the wages of delusion

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You will insist this money business is meaningful, and so you get you ask for. It's an hallucination, and yet the planet is burning down behind it. Ed Harrison just comes out and tells Max Keiser that it's ALL perception and not even Max gets it. People are SO attached to the notion of stuff—gold or plastic or dirt or water or air or calcium—being worth something, that trade is essential, they just do NOT see that it is all a sociopathological game... that you are going to lose.

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Or maybe you'd prefer Tsarion.

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Personally, I think both are worth our time, but I am particularly grateful for Tsarion. I love how SERIOUS he is. And not about bullshit. He's deeply serious about real things. Almost as good as a bathtub.

You have one life and infinite things to know. How are you going to do that using this mind?

I'm constantly wanting to ask how ANYONE can want to concentrate on ANYTHING else.

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love, 99
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do the math

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Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman was speaking to a conference of 75 Wall Street power-players, guys commanding six-to-seven figure incomes for managing your money.

Max opened by auctioning off a $100 bill. Simple rules: The highest bidder gets the $100 bill. And the second highest pays what he bid, but gets nothing. Forty hands quickly pushed the bidding to $95. Then a couple presumably rational hot-shots, an institutional money manager and a pension-fund trustee, broke the $100 barrier, after which both were guaranteed losers.

Imagine the insanity: Two of America’s financial geniuses caught up in a hotly contested duel, pushing the bids up, up, up … to $465!

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love, 99
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i'd so hoped that if i stayed quiet this just wouldn't happen

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Of course, that's just dreaming, just being superstitious, just dumb.

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And, while I'm on the subject, I become exasperated with Max Keiser over this stuff... this gold stuff. I'd've been vexed over the big Buy Silver gig, too, except for the notion of there being a chance to tap dance on JPMorgue's grave, which outweighed my concerns over heavy mining activity anywhere. I know we need it for lots of things beside money, but money is the most of it, and we DON'T need that. We only agree to THINK we need that. HUGE difference.

He and Stacy carry on like they're environmentally-concerned, but also push gold so hard even I start groping around for what remnants of jewelry I have tucked away somewhere. You can't push gold that hard and not know that moonscaping vast tracks of pristine planet is the desired result. Yes, yes, you think it is the preservation or enhancement of your security. And you might well think that, because it obscures the ugly truth.

Right now I'm listening to him discuss how America is exporting inflation with Catherine Austin Fitts, who is a pretty damn cool lady. Maybe you'd like to join me?

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love, 99
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dictators rotating in and out

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Baby Doc mystically makes his way back to Haiti as Ben Ali rotates out of Tunisa with lotsa scratch.

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love, 99
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no, wait — crash jp morgan — buy silver — send it to haiti

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Let's get real, eh?

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love, 99
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kids in candy stores

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We gotta fight the kids in candy stores aspect of all these gizmos and special arts they're giving the cops across the globe. I know these fellows won't be nearly as gleeful about displaying their talents when they get to do it for real, but, clearly now, since we've seen the avidity with which the fun stuff is applied by troops who know they're the bad guys and their victims are innocent but won't ever admit it, it's not going to be easy talking them out of their candy stores. They're going to have to see awfully big showings by their fellows before they will have the courage or the selflessness to resist their masters, and all that power.

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love, 99
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the hive mind is lethal

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UPDATE:

Business Insider has ripped down the piece, but directed us to the author's blog, where it remains.

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You can tell the American public pretty much thinks what the media tell it to think, but those of you who made some kind of a breakthrough on the internet, discovering that all is not as the media has been hyping all this time, are still being nuked with it. The intertubes are now part of the corporate mainstream media. Yes you can still find dissent. Yes you can still find bloggers who can get out of the box and leave evidence of independent thought, as in this piece, but you will, if you are a liberal, have a tendency to view Paul Krugman as "one of us", as someone with a good heart and wants the little guy to come out okay. You would be disposed to mistrust anyone who bashes him on the grounds they may be warmongering right wingnuts, and miss that Krugman himself may be warmongering.

