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Forums - The lounge
Subject: parallel universe stuff - Feb 2006 (2)
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Original Message 1/1 20-Feb-06 @ 11:55 AM - parallel universe stuff - Feb 2006 (2)
TURN ON COMPUTER // TUNE IN TO FREED SPIRIT OF INTERNET // TAKE OVER!
“I know I can fetch the up! from the website, but the fun is having it delivered
like magic. We're nurtured by that magic - and the electronic equivalent
of a clanking letterbox announcing welcome UPinions
is the kind of affirmative alchemy we need indeed.” Bill Froog, Bristol.
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u cant understand the world without innerstanding yourself
the up! 0027 // feb 20, 06
la- la- la- lap-toppling da system!
Know Ye Not That Ye Are Gods?
u cant innerstand yourself without understanding the world
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\\))))/
____,,,,_{ô¿ô}_,,,,____
We Should Be Ashamed Of Ourselves
AND GLORIFY THOSE WHO RESIST
· The Lancet may have greatly underestimated the Iraqi death toll. No one knows how many since 3/03, but some honest estimators using random sampling techniques, estimate it could be as high as 500,000.
· That's on top of about 1.5 million killed between 1/91 and 3/03.
· Yet these numbers are minor when compared to the number of wounded, mentally shattered and sick Iraqis, and those who will become so from the effects of depleted uranium alone in a country that will be a toxic, irradiated wasteland for the next 4.5 billion years.
· Plus, the Immeasurable Millions of Iraqis (and everyone who spends any time there) who, from now till infinity, will be affected by deaths and terrible illnesses (almost any illness you can imagine).
· A FEW YEARS FROM NOW, HOW WILL HUMANITY LOOK BACK ON THOSE WHO RESISTED THIS TERRIBLE HOLOCAUST? WERE THEY GLORIFYING VIOLENCE OR RESISTING IT & ITS GLORIFICATION?!
· You decide. I’m only asking the question.
· Please don’t arrest me
[Steve Lendman remix]
up!
Mahatma Gandhi, 1924: “I wanted to know the best of the life of one who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of millions of mankind.... I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle. When I closed the second volume (of the Prophet's biography), I was sorry there was not more for me to read of that great life.”
UP!
contents
p.02 Know Ye Not That Ye Are Gods? another radical extract from megatripois@forever
p.06 The Flying Saucer’s Apprentice // PART TWO
p.09 IRAN: ''US Threats Of Military Action Are But Expressions Of Its Desperation.''
p.10 OBITUARY for YIPPY Stew Albert 1939-2006
p.12 Danish Cartoons //FEEDBACK
up!
Hey Frase, your megatripolis segments are enchanting; a visually erect, time-traveling alchemy for the mind...
gaby romeri, madrid.
up!
Know Ye Not That Ye Are Gods?
As midnight, 2009, struck in each Dream-In, several Tokyo clubs, Beijing, Delhi, Teheran, Athens and round the planet till it was London’s turn, the zippy clubbers in each club had watched the ravers in each of the others go ballistic. Now it was Home Base, and the moment of decision for PPJ Numan (poetry&philosphy jockey).
He’d been increasingly disturbed by how it was all going. Oh sure, it was good business, every club looked absolutely packed, and all his stuff looked groovy on huge screens above every dancefloor - but It was all like, well, like any other New Year Dream-In - music, dancers, ‘spiritual’ hangings, fancy dress, the whole mystic razzledazzle. But where was the Real Drama of 2010? Ten years into the 3rd Millennium and some things getting worse? Where was Community with the Planet that Zippies were always talking about? The Planet was in absolute crisis, everything seemed to hang in the balance, yet here were the most aware, sensitive, idealistic and potentially empowered members of the human species, gathered together, AND NOBODY WAS SAYING ANYTHING! ABOUT ANYTHING!
So moved had Numan been that, in despair, and in fury (at the promoter, at the Earth Government, at everything!) and with the sense that a Once in A Decade’s Opportunity was being missed, he’d started sketching in more of his Honesty Path rap, stitching in some Beethoven, Tibetan chanting and all sorts of Stop Dancing And Pay Attention stuff.
The Voices weren’t helping either, his studio was filled with Presences, and they were all telling him how important this moment was, what potential to HELP he had beneath his fingers, indeed that he’d already saved the world anyway. (?) He’d felt it from the start of the evening, way back at 6pm when Tokyo’s New Year had kicked it all off.
By Paris, the main line his mind was hearing was absolutely clear: ”Everything depends on YOU!” Over and over: ”Everything depends on YOU!” ‘Everything depends on Everyone!” Of course the fact that he was PPJ YOUman just seemed to clinch it.
And on a level of consciousness just below this, in non tek moments when he was watching the screen but doing nothing, his typing fingers had completed his Honesty Path rap, feeling deep and ancient wounds forcing themselves to the surface, raising trains of thought he’d been having with himself for decades now, but which had never, ever, reached a fully conscious level. And, much more importantly, seeing their relevance to TODAY! To THIS MOMENT!
Did he dare to send it? Did he dare not to send it?!
Again and again it came back to this: he was just one guy on a very big planet. What could he do?
And then it came to him. With the Voices prompting him through each inch of his Decision process, the Truth led him to the realisation that HE… COULD… DO… WHAT… HE… COULD… DO!!! And if everyone, at every moment in history, did the same, then WE CAN DO IT!!!!
Jabbing a finger down on Destiny, he watched his rant meteor off into the screen till it was a tiny white dot. And began appearing in huge black&red lettering on all those huge screens out there >>>
The Honesty Path
I’ve felt ‘encouraged’ (by Higher Forces?) to explain ‘the real stuff’ about myself . My “Being More Honest With Myself” Resolution of last New Year has taught me a new way of avoiding being depressed by events in the world outside our Dream-Ins. Instead of ignoring them and getting high again, I GO TOWARDS THEM!
The Honesty Path is a kind of mental yoga that grows out of LOOKING THE FACTS IN THE FACE. Why does it help to avoid being depressed? Because of a historical FACT, which is this: no matter how bad things sometimes look today, they were a lot worse in the Middle Ages. So evolution MUST be happening!
Through all my Truth meditation process this past year has materialised a kind of ‘dream sequence’ - more like a ‘memory’ - of being burned as a heretic in the Middle Ages. More than once!
Infinitely more real than any VR is this Primal scene I find in my psyche’s memory. There’s a dark wild sky backdrop, a blacker line of trees with the accusing silhouette of the church spire, that symbol of Oppression, see yonder red and yellow tongues of flame? see how they flicker and illuminate the ring of drunkenly leering, jeering and cheering faces around me as the flames start to sear my legs. Only now there’s no pain, no searing screaming torture to blank my vision and my memories, now separated from me like the beautiful future-memory voices I’m hearing tonight!
I know every face in that crowd! My family, my neighbours, my friends and enemies in the town!
There’s Inga, tears watering her cheeks, my first love whom I screwed behind the grave yard and to whom I’d first opened my heart - about my Doubts. She would never have denounced me, though her tongue might have wagged too freely in the tavern of an evening, or in bed with that yuppie idiot of a blacksmith’s son she “married”.
There’s stocky, black-bearded Geoffrey, the miller, who always envied and hated my “hi-fallutin’ ways.” He’s enjoying my come-uppance.
There’s the “dominie”, the school teacher whose mind was simultaneously thrilled and terrified by my “free thinking”, and who’d worked devotedly to close down my (naturally?) unruly spirit, “for your own good, my son.”
Even ten lifetimes later I can’t look at my mother. Oh, the social shame of it all, her son spread naked, “brought to justice,” alone and clearly “proven wrong” before these the whole town’s assembled frightened, ignorant “Goode Burghers”, their faces flickering pink in the firelight from fear, rage, condemnation, their lips purple like the gashes of wounds muttering the Christian voodoo spells they only half believe can protect them from their own “doubts”. Realists, who, without initially swallowing the Men of the Book’s ghastly mumbo jumbo, could see it was the only game in town and probably always would be. Except for the cults and lonely fools like me who continually popped up for immolation!
But “losing,” and in public like this, before all your assembled peers, was almost more than any human could bear! And it was far worse than that. For (apart from my terrified “brothers” and “sisters” from our secret Truth Posse lurking at the back, a few brave hearts who refused to have their minds straight-jacketed by the new foreign “Religion” of the conquering Concrete Boys) not one of those “realists” even glimpsed my courage or commitment.
Half of them perceived anyone who opted for any path than up the new, official greasy pole as touched in the head. “With a brain like yours you could have been a butler’s understudy at the big house,” that’s what they’d always wondered aloud at me.
And for the other half? My spiritual questionings had been social affectations, done to arouse the lassies (who indeed used to flutter “Oh, you’re a terrible man, and will come to a sorry end!” ). Now they saw me getting my just desserts for crying wolf too often.
None doubted for a second (I suppose) that my burning here today proved once and for all that I’ve been wrong, all along. A fool. A sucker. “Dead” wrong.
Yes, things were a lot worse then for the free spirit than they’ve ever been since!!
Such ‘memories’ have come to feel more real to me than life itself. They explain the whole direction of history.
Often I recognise people from that crowd, in this lifetime! A security guard I encountered yesterday had the loud, puggy red face of the drunken, laddish bastard who led the bonfire chants. Several politicians I recognise as former priests leading the “Holy Communion” as they roasted me alive!
Nor was such barbarity, such personal humiliation and utter failure just one event. It happened in a string of lifetimes, each ending in “disaster”. No wonder people today are so conformist, so afraid - we’ve been traumatised by the Concrete Boys for generations!
