Well, I finally went to see a doctor, and I am happy to report that after 39 years of smoking, I do not have cancer or emphysema, nor have I caught tuberculosis from living in the barrio for 10 years. I had intended to quit smoking somehow, someday, and the month-long + respiratory illness helped me along. On the second day, I was hacking so badly I couldn't stand to smoke. Then I stayed so miserable for a couple of weeks that I didn't notice the withdrawal from my nicotine addiction. Now, breathing without a lot of popping, burbling and wheezing noises is something I am easily learning to like.

Some more miscellaneous passing thoughts for the entertainment and enlightenment of my friends:

When God was handing out Money, I thought He said Funny, so I went to the end of the line because I wanted to hear all the best stories. When I got up to His desk, He had run out of Money. In recompense for that little misunderstanding, He gave me a rather deep but odd sense of humor.

If the Guru says he didn't answer his door because:
He was communing with his ancestors, it means he was asleep;
He was meditating upon the Mysteries of the Cosmos, it means he was daydreaming about Sex;
He was delving into the Mysteries of the Cosmos, it means he was getiing some and really didn't want to be interrupted.

First Law of the Guru business: There's a seeker born every minute.

The course of the Sexual Revolution as I saw it:
When I was in Junior High, and first noticing girls, the Big Question was "Should you hold hands on the First Date?"
In High School, the Big Question was "Should you kiss on the First Date?"
After High School, the Big Question was "Should you Fuck on the First Date?"
After my tour with the U.S. Army, the Question was "Why bother dating, Want to Fuck?"

I once read of a German, more or less apologizing for the Holocaust, saying "We are a very obedient people, it is our greatest strength, and perhaps our greatest weakness." To that I say: We Americans are a very Disobedient people, it is our greatest weakness, and perhaps our greatest strength.

Two winos pissing in an alley, one says "Does your dick ever burn when you pee?" The other says "I dunno, I never tried to light it."

Daylight Savings is the equivalent of cutting a foot off one end of a blanket, sewing it onto the other end, then imagining you have a bigger blanket.

A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room, searching for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian in the one who finds it. (forgotten source)

Only Users Lose Drugs!

Q: What's the difference between Kissinger and Fuckinger?
A: Kissinger is Strangelove.

Self-deception is the cornerstone of civilization.

Proof that cats are smarter than dogs: People train dogs, cats train people.

Cats are the last of the domestic menagerie to join with humans. Dogs go back to mesolithic times, horses and cattle are neolithic, but cats showed up in Egypt some mere 4,000 years ago. They waited until people had domesticated themselves enough to be fit to live with. One day a cat came sauntering in, looked around, and if people only had ears to hear, they would have heard:

"Hmmm, nice digs you have here. Whether you know it or not, you need a cat. I am that cat. I am herewith the Lord and Master of this house. These are the rules: 1) The dog stays outside; 2) I will sleep whenever I want, and wherever I want; 3) Anything not tied down is mine; 4) Anything I can tear loose isn't tied down; 5) You have the privilege of stroking and cuddling me whenever I don't have anything more important to do; and 6) When it suits me, I will help reduce the mouse, rat and bug population hereabouts."

The air conditioning finally got fixed toward the end of September. I usually only run it in the late afternoon and evening when the heat is at its worst. Even this late in the year, if I forget to switch it on the temperature in my room will easily climb to 80° F. by 10:00 PM.

I'm at the tail end of one of the worst cases of the flu I've ever had, almost as bad as, if not worse than, the pneumonia I had 'way back in Viet Nam. This one has finally persuaded me to stop smoking. For the past two weeks, I haven't been doing much of anything but sacking out, taking plenty of fluids, and coughing my brains out, with an occasional trip to the grocery store.

