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The Wilson-Bush Correspondence
8 Ramadan, 1425 a.H.

Dear President Bush,

I've been looking at TV news a lot lately, and have noted that the drug commercials seem full of 'liberal' [Jeffersonian/Kerryan] progaganda. They all tell me to consult my DOCTOR before choosing a medicine -- NONE OF THEM TELL ME TO CONSULT THE TSAR!!!

My doctor disagrees with the Tsar about which pain killer will best treat my postpolio symptoms. The commmercials are trying to lure me into following research-based ideas rather than faith-based ideas!

Are you going to allow this heresy to continue?

Worriedly,

Robert Wilson

Thank you for e-mailing President Bush. Your ideas and comments are very important to him.

Because of the large volume of e-mail received, the President cannot personally respond to each message. However, the White House staff considers and reports citizen ideas and concerns.

In addition to President@WhiteHouse.gov, we have developed White House Web Mail, an automated e-mail response system. Please access http://www.whitehouse.gov/webmail to submit comments on a specific issue.

Additionally, we welcome you to visit our website for the most up-to-date information on current events and topics of interest to you.

Dear President Bush,

Forgive my mental slowness,but I don't understand your answer.

Should I follow the research-based opinions of my doctor or the faith-based opinions of the Tsar?

And: if we should follow faith instead of research, why don't you stop those ads that tell us to consult our doctors and make them tell us to consult the Tsar?

Your obedient serf,

Robert Anton Wilson

Thank you for e-mailing President Bush. Your ideas and comments are very important to him.

Because of the large volume of e-mail received, the President cannot personally respond to each message. However, the White House staff considers and reports citizen ideas and concerns.

In addition to President@WhiteHouse.gov, we have developed White House Web Mail, an automated e-mail response system. Please access http://www.whitehouse.gov/webmail to submit comments on a specific issue.

Additionally, we welcome you to visit our website for the most up-to-date information on current events and topics of interest to you.

18 Brahe, 36 Tranquility

I've recently noticed "as if for the first time" that when people pray they always look "upward" -- i.e. perpendicular to whatever place they're standing -- or kneeling or groveling. I deduce that they conceive of their "god" as topologically isomorphic to a huge donut, about a thousand miles wider than Earth.

[Of course, if people ever pray at the north or south poles, this would have to change; then "god" would become isomorphic to a hollow sphere.]

When I raised this issue in a blog recently, Paul Krasner asked "Does this mean that the pledge of allegiance should be changed to 'one nation inside god'?"

Not necessarily. Although the Bible and Koran always speak of their god as "above," Christians, Jews and Moslems can either accept what their rituals imply -- a donut god -- or return to a flat Earth....

Giambatista Vico, "the father of sociology", suggested in The New Science that Thunder historically underlies the "god" idea; the Noisy Thing roaring in the sky , seemingly in rage, had to be appeased. Sometimes lightning came from that roaring monster, and sometimes lightning killed somebody. Hence Zeus bronnton [Zeus the thunderer], Jupiter, another thunder god; Thor, Donner, whose very name means thunder; etc.... and Yahweh..... and Allah...... Joyce uses this god=thunder equation repeatedly in Finnegans Wake [which drove me to read Vico...]

I have also observed that thunder on the sound-track -- signalling oncoming tragedy or horror -- appears in films as diverse as those of Orson Welles, James Whale, Howard Hawks, Wes Craven, Monty Python etc etc.... Listen for it and note how bloody often it pops up...... especially in thrillers....

The monotheistic idea implies a cruel and grumpy old electric donut surrounding Earth and ever threatening it.

I think this explains the "structural unconscious" or inarticulate neurosemantics of Bozo, Ariel Sharon and Osama bin Laden equally. They're all heaping up human sacrifices, as at Stonehenge, to Him Who Thunders From On High.

UNIX Date 1073865600

"Maybe" is a thin reed to hang your life on but it's all we've got.
--Woody Allen

This may not seem startling to gamers, but it sure woke me up; I learned about it on Law and Order last Sunday.

A type of program called a"bot " can play a computer game "just like a human" and in the style of any chosen human, given enough skill on the part of the bot-maker.

It seems to me this surpasses virtual reality and approaches electronic cloning. After all, the bot can go on playing after the human has "died."

A bot can also exist which, like an art forgery, seems to have the style and habits of a certain human but actually emerged from the brain of a clever faker.

This seems to me like virtual virtual reality and electronic immortality of a sort. If a bot plays chess like Alekhine, in what sense can we call Alekhine totally "dead"?

More: computer tech in general as brought us to the stage where producing a photo of a crime or even a moving picture of it does not prove a damned thing anymore. "I saw it with my own eyes" has become a bad joke.

I begin to feel that Maybe Logic will soon replace the Aristotelian either/or, not because of my books or Korzybski's or von Neumann's. but because virtual reality and artificial intelligence have destroyed certitude and left us with only degrees of probability.

BTW, do you feel absolutely sure "Robert Anton Wilson" wrote this and not some gol-danged bot?

GOD AND TSARDOM
03 September 2003 e.v.

art by rasa pelorian

Tsarism represents an intermediate form between European monarchism and Asian despotism, being, possibly, closer to the latter of these two.
-- Leon Trotsky, Russia's Social Development and Tsarism

The Guns & Dope Party wants to abolish Tsarism and restore constitutional democracy in the California Republic. If our example inspires the other 49 states, so much the better.

Why do we oppose Tsarism? How does the U.S. drug Tsar function?

Allegedly, this omniscient official knows what drugs, herbs ,compounds etc. you should use for your medical problems better than your doctor knows!!!!!! Even more magically, the Tsar knows this without doing any physical examination of you, blood pressure readings, other scientific tests etc. that your doctor does, and often from a distance of 3000 miles -- and the Tsar does it without even looking at you. The Tsar doesn't even know if you have hangnail or cancer, AIDS or flu, belong to the senior set or haven't even reached voting age yet. He can't even classify you as male, female or undecided.

In short, the Tsar knows nothing about you or your medical problems, by ordinary data, but he still know more about your medical care than your doctor knows, by some supernatural means unknown to mere mortals.

This makes sense if and only if we have a devout faith that our Tsar, like the Russian Tsars of olde, recives guidance directly from "God." No other,less spooky explanation fits the claims made by Tsardom.

The government accordingly spends more and more of our tax money financing "faith-based organizations." Without faith we might relapse into scientific or rational thinking, which leads by a slippery slope toward constitutional democracy.

28 August 2003 e.v. After refusing many pleas to run for governor, I have reconsidered and now enter the race as an unofficial write-in candidate. After all, why should I remain the ONLY nutcase in California who ain't running?

art by rasa pelorian

My party, the Guns and Dope Party, invites extremists of both right and left to unite behind our shared goals of:

1. Get those pointy-headed Washington bureaucrats off our backs and off our fronts too!

2. Guns for everybody who wants them; no guns for those who don't want them

3. Drugs for everybody who wants them; no drugs for those who don't want them

4. Freedom of choice, free love,free speech, free Internet and free beer

5. California secession -- Keep the anti-gun and ant-dope fanatics on the Eastern side of the Rockies

6. Lotsa wild parties every night by gun-toting dopers

7. Animal protection -- Support your right to keep and arm bears

More position papers will follow; we know at least 69 good positions.

POSITION PAPER 5

Major goal of first term: California secesion. [Oregon, Washington State and B.C. invited to join Freetopia....]

First order of business on assuming office: Fire 33% of the legislature [names selected at random] and replace them with full-grown adult ostriches, whose mysterious and awesome dignity will elevate the suidean barbarity long established there.

Both the pro-gun people and the dopers [medical, religious and/or receational] feel like minorities, and the TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government] agrees with this estimate of their weakness. Our contention holds that in California both groups woikin' together make a MAJORITY. Ergo, they have much to gain and nowt to lose in combining forces. Each side only has to realize this and agree "We'll tolerate their hobbies if they'll tolerate ours" and we can even beat Schwarzenegger!

Political philosophy in depth at: http://www.lysanderspooner.org/

Tsar cards granting full autonomy available from rawlist@maybelogic.com

More details at http://www.maybelogic.com/rawgov.html

Inspiration and incitement at http://www.madsci.org/~lynn/juju/surr/paranoia/CP.html

Humor in a Small Virginia Church
23 Hestia 81 p.s.U.

In THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS the egregious psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter explains to Agent Clarice Starling why he killed one of his own patients: "I simply could not endure his interminable whining any longer. Besides, his therapy was going nowhere. Believe me, Clarice, there isn't a psychiarist in the country who wouldn't like to refer a few cases to me."

They found this victim in a small church in Virginia, nude except for a high silk hat, with a child's bubble pipe in his mouth. Dr Lecter had only removed two glands --the "sweetbreads"

Near the end of the third volume of the Lecter trilogy, Hannibal remarks to Clarice, "Events which appear gross or offensive in the instant may become, with a slight change of perspective, somewhere between droll and riotously funny."

I wonder if ole Doc Lecter planned the kiddie bubble pipe when he planned the murder, or if that came to him as a last minute inspiration while packing his surgical tools? In either case, I still regard him with less fear and loathing than I have for Dubya; at least Hannibal didn't claim that he only wanted to Liberate the patient.....

Bush's War on the Sick and Dying
13 Hephaistis 82 p.s.U.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
United States Constitution, 10th Amendment

As most of you know by now, my photo went all over the country as the first patient to receive medical cannabis from the city officials of Santa Cruz on September 17; I assume the organizers pushed me up front because of my age, my white beard, my wheelchair and my general resemblence to a colorful Gothic ruin.

I've had a lot of experence with civil disobedience, dating back to Vietnam War days, but this occasion seems unique, in that the mayor, the former mayor, the city council and various other local officials participated [not as patients, but as supporters.] In fact, we all acted perfectly in accord with local and state law: Californians voted to legalize medical cannabis by a 55% majority, and Santa Cruz County by a 75% majority. The TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government], however, has thrown the tenth amendment into the same garbage heap with the first nine. The Bill of Rights exists now only as a historical curiosity, although you can still find it in the back of a good fat dictionary.

I suggest that you check this out by looking into your own dictionary before His Royal Fraudulency George II has this subversive document removed and thrown down the memory hole.

What will Tsarism in America engulf and devour next? Having invaded medicine -- not only in the present case, but in banning stem cell research-- will the TSOG move on physics next and allow the pointy-headed bureaucrats to decide which of the eight theories of quantum mechanics professors may discuss in class? Will they issue dogmas about mathematical set theory? Will they raid Chinese neighborhoods, indefinetly "detaining" those who prefer herbal meds to allopathic ones? Nothing seems impossible: Tsarist governments use a special logic with deuces, eights and one-eyed jacks wild.

I wonder how many of the serfs even remember that the founders intended to create a free country here.

Perils of Cocaine Abuse
23 Mars 81 p.s.U.

Two recent political leaders allegedly had this nefarious habit.

Both came to power after dubious elections, by non-electorial and irregular methods.

Both nations immediately experienced attacks on famous public buildings.

Both blamed an ethnic minority before forensics had any evidence.

Both led "witch-hunts" against the accused minority.

Both suspended civil liberties "temporarily."

Both put the citizenry under surveillance.

Both maintained secret and clandestine governments.

Both launched wars against most of the world.

One had a funny mustache. Can you name the other one?

I WANT MY FUCKING MONEY
5 Zeus 81 p.s.U.

"Shit, motherfucker! I want my fucking money, motherfucker!"

Last night I looked at Spike Lee's superb film Jungle Fever on the Independent Film Channel and that line hurtled off the TV and burned into my neurons like a Joycean epiphany. The speaker, a minor character in the story, virtually a non-character, spoke into a cell-phone as the major character walked past him in a crowd scene, and yet he seemingly summed up everything about our world today.

Joyce developed his theory of the artistic epiphany from a similarly simple sentence that he overheard passing an open window in Dublin circa 1900. It seemed to him that with his usual mixture of logic, empathy and artistic intuition he "knew in a flash" a great many things about the speakers, their lives, the lives of most Dubliners, and, by extension, the lives of colonized peoples everywhere. I invite you to apply the same methods to the wonderful sentence Mr. Lee has given us:

"Shit, motherfucker! I want my fucking money, motherfucker!"

In the feudal age, people once fought wars over Land, when Land served as the source of wealth. Those who had Land wanted more, on the usual addictive rule that we want more of what makes us feel very very good. They also worried that others wanted to take their Land away. Then paper Money appeared, almost as abstract as pure information in communication theory. For over 400 years now, the world has struggled over Money -- working for it, swindling and robbing for it, conspiring to monopolize it, going to war over it. Since less than one percent of Earthians owns 99 percent of the Money, the [approximately] 6 billion of the rest of us struggle evermore desparately over the one percent of the green magick not yet monopolized. We all feel like Spike Lee's guy on the cell-phone part of the time,do we not?

By the way 23 Zeus -- 23 December,2001 e.v. -- marks the 36th birthday of former Special Agent Clarice Starling. Bon appetit to her and Hannibal both!

FIENDISH PLOTS
21 SHa`baan 1422 A.H.

Fu who?
-- THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU

Last night I looked at THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU on TV, partly because it starred Peter Sellers as both Dr. Fu and his enemy Nayland Smith of Scotland Yard, and partly because I wanted to compare the epic battle between Fu and Smith with the current rumble between Dubya and Osama bin Laden.

I have long regarded Dr Fu as both archetype and stereotype -- the incarnation of British fear of Oriental revenge for imperialist invasions. Osama fits that role very well indeed, and the Dubya/Smith parallel came across with almost synchronistic shock:

"The difference between Fu and me," Smith sez, "is that I'm Good and he's Evil."

Have Dubya's speech-writers read the original Fu novels or just seen this film?

Unlike the novels, the film does not portray Dr Fu as driven by "motiveless malignancy" [like Dubya explaining Osama: "He is a man who is an evil man."] On the contrary, Fu has a personal grudge we can understand: as a boy he had to work in his father's laundry at Eton, and starching all those white collars drove him bonkers. That makes more sense to me as a novelist than the unmotivelated malice of Osama, as portrayed by Dubya, CNN and the other corporate spin doctors.

Fear not, O true believers: the film didn't mention imperialism, any more than the novels -- or Dubya's speech-writers.

Meanwhile, another of my favorite villians has resurfaced:

THE FIENDISH PLOT OF MING THE MERCILESS

[Adapted from the Irish Times 5 Nov 2001]

The cannabis campaigner, "Ming the Merciless", has been arrested in Dublin this afternoon in connection with posting what is believed to be cannabis too close to 300 politicians and journalists.

He was detained while attempting to hand deliver a potted cannabis plant to the offices of a senior Government Minister,and taken to Pearse Street Garda station where he is being held under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act.

Earlier today, several letters containing what is believed to be cannabis and addressed to politicians at their offices were discovered by officials checking the post following recent anthrax scares.

"Ming the Merciless", whose real name is Luke Flanagan from County Roscommon, is a well-known campaigner for the legalisation of cannabis. He ran in Galway West on a legalise cannabis ticket during the 1997 general election and also ran on the same platform in the European Parliamentary elections in the constituency of Connacht-Ulster.

Every country gets the villians it deserves. And as Joyce would say, there's lots of fun in Flanagan's work.

WAR AGAINST SOME TERRORISTS

7 Ways of Looking at a Monkey-House
September 29, 2001 e.v.

Just as the War Against Drugs would make some kind of sense if they honestly called it a War Against Some Drugs, I regard Dubya's current Kampf as a War Against Some Terrorists. I may remain wed to that horrid heresy until he bombs CIA headquarters in Langtry.

I turned on CNN a few days ago and a White House robot announced that the rebels in Chechnya "were" no longer freedom fighters but "are" now terrorists with "clear" links to Osama bin Laden.

CNN provided no details about whether the transformation occured in a sudden miraculous flash like the transubstantiation of the host in a Catholic mass, or happened slowly and gradually like Darwinian evolution.

In a related bulletin, Russia pledged its support in the War Against Some Terrorists, and will presumably start with those bastards in Chechnya.

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND:
IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING

The plight of Bill Maher reminds me of something Ezra Pound wrote about London in 1919: "A single intelligent remark can destroy a man's entire career."

A friend in Israel just sent me an email quoting George Bush saying we should all go to Disneyland. It didn't surprise me. I kind of suspect George lives in Disneyland all the time, with Mickey and Goofy and Osama bin Laden and all the "faith-based organizations" in the world.

