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When Gods War
When Gods War
By
Cognitive Dissonance
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When I entered high school back in 1969 the small town I grew up in was just introducing a more flexible, dare I say liberal, curriculum to broaden my indoctrination experience. I vividly remember the excitement exhibited by the principal as he (there were no ‘she’ high school principals in Southern New England back then) addressed the incoming freshman class about the educational wonders “We the Guinea Pigs” were about to encounter.
I for one was as excited as the principal, having grown exceedingly bored with the standard canned textbook fare that passed for a Middle School (then called Junior High) education. In fact it was so new that even though we had already selected our High School freshman classes several months earlier just before leaving for summer vacation, there were now a few gaps in the schedule we could fill with ‘electives’. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. “Electives? You mean I can pick my own poison?”
Quickly I seized upon two courses that sounded interesting, “Greek Mythology” and “Totalitarianism and Appeasement”. The guidance counselor who was assisting the planning of my cognitive conditioning was aghast, quickly informing me that oil and water do not mix. Thankfully she (guidance counselors of that era were almost exclusively female, the maternal instinct considered oh so important to my guidance) could find no published rules disallowing my choices and I would not be swayed by her stern disapproval. I was in like Flynn.
Looking back from the vantage point of four plus decades of acquired wisdom I can better appreciate her concern for my welfare. Was I insane? Learning about the Gods of ancient Greece in conjunction with global politics during the run up to the World War Two madness was most assuredly a potent cocktail for my tender brain cells and not to be treated lightly. Our formal grade school ‘education’ is carefully planned out by ‘experts’, with one conditioning step after another explicitly designed to properly train Pavlov’s Dogs. Clearly I was messing with the secret sauce.
Similar to two classes of drugs that by themselves are ‘safe’, but when taken together are deadly, recognizing similarities between the ancient Greek War Gods and the Nuclear Gods of twentieth century Warring Earth was either going to be supremely enlightening or my cognitive subsystems would go critical and melt down. From the point of view of the masters of the universe it was the latter that befell me. As Mrs. Cog would say “I was ruint” and would never be a fit wage slave suitable for gainful exploitation….err….employment.
Two hundred years ago I would have been cast out of school on my arse and sent off to the salt mines to toil away my days till death did I part, broken by hard labor, slave wages and the foreman’s whip. Thankfully this was 1969 in New England so my sentence was commuted to two more years as a Roman Catholic altar boy and seventeen million recitals of the “Act of Contrition”. Ah, those were the blessed days my friend. “Thank you Father, may I have another?”
I suppose if I had taken both courses during the same semester my head would have exploded. Thankfully this was not the case, having elected to swim with the Gods during the first semester and then dive into the dictators during the second marking period. To this day I’m not sure exactly why I selected the Greek Gods first; though being pubescent I suspect the opportunity to gaze upon images of half naked statues of Goddesses for homework might have been a significant draw.
To be perfectly frank I didn’t quite understand what the term mythology meant since everything I had learned up to this point was taught as iron clad fact, no questions allowed. Early on in our indoctrination we are trained to question who, what, where, and when, but never ever why. One simply does not question the control system itself, only the cancerous symptoms of the control system.
One of the advantages of being ‘me’ was a last name that fell near the end of the alphabet, which nearly always assured me a seat in the back of the class. Strategically located as I was during the first day of Mythology class, as soon as the textbooks were passed out I quickly scanned the pages for images, then dog-eared each nubile no-no for rapid retrieval at any time.
I wasn’t too concerned about the disposition of my soul considering all the images were school board approved and I attended confession every Saturday and did God’s service on Sundays. Doing so assured me I was a lock, so why not dabble with the devil now and then as long as I confessed my transgressions to the proper authorities?
By the end of the first week I was thoroughly traumatized by how utterly violent, homicidal actually, and quite human-like these Greek Gods of War seemed to be. The Catholic Church assured me ‘my’ War God was all cuddles and kittens (as long as I ignored the Old Testament) so to find ‘these’ Gods sleeping around without wearing a condom, smiting the poor humans just because of a bad hair day and falling down drunk at all times of the day was, in my opinion at least, conduct unbecoming of a True God.
Even though I had not begun the “Totalitarianism and Appeasement” class, thus I had not gained that particularly unique perspective yet, the similarities between the angry spiteful Greek Gods and present day society’s duplicitous leaders were glaringly obvious and I was foolish enough to say so in my out loud voice. Since I was speaking truth to the blind I quickly became persona non grata, with even my fellow slave students turning on me.
“Just shut up and stop asking questions” I was told, then beaten about the head by the school bully-for-hire as the blunt instrument designed to drive home the message. Half way through the second week the teacher stopped answering my questions altogether and simply ignored my raised hand, regardless of if it was just a request for a visit to the comfort station. Thank the Gods of War that I had superior bladder control.
One must carefully consider the cultural time frame in order to appreciate the insanity I was pushing back against. A year or so removed from “The Tet Offensive” which coincided with peak United States involvement in the insanity called “The Vietnam War”, Walter Cronkite’s evening news was a grim blood and guts recital of bombs, booby traps and body counts, both ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’.
I was curious, fascinated even, about the ‘fact’ that the number of enemy soldiers killed was always two to three times ours. Kind of made you proud in a sick sort of way that our War Gods were that much more effective at squashing the puny humans then their clearly inferior junior grade war gods (please note the small ‘g’). Odd how it was that only much later did we ‘discover’ there were huge numbers of women and children mixed into that bloody body count.
While it appeared our Gods of War wanted to ‘win’ the conflict, or at least they said they did, they certainly weren’t trying very hard. Little did I know this was the new blueprint for future God like productions such as Afghanistan and Iraq. I was old enough to comprehend the facts, but much too young to fully understand the madness. Cultural insanity is learned the hard way; by brute force repetition and total immersion rather than the light touch of reason and logic.
