a story of my mother

    My mother grew up in Lake Village, Arkansas. The lake was one of those long fingers of the Mississippi that was left behind by the river. She was the preacher's daughter. She was probably 4 or 5 when this happened, putting it in the mid to late 1930s.

     It was some church function and it was time to eat. My mother came into a room with a tray of fruits and such. She heard a woman say, "That's the preacher's daughter." A second woman said, "Oh. Not very p-r-e-t-t-y, is she?" And my mother said,  "I may not be p-r-e-t-t-y, but I am s-m-a-r-t", and left the room.

My Music

 Of course you can't write about everything all at once, unless you're Lao Tzu or Wittgenstein. So I'll start with some lists. Here's a list of all the albums I've had a hand in. All but the 1st 2 earthalien albums I produced as well, either by myself or with Arnold Bodmer's help, thanks to digital technology.

earthalien:

    earthalien

    Ominosity

    Your Next Dream

    Hypnotizer

    Make Peace with the World

    Grace Period

Solid Ghost:

    Normal Musik

    Black

    Disconcerto no.1

    Indigo Children

    Alpaca Caca

Rampant Egos:

    Tweak of Nature

    Shapeshifter

    Cockroaches

    Road to Nowhere

    Ancient Circuits

    Happy Horse and the Shark

    Live at the Roost

    Egometry 2012

    Laser Cannons

    Centerpeace

    Songs in the Key of Me

    Tarantula Downpour

    The New Equilibrium

    The Dark Ages

    Primordial Goo

    Zombie Apocalypse

    Avant Garden

    Preaching to the Choir

     The Mystery of Uncertainty

The Rampant Egos Conspiracy:

    Fallen Devils

"Sleepless" Justin Parker:

    Stop That Thing: Music of Sleepy John Estes

just1:

    Air

too much to say

Having too much to say is a bad reason for not writing. 

Also, a talent for procrastination renders all other talents inoperable.

The Results of Having Taken the Photograph

Whether or not it was lost in the moment of its preservation 

 strands mercilessly perpetuate the horizon 

 

     in the time it took 

carpet was enfeebled; 

bees muse; 

a popeye descended; 

several stars fling.

For the Record

I want to go on record as saying that Israel is a suckass, shithole, fascist country. Not the only one, certainly, but the only one that gets away with it by whining about 'anti-semitism' every time someone complains. They routinely practice apartheid and genocide, they practice and sponsor terrorism, and peace is impossible as long as they are allowed to continue this. It is time for everyone to step up and say something about it.

GOLD

They came
First from Spain
Then from everywhere
with one thing on their minds
They saw gold in mica-flecked beige mud
in waving tall grasses
in placid expanses of yellow blooms
in free running streams.

Wherever they found it they knew there had to be more
and so doomed the place to endless rape
In this way they explored and mapped two continents
and reduced the magical new world to a chart,
a grid of exploits,
of dead animals and depleted holes.

Many tried to tell them, that the gold was apricots,
the limpid sunlight,
the poppies,
the glinting rivers.
But they mistook the lifeless metal for power,
and would not listen.
They mauled and murdered the land without mercy and gained very little,
And only gained at all by ignoring the damage they did and refusing to pay.

I myself have felt the pull, the power of finely wrought gold, when I saw Tutankhamen's treasures.
But then I walked outside, and saw dragonflies and moths, oaks and maples, clouds in sunset,
 and was instantly cured of obsession with inert wealth.
I do not know what makes me so different from my fellow humans,
who can forget the glory of joy, of love,
of belonging to a place engineered to suit us.
We seek shelter from the same rain,
breathe the same molecules of air,
falter and hesitate, succeed and fail
in the disinterested light of the same sustaining star.

Yet some must slaughter and devastate for the sake of a shining mirage
which will not extend their finite lives by a second.
I wish I knew why
I wish I could help
But I am just another errant child here
in a vast and aging universe
made not for me but before me,
without my consent and beyond my understanding.

