tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78677755939302810162024-02-18T23:30:38.464-08:00Lily Love - Murmansk (33E, 69N)~ Che Benning Peacecorps Star ~<br>
West ~ Water ~ Spring ~ Red ~ Hearts<br>
INNER WATER: ASSOCIATED WITH THE ASTRAL WORLD AND DESIRE BODIES, TESTS ARE CONCERNED WITH CONTROL OF THE EMOTIONS.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867775593930281016.post-13884948248535976372008-01-27T03:35:00.005-08:002008-01-27T03:59:43.104-08:00ZhivagoMiracle~DLBuffaloElk~GoldHeartPaw<div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">Kronstadt Radostburg Stalyn-OJ-Sky Naval Akademy </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">Couldn’t pour ‘Fig Noodle’ piss from a Boot </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">:GO-Sunna-SIP: </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">Post the ‘Barstow’ Violin </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">War over Jobless-Vyeche-Committee Words </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">:Gorky-Zhivago: </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">The freest ‘Sovied’ Country in the world </span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">Boring Establishment Politics - Wolfe KKK Tone – Graduate Explorers Program </span></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWk7xBGG0A1hZ3YYpEjg3Hgx87eaPPZU1oxX_qpvD7Zq_3BG-Thm3Pk1AC1hY_Q7ZwBE9hqOsmd93PbpgSL2aHxdvsiLgiPHeS1bfRzy4zuSZ07-mQNJdp0M5wo5GuDUBSmemWF2cOhYXS/s1600-h/BlackfootTwin-WildcatDeer-35.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5156991349975742562" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWk7xBGG0A1hZ3YYpEjg3Hgx87eaPPZU1oxX_qpvD7Zq_3BG-Thm3Pk1AC1hY_Q7ZwBE9hqOsmd93PbpgSL2aHxdvsiLgiPHeS1bfRzy4zuSZ07-mQNJdp0M5wo5GuDUBSmemWF2cOhYXS/s320/BlackfootTwin-WildcatDeer-35.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ff33;">DR. ZHIVAGO</span></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">by Boris Pasternak</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">WHITE NIGHT</span></div><div align="center">(471-472)</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">I see a distant past</div><div align="center">And a house on the Peterburg Quai</div><div align="center">Daughter of a small landowner of the steppes,</div><div align="center">You had come from Kursk to be a student.</div><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">You were beautiful, young men loved you.</div><div align="center">Through that white night we two</div><div align="center">Sat on your window-sill</div><div align="center">Looking down from the skyscraper.</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">Like gas butterflies the street-lamps,</div><div align="center">Touched by the morning, trembled.</div><div align="center">I talked to you softly</div><div align="center">Like the sleeping distance.</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">And we, like Petersburg spreading away</div><div align="center">Beyond the shoreless Neva,</div><div align="center">Were held in timid fidelity</div><div align="center">To a mystery.</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">Out there, far off, in the dense forest,</div><div align="center">On that white night of spring,</div><div align="center">The nightingales filled the woods</div><div align="center">With the thunder of their praisgiving.</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">The mad trilling rolled on,</div><div align="center">The voice of the small insignificant bird</div><div align="center">Roused a bustle of delight</div><div align="center">In the depth of the spell-bound forest.</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">Thither crept the night,</div><div align="center">Hugging the fences like a barefoot tramp,</div><div align="center">Trailing behind it, from the window-sill,</div><br /><div align="center">The wraith of that conversation.</div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">Within the reach of its echo,</div><div align="center">In fenced gardens,</div><div align="center">The branches of apple and cherry</div><div align="center">Put on white blossoms,</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">And white as <a href="http://lilytruth-greenpeacestar.blogspot.com/2007/12/wanderer-king-deadmanslandwalking.html">ghosts</a>, the trees</div><div align="center">Crowded into the road</div><div align="center">As though waving good-bye</div><div align="center">To the white night which had seen so much.</div><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">THE WIND</span></div><div align="center">(478)</div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center">This is the end of me, but you live on.</div><div align="center">The wind, crying and complaining,</div><div align="center">Rocks the house and the forest,</div><div align="center">Not each pine-tree seperately</div><br /><div align="center">But all the trees together</div><div align="center">With the whole boundless distance,</div><div align="center">Like the hulls of sailing-ships</div><div align="center">Riding at anchor in a bay.</div><br /><div align="center">It shakes them not out of mischief,</div><div align="center">And not in aimless fury,</div><div align="center">But to find for <a href="http://groups.msn.com/exposureofthetruth">you</a>, out of its grief,</div><div align="center">The words of a <em>lullaby</em>.</div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">ONE RIVER</span></div><div align="center">(37)</div><div align="center"></div><br /><br /><div align="center">From beneath the blue awning of the Pan-American bar you could survey the entire waterfront of Santa Marta. The sun was going down. I found Tim reading <a href="http://groups.msn.com/exposureofthetruth">a newspaper</a> at one of the tables close to a small bandstand. He had already finished a beer. </div><br /><div align="center">"Look at this." He passed me the paper. "It's a couple of years old. I noticed it when I went down to the depot to get newsprint for the plants." Beside a notice for an upcoming performance of <em>El Maestro de Obscuridad</em>, a magician from Bogota who claimed to be able to predice the future, there was a small item about tomb robbers. They had formed an association and wanted the Ministry of Labour to recognize it as an official union. In Santa Marta alone the association had registered ten thousand members. Though it contradicted every law concerning the protection of archeological sites, certain authorities within the Ministry had initially agreed, thus provoking a scandal.....</div><br /><div align="center">A waiter brought our dinner, beer and two plates of chips of fish and rice. For a few minutes we ate without speaking. A band started up, and a woman in a satin dress began to sing wearily. I looked up at Tim.</div><br /><div align="center">"It's hard to believe the Tairona were once here," I said.</div><br /><div align="center">"I know," Tim replied. "You think of this town and then try to imagine priests in cloaks woven with gold and jewels, feather headdresses. Beautiful fields of plants." He stopped eating, looked out to the sea, and then turned back to me. "I'd like to know more about them -- how they lived, what they thought. Have you ever paid atttention to language?"</div><br /><div align="center">"In what way?" I asked.</div><br /><div align="center">"The choice of words. What they mean. There's a tribe in Uruguay, one of the Guarana groups, whose word for soul was <em>'the sun that lies within'</em>. They called a friend <em>'one's other heart.'</em> To forgive was the same word as to forget. They had no writing, and when they first saw paper, they called it the skin of <em>God</em> -- just because you could send messages."</div><br /><div align="center">"Like magic."</div><br /><div align="center">"It was magic," Tim said. "Did Schultz ever tell you about the Indians in the<br />Amazon who couldn't tell blue from green?" I forget the tribe. I asked him whether they saw the same colour or whether they just considered the two colors to be one."</div><br /><div align="center">"What did he say?" I asked.</div><br /><div align="center">"He didn't know. I don't think he ever really thought about it."</div><br /><div align="center">"But you have," I said. Tim laughed.</div><br /><div align="center">"Reichel talks about all this. In one of his books he says the Tairona believed that gold was the blood of the Great Mother. He sais the Kogi word for vagina is the word for dawn. Can you imagine what it means for a people to have such thoughts?"</div><br /><div align="center">"No," I said.</div><br /><div align="center">"I can't, either." He smiled. "Listen. Let's get the bill and get out of here. We've got an early start."</div><br /></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;">SOULDIER WE LOVE YOU!</span></div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center">I read how you took a stand</div><div align="center">& refused to kill in Vietnam</div><div align="center">You said No Man was Your Enemy</div><div align="center">What he's fighting for is to be free</div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center">Souldier we love you,</div><div align="center">Yeah, souldier we love you.</div><div align="center">Standing strong, cause it's <a href="http://www.sirnosir.com/">hard</a> to do</div><div align="center">What you know you <a href="http://brittish-brave-bleader.blogspot.com/"><em>must</em></a>,</div><div align="center">Cause it's true.</div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center">They'll lock you up in their stockade</div><div align="center">Yeah they locked you up,</div><div align="center">Cause they're afraid</div><div align="center">That you would rap</div><div align="center">And spread the word</div><div align="center">But you can't jail <a href="http://yshmaels-guerrylla-jyews.blogspot.com/2007/12/excerpts-of-time-interview-president.html"><em>truth</em></a>,</div><div align="center">It will be heard.</div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center">Oh, ain't it hard sometime...</div><div align="center"> </div><div align="center">Soldier we love you,<br />Yeah, soldier we love you.<br />Standing strong, cause it's hard to do<br />What you know you must,<br />Cause it's true...</div><div align="center"><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;">~!~ ~!~ ~!~ ** ~!~ ~!~ ~!~</span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867775593930281016.post-374503686405894252008-01-27T03:35:00.003-08:002008-01-27T16:48:28.026-08:00ZhivagoMiracle~DLBuffaloElk<div align="center"><span style="font-size:180%;color:#ffff33;">CHE BENNINGS PEACECORPS STARH</span></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFV27RQmP6SmANFc0dynHMjpYcKUFMlgDVynOCaMkdDR5Vgskk7anQI7XtrrvpMZpMOhXtrPelnufInOxj3zeXbpp6E3nzy0cSB5DpCORVOXvfvc1eYo4j42pzvcpiLfG1RpG-cNZvV9m2/s1600-h/BlackfootTwin-WildcatDeer-35.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5160322385823567922" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFV27RQmP6SmANFc0dynHMjpYcKUFMlgDVynOCaMkdDR5Vgskk7anQI7XtrrvpMZpMOhXtrPelnufInOxj3zeXbpp6E3nzy0cSB5DpCORVOXvfvc1eYo4j42pzvcpiLfG1RpG-cNZvV9m2/s320/BlackfootTwin-WildcatDeer-35.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:180%;color:#ffff33;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">"<span style="color:#33ff33;">I drew a little love-letter because I wanted U to see what u were shooting at</span>"</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#ff0000;"></span></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#ff0000;">KGB: The Inside Story</span><br /></span>by Christopher Andrew & Oleg Gordievsky<br /><br /><span style="color:#000099;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Sigint, Agent Penetration and the 'Magnificent Five' from Cambridge<br />1930-'09</span><br /></span><br />Diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union were established in November <em>1933</em>, at a time when the United States had no civilian intelligence agency and American military intelligence was both small and disorganised.<br />The first American Ambassador in <em>Moscow</em>, <em>William C. Bullitt</em>, wrote to the State Department in 1936: </div><br /><div align="center"><br />"<em><span style="color:#ff0000;">We should never send a spy to the Soviet Union. There is no weapon at once so disarming and effective in relations with the Communists as sheer honesty</span></em>."<br /><br />That honesty was taken to remarkable lengths. <em>George Kennan</em>, one of the original members of Bullitt's staff, later recalled that during its first winter of 1933-'4 the embassy had no codes, no safes, no couriers and virtually no security: 'Communications with our government went through the regular <em>telegraphic</em> office and lay on the table for the Soviet government to see."</div><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><br />Sarcasm Alert:<br />Ode to the ‘Civilized’ Yum-Yum Public School Education System!<br />Pardon my inability – as yet – to rise to Patricia De Lille proxywar-orgyprisonview fascism standards! Silly me – hung up on that fucked up concept of individual privacy and heavens above, that moronic document referred to as the Bill of Rights! Moron that I am.<br />-- End --<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">~ <a href="http://www.wic.org/bio/msilbert.htm">Real & Russtik </a>~</span><br /><br />“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch”<br />~ Orson 'Hovvell' Welles ~<br /><br />“Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast”<br />~ Oscar Wilde ~<br /><br />“Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French; Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good”<br />~ Alice MayPalm Brock ~<br /><br />“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.”<br />~ Anne Morrow Medevac Lindbergh ~<br /><br />~ Upstairs at <a href="http://www.wic.org/bio/msilbert.htm">Geronimo’s</a> Halekulani ~</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Mitt Romney</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Federal Reserve Bank of England</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">Oxford ST Champ Ruble</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">/ </span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Richard Branson</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Virgin Atlantic</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">God Almonty Stillwell</span>} </span></span></div><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ff33;"></span></span><br /><div align="center"><br /></div><br /><p align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Timothy -Kazcinski Yussuf- McVeigh</span></p><br /><p align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Blackwater, US Army SF, Al Qaeda </span></p><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">DS-DLB-DST (Bulgarian DeadLetter FrenchBox SS)</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">SkyfireBuffaloZhivagoSwagger-StormfuryRedRainHawkMoonSierra</span><span style="color:#33ff33;">}</span></span></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#33ff33;"><span style="font-size:130%;">John Maher of DELANCEY STREET</span><br /></span>by Grover Sales<br /><br />"The Wobblies were the prophets and forerunners of a new religion. Every religion starts at the bottom level, with the whores, publicans and sinners. Logically it has to start there, with the dissatisfied. You can't get the satisfied to accept new ideas.... The new religion will come here in America, because it is here in America, the home of the most hated race where the hope of the world will lie. The greatest religions always come up out of the most hated races.<br />~ Jack Malloy, From Here to Eternity ~<br />..<br />"All leaders, good or bad, who successfully promoted social movements, started with nothing: Martin Luther King, Jesus, Gandhi, Mao, Hitler, and Buddha -- a millionaire prince who had to give it all away before he could get anything going. The Mormon empire is the classic case of a fanatical, oppressed, and impoverished people who could build an economic power independent of the government. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />"If a group of addicts and convicts can organise, with no violence, along multi-racial lines, and produce an economically cooperative situation -- health care, employment, education -- without the endless 'help' of professional social workers and the government -- this means that the myth of the impotence of the people has forever been put to rest."<br />~ <a href="http://www.wic.org/bio/msilbert.htm">John Maher</a>, founder of Delancey Street ~<br />..