The Dirtbag

 

             

The Dirtbag

          One could suggest that the road to enlightenment begins as we step on to the road of the metaself, and upon this road, each step being a fresh invention, begins where language leaves off.

                         This linguistic tautology has long been recognized not the least in the recent century by Ludwig Wittgenstein who ended his Treatise (Tractatus ) into Language with the famous admonition that where words are inadequate one must remain silent. I've elaborated on this at times by suggesting that if all knowledge is language and in turn all language is a metaphor, you could place that into a circularity by saying that all metaphor relies upon some knowledge to give it form, and that knowledge is linguistic, and so on.Ultimately in this view language is a treadmill

At the very least however these common, axiomatic understandings leave us in a unknowable universe. Fortunately most of us are not philosophers and so we can disregard the fact of own possible non existence.

The great questions of humanity seem always somehow to be directed at God. Perhaps all our questions can be reduced to one. If you were so interested in creating us- why have you become to damnably indifferent to us after our births? Or in other words why is there no proof you exist? (Then again there's no proof of life on other planets yet some scientists insist the odds are there is.)

To this question I have no answer, so I shall pose another –

“Why do we have words and thoughts we are unable to think?“ One answer may surprise you. In actually these forbidden words can be spoken, but only by certain people in certain rarefied conditions.

Plus people can get used to things.

If you or I, were we to come home and find a dead body strewn over the living room table we would be, to say the least surprised, But a mortician seeing the same thing might just decide that he was in for some overtime - which is to say he or she would be immune to the queasy feeling that most of us have in the presence of the dead.

That in the case of a loved one of the mortician this would be a different story is certainly the case.

In the same way the so called forbidden words, or taboo words in any given society can be experienced without revulsion by almost anyone, given sufficient exposure. This then allows us to ask “What is it about the forbidden words or ideas that makes them so. The immediate suggestion is that they threaten the world view of the individual, which in turn is a creation of the world view of their society.

In a related instance the power of humor comes from it's ability to suggest that what we ordinarily take for granted is not. Sometimes these things revolve around ethnic stereotypes and commonly they have to do with notions of cleanliness . The laughter arises when we realize that what “everyone” takes for granted is nonsense.

And furthermore if you are “not in on the joke” then it is not uncommon for you to find the humor offensive, whether it be about Californians and light bulbs or Poles and wash clothes. The other face of laughter is not sorrow – it is anger and both laughter and anger are products of aggression temporarily placed on hold.

It's possible that given set circumstances one could easily suggest that said aggression was a good thing. In that case anything that siphoned off the aggression (or hatred), was not to be desired.

We have, after all, “the selfish gene” theory which argues persuasively that when all is said and done it is the actuality of our accomplishments that must be the criteria of judgment of a life s accomplishment.

It can be a bit cold – like suggesting that since the rapist tends to leave a greater impact on a gene pool that rape, while being socially ostracized is actually a positive thing. To my mind there are enough people arguing from this perspective of “nature red in tooth and jaw” and quite often the logic is flawed, either that or as in the case of Spencers social statics it assumes that what is at any given moment is a indicator of some unquestionable social hierarchy.

Or, to restate the last sentence “Wealth is given to good people and I am wealthy therefore I am good and therefore I deserve to be wealthy”

I am not interested in arguing the above the question. What I would like to inquire into is the question as to why certain things or words develop taboos. The answer I suggest is that the mind likes comfortable definitions. Descartes says something is true when it is clear and distinct. By distinct he means the borders, or boundaries between it and other things are well defined.

An interesting suggestion (and one that is not original with myself) is some of the taboo words in societies are so because they blur the boundaries. And specifically they blur the boundaries between life and death. These are the terms that go from mildly repulsive, such as cut hair and fingernails, through the products of excrement, such as sweat, feces and urine to blood and semen, which have the highest taboos..

Because I use the acceptable terms for these things they probably won't offend as much as otherwise. The point ought to be clear though that pejoratives, obscenities, curse words and the like are directed at others as a means of focusing harm on them, The late George Carlin, a stand up comic, and needless to say a lapsed catholic made a consistent part of his act the words forbidden by law being understood to provoke hostility.

I jest that both Manfred Sakel and Sigmund Freud began in the respective fields of neurology. Freud invented psychotherapy and the lesser know Sakel invented insulin shock therapy. As neurologists they were safe from harm because they could cloak themselves in academic verbiage. It was only later that they were run out of town.

          In any case I seem to have inverted the experimental process by suggesting that verbal usage in these cases is accompanied by neuronal changes. The key to my suggestion is that what cause the pain or frisson of the concepts is not so much the concepts themselves as it is the lack of relation ship to the context.

Dante places some sinners in a ocean of shit, unpleasant yes but worse it would be if were one to be given the task of removing the remnants of an ice cream cone deposited in such an ocean. That after all would require work. Just a reminder; In real life not every, lets say Hula Girl is a vision of loveliness and were to seek such a vision one would go through some effort - where as for the cliche ridden schlock songwriter all hula girls are lovely svelt and sway softly neath tropical moons.

To further elaborate this idea I will use two expressions of limited groups but first a word about the grotesque. Briefly late Roman Empire households were often confined to the house, or villa, because of violence, disease and crime in the street. A form of painting grew up in this hidden zones, dogs with the head of cabbages, fish with fruit growing out their anus, ten legged cows and such. The empire fell, the dark ages came and these paintings where lost for a thousand years until the Renaissance when they were rediscovered in the grottoes neath Rome – Hence the term grotesque.

The important thing to consider is that the elements of the paintings were acceptable – it was the way they were put together that repelled us, much like Thalidomide babies with their heads in the chest and a arms growing out of legs.

Part of our aversion is conditioning. The acceptance or rejection of sexual mores is one classic case, like slavery and monarchy, homosexuality varies from society to society.

Also terms like conservative or liberal are not of much use in some societies the madman is tolerated or even worshiped - in others he is put to death.

The Rastafarian tribe are transplanted Africans on The Caribbean island of Jamaica. Like some other captive populations the descendents of the original diaspora adopt a unique form of religion so as to avoid contact with the people who are their oppressors.

It is not specific to Rastafarian s but can be seen in other cultures that where the means of economic control are wanting the social strictures are not, Many a young woman , hearing the songs of liberation against the white male dominated society discovers that upon actual contact the Rasta man is as close minded as his nothern brethren.

Homosexuality in particular is not acceptable in this culture. Beastiality in the rural areas is regarded as unfortunate fact of life. To get to the real heavy taboos though, across the world it is menstruation. Since the institution of marriage there is little more important the the subjugation of women and the neccesary lies needed to enforce it.

In an understandable irony women are of value as breeders and the presence of menstrual fluid is the solitary indicator butw danger remains. In the old Jewish tale when a menstruating woman walks between two men, one of the men will die, in other cultures contact with menstrual fluid means death.

As an aside I'd like to comment on the various degrees of tolerance we afford to other cultures. From the point of view of the content provider one is between a rock and a hard place - the audience in effect, wants to be scared - they have perhaps legitimate concerns about racial religious, and subcultural groups yet the message they are fed is that we are all one . What is for the wealthy healthy competition is for the poor class warfare.

