The Legend of Sharky

                  The legend of Sharky 

 

                A lot of people think they know the story of the legend of Sharky, but they don’t. what they know is drips and drabs and figments and fictions. Most of these tell you more about the teller then about what the story is really about. But that’s just the way it is.

                       Maybe it’s a story better never completely told. You know, a wise man once said, “We get all the truth we can stand and the rest, that which we are unprepared to believe – that which we can never believe - just washes off us like water off a duck’s back.

      Those who tell you they were his friend – they lie. He had no friends, only associates and even they sooner or later could not resist the urge to succumb to his abilities. He made things happen. The women who loved him asked for nothing in return. Just to be seen with him was their reward.

                 And I’ll tell you right out loud right now that I never met the man; what I know has been pieced together from scraps, so if at a later time we discover that I’ve gotten a few facts wrong then I apologize, but nevertheless the core of the story is as I shall relate it.

             There are some, it is true, who say that Sharky was like many of us back in the seventies, he was a seeker after the great truths, and the primary difference between him and the rest of us is that he had the resources, granted to him by a wealthy family, that enabled him to carry on his journey further then the rest of us. I am not of this opinion. Nor can I subscribe to the idea that he, early on, joined the Peace Corps and led an exemplary life of voluntary poverty from an early age.

                                               What is by far his most likely origin is among the hard nosed Yankee businessmen of his new England roots. His family was long settled in the area and respectable, but in recent years had fallen on comparatively hard times. It is very likely the erudition and breadth of knowledge that he displayed early in life came from a comparatively enriched environment as a youth. One hesistates at this point to draw too many conclusions or suggest that he was overmuch influenced by the situation in Massachusetts in the second half of the twentieth century.

                    Whether it was from want of adequate opportunity, or, as most chose to believe, from a yearning to see the world it is known that he had left Salem before the age of eighteen, initialed to attend school in Northern Falls, Minnesota and then to various ports of call throughout and across the Pacific Ocean.

                        This is the romantic Sharky that we hear so much about. What often is not mentioned is that this period only lasted three years. His physical beauty was such that he never wanted for a place to stay in any city he visited. As well there are a number of prostitutes even today, nearly forty years after, who claim to be his daughters. As to sons however there are none who make this claim, which in an of itself is not astounding. Sharky made enemies as well as friends, especially among men who’s wives and daughters he had seduced, and who’s sons he had borrowed money from never to return.

                            What is certain is that on July second nineteen eighty a middle aged man checked into a Hong Kong Hospital giving only the name “Sharky”. Over then next year there are several other apparently voluntary admittances to this and other Pacific rim Hospitals. In each case the patient walked in and in all but the last he walked out without assistance. The official cause of admittance was given as “Influenza” This is problematic because there were no other reported cases of the disease in the locale at the time of his being struck by it.

                       He never was reported missing and so there was at no times and active search for him. Among the teeming hundreds of millions in Southeast Asia one more American who had sought enlightenment and found only death in a back alley would be no surprise. I happen to know for certain that there were reports of sightings soon after and for many years: sightings of a man in the deep ocean, of a man who, upon being seen, continued his lonely voyage across the waves.

              When on occasion the ships that sighted “Sharky” went to investigate they found nothing. Gradually the legend grew and eventually, the story of the man who left family and friends to gambol on the waves became a legend and went viral, but as we know the legend is somewhat incorrect. He had already left the security of his Salem home to attempt to find happiness in the fleshpots and opium dens of the worlds.

Some claim they have seen him on dry land, but none of these claims are from though who knew him before his transformation. Some claim that he has undergone a physical change of lower form; his legs have fused together to form the lower extremities of a powerful fish. When this insight is combined with that of recent discoveries of captured dolphins the picture becomes much more clear.

                   There is at present a significant human dolphin breeding program being undertaken on behalf of certain elements in the new world order. What is more the pioneer of this program went into it fully aware of the consequences and with no intention of personal reward other then the satisfaction of seeing the boundaries of science pushed back.

    Because of the shape of the mouth it is impossible for Dolphins to speak as humans do, but their hearing is excellent and it’s long been suggested that they understand not only dolphin, but human speech as well. Along with this the Prognikov theorem which states that once the initail form of the DNA code is broken human can survive with as little as a fifty per cent amount of standard Code.

            Along with this is the suggestion that once codes become intermingled  secondary and tertiary codes can be added with little additional damage to the species survivability. We have long used the introduction of cold water fish DNA into vegetables to make them more cold resistant and have a greater shelf life: the addition of the Turtles recombinant DNA, with it’s ability to live two hundred years and longer could mean that if that were done in Sharky’s case he’d still be with us, alive, today.

He certainly lives on in popular lore and legend. There are comic books and popular songs written about him nearly every day. As well, several of our major universities now offer classes on the Sharky Ethos, on Sharky in the Heroic Dimension and other interesting topics.

                   There are many among us who feel that if he ever was then by now anyway he’s dead. There are too many stories of his sightings for them all to be true. On the other hand sympathizers and Dolphin rights advocates are said to be surreptitiously arming them by leaving weapons on the shore. This much we know. Someone or something is coming to take the weapons away.

                                       Naturally supporters and believers must maintain a low profile, but all this begs the question which is “Why did he do it?” All the indications are that it was a voluntary decision on the part of the man from Salem. Conservative Christians see a Satanic influence, suggesting witches from a coven that has been located there for hundreds of years and has never been successfully eradicated. 

