particular company. They likewise turned him down, saying, "We get one call a week from someone claiming they have a super-efficient carburetor," as if that was evidence that none exist.

The reason why the establishment has to fight so hard to preserve its monopoly is because even a modest increase in efficiency would cause the market forces they love to sing about to bring the cost of oil down, which would in turn cause their whole house of geo-political cards to tumble. That's why no one is installing whisper wheels™ on their cars & buses--a technology that goes back 70 years!!


Under the “We don’t need no stinkin’ oil” banner, we have this post by Cory Doctorow over at the inimitable BoingBoing: Tuesday, January 31, 2006--Flying windmills -- power from the sky:

A Worldchanging post rounds up three different airborne power-generation systems -- a flying windmill, a windmill-equipped zeppelin, and a kite-based windmill.

According to their figures, one flying windmill rated at 240kW with rotor diameters of 35 feet could generate power for less than two cents per kilowatt hour--that would make them the cheapest power source in the world. For greater power needs, several units would be operated in the same location--Sky Windpower says that an installation "rated at 2.81 megawatts flying at a typical U.S. site with an eighty percent capacity factor projects a life cycle cost per kilowatt hour at 1.4 cents." And they would have far better uptime than most windmills--since the jetstream never quits, they should operate at peak capacity 70-90% of the time. Output would also be less dependent on location than it is on the ground, simply because terrain doesn't matter much when you're at 35,000ft; however, since the jetstream and other "geostrophic" winds don't blow much at latitudes near the equator, it would be useful primarily for middle- and higher-latitudes.


Then Cory gives us that link: It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Airborne Wind Power, by Jeremy Faludi, where we find this sobering fact:

1% of the jetstream's wind power could supply all US electrical demand.

It's a great article with some amazing ideas. Floating wind power plants. Bucky Fuller told us that if we built a sphere big enough--say a half-mile diameter--it would float. A Swiss outfit is making bioblimps, based on Schaubergerian principles, which could be fitted to sequester carbon in the upper atmosphere...literally shitting bricks of the stuff from up there where we don't want it to down here where we can build stuff with it. (Okay, not on our heads--parachutes can be attached.)

So here's what I'm thinking. Like the floating rafts on which Mexico City was built, we start growing some floating farms--air rafts--to balance the CO2 content, grow food & drugs, etc. As they gradually spread out & stabilize, we start colonizing them. In time, we start floating higher, adapting as we go, until we eventually float right out of this gravity well, to the space between the stars. Hollow, organic earths.

6/19/2007 01:32:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

I'm not impressed with the CT's blotting out my summer solstice. Something is amiss when low life throws a shadow over all the little life forms that bring their gift tp mankind no questions asked.

6/20/2007 05:18:00 AM  
Blogger Mark said...

Fascinating how pedophile networks, neofascist sentiment, and anti-labor laws all go hand in hand, eh?

Interesting that the whole thing seems to be used opportunistically in Portugal to go after the institutionalized left (in a period when the 'state' wants to destroy all labor laws), though I'm skeptical it was isolated only to the people so far mentioned...


Arrest of Portugal’s elite in paedophile scandal
By Paul Mitchell
18 June 2003 [note date]

A scandal concerning the abuse of children in care homes has led to the arrest of several members of Portugal’s social and political elite.

The arrests include an ex-Portuguese ambassador, a TV games show host and the employment minister in the former Socialist Party government. A minister in the current Social Democratic Party/Peoples Party coalition government has also been implicated.

The government has used the scandal to attack the opposition and justify the widespread use of phone tapping, long periods of detention and other repressive measures. [which, er, just maintains more power for those still in the network...]

The allegations are that state-run care homes were a target for wealthy and influential paedophiles whose activities were covered up for decades by successive Portuguese governments.

Since the scandal erupted the Ministry of Labour and Social Security has confirmed that 128 girls and boys who were mainly deaf-mutes at the care homes were victims of sexual abuse.

Portugal’s sexual abuse scandal has been compared to the Dutroux affair in Belgium [1].

Diario de Noticias has warned that if a paedophile “mafia network ... really exists, it is Portuguese democracy which is danger.”

According to Diario de Noticias, Portugal is “reeling from a far-reaching crisis of values and identity.” The author Antonio Mega Ferreira lamented in the weekly Visão, “I can’t recall, during the part 25 years of democracy, ever having felt we were going through such a disturbing, frail, demoralising, upsetting time as we are going through now.”

The scandal first made the headlines last November after dozens of children from Casa Pia care homes publicly accused Jorge Ritto, a former Portuguese ambassador to South Africa, of child abuse.

Casa Pia had the reputation as one of the oldest and most respected state institutions in Portugal.

It was founded by Diogo Inácio de Pina Manique, Police Superintendent of Lisbon, following the social instability caused by the devastating earthquake of 1755.

Casa Pia prided itself as “the very first establishment of popular education of the Country and the most significant institution of assistance to minors.”

The care homes currently accommodate 4,500 orphaned children.

Once the allegations became public Teresa Costa Macedo, a former Secretary of State for the Family, revealed that she knew about them whilst she was a minister in the early 1980s and that very influential people were involved.

In 1982, she claimed she told General Antonio Ramalho Eanes, Portuguese President from 1976-1986, about the allegations.

Following the arrest last November of Carlos Silvino, a former resident at a Casa Pia home who then became a driver and gardener for the institution, Costa Macedo warned that Silvino “was just one element in a huge paedophile network that involved important people in our country... It wasn’t just him. He was a procurer of children for well-known people who range from diplomats and politicians to people linked to the media.”

Justifying her silence about the allegations for over 20 years Costa Macedo said, “I received anonymous threats, by phone and post. They said they would kill me, flay me and a lot of other things.”

Costa Macedo claims that whilst a minister she handed police “photographs, an account of the methods used to spirit children out of the orphanage and testimonies of a number of children.” Press reports suggest many of the photographs were found at Jorge Ritto’s house. It is also alleged that when investigators visited Ritto’s house they found four children locked up who had been missing from Casa Pia for several days.

Ritto retired last year from his position as Portuguese representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in Paris.


The Visão magazine reported in March that Ritto was transferred from his job as consul in Stuttgart in 1970 after German officials complained about an incident with a young boy in a park.

Ritto, who is now in police custody, has denied all the allegations of child abuse and accused the media of conducting a “lynching.”

The Portuguese Attorney General’s Office has since confirmed it began investigations into the Ritto affair in 1982, but abandoned them in 1987 for [they say] lack of evidence.

Files relating to the case were destroyed in 1993.

After the paedophile allegations were first published, Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso ordered an investigation. Jorge Sampaio, the President and a Socialist Party leader, proclaimed, “The impunity which for decades on end has made this case a shame for us all will finally end ... Faced with the horror that so many children, who were entrusted to us to be educated and cared for, were victimised it is necessary to declare here that the guilty will be severely punished.”

He implored Portuguese citizens to trust the justice system saying, “We have to hope that our institutions work.”

However, a spokeswoman from Portugal’s Innocence in Danger charity said the organisation had been warning about child abuse for years in Portugal but there had been a virtual “media blackout”.