And for a thousand years it looked like nothing could ever change…
BUT……..
The Middle Ages turned out to be the lowest the human race ever devolved. And the positive, earth-shattering news is that, though the Concrete’s dupes immolated me in 12 of my last 16 lifetimes, along with literally millions of others, just for refusing to close our hearts and minds, they failed to entirely snuff out the Human Spirit!
And now that the human species has finally evolved beyond tolerating the physical extermination of nonconformists, we, the Alternative, have been breeding like succubae for 200 years and must now be near unstoppable! It looks like the CBs can slow it down but they can’t change evolution’s direction!
So, remember, when you land once more in mundane reality, that no matter how bad things look for the human race, our side is winning. Step by step, a brutally bloodthirsty, competitive culture is dying! And the losing side you’ve been on all your lives is succeeding! The meek shall inherit the Earth!
What’s left of it anyway.
Staring, entranced, exhilerated, terrified, as his words appeared on gigantic screens above every dancefloor, PPJ Numan distinctly heard a voice seemingly from the far distant future mutter: “You see? There ARE other paths to Megatripolis! Through the Portal this Nuke opened to escape the pain of burning!”
An hour later he was fired. For supposedly “bumming out all the Dream-Ins.”
But wait! Just as the face on the screen of his enraged ex boss was reaching the heights of its sneering condemnations, and as Numan was grovelling back in lonesome torture again on the bonfire of the insanities, another Dimension Opened, and the promoter was pushed instantly from the screen to make way for… an email. From the year 2055. From Megatripolitan Rebel Army Insurgents!?
[ends]
Extracted from megatripolis@forever,
the timedancing future history enovella
from Fraser Clark.
http://www.oneworldnet.co.uk/ebooks/index3.php
'Fraser Clark is the shamanic zippie spokesperson for a loose-knit movement of people
who aim to change the world - while having the best time of their lives.”'
Sydney Morning Herald.
up
london
FRI FEB 24 Radical Irish/English/Russian/American Poetry Night
ANDREA BRADY, KESTON SUTHERLAND, DMITRI PRIGOV (tbc), and an unrehearsed reading of “Ruby Fjord” a poem by LIZA HAYDEN. 7.30pm @ Hammersmith Irish Centre, Blacks Road, London W6 (Hammersmith tube) £4/£3 (concs)
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TEXT JOCKEY // TJ PHRASER (Fraser Clark) & THE MEDIA EVOLUTION
MIXING THE TRACTS LIVE ON THE KEYBOARD
@ A MEDIA-MEME RATE OF 160 IPP *
* Ideas Per Paragraph
TO SUBSCRIBE SOMEONE, WRITE I wanna get UP! TO fraser@parallel-youniversity.com
TO UNSUBSCRIBE, HIT REPLY WITH REMOVE IN THE SUBJECT BOX
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Gibbon in 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' 1823: “The good sense of Muhammad despised the pomp of royalty. The Apostle of God submitted to the menial offices of the family; he kindled the fire; swept the floor; milked the ewes; and mended with his own hands his shoes and garments. Disdaining the penance and merit of a hermit, he observed without effort of vanity the abstemious diet of an Arab”.
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China's Censors Facing Revolt
CHAIRMAN Mao's former secretary and official biographer has denounced the shutdown of an investigative weekly newspaper by the Chinese authorities in a spreading battle over censorship.
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=234582006
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THE ZIPPIES //FEEDBACK
I don't think the use of the word Zippy as reported in the New York Times actually conforms to your definition of the word. There doesn't seem to be any 'hippy' in it. It sounds like it's basically indian yuppies to me.
Steve Radford, London.
>> but that’s not a negative, it’s an Opportunity!
The Flying Saucer’s Apprentice
(Or How I Was Outsourced By Fraser Clark And The Zippies
And Got Zip From The UFO)
PART TWO
by David Robert Lewis
So, to get back to my story, I’m living with my de facto girlfriend in an unfurnished room in San Francisco, flat broke, making a few dollars doing some flyers and a newsletter for Fraser Clark’s Zippies, which was about as far as my "financial" ambition over this zippy phenomenon extended.
It was no big deal, I was just a writer who’d happened to be at Megatripolis UK the previous summer. Clark had actually invited me then to join him in his conspiracy "to save America". But it had all sounded too much like a proposal you make when you're stoned, not something as serious and illicit as hacking Wired Magazine and hauling equipment through the Kaibab National Forest to a banned festival, so I politely declined.
It was August 1993, I had made my way to Britain from my own country, South Africa, and now I bumped into one of Clark's Megatripolitans on the tube, a modern merry prankster who’d handed me a flyer for the club night "you just have to experience", a night with the "Zippies," hadn't I heard about them, "the Future Perfect State every Thursday at Heaven."
In fact Clark and I had already been corresponding for a while via his "Encyclopaedia Psychedelica International" or EPi for short. Nothing particularly unusual for the editor of a small counter-culture zine in South Africa isolated from the rest of the world by sanctions and a cultural boycott.
When I’d been editing Kagenna, an ethnopunk fanzine, from 1989-1993, the only way of keeping in touch with the outside world had been to write letters, one of them being EPi. As RU Sirius can probably testify, I’d been writing letters to a number of west coast publications like Mondo 2000 and had even had letters published under various pseudonyms like Ted Head.
So you can say all my "sneaking suspicions of positivity"
>> pronoia
were confirmed by finding a copy of Clark's next venture, evolution^, in a West London bookstore, with a small contribution from a South African "buddhist queen" called Samten, a regular contributor to Kagenna, the magazine I was now hawking as I travelled.
I drop in on one of the Megatripolis parties, basically a great big technoclub with a nice ambient lounge and a good, loving vibe. Mixmaster Morris on the decks, couple of kids taking acid, probably for the first time, and of course, a dancing granny and a small inner circle surrounding Uncle Fraser, who seemed like a warm old man who wanted nothing more than for everyone to have a good conscious time. It all seemed rather innocent, until he took me aside and mentioned, offhand, that he was going to America, and "won't you join us, we’re going to conspire with people, you know -- like Ram Dass, Tim Leary".
I laughed it all off as some kind of a practical joke, and left for Camden with one of the many rabble-rousers on the night-bus. Clark's offer only confirmed my own plan to go to San Francisco, do a tour of West Coast Counter-Culture, and basically meet people like Leary on my own steam.
So I bought a cheap six month return ticket to San Francisco, (which later turned out to be a dud) not expecting it would take a good while longer than I expected to get back home….
After interviewing people like RU Sirius in an Indian Restaurant in Berkeley, I headed for LA, to hang with some Extropians for a while. While this was all happening "according to plan," I suddenly got caught-up in an earthquake, lost my return air ticket to the scalpers, and spent a good few extra months simply trying to survive.
Then, suddenly, the "Here come the Zippies" cover appeared in the then super-hip Wired magazine. "Cool!" I thought, "They've actually gone and done it!" Myopically I contemplated jumping a bus right there and then for Flagstaff, Arizona and for what Fraser had been calling “The Paradigm Jumping Off The Grand Canyon Mega Rave” to join the tribe. This plan was quickly dropped as impractical - besides, I had no money.
>> and meanwhile i’m being talked out of the name by ‘serious’ americans worried that luvved-up raver kids on ecstasy might take the meaning too literally less than a decade later, of course, they’re getting shot at by iraqi freedom fighters. if only they’d been a bit more ‘serious’!
Nevertheless I enthusiastically followed events as they unfolded in the papers and on the internet. The alt.zippies topic on usenet was the most visited topic that year, with literally hundreds of postings being made, but compared to what was happening back home in South Africa where a country had just been liberated, this was kids’ stuff. “Let them have a good time," I thought, "maybe I'll go to a rave". Some Extropians on the West Coast were dismissive. "Youth nazis" they said. "They're good guys, what's the problem?" I countered.
>> u c the probs we faced? nobody trusted anyone’s motives!
By the time I got back to San Fran, Megatripolis West was about to be launched. I spotted a flyer in a clothing store and simply pitched-up. It was October 1. "Free Festival at the Trocadero," "Opening night speaker -- John Perry Barlow (Grateful Dead/Cyberologist/Founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation) talking about "The Trouble With You Kids Today," "Your participation is invited in our opening ceremony with Aum dancers, Witches, & the Kiwi Theatre," "Everybody is a star," and so on.
I join the crowd outside where Clark is welcoming a veritable long queue of guests. Practically everybody in San Francisco. "There's a familiar face" he says, greeting me with one of his zippy-style bear hugs.
As far as Clark was concerned, I was already a part of his "Conspiracy." While hanging at the new club, I find myself quickly roped into doing things, and the obvious reason why any of this is significant to you or anybody else is because the media event created by Jules Marshall's "Here Come the Zippies" story had mutated into a plethora of verbiage on all things Zippydom.
As I’d eventually learn, the High Times version of events was actually scheduled for publication in February 1995 of the next year. Hampton Sides’ excellent imitation of Tom Robbins' new journalism appeared only in December 1994. If the meme carried by the Daily Newspapers had seemingly dried out, it was only because the roller coaster had stopped to take on passengers - and all of us, including those who were only along for the joy ride, were still in for one hell of a time, even if just observing the circus, like Heisenberg, would make it explode.
