At the time Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands they had been under human control for a little over a hundred years. In that short period the birds had "learned" by natural selection, to avoid walking up to humans, because those that did got eaten and only the cautious ones remained to reproduce. This was one of his "aha" moments.

We're used to thinking of natural selection as occuring over long periods of time, and in terms of species that is true, but as Stephen Jay Gould maintained, once the species is in place, in an environmental niche, you get long periods of stasis interrupted by short periods (often due to climate changes) where the evolutionary process speeds up.

(A less respectable, but interesting anthropologist, Terrence McKenna, adds a corrolary to this idea of sudden leaps of species by his suggestion that around 30,000 years ago the fascilty of speech and language was kick started by the usage of pyschotropic drugs from plants. From what we know of primitive tribes in South America for instance, there's no hesitency of precivilized man to get stoned out of his gourd and should some primitive Nancy Reagan crop and say "just say no" she'd be in bad trouble, since the use of such plants is a mandatory part of tribal life.)

A refreshing thing about England is the trauma of the loss of empire has receeded and people now realize that while the English elites were the wealthiest on earth the majority of people suffered cruelly. To demonstrate how quickly this effected the population, untill about 1870 the height requirement for the Army was 5' 6" inches, then it was reduced to 5'3" because the population had shrunk in size, though not in number.In times of scarcity shorter people, needing less calories, are advantaged, and vice versa in times of plenty. This trend continued so by the time of the Boer War in the 1890's the height requirement had to be reduced again, to five feet, because there were not enough people over 5'3" to fill the needs.

This happened at a time when Britain was the dominent power on Earth and I think it contains a cautionary aspect for those in America who insist on patting themselves on the back. The situation gave Dickens a lot to write about and he made out okay, but otherwise, and this is a very sad thing, I do not see any way of shifting priorities in the US because the essential factor is the good of the individual verses that of the group. In terms of survival it makes more sense to sell out then to be a martyr.

We have been questioning this for years here at the Tamlinmediaco and it comes down to a very nasty conclusion, at least for the next few decades, which is what we care about.

Next, it might be nice to say a few words about Marv Kitman, a friend and TV critic who's retiring. When we first began corresponding via e-mail, ten years ago, I said to him I nearly always enjoyed his reviews of programs more then the programs themseves. Obviously my lifestyle is weirder then the weirdest person you know. I work 14-16 hours a day, 7 days a week and haven't had a holiday in ages. I know about story telling, scripts and things but have not watched television in over five years and have no idea who plays second base for the RedSox. But I continued to be interested in reading his comments and realized a few months back that I didn't care what he said, or what his opinions were, only that he continued to say it well. If that is good or bad one can't say, but as Schoenburg said the audience values comfort above all and that's why he invented 12 tone music. heh

The best show Marv clued me into was the Iris Chacon show on Telemundo, good band, good tunes, good performance. It was a little disconcerting to have most numbers featuring the gal surrounded by lively dancing boys but she generally managed to keep one's attention focused on her. Very focused.

The era of television that Marv covered can be compared to the social changes. Variety Shows, which were for the first 20 years of TV a staple format, died. As in publishing and music the specific genre article reigned supreme and hence there were no really dominent programs that crossed demographic bounds. News as infotainment developed as the government and free press collapsed. Documentaries or anything having to do with the lives of the non elites were banished. Local programming died. Sit coms such as I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Father knows best, et al, which were about family situations went through a transition period where race was the issue, All in the Family and The Cosby Show, to the present where they mainly feature unmarried individuals and their attemps to substitute sex for actual relationships. The power dramas, in their ten o'clock weekday slots, came into their own in the wealth programming of the 80's and then as the situation deteriorated and people no longer enjoyed being reminded of the new poverty, the programming shifted to what we call the myth of compentcy, ER, Law and Order, The West Wing, are all the same show,meant to convince an increasing aware and restive public that "everything is in good hands". Here's a freebie, a military ER where good guys go around the world teachng the primitives about the joys of democracy and the free market, killing bad guys, defying authority, changing hearts and minds, and struggling with their conscience between expediance and moral/professional ethics, a struggle that is always resolved - guess how? heh heh

The message? Sex and any form of non structured human contact is bad and leads to eternal frustration

Obediance and adherance to the norms as dictated is good and leads to satisfying lifestyles, loving relationships, and high pay.

