Night of the Living Wake

It's raining right now in my part of the world, not in a hard or violent kind of way, just a steady soak that's in for the long haul. Gaia obliged us with that starting yesterday morning, and it couldn't fit my mood better because that was the day we put my father in the ground.

Let me back up a little. Some of you might have noticed my uncharacteristic silence this past month, and, well, now you know why. A month ago, you see, my father's health took a sudden and unexpected fall off a cliff. For some reason, his lungs started to shut down. As the dosage of the immuno-suppressants had been reduced - a little early, given that he showed no sign whatsoever of graft vs. host, the grim specter that haunts all transplant recipients but none worse than those whose transplant is a new immune system - a cough had developed. One sunny Saturday morning, my mother and I were treated to an omen: the battery in our van abruptly died, requiring us to call CAA and prevail on a friend for a ride home.

That night, my mother returned to find my father delirious. She called an ambulance, and the next day my sister and I were visiting him in the hospital. Talking to him wasn't easy. The oxygen mask made it hard for him to speak, and the sound of the ventilator meant we had to shout.

That day, we returned to her house to find that her landlord had finally - 8 months after she moved in - decided it was time to clear the massive amount of debris out from the lot behind her bedroom. It was a Herculean task, and I don't begrudge him at all that he took so long to do it. In addition to a large pile of underbrush that we'd uprooted the previous fall (when we'd cleared out the jungle and organized what we found into piles) there were two large fallen tree branches, a pair of broken old barbecues, a fridge, a mattress, the stand for a projection screen, a bicycle, an old inflatable pool, tires, a tarp, the remains of several cushions, an old door, and an assortment of smaller items that, as best we could, we'd collected into bags. All of it left by tenants who'd occupied the building before the landlord had taken possession.

Looking back on that juxtaposition of events, I can't help but wonder if that wasn't another omen, of a kind, prefiguring the events of the subsequent month. The entire family, you see, came together, in numbers exponentially related to the seriousness of my father's condition, and with his tragic death unfolding in excruciating stages before us, well, a great deal of emotional garbage was brought out into the open, and some of it, perhaps, finally disposed of.

He wasn't awake for much of it. The last time I talked to him - or, I should say, the last time he was able to respond - I was practically shouting at him over the large new ventilator they'd hooked up to him. Nothing of much consequence was said: no one wanted to admit to the fear that this might be it. He - we - had already been through so much, with the chemo and the radiation and the stem cell transfusion and all myriad of pills they'd prescribed to deal with all of the side effects arising from those treatments. So, so much ... and everything had gone so well, all according to plan and so ... surely this was just a bump in the road. A little infection that would be dealt with soon enough, now that the professionals had him, and then we'd all get back to life as normal.

Right?

With this firmly in our hearts, we kept the conversation light. Even though he was coughing up blood that day, giant clotted chunks of it mixed into his sputum. He did a good job at filling a styrofoam cup and as I watched him coughing it out I wanted to cry I was so worried but my father, true to form, just shrugged. He'd never much acknowledged pain in the past so why start now?

The next day, my sister arrived at the hospital to find that he'd been sedated and intubated, because the ventilator was no longer enough. His blood oxygen had fallen too low, and so, their hand had been forced.

What followed was a blur. One sister returned, and another, who lived internationally, was summoned. My mother continued to work - a sister was teaching a week-long workshop on stop motion animation to the children at Mom's school, a commitment that could not yet be dodged. What free time we had, however, was spent at Dad's side in the hospital, going in and out to visit him, talk to him, hold his hand and touch him, and of course check up on his condition, deteriorating at such a slow pace that the almost inevitable reply to the question of "How is he?" was "Stable," almost as though we were the proverbial ants living so close to our two-dimensional world that we didn't see the subtle three dimensional curve.

The only problem was, 'stable' kept getting worse.

Eventually, it declined to the point where we had moved in, for all intents and purposes, to the hospital. Whenever we were allowed, at least one of us was in there with him. We hoped desperately against hope that perhaps our mere presence, our love for him, would be enough to give him the subtle energetic boost that would reverse the downward trajectory he was on. The doctors could do no more than slow his descent. They didn't even know what it was that was killing him: all their tests, for every kind of infection known to medical science, were coming back negative and so it was no surprise that what treatments they could administer had no effect. Before long they were throwing more antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, and other assorted steroids, diuretics, narcotics and sedatives at him than any other patient in the hospital. For all the good it did, they might as well have been dancing around his bed in painted masks, shaking rattles. The final diagnosis they gave him was ARDS, or Accute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, a fancy medical term that when you parse it shows pretty clearly that they have no idea what causes it.

