my NaNoWriMo moment

Stella is not at home these days. If she was she would be buried in the morass that is her living breathing monadic representational construct of the cosmos that most would call a home, or at least a house. For Stella it is something much different. Stella Lazuli is the daughter of the Hunkpapa Lakota elder shirt wearer Sturgeon White Cloud, the full-blood spawn of 19000+ thousand years of a genetic connection with the core of the Great Mystery that other cultures have called GAIA and ?? She is a powerful woman, charismatic and assertive merely by standing in a space occupied by other people. Nearly six feet tall, strong and fit from a life of physical training and long distant running, her long nearly blue/black hair tied in two long braids at all times covered in otter skins appliquéd with lapis and garnet stones, a cut piece of meteorite embedded in a gold setting always around her neck—Stella is one of the foremost professors and researchers of spiritual human consciousness.

Her study/library reflects her intense interests in all things spiritual, and in the mystery of the Holy Other. The titles of books clearly show the profound texts of shamanic students and scholars in the History/ Phenomenology of Religions at the University of Chicago. The volumes include authors such as: Eliade, Bolle, Culianu, Wasson, McKenna, Sharon, Schultes, Weil, Capra, Baron von Bibra, Arden, Wilpert, Levi-Strausss, Suziki, etc.. Likewise her shelves are filled with videos of intellectual quests for meaning, and artifacts from around the world’s shamanic masters. The range of voices reflects: PBS documentaries of explorations of mind and spirit, feature films on shamanic transformations like Emerald Forest and White Dawn; commercial TV programming of scripts dealing with issues of change in personalities and forms of being including X-Files and Twilight Zone; and other products specifically created for learning at home. Her kitchen is lined with jars and containers of herbs and plant matter; a whole wall is shelved as an apothecary in the Chinese style, filled with various individual cabinets of herbs, animal parts, plants, etc. The majority of this pharmacopoeia represents homeopathic remedies for the entire range of human ailments from both the Chinese and indigenous native americans, and of course, the more legal ethno—psycho—pharmacologies, especially entheogens, for severely altering one’s state of consciousness including the precursors plants for DMT, mescaline Ayuhuasca, daturas and brugmansias, and other phenethylamine neuro—transformers. Entheogens are the class of various alkaloids from plants, fungus, and microbes that, when used by specialists, create powerful alterations in human consciousness leading to visions of relations with spiritual beings and aspects of creation.
Just off the kitchen is what was once a bedroom, but is now a very complete greenhouse ranging in climate and flora zone growth from tropical to temperate. A small antechamber is sealed as a fungi growing area in which most of the world’s most psycho—active fungi have representational spawn. Inocybe, Conocybe, Amanita, Stropharia, Panaeolus, Heimiella, Boletus, ergotamines, etc.,--are all well represented by their mycileum and fruiting bodies. The house seems to be a living organism, with dust free window corners where spiders move freely about their silky realms unencumbered. Her father was the shamanic alchemist Iktomi Hitunkala (Spider Mouse) of the Otter Clan whose relationship with arachnea of all species was deep and personal. He often pointed out that family Arachnea was one of the few GAIAN species which was represented from deep below the sea to high up in the life limiting troposphere.

Stella is not at home these days. She is high atop a strange and wondrous pinnacle in South Dakota known to the locals as Eagle’s Nest Butte. It is the most sacred of the hanblechia sites, as powerful an elemental spirit circle as there is on the planet. While the majority of Lakota vision quests were held on Bear Butte or deep in the Black Hills and Badlands, Eagle’s Nest Butte was reserved only for those who had demonstrated a profound relationship with Wakan Tanka, either through phenomenal mythical acts or revelations of spiritual manifestations. All shamanic beings commune on Eagle’s Nest Butte, a true sacred power center on GAIA.

yesterday, all the corruption seemed too close

Please consider that powerhouse senior adviser Karl Rove continues to strengthen his hand politically -- and that the intelligence reorg just doesn't seem to be on his radar, one way or the other. Instead, Rove is revving up to push a series of audacious plans to fundamentally reconfigure the way the government gets and spends money, in a way intended to strengthen the Republican Party's grip on power for decades to come.

A New Team and a Battle Order

Mike Allen writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush plans to overhaul his economic team for the second time in two years and wants to tap some prominent replacements from outside the administration to help sell rewrites of Social Security and the tax laws to Congress and the country, White House aides and advisers said over the weekend.

