53 Early Bob Dylan Songs (Cover and photography by Paul)

Mall Rats

Mall Rats Evidence of mutation in the human genetic code in the commercial shopping arena.  by Paul A. L. Hall. The mall is nothing new. It really got going back in the days of ancient Rome. It is the epitomy of the self-destructiveness of human nature. But I'm not here to criticize the mall in this entry at least, though I could come up with a few choice words. Not to mention the fact that they don't work. They have the mere illusion of viability but it's only the strength of such things as brand-name association and so on that keeps them barely hanging on. What is serious is that the shopping and working environment is beginning to write itself in the vulnerable and sensitive genetic makeup of those who frequent such dives. The resultant mutations are on a crash-course with extinction. They will have no relation with real surroundings and eventually their line will perish. Such mutations are causing people to be born with human brains but not to be able to use them. Eventually the successful humanoid that survives the test of time will be the villager who is fairly rustic and has a relationship of lifestyle with natural things. Eventually, people will walk places, commerce will cease, nobility will go no faster than horseback, and a functioning relationship of stewardship with plants and animals will bring a non-technological prosperity unimaginable in our time. I mean mankind is so stupid now they don't even know how to use squirrels to sow crops. The grotesque figures that have become a mere excuse for humanity will just fade away and cease to exist. It may be profitable for a few individuals for the time being, but they are the guilty ones, prospering at the expense of others, deliberately causing everyone else to fail and perish that they may abound.

The Golden Invectee

The Golden Invectee by Paul A. L. Hall An invectee is a double arch in heraldry. But here is the nobility of a certain aspect not yet considered noble. The rounding of the m in McDonald's Restaurants symbolizing the nobless oblige of feeding the out-going public. To wit, the contest between the legitimate owners of the McDonald's name, princely McDonald himself, the present heir to the name itself, native of Scotland of the McDonald clan, not too recently at odds with the economic nobility of the restaurant chain over who should have the right to call their restaurant by said name. The result was that with amusement, McDonald himself has but tolerated the restaurant's usurpation of the name to which it had no observable right nor claim until the point said chain sought litigation against him for those rights, claiming McDonald could not so name his own restaurant, in the family for generations by the same name used by the food chain. How the outcome was determined, I am not privy to know. But suffice it to presume that combat was had on the field of the courts of a new realm in our litigant age, and the black night of the golden invectee did wield formidable clout.

Developing Nations Discover America's Secret Plastic World

Developing Nations Discover America's Secret Plastic World by Paul A. L. Hall. There's a problem with being the fustest with the mostest. Eventually the real players pass you and you get, as the track-and-field term goes, lapped. America the land of the flim-flam, the illusionist, the prestidigitator and the Yankee peddler. Well, your little plastic world had 'em fooled for the better part of a century and now it's their turn. For decades you've been unwisely using the originators of gunpowder and producers of some of the world's greatest antiquities for cheap labor.  Well, they caught on, in case you haven't been keeping up on your current events.  But those guys have potential.  When they go to space they're the type to be mining the asteroid belt while you're still tripped off on saga movies. Now, what's the better thing to be? What's the opposite of the cheap, shallow, meaningless existence. Among other things, a bit of real civilization would be nice. A world in which whole forests remain intact instead of becoming peddler's mediocrity stuffing your mail box. A pet peeve? Maybe. Let's look at something more pertinent: We now have a sort of throw-away society. This implies a temporary existence in which one camps out, as it were to get something more substantial under way. But it has become permanent in contemporary society. A sort of picnic lifestyle generating garbage mountains. The point is, if you want to continue to live that way, don't expect to be a world class power. Because that's a life-style anyone can emulate and eventually others will catch on and not only equal you but, and justifiably I might add, best you. I mean, you want to be a world power with nothing more than a pathetic pop culture and a few trinkets? Listen, there's only one place for a cheap shot like that: oblivion. They will not just "bury you", as Khrushchev warned, they'll simply forget you. You'll be recorded in history as an also-ran. A "what-not-to-be". The problem with this lifestyle of plastics and cheap housing made of press-board stuck together like a Hollywood prop is that it's not unique. It's not creative. There's no real personality to it, no innovation, no greatness. Anyone in the world can imitate it. There's nothing to it. No substance.

Bingo, Ball and Booze -- The Three "B's" ...

