休暇

私は1週間休暇にある。 私は次の土曜日戻る。

Indiana Jones and the Salvation of the Swastika

Here I step into the dark, to wonder at things I don't understand very well. I'm not much at arcana, in fact I tend to reject it all on principle. But occasionally things loom out of the dimness and, like clouds in a Hollywood cloud tank, they seem to form pictures that demand my attention.


It all started with me wondering at the swastika. No one needs me to tell them what the swastika is now - it's easily the most reviled symbol in the world. It's very depiction is illegal in most countries in Europe. Absurdly, even anti-Nazis displaying it with a Ghostbusters circle-with-red-slash were technically breaking the law. That is until Claudia Roth, a Jewish member of the Bundestag, deliberately had herself arrested campaigning for the right of people to denigrate the swastika. Never mind that nazism per se is dead and buried, and appears only to exist in invariably Jewish-led race hate organisations. Nor should we wonder at the subsequent idiocy of these neo-nazis whose main task it seems is to behave like perfectly obnoxious arseholes and leave behind a trail of swastikas so that we might know where to direct our hatred. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. First - what is the swastika? Actually, never mind that. What is a symbol?

As I learnt in that piece where I ineptly wondered at pyramids, symbols are a big deal. In the beginning there was the word. This refers to God apparently, who variously was with the word, or was the word. Whether you believe in God or not, the bible has a point in declaring words/symbols significant. Without a series of symbolic representations (at first vocal and later visual) to represent ideas, what would the ideas be? Would there even be any ideas at all? And without these what would we be? How would we differ from other higher order mammals?


Remember Koko the gorilla? She could speak by way of sign-language and had a vocabulary of 2000 words. What if Koko had a similarly capable mate? What if they were taken back to the wilds of Rwanda to have kids? And were then left alone, sure enough. Imagine this as a self-replicating ability - genes and memes hand in hand. With the kids then similarly literate, imagine Charles Darwin smiling as successive mates chose each other based on their ability to express themselves with symbols. That the gorillas would arrive at a point whereby they could remark upon their own cleverness would have to be an inevitability surely.

Never mind fuzzy counterpropositions, I declare that even without our intervention such a result is inevitable: A fist in the palm to express punishment; a skull on a stick to denote a place of bad juju; various colours daubed on a cave wall to indicate places of: hunting, gathering, feast, famine. Given enough time (and evolution has nothing if not insane amounts of time) there is only one end point to this path - a symbol based communication capable of remarking upon itself. Humans as teachers might speed things up but really, to imagine that it wouldn't happen without us says more about us than it does about the gorillas.


One millennia or a thousand, both are a blink of the eye to evolution. And within that, would we be surprised that a creature whose previous mechanism for complying with Darwin's dictums had consisted almost entirely of It's all about me, would rise to heights of self-impressed dizziness? With that as a headspace, might that creature not go on to describe its ability to deal with symbols in terms of awe, indeed to conflate them with their own monkey gods? And might they not describe themselves in such terms, and worship themselves? But do we really need the experiment? Humans, the clever monkeys, have done both of these things. Thus In the beginning was the word and the word was God could happily be described as us being impressed with ourselves. And God knows we are that, ha ha.

Oh dear, have I digressed? The question was: what is a symbol? It seems that it's either a very big deal, the equal of God, or an obvious thing that, given enough time, any monkey could think of. Well, as self-appointed loud mouth of this here clever monkey blog I hereby declare it to be... both. In this real world of nothing-is-real, symbols are a big deal and a load of bullshit. Whatever! We shrug and carry on knowing that some things just 'are'.

"To celebrate twelve consecutive months each dedicated to documentaries depicting the horrors of the Nazi era, SBS television is proud to announce the inauguration of SBS's Decade of Nazi Documentaries. Every night, each week, for 52 weeks a year, for the next ten years, SBS will be screening all 3,650 episodes of the greatest documentary series ever made. Starting tonight with Typefaces of the Nazis: The Hidden War against the Hungarian Ümlaut, all the way through to the final stirring episode Fritz Deutsch: Recognition at Last for the Man who Refused to Catch Nazi Public Transport (VO - 'I walked everywhere, It was terrible'), this series will bring a whole new level of overkill to the most overkilled period of history the world has ever seen."