Some things never change

The Jerry Springer "Opera" was broadcast on the BEEB. Since I have what some call the world's greatest living opera composer on staff asked him what he thought of it. He said first he'd do anything for money, but as propaganda he preferred "The East is Red," or "The Red detachment of Women," both opera's extolling Chinese Communism. Hemmingway said satire belonged in urinals and so too post ironic, post modern celebrations of trash art don't thrill those of us who feel sympathy and empathy for the newly created peasant class. Such art is elitest to the core but if you are not a snob or social climber, reveling in your superiority to red neck swine it's amateurish and unprofessional.

In a very real sense that is what bothers most about the takeover and the class system; it is the shocking lack of competence, plain old fashioned ability to get the job done, in politics, media and business, for the ignorance of those who have taken over things is compensated for with brute force and a willingness to commit criminal acts the like of which we have never tolerated and we only tolerate now at the point of a gun.

On the hand it's a safe bet that Mad Magazine did a spoof of Springer and it's a satire magazine and I have no problem with that. I am not a fan of trash culture, maybe because that's where I came from and I am trying to dissassociate myself from it. Like many self educated people my tastes by and large are conventional. The opportunity to snicker up my sleeve as I sold the hoi polloi another bill of damaged goods was never given to me. Just to survive i have to have discipline that would shatter nearly all of the golden children., but still you pay a price, in bitterness, envy and hatred. Basically I no longer think of the future, Ihave no dreams, ambitions or holy grails I seek to obtain. I focus on being a killer, that is to say, on killing those attacks on my sense of self worth that are constantly being thrown at me. Whether this is good or bad I can't say.

That's why i call this place I live the wasteland. It's like outer space the information bombs don't explode, the saints wear no halos, all the emotional buttons are broken. One loses a lot of functionality here but it has the redeeming grace of rendering the weapons of the enemy useless and it is my hope that someday we may return to the world you inhabit, of families, friends, homes and we will have the means to rip from the clutches of the devils that have stolen them those things that are our rightfull honour.

Before we move into the essay proper I'd like to say a few words about two subjects in order to give the essay context. Likewise at the end of the essay I will return to these subjects, after discussing and see if we draw any conclusions.

First, within any society we may expect the leaders of that society to praise the energy, inventiveness and generosity of the population. In show business it is likewise something of a given that a performer will inform their audience that they are the best that has ever been. Certainly from the performers perspective the audience is great becasue they chose that particular performer to spend their money on. In societies and governments the element of the populations choosing who shall rule, or lead them it not always so much a option of the governed, but nevertheless we may expect even the dictator with 98% of the vote to praise the wisdom and accumen of the ruled.

From the point of view of the Temlinmediaco we take this for granted, but some don't, they actually believe, or maintain that they believe the "company line." That is their choice to make, but from a scientific vantage it is irrelevent. Perfection maybe impossible but we do try as much as possible to judge actual effects of policy and not the wrappig on the package. If you want to live with the wrapping on the package, as a Stalinist or Reaganite you are welcome to but what follows is not going to make much sense to you.

Secondly it is not neccessary to be aware of the lyric that provides the jumping point for todays essay and indeed such knowledge may even confuse te issue. The ALF is a very sophisticated writer. When he is being entertaining, whether in mythical or storytelling mode the technical virtuosity is apparent but it is often when he is being least lyrically virtuosic that the philosophical explorations reach their greatest depth. Like Shakespeare and perhaps preciousfew others we can look at his work both from the point of action and that of character.

"Elanya" is different from many of his recent works inthat it is entirely concerned with character. Outside of the singers perceptions nothing happens. It is they that change. The character begins with a sense of loss and that evolves in a sense of disconnectedness from the world. In addition the loss changes from the absolute other (You) to a representive other (she)

Plus, as with any great artist while the work changes in it's meaning to us over time the initial impression, or meaning must remain valid. So, even though we may develop less sympathy for the singers sense fo loss we do continue to understand that to the singer themse;lves the loss is very real.

Cu[pabilty or guilt colors perception. One of the things we talk about interms of the data fog is to what degree is it chaos and to what degree camoflage, or intentionally created in order to help people escape responsibility. A man has a wife. She dies. does the man feel worse because he killed her? We can't say.