So we're back at that morning in early October. A phone call from Clark etc etc. And now it’s later in the morning, I'm just casually doing my small task, for a man, a friend, who I know very little about, when suddenly my complete and total attention is demanded. (Folks - nobody can be accused of holding a gun to my head, I simply acquiesced, but its a diabolical plot nevertheless). One minute you're following the yellow brick road, the next you're being transported by flying monkeys to the palace of Brumhilda the Bad with the Tin Man. Basically I'm picked up in a car driven by someone's mom. As far as everybody is concerned this is hype heaven in hippyland. "We need more zippies" says Sionadh Craigen, Fraser’s partner on the Zippy Tour, packing us all into the car.
Basically Fraser’s adolescent girlfriend is in charge. We drive off while I struggle to remain composed, nonchalantly telling her that, seriously, all I’d promised was a flyer or two, nothing more.... it’s all seeming to happen in slow motion. I guess you could also say I was abducted by the UFO never to return home to normality again. I'm a little queasy in the pit of my stomach.
“We need some more zippies" she explains as we pull up at this huge conference centre, A strange inexpressible emotion, my silent scream -- "you don't even know me that well, and already you're telling me who I'm supposed to be", but foolishly I ignore my inner voice’s warning sighs and float downstream, abandoning my personal ego to the Carnival. What I probably should have been doing is making an appointment with the "Teenager Inside My Twenty-Something Body", if only to reassure him that all this was not a commitment to a lifelong fraud, a simple hoax Hey, I'm just a professional, an associate, an equal, my whole life is still ahead of me!
But quaint stuff like this would soon melt under the pressure to become an arbitrary, totally anonymous "Zippy".
As I write this, Time magazine has just published a cover story called "Secrets of the Teen Brain". Apparently research is "revolutionising our view of the adolescent mind -- and explaining it in mystifying ways." No doubt the mystery of life is unfolding, but such research inevitably comes too late to save me from teenage expectations of what a Zippy ought to be, even way back in 1994.
As those already familiar with this demon of an issue perhaps already know, getting treated like a new species of teenager was only half the problem of being associated with Clark's new "posse". The other problem was having to put up with "adults" like Peter Booth Lee, a perpetual 4-year-old who’d literally assumed the cultural persona of Wired's "Here Come the Zippies" cover -- knitted cap, tecnno glasses and all. If he’d been a real "mensch," he’d probably have gone all the way, but to do that would have meant living up to the expectations created by "Pincus the Cyborg" who already had the zippy franchise on human-machine relationships.
>> pincus had joined the zippy tour in New York where he’d been earning a living posing as a cyborg statue on wall street.
I'm hopeless in the fashion stakes, however, much to Sionaidh's dismay. While we're driving in the car to yet another "photo opportunity," I ask her what's up. She updates me in her boho lilt: the Zippies have already had a press conference, “and an eco-friendly fashion show, you know, like with hemp products..." and it all sounds terribly cultish, and exciting, and I want to be a part of what one could call the funfair, but like who’s backing the Zippies? It can’t ALL be pronoia, the sneaking suspicion that others are conspiring behind your back to help you.
We end-up downtown in Silicone Alley. RU Sirius, my cyberpunk friend, is there, being interviewed for a television spot I guess, by some young brat who’s covering the incipient counter-culture, probably with a student loan and his dad’s video camera. I'm instructed to sit on the floor or, like, wait in the kids room. If I’d had a portable rocket from the future I’d have got out of there fast, but all I manage is to chirp-up that actually I'm nearly 26 and a publisher of sorts, etc etc. The video guy just looks at me like I'm worse than a redneck on the inside of his politically correct televisionland brain.
While Fraser does the interview, I try to network a little: "Names Dave Dei," I say, trying to appear cool by using one of my net-names. Big mistake. Because, since Shionadh is unaware that Fraser already knows me from London, I’m marked as some kind of an attention-getter; or worse, one of those complete nobodies who grab microphones while you're on stage, and goes out of his way to steal your thunder.
Indeed Jules Marshall wrote recently in his "A Decade After The Zippies" piece commissioned for Wired about something familiar to all of us: "I caught up with Fraser at a party just outside Santa Cruz. He was introduced to speak when suddenly this weirdo called Pincus, dressed in body armour, fur and cow horns as I remember, grabs the mike and announces HE is Fraser Clark, and goes on to spout complete gibberish for ten minutes."
He goes on: "This guy had at some stage attached himself to the zippies, or one half of them as it had become by now, it seems." Yes, there was a split and no, I wasn't even party to that split. What had happened, in reality, is that I’d become a useful part of what Clark would always term "the reinforcements the planet’s been praying for." And as such, I was an easily expendable commodity in both media terms and in THE ZIPPIES’ terms.
(continued in next UP!)
up!
Whistleblower Alleges Second Wiretap Program
A former NSA employee said Tuesday there is another ongoing top-secret surveillance program that might have violated millions of Americans' Constitutional rights. Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a "special access" electronic surveillance program that he characterised as far more wide-ranging than the warrantless wiretapping.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021506A.shtml
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“History makes it clear that the legend of fanatical Muslims sweeping through the world and forcing Islam at the point of sword upon conquered races is one of the most fantastically absurd myths that historians have ever repeated.” De Lacy O'Leary in 'Islam at the Crossroads,' London, 1923.
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the UP! is a global edutainment round-up, broadcast weekly to =[13,791]=
Alternative// Activist// Zippy// Trance// New Age// Peace folks
recommended to the Parallel YOUniversity// Megatripolis Dance Dept as
"showing signs of life".
Since recipients forward it widely to their own lists & sites,
we conservatively estimate 50,000+ direct recipients.
A further 40,000 read it on the YOUniversity's site.
And, because of its 'mix' of 'specialist' & 'general' content,
it's increasingly being posted on a variety of sites worldwide,
making an estimated total weekly readership of =[275,000]=
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RUSSIA WARNS U.S. AGAINST STRIKING IRAN
Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the chief of Russia's general staff, warned the United States against attacking Iran. Russian news agencies quoted him as saying "A military scenario can't be ruled out,"
>>>
IRAN: ''US THREATS OF MILITARY ACTION
ARE BUT EXPRESSIONS OF ITS DESPERATION.''
"The US, the Zionist usurper entity and their band of bullies would do well to kick their habit of threats of military action, especially as the rulers in Washington are well briefed on just what they might face in Iran should they get carried away with their megalomania," concluded the editorial.
http://tinyurl.com/d3v5b
>>>
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly said that Iran has NO nuclear weapons program or similar. Iran will need at last TEN years to construct a nuclear weapon. On average- for the enrichment to weapon grade uranium - one needs more than 2500 centrifuges - Iran has THREE working models.
UP!
OBITUARY
Stew Lives!!
YIPPY Stew Albert 1939-2006
by Michael Simmons
Thus read the simple blog entry by Stew Albert on January 28, 2006. He died two days later, in his sleep, at his home in Portland, Oregon, surrounded by his wife Judy Albert, daughter Jessica, and friends. Suffering from cancer and unable to write at length, he was clearly determined to make a statement A Last Stand -- that blended the legendary Yippy’s defiance and wit.
For the Yippies - the Youth International Party - the word “party” meant both political group and outrageously good time. The Yippies merged left-wing activism and freak culture in the late 1960s. One of the “non-leaders” along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner, Stew was a fierce soldier for justice as well as a subversive prankster.
Born on December 4, 1939 to a working-class family in Brooklyn, Stew was genetically nonconformist a natural blonde Jew. In 1960, he visited the young, idealistic revolutionary Cuba and it derailed his plans for civil servitude. “I saw people living exciting, meaningful lives not based on self-promotion or small-time ideology,” he later wrote. After a failed attempt at reintegrating into normalcy, he got bit by wanderlust and ended up in Berkeley, California working for the anti-war Vietnam Day Committee whose most effective founding member was Jerry Rubin.
Soon, Stew and Jerry were best friends, and Stew was in the thick of Berkeley’s cannabinoided counter-culture. Despite his “growing rage” at America’s war on Vietnam, his “private joy was complete.”
In 1966, his pal Rubin ran for Mayor of Berkeley and Stew became campaign manager, creating a campaign that advocated social justice, an end to war and racism as well as the legalisation of marijuana a brave, new demand and he laid out the campaign pamphlet in a decidedly psychedelic style. The same year, Rubin was called before the commie-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee and he showed up wearing a Revolutionary War costume. These examples of performance politics successfully blew the minds of the congressional creeps and thrilled young anti-war activists by establishing a new tactic capture their imaginations and their hearts will follow.
In the summer of 1967 Stew and Jerry flew to New York for preparations for a march on the Pentagon, and befriended a fellow longhaired, wisecracking troublemaker named Abbie Hoffman. Stew, Jerry, Abbie, Jim Fouratt, and others descended on the visitor’s gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and showered 500 one-dollar bills onto the floor below. For the first time in Wall Street’s history, trading stopped on the floor while the greedheads went grabby ga-ga for the green. This merry band had pulled down the curtain on the wizards of capitalism and the media lapped up the story.
In October of that year, Stew helped organise the massive March on the Pentagon, announcing, along with Jerry, Abbie, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs and others, announced that they were going to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise it of evil spirits. Again, the story made for thrilling press.
Next, along with Paul Krassner, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Bob Fass, Anita Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, Kate Coleman, Keith and Judy Lampe and others, they signed a unified statement of purpose and announced themselves as Yippie, a name thought up by Krassner.
The Yippies began planning a Festival of Life for the Democratic Convention in August of 1968. The idea was to present a counterpoint to the Convention of Death hosted by the politicians responsible for the war in Vietnam. That same year Stew met fellow traveler Judy Clavir, a love story that lasted his entire life. Judy, later dubbed “Gumbo” by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, became his mate and a renowned activist in her own right.
