Born Free

Food, Shelter

2010-03-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a while...

In a Christian hostel in Amsterdam, rather outside on the street in front of it, stark and wet grey dawns come and go... my hands, sheathed in red rubber, pick up trash, cigarette butts and chewed-up chicken wings from the cold brick, depositing into the black garbage bag.. my eyes scan the ground for gum, receipts, spliff filters, discarded cans and bottles..

i work with a mother and son from Hungary, but i dont know work the way that they know work... although we all work to survive.. they work to exist

they have no home to return to

Tomas, as we smoked Golden Gate cigarettes in the small courtyard, explained that he had some other prospects coming up

"On twenty-nine, i try for work at.. Burger King?" strong features, clear eyes that spoke dignity and lucid hardship, caught between memory and the approaching future..

"My father, says be send money. But no money." He took a drag and looked up at the rooftops and trees.

The topic changes. "You like action movie? Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Stallone?"

"Yes, I like them very much. Good movies." I forgot to say that i started talking to Tomas because he was whistling the Terminator 2 theme as he worked down the hall from me. I was elated.

"You like rock music? Scorpions, Guns and Roses, Pink Floyd?"

"Yeah man, awesome rock music. Very cool."

He looked up to the rooftops, clear, vigilant. "Yes. Rock music."

He suddenly turned to me with a need to communicate in his eyes:

"Them, the girl... they are... Prisoner of God!" His eyes strained to explain to me, but i understood.

"Ha ha. Yes, prisoners of God. It is very strange." I smiled.

He laughed heartily. "I believe in mother, father... for them, father is God!" He threw up his hands, uncomprehending.

How could you love an abstract concept more than your family? I could relate to his confusion.

4 days earlier, I had checked out of Bob's Youth Hostel in the heart of Amsterdam's red light district.

I ate the egg and bread breakfast, savored the tea. And asked a question of the New Zealander manning the desk.

"If you had to spend a few nights on the streets, where would you do it?"

He eyed me. "You are out of money?"

"Yeah. 4 days til my flight home. Any ideas?"

"Well, if teh weather was good I would say just make it to the westerpark, but its gonna be shit rain for days mate. Might try this homeless shelter." He marked it on a tourist map.

* * *

to be continued... so many tales to tell

Scenes from Thunder Bay, ON

2010-02-14T06:38:00.000-08:00

frozen grey dawn, greyhound bus depot.... 'blow at high dough' on the radio

followed by the Doors - 'people are strange'

and then another song, maybe steve miller, 'you can only drive down main street so many times'

got a whole bunch of new songs forming, soon soon

moving fast under brilliant star skies, death hurtles by inches away

slept through kenora, thought of rmrm

winnipeg was amazing, banff was chilled, skipped regina, vancouver was the best of all

left sleeping bag, useless clothes, bag of cinnamon sticks in a frozen-slop city bus shelter on Garry Street, in the Peg... dead weight

love

Tiny Tour 2010

2010-02-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow kicks off the first Small Wars tour.. here is a breakdown of dates.

sidney - folk society meeting (church)
victoria - folk society meeting (heritage house)
nanaimo - open mic (converted bank)
vancouver - open mic (coffee house)
banff - open mic (community center)
regina - busk (rcmp church)
winnipeg - full set (bike repair co-op)
toronto - open mic (hostel)
peterborough - support set (club)
ottawa - busk (eternal flame)
montreal - full set (club)
amsterdam - busk (squat)
the hague - busk (international court of justice)
antwerp - busk (hidden ancient street)
ghent - full set (anarchist community center)
bruxelles - full set (club)
paris - support set (club)
toulouse - support set (club)
barcelona - busk (ancient cemetary)
zaragoza - busk (3rd century roman tower)
rouen - busk (monument where joan of arc was burned at the stake)
lille - busk (palais des beaux-arts)
new york city - support set (club)
san francisco - support set (club)

All details and dates are here.

Single Cell

2010-01-21T10:49:00.000-08:00

Lymphocytes, Natural Killer cells, granulocytes... Protein envelopes, microphages, and advanced, self-replicating machinery...

Sounds like the Future but in fact, is the Past... Going all the way back from the Great Birth that probably happened at some point...

Studying the universe of the biological Body is fascinating, enlightening, and stupifyingly complex.

I have a cool book about the known processes of the human immune system that is my go-to text when I am sick of the lightstream that is the Net. It is written for the layperson (me), with enough technical language to keep things scientifically accurate.

The most interesting thing about the book is that, unlike most texts, it happily admits that very little is known about anything.

Finally, some honesty.

It is understood that there are groups of cells that swoop down to the site of any damaged tissue - microphages - and get to work cleaning out the area and destroying any bacteria or pollutants... There are the next-level guys (big eaters = macrophages) that do the same, there are antibodies (produced by the body to deactivate antigens, foreign substances in the body)...

They have their soldiers, and they engage in typical, chemical, and asymmetrical warfare - some cells can shoot others (granulocytes), some cause chemical reactions that blow-up tumor cells (NK cells.. awesome)... There is a mysterious substance called Interferon that cells deploy to fuck with the machinery of virus-inhabited cells, inhibiting their ability to replicate... There is an elaborate system of chemical communication between the brain, the limbic system and untold other regions using messages called Cytokines... little emails between varied regions that say "Got it", "Send more weapons to this region", or "We are fucking up"

Amazing, isn't it?

I mean - Why?

Good and bad, good and bad.... In the human world everything is grey, relative, and fluid according to norms and such...

In the natural world, devoid of morality, there is only the Threat and the Killer.

The cockiest of animals know that Death is everywhere...

And they take huge pleasure in destroying their enemies, in bringing Death to what they hate.

Is it wrong to feel the same way? To want to murder - ideas, paradigms, structures that threaten?

To feel a programmed, natural desire to Kill those who would enslave?

Wrong or not, I've always known that my purpose Here is to fight - conceptually and rationally, not with violence - the rotten scum who get off as they assault you... Who try to control our minds and bodies...

That's why this blog is called Born Free - because we were. I dont think anyone on this planet has authority to tell any other human what to do - Period.

That being said, I believe in co-operative government, sustainable communities, and equality for all. I believe that if someone is threatening your safety, you have the right to defend yourself.

All of these ideas will be important to keep in mind over the next decade or so.

Love

2010-01-20T22:09:00.000-08:00

We fear what we don't understand; it follows that if you don't understand yourself, you will become very fearful of yourself.

Isn't it confounding when you do something that makes no sense? One time I had a couple whiskeys in me and I walked out of a bar wearing someone else's jacket.

It was totally on purpose; I just felt like stealing. I had plenty of money so there was no motive beyond stupidity.

Luckily, that night I was spared a punching (dude tore the jacket off my frame, stared at me hard, and went back inside). But that was just one of a hundred thousand fuck-ups that have defined the majority of my life.

I'm sure you can relate - no need for an AA meeting here.

Could it be that fucking up, over and over and over again, is in fact our crossed-wires reaction to impulses that we don't understand?

Do we attempt to destroy what we fear - what we cannot understand?

Ourselves?

The short answer, for me at least, is yes.

Once this uncomfortable truth was identified, it was clear what had to be done: I had to start the process of making peace with myself.

Only, I wasn't ready. It took a couple more years of suffering before I finally injured myself so badly that there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide any longer.

It took until I had literally no other options, until I was confined to a bed, flush with agony and stricken with narcotic emptiness, before I finally stopped... started to breathe... and raised my eyes to face my aggressor, my tormentor - myself.

Sorry, I know this is coming across a bit self-involved (a bit? ;) - Ed.), but it's a personal topic after all, not to mention I'm only starting to get this myself...

I hope that anyone who reads this understands that I need this for me too - I don't only write for people to read.

The journey to the center of my own existence was prompted by need...

I had been steadily taking 2 x 2mg Dilaudid pills, three times a day, to dull the pain of a severe injury.

Like any heroin, it didn't take long before the little pink bastards were no longer up to the task of fighting off the waves of deep, crushing pain that accompany a broken-and-reassembled femur.

In the basement, alone in darkness, I writhed like an animal...

I pleaded in desperation to an unknown God... I tried to sleep the remainder of my life away...

But there was no way out.

When I awoke from a 14 hour heroin-sleep, mentally and physically shattered...

When I awoke to find the beginnings of bedsores on my elbows, legs, back...

I fucking lost it.

In this moment, I realized the true, fundamental, nature of Human Existence:

Fight - or Die.

Adrenalin surged, my mind snapped taut. One thought overwhelmed: NO.

I surged upward, reached for my crutches, and maneuvered my way up to a hobbling stature, breathing through clenched and dirty teeth.

I stood, naked and broken, but not dead. I felt my heart pumping fluid and my brain calculating my balance. I felt my eyes sharpen to razors and my balls fill with blood.

No fucking way. Not like this.

I wanted to scream, to twist the steel crutches into wire, to rip my flesh off with my bare hands.

I hadn't known that I wanted to live - ever. Having never been faced with the rotting of my own facilities, the test had never been put to my Will to Live.

And when I had finally sunk myself so low, after years of pushing and pushing - I ran face-first into Nature's first command, wound deep and simple, hidden in a little box on a strand of DNA:

Live.

I stood, sweat-soaked and emaciated - and I Saw, for the first time.

I could see the knot in my bone, the one being carefully knitted by the army of benevolence that was - Is - my Body. I could see the crackling of the energy deep within the structure I inhabit, could feel the warm and assured hum of Healing - working, working.

I saw, finally, that it Loved me.

It had been with me since I was conceived, had spent untold kilowatts of cosmic power to design and grow me... to protect me from Death, ever in the wings... it had subverted callous bacteria and cunning viruses, led great armies, had fought and would continue to fight - to the very end - because it Loves me... Believes in me and my ability to do good, not bad...

And that was when I realized that I had never, ever loved myself.

Schooling Cokeheads

2010-01-20T21:00:00.000-08:00

There is a strange and vast body of knowledge to be navigated...

It is coded deep within the elusive currents that wind between relatively sturdy islands of study: immune system function, emotional states, drugs, spirituality, the quantum level of reality...

Actually, none of those are sturdy fields of study.. But they are better-explored than the new creeks and rivers I'm stepping into..

Learning to like yourself is Step One for those of us with issues - standard, North American-issue issues like self-loathing, perpetual illness, impotent anger... issues that are often compounded by intangible factors like uncertainty and uncomfortability (new word).

When your body is the enemy, the failed state, the lurking terrorist - external hardships are rendered black-and-white, muted by the constant hum of internal Threat.

In this state - when occupying this particular range of bandwidth - Pain is a Master, Love is like a bad touch from an uncle, and Fear is a well-worn, springy, black-as-night couch that is impossibly uncomfortable but consistently reassuring in it's familiarity.

When we live this Reality, it is unavoidable: We Are It.

It isn't a mindset that can be cheered-up, nor a mood that can be swept aside by distraction.

Not a reaction to a set of circumstances; It is the circumstance, You are the circumstance -

I am the circumstance, and I cannot be avoided.

I have come to discover, however, that I can be negotiated with.

I talk to myself a lot. This could of course be considered unhealthy, but I think offhand dismissals of curious human behavior as 'crazy' is as myopic as believing anything that the revered psychoanalyst, cocaine-addict Freud had to say...

And his theories have formed the basis of our entire social philosophy in the 20th century...

So whats really crazy - basing your world-view on the rantings of an incest-obsessed cokehead, or having a dialogue with yourself?

Moving right along...

Talking to ones' self is an exercise in Rationality, not lunacy. It is an attempt to externalize the continuous internal dialogue that we as people carry with us - an attempt to shed the light of the world on the dark corners of our own psyche... The idea being that things make more sense once examined in reality than they do trapped in our heads.

Without ever having touched a therapeutic text in regards to how one might heal insatiable wounds of the spirit, I've come to realize that building up a dialogue with yourself is one of the keys to negotiating a ceasefire.

It is after all your Self that you are at war with - it makes sense that the Self must be invited to the bargaining table.

Some psychoanalysis is strictly focused on the determination of the trigger - what happened to make you this way? - but after some paddling about in that river of filth, I find it to be entirely unhelpful.

You could liken it to being stuck in a dirt-pit, and deciding that the best way to get out would be to sit down and think about that first shovel-bite that got you there...

It doesn't work - not for me, not for anybody. All it does is start (or reinforce) the process of defining yourself by your problems, your issues, your nightmares.

The closer you hold them - your precious trauma - the more confidently they own you.

Going the opposite route - pretending that everything is fine, that you are happy and well-adjusted and, no, you don't want to drag a razor across your own tongue - invariably leads to the complete ownership of your soul by your trauma. Every second you evade it, deny it, it cackles with steel teeth and a forever smile of hate... Laughing at your pitiful, scrounging, transparent (to everyone) attempt to pretend to be Normal.

Normal - which doesn't exist on Planet Earth, except as a false concept in some of our minds.

So - pretending it's not there won't work. Gingerly stepping in to the hot shit-bath of trauma analysis - also, won't work.

Just like in any war, the only way to start to bring a rational, workable solution to the table...

Is to Talk.

One of the things I noticed about myself, after many years, is that when I talk to myself, I always say 'we'.

As in: "Ok. We have to make it to the dentist this week, and ideally, we should refrain from smoking weed for a couple days after they rip that tooth out."

This is common - you could even say it's Normal :)

This nearly-universal commonality in the self-conversation shows how there is an inherent divide within most of us - I think it's fair to say that the divide is what separates our Higher and Lower selves.