How I got to be the way I am Department:

For me, the definitive 60's song was The Sounds of Silence by Simon and Garfunkle. It neatly summed up my utter alienation from a psychopathic society. Since it's over 40 years old, call it two generations, I don't suppose it gets much airplay these days. So, just in case you missed it, here are the lyrics:

Have things changed? Yes, somewhat. Have things changed enough? Not really.
What really bothers me is the NeoCons trying to take the country back to the 50's. Happy Days and Back to the Future notwithstanding, those really weren't such good times.

The air conditioning in my room has broken down again. Right now the temperature is 90° F and climbing. Things could be worse, last year the breakdown came in April.

I screwed up, forgot just when the end of summer term was, so I didn't drop the Photo Lab class in time to preserve my retake option, and I didn't clean out my locker in time. I've lost my grungy lab towel and a 25-pack of (no longer in production) Agfa MCP 310 RC Glossy print paper. At least I didn't leave my folder full of negatives there.

Arthritic degeneration in my neck had me in some very severe pain between my shoulder blades and all the way down my left arm for a while. A half dozen or so visits to a chiropractor relieved the pain, but now my left index finger is numb, and the adjacent sides of my thumb and middle finger. Sometimes the numbness spreads into my palm. It makes me even clumsier than usual because I always help my right hand with my left, and my left isn't reporting back what it's doing. It's weird, the motor functions aren't affected at all. If I carefully watch what I'm doing it works fine, but if I glance away or try to do something without looking I fumble.

I'm also in a prolonged bipolar slump. Sometimes I can spark myself up again with some sort of intense interest, sometimes I just have to ride it out until my neurochemistry changes up in its own dear sweet time. It's a struggle to rouse the energy and attention to do much of anything. At times like this, I tend to retreat into books. I've been reading a lot lately, right now I'm having a good old time with The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson.

After the barrage of quotations in my last post, I decided to amuse and abuse you, my friends, with some thoughts of my own, and some bad old jokes.

If you met a living being with the face, figure, and proportions of a Barbie(tm) doll, what would you say? I would say "Welcome to planet Earth. Can you get me out of here?"

People in the illegal Protection racket say they're selling Insurance, while people in the legal Insurance racket say they're selling Protection. The sad part is, you're more likely to get exactly what you pay for from the illegal protection peddlers.

The prevalent superstition has it that any knowledge whatsoever of sexual matters is inherently harmful to children, and that they must be "protected" from any such knowledge by every means available or imaginable. That idiocy doesn't protect children, if anything it only protects pedophiles. If little Sally knows what it's about, she can blow the whistle on Uncle Harry the first time he puts the moves on her. If she doesn't have a clue, then their Special Secret Game just goes on and on.

The Pope called Michael Jackson on the phone, and said "My Son, if you continue the way you are, I may have to make you a Priest."

Has anyone else noticed that once Britney started acting scandalous, all the "Britney Spears Nude!" eMail spam stopped?

If whoring were a recognized, tax-paying, respectable profession, only qualified professionals would be doing it. As it is, too many (at least at the street-corner level) are simply witless down-buttocks who don't have anything else to offer the world. I mean, if some scabrous, burnt-out 5th Street slag says "Wanna mess 'round, 5 bucks" to me, while I'm waiting for the bus at 12:30 am, while I'm saying out loud "No, Thanks," I'm thinking "If you don't think your ass is worth at least $50.00, I sure as Hell don't want a piece of it."

Q: What's the diifference between Theology and Mythology? A: Whether or not the perpetrators of the myth still hold political power.

Truth is a Spiritual concept, with implications and consequences for every aspect of human Life. Religion is a Political concept, its main purpose being to gain and hold Wealth and Power, with little or no regard for Truth or Spirituality. Every religion has something to say about sexuality, because if people submit to dominance and control over something so primal and fundamental, it is then relatively easy dominate and control every other aspect of their lives. Link that to the fear of death, and you've got an unbeatable combination.