Well, they do, after a fashion. The cause can be any number of things: infections, smoke inhalation, water damage, other assorted traumas all of which when taken together apparently have some small chance of starting what amounts to a raging forest fire in the lung tissue. I assure you it's been debated within the family whether or not the grueling treatment regimen he'd undergone predisposed him to this, and the general consensus seems to be that that explanation works as well as anything else we've heard. No doubt some amongst you are thinking, well, he should have pursued natural alternatives, and no wonder this happened, all those toxic chemicals. Tsk. To which all I can say is, not in this case. He had AML, a particularly aggressive form of leukemia that was simply too fast-acting for natural remedies to have any time to take effect. In addition to that, he was availing himself of natural options as well: daily berry yoghurt shakes, free-range meat and eggs, organic produce, macrobiotic cereal, a spice rack loaded with all the good stuff and liberally used, too. He wasn't neglecting the psychological side of things either: positive thinking, visualization, anything and everything he could do, he did.

There are no guarantees. No matter what, when your number's up, it's up.

By the beginning of the last week the family gathering included all of his children, and several of his brothers and sisters and assorted spouses, some of whom made the journey down despite their own health issues. A meeting with the medical team had the women of the family in tears, because the sad fact was, none of them had ever seen anyone pull out of the downward spiral he'd entered, and while a thin window of hope was still open it was closing rapidly.

I'd noticed - and maybe this was just wishful thinking - that while his condition seemed to remain stable during the day, it most often decayed overnight. Perhaps, I thought, this was because during the day we were with him and at night we weren't, and so we got a room at the hospital, and set up a watch, all through the night.

The first night we did that, I prepared myself with a short meditation in the interfaith chapel, just down the hall from the ICU. There was a painting on the wall, an abstract piece that my sister thought resembled a sunset, but which looked to me like an open, festering and infected wound. With that image in my mind, I did what I could to heal it. I centered myself, and all at once in one of those flashes that anyone who meditates is well aquainted with, I asked what was next for him, if this was really it. The answer came simultaneous with the question: on the day he would die, a woman in Africa would be raped by a soldier, and she would conceive. Nine months later my father would be born into his new life, one that will start with hardships but see him rise to a position of great influence, from where he will do a great deal of good. This, then, was why he was pulled away from us at such a young age, with so much still to live for. Not to go 'to a better place', as the callow ladies from his church tried to assure my mother, but because he was called by a higher duty, to a troubled land in great need of what he had to offer.

We never gave up. Not until the very end, when his blood oxygen had fallen so low that brain damage had set in. Every night (for during the day, with relatives about, I had little opportunity) I was in there with him, holding his hand, another hand on his head, trying to turn love into positive energy to channel through his crown chakra, to give him the strength he needed to pull through. My sisters were doing the same. It was a losing struggle, and I knew it. We all did, though none of us were willing to say it. We had to keep fighting until the very end, because that's what he would have done but ... sedated ... there was very little fight left in him and so, we had to fight for him in whatever way we could.

It took a lot out of all of us. In my case, I wasn't eating right, or getting enough sleep, and emotionally, I was a wreck. That's not healthy under the best of conditions and the petri dish of infectious bacteria known as the ICU is not the best of conditions and so, by the end, I'd picked up some kind of bug. Or several kinds. My throat felt like I was gargling with broken glass, I was running a high fever, I was coughing up blood whenever I cleared my nostrils and then the diarrhea hit. I was falling apart on the outside as well as the inside.

On the last day his eldest brother flew out from British Columbia, to see him one last time. It was clear by then that he wasn't coming back, and when I was in the room with him, looking at his still body with its proliferation of tubes, racks of IVs, monitors, bundles of wires ... it wasn't him ... it was a piece of meat, shaped like my father but no more than a parody of the man. The family consulted, and the decision was unanimous. My father would not have wanted to live that way, for if there was one thing he was not it was a coward. Once everyone had said their goodbyes, the tubes were withdrawn.