I keep being silly. I keep putting links to people who are notorious nutters on my blog. I keep insisting you should do the thought experiment of listening to them without judging, just listening, suspending opining until after you've heard them, done a moment's meditation on how they were NOT as nutty as presupposed, even with their out there ideas. You listen to them and you see how they might in good faith have come to those conclusions, nutty or not. You learn not to take that amorphous word of groupthink on this stuff. You learn not to automatically place people like Krugman in the set of all okay people. There is a method to my madness.

Yesterday, someone linked something at LaRouche's site and it reminded me of meeting an avid follower of Lyndon LaRouche many, many years ago. He was all defensive about it immediately, and in point of fact I did have a very negative view of LaRouche... except, as I was realizing this, I also realized I had not the faintest idea WHY my view was so negative. I did not know Thing One about Lyndon LaRouche. I had to think about it. HOW did I get that strongly negative view of someone about whose work I had not the first part of a clue? I figured it out. And it has formed part of the reason I give you nutters on whom to practice opening yer mind.

Why do I know they are bent on WWIII, that they will be pulling off another false flag to get it going? The hive mind is full of it already, even as hardly anyone in it realizes it.

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love, 99
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greed

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I admire goldfish. They don't grow bigger than their tank or their pond will support. They get just as fat as is comfortable and no fatter. Their lives enhance the aquasystem in which they live. In fact, did you know that you can have a fish tank that never needs cleaning if you but put some goldfish, some freshwater snails and some water plants in it? Never goes stagnant or dirty. Stays healthy by itself. Outdoors it might be optimal to have some mosquito fish... well, and maybe some toxin-impervious snails... times being as they are... but these critters do not proliferate beyond the perfect balance, do not bloat to the point where there has to be a massive die-off for anything to survive.

I have been screaming about population control since I was a teenager. Legions believe that is a sin, an offense against life the size of Jupiter, but NEVER can answer the balance problem with anything nicer than wholesale slaughter or starvation.

Fucking hell.

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love, 99
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self interest is the prescription for mass extinction

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And I'm not just talking about other creatures. People even realize how murderous are their remarks when it comes to this stuff, but, since it interferes with their unswerving allegiance to taking care of number one, The American Way, they blank that out, turn everything that militates against their position into cartoons, abstractions, worthlessness. It is NOT only wealthy sociopaths who do this. There are plenty of not-wealthy-at-all sociopaths hard at it, and the more you hold up the mirror, the more bulletproof arguments you have against them, the more determined they become. They are locked in a dream, and it seems perfectly reasonable to most people that when one comes upon someone locked in this kind of nightmare for all living things, one shakes them awake and assures them it was all a bad dream, they're perfectly safe now. But no. Obviously, it doesn't work that way, now does it? The nightmares they form by taking untenable "truisms" like everybody-looking-out-for-number-one-is-the-right-thinking-adult-view-in-a-civilized-and-free-society are not the kind another can help them with, unless somewhere within their ability to discern real feelings there is an accompanying urge to uphold them, brave all the supposedly horrible consequences of loosing their death grips on murderously propagandistic bullshit that has been passed off as consensus so long it actually IS a type of consensus, to really SEE.

The ancients called this "stopping and looking". Sounds so simple. Enlightening beings cannot FORCE sentient beings awake. They have to want it like a drowning man wants air before they will take any guidance. Some of them are strangely drawn to it, but it is turned into entertainment—not serious, just soothing—most of the time. The number of people who are capable of "leaving the world" and "stopping and looking" at reality—which is never not right there under your nose—are very, very few indeed.

In all my decades of study I continually come across passages where masters remind one that it cannot be said. Well, in point of fact, it CAN be said. Straight out. Completely reasonably. But it sounds like wuwu gibberish to most people, and like, oh, well, right, of course, but... to others. There is no "but" about it. You ARE Charles Munger. You ARE the rings of Saturn. That fucking gnat batting at yer monitor is YOU.

I used to say you are life itself, but that doesn't quite cover it. Material we don't think of as sentient is us too. We all love the notion put forth, it's said, first by Carl Sagan: We are star stuff. But still almost no one grasps the import, even after our feeble science has either proven it or run up against it so many times even they are forced to say that everything there is or can happen seems so vexedly completely dependent on the observer.

