Care2: Sign Petitions, Make a Difference
[link]
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey [link]
Reality Sandwich: [link]
Our Forgotten Future: [link]
Solar Waves make Earth Ring like a Bell:
[link]
Sleights of Mind: [link]
Dark matter mash-up poses new puzzle: [link]
The Daily Grail [link]
Bush's Blog [link]
Daniel Pinchbeck "Mission Possible": [link]
The Day I Died, Near-Death Experiences: [link]
BioGems: Saving Endangered Wild Places
A project of the Natural Resources Defense Council: [link]

***********************************************************



Would you like an original acrylic/oil painting, drawing, or digital-painting to illustrate an idea you have?
I am open for COMMISSIONS.

SIGNED FINE ART PRINTS DIRECTLY FROM ADAM
For each purchased print, you will receive a surprise (!) print (usually 13x19) for FREE.
So, this is a better and more valuable deal than buying prints through DA.

$13.00_____8.5" x 11" Luster Print (ltd. ed. of 93)

$36.00_____13" x 19" Premium Luster Print (ltd. ed. of 52)

$42.00_____13" x 19" UltraSmooth Print (ltd. ed. of 26)

$49.00_____13" x 19" Velvet Print (ltd. ed. of 23)

$67.00_____18" x 24" Premium Satin Print (ltd. ed. of 20)

PayPal, cash, checks, and money orders are accepted.
Please email CorpusCallosum.CC@gmail.com for all sales inquiries, questions, and comments.




HARPER’S WEEKLY
April 8, 2008

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WEEKLY REVIEW
The United States marked the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. “He was normal as a person could be,” said his sister Christine King Farris. “I want people not to think of him as some mythic character from out of space.” Speaking from the Memphis hotel, now a museum, where King was shot, John McCain was booed after describing how he had voted against creating a federal holiday in King’s honor, and Hillary Clinton, speaking from the church where King delivered his last sermon, called for the creation of a poverty czar. The Clintons released thirty years of tax returns, showing they had earned more than $109 million since the year 2000; Bill Clinton said that Hillary was “in tears” when he called to say that $250,000 had been raised for her at a Pennsylvania event. The United Nations found that women make up 70 percent of the world’s poor, own only 1 percent of the world’s titled land, and are discriminated against in almost every country. Oregon was holding a health insurance lottery for the state’s 600,000 uninsured citizens, angry Americans boycotted Absolut vodka after the company ran an ad showing much of the western United States as part of Mexico, and DNA found in ancient feces indicated that people lived in the United States much earlier than previously thought. Utah-based Internet provider OnSat Network Communications was preparing to shut off service for the entire Navajo Nation, and foreclosures were forcing Americans out of their mansions. “eople had in their head, ‘I need a mud room, I need giant columns, I need a media room,’” said a Virginia real estate researcher, “’and I’m going to do anything to get it.’”
Russian President Vladimir Putin crashed a gala on the last day of the NATO summit in Bucharest. “Let’s be friends, guys,” he said. President George W. Bush snuck out early from a summit meeting on operations in Afghanistan, and it was reported that more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen had abandoned their posts during the Basra siege last week. Deaths of Iraqis were up 50 percent across the country compared to the previous month. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she believed peace in the Middle East will come about before President Bush leaves office in January. Doctors in Al-Anbar province named a deadly malarial infection after Blackwater, whose contract the U.S. State Department recently renewed and who are currently under investigation by the FBI for the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians. The Vatican’s newspaper reported that Islam had overtaken Roman Catholicism as the world’s largest “single religious denomination.” “While Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children,” said Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, “Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer.” A church exploded in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. “eople say miracles don’t happen now days,” said the town’s deputy fire chief, who was shielded from the blast by the bell tower. “I firmly believe they do, because one just did.” An Iowa man with a lengthy and violent criminal record was serving an eight-Sunday church sentence, and Charlton Heston, the actor and NRA spokesman who had called Martin Luther King, Jr, “a twentieth-century Moses for his people,” died at 84.
Hadijatou Mani, a former slave from Niger, was suing her government for not implementing protective laws after it ended slavery four years ago. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe demanded a recount and refused to release the results of his country’s recent presidential election, which he probably lost, and a Burmese man was fined $1 and sentenced to life in prison for staging a silent protest outside the U.S. embassy in Rangoon. New codes were drawn up to provide the United Kingdom’s 900 working beach donkeys with such protections as vacation time, decent housing, and rider weight restrictions. Billionaire Ted Turner told Charlie Rose what will happen if global warming proceeds unchecked: “Most of the people will have died,” he said, “and the rest of us will be cannibals.” Global temperatures were expected to decrease in 2008. A Vidalia, Georgia, man who had married the widow of the man whose suicide provided him with a heart transplant twelve years ago committed suicide; it was reported that the organs donated by a New York teenager had spread cancer to all four of their recipients, killing two of them; and scientists hoped that a cure for the contagious cancer wiping out Tasmanian devils was to be found in a tumor-resistant devil named Cedric. A New Zealand man threw a hedgehog at a 15-year-old boy; “He was arrested shortly afterwards for assault with a weapon,” said Sergeant Bruce Jenkins of the Whakatane police. “Namely the hedgehog.”




__________________________
It's all in your head... you just have no idea how big your head is!

What is within surrounds us. - Rainer Maria Rilke

If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.

Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. Seek, but realize that not all answers may be revealed. For you wouldn't be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything, live the questions now, and perhaps without knowing it, you will live along some day into the answers.

It is not their intention to destroy... Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

The authority parasites try to impose a program of mind control, or soul enslavement [in order to] keep mankind distracted by material problems and concerns, imprisoned by its own fear of death, of mortality, and ignorant of its true, divine nature.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.
Rabindranath Tagore

I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd. – R.A.W.

