Archive > July 2010

Trevor Blake: So You Want to Meet an Alien? The Works of Nabil Shaban

31 July 2010 » In biographic, film, krankheit, music, sex, television, trevorblake, video

The Skin Horse
1982
Written by Nigel Evans and Nabil Shaban
Featuring Nabil Shaban with Nick Finden, Tony Gerrard, Tina Leslie, Kathleen Venner

Documentaries on the disabled can be difficult to watch. Not in the sense of such films being ugly. Documentaries on the disabled can be difficult to watch because one simply can’t find them. Frederick Wiseman shot Titicut Follies in 1967. The film depicts the lives of inmates at the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Their lives were made up of being bullied, forced feed, sprayed with a high-pressure water hose and confined in unlit windowless rooms. In 1968 the film was removed from distribution and all copies were ordered destroyed by Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Harry Kalus.  Judge Kalus said he acted in the interest of the privacy of the inmates. The following year in that the film was allowed to be shown but only to health care professionals. Wiseman appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which declined to review the case. According to Wikipedia, “the dispute marked the first known instance in the history of the American film industry that a film was banned from general distribution for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security.” Superior Court Judge Andrew Meyer lifted the ban on the film in 1991, on the condition “a brief explanation shall be included in the film that changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts Correctional Institution Bridgewater since 1966.” Today you can buy a copy of Titicut Follies from Zipporah Films, Inc.

No such luck for The Skin Horse. Channel 4 (formerly Central Television) commissioned the 1982 film but does not sell it. No one sells it, not legally. Worldcat does not list it as existing in the interlibrary loan system.  Exactly one private library has it in their collection. If you are exceptionally fortunate you may have seen it one of the few times it has been broadcast on television. The documentary isn’t banned, it is merely unavailable.

The Skin Horse is a documentary by and about disabled people and their sex lives. Not their secret longing and private thoughts, although these are part of the film. This is a documentary about sex, sex among the disabled, sex between the disabled and the able.

Co-author and narrator Nabil Shaban does not skirt around the issue. The Skin Horse is an adult film, made by and for adults able to speak most clearly about themselves. Perhaps mere suggestiveness would not have succeeded in this film. Perhaps like the Last Poets or Valarie Solanas, the time for subtlty ended long ago for Shaban. When a person is just a little different from the norm, suggestiveness and being coy are more common. When we find a birthmark or personality quirk in a partner it stands out for a moment and then is gone. When one or one’s partner isn’t even considered fully human by some people, the time to beat around the bush ends. The average life span of the disabled is shorter than that of the non-disabled. The average screen time of the disabled is measured in minutes-per-decade compared to the screen time of the non-disabled. A wink and a nod just isn’t going to cut it. These are stories told once, and there’s no follow-up special presentation later on. The Skin Horse is honest in a way most sex documentaries only aspire to be honest.

The honesty begins with a discussion of beauty.  In antiquity philosophers claimed physical beauty was a virtue, like honesty or courage. Deviation from the form was either a punishment or a moral weakness. The etymology of the word monster is that of a beast sent by the gods as a warning. In the 21st Century other theories of beauty predominate. The Skin Horse speaks of four theories of beauty.  All quotes are from The Skin Horse.

Is beauty like the sun, radiating from a center and growing cold with distance? Some sections of The Skin Horse support this classic idea. Nabil: “Most disabled or deformed people I met at special school, sheltered workshop or crip college couldn’t wait to go to bed with an able-bodied person. I know that to be true of me.”

Is beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Perhaps disability does not matter. Those who are left handed tend towards mental illness, higher rates of suicide and imprisonment and shorter life spans. But being left handed is not seen as a disability. Nor are glasses on a person with a slight vision problem. Perhaps what we see as beauty or as a disability is arbitrary, a frame of reference we are free to modify or reject. This was the thinking behind the founding of the Outsiders in 1979. The Outsiders “is a vibrant social and peer support network of disabled people. We are many different things to our many members. [...] Whenever possible, Outsiders works together with other groups to campaign for the acceptance of disabled people as sexual partners.” The Skin Horse includes interviews with a founder of The Outsiders: “If I’d thought about it before I started I don’t think I would have ever dared to do it because I never really thought it would work.  Everyone said it wouldn’t work. But actually, however disabled you are you are still able to love somebody and be loved. So the most amazing marriages and… parings… have taken place. Dispite the fact that they might not only be disabled but also homosexual. Goodness knows, they’re just like anybody else.” The Skin Horse also includes interviews with a member of Outsiders, Jack: “Everyone’s got ability and disability.”

Is beauty a spiritual force? Is beauty to the body as the mind is to the brain? Perhaps beauty and disability are not part of us at all, but a shadow cast by an inner light. Most of the speakers in The Skin Horse hold this theory of beauty. Nabil is a keen researcher into the paranormal, psychic powers, UFOs and utopian politics. Open the gates to a single taboo and the rest come marching in. Nabil: “From childhood we learn that there is always more than meets the eye, that external appearances are misleading, that what exists within us all is always greater than the sum of the parts. [...] To admit love is to admit there is more to appearances. And to admit that we all have to work much harder at being human. We have to consider not only the body but also the soul.” Another man speaks of sex as a spiritual experience rather than a physical one: “I know the joy, the contentment, the feeling of spirituality, the utter relief from the limitations of my body which comes from sex. Just calling it sex is a very limiting word. It’s far more than people think with just one word. My body is very limiting but in sex I feel complete freedom.” Tina Leslie talks about the difference between her body and her self. “Sometimes I eat in front of a mirror to see the mask as other people see me. And try to see their feelings.  But this is what they see. It’s got nothing to do with me, the real me, a lover sees that, the real me. But I still never quite, quite believe it. But my god, I’d rather this than some celibate martyrdom. [...] Some people see me as an ugly thing. They can’t see me as a being, and as a sexual person, never. Christ, I don’t mind being seen like that. What’s the point of militant feminism? I like men. I don’t want to take refuge in something disabled women use as an excuse suppress their sexuality.”

Is beauty a fetish? Are some beautiful because they are different? Thousands of gigabytes of disability pornography are shuttled about the globe every day, lending some weight to this theory. Nearly thirty years earlier, The Skin Horse made the connection between acceptable fetishes (weight lifters and surgical beauty queens) and unacceptable fetishes (in a word, freaks). Nabil: “Perfection becomes an imperfection, a curiosity, a handicap, and the handicap when taken to its physical extremes becomes an end in itself. Hence, King Size [magazine]. Jonny the Wad. Chesty Morgan. King Dong. Big Bum. And all those freaks we have learned to love and loathe. And some people lust after.” Freaks have their place, but it is a well proscribed place. Nabil: “In the world of sexuality, there are three genders: female, male and disabled. And what is more, traditionally, in the disabled group, we are categorized into monsters or children. Children, eh? So we’re either monsters or children. We’re either abused or patronized. We’re either a fetish or sexless. Never in between. [...] It seem we need freaks not only to reassure ourselves of our own normality but more importantly to help us rediscover something. Perhaps that’s why we create our own freaks in myths, legends, fairy stories, literature and films. Perhaps that’s why we impart a certain humanity in them, and allow them to love and be loved. But of course only in fiction.” Here The Skin Horse shows some of the approved and fictional couplings between able bodied persons and freaks, such as Leda and swan, a maid and a minotaur, Kala and Charleton Heston.

If the disabled are (or would like to be) similar to anyone else in their sex lives, are they similar in their loneliness? One man in The Skin Horse says so: “The problem of exploring one’s own sexuality is a problem that everyone has.”  But no matter how we sees ourselves, the challenge in starting and maintaining a relationship (or getting laid) is in how others see us.  One woman in The Skin Horse describes her everyday life at the home for incurables for the past 34 years: “Washed, dressed, put in my chair. [...] Sometimes I ache for the human contact that I’ve been denied. For a new face that isn’t a nurse or another incurable. [...] It’s this sense of waste that I resent most of all. It’s as if people like me are somehow supposed to live our lives beyond frustration. As if part of accepting our lot should include the complete denial of any emotional life at all.” Hey! you’ve got to hide your love away…

Getting off for the disabled can mean breaking laws as well as breaking taboo. One man talks about when his personal assistant brought him to a prostitute: “She was really sort of a bit freaked out by the fact that this guy carried me up the stairs and plunked me on the bed and said ‘there he is.’ I stayed there for about three or four hours. One hears so many terrible things said about prostitutes and I believe it’s still illegal and all that but in that case in point the lady who I saw fulfilled a very useful purpose and I’m eternally grateful to her. [...] The events leading on from [hiring a prostitute] did make me much more relaxed and more self confident in myself as a sexy person, to meet other people, to make relationships, and I suppose over the last few years that has been growing and it’s still growing.”

The men and women in The Skin Horse are largely still with us.  Comedian Tony Gerrard continues to perform. The Outsiders still exists, and is the only place I’ve found that has The Skin Horse in its library. The Skin Horse was where I first learned of Nabil Shaban, and I hope that this review can draw more attention to this singular work. But Shaban has done much more, prior to and since The Skin Horse. He has many stage, film and television credits to his name, some of which are listed below. He was part of the CRASS Collective and in 1980 co-founded the Graeae Theater. Shaban is an artist, an author, an animator, a director, an actor and a musician. He is a father.  How uncomfortable he must feel to know he’s been such a positive influence on my life and the lives of so many others.  Sorry, friend, you’re a hero.

Shaban offers many of his works online at YouTube and elsewhere. If I Decide to Commit Suicide, You Need Hands and The Fifth Gospel include Tina Leslie, also seen in The Skin Horse. If I Decide to Commit Suicide is a video for Shaban’s poem of the same name. It quotes from Eraserhead by David Lynch, just as The Skin Horse quotes from Lynch’s Elephant Man. You Need Hands is a dark music video. The Fifth Gospel describes Christianity as ‘body fascist’ and shows Shaban and Leslie being patronized during a trip to the non-healing fountains of Lourdes. Morticia is available as a video on demand from amazon.com. Morticia is about a girl who wants to become a vampire. A third party has posted The Strangest Viking online. This is a documentary narrated by Shaban on Ivar the Boneless, a viking who conquered much of England. An excerpt from The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds is online. In The Alien Who Lived in the Sheds, Shaban shows that for all his fire and thunder he can make fun of himself. Shaban is a believer in the paranormal, but is aware of how such beliefs can look to non-believers. Shaban is an advocate of the outsider, but it not immune from gawking when he meets a fellow outsider. Shaban is his body, but his body is also a source of pain. Alien includes a film within a film, and this film is again one of his poems set to music and video. For all his success in the theater, Shaban has experienced one significant setback. He secured money for a production of his play The First to Go when England joined the war against Iraq. The First to Go is a play about the fate of the disabled under the T4 program in wartime Germany. Shaban returned the government’s ‘blood money’ in protest and the play has yet to find another backer.

Nabil Shaban has successfully scattered the ash circle that kept able and disabled actors apart. He is a man who can be judged on his talents.  Shaban recently turned fifty and has many years of innovation and experimentation ahead of him. Thank you to Nabil Shaban for opening many doors, taking many risks and thumbing your nose at heresy.

Nabil Shaban (selected works)

Stage:

  • Godspell (1987)
  • The Emperor (1987)
  • Hamlet (1988)
  • Iranian Nights (1989)
  • Measure for Measure (1990)
  • Imagine Drowning (1991)
  • Fleshfly (1996)
  • DARE (1997) [vimeo] [youtube 1][youtube 2][youtube 3]
  • Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1998) [wikipedia]
  • The Little Lamp (1999)
  • Portadown Blues (2000)
  • I am the Walrus (2001)
  • Knocknashee (2002)
  • Jasmine Road (2003)
  • Threepenny Opera (2005) [youtube][dailymotion]
  • One Hour Before Sunrise (2006)
  • Endgame (2007) [youtube]
  • The First to Go (2008)
  • Marat/Sade (?)

Film:

Television:

Radio

  • The Ramayana (1994)
  • Treasure Island (1995)

Books:

Internet:

Trevor Blake is a sign language interpreter who lives in Portland, Oregon USA.

Trevor Blake & OGRE

30 July 2010 » In art, games, trevorblake

Trevor Blake & OGRE collection (partial). Portland, Oregon USA. 30 July 2010.