<br />"God is not to be fucked with"<br />~ Anonymous, The <a href="http://www.ishmael.com/Origins/Ishmael/">Neighborhood</a> ~<br />[A friend of mine who was a dope dealer knocked off a Catholic church for a considerable sum. The collection was returned. They took him down in a basement, took off his shoes, and burned the soles of his feet with a hot poker and made him walk home barefoot in the snow. They told him, "You sell dope to nice children instead of bums, and now you steal from the church. Now return the money -- you can't afford to have God against you, you got enough troubles with the <a href="http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/01/airforce_area51_newname_080122w/">landlord</a>." The woman that burned his feet was an old Italian grandmother, he sold junk to one of her grandchildren who died from an overdose. It was just a mild object lesson so people would understand that God is not to be fucked with.]</div><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~ ~!~ ~!~ ** ~!~ ~!~ ~!~</span></div><br /><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Anderson 'TT' Cooper</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">CNN International Correspondents, MOR (Monarchist Assoc of Central Russia "The Trust")</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">BlueFTA-Gwinevvere-SkyMagicSun</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"><span style="font-size:100%;"></span></div></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"><div align="center"></span>John Maher is reluctant to talk about his past, not because he's ashamed of it, but because it bores him...</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">'Why would anybody want to hear about that? It's hackneyed to death, typical of a hundred thousand New York gutter rats. Only reason I'm different is I'm lucky, I had the opportunity to get out. Very few do...</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">'When I wasn't locked up in my room, I hung around the Public Library, where I found a copy of Crime and Punishment -- that started me off at nine or ten on the Russians -- Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol. I was knocked out by this kind of Russian mysticism because it was closely related to the 'Celtic twilight' attitude that was part of my family culture.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">In retrospect, I think most of my antisocial behaviour was due to the fact that I wanted to get laid. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">In slums, the romantic and heroic figures are those who can beat the system. Soon as a guy legitimately (sic) makes money, he moves out of the slums. No movie stars or social leaders there, so the guys that could make it with broads were the ones who had cash and some heroic nondrudge role -- the hoodlums. So why dig ditches that don't get you the girls, the attention, or the cash to pay off the cops? </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">I know Frank Serpico's neighbourhood, and those cops have been on the take since I was a kid, a known thing. If you're part of the Irish mob, or the Mafia and you pay, no sweat; if you happen to be a poor black or some dumb Puerto Rican that shoots dope, you go to jail. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Elements of the New York Police Department are a central source of heroin in the United States; nobody believes this. The police steal heroin, or buy it, off the Corsicans, who sell it to Italians, who sell it to the blacks, who sell it to the Spanish and other blacks. The whites buy it off the blacks, then go back to their neighbourhood and sell it to some teenager and he's the one that gets arrested, by the same coppers that sold it to him. That's why New York City is in shambles, because they all know they're living in a lunatic asylum. ...</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">That scene in the movie Serpico, where the cops hit him with a phone book, they don't do that. What they do, and they did it to me, they put the phone book on your head and chain you to these hot water pipes. The handcuffs will heat slowly, and they wrap wet handkerchiefs around your wrists so's you won't get a burn, but you'll feel the pain like boiling water. Then they put the phone book on your head, and beat on the book. This might not kill you but your brains might scramble. And they tell you, 'We keep this up another half hour, you're gonna go crazy -- you gonna talk, or what?" Only way to beat them at that game is to pretend you're already crazy.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Problem with the movie Serpico, it only showed one-tenth of reality; it's ten times that bad. I used to walk into the station house on Alexander and 38th Street; been pinched there twenty times. Timothy J. Incumbent wants to turn out the vote, pick up his button and his literature, hand it out in front of churches, in saloons, and you'll never get hassled. But anybody handing out any other literature, first time some of it hits the pavement, he's arrested for littering.<br />And nobody sneaks around corners for the pay-off -- you literally walk into the station house and yell "Lieutenant O'Hara in? Timothy sent me," and he goes in the back, or slams the phone down in your ear (sometimes repeatedly!).<br />..<br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;">~!~ ~!~ ~!~ ** ~!~ ~!~ ~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Dmitry Medvedev</span></div></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Kremlin, Okhrana (Tsarist Security Service)</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">Tramps Ascalon Treasure-U ST Thunder</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">The ‘No-<a href="http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/awaken.html">Meme</a>-Gorky-Dabble ‘Jails </span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span>We should see more of the consequences of this war and hear less platitudes about it by our government.<br />~ Rasputin ~<br /><br />'Warwick, one of many prep schools for prison, was filled with lost, tortured slum kids -- mainly black, some Spanish -- who were utter social victims, caught in gang wars, boosting a car to go joy riding, or smoking pot. Once in every two hundred, they'd maybe get would-be professional like me, a stand up guy, which the administration hates. Anyone who says, "I don't wanna go to basket-weaving class this morning, Buster' is a bad guy. You got to kiss their asses. If you're clever enough to con them into thinking they're rehabilitating you, if you give them that ego enforcement, they let you go. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />But they couldn't stand what they called my attitude, which was that these reform-school clowns were incompetent assholes who couldn’t find a man's job, so they settled for glorified baby-sitter at $75 a week while fancying themselves social heroes like Lincoln Steffens.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Brooklyn House of Detention: These low-level intellects couldn't find more lucrative employment, so they fed each other's egos by telling each other the reason they did this work was because they liked children; all bullshit. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />I got in a fight there, this guy hit me in the melon with a table leg, so when I get out of the hole with my head stitched up, I have to get this punk -- can't be going home having somebody hit me and not get him back, because nobody on the street would ever talk to me again. So I clobbered him with an ax handle, and it was back to the hole again; seclusion they called it. For two weeks in the hole, I figured I got a reputation, so from then on I played up to these assholes, say good things about them in the school essays I had to write, "Supervisor Horseface took us boys on a wonderful camping trip," and three months later I was out.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />This taught me a great lesson for later life. With this kind of correctional creep, so lonely and hurt because they have failed for so long in their job, if you give them the slightest hope that they've helped you, they're so thrilled they let you out of jail. First week you're there, start a big scene and just waste somebody, really clobber them. You start out by creating this illusion you're a totally dangerous motherfucker. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Then six months later, you're less dangerous. After eighteen months somebody says, "What a remarkable transformation in this man!" Anyone stupid enough to think that anyone's going to get well under the current correctional system deserves to get played with. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />The administration at all times encourages racism, even to the point of pitting white guards against black guards. I've seen race riots in jails where the black guards managed the black team and the white guards were the Vince Lombardis of the white team. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />In a jungle like that, where dozens of knifings are committed every year, prisoners gravitate toward those most like themselves for mutual protection. In prison, the education system has nothing to do with training prisoners, but it has everything to do with upping the budget and employing a few excess middle-class teachers. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />In the middle of the daily race riot, it's hard to concentrate on Shakespeare.<br />..<br /></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Dick Cheney</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">White House, SDECE-DGSE (French Foreign Intel Agency) </span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">Darth O'Reilly SacredLear Illusion</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">New York’s Rikers Island: </div><br /><div align="center">This was the armpit of New York City: </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">A place for detaining excess populations who are unemployable. Jails like rain to a farmer – just make sure you don’t get too much of it. Jail was a chance, with little risk, to impress gangsters from the Neighbourhood; there were men in all the New York jails who knew my father and grandfather. On the street, I had to work for a rep, but in jail I could build it easily, pick up the law from older Neighbourhood fellas, names I could use to drop on the outside, like “You was with Yago,” or “You was with Irving the Banker.” </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">In a prison like Rikers its inevitable that any new prisoner is going to be a target for sexual advances. Only two ways you can handle this: Either you go along with it and become somebody’s punk in return for his protection against gang-bang rapes – or you do what I did. First time someone makes a pass, or even hints at it, you say, “Lissen, punk, you so much as lay a hand on me and I will kill you, and when I get outa here, I’ll kill your wife, your mother, your whole fuckin’ family! And you ain’t bullshittin’, you mean it...</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">When my wrist healed I got a job in the psychiatric ward because I could read, write, and spell correctly. It was the doctor’s or the captains decision to appoint someone a psychiatric clerk. A good line of shit, and a fifty buck donation to the ‘Correctional Officers Benevolent Association’ would get you the job. The doctors were obvious yo-yos incapable of private practice, senile clowns, refugees from the University of Hungary, 1911. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">One of my duties was to walk around and look at the nuts; the ones who are really crazy – hearing voices and talking to cockroaches – you write “faking” on their report so they’ll send them back to the yard to make room for a prisoner sane enough, who can pay us $50 or $100 for the cell. You wouldn’t have to pay nothing if you were a good fellow, and connected, with a mob, a man with ‘respect’ who had kept his mouth shut. So the real nuts with no money or connections never see the inside of the psychiatric ward, except for the few minutes when we transfer them to Bellevue or Matteawan. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">The function of the prison psychiatric ward is to provide a place where the sane people could go to get away from the nuts. Nobody believes them when you tell them this. At night I walked around the tiers reserved for the ones who were so crazy you couldn’t pretend they were faking – the ones banging the heads on the wall – and try to calm them down. What the doctor tells you to do is Mickey Mouse stuff. You got to realize that in prison, nobody works; the guards just sit around. Once in a while some bright-eyed fool runs in bushy-tailed from the Columbia School of Social Work and wants to change things; he ends up bitter, rotten and corrupt. If they’re snivelers, they go around whining how evil the world is; if they’re mensches, they take it for what it is and do what good they can. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">One day this brand new Ph.D. comes around looking for a quorum for his group therapy sessions, so I tell him, “You get us some good coffee and keep my boys out of the hole and we’ll go to therapy.” I line up this motley crew to sit around in a room while this dopey doctor asks some guy from East Harlem, for Chrissake, how he feels about his mother! Well, you don’t ask that to Italians – they’d just punch the shit out of you – kiddie stuff, you lead the sucker along: “Gee, Doc, I get these terrible feelings of insecurity when I go look for a job – we go out and get a fix. </div><br /><div align="center">What job? </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">I’ve been group therapized thousands of times – it’s about as good as exorcism. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">The thieves and crazy people run the streets of New York; the police have the illusion that they run them, and the churches share this fantasy.<br /><br /><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span> </div><br /><div align="center"><br /></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">Dr. James Hanson</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">NASA, GCHQ</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">Devils Sympathy Black Tears</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">EMERGING VIRUSES: AIDS & EBOLA: </span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">Nature, Accident or Intentional</span></div><br /><div align="center">by Dr. Leonard Horowitz</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">~ Dirty Work 2: Clark Jonestown Therapy Gone Wild ~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">The Consequences of "Pre-publication Review": A Case Study of CIA Intuition Censorship of the CIA and the Cult of Intelligence."</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">"<span style="color:#ff6600;">Every time that Bill Colby gets near Capital Hill, the damn fool feels an irresistable urge to confess to some horrible crime</span>."</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities</div><br /><div align="center">US Senate, Tuesday, September 16, 1975</div><br /><div align="center">Chairman: Senator Frank Church</div><br /><div align="center">Also present were Senators Tower, Mondale, Huddleston, Morgan, Hart, Baker, Goldwater, Mathias, and Schweiker</div><br /><div align="center">Boston Public Library</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">WILLIAM COLBY, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: </div><br /><div align="center">Mr. Chairman... The subject today concerns CIA's involvement in the development of bacteriological warfare materials with the Army's Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick... The project at Fort Detrick involved the development of bacteriological warfare agents -- some lethal -- and associated delivery systems suitable for clandestine use...</div><br /><div align="center">CIA association with Fort Detrick involved the Special Operations Division (SOD) of that facility. This division was responsible for developing special applications for biological warfare agents and toxins. Its principal customer was the US Army. Its concern was with the development of both suitable agents and delivery mechanisms for use in paramilitary situations. Both standard biological warfare agents and biologically derived toxins were investigated by the division.</div><br /><div align="center">The CIA relationship with SOD was formally established in May 1952... in the laboratory facilities of the Special Operations Division of the Army's Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick...</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">SENATOR GARY HART (COLORADO): </div><br /><div align="center">To your knowledge, was there any indication of any thought in the minds of those conducting these [population vulnerability] studies that we would make them operational or offensive at any time?