289 - Robert Anton Wilson The Lost Studio Session

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Robert Anton Wilson

[NOTE: All quotations are by Robert Anton Wilson.]
“You know what family values means, that’s hating the same people your grandfather hated.”

“Information intrinsically tends to produce more information, and it breeds faster than rabbits.”

“We never do reach limits. That’s one of the big fallacies of our time, is the idea of limits. There are no limits.”

“We are graduating from being terrestrial mortals to becoming cosmic immortals. We are becoming the gods that we imagined a long time ago. I think that’s where evolution has been pointing.”

“I think we’ve passed over the Abyss. Getting through the Hitler and Stalin eras and Auschwitz and Hiroshima and all those horrors we’ve gone over the Abyss, and now we are graduating into cosmic immortals, as startling as it sounds.”

Links mentioned in this podcast
Occupy Movement eMail: lorenzo (at) occupysalon (dot) us
TERENCE MCKENNA: BEYOND 2012

Constance Demby

Joe Matheny’s G-Spot Podcast

The Original Falcon Press

BB’s Bungalow

OccupyStream.com

The Declaration of Desperation

Michael Ruppert’s Web Site

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And today is day 53 of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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And to begin with, I’d like to thank some of our fellow salonners who made donations to help with the expenses here in the salon,

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either through a direct donation or by paying for a copy of the audiobook edition of my Pay What You Can novel, The Genesis Generation. And these wonderful people are Duncan M., Alexander H., Thomas R.,

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Revlin J., Katrina F., Arwen O., and Tommy S. So, Duncan, Alexander, Thomas, Revlin, Katrina,

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Arwen, and Tommy, well, hey, thank you all ever so much. Your help is very much appreciated.

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And Tommy, well, hey, thank you all ever so much.

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Your help is very much appreciated.

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And one more huge thank you goes out to Dennis Berry and the Futique Trust,

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which is the trust that is managing the estate of Dr. Timothy Leary.

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As you know, Dennis has made all of Dr. Leary’s audio recordings available to us here in the salon.

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And so far I’ve played about 40 of them, and there’s still many left for us yet to listen to.

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But on top of that, this past week we received a significant grant from the Futique Trust and as a result

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I am very pleased to confirm that the Palenque Norte lectures

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at Burning Man are definitely going to take place

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at next year’s festival.

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As you know, I haven’t been able to afford to attend the Burns since 2007

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and so the lecture series has been dormant since then.

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But seeing as how next year is 2012, and now that a good part of our expenses have been covered,

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well, we will once again be able to gather on the playa for some afternoon lectures and conversations, and with luck I’ll also see you there.

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So, again, my heartfelt thanks and love go out to Dennis

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and to the Leary family for making this possible.

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And one more big thank you goes out to the Grammy-nominated

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and internationally acclaimed recording artist, Constance Demby,

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who some have called a 21st century Mozart.

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It is therefore quite an honor for Bruce Damer and myself that

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Constance has offered to perform at our 28th of January workshop in LA. And like Bruce and myself,

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Constance is also doing this for free. In order to keep the cost of the event down, we’re all even

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paying our own expenses to be there. As you know, the cost for the one-day workshop is only $40,

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and ticket sales are going to pay for the facility,

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lunch for everyone there, and a shuttle service

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that will take you from the free parking lot to the facility

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where the workshop is taking place.

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Now, there’s only room for about 70 people,

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and so it’s important that you reserve your spot today

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if you want to be guaranteed a seat for

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what we plan to make a very interesting day of lectures, music, and possibly even some never

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before seen video of Terrence McKenna. And while Bruce will be presenting part of this workshop in

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other locations during the year, the January 28th event is the only one besides the Esalen workshop in June that I’ll be at.

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And while the Esalen workshop will take place over the June 15th through the 17th weekend,

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and while it also includes room and board for the weekend, it’s going to cost around

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$700 and the size of the group is going to be restricted to about 24 people.

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So if you want to be involved in an ongoing conversation that Bruce and I are

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having about what we see taking place in 2012 and beyond, well that January 28th event may be

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the best bet for you. Now I know that January is still a long way off, but on the planning side we

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need to make deposits and put other arrangements in place long before then, so in order to help a

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little in filling up our reservations early, I’m going to add a little something to the pot.

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Last January, during our latest move, I came across a few boxes of books that I’d forgotten

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about. They are copies of my out-of-print book, The Spirit of the Internet, which is now available

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in Kindle. So these paperback copies have more or less become collector’s items.

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At least for collectors of works by unknown authors, I should add.

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But in any event, they are something that isn’t readily available anymore.

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And so for everyone who gets her or his $40 deposit sent in by the 15th of December of this year,

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that’s a little over a month from now,

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sent in by the 15th of December of this year, that’s a little over a month from now,

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well, for everyone who is registered by that date, I’ll be giving them one of the few remaining copies of The Spirit of the Internet.

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And by the way, if you are interested in that book and you can’t afford to get to our workshop,

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well, you can still read it for free on the net, so I hope that no one is feeling left out here.

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This is just a little thank you for those who sign up early and help us out by doing so.

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And now, let’s get on with the show, as they say.

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Well, today we have a real treat, thanks to Joe Metheny, who, by the way, is the host of his own podcast,

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The G-Spot, among his many other activities.

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And thanks to Joe, we are now going to begin the first of several podcasts featuring the one and only Robert Anton Wilson. As you know, it’s quite difficult to

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get the rights to play one of Bob Wilson’s talks because most of them, including the one we’re

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about to hear, are all copyrighted. But the reason we get to hear this one and the others that will

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follow soon is because that Joe Metheny is the owner of the copyright, as well as being the producer of these talks.

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And what makes Joe’s permission for us to play these talks even more significant is the fact that they are still being sold under a distribution agreement that he has with the Original Falcon Press, whose website you will find at originalfalcon.com.

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And if you’ve never been to their site, you may want to check it out as it has quite a

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few other books, videos, and audio recordings that I’m quite sure you’re going to find very

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interesting.

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And I’ll post a link to their website along with the program notes for this podcast, which

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you can find via psychedelicsalon.us.

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So Joe and Falcon, thank you all ever so much.

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Now, the recording that I’m going to play for you right now is titled

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Robert Anton Wilson, The Lost Studio Session.

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And it came with an interesting story included that tells of how this talk was recorded in 1994,

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but then a series of events caused it to be lost until 2009 when Joe and a

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friend of his searched through hundreds of boxes in a storage facility before finding the master

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tape which we are about to listen to. And it’s a beauty. So where were you on that now mythic day

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when OJ Simpson took his historic ride in a white Bronco. I can actually still remember

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watching that event on television in a Florida cafe where I was having dinner that night.

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And now I know where Robert Anton Wilson also was on that very day. He was in a recording

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studio in Chicago, recording the thoughts that you and I are going to hear in just a

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moment. I’m not really sure how to introduce this talk, which actually is a series

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of eight short vigenettes about a wide range of topics. For example, who but Bob Wilson would be

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able to combine the idea of remaking the King Kong movie, but starring Rush Limbaugh as King Kong and

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Hillary Clinton in the Fay Wray role, and then go on to come up with a very novel idea about how popes

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are actually elected. And while there is a great deal of humor in Bob Wilson’s talks, well, to me,

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they also give us a hint of his true genius. So let’s join him now. You know, in Zen, they say

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enlightenment consists of recognizing everything as nothing special.

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I got a nice exegesis on that last weekend from Al Wong, the Tai Chi master.

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He said, nothing special, just another lousy sunrise.

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And if you can look at the whole world that way, nothing special, just another lousy sunrise,

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just more rain, just more food, you got to put your clothes on, you got

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to drive your car, nothing special. Then you’ve achieved Buddhist enlightenment, nothing special,

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just another lousy sunrise. I test myself by listening to Rush Limbaugh. If Rush Limbaugh

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seems like nothing special, I feel I’m getting close to Buddhahood.

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Unfortunately, Rush Limbaugh very seldom seems like nothing special.

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He seems like something obnoxious.

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And so I know I haven’t achieved Buddhahood yet,

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so I listen to him more often to try to develop the ideal Buddhist detachment.

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It’s sort of like hitting yourself with a knobby stick

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until you don’t feel anything.

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Then you know you’ve achieved detachment

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and lately uh his major passion is hillary rodham clinton who has a wonderful name by the way

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when when uh before bill ran for president she was hillary rodham which is a name that sounds

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like a railroad train going away. Hillary Rodham,

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Hillary Rodham, Hillary Rodham. And then when he ran for president because she was suspected of

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being a liberated woman, God forbid, she changed it to Hillary Clinton, which sounds like a train

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coming closer. Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton. Now that he’s elected, she’s

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become Hillary Rodham Clinton, which sounds like

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a train crossing a shaky bridge. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Rodham

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Clinton. But be that as it may, she’s a very cute lady and very bright, and I like her a lot. And

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I’m fascinated by the way Rush Limbaugh rages and rants against her. And I finally realized it’s not

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hatred. It’s not hatred.

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It’s frustrated love.

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This man is in love with her, but he doesn’t know how to express love.

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It’s the most tragic love affair since King Kong and Fay Wray.

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And you can see the physical resemblance between both of them.

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Rush has a lot in common with King Kong, and Hillary has a lot in common with Fay Wray.

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common with King Kong, and Hillary has a lot in common with Fay Wray. And the tragedy of King Kong is that he could never express his love. He tried to, but he didn’t know how. When you first

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see the film, you think he’s attacking Fay Wray. Then when you see it over a few hundred times,

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like most of us have, you realize Kong is always trying to express love, but he doesn’t know how.

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That’s because he’s lived his whole life behind a wall with a bunch of dinosaurs. And it’s the same with Rush Limbaugh.

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He grew up among Republicans, which is like living your whole life behind a wall with a bunch of

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dinosaurs. So when he tries to express love, it comes out sounding like a little boy’s spite.

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It sounds like hatred, but it’s really frustrated love.

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And who can blame him? I mean, don’t we all have a yen for Hillary? Anyway,

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one of these days they’re going to walk into the studio and find him there dead

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with French fries and Big Macs and chocolate malted all over the place that’s because he dislikes the ama he believes all their

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health rules are more liberal propaganda anything that interferes with his appetites or prejudices

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are liberal propaganda and oppose family values you know what family values means

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that’s hating the same people your grandfather hated. Anyway, they’re going to find him there with all this junk food dead,

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and somebody from the AMA is going to walk in and say,

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well, the junk food finally killed him.

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And then Robert Armstrong will walk in and say,

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no, it wasn’t the junk food.

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It was beauty that killed the beast.

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That’s one of my alternative endings for King Kong.

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Remake it with rush limbaugh and

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hillary clinton another alternative ending i have in mind is we do it uncensored this time and you

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can see king kong’s dong which you never saw her in the original most people have never thought

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much about how big king kong’s dong was even although it’s in the back of all of our minds

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if you stop to think about this, lots of jokes about it.

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We were just afraid to talk about it in public.

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We joke about it in private.

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It’s the great allegory of the 20th century.

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And, of course, what’s right out in the open, the most obvious thing,

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how could they do it, is the one thing we never talk about publicly.

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Could they do it at all?

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There’s a little hint of that in that question in

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the remake made by Dino De Laurentiis, where Jessica Lange says, be reasonable, Kong, it can’t

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work between the two of us. But a French critic named Raymond Bernard wrote an essay based on

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comparative anatomy and mythology

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and concluded that by comparative anatomy, King Kong should have 30 inches,

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given his size compared to the size of an ordinary gorilla.

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But he rejects that after demonstrating it on the grounds that Kong is not a creature in zoology,

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but mythologies and ethyphallic divinity,

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in the family of Pan, Dionysus, Osiris.

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All those old Mediterranean gods had gigantic wangs,

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which are seldom shown in popular books on the ancient world.

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You’ve got to get into really scholarly works to find out.

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They were all shown with dicks three times the average size.

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The ancient Mediterranean belief seems to have been

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the greater the mass of the willy, the greater the divinity in dwelling.

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And so King Kong, Bernard figures,

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must have had three times as much as we’d expect,

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which gives him around six feet.

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And so you can understand the panic in New York when King Kong is on the loose.

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A gigantic gorilla in heat is terrifying enough,

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but a gigantic gorilla in heat with a six-foot wang is absolutely terrifying.

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No wonder everybody’s screaming and running around.

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But, you know, this ancient Mediterranean belief about divinity

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and dwelling in the willy, and the bigger the willy, the more divinity,

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has made me wonder who

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had the who had who had the bigger dick king kong or god i decided king kong because if you read

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genesis god walks around the garden of eden without knocking over any of the trees king kong couldn’t

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walk through there without banging over half the things he ran into, he was so enormous. I figure God is about 18 feet compared to King Kong’s 60 feet.

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But getting back to ethyphallic divinities,

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as they’re called in the anthropology books,

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this, I think, underlies the Roman Catholic doctrine

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that a woman can’t be a priest.

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Protestants have women ministers in most of

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the Protestant churches now. There are women rabbis. There have been a couple of women

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Zen masters. All the other religions have moved with the times. But the Pope keeps insisting

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there can be no women priests because the priest represents Christ. And the most important thing about Christ was that he had a willy.

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Most people think the most important thing about Christ

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is that he represents love, forgiveness, endless compassion, noble ideas,

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but the secret teaching within the Vatican seems to be

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that the most important thing about Christ was that he had a willy,

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and an absolutely enormous one it must have been

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for him to be the chief of all the gods.

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And that’s probably why the election of the Pope is surrounded with such secrecy.

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Every time a Pope dies and they have to elect a new Pope,

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they go into this solemn conclave where all the doors are locked.

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Nobody knows what goes on in there.

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It’s all a big secret until some smoke comes out,

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which is the signal that they’ve made a choice.

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I think the way they do it is sort of like they cast the lead in a porno film.

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Everybody lays it on the table,

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and the pilgrim with the biggest musket wins.

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That goes back to this idea of the sanctity of the willy,

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which is so central to pagan, Mediterranean, and Catholic thinking.

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One of the things that fascinates me is the information explosion, as it’s called.

