In an attempt to keep making gains with my reading, I figured I should keep updating my blog with the books I’m reading so that it ensures that I make time to keep reading!

Just wrapped up Brave New World. I liked it though I was more fascinated by the science in it with the concepts of Bokanovsky’s Process and how the society was created than some of the other concepts involved.  Good read and apparently ranked 5th on Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century (Ulysses by James Joyce is #1, and The Great Gatsby is #2)

I have moved onto Donna Foote’s Relentless Pursuit. This baby is about a year with  TFA and so far I think it’s a pretty good book for anyone who wants to know what the TFA experience is like. I have found it to be incredibly similar to my own experience and have recommended it to my family so that when I’m talking about my experience they have an idea of what it is like.

I’m also recommending it to you. The raw emotions described in the book are real and I feel them everyday.

Check it out! (wasn’t that a line from Reading Rainbow…..?)

In the November issue of Shambhala Sun magazine, Huston Smith recounts one of his last conversations with longtime friend Aldous Huxley. Huxley said:

“It’s a little embarrassing to have spent one’s entire life pondering the human situation and find oneself in the end with nothing more profound to say than try to be a little nicer.”

This is one thing I love about philosophy and the great wisdom traditions–what’s there is just so flippin’ obvious, but we somehow need to be reminded, early and often.

Tangentially, recall that last week I offered up a little show tune for your listening pleasure. There’s just one more thing I wanted to say about that number… I love that it’s get happy. Not “find something that makes you happy” or “hope one day you’ll discover happiness”. Get happy. It’s an active choice, a state you set your mind to achieve, not one that descends upon you if you’re lucky enough. I hate that Nike staked a claim on this one, but it’s so darn true I can’t help but repeat it: Just do it.

What Judy’s singing and Huxley’s saying is basically the same thing: We make the choices. We set the tenor of our own lives.

So what’ll it be?

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another;

but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.”

-Aldous Huxley

“Depois suspirou «Como isto seria divertido se não se fosse obrigado a pensar na felicidade!»”

Mustafá Mond in

“Admirável Mundo Novo”,

Aldous Huxley

Es handelt sich um eines meiner Lieblingsbücher. Hat aber keinen Zweck, es mir zu Weihnachten zu schenken, auch nicht zu Ostern. Natürlich habe ich das Buch schon. Wer es aber noch nicht hat und/oder es im Original lesen möchte, den verweise ich auf dieses im Internet frei verfügbare Exemplar: Brave New World, Aldous Huxley.

Manchmal finde ich das Internet rischtisch geil.

MK ULTRA Zombie Expressions of Elderly Victims of the Peoples Temple

JONESTOWN: THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH IT WAS A CIA COVERT MEDICAL  EXPERIMENT

My special thanks to Bonnie Faulkner of Guns and Butter of KPFA as one of the few if any progressive radio programs airing a special program this afternoon on November 18, 2009 on the 31st anniversary of one of the nation’s most horrific mass murders in U.S. History involving some 918 people, 305 children, and 40 infants, predominately African-Americans, mass slaughtered in a remote isolated rainforest of Guyana of South America at a covert concentration camp called Jonestown.

It aired a rocking alternative view of Jonestown that it was a governmental coordinated CIA MK ULTRA racial medical-agricultural experiment. This evening I checked KPFA archives on the internet to hear it again, but Bonnie Faulkner’s explosive expose on Jonestown is the only program missing at the KPFA’s 2:00 p.m. air slot. I image that it shook up a lot of Bay Area liberals and progressives sitting on the fence blind to Fascism, Racism, and Nazism that continuing rot away the moral core of this country. 

PEOPLES TEMPLE: THE UNBEKNOWN BRUSH WITH THE CIA CULT OF DEATH

 My first unbeknown brush with Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple was in Downtown Oakland at the T&D (Turner & Dahnken being the chain) Theatre at 419 11th Street. I recall it was soon after the mass development demolition of Downtown Oakland had begun in 1965-67 that there was a religious group with a number of black people carrying on daily and night services at the recently closed theatre. As manchilds, a group of young macks as we referred to ourselves were interested in checking out the new girls in town. So, we sat in on some of the services.

The Girl with the Beautiful Natural from http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/

What was puzzling and stuck out about the experience with this group was that we could not separate the girls from a group of small kids that watched and listened to everything we said and the girls’ reactions. We tried to shoo the kids away, but over and over again they just wouldn’t move or leave. One of the girls was an attractive tall light skinned young lady with a natural. All of the younger macks just asked how old she was. It was like the younger kids cried “Ohoo-ohoo, we are going to tell.”  As soon as the kids threatened to tell on them, the girls turned in complete unison with the small kids and ran away. It was so puzzling at the time. It was like something out of a movie. 

Another thing that stuck out about this religious group was that on one of the night services, the pastor claimed that he was going to perform a miracle and resurrect the dead. Being an impressionable manchild as I was, I was very much interested in seeing that incredible phenomenon and planned to attend, but for whatever reasons I missed it.  The man in the Bay Area who claimed to be able to resurrect the dead was none other than the self-proclaimed “Prophet”, Rev. Jim Jones. By 1972, Jim Jones would claimed to have done “over 40” resurrections of the dead. [1]

According to assistant prosecuting attorney of Mendocino County and Peoples Temple attorney, Tim Stoen: 

“Jim has been the means by which more than 40 persons have literally been brought back from the dead this year. When I first came into the church, I was the conventional skeptic about such things. But I must be honest: 

Following the November 18, 1978 mass murder in Jonestown, U.S. Attorney William Hunter was in charge of investigating and covering up the Peoples Temple ties to the CIA. Hunter had a close personal relationship with Temple attorney Stoen ever since they both worked as assistant district attorneys in San Francisco to cover-up a 1975 election fraud perpetrated by Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. When Hunter was promoted to U.S. Attorney, he offered CIA asset Stoen the position of Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney. When this scandalous conflict of interest was disclosed, Hunter stepped down but appointed one of his employees, Robert Dordero, to prosecute Layton. [3] The unsuspecting Charles Alex Gregory had counted the same William (Billy) Hunter as one of his close personal friends and business confidents.

THE LAYTON FAMILY OF THE PEOPLES TEMPLE: LUCIFIER’S SERVANTS

Tim Stoen along with Deborah Layton-Blakely had been central figures in stashing Peoples Temple assets in the millions in secret bank accounts by establishing two offshore dummy Panamanian corporations: Briget, S.A. and Asociacion Evangelica de las Americas, S.A.  [4]

Deborah Layton is one of the key central figures in the Peoples Temple CIA project. Deborah is the daughter of the southern aristocratic Dr. Laurence Laird Layton of the chemical warfare division of the U.S. Agricultural Department (USDA). Plum Island Animal Disease Center and the chemical warfare division of the USDA was the brainchild of (Operation Paperclip) Dr. Erich Traub straight out of Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler’s secret SS biological warfare laboratory on the island of Insel Riems on the Baltic Sea. [5] Keep that in mind, Jonestown was also an agricultural experimental camp, and Dr. Layton and Layton family were some of its major covert funders.

Deborah Layton’s mother, Annalisa Philips-Layton, was of an elite wealthy aristocratic family of Nazi’s Germany. Lisa’s father Hugo Philips of Hamburg, Germany also reportedly funneled money to Lisa for the Jonestown CIA Medical/Agricultural Experiment.

