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"You're driving past a strip mall in Bakerfield. Every building you can see is concrete or corogated metal.
You've just been working twelve hours designing computer chips for Barbie dolls. Your headache is screaming.
In the distance, you can see red lights from an accident on an over-pass. The red blood of consumer society. Every off-ramp looks the same.
No need for conspiracy. No need for democracy. America has alotted each man his share of emptiness. You just have to step up and buy it.
Your is cousin in telling you about his divorce, talking long distance on his cell-phone. The images are spread-out like TV news. You wonder if he is going to have an accident.
No need for conspiracy. No need for democracy. America has alotted each man his share of emptiness. You just have to step up and buy it.
The assembly line has made terrible mistake. All the parts are spread out in front of you. A thousand dolls with no heads. Everything thing will be cleaned up soon.
Civilizations will not fall by itself, Civilizations will not fall by itself.
It needs your help, It needs your help.
I am here to deflate your hopes, destroy your idea of the future and maybe get you moving. I'm not joking yet. If we aren't turning ideas upside down, we're not taking you to the places we can't imagine being in yet.
As for hope, how many people keep hoping for things that only be won by an honest battle? How many people hoped that Y2K would end this society? I'll admitt I did a little, I thought it would be nice. But as it got closer to the time, it just hit me that there aren't any shortcuts. If we're going to end this, we, the mast of dispossessed people, will have to do it ourselves.
Many people ask, what's the difference between what you last saw on television and what you, really, authentically want from life.
Many people believe in freedom, responsibility, democracy, maturity, honesty, etc,
These are people's ideals. If you could actually go inside, go way and ask yourself what is really important, perhaps you could certain words that just express what you really want. Words like these.
What you do believe in doesn't really matter that much unless you happen to find yourself totally searching for it. For the end of capitalism, that is what we're going to be talking about.
Anyway, if today's horror hadn't continued happening before, we would have had to start putting an end to then now, the horror that is.
Now, the thing about ideals, is that they are very general. Essentially, what important about words like this isn't what other people say they mean but how well they touch a certain place, how well they make a person feel that hey that's true.
For some people, this process of recognizing their ideals brings them back to feelings they haven't felt since they were are child. For others, they can feel in touch with these things right now.
Now what do you get when cross a prison guard with a cocker-spaniel?
No, How are we harnessed ridiculously to time?
There's a management consultant I know of who goes into companies and says "the biggest excuses you have, time and money, just don't exist, they are just ideas in people's heads." And he gets everyone working twice as hard and that really shows language can transform things and how the tool doesn't care what you do with it.
Because if money doesn't exist, how come they have to decimate whole forrests and ecosystems to make this money? It's like the screen door in the submarine, why do you need to change the light-bulb in it anyway.
You ever here how the great thing about America is how everyone can grow up to be president? Well, maybe anyone could grow up to be president, if they were murderous enough about it, but could everyone be president?
Imagine "Good Morning Mr. President, yes how are you doing Mrs. President" Same thing with winning the lottery - imagine everyone winning the lottery - you'd have to spend those million bucks to get the guy at Star Buck, who also just won the lottery, to serve you coffee.
But look at it more. This world is run on the basis of how cops does to change a lightbulb in an electric chair on a submarine with a screen door?
Just think, just consider how the more we produce in the world, the harder everyone works. What a simple formula.
Some people say "your freedom ends where my nose begins" why not say "you honesty begins where my elbow ends" or "My democracy grows where his big toe ends" or "Your happiness starts where his doornob ends."
We're really just exchanging idealism and body parts, like any modern relationship. It's like a movies - it used to always be "a woman, horse and sword" - now it can anything appealing, "A piano, a young boy and snowfield" - "a computer, a city and trench coat." When we go up these levels of abstraction, we wind-up thinking something's important just because we halucinate theme music in the background.
Really, if you look at democracy, freedom, America, "family values," idealism, all these abstractions, they just loose context, just becoming eye candy for television.
How many people can understand that what we could be creating won't have once existed in the past. It will be completely new, an authentic community that is.
Essentially, we don't nowhave a connection between our existence, our animal existence and the ideas we are connecting with.
Experiancing a life worth-living directly is an interesting thing. Love can be something you can touch, if you make it that. Your power can be something you can touch, if you make it so.
In essence, just consider, how could anyone say they have over their life when they don't have power over the cars whizzing past them?
The prison where everyone was divided into the smallest groups.
In the present, wider prison, the tactic of dividing people based on simple phenomonology continues.
[The difference between an abstraction and a key concept]
Abstraction is a idea that is just more general. Freedom just means acting without restraint. It is doesn't yet situate us in how we're going to act.
For me exchange is key concept. It is like the eye of the present whirlpool. In many ways, everything that exists comes out of exchange, this is considering that people are more and more things whose whose every action is given an economic interpretation - exchange is the apex of this society, destroying it is this society's abolition.
