#3, MAD WORLD NEWS ROUNDUP

JUNE 14, 2011.

ITEM: Let’s say you owe $60,000 on your credit card. What do you do? Naturally, you enter a dream state where you ask the company to raise your limit, right? And then with a new ceiling, you can pay off the 60 grand.

This is what the White House and the Fed Reserve are trying to do with the national-government debt. Raise the debt ceiling. Otherwise they won’t be able to invent more money to pay the interest on what they already owe.

Of course, your credit-card company isn’t going to raise your limit when you already owe 60 g, so you’re not going to be able to pay off the 60 from newly minted credit.

At some point, the music stops. Not with government, though.

In case you’re interested, this all started with Alexander Hamilton, who claimed that building up federal debt was a GOOD thing. And ever since then, the balls have been juggling in the air. What Hamilton meant was: LET’S SUBVERT THE MEANING OF THE REPUBLIC. LET’S MAKE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT AND A NATIONAL BANK THE CORNERSTONES OF A COVERT MONARCHY OF ARISTOCRATS.

He won the argument.

ITEM: The reporter never bothered to ask the most interesting questions. Happens all the time. A tour-bus driver in Michigan was taking people to Ohio. The ride was overbooked, so he put six passengers in the luggage compartment for the trip. Yup.

Unanswered questions: why did the six agree to take the tour in a dark box a foot off the ground? Did the driver wave a gun? What possessed the driver to come up with this solution? How was the whole deal discovered?

Well, an Ohio patrol officer exposed the ruse…but how? Did a passenger spill his guts at a roadside stop? Were the people in the luggage compartment knocking on it trying to get out at a red light? And how could six people fit inside the compartment along with all the suitcases, if the bus was full?

Or is most of the story wrong? Perhaps six people said they WANTED to ride with the luggage. I’ve often thought it might be fun. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time, and the Michigan-to-Ohio tour is just the tip of an iceberg.

ITEM: An Illinois man entered a convenience store and demanded 99c from the clerk. The clerk refused, so the man pulled a gun. My theory is the man saw a big sign outside the store advertising something for 99c, and he thought it meant that’s all the store HAD. 99c.

ITEM: A woman in England wants to give her womb to her daughter, who doesn’t have one, so the daughter can have a child. The surgical transfer would be temporary. The womb would be removed from the daughter after: the daughter’s egg is fertilized with her husband’s sperm and inserted in the womb, and after the baby comes to term and is born. It’s like a rental womb.

Of course, the highly risky uterus-transfer surgery has only been performed successfully on a few mice. Is this what is meant by “the genetic imperative?” A human must pass on his/her DNA to another generation? Simple adoption is no good? Risk hemorrhaging and dying in the O/R instead?

I call it medical adventurism—the desire of people, who believe they lack other alternatives, to experience something wild, beyond the pale, about which, if they survive it, they can gab and chatter all the way into old age…at which point they would possibly understand how utterly whacked they once were.

ITEM: At a site called Teptronics, you can fork over $17.99 and buy your kid a plastic toy that looks like a little bulbous aquarium. Inside are five seated figures. From left to right, Lenin, Gandhi, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Mao. Lenin looks like the pissed off puppet-old-man, Walter, that ventriloquist Jeff Dunham uses on Comedy Central. Pinched face, nasty attitude. Gandhi looks like a walrus with glasses. Che looks like Horatio Sanz on Saturday Night Live doing a bearded bozo. Mao looks like some guy with a generic ceramic Chinese mask over his face. $17.99. “The Revolutionaries Collection.” Really.

ITEM: From Syracuse to Watertown. 70 miles. On foot. A man named Ned is traveling with his wife. She’s in a wheelchair. He’s pushing her. Her name is Teagan.

Ned says they were married in 1986. When he met her, she was just a head. He built the rest of her body and put her in a wheelchair. She’s a big doll. Wooden head, wooden body. A mannequin.

The really interesting part of the story, though, is that Ned was interviewed by a local social welfare worker. The worker reported that Ned seemed very happy. My question is, what would the social worker have done if Ned said he was very sad? I think the answer is clear. If a guy pushing his wooden wife of 25 years 70 miles in a wheelchair is happy, he gets a pass. If he’s performing the same activity—quite competently—but he’s sad, that’s not okay. Such a person would have to be treated. With drugs. Keep smiling, Ned. Don’t let your guard down. Eccentric-plus-sad is a definite no-go. They’ll lock you up and take Teagan away.

ITEM: The post office lost $8.5 billion last year. Nice work, guys. Now the head of the PO Union has a really innovative idea. Expand the duties of letter carriers. Equip their trucks with sensors that can detect bio-terror attacks. Really. This will somehow justify the red ink in the PO’s books. And if I may ask, how do these sensors in trucks work? They register an increase in the presence of viruses? I’d love to see the specs. I’ll bet they’re a doozie.

“Computer modeling architecture, uh, ahem, predicts, according to several humidity variables, the 6-8 percent likelihood of reverse transcriptase activity occurring in a geo-area six by seven inches square…which can be extrapolated out to a city block, at which point the predictive value diminishes to a minus-4% accuracy on a slow Tuesday afternoon between 3 and 4, given automobile frequency of one car per hour on a street…”

ITEM: And finally, I almost forgot, here’s an interesting report from North Carolina. Since December 2007, 311,400 jobs have been lost in the private sector of the state. During the same time period, government employment is up 500 jobs.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

HELP ME TWEET. I’M SERIOUS!

JUNE 14, 2011. Wanna have some fun?

Well, I have a Twitter account now, and it’s working.

http://twitter.com/#!/jonrappoport

I personally have no idea how Twitter operates, but my colleague, Theo Wesson, is running it for me, and he’s actually living in the 21^st century. My location is less certain.

Here’s the thing. To add fun and increase spread, I can give you a few tweets and you can send them out. Theo assures me it’s easy. Stay with me. He’ll explain. But first, the tweets.

Pelosi urges Weiner to grow a pair.

Harry Reid holds nation hostage: threatens to tweet his.

Hillary: “Thank God there was no tweeting in Bill’s day.”

Barney Frank: “In my youth, I would have been all over that Weiner thing.”

I mean, not bad for starters. Now here’s Theo to explain how to do this — you’ll also include my URL to nomorefakenews.com in the tweets —so some folks show up at my site. Gotta pump up the hits.

Hi everyone, Theo here.

When it comes to actually copying and pasting Jon’s tweets into twitter, what follows is the format you should use. Notice that each tweet is prepended with “RT @jonrappoport:” and appended with “http://www.nomorefakenews.com”. So, simply copy and paste one or more or all of the tweets listed below into you twitter feed. Done!

