A Dangerous Descent

Our philosophical pursuer of exalted thought has been rarely seen of late; his days seeming to consist of epic walks & even more epic sessions of intellectual secretion. Some fragments that have come to my attention have me troubled- containing as they do hints of a descent into realms from where one tends to emerge either as a kind of archetypal Hero figure, or incurably insane. Anyway, see what you think.

Do you dare look upon my visage? Is it not terible to behold? That is because I Am. You are, as yet, Not. Do you reach up your hand towards my height? Be careful not to assume I will grab it.
God is decomposing in the compost heap of Time. Frankly, He begins to stink. Others turn away in disgust. I smile.
He is dead & rotting. I am not dead. Nor rotting. Though my clothes are torn & my face scratched. The good & virtuous avert their eyes when I approach growling. I pull faces & bark. They think I am mad. I bark all the louder.

Great Song, Great Video

An injection of this kind of inspired, vicious brilliance into the present mainstream would be welcome.
And while we're here, one of the great modern works of primitive art here. I think modernity might be in need of a few more similar artistic exorcisms.

Defending Shakespeare

There is the notion that the true author of the extraordinary plays of Shakespeare was not Shakespeare at all, but that these works were falsely attributed to the famous bearded actor. The theory goes that the actual author was an infinite number of monkeys banging away on typewriters in some hidden part of London; a scientific experiment conducted by some deranged Svengali to satisfy his lust for literary masterpieces & animal cruelty, though perhaps not in that order. Presumably, knowing the works of greatness produced by the monkeys would be simply ignored &/or ridiculed if their true authorship were known, he paid this William Shakespeare actor to pretend to their creation. 

The main problem with this hypothesis is, of course, the inconvenient truth that typewriters were not in existence at this point in history. One could also attack the argument from the side of logistics: acquiring the monkeys, feeding the monkeys, hygiene, analysing their output, etc... but valid though such an approach would be, it is rendered superfluous by the howitzer blow of the typewriter point.

The Way of the Intellect- Getting Deeper

I passed on Gearoid's advice to our amibtious hero regarding how to have the required high quality thinking. Like any great intellectual, he poured scorn on the notion that he might have anything to learn from use of hallucinogenic substances, but he was excited about the walking notion. He recallled that Nietzsche, for one, was a great leg user, & perhaps this was indeed the secret of the presence of the right kind of thoughts in his head. He headed for the hills & returned, dishevelled & with a wild, hungry look two days later. He rushed towards his room, & began writing. This is a taste of what he produced:

"I am, therefore I think, because of the words. When you put the right words together after each other then you get ideas and when you get enough ideas together in a row then you get philosophy. This is what makes sense of what is out there & in here using the words that are in here to talk about what's out there. This is what makes us human & makes us superior to everything because of our words put together in our heads. Without the words we wouldn't be who we are which would be impossible because we are who we are & how could we not be it. We would be someone else & wouldn't even be able to know we were different than who we were without the words to think it."

The Way of the Intellect

He was trying to think of different things than what he was thinking at the time. Which is to say that the thoughts in his head were different than the ones he wanted to be there. The ones that were there weren't very good & he wanted to be a great thinker so it was essential that those that were there be a lot better than they were. But how to have these more brilliant thoughts...that was the question. What could be the answer to the great riddle? If only he could know it. All that was needed was a change in the words in his head...a problem of semantics.

Absolute Truth

I scornfully reject all artifice & place myself as a living centre of truth- moral, psychological, scientific & any other fucking kind you can think of, in this degraded cess-pit of lies & delusion. My task is to write wholly devoid of falsehood; to cast unreality into the void of its own filthy nothingness. And so my endeavour is to write wholly in the Now with total fidelity to the present moment exactly as it is.
I sit here in front of a computer screen...no, that won't do. I actually sit here in front of a page, my consciousness bleeding ink in strange symbolic emanation of itself. But I see I'm in trouble here because, yes, at this moment I am actually in front of a computer screen simply transcribing the previous present moment manifestations in a very different present moment. And the present moment of the hypothetical reader reading of this present moment is also a very different present moment, & this ghastly creature who gnaws at my innards will brazenly attest: "He claims to sit writing now but this now is no more...Time doth make a liar of him." This is more difficult than I'd imagined.