That is general and specific - different from freedom on the level of language (though it is seeking a far, far freer society than today)
- Everyone has roles, which job, relationship, family, school and so-forth.
We anarchists would prefer to live in a world where such things don't happen. But that doesn't stop us from being stuck here too.
How most of the problems people have could be solved by injecting enough money into their lives.
How many problems could be solved by someone meeting another person who just really like everything stand for?
How many problems could be solved by work hours being shortened to about half what they are?
Now, can you just stop and imagine having suceeded at a particular role. Just one thing. Imagine how satisfied, just to have mastered that requirement.
And once you have that feeling, once you've got it in-hand, then imagine what it would be like to throw it in the garbage can. [POP]
None of this is going to happen. And it wouldn't be the solution. But if you were to imagine one of these things, suddenly the preassure would be off. [POP]
What does it mean to situate yourself ridiculously in time.
You see someone who has a really annoying problem, I mean annoying to you. It's like when someone is stuck in something so stupid you want to slap them.
It's like some guy sees a woman he's attracted, wants to approach her and then suddenly is totally frozen.
Anyway, there's a whole series of problem that are typical for men and women in this society. Back when I went to family holidays, I would always eat too much during Thanksgiving and Christmas. So much I would feel physically ill. If I happened to have the kind of metabolism where I could have gained weight, I certainly would have.
And over-eating during the holidays is standard problem today. People get together with other people they no interest in and can only relate by buying stuff. So they're bored and they deal with the boredom they just eat. The brain is this great and terrible thing that when there is a new situation, it will come up with something to do about it. You may not like what your brain comes up with, you may hate it but you can count on something being there.
Now if an average person were to think about the worst problem in their lives, it's usually a problem about satisfying a role. It might be worse than just eating too much during thanksgiving that but it has that kind of structure. And it's sad, because people could have much bigger problems, people could feel much more tragic circumstances. The roles grinding against each really create just this smallness.
You know, You ever get sucked into a really good movie? So that when it ends there's this suck and the world seems so bright? I can't mean to tell you that your "self" doesn't go as far the language you use goes.
Now we anarchists, we revolutionaries, we sophisticated could never fall into that same trap that other people fall into.
We do know that roles are
If we could just float up above time and rearrange our decisions so that they are totally coherent, then certainly we'd have it all solved, would we not?
Now, time and money are the springs that hold us all glued to our seats in this funhouse.
It's too bad we won't stop delaying authentic connections until the future catches up to yesterday.
You know, when people continue to not experiance the ecstacy they want,
How many people will continue to have the attitude that doesn't gets them everything they could imagine wanting. This is the year two thousand.
You know, if five people were to simply give each job references, none of them would need either a job history or college degrees. The only will that living for the future gives you is
Bagwan Shree Rajneesh said that anyone who denounces something without giving you a technique to escape it is a preacher. He notes how priests are always denouncing different sins but most of the who do the "sins" - people eat meat on Friday or getting angry or whatever - most of those people probably don't actually want to sin. They just don't really have any way to escape their situation - they have no technique.
Now, I was saying that most people's problems come from roles and that if the ideas that supplied these roles were to change, the places people are stuck in would vanish just as compelely.
Now, if there actually is something I'd like to mention.
If you just happen to know what you want, if you happen to have some change you want within yourself, there are some pretty simple ways to actually achieve them easily, naturally and quickly.
Suppose that there was some resource, like confidence or spontineity or playfulness that you wanted at some point in your life. Then there's actually an easy way to get it.
Since you brain and your imagination does much more than your "self," is aware of, all you have to do is sommon your imagine suppose.
If you have a quality that you would like to have in a situation. First, describe the quality and the situation you would like to have in reasonable detail. Then frame question "what I it like to this exact resource when doing this activity."
Let's say "What would it be like to have complete calm when talking to a bully." And so-forth.
And your imagination will supply you with the answer and the resources for this question.
Today, the past isn't what it used to be. And the future is looking pretty shakey as well.
De Toqueville was a French Nobleman who traveled to America and wrote a book "Democracy in America." It is considered a classic.
One of the things he describes is how in America, there is neither community nor is there an fixed order of rank. But by that token, everyone is constantly using and afixing themselves to any and all symbols of rank with the hope that this or that symbol will give them some prestige.
A big example is colleges. If you've ever seen two people who are going to school start talking, you might hear them say something like "oh, I've heard of that school" or "gee, I don't know where that is." And you really need my packet decoder ring to know exactly what this means.
So what happens, according to Paul Fussell, is that college, in this unstated, unsaid way, is the single biggest source of social prestige in America. But since there is no official order of rank for the schools, people just have to figure whether the school is "known", quote known, by asking each other.