“It is no good President Sampaio and Parliament sounding off about the problem now and appearing to be knights in shining armour,” the spokeswoman continued. “They, like the police, must have known about the widespread abuse of children in Portuguese institutions for years. They have been warned often enough by charities such as ours but for reasons best known to themselves have remained silent. Their recent acts of breast-beating are outright hypocrisy... Time and time again complaint files are lost, witnesses are seldom interviewed and suspects let off the hook.”

Since Ritto’s arrest, the police have also detained the popular TV games show host Carloz Cruz, known as “Mr Television”, and Joao Diniz, a high society doctor.

In April, they arrested Manuel Abrantes, a former assistant director of Casa Pia.

More controversially, in May, the police arrested Paulo Pedroso, Socialist Party MP and Labour and Training Minister from 1999 to 2001 with responsibility for the Casa Pia homes. Pedroso asked parliament to lift his parliamentary immunity so that police could question him about 15 cases of child sexual abuse that allegedly occurred whilst he was minister. Pedroso claims he is a victim of a witch-hunt saying, “I have never participated in any act of paedophilia or any similar act.”

The Socialist Party leader Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, who is a close personal friend of Pedroso, also offered to undergo police questioning after “he had learned of plans to implicate him in the scandal”. The weekly paper Expresso published a report on May 25 from four children who said they saw Ferro Rodrigues at locations where sexual abuse was taking place. The paper said there was no evidence he was personally involved and the Attorney General José Souto de Moura insists he is not a suspect.

Ferro Rodrigues says he will take legal action against those defaming him. “I want it to be clear: our fight will be serene but determined and it is and will only be directed at those who are responsible for this defamation, whatever their objective is.”

As a result of police tapping Pedroso’s mobile phone calls Luis Valente de Oliveira, public works minister in the current government, has also been questioned. Valente de Oliveira resigned in April citing health reasons.

When Durao Barroso came to power in March 2002, he promised to bring “life and honour” back to Portugal’s public institutions after a series of fraud cases.

Valente de Oliveira’s association with the paedophile allegations following the embezzlement trial of Portuguese Defence Minister Paulo Portas has made the promise worthless.

Whatever the truth of the child abuse allegations is, the government has used the Casa Pia scandal to justify the widespread tapping of phone calls by the police and the detention of suspects for up to 12 months without charge.

There are nearly 300 pages of transcripts of tapped calls made by Socialist leaders, including Ferro Rodrigues. Under Portuguese law the police can tap anyone’s phone if they believe it will help solve a serious crime and providing they have special permission from a judge. The Attorney General said, “I myself could be [tapped] whether or not I was under suspicion, if the conversation would help discover the truth.”

Portugal is one of the poorest countries in Europe with the lowest wage rates and high employment. The country is officially in recession and is threatened by the lower costs offered by the eastward expansion of the European Union into the former Eastern bloc countries. Durao Barroso is pushing ahead with a programme of privatisation and social changes that are provoking widespread opposition. A General Strike on December 10 last year brought the country to a standstill. The strike was called in response to planned labour laws including curbing the right to strike, making dismissals easier, increasing the working week, reducing overtime payment and classifying holidays as a bonus. The use of phone taps, detention and other repressive measures will be vital to defeat any political rebellion against the government.

1] Marc Dutroux, a notorious paedophile and child murderer is still in jail awaiting trial years after his arrest in 1996. The Dutroux case, which uncovered a sordid picture of judicial and political corruption, implicated the highest levels of Belgian society. The general outrage with the political system this produced found its expression in a series of mass “white marches” (so-called because of the white ribbons participants wore in memory of Dutroux’s victims).

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/port-j18.shtml

6/20/2007 12:34:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Yeah, I see your point, ericswan, but first off, I was just indulging an urge to imagineer a little (a prominent danger associated with reading too much sci-fi), and secondly, epehemral Bucky ships wouldn't really occlude your view of the heavens. If I could post some graphics here, you could see that a passing sphere or snowflake raft wouldn't be much more than a light cloud in permanent motion.

I guess what I was really trying to say with that odd notion (and the Top 100 alternative energy tech list) was that there are so many solutions because the problem is not what they say it is: intractable. The only thing that's intractable is the firmly entrenched interests of the Owners.

Not that they haven't tried to throw up sufficient smoke screens to cover the truth.

They tell us the problem is in our nature, when its really in theirs. They tell us that there just aren't enough resources to go around, so that they're justified in their depredations; it's just the strong hoarding their resources, just like in "Nature". They tell us that it's politics--that nothing can change because of gridlock, when they've engineered the lockdown in the first place.

Even our imagineers are oftentimes fooled by this sort of tomfoolery. This morning I was reading some more about that Blimp Swims Through Air Like A Fish story over at Technovelgy.com (an interesting location, to be sure) when I ran into the classic example of our professional visionaries doing their job...and falling down on the job.

The one falling down was Greg Bear, who has written some great stuff in the past but now seems to be following David Brin down the path of respected member of the Establishment. (The Wordsworth syndrome.)

In Technovelgy's Interview With Greg Bear On Quantico ("The novel is set about ten years into the future; it focuses on the baptism-by-fire experienced by several newly-minted graduates of Quantico, the FBI academy. Quantico is an engaging thought-experiment on how terrorism might be fought in the near future. It is also an exploration of the possible outcomes of how we have prosecuted the Iraq war and the war on terror so far,") we see just how far a bright star can fall:

T: In the novel, I believe there are references to the strong conservative bent in our political system. Doesn't one of the characters express disappointment with conservative leadership?

GB: "I don't think I actually mention that per se. I certainly see that happening now. What we're seeing is a real backlash; I don't think Bush could catch a forward wind in a hailstorm right now. What we have is a balancing out, which I talk about in Quantico. We swing to the right, we go back to the center a little bit, we correct course... this is how America operates. It really depends on personalities, intelligence, on looking at your adversaries and studying them closely. It's not about ideology, it's about personality. We often forget that who the leader is is extremely important - not so much what they say to contact their base.

That goes for all the parties. Certainly it worked in the past in the 1980's with conservatives that I highly respected at the time. We don't always agree, but we work together. But that didn't happen this time. This time, it went so far off the beaten path of American politics that we got ourselves into deep trouble. And that's what I wanted to write about in Quantico, the fact that we are all in this together, that we have to understand that we are not right all the time, whatever side we belong to, that we need the counterbalance of the opposite opinion
.

He then goes on to lay this gem:

"...we have to learn how not to inflame the political waters.

I remember back in the 1990s when the Republican congress was basically saying 'Let's shut down the American government,' American government is the problem, everything they're doing is wrong' and then some people started saying that American government is evil. And very shortly thereafter we had Timothy McVeigh, and the Murrah Federal Building. They had politically assigned the target, and someone, one of those strange individuals had decided to take out the target.

That can't go on. We can't inflame political opinion..."


Yeah, okay, Greg--let's not rock the boat, shall we? Let's just allow the democratic process solove our problems...just like it always has.

What crap! And this from a guy who's supposed to be able to see past the end of his nose!

