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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
A Thought Worth Thinking

 

Do you ever have the feeling that you're just going through the motions?

In all likelihood, everyone you know feels the same - about you.

 

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Posted at 5:17 pm by Jeremiadist
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Monday, January 14, 2008
How Many Cigarettes?

 

How Many Cigarettes?

How many indeed?
How many will it take?
How many do you need?
And what will they make?

A million, and satisfied,
Lie down surfeited
With that final Bride
In that final bed.

 

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Posted at 11:23 pm by Jeremiadist
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Friday, January 11, 2008
RAW Bits - and Credo

 

Yesterday, my connection to the internet was doubleplusungood, and so I was unable to properly observe RAW Chaos Day - a novel Discordian Holyday instituted by consensus, or rather, by contagion (other methods, such as authority, not being available!) on the occasion of Robert Anton Wilson's recent (actual) death.  Now, a day late and a fnord short, I would like to remedy this by offering a few words in memery of RAW.

The most suitable memeorial I can build is to pass on a vision I might have gained by other means, but which I in fact first saw in fullness through RAW's intervention.  Because it suits my whimsy, I will borrow a framework, not from RAW, but from the Nation of Gods and Earths (or "Five Percenters"), an African-American Muslim group, of sorts - a doctrine also found, in a different form, in the Church of the SubGenius.  It runs like this:

The 85% are those without the knowledge, the mentally blind, deaf and dumb who are bent on self-destruction.  The 10% are the bloodsuckers of the poor, those who have knowledge and power but who use it to mystify and abuse the 85%.  The 10% include the "grafted" white devil as well as the orthodox Muslims and Christian preachers who preach that god is a "spook" or a "mystery god."  And the remaining 5% are the poor, righteous teachers, who are aver [sic] all of the 'dealings' of the 10% and their mission is to rescue the 85%.

(Obviously, the SubGenius variant on this soteriology takes a rather different view of how properly to (ahem) deal with the 85%!)  Like most statistics, these numbers may well be distorted - I suspect the breakdown is much closer to 98:1:1 - but the message is clear:  Most people don't Get It.  Some Get It, but keep It to themselves in order to profit from the unGettingItness of the Flock (let's call them Bad Shepherds).  Others Get It, and are inclined to benign or even benevolent use of their Hipness.

I would say that the Five Percent, so-called, may themselves break down into three subtypes (fixing the total breakdown in accord with the Law of Fives), and these are:  (1)  those who Drop Out of the game, to cultivate their own gardens, and don't interfere with the Flock;  (2)  those who use the same techniques as the Bad Shepherds, but to the presumed benefit of the Flock - shockingly, I would designate these Good Shepherds; and  (3) those who, following the model of the Nation of Gods and Earths, encourage the Flock to become like themselves - thus properly earning the title of Poor Righteous Teachers.

But what's all the fuss over?  With what are we in or out of Gettingness?  Well, opinions differ!  I'll take a crack at what I think RAW's version was - or at least what he sometimes seemed to say that It was.  From the point of view of Shepherds Good and  Bad, I suppose this means that I am breaking kayfabe again.  Shame on me, I guess!

It is widely known, but rarely understood, that all of our knowledge is obtained through experience and reflection - and that the processes underlying these are primarily sensory perception, thought, and memory.  All of these, are of course, functions of the mind.  And this applies not just to knowledge, but also to beliefs and expectations generally, and to the specific objects to which our hopes, fears, and values become attached.  Any new experience is processed by reference to prior mental content.  I see an object of a certain size, shape, color, etc., and I recognize it as, say, a cabbage.  In this way, it becomes linked to my desire for food, or to my fear of cabbages, and, more than this, seeing the cabbage means experiencing it as embedded in an entire map of the world which includes beliefs about botany, agriculture, economics, gastronomy, physics (I don't expect it to levitate, e.g.), and so on.  One might say that experience is conceptually loaded.  We cannot have an "innocent" experience of the object as a naked perception of color and form - we are condemned to see it as a cabbage, bearing with it with all that cabbagehood implies for us, and as part of an entire world about which we have a brainful of beliefs, expectations, hopes, fears, moral and practical imperatives, and so on. 

