Thoughts While Listening to The Collins Brothers



I was led to a radio interview with the Collins Brothers, Gnostic Luciferianism - What is it ? "Religion of Apotheosis" Paul and Phillip Collins via a Youtube link on Facebook today.

As I listened I made the following notes.

The Catholic sesquipedalian Collins Brothers, authors of  The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship: An Examination of Epistemic Autocracy, From the 19th to the 21st Century,
seem not to notice the Luciferianism in the Vatican.

At 21 minutes in we get the inevitable phrase "immanentizing the eschaton." This is the Collins' Catholic (via Voegelin and  American conservatism) putdown of any who presumes to try to make this world a Heaven (merely trying to improve one's self through gnosis or to ameliorate man's lot on this world is enough to qualify) rather than accepting one's place and suffering in Faith until one dies and is judged by God. I do not believe the Collins Brothers can get through an interview without using this term. 

Of course, Gnosticism was a prime heresy suppressed by the early Church for "Immanentizing The Eschaton," which, to the Church, is a form of the Sin of Pride. Salvation can only come through Faith and the Church. Good things come from God but without the intercession of Jesus Christ via the Holy Roman Catholic Church, Man is Lost. 

Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are anathema to the Church since both lead man and society away from the bindings of the true Faith.

The Collins Brothers present many good insights, however, the blinders they wear courtesy of the Catholic Church, force them to scrupulously examine Trees and to ignore the Warden of the Forest.  

Some Collins Brothers Links:

http://www.thebyteshow.com/CollinsBrothers.html
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Articles/Egypt_and_Beyond.htm

Eric Voegelin, Nazi refugee. Is it any wonder he despaired that government could do good?

"Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton," Eric Voegelin wrote in the National Review back in the fifties. "Them" referred to anyone (liberals) who believed government could be used as a tool to improve the lot of the people.  At the same time National Review conservatives were embracing big government as long as it was big in ways they wanted: Promoting big military, big intelligence (especially big intelligence since the Buckley Brothers were heavily involved in this avocation), big corporations, suppression of people's movements around the world, and obedience through faith and dogma. Conservatives who thought otherwise were ostracized. 
This pattern was copied, consciously or unconsciously, from the Catholic Church. In fact, many of the neo-cons are Catholic. Take a look at the current roster of the Supreme Court. There are six Catholics (four of whom are ultra conservative, one not quite so ultra and another a purported liberal). 
If government cannot be used to improve man's existence (a marker of their Faith), the only other things it can do is to protect a wicked establishment and oppose change. The United States government and the Catholic Church have lurched (in the case of the Church one might say it re-lurched) over to this kind of faux conservatism since Voegelin wrote these words. Voegelin would be appalled.



Eric Voegelin Quotes and Notes:

Let us peruse a few words of Eric Voegelin and discover what flavor conservative he is. 

 “A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself.
. . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as "murderous swine."


[I wonder if the conservatives who consider him a hero understand that their own belief set might be counted among the "ideologies" hated by Voegelin, especially after their conservatism morphed into a murderous and intolerant neo-conservatism.-JB]


"In order to degrade the politics of Plato, Aristotle, or Saint Thomas to the rank of "values" among others, a conscientious scholar would first have to show that their claim to be science was unfounded. And that attempt is self-defeating. By the time the would-be critic has penetrated the meaning of metaphysics with sufficient thoroughness to make his criticism weighty, he will have become a metaphysician himself. The attack on metaphysics can be undertaken with a good conscience only from the safe distance of imperfect knowledge." 

"Excuse my rough words—I don't mean to be disrespectful to the psychological analyses of Sartre (late in L' Être et le Néant, for example)—but he is a vulgarian and an epigone. He's not interesting.  He's not to be compared with Camus;   he was a thinker!  Sartre is not on that level."

[Sartre was a comedian.-JB]

"[Milton writes in Of True Religion , 1673:]  Catholic worship cannot be tolerated  "without grievous and unsufferable scandal giv'n to all consciencious Beholders."   And he leaves it to the civil magistrate to consider whether Catholics in England can be tolerated at all, even without public worship.   If Catholics should complain that their conscience is violated if the celebration of the mass is not permitted to them, he replies that  "we have not warrant to regard Conscience which is not founded on Scripture." . . . . Radical scripturalism has become, in the field of social technique, the instrument through which the conscience of man can be kept within the limits of national jurisdiction.
Milton goes even further in his scripturalism:  he expects everybody to do his duty and to use the opportunity offered by the English Bible translation for becoming thoroughly acquainted with Scripture.  "Neither let the Countryman, the Tradesman, the Lawyer, the Physician, the Statesman, excuse himself by his much business from the studious reading thereof. . . ."
Using a modern category, we might say that Milton was a totalitarian National Scripturalist. . . ." 

[I wonder what my Christian conservative friends think of that.-JB]
 

Voegelin Link:

http://www.voegelinview.com/

Many more quotes here:

http://www.voegelinview.com/ev/voegelin_pungent_observations.html

Beware of Men Bearing Poppets!

When I was a kid the puppets were quite popular on television. Burr Tillstrom's Kukla, Fran and Ollie may have been the first. I loved the "Howdy Doody Show."  

The Jack Paar show and Walter Cronkite's 1954 CBS "The Morning Show" had Bil Baird's company of singing and dancing puppets including Charlemane the Lion  interviewing people and talking with the hosts. (This stuck in Cronkite's craw and he quickly escaped the show to become CBS' legendary evening news anchor.) 