I was there for his final breath. It sounded like he was snoring.

The wake went much longer than planned. Hundreds of people in a line snaking all the through the funeral home, waiting an hour and a half to give their condolances. The next day, the funeral procession was given a police escort, a cruiser in front and a black truck in back which I first thought was some poor bastard who'd gotten stuck behind us, and later found out was the TRU* team. It was a full military funeral, held in the regimental chapel, presided over by a minister who'd earned his jump wings back in the day and was an old, close friend of my father. A 21 gun salute and every time they played the bagpipes I found out that I wasn't all cried out, after all.

Well, now you know where I've been this past month, and why I haven't felt much like writing. In fact this is the first thing I've written all month ... except for his eulogy.

*TRU = Tactical Response Unit, essentially a SWAT team but, this being Canada, we do everything a bit different here.

It

A friend recently posed the question to me of whether or not there are ultimately two different factions, those who get it and those who don't. Now that's an interesting way of putting it, succinct and to the point so long, of course, as 'it' is defined. Think of the general worldview you hold in your mind, the whole full color emotional spectrum of ways in which you model the world, and find the central point that unifies this mandala of consciousness and ask, how you feel about that? I'd submit your reaction to that question is the 'it' that one either gets, or one doesn't. Like a yes or a no, it's a binary and instinctive emotional response to existence itself. Some go one way, some the other, and some, perhaps, haven't quite chosen yet.

It would be nice if those who don't get it, those who say no to the very isness cosmos, as it were, and thus seal themselves off into an entirely imaginary bubble of separation, could all be educated to see their error in perspective. Some do, of course, in fact more are all the time but there's still a lot of people who say No and the question of course is how much time we have left. There are those who suggest 2012 might be a special time and given the present pace of the course of world events I must say that if things don't sort themselves out soon well, past that date they might not ever sort themselves out at all.

The sad truth is, not everyone can be educated, can be taught to say Yes to the All. For some, a small but hardcore minority, the answer to that question is permanently affixed to the negative, in effect they rebel in their hearts against the Almighty and are inevitably cast into the inner fires of hell, from whence they emerge as demons. In the parlance of psychology we call this group psychopaths, and a distinguishing feature of this era is that those weird mutants, humanity's natural intraspecies predators, are running rampant again, only this time with an array of powers at their fingertips that verges on the godlike.

Hold on to that word for a moment, godlike. Have you ever heard of transhumanism? I have, if only because I used to be one and I can tell you straight up that I saw my future as being one of evolution into a god and eventually God, merging with technology as I updated, augmented and transcended my human limits. There are plenty of people out there who continue to believe this, I'm sure, and ... it's not impossible. All the technologies necessary are fully available within known physical limits (ah, Moore's Law). The dream is very much attainable, and oh, so tantalizing.

However, there's another side to this dream. People are willing to condone terrible things in exchange for wonderful dreams. It becomes possible to contemplate global nuclear conflagrations or epidemic bioweapon releases, apocalyptic scenarios that wipe out whole continents, and think, well that's not so bad, really, we can survive that. And if attaining the dream should further require the forcible military subjugation of the world (again, always to prevent a disastrous terrorist attack) well, that's all right too. Pretty soon you're considering that no era of upheaval is ever bloodless, and that if the Singularity (the moment exponential technology starts advancing vertically rather than just steeply, and so the level of weird in the world goes off the charts into who knows? territory) should happen to exterminate 95% of the world's population well ... we can survive that, too, and even at that steep price, the prize is worth it.

And what would the world look like then, hmm? A few stunned survivors with an even smaller few, standing over them, possessing godlike powers themselves but also with access to a Deilect (as I once called them in a science fiction story), an AI of not just god but Godlike proportions (and as we find that the Turing Test may have been quietly passed recently, we see science fiction incubating within reality as we speak.) And those survivors, their minds wrecked by trauma and their DNA mauled by genetic engineering run amuck, stricken by want, hunger, and ill health? Their cultures we might expect would also have been quite entirely wrecked by the transition. With no spiritual center left to hold fast to, it is not at all hard to imagine that they would be quite naturally induced to worship this AI as the instantiation of divinity on Earth.