The Higher self conspires to control and contain the irrational Lower self - the side that succumbs to self-abuse, disregard for harmony, the side that says "yeaaahrreaggghh" and sniffs up piles of coke like old Sigmund.

Conscience, Morality, Reason - these are the traits of the language used by the Higher Self.

So when we speak with ourselves, we are attempting to reason with an unreasonable beast - the caged-rhino inside who would rather just wreck the place, pump one out and collapse in slumber.

Remember the song, "God help the beast in me?"

Remember how earlier this week, I wrote about how God is actually our higher nature?

Now I'm talking to myself again... hold up.

So talking to yourself, according to me, is in fact very healthy, especially for someone who doesn't like themselves.

Humans don't like to be confused; we are really fucking smart (and stupid, in other ways).

When you are as smart as we are, anything that cannot be understood is immediately classified as Threat.

This is why... if you don't Understand yourself... you Fear yourself.

Part II next.

Untitled

2010-01-20T14:02:00.001-08:00

When things fall apart - bodies, minds, connections - Life is in motion

There is no real Reason... but there is Pain, and there is Suffering

The end of Life is an end to Pain, a release of gravity

The weight is lift, the Suffering is broken

By the gentle lap of the saline sea

Only the greatest Love can be satisfied

By choosing to leave the world behind

And to go home

Signs

2010-01-18T16:57:00.000-08:00

Got a good sign from the Google Ad gods today, while using the booking account:

Dictionary.com Word of the Day: apposite (adj.): of striking appropriateness or relevance

I think the Net is getting smarter! ;)

Jesus, age-play, and the Human Temple

2010-01-17T10:28:00.000-08:00

Once you've bounced off the bottom a few times, you acquire a sort of metaphysical altimeter that beeps red when you start to drop again. These beeps often show up as thought patterns - meaning when certain thoughts arrive, your survival instinct recognizes them as dangerous and tells you so - but not always. Sometimes the alarm is external, a 'sign' to you to change your current path, and quickly.

It's funny how guilt and subconscious desires work... Some theorize that our actions are just a product of varied internal pressures, that free will is not free at all but at the whim of our biochemistry. Others think the opposite, that too much attention is paid to the details of action and thought, and not enough paid to the grand cosmic force that is our ability to Choose.

As usual, I think the truth lies somewhere in between.

One thing I am sure of is that when my altimeter starts to spin and whine with mechanical stress, I need to stop and examine what I am doing - physically, mentally, spiritually.

Caving to your worst desires is a death of sorts. Paradoxically, being a paragon of virtue and continuously denying your own twisted ideas is a kind of death as well.

The French call the orgasm petit mort, meaning 'the small death'. It's an apt description, since any and all of Life's rich array of emotions can be found in this window to eternity, depending on the situation...

One of the more overlooked concepts in religious texts, specifically the Bible, is the concept of the temple of worship. Jesus said something to the effect that external houses of worship are unnecessary to see God; that, in fact, God resides within us all.

Actually, a lot of what Jesus 'said' (flip through one of those Bibles that has all Jesus' actual words in red) was awesome: don't kill, don't steal, don't try to nail your friend's wife, etc.

Solid advice... and He hates interest charges too.

I think the bit about no temples of worship is one of the most revealing and important ideas in the Bibes. And since I think that the Bible is an amalgamation of a whole bunch of different allegories, tales, truths, distortions, and fiction - I think it is fair to say that some of it's strongest messages need not only apply to Christian thinkers. If you are critical and selective, you will discover that there is something to be learned in every text... Even the National Enquirer.

Knowing that there need be no mediator between us and God is a giant fucking relief. To know that speaking with God is means simply opening your mind and connecting with the infinite energy source that Is All Things is empowering, humbling, and eternally refreshing.

Priests, Imams, and Rabbis are people who have somehow been convinced that they are closer to God than you or I; that they have his ear and his blessing.

This is one hundred percent bullshit, wrapped in a costume and housed in a mansion of suffering.

God, simply, is our Higher Nature. It is the spark of divinity that humans are blessed with.

It is your conscience, your inspiration, your compassion and your reflection.

It is your shame, your mistake, and your remorse.

It is not your cleverness, your intelligence, or your cynicism. It is not your ability to manipulate; it is your ability to inspire. Not your ability to kill, but your choice to show mercy.

When we Choose Well, we harness the power of the true God that resides within us.

The root of all Choice is Morality - a human construct, necessary to our survival as a species.

Morality - an intangible manifestation of our inherent sympathy towards ourselves and our fellow life forms - is what keeps the majority of us from killing, raping, stealing and torturing - ourselves, as well as others.

When we subvert morality, pretend it doesn't exist or dismiss it as an archaic, intangible concept... We enter the gates of the real Hell, the Hell that exists just a few minutes from you..

The Hell found in a crack rock, or a hate-fuck, or a nuclear explosion..

Debasing morality is what 'progressive' culture is about - whether it be through porn or corrupted environmentalism, the idea is to scrub away any notion of human divinity... To reduce us to no more than the lizards and moths - eating, fucking, killing, dying - and to keep us seeing ourselves that way...

Because then, we can do anything.

Once we allow ourselves to believe that we are simple animals, all is lost. Why would we care to help each other? In Nature, its survival of the fittest. That means if I can kill you, there be no consequence - it was mandated by the divinity of Nature.

That means you can have sex with your daughter - why not? Animals do it. To do otherwise would be 'unnatural'...

Extreme? Yes. But how about a concept a little less insane - role-play.

We have been slowly conditioned to believe that if it happens in a role-play setting, then it's 'not real' - that we are just pretending, and by extension anything that happens within the scenario has no consequences.

Rape role-play, pedophilia role-play, even animal-play and pretend-incest - this garbage behaviour has been gradually introduced to the sexual mainstream under the guise of 'being free' and 'ending discrimination'.

The idea that these kinds of behaviours have no impact on the moral and social fabric of reality is absurd. To believe so is to employ the same logic that calls the invasion and occupation of a country by armed soldiers a 'peacekeeping mission'.

A rose, by any other name, is still a rose.

Culturally, this is where we are being steered - overtly and covertly.

The way to defeat this sick philosophy is through cultivation of morality - through treating each other well.

Furthering this concept, since there is no middleman needed to speak to God, the true house of worship is in fact our own body.

This castle of flesh is our Temple, within which we reside.

When we treat ourselves or others with impunity, we are disrespecting the homes that we live within, the construct that we cannot escape for the duration of this lifetime...

Every person is at war with him or herself, and the experience is relative - For me, to not drink for a week is no feat at all; for the alcoholic, such a challenge is a matter of life and death.

Keeping this concept in mind, it is our own weaknesses and flaws that we must challenge. To truly live, we have to reject our base animalistic desires in favour of reflection, calm, and deliberate actions.

And on the days that we fuck up - the days that we smoke crack rocks, get hookers, or drop bombs on strangers...

Those days must be followed by days of remorse and regret.

Boys and Girls

2010-01-14T21:45:00.000-08:00

One certainty about homosexuality is that gay sex is inconsequential in nature; it is a biologically meaningless act. The experience is simply a repeated firing of electrochemical circuits during orgasm - followed by nothing.

Sex with a female, however, is entirely different. One kiss from a beautiful woman can send a man reeling for days. Real, uninhibited sex between a man and woman feels like a trip to another universe. There are measurable physical changes in members of opposite sexes when they interact, even just during a conversation.

I think that the reason sex with a woman leaves you feeling physically and spiritually invigorated and sex with a man leaves you feeling unfazed is both metaphysical and biological in nature.

My guess is, the intoxication associated with heterosexual sex is due to the fact that the Potential for the creation of new life is permeating the entire experience.

When a man and a woman have sex, ancient enzymes in our saliva are mixing and transforming… hormone and pheromone exchanges are taking place… biological organs with the express purpose of breeding new life are interacting.

Between two males, however, there is no 'chemistry'. Nature knows there is no possibility of new life being created from the encounter, and so it provides none of the electrochemical magic normally used to entice you into breeding with a woman.

Nature, in essence, is dismissing the sex as a non-event - in the hopes that you will miss the experiential reward of hetero sex, and next time use your seed in a more 'productive' manner.

I think that gay people can love each other with the same depth of affection that heterosexual couples do, but I don’t think the actual intoxication of creation can be experienced in gay sex, even in the most extreme of stimulating situations.

The physical reaction from the body is there, there is a blast of 'pleasure' - but it is one-dimensional and icy, a shock of release that quickly fades to grey.

Among primates, homosexuality and incest is a part of daily life. But primates do not possess the spark of divinity that we do; primates cannot conceptualize, design and create vast works of architecture, engineering and art.

Among humans, unique with our (necessary) concept of moral relativity and our conceptual brilliance, homosexuality is rooted in the dark side of lust, found in the wiring of natures emotional and chemical black markets…

Tiny Tour

2010-01-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

It is almost that time again, although this time will be the first time...

The first Small Wars tour is wide and disparate, long and unwound, and the on-ramp is coming up soon. This is the first time I will tour alone. I have a feeling that it will make perfect sense.

This blog will become a repository for tour thoughts, just like when I was out with the RMRM crew last summer.. Pics, dreams, all that shit.

I wont have a computer though, so we'll see how often I manage to post...

Much love, and keep yer eyes on the skies... all dates will be posted before I go.

more Frontiers of Reality

2009-12-27T22:56:00.000-08:00

The rain was unrelenting.

I walked down Douglas at a clip, dark grey sidewalk soaked through beneath my feet, black Deer Stags work shoes gripping the concrete. Lunch was only half an hour, and I had already blown half of it cashing my check at the Money Mart.

My hands were shoved in the pockets of black work pants, one hovering above cold, damp keys, the other with six hundred or so dollars in a firm grip.

I ducked into the entrance to the Shoppers Drug Mart and the automatic door groaned itself open. I rounded the corner onto the polished floors with a squeak, flipping back my hood to set the security guard at ease. The light filled my eyes as I scanned the aisles.

Ranitidine.

Now that the Nexium samples were finished, I needed a couple of these per day to treat the ulcer. When it had woken me up in the middle of the night six weeks ago, I honestly thought it was a heart attack. Like a knife plunged into your most vital part, an ulcer will scare the shit out of you if you let it. Once established, it and only it can decide what you eat, when you eat, what you do and how much pain you can expect as a result.

I had staggered to the bathroom, clutching my chest. I thought for a moment, turned around and rapped on the bedroom door.

Startled awake, his voice came back. "Huh? What's going on?"

"Hey, sorry to wake you guys. I think I need to go to the hospital, this fucking pain is erupting like crazy. It feels like I'm getting stabbed."

He was already in the hall, dressed and grabbing his jacket. "Let's go straight to emergency. Then we'll figure out just what it is."

My mom swept out of the dark room into the hallway, looked into my face, worried, and then gave me a hug. "Don't worry, sweetie. They'll figure it out and get it all fixed up."

"Sure thing ma, back in a bit."

I had been attempting to self-diagnose on the internet - one of the stupider things you can engage in. Research is only worth doing when your judgement isn’t compromised by pain and fear.

Pleurisy? Infection?

Inflammation of the heart sac - pericarditis - that was my wager so far.

They triaged me quick and went through all the usual motions. After a thorough once-over, the kindly doctor announced "no sign of anything" - a diagnosis I had grown very accustomed to in my twenty-nine years….

The intercom went off overhead: "Checkout two is now open." I zoned back in to the shelf in front of me, picking the box of generic ranitidine, 10mg. 5.99

The next day I had gone to a walk-in clinic, and met Dr. Green.

I was wound up when he stepped into the examination room where I was sitting. We shook hands.

"So why are you here?"

I sighed. "I keep getting a really sharp, stabbing pain under my heart, and sometimes in my other side… smoking seems to set it off, but even if I don’t smoke, it still wakes me up an night…"

He interrupted me. "It's worse at night? It wakes you up?"

"Yes. I went to the emergency room last night it was so bad; they didn’t find anything. I thought it may be pleurisy or pericarditis, but apparently not." I took a breath. "So I think that maybe it's an infection, and I'm hoping to get some antibiotics, if you think that would help."

Our eyes met - mine fearful and glassy with pain, his assured and professional.

He spoke. "Hold on a minute." He paused and clicked his pen open over my file.

He locked eyes with me again. "We're going to figure out what's wrong with you, and how we're going to do that is by looking at all the different factors that could be affecting your health. Once I get some information about you, then I can start looking at what is causing the problem."

"Ok, sure." I felt like a deer in headlights, confronted with knowledge and confidence vastly greater than mine at present.

He took notes as he asked the questions.

"Smoker?"

"Yeah, but very little, like one every couple days. I just quit smoking pot too."

"Drink a lot?"

"No, 2 or 3 beers a week, tops."

"Eating habits?"

"Normal, I guess." I thought briefly. "I was poor for a long time, and didn’t eat well then."

"You say the pain is worse at night. Does eating help?"

I hadn't thought about it. Now that I did, I remembered how a granola bar had staved off the worst of the pain several nights.

"Yeah, I think it does, a bit anyway."

"Take any medication?"

"Just Advil."

"Any other pain? Symptoms? Going to the bathroom ok?"

"Well, my back hurts a lot these days… Other than that, no. Bathroom is fine."

He scribbled a few moments longer and then sat back and looked at me with a hint of a smile.

"I think you have an ulcer - or at the very least, the beginnings of one."

