The first few paragraphs below have been here for several years. They were written at a time when I still took transhumanists seriously. In the spring of 2005, I started adding new material. If you read farther down the page, you will find that by August of 2005 I was expressing severe dissatisfaction with this website. If you keep reading, you will see that I went through quite a few changes before finally arriving at a conclusion. Eventually I will replace this page with a new version. For the time being I am going to leave it here as a record of my journey, but I have an increasing sense of urgency about rewriting it. The whole site is more and more of an embarrassment to me. Most of the pages were written years ago. They only contain a fraction of what I have written, and not the best part. They are incomplete and poorly organized. They have little to do with the sunny mathematical world I normally live in, not to mention the even sunnier post-singularity world I intend to live in. Whenever I try to rewrite the site, other things are more pressing, and it never gets done. But I really need to find the time to do it. I can do better than this.

If you have been here before and just want to cut to the chase, there is new material added in 2007 and 2008.

Biocentric Transhumanism

The idea that we can evolve, not in the distant future but right now, still seems like science fiction to most people. This perception is about to be overtaken by events. Evolution isn't science fiction, it's the reality we live in, and that will be all too obvious to everybody within a few years. The internet is such a common thing now, it's hard to remember that just a few years ago almost no one had even heard of it. Biotechnology will emerge into our lives just as suddenly, and the consequences will be far more profound than the internet.

In the near future - within the lifetime of many people living today - it will be possible to perfect our cells. It will no longer be necessary to get sick, or to get old, or to die. People for whom this is not science fiction, but simply the reality they live in, are transhumanists.

Transhumanists differ about many things - how the transition from human to transhuman will happen, what the Singularity will look like, and the social context of the metamorphosis, just to name three.

In the 1980's and 1990's, almost all transhumanists were machine-centric. They expected nanocomputers and AI systems to reach a transhuman state first - i.e. a level of intelligence beyond human intelligence - after which they (the computers) will help us to "upload" ourselves into new hardware. I think this is nonsense. The following pages explain why, and propose an alternative scenario in which we transform ourselves from within, by redesigning our cells - and by redesigning our language.

The Singularity
The idea of the Singularity (according to Vernor Vinge) is that when machines reach our level of intelligence, they will be able to redesign themselves and become still more intelligent. This will supposedly result in an "intelligence explosion." Ultraintelligent machines will create ever more intelligent machines, with each iteration happening "on a still shorter time scale," and human intelligence will be "left far behind." I beg to differ. I don't know of any other place where you can find a critique that meets this idea head on and takes it apart point by point.

Considering the potential importance of this subject, it deserves a more serious discussion than it usually receives. As far as that goes, it deserves a more systematic discussion than I have given it. I rewrote the Singularity page in 2003, but I left one section unfinished. The present version is very different from the previous version that was here for a couple of years, but it still falls far short of what I really want to say. However, the page will probably remain in its present state for a long time. I am more interested in making the Singularity happen than in arguing about it.

The Singularity page is not merely negative. I don't just talk about what isn't going to happen. I think there is going to be a momentous event in the near future, but it's not going to be an "intelligence explosion."  On a physical level, it's going to be like the Cambrian explosion, or maybe the transition from anaerobic to aerobic life - but it's not just going to be a physical change.

At this point I should quote one paragraph from the Singularity page. It is an orphan paragraph, unfortunately, since I have not developed this line of thought, but it should be the center of the whole discussion:

In discussions of AI and the Singularity, it is always assumed that it's up to us to create a superhuman entity. The idea that a superhuman mind already exists, and it creates us, is outside the bounds of the discussion. But I'm not sure why I have to stay within those bounds.

My next step in rewriting this material will be to separate the critique of the Singularity from the discussion of what is going to happen, and put the latter on a page of its own. The next page is a step in that direction:

Cellular transformation
The cell already is a self-programming computer -- almost. It's crude in some ways, but it could be improved. It could be perfected. It has only limited self-awareness, but its model of itself could be made more articulate and more explicit.

Nanotechnology

Machine-centric transhumanists consider Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler to be a seminal text which describes what's going to happen as we approach the Singularity. I agree that it's a seminal text, but I think it is fundamentally flawed. However, we have to come to terms with it. The book is flawed in a nontrivial way, and it's essential to understand what's wrong with it.

Nanotechnology without Genies is my critique of Engines of Creation. When I first published this site, in March of 1999, this was the whole thing. This is where the site got its name.

Some major points:

The fact that nanotechnology will exist does not imply that little robots will supply all our needs for free.

Automated systems always exist in a larger context which is not automated, and their products are not free.

Whatever capability AI has at any given time, humans assisted by computers will have already reached that point and moved ahead.

Making things with atomic positioners will be at least as expensive as making them with biotechnology or bulk technology.

Without AI systems ("Genies") that design everything for free, molecular manufacturing is just agribusiness.

The recursive center from which ultraintelligence is emerging lies within us.

The cultural and political context for transhumanism

As we approach the end of ordinary history, the pressing questions are: Which direction are we going?  What are we going to become?

Once again there are profound disagreements among transhumanists. According to the standard machine-centric view, we are going to begin by adding ever more fine-grained prosthetic devices to our bodies, and eventually "upload" ourselves into computers. As far as I am concerned, the transhuman metamorphosis begins with a change of consciousness, which leads to a transformation of our bodies from within.

As Michael Murphy put it in Jacob Atabet,

In the religious traditions, the goal of life was generally conceived as release rather than embodiment... Part of what I'm doing is simply to show what a frontier there is in the simultaneous transformation of consciousness and the body, what an adventure there is in embodied existence... A new vision of human nature and destiny is emerging, a vision that was not possible until this moment in time.

Jacob Atabet  combines modern biological science with the ancient shamanic tradition of southern Siberia and central Asia - the same tradition that gave rise to Tai Chi and Yoga. I agree with that, but with one quibble. Murphy seems to have no interest in mathematics or computer science. My vision differs from his in that I am firmly rooted in the "western" tradition, starting with Pythagoras, Thales, Plato, Euclid, Archimedes, etc. in ancient Greece, and continuing through Gauss, Edison, Frege, Wittgenstein, Gödel, etc. in the 19th and 20th centuries. Transformation of consciousness requires thinking, and that includes thinking about science, including the mathematical sciences. It requires improving our model of the world. It includes, specifically, inventing a new language for biology, similar to a computer language. Instead of "biocentric" I could just as well describe my philosophy as "logocentric." This train of thought leads to The 915 page -

"Only a very few will separate themselves from the suicidal culture we live in, and seek out the narrow gate that leads to life.  But of course that has been known all along... The solution is to make the Singularity the starting point for theology. In other words, start with the Singularity and work back... The transhuman metamorphosis won't be a general event that happens to everybody at once. Somebody will get there first. In other words, if you think of this as a race, somebody will win. It will be somebody who has the best model of reality on all levels, including, specifically, a correct philosophy of mind. A correct philosophy of mind requires a correct understanding of logic, semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Thus, for the first time, we have an objective criterion of philosophical truth: the correct philosophy is the one that leads to the metamorphosis."

I should pause here and address a question that has come up in various discussions. Since I use the word "we," some people have gotten the impression that I intend to force this on everybody. Um, no... Even if I wanted to do such a thing, it wouldn't be possible. I couldn't force you to be Jacob Atabet any more than I could force you to be a QiGong master or a mathematician. It's your choice, and if you choose to make the attempt, it takes many years of hard work. Strait is the gate, and narrow the path, that leads to life, and only a few find it.

In any case, I am using an editorial "we" throughout this discussion.

Let's return to the question, which way are we going?  The default answer is that we will continue in the same direction we are going now. The same thought police who run our lives now will still be in power thirty years from now. That is our default future.

My (perhaps utopian) vision is that someday we will live in a society that doesn't consider us insane - a society in which the Tower of Babel has been rebuilt, and the thought police no longer exist. Our cells will be like tiny cathedrals with perfect acoustics, and our minds will be full of light. We are going to live in a nark-free world, and a rap-free world:  a world where perfect bodies dance fearlessly on a psychedelic beach.

Considering that it has been five years since I smoked pot, and twenty years since I dropped acid, maybe I shouldn't be using the word "psychedelic." In fact I am very dubious about acid and its associated subculture. The Politics of Ecstasy  by Timothy Leary is one of the stupidest books I ever read. But I don't know what other word to use. I am still trying to do what the narcs don't want us to do. Giordano Bruno didn't smoke pot (as far as I know), but they burned him at the stake for thinking heretical thoughts. The same thing is still happening in our time.

However, there is more to it than that. In the last ten years (I am writing this in 2005) I have become aware that the "thought police" are not a unitary phenomenon. There are two kinds of thought police. First you have the narcs, who have their roots in the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire. But you also have another kind of thought police, the Orwellian kind. Orwell said "The right to say that  2 + 2 = 4  is fundamental. Given that, everything else follows." In Germany and several other countries, it is illegal to say that a non-gas-chamber is a non-gas-chamber, even though it is as obvious as 2 + 2. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Our thoughts are controlled on many levels. My growing awareness of this has complicated my life tremendously.

And so I find myself discussing some things that it shouldn't be necessary to discuss. I don't like spending my time on stuff like this. As I said on the 915 page, if I could just go ahead and live my life, I wouldn't be doing this. But I can't just go ahead and live my life. I am under siege, and I have to deal with it. As Martin Luther said, Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.

Six Reasons Why the Gas Chamber Story is a Lie

The first and most fundamental reason is that the room that is supposed to be a gas chamber isn't a gas chamber. My argument begins where any such argument must begin: with the physical evidence, the rooms themselves.

Ministry of Illusion: Nazi movies as a window into Nazi Germany

In 1995,  I saw a series of German films from the Nazi era. That was a turning point for me. That was when I knew that they are lying to us about what kind of place Nazi Germany was. The story we are told about Nazi Germany is no more accurate than the story Islamic students are told about America, "the Great Satan."