"Aides said changing four of the five top economic officials -- including the Treasury and Commerce secretaries, with only budget director Joshua B. Bolten likely to remain -- is part of Bush's preparation for sending Congress an ambitious second-term domestic agenda."

Allen writes that while Bush is considering reaching beyond administration loyalists for his domestic team, he will continue dispatching White House staff members to key jobs. "Aides said many other such moves will be announced, because Bush and senior adviser Karl Rove are determined to 'implant their DNA throughout the government,' as one official put it."

And Allen writes that an order of battle has been established.

"Bush aides, who have been debating what parts of his legislative package to send to Capitol Hill first, will start with measures to restrict medical malpractice claims and other lawsuits. Bush will then try to advance his initiative on Social Security, after which will come proposed changes in the tax laws. In the next month or two, Bush plans to name a commission to make recommendations on the tax code that could eliminate some loopholes and even replace the income tax with a sales tax or value-added tax."

Just this morning, Bush announced that he has chosen Carlos Gutierrez, a refugee from Cuba and currently the chief executive of Kellogg Co., to replace Don Evans as secretary of Commerce. ""

paying off the florida constituency with a cuban exile cereal corp dude... suggesting a highly regressive taxation program--the poorest people pay the highest percentages of sales taxes relative to their incomes, or a value added taxation system increases the price of items that are processed more and more, unlike the custom works and services paid for by the wealthy--and so forth. and then of course, privatize Social Security, which translates directly to using mutual stock funds or bond fund portfolios that are subject to, well, let us really be honest here, the blatant corruption rampant in a deregulated financial markets system. What was that figure of jailed Enron and WorldCom executives who were convicted of fraud and corruption?--five out of 34.

how do they keep the media from challenging them???

<>Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) said he was disappointed but not surprised by the WTO ruling. He criticized how the law was implemented - by being inserted in an appropriations bill instead of going through the authorizing committee process. But overwhelming Senate support for the Byrd amendment makes changes unlikely.
<>
this of course is unlike any piece of legislation recently passed in the last three weeks by the Republican party in Congress... cause they never would try to insert amendments to approrpriations bills without allowing them to be thoroughly reviewed in committees, right! why is it that Grassley can say this stuff and not one single video media outlet will even suggest that the Repugs did the same thing.. it is like the whole judicial appointments rhetoric... the repugs withheld Clinton nominations and hassle the dems for even trying to attempt to withhold.. but of course all of that is BS because 89% have been affirmed... why why why doesn't the media just ask the simplest questions.. that is the part that worries me

from counterpunching the planet

The new U.S. Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez, disregarded torture in his infamous, post 9/11 memorandum to Bush: "In my judgment, this new paradigm [the 'war on terrorism'] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

"Quaint," eh?

It might more aptly be applied to Magna Carta, the epitome of quaintness, though Professor Huntington of Harvard tells us in his screed to rid the nation of Hispanic cultural influence that the American creed, its cultural core, is Anglo, "going back to Magna Carta," which he thinks is somehow Protestant (Magna Carta 1215, Protestant Reformation 1517)! Furthermore, although it is such a quaint part of the Anglo core, it is not even written in English. Its most powerful part is chapter 39:

Nullus liber homo capiatur vel imprisonetur aut disseisietur de libero tenemento suo, vel libertatibus, vel liberis consuetudinibus suis, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terræ.

Edward Coke provides the classic translation. Edward Coke was to the English Revolution of the 1640s as Rousseau was to the French Revolution or Marx to the Russian Revolution: though recently dead, his ideas caught fire among the leading actors, as did these very phrases: "No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land."

We parse the sentence in three parts ­ 1) the subject (no free man) is followed by 2) eight or nine proscribed actions making up the predicate which is then qualified by 3) a climax to the sentence stating two legal principles which provide the exceptions, trial by jury and law of the land. The first part used to be a favorite constitutional chestnut in cold war political science classes, when the professor with pedantic glee explained that a "free man" under feudalism actually meant someone with recognized privileges from the King, such as barons. To be honest, the Marxists weren't much better. Neither would countenance the serf. Thus, our passage to the middle ages was with a bucket of cold water poured on the warmth of our passions. Not until much later did I learn to read these things for myself, and find that Coke begins his commentary distinctly, "this extends to villeins."
It's the second part which has such variety, taking, arresting, imprisoning, exiling, banishing, ruining, destroying, victimizing, and disseiseing. It too contains a huge amount of commentary, legal and otherwise. Habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process of law, and prohibition of torture as principles of law have quaintly stemmed from this statement. It is the last one that concerns us.

