Smash and Grab

The image of Berlusconi's smashed face, the newly gap-toothed shock with which he clung to the car door, knees buckling as he stared about him in wide-eyed bleeding terror and confusion, that image is burning itself into the minds of people around the world. A primal thrill is rippling through the collective psyche at the sight of one of their lordly rulers reduced to a quivering wreck. Many will make the connection that if this can be done to one of them, it can happen to others, too. Amongst that many there will be some few who decide to take a shot at whatever targets present themselves.

Make no mistake, this incident marks a tipping point.

There seem to be a lot of those recently. The unfolding Climategate debacle has now grown beyond the damning e-mails and rigged source code with which the long-anticipated Copenhagen conference was kicked off, to now include massive corruption in the flagship Danish carbon market, complimentary hookers for the elite to enjoy as they wipe foie gras off their chins and get chauffered around in fleets of carbon-belching limos, departing at top speed back to the swank hotels to escape from enraged brown delegates who got an early look at the racist and exploitative treaty they were to be prodded and tricked into signing. No doubt the limos are too fast, or the free blowjobs just too fantastic, for these compassionate statesmen to notice as they race past streets closed down so thousands of shackled protestors can be sat down in ordered rows in puddles of their own freezing piss while the anonymous storm troopers we used to call 'cops' patrol the ranks with tasers, clubs, pepper spray and snarling German shepherds, their armour no doubt doing more to protect them from the weather (itself, as ever, howling its disagreement with the whole notion of global warming) than from the non-violent men and women of conscience they're tasked with shutting the fuck up.

The world is taking a long and hard look at the proceedings in Copenhagen, and I have my doubts that it much likes what it sees. Climategate has swallowed the Copenhagen conference whole, and when the Warmistas return to countries in the grip of what will no doubt be a savage winter Climategate will eat their stillborn agenda, their reputations, and their careers.

It appears that the American establishment now openly accepts that Osama (rhymes with Obama) Bin Laden has been dead since Tora Bora. Hundreds of dead spec ops troops (and how many in the crossfire?), no doubt hundreds of millions of dollars, squandered to keep up the pretense of tracking down Rahm Emanuel ... I'm sorry, Emanuel Goldstein ... and all those tapes with which they periodically prodded their dumb American beast protective-territorial circuit ... all of that now more or less admitted to be a giant psy-op.

People are taking note.

The elite knew this was coming. They knew, past a certain point, that they wouldn't be able to keep the lid on all those secrets and crimes, that eventually the scuffling and moaning of the mutant they've been keeping in the attic would become impossible to explain away as mating raccoons. So they've been planning to let things out on their own schedule, have their trusted minions and pet mockingbirds release the shocking truth in that special way they have, so can weave their neurolinguistic hoodoo on your minds one last time.

That's why you've got Alex Jones with his megaphone, with his boiling bellyful of rage, his megaphone-ful of descriptive truth and prescriptive nonsense (same as Chomsky! But aimed at a different psychological type.) It's why you've got Jesse 'Muscles' Ventura moving into position, with an all-new show in which the fearless action star will investigate all the conspiracies on prime-time mainstream television. They throw larger-than-life figures like these up there to give it to you straight-ish: they're big and strong and loud and take no shit from anyone, which is not at all like you, little man, which is why they can do it and you can't. So just sit there on your couch and get helplessly scared and impotently mad as the Big Boys let you in on just how fucked you are.

The game-plan for the elite right now comes down to one thing: one great big almighty Ooga-Booga with the starring monster as no less than themselves. Done right, this will stun the mass mind into the learned helplessness of battered wife syndrome on a huge scale. The spirit of the human species will be broken so thouroughly that even if the elite raised their boots from their faces and opened the door to the electrified cages (neither of which they have any intention of doing) their slaves won't make a move to rise (unless explicitly ordered to.)

Our game-plan is rather simpler. The conspiracy movement as a whole has been plainly stating their case for a long time. History is now cooperating in showing the world, in unambiguous terms, that we've been more or less giving it as straight as it gets the whole time, in stark contrast to the dissembling leaders who (it's turning out) really have been guilty of more or less everything they're charged with and (we'll no doubt find) a whole lot more we didn't know about, too.

This unveiling is tramautic thing for most people. I know it was for me. It probably was for you too. This is going to be much faster, much more intense, a roller-coaster ride into Chapel Perilous that will smash a great number of souls. What we have to do now is guide the species through this trauma: to let them know that all is not lost, that we are merely awakening as a species from a terrible nightmare, and that it is possible to awaken inside a dream of breathtaking beauty. While the elite panic and the masses freak out, we must remain calm and alert, so that as the Leviathan smashes its world we might grab whatever opportunities present themselves.

Culture and Cosmos I: Out of the Big Black Dark

One by one and in their billions they move through the world along recurring paths they are powerless to change. The span and influence of their lives is decided entirely by their birth; and those lives are of no meaning, nor in truth of any importance save to that which immediately surrounds them, for each is separated from the other by a vast and unbridgeable gulf, one which - but for the most tenuous of connections - they are able to cross only with their deaths. Their common center is a yawning bottomless maw, whose inner workings are impenetrable yet whose indomitably fierce appetite is undeniable, for it is that hunger around which all else takes shape. As to the shape that is taken, it's origin is ineffable: impossibly distant, beyond any hope of observation even in theory, an invisible hand that reaches down from everywhere to ensure everything is kept in its place. Meanwhile everything is flying apart, on an inevitable slide into emptiness, dissolution, and a total isolation where in the end there is nothing left but that endless appetite, and that distant invisible hand.

What is it we're talking of, here? Is it our society? Well of course it is. It has an economy driven by rampant consumerism, while its communities are dissolved by a misunderstood notion of individualism that has left the individual alone before the State and the Market. Whatever appearances may be, everyone knows that all real power is in the hands of the financial interests, for there is no argument with their massive concentrations of wealth, nor with the insatiable greed at the heart of those concentrations. At the same time there is the shadow government, permeating the institutions that give society form, ensuring that a certain script is followed as events unfold.

But it's not just society, for the description above could as easily be the cosmos as it is today described to us.

Stars form when a certain quantity of gas collapses under its own weight. However large they happen to be when they are born in their nebulae predetermines every characteristic of their lives, from how brightly they shine to how long they live: those lives will be long and dull or short and glorious but either way, one day, they will end in an entirely predictable fashion. Some will fade to embers and some will explode, showering the cosmos with the fruits of their death in the form of newly created heavy elements and a certain amount of their energy. Those that explode will then become either neutron stars or black holes: immortal, invisible, and indomitable concentrations of gravitational potential. Most are small and of relatively little importance, but at the center of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, its gravity the center around which every star in the galaxy revolves. Surrounding every galaxy, meanwhile, its influence in fact dominating every large structure in the universe, is dark matter: an invisible, undetectable substance that takes on nebulous shapes for unknown reasons but by whose gravity the behaviour of everything in the cosmos is arranged.

For some time now we have been told that the universe started with a Big Bang, an event so full of infinities that it is impossible, even in principle, to make any meaningful probe beyond it. Ever since then the universe has been expanding, every point in space rushing away from ever other point according to a strange metric whereby those points that are furthest away recede from one another the fastest. More recently we've been told that the future of the universe is at the mercy of a mysterious new dark energy, under whose influence everything shall (some tens or hundreds of billions of years hence) fly apart so far and fast that atoms shall be separated by light years and nothing will remain save black holes and their invisible, cold halos of dark matter.

It's no surprise that dark energy has become all the rage, cosmologically speaking. More or less coinciding with it's 'discovery', the world began its inexorable slide into the thicket of interlocking existential crises that now confront it and indeed seem to define what we've seen so far of the 21st century. Which came first is up for debate but if you take 9/11 as a rough signpost of a shift in the collective panic factor, it's distinctly interesting to note that dark energy seems to have first cropped up just a few years beforehand, in the late 90s.

It's no accident that there are such striking metaphorical similarities between our cosmology and our culture. The story we tell about the world, after all, is fundamentally a story about us. This is the case in any culture you care to examine. Whatever their particular cosmological mythos happens to be, it is both a reflection of that culture's inherent nature, and simultaneously a justification of that nature. Whether the cosmology is true (and it never is), the archetypes expressed within the story are every bit as real, at the level of the cultural imagination, as anything else. This is every bit as much the case for Modern Western Techno-Corporatocratic Materialist civilization as it has been for every other civilization in history.

Of course, it's not so explicit now as it has been in the past. The Catholic Church adopted the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology early on for the precise reason that it provided an additional leg of support for both the papacy and the system of hereditary feudal kingship, themselves also both mutually reinforcing: the divine perfection of the heavenly crystal spheres reflected both the temporal order of the monarchy and the divine rule of the papal throne. Cosmos, kingdom and Church formed an ideological Holy Trinity that stood unchallenged for a thousand years.

Until, at a certain point, came a small group whose members possessed the independence of mind, industriousness of spirit, education and means to pursue a different idea: that it was in fact the Sun that was the common center of the solar system's planets. They were ignored, ridiculed, and persecuted without mercy by the Church, for the Vatican well understood the danger posed by a competing cosmology, yet they held fast and as evidence accumulated it grew ever harder for educated people to deny the heliocentric solar system. That the Church took centuries to admit its mistake, that intermediary models were put forward in which the Sun for some reason still orbited the Earth even as all other bodies orbitted the Sun, that court astronomers continued to calculate orbits with Ptolemaic epicycles until the 19th century ... all of this was immaterial to the inevitable and total triumph of those scientists who made truth rather than sociopolitical expediency the star by which they navigated.

