Random Matter Suspended in the Dark*

At the moment I can't be bothered to give a tinker's damn about the human allegory in the White House or the FBI or the other alphabet agencies or news orgs or whatever. PBS>CNN forever anyway. What I'm concerned about is a little thing called the shared predicament of the whole damned human race. And it is one race, with myriad adaptations manifesting as physical differences that a bunch of yard apes still think is important enough to scrawl swastikas over. Screw em, that kind of person is lost and dying out anyway. I am focusing on the rest of us. People who can still see, and feel, and think.

We’re in a pretty uncomfortable boat, all told. It's tough out there in the Grid. We crave acceptance, social standing, and love. As we play soul-Tetris, we often have to play the piece that doesn’t fit. Without the satisfaction of being received as we are, isolation comes on as sure as puberty (and the two are likely to coincide). Feeling alone when we’d rather feel connected is a very strange sensation to explain. I’ve never lost an appendage, but I imagine it’s quite like the syndrome known as phantom limb.

In this case, it’s not an arm or leg we miss. It’s the rest of the human race and the web of life we dismiss as fuel and food. It’s the sense of clan, or family, or community in general. It’s the feeling of being connected to everything that we get in glimpses from time to time. That fleeting joy that leaves a gaping space when it goes. It hurts, damn it.

The more we suppress awareness of this pain the more it manifests as ignorant and destructive behavior. We’d do well to cop to that and start addressing it in the form of solutions. Otherwise we’re just passing the buck to our kids and their kids and so on forever or until we’ve wrecked the place beyond repair. I suspect our best hope of escaping the undertow of mass extinction is to stop pretending this is working for anybody and start getting creative right now.

I leave it to you to determine what that means in your life.

*Lifted from the song above.

Ol' Scratch

A long, long time ago, we hired ego to run the shop. It festered and got drunk on its own power. We fed it our allegiance and it metastasized into a dark god with as many forms as there are imaginations. I call it Adversary: a kaleidoscopic projection from the sadistic fantasies and masochistic nightmares of every human mind into the material world, with human action as its vehicle.

Every culture has an archetypal form of this night-side of our species: The Bogeyman, the Scapegoat, the Trickster. It is hated and denounced, yet its gravity is such that it draws worship and obedience, especially when it infects and displaces our notions of authority and divinity. Mankind needed a Devil, so we made one, but forgot both the origin and the responsibility. Some time just after taming fire, we grew frightened of our magic and pushed it down.

In the shadows of the subconscious, our collective darkness wove itself into a perfect deception. To Adversary, centuries blew by like dead leaves. It dressed up as other gods. It made delicious promises and terrifying threats. We started working for it. We learned to bow and to sacrifice without question. We gave it our children.

We convinced ourselves it was the god we wanted. We whitewashed our shadow instead of integrating with it. The more we deny it, the bigger it gets. Darkness, when visible, can be balanced with light. Darkness unchecked only hungers and devours, never filled.

Frame Work

Recent events have reminded me to question initial  interpretations, whether in the form of packaged media or my own estimations of what's going on. It keeps one honest to be willing to throw out comfortable paradigms in the light of new data or context.

People (including me) toss around the idea that perception is reality, but it's a bit more complex than that.

Perception effectively becomes reality, assuming that when incoming sense data sticks to existing bias/expectation, the individual welcomes habitual thoughts which reinforce a worldview embraced out of familiarity. Our impression of an image is always colored by the frame in which it appears.

Ok, more than a bit.

What we fail to remember is that we are the makers of the frames as well as the images. The eyes merely gather the light. It's in the brain that identifiable shapes, colors and meanings are born. We are all so busy now that our brains fill in the gaps with what we think ought to be there. How often are we more projector than camera?

Something to ponder when you find yourself beset with thoughts that put you in a mode of anger, jealously, anxiety, depression, and so on.

Maybe the picture is fine. Maybe it's just in a tacky frame.

Tenebris/Mysterium

The lights went off on the iconic statue, unlit for the first time in at least my memory. Ominous to some of us, confusing to others. Maybe nothing? But it's harder and harder to take "maybe nothing" seriously these days.

