The Great American Bubble Machine

Underpinning what has truely become no more than a charade is the fundamental idea that if one is smart enough and frugal enough to save a little at a time and sock it away into one or more of the various so-called "investment vehicles"... that is, anything but real goods and services... someday one will have the means to live out the remainder of their years in the secured comfort of retirement funded by the "growth". And along the way reap too the rewards and comforts that come from having firmly secured membership in the middle class. The Great American Bubble Machine. What has become one of the most deceptive, yet gargantuan lies of all time!

The words of whomever it was that said, "fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, shame on me" were completly lost to the vast majority of the silent ones.

Fooled.

Not just once.

Not just twice.

Not even three times.

Five times fooled we've been. And we're set up for number six. We should know by now the game is rigged. We say we just don't know how and by whom. But worst of all most of the masses believe we have to play because its the only game in town.

How should we know its a charade? History! Particularly recent history.

And how should we know who orchestrates it? By whomever goes home with the money!!

Our money!!!

Contrary to popular belief things like this don't happen by accident. They are consciously orchestrated. And contrary to popular belief Lawrence Welk does not hold claim to the Great American Bubble Machine. Goldman Sacks does.

How much money did they go home with? Well, here's just part of it...

Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and
benefits - an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee.

"In 2006,
the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion - an average of $622,000 per
employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."

Thats just the ones on the payrolls at those times. Far greater is the take of former Goldmanites running the show in both the gov'ment and the private sector including the Fed. Particularly including the Fed. There is no boundary now where one leaves off and the other begins. They are seperate entities in name only. The massive list of names of the players is a bonafide who's who.

And how does the likes of Goldman and Goldmanites continue to get away with this?

Deny, Deny, Deny!

And a posse of lawyers who's job it is to fight tooth and nail so when they do loose, the resultant fine don't even amount to a penny on the millions of dollars stolen. None of which would amount to anything except for one thing... the silent ones who turn our heads and play anyway in a game we know is rigged because we think we have no other choice.

How bad is it? Frankly, I'm sick to death of hearing about free markets cuz there is no such thing anymore. Here's how bad it is... if I have one dime consciously invested in any form of paper investment vehicle, I'm IN. And, given the evidence the reality is this... IN is a form of saying... I approve the scam! Ignorance is no longer a get-out-of-jail card buried in the deck!! Play and there's hell to pay...

THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

And what might that next bubble be?

Can you say cap and trade??

Carbon credits. The next commodity to be pumped and dumped. And who's behind the big promo? You get 3 guesses and the first 2 don't count. But if you need a hint there's this... just who, who has successfully fought tooth and nail beyond all imagination to get govt regulation of the investment industry gone, be now extensively lobbying for regs under the pretense of saving the environment and already positioned themselves as the beneficiaries?

But wait, before going there how 'bout the real story behind bubble number 4... why we paid over 4 bucks for gas last summer at a time when production increased and demand fell (which btw is another of the great lies of so-called free marketry... supply and demand)...

(last)summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.

But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling - which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? ...Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures - agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

And btw... this story is the smoking gun about the deeper reason for the so-called war on terror and why we're in the mid east... preserve usury!

Story? Matt Taibbi tells it all in the current issue of Rolling Stone. Scribd has it linked here

What Happens When God Farts?

This maybe?

Has My Lizzie Been To Mars??

I just found out yesterday that Linda goes to Mars
Every time I sit and look at pictures of used cars
She'll turn on her radio and sit down in her chair
And look at me across the room, as if I wasn't there

Chorus:
Oh My stars! My Linda's gone to Mars
Well I wish she wouldn't leave me here alone
Oh My stars! My Linda's gone to Mars
Well, I wonder if she'd bring me something home.

Something, somewhere, somehow took my Linda by the hand
And secretly decoded our sacred wedding band
For when the moon shines down up on our happy, humble home
Her inner space gets tortured by some outer space unknown.

Repeat Chorus:

Now I ain't seen no saucers 'cept the ones upon the shelf
And if I ever seen one I'd keep it to myself
For if there's life out there somewhere beyond this life on earth
Then Linda must have gone out there and got her money's worth.

Repeat Chorus:

Yeah, I wonder if she'd bring me something home.

We can thank John Prine for that. I didn't really know how to introduce this entry so, thanks John. I borrow from your wild and wacky words yet again as anecdote to what I hope is an humble pie. Suffice to say that Liz goes on these inegmatic journeys and connects up on that mysterious level many of us wonder about. Somehow something literally knocks on her head just as if someone's at the door.

Is it real? Some will just laugh and say its the subjective imagination having an affair with itself. Or worse, insanity. What the hell, it can't be any more insane than mankind gone mad in this world we're living in these days can it? If no more it justifies hope as more than an annoying nuisance.

Whatever it is it happens. On a regular basis. And when she comes back its always interesting to read where she's been. At least in her mind and feelings.

Who are we to question that its just her fancy? So indulge me here. Indulge yourselves. If anything its a trip you might enjoy and you just might be surprized that many of the mysteries that haunt us so just might have a future.

And even more surprizing? That the future is NOW! That somewhere, somehow, something took my Lizzie by the hand and secretly decoded the mysteries of our land....

Here's what she came back with...


2009-01-02 Elk Medicine, Whale's message, and Right Place

[Note: I was contemplating a Medicine Wheel that I had made at the Advanced Medicine Wheel Tool Workshop I went to last year. This Tool was designed to consider five areas in an organizational context: Purpose (in the center); Leadership (North/Air); Vision (East/Fire); Community (South/Earth); and Management (West/Water). It can also be used for personal and community development.]

Mamunia speaks: the rain is fine, so I will take that name today [note: mamunia is the name for rain in an African language]. We would like to invoke the circle, and do a short ritual to welcome the New Year and set our intention for it this morning. How does that feel to you?


Me: that feels fine.


Mamunia: Then let us welcome the four corners: Father of Earth, Mother of Water, Son and Daughter of Air, and Father of Fire. Let us ask for their wisdom and guidance, now and throughout the year. Let us thank them for their protection and care, and for the gifts that each brings to the circle of life. Let us renew our ties with them, so that we can work together to heal Mother Earth and our Universe.

Let us give thanks for all of our relations, for the winged ones, the two leggeds, the four leggeds, the creepy crawlies, the swimmers, and the standing people. Let us remember our ancestors and our children and the children to come. Let us welcome the unseen ones, in this and other dimensions. Let us light the fire in the center of the circle, and draw around, to share the light, the warmth, and the companionship. Aho.


Me & all: Aho.


Mamunia: we would like to do a round of the Medicine Wheel, with the topic being our goals and aspirations for 2009. I will put the talking object in the center of our circle, and each person is invited to speak from their heart about their personal and, if they are so moved, collective commitments. You are also welcome to speak about your hopes and fears, and any sads, mads and glads. In other words, anything you care to share is welcome.


Me: I’d like to draw a Medicine Card to get me started.


Mamunia: you would be most welcome to do so. As is everyone. In fact, why don’t we start with that, as a transfer in. What does this card tell you about your purpose for the New Year?


Me: I drew #3, Brother Elk. Interesting, because I just learned that Elk were prevalent in California, so I used to have a relationship with the Elk People. I knew their ways, their meat, their hides. And the shield (on the Medicine Card) has some human hair braided on it, which gives me the sense of giving back, of sacrificing, in thanks to the Elk’s sustenance.

The Elk is a prey animal. So they are very alert to their surroundings. They are swift. They are ruminants. They were basically the “cows” of my ancestors. I wonder if we ever domesticated them? I don’t think so. They are wild and beautiful and almost went extinct.

So what this tells me about my purpose for 2009… well, one thing is the importance of the herd. Also leadership (the bull) is important. Being willing to move to find new sustenance. So the importance of mobile, self-organizing groups. The importance of the family unit within the tribe.


Elk speaks: “We are here to share with you the knowledge of the land. We lived off of it, of course. We took what we needed, and gave back, without effort. You are now out of balance, so it will take some effort for you to get back into balance. But know that this is your natural state. It is not wrong to give to and receive from the Earth. Mother Earth has designed her inhabitants to do this.”


Me: Here are some highlights:

Stamina: As a prey animal, Elk had no other defense except his ability to go the distance, setting a pace that allowed him to utilize his stamina and energy to the fullest… If you have taken on too much recently, it might be a good idea to look at how you plan to finish what you have started without ending up in the hospital…

Family: Elk hang out with their own gender. This points to the strength you can draw from your own brotherhood or sisterhood. You may need a support group. Or at least a girls’ night out. When elks get together with their opposite gender, their mates, it is for reproduction.

Message: Elk is telling you to look at how you choose to create your present pathway to your goals—when to stop, when to persist, and to open to sisterhood for support.



Okay, so I get my purpose at the start of this year is to attend to the “how” of reaching my goals—especially paying attention to my ability to go the distance. Obviously I have a lot to juggle, but it will do me no good if I make myself ill, either physically or mentally or emotionally or psychically, in my efforts to reach them.

It is also telling me to flirt with my mate.


Mamunia: thank you. Does anyone else want to share reflections as they transfer in? I put the talking object—a piece of antler—in the center of the circle.


Inanna speaks: yes, I would. I am also reflecting on Elk, and am particularly touched by the importance of Sisterhood in the coming year. I am thinking particularly of the need to connect with the Grandmothers who have important survival skills to pass down. I know I don’t have to learn how to can tomatoes, but I do have my own grandmothers to connect with, who have stories and wisdom that might be relevant to me now.


Elk speaks: the four-legged are also members of this circle, and I would like to speak more about your purpose for the year, and our wisdom. We would like a healing between the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds. We understand how your survival has led to the relationships that you have with us now. But we hope this will change.

We believe that personal relationships between the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds will help you heal the gaps between us. We look to you, and honor you, but also hope that you will be willing to learn from us. We are but one form of manifestation on the planet, and we hope to evolve with the rest of those that are committed to healing. So it is important that you understand that we are not in a form that is “set in stone.” As terror moves, and as rage moves, we will have more flexibility to show up in other ways… as when the lion lays down with the lamb.


Whale speaks: In my being, I have the wisdom of many creatures, of a long, long history on the planet… and we have much wisdom to share, even though it is from a very unusual perspective relative to the land-based forms’ experience. We are still your relations. The mermaid form, in particular, was an attempt to bridge this difference.

The sea is so vast… yet it is being impacted in dramatic ways by the two-leggeds. Can’t you feel the anger in the hurricane? Or the forgiveness in a gentle rain? For all of your science, your “meteorology,” you still don’t seem to understand some simple facts—you can’t harvest the sea without feeling Poseidon’s wrath, if you keep on dumping your junk into our space.

The sea is like another dimension, like the Astral plain… it holds everything that is poured into it. And it is like the Akashic plain, in that it’s substance is not the currents—yet the currents are literally the most powerful force on Earth.

The Native Americans, First Nations, and many other Indigenous Cultures had a sense of this, and that is what they were addressing with the Rain Dance. But one group, one tribe, can only reach so far… your entire Earth population needs to join together in a Peace Dance… if you are going to be able to cope with the Pole Shift that is coming.

I love the phrase “Sea Change” that the business world has adopted… and yet, the true meaning of this, the true scope of this, has not been realized. You are literally facing a “magnetic change,” that goes all the way to the very core of the Earth; that is being driven or pulled or shaped by the energy field or aura of the Earth herself.

Yes, your hubby is right, there is a relationship between the Earth and the Sun—between the Earth and all the planets, in fact—that is contributing to climate change. And there is more to it than that. You can easily see the contribution of the “greenhouse gasses” to the equation. But what is causal to that? What energy fields in the people of the planet are causal to the outcome of greenhouse gasses? Why does the Earth need to move off the unloving energies in the first place?

Some of you are directly responsible for letting them in. I don’t mean to make you feel guilty, or bad—what I am hoping to point to, is that you also have the power, and the responsibility, to help with the cleansing that is coming.

Releasing unloving light is just part of the equation. You also need to release guilt. This means that you not only have permission to be “selfish” about what and who you include in your lives, you actually need to do this. The change starts within you, and then pulses out to your relationships, your families, your business partners, your friends… it continues to act on your civic structures, your social structures, your financial structures… why do you think that your economy is coming apart? It is, in large part, because of the intent of the parental fragments to undo the damage that has been done.

No, of course you do not want suffering. But you can’t let guilt keep you from allowing people to experience their own consequences. It is a giant version of “tough love,” of healing from co-dependence.

It is also a giant version of “getting clean,” of healing from addiction.

You really do need to look at every aspect of your life through the lens of “sustainability”—whatever that means to you. Another way to say it is you need to look at every aspect of your life through the lens of “health,” another way is “considering seven generations,” another is “considering all your relations,” another is “how it feels to your will.”

I know you don’t trust the healing process completely, and that is fine. How could you trust it ahead of the experience? But I want you to notice when you do listen to that voice, when you do act on it: how do you feel? What the results are in your life and in your world? You may not recognize how your actions are impacting the greater world, but they are.

First they flow out on subtle levels… and it is really these subtle levels that start things moving “out there.” This movement allows for the more substantial levels of your behavior to actually make a difference, to make change. In fact, when you let your will vibrate, when you sound, you are creating a resonant field that reaches out and “lubricates” things that may have been “stuck” for a very long time.

So don’t underestimate your power. You do that far more than overestimating it. Don’t veer from the path that your innermost knowing and desire point to.

With all the change that is coming, there is going to be a lot of opportunity to act in new ways. There are going to be cracks and fissures in the Intimidating Form that you call reality that you can follow to more open spaces. There are going to be roads that lead to your own right places, if you will allow yourselves to take the initiative, and get there first. For these places are your places, and you belong there, in leadership positions.

It is okay to be angry if someone is in your place. It is okay to complain that you could do it better than they can. It is normal to think about how you could improve things. These are all aspects of the process of you taking back your power. And if you make a mistake once you are in that position, forgive yourself. Making a mistake does not mean that it is not your position. It just means that you needed the experience to help you understand the “right” way to do something.

And people need to learn how to support you in your position. If they don’t get that “right” immediately, it does not make you wrong to be there, or make them wrong to not be there—it is just part of the learning experience. Forgive them for not knowing how to support you ahead of time. Continue to express your needs and preferences. Allow things to turn out right in the long run.

This brings me to a very important judgment release, but I would like to turn it over to God to talk about this.


God speaks: Thank you, Whale, for your wisdom, and for sharing your Grace with all of us. I really appreciate your message.

The judgment that Whale is speaking of is the one that wants to prove that your rage is right for giving up your power in the first place. This is the part of you that gives up—not because of a lack of commitment, or stamina, as the Elk Medicine brings—but because it has always known reversal, and finds it safer to expect that, instead of healing.

In other words, this judgment is the self-fulfilling prophesy that your rage or terror keeps manifesting when it says some form of “I knew that it would never work,” or “I can’t do this,” or, in your hubby’s case, “whatever I do turns to shit,” “it doesn’t matter what I do,” etc. Sapphire, in your case it shows up as a commitment to the symptoms of your brain chemistry imbalances. By this I mean that you hold on to them, as evidence of your past trauma.

Ironically, the way to heal this type of judgment/emotional pattern is not to release it in the usual way, in some form of “I forgive myself for judging that I would always have revesals,” etc. That tends to backfire. The way to heal this is to validate it.

Your judgments are absolutely right, on one layer of the cake, and there is no going to another layer until you have fully accepted your rage or terror’s position. You need to fully hear yourself… you need to fully feel the extent of the reversal that already happened to you around your power, over and over again. You need to let yourself rage about your powerlessness, or be terrified of your power, which led to others trying to control it, or grieve about the consequences of losing your power—whatever comes up for you.

You have very good reasons for being reluctant to take your power back. There is no point in skipping over these, because if you don’t understand them, you will be more likely to create yet another reversal. I don’t, we don’t, want you to do that.

You have my absolute permission to really go into why you don’t want your power, how you feel about losing it, why it was so unfair, or why losing it was my, or another’s, fault… it is totally okay to be “unreasonable,” or “stubborn,” or “unwilling,” or whatever position you might judge as being “politically incorrect” about it.

