CreateSpace™ site is temporarily down

At this writing (10:35 PM, EST), CreateSpace's™ ("an Amazon™company") home site is down. All attempts to reach the site url get a blank white page with the text, "Nothing to see here, move along," in the top left hand corner below the toolbar.Amazon has been party to the financial blockade on Wikileak™. Is this a hack by Anonymous™? This had to have occurred no more than four hours ago.Or: Am I being hacked? Very curious...

12:11 A.M.: Site redesign, it's back up again.

"Mr. Smiley" (product review)

PARENTAL WARNING: THIS REVIEW IS RIDDLED WITH SARCASM, SEND-UPS, BELITTLEMENT, AND SCORN FOR EVERYTHING. PROCEED WITH CAUTION...

With my first few tokes I wasn't expecting anything at all.

Not a buzz, certainly not a high, but I was surprised after around seven hits: this comes awfully close to being a lot like a marijuana buzz and high. Let's not get carried away, however. “Mr. Smiley” (which also goes by the monikers "K2" and "spice," among others) is one of those many enigmatic products littering our shelves and lives these days, and like most pharmaceuticals, it doesn't have a seal of approval from the now nearly defunct Food and Drug administration, created at the behest of the public and that communist, President Theodore Roosevelt, who, when he read an article citing slaughterhouse conditions uncovered by writer and muckraker Upton Sinclair (a socialist, say no more! The ignominy! The gall in caring about people and our nation, the temerity!) exclaimed over his breakfast on that fateful day in 1906 that, “I've been poisoned!” and indeed he had, but it was too late and a bad case of the trots was on his agenda for the evening.

Out of the kindness of his own Red heart, for his own Red heart's well-being, he ordered the creation of the communistic FDA. As we all know, life was never the same after that and an economic disaster ensued that reduced things to stone age conditions forever. A calamity of better health, nutrition, working conditions, and lower profits began to ruin America until very, very recently after all the Soviet Jews were run out of the federal bureaucracy on a rail, and replaced with nice people from the industries who merely want to feed us contaminated, ersatz foodstuffs and drugs at hyper-inflated prices. Truly, this has been part of our wonderful way of life...if you're one of the few within the saintly ranks of our Captains of Industry, men who have worked harder than all the sweatshop workers and illegal immigrant slaves combined!

Hype or reality?

Because Mr. Smiley is sold by different names and has evolved in different forms, most states have voted to ban the chemical compounds JWH-018 and JWH-073, synthetic compounds created by a Clemson University researcher to mimic the effects of cannabis on the brain.

According to published reports, the recipe to make those chemical compounds were eventually leaked to chemists in China, who began producing the compound and selling it as a marijuana substitute. By 2008, the synthetic marijuana began arriving on shelves in the United States, where it gained rapidly in popularity.

Because the compound is marketed as incense, it does not require Food and Drug Administration approval for sale and no long-term studies of its use have been completed.

"That's the thing, no one really knows how bad it is," Dieter said. "It may be much ado about nothing, but there's too much that we don't know about it."

It's also not known how popular synthetic marijuana truly is in South Bend. (City not smiling about Mr. Smiley," South Bend Tribune, 05.24.10)

Cry bitter tears for these poor men, brothers and sisters, because it's truly the White man's burden for them to sip champagne on the French Riviera while everyone else toils for them and consumes their toxic products that make our nation what it is: a gastrointestinal nightmare where the water supply is less-and-less safe and about to become privatized along with the air we breathe. Progress, indeed, has its price. But what of the “D” in the FDA, a communistic anagram if ever there was one? Yes, that other naughty word, besides the aforementioned “Jew,” the Satanic-infused word, “drug.” Yes, the FDA is responsible for marijuana still being off the lists as medicinally useful as well as a powerful narcotic, hence its persistence as an effective tool in throwing niggers and spics in prison when times are hard (and whites who "won't get with the program"). Poisoned by the free market?

Yes, haven't we all been after a little over a century later with the wacky-yet-divinely inspired wave of whipped-up sentiment to deregulate almost everything and to head willy-nilly towards the Maoist altar to Ayn Rand and the magazine stand erected to Lenin. Both are not-so-secretly adored by the GOP, secretly by mainstream Democratic leaders. Yes, the cranks have had their generation of fun, but the party's over, and it's time to pay the waiter...but all they have are Euros. What of Mr. Smiley? No, this isn't your grandfather's corn silk or Jimson weed, which you should never, ever smoke if you want to retain your ability to breathe or reason (potentially answering some of the question as to why rural voters shit where they eat) ever again, and besides, crank is for cranks these days.

According to my own eyes, the product has been sold at convenience stores and gas stations in my own part of the Midwest, namely, Northern Indiana and parts of Michigan. How does this product smoke? Very smoothly, I must say, and with an aftertaste that's very similar if not exactly like some decent Mexican weed, the so-so kind they leave for the rest of us and put on a NAFTA-approved semi-trailer bound for desperate potheads who will smoke literally anything to keep their buzz on. Mr. Smiley is made up of (according to the label, so it must be true...) TWO ingredients: “Damiana leaf” and “Mullein leaf extract,” about which I know very little, like high fructose corn syrup, glutemates, and all the other horseshit that manufacturers put into our food supply for reasons that would only make sense to a Soviet bureaucrat. You'll forgive the last contradiction, but this is being written by a product of the American educational system, also patterned after the factory model, so bear with us on this.

