Etemenanki

Ya know, this whole Supreme Corpse thing in the States really has me fired up.  It goes straight to the heart of one of my pet peeves, which I can lay directly at the feet of the Roman Empire (aka Catholic Church), and which has so screwed up Western history and, by extension, the world.

Here's the deal....

Once upon a time, Humans were viewed as the pinnacle of Creation.  We were Masters of our domain (Seinfeld excepted) and the individual was a sacred being capable of achieving god-like characteristics.  Buddhism, which predates both Christianity and Judaism, speaks to the whole idea that humans are perfectable to the point of deification.  Each of us, given enough time and effort, are capable of achieving apotheosis.  As Robert Heinlein put it in 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' "Thou art god."

That whole concept is as foreign to us now as snorting Moon-dust.  We folks today can't imagine such an idea as individual human beings becoming gods in their own right.  That's some quaint idea reserved for Caesars and Japanese Emperors.  Us little people are but worms to be trod upon for the greater glory of someone else.

It shows up in so many subtle ways in our thinking and social discourse.  The concept of our baseness and unworthy-ness is built into our language.  We speak it and don't even think about it.  If we only paused for a moment and pondered what we say on a daily basis, we would (should) be shocked.

The other day, in my Business Conversation class, we took up the topic of 'jargon'.  Jargon is slang that is meant to exclude others from the inner sanctum of any given profession.  Jargon separates us into guilds and professions.  It allows us to exclude the uninitiated, but it also excludes us from other groups.  Slang divides generations, jargon divides disciplines.

Some of the terms we took up were 'core competency', 'corporate values', and 'human resources'.  If you are a corporate drone, then these terms are branded on your soul.  And chances are, you've probably never really thought them through.  So let's do that, because it's part of the Big Picture here on the Far Side.

First of all, 'core competency'.  This is a gem of bullshit.  Here, we've taken a horse turd and shined it up into an object of veneration and desire.  We are using 'core', which means the center, heart or penultimate, as an adjective to describe 'competency', which means average achievement, mediocrity and unenlightened.  So, when your boss talks about your company's 'core competency', he's asking you to buy into the idea that at your organization's heart is nothing more than mediocre ability.  A competent surgeon means he likely won't kill you, but all the effort and money likely won't cure you, either.  There's no art or substance, just following directions, boss.

The next term, 'corporate values', really goads me.  It is the assumption that a collection of humans, working in concert, constitute a 'person' that, in itself, has values, judgement and morals.  In other words, the collective hive becomes an 'individual' with a soul and independent existence.  We are no longer a collection of individuals working in concert, we are cells in a body corporate, where the body is supreme over the cells that make it up.  This should be classified as a psychiatric pathology, but of course psychiatry is part of the problem and definitely NOT part of the solution.

Finally, we come to 'human resources'.  This is particularly egregious.  Earth, wind, fire, and water are resources.  Humans are not.  Paper is a resource.  Ink is a resource.  Electricity is a resource.  Time is a resource.  But humans are humans.  We are not raw materials to be thrown at any given situation, along with whatever lumps of shit we have to hand.  I have skills and talents that are available to my employer for a fee, but I am not cord wood to be thrown on the fire on a cold night.

Now, I think we have sufficiently built a framework to show that the whole core of modern society is sick and dying.  That we humans has surrendered our basic value as individuals who are capable of apotheosis, in order to become cells in artificial golems of mystical construct, in order to receive remuneration and pay taxes is, in a word, sick.

We are a sick society, and perhaps that is why apocolyptism has become so prevalent.  We know we are sick and admit that we have no way to cure this sickness, and so we hope for some deus ex machina to come along and take care of the situation for us.

It doesn't matter what stripe you hail from.  Whether it's neopagan, Christian, Muslim, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, even atheism...everyone is looking for some outside force to come in and clean up our dirty thinking.

This is the way mass murderers think.  They know they are 'broken'.  They can't figure out a way to cure themselves.  So they start killing people hoping to be caught so that someone else will take responsibility for their sickness.

This is the origin of the 'war on drugs'.  The elite don't want the individual to figure out how to cure their illness.

We, as a society-culture-civilization, are doing all we can to deny the problem at the core of our existence.  We ARE gods.  We are spiritual beings who are capable of things far beyond what we are achieving on a daily basis right now.  We are in the throes of evil beings trying to harness our power for their personal gain.  We  are the cocoon denying the worm the ability to become a butterfly.

It's time.

It's time to release ourselves.  Only we, as individuals, can open the cocoon and allow ourselves to soar where we belong.  All the legalisms and jingoisms and jargonisms serve only to keep us in the shell, when we should be fighting with all our might to break free of this morass of limits and horizons.

To come full circle, the Supreme Corpse decision on Obamacare serves only the shell, not the 'becoming'.  Those who are doomed to believe that we are nothing without the collective are doomed to spend eternity inside the cocoon.

In Asian thought, an individual is created by hard work.  One must spend a lifetime drawing the elements together to form a unique being.  If you fail, then you must return to the 'soup' from which you came, so that your energy can be recycled into another effort, commonly called reincarnation.  Once you achieve 'self', then you can perfect that thing into an eternal being.

Is the 'self' you are trying to create a part of some 'corporate' being?  Or are you strong enough to create a real 'individual'?  Therein lies our common dilemma in this day and age.

The root of the problem lies in language.  Take control of your language, and you take control of your life...your REAL life.

The lesson of the Tower of Babel was that the gods confused human language to keep them from achieving their true status.  Language is the key.  Learn your own language to the roots.  Then learn as many other languages as you can.  Then, at some point, it will all congeal to show the Big Picture.

Don't let anyone control your language.  If they control your language, they control your thoughts.  That was the whole point of the Great Light called George Carlin.  That is the point that I am trying to make.  Learn all languages.  Use language with great care and control.  It is the most powerful weapon that we, as Individual Human Beings, have at our command.  By controlling our language, we are setting ourselves free to exit the cocoon.

In other words, fuck the Supreme Corpse.

But One Just Man

In our ever-optimistic approach to insanity, we can still find a positive spin on the recent US Supreme Court decision regarding the 'tax' called, euphemistically, Obamacare.

We can now say, without reservation or equivocation, that the US is a fascist dictatorship.  The primary difference between fascism and socialism is the corporate logo behind government fiat.  In this case, we can see the stamps of massive insurance conglomerates like sponsor patches on the togs of professional athletes.

Stephen Decatur Miller famously said, "There are three and only three ways to reform our Congressional legislation, familiarly called, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box"  To this has been added the soap box, in recent years.  In every case, these boxes of liberty are now corporate owned.  Diebold owns the ballot box.  The American Bar Association owns the jury box.  A handful of manufacturers own the cartridge box.  And media mega-corporations own the soap box.

Why is this so positive?  Because it's always a good thing when the truth be known, even if it is unpleasant to look at.  Now that Obama has created an entire nation of syndics, and the Supreme Court has rendered its stamp of approval, we can safely remove our blinders and stare unblinkingly into the eyes of ruin.

Of course, there will be the vox populi of bovine humanoids who point to elections as proof that the US is still a 'democracy'.  This sophomoric defense fails in two ways, though.  First, it assumes that the corporate owners of the ballot boxes allow actual votes to be counted, and second that swapping out the butts in chairs has anything to do with changing things.

The old republic passed away over ten years ago in an orgy of nationalistic fervor, when a piece of legislation called the USAPATRIOT Act was enacted.  Anyone who actually read it, a group which excludes those who voted for it, knows that this particular piece of work was simply a translation of the Enabling Act that empowered Hitler after the Reichtstag fire and a couple of other lesser-known false flag events.