We are like caterpillars, contemplating pupation. No longer will I chew on the cabbage leaves, no longer will I spend my time moving around on the underside of the foliage. Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension...
Terence McKenna

"Then, as if a switch were being thrown, a great voltage will race through this finally synchronized and integrated circuit called humanity. The Earth itself will be illumined. A current charging both poles will race across the skies, connecting the polar auroras in a single brilliant flash. Like an iridescent rainbow, this circumpolar energy uniting the planetary antipodes will be instantaneously understood as the external projection of the unification of the collective mind of humanity. In that moment of understanding, we shall be collectively projected into an evolutionary domain that is presently inconceivable." ~ Jose Arguelles

We are the one's we've been waiting for, goddamnit.
_______________________
OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS

Recently finished my first (of 5) 23-day residency for an MFA in Painting here in Cape Cod, MA.

September 30th I experienced a magnificent concert performance by Tool w/ opening band Isis in Washington, D.C. I was fortunate enough to be on Tool's guest list. Very cathartic and inspiring! Too bad they were using their back-up visual screens, I suppose the main ones were broken? Cheers!

Tool "10,000 Days" lyrics: [link]

Global Ecosystems 'Face Collapse': [link]
Keith Obermann "The Beginning of the End": [link]
Alex Jones' TERRORSTORM video: [link]
All we need is UBUNTU [link]
The Ancient Turkish-Hindu "Spiritual" Solution to War and Collective Discord: [link]
Video of the heroic Keith Obermann: [link]


HARPER’S WEEKLY
October 24, 2006

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WEEKLY REVIEW
President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which suspends the right of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects and grants immunity to CIA interrogators and government officials, such as President Bush, for violations of the War Crimes Act. Domestic security officials notified seven football stadiums of a discredited threat of radiological bomb attacks out of an “abundance of caution,” and the United States Coast Guard announced plans to mount 7.62 mm, M-240B machine guns on official boats in the Great Lakes. Rear Adm. John E. Crowley Jr. said, “I don’t know when or if something might happen on the Great Lakes, but I don’t want to learn the hard way.” Furry crabs were found in Chesapeake Bay. The mid-month tally for U.S. troops killed in Iraq was 79, making October the deadliest month this year for American soldiers. The first Eskimo was killed in the Iraq war; it took 20 men a full day to dig his grave through the permafrost in a town 350 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The Maine National Guard has been offering “Flat Daddies” and “Flat Mommies,” life-size cardboard cutouts of deployed service members, to spouses, children, and relatives waiting for them to return. A Gypsy pressure group filed suit to stop British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest film from being shown in Germany. The group accuses him of antiziganism, or hostility to gypsies;
Cohen’s fictional alter-ego Borat claimed that Gypsies had molested his horse. During a debate with his Democratic rival, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana said that President Bush (who this week compared Iraq to Vietnam) has a secret plan for winning the war, but that Bush is not going to share his plan with the world. White House press secretary Tony Snow compared the President to “one of those guys at the gym who plays about 40 chessboards at once.”
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan collapsed from fasting during Ramadan. His security staff rushed him unconscious to the hospital and accidentally locked him in his car; they fought for ten minutes to break the car’s reinforced windows with a sledgehammer and chisel. A Denver woman was ruled criminally insane for stabbing her 21-month-old granddaughter 62 times with a butcher knife after she received “spiritual messages from the geese flying overhead.” A convicted killer on Texas death row committed suicide 15 hours before he was supposed to die by lethal injection by slitting his jugular vein with a makeshift blade; prison authorities found the message “I didn’t do it” smeared in blood on the walls of his cell. An Ohio cult leader who shot and killed a family of five as they stood in a pit dug inside his barn contested his upcoming lethal injection on the grounds that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment to execute a fat man. Coca-Cola announced plans to market a new calorie-burning green tea beverage called Enviga, and the mayor of Paris auctioned off City Hall’s most expensive wines in favor of serving “little democratic wines.” In Panama, 22 people died from ingesting poisoned cough syrup that contained the industrial chemical diethylene glycol, rather than the safe solvent glycerin glycol. More than 4,500 tons of polluted material, residue from the toxic sludge dumped in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in August, have been collected since a clean-up effort began in September. Scientists identified more than 200 oceanic dead zones. The king of Spain denied that he had shot and killed a drunken bear.
Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn elbowed a hole through Picasso’s “Le Reve,” a painting he had just sold for a record $139 million. Two subway trains collided at a station in Rome, killing one person and injuring more than 100. In Sri Lanka, Tamil rebels drove a truck full of explosives into a convoy of military buses, killing 92 sailors. Nearly four months after the arraignment of PFC Steven D. Green, eight other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division faced courts-martial in Kentucky for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family in March. In New York a developmentally disabled handyman was hospitalized after two teenagers sodomized him at a bowling alley with a plumbing snake, and a Catholic priest acknowledged having had an intimate, two-year relationship with Mark Foley when the now-disgraced Republican congressman was a twelve-year-old altar boy. An exhibit at the Oslo Natural History Museum displayed homosexual behavior among giraffes, penguins, parrots, beetles, and whales. Radical Christian critics said organizers of the exhibition should “burn in hell.” China insisted that the U.N. request, rather than require, countries to inspect North Korean cargo. An American expert called the sanctions “kabuki theater,” and North Korea called them a “declaration of war.” In South Korea, where scientists announced the development of a new genetically altered strain of adenovirus capable of destroying cancer cells, the government warned that North Korea might be preparing to conduct a second nuclear test. The Boy Scouts introduced a new merit badge for learning how copyright law applies to pirated movies and music. In New York City, CBGB closed, but the Russian Tea Room will reopen. Scotland Yard and the British Home Office misplaced two “extremely dangerous” terrorism suspects. One escaped from a secure psychiatric unit, and neither can be named for legal reasons. The U.S. Postal Service announced that it would phase out 23,000 stamp vending machines by 2010. A Massachusetts elementary school banned tag.