That world is not what we think it is - the actual, objective state of affairs; it is, instead, the sum and product of everything that has up to the current moment transpired in our minds.  The world we actually live in - the world of economies, of agriculture, of dangers and opportunities - is driven by information derived, via the senses, from the actual state of affairs, (maybe) but is nonetheless located entirely inside our minds.  To use the language of materialism, the brain is trapped in the skull and cannot get out of it in any meaningful sense.  Or:  It's all happening in your head.  What we endure or enjoy of life in the world is entirely constructed  by us out of the available flow of information (which I agree (probably) derives from an outside source).  For each person, that "world" will differ - slightly for people who have lived similar lives, perhaps very radically for people of different cultures or eras.  The world in which the Sun and stars travelled 'round the Earth must have felt very different from ours.  And so for worlds which include or exclude the afterlife, dangerous sorcerers, justice and other moral imperatives, gravitational and electromagnetic forces, hope, fate, gods, ghosts, the government, the law, race, and please insert your favorite concept here.  RAW called these worlds "reality-tunnels" - enclosing spaces within whose boundaries we move.

The art of the Shepherd is to skillfully manipulate the flow of information in order to design and construct the worlds in which the Flock will live.  (Read that again!)  Shepherds are the architects and masons who build the houses in which we live and the temples within which we worship.  It is probably impossible for most (if any) of us to dig our way out of our cave and into the open air above and the light of the actual Sun, except perhaps for a fleeting moment (a.k.a. the Beatific Vision) - I certainly haven't managed it!  But the experience of recognizing our condition is quite something - both liberating and empowering, in the full and robust senses of those words.

RAW's peculiar talent was to reveal our situation to us - thus playing the role of the Poor Righteous Teacher - and then (as a Good Shepherd) to deftly manoeuver us into a novel and exquisitely crafted reality-tunnel, only to suddenly tap us on the shoulder and remind us, artfully:  "Oh, by the way - none of this is real!"   Repeatedly.  He was like those master stage magicians who can tell you that they are about to do a magic trick, perhaps even tell you a bit about how the trick is done, and then do the trick so perfectly that it still fools you.  He repeated this routine as many times, and in as many ways as he could, hoping, one imagines, that the third (or the twenty-third) time's the charm.

Did he ever succeed?  I hope, for all our sakes, that he did.

 

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Posted at 11:56 pm by Jeremiadist
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Technical Addendum to "RAW Bits"

 

In order to maximize impact, and to clearly convey the Big Clue, I have deliberately simplified the picture presented in "RAW Bits - and Credo".  Since I suspect few are interested in these "details", I am appending them here under a false date and time to prevent them from driving away new readers.  The following, in short, may be a little dry.

A great deal about us cannot be attributed to the effects of experience, or even of reflection, but must necessarily be attributed to inherent properties of the human nervous system.  If Kant is to be believed, many of these are necessary preconditions for the existence of any  individuated conscious mind.  In any case, we do manifestly have them, and in some cases the neural infrastructure is fairly well known, or in the process of being investigated.

Regarding that cabbage, it is fair to say that its cabbagehood and the matrices of import in which that quality is embedded are, as claimed, learned.  However, much of the construction of that object is due to inherent mechanisms.  We come into our lives with significant brain structures devoted to language, and to perception.  Associated with these are inherent functions of reasoning, and, as it were, of world-mapping.  We necesssarily experience the world in space and time.  This immediately implies such concepts as location (and associated with this, distance, size, shape, etc.), sequence, simultaneity, and (arguably) causation and explanation.  Language in particular requires the capacity to oganize perceptions under concepts, to divide the spatial field into discrete objects, to attribute properties to these, and to conceive of matters in terms of structures and processes.  And let's not forget identity, similarity, affirmation, negation, number, and difference.  (And there are others!)  All of this is largely pre-reflective, and already built into our immediate perceptions, quite apart from any learned interpretive framework of the sort I attribute to "Shepherds".  Reflection, an important component of which is reasoning, also supplies us with widely-applicable conceptual tools such as consistency and implication, which also severly constrain us - though this can hardly be seen as a bad thing!  Again, no "Shepherds are required for this.

