THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

OCTOBER 14, 2010.  I can sum up many thousands of pages, many academic careers, and much labor in the area of modern philosophy by saying:

The sun sets in the western sky—and our language mirrors that event by stating: “the sun sets in the western sky.”

In other words, language reports events in the physical world.

You wouldn’t believe the internal wrangling that has gone on for decades in the field of academic philosophy around this fairly simple issue.

(In a somewhat related matter, noted linguist Noam Chomsky reported that, because children learn to speak their native tongue so quickly, they couldn’t merely be responding to inputs from their environment—these kids have some sort of innate capacity [or mental imprint] that involves language ability.  I’m shocked, I tell you.  Shocked.)

However, language as we usually understand it and speak it and write it is not our only option.  We could explore and invent other types of language whose purpose is not to reflect events in the physical world.

These new languages would create new realities.

For example—modern poetry.  Modern painting.  Music.  Hah.  Turns out we have such languages all around us.  Who knew? 

Anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down) 

ee cummings

Those lines aren’t merely constructing a fantasy that doesn’t exist in the world.  Those lines make relationships that confound what happens and how it happens in the world.  They subvert the grammar, syntax, and structure of how things are supposed to happen. 

Literalists hate this kind of thing.  They claim to the death they don’t understand it.  They claim no one, except perhaps insane people, can understand it.  They claim it’s a Communist atheist conspiracy eating away at the pillars of Western civilization.   

Of course, if you just read the lines of poetry, you begin to sense meaning.

Sea is moon,

Ever there you could,

You but I see

Leaning out over

I just made that up.  Why not? 

What would happen if two people began talking in a language that didn’t, in its content or structure, reflect the world?

Would they begin to “catch on” to something?  Would some previously dormant area of mind and imagination float to the surface and grasp what was happening? 

If so, we could speculate that, in fact, there is a huge area of mind/imagination that rarely if ever has the chance to make itself known—because we are trapped in matching our language to the world as it is—not only in content, but in structure and sequence.

I refer you to many movies that posit and depict other worlds of a fantastic nature.  But these movies show other worlds as if they were just like ours, except the people, events, and circumstances in them are “more advanced” in various ways.  The movies never present these alternate worlds as being of a distinctly different kind than ours.  By “different kind,” I mean the order of events, the processes, the relationships partake of a far different “grammar.” 

Suppose one of the intrepid Star Trek crews encountered a world in which everyone lived entirely in what we would call a subjective reality?  And had a language that reflected that?  And looked at life in that fashion?  What would THAT be like?

When I talk about the possibility of a magic theater (see my last article), I’m indicating we could have characters on stage partaking of a different KIND of world—and their language would reflect that. 

Why bother?

Because no one knows how deep the trance is that we live in, how truly devoted we are to the structure of ordinary reality, how tight we hold on to the sequence and grammar of that reality-language.  No one knows how much of our imagination is waiting in the wings to capitalize on a moment when we seek other possibilities.

I fully realize that what I’m saying in this article may take some time to sink in.  But that’s all right.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  And I’ll tell you a secret.  Rome was never destroyed.  It lives on in the vast dedication to its fundamental blueprint.

Our language confirms and feeds back to us our perception of what reality is.  A new kind language; a new kind of reality.  A new KIND of reality.  This is what few people want to contemplate. 

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE MAGIC THEATER PROJECT

By Jon Rappoport

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

www.nomorefakenews.com 

OCTOBER 13, 2010.  Lately, I’ve been looking over notes I made for a project called THE MAGIC THEATER.  It’s still on the drawing boards…

This article is a selection from those rather esoteric notes, and it’s dedicated to those of you who’ve stuck with me over the years as I’ve written many pieces on the power of imagination.  You know who you are.  I appreciate your interest and your desire to explore this vast area further and further.  To me, you’re champions.   

THE MAGIC THEATER would be for actors, or people who might want to act, or people who are already acting IN LIFE but are bored with the process and the results.

In other words, it’s for anybody.

Most actor-training schools focus on scenes and dialogue and movement rooted in Realism.  I have no problem with that.  I’m just interested in something else.