Bingo, Ball and Booze -- The Three "B's" ... by Paul A. L. Hall. I can almost remember the town in England, somewhere in the suburbs of London.  Almost remember, but not quite.  I should have kept a diary, but that's the problem with traveling light, at least in those days.  Maybe now I could just leave it in the blogosphere as I go.   I was on the street selling underground newspapers.  As I used to say, "underground and coffee ground".  The best thing about being on the street is you can, as Woody Guthrie used to put it, "touch the people", meaning you could get out there and meet folks.  I used to think I must have spoken with a million people in my twenty years of travel, but perhaps a more conservative estimate would be three hundred thousand.  But as far as personally contacting people, for example, everyone that heard me sing on the street and that I got to say hi to, well that's over one million. So one evening, I remember an elderly English gentleman stopped to talk with me about what he called the three B's.  He kept insisting that I remember the method the government (in England) controlled the masses with was the three "B's", bingo, ball and booze.  I mean, you never know.  I might have been talking with someone who simply enjoyed bantering conspiracy theories about, or he might have been the equivalent of a retired James Bond or something.  He asked me to repeat it a few times.  So that's how he was able, in a way, to make sure it got at least as far as this blog I'm writing now, thirty years later. At the time I imagined it unlikely that the governance of any nation would have to go to such lengths to install such a crowd control safeguard.  I mean, the industries themselves were big enough, why should any political entity want a finger in the pie?  But as I started to visit other parts of England, I began to see some evidence that the three b's might actually be in effect. Once, I remember looking for a bathroom in a city somewhere up north.  I was given permission at the door of a large motion picture theatre, the kind with the huge screens that they used to have everywhere back in the fifties.  As I was going through the deserted lobby on the way to the facilities, I heard this bizarre, chanting sound echoing throughout the actual theater and a more bizarre high-pitched sound that seemed to come from everywhere.  Thinking it to be some strange ritualistic event going on, and since there was no one around, I resolved to scamper up the carpeted steps a bit to take a little peek.  I had a bird's eye view. The auditorium, arranged in the typical amphitheater sort of  setting with loge, orchestra, and balcony seating in front of a stage, was absolutely filled with people, or, to be more precise, ladies, all more or less in their later years.  The high-pitched sound came from televisions, hundreds of them, very large ones, positioned at regular intervals throughout the entire seating arrangement.  The whole place was very dimly lit, except for a spotlight trained on center stage, where there was this enormous ping-pong ball style randomizer of clear glass or plastic, and even from my vantage point, one could see the balls whirling around inside under the power of an internal blower of some sort.   I mean it's not uncommon any more.  You see them all the time in those lottery drawings on television and such a devise was used to randomize the sequence of names appearing on ballots throughout California during the impromptu election that recalled governor Gray Davis this September of 2003 in which proceeding I voted just down the street.  Each electoral district, I believe it is, had to have the names of the hundreds of people that anteed-up for the privilege of running for governor if Davis was recalled, printed in different random order so that no name would continually come first.  In my district, the first two names on the ballot were both Schwarzenegger.  Until then I thought there to be only one in that race. Anyway, there they were a whole theater full of people, mostly ladies, it seemed, transfixed by the gleaming ping pong randomizer on stage.  Regularly, a well-dressed gentleman would take the most recent ball as it slid down the transparent tube and out into a sort of trough.  And then announce the letter and number imprinted on it to the waiting crowd in a low, droning voice that echoed throughout the auditorium on loud speakers in front, in back and on the sides.  I just stared and then remembered about the three b's.  Even if it weren't on purpose, this was big.  It is conceivable that something that enormous could happen by itself, I mean, with something that popular, it had to be a big business. But if someone wanted to control the segment of the population that didn't go for sports and might be absolute teetotalers, this was it.  I stared at the crowd of attentive ladies.  Not an empty seat in the house.  With a pastime like this there wouldn't be time for social protestation or any other project.  The government was safe.  At least for the time being.  They just would sit there for hours and hours waiting for the next ping pong ball to emerge.  One at a time.  Wow.  These would be the hardest to control.  They would have to have the most powerful of all the big three, the bingo "b", the first in the triptych! And don't think it was confined to just England.  What is it with this game?  I remember once in Eastern Samoa, the other side of the planet, on a beautiful weekend day, I think it was a Saturday, I had to find someone at the public market.  Now, the public market was in the capitol, Pango Pango.   You may think this is some exotic, off-the-wall place out in the middle of the ocean or something but think again.  Pango Pango is the location of the deepest natural harbor in the world.  It is the crossroads of the Pacific, at least when I was there back in 1978.  It's a big stop-off place for container ships who use it's facilities as a sort of transfer point, causing a great container skyscraper to cut into the tropical skyline.  Even though it may not look like much at first glance, it is.  It's just that it's dwarfed by the volcanic mountains around it. A fairly modern cable car spans the entire bay.  At the time, I don't know if it still is, it was home base or at least one of the home bases for the American tuna fishing fleet and several Korean tuna fleets.  They have a modern airport that accommodates international jumbo jets from continents and oceans away.    