A major task for the best sort of "Good Shepherds" - philosophers - has been the careful delineation of best practices for the construction of our individual and culturally-shared "worlds".  A broad consensus among the better contemporary epistemologists such as Quine (referred to in the original post) provides an attractive account of the better sort of world-making, which importantly constrains the excavation of reality tunnels according to minimal, but strict, standards of rationality (like consistency), which govern not only the internal relationships between our various ideas, but also the relationships between our internal map of reality and the ongoing stream of sensory experience.  Fully embracing modern science as embodying our most refined - and successful - forms of knowing the field of experience, they provide a robust model of revision and reorganization of our "world" which allows us to continually or periodically rebuild our reality-tunnels.  Since this rebuilding is constrained by the direct evidence of experience, by the careful incoporation of observations by others, and by those logical constrants whose abandonment would make any  type of world-building completely arbitrary, it is reasonable to suppose that a world constructed according to this plan is as close as possible to the presumed objective order underlying our sensations and our inner lives.  (It should be noted that the incorporation of others' observations is, itself, subject to the constraints provided by direct experience and reasoning, which provides some protection against "Bad Shepherds".)  The assumption of an underlying order is, perhaps, unfounded, but without it, there is actually nothing left for us to do at all, and so, in order to be able to conduct our daily affairs (like buying cabbages at the grocery store), we have to go with something - and this is the something we have.

Triangulating between these observations, and those in "Raw Bits", it is clear that we are still very much in the thrall, first of all of our hard-wired mental structures, and secondly of the "Shepherds" of whatever Fold we find ourselves in.  Nonetheless, we have quite a bit of room in which to manoeuver.  For all that the "philosophic" model provided above may seem to commit us to dull and relatively conservative "reality-tunnels", the sheer fact of the matter is that not one in a thousand people actually tries it  to see what results obtain.  These are in fact quite radical, as many common conceptions will not survive this trial by fire, and many matters commonly considered uncontroversial are revealed as so far unsettled - thereby requiring suspension of judgement, and gifting us with the sort of opened mind that can with great excitement freely expect that even the most remarkable things may yet happen, and that even the most outlandish claims may yet be true.

Or kill me!

 

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Posted at 12:23 am by Jeremiadist
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Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Breaking Kayfabe

 

I have had occasion when writing here to feel very sharply the sting of regret that comes from saying what is true, but perhaps best left unsaid.  Don't get me wrong - I have no reservations about shouting the ugly truth from the rooftops.  Actually, I take that back; I derive sublime pleasures unknown to lesser mortals from forcing unpleasant truths on anyone unguarded enough to listen, or unlucky enough to hear.

No, what I regret instead is the possibility of breaking kayfabe, or of fucking someone's con.  If you don't know what a con is, don't worry; someone will educate you on that matter soon enough.  (On a totally unrelated note, I will mail you an exciting account of the Astrological Secrets of the Atlantean Adepts for a mere $30 donation to my Atlantean Research Foundation.  Dig?)  As for "kayfabe" - it is a word used in various ways to refer to the professional mores of carnies, and, later, professional wrestlers - in particular, to the tabu against destroying the illusion of such enterprises as straightforward, unscripted, and "honest" in the sense of being exactly what they superficially appear to be.  Some illuminating reminiscences upon the carny millieu can be found at Quest for Slack.

Now, I maintain that kayfabe is good, and breaking it is bad.  Consider the cases of Santa Claus and Bigfoot.  Of course, in both cases, one wants the believers to eventually grow into non-believers in a certain sense, but there is a certain ineffable value brought into the world through such benign lies.  There is even a certain kind of truth to be found in each case.  Considering Bigfoot as potentially real at some point in one's life allows one a vision of the world as mysterious, uncharted, and as exceeding the grasp of even our most advanced knowingness.  And what kind of pissant world excludes strung-out carnies ripping you off with rigged games?