Of course, no one can say "Well am I important, do I impress you?". In fact, most people don't think at all about this. It's like eating too much at Thanksgiving. It's just one of those things that happens by combined preasure of the social roles.
You know, we live in a world where anything is possible. But the easiest way to do that anything is to fool yourself. So discernment is an interesting thing.
To really know something takes a lot of effort. To know something in a reasonble way takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of suspending belief and disbelief.
James Randi is the head of the committee for the scientific investigation of the paranormal. He is a stage magician. Penn and Teller, other stage magicians, also on this committee. And the committee exists to debunk claims that "real magic" is happening.
The funny think is that a number of theoretical physicist, when they step away from theoretical physics, are quite willing to embrace folks give a simplestic, mystical load of bollucks.
What's interesting is that folks who are experts on fooling people, some of these are the best at showing how other claims are wrong - much better than those who are out there investigating abstract truth.
In anycase, it's really interesting to look at the different truths and lies that people claim to find "out there."
Medical-biological industry is key one for providing people with truthes that seem to come from beyond them.
I've had some correspondence about where the HIV virus actually causes. I'm going to read it and then talk more about the entire situation.
Statement:
"thomas segal" <walter-@hotmail.com> wrote:
>The evidence that people are dying from AIDS and not from AZT whose toxic
>properties are known is that there are vast numbers of peole in the third
>world who are dying of AIDS without treatment with AZT or anything else
>besides folk medicine.
>
The "vast number of people" comes in media bits that ar nearly impossible to take apart into quantifiable numbers. The reports coming from the health bureaucracies are compounded from reports from local hospitals. These have no particular accuracy in terms of how much AIDS there is here.
In the West, AIDS consists of a person's having one or more of approximately 27 relatively rare diseases. In Africa, AIDS as defined by the World Health Organisation 1986/87 Bangui African AIDS definition is no more than a collage of common non-specific symptoms and signs such as cough, fever and diarrhoea, and a few diseases such as tuberculosis (TB) and a cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma, diseases which have been endemic in Africa for generation (See NOTE 1)
It is also compounded by the fact that hospitals have a strong incentive to report deaths as being AIDS since death by AIDS gets lots of western interest and aid. Death by other causes gets nothing. An African hospital official/health official can be flown all over the world to talk about AIDS but not to talk about anything or to give any different interpretation of the sitaution. Also, tropical diseases will can give false positives on certain HIV tests.
On the other hand, the average African has a strong disincentive to have anyone they know be considered to have died of AIDS. The level of misinformation is astounding - there is a story of guys kidnappeing young virgins (14year-old girls) and raping them because
"You can't get AIDS from having sex with a virgin" becomes "Having sex with a virgin serves as protection against AIDS." (This more on the topic of the impact AIDS as a pure myth has had)
Anyway, Africa is a region with a high rate of death from malnutrition and related non-specific conditions (conditions where there the whole body is breaking down rather than some single cause being present).
Statement:
>Conventional medicine appears to be on the right track in trying to treat
>HIV infection. The protease inhibitors have enabled many persons infrected
>with HIV to continue to live reasonably normal lives for several years
>longer than they would have been expected to live only a few years ago. My
>next door neighbors, both of whom are HIV+, have decided to look far enough
>into the future that one of them is finishing his college degree so that
>when he graduates college he can
>help his roomate finish his graduate degree.
>
>I hope this answers your question and gives you more info with which to
>work.
>
>Stay Well: TD Walter S.
Hmm,
Certain this seems like a powerful, positive improvement - they certainly should keep it. But just the way that's phrased - shows how the change in conventional **belief** quite plausibly has had a powerful impact on people - thus I'm less than certain that the drugs deserve the credit (but if it's a healing ritual, I'd let this go it's way).
Looking further at the arguments
---
"thomas segal" <walter-@hotmail.com> wrote:
original article:http://www.egroups.com/group/essential-skills/?start=2473
Statement:
> The antibodies that the Western Blot test tests for mean that the body is
> fighting the HIV.
This is the complex equivalence that is currently drawn. However, this is different from any OTHER virus, where a positive test implies that the body once fought the virus and was been successful.
Antibodies are substances generated by the body that each attach to a particular virus, so once a person has effective antibodies, with most viruses, that means that the person's immune system is effectively fitering out the virus (if the antibodies don't work, the virus would grow exponentially and over-whelm the body - in a matter of days, not years). Moveover, HIV behaves like a virus that has been neutralized by the immune system - it is normally only present in only small amount in HIV+ folks - like all the other viruses that a person has been exposed to. (Of course, if a person experiances an immunce breakdown "AIDS," or otherwise, HIV can start reproducing like crazy just like all the other dormant viruses in which the immune system had previously controled).