 

              In the final analysis all we know is we just don’t know.

-Tamlin

Tarrytown SnakeDance (Why Smart Girls Don't get laid

Why Smart girls don't get Laid

Tarrytown Snake Dance

                This is something I’ve been toying with for a few days. Remember when all is said and done the subject here is how to control vast segments of a contemporary population so that they will serve your interests and not their own. Call it propaganda, call it marketing, call it what you like. At times it may veer perilously close to philosophy but that is not the specific goal.

                Remember as well Hitler’s admonition to his subordinates – “If anyone gives you trouble - take them out back and shoot them – we don’t need to please everyone.”

               That is to say that the other side of this question is very real indeed and they regard  "academics" as little more then nuisances.

     We want to look at things that work the same process that sells a saint  can sell a tyrant.  In other words we are looking at the system  - from it's roots in the biological systems to it's results in the domination and enslavement of large numbers of people - an enslavement only possible with the willing acceptance of the subject population.

    

       The specific recent notion is first, remove the question of true or false – it doesn’t matter in systemic terms, or as Mao would say, “Truth is what the guy with the gun says it is.” In spreading the stimulai that’s the cause and the desired belief or action is the effect. In ordinary circumstances the effect is what we want, the volition, the purchase, the war, and we determine the validity via measuring the context. This works under the assumption that there is only one context, or reality.

            But such an idea is out of date. There are as many realities as we can effort to create. What is more the creation of alternate realities serves to negate the primacy of the one we’d ordinarily judge. The question of truth is not decided – it merely ceases to exist. It’s drowned out in the data flood.

                        And I have to keep driving home the point that although the processes we speak of are rooted in the biological organism, once the technostate is introduced to them the inevitable result is a totalitarian social system , which inevitably implodes. Usually because totalitarian systems are very poor at gathering feedback - like the father figures they often admire - they are only interested to giving orders not taking them.
                      Literally speaking technology erodes top down processing by the frontal lobe of the brain. This eliminates deep awareness and replaces it with extremely transient thinking that I call “Skatter-thought.” It is directly analogous to the thought process of a person on some forms of drugs. As we know most of the people who took LSD in the 60’s stopped of their own accord and when asked why they could not really explain – because the drug impeded among other things the generation of understandable sentences.

           This is why smart girls don't get laid. Note: I have delibertly not “Dumbed down” the above ( the way I usually do) in order to reach a wide audience. That's the kind of thing that newspapers do.

Sometimes we ask how it is that highly educated people, for instance, fall under the sway of gurus, or a peeve of mine, smart girls give it up for a few lines of coke.

           When we ask why technologically advanced societies can't defend themselves against comparative primitives we ask the wrong question. It is not that technological advancement fails to deal with human aggression it is rather that it destroys the source of human aggression, which some call God, but can also be called the EGO and can be located in specific areas of the brain.

The brain stem may be the source of the killer in us all but it is the cerebral cortex that tells the brain stem who to kill.

.                Remove the frontal cortex and you pacify the person, changing, actually destroying the personality, creating Reagan Zombies, incapable of what we consider normal, self interested thought, wishing only to serve the master puppeteer.

                     We've known this since the forties when we discovered the usefulness of frontal lobotomies – which do the same thing as technological overload, only surgically. Of course similar results can be achieved via drugs as well.

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        My gut feeling is that we are going to lose a lot of people to this, (We already have but the conditioning prevents the masses being aware of it.) and as well , we are going to have to create structures to protect ourselves. LSD did not take over the world, but technology is far more pervasive

          This is a subject that has brought tears to many eyes, not only in it’s tendency to allocate resources capriciously but in it’s tendency as well to deny individuals self determination, freedom, and at it’s most extreme, life itself.

                I speak, of course, of the technostate; the state that places efficiency and progress ahead of all things. It is a dark subject, made worse by the fact that many are unable to see or even conceive of the evils it harbors, but after awhile the human can get used to anything. There may be hope in that, since once we shed the unconscious terrors that it uses to control us we may perhaps only then begin on the path to it’s control and extinction.

               Hitler is said to have called Great Britain “a nation of shop keepers,” and hence put little faith in their ability to defend themselves. He also is alleged to have gone to war with the British with less enthusiasm then with other countries since after all, the Brits were by and large Anglo-Saxons as well.

             But, merrily or not, off to war he went. We know how that ended. The thousand year Reich has come and gone, but the shop keepers remain. (Actually it is the shopkeepers who face the new peril in the form of megastores – but we’ll get to that later.) Marx tells us that the real enemy of the humane society is not the poor, nor even the rich, but the bourgeoisie, those money grubbers who can never have enough and are indifferent to the misery they create.

Certainly the experience in the industrial revolution and in the later information revolution tells us that the regards of the middle class to those less fortunate are at best , callous. Fortunately we need neither Marx nor Hitler in our story, for they were but puppets, marionettes upon a far greater stage of history then even they could imagine.

       What we might call Post-Marxian thought  suggests that though the muddled middle class may be the instruments of the abuse, they are not the designers.  Indeed there are no human designers, like old age  or narcotics addiction the process occurs without design

                 As I said considering the macabre actions of the technostate, the killing of millions by Stalin, the Rape of Nanking and China by the Japanese, one needs a little distance to focus. This is why I remind you of the humble storekeeper – the fellow on TV telling you about the latest sale, or the computer guy introducing the newest up grade of flash drives.

