Ffolkes,
Lonely moments pass by, searching for companions with whom to travel their solitary road. But the bark of the aardvark sets them free, if only for the last time, and nobody seems to really even care. As the stores roll down their riot bars, the music plays on at the cantina, where the billycan boys gathered at noon to roast their geese, and take tea. With full intentions of grand exposure, those favored old engineers have quietly folded all the chairs, and put them in the rectory hall for safekeeping. Sadly, the nuptials were taking place, and had to re-water the plants, of course. At just that moment, reality intrudes, and the words, once flowing freely, stutter to a stop…..

And thank goodness they have….. I thought I’d never get out of there. In looking back over this paragraph, it reminds me of conversations I used to have with a couple of friends when we were in our college years. Tom and I, and Mark, and occasionally Johnny P., would all go into a Denny’s, or other local coffee shop, and start up a conversation that was as far from reality as we could make it. Nonsense statements, odd phrases, and just plain weirdness is what we were shooting for, and we got pretty good at it…. We also got run out of more than one coffee shop by irritated waitresses, but, hey, we were young and full of high spirits, if not tact…..

Well, today’s Pearl should prove to be interesting, if for no other reason than going in the direction indicated in the opening lines. I have a feeling that such strangeness has not finished manifesting today, and that we’ll see it’s like elsewhere in the process…. which is fine with me. I’m quite familiar, and comfortable with spending time outside the normal bounds of reality, having begun my explorations into that unknown territory while in my teens, and continuing my researches well into adulthood. Now, of course, I spend about half my time outside reality, looking in, wondering why I bother going back there at all….

Such is the life of a man in limbo…. I spend my time twisting reality to suit my needs, which allows me to avoid those parts of it that are painful and liable to increase my angst. Of course, reality, being what it is, rarely cooperates fully, so it’s all pretty much fooling myself. But, it seems to work, or at least, has worked so far, as here I am, still alive, fairly sane, and I haven’t killed any bureaucrats yet, in spite of the almost overwhelming urge to go down to the SS office and start firing away with my non-existent guns…..

Actually, when I wrote that phrase just now, I got this great mental image of myself, armed with a Super-Soaker 5000, standing in a room full of cubicles, spraying and soaking all the myrmidons until the dripping-wet look was the style of the day…. I feel better now….. Funny, isn’t it, how such a simple thing can do that? SIGH….

Well, I’ve wasted about as much time here in the intro as I can safely waste…. I’ll still be here at lunch time if I don’t get started on today’s dive for pearls. But, I guess if I’ve got the time to spend on crap like this, a bit longer to find some attractive oysters can’t hurt….. Shall we Pearl?…..
__________________________________

“Free enterprise ended in the United States a good many years ago. Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and drive out the small entrepreneur. In their conglomerate forms, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the legitimacy of the state.” — Gore Vidal

In his book, “Friday”, Robert Heinlein details a society of humanity’s possible future, one in which corporations have continued to grow beyond the boundaries of mere countries, until their interests become paramount even over that of the state, as observed by Mr. Vidal. We, of the society here on Earth in the early 21st century are witnessing that growth, as I write, and as you read…..

The small enterprise markets still exist, but only on the fringes of the economy, the major portion of which is busy manipulating the population into serving the economic trends that the corporations control, in the essential markets that cover everyone… In other words, the corporations monopolize most of the economy, allowing the fringe markets to exist to provide exotic, alternative toys and entertainments for the working classes.

Mr. Heinlein’s character, a young woman with designer genes, genius IQ, and Heinlein’s innate sardonicism, as part of an assignment, is required to perform a research and analysis of how the corporations affected the political and economic scenes of their society, obliquely referring, of course, to the one we have now. It is a very interesting part of a very good book, and well worth a read, not only for its perspicacity in explaining the piracy we are seeing today, but because Heinlein was a master storyteller, who created fascinating characters in  fantastic situations, making it all seem perfectly normal and real.

“The phenomenality of organic, conscious existence should, could have made impossible the sadism, the unending hurt of our ways. The impotent fury, the guilt that master and surpass my identity carry with them the working hypothesis, the ‘working metaphor’, if you will, of ‘original sin’. To this expression, I am unable to attach any reasoned, let alone historical substance. On the pragmatic-narratological plane, stories of some initial crime and inherited culpability are universal fables  — uncannily profound and lasting. Nothing more. Yet in the presence of the beaten, raped child, of the horse or mule flogged across its eyes, I am possessed, as by a midnight clarity, by the intuition of the Fall.” — Rudolf Steiner, Errata: An examined life, Phoenix — (a division of Orion Books), London, 1998), p. 169

At first, this quote may not seem to be related to the first. However, it is this “original sin” of which he speaks that is the root cause of the problems with corporations in society. Those humans who reject commonality with the rest of humanity are the villains in this play that passes for modern culture, for they do not accept their debt to the rest of the species, and have determined that they will use whatever means they need to become ascendant over the rest of us. Greed is only the most obvious of the ills that this group has subjected our culture to, with cruelty, dishonesty, and lack of compassion as side attractions. Through the actions of their corporate entities, they work to maintain their power and control of others, all for the sake of their own aggrandizement….

