"felix culpa"

What I am about to say I would not say in public,for I know that there are people who love you, or at the very least, depend on you, despite whatever flaws you may have. (Too numerous to list in a single letter, book, or library.) Yet, I grow old. My days are not long for this world. I have lived a reasonable life ,I suppose. Let others judge me as they may, I myself, felt for most of it I was more at the mercy of events then in charge of them. But then you would not understand that.

Still there is one last debt I owe myself, you and the world. Like a debt of honor it must be paid irregardless of whether anyone knows or notices.

As I said, while I could, animated by a spirit of malice and petty dissatifaction, list your flaws, so well hidden from the world, it reflect's ill on a man to see only ill in others. so I simplify to a word what must be said. You are contemptable.

This is no partial evaluation, no product of a bad mood, nor a judgement concerning questionable acts, but rather an assement of your entire life and being, from childhood to the despicable simulation of an adult you now present

As soon as you were able to you would never share your toys with other children. At seven and eight while the other boys were playing rough and tumble games you were spending an hour a day in the bathroom preening yourself so as to make "a good imression". I know who poisened the neighbors dog. I never said anything about it, knowing you would deny it and that your mother would take your side and you had already begun to turn her against me in ways that contributed to our eventual divorce.

If I feel guilt about anything it is for the fact as you grew older i purposely did everything I could to avoid contact with you. At the time it seemed the thing to do. I hoped, in vain, you might awaken and become my true son, and as well there was a darker reason. I feared that I would be unable to control myself at some point and would do you bodily harm, if not outright killing you. Oh, many a night i lie in bed wondering whether I had the courage to rid the world of the pest you were becoming. I told myself I would gladly accept the death penalty for the knowledge that the horror I had begotten by siring you would be gone.

But my courage failed me, so I told myself it was the belief you would change that stayed my hand. Now it is too late and others must pay for what I would not accept responsibility for.

You are the other side of the picture of the boy who kills his parents and begs mercy for being an orphan. You have made your selfishness into a private religion. You have sought and found comfort, physical comfort, and in return have left nothing to anyone else.. You would not go out of your way to call an ambulance if someone were bleeding to death in front of you. Such comforts as good food, company, shelter and security are yours. You have gained them by being in the right place at the right time.

You stare in unbelief at the fools who grow your food, who drive your cars and dance for you, never for a moment considering that they do these things not because they love you, but because they have to, in order to be paid, in order to survive.

All the things that make for an easefull life you take for granted as your birthright. You are like the man who has commandered the only well in town. You have guards surrounding it. When people tell you they are thirsty you reply,"Then get some water to drink. I don't see what the problem is, after all I have all I need."

The one answer to the problem is the last thing that will ever occur to you. Is this ignorance or wisdom? I have failed you as a father. These words i say to you are but a feeble attempt to soften the shame I feel for the way you have turned out.

In the interest of explicity I'll say this. A few weeks ago I felt that things had come to the point where further exploration of our previous topic, information distribution within the data fog, would be redundant. Besides which, and this is critical, as Frank Herbert would say, "To make something stronger attack it." We, by critiquing the means by which centralized power maintains its hegemony were perhaps inadvertabtlu informing it of where it's vulnerabilities lie. That is not in our interest.

In looking at the leaders of the technostates one of the things people often can't refrain from mentioning is how seemingly stupid or simple minded they are and the paradox it seems to reveal. I don't find that surprising however for a central tenent of our understanding is that the cults of personality, be they of Elvis or Hussian, or others, are the product not of the individuals but of the systems that elevate them. Hence the more powerfull the system of neccesity the less individual the celebrity. If you cannot accept this on a theoretical basis you can at least see the justification in light of experiential evidence :-)

Still our interest is not in tearing down what is, but rather in working to create a new world, a world not of order or chaos, but both, a living world, a world where people can survive. We are playing four dimensional ping pong. The first obstacle is who shall lead? The problem with the dead world is even when as in the case of Bono, the ends to which he works are good, he gets saddled, correctly or not with the notion of using altruism to increase his personal fame and power. Furthermore the skills , organization and ideals most usefull in gaining power are different from those most usefull in weilding it. Very few have overcome this problem.