First ingredient, Mullein leaf: This is often used as an herbal treatment for asthma! Is it safe? Yes it is, and it is sometimes known to cause a sense of drowsiness, like marijuana, and it's also an expectorant like that Weed of Satan. It's a mild sedative in some people, a common side-effect. It's sold by herbalist outlets in greater quantities than the less-than-an-ounce (one gram) little dispenser that Mr. Smiley comes in. In other words, it's significantly cheaper in larger quantities elsewhere. You can even buy it by-the-pound from Amazon.com.

Second ingredient, Damiana leaf: This is roughly the same deal. You can buy it off the Internet easily, and in quantity for a very low amount of money. Effects? In women, it's allegedly a “natural aphrodisiac,” meaning that it's bullshit and doesn't work at all in that area or most others claimed by those who sell it. Ask a botanist or a pharmacologist. You know: people who are evil communist scientists (the evil "Dr. Yakub" from the Nation of Islam's cosmology) or "fill-in-the-blank" since they have the temerity to be factually correct, trumping one's ego and personal narrative. Interestingly, Damiana lowers blood glucose levels like marijuana does when ingested or smoked, though it's more commonly ingested in tinctures and extracts. It might have psychoactive properties in some people. Sounds like snake oil bullshit, doesn't it?

So, how did “Mr. Smiley” become a “product”? Because some douche-nozzles sat around one day (as most asshole entrepreneurs have in the past in America, and the disease has been exported) trying to figure-out how they could get people to buy something they never wanted, needed, and could buy cheaper and assemble its constituents themselves, and then make a good profit. Take the money and run. There is no product code on the product. There is no address either. There is no Internet address. Yes, “Mr. Smiley” “works,” but you could save yourself a lot of time and money and simply buy its ingredients online for much cheaper, in larger quantities, and put these banal free market crackheads out of business along with the legitimate heat they're getting from the Police. But is it even safe?

Rumors--and that's all that they are so far--are saying that the substance is dangerous. How do they know? That said, I wouldn't advise anyone to buy or smoke it, and I only inhaled enough to see if there was indeed a buzz to be had. There is. Other rumors state that it's being packaged in China, though no evidence is forthcoming on that claim. One thing's certain: by pasting the story all over the Internet, TV, radio, and the like throughout Michiana, every kid in the region who would want to know about the fake drug will now, and they could very well end up finding it, online in one form or another. This has been facilitated by both the local political establishment, the Police, and what's left of the press. Thanks, assholes. Why not just let the kids smoke pot? We know it's not going to hurt them and that the FDA's stance on the substance is a purely political one. Do not taunt Mr. Smiley...

Grade: An “C-” for the fact that it works, and an “F” for them being typical hustler/grifter douche-nozzle fucks.

http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20100524/News01/5240337/1130

http://www.southbendtribune.com/article/20100519/News01/100519346/0/FRONTPAGE

The Rapture sounds better to me now...

Hey, with all the Christian extremists gone, we'd have housing freed-up for the poor, the homeless. Jesus would be proud. Needless-to-say, I'd go grab a stereo system (their music collection would be LEFT BEHIND). Take that Emperor Constantine, and emperor penguins too!

aleX joneS is the Fred Flintstone of our time

WWW--The fascination--even my own--just continues to boggle my mind. He has no real ideas of his own, but he's burly and loud and shows absolute certainty and credulousness at all times. There's no conspiracy theory he wouldn't love to have thought up. It seems he's the last guy on earth to have heard of Bohemian Grove. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about the gathering place of the elites decision-makers in the California redwoods way back in 1956 in his book The Power Elite, when rock was being born and Eisenhower was president.

America's global power had reached an apex, and it's been downhill ever since. Mills didn't think Bohemian Grove amounted to much and that it was simply a place for the influential to unwind and sometimes talk shop. I don't think he was mistaken, but even reading the implications of what Mills concluded, you can presume that deals are made and consecrated there. And? That's not a conspiracy, it's reasonably out in the open. Were that not so, Jones himself would never have been able to sneak in, but then you begin to realize that this is more about oversimplified explanations and the cult of personality than anything else.

With all of his yammering about government being evil, you'd think Alex Jones was merely an extremist Republican, not that that's saying much these days. Perhaps this is why he's becoming more mainstream. It's beyond my understanding why Slacker director Richard Linklater has placed Jones in two of his computer rotoscope films, Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006), based on the paranoid meditation on informant and surveillance culture by Philip K. Dick., except that he literally sees him as a cartoon character. If that's what he means, I'm with him. Jones is a symptom of a very sick body politic.

While he espouses being against the wars in the Middle East on the one hand as Ron Paul does, he's also spreading misinformation about the current president and his birth certificate on the other. Jones is a clown at best, but I have to wonder if he's around to bad-jacket information that's actually valid and true. But most of all, he really just looks like a shaved ape with a Halloween mask on, yelling at the top of his lungs that there's a fire in the crowded theater of America when there's merely smoke. He is alarmist in his rhetoric. He is a conflater and a spreader of hysteria. He is not the answer, and he is a demagogue. What he constitutes is a great example of delusions of adequacy, and the dark underbelly of Populism. He is a very dangerous man.