               Everything is great. Everything is big news. I imagine that toilet training in these households is done with equal fanfare.

                     But of course we must come around to the matter at hand. It happens to be something that incidentally obsesses many in public and private life today – call it information – call it propaganda – the big lie – or what you like, the insurmountable obstacle facing the functioning society is it’s inability to decide what is true.

“Democracy is too important to be left to the people!”

             Not by choice but by necessity I have studied this online, in public, for the past fifteen years. I am like the fellow who has been turned down for a loan and who, before walking out the door inquires of the banker, “Please sir, but why?”

And each explanation requires a new explanation, and so one, ad infinitum. That, in part, is how the system survives, by never actually being called to account and by adding one impossible answer on top of another, until the questioner is either exhausted or dead.

                   The problem of two conflicting notions of truth, each with an equal claim to actuality, can only be solved by expanding and changing the contextual universe.

              To restate, ordinarily we think that context will reveal who lies and who doesn't, but when context itself is a lie then that doesn't happen.

       First let’s observe process and disregard content. Obviously this is not the norm. In the norm we accumulate “evidence” to prove our contention, but in reality evidence falls prey to the same weaknesses as the essential premise – in other words evidence can lie, indeed at times evidence must lie in order to substantiate other lies. In any case we don’t have to know the “facts” they will always vary.

                   The role evidence plays is to create causality, as in cause and effect, also known as motive and opportunity. The way we have traditionally sought to determine true cause and effect is by context. In other words people do things for reasons, reasons which may not be readily apparent to the external viewer.

At this point we are placed in the position of second guessing the actors. When the Attorney General of the US states under oath that he can’t remember why he fired someone a year ago, however incredible is sounds that must be accepted.

Actually we might understand that the AG was under orders to remove state Federal Attorney’s for political reasons, but there is rarely accommodation for that in the law.

What we have to do is take the duality, the cause effect question, in it’s context and place all three in relation to other similar cases. It’s as if a judge were to say, “I’ve heard his lies – now let me hear your lies.”

I will now attempt to clarify this by giving a few examples.

The music business, in some cultures, has long had a questionable status. Prostitutes, actors and musicians are considered one and the same. Some societies, such as the Puritans, ban music. As we know the dawn of the technostate in America is traced to the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan. After that hundreds of newspapers were closed down, as well as independent Radio and television stations which were replaced by national networks run on cables.

              There was a joke around a few years later that went, ”The music business used to be run by organized crime, but now it’s run by a new and tougher gang – Time Warner.” Both artists and prosecutors were not happy . The artists were paid less and the prosecutors were staring in the fact of a huge international trust.

                       In previous instances, with Standard Oil in 1910, with NBC Radio in the 1930’s , with the Bell system in the 1970’s, the monopolies were forced into competition, but this was no longer because of a political shift to the right.

                      Let’s look at Thomas Edison for a moment. Every nation has someone they claim invented motion pictures. In the US it was Edison who promptly went to file a copyright. What he wanted though was not only a percentage of the profits on every movie made, but the total control of the manufacturing process. In other words he would decide what movies could and could not be made.

                       The East Coast courts went along with him, after all he had the power to do what he wished. The movie industry moved to California where there were more judges then Edison could buy.

                  If you had a popular song nowadays you’d have no choice but to work for one of the majors. There are four on the entire planet. To get airplay in the US you would have one company to deal with which controls 1800 stations – Clear channels.

Obviously these firms are in a perilous situation. Anyday the feds could drop the bomb on them – so what do they do? They reverse the modality. They claim instead that they are under attack from imaginary “pirates” who have stolen hundred of billions, trillions even from them.

Let’s look at another instance of word meaning reversal. The word “revolution” implies the changing of the world order, the poor are empowered, the rich get their comeuppance. How then does that apply to the election of Reagan? It doesn’t obviously. It was the big lie made to appear harmless. Likewise were the president of Time Warner, or Sony made to walk the plank over a sea of shark infested waters then perhaps they could claim to be the victims of pirates. Were they somehow to have their yachts taken over in the Indian ocean by Somali pirates maybe they could make the claim, but people downloading Mp3’s? Oh what a sorry state the pirates of today have fallen into.

                                                                                                                                But then, I said it would not be by evidence this case would be made, and I will be true to my word. Let it be only said then that it is classic technostate behavior, dating back to the Romans, to claim that the states they invade and conquer had bad intent and were invaded as a defensive maneuver.

                           Now comes the part that either clarifies the situation or confuses it. To give an example there’s the statement that nothing of importance is allowed to be discussed in the Congress. Such discussions, were they to happen, would only be futile and what is worse would confuse the public.

                          What you will get are questions of procedure, riders, local pork barrel projects and hot button issues that neither side cares about, such as abortion, the presence of prayer in public schools and highway beautification. Essentially we are dealing with a bait and switch. It’s long been known, and complained about, that a party will win elections on social issues and then once in office all they care about are economic issues. Ironically these complaints are not well founded because the impact of legislation on economics is increasingly nil.

