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

The Armored Knight of the 20th Century

2006-12-19T06:56:00.000-05:00

Sex and Selling
by Robert Lawlor

Since the earliest shadows of prehistory, humanity has always created and revered images. Making images and signs is the behavior that most distinguishes us among the rest of living creatures. Modern psychology has shown that, through images, mankind externalizes and becomes aware of its inner nature. The word 'man' or 'human' is derived from the Sanskrit word, manas, which means 'those who reflect upon themselves,' and this is perhaps the most important function of imagemaking. The projection outward of our inner content, through powerful concrete representations, acts to clarify values, behaviors, characteristics, and life-roles toward which individuals can grow and develop. In ancient times these often mysterious idealizations were communicated not only in visual images but through myths. These traditional stories reinforced the collective stereotypes that helped society maintain a connectedness with the spiritual and natural forces that pervade the world.

History warns us that there can be a dark power involved in the image-making process as well. Certainly Hitler and the Third Reich in their rise to power played upon deep archetypal images of the German collective unconscious. The symbol of the swastika, for example, was almost universally held by ancient tribal religions to be most sacred, to them it signified the unrelenting vortex or vulva of the ever-creating/ever-destroying Earth Mother. Most certainly, the Third Reich consciously adapted this symbol to touch a sublimated primitive core in the mass psyche.

Similarly in our modern society that image and mythic process has been taken over by corporations that directly control advertising and, indirectly, the entertainment industry. Powerful erotic images are used for the sole purpose of selling consumer products; the side effects of this commercialization have a profound impact on the sexual imagination and identity of vast numbers of people.

The Armored Knight

One example that greatly affects male sexuality and self-identity is the exploitation of the male archetype of the Armored Knight: the warrior who wins self-esteem and feminine favors through defeating and injuring others. The psychological syndrome connected with the commercial exploitation of this male archetype is as follows: throughout their very impressionable adolescence (eleven to perhaps twenty-five years old), men are bombarded by the advertising, media, and entertainment industries with images of a particular type of female beauty - the Model Starlet type. The sexual fantasies of boys are then directed to a very narrow image of female beauty, one that is hyperstimulated, and exploited commercially. This female type, for many boys, is in reality virtually unattainable. Women who fulfill this narrow image of beauty then become like "biological celebrities" in relation to the boys in their adolescent peer groups. At this impressionable age, boys learn that they must compete, like a battling knight, against other men for these desirable women. Generally, the boys' chances of gaining attention from this type of female are dependent on performance, achievement and success, in sports and, later in the world of business. The pressure is further compounded since adolescent girls are usually attracted to older boys who are better equipped to achieve and perform in sports. The commercial fantasy usually implies that the boys should make contact with as many women of this particular genre of beauty as possible. In later life, this male adolescent fantasy is difficult to reconcile with the primary request of many women, which is that men become monogamous as well as become breadwinners for their wives and children. In other words, marriage abruptly changes the mythic image that prevails over a man's youth - that of the Armored Knight - into the mythic image of the King or the Householder. Before we examine the implications of this change, let us examine the effects of the knight image on male psychology.

The important patterns generated in our society by the commercial exploitation of the Armored Knight can be summarized by some of the research and ideas of Warren Farrell in Why Men Are The Way They Are. These patterns not only inhibit the evolution of the male self-image, but they perpetuate those male traits that alienate most modern women: men come to rely on competition and aggressive performance as a way of gaining admiration and attention from females. This paradigm, male competitor with female as reward, generates three main attitudes in men toward women:

1. An underlying contempt, due to the idea that the women is no more than an object-like prize.
2. Subjugation of that prize to the will and ownership of the deserving victor; or
3. As with all trophies, isolation of the woman on a pedestal.

The domination of the competitive image does more than shape the male/female pattern: it also forces particular relationships of men with other men. We find a disproportionate dependency on male camaraderie resulting from the amity generated from having or projecting a male enemy in common. Recent disturbing riots at soccer and football matches are testimony to this phenomenon. Large groups of males are united against a common enemy (the fans of the opposing team). Usually fortified with a ritual consumption of alcohol, these groups, bonded by a common image, turn the sports arena into a battleground. To ensure that the excessive male camaraderie associated with competitive sport is not misinterpreted, the male groups tend to have strong aversions to, and a paranoia about, homosexuality. Business competition subliminally bears the marks of the same male values, attitudes, and bonding patterns as found in competitive sports. This competitive emphasis not only tends to exclude companionship with women from these activities but contributes to a "war mentality" among most men, including many of the men who make the economic and political decisions that affect every minute of our lives.

Testosterone is the male sex hormone responsible for aggressive behavior. Testosterone levels in the blood rise even from the observation of situations or images of aggression and conquest. These heightened levels engender excitement, hostility, anger, irritability and aggression and, at the same time, aggressive sexual appetites. The fear and anxiety surrounding the winning and losing of money in business competition have a similar effect on raising adrenaline and testosterone levels. The businessman's expression, "I made a killing today," is less metaphorical and more descriptive than we would like to realize. In tribal societies that emphasize the warrior caste, such as the Masai in Africa, males preparing for battle will frighten and torture a wild male animal, so that the adrenaline and testosterone levels in the animal are raised. The young warriors will then kill the animal and immediately drink the blood, transferring this chemistry of aggression into their own system. Modern atheletes repeat a similar pattern when they dose themselves with cortical adrenal hormones and testosterone before competitive games like football and boxing.

For the most part, the people in advertising and commercial entertainment who manipulate the aggressive, subjugating, archetypal male images are unaware of the powerful historic and metaphysical forces that stand behind and propel the effectiveness of their activities. In Whitmont's words, "Behind every mass movement or change in the pattern of society, there is an archetype which acts on the imagination of the people." It is important to examine how the exaggerated competitive instinct in men affects their relationship to women, the formation of society, and our relationship to the environment in general. The same aggressiveness and need to control and subjugate, promoted by competition, lie very close to the cause of the ecologocal crisis.

SOURCE: The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

Pink Floyd - One Of These Days

2006-12-17T13:25:00.000-05:00

I remember when finding this video meant driving miles and miles, if there happened to be a record show or convention in your area and hoping that there was a Floyd collector there. Of course, back then they were all bootlegs. Now, the performance this piece is sampled from can be ordered. This comes from the legendary Pompeii show, a gig they did to themselves (no audience) in a practically fossilized amphitheatre on the island of, you guessed it, Pompeii, the island off the coast of Italy that got bathed in magma centuries ago. Enjoy!

WHY DID THEY TORTURE JOSE PADILLA?

2006-12-16T20:47:00.000-05:00

By John Grant

THERE'S A RANCID odor escaping from the cracks in the Jose Padilla case. Padilla is the American citizen arrested in Chicago and declared by President Bush to be an "enemy combatant." He was then kept for nearly two years in a South Carolina brig without access to a lawyer, family or friends.

The courts finally forced the Bush administration to release Padilla into the justice system, and he is now imprisoned in Miami awaiting trial on charges that have nothing to do with what he was arrested for, an alleged plot to use a dirty bomb in the United States. It is claimed he had al Qaeda connections.

What makes this case so insidious is that, according to a psychiatrist who examined him over a 22-hour period, the treatment Padilla received in the South Carolina brig was such that he now "lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense." In other words, a U.S. citizen was secretly worked over for 21 months to the point he is unable to think well enough to engage with his lawyer.

What needs to be pointed out is that the procedures that broke down Padilla's mental equilibrium weren't dreamed up by his jailers in South Carolina. According to Alfred McCoy in a new book called "A Question of Torture," they are the result of decades and billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded research.

"From 1950 to 1962," McCoy writes, "the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a billion dollars annually - a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind." This research amounted to "the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries." This "black budget" research has never stopped and elements of it were rushed into practice after 9/11.

No need for thumbscrews, racks, phone-crank generators to the genitals or Black & Decker drills. This was "no-touch torture," using extreme isolation and sensory deprivation to create confusion while establishing in the subject's mind the sense that any pain is self-inflicted, that he had chosen the course that led to the pain he was suffering. All it required was extended periods of time and the total elimination of all stimulation and human contact other than that of the jailer and the interrogator.

Padilla spent 21 months in a South Carolina brig especially re-designed after 9/11 to handle interrogation cases like his. A 10- cell wing was devoted solely to Padilla. The windows of his cell were blackened, and he wasn't allowed a clock or calendar.

McCoy says the no-touch torture chamber "has the theatricality of a set with special lighting, sound effects, props, and backdrops, all designed with a perverse stagecraft to evoke an aura of fear... The psychological component of torture becomes a kind of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies and inversion, in a plot that ends inexorably with the victim's self-betrayal and destruction..."

"As a result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation," the New York Times quoted psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty as saying, Padilla "has impairments in reasoning... complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation."

Why did the administration decide to dishonor the Constitution and do this to an U.S. citizen arrested on American soil?

Clearly, it hoped to ferret out leads to more arrests. But if Padilla's lawyers have their way, the psychological torture will actually exonerate him of even the new, vague charges that have nothing to do with what he was originally arrested for. As all experts on torture agree, torture is not as useful in getting true information as it is useful in getting confessions or responses interrogators want. The upcoming trial should be interesting.

A persistent conspiracy theory floating around the Web has Jose Padilla as John Doe #2 of the Oklahoma City bombing. Due to an uncanny likeness between Padilla and the police drawings of Doe #2 and some overlaps with the perpetrators of the bombing, this theory as an explanation of the government's extraordinary treatment of Padilla lingers in the mix. (A Google search of "Jose Padilla John Doe #2" turns up 60,000+ hits.)

For whatever reason the U.S. government did this to one of its own citizens, and whether or not he is guilty of anything, what was done to Padilla should give us all pause. We are now learning that post-9/11 fear resulted in a number of horrendously wrong-headed actions such as the invasion of Iraq that led to that nation's civil breakdown. The Padilla case is about the psychological breakdown of a single man, but it should send a shudder down the spine of every freedom-loving American.

SOURCE: Philadelphia Daily News

Jose Padilla: U.S. Government Gave Me LSD

Trey Anastasio

2006-12-16T06:48:00.000-05:00

Yup. It happened just yesterday. I am sure "authorites" are foaming at the mouth and patting themselves on the back for nabbing this hardened, dangerous countercultural guitarist. Apes will be apes.

BORED?

2006-12-15T17:33:00.000-05:00

These words rain down on the upturned faces of the insane, the fearful, the sick, and the exhausted. We are speaking to the people; the people know their symptoms. Alienation, technoboredom, neurosis, and frustration are not diseases of an unlucky few, nor even of the many. They are built into the structure of this society, twisting beggar and businessman alike, spitting them out like shards from a flawed machine, anemic shadows of human beings.

We do not profess to be immune. We claim only to have given some thought to the problems which affect all of us. This project is a desperate attempt to fill the unfillable void created by the conditions of existence in consumer culture -- that gap in personality, the yawning but never sleeping of the work-leisure cycle, always one step removed from the immediacy of experience. And if, by our meager example, we inspire even a few people to re-examine themselves and their world, to find out what their lives could be like, then we will not have failed entirely.

How many people do you know who feel trapped where they are? How many of your friends have sworn to kill themselves or die trying? How many have you seen burning with that nameless fever -- fingers closing around whatever's closest, desperate to kill the pain, then, unsatisfied, dropping it to find something better? Do you really think this is natural human behavior? Do you really believe that a healthy society would create such dysfunction among its members? Trust us, friend, these aren't problems you can solve with higher taxes, or by drawing peace symbols on your blue jeans, and it's far too late to simply scrap everything and "go back to the basics." To overcome, you need to shift your perception.So there you are, staring out at the world through bugging, bleary eyes, "entertained", getting your buttons pushed, but always restless. You're in slow-motion death on your feet, and you want to know what the hell we intend to do for you. Well, just putting up flyers isn't going to fix it. We know that. But we're trying to help. To solve any problem, you first have to know what it is. The real wound runs much, much deeper than the come-and-go "issues" in the media arena; it's the arena itself which must be redefined . We can't do it ourselves. What we are trying to do is change the way other people look at the world, because it's people who ultimately make the system what it is.

Sound cliched? Just remember this: the decisive point which determines the quality of existence is the point of interaction between the individual and society. It's not all in your head -- the universe is quite real, despite all philosophy to the contrary -- but neither is the world quite the same for any two individuals. Our individual perception shapes our experience of a very real world, and the bumps and jostles of life shape our perception. Only a sturdy bridge between mind and matter -- or indeed, the realization that they're one and the same -- yields the proper balance. And only through significant interaction with other humans can that bridge be strengthened. There are many forces at work, but it is here that the doctors must shine their light if they want to find the tumor. Interpersonal relations: the frictional surfaces between one person's awareness and another's. These surfaces have grown flat and impassive as distrust, fear, and the lust for commodities have become standard modes of interaction, so that all we have to offer one another is an inventory of products and hobbies, draped in a sort of cynical self-consciousness.

FRUSTRATED?

Listen, your life can be an incredible and satisfying thing, but there are forces at work which deny you that. They make you bored. They make you hate yourself. They destroy your ability to find fulfillment in yourself and other people. They sell you cheap plastic substitutes for the REAL THING.

For all our bitching, though, we're with you. We have no easy solutions. There are none. The choices are escape -- be it through drugs, suicide, or madness -- or struggle. We choose the latter, hoping that struggle itself will at least dull the pain in a non-self-destructive way. We are not Puritanical, we are pissed off! We want to be able to indulge our primitive desires. The difference is that we see the options for indulgence presented by this culture as inherently and deliberately unfulfilling. We have all been raised to be anxious and dissatisfied consumers, constantly in search of the right "fix". Well, Abrupt isn't buying any of it. At the very least, we hope to create an awareness of some of these problems, and perhaps give hope to people who currently just survive from day to day.

Do you think? That is, are there ideas in your head that are at least partially your own? (And even a creative synthesis of old ideas is better than repeating the same old commercial patter minute after minute.) Then make it move -- find the words or the motions or the bodies that can carry your thoughts into the steam and whistles of the real world. It's doesn't help much sitting in your head -- take it to the streets! Spray-paint stencils of cryptic symbols, ornament trash cans and cracking sidewalks, leave a message in a bottle with your address in it, sing in public restrooms, scratch your words on school desks and playgrounds, singe their skin with your molecular love, put up hundreds of flyers anonymously, make loud Doppler-shift sounds as you pass people on the street, or lace bank windows with shaving cream question marks. At every moment a million possibilities lie open, beckoning the explorer to break the patterns that trap and enchain, to find new ones that drive back the darkness.

We adhere to the credo "Make your mark heavy and dark.' (Plus the qualifier, "If you must erase, erase completely.") It seems that beneath the bureaucratic blandness and psychic trauma of our high school years was a call to action, an ontological rallying cry for those frantic souls out there who despaired of finding their voice. Make your mark heavy and dark. Be decisive. Know when to stop planning and act, and be ready to defend your position. Realize that you can't please everybody, and use to your advantage the prejudices of those who disagree with you.

CONFUSED?

Sure, everyone is responsible for his or her actions; you can't just run away. But that responsibility is the price you pay for freedom -- and that's not the freedom to buy any brand of shampoo you want. We're talking about the freedom to set your sights higher than the school-work-nervous-breakdown cycle that most of us find ourselves in. Ask yourself, are you a hamster, or a human being? Do you dare to step off the treadmill and run amok in the pet store? If nothing else, it can be fun. And dangerous. But more importantly, you might learn to twist your perception enough to see the window, and the world beyond the pet store. It's a world much bigger than you could ever see in its entirety, much stranger than drugs or God or UFO's, but it's there. It's already around you right now; you've just forgotten how to see it: even as mass communications and transportation have made our planet seem a thousand times bigger than before, our private worlds have atrophied. Perception has been narrowed to a single dim point, experience has become an alternating parade of "stimulation" and frustration. We have memories, but our memories no longer tell a story. We have voices, but we have nothing to say. The struggle to survive no longer inspires us to transcend mere survival, so that at the moment of our greatest technological achievement we have become emotional infants, floundering in a pool of frustrated desires and failed illusions. Still, all is not lost. There will always be a demon in the human spirit, an animal raging in its cage. It can only be beaten or anesthetized so much before it gets fed up and breaks out, dragging its owner to either prison or Paradise. The nature of its restraints will determine the nature of its escape; as things stand now, most options for real animal passion are devastating, not to mention illegal. Rape, suicide, murder: symptoms of constriction, the starved Animal blindly feeding itself into extinction.

These are not the only options. There are healthier ones, and they need not take the form of sudden outbursts or compulsions. No, under healthier conditions, the release valves would be built in to our daily lives. Not a sudden seizure of hate, but a million tiny outlets would appease the monster inside us, or at least keep its rage in balance with its beauty, so that each of us would harbor a proud tiger, and not a rabid, mangy dog.

Defeatism is seductive, it's true, and despair beckons at every corner when you look at what has been done to us over the past several decades. But total despair is useless, because it just reinforces the feelings of helplessness which you've been taught from day one. The only solution must start with the assumption that existence need not be miserable, and with the knowledge that the current state of affairs is relatively recent. Instead of giving up in any of the billion ways that you are told to give up, take an active role in pursuing life's potential for intensity. Fight the pall of laziness and helplessness that weighs down on you all day long. You owe it to yourself to struggle.

GET MAD!!

Think about some of these things we've said. You'll have to, since we can only tell you so much before we run out of words. It's up to you to figure out what your own strengths are, and what exactly is wrong with you. Perhaps you will find out there's much more wrong with you than you thought. Perhaps not. Just remember that this life is yours, and if nothing else, you deserve a shot at living it well. Do you believe this? Then begin making your plans today.

ABRUPT

The Hobohemians

2006-12-15T07:25:00.000-05:00

On the rails with the new freedom riders
by Ben Ehrenreich

Catching Out

I WON'T TELL YOU EXACTLY WHERE WE ARE, LEST UNION PACIFIC get wise and throw up another security camera, a few more reels of razor wire or some of those infrared sensors I keep hearing about. Suffice it to say that we're east of the river, not too far from downtown, and that there are a lot of train tracks around -- which is the point, really, since we're here to catch a train, but not Amtrak or Metrolink or anything so banal. We want a northbound freight, with luck one that will take us all the way up to Dunsmuir, just 50 or 60 miles below the Oregon line, in time for the annual hobo gathering there.

Crazy Angel and Meathead (Photos by Virginia Lee Hunter A.K.A. West Coast Virginia Slim)

We heave our packs onto our shoulders and trek over mounds of concrete and twisted rebar. We settle in a clearing surrounded by rusted truck cadavers, their doors hanging open like broken wings, and listen to the hissing of air brakes in the yard behind us, to the hum of the electric wires, crickets chirping, and garbled orders from the Men's Central Jail PA system echoing across the river. What we don't hear is trains. Forty minutes go by, and not one has passed. "This is the waiting part," says Clare. Virginia, who has four years of sporadic train-hopping under her belt, nods in agreement. "This is what it's mainly like."

On the way to the Dunsmuir Hobo Gathering, Clare practices hobo songs on her ukulele.

Virginia, Clare and I spend the night curled in our sleeping bags amid the chaparral and rubbish. Only two trains pass -- one heading south, and a northbound that could've been ours had a crew of workers not been laboring a few yards away. With dawn our camp is revealed in all its postnuclear glory. I find an empty backpack, a handmade shank with its blade snapped off, a spool of surgical tape and a Bible, one of its pages penciled full with Spanish scribblings. I can make out only one sentence: "Love is extinguishing itself."