You may also discover that you have abused your power in the past—and frankly, who hasn’t—and feel you don’t deserve it, or can’t trust yourself, or need to punish yourself. So be it. Nobody can make you take back your power. You actually have the right to refuse it. If you really don’t want it, you can give it to me. I’d much prefer that than you give it to a denial reflection.

In fact, many of you went into seminaries or convents because you didn’t trust yourself with your power, and wanted me to take it back. Unfortunately, I had the same problem, so my denials were often running the show in these scenarios. We both have work to do.

Many people who were the “right” people to lead faced reversals because they had no understanding of how to release their own guilt and judgments—and so drew the reflection of their guilt and judgments in manifestation. Some didn’t even know they had guilt or judgments, and so the reflections seemed to “come out of nowhere.”

Some had fragmentations, usually of their rage, that wanted to be in the parental position, and so pushed their parental parts out of their place—or even killed that part outright. Some of you tried to avoid this by banishing or killing your rage fragment first—but this did not actually remove it from manifestation. It often just flowed to another person that had room for it, and did you in anyway.

Your rage may have something to say to you about how you are or were fulfilling your leadership position. It may be very angry with you for denying it in favor of a more “loving” presentation. It may, in fact, be “right”—that what you thought was love, was actually guilt, and you “should have” let your rage say “no” in the first place.

Of course, what rage needs to understand, is that you needed the experience, and you did not have very good role modeling from Your Parents.

My point is; you have to let yourself go into all of your feelings, here. You need to give yourself permission to really explore all of your judgments. You made them because of something that happened to you; in other words, for a “good reason.” You were trying to protect yourself from ever having to experience the pain of that original experience again.

But, as you know, the way to truly heal, to truly protect yourself, is to allow yourself to feel the original pain. In fact, there is really no way to avoid it. Your judgments can’t protect you from it, so you might as well give them up.

I am not saying that you have to go into a long, painful process, necessarily, but I am saying that you have to allow your will to let you know what it has been holding—and your lost will, as well.

You may find that you are triggered by each other as you work through your relationship to your own right place and whatever form your leadership takes. From my perspective, this is a good thing, as there is more possibility of healing when you are getting your triggers “internally,” so to speak, than “out there,” in the gap. Jealousy, competition, judgment, criticism, impatience, resentment are all likely to come up. Allow them to take you where you need to go.


Mamunia: Thank you, God. You have taken us into the Leadership Quadrant (North). I would like to close this meeting now, and invite everyone to return when we will continue with leadership, and then go on to your vision for 2009. In closing, I will put the antler back into the center of the circle, and invite anyone to share whatever they need to, to get closure.


Gar-Gar speaks: Thank you everyone, for another enlightening meeting. I am thinking about how I always look to adults for wisdom, and that I can also look to my peers, especially other younger males, for insight and guidance. I am not sure what my leadership role is in that context. I guess I fear that I won’t be respected because I am small for my age. Anyway, I am going to be sitting with this for a while.


Inanna speaks: I am going to be sitting with my relationship to power. I know I have abused it in the past… and I think I have abdicated from a lot of it because I didn’t want the responsibility again. I have been working with my child-self, as I needed to reconnect with that part of me… but perhaps it is time for me to step into my adult-self, with the wisdom that I have gained. I am not exactly afraid of doing this… it just hasn’t seemed like the right thing to do. But as I am becoming more involved with the Universal Healing Project, I am more interested in being conscious about the ways that I am living out my right… what is the word… not one in English… “beaming manifestation” is the closest I can come.


Whale: there is a bumper sticker that we find very amusing… it is of a whale, saying “save the humans”… and this is actually how many of us feel. Yes, some of us have turned away from the two-leggeds… but some of us recognize that some of you are receptive… as some of you were in the Old Days… so I want to say Thank You, for making space for me in your Circle. I don’t always speak, but I almost always come. Much of my message is communicated through non-verbal means, anyway… it is there for your taking, if you so wish… and is always there, through your connection with the Akashic Plain. It gives me, and many of the non-human nations, much happiness that so many of you are receiving us again.


God: I am glad that you are willing to specifically look at leadership… it is a very charged issue, as you well know… the more you move with the little triggers, the less you will have to draw big ones to you… So I am hoping that you will call [your potential client], and talk to her about what is going on in her community… hint, hint. ;)


Me: whew, yes, all of this is very intense for me… I am feeling a bit of terror… I am grateful for all of the input, everyone… grateful to myself for putting time aside for this… grateful for my hubby and grateful that I have a life that allows for this time, and the technology to capture this and share this… thank you, thank you everyone…


Wolf speaks: thank you for noticing me. Yes, I have been Elk’s enemy… but that is not why I am here today… though I do appreciate Elk’s wisdom, and know that I am the other side of that coin. I am here because I have an urgent message, that I want to squeeze in here, even though it is rather last minute. My message is simply this: you have to embody the energy of The Hunter as you track and own your right place.

I know there is much to heal in the Predator mode. But to do this, we need to honor what is right about this modality, what it is useful for, and when is right time to be in this mode. In order to heal it, we, the predators, the reflection of your denial of it, need you to bring it back into your bodies, and work with it, in order to discover what it has to contribute in its healed form.

This is a part of leadership, ownership, and power, at least as it stands right now. I don’t care if it doesn’t remain so, but I am asking you to please stop denying your own predatory aspects, so that they do not have to act out in a state of denial. Bring them in, move what needs to move, and learn what needs to be learned. Thank you.


Mother speaks: I hear you, Wolf… and your Bretheren… and I thank you for heading my cry for healing, in the way that you can…

Leadership that is not power-over, that is not predatory, is hardly imagined at this point, let alone manifested. Yet it has to happen.

But I am willing for you all to go through whatever you need to go through to get there. I am willing for Rage to have its say; for whatever feelings, “unloving” or no, to come up and express. This is the way to take the fangs out of the flesh, the claws from the hide.

You have to be willing for your rage to express, too, in order to follow my way. You have to trust your will, and make it safe for ignition to happen. When it does, take advantage of it, no matter how ugly you have judged those feelings in the past. Embrace the shadow.


Mamunia: thank you, everyone, for your contributions today. And thank you, Sapphire, for suggesting that we transfer in. I was being too ambitious in my agenda, I think, and it was a good lesson in allowing the process to unfold in its own pace—pacing being one of the lessons that Elk has brought to us today.

Until next time, I will formally close the circle. Aho.


All: Aho.


No need to wonder longer if she brought me something home!

Aho!!

Me and Mr. Mouse

There it was. Right in the middle of the stove top. A mouse terd. We have one of them drop-ins. Except for the oven compartment and the stove eye compartment and a drawer at the bottom where we keep some frying pans, there is no cabinet. The cabinet is actually the kitchen cabinets. I pulled the pan drawer open. Just in time to see the little bugger disappear into the darkness. Somewhere into the back reaches of the cabinets where unmentionables are stored. And unmentionables happen. Rats fucking! Nesting!! Vermin!!! Disease spreading!!!! Unknowns happening!!!!! Scarey shit!!!!!!

Having cats around we've never been bothered much by rodents in the house except for the carcusses of the ones they bring in as gifts. Its in their DNA I guess. Just like squirrels do what squirrels do when they store nuts.

But this guy made it past the guard. Had he moved in? I kept an eye out for it for a couple days and then forgot about it. Left a loaf of bread on the counter overnight. Next morning I walked in the kitchen just in time to see the little bugger disappear down one of the eyes. There was a nice neat hole in the corner of the bread wrapper. I didn't mind the missing little bit of bread. Or the minor mess of crumbs. But there was another one right in the middle of the stove top.

Another turd!

I can live with the squirrels dropping turds on the rail of the deck outside. I might even be able to live with most anything as long as its not shitting on my stove! So I put out one of those mouse catchers that was left by the previous house owners. Plunked it right down on the cabinet where the bread had been. Next day, sure enough, the catcher had caught. It was one of those stickie things. Mr Mouse was alive and squirmin. And the more he squirmed the stucker he got.

Then it happened. He caught my eye with his. Or maybe he was a she. I didn't check. But I couldn't look away either. There was a sadness. A hopelessness. A cry for help. A connection between one living thing that was in trouble and another. He'd look up at me. Then down at his little paws mired in the tar. Then back up at me. Somehow this little mouse knew he was toast. I could see it in his face. I swear, I saw tears in his eyes and stream down his little face. I just stood there mesmerized. Taken by his plight which he communicated to me on some level.

Then a wave of compassion moved through me and I thought, maybe I can take him outside and turn him loose. But those stickies grab like magnets. I'd never used one before. He was mired in the tar beyond rescue and I knew it. And I certainly hadn't considered these consequences. Or this reaction. That I couldn't do something that would determine the fate of another living creature and just put it out of mind. That I'd actually have to follow through. Pull the trigger so to speak. Face it. Deal with it. Take it to completion. Consciously.

And it was as if he knew I knew. He even looked sad for me. For my plight too. As if he knew I couldn't help him. As if he knew I hadn't thought the whole thing through. As if he knew I'd learn that it, that he, that life itself, actually mattered to me. That he mattered. That life mattered. That if I had a choice to let him live I'd make it on his behalf. And because I was helpless too he was actually sad for me. Sad for both of us.

And then I realized I was too. It couldn't just end here. I couldn't just leave him squirming on the counter. And I couldn't just pitch him out in the yard stuck and helpless to defend himself. To slowly starve to death. Or become dinner for Mr Hawk. Or Mrs Owl. Not that those kinds of things aren't facts of life as it is. And the perdator would then become victum to the tar too.

One of us had to take action and it was clear who was still capable of action and who was helpless to their fate. And it was clear who was responsible. I'll spare the details but suffice to say the end was quick. And before I did what I had to do... to do for both of us, I told him I was sorry.

Was it just a mouse? Or can the experience be extrapolated to apply to one's principles? To go to the very core of one's being. What is it about life that is so precious? That moves us so? Its a fair question. But even moreso is the question, why can't we hold the value of it present? Why do we have to be reminded in such heart wrenching ways?

Tears. Heartbreak. Besides life itself, one of the most precious of feelings. It serves to remind us of the value of life as a feeling reaction to loosing it.

RIP Mr Mouse. I never thought the whole thing through.

I told Liz about it and she told me the story of her and Mr Mouse. When she was about 7 she had a little mouse. It was her friend. The only friend she had at the time. But it struck her. Somehow the relationship translated into understanding freedom in the mind and heart of a 7 year old. Somehow, in her loneliness, with only a mouse as a friend, she knew she had to set that mouse free. To let go of the only other living thing she could truely connect to unconditionally. And that to keep it in a cage for her own satisfaction, for her own comfort, was conditional.

So she took the little mouse to the park and set it free. Along with a box of corn flakes so it would have something to eat. And she cried. But she said she'd never felt free-er herself. Someone, some wise bird, once said, if you love something, set it free. If it flies back to you, its your's forever.

Was that you Mr. Mouse?

So Who Needs 600 Bucks?

The guy who makes 75 grand or the guy who makes 3 grand?

Probably both is the correcto answer.

But who needs it worse? That otta be a no brainer!

So how come the guy makin only 3 grand only gets 300 bucks?

The Field

Somewhere in a remote pristine monestary perched precariously on the cliffs of a Tibetan mountain side, priests are levitating. Have been for 5000 years.

How do they do it?

Somewhere in the snow, shivering in the snarly entrails of the Black Hills of the Dakotas, sits a young Lakota brave in silent, sensual meditation on his first vision quest.

How's he do it?

While that is going on psyops and black ops weaponry are being developed. Have been. For at least 50 years now and some would double that. One particularly nasty... well hell, they're all nasty... version of these is called the Active Denial System, aka, the pain ray. Appalingly, some find this fortunate! Hopefully, by the time we get to the bottom of this entry, the reader will find a chilling irony in that.

The space between things is NOT empty. and.... the assumption that our inner experiences - what we call thought, feeling, emotion, and belief - have no affect on the world beyond our bodies, is FALSE.

The exact opposite of that is recognized as commonly accepted academic scientific assumption. Has been for years. 300 years.

Academic science is just now starting to agree that the space between things and inner experiences are in play and influence outside events. Go check it out for yourselves. Now they're wondering what the hell to do with it. The boogie man has not only figured out what to do with it, they are doing it. In every way other than life sustaining. And don't even think about loving.

Journal, Nature, vol 326, aug, 1986, pg 590... "Silvertooth, under the auspices of the UNITED STATES AIR FORCE (emphasis added) reproduced the nearly 100 year old experiments done by Michelson and Moreley.

Though the M-M experiments were considered a failure even by M-M and the specific force they were attempting to measure became regarded as a superceeded scientific theory, the parameters of the experiment became a protocol for further research including that of Earnest Silvertooth.

"The results of his (Silvertooth's) experiment show that there is in fact a field of energy that connects everything in our world and the field was found to exist within the same parameters predicted 100 years earlier by Michaelson and Moreley." Quote, Greg Baden.

But don't take ole Silver Tongue's word for it. Or was that Silvertooth? Or Baden's...

Silvertooth's Experiment:

In a 1986 letter to Nature[42] Ernest W. Silvertooth reported that he constructed an interferometer capable of detecting the absolute motion of the Earth with respect to the ether. In Experimental detection of the ether[43] and Motion through the Ether[44], Silvertooth reported that on the particular day of his measurements, the Earth moved at 378 km/s towards the constellation Leo. If relativity is correct, than this result should be complete garbage.

Silvertooth published his findings before NASA launched COBE, the first satellite to accurately measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Due to Doppler shift, there is a slight anisotropy in the spectrum of the CMB. Based on precise measurements of this anisotropy, it was determined that, relative to the CMB, the heliocentric frame moves at 390 km/s towards Leo. Given the earth's orbital speed of 30 km/s, this is a very good agreement with Silvertooth's measurement. In a refined experiment[45], Silvertooth and Whitney confirmed the earlier result and found a speed of v = 378 km/s.

A citation search through ISI Web of Science[47] reveals no references to any of Silvertooth's papers in the mainstream scientific literature. An online document[46] briefly mentions and dismisses it on the grounds that both the experiment and the theoretical analysis are flawed, but given how well Silvertooth's result agrees with the independently determined motion of the Earth through the CMB, error seems to be an insufficient explanation. Unless Silvertooth committed outright fraud by simply making a lucky guess as to the Earth's velocity relative to the CMB and then ascribing this guess to an imaginary experiment, the inescapable conclusion would be that translation can be measured by purely electromagnetic means and that Einstein's theory of special relativity is falsified.

So while monks levitated and mainstream went nowhere in a pissin contest about what's science and what's pseodoscience and what's bullshit, the Air Force, et al, saw opportunity. Now we're all seeing the results. Ain't we the shit man!!!

Who put the field there? That's sure to feed another pissin contest... the one about who's God put it there.

I got news for all of em... the field IS God.

Oh c'mon, how can that be? How can something so majestic get so twisted up, so fucked up, so monstrous, and being used in such evil ways, have anything to do with God?

Well, let me ask you this... what do you 'spose god in a state of denial might look and act like?

Insanity Runs Amuk

Now here's some scary chit!! This is kinda sorta about Britney Spears and she's someone I wouldn't waste my time writing about. But its actually more about Dr Phil. He's the guru millions tune in to on a dialy basis to hang their sanity on. And people's sanity is worth writing about.

Here's the chain of events. Spears, after a judge takes her kids away from her, ends up on a stretcher on full watch on a psyc ward. Dr Phil shows up to do a show. The hospital lets him in. Everybody goes nutzo and the Doktar defends hisself by saying the family asked for his help. And apparently in the format of doing a show around the whole thing.

Now I ask you, fucked up as Spears is, whats the chance she came from a family system just as fucked up? Whats really scary here is that the Dok didn't consider this. Here's a guy who advises millions on a daily basis and is held in high regard as being, not only sane but, enlightened enough to advise and guide others in that general direction. And this guy goes to do a show on Spears? What the fuck besides a twisted up mind fuck would do a thing like that?

