Emmanuel Goldstein is back, his beard darker than before. Just in time before the memorial of 911 yet another Osama Bin Laden video appeared somewhere in cyberspace, reminding us to be afraid.

The internets are dangerous, full of child abusers, cyber criminals and terrorists. Pedophiles, perverts and crooks hide in dark corners of the tubes that build the web, which we cannot trust. Just when the official evil mastermind of terror(tm) uses the web, it is automagically an authentic threat.

Terrorism makes stupid. Fear and rational thought are hardly compatible, and since 911 the word terror and its variations works as perfect trigger in most minds to switch off thinking.

A good example for this short-cut in reasoning is provided by Alex Doherty's "Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible?" piece.

Doherty describes the 911 truth movement as a coherent group which agrees on a specific variant of possible explanations of the 911 events, just to assume generously that "there is no serious evidence that contradicts the standard account of what occurred on September 11."

He ignores the strongest argument of the 911 truth movement, that the official account is incomplete, contradictory and physically impossible, and simply fails to acknowledge that there is no serious evidence that supports the standard account, which is the 911 commission report.

Doherty then constructs a guilty by association argument. 911 truth is just like the JFK, Moon landing hoax or Bilderberg conspiracy theories, so just give them all a tin foil hat and get back to sleep. However, at least the Bilderberg group exists, which raises the first suspicion that Doherty's research was a bit oblique.

Doherty elegantly circumvents the cui bono question, and fails to give any rationale of Osama Bin Laden's benefit of the attacks. Instead, he gives further evidence how other governments like Russia's and China abused their fear paralysed populations.

Doherty's individual selection of topic of various theories leads then to "common sense" rebuttals, like the idea of how to keep governmental involvement secret. The easiest way to big secrets like this comes with group think. If you think that it is impossible for the earth to circle the sun, it remains the centre of the universe. If you assume that governments would never harm their populations, all related mechanism that would enable it become "impossible".

The final point of Doherty's argumentation compares then 911 and 7/7 theories to geniously concludes: 'The various 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracies are so ludicrously devoid of sense that one has to consider a "psychological explanation".' Now that's what I would call an elaborate way to construct a compelling ad hominem attack.

Well, I would call it devoid of sense to ignore that a 47 floor highriser fell neatly in about 7 seconds in its footprint. Dozens if not hundreds of cctv cameras could have seen a Boeing smashing into the Pentagon, it is devoid of sense to accept that this simple proof has not been provided yet. Of course, admitting that explosives brought down the Salomon Brothers Building, or that the object flying into the Pentagon didn't look like a passenger plane, opens an ugly can of worms.

However, a terrorist act is basically a crime with a special motivation. Killing people, blowing up things is illegal, like many other things that have nothing to do with terrorism. No kind of crime has ever been prevented by law, so what do we gain by introducing special laws for terrorism?

That depends on the "we" you count yourself to. As member of the ruling class you gain an easy way to suppress and punish dissent, and to protect your undeserved privileges. As regular citizen you gain exposure to fear-raising propaganda, and tax raises to finance the storage of your personal information.

The permanent talking point is presented with the notion "somebody's gotta do something about terrorism", which offers a perfect disguise for the abolition of civil rights, called anti-terror legislation.

The government cannot protect us from terror. It cannot protect us from drunk drivers. It cannot protect us from suicide. The government can punish drunk drivers and terrorists, and it can do so as good without special laws that turn citizens into slaves.

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Will they fire me if I call in sick today?

A clearly dreary morning
My head pounds from the drink.
I'm praying for a good excuse
To lie in bed and think

I'll be right for the 12th tomorrow
If I can just sleep through today.
The september sun is burning
Labors prospect brings dismay.

But i've got work to do
That if I skip i'll get the sack.
I need a miracle
To get the suits up off my back.

So please god, a distraction.
Something big enough to set
The bosses sights upon the distance
and my tardieness forget.

The tv hurts my bloodshot eyes
The morning news I see
It seems that god granted my wish
This day belongs to me.

So thank you Eris goddess of discord
I see i'm truly blessed
I think of you as I close my eyes
And enjoy my hard earned rest.

bed clearly dismay distance eyes god hard morning pounds praying think today

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(Thanx to Zacius)

Blinded by science

Lost in the void of no-place and no-time
Crawling through trails laid of digital slime
Switching through endless connections
Weaving a random network of relations.

Diving in extended virtuality
Thriving in expanded spirituality
Swarming here, swarming there
while providing collective care.

The universe of possibilities
creates endless opportunities
Let your imagination run wild
to be the future's child.

All humans are born free -
is this so hard to see?

collective connections creates diving endless future network possibilities providing relations swarming trails

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While cruising through Brunswick, I noticed this signs of resistance. Life is not like on TV. Thinking for yourself doesn't (yet) harm. Art heals.