Here are some preliminary notes—-you may find these ideas opaque or confusing or puzzling…but I submit that just means you need to think about them a good deal more than you think about the news or what’s on television or the next thing you’re about to do. 

Notes—

We need an opportunity to use words, language and expressed emotion that surpasses the expectations of ordinary reality.

For example, if you rehearsed a scene with other actors in which the substance was a DREAM, and the language was an invented poetics in which the usual connections between words were advanced beyond rational and logical discourse, you would be approaching the point where new space and time became palpable.

Most “dream scenes” in theater or film hang on to ordinary language.  The setting and events are challenging, but the words are pedestrian. 

Language as we use it is ballast.  It keeps us rooted in the conventions of reality.  It assures us that the relationships between things and events and people are stable in a simplistic context.

According to at least one interpretation of the Chinese language, it posited, in its original form, a vital flow in which process and relationships and action verbs were the primary forces.  Objects, positions, nouns, measurable distances were background, incidental. 

Poetic drama has the potential to surpass the conditioning that accommodates us to every-day reality. 

Rarely has theater seriously transformed the very basis of language, dialogue, and verbal assumptions.  In that sense, theater has been a bird with rocks on its wings. 

In THE MAGIC THEATER, people learn to speak in different ways.

About 35 years ago, I was a regular in a theater experiment with Scott Kelman, at his Factory Theater in downtown LA.  Every week, about 10 of us gathered for something he called The Liars Club.

One by one, we would take the stage and tell a story about ourselves that was a complete lie.  The idea was to make it as convincing as possible.  We were motivated to tell some major lies.  It wasn’t just, I stole a marble from my childhood friend. 

The effect of each person stepping up and telling a story for 10 minutes or so was rather extraordinary, and it was sub rosa.  We didn’t quiz each other about the “lie aspect.”  There was no probing…just one lie after another.  Then, turn out the lights, and go home.

It took me about three weeks to realize that I was assuming people were telling the TRUTH about what had happened to them, under the pretended cover of lying.  It was that convincing. 

Of course, I didn’t know.  Still don’t.  Lying or telling the truth? 

Conscious lies change space.

Not being able to separate lie from truth, AND KNOWING YOU CAN’T, changes space.

The pressure to tell the truth reduces and distorts space.  Eliminate that pressure and space opens up.

Dada and Surrealism were efforts to subvert conventional space and truth, based on the alternative prospect of finding new space and time. 

THE COSMOS IS A FORGERY OF THE INDIVIDUAL.

People tell or accept a story about the cosmos based on their conception about how the story might suit them.  Help them.

In accepting such a story, they create a reductionist version of what they are.

Imagination knows no bounds.

Theater, for all its props and stories, does relatively little to exercise the far reaches of imagination when it comes to language.  Even poetic drama tends to center on what is fondly called “the human condition.”  The human condition is a convenient set of stories about human nature and motivation which become a shorthand method for cementing people into a limited notion of what is possible. 

There are non-verbal “languages.”  Twenty years ago, I ran a series of experiments that other people started calling Sounding.  I never called it anything.  It involved working with a small group (8-15 people) in a room.  After a set of warm-up exercises, people made sounds—any sounds—for a half hour or so.  The effect was quite interesting, to say the least.  Language unhooked from words provoked all sorts of unique combinations of feeling and thought.

It was theatrical, although content normally associated with theater was absent.

It resembled a five-year experience I had with a space in LA called Dance Home.  Recorded music ranging from Strauss waltzes to techno-industrial-pop was played continuously for 4 hours a night, several times a week, in a dance studio.  People moved in whatever ways they wanted to.  At times, the events took on a distinct theatrical flavor.

In the late 1970s, I rented a small theater in West LA and did 3 one-man shows, which were a series of comedic monologues.  In certain ways, they were similar to my later experiences with The Liars Club.  I was telling surreal stories that became more and more ridiculous as they went along.  It was an early attempt to push the audience into unfamiliar landscapes.

Many years later, when I ran for a seat in Congress, in LA, my team and I began to realize there were significant possibilities for a theater of the absurd in mainstream politics. 

