An Octad of Items For Your Delectation

Q: Is the OG stoned while writing this post?
is X
is not

Random articles I stumbled upon that interested me, with brief (you hope!) comments. - OG

1. When fire alarms go off, or you're stuck in a burning building, or even in the WTC just after they were hit by planes, many people don't do anything. They second-guess what's going on. They rationalize. Some apparently think they'll do something to get away from danger, but let me finish this phone call first, or oops, let me go back into the burning building to save my photos. They don't want any unknown changes in their lives. This is well-documented. Stephen Grosz, a psychoanalyst, notes clients who come to him with obvious problems. They want to change. The decision to make the change seems like a no-brainer to us, reading this. But they don't want to make any changes. How do we account for this?

Comment: as I read this brief article, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the people who neglected to get out of harm's way, and all I could think of was "Gads, I've seen so many false alarms and I've felt foolish a few times when I overreacted to what purported to be danger signals, I bet this is really not a big deal." But staying in a burning restaurant and burning to death because you thought you should pay the check first? Approach/avoidance cross-signals and Really Bad Outcomes...

2. Sorry for this article's length, but I couldn't stop reading it when I began. New School University cultural critic and PhD in American Studies, Mark Greif, writes one of the best cultural sociological pieces on the role of police in a Constitutional democracy that I've ever read. Tackling the topic due to increased visibility of police violence and numerous cries for reform, Greif notes that the role of police is "impossible," that when they graduate from the academy they swear to uphold the Constitution, though every cop knows this isn't what they do. Indeed, legal and political thought is "above their pay grade." Because a theory for the existence of police is fairly informal, reform will be difficult. Greif ironically mentions the great sociologist of police, Egon Bittner, who wrote that "criminal law enforcement is something that most of them do with a frequency located somewhere between virtually never and very rarely," and yet police departments award a Bittner to cops who've stayed on the force for 15 years.

This is an amazing piece, and despite quotes and references from and to Foucault, Adam Smith, Ben Franklin, Erving Goffman, Mary Douglas, Hobbes, Locke and the formidable police ethnographer Peter K. Manning, the piece flows. What hooked me in was the first section, about how police touch you. The varieties of touch. Women can be touched by police in public and the subtlest shift in touch can go from "professional and neutral" to "sexual and humiliating." There's a catalog of touching, and Greif states, "The purpose of touching by police if to make people touchable." And it can go all the way up to being punched and kicked while an arrestee is already on the ground.

Police in ambiguous situations add violence, and Greif argues this is a way to "test" the "good" citizens in the public to see to what degree they will support this violence. A problem is that the police really don't know who the "good" citizens are. Another problem: do you think your neighbors support escalating police violence? How many object, but withhold their voices for fear of retribution by the police? One thing is clear, and Greif points this out: police know black and poor people look wrong in white and rich neighborhoods; they know white and rich people in black and poor neighborhoods look suspect. So they investigate. "This, to their minds, is parity. They don't recognize their role in making up the boundaries of these neighborhoods in the first place, or why not all neighborhoods are functionally the same."

Comment: if you're concerned with police violence, read this.

3. In Russia, a 53 year old former professor who favored poetry stabbed to death his 67 year old friend, who said the only real literature is prose. Both were drunk.

Comment: Who knows what got lost in the translation here, but neither guy had ever read Korzybski, that seems for goddamned sure to me. In other words, in my own evaluations of poetry and prose, both seem like what is commonly called "literature" to me, and both forms can say profound things; at the moment I write this, I consider both forms as complementary, and if I encounter a drunk who gets belligerent and wants to argue that either poetry or prose "is" better than the other, I will very likely leave the presence of such a learned moron.

4. At Stanford's "Cracking The Neural Code Program" they've developed ingenious ways to isolate the circuitry for social behavior in the brain, of mice. Using optogenetics (read the article), when the circuit was buzzed the mouse interacted with a new mouse. (By sniffing. I do this too at parties but have found it necessary to develop stealth methods, know what I mean? Also at parties I frequently search for the cheese, but that's not my social behavior circuit working and merely my mouse-circuit.) By inhibiting the circuit, the mouse doesn't care for mingling at all. Of course dopamine is involved in this new knowledge of social circuitry, and I'm impressed not only by the Stanford people's techniques, but by the fact that they didn't buzz a circuit and note which neurochemicals rose up. That's what most pharmacological research does. This is on a very complex circuit, with branches into the ventral tagmental area and the nucleus accumbens. Just the trick of finding the social circuit(s) seems impressive. Buzz the circuit and put an inanimate object in the environment and the mice don't care: it's a social circuit. These researchers think this knowledge may spin off into helping humans with autism, social anxiety, depression, and maybe even schizophrenia. And let's hope it does help. I just hope these researchers aren't yankin' our chains, or chainettes.