We return at night and are almost ready to give up when four locomotives roll slowly out of the yard, towing a northbound freight. They're gorgeous, sleek and huge and gleaming, all power and promise in the yellow lithium light. We jog through the gravel, lugging our packs and, running now, grab the ladder to a piggyback, leap up and pull ourselves on.

A piggyback is a flat car that carries the ass end of a semi truck, just the cargo box and the rear axles. We jam our packs into the narrow spaces above the axles and hide behind the wheels. I curl myself as small as possible, dreading the beam of a spotlight, the bark of a cop. The train stops for five minutes and I do my best not to move. It picks up again, slowly, and the river snakes by to my right. The towers on Bunker Hill loom bright in the distance, looking sillier than they ever have before. We pass Main Street and are out of the yard, picking up speed. Sitting there, wedged in among brake hoses, fluid reservoirs and spiny metal things, with dozens of identical cars ahead of me and more than I can count behind, I panic for a second and ask myself, "Just where in fuck's name am I going?" Then a smile spreads itself across my face, and I don't care at all.

Tehachapi Pass at dawn.

Goals

WE'RE HEADING TO DUNSMUIR TO EXplore this curiously American phenomenon, which, despite rumors of its death dating back at least a half-century, seems to be catching on again. Men (and until recently, it has been largely men) began riding freight trains after the Civil War, when enough track had been laid to make it worthwhile, and enough dislocated veterans had become averse to staying still. Since then every major war and economic downturn has seen a return to the rails, providing a sort of shadow history of America, a constantly mobile underground of migrant workers, radicals, dreamers and thieves, misfits of all kinds who didn't mesh with the societal weave. During the depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, it was a common if not entirely acceptable way for working-class men to get around in search of wages. In the '30s, Frank Czerwanka, one of Studs Terkel's sources in Hard Times, recalled, "When a train would stop in a small town and the bums got off, the population tripled."

The hobo's death knells began tolling shortly thereafter, and have been ringing ever since. Prosperity and the automobile kept people in houses and on the road, and by 1960, Jack Kerouac was blaming the hobo's death on the still-fledgling rise of the security state: "Today the hobo 's made to slink -- everybody's watching the cop heroes on TV." Though nearly every book written about hobos since then has mourned them as a dying breed, and despite all the cameras and infrared gadgets, thousands still manage to slip through Kerouac's "cop-avoiding night" to steal a little fast freedom from a shrink-wrapped world.

From the sublime . . .

Today, except for immigrant workers eager to stay invisible, few ride the rails just to get from place to place. With all the risk and potential for mishaps, comic and tragic both, walking is almost more efficient. But since the early '90s, train-hopping has been gaining ground among a new generation of tramps. The grizzled old hobos may be dying off, but they're being replaced in boxcars and on the porches of grain cars by street kids, gutter punks, dreamy anarchists and eco-warriors, train-obsessed professionals, all held loosely together by a vision of freedom as old as the nation itself, an America of movement and self-reliance, of mythic vastness and silence, of discovery, escape, rebellion. It's an America that was offered long ago and never delivered, that we're all supposed to love but not allowed to look for, that's just around the corner and always out of reach.

. . . to the mundane - either way, no advertising

The Ride

THE WORLD LOOK S DIFFERENT FROM A freight train. There's no heat and no a/c. No meals are served. The restroom is wherever you find it. There are no buttons to push or cords to pull when you want off. The train goes where it wants when it wants to, and sometimes doesn't go at all. It doesn't care about your wishes. It doesn't like or want you, doesn't even know you're there. It can kill you without a thought, can leave you behind, maimed and bleeding, without a moment of remorse. There's no getting around it -- it's ridiculously romantic.

Ben, a crusty punk, tagging the Black Butte watering tank, built in 1926

We stay hidden as the train makes its way out of Los Angeles. Virginia's at the other end of the car, and I'm crouched beneath the axle beside Clare, a Web editor and sometime hobo who flew down from Berkeley to join us for the ride. We pass a Burbank strip mall, Krispy Kreme, Staples, Target, Best Buy, and I can't help but laugh out loud. All those packaged comforts, the shadowless, dust-free expanses of American convenience, exist now in another world completely. We thump off through the Vall ey, past auto-parts stores, taquerías, the leering pink neon of motels and topless bars. The L.A. night slides by -- a different country, already far away.

We leave the city and chug up through the mountains . It's too loud to talk. The train shakes out a cacophony that seems intentionally musical: a high-pitched squeal that varies from hiss to yawn with the steady bass rumble of the turning wheels, in turns cruel and joyful and terrifically sad, layered with the backbeat of the shaking steel car. I hold my ears as we echo through a tunnel and the high notes break toward painful.

Tags of yesteryear's hobos

At around 3:30, the train shudders to a halt somewhere in the Antelope Valley. Bats flutter in the streetlights. After 10 minutes another train passes us, and we lurch on forward into the desert. We sleep for two or three hours, waking cramped under the axle, a cold wind blowing, our faces blackened with diesel smoke and dust. The sun rises and the air warms quickly. The Tehachapis roll by, golden on all sides, dotted with oaks and the occasional horse farm. We pack our gear and keep low behind the wheels until we've cleared the Bakersfield yards.

After Bakersfield we fly, maybe 70 miles an hour, past rusting factories of corrugated metal, pink trailer homes, a man watering his lawn, sunflowers as big as your head. We speed through miles of vineyards and citrus groves, along Highway 99, past sprinklers irrigating green fields in great white arcs, past three men trying to free a forklift stuck in dried mud. It smells of fertilizer, cow shit, diesel. We do our best to sleep through the morning, chasing the sun across the floor for the heat. I wake and see a world that is green forever in every direction but up. Later, I open my eyes to a huge white silo, filling the sky like a spaceship. This is the West as hallucination, as fever dream -- as strange and beautiful as you always knew it was. Cows loiter in a flooded field. We pass a bowling alley, a truck stop, a burned-out nightclub, a street called Temperance Avenue, swallows diving over a field of corn, a Costco, a man standing alone beside the track, looking right at me but not seeing me at all.

New York Slim with Babys, a Chinese pug he rescued

The Bull

AFTER 13 HOURS, THE PIGGYBACK IS just starting to feel like home when we're spotted by Union Pacific police in a small train yard in the town of Lathrop, just outside of Stockton. The train has come to a stop, and as a whi te Ford Explorer pulls up in the gravel at the far end of the car, Clare begins to laugh. "Please step off the train," someone says, and Clare's shoulders start shaking. Funny time to laugh, I think. She covers her mouth to try and hold it in. " What?" I say.

It seems Virginia had taken advantage of the train's stillness to heed nature's call, and was squatting over the edge of the car when the bull drove up. A stocky, pink man, he seems a little embarrassed -- pinker than usual perhaps -- but mainly pleased, like he's already looking forward to chuckling about it over a quiet beer after work. Clare doesn't have to wait, and is laughing openly when another Explorer stops beside us and we climb off too.

Tex leads the Hobo Marching Band in Dunsmuir's Railroad Days parade.

The second bull, a compact Latino man in a blue uniform, asks Clare and me if we are associated with "the FRA." (He's talking about the FTRA, which stands for either Fuck the Reagan Administration or Freight Train Riders of America, and is alleged by everyone from Fox News to The Times of London to be a "gang of killers who prey on the weak" -- more on that later.) We are not. He asks me if I'm armed, asks where we're coming from, where we're going and if we've done this before, and seems as much motivated by curiosity as any putative intelligence-gathering. He takes our IDs, but doesn't bother to check them for warrants. He's almost apologetic when he finally hands us our tickets, citations for misdemeanor trespassing, and tries to make up for it by giving us directions to a homeless mission five miles off in Stockton, and offering a little advice: "Now you never heard this from me, but if you're going to ride freight trains, be careful, and I'd prefer you do it after dark."

It won't be dark for seven hours, so we hitch a ride to a bus stop and two buses later are in Roseville. We hike from the station to the freight yards, and by midnight have found an open boxcar on a northbound train. (On the West Coast, northbounds generally carry empty lumber cars, which come back south piled high with fresh-sawed timber.) We climb in, spread our bedrolls in a corner and fall asleep to the sound of hammers clanking far off in the yard, and to the steady click and kiss of the idling engines, like someone spitting on a white-hot stone. Three hours later the car rolls out of the yard, and within a few minutes is speeding along, singing and pounding, its floor vibrating at a frequency that could iron out your elbows and turn your spine to jelly.

For all that, a boxcar is a great ride. You have shelter from sun, wind, rain and the prying eyes of cops. If you're lucky and both doors are open, you have two huge bay windows and a choice of views. It's roomy, with a high vaulted ceiling, perhaps indifferently furnished -- some broken two-by-fours, stray cardboard -- b ut still bigger than a lot of apartments I've rented. Until last year, a boxcar could easily have fetched two grand or more a month on the Manhattan real estate market.

I lie awake until the boxcar's groans and belches begin to sound like voices. "Shhh!" they say. "Last! Phhhh. Eat 'em! Pht! Eat 'em! Tsph. Get 'em out!" I drift off and wake in the mountains, in a forest of high firs. The earth is red here. We pass fingers of Lake Shasta, dotted with fishermen and kids on boats, the water clear and green. Purple wildflowers line the tracks; the Sacramento River flows fast and white beside us. Finally Mount Shasta appears, a giant ice-cream sundae of a hill, alone on the horizon, snow-topped and startling. We've arrived.

The Convention

DUNSMUIR IS A PRETTY LITTLE TOWN, nestled beside the river in evergreen hills, with a population (1,923) slightly lower than its altitude. It's been a railroad town for more than a century, a crew-change spot for the Union Pacifi c. It became briefly famous in 1991, when a train derailed and emptied a tank car filled with herbicide into the Sacramento, killing every bug, bird and fish for miles. It's been tidied up, I'm told. Today, railroad kitsch and fly-fishing are the staples of the local tourist industry, and this weekend, the trout are biting obediently and the Dunsmuir Railroad Days festival is under way.

Heading Home: Crazy Angel, Ben, Longhaired Donnie and
Meathead

On a wooded strip of land between the tracks and the river a 10-minute walk from town, the 2002 Dunsmuir Hobo Gathering has already begun. Only the old-timers have arrived, sitting in a clearing drinking beer until we trudge in and they all rise to greet us. North Bank Fred is here, an amiable local train-hopper and railroad nut who organized the Gathering, and who looks like a phys. ed. teacher gone slightly to seed -- always in red track shorts and sneakers, usually shirtless with a liter of Gallo white port in one fist. We meet a quiet silver-bearded man named Buzz Blur, who turns out to be a legendary boxcar graffiti artist, and the intensely friendly New York Ron, who speaks in a mile-a-minute upstate accent of a variety you don't hear much anymore. "I just got outta jail!" he says by way of gree ting, vigorously pumping my hand. "Congratulations," I say, unsure if that's the appropriate response. He tells me he got nabbed by the bull up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, after riding in all the way from Albany, and that he just finished an eight-year stint in a Montana prison (for what, exactly, I never learn).

We meet a tall, slender m an with an easy smile who combs his long, yellow-gray ha ir with o bsessive regularity ("I'm a platinum blond," he laughs) and looks a bit like Donald Sutherland left out in the sun. He sticks out his hand and says his name with a grin: "No-Nuts." Later, we'll argue about who gets to ask him how he came to be called that, but it turns out it's no secret: He earned his name the hard way in Vietnam. We meet a bearish fellow named Tennessee, and the voluble Silver Miner Larry, a fast-talking tramp with short gray hair, his eyes a little loose in their sockets. He introduces his old lady, whose name is either Kimberly or Bert or Whistle Britches, depending on whom you ask, and who, before the weekend is over, will somehow manage to break her leg in three places while squatting to pee.

The trading blanket: Hoppers negotiate for train patches, old railroad dated nails, hand warmers, etc.

That night we bring a pint of whiskey over to the clearing, expecting to find a crew of beer-happy tramps to share it with. Instead there's just Tennessee, sitting alone in the dark, working on one last 12-pack of Natural Ice. Over the next few days I will never see Tennessee sober, neither at 9 a.m. nor midnight. Nor will I ever witness him being anything but gentlemanly, regardless of his c ondition -- he will one afternoon rouse himself unsolicited from what looks like a near-comatose state to help me lug a couple bulky 25-pound packs a quarter-mile down the tracks. He's bearded and a little shaggy, like Santa's wayward younger brother, with fists large enough to make the beer cans they continually clutch look like they belong in a dollhouse, and a North Florida drawl as thick as his forearms.

He complains of a Siskiyou County sheriff's deputy named Stuart, who lives around the bend and will prove to be no end of trouble. "Excuse my language," Tennessee says, "but he's a real fuckin' prick." Just the other day, he says, he was walking over the bridge to the Texaco on a beer run, when Stuart stopped him. He ran his ID for warrants and found none. ("I'm unwanted," Tennessee says.) "He said, 'Why don't you get out of here?' I said, 'Where you want me to go?' He said, 'Just go. I don't care where. Go to Roseville, Klamath Falls , Eugene, Reno, Elko, I don't care, just get outta here.' I said, 'I been to those places, and they all told me the same thing. Except they said come here.'"

Tennessee sips the whiskey gratefully, chases it with beer, then holds forth on the nemesis of West Coast tramps, the bull in Klamath Falls, a certain Roger the Dodger.

Roger the Dodger
EVERY WORLD AND EVERY ERA NEEDS its myths, its saints and its demons, and this one is no exception. Meet Roger the Dodger, a trickster-devil for the epoch of the corporatized rails. Not that he's not real -- even those who doubt his omnipresence and scoff at his legendary powers affirm that Roger does exist. Like Lucifer, he stood among the angels once. Back before Union Pacific bought out Southern Pacific, Roger was a friend to the tramp. He was hard but kind, and made only two demands: "Stay off of my money, stay off of my power." So long as he didn't catch you riding a hotshot (a high-priority train towing particularly valuable freight) or stowing away in one of the rear locomotives, you could count on a smooth ride through K-Falls. If you abided by his rules, he'd let you be, and might even tell you when your train was leaving, and on which track.

But after the buyout, legend has it, the corpora te powers put the screws on -- if Roger wanted his job and his pension, he'd have to bust some tramps. He took to his task with all the zeal of the converted. If you can believe the stories, Roger the Dodger never sleeps. He works no fixed hours and knows the tracks like the veins in his arms. You've got a slim chance passing through K-Falls under cover of night, but in daylight it's near impossible, says Tennessee: "He'll get you, Roger will." It was Roger who got New York Ron, fresh from the Montana pen, and kept him in the tank for two days with the snoring drunks and, Ron says scornfully, "no shitter, just a piss hole." Roger keeps a book two inches thick containing the name of every tramp he's ever come across, says Ron. Their only other encounter was 10 years ago, but Roger remembered the name and flipped straight to the tattered page. So if you choose to ride the rails, take Tennessee's advice, and "Watch out for old Roger" -- no matter where you are. "I've even seen him right here," Tennessee swears, "under that bridge."

Tennessee is not joking, but Roger's not there now, and won't be tomorrow either, though a steady stream of tramps will be coming up the tracks all day long. Save for a few stragglers, everyone will be here by afternoon, and before they all arrive, some introductions are in order.

The Tramps

TODAY'S OLD-TIMERS, OF COURSE, ARE not the old-timers of yesteryear. Even a decade ago, there were still a few left who'd been tramping since the hobo glory days of the Depression. Most of them are now dead or indoors, and a generational shift has occurred. The romantic hobo of kitsch and legend can be safely buried.

The old-timers of today hit the rails in the '60s and ear ly '70s, most after coming back from Vietnam to a country into which they no longer quite fit. Others were casualties of the '60s drug culture who either lost everything or decided after some consideration that Main Street America was worth avoiding. As harmless as most of them now seem -- usually blind drunk, and pretty damned rickety even when they're not -- they're a gristly bunch. More than a couple of those present are members of the aforementioned organization, the FTRA, the object of a storm of media hype in the 1990s, when they were blamed for a string of murders. Most of these turned out to be committed by one man, Robert "Sidetrack" Silveria, who confessed in 1996 to killing 28 tramps. It's not even clear that Silveria ever claimed to be in the FTRA, but the reputation stuck, and whenever a newspaper or tabloid-news show wants to warn kids to stay in their cars and in their bedrooms, they trot out "the killers of the rails."

SocX and Ultra Heather trade while New York Slim offers up a Leatherman tool.

You've met a few of the old tramps already. There's also New York Slim, a 6-and-a-half-foot black man with an enormous laugh and a tiny, cockeyed dog. Only the white hairs in his beard give away his age -- without them he could pass for 40. He survived a POW cam p, but stays sober and radiates calm. Slim's generosity and easy regality win him the instant loyalty of almost all the younger tramps. He complicates the common assertion that the FTRA is a white-supremacist group: A couple of members do have swastikas tattooed on their arms, but Slim is not only accepted, he's treated with more respect and deference than anyone else around. These days he's rubber-tramping, getting around in an old blue pickup rather than by rail.

Then there's Magoo, who, like Tennessee, is never without a beer in one hand, sometimes with a pint of whiskey in the other -- even shortly after sunrise, still sitting on his bedroll. "They call me Magoo," he tells me, "because I can't see past . . ." he pauses for a good 10 seconds before coming up with ". . . dusk." It's often hard to figure out what Magoo is saying, n ot only because of the drunken circuitousness of his conversation, but because he laughs his way through most everything he says. There's also Longhaired Donnie, not a vet ("I got a wing-nut pass," he explains, "but I can't get a wing-nut check. Figure that out.") and not an FTRA member, "just an old hippie." With his long brown beard and crumpled face, he looks like a wrinkled elf, though his eyes don't start twinkling until he's had a few beers.

Finally, Crazy Angel is only 29, and thus hardly an old-timer. But he's been riding the rails since he was 14 ("I don't kno w," he shrugs wh en I ask him why he started, "I got tired of all the bullshit"), and mainly hangs with the older tramps. When I first see him it's like a vision out of The Road Warrior -- he's tall, lanky and long-limbed, and walks down the tracks a stride behind his pit bull, Meathead. The dog wears a collar studded with 2-inch steel spikes, carries his own food and water in woven-leather saddle bags, and is so well-trained he might as well speak English. Crazy Angel's muscled arms are tattooed with grinning skulls, the letters FTRA, and a big red swastika. His nose and lip are pierced with hoops, a metal spike protrudes from his brow, and he has puzzle pieces tattooed on his shaved skull. Behind his glasses, though, Crazy Angel's eyes are s hy and questioning. He speaks in soft, gentle tones, and laughs a goofy stoner's giggle. When asked how he got his name, he blushes a little and says sincerely, "I guess it's 'cause I'm a nice guy." And he is.

Crusties

IF THE OLD-TIME TRAMPS ARE THE PAST, fading as fast as their overworked livers, train-hopping's future likely lies with crusty punks -- street kids so named for both a frequent disregard for hygiene and a bristly punk-rock attitude. There are plenty of ot hers taking to the rails these days, but most of them do it part-time. The crusties, who at this particular gathering are rather slimly represented, are more often homeless, and if they can get as romantic about trains as anyone else, they also ride them out of sheer practicality.