Taxonomy of Infotoxin Pt. 1

The first distinction to be made is between natural and artificial. We can assume that Nature has no intent to deceive us, but the mechanics of our perceptions can create misunderstanding of the facts. All of our senses are subject to some of this. To begin with, for our bodies to process any sensation takes time (said to be about 1/30th of a second). Thus we are always behind reality by a small but significant amount. Also each of our senses has certain deficiencies. Seeing and hearing are limited to fairly narrow ranges of frequencies. The sense of smell is drastically affected by air currents. Touch and taste, perhaps the most direct and immediate senses, are the most limited in access to the world.

One further distinction to be made in natural infotoxin is between the inevitable and the predilective. This is to say there are certain illusions we simply cannot help having, and others which affect only some of us thanks to our predilections. One does not have to be thirsty to see a mirage, nor is one more likely to see it when one is thirsty. However, real thirst can override the sense that a liquid may be not good to drink. I have been fooled on a hot day by a cold chocolate milk that had gone sour. My nose should have warned me but it didn't. We may hear faraway voices as if they are near, thanks to acoustic lensing; or we may hear voices that only exist in our memories as if they are real, especially during that indistinct time between sleep and waking.

As with every type of infotoxin, knowledge is the best armor and antidote.

Many such examples can be given, and they would make a good study, but I am mostly concerned with the artificial here. The study of infotoxin must acknowledge these natural varieties, but it is most useful to concentrate on those which are deliberate and maleficent. This is where so many of us lack the necessary knowledge and discernment, but could gain it to our great benefit.

The next post will define the many types of artificial or manmade infotoxin.

Transcendence

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.

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.

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.

Enemies

The day I realized that I have no enemies in this world was in retrospect one of the most important days of my life.

It wasn't that long ago, sometime in the summer of 2007. It came as a surprise to me that I hadn't realized it before. I had long ago understood, for instance, that those we imagine to be our enemies are usually not that important to us; those who act to undermine us are not criminals or terrorists but people we live and work with daily, the ones who envy us our jobs, our things, our money, our looks, our sexual status. And that's just for white people, in this country. Those counted as 'minorities' will have a host of other local forces arbitrarily marshalled against them. Most, of course, white and otherwise, will do whatever is in their power to undermine those local forces in turn. We constantly suffer at one another's hands; but quite rarely at the hands of those popularly deemed to be the 'enemy'.  This is quite notable at such places as the Pentagon, where people use the most part of their energy and effort to work against each other rather than the declared Enemy, just like in any workplace.

When I suddenly became aware that all human beings are stupid (and though some are smart, they are always still stupid about some things), it became impossible to hate anymore. Even people who do things that are appallingly stupid, I see that their stupidity is just a tendency that I find also in myself, magnified. I used to have fits of rage, irrational anger. Sometimes I would smash things. No longer; there doesn't seem to be any point in getting that angry.

What still makes me angry is that the whole human race, with all its marvelous potential, has been made ill by some unknown force, and is very likely to destroy itself without realizing any of this potential. I believe I can assume that no human being has made any legally binding agreement with this unknown force, in spite of all the stories and legends about deals with the devil, etcetera. Certainly no agreement was made to which I was a party! So I'm mad, and I express anger at our stupidity frequently.

But I can no longer feel hatred of anyone, even monster mass-murderers like Hitler, Stalin and Cheney. They are ill in the extreme, probably incurable, and thus pathetic. Maybe all of us are incurable, I don't know. But some are less damaged than others, that is clear.

By the way, Alice Miller has many valuable insights into what creates such human monsters, and I'll be touching on her works a good deal in the future; I think they're among the most important modern books.

Soon I'll write on infotoxin, and how even nature can mislead us, in addition to all the ways we devise to mislead one another. For now, just imagine yourself on a ship in  a calm sea on a bright day. Can you always tell the sky from the sea?

Neither can anyone else. We are truly incapable of judging one another with accuracy, yet we have to use such judgements to survive. There are many, many, many dangerous people. Yet not one is an enemy!

Makayla, you're being brought up in a more civilized neighborhood than most USAns, and hopefully you'll come to this conclusion on your own. I realize that just telling you these things won't make you 'see' them. Most people, especially 'my fellow Americans' post-9/11, would read this and merely scoff. Of course there's enemies, they think. Otherwise what are we spending all this money on?

Ah well, I'll repeat what I printed on the Rampant Egos' album Centerpeace: Though your fate be war, may your heart know peace. In spite of everything, walk in beauty, my love. Walk in beauty.