As Voltaire said, "The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity."

Pfui.

Bloomsday 2001 e.v.
16 Juno 80 p.s.U.

Schrödinger's Jew

97 years ago today Leopold Bloom, a fictitious man, wandered the streets of Dublin, a real city; and Joyce scholars still argue about his odd odyssey. I would like to add to the confusion with a note about Bloom's "Jewishness."

"Is" Leopold Bloom a Jew?

Not according to Orthodox Rabbinical law, which defines a Jew as the child of a Jewish mother. Bloom as the child of a Protestant mother "is not" a Jew.

According to Nazi law, however, a Jew "is" a person with a known Jewish ancestor. Bloom as the son of Rudolph Bloom [born Rudolph Virag], "is" a Jew.

See how easily a person can "be" and "not be" a Jew at the same time?

On the third hand, most humanists define a Jew as one who believes in and practices the Judaic religion. By this definition, Bloom who neither believes in nor practices any religion "is not" a Jew. But Marilyn Monroe, who practiced and probably tried to believe in Judaism while married to Arthur Miller, "was" a Jew by that definition-- for those few years, if not before or after.

Extensionally or phenomenologically, a Jew "is" somebody considered Jewish by all or most of the people he meets. By this standard the multi-ordinal Bloom "is" a Jew again.

Once more: in terms of pure existentialism a Jew "is" somebody who chooses to consider themselves Jewish. Bloom obviously doesn't consider himself Jewish but Irish, most of the time. Only when under verbal assault by the anti-semitic Citizen in Barney Kiernan's pub does Bloom define himself as Jewish ["And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me."] Here he obviously has in mind the "known Jewish ancestor" rule, because he adds "And so was his father," to which the Citizen replies, as a correct Catholic, "He had no father," and Bloom, unfamiliar with that theology -- logic played with deuces, eights and one-eyed jacks wild -- can only pragmatically reply, "Well, his uncle then."

But recalling the incident later, Bloom says "And he called me a Jew, which as a matter of fact I'm not." Here he returns to his customary "believer in Judaic religion" definition.

I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism" and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word "is."

For more on Korzybski's criticisms of "isness," click here.

17 Kupris 80 p.s.U.

In my youth I majored in mathematics for a few years before switching to Education and then to Psychology. Out of this strange smorgasbord, I developed a lot of the surreal ideas in my books, and especially my weird habit of looking at art and myth in terms of isomorphisms ["similarities of structure"].

For instance, when I first saw Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I immediately saw an isomorphism with the Grail legend. Roy [Richard Dreyfus], the contactee most traumatized by his experience, seems like a fool to everybody -- especially to his wife. Parcifal also seems a fool, even "the perfect fool" in Wagner's version. Yet Roy gets past the government cover-up and enters the Mother Ship, and Parcifal passes through Chapel Perilous and finds the Holy Grail. Since Roy and Parcifal both have lots of companions or rivals on the Quest, one can even see an analog with the single sperm that beats all of its brothers and reaches the Egg first...

Close Encounters also has strong isomorphism to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu;" but I leave that to the student's own ingenium, as Crowley would say.

Or consider the folktale, found from Russia across Europe to Ireland, in which a young girl on an errand of mercy meets a cannibal in the woods. The monster sets her three riddles, and when she solves them, instead of eating her he becomes her ally and defender. One variation on that became "Little Red Riding Hood" and another became The Silence of the Lambs.

The three brothers who go forth to slay the dragon in many fairy-tales appear as the three shark-hunters in Jaws; the Three Stooges trying to repair a plumbing system; the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scotsman, in many jokes of the British Isles; Smith, Jones and Robinson in logical puzzles [note the distinctly English, Welsh and Scot names]; Dumas' Three Muskateers; and all of these plus the three sons of Noah and the Holy Trinity in Finnegans Wake.

You might find some amusement in discovering the isomorphisms between Jesus' parable of the Good Samaratan, "The Little Engine That Could," and Ulysses; you might even glimpse why Joyce, who never used a word without intense awareness of its history, describes Bloom as behaving "in orthodox Samaratin fashion" in the first sentence of Book III.

Any number can play this game. Try finding the isomorphisms between the ancient ritual of bride-capture; the Eternal Triangle of Finn/Graunia/Dermot, Arthur/Guinevere/ Launcelot, Mark/Isolde/Tristan etc.; Zeus and Leda, Zeus and Danae, etc.; King Kong; Behind the Green Door; the rude man in the lower berth who interrupts the honeymoon couple in a 1001 bawdy jokes...

The more often you try this method, the more likely you will come to credit something like Jung's "collective unconscious" or Sheldrake's "morphogenetic field" and to suspect it has a structure both sexual and mathematical, like I Ching.

"I Seem to be a Verb"
13 Phoebus 80 p.s.U.

The wind is part of the process
The rain is part of the process
-- Ezra Pound, Canto 74

Pound, beaten by rain and wind in his outdoor cage at Pisa, remembers a bit from Kung-fu-tse, who also knew hard times. I think a lot these days about Dao, the ideogram Ez translates as "the process," and which most Americans still spell old-style as Tao. More traditional renderings turn Dao into a capitalized abstraction such as "the Way" or "the Path," and anybody trying to understand them feels like their brain has just turned to oatmeal.

Although too ignorant of Chinese to trust my own judgement, I have always preferred Ez's rendering of Dao as "process" on the basis of Ernest Fenollosa's claim that ideograms render "noun and verb as one -- things in motion, motion in things." That fits the world of modern physics, of perception psychology and of what little I think I know of Chinese. You can imagine my delight when Daniel Coyle, a friend who recently [1999] earned a Ph.D. in Chinese studies, assured me that Pound got it right.

Dao, the process, seems more nitty-gritty and tangible since I acquired an apartment with a panoramic vista of Monterrey Bay and the surrounding hills. The view never seems quite the same twice. Waves, sun, fogs, seasons, dogs, dolphins, moons, planets, stars -- all seem flowing, as if every kind of evolution, cosmic to biological,parades before me.

More and more I lose contact with "me" and flow with all else that flows..the Dao-process.

An old proverb of the Middle Kingdom says, "The wise become Confucian in good times, Buddhist in bad times and Daoist in old age." If some pookah magick made me thirty years younger, in the present wretched state of this nation, I'd have to become a Buddhist. Old age has its advantages. When pain keeps me from writing, I eat a magick muffin, sit on the balcony and get totally lost in the Dao.

Yeah, even in the rain and wind.

The Wilson-Bush Letters:
19 Hermes 80 p.s.U.

Your Royal Fraudulency King George II:

I wish to support your efforts to abolish as much as possible of the federal government and transfer its functions to faith-based organizations. I suggest that you should apply this idea especially to the controversial matter of capital punishment.

Let faith-based organizations take over our seasonal rites of human sacrifice; after all, they invented the institution in the first place, and it requires ardent faith to believe in it in the 21st Century. Distribute the boodle evenly to all faiths, so that Roman Catholics can burn offenders at the stake, in accord with their own faith-based system, Protestants can revive the public hanging, Moslems and orthodox Jews can employ stoning to death, Mormons can use bullets, Sikhs can chop off heads again, etc.

The federal funds so spent will not only boost the power of faith-based groups, but will proportionally decrease the influence of research-based groups, who often destroy faith and encourage doubt anyway.Think how much this will aid the drug war alone, along with most of your other programs, and you will see the long-range benefits of this modest proposal.

Hoping that this will meet with your approval, I remain

Your serf and servant,
Robert Anton Wilson

Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 12:02:33 -0500 (EST)
From: Autoresponder@WhiteHouse.GOV
Subject: Re: Faith-based Executions
Sender: White.House.Mail.Relay.Autoresponder

The President@Whitehouse.Gov received your electronic mail message.

Thank you.

22 December 2000:
As Darkness Falls....

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

- George W Bush (See CNN transcript from 12/18/2000)

After that, the NRA has finally won me over -- we all need guns now.

8 As 128 Era Pataphysique

for Col. Hugh Romney, USAF [ret.]

I have never enjoyed an election more, or had my animal spirits raised higher by the results. I feel, in short, just like I did in Berlin the week before the Wall came down: a quantum jump seems about to happen.

