Viral Mind-Hijacking and the Memetic Lexicon

As walking, breathing, excreting bio-energetic computers, every human is susceptible to progamming. As children, along with our genetic predisposition, we take our initial crawling orders from the neo-hominids in our closest proximity. Like sponges, we absorb imprinting cues that frame our view of the emerging World. Through tribal socio-cultural conditioning and governmental and religious indoctrination, the brain software is infused with binary categorical acceptance or rejection of “the other” predicated on the initial rule set.

Do we ever stop to question how we came about our individual belief system?  The process of identity creation is a slow and seamless process that builds incrementally on previously accepted notions that attract like beliefs. A majority of these beliefs are spoon or force fed to the minds full of mush that we possessed as children. As we grow older, ideas and beliefs that conform to our current worldview are incorporated while opposing views are diverted subconsciously by the bio-computer through cognitive dissonance.

This is where memes come in. Memes are a form of mind virus intentionally employed to override previously conditioned or learned beliefs.  The media, organized religion, and governments are the greatest proponents of meme infestation. WMDs in Iraq, Swine Flu hysteria, and Obama =  anti-war candidate are examples of the media and government colluding to distort the collective reality perception for a desired political aim.

In response to fear-based stimulai , neural circuits are activated in the limbic system that emotionally paralyze the individual. The meme proponents promptly follow up with an immediate solution to the crisis (military invasion, vaccine, etc…) Logic and critical reasoning faculties are rapidly bypassed in a form of sleight-of-mind trickery that temporaily destabilizes the individual through a faux crisis. The pre-devised mock solution is quickly presented to the unsuspecting recipient. The psy-op technicians, mind-warp scorcerors, and lunatic religious hucksters work overtime to co-opt your cranial computer functioning. The meme lexicon listed below provides a bit of insight into their tactics.

Memetic Lexicon

Source

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AUTO-TOXIC: Dangerous to itself. Highly auto-toxic memes are usually self-limiting because they promote the destruction of their hosts (such as the Jim Jones meme; any military indoctrination meme-complex; any “martyrdom” meme). (GMG) (See exo-toxic.)

BAIT: The part of a meme-complex that promises to benefit the host (usually in return for replicating the complex). The bait usually justifies, but does not explicitly urge, the replication of a meme-complex. (Donald Going, quoted by Hofstadter.) Also called the reward co-meme. (In many religions, “Salvation” is the bait, or promised reward; “Spread the Word” is the hook. Other common bait co-memes are “Eternal Bliss”, “Security”, “Prosperity”, “Freedom”.) (See hook; threat; infection strategy.)

BELIEF-SPACE: Since a person can only be infected with and transmit a finite number of memes, there is a limit to their belief space (Henson). Memes evolve in competition for niches in the belief-space of individuals and societies.

CENSORSHIP: Any attempt to hinder the spread of a meme by eliminating its vectors. Hence, censorship is analogous to attempts to halt diseases by spraying insecticides. Censorship can never fully kill off an offensive meme, and may actually help to promote the meme’s most virulent strain, while killing off milder forms.

CO-MEME: A meme which has symbiotically co-evolved with other memes, to form a mutually-assisting meme-complex. Also called a symmeme. (GMG)

CULT : A sociotype of an auto-toxic meme-complex, composed of membots and/or memeoids. (GMG) Characteristics of cults include: self-isolation of the infected group (or at least new recruits); brainwashing by repetitive exposure (inducing dependent mental states); genetic functions discouraged (through celibacy, sterilization, devalued family) in favor of replication (proselytizing); and leader-worship (“personality cult”). (Henson.)

DORMANT: Currently without human hosts. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph system and the Gnostic Gospels are examples of “dead” schemes which lay dormant for millennia in hidden or untranslatable texts, waiting to re-activate themselves by infecting modern archeologists. Some obsolete memes never become entirely dormant, such as Phlogiston theory, which simply mutated from a “belief” into a “quaint historical footnote.”