Lisa Layton’s mother was Anita Lea Heilbut, a daughter of a wealthy Hamburg stockbroker. Under the ruse of escaping from Nazi Germany claiming to be of Jewish descent, Lisa sailed for New York aboard the S.S. Manhattan on May 6, 1938. Her claim to be Jewish was patently false. Sometime in 1931, her sister Eva had entered into Himmler’s SS Lebensborn Program as a pediatric nurse. [6]

The organization Lebensborn is part of the race and settlement central bureau of the SS. It served SS leaders in the selection and adoption of qualified Aryan children as part of its secret plan for a 1000 Year Third Reich of Aryan World Supremacy. In 1935, the Lebensborn as an organization was officially placed under the personal direction of Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. Under the iron fist of SS and the Gestapo, the Lebensborn program was stringently confined only to persons of certified Aryan decent and ancestry.

On April 23, 1938, the American consulate in Hamburg issued Eva Philips of the SS a visa to the United States, like her sister, Lisa, Eva was in the service of Himmler’s SS in America. [7] Eva traveled to Texas and blended into an Old South aristocratic family of Houston were President of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, one of the most important figures of Nazi Germany, was positioned.

After WWII, Dr. Schacht had been indicted as a Nazi war criminal. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, Schacht was an active supporter of the Nazi Party before its accession to power on January 30, 1933, and supported the appointment of Hitler to the post of Chancellor. After that date, he played an important role in the vigorous rearmament programme which was adopted, using the facilities of the Reichsbank to the fullest extent in the German rearmament effort. The Reichsbank, in its traditional capacity as financial agent for the German Government, floated long-term Government loans, the proceeds of which were fused for rearmament. He devised a system under which five-year notes, known as M.E.F.O. bills, guaranteed by the Reichsbank and backed, in effect, by nothing more than its position as a bank of issue, were used to obtain large sums for rearmament from the short-term money market. As Minister of Economics and as Plenipotentiary General for War Economy he was active in organizing the German economy for war. He made detailed plans for industrial mobilization and the coordination of the Army with industry in the event of war. He was particularly concerned with shortages of raw materials and started a scheme of stock-piling and a system of exchange control designed to prevent Germany’s weak foreign exchange position from hindering the acquisition abroad of raw materials needed for rearmament. On May 3, 1935, he sent a memorandum to Hitler stating that “the accomplishment of the armament programme with speed and in quantity is the problem of German politics, that everything else therefore should be subordinated to this purpose.” [8]

The Peoples Temple Jonestown camp sadistic doctor was Dr. Hjalmar Schacht’s namesake, Larry Schacht. It was Dr. Schacht, the Nazi Minister of Economics, who coined the phase entering Auschwitz “Arheit Macht Frei,” or “Work Will Make You Free.” [9]

I CRY CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: GENOCIDE

According to John Judge, in the first count of the dead at Jonestown which numbered 408 Dr. Larry Schacht wasn’t there. Allegedly, the second count of the dead amounted to 780. Miraculously, an additional 372 people supposedly appeared dead at Jonestown then it climbed to 913 or 918. After the second count an additional 133 people that escaped the initial slaughters were rounded up out of the rainforest and dragged back to Jonestown and executed. Among the second count, purportedly, Dr. Schacht body appeared, but there is still no independent evidence of his death. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht’s namesake at Jonestown is presumed to have escaped the slaughter with other special team members of the killing squads. On May 10, 1952, Deborah Layton’s grandmother and Dr. Layton’s mother-in-law, Anita Philips died from injuries suffered in a fall from from a window of a New York City apartment house. The police determined that Anita’s death was a suicide when they discovered the following note written in German: “My Friends, know that I, free and proper, am a good American. But I was a gossib and have been estangled in a network of intrigue. I no longer have the strength to free myself from it. Forget me not my beloved children and family. And you, Hugo, forgive me. Live well. All of you loved mankind so well.”  [10]

The network of intrigue that Anita referenced was that she was suspected of being part of SS Reichsfurhrer Himmler’s spy network in New York City. During this time, Dr. Erich Traub was also part of SS Reichsfurhrer Himmler’s spy network in New York. During WW I, Traub was a captain in the German army working as an expert in animal infectious diseases, particularly in horses. His veterinary corps led the germ warfare attacks on horses in the United States and Romania with a bacterium called glanders. He was also a member of the National Socialist Motorists Corps (NSKK) [11] 

The NSKK (German: Nationalsozialistisches Kraftfahrerkorps) also known as the National Socialist Drivers Corps was paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party that officially existed from  1931-1945. In April of 1930, Adolf Hitler joined the NSKK as one of its first members. In 1945, NSKK was disbanded or went underground.  The group was declared a “condemned organization” at the Nuremberg Trials. This was due to the NSKK’s orgins in Heinrich Heydrick’s SA and its doctrine of Aryan superority required  of its members.

During the 1930’s and preceding WWII, Traub worked at the Rockefeller Institute of Princeton in New Jersey on viruses and bacterium. He was an active member of the Amerika Deutscher Volksbund, a German-American club also known as Camp Sigfried. Camp Sigried was the national headquarters of the American Nazi movement. On weekends, about forty thousand people throughout New York participated in mass Nazi rallies marching in lockstep divisions, carrying swastika flags, burning Jewish U.S. congressmen in effigy, and singing Nazi songs pledging their allegiance to the Third Reich as if they were in Nuremberg Nazi Germany.

Dr. Traub’s detailed debriefing from 1949 under Operation Paperclip of Himmler’s secret SS biological warfare research on Insel Riems, and his activities there and during the war and for the Soviets, laid the groundwork for Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on USAD’s Plum Island. Dr. Traub was a founding father. [13]

From 1957 to 1978, Dr. Laurence Laird Layton worked at the USDA’s Western Regional Science Laboratory in Albany, California just outside of Oakland. CIA consultant Colston Richard Westbrook was also located on the borders of WRSL during the creation and operation of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army), and Peoples Temple MK ULTRA project. [14]  At USAD, Dr. Layton secretly along with Dr. Traub continued the racial biological research of Himmler’s secret Biological/Chemical Warfare Program with Jonestown as its secret cohort testing grounds.

It makes absolute sense that Deborah Layton, a descent and bloodline of Himmler’s old SS espionage network, would clandestinely take legal control and ownership of the bulk of the Peoples Temple’s assets for ODESSA which by 1978 may have reach a couple of billions of dollars.  After setting up dummy corporations, Stoen then open accounts with the Swiss Banking Corporation in Panama and the Union Bank of Switzerland and Panama, respectively. White member of the Peoples Temple, Deborah Layton along with Maria Kataris, Terri Buford and Stoen traveled to Panama with several million dollars from social security, foster care, and welfare benefits of its Black members as initial deposits in the new accounts. Stoen also established a Temple branch in the country of Luxembourg that opened bank accounts in London, West Germany, Switzerland, Romania, and Venezuela. The signaturies were not Jim Jones or even Tim Stoen but Deborah, Maria and Terri.  [15]

Months later, Deborah and Terri returned to Panama on another mission. From there they flew to Paris, rented a car and drove to Zurich, Switzerland, where they opened one or more secret accounts in Deborah’s name or, more accurately, in her account number. Tim Stoen and other trusted couriers then traveled to Switzerland to deposit untold millions into Deborah’s secret bank account. [16]

Following the Jonestown mass murder in Jonestown, the known wealth of the Peoples Temple was viciously seized by Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Administration to offset the expense in returning the corpses, hundreds of black bodies, to the U.S and a small and trivial remaining portion was distributed to the surviving families, but only a small portion of the Temple’s estimated fifty million to two billion dollars was ever recovered.  Millions were missing; millions that were hoarded in secret Swiss accounts in Deborah Layton’s name. [17]