Take Rocco and Ben, who've been traveling together for more than two years. Rocco, 23 and the more voluble of the two, hails originally from Virginia and most recently from San Diego. He's got short black hair, hated is tattooed on his neck (it was hate originally, before he added the d), and he dresses in standard crusty fashion: faded black Slayer T-shirt, cut-off Carharts patched and repatched, so well-worn they look like leather. "Wh y I started," he says, "is because I got kicked out of my house." He was 17, using a lot of crystal, living on Ocean Beach and looking to get straight. "I never thought about being on the streets," he says. "I was like, 'What the fuck? How do you sustain? How do you eat? What do you do?'" He met a kid who told him he'd just come in on a freight train. "It was like Ding! -- the light bulb -- 'Why did I not think of this?'"

Rocco in his winter riding gear

He left with no goal in mind except "to get the hell out of there." His first ride took him to Mexico by mistake, the next one to Barstow, where he stayed in a mission for a while. "I don't do homeless missions anymore," he says. "I can depend on myself more." He Dumpster-dives for food, panhandles, works when he can. "If you're starving in America, you're a fool."

Despite the anarchist tattoo on Rocco's arm, he doesn't see train-hopping in any explicitly political context, except as rejection and flight. "The way we live is not acceptable to society." The distaste is mutual: "I don't care for greed," he says. "That's why society's so filthy and shitlike."

Roc co tries to downplay his love of trains -- he rides because, he says, "I don't want to be bound by anything. I don't want to be tied down." But he has a boyish enthusiasm for big machines, and a hard time keeping it from showing. "For me it's to escape. And it is my transportation, like people use their cars. I really love it," he concludes, waving his hands in frustration, unable to express the depth of his feeling.

His partner, Ben, taller and more reserved, will later open up over a few beers and put it like this: "Sometimes I feel like I'm the richest guy in the world. I could've set out to make a million dollars and never seen the things I've seen. But I didn't. I decided to be poor."

Pixies

THEY ARRIVE IN GROUPS OF 10 OR 12 at a time, around 40 of them altogether. Most are in their early 20s and look a lot more prosperous and middle-class than the crusties: Their faces are rounder; they wear Tevas rather than combat boots and carry expensive camping gear instead of battered army-surplus packs. Despite the road dirt and the long trip, they glow with youthful exuberance and hardly rest before they begin sorting lentils and chopping potatoes for a big vegan mulligan stew. Enough came from Santa Cruz that they had to meet before they left and divide into three shifts to preven t dozens from descending on the train yards all at once. Many of them haven't hopped before, or have done so only rarely, and most, when asked what got them interested in hopping, say the same thing: "Lee."

Banjo Fred performs at Black Butte camp.

Lee Desaux, 47, is a sort of Pied Piper of Santa Cruz, where he's been living in well-appointed squats in the woods for more than a decade. Invariably dressed in torn cutoff black sweatpants and boots, his neck and arms bejeweled with aluminum hose clamps, Lee's been riding since 1986, and introducing the barefoot and besandaled, eco-radical, neo-hippie set to the rails for almost as long. For Lee, and most of the Santa Cruz crew, train-hopping is a beautiful way to see the country, a source of community and, he says, with trademark squinty smile, "a natural extension of our visions and lifestyles." It's a way to get around without buying into the money economy, a way of consuming without waste, of living off the leftovers of American abundance in the same spirit as squatting unused land and subsisting on food that grocery stores and restaurants discard. Freight trains are like a communal garden that moves.

Espresso

LAST COME THE YUPPIE HOBOS, IN wh ich category I include not just the ones whose cell phones wake them up on boxcars, but all those folks with homes and jobs somewhere who could afford Amtrak but ride the rails because they love it. Some make occasional long-weekend excursions, others organize their lives around trains. Take Clare, who rode with Virginia and me up from L.A., but fell ill shortly after arriving in Dunsmuir and left for home. She does freelance work in what's left of the Bay Area's e-economy and has taken a handful of freight journeys over the last few years, once as far as Iowa. She likes the adventure, she tells me on the phone a couple of weeks later, and the fact that "When you're traveling by freight train there's no advertising pointing at you. You go through the back yard of America" without a billboard in sight.

Longhaired Donnie and his new girlfriends from Santa Cruz

Or take a hobo couple, one member of which will later e-mail me to ask that their names not be printed here. He lives in the Midwest and reviews grant proposals for a living; she's an ornithologist based in California. They met in a rail yard three years ago. Both work freelance, and work just enough to be able to devote about half of their time to train-hopping, riding back and forth across th e West to see each other.

Or take SocX, pronounced socks -- it's a complicated pun decipherable only by train freaks, but yes, it does refer to his hosiery, which is enviably colorful. The 25-year-old sound engineer with an apartment and a girlfriend back in Nashville took two weeks to get here. He started riding short hops with a friend when he was 17 and was thrilled to learn later that "This isn't just a mode of transportation, there's a culture here." He rides as often as he can and absorbs the minutiae of railroad history and lore like a sponge soaking up diesel. "I'm one of the complete nutcases," he says. "If you would take a microscope to me, you'd see there' s trains running in my veins."

Train-hopping is uncomfortable and dangerous enough that it's rare ly just a recreational activity: Most of the yuppie hobos are seriously obsessed. They can talk trains for hours, which is good, because the tramps and the more experienced crusties and hippies can as well, so everyone gets along, more or less. And the yuppie hobos often carry espresso pots, which everyone appreciates.

The Law

OUR FIRST MORNING IN DUNSMUIR, the espresso pots have not yet emerged from the rucksacks, so we head into town for eggs and bacon. On our way back, a mope y young man who calls himself Papa Dalek tells us that Siskiyou County sheriff's deputies have shown up at the campsite and, with shaky legal reasoning, ordered everyone to clear out. People were trespassing on private land, they were drinking in public, it didn't matter what they were doing, they had to leave.

At a bend in the tracks, we meet Rocco and Ben, who are waiting there to give new arrivals the options. The old-timers are heading off to a place called Black Butte, they tell us, about a 15-minute drive away. The rest are camping at another site downriver, a little farther from town and, we hope, from the consciousness of the sheriffs.

We head for the latter, a high, sloping fie ld on the other side of the tracks, thick with poison oak. It's not long before Ben and Rocco turn up -- they were just chased off by four sheriffs toting shotguns and a dog. Eight kids from Santa Cruz, their faces still blackened with freight-train grit, arrive looking shaken -- they too were greeted by the sheriff's impromptu welcoming committee. Later, another group of Santa Cruzians who left their packs at the original camp and hiked off to the waterfall upstream to frolic and bathe will return and find the site abandoned, their packs emptied and the contents strewn about the woods. They will find their sle eping bags hanging from trees, bags of food and spices emptied in the dirt, $20 of food stamps torn apart. A tall, skinny 21-year-old with short blond hair who goes by Buffalo Alice will find "all my personal possessions -- passport, pictures, letters, everything -- scattered and in the bushes." An earnest, bearded substitute teacher named Doug (hobo name: D-Rail) will search for one of his boots but never find it. Though no one will have seen the culprits, no one will doubt their identities.

Campfire Symphonics

NOR DOES ANYONE WANT TO LET THE police spoil a good time, so once the sun goes down and the lentils are gone, the beer starts flowing. A few Santa Cruz kids break out guitar s and begin singing songs about friendship, multinational corporations and pollution. Rocco tells me about his father, who was once in the military, assigned to some highly secret unit trained to kill people quietly in foreign lands. Now he's a cop, and sounds like a real piece of work. Rocco's clearly pretty broken up over the guy. He's also concerned about my motivations, concerned I'll write something sensationalistic and exploitative. He says he doesn't think society deserves to know about this world, that people haven't earned it. Maybe he's an elitist asshole to think that, he says , but that's how he feels.

Some kids from Portland start playing old bluegrassy hobo favorites on fiddle and guitar, and as I retreat to my sleeping bag I hear the whoops and stomping feet of the dancing pixies drifting up through the trees. Lying there in the dark, I consider what Rocco has said, what everyone else has told me, and I understand that this is about community, about finding a group of like-minded folks outside the usual channels, but also about creating a realm of skill, of secret knowledge, virtue and style, that the scared and intolerant residents of comfortable straight society cannot touch or understand. And Rocco does not want them to understand. They have their own culture, and it's because that culture is so insipid and co rrupt that he sleeps out of doors. Hobohemia, to borrow a term coined by the anarchist Ben Reitman in the '30s, is a separate world, and defiantly so. It has its own rules and rewards, even if the rules are rarely followed and the rewards frequently fail to materialize. It's a secondary track off the American mainline in which courage and independence still matter, in which freedom is not abstract but palpable, and easily distinguishable from its opposites -- work, stasis, jail.

This is true for the idealistic Santa Cruz kids as much as it is for home less punks like Rocco, though for many of the former the risks are smaller. And it's certainly true for the old tramps. All share a disappointment, to varying degrees and in divergent ways, a nostalgia for an America that's failed to become, the one we were promised in grade school, allegedly passed down to us by vision-rattled heretics and daring claustrophobes, an America already lost by the time Whitman and Thoreau claimed to have found it, still a sustaining memory for the Beats and the hippies and even the fuck-off-and-leave-me-alone punk rockers.

Turning on my side, I can see Rocco standing by the fire looking glum while the Santa Cruz kids go on singing about being free, treading softly on the earth and loving one another. Then a train goes by on the tracks below and silences them with its wails, and the train's song seems to have lyrics this time, to sing of all that yearning, all the failed dreams left to hang immaterial on the edges of cities, beneath cement overpasses, in riverside jungles and hard urban squats, all that space and longing squeezed into this rhythmic yowl and clang. Everyone falls silent. The guitar and the fiddles stop, and maybe I'm drunk and sentimental and imagining things, maybe it's just late and everyone is tired, but it seems the train sang for them better than they knew how, and when it passed there was nothing left to do but stumble off into the woods and search out a piece of ground flat enough to sleep on.

Railroad Daze

IT'S A HOT AND CLOUDLESS DAY. TOURists and locals line the street in lawn chairs to wait for the Railroad Days parade. First come the VFW, old men marching stiffly in uniform, guns and flags on their shoulders. They're followed by a little girl dressed as the Statue of Liberty; some Boy Scouts; two kids cruelly encumbered with sandwich boards advertising Better Home Realty; seven vintage Corvettes; a few shiny fire trucks; a grinning boy in a go-cart labeled the "Osama yo mama Payback mobile"; a truck painted camouflage topped with waving children and a banner advertising Bullseye Tactical Firearms Training ("Protect Your Family and Yourself"). An old Ford tows a covered wagon, manned by a family in pioneer drag. The wagon is sponsored by the Dunsmuir Church of Christ, emblazoned with flags and painted "All Aboard America, One Nation Under God."

Finally, amid this panoply of patriotism, claiming another branch of Americana, the Hobo Marching Band arrives -- though this year their sign, in honor of the sheriff's shenanigans, reads "Hobo Marching Banned." An old tramp named Tex, who lives in a munit ions dump outside of town, heads the group, hobbling along with a cane. Beside him is Banjo Fred, a ghostly codger who leads the ragtag, sunburned group in a rousing version of "This Land Is Your Land." Barefoot, dreadlocked kids skip and dance and beat away at frying pans, empty water bottles and upturned buckets. The onlookers seem torn: Some laugh and cheer, others watch silently, sullen and suspicious. "Well," says Banjo Fred when it's all over, addressing no one in particular, "if we didn't make an impression, I don't know what would."

There's a stage set up on a side street, nestled among crowded booths selling tri-tip sandwiches and "Protected by Smith & Wesson" T-shirts. The kids from Portland who played at the camp last night take their seats. They're the Old Timey String Band, and they play their old-timey m usic to appreciative hobos, who dance and stomp and whoop it up in the hot sun without any sign of tiring. No locals join in. Rocco an d Ben look on in baffled silen ce. Half an hour goes by, and Rocco shakes his head: "Man, these kids must eat better than I do." Another hour passes. It only gets hotter, but the kids are still clapping and twirling, dousing themselves with water to keep cool. "We need to have a country all our own," Rocco decides. "It would be like this, all the time."

Black Butte

THE BAND'S SET ENDS AT LAST. A COUPLE of hours later, to avoid further run-ins with the sheriff, everyone packs up and moves out to Black Butte, an idyllic meadow of wildflowers and fragrant grasses a few miles up the tracks, between Mount Shasta and the tower of rock that gives it its name. For two days, train talk echoes around that meadow, pausing only when a train goes by. Debates rage over which is the longest tunnel in the country, which the highest pass. Most of the stories are tales of hardship, told now with a laugh, of frigid nights going through the Donner Pass by mistake without even cardboard to keep you warm, or of trains that stop and sit for days in the Mojave in midsummer. Ben tells of being so cold one Wyoming winter he had to stand all night because the soles of his shoes were the only part of him that wouldn't freeze instantly to the boxcar's steel floor. New York Slim tells about the guy whose face froze to just such a boxcar floor, and how they had to heat the metal with torches from beneath to melt him free. The stories dissolve into a sea of place names -- Marysville, Eugene, Pocatello, Livingston, Ogden, Evanston, Sparks, Colton, Whitefish, Green River, La Crosse -- an atlas of laughter and survival.

Crazy Angel keeps an e ye on Meathead to make sure he doesn't get too close to New York Slim's dog Babys, a snaggle-toothed little puff of white and brown fur that Meathead would barely have to open his jaws to swallow. Meathead's fine with people, Crazy Angel tells me, but he's "kind of antisocial" when it comes to animals. In other words, "he likes to kill them." Meathead would prefer a world stripped of all non-human fauna, and does what he can to push things in that direction. So whenever he gets within 10 yards of Slim's pet, Crazy Angel issues a string of commands, each one more or less instantly obeyed: "Meathead, go over there. By the gear. Not there. Over on the other side. A little farther. To the right a little. Farther. Now lie down. Good dog."

Sitting on his bedroll, old Magoo calls Meathead over. He hugs him and kisses his brindled nose. No-Nuts laughs and suggests that the two look alike. "Only difference is Meathead combs his hair better," he says.

Later, Magoo sits perched on an overturned bucket with a couple of drunken crusty punks and a pensive-looking Ben. He talks about Vietnam. He was there early on, from '61 to '63, sent not to fight but to "teach." He gestures with his beer can, marveling at the word. "They killed a lot of my friends," Magoo says. "And I got good at killing them. And I got to like it." His eyes are wide with residual wonder, still shocked by this strange fact: "I got to like it a lot." Ben is silent. The drunk punks talk about hitching into town to do some panhandling. "I was there two years without even getting athlete's foot," Magoo goes on. "I wanted to get shot, I just wanted to get out of there, but I couldn't."

Magoo starts in on a story about a reconnaissance mission. It's a bit hard to follow. "They told me to find 'em. 'Find 'em or kill 'em?' I said. 'Find 'em,' they said. 'Okay,' I said. And I found 'em." Ben gazes sadly at the ground; the punks aren't listening at all. Magoo is "four clicks up the crik" when he loses track of the story entirely and gives up.

Catching Out (2)

AFTER TWO DAYS OF LAZING ABOUT AT Black Butte, eating pancakes cooked over a barrel fire on a greased-up sheet of scrap metal , drinking around that same fire beneath a sky perilously heavy with stars, we say our goodbyes. New York Slim gives us a lift back to Dunsmuir in the back of his truck, a tarp pulled over our heads so the police won't have cause to stop him. Seven of us are heading south: Virginia, myself and a schoolteacher from Topanga named Jacob; Steve and Jodie, recently arrived from Portland; Longhaired Donnie and Crazy Angel. Meathead the Dog makes eight.

We miss one train just as we get into the yard, and run up to the Texaco to buy food and water for ourselves and beer for Donnie. This will be, he tells us, his last ride. He's got an appointment in Roseville for an operation on his eye ("a floater"). His liver is bad, and he has a hard time keeping up. "I'm just an old sore, I guess you could call me, one that never healed," Donnie smiles sadly. He started riding in the early '60s, and has done so ever since, sometimes staying put for a while, working, even owning a business, losing everything to drugs and prison. Riding the rails is the only thing he ever found that could keep him off heroin, he says, and thereby out of trouble. "I called my grandma before she died. I said I finally found my niche."

Walking along the tracks through the town with Crazy Angel, I note how quiet it is. "It's nice," he says. "There's no people around. I hope they stay in their houses." He tells me he travels to keep sane, that he doesn't like being around people too often and never learned the skills necessary to rent an apartment, pay the bills and get by in one place. He refers to the house-bound populace as "citizens," and regards them not with hatred ("Hate's a bad thing") but with the mistrust one reserves for unfamiliar be asts, as if they belong to a different species entirely, one possessed of wood and drywall exoskeletons, which they shed occasionally to crawl out and make trouble for tramps. With a sheepish smile he tells me his name for the scent a tramp develops after a few weeks on the road without bathing: "citizen repellent."

Donnie and Crazy Angel reminisce about the old days, before intense corporate security made tramping so difficult, when you could ride from New York to California without a hassle, when you could hop into any town in the country and find 15 of your friends. Even a decade ago, Angel says, you could camp in the yards without trouble from the bull. You could leave all your gear in the jungle without fearing it would be stolen, says Donnie, and you didn't have to worry about young punks wanting to fight you to give themselves a name. They talk about old friends who've died, others locked away for good. Donnie shakes his head. "It ain' t nothin' like it used to be. Nothin' at all."

No trains come through that night, and we sleep in a clearing beneath the tracks. Meathead has his own sleep sack, and a hooded sweat shirt for the cold. I wake at dawn to the sound of a whistle blowing. Crazy Angel is up and out of his bag, and by the time he says, "Wake up, Donnie -- southbound's coming!" e veryone else is awake too. We pack hastily, and climb the embankment to the tracks. Angel spots an open boxcar, and we all hoist ourselves up and in. "Jump, dog," orders Angel, and Meathead jumps in too.

The train sits. After an hour the sun rises over the hills, the light angling softly into the car. Donnie rolls a cigarette, and the smoke rises in the sunlight in little curling dragons. Another hour passes. Jodie reads a book. Steve stands on the track and juggles stones. Angel sews a leather pouch. Donnie tags the wall of the car with a Sharpie. He writes his name, and then "To Love/Is to Sacrifice/To be Loved/Is to Cherish!" After another hour a southbound hotshot speeds past. The air brakes on our train hiss, then click and squeak. The boxcar shivers. Its walls moan, and the green world glides slowly by outside the door.

Note to the curious: Like driving automobiles, falling in love, and speaking your mind in public, train-hopping is dangerous. Reall y.

To view more of West Coast Virginia Slim's train-hopping images, visit her site...

SOURCE: L.A. Weekly

California Cults 2006

2006-12-13T09:30:00.000-05:00

Snip: "Doubtless, California’s relative tolerance for deviation from the conventional and the mainstream provides opportunities for both liberatory, free-thinking self-experimentation; and for pathological, neo-conformist head-fucking. The presence of trippy and sometimes destructive fringe cults across California history might be thought of as an inevitable side-effect of the state’s position as post-modernism’s early adopter."

California Cults 2006
By RU Sirius

In his fascinating new book (with photos by Michael Rauner) Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape, Erik Davis writes, “When the United States seized the territory from Mexico in 1848 California became the stage for a strange and steady parade of utopian sects, bohemian mystics, cult leaders, psychospiritual healers, holy poets, sex magicians, fringe Christians, and psychedelic warriors.”