The two simplest and most obvious steps in life, arriving and leaving, sex and death, are the most obscured in nonsense, superstition, obfuscation, denial, evasion, myth, supposition, repression and oppression. Come on folks, face it, it's so easy. We all got here the same way, some two people fucked and it worked, a baby got made. We all leave the same way, we die. In between the two we have a Life, and it would be a lot more pleasant and worthwhile without all the spurious noise about sex and death.

Q: What's the difference between an Archaeologist and a Grave Robber? A: A College Degree.

Modern Theater devolved from the ancient high art of Initiatory Magick. That same capacity to assume a character is that which invokes a god form. Thus, an actor should approach the craft with the reverence and devotion of a priest, and an occultist should muster up production values at least equal to a high school Thespian play.

Occultists and illusionists each consider the others to be Brothers of the Left-Hand Path. Illusionists think occultists shouldn't be messing with Dark Powers. Occultists think illusionists shouldn't be abusing what powers they have to put on a cheap show.

At some magic age, anywhere from 12 to 18 depending on the State you're in, young people are suddenly supposed to be capable of informed consent without having been provided with any information except what they've picked up from their peers in the locker room and behind the bowling alley. There is no magic age, there is only verifiable physical reality. People who are capable of having children are no longer children, and deserve accurate, timely, and responsive information with which to make what are arguably the most important choices of their lives.

The real trouble with women is that they are human beings, and as Lazarus Long pointed out, human beings are deadly dangerous wild animals.

Q: Why don't women have brains? A: Because they don't have dicks to keep them in.

Liberals want to build schools and hire teachers, conservatives want to build prisons and hire cops.

I really dislike the plasticized baby-girl-doll look, and not just because it strikes me as a juvenile fetish. The Cosmetics industry subtly (but surely) pushes the notion that the natural female is inherently ugly, stinky, off-color, too hairy, and generally disgusting. Women simply must support a multi-billion dollar industry, continually primping, scenting, painting and changing themselves, just to get a start on being "acceptable."

Sex doesn't sell, the suggestion of sex sells. It's the difference between a scanty-clad model leaning against the front fender of a car, licking her lip with the suggestion that she is Just Dying to ride with The Man Who Owns One, and the same model naked on her back in the rear, with the ad copy proudly proclaiming that this car has the widest, most comfortable and resilient seats in its class. Sex, if it sells at all, should sell itself on its own merits. All the other products should sell themselves on their own merits (if any) as well.

Jacob's Ladder scared the shit out of me. The date shown on the bottom of the screen at the opening was two weeks before I left Viet Nam. I was seriously gripping the armrests all through the show. At the end, as I stood to leave, I said "That would explain a Lot of things."

I suspect homophobes are nervous about occasionally being subject to the kind of unwanted masculine attention that women have to put up with all the time.

Regarding Bill Clinton, has it occurred to anyone else that "Slick Willie" might refer to something besides political finesse? Like, I should wish my willie was as slick, as often.

Q: What's an honest politician? A: One who stays bribed.

My arthritis is still giving me hell, so I want to conserve keystrokes, but I'm also itching to post something. So here's a small collection of some of my favorite quotes:

"If you always tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." - Mark Twain [Samuel L. Clemens]

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." - Mark Twain [Samuel L. Clemens]

"It is by the goodness of God that we have in our country three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either." - Mark Twain [Samuel L. Clemens]

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." - Albert Einstein

"The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein

"Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea." - John Ciardi

"Sex... In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact." - Marlene Dietrich [Marie Magdalene Dietrich]

"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself." - [U.S. Supreme Court Justice] Potter Stewart

"There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." - Douglas Adams.

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." - Harlan Ellison

"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen." - Mort Sahl

"God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh." - François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778)

"All pop music is about sex. Rock is about wanting to do it, jazz is about doing it, and country and western is about feeling guilty after you've done it." - Robert Waldo Brunelle, Jr.