The reason why this is is easy to find. What the dominant social cadre wants is obediance and docility . Hence individuals are criminals where as social groups are invariably "Misunderstood."

Getting back to our story then the term "bumba clot" means nothing to most people but it is the most offensive thing that a person can be called in the Rastafarian sub culture. It referes to dried menstrual fluid on a vagina.

In fact it is fascination to witness the concepts of clean and dirty in the development of taboos. People will insist they can smell the presence of a person of another race. Travel to Pakistan and you cannot eat Pork, travel fifty miles east to India and is is Beef that is sacred.

What is going on? Actually nothing happens in this world that nature does not approve of. Things we cannot understand such as suicide or dietary laws n at one time had advantage or they would not be. Suffice to say today the prejudice may be obsolete but one recalls the sad joke of the gambler who bets on a crooked game.

When told that game is crooked they reply - yes I know, but it's the onlygame in town

Those of us who have lived for years in Post Reagan America know well the sting of this joke.

The second term is one used quite often by my former comrades in the PD. It is dirt bag.To be described as such you have to be more then a criminal. After all it you adopt an attitude that doesn't tolerate the presence of crime and you won't last long. You'll burn out. There are varying degrees of decency in the criminal world and one thing about crime it tends to benefit the very few.

Probably we could play some sort of game to describe dirtbags- betrayal ranks high in such categories, but I'll end this divertissement with a person definition, arbitrary as it may be.

I was in University, working wherever and when ever I could, sharing a house with some locals.It really was more of an Animal house then a haven of study, but that's how rock and roll goes.

One time I come home from class. It's dinner time and one of the partners in the house is sitting on the couch with a towel, drenched in blood. Sitting in an overstuffed chair is someone I had not seen before. He's holding a knife with a five inch blade, playing with it.

It was not an auspicious begining.

"Smokey" the guy who had been cut us says "This is so and so. He's going to be staying with us for awhile."

Things went downhill from there. The guy was a drug dealer from Portland Oregon who had had to make a quick exit subsequent to an argument which had led to murder.

I say nothing. After all, everyone's got to do their thing. For all I know the alledged murder was fabricated for some street cred. Live and let live I say.

But it wasn't that simple. Possibly smokey and his pal wanted to take the house to, as we say on the street, "another dimension."

I'd go out in the morning and my car would have a flat. In subsequent days the rear view mirror was ripped off, the windshield wipers were trashed , the front headlights were smashed. I began to believe there a pattern here.

Actually I gave the guy a ride one time. In those days I was mega wired. On the cassette deck was a Brandenburg concerto. It's didn't bother him too much.

I come home another day and the living room rug was in the back yard. Apparently, as an expression of contempt the bad buy had taken a dump on the rug and the smell was unpleasent.

I said nothing. One of the other people renting the house curled up in his bed, weeping. Dear reader I shall be remiss were I not to inform you that I was at a loss of viable strategic options.

Then the next day I chanced to look under the hedge by the side wall. There was bicycle, known locally as a "sting ray." This is a fairly small bike with a deep V handlebar. In my day it was considered cool to built one's own from scratch. I had done so myself and mine was florescent green and had a slick on it. That is a tire with a wide flat surface.

The story had now transcended the ordinary. To steal a bicycle was just too low. Murder, assault robbery and everyday vandalism could be tolerated by woe unto he who could break the code.

That night I got very drunk. Very very drunk. The moton was getting on full and I spoke to smokey about his beginning to bother me. I have no idea of what I said. I few items were thrown about and about 2:30 I decide I'm going to take a walk to the local police department, which was about three blocks down on Dutch Broadway there in No Valley Stream.

Entering the premises I consulted with the desk cop. There was nothing happened and once again I have no idea of what I said, only that the man behind the desk was polite and after a while I asked

"Where can I get a gun?"

He said he wouldn't know and maybe I'd know better then him. I said "I'm a college boy don't know nothing about guns"

Maybe, he said it would be a good idea if I spoke to the landlord and perhaps someone might drive by the next day.

It was getting on daylight and I reluctantly agreed to let the matter rest, but I could not resist one last exclamation.

"I mean what kind of a dirtbag would steal a bicycle from a kid?"

The next day I yanked the bicycle out from the hedgerow and left it in plain sight in the back yard. The day after it was gone. I didn't see the landlord, I didn't see the cop and I never saw the dope dealer from Oregon again.

This proves the point of Wittgenstein's theorem that no definition can be relied upon further then the singular and immediate example  since this is the case then no definition can be relied upon.

The Hand of Fate

                     Am putting finishing touches on yet another studio. Hopefully it will last long enough to actually record something! That doesn't concern you. Apparently guys like Beethoven could write entire werken in their heads. Mozart would have his wife play in the background so the formulated piece in his head would not be altered beyond recognition. I suggest he wrote much of his stuff while playing billiards. Anyway

                            So it is possible to write about one subject and make your living in another. A acquaintance from high school wound up teaching Buddhism and constantly had to remind the students that is was anthropology and not the revealed word of god that would determine grades.

                    And on the long term website, which is in slo mo now the theme there is the advent of technology in the broadest sense of the word. Tecknos being the wat one does something it can be applied, as with Lewis Mumford, to pyramid or city building or as in the case of Jacques Elule and the French existentialists with the technostate. Lewis was an American who saw the growth of the American Century and the French, such as Sartre and Camus who experienced the technostate first hand as members of the Vichy Republic. 

                         For the record let it be said that more then one person has remarked that the number of people who were in the resistance seemed to grow with every year after the liberation – but the poets, such as Robert Desnos, kept up the side and went to their graves in far greater numbers then the rightest “he men” such as DeGaulle.

                    I say this because there is a chance that such prognostications as such as I have made may someday be proven true and it is needed to remind future readers that it has been a long, cold road since the initial surrender in 1980. People don't want to hear it.

                  To begin with today as I said these are broad, across the board changes occuring. One can for instance draw parallels between changes in physics and epistomology, as the bench marks , once so solid, transform to hypotheticals. The same holds true with both finance and the law. Both are having to do without the corpus delecti of yesteryear. As the mathematicians say, “God turns out to be an equation.”

                        In simpler terms gold is replaced by photons in the intercontinental currency market and likewise the eyewitness of yesteryears crimes is replaced by the camera and printout of todays computer age.

                          Lets say some all knowing entity showed up tomorrow and said, Your justice system appalls me but I'll tell you what I'll do. I will tell you who on death row is actually innocent – but you in turn must let a guilty party go for each innocent I reveal.

                     What do you do?

               No to dissappoint the sadists in the crowd, mankind has by and large chosen to take the deal. Justice Frankfurter went so far as to say it was better that ten guilty go free then one innocent man be punished. I'm not here to argue that. My experience in criminal justice lead me to the conclusion that we prefer to punish the innocent because they are less trouble to catch!

                    Now we come to some salient issues. Much of the opposition to the privacy advocates can be summed up as “If you're not guilty you have nothing to worry about.” Nearly all false accusations though are based on circumstantial evidence. The more you know about someone the easier it is to concoct some sort of false picture about them.