Nope. It eludes you anyway.

This is why the crusty old Zen dudes of yore INSISTED that YOU do not exist. Once you've fully assimilated THAT, the rest becomes much easier to take in. I can't for the life of me understand why, with people being slaughtered by drones and squillions of gallons of dread toxins filling up the Gulf of Mexico and the Niger Delta and billions of people starving and polar bears drowning in droves and even America-the-Incomparably-Fat turning into a Third World bastion of neofeudalism before our very eyes, more people have not ceased staying within their own colored lines, mouthing platitudes, mouthing outrages, putting in their time for that almighty paycheck, squinting over the choice of lunchmeat to purchase, all of that, to give life to what HAS to be the most burning desire in anything capable of thought, to get to the truth and uphold it above everything else, treasure it above everything else, AND WORK TO MAKE IT INTO A BRILLIANT FUTURE.

Every single speck of everything, to include even what people call nothing, is nothing apart from YOU.

You are not it; it actually is you.

There. Piece of cake. I've told you. So now you can fix everything, right?

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love, 99
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my 'morning' has not measured up to my transcendental dreams

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Guess what! I am again victim of experimental upgrades in my commenting system! I have already botched it... not too badly... but it's going to add quite a few steps to my daily blogging regimen, that's for sure. At least we know BB2's comments didn't fall into the void. They fell into a black hole. Blogger doesn't like his little editor gizzy he uses to make comments and it called him spam. I was not alerted until today that there even IS such a thing as a spam folder and comment management now happening on my blog. I deleted a whole page of comments, thinking I was only taking them off a list, not deleting them from my blog. Sheesh.

It has to be karma that they like to do this to ME. Use ME as their guinea pig. They probably think that if this DITZ can get the hang of it, anyone can. But, not having had enough coffee yet today, and still swooning from my recall of bits of a long adventure in my sleep, I didn't realize Blogger, aka Google, is making a big effort suddenly to emulate Wordpress, give us some of the features enjoyed by those who use that system. I did not switch to Wordpress because they won't let me customize my blog. I have to pick one of their templates and do that. I guess this is not true if you have your own domain, but for us plebes who blather away on free blogging platforms, no dice in the customization gig... or at least last time I checked. Mayhap they are trying to accommodate people wanting to shift from the Evil Google now. I don't know.

So I was on a long trek, or pilgrimage, or escape from disaster, leading a bunch of people. Someone important, all important, was at my side. It didn't even get through my plastic wrap who was with me until we cut away to a scene where there was no ignoring this spectacularly lovable fact. So completely had I given up on this one coming to me, there was a need to kind of GET my attention. I feel as though too much of it has drifted back into my fog banks, but at least I know it was there, came with love, and I wish I could describe to you the kind of love I mean by "love" here. It's cosmic.

I have put the Shadow Stats unemployment graph in my sidebar and shall try to remember to keep it up to date. That video of that mob coming for a couple openings for HUD housing has broken my heart and powderized my bones. I am, of course, unsure and mistrustful of ALL stats, hate statisticians and the plagues they have brought down on our heads, but as far as I can see, all the most truthful people rely on Shadow Stats. If you look at their chart, you will IMMEDIATELY see why. They make an effort to estimate actuality instead of to cover up performance deficiencies.

Basically, the way you read that graph, the unemployment numbers from the beginning of fudging the stats for political relief, is the red line is TOTAL bullshit; the gray line is somewhat less bullshit; and the blue line is closer to not being bullshit.

Anyway, Hospice has been called to come help take care of my Poppa. This is a horror and a relief. Now he will be clean and the injuries caused by unskilled caregiving will cease hurting him, will heal. He won't be getting out of bed anymore, I don't think. I'm in the middle of freaking out about my mother and countless others insisting children should not see their parents in this shape, should be allowed to remember them when they were hale. I do not know who to kill. I have never heard anything so asinine in my life. It's akin to the incogitance of farming our incapacitated loved ones out to some institution when we have the means to help them at home. Everyone agrees this is the right thing to do... and it would be if you could not get the relief at home. I'm not saying anyone needs to be Superman to be decent. I'm saying that if it is possible to maintain any measure of quality of life while dealing with this stuff, YOU DO.

