"It's not steroids that are the problem, they are a side effect of being American."

How To Impress Women?

Smile at them as you open your wallet, say a kind word as you open your wallet, extol their finer points as you open your wallet, recite poetry as you open your wallet, promise the earth as you open your wallet, to save time just open your wallet, if you don’t have a wallet, gee that’s tough. Whatever you do, don’t wear a waistcoat.

- Malty

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

-Aldo Leopold

The only way to escape the treadmill is to escape Capitalist
propaganda and advertising, because beads and trinkets attract women
better than anything else. It's genetic.

-Jay Hanson

Humans are NOT the "intelligent" animals they are purported to be,
they are little more than lizards walking around on their hind feet.
Although fantastically complex arguments are given for doing this or
that, it's really quite simple. A binary decision switch is thrown
subconsciously and then sometime later (from seconds to as long as it
takes) a plausible excuse is invented to rationalize the decision.

- Jay Hanson

One of the oft cited premises of the 9/11 Truth movement is that the attack on the towers was the pearl harbor-like event that the neocons anticipated would be necessary to move the US to embrace the aggressive militaristic tactics manifested in Iraq. Here, we have Rumsfeld casually joking about it—not a smoking gun, but, perhaps, a clear “tell” in poker parlance, indicating ready ability to think in these terms.

"Humans do not really think. It's a fiction. Humans perform
"displays" to gain political power just like other social animals.
It's all about the body language, no thinking required -- or even
possible."

Jay Hanson

Mais l’orgie et la camaraderie des femmes m’étaient interdites. Pas même un compagnon. Je me voyais devant une foule exaspérée, en face du peloton d’exécution, pleurant du malheur qu’ils n’aient pu comprendre, et pardonnant! – Comme Jeanne d’Arc! – ‘Prêtes, professeurs, maîtres, vous vous trompez en me livrant à la justice. Je n’ai jamais été de ce peuple-ci; je n’ai jamais été chrétien; je suis de la race qui chantait dans le supplice; je ne comprends pas les lois; je n’ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute: vous vous trompez…’

But orgy and the comradeship of women were forbidden me. Not even a companion. I could see myself in front of an angry crowd, facing the firing-squad, weeping with the unhappiness which they would not have been able to understand, and forgiving them! - Like Joan of Arc! - ‘Priests, doctors, masters, you are mistaken in handing me over to justice. I have never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian; I belong to the race which used to sing under torture; I do not understand the laws; I have no moral sense, I am an animal: you are making a mistake…’

(Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer, tr. Oliver Bernard)

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

~George Santayana~

"A second result of man's animal vulnerability to death and his
symbolic consciousness of it is the struggle to get power to fortify
himself. Other animals must simply use those powers that nature
provided them with and the neural circuits that animate those
powers. But man can invent and imagine powers, and he can invent
ways to protect power. This means, as Nietzsche saw and shocked his
world with, that ALL MORAL CATEGORIES ARE POWER CATEGORIES; they are
not about virtue in any abstract sense. Purity, goodness, rightness—
these are ways of keeping power intact so as to cheat death; the
striving for perfection is a way of qualifying for extraspecial
immunity not only in this world but in others to come. Hence all
categories of dirt, filth, imperfection, and error are vulnerability
categories, power problems."
~Ernest Becker

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew -- what we had in common was that we both read books -- that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

- Howard Zinn

Great Letter!

I was on the scientific faculty of a "well-known American university" for 10 years. Academic freedom is a fairy tale, and universities are essentially corrupted by their funding. Here's why:

- A faculty member is a nobody if he/she doesn't pull in enough grant money. To get, say, $100,000 in grant funding, we had to get $167,000, of which the administration immediately took away $67,000 ('overhead'). This 'overhead' determined your stature with the boss ('dean').

- 90% of the grants in my department were with either federal agencies or the military.

- The administration's evaluations of faculty were largely based on grant income (not teaching or research). Untenured faculty without grants were fired, period.

- Even tenured faculty were considered 2nd-class citizens (low pay, lousy assignments) if they had no grants. It was a grim fate.

To promote 9/11 Truth, a professor would have to throw it all away: no grants, no research, low pay, crappy treatment. Also, his administration would desperately try to shut him up, out of fear of losing university-wide grants.

This is why so few academics have spoken up, and amounts to corruption of what should be a free-thinking part of society. One has to admire the courage of people like Steven Jones (and he left BYU, remember?).

Great letter, Christian, and my heart is with you as you rattle the cages at BU. It takes guts to do what you have done.

I am also aware how the points I am making above can readily be explained away with references to my ego, ignorance, lack of commitment, wrong priorities, etc. All that is fine. Things be as they may, the fact is that this is how I feel currently and this is the action my heart propels me to do. That is the same heart that brought me into Art of Living in the first place. I have nothing else to trust.

“Take stock of those around you and you will...hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas of this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”

~JOSÉ ORTEGA y GASSET

"How much lipstick can you put on the pig without poisoning the poor thing?"

- some net person

"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it's
profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion
becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the
scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables
and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back
of the theater."

~Frank Zappa

A tapeworm injects chemicals into a host that causes the host to crave what is good for the tapeworm.

- Catherine Fitts

"Any individual who rises to the national political level is, of necessity and by definition, committed to the authoritarian-corporatist state. The current system will not allow anyone to be elected from either of the two major parties who is determined to dismantle even one part of that system."

- Arthur Silber

Counting Crows

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three a wedding,
Four a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven a secret that's never been told.

(Folklore of Birds)

I bow down before you,
I honor your role in my journey to God.
I have no more karma to burn with you,
I desire no more karma to incur with you.
I release you, I release you, I release you.

Om Namah Shivayah