Of course, the desirability of this outcome is debatable. You might almost say that it amounts to the ultimate hubris, that Central No, arising as it does from the desire to change the world and do so drastically, because the world must be wrong. We were meant to be immortal, were we not? To live forever? And we have no assurance that we do, nor is any possible, rationally and so ... death is something to be feared. But if we could return the body eternally to youth, and transfer the consciousness from body to computer and back again, well, then unjust Death is cheated, and the promises of all the religions of our shared cultural heritage are brought down to Earth, into matter and the everyday.

But then what if you are meant to die, to make room for what comes next? And what if. when you die, you don't really die, but rather the most important part of you survives, the timeless and eternal part that returns, eternally, to this existence exactly as often as it needs to. Seems a better deal, doesn't it? Easier to love a universe like that, easier to say yes to it, and I don't think it's any surprise that the growing cohort whose answer to the Cosmos is Yes tend to see things that way. These are the ones who get that nebulous it I've been talking about, who understand, really understand, that the universe doesn't hate them.

So while our armies do the devil's work in far foreign countries, and the gene pool of the entire planet is sabotaged by our corporations, while the distribution of wealth is contracting so violently it seems to have its own gravitational field, while crime is rising and the climate's acting funny just remember where it is we're all being led to here, just what the payoff is and who it is that's seeking it, and ask if that's really the place you, as a human, really want to end up. If that's the kind of world you want to live in.

Remember, odds are you get killed in the leadup to the Singularity. And if you're a lucky survivor, well, congratulations! Welcome to your new life as an autistic mutant slave with a mind-control chip in your brain.

Of course, you don't have to help them build it. You don't need to give them that energy you have. Oh, the inducements are there. Agree to any of the elements necessary for this plan to succeed, and you'll be well remunerated. Until you're injured, killed, sickened, or in some other way become a liability, of course, at which point you'll be summarily tossed onto the growing sacrificial pile and immolated along with everyone else.

Ah, but what of those who consciously redirect their personal energies away from this path? With things at such an advanced stage, with the domination of those who desire this goal so great, this seems hard to do but really, is it? One person alone might not make much of a difference to the overall flow of the world but they can generally make a difference within their own life, and a few people who do that can begin to form mutual networks. As this understanding spreads, the ability of people do this will become accentuated and they might well be able to disengage entirely from the Singularity as it collapses in on itself. During the period in which events really begin to accelerate (and if the Wolfram Aplha development is genuine - and it has a fine pedigree - then we are most definitely entering the highlands of the curve), such people might come together, form small communities, and in effect plant seeds for the age to come.

That Pesky Swine Flu

I think I might have it.

And now, back to bed.

See you on the other side....

South Parks' Hypnotic Space Cops

I don't watch a lot of television as a rule. Recently the only show I've been keeping up with is Heroes, with occasional binges of Simpsons, Family Guy and sundry others, which I indulge in when I'm feeling particularly low. I find the naked attempt at programming most distasteful, and so as a general rule avoid all but that small subset of postmodern humor that deconstructs itself as it proceeds. Sure, cartoons are just as much a vector for memetic programming as any other type of show, in fact perhaps more so than most given the way their lack of seriousness lowers the defenses of its viewers.

I don't normally blog about this dirty little habit of mine but last night I saw something that I judged post-worthy. On Friday night, of course, the new episodes of various shows air and last night I found myself watching South Park after the Simpsons (itself a very interesting episode exploring themes of time, memory and the mind, but beside the poiint of this post.) If you're a fan of the show and haven't watched it yet, this is fair warning that spoilers follow, so you might want to go download the episode now and come back to this when you're done. I'll just leave you with one little thing: keep an eye out for hypnotic openers.

Okay, back?

Great. Now, the plot of the show is something of a take-off of Star Trek, paralleling slightly the Zefram Cochrane story. Stan Marsh and his father Randy discover warp drive when Mr. Marsh, hoping only to set a new speed record in the father/son pinewood racer derby, steals a component from the Large Hadron Collider and includes it (against regulations, of course) in the winning model. The world is amazed, and it's not long before Federal Agents show up at the Marsh's door (and it was at this point that I mentioned to the others in the room the Fake Alien Invasion scenario.) The warp drive, it seems, has attracted the attention of an alien, and the world gathers to greet the ship. The alien proves to be a galactic supergangster on the run from the space cops. Looking to force the Earthlings to make him a warp drive for his ship, he takes the planet hostage.