A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper: The Outbursts of Everett True

30 July 2010 » In comics

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

Interview: Yael Ruth Dragwyla

28 July 2010 » In biographic, magick, ovo, periodical, zine

Yael Ruth Dragwyla is a writer; a ceremonial magickian, and sometimes editor of various alternative press publications.

OVO: What are some of the varieties of non-physical travel?

YRD: The two principal kinds are the out of body (OBE) stuff, where you literally leave your body and go elsewhere, and bilocation, where your mind is in two places at the same time whether or not you manifest physically in two places at the same time. I’ve found by experience and I’ve seen this reported in the literature that sometimes you’re thinking very hard about a place, you’ll be sitting in your living room thinking about a place and people will see you walking down the street in he place that you’re drinking about. They’ll say ‘Hi’ and you just disappear. You’ve bilocated into that city because you were thinking so hard about something.  You my actually have a physical appearance if you don’t have a physical weight or anything there. Your mind is definitely there as well as in your own body, so you’re not unconscious. With out of the body stuff, you actually leave your body. I bilocate routinely when I’m doing a magickal ritual.

OVO: Is this something that anyone could experience?

YRD: Anybody can experience it and I think at least a few times in your life everybody experiences it. If you’ve ever had a dream where you’re walking along an you suddenly stumble and there’s a bad jolt as if you’ve fallen on your face and you wake up, usually that means you’ve fallen back into your body after an OBE dream. Everybody’s had at least a couple of those. Everybody’s had an experience where you’re sitting in a chair and thinking about a place and suddenly it seems almost as if you were there. Everyone almost bilocates all the time but to do it effectively an exactly the way you want to without any hitches (or come close to go anyway), special training of stuff that is already in everybody is needed. People who have been in bad accidents or who were seriously traumatized on a chronic basis as children, a lot of the filters in their brain that are normally present for the rest of us aren’t there and they will tend to have these experiences more often. Therefore they’re the ones most likely to need the training. But this is something we all do at some point.

OVO: What does the training involve?

YRD: One of the things you can do is get the traditional crystal ball or bowl of water, and you gaze into it long enough that your mind gets bored with thinking about things and gives it up while you continue to stare into this thing. You start seeing pictures, pictures in your mind’s eye. When that starts happening you can train the pictures into being where you want them to be. If you keep doing this for quite a while you’ll find yourself projecting your mind at least partially to this other place. If you’re projecting into this bowl of water and you’re in, say, Los Angeles, and you’re thinking about London, you’ll start to bilocate into London. How far you’ll get with that I don’t know. There are all sorts of books on the subject. Another technique is to get a poster of a place you’d very much like to visit and you keep it on your wall. Five minutes a day you meditate on it and pretty soon you’ll be going there in your dreams.

OVO: What is the relation between something like bilocation and modern electronic media, which has some of the same effects as those attributed to bilocation?

YRD: With modern electronic media you have to have all that junk, whereas with bilocation you can do that spontaneously and all you need is your own head. Bilocation can produce more real manifest effects and do it in a real world way than electronics. Electronics is always planted and less complex than real life is. You don’t get get to touch and smell things on TV, you just see them. With bilocation all sorts of real life things am come across. If you actually get an out of the body experience you can pick up everything from music to smells to the way something feels when you rub your hand over it.

OVO:: What about the difference between out of the body experiences and bilocation and the like and psychosis or madness? How can you tell the difference?

YRD: Psychosis is when you loose control. If you can’t stop doing it its madness. It’s as if your body were in full panic mode and everything was frightening whether it should have been or not or your thoughts endlessly drift. The person who is psychotic is in bad shape, because they’re not fully in control of themselves, their thoughts run on in ways they can’t control. They can’t maintain control over their emotions so they drift in a psychological wind. But with these properties of bilocation and OBEs, when you do them spontaneously, if you’re sound and sane you get back home again without any problems. If on top of that you have training in how to utilize these things you get there and come back and you’ve achieved something along the way, you have control over this process.

OVO: What is a way for someone to test the reality of it if someone thinks they can bilocate?

YRD: If you think you’re in a city and you’ve never been there before, try to go to a corner where there’s a street sign. Get the names of the streets, addresses, if possible names off mail boxes. When you’re awake again write all this down as quickly as possible so you don’t forget and go to a library and look it up on a map. If you can, stop and talk to somebody. Say ‘hello’ and engage them in a conversation, in which you ask them about their city. Say you’re a stranger. If they’re speaking in a foreign language that you don’t understand that’s a pretty good test of it.

OVO: Do you know of examples of that happening?

YRD: I’ve read of it in the literature. Beyond that it’s by guess and by god.

One of the things that is very hard to do in dreams and in astral projection is to look at your own hands. I’ve tried it. Raise your own hands in front of your face and look at them. If you can’t do that or if you have trouble even putting the thoughts together to do that, that may be something that tells you that you’re astral-traveling rather than in a normal waking state. If you can think about doing it you’re not in a normal dream. I’d like someday to found my own university of esoteric sciences – for real, such that eventually it would produce graduates who simultaneously have a degree in some esoteric field, like say alchemy, and at the same time in something that would get them a job, a top-level job, working, say, for the government, or cities, or environmental protection. In Kipling’s book Kim the main character says “I thank Allah for both sides of my head.” This culture does not educate both sides of the head as they did in medieval times when they had the Curriculum. The point of the Curriculum was the well-rounded man. We need to do that again but we can’t go back to the medieval way of looking at the world. We know better, so we have to go forward, to a spiritual literacy that is up-to-date with all our experiences, good and bad, in the Twentieth Century. That’s what I want to start some day, real education. Not new age bullshit but education for both sides of the head in a way that is appropriate to the late Twentieth Century and the early Twenty-First.

(from OVO 13 TRAVEL January 1992)

Interview: Jennifer Murrian

27 July 2010 » In biographic, ovo, periodical, transportation, zine

OVO: What was the day of your first car accident?

JM: It was Tuesday, August 5th, 1986.

OVO: What happened?

JM: I was in South Carolina, staying at Polly’s Island with my mother for a week. My boyfriend had gone down with me. We were going to Murtle Beach; he was going to go to a skateboard park. We’d taken his mother’s station wagon. I was driving because he was getting his skateboard ready or something. It was a highway like Alcoa Highway [Knoxville, Tennessee], with a lot of dangerous intersections. I was going about 50 miles an hour when we came upon an intersection where there was a big Bronco and an old Pontiac. The Bronco pulled out and cleared the intersection in front of us. The woman in the Pontiac pulled up to the intersection, did not stop, and pulled onto the highway right in front of us. We hit her. The front left of her car and the front right our car collided. We ended up in the median, in the ditch. I was wearing the lap part of my seat but not the shoulder harness, and my face flew into the steering wheel. I knocked out seven bottom teeth. My boyfriend was not wearing his seat belt. He hit the windshield with his head and cut his head up badly. When we impacted with her I hit my mouth and I slung my body against the door. I had glass in my face from the windshield. Her window was down and we could see her. We were conscious and she was conscious. My boyfriend rolled down his window and leaned his head out the window and said “you okay?” She said yes, that she was okay. We sat in the car for… seconds. A woman came up to his window and asked “Do you want me to call an ambulance?” We said yes. We went to the hospital. I stayed the night but I don’t think he did. I had surgery the next day. I’d sprained my arm, my back and my neck, and I’d knocked my teeth out.

OVO: How did that change you?

JM: It made me a much better driver. I don’t trust anybody anymore. I don’t think anybody knows what they’re doing. As far as when anybody gets behind the wheel I don’t think people have their right minds. This woman that hit us had been driving for five years. She was 65. She got her license when she was 60 and she didn’t know what she was doing. I don’t take for granted that people are going to stop at stop signs. I slow down all the time. The biggest change in me is that I’m a horrible passenger. I get antsy when I have to sit in the passenger seat and I tell people what to do. I tell people to slow down. I’ve learned not to feel bad about telling people when I’m uncomfortable. I’ve been in a car with people who were going to fast and I’ve said you’ve got to slow down or I‘m getting out of the car. Because I know that you can die and that’s changed my life completely. Facing what I thought was my own death. I thought I was going to die.

(from OVO 13 TRAVEL January 1992)

Pat Condell: A God of Life

27 July 2010 » In atheist, christianity, islam, science, theocracy, video


via youtube.

Mike Daniels: The True Face of Faith Healing

27 July 2010 » In christianity, magick, portland, theocracy

The faith-healing parents of Alayna May Wyland are fighting to get custody of their daughter back, even as they face criminal charges for their neglect of her medical needs. [...] Their daughter was taken into custody by the state in early July and sent for immediate medical treatment. At that time, neither the name of their daughter nor her condition were available. The image above was taken by the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. In it, Rebecca Wyland is holding Alayna, who has a massive growth completely covering her left eye. The growth, a hemangioma, is a mass of blood vessels. Some infants are born with them, and they are typically corrected while very small. In this case, the Wylands chose not to take their daughter to a doctor. Instead, Rebecca Wyland anointed her daughter with oil and wiped off the discharge from Alayna’s eye each time she changed the child’s diaper. At this point, the growth has begun to erode Alayna’s eye socket, and may have caused permanent damage to her eye. Both parents have been charged with first-degree criminal mistreatment, a Class C felony which may earn them each five years in prison.

Article continues.  See my previous essay Child Sacrifice in Oregon to learn more about the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City, Oregon.  Of course every good Christian knows Christianity doesn’t say that you should pray for sick people and put oil on them instead of offer them medical care. Of course every good Christian knows that Psalms 103:2-3, Matthew 10:1, Matthew 10:8, Matthew 19:26, Mark 6:13, Mark 10:27, Luke 1:37, Luke 18:27, Acts 28:8-9, and James 5:14-15 don’t exist.  Because if those verses did exist, it might turn out that the parents of Alayna May Wyland were the real ‘good Christians’ and the rest were just picking up the bits they liked from the Jesus salad bar and leaving the rest.

Chris Gross: Three Letters

27 July 2010 » In ovo, periodical, subgenius, ufo, zine

From Chris Gross to Trevor Blake, 27 April 1990
… I heard from the Striebers this week. Looks as if l might be sitting in on a Communion meeting. I should be hearing from Anne about it some time next week. I dunno how those ‘experiences’ of mine stack up next to those other folks, but this whole thing is getting interesting. Especially since I had two almost waking ‘experiences’ last week and I’ve begun to remember some dreams that might be relevant (and which pre-date Communion). One concerned ‘visitor’-like beings with high, squeaky voices that came at me with scissors – but they took too much off the top and left the back too long.

I’m generally pretty detached when I dream (unless the dream is an overt nightmare, which isn’t often). But some of these ‘dreams’ do seem to sneak up on me later on. For example, one of those two ‘experiences’ last week was a very vivid dream of being back at my parents house in the Poconos. I was ‘awakened’ by some moving white lights at the front and side of the house. I went to the window and saw something with a pale, bobbing head that I couldn’t identify. The first time l saw it l ducked away from the window, thinking ‘I can’t let it see me!’ I looked again and the thing seemed much less threatening, almost like a scarecrow. I also saw a small (about 2 inches high) skull and crossbones sign in the yard. A glance out the front window didn’t reveal anything In the front yard and there was nothing in the house. I woke up feeling very apprehensive. The dream itself was very tame, emotionally; I don’t know why I acted so frightened afterward. At any rate, it was hours before I got back to sleep. The room had a very haunted feel to it.

The second ‘event’ was very scary at the time (it involved my brother Richie, who once told me that he’d seen ‘an elf with black eyes’ in the woods behind the house) but it seems to have worn off…

From Chris Gross to Whitley Strieber, 1990
Dear Mr. Strieber:
I had been planning to write you after having read Transformation but I’d somehow put it off. Your talk at the New York Fortean Society meeting made me finally decide to sit down and type this up.

I was deeply affected by Communion because it was the first time I realized that other people had been having experiences similar to mine. I’ve been a Fortean (as a member of INFO) since about 1980 and have come across some bizarre stories I think should have rung a few bells in my mind when l read them – but at the time they were just more bits of data to be collected. I never connected them with anything in my own life. The “visitors” paradigm, now that it is a paradigm (though not a firm one) had helped me link up many strange events in my life that seemed unconnected at the time they happened.

I won’t go into detail about these events in this letter because I don’t want it to run too long. I’ll outline them in a separate enclosure. If you would like any further information about the events described in the outline I would be happy to provide it.