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                                I take this to be Mamakind with a vaporizer                

5. Here's a review of Sex Pot: The Marijuana Lover's Guide to Gettin' It On, from 2011. Written by Skunk mag's legendary Mamakind, a bisexual and polyamorous stoner who was so compelling to one reader that he developed her imagined "pussytoke": a way to get stoned through what I visualize as a dildo crossed with a pipe. It is described as gourd-like. Anyway...yes. Pot and sex: one of the alchemist's better-kept open secrets to illumination. I like reading books on pot. I like reading books on sex. I've been known to put a book down, walk nine feet, and have stoned sex. And yet I've only thumbed this baby in public.

Comment: I think I grokked it fully standing in a place that sells tie-dyes and does piercings. In Sebastapol, if I recall correctly.

6. Prof. of Analytical Philosophy at Geneva, Kevin Mulligan, reviewed A.W. Moore's book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. Mulligan likes it. It's about "meta-metaphysics," or trying to make general sense of the metaphysical thought of 20 eminent philosophers, all male, all English, French, or German. And Spinoza. The review was head buzz enough for me. Moore looks at Transcendent things. He tries to tease out the meta-metaphysics of Novelty: can we make sense of things in entirely new ways? Or are we "limited to looking for the sense that things already make?" I think making sense of things in entirely new ways is one of the great joys and jobs of the visionary, but what do I know?

Also scrutinized for its meta-metaphysical aspects: Creativity. Can we make things make sense in a creative way without hauling in wrong vs. right? Wittgenstein is a big deal for Moore. So's Guattari, as you see by Mulligan's remarks.

Very early in my reading of this review, I thought of William James's lecture on pragmatism in which he says (I paraphrase from memory) if you're reading Hegel or Spinoza or any of these Wiggy Thinkers and can't help but think, "What sort of person writes an entire, fat and very learned book on such topics?" And James says you're not wrong to think this. I love that riff. Anyway...

Okay, so there "is" propositional knowledge: of facts and truth. Non-propositional knowledge is what we get from art, or listening to music: we get knowledge, but it's not stated in the Art. And Moore wants his meta-metaphysics to be more like Art than Theory. What a relief! What appears to be the most important role of metaphysics, to Moore, is giving us "radically new concepts by which to live." This strikes me as having a strong family resemblance to Harold Bloom's notion of what the Strong Poet does. I wonder if neologisms qualify as quanta in this instance for Moore?

Comment: I doubt I'll read this book, simply because there's not enough time in my life. A more personal reason: knowledge and "reality" are, in my favorite models - pragmatism, the sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism, and the diffuse thought radiating from Robert Anton Wilson's writings - one in the same. Social knowledge is constantly creating "reality" and vice-versa. The various metaphysical issues are ones that function either as artistic objects for contemplation, or as tools for living. While I applaud the attempt (and I may surprise myself and end up reading such a thing as A.W. Moore produced here; stranger things have happened) to hunt for a simpler overview of metaphysics, I really do seem to have a full plate of reading to do already. The plate piles with books into the ionosphere, and Air Traffic Control and the Federal Aviation Administration is constantly on my ass over this.

7. A woman attended a lecture on out-of-body (OBE) experiences at the U. of Ottawa, then told the lecturers that she can do all that voluntarily, and seemed surprised that not everyone does it. They did an MRI on her and found that the visual cortex deactivated, and instead she had "activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery." These areas do mental representations of body movement. The woman often did it before sleep. She was aware she was still in her body, but says she could see herself "rotating in the air above her body" and other similar extravaganzas. The woman never told anyone because she thought everyone did it. She should've brought it up at parties! (Or maybe her social circuitry isn't working on all cylinders?)

The cool thing: maybe there are more people who can do this than we thought. Also, it may be learned during a "window" of time during adolescence. I think I've done it in middle-age - maybe 20 minutes ago, in fact - but I had extra-botanical help, so who knows if it counts. Also: because the woman said there was no feeling of "awe" or marvel when she did it, it wasn't classified as a classic OBE, but instead was deemed a mere ECE, or Extra-Corporeal Experience.

Comment: I'm jealous, frankly. Of course I'd want the whole nine in an OBE, but I sense an ECE would still be a kick. (Insert your anal probe joke in this space; go ahead and write on your computer screen right now, but only in crayon using cursive, please: _____________________________.)

8. I'm guessing a lot of you who've stuck it out here have already heard the one about the two Kazakhstan scientists who have looked at the human genetic code and think they have detected the hazy signals that our designers stamped their designer label into our genes, if we can only decipher it. Oh, they're onto it. If you play with models of the genetic code you see all sorts of cool things, like the use of zero and other mathematical concepts. What they are looking for will be statistically significant patterns in our code with "intelligent-like features" (ehhhh?) that are inconsistent with any naturally known process. Sounds like that book The Bible Code to me. Or using pretzel logic to find a cryptogram in Shakespeare that ends up reading, "I'm Sir Francis Bacon, and I approve of these plays."