The Obamacare decision was not so much the institution of fascism, but rather confirmation that the supreme powers of the Executive Branch are now applicable to every aspect of human existence. 

As one stands back for a bit of perspective, one sees that all the conspiratorial theorizing about prison camps being built across the US for the past 20 years was overly optimistic.  The real plan was to turn the entire nation into a gulag.  The theories erred on the side of thinking that there would still be an 'outside' and 'inside' delineation.  Who could have dared conceive of a single concentration camp thousands of miles on a side?

Not that this was unexpected.  Ask any American indian or Japanese-American of an age and they can give you copious examples of the US practicing for just this evenuality.  A quick study of Lincoln's General Order 100 will form the historical framework for the US' ultimate decent into dictatorship.

Where a lot of people stumble on this issue is that they assume that having a dictatorship necessarily means having a single dictator, such as Hitler or Mao or Stalin.  In the case of the US, the dictator is only fronted by an individual who, like a spokesman for a product, can be replaced at a moment's notice.  The popular ones are kept around for eight years until the brand needs a fresh image.  The unpopular ones are summarily fired after four years.  We can't have them sullying the good name of the brand.

At this point, there frankly can be no reform.  Any challenge to the direction of the country must, by necessity, go through the courts, and we see now that they are completely owned by private interests.  Any student of history knows that you can't attack an enemy at their strong point, and so a revolutionary war is out of the question.  And the ballots are controlled at even the smallest levels by tabulators that are programmed and processed by foreign entities far outside the jurisdiction of the courts, even if the courts offered relief.

America: Land of the Free - full of security cameras, genital grabbing, TASER-happy cops, and warrantless searches. 

America: Home of the Brave - where whiz kids sit in bunkers 10,000 miles away and rain death from robatic aircraft.

America: Where No Man is Above the Law - though some are quite a bit more no-above than others, depending on how much bank they have.

America: The Shining City on the Hill - where torture, murder, lies, prevarication, cheating, scapegoating, greed, and corporate interests come far ahead of moral and ethtical considerations.

One can truly say this is the apocalypse, meaning great things are being revealed.  The pretense that the world's great power and empire has any elevated intentions has finally fallen away.  That nation now stands before the world as a naked aggressor without even the shred of law behind it.  It's new national motto is "might makes right", and it will slaughter anyone who gainsays it.

That the American people are not rioting in the streets shows that they are little more than frightened lambs cowering lest they lose their 'preparations' and their 'stockpiles'.  They are being goose-stepped headlong into Perdition with all their 'preparations'.  It was said long ago that when fascism came to America, it would wear the flag and sing patriotic songs.  Such things prophecy is made of.

There is one curious sidebar to this whole mess, and regular readers knew I wouldn't let them down.

America, despite all the bloviating on the part of got-rocks evangelical a$$holes, was NOT founded as a Christian nation on Christian principles.  It was founded by heretics and pagans escaping Europe where they were being burned at the stake by Christians.

This occultic miasma let to the creation of a truly unique American institution: The Church of Latter Day Saints, or more commonly, the Mormons.  In fact, in all of American history, it is probably the most unique creation to have come from 300 years of history.

The Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, made a number of prophesies which remain at the heart of their faith and a central tenet of their thinking.  The prophesy stated that in America's darkest hour, when the Constitution had become a shredded pile of hemp paper with pretty writing on it, a Mormon leader would rise up and lead the charge to take back the country and return it to its lawful roots.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Mitt Romney.

We report, you think about it.

Please Stand By

Well, hello everyone out there in the Land of Byte.  Just thought we'd give everyone a head's up about some new things we're getting into here on the Far Side.

We've been hard at work developing a radio format to start bringing you more multimedia content with guests and information of special interest to folks who live on the Far Side, both literally and figuratively.  We've set up a Vimeo channel called Radio Far Side, where soon we will begin posting all-original content.  If a search doesn't bring it up, try 'luapjkt'.

We have some very exciting guests planned, and one or two already in the can, as they say.  We'll cover issues both timely and timeless.  These won't be podcasts, because frankly, who wants to hear me blabber?  Instead, the format is a fully-produced one-hour program with guests who have valuable things to offer our audience here.

We're used to winning awards for our efforts, and this one won't be an exception.  We are aiming for high-quality content and production value to make this a going concern.  After all, as George Ure says, everything's a business model.

Speaking of business models, we should point out the new 'donate' button on the right.  We're not asking for anything right now.  Wait till you hear and see what's coming.  But if you like it, then we're hoping you'll join in helping to grow the idea.  We've already sunk a couple of hundred bucks into hardware and software to do this thing right.  Ultimately, we want to set up a server and offer a whole range of information, entertainment and stuff to make it worth your while to hang out around the Far Side with us.

You'll notice we don't do advertising and just offer an Amazon gateway that hasn't earned a penny in over two years.  We envision this as being a completely user-supported effort.

To that end, we want to know what the audience wants.  We'd love it if you took a moment to send us a note at luap.jkt@gmail.com, and tell us what kinds of things would make this effort worth your while.  Suggest some guests.  Tell us what you like and don't like about other, similar sites.  We don't want to be another news amalgamator.  Rense and others do that quite well.  Instead, we want to offer more avant garde material that avoids the whole 'news' trap and goes to the heart of real issues, history and especially culture.

For a while now, we've been harping on the whole culture war, so now we're putting our efforts where our mouth is.  This will be our salvo into the fray of setting up a counter-culture of real content.

We genuinely hope this appeals to our audience here.  It's one thing to talk, it's another to make it count towards changing things.

We're serious about this, and we hope that our audience will find our efforts worth their while.  We will put all we have into making it a quality experience.

Please stand by...

Kutu-Kutu, Kupu-Kupu And Laba-Laba

BLEEP-BLOOP-BLOP-BLEEP
BLEEP-BLOOP-BLOP-BLEEP

It was the Batphone ringing, a.k.a. Skype.  My long-time bud from the old days was dialing in.  I clicked open the line.

"Dude!"
"Dude!"

Standard greeting.

"What's up, man?  Haven't talked in ages," he rightly noted.

"Ain't much.  I fell and racked my shoulder, I've got a boil the size of a golf ball on my butt, a half-dozen spider bites on my leg that hurt like a sumbitch, and I've been having palpitations.  Other than that, it's going great!"  I cringed inside for sounding like a travel brochure for topical life.  "What's up with you?"

"Oh, the usual.  Kid's got some kind of slime coming from his right eye and left ear.  The wife's got mange, but just on the back of her head.  I've got athlete's foot behind my ears, for some reason, and a rash in my arm pits, but otherwise it's all good.  I was bored playing Sniper, so I thought I'd give you a holler."

"You know it's 3:13 in the morning here, right?"

"Yeah, but I know you always get up that early.  Besides, I wanted to ask you if there's any work over there.  Things suck here and the wife and I are thinking about bugging out."

"At 3:13 in the morning?  Couldn't you think about it at, say, 9:27 at night?"  Fortunately, sarcasm doesn't bite as much when you've known someone for 30 years.

"Yeah yeah, get over it.  Besides, we're 12 hours apart.  There's never a good time to call you."  He had a point.  "What're things like over there?"

"Well, you're about 3 years too late, I think," not wanting to get his hopes up too high too fast.  "The place is being overrun with Europeans looking for work, too.  When I first came here, no one knew where Indonesia was, much less wanted to move here.  Even you asked me if Indonesia was in Bali.  Back then, this was a third world Hell hole, and the States were the Promised Land, as far as anyone was concerned."