In amongst this absurd deluge of detail we are aware that the swastika is an old symbol that existed in those ill-defined times before Nazis walked the Earth. But what did it mean? How old was it? Who used it? Never mind the overkill, it seems that in this instance we are short on details. Rather than me simply regurgitating what I read at wikipedia why don't I just provide a link and you may go read for yourselves. Or you can just read the following summary if you like: The swastika is over seven thousand years old and was as close to ubiquitous as symbols get. It was common coinage in: North and South America, Europe and Asia Minor, the Subcontinent, as well as the entire Orient. Astoundingly, in every place it was in use it was viewed as a symbol of felicity and good luck. The irresistible question is: Was there ever a symbol to match it? Keep in mind that it arose independently on three continents and each with the same meaning. In terms of a biblical conflating of symbols with the supernatural, the swastika is definitely spooky.


And then the Nazis lobbed up and trashed it did they? 25 years versus seven millennia. Wow. A quick calculation and it seems that the swastika was used as a symbol of 'hate' for approximately 0.35% of the time in which it's been in existence. And that, only in a single country amongst the myriad that had previously used it. With that in mind, what degree of diminution should that previous figure undergo now? Would 0.35% of 0.35% be fair? Did somebody say 'overkill' before? Oh that's right, it was me. It seems that in trashing the swastika we've not just thrown the symbolic baby out with the bath water but we've thrown out every infant everywhere, and all on the account of a single tainted bath. It's Herod Does Hygiene, ha ha.

In case anyone is sitting there thinking, 'Yeah but...' we'll make this clear: no other 'evil' symbol has copped this treatment. The Japanese imperial war flag of WWII remains unchanged on their naval vessels, and only ever so slightly changed for their ground forces, and no one gives a shit. Their WWII national anthem Kimigayo (my second favourite after La Marseillaise) remains unaltered. The Italian fasces symbol (which gave fascism its name), if it aroused any recognition at all, would more likely be associated with the Roman Empire than with anything else (and with no great opprobrium either). Not forgetting that even within Germany, Deutschland Uber Alles is still the national anthem. Does anyone get weird about that? Do they arrest people for playing it? Hardly, it just got an audience of however-many-billion-it-was that watched the world cup. Okay, so what the fuck is going on? (*Um... seems it's not quite that simple. See the note in the comments).


I'll admit here that I've sort of answered my own question. Symbols are very powerful. Or to put it another way, very, very, very powerful. But who's responsible for the hate juju belonging to the swastika? The Nazis? They've been dead and buried for over sixty years. Maybe it's those Project Paperclip bastards who run America? Maybe they snapped their fingers and had their Jewish puppets in Hollywood give us movie after movie featuring swastikas ad nauseam so that we might hate the Nazis like... we've never hated... anyone... um, wait... did that idea just disappear up its own arse? A tuppence for Nazis as top dog.

This is simple stuff - Whatever power the swastika possesses in this day and age is due solely to the efforts of the Jewish owned media. Without them stuffing it down our throats all the time it would be right up there with the Japanese war flag. Or to put it another way, consigned to obscurity - just another symbol, one amongst many. Had Jews wanted to defang the swastika as a rallying-point / symbol-of-hatred they could have clicked their fingers and given it the Japanese treatment. But they didn't do that did they? Instead they rubbed our noses in it at every possible opportunity, and here we are with no prospect of it abating any time soon. Madly, the further we leave the Nazis in the past, the more movies we get and the nastier they become. Says Quentin Tarantino, "If I'm going to be a felcher for the Jews, I'm going to be the best damn felcher there ever was!"


I understand that this is all part and parcel of the Jews' need to distract us from their own anti-buddha wickedness and otherwise cast themselves as victims. Thus, the swastika is merely a means to that end. But what if we had it arse about? There's very little about the Jews that isn't false. None of them are Semitic for starters. Which is to say, they're not chosen by God so much as chosen by themselves. Then there's their symbolic miscellanea. Like the star of David! It seems that this doesn't date back to the time of David as you'd expect but to a slightly later time, um... 2700 years later, give or a take (ie. the 18th century). Its two single blink-and-you-miss-it appearances in the 11th century and the 15th century are design accidents - circles, triangles, squares, pentacles and sure, a six pointed star, why not? It's not like there was anything special about it.

And then there's the Zohar, heart of the Kabbalah, written by Shimon bar Yochai in the 2nd century (whispered into his ear by the prophet Elijah no less), and discovered in the 13th century Spain by one Moses de Leon. Eh? What's that Widow de Leon? She confessed that her husband himself was the author of the work. She had asked him several times why he had chosen to credit his own work to another, and he had always answered that doctrines put into the mouth of the miracle-working Shimon bar Yochai would be a rich source of profit. The devil you say! Pah! Doesn't matter! Chosen by God / Designed by Committee - it's all good. Jews are whatever works. If a thing furthers them in their course to becoming god-kings uber alles, it gets dropped into the metaphoric DNA and declared that it was always thus.