Okay, give the Dok a break you say? The network and the show's producers, seeing this as an opportunity to blow the lid off late afternoon ratings and their advertizing revenues reacting accordingly, pressured the good Dok into it.

Maybe.

But good Docs draw the line when sanity is at stake.

Frankly, the sanity of everybody involved is in question. Spears for sure. Her family. The hospital. The network and the show. The Dok. The millions of viewers who watch this fuck on a daily basis. Public teevee who has him on all the time during their fund drives. Anybody who suppports him. And, argueably, even me for writing about it.

Christmas In Fallujah And No One Gives a Damn

It takes something earth shattering to get me to post anymore. Such just happened.I'm saddened. I awake to learn that Dan Fogelberg is dead. The original rock era did more to change the course of music than any other genre in human history. Proof positive for having lived in special times. Fogleberg was as much a part of that as anyone.

Such takes more than talent. It takes vision.

And balls.

Balls to, as Richard Ouzounian, entertainment reporter for the Star, put it... grab the right moment or spend the rest of one’s life regretting it. Balls to manifest a dream and say in song what no one else can or will say. He was a part of the 64 years that make up my reality. The older one gets the more of one's reality meets mortality. Comes with the program I guess. As Springsteen wrote... you get so sick of the fightin', you lose you fear of the end.


Some find comfort in knowing that, with death comes birth. So, to that crutch, I lean for some support and comfort in my sadness. But who gives a damn?

Birth.

Renewal.

It can come in many forms. Billy Joel, out on tour, takes Cass Dillon with him. I'm a long time Piano Man fan. Another rock of that original rock era and that reality of mine. But I must admit, Dillon is a new one on me. PDG talent I must say too. There's alot of PDG talent out there that I've missed along the way. That too comes with the program of gettin old I guess. But who gives a damn?

I'm constantly amazed at the syncronicities life brings. Someone sent me a link to the Troubled Texan Weblog. Right below the Lindsey Williams vid they wanted me to take a look at was a vid of Cass Dillon's, Christmas in Fallujah And No One Gives A Damn performance with Joel. Being a fan of Joel led me to click the link which led me to Dillon.

I love it when an oldtimer like Joel reaches a hand to an up-and-comer like Dillon. They recognize the talent and potential and mentor. Even though they had their heroes, that seldom happened for them. They were breaking new ground. New sounds. A whole new paradigm. Thats what sets them apart from all the rest. I love what they did and I hate to see them go.

Yesterday morning, another one fell.

So I'm watching this vid and thinking, man, this guy sure reminds me of Fogelberg. The face, the hair, the style, the voice, the body language. And the song. And, as life's enigmas will have it, while I'm watching Dillon do this song I notice a headline off to the side of the page... a link to Bluedaze and the headline... "dan fogelberg died today".

But who gives a damn?

Ouzounian put it best...

The troubador of might-have-been has sung his final song. Dan Fogelberg, the singer-songwriter whose melodies about feelings kept unspoken and loves left unrequited touched the hearts of a generation, died yesterday morning at the age of 56.

A generation. My generation.

Melodies about feelings kept unspoken and loves left unrequited. My feelings. My loves. Our feelings. Our loves.

One troubador dead and another born. Born to say what is left unspoken. In this case, about Christmas in Fallujah. But who gives a damn?

A BED NEAR THE WINDOW?

This is not really a sanity test. It's a test to determine if you have been in the public school system which, for the purpose of social control, gets people in the mode of following suggestions instead of thinking for themselves.


During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director "How do you determine whether or not a patient should be institutionalized"

"Well," said the Director, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," said the visitor. "A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."

"No." said the Director, "A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?"

ARE YOU GOING TO PASS THIS ON, OR DO YOU WANT THE BED NEXT TO MINE?

Catch A Falling Star And....

Stardust... go see it!

God's Warriors

Who's gonna get to God first? And what's gotta happen to get there?

I'm not a big fan of CNN's Christiane Amanpour. I've found some of her latest work around our current fiasco skewed. But she's got her chit together on this one if the first leg of her God's Warriors trilogy is any measure of what's yet to come.

I just finished viewing God's Jewish Warriors. Excellent! Tomorrow night, God's Muslim Warriors. Two seperate shows but you can't do a show on one without it being about the other as well. Tomorrow night will be no exception.

Jews are killin Muslims.

Muslims are killin Jews.

Friday night comes God's Christian Warriors. Its gonna to be interesting to see if Amanpour connects the dots and shows her viewers the real reason our ass is deep in the middle east...

Religous War!! We're there because we're part of it. And hell, God's on our side right? Just ask Dubbya. I doubt we'll see any clips of him tellin us the real reason. We're gonna get some pretty twisted fuckers tellin us who's really runnin for pres in 08. And why this country's literally gone to hell. But will we see the real agenda?

Jews, Muslims, Christians. Torah, Koran, Bible.

Ancient imprints playing out their various "ITS GOD'S WILL" interpretions and whatever's required to happen according to their prophesies for their version of their messiah to return, open the gates, and redeem them to the promised land.

The last segment of tonight's show was about the Jewish civil war. I expect we'll see the Muslim version in tomorrow night's show too. Both are about war and peace and the war is the war for God.

Jews are killin Jews.

Muslims are killin Muslims.

Christians killin Christians?

This country's certainly polarized enough to fight over. And the only thing more polarizing and highly charged emotionally than politics is Jesus! We just ain't in the streets killing each other over it.

Yet.

Momma's Movin'

I've been watching the USGS website for years now... the page where they watch Earthquakes of Magnitude 2.5 or Greater in the United States and Adjacent Areas and Magnitude 4.0 or Greater in the Rest of the World in the last 7 days.

My record of vigilence isn't perfect. But I look often enough that not many days in those years are left to mystery. Unfortunately I can't find an archive on the site. From time to time I journal the activity onto a calandar. At other times I just look and count. Thus I've got a pretty good read on daily averages over these years.

We just set a record! 83 shakers reported on the list 2 days ago. An average day would be in the low 20's. Ranges typically run from low teens on the low end to the low 30's on the high end. Over 70 of the 83 were in the same area of the big island of Hawaii. Most between 2.5 and 3. Its slowed down as of yesterday and so far today. But its still movin.

Thats just the list of the +2.5's. Theses are scattered 'mongst a whole lot more minors. Most are located between Pauahi and Makaopuhi craters at depths of about 1.5-3 km. About 10 to 15 small earthquakes per hour are being recorded in this area compared to more than about 100 per hour Sunday morning. Seismicity in the summit area consists of strong tremor.

More than a hundred per hour? Holy buckets!!!

Swarms like these are not that uncommon. I monitor other sites like Global Disaster Watch or Earth Changes TV to find reports of them because the USGS site only lists activity of 2.5 or greater and generally the differentiated events that collectively make up swarms are of lesser magnitude. Thats why this current swarm on the big island has the attention of the experts... the high number of 2.5+ activity.

And...

Craters?

The experts who study earthquake events are more and more connecting dots between shakers and volcanic activity. So it is on the big island....

GPS receivers in the area of most intense seismic activity continue to show widening across the rift zone in near Makaopuhi crater; preliminary data indicate widening of more than 40 cm (15 inches). A tiltmeter on Pu`u `O`o is also showing steady deflation.

Intermittent faint glow is only occasionally visible from the East Pond vent in the crater of Pu`u ``O`o, much less than is typical of the crater. On Sunday afternoon, HVO observers noted many rockfalls from the south wall of Pu`u `O`o cone and collapse of the crater floor around the vents. The lava level in East Pond vent dropped several meters in late morning.

All data indicate that an intrusion of magma started in the Mauna Ulu area early Sunday morning and moved slowly 5 km (3 miles) east along the rift zone during the day. The intrusion is continuing at this time.

Nauna Ulu has been putting on a show showhtml since 1984

Kilauea is also involved Pu`u `O`o is part of it.

Normally we could get a real time gander at the going's on.

But guess what? Current images are NOT AVAILABLE. Officially the continuously updated images have been "interrupted in order to do maintenance on the USGS web servers".

We'll see.

Or will we?

More Wisdom From The Wiseman

Taa Daa!!

Today we have a guest commentator. He doesn't know it but thats okay. The energies of the universe upon which poetic license sing shall judge the borrowing just since we give him full credit and disclosure.

And... because those same energies know!

Know what?

Know that he asks the questions that must be asked!

Thats what!!

So let me introduce to you my cyber friend, Montana Freeman.

A few weeks back i posted an entry called The Three Wise Men. The three wisemen referred to were Montana Freeman, Pogo, and Carl Jung.

The same Montana Freeman.

Montana Freeman, better known as MF to all of us who hang around the warmth of the council fires over on the Real Deal blog, is an elder of our native American brothers and sisters.

Featered in this entry is a comment he posted today to the current Real Deal topic. In it he poses some powerfully wise questions.

So where's the wisdom in posing questions you ask?

Perhaps you thought wisdom could only be found in answers. But hell... if we don't ask the hard questions in the fuckin' first place, how are we ever to find the answers?

Personally I find his comment to be directly speaking to exactly what this blog, the Unseen Role of Denial, is all about.

Here, word for word, are his comment and questions...

the unraveling of our most profound and beautiful Mother Earth brings one to question the most basic nature of mankind, which to me appears to be this, we are sleep walkers,the awareness of our own existence is lost do to the toxic nature of our unatural environment, which to me includes almost everything.

The deep psychological sickness that pervades the minds of the two leggeds is almost unbelievable, and would be laughable if it were a joke to be told at a council fire,however this is not to be, at least not yet.

The pure and unadulterated destruction of our home is an accident?

I watch my blood brother in the last stages of cancer and the daily progress of his existence which includes cigarettes, alcohol and some times a little processed food that i would not feed to a hog. Now this is a person who when tested scores in the top ten percentile of the folks on this planet, what happened to him and continues to this day is exactly a microcosm of what is happening to the world, is it not? or close enough, and as i watch him choose.? to die of this horrible disease amid an enviroment that approximates one of the most cleanest and purest places available on this earth,..i have to wander, is this not suicide? When cure is available and is tossed aside?

What on gods green earth will change this?

He speaks and says he is not afraid of death, so is he afraid of life? Is his life so filled with fear that death by the conscious polluting of his sacred body preferable to healing that which makes us sick?

To me this is the crux of our dilemma,we know we are killing our individual bodies and that knowledge bleeds over into the uncaring way we treat our mother.

i am not saying this from a soap box, and have no room to criticise, having been a smoker of tobacco for 18 years and a drunk for many many years and only recently pulled away from all the poison that surrounds me, which in itself is no mean feat,this also has the bonus of seeing things in a different light, of actually being able to feel the earth beneath my bare feet and being able to appreciate drinking water that has not been methodically poisoned by the hand of man,and learning to live in harmony with our mother,whom wants nothing more from us (my opinion) then to enjoy the bounty of her creation.

So this leads me to wonder, what in the fuck happened to us?

Suicide, (the act of intentionally taking one's own life;act of destroying one's own interests;one who commits suicide)

i would love to hear from someone at this council about how to repair that which has been done, either to us or by us and will make us wholesome human beings, walking this earth with love in our hearts for all living things including our selfs of course.

i feel the spring rain falling lightly on my face and the milk of mother earth softens the sharpness of life.Peace my brothers and sisters,may this day bring you love.

aho

mf

Powerful questions indeed!

Thankyou MF

Three Chords And The Truth

Three chords and the truth. That was how Harlan Howard, the hands-down dean of country music songwriters, defined country music. It wasn't his intent to define his own writing that way. But. nevertheless, it did.

That was thirty years ago and ever since hundreds have borrowed or stole that hook line to further their own agendas. Up until today the latest was Sara Evans who used it as the title cut for her highly acclaimed, freshman CD.

Today I'm stealing it to pen this entry.

The truth...

LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36th president of the United States, WAS THE LEAD PLAYER IN THE ASSINATION OF JFK, John Fitsgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States on November, 23, 1963!

It was likely sanctioned by powers greater than he lurking behind the scenes. But he was the primary force.

The operative workd here is COUP.

The chords were the operatives carrying out the agenda.

The three chords...

CORD MEYER>>>DAVID MORALES>>>FRENCH GUNMAN GRASSY KNOLL!!

There are minor chords that spin off the majors...

Cord Meyer (ironic name eh?)>>>Bill Harvey

Who's the Harlan Howard? The author? The tell-all teller of the truth?

E. HOWARD HUNT.

Harlan Howard. Howard Hunt. Another irony eh?

Who's E Howard Hunt?

E Howard Hunt. was a CIA operative known most widely as leader of the plumbers of Watergate fame. 3 years before Hunt died in Jan at the cursty old age of 88, he sat sat up in his sickbed, put pen to pad, and laid down the truth. At the top of the page he wrote "LBJ". Then drew a down arrow and wrote "Cord Meyer". According to Hunt, Meyer was an easy mark. His wife, the former Mary Pinchot, was one of JFK's favorite mistresses. Not only did they share the bed, they shared the bowl. Pinchot Meyer was murdered less than a year after JFK.

Below Meyer another down arrow. Then, "David Morales".

Then another down arrow and below that, "French Gunman Grassy Knoll".

To the right of Meyer was another arrow connecting to the name Bill Harvey.

Meyer, Morales, and Harvey are former CIA operatives and pop up midst various conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy killing. Presumably the French gunman is the Corsican Mafia assassin Lucien Sarti, who has figured prominently in assassination theories as well.

It is also widely held that Hunt was indeed one of the famed three "tramps" intercepted, detained, photographed and released without arrest or charges near the grassy knoll at the Dealy Plaza scene of the assassination of Kennedy.

How do we know all this? Hunt's eldest son, Saint John, has the goodies. Obtained from his father and reported by Eric Hedgegaard in the March 07 edition of Rolling Stone Rolling Stone.

Read the Rolling Stone article. It tells Saint John's story who is telling his dad's story. Listen to what his dad said in a tape he sent to his son. View a copy of the paper upon which his dad connected the dots of the major players.

Read in St John's story in the RS article of how he came to suspect many years ago that his father was involved. The epiphany was the photo of the 3 tramps. "Nobody has features like my father. I'm his son. That's him!" Read how he tells of helping his dad wipe fingerprints from microphones and walkie talkies and various other articles of espianage in the middle of the night and then, following his father's instruction, "got rid of it". And the 100 grand he ran for him. And the typewriter thrown in the lake for him. All this in the wake of Watergate investigations. The article reports there is another hand written document by E Howard with more details and names.

In the wake of the RS publication St John was contacted by 60 Minutes. A meeting was had in San Francisco between he and an executive producer. He told the producer the whole story, showed him the documents and played the tape for him. Producer flew back to New York where the network's investivative team had both the handwriting and the voice print annalyzed by independent experts which concluded beyond a doubt that the author was indeed E Howard Hunt. The excited producer contacted St John. He said everything had checked out, said this was a major story, and promised a piece would be done. That has never happened and St John's querries to CBS are being ignored.

Nowhere in mainstream media will you find anything about this bombshell. But there is a re-newed effort going on to reinforce the Oswald-lone-assasin conclusion. Most notable is recent documentary by the Discovery Channel and a new book by Vincent Bugliosi of Helter Skelter fame. Bugliosi was on one of those radio talk shows recently and the interviewer told him about the tape. Bugliosi said he doubted such a tape existed. The interviewer just happened to have a copy all cued up and played it for Bugliosi.

Bugliosi's response? "Saint John Hunt is not a credible source."

Those words are being reiterated by anyone who is presented with the tape who has some unseen interest in furthering the lone assasination theory. If you read the Stone interview you know Saint John Hunt was a meth addict and dealer for 20 years. Arrested for it too. At least twice. So certainly his past is shady and can lead one to question his credibility.

BUT.....

Is it his voice on the tape? Is it his handwriting on the papers?

HELL NO!

So his credibility is a moot issue.