Deborah’s other responsibility in the Temple was as political liaison in Terri Buford’s   Peoples Temple Department of Diversions; the group was established to carry out the Peoples Temple most sensitive work in government. Deborah gathered data on politicians who might be coerced or blackmailed into cooperating with the Temple, hence the CIA. She also wrote forged and anonymous letters endorsing candidates, commenting on pending legislation and presumably threatening politicians who opposed Jones’ politics. Her correspondence was so incriminating that Deborah wore surgical gloves to type the letters on special “D” typewriters that had been purchased second-hand and then destroyed after fulfilling their purpose so as not to be traced to the Temple. [18]

The Girl with the Natural: Shanda Michele James Before her Murder in Jonestown Taken from Deborah Layton's book "Seductive Posion"

It was Deborah Layton-Blakely that allegedly befriended a young Black young lady in Jonestown with that beautiful natural, Shanda Michele James-Oliver, at the Oakland T&D Theatre that one of the young brothers first asked her age.. In Seductive Poison, Layton said that she had been turned into some type of sexual enslaved concubine that was left comatose with mind altering drugs in the Jonestown medical barracks until she was murdered. [19] 

MK ULTRA: THE EYES OF ROSE SHELTON

Our Fragile Brainwashed Elder, Rose Shelton, Slayed in Jonestown, Photograph taken from http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/

I had been told by Rose Shelton’s younger sister who at time was one of my beloved in-laws, who we belovedly called Nanny, that she was one of Jim Jones’ personal nurses. It was either 1974-75 that I was then married to one of Rose’s grand nieces when she visited us in Los Angeles. Nanny and Rose had traveled in the Peoples Temple bus caravan from the Bay Area. For whatever reasons, she couldn’t talk about the Peoples Temple and Rev. Jim Jones in Rose’s presence. In private, Nanny told us that the buses were crammed with people lying in the isles and even stuffed in the luggage compartments. She told us that Jim Jones and Peoples Temple was trying to pressure her to sign over her home on 44^th Street in Oakland off of Telegraph to them. She wanted out while Rose, a very fragile senior elder,  remained one of his most loyal and trusted brainwashed followers and supporters.

I, natively, really didn’t know what to make of Rev. Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. I had recently taken a class in Psychiatry and the Law at Loyola School of Law. I was in interested in race and lobotomies (psychosurgery). As a class, we visited a local mental institution. I was dumbfounded by some type of universal zombie-like blank expressions that I observed in young black mental patients. It was their expressionless and blank eyes that left me bewildered and left an everlasting impression.

During Rose and Nanny’s stay at our house, I went by Ralph’s Grocery Store near Hoover and Vernon in Southeast Los Angeles. At the store, there were a number of people circulating around the store panhandling and operating from a table in the front of the store. It was Peoples Temple members. As I approached the store, one of the sisters approached me and asked for a donation for the temple. When I looked directly in her eyes, I observed uncharacteristic excessive wrinkling of the skin around the eyes as if she has been awake for weeks. In her eyes, I saw that same universal zombie-type blank and unemotional expression that I observed in young black mental patients in the mental institution. It was almost the same expressionless eyes that had left me bewildered and mystified.

I was perplexed. I didn’t know what it meant. My wife and I and kids were invited to the Peoples Temple to join Nanny and Rose. Initiatively, I wasn’t interested. But from what Nanny said about the church, and what I had actually observed in the eyes of one its members I had become concerned or deadly curious about what was going on at the Peoples Temple.

It was on a nice and sunny Saturday in Los Angeles that my wife and I went to the Peoples Temple church. I was amazed as I approached the front of an old majestic church at 1366 South Alvarado Street in the Alvarado Terrace Historical District at Alvarado and Hoover. The Peoples Temple was a former First Church of Christ, Scientist, built in 1912. The church has a grand historic Christian Science towering edifice with a mixed Beaux Arts-Italianate-Spanish Romanesque style.

There was dozens of people bustling about the round stairs leading up to the church. The doors were wide open. It was packed with people. There was standing room only. What I saw standing at the pulpit in the church froze me in my steps. At the pulpit looking down at a predominately black congregation was a white guy with a jet-black hair wearing a black robe. He had on large black sunglasses.     

It wasn’t just that a white guy was preaching to a black congregation that initially froze me. There was something about his demeanor and the expression on his face. The image that I saw wasn’t the humble and compassionate Christian pastor that I traditional had become accustomed to. This was different. He was standing there at the pulpit with what appeared to me a mocking posturing figure with a menacing scowl about his face. What Nanny had said about the church and that sister’s empty and tired wrinkled eyes flashed and raced through my mind. My mind was screaming, “this is not right”, “there is something extremely wrong about this.” I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t cross the threshold of that church. I told my wife that I couldn’t go in under no circumstances. She understood. She had promised her grandmother Nanny that she would be there. She entered the church to be with her.    

Suddenly, my mind flashed back to Oakland. I had encountered Rose and this so-called mystic Rev. Jim Jones before. It was at the Havenscourt Jr. High Auditorium at 66^th and East 14^th Street sometime in 1970 or 1971. At the time, I was living with my mother and siblings at the 65^th Street San Antonio Village. I was surprised one evening when I discovered that my little brothers and sister, middle school students, had been invited to attend some type of religious services at their middle school across the street.

I was alarmed that religious services were taking place on school grounds. I am still not sure how they came to be invited, but they weren’t going without me. I attended the religious services as they had planned. It was Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple circulating on the grounds of the Oakland Unified School District performing religious miracles. I distinctively remembered something odd about Rev. Jones attendant. She was an elderly Black woman with deep dark folds around her eyes. It had been Rose Shelton, my wife’s grant aunt, Rev. Jim Jones’ personal nurse. It was her eyes that evening that had left a burning impression on me. Again, it was those expressionless cold blank eyes buried in a pocket of wrinkling and worn skin. As Jim Jones was performing his phony miracle curing people of cancer by having them pretend to spit out cancer that was fresh chicken livers, I distinctively recalled Rose’s eyes and zombie like appearance as she attended Rev. Jones without the sun shades in his act by hiding and pretending to clutch cancerous matter that had been casted out of the mouth in her white handkerchief hiding the chicken livers.

When I looked directly in Rose’s eyes, it had been the first time that I had observed an uncharacteristic excessive wrinkling of the skin around the eyes as if a person had been awoke for days if not weeks. That was the first time that I had been plagued by some type of universal strange blank and unemotional zombie like demeanor and expressions. The blank expression and emotionless eyes that I observed in young black mental patients in the mental institution in Los Angeles wasn’t the first time it had made an impression on me. It was on that evening in 1970 or 1971 at Havenscourt Jr. High. It had been the zombie eyes of Rose Shelton that first bewildered and mystified me.

At that time, I knew very little about Nazis, mind control or the CIA. During Huey P. Newton’s incarceration at the San Luis Obispo California Men’s Colony, the older brothers as I recalled in specific, Brother DC (Captain Dennis Cox in exile in Paris), told us that it was important to make constant contacts with Huey at the prison because they were torturing him with Chinese-Korean Brainwashing tactics like sleep deprivation. For example he said that they were dropping water just outside his cell 24 hrs. a day until it caused ringing noises in his head. I just didn’t appreciate at the time the wicked ends of Korean torture tactics and sleep deprivation.   

As a manchild, I loved to watch monster and science fiction movies. Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples and what the system was putting Huey through at San Luis Obispo was a science fiction flick being played out in true life right before my eyes and I at that time had no way of knowing or appreciating its true danger.

Shortly after shielding my younger brothers and sister from Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple on the grounds of the OUSD under Superintendent Dr. Marcus A. Foster, two FBI agents (a black and white team) paid a visit to my mother and siblings while I was away to suggest to her that it was best for my health and safely if I got out of Oakland.

Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple was a covert governmental coordinated racial medical-social control and pacification experiment that extensively used sleep deprivation tactics as a means of brainwashing and mind control.

