Corporeality

Corporeality

               One of the disturbing trends in recent years that perhaps is inevitable in capitalism after awhile is the anthropomorphism of the corporation. In other words we begin to think that Ronald McDonald is a real entity and not just a corporate shill meant to fool us. Before you laugh and think me a fool this concept has reached the actuality of argument before the supreme court.

And of course lesson number one in a constitutional law course is the court decides what it wants to do and then finds a way to do it – the penumbras, etc. The problem here is the right wing court decided last year that corporations were entities and therefore could give as much money as they wanted to political candidates, but now , this year, when it is a question of being sued the court wants to declare corporations are not entities. It’s a tough job when you’re a hypocrite – that’s why the suppression of freedom of speech is high on the agenda of any modern corporate sponsored state.

One of the rudest blow offs I ever received was at a conference on trends in criminal justice about twenty years ago. During a break between lectures I walked up to a female judge and asked her whether she felt that protections of the basic “inalienable rights” were being eroded. She assumed I was one of the many vocal “pro-life” advocates (which I am not) and and angrily defended a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion or not. Then she and her aide walked off briskly, leaving me more mystified then anything else.

Hence we can conclude I’d make a terrible lawyer since much of their task involves saying things comprehendible by judges – something I seem to have difficulty with.

That said, much of the written product of the Tamlinmediaco is a sometimes humorous, often serious hypothetical survival guide. As such we deal more with trends then specifics. To resort to metaphor part of the task is getting out of the way of the train and the other part is catching a ride, if that’s possible. This has been shaped by a lifetime of downward mobility. What small pleasures I now have in seeing the things that first effected my socio-economic group now occur to a wider spead of the population I don’t take much joy in.

Then again it does hearten one to at last see the understanding of what has happened reach the point of consensus. There was a long time , thirty years, that we refer to as the wasteland, when what might be called the urban industrial working class was taking it on the jaw and when we mentioned it we received only abuse, humiliation and the suggestion that we retrain, move, or simply were too stupid to pass muster. It was a cruel awakening to man’s indifference.

Or perhaps this is incomplete. The rich people had no use for employing us, but they were quite willing to F8ck the females and enter into sequential marriages, and various other arrangements. This is to say they quite enjoyed our poverty, much as the Normans saw nothing wrong in enslaving the Saxon males after 1066. The political class got in on that action as well - often not waiting for sloppy seconds but getting the fruit fresh off the vine.

                      Now things have changed, but nowhere near enough to rest easy. Therefore our task is to avoid and minimize the effects of the ruling class on our daily lives. Somewhat incredibly I am mostly supportive of President Obama, but I am not confident that the forces at work under the surface in America will not return as soon as he is gone. Plus the trends we must factor in are no longer limited to boundaries but now are global. The decimation has been worst in the US but it’s not the result of malevolence per se – it is the result of the technostates ability to justify and defend itself which is combined with an inability to engage in anything like self examination.

                   if the technostate determines the most cost effective way to grow something is to exterminate the human population nearby then that’s all that matters. As far as I am concerned the burden of proof suggesting this is not the case must remain on the side of the advocates of the technostate. This is not negotiable. This is a hard and fast rule. Such power must never again be ceded to machine intelligence.

Suffice to say though, like the judge who thought I was talking about abortion rights when if anything I was inquiring about euthanasia it is important that we get it correct when we speak oh the technostate. When Ronald Reagan spoke about big government he spoke about cutting people off social security, ending food stamps, public housing, and such when we speak of the technostate we mean a state where the decision making occurs beyond the level of human intervention, eg: at the level of neural networks.

And again neural nets, artificial intelligences, etc cannot be done away with but we can work to assure ourselves they serve our purposes and not their own. I can say this because of the basic line in the sand that we have to consider - robots are not living intelligences. If or if not souls are inventions of man they nevertheless provide a critical borderline between property, commodity and life.

The sacred is a fine and wonderful and needed thing, but when the sacred is artificially created via forced repetition, isolation and such it can be a dangerous weapon in the enslavement of beings.

To place men’s actions apart from the norm an within the zone of the sacred where they are beyond ordinary judgment and understanding is a bad idea. We in America have learned many times to our sorrow the reality that a battle between a human and an artificially created god can end only one way.

On the bright side though, once we reach a critical point where we have enough people understanding this we’ll be able to replace the dictates of the technostates with other, better ideas.

Thusfar as well the technostate has slept, it’s always slow to create laws because it perceives law entirely according to property and it’s slow to realize how fungible property actually is. The ties that bind us shall be of other materials then those seen by mortal or immortal eyes. I wax poetic but it must be done , for in that realm, the virtual state, which cannot be comprehended by machines and lives only in the heart, that the future awaits us, in the new frontier.

GRS

MAR1.2012

NP  ny

     

Control Yourself Dear

Control yourself dear.

                 This little bit will be a one off. I’ve mentioned before that one of the themes he is the social disintegration that has resulted from the selective empowerment of a limited number of people. Please note I'm not saying it's good or bad – just that it is – and this can be seen in light of similarities between now and the early middle ages when advancements in armor, weaponry and printing created then as now, a class of nobles who's rights and privileges far outstripped that of the vast majority of the population.

                 Again I do not suggest as to the desirability of this state of affairs only that it exists and we must work with it as it is. One solution is to hire writers to promote “good values”. Augustus Ceaser hired Virgil to convince roman woman not to be promiscous and instead raise families – it was not a success. Marie de Champagne an her mother hired Chretian de Troyes to convince knights that raping and looting was bad for one's reputation – it had mixed results but brought about a social concept called Chivalry which was the beginning of the suggestion that women had rights and brains.

                  My plea, such as it is, is two fold, one that if you rape and murder even if you cannot be prosecuted by the modern legal system it will be bad for your reputations and you won't be invited to the best parties. Secondly if you make a habit of mistreating women you will surely go insane.

                      Even this little missive is not really targeted at the ordinary person, but rather the extraordinary and furthermore it is not so much a plea for mercy, as it is something of a warning.

When Leo Tolstoi quoted the bible saying “Vengeance is mine – thus sayeth the lord,” he was no naive spring chicken. He’d spent much of his adult life in the military and furthermore we are not talking the peaceful military but Sebastopol, home of some of the most deadly card games in history.

I’m no spring chicken either and I can tell you I am not going to set the wrongs of the world aright. That is for bigger punchers then I. If it means I play the coward at times – so be it. It can be looked at another way as well. I’m not going to sully myself with every dirt bag with an extra male hormone and a chip on his shoulder. It’s often difficult to avoid such chaps but it is absolutely critical if you’re going to get anything done.

Besides that the themes here are all interwoven – that’s part of the fun. For instance we speak of technology and it’s nasty habit of empowering bad people, because bad people are the most interested in killing and/or humiliating the rest of us. There’s always been some equivalent of weapons of mass destruction. In Napoleons day it was cannon which ended the several hundred year reign of the castle. Plus as he said, “A little bit of grapeshot takes care of a lot of problems.”