Postscript 10.17.2009: And if you don't believe me, look at the one you're with! We'll just say that Ted Nugent is Jones's Barney Rubble.

"We won the Cold War," but didn't want it to end: reflections on the Thatcher-Gorbachev revelations

WWW--We did? Who won it? It wasn't the average person. Considering the recent revelations about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("Iron Maggie," a beloved to neocons along with the Maoist veneration of Ronald Reagan) and her discussions with the final Soviet President Mikael Gorbachev--that Thatcher and the rest of the West including America--didn't want reunification of Germany under any circumstances, you'd think it would be everywhere in our media.

Fine, it came out on September 11th, our new sacred national day, but this is earth-shattering news, it downs many myths about the Cold War, including the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. The contention of "we won the Cold War" just doesn't float anymore, they wanted to keep it going, and it served many purposes for the power structures on both sides, and Thatcher's comments underscore what many have suspected all along: the Cold War was a lie, a big lie. I could have told you that, but now we have solid-proof.

As usual, the official line and rhetoric are just window dressing, a lie, cover. The Western powers wanted the Soviet Union to stay-in-place for the foreseeable future during Peristroika (the thaw of authoritarianism in the Warsaw Pact nations) and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This exchange comes less than three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it is extraordinary.

From the Times:

September 23 1989 : transcript

Thatcher: I wanted to raise some questions regarding the situation in the countries of Eastern Europe. I was deeply impressed by the courage of General Jaruzelski in Poland and by his patriotism. Of course, the future of Poland and its alliance with you are very important. I noticed that you reacted calmly to the results of the Polish elections and generally to processes taking part in this and other Eastern European countries. My understanding of your position is following: you welcome each country developing in its own way on the condition that Warsaw Pact stays. I understand this position perfectly.

Now I would like to say something in complete confidence and would ask you not to record this part of our conversation.

Gorbachev: I agree to your request.

(The following part of the conversation is reproduced from memory)

Thatcher: We are very concerned about the processes taking place in Eastern Germany. Some big changes could happen there, forced partly by the state of the society and partly by the illness of Erich Honecker. One example of this is the flight of thousands of people from the GDR to the FRG. All of this is on the surface, it is very important but even more important is something else.

The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it. We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests. Of course, internal changes are happening in all Eastern European countries, somewhere they are deeper than in others. However, we would prefer if those processes were entirely internal, we would not interfere in them or push the de-communisation of Eastern Europe. I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position. He sent me a telegram to Tokyo in which he asked me directly to tell you that the United States would not do anything that might put at risk the security of the Soviet Union or perceived by the Soviet society as danger. I am fulfilling his request.

Gorbachev: Thank you for this message. In broad terms, you have outlined our position correctly. We believe that socialist countries should solve their internal problems themselves, chose themselves the course and speed on the way of implementation of their socialist choice. We do not want and will not interfere but will, of course help our allies as we have always done.

As for the state of health of Erich Honecker, he is planning to take part in all events commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the GDR. I can tell you that I am planning to arrive to the GDR on 6-7th October to celebrate this anniversary.

In other words, Reagan was in total agreement with Thatcher and considering American might, could be presumed to have been pulling some of the strings here. And there is more, much more to establish the veracity and legitimacy of these documents. Where was it in the American press? The virtual "page eight," if it was there at all.

This is a stunning rebuttal to the mythology surrounding the Cold War, former Prime Minister Thatcher, and the late President Ronald Reagan. Former President Gorbachev comes off looking very good, even better than before. Western leaders of the time look like the lying, scrambling, unimaginative clowns that they were and are. "Conventional wisdom" is often misinformed, now we know. The real history tends to be unwritten for generations. We lucked-out on this one. What a "Man in the High Castle" moment.

"Thatcher Told Gorbachev Britain Did Not Want German Reunification," The Times online, 09.11.2009: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829735.ece

Excerpts from the Thatcher-Gorbachev talks and related excerpts:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6829416.ece

"Twenty lines with the president," a fictional satire of a fictional satire by the Great Charles Sheen

Twenty Lines With the President

Reported by CHARLIE SHEEN and his friend "Manly Gloss" [insert fear-based advertising]

Infopwarsh

Tuesday, September eleventy-twelve, 2009


Related: "Sheen blasts media for reporting truth about his addictions."

______________________________________________________________________

I recently--hiccough!--had the great pleasure of spending time with the president and several substances, some legal, others not. Bouncing a hooker on my knee was out, so I hid her in the bathroom of the Lincoln bedroom with my friend and erstwhile cohort, "Manly Gloss." The funny thing is, nobody else can see Manly, but I can assure you readers and my family (you can forget about the interventions pa, I have a gun now) that Manly's as real as you or me. Where the hell was I? Sorry, had to some DTs coming on...shit, uh--OH YEAH! Alex Jones asked me--since I'm famous, on the most popular TV comedy right now, to write an interview with President Barack HUSSEIN Obama, the 44th POTUS, and a socialist (needed spellcheck on that one!) darkie.