Oh dear, I've wandered again. Back to the mad what-if wondering: What if everything we've been told was bullshit? What if the swastika wasn't the means to an end but the end in itself? What if the point of the exercise was to crush the most singular and potent symbol of good the world has ever seen? And further, to reanimate it as a golem of death to serve its death cult masters? It's pretty far-fetched isn't it? And do we get the Steve Martin photo? "He's shooting at these cans! He hates cans!"

But symbols are very, very powerful and this one has had insane amounts of juice pumped into it to make it what it is today. Wonder again at Claudia Roth: she got herself arrested solely for the right of people to piss on the swastika, and only the swastika. Shake your head at the errant madness of that. Hell, shake your head at a people so obsessed with the number 6 that they had two holocausts both with six million victims. Then think of all those Jews who were sprung faking attacks on themselves / denigrating the swastika. No mistake they were doing one of those two things. Keep in mind they never write 'Jew Scum' on their faces, stomachs, doors, cars, tombstones, synagogues etc. It's always a swastika. Drop-ins may feel free to point to the occasional scrawling of the words 'red herring' here and there, and I'll gleefully point them at Agatha Christie.


Okay, so her works are fiction and perhaps that's what this should have been too - Indiana Jones and the Salvation of the Swastika. Starring as villain the only man ever to be born with the name of Hitler( ! ). With a cast of thousands featuring the most virulent Jew haters ever to be bankrolled by the Rothschilds. In this adventure Indy realises that the appearances of division are false and that the two hate-filled camps are actually a single entity: the Death Cult of the Anti-Buddhas! Their evil mission: to smash the world's most potent and democratic symbol of goodness and turn it into a harbinger of fear and hate ushering in a new world order of brutality, slavery, suffering, and death.

Cue the stirring music as the camera pulls back to reveal a back-lit Harrison Ford standing triumphant over the filthy racists. Drawls Ford, "You death cult scum, you're all the same. Now your bullshit charade is over. Auf wiedersehen anti-buddhas." The audiences cheer as the struck-from-the-same-mould Nazis and AshkeNazis cop their comeuppance: to run melancholy mad, awake to the horror of their own perversity. We then cut to a golden sun breaking through the clouds and follow the camera as it pans across to reveal monks, priests, and holy men from every nation on earth. We follow their gaze to see Indiana Jones standing in front of them as he restores the swastika seal to the ancient shrine. After Indy clasps his hands together and offers a silent prayer the crowd erupts, mobbing Indy and raising him to their shoulders.

Is that a what if? Ha, more like an as if, ha ha. Truth is, the latest reanimation of the Indiana Jones corpse was done for two broad memetic purposes: to awaken us all to the fact that Russians are 'it' again; and to pile in on the idea of unfriendly alien overlords (with a tip of the hat to the coming end-of-the-world destructo-palooza). We have been warned!

But to hell with the Crystal Skull. It's a figment of Hollywood's imagination as this is of mine. But one thing is true - between them, the two arms of the death cult turned the spookiest, most powerful symbol for good that ever existed into the world's most powerful symbol of hate. And that took some doing. It wasn't easy, with some very heavy juju going into the mix.


"Oh the humanity! Won't somebody save that poor swastika?" Sheesh! What's a feller to do? Me, I have no heavy juju. I just have a weeny blog with a couple hundred hits a day. But! I'm going to do my best. Here, I reclaim the happy little symbol for all those uncountable people across the millennia who used it entirely without malice and solely in a spirit of felicity. That uncorrupted swastika stood for a simple hope for a better future - no rancour, no superiority, and harm wished upon none. Given such selflessness it's no wonder it became the symbol of the Buddha stamped on every Japanese map.

I'm perfectly uninterested in what the twin pro and anti arms of the death cult have to say on the subject. No buts, I've heard it all before and I reject the message in its entirety. Here I embrace the simpleton ideal of one for all and all for one, albeit with all meaning all. Now, all stand for the anthem, Selflessness Uber Alles, ha ha ha.

Two men, a golden retriever, and a cat

Given the gossip (over at Henry Makow's) that Australia's current PM Julia Gillard is a lesbian whose 'boyfriend' is actually a 'beard'; further given Macow's suggestion that Paul Keating was also gay (which would explain a lot, ie. his insanely tailored suits, his fetish for antique French clocks, as well as his curious come-from-nowhere, never-to-be-discussed divorce): what are we to make of this, courtesy of the front page of Rupes' broadsheet The Australian? (click on the pic to get a full readable rez).


Well, blow me down! Plug this into Mark Latham's disparaging of Rudd, specifically for his lack of an Australian accent, and generally for his all-round effeteness, and gee whiz, you'd have to wonder wouldn't you? Then there's Rudd's famous Milky-Bar kid manner and propensity for hissy-fits and we're really getting somewhere ain't we? Ahem, not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Unless we're in crypto territory in which case, um... there is something wrong with it actually.