                        Along with that is the fact that it is in the interest of any criminal to provide the authorities with a substitute target.

                        In terms of apprehension one salient phrase, orginated by Lawrence Lessing, I believe is “The law of code.” The classic example is when you take out a library book overdue you pay fine but the book is still readable. When you take out an electronic library book at a certain point in time it becomes unreadable

                           What the law of code does is it heightens the power to say no. It is not fun. Recently in congress they tried writing legislation that on a certain date would do certain things and found it difficult to work with because we cannot tell what the future will bring.

                  For instance. I take a heart medication. I take it twice a day and it has made my life much better. I'll probably take it for the rest of my life. The catch is if I miss a day or two, I know it and to stop suddenly is not recommended.

                I go to Rite Aide because several years ago they seemed good. Late hours, many outlets, selection of other things. I probably don't have to tell the reader that the US has declared a limited war on it's citizens. The safety net, as poor as it was in comparison to the industrialized world is unraveling.

                         In practical terms it means my medications cost more, are more difficult to get and mys income is less. I go to renew a prescription on a Tueday and they say the computers down. So I have to make another trip two days later which I do and I discover that the computer which apparently keeps track of things is still down.

                          I come back four days later and I am loaded for bear. I am upset and I get even more upset when I discover that they had the medication all along. What they didn't have was the okay from the computer to dispense it.

              This medication is not a drug – you don't get a high. You don't feel anything in fact.

                               Why the central computer saw fit to deny the script I have no Idea. They have the numbers calculated .

                      When the shit hit the fan in 08 down in Riverhead and they had a crackpot County Exec out to prove he was a tough guy there were people living in tents, sleeping rough, veterans, drug addicts sex offenders ex cons – the whole gamut of the underclass nobody in the Hamptons gave a fuck. The only place where you could get a free meal was from the little old church ladies. They are last survivors of the old America.

                    It's making me superstitious.

                         I don't know what happened in RiteAide, but once again the little old lady came through. She pressed a vial of meds into my hand and said.

                        “Here, No pay. You don't have to pay for this”

                      Am I criminal? By some definition I suppose I am.

                          When was the last time you heard a machine cry?

four in to one and out

The Loa.

Zero point theory, the singularity the virtual state

this piece is sloppy even for me but the simple fact is I don't have a great interest in explaining things to you. If I can trigger some response that's preferable -  as Dylan said the best you can do is inspire.

An homage to certain characters. Wittgensteins influence might be discernible – I increasingly work in the disjuncted paragraphs that made his blue book such a fun read. It is also a style put to good use in the Koran.

& secondly It's time I sent a word about Jack Kennedy

• none of us are perfect – be both had bartenders on both sides of the family and both had families that were enriched by the prohibition. His family was never referenced by Scott Fitzgerald on the other hand. More importantly both of us lived lives in the shadow of medicine and sickness and both realized that a good enemy was worth a dozen friends.

much of what follows ought be comprehend able to those familiar with my work – the new concept is Loa which is the African version of a polytheistic entity. We have long been aware that the difference between the greeco-roman pantheon and the African one is that the greeks modeled the gods after themselves whereas the africans transmuted themselves via mask and dance into the gods.

Thus far it hasn't made them rich and powerful but we are entering a new era – one where the ability to transform the self becomes far more important.

For instance the reason google makes a lot of money is because they can reliably inform customers about who you are- what you like, who you dream of fucking and so on

the NSA exists for the same reason – all information services need to know who they are dealing with - this is something of a change but the only way it can be defeated is to develop mental abilities.

For instance in a classical attempt at mind thought alteration you might think the thing to do is to remain constant in you believe that for instance the sun is purple, but once the crack is in and they have broken you via drugs, or sound or whatever, you will tell your interrogators what they want to know.

They will use this to enslave you in the way they are now. When bank corruption is paid for by the poor it is but a small example – and comparatively harmless . Subsequent to the singularity such concepts as genocide will have to be re understood in light of new realities and the 95 % who die must do so willingly

the must go to their graves willingly because the human race has never had the physical power to enforce the hierarchy any other way.

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Today I’ll conclude the multiple popular topics essay, AKA buzzwords for geeks. Like most of what we deal with here these are survival concepts. I don’t deal with the specifics, after all they are constantly changing. As well, perhaps as well I no long address questions of causality or potential modification of coming factors.

To state this in the vulgate, my audience is aware that there is some weird shit coming down. As such on a one to one basis the individual probably cannot win, but I am not so pessimistic as to believe that consciously or sub consciously systems of survival will not be allowed to remain in place.

And to get to these avenues will not be easy nor a matter of chance. Part of the challenge is philosophical. Two similar models of cultural cohesion are the Kelts and the Jews. Interestingly enough the Kelts did it without language and in the case of the Jews language was the primary determinant . What they had in common was both groups were able to withstand the pressure to disintegrate under conditions of diaspora.

To restate this, cultures and nation states have traditionally identified themselves within territorial boundaries, such as Egypt, one these are moved along with the sacred spaces they contain, the connection is broken,

That the cohesion of nation states is torn asunder is no long questioned – increasingly we see questions of nationality, religion and race are made irrelevant. For multinationals in the post colonial era the matter is settled. In terms of actual family life this will take some adjusting to. When the robot nanny wish to apply aversive stimulus to a boy with his hand in the cookie jar she will merely apply electroshock to the miscreant via cranial implant.

Perhaps the most important variation of technology from it’s gradual innovation in the past is not so much the type of change but it’s speed. Both Gliech and Kurzweil have taken pains to indicate the difference between arithmetic and exponential change.

One minute we are making distinctions between Zulu’s and Americans and the next between humans and post humans.

Then this in turn is demanding of us that we identify not only linear determinants such as which town precedes which on the railroad line but contextual ones such as what town is within fifty miles of the route.

These all revolve around the famous needle and the haystack. Google, Enigma, recursive searching, all involve asking questions of what in the past would be considered chaos.

Psychologically it is a bitch. One has to sort of let things go and let for instance products develop themselves. After the singularity and to a large extent even today human interference with production can only be retardant of the process.

And in a strange way this may explain the continued existence of the God concept. In the past I had suggested that the unity of the God, even based on nonsense, translated into a tribal unity that provided and an advantage over other groups

The terror that post humanity holds for many is very real and perhaps for good reason to reduce it yet further in imagery what we are about to experience will take the role hitherto played by the unconscious mind out if the context of the individual.

What follows are ideas. What characterizes them are two things – they are important and they have only come into being in the past fifty years. For a long while in the beginning I would casually mention the Tamlinmediaco as the most important site on the web. Like most of what I do it was an experiment – the goal being to ascertain the average intelligence of the visitor and/or the famed seven degree of separation.

By and large humanity failed the test, Actually, being generous, it would be better to say that the information systems that serve humanity failed the test. Had they worked in an optimum fashion they would have triggered a response somewhere down the line telling some interested party that here was a source of the description of some things of immense power.

The problem apparently is that the information retrieval and dispersal systems are not sensitive to power as such, but rather tend to focus on monetary goals. In some regards this is not a bad thing.

Montezuma, for example , had a great deal of gold but was defeated by the power of a few Spaniards with guns. Gold is always deceptive in that way. The later day Romans also had plenty of gold but because their society was so diverse they had no one capable of turning that gold into military power and hence were slaughters by the northerners.

In my own life I owe something of a debt of gratitude both the destructive senseless economic policies of later day America and to a mother with a compulsive gambling problem, because it was not until I lost a considerable amount of money and went essentially broke that gold, or currency , was stripped of its hitherto semi divine qualities.

So today when I come across someone with a one track mind - making money- I regard that as a weakness and not a strength. Cecil Rhodes was speaking with Rudyard Kipling one time about a subordinate who was so concerned with advancing his career that he was borderline useless as an employee and would never go anywhere. Kipling remarks that thirty years on Rhodes predictions had come out to be true.

So today I will introduce you to four concepts that were you not the superstitious slaves of the technostate you probably would have heard of. If you have heard of them give you self a pat on the back. All of them have had numerous books written on them byt people with long strings of letters written after their name.

The are , Loas, Zero Point Theory, The Singularity and the Virtual State. I present these concepts from the abstract to the practical.

The twentieth century proved a watershed in the discovery of the mechanisms of myth. Much of this had to do with man’s discover that the myths he considered eternal truths existed in other times and places, some of which seemed to have no connection with each other.

The myth of the God who dies for three days and then like the dark moon is resurrected, obviously could not be seen for what it is until the sense of a supernatural entity was removed. As is often the case it was the quantitative amount of evidence that finally won over the nay sayers as to for instance evolution.

That said it does nothing to remove the reality of religion, or dare I say, the need for it. Most of use adopt the political and religious codes of our parents and most societies in turn have a predominant code which they take with them when they move. Likewise when a culture moves to a new place they invariably are either absorbed by or replace the extant culture.

Hence the stone age myths and religious ideas were replaced in Europe first by the Greco-Roman “thundergods” and then by the messianic religions.

Christianity (and now Islam) moved north and westward from its origins in the euphemistically named holyland. This also happened with the Romance languages and both religion and language pushed the previous cultures to the extreme western shores , to Brittany and to Ireland.

That’s why if we want to study the myths of central Europe in the Stone age we must go to Ireland, where cattle raids, a ritual kingships and such remain.

One of the reasons for the continued strength of religions is they give the “believers” an advantage over the non believers – that being the shared system. Plus the modern religions tend to be more specific as to rulership then the ancient ones. Christianity justified kings and wars and the same held true with Islam in Northern and Western Africa. Further more Africa was subject to intense colonization, one result being the destruction of African ways.

And, as well, we know that along with political failure there is often the sense that the native gods, or God has failed the people and have consequently lost their power. Note we need not concern ourselves with chicken or the egg questions.

Quite often as well there’s a rural, urban dichotomy. When Red China sought to suppress democracy activism they brought in soldiers from the conservative provinces. In the late Egyptian Empire that same was done when Alexandria grew restless and in the current United States the urban rural spread results in definite differences of opinion.

Like Ireland then, Haiti alone, in the Black diaspora, can provide us with a glimpse of the African religious ethos. It was the first independent black state and the very fact that it was French speaking instead of English helped isolate it from prevailing influences.

Suffice to say however, as in the case of Jamaica, where ganga smoking and Rastafari is frowned upon by the upper classes, the further up in class one goes in Haiti, the less the influence of the Voudon (Voodoo) religious constellation.

Let me begin by noting that much of the “Civilized” world purports to believe in Messianic religions. They believe in other words that a single semi-divine semi human individual provides a conduit between this world and the eternal supernatural world. The world religion itself indicates this - it means “the linkage.”

The oriental world does not believe this as such, but there are strong similarities between the teachings of the Christ and the Budda.

The great question that religion resolves is “do I exist and if I do, am I eternal?” Unfortunately this is not a dialectical exercise. B movie screen writers in Hollywood occasional refer the problem to the rose solution.

“The rose is the symbol both of lifes beauty and it’s transitory nature.”

Classically the body is transitory and the soul is eternal. There are nearly a limitless number of illustrations of this concept.

As a little catholic boy the nuns would lecture us continually about the notion that when we pray before a statue of a saint we are not praying to the statue but rather to the saint that the statue represents.

A Similar thing happens in Voodoo where the Loa, or God is not localized or even personified but the spirit of such and such a thing. Thus Acqu is not the ocean, nor water, but the oceans spirit. The ocean is like the statue, a transitory materialization.

And to refer to a term that is often misunderstood Legba, or Papa Legba, is not so much the toll collector at the crossroads as the man in the doorway. He’s in other words a more benign spirit then westerners often suggest.

In the American Blues tradition he’s often associated with a devil who’s primary goal is to trap ones soul. This recalls th western concept of the dragon, a natural force which wants our goods and would castrate us, as opposed to the oriental idea of the dragon as a fortuitous symbol of luck.

I seem forced to spend more time then I want explaining this in western terms but it seems necessary. Hence most recent religions, the Mormons, the Japanese Family cults are messianic in form. One advantage these systems have is nearly always you have hard evidence of the transitory aspect of life, meaning the founder dies.

The term Loa itself is capable of multiple definitions. The black population in Haiti comes from about a dozen nations, or tribes in west Africa. This is the Africa of the Jungle and the people were taken as slaves from internecine warfare in a comparatively short period of time.

Voudun itself is most often practiced with a mixture of Christian ideology. Unlike the spirit guardians of Tibetan Buddhism, the bodhisattvas, or the “noosphere” the loas are principles or even styles such as crane style, and monkey style in marital arts.

These are not saints in the sense of once being mortal men and women and herein we hit upon the critical difference between this system. ordinary polytheism, and messianic religion.

I’d even go so far as to suggest it is capable of post messianic religious impulse. Rather then to invoke the presence of the God through the ritual the goal here, through drumming, dance and even masks is to transform the participant into an agent of the God, a manifestation.

This then invokes a different relation ship to what we call “Sin”. One has to be careful here. The sin concept is so deeply embedded in the west, all with retribution that we can hardly conceive of existence without it.

As well, at first mention it is a deeply frightening thing. The idea that those who do wrong will be punished , sooner or later, is one of the glues of our society. Even as we know that very bad people have no problem sleeping at night.

And as well when we become, as god, in the dance, it may not be the same all powerful being that we ascribe to in our religions. We are taught, in effect to follow the leader but this can be taken a little too far.

Dante tries to explain this in El Paradiso. The inferno, of course is totally hierarchal - everyone has a place and everyone knows their place, whereas in heaven in the presence of God each place is as good as everyone other place and since everyone is so full of the joy at beholding the Godhead there is no competition for a better seat, so to speak.

Now of course the point is if we don’t watch ourselves we are heading into a technological inferno.

The joke about nuclear war used to be it was bad enough so that the living envied the deadm and don’t kid your self what google and all the rest of the web does is it creates a hierarchy / You are because you consume and the more you consume the more you are.