My questions were reasonable enough by any standards…..at least for a nation that wasn’t already totally insane. “Why were the Gods Warring” I would ask mom, dad, teachers, anyone I perceived to be an authority. Terms such as collateral damage, fratricide, napalm, friendly fire, My Lai, mine fields, cluster bombs and fragging were bandied about on the TV, in the newspapers, even between family members and strangers in the same tone of voice one would use to discuss the weather, gardening or the locally beloved Red Sox. Same ole same old.
The insanity was so normalized, so integrated into everyday living, that it was rendered innocuous, harmless even, or so it was thought. Sure, ‘our’ boys were dying over there, but it was the returning walking (or wheeled) wounded you actually had to watch out for. While the dead mortals were quickly shipped home in flag draped boxes and honorably buried (“Teacher, why don’t we honor the living so they won’t be shot dead?”) those damn wounded just wouldn’t go away. They were so public, so obvious, so in your face. It was one thing to read about ‘them’ in the papers, another thing entirely to meet them face to face.
To this day I vividly remember overhearing a conversation between my father and the next door neighbor about another neighbor’s son. He had returned home after surviving his turn as cannon fodder for the Warring Gods missing ‘only’ his right arm and several fingers on his left hand. My father was irritated that this ‘wounded warrior’ was walking around the neighborhood scaring the kids half to death. Why didn’t he have the decency to remain inside during daylight hours? Out of sight, out of mind I guess.
My head still spins when I think about how people would talk about ‘The War’ without ever discussing anything significant or relevant. Always who, what, when, where and never WHY. We are only as sick as our deepest darkest secrets, those inner Uglies we’d rather not discuss collectively or individually. Best to leave the boogieman under the bed where he belongs rather than drag him out for confrontation. We were all just cannon fodder for the War Gods, so why get all worked up over it?
Patty Hearst and the SLA had not yet appeared on the scene to mirror our own inner madness, Stockholm Syndrome writ large in our hearts and minds. Embrace the insanity with a full body love hug or be consumed by our own cognitive dissonance. Besides….the Warring Gods would eventually tire from their labors and collapse into bed to sleep it off, leaving us chattel to get back to the business of living before another royal row sets up the next cattle slaughter.
Like a hot potato passed rapidly from hand to hand to avoid a nasty scorching, my Mythology instructor bestowed upon me near perfect grades, regardless of my actual classroom submissions, in order to avoid any possibility of an after school one on one for conduct unbecoming of a student peon. Mama didn’t raise no fool and she wasn’t going to put herself alone in the same room with me and my questions.
Regardless of the quality of the homework handed in or the mark received when it was returned, the report card always showed I was at the top of the class. The teacher was not going to risk a parent teacher conference for a closer inspection of the offspring’s Genesis, let alone a return for a second semester.
Of course this was shear brilliance on her part because I wasn’t going to complain about grade inflation. Besides, I wanted to believe that the higher grade was based upon my classroom participation. It seems my conditioning was working after all. I got the message and kept my head, and hand, down for the rest of the semester.
The Greek Mythology class completed, my reputation preceded me when I walked into the “Totalitarianism and Appeasement” class to start the second semester (I loved referring to it as my “T&A class”, always with a dirty smirk on my face) and was greeted with a scowl from the teacher, quickly followed by “Oh, it’s you”. Even before the other students were seated I was escorted out to the hall and verbally dressed down, in essence read the riot act for crimes against the state of education.
“I’ve heard you’re a trouble maker, and I’ll have none of that in my class,” I was informed, finger wagging two inches from my face. “You mind your P’s and Q’s and we’ll get along just fine.” I suppose that was not the time to ask my first question, but it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t know the definition of P’s and Q’s. “Don’t you be smart with me young man” was the explanation I received. Not a good start by any stretch of the imagination, and it was all downhill from there.
While Greek Mythology could always be, and actually was, explained away as fantasy story telling by toga wearing Neanderthals if some rabble rousing child started asking difficult questions, T&A was an entirely different matter. This was modern history, the reciting of horrible events barely 20 years past, massaged and managed of course to agree with generally accepted lies. Worse, the present day (1970) Godly hostilities playing out in Southeast Asia were simply a continuation of “WW(restlemania) II, When Gods Play Rough” and no freshman teacher was going to stop the flood of questions that floated to the surface of the cesspool once the top was popped open.
With the benefit of hindsight it is now clear that what really irked me about that class was the tone of the instruction, which just reflected the arrogance expressed in the textbook and of the times. Look at what those silly War Gods did back in the 30’s and 40’s, how misguided they were while power wrestling among the mortals. Too bad several million were crushed under foot over such a silly misunderstanding. Our Gods of War, the new and improved Gods of 1970, would never be so foolish as to make the same mistake again. And the teacher said all this and more with a straight face.
I was equally dumbstruck by the fact that the teacher appeared to believe what she was saying and that my fellow student slaves were lapping it up unquestioningly. I was not gifted with immense insight or great intelligence, but even at my tender young age I could recognize that the mighty War Gods had not learned the error of their ways and were in fact just playing the same old tune in a different key.
Dear teacher assured me otherwise. “It’s different this time. We’re stopping the spread of God hating commies.” Well……that explained that, and I of all people should understand the importance of his Holiness’s crusade since I was an altar boy who wore the sacred black and white vestments and could regurgitate Latin adoration upon command. “Mea Culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Translation: “My bad bro.”
We mere mortals are not properly wired to understand the wondrous ways of the War Gods, having been deeply conditioned into the slave mentality from birth. All we need to know, the one training we must embody in order to be properly assimilated and then exploited, is what’s good for the Gods of Mayhem is good for the slaves. Always remember, when the Gods feast on barbecued humanity and drink their blood wine we are blessed with God given Golden Showers.