RT @jonrappoport: Pelosi urges Weiner to grow a pair. http://www.nomorefakenews.com

RT @jonrappoport: Harry Reid holds nation hostage: threatens to tweet his. http://www.nomorefakenews.com

RT @jonrappoport: Hillary: “Thank God there was no tweeting in Bill’s day.” http://www.nomorefakenews.com

RT @jonrappoport: Barney Frank: “In my youth, I would have been all over that Weiner thing.” http://www.nomorefakenews.com

Okay. Not too difficult, right?

Fun’s good.

Whaddaya say?

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

NEWS ROUNDUP IN A MAD WORLD

JUNE 12, 2011. ITEM: If, thirty years ago, somebody told you politicians were arguing about a picture of some guy’s dick, wouldn’t you think you’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Twilight Zone?

Coming up, just ahead, a picture of a guy’s dick.

ITEM: The Chicago Tribune is now the paper of no-record. Their recent editorial about flash mobs in the city indicates that printing the race of a criminal suspect without adding enough info to make an ID is racist. The Trib is now Jesus Christ. Plus a community agency, plus a sociology expert, plus a business doing a suicide leap.

ITEM: Backtrack—Weiner is heading off to rehab, which these days floats all boats. Stupidity? Hiding stuff from your family? Hey, it’s all about mental illness. Let the pros take over. Man is obviously suffering from DICKHEAD DISORDER, a chemical imbalance. Put him on ice for a month, and he’ll be fine. New contriteness to trump former contriteness. “Hey, I’m cured. I can read cue cards.”

ITEM: Looks like the Dept. of Health and Human Services wants to test an anthrax vaccine on…CHILDREN. Wonderful. This was the vaccine that caused so many severe and life-threatening effects in soldiers. Now listen up. As I’ve been telling you for some time, there has never been a properly done clinical trial of ANY vaccine to prove it is effective. And the usual self-serving holier-than-thou reason given for not doing it? It would be unethical to allow volunters to remain unvaccinated. But here it’s quite okay to stab a kid with a vaccine containing anthrax particles. Sure. We’ll go for it. Whatever you say. Just one little thing. YOU over there at the Dept. of Health. YOU line up first and take the shot. Then let’s see how it turns out. I’d say bring in your kids for the vaccine, too, but no, THAT would be unethical. Welcome to guinea-pig nation. Check your brains and your immune system at the door.

ITEM: From the celebrity plastic surgery file: Miami plastic surgeon Dr. Michael Salzhauer says, “The appearance of the hands is the biggest tell-all of a person’s age. Chemical peels or laser treatments can help reduce the appearance of spots and wrinkles. In order to create a smoother appearance to her [Christie Brinkley’s] hands, she could try injecting fat to decrease the appearance of her veins.” Chicken fat? Ass fat? “Shake, pardner. How does my ass feel?”

ITEM: Tennessee just passed a law making it illegal (pay a fine, serve jail time) to send images online that may “frighten, intimidate, or cause emotional stress.” Cause stress to whom? A housewife on Xanax? A nursing-home resident? A religious fanatic? A rabbit in a zoo? A meddling busybody who thinks SOMEONE ELSE may be frightened and is therefore stressed? I suggest using a crocodile as the reference standard. If he blinks and submerges when shown the image, nuke the sender’s house.

ITEM: Goshen College, a small school in Indiana, has banned the National Anthem from sporting events, because it conflicts with their Christian values. Where to start on this one? What about using Onward, Christian Soldiers instead? Or Wind Beneath My Wings? “I can fly higher than an eagle, ’cause you are the wind beneath my wings.” Hey, what about Lush Life? “And there I’ll be, where I’ll rot with the rest, of those whose lives are lonely, too.” No, probably not.

ITEM: A farmer’s land near Montreal is flooded. Carp are swimming in the water. Farmer must buy a fishing license to remove them. Otherwise, pay a fine of $1000. Gov’t official says the licenses are made available to assure farmers they won’t be fined. UH, THEY WON’T BE FINED FOR…FISHING WITHOUT A LICENSE. What factory produces these bureaucrats? I’m telling you, don’t worry about aliens from space.

ITEM: From the looking-back file: HL Mencken (1880-1956) is revered (lip service) as one of the most brilliant journalists in American history. One wonders what would happen now if he were alive and wrote these words he penned in 1924 (“Prejudiced, Fourth Series”): “Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Visit the site, sign up for the email list and receive free articles, and order a copy of my e-book, THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL LIFE, in pdf or Kindle format.

WEAPONS OF MASS HALLUCINATION

JUNE 10, 2011. Yesterday, we taped my upcoming radio interview (June 15) with Thomas Jefferson, performed by the consummate Clay Jenkinson, who has made the character, words, and ideas of Jefferson a major part of his life’s work. (Listen on the 15^th, at 7PM ET, www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com)

To say I was surprised by Mr. Jefferson’s remarks would be a vast understatement. I nearly fell off the chair several times. But listen to it yourself on the 15^th and get the full impact. I’m still digesting it.

What follows are my thoughts in the aftermath…

This nation of 330,000,000 people can’t operate on the strict principles of the Constitution. It isn’t operating on them now, and it won’t later. The whole notion of limited government and powerful states was created when the total population of the states was perhaps 5 million people. It was created FOR a small agrarian nation. It was created FOR a piece of the Eastern seaboard.

So what do we have now? I believe the answer is: federal government as a quasi-religion. That’s what we have, whether we know it or not. George Bush, Barack Obama, pick your Pope. To be more accurate, pick your religious PR front man. Choose from among the cliches they spout, the homilies they bring to the table, the phony sentiments they express in order to boost their base, their devoted base.

It’s all about sentiment. Which church do you want to attend? Which sermon do you want to hear? Which feelings or revulsions do you want to be stirred in your psyche?

Because these men certainly aren’t about government, in the sense in which it was intended after the American Revolution. They are/were sitting on top of an immense structure which is a grotesque parody.

Of course, if you’re deeply into the religious aspect of this, you won’t be able to glimpse what I’m referring to. You’ll be too busy praying at an altar.

It’s a con.

It’s a fake.

It’s an hallucination.

It’s designed to look real.

Only a person in the middle of an hallucination would think that the size and reach of the present federal government is useful, apt, successful, proper, or correct.

If the concept of a Jeffersonian Republic has any validity—government that is close to the people and reflective of its wishes—then by comparison we’re cooked. Hell, we’ve been cooked many times, refried and boiled and baked and broiled, over and over again.

If you don’t care about government that’s close to the people and their wishes, then you’re fine. You can relax in the Jacuzzi of the 2-party system and dream about the devil and God and who’s good and who’s bad. You can call one president God and the other the devil. It’s a horse race and you can place your bets and cheer and boo. You can ooze religious righteousness from every pore.

Now, as for the Constitution, I would refer you to the recent articles of three writers: Gary North, Lucifer Geraldo, and Kirkpatrick Sale. The three pieces, respectively: “The US Constitution: Tool of Centralization and Debt”; “The US Constitution is a Trojan Horse!”; “Getting Back to the Real Constitution? Fahgettaboudit!” The sites:

LewRockwell.com. infowarstoday.com. Vermont Commons.