An ulcer? I was shocked. Didn't ulcers happen to stressed old businessmen? I had an uncle get an ulcer from drinking too much, but that was the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

"An ulcer happens when the stomach starts eating itself. You said you were poor and not eating well for a long time, that could have certainly helped create the problem."

"Smoking always sets off an ulcer - it stimulates digestive juices, irritating the stomach. That's why the food helps - it fills the stomach, keeping the acid off of the wound."

He continued. "Alcohol and caffeine don’t help, and anti-inflammatories like Advil are hell on the stomach. Ulcers also often cause back pain, as well."

I thought about the endless nights of empty stomachs, or the days where I was happy with a few bagels and some candy. Endless shitty coffee, spiked with white sugar, whitebread McDonalds muffins. Booze, drugs and cigarettes for the nights; Advil liquigels for the mornings. Suddenly I felt very stupid and destructive. I had poisoned my body - in a way I had never intended.

I thought back to my uncle - experiencing unbearable pain in his stomach, he had decided to keep drinking beer until it went away. A few days later, he called my dad to come take him to the hospital. It turns out he had an ulcer that perforated, flooding his bloodstream with toxic poison; he lost 40 pounds during his month in the hospital, and endured two operations to have his rotten gut fixed up.

Soon I was on Nexium, which would define the first six weeks of my recovery. I found out that ulcers have a 100 percent relapse rate, and can take years to heal correctly.

Much later, I would discover that the most potent cure for ulcers is raw cabbage juice - that a few cups a day can heal an ulcer in a few weeks…

I stopped at the magazine rack. The new Wired was out. I had a minute to kill - and the headline of one of the features had caught my eye.

* * *

Excerpt from Recipe for Disaster: The formula that killed Wall Street (Wired, 2.23.09)

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

How could one formula pack such a devastating punch? The answer lies in the bond market, the multitrillion-dollar system that allows pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds to lend trillions of dollars to companies, countries, and home buyers.

A bond, of course, is just an IOU, a promise to pay back money with interest by certain dates. If a company—say, IBM—borrows money by issuing a bond, investors will look very closely over its accounts to make sure it has the wherewithal to repay them. The higher the perceived risk—and there's always some risk—the higher the interest rate the bond must carry.

Bond investors are very comfortable with the concept of probability. If there's a 1 percent chance of default but they get an extra two percentage points in interest, they're ahead of the game overall—like a casino, which is happy to lose big sums every so often in return for profits most of the time.

Bond investors also invest in pools of hundreds or even thousands of mortgages. The potential sums involved are staggering: Americans now owe more than $11 trillion on their homes. But mortgage pools are messier than most bonds. There's no guaranteed interest rate, since the amount of money homeowners collectively pay back every month is a function of how many have refinanced and how many have defaulted. There's certainly no fixed maturity date: Money shows up in irregular chunks as people pay down their mortgages at unpredictable times—for instance, when they decide to sell their house. And most problematic, there's no easy way to assign a single probability to the chance of default.

Wall Street solved many of these problems through a process called tranching, which divides a pool and allows for the creation of safe bonds with a risk-free triple-A credit rating. Investors in the first tranche, or slice, are first in line to be paid off. Those next in line might get only a double-A credit rating on their tranche of bonds but will be able to charge a higher interest rate for bearing the slightly higher chance of default. And so on.

* * *

I put the magazine back on the rack. I would have to read the rest online.

As I stood in line, I couldn't help noticing little fireworks of activity in my mind - vague ideas about the power of language to define reality, and how math is like any other language, in that it describes concepts… defines parameters…

"Just this today?" The cashier eyed me, her figure lit from above by the harsh fluorescent.

Excerpt from Frontiers of Reality

2009-12-21T18:02:00.000-08:00

Here is an excerpt from a new project, Frontiers of Reality. It will be all over the place.

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

The dude sitting in front of me had C.R.E.A.M. tattooed on the back of his neck.

As he violated persons unknown over the phone with his collections skills, I shivered.

I had to get the fuck out of here.

I was on my fourth day back on the phones, a collections agent for a long-standing criminal enterprise in Montreal. Like most long-term spots, it's offered services included the typical "Yellow Pages" subscription, paper rolls for debit machines, and counterfeit money detectors; they had also branched into first-aid kits in recent years, since several states had now passed laws mandating their presence in the workplace. This meant banner sales for our outbound team.

The company also had an in-house collections agency, where I was posted. As soon as an invoice went unpaid for 30 days, the gap-toothed little minx from AR would bounce the file down to us, the Collections Team, and we would follow up with the 'customer'.

In terms of who you wanted to get stuck on the phone with, I was your best bet. That's because I had no intention of actually trying to get payment for anything. I was there to acquire as many paychecks as I could before getting fired to pay for my ticket to Amsterdam, where we were booked at the end of the month. We had killer shows lined up in Brussels and Rotterdam too. I salivated at the thought of crushing Euro stages, of enrapturing strange young women of old-world bloodlines.

Our record had gotten some critical praise, and we had just played our biggest show yet, an opening slot for a big-name electronic act. We played to a packed house of 1000, live voodoo wreckage onsite…The only review I had seen so far said our set was 'ridiculous', and that from a Frenchman yet.

The phone picked up. "Hello?"

I pressed the release button and the line went dead. Oops.

I sighed and scrolled through the call log screens, selecting the client file for an Update.

Under 'Notes', I typed the following:

Do you ever think about getting a different job? This shit is borderline criminal. The poor fuckers we are calling are just hardworking people trying to run their businesses, and we conspire to rip them off. How sweet. Seriously, quit this fucking job now. La la la.

I tapped 'Save' and smiled. I had acted as a subverting interest within call centers for quite some time, but never to such a blatant extent. Before this one, my most recent position had generously allowed me to book many shows on company time by not clueing in that I had 15 browser windows open during my shifts, all dedicated to personal interests.

They were a new operation; I knew they had no workstation monitoring in effect yet.

As with most things in life, timing is everything.

Feeling righteous at that job, I had gotten ballsy, whispering to clients over the phone to "Just say that you will call the Attorney General," I would advise. "Once they hear those words, they will delete the invoice. It's the only way to beat them."

The gratitude from the client would be overwhelming. "I cant thank you enough. We pay all our bills on time, but this one - I mean, it's just a scam, and my husband is ill…"

"I know, yes it is a scam. Just mention the AG and you will be ok. All right?"

That one, at least, I had managed to keep for a couple months. I had caught them at a good time, just getting set-up, meaning the workload wouldn’t be significant for a few months yet. And the no-monitoring was perfect for my ghost-in-the-machine act, which could very realistically have gotten me a severe beating or worse had I been found out.

Actively sabotaging the revenue stream of an organized criminal enterprise? Stupid - and I would like to think, noble.

This one, my collections gig, I knew I would be gone in a week or so. I had progressed to a level of zero respect for these slimeballs and could no longer hide my contempt for the industry that had sustained me financially for so long. Every morning, as we smoked in the bitter grey cold, the big boss would arrive in his Lamborghini, made out of other people's suffering and stupidity and his own vile interest, scattering plebes like pigeons as he wheeled in to man the top tiers of this corrupt enterprise.

I would look at his push-button convertible and his vanity plates and smolder inwardly. "A real fucking tough guy eh? A real class act… One more pathetic fucking criminal with a taste for innocence and a hard-on for money… A bag of shit who will get what he deserves some day - hopefully a mugging and a quick stab with a dirty syringe."

I didn't think I was any better - we're all fuck-ups after all - but at least I wasn't proud of my faults, wasn't actively nurturing them, wasn't bragging with a Lamborghini about how many people I had ripped off.

I wanted to stab him in the guts, to feel a knife dig around his precious interior; wanted to burn fistfuls of dollars in my bare bloody hands in front of his dying eyes.

Break was over. We streamed back in, the Arabic girls in headdress, sweatpants-wearing cigarette-toothed lifers, Montreal North bottom feeders, macks, bangers and hustlers alike.

The building was straight out of an 80's coke-flick. A squat six stories, it occupied prime real estate in downtown Montreal, a tough little aberration among the towering glass cathedrals of the banks and investment firms.

They owned the whole building. One floor was sales, one was the cafeteria, one was collections, and so on. Each entry and exit point was secured by an ancient punch-in security system, where you enter your hand and squeeze these stationary plastic pegs.

I guess the squeeze-style was as unique as a fingerprint, because once you squeezed, it clanged and registered your action. It was pretty cool.

There were cameras everywhere. The lobby was faux-marble and overseen by an attractive brunette, Italian, in her late thirties.

* * *

I rounded the corner and tapped on the glass door. My card didn’t work anymore.

She glared at me, then reluctantly stood and came to the door.

"What do you want?" Her friendly tone was long gone; I had walked out mid-shift a couple days previous.

"I'm here for my paycheck," I smiled.

"Well, they are not ready yet. Come back tomorrow."

"It's Wednesday, I know they are ready. Eric the collections manager has them."

"Well, we'll call him, and see about that." She swung open the door for me to enter behind her.

She sat down at her reception desk and picked up the phone.

"Hi Eric, I have an ex-employee here to pick up his check…mm hmm… it's Nathan… all right." She held the phone out to me, smiling.

"He wants to talk to you."

I took the receiver. "Hey Eric."

"You're a comedian, eh? You think you're pretty funny."

Eric, interestingly, looked very similar to Erik Engstrom, founder of my favourite band, HORSE the Band. I found it hard to reconcile that these two similar genotypes would go on to such disparate endeavours.

I pictured him speaking to me from his desk, the other collections agents well within earshot. Had I simply left, there would likely have been no bad feelings - call centers are designed for high turnover. But I had disrespected him and the company with my client-notes messages, which were practically impossible to delete once saved in the file.

"What's the problem? It wasn't working out, so I left." I was actually starting to sweat a little. I needed that check.

"Well, since you were being so funny in your notes, maybe I'll be funny too. Maybe I'll just keep your paycheck and cancel it. Huh? Wouldn’t that be funny?"

I kept my voice calm. "Well, Eric, if you did that, then I'm sorry but I would have to call the Normes du Travail. I certainly expect to get paid for the hours I worked with the company." The last thing these guys want is a complaint filed against them with the labour standards board. I hoped that would shut him up.

"I'll mail you the check. You're never setting foot in here again."

I smiled at the receptionist; her glare had never left me. "Thanks Eric. I'll expect it next week." I handed her back the phone.

* * *

I did a double take as I passed the newsstand.

The cover of the Montreal Gazette, Tuesday Oct. 9 read:

ALLEGED FRAUD RING BUSTED IN MONTREAL

Police herded about 130 people from a nondescript downtown Montreal office building to RCMP headquarters for questioning Tuesday in what they described as a major crackdown on an alleged international telemarketing ring.

"No fucking way," I scanned the article for details.

Jesus Christ. It was. Belmont Street. I couldn’t believe it. They had been around forever!

When had I left? The previous Monday…came by on Wednesday for a check.

And now… after 12 years in business… they were done.

I had some timing. But I was as worried as I was grateful.

How would I get the check?

Whew

2009-12-12T14:44:00.000-08:00

Here is the link to the final draft of Hidden in Plain Sight. 102 pages.

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

http://www.mediafire.com/?mmnuzm2fonf

Hidden in Plain Sight: another excerpt

2009-12-08T12:29:00.001-08:00

This part focuses on other subtle (and not-so-subtle) techniques used to manipulate our perceptions in the media, and touches on some interesting theories as to why our current cultural climate is what it is.

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

A common trick used in media to distort our feelings about certain subjects is sarcasm.

In the wrong hands, and in the right context, sarcasm can be used to undermine concepts by associating them with negative feelings and imagery.

Sarcasm is considered to be the lowest form of expression. When you say something sarcastically, it means you are saying it in jest - like being funny, but without humour. It is a joyless joke, where you subvert your own words with an intentional disclaimer of falsehood.

Over the past decade or so, sarcasm and misplaced irony have come to be regarded as sophisticated by mainstream media, and no longer carry the social stigma they once did.

As a result we are particularly susceptible to the use of these tools, in that we associate sarcasm with intelligence.

So if a character we like on a TV show says something sarcastically, we are somewhat conditioned to 'laugh with them', to subconsciously side with their clever assertion.

A good example is the Progressive Insurance commercial with the woman in white, aired heavily in 2009. In it, she is helping a customer - a late 20's white guy - to pick out his insurance plan. She explains that he can 'build his own plan', customize insurance according to his budget. He, characterized as fumbling and boyish, remarks that he 'feels so empowered', and this is expressed as a half-joke, very close to sarcasm (as in, how could you really feel empowered by something as trivial as this). She then says "Power to the people!" in a way that is painfully insincere and characterized by a sort of forced-stupidity, making sure that we the audience are well aware that she is being ironic / sarcastic / sophisticated when she says this.

This cheapening of language is designed to reinforce the perception that social activism is literally a joke - something our drugged-up parents did when they had long hair and played guitar.

By saying the key words - power to the people - in such a way that conceptually undermines their meaning, the words themselves are corrupted by the associations to irony and insincerity.

Another key association being reinforced in this and many other recent commercials is the image of the young adult male as boyish - mentally, emotionally and physically underdeveloped as he approaches his thirties.

Television especially is an extremely suggestive medium, meaning that it's whole purpose is to communicate suggestions to the audience. Once your critical thinking skills are sharp, you become equipped to pick out these suggestions - manipulations - and examine them.

From his first appearance onscreen, it is clear that the young man in the Progressive commercial lacks physical and intellectual confidence. He has an air of uncertainty and implicit fragility. He is unsure of how to begin choosing the product, and is shocked when he is told that he can choose his own terms.