Just what is going on here? Think about it. Can the psyche deal with the reality? That a president could be so evil and power hungry that he would have his predicessor killed on live TV in front of the whole nation? Is this why so many people can't see the current president for what he really is?

St John was interviewed on Coast2Coast AM and I listened to the archived edition last night. I told my Dear Wife (DW) about the tape, the papers, and the RS article. I played her part of the interview. It literally threw her into a tizzie. She got heavily triggered by it and couldn't even listen to the tape (which they played during the interview) until she'd moved some through the initial triggers.

It'd triggered me too but not to the extent that it triggered DW. I was listening to the radio when the shots rang out. The moment is burned into my psyche. I still vividly remember exactly what I was doing and where I was at the time. It was a traumatic event. I've witnessed years of analysis both official and unofficial. I've done a ton of reading through the years. I highly suspected from the beginning that there were sinister forces involved and it was highly likely LBJ was involved.

I also highly suspected that LBJ, like many of our so-called leaders, was an operative in service to hidden, yet extremly powerful, forces that controlled him and us then, and control us still today. Why else would a good-ole-boy, street fighter, who had attained the highest political position in the nation, step down unless he was clandestinly forced to?

Viet Nam you say. He showed deep concern for what was happening in Viet Nam as witnessed by this photo . He's in the oval office listening to a taped intel report on the war. The implication is he is agonizing about the dire situation there. Good argument on the surface. He'd thought he would go in, kick ass, and come home. Sound hauntingly familar? Things weren't goin so well for the big guy from Texas by this time and then, it got even worse.

Beyond the agony of the moment was a guy who murdered to get to the chair in which he agonized. And on the way he muscled his way to the top. Then Kennedy pulled the rug out from under him when he won the nomination in 1960. JFK selects him as running mate and they win. Did JFK have reservations? Probably! But Kennedy needed Johnson's help in the south and his ties to Jewish Americans' (brokering Israel's want for the bomb at the time) influence on the Jewish vote.

2nd in command is not what Johnson had lied, cheated, snaked, muscled, raped, clawed, bought, stole, kissed ass, and sucked dick his way to the top to settle for. Kennedy was highly likely to be re-elected in 64. That meant LBJ had to wait 'til 68 to run. He'd be 60 then. And, though he couldn't know it at the time, he'd be dead 5 years later.

Could he wait? Could he discredit his nemesis without discrediting his party in the process? Get rid of the beastie baby without sacrificing the holy bath water? Could he stand in the darkness of the wings that long? Subordinate to the man he hated with all his passion? He was far from alone in that hatred. There were many in positions of power who hated Kennedy for myriad reasons but mostly because he was in power and hugely popular with the people. Camelot was here to stay and Camelot was anything but their idea of utopia.

What was he really agonizing about beyond that picture? No way was he about to step down. Despite public oppsition to the war he was still polling well. He'd railroaded and muscled in a ton of legislation, like the Civil Rights Act,.that had majority of public support. And suddenly, he quits. Just like that. I seriously doubt, not even for one fleeting second, that Viet Nam was the reason.

Kennedy's killing was a traumatic event for this nation too and has remained such throughout nearly 44 years now. Not to mention that of his brother and MLK. Many hold the official story to be false. Many hold open the possibility the hit was made by sinister forces other than Oswald and some even hold to the idea that these forces were our own leaders and/or those who control them behind the sceenes. We hold open to it for various reasons not the least of which is an incredible mountain of circumstancial evidence.

But nobody knew for sure. Nobody had the smoking gun. If they did, they weren't talking. E Howard Hunt handed it to us. And his son has gotten a number of emails and contact from others "in the know" who, "off the record," confirm what Hunt said and wrote in his own hand.

We can deal with maybe's. We can deal with circumstantial evidence. We can deal with half-truths. We can deal with lies. We can even find ways to deal with life in the wake of traumatic events like the JFK assasination or 9/11.

But, confronted with the un-deniable truth that agents on our own side conspired to carry out a coup including the killing of a sitting president, we go wacko! We just can't fathom it and we can dream up all sorts of ways to dispel or twist or question the reality and explain the evidence away.

This is one way how denial works. We find ways to deny the un-deniable. And this is one way why its so easy to get away with the horrid truth.

Psychologists call it a defense mechanism. There is truth to that.

But which truth is more improtant? Which truth has us by the short hairs in the long run... in the grand scheme of things? The truth of a defense mechanism developed and honed to perfection to protect us from the reality of what we interpret to be unsurvivable truth? Or the truth of the reality of what has actually happened?

Which one sustains life in the long haul and which one leads to inevitable death? And which one leads us to being controlled by others?

Think about it.

Pigs In Space

To anyone who went with me on my vicarious Memorial Day paddlin trip, thanks for coming along. Hope you had as much fun as I did.

Paddlers can come up with the strangest names for rapids eh? Wooton's Folly, Diamond Spliter, Table Saw, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Paddle some of 'em and you can see how the name came to be. For others you have to be familar with the particulars which usually involved not so pleasant experience by some unfortunate paddler. There's Broken Nose on the Ocoee. Jerrod's Knee and Reeders Rock on the Tellico.

A few are enegmatic. Nobody knows where it came from or who named it. Such is the case of a rapid called Pigs in Space on the Little River IN The Park near Gattlinberg. I've seen it but never had occasion to paddle it. It was in flood the day I saw it and there ain't nothin there to associate the name with the rapid. Speculation is that it came because you had to be crazy to paddle it or maybe on whatever the Beatles were on when they wrote Lucy In the Shy With Diamonds.

Its a popsicle licker and an ass kicker all at the same time. Here's a look.

And thats just the first drop.

Then again it coulda just been the experience itself and the namer was as straight as a razor-drawn line of cocaine. I've been on trips that do that to you and you need no help from Doctor Feelgood.

So this entry is about pigs in space. But its got nothing to do with paddlin. We're going on a different trip here.

Its more about pigs in hell actually.

I grew up on a farm in Iowa. Today farming is a bid'ness. Back then it was survival. We rotated crops, grew huge gardens, and kept livestock for food and market. Our primary stock was a beef cow heard, hogs, and chickens. When you're raised around animals you get exposed to things and you end up with a ton of stories to tell. Sometimes those things can be very disturbing.

The most disturbing thing to me were certain brood sows that would snap and eat their young or most of them. It was not uncommon. Sometimes it happened over night when none of the other sows were farrowing so we weren't keeping tabs. We'd go to bed with 9 in the litter and wake up with 3 left. Sometimes we'd catch em in the act.

There were 8 of us in the family and everyone was in 4-H except mom. They teach you all about keeping records in 4-H. We lost track of the ID on one once. Next farrow nothing happened in the brood.

There was another reason to give them amnesty. The smart money said they knew what they were doing and this was their way of reducing the size of the litter to what they knew to be a managable number for them under the current circumstances and for the betterment of the rest of the litter. A kinda morbid twist in the survival of the fittest game.

So early on we gave them 2 chances. More often that not the same thing would happen next litter. Two strikes and your out. We'd cull em out and send em to market.

The smart money wasn't looking into those crazed eyes while they were in this so-called twist of a so-called benevolent and alturistic act. The madness wasn't limited to the eyes. You can get to know your animals pretty well. Know who's stubborn about what, who needs a special kind of attention or approach, who's a good mother to her young, and so on. 30 brood sows and their offspring from farrow to market is what we were set up for so it wasn't that hard to keep track of em. A sow might check off as a good mother through 3 litters and then go bat-shit crazy with the 4th. It is not a pretty picture to watch 'em tearing their stalls apart to get to the babies to tear them apart. And it can be very dangerous to intervene.

If the smart guys were right I'da thought it would be more like communion. At least a somber occasion and mom ought to at least look sad about it.

But hell no. I could describe it but I think you get my drift.

Just a state they put themselves in so they could do the deed?

Maybe. But how 'bout this....

Years later I might be watchin a TV report about somebody going nuts and offing a buncha people. Friends and relatives of the perp would say... "he was a nice guy, a looner but he seemed harmless enough... he musta just snapped."

I knew exactly what they meant by "snapped" cuz I'd watched those sows do it.

I know what you're gonna say... "Wait a minute here. Pigs are pigs and people are people. One has got nothin to do with the other!"

Oh really? Why do they both go mad then?

I disagree. I know a little of what lurks in the shadows from my own healing work and after 20 years of study I've got a little deeper understanding of what I think happens. Something threatening triggers some dark, deeply held issue in the survival chakra in a very twisted way. A demon comes out and the limbric brain takes over. The details are illusive and sketchy and the best one can do really is speculate unless you're dealing with your own demons, your own shadow, your own experiences, your own sinister inclinations.

The shadow. The sub-conscious.

That deep, dark, irrational place where consciousness dare not venture and everything unacceptable lurks. There can be good stuff down there too as we found out last weekend. As long as we can keep the evil shit held down, it stays down. But somethimes an event will happen and trigger it and it surfaces before consciousness knows it. What was conscious and in control seems to go unconscious and what was unconscious becomes conscious, takes over, and runs rampent acting out what's held there.

Where'd those demons come from? They just blow in on the wind like some like some bad seed? Or where they there all the time lurkin in the shadows?

Whatever this is its not limited to the shadows either. There is some pretty twisted consciousness too. A henious crime is committed and the perp is found to be a psychopathic killer. Planning everything in bizarre ways with conscious intent. It might be maniacal but its still conscious.

Study it and its looks like the perp is operating on some very twisted wiring or imprint in a sick, obsessive way.

How is this killer different than the obsession to drink alcohol I delt with for 27 years other than the way it manifested and I didn't kill anybody? But I was certainly killing myself veeery slooooolly. How is he different than the one that just snapped and went on a rampage? How is he different from pigs in hell? The mama sow who goes berzerk and eats her young in a crazed state?

Or.....

How are we the same?

And.....

How do we find out?

What Makes Love Stay

I'm pining! Its Memorial Day weekend and I'M PINING!! Stuck here in the office by un-welcome work-related problems I'm gazing out the window at my boats stacked up under the trees. Dry!

They're pining too. To get wet! I can feel it.

I stare out at them. They stare back.

Back in my old paddlin days this was the weekend to paddle the Nolichucky which falls off the north slope of Flattop Mountain in western North Carolina and splashes into Tennessee.

Crashes is a better word. With a vengence!

Thats coal country and there's a line on river left where 40 thousand horses on wheels strain to jerk the stuff out of that awesome gorge, 100 carloads at a time. The energies of the river's class 3 and 4 rapids and the screamiong iron horses combine with the paddler's own and it all adds up to one hell-of-a gig.

Sorta like Godzilla on steroids!!

The best thoses boats and I are gonna get today is a paddlin' trip by proxy. So I reach way back in the archives to an essay I wrote back in the early 90's. This won't be the first vicarous paddlin trip I've been on. I was on one the day I wrote this.

But the trips that inspired it? Hey, most of 'em happened just like I told 'em.

We couldn't know it at the time but, compared to today, it was a time of innocence. And, with things like the Berlin wall coming down, promise.

Hell, we're all connected up anyway. So you might as well see where we've been. And we might even learn somethin 'bout things like curiosity and maybe even about what makes love stay along the way. So, won't you join me?

C'mon, let's paddle!!

WHAT MAKES LOVE STAY

I love them both as brothers. But, to me, they've always been about as different as night and day. And they'd gone to the mighty Grand Canyon at different times too to challenge that granddaddy of whitewater paddling, the Colorado River. O.C. Merritt went first in his canoe in July followed by John Hiscox in his kayak later on in September. The latter is a wimp by certain questionable paddling standards because he likes his boats with lids on them while the former likes his just like he likes his women... TOPLESS! The standards referred to are only held by the open boat community and are of course questioned by anyone in the paddling community who paddles anything but an open canoe.

I'd asked each of them at separate times about how IT was and so it wasn't a case of one of them saying, "this is the was it was" while the other nodded in agreement. No-sir-eee!!! All I had to say was, "tell me about it" and they each went into some sort of mystical stupor as if they had been bainwashed by the same guru. The tone in each of their voices was the same as was the gleam in their eyes and their body language was a mirror of one another. The Colorado had cast its spell on these boys dressed up in middle-age bodies and now they were so much one like the other that they were the same except for their seperateness.

I mean even the descriptions were almost word for word... "you look downstream at one of those major rapids like Crystal and it's impossible to comprehend you're about to float through that. Then you do it and afterwards, when you come down enough to see through the adrenalin rush, you look back upstream at what you've just floated through and it's impossible to comprehend that you were in that! You had to pinch yourself to try to keep yourself from falling into believing it was all just a dream and even then...."

And so, there I was pinching myself while looking out a cabin window of a 727 as it flew me toward a visit back home. Out and down through five miles of November and toward somewhere in east central Tennessee. Naked hardwood forests got lost in a sea of evergreen spread out over a bunch of bumps and lumps that went on and on except for its all being surrounded by oblivion and broken by a grayish looking ribbon that rambled on and on, seemingly with no method to its meandering except that it was all sort of cradled by and held together within the depressions running amongst the lumps and bumps scattered throughout the forests that would cause it to loop around in giant horseshoe fashion and almost run into itself before it would amble off in another direction. with another depression in mind.

Like the hammer finding the nail, it struck me--"That's the Tennessee River!" Down there was the sum total of the Tennesse Valley watershed. The creeks and rivers of a hundred counties spread out over seven states. Familiar ones began echoing through the halls and bouncing off the walls of my mind as it drifted back in time and I felt the breath of an Indian maiden calling me back to the cool clear Hiawassee and Canoe Schools and, "what's an eddy turn, anyway???" And friendships found and a love lost and connectedness cued by curiosity and a full moon rising behind a black lace tree and imagination whetted by legend and local folks doing what local folk do best... which is to mess with the foreigners every chance they get.

Around the Hiawassee paddlers or anybody from anywhere but Polk County, Tennessee are considered a foreigner by the locals. I walked out of Webb Brothers' General Store late one afternoon as a pair of them were crawling out of a battered old fleetside pickup. Even though it was July and hotter'n a grizzly in heat, the two were dressed in Osh Kosh B' Gosh pulled up over flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up just above their elbows and caps... baseball type sky-pieces!

One was worn backwards like a catcher chasing a pop-up and read, "My wife said next time I go fishin', she's gonna leave me. I sure am gonna miss her".

The other, worn missionary style said, "I chew Redman and I'll spit in your eye". Coffee colored chew juice gave credence to the warning as it oozed out from a straggle-toothed grin and chased a crease connecting the grin to a chin.

"Me no Injun", I mumbled as I walked past them toward the parking lot with hands up, surrender style.

"Huh?", the local with the Redman cap puzzled.

I turned to ask, "been fishin' or goin'?" ...it was a question posed out of peripheral curiosity.

"That ain't bait back in the back!", came the reply from the other one.

I looked past him and his answer to a battered old jon boat with fishing poles poking out over it's sides that was tied up in the back of the battered old fleetside. The poles were the cheap sort that come already put together and stapled on a card wrapped in cellophane with a Zebco 202 reel, a full load of ten pound test line, and a picture of a fisherman standing full-wader deep in a stream with a smile planted on his face, the rod and reel reared back with both hands over his shoulder and bent in obvious big-fish-on-the-other-end fashion followed by it's line disappearing into the depths before him. I could have turned around, walked back inside, and ole Webb could have sold me one for a dollar-two-eighty exactly alike except for one thing...

HEX NUTS!

They'd tied hex nuts to the lines for sinkers!!

The jon boat was as wide as the truck bed was wide inside to inside so the outside of the boat touched the inside of the truck on both sides at the back by the tailgate and was pulled forward by a rope as far as it could be pulled into the truck so the bow of the boat touched the front of the bed but the stern hung out the back because the boat was longer than the truck bed even with the tailgate down where it was even wider than the truck and there, right there in the widest part of the boat and beginning just above one gunwale and extending down the inwale to the bottom and across the wide, flat bottom to the other side and up the other inwale to where it poked up above the other gunwale, was the biggest damn catfish I'd ever seen! And in the middle of the boat, placed upside down between the two seats, in its most stable riding position, was a wheelbarrow of contractor proportion complete with dried up cement cleaving to its sides but with its wheel askewed because the wooden undercarriage, which is also the frame for the wheel, was freshly trashed and, along with the shinny new scrapes, scratches, and dents, tipped me off that the whole thing had been in an obviously recent wreck. Paint chips littered the bottom of the boat and new ones went flying blasting dried up cement into puffs of dust as Redman pulled his heavy frame up onto the step of the stepside and sat down on the side rail in cocky anticipation.