                       Grape shot is small iron balls welded together which are fired from cannons and which when impacting explode, like modern day shrapnel. Napoleon got his start when the French peasants wanted to continue the revolution and the bourgeois of Paris had had enough. As the case of Tienneman Square what you do when you have lost the support of the big cities is you import soldiers from the Provinces, who are invariably more loyal – and in the case of the French it it was a Corsican Artillery Captain, who went on to other things.

                         In the middle ages the effective technology was armor, swords, suits of armor, war horses, and the like – all of which were by law only permitted to those who were in the good graces of the rulers, meaning the nobility. We can draw strong parallels between then an now with the new nobility distinguished by it’s wealth, freedom and immunity to criminal prosecution.

                      The problem of course, which is no problem from the nobilities point of view, is they are free to steal, rape and murder without punishment as long as their victims are peasants. Knights often have a good reputation, now, five hundred years after the fact, but in truth they were not often nice people – it did not make sense to be. Even their own relatives hated them and so invented the crusades and the hundred years war to get them out of town. They were about as welcome as a Walmart in a small town.

                            This also messed up relations between men and women. The rite de seignior said the master of the peasants had the right to screw any bride he wanted prior to her wedding night. Concubines, mistresses, whores, etc were all in abundance but had few rights. More importantly it was the grand dames who were most upset. These are women who married with huge dowries. They nearly always married important men and then as soon as the husband died, often of what we call unnatural causes, pressure would be applied to remove her holdings from her. Often as well it was the heir who was at rish. If the owner of the estate is three years old the king is liable to appoint and overseer to his holdings and then the issue becomes what happens when the lad turns eighteen and his uncle or who ever doesn’t want to turn the lands over?

As stated, one of the turning points of history was when cities and agriculture developed. This went along with the stationary male/female marriage, since the father had more surety of his being the parent of any children, and the shift of the diety from Female Trio, to Male.

                           Capitalism was invented by Italian bankers in the fifteenth century, it was a precursor to todays B borderless society because a piece of paper, a note, replaced physical currency. In Charlemagnes day for instance the king would constantly travel the roads of his domain and take with him the royal treasury, since he could not trust anyone the court. Between these times was a period when estates would be , in effect handed over to families and extended families.

                              This increased peoples concept of what a family was to include the children, something which was of interest especially to mothers since unlike bastards their children were set to inherit not only property but titles as well.

                          So it came to pass that the twelfth century became the era where we first see the notions of romantic love. By this we mean not only lust but a shared commitment to keep the family together. Part of the reason for this development was to impress upon knights the potential value of the women they had possession of. Towards the end of the middle ages, in the troubadour period there came a cult of romantic love where classically the young beauty, forced as a breeder for an grey haired man, engages in illicit love with a man beneath her dignity.

                       As to the troubadours, the master singers, the minnesingers and the like, in the beginning it was a upper class thing to do. It seemed to fill the notion of the complete man to have this warrior step off the battle field and play the lute. These fellows influenced among others the poet Dante. One of the keys to poetry ( listen to me –I feel like I’m talking to a room of children) – but anyway , one of the keys to poetry is the way it can sometimes say something in such a way as a certain person might understand it but others don’t. This is true even to today with hip hop.

                        As the art form spread though and the number of troubadours increased it also became a sort of newspaper, telling of shipwrecks and the fortunes of kings and lords. Again however, especially in areas under the control of hostile forces, which was much of Europe, the songs were coded messages, telling forces where to gather for an insurrection, or where a vulnerable lord might be staying.

                      One of the best of the early poets was Chretian DeTroyes, a semi-ecclesiastical in the pay of Eleanor of Aquitaine. He set the ground work for the Arthur and round Table of legend. He was a superb writer; inventive, funny, moral, and was capable of taking daily problems to their philosophical origins .

Today, perhaps the single greatest problem we face is that what the proverbial ninetynine per cent think is criminal the remaining one percent think is absolutely hunky dory. It was Chretians task to convince the empowered ones not so much to share their wealth – that would be a little too much to ask – but to behave in a way that would not destroy their own families.

                          I’ll just give one example. The wounded king motive is prehistoric, from Dionysius, to Christ and including many others the fellow with the slow killing wound, which is life, and or sexuality, is a standby. Sometimes it’s presented as the Fisher King with the implication that there is a cure, but nevertheless as the king wasteth away so too doth the kingdom.

                          The potential of debilitation in strength however doesn’t cross the minds of the ordinary warlord. That is a truth they don’t want to think about. Mr Scrooge doesn’t seem to mind never getting his rocks off.

                        And Chretian tells a story of Yvain, who was a friend of Gawain, who was King Arthurs right hand man. Yvain was a knight who married young. His friend Gawain says to him “Oh I suppose you’re going to be one of those fat boys that sits around eating and playing with the women until the women can’t stand you?”

Yvain is horrified. He’s in the prime of life. He has monsters to slay, tournaments to win and fame to gain, so to the honor of his beloved bride. So a little while after he’s married he packs up and sets out for adventure, saying he’ll return in a year, but a year goes by and he’s doing so well on the jousting circuit that he forgets his promise.

                     When he does remember he is distraught. Madness overcomes him. This madness was a big them of Chretians. When a knight wishes to apologize for wrongs done his lady he always takes on some form of madness. In”The knight in the Cart” and Yvain there are humorous aspects.

In Yvian, to atone for his misdeed the knight sets out to rescue six separate damsels in situations of distress. By the time we get to the madness of Lancelot however the scene is much darker. Remember Lancelot is the most fearless, and deadliest knight that ever lived ( French of course, even though the Arthur tales are set in Wales.) Lancelot has betrayed his king for a woman and in doing so he has in effect betrayed himself.

We may speak of how in medieval times loyalty to the liege was held as all important but in poetic terms this would be a major crime no matter when it happened. As well the crime was not adultery. That could be forgiven, even praised in the case of a bad husband. The crime was in disloyalty

                         And what is more one must be care when asking “to what is he disloyal?” This was the warriors code we are talking about, where one kills dozens and then brags about it in the pub. So there’s got to be a cosmic dimension to this. Kings, kingdoms, loves – all come and go. I don’t feel all that qualified because the decision to pull a trigger on someone is not one I’d ever want to have to make.

                      The last madness is by Percival, sometimes called Galahad aka “The Welsh Knight”. Pierceval, or pierce the veil, is the only one of the epic to enter the grail castle- he does so naked. In other words without preconditions or expectations.

                           (Added later: We may almost suggest a continuum of madness with the first two minor offenses being punishable by laughable silliness, whereas the madness of Lancelot is a terrible thing to see - ( indeed the fact that Lancelot is the supreme knight is an indictment on the whole order) and the madness of King Arthur cannot be cured except by transmission – to wit, a grail knight has to ask him what ails him- meaning a knight has to have to ability to see through the trappings of majesty to the mortal wound.)

I’ve mentioned how, in the cold war, senior strategists who recognized the two sides were identical in technique and hence indistinguishable from each other used to tell field assets that they fought because they were men and the other side were not. This echo’s Bishop Turpins comments on why Roland was obligated to fight the Saracens. (EG:Because they are pigs and we are not)

                             Actually the origin is all too often like the grain of sand that forms the pearl, some sin that will not let the sinner rest. This seems a little facile, like Orson Wells “Rosebud” in Citizen Cane and one must hasten to warn readers into falling into the trap of thinking the rich somehow must suffer for ill gotten gain.