So yea: here's yet another panspermia scenario of our origins. Which I'm open to. The proof will be in the pudding code though. The Kazakhs say this code, once deciphered will prove all those dummies who thought SETI and use of radio-telescopes to pick up non-random patterns from within the white noise wrong: it's in all our cells! It's the SETI of molecular biology! And I've heard there's a lot of white noise in there, too, but it's gooey.

No, but wouldn't this be mindblowing if they pulled it off? And a real coup for Kazakhstan, not to mention. Golly! They (the Kazakhs, not our designers from millions but probably multi-billions of years ago) say this "stamp" will have math-semantic info (talk about time-binding!) and be unmistakably OTHER, and be "the most durable construct known" and it's utterly outside neo-Darwinian models. I'm not even at a party and I sniff Intelligent Design, don't you?

On the other hand, let's cut these guys some slack. How much more unheimlich is this compared to The Matrix trilogy? Or, serious philosopher Nick Bostrom's idea that there's a better than 50% chance that we're all living in a simulation? We live in a hologram? And I have a dippy blog there? Whoa!

Okay, okay, but Who or What designed the designer(s)?

At this point I whip out of its fine-tooled corinthian-leather sheath my Occam's Razor and see that once upon a time, one fine infinite day, Cosmic Mommy and Cosmic Daddy loved each other very very very much...

Birchers, The Illuminati, and Unistat Political "Reality"

It was the beginning of World War III.

Let me back up a bit.

There was an American Christian missionary to China who became an intelligence officer for the US Air Force. He knew China was dangerous, because they were Commies, but said God had called him to duty. Dying his hair black, dressing in traditional Chinese garb and immersing himself in Chinese language and culture, he slipped behind Japanese lines during WWII, and aided the return of American bombers who had firebombed Tokyo. His name was John Morrison Birch. About two weeks after the Nagasaki bombing, Birch was shot and killed by Chinese guerrillas. Thirteen years later, a far right wing nutjob named Robert Welch would found the John Birch Society and claim that Birch's death was the beginning of World War III.

Birch Paranoid Theology/Mystagoguery/Worldview: A Thumbnail
The world is run by wealthy communists and capitalists who are in cahoots, only pretending to be at odds with each other. They've pulled the wool over almost everyone's eyes...except the members of the JBS, who took the classic narrative of the One-World Secret Evil Government run by a shadowy and terrible and unfathomably rich group called The Illuminati...and grafted it onto their own theology/conspiriology, or whatever you want to call it. The Evil Rulers are not the Illuminati, they are The Insiders, and the US hasn't been a Constitutionally ruled democracy or republic since...well, maybe 1895 or so. Maybe earlier. Maybe later. They - The Insiders - were probably organized by Cecil Rhodes, in the the late 19th century.

Birchers hate the U.N. It's evil by definition, and evidence of the will to enslave the population of the world, right in front of our noses. Birchers think their own interpretation of the Judeo-Christian sex code is the only interpretation. Anyone deviating from that code - a code which tends to engender willful stupidity and an emotional plague in general - is evil and should be dealt with. The Birchers think The Insiders control the media (AKA Jews), and The Jews have so much money their propaganda can straddle the globe and control minds. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, any of the Elite "Round Table" groups of intellectuals and politicians, is Insider stuff. The Bilderbergers? What do YOU think?

It seems The Insiders have morphed into The Illuminati over the past ten years, but it's hard for me to get a read on this stuff. What do the Birchers want to do? "Restore" the good old ways. The way things oughtta be. Before Things went wrong. (The way they never were, really. Racist, fearful, uneducated nostalgia looks like an ugly brew to me.)

So okay: The US has been commie-controlled since the 1950s. How do I know? Well, their founder, Robert Welch, a candy-man business-owner, said so. He said General Eisenhower, then-President of the US, original CIA head Allen Dulles, and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren were all commies. Furthermore (and this is my favorite wingnut-riff from this period), Eisenhower's brother Milton was even "higher-up" in the commie pyramid than Dwight David himself. This led William F. Buckley, once a friend of Welch's, to try to purge him from the group, calling the charges "paranoid and idiotic libels." This pissed off Welch, who made a move to take over the YAFfers, or Buckley's Young Americans For Freedom. Oh yea: Truman and FDR were commie tools too, according to Welch.

                                                Robert Welch, founding Bircher

Have you heard about fluoride in the US water supply? They say it helps fight cavities. But Welch and his followers knew the real truth: it was Soviet mind-control stuff. Hey, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," as Bircher-backed Barry Goldwater said when he ran for Prez in 1964.