"Nice fish!", I said.

"Fair ta middlin", Redman said.

"What's the wheelbarrow for," I asked the other one who, by this time, had worked his way around to the back and was leaning on an old splintered 2x6 c-clamped to the stern and straddling the cat with a 180 degree grin.

"Brang this hare fish out," he said, as if the answer ought to be obvious.

"Bring the fish out," I asked, with what was by now puzzled curiosity.

"Yep. we fish a spot bes' got ta by walkin' the right-way in 'long the river," he said as if that ought to make perfectly good sense to anybody including a foreigner.

"So?" I said.

"So we left the wheelbarra with the fish in it on the tracks while we went back ta get the boat and a freight hit it."

"Oooooohhhh-kay.... well gosh, it sure tore hell otta your wheelbarrow eh?"

"Yep! But that ain't nothin' next ta the mess that there train made when it derailed..."

.....

The Ocoee: 1200 cubic feet of water crashing down every second from atop a 30 degree, 30 foot tall earthen dam. They call the dam Snow White. How appropriate!! Wnen the water rolls over it and down that bumpy face it looks like its covered with snow. A gigantic high-powered water pistol with a four mile range and a lake for ammunition! A powerful combination and the connected confusion that comprises the first rapid it shadows is known to paddlers as The Seven Dwarfs. I wonder what might happen if I throw a handful of beans out the window of the 727... or, maybe, someone already had!

It had happened two years ago last fall when I had occasion to paddle the Ocoee's "Surge" for the first time. Perhaps it was one of those mysterious, enigmatic moments like whatever happens with de-ja-vu. Perhaps it was just my imagination, fueled by the combination of birth and death and the emotions of each so enmeshed in one another, playing tricks on me. My excitement over the birth of a river all around and under me as I paddled along mixed with grief over the loss of my dear friend Jay Hall who'd been killed on a gray, drizzly morning just two Saturdays earlier. He had been on his way to this same river when a low-boy trailer, painted the same color as that drizzling morning, came loose from the hitch of a dump truck and caromed across the high-weeded median of Interstate 575 crashing head-on into his pickup. He never knew what hit him.

For weeks after the accident my dreams were filled with lowboy trailers coming head-on at me out of shadows. Wake time was filled with paranoia whenever I'd get behind the wheel of my truck. Mortality became reality. I miss Jay and think of him often. He treated everyone like they were the most important person in his life. He could love people for who they were and he did just that whether you wanted to let him or not. But what made him so special was he could do that without invading your space... without smothering you. He had an intuitive way of going about allowing folks to be themselves. He simply loved people and he loved life. Everyone who knew him knows how he loved the rivers too, especially the Ocoee river, and in particular, it's Table Saw and Witches Hole rapids. Perhaps his love has now turned to legacy... an energy to be carried along in the hearts of each of us who paddle the rivers. Perhaps it was that energy that made that particular trip so special.

That Saturday started out like most any other fall day at dawn in the east Tennessee mountains, shrouded in a wet, dripping, chilly, mist i could reach out and touch. I never could get quite used to that kind of cut-to-the-bone chill before the rising autumn sun would wring it out and chase it away. But, a cup of coffee later and this time, it was gone... kicked out by an old, anxious anticipation from days before the notches on the gunwales counted past dozens... turned into pure, hot, metallic, fear!

The "Surge," that's what I'd heard 'em call it!!

"West Virginia steep creek stuff!" That's what I'd heard Dub Ellis call it... and he'd get that same gleam in his eye he'd get when his adrenalin dam explodes. He'd been there before and told me about it and I'd been on enough other rivers with ole Dub to have more than curiosity satisfied by that body language.

There were four of us on the trip that morning. Tyros to the tide three of us were... Dick Conner, Dick Creswell, and myself all paddling Dagger Canoes. Ric Simmons was the only one among us that day who had ever paddled the surge before... the sole surge-sayer. Except for Ric in his C-1, it was a Dagger dance to a brand new tune.

"Something's different!" My eyes followed Ric's quizzical stare past the rock jumble at the base of the dam where we were putting in. The 400 cubic feet of water exploding every second from the crack in the water gate beside the wooden diversion flume on the far side of the river meant drawdown to winter pool for the reservoir upstream was in progress. It had brought another reminder of the clock around the corner and an icicle chased a naked tree through my bones. We hauled our boats across the jumble and joined the 400. In an instant I was broached against a boulder. My draw stroke was still asleep. It was a lesson learned cheap.

Normally all the water is diverted into that wooden flume through a gate at its mouth at the far end of the dam right next to the relief gate. Its a sixteen foot square cube straped to the side of the mountain overlooking the river gorge. The river bed follows the topograhphy dropping 200 feet in four miles while the flume stays just short of level as it shadows along above the river and terminates at a penstock where it developes head as it drops on a 45 degree incline straight down through two giant tubes into a generating plant perched on the bank of the river.

With only 400 cubic feet of water to work with, floating down through the Ocoee's put-in rapid was like dissecting a boulder field. We grouped up at the bottom of it and played in a still sleepy souse hole named Grumpy waiting for a TVA Tech to wake up and stick a cork in the flume forcing another 800 cubic feet to crash down every second from atop Snow White and right into our laps.

"Go with the flow till the flow don't go but it'll be different today," said Ric. "When you ride the surge you go like hell on the face of the wave through the narrows and drops. Then, where the river broadens out, you get the sensation that the water literally falls out from under you as it spreads out to fill up the pools and holes. With 400 out in front of us, some of those pools will already be full and it won't take long to top off the rest. We'll be moving fast.... real fast! Surf's up", he yelled. "Get ready for a wild ride!!"

"Surf's up" echoed back and forth between the rest of us scattered across Grumpy.

I looked back upstream past Ric and through 150 yards of an hour past dawn to a waking Snow White. Suddenly, the gleam in Dub's eye rushed down my spine, did a half dozen 360's, and chased away the fear swarming over that good-morning cup of coffee.

Ric was right! Eddies were there and then they weren't. A rock at the upper end of a diagonal ledge morphed into a souse hole. Then the hole was chased by a curling wave down the spine of the ledge and it broke into a dance as it spat out the other end. Poetry! Childbirth! Genesis! Catch a falling star! Chase a rainbow! Magic!

By the time my mind caught up with me we were down to a rapid formed by the river constricting and crashing over an offset ledge creating a pair of side-surfable souse holes named Double Trouble. With that 400 out in front of us we really didn't have the surge that is the tip of the tongue of a big long wave. But we did have a slanted wave stretched out, under and behind us, for maybe 50 yards where it melted into 1200 cubic feet chasing us down the river. So I didn't have much time. But, I just had to do it! I paddled to the side, got out, and pulled my boat back upstream toward the launching pad forming before me. Not much time to think about this one. Blast off! Two good forward strokes and I was on the curling wave that points to the upper hole. Plant a high brace and ride the wave. Drop into the hole sideways and turn the paddle over on a low brace for balance.

The hole does a dance with my very soul. Then suddenly I look up and see it coming... three, two, one, a huge exploding crest on the wave crashes in on top of me. I was in the hole sideways and perpendicular to the main flow as the crest rolled over forward and slamed down on my upstream gunwale. It was instant window shade! The lights go out and somewhere in the darkness a river troll dials a washing machine to fast forward. Who put these bowling balls in here? Helpless! Powerless! Fate turns a page and my God comes to mind. Amazing the places I run into Him! Thank You is such an understatement sometimes.

We'd been sort of leap-froging as we went along. First Ric was in the lead, then Conner, then Creswell, then me. Each of us chasing our fantasies though an ever changing dream. It had a sort of sureal mysticism about it. Topgraphy, hydrology, geology, gradient, velocity, humanity... all thrown into a giant morphological blender... like a stack of crayons melting in the sun, unpredictable! This is where you come to become one with the river. There is no test here. No place for a Palooka. If you see this mighty river as your enemy and set out to defeat it, you crash and burn. The river fights back and is much stronger than you. The purpose is not to conquer it but to become one with it and so, it lifts you up and washes you along with its rhythm.

I was out in front of the others and on the leading edge of the wave as we came into the approach to one of my favorite places in the universe, Table Saw Rapid! Whoever defined the seven wonders led a sheltered life! I flew in and out of eddies that came and went, held hands with holes, and danced with waves. Alaman left with the eddy on the left. Alaman right with the eddy on the right. Do-se-do with a boulder or two. Promenade with a curler past the saw and blast into a river-right eddy.

I ferried cross-river to the micro-eddy on river-left ten yards from the end of the tune and looked back in time. My God, the site was breathtaking! Awesome! Nirvana! In the foreground my gaze landed on an egg-shaped boulder... the saw... the soul of the rooster tail that was the rapid's namesake. The boulder was like a giant buzz-saw throwing sparkling diamonds dancing high up into the crisp, morning air as the surge, like a giant redwood tree, crashed into it. Every phenomenon of hydrology was happening everywhere and ever changing by a faucet turned on somewhere. Panacea on a panoptic stage lit by a sun that had just strolled in the door at the upper end of the canyon. All this and the paddlers three: Conner, Creswell, and Simmons, each on a roll in the sunlit dance before me. It was poetry. Ballet. Disco. Waltz. Classical. Rock N Roll. Jimi Hendrix, Mozart, and Beethoven rolled over.

I knew how they felt because all of a sudden something was missing. The feeling started in the pit where the coffee and the fear used to be and exploded into an aura of emptiness. Had I missed some irony in my exuberance? Then, just as suddenly, the aura was gone. Chased away by a blur in the eye of my imagination... purplish at first then, Blue Hole burgundy. As it peeled out and ferry-surfed the entrance diagonal toward the eddy on river left, a turquoise lifejacketed figure, capped off by a white helmet with a bearded smile in the face of it, appeared. On a precision tuned, off-side high brace it sank into the eddy. Gone? Gone in an Interstate 575, low-boy trailer instant.

As the micro washed out from under me the image washed from my mind and I drifted along toward Diamond Splitter left to pick up the pieces of a shattered vision. The wonders of life's magic and the image of a dear friend two weeks gone... could it have been real? A line from Harold Kushner's "When Everything You Ever Wanted Isn't Enough" came to mind; "...like most of the important dimensions of life: faith, love, loyalty, hope, are all rooted in a vast dark irrational area where reason cannot reach and the intellect cannot venture." In the context of the moment it was easy to include fear, magic, euphoria, the Surge, the image of a white helmet with a mischimous grin in it paddling a very familar burgandy canoe. And yes, even death!

I glanced downstream toward Witches Hole coming into view. Wait! Who is that side-surfing on a downstream grin and a hand brace?

......

Two single droplets of water, so much one like the other they would be the same except for their separateness, hold hands as they fall side by side in a soft rainstorm up on the Cumberland Plateau and light on a morphological Mason-Dixon Line where some mysterious law of genetic justice in the balance of nature claims them as victims of its fate for a fleeting moment before the forces of gradient and gravity garnish their destinies and one is pulled off northward toward the Big South Fork River of the Cumberland watershed and eventually the Ohio while the other is pulled southward toward Clear Creek Canyon of the Emory-Obed System and the Tennessee Valley.

"See you in Paduca" echoes softly through the wetness as they wave a fading farewell. The Dixie droplet doubles and doubles again and again it doubles again as if bound with others of common persuasion by some magical, hydrological magnet to form a fresheted, fizzgigged column of white water that crashes down through a fissure known as Wooten's Folly... where inevitability lives!

I know! I've been there...! Serveal times!!

Drop off the entrance ledge just off the right shoulder of the first pourover. But be sure to have the bow pointed a little to the left so as to catch the left portion of the tongue when it is split by the next pourover 15 yards beyond the first. Then, book it through all the standing wave stuff past the third pourover and toward the right side of the huge convergence hole at the bottom and sneak in between it and the big, house-sized, potentially lethal, undercut boulder on river right. If all has gone well and the adrenalin dam is about to explode, you might try catching the river-right downstream corner of the hole with an offside high brace and power-surf into the eddy on river-left and, if the timing is just right, an explosive splash from the backwash wave at the bottom left corner of the hole will end up in your face. Do that last part just right and its sort of like slingshoting around third base and sliding into home head first.

Creative visualization! Shakti Gawain would be proud of me even in my embarrassment. I don't know why but something is wrong with "the plan" at the entrance ledge. I can't really explain it except that it's more of a feeling than anything else and everything goes to hell in a handbasket and the resultant swim is always sort of... well, inevitable. If this is IT, just take me home Sweet Jesus!

......

The sound of Tellico water drifts through me and is suddenly swallowed by the demon that lurks under Reeder's Rock, one of the most notoriously heinous undercut rocks in the southeast. In all my life I've never heard another sound quite like the sound of water being swallowed up by that rock. Even at 35,000 feet and the roar of jet engines i can hear it as clear as a Kennedy killing.

But I still go there every year to paddle in the fall because this gorge has to be where God created color. And under that rock is where I almost lost my life one innocent Sunday afternoon a few autumns ago. Curiosity has more than one face. Strange how a place so terrifyingly threatening can be so profoundly peaceful all at the same time.

.....

The Nantahala comes to mind. How the Cherokee found one word to describe something that beautiful is a wonder to me. It takes five english words, "Land Of The Noonday Sun", just to translate it! Anyone from anywhere in the world who has ever brushed a boat with anybody in the paddling community has heard of the Nantahala.

An international paddling festival was held there recently. A competition born in the icy waters of Siberia that now promotes the spirit of world peace with the simple idea that people working together toward a common cause such as navigating a whitewater river together can transcend their differences and recognize their commonality.

You know, I'm always amazed how one idea leads to another and so on in such a way that when I look back I can begin to see the semblance of real value in what I do today. If I have enough time and I'm determined enough for long enough I can see how everything and everyone is all connected up together in some sort of mysterious and magical fashion. There are all sorts of tangible and metaphorical expressions of this such as that awesomeness I feel about the global water cycle and how water moves from the atmosphere to the land and across or through the lands and its peoples and back to the atmosphere again in a never ending, ever changing, curious fashion and so; how easily possible it could be that some of the same water that carried the competetors down the Chuya River in Siberia could conceivably have gotten connected up with water in the Nantahala, right here in my own back yard, and carried those same people along a whole year later and I even wonder how many of my brothers and sisters that same water may have nourished in between festivals. Its a curious thought indeed.

And so, for me anyway, the water cycle is a metaphor. Tangible evidence. Knowledge by association that helps clear the path and open space for me to connect on the idea that I'm comnnected to all of you and it is on the wings of this connectedness that the energies of the universe sing. Anytime I can move through fear and prejudice and pretense I FEEL this sense of connectedness and I've come to wonder in the wake of all that has been happening around the globe these past few months if this sense of commonality and equality isn't the very essence of the human spirit... the candle glowing in the dakness. The sound of freedom rings 'round the world as the chains of oppression fall and with every victory I actually feel freer. We still have a long way to go but already the whole atmosphere of life itself has taken on the aura of a justice that seems to trasncend time and distance and fear and prejudice and pretense. What greater oppression is there than the repression of self? The greatest gift we can give one another is the freedom to be free and until that day all the world walks in chains. To quote the words of Kris Kristofferson, the self-proclaimed Third World Warrior, "there ain't no chain as strong as the will to be free." Today deliverence from the bondage of one human being over another has become more than just something for the dreamers.

I've come to believe that life isn't worth a damn anymore if I can't find some value in it on a day to day basis and just believing in the hope that it'll all be okay tomorrow is dealing myself a short deck in the only game in town! I've lived my share of that kind of bondage.

