Cougar WebWorks 
by Nowick Gray
Do only poets
speak of stones and stars
the breath of inspiration
and crimes against nature?The rest, all occupied.
Engineered, corralled.
Entertained, entrained
while the wars rage on.
I send this arrow of inquiry direct into the heart of empire. Who does empire benefit, and who does it leave behind in the ground? Crimes against Nature count victims everywhere, extinctions forever. Life, the precious miracle, the beauty and wonder of this creation, gets somehow forgot, erased, overridden. What have we become—automatons, creatures of the corporatist state—endless consumers, in the sugar-crazed aisles?
We suffer the indoctrination of all our youth. Some listen for truth, rebel. But this is not about revolution, exactly. Insomniacs of rage, let’s be honest about that. And those of caring heart, let them come forward and speak. And if that be rage, let it be cried at the outset, a dirge of invocation, before the celebratory wake.
In the WWI film Testament of Youth, we see the wedding of beauty blasted beyond belief, and a cry, “No More.” Yet, today, a full century later, we have the semblance of consent, by the brainwashed sheep, under largely covert direction by the predatory class holding office for the mob of 13 or 86 or 300 families.
Sicilian Rules… how to get around that? Mussolini tried it once, to take down the mafia, and did he win? Hmmm. Guess who took him down, replaced him with their own? Italian-Americans, exports from Sicily. You can look it up.
There is a necessarily ugly side to every so-called democratic, humanitarian bombing story. So we don’t want to hear? Turn our heads down from the chemtrail-ridden sky (gotta do something with all that coal-fly ash the EPA is forcing us to filter in our scrubbers, so what goes around comes around, kind of thing) to fixate on our app, to distract us from the homeless or the lonely or the friendly or the real, to disappear from public view, into a miracle device to capture attention forever.
The oiled machine grinds on, feeding money through the hopper to the upper crust in the castle of caviar and dancing girls, old boys and war stories. Alpha chimps writ large—is that all they are? Reptilian implants from afar? There lurks not such evil in the heart of most humans, I trust; yet the villain is given equal time, or more, in our stories, gaining more weight than he or she is worth—as if the .01 percent were 50 percent. As if!
And yet, my focus today is on just such a minority thorn in the ass of progress. How to root it out, when it lives like an insistent stiletto of its own Roman or Viking or Chimp persuasion, seeking to dominate, butcher, rape and loot, just because; and for some reason, in the mists of time, tribe came to mean people, and others were consigned to non-people, barbarians, infidels, terrorists. Forgetting the mammalian species bond, the gift of precious human life, the sanctity of nature. The importance of truth.
Yes, in this postmodern age one can never presume to corner market on truth. Which makes the apparent consensus (with relatively minor divisions) of opinion in the mainstream media so instructive. The unitary fundamentalism of “national security” or “free markets” or “neoliberal democracy” hides behind false dualisms suggesting that choice and diversity of opinion is welcome, when in any meaningful broadening of discussion—to, say, the topics of 9/11 or chemtrails - one discovers there is no divergence allowed from the so-called consensus and artificial divide between the ruling factions: Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Liberal, Right/Left. Those divisions of opinion can have meaning, within limits, at the fringe of empire - Scandinavian welfare states, for example—but are taboo within the inner rings of power. There the haggling is over who benefits from the ongoing extraction of non-renewable resources.
Chris Hedges’ 2010 book doesn’t age in the passage of five years; rather it takes on increasing weight and power for its insightful survey of all the ways in which the humanist values of the modern era have been jettisoned by the educated liberal class, in favor of self-serving career advancement and brainwashed subservience to the neoliberal (equivalent in essence to the neoconservative—that is to say, corporatist) agenda. The trusty old tools of the Mafia are operative at large, here: bribery and blackmail, the carrot and the stick. Toe the ruling party line and you will be rewarded; speak against it and you will be ostracized, vilified, denounced and abandoned, even killed if you persist too earnestly.
Hedges speaks from experience: a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, he was censured by the New York Times for speaking out against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Hedges writes of the lesson of this experience in the media, which could also be applied to the other segments of the liberal class: academics, labor advocates, culture creators and commentators, and clerics:
If I had repeated the mythic narrative of America—the narrative embraced by the power elite and the liberal institutions that serve them—the talk would not have attracted notice…. The approved [pro-war] mythic narrative is “neutral” and “apolitical” because it serves the empowered classes. Those who honor these myths remain valued members of the liberal class. Those who do not are banished. (pp. 130–131)
Most people, I think, know deep down what’s going on… despite the constant distraction of false and irrelevant news, information and entertainment being scattershot at us by our “liberal” culture: the media, advertising, the education system, economic pundits, the church, politicians. We just can’t—even if we try to grab a spot of airtime in the prevailing onslaught of digital content—speak about it. The blinkers are internalized, to begin with, under the weight of such conditioning and peer pressure, the blanket of a manufactured “consensus” view of reality. And if these are overcome, if one breaks out of the prison of consciousness to glimpse a ray of truth and reflect it out, down comes the hammer of censorship, paid trolls, character assassination, dirty tricks. Or a polite, covert bit of “advice” to shut up.
Witness the pre-election withdrawal of Vancouver Island Liberal party candidate Maria Manna, after criticism of remarks she posted on Facebook in 2013 questioning the official account of the 9/11 attacks. Never mind that many credible authorities including the chairs of the investigating commission have expressed similar doubts; Manna was pressured to withdraw her candidacy because her opinion is deemed heretical. How much clearer could the irony be, that while the so-called attacks threatened “our freedoms,” the response to those attacks, in the Patriot Act and Canada’s Bill C-51, and even more insidious, the pervasive pressure of artificial consensus, is to deny those very freedoms. Another example is Tony Turner, the Environment Canada scientist forced to resign by the government for composing a protest folk song called “Harperman.”