My perennial candidate, Nobody, scored another stunning victory. The majority of citizens simply ignored the Gush/Bore/TSOG Control Machine, and "voted for Nobody," i.e. didn't vote at all. Unlike alienated artists of the past, I belong to the majority party -- the millions who looked over the candidates and decided they trusted Nobody.

According to the latest [wobbly] figures, since Gush and Bore each got the vote of [roughly] 25% of the eligible voters, and Nobody got the vote of [roughly] 50%, then Nobody won. Adding the "protest votes" for Nader, Browne etc., Nobody won even bigger, around 55%. since in this carefully rigged system, third party votes are, in effect, votes for Nobody. The people who voted for those "minority" candidates certainly didn't expect them to win; they just expressed their contempt for the 2 Lying Bastards more actively than those of us who just stayed home, got stoned and looked at Three Stooges videos.

I celebrate the majority with Whitmanesque rhapsody. The so-called Elite-- specifically, the 1/2 of 1% who own damn near everything, especially the politicians and the media -- spent THREE BILLION DOLLARS on this malign fiesta and still couldn't convince most of us that a choice between two over-rouged old whores like Gush and Bore matters a damn.

A few hours ago, I heard a pundit on CNN announce that whoever enters the White House on 20 January 2001 will know that "half the country" regards him as a fraud and usurper. As usual, the media got the facts wrong; they ignored the landslide 55% who chose Nobody. Whichever Lying Bastard enters the White House that day will seem a fraud and usurper to 80% of the country-- the 25% who prefer the other Lying Bastard + the 55% who prefer Nobody.

This seems wonderful to me. Liberty can survive only as long as most people distrust their government, and falls into decline and the "sickness unto death " whenever the people trust a government too damn much.

Besides, I think it's time to abolish politicians entirely and let everbody participate in self-government via Internet. We needed representatives in the 18th Century, because we couldn't all go to Washington. Meanwhile, times changed and our "representatives" have sold us out to the corporations, as we in the majority party all agree, whatever our differences in other matters. And we don't need "representatives" anymore; we have the Net technology to represent ourselves.

In that evolutionary sense, every vote for Nobody really represents a vote for Everybody.

4 Tishri, 5761

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE
Last night, a friend named Joe and I watched the 2 Lying Bastards on acid, and we agreed that it seemed the funniest show of the new season. A Laff Riot! Four Stars!! Hodgepodge cluster!!!

NOR DASHED A THOUSAND KIM
BTW, we looked at a 3 Stooges video before the Gush/Bore fiasco. While the magnificent Stooges can't compare in sheer surrealism with Gush/Bore [two millionaires financed by billionaires, each claiming he wants to help us peasants] the Stooges' perfomances seemed more nuanced and "deeper", especially Moe's. We definitely need more of them.Their passing remains a great loss, especially Moe's.

$34,000,000+
As for the major clown show: We especially admired the skill of both Lying Bastards in managing to keep straight faces during the entire farce, while Joe and I were both "rolling in the aisles." We also admired the tact of Gush in not mentioning the fact that Bore had received more than $34,000,000 in bribes -- er, I mean campaign financing-- from the corporations that own the country. But perhaps this tact derived from the fact that Gush had also received $34.000,000+ from the same corporations.

GEORGE DON'T MAKE NO BULL MOVES
I begin to believe the Gush campaign buttons that say "He's not a crackhead any more." He didn't seem speedy at at all, and almost slow at times. Bore, however,seemed stoned out of his gourd, and a few times I thought he was about to anounce that he only invented Intenet on the 7th day, having spent the first 6 creating the heavens and earth.

I wish the managers had given us a more meaningful debate -- e.g. Gush claiming Donald Duck was funnier than Daffy Duck, and Bore defending Daffy -- but still this remains the Laff Riot of the month.

FRENCH CANADIAN BEAN SOUP
Joe and I both thought Jim Lehrer also deserved special commendation for keeping a straight face, especially when looking directly into the camera and assuring us this "debate" concerned important issues.

GODDAM FLOATING WHOREHOUSE
DEATH IS THE NAVIGATOR
In summary, this appears a great election year if you keep well supplied with acid.

DADA IS NOT DEAD
WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT

23 Artemis, 79 p.s.U.

I regard "ideology" and "morality" as the two most dangerous forces on this planet. About "ideology" I have expressed my suspicions elsewhere; here I will only mention John Adams's verdict that shortening "ideology" to "idiocy" would save some space and add a great deal to clarity. He had the French Revolution in mind, but "ideologists" haven't changed much since then, have they?

As for "morality" -- or "moralic acid" as Nietzsche called it -- I consider it the major cause of almost all the major atrocities not caused by "ideology." This wonderful invention, "morality," allows people -- normal, ordinary people -- to do things so cruel and violent that they could never bring themselves to do them for selfish reasons. What the sociopath and sadist do for fun, the "moralist" does on behalf of "duty" or "justice."

"Morality," today, allows Moslems to stone women to death, as it once fueled the Christian witch-hunts. "Morality" has excused every war, and glorified some of them. "Morality" constantly plots to subvert the Constitutional guarantee of free speech. "Morality" inspires gay-bashing and the bombing of women's clinics. Why, without "morality" we might all suddenly go stark staring sane.

My vision of Utopia would include a hell of a lot more kindness and mercy than we have now, and a hell of a lot less "morality.'

26 Phalle 127 Era Pataphysique

Now that his 8 years in the White House draw to a close, I have begun to think of Bill Clinton as the first really entertaining president in over 200 years. He makes all the others seem dull, and that will guarantee his immortality. As centuries turn into millennia, Bill will appear continually in all media, existing or not-yet-existing -- e.g. drama,film, TV, Virtual Reality, you name it. All the best actors will want to play him, just as they now revel at the chance to play the randiest European royalty [Henry VIII, Charles II, Louis XVI -- you know, that crowd]. The best actresses will all play Monica Lewinski, who will achieve the archetypal status of Anne Boleyn, Nell Gwynn, Mme. Pompadour etc. among the Fabulous Courtesans.

Eventually, my sense of cult and mythos tells me, Bill himself will surpass mere kings and join the legendary Roman emperors -- Caligula, Tiberius, Commodus, et al. -- or stand beside the bawdiest tales in the Finn Mac Cool cycle. Hell, give it 3000 years, and with the usual corrosions of time, archeologists will be found in violent dispute over whether certain ithyphallic statues represent Pan, Priapus or Our Own Bill. Even today, he appears as the star of a best-selling porn novel, by Kenneth Starr, published and distributed by the Government Printing Office. He has eclipsed Errol Flynn as the symbol of raging male libido.

After all, who the hell remembers the actual politics of any of the sexual sociopaths of bygone ages just mentioned above? Henry VIII had six wives; that's what lives in folk memory. Nobody but professional historians knows or cares about his political positions.

Clinton will live in myth, legend, song and story as long as Nero. The folklore of humanity will never forget America's first president with a perpetual hard-on.

23 Hestia 79 p.s.U.
The Magick of Languge

We never experience "thoughts," "feelings," "perceptions," "intuitions," "sensations," "body symtoms." etc. We invent those categories after the fact. What we experience, nanosecond by nanosecond, consists of continuous reactions of the organism-as-whole to the environment-as-a-whole, including incoming verbal signals from others in the same predicament. These incoming verbal signals also produce in us reactions of the organism-as-a-whole sometimes culminating in a return signal.

That much seems simple neurobiological savvy.

But suppose I point a shamanic death-bone at you and recite a curse? Or utter a Magick Word that alarms and threatens you as much as a simple "fuck" threatens simple Methodists? We never "know" organismically all that we know theoretically. Parts of us remain simian, childish, inertial, mechanical etc.

Illustration: Consciously and will-fully remind yourself that you can tell the difference between a "movie" and "real life." Then go to see the latest ketchup-splattered horror/slasher classic and pay attention to how many times the director magically tricks you into real gasps, internal or overt cringe-reflexes, , dry mouth, clutching [seat-rails, coke can, companion's arm etc.] or other symptoms of minor but real [polygraph-diagnosible] anxiety and short-term near-panic, sometimes verging on vomit-reflex.

Illustration #2: With the same conscious and will-full reminders about the difference between "movies" and "real life," attend a hard-core XXX porno flic. Observe how long it takes before physiological responses indicate that parts of you at least have lost track of that distinction.

None of this represents trvial cases only. The role of magick in all language transactions has very concrete and exhilarating/terrifying implications; viz.