On bad days, I sometimes think of the world's organized religions as resulting from  the child's version of the story being remembered long after the adult's version has been forgotten - so that Santa remains a literal flesh-and-blood dude living at the actual North Pole (etc.) rather than what he is.  I suppose this is a perhaps undesirable side-effect of kayfabe having been kept too strictly.

My perception of Crowley changed considerably when I for some reason asked myself this question:  After he squandered his inheritance, How did he make his living?  After all, Heroin is (or was) expensive.  Another data point:  his involvement with the irregular (means "bogus") masonic group known as the OTO (New!  From the folks who sold you the Rites of Memphis and Mizraim!) began when they approached him accusing him of having revealed their innermost secrets in a chapter of his Book of Lies.   Many (including the always-straightforward Robert Anton Wilson) have suggested that this must have been Chapter 69, which deals with sex magick in a suspiciously transparent manner.  I suggest that the smart money is on Chapter 88, which is a meditation upon the Barnum Principle.  Certainly, this should make a great deal of sense to anyone who bothers making a sober investigation into the history of the pre-Crowley OTO.   Indeed, given their overall history, the moral of that chapter makes more than one kind of sense.  Oddly, none of this stops Crowley from having been a genuine visionary and critter of great insight - even, arguably, a great mystic.  And somehow that doesn't stop him from having been an asshole.  There is no contradition in him, or perhaps there is.

In a similar incident, Manley Palmer Hall (late of California) - esotericist, scholar, sometime crackpot-genius, man-about-town... - himself not a free-mason at the time, published a little hothouse flower of a book titled The Lost Keys of Freemasonry, which is bursting with unfounded speculations on the matter at hand.  Somehow, this publication caused him to be encouraged by actual masons to join, and in due time he enlisted in the Craft, after which time his book was effectively endorsed by some of his fellows in it (themselves, of course, sworn to secrecy, etc.).  Between this and the equally overheated works of Albert Pike, one suspects the masons of a conspiracy to promote as much nonsense about themselves as possible.  Consider how much good, by way of recruiting, is done for them by conspiracy theorists!  One imagines the young would-be initiate, lured in by Illuminatus! or, "Bob" help him, The DaVinci Code.  He kneels before the Grand Poobah.  The hoodwink is removed.  And....

"So - You fell for it too, huh?  Heh.  Okay, here's the secret handshake; now you're in.  Beer's on you, tonight, sucker.  Why the long face?  Get yours back the way I got mine!"

And yet, this is not necessarily incompatible with free-masonry as a system of personal development.  Having your illusions shattered is an unqualified win.

Having dwelt among free-thinkers and heretics, it seems natural to look into atheism - particularly the sort that draws on Nietzsche and Sartre.  How can one claim to be beyond good and evil if one insists on being seen as good - especially by oneself?  How can one claim to be free of the God concept if one still fears Satan?  One might say that the most sincere expression of atheism is to profess Satanism.  In this way, one makes it clear that the mythology of the prevailing religion has no more power over one than any other source of amusing myth and imagery that may supply entertainment - or inspire new means for freaking the mundanes.  Oh, and costumes - lots of costumes.

"But" - I hear you protest - "None of them do that!  Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Ayn Rand, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris - none of the leading atheists seem to agree with you on this.  All one sees are a scattering of real Satanists - those poor misguided fools!  Why, Satanism doesn't even make sense..."

Erm, right.  It doesn't.  Perhaps - well, perhaps you are citing the wrong names when you speak of "leading atheists".  Perhaps you forgot a big one.  Hint:  Friend of Jayne Mansfield.

Now - name all the most famous Satanists you can think of.  How many of them are in show biz?  Or even started out in show biz, and then later branched out into Satanism?

But it's a shame to say so.

