Not necessarily the last summer. For me. Or you. Though for many for sure.
But, yeah, why not be emotionally prepared that, this time, the roller-coaster – emotional or otherwise – is going into its last loop de loop? I mean, as long as you don’t suffer emotional whiplash as you’re jerked into the next one, which will in all likelihood occur.
Take my heretofore most frequently self-quoted aphorism – Eschatological paranoia is fueled by an awareness that others are enduring a personal apocalypse now and that none familiar with its cause should remain immune to its effects – as no excuse to expect the world’s coming to an end, being tainted as it is by association with nihilistic wishful thinking. It is certainly no reason to spoil everyone else’s fun. Per se.
Enjoy every warm summer sun as the last. Or just as another. Or not at all.
Some things for consideration:
- If you’re looking to improve your mood with diet, don’t eat the Damn Sandwich w/ Malaise.
- For gods’ sake, keep your pantry mold-free. And take a fucking walk in the morning.
- Would anthropologistoids observing from someone else’s moon be able to tell the difference between human traffic and human trafficking? If you really want to make use of your education, don’t become a wage slave just because you consider yourself lucky.
- Don’t forget to breathe.
- Remember, it’s not oversight unless you are the one doing the overseeing. It may be tempting to write your reps to urge their vote for a bill that’d pass authority from one body to another, but that is how diseases spread.
- If you believe in science that you can’t understand enough to verify its experiments’ results or falsify the experiments yourself, be aware that your belief is then faith.
- Remember to not forget this when the scientist becomes a minister.
- Can anthropologistoids observing from someone else’s moon tell the difference between a wage slave and a sex slave? Swallowing misogynists’ bodily fluids for a living deserves equal protection under the law; but that proverbial pride is also suffocating, to yourself if it’s stuck in your throat, to everyone else if it’s not.
- Can an indirect or unintended target be anything less than a target? Don’t let them tell you you are not a terrorist as long as you don’t mean it. Even the dubiously decisive “intentionally targeting innocent civilians” definition breaks down further when all indications are that innocent civilians will be terrorized and killed.
- Would anthropologistoids observing from someone else’s moon be able to tell who has it better, between someone who might not commute if she didn’t have to earn a living and someone else who would gladly brave the subway if someone weren’t keeping her passport as a security deposit? Not being in prison is no reason to build one for yourself.
- Is your opinion your own? The folk-informing function fallen to the free press was perhaps never a truly intended tenet for anyone other than the kind of journalist The People have prima facie little tolerance for; the consumer is partial rather to his favorite force fed perspectives.
- Every time you punch in a PIN code, type in a credit card number, or hold a grubby greenback between your fingers, think about who’s in charge of that transaction and what it means to- & about your relationship to the rest of the world, as well as your immediate counterpart. When the bill of currency happens to be crispy & new, think about that one more time.
- If you ride your bike wherever you go, get off and walk with it for stretches at time.
- Commence if you must, but try not to stifle anyone else from doing the same, or enable the stifling by others of others – by which paying close attention to all things relative and not is of utmost significance. And while that’s easier shat from my mouth than done, I find the following quote to be helpful:
Ik gloop et war ‘n Ire, der jedichtete:
„Es gibt nichts Schöneres, als wenn es mit der Tee klappt!“
D. Enée
In truth, it wasn’t an Irish poet, which is, of course, a moot point; there’s no D. Enée either.
Now, finally: don’t bother moving your tassels to the other side, you’re just gonna throw your caps in the air anyway.
The pixel width of this column is 500. This diary entry will be my 500th. As soon as I hit “Veröffentlichen”.
No need to get me anything, I never got you anything (except 500 entries of justified, white on black text). Sorry if you don’t like the format. Did y’know you can turn that stuff off in your browser?
Seems like just a couple of weeks ago I was pique’t about the presumption of the liar’s truth-telling at the expense of the presumption of innocence.
Here’s one: Born in Berlin, railroaded by a pig. You are now free to go. Well, whoop-dee friggin’ doo!
Sow of Poverty You probably knew that the pope was a dirty rat-bastard, but did you know that he is also a rare specious of pig? It’s true. He comes from the Urethrae order of the Autodidactyla family Suidae, which is more apt to familicide than suicide.
My mama always said, “Life is like a passel of Jesuits. You know the rest.”
You may have heard about the swelling number in thousands of pigs floating down a river in China, but did you hear about the thousands of red herring that washed up on the shore of the River Spree this midday?
David Hasselhooves did. ‘Nuff to make your heart bleed with tears of freedom, is wut.
You may boar bore the Hoff’s inkwell without striking an inkling, for neither do the pros & contras of the portion of the debate he’s ceremoniously latched onto regard the entire history short on preservation – a history written on lease agreements and construction contracts. Just like the flow of time itself, that shit’s bound only one direction.
There’s a reason why a tax is called a penalty. Why the rubes paying the penalties never gave a shit about the people using that land before it was parceled out to those who aren’t paying any penalties is not as much a mystery as why they now gather with some of them and pretend they give a shit.
It’s the same reason somebody’d pay a church tax, but avoid eye contact with the lady selling the homeless newspaper. The swine cynically use ceremony to club life over the head, and the ones standing on ceremony think the ones being clubbed are the swine.
Public–private feedback loop
If you recall my five-year-old paean to the capitalist pig – in which I likened the superstructural scenario along Berlin’s river to the wall that stood before it (that link, having been a recapitulation, hehe, dedicated to the result of the referendum that staunchly, if non-bindingly, refused the planned development) – then you might also remember the staunchly non-binding nature of democratic processes.
Five years ago, it was about curbing the construction along the river via a height limit; unrestricted public access to the riverbanks; a new bridge without auto traffic. It wasn’t about preventing the possibility of the East Side Gallery being interrupted a meter here & there, notwithstanding the foreseeable byproduct that that was.
A guy named Carsten Joost gathered together a group who gathered enough signatures to get the referendum on paper. The quorum was met and the movement overwhelmingly ratified. The 19.1 percent who showed up for the vote set a refe-record.
Some have ridiculed the 87% of the 19.1% who voted “Ja” that day as being insignificant, choosing not to acknowledge that the effort & turnout represents a democratic process more than showing up every few years to rubber stamp liars.
The 152,502 eligible who didn’t show up to vote yea or nay on the limitation could only come from a few groups:
- for the cause, but knew it wouldn’t make a difference - against the cause, and knew it wouldn’t make a difference - hated the organizers, but too lazy to show them up - never have any idea regardless, or couldn’t care
It’s true that some of the organizers of today’s action are residual of the overall goal, which was to stop the construction. But that’s not what’s being transmitted. And it ain’t gonna happen.
And the protest against the removal of a small section of the mediocre memorial, upon which is painted – can we not be honest? – one over many pedestrian works of art, has inspired counter-squeals about how the damn thing is representative of oppression and would be better gone. Which also ain’t gonna happen.
In short: What’s done is done.
Society is structured so that private money uses public money to shore up private profit. The protection of this process is also a public expenditure: Pigs, pigs, and more pigs. Law and order. The public is terrified of anything else.
So that stretch of land will preserve its mediocrity – which can include luxury apartments with in-house convenient stores! – eventually completing the massive wall of tasteless pop-commerce.
And David Hasselhoff will come to reprise (yet more reprisals?) “Looking for Freedom” to celebrate the opening of one new monstrosity or another. His pre-song banter will probably be something about how today’s protest forced the compromise that allowed the coexistence of the public’s goddamn wall memorial with whatever it is that’s being opened that day.
Cynics can mock Hasselhoff’s popularity here (acknowledging or not its being overstated) and laugh at his assertion that he had anything to do with all those other bits of the Anti-Freedom Wall crumbling asunder, but the folks at that ribbon cutting will be shedding tears of what they’re convinced is joy.
Because people are just that stupid.
Then the masses can go next door to stuff their faces full of brats with mustard and whatever else they’re being fed.
I doubt the construction will be as efficientexpedient fast as the East Germans built the wall. Now that was inspiring! No, today’s Berliners are a pretty sluggish bunch. Present company included.
The more time spent deploring someone else’s not taking personal responsibility, the greater the chance one’s own is not being owned up to. This applies especially when direct comparisons are being relativized or avoided.
This is about what a small world it is, about nations and their minions, about taking care of one’s own business. This is about me, and the duplicity of all of the above. It features those who deserve to be remembered, and that which one would like to forget.
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I am not aware of a more accurate microcosmic representative of the commercialized sexualization of children and literal rape & murder of a culture than the Philippines, most specifically Olongapo and Angeles Cities, onetime playgrounds to the American Navy and Air Force respectively. It’s not that Manila and other exotic towns on the islands don’t contribute their critical part to the nation of sex tourism that the country has become, but military patronage was central to a steady & strong industry with a high rate of customer turnover.
I cannot say what kind of place it would be, had it not been for Teddy Roosevelt, progressive hero, naturalist champion, and imperialist adventurer. Would the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who were not slaughtered have given birth to a much different society? Or would the Spanish or Japanese still be raping them instead? It seems that everywhere the Spanish once pillaged, the young Americans were not too far behind to “liberate and keep them stable”.
Just imagine naming your streets & parks after the last guy in line at your gang rape.
Based on the embedded advertisements I’ve seen on-line, the virtual state of the main island of Luzon shows no substantial change in tragically accommodating spirit from the time the Philippine government finally said “Paalam!” to the US military in 1991, the proverbially butting-door unfortunately being the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, affecting the relatively autochthonous-lessor (the least of them most) more than the relatively foreign-lessee (a freshly-built multi-million dollar base housing complex to leave behind); in spite of all her laments, America always seems to get off easy. The castoff alive & toiling would continue to apply to significant degree the survival skills learned during the American occupation. A girl’s gotta eat.
And what about me? I cannot say how the country’s fate might have been different had I not been there, but I can imagine the lives of others, and how I might have improved them. Or done them less harm.
So this entry is not about US failure to call itself to account for its many atrocities and occasional genocide. Whether denial is a failure or not, the US elite representing business, politics, academia, and media are busy suggesting to other nations how they are to behave. Considering, even fleetingly, how they themselves contribute to “the others’” inability to do so, or why anyone’d want to, is not part of the routine. When you’re bogged down with a checklist for someone else, how to be on friendlier terms with yourself and with others is a project too hauntingly daunting to dredge.
Aray ko! I remember finding it remarkable that to qualify for a job at McDonald’s in Pampanga, within which Angeles City lies, you had to be fluent in Tagalog, Pampangan, and English. A less than stellar command of the latter language is a dead giveaway that you are class-trash, to be made a mockery of. So that hat’ll earn respect, but a different kind of ridicule.
I rarely went to that McDonald’s, but kicked a lot of dirt and drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of weed in & around Angeles City. I used to pay regular visits to my friend Naia, who I knew from one of the bars. I call her a friend and she was but, to be honest, I often used her to get my pot for me at the local price.
Naia lived in an apartment, which for the average Filipina in Angeles City amounted to a tiny room with the bath and laundry down the road somewhere. Whenever I’d arrive, we’d usually start out with a sit-down, catching up on the latest. She’d tell me how she didn’t think her current American boyfriend would leave her as the others had. “This one’s a flyer,” meant that she’d landed a pilot, which outside Clark Air Base meant cargo planes or fighter jets. I never met any of these guys and didn’t want to, but deep down hoped she’d really roped one.
So we’d chat for a while before she’d ask me how much I wanted, or, “200 Pesos?” which if I recall correctly was about five bucks. I’d sit & wait for a few minutes to half-an-hour, and she’d return with what looked like the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, stuffed full of buds and heat-sealed at the end.
As she opened the door to greet me for one of our strictly social visits, I saw that she was showing. That was the time she mentioned “the flyer” as “the father”. A few visits after that, her roommate told me she’d gone back to her province for a visit. Naia was from Cebu, and not being a flyer herself, it was no casual trip. I knew this meant she’d gone to give birth, so the next time I popped round (none of us had phones back then), there was a baby in the house. She named her Lovely.
What I’m gonna do? Stop the rain? I also regularly saw Naia in one or another of the bars. She was usually a dancer. There weren’t many bars in Angeles City that didn’t have a stage or runway with dancers, either topless or in bikinis. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say the average age of a girl fresh from the province & onto the stage was about fifteen. The crappy treatment they’d receive from some of the GIs, many of them teenagers themselves, and the cheerful attitude they’d receive it with – until such time as one might snap – says an awful lot about the dynamic the American presence in the Philippines fostered in the sickening, sweaty slog that was the Twentieth Century.
But if you were to ask many of the Airmen, they’d've told you it was in the Filipina adolescent’s nature to be a sex slave. I am not exaggerating. The term “little brown fucking machines” comes to mind, with LBFM being the military nomenclature, unofficial but standard. I shudder now, but at the time such talk was everyday reality.
Theoretically, prostitution was and remains illegal in the P.I., but you couldn’t be arrested paying for a bar employee to take the rest of the night off, which was known as a “bar fine” and served as the barely-necessary cover for all its sundry unlawfulness. A bright-eyed & bushy-tailed kid out of high school might fall in love & marry a girl who agreed to let him pay her steady bar fine – the inference being that she’d rather be with him than hustle for more money – but to many regular patrons the bar-girl was latently despised, when not overtly scorned. And openly abused.
I don’t want to overstate this, but the relationship was complex and there were plenty of decent people who frequented such establishments and treated everyone with respect. On one level, superficial but persistent, it seemed like a cultural exchange between people of my age and younger, whereby American & Philippine youth who really wanted to get along with one another would get together and party and do all the things that young people do anywhere else. We could all see that we were puppets to our masters, that the rules of the exchange, while dictating positions of privilege & submission, came from others who somehow lorded over all of us.
On the other hand, it is entirely too easy for a person of relative privilege to relativize their behavior when options always seemed so limited prior to the sudden privilege of being able to lord over an entire people, the underlings of another culture, as an outlet for what he imagines to be an otherwise powerless existence. What had become an inborn underage sex-trade could not exist in a vacuum, it required justification from the bottom up. And it breeds misogyny and pedophilia. Literally.
And while I understand the position of those who fight for sex workers’ rights and unions and the like, what about the right NOT to be born into a class of society that makes sex work a likelihood? Angeles City on any night of the week might have appeared like a romping good time on the surface. But the reality was disheartening for the privileged observer of human frailty, and a destroyer of the very essence of life for those who’ve submitted their innocence to it.
One night I stumbled into a place I hadn’t known Naia began working. I hadn’t known her to be working the bars again at all since she’d returned from Cebu with Lovely, though I never bothered to ask about work when we met otherwise, even when it became clear that the fucking “flyer” had not remained in her life.
So I wandered in & plopped down and there she was, smiling and happier to see me than usual, and I, surprised and happy to see her, but too drunk to remember the specifics of our conversation the next day. I found out later from our mutual friend Suzann that that night I had agreed to be Lovely’s godfather, to be present at the coming Sunday’s christening, which when Suzann told me, was no longer the coming Sunday.
I can’t begin to tell you how deep-in-my-being shitty I felt. I immediately went to Naia’s to apologize. Naturally, she did everything to assuage my guilt, telling me that she was well-aware at the time she’d asked that I probably wouldn’t remember. That may have been true. I’d like to believe that it was and it wasn’t, not wanting to’ve been a disappointment either way.
Worse than that, however, is that I have two goddaughters on this godforsaken earth, neither of whom I know how to contact, neither of whose parents know how to contact me. If that doesn’t speak well of my decision not to have children. In fairness to me, the failure to stay in contact was not one-sided; but to own up, I could and should have been more diligent in that regard.
It pains me to think of Naia and Lovely now. What brought about this aching reflexion was the same thing that a couple of years ago reminded me of Ruford, a partner in a completely different set of crimes on the same set of islands: A pop song.
The song appeared in one form in a Pinoy movie, the first Philippine film I had ever seen. The aforementioned Suzann took me to the movies in downtown Angeles for my first real Pinoy cinematic experience. There were vendors outside the entrance – before you reached the legit ones inside – selling freshly roasted hot peanuts served in tiny narrow brown paper bags, a DIY-marvel which would one day be trumped when Naia handed me a cellophane crammed full of weed for the very first time. Come to think of it, Suzann and I were pretty friggin’ high that afternoon.
She was taking me to see Horsey-horsey: Tigidig-tigidig, starring Tito, Vic and Joey (TVJ). I don’t recall her telling me about their recent – at the time even more recently relevant – controversial past. I think she just presented them as famous Filipino comic actors. Filipinos call those who achieve their level of fame (both TV and movies!) megastars.
The song became an earworm almost immediately. The actors performed a reprise during the closing credits, and it would be years before I realized who the original artist was. It sounded like one of those semi-European novelty acts marketed for them alone. Like, you’d never hear this music anywhere else. A lot of the pop hits in the Philippines had that feel. Even Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach. Especially Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach.
I heard the song in question again the other day. So I YouBoobed it later. Naturally a song conjures memories of time & people & place. But this time it led me to a distant recollection not my own, for it led to a more sordid detail in the annals of megastars T, V, & J.
No, no, no. It led me to the tragic record of someone else altogether. Someone, I lament, whose befitting form of address I do not know, which reminded me of the reason why I’ll never see or hear from Naia again: It is the story of a person who, as I imagine it, didn’t have a name she liked and was never able to choose a name for herself that she could really fall in love with.
For veracity’s sake, I’ve snipped and compiled and paraphrased from several sources, including what I was able to apprehend from my own experience. You can google if you want, but it is tedious and painful:
Delia Smith was a Filipina from a poor family abandoned by their American father when she was a child. After being “discovered” at a strip club in Olongapo City, she was brought to the attention of talent manager, Rey de la Cruz.
Cruz gave her the name Pepsi Paloma. Together with Sarsi Emmanuel and Coca Nicolas, he cast her in the booming genre of sexploitation movies popular in the Philippines at the time, dubbing his trio the “softdrink beauties”.
In 1981 at the age of fourteen, she bared all for a small role in the film Brown Emmanuelle.
In 1982, she approached the law offices of then Minister of Defense Juan Ponce Enrile, accusing popular comedians, Vic Sotto, Joey De Leon, and Richie D’Horsey, of rape. Sotto and De Leon were hosts of the number one noon-time variety show, “Eat Bulaga”. Rene Cayetano, a partner in the law firm and later a senator, was assigned to handle her case.
When news broke that she was filing a rape case against the three stars, it made headlines throughout the Philippines. She soon went missing, but police found her, apparently having been abducted by a someone claiming to be in the employ of the maternal family of Vic Sotto. Officers interviewed the accuser, who stated that she was under duress to sign an Affidavit of Desistance by Vic Sotto’s brother, now a senator, Tito Sotto.
Soon thereafter, a settlement was reached in the amount of 300,000 pesos ($7,500) under the condition that Sotto, De Leon, and D’Horsey publicly apologize for the crime. There are contradicting reports where this transpired, either in court in front of a judge or the talk show “Pipol”, but there is no record of the episode where this is to have taken place.
After the “softdrink beauties” series had run its course, and a run of bookings limited to dancing in bars frequented by American GIs, she began to express the belief that the rape case had scared film producers away, fearing that they would be blacklisted if they cast her.
Shortly before her 18th birthday, on May 31st 1985, her boyfriend found her hanging in their bedroom. Investigators located her diary and found a suicide note in which she wrote, “This is a crazy planets!” She also attributed a lack of movie roles, financial difficulties, and relationship issues with her live-in boyfriend and mother as causes for her depression.
One of the things I found in researching this story is that much has been made of the grammatical error in her suicide note. Having acquainted myself intimately with this class of folk, I find the error at once endearing in my recollection of the time, people, and place, and depressing in my remembrance of things that should be, and should have been otherwise.
Things I could have done differently.
Glaiza, Suzann, Naia & Lovely, Manny, Ruford, Rose, Baby, Barry & Anton & Rachel, Lynn, Laura, Luz, Steve & Gina, Gina, Del, Armie, Lorenzo; those guys that kept ripping me off; that band that always played Metallica “por Dabe and priends” (Mark) and more importantly (after Mark’d passed out) Harrison’s Something; all names real or imagined or otherwise made up for reasons only you may know; and you who I’ve forgotten but cannot forget…
“Do you think you have a responsibility to ask him about it, so that you don’t be perceived as sort of propping up his regime, his cult of personality?”
This from George Stephanopoulos, talking head for the American Broadcasting Corps and former senior advisor & political enabler to the most narcissistic US Presidency the world has seen. Or had seen.
He was interviewing Dennis Rodman – a former professional basketball player known as much for his offcourt flash as his exceptional defensive skill and rebounding prowess – who had just made a trip to North Korea in support of a children’s basketball camp and a hoops exhibition featuring some of the Harlem Globetrotters and North Korean players, all for VICE magazine’s HBO series VICE Guide to North Korea.
Like the American president, Kim Jong-un is a basketball fan. Also like the American president, the new supreme leader is apparently not without charisma, prompting Rodman to refer to him as “awesome” and “honest”, at which point you hear the interviewer’s voice-over, “This about a dictator who presides over prison camps, allows millions to starve, and has threatened to destroy the United States.”
This, itself, from a guy whose boss presided over a privatization-wave of American prisons and the starving to death of a half-million Iraqi children, none of which interfered with his working to reelect him.
In the interview with the ABC host, Rodman described Kim as a friend and a great guy, to which Gorge Staphylococcus asked, “A great guy who puts 200,000 people in prison camps?”
Rodman replied, “We do some of the same things here,” but was unfortunately not articulate enough, or ready with the details to back up his allusion to the US penal system, and back down his inquisitor.
So when G. Staph Infection – responding to Rodman’s stated intention to return to the republic – handed Rodman a Human Rights Watch report on North Korea, gently but condescendingly admonishing him to, “Maybe ask some questions about that,” the basketball player was ill-equipped to remind him that Human Rights Watch has loads of reports on the United States, as well, that he could “maybe ask” his own supreme leaders about:
When two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object in inquiry we must always pay strict attention.
US DOJ FBI SA Dale Bartholomew Cooper fiction division
The link at the end of this entry will open in a separate window & begin playing automatically. It is the audio file of the first part of an extensive interview that Sibel Edmonds gave very recently regarding what she claims is the continuation of Operation Gladio, which is one of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” geo-pol strategies that began to fester in Europe and Asia during the Cold War.
I employ the quotation marks in the previous sentence in three ways: to quote conventional wisdom as it’s often dictated; to quote the ironic folly of the very idea itself as it is just as often dictated; and to point out that the folly itself is ostensible because the stated strategy is avowed by habitual liars and therefore dubious.
This last point is important; it relates directly to the most instructive thing about the interview: Again & again, everything the creeps say is taken at face value, even when not a word of it is believed. I blame Hitler. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Or making a joke. Sort of.
You may recall Sibel Edmonds as the translator contracted by the FBI in September of 2001, who subsequently blew whistles the organization couldn’t or wouldn’t, but certainly didn’t, deal with in any manner other than to fired her.
Stand by your man and deliver If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to exorcise a pet peeve: Sibel Edmonds, is not entirely unlike Cindy Sheehan, in that she was lioness’d by certain Democrats when what she had to say implicated the Republican malfeasance of Dick Cheney and his ilk, but quickly forgotten when she kept complaining about the exact same things as it pertains to the Democrats themselves. Nobody fucks, tosses out of a bus & drives over, and forgets better than the Party of Jefferson, not to mention the party of William Jefferson with or without all its coke. They’re all about grandstanding about women’s rights right up until you start to criticize their boyfriend, then you’re fucked & forgot. If you’re lucky.
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What I like about Edmonds is that she does not speculate. Too many outside-the-mainstream investigative journalists fall into that trap and, indeed, you can often tell a snake-oiler by how they come to conclusions and frame their presentations. Indeed-indeed, “the story” trumps the facts in the mainstream press as well.
Whether you believe what she presents or not, it is pretty straightforward and simple, which brings me back to that most instructive thing about the interview: It is not the deepness of the proverbial rabbit hole that keeps people out of it; frankly it’s not that deep, anyway, but we all know that as soon as you climb into one, you get dirty. It’s easier to walk around on land with the humans. The ostensible humans with all their ostensible humanity. Whatever that is.
Inside job? Who can’t afford to outsource & subcontract? In a nutshell, the interview is about how Operation Gladio, like the Cold War, never ended. While there is a lot of information to digest, the deepest it gets is reminding us who all NATO had cosied up to, and continues to cosy up with. And the conclusion I would think is most logical – not drawn only from this interview, but from what could be gleaned from history taught in school – is if you sleep with your known enemy, you are your own enemy; if someone else you trust is sleeping with your known enemy, they are an enemy you choose to trust.
The benefit of the doubt is always given to the habitual liars of authority to such an extent that those who choose to place their trust in authority will always take their professed good intentions at face value. So in a sense the rabbit hole is no deeper than where you’d bury your shit in the woods, but there is no limit to the depth of convoluted reasoning one will employ so as to mitigate why authority lied to them.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” can be easily digested as an always redeployed strategy that leads to nothing but unwanted results, but that your avowed friend might be your enemy is an unacceptable notion.
So, as we know from record, NATO member nations were in tight with Nazi ideologues every-fucking-where. Whether or not this was because of the Red Menace is immaterial, though I choose to believe that anyone who would choose to believe that particular stated purpose is either naive, or a bit of a simpleton. One might not subscribe to the remotest fascist beliefs, but if one has a job with an organization of people who actively recruit and employ Nazis, then you are working for a Nazi organization, regardless of how the post in Washingtonframes it.
Since Gladio is derived from the Roman word for short-sword, might Operation Gladio be the equivalent of A Century of the Long Knives?
Torturing and imprisoning and terrorizing and killing people in the name of a stated purpose is apparently no vice, therefore the stated purpose can go unexamined as long as the stated purpose is anti-somebody else’s tyranny.
I remind the reader that the anti-communists were not just some American Republican senator, the CIA, and an FBI pope, and that Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t surveilled at the behest of Richard M. Nixon, though I’m sure he would’ve done. But I’m also sure that saying he was murdered “on LBJ’s watch” would be language objected to, even by those who use the same twist of phrase to describe George W. Bush’s tenure vis à vis something which has come to be known in bipartisan circles as “9/11″.
Additionally, it doesn’t stop them from making the claim that the current president has “kept us safe”. That is his stated purpose, after all.
Almost simultaneously The reason why I even noticed and bothered to take notice of Sibel Edmonds’ Gladio interview is because of something else I stumbled upon. This link is to a German programme, which was in part about an Italian named Giuseppe Gulotta, who at 18 years of age was tortured into the confession of a murder he did not commit and spent twenty-two years in prison – thirty-six if you count the length of the legal ordeal, the progression of which would only seem to make the injustice more absurd. If you believe the claim to absurdity. That itself is absurd.
Virtually the only thing I can find in English about this case is this BBC puff piece, which doesn’t go into any of the details of the why – not even the ostensible why – he was allowed to age so long in prison when everybody knew he was innocent.
In the two minute German clip, the journalist makes clear that a NATO commando murdered the two Italian military police officers because they were witness to an underground delivery of NATO weapons as part of Operation Gladio. The only difference between my summary and the journalist’s is that he didn’t call the commando a NATO commando. Why not? Probably because they might have just been hired to do the job by some friends of NATO. Hell, maybe the weapons delivery itself was only done by someone that some friends of NATO happen to know of. Or some enemies of enemies of informers of other adversaries, none of whom are friends, of course.
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Bottom line is the stated purpose of NATO’s secrecy was and continues to be above reproach by some, reproachable by others, but the stated purpose is believed in either case. The harshest mainstream criticism regarding ostensible mistakes made amounts to the “it was the times” argument.
Which brings us back to Sibel Edmonds’ assertion of the obvious, which includes the extension of the Gladio-handers & handlers into this, the Twenty-First Century and its avowed War on Terror, with the stated motivations of keeping the world free, while simultaneously locking up and/or killing more of the world’s population than their publicly professed enemies.
The following interview reminds me that as long as the stated purpose is a war on some fictionally created & named group and theirassociates, those in friendlier political circles will only refer to the war itself as terrorism insofar as it terrorizes the populations of the regions where it is secretly and ostensibly secretly waged. And that’s only if they are willing to criticize their current O-boyfriend.
But it is most definitely (never never never) because the ostensible terrorists and ostensible war on terror warriors might by default be one and the same.
Any bureaucracy that functions in secret inevitably lends itself to corruption.
Four score and four hundred six days ago, I recognized for post-erity my wannabe recognition of conspicuously coincidental traffic patterns, in which I compared one particular day’s trip to-and-fro – a trip that on any other given day might transpire so spinningly as to resemble a meta-conscious journey on a bliss-bicycle, or so arduously as to rattle my brain into tiny beads of blood, sweat, and tears – to navigating the asteroid belt along a voyage from Jupiter to Mars.
The real trip, though, includes each day’s adventure, with the stretch from my hometown near Jupiter to my workplace on Earth representational of the aggregate daily commute. It’s just that on September 29th 2011, I found myself dodging a meteoric rise in the number of bicyclers addling the streets & paths, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, because unlike the interplanetary passage, you can’t see the cluster as clearly in advance.
Six days ago I experienced a morning circuit – or one unique and particularly necessary segment of it – that played out on the opposite end of the circular stage to that of 486 days ago. Firstly, there were no other cyclists to speak of, which in itself is not so unusual, but part of a remarkable hole.
The thing that makes this segment necessary is the inescapability of the route as much as the required transit between two points, though the required transit is the result of my having scheduled appointments such that the route is inescapable. I normally try to allow myself more time; once a week I put myself through changes. Changes perceptible, but not a moment before they confront me.
On a bad day, it might take me as long as public transit’s round trip of the same; under typical circumstances I get from A to B ten minutes before the train could.
But last Tuesday morning everything was as if it had already began to unfold when it saw me coming from far afield, as if it had to get out of the way before I saw it first, as if there were a penalty for making me break my stride even mentally. So, unlike lucky occasions past, I witnessed no parting of the seas of obstruction, observed no fortuitous flow of traffic. It was simply a void. Space devoid of atmospheric intrusions.
I looked around and found a world that belonged to me alone. And it’s a good thing, too, because I’d quite coincidently been running rather late at the time, though not a coincidence on my part, because I was conscious of my delay as I was doing the delaying. Still, you can’t chalk up the thereafter placement of traffic to my having meandered many minutes too long. It was just freak chance in accordance with my need for a little luck.
In the midst of that nothingness, I thought of the asteroid belt and how far away it was from my center of gravity, and, in the midst of that thought, I worried that this might be too much of a good thing, not that it was bloating me then, but would cost me one day when I could least afford it. Fortune would have it that the thought was fleeting. Nevertheless.
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LAM-ELISA stands for lipoarabinomannan (LAM), a molecule secreted by a mycrobacterium known to cause tuberculosis and, as such, a diagnostic for the presence of the same, with Enzyme-Linked Immuno-Sorbent Assay (ELISA) being the biochemical technique used in its application.
But if you were to do a web-search for the term LAM-ELISA, you’d find out a few other things. La Melisa is a restaurant in Denmark, for instance – the culprit in this conspiracy being a script written by the Romans, which is all Greek to me.
Anyway (that is, wholly unrelated), there’s been an outbreak of TB in LA. As reported in the town’s Times, the city’s skid row (apparently unworthy of capitalization) is the link in the majority of cases.
Anyway (that is, onto something entirely different & disturbing), 6 blocks removed from Skid Row Central (sec. Google Maps), is the Cecil Hotel on Main Street. It was in the water tank on the roof of the hotel that an employee, who was investigating a problem with the water pressure, found a 21-year-old Canadian woman who had gone missing from the same hotel almost three weeks earlier. Her name? Elisa Lam.
Now that is some pretty crazy shit, like, a concentrated coincidence.
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CREEPINESS ALERT: FIVE PARAGRAPH’S WORTH To state the obvious first: a decomposing body in a rooftop cistern did not cause an outbreak of TB around the corner; though the stories broke within a day of each other, the tuberculosis fatalities in this latest wave date back to 2007, when Elisa Lam would have been a teenager living a couple thousand kilometers up the west coast.
And rendering the denominators less common is the fact that the LAM-ELISA is used to detect TB in advanced cases of HIV infection, for which it is difficult to determine diagnosis. This applies to less than 20 percent of the cases according to city health officials.
Or does that make the coincidence eighty percentage points more remarkable? Like, remarkable in the way that, on a day just over nineteen months ago, there was a cyclist in front of me at every traffic light I got caught by. That never happens, and now only once.
The Cecil Hotel, by the way, was home for several months to The Night Stalker (Ramirez, not McGavin), a guy who is said to have developed his blood-lust from his US Army vet cousin who’d showed him Polaroids he took of a rape and beheading he had carried out while in the Special Forces in Viet Nam.
You may know the Special Forces as home to the kind of people who win hearts & minds, if not by securing their figurative freedom from tyranny, by literally removing them from their hosts. Who knows how many of these kinds of heroes occupy the flophouses and skid rows of the American West and elsewhere, let alone successfully instill in their prepubescent kin an acute appreciation for the awesomeness of gruesome cruelty. My guess is not many. Or a shit load. Like I said, who knows?
END CREEPY “GROSS-OUT” – BEGIN CREEPY “CREEP-OUT” When Elisa Lam was still a missing person, the Cecil Hotel elevator surveillance video was released in hopes of finding someone who might have known her whereabouts. It contains a couple of minutes of her on what may have been the last night of her life. I recommend it only for the incorrigibly curious.
I read a discussion about it on a forum frequented by amateur sleuths, the gist of which revolved around the nature of her perceived unusual behavior: psychotic, medicated; self-induced or drugged; was someone else outside the elevator; was she playing around and having fun, or just plain scared?
Which came first, LAM or Elisa? Like I said, I really believe this to be an extraordinary – or, rather, as I’m trying to understand it, a concentrated coincidence. As fascinating as I find Carl Jung, there is something about his synchronicity that I cannot get my head around.
So I think of clusters of objects in space as a metaphor for a concentration of coinciding similarities in an attempt to grasp why like-occurrences suddenly & inexplicably happen in clusters, or, as Jung would have it, result based upon their meaning rather than their cause. And I am no further along to grasping it than something that occurred to me at least fifteen years ago: Their seeming vastness notwithstanding, the possibilities are so limited that it couldn’t be any other way – even if only this once.
Or every single time.
To wit: the simplest & most concentrated coincidence I can think of is the fact that one plus one adds up to two. Every time I’ve checked, this has been the case. Still, it’s only a matter of time, even if we won’t live to see it…
And what of the LAM-ELISA >> TB >> skid row >> Elisa Lam ride into the universe? How can one calculate such chances? Sure, there are only twenty-six letters in the Latin alphabet. But there’re so many numbers – as many as the allotment of any given unit of chronology.
Yet always so little time.
How long before I have to return the cosmic favor of last Tuesday? How long ’til the next time I have another one of those too much of a bad thing days? How long before last Tuesday’s report in Los Angeles happens again upon another archaeological site, to another anthropological entity, the letters of whose name are arranged the same as a precisely chosen acronym for a pathogen infecting the area of the dig?
FOR INCORRIGIBLY CURIOUS CATS ONLY, and with that in mind…
That, I reckon, is what it means to have seen a ghost.
