"We need protection for our people." --Jeremy Scahill [dn2008-0407: Please forward my congrats)

Bravo! No, wait.BRAVO! O brother, my Brother Jeremy!



"We need protection for our people." He nails it! A perfectly introverted system of priorities.


The Commons becomes a Holy War Battlefield when we conceive of our kin as our enemies. That mentality is all about Divide, Fragment, Diminish, and Conquer. That mentality is the legacy of our evolution.

Choosing Western Science is not a solution; this mentality is precisely the Western scientific mind's home turf. We assume our own Source to be a god-forsaken machine, then act upon it as such; we are pimping Mother earth for all she's worth, not husbanding her.

O brother, my Brother Jeremy! Thanks for your Campbellian heroism.

AMY GOODMAN:And then, within forty-eight hours of this confrontation, the State Department extended the contract for Blackwater in Iraq.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, I mean, like much of US policy now, the Bush administration is sort of pushing everything for the next president to deal with. And the reality is that this is outraging the Iraqi government. As I was coming in here today, I was reading the comments of the puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. I mean, let’s be clear here. He’s not really the prime minister of Iraq. There’s not really a sovereign Iraqi government. But even the puppet leader of Iraq is coming forward and saying this is a company that’s engaged in a massacre, and Iraq is saying that this was not done with the approval of the Iraqi government. I mean, this shows, though, how central this company has become to the US occupation.
The reality is that when Gregory Starr, the Assistant Secretary of State, made the announcement that Blackwater’s contract was going to continue, he actually said, we could terminate the contract if we wanted to, and at this time, we’ve reviewed the needs of US policy in Iraq—not the needs of the Iraqi civilians who come near Blackwater, not the will of the US-backed Iraqi government, but we reviewed our policy goals in Iraq and determined that Blackwater needs to stay on. We need protection for our people. And so, the odds are that Blackwater is going to continue on in Iraq for the foreseeable future, certainly for the next year. It would take the administration actually actively canceling the contract at this point. That seems very unlikely.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, at about the same time, for the first time since—well, in forty years, since ’68, the Pentagon announced a charging of a civilian contractor under military law. This is what you write about in “Contract Justice.”
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. And, of course, it’s not one of the contractors who was one of the, what Blackwater calls "shooters” on September 17 in Nisour Square. It wasn’t the Blackwater contractor who was alleged to have shot and killed a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president on Christmas Eve 2006. These men are allowed to run around freely. Some of them return to the Middle East and work for other companies. No, the first prosecution under the court-martial system is apparently going to be a dual citizen of Iraq and Canada. I mean, the grotesque irony at play here is quite stark.

The Mythical Role of NO 1: Separate and Unequal, v.2.008

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
The Right People
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

...
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
1,000,000,000,000,000,000
1,000,000,000,000,000
1,000,000,000,000
1,000,000
1,000
1.0
0.1
....

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
We, the cash cows
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Galaxy
Solar System
Earth
BushRoveCo
...
...
We, the Cash Cows

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Rep. Inslee's question was very revealing of BushRoveCo's MO. Lines may be parallel and yet be 100s of powers removed. See how the conflation of math with mythosociopsychology works?

Hieratic states ordered their politics in pantomime of their idea of the Great Mathematical Cosmic Machine, Answerable to NO 1. So do we. So, bringing the People to the will of the leaders is easy, and it works the same in every country: conflate yourself with NO 1.

Misdirect all attention to your rendition of the Great Cosmic Machine, assigning omnipotence and omniscience to NO 1; unjustly move the #s in your favor, painting the children's blood running red and glistening in the streets as the majesty of your god, as proof of the foolishness of opposing you as His agent on earth; impersonating NO 1 all the while.

By conflating our military machine with the will of god, we are myth-jacking the world to Hell, and sticking us peons with the Bill.

Congrats to Rep. Inslee on Myth-Busting Lord Simon (c.42:00 dn2008-0402)

I just called Rep. Inslee's office (202-225-6311) and spoke to Laura. I congratulated him on that brilliant, myth-busting question: "Isn't that hundreds of orders of magnitude below" our real needs? Brilliant!

MYTH-BUSTED!

"And I saw it on Democracy Now!, by the way."

Rep. Inslee busts Lord Simon in the Myth-Jacking Act (c.41:00 dn2008-0402)

WOOHOO! Way to rep the state, Mr. Inslee!

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Congressmember Jay Inslee of Washington State also questioned the Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil, Stephen Simon, about the kind of change that could be expected from Exxon Mobil when they’re investing less than one percent of their profits in renewable energy.

REP. JAY INSLEE: Mr. Simon, listening to your testimony makes me even more convinced that we need to act to create an incentive for decision makers in industry to really make real investments in the clean energy revolution rather than relatively small ones. And the reason I say that is that, listening to you, as far as I can tell, you’re spending less than half a percent of your gross revenues on clean energy research. Is that right?


STEPHEN SIMON: It would be a very modest amount. I would acknowledge that. But I would not acknowledge that we’re not doing a lot to address greenhouse gas emission.


REP. JAY INSLEE: Well, considering that we have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent in this country below our levels by 2050, would you agree that if your company continues on its present course, it will fall several hundred orders of magnitude short of what we have to do to prevent cataclysmic global climate change?


STEPHEN SIMON: Well, the assumption there that that’s required in order to do that, I would—


REP. JAY INSLEE: Well, how else is it going to happen? I mean, oil isn’t going to all of a sudden become clean. We need to do the research to figure out these technologies.


STEPHEN SIMON: No, but the fact is that we are going to have oil and gas and coal, and it’s going to constitute about 80 percent of the energy equation. With that as a given, how do we then address and do what we can to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions with that being the case?

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Washington Congressmember Jay Inslee questioning Stephen Simon, the Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil. When we come back from break, we’ll be joined by Steve Kretzmann of Oil Change International. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

See that? See that? "Several hundred orders of magnitude" below what we really need to do"--MYTH-BUSTED!

Speaking of home-grown hitmen, that's what I'm saying! While we plebeians stumble about our mundane lives, our Lords and Ladies live on a playing field "hundreds of orders of magnitude" above us.

This is a Ptolemaic cosmos centered on absolute divine right royal houses. These people are as anti-democratic as it gets. "Democracy," to them, is the fairy tale with which they scare us into order. We are just raw material to them, not even beasts of burden any more, just "inputs."

"Fight them there so we don't fight them here" is a lie: there is no "there," there is only here! only now!

There is no Other, only relatively Beloved!