Otherwise, all things being equal, I'd have declared that this is an absolute dead giveaway. I mean honestly!

A Prayer for Rupert Murdoch

"It's like Pauline Hanson never left," said Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens. And he's right of course, but not quite right enough. For those who don't know, Pauline Hanson was the dim-witted fish and chip shop owner (no, really!) who overnight became the voice of all those Australian voters possessed of the vague idea that everything was the fault of abos, wogs, and gooks. Finally racists could come in from the cold! In less time than it took for the soy mochaccino drinking crowd to snork the froth out their nose, she and her One Nation party had magically become the third force in Australian politics.


Truth is, she had no idea what she was doing. Her party was full of losers and crackpots, run by grasping spivs and chancers, and its tiny number of MP's became one, became none, and in no time at all the whole thing descended into a series of undignified, money-grubbing spats and court cases. Yeah, seeya arseholes, have a nice life.

In a big picture discussion of the 'Hanson Phenomenon' there's no point dwelling on 'Hanson' half of the equation - she was an idiot who confused media interest with personal worthiness - better to pay attention to the 'Phenomenon' half of things. This had nothing to do with Hanson per se. I expect if asked, she could tell you what 'phenomenon' meant (well, she'd get close anyway) but I doubt she could spell it. But Rupert Murdoch's hacks certainly could. They can spell, whistle up a racist riot, and chew gum all at the same time. They ain't paid all that money for nothing. And Hanson? She was merely the pea in Rupert Murdoch's racist dog whistle.


Of course, that shit Little Johnny Howard did his part too. Riffing off Hanson, who'd now given voice to 'the concerns of many Australians' (according to the media), he could take a giant leap to the right. Domestically, that is. Abroad we were already the idiot son's deputy sheriff in the Pacific keen to bomb whomever as long as they were Muslim. And amongst such a campaign, God forbid Afghan and Iraqi boat people fleeing the hells which we'd made for them should arrive in Australia and behave like quiet, well-mannered model citizens.

They were terrorists who deserved nothing less than to have their wedding parties blown into strawberry jam - how dare they come here and be Muslim and turn our country into a cratered shit-hole like theirs was? That's why it was only too right that Howard should lock them all up on a blazing Pacific island hell hole to rot under the pitiless gaze of the Wackenhut corporation of America. Muslims must be the enemy and racism must be fostered.

Does it really come as any surprise that new Labor PM Julia Gillard has perfectly replicated that shit Howard's 'Nauru Solution' by substituting East Timor for Nauru? "No No, this is different because it's in East Timor." Brilliant - we all roll our eyes. And so when Bob Brown says, 'It's like Pauline Hanson never left,' really he'd be closer to the mark if he said, "It's like Rupert Murdoch never quit blowing his racist dog whistle." He's a lovely chap, Bob Brown, but what with his captaining of the death cult registered HMAS Global Warming you can only expect so much sense out of him. But otherwise he's on the money. Libs, Labor, who can tell the difference? Not me.


There is only one fact that counts in the boat people debate, and that is - they comprise less than three percent of immigrants coming to this country. They are a drop in the bucket. Our immigration centres are only 'swamped' because no one is interested in emptying them. If we just got on and processed these refugees like we did with every over wave of them (Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Mainland Chinese), then where would the immigration debate shitfight be? Nowhere. To paraphrase Paul Keating, It's the shitfight we had to have. And sotto voce, ...because Rupert Murdoch said so.

As for the old coming-over-here-and-taking-our-jobs chestnut, I am the wrong fellow for that discussion. I was in the advertising biz in Sydney and drowning in a sea made up the other 97% of immigrants who aren't boat people, which is to say Poms. If there was a decent paying white collar job in Sydney, one's competitors were bound to be English.


Lovely people, the English, until they come here, ha ha. Then they would inevitably complain about the beer, invent absurd traditions about Christmas on Bondi Beach, and otherwise torture the Australian Queen's English with expressions like, You're trippin'! and I was nana-ed, and That's when it all went pear-shaped. God it was awful. Never mind taking-our-jobs, the flipside of that coin is make-no-effort-to-assimilate-into-Australian-society - I rest my case. Not forgetting Sydney's insane rental market. Go sit in a real estate agent in Sydney's Eastern suburbs (ie. near the ocean) and see if Poms don't comprise 50% of the people making enquiries. No wonder the rents are insane.

As for Afghans - good luck finding any. It seems they've all skived off to regional Australia to work in the abattoirs and consider themselves lucky to do so. Those bastards - taking the jobs that no one else wanted to do! And living in the bush! That's bloody un-Australian!