The left for instance, in practising oppositional politics, when in those cases it gains power nearly always then retrains their targets from without to within, as in the case of both the French and Russian revolutions.

The ping pong ball I refer to represents the ideals we strive for and are the property on no man or group. Unlike the dying nation states with their atrified heirarchies of wealth and power the virtual state is to be a consensual agreement, or agreements. It is to be led not by men or women, but by laws.

At present this issue seems to have escaped many. Deluded by their isolation they make plans, presuming and predicting, slow steady growth and business as usual. They ask themselves will it work? And answer"yes". They do not ask "is it fair?" For that question would far more diffficult to answer.

They do not understand us. They do not even believe we exist for our way of thinking is so different from theirs. Justice to us is not a matter of expediency. It is not a matter of convienance to be disregarded when financially problematic. Justice is our life's blood. It is the only protection we have against the tyranny of wealth and power It is one of the few things worth dying for because without it life is not worth living.

And it cannot be imposed. A person is free when they feel they are free and at no other time. It must belong to they to whom it is applied and if needs be, it must be fought for.

Rather then take the short term focus that is characteristic of most media in this allegedly speeded_up 24/7 era, the Tamlinmediaco has, as the world's most important website, always shouldered the burdon of explaining why and how the messeges sent by the dominant information powers are sent. As to what the messages mean, we regard that question as both trivial and unanswerable. Disinformation is leavened with information in order to facilitate it's absorbtion in the same way that poison is mixed with wine or baked into cookies in order to mask it's presence. Since information is critical to survival the distributers of information have a stranglehold on belief, no matter what their intentions.

One of the first rules of science is "make no conclusions without evidence." I jest the Tamlinmediaco is empowered more by what it is not then by what it is. We cannot ascertain motives, We cannot ascertain truthfullness, even a measure of it, without some evidence and the innovation of the technostate is to be constantly supplying "facts" that the population has no way of checking and therefore is forced to believe. What evidence we do have, always after the fact, tells us that virtually everything said by the traid of government/buisness and media serves only one of two purposes, either the transfer of wealth from one part of the economy to and/or the strengthening of the power and control of the elite class over the rest of us. It is a mockery of democracy.

I've alluded in the past that we don't want to reform the system, we want to replace it. That can be looked at another way. To replace the system and leave the same people in charge is not our desire. Two can play that game. It is like the old con of the corrupt corporation declaring bankrupcy and then reappearing under a new name to do the same old crimes.

We are not, like the lower classes intimidated by the magic of wealth. We know what it is and we know we have as much a right to own, and as much ability to handle it as the next guy. Save your scrufula healing for the rubes. Furthermore we are not culturally distinct from the ruling class. We can lie and talk about altruistic noble intentions just as well as them, all the while keeping an eye on the essential question which is "Who gets paid?"

Which is to say, realistically we are not "fighting the system." If anything we are supportive of the system. It did well by us. We are fighting the usurpers. We are fighting the traitors. For we are fighting those who would destroy America by destroying her freedoms and the standard of living of her people. We are fighting for the true democracy.

Conceivably then the system could remain, as long as those in charge of it now are replaced, by us. As to whether as system governed by the needs of the people would resemble one governed, as now, by the aristocracy, i cannot say.

But the Tamlinmediaco is only one very small part of the picture. In propaganda you're speaking from a mass vantage and mass media, to an individual psyche. Much has been made in recent years of tailoring the message. Whether magazines, books, or candidates, specificity is used as a wedge. Crowd behavior aside, you shape belief, hypnotize and change minds one at time. So they who in the fifties were called "the hidden persuaders" are still forced to create their suggestions according to the needs and predilictions of individuals. We can think of that as the focal point.

I don't know enough about the subject to agree with the statement that one cannot hypnotize a person that doesn't want, or acquiese in, the process. But I am willing to go so far as to say that the process of dominating and controlling a persons beliefs can be made more difficult if the person is both consciously aware that they are being influenced and opposed to it. From our viewpoint it matters not whether the controller makes the subject think they are a duck or a penquin. What we want to do is keep the subject from forgetting they are a human being.