The media landscape, especially TV and Hollywood, reinforce the idea of benevolent government. V for Vendetta dares to suggest that the government enacted terrorism on its people, the classic exemption from the rule. Brazil, Terry Gilliams modernized take on Orwell's 1984 shows us the madness of institutionalised data collection and terrorist hunting. The majority of stories, however, doesn't leave the magic framework of benevolent government.

In Hollywood, the bad guy could never win. On this planet, the bad guys still make the rules, disguised as infallibly good and sheltered by myths glorifying them. One of these rules forbids challenging the legitimacy of government and the extend of its powers.

The challenge happens nevertheless, especially if governments act very arbitrarily and obviously not in the interest of their populace. And governments, especially those which call themselves democratic, embrace this opposition to a certain degree.

Rebellion morphs into a consumerist stream, and feeds the democratic myth of the diversity of allowed opinions. This trend, among many others, can be observed, used, controlled and follows the patterns of a fashion trend more than those of direct action.

Even the Matrix or V for Vendetta offer nothing but a new messiah, the single bringer of hail who liberates us all. Although these movies help understanding the virtual nature of consensus reality, both retell the story of the mystical saviour.

I don't think that another Jesus will come and heal our blood-thirsty society. A single guy (or gal) would pose no threat to the clique of bad guys that run the planet. Unless he or she has some cool super powers, of course.

I don't think there is a 'red pill', either. Going through the rabbit hole, seeing through the matrix, does not happen instantly, it just starts a different way in which we perceive information. Insight takes time and requires experience, yet avoiding the matrix even temporarily proofs very difficult.

This explains partly the fascination and the success of cults. Anyone can show examples for the distorted media representation of reality, and provide an alternative reality. Well, it certainly requires some work to construct a convincing alternative reality, but Ron Hubbard did very successfully so not too long ago.

Most cults take good care of the influences from the rest of society and maintaining an alternate reality. The global dictators appear as meta-player in this game, providing the elements of the myth of normality. Instead of focussing on a singular explanation of reality the puppet masters use the diversity of opinion as main distraction from the search for inner truth.

The ideal slave creates its ever growing economic dependency by avid consumption, excused as attempt to express its identity. Taxes and inflation help consolidating common wealth in the pockets of a few bankers and their collaborators.

The bankers, or more specifically, those who maintain monetary policy and issue printed money, play a game in which they can only win. Meanwhile, they determine how much money circulates through the hand of those who created their parasitic wealth.

Most people keep themselves sufficiently busy with running after money or planning how to spend it. They consider money as something natural, and not as a tool in the grip of few people who use it shamelessly for their own good.

Money and its quasi god like status would suffer immensely when the nefarious character of its primary keepers becomes more obvious. Nobody can afford a better PR machinery than the global banking elite, and they easily make it into the editorial part as well. Not too mention their legal departments that could sue me to eternity for defamation as soon as I get specific.

A great deal of federal and international legislation protects the monopoly to print money and to lend it to the governments of this world. Creating and living a new currency system can demonstrate the validity of alternative approaches to deal with money. Once the current systematic redistribution of economic energy lost its flair of inevitability, the parasites can be held accountable, and largely disowned.

The appeal of the the mass illusion for the Western societies vanishes, yet the three pillars of suppression, government, corporation and banking system, remain for many holy cows. I still every now and then devour a tasty steak.

alternative bad benevolent challenge created economic government guy happen maintain matrix money myth people print provide reality rules society story system vendetta wealth

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Two powerful, interconnected myths prevent societies from justice and equal rights.

The myth of benevolent governments survives throughout history, mainly because the writers of history rarely tried to create an objective account of the past.

Most areas of history simply perpetuate the myth of the necessity of government. Historians rarely care about common people, and the various ways they suffered from the introduction of individual property and government.

This perspective fits perfectly to the attitude of the ruling class, which doesn't care about common people either. Commoners deserve no better than to finance their oppressors, and gain their handicapped position in society rightfully by birth.

Nobody would seriously doubt that most citizens were used and abused by their feudal governments, but that has changed the French Revolution, hasn't it? And the Western World consists exclusively of nations that call themselves democratic, doesn't it mean that now power belongs to the people?

No. To exercise and demonstrate power, you need money, and that belongs still to the same families that owned most of the planet 500 years ago. The names and borders of nations, and the way governments are organised have changed, but the European Aristocracy, the catholic church and some old banking families have still unrivaled financial resources and real estates.

Most revolutionaries were simply deluded by the demonstration of overt power by governments, and underestimated the influence of the banking system on power structures. Revolutions just replaced people in positions of powers, but didn't reform the structures itself or abolish/reduce the dependency on monopolistic currency outlets.

