Juxtaposition: A Decompartmentalized Zone

"We" have moved...

2007-02-01T15:10:00.000-05:00

Click here. Thanks for visiting.

Eric out...

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NRO Covets New Toy

2007-01-25T23:42:00.000-05:00

The All Seeing Eye in the Sky

by Flemming Funch

An oddball retired aerospace engineer named Bill Grisham seems to maybe have invented something rather revolutionary, which the U.S. military complex would very much like to get their hands on. The site that explains it is here. And if we believe what it says, the idea is to provide globally accessible real-time 3D imaging of every point on the planet, and that it will be available to anybody. It says stuff like this:

According to Grisham, “MIRIAH is everybody´s Spy in the Sky. It´s like a Google Globe but in 3D and in real time. It´s like Internet, but with universal wireless remote wifi access without webservers. Anyone anywhere, will be able to virtually walk around anything or anyone, anywhere. Users will swoop down and walk around objects on the other side of the world. In the future when the Pentagon says there are WMDs somewhere anyone will be able to personally confirm whether or not that is true. There will always be spies on Earth and all that we can ever do about that is for all of us to spy on the spies. In the near future, the biggest secret governments will have to keep will be, How to hide from MIRIAH users? It’s Espionage4Everyone and Everyone2Everybody”.

In the official proposal MIRIAH is described as: an Interferometer satellite sensor which uses convergent illumination for a 2nd Power-Aperture to lower costs for the best characteristics of SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) and Optical Satellites. It provides day or night, all weather, penetrating imaging with extremely fine spatial resolution (half a wavelength), and extremely fine spectral resolution in its 1st Power-Aperture, for automatic GIS capable hyper-spectral imaging. It offers 10 samples/day, with 10 channels, to form square matrix Eigenvector “signatures” to instantly isolate critical tactical targets. SAR captures digitized “virtual” images needing extensive, time consuming processing, while MIRIAH captures “real” images, needing only digitization for delivered images, allowing for faster delivery of finished intelligence. This throughput time also varies with the satellite population: from 12 hours for 3 satellites down to 30 minutes for 12 satellites. Its architecture is 3-D symmetric, so piggybacked launching cuts expensive boosters in half, while balanced moments reduce precession to enable simpler cost effective satellites, adding powerful and secure communication and navigation capabilities.

Which, uhm, I didn't quite catch. But they claim that NRO (the National Reconnaissance Office) has examined the patents and found no flaw in the scheme, and that they're very interested. And that it is thousands of times cheaper and more efficient that any competing proposals. And that Grisham refuses to sell out, and will only grant non-exclusive uses for his patents, because he wants everybody to have access to it. You can read another article about all this here. Of course you should take all of that with a big grain of salt. These might of course be crazy religious fantatics and conspiracy theorists with a lively imagination. Or it might just be right, which would be cool.

Also see Radar love: the tortured history of American space radar programs

2007-01-19T20:59:00.000-05:00

Nez Perce Resumes Buffalo Hunt

Just as the Makah were chided for killing one whale, drawing scads of attention from the true criminals (commercial whaling), the Nez Perce have received lots of negative attention for hunting wild buffalo near Yellowstone National Park. Apparently, it is ok for Montana and the park service to kill thousands but the Nez Perce are to be hated for taking a fraction of that (three so far). From that, you'd think THEY were the visitors on this continent.

The 9/11 Psyop

2007-01-07T12:45:00.000-05:00

New Spy Chief's "Total Information" Ties

2007-01-06T10:45:00.000-05:00

Here is a piece from Defense Tech:

"John Michael McConnell, the retired vice admiral slated to become America's new top spy, [has some] longtime associations [which] may cause him headaches during Senate confirmation hearings," Newsweek.com notes."One such tie is with another former Navy admiral, John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who started the controversial 'Total Information Awareness' program at the Pentagon in 2002."

The international consultancy that McConnell has worked at for a decade as a senior vice president, Booz Allen Hamilton, won contracts worth $63 million on the TIA "data-mining" program, which was later cancelled [kinda sorta -- ed.] after congressional Democrats raised questions about invasion of privacy... While his role in the TIA program is unlikely to derail McConnell's nomination, spokespeople for some leading Democratic senators such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon say it will be examined carefully.

McConnell was a key figure in making Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., the prime contractor on the project, according to officials in the intelligence community and at Booz Allen who would discuss contracts for data mining only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "I think Poindexter probably respected Mike and probably entrusted the TIA program to him as a result," said a longtime associate of McConnell's who worked at NSA with him...

Intel experts agree that McConnell will need all the good will he can get from the intelligence and defense communities. "It's a good appointment for a bad office," says John Arquilla, who teaches intelligence at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "The directorate of national intelligence should not exist. It's very redundant." Insiders say Negroponte was frustrated by his lack of budgeting control over Pentagon intelligence, and the resistance of the CIA to his direction since his office was created in 2004 as part of the Bush administration's post-9/11 reforms.

And by the way, Rutty asks in the comments (I'm paraphrasing heavily here): What was McConnell's role in Echelon -- the NSA's massive information sweeper, which got some much attention during the Clinton years? (The project had been around for decades, remember.)

For more information on the intelligence nexus that comes further and further out of the closet, almost daily, check this piece out, where you will find mention of some of the very outfits spoken of above, like SAIC and Booz, Allen, & Hamilton.

The following is snipped from John Negroponte Demoted: Good News? (posted by a blogger who states clearly that he likes the idea of the intelligence community being run entirely by military personnel - hyperlinks added by yours truly):

If McConnell is tapped, and if the Senate confirms him, it would mean the final takeover of all civilian foreign-policy intelligence agencies by military personnel:

Director of National Intelligence: Vice Admiral Mike McConnell;

Director of Central Intelligence: Air Force General Michael Vincent Hayden;

Director of the National Intelligence Agency: Army Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander (also Commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare);

And, of course, the Department of Defense intelligence agencies are all headed by military personnel: Air Intelligence Agency, Army Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, Marine Corps Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Also see:

Nominee Played Big Role in Outsourcing Intelligence

Mike McConnell Next Director of National Intelligence

The Greatest Hacker Of All Time?

2007-01-04T12:20:00.000-05:00

The question comes up from time to time, who's the greatest hacker ever? Well, there's a lot of different opinions on this. Some say Steve Wozniak of Apple II fame. Maybe Andy Hertzfeld of the Mac operating system...Richard Stallman, say others, of MIT. Yet at such times when I mention who I think the greatest hacker is, everyone agrees (provided they know of him), and there's no further argument. So, let me introduce you to him, and his greatest hack. I'll warn you right up front that it's mind numbing. By the way, everything I'm going to tell you is true and verifiable down at your local library. Don't worry; we're not heading off into a Shirley MacLaine UFO-land story. Just some classy electrical engineering...

The Scene: Colorado Springs, CO.

Colorado Springs is in southern Colorado, about 70 mile south of Denver. These days it is known as the home of several optical disk research corporations and of NORAD, the missile defense command under Cheyenne Mountain. These events took place some time ago in Colorado Springs. A scientist had moved into town and set up a laboratory on Hill Street, on the southern outskirts. The lab had a two hundred foot copper antenna sticking up out of it, looking something like a HAM radio enthusiast's antenna. He moved in and started work. Strange electrical things began to happen near that lab.

People would walk near the lab, and sparks would jump up from the ground to their feet, through the soles of their shoes. One boy took a screwdriver, held it near a fire hydrant, and drew a four inch electrical spark from the hydrant. Sometimes the grass around his lab would glow with an eerie blue corona, St. Elmo's Fire. What they didn't know was this was small stuff. The man in the lab was merely tuning up his apparatus. He was getting ready to run it wide open in an experiment that ranks as among the greatest, and most spectacular, of all time. One side effect of his experiment was the setting of the record for man-made lightning: some 42 meters in length (130 feet).

The Man: Dr. Nikola Tesla

His name was Nikola Tesla. He was an immigrant from what is now Yugoslavia; there's a museum of his works in Belgrade. He's virtual unknown in the United States, despite his accomplishments. I'm not sure why. Some people feel it's a government plot, the same people who are into conspiracy theories. I feel it's more that Tesla, while a brilliant inventor, was also an awful businessman; he ended up dying penniless and broke. Businessmen who go broke fade out of the public eye; we see this in the computer industry all the time. Edison, who wasn't near the inventor Tesla was, but who was a better businessman, is well remembered, as is his General Electric. Still, let me list a few of Tesla's works just so you'll understand how bright he was. He invented the AC motor and transformer. (Think of every motor in your house.) He invented 3-phase electricity and popularized alternating current, the electrical distribution system used all over the world. He invented the Tesla Coil, which makes the high voltage that drives the picture tube in your computer's CRT, and in most cases, the spark that ignites the fuel in your automobile. He is now credited with inventing modern radio as well; the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in 1943 in favor of Tesla.

Tesla, in short, invented much of the equipment that gets power to your home every day from miles away, and many that use that power inside your home. His inventions made George Westinghouse (Westinghouse Corp.) a wealthy man. Finally, the unit of magnetic flux in the metric system is the "tesla". Other units include the "faraday" and the "henry", so you'll understand his is an honor given to few. So we're not talking about an unknown here, but rather a solid electrical engineer. Tesla whipped through a number of inventions early in his life. He found himself increasingly interested in resonance, and in particular, electrical resonance. Tesla found out something fascinating. If you set an electrical circuit to resonating, it does strange things indeed. Take for instance his Tesla Coil. This high frequency step-up transformer would kick out a few hundred thousand volts at radio frequencies. The voltage would come off the top of his coil as a "corona", or brush discharge. The little ones put out a six-inch spark; the big ones throw sparks many feet long. Yet Tesla could draw the sparks to his fingers without being hurt -- the high frequency of the electricity keeps it on the surface of the skin, and prevents the current from doing any harm. Tesla got to thinking about resonance on a large scale. He'd already pioneered the electrical distribution system we use today, and that's not small thinking; when you think of Tesla, think big. He thought, let's say I send an electrical charge into the ground. What happens to it? Well, the ground is an excellent conductor of electricity.

Let me spend a moment on this so you understand, because topsoil doesn't seem very conductive to most. The ground makes a wonderful sinkhole for electricity. This is why you "ground" power tools; the third (round) pin in every AC outlet in your house is wired straight to, literally, the ground. Typically, the handle of your power tool is hooked to ground this way, if something shorts out in the tool and the handle gets electrified, the current rushes to the ground instead of into you. The ground has long been used in this manner, as a conductor. Tesla generates a powerful pulse of electricity, and drains it into the ground. Because the ground is conductive, it doesn't stop. Rather, it spreads out like a radio wave, traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. And it keeps going, because it's a powerful wave; it doesn't peter out after a few miles. It passes through the iron core of the earth with little trouble. After all, molten iron is very conductive. When the wave reaches the far side of the planet, it bounces back, like a wave in water bounces when it reaches an obstruction. Since it bounces, it makes a return trip; eventually, it returns to the point of origin. Now, this idea might seem wild.

But it isn't science fiction. We bounced radar beams off the moon in the 1950's, and we mapped Venus by radar in the 1970's. Those planets are millions of miles away. The earth is a mere 8000 miles in diameter; sending an electromagnetic wave through it is a piece of cake. We can sense earthquakes all the way across the planet by the vibrations they set up that travel all that distance. So, while at first thought it seems amazing, it's really pretty straight forward. But, as I said, it's a typical example of how Tesla thought. And then he had one of his typically-Tesla ideas. He thought, when the wave returns to me (about 1/30th of a second after he sends it in), it's going to be considerably weakened by the trip. Why not send in another charge at this point, to strengthen the wave? The two will combine, go out, and bounce again. And then he'll reinforce it again, and again. The wave will build up in power. It's like pushing a swing set. You give a series of small pushes each time the swing goes out. And you build up a lot of power with a series of small pushes; ever tried to stop a swing when it's going full tilt? He wanted to find out the upper limit of resonance. And he was in for quite a surprise.

The Hack: The Tesla Coil

So Tesla moved into Colorado Springs, where one of his generators and electrical systems had been installed, and set up his lab. Why Colorado Springs? Well, his lab in New York had burned down, and he was depressed about that. And as fate would have it, a friend in Colorado Springs who directed the power company, Leonard Curtis, offered him free electricity. Who could resist that? After setting up his lab, he tuned his gigantic Tesla coil through that year, trying to get it to resonate perfectly with the earth below. And the townspeople noticed those weird effects; Tesla was electrifying the ground beneath their feet on the return bounce of the wave.

Eventually, he got it tuned, keeping things at low power. But in the spirit of a true hacker, just once he decided to run it wide open, just to see what would happen. Just what was the upper limit of the wave he would build up, bouncing back and forth in the planet below? He had his Coil hooked to the ground below it, the 200 foot antenna above it, and getting as much electricity as he wanted right off the city power supply mains. Tesla went outside to watch (wearing three inch rubber soles for insulation) and had his assistant, Kolman Czito, turn the Coil on. There was a buzz from rows of oil capacitors, and a roar from the spark gap as wrist-thick arcs jumped across it. Inside the lab the noise was deafening. But Tesla was outside, watching the antenna. Any surge that returned to the area would run up the antenna and jump off as lightning. Off the top of the antenna shot a six foot lightning bolt. The bolt kept going in a steady arc, though, unlike a single lightning flash. And here Tesla watched carefully, for he wanted to see if the power would build up, if his wave theory would work. Soon the lightning was twenty feet long, then fifty. The surges were growing more powerful. Eighty feet -- now thunder was following each lightning bolt. A hundred feet, a hundred twenty feet; the lightning shot upwards off the antenna.

Thunder was heard booming around Tesla now (it was heard 22 miles away, in the town of Cripple Creek). The meadow Tesla was standing in was lit up ,with an electrical discharge very much like St. Elmo's Fire, casting a blue glow. His theory had worked! There didn't seem to be an upper limit to the surges; he was creating the most powerful electrical surges ever created by man. That moment he set the record, which he still holds, for manmade lightning. Then everything halted. The lightning discharges stopped, the thunder quit. He ran in, found the power company had turned off his power feed. He called them, shouted at them -- they were interrupting his experiment! The foreman replied that Tesla had just overloaded the generator and set it on fire, his lads were busy putting out the fire in the windings, and it would be a cold day in hell before Tesla got any more free power from the Colorado Springs power company!

All the lights in Colorado Springs had gone out. And that, readers, is to me the greatest hack in history. I've seen some amazing hacks. The 8-bit Atari OS. The Mac OS. The phone company computers -- well, lots of computers. But I've never seen anyone set the world's lightning record and shut off the power to an entire town, "just to see what would happen". For a few moments, there in Colorado Springs, he achieved something never done before, nor since. He had used the entire planet as a conductor, and sent a pulse through it. In that one moment in the summer of 1899, he made electrical history. That's right, in 1899 - over one hundred years ago. Well, you may say to yourself, that's a nice story, and I'm sure George Lucas could make a hell of a movie about it, special effects and all. But it's not relevant today. Or is it? Hang on to your hat.

The SDI And The Tesla Coil

We just talked about an amazing hack that Nikola Tesla did - bouncing an electrical wave through the planet, in 1899, and setting the world's record for manmade lightning. Now, let me lay a little political groundwork. October, 1998, was the Hackercon 2.0, another gathering of computer hackers from all over the world. It was an informal weekend at a camp in the hills west of Santa Clara. One of the more interesting memories of Hackers 2.0 were the numerous diatribes against the Strategic Defense Initiative. Most speakers claimed it was impossible, citing technical problems. So many people felt obligated to complain about SDI that the conference was jokingly called "SDIcon 2.0". Probably the high point of the conference was Jerry Pournelle and Timothy Leary up on stage debating SDI. I'll leave the description to your imagination - it was everything you can think of and more. Personally, it was disturbing to see how many gifted hackers adopted the attitude of "let's not even try". That's not how Microsoft got started. A mention was made by a Time magazine journalist, that if anyone could make SDI work, it was the hackers gathered there. I also believe that the greatest hacker of them all, Nikola Tesla, solved the SDI technical problem back in 1899. The event was so long ago, and so amazing, that it's pretty much been forgotten; Let me present the case for the Tesla Coil and SDI.