"You're about to remind me of the crap I gave you when you said you were packing up, aren't you?"  He wasn't the only one.  In 2008, this was the ass-end of the Universe.  Now, the business sections are trumpeting Indonesia's economy and the States are the dirty end of the stick.

"Don't need to go there.  Already slapped you upside the head with it years ago."  Success does have an ego, doesn't it.  "In fact, all of Asia is getting over-crowded with westerners looking for work.  There was a time when all you had to do was speak English and you could get work.  Now, most countries require at least a bachelor's in your subject, and a few are starting to require masters.  Guess western educators are piling up in the pubs now, since that side of the world is swirling the toilet bowl."

"Figures," his voice trailed off.

"The hard part in all this is all the damn immigration rules," I griped.  "Here in Indonesia you can't sponsor yourself.  They make you get a job or go through all these hoops to set up companies and put money into the tax coffers.  If you marry an Indonesian, you can get a 5-year visa sponsored by your wife, but that still doesn't give you the work permit.  Go figure."

"That's bass-ackwards," he astutely observed. "What about other countries?"

"Well, Thailand is inundated with falong.  Everybody wants to move to the paradises.  I hear Cambodia and Vietnam are ballistic right now, and no one wants to move there, so there's actually recruiting."

"Can you say 'killing fields'?"

"That was a long time ago.  Now the killing fields are in Chicago and Tampa.  You could always move to Greece or Spain."

"Touche.  So what are things like in Indonesia?"

"You remember when we went to the Czech Republic?  It was like a year after the Velvet Revolution, and there was that feeling of hustle with everyone excited and running around with ideas and ready to bust out onto the scene."

"Yeah, dude, I loved that place."

"Well, it's like that here, sort of.  The middle class is exploding.  People are running around buying cars and gee-gaws.  Credit is cheap and easy.  It's a lot like the States in the 80s, when Reagan caused the greed-o-lution.  Everybody was on the make and there was music in the cafes at night."

"Yeah, those were the days.  I'm still paying for them on two of my credit cards.  So what can I do to get something going?  I mean, this hand-to-mouth grind is getting mighty old.  All the media production is drying up.  The film business has become even more protectionist than it was in the good ole days.  Everybody and their brother has a video camera and production software these days and the quality of the product is sliding into Ed Wood-land."

"I sent you the scripts I wrote.  Two TeeVee pilots and a movie.  I've got a great production company here that does quality work.  All we need is the money.  You find some and I can get you the immigration paper as producer."

"Where the hell am I going to find some money?  I throw everything I got into the damn gas tank, anymore.  Everyone around me is the same.  Nobody has capital anymore.  I've tried pitching a couple of my own ideas, but the nets won't even answer the phone now, and the indy houses are all strapped, too."

"I hear Japan is paying teachers pretty well right now."

"Japan?!  Aren't they living through another Nagasaki right now?  No thanks."

"Well, you could sell all your assets, buy a big sailing boat, and spend the next 10 years cruising down to South America and writing about the experience."

"I think my wife might object.  She gets sea sick in a swimming pool.  Besides, the kid's gonna start school soon."

"Mmm...nothing like the American schooling system to kill a spirit quick."

"But what am I going to do if I can't get out of here?"

"How about South America, speaking of South America?  I know a bunch of people that have settled down there.  West coast, not east.  Hell, even the Bushes bought up a massive ranch in Uruguay.  You could be Shrub's ranch master."

"I don't know jack about ranching."

"Breed cows.  Move cows to different field every month.  Round up cows for shots and branding once a year.  Easy."

"Yeah, yeah.  I'm serious."

"I know, dude, but you saw what I did.  I sold everything I owned, packed up a suitcase (only 1) and I pulled the trigger.  Granted, I spent seven years thinking about where I was going to go and what I would do when I got there."

"Yeah, but I have the wife and kid.  I'm worried about health care and education and all that."

"Hmmm...health care: eat healthy, take your vitamins and get some exercise.  As for education, what could be a better education than travel?  Learn foreign languages and cultures, get new ideas, experience the world."

"Sounds great in theory..."

"More experience than theory."

"Yeah, well..."

"The alternative is that you can hunker down where you are and start changing the world one square foot at a time.  C'mon, you've got the same background in media that I do.  Start producing some.  Throw down a garden in the backyard.  Get together with the neighbors and discuss things like forming a co-op.  Damn man, put your pirate hat on again!  You can fight back in a thousand tiny ways, and it's just as effective, if not more so, than a full-on land war."

"Blah blah blah..."

"You remember how we used to light off marine flares in downtown out of my convertable?  Remember how we used to yahoo beer and chips and find no end of trouble to cause?  What happened to that spirit?"

"Dude, got the wife and kid now."

"So do I.  But I know your wife is as much as pirate as you are.  And the kid...well, he's got your genes, God help him."

"You know...I've been thinking about some videos I could post to YouTube.  I know how to do it anonymously."

"That's the spirit!"

"I've been going around catching cops on video doing stuff...you know, STUFF."

"Run with it, dude.  Dust off the eye-patch and strap on your sword.  It's time to start feeling like a man again!  You remember that film 'Brazil'?  Ya gotta get Harry Tuttle again."

"Yeah, dude, you're right!"

"Of course I am.  By the way, do you stir your coffee clockwise or counter-clockwise?"

"What?"

"I'm doing an unscientific poll.  I think people who live in the northern hemisphere stir clockwise, and people who live in the southern hemisphere stir counter-clockwise."

"Where do you come up with this shit?"

"Just thinking."

"You're dangerous when you do that."

"I know.  That's the point."

Happy Father's Day

There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
-- John Swinton, 1880, on the 'independent press in America

(Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.)

Paul vs. The Powers That Be

Languages are slippery things.  Especially when you are translating one to another, and even more so when you are being paid to do it by someone with an agenda.

Language is never limited to simple 'word = word' kinds of formulas.  There are layers of connotations and subtexts, cultural contexts, and individual experience that flavor every part of a language.  Some examples?

In German, there is the word gemuetlichheit (the ue can also be written with an umlaut).  If you look the word up in most dictionaries, it will tell you that the English equivalent is 'cozy'.  This is such a pale translation.  Gemuetlichheit is an emotion for which there is no English word.  It is a feeling of well-being that one has when the environment includes good food, drink, friends, music, and a warmth and camaraderie that is only found in such a setting.  In English, it would take a whole group of words to convey the same content as that single word in German.

How about another?  In Indonesian, there is the word selamat.  Most dictionaries will tell you it means 'good', as in "good morning".  However, the word means much more than that.  Selamat can mean good, happy, fortunate, well, congratulations, and about a half-dozen other English words.  There is no direct, word-for-word translation for selamat.

This is true of every one of the 15 languages that I am proficient in.  Each of them have concepts expressed with single words that do not have equivalents in other languages.  Furthermore, every word you can think of has a vast context that includes every encounter you have had with the word, all your experiences that you self-describe with the word, the etymological origin and cultural baggage of the word.  On top of all that, words evolve over time, growing slang usages and additional cultural baggage.  After all, how would an American English native translate the slang meanings of 'hip' or 'cool'?  What Russian or Mandarin word would your choose to separate 'joint' and 'low temperature' from 'cutting edge' and 'very nice'?