Professionals "doing menial work just for survival." --Grace Kwinjeh (c.32:30 dn2008-0402)

WORD!
I'm six credits shy of a MA in research psychology, and I'm hoping for a call to go paint houses today.

Is this what it means, to bomb a people back to the Stone Age? Has that been Mugabe's function all this time? Plantation-master for his absentee gods?

That's the old school myth, you know. In this world, we are all born to be slaves. Who's sucking all the Juice out of Us: home-grown economic hitmen?

No, life is not a god-forsaken machine, Life is a Garden. Hey, BushRoveCo: Let's dance!

So the Usurpers extorted the NYT, go figure. (Lichtblau, dn2008-0401)

Hey Charlie Brown, hold this football while I kick it through the goalposts of Life! (Exit Lucy with the gate receipts etc., leaving the sap holding the ball he could've just picked up and run with.)

Whodathunkit--the usurpers lied. Poor NYT, they got took. As the great orator said, "Fool me once, won't get fooled again!"

Without ever looking up, without ever questioning the mechanistic Ship of State metaphor as one among many we may choose, we blithely go along for the ride to Hell.

We've conflated eternity with an infinitely large amount of units of time; there are no units in Eternity! We've conflated a mechanistic reduction of Nature with our military machine, treating generals and admirals and ambassadors like meteorologists who can magically manufacture a world of peace with the weapons of war.

Now we have Space Command. Now we want to be able to inflict pain and suffering of mythic proportions anywhere anytime we want, at the push of an innocuous plastic button. The Nazis only myth-jacked the Industrialized World. They didn't succeed in wiring the whole planet "like a ticking time bomb," in Dr. Helen Caldicott's vivid phrase. We've done myth-jacked the world, turning it into the bus in the movie Speed, wired to explode if we slow the juggernaut, thus taking hostage Gaia Herself, and all the children in her womb. We really can kill our Mother, and all our siblings, all our kin, with the mentality that has built our monstrous machines.

Quit the misbegotten Mechanical Cosmos! rebirth yourself as an organic Being, Aware of Eternity even while we are Becoming Space/Time.

How long can you go without using mechanical terms to refer to living Being? There is only one Being, and we're it!

WORD! HRC & Democrats "have been utterly contemptible." --Nir Rosen (c.26:00 dn2008-0401)

WORD!

See how she conflates the US with the master of the Great Cosmic Machine? See the inconceivable hubris? "Hey, we set your whole country, and the nations who reside therein, ablaze, it's up to you to put it out while we rob you blind."

Please tell me SOMEBODY sees Goering's method being applied here. Our social scientists have brought this method up-to-date.

IT'S THE MYTHOLOGY, YOU SILLY DJINNI !

For the Americans, its about Money, not Ideology. --Nir Rosen (c. 17:55 dn2008-0401)

Dear Brother Nir, our money IS our ideology! Being within our mechanistic cosmos, we've become habituated to its noise. We don't hear our Furnaces until they suddenly stop, right?




Our pay = Our control
Our myth = Gaia is a machine
Our method = put the right tokens in the right slots at the right time and BINGO! you can force the machine to feed you and starve everyone else.

Our greatest, most destructive WMD is this: our conflation of our military machine with the Weather. We accomplish this simply by assuming the cosmos to be a machine, at the controls of which our gods are permanently installed and engaged in a Holy War against Them Evil-Doers over There.

Our mythology conceives of life as Holy War. Our cosmology conceives of the physical universe as just a god-forsaken machine, directly answerable to NO 1. Our psychology conceives of us, in this monstrosity of a cosmos, as quantum singularities, the psychic equivalent of misconceived black holes.

For divine right royalists, this is wonderful: a CELLf-imprisoned, remote-controlled populace, not of co-equal vessels of divinity, not even cattle: mere mechanical receptacles.

The Cosmic Math is imperturbable. So all you have to do is convincingly conflate yourself with the Cosmic Math, by forgeries and faked elections -- John Stockwell used to say, "Any number of staged events will do;"-- that is, impersonate NO 1, and you can bring the people to heel, just like Hitler did.

Well meaning or not, our social scientists are machining Us all to Hell! We need to conceive of our mythosociopsychology in organic terms.

Are you a machine, or a Being? How long can you, dearly beloved reader, go without using mechanistic metaphors for living Beings?

A myth is NOT a lie! It's a METAPHOR, a vessel, all too easily JACKED

WTF?! Please don't tell me you're going to UNDERlook the vehicle by which Iraq is being jacked to Hell!


Sister Amy and Nir Rosen have started their discussion. It sounds as if "myth" is just being used as a fancy synonym for "lie." A nation's mythology is their greatest, most capacious Vessel: if you want to jack them all to Hell all at once, trick them into a Vessel, unjustly move the numbers in a predicted direction, thus implying the Favor of the Gods when it's only deus ex machina; "that is easy," Goering said. That's what Cheney did the other day that sickened Patrick Cockburn.

We are being captured by our own greatest Vessel! A myth is NOT a lie.

CHAPTER I
METAPHOR AND RELIGIOUS MYSTERY
THE MEANING OF MYTH

Let me begin by explaining the history of my impulse to place metaphor at the center of our exploration of Western spirituality.

When the first volume of my Historical Atlas of World Mythology, The Way of the Animal Powers came out, the publishers sent me on a publicity tour. This is the worst kind of all possible tours because you move unwill­ingly to those disc jockeys and newspaper people, themselves unwilling to read the book they are supposed to talk to you about, in order to give it public visibility.

The first question I would be asked was always, "What is a myth?" That is a fine beginning for an intelligent conversation. In one city, how­ever, I walked into a broadcasting station for a live half-hour program where the interviewer was a young, smart-looking man who immediately warned me, "I'm tough, I put it right to you. I've studied law."

The red light went on and he began argumentatively, "The word 'myth,' means 'a lie.' Myth is a lie."

So I replied with my definition of myth. "No, myth is not a lie. A whole mythology is an organization of symbolic images and narratives, metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and the fulfillment of a given culture at a given time."
It's a lie," he countered.
"It's a metaphor."
"Its a lie."

This went on for about twenty minutes. Around four or five minutes before the end of the program, I realized that this interviewer did not really know what a metaphor was. I decided to treat him as he was treating me.

"No," I said, "I tell you it's metaphorical. You give me an example of a metaphor."
He replied, "You give me an example."
I resisted, "No, I'm asking the question this time." I had not taught school for thirty years for nothing. "And I want you to give me an example of a metaphor."

The interviewer was utterly baffled and even went so far as to say, "Let's get in touch with some school teacher." Finally, with something like a minute and a half to go, he rose to the occasion and said, "I'll try. My friend John runs very fast. People say he runs like a deer. There's a metaphor."