One rumor is that it was a symbolic gesture for International Women's Day, but given Washington's attitude toward the feminine, I have my doubts. Sounds nice though. A useful rumor that I hope is the simple answer.

Another I heard was that maybe an insider put the lights out in response to the #Vault7 leaks (about the threat to the 4th amendment via "intelligence" agency malfeasance and malware). Same day. Could be.

The official answer comes from the National Parks service, saying:

"the outages were a temporary, unplanned outage. The outage was most likely due to work related to an ongoing project to activate a new emergency backup generator that is part of our last remaining Hurricane Sandy recovery projects.”

That's satisfactory, but the first thing I thought when reading it was what else could it be? Worst case nightmare scenario: Reichstag Fire. Cutting the power to install a means of remote detonation for the theoretical Big One, an attack engineered or allowed that would put the last nails in? I don't like to empower the possibility, but the people who run the machine at a certain level do not look at this world or its life as we do.

Somebody in the deep deep deep state (and it's there, however obfuscated and whatever the papers whose strings it tugs say) salivates over my nightmare, I'm sure. I hate that I went there so fast, and I concede it sounds mad. I hope very much to be wrong. I've developed a sort of paranoid stoicism: imagine the most horrible thing and try to accept the possibility, while simultaneously not believing I've solved any puzzles at all.

I don't know, y'all. I consider myself an optimist despite it all, but it's taking most of my reserves to keep the Lovecraftian sense of creeping dread from my conscious mind so I can go about my business. After posting I'm making it a point to get some sun and exercise and hug my kid a lot.

I hear the lights are back on. I suggest we add our own to them. Couldn't hurt, and sometimes all one can do is not assist in harm. I'd love your thoughts on the matter.

The Audience is Listening. Or are they?

 "How I loved listening to your sweet prayers every night. And then you'd jump in your bed, so afraid I was under there. And I was!"

 - Lucifer, from The Prophecy

Friends, I propose a social experiment in the wake of today's CIA-related revelations, said to be "the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency." It has yet to be seen if any of this is relevant to the great majority of us (probably not) or if we are seeing a clash between intelligence agencies, or very smart people with deep grudges telling tales out of school, or the agency itself muddying the water. What a time to wish for certainty!

But for kicks: 

1. Google "Vault 7," or go right to WikiLeaks.org. The truly curious can download over 8000 files in a torrent. I have not been to that end of the pool, myself, but summaries are appearing.

We can never really know the final truth of anything these days. There's always an agenda and these stories in particular relate to people who shift narratives for a living. Google does its thing and you can buy page ranking to create the illusion of higher authenticity. WikiLeaks has its own agenda that we can only guess at. It's probably best to read the stuff as raw data and discern for yourself.

From first impressions, however, the CIA appears to be doing precisely the things people at the margins have been speculating about for years, the sort of malicious abuse of power any group of rats get up to as soon as the cat's away. Don't take my word for it. Look it up while you can. If it sounds paranoid, dig into what they've been up to over the years.

Collusion with Nazis: Operation Paperclip/Overcast

Drug war profiteering: coke/crack (Iran contra), opium now

Human experimentation: MKULTRA, MKOFTEN, ARTICHOKE

Coup abroad: Pinochet, The Shah

Media manipulation: Operation Mockingbird

These are the things we're aware of, from declassified documents and independent investigations. Certainly use your own judgment as you suss out "no way" from "damn, maybe," but look for yourself. The so-called "intelligence community" is not our friends. They've been up to lot of dirty deeds. They are spies, after all. Spies and thugs. Some of the more out-there things which have been lampooned by opportunists or fictionalized (Stranger Things comes to mind) but you can read scraps about the real deal. Get ready to hesitate the next time you do your taxes if you do.

Organizations of all stripes are made of people, and there's always a spectrum when people are involved. I can't say the CIA is full of demons. But this is an agency built to disable countries. These are not the good guys, and chances are great that they're spending a fair chunk of the money the Treasury Department "loses," to say nothing of the money they make trafficking drugs. Opium production lept up after we invaded Afghanistan. Back home, suddenly everyone you know who pulls a muscle gets a percocet scrip. Funny how that happens.

