Friday, September 28, 2007

It's Like Deja Vu All Over Again

The Lieberman/Kyl amendment passed in the Senate yesterday. Basically it is about combating and containing Iran. Iran isn’t actually doing anything but they need to be stopped anyway because they are part of an overall plan and that plan hasn’t really got anything to do with what any of the targets involved are engaged in. They are just there as parts of the plan and the plan demands that they be presented as obstacles to the plan so that they can be rearranged according to plan. That’s clear isn’t it?

In 1998 we had the Iraq Liberation Act. Now we have the Lieberman/Kyl amendment, courtesy of Israeli sock puppet, Smokin’ Joe Lieberman. It’s like déjà vu all over again as the redoubtable Yogi Berra once said.

A big part of the déjà vu all over again factor is that Hillary Clinton, who voted to go to war against Iraq and has, more or less, admitted that she was wrong about that has now started voting for the same thing all over again for Iran. So did Harry Reid and 26 other ‘democratic’ senators. There is no more America in the sense that one might have understood it to be. That’s gone.

There is no more democratic process. There is no more freedom except to do as you are told. The Democrats swept into congress on an anti-war ‘get out of Iraq’ sentiment expressed by the American people at the polls. It was a clear hope in the minds of the majority of Americans that this would lead also to penetrating investigations into the secret apparatus of a criminal administration and thereby to impeachment proceedings as well. Something... someone... stopped it all dead.

Bad shit is twisting in the wind. Horrible possibilities are afoot. Fountain pens filled with human blood are dancing across documents filled with a dense fabric of words that twist like venomous snakes across the page. Signatures... handshakes... cocktails in the VIP lounge... hail fellows, well met, exchange crocodile smiles as the promise of black bags filled with cash are dancing like sugar plums in their minds. They know what’s up; you don’t. Everything is just the way it is supposed to be... all over again.

They didn’t win the war in Afghanistan. They are not winning the war in Iraq. It’s time to move on to another war in a country with a much stronger military, more people and much more land. It’s time to really pound the living shit out of someone and that someone, is Iran.

It’s another war based on the same lies that started the other wars and it’s going to be an economic boomtown; quite literally. It’s going to go ‘BOOM!’ and money and freedom and the grace of God are going to come down like bloody confetti as if Mount St. Helens had gone off all over again.

One million dead Iraqis is not enough. A human crisis of four million homeless Iraqis is not enough. The genocide in Gaza and the West Bank is not enough. The murderous assault on Lebanon was not enough. Never mind that the residents of Iraq had nothing to do with requesting this kindness. Never mind that the residents of Gaza and the West Bank had nothing to do with requesting this kindness. Never mind that the residents of Lebanon had nothing to do with requesting this kindness... just never mind. Stick those ear-buds back into place and turn on the GameBoy.

Hot searing agony... women and children and men... lives ripped apart... body parts flying... the wailing of the survivors, their lives bleeding away into the sand. All of this constructed for the profit and entertainment of the men and women for whom this is just business as usual... all over again.

Private Contractors shooting women, children and men for sport... free from all legal complication... ‘Rape and pillage, rape and pillage, let’s go out and burn a native village. You can’t have one, you can’t have one, you can’t have one without the other...’

Don’t ask yourself why. You don’t want to know why. Don’t wonder why private contractors exceed the number of troops and why they are paid obscene amounts of money while the soldiers subsist on poverty pay. Don’t question what Custer Battles and Bechtel and Halliburton and others have been up to. Don’t ask, don’t tell and don’t look. What would Jesus do? Jesus wept.

Fat, red-cheeked, Christian ministers with a flash of gold at the wrist exhort the faithful that it is God’s will that these heathens must burn in Hell fire on Earth. Afterwards they frolic with young boys and girls and sleep on black bag pillows filled with cash. The rapture is coming... the rapture is coming...

And the media is all the same media and the lies are all the same lies and the walking dead, no longer American flesh-bots parade in their quivering Jello suits; these steamer trunk bodies of the over-fed, unthinking prisoners of runaway appetite. WE ARE THE EMPIRE!!!

In countries around the globe, dishonorable men and women sell their souls for black bags filled with cash and promises of more to come while millions await the price they have to pay so that these bloat-bags of false gravitas can dine in the High Tower far above the carnage and the torment.

Step by step... the same thing all over again. On the one hand, a nation of self-indulgent fools, seduced by vapid entertainments and obvious lies, step back and let the murders continue and increase as they lose everything that made their excesses possible. On the other hand... terror and torture and want. It’s like a movie we were watching and then we turned around and found ourselves inside of it.

