Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

A friend was writing to me about the “Boethius” poem. He didn’t get the reference to “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in the title “The Insufferable Lucidity of Boethius” (see my previous posting) and like most people was unfamiliar with Boethius’s Consolations of Philosophy, a book he wrote while imprisoned awaiting trial. Boethius was one of the last generations of classically educated intellectuals as the Roman Empire collapsed in Italy. He served the Gothic King Theodoric. Theodoric wanted to maintain the Roman culture and traditions and encouraged the Roman elites to stay in governmental service. Boethius was one of the classical writers whose writings remained available in Europe in the so called Dark Ages, and was read by scholars and clergy all through the Medieval period. I pun on the title throughout the poem, throwing in the imagery of Justine, the innocent heroine of the De Sade novel of the same name who was defamed and deflowered constantly in De Sade’s condemnation of false virtue in a world of corruption, advocating libertine free love and women’s emancipation as the only appropriate response to the overturning of traditional values in the revolutionary Eighteenth Century. His La Philosophie dans le boudoir, thus becomes the new consolation for a new age. And thus his advocacy of the libertine life also represented by his character Juliette, is the response that will turn a ravaged innocent into a competent sexual navigator of the modern era. I have compressed this into a few stanzas in my rhyming romp, with a tip of the hat to Plato’s bat cave, Homer’s Odysseus and the Cyclops, turned into a phallic image in good De Sade tradition.

My friend was also curious about the term “traducer” which I told him was a word for a liar and deceiver, another name for the devil, which I had picked up from reading the Black Panther Newspaper as a youth when I distributed it in high school. My friend associated it with snitches. I hadn’t specifically been thinking of ‘traducer” as snitch, but when I was a kid involved with the Panthers in Connecticut, one of them was on trial in New Haven for killing a guy and the inside dope we were told* was that the guy the Panthers had killed, Alex Rackley was a snitch or a police agent/informer (see New Haven Independent link to tape recording of confession by Rackley to New Haven Panthers). We were supposed to basically just push the Panther line that the whole thing was a police frame up. It would be the best way to mount an effective defense for defendants Lonnie McLucas, Bobby Seal and Ericka Huggins, and to maintain support among white liberals who at that point did not understand the open war between the Panthers and the government. This was before the CONTEPRO files had been discovered by a radical group breaking into an FBI office in Pennsylvania (Panther Trials New Haven, Wikipedia).

Tom Wolfe wrote a book Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers that describes some of this, but he was an outsider looking in, specifically critical of white liberal faddism, writing about a party at Leonard Bernstein’s place in Manhattan. The Panthers didn’t appreciate Wolfe’ s original article from which part of the book was based, and this is quoted from a Time magazine article in a Wikipedia entry “a minister of the Black Panthers…said of Wolfe: ‘You mean that dirty, blatant, lying, racist dog who wrote that fascist disgusting thing in New York magazine?” (qtd. in Radical Chic, Wikipedia).

Interesting reading these links. because they all have slightly different takes on what happened. Epstein’s original article is the closest to the actual cases, with the other two being written much later. There are obvious errors and I wonder which version is closest to the facts. I was there, but as a kid and part of a group, A.I.M. (American Independent Movement based in New Haven and Bridgeport, CT) that was supportive of the Panthers. I had copies of the Panther’s version in their paper which I sold in my high school. I was in and out of the day to day activities of AIM and the trials. Since I was ostensibly still just a high school student and lived in Monroe, CT, which was an hour away hitching from New Haven where the trials took place, less time if you had your own car, which I didn’t, but I organized car pools to go to the trials and often would have a couple of car loads of kids. We would demonstrate outside the courtroom and attend the trials and help organize fundraisers etc.

Another interesting aspect is the involvement of a young Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was a law student at Yale and organized a group to monitor the trials for the ACLU. I might have actually met her because we would sit in the courtroom and monitor the proceedings of the trials at the same time (Black Panthers and Hillary, Snopes.com).

Link to Epstein article on Panther trials

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/archived/panthers2.htm

Wikipedia article on Panther Trials

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven_Black_Panther_trials

Yale teachers curriculum article about Panther Trials

http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1978/2/78.02.09.x.html

See volume #7 pdf articles on Connecticut Arrests in link below

http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/BPP_Newspapers/bpp_newspapers_index.html

Summary of an article about AIM in the context of Feminism in Connecticut.

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/radical_history_review/v081/81.1kesselman.pdf

Wikipedia article on Tom Wolfe’s book

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Chic_%26_Mau-Mauing_the_Flak_Catchers

Original article by Wolfe in New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/

Supposed confession of the police informer recorded by New Haven Black Panthers

http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/rackley_trial_tape_surfaces/

Summary of Hillary Rodham Clinton involvement.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/panthers.asp

*’Told’ is a strong word, the rumor was around through the grapevine and at that point the Panthers were considered to be the leaders, they were taking the brunt of the heat from the cops. They were getting killed. Nobody knew who did what, we had no access to police records, the Black Panthers themselves certainly didn’t tell us. There was no official meeting in a secret hideaway. Somebody must have talked to somebody, or more likely since our group ran a print shop and we printed most of the alternative press in the region, someone had access to the police and got tipped off. We, at least those of us who were younger, teenagers, wanted to see things in black and white. Panthers good, cops bad. Anti-war movement good, Nixon and his minions bad. Mao good, Stalin bad, pot and acid good, heroin and speed bad and so forth.