Ha! So what am I? An inverted version of Pauline Hanson? Racist against white people! Truth is I don't give a shit where immigrants come from. As far as I'm concerned the only difference between the current Muslim boat people and all those other immigrants whose kids play with ours (without anyone thinking much of it), is Murdoch's racist rabble-rousing. The immigration 'debate' we've been subject to for the last ten years is no such thing. It's merely a regional variation of the death cult's Sanctity of Banking Campaign™ otherwise known as the War on Muslims Terror.


A true immigration debate, ie. one that doesn't discriminate, is one that I'd be up for. The discussion would pivot on water. Droughts in Oz are really something else. Whilst this has always been the case it would also be true to say, what with the ever climbing population making ever greater demands, that it only ever gets worse. A few years ago the dams of all the major cities were scraping on empty. Any number of bone dry regional towns were trucking in water just to survive.

Add to that the fact that Australia's number one river system, the Murray/Darling, never reaches the ocean. The 'wetlands' at its mouth are arid wastelands. Sure enough, the water is taken by multi-national agricorps to grow the most absurd water-hungry crops imaginable - rice and cotton. Lunacy. The cherry on top of this insanity sundae was KRudd PM's declaration that Australia needed to double its population from 20M to 40M. Huh? Was he mad? Or did he know something we didn't know? That global warming is a con perhaps? And that under the coming global cooling Australia will become lush?

Who the hell knows? With that fucker Murdoch splitting the debate into two nonsensical shitfights: the first an anti-Muslim war for the banks; and the second, fodder for the coming You-Breathe-You-Pay global warming tax regime (with no third conversation possible) there's only one thing to look forward to - the death of Rupert Murdoch. Given that, and apropos the last couple of pieces here, why don't I offer up a prayer?

Dear God,

May I petition you on behalf of your humble servant Rupert Murdoch? What with his tireless work in having us all hate each other (so that we might more enthusiastically fight the death cult's wars of pointless conquest and slaughter), surely he must be very tired by now? He certainly looks haggard, don't you think? I expect his bones are creaky, the blood in his veins as black as tar, and his mind like some nasty, grinding abacus of death.

Just look at him: honestly, Methuselah ain't in it. Not forgetting that he's expended so much of his clapped out jism impregnating his Chinese brood mare (in order to introduce the Sabbatean agenda into China) that he's become a rattling withered husk. It's breaking all our hearts.

And so Lord, I beseech thee, will you not take pity on the man? Why let him continue to suffer in this fashion? Wouldn't it be best for all if you just eased him into the great beyond? We humbly ask that you wheel out the heavenly screens and have the angelic steward do the necessary thing and blow his brains out with a divine double barrelled shotgun. Both barrels - just to be sure.

'Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Rupert Murdoch'. Was that a prayer before Hemingway pinched it? It sounds about right so I'm sure you won't mind if I use it. How about, 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' That can either be you talking to him and then he carks it. Or him talking to you, in which case you should just kill him on principal. And divine mercy etc. etc. Otherwise may God be with you and blessed be His name, yours truly, amen and best regards, nobody.

The End of the World. Again.

I shut my eyes and step off the edge. There is no ill will in this, just questions. God knows how it will end.


But first me. Where to start? Perhaps in my last year of high school. It's religion class with Brother Williams. Believe it or not, there are Catholics who aren't hateful and I was fortunate enough to be educated by some of them for the greater part of secondary school. And what with religion class mostly consisting of philosophy it wasn't as bad as you might think. Hell, a lot of it was fun. But on this particular day I was most definitely staring out the window day-dreaming. Brother Williams is up the front rabbiting on about a particular essay that had been amongst the homework he'd marked and was handing back.

Apparently this one was brilliant, the best thing he'd ever read from a student. And whilst it was too long to read out he wanted the student who'd written it to say something about it. I sit there waiting for the name of the school captain or some other worthy.
"It was written by Nobody - Nobby, do you want to tell us about your essay?" The whole class turns to look at me as I stop staring out the window and suddenly pay attention.
"Um, what? I wrote it?"
"Yes"
"Yes, right, um, sorry Brother Williams but I can't remember what it was about. Can you remind me?" All I could recall was that it was meant to be 2000 words and I'd dashed off 1500 and hoped that I'd get away with it.
"It was about belief."
"Belief. Yes, er... " To be completely honest I don't remember what I said next except that I drew a blank, with Brother Williams somewhat deflated that the kid who'd written the best thing ever was completely unable to remember what it was.