Essentially I feel like John Stewart Mill, watching the process wherein a society is being churned into mincemeat yet reduced to the position of a bystander. Mills writing style is very complicated and convoluted and unfortunately I feel mine is going in the same direction. The cause is not difficult to find. I am way the hell out here on a promentory. Nobody goddamn wants to hear what I have to say. This is not to say I feel completely alone in my perceptions and in fact in a real way I feel I represent the majority viewpoint, but human societies have long found the majority serves a minority, which rules more by controlling belief then by overt force.

So you wind either thinking like Theodore Kazinski, about making examples, or like Jesus and talking about an afterlife and neither of these options seem particularly desirable. But in any field the initial impulse is from the wonder of what can be achieved and then the way to survive burnout is to understand what cannot be achieved.

As Freud say you can't make people happy the best you can hope for is to make them as little unhappy as possible. One may not like judging their own sanity. It's at best foolish. But one aspect of sanity I hope to retain is the option of walking away. If someone, or some society is hell bent on self destruction, as "Mother Mary" said to Paul McCartney in his dream "Let it be." If that's pyschosis then I hope to have a little of that.

When I was a kid there was a toy called "Rockem' Sockem' Robots" and these plastic figures, puppets would be controlled by the players with the winner being the one who succeed in making their opponents head pop up. Sometimes I see public lie like that, a a contest of battling pyschotics with both contestants sharing the requirement that they are oblivious to the opponent. Thereupon the only thing that remains is brute force and if you don't have brute force the sanest thing to do is to remoe yourself from the contest. I don't mean suicide I mean stop taking these assholes seriously, understand that they have no legitimacy. It can't be done completely but Jesus was right about one thing, the answer is not to make a better world, or a better game, but to make a new world and a new game.

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The following theory says that in observing behavior there's an other way to look at it then just stimulus/response. We assume that people steal and cheat for instance because of greed. That is at the heart of the liberal perspective, which says essentially that bad people use power and craftiness to get their hands on things they don't deserve and this is done at the expense of the majority, a group usually referred to as "the people."

I don't argue with this. It vertainly seems to fit the facts, but the question arises, If it is so self evident why doesn't every believe it?" Many do, obviously, but they are often the have nots and are then accused by the haves of self serving beliefs.

Another way to look it is as a form of criminal behavior. Criminals also use power and lies to get things they don't deserve. The concept of crime and reward fits a lot of criminal behavior, but not all, and a surprising amount of commonly defined crime proceeds from motives less obvious. Unfortunately the less obvious the motivation the more difficult it is to discover the culprit. So you get situations like the Supreme Court Justices, arguably the greatest criminals in the country, who are allowed to go scott free and continue their reign of terror because no one can understand why they would be biased.

I shall rectify the lack of understanding.

First off the failure to fight back against an abusive government is directly analogous to the wife who does not resist an abusive husband or boyfriend. The sin of the woman in that case is the sin of pride. She can't admit she made a mistake and clings to the idea that no matter how much he beats her she can conquer his lack of affection with her own inate overriding love.

But that's not my main point. The question and answer is suggested by the millionaire kleptomaniac, or the married rapist. Rape is a crime of aggression. The more the woman fights the greater is the sexual turn on for the rapist. As an aside the media often presents mock battles between between ostensive liberals and conservatives and so can often see the excitement build between the atagonists to the point where one half expects them to suddenly throw up their hands and say, "Oh, what are we arguing for?" and then proceed to toungue kiss each other. I don't know what that would do for the ratings, but they'd save some money on sedatives.

Ancient "Greek love" incidentally was not homosexuality as we think of it. If that were the case there'd be no little greeks and it was a cultural not a biological condition. The two males, often an older man and a beardless boy would embrace each other, face to face, often while standing up and then they'd stick their hands down the front of the partner and manipulate the gentials to ejaculation. In actuality it is a fairly abberant or unsual ritual and we may suggest that true homosexual attachment, as biologically determined was something quite different and existed at the rate it exists in most societies. Nevertheless these were the folks that invented democracy.

Getting back to the subject though, why does someone with a lot of power need more? Why does a millionaire need a tax break. The answer I suggest is not for the power or money, but rather to fill, or more properly cover over, an existential void in their sense of selfhood. The rapist does not rape to express love, nor to create children, he does it to sooth a pain within, an emptiness. The ritual must be repeated at intervals as the effect of the action wears off. When will Scrooge have enough" The anser is never, because his behavior is only apparently about acumulation of gold. When will the tax cuts stop? The answer is never and indeed in the many cases of the wealthy who pay no taxes they are then compelled to demand subsidies as a compensation for being wealthy.