EARWORM: “A tune or melody which infects a population rapidly.” (Rheingold); a hit song. (Such as: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”.) (f. German, ohrwurm=earworm.)

EXO-TOXIC: Dangerous to others. Highly exo-toxic memes promote the destruction of persons other than their hosts, particularly those who are carriers of rival memes. (Such as: Nazism, the Inquisition, Pol Pot.) (See meme-allergy.) (GMG)

HISTAMEME: See vaccime. (Morgan)

HOOK : The part of a meme-complex that urges replication. The hook is often most effective when it is not an explicit statement, but a logical consequence of the meme’s content. (Hofstadter) (See bait, threat.)

HOST : A person who has been successfully infected by a meme. See infection, membot, memeoid.

IDEOSPHERE: The realm of memetic evolution, as the biosphere is the realm of biological evolution. The entire memetic ecology. (Hofstadter.) The health of an ideosphere can be measured by its memetic diversity.

IMMUNO-DEPRESSANT: Anything that tends to reduce a personUs memetic immunity. Common immuno-depressants are: travel, disorientation, physical and emotional exhaustion, insecurity, emotional shock, loss of home or loved ones, future shock, culture shock, isolation stress, unfamiliar social situations, certain drugs, loneliness, alienation, paranoia, repeated exposure, respect for Authority, escapism, and hypnosis (suspension of critical judgment). Recruiters for cults often target airports and bus terminals because travelers are likely to be subject to a number of these immuno-depressants. (GMG) (See cult.)

IMMUNO-MEME: See vaccime. (GMG)

INFECTION: 1. Successful encoding of a meme in the memory of a human being. A memetic infection can be either active or inactive. It is inactive if the host does not feel inclined to transmit the meme to other people. An active infection causes the host to want to infect others. Fanatically active hosts are often membots or memeoids. A person who is exposed to a meme but who does not remember it (consciously or otherwise) is not infected. (A host can indeed be unconsciously infected, and even transmit a meme without conscious awareness of the fact. Many societal norms are transmitted this way.) (GMG)

2. Some memeticists have used `infection’ as a synonym for `belief’ (i.e. only believers are infected, non-believers are not). However, this usage ignores the fact that people often transmit memes they do not “believe in.” Songs, jokes, and fantasies are memes which do not rely on “belief” as an infection strategy.

INFECTION STRATEGY: Any memetic strategy which encourages infection of a host. Jokes encourage infection by being humorous, tunes by evoking various emotions, slogans and catch-phrases by being terse and continuously repeated. Common infection strategies are “Villain vs. victim”, “Fear of Death”, and “Sense of Community”. In a meme-complex, the bait co-meme is often central to the infection strategy. (See replication strategy; mimicry.) (GMG)

MEMBOT: A person whose entire life has become subordinated to the propagation of a meme, robotically and at any opportunity. (Such as many Jehovah’s Witnesses, Krishnas, and Scientologists.) Due to internal competition, the most vocal and extreme membots tend to rise to top of their sociotype’s hierarchy. A self-destructive membot is a memeoid. (GMG)

MEME: (pron. `meem’) A contagious information pattern that replicates by symbiotically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with “gene”.) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic. (Wheelis, quoted in Hofstadter.) (See meme-complex).

MEME-ALLERGY: A form of intolerance; a condition which causes a person to react in an unusually extreme manner when exposed to a specific semiotic stimulus, or `meme-allergen.’ Exo-toxic meme-complexes typically confer dangerous meme-allergies on their hosts. Often, the actual meme-allergens need not be present, but merely perceived to be present, to trigger a reaction. Common meme-allergies include homophobia, paranoid anti-Communism, and porno phobia. Common forms of meme-allergic reaction are censorship, vandalism, belligerent verbal abuse, and physical violence. (GMG)

MEME-COMPLEX: A set of mutually-assisting memes which have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship. Religious and political dogmas, social movements, artistic styles, traditions and customs, chain letters, paradigms, languages, etc. are meme-complexes. Also called an m-plex, or scheme (Hofstadter). Types of co-memes commonly found in a scheme are called the: bait; hook; threat; and vaccime. A successful scheme commonly has certain attributes: wide scope (a paradigm that explains much); opportunity for the carriers to participate and contribute; conviction of its self-evident truth (carries Authority); offers order and a sense of place, helping to stave off the dread of meaninglessness. (Wheelis, quoted by Hofstadter.)