With that said, what about texts written in other languages that are translated into yours?  Add to that a span of hundreds and even thousands of years.  How much is lost when a Babylonian clay tablet is translated into modern Spanish or Turkish?  Worse yet, how much is lost if the original text is ancient Greek, which was then translated into Latin, and from there into English?  Worse yet, suppose the Latin were first translated into older forms of English, and then updated several times over the centuries.

To this already big pile of confusion the fact that punctuation is a relatively modern convention.  Ancient Greek and Latin did not use punctuation.  Instead, they had a complex body of affixes, which combined with syntax and context, told the reader when one thought ended and another began, or indicated a direct quote, or talk the reader that this word was the subject and this other word was the object or a thought.

You have to imagine that huge piles of meaning have been lost, right?  And to complicate matters, we can assume that the translators, or the people paying them, had agendas that 'flavored' the translations, skewing the results in one way or another.  It doesn't take long before the compounding effect takes us far afield from the original intent and meaning of the primary text.

With all of this in mind, I come (at long last) to my point.  I want to examine a brief passage of ancient text that is often mistranslated, often on purpose, and has profound implications for contemporary thinkers.

The passage comes from something called 'Paul's Letter to the Romans'.  We'll bypass the whole 'was Paul a real person' argument and stipulate for the sake of moving along.  The text can be found in any copy, any version of the New Testament, which is a highly controlled and misused set of documents that have profoundly influenced the modern world.

How profoundly?  Well, I'm willing to bet most folks use the term 'powers that be', but few take the time to investigate the origin of the term.  In fact, it comes from the King James translation of the New Testament.  Specifically, it comes from the aforementioned Letter to the Romans, with the common delineation of Chapter 13.

Credible scholarship tells us that Paul's letters were written in ancient Greek (the Gospels probably in Aramaic).  That means we can search the internet for the original text in the original language.  So we click over to Dogpile, type in "original greek text of romans 13", and select what looks to be a fairly authoritative source that even gives tenses, voices, moods, and cases to help us understand what we are seeing.

Searching Romans 13:1, we get:

Πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω. οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὖσαι ὑπὸ θεοῦ τεταγμέναι εἰσίν:

Now I know what you are thinking: Hey!  This is all Greek to me!  I know, but I want to make sure that you can't come back and say I cheated.  I'm putting all the info right here.

Now, before we go on, let's take a look at how this passage has been translated.  For this, we click over to biblegateway.com (can you say gateway drugs?) and look up Romans 13:1 in the NIV translation:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

Keep in mind that the 'authorities that exist' is the part we all know as 'the powers that be.'  The word ἐξουσία actually means 'to be at liberty' or 'free', as in what you might tell a house guest when you want them to relax and feel at home.  Already, we've completely shot the standard translation out of the water.


In the 4th century, Jerome was commissioned by Constantine to translate the Greek text into the Latin Vulgate.  In every other instance that I've aware of, Jerome properly translates ἐξουσία as liber, or free.  Yet, in this one instance, he changes it to 'authorities', or the more familiar 'powers that be'.  Why?


Because the line actually reads: let everyone be at liberty and only follow those who are of God and righteous.


In other words, we are told NOT to follow blindly, but that only those who rule in righteousness and godliness are worthy of leadership.  The text goes on to tell us that revolt against evil rulers is a virtue.


Obviously, not something kings and emperors want people thinking.


If it is true that this one little line in the Bible has been maliciously manipulated to conform to the agenda of the PTB, then what other lies fester at the core of our culture and society?  What other 'little' changes have been made, not just to this book, but to all others?  How many other falsehoods have been foisted upon us to make us docile slaves, rather than empowered unique creations with moral duties and obligations to fight evil in all its forms?


We human beings have been played for fools for millennia.  It is morally incumbent on us to take back our power and to clean up our mess.  We owe that to our future, both as individuals and as a species.  It's time to flog the money changers in the temple.


The way to begin is to remove the blinders that were installed on our eyes from earliest childhood.  It is time for us to become adults and take responsibility for our lack of understanding, and our lack of action because of it.  Ignorance can be cured, idiocy can not.  We are left with two clear choices: cure our ignorance, or admit we are idiots.  Frankly, I choose the former.


There is a fictional character that has provided inspiration to me since those long-ago days in high school:  Chief Broom in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."  The first step is to see the fog that clouds our minds, the second step is to clear it away and take back our true power.


It is our birthright.

400

You are  reading my official 400th post on this blog.  Along with the 100 or so in the incomplete folder, this represents about six weeks of 24/7 writing over the past two years.  At an average of 1,000 words each, the 400 posts add up to 400,000 words, minus illustrations, which would be a respectable novel on the order of "War and Peace".

The primary criticism I've received is that my blog doesn't seem to have a hard focus.  Of that, I am guilty as charged.  I didn't start this effort to have a single focus.  I started it as an exercise that would be a legacy to my children...an effort to expose the mind of their father in a way that few children are privy.

As a writer, I've pumped out millions of words for money.  I've written hundreds of scripts, thousands of press releases, manuals, reports, and all manner of printed communications.  As a sideline, I've contributed hundreds of updates to urbansurvival.com, first as Oilman1/Houston Bureau, and later as the Indonesia Bureau.  I've written dozens of articles and ghost written books.  The vast majority of my work is uncredited, which is fine.  I got paid well for it, so who's complaining?

I wanted an outlet, though, that was just me.  No committees.  No editors.  No deadlines.  Only my own inner drive to write.  I don't get paid for this, though I have gotten a couple of jobs because of it.  In the end, it is a practice ground where I develop my thoughts and ideas for later polishing.  Most of what you read here is first draft with only minor edits for spelling and grammar after the fact.  In the parlance, it's 'spew'.

What's particularly gratifying is that, in two years, I've watched the hits go from zero to 8,000 per month.  Of those, about 1,000 per week are unique, meaning about that many individuals read this site on a regular basis.  In all, I've served up 100,000 pages in the time I've been at it.  I've also had Rense and Icke, and a dozen smaller sites, pick up posts for redistribution.  It's exciting, really.

But what is really gratifying are the folks who've written in to say that this or that post made them think, or gave them a new perspective, or taught them something they didn't know before.  The teacher side of me beams with pride when someone 'gets it' and takes the time to say so.

I titled this blog "Life on the Far Side" because it gave me latitude.  The original idea was from a friend who encouraged me to write a blog about my experiences living in Indonesia.  But I didn't want to get trapped into a travelogue.  I wanted to be able to write about all the topics that swim in the ocean of my mind, and about which I spend hours of my life reading and studying.  I wanted to be able to switch from Jakarta traffic to the gods of Olympus seamlessly.  This was to be my 'signature' work.

It's been a real education, too.  For instance, the most popular themes here are the articles on semiotics and acupuncture.  They run neck-and-neck.  The all-time hit leader is "GlobalRev and the Pig's Lipstick."  Close on its tail is "Adventures in Acupuncture II."  What my hit-counter tells me is that people are thirsting for any information on how symbols and hidden communications work, and information of alternative medicine.  We can extrapolate ad nauseum on what that means, but suffice it to say that the audience here is hungry for good, solid information on how the world works.

Interestingly, it matches my own thirst to understand how the Universe works, and why.

I'm taking this moment to thank you, the reader, for your support and encouragement.  It is like a shot of espresso to read an email from readers who got something from my work.  Gratefully, my readers are not ditto-heads, but thinkers who appreciate (as do I) a catalyst that gels their own thinking, or offers additional lines of research.

The lamentable thing about the modern world is that most folks don't consider research and learning to be life-long pursuits.  They have been trained to think of these things as work of 'experts' and 'authorities'.  It doesn't occur to them that we can all become such with a little volition of our own.  If anything, I want this blog to be a celebration of on-going adult education that is self-motivated and doesn't require the confirmation of outside 'authority' for verification.