The Sanskrit Story and the Third Wave

I begin this page by describing a Sanskrit class that I took in 1990. Then I retell the story of Ron Jones's "Third Wave" experiment, and follow that up with a long discussion. The Third Wave didn't happen the way Ron Jones described it. It does have some basis in fact, but most of it is fiction. It's a fable, intended to make a political point. However, it's not presented as a fable. It's supposed to be historical fact. It isn't.

On one of the 915 pages I said that going to a 915 meeting should be like crossing a threshold and leaving America behind, on many levels, and entering another space, a magical space. The Sanskrit class is one example of what I mean by this.

A recurring theme in these pages is this: is the default future inevitable? Is there anything we can do about it, or do we just have to accept it? I have gone back and forth on this question many times, and neither my optimistic comments nor my pessimistic comments should be taken too seriously. As Northrop Frye said, optimism and pessimism are just two sides of the same manic-depressive nonsense. Our first order of business must be to understand the situation we are in. Only then can we decide how to feel about it. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible not to be pessimistic. I'm afraid what's happening in Iraq is a harbinger of things to come.

I have also gone back and forth on the question of whether I need to be concerned with quotidian events at all.  Can't I just let things go, since the world as we know it is going to end anyway in a few decades?  I think not, and here's why:  Thoughts have physical consequences.  The thoughts we are forbidden to think are essential to the metamorphosis. Thought control is not merely a political issue. It's holding us back.

It's not just Orwellian thought control. The system we live in is destroying people's lives. Just to take one example I came across recently, consider what is happening in Russia. This is from an interview with Anne Williamson (you have to scroll pretty far down the page to get to it).

Q. Can you give a brief picture of what life is like for ordinary Russians today, after nearly a decade of U.S. financial aid? What are the dominant features of Russian economic, political, and moral life?

A. Essentially, whatever stability the IMF has claimed it brought to Russia, prior to August 1998, such as a "stable ruble," was done at the expense of the wages and pensions of the Russian people, which went unpaid.

That's how the Russian government met IMF guidelines. The IMF says it was trying to create free markets; but in free markets, labor receives its compensation. This puts the lie to the IMF's claim that that is the purpose of their work: to create open, free, and stable markets.

People are very poor, and totally alone. All their institutions have been eliminated or ruined. There is nowhere the Russian people can look for succor. The legal system does not work; the political actors are unaccountable; the police are considered a threat; you see large groups of young women turning to prostitution in the villages, which was never seen before.

All finance, money, cash, and benefits are flowing to Moscow, and are not being redistributed back to the communities. Wealth of every kind is going abroad, leaving the people totally destitute. This is how the system of plunder is designed in Russia today.

Of course, this can't happen to us. It only happens in unfortunate places like Russia and Argentina. The plunder flows to us, not away from us, so we have nothing to worry about, right?  Well, we like to think so. For most people in the United States, the effects of the system are not as obvious - only a few Americans are destitute - but it's an illusion to think anyone is immune from the "system of plunder."  The same social disintegration is happening just about everywhere, and when the financial house of cards finally comes down, we may find ourselves in a situation similar to Russia or Argentina.

The Singularity is decades away, and in the meantime I have to live in the same world as everybody else. Yes, I have to be concerned with quotidian events, at least to some extent. However, I am still undecided on the question of how much time to spend on resisting the default future. Paul Graham said 1 2,  "When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it?  My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles... The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky."  This is probably good advice, but I have chosen to speak up to some extent. Not as much as Chomsky, but more than Graham. It's a choice we all have to make, and it's not easy. I respect Paul's choice, but I feel compelled to engage in a couple of battles. Most of the time I try to stick to my real work and not get too distracted by problems I can't do anything about. The best way to deal with the thought police and the "system of plunder" is not to fight them head on, but to make a knight's move around them.

As you explore the pages, please remember that this whole site is work in progress. If you're looking for a true believer who never has mixed feelings or second thoughts, you're in the wrong place. Most of the pages were written some time ago, and I have changed my mind about a lot of things. If I could rewrite all the pages, in the light of what I know now, they would be quite different, and more consistent. But I can't rewrite the whole site, so there is a certain amount of residual inconsistency.

August, 2005

I think I should  rewrite the whole thing. I'm tired of this site, on many levels. I'm tired of beating my head against the wall, trying to get people to care about Orwellian issues. I'm tired of Nazism. Yes, they are lying about it, but that doesn't mean it has any relevance for our situation today. All the old ideologies are obsolete. All of them.  I'm tired of arguing about Eric Drexler and Vernor Vinge.  Those arguments are left over from the nineties, and all that stuff ought to be a dead issue by now.  The very idea of "transhumanism" is a 20th century concept.  It is inherently machine-centric. It puts everything into a technological context, which is just wrong. "Biocentric transhumanism" is almost an oxymoron, and mentioning cathedrals in connection with transhumanism is even worse. Those ideas just don't combine. Instead of trying to redefine transhumanism, I should abandon it and start over.

Instead of saying Eric Drexler is wrong - a point almost nobody cares about anymore - I should just put forth my own ideas about what is really happening as we approach the end. Just put them forth, assert  them. Not a critique of somebody else's ideas but a simple positive statement. The last section of The 915 page is a step in that direction. I should move some of the material on that page to the home page [done, as of 4/21/06], and make it the starting point for the site. Move the critique of Vinge and Drexler to other pages, in the background. All critiques should be in the background.  Finally, I should reframe the 915 thing.  Stop calling it a "movement," since it isn't.  Stop calling it 915 and give it a real name.  Make it entirely apolitical.  The basic idea is that "Our minds exist within a larger mind..."  Dialectical arguments lead beyond themselves to a point where you just join yourself to that mind. That's what it's about.

However, the arguments are a necessary step that can't be skipped. As I said on the Third Wave page, we are enmeshed in a web of lies, and extricating ourselves is no easy task. We have to think things through. We can't just go directly from where we are to a state in which we are filled with the Holy Spirit. The analytical parts of the site may be moved to the background, but they will always be there.

The nanotech part of the site will always be there, too. I can see the site evolving into a discussion of the end of ordinary history (that's Michael Murphy's expression, by the way) on two levels, with two starting points. On the spiritual level, the 915 page will be the starting point, and on a technical level, the investing in nanotechnology page emerges as the new starting point. It doesn't matter what anybody believes about nanotechnology, unless those beliefs lead to correct or incorrect investment decisions.

On the 915 page, I said "if you think of this as a race, somebody will win. It will be somebody who has the best model of reality on all levels, including, specifically, a correct philosophy of mind."  But that's only half the problem. You also have to have a correct model of what's happening on a more mundane level. You have to see what's going on and deal with it.

Survivalists do exactly the wrong thing. They may be right, or at least partly right, about the general outline of the future - the world is probably going to be very chaotic in the coming years - but they are totally wrong about how to respond. The way to survive is to be one of the people the survivalists are hiding from. Whatever happens, there will still be an ongoing economy of some kind, and some people will not only survive but prosper. Some people will make the correct investment decisions and some won't. The question is not what the Singularity means in theological terms. The question is what, specifically, is going to happen between here and there, and how we can set our sails to make use of the prevailing winds.

Coming back to the question of what to do about this site, I should move the Orwellian stuff to the background, or get rid of it.  That's  what I'm really tired of. If I could go back to the early nineties, a time of innocence when I only thought about science and knew nothing about Ernst Zundel and all that his situation implies... what a relief it would be.

Maybe I should just go over to the other side. Yes, of course Zundel should be locked up for the rest of his life. Yes, anybody who doesn't believe in teaching babies to listen to rap is insane and not fit to be around children. Yes, anybody who wonders why Building 7 collapsed is a conspiracy theorist. Yes, yes, yes, whatever Big Brother says.

If I could do that, everything would be so much simpler.

I am more than half serious about this. Archimedes didn't waste time on politics.  Neither did Leonardo.  Neither did Edison.  Edison had strong opinions - which were almost identical to my opinions - but he didn't let politics distract him from his work.

Judging by the comments I have seen on various discussion boards, it seems that most people who read this site think that anybody who doesn't live in tv-land is insane.  That link is just one of several I could mention. The response to this site has been pretty consistent, although there have been a few exceptions. So why am I doing this?  There is no use trying to talk to people who think I'm insane. Why don't I just shut up and get back to work?  Paul Graham is right.  At my age - at any age, but especially at my age - I should be doing things that only I can do.

Actually, if the truth be told, I'm proud of the site. It does need to be reorganized, and it is incomplete in many ways, but what there is of it is good. I'm right about the Singularity, and about cellular transformation. That's the most important thing there is. The coming cellular metamorphosis is the reality we live in. I said what needed to be said, and I'm proud of that. I'm also right about the gas chambers, and I'm proud of that, too.  I'm not really tired of my website, I'm tired of my readers.

If you have read this far, what I'm saying here probably doesn't apply to you.  If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it.

But if it does fit... Mark 3:20-30 is apropos here.  In the long run, who is insane and who isn't will be decided on the battlefield. I have made some false starts and missteps, but at the end of the day - at the Singularity - I'm going to be the one left standing. You make your enemies by choice.  Choose well.

September 1

I guess this is turning into a blog. Well, so be it. I almost never watch tv, but I keep one around for just such occasions as this (Katrina). Watching tens of thousands of people with no water, no food, and no plumbing, while George Bush makes cameo appearances with his nonsensical smile and his nonsensical words. Watching the U.S. slide into... what can I call it?  Third world fascism?  That's not quite it.  This is a new phenomenon and we need a new vocabulary for it, but  "third world fascism" is as close as I can come at the moment. I am as anti-fascist as anybody, in that sense. I am as horrified as anybody at what's happening. I think most people know that the country has come unhinged. People are waiting for somebody to stand up and say what needs to be said. But what needs to be said cannot be said.  That's one of the points I tried to make on the 915 page. There is no easy way out of this.

September 2

Things have improved in the last 24 hours for those who have been evacuated to Texas. Meanwhile there are many others who have not been evacuated, plus another 100,000 people in outlying areas around New Orleans, who couldn't even get to the Superdome, plus an unknown number of homeless people in Mississippi and Alabama, many of whom are stranded with no clean drinking water. In 90 degree heat, people can only live so long without water.  If they don't get water in the next couple of days, many thousands of babies, old people, and sick people just aren't going to make it.

This is a harbinger of things to come. When climate change starts in a serious way, or war in the Middle East cuts off the supply of oil, or some other catastrophe happens - I mean a general catastrophe, not just a local one - we are on our own. Survivalists are right that we have to be prepared to live off the grid. My references to Russia, Argentina, Iraq, and survivalism must have seemed strange and far-fetched to people who read this page at any time before Katrina. Surely nothing like that can happen here!  Yes, it can.

The hurricane will probably turn out to be the long-awaited event that breaks the economic logjam. The housing bubble will pop. A recession in the U.S. will have repercussions in Asia. As Andy Xie said just last week, conditions are ripe for a replay of the 1998 financial crisis in Asia. The outcome is unpredictable but is certain to be ugly.

In a world where everything is collapsing, the way to survive is to be part of something. Going off by yourself is the worst thing you can do. The more isolated you are, the more helpless you are. At the time of the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, I was living across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Center in Hollywood. I despise Scientology, but I thought about joining them just to be part of something - just to have an organized support group. I still think that's the only way to survive, but instead of joining Scientology or any other existing organization, I am going to start my own group.

September 3

In the summer of 1979, during the last gas crisis, Jimmy Carter lost it. He didn't know what to do. He left Washington and spent ten days travelling around the country, talking to people, trying to get his bearings. It was scary. There was a growing feeling of uneasiness, as we realized that the ship had no captain. Nobody was at the helm. We were drifting.

I think we are going to have a similar moment with George Bush. He is going to lose it, but in a different way. At least Carter knew that he didn't know what to do. After a ten day hiatus he returned to Washington and resumed his duties. Bush is going to do something that makes everybody's hair stand on end.

There are various possibilities, and I don't know exactly what he will do. He may start drinking again. He may start going off on people, snarling at them and using four letter words in public, like he already does in his office. He may start acting paranoid. If his approval rating drops below 20%, he may snap and abandon the veneer of civility - I'm the President, and I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want, and nobody has to like it. Fuck you. Fuck everybody.  (Note added 2/23/08 - I sure got that one wrong. His latest approval rating is 18%, but no such behavior has appeared.)  Or he may just say something so egregiously goofy that everybody, including diehard Republicans, can see he that is hopelessly out of his depth. It may be some combination of those things. In any case, there is going to be a sinking feeling, worse than 1979, as everyone realizes that we don't have a President in any real sense of the term. I grew up in Midland, Texas, and played on the same playground with George for five years. I know who he is. I have known all along that he is out of his depth. I see what's coming, at least the general outline of it if not the specific details.

God help us.

September 4

God helps them that help themselves. When government unravels, you had better have something to fall back on.  Either you have a support group, or else you live like a refugee. That's what it's coming to. I don't intend to end up in the Superdome. Nor do I intend to move to the hills and live off the land. It's just a question of what kind of support group to create. That project should have a website of its own.

This past summer I was reading too many conspiracy websites and taking them too seriously. A lot of people have been saying that there will be an incident that serves as a pretext for war with Iran. That may be true, but then some people went on to say that the incident would be a false flag nuclear attack on the United States, and it would probably happen this summer.  I am embarrassed to admit that I was seriously worried about this, and thinking about leaving Los Angeles. I was also worried about other scenarios, such as this and this. On the first of August, I decided I had gathered enough data, and I had spent enough time analyzing it. It was time to switch to intuitive mode. I looked deep within myself and asked "Is this real?" - i.e. is there going to be a bomb in Los Angeles, or an EMP attack that makes Los Angeles unlivable? The answer was clear: NO, this is not real.  I stayed in L.A.

I also asked myself which city really is a danger zone. Which city will take the hit when it comes? Two cities came to mind...  New Orleans and San Francisco.

By the way, today was one of the most beautiful days I have ever seen - about 75 degrees, sunny, with a fresh breeze coming in off the ocean. I hope I never get so preoccupied with disasters that I can't enjoy beauty when I am in the midst of it.

September 5

Katrina will break not only the economic logjam, but the political logjam as well. I am amazed at what I have been reading on the internet in the last few days. Everything is on the table now.  The 2004 election was the last one in which the real issues could not even be discussed.

September 6

For some time - long before Katrina - I have been thinking about what would happen if something broke the logjam and it became possible to get out of the Democrat/Republican unreality. I think it's going to come to a bad end. We are just going to jump from the frying pan to the fire.

Anyone who thinks it is possible to have a revolution in America should read Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, both of them, and ponder them long and well. In the last couple of years a whole subculture has appeared with more than a dozen men who at least hint at revolution - Jeff Rense, John Kaminsky, Ted Lang, Alex Jones, and Greg Palast, just to name a few. On the Rense site, there have been at least two articles that called openly for revolution. This is the first time since 1968 that it has become possible to think in such terms.

I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. I have said what I think of Alex Jones on another page. Some of these guys may be sincere - I'm not really sure if any of them are, but some of them may be - but they think they can call spirits from the vasty deep, just like Glendower.  They think the space beings are going to step in and save us. Remember what happened to Glendower and Hotspur.

Actually, I don't know that they believe in aliens. I should put it this way:  EITHER they are government shills, baiting a trap, OR they are idiots who believe in aliens. I don't know which, but it doesn't matter. Either way, nobody with any sense will join them.

For a contemporary version of the Henry IV plays, check out the 2001 movie, Bully.  It's about a bunch of stoned suburban teenagers in Florida. One of them is such an asshole that the others eventually decide to kill him. As soon as they hatched their plot, I started laughing, because it was obvious what would happen. It was like watching somebody slip on a banana peel, in slow motion. If you want to know what a revolution in America would look like, just rent this movie.

Better yet, look at this clip on YouTube, or this one, or just do a search on YouTube for "ignorant Americans" and see what comes up.

September 7

Maybe I'm wrong when I say the political logjam has been broken. Maybe nothing has really changed. Here is something amazing, to me at least:

First Gallup Poll on Hurricane Response Finds Americans Extremely at Odds

"Despite much criticism directed at the White House and federal government in the past week, President Bush seems to be maintaining much of his core support.

"While 42% of respondents characterized Bush's response to the disaster as bad or terrible, 35% said it was good or great."

Good or great?  How could anybody think that?  It just doesn't compute. But there it is. I still think Bush will do something that will shock even his core supporters, but I could be wrong. Maybe their belief system is unshockable. Maybe he will never lose his core support no matter what he does.

The Democrats are not going to lose their core support either. Kerry, Lieberman, Hilary Clinton, etc. are not a real alternative. The same people who control the Republican party will still control it in 2008, and the same people who control the Democratic party will still control it. The rest of us have nowhere to go.

There are actually several men who have tried to say what needs to be said - Jesse Ventura, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, David Duke, and Lyndon LaRouche. With the possible exception of Ventura, who has actually won an election, they are all marginal candidates, and that isn't going to change. If those five men got together and looked for common ground, they would find it. But that isn't going to happen. It might be possible to get Ventura, Nader, and Buchanan together in the same room. In fact Nader and Buchanan have already met, and they did find some common ground. But a viable independent party would have to have an economic program that proposes to change the whole system at a fundamental level - when I say fundamental I mean fundamental - and an ideology that honestly confronts the question of who is really running things. Nader and Buchanan can't do it by themselves. Without Duke and LaRouche, it isn't going to fly. And there is no way you could get either of those two in the same room with the others.

The same people who control the news media will remain in control on a meta level, and they are going to make sure that independent candidates remain marginalized. They are going to defend the two party system at all costs, and the two party system is going to continue giving us impossible choices. Therefore, as long as we stay within the political system, we lose. And, as I said in yesterday's post, revolution is not possible.

So much for that. On a more positive note, here are a couple of stories about people who coped in the aftermath of Katrina:

Australians escape the Superdome

Bud Hopes, of Brisbane, was praised for saving dozens of tourists as the supposed safe haven of the city's Superdome became a hellhole.

As the Australians left the Superdome, food and water were almost non-existent and the stiflingly hot arena was filled with 25,000 people and the stench of human waste. Gangs stalked the tourists and women were threatened with rape.

"Bud took control. He was calm and kept it together the whole time," Ms Cullington said.

Mr Hopes, 32, said: "That was the worst place in the universe. Ninety-eight per cent of the people around the world are good. In that place, 98 per cent of the people were bad.

"Everyone brought their drugs, they brought guns, they brought knives. Soldiers were shot.

"It was like a refugee camp within a prison."

Realising that foreigners were a target, Mr Hopes and the other Aussies gathered tourists from Europe, South America and elsewhere into one part of the building

"There were 65 of us, so we were able to look after each other -- especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened." Mr Hopes said.

Mr Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guard Staff Sgt Garland Ogden, who had broken the rules to get the tourists out of the dome, with 60 people being evacuated to a medical centre.

"We did some shifts at the hospital to help nurse the sick to say thank you. It was a real Aussie thing," he said.

Away from the coast and cameras, victims cope without much help

While they escaped the devastating floods that hit Biloxi, Gulfport and New Orleans, inland residents suffered damage to their homes and have spent the last several days without power or phones - and perilously short of drinkable water and gasoline.

But while state and local authorities, including some detachments from the Mississippi National Guard, are distributing ice, water and food in larger towns, the residents of smaller communities are helping one another.

Some rural residents have neither cars nor generators. Many said they're cooking outside on wood fires and trying to get into nearby towns for supplies when they can. But many smaller stores haven't reopened because supply schedules have been disrupted and there's no electricity to operate refrigerators, cash registers or other appliances.

Earlier in the week, Lee decided to make use of cafeteria food supplies that were thawing in school freezers. She donated them to the local Masonic lodge, which has been cooking meals on charcoal grills for residents every day.