I can't kill my mother. She can't cope and in her inability to cope she is causing this to be exponentially worse, but she's like a wild animal whenever any fault might be lit for her consideration. She and everyone in her circle think this all has been the very best that could be done.

I am from another planet. This is way beyond just family baggage, but there is plenty of that too.

I bellowed, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN 'I DON'T WANT TO SEE HIM LIKE THIS'!?! HE'S BEAUTIFUL! HE'S GORGEOUS! HE'S STILL HIM!" But that's as much as I could bellow at her because she's going to snap. I don't want to call my wonderful second cousin again to vent, because it really just boils down to us congratulating ourselves for not being emotional midgets, but I might have to call her anyway because the intense frustration of being so powerless in this just doesn't ebb. Actually, that's another thing I don't understand about consensual reality! People say you get over this feeling in a couple weeks. BULLSHIT. If you are a HUMAN you do not. If you are a delusory version of yourself I guess you THINK you do.

I was in such a state that I almost missed the help that came in my sleep.

Maybe I oughta go over to my big chair, balance three sets of cheaters on my no nose and read the sutra aloud for a little while. Or maybe I should have some more coffee before I do another thing.

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not quite a bodhisattva

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Some quotes from the almost enlightened:

Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street.

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is....

The weak in courage are strong in cunning.

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

—William Blake

That which can be made explicit to the idiot is worth every ounce of our care. The future of humanity depends on it. It may be true that idiots are typically weak in courage and can't see the noses on their faces, but not giving them even a moment, not making an attempt to put something that can communicate truth to them in front of their noses is only lethal arrogance. And don't you doubt it: Arrogance is as lethal as ignorance, and idiots do NOT have a corner on the ignorance market. Plus, THEY have a good excuse for it.

Here is a bodhisattva.

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and they HAD to pick memorial day

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When we mourn and give thanks to all who have died for us... the thousands and thousands and thousands who gave their lives to liberate their parents and grandparents from the concentration camps, to liberate the world from genocidal maniacs.
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night and day

[click image, and, if you have the time, you should also watch the Keiser Report, video, 26 minutes]

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What an instructive difference....

Bankers jailed, sued as Iceland seeks culprits for crisis
By Haukur Holm (AFP)

REYKJAVIK — More than a year and a half after Iceland's major banks failed, all but sinking the country's economy, police have begun rounding up a number of top bankers while other former executives and owners face a two-billion-dollar lawsuit.

Since Iceland's three largest banks — Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir — collapsed in late 2008, their former executives and owners have largely been living untroubled lives abroad.

But the publication last month of a parliamentary inquiry into the island nation's profound financial and economic crisis signaled a turning of the tide, laying much of the blame for the downfall on the former bank heads who had taken "inappropriate loans from the banks" they worked for.

On Wednesday, the administrators of Glitnir's liquidation announced they had filed a two-billion-dollar (1.6-billion-euro) lawsuit in a New York court against former large shareholders and executives for alleged fraud.

"I think this lawsuit is without precedence in Iceland," Steinunn Gudbjartsdottir, who chairs Glitnir's so-called winding-up board, told reporters in Reykjavik.

"It is about higher figures than we have ever seen," she said, adding that she expected Glitnir to file more lawsuits going forward, but that "it is unlikely any will be this big."

Glitnir said it was suing "Jon Asgeir Johannesson, formerly its principal shareholder, Larus Welding, previously Glitnir's chief executive, Thorstein Jonsson, its former chairman and other former directors, shareholders and third parties associates with Johannesson for fraudulently and unlawfully draining more than two billion dollars out of the bank."

The bank also said it was "taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by Johannesson and his associates, which ultimately led to the bank's collapse in October 2008."

Glitnir's suit, filed in the New York state Supreme Court on Tuesday, blamed most of the bank's woes on "Johannesson and his co-conspirators," who had "conspired to systematically loot Glitnir Bank in order to prop up their own failing companies."