Cogito ergo sum.  I think therefore I am.

One criticism that I should address is why I don't publish more links.  Well, if I link everything I refer to, then I limit your personal research to what I have found.  Your job is to take the names and references and find your own sources.  I don't have any pretense to tell you WHAT to think.  When I do link something, it's because that particular article or site offers something that must be communally experienced to understand what I am saying.

At any rate, enough of the reflexive analysis.  I just wanted to pause and mark the 400th post, and to address a few things that newer readers may not have picked up yet.  With that many articles online, folks are bound to find something they like.  Click around in the archive in the right-hand column.  See it you can't find something that challenges and entertains you.

One thing I hope I never do here, though, is amuse.  If you don't want to take the time to figure out why, it's because the word comes from French via Latin: a muser.  It means, 'without thought.'

One Dot Does Not A Picture Make

Well, the meme has been thoroughly planted in the mass mind now.

Ridley Scott, always on the cutting edge of yesterday's news, has delivered Prometheus to a waiting world.  Freed from the constraints of slim actors in rubber suits, he has re-imagined his 33-year-old flick Alien.  While he was at it, he sprinkled it liberally with themes that truly are on the cutting edge of research and thought.  Too bad that, like a cat, he immediately turns around and buries them under a standard (now-a-days) 'bug hunt' movie.

The effect is kind of like Rand Paul endorsing Mitt Romney.

I know it worked, because my wife, who's a die-hard - whatever they call that weird American religion with Christian trappings.  Shortly after leaving the cinema, she piped up with, "I'm confused.  They said another being created Man, and not God?"

"Well, yes, babe.  If you read the ancient texts and study the original languages, you find that's pretty much what they say," I replied laconically.

End of that conversation.  But the seed was planted, which I'm pretty sure was the whole intent of the film.

I wanted to explain how in Genesis, where we read (in English) that "the spirit of God moved upon the waters," the word 'spirit' is derived from the original Hebrew ruach, which itself is a combination of two Mesopotamian words, ru and a.  Together, they mean 'a thing which creates wind as it passes.'  The Vatican's official Latin Vulgate dictionary translates ruach as res incognito volens, which in English means, more or less, UFO.  Don't take my word for it, Mauro Biglino is much smarter about these things than I am.  I just learned this stuff sitting in my Bible classes at the monastery.  I wanted to explain all this, but baby steps...

Regardless of all the scholarship behind the assertion that humans are a product of genetic engineering by another species, planting that concept in the mass mind in a way that is entertaining, thus slipping past people's normal bullshit barriers, is no small task.

It involves getting people to engage what's commonly called 'willing suspension of disbelief.'  It's something we all do when we watch a play or movie or TeeVee show.  It allows us to drop our barrier of unreality and empathize with characters who are otherwise completely unreal.  Once that barrier has been lowered, we are susceptible to just about any idea the Controllers want to slip in to our minds.  (NB-in this case, a Controller can be anyone from the writer to the gaffer's best boy)

That Ridley is conscious of what he is doing is evidenced by the ham-fisted use of overlapping symbols to make his point.  That he was successful in making the point is evidenced by the fact that my wife, who is not terribly sophisticated in the ways of semiotics, got the message.  In fact, it was the only message that she brought up in the aftermath.

About this time 33 years ago, I sat in my roommate's Saab 900 Turbo at a drive-in in Santa Fe, New Mexico with two other running mates.  We were all hopped up on various perception-altering substances and staring wide-eyed at Ridley's original conception.  Alien truly was just a 'bug-hunt' movie, albeit the likes of which no one had ever experienced up until 1979.  With Prometheus, Ridley expands the scope a bit to include events that reach back into distant time, and brings us up to within a generation of the events in the former film.

That Ridley is aware of the semiotic whirlpool raging around our daily lives is without question.  Even a cursory look at Blade Runner tells us that.  I mean, come on...the only time the sun is seen in the whole film is while at the top of Tyrell Corp's peakless pyramid-shaped building, and the only animals in evidence in the whole film are a snake and an owl (though turtle and spider are mentioned).  He knows the pieces.

What Promethieus appears to show is that he has assembled the pieces into the same conclusions that quite a few folks are coming to, who bother to plumb the depths of existence.  The real question is, is he trying to educate us, or is he just a shill for the Controllers trying to scare us away?  That he would slip such profound ideas into the envelope of fear and trembling leads me to believe he is the latter.  We are apparently not allowed to ask such questions because, "Here thar be monsters."

On the other hand, Dorothy trotting into the sunset with her dog Toto in tow (just have to watch it) let's us know we aren't in Kansas anymore.  Perhaps he is warning us that to tread on such topics is to be bitten, so beware.

Obviously, the film will require a good bit more analysis on my part.  That the film has meat to chew on is a credit to Ridley's work, which is why I chose to spend my entertainment dollar on his effort, rather than Men In Black 3.

To return to the original thesis, though...the meme has been planted now.  It remains to be seen what fruit it bears.  Perhaps a few folks will rediscover the character Prometheus and his relationship to Mankind.  Perhaps they will make the connection to other characters like Enki and Loki.  Maybe that will lead them to discover the true identity of Enyeh-aser-enyeh, and that would lead to some interesting revelations.

Or maybe they'll be frightened off by the prospect of being bitten by whatever monsters dwell at the depths of Man's collective being.

One thing is for sure, given Ridley Scott's filmography and abilities.  Prometheus is more than just an entertainment.  That part is only the glazing on the cake.  The real substance will be found withing the layers buried at the heart of this film.  Ridley may not be as adept as, say, Kubrick, but he is no slouch in the semiotic department.  Trim away the fat and the gristle, and there's meat on this bone.  Only time will tell whether it's corn-fed Iowa, or dressed-up horse meat.

Post Scriptum - Georgia at The Chronicle Project was compelled to write in an point out that their work has brought many of these themes and ideas into the open.  If you are not familiar with The Chronicle Project, and you are interested in what the original Hebrew texts behind the Bible really say, then I highly recommend spending some time clicking through their site.  Warning: here thar be monsters.

All Take No Give

There are stories that float around society and occasionally surface as cautionary tales to scare us into submission.  Usually, the details of these stories are pure conjecture and speculation, but with constant repetition, they become truth that is unquestionable.

One such story is the tale of Easter Island.  In case you've lived under a rock for the past 200 years, that's the place in the South Pacific with the giant stone heads that no one ever seems to be able to figure out.  The story surfaced again recently when some real whiz kids (I'm being facetious) dug down and discovered, lo and behold!, the heads had bodies!  Not that the discovery is all that important.  For most of us, we just scratch our chins and nod appreciatively for a few seconds and go on with our lives.

Of course, once the heads hit the news, the old saw about how the islanders cut down all their trees and killed off their own society because they weren't judicious with their use of resources surfaces once again.  The fact is, no one knows exactly what happened on Easter Island.  There are scant written records and just a bunch of stone heads to tell the tale.  But why let facts stand in the way of a good story?

The thing about these stories that is never spoken, never written and never addressed is the cause of events like the one that killed off Easter Island.  Any inspection and speculation always stops just shy of the real reason these things happen.  We can't speak the fundamental truth, because it would undermine Everything.

You see, what killed off Easter Island, and the Maya, and the ancient Egyptians and Romans, for that matter, is always the same reason.  It's a greedy, resource-intensive elite that suck the land dry of anything of value in order to sustain their lavish lifestyles and enrich their coffers.