</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">COLBY: </div><br /><div align="center">I think the vulnerability studies conducted by the Department of Defense were basically defensive in their thought process. I think the intelligence people were observing them and watching them. I am not sure that they had a totally defensive approach toward the possibility of clandestine implementation of some such idea some day under some circumstances which might warrant it.</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">HART: </div><br /><div align="center">I think in the memorandum of October 18, 1967 [exhibit 6], identified as MKNAOMI [it] clearly states that anticipated future use of some of these capabilities were certainly intended to be offensive.</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">COLBY: </div><br /><div align="center">We are talking about a weapons system that the United States was developing and potential applications for it, and through regular military force or through secret methods and during times of war, and some such thing.</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">HART: </div><br /><div align="center">So it was not purely defensive.</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">COLBY: </div><br /><div align="center">No. I do not think it was purely defensibe. I think particularly the intelligence people who were observing it were thinking of possible positive applications where appropriate.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">For almost four decades, Third World countries had held American population control policies accountable for diverting attention from the central problem -- too much poverty, not over-population.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Many leaders charged that such policies were 'nothing short of blackmail and coercion directed against the people of the Third World.'</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">This was likewise argued by <em>Linda Gordon</em>, author of <em>Woman's Body, Woman's Rights: A Social History of Birth Control in America</em>. She wrote, "Coercive population control is stimulated and then made acceptable by racism... Nonsensical ideas about the cheapness of life among Asians [and Africans] and highly documented analyses of the different structure of the black family such as matriarchal theory have served to justify coercion to reduce non-white birth rates."</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">This view predominated during the first United Nations conference on population control held in Bucharest in 1974. The meeting ended in shambles after delegates from Africa, Latin America, and Russia denounced the entire concept of Third World population control as imperialistic and racist. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">Nixon administration US mass immunization program analyst Dr. R. T. Ravenholt:</div><br /><div align="center">"As one now fully engaged in work concerned with fertility-control pgorams in developing countries, I do not view the promise of more effective control of microparasitic disease by immunization with alarm; I look upon such disease and death control programs as partners in our common endeavour to move traditional socities from their inefficient pattern of high birth rates balanced by high death rates to a modern and more efficient developmental pattern of low birth and death rates. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Neither death nor birth control action can or should proceed far independently, the one without the other. Together they can provide a sound basis for the achievement of man's ultimate goal -- a prosperous and peaceful world in which everyone will have the best possible opportunity of attaining his own unique potential."</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">Carter administrations State Department Report:</div><br /><div align="center">"In centuries past, millions of poor have accepted their lot with resignation and political apathy. This situation is changing, as expanding communications instill greater awareness that there can be a better life. Some can be expected to seek radical prescriptions in violence, including terrorism. There is real danger that violence will grow and spread unless more effective means can be found for improving conditions of life for the masses. </div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">Overpopulation has been an underlying factor in certain international conflicts and major internal disorders. This danger continues and may intensify as populations burgeon and the scramble for scarce raw materials intensifies.</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">Such pressures seem destined to produce an increasingly turbulent and dangerous international environment for the pursuit of peace, stability, and improved conditions of life for all people."<br />..</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">While campaigning for the Presidency, Jimmy Carter hailed Kissinger as the real "foreign policy... president of this country." "Under the Nixon-Ford administration," he said in a speech, "there has evolved a kind of secretive... closely guarded and amoral.... 'Lone Ranger" foreign policy, a one-man policy of international adventure." To these attacks, Carter added his standard refrain. "Our foreign policy should be as open and honest as the American people themselves."</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">One year later, under the more 'open and honest' policies established by Carter, Brzezinski became National Security Advisor, and Joseph Califano became Secretary of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW). Both men heavily supported RAy RAvenhott, the director of population control programs of USAID, who revealed his agency's intention to help sterilize one quarter of the worlds women. He argued that this need stemmed from the administration's desire to protect US corporate interests from the threat of Third World revolutions spawned by chronic unemployment. </div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#33ff33;">~!~ ~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">The Essential Lenny Bruce</span></div><br /><div align="center">by John Cohen, Ed.</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><a href="http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/20080123_too_little_too_late/">Lenny Bruce</a> did not die of an O.D.; he was murdered. Murdered by the same people and for the same reasons protestors are getting their heads cracked open in Oakland and New York and Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. and on college campuses -- because Bruce's words and gestures said too clearly just what people are saying now in words not so beautiful or piercing and in gestures much more meaningful: that America proposes Christian Love and Democratic Goodness, and dispenses death and hate and corruption and lies. And if you say this too loudly in the USA, you'll get a bust on the head or a bust on some Big Lie, like the lie that Bruce was "sick," like that the lie that he was obscene, like the lie that he was an addict.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Bruce wouldn't have liked that paragraph. Despite the philosophy of facing up to "what is" instead of swallowing the legends of "what should be," he never faced the ultimate truth of what is in America. He never faced the facts of what is with the police, the government, the courts and the judges that busted and murdered him. He was afraid to -- it's hard to split completely from the Biggest Daddy of them all, the Establishment. Bruce couldn't do that --he couldn't even mouth the words to approach that. He satorized anything else viciously and beautifully -- the whole spectrum of the lies and the hate of America -- but he never really laid into cops, courts or the government. He picked at them occassionally -- he had to -- after all, everything else he was saying drove to that point. But he could never really make the final break. Instead, he apologised for the agents of his persecution.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">But this does not change where Bruce was at. And when you know where Bruce was at, most of the stuff that's been written about him becomes, to say the least, irrelevant: the early, nasty attacks published in the same magazines and newspapers that later, after Bruce had been silenced turned around and praised him; the carpings by those who couldn't bring themselves to go all the way for a crude, uneducated hipster; the soppy obituaries and post-obituaries by journalists, newspapers and magazines that never helped Bruce at all when he was alive. Bruce was a subtle and complex artist; but even the smartest literary criticisms and peans for him are irrelevant. Bruce was an artist, but he was dedicated to <em>what </em>he was saying, not the fact that <em>he</em> was saying it. So from where he was at, Bruce didn't like the Establishment's self-appreciating culture, even when it was aying how great Lenny Bruce was. For himself, Bruce preferred jazzmen and hipsters and people who were where he was at. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Bruce wasn't an activist, but anyone who says that he digs Bruce and prints it in the Times, or Tiime or the Examiner or the Star, anyone who says he digs Bruce and goes to work for Dow Chemical or IBM or the Peace Corps, doesn't comprehend. The only people who really dig Lenny Bruce are the people who are doing the same thing Bruce did -- cutting loose, turning on, turning away, trying to turn America around. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="left">This conflict, you know, like you talk to the average guy:</div><br /><div align="left"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">"Isn't that a pretty chick?"</div><br /><div align="center">"Yeah, she's beautiful"</div><br /><div align="center">"What's her beauty -- to you?"</div><br /><div align="center">"Well, ah, she's got a pretty face, nutty jugs..."</div><br /><div align="center">"Well, ah, would you marry a woman like that?"</div><br /><div align="center">"Of course."</div><br /><div align="center">"You'd like her for your wife?"</div><br /><div align="center">"Sure!"<br />"Would you et your <em>wife</em> dress that way?"</div><br /><div align="center">"No no no!"</div><br /><div align="center">"Why not?"</div><br /><div align="center">"Cause she got her jugs stickin out, man."</div><br /><div align="center">"What'd you dig her for in the first place?"</div><br /><div align="center">"Cause her jugs were stickin out."</div><br /><div align="center">"But you don't want her to dress that way."</div><br /><div align="center">"No, no!"</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="left">So that's where the conflict is -- we want for a wife a combination kindergarten teacher and a hooker.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">This <em>poem</em> was written by <em>Thomas Merton</em>, and, it's a <em>groovy</em> <em>poem</em>, and it really says a lot to me:</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">My name is Adolf Eichmann.</div><br /><div align="center">The Jews came every day</div><br /><div align="center">to vat they thought vould be</div><br /><div align="center">fun in the showers.</div><br /><div align="center">The mothers vere quite ingenious.</div><br /><div align="center">They would take the children</div><br /><div align="center">and hide them in</div><br /><div align="center">bundles of clothing.</div><br /><div align="center">Ve found the children,</div><br /><div align="center">scrubbed them,</div><br /><div align="center">put them in the chambers,</div><br /><div align="center">and sealed them in.</div><br /><div align="center">I vatched through the portholes</div><br /><div align="center">as they would doven and chant</div><br /><div align="center">"<em>Hey, mein Liebe, heyyy</em>."</div><br /><div align="center">Ve took off their clean Jewish love-rings,</div><br /><div align="center">removed their teeth and hair--</div><br /><div align="center">for <em><span style="color:#33ccff;"><a href="http://yshmaels-guerrylla-jyews.blogspot.com/2007/12/excerpts-of-time-interview-president.html">strategic defense</a></span></em>.</div><br /><div align="center">I made soap out of them,</div><br /><div align="center">I made soap out of all of them;</div><br /><div align="center">and they hung me,</div><br /><div align="center">in full view of the prison yard.</div><br /><div align="center">People say,</div><br /><div align="center">"<em>Adolf Eichmann should have been hung!</em>"</div><br /><div align="center"><em>Nein.</em></div><br /><div align="center"><em>Nein</em>, if you recognize the <a href="http://www.population-security.org/bush_and_terror.pdf">whoredom</a></div><br /><div align="center">in all of you,</div><br /><div align="center">that you would have done the same,</div><br /><div align="center">if you dared know yourselves.</div><br /><div align="center">My defense?</div><br /><div align="center">I vas a soldier.</div><br /><div align="center">People laugh</div><br /><div align="center">"Ha, ha! This is no defense,</div><br /><div align="center">that you are a soldier."</div><br /><div align="center">This is trite.</div><br /><div align="center">I vas a soldier,</div><br /><div align="center">a good soldier.</div><br /><div align="center">I saw the end of a conscientious day's effort.</div><br /><div align="center">I saw all the work that I did.</div><br /><div align="center">I, Adolf Eichmann,</div><br /><div align="center">vatched through the portholes.</div><br /><div align="center">I saw every Jew burned</div><br /><div align="center">und turned into soap.</div><br /><div align="center">Do you people think yourselves better</div><br /><div align="center">because you burned your enemies</div><br /><div align="center">at long distances</div><br /><div align="center">with missiles, pharmacopia, et al......?</div><br /><div align="center">Without ever seeing what you'd do to them?</div><br /><div align="center">Hiroshima....</div><br /><div align="center"><em>Auf Wiedersehen...</em></div><br /><p align="center"><span style="color:#33ff33;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></p><br /><p align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;">Evo Morales</span></p><br /><p align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;">Bolivia, Gehlen-BND</span></p><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">RedPeyoteRoadHotel</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ff33;">The Mymy Undergraduate</span> </span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">‘Hunesty is the best policy </div><br /><div align="center">+ </div><br /><div align="center">Confession is good for the soul’</div><br /><div align="center">=</div><br /><div align="center">‘Never do anything you will be ashamed to read on the front page of a newspaper.’ </div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">Synanon was an easier way of getting smarter, of getting my emotional needs satisfied for the right reasons, rather than the false reasons of image. Dederich would wander about, telling the small group in a voice that rang with absolute conviction, “Stick around. Something very big is happening here. Something important. You’re going to have more fun than you ever had in your life. You’ll be amazed where this thing is going to lead, what consequences it will have, not just for us, but for this entire crazy country of ours. It will emerge.” </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Dederich treated addicts like small children until he was satisfied they could think and function like reasoning adults. A man who threatened violence would have his head shaved and wear a sign, “I’m a little boy – please laugh at my courageous idiot attempts to act tough.” </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Proving to the old man they could stick it became important. The main re-educative tool was the attack-therapy session, the synanons that Dederich later christened the Game. His theory was that since games were fun, games about people should be more fun than whacking little balls around. The purpose of the Game was to develop psychic muscles and human insight, and since laughter, tears, rage, and love are the most basic emotions, he counted no Game “worth didly-shit unless every player is either screaming with laughter, bawling like a child, hugging each other – or on the verge of physical violence.” </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Dederich developed the Game when encounter group therapy was beginning to supplant one-to-one psychotherapy in America, and he took pains to reorient newcomers who had undergone psychiatric treatment. “We’re not interested if you wet the bed at ten, or if your scoutmaster jacked you off – we want to know what you did today, and what motions you’re going through to improve your behaviour tomorrow.” </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">As a result, Dederich claimed he saw people go through amazing transformations; whores became madonnas, pimps turned into leaders of men. He encouraged obscene and hysterical outpourings in Games to get bottled-up feelings of hostility out into the open. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">His own prowess in Games was legendary. An aggressive Hunter College social worker was bold enough to put the Game on Dederich, indicting him as a supersquare, a philistine who thought music and the arts mere toys to distract lesser folk from more pressing social concerns. It took him all of fifteen minutes to thrust her back to yowling infancy, and another ten minutes to patch her up.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">As Game players grew in toughness and skill, he urged them into Dissipations – marathon thirty to forty-eight hour ‘Games’, believing that people “‘dissipate’ their psychic energies in dreams,” and that with no sleep to act as a protective shield, players were put through “fantastic changes – they stopped conning us and experienced some real breakthroughs.” </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Synanon as a group had its own breakthrough on a <em>June night</em> in <em>1969</em>, the <em>Night of the Big Cop Out</em>. While some residents had been living clean, many clung to old street ways, hoarding a stash of pot, bennies, or even shaving lotion, anything to get high. Most of Synanons law-abiders knew, but true to the old criminal code, they never told Dederich. Squealling on your friends was still the unthinkable crime. This changed overnight when a pres-resident in a Game accused his friend of using. </div><br /><div align="center">“<em>Look shit-head, I know you got loaded last week because we got loaded together!</em>” </div><br /><div align="center">Suddenly the urge to cop out, to admit using drugs and to <em>finger</em> known users, swept the clubhouse. Dederich roused all from bed at 3:00 A.M. to join in an orgy of <em>self-confession</em>, obscene accusations, <em>howls</em> of denial, and <em>maniacal laughter</em>. </div><br /><div align="center">He climaxed the meeting with a still-talked-about marathon speech, proclaiming the <em>Code of the Street</em> had been replaced by the Synanon Ethos. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">If Pontius Pilate had been a smart Washington politician instead of a dumb Roman bureaucrat, he could have subverted the entire Christian movement by giving the Founder five thousand dinars to start a boys club in Bethlehem to see how many Samaritans he could cure. Next year, the Carpenter would come back to Pilate to refund the grant because the new state regulations say they need two psychiatric social workers, one probation officer, and a fire escape. This would have cleverly diverted the Leader from His central purpose: to sit around with a dozen buddies and “work out a philosophy that’s acceptable to us.” Now, that’s powerful talk, because if that ethic makes them feel good, lots more folks will join them. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">When these women come to us for help, most of them have been used and don’t even know it. No one with authority in the Foundation – male or female – can sleep with someone who comes to us for help until these inmates have been taught to regard themselves as human beings and not just a piece of meat, and have gone through our re-educative process to where they are no longer dependent on us, socially or economically. This is not going to be another of those freak free university professors-ball-students bullshit in the name of liberation. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">When Archie Bunker screams, “I’m tired of being mugged, and I’m gonna break some jaws,” it’s the same thing as the black radicals saying, “Get these corrupt cops, dope pushers, and creep social workers out of my neighbourhood!” Because of the difference in political rhetoric and their sociological platform, they’ve got different perspectives. But the good people in <em>both</em> these camps find themselves at war with each other, when they’re actually on the same side, and in this kind of struggle, it’s only the giant bureaucracies that win. Quickly we find that the most virulent white racists can begin to respect blacks who stand up for themselves, and that when blacks meet really tough whites for the first time, instead of middle-class social worker lames, a mutual respect builds to where they can work together. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">The toughest gangsters are verbally more racist when they come here, and racist in terms of who they hang out with. But the tougher they are, the more quickly they will grant respect to a member of another ethnic group who behaves in a fashion acceptable to their code. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">In Games, a white racist is talked down to, laughed at, and maybe yelled at from time to time. We find it silly, some asshole comes here of any colour, never done anything except steal off his own mother, pimp off his wife, sell dope to poor people – this clown gets up and says, “<em>I don’t like Armenians, they’re oily, smell weird, and got the brain-pans of salamanders</em>.” This is comical, but not in a threatened environment where the integration is not genuine, and where such nonsense is greeted with horror. But in Delancey Street, we greet this kind of garbage with great gales of laughter. How can some black dope peddler come in here selling heroin to black children to keep them enslaved for the benefit of the landlords and the police structure, actually get up and rail at the white oppressor? </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">HE IS THE FUCKING OPPRESSOR!</div><div align="center">..</div><div align="center">We recognise that racist babble and drug use are merely the symptomlogy of the oppressed, therefore not great crimes. </div><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867775593930281016.post-27510133571228621692008-01-27T03:35:00.001-08:002008-01-27T16:55:00.303-08:00DLBuffaloElk~GoldHeartPaw<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPopeVn5cgTz8LOTZ8gCv_AcXksWnXu8HJ_yckIW69uOZiF00MQ1Vu8FTxQ-rWnBW7fv8z92Ut0D8VVv9R0Bzet2DacHWJCOP4i9Byp9rnwIXnvMNYn_uL3If87HLdqjmGbbolEOXRvnAl/s1600-h/Fleur-david-Lis-77.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5160324249839374402" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPopeVn5cgTz8LOTZ8gCv_AcXksWnXu8HJ_yckIW69uOZiF00MQ1Vu8FTxQ-rWnBW7fv8z92Ut0D8VVv9R0Bzet2DacHWJCOP4i9Byp9rnwIXnvMNYn_uL3If87HLdqjmGbbolEOXRvnAl/s320/Fleur-david-Lis-77.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;">Fidel Castro<br />Cuba, OZNA-UDBA (Yugoslav Security Service)<br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">SadWhiteLowlands-ForestBlueOrchid</span>} </span></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;"><span style="color:#33ff33;"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span><br /></div></span></span><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~ </span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;"></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;">General Benton Partin</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;">USAF, Smersh ('Death to Spies' Soviet Mil. Counter Intel 1943 - '46)</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">Henrietta</span><span style="color:#ffff00;">Alex II SunPhoenixWoodwardElkCheWeatherfordTzu</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">John Maher of DELANCEY STREET</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">by Grover Sales</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">Minion Fun and Games </span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center">“A Game is like an orgasm – just words until you’ve had the experience.” </div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">“There’s no greater joy in life, than to watch tough, big-city gangsters terrified by their first encounter with a <a href="http://www.johnbevere.com/">be-feather</a> garter snake’ </div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">Almost all prison riots start in the mess hall, and probably most family fights, too. Food and sex are such visceral things that it’s very tough to fuck with them, and since we have to have certain restrictions on sex around here, with men outnumbering women four-to-one, the least we can do is give our people a good meal.<br />..</div><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center">Ron Coombs</div><br /><div align="center">Vietnam veteran <em>Sundance </em>kid</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">Of course, John Maher is behind all this. They held these seminars every morning, where someone in the house would run it down about what Delancey was doing, for about an hour, except when John did it, once or twice a week, and then it would run three hours. First time I heard John, I thought, "Jesus, they got me in here with a bunch of commies!" The second time he spoke I thought I was hearing Martin Luther King. And his seminars would start to build the unity. He told us where the Foundation was going; we'd ask him questions. He got rid of a lot of my prejudices about blacks, and my ignorance, the labels they put on people.</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><div align="center">John has a way of carrying everyone in the room. He will say something in three hours to hit all three hundred people, give them something to work on. He speaks to an audience. He can talk about the prejudiced honkies, the prejudiced blacks, the guilt people carry around. He caroms everyone, hits them with something, and when he walks out, he leaves them thinking about themselves and their actions, what they really want to do with their lives, and if their lives are kind of fucked up, how they can change it.</div><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">The reason John gets to much respect is that everyone knows he is not asking you to do anything he doesn't do himself. I got so much trust in the man, that he can ask me to do anything, I wouldn't even question it, and I never felt that way about anyone. John can relate to you, put you through changes, because he's been there himself, it's not something he's read in a book.</div><div align="center">..</div><div align="center">I'm not afraid of John, but I know if I try to run something under him he'll say, "Ron, quit bullshitting me. Don't bullshit a bullshitter," and that's frightening, because you got to come right out and level with him. ..<br /><br /><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span><br /></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">General Myers</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ccff;">USAF, VMS (Supreme Monarchist Council - White Russian Emigre Group)</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">JaguarNectarMountains-DivineLeafGhostDance</span>}</span></div><br /><p align="center"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">A Short History of Nearly Everything<br /></span>By Bill Bryson<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Lost in the Cosmos: How to Build a Universe<br /></span><br />For a long time the Big Bang theory had one gaping hole that troubled a lot of people – namely, that it couldn’t begin to explain how we got here. Although 98 percent of all the matter that exists was created with the Big Bang, that matter consisted exclusively of light gases: the helium, hydrogen and lithium that we mentioned earlier. Not one particle of the heavy stuff so vital to our own being – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the rest – emerged from the gaseous brew of creation. But – and here’s the troubling point – to forge these heavy elements, you need the kind of heat and energy thrown off by a Big Bang. Yet there has been only one Big Bang and it didn’t produce them. So where did they come from? Interestingly, the man who found the answer to that question was a cosmologist who heartily despised the Big Bang as a theory and coined the term Big Bang sarcastically, as a way of mocking it.<br />We’ll get to him shortly, but before we turn to the question of how we got here, it might be worth taking a few minutes to consider just where exactly ‘here’ is.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Welcome to the Solar System</span><br /><br />Astronomers these days can do the most amazing things. If someone struck a match on the Moon, they could spot the flare. From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars they can infer the size and character and even potential habitability of planets much too remote to be seen – planets so distant that it would take us half a million years in a spaceship to get there. With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so presposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is ‘less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground’, in the words of Carl Sagan.<br />..<br />In short, there isn’t a great deal that goes on in the universe that astronomers can’t find when they have a mind to. Which is why it is all the more remarkable to reflect that until 1978 no-one had ever noticed that Pluto has a moon. In the summer of that year, a young astronomer named James Christy at the Lowell Observatory in <em>Flagstaff</em>, Arizona, was making a routine examination of photographic images of Pluto when he saw that there was something there – something blurry and uncertain but definitely other than Pluto. Consulting a colleague named Robert Harrington, he concluded that what he was looking at was a moon. And it wasn’t just any moon. Relative to the planet, it was the biggest moon in the solar system.<br />..<br />This was actually something of a blow to Pluto’s status as a planet, which had never been terribly robust anyway. Since previously the space occupied by the moon and the space occupied by Pluto were thought to be one and the same, it meant that Pluto was much smaller than anyone had supposed – smaller even than Mercury. Indeed, seven moons in the solar syste, including our own, are larger.<br />..<br />Now, a natural question is why it took so long for anyone to find a moon in our own solar system. The answer is that it is partly a matter of where astronomers point their instruments and partly a matter of what their instruments are designed to detect and partly it’s just Pluto. Mostly it’s where they point their instruments. In the words of the astronomer Clark Chapman: ‘Most people think that astronomers get out at night in observatories and scan the skies. That’s not true. Almost all the telescopes we have in the world are designed to pper at very tine little pieces of the sky way off in the distance to see a quasar or hunt for black holes or look at a distant galaxy. The only real network of telescopes that scans the skies has been designed and built by the military.’<br />..<br />We have been spoiled by artists renderings into imagining a clarity of resoliution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzzy – a piece of cosmic lint – and its moon is not the romantic backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a <em>National Geographic</em> painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence.<br />..<br />One nice touch about Christy’s discovery was that it happened in <em>Flagstaff</em>, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell. Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous <em>ditty</em> about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator.<br />..<br />Lowells other abiding conviction was that there existed, somewhere out beyond Neptune, an undiscovered ninth planet, dubbed Planet <em>X</em>. Lowell based this belief on irregularities he detected in the orbits of <em>Uranus</em> and <em>Neptune</em>, and devoted the last years of his life to trying to find the gassy giant he was certain was out there. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in <em>1916</em>, at least partly exhausted by his quest, and the search fell into abeyance while Lowell’s heirs squabbled over his estate. However, in <em>1929</em>, partly as a way of deflecting attention away from the <em>Mars canal saga</em> (which by now had become a serious embarrassment) the Lowell Observatory directors decided to resume the search and to that end hired a young man from <em>Kansas</em> named Clyde Tombaugh.<br />..