Just before his death in April 1992, Charles Alex Gregory, was drawn inside an organization that from all appearances was an instinctively benign group, SIMBA Inc., from the mindset of Roland Gilbert, a former inmate of Lompoc Federal Penitentiary.  

In prison, Gilbert had gone through some type of MK ULTRA operant conditioning experimental behavior modification program. Charles didn’t understand it but SIMBA Inc. was nothing more than Lompoc’s experimental operant conditioning program covertly repackaged as SIMBA’S “The GHETTO SOLUTION” targeting Black children, particularly males that conditioned them and their adult mentors, one of which was Charles Alex Gregroy, into “altered states of consciousness” — a hypnotic state used in mind control in which the mind becomes highly susceptible to suggestion. Gilbert’s mind control paradigm program for SIMBA Inc. was straight out of the Dr. Gregory Bateson, Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley’s Esalen Institute; and it singled out and targeted Charles Alex Gregory’s independence and genius for obstruction. Bateson, Maslow and Huxley were some of the most important clandestine architects of the CIA’s MK ULTRA program.

The medical-military-industrial-congressional complex has clandestinely turned Oakland into some sort of far out and futurist medical scientific pacification laboratory and testing grounds because Oakland had become ground-zero and home to Black Power Nationalism and African-American Independence that Charles Alex Gregory presented;  and Liberation.

Oakland was the home of the feared Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense that was sweeping across the World like a wildfire. Oakland had become home to some of the most progressive educational and political systems in the nation and the World. 

The CIA’s MK ULTRA PROGRAM IS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. The trail to Jonestown runs right through OAKLAND.

[4] Id.

[5] Carroll, Michael C., LAB 257, Harper, NYC (2004) pgs. 7-8

[6] http://www.fonebone.net/Jonestown/02.Chap.txt

[7] Id.

[8] http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judschac.asp

[9] http://waronyou.com/forums/index.php?topic=3445.0

[10] Id. At footnote 6

[11] Id. At footnote 5, pg. 8

[12] Id.

[13] Id. Page 9

[14] Meier, Michael, Was Jonestown a CIA experiment? a review of the evidence, Mellen House (1988) at page 92

[15] Id. At footnote 3

[16] Id.

[17] Id.

[18] Id.

[19] Layton, Deborah, Seductive Poison, Anchor Books, NY (1999)

I don’t have the time today to make it a true Wednesday Wednesday, but here’s a little Miss Addams in your life, both literal and reminiscent, and also some really cool wisdom from great sources about two simple, harmonious, earth-friendly pleasures for which we can thank each other: reading and bicycling.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. — Christopher Morley

It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us. Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they’re out on a bike. Or they like the bicycle’s simplicity and the precision with which it is made. Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep. — Gurdon S. Leete

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. — Aldous Huxley

We read to know we are not alone. — C.S. Lewis

Schoolgirl IV Reading by x-Autopsie on deviantart.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book. — Coolio

Uma (im)possibilidade de futuro da humanidade, após uma Terceira Guerra Mundial. Mais próximo de um “1984″, de Orwell, do que do próprio “Admirável Mundo Novo”, de Huxley.

Este livro encontra-se disponível para download no site Repertório Cultural:

http://www.repertoriocultural.org/index.php?formulario=obra&metodo=0&id=183&url=YnVzY2E9aHV4bGV5JmZvcm11bGFyaW89b2JyYSZtZXRvZG89NA==&voltar=sim

Um clássico da Literatura Contemporânea, leva à refletir sobre dominação, “progresso”, tecnologia e seus usos, controle social e natureza humana.

Este livro encontra-se disponível para download no site Repertório Cultural:

http://www.repertoriocultural.org/index.php?formulario=obra&metodo=0&id=179&url=YnVzY2E9aHV4bGV5JmZvcm11bGFyaW89b2JyYSZtZXRvZG89NA==&voltar=sim

Quando si legge un libro come Il mondo nuovo viene inevitabile chiedersi tra quanto tempo uno scenario descritto in maniera plausibile possa giungere anche ad una parziale realizzazione. In realtà il futuro immaginato è plausibile nella misura in cui è già qui, adesso.

Il mondo nuovo raccontato da Huxley si pone come il fine della Storia, è l’ultima spiaggia di una orribile concezione tutta moderna. Gli strumenti? Il condizionamento e la manipolazione, l’eteroinduzione dei bisogni, l’eugenetica (al contrario, quindi disgenetica, nel senso di una destinazione dell’uomo), il controllo del passato, la stabilità. Il fine? La felicità.

Intrattenimento-intontimento. Vitalismo consumistico. Massimi risultati con il minimo sforzo. Socialità forzata. Ricerca del piacere immediato. In un mondo di prescelti Alfa Plus specializzati che comandano e controllano e di Epsilon a cui non resta altro che un entertainment di regime, essere felici vuol dire essere nel modo migliore rotella dell’ingranaggio. Per molti si traduce nell’essere tubo di scarico di un sistema. E l’imperativo categorico e illusorio, tutto obbrobriosamente moderno, della ricerca della felicità diviene un incessante scavarsi la fossa. Adesso, oggi, non tra cent’anni.

Aldous Huxley, Il mondo nuovo – Ritorno al mondo nuovo, traduzioni di Lorenzo Gigli e Luciano Bianciardi, Mondadori, 2000

Kevin R D Shepherd Allied With LSD Advocate Robert Priddy

Kevin R.D. Shepherd attempted to defend LSD advocate Robert Priddy (a caustic critic and defamer of Sathya Sai Baba) on his citizeninitiative.com domain. Needless to say, it can be thoroughly proven that Robert Priddy’s pseudo-criticism of LSD was nothing more than a shameless attempt to cover-up and blur his decades-long praise of mind-altering drugs. Kevin Shepherd said (underlined emphasis added by Moreno):

citizeninitiative.com/sathya_sai_and_wikipedia.htm
Kevin R.D. Shepherd:

That was a long time ago, though Priddy did subsequently compose three documents describing his LSD experiences, and which he placed on the web in the 1980s. These writings remained on the web while he was a devotee of Sathya Sai, though he deleted them at the end of his devotee phase.

As a critic of LSD, I questioned the relevance of these writings, though Priddy told me in 2007 that he had long outgrown the eulogies, to which he had added cautions. In The Psychedelic Experience, Priddy says that he did not become addicted and that his disillusionment with LSD led to his conclusion that “all psycho-chemicals of this nature should be avoided.” He stresses instead the “gradual evolution of the psyche by controlled moral and mental discipline.”

I do not myself agree with promotions of psychedelic experimentation. In fact, I can present strong arguments against that option. However, in cases where there is clear denial of the “spiritual enlightenment” syndrome, extenuating factors should be acknowledged by critics. Retrospective accounts of this nature are deemed relevant by some academic analysts, in that these accounts serve to offset the exuberant and misleading conclusions found elsewhere. It is apparent that Priddy does not believe in “LSD spirituality,” unlike many other writers on the subject of psychedelic experience. The intensity of LSD experiences is not denied by critical analysts. It is the psychoactive context of these experiences that is in dispute…

One should respect the warning of Priddy in the same document abovecited that:

“The use of biochemicals like LSD-25 to alter consciousness is like reaching for ‘plastic grapes.’ They do not allay one’s hunger. They can also create an illusion of knowledge and power, and that can be harmful.”

The Priddy version of LSD is thus very different to that of Stanislav Grof and other psychedelic enthusiasts, who interpret the “illusion of knowledge and power” in terms of an LSD “therapy” amounting to a “spiritual path” of neoshamanism. Those enthusiasts have an extension in MAPS (Multidisciplinary Assn for Psychedelic Studies), the controversial American organisation influenced by Grof, and which ingeniously includes data on the “risks and benefits” of drugs, though the underlying motivation is clearly one of drug promotion converging with the Grof paradigm.