2. Note the tone of headlines today. I will wager TV and radio are busying themselves with cooler potatoes. To be fair, I mostly avoid these and so I can't chime in on that. Online, you'll note that even the major news outlets with a habit of downplaying validity and relevance of such documents in the past are reporting matters of concern with regard to safety and privacy. This is not "fake news," so far as anyone can tell. Just bad news, maybe. 

3. Because it's so easy to find articles with your existing worldview, read from a few different/opposing publications about the charming forms of "snoop on everyone always just to be sure" technology the CIA is demonstrably using and actually bragging about. What sticks to the story when you shake loose the agendas of the outlets themselves? It feels good to be proven wrong too, actually, though we all tend to prefer vindication.

4. Repeat the experience in a few days. Take note of the difference in tone as search results are re-ranked to shape the conversation. Watch for backpedaling or a cover story or both. They'll arrive sure as a sunrise. Inboxes across the industry just got full of Official Version. You might even hear the same phrasing. "This doesn't hurt average citizens, just bad guys." Yeah, I remember the Patriot Act and similar snoop-first ask questions later activity by the NSA having similar defenses.

5. Witness, watch, and analyze the machinery of The Narrative as this (if true) gets inverted to cover their asses and dupe our masses. (What will they come up with to try and laugh off remote shutoff of vehicles and TVs that record your living room when they're "off? Even if these things are only possible by installing malware and not just doable at will, the implications give me the heebiejeebies.)

6. Realize and accept that democracy is not really what we have. That's the first step. We live in a commercial for democracy. What we actually appear to have is a hustle within hustles which is just beginning to be revealed. Not a grand conspiracy but a "king rat" mess of mediocre ones. That's the rough but good news. Now we know how bad it is, and we can each find our ways to add to the resistance and the replacement.

7. Think about other big stories and wonder what else might be a fairy tale. Plenty, it's safe to reckon. But when you can see the mechanism, it stops working on you. More good news. Doubt it all and investigate until you're satisfied. Doubt the mainstream/legacy media. Doubt WikiLeaks. Doubt the CIA. Doubt me. Doubt is freedom.

8. Adapt to the Adversary.

It's easy to dismiss this as irrelevant. Isn't this mainly of concern to terrorists, anarchists, etc? Perhaps, but keep in mind how flexible those definitions got after 9/11, Occupy Wall Street, etc and how much looser they are getting now. Things are getting crucial. If you're resisting the state, it's wise to evaluate how to proceed. You can't allow paranoia to silence you, but you do want to minimize the chance of being targeted. There are two paths that come to mind.

A. Relative Stealth until you're ready for Plan B

Get off data-mining media platforms, and look for alternatives with encryption. Think twice about buying state-of-the-art, hackable smart appliances with potentially always-on recording functions. If you like, use "outdated" tech, or use old windows versions to minimize threats written for new ones. Go old school and gather in person. We should all unplug more anyway.

B. Get Loud

Eventually we must be heard. The aim of all the fear and example-making being folded into the media soup is to intimidate resistance. Be obnoxious and persistent. Be the signal breaking over the approved broadcast. Fill streets, and stay away from provocateurs who are there to lead the angry into violence which destroys legitimacy. Flood phone lines. Hijack hashtags. Fight the meme wars. Do whatever calls you, covering your butt but not your mouth.

The Curse only works if you fear the spell. The Vampire only gets in if you open the door. The Con only works if we buy the snake oil. Secret Police are only scary if we allow them to be. There will always be more of us.

9. That said, what to do about all this? Make up your own mind, and see the shapes of the invisible as it creeps through the moonlit fog. Survive with your will intact by working around the brambles, and continue to work for the world we all deserve, playing your part in the way you are made to. 

My part? One of many acting as town cryer for the moment, I suppose, though I am no more prescient or expert than anyone. Rather than "The British are coming," I announce that "the intelligence and security communities are not working for you anymore, if they ever were at all." I suppose we all suspected. There's certainly a chain of precedent:

"Carnivore, later renamed DCS1000, was a system implemented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was designed to monitor email and electronic communications. It used a customizable packet sniffer that can monitor all of a target user's Internet traffic. Carnivore was implemented in October 1997. "

"By the end of the 20th century, the system referred to as ECHELON had allegedly evolved beyond its military and diplomatic origins, to also become "…a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications."