Statement:
>It isa battle between the body and the virus; the virus
> usually wins the battle, and the HIV+ person goes on to develop AIDS.
>
Oh, statistics on this are very slippery thing. Consider the evengelists of this theory have continually pushed forward the incubation period of AIDS, the term "usually" has lost more and more meaning over the years.
In the US, we've had statistics about a million HIV+ people but haven't gotten our million AIDS cases.
Certainly the group of people who were the first to be coming down AIDS diseases in the early eighties did get AIDS soon after becoming - within a year or two. But this pattern has not been shown to continue through-out the "epidemic." (with the quotes questioning the virus cause, not the number of deaths). It takes people now "much longer to dies" today (note the presupposition THERE).
Statement:
> There are not many persons who have been HIV+ for many years without
> developing full blown AIDS. The number of unmedicated HIV+ persons who have
> not gone on to develop AIDS is miniscule, and these people are studied
> extensively for the possibility of developing an AIDS vaccine or cure.
>
This unquantitied statement is typical of the "bone pointing" of the medical community. If researchers are coming up with a five year incubation period of HIV "Normally," shouldn't most of the folks who have AIDS have been HIV+ for "many years"? The clinics are filled with folks who are sure they know everything about the situation yet have never looked at the science is detail - "HIV educator" who know little in terms of the actual research backing thing up.
Most HIV+ survivors stay far away from the medical community, thus do not appear on statistics. Considering the medical community universally medicates folks, there is some reason for this. Considering the medical community's response to an HIV+ person is "you're gonna die, you're gonna" (to peraphrase yourself), if belief is also a corolation to health, then it is again logical for HIV+ folks to stay away from the medical community.
Statement:
> There are NOT many people who die of AIDS related diseases who show no HIV.
> Both Karposi's sarcoma and the pneumocystitis Carini were virtually unknown
> diseases before AIDS came.
KS and Pneumocystitis Carini were unstudied before AIDS and thus no one actually knows what their incidence was before HIV came along - for example no knows what percentage of "regular" pneumonia was pneumocystitis Carini.
Consider this. There are probably not many who die of AIDS related diseases who haven't previously been exposed to the flu virus. This is because the Flu is something everyone is exposed to.
Within IV drug users and activity male homosexuals, there are relatively few who haven't been exposed to Epstein-Bar virus or other viruses as well. Considering that HIV is an endemic (common) virus within IV-Male Homosexual community, along with lots of other things, corolation is pretty as far proving causation.
(Indeed, Epstein-Barr was a candidate for causation till the media-gala of HIV (originally known as HTLV-III).
- And there are more statistical detail within this that can be argued about but the point is that things are far from clear.
Statement:
>In fact the discovery of AIDS came when a young
> oncologist told an older colleague that he had just seen a case of Karposi's
> Sarcoma, and the older oncologist was shocked because he had just seen his
> second case in several decades of practice.
>
AIDS treated as a distinct phenomenon because of new statistical methodologies design to show "clusters" of disease and new tests showing immune system functions. However, this isn't necesarrily a victory of hitech. A danger of having a fancy new tool is that you look an old phenomenon and suddenly believe that it is something new.
Statement:
> I don't know what kind of proof you want to show that HIV causes AIDS.
>
> Walter S.
Personally, things that contain good science, plausible statistics and math, a hypothesis that's disproveable, test tube and field results that have some relation, that kind of thing. (I've look at "highly mathematical" papers by the David Ho (Time man of the year), and, as a mathematician, I can say they were total bunk.I have friends who stopped doing AIDS research due to the huge amount of fraud that was happening).
One of the best points of Duesberg is that the belief that HIV causes AIDS was never treated as a hypothesis. Essentially it never went through an incubation period but was instantly hoisted into the drivers seat under the aigis of Robert Gallo (who has been shown to have falsified or gotten false results, for a number of his experiments).
I actually am still not absolutely convinced one way or the other - I do know the mainstream approach is incredibly sloppy, incredibly arrogant and very focused on and presupposing the death of the patient - not the kind of thing that recommends it.
Also, as Duesberg points out, the medical community has historically been so focused on a single organism as the cause of a given condition that they often neglect other causes. It's become moderately well accepted that cancer does not single root cause but rather comes as a result of the break-down of a broad range of systems. But this comes after medical science bashing it's head against the wall many, many times.
Read
"Inventing the AIDS virus" By Peter Duesberg and
"Rethinking AIDS" By Robert Root-Bernstein
Hanss
One thing about AIDS, of course, is that it not only killed off a definite segment of the population, it definitively moved the entire country in a more conformist, more repressed direction.
And this is one of the hardest things to actually look at with some distance, this is a phenomenon where a person's belief is going to be strongly influencing their conception of their possibilities in the world.
One of the thing Peter Duesberg that's really interesting is how he