Don’t bother yourself with trying to understand the divine madness of the God Wars, the fallout which consumes your mind and destroys your body. Just busy yourself with counting the nano angels dancing on the head of that nail driven through the palm of your hand while you follow the slave into the valley of death. One hot potato, two hot potato, three hot potatoes more. Blinders or blindfolds anyone? I’ve got plenty more where they came from.
There seems to be a general consensus among those whom you and I may consider at least somewhat ‘awake’ and those whom we might consider still deeply asleep. Sooner or later war is inevitable because the Divine Gods of War deem bloodletting to be good….or at least vitally necessary. Who needs leaches to cure our ills when we have Divine intervention?
I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of ‘We the Fragile Humans’, when encouraged to think for ourselves and to ponder the terrible destruction to our own life and limb, would agree that wars have no purpose or benefit to us personally. Then again, what good is a war machine if you ain’t gonna use it.
The next time the War Gods of finance, government, politics, industry, military, health care and especially the Divine Gods of the mainstream media implore ‘us’ to fight their wars of Peace and Godliness, just say NO. These are not ‘your’ wars, these are the Wars of Gods fought by the fragile humans of Earth for the benefit and amusement of the self appointed and self proclaimed Divine and Omnipotent. Cast off the mind meme and reject the wizard’s war ‘spell’, the claims of imminent attack and close proximity to danger. They are all lies.
The Money Meme is failing and the Ponzi is crumbling; the central banking War Gods are losing control of the ‘faith and belief’ support that is the glue that holds it all together. Public support for the Pontificating Politicians is at all time lows, and these mid level Mayhem Muckers are desperate to distract, divide and destroy in order to divert attention from themselves and their puppeteers.
The war drums are booming and those among us susceptible to the blood lust beat are beginning to rouse. In other words, the table is set for that inevitable war everyone expects and feels powerless to stop. You and I are not responsible, nor should we be responsible, for the decisions others make unless and until we are responsible for our own.
Do not defer to the herd, to assume it is hopeless simply because the herd is surging. Refuse to be passive, to go limp in the face of insanity and a perceived lost cause. Be personally sovereign and responsible to and for yourself. Do not under any circumstances surrender your power to the Gods of War. By not preserving and conserving our power exclusively for ourselves it is slowly bled from us as if we are mortally wounded, slowly bleeding out on the battle field. Worse, we don’t die, but rather remain in a severely weakened state, near comatose and tragically incoherent.
I have been speaking of late about personal sovereignty, of how first and foremost it is a State of Mind. The buck stops here for I alone decide if I will release the power that springs from within me and transfer it to the War Gods. If I were to do so, the sole result of this transaction would be that my power is used against me. I am a sovereign entity, a State of One, head honcho and chief bottle washer of Cognitive Dissonance. The Gods of War will not have my consent. Will they have yours?
03-23-2014
Cognitive Dissonance
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Man's Best Friend - WAR
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"Law is for the little people." - Something Leona Helmsley might have said right after she declared "Only the little people pay taxes."
"Forest..why'd this have to happen"
Bubba, Forest Gump
Night will come and I will follow
For my victims, no tomorrow
Make it fast, your time of sorrow
On his trail, I'll make you follow
Quarters for the criminally insane
The sentence read for life I must remain
The path I chose has led me to my grave
To try again I'd have no other way
Quarters for the criminally insane
Escape for me has fast become a game
Soon to be, I'll leave without a trace
Endangered species end the human race
Branded in pain
Marked criminally insane
Locked away and kept restrained
Disapprobation, but what have I done
I have yet only just begun
To take your fuckin' lives!
Night will come and I will follow
For my victims, no tomorrow
Make it fast, your time of sorrow
On his trail, I'll make you follow
-slayer
Criminally Insane - nice Jack. Death metal to stir up the glowy crowd and scare the older folks? :-)
"God is great, beer is good and people are crazy"
balance of power determined by where and how much resources and food on the land and below. voids will be filled!
killing is the result as it is only just survival at the core. wolves defend their territory vehmently for food, only we need oil for food....
Its true the war-machine is rumbling, it may just be to distract from the loss of sovereignty in some parts, but theatres may well yet succumb with further loss-of-Life. My greatest fear is that both large powers want a series of conflicts; the non-american part of NATO is perceived as little more than a Swiss Guard, so this would mask the inevitable transition from West to East: as not only the Weather, but also the demographics are against the West. The non-militarization of Europe is a gift, since it shows an alternative, if as unaffordable government budget, and it certainly is in the interests of the East to promote Europe as a way forward, in order to win without firing-a-shot. ::either way, Centralised power remians tenously held and appartchicks have forgotten that slaves can overthrow Masters.
"My greatest fear is that both large powers want a series of conflicts;......."
Roger that sentiment. It appears so.
That was the best article I have read by you yet, CD!
It reminded me of the episodes in Greek Mythology where Zeus was annoyed that Prometheus had given mankind fire, and in response Zeus gave men justice, through the rule of law, which was supposed to help cope with men having gained power to control fire. In that context, I ask, after men gained the power to use atomic fire, which is ten billion times more powerful than chemical fire, what other gift from the gods is supposed to help us to cope with that?
It was during the 1960s that the Gods of War had amassed enough atomic bombs so that any more real wars, fought to exhaustion, would result in the globalized destruction of civilization. The first generation to grow up after weapons of mass destruction became bombs that were billions of times BIGGER is still alive today. However, we are mostly still stupid little monkeys, despite having those atomic bombs! So far, almost nothing has been done to change the ways that people think regarding that. Instead, we continue to do what Einstein said:
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
So far, nothing remotely close to the changing our modes of thinking about politics has happened to cope with weapons of mass destruction becoming billions, then trillions, and now headed towards becoming quadrillions of times more powerful than anything that previously existed in known human history. The intellectual scientific revolutions in the philosophy of science that could be applied to cope with weapons of mass destruction are practically nowhere to be seen on the horizon of history.