MEMEOID, or MEMOID: A person “whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a [meme] that their own survival becomes inconsequential in their own minds.” (Henson) (Such as: Kamikazes, Shiite terrorists, Jim Jones followers, any military personnel). hosts and membots are not necessarily memeoids. (See auto-toxic; exo-toxic.)

MEMEPLEX: See meme-complex.

MEME POOL: The full diversity of memes accessible to a culture or individual. Learning languages and traveling are methods of expanding one’s meme pool.

MEMETIC: Related to memes.

MEMETIC DRIFT: Accumulated mis-replications; (the rate of) memetic mutation or evolution. Written texts tend to slow the memetic drift of dogmas (Henson).

MEMETIC ENGINEER: One who consciously devises memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others. Writers of manifestos and of commercials are typical memetic engineers. (GMG)

MEMETICIST: 1. One who studies memetics. 2. A memetic engineer. (GMG)

MEMETICS: The study of memes and their social effects.

MEMOTYPE: 1. The actual information-content of a meme, as distinct from its sociotype.

2. A class of similar memes. (GMG)

META-MEME: Any meme about memes (such as: “tolerance”, “metaphor”).

META-MEME, the: The concept of memes, considered as a meme itself.

MILLENNIAL MEME, the: Any of several currently-epidemic memes which predict catastrophic events for the year 2000, including the battle of Armageddon, the Rapture, the thousand-year reign of Jesus, etc. The “Imminent New Age” meme is simply a pan-denominational version of this. (Also called the `Endmeme.’)

MIMICRY: An infection strategy in which a meme attempts to imitate the semiotics of another successful meme. Such as: pseudo-science (Creationism, UFOlogy); pseudo-rebelliousness (Heavy Metal); subversion by forgery (Situationist detournement). (GMG)

REPLICATION STRATEGY: Any memetic strategy used by a meme to encourage its host to repeat the meme to other people. The hook co-meme of a meme-complex. (GMG)

RETROMEME: A meme which attempts to splice itself into an existing meme-complex (example: Marxist-Leninists trying to co-opt other sociotypes). (GMG)

REWARD CO-MEME: See bait.

SCHEME: A meme-complex. (Hofstadter.)

SOCIOTYPE: 1. The social expression of a memotype, as the body of an organism is the physical expression (phenotype) of the gene (genotype). Hence, the Protestant Church is one sociotype of the Bible’s memotype. 2. A class of similar social organisations. (GMG)

SYMMEME: See co-meme.

THREAT: The part of a meme-complex that encourages adherence and discourages mis-replication. (“Damnation to Hell” is the threat co-meme in many religious schemes.) (See: bait, hook, vaccime.) (Hofstadter)

TOLERANCE: A meta-meme which confers resistance to a wide variety of memes (and their sociotypes), without conferring meme-allergies. In its purest form, Tolerance allows its host to be repeatedly exposed to rival memes, even intolerant rivals, without active infection or meme-allergic reaction. Tolerance is a central co-meme in a wide variety of schemes, particularly “liberalism”, and “democracy”. Without it, a scheme will often become exo-toxic and confer meme-allergies on its hosts. Since schemes compete for finite belief-space, tolerance is not necessarily a virtue, but it has co-evolved in the ideosphere in much the same way as co-operation has evolved in biological ecosystems. (Henson.)