What I knew about from real research when I was fifteen, well, not much, I listened to a lot of rock, got my hands on drugs when I could, read scifi, drug literature like Leary, a rather academic tome The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, written by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, Huxley’s Doors of Perception, his fiction, Orwell, Catcher in the Rye, the beat poets, the underground press, and lots of underground comics, I loved R. Crumb. I had an interest in education theory so I read books like A.S. Neil’s Summerhill, and George Leonard’s Education and Ecstacy, as well as the popular psychology of the day. I read some spiritual literature like The Tibetan Book of the Dead and I had from fifth grade until seventh grade kept a very full scrapbook of all the articles I could get my hands on about the war in Vietnam. It started as a school project and I just kept at it. It was how I started reading the New York Times.

I had a copy of Chairman Mao’s Quotations from Chairman Mao, popularly called “The Little Red Book,” but I mostly skimmed through it. I had carried a copy of Plato’s Republic around all year in eight grade but never finished it. Mostly we got our information through the grapevine, personal communication with the older members of the group who had been to college, they led classes on feminism, Marxism, as well as partying with us where we would get stoned and rap. They also made sure those of us who were younger could not get our hands on the ‘good acid.’ It was a constant source of irritation, I in particular would nag them and they would give me some weaker drug like THC, which really was probably just ground up tranquilizers. But we could smoke all the pot and drink wine as long as we didn’t get to drunk. My high school buddies always wanted to tag along just for the free drugs, but I screened most of them out. Only potential recruits could enter the hallowed halls.

Teachers in school for the most part were divided into two camps, the pro-war and the anti-war, just like the rest of society circa 1970. Sometimes I wonder why we accepted the idea of killing an informer so complacently. But we felt we were in a war. Kent State simply confirmed our expectations, the system was brutal and would grind up any resistance. I experienced almost daily police harassment so it just seemed like the order of things. You took a side and hoped your side would prevail.

Once the war ended, the whole movement collapsed, we no longer had a concrete visible enemy, the threat of the draft and a miserable death in Vietnam had vanished and so did the movement. What was left was a scraggly counter-culture that quickly lost its idealism and became the druggie scene. The remnants of the left fragmented, a lot of people like myself moved to the country, in my case to live on a spiritual commune and finish school. Something I never did because of the newest wave of counter-culture punk…for that I was something of a trend setter, I was an elder of the movement by then, in my mid twenties, and did my best to steer it in a radical political direction, by then an Anarchist one. Still a dreamer. It wasn’t until the second Reagan administration, that I gave up and got a steady job at age thirty, I guess there is an irony in there somewhere.

I cut my teeth on poetry watching Ginsberg and company perform at the “Jack Keroac School of Disembodied Poetics” in Boulder as a kid. We had three warring poetry communities back in the late seventies, one the University poets at U of Colorado, two the NAROPA poets mostly the older beat poets, and third the street poets who were mostly more intellectually oriented hippies, punks and Villon followers. I had my radio show in the middle of the night and liked to be an ambassador to all of the factions, egging them on when things got boring.

I missed the famous party where W.S. Merwin was put upon by Rimpoche’s thugs at a drunken orgy as described by Ed Sanders of the Fugs fame. Good luck finding this anywhere. It has become something of a non event…
Sanders, Ed (ed.). The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary. 1977.
Copies are available through Amazon but links for a free copy seem to have disappeared from the internet.

-Note: Trungpa Rimpoche was Tibetan Buddhist Crazy Wisdom lineage leader, rather a drunkard, but smart, who ended up in Boulder started the NAROPA Institute and some of his more famous followers from the beat scene formed the Jack Keroac poetry school.
it was a place for middle aged beat poets to rest their weary bones and teach neophyte escapees from the upper and middle classes how to be bohemian without the risk of endangering their trust funds…or getting cut off from parental support systems…(my own observations), I was a cynic and an anarchist even then. Allen gave me a burnt out stick of incense from his reading one time. I was not impressed. I was impressed with Bill Burroughs and shook his hand. That handshake must have contaminated me, I spent years under the influence.

This is an over the top version of “The Junkie’s Christmas.” Coppola was probably swept up in the eighties’ heroin chic’ thing. Ever see the movie “High Art”?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6kHN92Yv48

A more typical Burroughs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qDP4M2WYAk

My favorite Burroughs “Twilight’s Last Gleamings” but there is a longer version that I remember him reading at NAROPA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBTkk3b7Ofo

This is a youtube with both Allen Ginsberg and Trungpa Rimpoche.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYTEskqkGkg

Another one about a film about Trungpa and his approach, romanticized by his followers a bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80jGSadccmY

This is Trungpa himself lecturing on Tantra in 1974, not long before the party. My girlfriend circa 1976 had been one of his lovers, or so she claimed. I stole her away to my cult at the time and lost her to my best friend… Live goes on…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW7MWq7v7mQ&NR=1&feature=fvwp

I remember sitting in the back of Left Hand Books also in Boulder, where I ran a poetry series, getting drunk with Anslem Hollo and making fun of our friend Joe Shakarchi who was reading something of his. My girlfriend (new one circa 1980), who was co-host of the reading series, was getting pissed at me for being so rude and ending up taking a slug of the cheap red wine too. That was typical of the times. We partied hard and created like we were godlings…