As Jung would say we must not allow apparent absurdities or contradictions to prevent us from accurately following the motions of the psyche. In dreams there is no up or down and one and one is as likely to equal three as two.

In the same way to think of the rapist, as merely a psychotic is not quite accurate and in a way we are being too kind to them. We assume that the businessman or politician who destroys a community in order to further their own carreers is pyschotically indifferent to the pain and suffering their actions have on said community. In fact that may not go far enough. Like the fellow who signs the death warrent for a person with an IQ too low to be accurately measured, to demonstrate they are tough on crime, we regard the rapist as, to put it mildly self centered.

To refer to the most characteristic example of the new world order, namely the concentration camp, we profess to be shocked that humans could stand by impassively while crimes beyond barbarity were committed We think they are psychotic becasue they seem incapble of realizing that they are participating in mass murder

The truth however as our friend the rapist and our hero the mayor and even the guy in the office who makes the sexually agressive statement to the secretary will tell tell, they are not indifferent to the reponse of the victims. The screams of agony or disgust are a turn on for them. The person who volunteers to work in a concentration camp, or to join a death squad doesn't do because they are indifferent to those they kill. They are not indifferent at all. They like kllling people and in most cases would do it without pay for the intrinsic pleasure of the action.

I am speaking not as someone who is aghast at this or thinks of it as inhuman. Something that gives pause for thought is the possibility that nearly all of us are capable of behaving in this way as evidenced by the example of people who live ordinary lives untill the opportunity to become killers arises and then when the opportunity is gone they go back to living as ordinary responsible people.

There can be optimism in the understanding that in the same way people don't find it difficult to, when authority says it's okay, inflict pain, so too they don't find it difficult to behave in humane ways.

Moving on, as you know the songwriter/musician ALF, is not of this earth and he creates many works of art that we do release to the public because it would be irresponsible, like giving a college text book to a child written in a language the child does not speak. So we try, as best we can, not so much to dumb down, but to release those songs that we feel have the best chance of being understood by at least a small fraction of the public. It's not entirely altruistic, but neither is it entirely cynical. We want to help people. We understand they have their beliefs and we don't want to destroy their culture but we feel that it would be better that they be introduced to more advanced ideas by someone who is not totally exploitative.

We need you to help us help you. Like any science if people. for whatever reason, fear for instance, won't give it a chance there's not much we can do. It still seems though taht many of ALF's songs are not understood and won't be for a long time, if ever. "Elanya" though I think can be understood.

This is a song about a man who has lost his wife. Whether she has died or gone away makes no difference. She's gone. The song evolves in two ways from first person to third and from singers sense of loss to his sense of non being. Obviously one cannot sense non existance. If you could what a different world it would be, eh?

Running through the lyric is the thread that the man never knew how much he loved her until she was gone. More importantly maybe is I wanted to present the idea that the man did not cope with his problem, he did not overcome his difficulty, he did not get his head together, he did not start a new life with someone else.

This relates to something that particularly disgusts me about people, which is the idea that no matter how much you hurt someone, all they need to do is look at things in a different light, adjust their perspective and everything will be right as rain. It's a not clever way of avoiding reponsibility.

Even and especially the murderers among us like this belief. The person is dead. You killed them. Stop changing the subject.

Still it is perhaps best to think of this song being sung by a man standing over the corpse of his wife who he has just murdered. Statistically that is the most likely situation. He kills her because A) He's afraid she will dominate him and B) because he wants material for his autobiography, he wants to wallow in the loss of his true love. Unfortunately for him however he discovers that the pain he so earnestly desires does not last. The dead woman ceases to be the other..

He realizes he did not love her that much in the first place because he does not know what love is. So instead of the glorious unending agony that he believes will enoble him appearing a sense of non existance creeps into his life. In real life what he would then do is find another woman, marry her, kill her, and so on, untill he's found out or dies in his sleep.

The same holds true with a lot of human behaviour. The emotional fix that the psychotic killer gets doesn't last and it is to escape the sense of non being that performs his ritual again and again. One could say the same thing of the artist as well.

reminds of the pld c/w song, - "Stop me, before I love again".