In some conservative translations aliquo modo destruatur is rendered "ruined," or "molested," or "victimized." To interpret the prohibition of torture as molestation or ruin or victimizing is to displace the damage away from the body. Coke glosses "any otherwise destroyed" as "That is forejudged of life or limb, disinherited, or put to torture or death." The expression, "life or limb," appears elsewhere in the Charter of Liberty, and it makes clear that the destruction which is referred to, is an action on the body, an actual dismemberment, a real mutilation. It is important for us to retain this classic translation - 'in any way destroyed' ­ for two reasons. First, it was retained in the Petition of Right (1628) whence chapter 39 was preserved and later perpetuated in the U.S. Constitution (see the 5th and 14th amendments among others), and second it was upon this translation that Edward Coke, and then the Levellers of the English Revolution based their opposition to torture.

On 19 September 2003 Paul Bremer promulgated Order 39, a "capitalist dream," according to The Economist. Two hundred state companies would be privatized, foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines, and factories, and 100% of the profits can be removed from Iraq. This was the charter of privatization ­ public companies became private, contracts were private, and all was up for sale. Order 39 promoted both privatization and globalization because foreign companies were now permitted to buy and invest in Iraq companies, repatriating 100% of their profits. The moment of invasion and occupation was accompanied by putting Iraq up for sale. The brutal actions designed to 'free a sovereign country' submitted it forthwith to the ravages of globalization. It is not the corruption that is the principle of exploitation; it is the policy of expropriation.

The neo-liberal project, or capitalism unrestrained, or the universal application of buying and selling was established in Iraq by Order 39. At the same time Abu Ghraib prisoners were degraded, abused, and tortured in violation of Chapter 39 of Magna Carta. The coincidence is curious, and it becomes curiouser. The Structural Adjustment Policies of the International Monetary Fund, or SAPs, were the principle instrument by which global capital enforced neo-liberalism on exploited nations. At the same time the Pentagon's secret man-hunting and torturing outfit was also called an SAP, or, special-access program, responsible for out-sourcing victims to torture chambers in Singapore, Thailand, and Pakistan (Hersh, p.16). Indeed, I remember during the full hey day of JFK in 1961, my father, the U.S. Embassy political counselor, returning home for lunch, pale and aghast, from a tour of the Karachi police headquarters. At the table he was unable to swallow food, barely able even to speak, but willing at least to tell us the truth of what had passed before his eyes. This must explain surely why they make up these absurd euphemisms, as they could not stomach the tortures otherwise. (A Bureau of Imperial Nomenclature?)

Nothing can so clearly help us understand the torture and the project of neo-liberalism as this, for Federici describes a foundational process creating the structural conditions for the existence of capitalism. This is the fundamental relationship of capitalist accumulation, or (as it is called in decades of technical literature) 'primitive accumulation.' This mystery perplexed (however coyly) Adam Smith. It was the 'original sin' of the political economists, and for Karl Marx it was written in "letters of blood and fire."

The birth of the proletariat required war against women. This was the witch-hunt when tens of thousands of women in Europe were tortured and burnt at the stake, in massive state-sponsored terror against the European peasantry destroying communal relations and communal property. It was coeval with the enclosures of the land, the destruction of popular culture, the genocide in the New World, and the start of the African slave trade. The 16th century price inflation, the 17th century crisis, the centralized state, the transition to capitalism, the Age of Reason ­ come to life, if the blood-curdling cries at the stake, the crackling of kindling as the faggots suddenly catch fire, the clanging of iron shackles of the imprisoned vagabonds, or the spine-shivering abstractions of the mechanical philosophies can indeed be called "life."

Federici explains why the age of plunder required the patriarchy of the wage. Gender became not only a biological condition or cultural reality but a determining specification of class relations. The devaluation of reproductive labor inevitably devalues its product, labor power. The burning of the witches and the vivisection of the body enforced a new sexual pact, the conjuratio of unpaid labor. It was essential to capitalist work-discipline. This is what Marx called the alienation of the body, what Max Weber called the reform of the body, what Norman O. Brown called the repression of the body, and what Foucault calls the discipline of the body. Yet, these social theorists of deep modernization overlooked the witch-hunt!