The monetary system used on this planet is not designed for the most efficient use of the tool money, but to concentrate material power in the hands of a few. All money is issued as a debt (from the privately owned Reserve and Central Banks) which systematically prevents a balanced system. Debt grows exponentially, just like cancer, and affects individuals and nations similarly bad.

Although money occupies the mind of modern people a lot, the mechanics and origins of the monetary system remain to most a bigger mystery than the Big Bang. Unfortunately. Ownership, one central aspect in the life of many people, does not exist in nature.

Nature has no equivalent to a title register, and knows nothing about a human right to property. In contrast, each livable spot on this planet teems with interdependent and interacting species. And although some animals claim a territory, they can't use their lower classes to go to war or hide behind lawyers, struggles are fought directly and not vicariously like man does.

Although we might have problems imagining a world without land titles and money, mankind easily survived some hundred thousand years without these ideas. That should not imply that mankind would do better without money and the idea of ownership, but that property has its origin in theft, and nothing else, and is in no way something natural.

Nobody owned planet Earth before some regents used bureaucracy and military to rob it from their people. Nowadays about 75% of all registered land is owned by a handful private persons and organisations, which happily use the force of law (and force in general) to get rid of the people who used to live on their newly acquired property.

Instead of despised for the crimes of their ancestors, wealthy people receive heaps of undeserved respect. Mainly due to some massive PR that tries to hide that governments care more about power preservation than its people.

Let's take Bill Gates for example. The legend tells that he build his economic empire from the scratch, in a shabby garage. The fact, that he belonged to a wealthy bankers family, is mostly omitted when his success story is told. It simply doesn't fit into the myth of a dishwasher that became rich, but then, did this really ever happen?

The distribution of wealth, and why it got distributed the way we know it, lacks any convincing explanation. Individual wealth finds its origin in injustice and coercion, nothing else.

However, a lot of people simply don't care about the monetary system and rather believe in benevolent governments. This believe is fostered by the media, and immigration regulations. While you might easily change your internet provider, changing your nationality turns out to be no viable option to get value for tax money.

Democracy thrives on participation, and this means more than just electing a representative who agrees to 90% with their opponent.

Although I firmly believe in the good of mankind, I appreciate accountability for those in power. I can only trust those I know personally, if you want me to hand over responsibilities to government, I want to see checks and balances.

Unfortunatly, politicians claim their moral impeccability as excuse to prevent thorough democratic control. Without control, power belongs to those who exercise it, and not the people, no matter what Unspeak expression you'll find to name it.

although believe belongs care changed doesn't governments history mankind monetary money myth nations nothing origin owned people planet power property simply system used

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Digital Noise

Surrounded by realms of digital noise,
permanently forced to immediate choice,
all life is just stored away
in an endless binary array.

The multiplicity of opinion
from utopia to oblivion
with dubious intention
craves for attention.

Exposed to and by Big Brother
we have long stopped to bother.
With our short attention span
we forgot how this once began.

Has this world full of sex and violence
still the space for some sweet silence?

attention bother craves digital noise oblivion opinion realms silence surrounded sweet violence

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Fear of reason

This month, we will commemorate nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks of September 11th 2001. We will not commemorate the million civilian victims killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor the 25,000 humans that starve daily, unspectacular, far away from the prying eyes of a sensationalist media.

From a psychological point of view, the unfortunate victims in New York belong to our in-group. We know little to nothing about the cultures of Iraq and Afghanistan, which easily qualifies them as out-group. We know even less about the people living in the heart of Africa, the common origin of all tribes of Homo Sapiens that populate this planet.

As humans most care about their perceived ingroup, they can be blatantly ignorant to the faith of their outgroups, even if our genetic heritage does not justify the popular idea of different human races.

The anti-terror laws, that have been introduced in most parts of the world in the aftermath of 911, the Madrid, Bali and London bombings, have already achieved their goals. No terrorist will be able to attack the free world anymore, after the Magna Charta and the rule of law have been suspended to fight the war on terror in most parts of the world, including Australia.

Civil liberties end now where national security starts, and national security is so important that it can’t be defined precisely but falls into the discretion of our wise politicians. Democratic tenets like the decision of independent juries or the separation of judiciary and executive powers were sacrificed, even in countries that have not experienced any terror attack themselves.

The images of the destruction of inner-city skyscrapers makes it easy to transfer the fear into the hearts and minds of anyone who lives in a country that displays the wealth of corporations in the midst of their cities. Fear, however, incapacitates reason, and reduces most decisions to fight of flight. This certainly increases the attraction for someone offering to go to war, even it will last generations.

