07-23-2016 | All Things

"God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when he does.

When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over.

God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else -- something it never entered your head to conceive -- comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?"

-- C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 52

04-27-2016 | Small Revolutions

How is it that when we try to do good we can often end up creating greater evil? The Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 ended in the Reign of Terror and the rise of the dictatorship of Napoleon. The temporary dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia ended up in the permanent dictatorship of the ex-proletariat in the new bourgeoisie of the Communist Party. America fought a revolutionary war against the British Empire, and then became an empire fighting to suppress a guerrilla war of national liberation in Vietnam. But these enantiodromias are not restricted to contradictory world of revolution and politics, for the Green Revolution started out as a project to feed the masses in starving India, and then ended up as the Americanization of Indian agriculture in which the rich got richer and the poor got poorer through the introduction of the petrochemicals, fertilizers, tractors, and large land holding of the modern agro-industry. The industrialization of the planet and the global distribution of medical services have increased the population so that more people are suffering than ever before. This year four hundred million people are dying of starvation.

Liberals speak of progress, especially of progress in terms of "modernization," but hunters and gatherers have more leisure time than we have and no way of institutionalizing conflict in warfare. Every step toward progress, whether it is the agricultural revolution of 9000 BC, the urban revolution of 3500 BC, or the industrial revolution of 1770, has carried with it an equal and opposite horror. As Homer recognized long ago, your unique excellence is also your tragic flaw; your greatness hobbles you. We have tried to do good in modernizing the planet through industrialization, but the internal contradictions of industrial society are beginning to become painfully visible; now some ecologists are predicting that the population of the earth with drop a hundred fold in the next ten to twenty years. If this is the case, then the entire Industrial Revolution and the whole philosophy of progress which went along with it will culminate, either through famine, ecological catastrophe, and economic disaster, or through thermonuclear war, in the greatest cataclysm in the history of the human species. When this happens, it will not be because people were consciously trying to do evil; in many cases, the leaders were trying to do good.

If evil can grow out of efforts to do good, it also seems to be the case that good can grow out of our efforts to do evil. The Roman military engineers built the roads that the Christian missionaries traveled to convert an empire. The British executed by firing squad the Irish rebels of 1916, and thus helped to free Ireland. The Nazis executed six million, and thus helped to bring the nation of Israel into existence. But much of this seems unconscious, for those who do evil certainly do not plan on having good result from it; and those who think they are working for progress do not wish to create the apocalypse. The inventor of the aerosol spray can did not wish to destroy the ozone layer of the planet, but whether it is dynamite, atomic energy, psychosurgery, or genetic engineering, it does seem to be the case that our very unconsciousness of these enantiodromias increases the likelihood of evil emerging from our acts. It is no longer safe to assume that good intentions are enough. One can wreak havoc with benevolence; therefore we have to stop and call into question the ideas of progress and philanthropy upon which modern liberalism is based.

A new race of liberals is arising to seek "The Creation of Just World Order," but if we remain as unconscious in this second global wave of liberalism as we were in the first wave which came at the end of the Second World War, then we are likely to create untold horror on a planetary scale. IF the Green Revolution can increase starvation, if antibiotics can be described as a threat to the evolutionary viability of the human species, if the entire edifice of modernization can be seen to be a curse, then how can we assume that those who write proposals for a "Systems Approach to World Order" know what they are doing? If a thing as tiny as an aerosol spray can generate intense scientific debate about the future of life on this planet, then what of a grand scheme of a handful of academics creating an entire world order?

We are like flies crawling across the cieling of the Sistine Chapel; we cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us. How can you fix up history if you cannot see it? What if history cannot be fixed from inside history? What if the attempt to fix human history is an effort to seek out the dark with a searchlight?

- William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order p. 79-81

2-19-2016 | RIP Umberto

04-12-2015 | Sunday Sermon

They say we need more revelations. I say we have had more than enough revelations on synthetic wars, atrocities, surveillance and torture. They wonder when the majority of Americans are going to speak up. And I say: The American Majority has already spoken — loud and clear.

The United States government has been engaged in the worst kind of human rights abuses, detention and torture around the globe. That’s a fact. And the American Majority knows this. The US Congress, NGOs and various human rights organizations, numerous reports, witnesses, leaks and whistleblowers, even the government propaganda outlets (aka US media) have established this as an undisputable fact: The United States has been engaged in unthinkable ongoing operations involving kidnapping, torture, black sites and detention centers, and murder all over the world. The American Majority knows this. They have spoken: with their silence.

The United States government has been engaged in ongoing police state operations, utilizing all sorts of surveillance and witch-hunt methods. Whether through the NSA’s massive surveillance, or the FBI’s massive informant cadre, or its joint operations with corporate partners, the United States government has been spying on and collecting a wide range of private information from its citizens at home and those abroad. Again, this is a known fact. And everybody knows. Ongoing revelations and leaks have made this an undisputable fact. And the American Majority has already spoken: with their silence.