                          But Percival/Galahad since carries not the stain of the past. He is a male virgin, so to speak and as well “The Matter of Britain” is set in a timeless zone, hence no on succeeds Arthur as king.

The Great Game

        

          Did you know there are now new sections of the Justice Department dedicated to to preventing “copyright abuse.” I kid you not – and these departments came into being in the dead of night without discussion, for the obvious reason that like most corrupt legislation they exist to pay off people who have been generous to politicians.

                  In a time and place where the nation is in the worst economic condition in a lifetime, when billionaires walk free after committing heinous crimes against the economy the American way is to make sure that some poverty stricken unemployed guy should not get away with saving fifty cents to download a ten year old copy of “Stargate Universe.”

                           Go figure.

                        Secondly a little odd history that actually tells us about how information flows. Information Theory, actually, is one of our primary subjects here and it’s most useful to know because unlike, say propaganda, pys-ops, advertising, or public relations, it can be viewed from a relatively objective standpoint. Also at times it bears resemblance to “Freakanomics” in that one sees consistent unexpected results from given situations.

                       One such case is when we ask a question and get and answer, but the answer is one step ahead of being complete and thereby we miss the whole point. A good example is “Who started World War One?” The overall answer is that the world was a tinderbox waiting to explode, as the old empires like Russia, The Austro-Hungarian empire and even Britain could no longer sustain themselves and so the assassination of the Archduke of Hungary was the spark that set things off. This is the usual understanding and basically correct.

But it’s a little more involved then that, and much less a result of chance.

When we hear the story we assume that some nutcase, anarchist, runs up to the car where the Archduke and his wife are motoring and shoots him – as if it was a spur of the moment act of a lunatic. Actually the story is different.

                Serbia, where the killing took place, was at the time under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they did not like it. Like most instances of the sort the submissive state was furious and the masters thought everything was fine. Here’s where the propaganda aspects come into play. Technically it’s called “The Great Game.” which is to say the game of international geo-politics. In the modern era we may suggest it began

Suffice to say no country will admit they place this game because, among other things, the player pieces are human lives and murder is the preferred means of scoring points. Messages are constantly being sent and they often are mixed. While appearing on the surface to be antagonistic nations may be in fact comfortable in a condition of shared goals. Likewise, as in the case of the Japanese peace envoy to the Roosevelt administration, such overt actions are meant to mask covert actions ( An attack was already underway as the envoys were knocking at the White House door)

             Many a seemingly random action then is actually a specific action with a specific goal of making a specific0110104 point. The Archduke Ferdinand assassination was a classic case in point. Serbia has been struggling for independence for centuries. Some might even say, for millennia, since it was once northern Macedonia and briefly ruled the known world, but like Wales and Scotland it as the disadvantage of being too close to a greater power.

                     The Hungarians wanted to send a message to the Serbians, which was that Hungry was their masters . One way this is done is the parading of the ruler through the streets. It has major ritual significance, even and in fact especially if the ruler is not liked. Cognitive Dissonance theory tells us if we force people to do what they would not ordinarily do they will “adjust their thinking” and come around to our way of thinking.

Rulers have always known this. It’s nice to be loved but it is necessary to be respected. To gain respect then we must humiliate the population that is not submissive to our will. That’s why we constantly elect tough bastards like Nixon and Reagan and piss on weak faggots like Carter. Toughness is largely measured by our willingness to killor hurt people and still sleep at night.

               Thus the Arch duke choose the anniversary of the day that the Austro-Hungarians first conquered the Serbs , June 28. 1389. That’s right the victory lasted over five hundred years and the Serbs were still upset. So much for time healing all wounds. He, or his advisors chose this day to humiliate the Serbs and send the message that they did not control their own nation on the most sacred day of the year.

When word of this came out, dozens of Serb men, enraged, volunteered to do the killing. The route the car was to travel was lined by over twenty assassins. Thje first two missed because the car was going too fast but when the car had to slow to make a turn the killer struck. Condemned in the international press in his homeland he was lauded as a hero.

                       Soon after the western world burst into flames. Thus the great game entered a new stage, and continues to this very day.

 

The Alchemical Rose (Rosa Alchemica)

                       

       Synopsis --- It is a commonplace in commercial fiction that we all must cone to grips and to  some understanding of our past, but maybe this is not true so much as we must achieve an raproachmont with the future- with our dreams and hopes. This is in particular important when those dreams, as for so many of us in America, have been shattered on the rocks of actual events. We are the traumatized victims of a brutal warfare against the public and what is worse there is no proceedure in place to aide the survivors in return to normal life. Indeed, if anything the maddening and infuriating thing is that the powers that are presently inplace are unable to face up to the crimes and misdeeds that have been committed. Instead using their positions as virtual jailors they force the prisoners, us, to blame ourselves for their crimes.

          If only we had been smarter, if only we had saved more and worked longer hours. In fact they punish us for the very misdeeds that they are the perpetrators of.

                   For us there will be no second acts, no overcoming of obstacles by will power, a plucky attitude and optimism. The best we can hope for is to avoid despair and point ourselves away from self destructive hatreds.

Specifically the following which is needless to say the effort of someone with too much time and not enough money on his hands is a response to a young black man in his twenties, a Harvard drop out who had his way smoothed and who, after witnessing what life was like on the other side of the fence, decided he liked the easy path better. The last time I saw him I tried to make conversation and yet he had nothing to say. He seemed to be laughing at an inside joke. Here was this chap, before him, me, trying to be interesting, vital, alive and yet he knew the world had no place for me – my kind are a dime a dozen – so he laughed, and I hid my reaction because his was no great sin.

                To be young is no sin

              This concluding essay of a brief series was to deal with the seeming downfall of the American way of life caused by our inability to conquer our own greed. Furthermore I like to think I’m better then those white people forever on the defensive – always bitching about how hard they have it. It was also in some sense before the world, not so much for mercy- after centuries of theft rape an murder that would be wrong = but for understanding – for when the shoe is on the other foot Indians are as capable of massacres as are cowboys.

                 I sought initially to preserve and soon realized it was impossible; history shows no evidence, nor does biology. The dominant species or gene will override the others and they will be relegated to dream and oblivion's forgotten fables.

                  I am aware if this and I won’t insult the reader by pretending they are not.

                   

Intro-

                   Okay, if you please, take a deep breath, sit back, and we shall proceed.

When I began this “thought experiment” I was extremely apprehensive as to the possibility of triggering untoward emotions toward myself. We live in a world that is filled with people utterly convinced that whatever the best life, the most decent life, indeed the life most beloved by the one true creator God is it just so happens that they live it.

                         We survive despite having such beliefs by the expedience of politeness and resisting the urge to constantly tell other people what we *really* think of them. (This incidentally holds true both on the large scale and the small scale.) I am aware of this and so beg the readers indulgence if I seem to exceed the boundaries of good taste – not to put too fine a point on it, but these are just words- they will not harm you unless you let them.

The effort I make is no more nor less then one of survival. Knowing the white race, as I do, intimately, I have not the slightest doubt that they will sell me out as long as they can keep their own power bases intact. That is the way it’s always been. The other races are on the upswing and it appears only a matter of time before we are over run . Not that I care; my concern is with the genetic survival. I want the world to be run by people who think like me not by people who think any other way.