Stew contributed Pigasus to The Festival of Life, an actual pig that he and Jerry announced was the Yippie candidate for president. The pig was later detained by the police and squealed in custody. Meanwhile the Festival of Life in Paley Park facing the Democratic Convention hotel devolved into a police riot where thousands of demonstrators including Stew -- were savagely beaten in what was dubbed “a police riot” by a federal commission. Undeterred by the facts, the government prosecuted a group of the organisers for conspiracy to riot in what became known as the Chicago 8 (later 7) trial. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial became known as “The Trial Of The Century” and eventually all charges were dropped.
Stew made history when, in London on the David Frost Show, he became The First Person To Say ‘Cunt’ On British Television. He traveled to Algeria to facilitate escaped fugitive Timothy Leary’s exile, where Leary stayed with another exile, Eldridge Cleaver. (Of all the Yippies, Stew was the closest to the Black Panthers.) He enlisted John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a “Beatle/Yippie Pact” that resulted in Lennon’s radicalisation and near-deportation.
With compadre and folksinger Phil Ochs, he traveled to Chile before the CIA-backed coup. When he implemented DIY egalitarianism by helping create People’s Park in Berkeley, then-Governor Ronald Reagan responded to the unsanctioned green space by bringing in the National Guard and turning the streets into a war zone.
Stew was played by actor Donal Logue in the Abbie biopic Steal This Movie in 2000.
Through the years, he never stopped thirsting for peace and justice. He became a mentor and friend to younger activists, from the L.A. Cacophony Society to myriad anarchists. Young people from all over the world corresponded with Stew, asking about Yippie and seeking advice on contemporary shit-stirring. He continued to write extensively, publishing The Sixties Papers with Judy and his autobiography Who The Hell Is Stew Albert?
A week before his death, he gave a two hour interview to a film crew making a documentary about the Yippies and, although he was clearly tired and in pain, he remained powerful, insightful, unrepentant, and funny as hell. As he wrote in his autobiography, he had “an uncontainable need to test my bravery,” something he did until the end.
And as the man said, his politics never changed.
Michael Simmons is an award-winning journalist and currently filming a documentary on the Yippies. Email to: munz@mindspring.com
UP!
“My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the secular and religious level. ...It is probable that the relative influence of Muhammad on Islam has been larger than the combined influence of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on Christianity. ...It is this unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in human history.” Michael Hart in 'The 100, A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons In History,' New York, 1978.
up!
>> suddenly the danish cartoon story, which we’d been covering for 3 weeks, is all over the overground media. //FEEDBACK
But isn't the story about what's happening in the overground media and peoples reactions to it? And is it such a good thing? What's there to be proud of here? Being provocative towards fundamentalists?
>> well, i thought & think it’s a very important issue, that’s why i covered it and wrote a hopefully stirring editorial about it at the time. yeah, “stirring” to what i hear u ask?
Ok, so it's brought up the issue of Free Speech, but in a way which only serves to emphasise the differences between cultures. Muslim fundamentalists don't give a damn about free speech.
>> but we give a bless about it, and they’re just going to have to learn to live with it or leave the country. what most touched me when i first covered this story was that a childrens book on religions of the world had found that most cartoonists they’d approached to do Mohamed were afraid to touch it. we can’t let that happen, can we? and i tell you, steve, i had real fears about publishing the cartoons, and that CAN’T be right. if the US & UK government can’t stop me speaking up on whatever i want (including the xtians and the jews whom i blast on at least a monthly basis) then, for damn sure, am not gonna let nobody else do it.
Let's face it, these people are angry and these cartoons are just something they've latched onto to enable them to express it.
>> i agree. by far the biggest tragedy in all this is that ‘we’ are the main culprits by our invasions and general smug aggressiveness. so i really blame the xtian and jewish attitudes for filling the muslim fundamentalists’ ranks. they’d be a tiny & irrelevant sideshow if it wasn’t for ‘us’.
No matter how angry Muslims become over the mocking of their religious symbols, what U.S. officials would prefer to ignore is the depth of anger that Muslims already feel at having been subjected to the arrogant, pretentious, brutal, and humiliating conduct of U.S. government officials. In fact, one cannot help but wonder whether the anger that has built up within Middle Easterners as a consequence of U.S. governmental conduct in that part of the world has contributed to the enormous anti-Western reaction to the publishing of tasteless cartoons by a Danish newspaper.
But the muslims aren't tackling the real causes of their anger and the cartoons aren't promoting anything constructive either.
>> i don’t accept that was the motive of the danish paper and it certainly wasn’t mine. look, if i can believe and SAY (often) that xtianity was the single greatest abomination to hit the human species then am certainly not going to treat another religion with any kid gloves. i’ll support them politically and sociologically but not that.
Pissing off fundamentalists is like shooting fish in a barrel. Except these fish shoot back. And no, we don't want to just shut up in the face of bullies, but we want to be very careful when we take sides just who we're taking sides with, yes?
>> i haven’t launched an ongoing campaign. and i don’t intend to keep banging on about it, but it certainly seems to need to be occasionally said.
This is a clash of cultures. On one level it's about Muslim fundamentalists against Western ideals of freedom and free speech. But on another level it's about people who believe in something sacred against a society in which nothing is sacred. Nothing that is except money.
>> i couldn’t agree more. and i certainly feel uneasy on this issue.
Bush and his gang love this sort of stuff, it just makes the countries they want to invade less popular with the people. They don't have a problem with free speech because they own most of the media through which it's expressed!
>> again i couldn’t agree more
We've got to promote peace, love and understanding, yes?
>> yes. and honesty, personal freedom, and (wot shall we call it?) a general unbranded spirituality in our species’ daily life.
and also, as i always say, Justice must come before Peace, otherwise it’s just Repression.
Maybe there is some good in the situation, maybe some youngsters on the fringes of fundamentalism will see truth and not go further, but I think more will get fired up by the righteous anger as a medium to express their own.
>> again i agree. but…
But it's not going to be until we in western society rediscover our own connections to the sacred and start expressing that in a way that changes the course of the mainstream that we're really going to offer an alternative to fundamentalism.
I appreciate that that's a big part of what the UP! is about, but don't get sucked into fighting their battles!
>> yeah, but despite the negatives of my stand, and despite the obvious hypocrisy involved in our ‘democracy’, we also have some good points about which we all agree, and this was one of them. it could even be the ONLY one.
Love
Steve Astronaut, London.
>> keep me on my toes, steve!
up!
Stupid Cartoons On Bits Of Paper
With no malice toward anyone or any religion or those with kind and loving hearts, this whole 'cartoon' issue, emblazoned with religious violence, indicates to me that the world is venting its suffering at the hands of theological tyranny and oppression.
Religious terrorism is happening all around the world... Muslim religious violence, Christian religious violence, Jewish religious violence... ALWAYS in the name of God. This blasphemy, in my opinion, is in direct opposition to the will of a loving God.
The world's greatest economic, militaristic and environmental terrorist, the United States, is now under the tyranny of a man who claims he has been called to massacre over 130,000 innocent Iraqis, to torture and bomb, to spy on Americans in violation of established law, and to spread fear and hatred IN THE NAME OF GOD - all Hitler's tactics.
This only emphasizes to me that religious dictatorial oppression of free thought, common sense, human and civil rights in every country only foments an inner rage, a ticking time bomb in the human heart, that is just waiting for permission or any excuse for an outlet. I believe this violence is the by-product of the passion & desire to be free, and the pent up rage at our own oppression, which the patriarchs then poison with fear, propagandise towards violence, and use as a tool for the furtherance of their own power.
German patriarchal society was a breeding ground for those looking for permission to vent their repressed rage at their society's dominating oppression... and Hitler gave it to them, plus a target for it... and they took it. Their whole society imploded and took with it most of Europe and many American lives. The sadness that pervades the German people since that time, and the horror of religious 'crusades' and oppressive times throughout history, should have told us something.
The world's people need to take back their personal power and give themselves permission to think for themselves... and to reject violence, supposedly in the name of ANY deity, and act with our best and most natural instincts for giving and receiving love... and for protecting each other and the very earth that sustains us.
Let's not allow a stupid cartoon on paper to unravel the precious fabric of understanding that was being woven together since 9/11. This is just one more smokescreen issue, INTENDED TO DISTRACT US FROM WHAT THOSE IN POWER ARE REALLY DOING.
PLEASE, WE MUST NOT LET YOURSELVES BE VICTIMS OF A HISTORICALLY SUCCESSFUL TACTIC OF DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
Lucille, Newark, California.
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Vandals In Denmark Strike Muslim Graves -
COPENHAGEN, Feb. 12 -- About 25 Muslim graves in western Denmark have been vandalised, bringing swift condemnation from Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as tensions simmer from the Danish cartoon controversy.
"I strongly condemn this disgraceful act, and I deeply regret the desecration of Muslim graves," Rasmussen said in a statement released by his office Sunday night. "I have made it clear that the Danish government condemns any expression or action which offends people's religious feelings."
Ahmed Akkari, a prominent Muslim leader in Denmark, said he was "happy" that Rasmussen had issued the statement so quickly. He said that in similar cases in the past, "nothing happened." Akkari said he believed that those who vandalised the Muslim graves in the city of Esbjerg, in Jutland, west of Copenhagen, "do not represent the Danish people's general attitude."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/12/AR2006021201087.html
>> but freedom of speech remains central to their and our culture.