In Lumberton, folks said the hero of the hurricane has been Chris Holzinger, a 28-year-old schoolteacher who's president of the local Masons. The day after Katrina hit, he unlocked the doors of the Masonic lodge and offered shelter to people who needed it.

"We've got a lot of people helping out," Holzinger said. He's lived most of his life in town, but his shaven head, goatee and tribal armband tattoo make him look more like he's from San Francisco.

Under an untucked polo shirt, Holzinger wore a small handgun on his hip - a precaution, he said, because there's been some looting of local stores, and everyone knows that food and water are being stored at the lodge.

"People are getting panicky. There's been some trouble," acknowledged town alderman Terry Canaday.

As he spoke, several police cars pulled up outside the Masonic lodge and members of the town's eight-member force began handing out bags of ice and cases of bottled water to about 150 people who quickly appeared from neighboring homes and buildings.

The supplies were gone in 10 minutes, but they were all that the locals could scrounge from a state emergency depot. Police Chief Mike Childress said he was hoping to persuade the National Guard to send more supplies and some soldiers to help distribute them.

For now, though, the residents of Lumberton are on their own.

"We've done all this so far without any help from the country or anyone else," Childress said.

Good for them!

Both of these stories illustrate what Hitler called the Leadership Principle: a man steps up and assumes responsibility, and takes care of his people. This is National Socialism 101.

September 8

Of course it's not really national  socialism until it is (a) scaled up to the national level and (b) made permanent. The problem is, neither of those things can happen, for numerous reasons.

It can't be made permanent because people don't normally live in an emergency situation. It's one thing for Mr. Hopes to lead a group out of the Superdome. It's quite another thing for him to continue leading them when they get back to Australia. They are all going to return to their former lives. Most men who are capable of leading a community would rather use their ability in a company, where they get paid, and let other people fend for themselves - and the other people would rather have it that way too. Most people don't want to be led, most of the time. They don't want too much community. They prefer to live in a fragmented society in which private life comes first, and community life is in the background most of the time.

As for scaling it up to a national level, obviously there are established forces which don't intend to let that happen. It's one thing for a small town in rural Mississippi to take care of its own needs in the aftermath of a storm. It's quite another thing for a nation to establish an autarkic economy and live outside the financial system. That is not allowed.

In the Ministry of Illusion series, there were two films on this theme. The first one, Fugitives, is about a group of German refugees stranded on the border between Russia and China. A German officer rallies the group and leads them back to Germany. The story ends at that point - we never find out what happens once they are back home. The second film, The Kaiser of California, is about Johann Suter. He led a group of men across the American deserts and mountains to California. He established a thriving community there. Then somebody discovered gold. Everybody stopped working and started panning for gold. Suter's whole project fell apart. Before he left Germany, when he was a young man, a spirit appeared to him and showed him a vision of America. He returns to Germany as a broken man, goes back to the same cathedral where he saw the spirit, and has another vision. This time the spirit says

Why do you keep trying to fight the gold?
You can't stop the wheels of the world.

I keep asking myself, why am I doing this?  Why am I talking about National Socialism?  As I said in my August comments, I am tired of this subject. I am tired of talking to a vacuum. And I know perfectly well that I can't stop the wheels of the world any more than Johann Suter or anyone else. That's a hard thing to accept, but at some point I am just going to have to accept it.

[A few minutes later] ... Ok, I do accept it... sort of... but what I don't accept is this:

I just got back from a FEMA Detainment Camp

We then started lugging in our food products. The foods I had purchased were mainly snacks, but my mother - God bless her soul - had gone all out with fresh vegetables, fruits, canned goods, breakfast cereals, rice, and pancake fixings. That's when we got the next message: They will not be able to use the kitchen.

Excuse me? I asked incredulously.

FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the "host" goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won't allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs - and...

it could cause a riot.

It gets worse.

He then precedes [sic] to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and "a sum of money" and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.

It keeps on getting worse.  You just have to read the whole thing.  Read it and weep.

Compare this with the two stories above - the group that spontaneously formed in the Superdome, and the rural community in Mississippi that handled its own affairs.

Calling those two incidents "National Socialism" is probably a misnomer. When you try to scale it up to a national level, it changes its character. The Third Reich was a bureaucratic state, and Germanic bureaucracy can be just as heavy-handed and paternalistic as American bureaucracy, although usually not as stupid. The German concentration camps must have resembled the FEMA camps, to some extent. I don't believe much of what I hear about the German camps, but still, they were concentration camps.

The Superdome story and the rural Mississippi story can be taken as a model for what should be happening, and the FEMA story is a prime example of what is happening, but shouldn't be. This is our situation: a state of tension between bureaucratic stupidity (and malice) trying to take over our lives, and spontaneous communities forming to resist it.

Katrina was not the last disaster we are going to have to deal with. There are going to be more storms, earthquakes, and epidemics, but I'm not really worried about things like that. I'm more worried about structural things like abrupt climate change, ecological collapse, implosion of the financial system, peak oil (although I'm pretty dubious about peak oil doomsday scenarios), and the fact that society is getting to be more and more like a prison.  It may be true that the leadership principle cannot be carried over to our "normal" lives, but that is beside the point, because we are not going to have normal lives from here on out.  We are in a permanent state of emergency.

I keep returning to the point that survivalists are right about the problem, but wrong about the solution. Instead of waiting for the next disaster, I want to go ahead and form an ongoing community of some kind. The question is how to do it. Actually "community" may not be the right word. I'm thinking about approaching this on an economic level, i.e. forming a network of companies, spread out over various locations, and engaging in a variety of businesses, so if part of it is taken out the rest will survive. That was how the internet was originally designed - in case of nuclear war, many of the nodes would be destroyed, but some would still be there.

September 10

Here is a darker story about Katrina. Lyn H. Lofland, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, was attending a convention in New Orleans, and was trapped after the storm. The title of his article is somewhat misleading. The main point is that the government not only didn't help the people, it attacked them. I have omitted part of the article for brevity. The part that I omitted does describe people helping people.

New Orleans Eyewitness Describes People Helping People

We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay.

Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowd cheered and began to move... We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps.

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water. Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway.

This behavior is a repudiation of the basic American principle of "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

According to the poll mentioned above, about 35% of Americans think this is "good or great," about 40% think it is "bad or terrible," and the rest, I suppose, are not paying attention. There is no obvious way for the ones who disapprove to get leverage on the situation. Changing the administration in Washington would have no effect, because (a) the Sheriffs are local officials who have nothing to do with national politics, and (b) it was the Democrats who brought us Waco and Ruby Ridge. This problem has nothing to do with Republicans vs. Democrats. It's more basic than that.

It may appear that we have come a long, long way from the top of the page, so let me pause here and review the basic idea that connects the top of the page with the bottom. I started with biocentric transhumanism, as opposed to machine-centric transhumanism. When we start transforming our cells, we can use a biocentric model, based on biofeedback and yoga, or a medical/bureaucratic model, in which machines operate on us from the outside. In politics, we can have informal, spontaneous communities, or bureaucratic, official structures. It's the same principle.

September 11

I keep saying that what needs to be said cannot be said. Well, some of it can. A lot of it can. Some of it can be said now, and more can be said after we have made a start.

Katrina by itself won't break the political logjam, but something will. I still think the 2004 election was the last one in which the real issues could not even be discussed.

What's missing in American politics is a party that represents working people. The Democrats are supposed to do that, but they don't. By "working people" I mean everybody who is getting squeezed by the global financial system. This includes the middle class as well as blue collar workers.

The key thing is to separate economic issues from social issues. In America, the way things are now, the "left" means multiculturalism, abortion, homosexuality, ecological guilt, gun control, affirmative action, etc. What if you cut all that stuff loose and just talk about economic issues?

What if you had a party that got its inspiration from Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Ford?

We could do the same thing to the Federal Reserve that Jackson did to the National Bank (close it). Do the same thing to Wal-Mart that Roosevelt did to Standard Oil (and do the same thing again  to Big Oil). Adopt Ford's idea that workers should be paid enough to buy the products they make. Repudiate the whole concept of globalization.

In other words, a straight ahead populist program, without  political correctness.

September 12

A populist movement just takes us back to Henry IV and Bully.  I know I should get all such nonsense out of my system once and for all, but it keeps coming back. I guess I just have to accept that that's part of who I am. As Patanjali would say, it's a samskara.  I know it's distracting me from more important things, but I can't stop thinking about it.

About 25 years ago, a taxi driver ran for mayor of Dallas. I don't think he had much of a platform. He was just running as an alternative to the establishment. His opponent (who was the incumbent, I think) was a real estate developer. The taxi driver didn't win, of course, but he got about 35% of the vote, with no money and no organization. A third of the voters were angry enough and alienated enough to cast a protest vote. If many such candidates ran for office all over the country, and if they were organized, and if they had a well thought out ideology, some of them would win. They might not get a majority, but they could get enough votes to win a three way race.

If the American candidates were part of an international movement, we could really shake things up. Of course it's easy to think of reasons why such a project could never work. Many, many things could go wrong. But you never know what you can do till you try. It may be true that what really needs to be said cannot be said, but we should say as much of it as we can.

It may be true that we can't stop the wheels of the world, but we should never stop trying.

September 13

The Powers that Be saw this coming a long time ago, and they gave certain individuals an assignment: to pre-empt the field and make it impossible for a genuine populist movement to exist. Alex Jones, Greg Palast, and that crew are doing their job very well. They are misdirecting everybody's attention. "Do you want to know what's really going on?  Whatever you do, don't look at the ----. No, no, no! Don't look in that direction. It's not the ---- who are doing this to you, it's the Nazis." That's the subtext for everything Jones and Palast say.

The owners of the mainstream media are all Nazis, right, Alex?  The Fed has been a Nazi institution all the way back to 1913, right, Greg?  The neocons in the Bush administration are dedicated National Socialists, whose goal is to create a new society free of Jewish power - isn't that right?