Anyway he took over and told the class why it was great. Apparently what I'd written was a backwards confirmation of a phrase that had been tossed around that term The Answer is in the Question. I think that's what it was called. To be honest it didn't make much impression on me, ha ha.

Finally I got the essay back and read it again. It all came flooding back to me. Madly, what I'd written was an attack on belief. All I'd done was to sequentially list all the things that humans had once prayed to as gods and which we now knew were no such thing. I'd finished up at the end by declaring that since science was a perpetual catch-up game there'd always be things we didn't understand and that subsequently we'd always believe in supernatural answers to otherwise mundane questions. Simplistic stuff sure, but not bad for a sixteen year old. Oh, and Brother Williams? Lovely chap, but I'm thinking he took my essay as a mirror and saw what he wanted to see.

What next? Perhaps we can jump ten years to me deprogramming my mother and brother from the Catholic church. Me, I'd given the church up as a dead loss somewhere around the time I'd written the essay. As for the two of them, I had no great opinion if they wanted to keep going to church - no skin off my nose. But on this night my idiot brother refused to let the subject drop. He wanted to convince me of the rightness of him believing - as if I cared. It was all rather sordid what with his fits of sobbing etc, but in the end I guess I won since they both stopped going to church. Years later I found all the arguments I'd used that night neatly summarised in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. He's a curious cove, Richard Dawkins. Best I can make out he's transferred his faith from one religion to another, the latter being called 'science'.


Jump another ten years or so to me taking up Buddhism. Why did I pursue Buddhism? I'm struggling to think. Honestly, I don't know - it appealed, I guess. I read this-book/that-book, none of them quite what I was after, until eventually I arrived at Buddhism Plain And Simple by Steve Hagen. A bombshell in the head of yours truly. Here was a Buddhism that didn't require belief - no karma, no reincarnation, no demi-gods or demons, no heaven or hell, no nothing - just an unadorned philosophy from an ancient Indian who said (I paraphrase), 'Don't believe me or take my word for it. All I know is that this view of the world, and us in it, works for me and it can work for you.' And sure I became slightly untethered for a while (the Buddha will do that to you) but it all worked out in the end with me the pointless mad bastard you see today, ha ha. But never mind, the bird-watching is good and I make sense to myself.

Or did I get ahead of things there? Somewhere along the line, the disbelief that had been reserved for things religious I found could equally be applied to, I don't know... 'every goddamn thing'. Or everything in the media, that is. Once again, it wasn't my fault - all I knew was that they were lying about Iraq, and so badly that even a Time Magazine/Economist reading zombie like me was never going to swallow it. Honestly, Saddam in cahoots with Bin Laden was an insult to my intelligence. Fuck those lying sons of bitches. So! You pull on the thread, and once you start in on that, the whole damn thing unravels until there's very little left. I won't go into the details since there's too many, and besides if you're here reading this you know perfectly well what I'm talking about.

Finally I arrive at Les Visible's Smoking Mirrors. I don't know about anyone else but for me it was significant. If you asked people why they were fans you'd get a thousand different answers. But me, I was there for the writing. Imagine Hunter S Thompson acknowledging 911 - wow. In those terms, Smoking Mirrors was not only an inspiration but it also provided a template as to how a bloke like me might go about doing it himself. It may seem obvious now, but it wasn't then, at least not to me having walked away from the hateful zionist troll infested Indymedia. Long and short - without Les I wouldn't be here ...for what that's worth, ha ha.

The writing is one thing and then there's the old disbelief chestnut. In Les' case I'd previousy kicked it into abeyance. Hunter S Thompson had always had an obsession with the Book of Revelations, and Les' writing was like that, only more so. And that was fine for a while but lately the millenarian vibe over at, well, all of Les' blogs has kicked into some kind of messianic exponential. Who can tell his temporal blog from his spiritual one? Not me. Somewhere along the line Les became his own Book of Revelations. In his latest technicolour armageddon meltdown there was time travel, UFO's, messages from the gods, public nudity, every goddamn thing. It was a grab bag for everyone who ever said I want to believe and The truth is out there.


Now I admit that Les has been good to me. He put me on his blogroll and said some nice things about me. But the catholic church did nice things for me too, and my parents likewise, but that didn't stop me from pulling that thread, you know what I mean? Okay, so that thread is just sitting there, and what's a feller to do?

Back to Les - says he, it's the end of the goddamn world and here is what the gods have told me. Deep breath, ask the question- How is this different to every other end-of-the-world, as described by whomever was in touch with those gods? Gee whiz, I'm back in high school: will I spiel off a list of millenarian cults for us all? There's any number merely amongst Buddhists beating each other with sticks over Maitreya.