<br />Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, but he was diligent and he was astute, and after a years patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto, a faint point of light in a glittery firmament. It was a miraculous find, and what made it all the more striking was that the observations on which Lowell had predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune proved to be comprehensively erroneous. Tombaugh could see at once that the new planet was nothing like the massive gasball Lowell had postulated – but any reservations he or anyone else had about the character of the new planet were soon swept aside in the derlirium that attended almost any big news story in that easily excited age. This was the <em>first American-discovered planet</em>, and no-one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant <em>icy dot</em>. It was named Pluto, at least partly because the first <em>two letters</em> made a <em>monogram</em> from Lowells initials. Lowell was posthumously hailed everywhere as a genius of the first order and Tombaugh was largely forgotten, except among planetary astronomers, who tend to <em>revere</em> him.<br />..<br />It is certainly true that Pluto doesn’t act much like the other planets. Not only is it <em>rusty</em> and obscure, it is so variable in its motions that no-one can tell you exactly where Pluto will be a century hence. Whereas the other planets orbit on more or less the same plane, Pluto’s orbital path is tipped (as it were) out of alignment at an angle of 17 degrees, like the brim of a hat titled rakishly on someone’s head. Its orbit is so irregular that for substantial periods on each of its lonely circuits around the Sun it is closer to us than Neptune is. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Neptune was in fact the solar systems most far-flung planet. Only on <em>11 February 1999</em> did Pluto return to the outside lane, there to remain for the next <em>228</em> years.<br />..<br />So if Pluto really is a planet, it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forety-eight states. This alone makes it extremely anamolous; it means that our planetary system consists of four rocky inner planets, four gassy outer giants, and a tiny, solitary iceball. Moreover, there is every reason to suppose that we may soon begin to find other, even larger icy spheres in the same portion of space. Then we will have problems. After Christy spotted Pluto’s moon, astronomers began to regard that section of the cosmos more attentively, and as of early <span style="color:#99ffff;"><em>December 2002</em></span> had found over six hundred additional Trans-Neptunian Objects or Plutinos as they are alternatively called. One, dubbed Varuna, is nearly as big as Pluto’s moon. Astronomers now think there may be billions of these objects. The difficulty is that many of them are awfully dark. Typically they have an albedo, or reflectiveness, of just 4 percent, about the same as a <em>lump of charcoal</em> – and of course these lumps of charcoal are over six billion kilometres away.<br />..<br />And how far is that, exactly? It’s almost beyond imagining. Space, you see, is just enormous – just enormous. Let’s imagine for purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won’t go terribly far – just to the edge of our own solar system – but we need to get a fix on how big a place space is and what a small part of it we occupy.<br />..<br />Now the bad news, I’m afraid, is that we won’t be home for supper. Even at the speed of light (300,000 km’s per second) it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But of course we can’t travel at anything like that speed. We’ll have to go at the speed of a spaceship, and these are rather more lumbering. The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts, which are now flying away from us at about 56,000 kilometres an hour.<br />..<br />The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that <em>Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus</em> and <em>Neptune </em>were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a ‘gravity assist’ technique in which the craft were successfully flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of <em>cosmic</em> version of <em>crack the whip</em>. Even so it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto.<br />..<br />Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system – ever. It is just too far. As it is, even with the Hubble telescope we can’t see even into the Oort cloud, so we don’t actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.<br />..<br />About all that can be said with confidence about the Oort cloud is that it starts somewhere beyond Pluto and stretches some two light years out into the cosmos. The basic unit of measure in the solar system is the<em> Astronomical Unit</em>, or <em>AU</em>, representing the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Pluto is about 40 AU’s from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote.<br />..<br />But lets pretend again that we have made it to the <em>Oort cloud</em>. The first thing you might notice is how very peaceful it is out here. We’re a long way from anywhere now – so far from our own Sun that it’s not even the brightest star in the sky. It is a remarkable thought that that distant tiny twinkle has enough gravity to hold all these comets in orbit. It’s not a very strong bond, so the comets drift in a stately manner, moving at only about 220 miles an hour. From time to time one of these lonely comets is nudged out of its normal orbit by some slight gravitational perturbation – a <em>passing star</em>, perhaps. Sometimes they are ejected into the emptiness of space, never to be seen again, but sometimes they fall into a long orbit around the Sun. About three or four of these a year, known as long-period comets, pass through the inner solar system. Just occasionally these stray visitors smack into something solid, like Earth. That’s why we’ve come out here now – because the comet we have come to see has just begun a long fall towards the centre of the solar system. It is headed for, of all places, <em>Manson</em>, Iowa.<br /><br /><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></p><p align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#66ffff;">General Ralph Eberhardt</span></p><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#66ffff;">NORAD, USAF</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff00;">Clover ST Sean-Shibumy Buddy Cloud</span>}</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;"></span></div><br /><div align="center">So that’s your solar system. And what else is out there, beyond the solar system? Well, nothing and a great deal, depending on how you look at it.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />In the short term, nothing. The most perfect vacuum ever created by humans is not as empty as the emptiness of interstellar space. And there is a great deal of this nothingness until you get to the next bit of something. Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, <em>Proxima Centauri</em>, is 4.3 light years away, a sissy skip in galactic terms, but still a hundred million times further than a trip to the Moon. To reach it by spaceship would take at least twenty-five thousand years, and even if you made the trip you still wouldn’t be anywhere except at a lonely clutch of stars in the middle of a vast somewhere. To reach the next landmark of consequence, <em>Sirius</em>, would involve another <em>4.6 light years</em> of travel. And so it would go if you tried to star-hop your way across the cosmos. Just reaching the center of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as human beings.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Space, let me repeat, is enourmous. The average distance between stars out there is over 30 million million kilometres. Even at speeds approaching those oflight, these are fantastically challenging distances for any travelling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in <em>Wiltshire </em>or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a <em>lonely road</em> in <em>Arizona</em>, but it does seem unlikely.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Still, <em>statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is <a href="http://www.disclosureproject.org/">good</a></em>. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to perhaps four hundred billion – and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life existing in the cosmos, based on a series of diminishing probabilities.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Under Drake’s equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally – yet even with themost conservative inputs the number of advanced civilisations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilisations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilisations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means, for a start, that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the <em>French Revolution</em> and <em>Thomas Jeffers</em>on and people in <em>silk</em> stockings and powdered wigs – people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a <em>rod of amber</em> with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from these observers is likely to begin “<span style="color:#33ffff;"><em>Dear Sire</em></span>”, and <em>congratulate</em> us on the <em>handsomeness </em>of our <em>horses</em> and our <em>mastery of whale oil</em>. Two hundred light years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />So even if we are not really alone, in all practical terms we are. Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at as many as ten billion trillion – a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. ‘If we were randomely inserted into the universe,’ Sagan wrote, ‘the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion’ (That’s <em>10 <span style="font-size:85%;">33</span></em>, or 1 followed by 33 zeroes.) ‘<em>Worlds are precious</em>’.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Which is why perhaps it is <em>good news</em> that in <em>February 1999</em> the <em>International Astronomical Union</em> ruled officially that Pluto is a planet. The universe is a big and lonely place. <em>We can do with all the neighbours we can get</em>. </div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7867775593930281016.post-60746456856300722342008-01-18T13:50:00.000-08:002008-01-27T16:59:04.937-08:00GoldHeartPaw~ZhivagoMiracle<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXzPGZBO-oIOC8WXYwrrya5gwC7AmqnZX-CWVq3Sih27nAciWLt0dr-ny7l0KaSaPz3J4vU_Fpw0KPVdw3yCyH24ER2lVvysywxV2jyJqHmvHNBA_sfCvrFnSNJlw54R-3P4zPWv2zOxj2/s1600-h/WildcatSeal-BlackJacksonSun-44.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5160325254861721682" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXzPGZBO-oIOC8WXYwrrya5gwC7AmqnZX-CWVq3Sih27nAciWLt0dr-ny7l0KaSaPz3J4vU_Fpw0KPVdw3yCyH24ER2lVvysywxV2jyJqHmvHNBA_sfCvrFnSNJlw54R-3P4zPWv2zOxj2/s320/WildcatSeal-BlackJacksonSun-44.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ffff;">John Coleman<br />MI6, SIS<br /></span><span style="color:#33ff33;"><span style="font-size:130%;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">FlanaganFailteWhisper-HawkIsleVIICead</span>}</span><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">A Short History of Nearly Everything</span></div><br /><div align="center">by Bill Bryson</div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"></span></div><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">The Reverend Evan’s Universe<br /></span><br />When the skies are clear and the Moon is not too bright, the Reverend Robert Evans, a quiet and cheerful man, lugs a bulky telescope onto the back sun-deck of his home in the <em>Blue Mountains</em> of Australia, about 80 kilometres west of Sydney, and does an extraordinary thing. He looks deep into the past and finds <em>dying stars</em>.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Looking into the past is, of course, the easy part. Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it – not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them. For all we know, the <em>North Star</em>, our <em>faithful companion</em>, might actually have burned out last January or in <em>1854</em> or at any time since the early fourteenth century and news of it just hasn’t reached us yet. The best we can say – can ever say – is that it was still <em>burning</em> on this date <em>680 </em>years ago. Stars die all the time. What Bob Evans does better than anyone else who has ever tried is spot these moments of celestial farewell.<br /><br />By day, Evans is a kindly and now semi-retired minister of the <em>Uniting Church</em> in Australia, who does a bit of locum work and researches the history of nineteenth-century religious movements. But by night he is, in his unassuming way, a titan of the skies. He <em>hunts supernovae</em>.<br /><br />A supernova occurs when a <em>giant star</em>, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then <em>spectacularly explodes</em>, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. ‘It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once,’ says Evans. If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners, according to Evans – ‘it would <em>wreck the show</em>,’ as he cheerfully puts it. But the universe is vast and supernovae are normally much too far away to harm us. In fact, most are so unimaginably distant that their light reaches us as no more than the faintest twinkle. For the month or so that they are visible, all that distinguishes them from the other stars in the sky is that they occupy a point of space that wasn’t filled before. It is these anomalous, very occasional pricks in the crowded dome of the night sky that the Reverend Evans finds.<br /><br />To understand what a fear this is, imagine a standard dining room table covered in a <em>black tablecloth</em> and throwing a <em>handful of salt</em> across it. The scattered grains can be thought of as a galaxy. Now imagine fifteen hundred more tables like the first one – enough to make a single line two miles long – each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. That grain of salt is the supernova.<br /><br />Evan’s is a talent so exceptional that Oliver Sacks, in <em>An Anthropologist on Mars</em>, devotes a passage to him in a chapter on <em>autistic savants</em> – quickly adding that ‘there is no suggestion that he is autistic.’ Evans, who has not met Sacks, laughs at the suggestion that he might be either autistic of a savant, but he is powerless to explain quite where his talent comes from.<br />..<br />The term supernovae was coined in the 1930s by a memorably odd astrophysist named Fritz <a href="http://www.greatconspiracy.ca/">Zwicky</a>. Born in <em>Bulgaria</em> and raised in Switzerland, Zwicky came to the California Institute of Technology in the 1920s and there at once distinguished himself by his abrasive personality and erratic talents. He didn’t seem to be outstandingly bright, and many of his colleagues considered him little more than ‘an irritating buffoon.’ A fitness fanatic, he would often drop to the floor of the Caltech dining hall or some other public area and do one-armed push-ups to demonstrate his virility to anyone who seemed inclined to doubt it. He was notoriously aggressive, his manner eventually becoming so intimidating that his closest collaborator, a gentle man named Walter Baade, refused to be left alone with him. </div><br /><div align="center"><br />But Zwicky was also capable of insights of the most startling brilliance. In the early 1930s he turned his attention to a question that had long troubled astronomers: the appearance in the sky of occasional unexplained points of light, new stars. Improbably, he wondered if the neutron – the subatomic particle that had just been discovered in England by <em>James Chadwick</em>, and was thus both novel and rather fashionable – might be at the <em>heart</em> of things. It occurred to him that if a star collapsed to the sort of densities found in the core of atoms, the result would be an unimaginably compacted core. Atoms would literally be crushed together, their electrons forced into the nucleus, forming neutrons. You would have a neutron star. Imagine a million really weighty <em>cannonballs</em> squeezed down to the size of a marble and – well, you’re still not even close. The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 90 billion kilograms. A <em>spoonful</em>! But there was more. Zwicky realized that after the collapse of such a star there would be a huge amount of energy left over – enough to make the <em>biggest bang</em> in the universe. He called these resultant explosions supernovae. They would be – they are – <em>the biggest event in creation</em>.<br />..<br />Zwicky was also the first to recognize that there wasn’t nearly enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together, -- what we now call <em>dark matter</em>. One thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrank enough it would become so dense that even light couldn’t escape its <em>immense gravitational pull</em>. You would have a <em>black hole</em>.