My takeaway and inferences from the articles and the Jefferson interview: the Constitution contained several fatal flaws: the Commerce Clause and the Supremacy Clause. The wording of each was sufficiently vague to allow the Congress, the Judiciary, and the president to move in and expand the national government, from the beginning. To expand the national government at the expense of the states.

This must have been quite shocking to the states, because, in the run-up to the writing and drafting of the Constitution, the states expected they would remain powerful and independent entities, with a federal government that would, for the most part, only run foreign policy. The states were shocked, but not entirely surprised.

The one man who was definitely not surprised was Alexander Hamilton. He was the architect of what turned out to be the America we know today. He, as Mr. Jefferson stated in my interview, took people to “the dark side.”

Now, I’m not a Hamilton scholar, so I don’t make this statement as the final word on him, but I certainly lean in the direction of concluding that it was his influence that projected America as a powerful national aggressive empire-building force. Jefferson was opposed to that vision.

The Constitution turned a newly formed loose confederation of independent states (republics, really) into a trampling ground for the federal machine, because it left open key doors of interpretation on vital matters.

For example, under the Commerce Clause, the national government was given the power to regulate trade between states. But this was merely supposed to mean the states would be held back from charging each other protective tariffs on shipped goods, and if there was a trade dispute between states that couldn’t be worked out, the national government would step in and mediate a resolution. In time, this evolved into massive federal power to interfere in state matters of all kinds, including the sale of pink or yellow or green condoms between midnight and 3 in the morning in Duluth.

And the vague wording in the Commerce Clause was the key. The courts and the Congress and the president could twist meanings and come to a new distorted concept of federal power.

What about the opening line of the Constitution? WE THE PEOPLE. As Mr. Sale points out, what’s THAT doing there? It should have been WE THE STATES. “The people” is as vague as it gets. It implies you’re talking about everybody, as if suddenly all people are cut loose from their states. It grinds a heel in the faces of the states. Remember, it was the states (legislatures) that ratified the Constitution.

So…to return now to the Constitution as-is, as a means of saving the nation, is asking for a flawed beginning, again.

And then we have this: the Bill of Rights. The whole manner of its inclusion suggests that government is the primary force, and the people are exempted from that force on specific counts—when, in fact, those enumerated Rights come FIRST. They were always there, even if nations for centuries denied them.

The Bill of Rights should have been called: THE WAY THINGS ARE NATURALLY, AND DON’T FORGET IT, BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER WE CREATE A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT. THE GOVERNMENT IS THE AFTERTHOUGHT, THE RIGHTS ARE OUT FRONT IN THE PARADE.

In the interview, Mr. Jefferson told me each generation should writeits own Constitution. That was what he wanted. That is what he hoped for. To make that work, I believe you need small Republics. Today, who knows how many you would need on this continent. A hundred? Two hundred? California has 37 million people, seven times more than all the new states combined, after the Revolution.

Hamilton was the man who wanted a strong central government and a national bank that would complicate money to the point where the average person couldn’t understand it anymore…and therefore, those men who did understand it well could manipulate it for their own extreme benefit. The aristocratic class. Some of the same men bought up debt incurred for the purpose of fighting the Revolutionary War—and then leaned on the taxpayers to repay the debt later with stronger better money. Buy the debt with hinky paper first; demand repayment with solid silver later.

Well, we don’t have 200 independent Republics on this continent, and therefore a new Constitutional Convention (to cover 300 million people) isn’t going to cut it, if we want real individual freedom.

Since I started this site ten years ago, I’ve written about radicaldecentralization. Understanding what that could mean, figuring out what that could mean, inventing what that could mean…it’s not just a casual reflection. It’s the idea and the action that—if anything does—trumps the religion we now have called government.

Mass hallucination is a wondrous thing. It allows you to think you’re doing A while you’re doing B. You can invest devout and sacred hope in a PR front man called a president while you’re in the voting booth. You can stand in a crowd and feel ecstasy or weep behind a barrier when the president comes to your town to wave his scepter and spray holy water on you, before he cruises his limo to a fund-raiser at a mansion. You can believe Jesus wore a white leisure suit and invested in oil wells while extolling the free market. You can look at the great capitol dome in Washington DC and fall to your knees and dream that the people inside are enacting the business of the Republic.

It works if you’ve got that fairy tale in your pocket.

What was it that Strother Martin said in Cool Hand Luke? “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

Well, what we’ve got here is a failure of imagination. As in, NOT ENOUGH. Because when you think you’re supporting a just government when you’re really chomping on a cheesy religion, that’s the ceiling on your imagination. You’ve reached as far as you can go. Every important-sounding pronouncement by your favorite president comes across as stars and angels drifting down from heaven. Whenever somebody’s PR machine cranks out a political sentiment all dressed up in “towering feeling,” you buy it as an elevation of government to the highest level. Which your imagination, held to a ridiculous minimum, tells you is religion.

Religion is a con. And so is the kind of government we have now. It’s no surprise people confuse them. Run some old footage of a presidential convention. Look at the upturned faces in the crowd, in the audience. They just ate the body and drank the blood. They’re radiant in the glow. The glow that floats political boats and turns hard-packed drivel into diamonds.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

RAPPOPORT INTERVIEWS TESLA

JUNE 9, 2011. Bringing back Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), the famous inventor, for an encore involved a few emails to Limbo, where he is continuing his experiments.

I expected the conversation would be like pulling teeth. You know, taciturn, dour, bitter. All that. But happily, it wasn’t the case. As with Orson Welles, another one of my interviewees, I was surprised to find that Tesla shares many of my views.

Q: How’s it going?

A: Fairly well, Jon. Working hard as always.

Q: Anything new to report?

A: Sure. Turns out the universe is an illusion, when you drill down far enough. And I have.

Q: Illusion in what sense?

A: It’s too real.

Q: Excuse me?

A: You have to be suspicious when things get too real, when you can’t wave a hand and make an ashtray on a table disappear. Look for a con. See?

Q: Actually, I think I might.

A: For a long time, I was working to tap into inherent energies in the Earth, in space, and I solved all that. I have the inventions built now, fully functioning. It’s in the bag. You reached me at an opportune time, because I’ve got a guy who’s handling the promotion on it. All open source. He’ll be distributing complete blueprints to several planets, actually. Earth included, of course. But then I needed something new to do, so I started applying high power resolution to sub-atomic phenomena, and I came up with a few exciting wrinkles.

Q: Let’s hear about that.

A: Let me give it to you as a metaphor. Because so many things do, in fact, turn out to be metaphors. Anyway, you travel far enough into micro-micro landscapes, and you come across a man holding up a sign that says: THIS IS REAL. See what I mean? It’s a form of hypnosis. THIS IS REAL. THIS IS THE MOST REAL IT GETS. So you have to think somebody is pulling the wool over your eyes.