On 19 September 2003 Paul Bremer promulgated Order 39, a "capitalist dream," according to The Economist. Two hundred state companies would be privatized, foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines, and factories, and 100% of the profits can be removed from Iraq. This was the charter of privatization ­ public companies became private, contracts were private, and all was up for sale. Order 39 promoted both privatization and globalization because foreign companies were now permitted to buy and invest in Iraq companies, repatriating 100% of their profits. The moment of invasion and occupation was accompanied by putting Iraq up for sale. The brutal actions designed to 'free a sovereign country' submitted it forthwith to the ravages of globalization. It is not the corruption that is the principle of exploitation; it is the policy of expropriation.

The neo-liberal project, or capitalism unrestrained, or the universal application of buying and selling was established in Iraq by Order 39. At the same time Abu Ghraib prisoners were degraded, abused, and tortured in violation of Chapter 39 of Magna Carta. The coincidence is curious, and it becomes curiouser. The Structural Adjustment Policies of the International Monetary Fund, or SAPs, were the principle instrument by which global capital enforced neo-liberalism on exploited nations. At the same time the Pentagon's secret man-hunting and torturing outfit was also called an SAP, or, special-access program, responsible for out-sourcing victims to torture chambers in Singapore, Thailand, and Pakistan (Hersh, p.16). Indeed, I remember during the full hey day of JFK in 1961, my father, the U.S. Embassy political counselor, returning home for lunch, pale and aghast, from a tour of the Karachi police headquarters. At the table he was unable to swallow food, barely able even to speak, but willing at least to tell us the truth of what had passed before his eyes. This must explain surely why they make up these absurd euphemisms, as they could not stomach the tortures otherwise. (A Bureau of Imperial Nomenclature?)

Why does torture accompany economic development or primitive accumulation? What is the relationship between the violation of Chapter 39 and the promulgation of Order 39? This is another way of expressing the relation between the tortures conducted at the Abu Ghraib prison and the project of neo-liberal economic policy. Why is the violation fundamental legal principle, the integrity of the body, necessary to the policy of oil extraction, modernization, and free marketing?

Capitalist work-discipline requires the mechanistic philosophy, it requires the enclosures and mapping of the world from the neighborhood to the GPS, it requires the tick tick ticking of the clock, the squared-out grid of the calendar of our days; it prohibits nakedness and public bathing; it forbids games of chance and games on the open field; it requires a belief in work, an ideology of work, a creed in work, and salvation through work. Labor power becomes self-managed. From signifying a work-stoppage, the phrase 'cakes and ale' became the gateway to consumerism. "We can see that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism." The acquisitive, pure, trained, punctual, chaste, producing, and consuming body ­ the "free owner" of "labor power" - to Marx appears as a gift of nature. Bechtel, Halliburton, and their contracted employees know otherwise. Shock therapy is applied to Iraq.

Historians of torture as practiced in England have limited their conception of it to a method of discovery, or of examination of witnesses; they call it 'interrogation under duress.' This however misconstrues its function which is not a misguided methodology of investigation; it is part of a policy to terrorize and to create a new type of human being. It is inherent in both the project of expropriation and the process of exploitation. From the marsh Arabs and the desert tribes: modern labor power is created by war, religion, and torture. Migration, diaspora, criminalization, pauperization result. The infliction of pain continues in several disciplining contexts: army, navy, imperial, Ireland, man and wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, master and servant well into the 20th century.

We cannot describe a 'moment of torture' that is exclusive to the expropriations of the period of primitive accumulation which then disappears that when exploitation is routinized in the factory, because the factory itself is a habitat of pain, sleeplessness, and stress. The expansion of the scutching mills in Ireland with the development of the linen industry took women, sons and daughters of small farmers and fed them into the rollers of these mills. At one mill (out of 1,800) in Kildinan, near Cork, between 1852 and 1856 six fatal accidents and sixty mutilations. Dr White, surgeon for factories at Downpatrick, found a vast sacrifice of life and limb, "in many cases a quarter of the body is torn from the trunk" Dr. Simon in England wrote, "The life of myriads of workmen and workwomen is now uselessly tortured and shortened by the never-ending physical suffering that their mere occupation begets." Every part of the globe now has these stories. In Toledo, Ohio, we remember Larry Fuentes, mangled to death by a robot at the Daimler-Chrysler plant in May 2000.