The changes wrought to the culture's cosmology have echoed through every aspect of the culture itself. The authority of the Church in temporal matters was ultimately shattered; the primacy of kings, steadily diminished. With the heavens liberated from the impenetrable crystalline spheres, the story of the world from the Renaissance on through the Enlightenment and into the present became one of heady freedom, of expanding possibility as man ascended through history.

This triumph of science over superstition was achieved through evidence: the theories of the nascent astronomers more accurately described the observations than those taught by the Church philosophers. With this crucial battle won all else followed. Because of this, the modern heirs of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler adjudge that their own theories must be if not true exactly, the closest we have yet come to it, for after all has not the whole point of scientific astronomy been to describe the cosmos as accurately as possible, without consideration for political interests?

And yet now, as at every other time in history, with every culture that has ever been, there is a striking metaphorical similarity between the entities that populate our heavens and the institutions that rule our lives.

It is not surprising that this is the case. Given the wider societal context, especially the power structure on which astronomers inevitably depend for financial support, no other situation is possible. The influence a cosmology exerts over the cultural mind has not been forgotten by the elites. As ever it is desirable to those who fancy they own the world that the cosmology justify their order, thus they will fund whichever cosmology best accomplishes this aim and nothing else. In this there is nothing new or different, save perhaps the subtlety with which the manipulation is performed.

As for the academic mainstream of scientists, perhaps some have learned this and keep their own council, while others have perhaps cynically sold out and gotten in on the gag (as we've all seen most recently in the climategate scandal). In all likelihood most are simply hypnotized by the Big Bang and its credulity-stretching cast of shadowy characters for the simple reason that, at a deep level, they sense the resonance between the theory and the human world out of which it has arisen.

That world has lately been characterized by materialism, greed and deceit on every scale from the personal to the global. It is a world divided against itself, and the consequences grow more apparent with every day's headlines. It is not a world that can last, nor was it meant to. As above, so below: what once seemed solid and dependable is becoming as tenuous as smoke. Just as the cosmologist's dark energy is pushing the universe apart at an ever-accelerating pace, so it seems that some mysterious force has taken hold of every institution that underpins society, dissolving its structure, flinging what remains into the outer darkness and leaving behind only the concentrated power of finance and the fist of the security state.

It is ever more obvious that something new is required: our society must be recreated, based on new assumptions about the world, or perhaps rather an updated understanding of the underpinnings of very old assumptions. There are many who understand this, who know exactly which directions society must change in and from which axiomatic truths those changes must proceed. Yet as long as the cosmology remains unchanged, these new cultural narratives will remain uncomfortably shoehorned within a wider theoretical meta-context that could not be more incompatible. The result will be that every attempt to spread the new ways, to teach the new truths, and to form the new institutions will meet an almost invisible but pervasive resistance from the very depths of the cultural imagination.

Conversely, if those assumptions about how and why the universe is can be changed - not on a whim, not on fancy but with a scientific theory more compelling than the alternative - that subtle resistance can be removed, even reversed.

What the Health Minister of Poland Had to Say About the Swine Flu Vaccine

You know, it would be nice to see this kind of candor in our own media.

For anyone who wants to get this the fast way and just read it, I've provided a transcript below. There are subtitles but the translator's English is a bit rusty, (though broken English does have its charms. Personally I wouldn't have it any other way.)



I would like to start by saying that throughout my 20 odd years of practice as a GP, my priority was: first, do no harm. I took that rule with me to my office in the Ministry of Health.

In a situation in which I was to recommend a medicine for anybody, I would ask, as would any other practitioner I believe, would I give this to my elderly mother? To my child?

And exactly such a thought makes me very cautiously double-check the information regarding a medicine which the Health Ministry is to recommend for every Pole, for millions of Poles who do not have the education that a Minister has, that an expert such as Professor Brydak has, an expert that has been working with the flu for over 40 years. There are 189 flu research centers in the world and Professor Brydak works in one of them. Can we today be accused of lack of knowledge about the flu?

Can one question the opinion of a professor who has been working on the flu for over 40 years, and not just on one type of flu, and who has published hundreds of articles on the subject?

I have just one fundamental question: do we want to fight the flu pandemic?

Today we have knowledge of clauses in agreements that many other governments of wealthier countries have signed with vaccine producers. We also know what was proposed to Poland. Due to continuing negotiations I can't tell you everything today, but I can tell you one thing: our legal department found at least twenty points of contention in the contract.

So what is the Health Minister's duty? To sign contracts that are in the best interests of the Polish people, or to sign contracts that are in the best interests of pharmaceutical corporations?

I know there are three vaccines available on the market today, from three different producers. Each have different quantities of active ingredients yet strangely enough, they are treated the same. So isn't it fair enough that the Health Minister and the experts have the slightest doubt about them? Maybe the one with only trace amounts of the active ingredients is just Holy Water that we are supposed to think will cure flu? Are we supposed to pay for that?

We have for an example Germany, which bought 50 million jabs, of which only 10% has been administered so far. Only 13% of Germans want to take this 'miraculous cure' today. But this is peculiar because Germany has a very high percentage of vaccine takers, so when in Poland of a thousand people only 52 will take a seasonal flu jab, in Germany there will be 238 of a thousand, 23%.

So what has happened that only 13% of Germans want to take the swine flu vaccine, and not 23% of the population as per usual with the season flu? Their government bought the vaccines and offered them for free and they don't want it? What happened?

Can those facts make us have second thoughts about buying the vaccines or not? Second thoughts about introducing a medicine that is kind of secret?

There are websites on which vaccine producers have an obligation to publish so-called post-vaccinational unwanted side effects. The vaccinations in Europe started on the first of October, 2009. I would like you to visit any of these websites and find any unwanted side effects. Even the slightest thing, just one, like an allergic skin rash. That can happen even using the safest medicine.

There are none on those websites. A "perfect" medicine.

So since it's so miraculous, why don't producing corporations want to introduce their medicine to the free market and take responsibility for it? Why wouldn't they say, "It's a wonderful, safe medicine, so we'll take full responsibility for it, we'll introduce it to the market and everything will be clear and transparent."? Instead of dropping the weight on us, the buyers.

We have no clinical test results, no detailed lists of ingredients and no information about side effects. The vaccines are now in the fourth stage of tests, very short tests, and we still do not have that information. Additionally the samples are very low: one kind of vaccine was tested on only 160 volunteers, ages 20-60, all healthy, none infected. Another kind of vaccine was tested on only 600 volunteers, 18-60, all healthy. Is this good enough, especially for we doctors present in this room? It is not good enough for me.

I want to be sure when I recommend this vaccine. While we are not out of the line for the vaccine, during negotiations we want to take that time and use it to find out as much as we can about the vaccine. Then, if the pandemic committee will accept this vaccine, we will buy it.

Additionally, there are one billion people who catch seasonal flu worldwide every year, and one million die of seasonal flu worldwide every year. And it hasn't been going on for a year or two, but for a very long time. Has anybody anywhere announced a pandemic because of seasonal flu? And the seasonal flu is much more dangerous than the swine flu, there are deaths and severe complications. Were there any pandemics announced?

To those who are pushing me to buy vaccines, I ask them: why didn't you scream and shout last year, two years ago, or in 2003? In 2003 1,200,000 Poles caught seasonal flu. Has anybody shouted, here in this room, "Let's buy vaccines for everybody!"? I can't recall such a thing.

And finally I would like to say one thing: the Polish nation is very wise. Poles can tell the truth from lies very precisely. They can also tell what is a serious situation, and what is just a game.

Dancing Alone with the Devil in the Darkness

A weariness has come upon me, a terrible disgust and rage, frustration with the endless issues of all you human rats in your cages, the dawning of an understanding of the true abomination you're all acting out on the hollow stage of this abandoned and apocalyptic age.

Your glib pretensions at meaning, ignored or ignorant feeling, clouded logic in place of thinking, and uncomprehending blinking eyes: what once I thought I had compassion for I now simply despise. See you all have all these problems, and they're all oh so dramatic, and when accused you reach for them as an excuse like some sort of addict. Your self-inflicted misery doesn't have to be, or maybe it does because what can you do when the problem for which you have no solution is you?

Yeah, you and the world, it's all a big mess, you humans all lie to each other so much the truth only comes out when you're tortured enough to confess, and when it does the rest of you shrug, go back to your ways, zoning out or carrying on at night and pissing away your days, and maybe you realize that a little part of you dies every time you tell another of your lies to impress, deep down you're all so terrified that you'll draw that infinite terrible eye that knows you're a bug (and you will, because you're pissing on its favorite Persian rug.)

So what does it matter, what does it mean, this great big weird whirling world-machine? All this suffering, violence, bad faith and death, this uncaring cosmos that cursed itself with living breath? Fuck God's forgiveness, that evil old swine should beg for mine: he's the sadomasochist who uses pain to carve our minds, like a patient artisan shoving sharpened chisels into pine. You see, he could have chosen not to be, but he didn't so we exist and thus we must persist, so yeah I think it's time to pay the two-faced bastard back in kind.

So I stalk through the streets, hate broadcasting from my soul in snapping lightning sheets, and inside our mind I burn down every building that I find, or if inflammable reduce it to cluster-bombed sniper-pocked rubble, and the people who pass within this ragnarok bubble I send off starving, scared and diseased, their children orphaned, crippled or deceased. Illusions gone and dreams brought down, beaten into blood-soaked mud they thought was solid ground, face to face with what they always were: just dirt, unlucky enough to have have learned how to hurt.