So when I went to find that person, I expected to see a huge market place bustling with activity.  But they had shut the place down and what appeared to be thousands of people were sitting on the pavement -- you guessed it.  Playing bingo.  Lane after lane of the normally busy market, the entire area the equivalent of five or six city streets, loudspeakers blaring at regular intervals, people were attentively playing bingo.   Now, if people want to play that all day long, that's their choice.  It is kind of fun.  I thought it might be more interesting to try different words like "existentialist" or "antidisestablishmentarianism", but maybe that wouldn't work.  Someone got the winning formula when they came up with the name "bingo".  They started us out early in life singing about the old man who owned bingo the dog.  Best damn advertising jingle they ever came up with.  If they did, whoever they are.  Probably it was just a cute song. But have you ever noticed how seriously those guys take it?  It's a kid's game, for crying out loud. Why bingo?  What about slinky, or silly putty or old maids or snakes and ladders?  Maybe even a more grown up game like checkers.  No.  It had to be bingo.  That was the winner.  And man, did it catch on.  Whether the man with the three "b's" was spot on or not, it sure looked like there was something more going on than meets the eye.  But even if not, "bingo" could go it alone.  It could take over the world all by itself.   But the players take it so seriously.  When I found the person in the market the only comment was that my clothes were unkempt.  I mean, come on.  Here I was at this miscarriage of human potential and they were worrying about my P.R. presentation.  That's where I had to draw the line.  It had to be institutionalized.  Nobody was having any fun. Well, after that I sort of forgot to check in an area if bingo had spread to their land or if these other countries had something else going on or what.  But something really powerful is going on to prevent the section of the population that isn't neutralized by the other two b's (and those guys -- they're hopeless; if once they walk down the dark side of the farce, the twisted paths of ball or booze, just write them off as goners! -- easy shots, piece of cake).   I'm not talking about the poor closet drinkers here, at least they have an excuse.  Something else wiped their slate. But what about those who really pose a problem to the sort of institution that would prefer the remnant, the most serious segment that could really do something if left to their devises, under the proverbial thumb of state control?  Then you've gotta have the ultimate weapon to get the other statue-quo-threatening one tenth of the population who escaped unscathed.  Who ever thought it?  A gambling devise from a kid's game.  But it worked, and that's all she wrote.  Curtains.  It must be the end of the world for sure.  There was an old man who had an old dog and bingo was his name.   Forget trying to find out if Hussein tried to buy uranium in Africa.  Forget the nukes.  There's something far more sinister afoot here and there's only one solution.  Regime Change.  B-ten, I-nine, N-eight, G-seven, O-six, -- fivefourthreetwoone.  apocalypse.  Okay.  You could probably tell I was kidding.  But the bingo thing was sort of incredible, I have to admit.  So let's get serious for a minute, here. In all our stories and works of fiction we look for the bad guys.  In fact, I notice the terminology creeping into the military vernacular as well.  It may be a public relations ploy or just an unconscious reaction.  They're the bad guys.  Get them.  They may be or not, or partially or completely.  When you make blanket statements, you can loose some of the effect if you have to go defining terms. In the real world, it's the good guys who cause even more problems than the villains.  Something just happened in the human condition to make us that way.  But the bad guy thing is compounded by willful ignorance.  So what is the greatest cause of global poverty, wars, political unrest, even catastrophic plagues and all sorts of other extreme failings in society?  The disinterest of the common person.  The everyday person in pursuit of disconnecting amusements such as gamboling, social drinking, and the worst of all, professional sports. That's right, buddy, it was guys like you that caused world war two.  That's a good one.  Blame it on Hitler.  Meanwhile there's the president throwing out the first baseball of the season.  Tell me about it.  The bottom line is if the three b's come into play in your world then you're a part of the cause.  Because you couldn't give a damn.  Oh, you claim you can indulge yourself and still get on with doing a good job, but you're kidding yourself.  It's a front.  All just a good show.  No substance, no professionalism.  Just enough to squeak by.  A waste of a life, a waste of a contribution. You want baseball?  Go out and play some softball with the neighbors.  So somebody can throw a ball, you want to make him a millionaire?  No wonder so much money is tied up and going nowhere.  Just so those guys can sit around and feel rich.  It's the cheapest mind control there is and you're the stooge.  So go ahead, waste a life.  Just so you know.  It's irresponsible.  And not just that, it's the cause of the problem.  Yet nobody dares look at it, no one dares bring the cancer into the light.  You know why?  They're scared to.  They're scared of you.  Does that make you feel good?  Yeah, I'll bet it does. Hey, whatever happened to Enron Stadium?  There's a real one for you.  What a bunch of creeps.  Well, guess what, wise guy.  This is the planet of death.  You people made it that way with your little games.  Just one of the crowd.  Too many wars.  A lot of people died and for what.  They died so you could have the freedom to act responsibly and do your part.  So what are you doing with it?  Sitting around blowing paycheck after paycheck on the slots?  Wasting your time off watching someone else play a game?  Hanging out at the watering hole staring at a swizzle stick all night?  Yeah, go ahead.  You don't care.  Okay.   So you're the bad guys.  You always were and you always will be till the inevitable world dictator shuts you down.  Someday.  And he won't need uranium from Africa to do it.  All he'll have to do is help out the global poor and the starving and they'll do anything for him.  They already know you don't care.