There are quite a few people in the revolution business now. They start out as 911 truth websites, and then segue into more general opposition to TPTB - or pretended opposition. They are fighting among themselves, accusing each other of being shills. A few of them are shills, most of them are not - but the point is, a genuine populist gets lost in the noise. That was the idea all along.

I think the thing to do is just have a good laugh. Ok, you guys, you win. The scheme is very clever, and there is no obvious way around it. The thing to do is just sit back and watch, the same way I watched Bully.

Welcome, my friend, to the show that never ends... might as well relax and enjoy the show. It's funny, if you're into black humor.

September 15

Today I rewrote the Revolutionary stories page and restored the link to it from the 915 page. The stories page was one of the original pages in the 915 project. In fact it was one of the essential pages. It dates all the way back to the fall of 1999. I removed the link several years ago, when I gave up on the 915 project and destroyed all the links. Since then it has been an orphan page, still on the server but unreachable.

Even now, it still requires a huge leap of faith to believe that a 915 movement might be possible. But the zeitgeist changes, and you never know. Now that the site is getting more traffic, it may be possible, just barely possible, to make that leap of faith.

The point of departure for the stories page is a thought from Ministry of Illusion:

There is a fallacy that is widely believed:  that in a conflict between races or cultures, the one with the best street fighters wins. That's not how it works. The one with the best storytellers wins.

Are there any storytellers out there who will respond?  I gave up hope several years ago.  Everybody in the humanities has gone over to the other side... so it seems.  But, surely not everybody.  The zeitgeist is certainly changing in Europe, and it will change here, too, although America is several years behind the curve. When somebody invents something, it frequently happens that somebody else thought of it at almost the same time. When an idea is in the air, more than one person will think of it. If I am thinking about revolutionary stories, maybe somebody else is thinking along the same lines.

September 19

In the Metafilter discussion, which I referred to back in August, one of the posters quoted a statement of mine and commented as follows:

[my statement]  As I said on the No-rap page: a lot of people get very upset about "cults," without realizing that they are already in a cult. America is a cult. TV is a cult. Our thoughts are already controlled.

[his response]  Why am I wasting my time -- this person is crazy.

So that is how things stand. When random people read this site, they think I'm crazy. Of course this is to be expected. People who are in a cult don't think of themselves that way. They don't want to be deprogrammed. They think their belief system is true, and anybody who is not  in the cult is out of touch with reality, i.e. insane. Scientologists feel that way about non-Scientologists. People who live in tv-land don't want to be told that they are delusional. They think I am the one who is crazy.

So where does that leave us? The idea of the stories page is to try to deprogram the whole culture, not by direct argument, but by changing the culture's underlying story. Of course this is easier said than done. It may or may not be possible, and even if it is possible, it will take a long time. And meanwhile---?

I'm not going to let them lock me up. Ernst Zundel is a great man, maybe the greatest man living, but one Zundel is enough. I'm sure Aristotle had enormous respect for Socrates, but when he thought Athens was about to turn on him, he did not follow the Socratic example and drink his cup of hemlock.  He said  "I am not going to let the Athenians sin twice against philosophy," and he got out of town.

September 20

In the original 915 Manifesto, I wrote

We are approaching the moment of transcendence -- the culmination of our long evolutionary journey. The government should be providing a supportive environment within which we can finish our metamorphosis safely. That is its only proper function. No other government has a right to exist. Since our present government is trying to prevent the transformation from happening, we are going to replace it with a government that is on our side. We don't want a liberal government or a conservative government. We want an intelligent government which does what it is supposed to do at this stage of history.

Our enemy is insane, and insanity cannot prevail. Lies cannot prevail. In the long run we have to win, because reality is on our side.

That was where I made a strategic mistake. The fact that reality is on our side implies nothing about winning in a political sense. Trying to change society is as quixotic as trying to change the weather. A couple of days ago I said the zeitgeist is changing in Europe:  well, so it is, but that's like saying the weather is changing in the Gulf of Mexico. (As I write, another  hurricane is bearing down on the gulf coast.) The new zeitgeist may turn out to be an ill wind indeed. It's changing in Russia more than anywhere, and here is an example of what's coming out of Russia. "...the Children of Winter themselves, who at 6 years of age the weather had no effect upon them as they walked naked in the snows of winter. Who at 10 years of age could walk through boiling water with no burns or discomfort of any kind. Who at 15 years of age could travel the vast distances of space in but a single thought..."  (Correction - this nonsense did not come from Russia. However, that doesn't really affect my point. This sort of thing is going to be coming out of the woodwork, everywhere.)

If the zeitgeist changes in Germany, they may let Zundel go, but then, who knows, they may start burning witches again. All the old European demons are still there and could emerge at any time. Insanity can and does prevail, more often than not. We are not going to get an intelligent government which does what it is supposed to do at this stage of history. Yes, the government should  be providing a supportive environment within which we can finish our metamorphosis safely, but it isn't going to happen, and I should have known that in 1999 when I wrote the manifesto. We have to create our own supportive environment. We have to form a cocoon that will protect us from government.

Or rather, I have to do that. It is time to drop the fictional "we." My other strategic mistake was to think I had to have some kind of "movement."  There is no such thing as "our" side.  I have to create my own  protected space in which I can finish my metamorphosis safely. And when it happens, I am just going to disappear into the rabbit hole.

When I say 2 + 2 is 4, and everybody says you're insane,  the thing to do is just shut up and get back to work. I'm not sure this website even needs to be here.

September 22

I just checked my log files and found that the Six Reasons page has received 575 pageviews in the last seven days. That doesn't mean 575 distinct visitors, since some of them may have viewed the page more than once. Without using cookies, I have no way to tell. In any case that page has received several hundred visitors. I wonder how many of them think I'm insane?  More to the point, how many of them don't think so?

I don't know how many, but there must be some.

There are still a few people who care about honesty. More than a few, actually. There are many - maybe a growing number? - who understand that we are enmeshed in a web of lies. They want to extricate themselves, and they find some of my pages to be useful for that purpose. They are the ones I am addressing. That's why the site is still here.

But I don't usually hear from them. I need to find a better way to communicate with my readers. My address can only be found on a few pages of the site, and - with the exception of the Third Wave page - most of them are obscure pages. I did that for a reason. I have spent enough time on the internet to know how many idiots and timewasters there are. I thought if I hid my address, I could screen them out. But it doesn't work. I still hear from idiots who don't even know that a sentence ends with a period.

I also hear, occasionally, from sincere people who have something constructive to say - not often, but often enough to establish that they exist. By being so coy about my address, I am screening them out. There must be a way to set up a discussion in which those people have access, and the idiots are shut out.

Yes, people out there in tv-land think I'm insane. That comes with the territory, and I shouldn't let it bother me. There are many thousands of others who don't live in tv-land, or maybe they do but they want to escape from it.  I am not as isolated as I think.  Not quite.

Nevertheless I should not have any illusions about being able to relate to people who live in consensus reality. Communication with them is impossible. I shouldn't be addressing myself to them at all, nor should I be paying any attention to them. What they think about my sanity is no more important than what they think about early binding versus late binding.  Instead of trying to meet them halfway, and earnestly trying to reason with them, I should do the exact opposite. In an Orwellian mirror world where sanity is perceived as insanity, I should be doing something entirely different.

September 23

Back to the anti-survivalist theme. The big news today is the exodus from Houston. A million people are stuck on a gridlocked freeway, right in the path of the storm. This is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. What were they thinking?  If I had to evacuate Houston or Galveston, I wouldn't go north, I would go southwest, to Laredo. I'll bet Highway 59 isn't crowded. I'll bet there is plenty of gasoline out there in those little border towns, and plenty of motel rooms. And, of course, it's dry out there.

The people who are stranded on I-45 are the same ones who think I'm crazy. "That loonie is going southwest!  When a hurricane approaches from the south, you go north. Everybody knows that. Everybody except crazy people. People who don't do what everybody else does should be locked up."

They are going to get very wet, and I am going to be laughing.

I used to live in Houston, so I know a little bit about Houstonians. If you ever go there, don't drive a VW bus - and remember, if you order a Reuben sandwich in Houston, it will come on white bread.

When a disaster happens, and at most other times as well, you have to do the opposite of what the masses are doing. If Joe Sixpack and his wife don't think you're crazy, then you must be doing something wrong.

What happened to my populist politics?  All that stuff is fading into the distance.  In my more unsentimental moments, I realize that I don't care any more about the working class than they care about me, which is not much.

Instead of waiting for a disaster to happen, the smart thing to do is to live in an area that is not a potential disaster zone. I am more and more antsy about living in California. There are too many things that can go wrong here, and Murphy's Law is going to catch up with us sooner or later. It's time to give some serious thought to the question of where to go. In the short run I will probably move to a safer location in the US, but in the long run that won't do. It's not hard to find places that have neither hurricanes nor earthquakes, but when the financial storm hits, the whole country will be affected.  Other countries will also be affected in unpredictable ways.

The general solution to this problem is to have homes and businesses  in more than one country. The network of businesses should be designed so it can cope with whatever happens - physical disasters, inflation, deflation, political upheaval, whatever. It should float above the world, never tied to any one physical place. I mentioned before that this is the same principle as the internet, where if some nodes are broken the others still function. It's also similar to a hedge fund, where you bet on different things that go up or down independently of each other (you hope).

A very astute reader might notice that this concept is also isomorphic to something else, something that has come up on this site many times, but usually in a negative way. I'm not going to explain that, I'm just going to leave it as a riddle.

The network of businesses should embody a model of the economy - a better model than the economy has of itself, as it were.

As I said before:  the one who has the best model of reality on all levels will win.