Robert Bly said of my girlfriend and I that we were the future, this was when we met him at a Denny’s in Denver with my GF and the aforementioned Joe Shakarchi. Joe was writing his PHD thesis on Bly, it was rejected. Yet Joe got the last laugh, after a successful career teaching English and as a poet, he has retired in Thailand and lives the good life. So it goes…

Robert Bly from the way I remember him, pre-Iron John.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9LlA-Cl4NA

This is a reading of “The Ballad of Villon and Fat Madge.” Read by Tom O’Bedlam. Great name but he reading is a bit too upper crusty for the material. I think a drunken Gregory Corso reading would be better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQbyDGU4bgg

Corso “Marriage”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp2eyC2oaQ

I found this performance by Dennis Hopper on the old Johnny Cash show back in the early seventies of the Kipling poem “If.” Rather sentimental, but something I would not associate with Dennis Hopper. I always liked Cash and Hopper. This doesn’t really relate to anything except my dad took me to see “Easy Rider” as a warning against the evil ways of seeking to live free, when it first came out. Had the opposite effect on my impressionable mind, I couldn’t wait to go on my own easy rides, except I was afraid to go to Mississippi and Alabama for years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlfnm9gV52w

Much of this material is in my novel, but when I tried it out before the creative writing class at LBCC, (Long Beach City College) nobody seemed to like it, except the teacher and a couple of students my age, in fact most of them didn’t even know who Allen Ginsberg was…. I gave up on the book at that point. The common opinion of my drug infused youthful creativity was incomprehension at its unhealthiness…as if personal hygiene was the point. That is what frustrates. Where is the fire, the seeking after the Byronic heights, flaming of the candle at both ends…. I am getting grumpy in my senility.

I really wanted to leave my spelling of Trungpa Rimpoche as Trumpa, sort of a Buddhist Donald Trump, but for accuracies sake, I fixed it 5/12/2013. Also as the same friend pointed out, they were not really poetry wars, more like poetry rivalries…my poetic license I guess. I also modified my Joe section, he really is a good poet and we were being idiotic to tease him… Anslem is now a respected poet, and I am a reformed degenerate, so it goes… to give Vonnegut his due for the phrase. Now Karass mates, we shall perform ritual Bokononism.

Joe reading one of his poems
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21DGSHQQwrw

There is no other explanation. Sunday, I went to a church to see a performance of ‘The Rite Of Spring” the Stravinsky score to the ballet that was first performed in 1913, depicting Russian pagan festivals and a woman sacrificing to her gods by dancing to death. But when I discovered that what I though was a free concert was being charged for, I walked away with my girlfriend in tow. Instead after some misgivings on my part we drove across LA from Inglewood to Anaheim Hills with a stop off in Long Beach so I could change from my Sunday go to Church or job interview, or classical concert clothes, into my homie street gear. Like the Snoop song says “Crazy rolling down these avenues, crazy.”

We then went to a movie at the Starlight Theaters, which on Sunday before six pm are only $5.00 per person. She wanted to see “Iron Man 3″ and I was hoping for something artier. But I was willing to go along with her. The lines were huge for her movie, and all the performances were sold out. We were going to leave but then we noticed that “Oblivion” the Tom Cruise movie was playing. So we went to see it. It was a rather run of the mill sci-fi movie, Cruse looked old, but it was ok, stealing bits from several sci-fi movies. I came out not particularly impressed but it wasn’t a rip off.

A short synopsis, Cruise is part of a two person team, in charge of maintaining attack drones which are guarding factory ships that suck water out of the ocean to create hydrogen fuel or something. They are survivors of a war in which humanity had to make the planet virtually uninhabitable to destroy an alien attack that destroyed the moon. Humanity has evacuated to Titan, the moon of Saturn. After the Moon is destroyed which causes environmental havoc, how is never explained, but apparently is related to the lunar gravitational effect of the tides, we are supposed to simply assume that part. Cruise and his partner have had memory wipes supposedly to make them incapable of giving information to the enemy if they are captured, who still resist in small pockets on the devastated Earth.

Cruise is tricked by the unseen enemy who had captured one of his drones in a ruined library, and bait Cruise with a copy of “Lays of Ancient Rome” by Macaulay which opens to the page with the lines:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
the Captain of the Gate
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his father
And the temples of his Gods.”

This prompted some subconscious memories, leaking through the mind wipe were dreams about a woman from the past, who just happens to crash land shortly there after. Cruise finds the woman played by Olga Kurylenko and her crew in stasis pods. Drones come and destroy all the crew members except the woman, who he takes to his home base where she is treated by his partner/lover played by Andrea Riseborough. Cruise goes out again with Olga who wants her ship flight recorder and they are captured by the alien enemy who happen to be humans led by Morgan Freeman. They tell Cruise he is fighting for the wrong side, Cruise doesn’t believe them, so they release him and Olga, tell them to go to the bad lands which are supposed to be a radioactive zone and find out the truth. They find the old Empire State building, a wreckage, and Cruise remembers the woman is his wife. He had proposed to her there. There are some more twists and turns, his partner is killed by drones, he gets in a fight with a clone of himself and realizes that he too might be a clone, returns to the Freeman group convinced they were right, and ends up going into space to attack the alien seemingly robotic, mother ship, a giant upside down pyramid, that makes clones of the Cruise character who are used to conquer Earth and suck its oceans dry for their own nefarious purposes. Cruise listens to the flight recorder on the way to this attack, and remembers that he was captain of a ship sent to investigate Titan in 2017, and instead was diverted to investigate a space object which happened to be the aliens who capture Cruise and his co-pilot, Risenborough. His wife Olga was in a suspension pod in the back part of the ship which is released into space before Cruise is captured. Evidently he is cloned, memory suppressed and sent to attack earth, then after it is mostly subdued he is sent to maintain the drones while their factory ships proceed to suck the water out of the oceans. Cruise and Freeman, now act the part of Horatio at the bridge and destroy the alien ship with a nuke they smuggled on board saving the Earth. Meanwhile Olga has his daughter and three years later the other clone Cruise shows up at Olga’s hideaway in some Rocky Mountain paradise, and picks up where the other Cruise left off.