Visionary State documents an eclectic mix of these magical, mystical scenes from across Californian history, ranging from loose, anarchic configurations of independent seekers who reject doctrine; to authoritarian fringe cults that cobble together their own strange doctrinaire cosmologies based on the possibly schizophrenic revelations and prophecies of their visionary leaders and gurus. Theosophists, nature mystics, Zen Buddhists, 19th Century spiritual snake oil hustlers, various Hindu sects, the Merry Pranksters, Scientologists, Mansonoids, Burning Man Burners – all are enclosed in Davis’ rich spiritual gumbo.

His intention is not to judge. “California consciousness”, he writes, is “an imaginative, experimental, and hedonistic quest for human transformation by any means necessary.” Davis rightfully suggests that California’s “theme park of the gods”, in all its chaos and contradiction, is so fecund that it is inherently valuable. Our spiritual nuts, fruits and flakes are, he says, an important part of the richness of California’s dynamic psycho-social, economic, and even physical landscape.

Doubtless, California’s relative tolerance for deviation from the conventional and the mainstream provides opportunities for both liberatory, free-thinking self-experimentation; and for pathological, neo-conformist head-fucking. The presence of trippy and sometimes destructive fringe cults across California history might be thought of as an inevitable side-effect of the state’s position as post-modernism’s early adopter.

But while weird cults may be inevitable, very few of them could be considered benign. And though the depredations of the Manson Family, the horrors of Jonestown, and the pathetic futility of Heaven’s Gate’s attempt to hitch themselves to a comet may have afforded our culture a series of black humor bonanzas, nobody really wants to see their friends and family get sucked into the orbit of the latest power-mad cult leader.

So, for your edification and amusement, and as a warning, I am here presenting a very brief guide to some contemporary California cults:

Miracle Of Love

Miracle of Love is an ambitious Marin County based cult that, according to a March 2006 expose by Jill Kramer for The Pacific Sun, has plans to expand to Seattle, Vancouver, Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Australia and South America. Around 1995, their leader, “Kalindi” (real name: Carol Seidman) declared herself “the voice of the latest incarnation of God.” (Actually, God originally started speaking through her husband, but he died, and rather than except the obvious implication — “God is dead” — Seidman caught the spirit.)

In a six-day long session called “The Intensive,” the group employs classic techniques employed by brainwashers and kidnappers everywhere (famously adopted by Werner Erhard’s est group in the ‘’70s and ‘’80s). Attendees are deprived of sleep, forced to dredge up psychic pains, verbally abused and embarrassed, and then finally given a warm, comforting love bath to cement their attachment to the group. What’s the attraction? Apparently, there is a kind of high associated with completing this type of ordeal, and cult members get their targets to associate this feeling with “God’s energy” and that old cult standby: “unconditional love.”

For those who become members, classic cult brainwashing techniques continue. To the greatest extent possible, members are isolated from family and other non-believers and give complete control of their lives to cult leaders. According to Kramer, “Devotees are given new names. They’re told when to wake, when to meditate, when to do service work for the mission, how much time to allot for chores, what time to go to bed. Everything is dictated, down to which toilet paper to buy.”

“Kalinda” and her cohorts seem to be largely motivated by financial gain. Kramer reports that followers are told they can “come home to God within this lifetime” by “letting go of attachments to the material world — the world of illusion. The handiest way to let go of their attachments to money is, of course, to donate it to the Miracle of Love mission.”

On the back cover of her book, Ultimate Freedom: Union With God, Kalindi/Seidman poses provocatively in a thong and fishnet stockings. Underneath the picture, are the words “Don’t you want to break free?” Spot the irony?

Oneness Movement

Guru Sri Bhagavan and his partner, Sri Amma are the founders of the Oneness University, which is centered in India, but has a growing California following, particularly in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They claim that the “solution to humanity’s suffering can only be found through our awakening to Oneness.” And, of course, there is a particular one who can lead us toward that oneness. Bhagavan offers followers the opportunity to experience “Deeksha,” “a transfer of divine energy” that produces enlightenment. The group aims to enlighten 64,000 people and thus transform the world by — you guessed it — 2012.

According to a private correspondence published by Guruphiliac, “this cult is pressurizing its INDIAN devotees to donate large sums of wealth, if they want to remain in the good books of the disciples (dasas) who run the show, and progress further. We have even been asked to take loans (the last case was Rs 100,000 [$2,220.50 US] which is a large amount), and donate, if we don’t have the money. We have been told that we can repay the loans over a few years!

“From the day we join we are pressurized to bring in new people and send them for the initial 3-day deeksha (costing Rs 5000 [$110 US]).” A 21-day workshop, according to the Guruphiliac correspondent, costs $5,500.

The guru and his followers also use pseudo-scientific flim flam to claim that they have been able to measure neurological changes that result from the “deeksha” experience. Guruphiliac quotes someone they call “a major university neuroscience researcher,” saying this about the gurus claims: “The most questionable aspect… is the author’s claim that he has tested alterations in neurotransmitters, hormones, and receptors via electromagnetic signature testing. There is no scientific data to support that this technique is viable.”

Adidam

This is the religion that was formed by Adi Da. Da was born Franklin Jones and later changed his name to Bubba Free John and then Da Free John. I must confess to a soft spot (probably it’s just my fontanelle) for Da. He’s witty and smart and seems like he might be in on the cosmic joke, assuming that there is in fact a cosmic joke. Imagine if Alan Watts decided to declare himself “the complete manifestation of the divine in human form” and you’ve sort of got the picture. A 1985 San Francisco Examiner article by Don Lattin reported on secret “drunken sex orgies and luxurious lifestyles among the guru’s inner circle in Hawaii and their Fijian island of Naitauba,” and quotes one former follower as saying, “We took peyote, psilocybin, marijuana and an unbelievable amount of alcohol. The two of us would sit down and drink two bottles of whiskey. A lot of the people who came in were young women, and he’d loosen them up with alcohol and drugs.”

So, what’s the problem here? Jody Radzik at Guruphiliac writes, “We’ve always wanted to like Adi Da. First because Ken Wilber liked him, and then because he was so out in the open with his craziness. Gurus, drugs and group sex just get us so hot! But once he started with his ‘world teacher’ shtick, he went from being a tantric engine of transformation to just another wackadoo guru.”

And, of course, like all of our other gurus, Da scams as much money from his followers to keep the party going. I wouldn’t want to be one of Da’s followers, but Oh to be Da.

The Helzer Brothers – Transform America

The Helzer Brothers’ activities were a tawdry and pallid expression of Manson family values. After being excommunicated from the Mormon Church for taking drugs, Glenn Helzer, from Contra Costa County (a San Francisco suburb) decided to form a self-awareness group to stop Satan and hasten the return of Jesus. He got himself two members, his own brother Justin and a young woman named Dawn Goldman. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Glenn Helzer’s plans “included a bizarre plot to train Brazilian orphans to slaughter the leaders of the Mormon Church so he could become its prophet; and ‘Transform America,’ a self-help group to foster ‘a state of peace and joy.’”

In order to raise money, the Helzer’s sold ecstasy and Glenn got his onetime girlfriend, Keri Mendoza, to pose for Playboy. (She appeared as Kerissa Fare, Miss September 2000). But when drugs and sex didn’t produce enough money fast enough, Helzer’s mind turned towards robbery and murder. The group extorted $100,000 from an elderly couple, Ivan and Annette Stineman, and then killed them, returning the next day to dismember them. (Peace and joy can be such hard work!)

Helzer next planned to incorporate his friend, Selina Bishop (daughter of blues guitarist Elvin Bishop) into his plot by getting her to cash the check. But he decided that she knew too much, so he and his brother bludgeoned her to death and then eviscerated her body. Fearing that Bishop’s stepfather and mother would finger him as a suspect in the murder of their daughter, Helzer dispatched them the following day. On August 7, 2000 the three conspirators were arrested. Glenn Helzer received five death sentences. Brother Justin got only one and Dawn Godman was sentenced to 38 years-to-life.

Addendum

As someone who socializes at times on the periphery of “new age” circles, it is my personal observation that most spiritual seekers stopped giving themselves up to charismatic leaders and gurus by the end of the 1980s. But it is clear that there are still enough lost souls out there to fulfill the financial needs and psychopathic fantasies of cult leaders for years to come. My advice: If you feel a need to be part of a group, join a bowling league.

SOURCE: Ten Zen Monkeys

Culture

2006-12-13T06:10:00.000-05:00

Start with a cage containing five apes. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put stairs under it. Before long, an ape will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the Banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the apes with cold water.

After a while, another ape makes an attempt with the same result - all the apes are sprayed with cold water.

Turn off the cold water.

If, later, another ape tries to climb the stairs, the other apes will try to prevent it even though no water sprays them.

Now, remove one ape from the cage and replace it with a new one.

The New ape sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other apes attack him.

After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five apes and replace it with a new one.

The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous Newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Again, replace a third original ape with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well.

Two of the four apes that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest ape.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original apes, all the apes which have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced.

Nevertheless, no ape ever again approaches the stairs. Why not?

Because that's the way it's always been around here!

Why do good people do bad things?

2006-12-13T06:02:00.000-05:00

How does entire population become, itself, a weapon of war?

Simply tell them what they want to hear, leave out any information that contradicts the vision you wish to propagate, and you will have a mass political animal that you can steer to almost any end, especially when you control the flow of information, i.e. the press.

As one famous Nazi Propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, put it, "What you want in a media system is ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity."

Deprive people of justice, of any meaningful power or participation in the power processes of society, then give them just one way to attain power and the average individual, starved for the ability to affect their environment, will blow the hell out of anything society tells him or her is the appropriate target.

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Chaeostrophe: A Terence McKenna Moment

2006-12-10T15:05:00.000-05:00

If we are to glorify the nomads in their altruism, that of leaving a piece of land so that the land does not become burned out, at once ensuring continued opportunity for abundance in our diets (speaking as an amateur anthropologist, here), then how is it we can point our fingers and shame those that would carry humanity to the stars whilst giving Mother Earth a chance to revive - or is it give ourselves a chance to avoid cataclysm - I honestly can't remember.

The rhetoric I always hear is, "Just leave this planet and go and ruin another one, huh?"

To that I say, no: we leave the planet to save this one and when the time comes, we leave that one too. We can be starseed and it just might be the most ecologically sound strategy for planetary rejuvenation, not to mention the most sound strategy for human survival. It truly is a win-win.

Check Me Out on Adam Gorightly's Radio Show (Dec. 19)

2006-12-08T09:34:00.000-05:00

I first discovered Adam Gorightly's work when I happened upon this piece, entitled Ritual Magic, Mind Control and the UFO Phenomenon. I find his take on the UFO phenomenon to be refreshing and intriguing. Pure speculations on my part over the years led me many similar conclusions, namely that when we speak of unidentified flying objects, we may indeed be talking about apples and oranges. For my part, I am quite sure that saucer shaped aircraft, which made their widespread debut in the wake of Project Paperclip and the National Security Act of 1947, are indeed merely an attempt to create some of the first stealth aircraft ever. While the Horten brothers developed the first flying wing, in Goettingen, Germany, others, it seems, were working on the saucer shape as a means of offering a very low radar profile to enemy receivers. This would explain why Hitler devoted so little time to the development of radar: he was certain he had radar beat. In fact, if you look at the B-2 bomber from any other angle than from below or above (front view here), what one encounters is a definite saucer shape and if one looks at it from above or below, we have the boomerang shape endlessly reported for years around Area 51.

What Gorightly tackles, however, are entirely different phenomena. In his work on UFOs, we hear about the mind of humans superimposing its own reality constructs on what are, essentially, extradimensional visitations. I believe this kind of thing accounts for a majority of UFO encounters. In the extremlely hard to find film known as From Beyond, we see a story of a man who engages in a kind of electrostatic, plasma experiment, altering the field around his equipment with generators and transformers that can only be described as Teslian. In this field, manifest a variety of entities that almost seem to swim in from beyond, as if they can only exist in certain electrical environments.

In lieu of all of this, I consider it especially auspicous that H.P. Lovecraft, whom Nikola Tesla knew when Howard was a boy, wrote much about beings coming into Earthly reality via scientific experiments and ritual. While it is not generally purported that Tesla was much of an occultist, Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard, it is attested widely, were and both of them spoke of welcoming beings into this world from beyond. I for one, am open to the existence of subtle forms of telekinesis, such as the ability to affect the energetic fields surrounding one, especially when done with a group.

As is particular to these kinds of speculations, they often pose more questions than they answer but this should not discourage. After all, only the kinds of questioning that inspire further questions are likely to break new ground, whatever the topic or vectors of inquiry.

I hope you'll tune in on December 19 at 6 p.m. EST. Of course, since it has been billed that I would be there to discuss my role as "an activist and parapolitical researcher", expect us to go other topics as well, such as some of the things detailed at my other blog.

Related Material

Mind Control

2006-12-08T06:43:00.000-05:00

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul
Copyright FreeAmerica and Harry V. Martin, 1995

There was just a small news announcement on the radio in early July after a short heat wave, three inmates of Vacaville Medical Facility had died in non-air conditioned cells. Two of those prisoners, the announcement said, may have died as a result of medical treatment. No media inquiries were made, no major news stories developed because of these deaths.

But what was the medical treatment that may have caused their deaths? The Medical Facility indicates they were mind control or behavior modification treatments. A deeper probe into the death of these two inmates unravels a mind-boggling tale of horror that has been part of California penal history for a long time, and one that caused national outcries two decades ago.

Mind control experiments have been part of California for decades and permeate mental institutions and prisons. But, it is not just in the penal society that mind control measures have been used. Minority children were subjected to experimentation at abandoned Nike Missile Sites, veterans who fought for American freedom were also subjected to the programs. Funding and experimentations of mind control have been part of the U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency through the Phoenix Program, the Stanford Research Institute, the Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

California has been in the forefront of mind control experimentation. Government experiments also were conducted in the Haight-Ashbury District in San Francisco at the height of the Hippy reign. In 1974, Senator Sam Erwin, of Watergate fame, headed a U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights studying the subject of "Individual rights and the Federal role in behavior modification." Though little publicity was given to this committee's investigation, Senator Erwin issued a strong condemnation of the federal role in mind control. That condemnation, however, did not halt mind control experiments, they just received more circuitous funding.

Many of the case histories concerning individuals of whom the mind control experiments were used, show a strange concept in the minds of those seeking guinea pigs. Those subject to the mind control experiments would be given indefinite sentences, his freedom was dependent upon how well the experiment went. One individual, for example, was arrested for joyriding, given a two-year sentence and held for mind control experiments. He was held for 18 years.

Here are just a few experiments used in the mind control program:

A naked inmate is strapped down on a board. His wrists and ankles are cuffed to the board and his head is rigidly held in place by a strap around his neck and a helmet on his head. He is left in a darkened cell, unable to remove his body wastes. When a meal is delivered, one wrist is unlocked so he could feel around in the dark for his food and attempt to pour liquid down his throat without being able to lift his head.
Another experiment creates a muscle relaxant. Within 30 to 40 seconds paralysis begins to invade the small muscles of the fingers, toes, and eyes and then the inter costal muscles and diaphragm. The heart slows down to about 60 beats per minute. This condition, together with respiratory arrests, sets in for as long as two to five minutes before the drug begins to wear off. The individual remains fully conscious and is gasping for breath. It is "likened to dying, it is almost like drowning" the experiment states.
Another drug induces vomiting and was administered to prisoners who didn't get up on time or caught swearing or lying, or even not greeting their guards formally. The treatment brings about uncontrolled vomiting that lasts from 15 minutes to an hour, accompanied by a temporary cardio vascular effect involving changes in the blood pressure.
Another deals with creating body rigidness, aching restlessness, blurred vision, severe muscular pain, trembling and fogged cognition.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the U.S. Army have admitted mind control experiments. Many deaths have occurred.

In tracing the steps of government mind control experiments, the trail leads to legal and illegal usages, usage for covert intelligence operations, and experiments on innocent people who were unaware that they were being used.

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Second in a Series

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Sentinel commenced a series on mind control in early August and suspended it until September because of the extensive research required after additional information was received.

In July, two inmates died at the Vacaville Medical Facility. According to prison officials at the time, the two may have died as a result of medical treatment, that treatment was the use of mind control or behavior modification drugs. A deeper study into the deaths of the two inmates has unraveled a mind-boggling tale of horror that has been part of California penal history for a long time, and one that caused national outcries years ago.

In the August article, the Sentinel presented a graphic portrait of some of the mind control experiments that have been allowed to continue in the United States. On November 1974 a U.S. Senate Sub committee on Constitutional Rights investigated federally-funded behavior modification programs, with emphasis on federal involvement in, and the possible threat to individual constitutional rights of behavior modification, especially involving inmates in prisons and mental institutions.

The Senate committee was appalled after reviewing documents from the following sources:

Neuro-Research Foundation's study entitled The Medical Epidemiology of Criminals.
The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence from UCLA.
The closed adolescent treatment center.

A national uproar was created by various articles in 1974, which prompted the Senate investigation. But after all these years, the news that two inmates at Vacaville may have died from these same experiments indicates that though a nation was shocked in 1974, little was done to correct the experimentations. In 1977, a Senate subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy, focussed on the CIA's testing of LSD on unwitting citizens. Only a mere handful of people within the CIA knew about the scope and details of the program.

To understand the full scope of the problem, it is important to study its origins. The Kennedy subcommittee learned about the CIA Operation M.K.-Ultra through the testimony of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. The purpose of the program, accord ing to his testimony, was to "investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means". Claiming the protection of the National Security Act, Dr. Gottlieb was unwilling to tell the Senate subcommittee what had been learned or gained by these experiments.

He did state, however, that the program was initially engendered by a concern that the Soviets and other enemies of the United States would get ahead of the U.S. in this field. Through the Freedom of Information Act, researchers are now able to obtain documents detailing the M.K.-Ultra program and other CIA behavior modification projects in a special reading room located on the bottom floor of the Hyatt Regency in Rosslyn, VA.

The most daring phase of the M.K.-Ultra program involved slipping unwitting American citizens LSD in real life situations. The idea for the series of experiments originated in November 1941, when William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA during World War Two. At that time the intelligence agency invested $5000 for the "truth drug" program. Experiments with scopolamine and morphine proved both unfruitful and very dangerous. The program tested scores of other drugs, including mescaline, barbituates, benzedrine, cannabis indica, to name a few.

The U.S. was highly concerned over the heavy losses of freighters and other ships in the North Atlantic, all victims of German U-boats. Information about German U-boat strategy was desperately needed and it was believed that the information could be obtained through drug-influenced interrogations of German naval P.O.W.s, in violation of the Geneva Accords.

Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, a colorless, odorless marijuana extract, was used to lace a cigarette or food substance without detection. Initially, the experiments were done on volunteer U.S. Army and OSS personnel, and testing was also disguised as a remedy for shell shock. The volunteers became known as "Donovan's Dreamers". The experiments were so hush-hush, that only a few top officials knew about them. President Franklin Roosevelt was aware of the experiments. The "truth drug" achieved mixed success.