But you know what I’m talking about. You KNOW. Deep inside you know that this is wrong. It takes more than what you are, what you have become, to stand forth and be counted against it. It’s the easier way for each of you to hide among the millions and risk the odds that you won’t be seen and known for the coward that you are. Later you can tell the tale of how you did everything you could. Later you can manufacture and embellish the lie of how you were among the few who found their courage in the final hour; no, you will tell us all how steadfast you were at the start and how steadfast you remained.

There are others who laugh at this. There are others who sneer and mock and make light of every dreadful moment as each new one exceeds the other. I don’t know what to make of either of you. You have made something of yourselves that I cannot define. Neither fit into a category that is recognizably human as I understand it.

There is a Sufi tale of a master who had three disciples. He gave each of them a chicken and told them to go and kill it where no one could see them. Two of the disciples came back fairly quickly with a dead chicken. The third did not come back for a long time and when he returned he still had the live chicken in his hands. The master asked him what had happened. The disciple answered. “I could not do it master. Everywhere I went the chicken could see.”

Visible sings: 911 was an Inside Job by Les Visible♫ Something Good (is Coming Soon) ♫
'Something Good (is Coming Soon)' is track no. 10 of 10 on Visible's 2002 album
'911 was an Inside Job'

Lyrics (pops up)

911 was an Inside Job by Les Visible

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The Truth is a Dangerous Thing

Yes it is. It is often inconvenient; uncomfortable, embarrassing- confining under the wrong circumstances and... dangerous. There are countless examples in history of how the truth interferes with you; ask Galileo, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno.

It’s no different today than it ever was. One of the most amazing things is how people will insist on supporting a lie even when the truth is patently obvious. Quite often the people who support a lie are completely uninformed about the details that compose the lie or the truth of the matter. They just decide something is so because that is what they were told and that’s that. In many cases, when the lie is coming from the authorities; even though it is a known fact that the particular authorities have lied about nearly everything they have said previously, it’s just easier to accept and often safer too.

Another thing about lies is that when they are routinely reported in the various media they take upon themselves the veneer of the plausible. When you factor in government spokespeople and seemingly respectable members of the business and religious worlds along with anyone from anywhere who gets face time in front of you due to a perceived expertise on the matter under discussion- you can find yourself hemmed in on all sides by the sirens singing and unless you are one of the few; those with a thirst for the real, a curious nature that won’t be diverted or an intellect that possesses an objective reasoning capacity it is likely to overwhelm you. If you are such a person, things begin to reveal themselves to you in a way they do not reveal themselves to the majority of personalities under hypnotic control.

It is nearly impossible to convince a hypnotized person of their state because they are, in fact, hypnotized. It’s the same with dreaming and takes place in the same area of the mind. Only suffering seems to have any effect on the dreaming, hypnotized state. Sooner or later, after many traumas and disappointments, something within the person begins to long for a way out. Until the soul becomes thirsty for reality it will go on being the ball in the pinball machine and each life is counted as each ball goes down the chute and another ball comes into play.

Those who are not hypnotized are aware of a divine symmetry in the physical universe. It’s a natural and obvious perception. They also know that everything visible has an invisible source. It’s basic math. It is how physicists finally came to the realization that the universe is thought born. Independent thought is possible... however, the majority of humanity is herded like livestock by the common thoughts of their time; their hungers and hopes, their weaknesses and all of the common drives that hide the true light behind the veil of phenomena.

People want to be safe. Safety without the awareness of what real security consists of is only a temporary fix. It doesn’t matter how big your walls are, how many guards and guns you have. You may command armies but disease, old age and death will find a way in. Watching people go about their lives as if there were some permanence and harmony that will always continue is like being in a mental institution. It can be tough being in an institution when you aren’t actually crazy. You find that you have to swim in the opposite direction of the other fish without drawing attention to yourself.

People do not want to hear the truth. The truth is the enemy of all that they attempt to build for themselves. The truth knows that wealth is often a curse and beauty too. Fame and power lead you into a world very different than you imagined it to be before you set out in pursuit of these states. But the power of the hypnosis is very strong. It seems that most people are just incapable of stepping outside of their subjective state for long enough to look directly at their condition.