My flirtation with wealth in the 1990’s taught me the truth of the saying the poor pay more. And lets be real, it is not going to be easy to convince the privileged to give up those advantage’s. Not being interested in starting a religion I see my task as energizing the monads.

Maybe it’s yours as well. I hope so.If it is not that’s not my job to correct, but I won’t protect you either.

   Appendix   

One

Go gog go



(The limitations of language  and  historical parallels between concepts 

of "Knowing" and the physical world.)
 Several years ago I introduced a hypothesis which has held up fairly well. 

It suggests that our understanding of the physical world is paralleled by

 our epistemological concepts. So you have the rigid world of Aristotle

 and the Gods, - then in the time of Locke we understand how "Truth" could

 be shaped by the means of perception - the tabula Rosa, which in turn 

could be compared to the gravitational constant of Newton.

 In 1905 Einstein suggested that both perceived and perceive r 

were in flux and this soon led to the suggestion that we could 

know either location or direction, but not both. Quantum information 

theory is a strange bird indeed. Wittgenstein despaired of ever getting

 language to make sense other then perhaps as the thing in itself, but like 

hope from Pandoras box, the fact that we remain must contradict all such despair.

 We might well draw an analogy with religion, which wile not proving the

 existence of a God, nevertheless proves the existence of man's desire to 

believe there is. It is as if by transmitting one letter of the alphabet 

we would be able to convey an encyclopedias worth of information.

 The problem, which I make no claim to be able to solve, is how to 

find the correct original unit out of a near infinite number of 

possibilities, or perhaps an infinite number of possibilities.

 As it stands however such challenges need not be undertaken if 

world domination is our simple goal. Here's the kicker -

 as technology amplifies the data field it consequently

 simplifies the amount of information needed to be transmitted 

in order to effect a response, in particular from the human population. 

In other words in dealing with a school of fish or a flock of birds

 in flight you no longer have to convince each one of them of the 

direction you want them to go. All you have to do is "convince" 

the point bird. To draw the quantum analogy further consider

 a wall of doors. Each of the hundreds of doors has a number on it.

 You wish to convey a great deal of information but your means of

 doing so is limited. What you do is tell the bird the right door

 to open - so it only need to know one thing even as it provides 

he receiver with a wealth of info. The problem facing mankind today

 is just this. It is a two sided sword. We control the masses by controlling

 the lead birds in the flocking behavior; behavior which has been made

 possible by the ubiquitous presence of media. 

nd in turn we control any contrary messages by arresting people in extreme

 cases - but ignorance has a subtler and vastly more effective way of

 advancing it's purposes. And once again, we create “opinion leaders to

 give the masses condoned thoughts, even, as in the case of the Soviet

 Union's “Krokodile”, or the John Stewart show to the extent of officially 

sanctioned opposition and then at the same time does not reach the level 

of exposure as to even require censorship. Hackers, libertarians and people

 on all sides of the political spectrum, consciously at least, express 

concerns that the world is taking on the model of 1984. It's important to

 remember though that Orwell was not speaking about right wing or left

 wing political systems - nor was he even speaking about the excesses

 of the technostate. Difficult as it may be to accept one of the primary 

criteria for the existence of a 1984 is that the celebrity has taken the

 God role. It simply refuses to admit the validity of anything that

 opposes it's core principles. The NRA, which I do not oppose offhand,

 suggested that the way to prevent mass killing of schoolchildren was

to arm five year olds and give them lessons in shooting. They did not

 understand how out of place this seemed to be to most people. We create 

things, sometimes even things meant to do good, and they get out of hand.

 Thus along with promotion of the official line there is the seeming 

ignoring of the non sanctioned points of view until under the guise of

 preservation of the state offenders are silenced. In my own life, in a 

case that I've seen happen to many others as well, I began as something

 of a writer researcher who worked for the government and as I continued

 learning I became less employable as the years went by. My understanding

 was not the understanding that gets paid for. I was not saying what the

 employers wanted to hear. Or consider the case of Reagan. He's a guy, 

whatever you may think of him that provokes widely varying reactions from

the public. some see him as the savior, others as a monster, and It's save 

to say neither side is being duplicitous. The key factor here is that, as in

 the case of politics and business as well, technology favors market domination,

 which means it does not tolerate differences of opinion - the gun and the

 bow and arrow may coexist for awhile- but not for long.

 Appendix two Prelude to a new world 

For behold, we venture forth to a new world

 a world where fame comes to they who do nothing

and achievements are ground into oblivion where right and wrong,

 good and bad and ye even life and death are predicated by no more

 then the wheel of fortune where nothing adds up 

Where the gods preen before their mirrors and their 

dogs sign checks with paw prints The Senators bathe at three

 Children carry the firewood The “little fishes” age

prematurely on the Isle of Capri 

"When I return the dead shall rise from their graves

and they shall outnumber the living" 

Ishtar, Sumerian goddess, circa 2500 BCE 

Conclusion: The Technostate has two requirements;

 1) It must be free to create and expand markets*

 2) It must be rendered immune from prosecution for anything done in

 furtherence of the creation of markets *By the expansion of markets

 we mean markets for business to flourish in. What it means 

It means that no one is safe from the fluctuations of systemic variance 

- you personally may do a good job at what you do but that does not

 prevent the decision to move to somewhere where economic advantages

 are greater. And I repeat - one does not have to be convicted of a

 crime to be punished. The trial itself becomes the critical object,

 not the verdict. The trial demonstrates to the system that actions

 are being taken - that the controller/decision makers have a desire

 or direction that they want to see instantiated. We witness here

 technology taken to it's fullest extent - to wit- to the "world lever",

 amplified beyond any previous abilities. 

You can think of it in terms of flo

cking behavior, or schools of fish. Think of the incredible ability

of flocks to turn as directed by the bird at the point.

In classical democratic decision making paradigm each

 individual would consider the options available and reach a 

conclusion that would be best for them- but in the technostate

 that does not happen - under the quite possibly questionable belief

 that what is good for one is good for all.

 This sometimes false belief in the commonality of interest

 can in turn be manipulated for the interest of very small

 segments of society through propaganda. The tendency of humans 

groups to surrender individual thought in favor of the crowd has 

long been known and studied. As the case may be many technological 

developments of the past century have served to create a sense of

 intimacy which in turn has replaced actual direct human communication.

 This is evident from radio, to movies, to television, and now to Facebook

 - all of which bring the semblance of human lives into our own

 There is a difference however that should be obvious.

