The River

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Ladies and germs

Please welcome, your old friend and mine, Mr. Frank Paynter!

Mr. Paynter has a new blog out, called Listics, A Sandhill Joint.

This man is a legend. He's even interviewed Chris Locke!

And now you can find him at The River.

Also, welcome back, the bar-exam-acing Madpercolator! [link fixed now; ya take a break, ya get rusty]

These are the real people, folks.

Friday, April 14, 2006

A hit of Christian mysticism

Good Friday experiment, a test conducted on Good Friday, 1962, at Boston University's Marsh Chapel by Walter Pahnke on a number of divinity students, to determine the usefulness of psilocybin for facilitating mystical experience. According to Pahnke, the experiment determined that "the persons who received psilocybin experienced to a greater extent than did the controls the phenomena described by our typology of mysticism."

-- wikipedia

Besides the fact that the Pahnke quote is, somewhat ironically but understandably, hard to read (to translate to street-speak: the people who dropped got waaay more into the mystic, maaan), what strikes me is how far we've traveled from this sense of exploration and optimism.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Barnabas Collins, global warming, time travel and the neolithic

So I'm watching daytime TV and it occurs to me: Barnabas Collins. That marked the beginning of the end. He sank his black and white teeth into our necks, so to speak, way back in the 60s. Yes, the 60s. Of course. It all goes back to the 60s. While a very small minority around the world said, "fuck it, this is ridiculous," the PTBs, the ratbastards, produced "Dark Shadows." Get it? Dark shadows. For the minority, one look at old Barnabas and it was like, "are you kidding me?" It certainly creeped me out.

But they were dead serious, excuse the pun, and the majority fell under Barney's spell. It heralded, quite consciously, I'm sure, the beginnig of the new Neolithic. TV had finally been developed into the ultimate cultivation tool -- only this time, the crop was peoples' minds. "Dark Shadows" was a rush job to inoculate us against the 60s virus. Hence the poor acting and production values.

From the Wikipedia neolithic entry:

A significant and far-reaching shift in human subsistence and lifestyle was to be brought about in those areas where crop farming and cultivation were first developed, then gradually improved. In these areas, the previous reliance upon a more nomadic hunter-gatherer subsistence technique was at first supplemented, and then increasingly replaced by, a reliance upon the yield produced from cultivated lands. These developments are also believed to have greatly encouraged the growth of settlements, since it may be supposed that the increased need to spend more time and labour in tending crop fields required more localised dwellings. This trend would continue into the Bronze Age, eventually giving rise to towns, and later cities and states whose larger populations could be sustained by the increased productivity from cultivated lands.

Substitute "mind" for both "crop" and "lands" and "free thinking" for "nomadic hunter-gatherer subsistence technique" (note the use of the intentionally derogatory "subsistence"), and you get the idea.

A significant and far-reaching shift in human subsistence and lifestyle was to be brought about in those areas where mind farming and cultivation were first developed, then gradually improved. In these areas, the previous reliance upon free thinking was at first supplemented, and then increasingly replaced by, a reliance upon the yield produced from cultivated minds.

The SOBs time-traveled, so to speak, to the Neolithic for inspiration! It's obvious.

The only thing I can't explain, given the power concentrated at the top due to the Barnabas Collins/TV nexus, is the lack of concern for global warming. Must be the all-consuming power of TV programming. Consider:

I was ten years old when I came home from school to find my mother. As she always was, watching a soap opera. But this soap was different, it had a vampire in it and I was at first scared. The vampires name was Barnabas. I continued to watch the show and as time went by my feeling change. At first I felt sorry for him because of what had happened to him. Then slowly I began to like him. He was an interesting character. Finally I loved him because each show I watched became thrilling as I watched him.


I don't know about you, but I'm entranced. Nothing more thrilling than watching the PTBs trash the globe. And that goes for them, too. Top of the world, Ma! screams Bush as the last reel slips from the projector.

We can only hope that hunter-gatherer subsistence will survive.

Monday, April 10, 2006



US considers use of nuclear weapons against Iran

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The administration of President George W. Bush is planning a massive bombing campaign against Iran, including use of bunker-buster nuclear bombs to destroy a key Iranian suspected nuclear weapons facility, The New Yorker magazine has reported in its April 17 issue.

The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a potential Adolf Hitler.

"That's the name they're using," the report quoted a former senior intelligence official as saying.

A senior unnamed Pentagon adviser is quoted in the article as saying that "this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war."

The former intelligence officials depicts planning as "enormous," "hectic" and "operational," Hersh writes.

more


Hersh is a great investigative reporter. He has amazing contacts, but by downplaying the level of insanity (relatively, think of the level I'm talking about), by pretending, unlike, say Chris Floyd, that the Neocons are just a pack of misguided, somewhat crazy leaders, he does stupid things like write: "Bush and others in the White House view him [Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said."

I don't care if a senior official said it, it's bullshit. Iran stands in their way. It's next on the agenda of global domination via WWIII. End of story. But now every news report is leading with that quote, playing it straight even though it's not meant to be in the article, so that the reporter can go on to discuss the nuclear option as either saber rattling or a regretable last resort, both of which are then presented as reasonable when faced with stopping Hitler.