Well-documented case of a man literally killed by a shaman's curse and a "death-bone" -- The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, by Ernest Lawrence Rossi, Norton, 1988, page 9-12.

Equally well-documented case of another man, a cancer patient, "miraculously" blessed by remission and recovery due to a placebo [with tumors shrunk to half their previous size], then cursed back into critical condition when learning of deaths of others receiving the same placebo -- same book, page 3-8.

Whoever speaks a sentence to another human may pronounce a blessing or a curse without even intending this.

Remeber this the next time you get angry.

14 Archemides, 32 a.T.

I peeked at the G.O.P. convention a few times and concluded that we still live in the neurolinguistic Dark Ages.

Let me enlarge on that perhaps gnomic remark. I distinguish between information, all that humans can check by experience, as distinct from noise, those "things" [or non-things, or nothings] that they can only make noises or chatter about.

Examples: [A] I can say "If you open that box on the table, you will find three chocolates inside." Going to the box and opening it, in the sensory-sensual continuum, will quickly confirm or refute my statement, because you will inevitably find [1] less than three chocolates, or perhaps none at all, [2] exactly three chocolates, or [3] more than three chocolates. Results [1] and [3] refute my statement; [2] confirms it.

But [B] I might also say "Opening God for similar investigation, you will find three persons inside," as in fact Romish Magick does say. No investigation of the sensory-sensual manifold can ever confirm or refute this. Scientific philosophers generally describe such statements [about things beyond conformation or refutation] as "meaningless". Following Korzybski, I call them noise, and I venture that we cannot fathom our situation in space-time if we habitually confuse ourselves by mixing type [A] statments, informaiton, with type [B] statements, noise. We may never achieve Total Clarity [short of infinity] but we should at least have the ability to distinguish between what humans can experience and what they can only blather about.

Distinguishing between these two types of statements seems necessary for sanity and survival, because all forms of illusion, delusion, mob hysteria, hallucination etc., dogma, bigotry, "madness," intolerance etc. "idealism," ideology, idiocy, obsession etc. depend upon confusing them. The people who released poison gas in the Tokyo subways, the Nazis, the Marxists, nut-cults like Objectivism, Heaven's Gate, Scientology, etc. represent some of the horrors and curses unleashed by mixing Class [A] statements with Class [B] statments.

I don't expect any better of the Democrats when their convention rolls around. Politics, like theology, consists of much noise and no information.

12 Gouidille 127 E.P.
National Chocolate Pudding Day

I regard the two major male archetypes in 20th Century literature as Leopold Bloom and Hannibal Lecter, M.D. Bloom, the perpetual victim, the kind and gentle fellow who finishes last, represented an astonishing breakthrough to new levels of realism in the novel, and also symbolized the view of humanity that hardly anybody could deny c. 1900-1950. History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim. Bloom, exploited and downtrodden by the Brits for being Irish and rejected by many of the Irish for being Jewish, does indeed epiphanize humanity in the first half of the 20th Century. And he remains a nice guy despite everything that happens...

Dr Lecter, my candidate for the male archetype of 1951-2000, will never win any Nice Guy awards, I fear, but he symbolizes our age as totally as Bloom symbolized his. Hannibal's wit, erudition, insight into others, artistic sensitivity, scientific knowledge etc. make him almost a walking one man encyclopedia of Western civilization. As for his "hobbies" as he calls them -- well, according to the World Game Institute, since the end of World War II, in which 60,000,000 human beings were murdered by other human beings, 193, 000,000 more humans have been murdered by other humans in brush wars, revolutions, insurrections etc. What better symbol of our age than a serial killer? Hell, can you think of any recent U.S. President who doesn't belong in the Serial Killer Hall of Fame? And their motives make no more sense, and no less sense, than Dr Lecter's Darwinian one-man effort to rid the planet of those he finds outstandingly loutish and uncouth.

Confusion 142 Nortonian
[12 June 2000 Papist]

The Two  Lying Bastards Show

I'm looking forward to a great new TV sitcom this summer/fall season -- the Two Lying Bastards Show, in which a pair of our most talented clowns, Al Gore and George W. Bush, will appear, both as solo acts and as orchestrated duets. Gore  will attempt to keep a straight face while claiming that he hasn't smoked any reefer lately, at least not really lately, and Bush will also attempt to look honest and truthful while swearing that he hasn't snorted any coke in recent years, or months, or weeks. Both will endeavor to look stern and righteous while explaining why we need more prisons for the poor folks who share one or both of these recreational habits. Man, it should rank as the "laff riot" of the year, as Hollywood would say.

I wonder if there exists a single hominid critter with more than a half inch of forhead who can take either of these mutts seriously? The voter turnout last time was the lowest in our history; more than half  of the eligible voters didn't even bother to go to the polls. It will undoubtedly drop even lower this time.

Hey -- suppose they gave an election and nobody came?

9 Confusion 3166 y.D.

Corporations that have donated at least $500,000 to both Gore and Bush

[Source: Jim Hightower]

- AT&T

- Philip Morris

- Amer Financial Group

- Microsoft

- Atlantic Richfield Co.

- SBC Communications

- Enron

- Mirage Resorts

- Federal Express

- Citigroup

- Amer Airlines

- Bell Atlantic

- Anheuser-Busch

- Limited Inc.

- Pfizer

- Rite Aid

- Schering-Plough

- BellSouth

- Joseph E. Seagram & Sons

- Bristol-Myers Squibb

- Union Pacific

- Blue Cross & Blue

- Shield

- MBNA Corp

- America Online

- Amer Intl Group

- MCI Worldcom

- Ernst & Young

- Circus Circus

- Enterprises

- Sprint

- AFLAC

- Time Warner

- Boeing

- Prudential Insurance

- Ocean Spray Cranberries

- Paine Webber

- MGM Grand

- Archer Daniels Midland

- Walt Disney

- Coca-Cola

- Flo-Sun Sugar Co.

- Lockheed Martin

- Intl. Game Technology

- United Airlines

- Oracle

- Exxon Mobil

- United Technologies

- US West

- Pacific Gas & Electric

- Upjohn

- Owens Corning

- Chevron

- Park Place

- Entertainment

- Bacardi Martini USA

- Boston Capital Partners

- Eli Lilly & Co.

- Georgia-Pacific

- Amer Home Products

- Amer Express

- Bechtel Group

- Loews Corp

- Sunoco

- General Electric

- Northern Telecom

- General Dynamics

- New York Life Insurance

- United HealthCare

Now, folks, who do you think will win the election? Or does it really matter a damn?

28 Kupris 79 p.s.U.

TSOG [Tsarist Occupation Government]

According to a widely discussed article by Seymour Hersh [The New Yorker, May 22, 2000, pp. 49-82] our current Tsar seems guilty of war crimes under the Nuremberg rules. This surprises me about as much as the news that the Pope lists his religious affiliation as Catholic, or that furry mammals of the ursine family perfom their excretory functions in sylvan environments. Bill Clinton may be 77 kinds of sonofabitch, as most of us think, but he's no fool. When he picks a Tsar, he finds the right sort of man for the job.

But with the march of technology, and the almost daily announcements of new marvels and monstrosities of genetic engineering Bore or Gush might surpass him,; they might dig up the bones and clone Ivan the Terrible.

18 Archemides 30 a.T.

Wait a Minute--
What Goddam Millenium?

I have used a variety of different calendars over the past 30 years--partly because I find it amusing to do so, but mostly for reasons of neurolinguistic self-education. [I employ a few dozen other devices of this sort to re-program myself out of conventional semantic grids: experiments, if you will, on Guinea Pig Bob.] For instance, I often use Ezra Pound's post-Christian calendar to date this column. Beginning at midnight 30 October1921 -- when Joyce wrote the last words of Ulysses -- this chronolog has six months for the male/solar divinities (Hepheistos,Zeus, Saturn, Hermes, Mars, Phoebus) and six for the female/lunar divinities (Kupris, Juno,Athena, Hestia, Artemis, Demeter.) In this system, these words will appear on 8 Hestia 78 p.s.U.

Sometimes, I use the Discordian calendar, which dates everything from the Original Snub (see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/body.html) and makes today 1 Bureaucracy 3165 y.D.

As you can plainly see, we have 923 years to go until the next millenium (1001 p.s.U.) on the Poundian calendar, and 836 years to go to the next millenium (4001 y.D.) in the Discordian system.