 A friend in real life may be one of maybe ten people, on face book 

it is one of 50,000 - hardly comparable. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

If I lose you

"If I lose you..
  my heart will be broken"
                 Madonna  "Frozen"

CATEGORIA FORCE FOURTEEN

ultima coolness

    Gee   that's something about Silk Road - suffice to say I've
never logged on  but it's  worth mentioning that it  represents
, as words worth would say, intimations of immortality,
meaning it represents first glimpses of the virtual state that I've
been going on about for years.

     too bad  it's primary purpose is criminal and for that
matter  it's apprehension was effected by means that while
not criminal were   extra legal for the simple fact that the laws
have not been written.
       My guess is you can't stop commerce  and the battle
beginning to appear is between commerce and politics - by
politics I mean the classical nation state.
          It's really all evolution -  isn't it?
         The saying is that every great fortune begins with a
great crime and then when we ask what a great crime is - it is
ususaly something that happens in the beginning of a new
process.
            I'm working on a paper now which ironically "fixes" a
missing aspect of the previous paper which I had hubristically
presumed to be  conclusive.
         Any way if you recall, my comment on bit coins was
that they would serve to loosen the economic  strictures - and
that is good because from an economics point of view  there
is currently not enough money spread around  - it is all in a
comparatively small sector of the population.

         Morality aside it's not good economics  and nature as
always will come  up with a solution.    Just like the zones of
privacy - first mentioned inthe  80's are beginning.
 
              and here's a first - a shout out to La carmina  - a
japanese goth fashion  travel  blog . The thing is Bill Gibson's
usually ahead of the game on this stuff and he coined the
phrase cool hunter  in his book pattern recognition. Carmina's
a japanese woman raised in Canada and unlike others, she is
conscious of the role she's playing.  And of    course we all
know far too well then to expect your's truly to post a url  
since thatwould improve my status for the big machine and
we all know that contradicts  ultimate coolness  which is what
I am.
         But all you need to know is the linear thinking is no
funand not alive which I am mostly and which is the salient
thing to convey here in the pre singularity.
           and also I post on the ever so popular Beerfarts and
the closed to the general public stairway.




              

three roads to Memphis

                 There’s a saying which I believe is true - that there is no such thing as coincidence.  I suppose once you get to the point   where coincidence does not contradict, but affirms the world, then you have achieved the proverbial first step into being.

        That is to say being the real you. 

                 In the present instance  a yard sale brought me a copy of the six volume videotape of Bill Moyers interviewing Joe Campbell  and  my reaction  upon viewing it was that Mr Campbell must have delivered these lectures many times because one had the sense that his presentation was the essential elements and little filler.

                    Then I had the briefest of intimations. I imagined another Joseph saying to his wife, “Come dear, see the kingdom I have put into the mind of Pharaoh.”

   That said I too, like Joe, have begun to condense and edit the work that follows - and of course it is rather long. I don’t know if it needs shrinking. One of the delights in writing this extended blog over  the years   has been to follow the loose threads where ever they may lead.

      And I cannot let this pass without mentioning that many a tale begins with the main character  riding though a woods, only to have thier attention caught by some exotic bird  and then it is too late. Elvis has left the building and we can never return to the  lives we lived.

              Perhaps someday some such a thing will happen to you

n.b. Onr other thing.  Moyers, in passing asks Campbell about contemporary myths.  Campbell give the correct answer in tha myth as defined academically requires time to form. (Like a danish pastry)

That in fact touches upon the cutting edge of the discipline which is either the absence of myth, or even that time honored shibboleth, the end of myth.  We covered it a few months ago and often it is spoken of in connection with Nietzsche’s  famous death of God dictum. 

              I don’t have any problem with any of the theorists and am especially interested in the work of Jacques  Ellul  who had first hand experience of the techno state in occupied France.

          My field of interest then is one that may or may not exist- the presence of myth in the modern state.  I  find it amusing an hubristic that we so easily delegate mythical  thinking to little  guys round campfires round jungles in South America,

          And of course another word for the  modern mythical process is propaganda- one ordinary way of discounting the presence of such factors is to claim the  time frame is too short.  So for instance when the Reagan administration wanted to remove the  requirements for truth in advertising   they suggested that if the ads were untrue they would very soon be found out - this is not good logical thinking.

      Logic without context is worthless, or in other words if another proposition is advanced  before the initial question  is asked the question is irrelevant,  As Dr Goebbels would say to make a lie work just tell another lie before the first one is disprove and so on. As long as you control the process you control the outcome.

          And given the forms of Teknos that are evolving lies are no big deal for the truth can lie as loud as anyone else.  It is very clear that we must learn to master our machines or they will master us.  Strange to say in recent years I have been less concerned about the former possibility.  It fuses psychologically - that is to say that the urge to freedom  often accompanies the urge  to remain a child-  and I don't know if that is all that bad.

                                      ----------------------------------

               The following is very long for a blog entry. I would recommend, if interested that you print it  or at the very least save it for offline reading.

  It had it’s genesis about twenty years ago, prior to the internet as we know it in the age of Bulletin Boards, specifically a BBS out of Coney Island called Dreamland. There were several young Jews who had grown up in Brooklyn and had yet to experience the ways of the gentile.

     As such, when a society exists as a somewhat independent  subculture within another very often the accommodations  that smaller societies  make to co-exist are not as extreme. Certainly immigrants are more likely to experience insecurities then  people who have lived in a country for generations

               One youth  asked me why, if they were so smart and advanced and civilized, were the Germans capable of such as they were.

        For the record I answered, conventionally enough that anti-Semitism, or racism, was like Cancer   we all had the cells floating around inside us and circumstances  could trigger the full blown disease. (This was not my original idea - I had asked my mentor, Albert Jesson the question and the disease analogy was his.)   The young man, Seth, did not buy that answer. He accepted it but did not feel fully satisfied.

              Perhaps the only American I am aware of who understood the gravity of this question was Mark Twain. At the end of Huck Finn, Huck lights out for the territories, lest one of the local ladies “Civilize” him.  Most don’t realize it but this is contrary to what 99.8% of people believe.

            When I first encountered Rousseau, years ago, I felt his doctrine of the natural man to be totally unworkable.  It seemed solipsistic, selfish, egotistical and childish.   Tolstoy delivered  a similar message in a more digestible palliate, but we all know that Tolstoy was crazy, isn’t that so?

       Like the former soldier Leo Tolstoy I have spend a good deal of  life in the company of men. Men drinking, men doing dope, and men pretending they were not in competition with each other.  After awhile one developes tha attitude of the experience courtroom judge - to wit - everyone lies. They lie to protect themselves, they lie to advance themselves , they lie from trust in events and they lie from fear.

        In most cases age brings not wisdom but a certainty that lying is the only path to self preservation.

         In retrospect I imagine a conversation between Tolstoy and Twain to be quite interesting  - a contest in bitterness. 

          Getting back to our story. The Internet came and within a few years it revealed it’s flaws, mostly of human creation. When I began this exercise I felt not unlike others that humans tended to be more emotional then rational.  There seemed no other way to explain Reagan, for instance.

          And  likewise, like many others I felt that people had been hornswoggled - that they had been victimized by clever ad men and manipulators of myths - and that furthermore - it had been like that for a long time.

             If this is the case then the question would have to be reformulated to “Why now?” Is it really so, as it sometimes seems, that we have lost the ability to think  for ourselves?

           This can be asked in the context of the singularity - that moment in time when the  creations of man surpass their creator in cognitive abilities. One answer to this question, that many accept whether consciously or not, can be called the anthropological answer, an answer based on the historical record. Indeed history itself seems focused on the wealthy and exceptional and one could conclude that all throughout man’s history he has never by and large had the ability to think freed of superstitions  and subjugation to his superiors.