Our ersatz interview was conducamacated in the Lincoln bedroom, a place in the White House where the spirit of that assassinated president is sometimes seen, along with the smell of other spirits, so it was right up my alley. An autistic fella told me that twenty minutes is comprised of 1200 seconds, which is profound for a drunk, washed-up cokehead and whore-monger like yours truly, but it got me to thinking: "What the fuck was I thinking about with this interview, anyway?!"

I mean, the readers here at prisontoilet and infopwarsh are so retarded they're gonna think this shit is real, y'know? You think I'm wrong? Look at the comments below, fuck me, and I mean it, I have a sexual addiction...

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Charlie Sheen: Uh--burp!--sorry about that Mr. President, I had a few-too-many on the red eye here to nation's capital, they just keep shoveling them into your lap--especially when you demand it every five minutes.

Barack Obama: Well--uh--thank you--uh--Charlie, and I have to say that I watch your "Two and a Half Men" show frequently here in the Oval office, it's as entertaining as the Tea Baggers and the town hall folks. It's a nice apolitical break from a hard day's work of avoiding the real issues, and I can tell you that that's a very hard job indeed. But then, that's what Rahm's for: to remind who's really in charge.

Manly Gloss: Shhhhhhhhhhhh...

CS: [Looks over to the bathroom of the Lincoln bedroom] Shut the fuck up!

BO: Uh...what was that?

Manly Gloss: Look--Charlie--you created me to find some kind of much needed objectivity here. What's the deal? Just get on with the interview, don't respond to me, ignore the man behind the curtain of reality.

CS: Right. Er, Mr. President. Why won't you examine the issue of thermite being found in the residue around the WTC ruins? Sorry, bad copy, Alex wrote this.

BO: Well, Charlie, the scientific community is in-consensus on this. "Nano-thermite" is a byproduct in welding. Also, nano-thermite is created from the super-heating of aluminum and steel. As anyone knows, much of the WTC was constructed of steel, the planes were constructed of aluminum, and the very girders of the buildings that were destroyed on 9/11 were fused together through conventional welding.

CS: Shit, you got me Mr. President--but do you agree with the findings of the 9/11 Commission then? I was hoping to create a straw man argument here, but you're clever, at least three-moves ahead of me, what with that homespun "negro wisdom" and all. I mean, you got me, I knew it too. God, I wish I had that "voice of authority" my pops has...

BO: Well, you know Charles--may I call you that?

CS: Certainly, sir. I feel like I'm talking to myself, this is so natural.

BO: Hahahaha, indeed it is Charles. You see, you understood this because you're Black Irish. We'll leave it at that, heh-heh. [They both laugh, then stop abruptly, becoming very serious]

Manly Gloss: Pssst! Charlie! Ask him about his birth certificate.

CS: Nah-nah, no way!

BO: Who are you talking to? Charles, I'm frankly becoming concerned for you.

CS: Look, Mr. President, I know something to win you over, and that's cocaine. Let's hit the bathroom.

BO: No, no, Charles, I left that part of my life behind long ago, money power are my drugs nowadays, and they're more socially acceptable. But our relations with the Colombian oligarchy are good, sound, and my Attorney General--Mr. Holder--knows how to "do business" down there, if you know what I mean. [winks]

CS: [shaking violently] Gotcha. Well, if you don't mind, I'm going to hit the bathroom. You think Rahm might want to join me?

BO: Assuredly, he's from Chicago and Hollywood, hahahaha. I would never appoint anyone I couldn't blackmail right back, now would I? Let me hit my Blackberry, he'll be here in moments. We might have to open the door so that he doesn't--uh--rip it off of the hinges!

CS: Gotcha. Do you think that 9/11 was an inside job?

BO: No.

CS: Uh...shit. Alex gave me all these talking points and notes, and I...seem to have lost them, maybe left them in the rental outside. OK...uh. You think that the Bush administration perhaps was incompetent on that day?

BO: [smiling broadly] I couldn't say...does this all seem unreal to you, like we're part of some fake reality? Have you ever had that feeling? I feel it a lot lately.

CS: [shudders] Yes. My God, Mr. President, we're characters in someone's simulacrum, a phony narrative.

BO: I agree, but is it simply Alex Jones's?

CS: No, this is something more profound, perhaps cosmological. Now my head hurts after thinking and saying that, but that's a given. Man, I need a drink, a bump...

Criswell: Mr. President, I predict that you will pass a major health bill, reforming the health care system of America. But, because you lack all principles, it will flounder and you'll be forced to push for that Mars mission the last executive did once his political capital was entirely expended.

CS: AHHHH!!! Who the fuck is that, Mr. President?! Where did he come from?

BO: Haw! That's the ghost of Criswell's past, Charles. People think they're seeing the late president Lincoln, but he never slept in here. Criswell did. President Nixon was a great fan of the psychic and had him here several times, so did the Reagans.

Manly: Pssst! He's right Charlie, I know these things. You need to come in here for some more coke-sniffing, I can sense Rahm Emanuel coming.

Rahm Emanuel: OK, where's the coke and a taint to sniff it off of? Hahahaha! I kid--or do I? Mr. President, I know Charlie well from Hollywood--quite the "ladies man," although I never pay for it, I just take what I want, when I want. Know what I mean?

CS: That I do! Mr. President--about Sibel Edmonds.

BO: Yes? She gave some testimony under oath recently, in August. What does that have to do with 9/11?