Robert Priddy’s Denial: LSD-Visions Were Not Hallucinations:

On Robert Priddy’s Anti-Baba blog, he said the following about his LSD-induced hallucinations:

Robert Priddy: On LSD-25 and alleged “drug-induced hallucinations” Moreno makes false assumptions in dismissing LSD-25 experiences merely as induced hallucinations – it is very far from being so simple. Hallucinations can occur as a result of LSD, but they did not in my case. I was a student interested in psychiatry and psychology and my dose of LSD-25 was actually provided by the Norwegian Minister of Health explicitly for experimental purposes! Only one who has experienced it can have any idea at all of what inner clarity and scope of the mind may be released, if one is well-balanced and fortunate in the circumstances. In that I was in company with many well-known writers and hands-on researchers on the subject (egs. Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, Professor Susan Blackmore etc.) The dangers are considerable for borderline psychotics and others, so experiments are definitely not to be recommended to the public.

In Robert Priddy’s detailed LSD articles (and in a subsequent update added by him after a Pro-Sai Activist found the LSD-related webpages), he never stated that his LSD-25 was “provided by the Norwegian Minister of Health explicitly for experimental purposes”. Robert Priddy specifically stated he first experimented with cannabis then later experimented with LSD when he was 26 years old in 1963 with his friend Eric Steadman (with whom he shared a “perfect unspoken telepathic awareness”) and the entire episode was saved on a tape-recorder he turned on.

Although Robert Priddy wrote about his LSD experiences in depth, he never mentioned anything about any University officials, volunteer testing, Karl Evang or that the LSD-25 he took was “provided by the Norwegian Minister of Health explicitly for experimental purposes”. Furthermore, Robert Priddy admitted he experimented with cannabis before he experimented with LSD in 1963, experimented with “strong bio-chemicals” and LSD years after he experimented with LSD in 1963 and even wrote about another LSD-induced hallucination in 1965. Therefore, Robert Priddy fully acknowledged he experimented with drugs prior to and after his initial LSD trip in 1963. Was Robert Priddy also using cannabis and other “strong bio-chemicals” for “experimental purposes”? Although Robert Priddy whined that his druggy years are “outdated” and “ancient”, it is amusing to note the he eulogized his “outdated” and “ancient” druggy years:

1. In 1988 (25 years later) in his LSD article entitled “TRUTH, BEING AND BLISS – AN AMAZING PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE – Described By Robert C. Priddy – British author & ret’d researcher and teacher in philosophy and sociology, University of Oslo, Norway”: “I try here to give as truthful an account as I can of what befell me in 1963. In the intervening 25 years I have continually been returning to that experience as as source of inspiration and in the hope that the fullest possible light may be shed on it for me.” (LSD Reference).
2. In 1994 (31 years later) in his book “Source Of The Dream”, pg: 16-7, Chapter 2: ‘When the Soil is Ready’: “A totally mind-shattering and subsequently most wonderful and intensely ecstatic experience befell me one day, as if from out of the blue. Much could be said on the subject, as it is an almost entirely misunderstood one and thus very controversial, but I do not believe doing so would appreciably enlighten anyone who has not actually had the very same experience. I am certain that no words can capture the vital nature and truth of such an experience of transcendental consciousness…” (LSD Reference).
3. In 2009 (46 years later) on his Anti-Baba blog in an article entitled “Copyright Infringement By SathyaSaiBaba”.

In the referenced quote above, Robert Priddy claimed “I was a student interested in psychiatry and psychology”. Robert Priddy told a different story in his LSD article entitled “The Psychedelic Experience – On how I came to psychedelic experiences By Robert C. Priddy”. In that article, Robert Priddy said he was a student of philosophy and sociology (not “psychiatry and psychology”) and that he considered psychology “mostly irrelevant to understanding people, myself or anything remotely like the psyche”!

It is also significant to point out that the scientific community (contrary to Robert Priddy’s layman claims) unanimously agrees that LSD is a hallucinogenic drug and is commonly referred to as a “hallucinogen” (Refs: LSD 01 – LSD 02 – LSD 03 – LSD 04).

When Sai Devotees attribute extraordinary experiences, dreams or visions to Sathya Sai Baba (without the aid of drugs), Robert Priddy bashes those experiences as mere flights of fantasy, imagination, mental disorder and/or projection. However, when it comes to Robert Priddy’s LSD experiences (induced with the aid of drugs), he proudly proclaims them as genuine and bona-fide! This is the type of Anti-Guru / Pro-LSD weirdo who continually attempts to invalidate Sai devotees for their spiritual experiences! If a person claimed a spiritual experience, who would you be more inclined to believe:

1. A person who never used drugs?
2. A person tripping on LSD?

And let us not forget what exactly Robert Priddy claimed was revealed to him when he tripped on LSD. Robert Priddy claimed he saw (amidst lots of fluff and airy-fairy scenes) his wrist break with the bones sticking out of his flesh, compared the experience to what “schizophrenics may experience with intensity”, that his mind was ”deranged” and that his mind was “shattered into pieces again and again”. Gee, that doesn’t sound “hallucinatory” at all, does it? (sarcasm implied)

Finally, let us take a look at the three people that Robert Priddy cited to support and defend his views on LSD. I wonder what Kevin R.D. Shepherd would say:

• Susan Blackmore: “I hope that one day soon it will be; that as a society we will prove wise enough to use LSD for its highest potential, not its worst. And for purely selfish reasons, I hope this will happen in time for me to take LSD again in my lifetime and that, like Huxley, I may be able to take it on my deathbed.” (Ref)
• Aldous Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology, Human Potential Movement, Vedanta and philosophical mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. Aldous Huxley took LSD on his deathbed and referred to LSD as “a mystical, religious experience”.
• Gerald Heard was a historian, science writer, educator, LSD advocate, philosopher and friend of Aldous Huxley.

Therefore, Robert Priddy’s current views on LSD are based on the views of LSD advocates he considered authorities on the subject!

LSD Advocate Robert Priddy Refers Readers To A Pro-Drug Website:

Attempting to bolster the case for his experimentation with LSD, Robert Priddy posted the following link on his Anti-Baba blog:

Robert Priddy Cited A Pro-Drug Forum Intended For Drug Users

Robert Priddy: For objective source materials and intelligent discussions of LSD-25, see this major Forum

Since “scholar” Robert Priddy (who always boasts how thorough his research is) provided a link to drugs-forum.com (and described it as being “objective” and providing “intelligent discussions of LSD-25”), he apparently researched the site thoroughly and approved of its contents.

Let us take a closer look at drugs-forum.com, a website Robert Priddy described as “objective” and providing “intelligent discussions of LSD-25”.

First and foremost, drugs-forum.com is an international Pro-Drug website where users can request and/or share information on how to take, grow, purchase, make and use all types of illegal drugs, including LSD-25 (Refs: 01 – 02 – 03 or View Entire LSD Threads). All of these LSD-related threads prove that the discussions therein are far removed from being “objective” and do not provide “intelligent discussions on LSD-25” (unless you happen to be a drug addict).

Drugs-forum.com provides numerous threads advocating for legalizing all types of drugs (Ref) and even provides threads about which drugs maximize sexual experiences (Ref). Drugs-forum.com also provides picture galleries so that users can identify hallucinogenic mushrooms, peyote, opiods, hallucinogenic cacti and hallucinogenic plants (Ref). A majority of the posts on the drugs-forum.com domain are chock full of invectives and graphic language. This is the type of Pro-Drug forum that “scholar” Robert Priddy described as being “objective” and providing “intelligent discussions on LSD-25”! Perhaps Robert Priddy posts on that Pro-Drug forum since he claims to know it so well, he actually provided a link to it on his Anti-Baba blog.