Who Put the Homeland in Homeland Security?

The origin of this phrase to describe one's country explained here.

Efficient Eating

Cut thick slices of bread as opposed to thin, as over a whole loaf the energy lost in cutting, buttering, lifting & probably chewing will obviously be greater the more slices that have been cut from the loaf. Thick slices mean greater net energy profit which may give you the edge over your rivals.

US Dollar Symbolism

Short video here with Jordan Maxwell. Incidentally, it was in 1935 under the Presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt that the strange re-designing of the US Dollar took place; this being the same FDR who wrote; "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."

The Great & Profound Alternative Dictionary

Philosophy: The creation of mental problems, the solution to which is forbidden unless it is seen that the solution gives birth to a new problem.

As a vaguely justified extension of this, a scintillating summation of the free-will arguments follows:

"What do you think, do we have free will?"
"I dunno. What do you think?"
"Ehh....I dunno. What do you think?"
"I dunno..." etc

Mediocrites

Mediocrites(Mee-dee-ok-ri-tees)was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher (5th century BC) who preached a doctrine of ignorance, self-delusion & blind patriotism. He achieved little renown until he was declared Philosophical Patron Saint of Modernity by an international delegation under the chairmanship of Henry Kissinger in Frankfurt in 1969. This received the blessing of both the Pope & Mao Tse Tung who described the decision as 'momentous'. Kissinger chose to celebrate the Frankfurt announcement by bombing the shit out of Cambodia.

Mediocrites - if he didn't exist, you'd have to make him up.

Freedom Next Time- John Pilger on the Media

Revealing lecture here.

Paul Craig Roberts-More of

A whole host of articles from the man below, formerly at the heart of the Reagan administration, here. Some of his thoughts relating to the much mentioned 911 subject follow in the essay "Denouncing Inconvenient Facts as 'Conspiracy Theories'" :
"There is an inconsistency between the speed with which the WTC buildings collapsed and the "pancaking theory" used to explain the collapse. Another way of putting the problem is that there seems to be a massive energy deficit in the explanation that the buildings fell as a result of gravitational energy. There simply was not sufficient gravitational energy to produce the results.
For reporting a scientific finding, I was called a "conspiracy theorist." Only in America is scientific analysis seen as conspiracy theory and government lies as truth.
...The combination of oddities within 911 become inexplicable, a statistical impossibility.
Powerfully constructed buildings collapse when there is no source of the required energy to do the job. A large 757 hits the Pentagon but leaves a small hole, and there is no sign of wings, engines, tail or fuselage. Every air control and military procedure fails, and hijacked airliners are not intercepted by jet fighters. The alleged hijackers' names apparently are not on the passenger lists, and some of the alleged hijackers have been found alive and well in Saudi Arabia. Dr. Thomas R. Olmstead used the Freedom of Information Act to get a copy of the autopsy list of American Airlines flight 77, and he reports that there are no Arabic names on the list."

The one point on which I'd disagree with this noble soul is that it's not only in America that scientific analysis is seen as conspiracy theory and government lies as truth.

Banumas

A genetic cross between bananas & satsumas. A winner?

Impeach Now Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy

Paul Craig Roberts was the Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury under the Reagan aministration & the mastermind behind the economic policy that became known as Reaganomics. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review

"Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.

Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of "executive orders" that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, "terrorist" events in the near future."

The rest of the essay here.