Notice how the mentally and physically weak male (ironically, representing the period of life when a man is naturally at his strongest - late twenties to early thirties) allows himself to be "empowered" by Progressive - to go along with the insinuation that the corporation has generously allowed him to make his own decisions.

For stark contrast to this subtle manipulation, simply look back to the origins of consumer society.

Remember "The customer is always right", "Money Back Guarantee", "Highest Quality", "Best Value for your Money"?

These slogans represented the birth of advertising - whereby a product or service was sold under it's own merits, with little emotional manipulation. The relationship was clear: the companies trying to sell products, pandering to their potential customers, were held to account by the wit and currency of the buyer. In this sense, the consumer controlled the situation.

And since consumers were naturally grouped into families at the birth of the advertising age, the vast majority of advertising was directed at the person who made the purchasing decisions in the household: the working male.

There exists a school of thought that believes corporate and governing interests have colluded to gradually deconstruct the fundamental structure of our society - the family unit.

For motive, they point to a desire on the behalf of political structures to determine a way to increase tax revenues.

Not so long ago, it was common for only one parent of a family to work, while the other stayed home to mind the house and children. For the vast majority of families, the male parent worked, while the mother stayed home.

The theory suggests that in order to massively increase tax receipts from the prosperous middle class, it was decided at the highest levels of societal architecture that the most effective course of action to this end would be to somehow induce women to join the workforce - allowing their labour to be taxed, just like men.

Further, this theory contends that corporate interests also saw the potential benefits of such a paradigm shift - women would then have disposable income, ready to be spent on all manner of products, whether they were essential to the functioning of the home or not.

Here, should we choose to agree with the theory, we witness once again the tragic logic of economics.

This is where a glance back at the Disney Income Tax propaganda from WWII is timely, because it coincides well with other propaganda used domestically at the time - the campaign Women for Victory.

It is in these controversial theories that we find the seeds of concepts ubiquitous in society today - female economic empowerment, the acceptance and institutionalized encouragement of gay and lesbian relationships, male 'guilt', the economic necessity of having two working parents. These concepts didn't simply appear as the result of social activism; rather, they were nurtured and legitimized through capital flows that funded pressure groups, policy advocates, academic curricula, and other sources of intellectual influence.

It goes further as well. The mainstream promotion of previously taboo concepts - violent pornography, incessant drug use, cultural nihilism - are not necessarily reflections of a newly enlightened, post-liberal society; they can also be interpreted as a calculated effort to debase traditional values and subvert the paradigm that our society was built on - the family.

The media currently sells us a world where 35-year old men play videogames all day and obsess over pornography; men who avoid responsibility and cannot interact with strong women; men who are typified as effete, emasculated, juvenile, sex-crazed, or petty. All of these enforced media prototypes work to normalize the concept of men as grown boys in our society. Certainly, there are deviations from these prototypes in the media - remember that new concepts must be introduced to the public mind slowly, gradually tipping the scales of what is deemed 'normal' or acceptable; this is the philosophy and practice of incrementalism - the same process used to dismantle social architecture over time, the same process used to deteriorate our personal rights and freedoms as citizens - one little step at a time.

The media also sells us a world where a woman must choose between 'empowering herself' with a career out of spite for millennia of male dominance, or taking a step 'backwards' - becoming just another vessel for children, expected to stay at home and serve the husband.

In this context it is easy for us to forget that the family design is natural - it came about as the result of thousands of years of evolution. Simply look at the natural world for insight on the true, natural order of family - one that has been re-packaged and sold to us over the last fifty years as archaic and unsophisticated.

This isn't to say that feminism is an entirely corrupt concept. Of course women should get equal pay for equal work, and it goes without saying that both women and men should be free to live their lives however they choose. The feminist movement has achieved great triumphs in the struggle to right the glaring wrongs that exist in our patriarchal society.

However, like most good causes, its' integrity is not immune to subversion by interests with unscrupulous intentions.

The overt re-defining of gender roles and traits in the mass media applies to young women as well. The re-casting of females as power-hungry, sexually dominant, promiscuous (the flagships of this engineering being media-created institutions like Sex and the City, Pussycat Dolls, and the endless homegrown-prostitute imagery associated with mainstream female entertainers like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton, Nelly Furtado, etc.) seems relentless. The latest incarnations of these concepts are reflected in the vapid lyrics and grotesque imagery of acts like Lady Gaga and Rhianna, where it seems that all the cues embedded in their music and videos reference mindless promiscuous sex, themes of bondage and S&M, violence and depression.

Again, this isn't about being prudish - it's about opening your mind to the idea that maybe this isn't a simple cultural reflection of contemporary values that we are seeing - that in fact, it may well be part of a long-term, concerted effort to redefine how we see ourselves.

This is happening in tandem with the publicizing and promotion of sadistic, barbarous violence in cinema.

For example, look at Hollywood hits like the Saw series, 28 Weeks Later, or Inglorious Basterds. These movies not only portray extreme, sickening violence - but they actively promote the sensation of participation in and condoning of the killing. In 28 Weeks Later, there is a scene where a man brutally kills his own wife with his bare hands - gouging out her eyes, grunting like an animal as he batters his wife's face with his bloody hands - all shot up-close and personal, with blood spattering on the camera. The only words I can find to describe the effect are "meat-porn".

This is no fringe movie, nor did it receive any criticism for this and other portrayals. Free speech and expression have always allowed for the flourishing of pornography like this - however never in our short history has such base vulgarity been actively promoted as "normal".

This trend started years ago. I remember the movie The General's Daughter (1999), where the entire movie is based around the gang-raping of a female military cadet. Again, it's the sheer vulgarity of how the subject matter is treated within the film that makes it's intent questionable (actual quote: "They raped her and raped her…They just about raped her to death.") Or Monster's Ball, for which Halle Berry won an Oscar - for her outstanding performance in a rape scene. Even hilarious, lighthearted movies like Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo feature vulgarity that never would have been allowed pre-2000: facial cum shots, prison rape, forced gay sex.

As someone who remembers the controversy over musical acts like N.W.A. and 2 Live Crew, this kind of stuff appals the senses. Even UFC events were illegal ten years ago - they had to be held on Native reserves, since they were prohibited in Canada and the U.S.

In the end, an insurance commercial or a UFC fight may not seem like a fundamental threat to our objective thinking, but these are just a few examples.

Imagine the cumulative effect of thousands upon thousands of similar, subtle messages, coming at us every minute that we are engaged in media, each one designed to shift our perception one way or another.

From my observations, these types of projections are part of a long-term, top-down campaign to redefine both the young person's role in society and, more importantly, how young people see themselves. The goal seems to be to introduce us to the 'new normal' - to desensitize us to concepts once considered unthinkable, now seemingly a permanent part of our cultural landscape.

Once we examine the capital flows, political affiliations, and distribution structure of specific media entities, we begin to get a clear picture of how certain ideas and concepts are supported and allowed to flourish, while others are left to die on the vine, bereft of funding and industry support. Awards and publicity are directed to adherents to the currently supported 'cause', overtly or otherwise - think the Oscar for Al Gore's factually inept film An Inconvenient Truth, or the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama - whom had to be nominated for the honour a mere 12 days into his term as President, according to the official timeline.

Could it be that these accolades are simple advertisements - the symbols of once-vaunted institutions that now serve the interests of whomever is paying the bills?

Hidden in Plain Sight: Chapter 3 (excerpt)

2009-12-05T13:43:00.001-08:00

A brief excerpt from Chapter 3, commenting on the search engine censorship in the wake of Climategate.

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

During the media frenzy that came to be known as Climategate, it was revealed by both award-winning science blogger Anthony Watt and Telegraph columnist James Delingpole that both Google and Bing search engines were censoring the word "climategate" from their Autosuggest function. This despite the fact that when typed into either engine and searched, over 21 million hits came back.

This means that, even though millions of people worldwide were doing searches on "climategate", making it extremely relevant, it was purposely removed from the 'suggested search' lists that pop up when you begin typing a query into a search engine by the Google and Bing administrators, who in turn were acting on orders from above. (As of Dec. 5 2009, 'climate-gate' is now back in the autosuggest of Bing, still missing from Google.)

Why would Google and Microsoft, two of the world's most powerful organizations, team up to prevent this word from being suggested?

The official line is that there is no censorship - that search engines simply do what we tell them to and are completely democratic in what they suggest, starting with the most popular according to searchers.

The disappearance of 'climategate' from Google and Bing proves otherwise. By removing it from the autosuggest of most popular searches, they are subtly attempting to shape reality - attempting to both create a different perception of the event, and to literally 'un-create' it's existence in the digital realm.

Google admits that unsavoury terms like 'child abuse' and related concepts are removed from autosuggest, in order to discourage the searching of these topics.

In that respect, it's clear that both Google and Microsoft would prefer that we not search the word Climategate.

At this point, big questions arise. Who exactly, inside Google and Microsoft, is in charge of deciding what words and concepts are unsavory? Who is in charge of shaping how we see reality?

The Google censorship is just the tip of the iceberg - a tiny fraction of the social engineering going on behind the scenes of our Reality. We have seen how the classical media has been corrupted by powerful interests since it's inception, and their incarnations in the 21^st century are no different.

The difference this time is, the playing field is practically even. The television only speaks one-way - there is no room for debating what it's telling you. It is a controlled medium.

The Internet is a 6-billion-way conversation, and in it's true incarnation, represents the overwhelming possibility of Truth to change the way we lead our lives, conduct our business, and design our societies.

It represents unlimited intellectual freedom of expression - the Ultimate liberation of human consciousness.

The classical superstructures are working hard to see that this evolutionary step is further delayed so that they can remain in parasitical power, profiting from human misery and degradation through the imposition of unnatural, exploitative economic systems.

Senator Jay Rockefeller says it would be better had the Internet never existed, now that it's become a source of solidarity for the masses of this planet. That’s the thing - at first, Internet was seen as just one more business opportunity, another stream of income for the power structures.

Where most people saw the potential for unlimited freedom of expression, they only saw the potential for limitless transactions: the Holy Grail of Point Of Sale.

Now, president Obama may be granted the executive authority to 'shut down' the Internet in the United States at his discretion. Remember that the President himself doesn't even write his own speeches, much less dictate policy. The Pentagon and US Army have also launched their Cybercommand structure, bringing the conventional battlefield onto the Internet. The declared enemy? Anyone or anything deemed a threat to the 'security of the nation'.

And if searching for truth in the greatest store of human knowledge in history isn't a threat to the current power structure, I don’t know what is.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Chapter 2 (excerpt)

2009-12-05T11:27:00.000-08:00

Here is another excerpt from what will be my first book, Hidden in Plain Sight: Deciphering Truth in Modern Media.

This focuses on the 'Tea Party' movements in the States, the co-opting of grassroots movements by cynical media, and the false left/right paradigm - designed and maintained with deceptive language - used to keep our similarities hidden and our differences highlighted.

In the next post I'll explain how this is happening with Climategate too.

********

Legitimate grassroots movements are routinely subverted and co-opted by elements that had nothing to do with their original popularity.

The Tea Party movement is a prime example. Originally started by staunch Libertarians (Americans who support the direct interpretation of the Constitution) in tandem with the growing popularity of Rep. Ron Paul (a Libertarian-Republican political phenomenon), the Tea Party movement was populated by a majority of aging, white, middle-class Americans who are opposed to big government, foreign military intervention, as well as legally questionable entities like the IRS and the Federal Reserve.

Ron Paul garnered massive support from many different segments of the population in his bid for President. He received more money from active military personnel that any other candidate (Ron Paul was an Air Force flight surgeon, and has delivered more than 4000 babies), and raised more money than all of his opponents in the Republican Party in the last quarter of 2007.

He was also subject to mainstream media ridicule and blacklisting; at best, he was completely ignored, until his massive popularity (really, the popularity of his platform: laws that abide by the Constitution, individual freedom, abolish the IRS and the Fed, end all foreign occupations immediately) forced the msm to acknowledge his existence.

In a race populated by infantile John McCain, nonsensical Giuliani, and hollow Obama, Dr. Paul stood out as a representation of true American values, and thanks to the internet, he was propelled to massive popularity.

So when Ron Paul supporters began the Tea Party movement, it was a grassroots extension of the advocacy of his policies. These Americans wanted sound money, they wanted their freedoms, they wanted to express fury at the Banker Bailout - and they also wanted actual representation for their taxation, which is why they based their movement on the famous 'Tea Party' held in Boston - when crates of tea were thrown into the harbour to protest "taxation without representation" - people were sick of paying higher and higher taxes to a government that treated them poorly.

The new Tea Party gatherings were immediately attacked and ridiculed by the press, who took to calling them right-wing Nazi's because the believe in the Constitution, and by extension Free Speech, the right to Bear Arms, and the other provisions.

The left called them right-wingers and the Republican right called them lunatics - but not Ron Paul. He understood their frustration and sympathized with their message.

Once Obama was inaugurated, the Tea Party movement exploded in popularity, picked up by all sort of different conservatives and libertarian thinkers. It began to become clear that the idea of Constitutional freedom was very appealing, and across party lines. Many of the ideals of Libertarianism make sense to people on both sides of the political spectrum.

It was becoming clear that the Republican / Democratic divide is an entirely false, propagated paradigm - designed to divide Americans against each other, when beneath the shallow political surface, most Americans share the same ideals: Individual freedom, small government, no foreign war and occupation, human rights and decency for all.