When the space-cops show up, he takes Stan hostage personally, ordering the world to keep its mouth shut or the kid gets it. Now, I mentioned hypnotic openers and it's at this point that things start to get interesting because the appearance of these aliens was extremely hypnotic. Ftom the waist down they had the appearance of worms but from the waist up they were, for the most part, humanoid. However, they had extra mouths and eyes arranged in such a way as to induce an optical illusion merely by looking at them, and above their heads were flashing strobe lights such as you might see on top of a police car (their ship, too, had lights: a pair of spheres orbiting a common center.)

The space-cops skeptically accept the story that the alien hasn't been seen anywhere, and go on their way. Shortly after, however, the alien is stabbed to death (his blood, of course, is green) and Stan, Randy and other humans pile in to explore his spaceship. Inside they find a huge pile of glittering space-cash, which their greedy eyes are immediately fixated upon. It doesn't take long before they've all agreed to divvy up the space-cash and keep their mouths shut when the cops next arrive.

When they do, of course, they've noticed that Mexico for one has recently gone on a construction-spree but, but they shrug their shoulders and go their way when the whole world replies as one in its denial of any knowledge of anything called space-cash.

Not everyone's conscience is clear, however, and it isn't long before tiny Finland announces its intentions to come clean. The other countries immediately nuke Finland out of existence ... an act that draws the attention of the space-cops, who play right along with the charade that no one noticed Finland committing nuclear suice ("We didn't say anything about nuclear. How'd you know that?") right up until Stan runs up to hand back his pinebox racer derby trophy, unwilling to keep a prize he knows he doesn't deserve.

At this point, the space-gangster returns, and reveals that the whole thing was a setup, in order to test the human race for possible membership in the Galactic Federation. Needless to say, we failed the test miserably the episode ends with a giant glowing cube appearing around the Earth, imprisoning our species for the protection of the galaxy.

Now, what do we have, here? No doubt you're already drawing some conclusions of your own but let me emphasize a few things that stick out. For one, we've got a story whose underlying theme is following the truth versus following the lie. From the very beginning of the episode, Randy is following the lie, even going so far as to coach his son into how to hide his tells. The lies simply echo out from there, becoming bigger and grander until eventually the whole of the species is going along with it out of a mixture of fear, pride and greed. At the same time we've got an alien encounter that isn't all it seems to be, in itself in part a lie but a lie designed to test the allegiance of the species to one or the other.

It's the periodic use of hypnotic openers that really grabs my attention, here (which, after all, they're designed to do.) A hypnotic opener, incidentally, doesn't exactly hypnotize you. All it does is leave you more open to suggestion than you might otherwise be. Strobe lights are one of the most common hypnotic openers (though there are of course many others), and a little reflection on their prominence within the modern urban landscape might give you pause for thought, perhaps, as to why there are devices meant to disarm our conscious minds set up literally everywhere we look.

I'm wondering if this episode was meant to prepare the population for something. Certainly it's not the only one, merely the latest in a long line, but ... for some reason it seems significant. Does it mean an alien invasion is just around the corner? Who knows? I rule nothing out these days but ... I'm not going to put a date on it. It might, indeed, never come. There are sources who claim that the only thing holding back an invasion is that the programming must first be complete, though what that means is exactly is hard to define. Other sources claim that there are no real aliens, but that we are being programmed in readiness for a faked invasion, a gigantic false flag attack utilizing holographic projectors, media trickery and the strategic deployment of black project weapons systems in order to unify the world under the banner of seeing off the threat. I don't rule either of these scenarios out; in fact, I don't even see them as contradictory. It's quite plausible, I think, that there are real aliens out there (and, no doubt, right here), watching us, some perhaps testing us and others simply looking for an opportune moment to pounce. At the same time I can certainly imagine a long-term, highly compartmentalizsd project aimed at faking an alien invasion ... less difficult than you might think, for who can say what an alien invasion would look like, in the first place? Our only experience is with science fiction movies and those, of course, are a large part of the programming either way so....