                      Back in the early days of the rightward swing I used to wonder, “Why, if patronage is the life’s blood of politics, are these legislators giving it away by shrinking programs? The answer is that all those patronage jobs were distributed by comparative amateurs who could be dispensed with.

                 I was watching a George Carlin video the other day. In it he goes, “You know “Fuck so and so”(the person he mentioned I didn’t recognize but apparently he was famous at the time.) and while we’re at it “Fuck Tiger Woods”. Him I had heard of. He was the first major black player in the business of professional golf. He’s cute. As the expression goes he’s “right out of central casting.” The public is provided with photos of little tiger at five swinging a gold club. Adorable. WE get pictures of his lovely wife and family.

                          The message is sent. Golf is for everybody now! Everyone except Carlin, who said, “I’m tired of being told who to admire.” What is Tiger’s real name anyway? In the information state he makes much more money as a personality then as a golfer. He sells this. He sells that. He sells.

But we must go beyond the obvious – which is the salesman

To paraphrase the Upanishads

“I am the salesman

\ I am the buyer

I am the act of consuming”

 

                   In other words traditional marketing theory says that the target population so identifies with the exhalted hero figure that they will give anything they have to purchase items associated with the hero and thereby gain the heros strength by sympathetic magic. In this case, although Golf was nowhere near the dire straights that Basketball was in before the invention of “Air” Jordan. (Note the use of magical nicknames.) The idea was to recreate the profit centers.

                  Note as well in classical taboo relations the hero must not come from the same tribe as the one he saves. In taking a wife as well a man is not permitted to take a wife from the same totemic group, which in many cases would be a family relation.

                     I’ve referred to this in the past as the “Woman in Red” concept, namely the woman who seeks to be the hit of the party can tolerate anything but someone exactly like her who would threaten her position. We see this in media all the time, where first one, then another person claims to be “the voice of the public.”

To sum up then Tiger Woods, like a Senator, is chosen not for who he is but who he is not. He is the void which contains eternity to get philosophical on you. It would be possible to be aware of the status of the typical twenty five year old black man and actually do something about it – but that would cost money!

Take a graduate of a major university. His, or her, parents are educated, they make six figure salaries; the chap has never had a work experience other then maybe a summer job as a lifeguard. He discovers theres a pipeline from his school to some major employer. He takes a job as a reporter, he spends his summers in the Hamptons, and life is good.

Compare him to some working class guy. He’s gone to an average school. It took seven years because he was working at least two jobs in addition to going to school. He can’t hardly write nothing. When he goes out with the team for drinks after work he embarrasses everyone with his vulgar accent. The only stories he knows really well are not success stories, but stories of drunkards dead at forty, of twenty year olds throwing themselves in front of trains, of women with three kids with three different fathers, hmm. Well what would be the moral choice?

Do you go with the ideal, or the real? Is it such a good idea to let it out that your society is collapsing? What good, what good would that do anyone?

                And here chillum, is the kicker.

                   You let one of those in and the neighborhoods going to go to hell. And you personally, not someone else, but you will sacrifice your better interests for the better interest of the whole. Are you going to do it?

                       Because you know who is going to sacrifice you? Not the human trash that you forgot to lock out in the cold – but your own people, decent folks – because they are going to be mad as hell. Betrayal is a terrible sin. Terrible. Where is your loyalty to your family, to your friends? Remember you’re not doing it because of your personal weakness – you’re doing it to preserve a way of life.

               Don’t worry about me. I won’t force you. I’ve seen too much and I don’t want to see anymore. Do what you like.

Live long and.... huh?

                                Back in the day, when I was writing punk rock songs for the band it was more or less expected that such material expressed dissatisfaction with one’s circumstances. I don’t think I did a very good job of it, actually. The Ramones who were the local famous band , did it much better. The funny thing is the Ramones had a world wide following, but in their home town locales they were not successful. They were not unknown, but the area they came from is not condusive to rock bands. It’s not Seattle. Actually it’s pretty run down. The same holds true for Public Enemy who came from a mile from where I lived. With them it was worse though.

                              Probably some of their popularity came from being pro-black, macho chic, but from their perspective it really was them against the world. They lived in an isolated nearly all black community called Roosevelt amid white suburbia. Both the Ramones and Public Enemy also had talent – which helps and specifically by talent mean they approached things from a reliable perspective. The Ramones did the comic book ”trash art” mentality that gets critics hot and wet and Public Enemy saw themselves as more then just entertainers, as a news service for the black population.

                             As I said those angles were not for me. I was and am very much middle of the road. To me that’s an egalitarian approach. I’ve known jazz lovers for instance who’s insistence on it rubs me the wrong way – not all, but some. I’ve thought about it for a long time and basically I’ve come to believe that being a white male just was not cool. We took it on the jaw. This is not simple however. There are demagogues. Like Rush Limbaugh, who use this isolation, to get rich. And suffice to say the Republicans have counted on it for decades to elect the unelectable.

                        This condition affected the middle and lower middle class most. If we worked for a major company the affirmative action kicked in. My father had his career frozen in the Bell System and I ran into opposition in the NY Times. No one suggested we couldn’t do the job. In actuality we did the job pretty damn well; we had to, but there were just too many white guys and by coincidence it was at this time that the sins of our forefathers were discovered and we were expected to pay for them as well. This is how life works. Power comes from numbers and it also finds it’s own justification. 