The experiments were halted when a memo was written: "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, halt the program. In 1943 field tests of the extract were being con ducted, despite the order to halt them. The most celebrated test was conducted by Captain George Hunter White, an OSS agent and ex-law enforcement official, on August Del Grazio, aka Augie Dallas, aka Dell, aka Little Augie, a New York gangster. Cigarettes laced with the acetate were offered to Augie without his knowledge of the content. Augie, who had served time in prison for assault and murder, had been one of the world's most notorious drug dealers and smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and he was a leader in the Italian underworld on the Lower East Side of New York. Under the influence of the drug, Augie revealed volumes of information about the under world operations, including the names of high ranking officials who took bribes from the mob. These experiments led to the encouragement of Donovan. A new memo was issued: "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism which offered promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."

When the OSS was disbanded after the war, Captain White continued to administer behavior modifying drugs. In 1947, the CIA replaced the OSS. White's service record indicates that he worked with the OSS, and by 1954 he was a high ranking Federal Narcotics Bureau officer who had been loaned to the CIA on a part-time basis.

White rented an apartment in Greenwich Village equipped with one-way mirrors, surveillance gadgets and disguised himself as a seaman. White drugged his acquaintances with LSD and brought them back to his apartment. In 1955, the operation shifted to San Francisco. In San Francisco, "safehouses" were established under the code name Operation Midnight Climax. Midnight Climax hired prostitute addicts who lured men from bars back to the safehouses after their drinks had been spiked with LSD. White filmed the events in the safehouses. The purpose of these "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the act of lovemaking for extracting information from men. The safehouse experiments continued until 1963 until CIA Inspector General John Earman criticized Richard Helms, the director of the CIA and father of the M.K.-Ultra project. Earman charged the new director John McCone had not been fully briefed on the M.K.-Ultra Project when he took office and that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens are placed in jeopardy". The Inspector General stated that LSD had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign."

Earman's criticisms were rebuffed by Helms, who warned, "Positive operation capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." But in 1964, Helms had testified before the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John Kennedy, that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research".

Upon leaving government service in 1966, Captain White wrote a startling letter to his superior. In the letter to Dr. Gottlieb, Captain White reminisced about his work in the safehouses with LSD. His comments were frightening. "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun," White wrote. "Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

(NEXT: How the drug experiments helped bring about the rebirth of the mafia and the French Connection.)

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Part Three in a Series

Though the CIA continued to maintain drug experiments in the streets of America after the program was official cancelled, the United States reaped tremendous value from it. With George Hunter Whites connection to underworld figure Little Augie, connections were made with Mafia king-pin Lucky Luciano, who was in Dannemore Prison.

Luciano wanted freedom, the Mafia wanted drugs, and the United States wanted Sicily. The date was 1943. Augie was the go-between between Luciano and the United States War Department.

Luciano was transferred to a less harsh prison and began to be visited by representatives of the Office of Naval Intelligence and from underworld figures, such as Meyer Lansky. A strange alliance was formed between the U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Mafia, who controlled the West Side docks in New York. Luciano regained active leadership in organized crime in America.

The U.S. Intelligence community utilized Luciano's underworld connections in Italy. In July of 1943, Allied forces launched their invasion of Sicily, the beginning push into occupied Europe. General George Patton's Seventh Army advanced through hundreds of miles of territory that was fraught with difficulty, booby trapped roads, snipers, confusing mountain topography, all within close range of 60,000 hostile Italian troops. All this was accomplished in four days, a military "miracle" even for Patton.

Senate Estes Kefauver's Senate Sub committee on Organized Crime asked, in 1951, how all this was possible. The answer was that the Mafia had helped to protect roads from Italian snipers, served as guides through treacherous mountain terrain, and provided needed intelligence to Patton's army. The part of Sicily which Patton's forces traversed had at one time been completely controlled by the Sicilian Mafia, until Benito Mussolini smashed it through the use of police repression.

Just prior to the invasion, it was hardly even able to continue shaking down farmers and shepherds for protection money. But the invasion changed all this, and the Mafia went on to play a very prominent and well-documented role in the American military occupation of Italy.

The expedience of war opened the doors to American drug traffic and Mafia domination. This was the beginning of the Mafia-U.S. Intelligence alliance, an alliance that lasts to this day and helped to support the covert operations of the CIA, such as the Iran-Contra operations. In these covert operations, the CIA would obtain drugs from South America and Southeast Asia, sell them to the Mafia and use the money for the covert purchase of military equipment. These operations accelerated when Congress cut off military funding for the Contras.

One of the Allies top occupation priorities was to liberate as many of their own soldiers from garrison duties so that they could participate in the military offensive. In order to accomplish this, Don Calogero's Mafia were pressed into service, and in July of 1943, the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. Army appointed him mayor of Villalba and other Mafia officials as mayors of other towns in Sicily.

As the northern Italian offensive continued, Allied intelligence became very concerned over the extent to which the Italian Communists resistance to Mussolini had driven Italian politics to the left. Community Party membership had doubled between 1943 and 1944, huge leftist strikes had shut down factories and the Italian underground fighting Mussolini had risen to almost 150,000 men. By mid-1944, the situation came to a head and the U.S. Army terminated arms drops to the Italian Resistance, and started appointing Mafia officials to occupation administration posts. Mafia groups broke up leftists rallies and reactivated black market operations throughout southern Italy.

Lucky Luciano was released from prison in 1946 and deported to Italy, where he rebuilt the heroin trade. The court's decision to release him was made possible by the testimony of intelligence agents at his hearing, and a letter written by a naval officer reciting what Luciano had done for the Navy. Luciano was supposed to have served from 30 to 50 years in prison. Over 100 Mafia members were similarly deported within a couple of years.

Luciano set up a syndicate which transported morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, refined it into heroin, and then shipped it into the United States via Cuba. During the 1950's, Marseilles, in Southern France, became a major city for the heroin labs and the Corsican syndicate began to actively cooperate with the Mafia in the heroin trade. Those became popularly known as the French Connection.

In 1948, Captain White visited Luciano and his narcotics associate Nick Gentile in Europe. Gentile was a former American gangster who had worked for the Allied Military Government in Sicily. By this time, the CIA was already subsidizing Corsican and Italian gangsters to oust Communist unions from the Port of Marseilles. American strategic planners saw Italy and southern France as extremely important for their Naval bases as a counterbalance to the growing naval forces of the Soviet Union. CIO/AFL organizer Irving Brown testified that by the time the CIA subsidies were terminated in 1953, U.S. support was no longer needed because the profits from the heroin traffic was sufficient to sustain operations.

When Luciano was originally jailed, the U.S. felt it had eliminated the world's most effective underworld leader and the activities of the Mafia were seriously damaged. Mussolini had been waging a war since 1924 to rid the world of the Sicilian Mafia. Thousands of Mafia members were convicted of crimes and forced to leave the cities and hide out in the mountains.

Mussolini's reign of terror had virtually eradicated the international drug syndicates. Combined with the shipping surveillance during the war years, heroin trafficking had become almost nil. Drug use in the United States, before Luciano's release from prison, was on the verge of being entirely wiped out.

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Part Four in a Series

The U.S. government has conducted three types of mind-control experiments:

Real life experiences, such as those used on Little Augie and the LSD experiments in the safehouses of San Francisco and Greenwich Village.
Experiments on prisoners, such as in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
Experiments conducted in both mental hospitals and the Veterans Administration hospitals.

Such experimentation requires money, and the United States government has funnelled funds for drug experiments through different agencies, both overtly and covertly.

One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimentation is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite pet agencies. The Nixon Administration was, at one time, putting together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency toward violence in "concentration" camps. According to the Washington Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John Erlichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to implement the program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never implemented.

LEAA came into existence in 1968 with a huge budget to assist various U.S. law enforcement agencies. Its effectiveness, however, was not considered too great. After spending $6 billion, the F.B.I. reports general crime rose 31 percent and violent crime rose 50 percent. But little accountability was required of LEAA on how it spent its funds.

LEAA's role in the behavior modification research began at a meeting held in 1970 in Colorado Springs. Attending that meeting were Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldemann and other White House staffers. They met with Dr. Bertram Brown, director fo the National Institute of Mental Health, and forged a close collaboration between LEAA and the Institute. LEAA was a product of the Justice Department and the Institute was a product of HEW.

LEAA funded 350 projects involving medical procedures, behavior modification and drugs for delinquency control. Money from the Criminal Justice System was being used to fund mental health projects and vice versa. Eventually, the leadership responsibility and control of the Institute began to deteriorate and their scientists began to answer to LEAA alone.

The National Institute of Mental Health went on to become one of the greatest supporters of behavior modification research. Throughout the 1960's, court calenders became blighted with lawsuits on the part of "human guinea pigs" who had been experimented upon in prisons and mental institutions. It was these lawsuits which triggered the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights investigation, headed by Senator Sam Erwin. The subcommittee's harrowing report was virtually ignored by the news media.

Thirteen behavior modification programs were conducted by the Department of Defense. The Department of Labor had also conducted several experiments, as well as the National Science Foundation. The Veterans' Administration was also deeply involved in behavior modification and mind control. Each of these agencies, including LEAA, and the Institute, were named in secret CIA documents as those who provided research cover for the MK-ULTRA program.

Eventually, LEAA was using much of its budget to fund experiments, including aversive techniques and psychosurgery, which involved, in some cases, irreversible brain surgery on normal brain tissue for the purpose of changing or controlling behavior and/or emotions.

Senator Erwin questioned the head of LEAA concerning ethical standards of the behavior modification projects which LEAA had been funding. Erwin was extremely dubious about the idea of the government spending money on this kind of project without strict guidelines and reasonable research supervision in order to protect the human subjects. After Senator Erwin's denunciation of the funding polices, LEAA announced that it would no longer fund medical research into behavior modification and psychosurgery. Despite the pledge by LEAA's director, Donald E. Santarelli, LEAA ended up funding 537 research projects dealing with behavior modification. There is strong evidence to indicate psychosurgery was still being used in prisons in the 1980's. Immediately after the funding announcement by LEAA, there were 50 psychosurgical operations at Atmore State Prison in Alabama. The inmates became virtual zombies. The operations, according to Dr. Swan of Fisk University, were done on black prisoners who were considered politically active.

The Veterans' Administration openly admitted that psychosurgery was a standard procedure for treatment and not used just in experiments. The VA Hospitals in Durham, Long Beach, New York, Syracuse and Minneapolis were known to employ these products on a regular basis. VA clients could typically be subject to these behavior alteration procedures against their will. The Erwin subcommittee concluded that the rights of VA clients had been violated.

LEAA also subsidized the research and development of gadgets and techniques useful to behavior modification. Much of the technology, whose perfection LEAA funded, had originally been developed and made operational for use in the Vietnam War. Companies like Bangor Punta Corporation and Walter Kidde and Co., through its subsidiary Globe Security System, adapted these devices to domestic use in the U.S. ITT was another company that domesticated the warfare technology for potential use on U.S. citizens. Rand Corporation executive Paul Baran warned that the influx back to the United State of the Vietnam War surveillance gadgets alone, not to mention the behavior modification hardware, could bring about "the most effective, oppressive police state ever created".

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Fifth in a Series

One of the fascinating aspects of the scandals that plague the U.S. Government is the fact that so often the same names appear from scandal to scandal. From the origins of Ronald Reagan's political career, as Governor of California, Dr. Earl Brian and Edward Meese played key advisory roles.

Dr. Brian's name has been linked to the October Surprise and is a central figure in the government's theft of PROMIS soft ware from INSLAW. Brian's role touches from the Cabazon Indian scandals to United Press International. He is one of those low-profile key figures.

And, alas, his name appears again in the nation's behavior modification and mind control experiments. Dr. Brian was Reagan's Secretary of Health when Reagan was Governor. Dr. Brian was an advocate of state subsidies for a research center for the study of violent behavior. The center was to begin operations by mid-1975, and its research was intended to shed light on why people murder or rape, or hijack aircraft. The center was to be operated by the University of California at Los Angeles, and its primary purpose, ac cording to Dr. Brian, was to unify scattered studies on anti-social violence and possibly even touch on socially tolerated violence, such as football or war. Dr. Brian sought $1.3 million for the center.

It certainly was possible that prison inmates might be used as volunteer subjects at the center to discover the unknowns which triggered their violent behavior. Dr. Brian's quest for the center came at the same time Governor Reagan concluded his plans to phase the state of California out of the mental hospital business by 1982. Reagan's plan is echoed by Governor Pete Wilson today, to place the responsibility of rehabilitating young offenders squarely on the shoulders of local communities.

But as the proposal became known more publicly, a swell of controversy surrounded it. It ended in a fiasco. The inspiration for the violence center came from three doctors in 1967, five years before Dr. Brian and Governor Reagan unveiled their plans. Amidst urban rioting and civil protest, Doctors Sweet, Mark and Ervin of Harvard put forward the thesis that individuals who engage in civil disobedience possess defective or damaged brain cells. If this conclusion were applied to the American Revolution or the Women's Rights Movement, a good portion of American society would be labeled as having brain damage.

In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, they stated: "That poverty, unemployment, slum housing, and inadequate education underlie the nation's urban riots is well known, but the obviousness of these causes may have blinded us to the more subtle role of other possible factors, including brain dysfunction in the rioters who engaged in arson, sniping and physical assault.

"There is evidence from several sources that brain dysfunction related to a focal lesion plays a significant role in the violent and assaultive behavior of thoroughly studied patients. Individuals with electroencephalographic abnormalities in the temporal region have been found to have a much greater frequency of behavioral abnormalities (such as poor impulse control, assaultiveness, and psychosis) than is present in people with a normal brain wave pattern."

Soon after the publication in the Journal, Dr. Ervin and Dr. Mark published their book Violence and the Brain, which included the claim that there were as many as 10 million individuals in the United States "who suffer from obvious brain disease". They argued that the data of their book provided a strong reason for starting a program of mass screening of Americans.

"Our greatest danger no longer comes from famine or communicable disease. Our greatest danger lies in ourselves and in our fellow humans...we need to develop an 'early warning test' of limbic brain function to detect those humans who have a low threshold for impulsive violence...Violence is a public health problem, and the major thrust of any program dealing with violence must be toward its prevention," they wrote.

The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funded the doctors $108,000 and the National Institute of Mental Health kicked in another $500,000, under pressure from Congress. They believed that psychosurgery would inevitably be performed in connection with the program, and that, since it irreversibly impaired people's emotional and intellectual capacities, it could be used as an instrument of repression and social control.

The doctors wanted screening centers established throughout the nation. In California, the publicity associated with the doctors' report, aided in the development of The Center for the study and Reduction of Violence. Both the state and LEAA provided the funding. The center was to serve as a model for future facilities to be set up throughout the United States.

The Director of the Neurophyschiatric Institute and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Dr. Louis Jolyon West was selected to run the center. Dr. West is alleged to have been a contract agent for the CIA, who, as part of a network of doctors and scientists, gathered intelligence on hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, for the super-secret MK-ULTRA program. Like Captain White (see part three of the series), West conducted LSD experiments for the CIA on unwitting citizens in the safehouses of San Francisco. He achieved notoriety for his injection of a massive dose of LSD into an elephant at the Oklahoma Zoo, the elephant died when West tried to revive it by administering a combination of drugs.

Dr. West was further known as the psychiatrist who was called upon to examine Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin. It was on the basis of West's diagnosis that Ruby was compelled to be treated for mental disorders and put on happy pills. The West examination was ordered after Ruby began to say that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy. Two years after the commencement of treatment for mental disorder, Ruby died of cancer in prison.

After January 11, 1973, when Governor Reagan announced plans for the Violence Center, West wrote a letter to the then Director of Health for California, J. M. Stubblebine.

"Dear Stub:

"I am in possession of confidential in formation that the Army is prepared to turn over Nike missile bases to state and local agencies for non-military purposes. They may look with special favor on health-related applications.

"Such a Nike missile base is located in the Santa Monica Mountains, within a half-hour's drive of the Neuropsychiatric Institute. It is accessible, but relatively remote. The site is securely fenced, and includes various buildings and improvements, making it suitable for prompt occupancy.

"If this site were made available to the Neurophyschiatric Institute as a research facility, perhaps initially as an adjunct to the new Center for the Prevention of Violence, we could put it to very good use. Comparative studies could be carried out there, in an isolated but convenient location, of experimental or model programs for the alteration of undesirable behavior.

"Such programs might include control of drug or alcohol abuse, modification of chronic anti-social or impulsive aggressiveness, etc. The site could also accommodate conferences or retreats for instruction of selected groups of mental-health related professionals and of others (e.g., law enforcement personnel, parole officers, special educators) for whom both demonstration and participation would be effective modes of instruction.

"My understanding is that a direct request by the Governor, or other appropriate officers of the State, to the Secretary of Defense (or, of course, the President), could be most likely to produce prompt results."

Some of the planned areas of study for the Center included:

Studies of violent individuals.
Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and hyperkinetic children.
Experiments with violence-producing and violent inhibiting drugs.
Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys.
Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among various ethnic groups.
Studies of pre-delinquent children.

It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on pre-delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment of children before they became delinquents.

The purpose of the Violence Center was not just research. The staff was to include sociologists, lawyers, police officers, clergymen and probation officers. With the backing of Governor Reagan and Dr. Brian, West had secured guarantees of prisoner volunteers from several California correctional institutions, including Vacaville. Vacaville and Atascadero were chosen as the primary sources for the human guinea pigs. These institutions had established a reputation, by that time, of committing some of the worst atrocities in West Coast history. Some of the experimentations differed little from what the Nazis did in the death camps.

(NEXT: What happened to the Center?)

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Sixth in a Series

Dr. Earl Brian, Governor Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Health, was adamant about his support for mind control centers in California. He felt the behavior modification plan of the Violence Control Centers was important in the prevention of crime.

The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of William Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A counter insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and an advisor to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand Research Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence. Herrman was also a CIA agent who is now serving an eight year prison sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting operation. He was also directly linked with the Iran-Contra affair according to government records and Herrmann's own testimony.

In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA control officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black Cultural Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a facility which in July experienced the death of three inmates who were forcibly subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black Cultural Association was ostensibly an education program designed to instill black pride identity in prisons, the Association was really a cover for an experimental behavior modification pilot project designed to test the feasibility of programming unstable prisoners to become more manageable.

Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological warfare expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the CIA and for the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and 1969, he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers.

His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior modification experiments to learn how to extract information from prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.

Westbrook's most prominent client at Vacaville was Donald DeFreeze, who be tween 1967 and 1969, had worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence unit and later became the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Many authorities now believe that the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville was the seedling of the SLA. Westbrook even designed the SLA logo, the cobra with seven heads, and gave De Freeze his African name of Cinque. The SLA was responsible for the assassination of Marcus Foster, superintendent of School in Oakland and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San Francisco-based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an international arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly involved in the October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English prison for counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian officials to ascertain whether the Iranians would trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon.

The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections, tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This information was revealed in his London trial.

In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under Governor Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan. Both men have been identified as working for Reagan with the Iranians.

The Violence Center, however, died an agonizing death. Despite the Ervin Senate Committee investigation and chastation of mind control, the experiments continued. But when the Watergate scandal broke in the early 1970's, Washington felt it was too politically risky to continue to push for mind control centers.

Top doctors began to withdraw from the proposal because they felt that there were not enough safeguards. Even the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency, which funded the program, backed out, stating, the proposal showed "little evidence of established research ability of the kind of level necessary for a study of this cope".