Contrast that with this interview (also linked at Technovelgy) by the Armchair Anarchist with that smart Scot I've been linking, Ken MacLeod. They were talking about Ken's new book, The Execution Channel, the synopsis of which at Amazon goes like this:

Fighting has spread across the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. In the US, refugees from climate-change disasters subsist in FEMA camps. Images of official executions circulate on the internet like al Qaeda videos. State agencies sponsor conspiracy theories as cover-ups. As the troops of the last superpower stand astride the last of the oil, China and Russia aren't the only states considering their options: certain nations of Old Europe are quietly preparing for the worst...

So the Armchair Anarchist is asking Ken about the role of politics in "the way forward" and Ken responds to this question as follows:

AA: You’ve thrice won the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction writing. ‘Libertarian’ isn’t a word you hear very often in the UK, and researching into it on the internet tends to run a person into a lot of intense (and often conflicting) invective from US fringe politics. So, for the politically ignorant (myself included), what the hell is libertarianism, in a nutshell?

KM: “Even that question is a bit of a minefield, because historically ‘libertarianism’ was more or less synonymous with anarchism, which - even in its individualist versions - is a form of socialism. But in current usage - contested though it is - ‘libertarianism’ usually refers to a range of ideas that derive historically from liberal and to some extent conservative thought. In its moderate form it’s classically stated in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State. Its extremism is what’s provocatively called anarcho-capitalism. The best one-liner about it is: ‘Thatcherism - on drugs!’ The most thorough philosophical exposition of libertarianism is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. The best introduction to it for British readers is to browse the vast online literature of the
Libertarian Alliance, to which I’ve contributed a couple of documents. There’s a splinter group also called the Libertarian Alliance which has another online archive, also full of fascinating stuff. And, of course, the website Critiques of Libertarianism, for the other side of the argument.”

AA: OK, so *are* you a libertarian? Or a socialist? Or both, or neither?

KM: “I’ve often asked myself that question. In a review of
Newton’s Wake, Gwyneth Jones alluded to my ‘hard-left libertarianism’ and I immediately agreed with her - yes, I’m a hard-left libertarian! I have very hard-line libertarian positions on some questions, such as guns and drugs and free speech.

“On the other hand I have no objection to a public sector that is financed by honest tax-and-spend and not mucked about by so-called market reforms, which I strongly suspect were consciously advanced by free-market think-tanks for no other purpose than to destroy public transport, the health service and so on. In the long run I would like to see the public services run by mutual associations rather than by the state, but that’s another question.

“The only kind of socialism I would propose for the foreseeable future is what the economist Alec Nove called ‘feasible socialism’, or some kind of market socialism. The socialist thinker I find most interesting at the moment is the American philosopher
David Schweickart. There is no party that actually advocates feasible socialism or market socialism, as far as I know. In any case, I don’t think that’s the real dividing line in current politics. The real issue is whether you are for or against imperialism and all the repression and surveillance and authoritarianism that goes with it.”


I've been talking a bit with MacLeod, trying to get him to take the next step, to go beyond the market, beyond the political spectrum as we know it, to just imagine what we could do if we ignored all that nonsense. So far, he's pretty receptive, if not entirely convinced.

But then again, he's not really part of the system, either.

6/20/2007 02:38:00 PM  
Blogger iridescent cuttlefish said...

Fascinating how pedophile networks, neofascist sentiment, and anti-labor laws all go hand in hand, eh?

Yes it is, Mark.

The other "fascinating" (disgusting?) aspect of this sort of thing is just how plastic and meaningless these political labels are. I know we've talked about this many times in the past, but consider what Sounder has been getting at with the use that's been made of climate change.

The history of the ecology movement is very much intertwined with that of fascism, from the early days when the Nazis were appropriating the Wanderlieder & Wanderlust of the Wandervogel to build their own nasty "Blood & Soil" myth to the present day, which Kevin at Cryptogon is always on about. (One interesting look at this, from a "Left Biocentric" perspective comes from David Orton, while another, a Defending Steiner, shows just how complicated this whole business is, since those who castigate the eco-fascists can fall into the same mistakes as Peter Staudenmaier did...)

I just received the new Current Concerns newsletter which gets inside how this is working in the EU right now...and it's (surprise!) just like it was the first time around, except that they're so much more adroit at hiding behind misleading slogans.

The first story to catch my eye was Parliament Appoints First Green-Liberal Government in Europe, which talks about this "revolutionary" development in Finland--behind the press releases we find out that there's something just a little sinister going on here which is part of a much larger phenomenon, Black/Green coalitions:

"Nuclear power, tax reduction, economic deregulation...as in other western states, social equality in Finland is no longer at the top of the agenda but has been replaced by the protection of the environment and the fight of climate change."

In story after story, we find the fascists daubing themselves in the new green goo. As if social equality and environmental protections were somehow contradictory! (Why hasn't anyone explained this to poor, deluded Wangari Maathai?)

In Next Wars Violating International Law in the Name of Environment? Rainer Rothe gets to the heart of the matter:

Since neoconservative policy is cruel by nature it does not consider human dignity, which is guaranteed by the human rights as well as in all major religions and by the nature of man; the essential element of human dignity is the fact that by nature all human beings are born with the same rights. This obliges us to social justice and mutual respect since every individual is unique.

Whoever – as his political agenda does – avowedly abolishes social justice and replaces it by protection of environment, violates the principle of safeguarding and respecting the human being, the Creation and human dignity. This constitutes an attempt to fundamentally change our value system towards an inhumane existence.

The four principles of the early days of the Green Party in Germany are no longer spoken about: ecology – social justice – non-violence – grassroots democracy. What started with Fischer and the Kosovo war, a war that violated international law – at government level is now being continued. For quite some time now new constitutional concepts have been discussed in Germany which place the environment and its protection above human dignity and the protection of man. Everybody must contemplate where this will lead to. Furthermore, there are influential politicians in the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) in Germany who have been dreaming of a Conservative-Green coalition.

The Green Party’s policy (“Die Grünen/Bündnis 90”) that was able to participate in a war demonstrated by by Joschka Fischer – is not in opposition to that. However, it is the human beings that make the politics.

Apparently we need the right to a general strike that was requested in the German Parliament by the parliamentary group of the Left Party/ PDS – “Die Linke/PDS” – in order to put an end to such inhumane concepts as replacing social justice by a feigned environmental policy: dictatorship is the common denominator.
We citizens have to be aware that a just peace is not possible without social justice in the whole world. And did the citizen’s movement at the beginning of the '80s in Germany not search and demand this very peace?


The other stories from this month's Current Concerns that are connected in this intrigue are:

German Media, Russia and the “Anti Missile Shield” – PR and Politics, by Dr. Heinz Loquai, retired Brigadier General, Meckenheim

“Nato – you are not welcome!” (Text of a speech that Johan Galtung gave in Oslo on 25 April 2007 at a rally protesting the meeting of Nato foreign ministers)

and

Russia, Europe, Germany and the USA: Keep away from the path of US megalomania, by their best staff writer, Karl Müller (Germany )


So, I guess my question, Mark, is just what exactly "Socialist" means in the case of the Portuguese Perverts, since "Green" now means "Black" and "truth" has apparently become another species of "lies"?

Politics, schmolitics--can we ever just cut the crap and recognize social justice and sustainability as inseparable?