We generally focus on that as our remit and do not attempt to present a truthful picture in lieu of the slanted one. We feel if we can sufficiently discredit the veracity of the other information outlets it is of more value to the visitor then were we to attempt to get at the "real truth." Among other things, obviously we don't have the resourses and to make a guess, even an educated guess as to what the facts is not our interest.

Media is like a sausage making machine. Whatever goes in comes out looking much the same. To wit, "Decisive personalities have taken matters firmly into hand and results are expected presently." Of course the results are practically never as proposed, but that doesn't matter because the same message keeps being repeated.

As is said of Kings when are not trying to keep the peace between nations they are trying to keep the peace within nations. So too the power of the technostate to elevate mediocrities and weak minded individuals to prominence both in show buisness and politics is something that ought concern people. The technostate is like a power lawnmower, the machine does all the work and the lawn looks great.

The problem is I don't give a damn how good the lawn looks. I come from a group of people who want to start and own their own businesses, who will work with others as equals, but have no vested interest in the centralization of authority, power, or money.

Typical New York success story, in the 1830's Cornelius Vanderbuilt had a small boat that he used to ferry people across the Hudson. He worked late hours, had a reputation of crossing safely when others refused to go out, charged commensurately and went from there.

It is not in my interest to call attention to the failures of those who oppose me, but rather to hope those failures continue and multiply.

The Actual Dream Sequence

I had a dream yesterday. Ordinarily we describe dreams as strange. We sense a linkage between the perceptions and images of the dream state and our waking reality, but it is the dream with it's fluid timelessness that we call strange. This dream was not like that however. It was not another way of understanding the world of wakefullness. It was a teaching dream, or an idea dream.

In it I was in the wasteland. The sky was grey. The land, the trees and even the people were grey. There were two suns in the sky, one pale grey and the other black. It seemed as if all the colors and the sounds of voices were being pulled into the black sun. People would speak, convinced they had said words and the words would spiral the in black sun, which seemed to be receeding and pulling the earth, the grey sun, the grey moon and the stars after it.

And I thought to myself,"You know the world is at peace. The struggles are at an end. Every year goes by more or less like the previous one with a slight growth in the amount of things made, like the rings on a tree. Arguers argue but that's their role and no one takes it very seriously."

Then I thought "The only difference between me and everyone else is I need the wasteland. I need the way it cancels out valuation. Rather then being a nothing in something I'd rather be a something in nothing."

This goes beyond even freedom and slavery or dignity and humiliation. It is an even more basic part of life. It is the source of all war and it is why Cain slew Able. It is why Eve took the apple from Satan.

It's like bears in the zoo. A lot of animals die in captivity for seemingly no reason, and others won't reproduce, even though all their needs are met.

You see, maybe those who are successfull see a world that is rolling along it's tracks, like a frieght train. They repeat the mantras, Globalization is good, we are all interconnceted and no one can come up with a reason, at least in their conscious mind, to contradict that. I am only using economics as a metaphor here. Those who oppose globalization, which can also called global unity, do so often on the basic of the fact that it transfers wealth from one group to another and at it's heart the complaint is that the groups are defined not by national affliation but by economic class.

John Lennon wrote "Imagine" which a song that is a prayer to rationalism. Imagine people sharing all the world. Imagine no religion, nothing to kill or die for. Imagine no countries. It is a message the world likes to hear.

But in the wasteland we are all naked. Here effect no longer follows cause. In battle there is no wiser council to ones enemy then acquiescence. We want everyone else to want the opposite of what we want. We tell them, "Sleep, sleep my friend, for you have all eternity yet before you."

In my dream there was a double meaning. I'll do my best to explain it but I don't know if I can.