That aside, we think these times are bad, yes? I mean really super-double-bad, like no 'bad' that's ever occurred before? For whom? For white people who think that 'bad' means running out of coffee? Do we want another historical list? Perhaps we'd call it, Coloured people who'd roll their eyes at the magnitude of our suffering if only they hadn't all been genocided to complete extinction. It seems the gods slept through all those other genocides but now that the Anglo Saxons are to suffer: Enough's Enough! The Gods Awaken!

Back to the expressions of supernature now - Les' gods differ from every other false idol in the history of the world, how, exactly? And what of their alleged omnipotence? Given that nothing happens without them, that is. For them to appear before us and convince us utterly of their existence would surely be the merest blink of their omnipotent eye, no? And yet they never do. It's poor of me, but I have to shake my head. It seems that these supernatural beings never cut to the fucking chase. A click of the fingers is all it would take.


I will admit that spooky preternatural shit does take place. At Fatima in Portugal in 1917, an entity whispered in the ears of three children and then when 70,000 people had gathered, a silver disk flew around the sky. What the hell was that? Beats me, but if it was an omnipotent god keen to impress us all with his unambiguous reality you'd have to call him out as an incompetent, surely? If on the other hand, the whisperer/UFO pilot's job description was that of 'trickster', who could argue? But then, I never heard of anyone keen to tell us that they were visited by tricksters. It's like bragging that you slept with Amy Winehouse. Shudder... best keep that one under your hat. Or declare that it was actually Angelina Jolie - it's not like anyone could prove you wrong.

But forget the tricksters, we're talking about full-tilterama e-ticket gods. But big-timers or no, they seem to be uneasy Gods who feel unfulfilled, or something. Insecurity is their middle name. Wait, do gods have a first name? Or a last name? Whatever. Says these gods, or rather their earthly representatives, it's very important that we acknowledge them, and specifically their omnipotence. And God forbid anyone not do this because it's this acknowledgement by His subjects that will separate the sheep from the goats. And Les is no different. Says he, nothing counts apart from us attempting to commune with the gods. A life spent in selfless giving (er... by better people than me, sure enough) would, were these gods not sought out along the way, count for nothing.

High school again: aren't these yet more in a loooong line of insecure gods who, say the priests, demand that we love them? Actually when I say long line of gods, wouldn't it be more correct to say every god ever posited? Perhaps God is Gloria Swanson from Sunset Boulevard - a hollow shell who needs the adulation of millions to be real. What was her line again? "I'm ready for my close-up Mr De Mille." Ha ha ha - spooky!


What the hell would I know? I'm just wide-eyed high school kid who doesn't know what all the fuss is about. Or I'm a dry-eyed nobody who does - it's one of those two things. If there's a proper god out who thinks I'm worth the effort, I'd be happy to ask him what he wants of me. But that insecure god who demands my love and yet madly refuses to ask for it in person, who otherwise saves his favours for those who could most accurately be described as 'the credulous': I don't know what his problem is, but he can just leave me out of it. I expect that that will piss him off but, gee whiz... he needs to get over it.

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This is the first part of two. The second part follows immediately below.

A head full of Clint Eastwood

Okay be warned. This is where it gets ugly, or as Clint Eastwood so succinctly put it in Gran Torino, Fuckin' Ugly. And we all know how that ended. Yeah well... so be it.


So be it! In a discussion of Millenarian cults, how many do we think are well-meaning efforts led by people who earnestly believe everything they're on about? Perhaps we should put that in the past tense. In all of those end-of-the-world cults that found themselves still extant when the world didn't end, what percentage would we describe as good-hearted and benevolent? I'm not talking about the followers here: our opinion of them would be very low. Instead I'm talking about the charismatic people at the top of each respective pyramid, the ones who'd talked everyone into it. In fact, for any such group or cult that might be described as millenarian/messianic/
apocalyptic, what other words would ordinarily pop into our heads in describing them? Would they be good ones?

Otherwise, who am I describing here: "social outcasts adrift, making no sense of society as it stands, and yet seeking a purpose in life. Having rejected society, and society having rejected them they float hoping for a guru, a teacher who can lead them to rightness, fulfilment, salvation." Am I talking about the losers in the Raelians? Or Scientology? Or Jim Jones' People's Temple? The Children of God perhaps? Or am I talking about us, the hell-bent, truth-seeking extremities of the internet? Ha! As if those other sorry losers are anything like us. They all fell for bullshit CIA mind-control cults and we... well, we're too smart. There's no way we'd fall for some smooth talking spook bullshit artist.