<br />..<br />Supernova do much more than simply impart a <em>sense of wonder</em>. They come in several types, and any of these, one in particular, known as the <em>IA supernova</em>, is important to astronomy because these supernova always explode in the same way, with the same critical mass. For this reason they can be used as ‘<em>standard candles’</em> – benchmarks by which to measure the brightness (and hence relative distance) of other stars, and thus to measure the expansion rate of the universe.<br />..<br />The question that naturally occurs is: what would it be like if a star exploded nearby? Our nearest stellar neighbour, as we have seen, is <em>Alpha Centaurs</em>, 4.3 light years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 years to watch the light of this magnificent event spreading across the sky, as if tipped from a giant <em>can</em>. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom <em>advancing</em> towards us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? Would people still go to work? Would farmers plant crops? Would anyone deliver them to the shops?</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Weeks later, back in the town of<em> New Hampshire</em> where I then lived, I put these questions to John Thorstensen, an astronomer at Dartmouth College. ‘Oh no,’ he said, laughing. ‘The news of such an event travels out at the speed of light, but so does the destructiveness, so you’d learn about it and die from it in the same instant. But don’t worry, because it’s not going to happen.’<br />For the blast of a supernova explosion to kill you, he explained, you would have to be ‘ridiculously close’ – probably within ten light years or so. ‘The danger would be various types of radiation – cosmic rays and so on.’ These would produce fabulous auroras, shimmering curtains of spooky light that would fill the whole sky. This would not be a good thing. Anything potent enough to put on such a show could well blow away the <em>magnetosphere</em>, the <em>magnetic zone</em> high above the Earth that normally protects us from ultraviolet rays and other cosmic assaults. Without the magnetosphere anyone unfortunate enough to step into <em>sunlight</em> would pretty quickly take on the appearance of, let us say, overcooked <em>pizza</em>. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />The reason we can be reasonably confident that such an event won’t happen in our corner of the galaxy, Thorstensen said, is that it takes a particular kind of star to make a supernova in the first place. A candidate star must be ten to twenty times as massive as our own Sun, and ‘we don’t have anything of the requisite size that’s that close. The universe is a mercifully big place.’ The nearest likely candidate, he added, is <em>Betelgeuse</em>, whose various sputterings have for years suggested that something interestingly unstable is going on there. But Betelgeuse is fifty thousand light years away. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Only half a dozen times in recorded history have supernovae been close enough to be visible to the naked eye. One was a blast in<em> 1054</em> that created the <em>Crab Nebula</em>. Another in 1604, made a star bright enough to be seen during the day for over three weeks. The most recent was in 1987, when a supernova flared in a zone of the cosmos known as the <em>Large Magellanic Cloud</em>, but that was only barely visible and only in the southern hemisphere – and it was a comfortably safe <em>169,000</em> light years away<br /><br /><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">Hugo Chavez<br />Venezuela, FARC, IBAMA<br /></span><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">PapillonTiticacaCartagena-BryanCayennetown</span>}</span></span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">John Ashcroft<br />Dept. of Justice, ZOMO (Polish Paramilitary Police)</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">Vladimir Valentin Mikhailovich HartLabur</span>}</span><br /><br />A Short History of Nearly Everything<br /></span>By Bill Bryson</div><br /><div align="center"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Lonely Planet</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span><br /></span>Apart from avoiding high-pressure environments altogether, only two strategies are reliably successful against the bends. The first is to suffer only a very short exposure to the changes in pressure. That is why the free divers can descend to depths of 150 metres without ill effect. They don’t stay down long enough for the nitrogen in their system to dissolve into their tissues. The other solution is to ascend by careful stages. This allows the little bubbles of nitrogen to dissipate harmlessly.</div><br /><div align="center"><br />A great deal of what we know about surviving at extremes is owed to the extraordinary father and son team of <em>John Scott</em> and J.B.S. Haldane. Even the demanding standards of British intellectuals, the Haldanes were outstandingly <em>eccentric</em>. The senior Haldane was born in 1860 to an aristocratic Scottish family (his brother was Viscount Haldane), but spent most of his career in comparative modesty as a professor of physiology at Oxford. He was famously <em>absent-minded</em>. Once, after his wife had sent him upstairs to change for a dinner party, he failed to return and was discovered asleep in bed in his pyjamas. When roused, Haldane explained that he had found himself disrobing and assumed it was bedtime. His idea of a <em>holiday</em> was to travel to <em>Cornwall</em> to <em>study hookworm</em> in <em>coal, gold and silver miners</em>. <em>Aldous Huxley</em>, the novelist grandson of T.H. Huxley, who lived with the Haldanes for a time, parodied him, a touch mercilessly, as the scientist Edward Tantamount in the novel <em>Point Counter Point</em>. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Haldane’s gift to diving was to work out the rest intervals necessary to manage an ascent from the depths without getting the <em>bends</em>, but his interests ranged across the whole of physiology, from studying altitude sickness in climbers to the problems of heatstroke in desert regions. He had a particular interest in the effects of toxic gases on the human body. To understand more exactly how carbon monoxide leaks killed miners, he methodically poisoned himself, carefully taking and measuring his own blood samples the while. He quit only when he was on the verge of losing all muscle control and his blood saturation level had reached 56 per cent – a level, as Trevor Norton notes in his entertaining history of diving, <em>Stars Beneath the Sea</em>, only fractionally removed from nearly certain lethality. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Haldane’s son Jack, known to posterity as J.B.S. was a remarkable prodigy who took an interest in his fathers work almost from infancy. At the age of three he was overheard demanding peevishly of his father, ‘But is it oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin?’ Throughout his youth, the young Haldane helped his father with experiments. By the time he was a teenager, the two often tested gases and <em>gas masks</em> together, taking it in turns to see how long it took them to pass out. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Though J.B.S. Haldane never took a degree in science (he studied classics at Oxford), he became a brilliant scientist in his own right, mostly working for the government at Cambridge. The biologist Peter Medawar, who spent his life around <em>mental Olympians</em>, called him ‘the cleverest man I ever knew.’ Huxley paroded the younger Haldane too, in his novel <em>Antic Hay</em>, but also used his ideas on genetic manipulation of humans as the basis for the plot of <em>Brave New World</em>. Among many other achievements, Haldane played a central role in marrying Darwinian principles of evolution to the genetic work of Gregor Mendel to produce what is known to geneticists as the <em>Modern Synthesis</em>. </div><br /><div align="center"><br />Perhaps uniquiely among human beings, the younger Haldane found the First World War ‘a very enjoyable experience’ and freely admitted that he ‘enjoyed the opportunity of killing people’. He was himself wounded twice. </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Among Haldane’s many specific preoccupations was <em>nitrogen intoxication</em>. For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fish or to decide to try to have a <em>smoke break</em>. It also produced wild mood swings. In one test, Haldane noted, the subject ‘alternated between depression and elation, at one moment begging to be decompressed because he felt ‘bloody awful’ and the next minute laughing and attempting to interfere with his colleague’s dexterity test.’ </div><br /><div align="center">..<br />In order to measure the rate of deterioration in the subject, a scientis had to go into the chamber with the volunteer to conduct simple mathematical tests. But after a few minutes, as Haldane later recalled, ‘the tester was usually as intoxicated as the testee, and often forgot to press the spindle of his stopwatch, or to take proper notes.” The cause of the inebriation is even now a mystery. It is thought that it maybe be the same thing that causes alcohol intoxication, but as no-one knows for certain what causes that, we are none the wiser. At all events, without the greatest car, it is easy to get in trouble once you leave the surface world. </div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">John Stockwell<br />CIA, SIM (Spanish Republican Security Service)</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">Vladimir Mikhail Alekstantinovich Smirnov O'Reilly</span>}<br /></span></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">Leonard Peltier<br />NAIM (Native American Indian Movement), Jericho Political Prisoners</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">Wounded-ShinboneGeronimoStar-Knee</span>}</span></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Excuse Me, Mr. President</span><br /></span>By Rick Paul Springer<br /><br />Grandfather,<br />Look at our brokenness<br />We know that in all creation<br />Only the human family<br />Has strayed from the Sacred Way<br />We know that we are the ones<br />Who are divided<br />And we are the ones<br />Who must come back together<br />To walk in the Sacred Way<br />Grandfather,<br />Sacred One,<br />Teach us love, compassion, and honor<br />That we may heal the earth<br />And heal each other<br />~ Ojibway Prayer ~<br />..<br />..<br />IRAQ: </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Saddam Hussein believes he is the son of <em>Nebuchadnezzar</em>; and the <em>Prophet Mohammed</em>. Iraq bought a small <em>French nuclear reactor</em> called <em>Osiris</em> (the <em>Egyptian</em> version of <em>Pluto</em>, the <em>Greek God of the underworld</em>), capable of quickly generating enough bomb-grade material for three Hiroshima size bombs. On <em>Sunday June 7, 1981</em>, the <em>Israeli Air Force</em> blew it to smithereens. “Peace-loving nations,” said Hussein afterwards, “should now help the Arabs to acquire atomic bombs as a counter balance to those already possessed by Israel.”<br />Marc Ian Barasch, The <em>Little Black Book of Atomic War</em>, 1983<br />..<br />..<br />With all the emphasis on the fault of governments, the corporations, scientists or the media, it is critical that we recognize that the greatest obstacle to world peace is the ‘<em>Peace Movement’</em> itself. The message of the broken eagle is that we are a broken people throughout. While our movement is already fully empowered to succeed, it is our human immaturity that keeps us divided. We berate the US government for violating treaty after treaty, yet peace and environmental organisations violate their own agreements and charters just as often. While corporations fight to gain control of the largest military contracts, the fiefdoms of our movement keep us separated and dispirited, not on purpose but in ignorance. While dictators are installed and assiassinated by the CIA, FBI, or DEA, we, in the movement, nurse lifelong grudges against other activists and assassinate their character and projects more effectively than Time or Newsweek ever could.<br />..<br />Whether you work in congress or Earth First, on the board of General Electric or the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, you are a human being in the 20th century. Betrayal, sex scandals, mud flinging, jealousy, sexism, racism, embezzlement, violence and power struggles are a part and parcel of congress and the so-called ‘peace movement’. Because we have chosen a particular path is no indication of our departure, location or arrival. Most of us are still just perusing the spiritual travel literature. Because one can articulate the moral high ground is no indication of ones ability to occupy it. Presidents and activists alike, can espouse the rhetoric of our shared human ideals… and then we go to war, physically verbally, or emotionally. Racism is not under the proprietorship of a race nor sexism a sex. We are all human beings with our own styles and degrees of dysfunction.<br />..<br />As social change organisations, the peace, environmental and social justice movement rely heavily on volunteers. Money is not supposed to be the motivation of volunteers or even those employed for social change, be it forest, animal, human or antinuclear activism. What has stemmed from the focus on sacrifice rather than money is an intense yet unspoken emphasis on power, status and recognition. But we can’t deal with it because it’s not supposed to be there. How can you criticize someone who has done so much work for nothing?<br />..<br />Combine this with a new decision making process, consensus, which many social justice organisations attempt to embrace, and what results in struggle and dishonesty in ways that are very difficult to pinpoint and over come. Consensus, in a nutshell is a group decision-making process which attempts to achieve full agreement on issues and decisions by allowing everyone participating to have a voice and a vote. No decisions are reached until all agree. What this often accomplishes is weak and ineffectual actions because some people are not ready for bold and aggressive action.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />My personal experience is that consensus is a noble process that is less functional with immature participants than is majority rules. I prefer honest hierarchy to dishonest consensus any day. Consensus does not override outgoing and aggressive human personalities. Consensus is as open to manipulation as is democracy. My experience is that individuals involved in consensus are usually poorly educated in its use. It requires study and practice, which are almost always taken for granted as new organisations assume consensus is a better model. It is better when practiced by people who have invested the time to learn it. When practiced by groups that don’t grasp the inherent responsibility, it is less functional, highly time consumptive and less honest. Those that scream the most loudly about process are often the first to violate it. As individuals, raised in American society, we have absolutely no experience in group decision-making.<br />..<br />This is the message of the Broken Eagle: </div><br /><div align="center">Humanity is broken on all fronts, as children, in intimate relationships, in families, in ommunities, organisations, corporations and governments. We will not heal until we see this reality. Recognition of our brokenness empowers us to focus on the healing. Like an alcoholic, the first step is to admit we have a problem.<br />..<br />Family counsellor and author John Bradshaw estimates that 94% of Americans are dysfunctional to some degree. This is a conservative estimate. We grew up in one of the most brain-washed, manipulated society on Earth. Immersed in hierarchy, patriarchy and capitalism, we are at home in the land of rugged individualism.. ME-ism. That is why it is so difficult to organize in such a wealthy country. You do not remove this type of brainwashing as if it were an old t-shirt. It takes discipline. It is a journey – one worth undertaking.<br />..<br />It is still a beautiful world, but many have no chance to see that beauty and that beauty is being degraded daily. It is no longer a matter of just a positive attitude. It is a matter of positive action. In order to act we must fully grasp the present human psyche. John Trudell, one of the leading spiritual philosophers of our day, suggests that we have become a virus on Earth, immersed in a predator mindset. But we can choose to be part of the infection or antibodies for the cure.<br />..