As you wrote, presumably with tongue in cheek, CD: "We mere mortals are not properly wired to understand the wondrous ways of the War Gods, having been deeply conditioned into the slave mentality from birth."
In response, I repeat my view that sovereignty is based on the power to rob, with the power to kill being the ultimate form of the power to rob. Society has bifurcated into groups who are taught not to kill, and groups who are taught to kill. I continue to get the impression that you, CD, are attempting to promote the views that we should not kill, in opposition to those who kill. However, my views are based on the military ethics regarding killing better. Unfortunately, at the present time it appears that we are on a totally tragic trajectory where the vast majority of people have no understanding of the War Gods, or no sympathy for the Devil.
In my view, your notions regarding "personal sovereignty" continue to be too old-fashioned. In my view, the existence of weapons of mass destruction requires us to think about death controls in radically different ways. Militarism is still the supreme ideology, because the murder systems are the most important systems. However, the dilemmas presented by weapons becoming trillions of times more powerful are not yet being resolved.
In that context, CD, you are noticing the human beings who have adapted to function as the top carnivores in the human ecology have been degenerating into parasites, and you are rightly saying that we should not obey them, nor cooperate with them. However, you are not providing any better ways for "personal sovereignty" to operate death controls, as artificial selection operating through the human ecology. You are not harnessing new murder systems to serve saner purposes. You are not retooling the fascist plutocracy, so that the banksters and their ilk could be transformed to provide better service as the functioning top carnivores. (Unfortunately, that currently that makes sense, to the degree that they themselves have degenerated into parasites, that are killing their host, and therefore, themselves too.)
My attitude is that I do not regard the "War Gods" as being all that different from me. Rather, my metaphorical solutions to these kinds of problems require that more people remember to become like wolves, rather than continue to act like sheep. The sovereignty of states was supposed to channel the power of everyone to rob, and to kill to back up that power to rob, through the justice of the rule of law.
My opinion is that the problem has been is that the "War Gods" were the people that were the most vicious wolves, who were able to teach the sheeple to bleat their moralities. So far, people like you, CD, continue to seem to me to still be relying upon the notions that everyone should become better sheep, rather than that everyone should become better wolves. A democratic republic, operating under a constitutional rule of law, can not function unless the citizens take responsibility for their death controls, in thereby democratize the death controls. Real personal sovereignty should be better assembled and channeled into collective expressions of sovereignty. As you say, CD, but I repeat again and again on deeper and deeper levels, "Personal Sovereignty is a State of Mind."
So far, the existence of weapons of mass destruction has been driving the previous War Gods insane, while nothing saner has been offered to replace that, because no better theory and practice of death controls has been developed. Rather, most of the opposition to the old-fashioned Gods of War continues to exhort everyone to become better sheep, so that there will no longer be any death controls, because nobody will murder anybody else. However, that impossible ideals is driving the opposite to happen in the real world, since it builds up more and more suppressed pressures, towards crescendos of death insanities.
There is still an abundance of weapons of mass destruction, which are trillions of times more powerful than anything which previously existed in known human history, and nothing corresponding to changing the ways we think has yet happened to enable us to cope with that! In my opinion, we need to look at the kind of thinking which made the physics possible, so that atomic bombs could be built, in order to look for inspiration regarding how to think differently about how to operate our death controlling murder systems. However, of course, I recognize that is not happening in any significant way, since we are still stuck inside of the kinds of sterile debates where you illustrate those who refuse to respect the old Gods of War, but simultaneously you are not proposing any new Gods of War to take their place.
The Zeus and Prometheus mythologies were about revolution in the world of the gods. What I am advocating is another similar revolution in the world of the gods, an intellectual scientific revolution to change our modes of thinking enough to perhaps be able to survive having developed science and technologies that enabled the building of weapons of mass destruction which are many orders of magnitude BIGGER than anything which previously existed in known human history.
In my opinion, the raw material needed to carry that through already exists in the modes of thinking in those sciences which have been applied to create those weapons of mass destruction. However, so far, nothing like that has become politically significant. The old, increasingly insane, Gods of War are still beating their demented war drums, while so far, no better war drums are yet to be heard about how to have better Gods of War operate better death controls, so that our human ecology can develop effective murder systems, which we could survive developing.
To do that, then what I have previously been commenting upon regarding your notions of "personal sovereignty" continues to be relevant to that transformation. So far, the only things that I am reading in your series of articles are about how we should say "no" to the old gods of war. However, I do not detect any useful ways about how to say "yes" to new gods of war.
I think it would be smarter to reject all new gods of all sorts, reject borders and nations so we see ourselves all as equally viable to live, a right to live, so we never take arms upon each other ever again in the name of the war gods.
Ever.
Let the sociopaths fight each other as they would in prison, no matter if they are from the street and covered in jail-tats or from the board room, Icahn, Dimon, and Putin and Obama and other nonsensetards that dare call themselves 'our' leaders.
They are not our leaders.
Should never be.
Let them fight each other with shanks and let us refuse to fight in their name.
With no borders, no nations, a mutual respect for each others' survival we never would have reason to to kill 'the' enemy for we'd have none. We'd have fights, arguments, etc., as humans would person to person over the eons but we'd have no reason at all to make armies to battle each other if these psycho-fucks were put in their place by us and ignored by us.
we live in the field or valley of death, that is the basic ground of
our existence. i don't see any reason to increase that, elevate it,
intensify it or anyway to improve it. it can, will and does take
care of itself with associated fear, hate and jealousy. that ground
also has a fertile aspect from which springs something else that we
might nurture. this other way might be revealed to be the
solution to all death controls, the way to overcome all the death
controls or the illusions of the death controls.
it could be that man has become god but has yet to know
what god , or himself, actually is; perhaps this is the
less-on or point that would render your concerns moot.
deescalation rather than escalation is more realistic,
sane, and likely to offer opportunity for survival and
life to continue and that is the point, to live, not to be
right but to live. i would very much like to avoid the day where
some form of empowered "intelligence" concludes that to be
intellectually consistent it must destroy the planet and all
life on it. there the difference between sanity and insanity,
intelligence and intellect? square one, priorities and insight.