Robert Priddy revealed his drug advocacy and revealed his standards for “objectivity” and “intelligent discussion” by citing a Pro-Drug forum full of invectives that is intended for drug users! Thank you, Mr. Priddles for coming clean once again!

Robert Priddy’s defense of LSD is in severe conflict with Kevin R.D. Shepherd’s Anti-LSD / Anti-Drug position.

Robert Priddy, Kevin Shepherd, Drugs-Forum.com & Stanislav Grof:

It is also amusing to note that the drugs-forum.com webpage that Robert Priddy linked to (which he described as being “objective” and providing “intelligent discussions of LSD-25”), linked directly to another drugs-forum.com LSD webpage that strongly advocated for Stanislav Grof’s book “History Of LSD Therapy” (Ref). The drugs-forum.com website provides over 120 pro-articles on Stanislav Grof, holotropic breathwork and Pro-LSD research (Ref). The reason why this is so amusing is because Robert Priddy professes friendship and alliance with Kevin Shepherd, a staunch Anti-Drug, Anti-LSD and Anti-Grof critic! Isn’t it ironic that Kevin R.D. Shepherd professes friendship and alliance with Robert Priddy although:

1. Robert Priddy eulogized and promoted LSD for those who are “well-balanced and fortunate in the circumstances”?
2. Robert Priddy eulogized his LSD-induced experiences as bona fide revelations and not as the result of hallucinations (an absurd and dubious claim at best)?
3. Robert Priddy solicited the objectivity and intelligent discussions of a Pro-Drug forum intended for drug users?
4. Robert Priddy solicited the objectivity and intelligent discussions of a Pro-Drug forum intended for drug users that strongly advocates for Stanislav Grof, Holotropic Breathwork and the benefits of LSD?

What more can I say more about Robert Priddy and his laughable views, absurd arguments and clown-like antics about LSD? This is the guy who is attempting to “expose” Sathya Sai Baba. Well, the truth is now out about Robert Priddy (direct from his personal blog) and there is no stopping it! Expect Robert Priddy to do damage control, offer no apologies, deflect from the issue and bore everyone with his mindless prattle. Afterall, that is what he does best.

Predictable Update:

After publishing this article about Robert Priddy’s loud endorsement of drugs-forum.com, a Pro-Drug Forum intended for drug users (which he described as containing “objective source materials and intelligent discussions of LSD-25”), Robert Priddy rushed to do damage control (just as Moreno predicted he would) and removed the link to drugs-forum.com by saying:

Robert Priddy Removes Link To Pro-Drug Website Intended For Drug Users

Robert Priddy: “Please note: Having looked more closely at the web pages on LSD-25 I had first linked to here I found them partly very misleading and that there was an overall bias towards possibly dangerous viewpoints, though there was also nonetheless a good deal of accurate historical and other materials in them and/or linked to them. As a whole those pages do not represent my standpoint, therefore the link is deleted”

“Scholar” Robert Priddy (who constantly claims he conducts thorough research) argued that drugs-forum.com (a Pro-Drug Forum intended for drug users) contained “objective source materials and intelligent discussions of LSD-25”). Now, however, Robert Priddy is claiming that his initial assessement of drugs-forum.com was wrong and the website is not as “objective” or as ”intelligent” as he first assessed it to be.

Why doesn’t Robert Priddy specifically tell us which webpages on drugs-forum.com (a Pro-Drug Forum intended for drug users) contained a “good deal of accurate historical and other materials in them and/or linked to them”?

Perhaps Robert Priddy’s change of heart was prompted by an email I sent to Kevin Shepherd about Priddy’s Pro-Drug advocacy? Kevin Shepherd is a notorious critic of the Findhorn Foundation, Stanislav Grof and LSD. Kevin Shepherd has a lot of face to lose by allying himself with LSD-advocate Robert Priddy. Well, for interested Findhorn Foundation members, Stanislav Grof advocates and LSD critics, Robert Priddy still believes that there is absolutely nothing wrong with using LSD and that his LSD trips were not hallucinatory in nature (although LSD is a hallucinogen)!

Rather, Robert Priddy would have the world believe that LSD is simply a great “mind clearer” that produces out-of-body experiences that result in enlightenment and visions of broken bones sticking out of bloody flesh! What more can one do but laugh out loud at Kevin Shepherd and his LSD-advocating friend, Robert Priddy?

LSD advocate Robert Priddy is the person with whom Kevin R.D. Shepherd openly professes alliance. Consequently, Kevin R.D. Shepherd’s Anti-LSD rants are to be considered diluted, self-serving, hypocritical and selective. Kevin Shepherd’s defense of LSD advocate Robert Priddy is akin to his defense of Pyschic Trance Medium Conny Larsson.

Hello

July 5th – not Independence Day, but nonetheless a day that will go down in history as the day when Roger Federer finally won 15 grand slam tennis titles – saw another historic milestone. Yes, that’s right: book club no.30! If only we’d realised this at the time we might have made more of an effort to celebrate it.

The text before us was “The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell” – two separate, short works of non-fiction prose (our first foray into this genre) by renowned English bohemian and all-round literary dabbler, Aldous Huxley.

The group was reduced to a core of four personages – Owain (host), Sophie (hostess and sous chef), Pete (watching the tennis) and Ed (late). Nonetheless – and despite a certain amount of trepidation about how to approach these tricky, ambiguous books – the session was immensely fruitful and thought-provoking.

Debate started by considering Huxley’s motivations for writing the book, a description of a mescalin trip he took in 1953 and its impact on his thinking about mystical or visionary experiences. Pete argued that Huxley in some sense through this book helped give birth to the Californian movement (which has been so important in the modern West) which focused on self-realisation and consciousness expansion, and that this book was particularly influential in giving credence to the drugs movement that became emerged during the 1960s. When considering why these books remain in print and are regarded so highly, we felt that Huxley’s status as an outsider – an English aristocrat arguing for drug legalisation – was significant.

We also discussed how Huxley’s attitudes to drugs in these books seem to differ from that in “Brave New World”, where his invented drug ’soma’ is used to keep the masses in a state of soporific acquiesence. And we considered the relationship of this book to previous book club authors, including JG Ballard (who wrote a cursory introduction to our edition of the text) and Thomas Pynchon, the former developing Huxley’s interest in how drugs began to permeate mainstream, ‘respectable’ society during the second half of the twentieth century, while the latter was clearly influenced by Huxley’s description of the paranoia that drug trips could bring on.

However, despite the interesting ideas raised by both books, the group found them on the whole rather disappointing. “The Doors of Perception” – with its greater narrative drive – was agreed to be the stronger of the two, but “Heaven and Hell” came in for particular criticism, especially from Ed who commented on Huxley’s pro-drugs stance and the distinct lack of a “hell” in his description of what drugs such as mescalin do to people’s minds and behaviour.

Owain (who chose the book) was particularly let down by it, finding the narrative description of Huxley’s trip – though its strongest part – still weak and unexciting, while he felt the other sections looking at the role of mysticism in art and religion were simply poorly argued, biased and subjective. We also agreed that the pieces of art shown or played to Huxley during his trip by his wife and friend – Cezanne, Mozart, Botticelli, Van Gogh – demonstrated a canonical bias of Huxley’s time and place without shedding too much valuable light on the impact of the drug trip itself.

All in all, there was much to discuss – including genre, the status of the book as ’scientific’ or otherwise, its Western bias and Orientalist attitudes, and its wider cultural impact – but our feeling was the book was not all it was cracked up to be.

The baton is passed over to Fleming (host of one of our favourite ever book clubs) even though he couldn’t be bothered to turn up this time.