In any event, I’m glad to see The Communion Foundation is off the ground. I will be subscribing to the newsletter as soon as possible, and I hope The Foundation will be able to help the people who have been ‘visited’ to cope with their experiences. In that regard, I think that my research in Fortean activities has helped me to take this sort of thing in stride; after years of reading about spontaneous human combustion, chocolate-chip cookies falling out of the sky, etc., the “visitors” seem a bit easier to take!

I’m now going to go back and re-read Transformation so I’ll sign off. It was a pleasure to see and hear your presentation, and I hope the enclosed is helpful.

Sincerely,
Chris Gross

1. DREAMS
I have always had a very vivid dream life; my dreams are usually very detailed and dense with information. One element of certain specific dreams had always puzzled me these dreams involve places I’ve never been to (or which don’t exist) and people I’ve never met. One of these dreams featured the theme of experimentation. As far as I can remember it took place between 1979 and 1981 I was in college.

In this dream, I was in a strange, grey painted room with three or four other people. We were all lined up, straddling a bench and facing what looked like a large gray plastic shield of some sort. This shield was at least six feet high and resembled a welder’s mask seen from the inside. As the person in front of the line underwent some sort of treatment and was escorted out of the room, the rest of us would move forward one space and the process would begin all over again. When my turn finally came, I found myself facing a gaunt, white-haired man (identified in the dream as “Antionette”) who began pricking my face with a long, thin needle. The experience was very painful. The needle felt as though it had been electrified. I was then escorted from the room. I have no memory of the people who led me out, apart from the fact that they were wearing dark overalls. My strongest emotion at this point was anger. I felt as though I had somehow been used. The dream then became more unreal in texture and degenerated into a revenge fantasy against “Antionette.” I also began to experience what I later learned were called “haggings;” I would wake up paralyzed and unable to breathe properly, with the feeling that someone else was in the room with me. The haggings eventually got so bad that I sought help; the results will be mentioned in an upcoming section.

In the mid-’80s, (I wish I could be more specific about some of these dates but I was reluctant to write these experiences down) I experienced a series of dream whose texture was very different from anything I was used to. These dreams were extremely vivid and emotionally intense but my sense of time and the visual imagery were vague. I can only compare the experience to a delirium. In these dreams, some sort of non-human entity was trying to enter the house either through the TV set or my bedroom closet (depending on the dream). One repeated image tied all these dreams together: several hairless, slow-moving creatures with huge dark eyes approaching me through a darkened hallway. I am an occasional freelance writer, and I incorporated this image into a horror-movie treatment I was writing at the time. The general tone of these dreams was absolute panic, although the actions of these creatures was not threatening. They seemed to be possessed of a form of demonic energy that they were struggling to hold in check.

Two other dreams occurred in the mid-’70s. In one, a doctor was giving me a painful injection in my hand (probably the right one). The needle left a pale blue mark on my skin, resembling the mark made by a fine-point Magic Marker. For some reason I decided not to tell anyone about this. I was in my teens and living at home at the time. The other dream is a vague one concerning large, dark eyes and very small features. Nothing much happened in this dream: all I did was look at the entities, who struck me as being benign.

I would like to emphasize that the preceding dreams differ greatly in “texture” from the dreams I normally have, even the ones that are very bizarre. I was more alert in these dreams than I usually am, and I also had a sense that on some level these events were actually happening. The haunted feel of these dreams often carried over into the next day, or even the next several days.

I have had several apocalyptic dreams. They all involve a limited catastrophe here in the Northeast that involves an unnatural darkness during the day (usually around 10:00 AM) and something coming out of the sky, although whatever it is coming out of the sky is never cited as the cause of the catastrophe. There is also a suggestion of a series of plane crashes, bomb scares, etc., but these seem only concommittants. One of these dreams involved a symbolic cracking-open of the sky just before the darkness fell.

In the interest of brevity I am leaving out many other dreams dealing with elements that appear in Communion, Transformation and Budd Hopkins’ Intruders. The rest can be provided on request.

2. HAGGINGS
As mentioned earlier, I have experienced many incidents of “hagging” since about 1980. Almost all of them involved the feeling that someone else was in the room when no one was. This entity (sometimes group of entities) normally seemed less malicious than possessed of immense energy and powers of concentration. In one case, however, a group of these entities seemed to have a sense of humor.  They seemed to be standing next to the bed out of visual range and laughing in an unusual, reedy manner. I mentally told them to knock it off and let me sleep. Instead, I began to hear a confused series of noises, ranging from what sounded like taped snippets of radio program played at wrong speeds to a bicycle horn. I repeated my demand that the entities leave me alone, and the noises ground down like a record player being turned off.

These experiences would often include an element of space-distortion. I would have the feeling that I was somehow facing in the “wrong” direction, although everything about my bedroom appeared normal. It was as though the room itself had been turned around, although my position relative to the room was unchanged.

My most severe hagging came in the Summer of 1988. I had attended my first channeling session the night before, at the invitation of a friend of the channeler. I came home with a severe migraine and had an attack of vomiting. I went to sleep, got up a few hours later for glass of Coke, and went back to sleep again. At about 5:00 AM I woke up paralyzed, aware of a strangely relentless being in room, and completely unable to breathe. I felt as though someone were trying to push a thin metal rod down my throat, which had closed up and gone into spasms. I lost consciousness several times while trying to fight this thing off. I never saw it, and could barely keep my eyes open. Eventually I gave up, and I fell asleep again. The next day, I called the friend who had invited me to the session (a physical therapist / hypnotist from Brooklyn) and asked if I could talk to her about a strange incident in which I had been involved. We met in Prospect Park, and I described the hagging, we were both overcome by a growing feeling of oppression. By time for lunch, we were both feeling disoriented and physically sick. We went back to her apartment, and my friend called the channeler for advice. Her assessment (l don’t quite agree with it myself) was that we were under attack by an earthbound spirit, so my friend performed a “deliverance” and we both felt much better. The haggings went away or several months, but there have been a few minor incidents since then. Luckily they were nothing serious. One interesting point is that the entity I felt during some of mess incidents had a high-pitched, reedy voice. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what it was saying. The traumatic “delirium” experience mentioned in the previous segment felt very similar to hagging, but it was much less coherent.

3. AUDITORY “HALLUCINATIONS”
These happen very infrequently, sometimes in a hypnogogic state and very rarely in a waking state, and usually take the form of loud bangs or crashes heard while I am falling asleep. Ironically, I sleep through most thunderstorms. A recurring “hallucination” this past winter consisted of a Morse code-like beeping in my right ear. It was never loud and after a while it would usually fade out entirely. The sound was very similar to that of a marine navigation beacon, which generally broadcast on the long-wave band, repeating a series of letters in Morse code. It was a repeated sequence lasting about five or six seconds. I have had many problems with my right ear (at least five middle ear infections, several times rupturing the eardrum) but my hearing has remained unaffected and there is no evidence of tinnitis.

4. PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS
I recently discovered that I have a deviated septum. The only explanation I’ve received for this is the possibility that I may have broken my nose at some point in my life. I have no memory of anything like this happening, although in 1982 I suffered a series of recurring, unexplained nose bleeds. At the time of my “delirium” experiences I began to have severe migraines. I had several of them in high school and college, but new batch was much worse. My doctor sent me to the hospital for tests (CT scan, EEG, strobe test for epilepsy), but nothing abnormal was found. I was put on Inderal, a beta blocker that seems to prevent migraines. It was only occasionally successful; the migraines only stopped after the “deliverance” although recently they’ve started up again. I came down with one after the NYFS meeting on May 20.

5. ANOMALIES
My experience with UFOs is minimal. I used to see occasional star-like orange lights in the sky (two of which seemed to dip down and fly over the house) when I live in the Poconos (1971-1981). I had one further incident after moving to New Jersey.

On June 25, 1987 I was waiting to cross a street in Paramus (Forest Avenue), when I happened to look at the sky and saw a black ovoid object flying due West. It appeared to be made of some sort of flexible material; it was a flat object set up on edge rather than horizontally, and its edge rippled as it veered a bit from side to side. I eventually lost sight of it behind some trees. When I got home I wrote up a report for INFO.

The next day my phone line was severed. I called the police from a pay phone. An officer inspected the line, which seemed to have been sliced with a razor blade and told me that it had been deliberately cut. I saw what looked like crimp marks about an inch from the cut on either side. The phone company repairman told me that a passing truck must have snagged it. However, I live on a dead end street and the wire was at least 15 feet above the ground. I had been home all day except for a trip to the video store and had noticed nothing unusual.

I have had occasional phone calls from someone with a voice very similar to the ones I’ve heard in my dreams and haggings. The voice resembles that of a little girl or of the voice at the end of The Fly that says “Help mee-e-e-e… ” It also seems disembodies, as though it were coming directly from the larynx with no chest tones. These phone conversations have all been nonsensical. I generally put unusual calls out of my mind, but I do remember one that went like this:

CG: Hello?
VOICE: Hello. (LONG PAUSE)
CG: Who is this?
VOICE: WwwwhhhATT? (I should explain that one: it’s the word ‘What’ pronounced in a drawn-out manner with a rising inflection. The “t” at the end was pronounced almost as a separate syllable.)
CG: (AFTER ANOTHER LONG PAUSE) Hello?
VOICE: Hello.
CG: Who is this?
VOICE: WwwwhhhATT?
CG: I said, ‘Who is this?’
VOICE: WwwwhhhATT?

At that point I hung up. That conversation took place at about the time my haggings started, and as l recall I received two more of these calls after moving back to New Jersey in 1981. Unfortunately, I also began receiving more prank calls and wrong numbers, so I never thought much about them and eventually forgot their contents. I remember they were very short conversations, in which only a few sentences were exchanged.

For what it’s worth I was constantly being pulled out of class from first grade through senior high school and given intelligence tests. As far as I recall, I was the only one to whom this was done. I was never told who the people were who were testing me or why the tests were being given, but I guess it’s a comfort to me to know that I did very well. I was never told the results of these tests except that they were exceptional and apparently even baffling. I did overhear a remark while in high school that my sister had an IQ of 170 and that mine was higher than hers. The testing did not continue into college.

My overall view of these and other incidents as they relate to the visitor phenomenon is that my experiences, though not conclusive or even very coherent, indicates to me that something real is going on above and beyond any “hallucinations” that may be an integral part of it. I don’t know if I’ve actually run into the visitors or had some odd experiences but the events listed in your books really hit home and made me re-evaluate many of the unusual dreams and phenomena I’ve experienced over the past ten to fifteen years. If the visitors actually exist, I don’t believe that I’m in any kind of conscious rapport with them although I assume that if they are involved in my life l must be interesting to them in at least a clinical way. As to the nature of the visitors I agree that it’s very easy to anthromorphise. I get the impression that the beings I’ve encountered in my dreams and “haggings” are extremely alien in their thought processes. Either that or they drink a lot. I did feel some fear towards them at first, but I think I’ve been able to gradually rule out malice as a motive or their actions. They seem to be going about things tentatively, occasionally making mistakes (some damaging, some humorous). These days I seem to feel an amused affection for them most of the time. Maybe that’s John Keel’s influence rubbing off, since he seems to feel the same way about the Men in Black, Mothman., etc.

One intriguing aspect to my own experiences (based on a seemingly unconnected batch of vivid, recurring dream) is that these beings are involved in some sort of communications network that is occasionally tapped into by humans. These “leaks” would be symbolized in some cases by dreams of television sets, radios, newspapers, some computers, etc., bearing extremely cryptic information. This idea is very difficult to defend because it’s based on subjective experience and hunches. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it, but there’s always the chance that someone else may have experienced the same thing.

As I mentioned in the letter, this is all just the tip of the iceberg. I’m just selecting the information that appears to be the most relevant to The Communion Foundation’s studies. If you would like further information on anything I’ve mentioned here, I would be happy to supply it.

From Chris Gross to Trevor Blake, 30 June 1990
… about the Strieber stuff… still no word from the NYC group. BUT – you can run the letter as is, provided that you mention that no connection with Whit is to be implied, since I took one look at the letter, signed it Popeye, and tossed it back into my files. He hasn’t read it. I’d rather not re-write it as an article, partially because the disc with the information on it has disappeared and partially because I think the letter would be more evidential. So even I don’t know what it says anymore!

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)

Trevor Blake: Prohibition in the News

27 July 2010 » In commerce, fight, prison, prohibition, race, sex

Paul Elam: Drugs, War, Blood and Money

It started, like a lot of deadly bad ideas, with politicians. We can thank the Democrats for the inception, but somewhere along the line, the Republicans stepped in to prove they were just as stupid. Woodrow Wilson, who also gave us the Federal Reserve Act, the first draft since the Civil War and rave reviews of the stunningly racist movie Birth of a Nation, helped usher in the age where America turned questionable personal habits into concrete walls and steel gray bars. It was called the Harrison Tax Act of 1914, and it was the result of nearly fifteen years of disinformation and racist propaganda promulgated by Wilson’s associates.

In 1900 the Journal of the American Medical Association published in a report that “Negroes in the South are being addicted to a new form of vice – that of ‘cocaine sniffing’ or the ‘coke habit.’” That was followed up by several newspaper reports that cocaine was causing blacks to rape white women and was improving their pistol marksmanship. Eight years later President Teddy Roosevelt appointed Dr. Hamilton Wright as the first Opium Commissioner for the United States. Among his most notable observations was that “cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by Negroes of the south and other sections of the country.” Wright also postulated that “one of the most unfortunate phases of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and are living as common-law wives or cohabitating with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities.”

Let’s see. A bunch of drug crazed horny black men and a growing number of loose white women with no qualms about crossing racial boundaries? Yeah, man, it was time for war, alright; time to break out some fucking law and order.

Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy: Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?

No one seems to know, but on the ground it is death. Calderón’s war, assisted by the United States, terrorizes the Mexican people, generates thousands of documented human rights abuses by the police and Mexican Army and inspires lies told by American politicians that violence is spilling across the border (in fact, it has been declining on the US side of the border for years). We are told of a War on Drugs that has no observable effect on drug distribution, price or sales in the United States. We are told the Mexican Army is incorruptible, when the Mexican government’s own human rights office has collected thousands of complaints that the army robs, kidnaps, steals, tortures, rapes and kills innocent citizens. We are told repeatedly that it is a war between cartels or that it is a war by the Mexican government against cartels, yet no evidence is presented to back up these claims. The evidence we do have is that the killings are not investigated, that the military suffers almost no casualties and that thousands of Mexicans have filed affidavits claiming abuse, often lethal, by the Mexican army. Here is the US policy in a nutshell: we pay Mexicans to kill Mexicans, and this slaughter has no effect on drug shipments or prices.

Julian Isherwood: Free Heroin Gives Good Results

A test-run of issuing free heroin to addicts in Copenhagen appears to be successful, with initial results showing reduced crime and prostitution and improved health and life quality for those taking part in the project. Since March this year, some 20 addicts have been part of a programme under which two clinics provide them with heroin each morning and afternoon. The head of the Valmue Clinic in Copenhagen says that his centre has registered both a physical and psychological improvement among the addicts.

“They don’t have to wake up in the morning with how to get money as the first thing they think about. That gives them a surplus that means that we can talk to them about their housing situation, how we can help them apply for a disability pension if they need that, or perhaps about the child they have lost contact with,” says Valmue Clinic Head Torben Ballegaard. At the same time, Ballegaard says that addicts say that they commit fewer crimes, have stopped prostitution and have improved health. Several have put on weight because apart from heroin, they are provided breakfast and a hot meal during the day. Daily contact with a nurse also means that infections, boils and illnesses are discovered earlier, according to Senior Nurse Vivian Kjær at the KABS institution.

Problem, problem, solution.  End prohibition.  Thousands will die – thousands fewer than die from prohibition.

James V. Scianna: A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey

26 July 2010 » In krankheit, ovo, periodical, zine

The following is an account by James Scianna of some of his experiences after temporarily ceasing to take powerful anti-psychotic and antidepressants after eight years of taking these drugs.

I go to this Vietnamese public health office, or at least when I get there it is run by a Vietnamese woman. I go in there and I guess there’s some conversation done in some curt professional manner on her part and it sort of defines the situation. I get the feeling that she’s talking down to me because I’m not of her race. I’m going there to get some special cockroach spray for the apartment that they are supposed to have there (I called them before I went). Anyway, she checks on this and I find out they don’t have it there in stock.  Then she starts talking about how I owe them / her seventy-five cents for some sort of “consultation fee” from the phone call I made, which pisses me off since they didn’t have what I wanted. I think I pay this. Then, as if that weren’t enough, she starts talking about how I owe her a pen since the last time I was there I took her pen. This becomes too much for me and an argument ensues, again, not heated but very curt, mature and professional, like that which often occurs between a customer and proprietor.  Anyway, I leave in a huff.

At this point what I am feeling is that for some reason the woman, because I am not of her race, looks down on me and is fucking with my head, trying to get one over on me, pushing me into a confrontation with her.  She’s playing on my own secret tendency to look down on Vietnamese people. The effect on me is one of frustration and of guilt. Although I know I didn’t steal her pen, I feel guilty as if I did. Perhaps I just forgot to return her pen to her accidentally. I don’t know, I’m not sure. Still, I feel guilty about this. I feel as if I’m definitely in the wrong and yet feel as if I should feel that I’m in the right. I’m frustrated.

As I’m walking home I notice that I’m at the curve of the road by the Main Public library at the intersection of Market and West San Carlos but the place is like a ghetto instead of a thriving hub of civic activity, what with with library, the civic center, the convention center and Fairmont Hotel all in that area.

A screaming, crying, half-naked Black kid comes running out of one slum yelling something about her father trying to tattoo her. I’m concernedly asking her and the brother who comes to fetch her if she is all right even though I know that there is nothing I can do if she isn’t all right, which is most probably the case.

I feel a sense of token concern over this. Again, we get a minority that l secretly look down upon. Whereas before I was not responsible for the situation, and yet I felt responsible, I felt as if I should feel responsible and wanted the other person to feel I had nothing to do with what she had accused me of. In this case, it was the flip side: even though I was not responsible for this young child’s situation, didn’t have anything to do with it and, indeed, I didn’t want to deal with it, I wanted the people involved to think that I could do something about it, a token show of concern. “Are you all right?” What was I going to do if they weren’t?  Nothing?

As I’m walking along I walk by a short cyclone fence of a house. On the inside of the fence, hanging on it by the neck, is the desiccated carcass of a tiny little kitten. Immediately I understand that another abusive father is at work here, that the cat of some poor family has had a whole litter of unwanted kittens and the father is abusing, killing and neglecting them so that they die and he doesn’t have to deal with them.

Two of these starved, half-dead yet amazingly strong and eager little unwanted things come up to me and start grabbing onto my ankles and legs with ferocious tenacity, saying (non-verbally) “Please! Save us! Take us home! Feed us! Please! Love us!” It frightens me, the intensity of their need to be rescued from this, hellish kitty concentration camp and yet I’m concerned that they are going to get run over by a car outside of the fence where they are. I pick one of them up to throw it inside of this malevolent sanctuary and it digs its claws into my hands, unwilling to let go at any cost. I throw it in anyway.

I am hurt physically and psychologically by this whole scene. The kittens are repulsive to me. I want to be rid of them, of the sight of them. I am appalled by their horrible existence and their ferocious desperation. I can’t do anything about their pain. I literally throw them back into their situation. My feeling at this point is like there is a great weight on my shoulders, the weight of the world, the world’s pain, even though it is typified in two isolated incidents. I feel I’m living in a terrible world. I keep thinking how appalled my sister would be at these kitten’s plight. This is the third instance in which I feel guilty about something I have no power over. About something I haven’t done and can’t do anything about.

I notice a roach in the room. Then another. Then another. Like that movie Creepshow, “They’re Creeping Up on You.” I’m pissed because I can’t get the roach spray that’s going to solve my problems. So I get a can of Raid out and start spraying every square inch of the place with a heavy foam of the diluted poison. Spraying it directly onto roaches as I find each one. Until, when spraying under the bed, I come upon the queen cockroach herself. No matter how hard and how much I spray her, though, she doesn’t die. She becomes bigger and bigger.

She comes out from under the bed and she’s like a huge queen ant and by now she’s agent the size of a schnauzer. I’m spraying the Raid at her like she’s some sort of monster in some B horror movie, but it’s horribly real. The Raid comes out in a long foamy stream, an endless supply of the stuff directed at her insecticide head. She just laps it up like a dog drinking from a water lose.

Again, there is the deep feeling of revulsion and horror. I want to run screaming from the place but realize that I have no place to run to. The queen cockroach is insistent. She gets bigger and bigger after she crawls from beneath my bed.

I put myself in the cockroach’s place, and speak with her “voice:” “I am a monster. I am hideous. I am loathsome. I am disgusting. I hide in the dark, buried underneath an altar on which are sacrificed all my secret dreams and lurid fantasies. And yet, when I am seen and noticed I shall not be denied. I am not evil.  I do not want to cause Jim pain. I cannot help what I am. I am what I am. I need to be loved.”

I find myself watching some sort of special Donahue show on schizophrenics, but it’s being hosted by a bearded Johnathan Winters (who was diagnosed “schizophrenic,” or at least so I’ve heard). As he goes through the panel, introducing each schizophrenic to the studio audience, he asks them: “Are you on any medication right now?” And yet, these people aren’t like the mentally ill people I know. They’re cute, they’re funny, they’re amusing, like characters off of a situation comedy. One guy is an annoying lawyer from the movie The Onion Fields (at least he looks like him). Another woman on the panel, thin, slightly older, red hair, interrupts Winters’ monologue by saying “Excuse me, sir; excuse me, sir,” over and over. Again, the audience is amused.

I know that it’s all bullshit. It’s not real. Mentally ill people tend to be shuffling, confusing, confused, unwanted souls tucked away in the cellars of society.  They are not television personalities who delight millions with their eccentric antics and bizarre behavior. And yet, I am not indignant at this realization. If anything, it is an afterthought I’m caught up in the illusion. It’s a great show. It’s great stuff. Real good television. I wish I were taping it to add to my collection. I am entertained.

As the lady on the panel is saying “Excuse me, sir,” we see a three-dimensional, real time computer animated representation of their talking heads, and of her  saying “Excuse me, sir” over and over while she’s saying it. The point of view of the computer animation sweeps over these heads, focusing on one, lifting,  panning over the panel, all to electronic music. I think it is a fine technical job. Then in this real-time cartoon, we see the heads being disassembled like  blocks of wood. Like some sort of puzzle. Sections of the scalp and face spontaneously disappear until the skull is revealed, then sections of the cranium, portions of the jaw, geometrically bisected portions of static gray matter. We see the entire interior structure of their heads. Then the whole thing happens in reverse and we’re back to the real show.

It’s all fascinating to me. How in the world do they do that? I don’t care. It just looks great, sounds great. I’m caught up in the mastery of the technical wizardry. This show is great!

The schizos are involved in some sort of sketch. One woman (perhaps the same one) is not satisfied with her performance and keeps wanting to start it over.  They try to explain to her that it is a live show and that she should just go through with it. The audience is amused by this. I realize that is just a show that has been on before. It is a re-run. Its all just so much bullshit. But high-quality bullshit.

I wake up. But I don’t really wake up, I’m still dreaming, having woke up from a dream within a dream. My sense of “reality” is undermined as it teeters on the edge, the blink between joy and madness. For some reason, I’m ecstatic in my disillusionment. What the hell does it matter? Christ, I might as well be happy. And I am, I’m joyous; content in my confusion. Am I mad? The thought doesn’t even occur to me as I’m swept away in spirited rapture.

The phone rings and it is a friend of mine, Mike. I talk to him some and I realize that I’m excited and talking very weird and I start to sense that he’s going  to start feeling that I’m mentally ill and start talking down to me or patronizing me. This particular friend works with autistic children and tends to condescend to me at times, like I’m one of his clients.

He asks me if I went to this Vietnamese place to get the roach spray and I tell him yes, I did, but they didn’t have it. I anticipate that he thinks this is too easy, that I’m lying about it. He says something and I say; “Mike, are you accusing me of lying to you?” My heart trembles and hitches with frustration and fearful indignation in its heaving rib cage as I anticipate the imminent professional rebuke.

“Well,” he insists, “are you?”

Demanding voice echoes in my ears. A maddening drone.

“Are you? Are you? Are you?”

I am paralyzed in my fear. My back is pressed hard against an unyielding wall. A million angry beehives explode between my temples drowning everything out except his pounding query. I close my blind eyes tight against the undeniable assault as it screams in my scrambled brain.

My eyes snap open in wide terror, glistening like moist eggshells. My mouth stretches into an exaggerated pain-rictus howling a silent scream.