The war on terror will certainly be perpetual, unless the people of the planet, who have to pay for this war with their taxes and even their life, step back from their fear and start using reason again. Because the war on terror can never be won, no matter how hard you try.

Terrorism lacks a commonly accepted definition, but it’s a fairly save bet that historical figures like Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Ghandi would end up in an American torture camp like David Hicks, or be kept in solitary confinement like Dr. Haneef, or at least suffer from a constraint order like Jack Thomas.

Don’t get me wrong; I just used David Hicks, Jack Thomas and Dr. Haneef as example to illustrate the loss of the rule of law and civil liberties in Australia, not to sanctify them. However, unlike traditional wars against a well-defined enemy, the war on terror fights a method. Addition is a method to relate two numbers in a specific way, frying eggs is a method to prepare them as food.

Do you really believe the war on frying eggs could ever be won? Considering the well-educated audience of the blogosphere, I would be surprised to hear a single yes to this question, but you’ll never know. People develop all sorts of anxieties, and fried eggs might be one of them, but it seems less suited to spread a common fear amongst the majority of the population than the terrifying expression “terror”.

Nevertheless, the Australian government spend already billions of taxpayers money on this war on frying eggs, and will not stop doing so whether Howard remains PM or not.

Western governments fell into a hole after the end of the cold war. The threat of mutual nuclear destruction justified maintaining civil liberties, as those did not exist in the communist world. The tangible enemy allowed direct comparisons, so the Western World carefully refrained from arbitrary jurisdiction, secret prisons, restrictions to the right to strike or have a rally wherever you wanted.

As communism faded away as archenemy of the Western World, the necessity to keep up the illusion of a free society vanished with it. Yet, without fear as motivator for the abolition of rights and freedoms achieved mainly by social movements and direct action, reason might have caused an outrage about the introduction of anti-terror laws.

We are constantly reminded that the terrorists are out there to get us, terror suspects are arrested en masse, foiled terror plots and the memory of 911 keep the fear alive. The constant reinforcement of terror paranoia is designed to stop anyone to use reason to assess the size of the risk.

While we read often enough about the arrest of terror suspect (They are coming to get us, and they will use fried eggs if we don’t stop them!), we hardly hear about convictions. In the US, the two convictions that have been achieved for homegrown terrorists are as convincing as the case of Dr. Haneef.

Although the latest terror attack in Britain luckily didn’t kill anyone, and the perpetrators fit into the terrifying scheme of “home-grown terrorists”, biometrical visa will make the UK safer. However, passports cannot be the problem. Although the contents of the World Trade Centre were mysteriously blown to smithereens on 911, the passports of some of hijackers, which were used to officially cross the American border while being on terror watch lists, were found.

Reason cannot really explain why biometrical identification of every citizen helps defeating terrorism. And reason cannot explain why the WTC 7 collapsed on the afternoon of September 11 2001, although it was not hit by plane. The building closer to the World Trade Centre building 1 and 2 were severely damaged, but did not collapse. Unfortunately, the complete account of everything that led to 911, the 911 commission report, fails to explain why WTC 7 collapsed as well.



But thinking that they will come to get us might stop you from wondering why three massive steel-framed high-risers crumble in freefall speed to bits and pieces, although this never happened before and since then. And it might stop you from wondering whether less than 100 Australian victims, who were killed in the Bali attacks in 2002 and 2005, justify spending far more taxpayers’ money than about 2,500 people that commit suicide each year in Australia.

If they Australian government makes “securing Australian life” its priority, shouldn’t it use statistics to assess the size of the problem? It takes two weeks of suicide to have the same amount of life lost as in all terror attacks, which killed Australians in this century, and about three weeks in road accidents.

As long as you drown in fear, my comparison of the war on terror to a war on fried eggs might appear extremely inappropriate. Once you start using reason again, the advertising campaigns to suspect your neighbour seem like an outrageous waste of taxpayer’s money.

The US went to one war, along with Australia, before it even started an investigation of the events of 911, and to another one, before the results of the dubious 911 commission were known. Yet, both wars were sold to the public as a reaction to the events of 911.

Let me put this in other words for you. Without knowing the results of a forensic analysis (which didn’t really take place in the 911 commission) of the biggest crime case in the 21st century two wars, that killed about a million innocent people by now, were started. Not only did Australia participate in this unjustifiable wars, the cases of David Hicks, the Barwon 13, Jack Thomas and Dr. Haneef demonstrate that human rights and the rule of law are disregarded in this country, due to the (myth of the) global threat of terror.

When I use reason to analyse this situation, I think there is something utterly wrong with this picture. About one hundred people starved to death while you were reading this. They will not be out there to get you. Enjoy your fear.

although attack australia australian commission dr eggs fear haneef human killed liberties life people reason rule start stop terror terrorists victims war world

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