Shari Lewis

As Shari Lewis' show became popular I was losing interest in puppets but I found Shari very sexy. Shari Lewis was more than a puppeteer; she wrote the Star Trek episode "The Lights of Zetar." 

You don't see many puppets on TV these days. Mostly the art lives on in live shows. I remember taking my daughter to a few back in the early eighties and I felt rather creeped out by the puppet experience. I seem to recall my daughter was too. In fact, when I took her to Disneyworld when she was 6 or 7 she told me she felt very uncomfortable there. 

Disney's It's a Small World

Full Moon's Puppet Master movies show us that in popular culture puppets have become more scary than anything else. 

From Full Moon's Puppet Master II

Now we see another example of someone whose public religiosity cloaks a private life of debauched evil. Ronald William Brown, 57, of Largo, Florida is a public Christian and a  puppeteer who entertained the little ones during what must be the extremely boring services at Gulf Coast Church. He planned with an internet buddy comrade in crime, Michael Arnett,  to abduct and eat after roasting  a two year old girl.  
Puppets are often used as tools by black magicians, consciously or not.  If the FBI just checked out all the Christian puppeteers in the country they might stop a few crimes. It is interesting that it was Homeland Security that got this guy. At this link you can watch Ronnie in action. 

Update: Puppeteer Ronald Brown was convicted July 30, 2013

Order Out Of Chaos
Mundi exigere ordinem. 

“Children of the World Dream of Peace” diptych part 1 by Leo Tanguma, One of Those Cryptic Murals  at the Denver Airport

Now some of these cryptic murals at the mysterious Denver Airport are beginning to make sense.
This one is especially morbid and would be very much at home on the cover of some Death Metal band's record. The sheets of paper at the lower portion of the painting on the right contain these words:

I once was a little child who longed for other worlds
but I am no more a child for I have known fear
I have learned to hate how tragic, then, is youth
which lives with enemies, with gallows ropes.
Yet, I still believe I only sleep today. that I’ll wake up,
a child again, and start to laugh and play.
Hama Herchenberg, 14 years old..died December 18, 1943
Auschwitz Concentration camp”.

Painting and quotation Found at Mountain Weekly News, April 12, 2011  

The Happy Ending?

"Children of the World Dream of Peace" dipytch part 2 by Leo Tanguma

Interesting Addendum:
HNC, FICO, and Confabulation

Robert Holmes Jr., senior lead scientist at Fair Isaac, FICO

In an initial post about the Aurora, Colorado massacre, I noted that Robert Holmes Jr., the father of the killer, previously worked at what I called a "spooky place," HNC Software, formerly Hecht-Nielsen Neurocomputer Corporation. I termed the company "spooky" because of their long term contract with DARPA.  The company itself described the situation as follows in their own descriptive materials in 1999. "HNC is working on a long-term research project launched in 1998 that is jointly funded by HNC and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the U.S. Defense Department, to investigate ‘cortronic neural networks,’ a concept originally proposed by Robert Hecht-Nielsen, HNC’s co-founder and chief scientist."   What could be more spooky than that? I'm not saying evil, just spooky.

Robert Hecht-Nielsen with Zeus

While searching for information on Robert Hecht-Nielsen, co-founder of HNC Software and adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego,  I discovered that Robert Holmes still works for the ghost of HNC Software because HNC merged with his current employer, Fair Isaac Corporation, a credit score company now known as FICO for a tad over $800 billion in stock swaps in 2002, and Mr. Hecht-Nielsen had become FICO's vice-President of Research and Development. It's a complicated stock swap and I have read the transaction as a purchase by HNC of Fair Isaac and the other way around. We do know that it was a merger. Both Hecht-Nielsen and Holmes are still associated with FICO when all is said and done.

Here is the FICO website. 

This is his bio from the University of California at San Diego:

"Robert Hecht-Nielsen has been on the UCSD faculty since 1986. His popular ECE-270A/B/C year-long graduate course, Neurocomputing, provides an introduction to the neuroscience, and technological applications, of confabulation theory. Hecht-Nielsen is Director of the Confabulation Neuroscience Laboratory of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), a Member of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation; and an Adjunct Professor in the UCSD Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He serves on the Board of Governors of the International Neural Network Society (2007-2009). An IEEE Fellow, Hecht-Nielsen has been awarded the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Medal and the UCSD ECE Department’s Graduate Teaching Award. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Arizona State University in 1974."

Mr. Hecht-Nielsen specializes in the field of cognition, neurocomputing. He asks the question: how does thought work? Philosophers call this field of study epistemology. A thorough understanding of knowing how we know what we know would ultimately lead to true artificial intelligence. It is difficult to avoid strange loops when delving into neurocomputing  as much as it is difficult to ignore the lack of coherence in human thought by philosophers interested in epistemology.  Professor Hecht-Nielsen is Director of the Confabulation Neuroscience Laboratory in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology which gave us this 2008 press release, which I cognate may have come from Hecht-Nielsen himself. 
Here are some excerpts.