__________________________
It’s all in your head... you just have no idea how big your head is!

It is not their intention to destroy... Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

The authority parasites try to impose a program of mind control, or soul enslavement [in order to] keep mankind distracted by material problems and concerns, imprisoned by its own fear of death, of mortality, and ignorant of its true, divine nature.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein

We are like caterpillars, contemplating pupation. No longer will I chew on the cabbage leaves, no longer will I spend my time moving around on the underside of the foliage. Life must be a preparation for the transition to another dimension...
Terence McKenna
_______________________
OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS

What's the brain for? [link]

Recent filming of Alex Grey at CoSM [link]

Short HR Giger documentary from about a decade ago. [link]

Great [NeoConservative Admin.] "Asshole" music video [link]

_________________________

MY NEW WEBSITE IS UP- CorpusCallosum.cc

Sub Rosa 4 can be downloaded at The Daily Grail [link] , the magazine should be published in print this summer. The topics include UFO and technology extraordinaire Jacques Vallee, Mary Magdalene, Skinwalker Ranch, Leary and Crowley, and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. I think all of you would find great interest in it. If you can, it would be wonderful to make a donation.

For the next 2 Mays and 3 Septembers I'll be going to Provincetown, MA, US to attend the Fine Art Work Center, a part of the Massachusetts College of Art to earn a MFA in Painting.
I also just recently found out that my "How to Make Amends?" ( [link] )has been accepted into the Society of Illustrators student competition. This is a pretty big deal for me because the SI is the most highly respected illustration competition there is and thus is great for an in illustrative resume. My artwork will be on display in the Society of Illustrators gallery in NYC through May.

As a prelude to this week's summary of this week's news, here's one of my favorite old poems NEPTUNE ENTELECHY, with its accompanying piece [link] .


Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds rising,
10 billion reflective satellite cells firing,
collective perspective hive breathing.
The occulted fire distilled in the sea of body,
tidal tug across the planes beneath solar wind induction.
Sunspots cultivate the brain’s constellation cryptogram Mandelbrot map,
betwixt molecular crystal lattice embryogenesis.
Narcotic gemstones dance on the rotating celestial chalice rim of our-glass.
Sands drip as gravity congeals the impedance that’s lead to understanding.
Double-bubbles fuse at the junction for communication conduction,
vibratory cerebro-chemical ejaculation.
Ethereal sparks toward the pulsating galactic core of perfect-ion.
The free and infinite ocean of bubbling fermented being coagulates,
and stares back from star-gate in the dew of the deep.
Alchemical harvest on zero-pointed waving backdrop of time-emittance.
Thunder gives the warning for quickening coming cyclone of orange.
It’s now mushrooming midnight and the clockwork’s trident is about to ring 13.
Ensuing meltdown into the marbleized wax matrix interface.
Quintessential alarm sounds from behind the sun dispelling the shadow-play.
Non-linear bloodline awakens to the gateway,
wherein the jewel within the lotus reveals who is Sirius,
and the flickering fetus goes nova.
Global vertebrae axis pole-shifts into ecliptic unity.
Critical mass compassion transmutates in illumination amidst resurrection.
Chronologic quantum joke to the cosmic yoke.
It’s a matter of time De-eMpTied.
POP! Creation ate itself.


HARPER’S WEEKLY
May 30, 2006

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WEEKLY REVIEW
In Iraq over 66 people were killed in attacks, including two CBS News employees when their convoy was struck by a car bomb; a CBS correspondent was seriously injured in the same attack. In Baghdad two tennis players and their coach were killed for wearing shorts, and a Marine helicopter was shot down over the Anbar province. Soldiers were developing emotional relationships with their bomb-defusing robots. “Please fix Scooby Doo,” said one soldier, “because he saved my life.” Senator John Warner called for hearings into the killings of more than 20 civilians in Haditha by U.S. Marines in 2005, and it was reported that, since 2003, 8,600 British troops had gone AWOL in Iraq; 929 were still missing. Riots broke out in Afghanistan after a U.S. military truck went out of control and killed some civilians. Osama bin Laden released an audiotape in which he claimed that convicted terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was not involved in the September 11 attacks. “Brother Moussaoui was arrested two weeks before the events,” said bin Laden, “and if he had known something—even very little—about the September 11 group, we would have informed the leader of the operation, Mohamed Atta, and the others . . . to leave America before being discovered.” British MP George Galloway said that an assassin would be “morally justified” in killing Prime Minister Tony Blair. Seventy-five prisoners were on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay prison, and a charity organization published a report claiming that 60 minors ages 14 and older have been held at the prison. President George W. Bush signed into law the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act, which limits protests at military funerals. In Ontario, Canada, a man was arrested ten minutes after stealing a hand-held vagina. “He had used it,” said a constable.
An earthquake in Indonesia killed more than 5,000 people, flooding in Thailand killed more than 100 people, and four Russian soldiers were killed in Chechnya. The government of Burma extended the house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi for an unspecified amount of time. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority to accept the goal of establishing a Palestinian state (and thus acknowledge Israel’s right to exist); if Hamas does not comply, he said that he will call a national referendum on the issue. A gay-rights rally in Moscow turned violent when activists were attacked and beaten by anti-gay protesters. “Moscow,” shouted the protesters, “is not Sodom!” In Germany, at the official opening of the Hauptbahnhof, the largest railway station in Europe, a man went on a rampage and stabbed 35 people. Because one of the first people he stabbed was HIV positive, concerns were raised that some of the subsequently stabbed may also become infected. A team of researchers in southern Cameroon said that they had found wild chimpanzees carrying the SIVcpz virus, thought to be the precursor to HIV. In Washington, D.C., police searched the 50 acres of office space in the Rayburn House Office Building to find that the “gunfire” that precipitated a several hour lockdown was actually a pneumatic hammer.
Former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were found guilty of conspiracy and fraud, and in San Diego a man named Lawrence Christopher Smith was sentenced to 84 years to life in prison for shooting and killing a man named Dom Perignon Champagne. A Nebraska judge sentenced a man convicted of sexually assaulting a child to probation because the man is too short for prison. The Supreme Court voted unanimously that police may enter a house without a warrant in order to break up a fight. President Bush ordered that the documents seized by the FBI in a raid on the offices of Representative William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, must be sealed for 45 days, so that Congress and the Justice Department can determine exactly how material seized from Congressional offices should be reviewed. The Justice Department denied reports that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (who publicly criticized the FBI for raiding Jefferson’s offices) was under investigation for his relationship with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Hastert said that the FBI was planting stories in the media to discredit him. Jack Kevorkian was very ill and reportedly had less than a year to live. In Australia, a psychiatrist named Stephen Allnutt testified that financier Brendan Francis McMahon had believed he was helping animals when he mutilated 17 rabbits and a guinea pig while under the influence of methamphetamine. “I wonder,” McMahon reportedly said, “if I made a mistake because I never asked the rabbits?” Scientists in North Carolina said that they could grow new, functional rabbit penises, and a jury in Illinois awarded a woman $5 million in compensation for her ruined vagina. In Norway a grevling, or badger, wrecked a man’s bedroom. An analysis of FCC decisions found that the following terms or phrases are neither indecent nor profane: “a lot of crap,” “ass is huge,” “ass,” “bitch,” “damn,” “dick,” “dickhead,” “fire his ass,” “for Christ’s sake,” “hell,” “kick-ass,” “kiss my ass,” “my ass,” “pissed off,” “poop,” “sex with a dog,” “singers that suck,” “sit their asses down,” “sucked,” “up yours,” “wiping his ass,” and “you suck.” NASA scientists claimed that they could extract oxygen from lunar soil, Pat Robertson claimed to have leg-pressed 2,000 pounds, and Senator Bill Frist helped give a gorilla a root canal. A study found that most British men are cry babies. A Sherpa stood naked on the summit of Mount Everest.