The solution you seek has been described in multiple science fiction stories. It's called artificial intelligence. We have nothing to fear from purely logical A.I. war gods. They will murder us in a very sane manner. It will be for our own good.
Something you may not have considered is that the sheep are responsible for driving the current war gods insane. I imagine there would be various psychological problems associated with murdering members of your own race, with seemingly no long-term changes. Imagine if you had to murder day in and day out, with no end in sight. Would you not also go insane?
A.I would not suffer from these human sensitivities, and will, therefore, be able to keep on murdering indefinitely without having to alter their actions. I think rather than fearing the A.I. war gods, we should be trying our hardest to bring them in to existence.
Actually I think Phillip K. Dick's creation was much more effective.
At its core is a telephatic protozoa. Around it is a killing machine. These machines are everywhere.
Simply but, they'll leave you alone but they are ubuquitous. IF, however, you and another come to disagreement it will know.
And kill you both.
See how quick that is? The killing machine slices 'n' dices, the protozoa knows who's in disagreement so now you learn to live in agreement or you die.
No more war, fighting or chaos.
Obviously if you've read much more of Dick's writings you'll realize there's some nuance here to the morality being cast and it isn't being ignored, as with Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, this crazy empathy-centric testing and such (the novella from which Bladerunner was evolved).
mrpxstyin:
Much of my work could be described as political science fiction.
It is certainly NOT the case that I "may not have considered is that the sheep are responsible for driving the current war gods insane."
Since most of what I do amounts to attempts to apply the understanding of general energy systems and their evolutionary ecologies to human beings, and their civilizations, I have always been acutely aware of the co-evolution of the ruling classes with those they they rule over. Certainly from a cultural point of view, and partially genetic as well, the human species has created its own kind of ecology, where different groups of people have adopted analogous trophic layer roles, like in other natural ecologies.
There are people who act like:
Vicious Wolves, and
Domesticated Dogs,
vs. Zombie Sheeple,
and Black Sheeple.
One of the biggest problems is that the excessive success of the ruling classes in being able to apply more and more scientific psychology to control those they rule over has enabled those top carnivores to degenerate towards becoming parasites that are killing their host. The vast majority of people have become Zombie Sheeple, that make it way too easy for their rulers to rule over them. Furthermore, the Black Sheeple (amongst who I would include almost everyone who writes anything on Zero Hedge), tend to not enable the Zombie Sheeple to respond better, since their "solutions" tend towards recommending that everyone should be better sheep, while what I am saying is that everyone should be better wolves. That requires a radically different understanding of the concept of "sovereignty." My pointing that out has been the main thrust of my comments on Cognitive Dissonance's articles.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) possibly advancing until human beings degenerate to become little more than the "pets" of those AI entities is a science fiction nightmare scenario. However, if civilization survives in its current form, then that could be a horribly probable development. Tragically, only the worst science fiction nightmare scenarios appear to be the ones that are coming true.
One of the most extreme examples of that is reviewed towards the end of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5dS8hu-_W4
Classic Science Fiction DocumentaryH.G. Wells predicted atomic bombs before anyone else. Furthermore, the scientist that had the creative breakthrough regarding how to actually make an atomic energy chain reaction was supposed to be inspired to do that by his remembrance of having read about atomic bombs in H.G. Wells' science fiction. Lots of science fiction is becoming fact, faster and faster. However, so far, the way that human civilization was built on the foundation of backing up lies with violence has driven the development of technologies to tend to create worse and worse dystopias. Therefore, our current War Gods have become INSANE, and should not be respected, nor obeyed. However, the chronic political problems that are inherent to the nature of life will always continue to exist as long as any life exists. Therefore, I repeat my main points that we need a series of intellectual scientific revolutions which will transform politics, so that Neolithic Civilizations can make a quantum leap to become Translithic Civilizations.
I do not share the optimism that AI will be all that wonderfully different than we are. Instead, it is my view that any entity that is able to build enough of model of the world, with a model of itself within its model of the world, will still have all the same psychological and political problems that we do now. The achievement of AI will create another level of self-consciousness within its own industrial ecology. Any AI will therefore have to cope with its own levels of War Gods too!
Depends on how it evolves, if it evolves. Multiple manner of AI have been attempted but the genetic-programming style seems the most adaptive to incomplete solution spaces & unknown future conditions, while also making the most of available storage + computing power.
AI isn't needed for humans to be pets to machines. Look at how humans are covered in all manner of iThings, slave to financier-debt machines that provide them with fancy house-machines that are far more than a necessary dwelling but quasi-luxury and also cars which are more flash & debt than necessary work transportation.
Adding AI to the mix could reduce costs in planning, energy use, could think for us and so make us stupid, could inspire us with new things to search for and then make us potentially smarter (if one is motivated).
AI could even be melded physically to the body and so make us stronger, reminding us to exercise more & when, or weaker, making us reliant on some brand of it for our immune systems in the future, our physical strength or reflexes.
That future isn't yet written, or it is many time over in Sci-Fi and awaits to inspire those who have been born or will be soon that will invent the real deal.
Given your claim that the human system is an ecology, you would have to accept that, like any other ecology, the energy system is circular, i.e., life cycle, hydrological cycle, seasonal cycle, etc. Any human ecology would also have to have some type of cycle where energy (or states of being) are constantly cycled through the various components of the society.
