a blog for j z dot net

Dr. John Archibald Wheeler has a more radical view of the matter these days than he had back when he co-authored the EWG model.But before discussing that, we need to look at “non-locality.”In 1965, Dr. John S. Bell published a paper which physicists refer to tersely as “Bell’s Theorem.” Since a great deal of nonsense has gotten printed about this — and I wrote nonsense myself in an early book called Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati Falcon Press 1987 — we will take this very slowly. Bell’s Theorem asserts that: If some sort of objective universe exists in some sense i.e., if we do not accept the most solipsistic heresies uttered by careless proponents of Copenhagenism, and,If the equations of quantum mechanics have a similarity of structure isomorphism to that universe, then, Some sort of non-local correlation exists between any two particles that once came in contact.

via benperidol – Star Makers?.

The Great San Francisco Bubble
Life in America’s last great progressive cocoon, as conservatives snicker and puke
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, May 9, 2003 ©2003 SF Gate

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/05/09/notes050903.DTL&type=printable

It’s that odd dumbstruck jolting feeling you get as soon as you step more than 25 miles away from this most progressive and funked-out and deeply flawed and self-consciously screwy of kaleidoscopic American urban metropoli: oh my freaking God, what is happening to the world? This is what you say. To yourself. Probably.

Because suddenly you find yourself pummeled with many of those lovely bleak horrible things you’ve somehow become so inured to while living in S.F., those things you might’ve slowly come to hope don’t really exist quite so violently and vehemently anymore. But of course they do.

It happens when you step off that plane in some — let’s say — “differently evolved” part of the country and don’t see a single ethnic person for four days and can’t get a decent organic basil-and-goat-cheese omelet to save your life and all the theaters are playing Adam Sandler and the concept of fresh sushi means “less freezer burn than the corn dogs.” Elitist? Whatever.

Sexism. Racism. Guns. Jingoism. Jesus fetishism. Psychopatriotism. Rampant pseudo-religious family-values faux-ethical circle jerking masquerading as Christian humility. Wal-Marts like giant florescent-lit viruses. Strip malls like a stucco plague. Ho hum, ain’t that America. It so is.

Let’s face it: We in S.F. live in a cultural bubble. A giant tofu-huggin’ gay-lovin’ lusciously fed hippie liberal sunshine-y cocoon that might as well get blasted by terrorists and die of AIDS and drop off into the ocean for all the relevance it has to the rest of the world — that is, if my rabid monosyllabic gun-lickin’ hate mail from, say, the psychopatriot Freeps over at freerepublic.com or the bilious dittoheads of lucianne.com is to be believed.

And they’re right — sort of. It’s so very true. We are freaks and crazies and tend to shrug it all off, we in our radical prosaic goofy normalcy. We live in “the Granola State,” full of “fruits and nuts and flakes.” (Isn’t that cute? That’s about as clever as it gets, slam-wise. The poor things. They try so hard).

We are indeed anti-gunlicking and pro-organic and avidly orgasmic. We are more flagrantly enthusiastically balls-out do-it-now feel-good suck-me hell-yes tolerant than Austin and Chicago and Seattle put together.

We are a danger to the status quo, a nipple-twisted threat to the “nukular” family, a pantheistic whip on the ass of the Bible Belt, a pox on the house that oil built. Or at least we try to be. Sometimes. Depends on how much Peet’s we’ve imbibed.

Because despite S.F.’s adorable slew of brazen flaws, despite our frequent hypocrisy and suckass mass transit and decimated music scene and shameful homeless issues and ridiculous housing prices and a desperate lack of exceptional pizza and an ongoing invidious adherence to snippy politically correct mind-sets and Good Vibrations closing at a tragically early 7 pm on Valentine’s Day …

Despite all of this, we sense that San Francisco still remains the most luminously progressive and culturally frappeéd and perfectly climated major metropolis in the nation, if not the entire goddamn universe, and for that we can only kneel down and be forever grateful.

Like my good friend just did. The one who recently returned from a jaunt to Italy and literally fell to her knees and kissed the glorious grungy S.F. ground when she returned, breathlessly grateful to be back on relatively free-thinking ground, as she felt all the ills of the perturbed and uptight and backward world drain right out of her.

Not that Italy wasn’t beautiful and culturally intoxicating, she said, but that it was, as she was painfully reminded, sexist as hell, homophobic as Rick Santorum, intolerant as Utah, what with the example of my friend’s young shy half sister casually molested and possibly worse by a drunken Italian suitor and then everyone pretty much shrugging it off and brushing it aside and asking what she did to deserve it and no one standing up for the girl or smacking the dolt with a brick before castrating him with a rusty pizza cutter. Just one example.

And on one leg of her return flight, my normally kind and gentle friend found herself taking a sort of savage delight in the oddly perturbed stares she received from the Portland-bound passengers, many rather confused and slightly mortified as they read their Nora Roberts and Michael Crichtons and she, of course, sat there enthusiastically marking juicy passages from “The Ethical Slut” with a yellow highlighter. Ah, perspective.