UTISM: UTism is short for ‘us-versus-them-ism.’ Dogmatic adherence to a belief system can create an ‘us vs. them’ mentality in the believer. The ‘us’ group consists of people who share our beliefs, and the ‘them’ group consists of those who hold conflicting beliefs. (KMO)

VACCIME: (pron. vak-seem) Any meta-meme which confers resistance or immunity to one or more memes, allowing that person to be exposed without acquiring an active infection. Also called an `immuno-meme.’ Common immune-conferring memes are “Faith”, “Loyalty”, “Skepticism”, and “tolerance”. (See: meme-allergy.) (GMG.)

Every scheme includes a vaccime to protect against rival memes. For instance:

Every scheme includes a vaccime to protect against rival memes. For instance:

• Conservatism: automatically resist all new memes.
• Orthodoxy: automatically reject all new memes.
• Science: test new memes for theoretical consistency and(where applicable) empirical repeatability; continually re-assess old memes; accept schemes only conditionally, pending future re:-assessment.
• Radicalism: embrace one new scheme, reject all others.
• Nihilism: reject all schemes, new and old.
• New Age: accept all esthetically-appealing memes, new and old, regardless of empirical (or even internal) consistency; reject others. (Note that this one doesn’t provide much protection.)
• Japanese: adapt (parts of) new schemes to the old ones.

VECTOR: A medium, method, or vehicle for the transmission of memes. Almost any communication medium can be a memetic vector. (GMG)

VILLAIN VS. VICTIM: An infection strategy common to many meme-complexes, placing the potential host in the role of Victim and playing on their insecurity, as in: “the bourgeoisie is oppressing the proletariat” (Hofstadter). Often dangerously toxic to host and society in general. Also known as the “Us-and-Them” strategy. (See UTism.)

You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind ~ Timothy Leary

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A Thanksgiving Prayer – William Burroughs (annual repost)

To John Dillinger in hope he is still alive

Thanksgiving Day November 28th, 1986

Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin’ lawmen,
feelin’ their notches.

For decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for “Kill a Queer for
Christ” stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody is allowed to mind his
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories– all right let’s see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

GG ALLIN 1991 Extra Filthy Bloody Edition “Throbblehead” Doll

Ma, I found out what I want for Christmas. The company Aggronautix has ushered the infamous GG Allin into bobblehead-dom. The violent, self-destructive, turd-munching punk rocker’s memory will be celebrated on dashboards across the land, and just in time for the holidays.

This “Extra Filthy Bloody” Edition a striking representation of GG ALLIN circa 1991 with added crud, blood, and cuts. The figure, limited to 500 numbered units, stands at 7 inches tall and is made of a lightweight polyresin. Loaded into a full color “splatter” box, here GG is accurately sculpted right down to the tattoos, and copious amounts of blood and filth.

GG died from a heroin overdose in 1993 (last concert and final hours documented here). His legion of adoring fans will never forget his soaring punk anthems advocating self-liberation and other less than desirable activities. Whether he was rogering himself with a microphone, throwing his toxic stool on audience members, or going to prison for rape and torture, GG did it with style. Celebrate his legacy with your very own GG Allin throbblehead doll.

Here are a few of GG’s more memorable song titles:

• Eat My Diahrrea
• Sleeping in My Piss on a Monday night
• Suck My Ass It Smells
• Cunt Sucking Cannibal
• Scars on My Body – Scabs on My Dick

If I wasn’t a musician, I would be a serial killer – GG Allin

See related post – GG Allin: A Rock and Roll Suicide

Tweaker.Org: A Helpful Web Resource for Gay Meth Addicts

I have been smoking meth for over 10 years.  I do not try to pretend that I ain’t hooked on the shit (see earlier post).  Some tweakers I know will swear up and down that they is through with Tina, only to find them sucking down domers behind a Taco Bell dumpster two days later. I have more or less reached a semi-healthy impasse where I smoke from Thursday night to Sunday around mid-day and then bust my ass working (crank-free) the rest of the week.