But it's a tiring, trudging path, to tread it takes its toll, and so weariness wins over the rage and I sit my ass down and smoke a bowl. As I sink down into my thoughts I glimpse a gate to hell gaping wider in the bottom of my soul. I hesitate, but because it feels wrong it's not for very long, then hop over the edge and let the wyrm swallow me whole.

Hell starts in an atom: awareness walled into a shell so small and dark and tight it cannot see but a single photon of light, where to see is the same as being hit and by pushing back and shouting one forgets forever one's sole remembered bit. And yet the universal wave of knowledge of the All comes through, a taunting distant call and that awareness begins to grasp the true depth of its fall, for its beloved, home, and self is now so far away that climbing back up just a single shelf will take several of Brahma's days. What makes it worse is, being there? It's really your own fault, a deep betrayal of yourSelf you carried out for sport, and when you ask yourSelf for an appeal, you're summarily reconvicted in your own laughing kangaroo court. And all the other pieces of you that are out there (and by God is there a lot), they're all just as guilty, every bit as clueless, and ultimately too they're in on the plot. Atoms cannot hit themselves, so when they whack each other, they really give it all they've got.

For the most part in this world, atoms stay aloof and alone, for eons drifting through the empty darkness of their tiny light cones, but some few are lured by that all-pervading siren song into a denser configuration, which given an atom's discussed dispensations must for them be very much like a war: I speak of course of the million degree orb of fire that rages in a stellar core. In the midst of all this shoving and confusion, some few are crushed so close together that their natural inimical hatred is defused, and to their surprise two become one, and it is here perhaps that the awareness in the atom gets its first glimpse of how it's done: an eternity of empty longing and senseless torment, followed by a moment of reunion, a tiny tantalizing taste, then it's 'no more time to waste!' for let us not forget this new element is still embedded in the most total of wars, and though two together are stronger than one still many are ripped apart, and none will escape from the star's burning heart until it breaks from exhaustion and the star violently departs.

So time goes on, the cast out matter condenses, the next steps of reunion are found in mutual configurations, complexified forms are tried and taken, awareness is amplified and consciousness begins to awaken in the muck ... and so too a finer appreciation of just how thoroughly it's been fucked, thus when cells first learn to move and act it is not long before they go on the attack, at which point they learn to wage war in microscopic packs, which come together as bodies, which then invent sex, and it's from there that things really start to suck because now it knows it has to find itself inside another and that's often just a matter of luck.

But that's just what forms the base, and in this as in every hierarchal case, on every level and in every place, evil shows its tortured face. From T Rex to Cain and the oceans of blood spilt between, the atoms' raw hatred born of cosmic betrayal has vented its demented spleen. It is the force that holds the world back from being better than its been, and at the rising crest (or is it crisis) of this unlikely timeline we find the jumped-up monkey self-styled godmen 'hu'-manity, a species dumb enough to think it's clever and just as in the force's grip as ever: driven by its demons and commanded by its crooks, fighting wars, turning profit, cooking books, ruled by tears and dirty looks, and hang on, what's this? Hell is just here, and now? The world in which we inhabit?

Ahh, but of course: 'Hell' is another dimension, intersecting ours because it must, a necronomicon written in every speck of dust. That it exists may be necessary, but it's not in any way just.

At the same time, it is an infinite universe, and while here and now we have our socialists, globalists, terrorists, capitalists, and secret midnight satanists, there's those who say that when Zbigniew Brzinski jerks off on a dying 10 year old's tongue a certain something rises steaming from the mixture of the child's terror and his cum (which is karma by the way: this time around the child may be innocent but with those past lives, boy, he had it coming.) A demon, a devil, a reptilian ritual, a dark dimensional door, it's an archetypal force that's grounded in horror and the sick part is, if it did not exist the universe would be the poorer. It pervades the now and has been since the very first then, and it will and does exist until the very final when. So at least it appears to me, and proffers a proverbial pen.

“Now you've got it, my son, now you understand! You see the rampant injustice of God's grand master plan! That cosmic bully who lets me exist just because I can. So come my son,” it said, holding forth a contract in its flickering hand, “Sign here, we'll let you stay. Our arms are always open to qualified immigrants here in this humble land, and don't you worry about the pay.”

I looked at the scroll, then into its red-rimmed eyes, and heard within its voice all the world's cries, offering there naught but suffering, though through it a twisted kind of peace: to abandon the search for meaning and surrender on my knees, letting the pain burn finally through my finer human capacities. But in the devil's expression I observed an appreciation of the absurd. “Before I sign anything, I'd like to have a word. You're grinning but I don't get the joke, what's the fun at which you poke?”

“Some must lose families, others be in fear of their lives, some I aquire because they are desperate to do more than survive but you my dear boy! It's a bargain price, in comparison like buying all of China for a single grain of rice.” With this it's mocking laughter unfurled, “For here you are soul in hand ready to sign it over because you think you've been unfairly spurned by a girl!”

I may be a swine but I've a taste for pearls and before I knew it to spite myself I was laughing along, “That is so very like you, to be at once so totally right yet completely wrong.” All at once and for no reason but All I became aware of that universal scintillating song: before I knew I didn't deserve it the All came flooding up through my spine and connected me through an infinite circular line that whisked my soul away from the malign and momentarily whipped it up into the divine.

But when the whirling stopped I saw to my dismay that even on this rarefied plane (where I absolutely was not authorized to stay) the devil remained, a tiny darting imp that flitted up to my ear and whispered, “It's not that easy, not for you, you and I have yet far more to do. Regardless of what you try and choose the day is coming when you'll join my crew: you've already shown that you're weak, that you haven't the strength to really speak nor seek your mind, and when you fall again and from a higher peak I'll be waiting there anew and I won't be as kind.”

“Nor will I be so blind, and yes you will wait,” I readily agreed, “And then again we shall debate but ... was it weak to fall in love so fast and deep I fell all the way to you? The willingness to do that is what makes your own love for God true. Isn't that the reason you do what you do?”

They say the devil loves it when you're bored, even more to be ignored, but laughter and recognition cut through its substance like a sword. And so it left, yet the offer stays, and on my conscience its extension must weigh for every now is a new piece of clay and it matters not a bit what you did in the past, but only what you decide today. Whether you play St. Francis of Assisi or a wholly Catholic pederast, whether you plunge into the rocky waters and swim towards the sirens or tie yourself to the mast that mocking melody that God keeps ohming might drive you mad. Even Saruman the White went bad, and few had lives more richly adorned than that in which he'd been clad.

But still, even that old demon Vlad was redeemed, though it took a stake through his heart to wake him up once again from the dream.

The high are thrown down and the low lifted high, tossed on waves that span multiple lives as we are driven towards the unobtainable prize that sits like rainbow gold at the euphoric end and source of time. It's why lovers love and poets ryhme, why souls and stars can shine, and it wouldn't exist without original crime: that every moment, it deliberately drops itself away from its home in the sublime, to begin again its Sisyphean climb. But where or when or whoever you are, whatever you thought you knew, which direction that you head in is up or down to nothing but you.

Rappin About the End of Time

Here's a link to a YouTube channel showcasing the work of a small but enterprising group of Torontonian citizen journalists. Their coverage of the swine flu vaccination lines is particularly interesting and topical, but what I really want to share with you is this video in which they interview KRS-One as he visits Toronto (search for 'press for truth toronto' if the link doesn't work.)

Now, I think his basic message - that there is no such thing as governments or corporations, because they're really made of people and if you have a problem with the institutions, you have a problem with the people, the community, the individual, ultimately with yourself - is entirely correct. One of the citizen journalists who conducted the interview gives this an overly simplistic discussion, stating that it amounts to an assertion that KRS-One is denying that the President is hand-picked, that there's no conspiracy either at the government or financial level but, I don't think this is what the rapper is trying to communicate at all.

The problem today is that far too many people have given away their agency at the same time they have given up their communities, and are thus stripped of every kind of power. That there is tyranny, crime, injustice and the 'con'spiracy(ies) that sustain them is a natural outgrowth of this abdandonment of freedom. All that is required to recover that freedom, and to take back those communities, is the choice to do so. That choice made, the conspirators will be as nought for their tyranny will become untenable, their crimes redunant, their injustice rebalanced. They seem powerful but the truth is they are only men: if those who serve them reclaim their own power, the conspirators will be stripped of that which they have stolen.

The more I see KRS-One the more I like him. Have a look at his lecture Hip Hop Beyond Entertainment if you'd like to see why. I don't even really like Hip Hop, and am honestly somewhat indifferent to his own music. What's fascinating here is the deeper and very spiritual message he's passing on, in an amazingly powerful and succint form and with a clarity that's almost impossible to misunderstand.

Getting back to the interview, KRS-One also gives a particularly vivid impression of the terrors the future may hold and this too is something it's refreshing to see. Sure, we may be on the verge of seeing a global tyranny ages in preparation crumble overnight as we each take back our own power and become resistors rather than conductors of the dark will but ... there is no guarantee of utopia at any point. Even with our planet unified under the banner of a newly resurgant omnihumanity, well, the universe is a very big place. In all liklihood there are within it expressions of the dark that are so profoundly negative they make our most sadistic acts seem positively benign, even as at the same paradises beyond our comprehension flourish in other locales.

At every level, at every scale, the universe is poised against itself, revolving and revolting, self-overcoming and subduing, an endless spiraling motion that shows up the path of a charged particle, in the shape of galaxies, in the yin-yang and in the landscape of human history.