It was during this surge in popularity that Fox News and other 'right-wing' media jumped on the bandwagon, claiming to have supported the Tea Party / Libertarian movement all along, when in fact they had been some of the most vocal attackers of Dr. Ron Paul and Libertarianism.

This had a two pronged effect: First, any one who leaned to the left politically and identified with Libertarian ideals was immediately pushed away by the Fox News association. Fox, after all, is the channel that disseminates endless war propaganda on behalf of the corpo-gov superstructure, advocating endless war and regularly deriding left-wing ideals and liberal policies. So once Fox took up the banner of Libertarianism, lefties wanted nothing to do with it anymore, not wanting to be seen as supporting or identifying with Fox.

(Again, the twisting of language is constant. For example, what we call neo-conservatives here in north America, are referred to as neo-liberals elsewhere.)

Secondly, it gave Fox the chance to regain their dwindling popularity with their core audience - white, middle class, conservative.

The American middle class, who just a few years before had been overwhelmingly supportive of the Iraq and Afghan wars, was figuring out the truth: That war is nothing but big business, and that America had been duped into occupation by unscrupulous politicians and a compliant media.

Fox had to act fast, before they were left in the dustbin of history as the War Channel - the media that didn’t keep up to the mood of their audience.

Once Fox saw their audience shift from interventionist back to Libertarian, they jumped on the bandwagon, co-opting the Tea Party movement - and acting as a cynical pollutant to its ideals.

Meanwhile, those on the left fell for the ruse, denouncing the Tea Party and Libertarian ideals, since they were now under the Fox banner, and throwing blind support behind Democratic president Obama.

Obama, who has escalated wars, who has bankrupted the nation through bailouts and forced the purchase of health care insurance to benefit the industry, who has continued and expanded the domestic and foreign policy of Bush / Cheney.

Work and Play

2009-12-04T17:00:00.001-08:00

Language has been used to divide us against ourselves...

When you're doing things right, work and play mean the same thing...

Success and Failure

2009-12-03T16:27:00.000-08:00

Success and failure are flawed concepts.

They have no meaning!

You attempt to do something, say ride a bike; you fall over.

You have "failed", according to common logic.

But in fact, what you've done is taken the first step in understanding the bike, and how to interact with it.

You have also forced a blast of new information into your muscles, a new set of coordinates and commands, on 'how to ride the bike'. There is so much information coming from your body during this first attempt that it overwhelms your system, and you to fall to the ground in disarray.

Hundreds of muscles, billions of cells were all attempting to operate in perfect interaction - your limbs, eyes, internal organs, endocrine and adrenal systems, and so much more - all doing their utmost to excel at this new, mysterious task.

There was no Failure - just the opposite. There was a massive step forward, one that could lead you to entirely new possibilities.

Success works the same way only backwards.

You write a book that becomes popular; you become rich and celebrated. You have "succeeded".

What you have actually done is to completely reinforce your entire way of existence - whatever qualities and shortcomings you had before "success" are now ingrained in you as the 'right way', because you have been rewarded for your behaviour.

This obviously isn't always a bad thing. But if we are being honest, most of us will admit that we have patterns and attitudes that aren’t healthy and need working on. And if you have managed to hang on to some unhealthy habits while still becoming 'successful', then you can let them fester and grow complacent, smug in the comfort zone of the reinforcement of success.

With this in mind, the simple act of Doing, to the utmost of your desire or ability, is the most integral action one can undertake.

Expect no rewards and hold yourself to your own standard.

Vicersby

2009-12-03T03:21:00.000-08:00

Vice, normally smart enough to vet their shit, published a weak bit on Climate Change that I dropped a comment and a few links into. Alex Dunbar, the author of the piece, called me an idiot, so he's gonna get taken to school.

Comments start at the bottom. Updates tomorrow! Fuck off, Dunbar.

http://www.vbs.tv/blog/eleven-degrees-is-a-lot

Convos with a Pro, Part 1

2009-12-02T13:48:00.001-08:00

After speaking to my friend the ICU (not ER) nurse in Seattle, I explained that I am not trying to debate or fight about all this crazy alternative info found out there.

I just want to know some truth god damn it, and he is the only medical pro I know, so I want his opinions.

He agreed to humor me and here is the first letter I sent over.

**********

Stoked we finally got to chat a bit!

I submit to you some findings here that I would be interested to hear your opinion on.

I am well versed in deceptive language and the critical thinking skills necessary to examine work like this - but Im also inherently biased because I am of the belief that funding flows / politics / self-interest / stubbornness have corrupted many areas of research and treatment.

So it would be awesome to hear your perspective, as an actual medical professional ;)

First, the evidence that vitamin D3 deficiency plays a major role in the development of many cancers and other disorders.

This was published in June 2009 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:

*******

OMAHA, Neb., June 8 -- Most Americans and others are not taking enough vitamin D, a fact that may put them at significant risk for developing cancer, according to a landmark study conducted by Creighton University School of Medicine.

The four-year, randomized study followed 1,179 healthy, postmenopausal women from rural eastern Nebraska.* Participants taking calcium, as well as a quantity of vitamin D3 nearly three times the U.S. government's Recommended Daily Amount (RDA) for middle-age adults, showed a dramatic 60 percent or greater reduction in cancer risk than women who did not get the vitamin.

The results of the study, conducted between 2000 and 2005, were reported in the June 8 online edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

"The findings are very exciting. They confirm what a number of vitamin D proponents have suspected for some time but that, until now, have not been substantiated through clinical trial," said principal investigator Joan Lappe, Ph.D., R.N., Creighton professor of medicine and holder of the Criss/Beirne Endowed Chair in the School of Nursing. "Vitamin D is a critical tool in fighting cancer as well as many other diseases."

Other Creighton researchers involved in the study included Robert Recker, M.D.; Robert Heaney, M.D.; Dianne Travers-Gustafson, M.S.; and K. Michael Davies, Ph.D.

Research participants were all 55 years and older and free of known cancers for at least 10 years prior to entering the Creighton study. Subjects were randomly assigned to take daily dosages of 1,400-1,500 mg supplemental calcium, 1,400-1,500 mg supplemental calcium plus 1,100 IU of vitamin D3, or placebos. National Institutes of Health funded the study.

Over the course of four years, women in the calcium/vitamin D3 group experienced a 60 percent decrease in their cancer risk than the group taking placebos.

On the premise that some women entered the study with undiagnosed cancers, researchers then eliminated the first-year results and looked at the last three years of the study. When they did that, the results became even more dramatic with the calcium/vitamin D3 group showing a startling 77 percent cancer-risk reduction.

In the three-year analysis, there was no statistically significant difference in cancer incidence between participants taking placebos and those taking just calcium supplements.

Through the course of the study, 50 participants developed nonskin cancers, including breast, colon, lung and other cancers.

Lappe said further studies are needed to determine whether the Creighton research results apply to other populations, including men, women of all ages, and different ethnic groups. While the study was open to all ethnic groups, all participants were Caucasian, she noted.

There is a growing body of evidence that a higher intake of vitamin D may be helpful in the prevention and treatment of cancer, high blood pressure, fibromyalgia, diabetes mellitus, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases.

Humans make their own vitamin D3 when they are exposed to sunlight. In fact, only 10-15 minutes a day in a bright summer sun creates large amounts of the vitamin, Lappe said. However, people need to exercise caution since the sun's ultraviolet B rays also can cause skin cancer; sunscreen blocks most vitamin D production.

In addition, the latitude at which you live and your ancestry also influence your body's ability to convert sunlight into vitamin D. People with dark skin have more difficulty making the vitamin. Persons living at latitudes north of the 37th parallel -- Omaha is near the 41st parallel -- cannot get their vitamin D naturally during the winter months because of the sun's angle. Experts generally agree that the RDA** for vitamin D needs to be increased substantially, however there is debate about the amount. Supplements are available in two forms -- vitamin D2 and vitamin D3. Creighton researchers recommend vitamin D3, because it is more active and thus more effective in humans.

* Study participants came from the Nebraska counties of Douglas, Colfax, Cuming, Dodge, Saunders, Washington, Sarpy, Burt and Butler. ** RDA recommendations for vitamin D are 200 IU/d, birth-age 50; 400 IU/d, 50-70 years; and 600 IU/d, 70 years and older.

*******

Ok, so from that and other recent studies, I cant help but take the conclusion that preventative therapy is the smart bet for cancer reduction in the population...

After looking into this and other recent studies that show D3 deficiency as a potential cause of MS, fibromyalgia and a host of other chronic conditions, I started looking into research regarding chemotherapy, mammograms, CAT scans and other radiation-based therapy / diagnostic tools, and came up with some interesting info. I'll start with the most recent.

This study below was presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, Nov. 30 2009, quoting Marijke C. Jansen-van der Weide, Ph.D., an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Radiology at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands.

*******

"For women at high risk for breast cancer, screening is very important, but a careful approach should be taken when considering mammography for screening young women, particularly under age 30," Marijke C. Jansen-van der Weide, Ph.D., an epidemiologist in the Department of Epidemiology and Radiology at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, said in a statement to the media.

"Further, repeated exposure to low-dose radiation should be avoided."

Dr. Jansen-van der Weide and colleagues analyzed peer-reviewed, published medical research to investigate whether low-dose radiation exposure affects breast cancer risk among high-risk women. Out of the six studies included in this analysis, four looked at the effect of exposure to low-dose radiation among breast cancer gene mutation carriers. The other two studies traced the impact of radiation on women with a family history of breast cancer. The researchers took the combined data from all these research projects and then calculated odds ratios to estimate the risk of breast cancer caused by radiation.

The results? All the high-risk women in the study who were exposed to low-dose mammography type radiation had an increased risk of breast cancer that was 1.5 times greater than that of high-risk women who had not been exposed to low-dose radiation. What's more, women at high risk for breast cancer who had been exposed to low-dose radiation before the age of 20 or who had five or more exposures to low-dose radiation were 2.5 times more likely to develop breast cancer than high-risk women not exposed to low-dose radiation.

"Our findings suggest that low-dose radiation increases breast cancer risk among these young high-risk women, and a careful approach is warranted," Dr. Jansen-van der Weide said in the press statement."

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

Some quotes and figures regarding Chemotherapy as cancer treatment:

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

"Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy... Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade. Yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors... Women with breast cancer are likely to die faster with chemo than without it." - Alan Levin, M.D.

- An investigation by the Department of Radiation Oncology, Northern Sydney Cancer Centre, Australia, into the contribution of chemotherapy to 5-year survival in 22 major adult malignancies, showed startling results: The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA." [Royal North Shore Hospital Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol) 2005 Jun;17(4):294.]

- In 1990, the highly respected German epidemiologist, Dr. Ulrich Abel from the Tumor Clinic of the University of Heidelberg, conducted the most comprehensive investigation of every major clinical study on chemotherapy drugs ever done. Abel contacted 350 medical centers and asked them to send him anything they had ever published on chemotherapy. He also reviewed and analyzed thousands of scientific articles published in the most prestigious medical journals. It took Abel several years to collect and evaluate the data. Abel's epidemiological study, which was published on August 10, 1991 in The Lancet, should have alerted every doctor and cancer patient about the risks of one of the most common treatments used for cancer and other diseases.

In his paper, Abel came to the conclusion that the overall success rate of chemotherapy was "appalling." According to this report, there was no scientific evidence available in any existing study to show that chemotherapy can "extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients suffering from the most common organic cancers."

Abel points out that chemotherapy rarely improves the quality of life. He describes chemotherapy as "a scientific wasteland".

The FDA's definition of an "effective" drug is one which achieves a 50% or more reduction in tumor size for 28 days.

Professor Gary Null, PhD: "Most people don't know how dangerous radiation is. I wouldn't touch any of that medicine with a 10-foot pole."

(Prof. Null is also a vocal dissident of the commonly accepted theory of HIV infection leading to AIDS - here is a complied list of over 60 PhD's who agree with him: http://garynull.com/dissidents_list.html)

Quoting Prof. Null: "The mainstream medical establishment often prescribes mastectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy to treat breast cancer, an approach that has been described as a slash-and-burn strategy. This approach may be in for a reappraisal with the recent insight by the medical world that breast cancer is actually three different diseases, with indistinct boundaries, rather than one. In other words, only some breast cancers fit the image of a disease that is fast-growing and fast-spreading. Two other categories of this condition exist, the slowest-growing of which may never spread or be life-threatening at all. With this realization comes the idea that giving everyone with breast cancer chemotherapy may be unnecessary. Considering the harmful effects of chemotherapy, the belated nature of this realization is disturbing, to say the least."