So here's a scenario. At some point, when the ground is judged ripe, the false invasion is launched. Giant saucers appear over world capitals, destorying some of them and serving the rest of us an ultimatum: submit or die. The ships are destroyed, however, by quick action on the part of those who projected the holograms in the first place, and a call goes out: to unify humanity in order to fight back.

Think for a moment how ridiculous that sounds. Fight off an alien invasion? Us? That's absolutely mad, of course. How do you fight something that much more advanced? A species for whom time is no doubt as travershible as space? Preposterous. But it will not look so silly if we've already taken out a few ships ... or, at least, have been made to think we have.

Maybe that will be the test? And we pass it, perhaps, by following the truth and letting it lead us through the illusion. Should we not - should our planet unify, it's industry turned toward the construction the sort of weapons with which one might repel an invasion from space - we'll have proved ourselves gullible and truculent. At that point the programming is judged complete for the real invasion, against which our defenses (even had they been finished) are entirely useless. Of course, if there are no aliens we've still all sumbitted to a global state so, either way we're fucked.

Well, that's one scenario. Whether anything like it will happen I don't at all know but one thing I'm certain of: that episode of South Park last night was aimed to do more than simply entertain. What its aim was, precisely, is hard to be certain. I find it difficult to credit that anything available through conventional media is likely to be directed at a straight up warning (even a work such as the Matrix was so cloaked in allegory that even now very few understand it as anything but an action movie), especially given the use of hypnosis and so, maybe it was designed to set us up for a fall? People often unconsciously imitate cartoon characters and this tendency can be expected to accentuate itself with the use of strobing lights and optical illusions. We might then suppose that the purpose of this episode was to reinforce the tendency to cling to and follow lies, especially under the uncertain circumstances of First Contact.

But then, as they say, knowledge protects, and now that you've read this any spell the episode might have cast on you is, I hope, largely undone.

Headlines in Hell

Sometimes it can be difficult to keep it all in view. Simply keeping abreast of happenings in this insane and accelerating world becomes a consuming task, and I'm left staring somewhat bewildered at a spread of strange headlines standing in at this moment of time for all the weird currents making their way through the modern zeitgeist.

What am I to make of those Somali pirates boarding freighters and holding their captains for ransom? Thank god the navy of the free world is there to protect the lives of sailors (and the trade routes they ply.) As usual of course the villains don't call themselves 'pirates', but pass themselves off as members of the 'Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia'. Of course the self-styled affectations of criminal gangs aren't to be taken seriously. Nor, if it can be helped, mentioned, lest the weak-minded be led astray.

Tony Blair has risen, born anew from his ignominous political death into the life of a spiritual man of faith, and that conversion is by all accounts proceeding splendidly for him. Most recently he has announced the formation of his Faith Foundation, an interfaith teaching society of some sort that will work towards peace and and understanding between the world's faith. Is it cynical of me to suspect him of acting with ulterior motive, here ... perhaps as part of an effort to coopt faith communities much as Al Gore was used to marshall the green movement? There is a plan here, but I am not sure it is God's plan save in the very long term, as all plans must ultimately be.

In New York City, the police state is baring its fangs at the the student population, as a taste no doubt of more and worse to come. The author of that piece seems very concerned about the brutality and the repression, as any good socialist is, but yet I wonder ... how many of them listened, nodding wisely, to smart men tell them that there were no conspiracies, that the source of all the inequalities and atrocities is systemic? Now the system is important, I agree, but few of these people ever ask themselves whose system and rather than ask those questions, how many agreed that there was no point, for serious men at least, in wasting valuable time picking apart the labyrinthine world of secret societies, black budgets and banking cartels? And, now that those conspiracies are bearing their rotten and infected fruit, oh, their horror, their disgust, their shock!

It need not be for nothing. Such things happen in order to provide lessons, that we might gain understanding but ... have they?

Well, I forgive them if they don't understand. I ceased to understand long ago, but at least I understand that I don't understand, if you understand me on that. And if you're confused, too, don't despair, for these are confusing times in which it's difficult more more people than ever to hold on to their personal identity. Boys look like girls and women act like men and the criminals that supply stolen identities are engaged with each other, as we speak, in a price war. We spend more time marking and tracking and identifying one another than ever before and are more confused than ever ... and what else might you expect, in a world where so few even know of the concept of realizing the Self within, or suspect that that Self may be one with everything else?