Soviet Use Of The Tesla Coil

You will recall that Tesla was born in Yugoslavia (although back then, it was "Serbo-Croatia"). He is not unknown there; he is regarded as a national hero. Witness the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade, for instance. There's been interferences picked up, on this side of the planet, which is causing problems in the ham radio bands. Direction-finding equipment has traced this interference in the SW band to two sources in the (former) Soviet Union, which are apparently two high powered Tesla Coils. Why on earth are the Russians playing with Tesla Coils? There's one odd theory that they're subjecting Canada to low level electrical interference to cause attitude change. Sigh. Moving right along, there's another theory, more credible, that they are conducting research in "over the horizon" radar using Tesla's ideas. (The Russians are certainly not saying what they're doing.) When I read about this testing (now over a decade ago), it worried me. I don't think they're playing with attitude control nor radar. I think they're doing exactly what Tesla did in Colorado Springs. Just a guess? I think not.

Computers And Grounding

Time for another discussion of grounding. Consider your computer equipment. You've doubtlessly been warned about static electricity, always been told to ground yourself (thus discharging the static into the ground, an electrical sinkhole) before touching your computer. Companies make anti-static spray for your rugs. Static is in the 20,000 to 50,000 volt range. Computer chips run on five to twelve volts. The internal insulation is built for that much voltage.

When they get a shot of static in the multiple thousand volt range, the insulation is punctured, and the chip ruined. Countless computers have been damaged this way. Read any manual on inserting memory chips to a PC, and you'll see warnings about static; it's a big problem. Tesla was working in the millions of volts range. And his special idea - that the ground itself could be the conductor - now comes into relevance, over one hundred years after his dramatic demonstration in Colorado Springs. For, you see, in our wisdom, we've grounded our many computers, to protect them from static. We've always assumed the ground is an electrical sinkhole. So, with our three-pin plugs we ground everything; the two flat pins in your wall go to electricity (hot and neutral); the third, round pin, goes straight to ground. That third pin is usually hooked with a thick wire to a cold water pipe, which grounds it effectively.

Tesla proved that you can give that ground a terrific charge, millions of volts of high frequency electricity. (Tesla ran his large coil at 33 Khz). Remember, the lightning surging off his Coil was coming from the wave bouncing back and forth in the planet below. In short, he was modifying the ground's electrical potential, changing it from an electrical sinkhole to an electrical source. Tesla did his experiment in 1899. There weren't any home computers with delicate chips hooked up to grounds then. If there had been, he'd have fried everything in Colorado Springs. There was, however, one piece of electrical equipment grounded at the time of the experiment, which was the city of Colorado Springs' power generator. It caught fire and ended Tesla's experiment. The cause of its failure is interesting as well. It died from "high frequency kickback", something most electrical engineers know about. Tesla forgot that as the generator fed him power, he was feeding it high frequency from his Coil. High frequency quickly heats insulation; a microwave oven works on the same principle. In a few minutes, the insulation inside that generator grew so hot that the generator caught fire. When the lights went out all over Colorado Springs, there was the first proof that Tesla's idea has strategic possibilities. It gets scarier. Imagine Tesla's Coil, busily pumping an electrical wave in the Earth.

On his side of the planet, he was getting 130 foot sparks, which is a hell of a lot of voltage and current. And simple wave theory will show you that those sort of potentials exist on the far side of the planet as well. Remember, the wave was bouncing back and forth, being reinforced on every trip, in tuned resonant frequency propagation - the more reinforcement, the stronger the wave becomes. The big question is, how focused the opposite electrical pole will be. No one knows. But it seems probable that the far side of the planet's ground target area could be subjected to considerable electrical interference. And if computer equipment is plugged into that ground, faithfully assuming the ground will never be a source of electricity, it's just too bad for that equipment. This sort of electrical interference makes static look tiny by comparison. It doesn't take much difference in ground potential to kill a computer connected across it. Lightning strikes cause a temporary flare in ground voltage. Imagine the effect on relatively delicate electronics if someone fires up a Tesla Coil on the far side of the planet, and subjects the grounds to steep electrical swings.

The military applications are pretty obvious - those ICBM's in North Dakota, for instance. It's possible they could be damaged in their silos, and from thousands of miles away. Running two or more Coils, you don't have to be exactly on the far side of the planet, either. Interference effects can give you high points where you need with varied tunings. Maybe, just maybe, the Russians aren't doing "over the horizon" radar. Maybe they just bothered to read Tesla's notes. And maybe they are tuning up a real big surprise with their twin Coils.

"Star Wars" And The Tesla Coil

You've heard of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars" from the Ronald Reagan era. We're searching for a way to stop a nuclear attack. Right now, we've got all sorts of high powered research projects, with the emphasis on "new technology". Exciter laser, kinetic kill techniques, and even more exotic ideas. Research oriented people will want to read as much as they can about a secret government project, called PROJECT HAARP. I'll let you read about HAARP in the comfort of your easy-chair at home...suffice to say, you will be quite taken back. The book is listed, below, from Amazon.com.

As any of you know that have written computer programs, it's darned hard to get something "new" to work. Maybe it's an error to focus on "new" exclusively. Wouldn't it be something if the solution to SDI lies a hundred years ago, in the forgotten brilliance of Nikola Tesla? For right now we can immobilize the electronics of installations half a planet away. The technology to do it was achieved in 1899, and promptly forgotten. Remember, we're not talking vague, unproven theories here. We're talking the world's record for lightning, and the inventor whose power system lights up your house at night and the electrical power that runs the entire world.

The Tesla Coil Works!

All we'd have to do is build it. You might not believe the story about Tesla in Colorado Springs, and what he did. It's pretty amazing. It has a way of being forgotten because of that. And I'm not sure you want to hear about the SDI connection. Still, as you work on a computer, remember Tesla. His Tesla Coil supplies the high voltage for the picture tube you use. The electricity for your computer comes from a Tesla design AC generator, is sent through a Tesla transformer, and gets to your house through 3-phase Tesla power. Tesla's inventions... they have a way of working.

If you've come this far with your reading, you will definitely want to pick up some books - Nikola Tesla; Journey To Mars - Are We Already There? --- "The Lost Journals Of Nikola Tesla" by Tim Swartz, and, for fascinating info on Project HAARP, "Secrets Of Cold War Technology" By Gary Vassilatos...talk about some great reading! Below, from Amazon.com - click here for the complete history of Tesla's Magnifying Transmitter

SOURCE: Frank Germano

Humans must colonize other planets: Hawking

2007-01-04T12:07:00.000-05:00

LONDON (Reuters) - Humans must colonize planets in other solar systems traveling there using "Star Trek"-style propulsion or face extinction, renowned British cosmologist Stephen Hawking said on Thursday.

Referring to complex theories and the speed of light, Hawking, the wheel-chair bound Cambridge University physicist, told BBC radio that theoretical advances could revolutionize the velocity of space travel and make such colonies possible.

"Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out," said Professor Hawking, who was crippled by a muscle disease at the age of 21 and who speaks through a computerized voice synthesizer.

"But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe," said Hawking, who was due to receive the world's oldest award for scientific achievement, the Copley medal, from Britain's Royal Society on Thursday.

Previous winners include Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin.

In order to survive, humanity would have to venture off to other hospitable planets orbiting another star, but conventional chemical fuel rockets that took man to the moon on the Apollo mission would take 50,000 years to travel there, he said.

Hawking, a 64-year-old father of three who rarely gives interviews and who wrote the best-selling "A Brief History of Time", suggested propulsion like that used by the fictional starship Enterprise "to boldly go where no man has gone before" could help solve the problem.

"Science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination," said.

"Unfortunately, this would violate the scientific law which says that nothing can travel faster than light."

However, by using "matter/antimatter annihilation", velocities just below the speed of light could be reached, making it possible to reach the next star in about six years.

"It wouldn't seem so long for those on board," he said.

The scientist revealed he also wanted to try out space travel himself, albeit by more conventional means.

"I am not afraid of death but I'm in no hurry to die. My next goal is to go into space," said Hawking.

And referring to the British entrepreneur and Virgin tycoon who has set up a travel agency to take private individuals on space flights from 2008, Hawking said: "Maybe Richard Branson will help me."

SOURCE: Enlightenment Engine

A New Blog of Mine

2007-01-02T11:16:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Juan for the invitation..

Check it out...

Here, there is no division of thought nor of bodies of knowledge. What is known about mathematics can enlighten areas of art and vice versa. Here, we will juxtapose matters of what are normally deemed separate topics that new light may be shed. Yeah, we're making it up as we go along....

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An Epitaph from King Crimson (1969)

2007-01-01T10:16:00.000-05:00

A Little Adbusting

2007-01-01T09:52:00.000-05:00

Saddam's Hanging: Psyops as Usual

2007-01-01T08:56:00.000-05:00

You only have to look back a few years (we won't mention JFK) to find a huge event aimed at viewers with media complicity intended to induce trauma. Recently, in Iraq, we have a two pronged psychological attack, the first being aimed at placating the bloodthirst of a vicious and warmongering American mind (by and large) and the other intended, I reckon, to create War on Terror security, i.e. induce martyrdom, insurgence, and further justification for the Bush global military thrust.

Saddam and the Cellphones
By Michael Roston

By now, millions of people have viewed the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Not just Al Iraqiya's pornographic tease of America's old pit bull just prior to his necktie party. No, I mean millions have watched Saddam actually hang. Take a look at the video up at this website Live Leak, a YouTube clone (Hat tip to No Quarter; you probably don't *really* want to follow this link). How many views? When I clicked it was 134,205 times it had been watched. Meanwhile, the people at Boing Boing found 4 more of these clips at Google Video, guaranteeing that millions more casual internet users will watch Iraq's dead president swing. And I'm sure it will be no time at all before these videos are pressed to a million VCD's sitting on the floor of marketplaces across the Middle East to be viewed as short films prior to one's at home screening of a pirated copy of Dreamgirls.

Clearly, the location of Saddam Hussein's execution was one of the most secure settings for an execution ever constructed. So, why are we finding on the move about this planet a bunch of viral, unrestricted and uncensored videos of what is probably the most controversial execution ever carried out?

Newsweek provided an interesting interview with Ali Al Massedy, the "official videographer" tasked with producing the official record of the execution. He usually does this job for Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Presumably, they brought him in to shoot the film so that there would only be one version of the execution, and the government would then be able to tightly control its distribution. Ali says as much:

Ali said the videotape lasts about 15 minutes. When NEWSWEEK asked to see a copy, Ali said he had already handed the tape over to Maliki's chief of staff. "It is top secret," he said. He would not give the names of officials in attendance, though he estimates there were around 20 observers....He also said that government officials had not decided whether or not to release the videotape.

Well, I guess they decided. It was so top secret that they let multiple men out of that limited group of 20 bring in cellphones with video functions, and then allowed them to record the execution. I bet you couldn't smuggle a gun into that execution chamber. But apparently you could smuggle a cell phone with a video camera into those gallows, and stand out in plain sight 15 feet from the platform and shoot that video of this "top secret event" to your heart's desire.

And just as our fair president raced to wake up Saturday morning and issue a statement about what had been done in Iraq, several of those 20 attendees raced home or to their offices to upload videos of a hanged Saddam Hussein so everyone in the world could see this secretive execution carried out.

What a sham it has been. Pretending at the time of Saddam's capture that now was the time for a trial, and pretending at the time of his sentence that now was the time to order his execution, and pretending at the time of his execution that now was the moment he had to hang, and then pretending that it was a secret act carried out with discretion to avoid antagonizing any of Iraq's population.

Here we are seeing 21st century psychological operations. It's hard to know who is directing this internet traffic, but it can be concluded there were elements within America's government and/or military, working in concert with Iraq's current scarecrow power-holders, who wanted as many people as possible in the world to see Saddam hang. And from that rope hanged not just that bearded old man, but whatever was left of our culture that hasn't been degraded by the 7 years of 'leadership" we've been dragging around with us.

SOURCE: TPM Cafe

Age of Grand Canyon Witheld to Cater to Creationists

2006-12-31T14:04:00.000-05:00

HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY — Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology

Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

In a letter released today, PEER urged the new Director of the National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, to end the stalling tactics, remove the book from sale at the park and allow park interpretive rangers to honestly answer questions from the public about the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. PEER is also asking Director Bomar to approve a pamphlet, suppressed since 2002 by Bush appointees, providing guidance for rangers and other interpretive staff in making distinctions between science and religion when speaking to park visitors about geologic issues.

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

Park officials have defended the decision to approve the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, claiming that park bookstores are like libraries, where the broadest range of views are displayed. In fact, however, both law and park policies make it clear that the park bookstores are more like schoolrooms rather than libraries. As such, materials are only to reflect the highest quality science and are supposed to closely support approved interpretive themes. Moreover, unlike a library the approval process is very selective. Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.

Ironically, in 2005, two years after the Grand Canyon creationist controversy erupted, NPS approved a new directive on “Interpretation and Education (Director’s Order #6) which reinforces the posture that materials on the “history of the Earth must be based on the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism [and] Interpretive and educational programs must refrain from appearing to endorse religious beliefs explaining natural processes.”

“As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan,” Ruch added, pointing to the fact that previous NPS leadership ignored strong protests from both its own scientists and leading geological societies against the agency approval of the creationist book. “We sincerely hope that the new Director of the Park Service now has the autonomy to do her job.”

SOURCE: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

The Cleanup Wars Continue

2006-12-31T13:44:00.000-05:00

I have gathered a few relevant snips from various, reputable sources on the recent hanging of Saddam Hussein and the politics that surround it, the psyops, and the history of the relationship between the former Iraqi president, his former American supporters, and the very, very dirty politics of Iran-Contra and the elder Bush that has just lost one more witness.

First, a snip from an older piece from Steve Mizrach, Adjunct Lecturer, Florida International University, Department of Sociology/Anthropology:

"...another man who was a delighted beneficiary of American generosity throughout the 1980s was Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The Agriculture Department and other agencies gave Saddam agricultural credits worth millions of dollars which he used to purchase American attack helicopters, chemical weapons for using on the Kurds, and the components of a nuclear weapons program. It is suspected that the CIA and Justice Department overlooked, or aided, the Banco Nazionale Lavoro (BNL) of Italy while it funneled billions in military aid to Iraq. This recently burgeoning scandal, "Iraqgate," suggests we were playing both sides against the middle during the Iran-Iraq war. We were selling arms to both the Iranians and the Iraqis, and the CIA at various points double-crossed both sides. It is no wonder that America is so distrusted in that part of the world. In any case, there were two men that knew too much, and when Bush became president, he had to clean them up, and he would wage two "cleanup wars" to do it.

One link between Bush, Saddam, and Iran-Contra was the corrupt Middle Eastern bank, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI). BCCI, it turns out, laundered drug money, financed CIA and Mossad covert operations, and helped Bush, Saddam, and others split over $250 billion in extortion from the sale of Persian Gulf oil. (BCCI also might have had links to the corrupt drug-money-laundering-and-CIA scandals involving Australia's Nugan Hand Bank.) Attorney General Richard Thornburgh squashed an investigation into First American Bankshares, secretly controlled by BCCI, in October 1990; and William von Raab, former U.S. customs official, was fired by Treasury Secretary James Brady for delving too deeply into BCCI. This may have a lot to do with the links between Prescott Bush, First American director Stephens, Bahrain, and Iraq. Bush's family were oilmen, and if there is anything he stood for, it was Big Oil and its interests in the Middle East. (It might be pointed out, incidentally, that it was Norman Schwarzkopf's father who helped boot out Mossadegh in Iran when he threatened to nationalize holdings of British Petroleum.) The mess was in place, and President Bush had a lot of cleaning up to do."