             By this reasoning man is the hierarchal animal par excellence - like a pharaoh with his million subjects most people really matter, they never did and never will.

             One of the defining characteristics of science is that one proceeds until they reach a point where they learn something new and then stop and set off in another direction.

           The first time that happened on a large scale to me is when I realized that progress, in the form of the industrial revolution, and now in the form of the information age,  does not  benefit all people equally.  This is contrary to prevailing myth. It is even contrary to word usage. The most common work in German magazines is “new”.

      As you can imagine this discovery did not win me many friends, nor even a paycheck - but the worst was yet to come.

        We ordinarily see the middle class family as the core of society, yet when all the horrific and monstrous things happen who is it clapping hardest ? The middle class.  This was the second realization.

              They are the monsters. The creatures from the id.

    Once the illusion is shattered you can’t go back and all the lies are obvious. The love lie - the truth lie - the God lie

            All the middle class has was gotten by violence and it is all preserved by violence and yet it claims to be horrified by violence.

       That is what we cannot face up to.  We lie. We prefer to place the blame on others so like children we say, he made me do it, but the reality is if he made you do it, it was because he was aiming a gun at  you,

              If you don’t want to read all the words that follow I can summarize it.   I warn the reader immediately however that the conventional “answers”   will not appear. If you scan the web for sites telling you how to make money they tell you that the best bet is to do a “how to”   page.

              Likewise experts are experts because they have an answer - right or wrong often make little difference - it is the presumption of wisdom that counts.   I make no such presumption.

          Overall then though I hope to leave you with two suggestions and an observation.

         One suggestion is that technology benefits those who use it and conversely it  retards those who have no access to it and man, the selfish gene  tries to make that the case.

             Secondly, to say it in a clumsy way “Civilization is a fungible concept.”  Distinguished looking scholars  may forever   chuckle at lifes ironies as they glide through antiquarain  halls, but  those ironies  are based on  irony number one which is that the  originator is an animal.

   And the observation that follows is that the problem is not metaphysical, nor perceptual.   We need not put the carriage before  the horse, nor the myth before the fact.

     In the current day much is made of the warrior, the spiritual warrior,   but real soldiers will tell you it is no game and no fun.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

                     Brilliant!  - The art of appearing to be far more intelligent then you really are.

      Pay attention today chillum because whereas in the past I have spoken of the future and what will br today I speak of what is.

        What is more , for the benefit of those for whom English is a learned or second language I shall be using mostly, entirely all short  words and sentences.

           We will begin with the famous running man joke. It goes like this. Two men are in a jungle. A tiger appears. One man begins to run. The other man says, “Why are you running? It is well known that a man cannot outrun a tiger.”

       The first man replies,”I am not trying to outrun the tiger. I am trying  to outrun you!:

         So it goes - especially on the internet it matters not that you are not intelligent or smart or nothing. It matters only that you can convince someone that you know something - only one little thing-  sightly better  then the sucker 0h pardon me,  reader that you are seeking to “help”.

       The core principle here applies across the board, up to and including the famous net commerce,  where you can sell anything as long as you have a picture of it. Once you have have the cash in hand the great distances involved between buy and sell my be relied upon to discourage the buyers of product.

            Suffice to say, as the case may be, in any event, never the less  in the selling of actual goods the product will always be impacted upon by the cost of obtaining the actual  object or service sold. This is not so in  that vast majority of cases where in effect nothing is traded for a price.

             These are those cases where the product sold is information- which im my day used to be called wisdom, or sometimes, advice. The imparting of such information used to be considered a courtesy.

               The fact that what used to be considered a social obligation between people is now reduced to a salable commodity may be pointed to as evidence of disintegration of the social order.  To make a  poor pun there is nothing “long” with it except the fact that it exists.

                  Here is something I have only referred to in recent months  which is that when change occurs the context in which it happens  also changes correspondingly.   This means that when for instance slavery is reinstated as a social mechanism it is not viewed with the same abhorrence and disdain as would have  greeted it in a previous era.

  This is all wonderfully abstract and I make it so because I am a nice person  and don’t want to jump to conclusions, considering what they may be. I will therefore give three examples of visualizations,  one humorous, one philosophical and one deadly serious. 

 Recall, we speak  of change - not the habitual buzzwords of candidacies

Pt 2

  Tom Peters in the middle 80’s wrote a book that was very influential in the American business world called, I Search of Excellence”. It told a lot of war stories about CEO’s who turned companies around.  I read it and was not overly impressed. The tales seemed self evident, but what was amusing was listening to all these otherwise uneducated CEO’s parroting admonitions to stay close to the customer and deliver a quality product.

        For the record I’d much rather deal with an uneducated CEO who knows about the product then one with superb marketing skills and an MBA.  There’s plenty of evidence as to why this is.

        Peters problem was his next book - “Thriving on Chaos”  which was so confusing it was effectively unreadable and indeed ended Mr Peters big time career as a business guru.

       

   I similar thing happened to Francis Fukuyama with “The end of history” - in that the follow up  did not provide answers only questions. My respect for Mr Fukuyama increased greatly but obviously I do not represent the norm.

    Fukuyama’s premise was that the world had adopted liberal free market economic and the various cycles had slowed down.  A perusal of Finnegan’s Wake might have convinced him otherwise.    The following  book sincerely asked what was going to replace history and he realized that the contest for hierarchal  supremacy, genetic dominance,  personal hegemony or whatever you wish to call it, was not about to end.

    The problem with both these efforts was that no matter how well they proved their points they did not enlighten the greater picture. The expression we use here is they relied upon  linear thought, or cause and effect reasoning, which sounds harmless enough but is not effective in a multivariate context. 

       If anyone, which I do9ubt, has followed the progress of reasoning here in actuality the scope of  comprehension has been spirally inward and outward at the same time.  By inward I mean with gone from broad questions to specific ones.

         What you may find remarkable is the continuity of the questioning process. The first question was “Why don’t things work?” That lead to a wagon load of smiler questions such as  “Why do we believe myths rather then evidence?”  or in other words, “Why are we incapable of doing that which is best for ourselves?

          That yielded, after many years, the conclusions that technology isnot guaranteed to raise the immediate standard of living  and secondly, more brutally that man will not relinquish any behavioral advantages willingly.

     To restate myths are like propaganda  and most often are used to induce behaviors in subordinates by their superiors. And secondly when the myth no longer works the only recourse is to power and or violence.

   It’s therefore quite easy to suggest that people behave certain ways are brainwashed or because they are lied to.

 But what if the opponent is no fellow man, but raw nature? n the event of a plague people believed their malady was the result of God’s displeasure and so gathered to churches for safety and were slain in greater numbers then ever before.

       What in the past was attributed to God’s displeasure is today blamed on conspiracies.  This all begs the question which is “How do we survive?”    There’s  way this can be asked in the past tense as well, which is  “How could we have gotten it so wrong?”

       The question is not asked nearly so often in the past tense however, because most of those who would ask it are dead. The dead tell no tales and ask no questions.