September 24

Guess what's on the cover of this week's New Scientist:  "THE INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION - Ray Kurzweil charts the next step in human evolution"

So the Singularity is not a dead issue after all. On the contrary, it's the latest hot topic in tabloid science. Most of Ray Kurzweil's article could have appeared on transhuman mail lists a decade ago, and it wouldn't have been state of the art even then. In those days New Scientist wouldn't touch this subject.  As far as they were concerned, the Singularity was crank stuff, like Velikovsky, the sort of thing science journalists laugh at. Now, in 2005, they put it on the cover. Wow. They are really on top of things.

Some of what Ray says makes sense and some of it doesn't. I don't have much to add to what I said on the pages referred to at the top of this page, but I will say this:

Suppose you have a rocket moving at 1000 km/hour, and it is accelerating. Its velocity is increasing exponentially. After a time it is moving 20 billion times faster... No, wait a minute. Is that possible?  If you multiply 1000 km/hour by 20 billion, you get a result that makes no physical sense. Velocity is not the kind of quantity that can be multiplied by an arbitrary number. The same question can be asked about intelligence. Does it make sense to start with a certain level of intelligence, and then multiply it by 20 billion?

It makes even less sense. At least velocity is a measurable quantity that can be multiplied, sometimes. For further discussion I refer you to the Singularity page and Part 3 of Nanotechnology without Genies.

September 25

Of course most people don't want to think about questions like that. Whether a concept makes sense is not on their radar screen. They will look at Ray's graphs and believe them.  The interesting thing about this is that Ray has dumbed the Singularity down to the point that even New Scientist will put it on the cover, and now that it has been on the cover of New Scientist, it will have credibility with the general public. Ray has just published a new book, The Singularity for Dummies,  a sequel to his earlier book, Transhumanism for Dummies. 

The Singularity meme has arrived.  It has emerged from obscurity and become part of public discourse.  I expect to see it on the Jeff Rense site any time now, and then in The National Enquirer, Time magazine, 60 Minutes, etc.

I am trying to imagine what Barbara Walters would do with this story. When she interviewed Bill Gates, she asked a question that began "When you invented software..."  He just grinned and didn't try to correct her.

And here it is!  It appeared on Rense.com, 12/30/05...  LOL

September 26

Today is my Easter.

This is the 23rd anniversary of the Breakthrough, which you will have read about if you have explored the deeper layers of the site. It's a private thing, not to mention illegal, and I'm not sure how much I want to say about it on the home page.

For a while, I was where I wanted to be, where I always want to be.  Ever since then, I have been trying to get back to the space I reached in 1982, starting on September 26. To me, the Singularity means reaching that state permanently. I don't care what, if anything, happens to the world. Maybe the Singularity will be some kind of apocalyptic event, maybe not. My own personal Singularity may not even be a noticeable event to an external observer. I don't care one way or the other, as long as I get there and stay there.

I'm not sure how much I could say about this even if I wanted to - partly because I don't remember it clearly, and partly because it defies description. It is, first of all, a state of absolute concentration. It's like playing the 15th level of a video game (at the time I had been playing TI Invaders). Unlike playing a game, however, it is effortless, unhurried concentration. It also involves the whole person, not just the mind. One thing I remember about it is that I kept thinking "If this stays on the level of having visions, it's worthless. If it doesn't lead to physical transformation, it's not what it purports to be."

It did lead to a physical rejuvenation, to some extent. I had always looked older than my age. I never got carded. When I was 30, people thought I was 40.  When I really was 40, four years after the Breakthrough, people thought I was in my late 20's.

In the last chapter of Jacob Atabet,  Michael Murphy said

Everything is made of music - each voice, each body, every step we take. The whole world is nothing but music.

Each body, burning like a flame as two and a half million red cells come into being each second, is far less solid than we think. The earth is tinder for spirit. All of it is ready to burst into new flame.

Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

October 12, 2005

The September 26 entry was supposed to be the last. A few days after posting it, I removed the quotation at the end. It's from Romans, chapter 12, and I removed it because I think most of Romans is incoherent and some of it (particularly chapter 9, verses 10-23 and chapter 13, verses 1-5) is monstrous. I didn't want to close my home page with a line from Romans, of all things. However, that line sums up what I am doing better than anything I have ever seen, so today I put it back. In any case the September 26 entry is not going to be the end of the page. I have more to say.

My vision of the End Times is almost isomorphic to the vision of the Bible. I have known that for a long time, and I have hinted at a connection. There are many allusions to the Bible on this site. Paul's "be transformed" line already occurred in one of the original nanotech pages. It's time to stop hinting and write about this explicitly.

I have just read Left Behind  by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. It is very, very well done. I read it straight through in two days. It's a gripping story, but the basic thing that needs to be said is that it's not true. There isn't going to be a Rapture, at least not like that, not the way it is described in the book. Yes, we are in the End Times, but that's not how it works. Left Behind  is almost right, but fundamentally wrong.

In one of his more lucid moments, or one of his more honest moments, Paul said "Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face." That's the traditional King James Version. Glass means looking glass. Modern translations say "a poor reflection as in a mirror," or "in a mirror, obscurely," or something to that effect. This applies to the whole Bible, including Paul's letters, and particularly including the Book of Revelation. All the old prophecies are reflections in a cracked and clouded mirror.

As Michael Murphy says, "All the old maps are incomplete."

One problem with "Born Again Christians" (one problem among many) is that they think their map is already complete. As I said on the 915 page, our language will evolve as we approach the Singularity. That's how we get from here to there.

Returning once again to the anti-survivalist theme: at a time when everything is falling apart, the second most important thing you can have is an organized support group. The most important thing is the ability to distinguish what's real from what isn't. If you don't know what's going on, your efforts will come to nothing. If your support group is based on a delusional belief system, you are just going to dig yourselves in deeper. Actually that's only true in the long run. If you are just dealing with an emergency such as the aftermath of an earthquake, then any support group, even Scientology, would be better than nothing. But if the chaotic situation is going to go on for years, and therefore your participation in the group is more or less permanent, then you had better join something that makes sense.

As we approach the end, there is going to be a general breakdown that could fairly be described as the Tribulation. At the end of Left Behind,  the four protagonists band together into what they call the Tribulation Force. The book ends as follows:

"The task of the Tribulation Force was clear and their goal nothing less than to stand and fight the enemies of God during the seven most chaotic years the planet would ever see."

The 915 movement, as I originally conceived it in the 1990s, was supposed to be something like that, but of course it didn't work. One problem with me (one problem among many) is that I won't let  anybody agree with me. Just the other day I heard from a young man who buys into both parts of the 915 concept, but I put him off. When he tried to agree with me, I said "Yes, but---" and then contradicted him. After a while he gave up. He's not going to be joining the movement, and neither is anybody else. I won't let anybody join. Another problem is that I don't really agree with the 915 concept myself anymore. It was a step in the right direction, but only a step, and it's time to move on.

As for fighting the enemies of God, the only thing I can do about that is to keep on writing articles like the Third Wave page and the Six Reasons page. When I argue against liars and people who sow seeds of confusion, I am fighting the only battle I am in a position to fight.  In fact that's the only battle that matters. Before you can fight the enemies of God, first you have to identify who they are. I am afraid the "Born Again Christians" don't have a clue. As far as I am concerned, anybody who lies - I mean lies about important things, not trivial things - is the enemy.

The key thing is to recognize that this can only be done alone. I can never be part of a Tribulation Force, or any kind of movement, even if I organized it myself.  Joining a group - i.e. a group with an ideology - would make it impossible for me to do what I do. Therefore my support group has to be a network of businesses that are just businesses. Assuming there is a certain amount of camaraderie and esprit de corps among the employees, that would be an almost ideal support group.

October 14

I have come a long, long, way in the last couple of days.  After reading Left Behind,  I said it's almost right but fundamentally wrong. Now I would turn that around and say it's wrong about almost all of the details, but fundamentally right. It may be a vision in a clouded mirror, a very clouded mirror, but it's basically a true vision. Since I started reading it, I have felt grounded in spiritual reality and full of strength.

And yes, I definitely want to be part of the Tribulation Force. I know it won't be easy for me to fit into that scene. I am still going to be the same uncontrollable force I have always been.  I am still going to say the green pencil is longer when everybody else says the red pencil is longer, and they aren't going to appreciate that any more than anybody else does.

--------------

Later in the day... I am feeling some pretty severe dissonance. I started to look something up in the Bible, and suddenly found myself in a world of Passover lambs and all kinds of nonsense. This mirror is broken, shattered, useless.  No, of course  I could never fit into that scene. I may be part of some kind of Tribulation Force, in a general sense, but not Tim LaHaye's Tribulation Force. As I said before, what I am doing can only be done alone.

I am going to retreat back to my own domain. I am going to spend the rest of the evening curled up with Applied Differential Geometry  by William Burke, which is probably the most beautiful book I own. It's not just beautiful, it makes sense.  I am going to read that book and try to get grounded in a different way. And then I am going to sleep on it.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, here is another take on Revelation: Apocamon: an anime version of the Apocalypse.

October 15

Stories have real effects, even if the premise of the story is absurd, and even if you know it's absurd.  Of course, I knew all along that Left Behind  is preposterous, but knowing that intellectually didn't stop me from getting caught up in the story.  For several days I woke up earlier than usual and had lots of clear energy all day.  That's a fact. That really happened. But when I was reading Luke, and came across the part about the Passover lamb, all of a sudden the magic was gone. The Passover lamb is no more absurd than the Rapture, but for some reason that pushed me over the edge, and the spell was broken. The euphoria disappeared.  Now I feel like a flat tire.  Going back to my mathematical roots didn't help. I need to live in a story as much as anybody else.

With my geek background, it's hard for me to accept this. I live in a matter of fact world. I always have to ask whether stories are factually true or factually false.  This is good, usually, up to a point, but sometimes that's the wrong question to ask. However if a story is supposed to be historically true, that question can't be avoided.

What bothered me about the Passover lamb is that it put everything into a different context. The book of Exodus is fiction. There was no original Passover. Jesus didn't know that. He didn't know what any undergraduate archeology student knows today, therefore he could not be what he is supposed to be. That pulls the rug out from under the whole gospel story, which is the larger story that frames Left Behind,  and so Left Behind  is left hanging.