Johannesson, the former owner of the now-defunct Baugur investment group with stakes in a number of British high street stores including Hamleys, Debenhams and House of Fraser, said he was shocked by the lawsuit.

"The distortions and the nonsense in the lawsuit are incredible," he told the Pressan news website.

Glitnir's administrators "can get a 10-year-prison sentence for misusing US courts in this manner," he insisted.

The bank's chief administrator Gudbjartsdottir took his comments in stride.

"I didn't expect him to be happy with the lawsuit," she said.

In addition to its New York suit, Glitnir said it had "secured a freezing order from the High Court in London against Jon Asgeir Johannesson's worldwide assets, including two apartments in Manhattan's exclusive Gramercy Park neighbourhood for which he paid approximately 25 million dollars."

Gudbjartsdottir said Johannesson had just 48 hours to come up with a satisfactory list of his assets.
"If he does not give the right information he faces a jail sentence," she said.

Four former Kaupthing executives, who all live in Luxembourg, have meanwhile been arrested in Iceland in the past week and Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for that bank's ex-chairman, Sigurdur Einarsson.

Former head of the bank's domestic operations, Ingolfur Helgason, and former chief risk officer Steingrimur Karason were arrested late Monday on arrival from Luxembourg, just days after former Kaupthing boss Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, along with Magnus Gudmunsson, who headed the bank's unit in Luxembourg, were taken into custody.

The 49-year-old Einarsson, who lives in London, said late Tuesday he had no plans to travel to Iceland to be arrested.
"I'm absolutely flabbergasted about the latest news," he told the Frettabladid daily.

"There is in my opinion no need for the arrests or custody rulings, and I will not of my own free will take part in the play that it appears is being staged to soothe the Icelandic people," he said.

"I'll put the human rights I enjoy here in Britain to the test and will not therefore come home (to Iceland) to these conditions without being forced," he added.

Tell me, what is it about us that we cannot be sensible, sane actors in the world?
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if you wanna be black like me

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You gotta get a computer with a psychedelicizing camera like mine. I've been listening to this dialog with Cornell West from Princeton Lectures for the past couple hours and doodling with an image from my Photo Booth program the whole time. Seems one needs to have the screen at a certain angle, with exactly the right light before one gets a nearly normal-looking image out of this puppy. Good for the creative juices I guess, but, anyway, they're pushing my patience with the scholarly lexicon to its absolute limits with this discussion about the nuances of Islam and Christianity as they bear on black suffering. If you can endure it, there are some good bits to chew herein, and I can totally understand if you'd rather be black like you instead.

The good news is: They do NOT mention the trials of the sainted Mrs. Williams in her second grade class of 1956. Old Uncle Dave, therefore, has at least escaped the ignominy of becoming a foundation stone for black suffering in America. The crux of the matter, it is agreed herein, is in the willingness to pay the price to relieve suffering.

No suffering can be relieved without the willingness of individuals to sacrifice for it.
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he's not talking about a woman

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Even though I love the music, the video is STUPID. It occurs to me, if he even wrote the lyrics, not even Robertson exactly got what he himself was saying... if he thought all that puny/chic symbolism in the video was capturing it....

Oh! Wait. Who cares? Forget the artist.

Look at it as NOBODY being the author of the words.

The lyrics are about nature, The Great Spirit, Avalokiteśvara, Samantabhadra, the primordial principal, sometimes a she, sometimes a he, sometimes both and neither. It's not about social constraints, or politics, or money, or sex. It's about real liberation.

With eyes of fire
No one can see
The smoke from the sweet grass
Covers me

I am drawn
I am drawn to her
Like a moth to flame
She leads me down
Unbound

I am lost
I am lost
Has anybody seen me
I am lost

Oh nothing is forgotten
Only left behind
Wherever I am
She leads me down
Unbound

No borders
No fences
No walls
No borders
No fences
Unbound

Oh, listen for the night chant
Oh, listen for the night chant

Like a moth to flame
She leads me down
Unbound

No borders
No fences
Unbound
No borders
No fences
Unbound

I'm dying for someone to start speaking my language to me. Am I being a baby tiger?