Hedges’ solution? Though since 2010 he has spoken in support of the Green Party, I suspect he leans more to the pithy wisdom of sixties activist Philip Berrigan, whom Hedges quotes: “If voting made any difference it would be illegal” (p. 101). Hedges has also lent support to the Occupy movement. That more radical, grassroots approach resonates more with his conclusion in the book, which harks back to the traditional faith-based social engagement of the Catholic Worker movement.
Hedges speaks and writes consistently of the need for nonviolent forms of rebellion, noncooperation, resistance to the dominant paradigm of the ruling corporate state. We do so out of empathy and compassion with those suffering most as victims of the globalist regime:
The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. That state appeals to pleasure, as well as fear, to crush compassion. We will have to continue to fight the mechanisms of that dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve, through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the injustice visited on others, especially those we do not know. As distinct and moral beings, we will endure only through these small, sometimes imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what mass culture and mass propaganda seeks to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces, we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces, we remain alive. And, for now, this is the only victory possible. (p. 217)
Sicilian Rules
In the movie Black Mass the gangster played by Johnny Depp instructs his six-year-old son in the basic law of crime and political manipulation: “If no one sees it, it didn’t happen.” Or conversely, what you concoct as a fabricated fiction for effect, has the effect, in the absence of other broadcast truth, of becoming the public’s version of “what happened.” Witness the lies of Powell or Obama before the UN presenting false “evidence” of Iraqi WMD or Syria gas attacks, respectively.
Harald Kautz Vella, a young German scientist, offers an incisive view to the heart of the matter:
When you look at the entire thing, you try to find solutions to it. You realize actually that everybody who is involved, on the different agendas, on the different levels, is doing the same mistake. It is the Luciferic game: "Let me participate in your power, and I will serve you. I don't want to know what you're doing; I don't want to stand in my own responsibility. Just let me participate from your power, and I will serve." This is the Luciferic deal everybody's doing.
And we are doing this by going to vote—the government that is taking care of all the pipes we are connected to. But we let go of our responsibility, and we let them do. They're giving control to the military domain, the military domain is giving control, same game, to the intelligence community, the intelligence community is giving control to the black magicians, the black magicians are giving control to the demons, and the demons lost control to their AI.
And if we all understand the game, we can just say, “Hey. Stupid game. Let's let go of it.” And we can stop playing these things, that basically is nothing else than being afraid of self-responsibility. And I think we are at the point in history when every single individual should master that. To regain self-responsibility, and then we will not need a government. It's not about changing the government. Because the entire concept of government, of having governments, someone to control, is demonic. It's not about replacing people. It will never work. We need to replace the game....
At the end, the only one I'm harming, when I do this, is the AI. And I don't need to take care of her, because she's not a being. No pity necessary. No respect towards a living creature. I could switch her off; this is one way. I could start taking care of my own business, and ignore her, and then she will diminish by herself. We don't need to fight anybody, when we get rid of this problem. (from 1:38 of the video)
The candy parrot comes to play in the kindergarten, and between cartoons of cute battles to the death, sings homage to the voice of authority, from boss, preacher and judge. And we thank the bearer of this bad news for appraising us of the speeches of such behind the curtain, for the curtain pulled aside exposes the narrative for a fairy tale called, for convenience’s sake, Disneyland.
Finally there is the anti-matter of Spiritual Immaterialism, which denies the current climate of fear and greed as so much jiggling neutrinos, so what’s the dif, Bif?
One needs to resurrect the ghost of John Dos Passos, from his one hundred years of solitude in the grave dug of mass delusion, manufactured candidates and purchased political manipulation; the blinding spectacle of national press, engines of commerce, patriotic frenzy orchestrated for particular industrial and commercial entities, which even then effectively convinced, bribed, and extorted the population at large, through advertising, mass education, controlled media narratives whether called “news,” “commentary,” or “entertainment.”
For what? To fuel corporate and bank profits, above all other considerations. Ironic, isn’t it, that so many potential consumers had to be wiped off the books in the process. No matter, at least they won’t demand handouts at the barricades any longer. Now where were we? Oh, the W word again?
It is a war, and I would wager the players stack up like this. On one side is just people, you and me, Joe and Aunt Hilda, Zackface and Chipper. On the other side, is, you know, stealth bombers. That’s just it: there’s no people there. Who’s this big bad they? It’s nobody, man. It’s like the guy from the Greek story staring the Cyclops in the face and fooling it by saying his name is “No-man.” Only he was the hero. Now the bad guy who’s not a guy is pulling the same trick, disappearing from the suits doing the dirty work.
My father was a corporate man. First a bomber pilot, if you want to go that far. So it’s all, I mean this antiwar crap, about hating your father? And of course he was alcoholic too, right? So tell me about your mother…
So it goes, the family saga. Another retreat from the battlefield—I mean, in my father’s case, the bombed-out burning cities below his B-26—into corporate no-man’s land. The bosses made sure their men moved every two or three years (their families with them, hello), further driving them (along with the war, how can you ever forget?), in their social compartmentalization, to drink.
Artificial intelligence, as Vella asserts so matter-of-factly, is what it comes down to, against the messy wetware of human kind. Inserting, for instance, in legal code, the rights of corporations as “persons” under the law. Impersonating humans, as it were, while the trojan horses bear innumerable gifts, pledging better living through frankenstein foods, toxic water, engineered skies. Buying up and outsizing the lesser competition, the human scale, so only the Big Brands and the Mega Stars hold public attention now, celebrity leaders in the noble crusade against evil enemies who want to steal our children, rape our wives, behead our puppies and, and, well if you don’t get the picture by now, we’ll program a few human drones to up the ante till you come on board. You’ll be glad you did.