 

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Posted at 11:23 pm by Jeremiadist
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Sunday, January 06, 2008
Second Thoughts on Games

 

I have previously written rather warmly about games, but they are starting to look more sinister to me.

It seems to me that we don't play games to live, or to "play" - we play games in order not to live.  We play games instead of talking to each other.  We play games in order not to think about the war - and maybe our game-playing is why the war continues.

Every moment devoted to our hobbies moves us more deeply into a pastime paradise, which removes us from public life and walss un the more thoroughly into a purely private world of masturbatory selves who do not care for, or interact with, the larger world in which others are dying - and they die through our inaction, and their dying facilitates our lives of "comfort" and isolation.  Our greatest privilege - our luxurious vice - is to not need to care.

A culture of game-players, pop-culture fanatics, and hobbyists is a spectacle of alienation.  As we disengage from the real world, and retreat further into our fantasies, that world - the only world - dies from our neglect of it.  Soon enough, we will join it.

 

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Posted at 4:39 pm by Jeremiadist
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Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Dear Enlightened New Age Dude

 

Or:  On the Care and Feeding of the Recalcitrant Ego

Dear Mr. New Age Dude:

We can talk all day about the evils of the Ego, and the transcending thereof, but at the end of that day, your Ego is like your stomach - still there, and still hungry.

Dude, you are never getting rid of your Ego - you are stuck with it, and it's not going away.  You can (and from the looks of you, probably should) take a vacation from it now and again - turn down the volume of Radio Me a little, at least - but like your stomach, it's built in. 

What's more:  The Ego drives art and literature, and the development of culture generally.  As George Carlin said of comedy, the name of the game is "Dig me!"  History would be a prolonged yawn without Ego-driven people doing Ego-gratifying, Ego-sustaining, and Ego-defending things.  No Ego, no action.

The completely selfless person (sustainable only under laboratory conditions, and rarely for very long) is potentially like a satisfied junkie - passive, unmotivated, and rather dull.  At any rate, it's not happening to you any time soon - just look at how much pride you take in being selfless!

Like the stomach, the Ego needs to be fed to avoid becoming an annoyance and a distraction.  Consider Breatharians and anorexics - by trying to suppress the stomach, they make it the center of their lives, their activity, and their identity.  Ultimately, their spurned and abused god consumes and destroys them.  (It's like a character in Carrie Fisher's Postcards from the Edge said about twelve-step program members - "All they do is not take drugs!")  A healthier approach to the stomach and Ego is to respect that you have them, as structural features of who and what you are, to learn to manage them, and to remember not to identify with them - and to take them out for a nice dinner now and again.

So care for it and try to keep it off other people's lawns, and maybe toss it a bone now and again, because it likes treats. 

(Just don't mistake it for a soul.)

 

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Posted at 11:43 pm by Jeremiadist
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Sunday, December 30, 2007
The Great Propeller Beanie Experiment

 

While I agree that science should serve its own ends, disinterestedly, I nonetheless feel that sometimes the deeply felt needs of humanity at large should be allowed to raise the priority of certain research programs of immediate urgency.

To wit:  What's the deal with propeller beanies?  They have a long history as the preferred headgear of such crypto-elite groups as the SMOF.  And yet, who really knows what function they serve?  Or what effects they have?

While we remain at the stage of hypothesis-formation (or abduction, if you will), two possibilities seem to stand out:  that the propeller beanie is an indicator, or that it is a regulator.  Allow me to explain.

Though normal motion will, of course, create air currents sufficient to cause propeller rotation, let us assume a stationary subject in a closed room with still air.  Heat from the wearer's head should rise, and thus impel roation in the propeller.  In this way, the beanie may serve as an indicator of head temperature, and, further, of fluctuating rates of heat dissipation.  So, (once our grant is obtained from the National Academy of Sciences) we can attach a laser pointer, or similar device, to the side of the beanie; interruption of the beam by the moving blades may then be recorded by, e.g., a suitably-placed photoelectric cell, thereby giving us a measurement of the rate of rotation, and of its changes.  We may control for heat dissipated by the laser by taking a base measure of movement of an unworn beanie.  In combination with equipment to continuously measure the subject's temperature, we can work up a fairly robust account of the relationship between angular speed (and acceleration) of the propeller blades and heat dissipation across the upper scalp.  At this point we have made the propeller beanie into a useful instrument in the pursuit of truth.