UP!
a l l g o o d t h i n g s c o m e t o a n e n d
which don't justify nuttin'
U U U U U U U U U U U U U U UP P P P P P P P P P P P P P P
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SO RECOMMEND SOMEONE 2DAY!!!!!!!!!!
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“I know I can fetch the up! from the website, but the fun is having it delivered
like magic. We're nurtured by that magic - and the electronic equivalent
of a clanking letterbox announcing welcome UPinions
is the kind of affirmative alchemy we need indeed.” Bill Froog, Bristol.
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u cant understand the world without innerstanding yourself
the up! 0027 // feb 20, 06
la- la- la- lap-toppling da system!
Know Ye Not That Ye Are Gods?
u cant innerstand yourself without understanding the world
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\\))))/
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We Should Be Ashamed Of Ourselves
AND GLORIFY THOSE WHO RESIST
· The Lancet may have greatly underestimated the Iraqi death toll. No one knows how many since 3/03, but some honest estimators using random sampling techniques, estimate it could be as high as 500,000.
· That's on top of about 1.5 million killed between 1/91 and 3/03.
· Yet these numbers are minor when compared to the number of wounded, mentally shattered and sick Iraqis, and those who will become so from the effects of depleted uranium alone in a country that will be a toxic, irradiated wasteland for the next 4.5 billion years.
· Plus, the Immeasurable Millions of Iraqis (and everyone who spends any time there) who, from now till infinity, will be affected by deaths and terrible illnesses (almost any illness you can imagine).
· A FEW YEARS FROM NOW, HOW WILL HUMANITY LOOK BACK ON THOSE WHO RESISTED THIS TERRIBLE HOLOCAUST? WERE THEY GLORIFYING VIOLENCE OR RESISTING IT & ITS GLORIFICATION?!
· You decide. I’m only asking the question.
· Please don’t arrest me
[Steve Lendman remix]
up!
Mahatma Gandhi, 1924: “I wanted to know the best of the life of one who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of millions of mankind.... I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet, the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle. When I closed the second volume (of the Prophet's biography), I was sorry there was not more for me to read of that great life.”
UP!
contents
p.02 Know Ye Not That Ye Are Gods? another radical extract from megatripois@forever
p.06 The Flying Saucer’s Apprentice // PART TWO
p.09 IRAN: ''US Threats Of Military Action Are But Expressions Of Its Desperation.''
p.10 OBITUARY for YIPPY Stew Albert 1939-2006
p.12 Danish Cartoons //FEEDBACK
up!
Hey Frase, your megatripolis segments are enchanting; a visually erect, time-traveling alchemy for the mind...
gaby romeri, madrid.
up!
Know Ye Not That Ye Are Gods?
As midnight, 2009, struck in each Dream-In, several Tokyo clubs, Beijing, Delhi, Teheran, Athens and round the planet till it was London’s turn, the zippy clubbers in each club had watched the ravers in each of the others go ballistic. Now it was Home Base, and the moment of decision for PPJ Numan (poetry&philosphy jockey).
He’d been increasingly disturbed by how it was all going. Oh sure, it was good business, every club looked absolutely packed, and all his stuff looked groovy on huge screens above every dancefloor - but It was all like, well, like any other New Year Dream-In - music, dancers, ‘spiritual’ hangings, fancy dress, the whole mystic razzledazzle. But where was the Real Drama of 2010? Ten years into the 3rd Millennium and some things getting worse? Where was Community with the Planet that Zippies were always talking about? The Planet was in absolute crisis, everything seemed to hang in the balance, yet here were the most aware, sensitive, idealistic and potentially empowered members of the human species, gathered together, AND NOBODY WAS SAYING ANYTHING! ABOUT ANYTHING!
So moved had Numan been that, in despair, and in fury (at the promoter, at the Earth Government, at everything!) and with the sense that a Once in A Decade’s Opportunity was being missed, he’d started sketching in more of his Honesty Path rap, stitching in some Beethoven, Tibetan chanting and all sorts of Stop Dancing And Pay Attention stuff.
The Voices weren’t helping either, his studio was filled with Presences, and they were all telling him how important this moment was, what potential to HELP he had beneath his fingers, indeed that he’d already saved the world anyway. (?) He’d felt it from the start of the evening, way back at 6pm when Tokyo’s New Year had kicked it all off.
By Paris, the main line his mind was hearing was absolutely clear: ”Everything depends on YOU!” Over and over: ”Everything depends on YOU!” ‘Everything depends on Everyone!” Of course the fact that he was PPJ YOUman just seemed to clinch it.
And on a level of consciousness just below this, in non tek moments when he was watching the screen but doing nothing, his typing fingers had completed his Honesty Path rap, feeling deep and ancient wounds forcing themselves to the surface, raising trains of thought he’d been having with himself for decades now, but which had never, ever, reached a fully conscious level. And, much more importantly, seeing their relevance to TODAY! To THIS MOMENT!
Did he dare to send it? Did he dare not to send it?!
Again and again it came back to this: he was just one guy on a very big planet. What could he do?
And then it came to him. With the Voices prompting him through each inch of his Decision process, the Truth led him to the realisation that HE… COULD… DO… WHAT… HE… COULD… DO!!! And if everyone, at every moment in history, did the same, then WE CAN DO IT!!!!
Jabbing a finger down on Destiny, he watched his rant meteor off into the screen till it was a tiny white dot. And began appearing in huge black&red lettering on all those huge screens out there >>>
The Honesty Path
I’ve felt ‘encouraged’ (by Higher Forces?) to explain ‘the real stuff’ about myself . My “Being More Honest With Myself” Resolution of last New Year has taught me a new way of avoiding being depressed by events in the world outside our Dream-Ins. Instead of ignoring them and getting high again, I GO TOWARDS THEM!
The Honesty Path is a kind of mental yoga that grows out of LOOKING THE FACTS IN THE FACE. Why does it help to avoid being depressed? Because of a historical FACT, which is this: no matter how bad things sometimes look today, they were a lot worse in the Middle Ages. So evolution MUST be happening!
Through all my Truth meditation process this past year has materialised a kind of ‘dream sequence’ - more like a ‘memory’ - of being burned as a heretic in the Middle Ages. More than once!
Infinitely more real than any VR is this Primal scene I find in my psyche’s memory. There’s a dark wild sky backdrop, a blacker line of trees with the accusing silhouette of the church spire, that symbol of Oppression, see yonder red and yellow tongues of flame? see how they flicker and illuminate the ring of drunkenly leering, jeering and cheering faces around me as the flames start to sear my legs. Only now there’s no pain, no searing screaming torture to blank my vision and my memories, now separated from me like the beautiful future-memory voices I’m hearing tonight!
I know every face in that crowd! My family, my neighbours, my friends and enemies in the town!
There’s Inga, tears watering her cheeks, my first love whom I screwed behind the grave yard and to whom I’d first opened my heart - about my Doubts. She would never have denounced me, though her tongue might have wagged too freely in the tavern of an evening, or in bed with that yuppie idiot of a blacksmith’s son she “married”.
There’s stocky, black-bearded Geoffrey, the miller, who always envied and hated my “hi-fallutin’ ways.” He’s enjoying my come-uppance.
There’s the “dominie”, the school teacher whose mind was simultaneously thrilled and terrified by my “free thinking”, and who’d worked devotedly to close down my (naturally?) unruly spirit, “for your own good, my son.”
Even ten lifetimes later I can’t look at my mother. Oh, the social shame of it all, her son spread naked, “brought to justice,” alone and clearly “proven wrong” before these the whole town’s assembled frightened, ignorant “Goode Burghers”, their faces flickering pink in the firelight from fear, rage, condemnation, their lips purple like the gashes of wounds muttering the Christian voodoo spells they only half believe can protect them from their own “doubts”. Realists, who, without initially swallowing the Men of the Book’s ghastly mumbo jumbo, could see it was the only game in town and probably always would be. Except for the cults and lonely fools like me who continually popped up for immolation!
But “losing,” and in public like this, before all your assembled peers, was almost more than any human could bear! And it was far worse than that. For (apart from my terrified “brothers” and “sisters” from our secret Truth Posse lurking at the back, a few brave hearts who refused to have their minds straight-jacketed by the new foreign “Religion” of the conquering Concrete Boys) not one of those “realists” even glimpsed my courage or commitment.
Half of them perceived anyone who opted for any path than up the new, official greasy pole as touched in the head. “With a brain like yours you could have been a butler’s understudy at the big house,” that’s what they’d always wondered aloud at me.
And for the other half? My spiritual questionings had been social affectations, done to arouse the lassies (who indeed used to flutter “Oh, you’re a terrible man, and will come to a sorry end!” ). Now they saw me getting my just desserts for crying wolf too often.
None doubted for a second (I suppose) that my burning here today proved once and for all that I’ve been wrong, all along. A fool. A sucker. “Dead” wrong.
Yes, things were a lot worse then for the free spirit than they’ve ever been since!!
Such ‘memories’ have come to feel more real to me than life itself. They explain the whole direction of history.
Often I recognise people from that crowd, in this lifetime! A security guard I encountered yesterday had the loud, puggy red face of the drunken, laddish bastard who led the bonfire chants. Several politicians I recognise as former priests leading the “Holy Communion” as they roasted me alive!
Nor was such barbarity, such personal humiliation and utter failure just one event. It happened in a string of lifetimes, each ending in “disaster”. No wonder people today are so conformist, so afraid - we’ve been traumatised by the Concrete Boys for generations!
And for a thousand years it looked like nothing could ever change…
BUT……..