"Hecht-Nielsen believes the Outstanding Engineer award honors his presentation and publication last year of "Confabulation Theory" (Springer-Verlag 2007)-the culmination of a lifetime of work on the mechanism by which thinking is carried out in humans and animals. "For forty years my goal has been to understand the fundamental mechanism of thought," said the author. "This search led to a unified 'confabulation theory' of cognition that explains the mechanism of thought."
How thinking works has puzzled scientists for millennia -- from Aristotle's studies on human thought (published in 350 B.C.), to recent computational neuroscience research. Hecht-Nielsen's Confabulation Theory now presents the scientific and engineering communities with what he calls the "first comprehensive and complete theory of cognition," a theory that he believes can shed extensive light on the design of the brain. "Seeing the detailed process of thinking in action," said Hecht-Nielsen, "it is clear that thinking is starkly alien in comparison with past concepts in neuroscience, computer science, and so on."

Confabulation Theory seems to involve the fact that the human brain makes inferences from given information. Sherlock Holmes could be described as a master confabulator. And I must admit I infer things all the time. One might say this is intelligence. Perhaps it is intuition.
Artificial intelligence has traditionally had a big problem with putting together disparate pieces of information in novel ways. At this time computers are not structured to infer information like humans or animals. If confabulation technology could be combined with  gigantic computational power, it would be of  inestimable value to corporate and government interests. As our hero says, "What is most striking about this confabulation architecture is its extremely large quantity of knowledge and the effectiveness with which it exploits this knowledge to craft astonishingly intelligent outputs, all without any traditional 'software', 'rules', or 'algorithms'. This is how neurons think. This is how human and animal 'intelligence' arises. Establishing a complete understanding of this will require a huge new phalanx of research."

 Robert believes his work is leading humanity in a very Utopian direction. 

"Hecht-Nielsen envisions that by 2 100, human toil will have permanently ended; he argues that hundreds of billions of confabulation theory-based intelligent machines would do all work that humans choose not to do. "By 3 000, humans and their intelligent machines will have spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy," he said, forecasting that "by the year 20000, humans and their intelligent machines will be intervening to eliminate unnecessary lifeform suffering, strife and tragedy throughout the millions of billions of galaxies of the entire universe.""

I am a bit less optimistic about these things. I remember predictions similarly made in the 1950's about the way we would live at the arrival of the Twenty-First Century. I do believe Hecht-Nielsen is an extraordinary salesman.
And I am certain that Bob's excitement for the future is helping him land these long term contracts from the government.  
To tell the truth, I am skeptical of FICO's software simply by reflecting on recent history. 
Have you ever heard of the FICO score? You have one.  It is one of the prime tools used by banks to judge whether a customer is worthy of a mortgage. During the heyday of easy money in the oughts, before our economic bubble busted, banks were using FICO scores to give any Tom, Dick or Harriett a mortgage for which they could not make the payments. We are still feeling the effects today. 
Perhaps the banks ignored FICO scores in their rush to bundle and resell bad loans. 
But one must suspect  that FICO was riding the wave just like everyone else in those days.
Somehow I confabulate that this credit score company was handing out scores that reflected the optimism for the future of Mr. Hecht-Nielsen himself.  

More to come in future posts. 
 
 





 

Cinemark Holdings, Inc. 


Cinemark Holdings, Inc.  (NYSE:CNK) is the parent company of the Century 16 Theater (since 2006) where Little Jimmy Holmes went to relax and recreate. Cinemark owns 448 theaters with 5,096 screens and he (I use the personal pronoun because corporations are legally persons like you and me, but are they girls or boys or something else?) has a very lucrative presence in South America.

Cinemark was the first theater company to introduce stadium seating in their theaters (1997) which led to a long legal struggle with people confined to wheelchairs who were placed in an area close in front of the screen which forced these customers to look directly and uncomfortably up. They sued on the grounds of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Cinemark found a friendly Federal Judge in Cleveland who initially ruled in his favor, stating that the Act required that the handicapped merely  have a view of the screen, not a good view of the screen.  Cinemark finally settled with the Justice Department after seven years of struggle and he agreed to retrofit his cinemas to allow handicapped people to actually see the screen (2005). Click here for a link to the resolution of the case.

An ebullient Alan Stock visits the New York Stock Exchange last year.
 [I don't believe the place was named after him.]

Cinemark's recently retired (February of this year after 26 years with the company)  CEO, Alan Stock, (and what a golden parachute he has!) donated $9,999 in 2008 to the successful Proposition 8 in California, which banned and overturned gay marriage. COO Tim Warner, a sixteen year company man,  had these comforting words for us when he replaced Alan as CEO:

"Throughout our careers at Cinemark, Alan and I have worked closely to enhance the theatergoing experience while driving domestic and international growth. We thank Alan for his outstanding contributions to the company and for his initiatives to promote high standards across the industry and strong relations among its various constituents."

Alan's executive profile at Bloomberg is here.  
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Stock is a Mormon and a Romney supporter.
 He visited his alma mater last fall. 
Here is a glowing story written in 2008 and published by the Deseret News on young Alan's love of the cinema. 
In this story Alan says,   "I realized that while we don't make the movies, we can make sure the customers are comfortable and can see and hear well. So, we do absolutely everything possible to create a great entertainment experience."  It seems he had forgotten about Cinemark's  long effort, when he was Cinemark USA's president, to keep handicapped customers from seeing well.

Goldman Sachs rated Cinemark Holdings at "Neutral" yesterday in the wake of the shootings, but most of their concerns had to do with the shrinking attendance at theaters domestically. Goldman suggested that this was somewhat mitigated by his Latin American business.

There's a lot of snake charming going on.

Even though Chief "There is absolutely no question that this guy acted alone." Oates had this crime all figured out before twenty four hours had passed, a judge has sealed the case of Little Jimmy Holmes.