 

                          While this was all going down however the psychological effects were very subtle. Looking at Reagan you’d think that it was morning again in America, which was a code phrase meaning, “White guys are back on top” but Reagan could not do that – even the great communicator could not change history. That’s something that we disregard at our peril. As I’ve tried to indicate recently the only satisfactory way to view events is as a totality, meaning for every cause in a cause and effect relation the effect is drawing the cause into being as well. Les Paul and Mary Ford had a song “The World is waiting for the sunshine” and history awaited it’s Napoleon till he showed up. The inevitability of it all is a little frightening, but I tend to think that is how the masters and shakers view things. In other words, Bill Gates might have done things legally, but if he didn’t cheat someone some else would have. 

                The dirty little secret is this. While Mary Tyler Moore was turning the world on with her smile, the guy next door was commiting suicide in any of a dozen ways. And no one noticed. No one ever notices. Ghosts aside, no one ever notices the dead.

                        Except me, because , to coin phrase, everyday, I live with the dead. I lived in dying communities. Perhaps because of the isolation I experience being a harelip I saw differently the effect of people discovering there was no place in society for them. It was like the very poor in the depression never noticed it because things had always been bad, so too for me, having been officially handicapped and outcast early on I didn’t notice it when the plants closed.

                                  So now let’s let some air into this room, and speak of the future. When Francis Fukuyama and others in the late nineties came up with their new millennial world I didn’t bother to read them. I got the point which was on page 199 at the bottom in the foot notes (Yes there will be collateral damage, but that can be dealt with later) Another phrase that came into being as a code word to mask evil was “Roadkill.” As long as the roadkill isn’t them, people have a marvelous ability to disregard it’s very existence. As the Germans said of over one hundred extermination camps , “We didn’t know what was happening.”

                                However small the details though, Fukuyama, to his credit, attempted to address them in his next book, only to discover that the very technological advances that had brought us cells phones also brought powers of discrimination that will prove very problematic. Since I don’t have to speak to the general public and was not trying to prove a hypothesis I was in a better position to see them early on. 

 

                        As you are probably unaware, the Tamlinmediaco has been around online since 1995. We’ve covered the stories with the amount of info available to the average person who reads the papers and like every other start up we claim to tell it like it is and not like big media wants the story told. Unlike anyone else I tended to doubt success was possible, in part because my educational level is fairly high and I know well what it’s like to communicate with people and see their eyes glaze over. It’s not only they can’t understand, it’s they don’t care. It’s all too abstract. What can I say?

                       I can still joke, that like Twain, my writing will only be understood in the far future when humanity comes to it’s senses, if ever.

                                                                         So anyway, often I’d close an essay with a dream sequence, or my attempt at Joycean escapades.

This time I will conclude with an anti-dream sequence – in other words – with a factual story – which of course the majority of you won’t get the point about.

                 From approximately forty thousand BCE to three thousand BCE the inhabitants of Europe worshiped a Goddess . Usually, like our modern Christian God, she had three forms, the mother, the harlot and  the crone. In some places she was called “Anu”, a name which survives in the Christian Saint Anne, who is the mother of the mother of God. Woman as a possession at that time was a basically unknown concept and so lineage was traced by the maternal line. With the advent of agriculture, the technology of the day, came cities and people no longer needed to be hunter gatherers. It also meant that males could keep an eye on females and thus lineage was traced from the father, as it is today.

                   The advent of cities also brought other concepts, like wars, police forces and a pantheon of Gods who were at first identified by Weather characteristics. These were called the Thunder gods because they made a lot of noice and wind. This is Zeus.

                              Incidentally to show how all these things fit it was discovered in the nineteenth century that the king of the Gods of ten had similar names. Yoga or yoke, and Deus, or Day are two very old words. They are Sanskrit and go back maybe ten thousand years or so.Deus is easy to trace. It became first Zeus, in the Greek world and Jupiter in the Roman world, but always retained the notion of the supreme deity.

Suffice to say four thousand years ago most of the world lived in the middle east. Europe for most of the prehistoric era had about a million people, but they were spread out across the entire region, which incidentally was covered by a single forest. In the Balkans and what is now Turkey there was a proble. First it’s impartant to realize that the Dardanelles, or Istanbul has always been the dividing point between east and west. It’s not hard and fast. The turks are very westernized despite being Muslims. And at times it been suggested that the new dividing line is Paris, but I think that’s taking things too far.   

                     In any event as the thundergods assumed their supremacy there was a countereaction. The thundergods were a different kettle of fish as you can imagine. They legitimized rape, theft and murder, as long as you could get away with it. For about a thousand years there was conflict between the two groups the female and the male deities. Cults grew up including the Cult of Cybele who’s male initiates proved their sincerity by castrating themselves, and the Cult of Dionysus which featured the chasing of a symbolic God by a group of women who then murdered him. This religion is considered one of the antecedents of Christianity incidentally. It is the wounded God who dies and then returns to life, syndrome. The Cult of Diana and the Cult of Venus were two cults that survived right into the Roman era. Eventually, as you know, the Thundergods triumphed and along with them the domination of the male in western society.