The Middle Ages turned out to be the lowest the human race ever devolved. And the positive, earth-shattering news is that, though the Concrete’s dupes immolated me in 12 of my last 16 lifetimes, along with literally millions of others, just for refusing to close our hearts and minds, they failed to entirely snuff out the Human Spirit!
And now that the human species has finally evolved beyond tolerating the physical extermination of nonconformists, we, the Alternative, have been breeding like succubae for 200 years and must now be near unstoppable! It looks like the CBs can slow it down but they can’t change evolution’s direction!
So, remember, when you land once more in mundane reality, that no matter how bad things look for the human race, our side is winning. Step by step, a brutally bloodthirsty, competitive culture is dying! And the losing side you’ve been on all your lives is succeeding! The meek shall inherit the Earth!
What’s left of it anyway.
Staring, entranced, exhilerated, terrified, as his words appeared on gigantic screens above every dancefloor, PPJ Numan distinctly heard a voice seemingly from the far distant future mutter: “You see? There ARE other paths to Megatripolis! Through the Portal this Nuke opened to escape the pain of burning!”
An hour later he was fired. For supposedly “bumming out all the Dream-Ins.”
But wait! Just as the face on the screen of his enraged ex boss was reaching the heights of its sneering condemnations, and as Numan was grovelling back in lonesome torture again on the bonfire of the insanities, another Dimension Opened, and the promoter was pushed instantly from the screen to make way for… an email. From the year 2055. From Megatripolitan Rebel Army Insurgents!?
[ends]
Extracted from megatripolis@forever,
the timedancing future history enovella
from Fraser Clark.
http://www.oneworldnet.co.uk/ebooks/index3.php
'Fraser Clark is the shamanic zippie spokesperson for a loose-knit movement of people
who aim to change the world - while having the best time of their lives.”'
Sydney Morning Herald.
up
london
FRI FEB 24 Radical Irish/English/Russian/American Poetry Night
ANDREA BRADY, KESTON SUTHERLAND, DMITRI PRIGOV (tbc), and an unrehearsed reading of “Ruby Fjord” a poem by LIZA HAYDEN. 7.30pm @ Hammersmith Irish Centre, Blacks Road, London W6 (Hammersmith tube) £4/£3 (concs)
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TEXT JOCKEY // TJ PHRASER (Fraser Clark) & THE MEDIA EVOLUTION
MIXING THE TRACTS LIVE ON THE KEYBOARD
@ A MEDIA-MEME RATE OF 160 IPP *
* Ideas Per Paragraph
TO SUBSCRIBE SOMEONE, WRITE I wanna get UP! TO fraser@parallel-youniversity.com
TO UNSUBSCRIBE, HIT REPLY WITH REMOVE IN THE SUBJECT BOX
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Gibbon in 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' 1823: “The good sense of Muhammad despised the pomp of royalty. The Apostle of God submitted to the menial offices of the family; he kindled the fire; swept the floor; milked the ewes; and mended with his own hands his shoes and garments. Disdaining the penance and merit of a hermit, he observed without effort of vanity the abstemious diet of an Arab”.
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China's Censors Facing Revolt
CHAIRMAN Mao's former secretary and official biographer has denounced the shutdown of an investigative weekly newspaper by the Chinese authorities in a spreading battle over censorship.
http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=234582006
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THE ZIPPIES //FEEDBACK
I don't think the use of the word Zippy as reported in the New York Times actually conforms to your definition of the word. There doesn't seem to be any 'hippy' in it. It sounds like it's basically indian yuppies to me.
Steve Radford, London.
>> but that’s not a negative, it’s an Opportunity!
The Flying Saucer’s Apprentice
(Or How I Was Outsourced By Fraser Clark And The Zippies
And Got Zip From The UFO)
PART TWO
by David Robert Lewis
So, to get back to my story, I’m living with my de facto girlfriend in an unfurnished room in San Francisco, flat broke, making a few dollars doing some flyers and a newsletter for Fraser Clark’s Zippies, which was about as far as my "financial" ambition over this zippy phenomenon extended.
It was no big deal, I was just a writer who’d happened to be at Megatripolis UK the previous summer. Clark had actually invited me then to join him in his conspiracy "to save America". But it had all sounded too much like a proposal you make when you're stoned, not something as serious and illicit as hacking Wired Magazine and hauling equipment through the Kaibab National Forest to a banned festival, so I politely declined.
It was August 1993, I had made my way to Britain from my own country, South Africa, and now I bumped into one of Clark's Megatripolitans on the tube, a modern merry prankster who’d handed me a flyer for the club night "you just have to experience", a night with the "Zippies," hadn't I heard about them, "the Future Perfect State every Thursday at Heaven."
In fact Clark and I had already been corresponding for a while via his "Encyclopaedia Psychedelica International" or EPi for short. Nothing particularly unusual for the editor of a small counter-culture zine in South Africa isolated from the rest of the world by sanctions and a cultural boycott.
When I’d been editing Kagenna, an ethnopunk fanzine, from 1989-1993, the only way of keeping in touch with the outside world had been to write letters, one of them being EPi. As RU Sirius can probably testify, I’d been writing letters to a number of west coast publications like Mondo 2000 and had even had letters published under various pseudonyms like Ted Head.
So you can say all my "sneaking suspicions of positivity"
>> pronoia
were confirmed by finding a copy of Clark's next venture, evolution^, in a West London bookstore, with a small contribution from a South African "buddhist queen" called Samten, a regular contributor to Kagenna, the magazine I was now hawking as I travelled.
I drop in on one of the Megatripolis parties, basically a great big technoclub with a nice ambient lounge and a good, loving vibe. Mixmaster Morris on the decks, couple of kids taking acid, probably for the first time, and of course, a dancing granny and a small inner circle surrounding Uncle Fraser, who seemed like a warm old man who wanted nothing more than for everyone to have a good conscious time. It all seemed rather innocent, until he took me aside and mentioned, offhand, that he was going to America, and "won't you join us, we’re going to conspire with people, you know -- like Ram Dass, Tim Leary".
I laughed it all off as some kind of a practical joke, and left for Camden with one of the many rabble-rousers on the night-bus. Clark's offer only confirmed my own plan to go to San Francisco, do a tour of West Coast Counter-Culture, and basically meet people like Leary on my own steam.
So I bought a cheap six month return ticket to San Francisco, (which later turned out to be a dud) not expecting it would take a good while longer than I expected to get back home….
After interviewing people like RU Sirius in an Indian Restaurant in Berkeley, I headed for LA, to hang with some Extropians for a while. While this was all happening "according to plan," I suddenly got caught-up in an earthquake, lost my return air ticket to the scalpers, and spent a good few extra months simply trying to survive.
Then, suddenly, the "Here come the Zippies" cover appeared in the then super-hip Wired magazine. "Cool!" I thought, "They've actually gone and done it!" Myopically I contemplated jumping a bus right there and then for Flagstaff, Arizona and for what Fraser had been calling “The Paradigm Jumping Off The Grand Canyon Mega Rave” to join the tribe. This plan was quickly dropped as impractical - besides, I had no money.
>> and meanwhile i’m being talked out of the name by ‘serious’ americans worried that luvved-up raver kids on ecstasy might take the meaning too literally
less than a decade later, of course, they’re getting shot at by iraqi freedom fighters. if only they’d been a bit more ‘serious’!Nevertheless I enthusiastically followed events as they unfolded in the papers and on the internet. The alt.zippies topic on usenet was the most visited topic that year, with literally hundreds of postings being made, but compared to what was happening back home in South Africa where a country had just been liberated, this was kids’ stuff. “Let them have a good time," I thought, "maybe I'll go to a rave". Some Extropians on the West Coast were dismissive. "Youth nazis" they said. "They're good guys, what's the problem?" I countered.
>> u c the probs we faced? nobody trusted anyone’s motives!
By the time I got back to San Fran, Megatripolis West was about to be launched. I spotted a flyer in a clothing store and simply pitched-up. It was October 1. "Free Festival at the Trocadero," "Opening night speaker -- John Perry Barlow (Grateful Dead/Cyberologist/Founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation) talking about "The Trouble With You Kids Today," "Your participation is invited in our opening ceremony with Aum dancers, Witches, & the Kiwi Theatre," "Everybody is a star," and so on.
I join the crowd outside where Clark is welcoming a veritable long queue of guests. Practically everybody in San Francisco. "There's a familiar face" he says, greeting me with one of his zippy-style bear hugs.
As far as Clark was concerned, I was already a part of his "Conspiracy." While hanging at the new club, I find myself quickly roped into doing things, and the obvious reason why any of this is significant to you or anybody else is because the media event created by Jules Marshall's "Here Come the Zippies" story had mutated into a plethora of verbiage on all things Zippydom.
As I’d eventually learn, the High Times version of events was actually scheduled for publication in February 1995 of the next year. Hampton Sides’ excellent imitation of Tom Robbins' new journalism appeared only in December 1994. If the meme carried by the Daily Newspapers had seemingly dried out, it was only because the roller coaster had stopped to take on passengers - and all of us, including those who were only along for the joy ride, were still in for one hell of a time, even if just observing the circus, like Heisenberg, would make it explode.
So we're back at that morning in early October. A phone call from Clark etc etc. And now it’s later in the morning, I'm just casually doing my small task, for a man, a friend, who I know very little about, when suddenly my complete and total attention is demanded. (Folks - nobody can be accused of holding a gun to my head, I simply acquiesced, but its a diabolical plot nevertheless). One minute you're following the yellow brick road, the next you're being transported by flying monkeys to the palace of Brumhilda the Bad with the Tin Man. Basically I'm picked up in a car driven by someone's mom. As far as everybody is concerned this is hype heaven in hippyland. "We need more zippies" says Sionadh Craigen, Fraser’s partner on the Zippy Tour, packing us all into the car.