Bloody Quislings...

6/20/2007 03:31:00 PM  
Blogger Mark said...

I think that's an excellent summary (and summary of links), IC. And you said:

"The history of the ecology movement is very much intertwined with that of fascism, from the early days when the Nazis were appropriating the Wanderlieder & Wanderlust of the Wandervogel to build their own nasty "Blood & Soil" myth to the present day,"...

...which is exactly what the bioregional state is designed to check and balance against, since pro-humanist sentiment is environmental sentiment (see other post).

And IC said:

"So, I guess my question, Mark, is just what exactly "Socialist" means in the case of the Portuguese Perverts, since "Green" now means "Black" and "truth" has apparently become another species of "lies"? Politics, schmolitics--can we ever just cut the crap and recognize social justice and sustainability as inseparable?"

Ah, though here we go (in the below) into how various strands of environmentalism have intentionally not been organized (or have been violently disorganized) from making such a seeming simple association.

In my view, any sentiment that attempts to popularize a dichotomy between pro-human and pro-environmental is just conducting fake discourse heresthetics coming down on the side of repressing someone while wearing a green cloak from a centralized location. This has a lot to do with various forms of 'heresthetics' a mouthful of a word, though once you know it you see it everywhere:

Heresthetics is a word coined by political scientist William Riker. It was designed by him to fill a gap in political speech discourse analysis originally, to discuss the rhetorical political intents and effects of employing particular arguments in political speech that propose logical fallacies of various sorts (“it’s environmental degradation or its loss of jobs”; “these are your only choices”; “since this is A, you are B” ; “any opposition to the Likud Party in Israel is Anti-Semitic,” Bush’s “you are either with us or against us,” “your choice is imperialistic Bonesman Bush or imperialistic Bonesman Kerry” etc.) These statements Riker defined as discourse heresthetics, as they typically are proposed around attempting to constrain, frame, and convince individuals faced with choices that others attempt to set up in such a way, as to get them to follow through with a designed choice of what the speaker wants. All are examples of attempting to use the mental gymnastics of heresthetics to confuse people enough to get them to fall in line behind someone else’s political interests. Freudenberg has labeled the same discourse phenomenon as the ‘double diversion’ used in many arguments in American environmental politics.

However, instead of a discursive based heresthetics, I am proposing to apply this concept to consumption, in a heresthetics of consumption, where various social groups design both social and material issues in a constrained and directed fashion in such a manner as to innately forebear against any choices in consumption, so that “any choices all are pre-chosen issues” in a sense toward certain political-consumptive heresthetic goals.

This herds the consumer/citizen in certain more easily administered and managed directions over others through a reduction of choices instead of through the offering of choices.

A heresthetical outlook on consumption aims instead to identify how a background aggregate demand gets funneled and put into selected pre-determined channels instead of ever considering that consumers have much say in the heresthetical matter of what is being consumed. Certainly there is choice. Though who chooses and administrates the set of guided choices? Is it actually a choice? Consumptive heresthetics is designed to approach these issues of the gray area of guided clientelistic choice and the administration of consumption, and how this lack of choice is disguised and ‘marketed’ as choice to disguise the heresthetics at work.

For instance [there are completely different interests at work in some environmentalism that the powers that be obviously hate to see as environmentalist sentiment], the battles over labeling GM-crops in the United States where upwards of 97% want labeling (certainly a demand side pressure if ever there was one) or the worldwide rejection of GM crops, fails to actually understand how or why it is only pressures coming from states and corporations that want to institutionalize and impose materials against and across demand heresthetically, in a de jure coup de grace of introduction without notification.

Can we actually state with a straight face that “supply responds to demand”? Or is that merely a religious mystification that merely distracts demand interests from seeing supply sided consumptive heresthetics at work upon them, demoting their choices and politics in materials?"


[From the above, and Adam Smith despite intellectually against such monopolies--was sponsored through the BEIC corporate global monopoly, a useful ideology for a corporate monopolist to espouse: 'just let 'the market' (i.e., "us monopolists") take care of it.' That discourse of 1800s European economic liberalism (increasingly opposed to political liberalism once entirely part of it--though increasingly shorn off as annoying to corporate monopoly jurisdictions to have such political feedback) is a heresthetic battle over 'proper jurisdiction' and political input.

Same with how the neocons depend on the popularized heresthetics of 'the perfect self-organizing' game theory, etc.] Back to my quote:

"We are instead talking about particular ideological interests [in the example above,] of supply being manifested in certain materials over others, that allow for more consolidation and administrative power through a materials change, that no one wants to impress upon people into their very bodies except corporate/ state actors.

Another example of consumptive heresthetics would be the issue of supply-side corporations refusing and legally challenging citizen-pressured state laws for the introduction of electric cars in California where surveys say there is a huge demand waiting to be filled."


Electric cars, are an example that sort of gums up that form of 'corporate voluntarism environentalism' by being a pro-human 'market' desired thing and pro-environmental thing at the same moment--though since such a style of environmentalism in practice went against the grain of profits for degradative corporations to offer such choices that undermined their other profit streams elsewhere, they worked to call it off--and crushed all their electric cars that they only offered on revocable leases anyway, and crushed the California laws that made them do it in the first place. (Edwin Black's "expose" on oil unstudiously left out THAT recent California episode in his book, despite it being the far more cogent example Americans could connect with and relate to, actually. Why did he leave it out?).

THREE STRANDS OF HERESTHETIC ENVIRONMENTALISM

So, I'm uncomfortable talking about "the" ecology movement, I guess as you can see, since so many groups are competing heresthetically to be recognized as 'the' environmentalism, which means basically 'kill other heretics,' basically.

Strand One

For instance, on the one hand there is the interpretation of environmentalism, dependent on neoMalthusianism, that's interests are an international corporatist and attempt to make environmentalism 'non-political' in the letting of people just die off. They are quite eager to turn this into their typical anti-humanist sentiment and spin it as 'the' enirononmentalism 'for the environment'. This would be the aristocratic global corporatist 'environmentalism' biased views. Another strand one situation are the ideas mostly around ecologicial modernization, which as well, is a totally private, voluntaristic method of environmentalism that only keeps bad design intact by shifting wastes around from one area of production to another. The Todds' 'living machines' are just a wetland attached to the bad design issue, when ideally, there would be no mid-stage of wastes to remediate at all. William McDonough as well tweaks this form of ecological modernization toward corporate, private, voluntaristic design as 'the' environmentalism.

Strand Two

Another strand of 'environmentalism,' might be all the attempts to enhance state frameworks in the name of environmentalist forms of democratic represetation. Strand one, on the (not so) sly, actively hires people to kill off 'strand two people' since they do want to create that kind of public politicized environmentalist-state alliance that the privatized, voluntaristic "on our own schedule only" strand one people hate, as Helvarg's book The War Against the Greens: The "Wise-Use" Movement, the New Right, and the Browning of America, sickeningly demonstrates:

"Antitoxics activist Paula Siemers remembers the night two men attacked and knifed her on a Cincinnati street near her home, following earlier incidents of harassment in which she'd been stoned and her house set on fire.... "After they cut my throat they poured water in it from the river and said, 'Now you'll have something to sue about,'" says Stephanie McGuire, an activist who was raped and tortured by three men in camouflage after she protested water pollution on the Fenholloway River....

