CLOSED VERSUS OPEN SYSTEMS

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human

JUNE 18, 2011. There is a trick in the physical and social sciences. It can get a professional grant money and promotion and something to chew on for 30 or 40 years.

Here it is: invent a category that is basically useless, convince everyone it’s real, and then argue about its definition forever.

Take the term “system.” When you boil it down, it means a piece of equipment or a bunch of ideas that fit neatly together and admit nothing from the outside. It’s a fortress with a moat and slavering dogs and troops on the turrets.

But then, to get cute, you introduce the notion that a system could, somehow, be closed or open. Which is like saying a washing machine could possibly be a nectarine. Now you’ve set the stage for 10,000 articles in professional journals that will debate open versus closed.

The concept of an open system is actually surrealism.

“The fortress was buttoned up tight, but then time travelers broke through the sky and there they were, in the throne room. We thought the system was closed, but it wasn’t.”

How many pins can dance on the head of an angel?

On the other hand, we have this: “During the Renaissance, painters developed a system of perspective.”

Actually, they didn’t. They developed some rules. Guidelines.

If a system is anything, it’s self-referring. Formal logic, for example. A machine. You set up terms and their definitions, you set up operations and their descriptions, and then you let the machine run. And it always runs the same way because that’s how you built it. And if some little piece of it suddenly works in a new way, you just say, “Well, that’s not logic. That’s a different animal. Shoot it.”

A system is like a dream that always play out the same. Start to finish.

Closed? Open? Balderdash.

Moving on—an artist is never doing a system.

He’s often doing anti-system on purpose, breaking apart a cluster of habits people have gotten used to.

A robot would be a system. He can perform 100000000000 operations and each one is specific and bounded. And that’s all he can do, no matter how you dress him up.

People try to teach magic as if it were a system, when it isn’t. They cite rules and rituals and symbols. If that’s magic, a spider can fly a jet plane.

But people who get involved in magic don’t want to admit they don’t really have a system, because that would be tantamount to admitting past practices shrouded in the mists of history are irrelevant. Which would put them in the present moment, needing to figure out what magic really IS. Right now.

You could say Tic-tac-toe is a system, because you can figure out all the ways to win or tie, depending on who moves first. But Tic-tac-toe isn’t magic. It’s a child’s game.

The universe—is that a system? It’s a juicy question for debate. You can drag in the Indeterminacy Principle, and Quantum Entanglement, and all sorts of interesting notions. But when all is said and done, what you have left is this: the universe is a great big IS. It’s the cardinal IS. It’s the IS circus under the big tent. It rings all bells as REALITY. Universe is reality. So it doesn’t really matter whether you call it open or closed.

And magic is not about IS.

It’s not about universe.

It’s about proliferating new realities. Tons of them.

How many tons? Let me guess. 1000000000000000000000 tons. If you did that much proliferating, then you would see universe in a quite different way, and you would be able to affect it as if it were a lump of wet taffy.

And THAT ain’t system.

Again, moving on—magic runs on desire. You desire X, you want to materialize it. But now, let’s think on the far edge of that assumption. How many IS’s do you want to materialize before you begin to get tired of the whole business? How many wishes do you want the genie to fulfill before you say stop?

How heavy and deep is your fixation on exactly what you want and desire? How fast could it theoretically be satisfied?

There are a whole lot of two-and-three wish people in this world. A whole lot of five-and-ten wish people. Give them what they want and they’re done. They’re as cooked as a player who just won the lottery.

And that’s because they’ve made desire into a kind of system. It’s a sort of closed network. It’s tight. And you walk in there and give them what they want and boom, they’re done. They’ve really got nowhere to go after that. Their energy peters out.

This is interesting—because it suggests—and you might want to chew on this for a while—that there is another version of desire that isn’t so precise, isn’t so defined, isn’t so definite…and if that is so, we are looking at desire as possibility. Not in the sense of “I see all the possibilities,” but in the sense of implication, metaphor, suggestion, open-ended X.

People tend to recoil from this. They want the Caddy with the big fins, and they want it now. They want the prettier fingernails, the new nose, the butt implants, and the island in the Pacific with the yacht.