Now, onward into the theoretical depths!  The brainpan being generally regarded as the seat of the soul, we may now use our newly-developed and brightly-colored laboratory apparatus for some substantive work on cognition.  Let us assemble a graduated series of problem-solving tasks - such as the Towers of Hanoi, graded sudoku problems, etc. - and see if "thinking harder" increases rate of rotation.  If this hypothesis pans out, and rotation does increase as our subject's thinker gets over-heated, we will have fully operationalized the notion of intellectual work!  At this point, we may further hypothesize that the popularity of these deceptively-simple novelty caps among the world's hidden elites has always secretly been a form of subtle boasting - the faster one's propeller turns, the greater the mental activity one reveals.  This affords ample opportunity for flexing one's cognitive muscles, as it were - though one might conceivably "cheat" by the internal manipulation of other phenomena such as emotional agitation.

As for the propeller beanie as a regulator:  We cannot neglect the fact that the upward current of heated air off the skull may to some extent be increased one the propeller has been accellerated up to an equilibrium point (and perhaps during the accellerative process itself - an area for further investigation).  This raises the possibility that the beanie's propeller may serve as a crude radiator, slightly cooling the brain, and perhaps allowing for greater mental exertions with less wear and tear on the neural infrastructure.  In this sense, the propeller beanie may also serve as a primitive noötropic device - which is to say, an intelligence enhancer.

Clearly, there is much difficult - and exciting! -  work ahead of us, but, with sufficient funding, I, at least, am willing to undertake it, for great justice, and the ongoing advancement of the geek nation.

 

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Posted at 8:23 pm by Jeremiadist
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Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Simple Hypotheses Upon Free-Masonry - Part the Second

 

Having debunked the Shriners to my own satisfaction, I would like to move on to the larger question:  What is the nature of Free-Masonry generally? 

In venturing into this territory, I enter the august (or fallen) company of conspiracy theorists, esotericists, crackpots, addle-pates, schizophrenics, several popes, and every tin-foil-hatted wingnut this side of Lemuria.  What - I hear you asking (I am prone to auditory hallucinations) - What could possibly be left to say about the Free-Masons?  [And why do you keep spelling it like that?] 

It may appear that every speculative stone has long since been upturned - A. E. Waite even hypothesized once that the great secret of Free-Masonry is:  That there is no secret.  I can therefore forgive you for doubting my capacity for novelty.  (O, ye of little faith!)  But, as Jesus once said, dig this:

As with the Shriners, let us first review some salient data points.

  1. The Free-Masons are an international, fraternal, (indeed, exclusively male) society of apparently British origin, with numerous prominent members.
  2. They are a secret society, in the sense that they maintain secrey of some kind, and therefore may be assumed to secretly be keeping a secret or two, in secrecy.  Or perhaps they simply hope to protect the privacy of their more prominent members.
  3. Sober sources (which are a bit dull) indicate that primary candidates for "the secret" would be identities of members, content of initiations, and recognition signals.
  4. Masonry has a well-known history of developing ways for one Mason to identify himself to another.  Secret handshakes, gestures, postures, seemingly innocent phrases with covert meanings, and so on.  One might say that they are among the primary architects of the art of discreetly signalling one's intentions.  (I have commented on this before.) 
  5. Masonry is documentably centuries old, and allegedly much older.  This is far and away more than enough time to take over the world, or end it, were they so inclined.  A simple look at any day's headlines shows the utter failure of anyone to actually run the entire world, and incidentally confirms its continued existence.  If they've been trying and failing all this time, they suck.
  6. Political conspiracy having been ruled out, they still seem to have a need for secrecy, and especially for secretive means of mutual recognition, but apparently not because they are plotting anything.  They could be an intelligence service, I suppose, but that seems far-fetched for an international organization, besides which, if they were a branch of the British intelligence community, the presence of many Masons among the leaders of the American Revolution is rather perplexing. 
  7. They seem like nice enough fellows, so various sorts of distateful vices like cannibalism, human or animal sacrifice, and so on, seem straight out. 
  8. They insist that candidates affirm the unique Deity, and they are far too tied, historically, to Christianity to be plausible as a front for a cult.