All our ancestors knew about this. They rode the last great recovery from cataclysm that we might know it too, live truly, be with reality, be the adamantine kind of free in a perfect environment. You keep ignoring it. You keep trying to squeeze it into a science you can quantify and manipulate. You keep drinking the ignoring away because you don't believe in it yourself anymore. You are distracted by endless horrors, and letting off bottle rockets in your backyard, changing the oil in your car.

No wonder you think it's about sex.

That's the closest you ever come to the truth.
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burying ourselves

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Karma is such a bitch. Most of us have been skating—running around seeming to hold our positions, rather than actually fulfilling the functions of our positions—for way too long.

And here's the kicker. Last year, when Jefferson County, staggered by the weight of its penalties, was unable to make its swap payments to JP Morgan, the bank canceled the deal. That triggered one-time "termination fees" of — yes, you read this right — $647 million. That was money the county would owe no matter what happened with the rest of its debt, even if bondholders decided to forgive and forget every dime the county had borrowed. It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live. On a sewer project that was originally supposed to cost $250 million, the county now owed a total of $1.28 billion just in interest and fees on the debt. Imagine paying $250,000 a year on a car you purchased for $50,000, and that's roughly where Jefferson County stood at the end of last year.

Last November, the SEC charged JP Morgan with fraud and canceled the $647 million in termination fees. The bank agreed to pay a $25 million fine and fork over $50 million to assist displaced workers in Jefferson County. So far, the county has managed to avoid bankruptcy, but the sewer fiasco had downgraded its credit rating, triggering payments on other outstanding loans and pushing Birmingham toward the status of an African debtor state. For the next generation, the county will be in a constant fight to collect enough taxes just to pay off its debt, which now totals $4,800 per resident.

I don't think our whole history of abundance needed to come to this, but I'm very, very hard-pressed to see how we can escape complete ruin now. Many of the space lizard people feel that the whole crisis can turn on a dime, that the flap of a butterfly wing on the other side of the planet can create the force that turns it all around in a snap, but... well... this is pretty damn pervasive and seriously damn bad... so... I guess we're gonna see....
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operation enduring delusion

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The TRUTH is that we are imperialists. This IS an empire. WE are adults. WE are in charge. WE fix this, do whatever it takes to come up to our true humanity against this, or WE lose.
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didn't we just fall back last week?

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Yer telling me I gotta Spring Forward tonight or be all worse discombobulated tomorrow? Could we consider returning me to my home planet instead? Am I getting old? Whut?

I've got stuff going on here that, believe it or not, for once, I don't much feel like discussing, but in the midst of my thinkings and doings and explorations I find this Chinese lay Zen master, teacher, old dude, and notwithstanding his having been damned with faint praise by Thomas Cleary—There is no question that Master Nan’s work is a cut above anything else available from modern authors, either academic or sectarian, and I would like to see his work gain its rightful place in the English speaking world.—I'm not getting the right feeling from this encounter with evidence of his existence. I even think I've read one of his books and not been grabbed.... There could be a couple thousand reasons for this and I may see them or just forget any significance to coming across him again at this moment of vexation and deal with it some other how. I don't know.

I'm going to practice NOT getting into a sweat over it one way or another....

Have I mentioned lately that if you are interested in Zen and reading anything by anyone beside Thomas or J.C. Cleary, yer taking way too big a chance with your whole life? I know I must've before, but, well, it bears repeating ad infinitum....

There are others I could sort of recommend, would recommend if I had you right in front of me to insert the proper amount of qualifiers and list pitfalls for you, but I can't have you right in front of me, and, truly, there's enough stuff by and translated by the Cleary brothers to keep you busy for the rest of time anyway. In fact, I'd like to be powerful enough to call them both up out of the soup this very now to come smack me around a little, put me back into shape.... I know I oughta be grateful enough for their spectacular work that is piled up all around me, but, well, most of the time I am. Just this very now it seems not enough somehow.