"Law and Order is like patriotism--anyone who comes on strong about patriotism has got something to hide; it never fails. They always turn out to be a crook or an asshole or something." - Bill Mauldin

"When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were." - John F. Kennedy

"I've noticed that men generally leave married women alone and treat them with respect. It's too bad for married women. Men are always ready to respect someone who bores them. And if most married women, even the pretty ones, look so dull, it's because they're getting too much respect." - Marilyn Monroe [Norma Jean Baker]

"Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one third the money twenty years ago." - Will Rogers

"There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob." - G. K. Chesterton, "Heretics"

"It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired." - Lazarus Long [Robert A. Heinlein]

"Place your clothes and your weapons where you can find them in the dark." - Lazarus Long [Robert A. Heinlein]

"Writing is not neccessarily something to be ashamed of--but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." - Lazarus Long [Robert A. Heinlein]

"Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence." - George Orwell [Eric Blair]

I've had some serious problems in the past with solipsists, especially the chemically-amplified variety. I've wrestled with this piece off and on for the past year or so, once the core of it came clear to me. Yeah, sometimes I'm a bit slow.

My argument against Metaphysical Solipsism

First, let me suggest a (perhaps uneasy) truce between Objectivism and Epistemological Solipsism: Let us grant that the external world exists as it is, in and of itself, regardless of any perception or consciousness of it. Nonetheless, the "objective methods of science and reasoning" are carried out by the consciousness, within the limits of the Egocentric Predicament. Ultimately, we can only know what we allow ourselves to know, regardless of the rules of knowing by which any particular individual abides.

Metaphysical Solipsists earliest argument centered on "The Primacy of Mind," the notion that all things exist first in the Mind Of God, and are made manifest thereafter by the Will Of God. Thus, manifest matter is necessarily the lesser. By a rather long stretch of logic, the primacy of the mind of Man over manifest matter is proposed. The notion is as old as philosophy itself, but I suspect that in medieval days it became very popular as a way of allowing philosophical speculation to proceed while avoiding charges of heresy. In more "enlightened" times, the notion of the primacy of mind has been abused to give a logical cachet to self-indulgent flights of fancy.

The modernist, "scientific" solipsists argue that the Sensory Perception is incomplete, misleading. and ultimately False. The senses report Light, Color, Sound, Heat, Pressure and Odor rather than electromagnetic wave frequencies, air pressure wavelengths, molecular motion, ergs of force, or the chemical composition of aromatic molecules. The raw data received by the external sensorium is further filtered, analyzed, and interpreted by the brain, then presented to the consciousness as an arbitrarily synthesized illusion with no provable direct relationship with external reality.

There is no possible way to know if any two people actually see the same color red, perceive the exact same scent of a rose, or hear the same Middle C note on a piano. Thus, any conscious perception is wholly a construct of the mind alone, and any perception of external reality is illusory. That makes the inner Mind the only verifiable reality. Recently, populist writings on Quantum physics have added the notion of "The Observer-Created Reality" to the Solipsist's argument.

I submit that nothing has been shown to suggest that self-perception is any less incomplete, misleading, and ultimately False. The Mind does not present itself with a schematic of synaptic junctions, neurotransmitters, neuronal pulses, frequency and amplitude of brainwaves, or a myriad of other physical processes that give rise to and moderate the subjective phenomenon called "Mind." The Mind, even while conscious, is more than sufficiently vague and contradictory to make any postulate of its ultimate primacy highly suspect.

While asleep, the utterly disjointed, non-sequential, chaotic and nonsensical character of dreams is a quite fair sample of what the mind can get itself up to when it has no objective external input to occupy it.

Anyone who replicates Michael Faraday's experiments will get the same results. Anyone with the requisite mathematical skills could examine those results and derive the same wave equations as did James Clerk Maxwell. These things don't change, no matter whether or not you have heard of them, let alone what you may think of them. If two people observe the same experiment, and one's perception of light and dark is reversed, seeing white numbers on a black scale instead of black numbers on a white scale, it doesn't matter. Ohm's Law remains E=IR.

Regarding "observer created reality," I think that is partly a Scientific Conceit, and partly ill-considered Semantics.