Pete

“Satirical romances should be long, slow moving, graceful and handsome.”

-Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

David Frederik Attenborough Premio Príncipe de Asturias de Ciencias Sociales 2009

Tu lee, y luego enlaza, esto solo es un cachito de una gran red interconectada.

Premio Príncipe de Asturias de Ciencias Sociales 2009

-David Frederik Attenborough uno de los divulgadores científicos de la naturaleza más conocidos de la televisión mundial.

- Su ultimo documental es un especial, de su guru Charles Darwin.

- David Frederik Attenborough pertenece a la Optimun Population Trust, que aboga por la reducción drástica de la población humana.

- Tiene premios tan bonitos como La Orden de Mérito,Orden de los Compañeros de Honor,La Real Orden Victoriana, etc…….

- Su mentor, con el que se estreno en tv, fue ni más ni menos que:

Julian Huxley

-Julian Huxley fue un biólogo, escritor, humanista e internacionalista británico, conocido por sus contribuciones a la popularización de la ciencia a través de libros y conferencias.

- Julian Huxley parece haber sido el primero en usar o describir la idea de el  «transhumanismo»

- El abuelo paterno de Julian Huxley fue el biólogo T. H. Huxley, el chupapollas de Charles Darwin.

- Julian Huxley trabajo con Herbert George Wells ( el de la guerra de los mundos )

- Julian Huxley era hermano de Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley es el escritor de la distopia tecnológica más famosa de todos los tiempos:

UN MUNDO FELIZ.

¿ Era un visionario, o solo escribió la biblia de los científicos ?

…………………………………………………………………………

Reflexiones:

Mientras una gran parte de humanidad, ( la cual dice estar despierta ) abogue por un mundo sin dinero, sin políticos, pero por un mundo dirigido por científicos, nada cambiara.

Aunque no lo pensemos, el gran problema, puede que no sea más , que la permisividad ante el avance tecnológico.

Hemos olvidado nuestras costumbres mas cotidianas, y hemos dejado que todo sea más artificial: comida, medicinas, higiene…

No hay superpoblación, ni falta de alimentos, solo hay miedo a

UN MUNDO FELIZ

O igual lo deseamos………

O ano era 1932. O mundo vivia um crescimento acelerado do capitalismo e um desenvolvimento tecnológico nunca visto antes. Foi em meio a essas transformações e evoluções que Aldous Huxley escreveu seu maior romance: “Admirável Mundo Novo”. Com ele, Huxley viria a alertar sobre a manipulação inadequada das novas descobertas e no que isso poderia se tornar em um futuro próximo. Huxley descreve um Mundo em que todas as pessoas são criadas em laboratório, e cada uma já nasce com suas características pré-estabelecidas, correspondentes à cada classe existente. O sexo como forma de reprodução foi abolido e virou apenas uma diversão banal praticada até por crianças. O povo é condicionado a viver feliz através de drogas e tratamentos de manipulação das consciências. O Governo é mundialmente soberano e proíbe qualquer forma de manifestação cultural. O importante deixou de ser o Homem ou Deus e passou a ser a manutenção do poder de uma elite individualista e gananciosa. O ano em que a estória se passa não é especificado, o que dá uma impressão de que isso pode acontecer a qualquer momento. É o encontro entre os moradores desse “Admirável Mundo Novo” e um remanescente do “antigo mundo” (morador de uma reserva “indígena” da época) que inicia a reflexão do livro. Será se este conceito de felicidade é válido? Sentimentos diferentes como a consternação e aflição não formam a verdadeira essência do homem? Como restaurar uma sociedade onde os próprios subjugados estão contentes com sua situação? Em Admirável Mundo Novo o ser humano é apresentado como um animal que fala. Seus sentimentos são suprimidos e suas esperanças morrem antes de nascerem. Esse é o tipo de mundo futurista que nem o mais sádico dos homens almejaria para nossa raça. Aldous Huxley usa nesse livro todo seu vanguardismo Modernista e conduz a narrativa com destreza e sabedoria. Ele coloca o leitor dentro desse utópico futuro e faz uma crítica contundente ao indiscriminado e às vezes antiético uso da tecnologia e do poder que ela fornece. Huxley deixa claro que as mentes podem ser facilmente manipuladas (coisa recorrente atualmente), e com isso alerta à sociedade sobre as drásticas conseqüências que tal ato pode ocasionar.

Joan Shelley Rubin, author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America, said the 1920s belonged as much to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as it did to Thomas Stearns Eliot—and this is true.

The anti-Victorian, Imagism revolution of Bloomsbury, which gradually changed poetry from an art of song to an art of image through the ’trickle-down’ effort of its elites, gained the overwhelming momentum of  great numbers when its ‘trickle-down’ effort became  normalized and taught in the academy–both in English departments and Creative Writing Workshops–during the second half of the 20th century.

Are there any prominent musicians who bother to set contemporary poetry to music?

The image in poetry became associated with art, while the music of poetry became associated with vulgarity.

Two brief examples, from last century, will suffice:

First: these lines from J.V. Cunningham, the anti-modernist poet, who is largely forgotten:

Second:  Bloomsbury author Aldous Huxley’s infamous slam against Poe’s verse as “vulgar.”  The prim Englishman’s distaste for musical Poe was quoted approvingly in Brooks & Penn Warren’s well-placed textbook, Understanding Poetry (first edition, 1938) which also solidified the reputations of Imagist classics, ‘At A Station In the Metro’ (Pound) and ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ (Williams) in its unalloyed praise for these two works.

Could poetry change radically today?  And, if it did, would the public even notice?    The answer to both quesitons is, ‘no,’ and the reason the first answer is ’no,’ is because the second answer is ‘no.’

How did poetry change so radically in the early part of the 20th century?

First, it did have a public, but not a particularly large or enthusiastic one, and secondly, poetry was understood by the public to have a certain definite identity: it looked like work by Longfellow and Tennyson.

An art whose practioners are disunited, who have no common expertise, will not be seen as an art at all.  Poetry had a common expertise: the ability to compose memorable music with mere words, like Longfellow and Tennsyon.

“Verse is not easy,” Cunningham wrote.    But the skill of verse is no longer a part of poetry; poetry no longer has a specific “skill.”

The Imagists never got beyond a very minor, little magazine existence, but they believed what they were offering would be very popular, like a portable camera; now you can just point and shoot!  Anyone can appreciate images–and put them into simple poems–like haiku.  Poetry for democracy!  Poetry that was selfless and natural!  It will be a phenomenon!  But the public didn’t buy it–they still wanted their Tennyson and their Longfellow with their gadgets and their telephones and their cars.  Imagism, like Futurism, Cubism and 12-Tone Music, failed to inspire anyone except the core of elites who were pushing them.  Imagism was a flop.

Or, was it?

People ‘on the street’ today define poetry as vaguely expressive, and the public’s perception of something, we have learned, should not be underestimated.  ‘Vaguely’ is the chief term here.  No longer does the public think of poetry as Longfellow.  They think of it as vaguely expressive.

100 years ago the American public had a more sharply defined view of poetry.  It was like what those fellows, Mr. Alfred Lord Tennyson and Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote.  That was what poetry was.

The zen joke of ‘The Red Wheel Barrow’ and ‘The women come and go/talking of Michelangelo’ resonated once, but these jokes are no longer funny.  But Longfellow is gone, too.

Image truly belongs to other arts: painting, photography, and film;  further, these arts do not need to look to poetry at all as they wrestle with the image.

Song belongs to songwriters, and songwriters, the good ones, are poets, but they are known to the world as songwriters; poetry’s identity carries on in the sister art of songwriting, and unlike the filmmakers, photographers and painters, songwriters do consult poetry, not contemporary poetry, but old poetry, the art, for inspiration.