Rationality of Atheism

As many people consider the belief in a deity/intelligence behind reality to be irrational with the obvious implication that atheism is the rational view I thought it might be interesting to examine the rationality of this view.
To begin with an analogy let us say you were to enter a concert hall and listen to an extremely complex symphonic piece and upon subsequently enquiring as to its composer you were told that it had no composer but that it had simply emerged, authorless from the void. Upon expressing surprise you are told that this reaction is irrational, & it to be expected that the symphony be capable of its own creation. This would seem to be the position of atheism towards something of infinitely greater complexity than the most elaborate of mere symphonies ie the universe.
What then what are the explanations of this emergence from the void? Well there are two possible positions. Firstly that it actually has not emerged at all but has been in a state of beginningless, perpetual existence. Rationality though tends not to look favourably on things being in states of perpetual, beginningless existence. Reason, in other words, would have problems with the dead-end explanation for the arising of something's state of being amounting to- "It has just always been there". Perhaps this is true, but if so then this is essentially a kind of mystical position, from which standpoint our conception of rationality is inconsistent.
The more orthodox and possibly atheism-friendly stance is that yes, the universe has had a beginning, it did arise. Using reason I deduce that prior to its existence or becoming reality there was something we can call "not existing". What was the nature of this "not existing"? Well, of course, this must be the absence of anything; hence a state of absolute nothingness. Using very simple logic I deduce that absolutely nothing is capable of emerging from a state of absolute nothingness.
And from there to electrons banging off each other or whatever-an enormous leap has been made amounting to explaining the existence of the universe with "Well first of all, you have a universe and from there....."

Aldous Huxley on Propaganda

All the following more or less from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited from 1957 so I'll omit to quote his writing. 

 The media are controlled by members of the Power elite. 

The non-stop distraction of the various forms of media deliberately used to prevent people from paying too much attention to the reality of the social and political situation. 

A society most of whose members spend a great part of their time in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera etc will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it. 

Today's dictators rely on repitition, suppression and rationalization- the repitition of catchwords they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or State. 

In the words of Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister for Armaments "Through technical devices like the radio and loud-speaker 80 million people were deprived of independent thought.....subject to the will of one man." 

Children can now become radio or television fodder for the propagandist. 

Hitler viewed the masses of man as utterly contemptible and incapable of abstract thought. They are determined by feelings and unconscious drives which the succesful propagandist must learn to manipulate. 

In the words of Hitler himself- "All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities and expressed in a few stereotyped formulas constantly repeated". ["War on terror" anyone?]

The propagandist's statements are made without qualification. Everything is either diabolically black or celestially white...." 

Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, or shouted down. 

Though here Huxley omits to mention ignored. The media simply deprive them of a public voice.

 The effects of propaganda cannot be neutralised except by a thorough training in analysing its techniques and seeing through its sophistries.

 A democracy is a society dedicated to the proposition that power is often abused and should therefore be entrusted to officials only in limited amounts.

 Just to add a final quote from the DH Lawrence character of Huxley's Point Counter Point: 'The industrialists who purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don't let them. Make the effort of being human.'

Mass Culture/Media as Hallucination Machine

American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary
Hallucination: False or distorted perception of objects or events with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or drug.

An hallucinatory sense of reality can arise from correct sensory information but a false interpretation of the information. The mainstream media as projectors of the hallucination, the masses as those dwelling in the hallucination & media owners, politicians, captains of industry, ie the ruling elites as parasites who derive their power from the hallucination. In the Stedman's definition, the mental disorder or drug being the projections of the media.

A good example of the media as hallucination would be the famous video of Bin Laden admitting to responsiblity for the 911 attacks, as described here. This video heavily pushed by the Bush admin as proof positive of BL's responsibility, but there is a small problem with the video. Oh, the mistranslation of the words, says you. Possibly, but there is a slightly larger issue; that being that the man in the video is not Bin Laden. Besides "Bin Laden" having become a much fatter man than previously, the man's nose in the given video has undergone a very radical transformation. He's also gone from left to right-handed though this quite a small detail compared to being in possession of a different face. Admittedly he does have a beard. However, all in all, this is not Bin Laden & the projections of the power brokers onto the media onto the masses an intentional lie at the root, & the view of reality being projected & believed in is simply an hallucination. If one starts with a lie, all the analysis down the line is worthless.
Here incidentally is the FBI Bin Laden homepage where it says
"Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world."