A few other random calendars yield results like this:

- Thelemic: present year 96. 905 years until 1001 millenium,

- Hebraic: present year 5759. 242 years to 6001 millenium

- Mayan: present year 5113. 888 years to 6001 millenium.

- Pataphysical: present year 126. 875 years to 1001 millenium.

- Islamic: present year 1420. 581 Islamic years (or 563 solar years) to 2001 millenium.

Why all the fuss, then, about the totally arbitrary Gregorian millenium? Well, maybe some intellectual Catholics (Jesuits, probably) have convinced themselves that Pope Gregory XIII created the "one true" calendar by tuning in -- infallibly -- to some Cosmic Clock. Einstein, however, has proven mathematically, and his successors have proven experimentally, that no such "one true" clock exists anywhere; and most of us don't believe in Papal infallibility, anyway. Dating the year after next 2001 (Gregorian) has as much and as little validity as dating it 5761 (Hebrew) or dating it 128 (Pataphysical.) I think most people honest-to-Gawd believe the Papist date "is" the "real" date because they never stop to think about it.

I suspect, also, that most people do and say most of the things they do and say for exactly the same reason: they never stop to think about it. I know this sounds brutally cynical, but at least it explains the religious and political behaviors of our species, which otherwise seem totally beyond rational comprehension.

By the way, I used an excellent new calendar to date this data-about-dating: the Tranquility calendar which begins on the day of the first moon landing (20 Athena 48 p.s.U; 20 Fructidor 177 a.R..). You can thank Pat Farley for calling this calendar to my attention. You can also thank him for the weird and lovely style of this website. He designs it.

30 Apollo 78 p.s.U.

"There are only two kinds of artists: the plagiarists and the revolutionaries."
-- Paul Gauguin

I love this quote because it sums up my own philosophy of art so neatly.

To say it in my own jargon, Gauguin's "plagiarists" consist of those who do relatively good or relatively bad work within "the style of the period"-- the dominant paradigm or current reality-tunnel-- and the "revolutionaries" create an entirely new style, i.e a new reality-tunnel (or, in the case of Picasso, a new reality-labyrinth.)

These "plagiarists" (remember: this pejorative term comes from Gauguin, not from me) may provide light entertainment but they have low information in the sense of Shannon's "Mathematical Theory of Communication." (where information = the negative of the probability that you can predict the "signal" in advance. If you can always predict it, it ain't information.)

In general, dogma always produces low information; see, the Fundamentalists (Xtian, Judaic, Moslem etc.), Marxists, Objectivists, Aryan Nation, CSICOP etc.) You always know what such True Believers will say even before they say it, and they all say it in the same words as their Fuhrer. In art, the "style of the period" = an equivalent of (perceptual/conceptual.) dogma, a rigid and familiar reality-tunnel This kind of art reaches a large public immediately, because the mass consists mostly of (in Houseman's phrase) "fellows whom it hurts to think." People in general love the familiar and predictable and have "crawly" sensations at the unfamiliar and unpredictable.

The "revolutionaries" contain high information and a whole new "style" of reality-tunnel (high unpredictability) and annoy or infuriate the general public. Later, with time, they get consigned to "starters of crazes" or elevated to Masters (those who really did enrich our experience of Universe.)

In my opinion, the primary "revolutionary" Masters of our past century include Picasso, Klee, Pound, Joyce, Faukner Ginsberg, Frank Lloyd Wright, D.W. Griffith, Chaplin, Welles, Clint Eastwood,, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Epstein, Brancusi, Carlin : the man or woman who doesn't know their work deeply and richly still lives in the 19th Century as the rest of us prepare to enter the 21st. The artists on that list haven't become familiar enough to stop surprising us. We still need to interpret our interpreters, as Ellman said of Joyce.

The "plagiarists" appear on popular magazine covers and the NY Times best-seller lists. God bless them, they live happily and sincerely in the same world as the mass audience.

9 Hephaistos, 97 p.s.U.

For the second time in two years I found more to celebrate than to mourn in the election results. If this sort of thing continues I may finally rid myself of the half-ashamed contempt for my fellow citizens that has dogged me for nearly 30 years. Although alienation allegedly gives fire to an artist's vision, I have always found it more of a drag than an incitement.

Item: everybody sees a different meaning in the GOP's setbacks,but I feel that the voters recoiled holding their noses when they sniffed the strong stink of polecat pee arising from Kenn Starr's witch-hunt. After all, in previous nightmare journeys on "moralic acid," the puritans merely announced that somebody had acted naughty, without prurient details. Grover Cleveland, they told us, had an affair (and a child) with a woman whom he had not wed; they didn't spy and snoop enough to find our what styles of dalliance Grover and his lady enjoyed, and they did not publish such intimacies.. Even the excremental McCarthy merely denounced people for a Gay lifestyle: he did not try to find out, or tell us at length , what forms of Gay sex the victims had enjoyed. Starr's sexual fascism sunk to a much lower level of the sewer than these previous swineries. I think most people knew that his Report would have included "Graphic Photos --The Kind Adults Like" if he could have found any. I have no quarrel with porno, if the actors get paid decently and volunteer for the work, but when any prosecutor can make any political foe into the unwilling star of a porno novel, we have entered a nightmare worse than any in Kafka: a sexual fascism only William S. Burroughs ever foresaw.

Item: In California, Dan Lungren, the worst political monster since the guy who founded the Ku Klux Klan, went down to defeat, beaten by Gray Davis, a dull, seemingly decent man with no more charm or charisma than a small-town undertaker asking for a down payment on the casket.

Item: 10 states have now voted for medicinal marijuana (2 in the last election, 8 this time.) Medical decisions, the voters seem to want to say, should remain in the domain of the patients and their physicians, not in the totalitarian grip of Washington bureaucrats. I feel as if the Constitution has risen from the dead, after all the wounds inflicted on it by New Deal liberals and Republican puritans.

My God, maybe the American people have some common sense and common decency left after all.

September 17, 1998 e.v.

"Puritanism: the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, might be having a good time."

--H.L. Mencken

I have never supported Bill Clinton uncritically and, in fact, have damned him up hill and down dale at times, but I must say I immeasurably prefer him to Kenneth Starr. If Clinton's horniness represent "immorality" and Starr's self-righteously slavering porno novel represents "morality," I can only conclude that "immorality" poses no threat to the Republic, but Right Wing "morality" represents a menace worse than a new outbreak of bubonic plague.

If a tin-horn Torquemada like Starr can pry into the most intimate details of the private life of the President -- allegedly the most powerful man in the world -- imagine what he could do to you or me... especially with four years to snoop around and a budget of forty million greenbacks. I can only see one "moral lesson" in this schweinerei: don't piss off the G.O.P.. They have a talent for mixing hypocrisy, malice and "morality" into that toxic mixture Nietzsche called moralic acid.

MAY DAY MAY DAY MAY DAY

Back in the 1980s, when I lived in Ireland, a murder occured in Phoenix Park and the police started looking for a suspect named James MacArthur. They found him living in the luxury pad of the Attorney General, which led to great scandal and outrage. The Attorney General was a bachelor in his 40s and MacArthur was a young man of about 20. Even in puritanical Ireland, they have heard of homosexuality and certain inferences were discussed widely in the pubs,although not in the media. The AG resigned and the Prime Minister, Charles Haughey, had a press conference, in which nobody mentioned the innundoes going around, but the tension still got so great that Mr. Haughey accidentally had a slip of the tongue. None of the media repeated what Haughey had said,but the defense attorneys asked for a dismissal anyway because (they claimed) some prospective jurors might hear what the Head of Government had said and be prejudiced by it.

The judge ruled that there was no evidence of enough gossip to taint the jury pool, and MacArthur stood trial and was convicted. A year or so later I met a few reporters and learned what none of the media had dared to tell us:namely, that Haughey had inadvertently referred to MacArthur as "the murderer" instead of "the accused."

You see, the Irish media never pronounces on the guilt or innocense of accused persons. They consider that contrary to the ideas of fair trial and fair juries.

The same events could have happened in England, and perhaps in other civilized countries, although not in the U.S., where the media would have all proclaimed MacArthur's guilt from the day the coppers started hunting him as a suspect, and would have used banner headlines to announce that the head of government agreed with them that the guy really committed the murder.

