Transcendence, or strictly speaking the possibility of it, is what sets humankind apart from all other species, and it is what ultimately determines our essential equality to one another.
I'm defining transcendence as the exercise of the ability to alter one's situation by changing the basic facts of the situation. I believe all humans potentially have this ability. Many never use it. Of those who do, some do it entirely on their own, and some require a lot of help, like Helen Keller. But in all cases, the possibility of rewriting one's own future exists.
This is why we have no ability to foresee or declare the end of 'the world', meaning our species. Though we may seem doomed to self-extinction, the game cannot be called until it is played out.
Friday, September 22, 2017
Monday, September 11, 2017
Introduction to Infotoxicology
I propose that Infotoxicology is a new and necessary science.
I think the word 'infotoxin' was coined by Jeff Phillips, in an article published in Adbusters sometime in the 1980s. It may have appeared earlier but I do not know of it.
The best way to explain what it is, is to lay out the axioms of this new science. This post will concern mostly those axioms - unprovable assertions which must be accepted as basis for all that follows. I have identified four such assertions. Subsequent posts will embark on a discussion of the elements of the new science.
The axioms:
Reliable information is necessary for the continuance of life, and for maintenance of its quality. We constantly interact with the world in our daily lives, and thus must deal with that which we have neither created nor can control. The more reliable is our understanding of it, the better are our chances of not only surviving it, but improving our situation in it. A corollary to this is that life which can reliably better its circumstances is a life worth living.
Infotoxin in the mind is analogous to poison in the body. This analogy holds in several important ways. First, the effects are always deleterious. The ill effects of misguided understanding can range from near-negligible inceonvenience to death, including all possible ills between the two. Second, infotoxin very often persists, just as poison becomes lodged in the body's various hidey-holes. The spleen, the liver, the pancreas, pockets of the colon and other areas can retain poisons after our awareness of ingesting them has passed. From these places, although sequestered and controlled by the body's defenses, they can continue to cause trouble. In the same way, unexamined beliefs can affect our thinking processes and our reactions to the world long after their 'ingestion'. Thirdly, as with poisons, the act of purging them can be violently uncomfortable, more so than maintaining them in sequestration. Fourthly, such purging is very much desirable in spite of this.
Everyone lies to everyone. Including of course themselves. Untruth and misunderstanding is a universal fact of life, and must be accepted as such even as we undertake to defend ourselves from its worst effects.
The human being of average intelligence is capable of significantly improving quality of life, by learning to distinguish truth from untruth as much as possible. Being part of the world we live in, our understanding of it will never be perfect. But here I use the word 'average' to indicate my belief that at least half of living humans, and probably much more, are sufficiently intelligent to improve their ability to detect untruth with a little study. A corollary to this is that the subject does indeed require study, just as we need practice to learn how to swim. Once certain defenses are put in place by learning the techniques I intend to propose, their operation becomes more or less automatic, and we are less easily fooled.
Soon, within a week I think, I will follow this post with an attempt to classify the various types of infotoxin, both natural and manmade.
I think the word 'infotoxin' was coined by Jeff Phillips, in an article published in Adbusters sometime in the 1980s. It may have appeared earlier but I do not know of it.
The best way to explain what it is, is to lay out the axioms of this new science. This post will concern mostly those axioms - unprovable assertions which must be accepted as basis for all that follows. I have identified four such assertions. Subsequent posts will embark on a discussion of the elements of the new science.
The axioms:
Reliable information is necessary for the continuance of life, and for maintenance of its quality. We constantly interact with the world in our daily lives, and thus must deal with that which we have neither created nor can control. The more reliable is our understanding of it, the better are our chances of not only surviving it, but improving our situation in it. A corollary to this is that life which can reliably better its circumstances is a life worth living.
Infotoxin in the mind is analogous to poison in the body. This analogy holds in several important ways. First, the effects are always deleterious. The ill effects of misguided understanding can range from near-negligible inceonvenience to death, including all possible ills between the two. Second, infotoxin very often persists, just as poison becomes lodged in the body's various hidey-holes. The spleen, the liver, the pancreas, pockets of the colon and other areas can retain poisons after our awareness of ingesting them has passed. From these places, although sequestered and controlled by the body's defenses, they can continue to cause trouble. In the same way, unexamined beliefs can affect our thinking processes and our reactions to the world long after their 'ingestion'. Thirdly, as with poisons, the act of purging them can be violently uncomfortable, more so than maintaining them in sequestration. Fourthly, such purging is very much desirable in spite of this.