You will notice the absence of mention of 911 as the FBI believe they have no evidence to make this connection. You will not however notice this absence of mention of 911 in relation to Bin Laden when you see him mentioned in the media.

A bit of Pelevin

"Watching the hot sunlight falling on the tablecloth covered with sticky blotches & crumbs, Andrei was struck by the thought of what a genuine tragedy it was for millions of light rays to set out on their journey from the surface of the sun, go hurtling through the infinite void of space & pierce the kilometres thick sky of Earth, only to be extinguished in the revolting remains of yesterday's soup. Maybe these yellow arrows slanting in through the window were conscious, hoped for something better- and realised their hope was groundless, giving them all the necessary ingredients for suffering."
From The Yellow Arrow

J.M. Coetzee's "Youth"

Joyless. Final lines: "One of these days the ambulance men will call at Ganapathy's flat & bring him out on a stretcher with a sheet over his face. When they have fetched Ganapathy they might as well come & fetch him(our hero) too."
I shudder to think what kind of vantage point of consciousness is that of the Daily Mail's critic who describes it as "exhilerating."
Whenever I decide to forego my natural inclinations & read what is generally being touted as modern great literature, my natural inclinations are proven to be the far more accurate barometer of what I enjoy. At least Coetzee's book was relatively short and those occasions when I defy what naturally attracts me incredibly few.

Macbeth Reconsidered

In the fine tradition of this blog of re-working, some would say improving, old classics of human thought such as my much renowned Platonic series, here, here and here, I've been spurred into daring mental flight by Shakespeare's dark tale, Macbeth(which the more astute readers may have already realised from the title of this piece). WIthout further ado we leap towards the end of the play where Macbeth is prepared to make his final stand.

Macbeth: I bear a charmed life that must not yield
To one of woman born.
Macduff: Despair thy charm
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripped.
Macbeth: Hold on a minute here, for fuck sake. I can see
Where this is going & it's laughable. I decided I'd hold my tongue
About that stupid Birnan Wood coming to Dunsinane rubbish. "Oi lads
Lets hack down a load of branches & disguise our numbers."
Were men of any substance in th' field, they'd have
Told them to piss off.
But anyway, I stayed quiet for the sake of decorum. However,
This woman born stuff even beats that. We'll look up a dictionary
So I can make my point.
The Free Online Dictionary
"Born: Brought into existence; created"
Webster's English Dictionary
"Birth: the emergence of a new individual from the body of its parent."
Just because it's a Caesarean doesn't mean you weren't of a woman born, Macduff.
And so without further ado, I slay thee.
Macduff: Dead, dead, dead, aaahhhhh.

Macbeth slays Macduff & reigns over an era of tyrannical depravity till he dies at the age of 81 of heart disease.

The Brotherhood of Darkness

What is or may be the New World Order, that visionary vagueness which one can observe people like Gordon Brown & GW Bush mention with great fondness. What is this ideological drive that we are only told glimpses of really all about? Well, it's quite easy to find a relatively superficial idea of what it's all about; in the words of David Rockefeller, one of the world's key figures, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991. 

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." 

George Herbert Walker Bush: "What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea - a new world order...to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind...based on shared principles and the rule of law...The illumination of a thousand points of light...The winds of change are with us now."

I take back what I said about vagueness? It’s all very clear now.

Electric Toothbrushes

For fuck sake.