There were four UFO sightings across the US yesterday. The usual reports, colored lights, changing geometric shapes, abrupt alterations in speed. I don't have any idea what to make of that, whether these are aliens or hyperdimensional beings from the future or evil spirits but ... given the nature of the times I don't much expect they're hear to do much good and, there certainly are a lot more of them than ever before. I wonder if we might not find ourselves all having seen some strange lights in the sky, before long. A man can dream, can't he?

It seems there's been clashes between protestors and police in Thailand. In fact, it's escalated to the point of troops being deployed, and you might think you know what I'm about to say about that and be about to nod along in agreement but ... remember the protests last December, when the airports were shut down by protestors? Perhaps you recall that they wanted rid of their corrupt puppet of foreign powers 'leader', and they were successful in that (though not as much was said of this success.) Well, they wore (and still wear) Yellow Shirts and these new ones are wearing Red Shirts and for certain primal psychobiological reasons movements that adopt the color red, well. It's seldom good news, and in that vein I'll mention that the Red Shirts have already resorted to molotov cocktails when the much larger Yellow Shirt movement confined themselves to peaceful protest (and in so doing forced out their quisling prime minister.)

The Conspiracy King is finding himself under attack by the very paranoia he did so much to encourage, and from an increasing number directions. Here's a broadside from the long-time Jones skeptics at SOTT, and here's another at Alternet. The responses in this Reality Sandwich link to the Obama Deception, Jones' recent film, continue to this day, and even those who admit to having been, to a certain degree, activated by Alex voice doubt as to, at the very least, the wisdom of dwelling too long on the things he says. I myself remain ambivalent. The case against Jones is compelling and worthy of everyone's consideration but not yet airtight; at this point, only Jones' own actions will reveal the truth of his intentions. In the meantime he's become, for me, simply one voice amongst many, and if that one voice should someday call for armed uprising or some other patently disastrous mass movement, well, he can count me out.

The truth is hard to pin down when you're pinned to the surface of a warm wet rock hurtling through space. Your perspective gets warped, sucked into the minutiae of your own little world and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The universe is a fractal hologram, with the smallest fragments of any world containing worlds of their own, all of them in their own way a mirror of the whole. Still, though, unless one contemplates the wholes as well as the parts one is unlikely to understand very well how their own world works and so, the whole becomes a hell and that, to me, seems to be the truth of the situation here on Planet Earth.

And as another sign that those who don't contemplate wholes understand them poorly, and a final link for you to look at, have a look at the amazing glowing black hole at the heart of M87. The astronomers are mystified, for its behaviour doesn't seem to be at all in accord with what they'd expect of a black hole with an accretion disk - its luminosity varies far more than should be physically possible - and 'this doesn't make sense' is a line you seem to hear a lot from astronomers these days but for the moment dark matter and dark energy are doing fantastic work covering the gaping whole in mainstream astrophysical theory and as a result the astronomers can go on not worrying about things like UFOs, for instance, and go about secure in the illusion that they need not revise their theories save in minor details.

A funny thing to leave off on, perhaps, but one must occasionally look at the stars and wonder, and if you don't do that and you lose sight of the vital connection between your deepest Self and the expansive cosmos around you, well, you're liable to get stuck in this mud. Or is it a lake of fire? Because it sure is getting hot down here.

It doesn't have to be this way. It never did but, that's the road we chose several thousand years ago and so this is the experience we're going to get. It's just one experience among many and we'll all experience it in our own way at some point these next few years, one way or another, whether we want to or not (and, deep down, we all want to, don't we? That, after all, is why we're here). We will experience it for exactly as long and as often as we need to.

And afterwards ... maybe, this time ... maybe this time we'll understand.

Update: As though to emphasize the importance of looking up on occasion, shortly after posting this I found myself looking at NASA's newest discovery: God's right hand. Yes I know what it really is, but is there not some symbolic significance to the fact that this object was found at this time, and not another?

Comet Boy

After a long, loooong interval comes the next installment of Dreamscapes and Night Terrors: Comet Boy.