Global Emperor to Use Religious Conservatives

by Paul A. L. Hall.

And that -- might be whom? I had a dream about that back in London in 1971, and in my dream I saw four things above the podium of a global Emperor or dictator or something like that. Now , you might think, "Huh, big deal. After all dreams really are not all that serious, are they?"

Well, maybe there's nothing to it. It's only that this dream was so jarring and so realistic, and the same time symbolic -- really symbolic, that I remember it to this day. OK, for what it's worth, here are some of the main things I saw -- by the way, it was one of those color dreams: They were religious objects, hung over the podium of this dictator as a form of symbolic, obvious religious, huge symbols on a banner. There was a cross, a six pointed star, a crescent, and a beast or animal with two horns, it appeared to me to be something like a bulls head.

Now, what I would tend to read into this, if there was anything to it, and maybe there is, who knows? -- But what I would read into it at this point is those symbols represent religious symbologies. There was a cross, a six-pointed star, a crescent and what appeared to be a bulls head. It's fairly obvious, perhaps, that these would tend to represent the majority-style conservative-type fundamentalism in all the world's major religions. There were the three monotheistic religions, and the fourth might've been a kind of union of all the world's polytheistic religions. You have to realize that polytheism comprises quite a few believers out there.

Now I know, here we seem to be getting into the hazy grounds of what is termed "theology". But I consider theology to be a science, just like the relatively unknown scientific discipline of the study of miracles, "thomotology" (I hope that's the way that word is properly written). Now the common concept of theology is what clergy study before they can be ordained and blah blah blah and on and on they go, losing it all in somebody's misconception of religious ritualism. But actually theology is supposed to be a scientific discipline, like biology, chemistry, physics and so on. It's just that apparently it has never been treated as such a discipline.

In other words, as a scientific discipline, theology would be, in a way, the science of humankind's functional relationship with the unexplainable realities and human interaction with probable superior intelligence. You may be one of those who jump to the convenient, self-comforting conclusion that the concept of superior intelligence is simply a superstition, or at best, the type of fiction relegated to the UFO crazes, but my conclusion is that it's safe to say that the jury is still out on that one.

But whatever theology is, and however many impostors and charlatans there might be imposing themselves in the discipline of theology, it must necessarily depart from humankind's concept of religion. Religion is the opposite of theology. Religion becomes the historic tool in the hand of politics, especially the type of politics involving authoritarian rule and dictatorship.

Religion is the historic device politicians use to get the will of the people on their side. And that certainly has to be true with imperial rule and dictatorship: There is no empire without an indigenous religion to assign authority to that Emperor and his or her empire. Well, check it out. History is rife with these patterns. Therefore, you can extend the postulation to involve the ultimate empire, a global empire. A global Emperor uses all global religions.

The founding fathers of the United States seemed to have tried to avoid this inevitability -- apparently they recognized it as a part of dictatorship. They may have recognized that any human attempt at theocracy would only end up in some abuse that would lead to a dictator. And isn't that the inevitability of the pattern of history involving any theocracy, and also, by the way, just about every dictatorship?