"A judge has sealed everything in the case, not allowing affidavits, court documents or photographs of the suspect. The official booking photo of Holmes will not be released for the time being.
A judge agreed with prosecutors request that the case be sealed, saying it would be contrary to the public interest to release any information at this point." CBS Denver Report

Aurora, goddess of dawn, Giovanni Bonazza, 1717, Summer Garden, St. Petersburg

Yes, you are right if you are thinking that the authorities are massaging the evidence and getting their story straight.

Cynical Thoughts of the Day

2006 Westview High School yearbook photo of Jimmy Holmes

I wonder for what studies and experimentation James Eagan Holmes, neuroscience student, volunteered in his short stay at the University of Colorado?

I wonder if any of these possible experiments were funded by the DOD?

I wonder how much the gross for "The Dark Knight Rises." will increase as a result of this massacre?

The killer's father, Robert Holmes, worked for a spooky company from 2000 to 2002, HNC Software:

"But perhaps the most exciting frontier awaiting exploration and commercial development by HNC is in an area that scientists still know very little about: the human brain. HNC is working on a long-term research project launched in 1998 that is jointly funded by HNC and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the U.S. Defense Department, to investigate ‘cortronic neural networks,’ a concept originally proposed by Robert Hecht-Nielsen, HNC’s co-founder and chief scientist." HNC Software, 1999 profile, found at Cryptogon blog. 

Robert Holmes is now employed as lead scientist by the Fair Isaac Company, (FICO) a credit score company. Being lead scientist for a credit score company could make Robert a valuable asset to any intelligence agency.  So far I can find no work history for Robert Holmes before 2000. He got his last degree in 1981.

The conspiracy theories have begun, and for good reason.  .....

Billy Kromka, a pre-med student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked with Mr. Holmes for three months last summer as a research assistant in a lab of at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Mr. Kromka said he was surprised to learn Mr. Holmes was the shooting suspect. "It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this," he said. -The New York Times  quoted in Naturalnews.com

 Yet Jim's mother does not seem to be surprised.

"You have the right person." - Holmes mother when asked about the reports of her son being involved in the massacre.

Jimmy's AFF profile. "Will you visit me in prison?"

James Holmes was called "Little Jimmy" when he was a child. 

I am surprised they haven't developed some kind of antisocial mythology for Little Jimmy Holmes by now.
But maybe being a "quiet loner" is enough mythology to demonize someone these days. 

"We are confident he acted alone." - Friday statement by a very assured Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates, who began his law enforcement career as a New York City beat cop.

Maybe I'm just the suspicious type, but I would wonder where an unemployed suspect got the money to outfit himself with body armor, assemble an armory with multitudinous weapons, accumulate a giant magazine of ammo and booby trap his apartment. All of this required  tens of thousands fifteen thousand (at last count) dollars worth of gear. "Through the Internet he purchased over 6,000 rounds of ammunition, more than 3,000 rounds of. 223 ammunition for the assault rifle, 3,000 rounds of .40 caliber ammunition for the two Glocks in his possession and 300 rounds for the 12 gauge shotgun." -Chief Oates, Saturday, July 21, 2012

 "There is absolutely no question that this guy acted alone." - Saturday statement by Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates who seems to have completed his investigation in record time

Miscellany

I watched the Tony Scott 1998 film "Enemy of the State" last night. It told of how a "rogue" NSA guy (John Voight) had a recalcitrant Congressman murdered to ensure a "Patriot Act" type law would pass. It was a curiously predictive movie for its time, some three years before the twin towers were destroyed. Here is an interesting fact. Voight's malignant character, "Thomas Brian Reynolds'" birthday was September 11 as revealed by the ID found and displayed on a computer monitor by Gene Hackman's "Edward Lyle" character. Hackman effectively encored the "Harry Caul" role he played in Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film "The Conversation."

You had better believe it, Buster.

 They Live! 

This discussion dates from June 2010 and was originally published on the great Vyzygoth's site.
Just put on the glasses and follow this LINK to listen. 

How Did I Get Here?
Originally published in Vyzygoth's
"Inside The Grassy Knoll" Issue 2, Summer/Fall 2009
By John Bonanno

Gauguin, d'ou venons nous que sommes nous ou allons nous

"Who am I? Why am I here?" said Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale, a truly great American whose record as a prisoner of war in Vietnam must make Senator John McCain feel regret and shame. Stockdale was set up to fail by Ross Perot in that debate, but that is another tale.

So did Paul Gauguin name his masterpiece now on display in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts “D'où venons nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons nous?” [Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?]

Francis Galton was a brilliant polymath who developed (among many other things) the concept of correlation in statistics and the scientific classification of fingerprints, which allowed them to be used in a court of law; he coined the term eugenics, and floated the concept of “nature versus nurture”(he tended to favor nature); he introduced the use questionnaires and surveys to study human populations; this great traveler founded the science of psychometrics to measure mental ability. How useful he was to the reigning powers! He also asked this question and answered it this way:

“Individuals appear to me as finite detachments from an infinite ocean of being, temporarily endowed with executive powers. This is the only answer I can give to myself in reply to the perpetually recurring questions of 'Why? whence? and whither? ' The immediate ‘whither?' does not seem wholly dark, as some little information may be gleaned concerning the direction in which Nature, so far as we know of it, is now moving. Namely towards the evolution of mind, body, and character in increasing energy and co-adaptation.”