The experimenter doesn't really interact with events at the quantum level. The experimental apparatus imposes the conditions for a detectable event. In a sense, the design, construction and operation of the apparatus may be considered interaction, but only to the extent that it limits what kind of event can possibly be detected. The experimenter doesn't really observe an event, but rather notes the several-steps-removed effects of unobservable phenomena.

For example, the sad case in the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment: 1)nuclear decay; 2)emission of an invisible particle; 3)detection of particle by a contrived device; 4)release of poison gas; 5)cat killed by gas; 6)box containing cat opened by experimenter, letting in light; 7)reflection of photons off cat corpse; 8)experimenter's eye absorbs reflected photons; 9) more quantum interactions within the retina; 10)nerve impulse to visual cortex of the brain; 11)etc.; 12)etc, ... Eventually, the consciousness of the experimenter registers a result, at the end of a long chain of unobserved events.

The interaction between the experimenter and the experiment is actually no more mysterious than switching on a light in a dark room. The observer has altered the reality of the room by manipulating a contrived apparatus, not by peering intently into the gloom.

The conceit is in imagining that the mathematical formulations describing quantum events are complete and accurate, and therefore a "true" description of reality. That issue is far from being truly settled. The Semantic error arises out of that conceit, leading to imprecise and misleading common-language descriptions of events and interpretation of results.

For all its delusions of grandeur and primacy, solipsism is a symptom of a feeble sense of self, accepting itself as the author of all that is insane, chaotic, destructive and irrational in the world, as well as what little personal good and passing pleasures it can find. The ultimately petty mind of a solipsist would be incapable of conceiving and creating the tight-knit "conspiracy" of objectivist thought that opposes it.

Besides all that, if Solipsism were a valid thesis, people who were born blind could walk through walls.

My arthritis has been giving me Hell, and I'm in a Bipolar slump, so my external life is a bit out of control. I won't bore you or alarm you the details. Suffice it to say, that is why my responses to personal contacts have been a bit slow and terse. I'm not being aloof, just seriously distracted.

Those who have noted my comments in the discussions can see that I am largely concerned with the Iraq war, parallels with the insanity of Viet Nam, and the attendant abuses of legal rights.

Suggested reading on the subject of War:

http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

And a current update on the theme:

http://www.counterpunch.org/white01092003.html

On a lighter note, I also suggest:

Generation of Vipers
Criticism and Other Nonfiction
- Philip Wylie
Dalkey Archive Press (reprint)
September 1996
331 pages, 8.5 x 5.5 paperback
ISBN 1-56478-146-1

Written in 1942, originally published in 1943. I have a couple of very frayed, yellowed and spine-broken 1954 edition paperbacks. Rather than revising, Wylie added equally spicy footnote comments.

Available online from Amazon.com (and others, no doubt), and direct from the publisher.

Here's a little taste:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philip_Wylie

I'm new, and I'm not here just for the Tits and Ass, though I do think they're Just OK.

I have heard, and still hear a lot about how "todays kids are no-good, spoiled, don't care about school, grades, responsibility, life, values..." etc., etc, etc, ad nauseum. Yeah, right! People have been saying that shit every fifteen years for the past 15,000 years at least. It is shit now and it always has been.

I not only approve of youthful upheaval, dissent, rebellion and defiance, I believe it is vitally necessary. If it weren't for generational strife, we would still be Medieval at best, with No Way Out Or Up. The people who just swallow the party line, unquestioningly accept authority and do what's expected of them don't accomplish much besides repeating the mistakes (and disasters) of their elders. As long as there have been human beings, it has been the rebels, the dissidents, and the shit disturbers who have driven all forms of progress.

Young people are going to make their own World to live in as they go, no matter what the old folks say or try to do about it. The best any of us can do is throw some light on the path. I am deeply opposed to those who believe it is their right or responsibility to put up fences and walls, obscure the lights, and set traps.

Go For It! Grab it with both hands, and make it your own!