CS: OK, she's talked about a lot of subjects...oh fuck it, let's go snort some coke, won't we?

RE: You're the man! Let's hit that shit! No broads, though? Well shit, Charlie, you're losing it, man. I'd order out, but the heat's on with that shit. Some of these fuck-head prosecutors actually do their jobs around the beltway, we can't be too careful. In Chicago? No problem. You see, these Republicans are too stupid to cover their tracks, so ordering out for ass is just out. Surely you could have brought some groupies, some chicks from L.A.

Shit, who cares? There are plenty of interns to fuck around here. Besides, your fuckin' father might pull another one of his legendary "interventions" on you, and we wouldn't want that, would we? We need your ass at Alex Jones's site to bad-jacket real information that makes us and the last brew culpable for...hahahaha, we won't go into it, you're too fuckin' dumb to understand anyway. [slaps me on the back soundly]

(Incredibly loud sounds of snorting emanate from the Lincoln bathroom for several minutes. I, and Mr. Emanuel emerge with cocaine peppering our respective upper-lips)

RE: Good shit Charles, we'll have to hook-you-up some time with the good shit from Chiquita, from our friends to the North in Colombia! [slaps Sheen on the back so hard he hits the floor]

CS: GASP! So, where were we Mr. President?

BO: Charles, it appears that we're running short on time, I have a country to run, kinda like a 7/11. Someone has to be manning the controls at all times. You want a Big Gulp? Hahahaha! Ahhh, you "righties" and your endless stream of non-sequiturs--but we need people like you. Who else is going to distract the rest of the country when hardly anyone buys newspapers or trusts the mainstream media anymore? I cannot even rely on it for factual information anymore, and neither can investors on Wall Street, or even foreign investors, the only thing keeping this house of cards afloat these days.

CS: Thanks--I guess--Mr. President. You sure you don't want a bump?

BO: Hahahaha, very tempting Charles, but like I said, I have a country to run, bullets to dodge, and many promises left to break. I have my work cut-out for me.

CS: Mr. President, are you trying to stonewall me and the readership of...shit, what's the name of it?

BO and RE: It's "infopwarsh," get it right.

Criswell: What's "eleventy-twelve" mean?

BO: Freedom.

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Comments

Texas Terrorist: Man, Charlie! You are true patriot, not one them socialest sissies!

LargeMardge: Spare any of that coke?

Non-sequitur Party of the Right: Man, why didn't he shoot that nigger-varmit? I was in Nam, man, I was there! What the hell is this shit about eleventy-twelve anyway, what the fuck is that--"niggerease"?

Tard Steve: I cant reat any o tis. Wil sumwun reat it 4 me.

Ted Nugent's Illegitimate Children: You tell that nigger a what for! Barack HUSSEIN O-bam-a! Yer wang dang doodlin' my country right into the ground, fucker! ...OK, my shrink has told me I need help, a lot of help and copious amounts of anti-depressants. The problem is, I don't do drugs of any kind. What do I do? Rush? Judy? Someone, turn on a spotlight now, I'm feeling randy, and he's getting pissed!

Jaenelle Antas: Springtime for Hitler? Germany? Anyone?

Bladderwarts: Clearly, the WTC could not have been taken down by human technology. This was a job by "greys," aliens. We must stop illegal aliens!!

Everyone's a comedian, but what would Jesus™ actually do?

Jesus™ would (if he weren't carbonized-dust somewhere in Palestine):

1. Jesus would never call anyone "nigger," "spic," "chink," "gook," "slant," "wop," "kike" (we know this one), "mick," "spade," "ofay" (he wasn't white, get over it), etc. .

2. Wash AND dry, because he's a nice guy and a responsible guest.

3. Jesus would watch NC-17 movies because he had depth and curiosity, unlike his subsequent generations of followers. His favorite director is Pier Paolo Pasolini. I asked him last night.

4. Jesus would always be in-trouble because his beliefs wouldn't be popular in-practice today. Luckily, only a tiny minority of self-proclaimed Christians have ever done this: himself and St. Francis.

5. Jesus would vote independent, and never for a Republican or Democrat unless they were enlightened (there's a clear-and-empty shot there so far...). He would be a hard-left voter who hates the sick, greedy rich as most reasonable people have throughout human history.

6. As a carpenter in an industrialized, mechanized, and technological world Jesus...would do very little work. He would be unemployed unless he was lucky and had a journeyman's union-card.

7. Jesus would say, "I told you to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, but I didn't mean 'worship him or myself as a god.' I never said, 'worship authority.' " Like the last time, nobody would listen or change their behavior and would go on like before in the standard dumbshow way.

8. Jesus would save green stamps, finding-out that they were worthless later-on, exclaiming as he did on the cross: "Lord, why have you forsaken me?"Indeed. Clouds would gather as they did in a Cecil B. Demille movie--but didn't at the actual crucifixion--and the mourners would gather (also more than at the actual crucifixion). Birds would fall from the sky, but the universe would shrug as it always does.

9. Because Jesus would see our industrial and technological reality as a hell on earth, and because he would see America as the New Rome, he would read Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Melville, Huxley, Blake, Poe, Marx, and Nietzsche voraciously. He might even smoke pot occasionally.

10. Jesus would avidly watch Sam Peckinpah movies because he hates violence and murder. His favorite would be "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia."