-Francis Galton, 1905 essay, “Probability, The Foundation of Eugenics”

In other words, he suggested that the best of us may end up as intelligent and able as Galton himself.

But these basic questions impel and motivate free human beings. If we do not ask ourselves these questions we will fall under the sway of those who do ask them. Rulers through history have known this and tried to insure that most people have neither the time nor the energy to contemplate such existential issues. Plato knew that wise rulers must keep the common people in the allegorical cave, taking the illusion of shadows for reality and given as little information as required to perform the tasks allotted to them:

"The Cave" John Bonanno illustration

Plato, The Allegory of the Cave: " And now, I said , let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. 

- I see. 

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. 

- You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?


- True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?


And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?

- Yes, he said.

And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?

- Very true.

And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?

-No question, he replied.

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” 

Overly literal schematic of "The Cave" found on the internets.

Plato, a true proponent of the elitist rational if there ever was one, goes on to state that these miserable humans, ultimately at home in their shadow reality, would reject the truth of the greater world as too painful, bizarre and unbelievable. The few who have dominated man through history are absolutely certain that the average man is not only unworthy of the truth but, by now, has become incapable of handling the truth. Despite the popularity of Jack Nicholson's famous scene as Col. Nathan R. Jessup in “A Few Good Men” few viewers actually “got it” and most happily applauded this megalomaniac character as if he truly fought for their interests as opposed to their masters' interests. The masses who cheered this monster were getting the truth thrown in their face. Getting the common man to reverse-project his masters' interests into his mind as his own and negating or retarding his own free will is the essence of controlling the mob. It is an essential tool of black magick. It is at its simplest called the power of suggestion. Aleister Crowley said “the slaves shall serve” and these words are true even taken out of Crowley's cynical almost Calvinistic context in The Book of the Law, Liber CCXX:

Yea! deem not of change: ye shall be as ye are, & not other. Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was. Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty. Chapter II Line 58

Crowley was saying that the human being who does not exercise his free will is a slave. One who considers himself a King will inevitably come and direct such a mindless being. People who are unable to determine who has directed them in their actions fall into this category. Hence, mindful contemplation of one's actions is a first step to freedom.

We like to believe we are free. And it is no easy task to be free. I like to believe my mind is free. But it is impossible in this world to be totally free. I assure you that exercising freedom makes other people and one's self uncomfortable more often than you might imagine. We have necessary obligations that constrain absolute freedom but we often assume obligations that are unnecessary. Some obligations are inflicted on a person by others or groups for their own selfish purposes, usually through the mode of fear; other obligations we take on out of love and faith. The first leads to Crowley's status of slavery, the second to freedom. Our difficult task is to separate the two.

An object of tantric yoga is to break free of the shackles that bind the mind through partaking in activities that are forbidden or bizarre. Tantric practices may involve free sex, eating taboo foods, or undergoing frightening initiations in graveyards involving corpses. This exposure to the unusual may or may not achieve the desired result (desire always muddies the waters). Often the individuals involved get addicted to these acts and they become just more afficionados of fetishes that bind the souls of those who originally desired spiritual freedom.

I was asked to write about the path that got me where I am today. Each of us takes different paths and each of us finds ourself in different places that afford varied points of view. I try to take advantage of those places.

The first mind-bending experience I can remember happened when I was five years old. I had been warned by my Italian grandmother that I should not go upstairs into a vacant apartment on the third floor of her three-decker house in Dorchester, Massachusetts. If I did go into the forbidden zone a ghost named Mumuni would definitely snatch me up. This was as strong an attractant to a little boy as fresh bloody meat would be to a lion. I ascended the stairs the first time I was alone in the house for a few moments and thought I could get away with it. As I turned the corner of the flight of stairs, I saw a motley form at the top landing and I heard a low moan “Muuuumuuuuniiii.” I ran down the stairs and called for someone, anyone. No one was around. I went back up the stairs thinking it was someone playing a joke on me. No one was there. It could have been imagination; it could have been someone trying to frighten a child; it could have been something else.


Soon after that I was brought to the dentist for the first time. I had heard about the dentist from others and I was probably in a little fear. This was not yet the era of painless dentistry, but I was mostly fascinated by the scary prospect. As I was led into the dentist’s chair, I noticed a huge jug next to me almost full of pulled teeth still retaining blotches of dried blood. There were other similar jugs in the room. The man in the white coat, with a long mustache, seemed to leer at me expecting to smell fear. But I laughed at the absurdity of it all. I knew at that moment that the world was a very curious place. Years later, when I read Hamlet, these lines of Shakespeare vividly returned the memory to mind:


“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”


The first two stories told of things that happened; the next will be about a thing that did not happen. Two years later at the age of seven, I was in the midst of preparing as a Roman Catholic for first communion. I attended Catholic school and the nuns were very strict in those days. They inculcated in our brains a dreadful fear of the host and the necessity of treating it with the utmost respect. We were told stories of those who were struck dead by God for blaspheming the communion wafer. Only a priest was allowed to handle the consecrated host with his two specially blessed fingers. It was a Sunday morning mass and I was sitting in church next to another boy who was known as a hooligan. Neither of us had received first communion yet and it was that endless time during the mass when the sacrament was being distributed to the packed congregation [well it was in those days] and we had to remain on our knees for the duration. My friend suddenly turned to me and stated firmly, “Watch this.” Perhaps it was boredom or perhaps it was the devil that led him to the line of parishioners going for communion. No one noticed he was coming from the section reserved for the younger children. But he went and he received the wafer from the priest. He returned to the pew and I watched in fascination as he sat down and spit out the bread into his hand. He rolled it up in a ball and flicked it on the floor. I half expected a lightning bolt from the Lord to strike us both down: he for his sin and I for failing to inform the nuns. But nothing of the sort happened. From that time forward I never automatically believed anyone in authority again. [Even 'though, as it turned out, my friend had real criminal potential and met an early violent end.]