Since poetry has given up song for image as its current identity, poetry manifests no contemporary attachment with any other art.  No glory belongs to poetry, or is even reflected back on poetry.  Poetry is in the dark.

Poetry, with no public identity, is stuck: it has nowhere to go.

History affords countless examples of  technical changes which have improved music’s expressive qualities as a whole even as music, the art, remains, in its simplicity, recongizable to everyone.   When the piano replaced the harpsichord, all composers took notice, not just some.

The modernist revolution changed poetry so that everyone took notice,  but unfortunately in a way that made poetry no longer recognizable to everyone.  Nor is it easy to say if expressive qualities have increased–certainly not in the public’s perception.  As far as prose and how it perhaps opens things up, the problem poetry has, is that in prose, one would naturally think poetry could express itself with greater variety, but fiction owns prose, and poetry is expected to do something different than fiction; poetry as art has been developed in different ways than prose.   Yes, poetry should be as good as good prose, and all that, but how does poetry keep from disappearing into it?  And so poetry–sans the music that separates it from prose, as the art which the public knows as poetry–has been at sea for 100 years.

T.S. Eliot, an honorary Bloomsbury member, and the most respected critic of the 20th century, recommended minor poetry 300 years old as superior to major poetry composed  250, 200, 150, 100, and 50 years before his day.  This, in some ways, was counter to the whole modernist revolution.  John Donne?  Andrew Marvell?  Henry King, Bishop of Chichester?  What was Eliot thinking?  Eliot was thinking this: If my friends and I are to effect this modernist revolution of ours, we must not seem like mere brick-throwers; we need erudition, scholarship, appreciation of certain aspects of the past, and if we are to become professors and editors of modernist verse, it will be well to be able to make the past our clay, for revolutions must feed off the past; no revolution lives in the present day; Eliot knew he and Pound were not Bach, the master, at the keyboard, re-inventing music itself; he knew they were merely sullying a grand tradition with a little sleight-of-hand: Goodbye, Milton, Shelley, Poe, Shakespeare, Keats.  Hello, Kyd, King, Corbiere.  Eliot knew that when a revolution happens, the past will not disappear; a certain respect for the past must not only be feigned, but enthusiastically pursued, for every manifesto needs food; actual ’new’ material (Waste Lands, cantos, wheel barrow haiku,) will run out in a week, so the past has to be transformed.  Every revolution needs a professor; Mary Ann and Ginger alone will not do.

The image is free-standing and pre-verbal; it is not necessary for image to fit, or be coherent–it simply is. Why should such a thing be the essence of poetry?  Ask that Bloomsbury elite.  After a snort and a sigh and a sip of their very expensive wine, they will tell you.

In the ethical thought of such existentialist writers as Sartre and Heidegger, abandonment is the awareness that there are no external sources of moral authority. No deity, for example, provides us with guidance or direction; we achieve an authentic life by depending only on ourselves.

(Via Philosophical Dictionary)

One inevitable consequence of this approach to morality is well described by Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World.

For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.  The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality.  We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization (New York: Harper & Bros., 1937), 316.

It turns out to be convenient in many cases that life has no ultimate meaning:  It’s the ideal excuse to fashion a morality that suits one’s individual whims.  Objective meaning and purpose can prevent one from doing things one is inclined to do.  As a result, such things are ignored, attacked, or reinterpreted.  But they never quite go away.

Grußwort vom G&GN-Institut BERLIN New Cologne 6.11.2009 / Auch die Berliner Mauer “macht weiter” (Zitat Brinkmann), nämlich in den seelischen Käfigen aller Betreiber unserer “schönen neuen” Welt (Zitat Huxley), denn das sind wir: jeder einzelne Bürger tagein tagaus… Davon handelt ein neues Gedicht von Tom de Toys, das den Auftakt bildet zu seinem mehrteiligen Mauerfall-Beitrag auf myspace & youtube: 2 Dokumentationsvideos (Mauerweg an der Lohmühlenbrücke & Mauerteile in Jülich), 2 brandneue Poetryclips (“b…OM…b” sowie der Titel dieser Pressemeldung als Anspielung auf Christa Wolfs Buch “Kein Ort. Nirgends” von 1979), der Videovortrag seines programmatischen Politgedichts aus den 90ern “LANGEWEILE” (Live-Mitschnitt vom 6.10.09 auf der Wiener Poemie-Tour) und diverse andere CLips, die indirekt auf das Thema abzielen, wie z.B. ein Musikvideo für einen Soundtrack, den De Toys mit dem ersten Technoprogramm “Rebirth” 2003 selbst komponierte, um den damaligen Vortrag seines Gedichts “OZ(O/E)N” in seinen abendfüllenden “Poemie-Shows” zu untermalen (1989 fand die erste Loveparade im noch geteilten Berlin statt).

Alle Mauerfall-Beiträge von Tom de Toys präsentiert in seinem myspace-Blog:
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=482406116&blogId=517146219

Die youtube-Playlist mit jenen Videos zum Thema, die max. 10 Minuten dauern:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=BCA4E059F815FAF7

Lesbar im G&GN-Institutsarchiv: “EXTASE STATT ELITE”
(= KURZFORM VON “LANGEWEILE” vom 28./29.10.1994 + 4.12.1997)
http://www.wulle.de/GGN/TomToys/extasestattelite.html

Und für die Lyrikzeitung gleich hier zum Ansehen, Hören & Lesen die 3 Hauptclips & das neue Politgedicht:

Doku über BERLINER MAUERTEILE in Jülich (vom 1.11.09):

Doku über die LOHMÜHLENBRÜCKE (vom 18.10.09):

URL = http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=64312539
Schauplatz einer Schlüsselszene der beiden Engel in Wim Wenders berühmtem Spielfilm “DER HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN” von 1987. In der 13-minütigen Doku sieht man 1 Minute lang (von 11:20 bis 12:20) den kleinen Pflastersteinpfad in der Straße, der jetzt als symbolische Mauer den Wanderweg quer durch die Stadt kennzeichnet…

Poetryclip für “KEIN WORT. NIRGENDS (GUTE NACHT EUROPAXXL)” (vom 2.11.09):

URL = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRPduqHu9sc

Tom de Toys, 2.11.2009

KEIN WORT. NIRGENDS
(GUTE NACHT EUROPAXXL)

(…weil) diese viel zu normalen leute
in ihren allzu normalen wohnungen
mit ihren ziemlich normalen beschäftigungen
bis an ihr reichlich normales lebensende
sind nicht ganz so normal (sind)
wie die politiker meinen
sie tun zwar so aber sind jederzeit abrufbar
wenn es drauf ankommt und
es kann jederzeit losgehen
und dann wird es ernst in ihrem normalen leben
und alles wird kurzerhand umgekrempelt
bevor es in anderen bahnen normal weiterläuft
mit ein paar neuen gesichtern an ihrer spitze
ein paar neuen geschichten zum einschlafen
ein paar neuen gesetzen zum debattieren
ein paar neuen freunden zum feiern und
kindern die jederzeit abrufbar werden
falls es schon wieder soweit sein sollte
daß alle ein klitzekleines bißßchen
zu sehr normal tun
obwohl keiner es ernst meint
dann spielen die kinder ganz plötzlich
ein neues spiel
mit ganz seltsamen regeln
die keiner mehr nachvollzieht
wenn die jahrhunderte erstmal ins land ziehen
und jeder sich sehnlichst
die alte gewohnte normalität wünscht
die gestern so gut funktionierte (weil…)

© 2009 by Trademark POEMIE™, G&GN-Institut Berlin-Neukölln
(in: “LOCHiSMUß LEiCHTGEMACHT”, G&GN-Verlag 2010)