11. Jesus would find Deborah Jeane Palfrey innocent for every reason you suspect.

12. Jesus would abolish the death penalty for every reason you suspect.

13. And finally, Jesus would be very-very angry that anyone would suggest what he would do, nearly 2,000-years after his untimely death, as most human beings would. Luckily, it doesn't matter, only what he taught about treating each other better does. "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword," said Jesus. So mote it be. We murder a guy for saying, "Be nice to each other," and then we feel bad and are haunted by the guilt of it for two-millennia. We're still pagans, barbarians flailing our way through history. It will end one day. So mote it be.

Philip K. Dick android head still missing, with "No Plans to Rebuild You"

The People's Republic of China--It's out there somewhere, but it appears someone, somewhere, still has the head of the Philip K. Dick android. Hanson robotics still has the body, which is weird. The whole scenario is weird, like a PKD story.

Let's face it: it's probably in China, right now, and a whole factory is manufacturing PKD androids by-the-thousands (with lead-paint). That would be kinda cool--minus the lead-paint.

The androids could help lead a revolution there, then liberate the citizens of the United States of America from the corporations and the politicians. Somehow, I think artificial-intelligence will evolve to this point, where it starts telling us to be more human to each other. But then, I was always a fan of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951), and I believe we need someone bigger than us to make us behave, some kind of non-human force. Nature (global warming) will have to do for now.

The droid has been missing since February of 2006, though "stolen" is a more appropriate term. If it's not in China, one could imagine some intelligence entity (not aliens) from nearly anywhere--even here--that wanted the technology...and maybe even some much needed enlightenment.

Remember: the head was created by a consortium of A.I. specialists, and there were over 2 million words from Dick's writings, many of them unpublished pieces from his legendary "Exegesis" and even some correspondence. If you want a good summary of what the Exegesis was, imagine a genius trying to explain the nature of reality in abstract terms. It's a sprawling document that was never finished by its author, but he gave it a good try!

I recently had the good fortune of correspondence with Hanson Robotics and asked them if they had either found the head or were going to construct another--bad news. "No" to both, the head is still missing and they have no plans to build another anytime soon. It's understandable considering how much the original cost to create it was and the fact that someone, somewhere, might attempt to steal a new one.

But why just steal this particular android's head? As far as anyone can tell, nobody ever grabbed the Albert Einstein whenever it was in-transit on a North American flyover.

Hi Matt,

Thank you for the email.The PKD head is still unaccounted for.
We do not have any plans at this time to reconstruct another.

Best regards, Matt Fisher
Hanson Robotics

At least we have lots of footage and photos of the original android, but imagine being able to converse with a simulacrum of someone who wrote about them? Friends and family of the late writer were consulted extensively to contribute what Dick's countenance and mannerisms were like when he was alive, and they've attested to the accuracy of the droid.

And why not a John Lennon, or an Adolf Hitler, Leonardo DaVinci, Aristotle (not Onasis), Socrates, Julius Caesar or George Orwell? Mark Twain would be a wonderful android, or even Sigmund Freud. But imagine being able to ask Philip K. Dick a question. We could have had a taste of that before February of 2006. Now what could be a better gift to Philip K. Dick fans--and the human race--to give the head back?

To whomever stole it--we want it back now. Don't be a dick-head. Elect an android to Congress, because machines don't lie! Speaking of that, they should build a Richard Cheney model, it would be more human.

http://www.hansonrobotics.com/

Philip K. Dick android still missing

North America--It's out there somewhere, but it appears someone, somewhere, still has the head of the Philip K. Dick android. Hanson robotics still has the body, which is weird. The whole scenario is weird, like a PKD story. It's probably in China, right now, and a whole factory is manufacturing PKD androids by-the-thousands.

That would be kinda cool. The androids could help lead a revolution there, then liberate the citizens of the United States of America from the corporations and the politicians. Somehow, I think artificial intelligence will evolve to this point, where it starts telling us to be more human to each other.

The droid has been missing since February of 2006 and vanished in-flight within the continental United States, oy veh. Hanson robotics and a consortium of A.I. contractors put over 2 million words of text from Dick's private writings into the android's head (including parts of the "Exegesis" that the public has never had access to).

Since much of the data is still unpublished, the missing-head has been a cause for concern to the Philip K. Dick Estate. No updates, though Hanson has vowed to build another head. I would wager they are nearing completion of it now. I've been told that the voice-synthesis is eerily close to that of Dick's, and even with its flaws comes off like a resurrection of the man. The closest story of PKD's to this event is "The Simulacrum," one of my favorites.

http://www.hansonrobotics.com/
http://www.pkdandroid.org/

VOILA! STEPHEN HAWKING STICKS HIS FOOT UP HIS OWN ASS, ACCIDENTALLY INVENTS 'POP SCIENCE-FICTION'

UK-- What is it with this guy? He leaves his saintly wife of several years for a bimbo nurse, and makes all these pseudo-scientific pronouncements as if they have any validity. Today, maybe he felt irrelevant, so he told us all that "we have to leave the Earth for the species to survive."

Problem: the logistics simply aren't there. Scientists tell us that to even accomplish a successful-implementation of fusion, we'd all have to go Socialist.

