Emergency Broadcast System

Abandon Ship!

Here's the link to our new, temporary home. Hope to have a permanent fix soon.

Time for an appeal, here

If you've found this and it's not on the main page, can I ask a favour? Please submit a problem report to Blogger. Maybe adding some voices to my own may get their attention. You could also reference this thread on Google's Blogger Support Group.

A problem report should generate an emailed bot response within a couple of days, and Blogger then expects an emailed reply if the problem is persisting.

Thanks.

The Revolution Will Not Be Webcast

Broken pipes, broken tools, people bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking - Everything is broken. - Bob Dylan

If Nazi Germany had been wired with fibre optics, I doubt whether the White Rose would have distributed a single leaflet. Perhaps, rather than cranking them out on a hand press, Hans, Sophie and the rest would have spammed Hitler Youth forums from cyber cafes across southern Germany. That is, if they had first evaded the Gestapo's Carnivore, sifting every email and seemingly anonymous web comment for anti-Fuhrer sentiment. (A headline today: "Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites".)

Freedom of expression is often regarded as America's distinguishing liberty. "That's what's great about this country and all free countries: freedom of speech," Neil Young told CNN six weeks ago. "That's what makes us different from everybody else." Though it's suffered multiple paper cuts from the Patriot Act, it's still the go-to characteristic for those who choke on Nazi analogies. (Bush isn't Hitler, runs the argument, because you have the right to call him Hitler.) But it's also the cheapest freedom rulers can afford, when popular expression is cut off from the means of effecting popular change. Nothing is risked by allowing people to say what they feel, so long as it's understood they cannot act upon it outside of the unresponsive and compromised political system. But when the elections are rigged, and most politicians of prominence are beholden to the same security apparatus, what do you do then?

America is a free-speech zone, and Americans remain fenced within it so long as they mistake risk-averse expression with direct yet non-violent action. It's the difference between shouting slogans on a sunny afternoon and Tiananmen Square. And so much of the ineffectual sloganeering now takes place only in the cocooned and virtual America, where the empire obligingly hosts its chat rooms of dissent for political deviants. It has no worries, so long as everyone keeps talking.

I don't think I like paperless revolutions anymore. It seems the more sophisticated our means of communication, the more illusory our ownership of the media, and the greater the disconnect between our words and our words' implications. Under the Nazis, hand-cranking the press in the basement took courage. Under the NSA, posting online may take nothing more than naivité.


By the way, I'm still trying to get Blogger to address my broglem of the non-updating home page, though I'm increasingly pessimistic. So I'm beginning to consider alternatives. In the event Blogger is finished with me, I've registered rigorousintution.ca, and am starting to scout about for hosts and publishing options. (WordPress or Movable Type?) If I move - and I'd rather not, because the thought gives me a sick headache - I would want to leave this blog standing as an additional archive, but copy everything over, including comments. (I'd also like to consolidate the discussion board, bringing over the posts into a php forum.) I've received some good tips already, and would be happy for more. And thanks for your patience.

Mephistopheles

No kingdom made of human hands can stand
Too bad about MacBeth
In order to possess that corruptible crown
Gotta make a deal with Mr Death - Bob Dylan

Faust was a doctor, and it was for knowledge that he signed his contract with the Devil. According to Goethe, modern science - Carl Sagan's "candle in the dark" of a demon-haunted world - is ignorantly under the patronage of the demon Mephistopheles.

Rupert Sheldrake brushes against Faust and our own lousy bargains in his trialogue with Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham entitled Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness:

How seriously do we need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization is under the possession of such a spirit.... How much are fallen angels actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology? Is a great war between the good and evil angels being acted out on Earth? We hardly know how to think or talk about such possibilities since they are so alien to the official, standard models of Western history.

Like Faust, the original sin of intelligence agencies is the appetite for unbound knowledge. The death-dealing, the drugs and guns, the fellowship of gangsters and terrorists all follow upon this seemingly benign desire.