Q: It’s a scam.

A: Full scam.

Q: And who is this man with the sign?

A: Just a prop. Depending on what angle you’re looking at him from, he appears in different guises. That’s where cultural programming comes in. Whoever a particular culture would consider the most elevated authority figure, that’s who this man with the sign looks like.

Q: Who does he look like to you?

A: Donald Duck. But that’s because I’ve developed a bit of a sense of humor. It was a long time coming. You remember a guy named Lenny Bruce?

Q: Sure.

A: Well, Lenny and I have been hanging out. He’s kicked his habit, and he’s clean. But he’s still the same basic Lenny.

Q: I would never have expected…

A: I know. Weird, isn’t it? He’s something. Anyway, what I’m saying is, physical reality, this whole universe, is a…

Q: Virtual reality.

A: Not exactly. No. It’s constructed as a kingdom might be, except there is no king. So the natural inference is, there IS a king. But no, there isn’t.

Q: Rather confusing.

A: Sure. The whole hierarchy of species, for example. From simple to complex. The progression from very tiny particles to whole galaxies. It looks organized. And it is. But that’s a feint. It’s a diversion in a shell game. A lot of effort was put into making the universe seem real in an imposing way. But as I said, this is a clue. When someone goes around pounding his chest all the time and telling you who he is, you begin to wonder what’s going on behind the facade. On Earth, people live in a very provincial monopoly in which, for instance, energy is controlled by a small number of people—so it’s natural pioneers would look for other sources of energy. As I did. And I found them in abundance. There never was and never will be a scarcity, unless it’s imposed. But that’s just the beginning of a much larger story. From my perspective now, when I look at physical reality, I see facades.

Q: Stage flats.

A: A man running around with a sign that says THIS IS REAL.

Q: Can you do something with that? I mean, can you invent something that makes use of that?

A: An interesting question. You can always do something with something. Do you know? You can guide it, expand it, constrict it, you can work it like salt-water taffy. But when you’re basically dealing with nothing, it’s different.

Q: Nothing?

A: If you have facades, what’s in back of them? Nothing. The show’s not going on back there.

Q: I see.

A: Nevertheless, I wanted to explore that.

Q: Explore nothing.

A: Sure. Wouldn’t you?

Q: I guess so.

A: It’s a challenge. What do you do with nothing? I wish more philosophers and scientists had asked that question.

Q: You don’t mean a vacuum.

A: A vacuum sucks in matter and energy. Nothing doesn’t do that.

Q: What’s it like being in nothing?

A: Restful.

Q: Is nothing a space?

A: No.

Q: Then how do you describe it?

A: Lenny said it was like a long moment when his mother stopped talking at him.

Q: If it isn’t space, how do you move around in it?

A: Turns out you can move around in no-space. You’re in a void. What was the other thing Lenny said about the void? It’s like Alzheimer’s, except your mind is very clear and you remember everything.

Q: Can you use it?

A: Well, as an inventor, naturally I was interested in the possibility. It took me a while, but I did come up with what I call the physics of potential. Nothing happens, but anything and everything could happen. If you took the moment before a thought occurs, and expanded it to infinity, what would you have? You’d have consciousness of possibility. You’d have a moment with no end to consider whatever you wanted to consider. A plan, an idea, a design, an invention, a work of art, an action. I was already acquainted with this, in a much more limited sense, because as you probably know, I was able to visualize a new invention as a completely finished entity before I ever laid a finger on materials and built it.

Q: The physics of potential.

A: The universe is, from this perspective, the creation of overall amnesia.

Q: People might have trouble understanding that.

A: I’ve never waited for people to catch up to me. They have to grapple with what I’ve done. Most of the time, they don’t want to. So why should I be concerned? When you leave the infinite moment of potential, and let’s say you make a universe, you develop amnesia about what you left behind, which is that nothing where it all started.

Q: You’re not just talking semantics.

A: No, this is very real. The void is the absence of creating. It’s not a thing. It’s just a word you apply to not creating. You don’t create ANYTHING. You stop because you want to. And when you do that, you have an energy potential that is infinite. Here’s another metaphor. The universe you’re living in is a cartoon. You’re in a consensus reconstituted can of orange juice.

Q: And what does Lenny call that?

A: The Big Bong.

Q: Why do we buy the idea that the physical universe is so real? Why don’t we see the little man with the sign?

A: Because you want real. Real is a very interesting experience. For a while. If you ran around pulling out a chunk of sky here and a chunk of sky there, the illusion would become obvious. So you institute laws that connect everything together—or seem to. If you pull out a chunk of sky you get a huge explosion and things go haywire. At least, that’s what you firmly believe. Actually, you can remove things and nothing happens. You just have a steady hole. But everyone denies that.

Q: You mean there is a conspiracy to maintain the basic laws of physics?

A: Yes. A consensus.

Q: You destroyed a consensus when you found a way to tap into unlimited energy and send it to people all over the world.

A: No. I destroyed the monopoly of a few men.

Q: Which is why they cut you off.

A: They told themselves a little story. That I was crazy. Of course, they really knew why they shut off my funding.

Q: So anyone can create a universe.

A: Of course. That’s obvious. Just as there is no scarcity of energy, there is no scarcity of universes. It’s a walk in the park. But One Universe is a kind of religion. I had inklings of that while I was doing my energy experiments on Earth. But now I see the fuller picture. People think they’re free from the demented ideas of religions. But they have their own. Universe. One Universe. And it’s a humdinger. One reason it works so well is there is no visible church. Universe appears to be neutral. Dogma isn’t labeled dogma.

Q: What’s it like seeing all sorts of other universes and being able to travel to them?

A: It’s quite enjoyable. I would say relaxed. You give up this whole ridiculous idea of entropy, according to which usable energy is diminishing. But people want entropy. They want that idea that existence is limited. Like I say, it’s a religion. If a person thinks he’s limited, then he wants to posit an energy supply that’s limited.

Q: You always did opt for abundance.

A: Why shouldn’t I? It’s a better concept than scarcity. It’s a key in the door that opens out into infinity. Infinities, actually. For the intellectuals out there—there are supposed to be more possible moves in chess than the number of quarks in the universe. So imagine that a chess game could begin with the pieces rearranged on the board in all possible ways…and for each configuration, figure out the number of possible moves starting from that configuration all the way to the end…you know, and add all those up, and you would only begin to fathom the number of infinities that are possible. But you see, a much easier and more direct and true thing to say is a person can create universes. As many as he wants to.

Q: But you’re not really talking about science.