"Free market" everything, government is bad and can't do anything right, taxes are evil, universal health care is a horrific spectre haunting every real red-blooded American, "prosperity" is good, so are the real American "values," the 2nd Amendment is much sexier than the 1st, we need the Bible in schools, being anti-union (which is so obvious a commie plot) is a no-brainer, anti-anyone from any other country, anti-looking too brown or Asian, anti-the-rest-of-the-world, who are all a bunch of weirdos. And the flag is just grand. So how did they stay afloat? (I will guess: right wing billionaires think it's a good idea to keep the rabble as dumb as possible, but you are free to guess for yourselves.)

This stuff gets crazier and crazier. And often it gets cross-pollinated with KKK-like groups, militias,
Aryan Brotherhood garbage, and now a rather large portion of the Republican Party,  etc. You know: patriots.

Wiki history of the JBS

Wither the Birchers?
Well, we can relax. I read the entry under "John Birch Society" in Michael Newton's compendious 2006 book The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories, which ends with, "The group remains active today, continuing its 'educational' efforts in print and on the Internet, but the society is a shadow of its former self with the glory days of the 1960s (hopefully) lost beyond recall." (p.192)

That's heartening. Then 3 1/2 years ago I ran across this glib Gawker piece; more reason to relax, right?

But then, a scant eight years ago, in the Youngstown (Ohio) News: JBS making a comeback? That can't be right, can it?

Well, most of you were on to me 15 paragraphs ago: this stuff never went away; it's a major part of the fabric of thought in Unistat. Anti-intellectualism goes back to the 17th century here. And the Koch Brothers are the latest financiers of this Bircher thing, under other names: The Tea Party, Americans For Prosperity, etc.

Some liberal-progressives have been sounding the alarm. A few days ago I read in the Daily Kos, "Birch Society Republicans: America Now Has Three Major Political Parties,"with "Business Republicans" numbering 84 of the 435 in Congress, "Democrats" numbering 201, and Bircher Republicans amounting to 150 of the 435. And so it goes.

                                     Koch Bros flow-ish chart: talk about tentacles!

CODA: An Early Satirist of The Illuminati
It's Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, November, 1789. Scottish Professor John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy had made it to the US shores and caused quite a stir: are the same Illuminati that fomented the French Revolution - as Robison "proved" - here on our shores, plotting evil? Then word arrived that French Catholic Abbe Augustin Barruel's anti-Illuminati Memoirs of Jacobinism had been translated into English and we'd get to read all three volumes! (or was it four?) Anyway.

Someone writing into the Massachusetts Mercury, calling himself "A Friend to Truth," suggested that we all wait to read Barruel before passing judgement, and that we might want to consider that Robison may be a bit daft, and probably wrong about the nature of Freemasonry and its influence on the Illuminati; comparing Barruel to Robison might prove quite enlightening indeed.

Others wrote in to disparage the disparagement of Robison. Enter an Erisian writer named "Trepidus."

Trepidus wrote in to express his amazement and wonder at Professor Robison's discoveries of how influential the Illuminati had already been in America. What the Illuminati had already achieved dwarfed the achievements of the Gunpowder Plotters, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the Sicilian Vespers!

What Trepidus wished to do was urgent, and on November 30, 1789, in the Massachusetts Mercury, he sought to urge Americans to take notice of a secret cabal in their midst now, one so like the Illuminati it's amazing we all didn't see it before! Who were these plotters? The Quakers! Yep. Some "Friends"! Here's Trepidus:

"The Illuminati esteem all ecclesiastical establishments profane, irreligious, and tyrannical; so do the Quakers. They hold also the obligations of brotherly love and universal benevolence. The Quakers  not only profess these Atheistic principles, but actually reduce them to practice. The Illuminati hold the enormous doctrine of the Equality of mankind. So do these Quakers. They, like the Illuminati, have a general correspondence through all their meetings, delegates constantly moving, and one day, at every quarterly meeting, set apart for private business; and I engage to prove at the bar of any tribunal in the United States, that these Friends, these men so horribly distinguished for benevolence and philanthropy,  (Ah! philanthropy!) have held, and do still hold a constant correspondence with their nefarious accomplices in Europe...Awake, arise, or be forever fallen!"
-The Bavarian Illuminati in America: The New England Conspiracy Scare, 1789, by Vernon Stauffer, pp.261-263, orig. published in 1918, my copy published by Dover Publications in 2006

So: Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea have an antecedent of remarkably old vintage, eh? Meanwhile, we brainwashed dupes of The Insiders/Illuminati continue to endure World War III...without even knowing it! (NB: Tinfoil Hats Actually Amplify Mind Control Beams!)

ficken Sie die Koch-Sauger!

Kids In the Hall's Dave Foley, performing a satirical prophecy, pre-Glenn Beck. As Allen Ginsberg said, the poets are the antennae of the race: