I live for this stuff. I'm addicted. As much as I hate the sick corruption of politics, I can't turn away from its seductive drama.
This video shows "consultant" (political fixer)Stephen Payne meeting with an undercover reporter and a representative of Askar Akayev, former president of Kyrgyzstan. During the fall of the Soviet Union, Akayev was selected (or elected, depending on how you look at it) by the Supreme Soviet to be the first president of the fledgling republic of Kyrgyzstan. He ruled until 2005, when his government was overthrown by a mob.
In the video, Payne suggests that for a few hundred thousand dollars, he could arrange for Akayev to meet with a high-level politican who would then make a statement about what a great guy he is, which would help his credibility in running for a new term of office in his homeland. The donation would be made to the Bush Library, which is not required by law to disclose it's donors.
This is just one example of what I call "deep politics". While the media pundits are busy covering the electoral distractions of official political business, the real action goes down in backroom deals where guys like Stephen Payne exist. Middle-men who keep the pump of corruption primed. They keep the cash flowing and hidden. They keep a priceless rolodex, their stock in trade. But Payne isn't just some schmuck with a few phone numbers, he sits on the board of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, is a 20 year associate of the President, and has traveled across the planet with the Vice President. When he offers to hook up a meeting with Cheney for a smooth 750K, he's not fucking around.
But this isn't just another "republicans are corrupt" rant. Notice that while most of the individuals Payne mentions are Bush cabinet officials, he also names Joseph Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This reminds me that while the Republican party is measurably more corrupt, both parties together run a corrupt system of politics that rules this, the most powerful nation in history. And even though I trust Obama, and I think he's a decent guy, the first decent candidate in my lifetime, remember, he is still a party man. His cabinet will be party people. They will cut checks to hacks like Stephen Payne, to do their dirty work and keep it well hidden. Obama can't fix the system, and if he did, he would probably be assassinated.
Civil Servants and Spies
Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and even utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as "Terrorism Liaison Officers" in Colorado and a handful of other states to hunt for "suspicious activity" — and are reporting their findings into secret government databases.
Launching the Private Network
In 1987 the United States Congress concluded an investigation of what came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal. This wide-ranging collection of covert operations, headed primarily by CIA Director William Casey and little-known NSC staffer Oliver North, involved secretly selling weapons to Iran (a violation of U.S. law, since Iran was officially listed as a state sponsor of terrorism), then secretly channeling the profits to various Nicaraguan paramilitary groups, (in violation of a U.S. law known as the Boland amendment).
This investigation uncovered a plethora of illegal and quasi-legal actions ranging from terrorism to drug-running, to money-laundering, to propaganda, all over Latin America and the Middle-East, in the name of fighting the Communist threat. Although many of the perpetrators were convicted by Congress of various crimes against the American people, most of them were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. Sadly, many of those perpetrators, such as John Poindextor, Otto Reich, John Negroponte, and Elliot Abrams later found work in the Bush Jr. administration.
However, one facet of the story never made it into the final congressional report. A chapter was left out. As it turns out, the Democratic majority on the committee allowed themselves to be bullied by the ranking Republicans, including Republican Whip Dick Cheney, into leaving that section out.
This section has now been released. It was buried deep in the congressional record and discovered by journalist Robert Parry. Titled Launching the Private Network, this fascinating document explains how the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department, secretly channeled taxpayer money to private public relations and news organizations, to manage the perception of the media, the American people, and the United States Congress. The document refers to this as "public diplomacy". In other words, they ran a covert propaganda operation on us. On me and you. They did the kind of thing they've always done against hostile nations, but they did it to our nation. I've always assumed the government does this and I guess I'm not surprised to be proven right.
Oh, and by the way, Oliver North, the liaison between the CIA and the NSC, whose official duty it was to lie to the Congress and manipulate the American public through use of the media? He has his own show on Fox News now.
I'm reminded of a question Noam Chomsky asked a while back: if the American media were not free, but were instead a propaganda arm of the US government, would it look substantially different from Fox News?
The Eye, the Clerk, and the Archetypes
Lonely tonight, but not gregarious. Just another Monday night. Apathy.
I drive to the video store, looking for some chuckles. Just as I make my decision to see the Onion Movie, a pair of teenage girls passes me and one of them gives me the Eye. I pretend not to notice. I know that Eye. Nothing but trouble. These two are teenage girls in an archetypal sort of way, at the hormonal apex of puberty. Vain, insecure, selfish, sporadic, fickle, and foolish.
They beat me to the checkout counter, laughing obnoxiously at nothing in particular. Eye Girl rudely tosses the video at the clerk, who fumbles it. His face darkens into a frown. I know this clerk 's face by now. This guy is always here. I think he's the assistant manager. Mid-forties, slightly dorkish. Trying desperately to pretend that he still has some dignity, but badly beaten down by years of standing behind the cash register, taking abuse from rude teenage girls who have no respect for anyone, including themselves. This store is his own personal hell.
Tonight, he's tightly wound. I can see it in his eyes. Like he's about to snap. He's tense in a way Eye Girl can't possibly understand. He sees through her, beyond her individuality, to her essence, her Archetype, brilliantly illuminated beneath fluorescent bulbs. He sees it. Teenage girls eventually become bored house-wives, but when you're standing behind the counter at the video store, watching years go by in maddening time-lapse, they seem to stand still, encapsulated, always the same. This is the girl who wouldn't give him the time of day in high school, who hurt his feelings and made him feel small. And now he's forty and still working a shitty job and still taking shit from her. Not her specifically, but HER, timelessly. The unfairness of life is now fully in his face, crushing him.
His voice is monotone. “Phone number?”
“You know what it is,” she sneers. I guess she's a regular. “No, I don't,” he fumes. She rolls her eyes and rattles off her number too quickly to be heard. Now he's pissed. “Slower,” he growls. She repeats it with agonizing slowness, in a mocking, sing-song tone, locking eyes with him, daring him to slap her. He unlocks the movie, slams the plastic guard on the counter, takes her five-dollar bill with a look of barely suppressed rage that seems to amuse her. I start to get a little nervous. He fixes her with a glare, slams the change on the counter and mutters “next customer in line” in a dark tone of voice that implies I hope it hurts when you die. She scoops up the video, and as she slinks toward the door, gives me the Eye again. My gaze is sexless and penetrating. I proceed to the counter.
“Number”, he whispers, not even making eye contact. He is, at this moment, a broken man, and it is painful to behold. I deliver the requested digits at just the right pitch, volume, and tempo; respectfully, deferentially. I let him control the rest of the transaction, allowing him to decompress and regain the illusion of dignity. Then I thank him, and wish him a good night. His weak smile of appreciation is bittersweet. Now I am the Archetype of the decent customer.
I drive home musing on how grateful I am that I probably will never have to work that job again.
When protest is viewed by the feds as terrorism, the Bill of Rights is suspect.
This isn't the first time the JTTF has investigated domestic political dissenters under the rubric of protecting America from "terrorism". And they aren't the only "anti-terrorist" operation in domestic law enforcement to keep tabs on political dissent.
The Fresno Sherriff's Department's anti-terrorism task force got caught spying on anti-war protesters in 2003.
I could cite lots of other examples, but I get tired of leading the horse to the trough.
Back in 2002-2003, when the federal government began expanding and consolidating the authority of the national security establishment, in response to the 9-11 attacks, people like me- dissenters who never trust the government for any reason whatsoever- complained that the government already had too much power, that we should stop the feds from expanding their authority, that it amounted to a power-grab. Political pundits at the time, mostly conservative ones, responded with statements like "what do these protesters have against protecting America from terrorism?" I even heard one pundit warn ominously that "protesting against anti-terrorism is itself terrorism."
I'm not stupid. I know about COINTELPRO. I know enough history to know that power always seeks more power, under any rubric, and through any guise. The ostensible reasons never match the underlying motivation. It's called Mission Creep. One minute they're claiming to protect you, the next minute they're investigating you. Protecting you from you is the job of the feds. We're all suspects. If you investigate anyone long enough, you will find them breaking a law. We're all guilty. But the feds already have too much power. If you don't believe me, ask yourself why America has more citizens living in prisons than any other nation on Earth, by volume, and per capita.
After the 9-11 attacks, every federal official in the nation began clamoring for some of that post-9-11 national security money, paid for by our taxes. More contracts, more offices, more resources. Once they've got the contracts, they spend their days justifying their bloated budgets by scaring you into thinking they're keeping you safe. There aren't many actual terrorists in America, so the national security establishment spends its time fighting the only enemy that can reduce its power: American citizens.
So what can we do about it? Not a goddamned thing. Only our elected representatives can change the law and they're too worried about their media image to rock the boat. If they criticize the national security establishment, the feds cry foul, the think tanks start calling newspapers, and the next day the headline reads "Senator is soft on terrorism". Our whole system is rigged to expand power, away from us, and into the hands of the power-whores who claim that it's for our own good.
Fuck them.
Mysterious Butterflies of the Soul
About four years ago, I was spinning my wheels, working a crappy job and going nowhere when I decided one day to pick an outrageous ambition and go all the way with it. My life needed focus. I began several long months of intense soul-searching. What do I want to accomplish? Which leads to the question of what really matters? I began to review my intellectual life, which really began around the age of 8, when my reading ventured into encyclopedias, atlases, books of science, and philosophy. This interest in the "big picture" has taken various forms throughout the years, leading to an interest in history, poetry, politics, journalism, technology, and finally biology. Here I really started to dig in, working at a zoo and taking some biology courses in community college. I also read several very influential books during this period, including The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, The Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie, and The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom.
Finally, I settled on the brain. The reason for this is difficult to articulate simply. Human behavior has always fascinated and sometimes puzzled and even disturbed me. Not just the behavior of other individuals, or the behavior of crowds (in high school, I fantasized about starting riots), but my own behavior. My interest in behavior caused me to contemplate the intricacies of the human mind, which led me to the study of psychology. After some research on the subject, I became estranged from what we call psychology, partially due to bad experiences with psychiatry, and partially due to the subjectivity of the discipline.
At this point, I began to wonder how the brain is correlated with the mind. This line of thought has taken root in my mind, and presumably my brain, with growing strength, ever since. What is the relation of the mind to the brain? Brains can exist without minds, but as far as we know, minds cannot exist without brains. Studying minds is tricky because although we all have one, they are entirely subjective. Science has no traction with the subjective. However, through brain scanning, we can at least correlate the function of the mind with the function of the brain. We can begin, however primitively, to quantify human thought in a meaningful way.
Why is this so important to me? Well, let's take a look at the big picture. From what we know of the geological and fossil record, we can piece together a general timeline of life on Earth. From Prokaryotes to Eukaryotes, to bacteria, to DNA, to fish, to mammals, to humans, what we see are epochs of evolution. One generalization we can make from the available data is that each epoch took less time and resulted in greater intelligence. Intelligence seems to increase exponentially throughout geological time. From what we know of physics and chemistry, it appears that life is an emergent property of matter, and that intelligence is an emergent property of life.
Now, looking specifically at the development human species, we see the exponential evolution of intelligence speed up yet again. From speech, to fire, to the wheel, to agriculture, to cities, to writing, to philosophy, to the printing press, the Renaissance, the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the computer age, the space age, and so forth, we see that the time between these events grows less and less, so that the computer age and the space age happened simultaneously and bled into the information age, in which we now exist. Scientific breakthroughs happen daily. The speed of computer chips doubles every few years, and has since before I was born. The price point per calculation of not just CPU's, but RAM, and storage devices is greater than exponential.
The human brain is the culmination of billions of years of evolution. And it's inside our fucking heads. I wish to break it open and pour it out, to find its secrets and illuminate them for all to see. And I'm just in time. Neuroscience (or biopsychology, if you prefer) is maturing. Unlike most sciences, there isn't even an overall theory. Biology has Darwinism and Physics has Relativity, but the best Neuroscience can do is the theory of neural function as a basis for epistemology. And there is a shitload of work to do in that area. A colleague of mine warned that I might find the field crowded when I apply for PhD. We should all be so lucky, I replied.
A couple years ago, I got a job that pays decent money. Now I can save up for a Bachelor's in Neuroscience. I can pay for it in cash. When I tell people my plan to study neuroscience, they often hesitate for a moment and then ask why. I've never been able to muster a satisfactory response. The best reason I can come up with is in a quote from the father of Neuroscience, Santiago Cajal. But first, let me explain Cajal.
In 1899, Cajal mastered Golgi's technique for staining brain tissue for viewing under a microscope. At that time, there was disagreement among anatomists regarding the nature of brain tissue, whether composed of cells like the rest of the body, or a tangled web of threads, as it seemed from viewing under microscopy. Neurons, or nerve cells, had been identified in the body, and a nervous system was generally theorized, but the theory that the brain is composed mainly of these cell was unproven at that time.
Using tissue from a pigeon's cerebellum, Cajal was able to isolate and sketch in great detail two neuron cell bodies, which were connected by many of the fine threads that had puzzled anatomists. His original sketch of these cells, the first record of the neurons of the brain, is below:
Cajal later identified the synapse and did a great deal of the founding work in the field of neuroscience, winning a Nobel Prize in 1906.
When writing his memoir, decades later, he turned to the question of why studying the brain was so captivating to him. His answer is now my answer:
"Really, the garden of neurology offers the researcher captivating spectacles and incomparable artistic emotions. My aesthetic instincts find there full satisfaction. Like the entomologist catching beautiful butterflies, my attention pursued in the garden of gray matter, the delicately and gracefully shaped cells, the mysterious butterflies whose wing beats might some day reveal the secret of mental life."
In 1899, Cajal mastered Golgi's technique for staining brain tissue for viewing under a microscope. At that time, there was disagreement among anatomists regarding the nature of brain tissue, whether composed of cells like the rest of the body, or a tangled web of threads, as it seemed from viewing under microscopy. Neurons, or nerve cells, had been identified in the body, and a nervous system was generally theorized, but the theory that the brain is composed mainly of these cell was unproven at that time.
Cajal later identified the synapse and did a great deal of the founding work in the field of neuroscience, winning a Nobel Prize in 1906.