SOURCE: Florida International University

Allen L. Roland, at Salon, has offered the following:

"Do not forget that this execution was carried out by a U.S. installed government in Iraq while the U.S.( contrary to International law ) is illegally occupying Iraq. Do not forget that the U.S. preemptively invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in a war based on deception and lies. As such, do not forget that Saddam Hussein, in essence, was executed by the U.S. government no matter how the Cheney/Bush administration tries to spin it."

There is more from Allen at his blog, which I recommend, here.

What follows is reproduced in its entirety, from Consortium News which, for the record, I consider among the most reputable of sources:

Bush Silences a Dangerous Witness
By Robert Parry
December 30, 2006

Like a blue-blood version of a Mob family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key witness to the important historical events that led the U.S. military into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink of calamity.

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be – as the New York Times observed – the “triumphal bookend” to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of “major combat,” posing under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1, 2003.

But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.

Still, Bush has done his family’s legacy a great service while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials.

He has silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi “green light” for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.

Hussein now won’t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can’t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.

Nor will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush’s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American “green light” or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?

Like the climactic scene from the Mafia movie “Casino” in which nervous Mob bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush has now guaranteed that there will be no public tribunal where Hussein gives testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals, which could threaten the Bush Family legacy.

That could have happened if Hussein had been turned over to an international tribunal at the Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as Yugoslavia’s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Instead Bush insisted that Hussein be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that the Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before being put to death.

Hussein's hanging followed his trial for executing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982 after a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and his entourage. Hussein's death effectively moots other cases that were supposed to deal with his alleged use of chemical weapons to kill Iraqi civilians and other crimes that might have exposed the U.S. role.

[For details on what Hussein might have revealed, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “Missing U.S.-Iraq History” or “The Secret World of Robert Gates.”]

Thrill of the Kill

Some observers think that Bush simply wanted the personal satisfaction of seeing Hussein hanged, which would not have happened if he had been sent to the Hague. As Texas governor, Bush sometimes took what appeared to be perverse pleasure at his power to execute prisoners.

In a 1999 interview with conservative writer Tucker Carlson for Talk magazine, Bush ridiculed convicted murderer Karla Faye Tucker and her unsuccessful plea to Bush to spare her life.

Asked about Karla Faye Tucker’s clemency appeal, Bush mimicked what he claimed was the condemned woman’s message to him. “With pursed lips in mock desperation, [Bush said]: ‘Please don’t kill me.’”

But a more powerful motive was always Hussein’s potential threat to the Bush Family legacy if he ever had a forum where he could offer detailed testimony about the historic events of the past several decades.

Since stepping into the White House on Jan. 20, 2001, George W. Bush has made it a top priority to conceal the history of his father’s 12 years as Vice President and President and to wrap his own presidency in a thick cloak of secrecy.

One of Bush’s first acts as President was to sign an executive order that blocked the scheduled release of historic records from his father’s years. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush expanded his secrecy mandate to grant his family the power to withhold those documents from the American public in perpetuity, passing down the authority to keep the secrets to future Bush generations.

So, even after George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are dead, those noted historians Jenna and Barbara Bush will control key government documents covering a 20-year swath of U.S. history.

Already, every document at the George H.W. Bush presidential library must not only be cleared for release by specialists at the National Archives and – if classified – by the affected agencies, but also by the personal representatives of both the senior and junior George Bush.

With their backgrounds in secret societies like Skull and Bones – and with George H.W. Bush’s work at the CIA – the Bushes are keenly aware of the power that comes from controlling information. By keeping crucial facts from the American people, the Bushes feel they can turn the voters into easily manipulated children.

When there is a potential rupture of valuable information, the Bushes intervene, turning to influential friends to discredit some witness or relying on the U.S. military to make the threat go away. The Bushes have been helped immeasurably, too, by the credulity and cowardice of the modern U.S. news media and the Democratic Party.

What Can Be Done

Still, even with Hussein’s execution, there are actions that the American people can take to finally recover the lost history of the 1980s.

The U.S. military is now sitting on a treasure trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration exploited these documents to discredit the United Nations over the “oil for food” scandal of the 1990s, ironically when Hussein wasn’t building weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush administration has withheld the records from the 1980s when Hussein was producing chemical and biological weapons.

In 2004, for instance the CIA released the so-called Duelfer report, which acknowledged that the administration’s pre-invasion assertions about Hussein hiding WMD stockpiles were “almost all wrong.” But a curious feature of the report was that it included a long section about Hussein’s abuse of the U.N.’s “oil for food” program, although the report acknowledged that the diverted funds had not gone to build illegal weapons.

Meanwhile, the report noted the existence of a robust WMD program in the 1980s but offered no documentary perspective on how that operation had occurred and who was responsible for the delivery of crucial equipment and precursor chemicals. In other words, the CIA’s WMD report didn’t identify the non-Iraqis who made Iraq’s WMD arsenal possible.

One source who has seen the evidence told me that it contains information about the role of Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, who has been identified as a key link between the CIA and Iraq for the procurement of dangerous weapons in the 1980s. But that evidence has remained locked away.

With the Democrats taking control of Congress on Jan. 4, 2007, there could finally be an opportunity to force out more of the full story, assuming the Democrats don’t opt for their usual course of putting “bipartisanship” ahead of oversight and truth.

The American people also could demand that the surviving members of Hussein’s regime be fully debriefed on their historical knowledge before their voices also fall silent either from natural causes or additional executions.

But the singular figure who could have put the era in its fullest perspective – and provided the most damning evidence about the Bush Family’s role – has been silenced for good, dropped through a trap door of a gallows and made to twitch at the end of a noose fashioned from hemp.

The White House announced that George W. Bush didn’t wait up for the happy news of Hussein’s hanging. After the U.S. military turned Hussein over to his Iraqi executioners, Bush went to bed at his Crawford, Texas, ranch and slept through the night.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Global Warming Claims Tropical Island

2006-12-29T09:57:00.000-05:00

For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports:

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

SOURCE: The Independent

Also see Ice Shelf Collapse Sends Chill

End of year report: The State of the World

2006-12-28T08:27:00.000-05:00

by Richard K. Moore

As many others have recognized, and I have often written, we are now in the midst of a global Great Transformation. By some strange coincidence, this Great Transformation seems to be synchronized with our calendar -- coinciding more or less with the beginning of a new millennium.

'New Millennium' is not a buzzword that people use yet, but they will soon. I wonder how far we were into the 1900s before people recognized that the Twentieth Century was a very special century? World wars, relativity, air travel, radio & TV, nuclear energy, mass prosperity, computers -- the pattern of radical invention became clear soon enough, but when was it first recognized as a 'phenomenon of the century'? By comparison, those phenomena will seem insignificant compared to those that will be identified with civilization's Third Millennium.

There are many singular events that can be identified as 'signs of changing times'. In my own mind, two such events that stand out were the '98 Seattle protest, and the '01 WTC incident. I pick the Seattle protest because it symbolizes the growing and deep-seated popular rejection of the current world order. I pick the WTC incident because it symbolizes the elite reaction to that rejection. The people said: "Here's what we think of your old millennium," and the rulers answered: "Here's what we've got in store for you in the new one." Again coincidentally, these two events evenly straddle the beginning of the new millennium, each a year and some months separated from it.

There are of course many dimensions to this Great Transformation. The events I selected above reflect only one dimension: the relationship between Western citizens and their governments. I see this as the most critical dimension however, as that perspective is the one from which we can identify a path of hope. Only when the people of the West wake up and make their dreams of democracy real, can the direction of transformation be shifted toward the salvation of humanity.

In the rest of this report, I will be exploring the state of the world, and likely near-future scenarios, assuming that Western populations remain unable to rouse themselves from their current hypnotic trance, their dream that they are living in reformable democracies, their state of denial regarding elite rule and elite machinations.

* The Geopolitical Dimension

There are four significant players on the geopolitical scene.

1) The Anglo-American Block: controlled by Anglo-American banking elites, backed up by the Pentagon, seeking global hegemony, and with EU elites cooperating -- while at the same time they seek to keep their options open to the East.

2) The Sino-Russian Block: led by Sino-Russian political elites, supported by a military strategy based on asymmetry, seeking a multi-polar world, and in alliance with other SCO members.

3) The Independent Rebels (ie, all those smaller nations that Washington considers to be 'troublesome to US interests'): with leadership symbolized by Hugo Chavez, in an alliance-of-convenience with the Sino-Russian Block, and increasingly showing the courage to defy the Anglo-American Block and its imperialist system

4) The Global Insurgency: with leadership embodied in Hezbollah and in the people of Iraq, Mexico, unoccupied Palestine, and other similars.

While the Independent Rebels are picking away at Anglo-American hegemony, and the Global Insurgency is complicating the problems of imperial management, the Big Game is between the Big Blocks: the West vs. the East, Washington & London vs. Moscow & Bejing. All the major international initiatives of these Big Players amount to jockeying for position in the face of an inevitable confrontation.

The Anglo-American Block is pursuing three parallel strategies. In the short term, it focuses on domination of the Middle East, in an effort to control international petroleum markets and to maintain the dollar as a reserve currency. In a slightly longer term, it sees two options for itself: a victorious first strike on the Sino-Russian Block, or -- if a multi-polar world cannot be avoided -- a retreat into Fortress America. In pursuit of the former it is rapidly developing a space-based control-of-theater system, and in pursuit of the latter it is preparing a neoliberal-based merger of Mexico, the US, and Canada.

Time, meanwhile, is entirely on the side of the Sino-Russian Block. The longer confrontation can be postponed, the stronger that Block becomes in relation to its adversary. The ancient Chinese strategic paradigm is at work here: the wise general wins from position, avoids combat, and leaves his adversary a way out (acquiescence to multi-polarity). This Block will not intervene if the US attacks Iran, partly to delay direct confrontation, and partly because they are willing to write off the Middle East as 'Anglo-Amercian territory', in return for de facto recognition of Sino-Russian hegemony in Eurasia. That fits well with their vision of a multi-polar world.

It is the Anglo-American elites that are under the pressure of time, and that is why they are so frantically flailing for position wherever they can, sacrificing their own economies and civil societies, and flagrantly violating every standard of international law and human decency.

The psychically primitive elites of this Block follow in a direct line from the Vikings, the Crusaders, and the Conquistadors -- they understand only conquest and exploitation, and they see compromise as a fatal weakness. The more evolved chess and Go players of the East see them as cowboys, and are patiently waiting for them to exhaust their ammo in peripheral battles.

While the Anglo-American Block is managed so as to enrich an elite clique, the Sino-Russian Block is managed so as to promote national interests. While the former is desperately cannibalizing its national infrastructures, the latter is patiently strengthening theirs. This is why time is on their side.

From a geopolitical perspective the Great Transformation can have one of two outcomes: (1) Anglo-American hegemony -- in which case the entire world will for the first time be controlled by a single elite clique -- or (2) multi-polarity, whereby China will re-emerge as the world's Great Central Nation, with the five-century tide of Western Expansionism finally brought to a halt.

* The Economic Dimension

The central economic fact of the Third Millennium is the collision of an irresistible force with an unmovable object: the paradigm of industrial development and economic growth cannot be sustained in a finite world. Economically, this fact exhibits itself as a declining global economy in real terms, the flight of capital into speculative markets, the de-industrialization of the entire Western world, and the impending collapse of the US economy. Environmentally, this fact exhibits itself as deforestation, loss of topsoils and fisheries, oil depletion, species extinction, and global warming.

These economic conditions are motivating the Anglo-American grab for hegemony, and these economic conditions favor the East, with its vast land mass and its lower level of economic development -- ie, its lower level of structural economic waste. It will be much easier for Eurasia (and the third world) to move toward sustainability than it will be for the West. Again, the national focus of Eurasian elites has more survival potential than the does the greedy, self-serving focus of Western elites.

In the West it is the people who are exploring the question of sustainability, while the elite focus is on increasing the sales of automobiles, jet travel, and petroleum (despite Gore's hypocritical campaign posturing). In China, on the other hand, it is the national leadership which is beginning to understand the need for sustainability, being the first nation to require photovoltaic cells in some of its new residential construction.

It is in the economic dimension that the Great Transformation will be most pronounced. Whether we have a multi-polar or a single-empire world order will be of interest to political scientists and historians, but the necessity of sustainability (or die) will effect everyone directly.

* The Political Dimension

The Age of Enlightenment is over. The liberal mythologies that arose as an apology for capitalism have been abandoned by Western elites. In Britain and the US, the standard bearers of neoliberalism, the death of the democratic myth is all too apparent. Europe lags behind, but EU elites have no vision of an alternative future. Fortunately Europeans are considerably more politically evolved than Americans or Brits, as evidenced by the popular rejection of the neoliberal EU Constitution. In Europe there is hope for popular democratic impact, while in the heartland of the Anglo-American Block, one sees mostly sheep panicking for a path away from chaos, or distracting themselves with consumerism and television fantasies.

In the Sino-Russian Block, there is little political hope. China, the heart of the Block, is the longest standing centralized society in the history of the world (5,000 years or so). One might compare this with Germany, which until 1871 was still divided into autonomous units, or the USA, which didn't even exist until a century before that. The Chinese are so conditioned to hierarchy that there is little hope of any kind of democratic impact.

If there is to be an effective popular response to the current path of civilization, if humanity is to be saved, the initiative must come from the West. In the East the psychology of hierarchy is too deeply ingrained, and the third world cannot control the course of geopolitical events, regardless of how enlightened its leaders and people become.

It is up to us, over-coddled and over-comfortable Westerners, to begin the process of turning the Great Transformation into the Great Enlightenment, rather than the New Dark Ages. This can only happen when we wake up from our pseudo-Enlightenment trance.

SOURCE: Cyberjournal

The O'Odham: Native Americans With Ancestors From India?

2006-12-27T19:12:00.000-05:00

By Gene D. Matlock, BA, M.A.

Hindu scholars have always claimed that in remotest times, their ancestors visited every part of the globe, mapping it accurately, and mining gold and copper in such places as Michigan, Colorado, Arizona, England, Ireland, Peru, and Bolivia. Known to us as "Indo-Europeans," they lost their grip on the world in about 1500 BC., retreating to what are now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Northern India. However, they continued to visit the Americas in their large teakwood ships, many of them 250 feet long and five- to six-masted, until about 1200 A.D. After that, the sectarian fanaticism and territorialism of their religious leaders, rebellions among their conquered subjects, constant internecine rivalries, and troubles with Moslem invaders forced them into isolation.

No Westerner naively accepts India's claims of having once dominated the world. Right? Well, some of us do.

In an essay entitled On Egypt from the Ancient Book of the Hindus (Asiatic Researchers Vol. III, 1792), British Lt. Colonel Francis Wilford gave abundant evidence proving that ancient Indians colonized and settled in Egypt. The British explorer John Hanning Speke, who in 1862 discovered the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria, acknowledged that the Egyptians themselves didn't have the slightest knowledge of where the Nile's source was. However, Lt. Colonel Wilford's description of the Hindu's intimate acquaintance with ancient Egypt led Speke to Ripon Falls, at the edge of Lake Victoria.

The Hindus also claim that the gospel of their deity Shiva was once the religion of the world and the progenitor of all religions coming after it.

"Isvar was the only god in India, the whole of Asia, the southern parts of Russia, Mediterranean countries, Egypt, Greece, the whole of Europe, the human inhabited places of both Americas…and also in England and Ireland. In all these lands, Isvar was the religion with slight variations in the pronunciation of the word Isvar….the Isvar religion is the mother of all religions in the world, including Christianity and Islam."(Remedy the Frauds in Hinduism, by Kuttikhat Purushothama Chon; p. 36.)