As the last seconds of the interview ticked off, I replied, "That is not the metaphor. The metaphor is: John is a deer."
He shot back, "That's a lie."
No," I said, "That is a metaphor."

And the show ended. What does that incident suggest about our com­mon understanding of metaphor?

It made me reflect that half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think reli­gious metaphors are lies.

Campbell, J. (2001). Thou Art That: transforming religious metaphor. pp. 1-2. Novato, CA: New World Library.

Body of War: Tomas Young Appraises Sen. Byrd

"Tomas Young, Iraq war veteran and the main subject of the documentary Body of War. On April 4, 2004, his fifth day in Iraq, Young’s unit came under fire in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. Young was left paralyzed, never to walk again. Released from medical care three months later, Young returned home to become an active member in Iraq Veterans Against the War."

SEN. ROBERT BYRD: Twenty-three. Seventy-seven to twenty-three. The immortal twenty-three. Our founders would be so proud. Thank you for your service. Man, you’ve made a great sacrifice. You served your country well.

TOMAS YOUNG: As have you, sir.

SEN. ROBERT BYRD: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator Robert Byrd meeting Tomas Young in his Senate office.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

WORD! Alexis de Tocqueville is vindicated again! That Frenchy was always amazed at how every American thinks himself the equal of his leaders. HA!

Instead of bowing ever further with every word of praise from his "better," Mr. Young answers with his own co-equal appraisal: "As have you, sir."

GROOVA-FREAKIN-LUJAH!

Winter Soldiers Tell Their Heroic Tales: Camilo Mejia

Winter Soldiers deliver the boons of their repeated trips to Hell and back

CAMILO MEJIA: I just—there was this blank space in my memory, which is a blank space that I have for other experiences, like this time when this child was basically riding in the passenger seat with his father, and we decapitated his father with a machinegun. And when we went down to the low ground to search for enemy wounded, I remember seeing this young person standing next to this body that was decapitated. And when I think about it, I cannot remember the expression on the child’s face. I cannot remember that he was a child. I only know this because people told me later on that was the man’s son, the man’s young son, who was standing next to the body.

And it’s because not only—it’s not enough to—to dehumanize the enemy by means of your military background or training or the indoctrination or the heat and the fatigue and the intensity of the environment, but there are times when it is so hard to deal with these experiences that I suppose your own body, your own psyche, in order to protect you from these memories and in order to protect you from losing your humanity, erases certain memories that are too painful to deal with, that are too overwhelming to deal with. And whether it is to punish the men in your squad or the men in your unit or to erase the face of a child whose father was decapitated next to him in a car at a traffic control point, or whether it is to pose next to a dead civilian or Iraqi or whoever, it is necessary to become dehumanized, because war is dehumanizing.

And we have a whole new generation—we have over a million Iraqi dead. We have over five million Iraqis displaced. We have close to 4,000 dead. We have close to 60,000 injured, both by combat injuries and non- combat injuries, coming back from this war. That’s not even counting the post-traumatic stress disorder and all the other psychological and emotional scars that our generation is bringing home with them. So all that just to say that war is dehumanizing a whole new generation of this country and destroying the people in the country of Iraq. In order for us to reclaim our humanity as a military and as a country, we demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, care and benefits for all veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people so they can rebuild their country on their terms.

(Emphasis added.)

WORD! The frame of mind we've had beaten into us, the conditioning mentioned by the Winter Soldiers, is the problem itself; acting within it will bring us no relief.

[(Absolute Supremacy) //NO 1's Land// (Absolute Subjugation)]

That's the cosmos of our oppressors. And as Slavoj Zizek points out, it's all too often the frame of mind of the Left. Choosing the role of underdog in our oppressor's cosmos won't cure what ails us, either.

What ails us, Uncle? I'm glad I asked: our unfounded, Newtonian, mechanical model of Psyche, based on the CELLf-imprisoned quantum singularity of pure pain.

Not being satisfied with mechanizing the cosmos, turning Gaia into a Frankenstein's monster that we then do not husband, but instead PIMP for all She's worth, no, we social scientists, esp. psychologists such as myself, have mechanized and weaponized humanity's greatest boons for the pursuit of private gain on global scales.

Is it any surprise that Walls of Denial erupt from the ground wherever we go? Here's why:

[(Absolute Supremacy) //NO 1's Land// (Absolute Subjugation)]

This misbegotten conception of the cosmos imprisons us all in CELLves of our own making. It's the pattern for the cosmos in which we fight a perpetual Holy War against Them Evil Doers Over There.

The area labeled //NO 1's Land// is the "chasm" that divides us. It's the area upon which Israel builds its apartheid wall. It's the illusory division in our own hearts between our self and all else. Ever wonder where the "cracks in the system" come from?

beloved /UNION/ Beloved

And into which Union experience is pouring; from which, awareness is arising; and out of which, We are Flowing {Mater 'n Pater} Rhyming in Water.

Winter Soldiers Tell Their Heroic Tales: Hart Viges

Winter Soldiers deliver the boons of their repeated trips to Hell and back

HART VIGES: My name is Hart Viges. I joined the Army right after September 11th and asked for Airborne, asked for Infantry, ended up with 82nd Airborne Division, 1st/325 HHC, Battalion Mortars, Hunters in the Sky, Death from Above, and went in November 2001 and left the Army in December 2004. I was deployed to Kuwait in February 2003 and subsequently was part of the invasion in March.

And then, with raids, we never went on a raid where we got the right house, much less the right person. Not once. We were outside of Baghdad, this water treatment plant, and it seemed like a pretty nice area, you know, trees, green. But then, as we were leaving, two men with RPGs run out in front of us in the road, and there’s a lot of yelling and screaming. And they’re huddled themselves with women and children that were there. And we’re all screaming, “Drop your weapon! Drop your weapons!” They had RPGs slung on their backs. And I was watching my sector on the left. They were on the right. You know, I was very adamant about watching my sector over there. But I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I swung my rifle around, had my sight on the dude in the doorway, RPG on his back, had my sight on his chest. This is what I’m trained to do. But when I looked at his face, he wasn’t a bogeyman, he wasn’t the enemy; he was scared and confused, probably the same expression I had on my face during the same time. He was probably fed the same BS I was fed to put myself in that situation. But seeing his face took me back, and I didn’t pull the trigger. He got away.