And I am left hanging too, alas... Geek or not, I need stories as much as anybody. I need a mythical context for my life. I also need a social context. It's all very well to say that what I am doing can only be done alone, but I can't live alone.  Without a social context, I lose my motivation.  There have been numerous occasions in the past when I felt connected, and I felt the same energy that I felt in the last few days. When the connection turned out to be an illusion, I felt the same letdown I felt last night. I need not just a story but a shared story, which leads to a shared project of some kind.  Without that, I'm living at half speed.

So I need to deal with this. Instead of waiting for something to turn up, I need to approach this problem systematically and solve it once and for all. I have to find a shared story and a shared project. I have to either decide on an existing story that I can take seriously, or create one.

There are constraints. It can't be just any story. It has to make sense. A story has real effects even though you know it's absurd, but only up to a point. Eventually you reach a tipping point, after which the absurdity becomes too obvious to ignore. Then you snap out of it.

For me to take a story seriously, it has to take into account everything  that's happening on the most general level, which means it can't be a secular story. This condition eliminates political stories about nations and economic classes. In other words, it has to be religious in some sense. It has to involve a struggle against evil - the "Tribulation Force" idea has to be there in some form - otherwise it won't engage me on an emotional level. It has to be either a story that's already there, or something that emerges naturally from what's already there - not something I just made up for the occasion. And finally, it has to be something that resonates with other people, not just me - the plot cannot be "Lyle goes off by himself."

That may be too many constraints. It's not clear that any story exists which satisfies all those conditions. I may be asking for an impossible combination.

The quandary is that my story inevitably leads to the End Times, the culmination of history, and that concept comes from the Bible - but I don't take the Old Testament seriously at all anymore. The question of whether Jesus was the Jewish Messiah goes right past me. It's like asking "How many Hobbits does it take to change a light bulb?"  It's a nonsensical question. There is no such thing as "the Messiah."  The idea of sacrificing lambs is bizarre. The idea that "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness" is also bizarre. The more I think about all this, the less sense it makes. The concept of Yahweh, the male god who declares war on the Queen of Heaven and wants to tear down all her altars, is not exactly meaningless, but it is pernicious. And yet, as I said, the very idea of the End Times is Biblical. How can you have the End Times without the rest of the Bible story?

There is no obvious way out of this, but I think there must be a way.

October 16

Yesterday I was assuming that my story has to be a cosmic story. That may be the problem. Maybe I could settle for mundane stories such as "we fall in love and get married."  The rush of falling in love is similar to the surge of energy that I experienced a few days ago.

Actually there was more to it than that. Leaving all the hocus pocus aside, there is a special energy that you get from the Bible, a kind of YMCA healthiness, so to speak. However, this is not unique to Christianity. Qigong masters have it too. Most Christians don't have it. It's pretty rare, in or out of church.

As for the End Times, that concept may be irrelevant. Michael Murphy doesn't talk about the end of history, he talks about the end of ordinary history, which is a different thing. My idea of the Singularity is that it's comparable to the Cambrian Explosion, which was just a change, not the end of the universe. The Singularity is not an end but a beginning, a transition to something unknown. It has absolutely nothing to do with Yahweh vs. Asherah, or the Chosen People and their Messiah, or the Seven Vials and Seven Trumpets, or any of that stuff.

There is no use trying to make the future fit into any of the old myths.  Some of them may seem to be relevant, but they are only relevant by accident, like a broken clock that is right twice a day.

We are in uncharted territory now. The only way to keep up with what's happening, let alone make it happen, is to leave all the old stories and concepts behind and think thoughts that seem insane to most people.

Maybe I should keep such thoughts to myself. Gauss refused to publish his work on non-Euclidean geometry, "to avoid the clamor of the Boeotians," as he put it. There are still plenty of Boeotians out there, as I know all too well.  It should be noted that Gauss was a lonely and unhappy man. When you think thoughts that have to be kept secret - or thoughts that nobody else understands, even if you don't keep them secret - you pay a heavy price.

I am willing to pay that price, or any price. Whatever it takes.

When I started writing about Biocentric Transhumanism, I used the word "we." It turned out that there is no "we." The Singularity does not give rise to a human story. Nor does it give rise to a shared project. I am just going to have to get along without a shared story and a shared project, on that level.  I would love to be part of some kind of Tribulation Force, but if that's not possible, so be it. As for losing my motivation, that doesn't have to be a problem. There are other ways to have a social context for my life, besides joining a project designed to fight the enemies of God.  The basic idea is to pull back to a less abstract level.

Marriage would give me a social context, the only one I really need, the only one that matters.  The stories page could give rise to a literary scene, which would be a shared project.

My conclusion of October 12 still stands:  joining a group with an ideology would make it impossible for me to do what I do. My support group has to be a network of businesses that are just businesses.

That's not what I really want, but that's what I am going to settle for, for the time being. As the song says, you can't always get what you want.

...On second thought, maybe that is what I want.

Actually the Singularity does have a story associated with it:  the old Darwinian story of competition for survival. The competition is going to get very tough. Illusions of any kind are not conducive to survival. Like everybody, I was taught all kinds of nonsense in the first two decades of my life, and some of it is wired into my brain at a fundamental level. Unlearning it is not easy. As recently as a few days ago I was still susceptible to Left Behind,  of all things.  But I snapped out of it.  I guess I will always have an element of John Wesley in me, and I will probably always be susceptible to stories or myths in which Lyle is a knight going forth to right the world's wrongs. As I get older I see this in perspective, and I think it's kind of funny to watch myself doing it.

I am continually trying to get all the nonsense out of my mind - about artificial intelligence, about religion, about politics, about everything. The correct philosophy is the one that leads to the metamorphosis.

I want to see the world with absolute clarity and act on what I see.  When the competition comes down to the final crunch, I want to win.

Absolute clarity can only be approached asymptotically, through an ongoing process of adjustment. Obviously I have a long way to go (and so does everybody else). As I said before, this whole site is work in progress.

This is now a very long page. Enough is enough. When I started writing these notes, back in August and early September, the idea was to record my daily thoughts for a while, to give my readers a chance to get to know me better. That purpose has been achieved. Not many people read this far down the page, but anybody who does read this far should have some idea where I'm coming from, albeit a very limited idea. It should be noted that I have also been reading Logical Investigations by Edmund Husserl and Computer Architecture by Gerrit Blaauw and Fred Brooks. That's the kind of material I normally read. The topics I have been discussing recently are usually in the background. At least I try  to keep that stuff in the background. I wish  it would stay in the background.

I have also learned some things about myself in the course of writing this page. For example, in the previous paragraph, after writing "That's the kind of material I normally read,"  I added "That's where I live and who I am." But then I erased it. I'm not sure that's who I am anymore. Maybe it's time to update my self image.

Two more points should be made here, to avoid giving a false impression. (1) I stopped going to church in junior high. In the 9th grade, I was the class atheist. I am the last person who would be expected to read something like Left Behind,  let alone get caught up in it.  But I did.  That subject isn't going to go away, for me or for the world.  (2) There is more than one way to enter this site. Some of my visitors just come here to look at the sex pages. Yes, the sex pages. This site has an x-rated section. It's as hot as anything on the internet, and John Wesley would not be amused. (Well, he probably would be amused, but he would never admit it.) This site would be more fun if I moved those pages to the foreground, but that would require a pretty radical change to my persona. I don't want to be Hugh Hefner or Gerard Titsman. Nevertheless the pages are there.

I am probably weakening myself by adopting a respectable persona. There is such a thing as too much discretion. I am not a goody-two-shoes transhumanist. Breast tantra is the most explosive thing I do, and I would have more juice if I went ahead and did it as openly as Gerard does.

A lot more could be said, but if I am going to continue doing this, I should get a real blog. It's time to bring this page to an end.

October 22, 2005

I just have to add one more thing. I found this in the news today:

"Left Behind" series debuts in churches

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The third installment of the Bible-inspired Left Behind movie series is premiering this weekend, using an unconventional marketing strategy of screening the film in over 3,000 churches nationwide just a few days before the movie's DVD release.

The film, produced by Cloud Ten Pictures and distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, chronicles apocalyptic times after millions of Christians ascend to heaven during the Rapture. Those people remaining are left to deal with chaos on earth, including the rise of a charismatic European leader who promises world peace and believes all religions are the same, and who turns out to be Satan.

The first two films in the series, which came out on DVD in stores then had limited theater runs, sold more than 6 million copies and generated $100 million in spending, according to Peter Lalonde, chairman of Cloud Ten.

Lalonde hopes to move 2 million copies of the latest version in the first four months. At $25 a pop, that's $50 million.

But Lalonde says he isn't just doing it for the money.

LOL

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causos.

Tim LaHaye is a prime example of someone who is lying about important things and sowing seeds of confusion. When we enter the Great Contraction - a time when agriculture becomes practically impossible in many parts of the world, the oceans are almost devoid of fish, and obesity is no longer a problem - he and his followers will still be here. They will not be raptured away.  Everybody  will still be here, except the ones who die.  Then some of the people who bought his books and believed them will catch on that they have been lied to and ripped off. Others won't catch on even then. They will keep coming back for more illusions, which the evangelists will be happy to provide.

Tim LaHaye and his business partners will still have the money, and that will help a lot. When TSHTF, their followers will be left out in the cold, or out in the heat as the case may be, but LaHaye and his cohorts will have as much safety as money can buy. As long as there are gated communities to live in, that's where they will live, and as long as any food is available, they will be able to buy it. As much as I detest them, I have to admit that they have a good racket, and I admire their hypnotic storytelling skills. Like any widely believed lie, the Left Behind story has found a large audience because in some twisted fashion it reflects the reality of people's lives. During Katrina, somebody made an astute observation: it was like the Rapture, in the sense that rich people were whisked out of harm's way, and everybody else was left behind.