So is it really more revelations we need? More whistleblowers? More alternative websites in the business of educating the people on these issues? Because from where I stand I can tell with one hundred percent certainty: The American Majority already knows. They have spoken: with their silence. And their silence speaks more than a million words.

Then, what is it that we are trying to do? If knowing, being aware, has so far translated into a loud deafening silence, then, what is the next logical step? Keep telling them what they already know? Ask more whistleblowers to put their lives on the line to tell them what they’ve been told for years?

--Sibel Edmonds

04-05-2015 | Sunday Sermon

"I have no doubts about the date when I discovered the law of syntropy. It was in the days just before Christmas 1941, when, as a consequence of conversations with two colleagues, a physicist and a biologist, I was suddenly projected in a new panorama, which radically changed the vision of science and of the Universe which I had inherited from my teachers, and which I had always considered the strong and certain ground on which to base my scientific investigations.

Suddenly I saw the possibility of interpreting a wide range of solutions (the anticipated potentials) of the wave equation which can be considered the fundamental law of the Universe. These solutions had been always rejected as “impossible”, but suddenly they appeared “possible”, and they explained a new category of phenomena which I later named “syntropic”, totally different from the entropic ones, of the mechanical, physical and chemical laws, which obey only the principle of classical causation and the law of entropy.

Syntropic phenomena, which are instead represented by those strange solutions of the “anticipated potentials”, should obey two opposite principles of finality (moved by a final cause placed in the future, and not by a cause which is placed in the past): differentiation and non-causable in a laboratory. This last characteristic explained why this type of phenomena had never been reproduced in a laboratory, and its finalistic properties justified the refusal among scientists, who accepted without any doubt the assumption that finalism is a “metaphysical” principle, outside Science and Nature.

This assumption obstructed the way to a calm investigation of the real existence of this second type of phenomena; an investigation which I accepted to carry out, even though I felt as if I were falling in a abyss, with incredible consequences and conclusions. It suddenly seemed as if the sky were falling apart, or at least the certainties on which mechanical science had based its assumptions. It appeared to me clear that these “syntropic”, finalistic phenomena which lead to differentiation and could not be reproduced in a laboratory, were real, and existed in nature, as I could recognize them in the living systems. The properties of this new law, opened consequences which were just incredible and which could deeply change the biological, medical, psychological, and social sciences."

-- Luigi Fantappiè

03-29-2015 | Sunday Sermon

"I can’t help but laugh when people insist that the internet is an information-rich environment. It’s quite the opposite, actually: all you get from it is the very narrow trickle of verbal, visual, and auditory information that can squeeze through the digital bottleneck and turn into little colored pictures on a glass screen. The best way to experience this is to engage in a media fast—a period in which you deliberately cut yourself off from all electronic media for a week or more, preferably in a quiet natural environment. If you do that, you’ll find that it can take two or three days, or even more, before your numbed and dazzled nervous system recovers far enough that you can begin to tap in to the ocean of sensory information and sensual delight that surrounds you at every moment. It’s only then, furthermore, that you can start to think your own thoughts and dream your own dreams, instead of just rehashing whatever the little colored pictures tell you.

This is one of the reasons why I think it’s deeply mistaken to claim that Americans are materialistic. Americans are arguably the least materialistic people in the world; no actual materialist—no one who had the least appreciation for actual physical matter and its sensory and sensuous qualities—could stand the vile plastic tackiness of America’s built environment and consumer economy for a fraction of a second. Americans don’t care in the least about matter; they’re happy to buy even the most ugly, uncomfortable, shoddily made and absurdly overpriced consumer products you care to imagine, so long as they’ve been convinced that having those products symbolizes some abstract quality they want, such as happiness, freedom, sexual pleasure, or what have you.

Then they wonder, in the darkest hours of the night, why all the things that are supposed to make them happy and satisfied somehow never manage to do anything of the kind. Of course there’s a reason for that, too, which is that happy and satisfied people don’t keep on frantically buying products in a quest for happiness and satisfaction. Still, the little colored pictures keep showing them images of people who are happy and satisfied because they guzzle the right brand of tasteless fizzy sugar water, and pay for the right brand of shoddily made half-disposable clothing, and keep watching the little colored pictures: that last above all else. “Tune in tomorrow” is the most important product that every media outlet sells, and they push it every minute of every day on every stop and key.

Via: Peak Meanginglessness by John Michael Greer

02-13-2015 | We Reconvene

FREEMASONS, n. An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void.