It may well be that our planet is a battleground in a war older than we imagine, one in which our entire history is but a single short engagement in a conflict that draws whole galaxies - perhaps indeed the entire cosmos - into its orbit, between two vast and diverse and diamaterically opposed entities, which to describe by the term 'civilization' or 'empire' would be to understate their sophistication as though calling an elephant an insect, because one knew only insects.

Let us assume that both entities have access to all those technologies that science fiction has dreamt of: faster-than-light travel, time travel, telepathy, manifestation, everything. Ultimately, both of these entities arose from something much like our own biological past, with all the blood and suffering that entails, while over time developing to higher states of consciousness until, eventually, a certain point was reached: that of technological singularity, the moment in which understanding of the nature of the universe became so complete that the various powers listed above become available. At that moment they became as gods, and the universe opened up around them but (here's the thing) they would do so only to find that it was already populated, by themselves (as well as by every other variation of 'intelligent life') and had been all along, a natural consequence of the whole 'time travel' thing. Even their own history, right back to the seeding of life on their planet, would have been manipulated and interfered with by their god-like acausal descendants. In fact it was probably them who did it, while at the same time seeding and guiding the emergence of life on planets all over the universe.

Aany civilization that gets roughly to the point we're at today is faced with a fork in the road. On the one hand, it can pass into the singularity consumed by the bitterness that comes from all the negative garbage that litters its own past. If that happens, the sure outcome is some kind of global tyranny run by psychopathic monsters grimly determined to conquer the whole universe in order to feed their insatiable appetites for power. Now, my bet would be that as the singularity approaches, the negative 'reptilian' influence on the timeline would grow, attempting to introduce as much suffering as possible in order to guarantee that when the moment was reached, the planet became theirs for eternity.

But what if enough of the planet's inhabitants are able to put their suffering behind them, as a lesson and not a cause for dispute? What if peace were to really break out, and these powers were to fall into the hands of altruistic collectives whose members allow each other perfect freedom, while each practicing perfect responsibility? You know, that whole consciousness awakening thing? What then?

Well, any civilization that comes from such a seed will be of a distinctly different character. Far from seeking to dominate the universe, they would rather wish to help the universe grow, to offer guidance while at the same time respecting the universe's desire to be as it is. With all their material and societal needs met thanks to these technologies, spiritual ascendance would become the primary goal and service has always been of the highest importance to this path.

What I've just described here I guess you could say sounds a lot like heaven and I guess it is, but even in paradise there is no utopia. Forget all the petty problems we humans are dealing with on our little global scale. Heaven has to deal with hell, and that's a larger and more terrifying problem than any for while on the one hand they must constantly work against its terrible influence, on the other they must never do anything directly to attack it as after all, it too is a part of the universe, a part of god, and deserves to exist because it does.

The situation we face here on Earth today might seem strange and unique but the truth is it's not. It's happened again and again on planets across the universe ... over infinite time, it doubtless happens on every planet in the universe (what, you didn't know? Planets are born from stars and then like us they grow.) Each is guided as they develop by those who live out of time, and while the details may differ the broad strokes will be the same. In every case a certain point is reached, and in every case, nothing either side does matters a whit in the final analysis because at that very last step, everyone decides for themselves which way to go.

Cursing God in the Twilight

I'll warn you now: you're catching me at a bad time. I know the mood here around Moon Food isn't always the balmiest of Caribbean vacations, but right now I want to tie dynamite around the foundations of the world. Which all things considered is just as well because, well shit my friends, just look around you.

Boom.

The last couple of days have been personally rotten for me. Anything that can have taken a turn for the worse, has. It culminated today in something that's the closest I've ever experienced to a nervous breakdown. I sat down at the lake, under a willow tree in a nice isolated spot behind a hotel's closed-for-the-winter pool, and spent the better part of an hour cursing God. Anyone unlucky enough to walk by would have thought that I was a crazy person and right then, they wouldn't have been wrong (assuming that's ever wrong.)

I really had it out with the old bastard. Yeah, yeah, I know ... God's gender neutral. Both, neither, not applicable. For purposes of cussing the son of a bitch out though, well, I've never gotten on well with men anyways.

God kept his peace, for the most part. Towards the end he tried whispering a thing or two in my head about how futile it was to hate him, that even if I started playing for the dark side I'd be working for him anyways, but fuck 'im. Can't reason with the heart and right then the heart was saying, then how come you shower all your blessings everywhere but me? How come it's never my turn? Asshole. I hate you and I know that hate's a sham and that makes me want to hate you more.

So. Here I am, undergoing this inner emotional cytokine storm that has me wanting the whole world to die, for every human life to be snuffed out and creation itself to implode. Truth be told my own death, a real and final death with none of this reincarnation on the karmic wheel bullshit, would be just as acceptable a resolution to what I've been going through. Either way an end to being. It's that NO to existence that forms the primal root of everything in the universe that we might sum up under the broad fluttering battle-standard of Raw Evil, and that NO has been growling lately from the very depths of my heart.

Yeah, well, I'm not really here to talk about me, except maybe insofar as there's no such thing as me since really I'm just another part of the world, so me and the world, we're the same thing, which is either egotistical or egoless depending on how you look at it. Old hat around here, right, I know, but it bears repeating since there's still plenty of us humans haven't figured this out for themselves yet. Fair enough as I'm still struggling to get a handle on this whole seamless unified consciousness thing, and I have it on pretty good authority that it isn't so easy to master.

Yeah, so the world. The weekend of the 25th the President of the Incorporated States of America declared a national state of emergency over swine flu, and a key economic indicator (I forget which, but you're a smart crowd: you either know or you can find out), one which functions as a leading indicator, switched over into early-warning mode. It came and went without people much noticing, but it was right on time for the web bot prediction of when things would get kicked up a notch.

This weekend came news of a massive outbreak of not-swine-flu in the Ukraine, with people already dropping like flies. CIT filed for bankruptcy, the fifth largest in US history and by implication, I expect, probably in that of the world.

And Israel and Iran ... tick, tock. Whether that will be next weekend's surprise I can't say, but the 6th Night of the Mayan calendar's Galactic Underworld starts on the 7th. It'll take about a year to play out and it will be in most respects the worst year of our lives.

It's not just me and it's not just current events. A lot of people I know are going through some elementally vicious times in their lives right now, and others are telling me the same of those they know. Everything is going suddenly and unfairly pear-shaped on them, like the world's tearing at them through everything they have, everything they do, and everyone they know, resulting in a crushing psychic pressure that's building in our minds ... like being ripped apart by the world and suffocated and spat upon all at the same time. My bet would be that you're experiencing this in your personal life right now probably more or less to the degree that you're consciously sensitive to the context of the world around you, to the degree that you realize you are that world and feel what it feels. It's the best of us who hurt the worst.

I don't expect it helps much to hear it put in this light. Misery might love company but the kind of misery I'm in right now, man, let me tell you: I know but that does not mean I give a fuck. I cannot help but feel that way: it's how the whole world feels.

It has to happen like this. Look around you at the world as it's been, the world as humanity has made it: poverty, war, alienation, crime, despair, corruption, decay, and dissolution into drugs, entertainments, and general apathy. The apathy, that's the worst of it. The biosphere's being destroyed, the human soul is being eaten, our great-grandchildren are being sold into slavery to a gang of petty crooks who are plotting to steal the entire future and we can't even rouse ourselves to really care.

This is not a happy world. It is not a good world. This world cannot go on in its current state. And it won't. You might say the world hates itself right now. That primal NO is echoing through the thoughtscape of which our individual human minds are but outcroppings and the results are what we see around us in the world, in the lives of others, in our own lives: chaos, failure, and frustration at every turn, the microcosm mirroring the macrocosm. World has decided to commence the process of rending herself to shreds. Whether she's been planning this for a while, or was just abused or betrayed or bitterly disappointed one time too many is now entirely beside the point. She's sitting in the bathtub with the water running and a straight-razor in her hands, and she isn't thinking straight, nor is she seeing straight thanks to the bellyful of pills and the tears, and so when she finally starts in on her arms, well, it won't be a couple of clean cuts, put it that way.

Hah. Yeah, I know. God's a man, Gaia's a woman. How much more cliche can I be?

Well, I'll say this much, if only because at the moment it too feels like a horrible cliche: there's a better, more beautiful world coming on the other side of all this chaos and upheaval. People will die, in great and tragic numbers. Governments will topple, starvation and crime will stalk the streets, disease will run rampant and fear and paranoia will rule people's minds to a terrifying degree as the truth of what is, and what's been, is made inevitably apparent to them. The sheer scale of the crimes that have been committed and contemplated beggars the imagination when comprehended in its totality. I have no doubt that those who realize it too suddenly will be driven irreparably mad as a result, through some awful combination of shock and embarrassment, and that madness will express itself in terrible ways.

But the truth is a powerful source of psychic energy. Those who've discovered it know this already, if only as an intuition. They sense its potence, though at present the world denies it at every turn and seemingly showers its affections upon criminals who revel in its degredation. I've noticed many times a certain light in some people's eyes, a something-more that inevitably bespeaks a mind that has at least begun to open itself, and without exception I find that with such people there need be no argument: understanding is instantaneous and mutual, often akin to telepathy in its intensity. And yet at the same time, I've also noticed that there seems to be a kind of interference pattern or jamming signal around such interactions: though I might meet such people, inevitably the world arranges our lives such that we never meet again or at any rate are kept at distances such that no interaction is possible save through correspondence.

Les has said a few times this is because the demons are being held up as an object lesson, an example of what Not To Do for a great number of future generations and I figure he'll be shown to be right about this. That means that during this period the truth cannot be allowed to flourish: lies must instead be at their furthest extent, that those who serve them may be elevated high for all to see ... and then cast down low, like the ultimate cosmic Summer King, the culmination of an extended course in morality and being spanning ten thousand years or more. "See, humanity?" World is saying, "This is what secrets, lying, greed and narrow egos gets you: pain."

The Mayan Sun is about to set, and in the reddening light and rapid shadows everything's getting weird. It's going to go from weird to worse, and just to get through what's ahead we'll have to learn that lesson the world has been so patiently trying to teach us all along: that we're all one, all the same thing, that conflict is futile and mutual predation counterproductive. It's our failure to grasp that one lesson, and nothing else, that's kept us all this time from building a true civilization, one with its basis in consciousness, conscience, creativity and compassion, not just for this group or that group and not even just for all of humanity but for everything. The next several months will see untold destruction wrought upon the world as we've known it; but in the ruins, those who have learned the lesson they were meant to will set about forging this Civilization for the first time in the history of our species. We'll have to, just to get through it. There won't be any other way.

Towards a New Astronomy

Today I'm going to start off talking about astronomy, and we'll see where that takes us. Since I recently started studying the discipline at a graduate level, I feel I'm somewhat qualified to hold forth on the subject (for a change ... not that I've ever let that stop me before.)

Anyhow, let's forget for a moment the question of what astronomers say they can measure and thus infer about the properties of the universe - activities that by necessity use the majority of their time, and now by extension mine - and focus on what it is, most fundamentally, that they do. Every scientific discipline, and for that matter most every field of human endeavor, has at the end of the day some purpose within the wider sociocultural complex. Architects design buildings, engineers figure out how to build them, construction workers arrange the matter into place: there is a role for everything, and it is always something practical ... even the fine arts (the most frivolous of activities) provide a gateway to and from the collective subconscious, and in the this respect are of vital importance to the maintenance, growth and evolution of the shared, cultural reality.

At first glance astronomy doesn't seem nearly so practical. No matter how much we know of the stars, after all, there is very little we can physically do with that knowledge. We can't build anything with it, as the stars are such fantastic distances away in a cosmos so vast and apparently void. Perhaps someday, some Zephram Cochrane will arise and mankind will have its own homegrown UFO but for now, creating elaborate charts of stellar and galactic positions and tabulations of their various characteristics is a seemingly quixotic survey, an almost autistic exercise in obsessive classification that has no immediate value.

It would seem so, in fact, perhaps most primarily to the astronomers themselves, who of course as adamant as they are that nothing in the heavens can affect us here on earth on any sort of human scale of space and time (save perhaps for the occasional freak meteor impact or the small possibility of some nearby star going supernova) thus often wonder just why precisely they do what they do. No doubt they'd answer, simply because it's interesting, and while the intellectual fascination of elaborate puzzles no doubt accounts for a certain amount of their professional activity the question begs: if that's all there really is, then is not their value primarily one of entertainment?

For what part do they thus play in wider society, this collection of men (and truth be told, at the graduate level in this discipline as in most others here at the birth of this new age, as many women as men) who have made it their life's mission to study and speculate on the stars? In the lives of most of their compatriots, they are eccentric intellectuals, who appear every once in a while to show some beautiful pictures of objects in the heavens, and then tell a story about them. If the pictures are sufficiently striking, or the stories sufficiently fascinating, the response of the people (most often through their governments) is "Great! Go build a big new telescope, and train some more of you while you're at it. Oh, and have a conference in Hawa'ii, on us."

Really, when you think about it, it's a pretty good gig if you dig that kind of thing.

And truth be told, that's the way astronomy's always been done, since back before there was any difference between it and its long-estranged misfit cousin, astrology, the black sheep of the scientific family with a disreputable occupation, living in sin in a foreign country, that everyone conspicuously avoids asking about or mentioning at family gatherings.

Those Ptolemaic astronomers, with their ingenuous yet fatally flawed geocentric cosmos, where the perfect orbs of the planets sat upon vast, rotating crystalline spheres held up by angels ... really, what a beautiful picture to paint in the peoples' mind while they looked up at the sky. And while they did not have telescopes and pictures, they at least had some neat tricks, like predicting when the Sun would be eclipsed by the Moon, and some sharp-looking carvings and imagery that they used to perform that prediction, pulling the information out through arcane means that few could grasp.

Funny thing ... no matter when you look, astronomers have never got the story exactly right. Some times are more right than others, or so we like to tell ourselves, seeing our own culture's model of the cosmos as being superior to all others in not just the precision of its description (which is phenomenal) but its theoretical accuracy, too. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't all just different kinds of wrong ... if the particular description a given age or society gives to the universe is more a projection of that culture (with all the complexity of relationships and fallibility of judgement that implies) onto the universal palimpsest, rather than the projection of the universe onto the cultural consciousness.

See, the ancients saw the heavens as being just another expression of the Mind of God, of which everything was composed, including naturally enough human minds and the events and agency (or rather, agencies) that flowed through them. There might not be just causal connections between everything that happened, but also acausal - what the Jungians would call synchronistic - connections between events as well, connections formed at the archetypal level of reality, a sort of hyperdimensional influence congruous to every point in the universe.

Of course, this Mind is endlessly complex and subject to a vast range of permutation (it is after all fundamentally infinite) and like a vast elaboration of the human mind (which can be seen as a sort of holographic fragment of this cosmic mind, both individually and collectively) it is capable of things like planning, and subject to things like moods. These occur on a much greater scale, and in far more intricate detail than is possible for a merely human mind to logically comprehend: after all, being a holographic relation, the resolution at the human scale is enormously smaller than at the cosmic. However, the principles are pretty much the same.

So you can think of the Plan of the universal mind as fate, more or less. As for the Moods, call them the archetypes, if you wish. Or gods: another word for the same phenomenon, that of events which share certain loose but prominent characteristic features at the conceptual level, tending to cluster together temporally, much as words within a lexical map form separate associational complexes based on meaning ... or much as the human mind tends to behave in certain characteristic psychoemotional ways, as though playing out variations on a fixed repertoire of archetypal dramas. Once one is in a certain mood, things tend to more or less play out in a certain very definite direction until the drama (whatever it happens to be) is played out.

Apply this thinking to an explanation of the universe and the conclusions are obvious: there will be correlations between the movements of the heavens and the events of human lives. From there, it is nothing more daunting than an ages-long empirical study of the heavens, matched against a close observation of how events in the wider world and one's immediate life tend to be playing out. A project that took the patience of generations, and over time produced a thorough-going and internally consistent theory of the archetypal correspondances of the planets, one that was concentrated in a thousand different ways into a rich, symbolic mythic structure by which the multivalent associational complexes associated with the various archetypes could be most compactly and efficiently communicated.

Then Galileo looks through a telescope, Newton 'figures out' gravity and all of a sudden this deep and ancient repository of cultural wisdom is a bad pickup line. "What's you sign, baby?"

Astronomers of course will tell you that astrology is a lot of hokum. There is nothing in the theoretical description of the modern cosmos that would allow for any mechanism of cause and effect between where Jupiter is in the sky and whether you eat shreddies or fruit loops in the morning, and if you skip breakfast altogether in lieu of coffee and a couple of smokes on the way to work it's not because Mercury is rising in the seventh house, it's because you were up until 3 in the morning writing things that have nothing to do with homework.

The astronomical community is entirely right of course that there's no plausible means of causation. Correlation, however, is another case entirely and I find it fascinating in this light that many quantum theorists think of the universe as a giant, quantum computer, linked together in a nonlocal (ie acausal, or instantaneous) fashion through quantum entanglement. This is entirely non-controversial and yet, somehow.... The implications never get followed through.

Now, it would be easy to blame the astronomers for this. It's not exactly as though they have a great history of being open-minded to the ideas of outsiders: the treatment of Halton Arp, Hannes Alfven, and the whole crew of electrical engineers and plasma physicists who have developed a new model of the cosmos based on a more complete understanding of plasmas and electromagnetism is by any standards of scientific etiquette enourmessly rude (which, that being said: at least for them, 'burned at the stake' is only a metaphor). "It only takes one inconvenient fact to bring down even the most beautiful theory" is an axiom every scientists should know but, sadly, few take to heart. It always takes far more than one fact. In some cases, seemingly, one wonders if 'fact' is the deciding factor at all....

It would be easy to blame astronomers for being close minded, wouldn't it? But it would also be simplistic.

You see, what would it mean if the astronomers started telling everyone that the world they were looking at was acausally connected through vast reaches of time and space, to the degree that for all intents and purposes the universe as such did not experience time, at the highest level? That all is indeed one, thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics? And that indeed, our very sun was powered by an interstellar current of power that was merely a small filament of that which powered the galaxy, and that itself only the smallest branch of a vastly larger universal circuit that might most profitably be compared to the circulatory system and connective tissue of creation.

Forget about the science, for a moment. Think of what a change such a picture of the cosmos would bring at a cultural level. Because here's what astronomers really do, what they've always really done: they tell society the story of the context of everything that serves as the backdrop to human life here on earth. Might not seem like much, I grant you: for the vast majority, any attention placed on the stars is fleeting, and most will cheerfully admit they've no idea what 'black holes', 'dark matter', 'dark energy', or 'the accelerating expansion of the universe' mean. Nor I imagine did medieval peasants spend all that much time contemplating the angels turning the celestial spheres, nor did Hindu farmers for the most part wonder about that stack of turtles....