It's a real pile. But I mean, they are spies doing spy things. Not amazing, just troubling since they're out of bounds. What do I suggest we do? Well, the spy versus spy game is one we are going to lose if we let it go on with our blessing. The threats these agencies are supposed to shield is from are mostly fictions, used to justify further domestic invasions. The Emperor has no clothes. Point it out. Laugh the Beast back into the hell mouth it snuck here from, and keep watch that we don't invoke it again. Ideally, flush the toilet and put the black budget money into cleaner water. 

Decide for yourself if this is bullshit or revelation. The investigation is good practice for a free mind in these times. As things stand, we're probably not the fish the CIA or NSA want to fry, but the principle is irksome. As citizens of a country in a very strange place, it does put a certain taste in the water.

President Truman set the CIA up, and even he came to hate what became of it. In his words: 

 "Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there's nobody to keep track of what they're up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they'll have something to report on. They've become ... it's become a government all of its own and all secret. They don't have to account to anybody.

That's a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, and it's got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. And if I was back in the White House, people would know. You see, the way a free government works, there's got to be a housecleaning every now and again, and I don't care what branch of the government is involved. Somebody has to keep an eye on things.

And when you can't do any housecleaning because everything that goes on is a damn secret, why, then we're on our way to something the Founding Fathers didn't have in mind. Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix. And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn't prove that, I don't know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn't matter whether it's the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA."

Where's the line, and how do we keep things on the side of it we want? A lot of boundaries are being pushed. A lot of frogs are boiling. In one way or another, this is a test. Studying and checking our homework is a good idea. 

Addendum

For those wishing to dive in and see the bones yourself, there is allegedly a torrent here:

https://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/WikiLeaks-Year-Zero-2017-v1.7z.torrent

The password is rumored to be a JFK quote: "SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds"

(His stated plans for the CIA before he got publicly perforated.)

Of course, "I can neither confirm nor deny this information."

It Tolls for Thee

First they came for the elections, but we grew up hearing that "voting doesn't matter." A slow boil of district manipulation and a thinning pool of viable candidates made that essentially true, but still, turnout was dismal and symbols are important.

Then they yanked the reigns of the media, but we were blasted with the idea that dissent and conversation about corruption are "fake news" now. Division everywhere, a priority. TV, radio, and print sold out years ago. The web is being purged. Hijacking online conversations is a growth industry. We were told who to trust and who to scoff and it was easier than looking for ourselves.

Then they rolled back progressive laws but that only hurt "snowflakes." We figured anti-queer hate crimes and transphobia and racism were overblown. We bought into stereotypes and stopped seeing strangers as human or individuals. We didn't think the Klan was even really a thing. Seemed like a joke. A relic of a former time.  How lucky we were to have such delusions as others watched their backs for lifetimes, as "lone gunmen" and badged officers alike got away with xenophobic murder.

Then they shut the gates. They started turning people away who had nowhere to go, and years of conditioning made us associate the wrong countries with "terrorism" and "job stealing." They started stopping people on planes. Asking for papers. The mask is slipping.

Then they militarized the police, and sent them after indigenous people who wanted clean water. In the cities they hired a few people to mix with peaceful protestors and break windows for the camera so they could point to the violence. They started criminalizing protests, but we took the bait and assumed it was mob rule. Miles from pipelines or the inner city hunting grounds, we figured we had nothing to shout about.

Until we did. We all do. Now what?

Turn inward and to each other now. These are the times we expected. Cross the artificial divides. Resist the death grip of the old institution as we quietly make them irrelevant.

Authority was never the friend of the people, and the pretense is finally falling away. The Germans lost the war, but plenty of Nazis got new jobs and learned to take new shapes. Biding their time and inspiring new legions. History repeats and mutates. And here we are.

This is the moment for vigilance and courage, self-empowerment and cooperative subversion. It's now or never, in a very real sense.

That escalated quickly, or: how to deal when the monsters are real

Number 45 is trying to pass for normal but he has no clue how to live outside his gold plated universe. He can barely read the speeches he stumbles on or the life-destroying executive orders he signs, his cabinet think we're cattle to be looted or destroyed, and we might finally have annoyed the world enough to sweat the sky again. Yikes, to put it mildly.