At least that’s what they think, because they don’t have them, and they tend to define their future in those terms. So they’re yearning and longing and drooling.

But what if there is a whole other space, a whole other future that isn’t so simple? And what if its uncertain shape makes it even more attractive?

What if the poem you’ve read a hundred times, the one you never quite understood, is the one you admire the most? The one that sends your mind and imagination off in so many directions.

And what if this has something to do with what magic is really all about, or is a kind of magic that normally escapes attention? What if magic can be like this, can be a road with thousands of forks that take you into undiscovered territory you’ve never dreamed of before?

What then?

What if our programmed sense of what reality is, the precision and the definition and the thing-ness, is a diversion from what, underneath it all, we want?

What if the most subtle illusion about reality isn’t all the things themselves laid out end to end across the universe, but instead is the conviction that reality is an absolute IS separated from a theoretical ISN’T?

What if trying to meld the IS and ISN’T in a harmonious Yin-Yang circle is just another dead-end illusion?

What if that keyboard on your computer, which is so THERE on your desk, is only one KIND of thereness? And another kind of thereness is implication-not-fully-realized…and although you’ve always been quite sure you want the THERE of that keyboard and the yacht and the villa, you also want the implication-not-fully-realized…and you want it so much that it would fulfill the requirement of magic?

In other words, for all this time, desire has been, for you, a kind of closed system that is leak-proof and bulletproof, and that’s why it has remained unfulfilled.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

WHAT ARTISTS TELL THEMSELVES

JUNE 18, 2011. There is an element of story in what any artist creates, but there is also a story artists tell themselves about their their work, their effort, their lives—and in this latter venue, the tale is often self-defeating or self-limiting.

In other words, in work the possibilities are unlimited, but that lesson doesn’t cross over. Which is a rather extraordinary thing when you think about it.

On the one hand, the artist is taking a rocket ship to another galaxy, but then he’s also out on a lake rowing in a leaky boat with an oar that’s splintering and falling apart.

Art should be about lifting all boats.

Art and life weren’t meant to be separated. Art should infiltrate the spirit of the artist’s life and transform it.

It’s not my intention to be pollyannish about this. Believe me, I understand all too well the day-to-day exigencies. Nevertheless, somewhere along the line, the artist has to take a clue from his own work and imagination.

The myth of the suffering artist started out as a story. And the artist has to see it on that level. What he invents in his work has all the characteristics of transferability. The artist’s work will naturally spread to his life if he lets it.

This is how you come to magic.

Basically, the artist is undefeatable. He already has the consciousness of immortality in his grasp.

It may take some time to temper that blade, but it happens.

However, the process isn’t merely passive. It has to do with the him continuing his work over time.

It has to do with his ability to reject belief in a limiting and self-defeating myth.

Once you drink from the cup of your imagination, the usual excuses ring hollow. That’s the price you pay for being an artist.

The cost may seem steep, but it’s actually the doorway to another kind of perception. You may not have realized it, but there it is.

The story the world is now telling itself has everything to do with the drama of being a victim, in all ways, on all fronts. It is intensifying. You can be part of it, a player on that stage, or you can walk away and carry on with your self-created destiny as an artist. It’s a naked choice, and no amount of dressing it up will change that.

I fully understand, when I write about imagination, creating, and magic, that I’m speaking to people who are out there in no group—they’re lights of their own in the world. They conform to no demographic or ideology. They aren’t groupable in any category. They are individuals. That suits me. That’s what I’m aiming for.

You can’t spoon-feed what I’m writing about. You can’t put a rope around the artist’s neck and lead him to water. You can’t even get him in the vicinity of the pond. It either clicks or it doesn’t.

Everyone, and especially the artist, has the impenetrable freedom to live a life according to his own dictates. If that means magic, so be it. If that means a sense of misery or boredom, so be it. Those are the rules.

Over the course of the last 40 years, I’ve had many artists explain to me how their lives can’t be any different than they are. I sympathize to a degree, because I like artists. But I never buy it. And never will.

I draw a line in the sand. That’s my rule.