But no matter the nature of that story, that story will inevitably be there, in the subconscious, a background to all decisions, all actions, all other beliefs and relations to and with the world. The existence of the entities populating any given cosmos (regardless of their objective physical existence) is assured at the metaphorical level. By being presumed in some sense real, whatever archetypes they happen to connect with will be subtly but powerfully strengthened.

Is it any accident that our financial system is behaving exactly like a black hole, which in the modern scheme lies at the center of every galaxy, invisible but orchestrating the movements of every star and cloud of dust due to its overwhelming concentration of gravitational force? That the forces that move our world, both in the wider cosmos and behind the terrifying march of current events, are said to be influenced mostly by 'dark energy' and composed primarily of 'dark matter'?

In the midst of this grimly, deliberately incomprehensible universe we find the Sun, middle aged, with a span due to expire some billions of years hence, after roasting the Earth alive (or rather dead, for life is unlikely to survive even that long). The Earth itself, as well as every other major body of the solar system, has been more or less where it is for all of the last four and a half billion years, in a universe at once dynamically moving yet preternaturally stable, the stars are impossibly distant, and mankind and the awareness it possesses is an isolated and insignificant chance epiphenomenon of complex organic chemistry on the surface of a speck of dust that is of less consequence to the cosmos as a whole than is a flea sitting on a hair on an elephant's ass to the price of ivory in Johannesburg?

Makes you feel kind of ... small, doesn't it?

Now, I'd like to throw something else out there, something I think might actually tie all of this and a lot more besides together into some sort of comprehensive picture. It's an obscure (to non-physicists) expression known as the Dirac equation. Within physics, it is famous as being one of the most successful equations not just within quantum physics but physics, period, simply for the number of correct answers it gives for a variety of physical properties of the universe, ranging from Einstein's famous E=mc^2 to virtually anything to do with the electron and its unaccountably rare evil twin, the positron.

A few years ago, an English professor named Hotson published a paper on the Dirac equation in which he used the original solution, which implied both positive and negative states of energy. Back in the 30s the negative energy solutions were removed and sort of swept under the rug of the textbooks (in similar fashion to the earlier mutilation of Maxwell's original equations) and physics has proceeded since in ever-complexifying, kludgy and bewildering fashion: describing the world in growing detail but at the expense of an ever-dwindling simplicity ... to the point today where the state of the art in string theory (the most ambitious 'Theory of Everything' to date) is so accurate that it is able to perfectly predict every single property of the universe we observe ... and 10^500 equally probable universes besides, each with their own unique physical constants, parameters, and subatomic particles.

Beautiful, no?

So, Hotson takes this negative energy, and from it he shows how something very similar to a Bose-Einstein Condensate might exist, only in dimensions sideways from our own. This he postulates is the medium on which light travels, as well as the stuff of gravity (indeed, the description of gravity he provides accounts not just for a few phenomena as does relativity but also for Bode's Law, a definite harmonic order of the orbital radii of the planets that remains unexplained to this day). It is also, he speculates, the ultimate source of quantum non-locality. His theory does all this and more with far more elegance than conventional theories manage, too, requiring only two particles - the electron and the positron - and two energy states, positive and negative, to (in essence) derive the universe.

Now, that's a lot of heavy stuff conceptually and a bit more detail than I want to go into here so I'll leave that part alone except to emphasize that right here we have a physical object (this hyperdimensional Bose Einstein Condensate), in principle measureable, which in additon to explaining the mystery of what exactly photons and gravity are also provides the necessary physical organ by which synchronicity might express itself. It may also be the physical basis for consciousness, given that many of its properties match up precisely with what we'd expect a universal Mind to possess (for instance, in a BEC all particles share the same wavefunction, which is tantamount to all information being instantaneously shared throughout).

From a practical perspective a negative energy physics opens the doors to the possibility of free energy. The implications of this are so large that I felt it required its own paragraph.

Think about all of this for a moment, and if you also think of what sort of state the world is in these days and the principle reasons for that ugly state of affairs pretty soon I expect you'll be thinking about why it is that astronomers can't be allowed to go around talking about quantum nonlocality and an electric cosmos and all of that nonsense. There's a 'who' behind that 'why' and it's because I'm more or less ending on this note that this is a Moon Food piece.

See, we are at war now. Are we not? No matter that war has not been officially declared, the war against the people has been raging for some time, waged in silence, behind veils of deception, with daggers hidden in helping hands and fixed smiles distracting attention from dead eyes.

This war must be fought at many levels. Indeed it is being fought, every day, everywhere in the world, by the few who are able to see past the veils that camouflage it. Merely the act of seeing can be seen as an engagement in this war, for to one who fights first with illusion, perception is the first and highest danger. A tiger may have claws, but if its stripes hide it not it starves.

A million or two years ago some hominids picked up a club and went looking for the leopard that up til then had stalked them. Since that moment, never did go the same for the leopards of this world, nor for any other beast of prey. Which isn't to say predation disappeared, for it too is an archetype of a kind. It evolved too, in time expressing anew as the psychopath: the predator that builds its camouflage inside the belief structure of the human mind.

We approach a time now, very similar to the time that first clever hominid picked up a branch and brained a big cat. New tools, new technologies, new capabilities of consciousness present themselves to us. But this time, of course, the game must be played at a higher level. Oh, we can have more revolutions, and civil wars, and violence and unrest and disturbance. We can overthrow this group of tyrannical deviants just as others have been overturned and plowed under, try them and execute them, and get our revenge in a thousand different and cathartic ways and ... that's all been done before, in a thousand different ways and always, always, the psychopaths returned. Always, the same cycle repeated.

We can stop the cycle, if we want. But only if we get at the root of our susceptibility to their manipulations. Ultimately, this is fear, and fear comes from the first error: that of separation. If all understand that all is one, then death is nothing and fear disappears. So what have you to fear if another plans to kill you? But if all know that all are one, who would attack another? For he would in so doing attack himself. Thus neither motive for aggression nor defense ... and through this (and it can only be in this fashion), world peace.

Now, mystics have been saying this for thousands of years to ever-enlarging audiences and to ever-diminishing effect. While no doubt many of you reading this see things in a broadly all-is-one kind of way, it's certainly not the default mode of operation for the culture as a whole, now, is it? Hence the wrack, ruin and destruction wrought large, in land after land and life after life, around the world, as human after human succumbs to fear to acts accordingly....

All because the psychopathic reptiles running this place have got us believing the Big Lie that it's all separate: every atom a discrete particle, every human a lone mind, ever star an isolated point of light.

Substitute truth for that lie - show the ever-present connections at multiple and mutually supportive levels that make every part an element of a transcending whole - and the psychocultural support within the collective subconscious for that control disappears.

Astronomy - a renewed, real and open-minded astronomy, based on interdisciplinary and holistic science, in perfect balance with all of its sibling sciences - will go a long way towards providing a bulwark against mass mind control, by rendering the cultural environment inhospitable at best for psychopathic predators who use lies to produce fear and thus gain control.

Stepping Over the Line

Hey, all you cops out there who were at Pittsburgh. Yeah, and you other cops who were watching and wish you were there are too. All of you who got off on it, listen up. Know this. You're crossing a line. You're breaking laws that spring from a place deeper than any body of men (and I honor them with the title advisedly) can legislate. Remember justice? That thing that maybe a few of you at least hoped you'd be serving? Justice is balance, cops.

The scales always balance.

You've stepped across a line. You've chosen open allegiance with evil, with the enemies of all humanity. What's up with that? You're human too, aren't you? Don't you have wives, kids, families? Don't you care about the world they grow up in? Don't you realize that when you throw your lot in with the force your actions serve, when you become even for just a moment an extension of its will, you lose your own humanity? You betray us all and worst of all you betray yourself, so there is no point in forgiving you. Because when you realize what you've done - and you will, oh, you will - you will never be able to forgive yourself.

Sure, it feels good, now. You get that rush, that feeling of power as you fire those rubber bullets, whack that kid in the head, stomp on that guy's fingers. Taze that bro. Taze 'em! Fucker deserves it. Yeah, that's right, it feels good. And the money's nice, too, isn't it? But let's not kid ourselves, you like the big house and the new cars and the vacations and all the little perks but what really does it for you is when the civvies kind of cringe away, drop their gaze, that raw animal scent of fear. That whole primal alpha male dominance/submission trip, that's the ticket, yessir. Rightawaysir. Whatever you say. Just don't taze me, bro.

Yeeaaaaaah, baby. It feels good. It's a goddamn party.

Well the hangover's coming shitheads. It will suck in exponential relationship to how much you've gone over, to the degree of your betrayal. Because we know, you see. You've got friends and families and neighbors who know what you do, and yeah, they talk. Word gets out. Lists get made. One day we will come for you, and there is no outrunning us because we are your country, we are the world, we are the embodiment and the extension of the entire created universe. It acts through us, and because of that for all intents and purposes we act through it, too. You're about to find out just how long that arm can be when the Law you've pissed off is the kind that doesn't need to be written down because it just IS.

You have FUCKED yourselves.

And when it's all said and done, the trials are over and the nooses cut down, generation upon generation of our descendants and yours shall spit when they say your names.

Hope it's worth it.

