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Part of a short work of fiction. (See Chaps. 7-12) I won't.

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Tight oil.

07.31.04 (12:36 pm) [edit]

Looks like the boys from Yukos had a lotta
clout. What do you think? (Look at the news
about this posted here earlier.)
_________________________ _

"The erratic behaviour of the Russian
prosecutors, and the amazing, though plausible,
idea that they might close down Yukos’s
production, served to illustrate just how
important Russian oil has become. Yukos alone
produces 2% of the world’s output, and more than
all the wells in Libya. A couple of years ago
OPEC, the cartel of oil-exporting countries, was
annoyed with Russia, which is not a member, for
increasing production while the cartel tried to
support the price through production quotas. But
with demand booming and supply constrained, the
world, and even OPEC, is now grateful for Russian
production—it has become the second-biggest
exporting nation, after Saudi Arabia. As output
from oilfields in places like North America and
the North Sea has declined, production from
Russia and other former Soviet countries has shot
up, by 2.5 billion bpd since 2001. This has
helped to meet new demand from oil-thirsty China
and other countries."

The story of tight oil.

Kerry is a mass-murderer. Bush is psycho.

07.31.04 (4:50 am) [edit]

"The more I think about it, the more I´m
convinced that we´re reliving the last days of
the Roman Empire.

If power tends to not only corrupt, but also
drives even the best of us a little nuts, then
what must it do to a fifth-rate intelligence like
George W. Bush, the Boy Emperor of the West? The
presidential depression also comes as no
surprise: after all, wouldn´t you be a little bit
down if you had just committed the worst foreign
policy mistake in American history?...

From what we know about his activities as a star
performer in the naval component of Operation
Phoenix, which engaged in wholesale atrocities in
Vietnam, it was something other than patriotism
that motivated Kerry to cut a murderous swathe
through 'enemy' villages, mowing down innocents
without showing the least sign of remorse, not
even years later. As Cockburn and St. Clair relate:

'Day after day, night after night, the Swift
boats plied the waters, harassing and often
killing villagers, fishermen and farmers. In this
program, aimed at intimidating the peasants into
submission, Kerry was notoriously zealous. One of
his fellow lieutenants, James R. Wasser,
described him admiringly in these words: "Kerry
was an extremely aggressive officer and so was I.
I liked that he took the fight to the enemy, that
he was tough and gutsy – not afraid to spill
blood for his country."'

Cockburn and St. Clair cite former assistant
secretary of defense W. Scott Thompson´s
recollection of a conversation with the late
Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr.:

'[T]he fabled and distinguished chief of naval
operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, told me – 30
years ago when he was still CNO [chief naval
officer in Vietnam] – that during his own command
of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, just prior to
his anointment as CNO, young Kerry had created
great problems for him and the other top brass,
by killing so many non-combatant civilians and
going after other non-military targets. "We had
virtually to straitjacket him to keep him under
control," the admiral said. 'Bud Zumwalt got it
right when he assessed Kerry as having large
ambitions – but promised that his career in
Vietnam would haunt him if he were ever on the
national stage.'"

The author of the article then goes on to
list the other candidates available for your
vote. He too, doesn't know how to play the game
without a ball, getting buried in power's
detailed distractions, thinking a savior is just
around the corner.

But why not read it all?

You or them?

07.30.04 (3:42 pm) [edit]

"It is unfortunately none too well understood
that, just as the State has no money of its own,
so it has no power of its own. All the power it
has is what society gives it, plus what it
confiscates from time to time on one pretext or
another; there is no other source from which
State power can be drawn. Therefore every
assumption of State power, whether by gift or
seizure, leaves society with so much less power;
there is never, nor can there be, any
strengthening of State power without a
corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of
social power." --Albert Jay Nock

What it "confiscates" is also done when the
state prints more money. The "confiscation"
takes place thru inflation where the same amount
of money buys less simply because there's more of
it in circulation. Those holding debt of this
example country, are screwed with "cheaper"
currency. (Remember, it buys less.)

The current governments know inflation doesn't work.
Currency markets will clobber their currency when
a country's central bank gets out of line,
but the central banks have no control and must print
more currency as taxpayers flee even tho the Feds
know that the currency markets will tell them they're
wrong in doing so by selling that currency.
These central banks think they're caught between a
rock and a hard place, with no other option that
they would consider satisfactory.

Others know better.

It won't matter.

At some point everyone dumps the currency, even
tho it's currently believed to be the worlds reserve
currency. (The USD holds that position now...barely.)

Then the euro or some other trash paper takes center
stage...for a while.

The state is on the way out...or not.

Depends on how you look at it, right?

Will a new state takes its place?

By what means?

But I may just be blowing smoke up your ass or I
may be wrong.

If you're interested, why not do your own research
and thinking about it?

I recommend you start here.

Where did it go?

07.30.04 (11:26 am) [edit]

"Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading
in a way that obliges you to formulate a position
and support it against objections, is an
operational definition of education in its most
fundamental civilized sense. No one can do this
very well without learning ways of paying
attention: from a knowledge of diction and
syntax, figures of speech, etymology, and so on,
to a sharp ability to separate the primary from
the subordinate, understand allusion, master a
range of modes of presentation, test truth, and
penetrate beyond the obvious to the profound
messages of text. Reading, analysis, and
discussion are the way we develop reliable
judgment, the principal way we come to penetrate
covert movements behind the facade of public
appearances. Without the ability to read and
argue we’re just geese to be plucked...

Once you trust yourself to go mind-to-mind with
great intellects, artists, scientists, warriors,
and philosophers, you are finally free.

But now...don't we just suck it up like a
sponge, uncritically? What does the boob tube
teach about how to become a sponge?

In America, before we had forced schooling, an
astonishing range of unlikely people knew reading
was like Samson’s locks—something that could help
make them formidable, that could teach them their
rights and how to defend those rights, could lead
them toward self-determination, free from
intimidation by experts. These same unlikely
people knew that the power bestowed through
reading could give them insight into the ways of
the human heart, so they would not be cheated or
fooled so easily, and that it could provide an
inexhaustible store of useful knowledge—advice on
how to do just about anything."

Once upon a time.

The Coming Revolution

07.29.04 (3:11 pm) [edit]

Googling "Fuck the IRS", I was pleasantly
surprised when I looked at the results:

"Results 1 - 10 of about 926 for 'fuck the irs'"
showed at the top of the page.

926 pages! Impressive. There's hope after all.

Now I'm going to add to the list.

Fuck the IRS

Why not join the only revolution that makes
any sense and add to the list? Any other will
be nothing but trouble and a lot of spilt
blood for nothing more than an attempt at
polishing a turd.

Etienne de la Boetie 1553 France

"There are [four] kinds of tyrants: some receive
their proud position through elections by the
people, others by force of arms, others by
inheritance, [others by 'divine right']. Although
the means of coming into power differ, still the
method of ruling is practically the same. The
tyrant has nothing more than the power you confer
upon him to destroy you. How does he have any
power over you except through you? Tyrants need
only be deprived of the public's continuing
supply of funds and resources. Resolve to serve
no more! and you are at once free. [My emphasis]
I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant
to topple him over, but simply that you support
him no longer. Then you will behold him, like a
great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away,
fall of his own weight and break in pieces."

But hardly anyone knows that the tyrant is
the system itself.

Some strong evidence of this resolve below...

These stats below were taken from IRS records...
_________________________ ______

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - "Americans' overall income
shrank for two consecutive years after stocks
plunged in 2000, the first time that has
effectively happened since the current tax system
was put in place during World War II, according
to a published report Thursday...

The drop in income has hit government tax
collections -- the paper said individual income
taxes declined 18.8 percent between 2000 and
2002. Part of that was due to tax cuts passed in
2001.

Don't you think much of this shortfall came
from folks joining the Underground Economy and
avoiding the Political Economy?

The report said the sharpest drops were in both
the number and the earnings of people with the
highest incomes. Those with incomes of $10
million or more saw average income fall 22
percent, while the number of returns reporting
incomes at that level fell 53 percent during the
two year period."

I'm suddenly convinced that taxes on the rich
should double so they all take their money
and leave. And if you don't know how that's done,
you should find out. It's exceeding simple. If
the rich are heavily taxed the Fall of Empire will
be over in a flash as that giant sucking sound of
money leaving high tax countries is heard.

And I have small pity for the silly sombitches that
will put up with the 80% tax rates coming as a result,
no matter what the political economy does to try
to collect it.

When tax revenues fall, what will the US Fed do to the
money supply?

Inflate.

The last report I read estimated the entire US debt
to be at $11 trillion including the off-budget
proportion, but it's obvious nobody really knows how
big it is.

Do you think there's any way to pay that off?

Sell US debt at 10 to 25 cents on the dollar?

Do the math.

But I've taken some things out of context from the
article.

You should read the whole, short thing.

The Protest Pit

07.29.04 (1:07 pm) [edit]

First there were smoking zones, then smoking
was outlawed in many places, soon to come in
all places. Now there are free speech zones...

Draw your own conclusions.

I know.

You're not a smoker.
_________________________ _

"With the exception of a handful of permitted
marches and rallies, people who want to
demonstrate their views during the DNC have been
told they are free to do so, but only from the
discomfort of a so-called free speech zone.
Protest organizers refer to it as an internment
camp or a detention center. The area the
authorities have designated as the official
protest area is enclosed by a maze of overhead
netting, razor wire and chain link fence. The
FleetCenter, where the convention is taking
place, is barely visible through the abandoned
elevated rail lines and green girders overhead.
At this weekend's Boston Social Forum, there was
quite a bit of discussion about the protest pit."

Full story.

Watching the snoring.

07.29.04 (11:18 am) [edit]

I posted this before...quite a while ago.

As far as I'm concerned, this kind of thinking
needs repeating...often.

But I can't help it. Watching people snore
bores the shit outta me, so I gotta do
something, even if it's wrong.

And don't we all think it's The Other Guy
that's doing all the snoring?
_________________________ ____________

"I can only suggest that he who would combat
false consciousness and awaken people to their
true interests has much to do, because the sleep
is very deep. And I do not intend here to provide
a lullaby but merely to sneak in and watch the
way people snore." -- Frame Analysis,
Erving Goffman

Ooops, here comes another fucking.

07.28.04 (5:52 pm) [edit]

"Crude oil futures rose to a record after OAO
Yukos Oil Co., Russia's biggest oil exporter,
said the government ordered a halt to production
from its main Siberian unit.

So what's new? Every time government lifts
a finger, someone takes it up the ass and we
all suffer...decreasing production of one kind
or another...and so moves the political means.
Are you ready for higher gas prices?

The order forbids units from selling property,
in effect banning oil sales and forcing a stop in
output, Yukos lawyer Dmitry Gololobov said in a
letter to chief bailiff Arkady Melnikov. Russia
is seeking to recover $3.4 billion in back taxes
and fines. Russia has attracted investment from
BP Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp. and other companies
searching for reserves.

'This is detrimental to the long-term supply
outlook,' said Kyle Cooper, an analyst with
Citigroup Inc. in Houston. 'It will become much
harder to attract foreign investment in the
Russian oil industry. Any investor in the future
will demand much higher returns to make such a
risky venture.'

Now, before you flys of the political means go
spreading your droppings here, I have a secret
to tell you.

An acquaintance, a gasoline tanker truck driver,
told me recently that the oil companies make $.10 a
gallon on the gas they sell. The reason they're
well off is because they sell millions of gallons.
Millions...my, that's a lotta votes, ain't it.

Bwahahahaha.

And if you want to bitch about the cost of gas, take
a look at the visible taxes on each gallon and check
this out, a fine example of the political
means that most of you love so much. Now go check
how much the Europeans love the political means
attached to their gas prices. But I expect virtually
no one to see the unintended consequences of this.

Unfucking believable, isn't it.

Now I expect to hear rants about the corporation,
another granfalloon and child of your favorite
granfalloon, the State.

And I won't be surprised when so many of you
wonder what happened when the lights go out.

Will you?

The whole thing.

Have you seen the Big Puzzle yet?

07.28.04 (3:25 pm) [edit]

Stay tuned here for the continuing saga of
yet another in a long string of articles
on The Fall of Empire.

Here's another small piece of the Big
Puzzle...
_________________________ ___________

"WASHINGTON Maureen Dowd Maybe it's because I've
been instructed to pack a respirator escape hood
along with party dresses for the Boston
convention. Maybe it's because our newspaper has
assigned a terrorism reporter to cover a
political convention. Maybe it's because George
W. Bush is relaxing at his ranch down there
(again) while Osama is planning a big attack up
here (again). Maybe it's because there are just
as many American soldiers dying in Iraq post-
transfer, more Muslims more mad at Americans over
fake weapons of mass destruction intelligence and
depravity at Abu Ghraib, and more terrorists in
more diffuse networks hating Americans more.

Maybe it's because the FBI is still learning how
to Google and the CIA has an acting head who
spends most of his time acting defensive over his
agency's failure to get anything right. Maybe
it's because so many of those federal twits who
missed the 10 chances to stop the 9/11 hijackers,
who blew off the Paul Reveres - Richard Clarke,
Coleen Rowley and the Phoenix memo author - still
run things. Call me crazy, Mr. President, but I
don't feel any safer."

Full story.

The essence of progress.

07.28.04 (1:51 pm) [edit]

If you want progress, shouldn't you avoid the
conventional and predictable?

Scary, ain't it.
____________________

"Progress comes from people who think against
the grain. Without nonconformists, you don't
advance." -- Saw Ken Wye

Our Enemy, the State

07.27.04 (6:25 pm) [edit]

A short look at where all power ends...

Excerpted from Our Enemy, the State, by
Albert Jay Nock:
_________________________ ___

"'Such,' says Professor Ortega y Gasset, 'was the
lamentable fate of ancient civilization.' A dozen
empires have already finished the course that
ours began three centuries ago. The lion and the
lizard keep the vestiges that attest their
passage upon earth, vestiges of cities which in
their day were as proud and powerful as ours –
Tadmor, Persepolis, Luxor, Baalbek – some of them
indeed forgotten for thousands of years and
brought to memory again only by the excavator,
like those of the Mayas, and those buried in the
sands of the Gobi. The sites which now bear
Narbonne and Marseilles have borne the habitat of
four successive civilizations, each of them, as
St. James says, even as a vapour which appeareth
for a little time and then vanisheth away. The
course of all these civilizations was the same.
Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the
State; then the sequences which we have traced in
the course of our own civilization; then the
shock of some irruption which the social
structure was too far weakened to resist, and
from which it was left too disorganized to
recover; and then the end."

The book.

Vibrant-verde-pistachio alert announced.

07.27.04 (1:55 pm) [edit]

Cryin' laughin', I am, at this...
_________________________ ___

"September 23, 2003: The nation was placed on
vibrant-verde-pistachio alert after reports that
a substance found atop tacos in Phoenix may have
been a chemical agent spread by terrorists
seeking to weaken the nation's resolve.
Conflicting reports have emerged. Citing
unidentified sources, reporter Cokie Roberts said
that the substance may instead have been
disguised as pistachio ice cream atop handmade
waffle cones. Security has been tightened around
hospitals and taquerias in the area, and the
governor has called out the National Guard to
supervise Arizonan snack-and-dessert decisions.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, an expert since the
crisis posed to his administration by a suspect
blob of guacamole on a Chicago sidewalk in the
months after 9/11, has been called in as a
consultant.

In a separate matter, 7,452 Indian and Icelandic
nationals, Iranians, Turks, Ibos and Inuit
indigenous tribespeople were released from
custody under a special bill passed by Congress
this week, the 'Au Pair Provision Act of 2004,'
which seeks to remedy the nation's childcare
crisis with in-home care for those who can afford
it. The immigrants had been incarcerated during
the Christmas season's crimson crisis, which
focused on people from countries that either
bordered Iraq or began with the letter 'I.' Saudi
citizens in the US had been exempted under the
Very Special Relationship, Emulsifiers and
Emolients Act."

The whole hilarious thing.

Getting it half right.

07.26.04 (5:02 pm) [edit]

" 'Right now we've been spending a lot of energy
in the government to dry up sources of funding,'
...

And what might be the unintended consequences
of the above attempt? What happens when money
doesn't move like it used to, due to the new Money
Laundering Laws? What happens when it becomes
more difficult to move money legitimately?
What happens when fear pervades the legitimate
movement of the worthless paper peddled by all
nations as having 'value'?

Do your own research if any of this interests you.
The topic gives me gas.

...Kean, a Republican, said on NBC's Meet the
Press program. 'It might be more productive to
spend more time following the money because you
can disrupt plots, you can find out what's going
on, if you can follow these money trails.'

The commission's report, released on Thursday,
found it cost the al-Qaeda terror network between
$400,000 and $500,000 to kill nearly 3,000 people
in 2001, and the U.S. remains unable to determine
the origin of those funds, Kean said. 'We'll
never dry up all the money,' he said."

And so the Amurikan government runs off to frag
folks into accepting "democracy", an abstraction
and lie the victims never gave a shit about anyway
and will continue to do so. Do you suppose these
victims can see thru the Amurikan dream/scam?
And all because the Amurikans can't 'dry up all the
money'?

"We're just here to saddamize your chil'ren."

And I suspect 99% of the world doesn't understand
how Amurika got so very ugly.

Could it have been Amurikan power exposed for what
it is? Has this power been hidden from view until
now?

And if you think that's only an Amurikan disease,
you're fucked. It has permeated the planet since
the day God was born, and this disease wasn't even
his fault. By the way, I'm not even A Believer.

Stay tuned. Maybe enough of you can figure
where shit started to go wrong, but I'm betting
the odds are slim and none based on some of the
comments I've seen to my posts. But most git it
half right, flopping around on one wing, so maybe
there's hope. Will half right git it?

On the other hand, hope in one hand and shit in
the other to see which one fills up first.

Damn near nobody understands the difference
between the political means and the economic
means so I expect most to be lead into a
complete Dark Age rather than just the Intellectual
Dark Age Amurika has lived in since 1913.

Bwahahahahaha.

It's really sad but I gotta laugh otherwise I think
I'd go insane.

Howbouchu?

Solutions, alternatives?

When ya got cancer, what do you replace it with?

But be very careful. The operation is very delicate
and requires much more thought than you think.
Physically fighting power is not the answer. A wise,
long dead Chinaman named Lao Tse knew better.

Just keep talking.

Am I right?

How the hell would I know. You got a brain. Why
not use it?

[/rant]

The rest of the article.

Chicken Hawk groupthink?

07.26.04 (3:01 pm) [edit]

"In a 1972 book, Victims of Groupthink: A
Psychology Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and
Fiascoes, Irving Janis identified the Vietnam
War and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba as
particularly compelling examples of how very
smart people can collectively make very stupid
decisions.

If you've been following the posts here, you
might know that groups/institutions don't think
but instead engage the members in mutual ass-kissing
and looking for an enemy to bash over the head.
The followers just nod their heads like plastic
dogs one sees hanging by a thread in the back
windows of some cars.

Have you ever watched a mob in action?

Have you ever seen a mob think?

Doesn't a mob have a personality different from
the individuals in it? Isn't it enraged at its
enemy and so, unthinking?

Doesn't a member of a mob do things he would never
dream of doing on his own?

Do you ever engage in mob-think?

Would you know it if you did?

A great deal more is known about group dynamics
within the Bush administration foreign-policy
apparatus today - as a result of leaks, memoirs
and books, such as Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack
and Jim Mann's Rise of the Vulcans - than was
known at the time about the Kennedy administration."

I think this is the key. The press has competition
now from people doing the necessary homework and
publishing their blogs, web pages and alternate media.

Given that, do you think the press has ever
been anything more than a mouthpiece for power?

And how much do you need to know about this abstraction
called 'group dynamics'? Sounds like a bullshit term
to me. A group looks like a worm without a head to
me. For the most part, a very vicious worm but essentially
out of control...of anyone.

Full article.

The Two Choices you have.

07.25.04 (6:09 pm) [edit]

What are the two choices?

The political or the economic means.

I've posted material from another site on this
before. It bears repeating.

Until most people understand this simple thing,
it'll be same ol' shit, different day.

Isn't it up to you, and you alone?

Read carefully and think about it.
_________________________ __

"There are two methods, or means, and only two,
whereby man's needs and desires can be satisfied.
One is the production and exchange of wealth;
this is the economic means. The other is the
uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by
others; this is the political means."
-- Albert Jay Nock

Google news alerts

07.25.04 (7:07 am) [edit]

Something you might find useful...or not.

http://www.google.com/newsale...

The world's newest Banana Republic

07.24.04 (7:22 pm) [edit]

"But Homeland Security has revived a long disused
relic of the McCarthy era, a special I-visa for
journalists that entails, upon application
overseas, being grilled by U.S. consular
officials about whom the journalist plans to talk
to and what he plans to write. Few other
countries require those visas, and those that do
tend to be unsavory Third World dictatorships."

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/articl e_4862.shtml" title="http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/articl e_4862.shtml" target="_blank"http://www.capitolhillblue.co...

The ever present and failing institution

07.24.04 (1:02 pm) [edit]

(Washington, DC-AP, July 22, 2004, 7:20 a.m.)
"The 9-11 panel is releasing its findings today
with calls for an intelligence overhaul. The
commission has concluded that governmental
neglect did not cause the 2001 attacks. It says
an underlying cause was a 'failure of
imagination.'

Administration officials who are familiar with
the report say it concludes the hijackers
exploited 'deep institutional failings' within
the government. The report also lists numerous
missed opportunities to stop the hijackers. But
it doesn't blame President Bush or former
President Clinton for the mistakes.

So...can't we say they're not in charge?
What purpose did they serve? To stand and
babble? What? Just what are they in charge of?
Are "things" out of control?

As expected, the report will call for creating a
Cabinet-level national director of intelligence
with authority over the entire intelligence
community, including the CIA and the FBI."

Fine solution. [/sarcasm] When one or
more institutions fail, create a bigger one
to oversea the failures leaving the failures
in place.

Does that make sense to you?

http://www.woodtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2073676&nav=0RceP3m Z" title="http://www.woodtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2073676&nav=0RceP3m Z" target="_blank"http://www.woodtv.com/Global/...

Why the Press Failed

07.23.04 (4:05 pm) [edit]

A better title for this article would be,
Why the Press is Now Irrelevant.
Who was The Press for The Church in its
days of power? Wasn't it its very own
scribes?
_________________________ _________

"As reporting on the lead-up to war, the war
itself, and its aftermath vividly demonstrated,
our country is now divided into a two-tiered
media structure. The lower-tier -- niche
publications, alternative media outlets, and
Internet sites -- hosts the broadest spectrum of
viewpoints. Until the war effort began to unravel
in spring 2004, the upper-tier -- a relatively
small number of major broadcast outlets,
newspapers, and magazines -- had a far more
limited bandwidth of critical views, regularly
deferring to the Bush Administration's vision of
the world. Contrarian views below rarely bled
upwards.'

Do you see how big changes are coming here?
What happened to The Church after the invention
of the printing press? What will happen to
government because of the net?

Few in our media, it seemed, remembered I. F.
Stone's hortatory admonition, 'If you want to
know about governments, all you have to know is
two words: Governments lie.' Dissenting voices in
the mainstream were largely buried on back pages,
ignored on op-ed pages, or confined to the
margins of the media, and so denied the kinds of
'respectability' that a major media outlet can
confer."

The whole story.

Lockdown in The Big Apple

07.23.04 (5:23 am) [edit]

"Madison Square Garden will be walled in by a
fence or 'other physical barrier' with additional
'movable barricades', complete with checkpoints
reinforced with heavy weapons. A new 'closed-
circuit surveillance video system' will be
introduced; armed federal agents and police
officers will be keeping watch; and plenty of
helicopters will be circling overhead. In
Carpenter's future, however, the government was
in control and New Yorkers were locked down. In
our present, the administration of President
George W Bush and the Republican Party are the
ones retreating into a fortified bunker...

Wouldn't it be funny if no one showed up?

Who, in their right mind, would...for a whole
host of reasons? Won't that tell you a hell
of a lot about the ones that do?

Once upon a time in a past not so long ago, New
York City was viewed by many in the Republican
Party as an enemy outpost in an alien land. Then
came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and
Manhattan became the Bush administration's Ground
Zero in its 'war against terrorism'. On January
31, 2003, with a supposed easy victory in the
upcoming war with Iraq looming, it seemed the
perfect place for the president to begin an
inevitable march to a second term. But like the
president's flight in Escape from New York,
things have gone awry. New York once again looks
like a threatening, alien land and the party of
the president, whose greatest claim to fame is
that he's made Americans 'safer', is about to
treat the city as if it were Baghdad...

To sum up the 'security' scene: Choppers
hovering above; military fighters streaking
overhead; under foot, fumbling with cameras they
never seem to know how to work, those famously
easy-to-spot undercover cops clad in bulky
sweatshirts (no matter the weather); federal
suits listening to their earpieces; protective
fences; 'frozen zones' (huge swaths of 'public'
city streets to ordinary citizens); metal
barriers; 'vehicle checkpoints around the
perimeter of the Garden manned with heavy
weapons, dogs and portable Delta barriers, which
are enormous metal contraptions that lie almost
flat in the road and can be raised very quickly
with the flip of a switch'; mounted police; cops
on bikes and scooters; NYPD K-9 (police dog)
units; stormtrooper-esque 'Hercules' teams;
conventional 'arrest teams'; cops boarding
commuter trains and subway cars one stop before
they reach Penn Station, the hub nearest the
Garden; permit refusals; murmurs about the
invocation of an 1845 law prohibiting mask-
wearing under certain circumstances; and Kelly
and Bloomberg periodically claiming to know
protesters' plans or issuing wild claims about
the supposed plans of violent anarchists,
'hardcore groups ... looking to take us on'; and
various administration officials issuing vague
but chilling warnings of possible terrorism to
come...

President Bush, who continually tells us that
our world is safer due to him, aims to arrive in
an alien 'New York City' out of some lockdown sci-
fi movie - a place specially prepared to make him
the safest man on Earth. And yet New York isn't a
stage set, and the best-laid plans of frightened
and controlling officials do have a way of coming
undone, just as they did last February in New
York when, having been prohibited from marching,
hundreds of thousands of protesters, directed
toward police 'pens', snarled traffic and
literally took over large portions of the city.
Who knows in what strange ways life will burst
into New York despite official efforts to empty
the city and lock down Madison Square Garden?"

Indeed. Chaos is better organized. It's been
around longer.

Full story.

Expatriate Manifesto

07.22.04 (1:33 pm) [edit]

A description of why I left....

Excerpted from the link below:

"A spectre is haunting America—the hollow-eyed
and moaning spectre of our nation's decline (2).
It haunts the expanding waistlines of our
increasingly obese citizenry (3). It lurks among
the ineloquent yo's and ho's of our popular
discourse, a diminished national conversation of
ghetto kabuki, rhyming doggerel and white-boy
ebonics. It peeps from the crusty, ragged
piercing holes in the flesh of our self-mutilated
youth. It rattles its chains at the hubris of our
foreign policy and the imbecilic pap of our
summer blockbusters. It stalks the parapets of
our crumbling democracy, howling at our low voter
turn-out and groaning at a republic of television-
entranced morons with little knowledge of or
interest in the world outside their cycles of
compulsive consumption....

The defining aspect of expatriate life—the
sensation, whether they know it or not, that all
expatriates are seeking when they decide to
depart Homeland—is anomy. Anomy is defined as a
lack of familiar rules and values. The expatriate
must learn the local language and customs. He
must find shelter and sustenance with no network
of family or friends to assist him. Anomy means
the removal of context, both the strictures of
prejudice and the false props of family
reputation and class. The expatriate is a
stranger whose actions are judged prima facie by
the locals, qualified of course by common
American stereotypes...

Anomy encourages independence, self-expression
and the development of new ideas. It is no
accident that the most innovative and enduring
art of the last century was created by
expatriates. Anomy requires self-reliance and
initiative. Mental and physical vigor are
rewarded by anomy; sloth and hebetude are
punished. Anomy inspires humanistic sympathy for
the previously strange and unfamiliar and favors
the strong and imaginative and individualistic.
Anomy is what made America great. A dearth of
anomy and its salutary effect on the human
organism is responsible for the spectre of our
nation's decline...

All true patriots shiver in dread when
confronted with this spectre that no jump in GDP,
world-changing Silicon Valley tech innovation or
smackdown of suicidal terrorists can dispel.
Conservatives decry a decline in family values
while Liberals, a decline in social justice. Many
are the scapegoats incorrectly identified as
responsible for the invocation of this spectre,
and many are the forces that fruitlessly attempt
to exorcize it. But it endures and grows in
strength of presence—a recurring visitation, an
adumbration, the ghost of America's future. It
endures and grows because this malaise has yet to
be correctly diagnosed, nor has a workable remedy
been proffered.

Until now."

All of it.

The Gospel according to Dubya.

07.22.04 (8:19 am) [edit]

"The Bush Administration had little esteem for
the watchdog role of the press, in part because
its own quest for 'truth' has been based on
something other than empiricism. In fact, it
enthroned a new criterion for veracity, 'faith-
based' truth, sometimes corroborated by 'faith -
based' intelligence. For officials of this
administration (and not just the religious ones
either), truth seemed to descend from on high, a
kind of divine revelation begging no further
earthly scrutiny. For our President this was
evidently literally the case. The Israeli paper
Ha'aretz reported him saying to Mahmoud Abbas,
the Palestinian Prime Minister of the moment,
'God told me to strike Al Qaeda and I struck, and
then he instructed me to strike Saddam, which I
did.'

Just as the free exchange of information plays
little role in the relationship between a
fundamentalist believer and his or her God, so it
has played a distinctly diminished role in our
recent parallel world of divine political
revelation. After all, if you already know the
answer to a question, of what use is the media,
except to broadcast that answer? The task at
hand, then, is never to listen but to proselytize
the political gospel among non-believers, thereby
transforming a once interactive process between
citizen and leader into evangelism."

Ahh, yes...the New Gospel of Divine Political
Revelation. This competition must be an embarrassment
to Christians and other True Believers of a different
flavor.

More...

Another deviant look at things.

07.22.04 (4:37 am) [edit]

I ain't on this planet to please anyone, even if I
could. I can't so I won't even try.

Why do I do this blog routine?

I dunno. Sometimes I think it's exercising 'tuff luv',
other times I just wanna draw my lines, pissin' in
my corners like a junkyard dog.

What I do know is that stasis is death.

Why not stir the pot?

Here's one such stirrer...
_________________________ _

"Given an objective view of the human phenomenon
at its origin, in relation to each person who
started thinking about each concept, when would
you have predicted that humans would discover
that the earth was round, that the South Pole
would be reached by humans, that humans would
land on the moon, and return, that the human
genome would be mapped, that humans live for 500
years, that war and bashing each other over the
head become amusing relics of history, that
frequent flier mileage is available on trips to
other galaxies, with a double mileage bonus in
the off-season?

How long do you want to wait for the
manifestation of your desires? What incentive
will you offer for the knowledge of how to
produce them today?

Considering the number of things each person can
pursue with his time, precisely who, under
precisely what incentive, is pursuing the goals
of your greatest desire? If you named persons in
institutions purportedly pursuing those goals,
you are as self-deluded as they. Many humans
commit suicide, as is their choice, completely
within the control of an individual mind. If an
institution actually achieves its defined goal,
it leaves itself without its excuse to exist,
thus committing suicide. While that is a choice
of individual minds, every institution will
refuse to do because there are other people in
the institution who crave the institutional
leadership positions (power) more than the
achievement of the espoused goal, by design of
the concept of power in the human mind, despite
their denials at reading these words. And those
people are the ones doing the actual work to
insure the referenced goals are never achieved.
You do not command your own mind until you can
answer every question any mind can devise,
without creating a contradiction, encompassing
each part of the human mind's puzzle. Until then
you are subject to the mind's controlling
concepts, such as the incentive of power over
reason in a mind lacking the referenced knowledge."

Read it and weep with laughter.

Do you have a virus of the mind?

07.21.04 (4:47 pm) [edit]

Just a small sample....
_________________________ _

"A subset of memes: political memes or pemes.
Pemes influence political behavior. If memes are
the secret to understanding behavior, pemes are
the secret to understanding political behavior.

The Peme Imperative

1. Peme survival and propagation shall be the
ultimate imperative.

You mean like, "We gotta take back our country."?

2. Pemes shall infect, pervade, and absolutely
rule all human brains.

Like the Borg? Holy shit, Batman!

3. Pemes shall speak through the mouths and
write through the pens and keyboards of humans at
every opportunity.

Yuk! Ugly, ain't it.

4. There shall be surface pemes, middle pemes,
and deep pemes; pemes shall be positive, neutral,
or negative.

Damn, they're everywhere.

5. Pemes shall divide humans into opposing and
conflicting political and economic factions --
such as "conservative" / "liberal," "capitalist"
/ "socialist," and "statist" / "anarchist" -- who
shall endlessly argue, fight, and even kill...
all in the name of pemes.

Wow! Did a light just go on or was that
a lightening strike?

6. All humans shall be subjected to "compulsory
education" (a negative surface peme) to ensure
that their brains are thoroughly implanted with
surface, middle, and deep pemes -- positive,
neutral, or negative.

Ooooh. Feels sooooo good to let someone else
think for me. I'll gofurit.

7. Negative surface pemes shall induce mild
soporific, stupefying, and debilitating effects
in human brains...."

Ooooouuuummmm.

[/sarcasm]

There are a lot more at the link below.
Have you installed your virus software...in your
head? Did you think that stuff was just for your
computer?

Bwaahahahaha!

Wanna check it out?

Full story.

Doesn't look good, does it.

07.21.04 (2:54 pm) [edit]

You got any ideas...real solid ideas and not
the standard pap...about what to do about it?
_________________________ ___________

"The violent strategies chosen by our government,
not properly questioned by a compliant and
uninformed mainstream, will blow back to haunt
us, for in destroying human lives in other parts
of the world, we destroy parts of ourselves;
ultimately, we sow our own destruction."

Full essay.

Are you innocent any longer?

07.21.04 (10:03 am) [edit]

Does anyone even remember what an innocent
man is?
________________________

"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only
power government has is the power to crack down
on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals,
one makes them. One declares so many things to be
a crime that it becomes impossible for men to
live without breaking laws." -- Ayn Rand

Who does this describe?

07.20.04 (2:50 pm) [edit]

I mean, who are 'the few fools'...? What group
are they represented by?
__________________

"Fortunately for themselves and for the world,
nearly all men are cowards and dare not act on
what they believe. Nearly all our disasters come
of a few fools having the 'courage of their
convictions.'" -- Coventry Patmor

The Chickenhawks

07.20.04 (5:58 am) [edit]

"The full story of the modern Chickenhawk is
this: deluded, lying, blood-thirsty cowards,
afflicted with hubris, who have a lust for
political power and attention. They refuse to
fight, but trick other[sic]into doing so, because
of their mistaken belief in their intellectual and
moral superiority. They think the belief in
their superiority gives them the right to
sacrifice huge numbers of people, who should do
as they are ordered, without question, so the
Chickenhawks can social-engineer the world
through political violence, as the way the Borg
Queen wanted to, when she said, 'Why do you
oppose us? We only wish to improve the quality
of your lives.'"

Of course. "We're just here to help."
My, my. Such service!

Aren't you happy you're not getting all you're
paying for?

http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/wallace/wallace18.html" title="http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/wallace/wallace18.html" target="_blank"http://www.strike-the-root.co...

What are the effects of the worship of power?

07.19.04 (2:24 pm) [edit]

Does anyone out there really understand this
below...completely? Again, I doubt that one in
one-thousand does. To you who do, it doesn't look
good, does it? But you already know that and
have taken steps to be as far away from the
results as is possible. What a fucking show
it'll be, eh?

Libertarians are only the most obvious suckers.

What of the rest of the worshippers of power over
reason who will deny, deny, deny the very fact
that they worshit it? [That wasn't a typo.]

Are you all wrapped in a power envelope inside
a power envelope inside a power envelope?

Does anyone know how to reason anymore or is
it all about power now?

Are there no salesmen out there selling ideas with
incentives or just thugs with guns and billy clubs
waving supoenas?

If it's all about power now, what does that tell
you of the future, your future? Did you know that
power and intelligence are mutually exclusive?

"'But what would you replace the state with?' The
question reveals an inability to imagine human
society without the state. Yet it would seem that
an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives
within a century hardly needs to be 'replaced.'"

I include the link directly above because it appears
that few on tblog know how to read and/or reason
through the simplest of puzzles. How do I know?
It's obvious from some of the responses to the
comments I make on some other blogs here but you
outsiders to tblog wouldn't know that. That's the
only reason I mention it. I posted the link above
a couple of days ago and one Dull Spark called me
a neo-con. He obviously didn't read or understand
my posts here.

Bwahahahaha.

For those of you who don't know what a neo-con is,
don't bother. They're just as Dull as the rest
of 'em.

I could say wake the fuck up but what
good would it do for all the Dull Sparks out
there?

Doesn't anyone know how to play the game
without a ball?

_________________________ __________________

"The Libertarian craving for the attention of
news journalists who inherently cannot understand
the Libertarian concept, verifiably so upon only
a few questions, is only one of the amusing
contradictions of Libertarians who espouse the
process and results of reasoning, instead of
force, by foolishly attempting to manifest it
with a majority rule political party, which is an
instrument of force, not reasoning, but
attempting to force nobody, and therefore not
attracting the news media attention that they
crave to help build a force-based political party
within a government-taught society that therefore
learns to function on force rather than human
reasoning. The power-damaged minds of the
Libertarian Party leaders become angry and
confused when they encounter words such as these,
like all institutionally power-damaged minds,
rather than become curious and ask questions to
advance their knowledge, as all experience has
shown, and as reasoning can explain. Some of that
experience with Libertarian Party leaders has
been most amusing.

If you are not laughing at the humans who create
such labyrinths of contradictions from unresolved
original contradictions they claim to be
resolving with what are identifiably more
contradictions, you are missing the only show
humans know how to stage. If you are laughing,
you are in a position to learn how to easily
resolve the most complex contradictions humans
can fabricate. The process is just knowledge. It
is a multi-part puzzle.

The Libertarian Party leaders can read these
plain English words, which carry their meanings,
and their minds would only be confused and
angered. Their power-damaged minds will die of
old age, still clueless of what went wrong with
their ludicrous illusion of gaining inherently
corrupting power, to rid corruption from power,
just as the Anarchist Party leaders cannot
understand what when wrong at their convention,
if you therefore enjoy the comedy. The LP sorts
asked enough questions to understand enough of
the puzzle to recognize why the other guy's power-
based institutions are failing the process of
reasoning, but did not ask the subsequent
questions (reasoning process) to understand that
the controlling contradiction was that of the
institution, the creation of an instrument of
power, a political party process, regardless of
which persons were attached to the Parties of
whatever names.

The other guy is not the problem. The
institution is the problem, any institution,
including and primarily one's own, such as the
Libertarian Party. Institutionally created power
alters the human mind's perceptions, to preclude
learning the controlling contradictions. Once an
institution or organization is created, and
therefore creates the concept of institutional
power, the institution must and shall be defended
by its leaders and members, above all reasoning,
or there is no reason for the institution to
exist."

For those that know how to reason.

It's a waste of time for the rest of you.

More divine comedy with a different flavor.

07.18.04 (5:38 pm) [edit]

You'd hafta be an idiot's idiot to run for
Prez. Hot damn! What am I saying? They are!

See what the folks from India are quoting
American comedians saying about this particular
crop of idiots:
_________________________ ___________

"The American Presidential election is shaping
up to be a contest between dumb and dull. While
George Bush's lack of grey matter has been the
butt of jokes for years, John Kerry has overnight
acquired the reputation of being so dull and
wooden that he is being called 'Al Gore without
the flash and the sizzle.'

Even the staid Economist ribbed the Democratic
candidate this week, saying he can 'put a
hummingbird into a coma.'

From Jay Leno: 'John Kerry says that he wants
to debate President Bush once a month until the
election. This could be a risky move for Senator
Kerry. If Bush doesn't show up for the debates,
John Kerry may end up debating an empty chair.
And that could be pretty much a toss up as to
which one has the better personality.'

Even with Bush, Kerry and an empty chair,
wouldn't the chair win?

'Kerry was here in Los Angeles. He was courting
the Spanish vote by speaking Spanish. And he
showed people he could be boring in two
languages,'' taunted Leno.

The media is not even sparing Kerry lugubrious
looks. The Economist said Kerry looks like a
portrait of himself by Edvard Munch (a Norwegian
expressionist painter known for his symbolic
portrayal of misery and death)."

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/782517.cms" title="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/782517.cms" target="_blank"http://timesofindia.indiatime...

Message to the birds.

07.18.04 (11:00 am) [edit]

Wandering around tblog.com and elsewhere, I
notice so many birds talking about the others'
wings that I thought I'd start a new party, one
without wings, unclassifiable... something to
fuck with the heads of these winged creatures
flopping around on just one wing.

My party is called The Radical Centrist Party
and it has only one member: me. It has no wings
and no room for new members. It doesn't fly, even
in circles with one wing dragging the ground. It
has both feet on the ground.

I am the Prez, Sect'y-Treasurer, Vice-Prez,
Chairman of Vice and Foolishness, and only dues
paying member. (When I fuck up, I pay the dues.
Can ya dig it?)

The party platform is located, signed with my
name, on the panel on the left side of this page.

I vote for everything and I always win by a
landslide. I rule my party and I hardly ever miss
my goals, unlike the single-winged fools,
yearning for other like-winged fools to Make
Their Life aw Better with even other's stolen
money. (Odd, these single-winged hyumans.)

Membership to the Radical Centrist Party is
closed and I put no party above me and never vote
outside my party.

And membership will always be closed.

Why not start your own Radical Centrist Party?

What do you think?

07.18.04 (10:08 am) [edit]

"Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from a lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions." -- Eric Hoffer

Another myth uncovered.

07.18.04 (7:03 am) [edit]

"The Sun´s radiance may well have an impact on
climate change but it needs to be looked at in
conjunction with other factors such as greenhouse
gases, sulphate aerosols and volcano activity,'
he said. The research adds weight to the views of
David Bellamy, the conservationist. 'Global
warming - at least the modern nightmare version -
is a myth,' he said. 'I am sure of it and so are
a growing number of scientists. But what is
really worrying is that the world´s politicians
and policy-makers are not.

'Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what
has, unfortunately, become one of the central
credos of the environmental movement: humans burn
fossil fuels, which release increased levels of
carbon dioxide - the principal so-called
greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the
atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global
warming: I say this is poppycock.'"

Full story.

Some real whistleblowing.

07.17.04 (4:03 pm) [edit]

I doubt one in a hundred people would believe
this.

But don't believe me. Look around. Why
not do your own research?
_________________________ _________

"The greatest tragedy in our culture is the
widely accepted lie that the wars in U.S.
history, since after the American Revolution,
have been necessary, proper and even glorious.
And this lie has been swallowed, parroted, and
perpetuated by many of those who call themselves
conservatives, liberals, progressives,
socialists, constitutionalists, 'libertarians'
and even 'anarchists' – all to the fatal
detriment of American civilization and the lives
of countless millions."

See the details.

"Shaddam" Hussein in the flesh and on camera.

07.17.04 (4:50 am) [edit]

Will the real Sadman please stand up?

Just another day of lies and cover-ups...
_________________________ _________

"Clearly these accredited journalists from San
Francisco and Sydney must have been hallucinating
badly, or simply mistook a clean-shaven court
janitor for the alleged President of Iraq,
because less than two hours later they were
swiftly cast aside in favor of the 'A' team from
New York, headed by Mossad favorite Christiane
Amanpour of CNN, a hard-nosed chief correspondent
who never let truth get in her way during Gulf
War One.

Christiane had photographs all right, in fact
she had several hundred feet of edited video
footage direct from the 'courtroom', though we
have no proof of where the mock courtroom
actually is, or where the video footage was shot.
But as we will see quite clearly in a moment,
Amanpour's damning footage actually proves that
the prisoner cannot be President Saddam Hussein,
leaving us with the problem of how to label the
different players in this bizarre Orwellian
tableaux. So let us shorten the name of the
Mossad imposter from 'Sham Saddam' to simple
'Shaddam', and refer to the absent Saddam Hussein
as 'President Hussein', which was and still is
his correct title in international law."

Story and photo proof.

An illusion or an illusion of an illusion?

07.16.04 (6:54 pm) [edit]

Shespecies
made the following comment on one of
my posts here:

"The life we have here on this planet is merely
an illusion..."

If it is an illusion, how would we know? Don't
we have to know what's real to define an
illusion?

Have you had some divine revelation about what
reality looks like?

I don't doubt that many are living delusional
lives, but to them how could it be obvious unless
they knew what was real?

If someone can't resolve contradictions, let alone
see them, wouldn't life appear as an illusion due
to the lack of ability to think clearly?

From where I sit on my little chair buzzing around
the net most folks sound confused, probably because
they been covered with bullshit for so long, not
carrying the proper repellent.

Of course, I, like all the other hyumans I know have
a necessarily limited view of the world.

All I can do is make assumptions, just like everyone
else.

It works for me.

Don't let anyone tell you different.

By the way, there are quite a few illusionists out there.

It might be a good idea to learn how to spot 'em.

Think about it.

More mental masturbation.

07.16.04 (11:40 am) [edit]

"The covert operations carried out by the CIA,
both information collection and covert actions
designed to influence the policies of other
governments, actually are and have to be part of
the U.S. policymaking and policy-implementing
establishment. The intelligence analysis
functions, on the other hand, should be separated
to the maximum degree possible from policymaking
and should never be distorted or falsified in
order to support policies already desired by any
administration."

Bwahahahahahah.

This hyuman doesn't get it either.

More shuffling of deck chairs won't change a thing.

If you've been doing your homework by reading some
of the Advanced Thinking pieces I've posted here
you already know that creating a New Mutual Ass-Kissing
Institution is not an innovation. How is it possible
to create a new and improved power-based institution?

If you're really interested in more mental masturbation...

The Political Animal House

07.16.04 (5:37 am) [edit]

Isn't it really all so simple?

After all the yammering, shuffling of deck
chairs, naming names and all sorts of birds, it
really just comes down to this...
_________________________ ____________

"The names are not material. [My
emphasis] The concepts are at play, and
categorically controlling. Learn the concepts.
You can apply any names of leaders, militaries,
countries, gangs, political parties or any other
institutions (two or more humans organized under
a separate name) utilizing any form of force,
including the force of majority rule votes for
laws backed by armed police, throughout history,
and verify every inherent result in the past, and
itemize every result in the future, and laugh
yourself to tears over the most brilliantly
designed comedy known to humans, humans, while
fools too lazy to ask a few more questions
continue to wring their hands and anguish over
the results, or run off to wars or ballot boxes
to create those force-created contradictions."

Even the Libertarian Party isn't immune. See
why...

More machinations of the Cult of Power.

07.15.04 (12:16 pm) [edit]

If you like to read about all the Left/Right
wing machinations of power, go to the link below.
Personally, it bores the shit outta me, but the
conclusion in the paragraph below is apt.

I think wings are for the birds.
_________________________ ________________

"The cult of Power, with its roots in the Left
and its present hegemony over the Right, is the
eternal enemy of peace and liberty. Like any
cult, it has an exoteric philosophy, which is
presented in reams of essays and proclamations
extolling the virtues of 'democracy' – while its
esoteric meaning is embodied in the photos of the
Abu Ghraib house of horrors."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=302 7" title="http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=302 7" target="_blank"http://www.antiwar.com/justin...

A rarity.

07.14.04 (6:48 pm) [edit]

Now here's a guy who probably figured out he
pays a cost for being wrong.

Cheers, John.
____________________

"The Free Press corrects all errors of fact. If
you know of an error, please call John X. Miller,
public editor, at 313-222-2441 or 800-678-7771
anytime, write him at 600 W. Fort, Detroit 48226,
or send e-mail to miller@freepress.com."

http://www.freep.com/news/metro/strait14_2 0040714.htm" title="http://www.freep.com/news/metro/strait14_2 0040714.htm" target="_blank"http://www.freep.com/news/met...

Accountability

07.13.04 (6:22 pm) [edit]

Do you know what group of people he's talking
about?
_________________________ _________

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more
dangerous way of making decisions than by putting
those decisions in the hands of people who pay no
price for being wrong." -- Thomas Sowell

Fahrenhype 9/11

07.13.04 (2:37 pm) [edit]

It's the power, folks, it's the power.

Shun it.

Keep looking at Big Picture until the last puzzle
piece snaps into place.
_________________________ ___

"I am delighted the movie is out there,
disappointing as I found the depth of research,
but the danger is that people will think they now
know the information that has been kept from them
and therefore fail to realise that Moore has
about 2% of the real background to global events
and control. Or that they will focus themselves
on targeting and removing Bush when he is just a
puppet and Kerry would be another."

Full story.

A Reluctant Anarchist

07.13.04 (12:45 pm) [edit]

I'm not going to tell you who wrote this. His
identity might color your thinking. Just read
it for the ideas. Ideas are what count. Not
personalities, doncha think?
_________________________ _________

"As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking
the state can be controlled by a constitution.
Once granted, state power naturally becomes
absolute. Obedience is a one-way street.
Notionally, 'We the People' create a government
and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise
over us; our rulers swear before God that they
will respect the limits we impose on them; but
when they trample down those limits, our duty to
obey them remains...

Other things have helped change my mind. R.J.
Rummel of the University of Hawaii calculates
that in the twentieth century alone, states
murdered about 162,000,000 million of their own
subjects. This figure doesn’t include the tens of
millions of foreigners they killed in war. How,
then, can we speak of states 'protecting' their
people? No amount of private crime could have
claimed such a toll. As for warfare, Paul
Fussell’s book Wartime portrays battle
with such horrifying vividness that, although
this wasn’t its intention, I came to doubt whether
any war could be justified...

If I said it once, I'm gonna say it a million
times: Isn't it the fault of the followers and not
the leaders?

The essence of the state is its legal monopoly
of force. But force is subhuman; in words I quote
incessantly, Simone Weil defined it as 'that
which turns a person into a thing — either corpse
or slave.' It may sometimes be a necessary evil,
in self-defense or defense of the innocent, but
nobody can have by right what the state claims:
an exclusive privilege of using it...

'But what would you replace the state with?' The
question reveals an inability to imagine human
society without the state. Yet it would seem that
an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives
within a century hardly needs to be 'replaced.'"

Who'da thunk it?

The whole thing.

Do you think your leaders are demented...or do you even have one?

07.12.04 (3:11 pm) [edit]

Now here we have an explanation of something
different...by a college of shrinks. Doesn't
really blow my skirt up. How about yours?

As far as I'm concerned all leaders are demented.

Could it be that the Feel of Power is the cause...
a virus invades the mind, destroying it?
_________________________ ________

"Consultant psychiatrist Dr George El-Nimr said
World War II might not have happened if past US
president Woodrow Wilson had bowed down to his
dementia.

Stalin and Franklin D Roosevelt most probably
had dementia too, he said.

Dr El-Nimr and colleagues spoke at the Royal
College of Psychiatrists' annual conference in
Harrogate.

Dr El-Nimr, from Haywood Hospital in Stoke-on-
Trent, and his colleagues Dr Baseem Habeeb, at
Mersey NHS Trust, and Dr Emad Sulib, senior
lecturer in psychiatry at Liverpool University,
looked at the possible impact dementia may have
had on seven world leaders.

Millions of Russians might have been saved from
death if the dictator Stalin had seen a
psychiatrist, they believe.

Not likely. What of the 20 or so million
Ukranians that his followers killed, leaving
them no shovels to bury their dead. Who were
the demented there, Stalin or the followers of
his orders?...or both?

You decide.

They told doctors attending the conference that
Stalin's behaviour could easily be explained by
dementia following a series of strokes.

Yea. You find out people are uncontrollable,
you go into a rage, your blood pressure skyrockets
giving you a stroke, then you kill 'em because
you can't control 'em. Looks like a lot of nonsense
to me. What do you think?

'This might be an explanation for the florid
paranoia, dimming of superior intellect and the
unleashing of his most sadistic personality
traits,' said Dr El-Nimr."

"dimming of superior intellect"? Holy shit,
Batman. Why would anyone with superior intellect
want to exercise power? Power and intellect are
opposites. Who needs power when they can use
the mind to overcome all obstacles? Could it
be just because they're in a fucking hurry to
accomplish their goals because they know life
is short?

When you get pissed off, do you think straight?

I don't.

So much for dementia and the army of shrinks.

Think about it.

Full article.

This just in...

07.12.04 (9:34 am) [edit]

A marine squad was marching north of Basra when
they came upon an Iraqi soldier badly injured and
unconscious.

Nearby, on the opposite side of the road, was
an American Marine in a similar but less serious
state The Marine was conscious and alert. As
first aid was given to both men, the Marine was
asked what had happened. The Marine reported, "I
was heavily armed and moving north along the
highway and coming south was a heavily armed
Iraqi soldier. Seeing each other we both took
cover."

"What happened then?" the corpsman asked.

"I yelled to him that Saddam Hussein was a
miserable low life slug, and he yelled back:
'George Bush, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Bill and
Hillary Clinton are miserable slime balls'. "

"We were standing there shaking hands when a
truck hit us."

Why we're stuck in this rut.

07.11.04 (12:58 pm) [edit]

Life is too short for any sincere person to make
any good difference today on any level that would
count except maybe in the field of divine comedy.

A major slice of the Grand Illusion

07.11.04 (4:14 am) [edit]

And payment from you is even demanded for
this....
________________________

"The US President and all of his institutional
advisors seek their consultants and advisors only
from within their own institutional box, by
definition of the institutional design. The
situation is more amusing than you first
recognize. To be selected as an advisor to the
president or any high title of any institution,
one must first be selected by a small or large
legion of current advisors, each weeding out
anyone who says anything that makes their mind
uncomfortable, precisely the new knowledge for
which a useful advisor would be selected. The
results in sum are the most intellectually absent
yes-men available in society, selected as so-
called advisors, by design of that process. Any
rhetorical denials, upon seeing these words of
obvious truth, are only a fool's illusion first
fooling the fool who would attempt to deny such
obvious truth. And the original advisors directly
selected by the president and such chaps, are
inherently their friends, having become their
friends because they routinely agreed with the
chap they helped acquire the title. The only
useful advice to the human mind is that which
contradicts the mind's current conclusions, to
thus create the questions to correct or verify
the conclusions. There is no currently manifested
process for an institutional leader to acquire
useful advisors." [All italics here are
my emphasis.]

Full essay.

Chaos is order or Who's in Charge, Part II

07.10.04 (5:40 pm) [edit]

The natural state of the planet is chaos because
chaos is better organized.

Look around you for the proof.

Endless wars for an elusive peace.

Endless rules creating more disorder and more criminals
daily.

And I ain't even scratched that proverbial surface.

Look for the paradox.

First Fuel Cell Cars Delivered to Customers in Berlin

07.10.04 (10:31 am) [edit]

I wonder what might beat the FCV to a large market
share...a magnetic motor car?
______________________

* DaimlerChrysler hands over Mercedes-Benz A-
Class "F-Cell" vehicles to Deutsche Telekom and
BEWAG/Vattenfall Europe

* Europe's first service station for fuel
cell cars opened for regular operation

* By the end of 2004, a total of 60 "F-
Cells" will be in use by customers throughout the
world

Full story.

Power or wisdom.

07.10.04 (5:43 am) [edit]

Which do you choose, power or wisdom?

It's simple. Make your choice.

Big trouble in River City tho, as most can't
rightly tell the difference, so I expect we'll
muddle along unless some dickhead pushes the
red button somewhere, following without question
the orders of a Supreme Dickhead.

But even in the worst case, life will probably
start all over, possibly in some other form.

But wouldn't that be a waste of time and energy?
_________________________ _____

A very small piece from the link below:

"There is no social mechanism to place
knowledgeable people in positions of social
governance, regardless of their percentage in the
population. In fact each existing mechanism
creating social governance is counter productive
to achieving knowledge, wisdom, intelligence or
any such concept as a governing process.

All the existing mechanisms create power, the
antithesis of logic, knowledge or wisdom."

http://www.think.ws/relatedconcepts-5.html" title="http://www.think.ws/relatedconcepts-5.html" target="_blank"http://www.think.ws/relatedco...

The contradictory, confusing hyuman animal.

07.08.04 (7:38 pm) [edit]

Odd, the hyuman animal.

A good portion of his existence is spent
convincing others to buy a product or service
from him to continue his survival.

On the other hand, a growing slice of the waking
hours of many are spent convincing others of the
necessity of electing someone they don't know, to
give them orders and services they are told they
can't refuse and, in addition, that they
must pay for these things without question even
when these orders and services may no longer be
wanted by the person doing the paying.

And then the process begins again...for lack of
the refund.

Why are these hyumans so confused?

Breaking news in the deadly soap opera.

07.08.04 (9:53 am) [edit]

"Psychological flooding of this sort is not new,
and has been around almost as long as Sigmund
Freud. In this particularly crude example, you
were flashed more frames per second of Shaddam
than you had been flashed frames per month of
President Hussein when he was still visibly
present in Iraq. This sheer weight of numbers
then forces your brain to accept Shaddam as
President Hussein, even though you may be deeply
skeptical. Once you realize what has been done to
you, unraveling the illusion becomes easier,
because behavioral psychology in itself is merely
a series of manufactured stage tricks."

All of the story.

A look inside the earthly Borg.

07.07.04 (1:03 pm) [edit]

"The organization will inherently attack other
people. A power-based organization, which is all
but a rare few organizations, cannot exist
without an enemy. The organization need attack
only one person, and the organization without an
individual mind to synthesize all the related
data, will then have an opponent with a human
mind. The organization without a mind can
therefore never win against a human mind, and
will only play out an identified and precisely
itemized process before it eventually defeats
itself. It is immaterial to a thinking person
that an organization can achieve many temporary
illusions, and provide for the material wealth of
many fools, all of which will collapse, in sum
for only the ancient lesson illuminating that for
which a thinking person obviously would not want
to waste his life. Within the social functioning
of the human species, any human mind will win a
game against an artificial person without a mind.
Do not be hasty in your suggestion of any
exceptions. The process will primarily be that of
the organization without a mind, inherently
defeating itself for physical lack of ability to
synthesize all the otherwise easily synthesized
organizational contradictions. Do not be hasty
with your claims of organizations winning
proverbial battles. Their proverbial wars are
doomed, as consistently proven."

The rest of the article.

Are you hip?

07.07.04 (5:52 am) [edit]

"They think they're hip," the entertainer said.
"They can't read; they can't write. They're
laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."

And Cosby thinks it's just a "black" thing?
I got two of 'em in my house...and they aren't
black. What he didn't say is they aren't interested
in thinking, only feeling.

What am I doing about it?

Leading solely by example. What else is there that
can be done with dummies who don't listen?

Why do most of us have to learn the hard way?

Isn't it probably the fault of the teachers,
whoever they are at any given moment?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/01/cosby.comments.ap/index.html" title="http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/01/cosby.comments.ap/index.html" target="_blank"http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07...

Strange crop circle.

07.06.04 (9:52 am) [edit]

Strange indeed. Very strange.

Tesla was thought to have talked to aliens.
_________________________ ___

"But according to experts, the giant circles are
not supposed to be footballs, instead this
pattern apparently represents a diagram of an
electrical transistor designed 100 years ago by
the world's most mysterious inventor."

(read more to see photos)

Something very different this way comes.

07.06.04 (4:48 am) [edit]

This appears to be a different approach to
the magnetic power motor I posted earlier.

Will someone please state a new law concerning
magnetics that explains this?

They say ideas whose time has come pop up
in various locations at the same time, with
no apparent connection between the people
discovering them.

Hmmmm.
_________________________ _______

"All-magnet motor poised to be first to reach
market. German manufacturer licensed to
manufacture 20 kw unit for Europe and Russia.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (PRWEB) July 2, 2004 -
- For centuries, inventors have been claiming to
come up with magnetic motor designs that use
nothing more than the power of permanent magnets
for the motive force; and for the same amount of
time, mainstream science has responded that this
is impossible. 'It has been proven mathematically
that no combination of permanent magnets in any
arrangement will generate power.' {1}

History tells us that what has been proven in
many people's back yards and garages does not
always coincide with mathematics.