"We think it was murder," says a friend of Leroy Jackson, a Native American environmentalist whose body was found by the side a New Mexico highway several days before he was scheduled to fly to Washington to testify against clear-cut logging on the Navajo reservation...

"I was driving home from a concert and saw a glow in the mist. By the time I got to my house a mile and a half in from the highway it was burned to the ground," recalls Greenpeace USA's toxics coordinator Pat Costner of the arson fire that destroyed her home....

"We were told if we killed any of them there was $40,000 that was there to defend us in court or to help us get away," says Ed Knight, an ex-logger and Hell's Angel describing how he was hired to lie in ambush with an Uzi, waiting to shoot Earth Firsters in the California woods....

On and on the stories go, told in crystal clear prose, documented with footnotes abundant, by this veteran journalist and private investigator, David Helvarg.

Had I come across this book before reading "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" and "Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future," the stories might have sounded far-fetched.

However, the vast accumulation of evidence of corporate violence against environmentalists and ordinary citizens alike is now beyond dispute - and sickening.

This bafflingly unavailable book is ESSENTIAL READING for anyone attempting to understand the [strand two side of the] environmental movement and its unique challenges."


Besides millions of Native Americans over the years, pro-labor, pro-health, and pro-environmentalist Karen Silkwood's sudden death (in the midst of course of her seeming 'murder by plutonium poisioning') as she was driving to testify against her nuclear industry for its heinous pollution crimes and false documentation coverups about nuclear accidents certainly was the first first 'white person high profile' version of what Helvarg would describe as the ramped up corporate fascism in U.S. from the 1970s onward.
Regardless of the Wiki write up, Silkwood seems to have been murdered into silence. Particularly the article ignores the car damage that indicates she may have been sideswiped off the road. And strange how car crashes cause her document stash in her car she was transferring to the open hearing to disappear, eh?

Even the jury/courts found the FBI guilty for attempted murder of Earth First! ecological activist Judi Bari, by planting a bomb in her car to detonate..... Note the same environmentalism--that pro-labor, pro-human rights, pro-environment--that the 'powers that be' hate to see having such a popular association. It was just like the 1999 Seattle WTO protests of "teamsters and turtles" in the same parades on the same side. Business owners have attempted for a generation to paint environmentalism (heresthetically) as 'against workers' for instance. However,...

"Judi Bari (November 7, 1949 – March 2, 1997) was an American environmentalist and labor leader, a feminist, and the principal organizer of Earth First! campaigns against logging in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California as well as efforts through Industrial Workers of the World Local 1 to bring timber workers and environmentalists together in common cause.

On May 24, 1990, Bari was severely injured by a pipe bomb which exploded on the floor directly under the driver's seat of her car as she and fellow Earth First! member Darryl Cherney traveled through Oakland, California, on an organizing tour for Redwood Summer, a campaign of nonviolent protests focused on saving redwood forests in Northern California. When the Oakland police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) immediately accused Bari and Cherney of knowingly carrying a bomb for use in an act of terrorism, the story made headlines nationwide. While Bari and her supporters agreed with authorities that the bomb was a timed device, making it useful for an act of terrorism by Bari, they maintain that a motion trigger was also included, meant to explode when the car was driven by Bari. After nearly two months, the district attorney declined to file any formal charges against Bari and Cherney, citing lack of evidence.

Bari had received numerous death threats from timber industry supporters in the weeks before the bombing. She had reported them to local police, and after the bombing Bari's attorney turned written threats over to the FBI for investigation. A year later, Bari and Cherney filed a federal civil rights suit claiming that the FBI and police officers attempted to frame them and to falsely paint them as violent terrorists.

In 2002, a jury in their federal civil lawsuit exonerated Bari and Cherney by ordering four FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers to pay a total of $4.4 million to Cherney and to Bari's estate for violation of their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and for false arrest and unlawful search and seizure."


You have to remember James Watt's quote (in the Helvarg book as well), paraphrasing the corporatist view, 'if we can't win against them at the ballot box, we'll have to use the cartridge box' (i.e., kill them)--a great (if sick) quote by the Reaganite 'public servant' Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, that shows some business groups anti-environmentalist anti-humanist sentiment...

"James Gaius Watt (born January 31, 1938 in Lusk, Wyoming) [Dick Cheney was long term Representative from Wyoming] served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1983....In 1966, Watt became the secretary to the natural resources committee and environmental pollution advisory panel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In 1969, Watt was appointed the deputy assistant secretary of water and power development in the Department of the Interior. In 1975, Watt was appointed the vice-chairman of the Federal Power Commission. In 1976, Watt founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm that represents clients on a pro bono basis. Its stated mission [heresthetically] was to further the cause of individual liberties, especially in the realm of economic and property rights,[1] though environmental groups have criticized it as "training ground for a number of attorneys most active in the anti-environmental movement."[2] A number of attorneys who worked for Watt at the foundation later assumed positions of responsibility in the federal government, including Ann Veneman and Gale Norton.

Small world. Reaganites rapidly moved on disassembling the 'second strand' of environmentalism in the U.S. that drew its inspiration from 'Grunen' (the German Greens), in many ways on the grass roots level--though even the German Greens were very split between this second strand and a third strand of environmentalism). U.S. second strand environmentalism additionally requires looking thorugh for different motivations, that Hunt's talk gets into as well--as a top-down elite power move that has little to do with environmentalism per se and more just global control along another vector. (I would link to it, though YouTube has deleted this talk about global corporate sided power grabs through environmentalism. It's still at Google though:

George Hunt:UN UNCED Earth Summit 1992 (Population reduction, Bank Scams etc..)
36 min 58 sec - Jun 6, 2006

The dark side of [exclusively second strand managerial versions of] the sustainable development movement is exposed by George Hunt. George Hunt, a business consultant, was present at the earlier mentioned 1987 Fourth World Wilderness Congress as a member of the staff. He initially wanted to buy a ticket in 1992 but this proved to be much too expensive ($650).

At the conference he noticed it had very little to do with the conventional [grass roots views of] environment movement and was surprised to see people like Maurice Strong, Edmund de Rothschild (Pilgrims Society), David Rockefeller (Pilgrims Society), and James A. Baker (Pilgrims Society; Cap & Gown; trustee American Institute for Contemporary German Studies; Atlantic Council of the United States; National Security Planning Group; Bohemian Grove; CFR; Carlyle; advisor George W. Bush in his 2000 election).

In his two videos, produced in 1989 and 1992, he plays audio recordings of several of the 1987 speakers, including [U.N.'s] Maurice Strong and Edmund de Rothschild (71). There's not really a reason to label these recordings a hoax (to use UFO community language) and subsequently denounce George Hunt as a fraud. In fact, Hunt could hardly have done a better job at presenting his evidence. However, some of the evidence this person has uncovered is so amazing, that most people will remain skeptical (like me), no matter how much evidence is presented. If what Hunt is claiming is true, then it confirms the overall picture that has been sketched in this article. First take a look at the following Fourth World Wilderness Conference (1987) statement from David Lang (spelling unknown; a Montreal banker, according to Hunt):

"I suggest therefore that this be sold not through a democratic process - that would take too long and devour far too much of the funds - to educate the cannon fodder, unfortunately, that populates the earth. We have to take almost an elitist program, [so] that we can see beyond our swollen bellies, and look to the future in time frames and in results which are not easily understood, or which can be, with intellectual honesty, be reduced down to some kind of simplistic definition." [snobby emphasis in the audio, on 'simplistic']-"


These are your 'elite environmentalists' in some quarters--hardly far from a quick cell phone conversation with the corporate boardroom.