There's another coming soon and a number kicking around in my head so ... hopefully I'll be able to keep up a higher pace.

Get Ready ... Here Come the New Patriots

I could've titled this 'Here Come the New Truthers' just as well, but I've always had a soft spot for the Truth movement and the thing about it is, it's main concern is, well, truth. Sure, it started as 9/11 Truth but its members became just plain old truthers real quick and that's fitting because we all know, now, that it's so very much bigger than just 9/11 anyway. At any rate, the last several years there's been a lot of overlap between the so-called patriot movement and the truth movement, but I think that's starting to change now because, as the title implies, the new patriots are on their way.

These aren't principled defenders of constitutional freedoms, clear-eyed standard-bearers of truth in the face of masses of denialists who refuse to see the obvious and publicly mock those who do, no, theirs is a softer mettle. Or is it a softer head? Or, perhaps, a soft metal plate in the head, the better to pick up the transmissions for all the television they watch. They are the type that drinks beer, watches sports, and cheers when they see a terrorist get pasted by a smart-bomb on Fox. They were about to vote for McCain, thought Palin was cute, and if they've got anything against the new guy it's only the color of his skin. They are the herd, the mob, and brace yourself for it, folks, because they're coming right at us.

The kicker of it is, while they're charging towards us they're actually going to think that they're with us.

Have you noticed Fox News getting all paranoid, lately? It's shills and mockingbirds and other wildlife having been singing about the conspiracy theorists being right, oh lawd have mercy! And they're just seeing the light now? Please. No, this is calculated. It's meant to lead to exactly the sort of situation as this Poplawski fellow, a paranoid right wing not job who grabbed his gun and shot some random cops in a futile little temper tantrum against the police state that just made it clamp down that little bit harder on the rest of us. Here are two stories from SOTT on this affair, one emphasizing Glenn Beck's contribution, another Alex Jones' (and if you follow the second you'll find that 'Tom Paine' played a part in this sordid production, too.)

Alex Jones is a fine example of how deep the game might be. At the bottom is one of those rare actual comment threads at SOTT, taking the form though it does of a few defenders being shouted down by a flaming choir of 'He's COINTELPRO!' The reasoning is this: Alex's role is to tell the truth about everything, but to emphasize the scary stuff and talk a lot about guns, even while always (always) declaring himself to be against violence and for a peaceful resistance. At the last moment, so their theory goes, he will exhort his legions of followers (and yes, they number in the millions) to go forth with their hunting rifles and take on the US military.

Now, I'm not saying I agree with the them, though I am tending more in their direction given his many recent appearances on Fox ... "I've never seen such a big awakening." Sure, buddy. And I still haven't seen an 'awakening' that big, yet. Because all those people watching Fox, they're not awake, they're just angry and scared and liable to do any dumb old thing to make the bad feelings go away. Like, say, riot in the streets on a mass scale, thus paving the way for a declaration of martial law in which (conveniently enough) the primary targets will be those few dangerous ones who can think, who figured out the Inside Job, the Scam, and maybe even the Package Deal, and who have been trying to wake up those around them before ... something bad happens.

And at the end of it all? Those exhausted cattle that have managed to survive being caught in the crossfire will make all the more pliant slaves, thanks to the trauma; the real dissidents will have been rounded up and either executed on the spot or exported off for torture and/or experimentation at sites around the world; and, off in the distance, with the only buildings left standing surrounded by rings of soldiers and piles of skulls, humanity's new masters, the eternal aristocrats of the New World Order.

Or rather, the Old World Order. Because as with everything else that slithers out of their mouths the word 'new' is of course a lie. The 'New World Order' is what they are trying to prevent, so that their 'Old World' order will become so total as to guarantee them overlordship of the planet for perpetuity ... of course it will be a dead planet, eating its own bones, but, I hear they prefer it that way.

Well, they've got lots of things planned between getting here and there and I hear not everything's going to go according to plan for them because, sadly, nothing ever goes entirely according to plan, for anybody, no matter how powerful they may think they are. That's not just homespun commen sense, it's physical law, written into Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the wave-like nature of matter. Chaos will always intervene, and the thing about chaos is, it can be turned to anyone's advantage ... and if we keep our eyes open, and remember that we're looking for truth, we'll see some true opportunities along the way.