Eventually it became known that control of the Violence Center was not going to rest with the University of California, but instead with the Department of Corrections and other law enforcement officials. This information was released publicly by the Committee Opposed to Psychiatric Abuse of Prisoners. The disclosure of the letter resulted in the main backers of the program bowing out and the eventual demise of the center.

Dr. Brian's final public statement on the matter was that the decision to cut off funding represented "a callous disregard for public safety". Though the Center was not built, the mind control experiments continue to this day.

(NEXT: What these torturous drugs do.)

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Seventh in a Series

The Central Intelligence Agency held two major interests in use of L.S.D. to alter normal behavior patterns. The first interest centered around obtaining information from prisoners of war and enemy agents, in contravention of the Geneva Accords. The second was to deter the effectiveness of drugs used against the enemy on the battlefield.

The MK-ULTRA program was originally run by a small number of people within the CIA known as the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Another CIA department, the Office of Security, also began its own testing program. Friction arose and then infighting broke out when the Office of Security commenced to spy on TSS people after it was learned that LSD was being tested on unwitting Americans.

Not only did the two branches disagree over the issue of testing the drug on the unwitting, they also disagreed over the issue of how the drug was actually to be used by the CIA. The office of Security envisioned the drug as an interrogation weapon. But the TSS group thought the drug could be used to help destabilize another country, it could be slipped into the food or beverage of a public official in order to make him behave foolishly or oddly in public. One CIA document reveals that L.S.D. could be administered right before an official was to make a public speech.

Realizing that gaining information about the drug in real life situations was crucial to exploiting the drug to its fullest, TSS started conducting experiments on its own people. There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation. The Office of Security felt the TSS group was playing with fire, especially when it was learned that TSS was prepared to spike an annual office Christmas party punch with LSD, the Christmas party of the CIA. L.S.D. could produce serious insanity for periods of eight to 18 hours and possibly longer.

One of the "victims" of the punch was agent Frank Olson. Having never had drugs before, L.S.D. took its toll on Olson. He reported that, every automobile that came by was a terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get him personally. Each time a car passed he would huddle down against a parapet, terribly frightened. Olson began to behave erratically. The CIA made preparation to treat Olson at Chestnut Lodge, but before they could, Olson checked into a New York hotel and threw himself out from his tenth story room. The CIA was ordered to cease all drug testing.

Mind control drugs and experiments were torturous to the victims. One of three inmates who died in Vacaville Prison in July was scheduled to appear in court in an attempt to stop forced administration of a drug, the very drug that may have played a role in his death.

Joseph Cannata believed he was making progress and did not need forced dosages of the drug Haldol. The Solano County Coroner's Office said that Cannata and two other inmates died of hyperthermia, extremely elevated body temperature. Their bodies all had at least 108 degrees temperature when they died. The psychotropic drugs they were being forced to take will elevate body temperature.

Dr. Ewen Cameron, working at McGill University in Montreal, used a variety of experimental techniques, including keeping subjects unconscious for months at a time, administering huge electroshocks and continual doses of L.S.D.

Massive lawsuits developed as a result of this testing, and many of the subjects who suffered trauma had never agreed to participate in the experiments. Such CIA experiments infringed upon the much-honored Nuremberg Code concerning medical ethics. Dr. Camron was one of the members of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

L.S.D. research was also conducted at the Addiction Research Center of the U.S. Public Health Service in Lexington, Kentucky. This institution was one of several used by the CIA. The National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Navy funded this operation. Vast supplies of L.S.D. and other hallucinogenic drugs were required to keep the experiments going. Dr. Harris Isbell ran the program. He was a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulants Drugs. Almost all of the inmates were black. In many cases, L.S.D. dosage was increased daily for 75 days.

Some 1500 U.S. soldiers were also victims of drug experimentation. Some claimed they had agreed to become guinea pigs only through pressure from their superior officers. Many claimed they suffered from severe depression and other psychological stress.

One such soldier was Master Sergeant Jim Stanley. L.S.D. was put in Stanley's drinking water and he freaked out. Stanley's hallucinations continued even after he returned to his regular duties. His service record suffered, his marriage went on the rocks and he ended up beating his wife and children. It wasn't until 17 years later that Stanley was informed by the military that he had been an L.S.D. experiment. He sued the government, but the Supreme Court ruled no soldier could sue the Army for the L.S.D. experiments. Justice William Brennen disagreed with the Court decision. He wrote, "Experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable."

Private James Thornwell was given L.S.D. in a military test in 1961. For the next 23 years he lived in a mental fog, eventually drowning in a Vallejo swimming pool in 1984. Congress had set up a $625,000 trust fund for him. Large scale L.S.D. tests on American soldiers were conducted at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and in Europe and the Pacific. The Army conducted a series of L.S.D. tests at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The purpose of the tests were to ascertain how well soldiers could perform their tasks on the battlefield while under the influence of L.S.D. At Fort McClellan, Alabama, 200 officers in the Chemical Corps were given L.S.D. in order to familiarize them with the drug's effects. At Edgewood Arsenal, soldiers were given L.S.D. and then confined to sensory deprivation chambers and later exposed to a harsh interrogation sessions by intelligence people. In these sessions, it was discovered that soldiers would cooperate if promised they would be allowed to get off the L.S.D.

In Operation Derby Hat, foreign nationals accused of drug trafficking were given L.S.D. by the Special Purpose Team, with one subject begging to be killed in order to end his ordeal. Such experiments were also conducted in Saigon on Viet Cong POWs. One of the most potent drugs in the U.S. arsenal is called BZ or quinuclidinyl benzilate. It is a long-lasting drug and brings on a litany of psychotic experiences and almost completely isolates any person from his environment. The main effects of BZ last up to 80 hours compared to eight hours for L.S.D. Negative after-effects may persist for up to six weeks.

The BZ experiments were conducted on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal for 16 years. Many of the "victims" claim that the drug permanently affected their lives in a negative way. It so disorientated one paratrooper that he was found taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar. BZ was eventually put in hand grenades and a 750 pound cluster bomb. Other configurations were made for mortars, artillery and missiles. The bomb was tested in Vietnam and CIA documents indicate it was prepared for use by the U.S. in the event of large-scale civilian uprisings.

In Vacaville, psychosurgery has long been a policy. In one set of cases, experimental psychosurgery was conducted on three inmates, a black, a Chicano and a white person. This involved the procedure of pushing electrodes deep into the brain in order to determine the position of defective brain cells, and then shooting enough voltage into the suspected area to kill the defective cells. One prisoner, who appeared to be improving after surgery, was released on parole, but ended up back in prison. The second inmate became violent and there is no information on the third inmate.

Vacaville also administered a "terror drug" Anectine as a way of "suppressing hazardous behavior". In small doses, Anectine serves as a muscle relaxant; in huge does, it produces prolonged seizure of the respiratory system and a sensation "worse than dying". The drug goes to work within 30 to 40 seconds by paralyzing the small muscles of the fingers, toes, and eyes, and then moves into the the intercostal muscles and the diaphragm. The heart rate subsides to 60 beats per minute, respiratory arrest sets in and the patient remains completely conscious throughout the ordeal, which lasts two to five minutes. The experiments were also used at Atascadero.

Several mind altering drugs were originally developed for non-psychoactive purposes. Some of these drugs are Phenothiazine and Thorzine. The side effects of these drugs can be a living hell. The impact includes the feeling of drowsiness, disorientation, shakiness, dry mouth, blurred vision and an inability to concentrate. Drugs like Prolixin are described by users as "sheer torture" and "becoming a zombie".

The Veterans Administration Hospital has been shown by the General Accounting Office to apply heavy dosages of psychotherapeutic drugs. One patient was taking eight different drugs, three antipsychotic, two antianxiety, one antidepressant, one sedative and one anti-Parkinson. Three of these drugs were being given in dosages equal to the maximum recommended. Another patient was taking seven different drugs. One report tells of a patient who refused to take the drug. "I told them I don't want the drug to start with, they grabbed me and strapped me down and gave me a forced intramuscular shot of Prolixin. They gave me Artane to counteract the Prolixin and they gave me Sinequan, which is a kind of tranquilizer to make me calm down, which over calmed me, so rather than letting up on the medication, they then gave me Ritalin to pep me up."

Prolixin lasts for two weeks. One patient describes how the drug does not calm or sedate nerves, but instead attacks from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain. "The drugs turn your nerves in upon yourself. Against your will, your resistance, your resolve, are directed at your own tissues, your own muscles, reflexes, etc.." The patient continues, "The pain grinds into your fiber, your vision is so blurred you cannot read. You ache with restlessness, so that you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you, you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down, you go in pain you cannot locate. In such wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed because you cannot get relief even in breathing."

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Eighth in a Series

October 15, 1991

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

"The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.

"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." These were the remarks of Dr. Jose Delgado as they appeared in the February 24, 1974 edition of the Congressional Record, No. 26., Vol. 118.

Despite Dr. Delgado's outlandish statements before Congress, his work was financed by grants from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Aero-Medical Research Laboratory, and the Public Health Foundation of Boston.

Dr. Delgado was a pioneer of the technology of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). The New York Times ran an article on May 17, 1965 entitled Matador With a Radio Stops Wild Bull. The story details Dr. Delgado's experiments at Yale University School of Medicine and work in the field at Cordova, Spain. The New York Times stated:

"Afternoon sunlight poured over the high wooden barriers into the ring, as the brave bull bore down on the unarmed matador, a scientist who had never faced fighting bull. But the charging animal's horn never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen, Dr. Delgado pressed a button on a small radio transmitter in his hand and the bull braked to a halt. Then he pressed another button on the transmitter, and the bull obediently turned to the right and trotted away. The bull was obeying commands in his brain that were being called forth by electrical stimulation by the radio signals to certain regions in which fine wires had been painlessly planted the day before."

According to Dr. Delgado, experiments of this type have also been performed on humans. While giving a lecture on the Brain in 1965, Dr. Delgado said, "Science has developed a new methodology for the study and control of cerebral function in animals and humans."

The late L.L. Vasiliev, professor of physiology at the University of Leningrad wrote in a paper about hypnotism: "As a control of the subject's condition, when she was outside the laboratory in another set of experiments, a radio set was used. The results obtained indicate that the method of using radio signals substantially enhances the experimental possibilities." The professor continued to write, "I.F. Tomaschevsky (a Russian physiologist) carried out the first experiments with this subject at a distance of one or two rooms, and under conditions that the participant would not know or suspect that she would be experimented with. In other cases, the sender was not in the same house, and someone else observed the subject's behavior. Subsequent experiments at considerable distances were successful. One such experiment was carried out in a park at a distance. Mental suggestions to go to sleep were complied with within a minute."

The Russian experiments in the control of a person's mind through hypnosis and radio waves were conducted in the 1930s, some 30 years before Dr. Delgado's bull experiment. Dr. Vasiliev definitely demonstrated that radio transmission can produce stimulation of the brain. It is not a complex process. In fact, it need not be implanted within the skull or be productive of stimulation of the brain, itself. All that is needed to accomplish the radio control of the brain is a twitching muscle. The subject becomes hypnotized and a muscle stimulant is implanted. The subject, while still under hypnosis, is commanded to respond when the muscle stimulant is activated, in this case by radio transmission.

Lincoln Lawrence wrote a book entitled Were We Controlled? Lawrance wrote, "If the subject is placed under hypnosis and mentally programmed to maintain a determination eventually to perform one specific act, perhaps to shoot someone, it is suggested thereafter, each time a particular muscle twitches in a certain manner, which is then demonstrated by using the transmitter, he will increase this determination even more strongly. As the hypnotic spell is renewed again and again, he makes it his life's purpose to carry out this act until it is finally achieved. Thus are the two complementary aspects of Radio-Hypnotic Intracerebral Control (RHIC) joined to reinforce each other, and perpetuate the control, until such time as the controlled behavior is called for. This is done by a second session with the hypnotist giving final instructions. These might be reinforced with radio stimulation in more frequent cycles. They could even carry over the moments after the act to reassure calm behavior during the escape period, or to assure that one conspirator would not indicate that he was aware of the co-conspirator's role, or that he was even acquainted with him."

RHIC constitutes the joining of two well known tools, the radio part and the hypnotism part. People have found it difficult to accept that an individual can be hypnotized to perform an act which is against his moral principles. Some experiments have been conducted by the U.S. Army which show that this popular perception is untrue. The chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, Dr. Estabrooks, has stated, "I can hypnotize a man without his knowledge or consent into committing treason against the United States." Estabrooks was one of the nation's most authoritative sources in the hypnotic field. The psychologist told officials in Washington that a mere 200 well trained hypnotists could develop an army of mind-controlled sixth columnists in wartime United States. He laid out a scenario of an enemy doctor placing thousands of patients under hypnotic mind control, and eventually programming key military officers to follow his assignment. Through such maneuvers, he said, the entire U.S. Army could be taken over. Large numbers of saboteurs could also be created using hypnotism through the work of a doctor practicing in a neighborhood or foreign born nationals with close cultural ties with an enemy power.

Dr. Estabrooks actually conducted experiments on U.S. soldiers to prove his point. Soldiers of low rank and little formal education were placed under hypnotism and their memories tested. Surprisingly, hypnotists were able to control the subjects' ability to retain complicated verbal information. J. G. Watkins followed in Estabrooks steps and induced soldiers of lower rank to commit acts which conflicted not only with their moral code, but also the military code which they had come to accept through their basic training. One of the experiments involved placing a normal, stable army private in a deep trance. Watkins was trying to see if he could get the private to attack a superior officer, a cardinal sin in the military. While the private was in a deep trance, Watkins told him that the officer sitting across from him was an enemy soldier who was going to attempt to kill him. In the private's mind, it was a kill or be killed situation. The private immediately jumped up and grabbed the officer by the throat. The experiment was repeated several times, and in one case the man who was hypnotized and the man who was attacked were very close friends. The results were always the same. In one experiment, the hypnotized subject pulled out a knife and nearly stabbed another person.

Watkins concluded that people could be induced to commit acts contrary to their morality if their reality was distorted by the hypnotism. Similar experiments were conducted by Watkins using WACs exploring the possibility of making military personnel divulge military secrets. A related experiment had to be discontinued because a researcher, who had been one of the subjects, was exposing numerous top-secret projects to his hypnotist, who did not have the proper security clearance for such information. The information was divulged before an audience of 200 military personnel.

(NEXT: School for Assassins)

Mind Control: a Navy school for assassins

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Ninth in a Series

Tuesday, October 22, 1991

In mans quest to control the behavior of humans, there was a great breakthrough established by Pavlov, who devised a way to make dogs salivate on cue. He perfected his conditioning response technique by cutting holes in the cheeks of dogs and measured the amount they salivated in response to different stimuli. Pavlov verified that "quality, rate and frequency of the salivation changed depending upon the quality, rate and frequency of the stimuli."

Though Pavlov's work falls far short of human mind control, it did lay the groundwork for future studies in mind and behavior control of humans. John B. Watson conducted experiments in the United States on an 11-month-old infant. After allowing the infant to establish a rapport with a white rat, Watson began to beat on the floor with an iron bar every time the infant came in contact with the rat. After a time, the infant made the association between the appearance of the rat and the frightening sound, and began to cry every time the rat came into view. Eventually, the infant developed a fear of any type of small animal. Watson was the founder of the behaviorist school of psychology.

"Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings or stone or wood. I'll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless. Even gross differences in anatomical structure limits are far less than you may think. Make him a deaf mute, and I will build you a Helen Keller. Men are built, not born," Watson proclaimed. His psychology did not recognize inner feelings and thoughts as legitimate objects of scientific study, he was only interested in overt behavior.

Though Watson's work was the beginning of mans attempts to control human actions, the real work was done by B.F. Skinner, the high priest of the behaviorists movement. The key to Skinner's work was the concept of operant conditioning, which relied on the notion of reinforcement, all behavior which is learned is rooted in either a positive or negative response to that action. There are two corollaries of operant conditioning" Aversion therapy and desensitization.

Aversion therapy uses unpleasant reinforcement to a response which is undesirable. This can take the form of electric shock, exposing the subject to fear producing situations, and the infliction of pain in general. It has been used as a way of "curing" homosexuality, alcoholism and stuttering. Desensitization involves forcing the subject to view disturbing images over and over again until they no longer produce any anxiety, then moving on to more extreme images, and repeating the process over again until no anxiety is produced. Eventually, the subject becomes immune to even the most extreme images. This technique is typically used to treat people's phobias. Thus, the violence shown on T.V. could be said to have the unsystematic and unintended effect of desensitization.

Skinnerian behaviorism has been accused of attempting to deprive man of his free will, his dignity and his autonomy. It is said to be intolerant of uncertainty in human behavior, and refuses to recognize the private, the ineffable, and the unpredictable. It sees the individual merely as a medical, chemical and mechanistic entity which has no comprehension of its real interests.

Skinner believed that people are going to be manipulated. "I just want them to be manipulated effectively," he said. He measured his success by the absence of resistance and counter control on the part of the person he was manipulating. He thought that his techniques could be perfected to the point that the subject would not even suspect that he was being manipulated.

Dr. James V. McConnel, head of the Department of Mental Health Research at the University of Michigan, said, "The day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis, and the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior. We want to reshape our society drastically."

A U.S. Navy psychologist, who claims that the Office of Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated them in American embassies throughout the world. Just prior to that time, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee had censured the CIA for its global political assassination plots, including plots against Fidel Castro. The Navy psychologist was Lt. Commander Thomas Narut of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy. The information was divulged at an Oslo NATO conference of 120 psychologists from the eleven nation alliance. According to Dr. Narut, the U.S. Navy was an excellent place for a researcher to find "captive personnel" whom they could could use as guinea pigs in experiments. The Navy provided all the funding necessary, according to Narut.

Dr. Narut, in a question and answer session with reporters from many nations, revealed how the Navy was secretly programming large numbers of assassins. He said that the men he had worked with for the Navy were being prepared for commando-type operations, as well as covert operations in U.S. embassies worldwide. He described the men who went through his program as "hit men and assassins" who could kill on command.

Careful screening of the subjects was accomplished by Navy psychologists through the military records, and those who actually received assignments where their training could be utilized, were drawn mainly from submarine crews, the paratroops, and many were convicted murderers serving military prison sentences. Several men who had been awarded medals for bravery were drafted into the program.

The assassins were conditioned through "audio-visual desensitization". The process involved the showing of films of people being injured or killed in a variety of ways, starting with very mild depictions, leading up to the more extreme forms of mayhem. Eventually, the subjects would be able to detach their feelings even when viewing the most horrible of films. The conditioning was most successful when applied to "passive-aggressive" types, and most of these ended up being able to kill without any regrets. The prime indicator of violent tendencies was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Dr. Narut knew of two Navy programming centers, the neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego and the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Italy, where he worked.

During the audio-visual desensitization programming, restraints were used to force the subject to view the films. A device was used on the subjects eyelids to prevent him from blinking. Typically, the preliminary film was on an African youth being ritualistically circumcised with a dull knife and without any anesthetic. The second film showed a sawmill scene in which a man accidentally cut off his fingers.

In addition to the desensitization films, the potential assassins underwent programming to create prejudicial attitude in the men, to think of their future enemies, especially the leaders of these countries, as sub-human. Films and lectures were presented demeaning the culture and habits of the people of the countries where it had been decided they would be sent.