By the age of seven I learned that I could be influenced by others’ passionate stories. I determined that everyone has secret, ulterior motives for telling these stories. I understood that these secrets could be learned by paying more attention to the emotional and physical environments from which words emanate than the words themselves. I began to guess that most people secretly want you to learn their secrets, even, or especially, when their secrets are unknown to themselves. I later discovered that the most effective storytellers were perfectly aware they were using fictions.


Ransom Stoddard: “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?”
Maxwell Scott: "No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." 

from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Screenplay by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, based on a story by Dorothy M. Johnson

Bos'n Higgs

Satyendra Nath Bose, for whom the boson is named.

The Higgs boson has been found...or has it?
The link goes to a Boston Globe story from the AP. 
There is a lot of hedging here.
These scientists are under pressure to produce results with their not so new expensive toy,
the Hadron Collider.
It looks like they have found another subatomic particle to go along with fermions, quarks, leptons, bosons (of which this is said to be another of at least six), and many many hypothetical ones.
Ho Hum.
It is all so reminiscent of the United States government
periodically announcing that Al Qaida Number Two has been killed.
By the way, the latest snuffed  Al-Qaeda  No. 2 leader,  was Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was blasted in "Pakistan's lawless frontier region" according to the Washington Post of June 5, 2012, by a CIA drone.
Watch out Al Qaeda Number 3; you are now Number 2.

There is always another Al Qaida Number Two to be tracked down. 
One can find anything one desires in this vasty universe,
From Higgs Boson particles 
to another Al Qaeda Number Two 
to Pink Unicorns.  
We do not even notice anymore. 

"This Book Is A Weapon" a painting by John Bonanno,
although it just might as well been named, "Appeal to Authority"

"As a layman, I think we did it...As a layman, I think we have it. But as a scientist, I have to say, `"What do we have?' ""- Rolf Heuer, CERN director

"Ladies and Gentlemen, We Got Him!" - Paul Bremer, USA Iraq director on the capture of former CIA asset Saddam Hussein who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda

Here is a rather extensive list of Al Qaeda leaders killed since 2004. 

This and That

Salafi Muslims are warning us that tomatoes can turn you Christian.
I hope that isn't true.
Their "reasoning" is that when tomatoes are sliced a certain way they reveal a cross.
I suspect if Muslim homes are dismantled a certain way, wooden studs and beams that form crosses would also be revealed. 
I love tomatoes and have over 60 plants of various varieties in my garden.
I am not concerned that they will convert me to any particular religion.
Muslims must be weak in their faith if a wonderful and healthy component of the diet can force them to stray.
Since the delicious fruits originate in  Peru I suspect tomatoes are more likely to turn one into a follower of Viracocha instead of Christ.

Perez Hilton noted that several Maine communities are preparing and training for a zombie apocalypse. Perez noted that it is better to be safe than sorry.
It looks like Perez was going for tongue in cheek funny.
I, for one, am hoping that Maine becomes the zombie fighting and training center of the world. ... unless I become a zombie.

Paraguay has impeached their president for little more than being a Leftist. Is that a surprise in a nation that welcomed so many Nazis who arrived via the Roman Catholic ratlines after World War II?
Is it a coincidence that the Bush Family possesses 100,000 acres of land in Paraguay?

The Lone Star Tick is working its way up the East Coast. It is reported that a bite of this tick can cause one to develop an allergic reaction on eating meat. God protect me.

Glen Beck has declared war on Glee, the television program. 
Why is the right so fascinated by this show? I watched it once and it was singin' and dancin' kind of like an old Judy Garland & Mickey Rooney movie. It's not exactly to my taste but I can see why so many like this kind upbeat and optimistic entertainment in a gloomy hopeless world. 
But Glen can't stop watching and it makes him want to go to war. Why? 
Because it is a "horror show."  
Maybe it gives him a little gay tingle. 
All this stimulates me to ask: why do so many of these right wing pundits love to make war, yet when they had the chance to kill for their countries, declined to bring their talents to the Defense Department?

Artist at Scituate Light, June 24, 2012, John Bonanno Photograph

Peony planted 2009, growing by the pond, perhaps Krinkled White, P. lactiflora cultivar, introduced by A. M. Brand, 1928, John Bonanno photograph, June 12, 2012

Darwin's notion of Fitness in human societies is a murky thing.
Nature is barely involved. 
Some humans make rules and the rules favor those who make them.
Humans are the only known animals who adapt to Nature's Environment using Culture.
So humans are forced to adapt to an amorphous somewhat invisible Culture rather than a more consistent  Nature.
Human Fitness is measured by one's ability to read and use other humans in the Cultural context.
Darwin told us a story of life's physical adaptation to Nature.
For humans, this has been a misdirection all along.
We are forced to adapt to Culture.
Nature has been damned by Man who is blinded by the Cultural Artifice.

The Light and The Dark

Now that I am retired, I have returned to home brewing after a few years away from it.
What a rewarding endeavor it is in so many ways.
I am so happy I kept my brewing gear. 
Chin Chin!

John T. Scopes

Are We Still Arguing This?