The order was founded at different times by Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Cyrus, Solomon, Zoroaster, Confucious, Thothmes, and Buddha. Its emblems and symbols have been found in the Catacombs of Paris and Rome, on the stones of the Parthenon and the Chinese Great Wall, among the temples of Karnak and Palmyra and in the Egyptian Pyramids -- always by a Freemason.

--Ambrose "Zingers" Bierce

10-11-2014 | Sunday Sermonette

"Because he is riveted to the news, the citizen rejects the truly fundamental problems, remaining attached exclusively to outmoded and useless terms and images such as 'Right and Left,' 'capitalism and communism,' and really believes that the fundamental political problems are located."

-- Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion

09-19-2014 | Colder Nights

Their chiefs and wiser ones shall know
That here was a wastrel race, cruel and sordid,
Weighed and found wanting,
Once mighty but forgotten now.
And on our last remembrance stone,
These wiser ones will write of us:
They desolated their heritage,
They wrote their own doom.

--"A Lament" by Ernest Thompson Seton

08-26-2014 | Gathering Storms

We have seen weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time there really is nobody flying the plane ... we are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

The autumn months are never a calm time in America. Back to Work, Back to Football Practice, etc....Autumn is a very Traditional period, a time of strong Rituals and the celebrating of strange annual holidays like Halloween and Satanism and the fateful Harvest Moon, which can have ominous implications for some people.

Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough cash to weather the known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings.

Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly — but at least they are Traditional. They will happen. Your driveway will ice over, your furnace will blow up, and you will be rammed in traffic by an uninsured driver in a stolen car.

But what the hell? That's why we have Insurance, eh? And the Inevitability of these nightmares is what makes them so reassuring. Life will go on, for good or ill. But some things are forever, right? The structure may be a little Crooked, but the foundations are still strong and unshakable.

Ho ho. Think again, buster. Look around you.

-- HST

08-12-2014 | Eulogy

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel.

Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.

Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up."

Man bursts into tears.

Says, "But doctor...I am Pagliacci."

07-30-2014 | Content Creation

"All originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,- all perished- which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder.

Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wit would never disturb his consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of books and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has conversed."

- Emerson

05-19-2014 | Broke & Bored

Gonna take the week off to focus on reading my money manuals: "The Art and Science of Technical Analysis" and "Sell & Sell Short." I spent an entire tax refund on such titles in 2012, and these two were the clear winners from an excellent batch; highly recommended.

We will resume processing with the Sunday Sermon on May 25th.

04-20-2014 | Sunday Sermon

"Evil and World Order," William Irwin Thompson pg. 7

"At the time of Pythagoras, the Egyptian mystery schools were no longer forces of culture and civilization-building; they were probably priestly bureaucracies subsidized by the state to pass on harmless traditions by rote. The only way to preserve the purpose of the mystery school was to do something radical, radically conservative. And so Pythagoras created the secular school, the university. As civilization was moving towards entropy, he created a new form to hold old values against the flow of time.

The tragic background against which the school of Pythagoras at Crotona was figured continued, however, to its end. Many were accepted into the Pythagorean discipline, but some were rejected as morally unfit. One of the rejected students is reputed to have raised a rebellion against the influence of the school. In the conflict, the school was burnt to the ground. The Pythagoreans fled throughout Greece, but in their flight, they took the message to the Greek world. Like the seed-pod exploding in its death, the school created new lives, and one of those lives was Plato and his Academy.

Plato's Academy lasted from 385 BC to 529 AD; it became the archetype for all the universities that followed. Pythagoras's school at Crotona lasted only for twenty years. The Pythagorean tradition went underground, but like an underground spring it flowed beneath the foundations of many of the schools that came after. Iamblichus in Syria, Ficino in Florence, Copernicus in Fauenbeurg, Bruno in Nola, and Heisenberg in Munich: all identified themselves as Pythagoreans. Pythagoras may have died as an old man in exile and despair at the destruction of his life's work, but the success of his short-lived experiment rivals the success of institutions that endured for centuries."

04-10-2014 | Working Vacations

Innovation Patterns will be offline until April 14th for VIP trolling in Washington DC.

10-11-2013 | Yeah: Nope.

Hiatus is indefinite. Currently reading through my new library and writing raps, raps and raps. Be excellent to each other.

08-21-2013 | Synthesis Vacation

On hiatus for long-form writing and General Synthesis work. Thank you for tuning in, and expect this signal to go live again on September 11th, 2013.

08-04-2013 | Sunday Sermon

07-21-2013 | Sunday Sermon

"By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.

The grandest picture in the world is the sunset sky. In your higher moods what man is there to meet? You are of necessity isolated. The mind that perceives clearly any natural beauty is in that instant withdrawn from human society. My desire for society is infinitely increased; my fitness for any actual society is diminished."

-- Apostle David Thoreau

07-14-2013 | Sunday Sermon