Everyone lies to everyone. Including of course themselves. Untruth and misunderstanding is a universal fact of life, and must be accepted as such even as we undertake to defend ourselves from its worst effects.
The human being of average intelligence is capable of significantly improving quality of life, by learning to distinguish truth from untruth as much as possible. Being part of the world we live in, our understanding of it will never be perfect. But here I use the word 'average' to indicate my belief that at least half of living humans, and probably much more, are sufficiently intelligent to improve their ability to detect untruth with a little study. A corollary to this is that the subject does indeed require study, just as we need practice to learn how to swim. Once certain defenses are put in place by learning the techniques I intend to propose, their operation becomes more or less automatic, and we are less easily fooled.
Soon, within a week I think, I will follow this post with an attempt to classify the various types of infotoxin, both natural and manmade.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
What I Know About 9/11/01
I don't know very much, really, but what I know is enough to convince me that the official history is a pack of lies. This is not surprising, as many such histories fall into this catregory, for instance, the building of the Panama Canal, the death of Warren G. Harding, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to name just a few. We in the US are raised on a diet of such lies to give us the impression that we live in an exceptional, god-blessed state, and nothing we do is ever really wrong. This of course is the biggest lie of all.
Our 'President' at the time had lost the election, but was unconstitutionally declared President anyway by the Supreme Court. I gave up on democracy in the US in January of 2000. I gave up on the so-called free press not long after that. For years, thanks to Reagan's deregulation, the mainstream press had been undergoing consolidation into fewer and fewer hands, nearly all of them very rich and paranoid. Fearmongering and sensationalism had completely replaced objective analysis before the end of the 80s. To this day, this disappoints me severely, as I had grown up in one of those rare eras when the news was relevant and interesting.
But it was Jimmy Carter who started it all.
It seems clear that 2 airplanes hit the 2 towers of the World Trade Center. Everything else is questionable. Whatever hit the Pentagon was not an airplane. The explanation that the wings were sheared off is ridiculous, since the wings are the heaviest part of a commercial jet. I don't know what happened to the airplane that was supposed to be, but there was a crash of some kind in remote West Virginia that was very little spoken of later.
The story of the plane over Pennsylvania was mostly fabricated. That plane was destroyed in the air, most likely by US military jets, as that is the only way the debris could be spread over so many miles. It is possible that the passengers did in fact retake the plane from the hijackers, and this sealed their fate.
I heard an 'architectural expert' say on TV on 9/11 that the destruction of the towers was 'a classic case of accelerated building collapse'. Sine this was something that had never happened before, I was immediately suspicious about this 'classic case'. Everything I have learned since confirms that it is quite impossible for burning jet fuel on the upper stories to initiate such a collapse. The only possibility is electronically controlled demolition, involving a great many precisely placed explosive charges. How or when these were installed I have no idea. The sudden collapse of WTC 7, hours later, was similar. Nothing the hijackers did could have caused any of that.
At the Camp David Peace Talks, Jimmy Carter performed the miracle of getting Israel and Saudi Arabia on the same agenda. Israel could continue to blackmail our government, influence all of its elections down to the local level, and receive the lion's share of foreign aid, especially military aid. Saudi Arabia was assured of a large but lesser military budget, and encouraged to build schools throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, and eventually many other places, to train young fanatics, and spread their intolerant and violent version of Islam all over the world. Up into the term of George W. Bush, many of their texts were published by a press in Oklahoma City. These 'textbooks' typically preached intolerance towards moderate Muslims (I believe Jews were never mentioned), and familiarized their students with modern weapons. The mujaheddin who drove the Russian-sponsored secular government out of Afghanistan were students of these schools. They later became the Taliban.
Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA, or at least with them, and was at one point given a tour of US military bases while wearing the name Tim Osman. After the 'success' in Afghanistan, he made himself useful in Azerbaijan and other places, sowing chaos and fear on the fringes of the Russian Empire with American weapons and Saudi-trained fanatics.
There is a corporation called the Carlyle Group, and other than 'run the world' it's not very clear what they do. At the time of 9/11, its board of directors included Dick Cheney, Watergate criminal Frank Carlucci, and several members of the bin Laden family. These bin Ladens were flown from the US to Saudi Arabia shortly after the event, when commercial planes were not allowed to fly. Noone has ever questioned them about these events.
In fact, evidence of what happened was destroyed as much as possible, as soon as possible. barges full of debris from the site of the disaster dumped their cargoes in the middle of the ocean. Israelis who were caught on tape dancing in celebration as they watched the towers fall were quickly deported to Israel with no questions asked. The same with those who were driving a van filled with explosives across the Brooklyn Bridge.
A perfect storm of propaganda was our fare from that day on, so coordinated that it had obviously been planned for some time previously. There was a huge purge of college professors in the weeks following, accounting for more than a thousand I think; not just 'left-wing' professors, but any who taught that skepticism has to be the basis of objectivity. Our educational system not long ago was the envy of the civilized world. It is now a stock-tank for corporations.
The Taliban, faced with the task of running a real country, quickly became practical (though without losing any of their fundamentalism). They agreed to the US proposal of running a natural gas pipeline through their country, but they wanted to be paid fair market value for it. At this point they became an enemy of the US. After 9/11, when Osama supposedly went into hiding there, this was touted as the reason to invade that country. It was never a good reason. The CIA, Interpol and any number of other police organizations could have gone after him. But the idea that such a criminal should be brought to justice is an idea our 'leaders' wanted dismantled. We quickly started a war in Afghanistan, and won it within a few hours, if not minutes. The 'war' that has gone on since is no war, but a brutal and hostile occupation. The Taliban, among other sins, had nearly eradicated the cultivation of opium poppies in that country. Under US occupation, there have been record surpluses almost every year, and a huge increase in addiction in Russian territories and the other '-Stans'. And the CIA has stopped asking for more money.
The war in Afghanistan, and later those in Iraq, Libya and Yemen (possibly Somalia should be included, too) are not 'failures'. "Mission Accomplished" was a true statement. All followed the pattern of Afghanistan; a very quick war to depose the existing government, followed by an occupation mischaracterised as war. Terrorized populations, and puppet governments unable to assert any control over their country's resources, is exactly what was wanted, and it has been achieved. In Syria, Iran and Venezuela, the mission is not yet accomplished, thank goodness. But the effort is ongoing, and was not interrupted at all by the 2 terms of an intelligent, Democratic, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning President. The US has killed an estimated 4 million people in these 'wars' since 9/11. Needless to say, most were innocent.
There's a lot more, but I'm tired of writing for now. let this stand as my contribution to history on the 16th anniversary of the world's largest and most successful false-flag operation.
Our 'President' at the time had lost the election, but was unconstitutionally declared President anyway by the Supreme Court. I gave up on democracy in the US in January of 2000. I gave up on the so-called free press not long after that. For years, thanks to Reagan's deregulation, the mainstream press had been undergoing consolidation into fewer and fewer hands, nearly all of them very rich and paranoid. Fearmongering and sensationalism had completely replaced objective analysis before the end of the 80s. To this day, this disappoints me severely, as I had grown up in one of those rare eras when the news was relevant and interesting.
But it was Jimmy Carter who started it all.
It seems clear that 2 airplanes hit the 2 towers of the World Trade Center. Everything else is questionable. Whatever hit the Pentagon was not an airplane. The explanation that the wings were sheared off is ridiculous, since the wings are the heaviest part of a commercial jet. I don't know what happened to the airplane that was supposed to be, but there was a crash of some kind in remote West Virginia that was very little spoken of later.
The story of the plane over Pennsylvania was mostly fabricated. That plane was destroyed in the air, most likely by US military jets, as that is the only way the debris could be spread over so many miles. It is possible that the passengers did in fact retake the plane from the hijackers, and this sealed their fate.