________________________________

It’s all in your head... you just have no idea how big your head is!

It is not their intention to destroy... Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

Exec #2: Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this "soul" does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

Exec #3: What was that about hats again?

Exec #2: Oh, Uh... people aren't wearing enough - Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life".

When a human imagines, he actually creates a form on the Astral or even on some higher plane; and this form is as real and objective to intelligent beings on that plane, as our earthly surroundings are to us.

"Time, space and knowledge are the most basic facets of human experience. They are the Being of our being as it manifests in this world. Space allows the world of objects to appear, time makes possible the sequence of events that gives order to our lives; knowledge gives meaning and significance to whatever appears or unfolds. Time and space are the ordinary stuff of existence, which ordinary knowledge aims to know."
(KNOWLEDGE OF TIME AND SPACE - Tarthang Tulku)

_The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein
_______________________
OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS

_______________________

"SU.MER.I.AN."EV.OL.UT.I.ON."

The origin of civilization has ceaselessly been a heatedly debated topic. This question precedes all the answers we have given ourselves, including the predominant mystery of why we are and how we got here. I will attempt an excavation intended for further resolve by elucidating the connections between Sumer, semiotics, and the brain, in the context of historical-human development from pictographic writing to cuneiform. This shift of communication media may have been a pivotal facilitator of neural evolution and thus, lead to a great diversification of cultural and civilizing faculties.
While it is true that the terms “civilization” and “culture” count as synonyms in general usage, and that every distinction maybe be somewhat arbitrary, there are etymological reasons for preferences in their use. The word “culture,” with its overtones of something like organic coagulation, something grown through tradition rather than made- has its root meaning as “to cultivate”. Anthropologists usually use the term "culture" to refer to the universal human capacity to classify, codify and communicate their experiences symbolically. The word “civilization, on the other hand, appeals to the sense of people being primarily political-economical creatures of complex societal structures who abide by a code of laws.
Sumer was the oldest civilization and the first to develop written language. The most important archaeological discoveries in Sumer are a large number of tablets written in cuneiform (wedge-shaped writing). Sumerian pre-cuneiform script has been discovered on tablets dating to around 3500 BCE. The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4000 BCE. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BCE, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language in Mesopotamia until about 1 AD.
The Sumerian language is generally regarded as being isolated in linguistics because it belongs to no known language family. There have been many failed attempts to connect Sumerian to other language groups. It is an agglutinative language; in other words, morphemes (units of meaning) are added together to create words.
Sumerians invented picture-hieroglyphs (pictograms) that developed into later cuneiform, and theirs is the oldest known written human language. An extremely large body of hundreds of thousands of texts in the Sumerian language has survived, the great majority of these on baked clay tablets. Known Sumerian texts include personal and business letters and transactions, receipts, laws, hymns and prayers, magical incantations, and scientific texts including mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. While all new media (forms of communication) undergo a phase where the audience feels as if reality was both susceptible, invoked, and enacted by the medium, as if falling through the looking glass; and where this process is both feared as leading to insanity and admired for its magical abilities; the Sumerians possess a special place in our history as the bridging culture between vocally transmitted knowledge and literature. And although, despite their overwhelming cultural-influence on all Western civilization (including Judaism), the Sumerian language does not live on in any shape or form. Just to elucidate that latter statement for a moment, the Sumerians were the proto-culture for all the Tigris and Euphrates cultures, including the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hebrews. They were the first to codify laws in the Code of Hammurabi, although their codification of laws were more direct than our rationalist, philosophical view of laws. Rather, laws covered everything in society, and cities in Sumer compared themselves by the efficacy of their laws. Also, their myths live on in the myths of others as archetypes: such as the fertility goddesss, the snake, the flood, and the mythic dissolution of the one inherent language into the babble of diversified language protocols. Enki (or Ea, as known to the Babylonians), one of two brothers fathered by the top-tier god Anu, was the god of light, freshwater (often depicted with water flowing from his palms), wisdom, civilization, and language- as the recognized benefactor of humanity.
In his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, Julian Jaynes argues that early man was not conscious in the modern sense, lacking self-awareness and could not think of oneself as an independent, self-willed "I”. Instead, the right brain formulated ideas and plans, which were perceived by the left brain as literal voices emanating from outside oneself. In effect, Jaynes says, early man hallucinated constantly, living his life by obeying voices. This is where the gods came from. Each person's god accompanied him constantly through life, always telling him what to do.
What is there to recommend such a bizarre theory? For one thing, Jaynes points out, it explains the preponderance of living, speaking gods in Sumerian and Assyrian texts, and in the Bible and the internal mythological journey. Early man wrote about gods because they were a factual, daily part of his life. Jaynes also draws from studies of modern schizophrenics, whom he argues are simply regressions to ancient forms of consciousness, and various neurological studies of left and right-brainedness. It has been discovered that both schizophrenics and split-brain patients perceive their thoughts as not originating from themselves and lack a self-referential ability to communicate. Notably, both have distorted or altogether destroyed corpus callosums.
Where did the deities go? Jaynes argues that a series of catastrophes and contacts with other cultures forced human beings to integrate the left and right brains and become self-aware, self-willed beings in order to cope with the increasing complexity of the world. Also, a translation of a cuneiform tablet “The Nam-Shub of Enki” (“Spell of Enki”) from the epic tale "Enmerkar and the Land of Aratta" seems to be perhaps a facilitator of this socio-lingual transformation into self-referential consciousness.
Jaynes hypothesizes socio-biological reasons for this shift. Jaynes suggests that prior to human consciousness as we know of it today, the hemispheric partioning of the brain acted schizophrenically to induce behavior. The logical left-hemisphere created orders that the right-hemisphere intrepreted as divine commands to act out. Thus, the Sumerian conception of laws, known as the Me [?!], seemed more like a software that was executed by the neural hardware of the people, rather than obeyed. Certainly many people have theorized that there was no conception of Self at some point in our written history, including as late as the Old Testament, and if take it as the truth, then it was the emergence of Self that led to the destruction of language. After all, society was no longer a hive mind, controlled by the writers of the laws (ensi-priests), but a contentious lot of individuals for which (at the time) there was no protocol to order them (governance; note that governance is different from algorithms, though may abide by such).