It feels like somebody hit reverse on western civilization. Very Bad Things are being unleashed. I've been letting it get to me. Don't. Try every day not to, anyway. Be aware of what's happening and admit it's awful, rail against it, but don't succumb to the weight of our predicament. Keep being kind and keep getting smarter and keep finding ways to be visible and formidable. Connect with your neighbors and disconnect from time to time from the holographic universe offered by sponsored screens.

On the one hand fear is pumped into the culture nonstop to keep people distracted. On the other, real evil walks in human skin and feels it has permission to play now. Be vigilant and don't be afraid to punch it in the face if you get the chance. Nazis aren't famous for being reasonable.

Take better care of yourself than you are naturally inclined to. Your pain teaches you your needs, so listen to it and act. Listen also to people when they talk, even if they seem like the enemy for ideological reasons. People may not understand, but only a malignant few truly choose ignorance. For the rest it's a mask, armor. Armor comes off when people feel safe and since the veil is being ripped off the Legend of America only sociopaths and really grounded people feel safe right now.

There is an enemy, but it isn't your neighbor or even the strangers you're conditioned to fear or blame. Certainly not the Enemy of the Moment blasting on TV. The real threat is not one thing exactly (wouldnt it be great if there really were only ONE conspiracy?) but a community of parasites working against each other but also against everyone not in their club.

The Growth has wrapped itself around everything like those vines that slowly choke trees over a century. It has a lot of faces but you know it when you see it. Don't work for the parasites, and don't work against yourself.

Despair is easy to come by, trust not so much, but don't give up and go dark. We need you. Like Henry Rollins said, it's punk rock time. You've felt the premonitions for years. It's time now.

I'm writing this as much for me as for you. Good fight to us all.

Let's not invoke the RoboCop version of reality, okay? 

The Cliffhanger

Will America plumb the depths of corruption before it wakes from the trance of separation and fights back or will we sleepwalk into a Fourth Reich with nothing but a few unread petitions to show for it? Will the gravity of the new dark age take hold before the pendulum effect pushes us back toward science and growing up as a species? Will we make real moves to try the human experiment on other worlds before the inevitable space debris comes to push reset as it did in days past when we still cared enough to pay attention to the sky?

FIND OUT RIGHT AFTER THIS WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR!

Dialing down the feedback: a simple strategy to stave off depression and anxiety

1. Remove yourself physically from the space you were feeling the emotional pangs.  Find a private place and allow yourself to feel it until you believe it's had enough audience. Now concentrate on breathing until you feel the depression/anxiety wane to a functional level. It's too easy to just keep dealing with it and carrying it, but we are finite containers. People may not understand this practice and be offended if you leave, so explain it before or later, but either way just make the time.

2. Improve your situation slightly, and by this I mean put your full attention into a small project that can be completed in one go. Cross off a chore, fix a meal in advance, pay a bill, walk the dog, something. The point is to accomplish some little victory that adds dopamine back into the brain soup and lifts a little of the subconscious burden.

3. Create something. Don't make it a big deal. It doesn't matter at all what medium is or what your skill level is or if it's worth showing to anyone. It's for you. Expressing what is difficult to articulate otherwise and honing the ability to do so are life skills that everyone has a right to.

4. Go to bed at a reasonable time, and try to relax again before lying down. Set an alarm early enough to give you some time to repeat steps 1-3. If you can't sleep, read, but probably fiction and probably not for very long. Your entire being needs true rest to survive.

5. Rise early and do steps 1-3. Have water before coffee. Eat a sustaining breakfast. Take stock of what you have before anxiety about lack creeps in. In this way you'll be bolstered to recognize the thought loops as far more fragile and distorted than they appear when you are weakened.

6. Do this as often as you can and take notes on what works best and what doesn't work. It won't prevent depression or anxiety from coming on, but it will help you to identify triggers and remedies.

7. Remember that everyone experiences this differently. The insight you gain from your own mental hygiene practice doesn't give you a master key to fix people. What it does give you is a way to keep yourself in tune so you can be of better service to them.