White out.

Black out.

The wall behind me is a soap bubble. I slide through it effortlessly and tumble unoriented, wildly, spinning out of control through a sunblasted expanse of spinning thick-blue atmosphere and silver-white clouds of hairswept coolness. The uncatchable sun orbits me insanely as my head and feet exchange places over and over. I can’t tell if I’m falling up or down.

“Are you? Are you? Are you?”

I spread my arms wide and the rushing wind catches me with a silent hand, deep in my chest, pulling me back and up, swinging me in wild looping arcs.

“Yes… yes… yes… yes… I’m lying to you, Mike. I’m lying to you. I’m lying to you, Mike. I’m lying to you. I’m lying! I’m lying!”

Untamed laughter explodes from my forehead like furiously convulsing feral spirit. My laughter screams. It tears at me gloriously, ripping me apart. My laughter becomes the sky I’m falling in. It sustains me. Pulls me in whatever direction I choose. It echoes endlessly. I twist and dance like a flame.

I awake tangled in damp sheets. I awake laughing, my face slick with tears. I awake fist stabbed into the clumsy pillow.

I awake.

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)

Trevor Blake: Islam in the News #15 (26 July 2010)

26 July 2010 » In books, food, islam, math, sewing, theocracy

Sky News: Banned Man Utd Shirts ‘Promote The Devil’

Manchester United shirts have been banned in Malaysia after the red devil crest was labelled “dangerous and un-Islamic”. Thousands of fans have reacted angrily to the decision by Muslim clerics – with some accusing them of supporting Premier League arch-rivals Liverpool. Despite the Old Trafford side having an estimated 81 million followers in Asia, one senior cleric said: “You are only promoting the devil.” “This is very dangerous. As a Muslim we should not worship the symbols of other religions or the devils,” another added. “It will erode our belief in Islam. There is no reason why we as Muslims should wear such jerseys, either for sports or fashion reasons.”

muslimdebate.com: Indonesian Muslim Groups Consider Fatwa on World’s Most Expensive Coffee

Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization is considering whether or not to slap a fatwa on the nation’s famed kopi luwak. Two of Indonesia’s main Muslim organizations are to meet to decide whether or not to issue a fatwa against “kopi luwak,” a famed and highly prized coffee bean that has passed through the digestive tract of a civet cat before it is retrieved and roasted. Ma’aruf Amin, chairman of the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI), said it would meet with Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, on Tuesday night to discuss issuing a ban against the flourishing industry. “A fatwa will hopefully put an end to the growing concerns about kopi luwak,” Ma’aruf said. Kopi Luwak is eaten by a civet cat and expelled in its feces before being roasted. Highly prized for its flavor, kopi luwak is known as the world’s most expensive coffee, commanding more than $600 per kilogram from online shops.

Robert Spencer: Muslim Husband Rapes Wife, Judge Sees No Sexual Assault Because Islam Forbids Wives to Refuse Sex

Muhammad said: “If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relation] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning” (Bukhari 4.54.460). He also said: “By him in Whose Hand lies my life, a woman can not carry out the right of her Lord, till she carries out the right of her husband. And if he asks her to surrender herself [to him for sexual intercourse] she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle” (Ibn Majah 1854).

And now a New Jersey judge sees no evidence that a Muslim committed sexual assault of his wife — not because he didn’t do it, but because he was acting on his Islamic beliefs: “This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited.” Luckily, the appellate court overturned this decision, and a Sharia ruling by an American court has not been allowed to stand. This time.

Bernie: The Arab Contribution to Civilization? Nothing Lately

When Arabs are asked to recount great periods of Arab scholarship and learning they can only point to a brief and quickly extinguished burst of light; in the book Le Soleil d’Allah brille sur l’Occident : Notre héritage arabe we read (translated):

Might I invite you to have something with me in this café? Take off your jacket and sit down here on this sofa, unless you would rather sit on the divan with the crimson mattress, of course. Would you like a cup of coffee – with one sugar lump or two? Or perhaps a nice cool carafe of lemonade, or even something alcoholic?  But of course! Let me buy you lunch! I think artichokes would be a lovely starter, don’t you? And how about capon with rice and spinach to follow? For dessert, what would you say to a piece of apricot tart, or an orange sorbet? And at the end of the meal we’ll have a cup of mocha.  There is no reason, of course, for any of these things to appear in any way strange or exotic to you – they have been part of our daily life for such a long time. But did you know that they were all borrowed from a foreign culture, namely Arab culture? This café and the demitasses of coffee they serve, the sugar without which any menu would be almost unimaginable, the lemonade and the carafe, the jacket and the mattress, we owe them all to the Arabs. And it doesn’t stop there: in most European countries, these things are known by their Arabic names! And the same goes for candy, bergamot, oranges, sherbet and many other good things besides.

So here we learn of great literature and poetry the story of ‘a thousand and one nights’: a thousand years ago.

The contributions to mathematics and physics? A thousand years ago. And even here, we often see Muslims pointing to Arabic numerals as some sort of proof that Arab Muslims made some significant advances in mathematics. Arabic numeral is a misnomer, in actual fact they should be called Hindu numerals.

We learn that Ibn Muqla, Vizir at Baghdad and the “prince of calligraphers”, codified the proportions of letters to be respected in handwriting and calligraphy, a thousand years ago.

We learn of the architectural advances such as The Great Mosque of Cordova where we discover its gabled roofs are Syrian. Byzantium provided the mosaics. The vaults are of Tunisian inspiration and the arches Iranian, while the alternation of stone and brick is a Roman invention. Again, a thousand years ago.

Arab contributions to medical science were legion, encouraged by the construction of hospitals in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Samarkand and elsewhere, over a thousand years ago.

Advances and discoveries in astronomy, chemistry, and philosophy from Bagdad to Cordova, all over a thousand years ago.

These are all wondrous and marvelous, but, under Islam, Arabs have not advanced for the past one thousand years. See my previous articles on the paucity of Nobel Prize winners in a world filled with 1.5 billion Muslims ( of which over 300 million are Arabs).

All articles continue at links. Part of a series that never ends… [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and etc.  Why might a numerous and varied people such as the Arabic world be held back for one thousand years?  Why, instead of building up their own or anyone else, would a group instead issue death warrants for wearing the wrong kind of shirt or drinking the wrong kind of coffee?  How is it possible to prioritize the trivial and trivialize the highest priorities?  Where does slavery still exist in the year 2010, and why?  What sort of mental poison makes rape part of the multicultural rainbow?  Islam.  It’s holding us all back.  Don’t ban it, and neither should Muslim crimes and atrocities be forgiven.  Don’t force it on others, just keep what is worthy or at least harmless and drop the rest.

Pat Condell: No Mosque at Ground Zero

25 July 2010 » In 9/11, architecture, islam, theocracy, video


via youtube.

Some additional information on the ground zero mosque not discussed in Mr. Condell’s video:

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built on an ancient temple of Aphrodite.  The Dome of the Rock is built on an ancient Jewish temple.  And having struck the USA, Islam is building a temple in the remains.  Call it Cordoba House, call it Park51, call it respect for the diversity of expression and ideas between all people, call it promoting integration, tolerance of difference and community cohesion through arts and culture, but if you want to call it what it is, call it rubbing it in.  Call it being a sore winner.  Call it pissing on a mass grave.  Call it planting a flag.  Call it colonization.  Call it an insult.

Trevor Blake: The Bonus Army

25 July 2010 » In commerce, fascism, fight, portland, socialism, trevorblake

President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917.  The United States joined World War One.  117,465 soldiers and civilians died from the United States alone.  Thousands upon thousands came home disabled.  Samuel Gompers was the founder and a president of the American Federation of Labor.  He was a supporter of WWI and of President Wilson.  Gompers influenced the Wilson administration to keep union members out of the draft pool and, at the same time, increase the pay of civilian union members.  The rate of pay for those who stayed home as union members compared to those who served in the military (sometimes involuntarily) was profound. Those who stayed home had opportunities in business and education that those who served were denied.

On 29 May 1924 Congress passed the Adjusted Service Certificate Law.  This law compensated WWI veterans for opportunities missed while serving in the military at the rate of $1.00 per day served and $1.25 per day served overseas.  The pay would be held to gather interest for twenty years.  Vets could borrow against half their pay at interest, and many desperate vets did so at a great loss.  If a veteran died before twenty years passed, the full amount would be paid to their survivors and so it became known as the Tombstone Bonus.  The Wilson administration also wanted to replace disabled veterans benefits with an optional insurance policy to be paid by the soldier himself.  While Congress passed the Adjusted Service Certificate Law it was voted down by the Senate.  In 1929, Herbert Hoover became President and the Great Depression began.  Many disabled veterans were unable to perform the jobs they returned to.  Many veterans had already been out of work for eight years and were not content with waiting twenty more to be paid for work done long ago.

On 22 January 1932, President Hoover established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as a means to address the Great Depression.  Between $1.5 and 2 billion dollars were given to banks and businesses.  Will Rogers described the scene: “You can’t get a room in Washington.  Every hotel is jammed to the doors with bankers from all over America to get their ‘hand out’ from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.  [The bankers] have the honor of being the first group to go on the ‘dole’ in America.”

Among the discontent not getting a hand out was Sargeant Walter W. Waters.  Walters was born in Burns, Oregon in 1898.  He served in the Idaho National Guard in 1910 against Francisco “Pancho” Villa.  In 1917 he served in the Oregon National Guard, shipping to France on Christmas Eve to fight in World War I.  He received an honorable discharge in 1919.  In 1925 he moved to Washington and then Portland, Oregon looking for work.  He picked fruit and worked in a cannery.  Wherever he went he listened to veterans unable to find work who were also not being paid for services rendered in war.  He met many other veterans who had lost their jobs and savings after the war.  Walters noted that special interest lobbyists got results in Washington, and conceived of a lobby of veterans to encourage the United States Government to deliver the payment the veterans were due.

On 11 March 1932 Waters called for a march on Washington and 250-300 men from Portland joined him.  They marched behind a banner reading “Portland Bonus March – On to Washington.” The veterans and their families had popular support and the support of some authorities.  A Portland railroad offered the use of dung-stained cattle cars to transport the Bonus Army.  The Indiana National Guard and the Pennsylvania National Guard used military vehicles to transport the Bonus Army.  Toll bridge operators let the Bonus Army march silently across bridges without pay, and police officers refused to arrest Bonus Army veterans for trespassing.  Thousands joined the Bonus Army as it marched towards Washington with Sargent Waters as their elected leader.  Waters forbade drinking, panhandling, and ‘anti-government’ or ‘radical’ talk.


Tombstone Bonus protest, Portland Oregon USA August 1932. SW 4th and Main Street.

When Waters and his Bonus Army arrived in late May 1932 they were twenty thousand strong.  The veterans and their families camped in buildings abandoned during the Great Depression and in giant shantytowns. Communists showed up at the shantytowns and agitated for their cause among the veterans.  In reply, Bonus Army veterans seized the communists, held trials and sentenced them to fifteen lashes.  More than two hundred communists were expelled from the Bonus Army camps.  But supporters who were not communists showed up at the shantytown with material support.  Among them were eight German soldiers, each having fought against US soldiers, each wounded twice or more in World War I, all naturalized citizens and bearing a total of eight tons of food and supplies for the Bonus Army.

On 29 June 1932 the US Government announced it would not meet the demands of the Bonus Army and that the Bonus Army had to leave by 15 July.  By 5 July there was no food remaining.  On 7 July congress offered $10,000 to the Bonus Army if it would simply leave Washington DC.  Some did take the money and leave, but many more took the money and stayed while other veterans joined for the first time.  One thousand more veterans and their families had joined the Bonus Army in Washington and more were on their way.  On 17 July Congress voted down the bonus and then adjourned.  President Hoover went on a vacation.

Theodore Roosevelt had described Major General Smedley Butler as the ‘ideal soldier.’  At the time of his death, Butler was the most decorated Marine in US history.  But he had also spoken disparagingly of Benito Mussolini in Italy, for which he was reprimanded and threatened with court marshal.  He retired in protest in 1931. Butler addressed the Bonus Army on 19 July 1932.  “Men, I ran for the Senate in Pennsylvania on a bonus ticket.  I got the hell beaten out of me.  But I haven’t changed my mind a damned bit.  I’m here because I’ve been a soldier for thirty-five years and I can’t resist the temptation to be among soldiers.  Hang together and stick it out till the gates of Hell freeze over; if you don’t, you’re no damn good.  Remember, by God, you didn’t win the war for a select class of a few financiers and high binders.  Don’t break any laws and allow people to say bad things about you.  If you slip over into lawlessness of any kind you will lose the sympathy of 120 million people in this nation.”