And "fascinatingly" (there's that word once more, IC), Helvarg documents how some fellow travelling corporate monopolist Leninist communists were keen to conduct vigilante violence in the USA on environmentalists for being 'anti-development and anti-worker." Much of the history of how the 'workers movement' has played out has been decidedly anti-environmental, though one could make the case like John Bellamy Foster that Marx was more of an 'eco-marxist' at heart--though of course it's hard to see that in any of his followers particularly the totalitarian Leninites for whom big was better (and better funded from abroad bankers of course--if you read Antony Sutton on the Bolsheviks because they wanted a captive economy to centrally plan for themselves without any annoying competition. That's where Armand Hammer stepped in, by the way--as well as "Bunny" Roland Harriman, Bonesman in same 1917 Bonesman cohort as Prescott Bush).

Third Strand

The third strand of environmentalism might be all those examples of pro-localism, pro-environmentalism, pro-humanism, that are mostly against participation in larger state frameworks, or at least for democratic participation instead of gatekept against participation. For instance, there was a self-proclaimed third wheel "Green army" actually against both the Whites and the Reds in Russia during the 1910s. Nobody wants to talk about the "Russia for the Russians" movement. Sutton i nhis book claims them as anachronistic "Russian libertarians", though I don't think they were entirely motivated by Hayek (like Sutton), quite yet..., it still being the 1910s or forty years before all that. :-)

In practice, drawing mostly from Europe-America, this third strand of environmentalism sees that some are pro-humanist, pro-developmental. Some are resolutely anti-humanist, and anti-developmental, particularly the 'deep ecology' wing.

I have sort of analyzed this version under the rubric of how it affects 'pro-health, pro-ecology, pro-economic' local developmentalism strand--for particular localities first, as this is the basis for their loyalty to any form of larger state. [You might find Deeper Shades of Green an interesting example of this:

Environmental planner, journalist, and activist Schwab draws on broad primary and secondary research and hundreds of interviews with participants to analyze the energetic and effective grassroots activism stimulated by environmental justice issues in working-class and minority communities across the country. The book describes specific battles in some detail: Robbins, Illinois; South Central and East L.A. in Southern California; Cleveland and East Liverpool, Ohio; the Calumet region of northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana; "Cancer Alley" on the Mississippi and other pollution pockets in Louisiana; the once and future mine lands of Appalachian Kentucky; and Native American lands in several parts of the country. The final chapters trace the slowly developing relationship between environmental justice groups--which came together at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991--and more traditional green groups; describe ways that industry and government can move toward pollution prevention (rather than control) and waste reduction (rather than management); and discuss the future of the movement for environmental justice. A lucid, enlightening survey; includes notes, appendixes, and bibliography. ---Mary Carroll

"A new merger of movements is aborning. African-Americans, who had largely ignored much of the environmental movement as irrelevant to their primary social and economic concerns, became increasingly aware that racial discrimination can take the form of environmental injustice. Workers, long accustomed to the adage that jobs are more important than preserving the environment, have discovered that they were often sold a bill of goods....In the process, these groups have found each other. They have become America's newest, most radical, and most committed environmentalists. Radical, not because they adhere to esoteric theories about humankind's ecological crimes against the biosphere, but because they have discovered a mother's passion for true family values when her child's life or health is in danger. Committed, not because they believe deeply in a particular political philosophy, for most come from fairly unremarkable backgrounds, but because they are America's real communitarians. They believe that neighborhoods matter and that government should be in the business of protecting, not destroying, our sense of community."
--Jim Schwab, from the Introduction

"Deeper Shades of Green is about the struggle for a better environment at home, in our communities. The heroes of this struggle are people of every walk of life, every income bracket, every color, who have banded together to protect their neighborhoods....Issues of drugs, violence, and poverty are as much a part of their struggle as a proposed incinerator or landfill. Residents living in communities described in this book are people fighting for their basic right to participate in decisions about their environment."

Lois Gibbs, Executive Director,
Citizens' Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes


.]

Another example in Green Politics, how Grunen was split between strand two and strand three from the start over what 'environmentalism/green politics' would be, institutionally and programmatically.

For the anti-humanist wing of strand three, in the U.S. some 'commando environmentalism' groups in the deep ecology movement would be an anti-humanist neoMalthusian strand--they (unknowingly) take from their corporate monopolist benefactors (intellectually speaking)--which in some situations make a Nelson Rockefeller seem like a Zerzan since both link up with popularizing anti-humanist strand of environentalism as 'the' environmentalism. Zerzan is particularly the "New York Times" version of what this environmentalism looks like, having long interviews with promoting Zersan's anti-humanist environmentlism and apocalypse-mongering getting the 'green' light from them.

On the other hand, a sympathetic pro-humanist pro-environmental movie about this strand of Earth First! is called "Pikaxe" which doesn't really show them acting in a "Zerzan-approved" sort of way.

However, there is this wing that is anti-humanist (like the 'depopulation sentiment' (meaning 'quick kill them off, they are challenging our politics of degradation in their areas') of strand one as well.

As an aside, I don't think the decided aspects of 'environmentalism strand two' style Hilter examples of 'ecofascism' are similar to the current 'strand one' versions of it. Such strand two environmentalism was in line with traditional German state-managed economy frameworks and pro-worker health frameworks--very much in the German tradition of political economy anyway--though increasingly attempted to be dismantled by the 'strand one' European Union. (see film down at the tail of the post on the EU).


'Strand one' Anglo-American versions after WWII tend to be the 'environmentalism of the global market'--sort of loose voluntaristic corporate actors as the only allowed or conceived seats of action or seats at the table. This can be almost nausiatingly seen (for me) in the whole coterie of the glittery 20 minute infomercials at the TED talks (ted.com) concerning their view of what 'green issues are'--incessantly only talk about voluntaristic, 'non-governmental intrusion' strands of it. Ted.com studiously spins strand one--certainly making their corporate benefactors (BMW) or others in the audience (with their high priced multi-thousand dollar tickets) feel good that 'insider environmentalism' means an exclusive comfortable continuation of their order of approach of things and the same jurisdictional hegemony. In some ways William McDonough and so called "Worldchanging.com" website are entirely of this 'strand one' form of environmentalism. Regardless of how critical they are of it letting them down before, their 'hope springs eternal,' and only flows into this group, I guess. From the 1990s, onward 'Gore environmentalism' loves McDonough. Gore of course comes from owning mines in Tennessee and oil stocks in South America under Occidental Petroleum, that strange corporate vehicle of 'capitalist to the communists', Armand Hammer. Hammer Senior 'created' (financed) father Al Gore, Sr., by the way. (If you want to see the blurring of the lines of right/left at work, just read Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer. It would be hard to write a better Greek tragedy than that book.)