I much prefer the rules governing criminal cases in civilized countries to the rules in the United States.

No, this is not another comment on O.J. -- at least not in particular. I just don't like the lynch-mob stink that our media always emits when somebody is accused of a major felony.

55 Verwirrung 5998 A.L.
(only 819 years to the Millenium!)

I am much more interested in what Bill Clinton does as president -- his economic and political decisions -- than in what he does for relaxation in his hours off the job. According to recent polls, over 70 percent of our citizens share my slant on this matter. They don't give a damn about Bill's sex life.

But-- but-- but -- what about that other 30 per cent? What can possibly be wrong with their brains to make them more obsessed with a man's private life than with his whole administration's public policies? The longer I think of that, the more I wonder about these people. They may need psychiatric care -- certainly, some of them do -- but most of them probably just need a good blow job.

In this connection, see Schrodinger's Cat under RAW Bookstore, written 1979, in which I argue that a happy and relaxed president is less likely to bomb people than a tense and uptight president.

13 Internation Relations 3181 y.C.
(only 819 years to the Millenium!)

The revival of group hatreds in this country has dismayed and even frightened me ever since it began in the late 1960s.

When I was in high school and college, in the late 1940's - early 1950's we all remembered Hitler very well. Teachers taught us that Hitler was terrible, not because he hated the wrong group, but because hating any group is illogical, unscientific and leads ultimately to violence. Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different. Sometime while I was busy and didn't notice, Political Correctness took over Academia and they stopped teaching that. They started teaching that Hitler was terrible because he hated the wrong group, but it's okay to hate other groups.

Logic has nothing to do with it; logic itself is now suspect (just as it was in Nazi Germany.)

This rebellion against rationality originally intended to make Radical Feminism and its doctrine of male fungibility respectable, and it succeeded, at least in the major media, but it also made fungible group hatred respectable in general. Now the anti-Semites and all the other hate mongers are crawling out from under their rocks, and Academia does not have the ammunition to argue against them. Academia cannot argue the rational principle that hatred of any group does not make sense; they dumped that when they dumped logic (as a "male" perversion.)

The argument between Left and Right now consists only of debating which are the correct groups to hate.

14 Hestia, 76 p.s.U.

I have lost several friends and colleagues in the last couple of years (Leary and Burroughs are only the most famous ones) and it has finally really dawned on me that I am not just "getting older;" I am getting old, period. Now another friend has cancer, and another is recovering from a massive stroke.

I'm glad I have a lot of young friends, because the old ones are all leaving me.

Burroughs wrote a lot about preparing for the big casino by getting out of your body while still alive, via Tibetan and Egyptian methods. Leary also tried those methods (aided by a Lilly isolation tank) and may or may not have had his head preserved cryonically, depending on whose story you believe. I don't regard either of these ideas as preposterous or silly: Since I know nothing for sure, nothing seems really unthinkable.

Death makes me realize how deeply I have internalized the agnosticism I preach in all my books. I consider dogmatic belief and dogmatic denial very childish forms of conceit in a world of infinitely whirling complexity. None of us can see enough from one corner of space-time to know "all" about the rest of space-time.

Every day is full of wonderments to me: Death will probably come to me as the greatest wonderment of all.

19 Juno 74 p.s.U. Moe Day (Moses Horwitz Centennial)

On the hotly-debated question of jury nullification, I will not offer my own arguments this time (I have done that often) but will quote some authorities far more learned in Anglo-American law than I am. To wit:

Every jury in the land is tampered with and falsely instructed by the judge when it is told that it must accept as the law that which has been given to them, or that they can decide only the facts of the case.
-- Lord Denham, O'Connell v Rex (1884)

The jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both the law and the facts.
-- Justice Holmes, Homing v District of Columbia, 138 (1920)

If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states then that juror has accepted the exercize of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and a right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Bancroft, History of the Constitution

If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence.
-- 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, US v Moylan, 1969

When a jury acquits a defendent even though he or she clearly appears to be guilty, the acquittal conveys significant information about community attitudes and provides a guideline for future prosecutorial discretion...Because of the high acquittal rate in prohibition cases in the 1920s and early 1930s, prohibition laws could not be enforced. The repeal of these laws is traceable to the refusal of juries to convict those accused of alcohol traffic.
-- Sheflin and Van Dyke, Law and Contemorary Problems, 43, No. 4, 1980

Kupris, 75 p.s.U.

Whatever the rest of the world needs, I think the U.S. needs more population, not less. I know this sounds kookie, but listen to me a minute -- please --

According to Peter McWilliams (http://www.mcwilliams.com) the cost of enforcing our laws against victimless or consensual crimes (prostitution, gambling, using forbidden drugs etc.) comes to 450 billion dollars a year. You can easily see that totals over a trillion dollars in less than three years, and it explains why our national debt continues to soar to astronomical heights. As the debt soars, so does our tax bill, to pay usury to the bankers to whom we "owe" this money.

In 9 years, the national debt will increase at least three trillion dollars more, from this factor alone, even if we stopped a lot of other government waste. In 20 years, including inflation, this can rise to another 10 trillion (that is, 10,000,000,000,000)(!!!!!)

I see no hope that this enormous boondoggle will end in the near future. Hell, Bill Clinton is using the whole federal police-state apparatus to keep California doctors from prescribing one forbidden medication to dying people even when the doctors think these suffering people really need it. And Clinton does rank as almost "liberal" comparatively speaking, by contemporary standards, ironic as that sounds.

How the hell are our children and grand-children going to pay enough taxes to continue this War To Enforce Fundamentalist Morality On Everybody? They can't. They never can and never will. The only hope of paying this bill is to have more children, lots more, and lots of lots of grandchildren. So, ladies, get pregnant as often as possible, and, men, impregnate as many women as possible. We need more tax-payers, damn it, or the attempt to enforce Christian Tyranny on all of us, non-Christians included, will bankrupt every person in the country by 2017.

7 Apollo, 75 p.s.U.

The pundits and mahatmas of Talk Radio seem to want us to believe that the Heaven's Gate cult and its human sacrifices somehow resulted from Internet or wouldn't have happened without the Net. This nonsense ignores the facts that (a) the cult recruited most of its members face-to-face, relying on the "charisma" of the Guru, and (b) similar cults, equally crazy and often homicidal rather than "merely" suicidal, have always existed, especially within Christendom, which itself started as a typical Doomsday cult.

I think Talk Radio hosts hate the Net because they know it will replace them very soon. The Net offers real freedom of speech: you can post any opinion you want and defend it as long as you want. Talk Radio offers only a counterfeit of free speech: the hosts all have a Magic Button (honest!) which turns the sound down, or turns it totally off, with any caller whose ideas the host dislikes. Between the real freedom of the Net and the fake "freedom" of Talk Radio, the contest will not last long. Why try to express an opinion in a dull old medium rigorously censored by fanatics and prima donnas, when real freedom exists on the livelier medium of the Net?

10 Clinamen, 123 E.P. In Houston in 1977 two people walked out on one of my lectures. Later I was told that they called themselves Bo and Peep and led a rather weird UFO cult.

A few years later, in Berkeley, I met a refuge from that cult who told me that Bo and Peep had changed their names to Him and Her. Now Bo/Him, also known later as Do, has become world famous as the leader of Heaven's Gate, who persuaded 39 of his followers to commit suicide.

In all the blather about this case on Talk Radio, everybody seems to think they know the difference between a religion and a cult. I see absolutely no difference. Roman Catholics claim, and evidently sincerely believe, that they engage in cannibalism in their "Holy Communion"; Mormons believe Native Americans are Hebrews; and I can't think of a single "cult" that believes anything crazier than most of the other major religions. I regard a "cult" as a religion small enough to be easily victimized by the authorities and a religion as a cult big enough to force the authorities to treat it with respect. And that is the only difference I can see.

66 Verwirrung 5997 A.L.

The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now.

Pedale 6, 124 E.P.
According to Bill Clinton's position on medical marijuana, only the Federal Government has the right to decide how much pain we must endure in illness or dying. We do not have that right, nor do our families or doctors, nor our families and our doctors and ourselves in consultation. The State decides and we must slavishly submit, accepting as much pain as The State ordains.

Can anybody think of more diamond-clear example of the basic Fascist philosphy, or a more total logical contradiction of the U.S. Constitution?