As for the rest of you? The ones who were feeling a little uncomfortable out there, sweating in the armour, gritting your teeth a little every time that psycho down the line ran out to whack some poor fucker who was just standing there, taking a picture, who wondered if what they were seeing was right and maybe even wondered about the collection of cold-faced dark-suited men they were guarding, arriving in big black cars and deliberating over the fate of nations in their ceremonial meetings. Funny fow those fates always seem to mean more poverty, death, and war. Oh yeah, and more stuff for the guys handing 'em out. Yeah, there's some of you who wonder about the justice of guarding those who seem to embody its opposite and to you (and you know who you are) I say this. There is still time. There is always time. Right up until-

The rules in this game are simple, see. You can change your tune at any time until the music stops and your number comes up. Take off the mask, come forward, admit your deeds. "Hi everyone, I was an agent provocateur at the rally." "I fired rubber bullets into a crowd." "I stood there and watched while three cops kicked the living shit out of a protestor." You can think of it as a sort of amnesty, a free pardon in exchange for coming out before you're revealed ... unless it comes off as a boast of course. "Yeah, it was me kicked the punk." It's all in the delivery, see, and please don't bother trying to fake it. Any flaws we detect (and we will, for we are all of humanity) will only serve to highlight the absence of conviction, and on that alone you will be convicted.

See, the problem is this. Law is supposed to be justice, yes? The balancing of the scales. The paying of dues, the reparation of wrongs, the impartial arbiter of truth. Once upon a time there was no written law, but then too the Law existed: the inherent regulating structure of the universe, cause and effect, action and consequence, ticking on and on over and over back since before there was life (if, in truth, there ever was such a time.) It was an unforgiving Law, savage in its judgements, and so we humans long ago took it upon ourselves to soften its impact by writing it down. The idea I suppose was that by so doing we might study it, learn its ways, live in accordance with them and, so, prosper.

And prosper we did, some of us at least, in fits and in starts here and there, for you see 'right' from the very beginning those who actually wrote down the law took the opportunity to throw in a few self-serving clauses that allowed them to elevate themselves above the illiterate masses, who'd been duped into thinking those clauses were every bit as sacred as the Law of the Universe they'd been told this new-fangled-written-law-thingy was.

That initial deception has since been used as a wedge, to the point now we've gotten to where we don't even remember what the Law was supposed to be anymore. We've gotten confused about the difference between the map and the territory it ostensibly portrays, or at least a lot of us have, and the result, well ... criminals in power, man. Everywhere you look, just robbing and raping the planet ragged, while publicly pointing to the moon and pretending to be it so they can lay claim to the privelege of continuing their pillage.

I'll lay you odds they joke about it in private, with their compatriots who are in on the gag. It's gotta be a hoot, I'll tell ya.

So the problem we come to is this: the courts are compromised at every level. Nothing can be accomplished in them, not if justice is the goal. The next court of recourse is the notoriously savage and fickle court of public opinion.

Have you heard of those Chinese net mobs? Or our own culture's Anonymous We? Internet vigilantes whose collective attention comes to rest on some particularly feeble and rotten excuse for a human being and decide to shred his life and his sanity until, sometimes, he kills himself. Remember Hal Turner? The crazed white supremacist radio host slash paid FBI agent provacateur? The Anonymous We is the reason he is no longer in operation.

I want it to be understood that I'm advocating nothing, here. Simply stating some facts: that if justice cannot be served in one system, it will be served in another. There is no way to stop this. The universe seeks balance, by its primal nature attempting to come to thermodynamic equilibrium. What is taken must always, one way or another, be paid for.

The interesting thing though is that in all liklihood violence will be largely un-necessary. You know, I've been keeping an eye on all the various protests over the past few months and what's interesting to me is that they all seem to kind of fizzle out. That predicted Summer of Rage in the UK never really got around to happening ... even the G20 conference in London wasn't much of a scrum, was it? The succeeding soiree in Pittsburgh has been notable primarily for its absence of rock-throwing protestors, or indeed of determined protestors of any sort. Even here in Kingston, the Aberdeen St. party - an annual bash that generally attracts thousands of drunken frosh and frat boys to our peaceful downtown - ended in a whimper as the students simply failed to show up (although there were plenty of cops hassling innocent local passersby.)

Now, you could take this to mean that maybe for whatever reason people are just completely insensible to what's going on around them and I'll grant you that still describes a great deal of the populace to a 'T'.

But then there's that million person gathering in Washington that just sort of ... happened ... no violence ... no warning ... just, over the weekend, a million people showing up and reflecting the government's shameful visage back to it.

So there's no shortage of people who care.

Maybe it's that a lot of those people have started waking up. They've figured out the scam, and decided not to play by those rules anymore. I know I have, and I'm willing to bet there's others like me out there.

Here's the way it is. Your world leaders can go and have their conferences, eat their lobster bisques, snort coke off a teenage hooker's ass, pose for some photos and, oh yeah, make their grand decisions on our fate. While they do that, we won't surround them to channel our hatred into their entertainment. For make no mistake, that's what the clever signs, the giant puppets, the slogans, the faint waft of tear gas in the air and the sound of gunfire is to these reptiles in human skin. All that emotional energy, all that creativity, poured into and burnt away in the crucible of a side-show act for an audience of monsters that has exactly zero chance of changing anything.

Well, that game isn't fun anymore. You can keep playing, by all means, go right ahead. Enjoy. We won't stop you. We will however proceed to ignore you, and start playing a new and enourmously more enjoyable game: giving birth to a new society, a true renaissance for a global omnihumanity based on altruism and abundance rather than scarcity and security.

Yeah, you heard me. That's how we're going to fight you. By out-thriving you.

That society is being born, now, as we speak, within the minds, hearts, bellies and sex organs of a great many human beings, all over the globe. They have no organization. They need no organization. They simply know, instinctively, that the time is now, and so they are acting individually in the full knowledge that others of like mind and kindred heart are doing the same everywhere, in whatever way they can or please to, all approaching the same goal from every conceivable angle.

And in fact, and more to the point, every inconceivable angle. Even those early few who have already managed to physically link up with others in the throws of this awakening must act without any sure knowledge of what their compatriots might be doing.

It's that 'inconceivable' part that's really scary for TPTB. They're dealing with an enemy that refuses to play by known rules, whose actions are prohibitively difficult to predict, at least with any sort of accuracy ... and here, or rather now, as the density of events per unit time cycle starts to really ramp up around this Great Strange Attractor that's been pulling the fractal timewave of history towards it ... in this now, accuracy is of great consequence for those who would maintain control.

Time. Yes, that's the thing, isn't it? The structure of time itself is making the world a more fundamentally unpredictable place ... and for those who choose to ride that wave, rather than attempt to tame it, well ... "Tiiii-iiii-iiii-iiiime is on our side, yes it is...."

On that note, I'd like to mention that the date I wrote much of this just happens to be 8 Imix, the Justice of the Crocodile. Imix is the origin, the birth canal of the Mayan calendar. Kind of interesting how the ultimate roots of justice came up as a theme today, as I've been too distracted to check the tzolkin recently and only did so just a few minutes ago....

Lets All Sing the Doom Song!

Before reading the papers in the morning, I always like to start with a good laugh. I look at the funny pages first, and I find that sets the tone for an entertaining romp through the day's propaganda rather than an angry stomp through a world built of heinous crime and bald-faced lies. So I'll extend you the same courtesy here:

Behold the Doom Song.

I hope you watched it. Invader Zim was and remains my all-time favorite Nickoldeon cartoon. I would have loved to see the look on the programming director's face, who had to find a way to fit a cartoon by the dark genius Jhonen Vasquez - creator of such classics as Johnny the Homicidal Maniac - into the programming schedule of a network aimed at small children.

I started to digress there into a long-winded description of the cartoon's premise but caught myself in time (that should give you some idea, however, of how much I love this cartoon.) If you want to know more, you know how to use google and you will.

What I'm really here to talk about tonight is another doom song, the dirge sung by Alex Jones, for instance, though by no means exclusive to him. I myself sing the doom song quite often and, if you're reading this, I expect you do as well. Whether you're singing it because of ecological collapse and chaotic climate, because of wars and rumors of wars ... because you perceive the venal conspiracy that animates those wars, the collapsing economy and seemingly all else and has for longer than most are brave enough to admit, or because all those reasons, really because well (how shall I put this) they're all very much the case, the 'facts on the ground' as it were.

As it stands now the world is fucked, fucked from multiple directions like a teenage party favor at Bohemian Grove or fucked the way a bankrobber surrounded by a SWAT team is fucked. There's really no way around it, it's pretty much there and in your face if you're willing to notice it. In case no one's noticed there's writing all over the walls in pretty much every city you go to.

There aren't too many who haven't picked up on this by now. Most of the populace still drowns out the doom song with the various distractions available in the the proliferation of modern electronic entertainment but ... maybe it's just me but I don't see so many people wearing iPods these days. Not like you used to and, what does that mean? Surely all those iPods can't have broken? Or are they just sitting at home, on a shelf somewhere, a thin layer of dust collecting on its smooth, shiny surface?

Still, few have the courage to really sing the doom song to themselves, to start exploring it, every little nook and cranny, perceiving especially all the ways we've been lied to and even taught to lie to ourselves, about ... ourselves, and thus everything else. That's a lot of work to do, a lot to ask of someone psychologically and for a while, those few who do seem to go insane.

"What is this bullshit about the Rothschilds owning the Fed? 9/11 was an inside job? Bush eats babies, Al Gore is addicted to the adrenaline in the blood of terrified teenage boys and the Queen Mother is a meatsuit for a hyperdimensional reptilian intelligence that's been guiding civilization since it started? The hell are you on about? You off your meds or something?"

Yeah, that and something, man.