Basically Fraser’s adolescent girlfriend is in charge. We drive off while I struggle to remain composed, nonchalantly telling her that, seriously, all I’d promised was a flyer or two, nothing more.... it’s all seeming to happen in slow motion. I guess you could also say I was abducted by the UFO never to return home to normality again. I'm a little queasy in the pit of my stomach.
“We need some more zippies" she explains as we pull up at this huge conference centre, A strange inexpressible emotion, my silent scream -- "you don't even know me that well, and already you're telling me who I'm supposed to be", but foolishly I ignore my inner voice’s warning sighs and float downstream, abandoning my personal ego to the Carnival. What I probably should have been doing is making an appointment with the "Teenager Inside My Twenty-Something Body", if only to reassure him that all this was not a commitment to a lifelong fraud, a simple hoax Hey, I'm just a professional, an associate, an equal, my whole life is still ahead of me!
But quaint stuff like this would soon melt under the pressure to become an arbitrary, totally anonymous "Zippy".
As I write this, Time magazine has just published a cover story called "Secrets of the Teen Brain". Apparently research is "revolutionising our view of the adolescent mind -- and explaining it in mystifying ways." No doubt the mystery of life is unfolding, but such research inevitably comes too late to save me from teenage expectations of what a Zippy ought to be, even way back in 1994.
As those already familiar with this demon of an issue perhaps already know, getting treated like a new species of teenager was only half the problem of being associated with Clark's new "posse". The other problem was having to put up with "adults" like Peter Booth Lee, a perpetual 4-year-old who’d literally assumed the cultural persona of Wired's "Here Come the Zippies" cover -- knitted cap, tecnno glasses and all. If he’d been a real "mensch," he’d probably have gone all the way, but to do that would have meant living up to the expectations created by "Pincus the Cyborg" who already had the zippy franchise on human-machine relationships.
>> pincus had joined the zippy tour in New York where he’d been earning a living posing as a cyborg statue on wall street.
I'm hopeless in the fashion stakes, however, much to Sionaidh's dismay. While we're driving in the car to yet another "photo opportunity," I ask her what's up. She updates me in her boho lilt: the Zippies have already had a press conference, “and an eco-friendly fashion show, you know, like with hemp products..." and it all sounds terribly cultish, and exciting, and I want to be a part of what one could call the funfair, but like who’s backing the Zippies? It can’t ALL be pronoia, the sneaking suspicion that others are conspiring behind your back to help you.
We end-up downtown in Silicone Alley. RU Sirius, my cyberpunk friend, is there, being interviewed for a television spot I guess, by some young brat who’s covering the incipient counter-culture, probably with a student loan and his dad’s video camera. I'm instructed to sit on the floor or, like, wait in the kids room. If I’d had a portable rocket from the future I’d have got out of there fast, but all I manage is to chirp-up that actually I'm nearly 26 and a publisher of sorts, etc etc. The video guy just looks at me like I'm worse than a redneck on the inside of his politically correct televisionland brain.
While Fraser does the interview, I try to network a little: "Names Dave Dei," I say, trying to appear cool by using one of my net-names. Big mistake. Because, since Shionadh is unaware that Fraser already knows me from London, I’m marked as some kind of an attention-getter; or worse, one of those complete nobodies who grab microphones while you're on stage, and goes out of his way to steal your thunder.
Indeed Jules Marshall wrote recently in his "A Decade After The Zippies" piece commissioned for Wired about something familiar to all of us: "I caught up with Fraser at a party just outside Santa Cruz. He was introduced to speak when suddenly this weirdo called Pincus, dressed in body armour, fur and cow horns as I remember, grabs the mike and announces HE is Fraser Clark, and goes on to spout complete gibberish for ten minutes."
He goes on: "This guy had at some stage attached himself to the zippies, or one half of them as it had become by now, it seems." Yes, there was a split and no, I wasn't even party to that split. What had happened, in reality, is that I’d become a useful part of what Clark would always term "the reinforcements the planet’s been praying for." And as such, I was an easily expendable commodity in both media terms and in THE ZIPPIES’ terms.
(continued in next UP!)
up!
Whistleblower Alleges Second Wiretap Program
A former NSA employee said Tuesday there is another ongoing top-secret surveillance program that might have violated millions of Americans' Constitutional rights. Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a "special access" electronic surveillance program that he characterised as far more wide-ranging than the warrantless wiretapping.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021506A.shtml
up!
“History makes it clear that the legend of fanatical Muslims sweeping through the world and forcing Islam at the point of sword upon conquered races is one of the most fantastically absurd myths that historians have ever repeated.” De Lacy O'Leary in 'Islam at the Crossroads,' London, 1923.
up!
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the UP! is a global edutainment round-up, broadcast weekly to =[13,791]=
Alternative// Activist// Zippy// Trance// New Age// Peace folks
recommended to the Parallel YOUniversity// Megatripolis Dance Dept as
"showing signs of life".
Since recipients forward it widely to their own lists & sites,
we conservatively estimate 50,000+ direct recipients.
A further 40,000 read it on the YOUniversity's site.
And, because of its 'mix' of 'specialist' & 'general' content,
it's increasingly being posted on a variety of sites worldwide,
making an estimated total weekly readership of =[275,000]=
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RUSSIA WARNS U.S. AGAINST STRIKING IRAN
Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the chief of Russia's general staff, warned the United States against attacking Iran. Russian news agencies quoted him as saying "A military scenario can't be ruled out,"
>>>
IRAN: ''US THREATS OF MILITARY ACTION
ARE BUT EXPRESSIONS OF ITS DESPERATION.''
"The US, the Zionist usurper entity and their band of bullies would do well to kick their habit of threats of military action, especially as the rulers in Washington are well briefed on just what they might face in Iran should they get carried away with their megalomania," concluded the editorial.
http://tinyurl.com/d3v5b
>>>
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly said that Iran has NO nuclear weapons program or similar. Iran will need at last TEN years to construct a nuclear weapon. On average- for the enrichment to weapon grade uranium - one needs more than 2500 centrifuges - Iran has THREE working models.
UP!
OBITUARY
Stew Lives!!
YIPPY Stew Albert 1939-2006
by Michael Simmons
Thus read the simple blog entry by Stew Albert on January 28, 2006. He died two days later, in his sleep, at his home in Portland, Oregon, surrounded by his wife Judy Albert, daughter Jessica, and friends. Suffering from cancer and unable to write at length, he was clearly determined to make a statement A Last Stand -- that blended the legendary Yippy’s defiance and wit.
For the Yippies - the Youth International Party - the word “party” meant both political group and outrageously good time. The Yippies merged left-wing activism and freak culture in the late 1960s. One of the “non-leaders” along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner, Stew was a fierce soldier for justice as well as a subversive prankster.
Born on December 4, 1939 to a working-class family in Brooklyn, Stew was genetically nonconformist a natural blonde Jew. In 1960, he visited the young, idealistic revolutionary Cuba and it derailed his plans for civil servitude. “I saw people living exciting, meaningful lives not based on self-promotion or small-time ideology,” he later wrote. After a failed attempt at reintegrating into normalcy, he got bit by wanderlust and ended up in Berkeley, California working for the anti-war Vietnam Day Committee whose most effective founding member was Jerry Rubin.
Soon, Stew and Jerry were best friends, and Stew was in the thick of Berkeley’s cannabinoided counter-culture. Despite his “growing rage” at America’s war on Vietnam, his “private joy was complete.”
In 1966, his pal Rubin ran for Mayor of Berkeley and Stew became campaign manager, creating a campaign that advocated social justice, an end to war and racism as well as the legalisation of marijuana a brave, new demand and he laid out the campaign pamphlet in a decidedly psychedelic style. The same year, Rubin was called before the commie-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee and he showed up wearing a Revolutionary War costume. These examples of performance politics successfully blew the minds of the congressional creeps and thrilled young anti-war activists by establishing a new tactic capture their imaginations and their hearts will follow.
In the summer of 1967 Stew and Jerry flew to New York for preparations for a march on the Pentagon, and befriended a fellow longhaired, wisecracking troublemaker named Abbie Hoffman. Stew, Jerry, Abbie, Jim Fouratt, and others descended on the visitor’s gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and showered 500 one-dollar bills onto the floor below. For the first time in Wall Street’s history, trading stopped on the floor while the greedheads went grabby ga-ga for the green. This merry band had pulled down the curtain on the wizards of capitalism and the media lapped up the story.
In October of that year, Stew helped organise the massive March on the Pentagon, announcing, along with Jerry, Abbie, Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs and others, announced that they were going to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise it of evil spirits. Again, the story made for thrilling press.
Next, along with Paul Krassner, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Bob Fass, Anita Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, Kate Coleman, Keith and Judy Lampe and others, they signed a unified statement of purpose and announced themselves as Yippie, a name thought up by Krassner.
The Yippies began planning a Festival of Life for the Democratic Convention in August of 1968. The idea was to present a counterpoint to the Convention of Death hosted by the politicians responsible for the war in Vietnam. That same year Stew met fellow traveler Judy Clavir, a love story that lasted his entire life. Judy, later dubbed “Gumbo” by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, became his mate and a renowned activist in her own right.