                           I have no justification for this desire – but then I don’t see where it is written that I need any; especially in light of the fact that so many others feel exactly the same way only they lie about it.

Then again, we have always run the world. Therefore we deserve to continue to do so.

                             My children shall walk through splendid halls. My concubines shall have many mansions, for each of the many seasons that I decree. Your children? They shall eat with the dogs out of garbage cans. This is what my God tells me is good and just and right and who am I to do other then obey?

                            My God tells me that when I lift a finger thousands shall dance, when I lift an eyelid worlds will explode – for my God is wise beyond all knowing, uncreated, and undying.

Yes, it’s a magnificent new world we are upon the verge of entering; one where the masters all have good teeth and hair, are six feet tall, have ready smiles and shy, wonderful depreciating senses of humor. The girls will love them. They always have. And we will shoot them down before they get a chance to draw. It won’t matter since they they will throw stones and we will direct lasers.

                              Call in the helicopters Doctor. Fear not we bring food and medicine. We bring technology so that you and your brothers and sisters can speak to each other and decide what color looks best in the recreation room. We bring word of a compassionate one, who will forgive you no matter how much of a bastard you have been.

                                Historian Michael Wood suggests the reason for European hegemony over the planet was late marriages and small families which concentrated wealth in to comparatively few hands. Pathetic, puny little men, disgusting to our sight! Better yes, nice tall men with smooth skin and long fingers, long fingers, precious, erotic, full headed - make me wanna, make me wanna, make me wanna scream!

AS I've already mentioned in recent weeks one can’t held notice the firebombs and Molotov cocktails in the streets of Athens. It would be Athens, wouldn’t it? (It’s been said God’s supreme virtue is his sense of irony.) The American newspapers carried not a word of such events. Then the long awaited crackdown on the internet happened. The co-ordinated efforts of many police agencies around the world went into play and once again the media did *not* notice. Fascinating.

                It makes one aware of how universal is the consensus that the public must be kept in ignorance. The logic goes like this. “The public are children, like all children they must be protected from things they do not understand. It is up to us the responsible, educated people to bear the terrible burden of knowledge of events as they are.”

                              I’m not sure I wish to be lumped in with the dozens of self appointed saviors of mankind who in ominous tones assure us catastrophe is just around the corner. If we are really engaged in a flat out information war then nothing is for certain. The group that calls itself Anonymous could be the FBI acting for two reasons, to collect names and addresses of potential targets for prosecution or to foment enough meaningless info-noise to provoke a blowback without actually doing harm to data structure.

In this game there is no inside or outside.

                  The examination room was windowless. The walls had a few posters portraying the stages of recuperation after after tramautic injuries and strokes. Patient had right arm resting. Organic material reached to the wrist, hand and fingers were thermotrak. Nurse rolls orange by patient.

                        “Please catch the orange if you can”

                      Nurse rolls orange by patient. Patient catches orange.”

                        “Very good” says nurse. “See if you can hold on to it.”

                        Nurse reaches over and easily grabs orange away.

                              “C’mon Brad, try harder this time”

                                 Patient squeezes orange. Nurse makes half hearted attempt to pull away.

                               In earlier mentions of Alchemy I sometimes took care to make note that when something big happens and something else big happens at the same time, it’s a good idea to see if there is something going on besides coincidence. European alchemy came into existence, in the form for which we generally know it, roughly at the same time as the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The printing press is important to us today because it is a template of sorts of what happens to a society which is suddenly faced with a massive increase of information - such, as we are at present, obviously, experiencing with the internet.

                             The usual joke I would tell in mentioning the above was that Alchemy was the result of too many men with a lot to say and none of which made much sense. We can think of them as the spiritual ancestors of todays new agers, or seekers after metaphysical truth; for the metaphysical aspect of things had to be kept in mind, as did the workings of the unconscious.

                           We know for instance that in some cases when a person has a psychological disturbance, or attachment they will create memories in order to justify the present condition. Classically this was the case in Vienna when Dr. Freud, much to his dismay, realized that the numerous cases of childhood abuse, in particular of girls being seduced by their fathers, could not have have happened. He concluded that perhaps it was a case where the girls had wanted it to happen, ( eg: the Electra Complex) in order to comfort their fathers who the patients felt were not being given enough care and attention from mother.

                                   That deciding to take over the task of caring for their fathers would free young women of the need to break away from the family and form their own mature sexual relationships begs the question. It is easier said then done, as in the case of Sigmunds own daughter, Anna, who never married and spent her entire live caring for her ailing father.

                               It was Anna who said, “When we view the turbulence of adolescence it’s worth noting that it is the young adulthood that proceeds without difficulty that bodes ill for future happiness.” And thus it was for her.

                             There is wisdom sometimes in not avoiding conflict. As the koan says, Chop wood carry water, don’t chop wood, or carry water, chop wood carry water.” This is to say that after ones trials and tribulations one may find themselves very much the same person as before.

                    And this brings us around to Alchemy, or the quest for enlightenment writ large. Prior to the fifteenth century there were no alchemical works – if anything the writing of an Alchemical opus is likely to have gotten you hanged for heresy. Nevertheless there were works written in that first era which purported to be of ancient lineage. Here opinions vary, Gerald Manley Hall, a scholar who made Alchemy his life’s work takes a hard line on this insisting all such “back dated” works, like back dated checks, were mere fabrications meant to deceive.

                               I’m willing to go so far as to suggest that there were earlier writings dedicated to the essential psychological opus as portrayed in chemical metaphor but they were not as of yet part of an organized school of thought such as Alchemy. Furthermore Hall goes on to point out that when we view Alchemy as the ur form of chemistry we are incorrect, in that chemistry, of a sort existed prior to the fifteenth century. Did not early physicians such as Aristotle and Galen prescribe chemical cures in the forms of herbs and elixirs?

                                  What Alchemy did,as evidenced by the name itself, is reflect the influence of the Arabic world which for several hundred years after the coming of the prophet experienced an intellectual renaissance; one which interestingly was characterized by it’s lack of metaphysical, spiritual constrains. It , in essence, began the suggestion, which we still adhere to, that that body and mind are one and that they are in the final analysis combinations of chemicals and electrochemical reactions in a unique and complex form.

After a few hundred years then chemistry returned to it’s original form being considered something alien to the human life form.

                       As  indicated, obliquely, at the beginning of this essay I was very concerned about being accused of racism, or nationalism, but having gone this far I am a little further at ease. Consider the Brits – to go from world rules to second tier in a lifetime. But then again they may have ruled India but as to whether they truly owned India – that is another question. In any case, I lived there for almost ten years and it is not something people go around crying about.

Let’s for the sake of argument suggest there is a God. God is the determinant. He decides what happens. As we know, some societies, particularly in the west, chose to represent God as a human, be he the one eyed Odin, randy Zeus, or Mild mannered Christ, tribal cultures, through masks prefer to make the human appear in the form of the God.