It's usefull to consider this when we ask about motives. There is no motiveless crime, just like there's no volitionless action. While it's easy to think bad guys do bad things for personal gain, there's enough apparently senseless crimes to suggest that theory inadaquate.

A quick and dirty definition of a pyschotic is someone who, obsessed with a delusional belief system is unaware of anyone else living in the world. Sound familiar? Nevertheless that would not be a problem for the rest of us if the pyschotic was content to look at the clouds all day. The reason they are troublesome though is they tend to do bad things, whether they are the nefarious wall streeter who wipes out a community to make a extra hundred grand, the overbearing statesman, or the serial killer.

(Both of whom incidently often regard themselves as instruments of a higher power, whether a metaphysical being in the case of the really demented, or the magic of the market place in the case of the wall streeter.)

I've long contemplated Mark Twains suggestion that the moral sense was the greatest flaw in human thinking. It nags at me. First off because it is often applied in a hypercritical way. Then I think like Churchill's democracy, it's a lousy thing, but the best we have. I haven't figured it out yet but I think it comes into play when we start thnking about pyschosis

As any detective will tell you a serial killer is often difficult to find because unlike your usual killer who either kills his family and friends, or for money, the serial killer's actions have no rhyme or reason. Even trained pyschologists often come up blank because the fellow is not trying to achieve anything, ergo there's no directionaity and where there's no directionality you can't backtrack.

Likewise if you're face to face a cop can often spot clues of guilt in behavior but a pyschotic won't demonstrate those indicators. Fortunately. like multiple personality disorders real, overt pyschosis is rare, but the lesser forms can be problematic as well. As I've suggested also it may well be that pyschosis, in limited form and placed at the service of the ego ( assuming this is not a contradiction in terms) can have a behavioral advantage, Nowadays the personality type is not in favor, but in the 80's the "shark" was a man both feared and admired.

At this point I believe I'm venturing over territory that has been covered by pyschologists and I maybe infact repeating what I read long ago, and was undoubtedly stated more clearly, so I say simply that in searching for a motive in the case of the psychotic really we're looking for, to coin a phrase, an "anti-motive." In other words their actions do not proceed from a desire to gain something, trophies, be they shrunken heads or stock certificates are not that important, rather the person is seeking to avoid confrontation with oblivion or nothingness.

Suffice to say you cannot confront nothingness or chaos, but you can place something between yourself and it. That is to say the ritual behavior.

The Tamlinmediaco is not on the trail of serial killers we are after different fish. The question I posed a week or two ago is why does someone who has more money then they could ever spend feel the need to accumulate more? One answer might be they are in competition with their peers but that doesn't ring true enough. Consider the retired man. Many of them keep an interest in their trade until they die and they do so not for pay but apparently because of some intrinsic interest in the field.

Freud was a fan of Sherlock Holmes, for the sake of entertainment. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spent the last twenty years of his life communicating with the dead in seances and I daresay Sigmund could suggest a few reasons why. Doyle was a man who believed in rationality, in science, and then he lost his son in the foolishness of World War One. He perhaps could not believe that death is a case that cannot be solved. Newton, after his discoveries spent his life decoding alchemical messages inthe bible. Einstein at least kept his head together. He said,"They keep expecting the goose to lay more golden eggs." I mention these things in case in the future I start talking about pyramid power or some such nonsense. Please don't shoot me, just put me in a padded cell. (Heh)

As I was saying Freud was a fan of Sherlock Holmes and it is tempting to view pyschoanalysis as a detective story, as if one need only discover the culprit to find the missing items and make everything okay. A good deal of the backlash against analysis came when people began to realize that was not the case. Like Humpty Dumpty the shattered personality is never the same. Sometimes it may be restored better then before, but it is never just a whodunnit.

In a similiar way myth provides us with models and frameworks but every individual will experience and retell a myth differently. Each of us remembers different aspects of a story and sees even the common elements differently. An example of this is the nature dragon both friend and enemy in that it is a powerfull unthinking force to be tamed, befriended, slain, or avoided as the case may be.

Dreams, even unpleasant ones, are wish fullfillments. Myth is the waking dream.

So to return to the ongoing theme here, which is how information flows and is shaped by technology as you know we've at times posited the idea that the warlords, meaning the financial (and indeed that often means intellectual as well) elites have been so callous as to the results of their actions as to suggest pyschosis.