At TED.com's version of environmentalism, there's little place for 'strand three' local decision making--much less integration in 'strand two' environmentalism. Letting people have more say locally both economically and politically is so far off most "Gore environmentalism" that to even mention it in such TED insider circles seems to me to be the subtext theme running through those talks, like a corporate heresy they all know though don't want to voice. (The only way they ever had the environmental justice movement up there was when it was in the form of an inspiring, vivacious black woman activist--who was very pro-market.

However, I wouldn't lambaste all top-down frameworks however in this simple analysis as being neofascist or totalitarian, since I think change toward sustainability requires merging all types of environmentalism currently seen fighting each other.

However, definitely some greencoated ideas never really were meant to be anything more than corporate monopoly defenders or State tyranny projects under a novel name, all of them mostly anti-poor and anti-localism in policy, combined with 'lets subsidize the corporations to help us get to a green world'--though removing subsidies already in place destroying that world might be even cheaper and would work a bit better of course, than giving GM or Ford or agri-business millions more (like in the push to ethanol). Things like that show that the claims of stand-alone corporate environmentalism 'stage one' on closer examination is in many cases just a statist pro-corporate subsidy handout.

I think it was (once more pro-labor, pro-humanist, pro-environmentalist recipe) Utah Phillips who said “The earth is not dying - it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses,” (i.e., which I take to mean it's hardly some amorphous unconceiveable populationist destruction, it's a driven from particular elite's biased developmental choices (technological and material choices) that are made without much democratic input--and these decisions are increasingly entirely unrepresentative. Polls of environmental sentiment concur.

CONCLUSION

It's this (intentionally public) semantic confusion of the ideas of environmental'isms' in which different interests, fight amongst themselves for defining the concept in their own biased manners. Thus, they are all mostly divorced from the input of the other and lead to a lot of hamstringing on wedge issues. Like how any suggestion of pro-local business issues seems out of the question in an Earth First! meeting, or how jurisdictional devolution is out of the question for strand two environmentalist sentiment, etc., that just wants more corporate regulation and that's it. Well, corporations are at this stage larger than most state whole taxation base, though.

In a few public talks I have given on the bioregional state, I get the feel that can see people in the audience struggling to quickly categorize the bioregional state based on these strands of different environmentalism that are 'supposed to be' at war with one another. In some questions I have received, it is on a complete tangent to what I said, based on an assumption that the questioner thought I 'assuredly must still mean [insert metanarrative claim here], right?'. Sometimes I am 'taken to task' for disagreeing with 'environmentalism' (i.e., so conceived, as one particular strand). I'm surprised how the pro-humanist and pro-political feedback throws most neoMalthusians for a loop so much, that their questions take a tact like I never even said it, like nothing I said was even heard.

Thus it's hard (and I would suggest it's futile) to attempt to categorize the bioregional state in only one strand of environmentalism, as it were.

Definitely, the bioregional state is an admix of strand two and strand three styles of environmentalism, though without the presumed dichotonomy that top-down approaches are entirely in all cases non-reflective of local sentiment. Historically, yes, though it all depends on how the institutions are designed to reflect or ignore it. Mostly they are indeed designed to cut out localism or durable ecoregional environmentalism in what I have called the 'environmental gerrymandering' motif of most unsustainable states formal institutions. Thus, in this sense, much of the bioregional state is toward what 'ecological checks and balances' would look like institutionally, merging strand two and strand three.

And more confusing to some, the bioregional state argues that will hardly be enough--offering a definite part for local businesses--though as long as they remain within a rubric of a far more democraticly arrived framework of choice in materials and technologies (instead of supply-side minded against the consumer), and involved in institutional mechanisms to recognize local jurisdictional primacy in developmentalism (as seen in the commodity ecology institutional frameworks for instance).

However, of course to have any kind of defense against transnationalist corporate degradation (that actually prefers institutional devolution--as it makes it easier for it to dominate by divide and conquer), state institutions are still required to network across the watersheds. I argue (not weblinked) that because of the cross-watershed issues of most pollution flows, as well as corporate transnational preferment to 'devolve' states, the art of protecting a watershed almost requires more than simply autonomy movements, and that autonomy of developmentalism would be thus better served by agglutinative larger frameworks, paradoxically, than ideals of autonomy that still allow pollution flows form outside with nothing to be done about it. Besides, most 'bioregionalism' that has been institutionalized has been cross-border institutional frameworks like the Great Lakes Commission or the Chesapeake Bay, instead of the strand three's 'burn all the political bridges' motif seen in fictional Callenbach's Ecotopia--despite it influencing much of the "Cascadia" culture.

In short, I would like to see a place for a blending of all three strands of environmentalism--which would be more conductive to institutionalizing sustainability instead of just institutionalizing biased versions of someone's hegemony called 'environmentalism' against others--that historically has only led others to lie in wait, to destroy such frameworks later on for their different version of environmentalism.

It was Jefferson who wrote about the worst tyranny as being 'from a distance,' right? Though surely (as argued in the bioregional state book) the 'hobgoblin of little minds' can operate just as well on an exclusively local level, in social politics? Jo Freeman's little political tract comes to mind and should be read back to back with Jefferson. For instance, to see Southern U.S. racists argue (heresthetically) for 'local state autonomy' in Virginia against civil rights implementations or against federal environmental standards against environmental justice movements, shows how different biases can crop up to use autonomy arguments equally. Thus the bioregional state is quite a balancing act. Ponder how such exclusively localist solutions might play into corporatist or racial caste versions of jurisdiction for instance, or promote anti-civil rights issues, or even pro-corporate degradation without another legal recourse of the local people to check against local corruption, similar to their their capacity to check against federal corruption--instead of a forced dependence on either.

The bioregional state if anything can show that to be pro-civil rights and pro-environmentalist is how to braid several strands together, instead of being heresthetically forced to choose one of these three strands over the other, as most environmentalist politics all agree upon. The bioregional state is toward that braiding of them together. And it's hardly to call the bioregional state "an ideology," since it is an association of suggested institutions and checks and balances between them--though I'm hardly blind to note it has ideological implications, particularly if arguably most environmental degradation comes from crony state corruption as I would argue though simultaneously requiring some form of 'bioregionalized' state--just without the degradative gatekeeping.

With the polls mentioned above, there is definitely a super-majority for the "politics of sustainability--waiting to be organized", though current political frameworks gatekeep against it. Even conceptions within environmentalism gatekeep against it, fighting amongst each other over selectively appealing to or curtailing or attempting to redirect this public call toward an Ecological Contract of states.

The French President Chirac mentioned publicly in 2001 something to the effect of an Ecological Contract requirement of democratic states, and French elites generally demurred.

Chirac repeated this call in 2004 at the opening ceremony of the founding of the Congress of the World Organization of United Cities and Local Governments [a very 'strand two environmentalism' organizational venue if you ask me.]"