(Added at the last moment; --because I can barely bring myself to say it, either deep down, or in extremis, I don't want peace or rationality if the price is my being a loser. I don't want to die. And the good and sane people may as well stop wasting their breath trying to convince me that they are acting fairly and for the good of all. It doesn't matter and whether I have a good justification or not doesn't matter either. If it comes to moral superiority or physical survival I choose the later. What good is sanity if it only delivers doom? If I am forced to be a saint at the point of a gun I'd rather be a sinner. )

We can use the words technology, progress and civilization in an interelated way. They work together to "out a lid on" chaos. They smooth out the rough edges much like modern economic higgledy-jiggledy smooths out the hills and valleys of the capitolist economic cycles. They remove the option of civil was or revolutions from sufficently advanced societies because even in the even if one part of a society were so dissenfranchinced from another as to want to separate the physical military force available to the central authorites rules out effective revolt, in the same way nuclear overkill rules out casual warfare between global powers over territorial issues.

And that "lid", or stablizing influence seeps down into everyday life, where everytime you use a credit card you are tracked and in every public place you are being watched by surveilance cameras. We accept this on the premise that if you are not doing anything wrong there's no need to worry.

"Adam did one good thing. He brought death into the world"
Puddin'head Wilson's Calendar"-Mark Twain

So, forwhatever reason, as far a civilization is concerned the grass is green, the sky is blue and let's all raise a glass to the generosity of the commen man. The human race is developing and mastering ever more complex systems which allows it to do more, to know more and to live better as time goes by. As the t-shirt says,"I can't wait 'till tomorrow becasue I get better looking everyday."

I suppose the true reason for the abject failure of the Teamlinmediaco to have any impact on the world, let alone get paid, is the prosaic fact that I don't knock on dooors, I don't submit my material to prospective employers, I don't make a point of networking with movers and shakers and my schmoozing ability overall is underdeveloped

That however is not the reason I've referred to in the past on thoss many occasions when I've brought up the fact that I don't get paid. What I've said in those cases is that the problem is where everyone else sees either a brighter day and a brighter tomorrow, with the occasional malcontent suggesting there are deep problems thatcan be solved if we do what they suggest, I see an age not only of darkness but one that will not be rectified by replacing part A with part b.

Now I'll try to say this simply. We have civilization as it likes to be seen. It's hardworking, optimistic, persistant and above all it seeks to rationally allocate the fruits of it's existance. We will call that "A".

Then we have perhaps, the discontents, those who feel either cheated or underappreciated by "A" and they don't see "A" as such a swell place at all. They feel they work hard and get nowhere and that like in Victorian England a few benefit and the many suffer and one reason this all happens is becasue thoe who benefit are a bunch of blowhards constantly telling everyone they never had it so good and never, never, never allowing a contradictory word to be heard. We'll call this view and those that believe it "B"

As Hegel and long before him, Aristole noted there is in belief a dialectic. Every thesis is followed by an antithesis. In mathematics for instance if one and one is two then you can say that two minus one is one. So for everything that is said the opposite can be said.. This can come in handy because to anything you or I say, when opposed, we can say "They are opposing us not because what we say is wrong, but because it is us saying it."

It is said the world is made by the word, and that means the first one to say something has priority. Freud wrote Civilization and it's Discontents, someone else could have written the exact opposite and called it Human Nature and it's Opponents.

In any case those on top of they wheel of fortune "A" we may expect to believe that the world does a marvelously precise job of elevating the deserving. Those on the bottom of the barrel "B" may find themselves asking why the world does such a poor job at the same task. I accept this.

It was to avoid the prejudices of the wheel of fortune that I first made my way to the wasteland. Here instead of turning vertically like a ferris wheel, the wheel of fortune turns horizontally like a merry-go-round.

Hate the rich/love the poor, love the rich /hate the poor, one or the other is the way it is in the world I left. Basically in that world you can adopt either view and get paid, if you were born with the right connections.

I go into this in detail because I want the reader to know that no matter how perfect or seemingly permanent their paradice is, it's only one viewpoint.

Speaking of viewpoints, one small point about the difference between argument and life is argument goes back and forth, but life only goes in one direction. Birth to death. That's how it goes. If you understand and accept that, as surprisongly few do, it shapes the way you think of things. Life is based on what we call the self organizing principle. This means it is constantly reaching outside of the circle of it's own being and putting things together within. So, if you want to kill a lifeform, real or even artificial, all you have to do is isolate it, keep it apart from everything else and in practically no time at all it will die. You don't have to actively enter into the circle of the other's being, via bullets or knives. This is how the technostate kills. It does not pull the trigger, nor does it even encourage always the subject to pull the trigger, it simply declares the subject redundant and thereby keeps it from not only reproducing, but from living even it's allocated life span.