            I could solve  America’s economic problems in a paragraph; reinstate the graduated income tax, institute negative rewards for corporate crime and increase human capitol. But it won’t happen. That is to say it will happen but not in our lifetimes.  The question is only  whether we can avoid a full scale civil war to attain our goals.

           Until then we’ll  be asking the same question which cannot be answered in todays context.   That question is “Why , is democracy works, does it consistently move to destroy the lifestyle of the common man?”

       Years ago when I was actively dating different girls and they would as often as not fall head over heals for the “hunk” and leave me flat I joked that they were emotional and not rational beings. (I also disregarded the fact that physical attraction played a role in my own selection of partners.)

             Well, I am not going to attempt to answer the question as to why people would vote for an obvious charlatan.  As time goes by and anger recedes I recall the words of the anonymous Saint, “I know the different between right and wrong but still  I do wrong.”

            Is there then some greater truth then good and bad?

Who knows?

           Here’s three examples of clasic mindf*cks.

Gore Vidal, in describing the collapse of the American Democracy repeatedly told the story of the fog and the hot water. If you drop a frog into pan of hot water it will jump out , but if you gradually increase the temperature of the water it will remain and boil to death.

            Plato, for his part tells the story of the philosopher king. This is the highest role a man may seek to achieve but it cannot be recommended because everything must be called into question before the would be king can see through to the eternal truths that guide a harmonious society.

         Dick Gregory, a pacifist comedian long ago told a story about violence. He said, “We are told that violence is not the solution.“What happened in Chicago was there was only one public swimming pool for black kids  and that had been closed, so they started a riot.  When they was shot they shot back. Now you can’t walk two blocks in Chicago without stepping into a swimming pool.”

          Incidentally you’re probably aware that one the problems with media in the US is it is too consolidated  and too much under the control of the government, which makes for things like Iraq.

           While today all we hear about is Martin Luther King, when it was happening the Civil Rights movement was far more diverse. As It happens I have a few issues of LIFE  magazine  from 1966 and the entire theme then was the “negro” revolution. It is nothing like what is taught in the text books.

          The third element here is the most radical because the most difficult thing a person can do it to think about familiar things  in   new ways.

           Just off high Street in Oxford there’s a close. A  close is what we in the states can a dead end.   On the wall, readable from the double decker bus in tall letters is spray painted   “One solution - Revolution” and if you don’t mind my saying so I don’t think it’s about the flavor of a new soft drink.

          When Goebells announced “Total war” in 41 we may ponder   what sort of war the Nazis had been fighting. The fact is he and Hitler envisioned conquering the earth as no big deal.  It would be sort of like your company being taken over by new management.

         This is because they had a modern view of government, one where legislators stay out of the way of business, and where personal rights were unheard of. As such they were fifty years ahead of their time

 The   term often used to describe the fascist states is techno state and the trick question on the history exams states the US had to become a techno state to defeat them, but there more to it.  Although such mentality brought us victory in the past today we have to learn to stop thinking that was.

        Americans in the past had no notion of the bourgeoisie. To them the word “middle class” was a positive thing. Up until Reagan  being middle class was a goal we strived for.

The war that Hitler and Goebells wanted to fight was one that would cause the least inconvenience to the middle class.

     They really planned on a continual warfare that would be enough to keep the economy thriving and would be paid for by a new form of colonial exploitation.

        The insane thing is that theoretically at least the scheme works! 

 And it would be held together by the middle class white heterosexuals all over the world imposing their way of life on everyone else.  We may then take a page from the Book of Reagan

   “The middle class is not the solution

                 It is the problem.”

       As well we must prepare ourselves for the thought, as Orwell said, of perpetual war.  A young Kenneth Galbraith  was given the burdensome task of calculating how muc actual damage the allied bombing of Germany did.

     His conclusion was that the more the cities of Germany were bombed the more it actually increased productivity of munitions. When the cities were bombed, at first at least, people left their jobs in the bakeries and hired on in the war industry in heavy guarded and hidden locations.

         As we have said previously the sea change in warfare over the past hundred years or so is whereas in the past the casualties were nearly entirely military today they are entirely civilians.

   Likewise we may say the same for the undeclared war of the state against it’s citizens.  The people in the legislature do not take casualties, nor do the aristocrats of capital - it is understood that they must be protected at all costs  for they are the sine  qua non of society.

           In the study of myth, or theology, one of the mind games we often play is the question of origins. God being defined as he without origin if you can point to an origin then you probably are not dealing with an authentic God.

          Likewise if you are creating a myth to gain a specific purpose -- say the myth of an altruistic political leader- you must be careful not to allow contradictory ideas into the story. This is why nearly every civilization worth the title has a creation myth, the purpose of which is not to shed light,   but rather to provide an alternative history to mask the actual one.

          The actual story is rarely ever said because wherever and whenever we look we see that it is achieved by force and the terror that man lives with is that that which has been gained by violence will be lost the same way. It is as if having won the game we immediately set out to change the rules.

                        We may also suggest that the third world man does not love or value his family any less then anyone else.  In fact, freed from the presence of serial polygamy  that is a part of life in a  hierarchal society one could go so far as to  say he might even love his family more - it being the only family he has.

    Still there remains the  productive myth, A productive myth is nothing more then what it says.  When we say, for instance the Asian does not value human life we are suggesting granting carte blanche to exterminate  them.

                   For a better sense of how this works let’s recall the evolution of laws.  What is a  proceedure in a given instance, the collection of a tariff, becomes a custom ( and in the  UK the term  custom retains the meaning of a financial transaction)  and then in time custom is  codified into law.

         A similar thing happens in the evolution of fact and myth.  A girl is raped and murdered in a specific location and then perhaps as little as fifty years later the location is commonly believed to be the  habitation of a hostile spirit - hense the origin of the virgin spring myth                                                                     

     I go through all this trouble to elaborate this because having reached a degree of reality as myth to make the reality into a concrete reality is fairly easy. Thus we have the recipe for genocide.  It is a knowledge familiar to tyrants and pimps - shatter the mind and the body will follow.

        If there is an optimistic side to this it is that  without the “preparation” of the  productive myth.  People and societies don’t decide things overnight.

           Awhile back we spoke of the fourty year phenomenon.  Moses led the the tribes of Israel a merry chase around the Sinai for forty years and it wasn’t because he had no sense of direction - it was because they had to learn to lose the ways of servitude and learn to think for themselves.

                 We must be aware of this if we wish to take mankind to a new era.  We must ask if having been reduced to slaves of the  corporate state  the population that remains is capable of accepting it’s own destiny. This is by no means a rhetorical question. The English revolution fell apart once Cromwell died and the French revolution could not resist

the urge to bloody retribution.

        And also when the lust for war overtakes us it is standard to require a period of time to prepare the population for the butchery ahead.  We mistakenly believe that the “Pieces are being put into place” but I suggest at least that the real reason is the need to prepare  the population psychologically.

    

This is  hardly new. The Roman empire was built tribe by tribe, region by region and in each case each invasion was preceded by a notification that the area, no matter how seemingly insignificant posed a deadly threat to the vital interests of the Empire. 

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