Some Facts About the Famous Confrontation Between 

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan

Evolution versus the Bible....not on the same playing field. Or, how to follow a truckload of red herring.

The Scopes trial indeed was different from what was portrayed in the movie, Inherit The Wind, which did not use the real names of the participants. Hollywood is not very friendly to nuanced complicated stories which test our definitions of morality and truth. Here are a few facts about that trial and its background.

Scopes agreed to be prosecuted as a test of the law. 

Scopes was hired primarily as a football coach and math teacher and was substituting in the biology class. 

Scopes was under no personal threat of fine or imprisonment at any time. 

Scopes left the Presbyterian Church in Paducah, Kentucky when church members drove prostitutes out of town instead of helping them find honest livings. 

Scopes doubted the gospels and the beauties of religion ever after but it wasn't that big a deal to him. 

Bryan spoke at Scopes' High School graduation in 1919 and took a moment to stare down Scopes and his friends for giggling during the speech. 

 Darrow made a first amendment argument that the Bible is not a book of science and should not be so taught against their better judgements by those who know better and Bryan stood for the right of the taxpayers to determine what will be taught in school.

As so often happens in difficult questions, each side was arguing different points, either one or both of which could be "right," depending on context. 

 Bryan's initial argument rested on the people's right to determine what is taught as science in the schools, presumably even if they know nothing about science or are wrong. (He never addressed what happens if the people decide they want Hindu or Muslim or Satanist scripture taught as science in the schools.) 

Then he argued (contradicting, or at least turning,  his main argument) that evolution was only a hypothesis and there was no evidence for it, which forever after became the template and article of faith for the religious argument against evolution. 

Bryan mocked the text used by Scopes, George William Hunter's (a teacher at De Witt Clinton High School, located in Hell's Kitchen at the time), "A Civic Biology" for its diminishing of man by lumping him in with animals, but he never addressed Hunter's long discussion and glowing endorsement of eugenics in the text and its implied social Darwinist love of capitalism and rather conservative social sentiments. 

Hunter describes two mentally deficient families as "immoral" and "feeble minded." He says people like these are "true parasites...if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading."  

And this  disgusting passage follows:

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites. 
The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country. 
 Blood Tells. — Eugenics show us, on the other hand, in a study of the families in which are brilliant men and women, the fact that the descendants have received the good inheritance from their ancestors. The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in Relation to Eugenics^ illustrates how one family has been famous in American Historv. 

We can observe that if believers' critical senses were dulled by Faith in relation to the Bible, this champion of Darwin had dirty genocidal hands on full display in A Civic Biology.

You can read or download this book in various formats here:

 http://archive.org/details/acivicbiologypr01huntgoog 

An exhausted Bryan at the Scopes Trial

Bryan ignored these passages that some thought would have been the best way to discredit the text and further his point that evolution is an atheistic evil dogma.

Dudley F. Malone

Some say the best speech in the trial did not come from Darrow or Bryan but from Dudley Field Malone, a former assistant secretary of state under Bryan, but now an attorney for the defense on Scopes' team paid for by the four year old ACLU..

 There is never a duel with the truth. The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the force of government. The truth does not need Mr. Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal and immortal and needs no human agency to support it. We are ready to tell the truth as we understand it and we do not fear all the truth that they can present as facts. We are ready. We are ready. We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America. We are not afraid. Where is the fear? We meet it, where is the fear? We defy it, we ask your honor to admit the evidence as a matter of correct law, as a matter of sound procedure and as a matter of justice to the defense in this case. (Profound and continued applause).

 He imitated the style used in Bryan's famous "Cross of Gold" speech which can be heard here:

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/williamjenningsbryan1896dnc.htm

After the applause in the courtroom died down Bryan told Malone, "Although we differ, I have never heard a better speech."  

The judge threw out Darrow's main argument, that religion is not science. 

Bryan failed to convince a Jew, Samuel Untermeyer, and a Catholic, Senator Thomas Walsch, to join the prosecution. 

Bryan did not seek the presence of any of the many black preachers who rallied in support of his cause.

Fearing for his health, Bryan's wife did not want him to participate in this trial. She was very critical of the bumpkins cheering for him...and just about everyone else. Of the defense team, she wrote this about Arthur Hays: he "is as forward and self-asserting as the New York Jews can be." and "his eyes are full of shrewdness."

The last two days of the trial were moved outside so all could hear the closing arguments. 

On the seventh day of the trial Darrow put Bryan on the stand. Bryan eagerly accepted the challenge. Darrow's goal was to make Bryan defend scripture as science. He got him to testify after some evasion that he interpreted some of the Bible other than literally. (such as the length of a day in Genesis) And got the famous response to Darrow's question about the date of the flood: "I do not think about things I don't think about." 

The weather was brutally hot and Bryan was old and sick. 

The Scopes Trial Moves Outdoors

Bryan believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Scripture could transform man into a just and peaceful race. 

This trial may have disproved that thesis.

Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Trial

Darrow then asked the jury to find the defendant guilty, reading the writing on the wall and probably to prevent Bryan from delivering what was expected to be a strong closing argument. 

The judge the next day ordered Bryan's unfortunate testimony removed from the record.

July 21, 1925 Scopes was found guilty and trial correspondant H.L. Mencken's paper, The Baltimore Sun, offered to pay his $100 fine, something that Bryan had done at the beginning of the trial.

Less than a week later, Sunday July 26, 1925 Bryan died. 