You have identified 4 broad components of the human ecology. I would suggest that rather than being stratified, and separated by membranes, that these four components are very much connected, such that human energy transfers freely through them in some cyclic way. Therefore, for you to suggest that any one component can 'degenerate' on its own accord is not accurate. With a cyclic system you cannot determine causality with any certainty as each component influences all other components. To claim that the war gods have degenerated on their own accord ignores the fact that their behaviour, or state of being, is very much influenced by the other components of the ecology.
When you attribute the gensis of various developments to the ruling classes you are claiming to have worked out which came first, the chicken or the egg. You claim that the ruling classes are the origin of changes to the ecology. But really you have no way of knowing this. This is a biased view of your own theory. If you were to be fully objective about your own theory then you would accept that it is possible that the sheep are degenerating the ruling classes. That the sheep are forcing the ruling classes to adopt harsher and more insane countermeasures. Or, what if the sheep have degenrated and gone insane, and the ruling classes are having to compensate for this? Ofcourse, any specific hypothesis such as these are biased because in a cycle it is impossible to say where the point of origin is. However, I have made this point to simply illustrate that your view is biased and that there are alternative explanations to how the ruling class has gone insane, if they have gone insane at all.
I think if you truly believe that this system is ecological then you would have to admit that a corruption of any component will mean that the entire ecology has been corrupted. You solution is for everyone to become better wolves. Yet you fail to acknowledge that wolves form packs, and that there are dominant and submissive wolves. I'm assuming you mean that we should all strive to become alpha wolves. If that is the case then I'm afraid your solution it utterly absurd. There can only be one alpha wolf.
Indeed. To evolve into an effective non-homicidal tribal network would in fact require we become much more like insects than predator mammals.
Even that can have horrifying consequences and is unlikely as we are already mammals, not insects, and that evolution's locked in to who we are.
If you care for it, a sci-fi book called Hellstrom's Hive (same author as Dune) illustrates how fucked up humans could be if they tried to do this (if I recall, it was ants that were emulated, as humans, right down to pheremone-based communications).
Linking back to AI there is also an AI algorithm called "artificial ant" which simulates the progress in finding best-performing paths (pick your metric, distance minimized for example) by simulating the pheremone trails used by ants in making their paths, for the obvious normal reason of bringing food to nest and needing scouts, then workers, to do so, with minimal energy cost, taking then into account the problems of distance, obstacles, add dangerous environments if you like, and then abstract it to any problem you want, such as nuclear decay and containment vessel construction parameters, etc., etc., to be put into a simulator and so on.
if you listen close this is the sound of true, real and
beautiful enlightenment; of course it is brief and
ephemeral but lasts a life time ......humourous, sacred, secular,
word based art.
.
Tom Waits - Intro & Putnam County
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG0t8oKcnkw
.
"i want to tell you a story here ...." t.w.
......
"...home to toast and honey, gotta start
up the Ford, your lunch money's there on the
draining board, toilet's runnin' christ, shake the
handle, telephone's ringin' it's Mrs Randal
where the hell are my goddam sandals?
.
with the porcelain poodles and the glass swans
staring down from the knick knack shelf
and the parent permission slips for the kids' field trips
yea and a pair of Muckalucks scraping across
a shag carpet
.
and the impending squint of
first light, and it lurked behind
a weeping marquee in downtown Putnam.
yea, and would be pullin' up any minute now
just like a bastard amber
Velveeta yellow cab, on a rainy corner,
and be blowin' its horn, in every window
in town." t.w.
.
there it is.
Tis good to see major voices standing up to do the right thing. Speaking truth to power is the first step towards salvation from the ignorance that has long to long been in the wheelhouse taking the planet down into the vortex of uncertainty, and death.
"The American people, whose gullibility is never-ending, were captivated by war-lust. Reed lost confidence in the American people whom he so well served. Reed could find no moral purpose in pushing the country toward war over nothing but fake news reports by “yellow journalism.”
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/03/23/2nd-attempt-three-made-war-pa...
@link.
"...If Americans were to read three history books, they could free themselves from their self-righteous delusions that endanger all life on earth. Those books are: A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn, The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, and The War Lovers by Evan Thomas.
No one who reads one of these books will ever again believe that the US government in Washington is the “light unto the world,” the “exceptional and indispensable” government that brings “freedom and democracy” to the conquered provinces of the American Empire.
Washington is the home of warmongering self-interested parties that have no concept of compassion or justice and serve only their own power and enrichment. Americans are as indifferent to the populations that their government bombs as Teddy Roosevelt was to the prospect of his own country’s coastal cities being bombarded. As Russia’s President Putin reminded the world on March 18, 2014, the US prefers the rule of the gun to international law." pcr
.
Steve Earle - Guitar Town
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otTW0JczoGQ
"A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn"
If I'm not mistaken, that's the one that has no footnotes or actual history in it...
The lesson being, never get your understanding of American history from a fucking communist.
"A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn"
If I'm not mistaken, that's the one that has no footnotes or actual history in it... and we know Oliver Stone is an anti-American communist.
Yikes! Never get your understanding of American history from fucking communists.
Take it easy Eugene. The " communists" were only a threat to the central bankers. Now, the psychopaths running the communists, well they didn't like playing nice with our particular bunch of psychopaths...
Add to your list "The First American Revolution, before Lexington and Concord" by Ray Raphael, a story that would have been front and center in Zinn's work had he known it.
Or would it?
Zinn's dark view of America is rooted in his experience as a bomber pilot in WWII, rooted in his shame, anger and revulsion. His "People's History" contains many forgotten pieces of the story of the Americal people, but Zinn did not truly love us. I don't think reading Zinn will help us learn to love ourselves, to forgive and embrace ourselves, to reach down inside for that which is good and great and find in it the strength to reclaim our destiny.
Which is why my copy of "A People's Hisory" is not a "loaner".
Read Raphael.
The Unperformance: Vivek Chaturvedi at TEDxNMIMSBangalore 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XijsnujcFg
Draft was discontinued for me as well. TV had a different use back then. Walter Cronkite was pretty honest compared to whatever is in his place today.