<br />‘No U.S. nuclear tests ever, Clinton pledges’<br />Denver Post<br />January 31, 1995<br />..<br />More than 60 retired US admirals and generals issued a statement claiming that our long term policy “must be based on the declared principle of continuous, complete and irrevocable elimination of nuclear weapons.” Retired US Air Force General Lee Butler argued that international security would best be served by total nuclear disarmament.<br />~ December 2, 1996 ~<br /></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">Vladimir Putin<br />Kremlin, KGB, AVO-AVH (Hungarian Security Service)</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">St Feliks Andreyevich YuriyatinGoldHeart tSarsen</span>}</span><br />/<br /><span style="color:#33ffff;">Lt. Col. David Grossman<br />USMC West Pt., DIE (Romanian Foreign Intel Agency)<br /></span><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">Tiger Lily's Against-The-Grain Serge</span>}<br /></span></span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#33ff33;">New Money for Healthy Communities</span><br />By Thomas H. Greko<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Chapter 1: Toward a New World Order</span><br /><br />“Money will decide the fate of mankind”<br />Jacques Rueff<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Gaia Consciousness and Human Unity<br /></span><br />The past 25 years or so seem to have brought a new period of enlightenment in which humans in increasing numbers have become aware of their oneness as a species, and their place, not as dominator or controller of nature, but as an integral part of the whole web of life. Many cultures have held the view that Earth is a living being in which each living species plays a vital role. It is a view which is now becoming current in our own culture and which sees humans as the “global brain,” the Earth’s centre of self-awareness. This changing identity is beginning to have profound effects upon the way we live our lives and, if we allow it, can change the whole course of history.<br /><br />Our actions emerge out of our visions and ideals. We humans, in our role as co-creators with the “Higher Power”, have plenty of work to do. There is work to be done at the persona level, confronting our own fears and doubts and taking responsibility for resolving our dilemmas; at the community level, using inevitable conflicts as opportunities to transcend our petty selves and limited perceptions; and at the societal level, building new structures which support and nurture rather than coerce and brutalize.<br /><br />Economics drives politics, and money is the central mechanism through which economic power is exerted in the modern world.<br /><br />The foundation of state power and centralized control in today’s world is the power to create and manipulate the medium of exchange. Because money has the power to command resources, and because most of us take it for granted, those few who control the creation of money are able to appropriate for their own purposes vast amounts of resources without being seen. The entire machinery of money and finance has now been appropriated to serve the interests of centralized power.<br /><br />The key element in any strategy to transform society must therefore be the liberation of money and the exchange process. If money (and hearts) are liberated, commerce will be liberated; if commerce is liberated, the people will be empowered to the full extent of their abilities to serve one another; the liberation of capital, education and land and the responsible popular control of politics will follow as a matter of course (we hope).<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Chapter 2: What is Money?<br /></span><br />“Money is an information system we use to deploy human effort.”<br />Michael Linton<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">The Essential Nature of Money<br /></span><br />The question, “What is money?” may seem trivial to us, who in this modern day make constant use of it, but it is confusion about the essence of money which has allowed it to be abused and misallocated. Money in classical economics is defined as (1) a medium of exchange, (2) a standard of value, (3) a unit of account, (4) a store of value, and (5) a standard of deferred payment. There are many problems with these definitions, but their primary inadequacy is that they are functional definitions; they tell what money does, not what it is. We need to understand the basic essence of money. Once we have grasped its essence we can begin to design exchange systems which will equitably serve the needs of people and the Earth.<br /><br />The process of economic exchange always involves at least two parties. The fundamental exchange process is the barter exchange. The fundamental purpose of money is to transcend the limitations of barter. Bilgram and Levy assert that:<br /><br />“We should… define money as any medium of exchange adapted or designed to meet the inadequacy of the method of exchanging things by simple barter. Anything that accomplishes this object is ‘Money.</div><br /><div align="center"><br />The one quality which is peculiar to money alone is its general acceptability in the market and in the discharge of debts. How does money acquire this specific quality? It is manifestly due solely to a consensus of the members of the community to accept certain valuable things, such as coin and certain forms of credit, as mediums of exchange.”<br /><br />We can see then that the essence of money is an agreement (consensus) to accept something which in itself may have no fundamental utility to us, but which we are assured can be exchanged in the market for something that does.<br /><br />Whatever we use as money, then, carries information. The possession of money, in whatever form, gives the holder a claim against the community of traders. The legitimacy of that claim needs to be assured in some way. The possession of money should be evidence that the holder has delivered value to someone in the community, and therefore has a right to receive like value in return, or that the holder has received it, by gift or other transfer, from someone else who has delivered value.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Chapter 6: Money and the Constitution<br /></span><br />“No State shall… make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts;…”<br />Article I, Section 10, U.S. Constitution<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">How Money is Misallocated<br /></span><br />Money, as it emerges from the banks which create it, is not distributed fairly because the allocation decisions are not made democratically but rather by elite groups of bankers who are not held properly accountable. They act in their own interests pursuing goals which are typical of any corporate business – profit and growth.<br /><br />The greatest abuses, however, derive from the politicisation of money, banking and finance. Banking and government have become intertwined and mutually dependent. In return for its privileged position, the banking cartel must assure the central government is able to borrow and spend virtually any amount it wishes. Despite their public protestations, the banking system will always “float” the necessary budget deficits of the central government, by “monetizing” the debt. What this means is that the banking system will create enough new money to allow the market to absorb the new government bonds which must be issued to finance the deficit. Thus, it allows the government to spend as much as it wishes without raising taxes directly. The result is inflation, which has been called a “hidden tax.”<br /><br />Economists often argue that inflation is caused by too much money in circulation. This would seem to refute the contention that money is chronically in short supply. The answer to this is that inflation is not caused by the amount of money per se, but by the fact that some of the money in circulation is improperly issued and misallocated. Such is the case when the banking system “monetizes” the government debt, as described above.<br /><br />The people have been cut out of the most important decision process, that of determining how the aggregate wealth of the nation, the fruits of everyone’s labour, will be spent. Massive expenditures for weapons, military interventions, and legalized “bribes” to client governments, along with S&L and corporate bailouts which benefit the wealthy, well-connected few and increase the gap between the rich and poor, are but a few of the abuses.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">How Money Pumps Wealth From the Poor to the Rich<br /></span><br />In this regard, I speak not of the very poor, who have little or no wealth producing capacity, but of the vast majority of people who work for a living but have little or no financial net worth. The “debt trap” is the bane of that class of people. Debt within the current system is destructive in two ways, first because of the interest (usury) that must be paid for the use of money (bank credit), and secondly, because of the collateral which must be forfeited when the debtor is unable to make repayment. The chronic insufficiency of money assures that there will inevitably be some forfeitures. It is interesting to note that the word “mortgage” derives from roots which mean “death gamble.”<br /><br />Everybody pays the cost of interest, even those who do not borrow directly. Interest costs are included in the price of everything we buy, whether it is provided by the business sector or the government. The production of whatever we buy must be financed in some way, and interest is the cost of using financial capital. Margrit Kennedy gives some examples which show the percentage of the cost which goes to pay interest on capital. Though her examples are drawn from her native Germany, it is clear that the pattern would be similar for all industrial nations, since their monetary and financial structures are all basically the same.<br /><br />Lending money at interest, either directly or through financial intermediaries is one of the primary mechanisms by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.<br /><br />Money carries information, but the present monetary system is dysfunctional because it carries flawed information. If information is the essential quality of money, then the next logical question is, what kind of information does it, and should it carry? The answer immediately presents itself is that money should carry information about “merit”. If money allows its possessor to claim wealth from the community, what is the basis for that claim? The possession of money should be evidence that the possessor has delivered value to the community, and is therefore entitled to receive back a like amount.<br /><br />If money is improperly issued though, the information which it carries is polluted at the very source. By issuing money to unproductive or privileged clients of the money monopoly, and by demanding interest (usury), the banking system redistributes wealth from producers to privileged non-producers. The consistent pattern of official action over the past several decades has been to concentrate economic power by centralizing control over the medium of exchange, limiting access to it, and charging exorbitant prices for its use (in the form of interest/usury).<br /><br />“Our objective should be to create exchange media issued on the basis of human service and Earth service rather than acquisitiveness and domination”<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Chapter 15: Good Money for Good Work<br /></span><br />In addressing the mega-crisis which confronts the world today, it should be clear that decisive changes will need to be made in the methods we humans use to distribute power and allocate material resources. The present dominant structures of money and finance, by their very nature, promote the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands, increase the disparity in the distribution of wealth, channel the vast majority of the earth’s resources into wasteful production, and force both social and ecological degradation. The pinnacle of power today is the power to issue money. If that power can be democratized and focused in a direction which gives social and ecological concerns top priority, then there may et be hope for saving the world.<br /><br />This chapter describes three proposals for achieving that. These proposals have two primary features: (1) the use of local currencies to facilitate trade and (2) the empowerment of groups which are working to serve the common good. Although they are described in terms of circulating certificates or notes, these exchange media could also take the form of credits in a mutual credit system or some combination of account credits and circulating notes.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Earth Rescue Receipts (ERR’s)<br /></span><br />Earth Rescue Receipts (ERR’s) are paper receipts for contributions made to what we will call “good work” organisations or individuals. ERR’s would be issued by any organisation which is a member of a consortium of mutual aid, social action, community improvement, environmental and other such organisations. These receipts, issued in small denominations, would simply acknowledge the donation of money, materials, equipment or services to a member organisation. They would provide evidence that the donor has done “good work” and would bear the name and seal of the consortium or as relevant.<br /><br />So what are the key features of the ERR proposal which make it empowering? Well, what if the donor, who now holds the ERR, were able to get something of value for it? Suppose some local business or individual were to agree to accept ERR’s in trade? In that case, ERR’s could become circulating currency. The original donor would not be any poorer for having made the donation, but would simply have “gotten the ball rolling.” An ERR would be considered to be a “temporary receipt” (TR) which could be spent, with the issuer, or depending upon the original intention of its issuance, as appropriate.<br /><br />As the positive effects of this process become more evident, more and more people will want to share the burden of community improvement, either by making additional donations to any particular member organisation, or by accepting ERR’s in trade and in the payment of debts. Growing acceptance of this exchange medium, and the increasing local prosperity which it brings, will encourage greater and greater amounts of heart-sharing to be contributed to the “good work” organisations and encourage work which is in the public, nature, and humanity’s future interest.<br /><br />Besides providing a local medium of exchange, it would provide a more participatory process for local community finance, eliminating the need for many government expenditures and transfer payments.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Funded Temporary Receipts (FTR’s)<br /></span><br />While a local currency system such as the Earth Rescue Receipts described above might approach more closely the ideals for monetary transformation set forth previously, a funded local currency might be initially more acceptable and less vulnerable to official interference.<br />It would probably provide better tax advantages to donors under current IRS regulations. It would be similar in many ways to the Earth Rescue Receipts and could work as follows:<br /><br />ONE<br />A consortium of individuals and/or community improvement groups could begin a program under which a trustee would accept, on behalf of particular individuals, or as appropriate, deposits of official money from any benefactor.<br /><br />TWO<br />These deposits would constitute an endowment fund which would be invested in ways which would provide income in official currency to help the organisation meets their cash or other needs. These funds could be invested in for example the Federal Farm Credit Bank, or similar; which might use them in more socially responsible ways.<br /><br />THREE<br />These deposits would be non-refundable, and spendable with any individual willing to accept them. FTR’s would thus circulate as currency.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Ledger Accounts or Paper Notes?<br /></span><br />Conceptually, it doesn’t matter whether the Riegels take the form of paper notes, tokens, or ledger balances (bookkeeping entries). These are all symbolic representations of the same thing – the values being exchanged, and each is “backed” by the same commitment of the issuers to redeem them – so checks and notes and electronic transfers can all be used interchangeably, as they are in the official monetary system.