Refusing to be daunted by what he considers to
be petty dogmas of academic science, inventor
Michael J. Brady of Johannesburg not only claims
to have produced such a device, but reports that
his company, Perendev Power Developments Pty
(Ltd) is now in process of manufacturing it on a
large scale for markets in Europe, Russia, and
Australia."

Full story with videos.

Insanity reigns

07.05.04 (8:07 pm) [edit]

Excerpted from the link below:

"Sadly, that conclusion was validated last week
by the widespread, coordinated attacks by the
Iraqi resistance-attacks that brought Vietnam to
mind and, specifically, the country-wide 'Tet'
offensive by Communist forces in early 1968 that
made Walter Cronkite and many other Americans
realize we had all been badly misled into
thinking that that war was winnable.

So, war is good if it's winnable, IOW if
I just decide I can kick somebody's ass and
win, it was a justifiable fight?

What the fuck?!!!!!!!

Somewhere along the line a bunch of Amurikans
and dick-head Walter lost their sense of justice.

Since when do you walk down the street and pick
fights just because you can win? What is it with
this World Bully shit? Whatever happened to
fighting only in self-defense? Why not take
lessons from the Swiss? They've been successful
and haven't been attacked because they don't
antagonize anyone.

The final week of formal US occupation of Iraq
was a bad one. And the last thing the Bush
administration needed was publication of the
challenging judgments of a CIA analyst who
devoted 17 years to tracking al-Qaeda and other
terrorists. That analyst (let's call him Mike)
wrote that the Iraqi adventure was 'an unprovoked
war against a foe who posed no immediate threat.'
He emphasized, 'There is nothing that bin Laden
could have hoped for more than the American
invasion and occupation of Iraq.'

True..and dumbshit Amurikans played right into
bin Laden's hands. Who has control in this
scenario?

Mike added that the US has 'waged two failed
half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and
Iraq seething with anti-US sentiment, fertile
grounds for the expansion of al-Qaeda and kindred
groups.'"

Again, "failed half-wars"? Isn't this guy
implying that America shoulda turned the Afgan
and Iraqi soil into melted glass along with those folks
just minding their own business? If someone doesn't
agree with ya, nuke 'em?

http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern06292004.html" title="http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern06292004.html" target="_blank"http://www.counterpunch.org/m...

How to Serve Man

07.05.04 (4:54 pm) [edit]

"It stands to reason that where there's
sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial
offerings. Where there's service, there's someone
being served. The man who speaks to you of
sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And
intends to be the master." --Ayn Rand

This reminded me of an old Rod Serling Twilight
Zone episode from the original TV series
where you see folks happily getting on an alien
spacecraft. The aliens are displaying a book entitled
How to Serve Man. Then one guy opens the
book to find out it's a cook book.

A small piece of the puzzle in the Death of Power.

07.05.04 (11:48 am) [edit]

"In the area of human intelligence, the
committee said the CIA 'continues down a road
leading over a proverbial cliff' because of its
failure to improve.

'There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for
corrective action,' the report added.

"Dysfunctional", my ass. It is the nature
of all adherents to an institution to defend
its existence at all costs and from all outside
criticism. It spends more energy doing this
than it does anything else.

Tenet fired back in a letter to House Select
Committee on Intelligence Chairman Porter Goss, R-
Fla., calling the criticism 'absurd' and 'ill-
formed.'

Aren't the first three rules of Spookdom, spouses
fucking around and all power junkies for that matter:

1-Deny.

2-Deny.

3-Deny?

'I am deeply disappointed at the way the report
has chosen to question the leadership and
capabilities of the clandestine service,' Tenet
wrote to Goss, who is often mentioned as a likely
candidate for the top CIA post.

Do I see a tear in Herr Tenet's eye?

'Dysfunctional organizations do not perform the
way the directorate of operations performed in
Afghanistan and in support of the military in
Iraq before and after the conflict.'"

Full story.

A Controller Extraordinaire

07.04.04 (12:19 pm) [edit]

"The history of literature preserves the names
and sometimes also the writings of powerless
dreamers who took pleasure in contriving plans
for an earthly paradise. The common
characteristic of all these schemes was that the
inmates of the proposed utopia were destined to
be unconditionally subject to the orders first of
its founder and later of his successors. What the
utopias envisioned were in fact all-embracing
prisons. Perhaps one can excuse some of their
authors as psychopaths."

Why not just call 'em assholes and be done
with it?

Money, Method and the Market Process,
Chapter 16, 1967, by Ludwig von Mises.

How do you exercise your power?

07.03.04 (4:31 pm) [edit]

"When watching men of power in action it must be
always kept in mind that, whether they know it or
not, their main purpose is the elimination or
neutralization of the independent individual- the
independent voter, consumer, worker, owner,
thinker- and that every device they employ aims
at turning men into a manipulable 'animated
instrument' which is Aristotle's definition of a
slave." -- Eric Hoffer
_____________________

I have a beef with Eric on his inclusion
of "independent voter" with the rest of the
folks there.

Isn't an independent voter a contradiction in
terms, believing that his man, once in power will
make other people conform to the image that he,
the voter, prefers? What's independent about that?
Isn't the voter attempting to use a man of power
to get what he wants no matter who he votes for?
And then doesn't he--by default--support and join
the men of power? How is that being independent?

Do you see the contradiction?

Now forget about the idea that voting for second-hand
power over another person just minding his own business
is a fucked idea in a civilized world, look at the
futility of being an independent voter by checking
out the article On Escaping Democracy at the
link below.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm" title="http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm" target="_blank"http://www.fredoneverything.n...

More on the shriveling Cosmic Nipple.

07.03.04 (9:49 am) [edit]

So, you think everything is just fine and your
government is running tried and true?

But isn't this ominous?

What happens when SS runs outta money?

Which other agencies might soon follow or
is SS just an isolated case?

Found on a forum: [link below]
_________________________ __________

"Here's something else that's really encouraging
(true story):

I'm defending a fairly complex claim and had to
get the plaintiff's records from the Social
Security Administration. I got the required
release form and sent it in. I got a call today
saying that I could come down and copy the
records, because they don't have the money to
hire someone to copy records. Oh, and I need to
bring my own copy paper, too."

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1022214" title="http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1022214" target="_blank"http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fa...

Are you searching for a kinder, gentler power?

07.02.04 (7:11 pm) [edit]

LA WEEKLY:

"But American history didn’t begin on January 20,
2001, or on 9/11. Isn’t much of what you describe
a situation that dates back a full century or
more? Why blame so much of this on George W.
Bush?"

...a full century or more? Let's look closer.

What is the nature of power?

Was there ever a kinder, gentler power or was
it just hidden from your view until Dubya hit
the scene?

CHALMERS JOHNSON:

"Yes, this goes back a long way — to Teddy
Roosevelt acquiring colonies from the Spanish.
But Bush dropped the mask. He comes out and says
we are a New Rome, we don’t need the U.N. or any
friends. We now put countries on hit lists.
Certainly, if there were some steering committee
for an American imperial project, it would
consider Bill Clinton a much better imperial
president than George W. Bush. It’s always
better strategy to not show your hand, to take an
indirect approach but to know exactly where you
are going." [My emphasis]

So, is it better to engage in lies, conspiracies
and cover-ups in this card game with lives at
stake? Doesn't that sound like a typical response
by a power junkie?

If future historians have anything good to say
about Dubya, might they say that what he did for
America was to show it the raw face of power so
Americans truly saw what it looked like?

The full story.

Do you really want to polish a turd?

07.02.04 (1:00 pm) [edit]

Isn't "reforming" or "re-inventing" government
like trying to polish a turd?

And doesn't the same hold true for an ol'
fashioned revolution?

Why not just let it die a natural death?

Do you really think Your Guy will make all The
Bad Things go away?

How would you go about "reforming" an institution
whose sole interest -- its raison d'etre --
is having you obey its dictates without question?

Don't we need a revolution in our way of thinking
about something in order to change it permanently?

"But to tear down a factory or revolt against a
government or avoid repair of a motorcycle
because it is a system is to attack effects
rather than causes; and as long as the attack is
upon effects only, no change is possible. The
true system, the real system, is our present
construction of systematic thought itself,
rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down
but the rationality which produced it is left
standing, then that rationality will simply
produce another factory. If a revolution destroys
a systematic government, but the systematic
pattern of thought that produced that government
are left intact, then those patterns will repeat
themselves in the succeeding government. There's
so much talk about the system. And so little
understanding." --Robert Pirsig in Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Can you get it right thi