While the languages our forefathers spoke thousands of years ago would be completely unrecognizable to us now, the names of their deities (those that survived to this modern age) may be immediately recognizable to their respective modern adherents, such as the Christians, Jews, Moslems, Jains, Buddhists, and Hindus. Names of deities tend not to change.

Isvar was and is especially visible (to discerning eyes) in our own Southwest as well as in Northern and Central Mexico. Some tribes even worshiped God Shiva's wives and consorts. Spanish priest, Andres Perez de Ribas wrote in his book, My Life Among the Savage Nations of New Spain, that a Northern Mexican tribe worshiped two deities: Viriseva and a mother goddess named Vairubai. Viriseva means "Lord Siva" in Sanskrit. Vairubai has to be (a mispronouncing of) Bhairava, another name of Siva's consort, Goddess Durga.

A few Hindu scholars insist that not all their gods and religious traditions are natives of the Indian subcontinent. When the ancient Nagas retreated to India, they also took back the deities and religious traditions they had acquired abroad, incorporating them into "Hinduism," a term meaning "The Indus Valley Way of Life."

Historian Chon states:

"There are strong indications in our ancient texts that the places and events described in them are lying outside the geographical limits of India But when we talk of geographical limits, …are they the national boundaries of post-independent India? Or are they the boundaries of India, the ancient?" (Remedy the Frauds in Hinduism; p.30.)

I'm especially impressed with the traditions of the Pimas (Akimel O'Odham) and Papagos (Tohono O'Odham) of Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico. Although I could write a lengthy article about Isvarist (worship of the Hindu deity, Shiva) practices in practically every Southwestern United States, Mexican, Central and South American Indian tribe, even India-Indian spiritual geography is reproduced abundantly in the O'Odham nation.

Though the pre-conquest era O'odhams were relatively primitive, the Spaniards admired them for their intelligence, industry, and high philosophy. Some Catholic missionary priests thought they were the progenitors of the Aztecs.

About 5,000 BC or earlier, a brilliant deified Phoenician Naga king and philosopher named Kuvera (also Kubera) learned how to smelt copper, gold, and other metals. These activities took place in the kingdom named after him, Khyber ("Kheeveri"), which consisted of a group of craggy mountains in what are now Southeastern Afghanistan and Northeastern Pakistan (i.e. the Khyber Pass). According to Hindu mythology, Kuvera and God Shiva lived in the totally barren, mineral-poor, goldless, frigid, lofty, bell-shaped or pyramidical peak of Kailasa in Western Tibet.

Edward Pococke stated in his book India in Greece,

The Khyber; its region is wealthy and abounds with rubies; gold is found in the mines in its vicinity, and it (the Kheeveri kingdom) was likewise the ruling power in those early days. (p.220.)

We derived our word "copper" from Kuvera's name. Eventually, the Nagas extended their influence over all of India. If you've intuited that Afghan Khyber (Kheever), Hebrew Heber (pronounced Kheever), Egyptian Khepri, Greek Khyphera, Cabeiri, Cypriotic Cip'ri (Kheep'ri), biblical Capernaum, Arabic Khabar, O'Odham Babo-Quivari (Kheeveri), Francisco de Coronado's search for the fabled Quivira (Kheevira), ad infinitum, are somehow linked, you've intuited correctly.

But why do the Hindus and Buddhists worship Kuvera and Shiva in a barren peak and not in the Khyber mountain range itself? I don't want to get "mystical," but the "reason" for this anomaly is the world's best-kept millennium's-old secret. Besides, it's not the focus of this article.

Kuh or Koh = "Hump; Mountain" while Vera or Vira = "Hero; Lord."

The Nagas, also called Nakas and Nahu(a)s, were a highly civilized ruling, maritime and mercantile class who once inhabited what is now Afghanistan, Tibet, Pakistan, and Northwestern India. The Nag ("Self-Consuming Serpent") was one of their principal tribal emblems. The substance of Kuvera's teachings is that God, then called Dyau, Deo, Dyaus or Jyaus, put all the plants, animals, ores, and minerals on earth for Man's enjoyment. As long as Man protects the happiness and security of all humanity, he need not place any limits on his greed. Kuvera's teachings spread throughout the whole world.

"Originally, the Asuras or Nagas were not only a civilized people, but a maritime power, and in the Mahabharata, where the ocean is described as their habitation, an ancient legend is preserved of how Kadru, the mother of serpents, compelled Garuda (the Eagle or Hawk) to serve her sons by transporting them across the sea to a beautiful country in a distant land, which was inhabited by Nagas, The Asuras (Nagas) were expert navigators, possessed of very considerable naval resources, and had founded colonies upon distant coasts." (The Encircled Serpent, by M. Oldfield, p. 47.)

"Asura" is the Indian equivalent of Assyria (really Asuriya and Asir) and the Persian Ahura of Zoroastrianism. It derives from the name of the ancient Hindu sun god Ashur. The Naga capital was called Oudh, Iodh, Yudh, and Ayodhya. Located near what is now Herat, Afghanistan, it is not to be confused with todays Oudh or Ayodhya in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The citizens of Oudh were called Oudh-am and Otia-Am. Am = "People" in Sanskrit.

In those days, only a few million people inhabited the earth. Most humans were cavemen and less. The Nagas didn't entrust their highly developed technologies to such aborigines. But they did teach them how to build simple thatch and adobe homes, and to raise vegetable and animal foods. They also taught them about the Creator of All Life, Dyaus or Jyaus. Even today the O'Odhams call it Jeoss or Josh. Joshi is one of God Shiva's many names. Some White Arizonians mistakenly insist that the O'Odhams derived this term from Dios (Spanish for "God"), Jesus, or Joshua.

The innocent Arizona aborigines believed these Nagas from Oudh, Afghanistan (part of India until the late 1700s) were gods. They even named themselves Oudham, which they pronounced as O'Odham or O'Ot'ham. An ancient Sanskrit word for "brotherhood; fraternity" is Ton; Tahun. The Papagos called themselves Tohono O'Odham, or "Oudh-am Fraternity." Tohono now means "Desert" in the O'Odham language. The Pimas settled along winding rivers, which seemed to look like writhing serpents. They named themselves Akimel O'Odham. "Akimel" derives from the Sanskrit Ahi-Mahal (Great Serpent). This name eventually came to mean "River."

The Nagas dug deep wells in the desert, siphoning water out of the ground with long, thick tubes. The exterior ends of these tubes were large and bulbous, and painted to look like human heads, in order to mystify the aborigines. The water spouted out from what looked like round, puckered human mouths. The heads had horns which were really handles for pulling tubes to different irrigation channels. As the flowing water caused these tubes to writhe and undulate like serpents, the primitive Arizonians thought they were real. In Kashmiri, Nag means "a snake, esp. a fabulous serpent-demon or semi-divine being, having the face of a man and the tail of a serpent, and said to inhabit Patala. In Kashmir, they are the deities of springs." (Grierson's Dictionary of the Kashmiri Language; p. 624, item 2.) The Kashmirians also called these siphons Nag-Beg (Snake-Lords). Patala was one of the ancient Indian names for "America." It's real meaning is "Underworld," but not an underground world. They used it as we often call Australia: "The Land Down Under."

The Arizonian O'Odhams similarly called the water siphon Nah-Big. According to both Kashmiri and O'Odham legends, the Nah-Big was harmless. However, if someone "killed" it, the spring dried up - and for good reason. Without a proper siphon, needed water could no longer spew out of the well. Several Southwestern Indian tribes worship exact replicas of the Kashmiri Nag-Beg (siphon) in special religious ceremonies. However, some of them call it by other names. Certain O'Odham and other Native-American clans in the Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora area also call this mythical serpent Corua (KoROOah, with the "R" trilled as in our English "City"). It derives from Sanskrit: Krura-Sarpavat (Violent-Serpent); Kadruja (Serpent Mother Kadru's equally serpent son).

Another O'Odham word for "snake," Vah-Mat, is nearly identical to the Kashmiri/Sanskrit Veh-Mar: "Poisonous-Snake." The O'Odham language contains an unusually high number of North Indian words.

When the Nagas arrived in Arizona, they found a huge stone peak in the desert, resembling Kuvera and Shiva's (I-Itsoi's) Kailasa in nearly every way except one. The Indian Kailasa, also in a desert, is nearly four times higher above sea level than the O'Odhams' holy peak. To honor their spritual progenitor, the Nagas named this Arizona peak Babu-Kheever ("Grandfather" or "Illustrious Indian Immigrant" Kuvera), adhering closely to the exact pronunciation of the mineral-rich Kheever (Khyber) mountain range of Afghanistan.

Baboquivari (Babo-kheeveri) has retained almost the same name after more than six millenniums. The O'odhams also call it Waw-Kiwulk, which sounds like "Vahv-Kivur'." Just as the Hindus, Jains and Buddhists call Kailasa the navel of the world, so do the O'odhams give Baboquivari the same distinction.

Babo-Kheeveri and the Afghan Kheeveri mountains were supposedly filled with unlimited gold, copper, and precious stones. Even today, much of the gold mined in that part of Arizona keeps leaking endlessly out of the Babo-Kheeveri (Baboquivari) mountain range.

Jutting upward at more than 7,750 feet above sea level, Baboquivari can be seen on a clear day from as far away as 80 miles, even from the Mexican side of the border. Few natural wonders equal the majesty and beauty of this spectacular peak. In my opinion, it is a "must-see" for any lover of Nature's wonders. You will notice that the mountain enjoys the close association of lesser peaks, forming a large trident.

Being such a prominent landmark, Baboquivari keeps incoming undocumented Mexican aliens and drug smugglers from getting lost. That part of the desert also abounds in water-filled cacti to slake their thirst, including edible fauna and flora. Evidently, the INS knows about Baboquivari. On the day my wife and I visited the peak, we saw several of their vans in the area, waiting to pick up uninvited guests and transport them back to the border - or to prison.

When I told the O'Odhams that I had learned about the unlimited quantities of gold within Baboquivari from Hindu books written millenniums ago, one woman moaned hopelessly, "Now that this news is out, the White man will even rob us of our God." She wasn't too far afield. The government has always wanted to probe the interior of Baboquivari.

A Possible Historical Scenario

About 3,000 BC, a saintly Indian prince and high priest of the Kheeveri empire left Afghanistan for Arizona, to manage the mining operations at Baboquivari and govern the O'Odhams. In India, he is variously called Shiva, Siva, Shaveh, Suva, Su, Ish, Esh, Yesh, Isa, Itsa, Ishvara, Yishvara, Yeshva, Moshe, Mahesh, Mahisa, etc. The suffixes Va and Veh refer to someone who is vengeful and short of temper. Vara = "Blessings of." The prefixes Mo, Mu. and Mah means "Great." Ish, Esh, Yesh, Isa, etc., = "Material Universe" in both Sanskrit and Hebrew cabalism. From these Sanskrit elements we derived our term "Messiah," which in Sanskrit is Masiha, and Massee'akh in Hebrew. These terms were honorific titles of the highest ecclesiastical and leadership castes of that period in history. These supreme "Sivas," whether good, bad, or indifferent, were also regarded as earthly gods.

We may never know what this "Shiva's" real name was. The Pimas call him Se-eh-ha; Siwa; Su-u (Elder Brother). The Papagos worship him as I'Itoi or I'Itsoi, which linguistically is nearly identical to "Isa."

Not yet united by a centralized government, the ancient Hindus weren't conscious of themselves as Indians - just as similar peoples separated by different tribes and kingdoms. All of them competed by fair and foul means for the resources of the world. Internecine rivalries tore them apart constantly.

During Shiva's Arizona reign, a powerful Indian emperor, Priyavarta, sent his armies to all the countries of the world, to unite all Indians and their colonial possessions as one nation. He appointed his sons as viceroys. One son, Sevana or Sewana, was sent to conquer and govern North America. Notice that he, too, was a "Siva." O'odham legends mention this Sewana whom they call Siwana. When I'Itoi or Se-eh-ha wouldn't submit to Priyavarta, he and Siwana met on the battle field. Ultimately, I'Itoi prevailed; Siwana was killed.

According to some Indian historians, later on, back in Southeast Asia, the volcano Krakatoa exploded violently, creating the China Sea. Our globe became extremely unsteady on its axis, causing rains, earthquakes, and floods to occur all over the world. The coastlands of Western India submerged by more than fifty feet and as many miles inland in some places. Even as you read this article, Indian archeologists are uncovering fabulous ruins lying just off the mainland, under the Arabian sea.

Dwarka, Indian deity Lord Krishna's capital city, is the focal point of these underwater digs. Dwarka may prove to be the greatest archeological dig in human history.

These floods forced millions of Indian refugees to flee to other parts of the world. When the Arizona desert flooded, the Pimas and Papagos took refuge on Baboquivari where I'Itoi or Se-eh-ha (Siva) helped them survive. After the waters had subsided, he helped the O'Odham re-establish themselves. Therefore, no matter to what religion they are converted, the O'Odham are always going to revere and respect I'Itoi.

Nearly all of today's O'Odham are Catholics. However, the Franciscan fathers tending to their spiritual needs allow them to set up the Swastika, I'Itoi or Isa's standard, on the altars of the Catholic churches there, even on the altar of San Xavier Mission church near Tucson.

There are other Shaivite reminders among the O'odhams. O'Odham Catholic churches usually face east as the Shaivite temples do in India. And, like the Hindus, they bury their dead in an east-west direction. They also revere the Shiva-Linga or Pillar of Energy, usually erected in front of and some distance away from their churches, placed on a tiered pyramid or pyramidical mound, exactly as in India. However, nowadays the Shivling is a Christian cross. In the book he wrote in 1644, Father Ribas acknowledged that the Northern Mexican Indians worshiped Shivlings.

"One of the padres, traveling along a trail near Guasave, observed an Indian suddenly depart into the woods. In curiosity they followed this Indian, presently coming upon him in the act of making reverence before a stone. This stone was about a vara (33 inches) in height, shaped in the form of a pyramid, and had some crude inscriptions carved upon it.

"The Padre ordered this false idol destroyed. The Indian, horrified at the thought, declared that he dare not destroy it, for fear of death." (My Life Among the Savage Nations of New Spain; p. 34.)

During my visit at San Xavier mission, I also saw representations of the undulating serpent Nah-Big on the exterior of the church of San Xavier. And get this: The O'Odhams call their way of life Himday or Himdag! Hindi?

I was especially intrigued by the Pima name for "Medicine-Man:" Javet-Makai. Dyaus-Pitar or Jyapeti (Japhet) is really another title of Shiva. Makai may be derived from Maga (Priest-Magician). Javet-Makai = Jyapeti Maga?

DNA analysis may prove that today's O'Odhams are genetically related to the India-Indians. Arjuna, Krishna's companion in the Mahabharata Wars (fought on Northern India's Kuruksetra plains in about 3000 BC), was married to a Patalan (American) princess. Military forces from Patala, possibly even some O'Odham among them, fought in those famous wars.

How did I'Itoi's deification get exported to India? Because Isvar was once the religion of all mankind, It could have been a partial contributor to all worldwide myths about Siva, eventually becoming consolidated in the Indian subcontinent. I'Itoi earned "godhood" on his own merits. Also, as a Hindu supreme leader, he was deified anyway. After all, the O'Odham and the Hindus do share the same India-originated "Way of Life."

Hindu immigrants to this country often tell me that they see the Southwestern Native-Americans as long-lost brothers. They say that many Native-Americans tell them the same thing. If we use Sanskrit language resources, Hindu mythology, Shaivite practices and mutually identical holy names as measuring sticks, the kinship between Native-Americans and South Asians becomes easily verifiable, no matter what the "experts" say. Could there be a special political reason why "The Great White Father" doesn't want certain Native-Americans to know they're Himday?