The CIA damned itself at its birth by sheltering and shepherding the devils of Nazi Germany into the United States, and casting them as seeds across the western world. And it was all for knowledge. For knowledge of camp experiments, of anti-Soviet espionage, of rocket science. Like a medieval magician invoking demons to do his bidding while binding them in the name of God, Allen Dulles recruited Nazis into the service of America. But America is a changeable god, and Dulles and his Nazis helped change it.

Yesterday it was revealed the CIA knew the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann, but withheld the information because it might have led to exposing the Nazi pedigree of the anti-communist intelligence efforts in West Germany. It would seem that Intelligence, and the protection of even relatively trivial knowledge, can be reason enough to overlook holocausts.

We too, rightly, want to know. But if that's all we want we'll slip into error ourselves, amassing data which won't change a thing but will leave us alternately thrilled and depressed. Knowledge must be the servant of justice, or we're just more clients for the devil.

Suspicious Minds

Answer me this, I won’t take you to court
Did you go crazy, or did you report
On that day they wounded New York? - Leonard Cohen

Blogger's been giving me serious grief the last few weeks and I haven't been able to publish for days, so since you may not even see this for a while, I won't make it a long post.

I'd had only a Discovery Channel-like familiarity with the work of Rupert Sheldrake when I began considering issues here such as the mysteries of consciousness, DNA and holographic fields, and I've since received much encouragement from readers to get better acquainted. So I'm binging. And I'm thinking how sooner, and wiser, I'd have gotten to where I am now, if I'd done this years ago.

In The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake devotes a chapter to human forebodings and presentiments of disaster. Soon after 9/11, he began gathering dreams and premonitions of the event, 57 in total, many which had been described to friends and family before the attack.

Five nights before 9/11, Manhattan forensic scientist Mike Cherni had "an unusually vivid dream":

I dreamt that I was a passenger on a commercial jet, seated at a window seat on the left-hand side. The cabin was filled with sunlight, and outside visibility was excellent. I don't remember the beginning of the dream, but I remember a pervasive sense of dread. The passengers and I were deeply concerned about the flight path we were taking; we were flying very low over Manhattan's buildings. I have flown into New York City's three major airports many times and am familiar with the normal approach routes, and this approach was quite out of the ordinary. I also love flying and had had no bad experiences as a passenger or any bad dreams about flying. Yet in this dream I was very frightened about how close we were to the buildings. Many of the passengers were very vocal and shared my concern. I recognized buildings as we flew over them, and it was clear that we were flying directly south over the southern tip of the island. Then there was a tremendous impact and I woke up. This dream disturbed me for days afterward, enough that I described the dream to my wife.

On the morning of Sept 11, Steven Brown dreamed he was "in the stairwell of the World Trade Center with a lot of people trying to get out," while Gina Vigo dreamt "Manhattan was hit by an incredible blizzard. People were running for cover from the fierce gusts of snow and everything was white. Later on, when I saw footage of the falling ash, it was strangely reminiscent." Audry Parrish dreamed she was in one of the towers when it caught on fire. She escaped by crawling across a glass bridge halfway up into the second tower, "when it too caught fire and burned."

This isn't the boneyard of Ripley's Believe It or Not. The stories aren't fabulist amusements which have no bearing on where we find ourselves today. They speak to our deeper nature buried beneath generations of fear-bred ignorance, and reveal intuitive capacities we're expected to deny.

Regarding 9/11 synchronicities such as The Lone Gunmen's March, 2001 pilot episode (hijacked, remote-controlled airliners target the World Trade Center to trigger a war for profit), and the Coup's June 2001 cover art, (the towers explode near the floors of impact), I contended the artists were not somehow tipped off to the plot, but rather they tapped into the dark frequencies which soon after began troubling the dreams of so many. I'm beginning to wonder whether it will be by recovering our ability to astonish ourselves that we will save ourselves. If we become fully human, then our executioners are finished. (I mean to explore this more later, when Blogger is more dependable.)