After his NATO lecture, Dr. Narut disappeared. He could not be located. Within a week of so after the lecture, the Pentagon issued an emphatic denial that the U.S. Navy had "engaged in psychological training or other types of training of personnel as assassins." They disavowed the programming centers in San Diego and Naples and stated they were unable to locate Narut, but did provide confirmation that he was a staff member of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples.

Dr. Alfred Zitani, an American delegate to the Oslo conference, did verify Narut's remarks and they were published in the Sunday Times.

Sometime later, Dr. Narut surfaced again in London and recanted his remarks, stating that he was "talking in theoretical and not practical terms." Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Naval headquarters in London issued a statement indicating that Dr. Narut's remarks at the NATO conference should be discounted because he had "personal problems". Dr. Narut never made any further public statements about the program.

During the NATO conference in Oslo, Dr. Narut had remarked that the reason he was divulging the information was because he believed that the information was coming out anyway. The doctor was referring to the disclosure by a Congressional subcommittee which were then appearing in the press concerning various CIA assassination plots. However, what Dr. Narut had failed to realize at the time, was that the Navy's assassination plots were not destined to be revealed to the public at that time.

(To be continued.)

Soviets, U.S. both using mind control methods

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Tenth in a Series

November 5, 1991

There were three scientists who pioneered the work of using an electromagnetic field to control human behavior. Their work began 25 years ago. These three were Dr. Jose Delgado, psychology professor at Yale University; Dr. W. Ross Adey, a physiologist at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA; and Dr. Wilder Penfield, a Canadian.

Dr. Penfield's experiments consisted of the implantation of electrodes deep into the cortexes of epilepsy patients who were to undergo surgery; he was able to drastically improve the memories of these patients through electrical stimulation. Dr. Adey implanted transmitters in the brains of cats and chimpanzees that could send signals to a receiver regarding the electrical activity of the brain; additional radio signals were sent back into the brains of the animals which modified their behavior at the direction of the doctor. Dr. Delgado was able to stop and turn a charging bull through the use of an implanted radio receiver.

Other experiments using platinum, gold and stainless steel electrode implants enabled researchers to induce total madness in cats, put monkeys into a stupor, or to set human beings jerking their arms up and down. Much of Delgado's work was financed by the CIA through phony funding conduits masking themselves as charitable organizations.

Following the successes of Delgado's work, the CIA set up their own research program in the field of electromagnetic behavior modification under the code name Sleeping Beauty. With the guidance of Dr. Ivor Browning, a laboratory was set up in New Mexico, specializing in working with the hypothalamus or "sweet spot" of the brain. Here it was found that stimulating this area could produce intense euphoria.

Dr. Browning was able to wire a radio receiver-amplifier into the "sweet spot" of a donkey which picked up a five-micro-amp signal, such that he could create intense happiness in the animal. Using the jolts of happiness as an "electronic carrot", Browning was able to send the donkey up a 2000 foot New Mexico mountain and back to its point of origin. When the donkey was proceeding up the path toward its destination, it was rewarded; when it deviated, the signal stopped. "You've never seen a donkey so eager to keep on course in your whole life," Dr. Browning exclaimed.

The CIA utilized the electronic carrot technique in getting trained pigeons to fly miniature microphone-transmitters to the ledge of a KGB safe house where the devices monitored conversations for months. There was a move within the CIA to conduct further experiments on humans, foreigners and prisoners, but officially the White House vetoed the idea as being unethical.

In May 1989, it was learned by the CIA that the KGB was subjecting people undergoing interrogation to electromagnetic fields, which produced a panic reaction, thereby bringing them closer to breaking down under questioning. The subjects were not told that they were being placed under the influence of these beams. A few years earlier, Dr. Ross Adey released photographs and a fact sheet concerning what he called the Russian Lida machine. This consisted of a small transmitter emitting 10-hertz waves which makes the subject susceptibile to hypnotic suggestion. The device utilized the outmoded vacuum-tube design. American POWs in Korea have indicated that similar devices had been used for interrogation purposes in POW camps.

The general, long term goal of the CIA was to find out whether or not mind control could be achieved through the use of a precise, external, electromagnetic beam. The electrical activity of the brain operates within the range of 100 hertz frequency. This spectrum is called ELF or Extremely Low Frequency range. ELF waves carry very little ionizing radiation and very low heat, and therefore do not manifest gross, observable physical effects on living organisms. Published Soviet experiments with ELFs reveal that there was a marked increase in psychiatric and central nervous system disorders and symptoms of stress for sailors working close to ELF generators.

In the mid-1970s, American interest in combining EMR techniques with hypnosis was very prominent. Plans were on file to develop these techniques through experiments on human volunteers. The spoken word of the hypnotist could be conveyed by modulated electromagnetic energy directly into the subconscious parts of the human brain without employing any technical devices for receiving or transacting the messages and without the person exposed to such influence having a chance to control the information input consciously.

In California, it was discovered by Dr. Adey that animal brain waves could be altered directly by ELF fields. It was found that monkey brains would fall in phase with ELF waves. These waves could easily pass through the skull, which normally protected the central nervous system from outside influence.

In San Leandro, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, director of Technic Research Laboratory, has been doing ELF/brain research with human subjects for some time. One of the frequencies produces nausea for more than an hour. Another frequency, she calls it the marijuana frequency, gets people laughing. "Give me the money and three months,"she says, "and I'll be able to affect the behavior of eighty percent of the people in this town without their knowing it."

In the past, the Soviet Union has invested large sums of time and money investigating microwaves. In 1952, while the Cold War was showing no signs of thawing, there was a secret meeting at the Sandia Corporation in New Mexico between U.S. and Soviet scientists involving the exchange of information regarding the biological hazards and safety levels of EMR. The Soviets possessed the greater preponderance of information, and the American scientists were unwilling to take it seriously. In subsequent meetings, the Soviet scientists continued to stress the seriousness of the risks, while American scientists downplayed their importance. Shortly after the last Sandia meeting, the Soviets began directing a microwave beam at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, using embassy workers as guinea pigs for low-level EMR experiments. Washington, D.C. was oddly quiescent, regarding the Moscow embassy bombardment. Discovered in 1962, the Moscow signal was investigated by the CIA, which hired a consultant, Milton Zaret, and code named the research Project Pandora. According to Zaret, the Moscow signal was composed of several frequencies, and was focussed precisely upon the Ambassador's office. The intensity of the bombardment was not made public, but when the State Department finally admitted the existence of the signal, it announced that it was fairly low.

There was consensus among Soviet EMR researchers that a beam such as the Moscow signal was destined to produced blurred vision and loss of mental concentration. The Boston Globe reported that the American ambassador had not only developed a leukemia-like blood disease, but also suffered from bleeding eyes and chronic headaches. Under the CIA's Project Pandora, monkeys were brought into the embassy and exposed to the Moscow signal; they were found to have developed blood composition anomalies and unusual chromosome counts. Embassy personnel were found to have a 40 percent higher than average white blood cell count. While Operation Pandora's data gathering proceeded, embassy personnel continued working in the facility and were not informed of the bombardment until 10 years later. Embassy employees were eventually granted a 20 percent hardship allowance for their service in an unhealthful post. Throughout the period of bombardment, the CIA used the opportunity to gather data on psychological and biological effects of the beam on American personnel.

The U.S. government began to examine the affects of the Moscow signal. The job was turned over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is now developing electromagnetic weaponry. The man in charge of the DARPA program, Dr. Jack Verona, is so important and so secretive that he doesn't even return President George Bush's telephone calls.

(To be continued.)

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Eleventh in a Series

Friday, November 8, 1991

The American public was never informed that the military had planned to develop electromagnetic weapons until 1982, when the revelation appeared in a technical Air Force magazine.

The magazine article stated, "....specifically generated radio-frequency radiation (RFR) fields may pose powerful and revolutionary anti-personnel military trends." The article indicated that that it would be very easy to use electromagnetic fields to disrupt the human brain because the brain, itself, was an electrically mediated organ. Iftfurther indicated that a rapidly scanning RFR system would have a stunning or killing capability over a large area. The system was developable.

Navy Captain Dr. Paul E. Taylor read a paper at the Air University Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Dr. Taylor was responsible for the Navy's Radiation Laboratory and had been studying radiation effects on humans. In his paper, Dr. Taylor stated, "The ability of individuals to function (as soldiers) could be degraded to such a point that would be combat ineffective." The system was so sophisticated that it employed microwaves and millimeter waves and was transportable by a large truck.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the South Bay, are working on the development of a "brain bomb". A bomb could be dropped in the middle of a battlefield which would produce microwaves, incapacitating the minds of soldiers within a circumscribed area.

Applications of microwave technology in espionage were available for over 25 years. In a meeting in Berkeley of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as early as 1965, Professor J. Anthony Deutsch of New York University, provided an important segment of research in the field of memory control. In layman terms, Professor Deutsch indicated that the mind is a transmitter and if too much information is received, like too many vehicles on a crowded freeway, the brain ceases to transmit. The Professor indicated that an excess of acetyl choline in the brain can interfere with the memory process and control. He indicated excess amounts of acetyl choline can be artificially produced, through both the administration of drugs or through the use of radio waves. The process is called Electronic Dissolution of Memory (EDOM). The memory transmission can be stopped for as long as the radio signal continues.

As a result, the awareness of the person skips over those minutes during which he is subjected to the radio signal. Memory is distorted, and time-orientation is destroyed.

According to Lincoln Lawrence, author of Were We Controlled, EDOM is now operational. "There is already in use a small EDOM generator/transmitter which can be concealed on the body of the person. Contact with this person, a casual handshake or even just a touch, transmits a tiny electronic charge plus an ultra-sonic signal tone which for a short period will disturb the time-orientation of the person affected....it can be a potent weapon for hopelessly confusing evidence in the investigation of a crime."

Thirty years ago, Allen Frey discovered that microwaves of 300 to 3000 megahertz could be "heard" by people, even if they were deaf, if pulsed at a certain rate. Appearing to be originating just in back of the head, the sound boomed, clicked, hissed or buzzed, depending upon the frequency. Later research has shown that the perception of the waves take place just in front of the ears. The microwaves causes pressure waves in the brain tissue, and this phenomenon vibrates the sound receptors in the inner ear through the bone structure. Some microwaves are capable of directly stimulating the nerve cells of the auditory pathways. This has been confirmed with experiments with rats, in which the sound registers 120 decibels, which is equal to the volume of a nearby jet during takeoff. Aside from having the capability of causing pain and preventing auditory communication, a more subtle effect was demonstrated at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research by Dr. Joseph C. Sharp. Dr. Sharp, himself, was the subject of an experiment in which pulsed microwave audiograms, or the microwave analog of the sound vibrations of spoken words, were delivered to his brain in such a way that he was able to understand the words that were spoken. Military and undercover uses of such a device might include driving a subject crazy with inner voices in order to discredit him, or conveying undetectable instructions to a programmed assassin.

But the technology has been carried even a step further. It has been demonstrated by Dr. Ross Adey that microwaves can be used to directly bring about changes in the electrical patterns of different parts of the brain. His experiments showed that he could achieve the same mind control over animals as Dr. Delgado did in the bull incident. Dr. Delgado used brain implants in his animals, Dr. Adey used microwave devices without preconditioning. He made animals act and look like electronic toys.

(Conclusion next week.)

Mind control origins found in Nazi Germany

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Twelfth in a Series

Tuesday, November 19, 1991

At the conclusion of World War Two, American investigators learned that Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany had been conducting mind control experiments on inmates. They experimented with hypnosis and with the drug mescaline.

Mescaline is a quasi-synthetic extract of the peyote cactus, and is very similar to LSD in the hallucinations which it produces. Though they did not achieve the degree of success they had desired, the SS interrogators in conjunction with the Dachau doctors were able to extract the most intimate secrets from the prisoners when the inmates were given very high doses of mescaline.

There were fatal mind control experiments conducted at Auschwitz. The experiments there were described by one informant as "brainwashing with chemicals". The informant said the Gestapo wasn't satisfied with extracting information by torture. "So the next question was, why don't we do it like the Russians, who have been able to get confessions of guilt at their show trials?" They tried various barbiturates and morphine derivatives. After prisoners were fed a coffee-like substance, two of them died in the night and others died later.

The Dachau mescaline experiments were written up in a lengthy report issued by the U.S. Naval Technical Mission, whose job it was at the conclusion of the war to scour all of Europe for every shred of industrial and scientific material that had been produced by the Third Reich. It was as a result of this report that the U.S. Navy became interested in mescaline as an interrogation tool. The Navy initiated Project Chatter in 1947, the same year the Central Intelligence Agency was formed. The Chatter format included developing methods for acquiring information from people against their will, but without inflicting harm or pain.

At the conclusion of the war, the OSS was designated as the investigative unit for the International Military Tribunal, which was to become known as the Nuremberg Trials. The purpose of Nuremberg was to try the principal Nazi leaders. Some Nazis were on trial for their experiments, and the U.S. was using its own "truth drugs" on these principal Nazi prisoners, namely Goring, Ribbentrop, Speer and eight others. The Justice in charge of the tribunal had given the OSS permission to use the drugs.

The Dachau doctors who performed the mescaline experiments also were involved in aviation medicine. The aviation experiments at Dachau fascinated Heinrich Himmler. Himmler followed the progress of the tests, studied their findings and often suggested improvements. The Germans had a keen interest in several medical problems in the field of flying, they were interested in preventing pilots from slowly becoming unconscious as a result of breathing the thin air of the high altitudes and there was interest in enhancing night vision.

The main research in this area was at the Institute of Aviation in Munich, which had excellent laboratories. The experiments in relationship to the Institute were conducted at Dachau. Inmates had been immersed in tubs of ice water with instruments placed in their orifices in order to monitor their painful deaths. Dr. Hubertus Strughold, who ran the German aviation medicine team, confirmed that he had heard humans were used for the Dachau experiments. Hidden in a cave in Hallein were files recording the Dachau experiments.

On May 15, 1941, Dr. Sigmund Rascher wrote a letter to Himmler requesting permission to use the Dachau inmates for experiments on the physiology of high altitudes. Rascher lamented the fact that no such experiments have been done using human subjects. "The experiments are very dangerous and we cannot attract volunteers," he told Himmler. His request was approved.

Dachau was filled with Communists and Social Democrats, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, clergymen, homosexuals, and people critical of the Nazi government. Upon entering Dachau, prisoners lost all legal status, their hair was shaved off, all their possessions confiscated, they were poorly fed, and they were used as slaves for both the corporations and the government. The SS guards were brutal and sadistic. The idea to test subjects at Dachau was really the brain child of Erich Hippke, chief surgeon of the Luftwaffe.

Between March and August of 1942 extensive experiments were conducted at Dachau regarding the limits of human endurance at high altitudes. These experiments were conducted for the benefit of the German Air Force. The experiments took place in a low-pressure chamber in which altitudes of up to 68,000 feet could be simulated. The subjects were placed in the chamber and the altitude was raised, many inmates died as a result. The survivors often suffered serious injury. One witness at the Nuremberg trails, Anton Pacholegg, who was sent to Dachau in 1942, gave an eyewitness account of the typical pressure test:

"The Luftwaffe delivered a cabinet constructed of wood and metal. It was possible in the cabinet to either decrease or increase the air pressure. You could observe through a little window the reaction of the subject inside the chamber. The purpose of these experiments was to test human energy and the subject's capacity...to take large amounts of pure oxygen, and then to test his reaction to a gradual decrease in oxygen. I have personally seen through the observation window of the chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungs ruptured. Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure in their eardrums. These cases of extreme vacuums generally ended in the death of the subjects." The former prisoner also testified, "An extreme experiment was so certain to result in death that in many instances the chamber was used for routine execution purposes rather than an experiment." A minimum 200 prisoners were known to have died in these experiments.

The doctors directly involved with the research held very high positions: Karl Brandt was Hitler's personal doctor; Oskar Schroeder was the Chief of the Medical Services of the Luftwaffe; Karl Gebhardt was Chief Surgeon on the Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police and German Red Cross President; Joachim Mrugowsky was Chief of the Hygienic Institute of the Waffen SS; Helmut Poppendick was a senior colonel in the SS and Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reich Physicians SS and Police; Siegfried Ruff was Director of the Department of Aviation Medicine.

The first human guinea pig was a 37 year old Jew in good health. Himmler invited 40 top Luftwaffe officers to view a movie of an inmate dying in the pressure chamber. After the pressure chamber tests, the cold treatment experiments began. The experiments consisted of immersing inmates in freezing water while their vital signs were monitored. The goal was to discover the cause of death. Heart failure was the answer. An inmate described the procedures:

"The basins were filled with water and ice was added until the water measured 37.4 F and the experimental subjects were either dressed in a flying suit or were placed in the water naked. The temperature was measured rectally and through the stomach. The lowering of the body temperature to 32 degrees was terrible for experimental subjects. At 32 degrees the subject lost consciousness. They were frozen to 25 degrees. The worst experiment was performed on two Russian officer POWs. They were placed in the basin naked. Hour after hour passed, and while usually after a short time, 60 minutes, freezing had set in, these two Russians were still conscious after two hours. After the third hour one Russian told the other, 'Comrade, tell that officer to shoot us.' The other replied, 'Don't expect any mercy from this Fascist dog.' Then they shook hands and said goodbye. The experiment lasted at least five hours until death occurred.

Dry freezing experiments were also carried out a Dachau. One subject was put outdoors on a stretcher at night when it was extremely cold. While covered with a linen sheet, a bucket of cold water was poured over him every hour. He was kept outdoors undersub-freezing conditions. In subsequent experiments, subjects were simply left outside naked in a court under freezing conditions for hours. Himmler gave permission to move the experiments to Auschwitz, because it was more private and because the subjects of the experiment would howl all night as they froze. The physical pain of freezing was terrible. The subjects died by inches, heartbeat became totally irregular, breathing difficulties and lung endema resulted, hands and feet became frozen white."

As the Germans began to lose the war, the aviation doctors began too keep their names from appearing in Himmler's files for fear of future recriminations.

(To be concluded Friday.)

America made it to the moon with Dachau research

By Harry V. Martin and David Caul

Last of a Thirteen Part Series

Friday, November 22, 1991

The Nazi doctors who experimented on the inmates of prison camps during World War Two were tried for murder at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The accused were educated, trained physicians, they did not kill in anger or in malice, they were creating a science of death.

Ironically, in 1933, the Nazi's passed a law for the protection of animals. The law cited the prevention of cruelty and indifference to animals as one of the highest moral values of a people, animal experimentation was unthinkable, but human experimentations were acceptable. The victims of the crime of these doctors numbered into the thousands.

In 1953, while the Central Intelligence Agency was still conducting mind control and behavior modification on unwitting humans in this country, the United States signed the Nuremberg Code, a code born out of the ashes of war and human suffering. The document was a solemn promise never to tolerate such human atrocities again. The Code maintains three fundamental principles:

The subjects of any experimentation must be volunteers who thoroughly understand the purpose and the dangers of the experiments. They must be free to give consent and the consent must be without pressure and they must be free to quit the experiments at any time.
The experiments must be likely to yield knowledge which is valuable to everyone. The knowledge must be such that it could not be gained in any other way.
The experiments must be conducted by only the most competent doctors, and they must exercise extreme care.