Some tribes, such as the Huicholes in Central Mexico, even remember from what Indian seaport they left for America - Aramra in Gujarat. The Huicholes revere a part of the beach at the old Mexican seaport of San Blas, Nayarit, as Aramara, "Place of Origin of the Huicholes." Millenniums ago, Gujarat was called Jukhar. Juj-Kha is an O'Odham name for "Mexicans." The Navajos call them Nakaii (Nagas). The Apaches claim to be Inde (Indus People.) They worship Shiva as Yusn. In Sanskrit, Yishan = "Shiva." Apache = "Enemy" in O'Odham. In Sanskrit, Apachnan = "Destroyer." Another name of the Zunis ("Zoonyees") is Ashiwi (Azhuva?, "Way of the Serpent," in Sanskrit). Two of their principal deities are Shivani and Shiwanikoya. Zoonya (Zuni?) and Zeenya ware epithets of ancient Kashmir. According to Indian historian K. P. Chon, the Naga Azhuvas, perhaps the forefathers of the Zunis, were India's oldest ruling dynasty. He said that they ruled for more than a thousand years.

"The descendants of this dynasty are still to be found in the southernmost part of India in Kerala. They are even now called Azhuva or Ezhava. The emperor Azi Dahaka, -- with two snakes around his neck -- was a devotee of Isvara."(Remedy the Frauds in Hinduism; p. 22.)

The Ezhavas' ships were said to have sailed all over the world.

The Hopis worship Siva under several of his names, one of which is Massawa (Maheswa?). The Hopis are ophiolators (snake worshippers). Thousands of years ago, a famous Naga cult called Hophiz lived near Kabul, Afghanistan. Orginally, this nation was named Oph (Serpent) + Gana (Group; Family) + Stan (Nation). "Afghanistan" evolved from "Oph-gana-stan." The Afghan Hophiz snake cult spread to Greece, becoming Ophis. The Ophis cult was popular in the ancient world, even among the Christian gnostics. Needless to say, it also found its way to the American Southwest. We may never know the exact "hows."

The name of the ancient Hopi village of Oraibi causes me to wonder whether the Hopi nation was a famous stronghold of Saivism, known even in India. This unusual word lacks only the "Bh" in Bhairavi, epithet of Goddess Durga. However, Grierson's Dictionary of the Kashmiri Language mentions another meaning of the term, which may explain exactly how and why Oraibi got its name: "Name of a certain class of lower deities who form Siva's host..." One of these is after the local godling of some locality or tract of country. Special localities protected by him are looked upon as sacred" (p. 129; item 44.) Was Southwestern United States an important Shaivite holy center in earliest times?

Other ancient Naga sea-faring miners, traders, conquerors and colonizers who left their bloodlines and names all over the Americas and the rest of the world were the Ute, Yuti, Yutiya, or Juti (Jutes). The Northern Mexican Indians called the invading Spaniards, "People-Who-Came-Before:" Yutiya ("Judeeya"); Yuti; Juti ("Jodee" or "Judee)." In Spanish, the word is usually spelled as Yori; Yuri. "R" is trilled as in "City." "Y" often approximates our "J." Because of the Spanish spelling, we can't see that this word is really the English "Jute.". Why did these Indians believe the Spaniards were Jutes? Juti now means "non-Indian Mexicans and Gringos." In Sanskrit, Juddhi; Yuddhi = "Conquerors." Our history books tell us that the "Jutes" were "Northern German or Danish tribes."

SOURCE: Mondo Vista

See also:

Is the Hopi Deity Kokopelli an Ancient Hindu God?
Maize in Pre-Columbian India
Lost city 'could rewrite history'

The Information War

2006-12-26T13:34:00.000-05:00

by Hakim Bey

Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality.

All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".

A similar trajectory can be traced through the phenomenon of "war". Hunter/gatherers practised (and still practise, as amongst the Yanomamo) a kind of ritualized brawl (think of the Plains Indian custom of "counting coup"). "Real" war is a continuation of religion and economics (i.e. politics) by other means, and thus only begins historically with the priestly invention of "scarcity" in the Neolithic, and the emergence of a "warrior caste". (I categorically reject the theory that "war" is a prolongation of "hunting".)

WWII seems to have been the last "real" war. Hyperreal war began in Vietnam, with the involvement of television, and recently reached full obscene revelation in the "Gulf War" of 1991. Hyperreal war is no longer "economic", no longer "the health of the state". The Ritual Brawl is voluntary and hon-hierarchic (war chiefs are always temporary); real war is compulsory and hierarchic; hyperreal war is imagistic and psychologically interiorized ("Pure War"). In the first the body is risked; in the second, the body is sacrificed; in the third, the body has disappeared. (See P. Clastres on War, in Archaeology of Violence.)

Modern science also incorporates an anti-materialist bias, the dialectical outcome of its war against Religion: -- it has in some sense become Religion. Science as knowledge of material reality paradoxically decomposes the materiality of the real.

Science has always been a species of priestcraft, a branch of cosmology; and an ideology, a justification of "the way things are." The deconstruction of the "real" in post-classical physics mirrors the vacuum of irreality which constitutes "the state". Once the image of Heaven on Earth, the state now consists of no more than the management of images. It is no longer a "force" but a disembodied patterning of information. But just as Babylonian cosmology justified Babylonian power, so too does the "finality" of modern science serve the ends of the Terminal State, the post-nuclear state, the "information state". Or so the New Paradigm would have it. And "everyone" accepts the axiomatic premisses of the new paradigm.

The new paradigm is very spiritual. Even the New Age with its gnostic tendencies embraces the New Science and its increasing etherealization as a source of proof-texts for its spiritualist world view. Meditation and cybernetics go hand in hand. Of course the "information state" somehow requires the support of a police force and prison system that would have stunned Nebuchadnezzar and reduced all the priests of Moloch to paroxysms of awe. And "modern science" still can't weasel out of its complicity in the very-nearly-successful "conquest of Nature". Civilization's greatest triumph over the body. But who cares? It's all "relative" isn't it? I guess we'll just have to "evolve" beyond the body. Maybe we can do it in a "quantum leap."

Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the Social, which is carried out through the machinery of the Media, increases the intensity of our alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on information rather than direct experience. In this sense the Media serves a religious or priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out of the body by re-defining spirit as information. The essence of information is the Image, the sacral and iconic data-complex which usurps the primacy of the "material bodily principle" as the vehicle of incarnation, replacing it with a fleshless ecstasis beyond corruption. Consciousness becomes something which can be "down-loaded", excized from the matrix of animality and immortalized as information. No longer "ghost-in-the-machine", but machine-as-ghost, machine as Holy Ghost, ultimate mediator, which will translate us from our mayfly-corpses to a pleroma of Light. Virtual Reality as CyberGnosis. Jack in, leave Mother Earth behind forever.

All science proposes a paradigmatic universalism: -- as in science, so in the social. Classical physics played midwife to Capitalism, Communism, Fascism and other Modern ideologies. Post-classical science also proposes a set of ideas meant to be applied to the social: Relativity, Quantum "unreality", cybernetics, information theory, etc. With some exceptions, the post-classical tendency is towards ever greater etherealization. Some proponents of Black Hole theory, for example, talk like pure Pauline theologians, while some of the information theorists are beginning to sound like virtual Manichaeans. (1)

On the level of the social these paradigms give rise to a rhetoric of bodylessness quite worthy of a third century desert monk or a 17th century New England Puritan -- but expressed in a language of post-Industrial post-Modern feel-good consumer frenzy. Our every conversation is infected with certain paradigmatic assumptions which are really no more than bald assertions, but which we take for the very fabric or urgrund of Reality itself. For instance, since we now assume that computers represent a real step toward "artificial intelligence", we also assume that buying a computer makes us more intelligent. In my own field I've met dozens of writers who sincerely believe that owning a PC has made them better (not "more efficient", but better) writers. This is amusing; -- but the same feeling about computers when applied to a trillion dollar military budget, churns out Star Wars, killer robots, etc. (See Manuel de Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines on AI in modern weaponry).

An important part of this rhetoric involves the concept of an "information economy". The post-Industrial world is now thought to be giving birth to this new economy. One of the clearest examples of the concept can be found in a recent book by a man who is a Libertarian, the Bishop of a Gnostic Dualist Church in California, and a learned and respected writer for Gnosis magazine:

The industry of the past phase of civilization (sometimes called "low technology") was big industry, and bigness always implies oppressiveness. The new high technology, however, is not big in the same way. While the old technology produced and distributed material resources, the new technology produces and disseminates information. The resources marketed in high technology are less about matter and more about mind. Under the impact of high technology, the world is moving increasingly from a physical economy into what might be called a "metaphysical economy." We are in the process of recognizing that consciousness rather than raw materials or physical resources constitutes wealth. (2)

Modern neo-Gnosticism usually plays down the old Manichaean attack on the body for a gentler greener rhetoric. Bishop Hoeller for instance stresses the importance of ecology and environment (because we don't want to "foul our nest", the Earth) -- but in his chapter on Native American spirituality he implies that a cult of the Earth is clearly inferior to the pure Gnostic spirit of bodylessness:

But we must not forget that the nest is not the same as the bird. The exoteric and esoteric traditions declare that earth is not the only home for human beings, that we did not grow like weeds from the soil. While our bodies indeed may have originated on this earth, our inner essence did not. To think otherwise puts us outside of all of the known spiritual traditions and separates us from the wisdom of the seers and sages of every age. Though wise in their own ways, Native Americans have small connection with this rich spiritual heritage. (3)

In such terms, (the body = the "savage"), the Bishop's hatred and disdain for the flesh illuminate every page of his book. In his enthusiasm for a truly religious economy, he forgets that one cannot eat "information". "Real wealth" can never become immaterial until humanity achieves the final etherealization of downloaded consciousness. Information in the form of culture can be called wealth metaphorically because it is useful and desirable -- but it can never be wealth in precisely the same basic way that oysters and cream, or wheat and water, are wealth in themselves.

Information is always only information about some thing. Like money, information is not the thing itself. Over time we can come to think of money as wealth (as in a delightful Taoist ritual which refers to "Water and Money" as the two most vital principles in the universe), but in truth this is sloppy abstract thinking. It has allowed its focus of attention to wander from the bun to the penny which symbolizes the bun. (4)

In effect we've had an "information economy" ever since we invented money. But we still haven't learned to digest copper. The Aesopian crudity of these truisms embarrasses me, but I must perforce play the stupid lazy yokel plowing a crooked furrow when all the straight thinkers around me appear to be hallucinating. Americans and other "First World" types seem particularly susceptible to the rhetoric of a "metaphysical economy" because we can no longer see (or feel or smell) around us very much evidence of a physical world.

Our architecture has become symbolic, we have enclosed ourselves in the manifestations of abstract thought (cars, apartments, offices, schools), we work at "service" or information-related jobs, helping in our little way to move disembodied symbols of wealth around an abstract grid of Capital, and we spend our leisure largely engrossed in Media rather than in direct experience of material reality. The material world for us has come to symbolize catastrophe, as in our amazingly hysterical reaction to storms and hurricanes (proof that we've failed to "conquer Nature" entirely), or our neo-Puritan fear of sexual otherness, or our taste for bland and denatured (almost abstract) food.

And yet, this "First World" economy is not self-sufficient. It depends for its position (top of the pyramid) on a vast substructure of old-fashioned material production. Mexican farm-workers grow and package all that "Natural" food for us so we can devote our time to stocks, insurance, law, computers, video games. Peons in Taiwan make silicon chips for our PCs. Towel-heads in the Middle East suffer and die for our sins. Life? Oh, our servants do that for us. We have no life, only "lifestyle" -- an abstraction of life, based on the sacred symbolism of the Commodity, mediated by the priesthood of the stars, those "larger than life" abstractions who rule our values and people our dreams -- the mediarchetypes; or perhaps mediarchs would be a better term.

Of course this Baudrillardian dystopia doesn't really exist -- yet. (5) It's surprising hovever to note how many social radicals consider it a desirable goal, at least as long as it's called the "Information Revolution" or something equally inspiring. Leftists talk about seizing the means of information-production from the data-monopolists. (6) In truth, information is everywhere -- even atom bombs can be constructed on plans available in public libraries. As Noam Chomsky points out, one can always access information -- provided one has a private income and a fanaticism bordering on insanity.

Universities and "think tanks" make pathetic attempts to monopolize information -- they too are dazzled by the notion of an information economy -- but their conspiracies are laughable. Information may not always be "free", but there's a great deal more of it available than any one person could ever possibly use. Books on every conceivable subject can actually still be found through inter-library loan. (7) Meanwhile someone still has to grow pears and cobble shoes. Or, even if these "industries" can be completely mechanized, someone still has to eat pears and wear shoes. The body is still the basis of wealth. The idea of Images as wealth is a "spectacular delusion".

Even a radical critique of "information" can still give rise to an over-valuation of abstraction and data. In a "pro-situ" zine from England called NO, the following message was scrawled messily across the back cover of a recent issue:

As you read these words, the Information Age explodes . . . inside and around you -- with the Misinformation Missiles and Propaganda bombs of outright Information Warfare. Traditionally, war has been fought for territory/economic gain. Information Wars are fought for the acquisition of territory indigenous to the Information Age, i.e. the human mind itself.
. . . . In particular, it is the faculty of the imagination that is under the direct threat of extinction from the onslaughts of multi-media overload . . . . DANGER -- YOUR IMAGINATION MAY NOT BE YOUR OWN . . . . As a culture sophisticates, it deepens its reliance on its images, icons and symbols as a way of defining itself and communicating with other cultures. As the accumulating mix of a culture's images floats around in its collective psyche, certain isomorphic icons coalesce to produce and to project an "illusion" of reality. Fads, fashions, artistic trends. U KNOW THE SCORE.

"I can take their images for reality because I believe in the reality of their images (their image of reality)." WHOEVER CONTROLS THE METAPHOR GOVERNS THE MIND. The conditions of total saturation are slowly being realized -- a creeping paralysis -- from the trivialisation of special/technical knowledge to the specialization of trivia. The INFORMATION WAR is a war we cannot afford to lose. The result is unimaginable. (8)

I find myself very much in sympathy with the author's critique of media here, yet I also feel that a demonization of "information" has been proposed which consists of nothing more than the mirror-image of information-as-salvation. Again Baudrillard's vision of the Commtech Universe is evoked, but this time as Hell rather than as the Gnostic Hereafter. Bishop Hoeller wants everybody jacked-in and down-loaded -- the anonymous post-situationist ranter wants you to smash your telly -- but both of them believe in the mystic power of information. One proposes the pax technologica, the other declares "war". Both exude a kind of manichaean view of Good and Evil, but can't agree on which is which.

The critical theorist swims in a sea of facts. We like to imagine it also as our maquis , with ourselves as the "guerilla ontologists" of its datascape. Since the 19th century the ever-mutating "social Sciences" have unearthed a vast hoard of information on everything from shamanism to semiotics. Each "discovery" feeds back into "social science" and changes it. We drift. We fish for poetic facts, data which will intensify and mutate our experience of the real. We invent new hybrid "sciences" as tools for this process: ethnopharmacology, ethnohistory, cognitive studies, history of ideas, subjective anthropology (anthropological poetics or ethno-poetics), "dada epistemology", etc.

We look on all this knowledge not as "good" in itself, but valuable only inasmuch as it helps us to seize or to construct our own happiness. In this sense we do know of "information as wealth"; nevertheless we continue to desire wealth itself and not merely its abstract representation as information. At the same time we also know of "information as war" (9) ; nevertheless, we have not decided to embrace ignorance just because "facts" can be used like a poison gas. Ignorance is not even an adequate defense, much less a useful weapon in this war. We attempt neither to fetishize nor demonize "information". Instead we try to establish a set of values by which information can be measured and assessed. Our standard in this process can only be the body.