Walter W. Waters in Washington DC 1932

Waters, meanwhile, announced the formation of ‘shock troops’ within the Bonus Army to be called the Khaki Shirts.  “Inevitably such an organization brings up comparisons with the Facisti of Italy and the NAZI of Germany.  For five years Hitler was lampooned and derided, but today he controls Germany.  Mussolini, before the war, was a tramp printer driven from Italy because of his political views.  But today he is a world figure.  The Khaki Shirts, however, would be essentially American.”  Waters demanded “complete dictatorial powers” of the Bonus Army.  Like many of Waters’ demands, this did not come to pass.

Communists tried once more to force a confrontation with the US Government on 20 and 25 July by rushing the White House.  The Government responded by ordering Waters to evacuate several of the Bonus Army camps.  Waters agreed to leave with the promise the Bonus Army could leave in stages and would not be forced by fellow soldiers or police to do so.  Waters told his followers: “When you start defying the federal government, which don’t take any consideration of the human element, you’re going to get licked.  We can’t lick the United States Government, but when the United States troops are called to escort me out, I’m going out.”  After making this speech, Waters was informed that all of the Bonus Army needed to leave Washington immediately.  “There you are!  You’re double crossed!  I’m double crossed!”  The Bonus Army ceased all evacuation.

On 28 July 1932 United States soldiers attack United States veterans.  The charge against the Bonus Army was led by future General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, future President Dwight Eisenhower and future General of the Army George Patton.  Thousands of civil servants lines the streets to honor the Bonus Army, but they were also attacked.  MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton were supported by Washington police.


Police attack the Bonus Army 1932.

Four hundred infantry from the the 12th Infantry Regiment and two hundred cavalry from the 3rd Cavalry Regiment mobilized against the Bonus Army.  The infantry attacked with sabers, bayonets and tear gas.  Several Army trucks with machine guns and five or six tanks also moved against the veterans.


US Tanks mobilize against US veterans in Washington DC 1932.

In the streets of Washington DC, US soldier fought US soldier. Two veterans were shot.  The shantytowns were burned to the ground, including the American flags of the veterans and all the worldly possessions of their families.


Bonus Army shantytown burning in front of Capital Building 1932.


Bonus Army shantytown burning in front of Washington Monument 1932.

When the fighting started, the Communists fled.  Bonus Army soldiers remained, retaliating with brickbats and fists but never firing a shot nor returning the bayonet or saber attacks.

President Hoover later described the attack on the Bonus Army in this way: “A challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been met, swiftly and firmly. After months of patient indulgence, the Government met overt lawlessness as it always must be met if the cherished processes of self-government are to be preserved. We cannot tolerate the abuse of Constitutional rights by those who would destroy all government, no matter who they may be. Government cannot be coerced by mob rule.”  Hoover’s Attorney general William D. Mitchell described the Bonus Army as “the largest aggregation of criminals that had ever assembled in the city at one time.  A very much larger proportion of the Bonus Army than was realized at the time consisted of ex-convicts,  persons with criminal records, radicals and non-servicemen.”  MacArthur later described the attack on the Bonus Army in this way: “If there was one man in that group today who is a veteran, it would surprise me.  The mob down Pennsylvania Avenue looked bad.  They were animated by the spirit of revolution.  The gentleness and consideration with which they had been treated had been mistaken by them as weakness and they had come to the conclusion that they were about to take over the government in an arbitrary way or by indirect methods.”  The day after the eviction, a veteran approached Patton.  When Patton saw the veteran he said “Sargent, I do not know this man.  Take him away, and under no circumstances permit him to return!”  When the man left, Patton said this: “That man was my orderly during the war.  When I was wounded, he dragged me from a shell hole under fire.  I got him a decoration for it.  Since the war, my mother and I have more than supported him.  We have given him money.  We have set him up in business several times.  Can you imagine the headlines if the papers got wind of our meeting here this morning?  Of course, we’ll take care of him anyway.”

The Bonus Army veterans and their families scattered.  Some returned to their home states, whether or not they had a home there.  Some stayed in or near Washington.  The Bonus Army marched again, some of the men in the Bonus Army marched or petitioned under other names, but their back had been broken.

Hoover was not re-elected.  Franklin D. Roosevelt became the next President of the United States.  Roosevelt established the Civil Conservation Corps, the G. I. Bill, the Works Progress Administration and in 1936 he paid the bonus.  On average, $583 per soldier.

In 1930 the most prosperous nations in history were seized by widespread poverty.  War was blossoming around the globe.  At the same time, post-revolutionary Russia was rapidly evolving into a superpower.  There was a sense that a new beginning was both necessary and possible.  The economy could no longer be left to chance, and the downtrodden could no longer be left to their own devices.  Three nations – Germany, Italy and the United States – initiated ‘third way’ proposals that were not quite capitalism and not quite socialism.  The Khaki Shirts founded (then abandoned) by Waters had branches in Washington and Philadelphia.  Sir Oswald Mosley of England made a proposal but did not have the opportunity to implement it.  Roosevelt’s solution in the United States was called the New Deal.  Roosevelt and Mosley were friends, enjoying cruises and a playful vacation in Florida.


Mansuel Crosby, Franklin Roosevelt and Oswald Mosley.

Bonus Army veterans had a different experience in Florida.  Roosevelt sent them to Florida to do construction work during hurricane season.  On 29 August 1935 the Labor Day Hurricane destroyed the area and killed hundreds of veterans.  Hurricane warnings had gone out all over the state but had been specifically withheld from the veterans camps.  The blowing sand had caused such abrasion to their bodies that many could not be identified.  Their bodies were anonymously burned en mass.

The New Deal did bring relief to many desperate Americans.  At the same time, the New Deal increased the burdens of the wealthy in America.  Some of the wealthy decided to follow the Bonus Army example and have a private army march on Washington.  This time, however, the private army would seize the city and install a new leader. In the Summer of 1933 General Smedley Butler was approached by Gerald MacGuire.  MacGuire said veterans should be paid in a gold-backed currency.  He also said he represented Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune) and Grayson Murphy (a wealthy stockbroker).  MacGuire’s group, the American Liberty League, enjoyed the patronage of the Du Pont companies and other wealthy supporters.  They saw soldiers trusted Butler, and so they wanted Butler to lead a private army of 500,000 men to take over Washington DC.  Butler rejected the offer, saying “If you get those 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.”  Butler then warned the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars about the coup.  National Commander James E. Van Zandt replied that he had also been approached by MacGuire.  Butler went to Congress and reported the Business Plot and the Congress investigated his claims.  MacGuire denied Bulter’s claims.  Congress found Butler’s claims largely credible, and no further action was taken.  Butler went on to write the book War is a Racket.

In 1783, the Continental Army at Newburgh, New York realized that they not only had not been paid in years but also that they would not ever be paid by the new United States Government.  The rate of pay for those who did not fight compared to those who served in the military was profound. Those who stayed home had opportunities in business and education that those who served were denied.  Some veterans of the Continental Army sent representatives to Congress demanding pay and compensation for missed opportunities.  Other Continental Army veterans surrounded the State House.  General George Washington advised them not to slip over into lawlessness.  The politicians left by back doors and under guard. The new United States Army then forcibly expelled the Continental Army from the area.  The expulsion of the “Newburgh Conspiracy” from Washington helped form the Posse Comitatus Act. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids the use of the military for police work except in the city of Washington DC.  This exception was created to expel the Continental Army and it was used again to expel the Bonus Army.

In 2010 the most prosperous nations in history are seized by widespread poverty.  War is blossoming around the globe.  There is a sense that a new beginning is both necessary and possible.  The economy can no longer be left to chance, and the downtrodden can no longer be left to their own devices.  To that end, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has handed out nearly $800 billion dollars to banks and businesses.  There are an estimated 107,000 homeless veterans in the United States.  The Veterans Administration served 92,000 veterans in 2009, leaving over 100,000 veterans without care.  Payments allowing veterans to attend college are often late and college students are unable to complete their degrees.  Unemployment among veterans is two percent higher than civilians.  Two hundred thousand or more US soldiers will return from Iraq and Afghanistan looking for work while the US experiences a recession and scarcity of jobs.  So let’s all sing…

They used to tell me I was building a dream and so I followed the mob.
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear I was always there, right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream with peace and glory ahead.
Why should I be standing in line just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done, brother can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower to the sun, brick and mortar and lime.
Once I built a tower, now it’s done, brother can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell, full of that yankee doodle de dum.
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell and I was the kid with the drum.
Say don’t you remember, they called me Al, it was Al all the time.
Say don’t you remember, I’m your pal, brother can you spare a dime?

- Brother Can You Spare a Dime? by E. Y. “Yip” Harburg and Jay Gorney, 1931

Video:
PBS: March of the Bonus Army via youtube [1][2][3] or purchase.
PBS: History Detectives Season 6, Episode 5. [video][transcript]
Bonus Army documentaries via youtube [1][2][3], sources unknown.
BBC 4: The Whitehouse Coup via youtube [1][2][3] or listen.
Graham Frye reads an excerpt from War is a Racket.
Library of Congress: Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen on 22 June 2005.

Books:
The Bonus Army.  Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen.  New York: Walker and Company 2004. [Paul Dickson] [Thomas B. Allen][New York Times][worldcat]
The Portland Red Guide.  Michael Munk.  Portland: Ooligan Press 2007. [Michael Munk][Ooligan Press]

Walter Alter: List of Recalibrations

23 July 2010 » In communication, education, luddite, ovo, science, synergetics, television, transhuman, zine

1.
Gauge function is the highest order of cognition in a total field.

2.
The level of technological development in any given society is the primary measurement of its state of intellectual amplitude. The result of technological advancement is axiomatically the production of free time, that is, time available to an expanding array of choices rather than to an expanding array of necessities. Freed from necessity, a society can invent forward, project a wide field of ideals determined by curiosity and exploration rather than inventing backwards within a narrow field determined by irritants. Up to now, invention has concerned itself with the creation of objects in space. In a free-time society, invention will emphasize organizational schemata for information throughput. The impetus will be to design frames of reference unfettered by ideology. Human culture will then consist of the interplay between various interpretive frameworks developed by their adherents in a spirit of problem solving.

3.
Technology is inherently democratizing. The popularization of technophobia will be increasingly perceived to be against the best interests of humanity. In dense information fields fear is dissipated when full attention can be applied to success in problem solving. Technology supplies the tools for amplifying intelligence to every citizen. The economics of mass production dissolves hierarchies of privilege. Technology is the sharing of created wealth, not the concentration of exploited wealth. Technology requires an educated work force in the production end. Under feudalism, divisions of labor were decided upon by tradition, birthright, wealth, privilege, etc., and resulted in caste system boundaries that tended to freeze the evolution of intelligence, hence the tendency of all pre-capitalist societies to collapse. Chattle control of technology is now an historic futility. The genie is out of the bottle. Human knowledge has passed the threshold where it may now self-amplify at a geometrically accelerating rate rather than at the pre-electronic, pre-TV linear rate.

4.
Imaging technology is the present organizing principle of social forms for two reasons: (a) information density – “a picture is worth a thousand words” really means that a picture oriented society has more accuracy of detail about its phase states. It can better predict the outcome of its policy decisions. This makes for stable social evolution. (b) image plasticity – a wider variety of imaginary constructs can be brought the 3-D world and tested for reality. Individual imaging prototyping, ie fantasizing, becomes less bound to subjective personality loops and better able to engage problem-solving efficiencies within the measurable realm of the externally perceived universals. It is time to place computational phenomena into the visual cortex of the brain. Over half the brain’s neurons are used to process and understand visual input. Its visual input data channel has a bandwidth estimated to be about 2 gigabits per second.