Given that option the wasteland, where all bets are off, begins to look much better. I can't kill George Wiil with a bullet (In truth I don't know if he's still alive) but he can kill me simply by being himself. Marvelous, but deadly

In my dream though a new aspect appeared. There's "A", the way the honkies see the world,-- fair,kind and true and "B" the way ALF and I see the wor;d -it stinks. I can't get the A group to accept the B idea of how things are.

To make it interesting we might ask,"Is it possible one of these worldviews is correct? I can't answer that without pretending I was objective and that is something that is not allowed in the wasteland. The wasteland frees us from the subjective evaluation by others but at the cost of being unable to pretend we in turn are objective.

So, all i know is I don't get paid when I should. instead of ALF having a budget of a million or two dollars a year, like he should he has to work on a shoestring.

The same world where people pat themselves on the back for being so generous in the wake of a flood is a world that I find very stingy towards songwriters.

Let's face it. There's a difference of opinion here and in part it can be explained in terms of location. Some people live in 20 room mansions and consider the world bright, others live for years on peanut butter in rented rooms and consider the world dark. We could share the light. That would be okay by me, but somehow I have the feeling the one's in the 20 room houses would not go along with that. That's what i mean by location.

It's like slums and gated communities. People in the slums say there's a connection. The people in the gated communities say "no way."

In my dream I saw all this. And I saw one other thing which i can't explain. It was that the darkness was not a real darkness for either side. We see the nightmare, we see the land blackened, the leafless tree, and the people who's mouths move without words coming out and it gets us angry or sad. And most of the reason we do such horrible things to each other is because we see, or think we see the world transformed, not into a kiddie toy freaks wonderland, but into a form of prison. WE can't admit that to ourselves.

It's like some hysterical illness strikes a person color blind and then as the years go by they forget what colors are. In other words the imaginary darkness also known as injustice, in time becomes real.

And I suppose I have one thing that puts me in better stead then the hundreds of millions of people demanding to be noticed and mad because they are not-I have direct personal access to the most important sentient being on Earth, and here he is

It opens up with this yokel from Pennsyvannia. He's been working in the mines, way down, in the bottom levels, like, dark, dark as a dungeon way down in the mine, downdowndown, you know, and he comes to le metropolis, there's this chick there, she's getting hit on heavy by a coupla lugs and he gets her out of the jam but takes a slug in the shoulder. She takes him to her boss/loverman's digs where the discreet surgeon patches him up.

Boss/loverman's a mobster and two others of the gang are there. The boys who had been hitting on the chick earlier on tip the cops off and now everybodies gotta split. Downstairs boss/loverman goes his way and the yokel, the chick, and the two sideboys they head out to the sticks with the cops hot on their trail.

They make it to the countryside when the car breaks down. They spend the night in an abandoned house. Come morning one guy decides to try to fix the car and the yokel, he see's a dog. He decides where there's a dog, there's a house and where there's a house there's food and he's hungry. People that don't travel much that way don't understand but for some reason when you don't have a place to stay and you don't have a ride, food becomes very important. First things first.

So, here we go . He walks through the woods. He's following an animal and is separated from the rest of his party. Are you digging this? Do you know what I am saying? Man in hunting party see exotic bird follows bird. Man in hunting party shoots white stag, follows wounded stag deeper and deeper into the woods, become lost. We are talking primordial myth here. Man in the middle of his life gets lost in forest.

Man walks on he comes to a river. There's a girl swimming there. The bridge is out but she directs him to where a tree has fallen over the stream. He walks over the tree, but falls in the water. (Like Bluebottle. "I've fallen in the water.") And he keeps walking, following this dog, untill out of nowhere is a mansion that has fallen into decay. There's no other houses in sight and we know the bridge is out so this place is in another zone, another reality.