Some quotes:

“If I were to contract cancer, I would never turn to a certain standard for the therapy of this disease. Cancer patients who stay away from these centers have some chance to make it.” (Prof. Gorge Mathe, “Scientific Medicine Stymied”, Medicines Nouvelles, Paris, 1989)

“Dr. Hardin Jones, lecturer at the University of California, after having analyzed for many decades statistics on cancer survival, has come to this conclusion: ‘… when not treated, the patients do not get worse or they even get better’. The unsettling conclusions of Dr. Jones have never been refuted”. (Walter Last, “The Ecologist”, Vol. 28, no. 2, March-April 1998)

“Many oncologists recommend chemotherapy for almost any type of cancer, with a faith that is unshaken by the almost constant failures”.(Albert Braverman, MD, “Medical Oncology in the 90s”, Lancet, 1991, Vol. 337, p. 901)

“Our most efficacious regimens are loaded with risks, side effects and practical problems; and after all the patients we have treated have paid the toll, only a miniscule percentage of them is paid off with an ephemeral period of tumoral regression and generally a partial one” (Edward G. Griffin “World Without Cancer”, American Media Publications, 1996)

“After all, and for the overwhelming majority of the cases, there is no proof whatsoever that chemotherapy prolongs survival expectations. And this is the great lie about this therapy, that there is a correlation between the reduction of cancer and the extension of the life of the patient”. (Philip Day, “Cancer: Why we’re still dying to know the truth”, Credence Publications, 2000)

“Several full-time scientists at the McGill Cancer Center sent to 118 doctors, all experts on lung cancer, a questionnaire to determine the level of trust they had in the therapies they were applying; they were asked to imagine that they themselves had contracted the disease and which of the six current experimental therapies they would choose. 79 doctors answered, 64 of them said that they would not consent to undergo any treatment containing cis-platinum – one of the common chemotherapy drugs they used – while 58 out of 79 believed that all the experimental therapies above were not accepted because of the ineffectiveness and the elevated level of toxicity of chemotherapy.” (Philip Day, “Cancer: Why we’re still dying to know the truth”, Credence Publications, 2000)

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

Next, prostate screening:

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

Dr. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the two studies - one in Europe and the other in the United States - are "some of the most important studies in the history of men`s health."

The PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test, which measures a protein released by prostate cells, does what it is supposed to do - indicates a cancer might be present, leading to biopsies to determine if there is a tumor. Most of the cancers tend to grow very slowly and are never a threat and, with the faster-growing ones, even early diagnosis might be too late.

Until the release of the results of the two new studies, it has been difficult to know whether finding prostate cancer early saves lives. Both studies have confirmed that in most instances it does not.

The findings, which are the first based on robust, independently audited evidence and randomized studies, confirmed some longstanding concerns about the wisdom of prostate screening and indicated that the practice of widespread prostate screening may result in far more harm than benefits. Prostate cancer treatment can result in impotence and incontinence when surgery is used to destroy the prostate, and, at times, painful defecation or chronic diarrhea when the treatment is radiation. In addition, many believe that the practice of cancer biopsies often leads to the spread and more rapid development of cancer.

The European study commenced in the early 1990`s and involved 182,000 men in eight countries Belgium, Finland, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland - with an overall follow-up of up to 12 years. The other study, by the National Cancer Institute, involved nearly 77,000 men at 10 medical centers in the United States. Although both studies are continuing, the results so far are considered significant and the most definitive to date.

In both studies, participants were randomly assigned to be screened - or not - with the PSA test and in each study the two groups were followed for more than a decade while researchers counted deaths from prostate cancer, asking whether screening made a difference.

In the European study, for every man whose death was prevented within a decade of having a PSA test 48 men were told they had prostate cancer and needlessly treated for it, and the study found that there were only seven fewer prostate cancer deaths for every 10,000 men screened and followed for nine years.

The American study, found no reduction in deaths from prostate cancer after most of the men had been followed for 10 years. Instead, by seven years the death rate was 13 percent lower for the unscreened group.

Sources Included: NY Times, New England Journal of Medicine, ScienceDaily

***********

AAAAnyway.... :)

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what I've found.... what emerges to me is a picture of a medical industry designed to 'treat and profit' more than it is designed to cure and prevent.

Do you see evidence of that in policy? I expect that most doctors and surgeons themselves are working hard to save lives - but is the policy being handed down from the advisory panels like the CDC and AMA focused on profitable treatment?

I've got a whole bunch of data on funding and corporate affiliations between care providers and equipment manufacturers, chemical / drug producers, all that stuff...

Business as usual!

Nate

Big One Two

2009-12-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

Ok, so the link I posted for the HIV cure article in the `Big One`post has been killed - it now leads to a blank page.

However, the original link found on Rense.com is still alive. They must have their own protected version of the article, free from the scrubbing hands that seem to try to erase important stuff before it can reach critical mass... like the disappearance of `Climategate`from Google Autosuggest.

UPDATE: As I write this, the page is now back online.

I was going to post the screenshots I saved of it.

Never mind then.

The CBC just won back my respect

2009-12-01T15:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.infowars.com/cbcs-the-fifth-estate-the-unofficial-story/

The Impossibility of Censorship in a Free Nation

2009-11-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

Stupidity reveals itself. Dumb ideas gain no traction.

And even when dumb people latch on to a dumb idea, the quality of those people's thinking is clearly on display - dispelling smart people from the stupid idea like water from oil.

This is why implementing Hate Crimes legislation is criminally stupid: You cannot legislate people's intelligence, nor their beliefs. If you try, you will inevitably end up arresting your own mother because she called you a rotten child once while spanking you.

People say idiotic things routinely. Even the most oppressive of dictators understood that to criminalize common human behaviours, like stupidity or vulgarity, while desirable, would result in unmanageable bureaucracy.

This is because we are all stupid, at times.

We get angry; we say things we don't mean. Some people are flat-out stupid, always angry, and say foolish things that turn our stomachs. This is fine. Stupidity being what it is, its' display will only attract more stupids, which will in turn drive the intelligents away. This is the way it has worked since the dawn of free speech, and it has worked: Do you see any white supremacist groups with any sort of political or social influence whatsoever in this country? The answer is no. Ten or twelve drunken rednecks does not an existential threat make.

This is the illusion that the media can propagate forever: That we are under siege by Hate, by Terror, by Drugs. All they have to do is photograph some dumb kid's scratching of a swastika on a school desk, slap the headline "Hate Crimes On Rise" overtop of it, and have it on page 3 of any / all of their newspapers.

By feeding into the illusion of growing hatred, threat, and ever-present prejudice, and by using language tactfully, it is easy to erode the freedoms that have allowed Canadians to become as prosperous as we are. We are so susceptible to emotional triggers in language - who wouldn't support legislation that magically Stops Hate? - that we buy it hook, line and sinker. Just tell us it’s to stop hate, or to save a child, or to feed the hungry, and we'll sign up.

But we won't read the legislation, or look into it's flaws - that would just be cynical.

Stripped of all the spin and bullshit, here's what it comes down to:

Once you make it criminal to speak an opinion - even true stupidity, like racist philosophy - you criminalize any and all deviation of opinion from the 'norm' - which is a manufactured concept anyway.

If we cross the line and begin censoring our own citizens for voicing opinions, what comes next?

Do we criminalize active opposition and derision of politicians? Speaking in an inflammatory way could lead to violence, after all.

Do we criminalize the right to protest in anger? To raise your voice and speak a truth you have discovered? Because when you do so, you are certainly Hating - you are actively advocating the destruction of certain concepts or institutions. Sounds like a threat to me.

Do we criminalize anger itself? It's irrational, it's dangerous.

If spouting racist garbage is a threat to the functioning of our society, does it not follow that criticizing the government is a threat to the functioning of our society? Of course it does.

And if spouting racist garbage is NOT a threat to our society, then why are we trying to prosecute it - why are we literally arresting people for being stupid?

Are we arresting them because their views are distasteful?

If that is the case - let me get this straight - we are trying to legislate TASTE?

In that case, we'd better burn all alternative literature, all punk / hip hop / jazz / alternative / reggae / folk / country / rock and roll music, all works of art that could be considered subversive or, I mean, "promoting hate".

In this context, a writer like me - or Noam Chomsky, or Jeff Rense, or Naomi Klein, or Michael Moore, or Amy Goodman - people like us promote hate every day.

I hate injustice, oppression, flawed economic policy… I hate hypocrisy on display, I hate the actions of the politicians, I hate military and police aggression, I hate the suppression of human integrity through systematic isolation and conceptual imprisonment… sorry, where was I?

In a few short years, we have twisted the lens of fear to include not only the turban-wearing brown man, but also the ideological supporters…the truth-seekers…the journalists…the bloggers… the dissidents, the speakers, the writers…the activist punk-rocker, the veteran of the military, the community farmer.

In 9 years we have run the course of our new philosophy of War on Terror… our War on Hate Crimes… our War on Words, and by extension, concepts…

We have met the Enemy, and he is Us.

Big One

2009-11-30T10:40:00.000-08:00

Here is a letter I just sent to an old friend who is presently working as an ER nurse in Seattle.

**********

check this out man...a quote from the article I sent you just now:

"The gene mutation CCR-5 Delta-32 is found mostly in white European populations, especially northern Europeans and Scandanavians, according to Gupta, who is on the staff of South Baldwin Regional Medical Center and served as chief of medicine in 2008.

“Those who have this gene mutation from both parents are completely resistant to most common forms of HIV infection. You can get tested for it if you wish,” he said.

“It is believed that this genetic mutation may have happened during long periods of small pox, plague and other pandemics that devastated European populations.”

Ok... have you done any deep reading on the origin of HIV? There is a ton of evidence that it originated as a side effect from a Polio vaccination campaign in Africa in the 50's. Here is a good resource:

http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/

Now, furthering that theory, there is a growing group who feels that it was done on purpose - genetic engineering / eugenics, to attempt to control the growth and ethnicity of the human species.

Of course that's the type of thing that is impossible to prove...

BUT after reading that quote - notice how the doctor clearly states that the gene mutation that PROTECTS from HIV, completely if both parents provide it, is found mostly in white european and scandanavian peoples.

Holy fuck, eh?!

Update

2009-11-27T19:52:00.000-08:00

They offered me severance.

The moral: write the letter.

Economics 101: Outsourced

2009-11-27T18:05:00.000-08:00

Today I arrived at work to discover I had no job.

Suffice to say it was through no fault of my own - a couple of us got laid off.

Below is the letter I sent to the owner and senior staff of the company.

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

John,

In the few short hours since my dismissal, Ive had the chance to think about a few things.

Firstly:

Why wasn't I given any notice?

I have been with this company for nearly a year - covering shifts whenever I was asked, taking on extra duties, being prompt and proactive in my job.

Did it not occur to you to let me know that I would be out of a job in the near future?

You make all your decisions with care, and I assume this one was no different. You knew that you were training someone to take my job.

Did you not tell me because the law says you dont have to because I'm part time...because I work 3 or 4 hours less per week than Deanna or Lori?

Maybe that is also why, in deciding not to give me any notice, you declined to have the decency to offer the standard 2 weeks severance?

Instead of treating me with the respect due not just a long-term employee of this company, but also an associate, and a fellow human being - you decided that I did not deserve that respect...

You didnt have to give it to me, by law, and in that case - why give it?

It's ironic that you mention 'economics' as the reason why I have been replaced, since you are directly contributing to the unraveling of the Canadian economy by exporting my job.

Were there other options? Of course there were - you are a smart enough guy to start this company and offer your employees the true Minimum Living Wage, something which really impressed me at the time.

Had you approached us, your long-term employees, and said 'unless we make some sacrifices, one of us will lose their job' - I personally would have gladly taken a reduction in pay rather than see my colleague lose their livelihood.

I would like to think that as a team, we all could have adjusted to financial realities within the organization without contributing to the problem by outsourcing jobs.

God forbid that the profit expectations of the company be aligned with some sort of loyalty to employees.

It would be interesting to know what your new Mexican employees are getting paid - did Geeks acquire 2 Mexicans for the price of 1 Canadian?

I know - it's impolite to speak about 'economic matters' in such a fashion.

When you wrote to me this morning John, you mentioned that you had tried to call me - since to lay me off over the phone would be "unprofessional".

Let me tell you - your conduct in this matter is the definition of unprofessional.

I thought we had a good relationship - we didn't know each other well, but I thought there was mutual respect at the very least.

I read your letter of reference, by the way, and summarily deleted it, although the piece of trash is still stuck to this email.

IT'S WRITTEN FOR A WOMAN. Take a look and see for yourself.

I cant imagine a more appropriate finale. Thanks for making me laugh, at least.

You will never get a reference call for me. After today, I would be embarrassed to associate myself with your company.

Very sincerely,

Nathan Munn

ps. In the interest of philosophy (which is what economics is - not a science), here is a quote reflecting the sick logic that I thought Geeks was above.

"If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry."

Andy Grove, former CEO, Intel Corp.

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

November 23, 2009

To Whom It May Concern,

I am happy to recommend Nathan Munn for employment at your company.

I had the pleasure of working with Nathan at Geeks On The Way where she was the Administrative Assistant in our head office. She was organized, efficient, punctual and possessing of excellent customer service skills. Because of the fast pace and sometimes cranky customers, her cooperative attitude and good cheer were important and appreciated. Although her primary duties were administrative, she assumed some bookkeeping duties as well.

Nathan deserves serious consideration as a potential employee, and I recommend her highly.

Sincerely,

John **********

Geeks On The Way

Chapter 1

2009-11-25T16:18:00.000-08:00

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT
Deciphering Truth in Modern Media

Media refers to the varied mediums that we use to communicate with each other. Newspapers, Internet, grafitti, and TV are all types of media. They have differing qualities - for example, the Internet and grafitti are both interactive media, while newspapers and television are not - but they all allow us to talk to each other.

Depending on what information is disseminated through any given media, and more importantly how we as people interpret and analyze what we read or watch, we may find our perspective broadened or limited as a result of our media encounter. The individual may be unleashed to new possibilities or restrained to orthodoxy, simply by reading or hearing a few words.

This is an extremely powerful concept, and one well understood by tyrants and free thinkers since the dawn of discourse. Philosophers, shamen and witch doctors could be considered the first incarnation of the media concept, since they were expected to communicate great truths, knowledge, and glimpses of the future to their society. This is interesting because in modern society, a 'medium' most often refers to a psychic or mystic who ostensibly acts as a bridge between dimensions - not exactly the most respected of professions. But in fact, anyone who disseminates information in any way can be called a medium.