A: Of course not. I’m talking about desire. What a person wants to create. You really start learning about desire when you use your imagination with great intensity and scope, because most of your desires ARE discovered/invented through imagination. This is life. Full life. It’s not mathematics. It’s not dry. It’s passion taken to higher and deeper levels. When I was standing in the middle of one of my electric-lightning spouting machines, the essence of that was BEING ALIVE.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

CASTLE ON THE HILL

JUNE 8, 2011. During his sessions with a psychiatrist, an artist named Gauguin P. Gauguin was asked to relate a dream.

He described it this way:

In the year 2078, a new category of crime was invented. It was called BI, Being Inhuman. A general charge, it could be brought against an individual who failed to exhibit a basic guilt.

Guilt about what?

No need to specify. Guilt about himself.

The new crime was placed on the books because it was finally acknowledged that guilt is the gateway drug into “the human condition,” and that condition is part and parcel of submerging one’s self in a GROUP.

Without pervasive guilt, there are no groups that make up the center of what we call civilization.

So why fool around? Go the heart of the matter.

Various tests were devised to measure the guilt index. A citizen could be dragged into an administrative court on the flimsiest of pretexts, where an examination would be carried out.

The central theme to be explored? Whose life is more important? Yours? Or your fellow human’s?

“That’s all?” the psychiatrist said. “That’s the dream?”

“Yes,” Gauguin said.

“Were you arrested in the dream?”

“Oh? Yes. Sure. I was brought in.”

“And how did you answer the question put to you?”

“I said my fellow human was of no importance to me at all.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“And what did they do to you?”

“Well, they wanted to hang me from a tree, but I escaped. I ran up to a castle on a hill. It was abandoned. So I took it over. I set myself up as king, and I began issuing edicts. From that moment on, no one would be permitted to care about anyone except himself. Violation of this law would result in electrocution.”

“Quite a radical step.”

“I thought desperate times required desperate measures.”

“And?”

“Everyone suddenly woke up. It was miraculous. Everyone realized we had been living a sham. This share and care nonsense was a social trap. It was operant conditioning. Mind control.”

“Did people start killing each other?”

“No, actually. Peace broke out for the first time in several centuries.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“It’s true. We were too busy pursuing our own futures to waste time on war. Besides, no one wanted to die bleeding on a battlefield.”

“But what about social conventions?”

“They fell away like old fungus.”

“So now it was about brutal honesty?”

“No, life suddenly became more…theatrical. Pretension was developed into a high art. High comedy.”

“What?”

“I can’t really explain it. I guess, underneath all the insanity that had been propagated, we wanted art. Theater.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, let’s see. Don’t you spend most of your days listening to people’s wretched stories? Aren’t you bored out of your mind? Don’t you wish you could find a better part to play?”

“Nonsense.”

“Sure you do. You’re the authority. You’ve got your own castle on the hill. You’d love to change the rules. You want to sweep away the bullshit. Well, that’s what we did.”

“We did? You’re describing a dream.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

“What’s going on?”

“Well, it’s not actually a dream. I AM from the year 2078. I’m here on vacation. Just dipping a toe in the water of the past. I can see you need some serious help.”

“You mean you feel an altruistic non-selfish impulse to help me?”

“No. I’m having fun. You’re in your castle, and you’ve lost the thread. You’ve become a megalomaniac. It’s interesting. See, doc, throwing away your guilt doesn’t mean you turn into a beast. That’s a fairy tale told to keep the rubes in check. To sustain an unworkable society.”

“I’m going to write a prescription for you.”’

“Sure. No problem. Write as many scripts as you want. You think if you drop your act about caring about everybody else, you’ll suddenly take off all your clothes and dance on your desk. You’ll be thrown into a well of infantile fantasies. But it doesn’t turn out that way. People have a natural sense of generosity. It has nothing to do with guilt or redemption or any of that crap.”

“But we have a system to run.”

“You sure do. How’s that working out?”

“It’s all we have.”

“Forget the we. Think about you in the castle. It’s pretty miserable, isn’t it?”

“You’re in serious trouble, sir.”

“From where I’m sitting, I’d say there’s something eating you up. And you don’t know what to do about it. I’m suggesting an out. But hey, if you don’t want to consider what I’m saying, no problem. I’ve got places to go, people to see.”

“In this dream of yours, what happens to the social system? What happens to the less fortunate?”

“They catch on.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“They stop looking up at the castle, for one thing. They realize the whole society was crazy, from top to bottom. They—well, all of us—discover we have our own resources. As individuals. It’s a revelation and it doesn’t come from the castle.”

“Sounds like self-serving doctrine.”

“Actually, it’s just the opposite. In a society of a little less than a billion people, we have a few hundred million theater companies.”

WHAT?”

“Last year, I played a guy like you. He tried to kill himself a few times. People would come into his hospital room and laugh at him. You should have heard the audience. People were wetting themselves.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“Easy, doc. You’ll give yourself a stroke. At the end of the play, you wake up and see the future. For the first time in your life. You really see the future out there, hanging like a big moon in the sky. And you’re overcome with grief. It’s quite a moment. Not a dry eye in the house. Because we’ve all been through it. We thought we knew what the future was. But that was just a gray hazy light. It was all of us going down with the ship together. To wake up from that is quite, quite something. Believe me. Nothing quite like it.”

“You’re a madman.”

“For all practical purposes, I’m just you looking at you. If you want to take the ride.”

“And become a selfish greedy moron?”

“I guess you haven’t been listening. I thought listening was your specialty. You’re the priest, aren’t you? Maybe you’re the inquisitor type, trying to drive people into a sea of normalcy. That’s a nice theme for a tragedy. Of course, in the process, you become the most normal person in the universe. Then people start laughing. Fucked, straight up with a twist.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

CREATIVITY/IMAGINATION

JUNE 8, 2011. A funny thing happens when you try to teach students a class in poetry. You end up carving a poem into lots of pieces, and you tend to impose some sort of system on it.

Of course, that’s counterproductive, because the poem isn’t a system, and it isn’t meant to be dissected like a dead frog.

I found an interesting way around this.

We would read a great poem in class. Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Hart Crane. We’d read it out loud six or seven times, so the sound would come through and the meaning would gradually sink in. Then I’d tell the students to write something about the poem. Anything. That was their between-class assignment. Write as much as they could about the poem.

When I got the assignments handed in, I’d take them home and read them, looking for a sentence here, a sentence there, that had a glint of fire and imagination…and I would circle those sentences.

The next class session, I’d read those sentences and indicate they had a spirit of poetry in them.

Then we’d move on to another poem.

Doing just this for a month or two, with poem after poem, some students began to get the idea. They began to make a connection between poetry and what they were writing. And so they’d dive deeper into that spirit of poetry in their own writing.

They made the shift from audience/spectator to creator. Which is the whole point.

When imagination is directed into psy-op PR and propaganda, one of the biggest preoccupations of this culture, you get something very different: passivity. Non-creation.

And that really is the objective. Holding a population in a kind of trance.

Breaking the trance, in the long run, leads to a future that is open, ifin the process, audience becomes actor, spectator becomes creator.