So…these are some of the threads I’m pulling on here.  THE MAGIC THEATER would utilize both improvisation and tight scene-work—using types of language that go far beyond ordinary speech or familiar poetics—to tilt the seesaw of life in the direction of much greater imagination and space for the participants. 

Human beings want to reach for more, but eventually they lose sight of what they could imagine and create.  THE MAGIC THEATER would function as a powerful antidote. 

In my experience, it is at precisely those moments when we, individually or collectively, seem more locked in than ever by external events, that breakthroughs can be made.    

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

RAPPOPORT RADIO ARCHIVE

OCTOBER 2, 2010.  My weekly radio show continues at www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com  The show airs live on Wednesdays at 4pm Pacific Time.

All my shows are archived at:

http://garynull.squarespace.com/the-jon-rappoport-show/

I believe you’ll find the program is one of the widest-ranging explorations in the world.  Here is a partial list of guests I’ve had.  All these shows can be accessed at the archive.

Peter Breggin—the conscience of psychiatry.  Breggin has led the way to greater knowledge of the dangers of psychiatric drugs and “biology-based” therapy.

Cliff Carnicom—a leader in research on chemtrails, their origin, meaning, and health implications.

Joseph Farrell—scholar of ancient texts and the accompanying science that may have led to interplanetary war in the dim past.

Michel Kassett—the world’s most fascinating numerologist and analyst of hidden mathematics behind language.

Peter Duesberg—heroic molecular biologist who exposed massive AIDS research fraud.

Rick Dubov—rising star in the firmament of painters working today.

Jonathan Emord—attorney who has gone up against the corrupt FDA numerous times and won stunning victories.

Catherine Fitts—economic insider who left the federal government and now exposes deep corruption in the financial world.

Check out these and other shows, and tell your friends.  There is much to be gleaned from these interviews.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

DR. BULLSHIT, TAKE 3

SEPTEMBER 30, 2010.  I’m taking this opportunity to present a backgrounder. 

A backgrounder on bullshit.

First of all, I realize that millions of people online prefer pictures to words.  To them, all I can say is: “You’re damned.”  I can’t work my way around that problem. 

Okay.  Bullshit comes in layers.  That’s the first thing you need to know.  Finding one layer is just the beginning, and if you keep pointing to that layer like a braying donkey and saying, “See?  That’s bullshit!”, you’re going to make a tiresome bore out of yourself, and anyone has the right to shoot you.

Bullshit comes in layers.  You can see this when a politician is caught with his shvance in the cookie jar.  He says, “I made a serious error in judgment.” 

He didn’t make an error in judgment.  He wanted to stick his shvance in the jar and he did.  Simple.  Of course, he can’t say that, because everybody is waiting for a dishonest, full-of-shit excuse from him.  That’s what they expect.

If the pol said, “Look, I shacked up with the woman because she was beautiful and I could afford it,” people wouldn’t know what to do.  They’d wander around in circles like drunken parakeets.

Anyway, then the pol goes into sex-addiction rehab, which is a combination country club and two-a-day AA-type meetings.  Another layer of bullshit. 

And if he gets religion, that’s another one.  If he attaches himself like a leech to a preacher, that’s another one.

But—and this is the interesting point—if he moves through these layers with reasonable haste, the public tends to accept his “repentance” because THEY KNOW IT’S BULLSHIT AND THEY WANT BULLSHIT.

Do you see?  In these times, bullshit is the most convenient navigational tool at everyone’s disposal.  Losing it would put too many people at sea.  There would be too much confusion.

We all recognize bullshit.  It’s the common coin of the realm.  So we maintain the social contract with it.

Can I quote the contract?  Ah, that’s not an easy thing, but I’ll try:

“We, the undersigned, recognizing that truth is a volatile and unpredictable material, which may cause considerable disruptions in the fabric of public life, opt instead for a relatively inert substance: bullshit.  Being intimately familiar with its forms and uses, we are able to pretend that those events which are being referenced by bullshit are real, when they are not.  In this regard, we are facile and practiced. 