Today in 2010, we inhabit a world that is changing faster and more thoroughly than at any point in known human history. Communicative and physical barriers are being deconstructed in all areas of knowledge, and the sphere of Media is one of the areas most affected. The Internet has grown to resemble an external Collective Unconscious that reflects all there is to know about the world and ourselves in one beautiful, grotesque organism - one that we can enter and navigate as both sovereign and participatory minds.

In this environment, caution, interest and patience are the best qualities you can hope to possess; narrow-mindedness and fervour will not help you distinguish fact from fiction, and inference from certainty.

The key to compiling and deciphering the crumbs of truth found in the daily meal of deceptive language is twofold: The reader must develop a knowledge base and analytic style that is different from the learning methods promoted in mainstream educational institutions.

This means Reading - as much as possible, from as many diverse sources as possible, and about as diverse an array of subjects as possible. This will begin the process of freeing your unlimited conceptual powers, and will make integrating new and uncomfortable truths into your reality more exciting than unpleasant.

Once you have a basic and working knowledge of language, geopolitical history, world events, sociology, economics, all levels of government (including shadow / covert / elemental), industry and technology, agriculture and international commerce - only then do you become truly equipped to effectively interpret and examine truth in modern media.

This text acts as a simple guide to the mechanics used to design media content, and the relationships that define the contemporary media landscape. Cultivating a rich knowledge base with which to interpret Reality is up to the reader.

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In the hands of an expert, the subtle intricacies of language have the power to shape not only how we interpret information, but our emotional response to it as well.

Combined, these responses form a final impression upon us - one disguised as our own conclusion.

Let's look at two made-up headlines, both written in a style typical to mainstream journalism:

Cowardly attack leaves home destroyed, family dead

When Rashib Halla first heard the thunderous explosion, he suspected an earthquake; it seemed as if the whole world was shaking. But after running the two blocks from his apartment to his parents home to make sure they were all right, what he found was much worse. "They were all dead… The entire house was destroyed, with my mother, father, sister, and two brothers inside," he told XTV news. "I am the only one out of my whole family who is alive now." The explosion and resultant deaths have been attributed to a missile strike by occupation forces. Mr. Halla says that there would be no reason for his family home to be targeted. "Why? My family are peaceful people. We work. My father and brothers started a successful business. My sister, mother, what have they done? Now they are all gone, and for what?" Occupation forces in the area had no immediate comment.

Bunker assault a success

Several suspected terrorists were killed by coalition forces in a daring early-morning raid in Karbala, quashing fears that the insurgency has become increasingly adept at avoiding casualties. The operation began with a surgical strike on the target location by an Apache helicopter, which used a Defender missile to penetrate the thick concrete bunker. Immediately following the strike, a team of US marines performed a sweep-and-clear operation in the area, which led to the discovery of the bodies of 5 suspected insurgents. Asked how the Marines knew that these people were terrorists, Maj. Jim Buckley explained. "We had received solid information from local sources that there was a lot of activity in this particular area, a lot of 'chatter' as we say, and that led us to investigate deeper. It turns out there were weapons and supplies in the area, as well as sophisticated communications systems that could be used to trigger explosives or co-ordinate attacks on civilians or coalition forces. At that point we proceeded with the operation in order to neutralize the threat. " President Obama praised the ongoing efforts of the coalition forces to quell violence in Iraq. "It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it. The coalition forces are working hard to keep ordinary Iraqis safe, and this operation is a good example of that."

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Both of these articles examine the same event, from opposite perspectives - let's say a local Iraqi newspaper and FOX News, respectively. Both articles use language that serves the underlying bias of the reporter/organization/government.

So how can we determine what the Truth is?

First of all, both of these articles are similar to mainstream media content in that they are short, succinct, and you find no sourced details about the event whatsoever. No quotes from medical or NGO personnel, no statements from local authorities, not even witness accounts. Knowing this, it is already clear that both articles are intended to provide you a conclusion about the event, rather than to supply you the facts and allow you to come to your own conclusions. The article tricks you into believing you are thinking, when you are really just absorbing.

Secondly, you have to separate the actual facts from the inferences and descriptions.

After reading both articles, what do we know for sure?

- A building was destroyed

- Some people in it were killed

- It was destroyed with a missile from an Apache chopper

How do we know these things for sure? Because both stories, regardless of bias, report the destruction of the building and the deaths. The only reason we know that it was a missile from a chopper - since the Iraqi paper just attributed the explosion to a chopper, meaning 'it had the attributes of', which is an uncertain statement - is because the military admits that it was a missile from a helicopter.

So, now we know a few things for sure. The next step would be to take some relevant details and form a search query to find other perspectives on the event.

Type the date into a search engine and add "missile" and "Karbala".

Let's say we come across another article on the event, found on a blog. We click the link and come to this:

ZIONIST JEWS SPILL BLOOD THRU U.S. PROXY IN IRAQ

Once again, the satanic and…

Well, that's all we needed to see there. Back to search results. Even if there may be relevant facts contained in the article, those facts can most likely be found somewhere else that doesn't proudly use inflammatory language and is obviously heavily biased.

Note: You will find a ton of heavily anti-Israel and anti-Zionist material in your modern media travels. You will also find a ton of extremely pro-Israel/Zionist material. What you choose to do with this information is entirely up to you; I find much of it to be agenda-driven garbage. That being said, Israel is undoubtedly an apartheid state involved in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine through starvation, house demolition, withholding of resources, kidnapping, assassination, illegal detention of minors, etc. That and many other well-documented scandals (espionage, false flag terror, Dimona nuclear facility, UN defiance) unquestionably have much to do with why there is so much anti-Israel sentiment in the alternative media as opposed to, say, anti-Costa Rica sentiment.

Let's say we click on another link, also a blog, and we find this:

U.S. missile strike kills 5 in Karbala - no evidence of provocation

KARBALA - An Apache helicopter piloted by US Marines fired a missile into a home in Karbala early this morning, killing all occupants and destroying the building.

Shimak Hallal, his wife Sabri Hallal, and their three children were known in the neighborhood as a hardworking, loving family, according to neighbor Mahfouz, who did not want his last name used for fear of retaliation by coalition forces.

Dr. Al Al-Awan at the Karbala General Hospital confirmed the deaths of the Hillal family. "All members of the Hallal family were killed by trauma from the initial explosion of the projectile, and also as a result of crushing by debris." The lone surviving member of the Halla family is Rashib Halla, 17, who recently moved into his own apartment down the street and was not present during the strike. He would not respond to requests for comment.

Coalition forces spokesperson Maj. Jim Buckley has said that intelligence sources indicated that terrorist activity was occurring in the area, and that a weapons cache was also located near the area. Several local witnesses claim there were no weapons found by the military.

-Naseem Al-Abouad, Jazarel Arabia News

Out of the three examples, this one is by far the most informative. It also uses the most balanced language of the three, and is hands down the most credible account thus far (at first glance).

First of all, the article is sourced to a name and a regional news network where the event took place. This means we could do a quick search and find his details, where their office is located, we could even send him an email or call to confirm details if we wanted to.

However, this in and of itself - clear reporter sourcing, large 'reputable' organization - does not necessarily mean that the article is without bias or distortion. In fact, you will discover that mainstream corporate media stories and articles are often the most deceptive and biased of all. This is because of the structures of capital flows, political affiliations, and vested interests of the corporations that bring us the news, which we will examine in detail in chapter 2.

Let's look at what this article has brought us.

- A detailed reporting of the event by a regional source, and a credited reporter

- Balanced yet direct language in the headline and main body, emphasizing fact while providing the necessary context for the reader to interpret ("no evidence of provocation")

This context, rooted in fact, is different from a claim made, for example "Al Qaeda suspected". This is because the claim in this case has no basis in fact (there is no reason, no evidence, to suspect Al Qaeda of anything in this case) while the context tells the truth: there was no evidence of provocation of the attack.

- Some, admittedly not all, names of the family members killed

- Very importantly, confirmation of deaths and cause, issued by a credited medical authority at a recognized hospital

- Also importantly, the article references the official statement made by coalition forces about the event. This rightfully helps deflect any accusation of anti-coalition bias on the part of the reporter / organization that generated the article.

- Lastly, survivor Rashid is also mentioned, confirming the earlier local report and adding to the accuracy of this portrayal of the event.

Now that we've seen some basic examples, let's look at how language was used to shape the perception of these events by the writers. The best way is line by line.

From the first article, the 'local Iraqi paper':

Right away, we can feel the dramatic intent. 'Thunderous explosion', 'Suspected an earthquake', the 'whole world shaking' - this piece reads like Hollywood. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; some great writers employ drama very effectively without distorting the truths of a story. However, the best journalism strives for humane impartiality while providing some illustrative context, and this is a little over the top for a news article. But it is not inaccurate.

Overanalysis: You would have to confirm that he did in fact suspect an earthquake for the reporters description to be considered factually true, however it would be pointless because what he did or didn’t suspect is irrelevant to the essence of the story. Even if the writer added that detail as a creative liberty, a lie, it would not affect the truths of the article as it is simply creative narrative. Writing is full of half truths and distortions that must be navigated, and untruths of this nature are common in journalism.

The second sentence finishes with another dramatic tool, the cliffhanger: "…what he found was much worse." Scary! The dramatic intent continues unabated.

Keeping this in mind, we read on, this time a quote:

"All my family were dead…" I'll abbreviate here, as the first line is the important part of the analysis.

In an instant, the protagonist of the article has all of our sympathy as the reader. In fact, he already had our sympathy, as the result of his earlier tribulation with the suspected earthquake and the 'then… much worse' that he had to deal with.

We've been with this guy from word one. Now, his whole family is dead? You could elect this guy president right now, if the reader were voting.

Maybe not that drastic - but we are rooting for him subconsciously whether we know it or not, as a direct result of the language used to describe him and the event.

The article continues on with the quote, and it is a fairly long quote. It is the emotional outpouring of a man whose entire family has just been killed, and it is heartbreaking. It is even more emotionally jarring if it is seen as video as opposed to being read. Seeing another human being suffer is a striking image for us, and affects us deeply.

Cynically, skilled navigators and architects of media recognize this and seek to trap us with subtle or overt emotional cues - language or image that causes a powerful emotional reaction in the recipient. These are the landmines of the media landscape, and they can destroy any hope of objectivity or open-mindedness about a situation if they aren't defused with calm analysis.

This long quote is an intended emotional cue - it is designed to make you feel for this man, to relate to his pain and suffering. It appeals to our basest fears: loss of loved ones, loneliness, and death.

This is the power of language. Good creativity is on display here, and what makes it good is that it is not inaccurate, and it is not distorted. It is human speaking to human, captured in a charged net of words that effectively transmit the intended emotional message in print. The writer here knew that to get the emotional impact he wanted for the story, he had to let the story speak itself in it's own devastated language; his external descriptions could never do what two or three teary, tormented sentences of the lone survivor could.

For all it's subtle qualities, this piece still clearly displays a sense of bias, although one that tends to the side of the human and the humane, which I personally do not find distasteful in journalism. I would like to think that we are all human, and humane, in our better moments.

Now let's examine the second article - the 'FOX News' style article, line by line.

Several suspected terrorists were killed by coalition forces in a daring early-morning raid in Karbala, quashing fears that the insurgency has become increasingly adept at avoiding casualties.

This opening sentence is nothing short of brilliant in its design. In the span of one sentence, the writer has managed to convey a semblance of an entire story - beginning, middle, end - with a supporting narrative so subtle that it reads like something you could say to your wife at the breakfast table. And that is exactly what the writer intended.

The first line sets the stage:

Several suspected terrorists were killed by coalition forces…
Immediately, we hear that 'we are winning'. That is what Joe Citizen will take out of this article, if nothing else: That we killed some terrorists this morning.

It is important to note that when used with an emotional trigger-word like "terrorist", the revealing word "suspected" is discarded by the mind as irrelevant. This is because when a concept that requires analysis - 'suspected' has a lot of possibility in it - is paired with a threat - 'terrorist' - the human mind automatically prioritizes the information, and to the mental survival mode, only the threat matters.

Even a slight change in language - say, to 'suspected insurgent' - significantly increases the chances of the reader pausing a moment to think, to analyze what he has just read.

This is because "Insurgent" is a relatively new word to the common lexicon of ordinary citizens. People feel a little bit smart when they say it, usually without knowing it. It's also a 'cool' word - like 'surge' - and these kinds of words are used to sell unpopular ideas to the public i.e. the Taxpayers who are on the hook for it. This is why "Troop Surge" - those specific words, not 'escalation' or 'expansion' of the war - was pushed so hard by the powers that be in the media sphere. It sounds like the latest Xbox title - Troop Surge III. Unless it's shrouded in deception, people don't like to hear about escalation of already unpopular wars.

So when the average reader reads Terrorist, it overpowers Suspected and the dead have now been tried, convicted and hung by the jury of the popular mind.

Now for the rest of the sentence.

… forces in a daring early-morning raid in Karbala, quashing fears that the insurgency has become increasingly adept at avoiding casualties.

This is the middle and summation segments of the sentence, neatly encapsulating the series of events in an overwhelmingly biased portrayal.

It is important for the first sentence of an article of this nature to be so complex because research shows that most people only read the first few lines of any article, necessitating the Pyramid model of journalistic writing that is standard worldwide.