The theme of globalization is immediately paired with a second theme of violent terror. Marx exemplified the relationship in chapter 31. The changing scale of rewards paid by Massachusetts for the scalps of Indians is at the beginning of the chapter and the "Herod-like slaughter of the innocents" at the end with an extensive quotation from John Fielden's Curse of the Factory System (1836) about the cruelty, flogging, and torture of children conducted by the factory masters of the industrial Lancashire. Fielden notes that murder and tortures of the factory occur in "the beautiful and romantic valleys of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lancashire."

Marx returns to a dominant figure in his history, the trope of sanguinary exploitation, or blood. Inspired by the writing of T.J. Dunning, a trade union activist among the bookbinders, Marx observes that capital comes into the world "dripping from head to toe from every pore, with blood and dirt." The dripping's name now is Fallujah. The mutilation of the human body and the globalization of commerce are two sides of capitalism, empire and torture.

The regime prevailing in the U.S.A. is lawless, cruel, and inhuman, and though it will plead that its atrocities are 'accidents,' or that they should be exculpated having been motivated in 'good faith,' such excuses scarcely scratch the surface of its crimes, because its deepest purposes and strategic goals are the very primitive accumulation and endless dominion which characterized its beginnings in the Age of Plunder. 'Structural adjustment' and 'special access' are but new names for an old crime. That they were encouraged by order 39 must remind us of chapter 39 of the Charter of Liberty which must be dusted off from the shelf in the cabinet of quaint curios and become once again one of the politically potent potions for Sycorax and Iraq.

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com

inflation up + dollar falls = fascism in US

Still, analysts say the overall tone for the dollar remains negative amid growing concern about the U.S. "twin deficits" – that is, the gap in the U.S. current account, the broadest measure of trade in goods and services, as well as the shortfall in the federal budget. Traders will watch for any further signs of reluctance among Asian central banks to close those gaps by buying U.S. Treasury securities

The US dollar fluctuates so greatly on the words of so few these days. In essence it really is already collapsed and is merely being conceptually propped up by the words of a few, in hopes that they can continue to deceive the masses that spending this x-mas is a reasonable response, rather than a huge and horrible mistake. Get real people. Save your money as it becomes more and more worthless each and every day..

It seems that as we move conceptually faster into the future those events that compose the historical narrative begin to shed layers of content. Few remember much of the cold war period and fewer the events between 1920 and 1941, especially overseas. But i am thinking that we need a refresher course on Euro hist post WW 1, in that much of the rise of the fascist states, not only in Europe and Asia, but also here in the US to a certain degree, grew not from belligerent posings or hate for other citizens, but rather from staggering inflation and huge global depression. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, et al (there were fascist regimes all over South America as well) all came to power in nation's beset by near total economic collapse. Stalin was not a communist nor socialist, he was like his brethren, a pure totalitarian fascist. it was convenient and necessary, the people were so poor all they could care about was themselves and their families and their close friends. thus it was easy to create a police state based on fear of neighbors who might have more than you because somehow they were taking things from you that you deserved. Ironically the closest nation to an egalitarian socialist regime was the US and it too reeked of growing pervasive fascism.

We here in the US, now paying for wars that could go on indefinitely, are on the verge of experiencing such a scenario. It would be amazingly easy for the CABAL to push realities on the citizens that they would fully accept, given the results of the election, to institute a purely fascist state here. Indeed it may already be virtually impossible to stop them. It is easy to see how a few "news stories" and pundit remarks could provoke violence against the minorities in the US as a means of misdirecting the population from the actual causalities. The average US citizen already believes in unrealities too bizarre for even the simplest rational mind. How much further could they be led into accepting that the world is out to get them and they must do everything in their (yes indeed) God given power to break this evil and bring the kingdoms of the revealed apocalypse down on earth. I really fear that we are already sliding faster and faster along this slippery slope...

Non curo. non lo so.

In a speech to other senior officials at the meeting, the United States under secretary of state for global affairs, Paula J. Dobriansky, said that once the full science report is released early next year, "the United States will take the findings into account as it continues to review the science on climate change."