48 Chaos, 3181 y.C.

The courts apply all criminal laws in this nation in a mild, rational and humane manner, if the defendent is rich.

2 Hermes, 95 p.s.U

The philosopher Carlin's three major types of public nuisances -- the stupid, the crazy and those just plain full of shit -- have changed proportions in my mind as I grow older. I used to attribute almost everything awful to stupidity and looniness, but now I more and more suspect the major problem is that so many people are full of shit. In fact, every time I see a man on TV wearing a suit and tie, I suspect he is full of shit, and if he has a flag hanging beside him I am almost sure of it. If I turn the sound on -- I usually do my dial surfing with the mute on -- it almost always appears that my guess was right. Those men usually are full of shit, especially the ones with the US flag behind them. They all seem to come from the State Department, too.

22 Chaos, 3181 y.C.

My teacher and mahaguru, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs once observed, "You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that." "Bob" may have had the average and the median confused, but he made a point anyway. As the philosopher Carlin observed in this connection, if you carry around a pad and make a note every time you see or hear something outstandingly stupid, you will have about 40 notes at the end of an ordinary day.

This problem has other dimensions, as Carlin went on. Some people only seem stupid but are actually fucking crazy or simply full or shit. It is often hard to tell the stupid, the fucking crazy and the full of shit apart, especially since they collectively make up the majority in any nation. I think this explains why the Supreme Court is currently meditating on whether Bill Clinton should stand trial at once or after four years on the charge that he once asked for a blow job earlier in a relationship than is considered politically correct.

Meanwhile pollution, poverty, crime and corruption in corporations (and Congress) grow worse and worse, but we must have the blow job question settled before we attend to minor matters. Some of the people who give first place to the Jones/Clinton question -- how soon is it P.C. to ask for a blow job? -- are just stupid, some are crazy and some are just full of shit (especially the talk-show hosts) ; but it's hard to tell which group a given speaker belongs to.

6 Verwirrung 5997 A.L.

Tim Leary once told me that Hustler was more important than Playboy or Penthouse because it presented the erotica of the working class male, and that's why (he said) Larry Flynt was hated, persecuted, even shot. I think there's a lot of truth in that.

The Playboy models look like they very much want to make love with you. The Penthouse models look like that they'd rather make love to themselves. The gals in Hustler look like they're submitting to a gyncecological examination... Erotica for the very repressed guys who've never had a good look at female anatomy because their wives insist on making love with the lights out.

November 6 (Schultzmas) 5996 A.L.

The election results pleased me mightily, and raised my opinion of public intelligence greatly.

I especially enjoyed the victory of medical marijuana in California and Arizona. Now all the rightwingers, who have demanded devolution of power back to the States and the people, will turn around and demand return of power to the Feds, so that States and the people can't continue to meddle in their own affairs.

October 23 (Schultzmas) 5996 A.L.

Bobdole (as he calls himself) has asked Ross Perot to resign from the race and turn his voters over to him, Bobdole. Perot told Bobdole to take a flying fornication in a rolling doughnut, or words to that effect. What next? Will Bobdole try to persuade Ralph Nader to drop out and hand over his voters, all 8 of them? Will Bobdole try to get the Libertarians or Natural Law party to drop out? This gets funnier all the time.

In my opinion, the only way Bobdole has a chance consists in doing the one thing he most fears: repudiating the anti-choice plank in the Republican platform. Then he could run on the slogan, "Get the government off our backs, and off our fronts, too!" and he might almost have a chance...

October 4 , 5996 A.L.

Racism designates the ignorant, bigoted, politically incorrect dogma that O.J. must be guilty because he is black.

Feminism designates the enlightened, educated, politically correct dogma that O.J. must be guilty because he is male.

Please note carefully the important difference between these dogmas. Please ignore the overwhelming similarity between them, or you will become ah um unfashionable.

September 30, 1996 e.v.

I glanced into alt.feminazis today and found a lively debate about whether the feminist claim that "all men are potential rapists" leads to the conclusion "Jesus was a potential rapist." (It does. See Aristotle's Logic, part one. If all x are y, and j is an x, than j is y.)

I think this issue arouses so much fury because people are not aware that group-hate has never become unfashionable. Only the target groups ever change. Thus, the Ku Klux Klan's dogma "All black men are potential rapists" is ignorant, awful and politically incorrect, because it targets a group now on the "unfashionable to hate" list. The feminist "all men are potential rapists" is enlightened, educated and politically correct because it targets a group now on the "fashionable to hate" list.

You must always hate the right group to maintain your modernity. To become post-modern, find even more groups to hate.

Only idiots like Jesus (a potential rapist) and Buddha (another of that ilk) ever proposed living without hate of any groups.....Oh, and Korzybski, who described group hatreds as neurolinguistic halucinations sympomatic of what he called unsanity. But he was another potential rapist.

September 20, 1996 A.D.

I saw a black helicopter early this morning. Given my mind-set, I just assumed the local sheriff and his goons had gotten up at dawn to pursue the government's goofy War Against Some Drugs. Later, as I drank my coffee I remembered that many people around this area (I hear them on talk radio) believe the black helicopters belong to the UN and represent surveillance of roads and utilities etc., as preparation for conquest, enslavement and the New World Order. Some others, with even livelier minds, believe the black helicopters belong to the Satanic Cattle Mutilators (who also produce all the rock'n'roll....)

Ah, if TV allowed as much freedom as the Net...It would make a wonderful comedy-educational hour to have representatives of all three theories (pot-hunting, UN conspiracy, Satanism) debate the matter. I would find it even funnier if a represenatative of the government also appeared to explain the "official" version of why those machines keep zooming around over our heads.

September 13, 1996 A.D.

The vigilantes in the old west had some colorful punishments. One of their imaginative ways of thoroughly discouraging evil-doers without brutal violence consisted of tying a dead skunk around their necks, handcuffing their hands behind them, and sending them on the road. I begin to feel some compassion for Bob Dole. No matter how much he denies having any responsibility for -- or even knowledge of -- the Republican Platform, it remains around his neck like the dead skunk of old. His best, or most eloquent speeches, all sound like variations on "What skunk?" but that doesn't fool anybody. We can all smell what he's got on him.

September 5, 1996 A.D.

Cultural configurations have a spooky fascination. The atheistic religions of the East (Buddhism, Taoism) have the relativistic tolerance of their theistic rivals (Hinduism, Shinto.). The atheistic religions of the West (Marxism, Objectivism, CSICOP) have the fanatic intolerance of their theistic rivals (Christianity, Islam etc.) I guess our cultural configuration (emic reality) determines us in more ways that we realize.

August 29, 1996 A.D.

I suggest a simple experiment. Everytime you hear the expression "the war on drugs," change it mentally to "the war on some drugs." At the same time call up to mind all the Drug Stores and Bars/Saloons in your town or neighborhood and all the cigarette shelves in your friendly supermaket and remember that the government has started no war against them. When you understand that we have no "war on drugs" but only a "war on some drugs," consult the passages on double-think and duck-speak in Orwell's "1984" for further enlightenment on neurolinguistic mindwarping.

August 22, 1996 A.D.

The only way the Republicans ever get the votes of anybody earning less than half a million a year? They go after the high school drop-out population. Thus, before the election Rush Limbaugh will produce a photo of the Grassy Knoll on Nov 22 1963 showing Hilary Rodham Clinton with a rifle in her hand and smoke coming out of the barrel. Or, if he doesn't do it, Newt Gingrich will.

August 15, 1996 A.D.

The Gun Lobby says we need guns to protect ourselves from the present government. Heiligefliegendekindersheisse! -- Have they looked at the government lately? To protect ourselves against the current government we each need 1700 tactical nuclear weapons, at least 100 earth-to-air missiles, 50,000 flame throwers, 10,000 grenade launchers and at least a hundred times as many assault weapons as NRA now owns, plus biologcal and chemical (viral) weaponry. . Maybe instead of going to war with Washington, when they have us totally outgunned, we should try reasoning and negotiating with them?

August 8, 1996 A.D.

From a Darwinian perspective, Radical Feminism represents the withdrawal of certain females from the breeding population. This means that they will play no role in the future gene pool of humanity. Considering the types who have taken this path -- e.g. Steinem, Dworkin etc. -- this appears to be a quite desirable eugenic choice.
Now if only we could persuade the Radical Right to withdraw from the future gene pool, too, I would like the results even better.

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