Lots of illogical and improbable sequences. But it is mildly entertaining. The aliens seem to be the modern industrial world, sucking the life out of the planet, with the only way to save the world seemingly being to destroy the brains behind this planet destruction, i.e. destroy Wall Street, and its ilk. Or it could just be a sci-fi tale with no particular significance, but I tend to think my analysis is correct, the environment being a big concern now and frustration at the lack of action being widespread among the thinking classes of the world. Nice bypassing of Christianity using an ancient Roman symbolism. I don’t know if the writer of this is apparently it was based on a unpublished graphic novel from director Joseph Kosinski and Arvid Nelson, rewritten several times, and then made into a movie.

I had meant to write something completely different, but now I am out of time, have to get ready to go to school and deal with the day on about two hours sleep. I had been thinking about the concept of the scape goat, how some of us, in fact most of us are loaded down like mules with the burdens of the world, think all those slaves or free workers, building pyramids. Some elites somehow are able to dominate and force or entice others to do their wills. We all are for the most part sheep being sheered or slaughtered for the machine of this elite, for ultimate unknown reasons. I mean why does this god need suffering and sacrifice? It only makes sense as part of some kind of power grab. Thus we are all lied to and act as clones going to work, doing our duty, sacrificed like lambs going to the slaughter to what end? Shades of anarchy or some Scientology fantasy. Who or what are the puppet masters? I was thinking about the fact that in India yogis thousands of years ago tried to find ways out of the web of karma that these gods used to keep us under their thumbs, meting out so called karmic justice over generations of lives. So the Yogis theorized that by stopping Karmic activity they could break the wheel. But how? But if this is simply a set up to control, then all these efforts are in vain. The only escape is refusal to participate, walking away or rebellion on a mass scale. But can sheep wake up and rule themselves successfully? Anthropology indicates man did fine for eons until the sudden development of sedentary man about 5-10 thousand years ago. We might really be part of some alien prison planet, or did humanity simply decide to break into elites and masses with the invention of agriculture? The theoretical basis is still pretty shaky, leaving room for doubt. And in the middle of the night I am full of doubts.

Recently I saw the latest Robert Redford film, The Company You Keep. It was recommended by a friend and because it was about the Weather Underground, and revolved around a scene that I was at least peripherally involved in back in the early 1970’s, I was intrigued enough to cough up the $22 bucks it cost for my girlfriend and I to go. I usually only go to the $4.00 movies at the Starlight Cinemas, but they often don’t have the more interesting arty films like The Place Beyond the Pines, which I thought was excellent.

Back to the Redford film and the Weather Underground. Briefly the story is about a group of former members of the Weather Underground and their supporters who are still underground. They have families who for the most part don’t seem to know about their pasts and they have a communications system to stay in touch in emergencies, including alternate sets of identification. Redford plays a lawyer in upstate New York who does public interest cases, reminds me of Abbie Hoffman, the Yippie, who was an environmental activist when underground in Upstate New York. One of the group who was involved in a bank robbery where a guard is killed, reminding me of the Brinks Robbery in the early eighties, is arrested by the FBI and a young Albany, NY reporter out to make a name for himself digs around to find where the other missing robbers are, leading him to Redford who goes on the lam looking for his former lover who can clear him of involvement.

There is a chase scene, the FBI is on his case. Redford’s character leaves his eleven year old daughter with his brother who reluctantly helps. This leads to a journey meeting the former members and supporters, all now established in their own lives, one runs a lumberyard, played by Nick Nolte, who helps out giving Redford a safe place to stay, a clean car, talks about old Weatherman politics in a convincing insiders manner and in general is true to his past, a ‘bro’ who has found a way to accommodate beliefs and the modern world. Another character played by Richard Jenkins is a college professor in Chicago, who had not agreed with the bank robberies and was not happy to see Redford, but helped out anyway.

The FBI and the reporter are on his trail, he meets his former lover played by Julie Christie, who has remained radical and underground. This takes place in a cabin in back woods of Michigan where they relive their past, talk about the daughter they abandoned to another family years before, who has become interestingly enough the love interest of the young ambitious reporter. Ultimately Redford is arrested, Christie who was going to escape had a change of heart, turns herself in tells the authorities Redford was innocent, he gets to go home to his eleven year old daughter. We don’t know what happens to Redford’s older daughter who is now studying law in Ann Arbor, but presumably her step -father. The reporter, who had been ruthlessly exposing people for the sake of the story, now decided to quash what he had found out about her, love conquers his reporter’s instincts.