Really, i could have thought that the full report, which was actually released online on November 8th, suggests that further review is not acceptable. here are a few of the tidbits that indicate that the problems are already clearly verifiable.
Due to loss of perma frost buildings across Siberia have been collapsing at alarming rates from 22% in Tiksi to 90% in Amderma in the last decade. The Khanty-Mansi pipeline region experienced 1702 fossil fuels pipeline failures permanently toxifying more than 640 square kilometers of agricultural land.
Destruction of the Alaskan forests will begin to occur from fires and insects at rates between 100-300% while underbrush will grow more rapidly choking out habitats of many species. Pretty much all of the marine species are in decline as warming fresh waters desalinate fisheries and make salmon and other related species spawning more difficult. Seal and sea lion populations have declined by up to 65% in some areas already. Most all of coastal based infrastructure is threatened with collapse of ice shelf formations, loss of permafrost conditions, increased flooding of tundra, et al.
In the Canadian arctic polar bears and other sea mammals will be threatened with extinction as their populations are collapsing at alarming rates. the boreal forests are moving northward at a rate of 7-10 kilometers per year and by the end of the century will eliminate the tundra as they will have moved more than a thousand miles to the north--these forests do not provide any useful wood products by the way..

anyway, get the picture.. the arctic has already changed dramatically and will continue to do so.. there is no need for further review, well except to allow more time for the energy extraction industries to rape and pillage as much as they can before it all collapses..

Interdum modo elabitur.

From a new Gallup poll:
Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories and has not been supported by the evidence. The rest say they don't know enough to say. Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word. Just a little more than a third of the American public is willing to agree with the "scientific theory well supported by evidence" alternative, while the same percentage chooses the "not well supported by evidence" alternative. Another 30% indicate that they don't know enough about it to say or have no opinion. There has been essentially no significant change in the responses to this question since 2001. <>

What do we make of these responses?
To be sure, most Americans are not trained scientists, and it's probable that the last formal exposure to biology and evolution theory for many came decades ago in junior high or high school, a few maybe in college assuming they were at a liberal arts institution and need GE requirements. Confronted with this question asking for thoughts about a scientific theory, it's perhaps surprising that even more did not choose the "don't know enough to say" alternative. Certainly some doubts regarding the validity or scientific "accuracy" of any theory comes from a lack of basic training or knowledge of science, as well as from holding BELIEFS that run counter to them. It is as if the human brain can only contain one set of underlying axioms of orientation to the universe at one time. If you hold Beliefs X & Y you can't hold Knowledge A & B. <>

Yet, evolution is not just any theory. It is one of the most basic theories in science today, and most biologists and other scientists believe that the theory is so well supported by data that it is a basic part of the scientific firmament. I find it constantly surprising that the same people to reject evolution can accept quantum/super string theory for which the evidence, experimential data, and objective validity are far less clear. These same folks spout Einstein and deny Darwin; the hypocrisy is insane. Thus, it is of great interest to the scientific community to find that the public appears just as willing to say that the theory of evolution "has not been well supported by the evidence" as it is to say that it has been well supported. That so many people were willing to make the claim that they Believe in Creationism is seriously frightening because evolution is grounded on something quite real and immediate, simple observation. Time passes along certain lines in consensual time/space continuums and things within that flow of time change, morph, evolve naturally. Even deeply devout church goers have to acknowledge that their own parishes evolve over time. so that "leap of faith" over and beyond the most vast chasm of disbelief into a place where what their very own sensory inputs tell them is rejected, is for the most part classically insane; it is psychotic. And that must necessarily apply to their "moral values" as well...

If i were inclined to deny reality presented by my own senses, and accept that there was this invisible being that floated around in space controlling and evaluating every action of every human, i think i would find it much more likely that i would accept that some species of life from some other nearby solar system in this galactic configuration could actually design, build, and use a vehicle to transport themselves and others to this planet. Which is far more likely?? a single diety with omniscient power holding total control over a cauldron of chaos filled with evils beyond human imagination, or that the Earth might actually have been visited by non-Earth related species? If this is a toughy, then we understand that the US is in big big trouble for a long long time to come..