The pyschosis is like the odd artifact found at the crime scene. The Reagan Adminstration, even in those few areas that it did not literally break the law, can be regarded as a vast criminal conspiracy. Indeed all the governments since then can be labeled so as well. These are organized groups that whatever their "cover" or fronts maintain, exist for the purpose of shifting large amounts of money from some sectors of the economy to others. The joke I've told a dozen times is the music business used to be run by the mafia, now it's run by a much meaner and tougher mob -The Time Warner Gang.

Which is to say that especially in this age of the market state, criminal activilty is not limited to the government, nor business, nor the media business.. The three, information, business and government triangulate and provide cover for each other and each as well knows that if they make one of the triad angry at them there will be negative repercussions.

At least in theory it should work perfectly, like the three monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. There is however a problem which is that in order to shift money to one thing it has to be found somewhere else and that somewhere else which long ago was public housing and education, and now has moved to other areas such as social security, is hurting and the effects are beginning to show up, even in something as immediate as using welfare recipiants to do jobs that formerly people were paid to do.

In the ideal you would think alarm bells would ring. Look at all the people in jail, look at all the people without health care, look at the fact that Americans have the longest working week and the fewest vacation days in industrialized world. Where are the programs that effectively rebuild the areas demolished by free trade? I mean free trade in the ideal is great, but where do the benefits go?

In criminal justice they sometimes say of a person on trial they are either guilty or extremely unlucky. That's the polite version. The impolite version says the person's either guilty or very, very stupid.

In 19th Century England the rich were very rich and the poor were very poor, albiet employed. This was known from early on and never improved. Correction, it improved for the middle class, slowly. The colonial empire was a toss up. It made money and it cost money. It's legacy in terms of experience in dealing with other cultures and spreading the english language is now at least, positive. None of these factors weighed heavily on the decision making at the time of the empire.

It remains to be seen what the exact results of the american psychosis will be a hundred years from now. Like the British empire we can at least suggest that the crimes are not entirely crimes of expediancy or greed. If greed were all that mattered then one would think even the criminal organizations, eg the political parties, the multinationals, would see the benefit of widespread productivity and consumption, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

In terms of the law theres crimes of opportunity and premeditated. In both cases, as the warlord would say,"They seen their chances and they took them." Certainly there are people looking to exploit opportunities. America, as even Dickens noted, is the land of committes.

We always have to ask the right question. It's easy to call someone a psychotic. Because it is so easy the appelation rarely sticks. I daresay as well someone living in Scarsdale with twenty or fourty million dollars in the bank and several homes could give a hoot about what some malcontent on a website thinks of them and their brethren. I accept this reality:-)

And I do remind you as well that the notion that people's morals change rapidly is not one I ascribe to. (Although, who knows, given speed of the change in the Galpagos perhaps natural selection has worked it's magic to create and upperclass entirely composed of pyschotic bastards. Let's, however asssume that is not the case.)

Let's go out on a limb and say that the new elites are not pyschotic bastards. Then we must ask,"Why do they appear to be?" Where did this indifference to the bpoint of stupidity and even self destructive behavior come from? (By self destructive I don't individually I mean the self destruction of te over economy and social system.

We point our finger at greed. We express shock that some of the less oblique characters say out loud "Greed is good," but I think the similarity of the actions and attitudes of many of the elites to pyscotics points to a different motive.

If there's a common thread to the new regimes it is the willingness to impose suffering on the many for the financial gain of the few. For this to happen the many have to be dehumanized, made faceless.

It's funny, I have the formula which seems to fit, but don't understand the components or elements of the formula. It says simply that the disintegration of the American way of life and it's replacement with techofeudalism is not driven primarily by the greed of the "winners" but rather by their fear of non being.

You could say that greed across all classes is a given, a constant almost. then they should balance out with the pendulam swaying this way and that but returning more or less to the center when one group feels particularly agitated. Eg If you don't pay employees at least a living wage they will strike.

Can it be that the fear of non existance is greater among the elites? Indeed we can go a step further and ask if the problem itself is driven by the elites. that's a silly question however because irregradless of their intentions the effect of the changes has been to shift resourses to them.