“Furthermore, we openly confess our happy addiction to bullshit.  Among other advantages, it lubricates our inclination for constructing a multi-front fairy-tale world in which we can exercise our ideological preferences and ignore contrary evidence. 

“We recognize that this contract will permit many criminal statements and actions to fly beneath the radar.  To put it bluntly, this is the price we pay for a (hopefully) easier passage through life.”

We elect public officials and support media commentators and religious leaders so they can provide us with some favored brand of bullshit.  We expect them to broadcast it.  Furthermore, our reactions to it are bullshit, as well.  This is called Cooperative Bullshit.

Some blowhard bloviating, day after day, month after month, on his usual theme in the most preposterous way is music to our ears.  It’s Reliable Bullshit.  We can always count on the creature to sing the same few notes.

Occasionally, when we consider the alternative to this overall way of being, we glimpse subtlety, nuance, and God forbid, even art.  We quickly shrink from the prospect.  It would be troublesome, whereas The Way of Bullshit is transparent and widely supportable, like the foundations of a bridge.

Finally, there not only layers of bullshit, there are also what could be called orders or multiples of bullshit. 

For example, in a corporate conference room, the CEO asks a question which everyone in the meeting immediately perceives to be a piece of self-serving bullshit.  A person at the table answers that question, and of course his answer is bullshit, too.  Another person tacks on a further piece of bullshit.  This prompts the CEO to float a related question—more bullshit.  And so the process goes.

No one in the room would even think of trying to interrupt it, because they are feeling the exhilaration of a long ride down a snow-covered hill in a sleigh.  It’s Christmas.

DR. BULLSHIT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

DR. BULLSHIT, TAKE 2

 September 26, 2010.  ITEM 1:  Brandon Joseph Rhode, a convicted child killer on death row in Georgia, had his execution postponed for a few days because he tried to kill himself. 

Rhodes used razor blades to slash his throat, so he had to be hospitalized.

I assume lethal injection on a table is considered more humane than letting him bleed out in his cell.  It’s cleaner, right?  It’s organized.  Doctor is present.  They can call time of death to the second. 

How thoroughly did they patch him up in the infirmary?  Prurient minds want to know.

ITEM 2:  In a related issue, the state of Ohio is trying to find medical experts who are willing to step forward and offer advice on better killing-drugs for murderers.  And the US Supreme Court is hearing a case in which the defendants are arguing that the present 3-drug cocktail is an inhumane “treatment,” and more skilled med techs are needed to administer them.

What’s the problem?  Uneducated people off themselves every day with prescription meds.  They know how to do it.  Pay an ER doctor a hundred bucks and he’ll give you the names of the pills.

Of course, there’s an obsession to make state-administered death to a lone individual a medical procedure.  Just like birth.  The mother isn’t pushing a child out into the world; she’s undergoing treatment.

Personally, I’ve always thought a firing squad was the best way to handle executions, as long as the prisoner is marched into the courtyard quickly and the riflemen are ready.  Ten or twenty bullets hit you and you’re gone. 

But at my execution, I don’t want some damn kid holding his weapon, sweating, fumbling with the strap, having second thoughts, pissing in his pants.  I want seasoned pros who’re already thinking about having a drink at the local saloon.

ITEM 3:  In ancient Rome, if you killed your parents, they put you in a sack and dropped you in a lake.  Inside the sack with you were a dog, a rooster, a poisonous snake, and an ape.  Wonder how they figured out that party.  Odds are, the snake was the last to go.

ITEM 4:  In case you’ve been living on Mars or Pluto, the United States is becoming a Medical State.  Doctors are accorded a degree of wisdom that used to accrue to Egyptian priests. 

I don’t care how much doctors know.  I only care that people have the freedom to reject medical care when they want to. 

In other words, if I want to ingest cigarette ashes to cure my arthritic elbow, nobody is going to intervene.  And if my neighbor wants to pay me to feed him the ashes for his gout, and we sign a contract to that effect, forgoing liability, the state has no business getting in our way or demanding proof of a license to practice medicine.

Freedom trumps knowledge or pretended knowledge.  If you don’t understand what that means, you wasted years of schooling.  Start over again.

Of course, I would like to see a law banning doctors from prescribing ADHD drugs or antidepressants to children.  Penalties would include public lashing.  The parents of these children would be punished as well.  All the shoes of the mothers would be placed inside a mound of maggots, and the fathers would be forbidden from watching football for the rest of their lives.

ITEM 5:  NBC.  Brian Williams.  His resume reveals he was a Sears underwear model.  One night he was pulled out of the Hudson, where he was diving for used condoms. 

After an emergency brain operation, he was suddenly able to speak in complete sentences. 

In fact, he could remember everything he read.  Articles, books, labels on products, billboards in Missouri.

The Pentagon flew him to a secret base in Florida.  He received a new head of hair that required no washing or combing.  Experts injected him with a mild cynicism drug that rounded out his new character, and kind matrons came into his room every day, smiled, and bathed him in warm water and Epsom salts.

With the assistance of a rapid flashing device attached to his cerebral cortex, he was given a four-year college education in eight minutes.

He arrived at NBC studios in New York with clean papers.

The rest is history. 

Except for one thing. 

We’ll eventually find out what that is.

DR. BULLSHIT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

DR. BULLSHIT SPEAKS

SEPTEMBER 25, 2010.  This is a red-letter day.  Welcome to the inauguration of a new column.  Save them.  Some day, they’ll be worth millions.  Millions of what, I don’t know. 

From high above the media tombs of New York and Washington DC, I, the good doctor, offer a different slant on the news…

I received my PhD in Bullshit from a prominent Ivy League college many years ago, when the world was young.  My thesis focused on political bullshit, although I also dabbled in the fields of a far denser brand: medical bullshit.

I traveled the world and, first-hand, reveled in astonishing varieties of bullshit.  Israeli bullshit, Arab bullshit, Asian bullshit, African bullshit, European bullshit, South American bullshit, and of course the premier vacuumed-packed government-inspected American bullshit.  Several times on my voyage, I was on the verge of concluding there were Demons of Bullshit who were infecting the whole human species.  But I finally pulled back from that, one night in Tangier when, when standing at the bar of the old decaying version of the Hotel Tanjah Flandria, I received a revelation from within: people loved bullshit.  They loved listening to it, watching it, feeling it, handling it and propagating it.  They wanted it.

That changed everything… 

ITEM 1:  Steaming barrels of fetid rhetoric re gay marriage and straight marriage keep pouring on to the air waves.  “The sacred institution should be reserved for a man and a woman and a penis and a vagina.” 

Yeah.  Well, if it’s so sacred, get married in a church and have the dude in the cloak make up his own certificate and sign it.  I may be wrong, but did the early Pure-it-tans in Mass. stand in line at some log cabin city hall and apply for a license on a rainy Tuesday afternoon?  Did they take a number?  Is that what they needed to justify their nuptials? 

The state never had any business sticking its morbid nose in marriage, which by the way is not an institution at all, except in the overheated minds of moral pundits.  And forget special government benefits for the married, too.  That’s a load. 

You want to get married?  Man to man?  Woman to woman?  Woman to man?  Man to Buick?  Woman to Macy’s?  Do it yourselves on your own and shut up.  Now, of course, if you’re of a mind to stone or hang or decapitate your wife because you imagine she cheated on you, we’re in a different pew.  That’s felony murder special.  Guerney, straps, and IV.  But I digress.  Point is, nothing about marriage implies that government should be the slightest bit interested, concerned, or involved, any more than it should be involved in mapping wrinkles on old people’s asses.

ITEM 2:  This one you actually have to read.  Take your time.  Breathe. 

Rawsome, a natural health food store in Venice, CA, was raided this summer by local cops BRANDISHING WEAPONS.  The crisis?  Store was selling raw milk.  Have to use guns in a situation like that.  A kid might pull an AK out of a block of cheese. 

Parallel: New study out of Germany (authors from Robert Koch Institute et al): “A commercial cheese (acid curd) made from pasteurized milk caused a large listeriosis outbreak in Germany from October 2006 through February 2007…Of patients with available detailed information on cheese consumption (n=47), 70% reported to have consumed the incriminated cheese product. Recent European food safety alerts due to Listeria-contaminated cheeses more often concerned products made from pasteurized or heat-treated milk than from raw milk…”

Do we need a pop quiz for this?

ITEM 3:  Yesterday, Stephen Colbert testified before the House Subcommittee on Blah-Blah about migrant farm workers.  Reporters and most committee members were miffed at his in-character presentation.  Well, they would be.  Do habitual fakers enjoy seeing a conscious faker? 

Rule number one in politics and journalism: don’t break the trance.  The river of crap flowing out of Washington moves in stately profundity.  Do not turn around and point at the source.  “We’re the professional fakers.  We don’t want this kid coming in here and stealing our thunder.” 

But steal it he did.  Colbert is a liberal who plays a conservative on TV.  Next time, bring in Ann Coulter impersonating a liberal.  Come on.  Live a little, you pussies.

ITEM 4:  Washington DC.  Every morning at nine, up on the Hill, an inveterate craps player from Atlantic City with a solid cocaine habit rolls the dice in the rotunda.  By a predetermined system, the numbers on the dice are correlated with phrases in the novels of James Joyce.

After 75 rolls of the dice, these phrases are connected in order.  That will be the Bill debated on the floor of the House and Senate.

At 3PM, two Victoria’s Secret models—one in the White House and one on the Hill—fart, and everyone goes home for the day.

ITEM 5:  The other day, I was listening to some talk-show host starting to work up a lather about excessive taxes.  Outrage was building in him.  Clean honest outrage, like wind sweeping clouds off the city.  Then a woman called who was a charity worker, soup organizer, and she said, “I hear anger in your voice.”  This was a goody-good putdown, you see.  She heard anger.  O gosh oh gee, the game is over, because the host is angry, and that means he can’t be on the right track.  He must be mired in his own ISSUES.  She’s the shrink, and he’s the patient.  The woman was getting away with it.  The host said, “I’m not angry.”  That was his stupid mistake.  She wouldn’t quit.  She kept coming, like some kind of dental drill out of a Unitarian save-the-world-I’m-giving-everything-to-everybody-and-I-love-you-too-even-though-you’re-a-selfish-prick riff.  I could hear that dental drill going at the end of her snake’s tail.  Slithering bright snake of her own Lord in the grass.  Sociopathic altruism.  A beautiful thing.  When a big foot finally comes down on it, the blood that flows isn’t red, it isn’t blue, it’s an inhuman green.  Like lubricating fluid in a machine.

ITEM 6:  All over this country, you can find playgrounds and ball fields empty.  Nothing happening.  Aside from TV, video games, and obesity, want to know why?  Insurance policies.  If soccer mom’s precious little Kyle falls down rounding second base and gets a boo-boo and mommy isn’t there to kiss it and make it better, her hubby can sue the school for half a mil without blinking—and the insurance won’t cover it.  Because the “activity” wasn’t “supervised.”  It was just kids playing like they’re supposed to.  Now they have GPS chips behind their ears. “Oh look, little Harry’s crossing the street against the light.  Call out the SWAT team.” 

“Hi honey.  Did you have a good intramural game today?”

“It was okay.  We lost.”

“WHAT?  They kept score?  Wait ‘til I tell your father.  He’ll have the firm all over those motherfuckers.  Do you feel damaged?”

“Somewhat depressed, mom.  It may be a transient event.  Hard to say at the moment.  But I’m certainly registering the sensation of being abused.”

“Of course you are!  I’m going to take some photos.  Stand over there by the fireplace.  Then I’ll call Dr. Blitzkrieg and arrange an emergency session.  Do you have your Zoloft in your Fannie Pack?”

“No.  Don’t you remember?  You scarfed down the last few yesterday.  Then, in an entirely unrelated incident, you tried to stab the fucking dog.”  

DR. BULLSHIT

www.nomorefakenews.com

NEWS ROUNDUP FOR A JADED BUT SECURE AUDIENCE

SEPTEMBER 24, 2010.  ITEM 1: Okay, so the Democrats and Republicans in the senate are launching proposals to settle the issue of the death tax—AKA, the estate tax. 

You know, where you croak and your lawyer reads the will to your relatives, all of whom have calculators in their hands.     

The Democrats want to grab 55% of any estate worth above $1 million.  The Republicans want 35% of any estate above $5 million.

Am I missing something here?  Is there some intrinsic mystical reason for considering death a “taxable moment?”  Or is it just another opportunity to grab huge chunks of loot from people who can’t complain because they’re in a box in the ground?

I thought so.

You work all your life, you accumulate assets, but they aren’t yours.  Only part is yours.  And your passing marks the fact that the feds have their hands up your stuff.

“So at the funeral of my beloved father today, I want to welcome family and friends…and the IRS, who is taking 55 points from his estate.  As an aside, how can I get in on this friggin’ racket?”

ITEM 2: Drudge headline this morning: DC OVERRUN BY ‘STINK BUGS’.  Hey, we know that.  They crawl around, don’t do anything useful, and man do they look ugly.  Frank, Waxman, add your own faves…

ITEM 3:  Warren Buffet tells taxpayers to get over their anger.  It’s not productive, he says.  Thanks, Warren.  I was looking for a little of that homespun wisdom.  Now will you buy me an ice cream cone at the corner sweet shop?  Taxpayer anger was probably unproductive back in 1776, too.  That Tom Paine was a real prick. 

ITEM 4:  1% of the UK population is gay and lesbian.  National survey.  But here’s the good part.  A half of one percent, when given the choice of listing themselves as straight, gay, or bisexual, said they were “other.”  They’re the most interesting ones.  Animals?  Tree trunks?  Fire hydrants?  Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?  I’m waiting for an activist group forming around the idea of gay men coming out of the closet and admitting they’re really straight.  Wait.  It’ll happen.  You know why?  Because by my count, 84% of people want to confess a secret, any secret, and if there’s a sliver of a chance they can get on TV to do it, they’ll friggin’ say ANYTHING.

ITEM 5:  Is Hillary Duff ready for motherhood?  Question was posed by ET or TMZ or Crapola Video News.  Not ready to give a considered answer yet.  But how about Hillary Clinton running for veep along side Obama?  Don’t count it out.  Bill gets appointed as ambassador to England or Germany to keep him out of the way.  Build-a-Burger.

ITEM 6:  Now that the hubbub has died down and is rotting in the sun—the book was wrong.  The movie was wrong.  It should have been Love, Pray, Eat.  Eat yourself into oblivion.  Far more interesting.

ITEM 7:  Nasal spray cures shyness.  Study reveals that shooting oxytocin up your nose—the so-called love hormone—allows socially unproficient types to achieve more empathy.  But do we want them to?  It might turn out to be another nightmare form of political correctness.  How about a spray that makes you more rebellious, intelligent, and daring in situations where everything hangs in the balance?

ITEM 8:  In case anyone’s still interested, since the current news cycle on it is done, the Mosque at Ground Zero is complete bullshit.  And I’m not even talking about hidden agendas.  Anyone who builds a big center dedicated to peace, understanding, international good will, and cooperation is fronting a line of old fashioned jive.  It means nothing.  It does nothing except produce mountains of insincere brain-wasting rhetoric and bad lunches. 

ITEM 9:  Tumors may cure chemotherapy.  Don’t count it out.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

HEALING EXCURSIONS

SEPTEMBER 12, 2010.  Yesterday, I wrote and sent out an article about a technique for reducing stress.  I call it Excursions.  These are “guided imagery” sessions, in which a person experiences other dimensions of energy and other places…

I’ve been working with clients in this way for many years now.

Well, the Excursions can go a lot farther than my previous description.  Let me start with a recent statement from a very close friend:   

“I am just out of the Rehab ward of a local hospital due to a stroke that affected my left side.  As I lay thinking about procedures that they use, I realized that it wasn’t enough for me. 

“I remembered that Jon had done an audiotape titled Excursions for the purpose of expanding the power and scope of our imagination.  We got together with the idea that he could help me imagine myself back to my normal physical state.  We did six wonderful Excursions, and after the second one I could grip with my left hand which was something I could not do at all up to that point.  As the Excursions progressed, my condition progressed rapidly to the place where I could return to the office after only two weeks on that ward.

“The medical establishment knows so little about our multidimensional SELF.  And it was the Excursions from Jon that my imagination needed in order to reestablish the connection of my motor nerves with that part of the brain that had been cut off.  There is nothing mechanical that can replace this magnificent healing technique because all healing of any significance must start with the imagination.  I am so thankful for Jon and his unique talents.”

There is so much to say about all this.  Let me start here.  When a human being is in transition, which is to say, passing from a less inclusive to a more inclusive state of mind, many new possibilities enter the equation.  Data, material, ideas, images, energies which formerly made no sense or could not be included are now relevant.

I’m not talking about an ironclad system of new beliefs or thoughts.  I’m talking about an expansion in which SPACE AND THE FUTURE open up to an extraordinary degree. 

In this state, Excursions can produce results that go far beyond the reduction of stress. 

That is because healing takes place on many levels.  You can’t count them all or label them or put them into neat categories.  Connections which were formerly IMPOSSIBLE are now, suddenly, operating.

And when we glimpse or see those new connections, we realize we had been living in a limited set of spaces.  We had been accepting consensus reality and molding our options and choices based on that consensus.

Through these improvised Excursions, imagination comes to the fore as a vital force, and old notions of reality are surpassed.

My friend was ready for such a transition, and in our sessions, she was somehow, quite naturally, able to accelerate beyond the “normal” process of recovery into another path of healing.

On my side of things, I need to take these Excursions into places and energies that exceed ordinary standards and models. 

Perhaps this brief article gives you a bit more insight into what I’m working with.

For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

UN-STRESSING LIFE—A TECHNIQUE

SEPTEMBER 11, 2010.  Let me start right off with a testimonial from a client, and then I’ll explain what this is all about:

“Some years ago, I was in the midst of an emotional crisis, (not really all that unusual for me), but this was a big one, causing me a great deal of stress.  I was leaving my home and city of forty years and was very upset and confused as to what to do and where to go next.  I live on the East Coast and Jon is on the West so we worked by telephone.  Once a week we spoke.  He would lead me through a series of guided visualizations which I taped and listened to every day.  They were extraordinary, touching me on a very deep level.  They bi-passed the critical thinking part of my brain and without my really becoming aware of it, my whole perspective and psyche began to change.  The stresses and anxiety took a back seat and I began to think more assertively and focus in on what I really wanted.  Those weeks and months turned out to be a magical time of growth and learning.  I owe Jon a debt of gratitude for this magnificent journey which certainly could not have happened without his help.”

Harriet Effron

For the past 15 years, I’ve been developing various methods to eliminate stress. 

During the last two years, I’ve been receiving more queries about these strategies—because in the current economic landscape, people are feeling pressure.

The best technique I’ve found for dealing with stress is what I call the Excursion.  Through what is popularly labeled “guided imagery,” I take people on Excursions into other spaces where energies that diminish stress and increase health enter the body and the mind.

These Excursions don’t require effort or struggle.  The client simply follows along and receives the benefits of the trip.

An Excursion operates in two ways.  It introduces de-stressing energies, and it allows the client, for a short time, to “inhabit” an alternate space where problems and solutions don’t exist.

In these landscapes, a person taps into fulfillment and idealized circumstances.  The mind and emotions are given a heightened vacation and begin to learn, piece by piece, what self-realization feels like.

Life tends to train the mind to accept a condition of dissatisfaction.  Getting out of this box requires the direct experience of something quite different: fulfillment.

The Excursion provides that.

The telephone sessions are short—about 15-20 minutes.  Over the course of several sessions, the client, without effort, is reoriented in the direction of greater happiness and less stress.

Many clients record these sessions for later use.

Feel free to contact me at qjrconsulting@gmail.com.  I can work individuals or groups.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com