Like a good thriller, some twists and turns, lots of political grandstanding with some characters still trying to live the radical dream, others attempting to accommodate to the modern world, with varying degrees of acceptance, all seemingly comfortable members of the middle or upper middle class. It is reasonably fast paced for a Redford film, not as didactic as some, but with a Hollywood ending that is not particularly satisfying although my girlfriend seemed to like it.

There are several key perspectives presented, that as Susan Sarandon’s says “if it weren’t for my kids I would still be in the struggle” or words to that effect. Secondly as Redford’s character says “I didn’t get tired, I grew up.” The third option offered by the character played by Julie Christie to keep on with the struggle, as an unrepentant pot smuggler in California. But even this hardened radical has a soft spot and ultimately turns herself in to save Redford’s persona from going to jail. Nolte, the loyal friend of old who gives jobs to ex-cons and helps as he can is my favorite character. The Marxist college professor who enjoys teaching but doesn’t believe in the path taken by the Weathermen, the cynical reporter who doesn’t take sides, only cares to promote his career, and the FBI who seem to be single minded, although not particularly successful in tracking the enemies of the state.
Redford got his friends in trouble as the FBI followed him and busted at least the Nolte character for aiding and abetting a fugitive. The Christie persona ends up locked up for participating in the bank robbery as does the Sarandon character. Redford’s character seems to only care about exonerating his name and being reunited with his eleven year old, not exactly an exemplary model of a revolutionary or a human being, but in the movie this is downplayed, and his return to normalcy and legitimacy, redemption so to speak seems to be its point.

I wish Christie’s character had simply kept on flying the flag of resistance. What was missing was any link to some present day movements such as Occupy which seemed to be a natural fit for her or some sort of third world activism besides delivering boat loads of pot from Latin America. She seems sort of like the elder Yippie, Dana Beal, who is serving time for a pot bust currently in the real world. Redford seems hell bent on reconciliation, and his Bill Ayers like character seems to be a stand up for Obama’s old school liberalism, sort of a paternalistic view of the responsible elites taking care of the country and keeping the world safe for the established order. The FBI is simply doing its job, the harpies of a Greek tragedy. The American continuation of war mongering, Vietnam all over again in Iraq, Iran and god knows where else, which has never stopped is not brought up in the context of the movie, except as an unstated rationale for the continued resistance of the Christie character and the uncompromising view of the Sarandon persona. Redford seems to want us all to get along, and not continue to make too much trouble, at least not so much trouble that it would cause him to lose sleep at night. For me the ending was intellectually troubling as it seemed to promote the view that all we need is some reconciliation, to smooth out the wrinkles in our collective pasts, facile and ingenuous in my view.

Note on being underground, that is living under assumed identities and contacting others only as needed through a fairly elaborate system of codes and safe houses, that seem to mirror the CIA if not in technology, at least in its sophisticated understanding of surveillance and how to avoid detection, which I remember boning up on back in the early eighties reading books like Without A Trace and self-help books on changing identities. Some of the techniques showing up in the movie, such as using the birth certificate of a dead person who would be about your age since birth records and death records are rarely kept by the same agencies or in the same cities given our propensity for movement.

Interesting I could not find a link to the original book Without A Trace. It might be a banned book in the USA. Or the underground publisher may never have copyrighted it back in the seventies.

Weather Underground links

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/weatherunderground/movement.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

A relatively good and comprehensive analysis of the movie and the real persons being represented at this link

http://seesdifferent.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/the-company-you-keep/

Jewish American liberal perspective comparing book and movie at this link

http://www.juf.org/news/blog.aspx?id=420482

Downloadable version of movie

http://kat.ph/the-company-you-keep-2012-dvdrip-xvid-ac3-by-zinkslane-t7325560.html

There were protests today in Spain as the unemployment rate climbs to 27%. This is being led by a new more radical group in Spain.

“The “Siege of Parliament” protest came hours after the release of official figures showing that unemployment had risen above 27 percent, with 6.2 million people jobless.

Among the signs protesters carried aloft were: “6.2 million reasons.”

The demo was organized by the political online platform ¡En Pie! (Stand Up!), an amalgam of political groups calling for the resignations of lawmakers, the dissolution of both the upper and lower houses parliament and a new political process.”

http://www.dw.de/violence-flares-as-protesters-besiege-spanish-parliament/a-16773486

I don’t usually copy an entire post but I am curious about the evolution of the protest movement in Spain. This is from a blog site called “Gender : Visual : Communication”

“8. April 2013 | INT. ROMA NATION DAY

#25A Spain: New protest mobiblizing for social justice
Posted on April 8, 2013 by birgitstoeckl

source: plataforma ¡en pie!

The platform “Plataforma ¡en pie!” [platform stand up] are activists from different cities in Spain, most come from other social / protest movements, lacking the right target when defining the roots of the problem of economic crisis- thus they raise a new platform with a very concrete objective.

They wanted to to position themselves ideologically, without any ambiguities and move to the action for the sake of those ideas, moving forwards a more forceful and committed protest. This was how one night, with the idea of promoting a strong mobilization in Congress comes to an initial group, later on the named it “Plataforma ¡En Pie!”.

Left not leftist

En Pie believes that social change is fundamental to start and move forward with a solid set of ideas about the current reality and desired reality, the discourse of “neither left nor right, go together without ideology” seems dangerous, they say not to stand with ideas is running like a headless chicken. Thus, they position themselves down and left, referring to left in its original sense, the social left, with the values ​​that this item represents justice and equality, which has nothing to do with parties who call themselves leftist.