So - with conspiracy, heresy, evil, and espionage ruled out, we seem to be left with victimless crime and ... sin?

Sin!  Why call it by the name given to it by its enemies?  Let us say, rather, in a fraternal spirit:
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Who enjoys theatre, costuming, and a mythology consisting near-exclusively of male characters?  The Free-Masons.  Who has an impeccable sense of style?  The Free-Masons.  Who virtually invented hanky codes?  The Free-Masons.  Who knows how to let you know that they know without letting your wife know in the process?  Well, you know.  And finally - who spends all their free time hanging out in the exclusive company of other men?  The devotees of brotherly love, that's who. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that!  We understand, guys - it was a different time...  There was the Church to contend with, for one thing.  And there you were, a beseiged minority, with an especial need for each other's company, but mortal danger lurking at every step taken to determine who was your comrade, and who was just effete.  There you were, benign, but stigmatized - in constant fear of jail, loss of your jobs, disinheritance, shunning, and harassment of all kinds.  What else were you supposed to do?  And you can hardly break silence now, in that you would betray the trust of all those, past and present, who have joined in hopes of being protected by that very silence.  This is not a demand that you out yourselves.  Rather, consider this a friendly letter from the outside world, saying:  Well played!

It is true that certain holographically-arranged texts contain within them all possible interpretations, and so, in this sense, this theory, and all others past and yet to come, have already been aired, but have perhaps not yet been read.  There is nothing new under the sun, so I can't really claim too much originality here... but I will wager that you heard it here first.

(Well, there is Illuminatus! to consider.  Oh drat.)

[Because it is quaint and antique, ("antient", if you will) and because I can.]

 

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Posted at 10:13 pm by Jeremiadist
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Saturday, December 22, 2007
Simple Hypotheses Upon Free-Masonry - Part the First

 

Consider, if you will, the Shriners.  They have a reputation as amiable, charitable, middle-aged businessmen who nonetheless retain a certain impish frat-boy streak that comes out during their conventions.  They are, collectively, subsumed under the archetype of Someone's Dad - maybe not yours or mine, but someone's.

I wish to offer an alternative picture of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine.  Here are some generally uncontroversial points:

  1. They have a curious fascination with Middle-Eastern culture and aesthetics.
  2. As members of a secret society, they presumably have at least one secret.
  3. They are known to enjoy a tipple now and again - which is to say, they like to party.
  4. They are often seen in parades, driving miniature cars, wearing fezzes and sashes, waving to passersby and grinning widely and amiably.
  5. In general, they display a remarkable degree of easy-going good cheer.  They are happy-go-lucky men of goodwill.
  6. Hashish has been widely available to Westerners, principally via Middle-Eastern trade routes, since the Nineteenth Century.
  7. The Shrine was founded in 1870.  Around the same time, a similar group was founded, named the Mystic Order of Veiled Prophets of the Enchanted Realm.  I am not making this up.
  8. For fuck's sake, they wear fezzes in public while driving toy cars.

I submit that the Shriners are venerable heshers - vipers of the first fucking water.  They are manifestly and royally baked.

Check out this dude, then just try and tell me that I'm wrong.   Oh, and by the way, he's the "Imperial Potentate".  Other Shrine titles are at least as florid as that.  He is also a member of the Royal Order of Jesters.  Apparently "Dad" isn't so square after all!

 

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Posted at 1:07 am by Jeremiadist
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