In that poetry class, the students, at the beginning, didn’t really feel they had what it took to create something. They were just looking to understand my system, my approach, so they could win a good grade. But I didn’t have a system. Instead, I turned the tables on them.

We ended up dealing, first-hand, with the fire of imagination. That was all the class was about.

I was just pointing to a sentence here, a phrase there, and saying, “This. This is it. This is something. You wrote it. Keep going.”

Imagination is never boring. It’s alive. It cuts through all sleep-inducing structures.

If you want to take this illustration (the poetry class) and extend it out to the whole of life, you’ll be walking a different road.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

REPORT OF A RETURNING STAR EXPLORER

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Vladimir Nabokov

JUNE 7, 2011. Frank C. Voyle was sent to the stars, and when he came home, he said he had encountered a man who sat behind a desk in a bed of clouds.

The man had begun talking. He made no sense, even though he was speaking English. The way he threw words together added up to complete gibberish. But gradually, Voyle claimed, he began to pick up a phrase here and there.

“They were like objects falling from a tree. There were periods when I blacked out, and when I came to, he was still talking. It didn’t bother him that I’d checked out.

“It was like listening to strange music. Changes of tempo, instruments arriving and going away, interludes. I learned to go along with it.

“It was almost as if I was receiving a treatment for a disease. I realized I’d been suffering from internal inflammation, because I had been subjected, somewhere along the line, to a form of indoctrination—and now this man was curing it.

“The programming…you see, it wasn’t a matter of content. Not at all. It was the basic nature of the method, which was reduction. That was the secret. In order to achieve clarity, and I needed clarity in my work, I had to eliminate vast amounts of potential meaning. And with reduction, I entered into a territory of sickness. Slowly. One step at a time.

“Everyone is suffering from this. We don’t see it because our only standard of reference is each other. We’re mirrors. And when someone doesn’t operate according to our rules, we can’t make sense out of it.

“Well, here was this man. He was talking on for what seemed like days, in the most outrageous way. He didn’t care. To look at his face, his expressions, the way he moved his hands, you would swear he knew exactly what he was saying. He didn’t have to think about things.

“As I caught on, I felt better. Coils and dead-ends left me. Tensions drained out of my body. But I wasn’t falling into a state of greater relaxation, I was more alert.

“I have thought about this a great deal. I don’t think he was trying to cure me. He knew it was happening, but he was merely talking. He knew that, for a long period of time, I didn’t understand anything he was saying, but it didn’t bother him. It didn’t bother him at all.

“He had arrived at a plateau that was entirely unfamiliar to me. He was comfortable there. He saw no reason to climb down. He wasn’t trying to make things simple for me.

“Of course, I’ve been trained in many techniques that hopefully bridge the gap when we encounter new species of intelligent life. But this was unprecedented. This was a man who was human and spoke English.

“I eventually reached a point where I understood a great deal of what he was saying. For long stretches of time, I was comprehending things without effort.

“So now I believe I need to learn how to talk like this. For many reasons. Of course, there is no way I can begin to explain to you what actually happened unless I can speak as he did. But beyond that, I want to talk in this way, so I can reach those places and those heights.

“Part of this man’s genius, if we want to call it that, was that he felt absolutely no suspicion about me.”

Q: Mr. Voyle, couldn’t you at least repeat some of this person’s statements for us?

A: I could, sir. But it wouldn’t do any good. You see, for him it was all spontaneous utterance. And that made the difference. It wasn’t only the words and combinations of words, it was the way in which they were being delivered. You could take a song and have two singers perform it, and of course there would be all the difference in the world between the two renditions.

Q: Well, we’ll have to decide on that later. But for now, we’ll continue to run tests. It’s apparent your brain patterns have been altered, to a degree.

A: But again, you’re not going to gain anything from that information—even if you reproduce those patterns in another brain.

Q: That’s quite an extraordinary statement. Would you care to explain it?

A: What might have happened to my brain is an effect. Of a cause. If you remove the original cause, you’ll at best replicate a series of electrical impulses without my accompanying perception. I was there. I saw him. I heard him. I perceived. It was the essence of the experience.

Q: Well, yes. But this is not the way science works. Most of the time, we aren’t “there.” But we nevertheless can infer.

A: In this case, science would bring you up short.

Q: Suppose what you’re reporting never happened to you. Suppose it was an extended hallucination.

A: Like a dream? Even if that’s true, I was there.

Q: Or you were tricked into thinking you were.

A: This is the crux, isn’t it? Do we take out our box of labels and impose one? Or do we treat my experience as genuine?

Q: Mr. Voyle, we really will need a number of examples from you. Things that…this person said.

A: I’ll be happy to provide them. But again, it won’t make sense to you, and nothing will happen.

Q: We can decide that. We’ll also present you with computer-generated examples of English spoken in random ways. You can determine which of these is closest to what you heard. You know, Frank, we have a whole file full of extraordinary astronaut experiences. They come back with stories. One astronaut stated he could see people walking around down on Earth from a hundred thousand miles out. Another one spoke to a dead aunt.

A: But in the end, there was nothing you could do with those events, because you couldn’t replicate them.

Q: That’s right.

A: You see, this is my point. I already know what happened to me was unique. I’m not asking for anything from the Agency.

Q: Was there practical value in the “messages” you received?

A: In the content?

Q: Yes.

A: It wasn’t about the content. And for quite awhile, I assumed he was speaking nonsense, gibberish.

Q: So perhaps you inserted your own interpretation of what was essentially meaningless.

A: That would be you placing a label on what happened.

Q: What else can we do?

A: The official position will be that I had a dream or suffered from an hallucination.

Q: You spoke to a man who was sitting at a desk in a cloud.

A: I was outside the ship doing repairs, and I saw him. I made my way to him. I was still tethered.

Q: Did he introduce himself?

A: He just started talking.

Q: Did he look like anyone you know?

A: No.

Q: But he was human and he spoke English.

A: That’s right.

Q: What was he wearing?

A: A pair of pants and a shirt.

Q: Do you have a sense of how long the event lasted?

A: The log indicates it was six hours.

Q: This was a one-man flitter. According to the main ship’s records, you took it to track down a transmission no one else was picking up. And there was nothing on ship’s instruments, either.

A: That’s right.

Q: You seem to have some mystical notions about language.

A: I’m just recalling what happened to me.

Q: Placebo effect. Dream. Hallucination.

A: From your point of view.

Q: This idea of “being cured.”

A: You go to a concert. The orchestra plays a composition that comes across as noise. It’s absurd. You wish you’d never come. You doze off, wake up. But after a while, the music begins to make sense to you, against your better judgment. You resist that. But as you keep listening, the whole thing falls into place. Only it’s a place you’ve never been. You can’t describe it to anyone else. You feel as if you’re flying. Your sense of well-being is extraordinary. You realize you’ve been perceiving reality inside a severely limited context. All your life.

Q: I see what you’re driving at. But then the person sitting next to you has a completely different experience.

A: That’s my point. We don’t know what would have happened if another crew member had been outside the ship with me.

Q: Actually, Frank, we wanted to get your impressions before we told you that we do, in fact, have a recording of what happened during those six hours. You were unaware your Cave-3 was on. We have the whole thing.

A: Really? That’s…amazing.

Q: And as you report, there was a monologue. An extended monologue. It doesn’t sound like you talking. But we have to infer that you were. Who else could it have been?

A: What do you make of it?

Q: We’ve had people listening. It’s gibberish. Words randomly thrown together. So far, we’re not finding any pattern.

A: Pattern? Of course there isn’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

Q: We’d really like to avoid getting into a confrontational psych eval on this.

A: Oh, you mean you don’t want me going around like a religious convert? Don’t worry about that. You know, I could have kept silent. But I felt an obligation to report what happened.

Q: And we appreciate that. You’re paying a price for coming forward.

A: Doesn’t matter how high I test out on my annual anymore. Doesn’t matter how high my performance quotients come in. You won’t be sending me out again. I understand that. But I don’t need to go out anymore. I found what I was looking for, even though I didn’t know I was looking for it.

Q: Here’s the thing, Frank. On all the physical tests so far, your numbers are good. Things are checking out fine. If that continues to be the case during the whole debrief process, we’re prepared to make you an offer.

A: A pay-off?

Absolutely not. You’ll leave the service. Which you’d want to do anyway, because you won’t be going out on future space missions. Aside from your pension, we’ll see to it, through a cut-out, that a small stipend handles your “extra expenses.” You can set up a non-profit research foundation. Whatever you want. Continue to pursue this “avenue.” It would be completely unofficial, of course. No ties to the Agency. Once a year, you’ll meet with one of us, and you’ll report. We’re not demanding performance quotas. Nothing like that. We just want to be kept in the loop.

A: This has happened before.

Q: Several times. Not the way it happened to you. But we’ve got a few men out there in the world who are “following their instincts.” It’s our way of keeping an open mind.

A: You’ll give me their names?

Q: No. We don’t want to taint the experiment. But you’ll find them anyway. You’ll nose around and figure it out. Or somebody will contact you. We’re not in the business of Weird, Frank. Nevertheless, we’re not completely stupid…

A: And if at some point I go public? Not about our arrangement. But about what I discover?

Q: Up to you. Obviously, we don’t want a big splash that’ll make us look crazy for having had you in the program.

A: I’m not interested in making the tabloids.

Q: Not much chance of that. You’d be going up against some celebrity who had sex with a sheep in a hotel room…

A: So the Agency’s official position, if pressed, is that you don’t understand a word of what I reported happened to me while I was out there.

Q: If it comes to that, yes.

A: Which was exactly my position when the man began talking to me outside my ship. Until it wasn’t my position anymore.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE APOSTLES

MEMORY OF A BRIEF JOURNEY

AN EXCERPT FROM THE MAGICIAN AWAKES

The object of travel is to get lost.

Lin Yutang

“…the universe is infinite; beyond the visible world there is an infinity of other worlds, each of which is inhabited…”

Catholic Encyclopedia, describing the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, the Church’s greatest heretic.

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Vladimir Nabokov

JUNE 5, 2011. My ongoing book, THE MAGICIAN AWAKES, is not only about multiple and simultaneous dimensions, it is itself taking place in such dimensions—paintings, poems, audio, text, lost text (computer crash some months back), dialogue, articles, and so on. It’s not a novel anymore, although that’s how it started out. It’s a hybrid. Right now, I don’t bother to keep track of it all. I just know I’m inventing it.

This is a non-form that works and satisfies me.

The word magic has been used in so many ridiculous ways. In fact, as I go along, I discover more and more ridiculousities.

As I’ve said and written many times by now, magic occurs as a side effect of wide open and proliferating imagination in action. The direct and straight-line approach is at best, a very minor pocket in an infinite coat.

Beginning, middle, and end is an addiction.

In an email, an old friend, a college professor, described his philosophy of life: “A golf ball is a golf ball and a steak is a steak.”

“So,” I said, “you know what you’re eating and you know what you’re hitting.”

He asked me what I’d been up to. It had been a long time since we’d been in touch. I sent him the following story, which I wrote in an airport, waiting out a surreal flight delay:

In Florence six years ago, I walked into a dim church and sat down. Next to me on the bench was a round gray stone. I picked it up and held it.

I dozed off. A voice came to me and explained matters that had long been puzzling:

Peter, John, Philip, Bartholomew, James, Andrew, et al, lived in Judea, followed Jesus, and were his apostles.

Philip’s father worked at the British embassy in Jerusalem. Bartholomew was a stock trader who’d flown from London to hear the Sermon on the Mount. James and Andrew were setting up a string of men’s shops along the West Bank.

The apostles’ names were part of the culture of miracles, because other people in that neck of the woods were Moishe, Sol, Marty, Jake, Al, Dov, Ish, and Zaide.

The Brit apostles could say shalom, but otherwise they knew no Hebrew. They learned to shrug, and made do with that.

Peter, Paul, and Mary formed a singing group in Tel Aviv.

When Jesus turned five loaves and two fish into food for 5000, Andrew asked if he could have a small jar of Marmite, and a Cadbury’s, but they were not available that day.

As illustrated in the painting of Piero Della Francesca, Jesus was actually flagellated in the courtyard of an upscale Roman villa.

I woke up.

I found the grim interior geometry of the Duomo again…a soul in here would decide he needed saving, even if that hadn’t been on his mind when he entered from the street. I thought about what a few De Koonings and Picassos would accomplish.

A short fat man in a gray suit walked up to me.

“Go to another universe?” he said.

I was still holding the stone.

“How much?” I said.

“Fifty Euros for the basic ticket. Insurance, mandatory. Ten dollars a day. But they have the best corned beef this side of the Carnegie.”

“You a priest?”

“A travel agent.”

He evaporated in the gloom.

A light snow began falling from the high dome.

It formed a shroud around my shoulders.

Give me your happiest hours,

We will make a template for the rest of your nights.

Who said that?

A man dragging his seared leg hobbled out of the shadows and smiled at me. What a face of pain and joy! It was the astronomer and poet, Giordano Bruno, who, in the winter of 1600, had died in flames in the garden of flowers, in Rome, after his seven-year trial. The apogee of heresy in Church history.

He whispered, “Infinite souls of infinite extension, overlapping, and yet not merged…”

He took my hand in his and sent a bolt of electricity through my brain.

I was suddenly hovering above the dome, in the late afternoon, and looking down at the plaza, I saw my wife walking among the stalls of merchandise. She glanced up at me, nodded, and smiled—enveloping the world map.

…Later that night, eating supper in a small restaurant facing an alley, we toasted Bruno, warrior of deep space. His telescope, his heraldic cosmos, his poems about immortality.

Trip the light fantastic, my friend, they built as far as they could go and hit the wall.

Gaspara Seigos was dying in his cabin in the Andes. His last book, Salvaje Silvestre, half-finished, lay on a sagging table next to the sink.

People from nearby settlements brought him light meals, and local healers arrived with their brews. A young doctor from Burma carried medicines in his bag.

Seigos told them, “Don’t bother.” To the doctor, he said, “I’m in touch with a nothing that is something, and if it can, it will heal me. The situation is cutting it close. We’ll see. I relax as far as I can, and then natural functioning takes over.”

Once, the doctor thought Seigos was dead. He could detect no pulse, no heartbeat. But then the writer’s eyes opened. He looked at the hazy light coming through the window by the door, nodded, and went to sleep.

A month later, he was up and walking around the cabin. He went outside and a dog ran up to him and smelled his hand.

At the little stream, he bent down and picked up a handful of pebbles and took them back to the cabin and threw them on the floor.

Every day he went out and found stones and brought them home. Eventually, he returned from his walks with large rocks.

A few months later, the cabin was piled high with boulders. Most of the space was gone. Seigos slept at night among the rocks. At that point, the villagers, the healers, and the doctor left him alone.

Seigos lived this way for almost a year. He passed into stone and stayed in that state for weeks. Then he returned, and walked out of his cabin and went into the mountain passes and disappeared.

In Lima, Salvaje Silvestre appeared on the shelves of bookstores. Some copies were missing pages. Not all copies were identical.

One night, along the Higuerta Roundabout, a parade of children walked silently. Above them, bicycles and urns and lamps and stoves catapulted and burned on the ground. At dawn, feral dogs gathered there and chewed the ashes.

That day, naked figures were seen walking on low clouds. A group of them clutched at the blue sky and tore it open at a seam. Behind the sky—the prow of a sailing ship. The sky continued to tear on its own, until the whole ship was visible. The crew took down the large and small sails and then stood silently on the deck as the ship passed across out of view.

The entire sky over the city fell away, exposing terraces of wild gardens and roving patrols of soldiers.

It rained heavily for the next month: extraviado. The terraces were still there, but extraviado. Snow fell, and in it people heard intricate music from the mouths of dead relatives. The soldier patrols fell back and staggered and crawled into a bruised cloud.

I brought the stone home with me from Florence. I placed it in a bowl of water for a few days. It gradually dissolved. The water turned blue.

…There was a scratching at our front door. I opened it, and a sleek brown dog trotted past me and went into the kitchen. I took the bowl off the counter and put it on the floor. The dog glanced at me and then drank the water. He ran out of the kitchen into the living room and through the back wall into the yard. He sat down, looked up at the sky, and barked. I looked at the sky.

When I looked back at the dog, only his head remained, floating above the grass. Then it faded out. My cell phone rang.

“This is the Pope’s appointment secretary, “ a voice said. “We’re defecting. Can you put us up for a few days? Ha-ha, just kidding. But we do have a question. Security cameras caught you in the Duomo with a man who looked very much like Giordono Bruno. Anything you can tell us about that?”

“Well,” I said, “did cameras also catch me hovering above the dome?”

Pause.

“I’m afraid we missed that one,” he said.

“Can’t help you locate him,” I said.

“He comes back now and then.”

“Good luck.”

“We try to maintain our seal on things,” he said. “But after fifteen hundred years or so, it develops cracks.”

“No big surprise there.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MORE ON THOMAS JEFFERSON PROJECT

JUNE 6, 2011. Yesterday I sent out the press release about my upcoming radio interview (June 15) with Clay Jenkinson, as he performs his vaunted role as Thomas Jefferson. He will be in character for the show.

I have seen him on C-SPAN, debating with “Alexander Hamilton,” and I can tell you Clay is phenomenal. Not just good. Great.

So tell all your friends and enemies and your grandma, too.

When I wrote my logic course for home schoolers, I discovered that Jefferson was a devoted student of logic. He went to college to study it. It was one of his pillars. So I hope to touch on that in the conversation.

Of course, there are so MANY questions I want to ask him. Impossible to get them all in. One hour is good, eight hours would be better.

For example, Jefferson once remarked rather casually, in a letter, that the federal government should run foreign affairs and policy, and the states should handle everything else. In 2011, I fell off my chair. Apparently, this is way he pretty much viewed the distribution of powers as laid out in the Constitution.

I have to believe that Jefferson, looking at the massive USA these days, would want radical decentralization. What form would it take?

Again, Clay isn’t just an actor playing Jefferson. He’s a scholar, and he’s explored Jefferson’s life and ideas up one side and down the other.

It’s a unique opportunity.

I’m sure you folks can navigate the site where the show will emanate far better than I can…as I’ve said many times, I’m basically a typist with a computer.

My understanding is it’s easy. Go to www.ProgressiveRadioNetowork.com and click on “listen live.” A few days after the show, the archive will have it there:

www.ProgressiveRadioNetowork.com/archive

Here is the press release again: spread it far and wide.

Hmm. Wonder if we can connect with 50 or 60 million listeners in China. Just an idea.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A MAJOR RADIO EVENT!

AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER INTERVIEWS

THOMAS JEFFERSON!

When: Wednesday, June 15, 7-8 PM, Eastern Time

Where: www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

Scholar Clay Jenkinson, who has portrayed, with stunning accuracy, Thomas Jefferson, in venues all over the world, will assume the identity once more, for a sit-down interview with Jon Rappoport, Pulitzer-nominated reporter.

“Mr. Jefferson,” in character, will answer Jon’s questions about life in 2011, from his 18^th-century perspective.

“I wish we had three hours,” Jon stated, “but we’ll squeeze in everything we can in one hour.”

What is Jefferson’s view of where America has gone in two centuries? Is it still a Republic? Should it be? How can a Constitution designed to fit fewer than three million citizens apply to a population of 300 million? Do even the rights and powers of individual states make sense, when one state, California, has 37 million residents? What about the national health-care plan? The state of public education? Mega-corporate influence? Two political parties with common agendas? The military-industrial complex? The Federal Reserve? Invasive surveillance?

The questions pile up.

This will be an intriguing and riveting hour of radio—a unique experience.

To pick up the show live: www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com and click on “listen live.” To access the show in the archive, www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com/archive, and scroll down to The Jon Rappoport Show.

Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute and the founder of the Theodore Roosevelt Center. A humanities scholar, he is the host of the nationally syndicated radio show, The Thomas JeffersonHour. (www.jeffersonhour.org)

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 35 years. He has published articles on politics, health, and media for LAWeekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin Magazine, Stern, and is the author of Logic and Analysis, a course for high-school students.

(www.nomorefakenews.com)

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For further information, contact Jon Rappoport at: qjrconsulting@gmail.com