                             The truest apprehension, one I am, as a hypothetical Alchemist am fond of is, "God is water."  This would solve the God/man pseudo issue once and for all. Land on a planet, empty a can of humafibe and a few gallons of water into a tube, let sit a few days and presto, a human being. This could prove useful in seeding distant planets.

                                 There’s also a horror there. William Butler Yeats wrote a story called Rosa Alchemical where, somewhat after the style of Faust, the main character is visited by an old friend and given the chance to transcend his mortal shell. But things get mixed up. Our relinquo, the conjoining of heaven and earth, the religion, or ritual, presupposes that the soul, the bridegroom, yearns for the comfort of the bride, or God.

In some Protestant theology, as in real life, the two rush for each other, the soul to the embrace of God. But even water, when frozen as ice, has form and attempts to make God of man are always doomed. The Alchemical Rose is symbolic of the fleeting perception of such unity as it can be known , at least on this side of the veil of life and death

                           To take this to a lower mundane plain for a moment what Yeats is saying is that the mystical experience is wonderful and powerful, but it doesn’t last – hence the Rose, which must decay.

                       But the poet is not to despair. We have the two logical forms of apotheosis, to change the outside to resemble the God or to convince others that the God resembles oneself. Both of these methods are viable but they are, as the mathematicians tell us “not elegant.” They require above all the transmutation of the God spirit into the soul of the human.

A third method remains, the God fills the form of the human, neither changing nor being changed.

The Agnostic and Atheist often has a strong argument in listening to the proclamations of a believer. Not only do two believers in the same God differ but event the beliefs of a single person about God can seem, incongruous.

                             That God cannot be changed by a human seems fairly evident. It is in our struggle to remake the God to fit our own conditioning that weakness and sorrow and sin are born. And Pain

Stay tund next week when we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

End of ptone

                      What Yeats was pointing out was something new; something obvious to the experimental Alchemist, which is that when two chemicals are conjoined they do not always remain separate but rather often mix into yet another element. This is the answer to the global racial problem.

                           The ordinary way of thinking of things is dualistic,  binary, or cyclical binary, on/off, life/death, winter/summer and repeat until fade. When we add the aspect of motion we speak of the dialectic, the ever revolving cycle of opposites.

                          Conventional religious thinking postulates the soul directing the actions of the body, or in earlier metaphor, the rider controls the horse, in the same way the man penetrates the woman and the superior man controls the man without direction. These also have their place in the mind/body questions that we no longer ask because we have discovered there is no line of demarcation between the mind and body, between the chemicals of thought and the excrescence of thought.

                                This is likewise carried to the nature nurture question which has vast political and social implications . The believers in nature, the blood, are the conservatives, believing that innate abilities are the major factor in who we becomes – the believers in nurture, the secular humanists, believe that one’s environment is dominant – the kicker is, of course, both sides can prove to seemingly irrefutable evidence proving their correctness.

                              Let’s think of form and content. Form can be thought of as the circumstances we exist in; content being our genetic constitution. Previously we often believed that the two aspects of being were not always in harmony. The saint begged us pity him who knew the correct path to God and yet fell constantly to the weaknesses of the flesh.

                  We ought not get carried away with the forms of being. It is not that they are unreal, they are no more unreal then any other forms in the universe, but they have no existence without material inhabitation. I call to mind the cartoons of my youth where one character would pour darkness into the shadow of another.

Now the dragon or water/fire lizard is usually thought of as the symbol of what we might call the life force. It is far more directed then what we think of as the ID yet never reaches the level of ego, per se. It is, as we musicians like to say, “Daemonic.” In the west the goal of the hero is to slay the dragon, as Paracelsus tells us the wood of a tree is of little use but for burning until we shape it into usable form.

                          This idea of forcing the submission of nature is allegedly, philosophically abhorrent in the east, but I’m not sure I see much evidence of it. One thing is for certain however the dragon symbol in the east is considered not a demon to be slain but a harbinger of good luck.

                                 In China for instance strict customs applied to how many toes pictures of dragons may have – with seven or more reserved for the emperor. The penalty of digression was, of course, death.

Note: I am aware that I am leaving the sexual connotations out of this discussion but the implication of the rider and the mounted is not difficult to ascertain.

                               Still, it all comes round, in the earlier forms, to a dualistic, “he said/she said”, issue. Who shall have control? I am reminded of Sartre’s comment that in every love affair there is the lover and the one who consents to be loved.

                       I can’t read William Yeats mind and he’s no longer with us so there’s no assurance what I say is correct. Maybe it doesn’t need to be. I mentioned a slight Faustian connection between the main character of his story Rosa Alchemica and the mysterious, seemingly allwise stranger. Perhaps this is over done. Yeats was very aware of the limitations of the corporeal world and like many he sought to somehow surpass them.

                      We are forever reaching beyond or attempting to reach beyond the barriers of what we know and are therefore often extremely permissive in allowing ideas without proof the benefit of the doubt. Yesterdays speculation is todays truth and tomorrows illusion. In any case , if we have not truth we have what we like to think is truth and who knows but that dream, like that of the afterlife is for many the prerequisite for living on earth.

                        So we are, according to this thesis, the result of the Gods pouring themselves into our shadows. We may like to think that we will be judged, that we think for ourselves, but actually we are the echoes of the whims of God who is the sole animating force. 

            As to the athiests among us, including to some degree myself- you can't get away with suggesting that since you don't believe in God that you therefore should be absolved of any questions of self interest. God, in the current sense, is a figure of speech.

GR Schaefer

New Paltz, NY Feb 2012

 

vLue and Mack 15

Intro-

                      As I mentioned this series of essays will not be like the ordinary. In, for instance, newspaper writing the old adage is tell them what the stories about in the first line then, tell them throughout the article what the stories about and conclude with a line doing the same thing. In the present case however, to make it interesting for both reader and the other fellow, the other fellow is not going to tell you what the article is about – maybe not ever! I’ll see how I feel.

                          This sort of thing is one of the advantages of not being paid. If I were to be paid then sure as shooting you can bet there’d be some chap, or missus, demanding that the story be clear and or the advertiser, overt or covert, gets their shekels worth.

                            And, but, still furthermore to make the game more interesting yet I will introduce this section with a few cheats – tips that will enable you, maybe, to figure out what I am talking about ahead of the other readers; for doth not the Alienist (Caleb Carr) say, “Context is everything.”

                      Starting with context, of course, this means two people can say exactly the same thing and mean two different things, and indeed mean the same words to serve two different purposes. This observation is central to language theory. Without it language is useless and we may as well revert to silence as Wittgenstein almost proves.

                        Consider that somewhat trite saying from AA – “Lord grant me the ability to change what I can and leave alone what I can’t and the ability to tell which is which.” Actually, if you decide you can’t change and am a juicer for life the adage isn’t much good. But it may have virtue in at least one aspect – it raises the possibility of things that we cannot change. I had two uncles who were alcoholics and unfortunately they could not change their past but more to the point, they were not sensitive to the present, which as we all know is the mother of the past.

                                       Another corny adage, one likely to be found in many a German American Kitchen is “We grow too old too late and too late too smart” – meaning that by the time we figure out what is happening to us it is too late to do anything about it.