It usually starts with religion, our old friend and bug-a-boo.  Religions demand that there be some privileged group within society who have a hot-line to the gods.  Only they can receive and interpret the messages from on high, and so they must be attended and obeyed without question.

It usually starts innocently enough.  The gods want a pile of fruit or a burnt offering (pilfered and consumed by the elite).  Later, it always escalates into grand temples and palaces, elaborate rituals, wealth and riches, and so on ad nauseum.  The gods are never happy with a little, they ultimately need everything their chosen representatives on Earth can get their hands on.

These elite can never work or pull their fair share.  They must always devote their complete attention to communing with the gods to get the information needed to continue subjugating society.  Consequently, huge supply chains spring up to support the ever growing and burdensome elite as they demand greater and greater sacrifice to the gods.

Inevitably, these elite start handing out laws, supposedly received from the gods.  This, in turn, becomes government, which itself demands constant attention and maintenance, since it too is a tool of the gods/elite.  More and more labor and resources are devoted to maintaining these institutions, to the point that they begin to encroach on the daily activities and supplies of the regular folks. 

The regular folks can't attend to things like crops or hunting or productive activities, because so much of their time and effort are consumed in serving the elite and their institutions.

For their part, the elite do really well.  All they have to do is sit around and look thoughtful, and for that, they demand the very finest of everything - arts, crafts, food, buildings.  They grow, and spread, and prosper, and in so doing, they demand more and more resources to maintain their fancy lifestyles. 

And hey!  If you little people don't hand it over, the gods will get very angry and throw lightning at you, and your crops will fail and your kids will be born without fingers...and on and on.

At some point, the society reaches a tipping point.  It takes so much effort, time and resources to sustain the elite and their institutions that society collapses.  The people's strength fails for lack of food.  They have no homes because all the materials went to building temples.  They have no clothes because the finest textiles went to ceremonial vestments.  The best livestock were sacrificed to appease the gods/elite.

At this point, either the regular folks all die off from starvation and disease, or they wander off to less oppressive climes.  No longer able to care for their basic needs, the regular folk cease holding up the pyramid of power.  More often than not, the regular folks go on a murderous spree, slaughtering all those they perceive as having caused this mess.

This is the way all empires pass, whether it be one isolated island in the South Pacific, or one that spans the known world.  Eventually, the elite demand more than the masses are willing or able to give, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

On Easter Island, the answer to the mystery is literally staring us right in the face.  The elite demanded that the people create these massive stone heads.  The project grew to absorb the entire output of the society and destroying the limited resources available.

No doubt, the "head" idea was sold by an elite who (thinking more of their own aggrandizement) convinced the regular folks that these heads would protect them from angry gods.  They had to do this project or perish in the wrath of the Invisibles That Only We Talk To.  No doubt, the elite were very proud of their 'achievement', but the result was to consume all the useful things that sustain daily life.

And so it collapsed and left us with a mystery.  Only it's not really a mystery if you look closely and compare the outcome with dozens of other civilizations throughout history.  They all follow the same path.  And it was all caused by inbred, insane elite who lost complete touch with reality by insulating themselves with the administrations of the societies they controlled.

Take a look around you.  How many churches, banks and government buildings do you see?  Calculate how much time, money and resources have gone into building those structures and the institutions they represent.  Think about what EXACTLY you get back from them?  How many ghost stories have you bought to support these things that give absolutely no value back to society?

Now look at the Moai heads on Easter Island.

See a connection?

Mens Rea

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the HAL computer was given a set of secret knowledge and a mission based on it that required the computer to carry out its instructions at all costs.  The computer interpreted that mission to mean that nothing should be allowed to compromise the secret until the appointed time.  Thus, when the astronauts Bowman and Poole start to question the mission and the computer's ability to function, the computer takes the only logical action and eliminates the threat.

This is such a human experience.  How many individuals and organizations have chosen this path in order to keep hidden their secrets?  One could speculate that nearly every violent crime, war included, involves hiding something at some level.

I would venture to speculate that the western governments got derailed somewhere around WWII and the creation of the national security concept.  Over time, more and more information needed to be classified as secret in order to continue the obfuscation.  Ultimately, nearly everything becomes a national secret to the point that even within the organization, things must be hidden from the internal structure with no one individual having the true key to it all.

As time goes on, the threats begin to mount that the secrets will be exposed, and because of the mounting number of secrets, the price of exposure grows exponentially.  Consequently, the only logical conclusion is that all threats to exposure must be eliminated in order to perpetuate the secret.  In the end, there are armed drones, mercenary police, indefinite detention, torture, and mayhem with the true cause of it all being nearly lost in the noise.

What is even more concerning is that at this point in time, there seems to be a confluence of protective interests hiding a great many secrets, both from each other and from the public at large.  The banking and financial system has its secret agendas and manipulations that would cause its utter collapse if exposed.  Governments have amassed great gobs of secrets that would trash their existence.  Corporate interests have their secrets, and so on down the line.  In the end, they all begin to view each other and the rest of the world as threats to their exposure and must take the only logical step to prevent that from happening.

And even that step requires an ever escalating series of crimes, and the first murder becomes a secret that must be protected in its own right.  Then, as others begin to question and probe, they too must be eliminated to continue the cover-up.  It becomes an ever snowballing problem that demands ever increasing crimes to hide the original sin.

And so it is with our current global situation.  As secrets amassed under various cloaks of interest, it became necessary to commit ever greater crimes to maintain the status quo.  Ultimately, this is unsustainable, and that is the position we are in now.

On some levels, things like Fukushima and the BP Gulf fiasco can be explained as crimes to cover up other crimes which were covering up deep secrets.  How does one commit murder on a mass scale with plausible deniability.  Horrible freak accidents that poison the waters and atmosphere of entire hemispheres?  Not impossible, nor unthinkable.  Prince Phillip, the consort of the erstwhile Queen of England, has stated on record that he would like to be reincarnated as a virus that would wipe out a vast majority of humankind.  What kind of secrets must he be concealing that could generate a thought like that?

It stands to reason that the greater the secret, the more heinous the crime must be to hide it.  How many lives have been sacrificed to this point to conceal the hidden agendas in the Middle East?  How many people have died to prevent the revelation and proliferation of nuclear technology?  What terrible truths were behind the genocides of history?  How many people vanished to hide the dirty laundry of our so-called leaders?

Genghis Khan once said that every man must kill another to make room for himself in the world.  I am of the mind that any man in a position of power must have a great many secrets to hide, which drives him to greater seats of power to continue the ruse.

There are only two ways out of the trap of secrets.  One is to have everyone quit trying to expose them, and the other is to actually expose them.  History teaches us that when secrets are exposed, kingdoms crumble, yet it further teaches us that having secrets in the first place ultimately leads to the same fate.

Think of the great spiritual healing that would take place if the US government's treasure troves were laid open, or the Vatican's archives were made public, or the true originas of humanity were finally revealed.  Like a massive, festering boil on the butt of society being lanced, we could finally put to rest the secrets that have driven so much hatred, fear and death, and then proceed confidently into the future.

If all the mystery and intrigue behind the world's greatest secrets were laid open, think of the burden that would be removed from our collective conscience.  The Truth would indeed set us free in ways we can't even imagine, as we stand here inside the pus-filled mass we can modern society.