According to certain mystics, spirit and body are "one". Certainly spirit has lost its ontological solidity (since Nietzsche, anyway), while body's claim to "reality" has been undermined by modern science to the point of vanishing in a cloud of "pure energy". So why not assume that spirit and body are one, after all, and that they are twin (or dyadic) aspects of the same underlying and inexpressible real? No body without spirit, no spirit without body. The Gnostic Dualists are wrong, as are the vulgar "dialectical materialists". Body and spirit together make life. If either pole is missing, the result is death..

This constitutes a fairly simple set of values, assuming we prefer life to death. Obviously I'm avoiding any strict definitions of either body or spirit. I'm speaking of "empirical" everyday experiences. We experience "spirit" when we dream or create; we experience "body" when we eat or shit (or maybe vice versa); we experience both at once when we make love. I'm not proposing metaphysical categories here. We're still drifting and these are ad-hoc points of reference, nothing more. We needn't be mystics to propose this version of "one reality". We need only point out that no other reality has yet appeared within the context of our knowable experience. For all practical purposes, the "world" is "one". (10)

Historically however, the "body" half of this unity has always received the insults, bad press, scriptural condemnation, and economic persecution of the "spirit"-half. The self-appointed representatives of the spirit have called almost all the tunes in known history, leaving the body only a pre-history of primitive disappearance, and a few spasms of failed insurrectionary futility. Spirit has ruled -- hence we scarcely even know how to speak the language of the body.

When we use the word "information" we reify it because we have always reified abstractions -- ever since God appeared as a burning bush. (Information as the catastrophic decorporealization of "brute" matter). We would now like to propose the identification of self with body. We're not denying that "the body is also spirit", but we wish to restore some balance to the historical equation. We calculate all body-hatred and world-slander as our "evil". We insist on the revival (and mutation) of "pagan" values concerning the relation of body and spirit. We fail to feel any great enthusiasm for the "information economy" because we see it as yet another mask for body-hatred. We can't quite believe in the "information war", since it also hypostatizes information but labels it "evil".

In this sense, "information" would appear to be neutral. But we also distrust this third position as a lukewarm cop-out and a failure of theoretical vision. Every "fact" takes different meanings as we run it through our dialectical prism (11) and study its gleam and shadows. The "fact" is never inert or "neutral", but it can be both "good" and "evil" (or beyond them) in countless variations and combinations.

We, finally, are the artists of this immeasurable discourse. We create values. We do this because we are alive. Information is as big a "mess" as the material world it reflects and transforms. We embrace the mess, all of it. It's all life. But within the vast chaos of the alive, certain information and certain material things begin to coalesce into a poetics or a way-of-knowing or a way-of-acting. We can draw certain pro-tem "conclusions," as long as we don't plaster them over and set them up on altars.

Neither "information" nor indeed any one "fact" constitutes a thing-in-itself. The very word "information" implies an ideology, or rather a paradigm, rooted in unconscious fear of the "silence" of matter and of the universe. "Information" is a substitute for certainty, a left-over fetish of dogmatics, a super-stitio , a spook. "Poetic facts" are not assimilable to the doctrine of "information". "Knowledge is freedom" is true only when freedom is understood as a psycho-kinetic skill. "Information" is a chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity.

These tentative conclusions constitute the shifting and marshy ground of our "theory". The TAZ wants all information and all bodily pleasure in a great complex confusion of sweet data and sweet dates -- facts and feasts -- wisdom and wealth. This is our economy -- and our war.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES

1) The new "life" sciences offer some dialectical opposition here, or could do so if they worked and through certain paradigms. Chaos theory seems to deal with the material world in positive ways, as does Gaia theory, morphogenetic theory, and various other "soft" and "neo-hermetic" disciplines. Elsewhere I've attempted to incorporate these philosophical implications into a "festal" synthesis. The point is not to abandon all thought about the material world, but to realize that all science has philosophical and political implications, and that science is a way of thinking, not a dogmatic structure of incontrovertible Truth. Of course quantum, relativity, and information theory are all "true" in some way and can be given a positive interpretation. I've already done that in several essays. Now I want to explore the negative aspects.

2) Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society, Stephan A. Hoeller (Quest, Wheaton, IL, 1992), 229-230.

3) Ibid., p. 164.

4) Like Pavlov's dogs salivating at the dinner bell rather than the dinner: -- a perfect illustration of what I mean by "abstraction".

5) Altho some might say that it already "virtually" exists. I just heard from a friend in California of a new scheme for "universal prisons": -- offenders will be allowed to live at home and go to work but will be electronically monitored at all times, like Winston Smith in 1984. The universal panopticon now potentially coincide one-to-one with the whole of reality; life and work will take the place of outdated physical incarceration: -- the Prison Society will merge with "electronic democracy" to form a Surveillance State or information totality, with all time and space compacted beneath the unsleeping gaze of RoboCop. On the level of pure tech, at least, it would seem that we have at last arrived at "the future". "Honest citizens" of course will have nothing to fear; hence terror will reign unchallenged and Order will triumph like the Universal Ice. Our only hope may lie in the "chaotic perturbation" of massively-linked computers, and in the venal stupidity or boredom of those who program and monitor the system.

6) I will always remember with pleasure being addressed, by a Bulgarian delegate to a conference I once attended, as a "fellow worker in philosophy". Perhaps the capitalist version would be "entrepreneur in philosophy", as if one bought ideas like apples at roadside stands.

7) Of course information may sometimes be "occult", as in Conspiracy Theory. Information may be "disinformation". Spies and propagandists make up a kind of shadow "information economy", to be sure. Hackers who believe in "freedom of information" have my sympathy, especially since they've been picked as the latest enemies of the Spectacular State, and subjected to its spasms of control-by-terror. But hackers have yet to "liberate" a single bit of information useful in our struggle. Their impotence, and their fascination with Imagery, make them ideal victims of the "Information State", which itself is based on pure simulation. One needn't steal data from the post-military-industrial complex to know, in general, what it's up to. We understand enough to form our critique. More information by itself will never take the place of the actions we have failed to carry out; data by itself will never reach critical mass. Dispite my loving debt to thinkers like Robert Anton Wilson and T. Leary I cannot agree with their optimist analysis of the cognitive function of information technology. It is not the neural system alone which will achieve autonomy, but the entire body.

8) Issue #6, "Nothing is True", box 175, Liverpool L69 8DX, UK

9) Indeed, the whole "poetic terrorism" project has been proposed only as a strategy in this very war.

10) "The 'World' is 'one'" can be and has been used to justify a totality, a metaphysical ordering of "reality" with a "center" or "apex" : one God, one King, etc., etc. This is the monism of orthodoxy, which naturally opposes Dualism and its other source of power ("evil") -- orthodoxy also presupposes that the One occupies a higher ontological position than the Many, that transcendence takes precedence over immanence. What I call radical (or heretical) monism demands unity of one and Many on the level of immanence; hence it is seen by Orthodoxy as a turning-upside-down or saturnalia which proposes that every "one" is equally "divine". Radical monism is "on the side of" the Many -- which explains why it seems to lie at the heart of pagan polytheism and shamanism, as well as extreme forms of monotheism such as Ismailism or Ranterism, based on "inner light" teachings. "All is one", therefore, can be spoken by any kind of monist or anti-dualist and can mean many different things.

11) A proposal: the new theory of taoist dialectics. Think of the yin/yang disc, with a spot of black in the white lozenge, and vice versa -- separated not by a straight line but an S-curve. Amiri Baraka says that dialectics is just "separating out the good from the bad" -- but the taoist is "beyond good and evil". The dialectic is supple, but the taoist dialectic is downright sinuous. For example, making use of the taoist dialectic, we can re-evaluate Gnosis once again. True, it presents a negative view of the body and of becoming. But also true that it has played the role of the eternal rebel against all orthodoxy , and this makes it interesting. In its libertine and revolutionary manifestations the Gnosis possesses many secrets, some of which are actually worth knowing.. The organizational forms of Gnosis -- the crackpot cult, the secret society -- seem pregnant with possibilities for the TAZ/Immediatist project. Of course, as I've pointed out elsewhere, not all gnosis is Dualistic. There also exists a monist gnostic tradition, which sometimes borrows heavily from Dualism and is often confused with it. Monist gnosis is anti-eschatological, using religious language to describe this world, not Heaven or the Gnostic Pleroma. Shamanism, certain "crazy" forms of Taoism and Tantra and Zen, heterodox sufism and Ismailism, Christian antinomians such as the Ranters, etc. -- share a conviction of the holiness of the "inner spirit", and of the actually real, the "world". These are our "spiritual ancestors."

SOURCE: Left Bank Projects

Global Warming: Hibernation a Forgotten Pastime for Some Bears

2006-12-26T12:00:00.000-05:00

Climate Change vs Mother Nature: Scientists reveal that bears have stopped hibernating

by Geneviève Roberts
Published: 21 December 2006

Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.

In a December in which bumblebees, butterflies and even swallows have been on the wing in Britain, European brown bears have been lumbering through the forests of Spain's Cantabrian mountains, when normally they would already be in their long, annual sleep.

Bears are supposed to slumber throughout the winter, slowing their body rhythms to a minimum and drawing on stored resources, because frozen weather makes food too scarce to find. The barely breathing creatures can lose up to 40 per cent of their body weight before warmer springtime weather rouses them back to life.

But many of the 130 bears in Spain's northern cordillera - which have a slightly different genetic identity from bear populations elsewhere in the world - have remained active throughout recent winters, naturalists from Spain's Brown Bear Foundation (La Fundación Oso Pardo - FOP) said yesterday.

The change is affecting female bears with young cubs, which now find there are enough nuts, acorns, chestnuts and berries on thebleak mountainsides to make winter food-gathering sorties "energetically worthwhile", scientists at the foundation, based in Santander, the Cantabrian capital, told El Pais newspaper.

"If the winter is mild, the female bears find it is energetically worthwhile to make the effort to stay awake and hunt for food," said Guillermo Palomero, the FOP's president and the co-ordinator of a national plan for bear conservation. This changed behaviour, he said, was probably a result of milder winters. "The high Cantabrian peaks freeze all winter, but our teams of observers have been able to follow the perfect outlines of tracks from a group of bears," he said.

The FOP is financed by Spain's Environment Ministry and the autonomous regions of Cantabria, Asturias, Galicia and Castilla-Leon, where the bears roam in search of mates. Indications of winter bear activity have been detected for some time, but only in the past three years have such signs been observed "with absolute certainty", according to the scientists.

"Mother bears with cubs make the effort to seek out nuts and berries if these have been plentiful, and snow is scarce," Mr Palomero said, adding that even for those bears - mostly mature males - who do close down for the winter, "their hibernation period gets shorter every year".

The behaviour change suggests that global warming is responsible for this revolution in ursine behaviour, says Juan Carlos García Cordón, a professor of geography at Santander's Cantabria University, and a climatology specialist.

"Meteorological data in the high mountains is scarce, but it seems that the warming is more noticeable in the valleys where cold air accumulates," Dr García Cordón said. "There is a decline in snowfall, and in the time snow remains on the ground, which makes access to food easier. As autumn comes later, and spring comes earlier, bears have an extra month to forage for food.

"We cannot prove that non-hibernation is caused by global warming, but everything points in that direction."

Spanish meteorologists predict that this year is likely to be the warmest year on record in Spain, just as it is likely to be the warmest year recorded in Britain (where temperature records go back to 1659). Globally, 2006 is likely to be the sixth warmest year in a record going back the mid-19th century.

Mark Wright, the science adviser to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the UK, said that bears giving up hibernation was "what we would expect" with climate change.

"It does not in itself prove global warming, but it is certainly consistent with predictions of it," he said. "What is particularly interesting about this is that hitherto the warming has seemed to be happening fastest at the poles and at high latitudes, and now we're getting examples of it happening further south, and heading towards the equator.

"I think it's an indication of what's to come. It shows climate change is not a natural phenomenon but something that is affecting not only on the weather, but impacting on the natural world in ways we're only now beginning to understand."

The European brown bear, with its characteristic pelt that ranges from dark brown through shades of grey to pale gold, has black paws and a tawny face. It has poor vision, although it sees in colour and at night, and if threatened rears on its hind legs to get a better view. It can live for up to 30 years. It has acute hearing, and an especially fine sense of smell that enables it to detect food from a long distance. It is carnivorous, but has a multifunctional dental system with powerful canines and grinding molars perfectly adapted to an omnivorous diet.

The animals would normally begin hibernation between October and December, and resume activity between March and May.

The Cantabrian version of the brown bear, a protected species, was once as endangered as the Iberian lynx or the imperial eagle still are in Spain, but is now recovering in numbers. Between 70 and 90 bears roamed Spain's northern mountains in the early 1990s; now 130 live there.

Other seasonal freaks

* The osprey found in the lochs and glens of the Scottish Highlands in the summer months, usually migrate to west Africa to avoid the freeze. This winter, osprey have been spotted in Suffolk and Devon. Swallows, which also normally migrate to Africa for the winter have been also seen across England this winter.

* The red admiral butterfly, below, which hibernates in winter, has been spotted in gardens this month, as has the common darter dragonfly, usually seen between mid-June and October, which has been seen in Cheshire, Norfolk and Hampshire.

* The smew, a diving duck, flies west to the UK for winter from Russia and Scandinavia. This year, though, they have been mainly absent from the lakes and reservoirs between The Wash and the Severn.

* Evergreen ivy and ox-eye daisies are still blooming and some oak trees, which are usually bare by November, were still in leaf on Christmas Day last year.

* The buff-tailed bumblebee is usually first seen in spring. Worker bees die out by the first frost, while fertilised queen bees survive underground between March and September. This December, bees have been seen in Nottingham and York.

* Primroses and daffodils are already flowering at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, in Carmarthenshire. 'Early Sensation' daffodils usually flower from January until February. Horticulturalists put it down to the warm weather.

* Scientists in the Netherlands reported more than 240 wild plants flowering in the first 15 days of December, along with more than 200 cultivated species. Examples included cow parsley and sweet violets. Just two per cent of these plants normally flower in winter, while 27 per cent end their main flowering period in autumn and 56 per cent before October.

SOURCE: The Independent

A Revolution in Robotics?

2006-12-26T11:45:00.000-05:00

In many ways, it is no revolution but more of the same old same old - the continued technocratization and euclidean minded reorganization of matter to suit a sort of pseudo-gnostic escape from organic life.

An interesting commentary on this second video can be found here.

Iraqis Harassed by Robo-calls

2006-12-25T07:01:00.000-05:00

Iraqslogger:

A mysterious psychological operations campaign is underway in Iraq, with Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army as its target. In recent days, Baghdad residents report receiving phone calls that caller ID show to be originating from outside Iraq. When the phone is answered, the listener hears a recorded message from an anonymous man speaking formal Arabic. He condemns the Mahdi Army and describes how it destroys Iraqi infrastructure, including electricity. Baghdad residents are afraid to discuss details of the message over phone lines, believing them to be monitored. But an IraqSlogger source tells us the unnerving message left at least one Baghdad woman in tears.

TPMmuckraker thought that sounded a little familiar:

Who says we're not spreading democracy in Iraq?

Not long after Republicans harrassed tens of thousands of Americans with automated phone messages in November's election, news comes that the robo call, that staple of American democracy, is being deployed in Iraq. And it's literally terrorizing city residents.

Anyone think that Frank Luntz knows Arabic?

SOURCE: Crooks and Liars

Also see British Intelligence Use Text Messages in Psychological War

The Influence of Fly Agaric on the Iconography of Father Christmas

2006-12-24T07:08:00.000-05:00

Most people are familiar with the traditional image of Father Christmas (aka Santa Claus). The 1823 poem of Major Henry Livingston Jr, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas'¹ crystallised this image, and countless Christmas cards reinforced it. Father Christmas appears as a rather plump, white-bearded old man, dressed in red clothing with white buttons and trimmings. Such imagery also frequently depicts him:

Flying through the air.
Flying through the air in or on a sleigh, pulled by reindeer.
Delivering children's presents down a chimney.