The Nazi aviation experiments met none of these conditions. Most inmates at Dachau knew that the experiments in the pressure chamber were fatal. >From the very beginning, control of the experiments was largely in the hands of the SS, which was later judged to be a criminal organization by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Despite our lessons from Nuremberg and the death camps, the CIA, U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps targeted specific groups of people for experimentation who were not able to resist, prisoners, mental patients, foreigners, ethnic minorities, sex deviants, the terminally ill, children and U.S. military personnel and prisoners of war. They violated the Nuremberg Code for conducting and subsidizing experiments on unwitting citizens. The CIA began its mind control projects in 1953, the very year that the U.S. signed the Nuremberg Code and pledged with the international community of nations to respect basic human rights and to prohibit experimentation on captive populations without full and free consent.

Dr. Cameron, a CIA operative, was one of the worst offenders against the Code, yet he was a member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, with full knowledge of its testimony. In 1973, a three judge court in Michigan ruled, "...experimental psychosurgery, which is irreversible and intrusive, often leads to the blunting of emotions, the deadening of memory, the reduction of affect, and limits the ability to generate new ideas. Its potential for injury to the creativity of the individual is great and can infringe on the right of the individual to be free from interference with his mental process.

"The state's interest in performing psychosurgery and the legal ability of the involuntarily detained mental patient to give consent, must bow to the First Amendment, which protects the generation and free flow of ideas from unwarranted interference with one's mental processes." Citing the Nuremberg Code, the court found that "the very nature of the subject's incarceration diminishes the capacity to consent to psychosurgery." In 1973, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted regulations which would require informed written consent from voluntary patients before electroshock treatment could be performed.

Senator Sam Ervin's Committee lashed out bitterly at the mind control and behavior modification experiments and ordered them discontinued, they were not. But the New England Journal of Medicine states, that the consent provisions are "no more than an elaborate ritual." They called it "a device that when the subject is uneducated and uncomprehending, confers no more than a semblance of propriety on human experimentation."

The Nuremberg Tribunal brought to light that some of the most respected figures in the medical profession were involved in the vast crime network of the SS. Only 23 persons were charged with criminal activity in this area, despite the fact that hundreds of medical personnel were involved. The defendants were charged with crimes against humanity. They were found guilty of planning and executing experiments on humans without their consent, in a cruel and brutal manner which involved severe torture, deliberate murder and with the full knowledge of the gravity of their deeds. Only seven of the defendants were sentenced to death and hanged, others received life sentences. Five who were involved in the experiments were not tried. Ernest Grawitz committed suicide, Carl Clauberg was tried in the Soviet Union, Josef Mengele escaped to South America and was later captured by Israeli agents, Horst Schumann disappeared and Siegmund Rascher was executed by Himmler.

There were 200 German medical doctors conducting these medical experiments. Most of these doctors were friends of the United States before the war, and despite their inhuman experiments, the U.S. attempted to rebuild a relationship with them after the war. The knowledge the Germans had accumulated at the expense of human life and suffering, was considered a "booty of war", by the Americans and the Russians.The Americans tracked down Dr. Strughold, the aviation doctor who was in charge of the Dachau experiments. With full knowledge that the experiments were conducted on captive humans, the U.S. recruited the doctors to work for them. General Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his personal approval to exploit the work and research of the Nazi's in the death camps.

Within weeks of Eisenhower's order, many of these notorious doctors were working for the U.S. Army at Heidelberg. Army teams scoured Europe for scientific experimental apparatus such as pressure chambers, compressors, G-force machines, giant centrifuges, and electron microscopes. These doctors were wined and dined by the U.S. Army while most of Germany's post-war citizens virtually starved.

The German doctors were brought to the U.S. and went to work for Project Paperclip. All these doctors had been insulated against war crime charges. The Nuremberg prosecutors were shocked that U.S. authorities were using the German doctors despite their criminal past.

Under the leadership of Strughold, 34 scientists accepted contracts from Project Paperclip, and were moved to Randolph Air Force Base at San Antonio, Texas. The authorization to hire these Nazi scientists came directly for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The top military brass stated that they wished to exploit these rare minds. Project Paperclip, ironically, would use Nazi doctors to develop methods of interrogating German prisoners of war.

As hostilities began to build after the war between the Americans and the Russians, the U.S. imported as many as 1000 former Nazi scientists.

In 1969, Americans landed on the moon, and two groups of scientist in the control center shared the credit, the rocket team from Peenemunde, Germany, under the leadership of Werner von Braun, these men had perfected the V-2s which were built in the Nordhausen caves where 20,000 slave laborers from prison camp Dora had been worked to death. The second group were the space doctors, lead by 71-year-old Dr. Hubertus Strughold, whose work was pioneered in Experimental Block No. 5 of the Dachau concentration camp and the torture and death of hundreds of inmates. The torture chambers that was used to slowly kill the prisoners of the Nazi's were the test beds for the apparatus that protected Neil Armstrong from harm, from lack of oxygen, and pressure, when he walked on the moon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Napa Sentinel would like to acknowledge the exceptional contribution of radio commentator David Emory and his extensive archives. Other source material included:

From the Belly of the Beast, Jack Henry Abbott

Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118, Feb. 24, 1974, testimony of Jose Delgado

The Glass House Tapes, by Louis Tackwood

The Great Heroin Coup, by Henrik Kruger

Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, 1974. Sam Ervin Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional 'Rights

The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan, by Anthony Cave Brown

Mind Control, by Peter Schrag

The Mind Stealers, by Samuel Chavkin

Matador with a radio stops wild bull, New York Times, May 17, 1965

Operation Mind Control, Water Bowart

The Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine

The Physical Control of the Mind, Jose M. R. Delgado, MD

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred McCoy

Role of Brain Disease in Riots and urban Violence, by Vernon H. Mark, Frank R. Ervin, and William H. Sweet. Journal of the American Medical Association, September 11, 1967.

San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 28, 1991

Convict Talks of 1984 Arms Talks With Iran, San Francisco Chronicle, December 29, 1986

San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 1973

Guy Wright Column, San Francisco Chronicle, July 5, 1987

Sunday Times, July 1975.

Violence and the Brain, by Vernon H. Mark and Frank R. Ervin

War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, by Peter Watson

Were We Controlled? - by Lincoln Lawrence

Why Was Patricia Hearst Kidnapped? - by Mae Brussell, The Realist.

SOURCE: Free America

You Tell Me Please

2006-12-05T05:25:00.000-05:00

One of the first hypotheses one must entertain when checking into items like this is that of fraud. I have included this video here because of the implications were it determined to be legitimate. There are those who say that there is an oft unheard of aspect to HAARP and that it is as a weapon. Some maintain that this aspect of the program is called Shiva. What we seem to see below, is something making its way across the sky of the Earth, well out of its atmosphere, and this object seems to flee as soon as a subtle flash can be discerned in the atmosphere below. A few seconds after the flash, a stream of energy of some sort seems to emerge from Earth's atmosphere, as if aimed at where the object had been at the time of the flash. It is alleged that this is NASA footage.

Who knows?

For your information, here is Wikipedia's entry on HAARP.

NAVY MIND CONTROL

2006-12-04T08:10:00.000-05:00

The following came to me in an email from the Federation of American Scientists:

U.S. Navy research on "mind control techniques" cannot be performed on human subjects without the authorization of the Under Secretary of the Navy, according to a new Navy Instruction.

"The Under Secretary of the Navy (UNSECNAV) is the Approval Authority for research involving ... severe or unusual intrusions, either physical or psychological, on human subjects (such as consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques)."

The nature and scope of any such Navy research could not be immediately discovered.

There is more here.

MI6 Pays Out Over Secret LSD Mind Control Tests

2006-12-04T06:16:00.000-05:00

by Rob Evans

The Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has paid thousands of pounds in compensation to servicemen who were fed LSD without their consent in clandestine mind-control experiments in the 1950s. MI6 has agreed an out-of-court settlement with the men, who said they were duped into taking part in the experiments and had waited years to learn the truth.

The men experienced vivid hallucinogenic trips when given the drugs. One recalled seeing distorted "Salvador Dali-style faces and cracks in people's faces". MI6 is also paying the cost of the men's lawsuit, which alleged assault.

Don Webb, a former airman, said yesterday: "I feel vindicated; this has been a classic cover-up for years. They took a liberty."

The LSD experiments were conducted in 1953 and 1954 by scientists working for MI6 who were trying to discover a "truth drug" to compel prisoners to confess.

MI6, then led by Sir John Sinclair, was worried that the Russians had a secret drug to brainwash cold war enemies. The service had seen captured American servicemen confessing to "crimes" during the Korean war and calling for a US surrender. A Hungarian dissident had admitted to crimes he did not commit.

MI6's counterparts at the CIA also did LSD experiments on men without their knowledge to try to control their minds. Both agencies finally concluded that LSD could not be used to manipulate people.

One scientist involved in the trials wrote that the experiments were "stopped ... when it was reported that in a few people it might produce suicidal tendencies". The trials were described as "tentative and inadequately controlled" in one official document.

The amount of compensation paid to three servicemen in the lawsuit is not being disclosed by MI6 or the men; Alan Care, the men's lawyer, called it modest.

One man did not wish to be named. But Mr Webb and a former Royal Navy radio operator, Eric Gow, were 19 when they volunteered to take part in what they believed was research to find a cure for colds. They were sent to the chemical warfare research establishment at Porton Down, Wiltshire. Both said they were not told beforehand that they were going to be tested with LSD. At the time, the effects of LSD, only discovered in 1943, were unknown to the general public.

Mr Webb said scientists gave him LSD at least twice in a week. He remembers a nightmarish experience when he hallucinated for a long time. He saw "walls melting, cracks appearing in people's faces ... eyes would run down cheeks, Salvador Dali-type faces ... a flower would turn into a slug".

He said he had first made inquiries about the experiments in the 1960s but was "blanked by the government, which quoted the Official Secrets Act". He said he experienced flashbacks for 10 years after the experiments.

Mr Gow said the scientists acted in an "irresponsible and sloppy" way and had not properly monitored him. "They treated us just like guinea pigs. They did not know what was going to happen."

One morning, Mr Gow began to trip on LSD, seeing a radiator moving "like a squeezebox". He was still hallucinating when later he went dancing with his wellingtons on. Yesterday, he said: "I am glad they have finally admitted it."

A Foreign Office spokeswoman, speaking for MI6, said last night: "Settlement offers were made to the government on behalf of the three claimants which, on legal advice ... the government thought it appropriate to accept."

SOURCE: Guardian Unlimited

Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon

2006-11-21T20:38:00.000-05:00

By Andrew Walker
BBC News

Sixty years ago the US hired Nazi scientists to lead pioneering projects, such as the race to conquer space. These men provided the US with cutting-edge technology which still leads the way today, but at a cost.

The end of World War II saw an intense scramble for Nazi Germany's many technological secrets. The Allies vied to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble of the Thousand Year Reich for themselves, while preventing others from doing the same.

The range of Germany's technical achievement astounded Allied scientific intelligence experts accompanying the invading forces in 1945.

Wernher von Braun: Nasa icon and former SS officer

Supersonic rockets, nerve gas, jet aircraft, guided missiles, stealth technology and hardened armour were just some of the groundbreaking technologies developed in Nazi laboratories, workshops and factories, even as Germany was losing the war.

And it was the US and the Soviet Union which, in the first days of the Cold War, found themselves in a race against time to uncover Hitler's scientific secrets.

In May 1945, Stalin's legions secured the atomic research labs at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the suburbs of Berlin, giving their master the kernel of what would become the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal.

US forces removed V-2 missiles from the vast Nordhausen complex, built under the Harz Mountains in central Germany, just before the Soviets took over the factory, in what would become their area of occupation. And the team which had built the V-2, led by Wernher von Braun, also fell into American hands.

Crimes

Shortly afterwards Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe, wrote: "Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research.

"If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited."

Thus began Project Paperclip, the US operation which saw von Braun and more than 700 others spirited out of Germany from under the noses of the US's allies. Its aim was simple: "To exploit German scientists for American research and to deny these intellectual resources to the Soviet Union."

Arthur Rudolph: "100% Nazi"

Events moved rapidly. President Truman authorised Paperclip in August 1945 and, on 18 November, the first Germans reached America.

There was, though, one major problem. Truman had expressly ordered that anyone found "to have been a member of the Nazi party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazism militarism" would be excluded.

Under this criterion even von Braun himself, the man who masterminded the Moon shots, would have been ineligible to serve the US. A member of numerous Nazi organisations, he also held rank in the SS. His initial intelligence file described him as "a security risk".

And von Braun's associates included:

Arthur Rudolph, chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000 slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles. Led the team which built the Saturn V rocket. Described as "100 per cent Nazi, dangerous type".
Kurt Debus, rocket launch specialist, another SS officer. His report stated: "He should be interned as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces."
Hubertus Strughold, later called "the father of space medicine", designed Nasa's on-board life-support systems. Some of his subordinates conducted human "experiments" at Dachau and Auschwitz, where inmates were frozen and put into low-pressure chambers, often dying in the process.

All of these men were cleared to work for the US, their alleged crimes covered up and their backgrounds bleached by a military which saw winning the Cold War, and not upholding justice, as its first priority.

And the paperclip which secured their new details in their personnel files gave the whole operation its name. Sixty years on, the legacy of Paperclip remains as vital as ever.

With its radar-absorbing carbon impregnated plywood skin and swept-back single wing, the 1944 Horten Ho 229 was arguably the first stealth aircraft.

The Stealth bomber: Based on a 1944 German design

The US military made one available to Northrop Aviation, the company which would produce the $2bn B-2 Stealth bomber - to all intents and purposes a modern clone of the Horten - a generation later.

Cruise missiles are still based on the design of the V-1 missile and the scramjets powering Nasa's state-of-the-art X-43 hypersonic aircraft owe much to German jet pioneers.

Added to this, the large number of still-secret Paperclip documents has led many people, including Nick Cook, Aerospace Consultant at Jane's Defence Weekly, to speculate that the US may have developed even more advanced Nazi technology, including anti-gravity devices, a potential source of vast amounts of free energy.

Cook says that such technology "could be so destructive that it would endanger world peace and the US decided to keep it secret for a long time".

But, while celebrating the undoubted success of Project Paperclip, many will prefer to remember the thousands who died to send mankind into space.

SOURCE: BBC

The Occult, Flying Saucers, and the Third Reich

2006-11-11T08:47:00.000-05:00

Propaganda, the Media, and Education

2006-11-05T22:16:00.000-05:00

What the New Zogby Poll Tells Us about Propaganda, the Media, and Education
by Michael D. Morrissey, June 2006

The second Zogby poll commissioned by 911truth.org, this one nationwide, allows a number of revealing conclusions, despite its failure to ask the crucial question of complicity that showed in the first (August 2004) poll that 49.3% of New York City dwellers, and 40.9% throughout the state, agreed that “some leaders in the U.S. government knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to take action.”

Nevertheless, the re-wording of the question about WTC 7 in the second poll and the inclusion of a question about media performance, as well as the addition of the category of “educational level” in the statistical breakdown, provide a useful illustration of the relationship between the mainstream press, education, and the propaganda function of both in America today on issues of political importance.

The propaganda function of “the news” is easily demonstrated. People were asked how they would rate “the US media’s performance regarding 9/11.” 42.8% thought the coverage was good or excellent.

The question about WTC 7 was worded more felicitously than in the first poll (where people were asked to give the number of the “third skyscraper”):

World Trade Center Building 7 is the 47-story skyscraper that was not hit by any planes during the September 11th attacks, but still totally collapsed later the same day. This collapse was not investigated by the 9/11 Commission. Are you aware of this skyscraper's collapse, and if so do you believe that the Commission should have also investigated it? Or do you believe that the Commission was right to only investigate the collapse of the buildings which were directly hit by airplanes?

42.6% answered that they were “unaware of WTC 7 collapse.”

There is a startlingly exact correspondence, then, between the number of people who were positively impressed by the media coverage of 9/11 and the number who were unaware of the collapse of WTC 7, namely 43%! This is also very close to the number who think there has been a cover-up of “critical evidence” by the government and the Commission: 42.3%.

These figures become even more interesting when broken down for educational level. Although people in the lowest category (no high school diploma) were least likely to know about WTC 7, in the three higher categories the lack of knowledge is directly proportional to educational level: Only 38.6% of high schools grads were unaware of the collapse of WTC 7, but 43.2% with some college, and 43% with college degrees or higher, were unaware of this important fact!

Exactly the reverse is true of the belief that the investigation is a cover-up. 55.5% of those without a high school education suspect a cover-up, but only 47.5% with a high school diploma, 35.5% with some college, and a mere 33.7% with a college degree or more “believe that the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks.”

In other words, the higher the level of education, the less likely people are to know about WTC 7, and the more likely they are to believe the government is telling the truth about 9/11.

It would be hard to find a more convincing illustration of the propaganda function of formal education—much of it, in any case, as Noam Chomsky has said:

There are huge efforts that do go into making people, to borrow Adam Smith's phrase, "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be." A lot of the educational system is designed for that, if you think about it, it's designed for obedience and passivity. [Interview with David Barsamian, excerpted from Class Warfare, 1995, pp. 19-23, 27-31, and reprinted here.]

SOURCE: Michael D. Morrissey

Also see The Logical Reconstruction of Reality

2006-11-04T23:04:00.000-05:00

Reclaim Your Mind

Psychological Harm Means Iraqis Suffer 'Double Blow'

2006-11-04T21:24:00.000-05:00

By Kim Sengupta

The people of Iraq are facing a "double blow" in an epidemic of psychological damage being caused by the continuing violence, it was claimed in the British Medical Journal yesterday.

The sheer numbers killed since the invasion is a pointer to the huge proportion of people who would have been exposed to severe violence, Dr Michael E Reschen wrote.

Previous studies have shown that the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder following a traumatic event ranged from 7.5 per cent to 72 per cent, with the risk highest in those exposed to sustained combat trauma.

Dr Reschen, of the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, writes in the BMJ: "With over 500,000 violent deaths there will no doubt have been many more people exposed to grave violence.

"It therefore seems likely that the nation of Iraq may suffer a double blow, firstly by losing a sizeable proportion of its population - and the study shows that 15-45 year olds are most commonly affected - and secondly by the serious consequence of people with post-traumatic stress disorder. This may also be compounded by cultural barriers that prevent people from seeking psychological help."

Dr Reschen pointed out that while the coalition forces' medical facilities have been used to treat injured civilians in Iraq, nothing similar has been done for those suffering mental illness.

"We must learn the lessons of history and expedite the psychiatric help for Iraqi civilians," he added.

Dr Reschen is the latest medical figure to point out the psychological cost being incurred in Iraq. Dr Majid al-Yassiri, the chairman of the London-based Centre for Psychosocial Services in Iraq, has said: "Children in particular are showing behavioural problems and depression at a higher rate than one would expect in a population this size - three times as high. The impact of torture, war, continuous trauma and bereavement will take its toll on families."

Dr Yassiri said many Iraqis were reluctant to admit to mental health problems. "There is a stigma. Women in particular are less likely to seek help unless they become psychotic or suicidal, because of the fear of being seen as mad and not being able to marry," he said.

Iraq's largest psychological hospital, which had more than 1,500 beds, was destroyed in the war. Another hospital has a psychological unit but it has only two doctors.

SOURCE: The U.K.'s Independent

Also see Shock & Awe Revisited