Stew contributed Pigasus to The Festival of Life, an actual pig that he and Jerry announced was the Yippie candidate for president. The pig was later detained by the police and squealed in custody. Meanwhile the Festival of Life in Paley Park facing the Democratic Convention hotel devolved into a police riot where thousands of demonstrators including Stew -- were savagely beaten in what was dubbed “a police riot” by a federal commission. Undeterred by the facts, the government prosecuted a group of the organisers for conspiracy to riot in what became known as the Chicago 8 (later 7) trial. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial became known as “The Trial Of The Century” and eventually all charges were dropped.
Stew made history when, in London on the David Frost Show, he became The First Person To Say ‘Cunt’ On British Television. He traveled to Algeria to facilitate escaped fugitive Timothy Leary’s exile, where Leary stayed with another exile, Eldridge Cleaver. (Of all the Yippies, Stew was the closest to the Black Panthers.) He enlisted John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a “Beatle/Yippie Pact” that resulted in Lennon’s radicalisation and near-deportation.
With compadre and folksinger Phil Ochs, he traveled to Chile before the CIA-backed coup. When he implemented DIY egalitarianism by helping create People’s Park in Berkeley, then-Governor Ronald Reagan responded to the unsanctioned green space by bringing in the National Guard and turning the streets into a war zone.
Stew was played by actor Donal Logue in the Abbie biopic Steal This Movie in 2000.
Through the years, he never stopped thirsting for peace and justice. He became a mentor and friend to younger activists, from the L.A. Cacophony Society to myriad anarchists. Young people from all over the world corresponded with Stew, asking about Yippie and seeking advice on contemporary shit-stirring. He continued to write extensively, publishing The Sixties Papers with Judy and his autobiography Who The Hell Is Stew Albert?
A week before his death, he gave a two hour interview to a film crew making a documentary about the Yippies and, although he was clearly tired and in pain, he remained powerful, insightful, unrepentant, and funny as hell. As he wrote in his autobiography, he had “an uncontainable need to test my bravery,” something he did until the end.
And as the man said, his politics never changed.
Michael Simmons is an award-winning journalist and currently filming a documentary on the Yippies. Email to: munz@mindspring.com
UP!
“My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the secular and religious level. ...It is probable that the relative influence of Muhammad on Islam has been larger than the combined influence of Jesus Christ and St. Paul on Christianity. ...It is this unparalleled combination of secular and religious influence which I feel entitles Muhammad to be considered the most influential single figure in human history.” Michael Hart in 'The 100, A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons In History,' New York, 1978.
up!
>> suddenly the danish cartoon story, which we’d been covering for 3 weeks, is all over the overground media. //FEEDBACK
But isn't the story about what's happening in the overground media and peoples reactions to it? And is it such a good thing? What's there to be proud of here? Being provocative towards fundamentalists?
>> well, i thought & think it’s a very important issue, that’s why i covered it and wrote a hopefully stirring editorial about it at the time. yeah, “stirring” to what i hear u ask?
Ok, so it's brought up the issue of Free Speech, but in a way which only serves to emphasise the differences between cultures. Muslim fundamentalists don't give a damn about free speech.
>> but we give a bless about it, and they’re just going to have to learn to live with it or leave the country. what most touched me when i first covered this story was that a childrens book on religions of the world had found that most cartoonists they’d approached to do Mohamed were afraid to touch it. we can’t let that happen, can we? and i tell you, steve, i had real fears about publishing the cartoons, and that CAN’T be right. if the US & UK government can’t stop me speaking up on whatever i want (including the xtians and the jews whom i blast on at least a monthly basis) then, for damn sure, am not gonna let nobody else do it.
Let's face it, these people are angry and these cartoons are just something they've latched onto to enable them to express it.
>> i agree. by far the biggest tragedy in all this is that ‘we’ are the main culprits by our invasions and general smug aggressiveness. so i really blame the xtian and jewish attitudes for filling the muslim fundamentalists’ ranks. they’d be a tiny & irrelevant sideshow if it wasn’t for ‘us’.
No matter how angry Muslims become over the mocking of their religious symbols, what U.S. officials would prefer to ignore is the depth of anger that Muslims already feel at having been subjected to the arrogant, pretentious, brutal, and humiliating conduct of U.S. government officials. In fact, one cannot help but wonder whether the anger that has built up within Middle Easterners as a consequence of U.S. governmental conduct in that part of the world has contributed to the enormous anti-Western reaction to the publishing of tasteless cartoons by a Danish newspaper.
But the muslims aren't tackling the real causes of their anger and the cartoons aren't promoting anything constructive either.
>> i don’t accept that was the motive of the danish paper and it certainly wasn’t mine. look, if i can believe and SAY (often) that xtianity was the single greatest abomination to hit the human species then am certainly not going to treat another religion with any kid gloves. i’ll support them politically and sociologically but not that.
Pissing off fundamentalists is like shooting fish in a barrel. Except these fish shoot back. And no, we don't want to just shut up in the face of bullies, but we want to be very careful when we take sides just who we're taking sides with, yes?
>> i haven’t launched an ongoing campaign. and i don’t intend to keep banging on about it, but it certainly seems to need to be occasionally said.
This is a clash of cultures. On one level it's about Muslim fundamentalists against Western ideals of freedom and free speech. But on another level it's about people who believe in something sacred against a society in which nothing is sacred. Nothing that is except money.
>> i couldn’t agree more. and i certainly feel uneasy on this issue.
Bush and his gang love this sort of stuff, it just makes the countries they want to invade less popular with the people. They don't have a problem with free speech because they own most of the media through which it's expressed!
>> again i couldn’t agree more
We've got to promote peace, love and understanding, yes?
>> yes. and honesty, personal freedom, and (wot shall we call it?) a general unbranded spirituality in our species’ daily life.
and also, as i always say, Justice must come before Peace, otherwise it’s just Repression.
Maybe there is some good in the situation, maybe some youngsters on the fringes of fundamentalism will see truth and not go further, but I think more will get fired up by the righteous anger as a medium to express their own.
>> again i agree. but…
But it's not going to be until we in western society rediscover our own connections to the sacred and start expressing that in a way that changes the course of the mainstream that we're really going to offer an alternative to fundamentalism.
I appreciate that that's a big part of what the UP! is about, but don't get sucked into fighting their battles!
>> yeah, but despite the negatives of my stand, and despite the obvious hypocrisy involved in our ‘democracy’, we also have some good points about which we all agree, and this was one of them. it could even be the ONLY one.
Love
Steve Astronaut, London.
>> keep me on my toes, steve!
up!
Stupid Cartoons On Bits Of Paper
With no malice toward anyone or any religion or those with kind and loving hearts, this whole 'cartoon' issue, emblazoned with religious violence, indicates to me that the world is venting its suffering at the hands of theological tyranny and oppression.
Religious terrorism is happening all around the world... Muslim religious violence, Christian religious violence, Jewish religious violence... ALWAYS in the name of God. This blasphemy, in my opinion, is in direct opposition to the will of a loving God.
The world's greatest economic, militaristic and environmental terrorist, the United States, is now under the tyranny of a man who claims he has been called to massacre over 130,000 innocent Iraqis, to torture and bomb, to spy on Americans in violation of established law, and to spread fear and hatred IN THE NAME OF GOD - all Hitler's tactics.
This only emphasizes to me that religious dictatorial oppression of free thought, common sense, human and civil rights in every country only foments an inner rage, a ticking time bomb in the human heart, that is just waiting for permission or any excuse for an outlet. I believe this violence is the by-product of the passion & desire to be free, and the pent up rage at our own oppression, which the patriarchs then poison with fear, propagandise towards violence, and use as a tool for the furtherance of their own power.
German patriarchal society was a breeding ground for those looking for permission to vent their repressed rage at their society's dominating oppression... and Hitler gave it to them, plus a target for it... and they took it. Their whole society imploded and took with it most of Europe and many American lives. The sadness that pervades the German people since that time, and the horror of religious 'crusades' and oppressive times throughout history, should have told us something.
The world's people need to take back their personal power and give themselves permission to think for themselves... and to reject violence, supposedly in the name of ANY deity, and act with our best and most natural instincts for giving and receiving love... and for protecting each other and the very earth that sustains us.
Let's not allow a stupid cartoon on paper to unravel the precious fabric of understanding that was being woven together since 9/11. This is just one more smokescreen issue, INTENDED TO DISTRACT US FROM WHAT THOSE IN POWER ARE REALLY DOING.
PLEASE, WE MUST NOT LET YOURSELVES BE VICTIMS OF A HISTORICALLY SUCCESSFUL TACTIC OF DIVIDE AND CONQUER.
Lucille, Newark, California.
up!
Vandals In Denmark Strike Muslim Graves -
COPENHAGEN, Feb. 12 -- About 25 Muslim graves in western Denmark have been vandalised, bringing swift condemnation from Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as tensions simmer from the Danish cartoon controversy.
"I strongly condemn this disgraceful act, and I deeply regret the desecration of Muslim graves," Rasmussen said in a statement released by his office Sunday night. "I have made it clear that the Danish government condemns any expression or action which offends people's religious feelings."
Ahmed Akkari, a prominent Muslim leader in Denmark, said he was "happy" that Rasmussen had issued the statement so quickly. He said that in similar cases in the past, "nothing happened." Akkari said he believed that those who vandalised the Muslim graves in the city of Esbjerg, in Jutland, west of Copenhagen, "do not represent the Danish people's general attitude."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/12/AR2006021201087.html
>> but freedom of speech remains central to their and our culture.
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I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!
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