You think it would be any different with a project that would literally dwarf the Moon Shot? Yes, I know, we wouldn't take everyone, like on Noah's Ark--he couldn't even fit the dinosaurs and trilobites on his ark. Hawkings comments should anger and alarm most free-thinking people. Instead of all of us taking our destinies in-hand, it no-no-no-no-no, we accept that concentrated-power will always prevail and that there's no use in fighting-it. What a fascist.

Now, all I can hear is him doing sex-talk with his Texas Instruments Speak & Spell voice. He's reminding me of Carl Sagan, another man who just stopped saying anything and became bitter. Hey buddy, I've read my Philip K. Dick! Did he have hope, even at the end of his troubled-life? Yes. Hawkings thinks he's a philosopher, when in-reality, he isn't. He's a theoretician and a number-cruncher, not Zoroaster.
Hawkings displays a complete loss-of-faith in humanity on his part (worse than I!), and it's becoming typical within the sciences. Most of them are cynical ass-lick geeks, just like the other academics who only care about fame and their puny legacies. They have to rely on privileged turds for their funding, so you get the of framing of the issue he did today. It wouldn't surprise me if he knew he had to frame it all this way, or he'd lose that funding.

He doesn't believe there is any chance we'll get it together, and that we must leave Earth to the oil-companies and the other corporations. It's actually very weird, an almost religious statement. What a pathetic acquiescence to power. What a turd. It would take a minimum of 7,000-10,000 to terraform Mars to be habitable like the Earth. The closest planets that might be habitable are light-years from us.

Is is fucking insane?! Yes. He needs nursie to bobble her boobies in his face--the kid feels unwanted. At least he never got the sickle cell. He's no Heraclitus (and neither was Heraclitus, from moment-to-moment). Man, gotta get me one of those old Speak & Spells. A page out of a Philip K. Dick Cheney story, no doubt.

Philip K. Dick Simulacrum Still Missing (with a head full of speed)

The story of the missing Philip K. Dick simulacrum is a bizarre tale that began February, then had an end of June update again this year (still missing). As though taken from one of Dick's stories, the android was displayed prominently at a Chicago sci-fi convention (they did a Q&A), and Comic Con in San Diego.
But, after leaving with the body and head for Texas, main designer David Hanson forgot to retrieve it from the overhead carry-on compartment. Allegedly, the airline located it again, and sent it back to Hanson, but it has yet to arrive.

Yeah right, some baggage handler is using it for a Halloween decoration this year!

Imagine if they got it to talk: you would have a new PKD novel unfolding into our reality. What if a janitor from Puerto Rico found him? It would be hilarious if the person who found it learned from the simulacrum, and returned the head out of guilt!

I'd like to think the simulacrum awoke, and realized he really was Philip K. Dick, and decided to live a normal life somewhere. He would have his coffee in the morning, smoke, and have his beer in the evenings. He could do speed. Maybe he could find a cheap-apartment outside of Berkeley--the real Philip K. Dick wouldn't even recognize the town anymore.

He could go to Disneyland, becoming more-and-more like the original man. Who knows, maybe he could write like Dick eventually. But somehow, I think the android would become sad at how much the world had changed since Phil's death in 1982, but also how little it has changed. It's a bittersweet dream that might convince me there is some divine architecture to the universe, but as in Dick's novels, truth and proof of the divine will always be something elusive to humanity.

The irony of all this is that the CPU of the android has around 10,000 pages that have remained mostly unpublished from Dick's private writings. They could even be from his legendary "Exegesis", which is still basically unpublished in its 2 million word form. So, I would imagine the children of Philip K. Dick are a little worried about the whereabouts of the head. This is a strange thing when a lot of other databases have gone-missing, all in the same period...

Hanson has vowed that if the head isn't found, he'll build another one. That would be great, and I'd pay a lot of money just to sit and talk to a piece of Philip K. Dick--the only one we have left now. The creation of this android is exciting, and it also evokes the sadness embodied by Philip K. Dick and his canon. It is so miraculously infused with the spirit of the man, and it offers some hope.

I could see androids saving humanity from-itself, and wouldn't it be beautiful if Dick was partly-responsible for it? The loss to science-fiction was enormous when he died, though hardly anyone knew it at the time.

PS: Next models by Hanson Robotics Inc. wish-list: Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles, Josef Goebbels, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, William Blake, Winston Churchill, Ted Bundy, Aleister Crowley, V.I. Lenin, Josef Stalin, St. Francis, Che Guevara, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, John Dillinger, Al Capone, Graham Parsons, John Wilkes Booth, Nat Turner, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Augustus Caesar, Bugs Malone, Jimi Hendrix, Moctezuma II, Napoleon, Pablo Picasso, Yukio Mishima, Thomas Edison, Jim Morrison, Woody Guthrie, Lenny Bruce, John Brown, Pontius Pilate, Hernan Cortez, Grigori Rasputin, Sitting Bull, John Lennon, Leonardo DaVinci, Mary Shelley, John Ford, Christopher Columbus, Aldous Huxley, Heraclitus, Ted Bundy, Siddartha, Sid Vicious, St. Paul, Malcolm X, Thomas Paine, Carlo Gesualdo, H.H. Holmes, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Simon Magus, Sir Isaac Newton, Calamity Jane, Friedrich Nietzsche, Zoroaster, Pancho Villa, Ambrose Bierce, Edward R. Murrow, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Lord Byron, Comte St. Germaine, Adam Weishaupt, Joan of Arc, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler, Emma Goldman...