Fresh Legs

One often hears in football matches of a player being brought on because of his fresh legs. I have to say this has always baffled me. Are any of my countless illlustrious readers blessed with a pair of these invaluable commodites- the famous "fresh legs"?
An afterthought strikes me: if these fresh legs possessed players are so useful to a team's chances of winning, why are they not played from the start of these matches.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

Not necessarily. There is the possibility that it will continue to go up or may reach a point & then remain at rest in this position. There is also the intriguing variation where it may, after a while of being at rest, move sideways from this point, also without coming back down.
I call this slice of pure thought- "Things Not Necessarily Coming Back Down After They Have Gone Up." I do not call it a theory as it is obviously true as opposed to conjecture.

Mr Jealousy- Tonight BBC1

Stars Eric Stoltz. A man checks out his girlfriend's former lover. Amiable.

General MacArthur on the War on Terror, 1957

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it...."
While the subject has been broached:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
— H. L. Mencken

Wasn't it terrible how just when people were getting used to the end of the Cold War, right on cue up popped the next dreadful undefeatable threat?

Top Global Warming Advocate: Jupiter & Saturn Closer To Sun Than Earth

David Mayer de Rothschild's recent book, 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Changes was used as part of the PR blitz to accompany the Live Earth project.
Appearing on The Alex Jones Show this past Friday,Rothschild offered the following expertise:
ALEX JONES: "The polar icecaps of Mars are receding at several miles a year, much faster than ours and that the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are melting, in fact several of their moons were ice and are now liquid seas - how are SUV's causing that David Rothschild?
ROTHSCHILD: "Because those planets are closer to the sun, my friend."
ALEX JONES: "No, Jupiter and Saturn are not closer to the sun and neither is Mars."
Rest of the story here. This expert, incidentally, of the Rothschild banking family who are filled with good intentions for mankind.
So, anyway, there seems two possibilities; either this global warming expert, embraced by Albert Einstein Gore, is scientfically clueless, or else, and this is perhaps more fascinating though less likely, we are for some reason being fed a completely false version of the structure of our solar system. Falsified science, if you will, in the service of hidden ends. Though that would never happen.

If a Butterfly...

"Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?"
Lets face it- the effects of butterflies' wings flapping are on the whole harmless. Is this strange question designed to provoke the extermination of the butterfly species for fear of the possibility of untold ecological disasters befalling the human race? If so, this is a very advanced form of paranoia which should not be taken seriously. Let them flap away and consequences be damned.

The Slave Mentality

[This piece deals in very broad strokes]

Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. I am deeply convinced of it. He's made that way and arranged for it. And not in the present time owing to some chance circumstances, but generally in all times a decent man must be a coward and a slave. That is the natural law of all decent people on earth. If one of them does happen to get a bit of pluck in something, let him not be eased or pleased with that: he's still quail before something else. 

Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. 

The character uttering the above is full of cynicism, touching on despair, so there is an element of revenge in his utterances about cowardice and enslavement, but there is still at least a strong foundation of truth in his observations or claims.

There have, as long as recorded history, been masters & slaves with varying degees between the two extremities; masters here in the sense of the ruling elites of the societies. It is in the interests of the masters that the slaves' lot not be too traumatic lest, like Spartacus they revolt, and also in the slaves' interests that they be content with their lot as the odds tend to be stacked radically against them if they ever do feel like risking a revolt, Spartacus not ending particularly well after all. And so it is natural that a slave philosophy to have subconsciously developed to justify to oneself the social order so as not to be forever reminded of one's abjectness before the masters of this order. Such a slave-mentality would broadly advocate an obsequious attitute to one's masters and in the absence of especial misery the rightness of the social order. 

Since slavery & mankind go back such a long way, this philosophy becomes like a computer programme hard-wired into the mind's mechanism, and such a mental hardwiring of the mind will not simply disappear overnight. Over long stretches of our history, the lot of the what we may broadly term the slave populations have improved though the same broad master-slave relationship is being enacted. To the subject of the slave mentality in his purest form, the notion that he is a slave is an impossible one to comprehend since his very mind mechanism has come to be identical with this very slave mentality. The modern archetypal slave would have pious faith in the entire order of things as ordained by the political leaders of his state, and the economic leaders whose interests are represented by the political system. He believes essentially all that is told him by the truth revealing mechanisms of the rulers, ie the media, believing his opinion to be formed by his own objective analysis of objective facts, unaware that his gaze is merely being pointed in desired directions by the means of propaganda of the ruling masters.

