BEYOND STRUCTURES

MAY 18, 2011. I did an audio seminar on this a few years back.

We are fascinated with structures and systems because they work, and because some of us feel an aesthetic attraction to them.

They work until you want to do something different.

Like magic.

Magic is non-system.

Which puts it out of the reach of most people.

Because most people want to grab a structure and pull it around them and sit there like a bird in a cage. They want to go from A to B to C and feel the satisfaction of knowing it works every time.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all.

But go into a corporation and say you want to teach them creativity and they’ll say, “What’s the system?”

Once I told a personnel chief at a big company, “The system is to stand on your head.”

“Literally?” he said.

“No. That would be too easy. People would find a system for that. But figuratively, that’s what you want to get people to do.”

He scratched his head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s where we start. I say something and you don’t understand. Then we have a chance.”

“What are you?” he said. “Some kind of zen teacher?”

“No,” I said. “If I said I was, you’d pigeonhole me. I teach non-systems.”

He laughed in an uncomfortable way.

“We don’t operate on non-systems here.”

“No, but if you let three or four people do that, they might come up with a product you never dreamed of.”

That he could understand. Vaguely.

Here’s how things work at some very big corporations. The second-tier honchos decide it’s time for a new product. They call in the chief of production and ask him what could be done. He suggests a whiz-it 4, which is basically a whiz-it 3 with a few more bells and whistles.

The honchos give him the green light, and he goes to work. He sets up a structure, which means he basically triggers the structure he already has. He gets underlings to make sketches of whiz 4, and with those he assigns compartmentalized tasks to various departments under him. The timetable is eighteen months.

He appoints a project supervisor to oversee the whole thing.

The project supervisor pretty much knows what’s going to happen. The six departments in charge of bringing in the whiz 4 on time will do okay—except one key department will fail miserably, because three guys in that dept. are lazy bums. They find ways to delay operations. They ask meaningless questions. They let work pile up on their desks. They meddle in other people’s business.

Twelve times, the production supervisor has tried to get these idiots fired. No go.

So everybody settles down to grind of bringing in whiz 4 on time.

Structure.

Manuals, rules and regs.

DMV, IRS. Play it by the book.

This can make magic the way an ant can fly to the moon.

So long ago it was in another life, I taught private school in New York. There were six kids in my class, all boys. I was supposed to teach them math. They were all at different levels. They had no ambition to learn math. No matter what I did, they performed miserably. Add, subtract, multiply, divide, decimals, fractions—it didn’t matter. If they managed to learn something on Monday, they forgot it by Tuesday. It was rather extraordinary.

So I took them to an art museum one morning. They were as lost there as they were in the classroom. But I wasn’t. That was the key. I was already painting in a little studio downtown, and I was on fire.

So I began to talk about the paintings. The Raphael, the Vermeer, the Rembrandt. The De Kooning, the Pollock, the Gorky. I had no plan, no idea. I just talked about what they could see if they looked.

And then we walked back to school and I set them up with paints and paper and brushes and told them to go to work. I said I didn’t care what they painted. Just have a good time. Do something you like.

All of a sudden, they weren’t making trouble. They were painting. No more whining and complaining.

I walked around and watched them go at it. I pointed to this or that area and mentioned what I liked.

There was no way to measure or quantify or systematize what the kids were doing that day, but they were coming alive, out of their sloth and resentment.

Then we got back to math, and it was as if they’d all experienced an upward shift in IQ.

That night, back in my studio, I made a note in my notebook. It went something like this: Give them a non-structure, and then follow that with a structure, it works.

So that was that.

There used to be something in this culture called improvisation. People understood what it was, even if they wouldn’t do it themselves. Now the word has almost vanished. Same with the word spontaneity. The moment when eye, mind, and brush meet canvas. When mind meets the new. When the inventor suddenly gets up from his chair and trots over to his workbench and starts putting pieces together.

The old zen guys called it no-mind. That didn’t mean you were a robot, it meant you had a very sharp mind, actually, but you just transcended it, you skipped through it like a flat stone on water. Structureless.

This becomes magic when imagination jumps into the fray. When the inventive urge takes the foreground.

The trouble with all these Asian spiritual practices now is that they have a long and distinguished history, and the history tends to infiltrate everything that’s happening. It’s venerated. That’s like throwing a heavy wrench into an engine. You need a clean slate, a wide open space. You need Now.

You need Now, which is dry tinder to the spark of imagination.

Levitation now isn’t what it was six or 12 or 20 centuries ago. Magic isn’t a return to the mystical past. Alchemy was what people did in the Middle Ages to give themselves a Now, on which they could inject the flame of their imagination.

It wasn’t a system. Not really.

But if you have enough history at your back and you stand away far enough, everything looks like pattern and structure and system. That’s the illusion. That’s the deception.

Magic doesn’t work that way.

The only problem magic has is: if you create it, who else will see it? That’s the only glitch—and that can be worked with.

You see, systems make people blind. If they can’t fold an event into a structure, then for them it isn’t there. This is very interesting. This is where all the myths of Hermes (aka Mercury) sprang from. He was the figure who flew and passed through walls and had no barriers in the space-time continuum—the tin can we call universe. So people pretended, at a deep level, that they were unable to comprehend him. In a real sense, he was invisible. His response to all this was to become a supreme joker. A trickster. He toppled idols of the hidebound, rule-bound, system-bound society.

If you read the myths of ancient Greece, you begin to see he ranked very high in the pantheon of the gods. There really was no reason he couldn’t be considered the king of the Olympians.

But he didn’t want the throne or the lineage. That was just another system, erected by his god-colleagues, who were bored out of their minds and desperately needed the entertainment and distraction it could provide.

Hermes was deep in the fire of his own imagination and speed and improvisation and spontaneous action.

Magic.

He didn’t need or want metaphysics, cosmology, ultimate truth, illumination, enlightenment, or Oneness and Bliss. He already embodied of all those things and much, much, much more.

The notion of shared, consonant, and structured reality as the final goal became an enormous joke.

The structure and system of life and society, from a certain live perspective, is a joke.

Many marriages become impossible because husband and wife find themselves trapped in a system, and they don’t know what to do. That’s the beginning and end of their problem. If they could move in and out of the system, while remaining married and loyal, they would realize everything is wonderful. It’s a magic trick.

To make it work, you need imagination, which is the thing that allows you to see structure as putty that can be moved around and reshaped at will. Imagination has all the creativity there is, and yet it is non-material, it’s outside the shapes people build to run their lives.

From the point of view of civilization, structure should be a sturdy platform, from which people can take off and create.