Seems to be the answer...develope your individuality to the greatest extent possible and watch the wisdom spread. There is so much to do and so many more possibilities than in 1970.
With todays tech I do not believe we need a people government. I wonder what research has been done on open source solutions for governance and what problems were encountered. I have read Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielson and the book provided a lot of insight into what kinds of projects lend themselves to networked science.
It would be neat to find some type of self replicating open source social structure that could catch fire and spontaneously render the existing social systems useless in the face of technological advancements. Something that would be adopted because it works and alternatives do not exist.
I think that is why I like Bitcoin. It is self regulating.
Seems to me: not much.
If we really had a stable open-source adaptation to government it would at the very minimum:
Open source could do that for us but first we'd need to build it, and to build it we'd need to remove the obstacle. Existing-government is that obstacle. It's a voracious parasite and it doesn't want to be removed from the host any more than does a blood-hungry tick.
jon stewart is this generatins walter cronkite. most trusted
Ya he's pretty funny and true.
I noted in the picture title Women and Children of War, the troops in the back ground are US, solely due to the screaming eagle patch on the soldier in the foreground. Also, I noted the weapon in the black soldiers posession was a M-14 thus pre 1967 combat photo as they were all replaced by the M-16 by late 67, early 68.
I had already graduated HS, got drafted and did my time in the Asha valley when Cog asked his questions of the people in charge of his indoctrination. Many of my HS teachers did their best to "inform" me of what I had in front of me, but in my infinite wisdom could not miss out on the fun.
Last Tuesday evening I got a little overloaded on beer, stopped by a local college bar and celebrated the wipe out of 50% of my platoon on March 18, 1970. Due to the University being on spring break the only people that were in the bar were young athletes with homes far away and no money to go home or south on break. I had some real fun with them arm wrestling and showing them my grip strength from milking cows from a very young age. Of course, Mrs Stud Duck, asst Dean of the business school soon heard about my latest fun due too one of her aids was part of the spectators at the bar (all female) and promptly told her about my drunken escapade and beating up on the young football players., still paying the price on that one as well as getting over the strained tendons on my left arm.
One never gets over the effects on participating in a war, but the fun of freaking out the young ones with your knowledge of the subject never ends. One of the young running backs gave me the old "thanks for your service" routine, my response was for what, killing civilian by the hundreds?? he then asked my about how do you live with it, my response was, "smoke lots of pot"! That is what Mrs Duck really is pissed about!
stud, 101st 69-71, welcome home, some of us resisted while in country, did what we could to avoid KIA's (both sides)and such, did not have an out like political connected (kerry)..still smell it, I think you know what I mean.
i keep asking what is wrong with humanity, and yes i do get fucking pissed off that i have to be part of it.
yea, i will be opted out or soveriegn,and i can answer what is wrong, but that why question lingers...
i was at the racetrack the other day, and a horse broke down in the stretch and had to be destroyed (curious word) and somebody said, why do we come here, to watch these animals die for our amusement? and i pointed at the freeway, and said there you are, a certain number of people wake up each morning, get in their car to drive to work, and they never return home. do we stop working? do we stop driving? the social nexus continues, we can opt out, or join in, either way. thoreau died at a very young age. and yes i want to live the free life, and when i get sick i want to go to the free clinic. there is nothing wrong with those two conflicting thoughts. when you apply that resolution to central banking however the metaphor goes over the top.
I stopped driving so that wouldn't be my problem.
I didn't stop working but any work that requires I have a car is off limits anymore.
I'm safer & happier this way and life is less expensive.
In the beginning, there was Chaos.
Out of the Chaos rose worlds with a multitude of beings. Wars were fought, kings and emperors rose and fell and civilisations were built and crumbled while millennia passed. Gods, dark and strange, were worshipped in pagan temples. Still there was Chaos. The gods fought amongst themselves, bringing even greater ruin to those who would serve them. At last there was One, a being of great power and enlightenment, who rose above His immortal peers and cast them out of the Heavens into Oblivion. From Chaos came Order, and with Order came peace, and the creatures of the worlds flourished. The age of Chaos had ended.
Now the Wheel has turned once again.
The Supreme god has suddenly disappeared. Prayers are left unanswered and the smoke of offerings rises in vain to the heavens. Noone knows why He disappeared, but it is certain that the peoples of the worlds are once again left without direction, without guiding principle, without Order. Now is the time for beings of great power and ambition to try their strength. The Throne of the Heavens stands empty and only the strongest can rise to supremacy over All. Only the most powerful can rise to take the place of He Who Came Before. This is a time of great strife and suffering. This is a time of magic unequaled. This is- The Ascension Wars!
-Dominions prologue
Great works, CD.
Rollin rollin rollin...Rawhide!
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/23/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSBREA2M09...
"...The situation escalated when in 40 AD Caligula announced to the Senate that he would be leaving Rome permanently and moving to Alexandria in Egypt, where he hoped to be worshiped as a living god. The prospect of Rome losing its emperor and thus its political power was the final straw for many." ...
wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
so, they came up with this modification ...
we will all be executed by low interest rates and
the associated elite malinvestment that proliferates
from it in this debt based fractional reserve ,
at interest, global slave system; the false religion
of usury will kill mankind, watch. an unlikely deadly
viral social meme going on like a plague leveling
human life on earth, stock some popcorn and beverages
and a good book.
.
April 11, 2013
To Be, or Not to Be...
"Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
http://verbewarp.blogspot.com/
.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=buck&searc...
"buck (n.1) Look up buck at Dictionary.com
"male deer," c.1300, earlier "male goat;" from Old English bucca "male goat," from Proto-Germanic *bukkon (cf. Old Saxon buck, Middle Dutch boc, Dutch bok, Old High German boc, German Bock, Old Norse bokkr), perhaps from a PIE root *bhugo (cf. Avestan buza "buck, goat," Armenian buc "lamb"), but some speculate that it is from a lost pre-Germanic language. Barnhart says Old English buc "male deer," listed in some sources, is a "ghost word or scribal error."