This platform was initiated by the 25S movement, whose activists are convinced, that the real problem in Spain is living under an illegitimate regime installed in 1978, which still lacks democracy. Thus they believe in opening the debate on the necessity to initiate a process of transition towards a transparent and democratic social organization where power truly resides in the people.

Siege the Congress

#25A: ¡en pie! call for a new protest on 25 April, promoting to siege and final release of the Congress of Deputies as main action. As a secondary actions: Free disperse actions affecting the established power are planned, always within the framework of human rights. Their general objective is the the fall of the regime including the government’s resignation, dissolution of the Parliament and the Head of State), and the opening of a transition to a new model of political, economic and social justice and truly solidarity.

With the support of experts they are developing an information pack about everything related to the transition process, soon they will edit a package of documents. Moreover, they especially appeal to the female community, convinced that the system has been and is especially pernicious with. Thus ¡en pie! consider it essential that the female people stand up and exercise leadership in order that this revolutionary process is set up in equality, women and men side by side, fighting for a common goal. They also call for the solidarity of the syndicates to coincide their action day with #25A and support their protest with an indefinite general strike.

http://genderview.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/25a-spain-new-protest-mobiblizing-for-social-justice/?blogsub=confirming#blog_subscription-5

Recent days have been particularly interesting as the domestic scene has been full of bombs going off and Ricin being delivered in the mail, shades of the period after 9/11 when the Bush administration was pushing for passage of the Patriot Act and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Talk about over kill.

Obama’s administration likes a more discrete war mongering. Drone strikes, and smaller scale bombings, picking on smaller foes, like North Korea, and dancing around the bigger potential bug bears such as Iran and ultimately the biggest contender China.

The gradual build up of forces in Asia has a handy trigger in the North Korean faux conflict. As anyone should understand North Korea is a proxy for US and Chinese interests, with Japan playing a secondary role as America’s backup, they are even planning to re-militarize as part of the overall new containment strategy being pursued by the Obama administration. The shift in Focus from the Middle East, note Obama’s total unwillingness to get into the Syrian debacle, and his tentative support of Israel, as the main focus is moved to East Asia. Beefing up existing alliances, bids to take Myanmar from the Chinese orbit into the Western alliance, movement of troops into Northern Australia for easier access to the Gulf of Malacca choke point for oil imports to China, backing up Japanese aggression in the South China Sea to intimidate the Chinese and possibly provoke a premature reaction, are all part of the international chess game of big power ploys to retain or gain access to vital resources around the world.

China has expanded into the global South in a big way and has become the main contender for African loyalties. But the largest investments by far are in the United States and Australia. Australia having become economically dependent on continued Chinese economic growth as a resource supplier, hardly more than a third world country, and the USA dependent on Chinese production of cheap consumer goods in its scramble to become the world’s largest dumping ground for cheap consumables, presumably to keep the increasingly dispossessed American lower classes able to afford the necessities of life in a Faustian bargain, Americans trade good paying jobs for low paying service positions in exchange Americans get low cost consumer goods at Walmart and the proliferating Dollar Stores.

It is interesting that both of the sites I have linked too have vested interests that are governmental as VOA clearly is, or Heritage Foundation with its association with Neocon policies as the IRC report indicates.

The ratcheting up of East Asian tensions over the last few years, with China increasingly asserting itself in the region as a creditable alternative to the US as the hegemonic power, it remains to be seen if a renewed Sino-Russian alliance can counter the weight of the USA and Japan with India as a potential additional asset in the gambits to control resources and spheres of influence.

Still by far the largest overseas deployments are in Afghanistan, Japan and Germany, with larger numbers in cold war formations surrounding Russia than China at this point in time. Russia with a large nuclear force is still deemed the most dangerous of the forces potentially confronting the US.

China and Russia seem to be working in a loose alliance to contain the USA and its allies, with supporting Iran against western bombing and maintenance of Syria. The Russians seem to be wobbling in their support of the Syrian regime, they have an ally that is a bird in the hand with Assad, as opposed to the opposition which is currently a bird in the bush and potentially trouble if Al Qada gains a base there. The Russians already have trouble with Chechnya and Dagestan’s Islamic resistance. China faces Islamic resistance in Xinjiang, Buddhists in Tibet and a restless domestic population seeking greater freedoms, less pollution, greater food safety and increased wages to name a few. Russia has its own domestic problems, including a growing fascist tendency.

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/heritage_foundation

http://www.voanews.com/content/brics-summit-south-africa/1629306.html

http://rt.com/news/china-us-military-pacific-219/

http://www.heritage.org/research/projects/china-global-investment-tracker-interactive-map

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployments

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/NF07Ad01.html

http://www.mei.edu/content/chinas-evolving-stance-syria

http://www.usak.org.tr/EN/myazdir.asp?id=2129

http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/Russian-Muslims-and-Foreign-Policy-15687

http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5627/print

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/hard-love-and-empty-promises-china%E2%80%99s-domestic-counterinsurgency-in-xinjiang

http://rt.com/politics/reform-chubais-forecasts-protests-484/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/15/us-russia-summit-chubais-idUSTRE68E58W20100915

So I am doing this thing. Fasting every other day. Its part of my get back program, get back to where I once was…

See these links, or listen too them. You really need this stuff. Its from the past and back then before the David Gray’s took over the earthing “child of the universe,” but then there was nothing…nothing you say? But first a few words from our sponsor….