Sooner or later, chasing the “T” will get you in a crazy scene. Although I consider myself straight, I have engaged in a few bag-fag transactions when the situation demanded. Hanging with the fruitopian, rubber sheet, rompus room pounders reminded me why I prefer the mucousy fallopian stank chamber. Although Rick Santorum was well represented at these gatherings, he wasn’t getting no votes. I pity the poor little Tina twinks with their frail feminine hairless bodies getting pummeled by gut-buster deluxe sized masochistic bears. I did what I did out of necessity, but it don’t make me no poofter.

Anways, the point of the post is that I wanted to recommend a  wonderful resource for the Tina-fueled buggerers, rectal rambos, and dook-diggers out there on the scene. The web site is called Tweaker.Org and has a wealth of great risk-mitigation strategies for the homosexual tweakers. Below is their description of one of the more creative meth ingestion techniques:

Booty Bumping

How it’s done:

There are two ways this works.  In the first, think turkey baster!  With some acrobatics thrown in for good measure. The crystal is dissolved in water and a syringe without the needle is used to “bump” this solution of crystal into your butt hole. The other way is to push a small shard or a fingertip covered with powdered crystal into your butt.  Either way, the drug is absorbed by the blood vessels in the lining of the rectum.

Time to get off: about 3-5 minutes.

Things to watch out for:
If you bottom after booty bumping, you’re likely to have something besides your absorbent blood vessels and his big dick up your butt. You’re also gonna have an abrasive powder which can increase chances for internal abrasion and condom breakage. If there’s no condom on that dick,  the risk for abrasions both in your rectum and on his dick goes up. This increases the chance for exchange of blood. Damage to the mucous membranes that line your rectum, like burning or tearing, can put you at higher risk of giving or getting HIV and other STDs.

Strategies to reduce possible harms:
If you booty-bump and bottom make sure he has a condom on. Make sure you use clean water to dissolve the speed. Don’t share booty bump syringes – you could be sharing shit which could give you hepatitis, parasites or other diseases.

Meth is a helluva drug – Lois Griffin

More White Devil Word Games

Below is a random cell phone text message that I received:

–Fwd: Why when black folks wear their pants low white people call it saggin? Make you think huh? Spell saggin backwards [niggas] them crackers got us again misunderstood.

Evidently, the originator of the text had cracked a closely guarded word reversal technology used by Anglo-Caucasoid bigots to covertly mock their dark-skinned droopy-drawered enemy.

I got to give the message sender props though, that shit did make me think. Is the reversed spelling a mere coincidence or an intentionally employed linguistic dehumanization device aimed at African-Americans?  Well, as Wats Faller used to ax,  “One never knows, does one?”

Dwight David Honeycutt for Conway School Board

I weighed 14 pounds when I was born. My mama had 64 hours of labor. She pushed so hard that she shot a turd that knocked off the doctor’s glasses.

When they said I couldn’t teach because of previous incarceration I became the star of a local children’s show. We played games and played songs and I didn’t even mind taking direction from a Black.

I have the biggest dreams and the strongest hands in this goddamn state.

I made out with a dude.

I stole my granddaughter’s ADD medicine.

A guy punched my wife outside of Arby’s one night. I hunted him down and beat the fuck out of him with a trace chain.

I’m fucking this ol’ sunburnt girl one time…

The Religious Victim-Perpetrator Bond and Mass Psychosis

Excerpted from Not in His Image by John Lash:

The directive script of salvationism is the New Testament, including Acts and the letters of Paul. In its baffling combination of fairy-tale narrative and high theological rhetoric, the New Testament formulates and confirms the complicity of victim and perpetrator exemplified by the tribulations of the Jews in the Old Testament. The complicity implies a kind of contact of sin, with both parties falling short of God’s command. Perpetrators who harm others are obviously sinners, but so are the people they harm, who may well believe they are being justly punished by a higher power. The wrong done to victims is due to the wrong they have done in the eyes of God. To make matters worse, the twisted syntax of the victim-perpetrator bond condones domination, violence, aggression, and murder as expressions of divine retribution. Those who enact the will of God in violent ways are as righteous as those who suffer violence, because the bond prescribes and legitimates both roles. A deal that sanctifies violence and guarantees the righteous vindication of its victims is hard to beat. The temptation to victims to become perpetrators is ever present, although not all victims succumb to it. Those who do become top dogs in the dominator game.