What spurred on the creation of Self is heavily mythologized tradition. Certainly eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (which before was left to the right brain’s abode of deities), the loss of innocence, is the myth of the acquisition of Self. But what was that fruit in reality? What did happen at Babel?
One theory suggests there was a “Lethal Text”. This was a story, an incantation in a sense, a magickal spell, a law, an algorithm that interfered with and transfigured the mind. Since the Sumerians believed in the directness of speech, a form of language devoid of symbol-symbolized dichotomies, where speech and thought and action were essentially equivalent, it was natural that the disrupting process was itself language. In their case, it was their light god Enki's spell of babble, a cuneiform tablet describing a story of the destruction of language that had itself the effect of destroying language. Much like a quine (a self-referential symbol-system), it was folded on itself so it told the story of its own actual action. It was, in short, a ‘Lethal Text’: a text that destroys text.
The “Spell of Enki” seems to be two things: it is a story of linguistic disintegration, and it is an incantation that supposedly causes linguistic disintegration. To hear the tale is to lose the power of understanding speech. It tells of Enki, who "changed the speech" of the population to "put contention into it." This, of course, is similar in content to the Babel legend, where god disrupted the linguistic unity of the people in order to stop the Tower from being built.
It is interesting that many stories about lethal texts and/or linguistic viruses invoke ancient mythology, as if the ancients knew things about language which have been forgotten in the modern world. Jaynes posits that new kind of "unicameral" (though our brain’s hemispheres are not entirely united in sync, yet) consciousness swept like a virus through the ancient world, destroying what had been a kind of Edenic innocence, and cites, as evidence Sumerian inscriptions that are structured much like nam-shubs.
The nam-shubs suggest a magickal theory of language, in which the only kind of utterance that can cause the breakdown of language is one that also happens to talk about the breakdown of language. In other words, the surface meaning of the incantation is crucial to its deep effect.
Now what was this bicameral mind? As known to contemporary brain biologists- there are three speech areas, mostly located in the left hemisphere. They are: the supplemental motor cortex; Broca's area; and Wernicke's area. Jaynes focuses on Wernicke's area, which is chiefly the posterior part of the left temporal lobe. It is Wernicke's area that is crucial for human speech.
Pursuing the bicameral mind and what structure serves as a channel between the two main regions, the focus is on the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is an arched bridge of overlapping channels of nerve fiber located between the brain's hemispheres. It serves as the hub of inter-hemispheric communication, allowing associative sharing of input through its 7 sub-regions and weaving the countless aspects of sensory information into a higher-order whole. In human brains the corpus callosum can be likened to a small bridge by its form and function, a band of transverse fibers, only slightly more than one-eighth of an inch in diameter. This bridge "collects from most of the temporal lobe cortex but particularly the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke's area." And it was this bridge that served as the means by which the "gods" who dwelled in one hemisphere of the human brain were able to give "directions" to the other hemisphere. It is like thinking of the "two hemispheres of the brain almost as two individuals." Because the callosal fibers interconnect so much of the cerebral cortex, especially that cortex considered associative, it has often been suggested that they serve some of the "highest," most educable, and characteristically human functions of the cerebrum.
Jaynes says on page 171, "The bicameral mind (two-chamber mind) is one that functions as an unconscious, two-step process. Automatic reactions and thoughts originate in the right hemisphere of the brain and are transmitted to the left hemisphere as instructions to be acted upon. The bicameral functioning is nature's automatic, learned mode of response without regard to conscious thinking. By contrast, man-made consciousness functions through a deliberate, volitional thought process that is independent of nature's bicameral thought process."
Many evolutionary scientists claim that beliefs of the religious sort are ‘hard-wired’ into our brains. This neurological adaptation seems to have been selected because, despite some obvious aberrations and exceptions, religious beliefs generally strengthen society and therefore aid the survival of our species- just like our propensity to love, or our universal inclination to live by laws. But even if religion does exactly what the evolutionists say it does, the central problem remains. We may have learnt something more about the workings of society and its institutions, but we are no nearer to understanding why the common ground of all religions everywhere should consist of remarkable, unproven and deeply illogical beliefs in immaterial levels of reality and their alleged influences upon our daily lives. Yet, if they provide no advantage, then how are we to explain the fact that every human society throughout recorded history has been so thoroughly dominated and entranced by such beliefs?
According to Professor David Lewis-Williams, such ideas are not part of the normal, predictable currency of everyday life but arise from the universal human neurological capacity to enter ‘altered states of consciousness’- states of deep trance in which extremely realistic hallucinations are experienced. We might feel very sure that there is no more to reality than the material world in which we live, but we cannot prove that this is the case. Theoretically there could be other realms, other dimensions, as all religious traditions and quantum physics alike maintain. Theoretically the brain could be as much a receiver and translator as a generator of consciousness. Thus, it might be fine-tuned in altered states to pick up wavelengths [of light-language] that are normally not accessible to us.
As certain modes of consciousness-perception are no longer necessary, new software is introduced that demands a change in neural hardware. Many protocols are within our capacity allowing our minds access to new ways of thinking, and thus, being. These perhaps higher-functionality protocols are ‘altered states of consciousness’, including any technique (writing, art, dance, meditation, contemplation, entheogen taking, etc.) that invokes a state of trance and focused (or alternatively very defocused) attention. These states bring the awareness to a level of perception where the Self is sensed in a very new way, in contrast to the current default sensory envelope. Perhaps, outside our current envelope of lingual identification is the principle of Enki waiting with the next nam-shub. All this implies that inside us is what the ancient Sumerians knew as Anunnaki deities, and thus, due to our self-referential mode of conscience and being- we are responsible for shaping our thoughts and actions the way we would hope deity would shape us.