“Maybe I’d never see him again… maybe he’d gone for good… swallowed up, body and soul, in the kind of stories you hear about… Ah, it’s an awful thing… and being young doesn’t help any… when you notice for the first time… the way you lose people as you go along … the buddies you’ll never see again… never again… when you notice that they’ve disappeared like dreams… that it’s all over… finished… that you too will get lost someday… a long way off but inevitably… in the awful torrent of things and people… of the days and shapes… that pass… that never stop…”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan

One after another, one after another they come and go….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0k7FNYKepg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbOdnCvQfI0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdZYhhoJHxQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oBGqkTnIAg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kfTrV-ZxFQ4

“The question many people have asked me is whether the Grey Aliens have
already made contact with our government. Many stories circulate and much
of it turns out to be media hype to convince the majority of the population that
it is one big hoax that is going on.

One of the most interesting facts about Aliens is that no matter what part of
the world you go to everyone can identify a strange creature that has the
basic description of a Grey Alien.

So has the U.S. Government made contact with these Aliens and what are
they doing behind the backs of the American people? In 1952, the U.S.
Government prepared itself for the realization of ongoing alien contact when
our military technology reached a point that could threaten the Grey’s UFOs.”

http://arcturi.com/GreyArchives/USAndGreys.html

Well there you go…you are getting very sleepy…

From “Competitive Interference Effects in Consumer Memory for Advertising: The Role of Brand Familiarity”
by Robert J Kent, Chris T Allen

“Although consumers often encounter ads for familiar brands, previous advertising interference studies have used ads for low-familiarity brands. The authors focus on brand familiarity’s role in increasing ad memorability and moderating competitive interference. They conducted a factorial experiment varying the familiarity of brands featured in test and competing ads. With differences in ad executions, prior exposure, processing objectives, and exposure time experimentally controlled, subjects displayed substantially better recall of new product information for familiar brands. Their findings suggest that established brands have important advantages in advertising: Consumers should be more likely to recall ad information, and their memory should be less affected by exposure to competitors’ ads. The authors conclude with implications for the marketing of new and mature brands.”- Journal of Marketing

http://www.mendeley.com/catalog/competitive-interference-effects-consumer-memory-advertising-role-brand-familiarity/

From “Recovering Memories of Trauma: A View From the Laboratory”
Richard J. McNally
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

“The controversy over the validity of repressed and recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) has been extraordinarily bitter. Yet data on cognitive functioning in people reporting repressed and recovered memories of trauma have been strikingly scarce. Recent laboratory studies have been designed to test hypotheses about cognitive mechanisms that ought to be operative if people can repress and recover memories of trauma or if they can form false memories of trauma. Contrary to clinical lore, these studies have shown that people reporting CSA histories are not characterized by a superior ability to forget trauma-related material. Other studies have shown that individuals reporting recovered memories of either CSA or abduction by space aliens are characterized by heightened proneness to form false memories in certain laboratory tasks. Although cognitive psychology methods cannot distinguish true memories from false ones, these methods can illuminate mechanisms for remembering and forgetting among people reporting histories of trauma.

From “The Physics of Abductions”
By Dr. Corrado Malanga, PhD
Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry Department of the Pisa University,Via Risorgimento 35, 56126 Pisa Italy. malanga@dcci.unipi.i
Translation Curated By Dorica Manu

“Dr. Malanga’s Alien Levels Of Interference

Dr. Corrado Malanga proposes a new interpretation of the phenomenon based on a classification of the alien interferences in five levels:
-Level One: surgical operations on the abducted person.
-Level Two: alien memories implanted into the brain of the abducted person.
-Level Three: cloning of the abducted person.
-Level Four: attempt to move the light-dots matrix ( the Consciousness ) of the abducted person and constrain it into an alien body.
-Level Five: different kinds of an incorporeal aliens made up by light ( called “LUX” ) or coming from an another dimension ( called “GRINCH” or “SIX FINGERS” or HORUS-RA ) are the ones who control all the other aliens.

A “Level Six”, too, has been discovered and partially understood but this is still subject of research at the present time.” as Quoted by Eve Lorgen

http://www.scribd.com/doc/104179272/The-Physics-of-Abductions

or

http://evelorgen.com/wp/articles/medical-and-scientific-aspects-of-alien-abduction/the-physics-of-abductions/#more-207

From “CH8 Flashcards”

“After suffering a brain injury in a motorcycle accident, Adam cannot form new memories. He can, however, remember his life experiences before the accident. Adam’s memory difficulty most clearly illustrates:
encoding failure.”

http://flashcarddb.com/cardset/72279-ch8-flashcards

From “Natureserve: Invasive Species”

“Containing the onslaught of invasive species will not be easy or quick, but it is not impossible. Doing so will require work on four fronts:

Prevention of Additional Introductions:
The best and most cost-effective solution is to prevent the arrival of new alien pests in the first place.
Early Detection and Rapid Response:
Finding new outbreaks early, together with aggressive eradication campaigns, is the next best solution.
Control and Management of Established Problem Species:
If the invaders cannot be eradicated, or already are established, containing their spread and controlling their numbers can help minimize their effects on natural systems and biological diversity.
Restoration and Recovery of Natural Ecosystems:
Controlling problem species is not enough; the affected native species and ecosystems also must be restored and protected.”