We get backup with Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, and we go back into this nice little village, asking questions. And, you know, it’s a pretty good history in Iraq. You know, if you got beef with your neighbor back in Saddam’s day, you just say, “Hey, police, he said something bad about Saddam. Why don’t you go get him?” And they take him, and they torture him. Well, now, here with the US, we’re asking, “Who are the troublemakers?,” and we hear from the people in the village that these people are troublemakers over here. So we go, and myself and another soldier steps off, and we toss the hut. Well, the only thing I find is a little .22 pistol, not AK-47s, not RPGs, not pictures of Saddam, not large caches of money. But we end up taking the two young men, regardless. And I looked at my sergeant, and I was like, “Sergeant, these aren’t the men that we’re looking for.” And he told me, “Don’t worry. I’m sure they would have done something anyways.” And this mother, all the while, is crying in my face, trying to kiss my feet.

And, you know, I can’t speak Arabic. I can speak human. She was saying, “Please, why are you taking my sons? They have done nothing wrong.” And that made me feel very powerless. You know, 82nd Airborne Division, Infantry, with Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles and armor and my M4—I was powerless. I was powerless to help her.

See the power of intuition as Hart Viges breaks through //NO 1's Land// without an interpreter! All that gear, all that body armor and weaponry, should be labeled: "MADE FOR OFFICIAL USE IN NO 1'S LAND, penalty for misuse applies only to the little people."

He violated his most basic training: he saw the face of the Other, and was not terrified; no, he empathized. He said, his face probably looks like mine right now. Word!

beloved /UNION/ Beloved = a durable peace

Winter Soldiers Tell Their Heroic Tales: Mrs. Meadlo

Winter Soldiers deliver the boons of their repeated trips to Hell and back

SEYMOUR HERSH: And then this woman, this sort of uneducated, very rural woman from on the banks of the Wabash River and very south of southern Indiana, she looked at me, and she said—very angry and very low—she said, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.” And, you know, you hear those stories. I’m right there. It’s a moment you’ll never forget. And I—no matter how much I write about it, I still think about it. And we’re just hearing it today all day, again and again. And the bottom line is, this is what war is.

It's that, and more. Ellsberg calls it an "atrocity generating situation." The APA has made its contribution to our Holy War effort. Turning good boys into murderers is the whole purpose of boot camp, right? And who authors all those reports on the human mind and how to use it like any other weapon, irregardless of the long-term effects on the share of Divinity that happens to be passing through?

We train people into killers, right? that's the whole point of boot camp. OK, so where's the "unboot camp?" Where's the huge effort to undo these obviously harmful effects? HA!

The APA bears heavy responsibility for these crimes. We're being trained as dogs of war, taught to imprison ourselves in inescapable CELLves, mere mechanical receptacles, quantum singularities of PAIN. These doctors are producing more suffering than they cure.

Here's a question the APA can't answer: where's the evidence that this mind is as univocal as this throat? Where's the evidence that this mind flows 1 and only 1 named and known individuum?

Isn't that monotheism masquerading as science? In a presumably absolutely univocal universe, where is there room for dissent? What we have are absolute divine right Royalists and logical positivists, wee men afraid of their psychic shadows, in charge of a nuclear-powered republic. Everybody's just doing what some other Authority says is the right thing to do. Not very democratic at all, if you ask me.

"YAKKETY YAK!
Don't talk back"

--Some 50s band the name of which escapes me

Winter Soldiers Tell Their Heroic Tales: Jon Michael Turner

Winter Soldiers deliver the boons of their repeated trips to Hell and back

JON MICHAEL TURNER: Good afternoon. My name is Jon Michael Turner. I currently reside in Burlington, Vermont. I served with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines as an automatic machine gunner. There’s a term, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” But there’s also the term, “Eat the apple, F the corps, I don’t work for you no more.” [After telling the story of his trip to Hell and back, he finishes his own dressing down by saying:] I am no longer the monster that I once was. Thank you.

BRAVO!
And even Whitman would envy the man's poetic form. "That being said;" he presents his terrible facts for the world to see with that repeated phrase. "That being said," that's what I did, and for that I am sorry. He said testified for the same reason we all do it (take that plunge into the depths with only our blind inner vision leading us): to bring back a redeeming boon. Mr. Turner is a hero in the best sense of that greatly overused honorific.

There's nothing like the power of this kind of dramaturgical change in the known universe. But that hasn't stopped the APA from resorting to torture to try to invent an artificial substitute for an experience of the sublime capable of flipping enemies into allies like flipping a switch.

I guarantee you, that's what they're after. It's beyond a crime against humanity: it's a crime against Divinity as it passes through we humans.

I mean, it's just bad juju, dammit!

Dave "knowbuddhau" Parker
(son of a master chief, USN, with veterans going back to the Civil War)
Within the sound of the station horn that announces 8am and sunset on Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, under the growling dogs of war all day and night, aka
Oak Harbor, WA

What's over your coffee pot?

LIBERTY POEM

WALT WHITMAN


Courage! my brother or my sister!
Keep on! Liberty is to be subserv'd, whatever occurs;
That is nothing, that is quell'd by one or two failures, or any number of failures,
Or by the indifference or the ingratitude of the people, or by any unfaithfulness,
Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes.

What we believe in waits latent forever in Asia, Africa, Europe America, Australia, Cuba,
and all the islands and archipelagoes of the sea;
What we believe in invited NO 1, promises nothing, sits in calmness and light is positive and
composed, knows no discouragement,
Waits patiently its time a year, a century, a hundred centuries.

The battle rages with many loud alarm, and frequent advance and retreat,
The infidel triumphs, or supposes he triumphs,
The prison, scaffold, garotte, handcuffs, iron necklace and lead-balls do their work,
The named and unnamed heroes pass to other spheres,
The great writers and speakers are exiled, they lie sick in distant lands,
The cause is asleep, the strongest throats are choked with blood,
The young men droop their eyelashes to the ground when they meet;
But for all this Liberty has not gone out of the place, nor the infidel enter'd into full possession.

When Liberty goes out of a place it is not the first to go, nor the second or the third to go,
It waits for all the rest to go, it is the last.

When there are no memories of the lovers of the whole of the nations of the world,
The lovers' names scouted in the public gatherings by the orators,
Boys not christened after them, but christened after traitors and murders instead,
Laws for slaves sweet to the taste of the people -- the slave hunt acknowledged,
You or I walking abroad upon the earth, elated at the sight of slaves, no matter who they are,
And when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from that part of the earth,
Then shall the instinct of Liberty be discharged from that part of the earth,
Then shall the infidel and tyrant come into possession.

Then courage!
For, till all ceases, neither must you cease.

I do not know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself, or what any thing is for,)
But I will search carefully for it even in being foil'd,
In defeat, poverty, imprisonment -- for they too are great.