An artist, who is well aware of the power of imagination, can walk away from it and pretend that, “in real life,” it is suddenly of no value…he can do that, but at some level he knows it’s a bizarre move.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

JON DOES IT FOR FREE

AND HERE IT IS

JUNE 17, 2011. This is for people who’ve been reading my articles about imagination/magic and know what they’re getting at.

I had an idea last week and it’s coming to fruition. You may be interested.

I’m doing a conference call in a week or so, with a group, about magic. This group is very interested in the subject.. Well, they’re not exactly a group. They’re quite definitely individuals who are coming together for the purpose of this conference call. It’ll last a little over an hour.

So…you can put together one of your own.

No charge. I’m doing it for free.

I’ll be there.

There are a few conditions.

You set up the call with one of the free online services. You do this efficiently. No muss, no fuss.

You bring people to the table who are serious about magic. At least five people. A hundred if you want to. When I say “serious about magic/imagination,” I mean they should be open to the subject and definitely interested in it.

Understand, this won’t be me trying to break down my approach into handy tidbits. Get it? I’ll talk straight from the shoulder. No holds barred.

If you decide to make it happen, email me at:

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

On the call, I’ll talk about magic. Period. I do this in many different ways, and on that night, I’ll do it again. It’s fresh every time.

Will I take questions on the call? Yes, a few. I’ll talk for about an hour and then answer a few questions.

That’s my offer.

I look forward to this project.

Remember, one more time: on the call I won’t be pulling any punches. I’ll be going as far out as magic is. Which is far.

This is probably, as they say, a limited time offer, so if you want it, dig in!

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MAGIC CREATES REALITY

JUNE 16, 2011. The religious devotees of science pretend they understand the processes that underlie reality. But when it comes to fathoming the fact that existence exists, they abandon the battlefield.

Approaching existence itself is one of the great lessons, because you come to understand that it is the tree falling in the forest, and without consciousness (which is non-material), existence becomes a fading nothing.

Existence is a production of magic.

Magic belongs to the individual.

Magic is imagination with power, great power.

And here is a bugaboo of modern society: INDIVIDUAL POWER.

Those little armies of termites who believe it is their mission in life to define what is correct and acceptable and moral and permissible and inescapable—they nibble and nibble and labor on behalf of the collective, the group.

Whereas, magic not only makes reality, it turns it on its head when it becomes nothing more than a consensual puppet show.

Very early in the 20^th century, an art revolution called surrealism reared its head. It was born out of sheer boredom. But it is still in its nascent stages, because people are very, very stubborn about giving up their massive addiction to ordinary reality, serial time, and and juvenile rote versions of symmetry, harmony, and perfection.

In a primal sense, ordinary reality is a trance. It is especially a trance, because people use it to explain why they themselves don’t create/imagine radically different alternatives.

Surrealism explodes the consensus. It juxtaposes things that wouldn’t otherwise go together in a million years, and its messages aren’t literal. Surrealism doesn’t offer solutions to problems.

If approached head-on, surrealism provides a tremendous stimulus to create and imagine. It liberates imagination.

My work in the area of magic has taken three roads. One, describing what magic really is. Two, stimulating people to use their own imaginations. And three, in my audio seminars, providing exercises that lead you further and further into the living of real magic.

There are people in this world who want to partake of these three aspects.

There are also people who want to feel inspired, but don’t want to budge from their unadventurous lives. They want a little electricity on their marshmallow islands. A little kick. A little reminder about what could happen—the sort of thing you might get from a movie. For a few minutes.

After interviewing Clay Jenkinson last week on my radio show (and it was a very interesting conversation as he performed the role of Thomas Jefferson), I confirmed my conclusion that ALL politics, in the long run, ends up being about the group. That’s the bottom line. Whereas, I’m interested in the INDIVIDUAL, who is a source of, yes, life, existence, perception…and above all, imagination and creating and magic.

My work is not about routine or system. It’s not about ruminating on what might be. It’s not about the invention of fairy tales to explain why power should be limited.

It’s not about religious myths or the past.

There is an extraordinary amount of non-sense afloat on this planet, and there are very large numbers of people who spend their time promoting it. They promote it as good, necessary, and correct. If you want to understanding brainwashing and mind control, this is the place to start—with popular pictures of reality.

But knowing these are false pictures is merely the first step, and the celebration and the congratulations should be brief, quite brief. Because the next step is deciding what you want to create, and creating it.

ACTION.

Taken with POWER.

No hand wringing, no whining, no complaining, no excusing.

Whining is now a major industry, rivaling media and government and mega-corporate structures in size and scope. It’s meant to be huge, because a titanic amount of propaganda goes into encouraging it.

Magic, on the other hand, is the individual cut loose from all this.

Magic is IMAGINATION IN ACTION.

In that sense, a horse galloping across a tomato is more important than a stone building on the corner of Broadway and 42^nd Street.

A magician wants magic, and then he wants more magic. He doesn’t only want to make a better future. “A better future” all too often is translated down into cliches that have no bark or bite left in them. They’re dried stuffed products of taxidermy. They require no courage, no daring.

Is that all we were born for?

I think we were born for making art, however you want to define that.

Years ago, I spoke with a actor who had made a career out of doing one-woman shows. At the time, she was part of an ensemble cast, performing a play in a small repertory theater. I asked her about the shift, and how she felt about it. She told me it was wonderful to work with other actors, but she always kept in mind the fact that the play had been written by one person. Everything sprang from the imagination of that playwright. It inspired her to know it.

“One imagination above and beyond reality,” she said. “A new reality. Somebody made another world.”

She went on to say, “Every night, we [actors] experience telepathy with each other on stage. It’s extraordinary, but we accept it, because it happens so often. It’s magic. I wonder why it happens so infrequently in ordinary life. Maybe it’s because we lose the sense of imagination there. We think we’re ‘just living.’ But we’re not.”

She said she would never retire. For her, that would mean parking her imagination, and she didn’t see how she would ever want to do that.

“Being alive and creating go together,” she told me. “I can’t separate one from the other. And why would I want to?”

As we talked, the space around us brightened. Life itself became more.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

#3, MAD WORLD NEWS ROUNDUP

JUNE 14, 2011.

ITEM: Let’s say you owe $60,000 on your credit card. What do you do? Naturally, you enter a dream state where you ask the company to raise your limit, right? And then with a new ceiling, you can pay off the 60 grand.

This is what the White House and the Fed Reserve are trying to do with the national-government debt. Raise the debt ceiling. Otherwise they won’t be able to invent more money to pay the interest on what they already owe.

Of course, your credit-card company isn’t going to raise your limit when you already owe 60 g, so you’re not going to be able to pay off the 60 from newly minted credit.

At some point, the music stops. Not with government, though.

In case you’re interested, this all started with Alexander Hamilton, who claimed that building up federal debt was a GOOD thing. And ever since then, the balls have been juggling in the air. What Hamilton meant was: LET’S SUBVERT THE MEANING OF THE REPUBLIC. LET’S MAKE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT AND A NATIONAL BANK THE CORNERSTONES OF A COVERT MONARCHY OF ARISTOCRATS.

He won the argument.

ITEM: The reporter never bothered to ask the most interesting questions. Happens all the time. A tour-bus driver in Michigan was taking people to Ohio. The ride was overbooked, so he put six passengers in the luggage compartment for the trip. Yup.

Unanswered questions: why did the six agree to take the tour in a dark box a foot off the ground? Did the driver wave a gun? What possessed the driver to come up with this solution? How was the whole deal discovered?

Well, an Ohio patrol officer exposed the ruse…but how? Did a passenger spill his guts at a roadside stop? Were the people in the luggage compartment knocking on it trying to get out at a red light? And how could six people fit inside the compartment along with all the suitcases, if the bus was full?

Or is most of the story wrong? Perhaps six people said they WANTED to ride with the luggage. I’ve often thought it might be fun. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time, and the Michigan-to-Ohio tour is just the tip of an iceberg.

ITEM: An Illinois man entered a convenience store and demanded 99c from the clerk. The clerk refused, so the man pulled a gun. My theory is the man saw a big sign outside the store advertising something for 99c, and he thought it meant that’s all the store HAD. 99c.

ITEM: A woman in England wants to give her womb to her daughter, who doesn’t have one, so the daughter can have a child. The surgical transfer would be temporary. The womb would be removed from the daughter after: the daughter’s egg is fertilized with her husband’s sperm and inserted in the womb, and after the baby comes to term and is born. It’s like a rental womb.

Of course, the highly risky uterus-transfer surgery has only been performed successfully on a few mice. Is this what is meant by “the genetic imperative?” A human must pass on his/her DNA to another generation? Simple adoption is no good? Risk hemorrhaging and dying in the O/R instead?

I call it medical adventurism—the desire of people, who believe they lack other alternatives, to experience something wild, beyond the pale, about which, if they survive it, they can gab and chatter all the way into old age…at which point they would possibly understand how utterly whacked they once were.

ITEM: At a site called Teptronics, you can fork over $17.99 and buy your kid a plastic toy that looks like a little bulbous aquarium. Inside are five seated figures. From left to right, Lenin, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Mao. Lenin looks like the pissed off puppet-old-man, Walter, that ventriloquist Jeff Dunham uses on Comedy Central. Pinched face, nasty attitude. Gandhi looks like a walrus with glasses. Che looks like Horatio Sanz on Saturday Night Live doing a bearded bozo. Mao looks like some guy with a generic ceramic Chinese mask over his face. $17.99. “The Revolutionaries Collection.” Really.

ITEM: From Syracuse to Watertown. 70 miles. On foot. A man named Ned is traveling with his wife. She’s in a wheelchair. He’s pushing her. Her name is Teagan.

Ned says they were married in 1986. When he met her, she was just a head. He built the rest of her body and put her in a wheelchair. She’s a big doll. Wooden head, wooden body. A mannequin.

The really interesting part of the story, though, is that Ned was interviewed by a local social welfare worker. The worker reported that Ned seemed very happy. My question is, what would the social worker have done if Ned said he was very sad? I think the answer is clear. If a guy pushing his wooden wife of 25 years 70 miles in a wheelchair is happy, he gets a pass. If he’s performing the same activity—quite competently—but he’s sad, that’s not okay. Such a person would have to be treated. With drugs. Keep smiling, Ned. Don’t let your guard down. Eccentric-plus-sad is a definite no-go. They’ll lock you up and take Teagan away.

ITEM: The post office lost $8.5 billion last year. Nice work, guys. Now the head of the PO Union has a really innovative idea. Expand the duties of letter carriers. Equip their trucks with sensors that can detect bio-terror attacks. Really. This will somehow justify the red ink in the PO’s books. And if I may ask, how do these sensors in trucks work? They register an increase in the presence of viruses? I’d love to see the specs. I’ll bet they’re a doozie.

“Computer modeling architecture, uh, ahem, predicts, according to several humidity variables, the 6-8 percent likelihood of reverse transcriptase activity occurring in a geo-area six by seven inches square…which can be extrapolated out to a city block, at which point the predictive value diminishes to a minus-4% accuracy on a slow Tuesday afternoon between 3 and 4, given automobile frequency of one car per hour on a street…”

ITEM: And finally, I almost forgot, here’s an interesting report from North Carolina. Since December 2007, 311,400 jobs have been lost in the private sector of the state. During the same time period, government employment is up 500 jobs.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

HELP ME TWEET. I’M SERIOUS!

JUNE 14, 2011. Wanna have some fun?

Well, I have a Twitter account now, and it’s working.

http://twitter.com/#!/jonrappoport

I personally have no idea how Twitter operates, but my colleague, Theo Wesson, is running it for me, and he’s actually living in the 21^st century. My location is less certain.

Here’s the thing. To add fun and increase spread, I can give you a few tweets and you can send them out. Theo assures me it’s easy. Stay with me. He’ll explain. But first, the tweets.

Pelosi urges Weiner to grow a pair.

Harry Reid holds nation hostage: threatens to tweet his.

Hillary: “Thank God there was no tweeting in Bill’s day.”

Barney Frank: “In my youth, I would have been all over that Weiner thing.”

I mean, not bad for starters. Now here’s Theo to explain how to do this — you’ll also include my URL to nomorefakenews.com in the tweets —so some folks show up at my site. Gotta pump up the hits.

Hi everyone, Theo here.

When it comes to actually copying and pasting Jon’s tweets into twitter, what follows is the format you should use. Notice that each tweet is prepended with “RT @jonrappoport:” and appended with “http://www.nomorefakenews.com”. So, simply copy and paste one or more or all of the tweets listed below into you twitter feed. Done!

RT @jonrappoport: Pelosi urges Weiner to grow a pair. http://www.nomorefakenews.com

RT @jonrappoport: Harry Reid holds nation hostage: threatens to tweet his. http://www.nomorefakenews.com

RT @jonrappoport: Hillary: “Thank God there was no tweeting in Bill’s day.” http://www.nomorefakenews.com

RT @jonrappoport: Barney Frank: “In my youth, I would have been all over that Weiner thing.” http://www.nomorefakenews.com

Okay. Not too difficult, right?

Fun’s good.

Whaddaya say?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

NEWS ROUNDUP IN A MAD WORLD

JUNE 12, 2011. ITEM: If, thirty years ago, somebody told you politicians were arguing about a picture of some guy’s dick, wouldn’t you think you’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Twilight Zone?

Coming up, just ahead, a picture of a guy’s dick.

ITEM: The Chicago Tribune is now the paper of no-record. Their recent editorial about flash mobs in the city indicates that printing the race of a criminal suspect without adding enough info to make an ID is racist. The Trib is now Jesus Christ. Plus a community agency, plus a sociology expert, plus a business doing a suicide leap.

ITEM: Backtrack—Weiner is heading off to rehab, which these days floats all boats. Stupidity? Hiding stuff from your family? Hey, it’s all about mental illness. Let the pros take over. Man is obviously suffering from DICKHEAD DISORDER, a chemical imbalance. Put him on ice for a month, and he’ll be fine. New contriteness to trump former contriteness. “Hey, I’m cured. I can read cue cards.”

ITEM: Looks like the Dept. of Health and Human Services wants to test an anthrax vaccine on…CHILDREN. Wonderful. This was the vaccine that caused so many severe and life-threatening effects in soldiers. Now listen up. As I’ve been telling you for some time, there has never been a properly done clinical trial of ANY vaccine to prove it is effective. And the usual self-serving holier-than-thou reason given for not doing it? It would be unethical to allow volunters to remain unvaccinated. But here it’s quite okay to stab a kid with a vaccine containing anthrax particles. Sure. We’ll go for it. Whatever you say. Just one little thing. YOU over there at the Dept. of Health. YOU line up first and take the shot. Then let’s see how it turns out. I’d say bring in your kids for the vaccine, too, but no, THAT would be unethical. Welcome to guinea-pig nation. Check your brains and your immune system at the door.

ITEM: From the celebrity plastic surgery file: Miami plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Salzhauer says, “The appearance of the hands is the biggest tell-all of a person’s age. Chemical peels or laser treatments can help reduce the appearance of spots and wrinkles. In order to create a smoother appearance to her [Christie Brinkley’s] hands, she could try injecting fat to decrease the appearance of her veins.” Chicken fat? Ass fat? “Shake, pardner. How does my ass feel?”

ITEM: Tennessee just passed a law making it illegal (pay a fine, serve jail time) to send images online that may “frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional stress.” Cause stress to whom? A housewife on Xanax? A nursing-home resident? A religious fanatic? A rabbit in a zoo? A meddling busybody who thinks SOMEONE ELSE may be frightened and is therefore stressed? I suggest using a crocodile as the reference standard. If he blinks and submerges when shown the image, nuke the sender’s house.

ITEM: Goshen College, a small school in Indiana, has banned the National Anthem from sporting events, because it conflicts with their Christian values. Where to start on this one? What about using Onward, Christian Soldiers instead? Or Wind Beneath My Wings? “I can fly higher than an eagle, ’cause you are the wind beneath my wings.” Hey, what about Lush Life? “And there I’ll be, where I’ll rot with the rest, of those whose lives are lonely, too.” No, probably not.

ITEM: A farmer’s land near Montreal is flooded. Carp are swimming in the water. Farmer must buy a fishing license to remove them. Otherwise, pay a fine of $1000. Gov’t official says the licenses are made available to assure farmers they won’t be fined. UH, THEY WON’T BE FINED FOR…FISHING WITHOUT A LICENSE. What factory produces these bureaucrats? I’m telling you, don’t worry about aliens from space.

ITEM: From the looking-back file: HL Mencken (1880-1956) is revered (lip service) as one of the most brilliant journalists in American history. One wonders what would happen now if he were alive and wrote these words he penned in 1924 (“Prejudiced, Fourth Series”): “Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

WEAPONS OF MASS HALLUCINATION

JUNE 10, 2011. Yesterday, we taped my upcoming radio interview (June 15) with Thomas Jefferson, performed by the consummate Clay Jenkinson, who has made the character, words, and ideas of Jefferson a major part of his life’s work. (Listen on the 15^th, at 7PM ET, www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com)

To say I was surprised by Mr. Jefferson’s remarks would be a vast understatement. I nearly fell off the chair several times. But listen to it yourself on the 15^th and get the full impact. I’m still digesting it.

What follows are my thoughts in the aftermath…

This nation of 330,000,000 people can’t operate on the strict principles of the Constitution. It isn’t operating on them now, and it won’t later. The whole notion of limited government and powerful states was created when the total population of the states was perhaps 5 million people. It was created FOR a small agrarian nation. It was created FOR a piece of the Eastern seaboard.

So what do we have now? I believe the answer is: federal government as a quasi-religion. That’s what we have, whether we know it or not. George Bush, Barack Obama, pick your Pope. To be more accurate, pick your religious PR front man. Choose from among the cliches they spout, the homilies they bring to the table, the phony sentiments they express in order to boost their base, their devoted base.

It’s all about sentiment. Which church do you want to attend? Which sermon do you want to hear? Which feelings or revulsions do you want to be stirred in your psyche?

Because these men certainly aren’t about government, in the sense in which it was intended after the American Revolution. They are/were sitting on top of an immense structure which is a grotesque parody.

Of course, if you’re deeply into the religious aspect of this, you won’t be able to glimpse what I’m referring to. You’ll be too busy praying at an altar.

It’s a con.

It’s a fake.

It’s an hallucination.

It’s designed to look real.

Only a person in the middle of an hallucination would think that the size and reach of the present federal government is useful, apt, successful, proper, or correct.

If the concept of a Jeffersonian Republic has any validity—government that is close to the people and reflective of its wishes—then by comparison we’re cooked. Hell, we’ve been cooked many times, refried and boiled and baked and broiled, over and over again.

If you don’t care about government that’s close to the people and their wishes, then you’re fine. You can relax in the Jacuzzi of the 2-party system and dream about the devil and God and who’s good and who’s bad. You can call one president God and the other the devil. It’s a horse race and you can place your bets and cheer and boo. You can ooze religious righteousness from every pore.

Now, as for the Constitution, I would refer you to the recent articles of three writers: Gary North, Lucifer Geraldo, and Kirkpatrick Sale. The three pieces, respectively: “The US Constitution: Tool of Centralization and Debt”; “The US Constitution is a Trojan Horse!”; “Getting Back to the Real Constitution? Fahgettaboudit!” The sites:

LewRockwell.com. infowarstoday.com. Vermont Commons.

My takeaway and inferences from the articles and the Jefferson interview: the Constitution contained several fatal flaws: the Commerce Clause and the Supremacy Clause. The wording of each was sufficiently vague to allow the Congress, the Judiciary, and the president to move in and expand the national government, from the beginning. To expand the national government at the expense of the states.

This must have been quite shocking to the states, because, in the run-up to the writing and drafting of the Constitution, the states expected they would remain powerful and independent entities, with a federal government that would, for the most part, only run foreign policy. The states were shocked, but not entirely surprised.

The one man who was definitely not surprised was Alexander Hamilton. He was the architect of what turned out to be the America we know today. He, as Mr. Jefferson stated in my interview, took people to “the dark side.”

Now, I’m not a Hamilton scholar, so I don’t make this statement as the final word on him, but I certainly lean in the direction of concluding that it was his influence that projected America as a powerful national aggressive empire-building force. Jefferson was opposed to that vision.

The Constitution turned a newly formed loose confederation of independent states (republics, really) into a trampling ground for the federal machine, because it left open key doors of interpretation on vital matters.

For example, under the Commerce Clause, the national government was given the power to regulate trade between states. But this was merely supposed to mean the states would be held back from charging each other protective tariffs on shipped goods, and if there was a trade dispute between states that couldn’t be worked out, the national government would step in and mediate a resolution. In time, this evolved into massive federal power to interfere in state matters of all kinds, including the sale of pink or yellow or green condoms between midnight and 3 in the morning in Duluth.

And the vague wording in the Commerce Clause was the key. The courts and the Congress and the president could twist meanings and come to a new distorted concept of federal power.

What about the opening line of the Constitution? WE THE PEOPLE. As Mr. Sale points out, what’s THAT doing there? It should have been WE THE STATES. “The people” is as vague as it gets. It implies you’re talking about everybody, as if suddenly all people are cut loose from their states. It grinds a heel in the faces of the states. Remember, it was the states (legislatures) that ratified the Constitution.

So…to return now to the Constitution as-is, as a means of saving the nation, is asking for a flawed beginning, again.

And then we have this: the Bill of Rights. The whole manner of its inclusion suggests that government is the primary force, and the people are exempted from that force on specific counts—when, in fact, those enumerated Rights come FIRST. They were always there, even if nations for centuries denied them.

The Bill of Rights should have been called: THE WAY THINGS ARE NATURALLY, AND DON’T FORGET IT, BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER WE CREATE A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. THE GOVERNMENT IS THE AFTERTHOUGHT, THE RIGHTS ARE OUT FRONT IN THE PARADE.

In the interview, Mr. Jefferson told me each generation should writeits own Constitution. That was what he wanted. That is what he hoped for. To make that work, I believe you need small Republics. Today, who knows how many you would need on this continent. A hundred? Two hundred? California has 37 million people, seven times more than all the new states combined, after the Revolution.

Hamilton was the man who wanted a strong central government and a national bank that would complicate money to the point where the average person couldn’t understand it anymore…and therefore, those men who did understand it well could manipulate it for their own extreme benefit. The aristocratic class. Some of the same men bought up debt incurred for the purpose of fighting the Revolutionary War—and then leaned on the taxpayers to repay the debt later with stronger better money. Buy the debt with hinky paper first; demand repayment with solid silver later.

Well, we don’t have 200 independent Republics on this continent, and therefore a new Constitutional Convention (to cover 300 million people) isn’t going to cut it, if we want real individual freedom.

Since I started this site ten years ago, I’ve written about radicaldecentralization. Understanding what that could mean, figuring out what that could mean, inventing what that could mean…it’s not just a casual reflection. It’s the idea and the action that—if anything does—trumps the religion we now have called government.

Mass hallucination is a wondrous thing. It allows you to think you’re doing A while you’re doing B. You can invest devout and sacred hope in a PR front man called a president while you’re in the voting booth. You can stand in a crowd and feel ecstasy or weep behind a barrier when the president comes to your town to wave his scepter and spray holy water on you, before he cruises his limo to a fund-raiser at a mansion. You can believe Jesus wore a white leisure suit and invested in oil wells while extolling the free market. You can look at the great capitol dome in Washington DC and fall to your knees and dream that the people inside are enacting the business of the Republic.

It works if you’ve got that fairy tale in your pocket.

What was it that Strother Martin said in Cool Hand Luke? “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

Well, what we’ve got here is a failure of imagination. As in, NOT ENOUGH. Because when you think you’re supporting a just government when you’re really chomping on a cheesy religion, that’s the ceiling on your imagination. You’ve reached as far as you can go. Every important-sounding pronouncement by your favorite president comes across as stars and angels drifting down from heaven. Whenever somebody’s PR machine cranks out a political sentiment all dressed up in “towering feeling,” you buy it as an elevation of government to the highest level. Which your imagination, held to a ridiculous minimum, tells you is religion.

Religion is a con. And so is the kind of government we have now. It’s no surprise people confuse them. Run some old footage of a presidential convention. Look at the upturned faces in the crowd, in the audience. They just ate the body and drank the blood. They’re radiant in the glow. The glow that floats political boats and turns hard-packed drivel into diamonds.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com