                                                                                                                                          

                     The worshippers of Anu , the mother goddess, however would have nothing to do with these more bloodthirsty offshoots of what is traditionally called the war of the sexes. Realizing that “Civilization” was not going to go away they began a great migration. First they travelled due north to what is now Moscow, then they went westward across what is now Poland and Germany and Denmark. They stayed in Denmark for a while and give their name to the county (Danes – people of Anu Mark – realm) then made their way south and west to Britain and Ireland. Since Europe was not densely populated at the time they were continually stopping to settle. The generic term for these peoples was the Celts.

 

                              For whatever reason they didn’t have any problems assimilating with the native religion of the north, which were highly patriarchal and the south which were basic nature religions. 

 

                                    Okay, thankyou for reading this and now I’ll tell you why I mention is. Because when the Celtinc migration got to Ireland thy had an obvious obstacle- the Atlantic ocean. Ireland has a place in the hearts of many an anthropologist because it was at the end of the known world. Even the Romans never got around to conquering it and as such the legends there are very old and comparatively untouched.

What happens though is virtually everywhere there is conquest by one people by another. (It is a fact of life that we ignore at our peril. Actually my personal belief is that if the individual cannot save their society they must save themselves.) As we have discovered though our wanderings through myth, such tales are meant to pacify the vengeful Gods. They are acts of atonement done to convince the Gods of the conquered people that the conquest was not so bad and it had to be done anyway. Furthermore, to show what nice guys they are the victors promise to set aside a day or so to remember the people they slaughtered.

              This also helps when junior asks ,”Mommy, who was here before us?”

So in Ireland in Gaellic the phrase is the “Tuatha de Dannan” which means “the people of Danu”. Most societies don’t afford the little people such a large role but Ireland, as we’ve stated is a little different. Another name for these little people is “the leprechauns”.

                        Suffice to say the Atlantic proved a great obstacle, but there the people of Anu waited. One mught suggest that after four thousand years they finally traversed the great water.

                                Facts, me dearies , just facts.

               There was a fellow that used to write for the London Times who I quite enjoyed. His name was Anatole Kaletsky. I no longer read the Lindon time. More then most I quite admire Murdocks skills as a newspaper man. But in the same way one might admire hotpants and low cut blouses on a woman, but not on ones wife, I didn’t care to see what he did to the Times. 

 

                                  Kaletsky was an economics writer; he tended towards being a technician. He had, among others, two endearing qualities: he did not shy away from stating what he though would happen, nor from admitting when he was wrong, and two, he had a fairly decent vocabulary. I recalled him to my thoughts today because several years ago he had been to the World Economic summit at Davos and aside from the usual comments he turned aside and noted that not only were many of the participants of great age, but that they were in good health for the most part – thus he concluded that if one wished to be healthy one might try being a millionaire. Most amusing.

                           To conclude;  technology has brought us to that moment when we stand before the Atlantic ocean wondering how on earth we shall get across and if not it will be a long wait. Specifically the introduction of GM foods began surreptitiously several years ago, apparently – there’s no confirmation or denial. And I can appreciate the moral dilemmas we face. Again specifically if it is possible now to give a person a two hundred year lifespan how do we go about it?

             In case you're interested - to make a tomato last in frost it's  given  genes  from dolphins, which are  relatively immune to cold water.    DNA is fascinating  in that it is a code in every living thing.  The key is it is a code - not a chemical. So you can transfer code bytes from the "animal" kingdom to the "vegetable"  kingdom and it  still works. 

            Speculatively however nature has all sorts of ways to control populations. In some cases thousands of offspring only survive in small numbers. Or consider the fact that all out  war is no longer feasible.

            As I've indicated in several places recently the end point, as far as how far the aggressive part of the population can push the rest of us is, as always, starvation. You can take people's homes but if you bring them to the point of starvation you must either lock them up, terminate them, or face violence from street mobs - note for instance in Rome the situation of the poor was never allowed to deteriorate that far.

           

              However I'm afraid some of us will not demand things to get that bad before they do something about it.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

The human genome project is complete.         The possibilities are intimidating.

                     It is one of the cases where the essential question is posed.

                     Who gets to live and who gets to die?

                          And we will not be able to avoid answering it forever.

Tamlin

Objects of Desire

               It’s September and a new semester is here, at least that’s how I think of it. Being somewhat over educated I can’t help it. Here’s the overview:

                  I try to pitch this at about a second year post grad level. The discipline is somewhat undetermined but would best be though of as a specific branch of psychology. Actually it’s psy-ops without the nasties and as well these manipulations are primarily conceived of in terms of control of one’s own population and not the enemies – so there are constraints and freedoms not otherwise accessible.

It struck me today that I have never, even in the beginning bothered to cover the basic’s of the field. Essentially you must know something of Freud and Goebells as well as the role’ that Reagan played in defining the modern leadership format.   

               Current academic focus is if on anything, obsessed with the loss of myth.  We seem, according to these thinkers, to have either lost the light or it's gotten rather dim. Often they bring Nietzsche in to the picture and specifically mention the dead of God. Suffice to say Nietzsche was at most a bystander at that even and certainly events were leading to such a conclusion. Martin Buber has a nice way of dealing with the problem which postulates a sort of nucleus and electrons meaning I and Thou as the electrons and God as the central unknowable determinant. It's actually quite serviceable especially compared to some philosophies.