Things like 300 folks from around the globe, some of which I've been taught all my life to be my enemy (albeit against some inner feeling of saner judgement), paddling together in rafts cast upon the same water that carried them along in a different river a year earlier, half a world away... well, somehow I find value in that sentiment! Next time I go paddling I'll think a little different about the water under me... next time it rains... next time I take a drink of water...

.....

All this and more is collected up and fed nicely into that main artery down there. As we flew along over Paduca the Ohio came into view and then it's confluences, first with the Cumberland then, just 12 miles downstream, the Tennessee. From my vantage point I could barely make out the separation. Fantastic fantasy food!

I looked away from the window and my mind wanders back to a time when I stood on a bridge watching some no-name river disappear around a bend downstream and I wondered, "what's around that bend?" Curiosity came to visit that day and we went shopping. I look back out the window at the Ohio wandering off east-by-northeast toward the sunrise and the Tennessee wandering off east-by-southeast toward where I just came from and before either one of them can get to wherever it is they're going, they both disappear over the same bend that is the curvature of the earth itself.

Fantasy food indeed, except I actually floated along on some of that water under me and my boat that curiosity and I found while shopping one day.

"Way up on my pony on my boat," Lyle Lovett sang.

Jumped into the boat and sloshed right along with me, some of that water did! Splashed me in the face even. Swam in it too, albeit inevitably. Disappeared around a bend together....

Tom Robbins once wrote a love story about a princess and a character he called the Woodpecker that took place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes and in that story he wondered, "what makes love stay?" I used to wonder about that too. Now I wonder if Tom Robbins ever stood on a bridge and looked downstream....

The voice of the captain came on the p. a. system. "welcome aboard flight... we've leveled off at 39,000 feet... the temperature in Minneapolis is 29 degrees and they have snow falling... we'll be landing..."

I could tell which passengers were headed home by the glow that came over them. "Its snowing," they cooed back and forth to one another.

Burrrr, I thought. What a way to treat water!

My seat companion was one of them. I asked her about the snow. "I could live anywhere," she said, "but I like the change of seasons. It satisfies a certain curiosity and it's really more about the feeling I get with it rather than something I can explain."

My mind drifted back to a river disappearing around a downstream bend and I understood.

Questions From Murph

A reader poated a comment to my last blog entry. In it he asked some very poignent questions. So rather than respond to him in the comments section of the thread i"m making this blog entry. To put the following into context its advisable to read Murph's comment and questions first.


Murph... they point and laugh and shame? You do mean the pointing and laughing is the shaming don't you? Is this experienced as shaming in that culture?

I dunno.

I have no idea what the belief systems are in their culture and so, no idea what is going on with their ritual. They are a tiny microcosm still fairly isolated. Yet there is value to anthropological study there. We could probably get a pretty good read just by observing the eyes, the expressions, the body language, and the demeanor of the child in the midst of the pointing and laughter.

But thats not what you're asking me is it? That was just an example and you want to know if I think shaming could be a good thing right? Something to help insure survival?

Just because something prolongs life does not mean it sustains it.

Kinda like oil. Know what i mean?

I would say yes, shame has been used for that purpose though. Out of proclaimed good and loving intent too. I actually question that thats really love there though. For the most part, an incredibly heavy price is paid if shame is and does what the experts say it does to the psyche. And if they are right, we need to seriously question our interpretations of love.

As an aside I will say that I think we need to seriously question if there are alternatives to the ways and methods we teach. Guide is probably a better word and I have some ideas about this we can apply to your example. And I think if we look to the reflections our current ways and methods produce we may get some clues to the judgements, interpretations, and belief systems from which we are operating that may be entangled in the core. I'm speaking here to the point you made in your second para. But in another post perhaps.

Actually shame is probably a reactionary dynamic... something that follows or is a result of something else going on. Sorta like success is not something you chase (even though most view it as such), its something that follows. Its a result.

According to experts, (here's one of them) I experience guilt when I conclude that I did something wrong. Something not acceptable to an observer or society. Be that from within or from without or both. I experience shame when I conclude I AM something wrong. I AM the something that is not acceptable to the observer. In this scenario there is no outside observer. The observer is the self. The outside is influencing. Often the outside influence is making a mark on an emotional level of the observer.

That leads some to question who is really to blame. Is the perp and the victum the same? After all, who drew the conclusion? Only the self is responsible for the conclusion. That view is a pretty sick twist in the dynamic and is a form of denial in action. It can be complicated to see even in knowing we're talking about the experiences of a developing child and one would think any sane person could see the trama being inflicted. Unfortunately there's not much sanity going around in this department though.

You've asked some excellent questions Murph. Questions that beg examination. There's a whole lot more to the above, to the socialism of our young which I call pedagogies which are the activities of educating, teaching, and instructing. This produces positive and/or negative results. We've had some great minds examining these dynamics in the last 20-30 years and they are exposing a great psychic war in action playing out here. What Alice Miller calls poisionous pedagogies.

The work of Miller is the best study of this I have ever found. A trained therapist who had an epiphany when she began doing free expression water colors and was savy enough and brave enough to wonder from where within her all these tramatized images were coming from.She excommunicated herself from the orthodox psychoanalytic community realizing they could not possibly guide their patients through tramas where the very soul has been pirated when they themselves refused to look into their own tramas.Titles of her books reveal the result of the poisionous pedagogies of family, social, cultural, and theological systems...

Drama of the Gifted Child
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware
For Your Own Good
Banished Knowledge
The Body Never Lies

....to name a few. There was a time when I traveled pretty heavy in circles that exposed me to threapists and took me into rehab centers. I realized in my own feelings that Miller was right on but that was validated whenever I would ask a pro if they were familar with her stuff. Some would blow it off completly. Others would say yes and quickly change the subject. To me, that was a big fat clue.She identifies these pedegogies as causal factors contributing to the annilation of the self. In one of those books she did extensive research and went into annalysis on the childhood of Hitler.

The downside is she hadn't looked for clues beyond the present generations in her earlier works that might lead to further understandings about original causal factors. I'm only familar with her earlier works including all of the above except the last which is her latest. So my criticism may be unjustified for her later work. But I'm pretty sure there's a whole lot more going on in the story of what Hitler was and how this maniac came to manifestation.She did me great favor though in helping me to get to a point where it became time to dive into deeper realms... much deeper. For me, identifying and examining what she was calling causal factors led me the next obvious question... what then, is causal to those causal factors?

What are the causal factors in this psychic war? Why are our children being attacked by their own parents and role models? Our churches? Our educators? Our state? Our society? Our leaders? Is denial playing a role in it? I haven't examined this aspect of it in the particular context of your question. But you've posed a very valid question very worthy of examination.

We've had some great minds doing incredible work in the past 20-30 years in a myriad of fields. It seems we are in a very unique time. Some of us view that life itself may hang in the balance. Are we just pawns in its game? Or are we each playing a role? If so, how is it in play? If we examine and then recognize that we are, what can we each do to stop feeding the monster?

Ultimately we all need to find our own answers. But a sharing of views can be very helpful. I started this blog for 2 reasons....

1... writing is a tool I use to see a reflection of myself.

2... create a space that might draw inquiring minds such as yourself where we can have a sharing of ideas. People who have turned over rocks and connected dots. People who recognize we are under heavy attack. People who give a damn for themselves and their fellow man in the midst of this miserable human condition and have the courage to ask, why is this so? Can we change it?

Your observation about the survival aspect of denial is a case in point. My writings on the blog up to now have been pretty subtle actually. Maybe the blog has experienced a form of the 100th monkey dynamic and its time to be more direct.

You ended your comment with 2 more questions.... Do you see a difference in the complexity of a society and the relative amount of denial within that society? Do you see that denial evenly as a negative aspect?

My short answers are yes and no.

The first is complicated and worthy of unpacking. I'm not opposed to pursueing but we could get easily sidetracked.

A yes answer to the second would suggest there would therefore be a positive aspect to denial. Denial does have a positive aspect to it. But in the context of your question, all denial is ultimately a form of denial of self and therefore produces a negative result. I admit this is my opinion and is subject to scrutiny as such a claim should be.

Thats part of what this blog is all about. I submit that if we look at the reflections of our outer world we can observe the role denial is playing. And I submit that we will find it repeats itself over and over and over again.

If it turns out this is so then we already know the short answer to the question of if its playing a role in poisionous pedagogies.

So whats the positive side of denial? If it produces such negative results, the kinds of results I've suggested on this blog, what can possibly be good about it? I've also suggested on this blog that it could be a major piece in the perfection of creation. It could be that denial draws an experience equal to or greater than the denial so the denial present in the politic of the self can be recognized and moved out. And it could be that denial is at the very core of the human condition. It could be that denial is the very opposite of unconditional acceptance for the self. It could be that if i do not have unconditional acceptance for myself I can't possibly have acceptance for you or anyone or anything else as everything would be placed on condition.

It could be that denial is the opposite of love. And it could be that if I am denying myself I am denying my personal power and that denial is then used against me to over-power me. One things for sure, something is empowering power-over agendas. Why are we loosing so many freedoms? Why does it look like freedom itself under attack?

Is there a war on consciousness? On life itself? Is it a war between good and evil? Is it all about the fight of one to over-power another? Have we been fooling ourselves?

I believe the answers to those questions is a big fat YES. And I believe we can know and understand how to change it, that this is our challenge, our lesson, our purpose, our right.

I realize this all sounds rather utopian or the stuff of fantasy even. And thats being kind. Throw crazed and insane in too. But... well, let me put it this way.... we're either pregnant or we're not. We either have the right to question we can do something about the human condition or we can't. One things likely for sure, and we can see this if we study the oral and written histories of mankind... why has nothing ever really changed? Why do we keep repeating the same-o, same-o? Why do we keep killing each other? Why have we always had wars? Why are we having more and more of them? Why can kids be so cruel to each other? They're still young. What's in them that they are acting out? Why do adults continue to do forms of those very same childish behaviors and then claim we're adults?

Why do we rape and pillage and kill and allow even one human being to die of starvation when we have them dieing by the second and then claim we're a loving people? Why do we have guys like Bush in places of power? Why do we have this so-called war on terror? Why did Katrina happen and then the ugly aftermath and all the while claim we're the greatest nation thats ever been on the face of the earth? What was that tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands all about? This is our Mother Earth. What the hell is so massive, so horrific, so anti-life that she's holding that was un-leashed there?

Is she over it?

What the hell is this arrogance and complete disregard for land, life, and liberty that is so pervasive? Whats all this hatred about? Where's it come from? What's causal to it? What can we do about it? Why is it that views are becoming even more and more polarized in a time of obvious crisis and threat to the species if we'd done such a great job of training that survival chakra? In a time when one would think there would be a gathering of care and love and compassion amoung the people in a common cause if such really exists? I could go on and on and on here but I think you get my drift.

Often its hard to recognize the same-o over time because of the form changes involved. But if we study the dynamics and start connecting the dots we can see the re-enactments. At best evolution is stagnent. At worst we are de-evolving and there are students students out there who can show us in the record that much has been lost along the way. We can easily do this ourselves as we have so many pieces of evidence, hidden in plain site, right before our eyes, that prove to us there was a time when higher intelligence was at work here.

When those could-be scenarios I've submitted are considered it could be we could find some real solutions, solutions to issues like how to sustain life, whats the real reason why we have population explosion and how it will be solved in a loving way, how to clean the planet of the poisions, how to truely sustain life, not just prolong it. And it could be we absolutely can and must create a new paradigm and open the future to real evolution in life and love.

There's not much validity in short answers to important questions. It can be a long road to pealing the onion down to that core where denial can be seen as an original causal factor though.

The Three Wisemen

On The Three Wisemen: Montana Freeman, Pogo, and Carl Jung


"I would not blame the instruments of destruction because we are the instruments of destruction and thats that!" ... Montana Freeman, wise elder of our Naitve American brothers and sisters.

ALL of us need to heed the wisdom in our elder, MF's, words who echoes the words of the wisest of the wise, the late, great Pogo when he said...

I have met the enemy and he are I.

But just what does this mean? Perhaps the words of another late, great, wise man may be of help....

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate... Carl Jung.

There IS a war outside. And it is manifest in many forms. We see it. We discuss and debate on who and what to blame... all forces "out there". The PTB, the Elites, the neo-cons, the Christians, the Muslims, the NWO, Busco, global warming, peak oil, capitalism, socialism, american idol, lucifer and his minions, the masons, the Chinese, the media, the human condition, and so on.

But the real war is on Consciousness itself. These other things "out there", "outside", are the "noise". The "reflection." Yet, those words, "war on consciousness" can be impotent to drive home the point. So let me put it another way....

THE WAR IS FOR LIFE ITSELF.

Yours, mine, the collective. And it is real. It has always been so. BUT, it is coming to a head as never before. The Mother of Everything is seeing to it and the Earth that She IS is moving to clear. She can hold no more of this imbalance and denial.

There is definitly an agenda to take life down. It is a force to recon with and I need to realize this.

How and why am I serving this agenda? I need to realize this too and examine this thouroughly and profoundly for therein lay the understandings that the war between good and evil has been a war of each to OVER-POWER the other and thus, even "good" has been fooling itself.

There IS a perfection to the Universe. It could also be called True Understanding and Balance. When there is balance the "things" of the universe are "free" to be in their right places. There is no threat and thus no need for one to over-power another. That which is good. Which is within love and life. That which is evil. Which is outside love and life. All these "things" in their right place for there is a place for them that feels good and right for all in this Universe. And they would be happy there.

When there is imbalance we can find the tools within it to seek and find balance. This is also woven into the fabric of the perfection of the universe.

Is the concept just something for the dreamers who dream still of the original dream? The whole idea smacks of the utopian eh? Yet, this is the lesson. It is this I seek.

From Hartsfield To The Moon

Given the season I thought I'd write this in the spirit of Christmas.

Back in 1994 a star appeared in the east and 2 wisemen came over the hill bearing gifts. Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas of the Christian Heritage Foundation had won a bid to assume about half of fundamentalist Christian Liberty University's $72 million debt load for a measly $2.5 million... a fraction of its face value. Liberty is Jerry Falwell's Religious Right crown jewel and the debt had gravitated to the University from Falwell's abandoned Moral Majority political organization of the 80's and early 90's.

On Jan 28, 1995 Falwell stood before his Old Time Gospel congregation in Lynchberg, Va and introduced to them the 2 wisemen bearing gifts. “They had to borrow money, hock their houses, hock everything,” said Falwell. “Thank God for friends like Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas.” Falwell’s congregation rose as one to applaud.

Now, here's the point. Not only did Falwell stand before God and his people and LIE but the debt incurred by the Moral Majority was mostly backed by thousands of small religious investors who had bought church construction bonds through a Texas company. They were the big losers. Yet these are the same people who stood up in unison to applaud the wisemen who had bought the debt at deep, deep discount screwing them. the bond holders.

Falwell didn't tell them who the messiah was. He didn't tell them where the wisemen really got their gifts. The star in the east was none other than Sun Myung Moon. And another thing Falwell didn't tell them was that Moon, through the help of some prominent figures on the American Right who went to great lengths to conceal their financial connections to Moon, was able to launder his 3.5 million by passing it through several hands before it got to the pockets of the wisemen.

Thats right $3.5 million. 2.5 to meet the debt pledge and a cool million for their trouble.

So who is this guy Sun Myung Moon?

Of all the things I could have written about back in August I was suddenly overwhelmed to post this with a link to Consortium On-line's archive of stories journaling the very dark life and influence of Sun Myung Moon. I had no idea why until today. Most of the stories are authored by Robert Parry who today published on CO a 3 part series titled "GOP'S $3 Billion Propaganda Organ".

When I fly its generally out of Hartsfield. Its not that many years ago when you went to the airport and you couldn't get to your plane without having to beat off the moonies. They worked in pairs and were everywhere and they glomerated onto you like stink on you know what. Didn't matter where you were flying to or from. They were there. Most of us just viewed them as a nuisance... mere pimps for an exotic cult leader. We were right. But we were wrong too. Oh so wrong. Today we know the whoring at the airports was a mere pimple on the ass of one of the most sinsiter characters of modern time.