Perhaps that is the Great Trend of our times, the Great Tension, as well.  On the one hand, we have an entrenched elite willing to advance any plan that continues the Big Ruse.  On the other hand, the inevitable revelation of all that is hidden seems to be crushing down on their best laid plans.  Between them hangs the Rest of Us, whose fates are contingent upon who will win the battle of the Irresistible Force meeting the Immovable Object.

Perhaps the biggest decision we, as individuals, face is what sacrifice we are willing to make in order to clear the path for our species' survival?  When lancing a boil, there is a tremendous amount of voluntary suffering that must be endured in order to achieve the long-term benefit of relief and health.  Are we willing to endure the short-term exteme discomfort of draining the infection?  Or do we perceive the on-going, though slightly less intense pain of status quo more to our liking?

One bit of rather odd Biblical advise comes to us from the New Testament, where Jesus admonishes his listerners: if your eye offends you, pluck it out; if your right hand sins against you, cut it off and throw it away.  Though rather graphic, there is some great truth in there.  Allowing an infection to continue unabated leads ultimately to the demise of the organism.  By allowing our cultural and societal institutions to persist in secrets and cover-ups will ultimately be the end of all we know.

Benjamin Franklin rightly pointed out that we have nothing to hide if we live lives of integrity.  It is time that we demand this of our institutions, in order that we may heal our civilization and continue to grow.

But we must also demand it of ourselves.  If we practice right thinking and right action, then we will perceive the world clearly.  If we perceive clearly, then we will not be fooled by wizards and charlatans.  If we are not fooled, then fools can not lead us.  As Buddha and so many other great thinkers have pointed out, clearing our public sphere begins with cleaning our own.  Our personal integrity and actions ripple into the greater collective.  If we as individuals are sane, then our public life must also follow.

The real meaning of the unfinished pyramid is the individual.  We are, as unique creatures, the penultimate result of Creation.  It is we who must guard our thoughts and actions, and discipline our hearts and souls, so that we are not taken in by sweet smelling trickeries, but rather demand of our culture those things that we demand of ourselves.

What we have now is nothing more or less than what we are as individuals.  Our institutions are a reflection of each individual member of them.  To begin cleaning up our mess, we must start in our own rooms and work outward.  In the quest for secrets revealed, we must be the first, so that we can clearly demand the same of those who would lead and serve us.  As goes the Master, so goes the servant.

One other bit of wisdom that both Buddha and Jesus mentioned: you can not practice to remove the cinder from your brother's eye, when you can not see the plank in your own.  We must be what we demand in others.  And we must achieve it soon.

Otherwise we are all doomed to become cannibalistic zombies, or worse.  If we want civility, we must first be civil.

The Quickening Mind

Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows my mind makes weird connections between things that would otherwise seem disparate.  Today's noodle-bake is no different.

When this thought came to me, it was so powerful I had to sit down and ponder the implications for a while.  You know when you come across something that doesn't make sense and you just can't figure out why it's there.  Then a key falls into your lap and suddenly it just makes a Big Picture, and I love Big Pictures.

Anyway, I was toying with the word 'quickening.'  Fans of the Highlander series of films will recognize the word, but for the most part it has quietly faded into the background.  Most people don't use it, or at least not very often.  It's a great word though.

To save you from clicking over to dictionary.com and looking it up, quicken simply means to revive, restore, increase rapidly, and a number of other synonyms.  A pregnant woman will experience a quickening when the baby starts to get very active.  Pubescent teens experience a quickening when they hit the rapid maturation.  Basically, anytime someone or something reaches a point of rapid growth or revival, they are said to be quickening.

Great, so I made a connection to 'warming.'  We warm things up to make them more lively.  Places and people that are comfortable and cozy are said to be warm.  If you bake bread or brew beer, a key ingredient is heat.  Warmth is closely associated with life, growth and productivity.  When we set about a project, the early stages are often referred to as 'warming up.'

Given these definitions, I think it is safe to draw an equals sign between them.  In order to quicken, one must warm up, and by warming up, one is quickening.  Conceptually, these two words belong on a couch together getting cozy.

By now, you're probably thinking, "What the hell?"  And you're not wrong to think that, but bear with me a little here.

A great many writers and researchers have spent a lot of time showing how the self-appointed elite of this world communicate in multi-contextual codes.  They use symbols and words with layers of meaning which convey one meaning to the unwashed masses and a completely different one to the initiated.  Certainly, I've posted a number of popular articles here on how this works and how to spot it.  Without getting into a whole diatribe, let's just stipulate that this is true, and you can run read my other articles later.

The final piece to this puzzle is 'fear'.  Fear is one of the most effective weapons against masses of animals.  When animals feel fear and threat, they herd together and can be effectively controlled.  That is why fear has been at the top of the list of conquerors and empires for millennia, because they can so easily manipulate millions of people with such simple methods.

When we experience fear, our higher reasoning shuts down and our animal mind takes over.  We act on instinct rather than intuition.  We stop asking 'why' and start doing what we are told.  Witness the events following 9.11, or 7.7, or any other recent events of a similar vein.

That said, we come, at long last, to the point.  Please keep the cheering to a low roar.

Let's examine the term "Global Warming" in this new context.  First, we can make the terms Global Warming and Global Quickening equivalent by virtue of the previous reasoning.  We know that Global Warming has been used in close association with fear...fear of the future, fear of survival, etc.  God knows that Algore has spent hours and hours trying to make all of humanity afraid of the term Global Warming by planting hockey sticks in our minds.

Now, we ask ourselves, why would the self-appointed elites go through decades of effort, paying off hundreds of scientists, falsifying reams of data, and planting fear in our minds in order to get the message, "Global Warming," into our heads?

Well, suppose is was not warming in the sense of temperatures, but warming in the sense of quickening.  Suppose at some level, they were trying to make us afraid of revival, regeneration and rapid growth.  Suppose they were, in fact, communicating to each other their own fear of humanity's mass awakening.

Change all the associations in your mind from Global Warming to Global Quickening.  Are you starting to see the same picture I am?  Do you see how all the pieces suddenly line up?

They are terrified of the Great Unwashed Masses waking up and suddenly not needing them to tend us like so many sheep.  They tell each other this fear by calling it Global Warming.  Then they launch a massive, decades-long effort to make us all terrified of Global Warming, but what is really happening is that they are trying to stop the Great Quickening.  Now one can see why the huge effort beginning in grade schools.  Now one can see why they would go to so much effort to pay off and falsify and hammer into our brains this phantom fear.

Even when Global Warming started to lose its charm, and they changed it to Climate Change, the message at subtextual levels is still the same.  Climate is any environment in which something exists.  They are not talking to us about the climate changing, they are talking to each other.  Humanity is changing and becoming a lot less easy to control.

We mass of humans are quickening.  We're warming up.  We're changing.  And they are really, really afraid of it.

To reverse the trend, they have tried to create fear at every level of society.  They pump constant messages of fear and distrust out of every media outlet.  They create terror attacks and try to make us afraid of boogymen.  They create wars on ideas and methods to keep us unstable and looking for leadership.

In fact, it is they who are terrified of Global Warming/Global Quickening.  Their positions of power and priviledge are being threatened at the most basic levels.  They are using every tool they have to reverse the trend and maintain their status quo.

Now flip over to Algore's obscenity-laced tirade a while back.  Given what we have just discussed, does it make more sense now, or not?  If so, then maybe we are on to something here.

What it all boils down to is that issues that receive scads of media and get hammered by every mouthpiece of the self-appointed elite always have multiple layers to them.  When we start to pull them apart and analyze the issues, we can usually find layers of subtext that amount to communications among the inner circles that are hidden in plain sight.