This vast shopping mall of a world offers a million products. It promises you everything and delivers none of what it promises aside from temporary self-forgetting. The desire to escape from reflection on the profundity of now is a consuming thing. It is big business. The main business of the world is to make you forget why you are here. That’s enough for most people. If replacing the truth with something closer to the heart’s desire puts a rosy light on the approaching tomb of darkness then, why not? That is something for everyone to ponder, or more likely avoid, at their leisure.

Searching for the truth is like panning for gold in a dangerous stream. Telling the truth is akin to painting a target on your forehead. Why would you tell the truth? Telling the truth goes contrary to the mercantile instincts and contrary to the mercantile game set of the world you walk in. Those who manufacture the illusion of the manifest world are not amused by the things you say which reveal the world to be something else beneath its air-brushed, glossy exterior.

There has been an opportunistic machine, relentlessly at work for 6 years because of an attack that took place on New York City. Observing where certain powerful forces have taken the world since, it should stir the curiosity of anyone possessing any as to how serendipitously fortunate this event was for them. It has justified all manner of violence, repression and lies and effectively divided the country against itself. It has cost the lives of a million Iraqis and displaced millions more. It has justified the ongoing and brutal hammering of The Palestinians. It has resulted in the suspension of many previous freedoms and that goes on apace as I speak. Well, it could be coincidence.

But... when one actually investigates the evidence one finds that there is very little to support the official version and a quantitatively enormous amount of evidence that says something smells bad. If what we had been told was true there would have been no resistance of the sort that occurred when questions arose and there was hard refusal on the part of the government to release key evidence that has yet to be released today. Things just don’t add up; not just a few things but a mountain of things.

If someone knows certain truths, for some reason, they feel compelled to share them. Parents like to pass on important truths to their children. Wanting to share the truth with others seems to be born out of love and compassion for others. What other reason could there be? There’s no money in the truth. The truth is already a currency of its own. Shading and shaping the truth does have money in it, lots of money. You can’t really shade and shape the truth but you can make it appear so.

Caring about the truth is a hard thing. People really don’t want to hear it. They are already afraid of what the truth might be which, in a particular way, indicates that they may well know what the truth is after all.

If you are going to tell the truth- and God help you if you do- you can’t be concerned with the static that ensues and it’s pointless to argue about it. It either is or it isn’t and that will show itself in time as it did in the case of Galileo and many others. It comes down in the end- as does everything- to what you value and hold dear. It speaks to intention and ultimately, to where you end up.

In the New Testament there is made mention of a broad highway and a narrow, seldom used road. On this broad highway are all of the souls who pursue the shiny things and the lies which they hope will come true. On the narrow path are those few souls engaged in the truth’s pursuit of itself. It’s been going on since the beginning and it goes on today the same as it ever did. The forces massed against the truth and the methods of aggression against those who would tell it are the same as ever. The saving grace within the intensity of struggle for the light of the truth is that the truth is a living thing and it endures and will endure long after the world that opposes it is gone.

The truth is a dangerous thing but not nearly as dangerous as the alternatives.

Visible sings: Songwriter by Les Visible♫ Gone Baby Gone ♫
'Gone Baby Gone' is track no. 6 of 10 on Visible's 2006 album 'Songwriter'
Lyrics (pops up)

Songwriter by Les Visible

Monday, September 03, 2007

The Curious Case of Senator Larry Craig

A powerful senator from the most powerful nation in the world walks into a public restroom in an airport and proceeds to get himself arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer. The bathroom is notorious for casual gay sex and mounting complaints were the basis for the officer to be in that restroom. There’s no reason to disbelieve the scenario. Consonant with that we have the senator pleading guilty to a misdemeanor as a result of his being arrested.

The senator showed none of the outrage that he might have shown if this had been some sort of a set-up other than the sort of set-up that it was. He seems to say it was just a matter of mistaken signals; that he didn’t intend what the police officer surmised from the foot-tapping and the hand sliding along the partition and the senator’s foot touching the officer’s foot under the partition.

According to the officer, the senator actually stared into the officer’s stall through the doorjamb for what, in terms of ordinary bathroom etiquette, seems like a really long time before the rest of the activity occurred.

What are we to make of this? A powerful, Republican senator throws his career and his reputation; everything his life had culminated in, into the toilet and flushes it away because of the desire for anonymous sex with anyone who might be available in a public bathroom. It looks like a case of temporary insanity. It defies logic and it defies a powerful survival instinct. We can only imagine how powerful a survival instinct an American senator would have.

Lately a selection of Nietzsche’s quotes has been coming up in my mind because of things I have read in the news. There is one that perfectly fits this occasion; “Those whom the God’s would destroy they first drive mad.”

