today i followed a link to a site called “from the wilderness”. the headline: coup d’etat: the real reason tenet and pavitt resigned from the cia. the story is a somewhat interesting one postulating “both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from colin powell and his deputy richard armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of george w. bush and his neocon administration in a coup d’etat being executed by the central intelligence agency. the coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown”. admittedly the language makes it sounds a bit conspiro (coup d’etat, global meltdown), and though certainly theoretical, the conclusions they come to are not so outlandish as to seem ridiculous. in any case i’m not really all that interested in this particular story and it’s not why i’m posting this. the zzzzzz’s still floated pleasantly around me. let me continue…

so curious to see what these people at “from the wilderness” are all about i go to their homepage. again, i foolishly follow links. to make a long boring tale of sitting still with the occasional mouse movement and cigarette drag short: without really meaning to i came across stories which demanded that i consider my own opinions, which nudged the colossal annoyance and infuriating skepticism awake, and which led me, as is so often the case, into a general state of disgust. what could possibly be the root cause of this disgust you ask? do you really need to? doesn’t everyone else have the same experience of trying stubbornly to stay focussed on the fascinating universe of their own belly button lint only to have evidence of the troubling state of their country and planet sneak in to ruin it? surely they must. as is usually the case, the cause of disgust this time were stories about politicians, agencies, foreign countries, money, and that most tenacious and powerful of all bees in our collective bonnet, 9/11.

no matter how much we want to forget it, no matter how easy it is to simply cling to the official story in order to get on with the process of buying useless shit and staying placid enough to watch your fill of summer blockbusters, if you make the mistake of reading well researched stories which point out seeming discrepancies and drudge up conflicting facts, you can not help but get upset and angry all over again. likewise if you watch the evening news and then make the mistake of tapping international news sources on the internet the next day, only to be made aware again and again of what was missing from your broadcast, you can’t help but feel very uneasy. anyhow, i’m sure you all go through this yourselves and don’t need it restated in the least. the fact is though that as seemingly awful as the news is every night, the realization that this bad news is not necessarily the real news, or even true, never fails to make me feel worse. when i can’t help myself and click those tantalizing links about iraq, the bush administration, policy, the 9/11 commission, or the coming election, wanting naively to better understand what the hell is really going on around me, i am invariably left feeling hopeless, and wondering whether there is even any truth to be had.

i come across links almost daily which induce this state and have increasingly shied away from bothering to post them. i mean no matter how deeply we gaze into our belly buttons simply turning on the television or glancing at a front page of someone else’s newspaper on the subway will leave you feeling shitty, so why should i link to things you already know, or are in fact trying hard to ignore? well the more i come across the more i think, downer though it may be, much of the stuff which upsets me the most never actually makes it on to the subway riders newspaper or on to cnn.

in any case this is all just dumb babble. the nonist is not by any stretch of the imagination an overly political site because it’s creator is not overly knowledgeable, or even sufficiently. the increasingly scarce political links i post here are generally things which either confound me or seem to confirm things which are nothing more than poorly informed suspicions, gut suspicions as it were. but be that as it may i’ve decided to wake from my forced slumber just long enough to post some stuff which either got me thinking, was upsetting, or just seem absent from general discourse. not all new, just stuff i’ve accumulated. all this pointless babble aside i just though you might be interested in some of these links:

1) oh lucy, you got some splaining to do!. a very thorough time line of events leading up to and following september 11th. may seem dry but it’s hard not to come to some conclusion which differs from the official story after reading it.

2) nine hundred and eleven missing pieces. family member asks unanswered questions.

3) unscrambled jet fighters.

4) “not entirely unexpected”

5) map:// hijacked planes and military bases

6) meanwhile….

7) paranoid shift. are you just paranoid? might be.

8) the evacuation of saudi nationals after 9/11 long denied is verified as true

9) who is delmart vreeland anyway

10) scandal after scandal after scandal. how many investigations are needed? so many trees and no forest?

11) bush’s erratic behavior worries white house aids.

12) under the banner of war.

13) it’s not a “war” and yet it must be.

14) patterns of global terrorism report which stated terrorism at 34 year low needs to be revised because it was… well actually at it’s highest level in 20. 

15) path to pandemonium. a very thorough time line of events leading up to and following the invasion of iraq.

16) how do we know when we’ve won

17) public television gets force fed.

18) public information no more.

19) unfit to print media coverage of iraq not so hot, coverage of reagan just as bad.

20) global military spending in 2003. $956 billion. “very close to cold war peak”.

21) beyond mud slinging in our democracy. and how is that democracy doing? what do you think

of course there are more, but enough is enough. back to sleep for me.

evidently he has been alternately called the next hawking, darwin, einstein, newton, and freud. one quote has him single handedly touching off the next scientific revolution. grand praises indeed. but here is the odd part, until 1988 he was a PR guy handling clients like michael jackson, prince, john cougar mellencamp, bette Midler, bob Marley, david byrne, paul simon, billy joel, billy idol, grandmaster flash, run dmc, kiss, aerosmith, queen, and ac/dc… say what? yeah. though i hate to admit it reading this made me a whole lot more skeptical about those claims of his genius. i know it should make no difference, but somehow i could not help but laugh. the next isaac newton was a PR guy for bette midler?

his name was somehow familiar to me though i never read his book. after searching around i realized why, i had read a piece of his before called reality is a shared hallucination which served as a sort of forward to the book you are being lied to by the good folks over at disinfo.com. it’s an interesting piece to be sure. a heartbreaking work of staggering genius? i don’t know.

his site is chock full of crazily bold and intellectually titillating titles:

1) instant evolution: the influence of the city on human genes

2) from mammoth-bone huts to stone age cities

3) Beyond the Supercomputer: Social Groups As Learning Machines

4) diving in the microworld

5) his current book titled global brain: the evolution of mass mind from the big bang to the 21st century

6) his next book soul in the machine: reinventing capitalism a quick re-vision of western history”

to just name a few. so is he an inventive, esoteric, smarty pants or a nut? hard to tell without slogging through all the writing. and even after doing so, can you really say for sure? his site has that “kook” look (frames, weird jagged repetitive visuals, etc, reminds me of rense among others) but at the same time there is that wild praise from “people in the know” to consider. maybe he’s a wolfram type? mad genius? but then what to make of the past life as a PR guy? found another piece on disifo.com called i have met god and he lives in brooklyn. not a title which promises to resolve anything, but if you read it you see that bloom addresses the question himself:

“so why should they interested in this absolutely anonymous character named howard bloom? why be interested in bloom? hmmm . . . bloom’s got a book called the lucifer principle. the lucifer principle was endorsed by 22 major scientists, none of whom had ever met bloom or heard of bloom. none of them. they said things like it’s a seminal book, it’s monumental, it’s brilliant, it’s gonna change the way we see human nature, it’s gonna change they way we see the world around us, it’s going to scratch holes in our illusions about ourselves and force us to face realities we never saw. these are major scientists saying that this book is revolutionary. it’s become a textbook in universities from germany to australia, but it comes from this person who everybody thought: who is this person? he can’t write a book about science. he’s a music publicist….”

he goes on to answer it the best he can, though i’m still undecided. which, in the end, has to be good enough. after all i see no reason why he can’t be both a smart guy with interesting things to say and a kook. no reason at all. since when were those two things mutually exclusive? in a way he’s the perfect intellectual quantity for an age when nothing, not the simplest fact, can be agreed upon, when everything is up for heated debate, when the definitions of sex, marriage, war, and even life are no longer thought to be self evident, when truth is so subjective as to seem an impossibility. if reality is in fact a shared hallucination than so is identity. which means harold bloom is whatever people think he is.

...along with a slew of others (damien hirst is said to have lost 16 paintings). many of the works are touted as being “very important”. works like the ?40,000, turner prize nominated everyone i have ever slept with 1963-1995 by tracey emin. i am an artist, an art worshipper, etc, but the “devastation” of losing the work of all these contemporary artists really leaves me cold somehow. is it just that the work is new and so not as revered? is it that the work is really just o.k. stuff thats been over-hyped and made to seem important by the resulting bloated price tags? is it pure schadenfreude? i don’t know. but evidently i am far from being alone in my great big shrug of “eh”. (read some of the decidedly tepid, and occasionally gleeful reactions here, here, here, and here). there were so many unsympathetic reactions in fact that emin (mentioned above) got upset. not at the loss of her own work mind you, just by the reaction. in any case i have enjoyed pieces by some of the artists in question. hirst and the chapmans mainly. as far as the chapmans’ piece “hell” goes though it’s nothing that david levinthal

hasn’t already captured more elegantly on film. in my opinion at least.