When I was 19, people thought I had a few problems, so I was sent to an office in New York to take a Rorschach Test. The specialist opened up a large notebook to a page of inkblots. He was a technician who did one thing in his job. He interpreted what people told him about those inkblots. He had a complex system that enabled him to categorize people according to various subtle shades and types of neuroses.

So he showed me an inkblot and said, “Tell me everything you see in it.”

“Everything?” I said.

“Yes.”

He was a stern neutral android, and he followed his playbook to the letter.

“Okay,” I said.

So 20 minutes later, I was still talking about that first inkblot. I think he had a dozen of those blots in his notebook, and he was supposed to show me every one.

But I was still chirping away on the first one. Birds, animals, planes, kitchen utensils, ancient symbols, articles of clothing, wars, interstellar collisions, underground caves, noses, beaches, leaves, insects, clouds, forests, gnomes, ships, streams, rivers, idols, chewing gum, coins…

I was cheating, of course. Which is to say, I was using my imagination. This was outside the rules, really.

The technician was sweating. He was squirming in his chair. Contemplating how many hours it would take to get through all the inkblots. We’d take a supper break and then come back for more, far into the night.

Finally he said, “That’s enough.”

“But there’s more,” I said.

“No,” he said. “That’s all right.”

He stared at me.

I stared at him.

Standoff at OK Corral.

In his system of universe, you could have two things. Normal and neurotic. I didn’t fit into either slot. He didn’t understand that. So to him, I was invisible.

I thought about my favorite radio show, The Shadow. Lamont Cranston renders himself invisible to the bad guys, and proceeds to torment them.

It was a good day.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list, and order an audio seminar from the catalog.

PROMETHEUS REVEALED

MAY 17, 2011. There are many myths written by humans that describe the gods. Whether these stories contain grains and pieces of history is up for debate.

What is central, however, is the characterization of the gods as powerful, and the humans as less powerful. This is so obvious it hardly seems mentioning.

The Prometheus tale is one of the more interesting accounts, because this Titan stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humans. With it, humans were able to fashion weapons, tools, coins…which led to the establishing of civilizations, the arts, etc.

What were humans missing, that they needed this gift from above?

Indeed, in all god myths, there is a sharp division between what the gods can do and humans can do.

Depending on which myths you read, humans were missing intelligence, ethics, freedom…

But there is a simpler and more profound way of looking at this situation. In all god stories, humans decided to answer the question: how was the world brought into being? The answer? The gods or god), of course.

This power was expanded to mean: the gulf between gods and humans was all about CREATIVE POWER.

Humans decided that they were weak and deficient in this respect. The gods had a monopoly.

Strange that, in modern times, a school of psychology was never founded on that split—using it as the basis for describing humans’ negative state of mind.

Because it’s right there. In all human stories about the relationship between gods and themselves, you find it. The gods have all the creative power, humans have none.

That wasn’t a red flag?

That wasn’t a reason for investigating this curious attitude?

That wasn’t a perfect starting point for a new psychology?

Well, it wasn’t. Mainly because it was too real, too obvious, too important. It was, potentially, too liberating. And societies weren’t about liberation. They were about control. What better way to distance humans from their own creative power than to cede it all to invisible gods, whose minions on Earth were an elite priest class?

Remember, Prometheus was punished for giving fire to the human race. He was chained to a rock, where a bird would gnaw on his ever-regenerating liver every day.

And Lucifer, another related mythical invention, which, in Latin, means light-bearer, or carrier of light, went through a similar exercise. Except, Church fathers decided to make him into a hideous countenance—all because he (if you adjust the details) tried to bring creative power back to humans…

It’s absurd—it’s a human rendering of ceding all creative power to gods and calling the reclaiming of that power a crime.

Talk about self-imposed mind control. This one is the gem of gems.

If god myths described gods as the only beings who had hands, and humans as hand-less, well, the absurdity would have been clear…when humans looked at what was at the ends of their own arms.

But actually, it’s the same with creative power. Humans tell stories about gods having all the creative power? Are you kidding?

This should tell you something about the degree of effort it took for humans to deny their own creative fire.

Massive effort.

It’s really the ultimate cover-up and cover story.

And until science took over and brought its own curious forms of arrogance and control, the antithesis to “the gods have all the creative power” was magic.

That was the one place where a few humans tried to assert their inherent power.

Magic and art.

The Roman Church employed artists for two reasons. To flesh out, in visual form, their bizarre cosmology, and to capture the creative spirit of art, bottle it, and dominate the people who practiced it.

The true “neurosis” of the human race centers around the creative impulse and creative power. It’s all there for anyone who wants to see it.

But people still have a problem with it. They persist in inventing new and ever-more bizarre stories about beings and gods who have the ultimate creative force.

They think their stories are more permissive and gentle than the old Church versions. But it’s still self-imposed mind control.

The circus goes on. Scientists are, of course, getting into the act, with their maybe-could-be-possible speculations dressed up as “potential genetic breakthroughs.”

A 2003 Sunday Times piece began: “A creativity gene that evolved about 50,000 years ago was the spark that kindled the development of the modern mind…”

In 2009, the New Scientist weighed in with this headline: “Artistic tendencies linked to ‘Schizophrenic gene’…”

The modern myths employ genes as gods. It’s still out of our hands. It’s all in the DNA.

Sure it is.

Anything to distance ourselves from the obvious: we create the gods in our own image.

And it keeps working, along as we forget that our own image is really one of unlimited creative power.

Chew on that one for a while.

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.

VACCINE NATION

MAY 17, 2011. Well, it’s actually vaccine world.

I’ve written many articles about the so-called outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics of the last 25 years—SARS, bird flu, West Nile, Swine Flu… The stats show these illnesses, at best, were duds. They never spread to a fraction of the extent predicted.

And was there ever prediction! Everybody and his cousin got in on the act. Doctors, public health agencies, political leaders, conspiracy researchers. Franky, to blow my own horn a little, I was one of the people who put this crap to bed. I raked the fear mongers over the coals and showed, from a number of angles, why the predictions were based on no firm evidence at all.

But the mainstream epidemic mongers did accomplish one goal. They took the opportunity to hammer the global population over the head with the idea that WE ALL MUST GET VACCINATED.

In some countries, alas for them, it didn’t work. People caught on the to the basic scam.

However, the PR never stops. In one small example, the governor of Washington state, last week, signed into a law a measure that makes it necessary for parents (who want to opt out of vaccinating their kids) to first visit a health practitioner, who is now duty bound to provide information about vaccines. This appointment has to precede even the action of claiming a religious or philosophical exemption for children.

The medical strategy is to keep up relentless repetition about the need for and value of vaccination—and these fake epidemics providethe opportunity in spades.

You should know that.

The mindless PR campaign also provides citizen fools, who think they’re quasi-doctors and scientific elitists, with the chance to spout off about vaccination as a duty of every responsible parent. Typical boomer nonsense.

However, it does work, because peer pressure is a strong force—and so parents who are on the outside looking in, and don’t want to vaccinate their kids, are thought of as crazies. Dangerous crazies, who are exposing their own children, and other children in the community, to illness.

Many PR campaigns have this component. They may not succeed in all their goals, but they do define two basic groups—the normals and the nuts.

The normals (android types) look at the nuts and build up resentment toward them. And the nuts feel oppressed.

It’s called a squeeze play.

During the centuries of Roman Church domination, it was called excommunication.

From a purely political angle, it’s quite ingenious, this vaccine promotion…because it pretends that, without all the shots, whole populations will fall under the gun of communicable disease and we will all revert back to darker times.

I’ve spent many hours writing and talking about this false premise—how the decline of infectious disease in the West was the result of non-medical factors: basic sanitation, elimination of overcrowding, the rise of the middle class, and improved nutrition.

The vaccination PR campaign has the objective of making everyone into a Group. One big group. All of humanity. Interdependent. The Global Village. That’s the vector of attack against our freedom to choose, to vaccinate or not:

“No, you can’t do that. You’re part of everyone else, and if you don’t follow our vaccine directives, you’re endangering the collective.”

It works beautifully, once you accept the basic fallacious medical view of disease—one germ, one cause, one remedy, one method of prevention.

This is why, for the last 23 years, I’ve been educating people on the fact that medical propaganda and enforcement is the very best method for attaining long-range political control. The propaganda has no apparent partisan slant. It seems to favor no political cause at all. It has a neutral concerned scientific attitude. Along with, of course, the notion that the experts know everything and we, the children, know nothing.

And since we know nothing, we have no right to exercise our freedom to choose. That freedom stops at the door of “science.”

If you believe that one, you’re cooked. They’ve got you.

Look up the road into the future. Use a little common sense and a little imagination, and you’ll be able to see where this is heading. Unless it’s derailed.

I’m betting it’s not a place you want to be.

That’s why freedom matters.

I know, freedom is now a dirty word. Well, that’s the result of a whole other propaganda op.

They’re connected, believe me. The medical cartel and collectivism. They’re on an elite chessboard.

Two streams coming together.

Here are the best statistics I could find for the phony epidemics I’ve been talking about. These are global, and cumulative:

SARS: 774 deaths.

WEST NILE: 1,088 deaths

BIRD FLU: 262 deaths

SWINE FLU (H1N1): 25,000 deaths.

Keep in mind that the CDC claims ordinary seasonal flu in the US kills 36,000 people a year, and the World Health Organization states that ordinary seasonal flu kills between 300,000 and 500,000 people a year, globally. None of this is called an epidemic.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

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MORE GENETIC BALONEY

MAY 16, 2011. As I’ve been writing—and talking about, on radio—the strategy of gene research is exaggeration, especially when it hits the press.

I suggest you go to Drudge and pick up links to two stories this morning—one on obesity and the other on depression. In both cases, the headlines make it seem as if the controlling genes have been nailed down…but as you plow through the body of the text, the seams rapidly fray.

And in both articles, it’s clear that, whatever these researchers actually found out, treatment is years away. Which means, welcome to the memory hole. “Check back in a decade, we’ll be on to something else, another breakthrough, another song and dance in the media—while we’re spending billions of dollars.”

The headlines on stories like this should read: “Nothing here, forget it, minor achievement, we’re hunting in the dark, we need more funding, so we’re touting every step we take.”

Never has so much money been spent on so little.

What I want to know is, where is the gene for public-relations puffery?

Remember, in these bloated articles, look for words that indicate SEEMS LIKE, MAYBE, POSSIBLE, SHOULD, COULD, EXPECTED TO, and the like.

Okay. First piece from Reuters is headlined: SCIENTISTS FIND “MASTER SWITCH” GENE FOR OBESITY. Here are a few choice tidbits.

“…and say it should help the search for treatments…”

“…the regulating gene could be [a] target for drugs to treat…”

“…seems to act as a master switch…”

“We are working hard…to understand these processes and how we can use this information to improve treatment…”

My note to Reuters: “Hey guys, I’m working hard to do a lot of things. Where is my headline?”

Next, we move on to the blockbuster piece in the Financial Times (FT.com) on depression. The headline reads: SCIENTISTS FIND GENETIC LINK TO DEPRESSION.

Standard trumpet blaring.

Here are the text tidbits.

“The discovery…is expected to lead to a better biological understanding of the condition and eventually to more effective antidepressants…”

“…as possibly for the first time we have found a genetic locus for depression.”

“…is likely to pin down the gene responsible…”

“…which may be the basis for designing more effective antidepressants, though the pharmaceutical development process takes so long that new drugs could not be available in less than 10 years.”

So the next time a friend, trying to sound like a guy in a white coat who does research at the Mayo Clinic, says, “Well, you know, they’ve found the genes that control obesity and depression,” you can say, “BRAAAAP! Wrong.”

Of course, people like to deal in certainties, so they help the PR puff masters by ignoring all the MAYBES and SEEMS as they read articles about science.

I’m obviously in the wrong business. Anybody out there want to partner with me in launching a new company? We’ll only need a small amount of seed money. Then we’ll roll on federal and private funding. The name? MAYBE COULD BE INC.

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.

MAGIC AND LANGUAGE

END OF THE INFORMATION AGE

“The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.”

Gertrude Stein, “Tender Buttons”

“The creation lives as genesis beneath the visible surface of the work. All intelligent people see this after the fact, but only the creative see it before the fact—in the future.”

Paul Klee

MAY 15, 2011. Over the years, I’ve tried to dip into the vast technical literature of linguistics, and I’ve always come out of the experience exasperated.

The writers either make obvious observations (dressing them up for a party), or they slice their subject matter into miles of thin baloney, as they turn what we all understand, speak, and write into sub-sub categories of structure.

To mix metaphors, it’s as if they’re analyzing flight by dragging a dirigible down to earth by attaching thousands of weights to its underbelly.

Whereas, the poet can take us into another space with one line: “And the sabbath rang slowly in the pebbles of the holystreams.” (Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill)

If you’re going to say language reflects consciousness, better to just say it. Trying to chart how the operation works is futile. On the other hand, if you say language reflects what consciousness wants to do, you have more wiggle room. One of those wants is magic.

Consciousness wants to exceed ordinary reality and all its samenesses. How? However it can.

The culture may heap praise on dollar-getting and successful marketing and cunning practical skills and devotion to making the right deal, but consciousness in the background wants expansive magic.

When these two worlds collide, you get Learn to Levitate in Three Easy Lessons and Wear This Blue Stone and Become Rich.

The unlikely marriage is made in a Vegas chapel with a Wayne Newton impersonator as the minister. Actually, Vegas is probably the only place in America where money does become magic, because the total immersion and dedication to it is single-minded. Nobody pretends it’s for charity. It’s money, cash, solidified adrenaline. The mob dreamed up that alchemy. They invented popular loser’s magic, American style.

Theoretically, you could build a Poet’s city in the desert, where, around the clock, pumped into every room of every hotel, spread out on the green-felt tables in the big rooms, you’d find nothing but lines of Keats, Shakespeare, Yeats, Hart Crane, Rimbaud, Whitman, William Burroughs, William Gibson, 24/7…

Who knows what would happen in that city after a few years. You might find people drifting out of their ordinary minds and hovering a few hundred feet above the sand.

A certain percentage of customers would claim to be addicted, and rehab centers would spring up, people sitting in circles in rooms and cleaning up by grunting monosyllables at each other.

So that’s the prelude to today’s piece:

Stash this in the waking at dawn folder…

It happened the moment the Internet went public.

Of course nothing really ends. It’s just superseded.

So several levels are operating at once. Or maybe hundreds, thousands of levels.

While the global spread of information will go on forever, the END was signaled by the first people who worked the online data. They played with it, invaded it, changed it, reset it, wormed their way into figuring out how it was built. For them it was material to be woven and attached and discarded.

They were seeing information as pieces of vaguely recognizable IS. Didn’t matter what it meant, particularly.

Select a random piece.

“Sugar burns.”

The thought stretched out like a long lazy piece of gum, from mouth, between two fingers, past the nose, into the other hand, on a summer afternoon, cicadas in the canopy, sugar burns, a thought at the bottom of a mantrum when you think you’ve finally reached the last stop on the bus line, and everything is going to be good forever.

But of course, it isn’t going to be the same good.. Things change. The thought, a datum, goes through incarnations of place, time, home, the makeup is scuffed away and new powders and liners are applied. Does it matter what the face was, originally?

So these first meta-miners were working the strings of clusters of symbols, and the foundations and channels along which they could be flung. What else was there to care about?

Shadows, reflections, suggestions, hints, looking at a distance, down on ponds and streams and swarms and orchards of data…and finding a strange joy.

Perhaps all languages were really that way. Or if they weren’t, they could be.

Two people could exchange, not the facts, but the glints.

Not what did you learn today, but how did you transmute it?

An avalanche of stupidity might result back there on level one, but on level two something was happening.

The Net is the transportation company resurrected. The trucks loaded. Which route works? Where are the slow-downs and blocks? How’s the weather? Where’s the loading dock at the other end? Who’s driving? Did they do the maintenance inspection on the fleet?

You’re driving down the road at dawn, and the cows are standing in a field of green, the grass so high it obscures their legs and they look like they’re floating, and not a thought is given to what’s in the back of the truck.

Data jingle and jangle, and once in a while, you receive a little jolt of electricity, and you think you might have just translated them into something telepathic. Because you’re as far away from the cow as the shop owner who’s supervising the way the leather coat will be hung in the window. And when it’s close to sunset, and the lights come on in the street, there are little puddles and streaks of red and purple on the collar and the long sleeve. You penetrate a paper-thin barrier, and you’re in a world an inch away from the old one. Floating. Seeing.

Level one is crumbling. No one knows what a noun is or a verb, and the act of diagramming a sentence is as ancient as praying to the sun.

You wonder whether language was always meant to be more, a series of brushstrokes that make and unmake three oranges or a garden in Giverny.

You wonder if everyone is holding on too tight, and that’s why the magic doesn’t flood the days.

The meaning of meaning isn’t breaking any bones or nations. It’s sliding in through the narrow cracks and all the literal Godmakers will eventually have to accept it. They cover their ears and sing one song until they go deaf.

Somewhere, a software code grinder is reaching for his cup of coffee and out of the corner of his eye, he sees a hundred strings across the screen, and they are moving slightly, and one character jumps out of its nest. It taps a shoulder, and that shoulder puts an end to the world we knew.

We ARE moving in the direction of USING another kind of language, one that will, in the moment, ever changing, express sensations we’ve only glimpsed, and it will express them in a long flow…

BUT THEN we come upon a shape, an old shape, a complex circle done in slice-and-dice geometric perfection, encompassing hundreds of attached slender anchored tendons, the kind we might once have made with a compass holding a pencil on the end. Inside the circle, when you look closely, you see other shapes, pointed stars, and someone tells us this circle is the translation of an echo passed between two moons a trillion miles from Earth. Yes. The celestial music…and we pause. We pause, and there is a shift in our tectonics.

We recall our abject devotion to how the universe was designed.

We recall the hypnotic slow-down that signals our commitment to it.

We feel the new language fading out like a blank check in the hands of a Treasury agent.

Do we move into the New, or do we revert to the old temple of worship at the feet of Universe-as-it-is?

LIFE, or SLEEP?

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.

SACRED GEOMETRY, FRACTALS, CODE

THE UNIVERSE SPEAKS

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

TS Eliot, Four Quartets

Imagination is the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable world is but a faint shadow.

William Blake

MAY 15, 2011. You could say the universe was built with an option switch.

Option One: It can be approached as a series of layers, pattern hidden beneath pattern, shape within shape, message under message, code inside code. Starting from any point of reference, you can work your way in, until you reach the core.

At the center is a shape or energy or mystery that generates the whole.

At every step of the exploration, every piece of code suggests the whole.

Many harmonious, mathematically pure patterns emerged on the way to the core, intimating an intrinsic order.

Option One is the PR the universe broadcasts about itself. It is a story of sacred symmetry.

Many proofs are offered in the form of examples. The intricate designs of leaves, of shells, of natural sounds, of galaxies…

Proponents of Option One claim that, despite the dynamism of energy in the universe, the underlying structure is about perfection.

Option Two: This is far more esoteric. Universe is confessing, “I’m a work of art. Everything you can find through Option One confirms that. As such, I’m only one in an infinity of potential creations. Admire me, adore me, shrug your shoulders at me, I’m one ‘picture in the museum’. I was invented according to the aesthetic inclinations of the artist(s), but nothing about me is end-all or be-all. True, the artist(s) who made me poured a great deal of effort and planning into his work, with the intent of producing a masterpiece, but his design choices and his ‘painterly preferences’ and his determination for underlying Order are his and his alone. I could have been built in an entirely different way. It may seem that space and time demand order, balance, harmony, so that the creation, the painting holds together and doesn’t spin off in chaotic directions, but that space and that time are actually part of the work of art.

“You have come to accept this pattern, this harmony in the work of art, in me, as inevitable—and therefore, you believe I am more than just another painting—but the sense of inevitability is present in many different kinds of paintings designed in radicallydifferent ways. What has happened is this: you have filled your minds with THE REFLECTION OF THE STANDARDS BY WHICH I WAS CREATED.

“This is very important to understand. You’ve embedded in your minds the aesthetic according to which I was created—and then, playing a shell game with yourself, you’ve convinced yourselves that I am somehow sacred and perfect, because I MATCH WHAT IS IN YOUR MIND, WHAT YOU BELIEVE TO BE ULTIMATE BEAUTY.

“You’ve hypnotized yourselves into all this. You’re like an art critic who has convinced himself that there is only one pattern, one kind of beauty, and then forever pursues only that which reflects the pattern, the beauty.

“You have become, by secret choice, the ideal audience to appreciate and venerate me. You have tuned yourselves to me, to me alone.

“You’ve invested a great deal of energy in this enterprise of yours, and you’re not about to throw it all away. But you haven’t noticed the sacrifice you’ve made.

“You’ve buried, downplayed, avoided, postponed YOUR OWN IMAGINATION AND CREATIVE POWER AS AN ARTIST, which power happens to have no limit. Which happens to have an infinite freedom to invent any reality/universe based on any standard or no standard at all.

“It may seem you’ve made a small sacrifice, but that is because you are so dedicated to me. Your dedication is misplaced.”

Option One and Two are, in this metaphor, both present in any work of art, any creation. The painting pulls you in, on the one hand, to see and feel fully the universe of itself—and on the other hand, it makes clear that it is only one of an infinity of possible creations.

Following Option One, you feel magic.

Following Option Two, you make magic.

Option One results in eventual boredom, which seems to be mysterious.

Option Two results in making magic after magic after magic, without end. This path, as a side effect, answers all questions and delivers all of what is called, in modern terms, paranormal abilities.

…This is all found and implied in the astonishing 1600-year-old tradition of Tibet—squashed by its leaders, who loaded on their rocket ship the humorless heavy baggage of rituals, ceremonies, cosmological bric-a-brac, theocratic absolutism, and arbitrary contradictions so familiar in other religions.

Bad art to conceal great art.

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.

THE REAL PARADIGM

MAY 11, 2011. The word paradigm has been thrown around like a football at a picnic. In loose-knit spiritual communities, it signals any new musing on subjects ranging from Earth’s pole shifts to bowel movements.

Scientists who want greater recognition in the public arena will call their latest speculation a paradigm shift.

Real paradigm shifts involve changes of perception.

Suppose we came upon a fundamental factor that always changes perception of reality.

A factor that has been masked, buried, and hidden away.

Imagination.

Imagination, employed intensely.

Roughly 1600 years ago, the Tibetans, doubling down on the teachings of a few itinerant immigrants from India, decided that UNIVERSE WAS A PRODUCT OF MIND.

This extreme fact could be experienced, if a student imaginatively constructed what, in essence, was a piece of another universe.

Suddenly, the whole game would change.

Paranormal abilities could walk in the door as a side effect of the focused use of imagination.

John Blofeld explores this Tibetan practice in his 1970 book, The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet. I recommend the book.. Also, Alexandra David-Neel’s accounts of her journeys through Tibet.

But for artists and inventors, for anyone in any human field of endeavor who presses the use of imagination, perception of the world changes in various ways.

In which case, the way the world alters is less important than the driving force that made it happen.

I offer the following testimonial that touches on this phenomenon.

In 1961-2, in New York, I found myself with a little cash in the bank and no job. I had embarked on a small adventure, prompted by a sketchy friend I ran into, in Washington Square Park, a place where many borderline cases dwell.

Mike told me he had just landed a gig as the superintendent of an apartment building nearby. Free rent in exchange for a little work around the place. He hadn’t moved in yet. But he was leaving the country in a few days.

“Something just came up in Paris,” he said.

I knew better than to ask what.

“So,” he said, “the landlord of the building lives out of state and he’s never met me. If you say you’re me, you could walk into a nice little studio and take over as the super.”

I needed a place. I’d been up in Massachusetts for a while, and now I was sleeping on a friend’s couch in mid-town Manhattan.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

It turned out the landlord lived in New Jersey. I decided to pay him a visit. He was an old codger who owned several buildings. In his house, we sat and chatted. I realized he was quite out of his mind. He kept referring to “a pack of soldiers,” as if they lived on his property. He was probably under the influence of a few powerful meds. Looking back on it now, I’d guess Thorazine.

I told him I wasn’t Mike. I explained the situation to him, but it didn’t make an impact. He nodded sagely, but kept on calling me Mike. Finally, I gave up trying.

And so I became Mike. Just like that.

Three days later, I was ensconced in the studio, and I was sweeping hallways and collecting rents. I was the super.

A new idea occurred to me. Why didn’t I embroider my new ID with a few twists and stitches? (I wouldn’t use them on my friends, of course—just strangers.)

I spent an afternoon in Central Park mulling over the possibilities.

Gynecologist? Disbarred lawyer? Minor-league baseball player?

This is an experiment, I told myself. I’ll try it out for a month and see what happens.

I was painting small canvases in the studio. Perhaps something similar. I could say I was a sculptor. Not just a stone cutter. I needed a modern angle.

I could say I was looking for abandoned buildings. Spaces in those buildings where I could pound down walls and make new changes. Public art. That was supposed to be avant-garde. Of course, I’d never actually locate such a building. I would just be looking.

So for the next month, I wandered around Manhattan making a point of meeting new people, and I tried out my new role.

As I suspected, people ate it up. They were excited.

Would I need city permits? Was I going to become a squatter? Did I plan to stage events in the building?

A recently fired schoolteacher I ran into in a bar near Carnegie Hall introduced me to a friend who was a realtor. He loved my plan. He started phoning me every day with updates. We went and looked at buildings in the Bronx.

He, in turn, passed me along to a photographer who started shooting pictures of my “search” for abandoned spaces. The photographer was dating an ER doctor who had relatives in Connecticut. She drove us up to see her aunt and uncle, who lived on a farm that had a large empty barn. Why not shift from the bombed-out Bronx to pastoral settings?

In fact, the doctor said, why bother actually “sculpting” changes in buildings at all? I should, instead, figure out another reason for exploring abandoned structures—a whole series of photos could be taken, and there could be a gallery show. Sure, I said. Why not? I was flexible.

In fact, I was so flexible events began to feel like they were occurring on a stage where all the actors were improvising. What was going on, on stage, was realer than real. That was my sense of it.

Out in the countryside, the doc said, we could shoot pictures of animals who lived in barns and empty ruined houses. Mice, rats, maybe raccoons.

After a few driving expeditions into the hinterlands, she and the photographer lost interest. We weren’t finding lots of animals.

I didn’t care. I was having the time of my life. I noticed I wasn’t wearing my glasses. My eyesight seemed to have improved. As we trampled through woods and fields, I was seeing colors more sharply. Shades and distinctions of gray, green, brown.

Every morning, I was waking up with great energy and enthusiasm. As the super, I could fix things around the building. I had never been able to fix anything. But now a broken chair, a sagging couch, a fractured light fixture. Piece of cake.

One afternoon, on the spur of the moment, I walked into an art class in lower Manhattan and told the teacher I had studied with ____, a famous New York painter (I had never met). The teacher immediately got me a chair, easel, pad, and charcoal, and for the next hour, I drew the model who was posing on a platform. I sold one of those drawings to a woman who worked for an ad agency. She introduced me to a friend who was a collector, and I brought him down to my studio and sold him three small paintings.

Through this collector, I met several UN diplomats, and when a man named Richard Jenkins walked into a bookstore where I was temporarily stocking the shelves for a friend, I was able to drop those names—he knew people from the UN. They were his clients. Richard was an extraordinary healer. I wrote about him in my book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies. He helped change my life.

Richard had a dog and a cat. I made friends with the dog, Bill. I began taking him for walks in Central Park. I’d let him off his leash, wave my hand, and he would run off and play. Then, I would silently “reach out” to him 30 yards away, and he would suddenly turn around and race back to me. This was quite interesting.

One afternoon, the dog and I were outside a deli. We were just standing there, looking at the street. I started focusing on three brownstone apartments on Columbus Avenue. I began memorizing their architecture. I wanted to draw them later. After a minute, the buildings began communicating. It was as if they were announcing themselves. They were saying, “Here we are. This is what we look like. We’re always telling the people what we look like, but they don’t hear us…”

At that moment, the dog turned toward the buildings and barked. I decided “to return to normal.” To resume “average perception.” The buildings would just be buildings. The dog stopped barking. I pitched back up to “seeing the buildings as alive.” The dog started barking again. I tried this several times. Back and forth. Same result. The dog barked. He stopped barking.

I said, “Bill, you know you’re quite something.”

A man who was buying a newspaper at a stand turned and looked at me.

“Did you call me?” he said.

I shook my head and pointed to the dog.

He walked over.

“I’m Bill,” he said.

We talked for a few minutes.

I said I was a sculptor. I told him about my search for empty structures.

“Interesting,” he said. “Can you write?”

“Sure,” I said.

He walked with me. I took the dog back to Richard’s apartment and dropped him off. Outside, Bill told me he was putting together a report on the possibility of the reunification of Germany.

I asked him who he worked for.

“People at a bank.” He was intentionally vague.

That day, we made a deal. I would meet him at the 42^nd Street Library the next afternoon, and he would show me his notes. I would sit there for a few hours and write up several pages of the report for him. A try-out.

That’s exactly what I did, and it turned into my first paying job as a writer.

One night near the end of my month-long experiment, Bill knocked on my door. I let him in. His face was pale and he was sweating.

He sat down and told me his doctor had just diagnosed him with “a very serious disease.” For some reason, he wouldn’t say what it was. He told me he was going to quit his job and leave the city.

I liked Bill. He had a devil-may-care attitude I enjoyed. I’d had several dinners with him and his wife at their apartment. They had a good marriage.

Suddenly, I felt very, very lucid.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I know there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine.”

He looked at me. Something happened. It was as if we were exchanging words on another level we both understood very well. As if we were dipping into the future. Bill saw it, he glimpsed it, and so he knew he’d be okay. He and I both saw him in the future. We knew.

He laughed.

He stood up and looked around the room.

There were tears in his eyes.

He nodded at me and walked out.

Over the next few days, I called him several times, but there was no answer.

Two weeks later, I found out he’d moved. No forwarding address.

Six months went by. I got a letter from him. He was in Arizona.

He wrote that he’d quit his job and moved his family to a place outside Phoenix.

“I never wanted that job in New York,” he wrote. “Now I’ve really got something. After the night we talked at your place, I floated down 5^th Avenue like I was on a cloud. I don’t know what the hell it was, but I was free. I just had a checkup from a specialist here, and it’s all clear. But I already knew that. The world isn’t really what we think it is, is it?”

From a mutual friend, I found out the name of Bill’s doctor in New York. My new pal, the ER doc I’d gone barn hunting with in the country, visited the neurologist on the upper East Side. After a bit of wrangling, he told her he had indeed diagnosed Bill with a “serious neurological condition.”

After that month-long experiment, in which I’d imagined and invented my life from scratch, during which time, therefore, I saw reality in a new way (and still do), I decided to leave New York, too, and come to California.

Imagination/creation/invention. The hallmarks and the keys.

Sixteen years after Bill left New York, I ran into him in LA. He was healthy as a horse.

We had supper at a little restaurant in Santa Monica.

“You know,” he said, “that revelation I had in New York all those years ago, I’ve never forgotten it. It’s impossible to describe, but I’ve become more myself.”

The waiter came over with drinks. He said, “You two must really like the food.”

Bill looked at him.

“Why do you say that?”

The waiter said, “Last night, I was just going home and I saw you guys eating dinner here.”

I don’t know what the waiter saw, but as Bill wrote to me all those years ago, the world isn’t what we think it is, is it?

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.

MAYBE POSSIBLE ART

MAY 13, 2011. This is part of my flood. The flood that says: other people are imagining reality for you, so why not invent it for yourself THE WAY YOU WANT TO?

Contrary to popular belief, this shift doesn’t involve going crazy or finding yourself in a deserted cosmic bus station at 3 in the morning, unless that’s where you want to be.

Today, I do a little more dissection on the corpse called Media.

In particular, what passes for medical reporting.

I’m motivated by my radio interview this week with Becky Estepp, who is the project director of a lawyer-group called EBCALA. Becky explained that, although the federal government has quietly paid out $$ claims to parents of autistic children, who were damaged by vaccines, publicly the government asserts there is absolutely no connection between the vaccines and autism.

These payouts are done through a federal agency called VICP. VICP puts parents through a lot of red tape, and denies most claims.

Well, VICP was originally set up when big pharmaceutical companies—losing huge lawsuits filed by parents of kids harmed by vaccines—approached the feds and said, “We’re in deep trouble. If these suits continue to be brought against us, we won’t be able to manufacture vaccines anymore.”

The feds and the companies then cooked up their plan. Create a new agency, VICP, and mandate that ALL claims for damage must go through it. In fact, the US Supreme Court has decided that parents can’t sue vaccine manufacturers anymore, on the basis that their vaccines could have been safer. VICP is their only option. Thus, the drug companies are protected.

And as more states consider making it harder for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children, we have a potential situation wherein a product—vaccines—must be accepted…and if anything goes wrong, there is no recourse involving the maker of that product.

When mainstream medical journalists approach this subject, they invent a cozy little universe in which “everything is okay.” Actually, most of the time, that’s the universe they invent whenever a controversial medical subject comes up.

Conventional medical journalism is an art, believe it or not. It’s not a high art, but it still qualifies. Reporters learn how to use certain words and phrases, especially when, in the middle of an interview with a high-ranking researcher at a prestigious institution, they realize the researcher is straining, like a constipated blowfish, to inflate the importance of his own work.

The reporter slumps in his chair. He has no story. He has a deadline, but no content.

So he shrugs it off and gets ready to pepper his article with terms like:

“Could very well be a major advance on.”

“A possible coming breakthrough.”

“Glint of light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Evidence suggests.”

“The cutting edge of.”

“More research is needed but.”

“The future holds promise for.”

“A growing consensus that.”

“Are beginning to believe.”

“Strong conviction in light of.”

“In a related field, studies showed.”

“Colleagues agreed that.”

“Results never seen before.”

“Opportunities abound for further.”

“If this turns out to be.”

“Although there were side effects.”

“Hope is spreading that.”

“Never tried in the past.”

“In a few patients, we noticed.”

“Animal studies supported the idea that.”

“In his laboratory late one night.”

Look for these and similar plums in a medical story coming to your screen, TV, newspaper, magazine, journal soon.

Here’s one I found from today’s serving in about three seconds: “In detailing a new process that might someday speed the development of…”

Might. Someday. Speed the development of.

I’ll it file in the black hole I use for post-dated PR-could-be’s and check back with them in ten years.

And yes, this is art. Low-level, but art. It is literally the manufacture of reality—by the ton.

It’s a first cousin of the situation where, in a college fraternity room, a senior tells a freshman, “Now when you write the paper for Jones, use words like massive invasion, breached the boundaries, overwhelmed the civilian population, fire from the sky, surgical strike, heroic holding action. Jones watches a lot of History Channel.”

In the medical arena, the reporter needs to weld together a whole lot of vaporous bloviation to make the story stick together.

Whether he knows it or not, he’s inventing reality, and he’s pawning it off on the reader or viewer, who is supposed to take away a positive feeling about the researcher and his work.

Then there is the placement of subordinate and main clause, as in: “Although some parents are expressing concern, health officials assure the public the vaccine is completely safe.” Instead of, “Although health officials assure the public the vaccine is safe, some parents are expressing concern.” Depending on what editors in the newsroom perceive the “prevalent mood” is “in the community,” the clauses can be dealt out in either sequence.

As we all know, the reporter who interviews the self-aggrandizing researcher, Dr. Blowfish, needs to obtain a few supporting quotes from other experts. “I his work is an important step forward in the battle to conquer…”

Then, near the end of the art piece, there will appear a line or two expressing reservations:

“Dr. Forstskull, of the Bongloidia Foundation, was less sure of the results. “I believe, in the long run, we may find more thorough prevention in another form of the vaccine.”

Balanced. Fair. And completely meaningless.

Actually, the reporter also interviews a biologist from Stanford, who says, “This is by far the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever seen.”

He doesn’t make the cut in the article.

But you did make the cut. You’re the audience, and reality is being spooled out by the yard. Just for you and a few million other viewers.

Day after day, in many ways, they imagine reality. They drape it on your head. The accumulated coverage is supposed to convince you that inventing your own reality, in this or any other venue, is futile and impossible, and only a fool would try it.

That’s the whole point of the exercise.

And if you walk away and say, “I don’t believe any of that stuff they’re putting on me,” but do nothing, imagine nothing, invent nothing, create nothing, they’ve achieved their goal.

In the flowering of time, they don’t really care what you believe.

Prime elites only care that you don’t become prime mover of your own imagination, don’t walk through the door into territory beyond any of their systems.

Where, by the way, the magic is.

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.

GOVERNMENT “CONFESSES” VACCINE-AUTISM LINK

MAY 11, 2011. Listen to my radio show today. 7PM ET. www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

If you can’t make that, catch it in the Progressive archive. This is a big one. I’ll be interviewing Becky Estepp, project manager for the Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy (EBCALA).

EBCALA just held a press conference in Washington yesterday. They presented families who have received GOVERNMENT PAYOUTS based on vaccine damage to their kids. Damage that involved AUTISM.

Get it?

This is the government “confessing” the vaccine-autism link is real. Of course, they deny that. They say they paid out the claims for “encephalopathy,” which is a catch-all term for a host of “brain diseases.”

But this is just a word game. It’s an escape hatch. It’s “we won’t ever admit directly that mercury in vaccines can cause autism.”

It’s “we just got through proving mercury has nothing to do with autism, so we’re not going to take that back now.”

It’s “well, you see, encephalopathy is sometimes ACCOMPANIED BY autistic behavior or autism.”

But the government PAID OUT CLAIMS. They parted with cash. They proved they’re liars.

And these are the people who are supposed to be running the new and improved national health insurance plan? Are you kidding me? It’s a sick joke.

In my 30 years as a reporter, I’ve seen lots of these word games. They all add up to lies. They transfer blame and meaning from one category to another, and only the most dull and gullible among us would buy in. For example, kid is diagnosed with ADHD and is given Ritalin, a cheap form of speed. At first, he feels better, clearer, more centered. Then, sooner or later, he crashes—as people do who are on speed. This crash prompts mommy and daddy to take the kid back to the doctor, who will never admit that Ritalin was responsible. He says, “Ahem, well, your son now, I’m afraid, has a NEW condition. Clinical depression. It happens. So I’ll write a prescription for Paxil.” Then, quite possibly, on both of these drugs, the kid goes bouncing off the walls. The speed effect is multiplied. He lashes out, does all sorts of irrational things. Back to the doc, who says, “Your son’s condition has worsened, I’m afraid. He’s now borderline schizoid, psychotic. I’ll have to put him on a stronger medication.”

Which causes brain damage, euphemistically called Tardive Dyskinesia. (See the “major tranquilizers” section of “Toxic Psychiatry,” by Dr. Peter Breggin.)

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.

THE NAKED FEAR OF HEALTH FREEDOM

MAY 10, 2011. I have sent out this article before. In the light of recent events (bin Laden, the nuclear disaster in Japan, US hurricanes, etc.), the issue of health freedom has taken a back seat. In truth, it only surfaces during crisis moments, when big government makes overt moves to limit our health choices.

But that doesn’t mean people have lost track of it. In 1994, I ran for a Congressional seat in the 29^th District (Los Angeles), on this issue, and I know some of the people who were with me are still working to keep the flame alive.

First, I do have two updates in health-freedom news—

Right now, because I can’t find reports on the status of a bill in Washington State, which would limit parents’ choices re refusing to vaccinate their children, I have a query into the governor’s office. The bill would require parents to obtain a pediatrician’s signature, before claiming a philosophical, religious, or medical exemption. It is pernicious. It limits freedom by making a doctor the arbiter of another person’s religious or philosophical views. In a perverse way, it’s fitting—because in the last hundred years, doctors have become the modern priests of this era. Their white coats are the prelates’ robes; their instruments and medicines are the sacraments of the faith. They cite certainty as priests do—and they cover up the crimes. (See Starfield, July 26, 2000, JAMA, for evidence the medical system in the US kills 225,000 people a year.)

Second update: a group called EBCALA (Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and Advocacy) is holding a press conference at noon, ET, today, on the steps of the US Court of Federal Appeals, in Washington DC. The link for live viewing is www.ustream.tv/channel/ebcala

The subject? Kids brain damaged by vaccines. EBCALA states they have proof the US government has been paying out settlement claims to parents of kids who developed autism after vaccination.

This would mean the government’s statement that there is no link between vaccines and autism is a lie and a cover-up.

EBCALA has obtained a bombshell email sent by David Bowman (US Health and Human Services spokesman) to a reporter, in which Bowman denies the government has ever paid such a claim. But the interesting language comes near the end of the email, after Bowman indicates the government has paid out claims for vaccine-caused encephalopathy. Encephalopathy is a catch-all term for a number of “brain diseases.”

Bowman writes: “Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms, including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures.”

It’s the old disease-label shell game. “We pay for vaccine-injured kids who develop encephalopathy, not autism. Even though in cases, encephalopathy IS autism…”

Feel free to break down Bowman’s sleazy logic into its finer points.

Here is my 2010 article:

Usually, when politicians discover a large voting bloc that has no champion, they move in like gold prospectors with a fever in their heads. Tap that bloc; mine it; use it.

However, in the case of millions of Americans who passionately want to manage their own health without government interference, who want access to the full range of nutritional supplements and unlimited access to alternative practitioners, there is dead silence in Washington.

Why?

First, few politicians are willing to challenge the agenda of the pharmaceutical companies (drug everybody from cradle to grave). Second, these health-freedom advocates are radical decentralists—which means they know how it feels to be denied the right to take care of their own bodies. They have met the enemy and they know how it operates on a very personal level.

There is no chance politicians will be able to finesse these voters or make empty promises to them or wow them with “task forces” created to “study problems.” Health-freedom folks are too smart for any of that nonsense.

They want unbridled freedom. They want, for example, to be able to say no to vaccines for their children without having to walk the gauntlet of officials who try to dissuade and intimidate and threaten them.

They want to find alternative treatments for cancer in many cases, and cancer happens to be one of those tightly guarded provinces, where big money and big government insist on radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery, come hell or high water.

If politicians aggressively and publicly courted health-freedom people, they’d be exposing themselves to vicious attacks from the medical/government axis and its media dupes.

They’d be opening the door to the notion that people can really choose their own solutions, despite “the best science” and the authoritarian pronouncements of doctors, who are modern priests in white coats wielding hypnotic power.

In other words, FREEDOM would become the top issue and the trumping issue all the way across the board—and very few politicians of either party want to step out into that world.

It’s too raw, too real, too much about naked choice.

That’s why, even as states try to nullify ObamaCare, you don’t hear conversation about how the Dept. of Health and Human Services is poised to compose a list of permitted medical treatments and will eventually outlaw alternative options.

See if you can find, even among the most conservative legislators recently elected to office in the Republican landslide, any who speak up about health freedom.

Good luck.

It remains a taboo in the halls of Congress.

This means individuals will have to carry the burden themselves. They will have to speak out and keep speaking out. They will have to challenge government repression on the most fundamental level. They will have to make this issue electric.

In doing so, they will be accused of everything under the sun. They will be called anti-science Luddites, and religious crazies, and even killers of their own children.

Notice that I’m not advocating the wholesale rejection of modern medicine; I’m saying every individual has the right and the freedom to choose to how to manage his own health. Period. That right takes precedence over anyone’s idea of science or “best evidence.”

On that basis, the fight can be won, in the long run. On any other basis, defeat is certain.

I have lobbied for the formation of a PR agency, funded by nutritional companies, that would widely disseminate information about the health benefits of supplements and the false science behind many conventional medical treatments—and the response has been zero. These companies have no stomach for such a campaign. They, too, fear health freedom, in their own way. They continue to exist in a twilight zone of hope and fantasy. “Maybe the government will ignore us and let us go on doing business.”

In 1994, when I ran for a Congressional seat in the 29^th District (Los Angeles), on a platform of health freedom, I gained profound knowledge about who would come out of the woodwork to offer help and who would stay in the shadows. The results, in that regard, were quite sobering. One or two nutritional companies supported me. The rest stayed away.

When the inessentials are stripped away and you are talking about sheer freedom, and when people realize this is your sole concern, they tend to retreat and find other things to do. On the one hand, they will admit their own health is a top concern, but they won’t come out and fight for the right to pursue it according to their own dictates. It’s a strange landscape.

Call me crazy, but I believe a presidential candidate, fully funded, who argued vigorously and widely for health freedom (and other freedoms), could win an election, even in this day and age.

But we are not about to test that hypothesis, because the fear of health freedom is too deep.

And this tells us something.

It tells us we are in the right pew. We are mining a red-hot idea. We’re discovering a lever and a fulcrum that could move the nation.

Back in 1994, I saw passion about politics that far exceeded anything I’d ever run into before. The health-freedom supporters who emerged from their homes were battle-tested veterans in a war that, out of media range, had been going on for decades. They carried a revolutionary spirit of outrage. They weren’t opting for New Age rainbows and pastel prophecies. They had a spirit toward which the Founders would have tipped their hats.

I’ve learned it’s never too late for freedom, because freedom is not part of ordinary time. It’s stands above the passage of events. It is. It’s waiting.

The current trigger is this shuck-and-jive ObamaCare program. This sanctimonious share-and-care sop. Behind it is the plan to force all Americans into a straitjacket of pharmaceutical insanity.

That’s what’s up the road.

But we can take other roads.

If we will.

Neither mainstream political party will ever admit that the government/pharmaceutical axis is a perfect example of a fascist operation. Neither party will ever state, in clear terms, that every citizen has the right to define and follow his own dictates in managing his health. They are afraid to touch that electric core.

But we aren’t.

And that is where hope resides.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com