            I don't go that deep. As the joke goes I just want to run the world and leave the rule of the universe to the other guy.  My premise then is that the duality of myth and reality to be understood correctly has to be divorced from the notion of cause and effect.  One in other words does not determine the other. They are interrelated at an integral level.  Like mind and body, or nature and nuture, the question as to which is primary cannot be answered  because it is not a question.

               Take my word for it - there's a lot of room for extrapolation from here.  Thought effects reality both figuratively , as in perception and literally as in the case ofm deciding to saym build a building. Reality affects thought as well, conversely. I find it amusing, and somewhat dangerous however when I run into those who demand that there's only realty.

                 Reagan is important not because of what he did – that sort of question is for someone else to answer – but because of his psychological type and how that was manipulated to serve the ends of his handlers. As the saying goes “Flattery feeds a fool” and a glance at the ever confident , ever smiling POTUS tells us the appropriateness of that.

                 But as well, in all the figures we study it is well to remember the admonition of Gotama Budda – “AS the ants crawl across your toes remember each one is a Reagan, and there have been endless Reagans prior to this one, and there will be endless Reagans after this one”

                       My idea of the best learning experience is like having a group of comedians talking show biz around the lunch table – but unfortunately this is not easily arranged.

What I can give you, one on one, is a simulation of the sort of advice a shrink might give a patient. Note this is of necessity hampered since every patients circumstances vary, but then as Tolstoi said, “Every happy family is alike, every unhappy family different.”

So if any of you have had years of psychotherapy and find my comments to be things you’ve already heard before I beg your forgiveness.

As the cliché’ goes then we want to look at familiar things in new ways. As simple as that sounds it contains the essence of personal freedom. Imagine you’re driving from one place to another, there may be a road that will get you there much faster, but you can’t take it is you don’t know it’s there and you may not find it if you don’t look for it.

To repeat one of my by now tiresome axioms, The obscure can be found by anyone, it takes a genius to see the obvious.

This is quite literally true. In paintings we speak of the “invention” of perspective in the middle ages. Prior to that imagery was two dimensional. Why? Did they not see? Sure, but that vision did not make it into the brain. Just like today we might have difficult envisioning the other side of an eight sided object.

Some of these perceptual handicaps we soon outgrow. The young child is fascinated by the game of “peek-a-boo” because for all it knows the world beyond the closed figures has gone out of existence. In a matter of months it outgrows the wonder.

A good deal of the difference between the obscure and the obvious is not based in fact but rather in conditioning. In Reagans world it was obvious that the typical welfare recipient was a woman with a dozen illegitimate children of different fathers who owned a Cadillac.

This, of course was a lie, but it was a convenient lie for those who wished to dismantle the welfare system.

Which reminds me when I say that I expect at least a cursory knowledge of Freud and Goebells in the reader I am assuming they are aware of “the big lie” in the case of Goebells and the description of the subconscious by Freud.

      There was a cartoon by Gary Trudeau called “
In search of Reagan’s mind” and I think of it because his head was such a mess, between the feelings of contempt for his alcoholic, neer-do-well father, and the extreme narcissism, that one ventures in to explaining causality there with great trepidation.

For our purposes it is enough to describe the process by which damaged personalities may be manipulated into demi-gods.

Conversely one might add that it also brings into play the somewhat disturbing notion that *only* those with some sort of mental condition to hide, are ever seen as leaders.

This is somewhat amusing in light of the many books that purport to teach one leadership skills.

Sorry to make this sound so political – I don't regard it necessarily as a good thing but it seems to intrude whether we like it or not.

Where we'll be headed in the next few essays will be the way language shapes knowledge. In other words you can't begin to condition someone to your way of thinking until you have first given them the terms that you wish to impose. It's like a ball game where the notion of victory or defeat is senseless until the basic rules of the game are understood.

My premise will be that one can measure the degree of conditioning in a society by as simple an expedient as counting the number of times certain words appear in the media. Societies , like people tend not to think of themselves as “crazy” until it's too late and the situation has been brought home to them, via exposure to other societies, or people.

But so much for the elementary axioms. From the beginning I have insisted that we at least bear in mind the metaphors of the arcane, mystical traditions. It keeps it more interesting for me and since I neither get paid nor judged it is an open opportunity.

In alchemy and the alchemical opus we hear of the identification, the separation, the location and then the breaking down of belief systems which leave only the essentials which then can join with like essentials for a harmonius universe.

In the Tibetan varient of Buddism we hear of teleportation, levitation, astral projection, invisibility and such, all of which prefigure the means of the modern world by centuries.

Likewise the great scholar of the Hindu texts, Swami Prabuhabta when he translated the Upanishads and the Vedic Hymns insisted on using words like electric house, and radio waves while we know that three thousand years ago these concepts were not around.

Suffice to say what we call something matters. It matters because while the thing being named is what it is the name we give to it becomes immediately subjected to positive or negative interpretation.

Okay, let’s like Macbeth, “jump the world ahead.” (Let’s also hope we have more success then he did though.)

One of the simplest codes we can imagine is to just take each letter and replace it consistently with another letter or number. It’s also one of this simplest to crack. If you know the language the hidden message is in and if it’s long enough out simple examine and compare the frequency of the symbols and match them with the frequency of the letters in the coded language.

This is a “straight” code. In the case of most conditioning the coded language is “bent”. So instance in degrading a polish person you would not call them “a person of polish origin”, it would be much more preferable to call them a “polock” – general speaking the longer the description the more difficult it is to skew the definition.