This post was mostly based on material in Michael Kazin's excellent biography of Bryan,   "A Godly Hero"  Get it from Amazon here.

William Jennings Bryan, was a Christian liberal (for his day), and a hero to me, yet he was doomed by his naïveté his whole career. He thought that it was obvious to the people that the gold standard was the source of depression and poverty, neglecting to understand the power of wealth to influence elections.  He thought Prohibition was a good idea which would elevate the morals and behavior of the people. He thought he had some influence with President Wilson as Secretary of State but his opposition to World War I lost him his job.

A good link on the Scopes trial:  http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopes.htm 

A link on Clarence Darrow:   http://darrow.law.umn.edu/index.php
John Thomas Scopes on the trial, written in 1965.  http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/scopesreflections.html

Young William Jennings Bryan

The Garden

New hop vine area of the garden. Let us hope that deer hate Hops!

On the Birthers and their Fruitless Efforts to Get Rid of Obama on a Technicality
Or, Wasting my Time trying to convince the Birthers that they are Wasting their Time.....Or, How to Piss Everyone Off

The day President Obama was voted president by the electors, and again when Chief Justice Roberts swore him in, he became legally the president no matter where he was born, which became a moot point if it ever was a point at all. Obama is President and That is the "supreme Law of the Land" because of the actions of the Electors of the Electoral College and Chief Justice Roberts, whether anyone thinks it is Constitutional or Not.

The Constitution, in Article VI, states: 

 This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any state to the Contrary notwithstanding.

This convoluted sentence which is Article VI in its entirety, dictates that just about anything the government does is the "supreme Law of the Land" "any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." Which means that some congressman's pork spending bill when passed has equal gravity as the Constitution itself! Every Executive Order is the Supreme Law of the Land. Every rule and regulation written by bureaucrats as the result of any law becomes the Supreme Law of the Land. And all of that legal verbiage is automatically Constitutional.

Aside:  [I know there are those who will say that the above quote refers to the "Constitution" of "any State" and not the glorious and holy federal Constitution. That argument is a red herring because it misses the point. All laws are automatically considered Constitutional.  This Section is ambiguous for a reason. The men who wrote this document were intelligent and skilled with language to a degree beyond most of us who are the products of what passes for education in our era.  They knew laws would be passed in Congress that would fail to be in compliance of the Constitution. That is exactly what they wanted or they would have not been ambiguous about "Constitution" and simply would have written "Constitutions or Laws of any States to the contrary notwithstanding". Furthermore, laws are to be merely "in Pursuance" of the Constitution.   Something which pursues something is not required to catch it.  And the fact remains that it has been long accepted that any cockamamie law passed or executive order or federal rule or act of the federal corporation  becomes indeed "the supreme Law of the Land." until ruled otherwise by the Supreme Court should their Holynesses in Black deign to review it.  Our Constitution, in effect, is thousands of volumes long.   No human being can begin to understand it. It is a playground for lawyers bent on mischief.

The Constitution is a fraud with several technical outs that make the Bill of Rights a joke. The technicalities favor the government. This sacred document says a lot of pretty things in the Bill of Rights but it allows the government to go its sleazy way "notwithstanding." 

Not only that, Dear Birthers,  the Constitution never defines "natural born Citizen" and there are many who define that holy state as falling on the child of a citizen of the United States notwithstanding (to use a constitutional term)  that child's place of birth. The argument against Obama essentially rests on English common law that reckons "natural born Citizen" on the father's status (not American, in Obama's case) rather than either parent or both parents or the mother's status (undeniably American). This is why Birthers never so much as gave a thought to the fact that John McCain was born in the Canal Zone, which was not and is not part of the United States, since his father was a Citizen of the good old USA, and an Admiral too, as opposed to an African leftist. So all this energy spent on proving that Obama isn't a natural born Citizen is a royal waste of time based on a misunderstanding of the Constitution (perhaps thinking it is some kind of an unerring holy document that represents a kind of higher morality) and an archaic sexist interpretation of "natural born Citizen." 

It is an amusing spectacle every time some Birthers go to court trying to get Obama off state ballots, but it is also getting boring. They have no standing and no legal grounds to do this. 

The Constitution, in effect, allows anything to the government! This is why the Supreme Court can rule any damn nonsense they want (Bush v. Gore, corporations are people too) and see any damn thing in the Constitution that comes into their heads. Also, you may not know that the Constitution gives Congress the power to pass laws that are exceptions to review by the court, simply by indicating so on the law. That means Congress could pass a law doing anything in the world (like make ID chips mandatory, make dogs citizens, declare themselves royalty, anything!), tag it an exception to review by the Supreme Court  and it would be legal. (Read this from our noble US Constitution, Article III, Section 2, paragraph 2 very closely if you don't believe me: "In all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a state shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.") Isn't that wonderful? The Court can see anything in the Constitution it pleases and the Congress can hoist a finger to the Court whenever they want. So now you know that the problem is not with the Congress, the President, or the Court. The problem is inherent in the Constitution itself. How do you like this sacred silly putty document now?

Anyone with an interest in the fraudulent nature of our Constitution should get a copy of Ferdinand Lundberg's great book, "Cracks in the Constitution."  This book is out of print but can be found used at Amazon  for reasonable money. I bought a copy last year for a couple of bucks but I see it is now selling for $8.76.Word must be getting out. Perhaps my discussion with Vyz had something to do with that.
Listen to my discussion with Vyzygoth on these matters while you can.