The writer quickly paints the military soldiers - trained killers - in a light that endears them to the reader, with one effective word: "Daring", which implies valour, honour, sacrifice, adventure, even secondary associations like handsomeness and strength. The intent is to bedazzle the reader both with the strong mental associations of the word, and also to provide the reader the sensation of 'being there', along for the ride as democracy unfolds at the hands of our daring soldiers. This trick is accomplished by the subtle insert of 'early morning' before the clearly defined and associated word 'raid'.

Had the article simply read ...in a daring raid, the reader may not have been completely sold on the portrayal, because there is a bit of contradiction there. We as people associate the word 'raid' with swat teams and other invasion forces; black combat uniforms, masks and guns. Even a citizen who loves the police will experience subconscious stress from these images and associations.

So, another powerful trigger was needed, but this one the opposite of a landmine - rather, a de-fuser of potential emotional reactions that could serve to unravel the desired narrative.

The descriptive 'early morning' disarms the stress associations by implying a sense of intimacy. Early mornings are spent with lovers, spouses and only the closest of friends. In this sense we are induced to a place of dreamy peace in the midst of combat. There are also subtle secondary associations to rebirth and the conquering of evil - the rising of the sun to start a new day, and to ward off the night - concepts that touch us to our primal core.

The sentence finishes with a definitive statement: … quashing fears that the insurgency has become increasingly adept at avoiding casualties.

This conclusion simply states that all doubts of coalition supremacy were and are unfounded, and that there is no debating the subject. This is opinion stated as fact.

In a final clue, it also hints at the interesting language they use to describe "insurgents" or "terrorists". Look at the words adept and avoiding. These are powerful little words, snappy and snake-like, respectively. They are meant to imply cunning, stealth, intelligence, of an animal or unrefined kind. You will notice that much of the language used to describe an insurgency - depending on the current portrayal deemed to be necessary by the issuing powers - reflects these concepts. Asymmetrical, improvised, tactical, complex - all words used to define the conflict, and all intended to portray the insurgency as what the powers that be need it to be: A tough bunch of buggers, who we cant really figure out, and almost admire, like you would a wily dog that keeps getting up after you kick it to the ground. They need the insurgency to be seen as constant, never an actual threat to victory, and grudgingly respected from the military point of view.

While the narrative will vary according to what role the insurgency is needed to play in geopolitics at the time - usually, coverage of it acts as distraction from other, more relevant news - this thematic description of insurgency is fairly predictable.

In this particular piece, the intent of the article is clear after reading only one sentence, as per design, and that is to portray the coalition forces as dominating over the insurgency.

Let's dig a little deeper.

The operation began with a surgical strike on the target location by an Apache helicopter, which used a Defender missile to penetrate the thick concrete bunker. Immediately following the strike, a team of US marines performed a sweep-and-clear operation in the area, which led to the discovery of the bodies of 5 suspected insurgents.

Notice the language used in the first line. The raid has become an operation, and it began with a surgical strike. The use of medical language is no accident. The word 'operation' implies a precise, professionally executed, and very necessary event. People undergo operations to be repaired, or healed, and this is what the word is meant to imply here as well: we are 'healing' the situation (truthfully, killing people). This concept is expanded upon with 'surgical', which carries the notion of precision and necessity further.

One of the most important effects the medical terminology has on the reader is to grant a kind of immunity to the military machine doing the killing. "Operations" go wrong - surgeries fail, and patients die. Do we blame the doctor when this happens? Usually, no - we trust doctors. We expect that they have our best interests at heart, they do their best in all situations, and sometimes they cannot save a life.

This language is used to psychologically condition us to both sympathize with and dismiss criticism of actions undertaken by the military.

It is worth noting that throughout history, authoritarian regimes have routinely referred to their opponents as a 'cancer' or 'sickness' from which the nation must heal itself. Naomi Klein details this perversion of language well in her book The Shock Doctrine.

Now comes a concept that may be a little more familiar to the average reader: the Advertising section.

…on the target location with an Apache helicopter, which used a Defender missile to…

The modern military machine is no longer the simple state-maintained, green-painted workhorse that we identified with throughout the 20^th century. Now, the concepts of marketing, advertising and public relations affect all operational aspects of the military.

The military of today is the product of internal and external trade wars, market share wars, and propaganda wars as well as conventional conflict. The United States is far and away the world's biggest arms dealer, and like most corporate entities, it works hard to drum up sales for it's 'shareholders' - the private corps that work closely with Pentagon (DARPA) and DHS to create new technologies / products for the military to buy. After the military market has been saturated, these advanced technologies are then scaled down and repackaged for civilian consumption - Hummers, GPS, Tasers, Google Earth.

You can find good examples of overt corpo-military advertising and PR in publications like Jane's Defence, which regularly features full-page ads for companies like Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon, multibillion-dollar entities that make the bulk of their profit by selling technologically advanced weapons, aerospace and communications equipment to government clients - DOD, FBI, Air Force, etc. However this is not their only advertising route, nor is it the most effective.

For these manufacturers, there is no better advertisement than a demonstration of the product, in a context that excites the senses: War.

For example, remember Patriot missiles? Almost anyone over 25 does. Their use in the first Gulf War was massively publicized, in what was the first big 'roll-out' of new military hardware since the stealth bomber (which was also heavily used / advertised in the Gulf War).

In the current article, the new Patriot missile is the Defender missile - featuring an ironic name, like most of the real products have - and it was fired by the most widely known and feared / respected piece of military equipment the US has ever produced: the Apache helicopter.

These hidden ads operate the same way the example of "Troop Surge III" operates: It makes the products cool to the reader. Apache helicopters, as any 10 year old boy will tell you, are very cool. They are striking to look at, and they destroy our enemies, and they carry weapons with names like Hellfire rockets (that product name, admittedly, is not ironic).

Most grown men are equally as enthralled with cool helicopters that blow things up with missiles. But it is not only the imagery and our innate, male, interest in conflict (blame nature for that) that sells the product and the killing operation; the language is important too.

If the chopper were called a "Forward Reconnaissance Unit" and it fired "light capacity thermo-combustibles", three-quarters of the male audience would be skipping over the article completely. It sounds technical, bookish, boring and ultimately uninteresting to the average reader.

Conversely, when someone wants a reader to think something is boring and ignore it completely, this is the kind of obtuse language they can use to deflect interest.

For proof, simply look at the Tax Code, which isn't as boring as it seems - it details the process of taking a lot of your money. Or legislation like the Patriot Act, which uses both techniques - draw them in with the name ("Yeah, I'm a Patriot"), and then keep them away from the details by confronting them with an illegible body of text, written by creative lawyers.

So why is it important that these weapon systems be sold to the common male population that will never buy them? Because in fact, they are buying them - they are the taxpayers, and they fund the government who pays for the corporate development and production of the weapons.

The strange and perilous relationship between a government and it's people cannot be detailed with any significance in this short text. However, it is important to note that elements of government and private enterprise both despise and depend on the common population for their existence. The dynamics of this ever-changing relationship are on display in the media, the legislatures, the corporate boardrooms and the battlefields of our planet.

It is important to remember that while the linguistic architects do their best to manipulate our thoughts and opinions with their words, they also recognize their boundaries. The concepts and descriptions they put forward must be quantified and explained in a way that endears them to the reader without seeming too pandering or obvious. This can be seen in the following passage.

Immediately following the strike, a team of US marines performed a sweep-and-clear operation in the area, which led to the discovery of the bodies of 5 suspected insurgents. Asked how the Marines knew that these people were terrorists, Maj. Jim Buckley explained. "We had received solid information from local sources that there was a lot of activity in this particular area, a lot of 'chatter' as we say, and that led us to investigate deeper. It turns out there were weapons and supplies in the area, as well as sophisticated communications systems that could be used to trigger explosives or co-ordinate attacks on civilians or coalition forces. At that point we proceeded with the operation in order to neutralize the threat.

The roots of this passage reach back to techniques pioneered in a previous war: Vietnam.

By the time the war finally ended, millions of Vietnamese had perished, but the number that really stood out to most casual observers was 58 000: the number of US troops killed in action.

For the majority of it's 16 years, the Vietnam War was unpopular with the people of the United States. By the late 1960's, practically the entire student population, and much of the American middle class, were in active opposition to the war and by extension, the policies of the government.

It was during these heady times that the use of psychological propaganda against citizens through the news media became a significant part of US domestic policy. The idea was to figure out how to diffuse the threat of a mobilized, informed population without using lethal force, and also without having to change policy.

The government commissioned focus groups to study exactly what was causing the turmoil in their streets. Once they had dispensed with the obvious answers - the death of soldiers and innocents in Vietnam for no discernable purpose, discontent with government policy - they found some interesting clues.

They found that if the language used to describe the conflict were changed, so did the individual's perception of the conflict.

The first test of this inference was conducted publicly. For years, the army had been referring to offensive attacks against the NVA and sympathetic civilian populations as "Search and Destroy" missions. This was calling a rose a rose; the Army did in fact Search out the enemy, and once found, would do their best to Destroy them. It was simple language for a simple concept.

But as mentioned, things weren't so simple anymore.

The 'Search and Destroy' lexicon was likely brought into use by military staff who, recalling the days of WWII, assumed that the US population was interested in and overjoyed by the 'destruction of the Enemy'. In this sense, they were using advertising techniques, but in a clumsy way that didn’t serve their real interest, which was to maintain public support for the war. Once it became clear that the viewing and reading public were not at all impressed by the levelling of villages, the choice of words seemed ineffective for their goals, to say the least.

The military made a decision. Publicly, these missions were no longer to be called 'Search and Destroy', with all it's bloody connotations, but rather 'Sweep and Clear', a new term designed to change the perception of the event - from a fiery assault to the simple cleaning-up of a mess. This coat of gloss was to be applied at every opportunity.

While it's hard to gauge exactly how effective this wordplay was at the time, it doesn’t really matter, because the net effect has been monumental. These three words were the first steps taken down an unknown road - one that has led to the near-total distortion and sanitization of reality in the media today.

Near the end, the article allows for a brief appearance by the 'conscience' of the story - and an interesting technique is employed. Here, the narrative shifts to reflect not only the writer's perspective, it also cleverly uses language to assert the opinion of the reader and the nation at large at the same time. Through this technique the article can appear to be more balanced, more investigative, and less biased than it actually is.

Asked how the Marines knew…

Immediately in the sentence, an interrogative posture is adopted; this is meant to convey the impression of holding them to account for their actions, although the language in this case is very soft.

This is also where the clever perspective shift takes place. By saying Asked instead of When we asked, the writer positions himself together with the reader and the nation, making it seem like they are all asking together.

Think about it. It works because the article is no longer telling you what happened; at this point in the article, you become the narrator. See what I mean?

It's an illusion designed to placate our natural inclination of sympathy towards suffering - placed there to soothe your conscience. The reason it affects us so deeply to see another human being suffer is because we identify with that person; that could be us. Our natural, animalistic mind sees a creature that looks like us, it sounds like us, and so we can conceptualize what the suffering must be like.

The architects of the story know this. They also know that our inquisitive nature leads us to investigate the application of lethal force by our military, because our military is 'Us', an extension of ourselves. What they do, we as citizens stand behind.

Because of this, the situation must be 'managed' by the compliant media - it must be sold to us in a new light - described to us as necessary, just, and ultimately above reproach.

The concept of racism is used with devastating effect in modern media manipulation. The media use deceptive language and imagery to scrub away the humanity of the victims of our wars by portraying them as different from us: They are brown, they wear funny clothes, they chant and scream in strange languages. In the major western media, we very rarely see human interest stories about brutalized Iraqis or Afghans where they are portrayed as calm, rational, hardworking people.

Now that the writer has subverted our emotional defences by aligning himself with us, we are prepared to hear the scrubbed, neatly crafted, and factually hollow justification of the murder by a Marines representative.

We had received solid information from local sources that there was a lot of activity in this particular area, a lot of 'chatter' as we say, and that led us to investigate deeper. It turns out there were weapons and supplies in the area, as well as sophisticated communications systems that could be used to trigger explosives or co-ordinate attacks on civilians or coalition forces. At that point we proceeded with the operation in order to neutralize the threat.

Statements by military personnel remind me of the between-period interviews during a hockey game: No matter the day or whom they are talking to, they always say the exact same thing. In hockey, it's "we just gotta keep working hard, keep the puck in their end, keep up the momentum…" or some variation thereof.

The military is no different. Even the people they train to do PR and media relations are still military - trained killers. A soldier talking plainly can scare the hell out of you without ever meaning to.

So when it's time for the military to talk to the media - they are very careful about the language they use. They use reassuring terms like solid information, which have no actual meaning - what does solid mean? Does it mean that the information is over fifty percent right? Maybe it was right yesterday? Is it relative - is it 'more solid' than other information? When you analyze the statement, it falls apart. Without fact, without proof, there is only guessing. It's all about probabilities - a concept covered in the next book.

They use words that pique our interests like chatter - an interesting, curious word.

They use thorough and responsible concepts, like investigating deeper'

They talk about weapons and supplies like they aren't actually referring to kitchen knives and groceries…

Sophisticated communications systems... used to trigger attacks… Since cell phones are routinely used in the remote detonation of IED's, it follows that anyone with a cell phone can be designated an agent of the insurgency. Language defines Reality.

And if you think the illustrious and daring civilian/military/corporate command structure - most of whom share none of the dedication and integrity of our soldiers - wouldn't lie in the furtherance of their own interests - you have much to learn.

These are lies, where the truth hides in plain sight.