The sin doctrine does not give its adherents a chance to fail: it convinces them that they have already failed, even before they try. “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Moreover, the sense of having failed God plays directly into the victim syndrome, disposing believers to imagine the abuse and harm that befall them is due to their moral flaws. If they are hurt they must deserve it. It is their fault, for through God’s will they are made to suffer, punished for their own good. Punishment for failing to follow God’s plan is inflicted on some people (the victims) by other people (the perpetrators) who righteously uphold the plan. As long as the idealogy of redemption goes unchallanged, the victim-perpetrator pathology can thrive and remain concealed, using salvationist beliefs as cover.

The lethal insanity of the victim-perpetrator bind is staggering. The complicity of victims and perpetrators is a gruesome pact, but there is still a deeper dimension to the horror. Discussing the question of what “makes God accessory to the manifest sinfulness of the human world,” Alan Watts observed: “Beyond this theological nightmare there is the fascination of supernal masochism.” The factor of “supernal masochism” comes to expression in what can be called victim-perpetrator collusion. The two parties are not merely complicit in their beliefs, they are intricately and intimately codependent in their actions. Victims and perpetrators needs each other desperately and use each other both viciously and vicariously to keep their bond intact.

According to the Gnostic critique of Judeo-Christian religion, the triumph of salvation history is not due to the undeniable truth it carries, but rather to its covert delusional power. It operates likes an obssessive fixation that seizes the collective mind, comparable to what Wilhelm Reich called Massenpsychosen, mass psychosis. In the Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich shows how mystical and militaristic (or fascist) behaviors “rooted in the male authoritarian character structure” meld together in the religious obsessions common to National Socialism, Zionism, and Catholicism. In his analysis of “the passive idealogy of suffering in all genuine religions”, he revealved how irrational insistence on the redemptive value of suffering (“the emotional plague”) leads society head-on into conflict and madness.

Robert Anton Wilson on “National Security” and the Empedoclean Knot Infinite Regress

From Robert Anton Wilson’s “Prometheus Rising“:

Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on top. This is the typical flow-chart of any government, any corporation, any army, any bureaucracy, any mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear a nescience  in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being conscious organisms – the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, drawing inferences from perceptions, etc. – are in accord with the reality-tunnel of those above them. This is absolutely vital; pack status (and “job security”) depends on it. It is much less important – a luxury that can be easily discarded – that these perceptions be in accord with objective fact.

For instance, in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the agent had to develop a capacity to see godless communists everywhere. Any agent whose perceptions indicated that there were actually very few godless communists in this country at that time would experience cognitive dissonance – his or her reality-tunnel was at variance with the “official” reality-tunnel of the pyramid. To talk about such perceptions at all would be to invite suspicions of eccentricity, intellectual wiseactreing or of being oneself a godless communist.

As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively oppressed soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in – the last state before all brain activity ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.

We also propose that “national security” is another semantic spook, an Empedoclean knot; that the search for national security is the chief cause of national insecurity and a potent anti-intellegence mechanism.

As Leary writes:

Secrecy is the original sin. Fig lead in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love… The purpose of  life is to receive, synthesize, and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear.

As so often happens, the right wing is half right for the wrong reasons. Thy say primly: if you have done nothing wrong, you have no fear of being bugged. Exactly. But the logic goes both ways. Then FBI files, CIA dossiers, White House conversations should open up to all. Let everything hang open. Let government be totally visible. The last, the very last people to hide their actions should be the police and the government.