Hell, thanks to Dave McGowan we even have the spotter's profile. He's demo-ed it over and over again - we see keep seeing the same guy always popping up. Run through the checklist with me now: born into a military family; physically abused as a child; joined the military; spent time in psych-wards; spent time in jail; hung out at Laurel Canyon; is musically gifted; met Charlie Manson; took every drug known to man; is super charismatic with true-believers hanging off his every word; talks to the gods with himself as interpreter; demands our belief. Yeah well, if we see that guy we'll know him for sure.

I know that there are people who think Dave McGowan is bullshit. Like m_astera! Which is interesting, very interesting. I wrote about m_astera before. Now I'll happily admit that I know nothing about the guy apart from what he asserts about himself in Les' various comments sections (and lately most of that unread). I'll also admit that what I wrote in that demolition piece could be off the mark. All I know for sure is that there's something wrong with that picture - something off-kilter, something photoshopped out, an unlikely element lit from the wrong direction. Or perhaps it's just a smell? Hard to say, either way he makes the hairs stand up on the back on my neck. I note with interest that I'm not the only one to have violent reactions to him. Honestly, he's that kind of guy.


Anyway he's come a long way now but still lives in the shadow of others I notice. Which is to say, Les's. But still, within that shadow he's achieving great things. Seems he's become Les' own personal co-pilot: astral travelling and seated at Les' right elbow as the two bravely fly into weirder and weirder territory. With an image of him as joystick-clutching aviator may I dub him m_aster_vator? He's got a hide like a rhinoceros, so why not? And hide or no, underneath it all he's a man for all seasons: arch sycophant, platitude spouting sage, and charmless and unforgiving foe of all who doubt him. Like I said - something wrong with that picture, man. And Dave McGowan is bullshit he says. Yeah right, where's Mandy Rice-Davies when you need her? In Israel? Whatever...

Second fiddle bullshit artists aside, in wondering at curiosities it always pays to come at things from the opposite direction. Given that the CIA/mind-control/satanist/paedophile crowd has never given up on the religion/cult gag, and given that every medium that exists is considered fair game, does anyone really imagine that the internet would get a pass? Between - 'Gosh, that's a bit a head scratcher. Let's skip it' and 'How do we make this work for us' one of them is an inevitability, a 100% lock in. Okay dandy, the question now is: What would that internet version of a charismatic cult leader look like? And don't worry about differences between the versions that came in other times and other places. There's no cookie cutter here. It's whatever works.


What other clues are there? Where does Les stand in this blink/blink twin pillar world of duelling entities? In this world there's only ever one bad guy, and in spite of idiotic overlaps you have to choose your camp and then point your finger in the same direction as everybody else. EITHER - It's Mike Rivero (et al) declaring It's all the Jews, and if you listen to the pin drop silence you can almost hear the hypnosis-tape refrain Satanists? What satanists? Repeat after me, there's no such thing. OR - It's Jeff Wells (et al) certain that It's all the Satanists. And the Jews? No Jews here says he, apart from the utterly marvellous and endlessly quotable Robert Zimmerman and Leonard Cohen, bless their souls.

Les, with his perpetual spot at WRH, is definitely amongst the former of these two. But with his background he could hardly be the other, could he? I'll admit that McGowan, mind-control, and paedophilia have copped mentions at Smoking Mirrors but I think the word 'cursory' would be appropriate. What meagre mentions they do get are as likely to be condemnatory as anything else. Perhaps 'short shrift' would be the right expression. Ever eager tag-team partner m_aster_vator clearly knows which way the wind blows.

Finally there's that old chestnut, money. People have to make a living you know. Does no one ever wonder how some people seem perpetually able to devote themselves full time to the internet with no visible means of support? (yeah yeah, pun). Oh alright, I admit it, I live at 'home', I don't work, and I bludge off the old man's pension. But I'm happy to point to my spotty output. If you want an example of a blogger who makes sense in this regard, you need only to look to Craig Murray. A drib here, a drab there. Who's got time for more? Not me that's for sure. I'll admit that there are people out there who are driven, who tirelessly work and work and have an output that shames everybody else. Still, where does the money come from? How do they pay the bills? Really I'd like to know because after my gig here with the old man is over, I'm out on my arse. And me, I couldn't think of anything nicer than to write all day and not have to work for a living - like a dream come true...


Well, there's everyone's daily dose of bad ugliness. I recommend you all go rinse your mouth out to get rid of the taste of shit. I told you it'd be fuckin' ugly. Which is to say, I would be ...balls out without a stitch of common decency. And that's the problem when you pull on a thread - the whole thing unravels and you're standing there stark bollock naked. Yeah well, I came into the world that way and I ain't got nothin' to hide otherwise, so... what the hell.

Oh, is that the bell? Thank God. Class dismissed. Or is it me ringing at the door? It's hard to know... regardless there won't be any Hail Mary's...