Army Brat

I'm grateful I've always had a sense of history. Growing up British with a father in the Army, I was often surrounded not only by WWII veterans but also WWI vets. Germans and British depending on the country we were stationed in. 

Near one of my father's homes in Netley Abbey is a park where the largest building in the world once was. A hospital from the Crimean war where Florence Nightingale toiled and where later on American Jeeps drove down the central hall it was so long and wide. We'd head down to a pier (pictured under) now no longer, where injured soldiers arrived in all the major wars, and where I learned to do my first somersaults into the gravelly and pebbled beach below. Where the now absent struts had once supported the dying and the wounded as they were fetched into the Royal Victoria Hospital. 

My best friend and I would sneak out late at night to visit the prettiest but darkest of cemeteries with multinational graves of Canadians, Germans, Australians and more. Regiments with names like The Black Watch that I yearned to know the history of before the internet and smartphones. Names from far flung places of empires that no longer exist.

Later on as an adult I worked with the US military in Giessen just after the first Gulf War where i was selected in part because of resiliant psychographic profiling though they never knew that I merely used my wits and gave the answers I felt they needed (I later graphed the real answers and there were similarities of wave from but often with symmetries from the ones they wanted). I watched and observed the American Military machine from up close.

And so all my life I've been blessed with an unusual sense of luck at getting bogged down in a war no more bloody than the Cold War, and that even more so I'd skipped the horrific brutality of The Great War. Trench warfare in WWI was a first taste of mechanized killing through propaganda and manipulation by the string pullers. The second World War an extension of the first. And if the current slew of string pullers could have their way they'd pitch us against each other in an over populated planet's heartbeat. Of this I've no doubt. 

But maybe we're finally catching on. Realising it takes a higher type of consciousness to solve the problems that created it in the first place. Who knows.

What I do know is my idea of hell is trench warfare at the Sommes. Of being ordered to "go over" and slug it out in the poison gas and stench of rotting bodies, the cries and the senseless slaughter. I thank my lucky stardust I didn't have to see it, or if I did, I don't remember it. That so many unwittingly sacrificed all they had, stirred on by new found forms of mass media manipulation that subsequently went on to become the marketing industry through the efforts of Edward Bernays in New York, a nephew of Sigmund Freud exploiting the new found thinking in psychology and mass manipulation.

I'm blessed to have lived through the most extraordinary century ever and in terms of unwitting awareness of how it all was held together but now I know the Kali Yuga and whatever the new point of change will be, I welcome it irrespective of what my own fate is. It's nothing compared to the lives of millions sacrificed in the age of Iron and bullets.

This piece is in memory of Frank Buckles, WWI's last veteran who passed away after an extraordinary stretch of time spanning two centuries of the bloodiest years I've had the good luck ever to have missed.

Is Shirky Shirking The Obvious?

I think Clay Shirky handles some early questions here with elegance and intellectual panache but as soon as it comes to the schizophrenia of U.S. democracy with sham foreign policy interests he back peddles noticeably, passing one answer on to a deeply unrespected congress in a somewhat knock-kneed distancing of intellectual responsibility as to what the notion of an autocratic government is. Clue, its one that doesn't listen to its electorate. Hopeless, changeless and so on.

Clay evidently doesn't see that funding and propping up dictators such as Egypt and Tunisia and Libya (shall I go on?) is merely a variant of autocracy dramatized through repression abroad as a hyperpower strategy. 

Just because U.S. citizens are by and large pampered and misled sheep doesn't change the nature of pernicious empirical power or the impending doom that will visit them. This is only a matter of time. I'm also happy to write at length about US censorship too.

Clay, this isn't personal but the veil is over your eyes when it comes to the illusion you cling on to that the U.S is a model democracy.  By all means throw a Scandinavian country in there but not a dypsomaniac hyperpower lurching on the precipice. You need to get away from the Pasta and Chardonnay crowd.


I rarely agree with Gladwell but his tipping point is increasingly imminent.

LSD

LSD stops cluster headaches more effectively than big pharma drugs peddled on every high street around the world and yet it is illegal. The reason for that is that during the 60's the CIA et al were conducting unlicensed experiments on both US soldiers as well as waifs and strays that were kidnapped off the streets and imprisoned in rooms with two way mirrors where some of them were subjected to a number of experiences including sex that would normally have been rejected while uninfluenced. I've heard stories that some lost their mind as it's a molecule that requires a certain amount of respect. One where set and setting is crucial for people if proper consciousness exploration takes place.

This documentary is extraordinary in so much as there is an emerging desire from some people to reframe the propaganda that was pushed out about this neurotransmitter when the military learned that the most devastating effect of LSD is it dissolves the power of the State to kill our fellow men.


An idea not so well appreciated during the failed Vietnam war.


So they (the usual institutions) pushed it through a rush bill in the Senate where it was conflated with the drugs that the CIA much prefers to deal around the world thus creating  laws that give them distribution advantages for the much more profitable and addictive substances such as heroin and cocaine. Cocaine is incredibly interesting to me these days as I rarely meet a likeable person who is into it. Not that we didn't all dabble in our youth but it seems spiritually questioning people tend to grow out of it finding its narcissistic bent unappealing. If Cocaine is all about me, me, me. Then LSD could be described as us, us, us.

I don't condone or unambiguously proselytise the use of recreational pharmaceuticals. If life is  a patently beautiful experience of its own accord. If love and happiness are abundant, then there's no need to explore. However if a person does wish to explore then there is lots good information and people willing to offer constructive viewpoints at www.erowid.org that can be helpful and instructive in learning and securing the right information for a constructive exploration of the total infinity of consciousness. Remember set and setting. Here's that good documentary on the subject.