Totum dependeat.

time is mostly on the side of those who take the time to use in purely selfish and happy ways... we all need to do that... seek idleness and sloth which battles against greed and avarice and corruption... making each of our days filled with just so much fun that we can't even begin to think about the bills we owe or paying even one penny towards that thing called savings or retirement... yesterday the senate held hearing on pornography.. and one of the essential principles of the conservatives desperate need to get rid of it is that people who pay attention to it don't do anything... now that is obviously counter productive... and must be anihiliated at all costs.. one bizarre researcher proposed that watching porn increases endorphins in the brain.. those nasty neurotransmitters that resemble opioids and decrease pain and increase pleasure.. damn that porn, how dare we do anything that lets the population adjust their own mental attitudes in the privacy of their own homes... we are at that crucial moment in history when the population is realizing that they have been working and working and working only to fall further and further behind.. they will soon choose to stop it and decide just how far they can go without doing it... then it all comes crumbling down.. i sure bet those researchers would be happy if lots of those anarchic chaotic people just stay at home and look at porn...

Crimethinc makes it clear

Working every day, selling our labor on the market rather than using it to create new alternatives, we perpetuate the conditions that necessitate our submission to that market. Capitalism exists because we invest everything in it: all our energy and ingenuity in the production process, all our resources at the supermarket and in the stock market, all our attention in following the mass media. To be more precise, capitalism exists because our daily activities are it. Instead of each buying our own set of tools that inevitably sit rusting in the basement while we’re out working to cover the payments, we could all contribute a little towards a neighborhood toolset to be shared; likewise, instead of all trying to make
it on our own, we could save a lot of trouble by meeting our needs in cooperative groups, outside the exchange economy—but we don’t, because we fear no one else would join in, because we’re too exhausted from working to get started, because we’re too busy to even meet each other in the first place. Here we arrive at the catch-22 that maintains the status quo: revolution is not possible until
people change their lives, and vice versa. But somebody has to break this vicious circle and test out its implicit corollary: that revolution is possible when people change their lives.
. . . and Submission
It is a foregone conclusion for the average white collar worker that she would never sell sexual favors on the street—but spending her life in a cubicle, engaged in meaningless repetitive tasks, she willingly sells away more precious parts of herself. Obeying teachers, bosses, the demands of the market—not to mention traffic lights, parents’ expectations, religious scriptures, social norms—we are conditioned from infancy to put our needs on hold. Following orders becomes an unconscious reflex. As free-lance slaves hawking our lives hour by hour, we come to think of ourselves as each having a price; the amount of the price becomes our measure of value. In that sense, we become commodities, just like toothpaste and toilet paper. What once was a human being is now an employee, in the same way
that what once was a cow is now a medium rare steak. Our lives disappear, spent like the money for which we trade them. Commodities are consumed, working to produce commodities, and we become less than the sum of our products. Consumption—it’s not just a nineteenth century disease anymore! Having become merchandise ourselves, we rush to consume merchandise to prove we still have some power. Purchasing, once a necessary evil suffered to obtain the resources necessary for survival, is now a sacred act; in the religion of capitalism, in which value comes from financial power and spending is thus proof of worth, it is a kind of communion. The store is the temple in which the consumer’s status as one who can buy is affirmed in the actual act of buying. That’s why a certain class of people will gladly pay for bland food at an expensive restaurant when there is cheaper, tastier fare right down the street. For the consumer incarnate, spending money is the main point; everything else—taste in food and clothes, investment in the latest technologies, even political sympathies—is just a means to that end.
This compulsive disorder, which keeps us all running back to our jobs to earn more money as the credit card bills pile up, would be bad enough on its own—but it’s also gobbling the world up from beneath our feet. In the absence of beautiful mountain tops destroyed by mining and pickup games of street hockey outmoded by televised spectator sports, we can’t imagine what there might be besides consumerism to fill the aching void selling our lives away leaves within us.

try try again

yesterday's blog didn't post... something down at blogger i guess.. try again today

where have i been?? i d'oh no!

twenty two days away from computers and most of life's more media-technological amassments. some of it on the road for a couple of thousand miles and the rest locked away in a media free space yet filled with some of the most advanced alchemical technology i have seen yet. pretty amazing and cool what people have been doing in their efforts to get at the core of the spiritual connective properties of plants.