I have been learning in my time on the tubes that HEARING is what gets it in here. This may be because I damn well need a guide dog to drive me to town, but I never noticed it before. I have noticed that I am STUPIDLY sensitive to annoying sounds, and have—DEAF—friends who think I'm a damn maniac for flipping so hard over stuff they don't even notice, but there you have it. It seems to work the best if I hear it while I'm doodling or mindlessly playing computer solitaire or darning or embroidering or SMOKING AND SIPPING DEPRESSO.* I'm thinking that it's about keeping the other senses and my yammering ideas at bay while soaking in the good stuff.

I have a PROBLEM. Something has popped up in the last day or two that has been trying to pop up for quite some time and it is egregiously not kosher.... I'm not flipping. But I am vexed by it big time and don't know which trick to use on it.... So I'm building psychic rooms in which to return to my hermitage, see if I can't be here and a hermit at the same time... or keep me busy until my hand falls on the right volume to help me with this. It's a BIG problem. It seems on its face like a monstrous regression, but it feels more like a new clarity... only not in any way as happy as I've ever found clarity to be, and I have always loved clarity to bits, even when I have to be clear on stuff I outright hate. This one may be big.

Oh, sorry to be thinking obliquely out loud on you here. I'll shut up now. Sorry.
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* Long ago and far away I had a Venetian lover who cooked like God, did marvelous things for and to and with me, and made sure I never lacked for cups of "depresso". If his Martian roots had not finally started showing, I might have married him and never been swept off my feet by 86... and then... how very, very much else would be how many googolplexes of kalpas different around here? OMG
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you know, we have lyndon johnson to thank for bill moyers

[click image, audio, one hour]

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Denial is not a river in Egypt, and greed is never self-correcting.
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and, while we're on the subject

[click image, audio, one hour]

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I found this interview fascinating and encouraging... and know already that much of it is just plain true. It was spectacular to hear someone mentioning how our mental conditioning cages us for life, and doing it from the perspective completely divorced from anything you would call "Zen". I love how she discusses that there actually is NOT nothing you can do about certain predicaments, healthwise or otherwise, and adored the discussion about how what we frequently mistake for the advance of senility is really much more about feeling we should be able to remember information that did not interest us to begin with. She does a great job of articulating this.

Plus, she gets on the subject of how the too frequently dodgy information on the internet can actually improve our chances of discerning reality from the clues flying up out of this mosh pit world. This was particularly interesting to me, of course, because it was a problem I immediately encountered upon my connection to the internet... which was very late by the standards of many denizens of the tubes. I started to have regular access sometime in early 2005, but did not have my own 'round the clock connection until late 2005. I began being exposed to many alternative news sites and investigative journalism sites that were telling me stuff quite at variance with what I'd been led to believe about just about everything for my entire life, and I had always been comparatively well-informed, already knew the mainstream stuff was bunk... but had not the first part of a clue just how far into complete nonsense it actually was.

I immediately became intensely suspicious. I remember contacting some poor guy who ran a popular leftist site to ask him just who he was, and how on earth could I have faith in the outrageous stuff he was posting. He splutteringly replied as best he could, and as I was reading his response it occurred to me that even though I had not trusted the mainstream media for many years already, I still had some idea that mainstream sources were superior, could be used to rest one's case upon, EVEN after having thoroughly demolished the idea of the citing of authorities as purely delusional in a book I'd written. I sat there reeling over the realization of the depth of this business the Buddhists call "delusion" and wondered if I should bother trying to track down what was going on it the world, or what.

Obviously, I decided to start shooting the tubes and stay mindful of the mental conditioning that both goes into the reportage and opinion and that same problem with the one absorbing this information. I learned not to just take everything I read at face value, or to let my knee jerk up and bash me in the chin when someone came up with something that fought with what I already thought. I learned to check up on people. I learned to gauge the reliability of certain sources and not automatically accept the veracity of even the most trusted sites. I learned that people bragging of their own investigatorial prowess were very weak on investigatorial prowess, and saw with my own two eyes how the constant suggestion of it hypnotized readers into believing the boasts over assessing the content. If it agrees with their world view, they are the most apt to swallow it whole and cease looking further to get at the truth... at reality.

I don't know if I share Dr. Langer's optimism about this wreckage. I think she suffers from a default assumption that most are as intelligent and open-minded and driven to the discernment of the actual as she is. But her insights are very worth your attention.
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