But maybe the sneering anti-bubblers are right. Maybe S.F. is an entirely pointless, disposable, disease-ravaged wasteland full of perverts and icky gay people and used-up liberalism and way too many amazing organic-produce markets and yoga studios and wine shops and fetishwear outlets and Pulitzer Prize winners and a coastline to nourish your soul.

Maybe that’s why we’re the only city in the entire country whose median home prices are still skyrocketing, into gross obscenity, as the rest of the nation’s real estate prices plummet like Bush’s gutted economy.

Seems millions still want to live here. Go figure. Something about the weather. And the dazzling beauty. And the tolerance. The intellectual buzz. The mind-set. The great food and juicy sexuality and progressive politics and funky architecture and the wide-open encouragement to be as independently minded and screamingly divinely naked as you can possibly be. But hey, only if you want to.

Can you get doses of S.F.’s brand of rainbow acceptance elsewhere, in other major cities? Of course. Small but wonderful hot pockets abound in, say, Austin and N.Y. and L.A., delicious enclaves of Chicago and Miami Beach and Atlanta. Not to mention the dozens of staunchly quirky college towns from Ann Arbor to Asheville to Eugene.

But overall, in a nation where innovative, even anarchic ideas about gender and belief and the violent insult that is our sanctimonious oil-drunk warmongering government are not only frowned upon but also openly mocked and threatened and sneered at, San Francisco still reins as the funk epicenter, the winking liberal stronghold, the ecstatic 69 to the nation’s droning missionary position.

Hey, we know it’s a bubble. Most of us love the bubble, are exceedingly proud of the bubble, kneel at its gloriously flawed but still radiant altar. Anti-progressives want to burst that bubble? Have at it, honey. Go on and burst it — all over the rest of the country. C’mon, you know you want to.

The Prophet

Martin Burke

Age:54

Address: Albany Hotel, Room 315, 228 N. Tejon, Colorado Springs

Profession: The False Prophet

Martin Burke, according to his own words, was called by God 22 years ago to fill the role of the False Prophet as prophesied in the book of Revelations. Martin didn’t want to do this. God forced him. In the intervening 22 years, Martin has mentally suffered under the responsibilities of this burden and he now explains: “I’m unrecoverably crazy, but I have lucid moments”.

Martin is in constant communication with God. And God calls him Marty. He asks that we do the same. When Marty has a question for God, he looks over his shoulder and asks it. He usually nods a few times in silence as God responds, then he smiles and repeats the communication.

When questioned about the negative connotations of being the False Prophet, Marty replies variously: “It’s my responsibility to keep virtue within reasonable bounds”, or “in all fairness to the Devil, you’ve only heard one side of the story. God wrote all the books”. Another time he said: “There’s no use in exalting the humble and the meek. They don’t remain humble and meek once they’re exalted”.

Marty’s logic was compelling to the Boss’s Left Hand Man. Marty was asked if LHM could do a series of taped interviews which would then be transcribed and placed on the Internet. Marty was overjoyed, and apparently God was too, since Marty reported that God ordered him to co-operate. He asked only that he not be edited or censured in any way. These interviews are a result of over 100 hours of taping.

Marty asked that we give a brief background: Marty stayed for a time at the Pikes Peak Mental Health facility. He voluntarily checked himself in to get sanctuary because God, he explained, was trying to burn him. The hospital gave him sanctuary, but refused to let him leave. In 1985 he escaped and spent three years on the run. Colorado attitudes toward the mentally twisted changed in the three year period (mostly, it became no longer profitable for the hospital to have Marty) and he entered a period of peace, reflection and tranquillity. He pondered and came to profound understanding of such issues as attachments, the nature of time, war, cruelty, evolution, chaos and order, and other puzzling concepts.

Marty’s claim to be The False Prophet presents a dilemma. Since the false prophet’s purpose is to mislead, can anything that he says be trusted? Can we invert everything he says and get to the truth? Can we even believe that he is false? He, after all, says that he is false and such honesty would go against the grain of a true false prophet. Since he’s not happy being the False Prophet, could he be rebelling against his dharma and actually be telling the full truth? We don’t have the slightest idea. We asked Marty all of the above questions. He had these answers:

“Belief follows the path of least resistance.”
“A person’s virtues are the means of deceiving them.”
“The sublime is necessarily obscure to weak minds.”
“It isn’t lying you should concern yourself with. It’s inaccuracy.”

With a wink and a conspiratorial grin, he leaned close to LHM and added: “I’m not naturally honest, but I am sometimes by chance”. He leaned back, frowned, leaned close again and with finality announced: “Remember, the best liar makes the smallest lie go the longest way”. Considering who he claims to be, the thought was chilling.

The Interviews

via marty1.