                          This sometimes can work to our advantage however. When events occur we have two primary goals. One is that we get our way and the other is that the other guy doesn’t get his way. As an aside for whatever reason I seem to notice nowadays not the skewing of information, or misinformation, but rather the way some things worth knowing don’t appear to rise to the level of information, at least until it is far too late to do anything.

                             Here’s an important clue, and in fact one that is about as overt as I can imagine. Sigmund Freud, like many others in his era, had his dark moods. Remember that the animosity against “inferiors” in his lifetime went on for years; to the extent that entire sciences and schools were instituted to explain ad nauseam the justness of the cause. These people considered themselves the crème de la crème of intellectual society, selfless, dedicated servants of mankind who worked constantly to achieve a better life for those who deserved it and to kick the sh*t out of the kikes, queers and gypsys.

                         The rationale was that the best ought flourish and the worst ought be put down. In other words they worshipped at the altar of competition. But like the free market that is never actually free, as long as it exists in time and space, competition need fairness and fairness does not spring out of the ground naturally.

                            One of the saddest things you’ll ever realize is that there are people who are not going to give you a chance in the first place. They are not going to like you because they have been conditioned not to like you – and who knows but the conditioning may have some origin in cause, but it reminds me of what we we know about, well, specifically, localized myth.  Indeed a localized myth is what prejudicial thinking is about, along with whatever benefit said illusion might bestow.

 

                           A localized myth is one associated with a specific place usually and it comes about, again usually about seventy years after the occurrence of some dreadful thing. Furthermore, and here’s the mythical aspect, it often gains psychic impetus from some more generalized fear. Classically the scene of a rape is believed to be inhabited by a fairy spirit. This is well known in Europe as the legend of the Virgin Spring and one can suggest that the many Japanese stories of chaste moon goddesses have similar origins.

(In the category of ideas deserving further investigation, having studied , myths of identity and personal behavior for many years (as opposed to creation myths and end of the world stories) one comes to see them as almost primitive versions of what today we call “Case studies”. Sometimes they can be nearly allegorical metaphors describing the adepts “path to enlightenment” but just as possible is the instance where the myth describes a loss of ability and/or circumstance and how that is dealt with.

                  These loss tales fall into two categories, loss in the course of life, such as menstruation fables, death of parent fables, even poverty stories and those which border on propaganda; encouraging the listener to work hard and face up to the inevitable. The second form here is often associated with Hans Christian Anderson, who’s little girls never do the nasty and wind up dead in snowstorms or stranded on rocks in the harbor.

                    What I have only thought to consider in recent times is what we might call the proactive aspect of myth. In retrospect I feel a little like a fool - it is so obvious – especially in the case of males and knight errants.

The cult of Virginity has it’s sick aspects. It’s something that slave dealers are interested in – take her – 100% virgin, no chance of disease. All aspects of life, especially sexuality ought be thought out – at least as much as possible and what can happen is the girl refuses to consider that she may be sexually desirable, or may have desires of her own and winds up being the target of the moment – being raped or, subjected to an experience that is little different from rape.

                           In the case of the male, the so called noble knight it may be noble to die for a good cause, but it’s nice to win everyone once in awhile as well.

Humanity, in it’s never ending quest to name things has a name for soldiers that ride on horseback – knights. The image of the horse and rider goes back to prehistoric times and is global. The horse is the body and the rider is the sole. Bodies come and go being mounted ever anew by the same soul. As well in coarser representation the woman is represented as a horse and the man is the rider because the woman is the less ethereal of the two. She is connected with the earth, through birth among other things, in ways that man will never be.

                                       Now consider Sleeping Beauty. It’s a fairly conventional fairy tale, the point of which is that women mustn’t become sexually active before they are read. In ancient times this may have been when she had her first period, but that’s besides the point. We’ll allow for cultural variation. She sleeps one hundred years and wakes up to find, low and behold, Prince Charming. What is interesting from the point of todays discussion is the good Prince has no idea how close he has been to becoming road kill.

                                 To highlight this, again in standard fairy tale mode, the castle where the princess sleeps is covered in vines and decayed all about. The road leading to the castle is covered with corpses and the bones of all of the princesses previous suitors; those who arrived too early. We can be forgiven if we ask “What’s with this Prince? Can’t he take a hint?”

                            The prince is, in other words either very stupid or very horny. A third possibility exists however, one so strange yet seeming to fit the facts. The Prince doesn’t care. He is indifferent to death – he may even be a little attracted to it in the same way the Virgin puts herself in potentially problematic circumstances. Both know what is likely to happen. Both have heard the story, and yet, like the sperm swimming upstream, just keep going

Suffice to say, while on the subject of Virgin Princesses, the usual culprit is the parents, the wicked stepmother, and/or the father who banishes the girl to the tower.

I had an Asian (Chinese) girlfriend in high school. Her mother detested the idea of her daughter going out with me because I was white. So the girl was sent to an American School in Paris where she took up with another guy, and they lived the hi life. Meanwhile I was working in factories and anywhere I could find a job. We got together again but it was not the same. Mothers plan had worked.

“How you gonna keep them down on the farm

After they’ve seen Paree?”

                          “And what did Sigmund say about this?”

             To explain it first. The goal of interpersonal conflict is not to fight the fair fight.

The goal is to win. There was no possibility of Jews answering charges against them – there were no charges - there were no crimes – only law and punishment. It was Kafkaesque. The thing with Franz Kafka is you either think he was the most realistic writer of his day, or he was a mad man. He was not a little bit off the mark, because the human race had lost it’s bearings, as it has a tendency to do.

                         What Freud said was the the victors in the battle for the blessings of life do not win in a fair fight. They win by effectively castrating their opponents. It’s a little like the code of nobility where nobles would only fight the gentry of their own rank, leaving peasants to be disposed of by sheriffs and other legal functionaries.

                      The psyche remains strange however, even considering or disregarding the existence of a Thanatos (Death) instinct. For instance, (and this is another new idea for me) In the past I could point to the American public and ask them how it was they did not understand their handing of power over to the conservatives. The creation of the legendary one percent didn’t happen over night. It took thirty years of concentrated stupidity – of willful ignorance and disregard for the lives of others. Now all of a sudden we notice this?

                          To use a phrase I used innumerable times the American swing to the right involved the largest transfer of wealth in human history and we claim not to have noticed it? The Americans today are like the girl who does the half dozen lines with the coke dealer and insists the day after she was raped. Furthermore these smarty pants intellectuals who sat around with their fingers up their butts for twenty years now claim what? – That they were out maneuvered? If Ronald Reagan was as stupid as he seemed to be how come he still managed to screw the public out of hundreds of billions of dollars?

The answer is quite clear. They wanted it that way.

    There’s a difference between God and the Devil, they say. They say that if you make amends and are really sorry that God may forgive us our sins and greed and trespassing but the Devil is a more consistent fellow. He always keeps a bargain to the letter of the law. There’s no last minute change of hearts for him. He’s a reliable sort, not a fly by night, like God.

                           Finally let’s look at something out of the box. What the previous examples both in myth and in historical fact tell us essentially is there’s no accounting for taste. Humans do funny things despite their knowledge of cause and effect. The big happy is the mind. It must give the go ahead. All the Christians in the coliseum had to do was renounce Christ and they’d walk free. During the crusades the same choice was given to non Muslims – convert or die. And sometimes they died and sometimes they converted.