Did we think victory great?
So it is -- but now it seems to me, when it cannot be help'd, that defeat is great,
And that death and dismay are great.

Leaves of Grass, 1856-60

[After Liberty Poem. (1959). Lithograph. Jerome, Arizona: Rampart Press.]

Move the numbers and Impersonate NO 1 to Jack the Nation

That was it! @55:00-56:45, describing the sickening deceptiveness of Dick Cheney's declaration of "success" in Iraq, Patrick Cockburn nails it, but I doubt he's thinking of Iraq in mythosociopsychological terms like yours truly.

OK, two myths, two cosmologies: 1) The Imperturbable Cosmic Math, Answerable to NO 1; A) Being Aware of Becoming. The switch that took place millenia ago: move the numbers, impersonate NO 1, jack the nation!

We first hear of it in Egypt: The Secret of the Two Partners. We're supposed to be learning how we're all Being Eternity while Becoming Space/Time. Instead, these very cisterna mystica are stolen right out from within us, and replaced with mechanical receptacles of whatever it is our dear herdsmen feel like pumping us with today.

For example, just what in Earth is "non-dairy creamer?" Telling me "it's not torture" doesn't tell me what it is, AND it shoves a stiffarm in my face saying, "trust me."

[(Our unassailable standard of Living) //NO 1's Land, aka the atmosphere// (Greenhouse Gas emissions)] = Our Chilean kin blinded and cancer-ridden as a direct result, as if we each reached out and put out their eyes, declaring it finger-lickin' good free trade

Reductionism is dead, Stephen Jay Gould said February 19, 2001; with it dies mechanism as a basis for psychology. The social scientists who practice Newtonian psychology as their War on Terror effort are exposed as apprentices to our sorcerers of Death: Cheney, Rove, Zelikow, Clintons both, Carter,...all those who have weaponized myths and religions for breaking human spirits.

The fault is not with these walking talking cisterna mystica. The fault lies with our conception of ourselves: CELLf-imprisoned forever within inescapable egos; when in reality so-called, we are animated planetary {mater + pater rhyming in water}.

Look carefully at the spaces between these words: HA! fooled you, there are not "spaces;" look again, there's only the one background. Look at all the "things" in this cosmos!

Accepting the "life during wartime" framework steps into our opponents cosmos by definition. That's why I love the non-dualism of your slogan, "The War AND Peace report."

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Words and spaces;
Silences and sounds;
Absences and
Reunion

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We are more than only rational; we are intuitive as well. In this frameless mind, we are not infinitesimal, insignificant particles; we are all there is, simply becoming from within, as a plant grows from its apical meristems of root and shoot.

Here's a formula for the mythosociopsychology of this, our native cosmos:

beloved /UNION/ Beloved

The motto of this cosmos is:

In Union We Trust!

Being Aware of Becoming America

[First posted as a comment on 27 March 08 8:30 AM (GMT -0700) at BOVARD: The 9/11 Servility Reflex]


Q: What's a Zen poet & Kucinich supporter doing hanging out with the likes of supporters of McCain and Paul and "worse?"

A: Being aware of becoming America!

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I come to this out of a background of studying psychology as a natural science. I've been studying the role of our psychophysiology in empathically-mediated altruism since the late 80s.

I've seen pictures of kittens dressed up in the same paraphernalia (sans orange jumpsuit) as was Jose Padilla. The objective of it all is CELLF-imprisonment, the acceptance of a mere mechanical receptacle in place of these very *cisterna mystica.*

Are we human BEINGS, or mere machines? In what cosmos are we presently enacting our insane political theater?

I pick on the APA because I'm an American student of psychology (I used to be an AP Society member, the one more for natural scientists than for therapists), but it's the mechanization of Life in general that's the real target of my ire.

Both the APA and the APS believe in a mechanical cosmos. Both base themselves on an impossibility: the Newtonian point particle. Doing so implodes our shares of Psyche into black holes--and misconceived ones at that!

That wasn't legit back at the founding of modern psychology; it still isn't legit. Our psychology is unfounded.

Our psychology conceives of the cosmos as a political machine: one in which absolutely separate parts are forced into order from the outside by a Creator/God/King/Man among men. In this cosmos, TORTURE IS THE ORDER OF THE DAY.

We're dealing with authoritarian pinheads who can't think for themselves. I believe the medical profession to be the controlling authority to which BushRoveCo is listening when it demands the right to torture. They listen to the doctors and psychiatrists and psychotherapists oh my! and so feel relieved of responsibility for inhuman cruelty against our neighbors. For example, what is a polygraph but an electromechanical Iron Maiden?

Torture by isolation, the specific type practiced at Gitmo and elsewhere; torture by abuse of religion, which James Yee has said has become a weapon to break human spirits; torture by ever-present surveillance, by the implicit threat of Gitmo in the background; for psychologists, it's what we do.

Witness the treatment of climatologist Jim Hansen: his science was shaped to fit the policy, just as the intelligence was "fixed around" the policy of war with Iraq. Same thing goes on with psychology.

I propose a new fundamental unit for a living, breathing, organic psychology: the *cisterna mystica.*

The fundamental property of a mystic vessel is {self-filling/self-emptying}, aka kenosis. Our brains, our lungs, our hearts: all are kenotic vessels.

Neuronal models of stimuli are the {self-filling/self-emptying} vessels of Mind: into which experience is pouring; from which awareness is arising; and out of which we are {Mater & Pater flowing in Water}.

So even while we are here, now, being eternity; we are yet aware of becoming time- and space-embedded. This is a mystery to behold, within which we stand in awe.

Shall we trade our inalienable birthright: Divinely Being Eternally Aware of Becoming enmeshed in space and time; for reduction to mere mechanical receptacles of whatever our dear herdsmen decide to pump us with?

Shall we place our faith in the likes of Zelikow and Rice and Cheney and Rove? Or in our own experience?

Horton's Poetic Posts

Highlights from the blog of Scott Horton, No Comment, on Harper's Web site, that I think are sounding the same notes I'm trying to hit. Not that I think these posts are about me; no, these posts just are.

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"And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one strong, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!" –Czeslaw Milosz

The amazing thing about this quote is, it's almost identical to a revision of a Beatles quote I sent to friends around that time. I said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: I am She as She is Me and We are All Together. Googoogajoob!"