Along with this goes the fact that the shorter the description is the less information it conveys, but conversely the more emotive content. (Ie Nigger, Spic, Fag)

The use of code phrases thus raises an interesting question. We assume that such phrases as “states rights”, “supply-side economics” are used primarily to mask their actual intentions - in these cases the retention of slavery and the transfer of wealth from one class to another.

However this may be too simplistic an explanation. Adopting the language of behaviorist conditioning lets view the stimulae in terms of positive and negative responses.

We know that by touting dubious economic theories or metaphysical nationalism we avoid the stigma of being called liars, but perhaps too little attention is given to the idea of the charm that attaches itself to coded message.

Part of the reason why is it suggests an “us” and “them”. In this case the “in group” will understand the message, as the poet says, “in it’s true meaning”. If you think back to childhood you may recall that no great appropriation was placed on the young boy who used “curse words.” It was if anything a sign of early maturity.

Also reverting to an even more primitive process the guy who gets to name things is considered to have the power of controlling them. Let’s not forget that the use of prejudicial thinking is widespread and that is because, like violence, it works.

Lose track of that and you may as well give up and go home. It reminds me then of the idea that every defensive weapon is at the same time an offensive weapon. This means that we use coded messages to protect ourselves from having to state our true purposes and as well because they give a greater impetus to the message itself.

In the same way you can crack a code by the mere counting of letters you can crack the social codes by seeing what words appear most often. It was remarked that as the 80’s went to the 90’s businessmen had adopted a new lexicon – one based on the terminology of warfare.

Areas were “saturation bombed” in order to obtain “total market domination” . competitors were strangled, suffocated, or merely beaten to death. Strategic long term plans were devised for regional attack plans.

We can suggest that if anything these plans worked too well. They succeeded in essentially slitting their own throats by eliminating what economists call “demand.”

This leads to a superficially puzzling question which is “Why would a business, or society willingly commit hari kari?”

The usual explanation for this, as well as for acts of selfless self sacrifice is that by the single person sacrificing themselves conditions are allowed to exist that maintains the overall stability of the system. In other words by committing hari kari the warlord allows the rest of his extended family to survive and keep their possessions, which if he rebelled would not be possible.

There may be merit in this suggestion. The problem is that in the ideal, as taught to the population for instance, businesses in a Capitalist system compete against each other and the “losers” go out of business while the ultimate winner is the consumer who gets the best product at the best price.

This is nonsense. As none other then JPMorgan put it “I like a little competition, but
I like a combination (or trust) better”

The enemy and perpetual loser then in Capitalism is the consumer. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly but it’s the only one that matches the facts. Anyone who has been married knows that even in this most sharing of relation ships there are lttle competitions, and there are things that stem from almost exclusively psychological reasons - who gets to drive the car? Who handles the checkbooks, even who gives presents to who.

To take this parallel a little further into a somewhat disturbing dimension when couples who have known each other a long time separate they rarely remarry. They know each others habits too well.

We’ve mentioned here that a similar case occurred during the American revolutionary war. If the great majority of colonists had come from nations other then Britain they well may have been inclined to believe the Brits when they claimed that their “cousins across the sea” would be treated fairly, but such was not the case.

It was to escape British rule that the colonists came to America in the first place and to think they would willingly take up the yoke again is foolish. They had a good idea of the type people they were dealing with, and we need only see the misery and genocide in Ireland in the 1840’s to see what love the mother country bore for her offspring.

I claim no foreknowledge of the future but must suggest that it would not be wise to underestimate the antipathy that has arisen in America towards those who she feels have mistreated her.

And I am not speaking of foreign enemies.

Like the cheating husband who is convinced his wife will never leave him, even at this late date the people in the power centers of Washington and New York, safe in their cocoons, are not aware of the thin ice they tread upon,

That dissatisfaction comes from both left and right only strengthens my premise. After all the left may have raised small cries of disapproval at the policy changes of the past forty years- but they took the money anyway and are as culpable as those who did the actual stealing.

It may be that we will see a repeat of the Teddy Roosevelt administration and things will change – or things may have gone too far. No one knows.

Back in the days when I worked in Criminal Justice we would speak of the terrible trauma visited upon people who’s houses had been burglarized . It was the violation of privacy as well as the loss of personal items.

How much worse must it be when one loses a house through the fault of others – and the others are not punished but rewarded?

Or when one works hard only to lose their livelihood in middle age not because of necessity but because a greater profit could be made overseas?

I think that an awareness may be dawning – I just don’t know if it will come soon enough plus theres no avoiding the fact that someone is going to have to pay – and the poor and the middle class no longer have the resources.

Certainly you can brush me off as just another one of the new breed of fanatics – but doesn’t the number of fanatics tell you something?

I’ve been writing this column for nearly twenty years. I’ve never been paid a dime. I do it because of the discipline. I’ve seen too many brothers and sisters die of drugs, of malaise and of the pain of living as slaves. I may go down but I will go down fighting.

The powers that be have attempted to steal from us the single most precious thing a person can have – their sense that they have the freedom to control their destiny. “No one is to blame” – so they say.

I will say this one time, because the big lie will be repeated ad infinitum

If you take away a persons belief in their own self some will submit, but sooner or later, having nothing left to lose, some will bite back.

tamlin