Although an advertising campaign by the Coca Cola Company in the 1930s made this image of Father Christmas almost universal, it was fairly ubiquitous by the late 19th Century. With an expansion of global exploration in Victorian times, travellers returned home from visiting the Sami of Lapland² with the story of flying reindeer, spreading the tale all over central Europe.

The question arises; does some underlying connection pull all these characteristics together into a coherent synthesis? Perhaps...

Flying Reindeer

Although the Johnny Marks hit song, 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' popularised the link between reindeer and Father Christmas in 1949, the association of reindeer with Christmas was already well established. For example, centuries before the development of the legend of Father Christmas, English texts from the Renaissance mention reindeer antlers being displayed during Christmas festivities.

The first reference in print connecting Santa Claus and reindeer appears in the 1823 poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas' by Major Henry Livingston Jr (the famous 'Twas the Night Before Christmas').

Reindeer are a kind of deer found in the cold regions of Europe and North America (locally referred to as 'caribou'). They feed on grass and lichens, but also have a taste for the fly agaric toadstool, Amanita muscaria, because of its intoxicating and euphoric effects. Amanita muscaria is found in pine and birch woods of western North America, northern Europe, and Asia.

The Sami have a custom of feeding fly agaric to their deer and collecting the urine to drink. The reindeer's digestive system metabolises the more poisonous components of the toadstool, leaving urine with the hallucinogenic and psychotropic elements of the fungus intact. Drinking the urine gives a 'high' similar to taking LSD. Under the hallucinatory effects of the drink, the Sami thought their reindeer were flying through space, looking down on the world. The reindeers' liking for the toadstool hallucinogens are such that they, in turn, have been known to eat the snow on which intoxicated humans have urinated, creating a reciprocating cycle.

When the first missionaries reached Lapland they heard stories of such reindeer flight, and integrated those tales into the existing Christmas folklore of Western cultures concerning Saint Nicholas.

Red and White Clothing

The word 'toadstool' refers to poisonous or inedible mushrooms. The Amanita muscaria toadstool, instantly recognisable for its brilliant scarlet cap with white warts, has long been used in the rituals of certain Asian societies. This use has arisen due to the psychotropic and hallucinogenic compounds contained within the toadstool. Ingestion leads to 'expanded perception', macropsia (perceiving objects as enlarged)³, rapid heartbeat, dry mouth, and the belief that one could talk directly with one's god. It is no accident that fly agaric toadstools often appear in books of fairy tales.

Fly agaric is a source of the hallucinogenic components ibotenic acid (an amino acid) and muscimol. Ibotenic acid, only present in fresh mushrooms, has insecticidal properties⁴. When dried, ibotenic acid degrades (decarboxylates) into muscimol⁵, which has ten times the potency. Taken orally, Ibotenic acid is entheogenically active⁶ at 50-100 mg, whilst muscimol displays activity at 10-15 mg.

The shamans⁷ of Siberia use Amanita muscaria for recreational or ritualistic purposes. They use a dried preparation called 'mukhomor' to speak to their gods. These people, the Kamchadales and the Koryaks, eat between one and three dried mushrooms. They believe that smaller mushrooms and those with a large quantity of small warts are more active than pale red ones and ones with fewer spots. The Koryak women chew the sun-dried agaric and roll the product into small sausages, which the men swallow. The Koryaks also eat the flesh of slaughtered reindeer which have recently eaten fly agaric, but whose psychotropic condition has subsided. In a similar fashion to the Sami, the Siberians discovered that their urine contained the active principle of the fungi and they could consume this recycled product with less of the undesirable poisonous effects of the raw toadstool.

During a mushroom-induced trance, the shaman would start to twitch and sweat before falling into a deep coma-like sleep. During his coma, the shaman's soul left his body as an animal and flew to the 'other world' where it communicated with the spirits. The shaman hoped these spirits could help him deal with major problems, such as outbreaks of sickness in the village, by imparting medical knowledge from the gods.

On awaking, the shaman found their muscular systems had been so stimulated that they were able to perform spectacular physical feats with seemingly little effort - such as making a gigantic leap to clear a small obstacle. The effect on animals was the same, and a 'bemushroomed'⁸ reindeer traditionally guarded each shaman.

The poorer classes, who could not afford the time to gather the toadstools, would drink the urine of the better-off, collected in bowls or skin bags. Evidence suggests the drug's hallucinogens remained effective even having passed through five or six people, and some scholars maintain that this is the true origin of the expression 'to get pissed' - rather than having anything to do with alcohol intoxication ⁹.

The fly agaric may have been one of the earliest entheogens, that is hallucinogenic substances used for religious or shamanic purposes. Such use dates back as much as 10,000 years. The oldest archaeological evidence discovered so far of mushroom use by man exists as an image in a cave in Tassili, Algeria. The image dates back to 3500BC and depicts the mushrooms with electrified auras outlining dancing shamans.

Furthermore, the fly agaric has appeared for a long time as a popular image on Christmas cards in central Europe. In Kocevye, in southern Yugoslavia, folklore tells of the Germanic god, Wotan (the king of the gods, synonymous with the Norse god, Odin) who rides on horseback through the woods on Christmas night, pursued by devils. Red and white flecks of blood and foam spray from the horse's mouth to the ground, where fly agaric toadstools emerge in the following year.

Climbing Down the Chimney Bearing Gifts

Siberian shamans live in tepee-like structures made of reindeer skin, called yurts, with a roof supported by a birch pole and a smokehole at the top. At the midwinter festivals of Annual Renewal, the shaman gathers the fly agaric from under sacred trees. Interestingly, whilst harvesting the toadstools, the shaman wears special attire, consisting of red and white fur-trimmed coats and long black boots ie, very much like the modern day depiction of Santa Claus. He then enters his yurt through the smokehole, carrying a sack full of dried fly agaric, and descends the birch pole to the floor. Once inside, the shaman performs his ceremonies and shares out the toadstool's gifts with those gathered inside. Following this, he leaves up the pole and back through the smokehole.

It is interesting to note that, in central Europe, the fly agaric has been adopted as the symbol of chimney sweeps.

St Nicholas

Saint Nicholas is a legendary figure who supposedly lived during the 4th Century. He is best known as the patron saint of children, to whom he brings presents on the eve of his feast day, 6th December.

Most religious historians now agree that St Nicholas never actually existed, but was instead a Christianized amalgam of the historical bishops, Nicholas of Myra (4th Century) and Nicholas of Sion (d. 564) together with a number of pagan gods including the Teutonic god, Hold Nickar, corresponding to the Greek god, Poseidon. Legend tells that Hold Nickar galloped through the sky during the winter solstice, granting favours to his worshippers below.

St Nicholas is associated with a number of miracles, but it is the following one that integrates him into the legend of Santa Claus:

There was a nobleman who had three daughters, and who had fallen on hard times. As the nobleman could not afford their dowries his daughters had little prospect of marriage; and so they faced a life of prostitution. St. Nicholas heard of this and, one night, threw a sack of gold through a window of the nobleman's castle. The sack contained enough gold to provide for one daughter's marriage. The next night he tossed another sack of gold through the window for the second daughter. But, on the third night the window was closed, so St. Nicholas dropped the third sack of gold down the chimney. On hearing of this, townsfolk began hanging stockings by the fireplace at night to collect any gold that might come their way.

So also was born the tradition of the Christmas stocking and Santa arriving down the chimney.

The early Christians soon incorporated these traditions and folklore into their own 'Holy Day'. Many images of Saint Nicholas from these early times show him wearing the red and white robes of bishops of the Roman Catholic church or standing in front of a red background with white spots, the design of the Amanita mushroom.

It would appear that around 1300AD, imagery of St Nicholas fused with the pagan god Wotan. Wotan rode an eight-legged white horse, Sleipnir, through the night skies, his long white beard blowing in the wind. Prior to this time, Saint Nicholas was depicted as having a dark beard.

In 1823, Major Henry Livingston published his 'Twas the Night Before Christmas...' poem in which the connection between Santa Claus and reindeer appeared for the first time. Here, eight reindeer pulled a white-bearded Santa Claus in a sleigh. Livingston based his ideas on popular views of Christmas based mainly on his knowledge of diverse customs involving St Nicholas, brought to the area by Dutch, German and Scandinavian immigrants. Perhaps the eight reindeer echo Wotan's eight-legged steed.

And to All a Good Night

In summary, it seems quite possible that the traditional image of Father Christmas, described in Livingston's poem and universalised by the Coca Cola Company during the 1930s, has its real origins in shamanistic rituals involving the red and white fly agaric toadstool. From climbing into chimneys and gift giving, to dressing in red and white and flying through the air with reindeers, travellers and storytellers have fused these ancient customs with other pagan traditions and imagery. As is the wont of Christianity, these pagan customs have pragmatically been adapted and integrated into our Christmas traditions.

SOURCE: BBC

A Holiday Message

2006-12-23T13:27:00.000-05:00

Do yourself a favor...

2006-12-22T06:36:00.000-05:00

If you are a Philip K. Dick fan or if you enjoy films like Minority Report, Bladerunner, the Matrix, or the Truman show, if you are familiar with the state of the nation's counterculture and you enjoy movies about a psychotic police state being implemented with a profit oriented policy of crime maintenance, or if you just like films that break new ground, see A Scanner Darkly

How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later
by Philip K. Dick, 1978

First, before I begin to bore you with the usual sort of things science fiction writers say in speeches, let me bring you official greetings from Disneyland. I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it—and, as if that were not enough, I once had the honor of being interviewed there by Paris TV.

For several weeks after the interview, I was really ill and confined to bed. I think it was the whirling teacups that did it. Elizabeth Antebi, who was the producer of the film, wanted to have me whirling around in one of the giant teacups while discussing the rise of fascism with Norman Spinrad... an old friend of mine who writes excellent science fiction. We also discussed Watergate, but we did that on the deck of Captain Hook's pirate ship. Little children wearing Mickey Mouse hats—those black hats with the ears—kept running up and bumping against us as the cameras whirred away, and Elizabeth asked unexpected questions. Norman and I, being preoccupied with tossing little children about, said some extraordinarly stupid things that day. Today, however, I will have to accept full blame for what I tell you, since none of you are wearing Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb up on me under the impression that I am part of the rigging of a pirate ship.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful. A few years ago, no college or university would ever have considered inviting one of us to speak. We were mercifully confined to lurid pulp magazines, impressing no one. In those days, friends would say me, "But are you writing anything serious?" meaning "Are you writing anything other than science fiction?" We longed to be accepted. We yearned to be noticed. Then, suddenly, the academic world noticed us, we were invited to give speeches and appear on panels—and immediately we made idiots of ourselves. The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?

It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think: Someone in this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or cannot put on two-tone shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass as humans.

Well, I will tell you what interests me, what I consider important. I can't claim to be an authority on anything, but I can honestly say that certain matters absolutely fascinate me, and that I write about them all the time. The two basic topics which fascinate me are "What is reality?" and "What constitutes the authentic human being?" Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog's extrapolation was in a sense logical—given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness.

I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story... which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been right—let's not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus' philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real.

I offer this merely to show that as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin talk nonsense. Zeno proved that motion was impossible (actually he only imagined that he had proved this; what he lacked was what technically is called the "theory of limits"). David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume's point. It was all just talk. The solemn philosophers weren't taking what they said seriously.

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride—you can have all of them, but none is true.

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.

In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

We would not be aware of this tranformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn't exist, and how can something that doesn't exist have aspects? But then I realized that I'd been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank.

Of course, in science fiction no pretense is made that the worlds described are real. This is why we call it fiction. The reader is warned in advance not to believe what he is about to read. Equally true, the visitors to Disneyland understand that Mr. Toad does not really exist and that the pirates are animated by motors and servo-assist mechanisms, relays and electronic circuits. So no deception is taking place.

And yet the strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title "science fiction" is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?

And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but—Is it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth... and only later on realize it.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

And—and I say this as a professional fiction writer—the producers, scriptwriters, and directors who create these video/audio worlds do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product, along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labelling his product, like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label... you cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not know.

It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and to learn later on—perhaps years later—that it is true. I would like to give you an example. It is something that I do not understand. Perhaps you can come up with a theory. I can't.

In 1970 I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. One of the characters is a nineteen-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deeper into the novel, we discover that actually she is working for the police. She has a relationship going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was.

Anyhow, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy—this was after I had finished the novel, you understand. She was nineteen years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs; I kept warning her again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening as we were entering a restauant together, Kathy stopped short and said, "I can't go in." Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. "I have to tell you the truth," Kathy said. "I have a relationship with him."

Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the mystery becomes even more perplexing; the next stage totally baffles me. It has for four years.

In 1974 the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon I was talking to my priest—I am an Episcopalian—and I happened to mention to him an important scene near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and they begin to talk. As I described the scene in more and more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last he said, "That is a scene from the Book of Acts, from the Bible! In Acts, the person who meets the black man on the road is named Philip—your name." Father Rasch was so upset by the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in his Bible. "Read Acts," he instructed me. "And you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details."

I went home and read the scene in Acts. Yes, Father Rasch was right; the scene in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Acts... and I had never read Acts, I must admit. But again the puzzle became deeper. In Acts, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates Saint Paul is named Felix—the same name as my character. And my character Felix Buckman is a high-ranking police general; in fact, in my novel he holds the same office as Felix in the Book of Acts: the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel which very closely resembles a conversation between Felix and Paul.

Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my novel is named Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appears anywhere in the Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once and only once in the Bible. It is in the Book of Acts. And, as if to plague me further with coincidences, in my novel Jason is fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in a person's house, and in Acts the man named Jason shelters a fugitive from the law in his house—an exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious Spirit responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole thing.

Felix, Jason, and the meeting on the road with the black man who is a complete stranger. In Acts, the disciple Philip baptizes the black man, who then goes away rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional support, because Felix Buckman's sister has just died and he is falling apart psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and althought Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He had been flying home, weeping over the death of his sister, and had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a total stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of them—both in my novel and in Acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious Spirit at work: the name Felix is the Latin word for "happy." Which I did not know when I wrote the novel.

A careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible, and even had the right names. What could explain this? That was four years ago that I discovered all this. For four years I have tried to come up with a theory and I have not. I doubt if I ever will.

But the mystery had not ended there, as I had imagined. Two months ago I was walking up to the mailbox late at night to mail off a letter, and also to enjoy the sight of Saint Joseph's Church, which sits opposite my apartment building. I noticed a man loitering suspiciously by a parked car. It looked as if he was attempting to steal the car, or maybe something from it; as I returned from the mailbox, the man hid behind a tree. On impulse I walked up to him and asked, "Is anything the mattter?"

"I'm out of gas," the man said. "And I have no money."

Incredibly, because I have never done this before, I got out my wallet, took all the money from it, and handed the money to him. He then shook hands with me and asked where I lived, so that he could later pay the money back. I returned to my apartment, and then I realized that the money would do him no good, since there was no gas station within walking distance. So I returned, in my car. The man had a metal gas can in the trunk of his car, and, together, we drove in my car to an all-night gas station. Soon we were standing there, two strangers, as the pump jockey filled the metal gas can. Suddenly I realized that this was the scene in my novel—the novel written eight years before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my inner eye when I wrote the scene—the glaring white light, the pump jockey—and now I saw something which I had not seen before. The stranger who I was helping was black.

We drove back to his stalled car with the gas, shook hands, and then I returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. He could not pay me back because I had not told him which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was. I was terribly shaken up by this experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it had appeared in my novel. Which is to say, I had lived out a sort of replica of the scene in Acts where Philip encounters the black man on the road.

What could explain all this?

The answer I have come up with may not be correct, but it is the only answer I have. It has to do with time. My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts.

Parmenides would be proud of me. I have gazed at a constantly changing world and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. but how has this come about? If the real time is circa A.D. 50, then why do we see A.D. 1978? And if we are really living in the Roman Empire, somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States?