which brings me to DeLay. here is a manboy who is the ultimate national bully. he lies, deceives, cheats, defrauds, corrupts, harrasses, manipulates and all else purely for the sake of doing it. it is pretty apparent he doesn't even have much of an agenda in terms of what he wants to do except manifest as much political power as he can and make himself as economically secure as he can as quickly as he can. he clearly figures that the election results have given him the green light to even push his immoral agenda further into the very edges of gross indecency. if ever there was someone who really needed to experience the connection with entheogenic alkaloids it is texas tom.

now in a beauteous moment of dissonant reality, a rather complete disconnect from the realms of the more consensual forms that most of us share, this single immoral being has told the world that he fully intends to only get more so. i have to believe he is hugely jealous of W and would like so very much to be able to be more like the Sun King himself. but he can't do this alone, and he really needs the cooperation of others. well not exactly cooperation, that isn't the right word. he coerces all those around him to do his bidding. he does this through the same mechanism an old friend of mine used back in the way back machine with peabody and sherman.

this guy was old, old even then. he was one of those truly historic great CA lawyers of the 30's through the 70's; there were a few whose names were synonymous with, well, corruption and manipulation and economies and politics. someone had to protect the scions of the rich and super powerful, the next generations of the railroad barons and the large scale construction corps and the various "machines" well this guy was one of them. he could fix anything with any judge all over the state, and pretty much any where he needed to do so around the world. he would get calls from certain immoral, poor behaving little rich boys and girls stuck in some principality or codicile that they needed to get out of and he would fly there to do the deeds. BUT... ahh yes there is always a BUT isn't there..

in exchange for this ability, which, in a certain moment of drug induced weakness he shared with me the causal nature of--he literally knew all the secrets--he demanded to be free to embrace his own vices without interference. and these were pretty twisted ones. he liked little girls, mostly between the ages of 7 and 15. and he had so very much money, and power and sheer audacious will that he could sit on a beach exposing himself to them, get harrassed by a mother, convince her that it was in her best interest to name a price and if she really understood what was best, then she and her little girl could join him on a cruise or a flight to some far off wondrous rendezvous. he pulled this off so many times it was truly unbelievable. drugs were delivered from all over the planet, the best that could be found. his wine cellar stocked with vintages that people today are paying hundreds and thousands of dollars for. he and i could drink a bottle of 18 year old single malt lost island scotch in a sitting and enjoy every single sip.

he taught me a whole lot about corruption at the highest levels. he showed me that hollywood was infinitely more corrupt than national politics and this included the various machinations and hideous immoral escapades of nixon et al. hell, even agnew's connection with the CIA/Mafia shipping heroin back in the body bags of dead vietnam troops paled in comparison. Hollywood thrived on the necessary power of deceipt and corrupting influence of great wealth. remember kennedy came to marilyn and the west coast to get his. las vegas started in LA, joe bonanno and all the other mobsters controlled most of the illegal movement of commodities that were the essential part of happy hollywood types. what do you imagine happens at all those VIP clubs in LA LA land late at night. do you think cops have the power to care how much cocaine and smack gets exchanged, how many young nubiles get raped, how much it costs to create a performance piece of sin and decadence? throw away money and you begin to get the idea.

BUT good old Texas Tom, he ain't in that league. Bush ain't either. Kerry's wife maybe, but they are so east coast compared with the entrenched "nobility" of tinseltown. where do you suppose the billions of dollars in the porn industry goes--of course to certain producers in LALA. very very wealthy ones. Who pays rappers and pop stars and athletes millions and millions of dollars? the billionaires that own it all. And they don't really care one iota for little tom or dick or W or any of them. it don't make a difference to them. Tom is insanely jealous of that, the sheer capability of being not immoral but totally amoral. he doesn't get it so in his idiiotic mimicry he act immoral. and that is a major national tragedy. There are only something like 500 billionaires out there in the US, lots of them in LALA land when you take out the Waltons and the other old money. the rest are deeply immersed in media and entertainment and production of memes and monads. and tom, well all he has is texas and a little old corrupt bully instinct to make up realities as he goes along, begging the world to pay attention to him.

oh hum the tune is dumb

off into outspace i was, waiting for something to really happen.. then i get back here and not much has changed at all. would it ever really make a difference if things that seem to matter really did. i am not sure. but i will be ready to organize my thoughts better tomorrow. being on the road offline on the edge for three weeks has its rewards and merits. it also has its drawbacks in terms of proper and efficient use of technology. gotta get back into the swing of things..