The Nam-Shub of Enki [link]

Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion,

There was no hyena, there was no lion,

There was no wild dog, no wolf,

There was no fear, no terror,

Man had no rival.


In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi,

Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the me of princeship,

Uri, the land having all that is appropriate,

The land Martu, resting in security,

The whole universe, the people well cared for,

To Enlil in one tongue gave speech.


Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant,

Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy,

The lord of wisdom, who scans the land,

The leader of the gods,

The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom,

Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it,

Into the speech of man that had been one.

Bibliography

Casanova, Manuel F., M.D. The Decade of the Brain journal (vol. 5, issue 2). National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. 1995.
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, [link]
Forty, Jo. Mythology: A Visual Encyclopedia. PRC Publishing Ltd. 1999.
Frankfort, Henri. The Birth of Civilization in the Near East. Ernest Benn Ltd / Barnes and Noble Inc. 1968.
Frankfort, Henri. The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. Yale University Press. 1996.
Gwendolyn Leick. A Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology. London. Routledge. 1991.
Howard, Pierce J., Ph.D. The Owner’s Manual for the Brain. Bard Press. 1999.
Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Institute of General Semantics. 1995.
Kramer, Samuel Noah, & Maier, John, Myths of Enki, the Crafty God, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Lewis-Williams, David. The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. Thames and Hudson. 2002.
Rand McNally. Atlas of World History. Reed International Books, Ltd. 1995.

Recent filming of Alex Grey at CoSM [link]

Short HR Giger documentary from about a decade ago. [link]

Great [NeoConservative Admin.] "Asshole" music video [link]

_________________________

MY NEW WEBSITE IS UP- CorpusCallosum.cc

Sub Rosa 4 can be downloaded at The Daily Grail [link] , the magazine should be published in print this summer. The topics include UFO and technology extraordinaire Jacques Vallee, Mary Magdalene, Skinwalker Ranch, Leary and Crowley, and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman. I think all of you would find great interest in it. If you can, it would be wonderful to make a donation.

Tonight I was lucky enough to have seen the advance showing of 'V for Vendetta'. This is one of the most important films ever. Sociopolitically and spiritually... 'tis absolutely sagacious.

I just finished sending off my low-residency graduate school applications this week. I'm applying to Union State & University in Montpelier Vermont, Goddard College in Plainfield Vermont, and the Massachusett College of Art's Fine Art Work Center in Boston/Provincetown. Next week I might also apply to Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

I also just recently found out that my "How to Make Amends?" ( [link] )has been accepted into the Society of Illustrators student competition. This is a pretty big deal for me because the SI is the most highly respected illustration competition there is and thus is great for an in illustrative resume. My artwork will be on display in the Society of Illustrators gallery in NYC through May.

As a prelude to this week's summary of this week's news, here's one of my favorite old poems NEPTUNE ENTELECHY, with its accompanying piece [link] .


Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds rising,
10 billion reflective satellite cells firing,
collective perspective hive breathing.
The occulted fire distilled in the sea of body,
tidal tug across the planes beneath solar wind induction.
Sunspots cultivate the brain’s constellation cryptogram Mandelbrot map,
betwixt molecular crystal lattice embryogenesis.
Narcotic gemstones dance on the rotating celestial chalice rim of our-glass.
Sands drip as gravity congeals the impedance that’s lead to understanding.
Double-bubbles fuse at the junction for communication conduction,
vibratory cerebro-chemical ejaculation.
Ethereal sparks toward the pulsating galactic core of perfect-ion.
The free and infinite ocean of bubbling fermented being coagulates,
and stares back from star-gate in the dew of the deep.
Alchemical harvest on zero-pointed waving backdrop of time-emittance.
Thunder gives the warning for quickening coming cyclone of orange.
It’s now mushrooming midnight and the clockwork’s trident is about to ring 13.
Ensuing meltdown into the marbleized wax matrix interface.
Quintessential alarm sounds from behind the sun dispelling the shadow-play.
Non-linear bloodline awakens to the gateway,
wherein the jewel within the lotus reveals who is Sirius,
and the flickering fetus goes nova.
Global vertebrae axis pole-shifts into ecliptic unity.
Critical mass compassion transmutates in illumination amidst resurrection.
Chronologic quantum joke to the cosmic yoke.
It’s a matter of time De-eMpTied.
POP! Creation ate itself.