 The slave equates his own desires with those of the masters & we can see this in the form of patriotism, or at least a toxic form of patriotism, where the slaves achieve a personal satisfaction of their will to power through sublimation of their desires into the achievements of the State, and this identification of the individual ego with the projected national ego is an immense potential tool of manipulation for the masters of the social-political system. 

 In the pure form, because of the absolute alignment of the person with the slave mentality, a truth revealing attack on the social order of things is experienced as an attack on his personal being, and despite the power of the evidence presented to awaken him to reality, the structure of self which he believes himself to be acts as an impenetrable force-field exactly like in those sci-fi films where incoming misssiles are annihilated by this defence mechanism. This shield is doubly effective in that it actually tends to re-direct the attack back on the person trying to wake him up- this typically rendered where the messenger of the uncomfortable truth is mocked as a conspiracy theorist or madman, and the slave strucure left intact & even reinforced. As in the films, however, in all but the purest slaves this defence-shield can be weakened if enough outside force generated, or ideally from an enlightenment experience within where this hallucinated or imprisoned self vanishes in tandem with its own liberation. He might tell himself for example, “Wait a minute - the Fake News really is fake news!”

Nowhere to Run- Tonight ITV4

"Stars Jean-Claude Van Damme. A convict protects a farm. Poor."

As described by Sunday Times Culture. Could be worth a look.

When is a Controlled Demolition Not a Controlled Demolition?

- Presumably when fear and cowardice in the face of unsettling reality kicks in. Here is Danny Jowenko, a leading Dutch demolition expert, descibing one very obvious controlled demolition.
And while we're on the subject, here's MIT engineer, Jeff King, with a more detailed view.
As Voltaire wrote, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Onwards the War on Terror.

 

 

Sadly I have just learned Danny Jowenko died in 2011 in a bizarre single car accident on a straight road into a tree on the side of the road. Though it would have been much safer and wiser for him in worldly terms to have backed down, he held to his professional opinion that the collapse of WTC7 was without any doubt an instance of a controlled demolition.

Live Earth- A Counter Threat

In a slight variation on the rain-dance, an attempt to placate the elements into not changing our collective climate by means of a sacrificial offering; the offering consisting of lots of really shit music being played simultaneously in strategic locations dotted around the globe. This, I might have thought, a dangerous strategy in which the gods likely to be angered by the appalling nature of the offering, though perhaps Albert Nobel Einstein Gore is hoping the idea of being subjected to future incarnations of ever more awful music extravaganzas will persuade said elements to back off in their supposed hostile climactic intentions. A brave gamble by Gore whom I would trust with my life were I ever to suffer the misfortune of a full-frontal lobotomy.

Camus' Outsider & Existentialism- A Deep Understanding

I had a review of Camus' famous novel accepted by Amazon, which can be seen here with the given title, Outside the Inside. My short yet exquisite piece speaks for itself, though I would like to mention my personal admiration for the educating lines, "Existential means to do with existing and this book is to do with the existence of the lead character who is basically an outsider. Read it and think." The one thing that surprises me is that only 2 out of 12 people seemed to find the piece helpful. I can't imagine why but were I in need of consoling I can always remind myself of Nietzsche's line, "Where the rabble drinks, all wells are poisoned."
I'll take advantage of this precious opportunity to draw your attention to my other accepted review here, this time of Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment. Though it would admittedly be difficult to top my Camus review, I am proud of the lines,
"There is no denying that this is quite a big book so if you're not prepared to read this for quite a while, I'd go elsewhere if I were you. Me, I've no problem with big books and if it's very good, the bigger the better. And this book is very, very good. Which makes it ok that it's so big."