In another case from The Sense of Being Stared At, Amanda Bernsohn didn't dream of crashing planes or a burning World Trade Center: "I was walking down a street that was covered in swastikas that were spray painted on the building walls. The Nazis had invaded New York, but I wasn't able to find any people at all."

Sheldrake notes that Bernsohn's dream was of "horror in Manhattan," though it "was not at all like the WTC disaster."

About that, perhaps, Sheldrake is wrong.

Freewheelin'

And it's hard times in the city,
Livin' down in New York town. - Bob Dylan

Remember, they only want you to think they're out of their heads.

And many people will be so inclined, and receive that lie's sad comfort, now the Department of Homeland Security has cut anti-terror funding to New York City and Washington DC by 40%, and slashed in half New Orleans' grants for security and disaster preparedness on the day that marked the beginning of hurricane season. (New York, according to the DHS risk assessment, boasts zero "national monuments and icons," and only four banking and finanacial assets.) Meanwhile, huge increases in DHS dollars were won by company towns such as Jacksonville, Florida, Charlotte, North Carolina and Omaha, Nebraska. (Omaha might be justified, if the money were to be spent to liberate Boys Town from black ops' sexual predation.)

Are these bizarre choices? Is it incompetence? We may think so, if we mistake Chertoff's Homeland for the United States. Even with holes punched in its skyline, New York City stubbornly retains its listing in the latter. To those tasked with securing the Homeland, which exists as a High Concept, self-regulating prison rather than as common real estate, New York and every high-value target with a disproportionate population of intellectuals, free thinkers and dark faces remain its greatest threat. So what's to be done with them?

Somewhere there are 10-year old photos of me atop the World Trade Center, looking scared shitless. I'm not making claims of premonition, but I had a horrible, irrational impression that the tower was insubstantial, almost like a ghost, and could collapse at any moment. I've never had such a feeling on any other structure, and I've been on taller. My then-girlfriend had to reassure me we were safe; that nothing bad was going to happen to us, and we weren't about to all fall down.

And now when so many of us feel as though everything's about to fall down, what are we to do with that? Especially now such impressions don't seem so irrational?

Americans should know by this late date that those allegedly charged with their security are meant to be their executioners, and that duck and cover won't be enough to save them. Such knowledge can be bracing.

NOTE: please change your bookmarks to rigint.blogspot.com.

On the Cover of the Rolling Stone

And it's a gut check of what you believe - Anti-Flag

I don't have time this morning to post, but here's something to chew on.

Tomorrow, Rolling Stone tries to get its groove back by publishing a 10-page "damning and detailed feature article" by Robert F Kennedy Jr on the theft of the 2004 election. Bradblog, the electronic bulldog of voter fraud, is all over it. Kennedy will be promoting his story hard this month in a number of appearances, including a spot on The Colbert Report June 12.

I'm trying not to write something dithering, like time will tell whether America's peripatetic culture finally takes to this story. But it's tough. If it ever will, this is the window for it. With Bush's depressed numbers, editors who are neither backwash nor Mockingbirds may seize the moment, if for no more honourable reason than the consumers of their product are now more than ever likely to believe the worst of their government, and perhaps better of themselves. (We, the People, did not choose this man.)

The window won't remain open for long. Showdown: Iran looms, hastened by the hollow gesture of an offer of talks if Iran first abandons - well, just about everything. But it had to be done, so Washington can later shrug and say military action was, once more, the last choice. And when the next front opens in ernest, perhaps as soon as this month, don't be caught unaware in the stampede to "support the president in time of war."

Still, while the window's open a crack, it's encouraging to see pollster Lou Harris say that Ohio was "as dirty an election as America has ever seen." But what may come after that, I don't find so heartening. Do enough Americans really lack for knowledge of their government's crimes? Are there not already millions who, to the Bush laundry list of bloody obscenity, would wearily nod their heads, I know?

Maybe it's not awareness that needs raising, so much as American fists.