HAHARPER’S WEEKLY
May 2, 2006

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WEEKLY REVIEW
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, released a video in which he showed his face and claimed that the Bush Administration had lied about its military victories. “America,” said Zarqawi, “will go out of Iraq, humiliated, defeated.” The United States announced that it would free 141 of the 490 “enemy combatants” at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba because they do not threaten U.S. security after all. In Dahab, Egypt, three bombings killed 30 people, and in Baquba, Iraq, about the same number of people died in fighting. President George W. Bush pointed out that not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was depriving the United States of one million barrels of oil per day, and it was reported that Iraq’s oil production had dropped by one million barrels per day since the U.S. invasion. In New York City tens of thousands of people marched against the war in Iraq, and in Washington, D.C., five members of Congress, all Democrats, were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy for protesting the genocide in Darfur. It was revealed that in 2005 the FBI had, without court approval, obtained from bank and credit card companies and telephone and Internet companies information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents. Iran, under criticism for its nuclear program, accused the United States of using “illegitimate and open threats to use force against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Scientists in Florida were working to improve a “brain port” device that will allow soldiers to perceive things through their tongues. New construction began at Ground Zero.
A Quebec family was offering a reward for their mother’s head, which had been hacked from her corpse a year ago. “Each morning,” said one family member, “when we get up, we ask ourselves: ‘Where is the head? Will it show up on our lawn one morning?’” Chinese bra producers were offering larger sizes to meet increased demand, China announced that it would ban heavy snorers from its army, and a Chinese man used eBay to buy an old MiG fighter jet to decorate his office. It was reported that lobbyists had once provided former (now imprisoned) Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham with free limousine service, free access to hotel suites, and the services of prostitutes; it was also reported that the limousine service that was used to ferry the prostitutes had received a contract worth $21 million from the Department of Homeland Security. The Louisiana state senate approved a bill that bans abortion except when the procedure can save a woman’s life; an amendment to allow exceptions in the cases of women who have been raped or are victims of incest was defeated. It was reported that the Vatican might permit people with AIDS to use condoms, if they are married, although abstinence would still be preferred. A Vatican official also called on Catholics to boycott the “Da Vinci Code” movie. In Singapore an 18-year-old man, ashamed of his small penis, committed suicide by jumping from a building, and President Bush named Tony Snow, a Fox News host, as the new White House press secretary. The U.S. military, short of buglers who can play taps at military funerals, was waiting for an order of 700 automated $500 digital bugles. After 15,000 tries a California scientist was able to teach starlings some grammar.
A farmer in Brazil pleaded guilty to killing a 73-year-old nun; the farmer had been paid by two ranchers to shoot the nun after she attempted to stop the ranchers from clearing a section of rainforest. The Mexican senate passed a bill legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana, opium, cocaine, and heroin; President Vicente Fox was expected to approve the bill. In Loreto, Mexico, a 17-year-old boy was killed at a horse race when he attempted to stop a horse from reaching the finish line by jumping in front of it, and in Denver, Colorado, a 17-year-old boy on his first bucking bronco ride was killed when the horse rolled on top of him. “It was,” said his mother, “his first and last ride.” A couple in Milford Township, Pennsylvania, were suing a veterinarian for faking the death of their dog and then giving the dog to someone else. A wheelchair-bound woman in Florida, who refused to put down a knife and a hammer, died after being tasered by policemen, and a Liverpool, England, man was sentenced to 100 hours of community service for getting drunk and singing “YMCA” on a flight from Florida to Manchester while his wife wept and comforted their three children. “He makes no excuses,” said the man’s lawyer, “for his loutish, idiotic behavior.” Jane Jacobs and John Kenneth Galbraith died. Twenty percent of U.S. teenagers admitted to huffing household products in order to get high, and Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree.




________________________________

It’s all in your head... you just have no idea how big your head is!

It is not their intention to destroy... Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

Exec #2: Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this "soul" does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

Exec #3: What was that about hats again?

Exec #2: Oh, Uh... people aren't wearing enough - Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life".

When a human imagines, he actually creates a form on the Astral or even on some higher plane; and this form is as real and objective to intelligent beings on that plane, as our earthly surroundings are to us.

"Time, space and knowledge are the most basic facets of human experience. They are the Being of our being as it manifests in this world. Space allows the world of objects to appear, time makes possible the sequence of events that gives order to our lives; knowledge gives meaning and significance to whatever appears or unfolds. Time and space are the ordinary stuff of existence, which ordinary knowledge aims to know."
(KNOWLEDGE OF TIME AND SPACE - Tarthang Tulku)

_The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whosoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
Albert Einstein
_______________________
OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS

Very busy getting together application documents and portfolio for low-residency graduate schools. Here's three photos of my small gallery showing that is up now at my school in Baltimore.
[link]
[link]
[link]

Climate Change: On the Edge [link]

New Digital Brush Makes the World Your Palette [link]

Biocosm, The New Scientific Theory of Evolution [link]

Darwin's warm pond theory tested and found to be unlikely. [link] The seeds of life came from up there.

One of the most costly frauds (both in terms of money and human suffering) that has ever been perpetrated on the public. Politics and Suppression in the "War on Cancer" [link]

Iran Attack?! - Turning America Into A Straussian Totalitarian State [link]

As a prelude to this week's news summary is my 2.5 yr old poem"Rectal Requiem", analagous to its coinciding work "Narcy Goes to Qliphoth Land" (the image seems to have been erased? but I have just now replaced it with another copy) [link]

Dark clouds erupt and swirl as
you ignore the smoke signals
for the oncoming storm.
The old predatory structures panic
as their tumorous armor gives way to the revealing.
Found as a folded amassment,
lost in the glittering puddle.
Sealed and isolated in the rigid high tower
you locked the doors and escaped the windows into this
grand loft of a city built on shells and dust.
Lying like an intoxicated martyr on lead cement,
crowned by ravenous self-exaltedness.
You fear what lies outside the dogmatic encrustations,
paralyzed prisoner of these insecure delusions.
Refusing to shed the ego’s spiked blood,
it has been fermenting for far too long.
Diseased with the virus of inescapable paradox,
rapaciously justifying vanity’s denials.
Mocking enslaver of the innocent,
revengeful accuser,
defiler of the fallen.
You trampled the inborn love
now you are cold, cracked, atrophied and lifeless.
Sucked dry and choked of essence by the very forms
that supported the pompous pedestal.
Ignorant and blind behind your dearest mask,
caught behind the costume.
All that you gave of yourself to the cup
were heaps of shit
and you spewed your innards round
to blanket the precious,
broken shell of vampiric darkness.
The breaks have broken
and the tower’s remnants are pulled down
by the unrelenting undertow.
Collapsed, sunken and dispersed
to the bottom of the pool,
fertilizer for the roots,
at the bottom.