http://www.natureserve.org/consIssues/invasivespecies.jsp

From “White House Denies Any Contact with Alien Life”
by Clara Moskowitz, SPACE.com Assistant Managing Editor

“The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race,” Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy wrote in a statement published Friday (Nov. 4). “In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public’s eye.”

http://www.space.com/13534-white-house-alien-life-evidence-petitions.html

From “Invasive Alien Species: A Growing Problem for Environment and Health”

“There are more than 10 000 alien species present in Europe, and the rate of new introductions has accelerated and is still increasing. At least 15% of these alien species are known to have a negative ecological or economic impact.” - European Environment Agency.

http://www.ecology.com/2013/02/28/invasive-alien-species-growing/

Link to FBI report on Space Aliens.

http://vault.fbi.gov/hottel_guy/Guy%20Hottel%20Part%201%20of%201/view

I am thinking about random stuff. Not really real, like when I used to think I could talk to plants, or see ghosts, weird shit. I invented my own religion when I quit being a catholic. I wanted to know if any set of rituals would work. So I made up this elaborate on the floor pseudo masochistic thing. It was during puberty so there was lots of semi-repressed sexuality going on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYtmvZDRAOU

Whatever. So I used to take lots of drugs, back in the day. I still watch too much TV, almost never listen to music, but I do like the news, and European mysteries on the MHZ channel 311 on my Charter Cable box.

http://www.mhznetworks.org/

I also like Adult Swim, watch too many Family Guy, American Dad and King of the Hill reruns. Or rather they are on when I am doing homework, or vegetating at night, er I should say contemplating.

Politics, am I becoming conservative or what? I am almost thinking of getting a gun, but then, what would I do with one of those damn things, I am no drug dealer, and I don’t expect to see any jack booted Homeland Security types busting down my door any time soon. Even the IRS is polite and works out deals with me.

Is this a kinder gentler age or what? The homeless have taken on that sort of permanent poor quality, sort of the the ragged classes that used to be found outside of monasteries or in the galleries of the kings castle when he had a feast, waiting for a tossed bone or two. Seems Americans are beginning to know their place, not upsetting their betters, a new sense of class division is taking place with the new nobility occupying the upper one percent and the rest of us “by your leave-ing my lord…” and bowing and scraping and such.

“May I have more…” a fine kettle of fish, eh Mr. Dickens. Askin’, like it weren’t our rights to have a sop of bread and butter in the morning with the tea… well its a good thing we have the union to stand by us, oh, no, we don’t anymore. It is just us…alone seeking Justice…

and a little of our freedom,. like that old Love song. The Red Telephone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzkAwCs5bnI

You are growing very sleepy…

People are all fired up at the new Obama administration budget with social security cuts in it. It seems that what the president is proposing is what AARP is calling the “chained cpi.” Progressive Democrats, MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO, and CREDO are a few of the organizations who are opposed as well.

http://blog.aarp.org/2013/04/05/illinoisans-detest-president-obamas-chained-cpi-budget-proposal/

“The nation’s largest coalition of unions has been a staunch opponent of “chained CPI,” a proposal to reduce Social Security expenditures by tying them to a more restrictive measure of inflation, and one that’s expected to be included in Obama’s budget when it’s unveiled next Wednesday.

Besides chained CPI, Obama would also reduce spending on Medicare through lower payments to healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies.

Those cuts, confirmed on Friday by the White House, drew the ire of a number of progressive groups, at least one of which promised to support primary challenges against Democrats who support Obama’s plan.” -The Hill

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/292195-afl-cio-launching-petition-against-obama-budget

“The plan, if ever enacted, could touch almost all Americans. The rich would see tax increases, the poor and the elderly would get smaller annual increases in their benefits, and middle income taxpayers would slip into higher tax brackets despite Obama’s repeated vows not to add to the tax burden of the middle class. His proposed changes, once phased in, would mean a cut in Social Security benefits of nearly $1,000 a year for an average 85-year-old, smaller cuts for younger retirees.
Obama’s budget also proposes new spending for public works projects, pre-school education and for job and benefit assistance for veterans.” - Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/obama-social-security-cuts_n_3019123.html

The White House says it is fair. This is their line from the OMB.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget

But most on the left think it is outrageous, the elderly certainly don’t like it and the Republicans are dismissive. The president is pleasing no body this time around.

“Cutting benefits now, when people are already struggling to make ends meet, will mean unnecessary hardship for millions of people,” Reps. Keith Ellison and Raul Grijalva, the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in a joint statement. “It is unpopular, unwise and unworkable.” - Christian Science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2013/0406/Obama-s-budget-offends-just-about-everybody.-Is-that-compromise

The NYTimes broke the story and since then its gone viral.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/us/politics/obama-budget-is-dismissed-by-gop-and-attacked-by-left.html?_r=0

Seems the President can’t win for losing…or can he pull a rabbit out of his hat like he did with Obama care? We were all on his side back then. Now that he is trying to please budget hawks, he has lost his support on the left. What about the center? Certainly the elderly are not happy.

The right wing is probably going to let Obama swing on this but the fiscal hawks will taste a bone being tossed their way. Will they bite?

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/04/05/reports-obama-budget-will-include-social-security-reform-medicare-cuts-n1559357