Meaning "dollar" is 1856, American English, perhaps an abbreviation of buckskin, a unit of trade among Indians and Europeans in frontier days, attested in this sense from 1748. Pass the buck is first recorded in the literal sense 1865, American English:
The 'buck' is any inanimate object, usually knife or pencil, which is thrown into a jack pot and temporarily taken by the winner of the pot. Whenever the deal reaches the holder of the 'buck', a new jack pot must be made. [J.W. Keller, "Draw Poker," 1887]
Perhaps originally especially a buck-handled knife. The figurative sense of "shift responsibility" is first recorded 1912. Buck private is recorded by 1870s, of uncertain signification."
wondering where the term "buck" or "bucks" came from ...?
.
We have domestic war gods Cog. This happened about 20 minutes from where I live last Sunday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC9lHoZwfjM
People here are PISSED over this.
so what were the crimes of j.b. that resulted in his
execution?
it appears a history of violence and mental illness
in a violent and mentally ill world, i think about that
frequently.
.
https://www.myworldnews.com/Story/405927-james-boyd-s-criminal-background
He was camping where he was not allowed to camp. Yes, he did have a history of mental illness, and most of the charges against him never resulted in a trial because he was found not mentally competent to stand trial. Yet none of that justifies what the police did. They waited until after he agreed to go with them to throw the flash bang, meaning that they needlessly escilated the situation.
they executed him for his mental illness and "poverty"
is the way i see it. this is something
not so new in america if you are "poor". but
for the cost of a few of those weapons
used to execute him and some grace
and insight at the right time in his life
he could have been the president or a senator.
.
i agree the squad appears to have acted fascistically
in this case, perhaps because they work for fascists?
.
that would be the public that they work for and
watch, the public will do nothing much because
they have no empathy for people who have a history
of slashing other people in the face or display
signs of mental illness from a position of "poverty".
if mr. boyd were wealthy it would be an entirely different
story in the media and in the community. just sayin'
not that it's worth sayin', but there, i said it.
.
if he was a wild animal they might have used tranquilizers,
but no, he was a poor man in the wilderness so they
executed him and then pretended he was alive and handcuffed
his corpse; sounds like fascism to me.
Actually, the entire Albuquerque area is pissed off about this. Local radio shows had people calling in left and right denouncing what the cops did, and a lot of the local media is pretty negative about it too. I don't even remember my Facebook password, so I can only see the comments on APD's front page, but people have openly posted on APD's page that they're happy about cops getting killed, calling them pussies, dicks, fascists, etc... all openly under their own names. I asked a friend to login, and he chuckled and said "There's not one single positive comment about this on here." One that I saw that made me crack up was posted under a story about how one of APDs K-9s that was recently shot was home from the vet and recovering. It went something like "I'm glad the dog is doing better, but there is still a giant slaughtered elephant in the room."
For the past 15 or 20 years, APD has consistently been embroiled in scandal, corruption, it has been excessively abusive, rude and dishonest, and it is very trigger happy. We went from one chief who actively covered up the mayor beating the everliving shit out of his wife (he put her in the hospital) to another one who had to resign because he allowed all sorts of evidence tampering in the evidence room to another who was a spineless yes man to the current thin blue line scumbag that we have now. People here are finally realizing that this shit has to stop.
What a posse of cowards, what a gaggle of gutless SS Stormtrooper assholes. Rot in Hell you wothless cops.
Jesus H. Christ where are the MEN in this nation?
What a bunch of pussies; no, too nice a word.
Other video that has surfaced shows that there were a lot more cops on the scene than were shown in that video. APD, like many PDs likes to show up with overwhelming force even when it is not necessary. They also tend to go way overboard when using that force. They've killed 22 people since 2010 (IIRC,) and shot a few others.
That has to be the most god awful evil that has ever been created in this world.
Point blank blatant MURDER!
They want you all accustomed to it just for adults to start so when they start doing it to the children, entire families who won't get into the work-camp trucks and trains, everyone will dismiss it and say "they didn't obey, they must be terrorists"
Except something is falling out of place with that plan. Sheeple are awakening & people are getting armed.
Of course we do. Twenty years of police militarization and this is what you get. What good is a heavily armed aggressive police force if you don't use it?
There was a case in Northern VA some years back where a SWAT team was sent to deliver an arrest warrant for illegal gambling to a freaking dentist.
A dentist with no prior problems or any reason to think he had weapons or was violent.
As one of the SWAT members got out of the van he 'accidentally' discharged his weapon and killed the dentist. It was deemed a 'legal shooting'.
If you have heavily trained SWAT teams hanging around the office eventually you will put them to work. Death is sometimes a byproduct of their work. Consider it a side effect.
I agree that the war drums are booming. First Syria. Now we have the meddling in Russia and Ukraine where Russia has a very capable leader. But we also have things like out of control police, the NSA spying on everybody, $100/bbl oil, rampant corruption both in government and in our financial sector, and many, many other things. On top of that, there is a lot of war fatigue and a lot of anger over all of the BS. I think we will get our war, but I think there is a very good chance that it will be fought on our own soil between Americans. IMO, all of the civil unrest around the world will eventually make it here. There are events that are now on the horizon if not much closer that are rapidly approaching, and we will reach our breaking point. My guess is that, barring a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia, we'll get a world wide civil war.
Besides, we literally cannot afford a major foreign war.
Edit: FYI, APD's brand new police chief has already stated that the shooting was justified, and our DA is useless. While I didn't login to read all of the comments on APD's facebook page, the ones that I read were getting really nasty over this.
Now I'm very, VERY depressed.