Perhaps the simulacrum became paranoid (head full of speed), and decided it was time for a trip to the New Synanon under the pseudonym Horselover Fat. But what did it mean, and why had his car broken-down?

http://www.hansonrobotics.com/

A Scanner Darkly review

1Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

1Cr 13:12 For now we see through a glass [the original-Greek connotes "mirror," not a window], darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

1Cr 13:13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these (is) charity.


Substance-D is a powerful hallucinogen, a drug that when used over a prolonged period causes a bicameral-split in the user's personality. They become psychotics with multiple-personalities. Users call the drug "death," an appropriate moniker that reflects the eventual disintegration of the user's personality--or, at least in Philip K. Dick's science-fiction novel , "A Scanner Darkly" (1977).

Dick's adult life was spent primarily in-and-around Berkeley during the heyday of the antiwar movement and the American counterculture (though it really has continued into now). Many of the characters in his story like Ernie Luckman, Charles Freck, Donna Hawthorne, James Barris, and even Bob Arctor, were based-on real people that Dick had allowed to hang-out at his home while he wrote. Most of them were junkies and losers (and a few robbed him), but Dick felt a real pity and empathy for them. I share this with him, as despicable as addicts can be.

If you have ever truly been a part of the counterculture, this is going to be familiar-territory, and it will be both a funny reminder and a tragic one. I can say with authority that the film and the novel are pretty authentic in depicting the paranoia and the toll that the "lifestyle" takes on people. But, in classic Burroughsian-fashion (Philip K. Dick was an avid reader of William S. Burroughs, like many countercultural writers of that time), he shows that there are facets of the lifestyle that are worse, far-worse than "straight" society. Addicts are victims in more ways than you might suspect.

Think of addiction as a pyramid--as Burroughs enjoined us to do--and you'll understand that the so-called "drug problem" is about social control of rebellious populations and an excuse towards about gradually foisting a totalitarian system onto a democratic one. Dick homes in on this theme with incredible perceptiveness, simplifying it for the average reader. Yet the majority of Philip K. Dick novels are about the elusiveness of the underlying reality that constantly escapes us, the search for meaning within this reality, and the need for empathy in our lives. Like numerous other social observers, Dick saw us all becoming dehumanized by modern consumer culture, even becoming commodities through "reification." Richard Linklater has done this particular theme and story more justice than any other director has or possibly will anytime soon.

Linklater is a product of the American counterculture, which should be obvious glimpsing "Slackers," "Dazed and Confused," "Waking Life," and virtually all of his most personal films. He has also done what few writer/directors have ever attempted which is a story that is basically anti-drug (hard-drugs, not pot) without being preachy and boring.

I have read "A Scanner Darkly," at least six times and I can say that Richard Linklater has nailed the story, its meaning, and the hard lessons learned by Philip K. Dick and people like myself in the counterculture. Unlike many anti-drug films, we are told by the character Bob Arctor why he began his addiction: he hated his conformist daily-grind life with the kids, the wife, and its consumer nightmare of meaninglessness. This is why most people become addicted-to-drugs. They can no longer stand life in the developed world and how controlled and repressed it is. They yearn for empathy, closeness, and community.

When life's options have become constricted by ever-greater concentrations of power (a situation fostered by politicians and lobbyists, and the inaction of most people), you get a society like ours, and the one in A Scanner Darkly. The lives of ordinary people become warped by the distortions in power-relationships, and it poisons society and people's minds and spirits. Before long, nobody trusts one another, it all becomes apparently "normal," and society begins to feed on itself.

After that, collapse comes, inevitably. The body politic crashes and a bloodbath emerges as the system crashes. It wasn't hard to see where things were going in the 1970s, especially after Watergate and earlier--and more important--revelations like the 1971 break-in of an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania that revealed the extent of spying on American citizens at that time. Now, it's become "normal," but at that time the public was alarmed and outraged. Now, the war on terror justifies everything, and up is down.

The NSA's current spying is nothing new. Philip K. Dick's own home was burglarized during the early-1970s and his tax-records were stolen. The likely motive was that he had been a war tax resister during the Vietnam War, which raged into the middle-1970s. It should be noted here that Dick Cheney was a Nixon and Ford administration staffer. We shouldn't wonder why we're back to square one. Because things have only gotten worse, Linklater's version of the Philip K. Dick story is nothing less than a call-to-action and a very radical film in a very good sense. If we continue not to act against these encroachments on our rights, we will end-up with a society that closely resembles the one in A Scanner Darkly. Since 1977, things have gone in this direction. But then, there's the (second) war on drugs again...

There is ample-proof that our government has had involvement in the drug trade with corporate complicity in some areas (think NAFTA). Like any great science-fiction tale, this is a cautionary one, and we ignore the message at our own peril. What Richard Linklater has crafted is a great film based on a great American novel, and it was fun watching Alex Jones be dragged-away by the police (again). If only that part of the movie had been real, but Jones has a tendency to screw-up, so we'll see if he gets popped again. Timeless.

Significantly Revised, 09.13.2008