“To help the State and public authorities take full account of the ecological aspect, I have called for France to have an Environmental Charter incorporated into our Constitution. The right to a quality environment will hence be protected in the same way as the rights of man and the citizen stated in the declaration of 1789 and the economic and social rights laid down in the Preamble to the 1946 Constitution. The Charter was drafted following a major national public debate and has been submitted to Parliament. It states the place of Man in his natural environment, without which he would not be able to survive, and the detrimental consequences of excessive pressure on natural resources. It declares everyone’s right to live in a balanced environment that is not harmful to their health.”

However, the bioregional state argues that Chirac’s call for an Ecological Contract requires a method of ongoing enforcement, and political feedback as environmentalism, otherwise it's going to turn into some form of the strand two without any concern for strand three.

French elites will definitely demure more so under Sarkozy the neocon (whose party was the only one that avidly promoted 'the safety' of unverifiable e-vote machines in France that made him President). Chirac's Ecological Contract sentiment however thin on implementation would have had a natural heir in Senegolene Royal--though this is why in my opinion the French 2007 Presidential e-vote fraud occurred for occult insider, devil-sign high fiver Sarkozy, an election outcome in the round two runoff that makes little demographic sense given previous round one demographics as described by Wayne Madsen.):

"
May 7, 2007 -- Nicolas Sarkozy (whom are French intelligence sources have referred to a the "little French Hitler") will govern France with the help of two Silvio Berlusconi- and Rupert Murdoch-like billionaire neo-con French media moguls, Martin Bouygues and Arnaud Lagardere.

Bouygues owns the TF1 television channel, which can be expected to act as Sarkozy's own version of the U.S. Republican Party's Fox News Channel.

Lagardere's media group owns the Europe 1 radio network, Paris Match, several French regional newspapers, and is a major stakeholder in the French television network Canal+.

Sarkozy is known to censor any news reports that are unfavorable to him and pressure publishers and editors to fire wayward journalists.

With much of the French media in his pocket, expect the Franco-Hungarian Sarkozy to institute a new era of Janos Kadarist-style censorship in his nation.

The French election, from the start, has been plagued by election fraud -- bogus polling data, false exit polls, and electronic voting machine and machine counting irregularities were hallmarks of the first presidential election round. ES&S's I-Votronic machines were used in both elections across France. Only Sarkozy's party was supportive of the machines, with all the other political parties calling for a moratorium on their use. Turnout in the French election was 85 percent. With large turnouts historically favoring the left in France, the exit polling and actual polling were at odds with the turnout -- an indication of massive election fraud.

Similar polling irregularities were experienced in recent elections in Scotland, Wales, and England.

In Scotland, 100,000 ballots, thought to mostly be cast for the pro-independence Scottish National Party, were declared "spoiled" in Scotland's election. That "glitch" cost the Scottish Nationalists a larger majority in the Scottish Parliament.

Irregularities in Wales and England similarly affected larger margins for Welsh and Cornish nationalists.

As the Bretons and Corsicans will soon discover with Sarkozy, regional nationalism is anathema to the globalist neo-con agenda, particularly the international bankers who want strong centralized control and minimal devolution of power to local and regional governments.

The electoral malfeasance of neo-cons in manipulating elections in France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, and other countries will remain a problem until the people, acting through the power of progressive, anti-globalist, and anti-capitalist governments, seize control, via whatever means necessary, of the media, the voting and vote counting process, and the opinion polling mechanisms."


Though hey, with Sarkozy's only 'electorate' being some shadowy international insider cabal of neocons putting their fingers in the French state electioneering process for him now (so recently losing fellow devil-signing Burlusconi as their 'Il duche for Europe,' in Italy), Sarkozy can afford to ambivalently get drunk in public at the G8--and blow off public concern: 'His people' of support aren't in the audience anyway. They are in the back room drinking with him laughing their ass off at their own corruption, at the G8 'financial harmonization against democracy' meetings where they figure out common ways to (in my opinion) get rid of the previous French 'non' against the EU that really blasted that whole international corporate monopolizing fascist corrupt to the core project to smithereens right now. (Yea.)

Within democratic states--that have hardly had political wherewithal to implement such arrangements before--a simple statement about merely wanting an Ecological Contract is very different from actually institutionalizing it.

Without remodeling the democratic state, institutional implementation of an Ecological Contract will likely be a dead letter.

Such a public call combines health, ecology, and economics in the same breath or it doesn't breathe at all.

6/20/2007 11:56:00 PM  
Blogger ericswan said...

Mark.. I want to respond to your thoughts on the Portuguese sex rings but let me lace it into a "big picture" view as I try to respond to the many other points being made. In short, it's time for the rubber to hit the road.

IC.. I'm not sure you get it when I'm talking about CT's. The fact is that this mechanism is used to blanket the entire atmosphere from horizon to horizon. This was not a comment in any slight way about your tethered blimps generating energy from that 550 km/hr. wind we call the jetstream

I'm changing tack here as you and your other brother Daryl (hehe) are posting little epic tales that have much to discuss but it isn't in me to write long posts. I will dissect what I read a itty bitty piece at a time.

Quoting... IC
We swing to the right, we go back to the center a little bit, we correct course... this is how America operates. It really depends on personalities, intelligence, on looking at your adversaries and studying them closely.
.........................

If ever there was a time for gleaning from your adversary that time is now and the place is here. All my life of adversarial politics, I've been gleaned to death. As a founding member at the founding convention of the Green Party back in the very early 80's, I went away with a sense of having been hijacked. That sense has not lightened in any respect yet the "green" part has been lost and in fact damaged. The old saw about how to defeat your enemy or join them begins to glow in a new way.
To make a long story short, the convention was controlled from start to finish by forces with their own agenda and that was one of power. It's kind of shocking,,, no "stunning" to see the extent that the power elite will go to maintain their ship of state. Most people at the convention of almost 3,000 people didn't know they were there to elect a party executive. As a result, a group of insiders appointed themselves to the task and no election took place. How bizarre.

6/21/2007 06:53:00 AM  
Blogger ericswan said...

The Green Party of Canada finally has a leader some 28 years after the initial convention. Not necessarily a grass roots person but a high profile Elizabeth May, a bought and paid for WWF corporate Greenie that gets very good exposure in the national press and just last night proposed a carbon tax on consumers and producers. The problem here is that carbon is the least of all the polution problems. There is a forest outside my door the size of the state of New York, that has already died and the problem, if it were possible, is getting worse. Carbon didn't kill these trees off. Flouride, a by-product and effluent in the air, from the Military-Industrial complex aluminum industry is. Like the consumer needs aluminum cans for pop. I don't think so. The manufacturers of aircraft need aluminum and all these other uses for the stuff are toxic and wrong. In short, our Green Party is not interested in the super sites. That's all just sludge under the bridge. The Green Party of the 21st century is completely bought and paid for and in not representative of the grass roots in any way shape or form. I have links to flouride and the degradation it causes to human health and the environment but I'm not here to link sites. Google does that well enough. I'm here to state my point of view and sprinkle in a bit of my experience to demonstrate how I got there.

I will point out here that "scientists" have discovered a technology (they discovered it last night right on the BBC) that will convert apples to bio-fuel.

UMmmmmmm.. What is wrong with that picture?

6/21/2007 07:07:00 AM  
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