                          My science, so to speak, among the computer hobbiests, is as a mind hacker. Ordinarily we might call it social engineering but I’m too shy for most of that stuff. In the ,military it’s called Psy-ops and it’s not intrinsically evil. It can save lives. My interest however is in yet another subsection of the science.

It is a very wide subject, ranging from playing rock music at Manuel Noriegas bedroom window, to selling toothpaste, to convincing people to do things they would not ordinarily do such as revealing information. The line in standard hypnosis is that you won’t say that which you wouldn’t ordinarily say, but I find that hard to believe. For that matter I don’t understand why there was such an emphasis, seemingly on physical torture in recent years when drugs are more efficacious.

                      One suggestion is that the torture was not meant to effect information but rather as a determinant in the actions of those not in custody – but it’s a complicated issue and I make it a point to strictly avoid certain topics – because once you get them in the brain they start churning – one starts playing with them like a chess piece or three dimensional object and thinking of why something would happen, why it would be explained in a certain way. It is not a game for amateurs.

                     On the other hand it does get easier, I find, to avoid mind clutter and the effects of the data flood. Editing out commercials or simply not watching TV helps a lot. The age fact or contributes – people in their 20’s are always buying things but as you get older you slow down.

The challenge becomes clear. I think that it’s possible something like an Egyptian elite will come into being. I can’t say if there’s going to be a religious component, but the Chinese are thankfully free of it. Not to hurt anyones feelings but religion can postulate some weird things and then have to be dealt with.

                          The standard hypothesis, if we can call it that, is that the elite will be comprised of the technologically empowered and everyone else will be given tasks difficult enough to think they are living full lives. One of the things that is a touchy subject is this idea of optimum stupidity. I’m not joking. Seriously look at the priority America gives to education and you realize that we don’t think very highly of it.

                  Consider this. There are public libraries all over the country and they are effectively handing out for free copy written material. They have DVD’s and CD’s and are costing the media industry untold billions of dollars in lost revenue. We must close the libraries now or soon there will be nothing left to read!

I’m joking.

                             But few societies have every placed a high premium on education. It just makes them too difficult to rule. Our writers and opinion shapers understand this intuitively and that’s why they toe the line when it comes to exposing the public to knowledge that does not fit into the established prejudicial norms. The Bar Association, the AMA, these associations exist for the purpose of keeping the number of professionals at as low a level as possible so as to assure proper remuneration for the survivors.

                        Something like that will have to be done in the next hundred years. But I’m not giving the whole show away. I’m not charging for this and believe me well I know that the best way to establish credibility is to charge a few hundred for a few pages. I’ve read stock sheers, I’ve read Ester Dysons Version 1.0, Heck, I’ve even read presidential briefings, so I have and idea of how it works.

But I have a few other ideas as well

live long and prosper

glennschaefer

Mad Sox and painted Rocks

Mad Sox and painted Rocks

                            (Last minute addendum added after a few hours online) 

               

                         The same difficulty that trips up a lot of people with answers may well trip up those who wish to control the flow of the net – namely that not everyone may want to go along with your notion of what's right. Specifically the shutting down of the obvious file sharing systems will lead only to the opening of smaller and better protected ones and it is quite conceivable that at some point the cost of retrieval, meaning the cost to shut down pirate sites will exceed the gain realized – at which point what will happen?

Will merchants insist on prerogatives just to make a moral point? I doubt it. The hammer that is always held over the head of the public is that the business man will simply refuse to produce product. Social security was allegedly going to make it too expensive to do business in the US and would drive the country broke, supposedly - this did not happen.

                       Again it's worth mentioning that , after all, I am, at least allegedly, a content creator and my side of the fight should be with the publishers. Charles Dickens made copyright protection a big issue because he was paid virtually nothing by American Publishers throughout his entire lifetime. I suppose we could say then the shoe was on the other foot.

           Nevertheless at this admittedly late stage of the game as many a songwriter will tell you the large publishing companies are not overly generous with their remuneration. Again this is nothing new, but still it reflects the greater trend of the debasement of workers. Don't lecture me on the exceptions – the Micheal Jordans and the Madonnas – I don't want to hear it. To establish credibility of the NBA they needed and hence created a superstar, but it's still business as usual. The workers only alternative,of course is to not work – but do I have to mention the liabilities of that particular method?

                       In any case, we may go down, but we are not going down without a fight and what is more somebody, someday will find this maybe and they will know that not every one succumbed to the illusion.

                       

 From the other guys side of the fence          - the fabled one percent who take it all and do nothing

         Their attitude is not  unreasonable - As Galbraith said "Don't pity the poor white collar criminal who's lost their fortune. They never lose it all and even if they lose half they are still many times better off then you.

            This is to say that if we put the plutocrats feet to the fire they may find themselves being content with only ten million a year - they won't be happy - they will piss and moan like the spoiled brats that they are, the will claim the end of the world is at hand,  but at the end of the day they will accept whatever we offer - because it's better then working for a living.

okay, here goes...

                          It’s imperative, for my health among other things that we keep repeating that we are not speaking about truth in these essays, We are speaking about competitive belief systems in the information warfare that has thankfully in many cases replaced the actual warfare of the battlefield.

We have not even reached the point where we can define the deciding characteristics of the arguments or attack modalities that are most successful though we have it on the word of many generals of the past that even in actual warfare the psychological component is often the deciding factor.

We are aware, tangentially at least that modern belief shaping is patterned linguistically after that of warfare. We bombard territories, we seek total market domination, we engage in multistage invasion strategies all for the purpose of selling toothpaste.

A key element in the conditioning of the subject population however is the matching of the terms of conditioning with the cognitive structure of the subjects. A boy might write a hundred times “The dialectic determines action” and it could mean nothing if the the kid didn’t understand the basic terms.

A thesis I sometimes play with is the the Muslim faith is very sophisticated in terms of it’s ability to convey and convince. This is because primitive religious spheres tend to be based on stories whereas more modern ones are based on laws. Secondly the Koran, which I know very little of and which I confess I find hard to wade through (“For does not the devil find the blessed words of God abhorrent?”) is written in a very modern style. It uses short paragraphs and the way it works, from what I can tell, is it presents an idea and then another idea and leaves a space between the two ideas which invites the believer to contemplate.

A third characteristic of the Muslim faith is the ban on images of the prophet and that is what I’d like to speak to initially.

Essentially this ban forces the psyche to characterize the blessed one as one with themselves.

As indicated – as the most modern of the major messianic religions the prophet doesn’t really deal with a universe of cause and effect. Everything simply is. It’s not like a Polynesian story about how dolphins learned to sing, or how rabbits got their tails. In effect there’s no time for that.

In some regards this simplifies things. How many a catholic school teacher wishes they had such certainty; having to refer to instead of having to tell the students it depends on faith. Then again if you’re a fan of paradox you can appreciate the notion that faith only is real contingent on the extent it has no justification or causality.

Rolling along then in my parents bedroom asI was growing up there was a crucifix upon which the dying Jesus, in all his three dimensional agony could look down upon the marital bed. A child might well wonder why on earth this was done. Picasso suggested that while Africans and others may, by using masks, take upon themselves the visages of Gods the European chose instead to portray the Gods in human form.