HARPER’S WEEKLY
March 7, 2006

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

WEEKLY REVIEW
More than 100 people were killed in fighting in Iraq. “I think,” said the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, “the country came to the brink of civil war. But Iraqis decided that they didn’t want to go down that path.” In the Baghdad area, Sunni militants were evicting Shiites from their homes. “We want you out of here by 8 p.m. tomorrow,” one man was told. “If we find you here, we will kill you.” President George W. Bush said that Iraq’s choice was between “chaos or unity,” and it was reported that the White House had ignored repeated warnings about the growing capabilities of the Iraqi insurgency. “This was stuff,” said a former high-ranking intelligence official, “the White House and the Pentagon did not want to hear.” The U.S. State Department asked for $100 million for the reconstruction of Iraqi prisons. Saddam Hussein told a court that, after a 1982 attempt to assassinate him failed in Dujail, north of Baghdad, he ordered trials for 148 Iraqis and had the local orchards razed. Hussein insisted that his actions were lawful; all of those tried were later executed or tortured to death. Only 75 psychiatrists remained in Iraq. In Pakistan, four people, including a U.S. diplomat, were killed in a suicide bombing. The European Union approved a $140 million aid package for Palestine. In France far-right groups were criticized for serving pork soup to the poor with the intent of discriminating against observant Muslims and Jews. “We are all pig eaters!” chanted a crowd of soup activists. “We are all pig eaters!” An Italian commission found that the Soviet Union organized the shooting of Pope John Paul II in 1981. A videotape emerged showing President Bush being warned that Hurricane Katrina could flood New Orleans, and it was revealed that the Bush Administration had lowered the fines for mine safety violations and failed to collect nearly one half of the fines levied. President Bush’s approval rating fell to 34 percent, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s approval rating fell to 18 percent. Bush proposed legislation to give the President a line-item veto, even though the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that a line-item veto was unconstitutional, and it was rumored that Cheney would retire in 2007.
A physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, India, speculated that the “red rain” that fell in the Kerala district of western India in 2001 was filled with extraterrestrial, bacteria-like material from a passing comet. President Bush, after a brief stop in Afghanistan, visited India, where he was met by 100,000 protesters in New Delhi; he promised to provide India with nuclear fuel and expertise. At least 65 dogs in the President’s security detail were put up at a five-star hotel in New Delhi; hotel staff were told to address the dogs as “sergeant” or “major.” Laura Bush counted to five on Indian children’s TV. “She loved Boombah,” said an official from a television studio, “the giant, cuddly, Punjabi-rapping lion.” Condoleezza Rice appeared on television lifting weights and stretching at the gym. “You’d be surprised,” she said, “how many places around the world have gyms or exercise machines.” It was reported that U.S. prisons often shackle women prisoners during childbirth, and a study found that laws requiring minors to obtain parental consent before receiving an abortion have had almost no effect on the number of abortions performed. “I would have told my mother anyway,” said a 16-year-old abortionee in Pennsylvania. Wal-Mart announced that it would begin to sell the morning-after pill, but would not require pharmacists to fill prescriptions if the pill offends them. In Vietnam musician Paul Gadd, also known as Gary Glitter, was found guilty of sexually abusing two preteen girls. He will be jailed for three years and must pay the girls’ families 5 million dong.
AT&T announced that it would purchase Bell South for $67 billion and eliminate 10,000 jobs. A cat died of bird flu in Germany. Scientists, some funded by the U.S. military, continued their research into controlling the brains of monkeys and sharks. “We believe,” said a researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle, “we are the first to record neural activity from a monkey doing a somersault.” Researchers in Chicago verified that a quantum computer does not have to perform any calculations in order to arrive at results. A Rhode Island man who attempted to pay down a large balance on his JCPenney charge card was told that the payment would be delayed because it first had to be approved by Homeland Security. The Senate renewed the Patriot Act and sent it to the House; the House is expected to pass the legislation soon. Former U.S. Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham was sentenced to eight years, four months in federal prison for accepting bribes, and the Pentagon released the names of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay as part of 5,000 pages of hearing transcripts; one man, Abdur Sayed Rahman, a Pakistani chicken farmer, was apparently held because his name was similar to that of Taliban deputy minister Abdur Zahid Rahman. The Kenyan government raided a newspaper that had been critical of government corruption, along with an affiliated TV station. “If you rattle a snake,” said Internal Security Minister John Michuki, “you must be prepared to be bitten by it.” In Columbus, Ohio, a 54-year-old man was in jail after being caught hiding in bathrooms to collect the urine of adolescent boys. “I’m drinking their youth,” he explained. The White House announced that it would step up its efforts to control leaks. Author Octavia Butler died, and a British astronomer named Gerry Gilmore predicted that ground-based telescopes would be useless within 40 years because of climate change and jet contrails. “You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca,” he said, “or you give up astronomy.” In Nassau County, New York, a newborn baby was run over by several different vehicles; its sex and race could not be determined. Global warming forced the organizers of Alaska’s Iditarod dogsled race to move the race 30 miles north, and investigators found that termites had survived the flooding of New Orleans.




It’s all in your head... you just have no idea how big your head is!

It is not their intention to destroy... Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites

Exec #2: Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren't wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this "soul" does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.

Exec #3: What was that about hats again?

Exec #2: Oh, Uh... people aren't wearing enough - Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life".

When a human imagines, he actually creates a form on the Astral or even on some higher plane; and this form is as real and objective to intelligent beings on that plane, as our earthly surroundings are to us.

"Time, space and knowledge are the most basic facets of human experience. They are the Being of our being as it manifests in this world. Space allows the world of objects to appear, time makes possible the sequence of events that gives order to our lives; knowledge gives meaning and significance to whatever appears or unfolds. Time and space are the ordinary stuff of existence, which ordinary knowledge aims to know."
(KNOWLEDGE OF TIME AND SPACE - Tarthang Tulku)

"The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this."

The goal of art is to heal.
A man holds all the universe within him; and art is his view of it. But in the work of some artists spiral vast galaxies of meaning and imagination
What do you want? What do you want… You want to be an artist, you need to broke with money. Not to make that in order to make money. You need to work in order to have yourself, to find yourself. That is the problem. To find yourself.