What my eminent colleague states so poetically can be stated more functionally as follows:

Every secret police agency must be monitored by an elite corps or secret-police-of-the-second-order. This is because of (a) infilitration of the secret police, for purpose of subversion, will always be a prime goal of both internal subversives and hostile foreign power, and (b) secret police agencies acquire fantastic capacities to blackmail and intimidate others, in and out of government. Stalin executed three chiefs of the secret police in a row because of this danger. As Nixon so wistfully said in a Watergate transcript.

Well, Hoover performed. He would have fought. That was the point. He would have defied a few people. He would have scared them to death. He had a file on everybody.

Thus, those who employ secret police agencies must monitor them, to be sure they are not acquiring too much power.

Here a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration, or to acquiring “too much power” in the opinion of its masters. And so it, too, must be monitired, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order.

In brief, once a government has n orders of secret police spying on each other, all are potentially suspect, and to be safe, a secret police of order n plus 1 must be created. And so on, forever.

In practice of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until finding runs out.

National Security, in practice, must always fall short of the logically Empedoclean infinite regress it requires for perfect “security.” In the gap between the ideal of “One Nation under surveillance with wire taps and urine tests for all.” and the strictly limited real situation of finite resources and finite funding, there is ample encouragement for paranoias of all sorts to flourish, both among the citizens and among the police.

Thus, the USSR after 62 years of Marxist secret police games reached the point where the alpha males were terrified of painters and poets.

In spying-and-hiding transactions, worry leads to more worry and suspicion leads to more suspicion. The very act of participating, however unwillingly, in the secret police game – even as victim, or citizen being monitored – will eventually produce all the classic symptoms of clinical paranoia.

The agent knows who he is spying on, but he never knows who is spying on him. Could it be his wife, his mistress, his secretary, the newsboy, the Good Humor man?

If there is a secret police at all, in any nation, every branch and department of government, and institutions which are not even admitted parts of government, becomes suspect in the eyes of the cautious and intelligent people as a possible front for, or tunnel to, the secret police. That is, the more shrewd will recognize that something bearing the label of HEW or even International Silicon and Pencil might actually be the CIA or NSA in disguise.

In such a deception network, conspiracy theories proliferate. Rumor is necessary, it has to be found, when people cannot find “official” news sources that can be trusted to tell that them what is really going on. The present author, having worked in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the legalized-pot movement and other dissident causes, has repeatedly been approached by friend A with dire warnings that friend B is almost certainly a secret police agent, only to be told later and independently by friend C that friend A is a secret police agent. It requires delicate neurolological know-how to keep one’s sense of humor in the secret police matrix.

The more omnipresent the secret police, the more likely it is the intelligent men and women will regard the government with fear and loathing.

The government, on discovering that growing numbers of citizens regard it with fear and loathing, will increase the size and powers of the secret police, to protect itself. The infinite regress again appears.

The shock of discovering that most of the power in the world is held by ignorant and greedy people can really bum you out at first; but after you’ve lived with it a few decades, it becomes, like cancer and other plagues, just another problem that we will solve eventually if we keep working at it.”~ Robert Anton Wilson

Are you now, or have you ever been, a terrorist?

USA PATRIOT ACT

SEC. 802. DEFINITION OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM.

(a) DOMESTIC TERRORISM DEFINED- Section 2331 of title 18, United States Code

(5) the term `domestic terrorism’ means activities that–

(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any  State

Sneakers O’Toole: His Sneakers, His Right

Alongside Butters from SouthPark, Sneakers O’Toole is one of the animated characters on television that I respect the most. His incredibly dogged insistence on doing it his way makes Sammy Davis Junior look like a disrespected token minority cast member  in a  Anglo/Italian, skirt-chasing, drinking club. No Wait.  Sneakers O’Toole has the strength of resolve rivaled only by George W. Bush when he stood on the rubble at Ground Zero and inspired America with bloodlust and hatred for Arab Mohammadists. O’Toole’s purposeful stride and and forceful refusal to remove his sneakers are a testament to his inner strength. God bless you Sneakers O’toole, for you are the America that I cherish and love.