I had a particularly gruesome epiphany one time whilst walking though the church yard og a German Village church that was several hundred years old. The dying savior was portrayed in such agonies as I had never seen before. It was of the school of Grunewald.

I bring this to your attention because people are different. It’s a safe bet that the genetic difference between peoples is negligible but behavioral patterns and cognitive templates tend to remain and “Bounce back” even after extreme traumas.

Germany and Japan were both devastated by the second world war and yet in less then half a century they were once again among the worlds most effective economies. Granted, Japan as of late has had some problems, to which we may attribute to the relative strength of the other Asian tigers but the essential facts remain.

But things are slipping out of order here so I’ll make two suggestions and then move on. One is that contingent with the military examples of organized force being of superior merit to disorganized, or trained force how we treat free speech is critical. It’s easy to say “Shut the F*ck up B*tch you don’t know nothing”- As the mystics say “They who know do not say and they who say do not know”

What you wind up with is decided not by knowledge of a subject- but by ability to speak, or shout, louder and longer then others. This advantages women, and those from verbally oriented cultures, but it doesn’t always get the job done and sometimes can lead to theories overcoming facts. As the great theorist Reagan would say “Facts are such bothersome things.”

                     It’s nice to have a story teller as a leader – but it’s not that nice that one would actually choose them to lead. As we indicated yesterday the control of the media, not necessarily by the media itself, but simply by those who are good at using it can serve to inhibit the access of those who are being disposed by current decision making. It has nothing to do with evil intent per se, although the results may be less then desirable. As the great Herbert Khaury (Tiny Tim) would say - “I love to pose,” and as many of us would say “I love to hear myself talk.”

                        (I jest that for many years I was upset with the New Yorker, et al because they not only wouldn’t hire me, but wouldn’t hire writers like myself which included many of us who cut our teeth on the style, which dates back to Twain and may be referred to as “ironic transcendentalism”- instead there was all this crap about rich people and their lives and poor people and the millions of ways they could be killed. Now I could care less – they kept telling the audience to get lost and guess what happened? They got lost! )

              I mean where’s the nobility in that? Where’s the pride, the dignity?

                      As to the question of why Japan and Germany seem so resilient my normal answer would be – the weather. It’s cold enough so people have to keep busy or freeze. A corollary to this axiom must be included, because the weather is so cold (but not too cold) the little children have to wear socks and it is a well known fact that the wearing of socks is known to increase intelligence as proven by hundreds of IQ tests.

I’ll now give a few examples of the kind of thought obstacles we face in trying to make a better life for us all. I do this not in the spirit of personal animosity but in the open contest of ideas to decide which seems best.

                            Indeed my research has led my to understand that there are several concepts that are nearly unbearable for our sense of selfhood to tolerate.   One is the genetic modification to a new species – It need not turn out like the Island of Dr Moreau to give us pause for thought.     Another idea, only slightly less frightening is the hive intelligence. It amuses me, in terms of chaos theory that the world cloud as in cloud computing is becoming acceptable since it is not too far from the imporating chaotic concept of flocking – as in the case of birds or fish.    Here the component units move as one in incredible syncronicity – without the knowledge of why. That in turn is a step away from the hive, where, like in the Borg, all individuality is stripped away and life becomes a simulacrum, a form of living death.

                  Don’t worry it won’t happen to you because you, unlike the rest of us can think for yourself. You have a soul. You will be judged etc etc.  Just kidding  Obviously we prefer to think of ourselves as individuals. The dignity of which I speak is based on just that concept and I weep each time I see a person renounce it for the drugs of power and wealth.  That said though we will get no where if we insist on doing everything ourselves. The only way the war against the undying corporate mind can be won is to create a more deadly mind then has yet been known.  I don’t wanna play intellectual king of the hill, just because a person doesn’t take us all the way to Parnasus doesn’t mean the trail is useless.

           The mind must be flexible.

             We must learn to accept the advice and knowledge of others without taking it as a personal insult.

                    At the turn of the millennium, a mere ten years ago two writers seemed to be saying things that people apparently wanted to hear I however was a little appalled. They both had come to the same conclusion – that the triumph of consumer capitalism was a done deal the world over.

In actuality I am more amenable to their conclusions today then when they were first presented – perhaps this is because they are now considered somewhat absurd.

             The writers, and their utopian fantasies were Francis Fukuyama and his end of history thesis and Thomas Friedman and his Flat Earth theory. Fukuyama believed that the ongoing dialectic of nations overpowering weaker nations had been fundamentally changed.

               For instance when we speak of neoliberal economic theory, or globalism, or of neo colonialism what we mean is rather then a conquering nation taking over the complete apparatus of state (an expensive and often thankless task) the modern method is to take over only the economic structure and leaving the health and feeding of the population to others.       This lowers the locus of control: especially it lowered below the threshold of war in most cases. The wars that have been fought in recent decades are always fought by surrogates and mercenaries.

              Friedmans idea, also in brand ready simple form stated that technology was well on the way to leveling the playing field (eg: flat earth) and that wherever the ubiquitous golden arches of MacDonald’s could be found the march to a house and a car in the garage was inevitable.

They were nice, optimistic theories and as I indicated if one assumes a global perspective they are not that far off the mark. As I also indicated I personally was furious. They had locked up center stage and were in effect, as we say, stroking each other, while I was outside in the cold in a region that had been devastated by these same trends and neither they nor anyone else, for understandable reasons was willing to listen to anyone else’s viewpoints.

The reason why they went along with the crushing of dissent in the past was they did not have an answer- they still don’t. Their answer is for me to die and I can’t accept that.

Fortunately the science of economics is like God, taking notice of every leaf that falls. As I’ve said we’d might do better to judge a society by how it treats the weakest rather then the most powerful.

In any event the wolf at my door, having eaten its fill has moved onto other doors and without much change I’ve gone from radical to mainstream.

Both of these writers may, in their hearts be advocates of the common man – if only because that’s where the sales are 

                 Fukuyama went on to write a book about the next wave of the future, one which entails a good deal of genetic engineering and if there ever was a topic that was a wasteland of moral pitfalls that’s’ it.

             To repeat, if one word could describe what I am concerned with it is dignity. There’s an old adage to the effect that we best judge a person not by what they do but by what they don’t do.

This brings cause and effect into the picture. Sure one could occupy themselves with others ideas of causality but do we really want to do this?

                    I’m not being too clear, admittedly. Consider this we are given a solution to our problem but don’t we have the right to suggest that others adopt the same solutions?

Classically Bill (“Just call me Bill because I’m your pal) Clinton told people that they should think about having several careers in their lifetimes but I’d didn’t see him take that advice

                  Returning to Fukuyama though I got the impression he was sufficiently humbled by the ideas of cloning and intelligence modification to at least refrain from making absurd claims about it. Thomas Freidman and Micheal Mandlebaum, a former white house policy maker have a new book out dedicated to solving the problems apparently facing America today in 2012. Unfortunately the word that comes to mind is to damn with faint praise – it is “sincere.”

  This ends a little suddenly due to a glitch in a program that lost some data.

          See you again

_ GR Schaefer