Dodgy Reasoning Says You

If absolute pre-destination were not the law of being then all that has happened was not bound to happen in the exact manner in which it has. However, all this has indeed happened in exactly this manner, thus showing that it was indeed pre-destined to occur exactly so.

Lazy Post- Interesting Short Video

This 2 minute video here from Alex Jones in late July, 2001.

Word-Play in an Advanced Form

Cull the sack.
There you have it; a simple yet brilliant exercise in linguistic trickery. What I have done is to take a succession of words with which most of us are presuambly familiar; that sequence of words being "cul de sac", and I've replaced each word with one of phonetic identicality yet spelled differently & of different symbolic meaning. The result is a confusion in the synaptic connections of the mind where the expected well trodden pathways of intelligence are short-circuited, thus defying the emanation of the mind which is the rational self. This rational self tends to labour under the delusion that it is the self in its absolute sense as opposed to an emanation of mind and it is the aim of, for example, the reason defying zen koan to dethrone the rational sense from its imagined status of certain existence and its hegemony over the entelechy or self in its fullness. Someone may argue, quite correctly, that this word-playing is fucking with people's minds. However despite the violence of the phrase, fucking with minds may be of benevolent as well as malevolent or indeed neutral design & effect.

In the malevolent case, the breakdown of the cohesion of the rational self is replaced by scattered fragments of this same apparent structure, & these fragments fail to, at least temporarily, re-assemble into the prior structure nor do they succeed in re-convening in a new structure of cohesion. This is a state of paranoia & disjunction between the outer & inner worlds, & indeed within these worlds. The person whose rational mind undergoes such a breakdown cannot be said to have been improved by this unravelling of his synaptically connected self.

However, only the most paranoid among us could seriously interpret the very fine word-play of "cull the sack" in the malevolent sense of mind-fucking, & instead this is word-play of the benevolent kind. In this broad category of positive word-play a breakdown in the hegemony of the rational self also occurs, but crucially what it is replaced by isn't a fragmented sense of the previous self, but the pure mind which had produced the previous structure, or apparent structure, in the first place. So rather than a structure built on the symbolic world of language produced by the mind, or a scattered version of the same structure, we have the cohesion of pure mind, ie the famous state of enlightenment where mind expersinces itself as itself & all is well.

The rational self tends to fool itself into believing that meaning or truth depends on its own successful following of the pathways of language where meaning lies at the end of the correctly taken road. However the actual effect of these pathways of reasoning has the essential effect of ensuring the existence of the same rational self, & indeed here there is possibly a level of deviousness being exercised where this survival of the ego sense is the true goal of the apparently truth-seeking thought activities; the air upon which the rational self survives being thought. This extended may be why evil needs activities to persuade itself of its own self-imagined reality. The point of the zen koan is that mind being mind being truth needs no truth-seeking road to itself, & the thinking mind exhausts itself in its attempts to decipher the koan. A moment of supreme tension climaxes in the enlightenment experience, though someone like Krishamurti would stress that there is no need for annihilating of ego or any of that crap, since reality being reality is in no need of destroying what isn't.
And that is why I wrote cull the sack.

Richard Perle-Neo Con Man of Wisdom

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it. ..If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war...our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

What kind of vision & what kind of children are we talking about here, Richard?
Strangely in the following quotes, Perle offers a kind of Dictatorship for Dummies blueprint:
"Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces."
And
"Dictatorships start wars because they need external enemies to exert internal control over their own people."
Which echoes the wise words of Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg trials:
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

A Man for All Seasons

His hatred of love was only surpassed by his love of hatred.
He hated his friends.
His friends hated him.
But they also loved him. That was their weakness.
And his strength.

Staying Alive - Advice in the Art of

When crossing roads be careful to avoid being hit by fast-moving traffic, coming from either direction.