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">Convertibility of Local Currency to Official Currency<br /></span><br />The basic idea of a local currency is to empower people by allowing them to issue currency on the basis of the goods and services they have to offer, i.e. to monetize their labour. It is hoped and expected that as the merits of local currencies and exchange become more apparent, they will, to a large extent, supplant the official currency. As this happens, one needs to consider the possible need to covert dollars to Riegels or Riegels to dollars.<br />It is unlikely that there will be much demand for conversion of official dollars to Riegels so long as dollars are accepted as par along with Riegels as payment for purchases within the system. The situation is similar to current foreign exchange transactions.<br /><br />People prefer to hold dollars rather than pesos because the dollar has been debased less rapidly, i.e. the inflation rate ins pesos has typically been much greater than the inflation rate in dollars. In other words, although the Federal Reserve has been irresponsible in its issuance of U.S. currency, the Mexican central bank has been even more irresponsible, making the holding of dollars a better inflation hedge than the holding of pesos.<br /><br />The local currency needs to be insulated, as much as possible, from the adverse effects arising from manipulation of the official currency.<br /><br /><strong><span style="font-size:130%;">TWO Meanings of “DOLLAR”<br /></span></strong><br />It is extremely important to distinguish between the use of the word “dollar,” on the one hand to describe a unit of measure of value and, on the other, its use to describe the money issued by the Federal Reserve (the FED), either in the form of bank credit or as Federal Reserve Notes. Local exchange systems, while freeing people from using dollars, i.e. Federal Reserve money, typically use the dollar unit to measure the value of things traded. This makes sense because the dollar unit of measure is the unit which everyone is accustomed to using: it has meaning to people. The only problem with doing this is the fact that the dollar unit of measure is no longer defined in concrete terms. It used to be officially defined as so much fine gold, but that was abandoned long ago. The dollar is now a “rubber measuring stick” defined only by what it will buy in the market, and what it will buy in the market has been continually diminishing because of irresponsible issuance of money by the FED. That is the essence of general price inflation.<br /><br />Using the dollar unit of measure, then, as a basis for valuing things creates a problem of comparability over time. A “dollar” today is not what it was yesterday, and a “dollar” tomorrow will most assuredly not be what it is today. But so long as the local currency is used only as a medium of exchange and not as a store of value, this lack of comparability over time is not much of a problem. Ideally, all currencies and exchange media should be defined in terms of some concrete standard which would establish their value along with the value of everything else being traded. The existence of such a standard would make abuse and mismanagement of currencies readily apparent and allow fair exchange rates to be easily determined. It can be hoped that in the not too distant future, some organisation or group will take the initiative in defining a standard of this type. Until such time, there is little choice but to use available measures. It is possible, however, to define local standards based upon some commodity (or group of commodities) important in local commerce, such as a bushel of wheat, a kilo of rice, or a pound of copper, and there is considerable historical precedent for doing so.<br /><br />Another option would be to use some other concept for valuing the things traded. Ithaca’s use of the “Hour” unit is a good example. While an “Hour” is not precisely defined, people tend to think of it as having a value more or less equal to the local average hourly wage. This is what the Ithaca founders encourage, and this is what seems to be happening in practice. Ithaca Hours currently exchange among traders for value equivalent to about 10 dollars.<br /><br />Using the hour concept instead of the dollar concept for valuing exchanges, would probably be effective in de-coupling the value of the local currency from that of the official currency. As the dollar continues to be debased, hourly wages should rise, and, one might expect, the value of the Hour currency, in terms of dollars, to rise also. </div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">Erik Prince<br />Blackwater, US Navy, SSD (GDR Security Service 'Stasi')</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">MiracleCopperBuddy-LtColHenrysForkHuntley-FlamingRockLakePaw-1961</span>}</span><br /></span><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">..</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#33ff33;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Cryptonomicon</span><br /></span>By Neal Stephenson</div><br /><div align="center">..<br /><span style="font-size:130%;">MEAT<br /></span>(149)</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Okay, so <em>Private First Class</em> Gerald Hott, late of <em>Chicago, Illinois</em>, did not exactly shoot through the ranks during his fifteen-year tenure in the <em>United States Army</em>. He did, however, carve a bitchin’ loin roast. He was as deft with a <em>boning knife</em> as <em>Bobby Shaftoe</em> is with a <em>bayonet</em>. And who is to say that a military butcher, by conserving the limited resources of a steer’s carcass and by scrupulously observing the mandated sanitary practices, might not save as many lives as a <em>steely-eyed warrior</em>? The military is not just about killing Nips, Krauts, and Dagoes. It is also about <em>killing livestock – and eating them</em>. </div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">Gerald Hott was a front-line warrior who kept his freezer locker as clean as an operating room and so it is only fitting that he has ended up there.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br /><em>Bobby Shaftoe</em> makes this little <em>elegy</em> up in his head as he is shivering in the sub-Arctic chill of a formerly <em>French</em>, and now <em>U.S. Army</em>, meat locker the size and temperature of <em>Greenland and Iceland</em> combined, surrounded by the earthly remains of several herds of cattle and one butcher. He has attended more than a few military funerals during his brief time in the service, and has always been bowled over by the skill of the chaplains in coming up with moving elegies for the departed. He has heard <em>rumours</em> that when the military inducts 4-Fs who are discovered to have brains, it teaches them to type and assigns them to sit at desks and type these things out, day after day. Nice duty if you can get it.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />The frozen carcasses dangle from meathooks in long rows. Bobby Shaftoe gets tenser and tenser as he works his way up and down the aisles, steeling himself for the bad thing he is about to see. It is almost preferable when your buddy’s head suddenly explodes just as he is puffing his cigarette into life – <em>buildup like this can drive you nuts</em>.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Finally he rounds the end of a row and discovers a man slumbering on the floor, <em>locked in embrace</em> with a <em>pork carcass</em>, which he was apparently about to butcher at the time of his death. He has been there for about twelve hours now and his body temp is hovering around <em>minus ten</em> degrees Fahrenheit.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Bobby Shaftoe squares himself to face the body and draws a deep breath of frosty, meat-scented air. He clasps his cyanotic hands in front of his chest in a manner that is both prayerful and good for warming them up. “<em><span style="color:#000099;">Dear Lord</span></em>,” he says out loud. His voice does not echo; the carcasses soak it up. “<em>Forgive this marine for these, his duties, which he is about to perform, and while you are at it, by all means forgive this marine’s superiors whom You in Your infinite wisdom have seen fit to bless him with, and forgive their superiors for getting the whole deal together</em>.”</div><br /><div align="center">..</div><br /><div align="center">He considers going on at some length but finally decides that this is no worse than bayoneting Nips and so lets get on with it. He goes to the locked bodies of PFC Gerald Holt and Frosty the Pig and tries to separate them without success. He squats by them and gives the former a good look.<br />..<br />Shaftoe turns around and looks again at the meat locker, which is dangerously exposed to enemy air attack here, but no one gives a fuck because who cares if the Krauts blow up a bunch of meat?<br />Leuitenant Ethridge, almost as desperately sunburned as Bobby Shaftoe, squints. These Marines are all lethal combat veterans or else they never would have gotten into a mess this bad – trapped on a gratuitously dangerous continent (Africa) surrounded by the enemy (United States Army troops). Still when they get into that locker and take their first gander at PFC Hott, a hush comes over them.</div><br /><div align="center">..<br />Private Branph clasps his hands, rubbing them together surreptitiously, “Dear Lord—“<br />“Shut up, Private!” Shaftoe says, “I already did that.”<br />“Okay Sarge.”<br />“Go find a meat saw!” Shaftoe says to Private Nathan.<br />The privates all gasp.<br />“For the fucking pig!” Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, “Open it up!”<br />They are all working away silently when a new voice interrupts. “Dear Lord,” the voice begins, as they all look up to see a man standing nearby, hands clasped prayerfully. His words, sacramentally condensed into an outwards and visible cloud of steam, veil his face. His uniform and rank are obscured by an Army blanket thrown over his shoulders. He’d look like a camel-riding Holy Land prophet if he were not clean-shaven and wearing <em>Rape Prevention Glasses</em>.<br />“Goddamn it!” Shaftoe says. “I already said a fucking prayer.”<br />“But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?” the man says. </div><br /><div align="center">This is a poser. </div><br /><div align="center">Everything becomes quiet as the meat saw stops moving. Shaftoe drops the wetsuit and stands up. Blanket Man’s got very short grizzly hair, or maybe that’s frost coalescing on his scalp. His ice coloured eyes meet Shaftoe’s through the mile-thick lenses of his <em>RPG</em>’s, as if he’s really expecting an answer. Shaftoe takes a step closer and realizes the man is wearing a clerical collar.<br />“You tell me, Rev,” Shaftoe says.<br />Then he recognizes Blanket Man. He’s about to let fly with a lusty <em>What in the fuck are you doing here</em>, but something makes him hold back. The chaplains eyes make a sideways dart so small and so fast that only Shaftoe, who’s practically rubbing noses with him, could possibly see it. The message being: <em>Shut up, Bobby, we’ll talk later</em>.<br />“Private Hott is with God now – or wherever people go after they die,” says Enoch “You can call me Brother” Root.<br />“What kind of an attitude is that? Course he’s with God. Jesus Christ! ‘Wherever they go when they die.’ What kind of Chaplain are you?”<br />“I guess I’m a Detachment 2702 kind of chaplain,” the chaplain says. Lieutenant Enoch Root finally breaks eye contact with Shaftoe and turns his gaze to where the action is. “As you were, fellows,” he says. “Looks like bacon tonight, huh?”<br />The men chuckle nervously and resume sawing.<br />..<br />Shaftoe knows he ought to wait, but he just can’t stand it, “What are you doing here?” he finally says.<br />“The detachment is relocating,” the Rev says. “Closer to the front.”<br />“We just got off the fucking boat,” Shaftoe says. “Of course we’re going closer to the goddamn front – we can’t go any farther unless we swim.”<br />“As long as were pulling up stakes,” Root says coolly, “I’ll be coming along for the ride.”<br />“I don’t mean that,” Bobby Shaftoe says. “I mean, why should the detachment have a chaplain?”<br />“You know the military,” Root says. “Every unit has to have one.”<br />“It’s bad luck.”<br />“It’s bad luck to have a chaplain? Why”<br />“It means the waffle-butts are expecting a <em>lot of funerals</em>, is why.”<br />“So you are taking the position that the only thing a cleric can do is preside over <em>funerals</em>? Interesting.”<br />“And <em>weddings</em> and <em>baptisms</em>,” Shaftoe says. All of the other Marines chortle.<br />“Could it be you’re feeling a little anxious about the unusual nature of Detachment 2702’s first mission?” Root inquires, casting a significant glance at the late Hott, then staring directly into Shaftoe’s eyes.<br />“Anxious? Listen Rev, I done some things on Guadalcanal that make this look like Emily Fucking Post.”<br />All of the other Marines think this is a great line, but Root is undeterred.<br />“Did you know why you were doing those things on Gaudalcanal?”<br />“Sure! To stay alive.”<br />“Do you know why you’re doing this?”<br />“Fuck no.”<br />“Doesn’t that irritate you a little bit? Or are you too much of a <em>stupid jarhead</em> to care?”<br />“Well, you kind of backed me into a corner there, Rev,” Shaftoe says. After a pause he goes on, “I’ll admit to being a little curious.”<br />“If there was someone in Detachment 2702 who could help answer your questions about <em>why</em>, would that be useful?”<br />“I guess so,” Shaftoe grumbles. “It just seems weird to have a chaplain.”<br />“Why does it seem weird?”<br />“Because of the kind of unit this is.”<br />..<br />So with a dearth of complications that can only strike combat veteran Bobby Shaftoe as <em>eerie</em>, the truck leaves the <em>Societe Algerienne d’Eclaraige et de Force</em> behind and heads back up those damn ramps into Algiers. The climb’s steep – a first gear project all the way. Vendors and pushcarts loaded with boiling oil are not only keeping up with them but cooking fritters along the way. Three-legged dogs run and fight underneath the actual drive train of the truck. Detachment 2702 is also dogged by coffee-can-wearing natives threatening to play guitars made of jerry cans, and by orange vendors and snake charmers, and a few blue-eyed burnoose wearers holding up lumps of unwrapped and unlabelled dark stuff. Like hailstones, these may be classified by analogy to fruits and sporting goods. Typically they range from grape to baseball. At one point, the chaplain impulsively trades a Hershey bar for a golf ball of the stuff.<br />“What is that? <em>Chocolate</em>?” Bobby Shaftoe asks.<br />“If it was chocolate,” Root says, “that guy wouldn’t have taken a Hershey bar for it.”<br />“Shaftoe shrugs. “Unless it’s shitty chocolate.”<br />“Or shit!” blurts Private Nathan, provoking incredible hilarity.<br />“You heard of Mary Jane?” Root asks.<br />Shaftoe – role model, leader of men – stifles an impulse to say, Heard of her? I’ve fucked her!<br />“This is concentrated essence,” says Enoch Root.<br />“How would you know, Rev?” says Private Daniels.<br />“The Rev is not rattled. “I’m the God guy here, right? I know the religious angle?”<br />“Yes, sir!”<br />“Well, at one time, there was a group of Muslims called the <em>hashishin</em> who would eat this stuff and then go out and kill people. They were so good at it, they became famous or infamous. Over time the pronunciation of the name has changed – we know them as <em>assassins</em>.”<br />There was an appropriate respectful silence. Finally, Sergeant Shaftoe says, “What the hell are we waiting for?”<br />They eat some. Shaftoe, being the highest ranking enlisted man present, eats more than the others. Nothing happens. </div><br /><div align="center">“Only person I feel like assassinating is the guy who sold it to us,” he says.</div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">Paul Wolfowitz<br />World Bank, Dept of State, WPC (World Peace Council)<br /></span><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">ZhenBayonetWizzard-ElefenteLynnKeyes</span>}</span><br />/<br /><span style="color:#33ffff;">Robert Mueller<br />FBI, Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage Soviet Security Service '17 - '22)</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">CloverSTSean-O-CossackDillonClover</span>}</span></span></div><br /><div align="center"></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~~!~~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#000000;">..</span><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#33ffff;">Michael Martin<br />Blackwater, US Army SF, AK (Polish Home Army)</span><br /><span style="color:#33ff33;">{<span style="color:#ffff33;">PhoenixGeronimoPanther-StBlueEyeDixieStoneMarene-1991</span>}<br /></span></span></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="color:#ff0000;">~!~!~!~ ** ~!~~!~~!~</span></div><br /><div align="center"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1