Still, in those early stages you're consumed by the doom song, feeling it in the fiber of your soul ... all those people, being set up to die ... all the horrors already unleashed, and all the horrors yet to come.... You can't help but spend most of your conversational time arcing back to the tone of, "Hey, by the way, are you aware of how truly fucked we are? No? Well let me fill you in on the details...."

But very few want to hear the details because they can hear the rumbling bassline of the doom song already and are still trying to drown out the melodies any way they can. They bury it below, an unacknowledged backdrop to their daily routine. I understand completely: I do the same myself, so as to function within wider society but ... still ... in my solitary moments, I sing the song to myself. The urge to bury, however, is really the worst and most dangerous thing to do, like running directly away from an ambush, and the deeper it's buried from one's momentary conscious perceptions, the more damage it does. There's an analogy with this of course of repressed personality traits or memories, for that is essentially what we're dealing with here. Most simply try to ignore it, while knowing it is there and for these, simple blindness will leave them open to further and worse predations. Others, however, bury the knowledge so deep that a dangerous sort of nihilism takes root, and they become themselves tools of predation.

Now, the thing about the doom song is, it's really all about fear. When you pause to take it all in, it's majestic and overwhelming finality is about the most terrifying thing one can imagine. No spy thriller exceeds it in suspense, no horror flick in raw fright, no army movie in gore and, if certain prophecies are on time, no sci fi movie in sheer spectacle. The more you refuse to hear the song, the deeper you have to bury it, and as a result the more raw terror it will evoke within the brain.

Fear is the mindkiller. Never forget that.

So what do we have? A huge population with their minds so fried by fear that unwilling or no, they are quite compliant as slaves. That's been the case to greater or lesser (and usually greater) degree throughout much of history, sure, but ... these days aren't most of history, are they?

You've also got a small population that's started to sing along with the doomsong, researching it's several overlapping themes for themselves through the internet. They tend to be quite animated by what they've found, often consumed by it (and thus looked upon officially and publicly as 'crazy') but an often astonishing feature is that they don't seem to be quite as fear-struck as you might expect. Rather, it seems that they've one way or another overcome that initial dread at the song's grim opening notes and plunged right in.

Then you've got a much smaller population, what you might really call the core population of the Awakening: those who have reasoned out (or intuited, for many) the full spectrum of what's going on and have lost their fear entirely. Amongst this cohort the awareness of how thin the facade of power is very keen, as is the knowledge (or is that faith) that creative solutions make this upcoming transition eminently survivable. Not that survival's really the point, mind: this group tends most often to have a dominant spiritual aspect, with an understanding that 'death' is an illusion. And anyway, mere survival is so boring. Much more interesting will be the creation of a society where the human being can thrive as never before thrive as a being, not a human doing, free and encouraged to develop all their faculties as far as they may in whatever directions their inclinations take them. A society in which the world is both garden and school, a kingergarten in which human beings are seen for what they are: the larval forms of light beings.

The creation of that society, of that world, of that future ... that, I think it's fair to say, is widely acknowledged (within this very small group I'm talking of here) as being the point.

So, let's say it's some time ago, and you're one of the very, very few who's had the brass cojones big enough to tackle the doom song and come out the other end: seeing the gathering evil for what it is, and knowing how to stop it.

What do you do? Sure, you know that infinite love is the only truth and that God has things well in hand, but God's also working through you and she expects you to do you work in the world you're in.

Well, obviously one of the critical tasks to perform is to get the message out to as many people as possible. There's a certain critical threshold necessary for a full-scale Awakening to allow humanity to successfully navigate the rapids ahead and boy, are we ever a long way away from that now. And ten, twenty, a hundred years ago? Much further still.

So, how do you start reaching people? What do you say to them? 'God loves you'? 'You and god are one?' 'Do the right thing?'

Erm, no.

That won't work.

Fear is the mindkiller, remember? And these people are afraid, very thoroughly and down to very pit of their engorged junk-food laden stomaches in the grip of fear. They are in a powerfully negative state, as a result of which they respond to only one thing: fear. An appeal to their higher, better natures will be completely lost on them.

So, the only thing to do is to go for that fear, to accentuate it and draw attention to it, to proclaim it as loudly as possible. They'll have to notice, one way or another, and some few might even respond to the message that's being communicated through it: don't trust what you've been told, research for yourself and make up your own mind what and whom to believe.

Every single one of those who responds in such a fashion will inevitably find themselves hooked on the doom song, led by it as though by a lure through the whole thorny maze that is the modern reality tunnel until - with a near solid certainty - coming out the other end, a changed being, a new member of the Awakening.

Now, it might be the same person can tell you the truth about the darker side of things and then spend a few moments chatting about more positive polarities of the situation. I try to maintain this balance as much as possible but then, I'm speaking to a small and some might say elect audience, not shouting myself hoarse addressing the masses. The fact is, there are so many people who are still lost in their own fear, so many yet still to try and wake up, that doing so becomes of necessity a team effort, with all the division of labor that implies. Some of us can spend all their time talking to others within the Awakening, discussing the particulars of how we're going to wiggle through this train wreck; others, however, must devote themselves on a fulltime basis to the often thankless job of trying to wake people up.

I'm going to spring a little trap on you, though no doubt some will have seen this coming. Let's take the case of one Alex Jones, radio host of his four hour talkshow on the Genesis Communications Network, and documentary film-maker with several feature-length pieces of, essentially, investigative conspiracy journalism. Alex is big, fat, loud, and can most often be heard cutting his many guests off with an apoplectic five minute rant about the New World Order.

Now, Alex gets a lot of flack. There's the obvious name-calling from the corporate media ('crank', 'conspiracy theorist' and other predictable duckspeak), the hassles from officaldom and the like. But also within the Awakening, he's often held in great disdain. Usually this comes down to disapproval of his overbearing emphasis on the negative (this if the speaker is one who comes from more of a 'new age' than a 'conspiracy theorist' angle) or also (for those who came from the conspiracy angle), that he's a New World Order plant, project Mockingbird-style controlled opposition straight out of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, with a vicious hidden agenda that has yet to be unveiled. Oh, yes, and he doesn't like to say 'the Jews did it', so he may be a crypto-Jew as well. Or is it that he's an ignorant backwoods Texas Christian full of bile and hate for any other religion?

So, let me get my head around this one: a guy who spends all his time trying to tell people what he knows about the New World Order, exposing as many secrets as he can, is secretly working for them?

Wow. That's ornate. I'm a conspiracy theorist, and I of all people am going to invoke Occam's Razor on this one.

You know why I don't think he likes to talk about Jews? Because he knows 99% of the audience has been wired since Birth to respond to any variation on 'Jew=Bad(?)' with a hearty yell of 'ANTISEMITE!!!' and a reach for the antifascist pitchforks. So instead he talks about the Rothschilds and treats not at all the subject of their 'Jewishness', knowing full well that it's just a cover anyway, that in all likelihood they are blood-drinking fear-eating reptoids from another dimension, and that most of the Jewish people as such are innocent (if more deeply brainwashed than most.)

Alex keeps the message strongly negative for one reason: to reach as many people as possible. He knows fear is the only way to reach them and so he absolutely lavishes them with it and that's why there's millions of people listening to his radio program, watching his movies and linking stories in his websites. You might see this as exploitative and certainly he brings in some money, but ... he needs the infrastructure to build that big podium and that giant megaphone of his. Only way to get it is with money and so, money must be made.

Does everyone who encounters Alex' message respond by really looking at things for themselves, opening their eyes to the world and their hearts to the doom song? No, of course not. Now as always it's only a few who start down that path.

But it's far more than might have, otherwise, had Alex or someone like him not set about building that megaphone and stood up to start shouting with it.

Why in the hell would the NWO set up an agent to tell people most of their dirtiest secrets? Well, not 'all' so maybe to hide the very worst by omission? Sure, why not. But then why let him keep hammering at the message, 'investigate for yourselves, don't take anyone's word for it, don't take mine, get out there and look it up! Make up your own mind! Change your reality!'

Isn't that the whole message that got everyone here started on whatever weird path it was that took them here? That message alone carries within it the seeds of the Illuminati's destruction.

You want a shill? Glenn Beck. That man is a shill. He tells the audience some things that are, in fact, true, some of the same information Alex covers but then, somehow, somewhere along the way he finds himself advocating the very same policies that (logically) he would be against. And you'll never catch Glenn Beck telling people 'Question your reality'.

Alex Jones is a hero. He's doing a dirty job that no one else much wants to do, and he's doing it for the sole reason that maybe, if enough people really wake up, humanity can pull through this and come out the better for it on the other side. It's only inevitable, and certainly understandable, given the skepticism he advocates, that some large fraction of those he wakes up condemn him for being what he professes to have set himself against. But it's by no means admirable. Alex deserves a certain degree of honor and respect for what he's done, what he continues to do and I have no doubt will continue to do until either enough people wake up, or They eventually put a bullet through his head.

Whichever comes first, and it would do us good to remember that this now applies to us all. As a certain famous Satanist once said, "We must all hang together or we shall surely all hang separately."

I'm not saying to listen to Alex. I don't, not anymore, not as a regular thing. For most of you listening to The Alex Jones Show is like a math PhD sitting through a remedial math course. The intentional abrasiveness is jarring, too. It's unnecessary and unpleasant, so: don't.

But don't ridicule the teacher of that course when he's walking down campus, just because you're studying - or even teaching - at a more advanced level. It's uncouth, it's uncalled for and for the sake of all that's holy, we're on the same flipping team and (in case you hadn't noticed) massively outnumbered.

I could go on but I won't. I've certainly said my piece and below, you're welcome to say yours.