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There’s a French economist named Georges Andela

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who converted everything into binary units, which you can do on a computer

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and estimated how much information we had at the time of the birth of Christ which is a western

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imperialist way of looking at history dating everything from the birth of Christ but that’s

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the way he did it and he did provide us with some interesting figures. I call this the jumping Jesus phenomenon

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because Anderle didn’t name his unit of information,

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so I decided it needed a name,

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and units are named after important people,

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like the farad is named after Faraday,

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the watt after watt,

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the volt after volt, and so on.

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So I decided we should call the unit of information a Jesus.

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All the information we had in 1 AD, which is the first unit Anderle used, I call 1 Jesus.

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The question is, how long did it take to double? It took 1,500 years. And by 1,500 AD, we had two

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Jesus, or twice as much information units,

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twice as many bits in computer terminology, twice as many bytes, actually.

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Right after that, in one breeding generation, 17 years,

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Martin Luther hung his 95 theses on the door of the church.

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Wait a minute, that’s 95 theses, I beg your pardon.

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And we had the first successful Protestant revolution.

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And another breeding generation, 1534,

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Henry VIII started the second successful Protestant revolution.

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And the next 200 years represented continuous religious war in Europe.

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By 1723, Jonathan Swift made the very true observation,

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we have enough religion to hate one another,

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but not enough to love one another.

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Ask Salman Rushdie about that.

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Anyway, by 1750, information had doubled again,

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and most of the people, the intelligentsia anyway,

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in Europe were getting sick and tired of these religious wars.

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And Freemasonry was invented as a secret society to unite people

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in spite of their religious differences.

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And the French encyclopedists were writing books about history

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without giving religion any importance at all,

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discussing economics and other factors in history.

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And we had four Jesus.

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And in the next half a century,

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we had James Watt invented the steam engine,

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and we had the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,

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followed rapidly on the political level by the American Revolution,

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the French Revolution, the first Mexican Revolution,

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the Bolivar Revolutions in South America,

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the United Irish Uprising, which was the closest thing to a successful Irish Revolution until 1916,

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the whole world began turning over, and pretty soon the kings were reduced to just titular heads

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or abolished entirely. Capitalism replaced feudalism. Industrialism replaced agriculture.

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The whole world changed. That’s what happens when information doubles. Just like the Catholic

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Church, hegemony over the Western world collapsed after the doubling in 1500.

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And the next doubling only took 150 years, and by 1900 we were living in an entirely different world,

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a world people in 1750 couldn’t begin to imagine,

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except the wildest among them, like Condorcet, who predicted most of what happened.

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He’s always listed as the most unrealistic of the French revolutionaries

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because he thought it would all happen in the next 20 years.

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Well, it took 150 years, but most of his utopian predictions came

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true. By 1900, people were trying to get off the air, off the ground, and by 1905, the Wright

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brothers did it. In 1900, quantum mechanics began. We were the first step towards the atomic bomb.

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the atomic bomb. The next doubling only took 50 years, and by 1950, we had twice as much information as 1900, or 16 times as much as at the time of Christ. The information acceleration was itself

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accelerating. By 1950, it had doubled again to 32J, 32 Jesus, and we had had two world wars,

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the rise of fascism and the collapse, the rise of communism without its collapse yet,

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and the whole world had changed. By 1950, everybody accepted change as natural and normal,

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and most people were beginning to ask, what kind of changes can we expect next

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except for the conservatives who kept saying how can we turn things back to the way they were in

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granddad’s time but which you can never do once the genie is out of the bottle you can’t put it

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back in information intrinsically tends to produce more information it breeds faster than rabbits

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because if i have one unit of information and you have one unit of information

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and we talk to each other, pretty soon we’ve got four units of information, not two.

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Because they breed, they interact.

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Information sheds light on other information.

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That doubling between 1900 and 1950 was the first time in history

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that a human being could live through a doubling of information.

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All the others were longer than a human lifespan.

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That one was well within a human lifespan.

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The next doubling only took 10 years.

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And by 1960, information was up to 64, Jesus.

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And by then, everybody was expecting the change to accelerate even faster,

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and we had a worldwide youth revolution, which nobody understood at the time,

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and nobody fully understands even yet.

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By 1967, information had doubled again, and by 1973, it had doubled again.

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Now, just imagine that. The phrase doubling took 1,500 years.

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doubled again. Now, just imagine that. The first doubling took 1,500 years. Between 63 and 67 and 73 was only six years for a complete doubling of the information we had. They’re now starting to

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wonder how a scientist can keep up with the knowledge in her or his own field. Knowledge

00:23:02 ►

is doubling so fast. The last person to know all of mathematics was

00:23:07 ►

a Russian named Ostrovsky, who died in 1918. It’s now estimated that somebody who devotes

00:23:13 ►

their whole life to mathematics can learn maybe 5% of all the published theorems,

00:23:18 ►

and that figure will drop to 2% pretty soon. Every information is just,

00:23:22 ►

will drop to 2% pretty soon.

00:23:24 ►

Every information is just,

00:23:27 ►

well, to go back to my metaphor,

00:23:29 ►

multiplying like rabbits, so to speak,

00:23:31 ►

like rabbits in Australia.

00:23:33 ►

The latest estimate I’ve seen is by Dr. Jacques Vallee,

00:23:35 ►

who runs a computer company in Silicon Gulch.

00:23:38 ►

He says information is doubling every 18 months,

00:23:40 ►

or rather he said that in 1988.

00:23:44 ►

I assume that now, in 93, it’s doubling even

00:23:47 ►

faster every year, every six months, I don’t know, but the rate is increasing.

00:23:54 ►

Now every time information doubles, technology changes. Every time technology changes, society

00:24:00 ►

changes. Look how the steam engine changed society from an agricultural monarchist

00:24:05 ►

religious base to a democratic industrial secular base. Look at how the atomic bomb changed the

00:24:15 ►

world. We came to live with dread and horror of our own governments. We got to the point now where

00:24:20 ►

the world is gradually moving away from war. After 4,000 years of absolute enchantment,

00:24:25 ►

the excitement and fun of warfare,

00:24:28 ►

we’re suddenly afraid of it.

00:24:29 ►

We know it can kill us,

00:24:30 ►

even if we’re staying home and we’re old enough to be exempt.

00:24:35 ►

The bomb might drop on us,

00:24:36 ►

and so the world is moving toward peace.

00:24:39 ►

It didn’t surprise me at all

00:24:40 ►

when Rabin and Arafat Shukans on the White House lawn. Everybody’s beginning to realize

00:24:46 ►

how dangerous war is to us, to the whole biosphere. Now the IRA, it’s revealed, has been having secret

00:24:53 ►

negotiations with the British government. I was joking about that after Rabin and Arafat made

00:24:59 ►

their first step. I said, next will be the IRA and the British government. It happened even quicker than

00:25:05 ►

I expected, but that’s the way it is. The curious thing is that a mathematician named Gordon has

00:25:12 ►

published a theorem that as information flow increases, unpredictability increases. That is,

00:25:19 ►

the world is getting more and more unpredictable. I heard Gordon present that paper at the World Future Society in 1989,

00:25:27 ►

and then I flew to Europe for a lecture tour,

00:25:31 ►

and in Zurich people were arguing

00:25:32 ►

about when the Berlin Wall would come down,

00:25:36 ►

and they said within 10 years.

00:25:38 ►

By the time I got to Cologne in Germany,

00:25:40 ►

people were saying within five years.

00:25:43 ►

By the time I got to Berlin,

00:25:44 ►

people were saying it’s going to come down in the next one or two years. By the time I got to Berlin, people were saying,

00:25:45 ►

it’s going to come down in the next one or two years.

00:25:47 ►

Things are really changing fast.

00:25:49 ►

The day after I left Berlin, the wall came down.

00:25:52 ►

I just missed it.

00:25:53 ►

But I was lucky.

00:25:54 ►

A friend in Berlin sent me five pieces of the Berlin Wall as souvenirs

00:25:58 ►

to compensate me for missing, seeing it being torn down.

00:26:03 ►

I got the five pieces of the Berlin Wall in front of my statue of the Buddha

00:26:07 ►

to remind me of the Buddha’s teaching.

00:26:11 ►

All things are impermanent.

00:26:12 ►

All lines are impermanent.

00:26:15 ►

All separations are impermanent.

00:26:17 ►

Every border in Europe or anywhere in the world,

00:26:21 ►

but I like to use Europe as an example because there are so many borders there

00:26:25 ►

which are disappearing now with the European Parliament and the movement toward a single

00:26:30 ►

currency. Every border in Europe represents a place where two gangs of domesticated primates

00:26:36 ►

fought until they were exhausted and drew a new line on a map. Wild primates mark their territories

00:26:42 ►

with excretions. Domesticated primates mark their territories with excretions of ink on paper,

00:26:49 ►

which are known as treaties or maps that result from the treaties.

00:26:55 ►

And all these borders, all these treaties, they’re all breaking down.

00:26:59 ►

We saw a tremendous wave of hysteria in this country against NAFTA,

00:27:03 ►

but NAFTA is just part of the general tendency

00:27:05 ►

for all the borders to come down one by one. Perot was raving that there were six Mexicans

00:27:11 ►

following him around, planning to shoot him. I’m sure he thought they had mustaches, and I don’t

00:27:16 ►

know why he didn’t say so. I think I know how Perot’s mind works, and he could visualize these six mexicans they all had not only mustaches but big black

00:27:26 ►

bristly mustaches and they all talked like the bandits and who pretended to be federales at the

00:27:34 ►

end of treasure of the sierra madre we don’t gotta show you no stinking bodges that’s the kind of

00:27:41 ►

hysteria among the people who can’t understand why all the borders are coming

00:27:45 ►

down everywhere but that is the transformation the world is going through due to the information

00:27:52 ►

explosion which is happening faster all the time there’s a doubling of information that i was

00:27:59 ►

talking about leading to unpredictability. This unpredictability in mathematics,

00:28:05 ►

it’s technically known as chaos,

00:28:07 ►

and that’s one of the fastest growing fields of math,

00:28:11 ►

is chaos theory,

00:28:12 ►

which has been applied to virtually every science,

00:28:16 ►

from economics to the traffic patterns

00:28:18 ►

in and out of Los Angeles,

00:28:20 ►

and biology and even to physics.

00:28:24 ►

The fascinating thing about chaos theory is that I

00:28:27 ►

was one of the pioneers without even knowing it. Back in 1957, two friends of mine named Malaclips

00:28:35 ►

the Younger and Ho Chi Zen were in a bowling alley in Yorba Linda, the birthplace of Richard Nixon,

00:28:43 ►

the birthplace of Richard Nixon,

00:28:48 ►

and they were arguing about why there’s so much chaos in the world.

00:28:51 ►

And according to Ho Chi Zan,

00:28:53 ►

a chimpanzee walked in and said,

00:28:57 ►

read Bullfinch, all this chaos is due to Ares,

00:29:01 ►

and then disappeared in a puff of green smoke.

00:29:04 ►

According to Malaclips, they figured it out themselves, and Ho Chi Zen just

00:29:05 ►

invented the miraculous talking chimpanzee to make this religion more attractive to the gullible.

00:29:11 ►

So they each excommunicated each other. Maleklips became the head of the discordian orthodoxy,

00:29:18 ►

and Omar Ho Chi Zen became the head of the lunatic fringe. And as soon as I learned about this religion, I excommunicated both of them,

00:29:27 ►

and we were all popes of three different factions of the Discordian society,

00:29:32 ►

which is true to the spirit of Maleklips’ original revelation,

00:29:37 ►

we Discordians must stick apart.

00:29:40 ►

We used to print cards that said,

00:29:42 ►

the bearer of this card is a genuine and authorized pope,

00:29:45 ►

so please treat him right, good forever, guaranteed by the House of Apostles of Aris,

00:29:51 ►

on the site of the beautiful future San Andreas Canyon, San Francisco.

00:29:56 ►

Well, that card has been reprinted quite a bit.

00:29:59 ►

It’s in Malaclips’ Magnum Opiate, the Principia Discordia,

00:30:04 ►

How I Found Goddess and What i did to her after i found

00:30:07 ►

her it’s also in the novel illuminatus by bob shay and me and it’s even in a serious sociological

00:30:15 ►

study called drawing down the moon goddess worship in america by margot adler a sociologist who’s the granddaughter of Alfred Adler, one of the three founders of modern depth psychology.

00:30:28 ►

She treats the Aresian Discordian revelation

00:30:32 ►

as a serious part of the pagan revival and prints the card.

00:30:36 ►

So anybody who wants to be a pope can just cut the card out of one of those books

00:30:40 ►

and have your own pope card.

00:30:42 ►

However, if you don’t think you need credentials,

00:30:44 ►

you become a

00:30:45 ►

pope as soon as you hear me speak about this, because everybody who hears my voice is immediately

00:30:49 ►

pontificated. This started when I was in Ireland. I lived in Ireland for six years, and at that time

00:30:57 ►

the pope, the one in Rome, the guy who thinks he’s the only pope, he announced that bishops could give indulgences over television.

00:31:11 ►

And Dublin has the most argumentative and erudite atheists in the whole world,

00:31:13 ►

because they were all educated by Jesuits.

00:31:17 ►

So they started writing mocking letters to the Irish Times,

00:31:20 ►

asking theological questions like,

00:31:26 ►

if you haven’t paid your TV license, you see in Ireland as well as England,

00:31:28 ►

you have to pay a license for your TV.

00:31:31 ►

If you haven’t paid your TV license,

00:31:32 ►

when the bishop gives the indulgence,

00:31:34 ►

do you get the indulgence or is it canceled because your license isn’t valid?

00:31:37 ►

Or an even tougher one,

00:31:38 ►

if you make a videotape of it and play it over and over,

00:31:41 ►

do you get perpetual indulgence?