I heard an 'architectural expert' say on TV on 9/11 that the destruction of the towers was 'a classic case of accelerated building collapse'. Sine this was something that had never happened before, I was immediately suspicious about this 'classic case'. Everything I have learned since confirms that it is quite impossible for burning jet fuel on the upper stories to initiate such a collapse. The only possibility is electronically controlled demolition, involving a great many precisely placed explosive charges. How or when these were installed I have no idea. The sudden collapse of WTC 7, hours later, was similar. Nothing the hijackers did could have caused any of that.
At the Camp David Peace Talks, Jimmy Carter performed the miracle of getting Israel and Saudi Arabia on the same agenda. Israel could continue to blackmail our government, influence all of its elections down to the local level, and receive the lion's share of foreign aid, especially military aid. Saudi Arabia was assured of a large but lesser military budget, and encouraged to build schools throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, and eventually many other places, to train young fanatics, and spread their intolerant and violent version of Islam all over the world. Up into the term of George W. Bush, many of their texts were published by a press in Oklahoma City. These 'textbooks' typically preached intolerance towards moderate Muslims (I believe Jews were never mentioned), and familiarized their students with modern weapons. The mujaheddin who drove the Russian-sponsored secular government out of Afghanistan were students of these schools. They later became the Taliban.
Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA, or at least with them, and was at one point given a tour of US military bases while wearing the name Tim Osman. After the 'success' in Afghanistan, he made himself useful in Azerbaijan and other places, sowing chaos and fear on the fringes of the Russian Empire with American weapons and Saudi-trained fanatics.
There is a corporation called the Carlyle Group, and other than 'run the world' it's not very clear what they do. At the time of 9/11, its board of directors included Dick Cheney, Watergate criminal Frank Carlucci, and several members of the bin Laden family. These bin Ladens were flown from the US to Saudi Arabia shortly after the event, when commercial planes were not allowed to fly. Noone has ever questioned them about these events.
In fact, evidence of what happened was destroyed as much as possible, as soon as possible. barges full of debris from the site of the disaster dumped their cargoes in the middle of the ocean. Israelis who were caught on tape dancing in celebration as they watched the towers fall were quickly deported to Israel with no questions asked. The same with those who were driving a van filled with explosives across the Brooklyn Bridge.
A perfect storm of propaganda was our fare from that day on, so coordinated that it had obviously been planned for some time previously. There was a huge purge of college professors in the weeks following, accounting for more than a thousand I think; not just 'left-wing' professors, but any who taught that skepticism has to be the basis of objectivity. Our educational system not long ago was the envy of the civilized world. It is now a stock-tank for corporations.
The Taliban, faced with the task of running a real country, quickly became practical (though without losing any of their fundamentalism). They agreed to the US proposal of running a natural gas pipeline through their country, but they wanted to be paid fair market value for it. At this point they became an enemy of the US. After 9/11, when Osama supposedly went into hiding there, this was touted as the reason to invade that country. It was never a good reason. The CIA, Interpol and any number of other police organizations could have gone after him. But the idea that such a criminal should be brought to justice is an idea our 'leaders' wanted dismantled. We quickly started a war in Afghanistan, and won it within a few hours, if not minutes. The 'war' that has gone on since is no war, but a brutal and hostile occupation. The Taliban, among other sins, had nearly eradicated the cultivation of opium poppies in that country. Under US occupation, there have been record surpluses almost every year, and a huge increase in addiction in Russian territories and the other '-Stans'. And the CIA has stopped asking for more money.
The war in Afghanistan, and later those in Iraq, Libya and Yemen (possibly Somalia should be included, too) are not 'failures'. "Mission Accomplished" was a true statement. All followed the pattern of Afghanistan; a very quick war to depose the existing government, followed by an occupation mischaracterised as war. Terrorized populations, and puppet governments unable to assert any control over their country's resources, is exactly what was wanted, and it has been achieved. In Syria, Iran and Venezuela, the mission is not yet accomplished, thank goodness. But the effort is ongoing, and was not interrupted at all by the 2 terms of an intelligent, Democratic, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning President. The US has killed an estimated 4 million people in these 'wars' since 9/11. Needless to say, most were innocent.
There's a lot more, but I'm tired of writing for now. let this stand as my contribution to history on the 16th anniversary of the world's largest and most successful false-flag operation.
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