April 21, 2006

I have written a new page about different schools of thought in mathematics, how mathematics should be taught, how it relates to philosophy, etc. The new page is in one of the most hidden areas of the site, and I want to bring it to the surface. I have also added a link to it near the top of this page, but it won't hurt to have two links.

What a relief it is to leave all that other stuff behind - pun fully intended - and return to mathematics!  If all goes well, the new page will be the first of a new series of pages.

January, 2007

I don't visit my own website very often, except for a few pages that I am currently working on. A few weeks ago I read the home page, i.e. this page, for the first time in quite a while. Most of this page was written about a year and a half ago. Some of it is still valid, but some of it seems strange and distant now.

The first thing that needs to be corrected is my whiny complaints about my readers. When my nanotech pages first appeared in the spring of 1999, the response was not uniformly negative. It ranged from enthusiasm to incomprehension. That has remained true ever since. The response has never been uniformly negative, and the balance is shifting in a positive direction. A lot of my readers get it.

Not only that, there are a lot more readers than there used to be. I have been getting a thousand visitors a day to this site.

Apparently I have a wired-in tendency to see myself as isolated and misunderstood. This is irrational. It is a bias. It distorts my perception of reality. All such distortions have to go.

I may have been wrong about Exodus. That issue is far from settled. (See Biblical Archeology Review, January/February 2007.) Therefore my comments about Jesus were off the mark. In any case, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are bigger than the Bible, and bigger than the "Messiah" concept.

After almost 2,000 years, Christianity has reached a dead end. They are just repeating words mindlessly, and going through the motions of rituals that have lost all connection with spiritual reality. At the beginning of the 21st century, the church is an old wineskin that cannot hold new wine.

Moving on to politics, I was wrong about the 2004 election being the last one in which the real issues could not even be discussed. The powers that be have tightened their grip. In the 2006 election, no candidate made an issue of 9/11, or habeas corpus, not to mention more fundamental things. The Democrats won the election, and - surprise! - nothing changed.

But the fun is about to start. A lot of people are beginning to catch on that there is a reason why nothing changed. By this time just about everybody with a triple digit IQ must be aware that 9/11 was a hoax, and that our "representatives" in both  parties don't represent us, they represent a foreign country. To turn Eliot's famous saying on its head, people can only stand so much unreality. A lot of people are starting to see what's going on. To take just one example, consider this recent article by Marc Faber. He uses a code word instead of saying it straight out, but he says it. At least he says part of it. He is only concerned with one aspect. Many, many other people are saying it too, from other angles. Almost everywhere I look on the internet, I see the same thing. A few years ago I was a voice in the wilderness, but not anymore.

Seeing what's going on is not the same as having enough political leverage to do something about it. Last fall, Ernst Zundel said "We are close to an upheaval of horrific proportions that will change the political landscape drastically. Nothing will be as it has been up to now."  Maybe so, but it is hard to see what form this upheaval could take. Upheavals don't just happen by themselves, spontaneously. Somebody has to organize them, or at least create a catalyst or seed around which the upheaval can form. No such seed exists.

Zundel may be referring to a culture-wide change of consciousness, rather than a political movement. But even so, a change of consciousness does not automatically translate into political leverage. In fact the other side may want  an upheaval, since they are very good at consolidating and extending their power in times of chaos. They  have leverage. You may rage against the machine, but it's still there. Throwing a tantrum is not the way to deal with it.

It is still possible, barely possible, that my old friend George will come to his senses and realize that the neocons are the real evildoers. That would be an unlikely turn of events, but stranger things have happened. If not, the catastrophe I was expecting in 2005 is only months away. In fact I don't think George could stop it even if he tried. Events have been set in motion, and they will proceed to a conclusion. War in the Persian Gulf is almost inevitable. Even if the U.S. does not attack Iran, it will still happen.

As Iraq continues to disintegrate, other countries will be sucked into the vacuum. Turkey will enter from the north, to fight the Kurds. Syria and Iran will come in from the west and east. Saudi Arabia will come up from the south to defend the Sunnis, and Iran and Saudi Arabia will end up fighting each other. The whole region will be reduced to the same condition as Iraq. This is not a failure of policy, it is a success. It's what the neocons intended all along. At this point it is too late to prevent this outcome. It will happen no matter what the U.S. does. Stay in Iraq, or withdraw; attack Iran, or don't attack; the result is the same.

We have to assume that the supply of oil from the Persian Gulf, which is 25% of the world's supply of oil, will be cut off for an indefinite period.

In the October 12 entry above, I said that when everything is falling apart, the second most important thing you can have is an organized support group, and the most important thing is the ability to distinguish what's real from what isn't.  Well, I left something out. The very first thing is to be spiritually grounded.

The first priority is to restructure our minds so as to open ourselves to the power of God. That is the only thing that will get us through the coming maelstrom, and that is exactly what I have been doing. I start meditating the moment I wake up in the morning. "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind" - that is my daily practice.

Matthew 17:2 -  "There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light."  If you look at the original Greek you discover that the word "transfigured" in Matthew 17:2 is the same as "transformed" in Romans 12:2.  In both verses it's the verbal form of the Greek word metamorphosis.

No such thing is happening in churches, whether they are fundamentalist, liberal, or whatever. Churches have no concept of metamorphosis. I am not the only one who is exasperated with today's Mickey Mouse churches. I am not the only one who feels a need for a church which is focused on metamorphosis, no matter what it takes - yoga, pranayama combined with chanting and singing, meditation and prayer undertaken with absolute concentration, visualization, mathematics, music, philosophy, and other things that I won't try to list here.

Our minds exist within a larger mind - that applies to everybody, not just me. I am not the only one who is trying to tune in to that mind, and resonate with it, and let it transform me.

On the math page, I said that when I read Disquisitiones Arithmaticae, I try to imagine being Gauss, as he wrote the words I am reading. I try to join my mind with his, and let his thoughts shape my thoughts, like a morphogenetic field. The idea here is to go two steps beyond that. Gauss himself was letting the larger mind shape his thoughts. But it's not just a matter of shaping one's thoughts - if you go all the way, you let the morphogenetic field reshape your physical body from within.

January, 2008

The long-awaited rewriting of geniebusters is underway. As a first step, I removed the "treason" material that was here. This whole page probably won't be here much longer. The new site is going to be less political. I never intended to be a pundit.

I have been invited to an event where Laura will definitely be present (she's hosting it), and George may show up too. (I'm not going to say what it is or where it's going to happen, for security reasons.) It would be very strange to see them after all these years. It would be like meeting Leslie, my pinup girl. Famous people live in a different space, or at least they seem to, and when you meet them in real life, it's weird. I am trying to remember who they actually are (as opposed to their public roles) - the boy on the playground, the girl in honors English.  I am trying to imagine being in the same room with them, in an informal setting.

George probably had nothing to do with 9/11.  I imagine Cheney and Rumsfeld planned it, and George wasn't in the loop. If they did not tell him what was happening, he would not be able to figure it out by himself. He was not even aware of "the internets" until recently, so 9/11 websites have not come to his attention. He probably believes everything he says about the "evildoers." And if some trusted person took him aside and explained the whole thing to him - not in an accusatory way, but just explained what happened - he would change his mind about who the evildoers are.

Of course I'm just speculating here. I don't know if this is real. Is it possible that he didn't know what was happening at the time, and still doesn't know?  That's a stretch.

Does it really matter? What if he did know? Getting that invitation put everything in a different light. We were friends all the way back to the first grade. Do his actions as President change that? I have done a lot of things myself - nothing on the same scale as 9/11, but still... If you entered this site the way most people do, you know what I mean. Who am I to judge? If I do see George, I think I will meet him with a twinkle in my eye.

Is that real?  Is it possible to separate our personal lives from the political reality we live in? This is the man who abolished the 800 year old principle of habeas corpus, not to mention everything else he has done. Does childhood friendship still matter? It doesn't matter to him, and it should not matter to me either. The wisest course is to stay away from the event in question. It wouldn't be fun, it would just be awkward. It would be impossible to ignore the elephant in the room.

If you click on the "elephant" link you will find just about the hottest prose I ever wrote. That's what used to be here on this page. Now that I have gotten over the shock of being invited to a White House event - and decided not to go - I decided to put it back, but it's on a separate page now. When I say the new site will be less political, that's not written in stone. We'll see. I am watching as events unfold.

(Note added later - the White House event I have been talking about was a class reunion. It happened March 29.)

Just a few more comments in pundit mode, and then I'm going to wrap this up:

We are in another election season now, and once again the real issues can't even be discussed. The vast majority of Americans still live in tv-land. The next President will be a Zionist. This is a foregone conclusion. Things won't change in America until things change in Israel itself. But they will change.

Here is a prophecy: Israel will implode, and the Apocalypse will not ensue.  Zionists of all kinds, both Jewish and Christian, will be discredited once and for all. The death throes will be very ugly, but the nightmare won't last forever. It is now possible to foresee a time when the President of the US will not be a Zionist - nor will the President of France, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and so forth for all countries.

In the 915 Manifesto, I wrote

Our enemy is insane, and insanity cannot prevail. Lies cannot prevail. In the long run we have to win, because reality is on our side.

I should have stuck to that. The Manifesto needs to be updated, but it was more right than wrong. Sanity will prevail in the end, and we should not be discouraged by temporary setbacks.

A lot of things that were bothering me when I wrote the upper part of this page are not going to be a problem in the long run. The "default future" is not inevitable. Far from it. Truth will prevail and lies will self-destruct. That is inevitable.

The standard view of the universe, both in religion and in science, is that it started at some definite point in the past, and extends into the indefinite future. Time had a beginning but doesn't have an end. The truth is just the opposite. There was no Big Bang in the past. The history of the universe extends into the indefinite past, but it will come to a climax at some definite point in the future. Creation is an ongoing process. When the universe has a complete model of itself, that will be the end of ordinary history. The Big Bang is in the future.

I can be reached here: diogenes-at-geniebusters-dot-org