00:31:43 ►

Well, while the Jesuits who were wrestling with those conundrums, I got the idea, well, if they can give indulgences over

00:31:50 ►

TV, I can give pontifications. So every time I appeared on TV, I announced that everybody

00:31:55 ►

listening to me was a Discordian Pope, absolutely infallible, has the right to excommunicate all

00:32:01 ►

the other Discordian Popes. and this vastly increased our membership handing out

00:32:06 ►

cards we only had about 10 000 popes since i’ve started doing pontifications on radio and tv

00:32:13 ►

we’ve got close to 20 million popes at least now we’re not going to stop until every man woman and

00:32:19 ►

child on this planet is an authentic discordian pope and then let’s start then let’s see how that

00:32:25 ►

old queen in the vatican reacts when he’s only one among with all population of the earth we’re all

00:32:32 ►

popes together the discordian revelation which the miraculous talking chimpanzee revealed or

00:32:40 ►

which malaclips and home invented themselves comes from Bullfinch or from Hesiod.

00:32:47 ►

This is the doctrine of the original snub

00:32:50 ►

and it explains all the chaos in the world

00:32:52 ►

better than anything in mathematical chaos theory.

00:32:55 ►

Or you can consider it an allegory of mathematical chaos theory.

00:33:00 ►

They were having a party on Olympus

00:33:02 ►

and they didn’t invite Eris

00:33:03 ►

because she was known as the goddess of chaos, confusion, discord, bureaucracy, and international relations.

00:33:11 ►

Those are the five different stages of chaos.

00:33:14 ►

You see, you start out with simple chaos, and then people start arguing about how to organize it, which leads to confusion.

00:33:21 ►

Then they start battling each other, which creates discord.

00:33:25 ►

leads to confusion. Then they start battling each other, which creates discord. Then they form a bureaucracy to control the chaos, and then they start interfering with other countries, which

00:33:29 ►

makes for international relations. Those are the five heights of chaos. This is the law of fives,

00:33:35 ►

which is why the Pentagon, which is always messing with other people’s politics,

00:33:39 ►

represents international relations of the highest form of chaos, and it’s a five-sided building.

00:33:46 ►

We call the Joint Chiefs of Staff the Knights of the Five-Sided Castle,

00:33:51 ►

or the Order of Keote.

00:33:53 ►

They are all sacred Discordian saints

00:33:55 ►

because they’ve done more to make the world chaotic in the last 50 years

00:33:58 ►

than all the other forces put together.

00:34:01 ►

Anyway, not being invited to the party, Eurice made him an apple of beautiful gold,

00:34:10 ►

some say metallic gold, the greatest ore to be found in Cyprus. Others claim it was Macapoco gold,

00:34:19 ►

but be that as it may, she wrote on the apple, Kallisti, which is Greek for to the prettiest one,

00:34:25 ►

and threw it into the party.

00:34:27 ►

And immediately three of the goddesses claimed it,

00:34:30 ►

Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena.

00:34:33 ►

Hermes claimed it too.

00:34:34 ►

You know about Hermes.

00:34:36 ►

But anyway,

00:34:38 ►

it led to such a spat that Zeus appointed a mortal named Paris

00:34:41 ►

and let him choose who was the prettiest one.

00:34:46 ►

And they all tried to bribe him. Hera offered him wealth. Athena offered him wisdom. And Aphrodite, who understood men

00:34:54 ►

better than either of those, offered him Helen, the wife of Menelaus. He grabbed Helen and took

00:35:00 ►

off for Troy. Menelaus got royally pissed off, and that was the beginning of international relations.

00:35:06 ►

He got all the other Greek princes together.

00:35:08 ►

They formed an army, and they attacked Troy.

00:35:10 ►

And we’ve been involved in chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy,

00:35:14 ►

and international relations ever since just because of the original snub.

00:35:19 ►

That’s the ontological part of Discordian.

00:35:24 ►

That’s the esoteric or ontological part that anybody can

00:35:27 ►

understand. The exoteric part, the mysterious part, is based on the seer distant affirmation,

00:35:34 ►

which was revealed by Saint Gulik the St all ideas are true in some sense,

00:35:48 ►

false in some sense,

00:35:49 ►

meaningless in some sense,

00:35:51 ►

true and false in some sense,

00:35:54 ►

true and meaningless in some sense,

00:35:56 ►

false and meaningless in some sense,

00:35:58 ►

and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

00:36:02 ►

And you will achieve supreme enlightenment.

00:36:06 ►

If you repeat this 666 times, you will achieve absolute supreme enlightenment in some sense. Well, the Discordian

00:36:15 ►

religion, as I say, is spread and spread. We’ve got millions and millions of popes, and we’re

00:36:20 ►

getting mentioned more and more often. The sacred discordion number 23 pops up in more and more screenplays.

00:36:26 ►

You see it on the covers of

00:36:28 ►

rock albums. It appears in rock

00:36:29 ►

songs. I think

00:36:32 ►

we’re the world’s fastest growing religion

00:36:34 ►

and we still remain absolutely

00:36:35 ►

esoteric because nobody has ever heard of

00:36:38 ►

us in officialdom

00:36:40 ►

anyway. Thank God. If they ever hear

00:36:42 ►

of us, they’ll probably decide we’re a cult.

00:36:44 ►

And you know what happens to cults in this country? Look at the Branch Davidians.

00:36:48 ►

So it’s best they don’t hear about us.

00:36:53 ►

Out of all this chaos we’re going through, or the rapid changes the world is being

00:36:59 ►

mutated through, Terence McKenna, for instance, has calculated this rate of information and novelty

00:37:07 ►

is going to, in 2012, reach the point where information is doubling every day, and then by

00:37:14 ►

mid-summer it’s doubling every hour, and in December it’ll be doubling every second, and then every

00:37:19 ►

millionth of a second, at which point we encounter a transcendental object and history ends.

00:37:25 ►

I don’t know what the hell that last part means.

00:37:27 ►

Let Terence explain that himself.

00:37:30 ►

In all this chaos and rapid change,

00:37:33 ►

I think I can see certain trajectories emerging.

00:37:38 ►

Human lifespan in ancient Rome was about 30 years.

00:37:41 ►

It didn’t change much through most of history. With all the doublings

00:37:46 ►

of knowledge up to 1750, the average lifespan of the working class was still less than 30 years,

00:37:54 ►

and the aristocrats didn’t live much longer. 37 years was average. In 19th century England,

00:38:03 ►

Engels studied the statistics, and in his book, The Condition of the Working Class century England, Engels studied the statistics,

00:38:06 ►

and in his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England,

00:38:09 ►

found that the average working class family only survived 37 years.

00:38:15 ►

By 1900, the insurance companies were keeping records,

00:38:18 ►

and life expectancy for all classes in the industrial democracies was 50 years.

00:38:28 ►

By the Second World War, it was up to 60 years.

00:38:37 ►

It was 73 years when I started writing about life extension in the 70s. Now it’s up to 78 years.

00:38:47 ►

George Burns is 97 and has taken a booking to appear at a Las Vegas nightclub on his 100th birthday.

00:38:50 ►

And he was asked if he’s sure that that’ll come and that’ll work out.

00:38:52 ►

And he says, well, if they’re still there, I’ll be ready.

00:38:58 ►

And meanwhile, there’s more research on the immune system and other things connected with longevity right now than there has ever been.

00:39:03 ►

There are more scientists alive than there has ever been. There are more scientists alive than there has ever been.

00:39:07 ►

Most people in longevity research, and I’ve interviewed a lot of them,

00:39:12 ►

expect a major breakthrough sometime in the next decade or so,

00:39:16 ►

the next couple of decades.

00:39:18 ►

A human lifespan will not be calculated in decades, but in centuries.

00:39:22 ►

Nobody knows how many centuries.

00:39:24 ►

This is still a

00:39:25 ►

wide open field you get profit you get predictions like we can extend human lifespan to 400 years we

00:39:31 ►

can extend it to 700 years uh some of the conservatives say 140 years we just don’t know

00:39:38 ►

but the research that’s going on indicates that most people are going to live a lot longer than they expect, especially since war is getting phased out as a method of resolving conflicts.

00:39:51 ►

Along with that, Clinton is now pushing President Clinton,

00:39:56 ►

or Slick Willie, as Rush Limbaugh prefers to call him.

00:40:02 ►

Clinton is the only president in my lifetime that I would like to have for dinner because I could

00:40:06 ►

carry on an intelligent conversation with him he tries to hide his intelligence as much as possible

00:40:12 ►

you’ve got to do that in American politics but I heard him say counterintuitive one time in his

00:40:17 ►

speech anybody who can use the word counterintuitive and knows what it means is a Rhodes

00:40:22 ►

scholar which as a matter of fact, he is.

00:40:27 ►

Of course, he’s got to hide it as much as possible.

00:40:31 ►

In the early days of this republic, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, they were all intellectuals.

00:40:33 ►

This country elected intellectuals.

00:40:35 ►

Then we brought in a lot of cheap labor,

00:40:38 ►

and they wanted to be represented by people of their own intellectual level,

00:40:42 ►

and it got to the point that by the time of Ronald Reagan,

00:40:46 ►

you had to act like an idiot to get elected

00:40:48 ►

because anybody with any brains was regarded with extreme suspicion.

00:40:52 ►

If you want to know why Reagan got the biggest majority

00:40:56 ►

in American political history,

00:40:59 ►

just think there’s nobody you can imagine

00:41:01 ►

who felt intellectually inferior to Ronald Reagan.

00:41:04 ►

You could go to the home for the feeble-minded and ask them,

00:41:07 ►

what do you think of Ronald Reagan?

00:41:08 ►

And they’d say, oh, we love him.

00:41:09 ►

He’s a regular fellow, just like us.

00:41:12 ►

And I think George Bush was pretty smart.

00:41:16 ►

No morals, but a lot of brains.

00:41:18 ►

But he did his best to hide his brains.

00:41:19 ►

They all do.

00:41:21 ►

But Clinton, as I was saying before that digression,

00:41:25 ►

has proposed a joint Russian-American space station,

00:41:28 ►

which is something I’ve been urging since even before the Cold War ended.

00:41:32 ►

I thought it would be a good way to end the Cold War

00:41:34 ►

if we started cooperating in space.

00:41:37 ►

It’s obvious that space colonies are going to be built.

00:41:41 ►

Harry Stein, the engineer, has calculated

00:41:44 ►

there are 10 to the 100th power industrial processes

00:41:48 ►

that can be done cheaper in space.

00:41:50 ►

That means everything can be 10 to the 100th power cheaper than it is now.

00:41:55 ►

People are going to be moving into space to take advantage of that.

00:41:58 ►

Most of our communication technology is in space already.

00:42:02 ►

Most people don’t realize every time you turn on the television,

00:42:01 ►

is in space already.

00:42:03 ►

Most people don’t realize every time you turn on the television,

00:42:05 ►

if you flip, if you go channel surfing,

00:42:08 ►

half of what you look at

00:42:10 ►

is coming to you from outer space

00:42:11 ►

by way of satellites.

00:42:13 ►

A heavy industry will be following

00:42:15 ►

communication industry into space

00:42:17 ►

to take advantage of all the things

00:42:18 ►

that can be done cheaper out there.

00:42:21 ►

Once you’ve got a lot of engineers out there,

00:42:22 ►

it’s going to be like prison.

00:42:24 ►

No women. They’re going to get horny and angry and so on engineers out there, it’s going to be like prison. No women.

00:42:25 ►

They’re going to get horny and angry and so on, so they’re going to have to be allowed to bring

00:42:29 ►

their families, and that means they’ll have to be schools. And then they’ll want, of course,

00:42:34 ►

their own food. They’ll have groceries, supermarkets, and then they’ll want theaters and

00:42:39 ►

circuses. Pretty soon everybody will be going into space. Some just temporarily, like circuses on

00:42:47 ►

their worldwide tours will include a visit to the L5 space colony, or L6, or whatever, or Proxmire.

00:42:55 ►

I’m all in favor of having a space station named Proxmire after the guy who has opposed space

00:43:00 ►

research more vigorously than anybody else. I want people wandering around 25 years

00:43:06 ►

from now saying, why is this place called

00:43:07 ►

Proxmire? And then people will tell them about

00:43:09 ►

Senator Proxmire and they’ll all have a good

00:43:11 ►

laugh. Meanwhile

00:43:13 ►

all this longevity research

00:43:16 ►

is going on. You project forward

00:43:18 ►

the general trajectory of where things

00:43:19 ►

are going and the acceleration.

00:43:22 ►

We’re going to have people,

00:43:23 ►

maybe not this generation or the next, we’re going to have people, maybe not this generation or the next,

00:43:25 ►

we’re going to have people living hundreds of years, and breakthroughs and propulsion systems

00:43:33 ►

mean we’re moving into a Star Trek world. People will be moving all over the galaxy,

00:43:38 ►

eventually out of the galaxy, and life extension will go on. Research in that will not suddenly reach a limit.

00:43:46 ►

We never do reach limits.

00:43:48 ►

That’s one of the big fallacies of our time is the idea of limits.

00:43:51 ►

There are no limits.

00:43:53 ►

So eventually we are graduating from being terrestrial mortals to becoming cosmic immortals.

00:43:59 ►

We are becoming the gods that we imagined a long time ago.

00:44:04 ►

I think that’s where evolution has been pointing.

00:44:07 ►

As Nietzsche said, what is man?

00:44:10 ►

A bridge between the ape and the superman.

00:44:13 ►

A bridge over an abyss.

00:44:16 ►

I think we’ve passed over the abyss.

00:44:18 ►

Getting through the Hitler and Stalin eras and Auschwitz and Hiroshima and all those horrors.

00:44:26 ►

We’ve gone over the abyss,

00:44:28 ►

and now we are graduating into cosmic immortals,

00:44:32 ►

as startling as it sounds.

00:44:35 ►

That wasn’t very funny, was it?

00:44:37 ►

But think about it.

00:44:40 ►

Many people always expect me to say something about the Illuminati

00:44:44 ►

since I first became famous or infamous for a novel about the Illuminati I wrote with Bob Shea.

00:44:52 ►

And then to compound my folly, I wrote a few more novels about the Illuminati on my own.