During the Middle Ages, a curious theory arose, which I will now present to you for what it is worth. It is the theory that the Evil One—Satan—is the "Ape of God." That he creates spurious imitations of creation, of God's authentic creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic creation. Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are occluded, that we are deceived, that it is not 1978 but A.D. 50... and Satan has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ?

I can just picture myself being examined by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, "What year is it?" And I reply, "A.D. 50." The psychiatrist blinks and then asks, "And where are you?" I reply, "In Judaea." "Where the heck is that?" the psychiatrist asks. "It's part of the Roman Empire," I would have to answer. "Do you know who is President?" the psychiatrist would ask, and I would answer, "The Procurator Felix." "You're pretty sure about this?" the psychiatrist would ask, meanwhile giving a covert signal to two very large psych techs. "Yep," I'd replay. "Unless Felix has stepped down and had been replaced by the Procurator Festus. You see, Saint Paul was held by Felix for—" "Who told you all this?" the psychiatrist would break in, irritably, and I would reply, "The Holy Spirit." And after that I'd be in the rubber room, inside gazing out, and knowing exactly how come I was there.

Everything in that conversation would be true, in a sense, although palpably not true in another. I know perfectly well that the date is 1978 and that Jimmy Carter is President and that I live in Santa Ana, California, in the United States. I even know how to get from my apartment to Disneyland, a fact I can't seem to forget. And surely no Disneyland existed back at the time of Saint Paul.

So, if I force myself to be very rational and reasonable, and all those other good things, I must admit that the existence of Disneyland (which I know is real) proves that we are not living in Judaea in A.D. 50. The idea of Saint Paul whirling around in the giant teacups while composing First Corinthians, as Paris TV films him with a telephoto lens—that just can't be. Saint Paul would never go near Disneyland. Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland. Saints do not.

But somehow that biblical material snared my unconscious and crept into my novel, and equally true, for some reason in 1978 I relived a scene which I described back in 1970. What I am saying is this: There is internal evidence in at least one of my novels that another reality, an unchanging one, exactly as Parmenides and Plato suspected, underlies the visible phenomenal world of change, and somehow, in some way, perhaps to our surprise, we can cut through to it. Or rather, a mysterious Spirit can put us in touch with it, if it wishes us to see this permanent other landscape. Time passes, thousands of years pass, but at the same instant that we see this contemporary world, the ancient world, the world of the Bible, is concealed beneath it, still there and still real. Eternally so.

Shall I go for broke and tell you the rest of this peculiar story? I'll do so, having gone this far already. My novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was released by Doubleday in February of 1974. The week after it was released, I had two impacted wisdom teeth removed, under sodium pentathol. Later that day I found myself in intense pain. My wife phoned the oral surgeon and he phoned a pharmacy. Half an hour later there was a knock at my door: the delivery person from the pharmacy with the pain medication. Although I was bleeding and sick and weak, I felt the need to answer the knock on the door myself. When I opened the door, I found myself facing a young woman—who wore a shining gold necklace in the center of which was a gleaming gold fish. For some reason I was hypnotized by the gleaming golden fish; I forgot my pain, forgot the medication, forgot why the girl was there. I just kept staring at the fish sign.

"What does that mean?" I asked her.

The girl touched the glimmering golden fish with her hand and said, "This is a sign worn by the early Christians." She then gave me the package of medication.

In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black prison-like contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation was boundless.

Isn't it odd that this strange event, this recovery of lost memory, occured only a week after Flow My Tears was released? And it is Flow My Tears which contains the replication of people and events from the Book of Acts, which is set at the precise moment in time—just after Jesus' death and resurrection—that I remembered, by means of the golden fish sign, as having just taken place?

If you were me, and had this happen to you, I'm sure you wouldn't be able to leave it alone. You would seek a theory that would account for it. For over four years now, I have been trying one theory after another: circular time, frozen time, timeless time, what is called "sacred" as contrasted to "mundane" time... I can't count the theories I've tried out. One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness.

In the writing of Flow My Tears, back in 1970, there was one unusual event which I realized at the time was not ordinary, was not a part of the regular writing process. I had a dream one night, an especially vivid dream. And when I awoke I found myself under the compulsion—the absolute necessity—of getting the dream into the text of the novel precisely as I had dreamed it. In getting the dream exactly right, I had to do eleven drafts of the final part of the manuscript, until I was satisfied.

I will now quote from the novel, as it appeared in the final, published form. See if this dream reminds you of anything.

The countryside, brown and dry, in summer, where he had lived as a child. He rode a horse, and approaching him on his left a squad of horses nearing slowly. On the horses rode men in shining robes, each a different color; each wore a pointed helmet that sparkled in the sunlight. The slow, solemn knights passed him and as they traveled by he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.

Felix Buckman let them pass; he did not speak to them and they said nothing to him. Together, they all moved toward the house from which he had come. A man had sealed himself up inside the house, a man alone, Jason Taverner, in the silence and darkness, without windows, by himself from now on into eternity. Sitting, merely existing, inert. Felix Buckman continued on, out into the open countryside. And then he heard from behind him one dreadful single shriek. They had killed Taverner, and seeing them enter, sensing them in the shadows around him, knowing what they intended to do with him, Taverner had shrieked.

Within himself Felix Buckman felt absolute and utter desolate grief. But in the dream he did not go back nor look back. There was nothing that could be done. No one could have stopped the posse of varicolored men in robes; they could not have been said no to. Anyhow, it was over. Taverner was dead.

This passage probably does not suggest any particular thing to you, except a law posse exacting judgment on someone either guilty or considered guilty. It is not clear whether Taverner has in fact committed some crime or is merely believed to have committed some crime. I had the impression that he was guilty, but that it was a tragedy that he had to be killed, a terribly sad tragedy. In the novel, this dream causes Felix Buckman to begin to cry, and therefore he seeks out the black man at the all-night gas station.

Months after the novel was published, I found the section in the Bible to which this dream refers. It is Daniel, 7:9:

Thrones were set in place and one ancient in years took his seat. His robe was white as snow and the hair of his head like cleanest wool. Flames of fire were his throne and its wheels blazing fire; a flowing river of fire streamed out before him. Thousands upon thousands served him and myriads upon myriads attended his presence. The court sat, and the book were opened.

The white-haired old man appears again in Revelation, 1:13:

I saw... one like a son of man, robed down to his feet, with a golden girdle round his breast. The hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.

And then 1:17:

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand upon me and said, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and I am the living one, for I was dead and now I am alive for evermore, and I hold the keys of Death and Death's domain. Write down therefore what you have seen, what is now, and what will be hereafter."

And, like John of Patmos, I faithfully wrote down what I saw and put in my novel. And it was true, although at the time I did not know who was meant by this description:

...he made out the face of one: an ancient marble face, a terribly old man with rippling cascades of white beard. What a strong nose he had. What noble features. So tired, so serious, so far beyond ordinary men. Evidently he was a king.

Indeed he was a king. He is Christ Himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in darkness. The man sealed up in darkness must be the Prince of Evil, the Force of Darkness. Call it whatever you wish, its time had come. It was judged and condemned. Felix Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he knew that the verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed.

So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The core message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoghts to myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace. The most powerful man in the world. And I feel as sorry for him now as I did when I dreamed that dream. "That poor poor man," I said once to my wife, with tears in my eyes. "Shut up in the darkness, playing the piano in the night to himself, alone and afraid, knowing what's to come." For God's sake, let us forgive him, finally. But what was done to him and all his men—"all the President's men," as it's put—had to be done. But it is over, and he should be let out into the sunlight again; no creature, no person, should be shut up in darkness forever, in fear. It is not humane.

Just about the time that Supreme Court was ruling that the Nixon tapes had to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was eating at a Chinese restaurant in Yorba Linda, the town in California where Nixon went to school—where he grew up, worked at a grocery store, where there is a park named after him, and of course the Nixon house, simple clapboard and all that. In my fortune cookie, I got the following fortune:

DEEDS DONE IN SECRET HAVE A
WAY OF BECOMING FOUND OUT.

I mailed the slip of paper to the White House, mentioning that the Chinese restaurant was located within a mile of Nixon's original house, and I said, "I think a mistake has been made; by accident I got Mr. Nixon's fortune. Does he have mine?" The White House did not answer.

Well, as I said earlier, an author of a work supposed fiction might write the truth and not know it. To quote Xenophanes, another pre-Socratic: "Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances" (Fragment 34). And Heraclitus added to this: "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself" (Fragment 54). W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, put it: "Things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream." The point of all that is that we cannot trust our senses and probably not even our a priori reasoning. As to our senses, I understand that people who have been blind from birth and are suddenly given sight are amazed to discover that objects appear to get smaller and smaller as they get farther away. Logically, there is no reason for this. We, of course, have come to accept this, because we are use to it. We see objects get smaller, but we know that in actuality they remain the same size. So even the common everyday pragmatic person utilizes a certain amount of sophisticated discounting of what his eyes and ears tell him.

Little of what Heraclitus wrote has survived, and what we do have is obscure, but Fragment 54 is lucid and important: "Latent structure is master of obvious structure." This means that Heraclitus believed that a veil lay over the true landscape. He also may have suspected that time was somehow not what it seemed, because in Fragment 52 he said: "Time is a child at play, playing draughts; a child's is the kingdom." This is indeed cryptic. But he also said, in Fragment 18: "If one does not expect it, one will not find out the unexpected; it is not to be tracked down and no path leads us to it." Edward Hussey, in his scholarly book The Pre-Socratics, says:

If Heraclitus is to be so insistent on the lack of understanding shown by most men, it would seem only reasonable that he should offer further instructions for penetrating to the truth. The talk of riddle-guessing suggests that some kind of revelation, beyond human control, is necessary... The true wisdom, as has been seen, is closely associated with God, which suggests further that in advancing wisdom a man becomes like, or a part of, God.

This quote is not from a religious book or a book on theology; it is an analysis of the earliest philosophers by a Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Hussey makes it clear that to these early philosophers there was no distinction between philosophy and religion. The first great quantum leap in Greek theology was by Xenophanes of Colophon, born in the mid-sixth century B.C. Xenophanes, without resorting to any authority except that of his own mind, says:

One god there is, in no way like mortal creatures either in bodily form or in the thought of his mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. He stays always motionless in the same place; it is not fitting that he should move about now this way, now that.

This is a subtle and advanced concept of God, evidently without precedent among the Greek thinkers. "The arguments of Parmenides seemed to show that all reality must indeed be a mind," Hussey writes, "or an object of thought in a mind." Regarding Heraclitus specifically, he says, "In Heraclitus it is difficult to tell how far the designs in God's mind are distinguished from the execution in the world, or indeed how far God's mind is distinguished from the world." The further leap by Anaxagoras has always fascinated me. "Anaxagoras had been driven to a theory of the microstructure of matter which made it, to some extent, mysterious to human reason." Anaxagoras believed that everything was determined by Mind. These were not childish thinkers, nor primitives. They debated serious issues and studied one another's views with deft insight. It was not until the time of Aristotle that their views got reduced to what we can neatly—but wrongly—classify as crude. The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level—call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material. Much of this view reaches us through the Logos doctrine regarding Christ. The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.

Thus if God thinks about Rome circa A.D. 50, then Rome circa A.D. 50 is. The universe is not a windup clock and God the hand that winds it. The universe is not a battery-powered watch and God the battery. Spinoza believed that the universe is the body of God extensive in space. But long before Spinoza—two thousand years before him—Xenophanes had said, "Effortlessly, he wields all things by the thought of his mind" (Fragment 25).

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:

I am the brand name.

Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as:

When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.

It would seem that I not only bring you greetings from Disneyland but from Mortimer Snerd. Such is the fate of an author who hoped to include theological themes in his writing. "The brand name, then, was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; no single thing was created without him." So it goes with noble ambitions. Let's hope God has a sense of humor.

Or should I say, Let's hope the brand name has a sense of humor.

As I said to you earlier, my two preoccupations in my writing are "What is reality?" and "What is the authentic human?" I'm sure you can see by now that I have not been able to answer the first question. I have an abiding intuition that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation. That is all I can come up with—a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith. I would like to say something about the traits of the authentic human, though; in this quest I have had more plausible answers.

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.

The power of spurious realities battering at us today—these deliberately manufactured fakes never penetrate to the heart of true human beings. I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, They can't be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child's ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them.

One day while my son Christopher, who is four, was playing in front of me and his mother, we two adults began discussing the figure of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Christopher turned toward us for an instant and said, "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." He was playing with a metal lantern which someone had given me, which I had nevel used... and suddenly I realized that the lantern was shaped like a fish. I wonder what thoughts were being placed in my little boy's soul at that moment—and not placed there by cereal merchants or candy peddlers. "I am a fisherman. I fish for fish." Christopher, at four, had found the sign I did not find until I was forty-five years old.

Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand years ago. Or maybe it wasn't really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion that so much time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today. Perhaps time is not only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to end.

And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again. Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing.

Thank you.

SOURCE: The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

A Note to Readers

2006-12-22T06:05:00.000-05:00

Since every time, it seems, that outfits like Yahoo! and Google upgrade the services that they offer (in this case I refer to Blogger's recent upgrade - owned by Google) it is merely an excuse for ever increasing encroachment on privacy rights (data mining), I am sticking with Blogger's old format.

I consider it no accident that Google, who has long been considered a front for the national security state and who has recently been alleged to have been founded with CIA money (thereby, almost assuredly, cocaine, meth, or heroin money), has a webmail service that started by invitation only. Who were these inner elite that had been chosen or, rather, were charged with doing the early choosing?

I also consider it no accident that soon thereafter, Google made it possible to sign up with your cell phone. I think that, still, it is impossible to get Google mail without an invite from the network or by sending digital identity and tracking information from your cell network.

Now that Blogger is making the new beta version available only to those with Google accounts, it is easy to see a plan for internet domination. I don't have to inform the smarter readers that to control a medium is to control its contents. As Joseph Goebbels, head propagandist for the Third Reich, put it, the aim of a fascist state is to present an "ostensible diversity behind which lies an actual uniformity."

I have gone into all of this merely to let readers know that because of my refusal to embrace the new Blogger (which will almost certainly become the basic version before long) and because of the extent to which I have gone to lengths to bite the Gloggler hand that feeds me, I may one day suddenly be unable to post. As well, and hopefully not, my blogs could just disappear as had been the history of my attemtps to archive information online. Should that occur, I would give it a few months and you should, once again, be able to find me on your search engine. I usually don't stay off the map for too long. Perhaps the fact that I have given up my research into Mitre Corporation and other companies involved in the implementation of the operation that was 9/11 will help make me less of a target.

Just a heads up.

Ultraterrestrial Agents of Cultural Deconstruction

2006-12-19T07:10:00.000-05:00

From Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Componentin the UFO Contact Experience
by Carl Raschke
Archaeus, Vol. 5, 1989

I substitute the prefix ultra- where one would expect extra-, so as to stress that the phenomena in question may be not only from beyond the Earth, but from outside the very matrix of space, time and matter.

Such a surmise is not as outlandish as it may seem on first consideration, since many theoretical physicists today have acceded to the notion that everything that falls within the range of normal, empirical science may be only a thin strand of intelligibility interwoven with hidden alternative folds of reality.[4] The spatiotemporal order, whose geometry was formulated summarily by Einstein, may be little more than than a single vibrational "rate" within what John Wheeler has called "superspace."[5] Thus UFO "visitations" or intrusions may be traced back to some hyperdimensional point of origin. Furthermore, the "visitors," rather than systematically "studying" our ways out of magisterial curiosity, may be working with methodical dispatch to make us transparently conscious of, if not to elevate us toward, the realm in which they move and have their being.

4. For the clearest and most provocative exposition of this view, see the book by the British physicist David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).

5. See John Wheeler, Geometrodynamics (New York: Academic Press, 1962).

SOURCE: The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension