So there’s this big row about consciousness among “serious” scientists and academics and freelancers like Sheldrake and Hancock. Basically, it seems to me that the controversy comes down to whether Big Science will be allowed to dictate the scope of popular—albeit informed and educated—imagination on topics of philosophy, neuroscience and cosmology. To that end, I wish TED’s star chamber, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins would STFU. Thank you. I decided.

∞

In trolling less “serious” sectors of the Webs lo these many years, I have run across recurring, consistent rumors implicating the British upper classes and monarchy in black magick and systematic, ritual child sexual abuse. I always thought the rumors interesting and probably true if only as metaphor. But I’m of Scottish descent, so. Turns out the rumors may be legit.

∞

Not only is Ibiza mispronounced by Europeans, it’s all UFOey, too.

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I love the story of Ebert’s deathbed vision. I’m not alone.

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Aeon Magazine is approaching the event-horizon indispensability.

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I’m ambivalent about the usefulness of the more exotic drugs I’ve done over the years; however, I don’t have mixed feelings about psychedelics. Saving for a couple of fraught trips, they’ve almost always been overwhelmingly positive experiences.

∞

John Boehner, my chain-smoking carrot of a congress-failure, often stops by a local tavern called Hinders here in Tipp City. Judging from my own observations, “likes” wine and cigarettes is a gentle characterization of his relationship to smoke and drink. One of the most powerful men in the country, yes. But he reminds me my distant memories of men’s men in he mid-to-late 1970s. Engulfed in a cloud of cheap cologne, wearing golf-ready Izod v-necks, their exhalations stinking of tobacco and spirits, wearing faces red-tanned from booze-blush, leaning and leering, always one squeeze away from sexual assault and marital infidelity. They looked like Gordon Lightfoot sounds.

∞

Sometimes my soul yearns for a past not my own—what must have been a simple white-light Kyrie Eleison running-with-The-Lion apocalyptic bliss that animated early, early Christianity. That sheen is millennia gone now, but nags in Jungian collective memory to indict the sour crew of criminals, crackpots, opportunists, and anti-intellectuals that comprise the public face of Protestantism, especially in its most popular versions in the United States.

∞

Love me some Elon Musk, but I think he should have to pay Stan Lee a royalty every time Musk’s PR people manage to get a lazy journo to compare Musk to Tony Stark.

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I give you…this deer, farting. You’re welcome.

∞

The New York Times hits one, gets one, and shits one.

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Foreign Policy notices what literate people who can separate right-wing infotainment and a century’s worth of propaganda from philosophy and economics would consider beyond dispute: Karl Marx defined the 20th century, and may define the 21st.. Better late than never, I guess. Also, can we say yet that AIPAC and the ADL have overplayed their hands?

∞

William S. Burroughs lived the kind of life few contemporary American novelists seek to emulate. A roll call of his sins: He was a queer and a junkie before being either was hip; he was a deadbeat father and an absent son; he was a misogynist, a gun lover, and a drunk; he was a guru of junk science and crank religion; he haunted the most sinister dregs of Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, London, and New York; he was an avant-garde writer with little affection for plot and none at all for epiphany; he wore his Americanness like a colostomy bag, shameful but essential. When he died at age 83 in 1997, his last words were: “Be back in no time.” At least he wasn’t a liar.

Damn shame an otherwise ^ well-done review began with a quasi-ironic list of “sins” things that  aren’t: drugs, guns, booze, low places, avante-garde fiction, real patriotism, and brute honesty. Also, why the easy jab at “crank science” and religion? Burroughs had an open mind and approached life with vim, reserved judgment and the rigor of a scientist. The crank science and religion didn’t work for him, but he attested that parts of them worked.

∞

An interesting explication of Nietzsche & the Nazis. Folks forever trying to rescue proto-fascists and actual fascists (Heidegger, Pound, e.g.) from their love affairs, or influences on, National Socialism. The Nazis were Nietzschean as absurdum. Fact. We can also point to the ascendancy of that hirsute Russian dwarf, Ayn Rand, as a natural culmination of Nietzsche, and the Übermensch ethos. Gotta dance with them what brung ya, amirite?

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I nominate the maddening tendency to braid every feature of existence to bio-evolutionary selection.

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Trust me. I get it. Yes, it’s easy to speak like dumb people imagine s smart people sound if you parrot critical Marxian theory rooted in observations of oppression, colonialism, and difference; Foucault! Derrida! hooks! Oh my! But I’m sooo bored with the tired, cyclical, decennial waltz. Each modern generation of intellectuals rediscover the critical relevance of sex and gender and what-have-you, then lazy demi-scholars skeeze tenure by publishing lists of the majority’s shortcomings, assigned with an eye toward collective punishment. As though there’s real risk in that. When those opportunities wane, they descend into spiteful psuedo-scholarship goring pop-myths and the public-space vocabularies of common people. That’s bad enough. But what follows is worse: an inevitable right-wing Leo Strauss flavored intellectual backlash inflicting a decade, at least, of thought-crimes against Jesus, Uncle Sam and common sense. Stop it. Stop it now. All of you.

∞

My beloved physician, Dr. David Perilman, tells me anxiety is depression about the future. Nice to know  most of my ailments are mere depression, only different flavors. It was so depressing to think I had anxiety on top of depression. Good to have one thing instead of two. I guess. Sigh.

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Had he wanted, Picasso could’ve painted like a Dutch master. He learned the rules in order to break them. Articles like these, in the wrong hands? Matches and kindling to children, for playthings.

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The allure of the Big Novel, for writers, arises from an endlessly recursive personal relationship to narrative. Writing a long piece of fiction is a flavor of hero’s journey, or heroine’s journey, undertaken while simultaneously fashioning the same ordeal for imaginary people of your own conjuring. Easier concept to observe than comprehend, alas.

∞

I like this even if it’s in the Weekly Standard. So what? I read right-wing crap sometimes. I want to see what those fools are up to. Anyway, don’t judge me. You can’t judge me. Only God can judge me. Thank you.

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Last, but not least: there are about a dozen reasons I’m a Freemason, but chief among them is that it’s one of the rare places where a man of any socioeconomic class can engage high-culture: fine & awe-inspiring architecture, exposure to the hidden, Western esoteric tradition (e.g., Mozart’s The Magic Flute [Papagena! Papageno!]), often paired to classical arts like opera, and an invitation, no matter what the man’s education, to plumb the minds of the world’s great thinkers. I once listened to high-school dropout HVAC tech recite a long passage from The Symposium, flawlessly, by heart, in a lecture to initiates. For those fine, sharp seconds he might as well have been Olivier.

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