Over the last several years we have seen an epidemic of powerful individuals sacrificing everything they worked for on the altar of strange appetite. In most cases these individuals have been outspoken critics of the behavior they were compromised by. They have been exposed as classic hypocrites. Most of them have been Republicans.

It can be assumed that Larry Craig could have satisfied his desire for casual sex in a number of less dangerous ways. He could have had a remote cabin in Idaho. They have plenty of those and he could have rented someone for the times he needed someone. I imagine that he has plenty of money and there are thousands of websites where he could have ordered up just what he was looking for. Instead, he took pot luck in a public toilet with scant amenities and a serious degree of difficulty in the performance of his objective. Is he an adrenaline junkie?

Most of us are not powerful senators. We don’t talk to the president of the United States on the phone and interact with the movers and shakers in the world. We might be excused for a lack of judgment such as Senator Craig displayed. If we got arrested probably no one would have paid attention. We’d have soon been on our way to do whatever it was we did or wanted to do somewhere else.

We know that members of the Reagan-Bush White House were involved in a rent boy pedophile ring we know there was something strange going on in the Bush-Cheney White House with James Gannon we’ve heard a lot of strange things about Karl Rove and Dennis Hastert and Mitch McConnell that can make a guy wonder. Are the rumors true? I don’t know and I don’t care enough to stockpile evidence. I’m not curious about a person’s sexual inclinations. Others might be, especially when these people are such massive hypocrites; especially when these people deal death on a daily basis in pursuit of their twisted agendas.

Most people don’t want to know about the international pedophile rings that count among their members some of the richest, best connected and most important people on the planet. It’s too scary to think about. Thousands of children go missing every day and no one hears from most of them again. In France, a few years ago, hundreds of young girls disappeared and we never heard what that was about either. Everywhere you went in France there were posters up with the faces of these young girls.

The Franklin cover-up of the boy prostitutes in the Reagan Bush White House is a fact but... so much for the importance of facts and the rule of law. The hundreds of entries of Jim Gannon visiting the White House and then not signing out and signing out but not having signed in are a fact. There’s a lot of not so funny stuff going on in the cesspits of power but we don’t get any clarification and it all just slips away.

The Bush Crime Family is unrivaled in American history and it’s no great reach to assume that no matter what we think we know; the truth is far more terrible than our speculations.

Why would a powerful Republican senator self destruct in such an improbable way? How many other representatives and senators and sundry are up to the same thing right now? From what we’ve seen it is probably a lot. How much blackmail is operational right now? Probably a lot.

I feel sorry for Senator Craig. Whenever I hear about things like this I think, “There but for fortune go I.” Anyone of us could find ourselves in similar straights over the course of a lifetime. Now people laugh at the senator and make fun of him. He’s an international joke. It didn’t help for him to have been so predatory about Bill Clinton. It never helps to be self righteous and Senator Craig was that.

I think of all the ruined lives that our dysfunctional plumbing has caused. When you break it down it’s just the simple desire to be touched, to touch someone. If may be socially unacceptable in some cases but it’s really something to do with wanting love; wanting to feel close and have some kind of release with another human being.

Life can really be tragic. I don’t know what to think some times. I feel bad about Senator Craig. I can’t join in the joking and mocking and playground behavior of the bully boys scouting for the next victim of their scorn. Part of me says that he got what he deserved but I’m not sure that’s for me to say. I’d rather not pass judgment. I am keenly aware of human weakness; no stranger to it in my life or in the lives that I observe.

One thing I know, whatever Senator Craig is guilty of is small potatoes compared to some of the things going on. The press had no trouble getting into detail about Larry Craig. They seem to have real difficulty addressing what was happening in the Reagan-Bush White House and in the Bush-Cheney White House. They don’t seem very sanguine about the international pedophile activity that includes so many powerful individuals. Maybe they remember about Danny Casolaro and others who went looking into things they shouldn’t have.

Well, I guess we’ll just soldier on. The media and the government and most of the world’s market forces are all in the hands of people who get up to much stranger things than Larry Craig did. Whatever you might imagine it is probably worse than that. Nobody has much to say about these things. We know they happen. That’s just the way it is.

Visible sings: The eponymous Les Visible Music Album♫ Sing it Loud ♫
'Sing it Loud' is track no. 6 of 10 on Visible's eponymous
'Les Visible' Music Album

Lyrics (pops up)

The eponymous Les Visible Music Album