I'm talking global proportion here. But what is most disturbing is the role Moon played and still plays right here. The Right has alot of 'splainin to do about why they crawled into bed with this scumbag. Parry...

By the mid-1980s, Moon’s Unification Church had carved out a niche as an acceptable part of the American Right. In one speech to his followers, Moon boasted that “without knowing it, even President Reagan is being guided by Father [Moon].”

Yet, Moon also made clear that his longer-range goal was destroying the U.S. Constitution and America’s democratic form of government.

“History will make the position of Reverend Moon clear, and his enemies, the American population and government will bow down to him,” Moon said, speaking of himself in the third person. “That is Father’s tactic, the natural subjugation of the American government and population.”

Moon mighta thought Reagan "didn't know" but Reagan knew. How could anyone in Reagan's position not know? What Reagan did was take wise advice that serves both good and evil...

TAKE WHAT YOU NEED AND LEAVE THE REST!

And Reagan was in need. His Iran-Contra escapades where in times of heavy scrutiny and it was Moon's minions, primarily at the Washington Times who put the opposition in its place.

The moonies pimping at the airport, the Falwell story. the Reagan story are as pimples on Moon's ass compared to the influence this psycho has had in the rise to power of the Conservative Right. They did as Ronnie mentored... take what you need and leave the rest.

Now even the rest is coming home to roost.

Lyndon Johnson said that his signing of the Civil Rights Act would give the south to the Republicans for the foreseeable future. He was right. But just as the moonies were a pimple on the ass of the airports, Johnson's prognostication is a pimple on the ass of history compared to the disgusting Right Wing in bed with Sun Moon and the role it is playing in today's politics.

The Parry article is long. I don't care if takes you a month to read it. Just READ IT! You will NEVER look at politics, indeed the world we are living in, the same.

What better way to ring in the New Year than to do yourself a great big favor with a clearer understanding of the ugly, naked, oozing, pimply assed TRUTH!!

The Man Who Couldn't Cry

A friend sent me a collection of cd's. 5 of em. On number 4 is a cut of Johnny Cash's The Man Who Couldn't Cry. (thanks Laurell).

As if resurected so he could leave us with a collage of his life's accumulated wisdom, the man in black sat down with his guitar and struck a final chord. (thanks rubin).

There's a place inside of me that understands EXACTLY the saga of the man who couldn't cry. I
think it was George Carlin who said, "scratch a cynic and underneath is a disgruntled idealist".

And with good reason in my mind.

There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry


You find yourself thrown into a world that shows no real compassion for the human condition. That seems to not be able to do anything but add to it. And for awhile, you cry. But sooner or later, usually sooner, heartbroken, you cry no more. You haven't got the balls to blow your brains out so you resign yourself to life's tragic plot.

His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob
His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop

But you cry no more. What's the use anyway? And then, you become jaded.

He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop
In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face


The theologians cry out, God is good, God is merciful. But you can't help but wonder, how is it possible that a loving God could invent so much suffering and misery? Where's the justice? Your cry for it and it never comes. Worse, nobody seems to understand just what your problem is. You find yourself alone. Oh, so alone.

Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least
They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast

And, in your aloneness, you look around and you see others alone too. Hidden in plain site behind some damn invisible wall. Untouchable.

But, tragic though it is, life has an ironic way of turning shit into... well, something of some kind of weird value.

He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain

And, despite that its unexplainable, you recognize the value. You just can't help yourself because it triggered some mysterious, hidden wisdom. The kind you've been running from all your life. Or was it toward?

And you begin to cry. Finally. And then you begin to remember.

Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights/
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried

On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died

Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm

His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out
Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought

Justice prevails!

Its The Stupid Economy

I was hungry. I'd spent hours researching. Finally made a decision and bought $10 worth of stock.

Pheew!

Now I'm really nervous. I've procrastinated for years in deference to the monkey. The one sitting on my shoulder and telling me the whole damn thing is a dangerous conspiracy.

Conspiracy? How's that?

"Well, just plunk some money down and see what happens," said the monkey.

Thus the hours of exhausting research ending in the $10 buy and afterwards I was so famished I called up and ordered a double sausage and cheese.

"That'll be $10 and it'll be ready in 20 minutes," the voice on the other end said.

The only reason you'd ever want to invest your money in the stock market is to get more money back right? Made sense to me and I wanted more money.

Lo and behold... when I sold my stock I got $15. What a system! What took me so long to figure out something so elementary? And where's that damn monkey? My money just increased by 50%.

Called for a celebration so I called up and ordered a double sausage and cheese. "That'll be $20 and it'll be ready in 20 minutes."

What? $20? It was 10 last time I ordered. How come 20 now?

Ever hear of inflation you nit wit? Do you want the pizza or not?

Uh, I only have $15. Maybe you better cancel.

Damn I'm hungry.

So I call up the bank. You got any money I can borrow?

"Ya, we got lots of it. C'mon down."

"Told ya so," said the monkey.

The Rubber Meets The Road, Part 2: The Red Button And The Unseen Role Of Denial

We set the stage for this in Part 1 6 weeks ago. In the meantime we had an election and threw a bunch of the bums out. Watching all that is what I've been doing instead of writing Part 2.

In Part 1 we were talking about how not looking at something is a form of denial. But what about when we look and do nothing? What about the role denial is playing in the reflections our world, our country, our politics, our culture, our society is giving us. We look and we wonder why things are so bad, how they got so bad, and who to blame? And we wonder how to fix it.

There is a group of progressives who call themselves the Spiritual Frontiers Foundation International who wondered that same thing. They go into the woods for three days once a year to talk about how they can help society evolve spiritually... a very intelligent, caring, loving, dedicated group of American people. BRAVE Americans.

In summer 2000 Catherine Austin Fitts, who used to be Asst Ssecretary of HUD back in the Pappy Bush days and who discovered HUD's billion dollar connection to drug trafficing and money laundry, was speaking to them about how the money works. Fitts was talking to them about her discoveries of fraud and corruption at HUD and how its tied in to our TRILLION DOLLAR black budget and further discoveries of fraud and blatent book cooking by the various agencies of our government (they use an instrument called "undocumented adjustments" to "balance" the books) and involvement in things like laundering the documented 500 BILLION to a TRILLION a year in drug money in this country and the connections to organized crime.

After some discussion was had about the massive negative impact the "drug problem" has on the social, cultural, and spiritual health of our families and society Fitts said to them, " The Department of Justice says that we -- Americans -- launder $500 billion to a trillion dollars a year. What would happen if America stopped being the world wide leader in global money laundering? What impact would that have on your economy and ultimately, your way of life?"

So they all had further discussion pondering that question that evolved into something akin to a massive trainwreck. The more they discussed the potential implications the worse it got until they finally concluded that economic chaos would ensue and thus way of life, as they know it, drastically altered.

And so the discussion ended.

So then Fitts said to them, "Image I have a magic red button up here on the podium and if you push it YOU CAN STOP ALL NARCOTICS TRAFFICING IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOODS, YOUR CITIES, AND YOUR COUNTRY. RIGHT NOW! Who here would push the button?"

Out of this group of one hundred people openly, vociferously, proclaiming they are dedicated to the spiritual evolvement of our country and its peoples, guess how many came up to push the button?

ONE!

So Fitts asked the other 99, "Why would you not push the button?"

They said, "We don't want our pension funds to go down, & we don't want our government checks to stop, & we don't want our taxes to go up."

"Right then the CIA & Department of Justice had full "democratic" authority & popular support to facilitate narcotics trafficking," wrote Fitts.

And Fitts wasn't just talkin about "the mob" when she used the term "organized crime". She was talking about sanctioned government involvement and documented government fraud and complicity on the part of our banks, our money system, our corporations, and the whole damn rotten, corrupt to the bone, system!! And 99% of the people chose to do NOTHING because they ASSUMED that to do so would mean our economy would collapse, our jobs would be lost, our mortagaes forclosed on, our "economic security" would go to the dogs, our pension plans, our ira's, etc, would be worthless, our health insurance would be non-existent, our meds might be unavailable, our way of life as we know it would be OVER, our lights and air conditioners might go off, our water might not run, our cupboard might be bare, our gas tanks would be empty, our nation would be under martial law because our streets would be chaos, and our american dream would turn out to be a nightmare! And no body in the rest of the world would have any desire to help us because they are tired of being abused and killed, of being overridden and taken advantage of BY US!!

Despite our going to polls to throw the bums out, despite our intentions and actions to be environmentally conscientious, despite efforts to minimize personal footprint, despite objections to war and to appaling human rights violations and massive corruption and power-over agendas, despite what we think and say we'll do, when the rubber meets the road, we find the naked truth... that we, each in our own ways, hold positions of alignment with "the end justifies the means" agenda and are perfectly willing to turn our head so our future will remain secure.

I submit those 100 people spoke for an entire nation. And I don't care if it was 6 years ago... you can do it today and get the same results. You can change the subject from laundring dirty drug money to illegal occupation of soverign nations, to the war on terror, to horrendous torture and massive human rights violations, to corporate fraud, to govenrment corruption, to a Katrina cash cow, to the hijacking of the second richest oil nation on the planet, to the rape of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The results will be the same.

Or, speaking of oil, you can change it to Peak Oil. Thats what Art Bell did on his Coast to Coast AM radio show that claims up to 10 million listeners. Seems he had read an excerpt of James Kunstler's "Long Emergency" in Rolling Stone. He was moved by what Kunstler had to say about Peak Oil so he did a 3 hour call-in show about it to get people's reactions to the issue. He ran a straw poll midst this asking a handful of questions like, do you believe we're near peak? At what price can you no longer afford to buy gas? And, perish the thought, would you steal or even kill if the wheels come off? Dozens of callers responded. most tried in every way imaginable to avoid that last question. But, to Bell's credit, he held their pants to the fire. I heard one caller say they would not resort to killing their own neighbor.

ONE!!

I submit that somewhere, within the unspoken reality, within the deep dark irrational realm where reason cannot reach and intellect cannot venture, every U.S. citizen knows this. Down there in that red shit hole we all know the stakes and, quaking in our boots, we pray to our gods, acquiesce our rights, align with power-over agendas, elect idiots like Bush, turn our heads when presented with indisputable evidence and subject ourselves to being terrorized by our own "protectors" hoping we won't get backed down so far we will be forced into doing what our rational minds, our guiding mores, our gods, our guilt, our ideals, keep trying to convince us we would never, ever do... KILL!

KILL! Kill our brothers, our sisters, our neighbors.

We hope we will not have to turn into evil jihadists to survive cuz we know damn well we will. And we point to these morals and ideals to justify, to rationalize, and to lie to ourselves. And we point to everybody else as the "problem".


I submit we are getting EXACTLY what we deserve when we refuse to look at the evidence. Or worse, after looking at the evidence, we choose to do NOTHING!

I further submit that what is really going on here is that when its all said and done we, each of us in our own ways, are, through the UNSEEN ROLE OF DENIAL, in bed with the greed, corruption, and sinister agendas of those who, by that very same denial, have put in the so-called power positions and charged with "taking care" of us.

And in the end we are each, in our own ways, responsible for our own roles in this and ABSOLUTELY responsible for our own change.

The Sick Sons-A-Bitches!!

Here we go again. Another GOP darlin involved in girlieboyphilia. I ain't writin this to pick on the GOP... truth be known, this kinda sick shit knows no party lines. But the GOP is the self-proclaimed family values party and puerveyors of blatent homophoebic hatred and bigotry fueled by the religous rightous so hell-bent on stamping out the gays they can't see past their upturned noses even with both of their faces! So the sick bastards need to get those faces smeared in their stinkin hypocracy.

In less than 48 hours Mark Foley was toast. Thats United States Representative Foley, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. But it was a scandal just waitin to happen. Turns out the Rep had a rep. That means people knew. People in position to expose him. To do something about it. But did they?

Hell NO!

Instead they enabled him. And protected him. Still do.

The Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives continues to refer to him as the Honorable Mark Foley.

The White House calls Foley's sick, sexual exploitation of the future of America "simply naughty emails".

So a sixteen year old kid freaked and smacked-crashed Maf54's instant message slap into a Potomic closet and out rolled a buncha nasty bones... more bones than the chamber of skulls.

Like House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Rep John Shimkus to name two.

Hastert and Skimkus ain't the only beastial bones rollin otta the closet either. House Majority Leader John Boehner is another one.

Boehn-er.

Get it?

First ya say ya do/ and then ya don't/ then ya say ya will/ and then ya won't.... Boner, er... ah... Boehner, as it turns out, knew about Foley way back last spring according to the Washington Post. But then denied it.(ya, ya, i know, thats not how its pronounced but, just like Foley, I just couldn't help meself).

So why would he have to claim a sudden lapse of memory?

Its called cover yo ass! And for those who ain't figured it out yet cover yo ass is a form of denial. As if we didn't have enough going around already in this latest predatorgate.

Speaking of gates, remember Watergate? Here's another form of denial... LETS JUST MOVE ON! The History Channel has a poll up on their website.....

Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon most importantly...

a) Allowed America to move on after Watergate.

or

b) Let Nixon off without proper punishment.


62% said let's move on. Thats right America, give the ole trickie dick a pass. Movin on is more important. And thats about all that'll come from this latest trickie-dick preditorgate too!

(Coming soon... Part 2 of The Rubber Meets The Road)

The Rubber Meets The Road, Part 1: Setting The Stage

This is gonna be in 2 parts. Part one sets the stage. Part two is the coup de grace. Checkmate! Appalling conclusion!! And we won't have to extrapolate about the meaning and the role its playing in its many forms. When we get done with this one we'll have no where else to go except commit to change or acquiese to more denial.

We had been talking about the Steorn thing and trying to explore why such a high majority of people don't want this technology to be tested.

Palooka said, among other things, that they just don't wanna look. He admits that's speculation. How to know what lurks in the differentiated minds of over 100,000 voters? Palooka don't know. But Palooka know common motivators often manifest in forms so varied they can be easily construed as totally unrelated. Its called FORM CHANGE. Thus, truth be known, when the onion gets pealed, among other things, some common form of abject fear can often be found at the core.

Palooka say, when we don't wanna look it don't matter what form of reason or excuse we present to the "out there". Deep inside, way down there in the deep dark irrational places where our emotions lurk, we feel threatened. And thats freightening!

But its not just that we don't wanna look. As we will see at the end of part 2, its worse. We will see that, despite looking, despite knowing, despite legitimate concerns and desires on the part of many of us to do something, when the rubber meets the road, we crawl into our holes, turn our heads to the wall, piss all over ourselves, and then make a conscious, rationalized decision to do absolutley NOTHING!

Its a simple story involving only about a hundred people that we will come to at the end. Just an example really. But I dare say those few people are reflective of an entire nation of so-called BRAVE Americans.

THE FUCKING SUN IS BURNING OUT?

The Rubber Meets The Road, Part I will be up soon enough. In the meantime we interupt this broadcast for a commercial message...

"Be Here To Love Me", the docu-DVD of the life of Townes Van Zant from Director Margaret Brown is A+++ with a bullet. Two thumbs up. Toes too. Not because I dig Townes but because Brown and company did such an incredible job.

Townes was a singer-songwriter. A singer-songwriter's singer-songwriter actually. One of my favorites. One of the best ever. Let me put it into perspective... Bob Dylan sat literally MESMERIZED by him.

He came from the same mould of a long list of Texas singer-songwriters like Joe Ely, Lyle Lovette, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Kris Kristofferson, Delbert McClinton, et al. But ask any of them... Townes was the best. They all dream to touch perfection like Townes could. And Townes? He just blew it off. The songs he said, came through him. He just wrote em down.

He was a cult hero and like any cult hero there are a gazillion stories. But it really only takes four short anedotes to cut it to the bone...