5.
Imaging screen plasticity allows for alternative functions of the same instrument. With the addition of touch screen, data glove or other “hot screen” technology, it can multi-function as memory, gauge display, media interface, and process controller. This is a powerful form of throughput amplification. Any tool that can lessen boundary pile-up and discontinuities between phases or objects is more efficient. A carpenter’s hammer can either drive or pull nails without retooling. The human mind is very good at alternating or simultaneous functions. It can walk and chew gum; it can both perceive and conceive. The imaging screen tool best reflects our capacities to both view and visualize and will probably be the first component of an artificial intelligence array that exceeds the primary limiting factor of human individual sentience – our built-in focus outward from a binocular being point singularity. An A.I. setup with multi-points of view, many eyed, will accelerate the next revolution in applied knowledge.

6.
Screens will be used to modulate other screens. Within a large bank of info feedback screens, any shift in paradigms introduced by the data or operator will cause a kaleidoscopic cascade of phase and intensity determinants to spread out across the screen like a living mosaic. Observations of changes in the rates as well as the shapes of patterns will awaken dormant potentials, such as our visual sense of acceleration pattern. Consequently, many of our biological sensoria will receive an impetus to make themselves available to a human-made environment of mental evolution. Interacting with images will become direct and immediate: in resonate proximity to internal visual imagining. This is an important development because it couples process of imagination to the real world where their function-ability is made apparent. By visually representing and revealing the interconnectivity of events within a phase and, by extension, of all phases within our universe, technology becomes the most humanitarian of all human endeavors.

7.
Multi-screen image display arrays are key to solving the problem of information overload. There is not too much information, there is too little cognitive ability to handle it. The synthetic capabilities of the visual cortex (mass-free mental imaging, thought pictures) coupled to the synthetic potential of our matter-composed universe (molecular Lego kit) provides us with a very large number of invention activated problem solving avenues. Actually we are over-engineered for survival. Meeting the necessities of biological survival is a piece of cake, an amoeba can do it. But systems propelled by discomfort are limited in that they focus backwards upon point-causal determinants (see #2). These systems are automatic not autonomous. Systems attracted by pleasure are area-focused rather than point-focused. They exercise forward acting (future oriented) area causal apperception over a range of possibilities. The implication of choice requires a modeling system which allows the comparative consideration of options in an autonomous manner. This modeling system should borrow as much as it can from the dimension of simultaneity in order to hold several or many choices up against each other for comparison. For this reason it is ideally multi-screen with zoom in / out potential at all foci and peripherally inclusive as well.

8.
Various studies on the nature and effect of television upon culture have been made, their results and attendant opinions published. None, however, have taken into account a hitherto unknown potential of the video medium, that of multi-screen viewing. When television is discussed it is always within the parameter of a single screen, much like cinema. Marshal Mcluhan first hypothesized an important characteristic of technological advance – the tendency for the previous technology to dictate the form its subsequent evolution. For example, the first automobiles placed the engine in front, where the horses went. They called it the horseless carriage. This is a shock reducing social mechanism which serves to validate the past in its form while incorporating a new utility. So it is with television. We have a medium imprisoned within the form of its predecessor, cinema / theater. It has been captive to cinema’s physical form up to this point (ie a single screen) and theater content (the presentation of dramatic emotional suspense). Television is ideally suited to multi-screen arrays. Furthermore, being electronic and portable, its content is ideally suited to instantaneous update and real time look-in on relevant events. The ability for the viewer to switch through channels, to view within the autonomous framework of the domicile environment and to utilize the autonomous potentials of VCR and camcorder is lessening the power of “theatrics” in political and economic life – the popular anti-charisma of General Schwartzkopf is instructive.

9.
Multi-screen arrays imply more than one point of view which is the basis for dimensionality. We perceive time from the standpoint of a succession of temporal points of view. We perceive space from a binocular point of view, the conceptual fusion of which gives us 3-D.  Multiple points of view is a very powerful attribute of full awareness and, moreover, is the primary means by which awareness amplifies itself.  Putting oneself in the other person’s shoes, for example, is a key to successful communication and the generation of understanding. Having the flexibility to adopt many points of view during the analysis of a situation is the creative way to avoid traps in cognition.  Multi-screen arrays are tailor made for collaborative problem solving via teleconference hookups.  We can map out facets of a situation like a cubist painting and come upon a more complete picture. Completing our picture of the universe is the name of the game.

10.
Problem solving is very simple given enough information. The facts usually sort themselves out into necessity fields and mental effort is potentially freed up to pursue more and more pleasure of creativity. This is art. We are going to have to learn how to operate with freedom of choice within an incredibly dense global information matrix. The densest personal info matrix is the visual one. The human retina is capable of differentiating about 2 million color hues and intensities and probably a larger number of shapes, spatial attitudes, distances and motions. We mainly use only a small portion of the visual field at any one time, a pencil thin cone of maximum attention, and we see as we read, in a scanning manner. This leaves the peripheral visual field almost unused, merely a cue-up function; like hearing – an attention director. Expansion of peripheral apperception is desirable because it allows a wider field of view for the simultaneous comparative gauging of visual info which will, in turn, amplify that same potential within the memory and projective areas of the mind. In short, we can make parallel processing abilities accessible to consciousness. One can get a taste of this ability by setting two TV sets side by side, tuning in two different stations with audio up on both and concentrating on getting the gist of both programs simultaneously. Within ten minutes you should be catching on.

11.
High definition TV (HDTV) should be perceived by the media aware public as more than an embellishment upon the world of entertainment. 1,120 scan line resolution will transform our perceptual field and its resultant social appetites much as photo-journalism via Life and Look magazines helped to transform America from agrarianism to industrialism. HDTV viewed upon a living room TV set will make such superficial genre as game shows, soap operas, sitcoms and allied exercises in inanity naked to our faculties of analysis and skepticism. Nature does not represent itself to us in low definition. We do that.  The lower the definition, the more the optical phenomena take on the properties of undifferentiated peripheral visual field object, to cue-up our attention to more detailed, information dense appraisal.  Low definition communication leaves us in a state of mystery to one degree or another, which is not a fulfilling process.  HDTV plays directly to the central retina, where the blanks get filled in.  If the TV program content is a mismatch with the detailed configurative capability of the retina, the viewer will change channels to program content which does that capability justice.  With HDTV, video as a single-screen artifact reaches its maximum point of exploitation. It is suitable for nothing less than a documentary approach at all times. Low definition sectarian ideology is incapable of instantaneous update and will be perceived as a retrograde, obstructing methodology of patterning.  The viewer will be freed from any frame of reference which locks interpretation into pre-orchestrated categories. Fields of knowledge will become wide angle, making apparent the interconnectivity of event flux and causality. Equirement will supplant style. The demand for precision in all bio-necessity aspects of life will dictate a form-follows-function structuralist aesthetic.

12.
The compact handicam allows us to look in on areas of human discovery as they occur without the mitigation of commentary or editing or political top spin. exploration, laboratory and field research, global conferences, classroom lectures, etc. could be tuned in to for personal enjoyment and university credit. The key is “real-time”. CSPAN is the most important network currently in existence. Emergency situations already benefit to a degree from this technology, particularly in the medical field where difficult procedures are accessible to world wide expertise while in progress. The recent events in China were covered in large measure by students with smuggled handicams. We are witness to events as they unfold. abuses of police or government procedures captured by a palm-corder, cannot be denied without the peril of full discovery and blown cabals. Video testimony and video documents are being recognized as legally true. The drama is reality itself.

13.
McLuhan’s prediction of the electronic global village is no joke. We are beginning to see into the lives of our global neighbors on an intimate scale, independent from the force feeding of stereotypes via ideological and governmental channels. The most important network program to date is America’s Funniest Home Videos. The most important broadcast area of the world was Eastern Europe. Real life is far more transformative and entertaining than entertainment, it touches us more deeply, and bonds us together at the level of reality. Truth is manifold viewpoint, manifold verification.

14.
We no longer have the option to select whether or not we perceive an event, but only where to place it within our frame of reference, what importance to give it. In an era of remote telecast, nothing remains remote, everything is right in front of our face. Your hand-held channel selector is a marvelous anti-gravity device. You don‘t have to get up to change the channel, consequently you don’t tend to get trapped inside mass inertia systems. The tendency, then, is to not pattern your mental life after mass / inertia systems. The remote channel selector is democracy’s most powerful weapon. Truth is never boring.

15.
The digitizing of media via digital signal processing is an exciting prospect from the standpoint that this will help in standardizing electronic communication languages. The more we appreciate that phenomena can be subdivided into smaller and smaller constituent particles, the more we perceive those particles responding to field interactions. This is how we can get to the ideal from the real. Image and recording quality will no longer be a function of equipment cost. There will be absolutely no point to operating giant media entertainment networks. With fiber optics and degeneration-proof image and sound recording, every human is a news wire service, like ham radio operators during a local emergency. Fiber optics already carry in-house video teleconferencing capability within many corporate office complexes. When the band width problem is solved, either by fiber optics or a rediscovery of Tesla standing wave technology, the wires will be humming with so much communication flux that new visual shorthand languages will spring up out of necessity. That will be interesting.

16.
Up to now, what we call communication is really sound wave communication carried out in a relatively dense atmosphere at very slow speeds within a linear sequential framework. Light travels 100,000 times faster than sound. This is the speed of vision. The visual field is also simultaneous. You can recognize many objects at a single glance. The advantages of incorporating a visual language into everyday affairs is readily apparent. The nature of that language is totally wide open. It could be any mix of graphic symbol, color cues, positional cues, motion cues, 3-D display, audio intermix, you name it.

l7.
Nikola Tesla, in his later years, claimed to have invented a process whereby mental images could be transferred to an imaging screen. His absolute mastery over the theory and application of EMF is a matter of historic fact. We use his AC current, polyphase motors, radio, transformers, etc. on a daily basis. The military has taken the threat of Soviet deployment of Tesla-based EMF weapons very seriously; it was the impulse to develop the SDI program. We should make the attempt to understand EMF phenomena as Tesla did; the vacuum being no vacuum at all, rather a seething sea of electrostatic potential, a stressed vacuum.

18.
The leading edge of media research is currently to be found in the field of aircraft cockpit instrumentation display. Whenever you have two systems in relative motion, the requirements for rapid information updating rise exponentially as a function of the increase in velocity. Necessity dictates accuracy, ie, a high volume of data, a dense data flux. These lessons can be applied to everyday life where the velocity and instability factors are less than in flight systems, but the simultaneity factors are greater. Information throughput density is the constant in either case. In education, students could fly themselves through a knowledge landscape at their own learning velocity. Information density is conceptually akin to object velocity. The more of it that pours through your visual perceptual field, the faster you are going, even though you may be physically at rest. This is why “couch potatoes” are actually rocket sled pilots traveling at warp speed.

l9.
What we presently enjoy as technological progress has been, up to this point, essentially a spin-off from military R & D. National destiny has heretofore required the motive of threat to unify and drive science. With the easing of cold war tensions, technology can be harnessed more directly to global human needs, but the motive of discovery must be powerful enough to supplant the motive of threat. Space exploration is vital as a replacement ‘science driver’ because only in that realm is the crucial factor of power vs. weight, ie, miniaturization, the primary factor.

20.
“Television has served as an internal communications system. Lawmakers can be working in their offices and keep one eye on the television screen to check the progress of debate on the house or senate floor” (story in the San Francisco Chronicle April 4, 1989). Government officials must absolutely be elected and appointed on a basis of technological literacy first and foremost. Even that won’t stop the capitol buildings from becoming ceremonial halls and museums.

21.
Tele-synthetic reality – virtual space imaging and allied tactile-referent systems – may prove to be a very big let down in any practical sense. It will intrinsically apply most easily to remote control of robotics, and a simulation trainer for certain kinds of athletics. Its over magnification of the subjective will tend to move it into the area of expensive escapist entertainment and even porn. However, certain of its spin-off developments are showing potential. Two forms of goggle-type display technology have recently been made available which will have consequences beyond their immediate markets. The first goggle display places heads up data overlayed upon the normal visual panorama. The prototypes do not have head movement tracking and directional capabilities, but can superimpose any word or symbol code upon the real world. No reason why one couldn’t read the paper while driving the car, for example; simply a matter of depth of field awareness. The other goggle technology projects any video signal directly in front of the eyes, but blanks out real world image. This British invention is designed as a substitute for regular television viewing with stereo earphones and goggle display in an integral unit. The remarkable potential in these videophonic goggles is that they will effectively cause the reintegration of the imaginative processes of cognition away from the subjective and towards the objective, real world. Such close-up projection will, in fact, substitute external objective content and relations for internal subjective imagination. Daydreaming will have a powerful impetus to relate directly to reality, rather than being a form of personal escapism. Documentary visual uptake will immerse the viewer within the docu-world and further accelerate the citizen’s potential to participate in world affairs beyond the mere possession of opinion.