On the front porch of the mansion is a well dressed, elderly man whom we discover is blind. He greets the yokel courteously. That is absolutely critical. They talk. As the elderly man talks of the fields covered with corn the camera shows them filled with nothing but weeds, as he talks of how the house sparkles in the sun we see it is falling down. Yokel says he's come to buy some food, elderly man says hospitality is a priviledge and won't accept pay, tells man to go inside and take what he wants. inside the rooms are painted white and well furnished but old. Man walks through rooms till he gets to the pantry where he discovers the cupboard is almost empty.

Since the place is so out of the way and they need a hideout the yokel asks if he and his three companions could stay awhile and pay room and board. Old man, who seemingly is glossing over inconsistancies in yokels story agrees. Girl from river returns. She is old man's daughter.

The three others come along and they begin to like rural living. The girl former boss/lovermans dame, meets neighbor but still informs boss of their whereabouts. Boss wants his old gang back and comes to farm to get them, they refuse to go, so boss pulls bank heist and sets up his former partners. DA agrees to go easy on the four fugitives but yokel escapes before finding that out and singlehandedly captures boss/loverman and his new soldiers and dames. Man marries blindman's daughter. Roll credits.

The movie is called Escape by Night. totally forgetable yet intuitively eternal. I have no idea whether the film makers realized consciously they were telling a story told a million times, yet rarely so close to the ur form, the grail story, fisher king, but that's the amazing thing. waves of life pulse through the universe, not nature, not nurture, but an external thing that cannot be called a force because it is pan dimensional and won't show up on any instrument, quantuum affinity

Why does man seek the end? I mean the escatalogical end point? The strange attractor weaving it's way through time space, like a multicolored bird flying ever deeper into a forest. As long as it has not happened it is up ahead and we move toward it, so we think. But that is, of course a dimensional illusion. How far can you go into a forest? Only half way. How far can you go into a forest?

The notion of progress begs the question. progress where? Progress can only exist with an end of progress, some final point at which either the entire cycle repeats itself or being flips into another form or formlessness. That other form to us is formless and so we are not and canot be aware of it. Every journey begins with a single step and the last is no larger then the first.

The final secret. The final power. The final door. When we speak of boundaries it is easy to forget that like secrets they are not imposed from without, but generated within.

The goddess is three times three. She is the mother, the companion and the harlot, but she is also the infant, the adult and the crone.

Ben Bova , a science fiction writer, tried to explain evolution in terms of Prometheous, Appolo and Athena.

We had to deal with and preserve fire first and it took a long time. That conviently fits the natural resourses and quite often we literally find them in the ground, whether gold, lead or oil. They are finite but for intents and purposes few notice.

Appolo is the symbol of the age we live in now. It is knowledge that makes the world go round. In the past those who knew where the gold was, or the pearls had wealth if they could success both in getting the things in the ground and distributing them. Then come the day of the banker. Today.We often focus on the difficulty of gaining wealth, but it is as hard and as usefull, to give it away in a way that benefits one.

"The farmer is the man
The farmer is the man
He works in his fields until fall
Oh, da farmer is the man
Who sweats over the land
but the banker is the one who gets it all"

The step after that, which has not yet come is symboized by Athena. All is relationship. Gold has value in the world but no value other then as an ornament on a desert island. Same with information. Athena is the goddess of victory and wisdom. This is different from the arts,. Appolo is the god of music, of proportion, of science, but Athena is the Goddess of self knowledge.

First there is the idea of knowing where, physically to find materials, secondly there is the idea of organizing information, and thirdly is the journey within, the asking, "What are my needs"?"

None of these things would matter if they were mere speculations, or, so to speak, games, but they are not. They are the elements of survival and the only elements of survival.

To a primitive mind a lake full of oil would be worth nothing. They'd have no sense of how to use it. Likewise a half dozen credit cards may seem like baubles to someone unfamiliar with electronic money. And today at least the notion that knowing yourself belongs in a continuum with oil wells and credit cards seems far fetched.

interestingly enough, at each level we use less of the previous level. Most people don't have fires in their homes constantly lit, as they once did and it amuses me to consider the same is true with knowledge and self wisdom. The more you have the less you need.