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"The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God’s empires but is not the immutable universal law." --Emerson

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"In order to obtain a correct estimate of ourselves, we must reflect on the results of the investigations which have been made into the dimensions and the distances of the spheres and the stars." --Maimonides

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"I wish that all nations may recover and retain their independence; that those which are overgrown may not advance beyond safe measures of power, that a salutary balance may be ever maintained among nations, and that our peace, commerce, and friendship, may be sought and cultivated by all." --T. Jefferson

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"You’ll hardly believe it,” said Douglass, addressing his companion as if there were no one else in the room, “but I gave my white mare and your bay horse four quarts of oats each, and there they are, eating side by side as quietly and contentedly as if they were of the same color! ‘Tis most extraordinary!” He did not laugh nor wink, but made his remark with a simple sincerity that was irresistible. There was a moment of silence. Then came the echo. Human wit had spoken, and a human heart answered.... A little tact had been a hundredfold more effectual in melting a prejudice than a series of solemn lectures." --Curtis, recollecting F. Douglass

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"The mission of religion is to comfort humanity on its way to the gallows. The mission of politics is to make her weary of life; the mission of humanity: to shorten her appointment with the gallows, and then to poison the executioner’s last meal. –Karl Kraus

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This grave is a sublime renunciation
“It grows dark about me, let there be light!”

For all the possibilities that depreciate human life,
The immortal dies. He believes and thanks.

The farewell from a darkening day lights the horizon
So that the sun may shine for you again.

Through the gates of Hell of today and beyond
He dreams trusting in a perpetual peace.

He says it and the world is true again
And God’s heart opens up again with “and yet…”

It is documented, share the faith
So the promised salvation will come to you.

Oh save yourself from the calamity, hasten to the
Spirit that will bring you through yourself to the proper course....

--Karl Kraus


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"The ideal of democracy rests on the belief that the view which will direct government emerges from an independent and spontaneous process. It requires, therefore, the existence of a large sphere independent of majority control in which the opinions of the individuals are formed." --Hayek

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"But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free." --Merton

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Leaves of Grass for my 44th Birthday

Last Wednesday was my birthday. I used the only gift I asked for, the only gift I got: a gift certificate at the local bookstore, Wind 'n Tide Books, to buy 2 editions of Leaves of Grass. I checked the Deathbed edition out of the local library some years ago. Now I have that and the recent 150th Anniversary Oxford edition, with an afterword by David S. Reynolds.

I've always been so impressionable, more like Polaroid-able, I've avoided other poets all this time. I'm shockingly poorly read, if you measure your reading by the numbers.

Reading Leaves of Grass the first time--I only skipped around--was like going out into an open expanse I never knew was there. It was a second-birth, from out of House poetry into boundless Field poetry.

You Just Can't Quit Mother Nature

Whence come human events? How is this {self-filling/self-emptying} trick working right now, dearly beloved? How is the inchoate meaning I intuit making its way from here to where you now become aware of it?

Hint: 2 word answer

The venerable former senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, after inartfully ticking off talking points, suddenly compares Spitzer's Fall to King David's murder of a lieutentant, by sending him to the front lines, as a ploy to bed the dead man's wife. A surprised Amy Goodman asks bluntly if he's making that comparison. "Yeah I am." He goes on to emphasize contrition and asking forgiveness as lessons that make for greatness in men like King David and Governor Spitzer.

See! That's exactly what I'm on about! You don't have to be a student of comparative mythology to see the obvious conflation of personal, political, and spiritual Fathers.

He uses the same term, "battle," to refer to actual warfare ("battlefront") and political campaigns "("battling," "battle"). With all due respect for his sincerity, McGovern's conception of Life as Holy War and his political cosmology (Creator/God/King/Priest/General/Man among men rules by force applied from without) are precisely the problem with so-called Western Civilization in general.

The Commons is a battlefield when you conceive of Life as Holy War between your own Better Halves.

Despite millenia of overt efforts to write Her out of the script, you just can't quit Mother Nature.

The Bodhisattva's Vow: "So we would all Go, not just I." --Margaret Roberts

WORD! Word for word, that's the Bodhisattva vow: not to enter Nirvana unless one/1/I can take every one/1/I else along. Amen, Sister Margaret! See her transform into Kali when circumstances draw that out of her, a merciful killer. When we cut weeds, they become fertilizer, sonomama; where is the cruelty? That Life lives on Life is the tragicomic pivot of Being Aware of Becoming.

Rev. Tom Davis defined Living as Loving, it was the first thing he said. Contrast these statements of identity with Suffering and the Sufferer with our foreign policy: "full spectrum dominance." That's Fear talking!

Militarists make the fundamental mistake of trying to use mechanical tools on a mythosociopsychic problem: Justice. You can't machine Justice, despite what that triple monster, Karl Rove alias Grendel alias Moby Dick alias Lord Voldemort, thinks. He really thinks he's invisible!

Deep within every mythos, usually in the mystics, is the same Truth: I am She as She is Me and We are All Together! Jesus was crucified for saying what the scriptures themselves say, but a small group of militaristic madmen demanded a monopoly on all the proceeds of Life. Way way back when, we got Fooled out of our inalienable birthright.

The Myth-Jacking Trick: an epistemological trompe l'oeuil of the the Inner Eye

[(Absolute Supremacy) /No 1's Land/ (Absolute Subjugation)]

This is the Secret of the Two Partners, perverted to private gain. Instead of teaching us that we all share in the divinity of Being Aware of Becoming, a moat is drawn around the divine, /No 1's Land/. No joining, no communion, no Flow. NO 1 has the gall to come right out and say, "full spectrum dominance!" NO 1 said to torture our kin.

The disembodied voice of authority, the infamous and storied role of NO 1 in public theater, is substituted for our own experience of Being. Sure, this is useful and necessary; I'm a tutor, the value of teaching isn't lost on me. But whom does that leave ultimately in charge? NO 1! Must I teach what I know to be wrong, just because it's in ink on paper? No, I won't press my neighbor to death under stones or the juggernaut of "national security."

beloved /Union/ Beloved is a more perfect Universe, a cosmos of bliss, not pain.

O sister my Sister! O brother my Brother! O NO 1 my NO 1! Life is for Loving!

[must be something in that Green Mountain Coffee, WOOHOO!]
dp

Abortion foes plant flag of Western Patriarchy up inside Gaia's inner sanctum

Dearly beloved,
In pursuit of their own goals, no absolute boundary is recognized: they're charging right up inside Gaia Herself, to plant the legalistic lever of their mechanistic Law in the most fertile of Fertiles.

Out ahead of themselves, they project a Wall of Denial, too high/wide/deep for any Bad to get through; a mythosociopsychic bulldozer blade, the cutting edge of Western Patriarchy; with a sound-proof, air-conditioned, doppleganger-designed interior! aka the War Room. The War Rooms are inside their heads! It's peaceful here. Reminds me of a Kerouac haiku.

Useless! Useless!
Heavy rain falls
Into the Sea

--Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)


When water
pours into Water
what is There to get wet?

Mythology is to Religion as Operating System is to Application. The present dominant mythos defines us as essentially CELLf-imprisoned quantum singularities of pure pain in an egocentric cosmos compounded of good and evil with an absolute and eternal divide between us and the Beloved. Is it any wonder that we have more people in brick & mortar prisons than everyone else?

Gitmo is being used to learn how to smash the human psyche, clear the ground, and rebuild to suit new owner. We're being machined on the absolutely most fundamental level.

The best way to comprehend our fellow Americans in their militaristic madness, is "Life as Holy Warriors." They're not kidding. Only religious zeal and fervor could account for the $3 trillion War of the Centuries. Data won't do it: reading a legal brief in the court of public opinion right now is like reading ingredients to the starving. Don't get me wrong: if he wasn't a McCain supporter, I might hero-worship Scott Horton; as it is, I love him like a brother who listens to music painful to my ears.

I take it as a personal challenge to awaken America. It's put up or shut up time for poets.
dp

Live Blogging Democracy Now! Monday March 10, 2008 (beta)

[Break]
Buffalo Springfield sung live by a young woman with huge sunglasses.

I haven't heard the name of the singer yet, but she completely f*ed up that song. It's supposed to point to the folly of all sides saying "hooray for OUR side and only OUR side."

Partisanship offers only an illusion of progress, while it's actually turning the Wheel of Samsara, of "now you beat me, now I beat you." "Us v. Them" is the problem, not a solution!
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See hear BG T. Hartmann impersonate NO 1

Pentagon Seeks Death Penalty in 9/11 Cases

In Washington, Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, appearing in the storied role of NO 1, announced the filing of capital charges against six Guantanamo prisoners Monday [February 11) for their alleged roles in the 9/11 attacks. NO 1 drilled it into the audience: NO 1 intends to kill these men, our kin, on the say-so of secret evidence in secret courts. NO 1 but NO 1 could see the blood on NO 1's hands at the time!

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From an e-mail sent that day, with revised & extended remarks:

He reads that statement as if directing live fire at the room.

Here's the trick:
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The role of NO 1 is being played by Brig. Gen. T. Hartman:
We men say, in our Sunday-best voices: We are not a nation of men; we are a nation of laws made by wee men. That's different. When I wear this costume, stand at this pulpit, and speak like this, you all just believe what I say, and no one you know gets hurt.

We are not men, we are makers of law. This is the chamber where law is made. You will accept the product of this chamber as Law. You have no choice. You're just a voting machine on 2 legs. Do as you're told, especially when NO 1 comes right out and says it like this.

We stole the insignia of office, so why should the Law stop us from putting the fear of Gitmo into everyone with them?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Discovery Channel has, of course, inadvertently given Gibney's film the highest possible honor. Now the story of Dilawar's myth-jacking speaks in this Louder Voice.

These are absolute divine right royalists and positivists: they're terrified of the Line and The Other Side. They're using the nuclear arsenal of the United States to silence the voices in their heads. Which only makes them Fear louder. And so on.
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In Union We Trust

Seneca's Measure of the Human Life (in Scott Horton's 8 March 08 blog, No Comment, appearing in Harper's Magazine) is very interesting. I think it's losing something in translation. If I'm hearing aright, its about the opposition of Being and Becoming, of Eternity and Time, of wu-hsin (no thinking) and Making Ratios.

Comparing our Awareness of Becoming to the universe at large, is a vivid example, illustrating a new cosmology in which to understand psychology, sociology, and mythology. It goes like this.

Looking up into the night sky, the tendency is to feel very small, very insignificant indeed. But, dear reader, this has the effect, on our quantum shares of Psyche, of collapsing our Being into psychic black holes--and misconceived ones at that!

Take a look at this illustration from 321space.com

For me, the crucial difference, between Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian relativity, has to do with the fundamental units of analysis. For Newton, of course, it was the point particle in a vacuum. Tragically, the APA adopted this as our model of ego. But Einstein's universe is absolutely seamless; there is no absolute and eternal Other; absolutely speaking, there's no rupture from here to the other side of Being. The fundamental unit of Einstein's universe, I argue, is the cisterna mystica, a {self-filling/self-emptying} Vessel.

That's what's going on in this illustration. The thing on the left is most salient to my point. That's a black hole, with opposing jets, and a disk of the stuff of which we are made. Is the star on the right being devoured? feeding it's child? Neither: {self-filling/self-emptying}, that's all there is to Life.

Looking up and misconceiving our egos as dust motes, has the tragic effect of collapsing Psyche into quantum singularities of pain, with the Commons shrink-wrapped around our inescapable egos. Here's a formula for the mythosociopsychology of that cosmos:

[(Absolute Supremacy) /No1's Land/ (Absolute Subjugation)] = Sucks to be you!

Note that the area designated "No 1's Land" is what's left of the Commons. This induces a condition I call CELLf-imprisonment. In this mechanical society, we machine others into compliance through application of overwhelming force. Torture is the Order of the Day in this misbegotten cosmos.

We have another way of knowing, another way of Being Aware of Becoming. As Vonnegut argues in Galapágos, we're bewitched by this very ability right here: to order and Flow formerly inchoate meaning into these very cisterna mystica, passing them over to our Beloved, where they self-empty of their own accord. (Cha-no-yu, the tea ceremony, has its roots in Zen, for obvious reasons.)

You aren't forcing the meaning out of these very words, I trust; I trust the meaning self-empties.

Our ratio-making mind comes out of a non-dual, selfsame background. With the invention of maths and maps and words and such, we silly djinni have seduced ourselves into them, mistaking their entirely porous walls for impassable barriers. The little tiny segment at the heart of every ratio is mistaken for an impassable barrier: too deep to go under, too high to go over, too wide to go around. So go right through!

You are overlooking the spaces between these words. You are passing your eyes along this line of (squiggles on a contrasting backgrUnd), and its contents are self-emptying. By Xeno's paradox, though, these Voids could become impassable, too.

We are more than only rational; we are intuitive as well. In this frameless mind, we are not infinitesimal, insignificant particles; we are all there is, simply becoming from within, as a plant grows from its apical meristems of root and shoot.

Here's a formula for the mythosociopsychology of this, our native cosmos:

beloved /UNION/ Beloved

The motto of this cosmos is:

In Union We Trust

As you can plainly see, this is a more perfect Union, pouring forth a cosmos in which, for example, homosexual marriage is right at home. In this cosmos, we cultivate an ethos of hospitality. In this cosmos, empathically-mediated altruism (my specialty), like the "mind-brain" problem, are entirely natural, no problem at all; mere artifacts of our assumption of the inviolability of the Law of the Excluded Middle (the only law BushRoveCo ever obeys). Schopenhauer's amazement, that one person should help another, even at great peril or certain death, is based on the false assumption that there "really are" 2 beings to begin with.

As you may know, the Upanishads long ago answered every child's question: "what's that?" Tat tvam asi, that thou art! "Thou art that, my beloved child, and guess what? That loves that!"

In this cosmos, empathic compassion and cooperation, not Social-Darwinian competition, are the natural and proper bases for human social intercourse. It's "into" this cosmos we must "move," even though we've been Here All this Time.

Which brings me back to 'put up or shut up time' for poets. Poetry and revolution go together like thunder and lightning: though they may be named separately, just as 'you' and 'I' are, dearly beloved, they are selfsame.

As many know better than I, the Scientific Method is not a neutral instrument. It presupposes a dead machine as a subject, then confirms its own prejudice, making a Frankenstein's monster of our own Mother Earth, which we then proceed not to husband, but to pimp for all She's worth.

So this is the question at the heart of my poetry: are we cisterna mystica, or mere mechanical receptacles? Do we trust our experiences, or do we see and believe what we're told to from "on High?"

Does Samantha Power Mean a Myth-Jacking Monster?

To what kind of monster does Samantha Power refer? Obviously, I'd like to think she means the type who would stop at nothing, including fear-mongering tactics that already introduce the Dark Side here in the primaries. Given that the use of the term is out of character and inconsistent with previous praise of Clinton, I think it's reasonable to conclude, she meant the myth-jacking type of monster.

“I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign,” Power said in a statement.

Power, a top foreign-policy adviser to Obama, originally told Scotsman newspaper that Clinton “is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything.” Apparently she and the paper had different definitions of “off the record.” She later apologized, declaring her admiration for Hillary Clinton."
[from Slate's Trailhead]

Thaddeus Who?

[from Shotgun's Home of the Civil War]

Thaddeus Stevens
(1792-1868)

Known primarily as an extreme Radical Republican, Thaddeus Stevens was in fact a champion of the equality of man-rich and poor, black and white. Born into a poor Vermont family, Stevens was put through school by his widowed mother.

Graduating from Dartmouth, he moved in 1815 to Pennsylvania. Studying law, he later set up his practice in Gettysburg where he became known for defending runaway slaves gratis.

His reputation grew for his use of the insanity defense in a murder case, a novelty at the time. Eventually he acquired a great deal of land in the area and went into the iron business. Although one of his forges was a frequent money loser, he kept it going rather than displace his employees. In politics he moved from Federalist to Anti-Mason, to Whig, and finally to Republican. He served in the state legislature from 1833 until 1842, where he is most remembered for his defense of free public schools. He was a master at the distribution of patronage, especially on the unnecessary Gettysburg railroad. In 1842 he returned to the management of his personal affairs, including the donation of land to what is now Gettysburg College. Elected to Congress as a Whig in 1848, he was a constant opponent of extending slavery or appeasing the South in any way.

During the Civil War he wielded great influence as head of the House Ways and Means Committee. Although he had supported Lincoln in 1860, he was a constant critic of his moderate actions against the South, favoring instead a war of extermination and recolonization of the South, abolishing the old state lines. With his control of the Congress' purse, he became a leader of the Radical Republicans. The Confederates, however, got even with him for his harsh rhetoric by burning his Caledonia ironworks during the Gettysburg Campaign. Stevens provided for the support of some of the families, who were unemployed by this action, for as long as three years. As chairman of the Committee on Reconstruction, he became an opponent of the Lincoln-Johnson policy as too lenient. It was Stevens who was the prime instigator of the impeachment proceedings against Johnson. He died a few months after the acquittal. In a final declaration for equality, he arranged to be buried in a remote cemetery since it did not have racial barriers. (McCall, Samuel W., Thaddeus Stevens)
Source: "Who Was Who In The Civil War" by Stewart Sifakis

I'm So Vain!

On Th 6 March @ 10:57 AM Eastern, I sent a question to Prof. Horton; only 21 minutes later, @ 11:18 AM, a post on his No Comment blog appears to answer that question. So I'm prescient AND incredibly vain.
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Dear Friends,
Yesterday I posed the following question; today, unless I'm prescient, Prof. Horton appears to have answered it.

"Baconian-Cartesian-Newtonian mechanics inform our present political cosmos. Prof. Horton, would it be fair to call Bacon the Fredo of the 16th century? It's no wonder at all that we now use mechanical metaphors for psychology and mythology....The solution to our national problems, I dare say, is to be found not within a mechanical, Ptolemaic cosmos centered on quantum singularities of pain."

Ask my banker: I don't do numbers so well. What I do do well is mytho-poetic prosimetric expressions.

Old School, Royalist Cosmology (based on point particles in an absolute vacuum)
Fundamental unit: mechanical receptacles

[(Absolute Supremacy) / No 1's Land / (Absolute Subjugation)] = "Sucks to be you"

In this misbegotten cosmos of pain, the Commons is shrink-wrapped around pin-point egos, quantum singularities of Psyche CELLf-imprisoned at the behest of our modern day priests, doctors and psychologists and generals oh my! who preach Life as Holy War, to whom religion is just another weapon for breaking human spirits. See also, Guantánamo, and the US prison system.
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New School Cosmology

Fundamental unit: cisterna mystica: {self-filling/self-emptying} vessels of Being Aware of Becoming, the centers of which are everywhere, but the circumferences of which are No Where.

beloved / Union / Beloved

Obviously, this is a more perfect Union
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

dp

No Comment

by Scott Horton

March 6, 11:18 AM

Mukasey’s Law

Much of the constitutional struggle that engulfed the English-speaking world in the seventeenth century revolved around two fairly simple phrases. One was “no man is above the law,” and the other “the king can do no wrong.” Each of these expressions reflected a fundamentally different notion of the rule of law, and they could not be reconciled.

[clip]

For Michael Mukasey the view that Tom Paine announced and the Framers embraced requires some emendations. It is not the law that is king in America. Rather it is the president who has assumed the royal prerogatives of the king. He does not serve the law and cannot be made to obey it, because he is the law. And if he directs others to disobey the law, then their conduct can likewise be no crime, because “the king can do no wrong.” Perhaps Mukasey has forgotten the outcome of those three revolutions. Perhaps he requires a reminder.