00:44:58 ►

The Illuminati was a secret society of the 18th century about which everybody disagrees because it was secret, and it was so secretive

00:45:06 ►

that nobody really can agree about what the secret was. Thomas Jefferson described them as

00:45:12 ►

enthusiastic philanthropists, which sounds like high praise until you know that in the 18th

00:45:19 ►

century enthusiastic meant half crazy. Halfzy philanthropists is what Jefferson was calling

00:45:26 ►

them. They’ve been accused of being atheists, Kabbalistic magicians, sorcerers, Satanists,

00:45:34 ►

communists, anarchists, and just Jeffersonian Republicans. Jefferson also said that if they

00:45:42 ►

had lived in America instead of Europe, they wouldn’t have been a secret society

00:45:46 ►

they could have propounded all of their ideas openly

00:45:49 ►

protected by the First Amendment

00:45:50 ►

they only had to be a secret society

00:45:53 ►

because no place in Europe had a First Amendment then

00:45:56 ►

whether the Illuminati still exists or not

00:46:00 ►

is one of the questions I leave open in my books

00:46:02 ►

and I’m not going to close it here

00:46:04 ►

let people figure that out for themselves.

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But then what made them fascinating was they were a secret society

00:46:10 ►

within a secret society, an enigma inside a riddle,

00:46:15 ►

to paraphrase Winston Smith or Winston Churchill

00:46:18 ►

or one of those Winston guys.

00:46:23 ►

The Illuminati were all recruited from Masonic lodges. It was a secret society within

00:46:28 ►

Masonry. This technique was copied in the 19th century by the Molly Maguires, which was an Irish

00:46:37 ►

terrorist group, sort of forerunners of the IRA, who were recruited within the ancient order of

00:46:43 ►

Hibernians, which was a secret society. Now the ancient order of Hibernians, which was a secret society.

00:46:46 ►

Now, the ancient order of Hibernians, like the Masons,

00:46:49 ►

seems to be devoted chiefly to benevolent activities

00:46:53 ►

and advancing one another’s business interests.

00:46:57 ►

The Masons were advancing the interests of a certain class.

00:47:03 ►

They were the revolutionary class in the 18th century, the bourgeoisie who

00:47:07 ►

wanted to overthrow feudalism. Now they’re the conservative class, the bourgeoisie who’s terrified

00:47:13 ►

of further revolutions, which explains why the typical 18th century Freemason was somebody like

00:47:19 ►

Jefferson, Voltaire, Ben Franklin, Mozart all avant-garde revolutionary thinkers

00:47:27 ►

and the typical Freemasons of today

00:47:30 ►

are people like J. Edgar Hoover

00:47:31 ►

and the Pei Due crowd in Italy

00:47:36 ►

who I’ll come to in a minute

00:47:38 ►

the Molly Maguires

00:47:41 ►

worked within the ancient order of Hibernians

00:47:44 ►

which was a secret society of no nefarious character,

00:47:48 ►

which was just devoted to helping the Irish get established in this country

00:47:52 ►

against all the Anglo prejudice against the Irish.

00:47:55 ►

And they gradually took over a lot of political machines,

00:47:58 ►

and some of them they still run, especially in Boston and Chicago.

00:48:02 ►

especially in Boston and Chicago.

00:48:08 ►

Within the ancient order of Hibernians was the Molly Maguires, a terrorist outfit

00:48:10 ►

devoted to driving the English out of Ireland

00:48:12 ►

by any means necessary.

00:48:15 ►

They were just copying the Illuminati,

00:48:17 ►

a secret society within a secret society.

00:48:20 ►

There’s a good film about the Molly Maguires

00:48:22 ►

and it stars Sean Connery.

00:48:24 ►

You ought to look for it at your video store.

00:48:27 ►

In Italy in the 1970s, another secret society was formed within a secret society.

00:48:35 ►

That was Pei Due.

00:48:37 ►

Pei Due was formed within the Grand Orient Lodge of Egyptian Freemasonry,

00:48:43 ►

which was founded by the mysterious Count Cagliostro,

00:48:47 ►

a chap who appeared in France in the 1880s

00:48:53 ►

and claimed to be 2,000 years old,

00:48:55 ►

performed the transmutation of metals turned lead into gold

00:48:59 ►

in plain sight of the Archbishop of Rouen,

00:49:02 ►

and healed many sick people just by touching them.

00:49:09 ►

There are various theories about how Cagliostro’s magic worked. Faith healing does work if you build

00:49:15 ►

up enough enthusiasm, or it works a large part of the time. As for transmuting lead into gold,

00:49:21 ►

any stage magician can do that. It just depends on distracting

00:49:25 ►

the attention of

00:49:27 ►

the audience. Anyway,

00:49:30 ►

Cagliostro and

00:49:31 ►

Orléans founded

00:49:33 ►

the Grand Orient Lodge of

00:49:35 ►

Egyptian Freemasonry, which

00:49:37 ►

has become more

00:49:39 ►

in which in the 19th century was involved

00:49:42 ►

in many democratic

00:49:43 ►

revolutions against monarchy and feudalism.

00:49:48 ►

By the 1970s in Italy, the Grand Orient Lodge had settled down to being more or less conservative,

00:49:56 ►

and within it, Licio Gelli formed a secret society called Paidue,

00:50:01 ►

a secret society within a secret society, just like the Illuminati.

00:50:06 ►

Paidue managed to infiltrate over 950 of their agents into the Italian government.

00:50:13 ►

The government fell when this was revealed in the newspapers.

00:50:17 ►

The first crack was when a member of Paidue quit and put out a journal called Servitore Politico, pardon my lousy Italian,

00:50:29 ►

and in it he described a lot of the crooked deals Pei Due was doing. He was shot down by

00:50:35 ►

machine gun fire in Rome right after that came out. Pope John Paul ordered an investigation of

00:50:44 ►

the Vatican Bank and its connections with Pei Dewey,

00:50:47 ►

and he was taken suddenly dead of a heart attack right after that.

00:50:51 ►

Funny coincidence.

00:50:53 ►

Pei Dewey turned out to be operating over 200 fictitious banks along with some real banks.

00:50:59 ►

The fictitious banks, which the Italian investigating magistrates called ghost banks,

00:51:04 ►

a name I like. It sounds like

00:51:06 ►

it comes right out of one of my novels. The ghost banks existed only on paper, but they were used

00:51:11 ►

for laundering cocaine money from South America because Pei Dewei had worked out an alliance with

00:51:17 ►

the mafia and the CIA as for the laundering of cocaine money to support the CIA’s favorite dictators in South America.

00:51:26 ►

The money went through the World Finance Company in Miami,

00:51:30 ►

which was staffed by eight former CIA agents.

00:51:34 ►

A former CIA agent can be somebody who’s left the agency, although that’s very rare.

00:51:40 ►

Usually a former CIA agent is somebody who’s still working for the CIA,

00:51:44 ►

but he’s not on the

00:51:45 ►

books anymore. He’s getting paid through a numbered Swiss bank account. Anyway, the World Finance

00:51:51 ►

Corporation took all this cocaine money and sent it to the Cisalpine Bank in the Bahamas, which was

00:51:56 ►

run by Archbishop Marchinkas, the manager of the Vatican Bank, and Roberto Calvi, the president of Banco Ambrosiano. Calvi was found hanging from a bridge

00:52:07 ►

in London on June 18, 1982, and they’re still arguing about whether that was murder or suicide.

00:52:15 ►

He was wanted for laundering drug money and embezzling $55 million. Archbishop Marchinkas

00:52:23 ►

was kicked out of the Vatican Bank and made mayor of Vatican City,

00:52:26 ►

and then as the scandal mounted, he was kicked out of there too, and he’s back in Cicero, Illinois.

00:52:32 ►

The third big kingpin in this outfit was Michele Sindona, a mafia lawyer,

00:52:38 ►

who was running quite a few imaginary banks too, along with the Franklin National Bank in the United States,

00:52:45 ►

which turned out to be another drug laundering operation. He was convicted in New York of 55

00:52:51 ►

counts of stock and currency fraud. And then they extradited him to Italy, where he was convicted

00:52:58 ►

of murdering a bank examiner. He was about to go on trial for conspiring with Calvi and Gelli to overthrow the government and install a new fascist government, and he was poisoned in his cell.

00:53:12 ►

Most of the Pei Dei activities were connected with the Swiss banks run by the Grande Loge Alpina, which is the Swiss branch of the Grand Orient Lodge.

00:53:23 ►

which is the Swiss branch of the Grand Orient Lodge.

00:53:26 ►

The Grand Loge Alpina are the people Harold Wilson,

00:53:31 ►

the English Prime Minister, called the Gnomes of Zurich.

00:53:34 ►

Everybody else pronounces that Gnomes,

00:53:36 ►

but Harold Wilson believed the G should be pronounced.

00:53:38 ►

He said the Gnomes of Zurich, these Swiss bankers who all belong to the Grand Loge Alpina,

00:53:43 ►

these Swiss bankers control Europe

00:53:45 ►

by deciding who they’re going to lend money to.

00:53:47 ►

If a government can’t borrow money from them,

00:53:49 ►

it can’t do what it wants to do.

00:53:51 ►

So you can only do,

00:53:52 ►

a government, according to Harold Wilson,

00:53:54 ►

can only do what the bankers want to let it do.

00:53:57 ►

So the real power is in the hands of the bankers.

00:53:59 ►

Other people have said that before Harold Wilson,

00:54:02 ►

but he specifically picked out the Grand Loge Alpina,

00:54:05 ►

which it turns out not only was intimately involved with the pay-do-way banks and false banks

00:54:11 ►

in Italy and Latin America, but with the Priory of Sion in France, which is a group of French

00:54:19 ►

aristocrats who have allowed books about them to be published with the wildest imaginable stories.

00:54:27 ►

Gerard de Cèdre wrote a book called La Rasse Fabuleuse, claiming the members of the Priory of

00:54:32 ►

Sion are descended from intermarriages between the tribe of Benjamin in ancient Israel and

00:54:39 ►

extraterrestrials from Sirius. Another book by Bajent, Lincoln, and Lee claims that the members are descended

00:54:46 ►

from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, who was secretly married and had a son who became the

00:54:51 ►

founder of the Merovingian dynasty in France. And they have long genealogy showing a lot of

00:54:57 ►

interesting people are descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, including Prince Bernhard of the

00:55:03 ►

Netherlands, who founded the Bilderbergers,

00:55:05 ►

the group of financiers who meet every year very secretly and appear prominently in all

00:55:09 ►

conspiracy theories, and Otto von Habsburg, the president of the Society for the United

00:55:16 ►

States of Europe, which has done so much to unify Europe, who is also, by the way, a Knight

00:55:21 ►

of Malta.

00:55:22 ►

The Knights of Malta are an honorary group.

00:55:26 ►

The Vatican has given special privileges to many anti-Catholic historians

00:55:35 ►

who regard the Knights of Malta as the Pope’s secret police.

00:55:39 ►

There was one book claimed the Knights of Malta and the CIA

00:55:42 ►

work together continually in South America to maintain

00:55:46 ►

the landlords and the church in power and kill off all the peasants who object. Licio Gelli,

00:55:52 ►

in fact, the founder of Pei Due, was providing most of the ex-Nazis with false identity papers

00:55:59 ►

and getting them jobs with the death squads in Central America. So when people ask me if the Illuminati still exist, I don’t know,

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but things a lot like the Illuminati still exist, that’s for sure.

00:56:11 ►

That’s for damn sure.

00:56:14 ►

One of the great things about the Discordian revelation

00:56:17 ►

that every man, woman, and child on the planet is a fully endowed pope,

00:56:22 ►

as infallible as anybody else,

00:56:25 ►

has been that we’ve encouraged the growth of other religions.

00:56:29 ►

For instance, the John Dillinger Died for You Society,

00:56:32 ►

founded by our Pope Horace Naismith.

00:56:37 ►

Some claim he’s the illegitimate son of John Dillinger.

00:56:40 ►

He won’t affirm or deny.

00:56:43 ►

But the John Dillinger, he won’t affirm or deny, but the John Dillinger Died for You Society holds that Dillinger is the patron saint of our age

00:56:51 ►

because he, even during the Depression, he didn’t look for a government handout.

00:56:58 ►

He was self-reliant.

00:56:59 ►

He went out and got money his own way, a direct, honest way.

00:57:03 ►

And he left behind many wise sayings, such as never trust a district attorney’s deal or an automatic pistol,

00:57:10 ►

or you can get more with a simple prayer and a Thompson submachine gun than you can get with a simple prayer alone.

00:57:18 ►

Or his favorite saying, which he told to the essence of Buddhism,

00:57:22 ►

and he told this to many bank presidents, vice presidents,

00:57:25 ►

tellers, bank employees, lie down on the floor and keep calm. That really does contain all the

00:57:32 ►

wisdom of the Orient, if you think about it. Lie down on the floor and keep calm.

00:57:37 ►

And so the John Dillinger Died for You Society has unfortunately been fractured by disputes after a

00:57:43 ►

book came out, Dillinger Dead or Alive,

00:57:45 ►

which claimed the FBI shot the wrong guy and was so embarrassed they covered it up and gave up the

00:57:51 ►

hunt for Dillinger, claiming they had killed him. And he’s still alive in California, in Los Angeles,

00:57:56 ►

actually. So now the John Dillinger Died for You Society has the symbolic branch that says he

00:58:02 ►

symbolically died for us in that alley,

00:58:05 ►

even if he’s physically alive in Los Angeles.

00:58:07 ►

And the revisionists who say he did die, but he has risen.

00:58:11 ►

And that’s why he’s living in Los Angeles.

00:58:13 ►

They seem to regard Los Angeles as heaven,

00:58:16 ►

which is what it looks like your first day there.

00:58:18 ►

After you’ve been there a few months, you find out it’s more like hell.

00:58:27 ►

find out it’s more like hell. But another of our discordian off shots is the Church of Fred Mertz, Bodhisattva, which is based on the teaching that if you look at I Love Lucy

00:58:35 ►

reruns in an altered state of consciousness, and how you get into an altered state of consciousness

00:58:40 ►

is entirely up to you. The church does not take a stand on that.

00:58:48 ►

But if you’re in the right state of consciousness, you’ll see that Fred Mertz is speaking all the great mystic teachings of the ages. He seems to say nothing but the stupidest possible remarks.

00:58:55 ►

But if you’re in the right state of consciousness, everything he says seems incredibly profound.

00:58:59 ►

Like, huh? There was a Zen master who answered all questions by saying, quats? And Fred,

00:59:06 ►

they response to most things by saying, huh? Well, if you meditate on that, huh,

00:59:09 ►

it has as much meaning as quats, or the mu in the other famous Zen koan. And then Fred says

00:59:17 ►

things like, I don’t understand women at all, sort of the confession of the intellectual bankruptcy of the last 3,000 years of patriarchy.

00:59:32 ►

And then there is the American coffee ceremony invented by the Java Crucians.

00:59:38 ►

This is, in all respects, the opposite of the Japanese tea ceremony, which they feel is not suitable for Americans who just don’t have a Japanese temperament.

00:59:44 ►

The Japanese tea

00:59:45 ►

ceremony has to be done with great mindfulness and care so that every single detail is seen as

00:59:51 ►

if you’re on LSD. The American coffee ceremony is the opposite. You get up, you stagger to the

00:59:57 ►

kitchen, you throw some instant coffee into a cup. You can’t bother with percolating real coffee and

01:00:04 ►

all that. Just throw some instant

01:00:05 ►

coffee in a cup and hold it under the hot water faucet until you got something that looks like

01:00:12 ►

coffee. You stir it with your finger because you can’t be bothered looking for a spoon.

01:00:17 ►

And then you face the east and you take a hearty gulp. You face the east, the rising sun,

01:00:28 ►

hearty gulp you face the east the rising sun and you invoke the sun god crying rah rah rah and then you take a hearty gulp and you cry out passionately god i needed that and you immediately

01:00:35 ►

come to a tremendous clarity your brain wakes up and it just keeps on tick tick tick tick tick

01:00:39 ►

tick your brain just keeps right now working until you get to the office when it stops, of course, like all people in offices.

01:00:53 ►

Then there is the Church of the Subgenius, which has probably attained more fame than any of the other Discordian offshots.

01:01:03 ►

This is based on the teachings of J.R. Bob Dobbs, who issues real Zen-type co-ants like,

01:01:06 ►

don’t just eat a hamburger, eat the hell out of it.

01:01:11 ►

This is the essence of the subgenius faith.

01:01:13 ►

You know how dumb the average guy is?

01:01:17 ►

Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that.

01:01:20 ►

If you understand that, you’re ready to start your own religion and become as rich as Bob or Rajneesh or the Pope or any of them.

01:01:26 ►

A disciple, as Bob once told me in private,

01:01:29 ►

a disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to.

01:01:34 ►

And there are millions of them out there.

01:01:36 ►

Look at Rajneesh.

01:01:36 ►

He grew up a poor boy in India.

01:01:41 ►

Very poor.

01:01:41 ►

And then he read in the paper that Krishnamurti had come to this country

01:01:45 ►

and got so rich he was able to buy a Rolls Royce.

01:01:49 ►

And Rajneesh said, I’ve got to go to America.

01:01:51 ►

It’s full of seekers.

01:01:53 ►

There’s a seeker born every minute in that country.

01:01:56 ►

So he came over here preaching his line of gibberish,

01:01:59 ►

and he got 93 Rolls Royces before they ran.

01:02:04 ►

Krishnamurti only had one.

01:02:06 ►

Rajneesh got 93 before they ran him out of the country.

01:02:10 ►

Every time he got a new Rolls,

01:02:12 ►

people don’t know why he needed 93 Rolls Royces.

01:02:15 ►

Why does anyone need 93 Rolls Royces?

01:02:18 ►

Well, the answer is every time he got a new one,

01:02:20 ►

he’d take a Polaroid of it and he’d write on the back,

01:02:22 ►

fuck you, and send it to Krishnamurti.

01:02:25 ►

That’s how you play the guru game.

01:02:28 ►

My favorite religion is actually Shinran Buddhism.

01:02:33 ►

I was married in a Shinran Buddhist church 35 years ago.

01:02:39 ►

The great thing about Shinran is it’s an offshot of Amida Buddhism.

01:02:45 ►

Amida was the Buddha who refused to enter nirvana until all sentient beings could enter nirvana with him.

01:02:54 ►

And so he reincarnates perpetually to bring everybody to supreme enlightenment.

01:03:01 ►

And part of the teaching of Amida Buddhism is if you call on Amida Buddha once with true faith

01:03:07 ►

that’ll be enough even if you screw up this life entirely in your next life you’ll do better and

01:03:13 ►

the life after that you’ll do better until eventually you do achieve total detachment

01:03:18 ►

and nirvana all you got to do is say in Japanese Namu Am Amida Butsu, in the name of Amida Buddha. If you say it with

01:03:26 ►

true faith, you will eventually be saved. And in the 12th century, a monk named Shinran meditated

01:03:35 ►

on this until his heart broke. He thought it was just not fair to those people who can’t muster a

01:03:41 ►

true faith. There are some people who are always asking questions,

01:03:50 ►

never satisfied, always asking the next question, always a little bit skeptical. I’m one of them.

01:03:56 ►

And we just can’t manage true faith. We just can’t. We’re always wondering. Maybe there’s an alternative. Maybe there’s another way of looking at it. And Amida, the Buddha of boundless

01:04:01 ►

compassion, could he possibly leave us out if he intends to bring all beings to perfect bliss and enlightenment?

01:04:09 ►

And Shinran decided that was impossible.

01:04:11 ►

So Shinran Buddhism is based on the teaching

01:04:13 ►

that if you say Namu Amida Butsu once,

01:04:17 ►

whether you have faith or not, it’s enough.

01:04:19 ►

You’ll be saved eventually.

01:04:21 ►

I think that is the most merciful,

01:04:23 ►

the most commonsensical, the most generous, and the

01:04:27 ►

most noble religion ever invented. At least it seems that way to those of us who are incapable

01:04:32 ►

of true faith in the traditional sense. And so I have said, namu amida butsu, with some degree of

01:04:41 ►

faith and with a great deal of skepticism on numerous occasions. I never managed total faith, but I like to say it because Shinran says,

01:04:50 ►

whether I believe it or not, it will work.

01:04:52 ►

And so I’d like to leave everybody with those words,

01:04:55 ►

Namu Amida Butsu.

01:04:57 ►

Say them once, and whether you believe it or not, it will work,

01:05:00 ►

and all your problems will be solved.

01:05:02 ►

It may take a thousand incarnations, but eventually you’ll get there.

01:05:06 ►

And hey, we’ve got lots of time.

01:05:10 ►

All my favorite philosophers are Irish,

01:05:13 ►

like Scotus Origina, who denied the reality of time

01:05:16 ►

and said all things are lights,

01:05:19 ►

and Bishop Barclay, George Barclay,

01:05:21 ►

after whom the city of Berkeley is named

01:05:23 ►

because Americans don’t know how to pronounce Irish names.

01:05:26 ►

It should be Barkley.

01:05:28 ►

Bishop Berkeley proved the universe doesn’t exist, but God thinks it does.

01:05:33 ►

And William Rowan Hamilton, the great Irish mathematician,

01:05:37 ►

who proved that A times B does not equal B times A,

01:05:41 ►

contrary to all previous mathematical theory.

01:05:47 ►

And Jonathan Swift, who got into a great debate with partridge the astrologer about whether partridge was dead or alive and you

01:05:52 ►

think partridge had a distinct advantage in that debate but swift managed to win because

01:05:58 ►

every argument partridge came up with swift was able to refute. His major proposition was just because a man claims he’s alive

01:06:05 ►

doesn’t mean we have to believe him necessarily.

01:06:09 ►

But Sean Murphy of Dahlke, who inspired Professor Finnegan,

01:06:14 ►

is one of my favorites.

01:06:16 ►

Nothing is known about Sean Murphy

01:06:17 ►

except his influence on Professor Timothy F. X. Finnegan,

01:06:21 ►

the inventor of parapsychology,

01:06:24 ►

not to be confused with parapsychology.

01:06:27 ►

But Sean Murphy, of whom all we know is a remark attributed to one Nora Dolan of Dahlke, who said,

01:06:35 ►

sure, the only hard work that Finnegan lad ever did was climbing back onto the barstool twice a

01:06:41 ►

night after falling off it. But Murphy said to Finnegan one night in a

01:06:47 ►

dorky pub, sure, I’ve never seen an average day. I’ve never met a normal man or woman.

01:06:54 ►

And Finnegan had had 14 pints of Guinness at that point, and he suddenly saw the profundity.

01:06:59 ►

He called it Murphy’s first fundamental finding. And all of his books of philosophy are devoted to the implications

01:07:06 ►

of this. There wasn’t a single person in the pub who looked like an average Irishman,

01:07:11 ►

and going out on the streets he couldn’t find an average Irishman or an average Irish woman,

01:07:15 ►

he couldn’t even find an average dog, and he couldn’t find, and now he realized he’d never

01:07:20 ►

seen an average day. He never saw a normal human being. He never saw a room in

01:07:27 ►

which the corners make perfect right angles geometrically. And so the whole system of

01:07:34 ►

patapsychology, which is based on Murphy’s first fundamental finding and the French philosopher Alvarez Chari, who invented pataphysics, the science of non-repeatable events,

01:07:47 ►

led Professor Finnegan to invent patapsychology, the science of things that you see but you can’t believe.

01:07:56 ►

And one of the things he saw that he couldn’t believe was that nothing is normal.

01:08:01 ►

The normal, he decided, is purely an English invention.

01:08:05 ►

It derives from mathematics.

01:08:07 ►

The normal and the average are statistical abstractions that don’t exist.

01:08:12 ►

And so he formed PSYCON, of which I am the American director.

01:08:17 ►

PSYCON, that’s the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal.

01:08:22 ►

And we claim, Finnegan claims, and I agree,

01:08:28 ►

and Saigon has been crusading for years

01:08:30 ►

to demonstrate there are no normal people,

01:08:32 ►

any more than there are normal dogs, normal giraffes,

01:08:35 ►

normal events, normal days, average.

01:08:38 ►

Nobody is the average size.

01:08:41 ►

Nobody is the average weight.

01:08:49 ►

These are all pure fictions. The normalists live in a world entirely of abstraction and fiction and metaphysical entities that cannot be found in the normal world

01:08:56 ►

of sensory sensual space-time in which we actually live. So Professor Finnegan is offering a $10,000 reward to anybody who can produce an average human

01:09:07 ►

being or a normal day. And none of the normalists have been able to confront this challenge. They

01:09:12 ►

just can’t find the average or the normal. It’s purely abstract. The normal is that which none

01:09:19 ►

of us quite are. When I came back to this country from Ireland, I was astonished at all these ads by

01:09:27 ►

the Partnership for a Brain-Free America. No, they called themselves the Partnership for a Drug-Free

01:09:32 ►

America. I thought it was the Christian scientists were behind it. But it turns out that there are

01:09:37 ►

people who don’t know what a drug is. They’re against some drugs, but they just feel if they

01:09:42 ►

said the Partnership for freedom from some drugs,

01:09:46 ►

they’d sound kind of silly. So they claim they’re against all drugs, but actually they are not doing

01:09:51 ►

anything at all to stomp out the use of penicillin, aspirin, antihistamines, procardia,

01:10:00 ►

Prozac, most of the heavy drugs that the medical profession is pushing on us all the time.

01:10:08 ►

They’re just against some drugs, which is kind of ridiculous because we’re supposed to have a war on drugs.

01:10:13 ►

And meanwhile, we’ve got eight people who have been convicted of refusing to use drugs,

01:10:19 ►

whose cases are under appeal on their way up to the Supreme Court.

01:10:23 ►

These are the only true partnership for a drug-free America.

01:10:27 ►

They’re Christian scientists.

01:10:28 ►

They won’t use drugs under any circumstances.

01:10:32 ►

Even if the medical profession insists the drugs are necessary to preserve life,

01:10:36 ►

they say life is preserved by faith, and they won’t take the drugs.

01:10:40 ►

So we actually got a war against some drugs, which is a war for other drugs.

01:10:44 ►

So people are going to jail for using some drugs,

01:10:47 ►

and other people are going to jail for refusing to use any drugs.

01:10:50 ►

And it’s really crazy.

01:10:53 ►

And then they have these commercials.

01:10:54 ►

This is your brain on drugs.

01:10:56 ►

This is your brain on drugs with an English muffin.

01:10:59 ►

This is your brain on drugs with an English muffin and two slices of bacon.

01:11:02 ►

Where do they get this stuff from?

01:11:05 ►

And then I started seeing these other ads. The first one I saw was in Penthouse,

01:11:11 ►

but they’re in lots of magazines. Guaranteed drug-free urine, and this is a place in Boulder,

01:11:17 ►

a P.O. box in Boulder, Colorado, which is a major mystery. I’ve been in Boulder. I’ve been in Boulder

01:11:22 ►

several times. It’s beyond my comprehension how you can find drug-free urine in Boulder

01:11:28 ►

or within 100 miles of Boulder.

01:11:31 ►

And then I discovered there are big cattle ranches there.

01:11:34 ►

Well, one of the great achievements of the Neolithic age

01:11:38 ►

was they found out how to use every part of the cattle.

01:11:41 ►

They used the hoofs to make ornaments.

01:11:44 ►

They took the milk. They ate the meat. They did things with the cattle. They used the hoofs to make ornaments. They took the milk. They ate the

01:11:46 ►

meat. They did things with the horns. They used

01:11:48 ►

the hide for leather to make

01:11:49 ►

belts and shoes and so on.

01:11:52 ►

Nobody ever found a way to use the

01:11:53 ►

cow piss. Now somebody

01:11:56 ►

has found out a way to use cow piss.

01:11:58 ►

They’re selling it through the mail. Guaranteed

01:11:59 ►

drug-free urine. It doesn’t say human

01:12:02 ►

urine. It just says drug-free urine.

01:12:04 ►

Because you’re not going to find guaranteed drug-free human. It doesn’t say human urine. It just says drug-free urine because you’re not going to find

01:12:05 ►

guaranteed drug-free human urine

01:12:07 ►

in the United States today.

01:12:09 ►

Everybody has tried a few.

01:12:11 ►

Most cough medicines will register

01:12:13 ►

positive for heroin,

01:12:14 ►

even though they don’t have heroin in them,

01:12:16 ►

but they’re close enough

01:12:17 ►

that laboratories can’t tell the difference.

01:12:19 ►

If you have one of those puppy seed rolls,

01:12:24 ►

you might register positive for heroin because the puppy seeds have a little those puppy seed rolls. You might register positive for heroin

01:12:25 ►

because the puppy seeds have a little opium in them.

01:12:29 ►

These tests are about 95% accurate,

01:12:32 ►

so 5% of the people are getting inaccurate readings.

01:12:37 ►

So somebody in Boulder has found a way

01:12:40 ►

to sell cow piss through the mail.

01:12:42 ►

I think it’s a major achievement of American ingenuity,

01:12:46 ►

and it shows I always thought Reagan was a total cynic

01:12:48 ►

and he never would do anything except for his rich friends,

01:12:52 ►

but he actually has done something for small business.

01:12:54 ►

There are quite a few of these places selling guaranteed drug-free urine now.

01:12:58 ►

None of them say human urine.

01:13:00 ►

They’re getting it all from cows.

01:13:02 ►

And this is a great boon to little businesses. Little

01:13:05 ►

businesses are springing up everywhere. The only problem is one of these days, some poor bastard

01:13:10 ►

is going to be called in by his employer and they’re going to be told, you passed the drug

01:13:15 ►

test. And he’ll say, well, of course, I wouldn’t lower myself to using anything illegal. And the

01:13:20 ►

boss will say, yes, but unfortunately, you’ve got foot and mouth disease and we’re going to

01:13:23 ►

have to shoot you before you infect the rest of the herd.

01:13:32 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:13:34 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:13:39 ►

And that lovely voice that you just heard

01:13:42 ►

is the voice of the one and only Black Beauty of BB’s Bungalow,

01:13:46 ►

who just recently posted her 50th podcast.

01:13:49 ►

And since BB does a podcast once a month, that means she’s been at it for four years and two months,

01:13:56 ►

at least with BB’s Bungalow.

01:13:57 ►

But she goes back even farther, right to the beginning of the dopefiend.co.uk podcast network.

01:14:05 ►

And BB, we really appreciate everything you’ve done.

01:14:07 ►

I know you have a heavy work schedule, so it’s hard to get these in.

01:14:10 ►

And I guess we should also thank Iolite Knight and Niles and Hermit Girl

01:14:16 ►

and your other cast of characters for filling in for you from time to time and entertaining us.

01:14:22 ►

But, Bebe, for everything you’ve done for the entire community,

01:14:25 ►

well, we can’t thank you enough.

01:14:27 ►

Our love and best wishes go out to you and your whole team down there in Australia,

01:14:32 ►

and we look for many, many more podcasts coming out from down under.

01:14:36 ►

Thank you again, Bebe.

01:14:39 ►

Now, in Joe Metheny’s program notes for the lecture that we just heard,

01:14:44 ►

he wrote,

01:14:44 ►

Now enjoy this audio, which I would say notes for the lecture that we just heard, he wrote,

01:14:49 ►

Now enjoy this audio, which I would say is long overdue in coming to light,

01:14:53 ►

but all signs seem to point to its being exactly on time.

01:15:00 ►

And Joe wrote that in 2009, since which time Jesus has jumped yet again and again, I believe.

01:15:07 ►

And in regards to Bob’s jumping Jesus theory, well consider this. At the end of the year 1994, when this was actually recorded, there were not yet even 3,000 websites online.

01:15:14 ►

Today there are over 255 million. Holy jumping Jesus! Now that’s a lot of information that’s

01:15:23 ►

become available to a huge number of people in a very short amount of time.

01:15:27 ►

And when you recall what Wilson just now had to say about what happened during previous great information jumps,

01:15:33 ►

well, it’s no wonder that the Occupy movement is now a worldwide phenomenon.

01:15:38 ►

As you know, I’ve set up an email account for you and our other fellow Saloners

01:15:43 ►

to send in your own comments about Occupy Wall Street and what has now become the worldwide Occupy movement.

01:15:50 ►

And that address is Lorenzo at OccupySalon.us.

01:15:54 ►

So if you have any comments that you’d like to add to this discussion or even better yet an audio clip, I’d be more than happy to receive it.

01:16:05 ►

audio clip, I’d be more than happy to receive it. Now, the first person to send me a message at that address was Local Man from Canada, who sent me a link to a story about Occupy Calgary, in which

01:16:11 ►

the very breathless writer claimed that the city is now going to have to spend $40,000 to repair

01:16:17 ►

the damages done by a couple dozen tents. Here’s a part of what Local Man had to say about that.

01:16:27 ►

tents. Here’s a part of what local man had to say about that. How a bunch of tents on grass have caused $40,000 worth of damage is beyond us. Many have said that we have absolutely no reason to

01:16:33 ►

occupy because our economy and employment is quite good relative to the United States. I am even

01:16:39 ►

quite certain that this will remain the case should the following monstrosity be built. And the monstrosity that he then sent me some links to, of course, is the Keystone Pipeline

01:16:50 ►

that thousands of people were demonstrating about in Washington, D.C. last week as they

01:16:55 ►

surrounded the White House.

01:16:57 ►

And by the way, the latest word is that Obama now is planning on putting off his approval

01:17:02 ►

of the pipeline until after the next election.

01:17:05 ►

So my guess is that he’s probably going to campaign on the promise that he won’t approve it.

01:17:10 ►

And then, since he’s already lied about almost every other thing he’s ever promised,

01:17:14 ►

I assume he’ll approve it once he’s safely back in office for another four years.

01:17:18 ►

But hey, that’s just my opinion.

01:17:20 ►

Now, Local Man then goes on to say,

01:17:23 ►

Even if we ignore climate change, the peak oil crisis cannot be avoided. Now, Local Man then goes on to say, crisis, we will simply make the inevitable decline much worse. The Keystone XL pipeline is, of course,

01:17:46 ►

not the only reason I chose to occupy, but it is important to understand. Every day it seems that

01:17:53 ►

the movement gets stronger, the movement of consciousness. I hope to lose the fear that

01:17:57 ►

still resides in my heart. And that’s really one of the things that in many ways the Occupy movement has already done for us.

01:18:06 ►

We’ve begun to regain hope and lose fear.

01:18:09 ►

You know, it’s time to put despair to rest and get on with the work of building a better world.

01:18:14 ►

And as Local Man pointed out, it’s time to stop kicking the can down the road to generations that will be coming after us.

01:18:22 ►

We are the Genesis generation, and at long last,

01:18:26 ►

we have finally begun to act like it. Now, the next message I received came from MetalNeverDies1,

01:18:32 ►

who I think joins us each week from Australia. Here’s part of what he has to say.

01:18:37 ►

Hey man, just listened to your latest podcast 287. Very good, my friend. Long time listener,

01:18:43 ►

and just started networking this year and sorting out life, if there is such a thing.

01:18:48 ►

First, thanks for doing what you do, man. I’ve listened to countless

01:18:52 ►

hours of these podcasts, and I believe this is it. Exactly your last

01:18:56 ►

thoughts in the podcast. Heaps I want to say, but I’m not great

01:19:00 ►

at multitasking, so we’ll mail, join, and interact with you more

01:19:04 ►

as time goes on.

01:19:05 ►

By the way, I’m MetalNeverDies1 on Twitter and am following you, so get them cast links

01:19:10 ►

out there in Twitter land, dude.

01:19:12 ►

We really are starting to coalesce as far as consciousness and awareness of our friends

01:19:17 ►

being our neighbors goes, if that makes sense.

01:19:20 ►

The quickening has begun.

01:19:22 ►

Retweeted the link today as I think it’s important to listen to Terrence from back then.

01:19:27 ►

Knowing his slant already from listening, reading and watching heaps of his work,

01:19:31 ►

and then bringing that in with today’s mayhem makes perfect sense to a psychonaut.

01:19:37 ►

I would like to know where this point in time fits in with time wave zero right now,

01:19:41 ►

as novelty is at its biggest peak in my lifetime since 9-11 and I’m just about

01:19:46 ►

to turn 41. I figure the knowledge you have imparted to me via others contributions and

01:19:51 ►

your own have been integral. I have used it and helped others using it a lot. So what comes around

01:19:57 ►

goes around. Back to the funny farm now anyway and thanks again my friend on the hyper-dimensional

01:20:03 ►

plane. Cheers from Australia.

01:20:07 ►

Well, thanks for that medal.

01:20:09 ►

I really appreciate your comments.

01:20:11 ►

Next, I received an email from Adam M., who says in part,

01:20:14 ►

In terms of Occupy Wall Street,

01:20:16 ►

I believe, as you also

01:20:18 ►

expressed, that this could be the

01:20:19 ►

beginning of the big shift.

01:20:21 ►

On 9-11, after the buildings went down,

01:20:24 ►

one of my high school

01:20:25 ►

teachers said something like, this will change the world forever, and all of our lives will be

01:20:30 ►

impacted somehow in a societal way. Clearly, she was right, looking at the changes since then,

01:20:37 ►

especially in terms of a general sense of awareness among people, even if they are not

01:20:41 ►

fully aware or misinformed. There is a group mind and a collectivity that creates a powerful public Thank you. audio collage titled It’s About Time, and I would be honored if you were to listen to it, let alone

01:21:05 ►

play it on a podcast. I understand you probably get tons and tons of music, but when I heard the

01:21:10 ►

call for opinions on Occupy Wall Street and happened to be in the process of writing this song,

01:21:15 ►

I figured I wouldn’t ignore the synchronicity. In one of Terrence’s talks in which he states that

01:21:20 ►

culture is not your friend, he speaks of the possibility for a kind of human

01:21:25 ►

paradise and the fact that we have the potential, but we are led by the least caring people and we

01:21:31 ►

don’t fight back. Someone from the audience asked, how do we fight back? And Terrence’s answer was,

01:21:38 ►

art. So here’s a piece of art as my stamp on Occupy Wall Street, and I hope you enjoy it.

01:21:44 ►

So here’s a piece of art as my stamp on Occupy Wall Street, and I hope you enjoy it.

01:21:50 ►

Well, I agree with you, Adam, and at the end of today’s podcast, I’ll be playing your song.

01:21:57 ►

Next, I received an email from Joe R., who recommends reading The Empathic Civilization,

01:22:01 ►

The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin.

01:22:03 ►

And then he goes on to say,

01:22:10 ►

As an aside, you may be amused to know the details of my purchase last March of an audio copy of the Genesis Generation. A good friend of mine has been a fan of the salon for some time,

01:22:15 ►

and had been recommending it to me also for some time. I happened to be in Oaxaca last March,

01:22:21 ►

and was about to undertake one of those grueling all-night bus rides that

01:22:25 ►

is sometimes necessary because there is no other option. I saw the audiobook on your website and

01:22:31 ►

thought that that might be just the thing to occupy the sleepless night ahead. I had no idea

01:22:36 ►

what the setting of the story would be, so imagine my surprise and delight as I listened to it on the way to Palenque. And if you’ve read or listened

01:22:47 ►

to the Genesis Generation, you know that it begins in Palenque, which is why Joe found it to be such

01:22:53 ►

a synchronicity. As do I, Joe, as do I. Also, I received a message from Lauren who had this to say.

01:23:01 ►

Hey Lorenzo, I just got finished listening to podcast number 287

01:23:06 ►

and I wanted to share with you a connection I have made

01:23:09 ►

between Occupy Wall Street and Kaliman’s predictions.

01:23:12 ►

And she’s talking about Kaliman’s predictions about the Mayan calendar

01:23:17 ►

which he saw ending, well, just recently.

01:23:21 ►

And Loren goes on.

01:23:23 ►

I have been following the cycles he set out with more and more interest as the new century has progressed. And Lauren goes on. for me to set out the details for you, but if you look at the timing he proposed and the way

01:23:45 ►

the protest movement has progressed, especially since Tahrir Square, I think I can strongly argue

01:23:51 ►

that we are now in an entirely different world than the one we had at the beginning of 2011,

01:23:57 ►

one in which things are definitely slipping out of the hands of corporate control.

01:24:02 ►

Eight days into this new world, I think the momentum is back towards

01:24:06 ►

a humanity that is attuned and acts in the interests of Gaia, with all of the implications

01:24:11 ►

that entails. It is almost as if we have collectively given birth to a new consciousness

01:24:16 ►

of ourselves. I am constantly reminded of the Buddhist doctrine of Sangha. The Buddha is the

01:24:22 ►

Sangha, and likewise, the Christ is the community.

01:24:25 ►

It’s kind of amusing, really, when you think of it in this way, because then Christ has risen,

01:24:31 ►

only not in the way the Christian mainstream expected it. Look at how many of them are now

01:24:36 ►

trying to crucify it. Chortle. And I chortle, too. Well, Lauren, you make an excellent point, and barring anything more revolutionary than the Occupy Movement taking place

01:24:48 ►

by, say, December 21st of 2012,

01:24:52 ►

well, I’m going to have to go along with your assessment and say that Kalaman may have

01:24:56 ►

figured out the correct date for a change in human consciousness after all.

01:25:00 ►

And your assessment also fits my own model, which is that maybe

01:25:04 ►

500 years or so from now, historians will look back and see the decades on either side of 2012 as a pivotal time in the affairs of humans.

01:25:14 ►

And so the 2012 or 2011 dates will be significant in that way.

01:25:19 ►

But right now, it’s a very difficult argument that Kalamon wasn’t right.

01:25:24 ►

And all in all, it’s quite interesting, don’t you think?

01:25:28 ►

And finally, I received an email from Thomas Jefferson.

01:25:33 ►

At least that’s what his email address read.

01:25:35 ►

And here’s what old Tom had to say.

01:25:38 ►

I’ve written a little something for the Occupy movement.

01:25:40 ►

I would love to hear you read it.

01:25:42 ►

Signed, The Ghost of Thomas Jefferson.

01:25:45 ►

And the essay is titled, The Declaration of Desperation. Well, thanks for that, Tom. It is

01:25:52 ►

okay to call you Tom, isn’t it? Well, I’m afraid that it’s just too long to read here. However,

01:25:58 ►

it’s quite an interesting takeoff on the Declaration of Independence, and I’ll link

01:26:03 ►

to the website where you can read it for yourself. Now, I’ve got a lot more Occupy news from other sources that I’d

01:26:10 ►

like to read right now, such as the story about a second military man, a veteran of both the Iraq

01:26:15 ►

and Afghanistan wars, who was brutally beaten by the Oakland police and who was hospitalized with

01:26:21 ►

a ruptured spleen, among other problems. It was an unprovoked and vicious beating administered by a police force that is quite obviously out of control.

01:26:30 ►

Our hearts go out to you, Oakland.

01:26:32 ►

Hopefully this movement will eventually result in you being able to replace your entire police force

01:26:38 ►

with women and men who actually care about the people they are paid to protect.

01:26:42 ►

And the same goes for several other cities where

01:26:45 ►

cops are behaving quite badly. Like the cops in D.C. who let a hit-and-run driver in a white Lexus,

01:26:51 ►

D.C. license plate number 8AJ8425, go free without even having to roll down his heavily tinted

01:26:59 ►

windows after running over several demonstrators. This was obviously some big-time politician or corporate lobbyist that the police were protecting.

01:27:08 ►

The cops did arrest two demonstrators at the scene, however.

01:27:12 ►

No wonder the demonstrators in cities like Washington, Oakland, Nashville, Philadelphia, Atlanta,

01:27:17 ►

and other sites of police brutality are hardening their positions.

01:27:21 ►

Now, I’m sorry that you’ve just had to listen to me reading all of this information

01:27:26 ►

right now, when it would be much better to be playing some of the sound bites that I’ve recorded

01:27:31 ►

over the past week. And even though this podcast is already over a sensible time limit, I still do

01:27:37 ►

want to hear a few other voices as well. But don’t worry, I’m not going to play all 20 hours of

01:27:42 ►

material that I’ve recorded this past week. I’m only going to play all 20 hours of material that I’ve recorded this past week.

01:27:47 ►

I’m only going to play a few brief sound bites,

01:27:51 ►

just to let you hear some of the other voices that are being raised all over the world right now.

01:27:57 ►

To begin with, I’m going to play part of a talk that Michael Rupert gave recently,

01:27:59 ►

which deals with police brutality.

01:28:05 ►

It was kind of a long talk, and I’ll try to find a link to it that I can post with the program notes.

01:28:09 ►

For here, I’ve cut it down to just the last part.

01:28:12 ►

The first part is one in which he gives his police credentials,

01:28:16 ►

which are very considerable in case you aren’t already familiar with his work.

01:28:22 ►

Michael Rupert is now an author and investigator who I met during the early months after 9-11,

01:28:27 ►

and I personally find him to be a very solid citizen, very reputable.

01:28:30 ►

And here’s what he had to say to the police.

01:28:37 ►

I want to deliver a message to all the police officers around the world who have been supportive,

01:28:42 ►

to all the police officers around the world who have been helpful, who have shown restraint, who have expressed sympathy

01:28:46 ►

for the people that you are charged with protecting.

01:28:50 ►

I especially want to acknowledge the San Francisco police officers who wept in front of members

01:28:55 ►

of Occupy San Francisco as they were ordered to and complied with the orders to take the

01:29:00 ►

personal property, steal it, confiscate it from members of Occupy San Francisco.

01:29:06 ►

personal property, steal it, confiscate it from members of Occupy San Francisco. I want to give this message to every police officer anywhere in the world who sees what’s being directed at us

01:29:11 ►

in this movement and feels sick at heart and sick at their stomach. Thank you. We recognize that,

01:29:18 ►

and I’m aware of many messages where the Occupy movement has had good, positive encounters with police,

01:29:25 ►

and I want to thank you for that. We appreciate that deeply. Now, you may be doing, those of you

01:29:32 ►

who fall into that category, may be doing your job, doing your duty, and it may be your sense

01:29:37 ►

of job security that keeps you doing things which you find disagreeable. But I have some news for

01:29:43 ►

you. On my website, CollapseNet, for more than the last year,

01:29:47 ►

we have documented month in and month out

01:29:49 ►

how hundreds of thousands of police officers around the world

01:29:53 ►

have been laid off due to budget cuts and austerity.

01:29:57 ►

In case you haven’t noticed,

01:29:58 ►

the world economy is not getting any better.

01:30:01 ►

It can only go down from here.

01:30:03 ►

This is the collapse of human industrial

01:30:05 ►

civilization, and budgets are going to continue to be cut. So when the budget cuts come, you can bet

01:30:11 ►

that the first to be let go will be those showing any signs of honor, of compassion, of remorse,

01:30:17 ►

showing any signs of humanity, because the only ones that the infinite growth monetary paradigm

01:30:23 ►

can afford to pay will be the most ruthless, the most brutal, the sociopathic, and the psychotic.

01:30:31 ►

And the pressures are going to increase on both sides for you.

01:30:34 ►

You’re in a very tough spot because the world situation is going to deteriorate

01:30:39 ►

and the crowds with Occupy Wall Street are going to grow.

01:30:42 ►

And on the other side, the budget cuts are going to be looming

01:30:45 ►

and you are going to be forced into a place

01:30:47 ►

where you have to go inside

01:30:49 ►

sometimes on a daily basis,

01:30:51 ►

an hourly basis, or a minute-to-minute

01:30:53 ►

basis and ask yourself, can I do

01:30:55 ►

this anymore?

01:30:58 ►

And there’s going to be a lot

01:31:00 ►

of you who are going to be honorable

01:31:01 ►

like the warriors I’ve tried to talk to you about

01:31:04 ►

today, who are not going to be able to do it and you’ll stop you’ll quit and you’ll join us and you will

01:31:10 ►

bring a warrior’s power and a warrior’s honor with you when you do to everybody out there to

01:31:18 ►

every police officer in the world who’s getting off on this, who likes swinging the stick, who likes wearing the gloves and pulling hair

01:31:26 ►

and running people over and pepper spraying people

01:31:29 ►

and beating us.

01:31:31 ►

To all of you guys, I got news for you too.

01:31:34 ►

You’re the bad guys.

01:31:36 ►

And we live in an age now

01:31:38 ►

that’s back to where it was in Vietnam.

01:31:41 ►

In Vietnam, we had cameras

01:31:43 ►

belonging to what was then

01:31:44 ►

a pretty free and independent

01:31:46 ►

media, bringing us back all the horrible images of the war, all of the crimes and the carnage.

01:31:52 ►

We don’t have any kind of a press like that anymore, but what we do have is what you see

01:31:56 ►

right now. We have cameras everywhere, we have eyes everywhere, and we have means everywhere to capture and to communicate and to put up

01:32:06 ►

in front of the whole world every time one of you without honor nakedly brutalizes and attacks

01:32:15 ►

an unarmed civilian exercising the right to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

01:32:22 ►

So let me close this message by repeating the words of Sergeant Shamar Thomas.

01:32:29 ►

It is not honorable to attack unarmed civilians

01:32:33 ►

who carry no weapons,

01:32:35 ►

who have no intent or ability to harm you.

01:32:38 ►

It is not honorable to suppress the right

01:32:41 ►

to freedom of speech and freedom of association.

01:32:45 ►

You carry your badges and your guns and your authority

01:32:48 ►

because you are charged with protecting the innocent.

01:32:52 ►

We are the innocent.

01:32:54 ►

You are working for the criminals.

01:33:01 ►

And now here are a few comments by some of the other people who have shared their voices on one of the live video streams that are coming from Occupy locations all over the country.

01:33:14 ►

I’m here at NYU, and I came down to Occupy Wall Street basically to learn, see what everyone is here for, what brought everyone here together,

01:33:29 ►

find out what everyone’s interests are and their position on a lot of issues.

01:33:31 ►

And I think it’s a good thing.

01:33:34 ►

I think it’s a good thing for the country because there’s people here who are interested in starting a conversation that really hasn’t gotten a lot of attention.

01:33:47 ►

The past decade, maybe the past decade or two.

01:33:55 ►

People are starting to ask questions more about the state of America, our identity as Americans. I think there’s a little bit of a conflict there, and people are re-looking at the issue and asking questions.

01:34:02 ►

I think that can only be a good thing.

01:34:03 ►

and asking questions. I think that can only be a good thing.

01:34:10 ►

What brought me here is that in the 25 plus years that I’ve been here in this country,

01:34:16 ►

this is probably the first time that I’ve heard, that I’ve seen a serious movement calling for, demanding economic justice.

01:34:19 ►

It’s incredible. It almost feels like in the United States people are moving

01:34:25 ►

or sort of the blinders are lifting one way or the other.

01:34:31 ►

Say why you’re here tonight.

01:34:32 ►

Yeah, I’m Sean.

01:34:34 ►

I’m Alex.

01:34:36 ►

I’m here because I think it’s important for us to disrupt the constant stream of capitalism

01:34:41 ►

that just consumes our lives.

01:34:46 ►

How do you see it negatively affecting your life uh how in every possible way um um i mean i’m like i’m a student and like i

01:34:54 ►

have like massive student loans and like i’m not able to like pay for college and it’s like a

01:34:58 ►

constant battle of like i’m a first generation college student and like should i like change

01:35:03 ►

the pace of like my parents legacy and like go to to school and have all this debt to get a degree, or should I just not do that?

01:35:09 ►

I don’t know.

01:35:10 ►

There’s a lot of conflicts around that.

01:35:11 ►

That’s just one way that personally affects me.

01:35:14 ►

How about you, Alex?

01:35:15 ►

I work at an organization that works to help stop the connection between homeless youth

01:35:21 ►

and foster care youth, and so it affects me daily that I work in social services

01:35:27 ►

and I don’t get paid enough,

01:35:28 ►

and that my students are on the brink

01:35:30 ►

of homelessness constantly.

01:35:32 ►

And it was really great today to see a lot of my coworkers

01:35:36 ►

and my students walking around.

01:35:38 ►

And then I’m also here because I was part

01:35:40 ►

of the feminist queer blockade that came and walked through and that felt

01:35:45 ►

really good because, you know, queers, as queers we’re oppressed in really distinct

01:35:52 ►

and interesting ways, queers and trans people, so I think that’s really important to also

01:35:57 ►

talk about.

01:35:58 ►

Have you seen a lot of support in the queer trans community for this particular movement?

01:36:04 ►

Yes. Yeah. Definitely. support in the queer trans community for this this particular movement yes yeah i mean i think

01:36:07 ►

that there’s like both support like and criticism in that like a lot of like queer and trans people

01:36:13 ►

like don’t necessarily feel safe and they can put in the marches yeah which is why we are like

01:36:18 ►

very together and like why we have like a queer and trans block today um but like it’s it’s really

01:36:23 ►

hard to like advocate for like issues that

01:36:26 ►

like specifically affect like the way that capitalism specifically affects like queer and

01:36:29 ►

trans people and like sex workers um because people are like it’s divisive and like i’ve

01:36:34 ►

heard that over and over again at gs that’s been happening a lot on like the even the facebook

01:36:39 ►

event for um the blockade there were people who who were saying you shouldn’t talk about

01:36:45 ►

how

01:36:46 ►

trans people are oppressed via

01:36:48 ►

healthcare and things like that because

01:36:51 ►

that’s a special issue.

01:36:53 ►

And so we’re here together

01:36:55 ►

as a huge group

01:36:56 ►

to say that we’re not a special interest

01:36:58 ►

issue and that the

01:37:01 ►

Occupy movement has enough room

01:37:02 ►

for all of our differences. That’s why we’re a leftist movement.

01:37:06 ►

We’re not the right with one single, you know, we want money stance.

01:37:12 ►

We want lots of things.

01:37:13 ►

And we think that capitalism is at the root of patriarchy, white supremacy, and all these other issues.

01:37:20 ►

From California.

01:37:22 ►

From California. Remarkable. You’re luckier than me. That’s right. I may well be. I may well be. Very privileged.

01:37:46 ►

What do you think of what you see at these occupations,

01:37:49 ►

and what are your hopes and dreams for the nation and the world?

01:37:53 ►

Speak into the mic.

01:37:54 ►

Well, I think that these occupations represent a great new movement, very similar.

01:38:00 ►

Barcelona, as recently in Brazil, bahia and salvador and colombia all sorts of occupations

01:38:10 ►

everywhere new and new politics grassroots politics how do you see the when you were here

01:38:16 ►

at ground central in this movement what do you think uh of these other occupations should draw from what exists here?

01:38:26 ►

Are they organized in your view?

01:38:28 ►

Is everybody doing their job?

01:38:30 ►

Oh, yeah, they’re definitely doing their job.

01:38:32 ►

And they’re very inspired by Wall Street.

01:38:34 ►

Very inspired, yeah.

01:38:36 ►

But, of course, some of them began even before Occupy Wall Street in Europe.

01:38:40 ►

So it’s reverberating around the world.

01:38:43 ►

Interesting, isn’t it?

01:38:44 ►

Yes, very interesting.

01:38:45 ►

Well, you good luck.

01:38:46 ►

Good luck.

01:38:47 ►

Thank you, sir.

01:38:47 ►

I’ll be following.

01:38:48 ►

Thank you for stopping in.

01:38:50 ►

Okay.

01:38:51 ►

I don’t know how long you’ve been here, but…

01:38:53 ►

This is my third time down here.

01:38:54 ►

It’s his third time down here.

01:38:56 ►

Please speak to the people.

01:38:58 ►

Let us know your thoughts, your dreams for yourself, for your family, for the country, for the world.

01:39:03 ►

Oh, wonderful.

01:39:03 ►

And I’m sure your opinion is a great one.

01:39:06 ►

Well, my hope, my dreams, if you will,

01:39:11 ►

are to see a world where my children can live in a world that’s free, justified, and equal.

01:39:16 ►

I want to see, I have a lot of hope in this movement.

01:39:19 ►

I believe this movement is a movement whose time has come.

01:39:22 ►

I believe it’s way beyond Zuccotti Park and Liberty

01:39:25 ►

Park by now. I believe it’s in the hearts and minds of people, and this movement can never, ever die.

01:39:34 ►

And the final clip I’d like to play for you comes from the respected journalist, Bill Moyers.

01:39:42 ►

So I’m here as both a citizen and a journalist to thank you for all you have done,

01:39:48 ►

to salute you for keeping the faith,

01:39:51 ►

and to implore you to fight on during this crisis of hope that now grips our country.

01:39:58 ►

The great American experience in creating a different future together,

01:40:08 ►

American experience in creating a different future together, this voluntary union for the common good has been flummoxed by a growing sense of political impotence, what the historian Lawrence Goodwin

01:40:17 ►

has described as a mass resignation of people who believe the dogma of democracy on a superficial level, but who

01:40:28 ►

no longer believe it privately. There has been, he writes, a decline in what people

01:40:34 ►

think they have a political right to aspire to, a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions of people. You can understand

01:40:49 ►

why that is. We hold elections knowing they are unlikely to produce the policies favored

01:40:56 ►

by a majority of Americans. We speak, we write, we advocate, and those in power, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest aspirations.

01:41:14 ►

We petition, we plead, we even pray, yet the earth that is our commons and should be passed on in good condition to coming generations continues to be despoiled.

01:41:27 ►

We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the produce of political equality.

01:41:40 ►

Yet private wealth multiplies even as public goods are beggared.

01:41:47 ►

And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly veneration of wealth are now openly in force.

01:41:59 ►

And the common denominator of public office, including for our judges, is a common deference to cash.

01:42:10 ►

So, if belief in the dogma of democracy seems only skin deep, there are reasons for it.

01:42:19 ►

During the Great Prairie Revolt that swept the plains a century after the Constitution was ratified,

01:42:26 ►

the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Leese exclaimed,

01:42:32 ►

Wall Street owns the country.

01:42:35 ►

Our laws are the output of a system with clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.

01:42:50 ►

rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lied to us and the political speakers mislead us because she said money rules. That was 1890 and those agrarian populists were boiling over with anger that the corporations, banks, and government were conniving to deprive everyday people of their livelihood.

01:43:13 ►

They should see us now.

01:43:16 ►

John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they will fill it.

01:43:26 ►

That’s now the norm.

01:43:29 ►

And they get away with it.

01:43:31 ►

Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats,

01:43:36 ►

then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant

01:43:40 ►

where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.

01:43:45 ►

And that’s the norm.

01:43:48 ►

And they get away with it.

01:43:50 ►

As we speak, the president has raised more money from banks, hedge funds,

01:43:57 ►

and private equity managers than any Republican candidate, including Mitt Romney.

01:44:05 ►

Let’s name it for what it is.

01:44:10 ►

Democratic deviancy defined downward.

01:44:17 ►

Politics today, and there are honorable men and women in it,

01:44:21 ►

but politics today is little more than money laundering in the trafficking

01:44:27 ►

of power and policy, fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is occupied is no mystery.

01:44:52 ►

Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking, why are you here?

01:44:58 ►

But it’s as clear as the crash of 2008.

01:45:13 ►

crash of 2008, they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied America. I relish the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march in Iowa the other day,

01:45:26 ►

one of those Occupy that have grown up around the country,

01:45:30 ►

it read, I can’t afford to buy a politician, so I bought this sign.

01:45:40 ►

I’m going to jump several pages over to connect that to what you have worked so hard on and I’ve been trying to report on, and that is the success of the Plutarchats in ratifying with the Supreme Court their rule in its notorious Citizens United decision last year.

01:46:10 ►

rule in its notorious Citizens United decision last year. Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many. When five pro-corporate conservative judges gave artificial entities

01:46:19 ►

the same rights of free speech as living, breathing human beings, they told our corporate sovereigns,

01:46:27 ►

the sky’s the limit in pouring your money into political campaigns. And the Roberts

01:46:34 ►

Court today embodies the legacy of pro-corporate bias in justices determined to prevent democracy from acting as a brake on excessive greed and power in the private sector.

01:46:49 ►

Let me be clear, wealth acquired under capitalism is, in and of itself, no enemy of democracy.

01:46:55 ►

But wealth with political power, the power to shake off opportunities for others to rise, is a proven danger.

01:47:10 ►

for others to rise is a proven danger. Thomas Jefferson had hoped that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations,

01:47:18 ►

which dare already to challenge the government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of our country.

01:47:26 ►

James Madison feared that the spirit of speculation would lead to a government operating by corrupt influence substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty.

01:47:31 ►

Madison and Jefferson didn’t live to see reactionary justices fulfill their worst fears.

01:47:39 ►

In 1886, the conservative court conferred the divine gift of life on the Southern Pacific Railroad.

01:47:47 ►

Never mind that the 14th Amendment declaring that no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness without due process was enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves.

01:48:10 ►

the court decided to give the same rights of personhood to corporations that possessed neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned.

01:48:16 ►

And for over half a century, the court would act as a guardian of privilege.

01:48:23 ►

It gutted the Sherman Antitrust Act by finding a loophole for a sugar trust.

01:48:26 ►

It killed a New York state law limiting working hours, likewise a ban against child labor. It wiped out a law that set minimum wages for

01:48:35 ►

women and owned and owned decision after decision aimed at laws promoting the general welfare.

01:48:43 ►

a decision aimed at laws promoting the general welfare.

01:48:48 ►

The Roberts Court has picked up the mantle.

01:48:53 ►

Money first, the public second, if at all.

01:48:58 ►

The ink was hardly dry on the United Citizens’ decision when the Chamber of Commerce, which occupies the very spot on which Daniel Webster once lived and sold diplomatic offices for cash

01:49:07 ►

and took bribes to cover his debts, his wine, his mistresses, and his boats.

01:49:13 ►

It’s right at home there at 1615 A Street.

01:49:18 ►

The Chamber of Commerce organized a covertly funded front and rained drones packed with missiles with cash into the 2010 campaigns.

01:49:33 ►

According to Ellen Miller’s Sunlight Foundation, corporate groups spent $126 million in the fall of 2010 while hiding the identities of the donors.

01:49:42 ►

while hiding the identities of the donors.

01:49:46 ►

Another corporate cover group, the American Action Network,

01:49:55 ►

spent over $26 mi ll i o n o f u n d i sc l ose d cor p or a t e m o n ey inj u s t s i x S e na t er a ces an d 28 Ho u see l ec t i o n s . A n d K a r lR o v e^{'} s C rossro a d s GPS se i ze d o n C i t i ze n s U ni t e d t or ai se an d s p e n d a tl e a s t$ 27 million that NBC News said came from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund

01:50:10 ►

and private equity moguls, all determined to water down financial reforms designed to prevent another collapse of the financial system. Jim Hightower has said it well, today’s proponents of corporate plutocracy have simply elevated money itself above votes, establishing cold, hard cash as the real coin of political power.

01:50:47 ►

So it’s no wonder to me as a journalist or a citizen that so many Americans have felt that sense of political impotence that Lawrence Goodman described as the mass resignation of people who believe in the dogma of democracy at the superficial level

01:50:56 ►

but whose hearts no longer burn with the conviction that they are part of the deal.

01:51:04 ►

with the conviction that they are part of the deal.

01:51:09 ►

And I will tell you that against such odds,

01:51:12 ►

discouragement comes easily.

01:51:17 ►

But if the generations before us had given up,

01:51:20 ►

slaves would still be waiting on these tables,

01:51:25 ►

women would still be turned away from the voting booth on election days, and workers would still be committing a crime if they organized. So don’t ever, as Ralph

01:51:34 ►

said, don’t ever count the people out. During the last quarter of the 19th century, the

01:51:43 ►

Industrial Revolution created fantastic wealth at the top and excruciating misery at the bottom.

01:51:51 ►

Embattled citizens rose up and fought back.

01:51:54 ►

Into their hearts, wrote the progressive journalist from Kansas, William Allen White,

01:51:59 ►

had come a sense that their civilization needed recasting,

01:52:04 ►

that their civilization needed recasting,

01:52:08 ►

that their government had fallen into the hands of self-seekers,

01:52:14 ►

that a new relation should be established between the haves and the have-nots.

01:52:19 ►

Not content to wring their hands and cry,

01:52:23 ►

woe is us, everyday citizens researched the issues,

01:52:34 ►

organized to educate their neighbors, held rallies, made speeches, petitioned and canvassed and marched and marched and marched again.

01:52:46 ►

They plowed the field and planted the seeds, sometimes in blood-soaked soil, that 20th century leaders would then use to restore the general welfare as a pillar of American democracy. They laid down the markers of a civilized society, legally

01:52:56 ►

ordained minimum wages, child labor laws, workman’s safety and compensation laws, pure foods and safe drugs, Social Security,

01:53:06 ►

Medicare, and rules that promote competitive markets over monopolies and cartels.

01:53:12 ►

They showed us that democracy doesn’t begin at the top.

01:53:18 ►

It begins at the bottom when flesh and blood human beings rekindle the Patriots dream. The Patriots

01:53:29 ►

dream? Arlo Guthrie, remember? It’s the star-spangled banner of Zuccotti Park. And in every public place I’ve seen where Americans long for justice, it’s the anthem of public citizen.

01:54:04 ►

but for fortune placed by fate’s mysterious schemes.

01:54:12 ►

Who’d believe that we’re the ones asked to rekindle the patriot dreams?

01:54:17 ►

Arise, sweet destiny, time runs short.

01:54:20 ►

All of your patience has heard their retort. Hear us now, for alone we can’t seem to rekindle the patriot’s dream.

01:54:30 ►

Can you hear the words being whispered?

01:54:34 ►

All alone the Americans stream.

01:54:39 ►

Tyrants freed, the just imprisoned.

01:54:56 ►

Try to rekindle the patriot’s dream. Ah, but perhaps too much is being asked of too few. with nothing to do, hear us now.

01:55:06 ►

For alone we can’t rekindle the patriot dreams.

01:55:15 ►

Who, in these cynical times,

01:55:22 ►

when democracy is on the ropes and the great power of wealth concentration pounds

01:55:33 ►

and pounds and pounds the American body politic who still believes such a radical thing?

01:55:51 ►

Look around.

01:55:52 ►

Look around.

01:55:59 ►

Who still believes such a radical dream?

01:56:08 ►

Well, I’d say that about 99% of us still believe,

01:56:12 ►

and now we’re actually doing something about it.

01:56:15 ►

I’m going to close today’s podcast now,

01:56:18 ►

but there is one last thing that I’d like to pass on.

01:56:21 ►

Over the past six plus years that I’ve been doing these podcasts, there have

01:56:25 ►

been quite literally well over a hundred people who have said to me, I really wish that I’d lived

01:56:31 ►

during the 60s. Those were really inspiring times. Well, my friend, if you are now under 30,

01:56:38 ►

I’d be willing to bet that one day, long after I’m gone most likely, your grandchildren are

01:56:44 ►

going to come up to you and say,

01:56:46 ►

what did you do during the Occupy Revolution, Grandpa? What did you do during the Occupy

01:56:51 ►

Revolution, Grandma? And how are you going to answer that question? Are you going to say,

01:56:57 ►

well, since I missed all of the excitement of the 60s, I figured that I’d miss the boat.

01:57:01 ►

I just didn’t realize that 2011 was going to be such a pivotal year,

01:57:05 ►

and so I set it out on the sidelines.

01:57:08 ►

I never even made it for a single hour at one of the Occupy Street Corner demonstrations.

01:57:13 ►

I just sat the whole thing out.

01:57:15 ►

Is that what you were going to tell your grandchildren?

01:57:18 ►

Or are you going to tell them about how you participated in the movement?

01:57:22 ►

And let me tell you, I know a little about the 60s.

01:57:25 ►

You know, it was during that decade that I graduated from college

01:57:28 ►

and also did a tour of duty with the Navy in Vietnam.

01:57:32 ►

I know what the 60s were like from both sides of those times,

01:57:35 ►

and let me tell you, I’m predicting that 50 years from now,

01:57:39 ►

no one will still be talking about the 60s,

01:57:42 ►

because what is going down right now is going to make

01:57:45 ►

the 60s seem like the dark ages. So make a sign, stand on a street corner, visit an Occupy site,

01:57:52 ►

start a blog, get your friends involved. It doesn’t matter what you do, but do something

01:57:57 ►

because you know we’re all in this together right now and we really need your help.

01:58:06 ►

us together right now and we really need your help. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. And I’m going to leave you right now with a tune called

01:58:14 ►

It’s About Time by fellow salonner Adam M.

01:58:22 ►

Big banks complaining they’re being unfairly targeted by politicians eager to seize on

01:58:27 ►

occupy wall street movement’s energy now bankers are threatening to make it very expensive for

01:58:32 ►

politicians to support the protests our fourth story tonight wall street donors saying they

01:58:36 ►

will not support democrats who side with ows

01:58:39 ►

fuck you get out Fuck you! Get out!

01:59:03 ►

Get the fuck out of here right now.

01:59:05 ►

Get out.

01:59:06 ►

Fuck you.

01:59:07 ►

Fuck you, you idiot. I want you to go find a fucking soul!

01:59:41 ►

It’s simply too expensive to accede to their demands and actually bring in those banks.

01:59:57 ►

I want to bring people like this! How tough are you?

02:00:15 ►

How do you sleep at night?

02:00:20 ►

There is no I don’t know There’s a lot of them!

02:00:45 ►

What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy.

02:00:47 ►

It’s only the other fellow who’s greedy.

02:00:50 ►

Individuals pursuing their separators.

02:00:52 ►

The great achievements…

02:00:54 ►

You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted.

02:00:57 ►

Just tell me, where in the world do you find these angels

02:01:00 ►

who are going to organize society for us?

02:01:04 ►

Well, I don’t even trust you to do that. Thank you. We have to come together.

02:01:52 ►

We’re all different.

02:01:53 ►

But here’s the thing.

02:01:54 ►

Stand up!

02:01:55 ►

Put your fucking cell phones down!

02:01:57 ►

Yeah! Thank you. What happens is not a pleasant situation,

02:02:33 ►

and yet you can stand back and look at this planet

02:02:37 ►

and see that we have money, power,

02:02:42 ►

the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

289 - Robert Anton Wilson The Lost Studio Session

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