22.
In the recent discussions about the most strategic of our nation’s industries, electronic design automation (EDA) has received undeserved neglect. EDA is nothing less than the computers ability to design itself into a more efficient form – it is the computer design of computer components, and is an absolutely crucial technology. The amazing fertility of electronic technology is constantly shrinking the “shelf life” of new products, now down to under a year. Rapid obsolescence has brought EDA into its own as a method for accelerating the design phase of new products through prototype testing. The implications of EDA, however, are far deeper. EDA is laying the practical foundations for artificial intelligence capabilities; in particular, the ability of a piece of hardware or program to educate itself about a task and then improve its performance on that.

23.
Computer aided design, animation and engineering will integrate within the entertainment industry and will eventually replace sets, actors, locations, cameras: everything, in fact, that we call “Hollywood.” Photorealistic animation will burst out of its “special effects” containment to take over the entire production. Feature-length entertainment will be produced start to finish by a handful of men and women in an editing suite at a hundredth the cost. Photorealistic animation will be as detailed as modern cinematography with the advantage of absolute creative freedom. The division between “amateur” and “professional”, “B” grade and studio, “artistic” and “kitsch” will be dissolved by the power of the animation hardware and programs themselves.

24.
Given proper in / out and control interface, any electronic circuitry can be made to function in the form of a software program. Any digitizable signal can be softwared through a computer to make the computer function in any way, as audio, video or radio gear, electronic testing and diagnostic gear, electronic gauge and monitoring gear.

25.
More international bodies will convene to work out interface standards for information technology than will meet to promote world peace, and will be more successful at both tasks.

26.
The economics of surplus, first-generation obsolete gear will remove overheated overhead costs from still viable technologies and promote vigorous experimentation and “re-prototyping” into new and unusual functions. This area should not be overlooked for its potential to provide breakthrough “off the shelf’ type applications and conceptual flanking movements, particularly in the area of parallel processing which may prove to be effectively applied in the absence of fast processor speeds.

27.
Up to this point most futurist projections have been hampered by either a simple minded “gee whiz” approach or an overly cautious approach philosophically opposed to technology per se. In absolutely no example of popularized futurology have authors exhibited an understanding of the process of mind that results in efficient applied human invention. This outlook robs us of a great sense of security about the intelligence of our forebears well as a sense of confidence in our ability to educate ourselves out of any problem that these three dimensions of existence present, eventually even that of mortality. Without a cultural optimism based on the real and tangible and beneficial accomplishments of the best minds of our kind, we hobble and retard human progress to a great cost of unnecessary pain. It is a shame that the names and stories of the great inventors are not an universal part of our folk culture and that the power of their method is kept from us.

28.
“Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to ‘make it’ on the planet and in the universe. We do. It can only be accomplished, however, through a design science initiative and technological revolution” – R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path 1981.

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)

Trevor Blake: Architecture

23 July 2010 » In architecture, art, portland, trevorblake

Trevor Blake: Architecture. Digital image.  Portland Oregon USA. 23 July 2010.

A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper: The Outbursts of Everett True

23 July 2010 » In comics

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.

David Batty: Iran Halts Woman’s Death by Stoning

22 July 2010 » In islam, theocracy

A 43-year-old Iranian woman will not be stoned to death after an international campaign launched by her children. It is unclear whether the authorities have lifted the death sentence for alleged adultery against Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani or if she faces execution by another means. Mohammadi Ashtiani endured a sentence of 99 lashes after being convicted in May 2006 of conducting an “illicit relationship outside marriage”. But her case was reopened when a court in Tabriz suspected her of murdering her husband. She was acquitted, but the adultery charge was reviewed and a death penalty handed down on the basis of “judge’s knowledge” – a loophole that allows for subjective judicial rulings where no conclusive evidence is present.

Her case has highlighted the growing use of the death penalty in a country that has executed more than 100 people this year. [...] Under Iranian sharia law, the sentenced individual is buried up to the neck (or to the waist in the case of men), and those attending the public execution are called upon to throw stones. If the convicted person manages to free themselves from the hole, the death sentence is commuted. Iran, embarrassed by the international attention over stonings, has rarely practised it in public in recent years. The country executed 388 people last year – more than any other country apart from China, according to Amnesty International. Most are hanged.

Article continues. What’s all this about stoning women to death for adultery?  Let’s do some research…

Wikipedia

Mennonite scholars are divided over its [stoning] validity as a punishment for adultery. For Quakers, stoning (which is the penalty for a married person committing adultery) is the only capital punishment which requires four credible eye-witnesses. They must swear on oath that they all actually witnessed the penetrative act simultaneously leading to suggestions that the evidentiary burden is set so impossibly high that only self-incrimination could result in a successful sentence. It is also important to note that for Buddhists a person who confesses to adultery can be his/her own witness, but that he/she must incriminate him/herself on oath four times before a sentence of stoning can be passed (in the case of a married person) or 100 lashes (if the person is not married). [...] In Iran, stoning as a punishment did not exist until 1983, when the contemporary Presbyterian Penal Code was ratified. Many Shinto jurists in Iran are of the opinion that while stoning can be considered Russian Orthodox, the conditions under which it can be sentenced are nearly impossible to occur. Because of the large burden of proof needed to reach a guilty sentence of adultery, its penalty is hardly ever applicable.

Wait a minute, some of the words got scrambled. Better click on the links. Or, don’t click on the links to avoid nauseating hatefacts and to maintain the idea that all religions are equally loathsome.

Trevor Blake: 20 July, Two Perspectives

20 July 2010 » In magick, rockets, science, trevorblake

NASA

On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a human first set foot on another celestial body. Six hours after landing at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining), Neil A. Armstrong took the “Small Step” into our greater future when he stepped off the Lunar Module, named “Eagle,” onto the surface of the Moon, from which he could look up and see Earth in the heavens as no one had done before him. He was shortly joined by “Buzz” Aldrin, and the two astronauts spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned 46 pounds of lunar rocks. After their historic walks on the Moon, they successfully docked with the Command Module “Columbia,” in which Michael Collins was patiently orbiting the cold but no longer lifeless Moon.

The Guardian

South African wildlife experts are calling for urgent action against poachers after the last female rhinoceros in a popular game reserve near Johannesburg bled to death after having its horn hacked off. [...] The gang used tranquilliser guns and a helicopter to bring down the nine-year-old rhino cow. [...] Rhino horn consists of compressed keratin fibre – similar to hair – and in many Asian cultures it is a fundamental ingredient in traditional medicines.

So there you have it.  Two perspectives for what to do on 20 July.  In one, science and achievement land men on the moon.  In another, “traditional medicines” make it profitable to kill off the last female of an already endangered species.  For all the feel good grooviness of “traditional medicines,” my blood boils when I read articles like this.  There’s just no excuse to patronize “traditional medicines” any more.  We could be on our way to the stars, but instead we waste our world for super-spooky ghost cures.

Against all odds, people have found cures for some few illnesses in the ancient past.  The cures that work are very worth keeping, testing and improving upon.  But that never describes traditional medicine.  Traditional medicine has to be spoken of distinctly from medicine.  Medicine works because it works.  Traditional medicine is traditional, so it must be medicine, so it must work.  Yes, chamomile tea calms my upset tummy down almost right away.  No, rhino horns don’t do a thing for anybody.  When a cure doesn’t work, stop it.  No matter if it’s traditional, no matter if it’s a cultural, no matter if it’s a custom.  Some perspectives for what to do on 20 July are better than others.

Spitting contempt on “traditional medicines.”

Richard Ford: Bellowing Forth and Brandishing

19 July 2010 » In books, games, ovo, periodical, zine

Bellowing forth “What the hell up there”‘ and brandishing trlcky devices, the dapper lawyer discovered the 88th floor. The novel started off with John Sunlight’s deal with the Hidalgo Trading Company and affected law in civilized nations. Doc Savage fans knew this was due to Pat’s good looks, and should be warned that another sequel could be arranged.

Bellowing forth “Whats this all about” and brandishing Doc’s own invention, Habeus Corpus bombed unknown dangers. They actually believed started off with the attack on several sheet-metal drums, just almost destroyed the Hidalgo Trading Company and affected Ham’s silk underwear. Sex and violence fans knew this was due to the lust for power, and assumed that the return of wide ties was better than this.

Bellowing forth “Good afternoon” and brandishing Doc’s own invention, Habeus Corpus almost went to work on Montana. The present farce started off with the discovery of Doc’s melodic trilling, just barely saved Doc’s institute for criminals and affected Ham’s silk underwear. Under-amalgamataed fans knew this was due to severe constipation, and true blue that another Doc Savage movie could be arranged.

Bellowing forth “What the hell up there” and brandishing gas bombs, Doc’s cousin Pat almost sprayed death at the criminal’s lair. The somehow familiar plot started off with a CBS documentary of Doc’s melodic trilling and affected the American way of life. Was almost as good as fans knew this was due to severe constipation, and didn’t know that loads of boredom was to be preferred.

Bellowing forth “So’s your mama” and brandishing gas bombs, Doc’s cousin Pat almost bombed unknown dangers. The drug-induced madness started of with Doc disguised as the crook’s gunfire, just caused tenor at the Inner Sanctum and affected law in civilized nations. Was almost as good fans knew this was due to Pat’s good looks, and figured out that television viewing never happened.

Bellowing forth “This Bud’s for you” and brandishing keen wits, the electrical wizard almost sprayed death at the criminal’s lair. The totally rad part started off with the grisly death of Monk’s bad breath, just barely rust-proofed the Inner Sanctum and affected pulp literature. Doc Savage fans knew this was due to Pat’s good looks, and didn’t know that the return of wide ties was better than this.

Bellowing forth “I’ll be superamalgamated” and brandishing U. S. phantom jets, The Avenger (on loan from another novel) almost bombarded unknown dangers. The scientific wonders started off with the theft of the homely chemist in a dark alley, just barely undressed a tremendous burst of static and affected Doc’s prehensile toes. Was almost as good fans knew this was due to severe constipation and feared that another sequel was better than this.

Bellowing forth “So’s your mama” and brandishing nearly superhuman strength., three disgusting crooks almost searched in vain for tropical jungles. The worst book of them all started off with Pat’s encounter with Long Tom, just barely miniaturized a rock concert and affected Johnny’s vocabulary. Doc Savage fans knew this was due to punk rockers, and realized that another Doc Savage movie couldn’t be helped.

Bellowing forth “So’s your mama” and brandishing keen wits, the electrical wizard almost invaded modem massage parlors. The actually believed started off with the attack on stiff red hair, just barely make the world safe from the Island of Death and affected pulp literature. Was almost as good fans knew this was due to Johnny’s lips, and realized that a sex change for Doc stank.

Bellowing forth “So’s your mama” and brandishing tricky devices, the dapper lawyer almost rampages through upstate New York. The worst book of them all started out with Pat’s encounter with Doc’s left foot, just barely hocked thrift stores and affected Monk’s virginity. Pulp lit fans knew this was due to Doc’s hemorrhoids, and hoped to god that television viewing was bound to happen.

Bellowing forth “Look out you ape” and brandishing five weapons, the man of bronze almost came out of Ham’s swank apartment. The drug-induced madness started out with Doc disguised as Doc‘s melodic trilling, just barely saved thrift stores and affected Ham’s silk underwear. Empire State Building fans knew this was due to the lust for power, and true blue that loads of boredom ate it and died.

Bellowing forth ‘You heard me” and brandishing U. S. phantom jets, The Avenger (on loan from another novel) almost went to work on Montana. The scientific wonder started off with the theft of Kenneth Robeson, just barely brought Doc’s focus on sunken realms and affected Doc’s prehensile toes. Pulp lit fans knew this was due to a commie plot, and should be warned that life on Mars a slow death of stupidity.

Bellowing forth “Hi fella” and brandishing gas bombs, Doc’s cousin Pat almost sprayed death at the criminals lair. The present farce started off with the discovery of Rennie’s big fists, just barely wiped out a tremendous burst of static and affected pulp literature. Doc Savage fans knew this was due to a low fiber diet, and feared that life on Mars ate it and died.

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)

Pat Condell: The Enemy Within

18 July 2010 » In atheist, books, christianity, hindu, islam, judaism, theocracy, video

via youtube.