"I don't envision a very long life for myself, ya know.
Like I think my life will run out before my work does, ya know.
I've designed it that way"

One day in the third grade the teacher annouced it was time to talk about science. She talked about the universe, the sun, the solar system. And she said, "The sun is a star and, like any star, it is burning out. And she went on and on but Townes had heard nothing beyond "the sun is burning out!" Finally he interupted her and said...

"The sun is burning out? I have to polish my shoes, clean my plate, sit up straight, do my homework, be on time, and THE FUKING SUN IS BURNING OUT?

That formed his life. From that day forward Townes lived his life as if the sun was burning out tomorrow.

Then one night at a party in college he fell from a balcony just to find out what it would feel like. Years later he explained...

"I decided I was going to lean over and just see what it felt like, all the way up to, approaching when you lost control and you were falling. And I realized that to do it, you know, I would have to fall. Like I just started leaning back really slow, and really paying attention, and fell you know, and I landed 4 stories down just flat on my back. I can remember the impact, exactly what it felt like. Good lord!"

That defined his life.

Right after he got married for the first time he locked himself in the closet that served as his music room. When he came out it was with his first song. His new bride expected a romantic ballad. Instead it was "Waitin 'Round To Die".

Sometimes I don't know where this dirty road is taking me
sometimes I can't even see the reason why
I guess I keep a-gamblin, 'lots of booze and lots of ramblin'
it's easier than just waitin' around to die

On New Years Day, 1997, the sun burned out and Townes hit the ground. He was dead from heart failure.

His writings covered the whole range of emotions. I've turned lotsa people on to Townes and they'll ask, well, what kind of music? I tell em, therapeutic! Maybe it was because he could touch any number of different people yet each one would have their own subjective experience like it was just them and Townes sharing some deep dark secret. How someone could write about hopelessness and misery in a way that, when you heard it, it would cheer you up at the same time is beyond me. Maybe it was because you just somehow knew you weren't alone anymore. Townes was walkin beside you.

You know, every once in awhile over the course of a lifetme something magic happens. I'm not talkin about slight of hand stuff or allusion. I'm talkin about the real deal, real magic. And when it happens, you cherish it. To me, Townes was magic. I never knew him... but then I did. I did get to see him once. It was here in town at Blind Willie's about a month or two before his death. It would have been memorable anyway just "for the sake of the song" but it turned out to be particularly poignant. I couldn't get there until the show had started for some forgotten reason and he was on break when I took a seat at the bar. I'll never forget him stumbling out from the back. I mean literally stumbling and running into things walking the crookedest way on a straight path to the stage. Stumbling not like he was drunk or high but more like he was wandering disoriented in space searching for a home. Suddenly our eyes met and locked and he stopped dead in his tracks. A big huge grin came over his face as he passed by me as if we had re-discovered some long lost, yet enegmatic, connection. I haven't a clue what it all meant to him but to me it was magic.

Later, after the show, I went back backstage which was really just an old room stuck on the side of the building. I had not wanted to invade his space but I felt drawn back there. The door was open and somebody from the club said it was okay. Even walking in from the darkness of the club it took some time to adjust and focus in the even darker room that turned out to be totally empty except for a dirty ole 30's-ish period, overstuffed couch. The room was long and narrow, shotgun like and so narrow the couch had to be slung back hard against the long wall that seemed 10 times longer than the couch and was pushed all the way back into the darkness so the far arm of it was hard up against the far wall.

And there, in the darkness, sat Townes. He had stuffed himself into the back corner of that couch and was all huddled up as if he were trying to disappear or he'd crawled completly inside himself. I was totally taken aback by the sceene and a bit shy in his presence anyway dispite the earlier eye contact.

Here, in the midst of this, was the guy through which had come all those incredible songs. And then, with the memory of the haunting emotional tone of those songs echoing through me, suddenly it all fit. I remember him coming out of his shell just long enough to gesture for me to come ahead. I walked down into the darkness and sat down on the couch leaving what I hoped was a respectable distance from him. I sat there for what seemed like a very long time just staring ahead at the blank wall 3 feet away and not saying a word. I didn't look at him and he didn't look at me. We both just sat there staring at the wall. Then slowly, I pulled off my shirt, handed it to him along with a pen, and he signed it. He looked at me as he handed it back and I pulled it back on. We looked at each other for a moment as we each broke into a slow smile. As I got up I gave him a slow wink, a nod, and a thumbs up. Then I turned and walked away. A month later he was dead. I'll never forget it.

Sometimes words are necessary, like for the sake of the song. And sometimes they're superfulous.

With God On Our Side

"I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

Those disturbing words were written by George Hunter White, AKA Morgan Hall, upon his retirement in 1966 from civil service in a farwell letter to his boss, co-conspirator, and co-pusher of ultra-refined, psycotropic alkaloids, Dr. Sidney Gottleib, director of the CIA run COINTELPRO (counterinteligence program) commonly known as MK-ULTRA.

I could pick any number of anecdotes to set the stage for what is to come here. But those words are particularly poignent.

White and Gottleib were real sweathearts crawing around in the underbelly of the 50's and 60's American counter-culture who's antics were sanctioned by the collective, denied fear of post WW TWO Americans poised at the threshold of the coming cold war. Shaking in our collective boots over the post-war threat of communism and deep into war with North Korea exacerbating the threat we turned our collective heads giving priviledge to worms like White and Gottleib.

Too busy in pursuit of our individual slice of the American Dream to look. Truth be known we DIDN'T WANNA LOOK!

Ya, we were naieve. And we didn't have the internet. But the evidence was there. Hidden in plain sight!

Adding to, further justifying, and further twisting this empowerment in the minds of White, Gottleib, and a long list of other "Great Ameicans" was one of the main principles of Hagelism... thesis, antithesis, synthesis... explaining the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power.

Gottleib's boss in the glory days of MK-ULTRA was none other than Allan Dulles , then director of the CIA. Dulles was directly responsible for launching the US government as the first ILLEGAL domestic manufacturer and distributor of LSD. According to the late Michael Kreca in his 2001 classic "How The US Government Created The 'Drug Problem' In The USA, Dulles is the one who persuaded pharmiceutical giant Eli Lilly to "synthesize the drug contrary to existing international patent accords" and make it available to the agency for their own discretinary distribution.

Where am I going with this?

Stay tuned for in the next post, The Rubber Meets The Road, Part I, we're on our way to explore where the yellow brick road never dared to go.

And where does that road lead?

I'll give you 3 guesses and the first two don't count!

Will The Real God Please Stand Up

Three and a half days. Thats how long its been since I put up the Free Energy post. Steorn (pronounced shtyorn... its galic) has a counter on their webpage reporting that over 3100 scientists have expressed interest in accepting the challenge to test the technology. Thats 1800 more in the last 84 hours. Roughly 20 per hour. And their just gettin' a good start.

We're into the 7th day and 37,741 people have registered to recieve notice of the results. Thats over 24,000 more since I last posted.

I did a google on key word * steorn * right before I published 84 hours ago and got 110,000 hits. I just did it again and got over 586,000 hits.

Steorn is also running an opinion poll. Visitors can vote YES or NO to the question: "Do you think the scientific community should accept our challenge?" There are 94,850 votes cast so far, roughly 65,000 more.

None of that surprises me.

But this does... SIXTY SEVEN PERCENT VOTED NO!!! Thats nearly 7 out of 10 who don't want something like this to be real. It was 54%... still surprisingly high to me.

So 67% of the people responding DON'T think the scientific community should test a technology that, were it to be found valid, could very possibly make oil obsolite as an energy source! That would make a key motivation for much of what is going on geopolitically and militarily, all over this planet, a mute point!! And thats just the tip of the iceberg!!!

WHY???

Would 67% of the people have voted no to Columbus testing the "world is flat" belief system? It would likewise have surprised me. But now, I would bet they would. Probably even higher.

What would something besides a flat world mean to those people? Would they be afraid they would fall off and tumble uncontrolably into oblivion? I mean, we are talking about a pretty drastic challenge to world view at the time. Would it mean they'd have to throw their bibles over the corncrib?

Is that what this is all about? God? Interpretations? Polarized points of view? Images?

And what's under all that? FEAR?

Hell, if Steorn's technology works it appears it would defy the first law of thermodynamics. Thats pretty drastic. That means we can throw the physics book over the corncrib too.

So now, now that I've been surprised, gotten over the initial shock of it, and begun to ponder my own question, WHY, I'm no longer surprised.

WHY?

Because as I feel into all this I feel.... FEAR!!! Lots of it. Not just my own but COLLECTIVE FEAR. We would no longer know what we thought we knew.

Instead we would be faced with the great un-known. The whole understanding of the physical universe would be turned upside down. We would be out of control. Hell the whole damn physical universe would be out of control. And that dear readers, scares the shit otta us!

Terror! You know... one of those "negative" emotions. That stuff to be gotten rid of. That shit that feels like shit...so hated we deny it in every way imaginable.

There just so happens to be a little known suggestion that holds: denial draws experience equal to or greater than the denial so that the denial, in a state of acceptance for it, can be cleared and moved out.

Holy shit! Could that be what the war on terror is really all about?

Why, do 7 out of 10 people not want the scientific community to investigate and test a technology that could potentially resolve so much human suffering?

I'll tell ya what Palooka say. Palooka say, its all about the unseen role of denial darlin'!

We got lots of it going on here already and the scientific experiments haven't even started yet. We got 67% of the people saying THEY DON'T WANNA LOOK!

And I tell ya what else Palooka say. Palooka say its all about the spirit/body split.

Denial of the role of spirit by body. A denial of some greater, grander law. A denial that manifests as materialism for example. A denial of the intended perfection of the universe... that, a universe and its manifested spirits moving along in balance would be a self-sustaining, living, loving organism moving in evolution along destiny's path.

And least you think Palooka be thumpin his bible here it is a denial by spirit of Body's Godly role as well. A denial that manifests as creationism for example. There is alot more to body than just a vessel to tote spirit around in during physical manifestation. Spirit keeps forgetting that without physical manifestation it's just a wet dream!

Palooka say, they are both right! And they are both wrong. Both are so twisted and fragmented into extreem polarized points of view, even within their own camps. No place for any other reality than that held within their own... its just too threatening to consider the implications of a reality beyond their own held images.

Will the real God please stand up.

Free Energy

This is very interesting...

London, 18th August 2006: Steorn, an Irish technology development company, has today issued a challenge to the global scientific community to test Steorn’s free energy technology and publish the findings.

Quote:

Our Technology and the Laws of Physics
Steorn’s technology produces free, clean and constant energy. This provides a significant range of benefits, from the convenience of never having to refuel your car or recharge your mobile phone, to a genuine solution to the need for zero emission energy production. It also provides a secure supply of energy, since the components of the technology are readily available.
The technology is in a constant state of development. The company has focused for the past three years on increasing power output and the development of test systems that allow detailed analysis to be performed.
Steorn’s technology appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. This principle is stated simply as ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form’.
Steorn is making three claims for its technology:
The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).
The sum of these claims is that our technology creates free energy.

Here's some skinny on Steorn.

Palooka say, aside from the obvious benifit to the world and her peoples I'd just love to see oil taken out of the picture today just to watch the global geo-political power-mongers squirm.

Dark Side Of The Moon

Sheding some light on the dark side of the moon.

Palooka wisdom say: Before jumping on any high horse, turn it over and check out the underbelly.

Masturbating With Watermelon

Once you've tasted the real thing, masturbation just never quite cuts the mustard. There is no substitute for makin love with your honey. And you learn real quick that orgasm is just the frosting on the cake... no pun intended.

'Course, sometimes your content with just licking the bowl. But when you want yer cake and eat it too you want the whole enchelada.

So it is with watermelons. Eating one of these genetically modified seedless excuses just don't cut it. Its like unrequited love... it never quite sasifies.

I bought one the other day and put it in the garage refrigerator to get good and cold and wait for the mood to strike.

Then I forgot about it.

Then, earlier this evening, it started. Faint at first. So faint I couldn't even identify it. Just a yearning poking away at me. A need. A want. I WANT!

WHAT?

Finally it got strong enough to enter my conscious mind. WATERMELON! I want WATERMELON!!

Then my head really got its shit together. I GOT WATERMELON!! So out to the garage I went. And back with the coveted fruit.

Now, when you grew up growing watermelons in rich, black, Iowa farm dirt you know watermelons. You know it was back in the good ole innocent days before mad geneticists got their mitts in the melon patch. And you know from experience. And you remember because its a sensuous experience. And its sensuous because the senses know.

The ears know. They know when you thump it. And they know when you cut it open. Know from the sound... Craaaccckk! POP!!

The nose knows. You know from the smell... DISTINCT!

The Eyes know. Know from the color... a thin green skin over a pale green rind and then, RED. Stark Red. Red red. Watermelon Red! With Seeds!!

The fingers know. They know from the texture of the meat and the rind... CHRISP!

And the taste buds know.

This one, the only variety available at the stores these days (public demand they say), looked and smelled like a watermelon before I cut it. But the masquerade ended there. The fantasy was in trouble as soon as I put knife to necter. And it went down hill from there.

No craaaccck, pop under the knife. No red Red. But alot of that whitish looking layer where the rind turns into the fruit Its usually a pretty thin layer. That color extended way into the fruit. Never really getting watermelon red. Just sorta, well, SICK LOOKING!

Taste? Put one of these modern miracles in your mouth and its immediatly obvious something is missing besides the seeds.

Texture? Can you say RUBBER? You do the finger test. Stick a finger in the meat and the cells break away. Mine was like a half deflated ballon and the rind was like a sponge.

Rubbish!

But, hands down, the final evidence that you've just eaten good watermelon, real watermelon, comes when you've eaten your fill and you be SASIFIED!!

I know!

I just did!!

And I STILL WANT WATERMELON!!!

Nights When I Am Sane

We buried him at high noon on a sweltering saturday in August 10 years ago. I had been sitting by myself out on the back deck at my sister's house. Waiting. Grieving. Trying to make some sanity out of the insanity.

Then they came to me and said, "You're the patriarch now. Will you say some words?"

For a long time only the tears came. Then...

There was a time when he was young
When the winds blew free and life was fun
He was mostly quiet as I recall
He feared he was short but, to me, he stood tall

The oldest one on a mission to please
The books, the sports... it all came with ease
He could tell ya 'bout numbers cause he was bright
And I'd seen him hit many a ball clean otta sight

We grew up together on a farm not far
Worked in the fields, played in the yard
He might whup yer butt in a corncob fight
But he was always there when things weren't right

Then one day he was gone
College, a wife, two daughters, three sons
The time flew by, the years marched on
What he loved most scattered hither and yon

His world had begun to fall apart in a pile
Took comfort in a bottle of gin for awhile
On what looses for one, another might win
Well, he was the former and the demons moved in

Only God knows what lurks in the hearts of men
When the winds stir cold, the clouds move in
When the pain in your heart is all you can see
And every part of your soul aches to be free

Now the winds blow cold for you and for me
But for our brother they finally blow free

Mickey Newbury's Nights When I Am Sane is one of my favorite cd's. I play it regularly. Its bittersweet because the title cut reminds me of what was probably going through my brother the night he did the deed. He just simply couldn't stand the pain anymore....

Well its cold on this mountain... when winter comes on
The dew in the meadow is sprinkled along
This road down to Nashville like crystal and stone
Its a place where a man sells his soul for a song

God knows I loved her too much I can see
Much more than she could have ever loved me
If I was the last man in east Tennessee...

Well at times I feel I need the rain at times I need the sun
Pleasure is a thread of pain when it is undone
My moments of insanity are never like a chain
I only know I am not free the nights when I am sane

So do not be concerned my love if you see me cry
For the laughter does not choose to free the happiness inside
Just as there may seem to be a smile that's out of place
It only means there is a pain that hurts too much to face

God knows I loved her too much I can see
Much more than she could have ever loved me
If I was the last man in east Tennessee...

I'm just one man sometimes I wish I was three
I could take a forty-four pistol to me
Put one in my brain for her memory
One more in my heart then I would be free
One more in my heart I would be free

R.I.P. my brother.