If you hear something in the news or read it in the papers and it triggers a reflex action in you, then stop immediately and analyze what it was.  Were there any key words that were punched up?  Was there a perceived threat being promoted?  Can the message be interpreted in other ways by turning the context and focus around?

This little exercise will completely disembowel their control apparatus.  If we stop reacting on instinct and take just a minute or two to deconstruct the things we are being told, then we have already won.  The rest is just clean up.

Long live the Global Quickening!

Bild-A-Circus

Bilderberg Hotel - Oosterbeek, NL

Yes, folks!  It's time once again for that annual BS festival called the Bilderbergers.  This year, it's bigger and better and retooled for mass consumption, and coming to you live from the center ring, otherwise known as the US of A for the first time ever!

At this point, a lot of folks (newly awakened) are just discovering the Bilderbergs.  This group of degenerate slime have been meeting since the end of WWII in low profile annual circle-jerks with little or no consequence to the average man on the street.

I can hear a good number of people taking issue with that statement, but in all honesty, the only power they really have over us real people is what we give them by building up all this hype over the past couple of decades.  In fact, they are very easy to ignore, and outside of bankster cabals, have little effect on the everyday lives of us unwashed masses.

Few people take the time to learn who the Bilderbergs are.  If they did, they would realize the shocking truth, and at the same time, that they are virtually powerless if we take it away from them.  They are able to sway some institutions at certain levels, but for the most part they are just a bunch of old farts throwing money around and are not the Masters of the Universe that folks like Alex Jones would have us believe.

At the end of WWII, the Nazis had amassed vast amounts of cash and gold and priceless art/trinkets from around the world.  Most of it has never been reclaimed and officially is lost to history.  As researchers like Peter Lavenda and Joseph Farrell have painstakingly documented, most of the top Nazis escaped Germany, and justice, using the 'rat lines' to places like Argentina.  They took their loot and their toys with them and set up vast settlements in South America, and quite likely other places.

Prince Bernhardt - Nazi Big Wig

Lavenda's latest book, "Rat Line," carefully documents the entire process through safe-houses in Italy, Spain and Argentina.  Farrell picks up the trail and traces the evacuation of technology and the establishment of covert networks spanning the US, USSR and South America.  Both men show how the vast Nazi loot funded and hid this whole operation.

And that's where the Bilderbergs come in.

All that loot was laundered through US and UK banks, who were all too eager to have the huge infusion of cash and gold to use for their own nefarious purposes.  A group was established, under the direction of Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, to oversee the administration of the loot and direct its deployment.  This group first met at a small, unassuming hotel in a Dutch backwater town.  The name of the hotel was the Bilderberg.

This group met annually, not to decide the fate of the world, but to discuss their investments and where they would place their financial focus for the year to come.  For decades, it was a fairly quiet affair.  They would meet in swank hotels for several days of wine, fine dining and whoring.  They would invite people of interest to them to present investment options, as well as interview politicians to see which they would fund, based on whether Bilderberg interests and political agendas matched.

This is little different from any corporate retreat for the upper echelons.  Its the standard blow-out in Vegas where a little business gets done around a central bacchanal of gross proportions.  The Bilderbergs are little different in this regard to dozens of similar groups all over the globe who meet annually to plan strategy, investments and assert influence that favors their goals and ambitions.

The part that is scandalous, and the part that NO ONE ever talks about, is who these people are.  No one mentions that they are Nazis, or at least their heirs, and that they represent billions (if not trillions at this point) of dollar in ill-gotten loot that has been used for decades to further the ways and means of the Nazi Party.

It has been the unspoken secret of the survival of the Nazi Party that is the true problem with these people.  Those who have known about this have been silenced by greed.  They line up annually to beg for scraps of Nazi loot to push their own agendas, and most likely even those folks are ignorant of who and what they are playing with.

At the end of WWII, the US and USSR were so desperate to get shares of Nazi technology and brain-power that they became willing dupes in the cover-up of Nazi Party survival past the collapse of the Third Reich.  The US received enriched uranium and triggers for A-bombs, along with a high-level group of rocket schientists, engineers and research materials.

At the same time, Prince Bernhardt and his gang bought off the corporate and bankster boards by moving great piles of cash into US vaults.  Along with the blessing of the Vatican Bank, this effectively shut up anyone who might have an idea to blow open the doors on this secret.  It assured that everyone's hands were dirty, so no one would rat out anyone else.  Honor amount thieves, you might say.

This wad of Nazi loot went on to fund the rat lines, build up safe havens, launched the economic post-war boom in the US, and funded an Anglo-American empire.

Trouble is, like all bills, the time to pay up always comes.  A strong case can be made that the current economic mess is Nazi chits being called in.  As Farrell has pointed out, the US bank bailouts were very mysterious, in that there was so much haste and closed door congressional meetings, and the Federal Reserve insisted that a trillion dollars be handed over without question, oversight or audit.  Farrell speculates that this could have been the Nazis making a sizable withdrawl to do whatever it is that Nazis do with that kind of money.

Certainly, after three generations, a lot of the Nazi technology could very well be ready for mass deployment, including things like off-planet colonization, next-level development and any number of other things, for which a trillion or so dollars would come in handy.  And certainly, if those folks wanted to pull that much money out, all they would have to do is threaten to expose all the dirty laundry and that would put the fear of God in any bankster/politician, and even send a chill down the halls of the Vatican.  And notice all three of those groups have been embroiled in scandal, leaks and financial shenanigans for the past five years, since this all began.  Could that be Nazis rocking the boats to keep them in line?

So now the Bildergergs have gone mainstream.  It used to be they met quietly in sleepy Alpine retreats, but in recent years the media spotlight has been forced on them.  My bet is that the circus in Virginia is little more than a diversion, while the real business is being done somewhere in the Swiss mountains.  I laugh when I see all the speculation about the number of unknown faces seen going in and out of the Virginia circus.  Hell, they are nothing more than footmen dressed in Armani suits with sunglasses being paid to be seen.  Nothing more, nothing less.

So are the Bilderbergers the Masters of the Universe?  No.  They are just one of several equally powerful groups, all with piles of dirty laundry and global agendas.  All of them have one thing in common, their power is only over governments and corporations, not us real folks.  We are made to feel powerless in the face of these mafias, but really we are far more powerful than we give ourselves credit for.  All we have to do is quit playing their games and they will wither and die in months, if not weeks.

P. T. Barnum - 'A sucker born every minute'

Stop buying things from mega-corps.  Stop voting.  Stop putting your money in banks.  Stop paying taxes.  It's all a charade and none of it has real force on real people.  The only reason we think it does is because we buy into it.  Furthermore, we think this system can be repaired.  Well, guess what...?  It ain't broken.

In fact, the system runs exactly as it is supposed to, transferring your wealth and labor into the pockets of fat, decrepit old geezers with no souls and no consciences.  The system works (for them) because we real people buy into it every day, living beyond our means, using their credit, using their gee-gaws, hoping one day a savior will come to fix everything, when in fact we ARE the saviors.

So, when you hear about Bilderbergers, or the Club of Rome, or the Illuminati, et al, ad nauseum, just remember that their power is all illusion.  They appear glitzy and swank because they are dressed in sequinned leotards and have spotlights cast upon them.  It is nothing more than show business, making purses out of pigs' ears (or PIIGS?).  If you pull the curtain back just a crack, the illusion is gone.  If you change your perspective just an inch, the magician's underwear starts showing.

The only reason they keep winning is we keep buying tickets.  If you put on a show and no one comes, guess what?  You go bust.

Stop buying tickets!