These are the men who run the trade in human trafficking, abducting and abusing children and women, for sex and slavery. These are the men who run the brothels, and the underground casinos, and the money-lending, and the protection rackets, and the drug dealing rings. What many folks don’t realize is that they are also the men who run for political office, or become preachers/priests, and the bankers, and the CEO’s,  and other corporate officers, who make their decisions based on self-interest, never on altruism. They seem, and act like, they are the leaders of society, when, in fact, they are the very reason our society is headed for extinction….

Unfortunately, these men (and they are almost ALL men….) will not give up their power and control without a fight. They will not respond to reason, giving up all their wealth and perceived power, to benefit the rest of mankind. They will not suddenly see the light, and give it all back. They will have to be rooted out like weeds, tough, hardy weeds, and destroyed, if we are to have any chance of survival…. It is unfortunate, but no other method will work, and it brings with it the danger of falling into the same kind of behavior by which they operate. But, I can see no other way to solve the issue, since they will not cooperate with the rest of us for the benefit of all….

1. If you keep doing what you are doing, you will keep getting what you are getting.

2. What you settle for is what you end up with.

3. If you think that worrying about a problem is the same thing as solving it, then you must live in some other universe where different laws pertain.

–Smart Bee
__________________________________

A Draught Of Sunshine

Hence Burgundy, Claret, and Port,
Away with old Hock and madeira,
Too earthly ye are for my sport;
There’s a beverage brighter and clearer.
Instead of a pitiful rummer,
My wine overbrims a whole summer;
My bowl is the sky,
And I drink at my eye,
Till I feel in the brain
A Delphian pain –
Then follow, my Caius! then follow:
On the green of the hill
We will drink our fill
Of golden sunshine,
Till our brains intertwine
With the glory and grace of Apollo!
God of the Meridian,
And of the East and West,
To thee my soul is flown,
And my body is earthward press’d. –
It is an awful mission,
A terrible division;
And leaves a gulph austere
To be fill’d with worldly fear.
Aye, when the soul is fled
To high above our head,
Affrighted do we gaze
After its airy maze,
As doth a mother wild,
When her young infant child
Is in an eagle’s claws –
And is not this the cause
Of madness? – God of Song,
Thou bearest me along
Through sights I scarce can bear:
O let me, let me share
With the hot lyre and thee,
The staid Philosophy.
Temper my lonely hours,
And let me see thy bowers
More unalarm’d!

John Keats

I know, a lot of Keats lately, but, hey, if you’re gonna go with somebody else’s work, why not use the best?…..
__________________________________

So, I’m diving around, looking for oysters, and these random quotes on various aspects of religion kept popping up. Since I’m not particularly bursting with material or angst sufficient to either rant or write much of interest, I thought I’d string them together for an old school pearl…. my default position in these instances. There is no real point to be made here, though it may be entirely possible that there is one…. I just like these because they made me think…. and hopefully, they will do the same for you…. enjoy!….

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.     He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” — C. S. Lewis

We are arguing like a man who should say “If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.” — C.S. Lewis

“A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.” — James Feibleman, “Understanding Philosophy”, 1973

“While it cannot be proved retrospectively that any experience of possession, conversion, revelation, or divine ecstasy was merely an epileptic discharge, we must ask how one differentiates “real transcendence” from neuropathies that produce the same extreme realness, profundity, ineffability, and sense of cosmic unity.  When accounts of sudden religious conversions in TLEs [temporal-lobe epileptics] are laid alongside the epiphanous revelations of the religious tradition, the parallels are striking.  The same is true of the recent spate of alleged UFO abductees. Parsimony alone argues against invoking spirits, demons, or extraterrestrials when natural causes will suffice.” — Barry L. Beyerstein, “Neuropathology and the Legacy of Spiritual Possession”,   The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII, No. 3, pg. 255

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” — Michael de Montaigne (1533-1592) — Essays, Book ii, Chap. xii, Apology for Raimond Sebond

“…there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth.” — George Jacob Holyoake

No, it isn’t a trick…. The last one was, indeed, added on purpose, and actually brings all the rest into focus, making what I said above about this pearl having no point a lie…. or perhaps, premature ejaculation would be more appropriate….. Whatever it is, or might have been, or isn’t, it is what it is, so there…. And, believe it or not, it actually makes some sense, on a very basic level…. Any who, it was a few moments of exercising a muscle we all need to keep strong, so, all is well that ends well, yes?….. And, at the very least, you may comfort yourself with knowing it is ended….
__________________________________

I was correct in my earlier assessment as to the strangeness that could conceivably manifest itself today, but, examination reveals nothing that is toxic, or particularly offensive. A shame really, as I’ve heard it said that, if what you write doesn’t offend SOMEONE, you’re doing it wrong….. Don’t know for sure how right that is, but I’ve always tried to live up to it. This one isn’t too bad, all in all, so it’s going out, just like the rest of them have gone, naked and alone…. We’ll see how it fares….  Y’all take care out there, and May the Metaphorse be with you…..