Existentialism is certainly not in the everyday parlance. Like abstract expressionism it had it's day in the sun and faded away to be replaced by something, or other. Actually, I've mentioned how one of the harmfull aspects of corporate control of the arts is that they tend not to develop and evolve through schools, trends or styles, but remain rather constant. The same holds true in the world of ideas, unless you consider "The Da Vinci code" a philosophical breakthrough :-)

When I finished the above essay I felt like a man who was visiting a bombed out city where people were freezing and starving to death. After much study he announces he has discovered the cause that they are freezing and starving. "It is because they don't have homes and they don't have food."

In other words the discovery while being completely true does not help any. It's like the sad case of the severe schizophrenic who resists pyschotherapy and then you do a brain scan and realize that there's barely enough mind there to breath let alone function.

You can take people and put them in artificial environments, or, as is more often the case nowadays medicate them so they don't attempt to do things they can't. If a person is incapable of riding a motorcycle for instance and you want to keep them safe, you keep them away from motorcycles.

Unfortunately we cannot keep selfish people away from the objects of their desire and by no means is it accepted we would want to. This leads to the second subject which is framed by the question "What are you trying to do, make a perfect world?"

Well, no, not really. Most people, and especially those paid to complain, avoid the accusation of hopeless idealism by keeping their complaints narrow. They name names and like the cop on the beat they concern themselves with keeping their particular zone of reality reasonably copasetic.

But it is no fun being a statistic. All I can say is if we can understand what is happening around we may have a slighlty better chance of survival.

Chance and hope are related in that both are about fate and chance is quanitative whereas hope is qualitative. We fight on. Someone remarked that one of the most noticable effects of information spinning is no one believes anyone anymore. would that were true:-) We fight on. In this battle the first victory is discovering who your friends are and to paraphrase Jefferson it is better to have no friends then false friends.

Chance is a tricky little demon. A friend of mine had a dog named chance. I always found that very amusing. The promise of the new regimes is that of opportunity for all. Fat chance. You have a chance to win the lottery but for most people it is not a good bet. Unlike ALF I do not have the gift of prophecy and it has not done him a great deal of good. If I had a dime for every idea that showed up at the Tamlinmediaco and then a year or two later someone made money on it I'd be a much happier elf.

I suppose I am saying I have to believe that knowledge is better then ignorance, not because I regard that as proven, but rather because when everything else is subjected to testing and removed it is the only thing left to believe.

Rather then go out on a note of hopelessness I'd remind you and myself of something.

When people would take LSD the words of wisdom often repeated we're, "Remember whatever happens it's just a drug." Of course when you needed to remember that most, when you went that one trip too many, or you did the tab that was oversaturated, was the time you were least able to remember it was just a drug and you were propelled into another world, another simultaneous reality with different rules and different inhabitants.

And we, and I, must face up to failure. There's no sugar coating that and no radical solution, no bold risk, that will change it. But try to remember this -you are not alone-- there are tens of millions of us who have had our lives and chances foreshortened. We are roadkill and naturally the ones who have benefitted are going to do everything they can to convince we defeated ourselves.

I can't make you a success if I could make myself one, but I can't. If hope in the afterlife comforts you, okay, but it doesn't do much for me. What I was trying to say last time about the change in bad guys in movies over the past fifty years is the old bad guy lived in town, and youi could do something about him. You could catch him in the act, but the new bad guy is far, far away and he covers his tracks real well and as Neil Young said, you're just pissin' in the wind.

The Wizard of OZ is not a kindly bumbling showman. People want to believe that, like they wanted to believe the Czar was in ignorance about what his ministers did. Sorry. No Dice.

The Wizard of Oz is a psychotic power freak afraid of not being important and he believes he derives his importance by crushing others. EL Voco Omnipito. Like all such lunatics he must keep repeating the action. He will never be satisfied. Enough is never enough for him because he doesn't do it for the gain, he does it push away the demons that are chasing him and they will never stop because they are part of him. Little voices whispering. What do they say?

"You're no good. You should never have been born. Everyone knows it. They are lying to you, pretending they like you when they only want to use you. You are neither man or woman. You are damaged goods, a cosmic slip-up. A random thought doomed to wander aimlessly."

But we are not alone. Even if we don't succeed in creating an alternative society, a virtual state, even if they kill us by the thousands and hundreds of thousands we still will win. We will have won because we retained an ability to treat others not as we think they deserve, but as we would have them treat us.

. .

Long live the Virtual State

-Tamlin

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