So, the United States is supposed to have a separation of religion from the body politic. All I can say is, nice try. It seems to be ingrained in human behavior, and on a deeper level, there is another sort of devious human behavior that seems to be able to manipulate it. The one characteristic of religion is the use of formality and symbolism and ritual to achieve comfort and a false sense of security. Now, to cover it up, a lot of the church-state-separationists who are really protagonists of global dictatorship are pretending to be watchdogs, and are barking away at the slightest infringement of so-called religious artifacts and objects being proffered or displayed on state property or federal property -- or prayers in governmental functions, and so on.

Check it out for yourself, but I think you'll find that their real objective is also to, in the interim, keep ethics, often paralleled in monotheistic religions, from impairing personal interests, particularly those of the establishment of global empire -- whose establishers and tenants must needs use deceit and subterfuge to get into power.

People are so easily fooled. Religious institutions are easily infiltrated; ritual can be expertly imitated by any impostor, tricking an average parishioner into imagining such an impostor to be extremely devout. But still in all, they're not going to willingly forfeit their democracy and their freedom and just let somebody walk right in and take over and boss them around.

But as I said before, the pattern of history is a period of relative freedom or liberty followed by a subsequent abuse of mercantilism, which we are seeing now on a global scale, inevitably followed by a dictatorship; those that abuse liberty get busted by a dictator. But this time, as you can see, democracy in the world is very well-organized, and it is going to take subterfuge and deceit on the part of the unscrupulous who apparently at this point seem to be within striking distance of pulling this off, as well as the use of religions -- all religions, whose people will apparently be manipulated by infiltrators in their midst, to put the will of the people on the side of a global dictator.

U. S. A., King of the Banana Republics

by Paul A. L. Hall.

Now, that's a serious thing to say. So let's back that up with some facts, shall we? It's not over till the fact Lady sings.

Let's look deeply at the basic tenet of human nature. And then the differences in various aspects of human society that have managed to come to the surface in our globe of the 21st-century -- the beginning thereof.

What is Banana Republicanism? The cliché serves us well, but we have to go beyond that. Actually , I worked in a banana plantation for a while, about half a year in Western Samoa, Tutuila island. The banana has gotten a bum rap, here. It's the only vegetable with complete protein. For almost a whole summer, in France -- outside Paris, I lived on bananas. Fortunately for me, it worked.

No, what we're looking at here is the type of republic often found in a wealthy landowner situation, typically a plantation-style monocultural cash-crop situation, where the landowners are quite wealthy and have quite a weight and influence with the leader of the country, often a type of figure who is either elected for life, a dictator with the presidential title, or who mysteriously always manages to win elections.

Now , what we're looking at here is your run-of-the-mill type of Banana Republicanism. Now, once you get into the higher types, you're looking at wealthy land-owner scenarios, only they tend more to be industrialists, getting away from cash crops and into more lucrative forms of operations. These have a way of buying off the representatives, so while there is always a rotation of persons and personages, the influence is still nonrepresentational of the actual people.

Should the people be represented? Yes, of course they should. That's really what it's all about. It's about stewardship, although people tend to roll their eyes at that term, so a better term might be "repair". However, in the two high schools I attended, and so it seems in all the others, we were taught that that was not the real goal of the founding fathers. It seems they imagined the common man to be incompetent. Those that framed the Constitution actually intended that only those that could handle responsibilities, such as landowners and business persons, etc., would have a say in governmental processes and representation thereof.

So this for-the-people stuff was all a lot of hooey, as in hooey you think you are? And it does seem to be so, that when the average guy or gal gets to the polling booth, they really don't know who they're voting for. I don't blame them for that. In the kind of rat race that contemporary America has become, no one has time to be informed of the actuality of the candidacies or candidates. They probably don't even know from candied dates. But basically, the mechanisms are in place, that if they should get disgruntled enough, they, the people, could actually fire the incumbent.

During my tenure in Washington, I was able to conduct my own private investigation -- of what? Buddy, I investigated everything I could in the three years I was there, and I found a bunch of stuff. One thing I discovered was that it wasn't the representatives that were running the joint, it was their assistants, who remained in place often 30 years or more. And it didn't even matter which party, or who, was in the office, the assistants remained, almost like part of the furniture. Oh, but it gets better.

It's the very echelons of "persuasion" -- the levels from the obvious persuasions, such as lobby-ism, down through the deep dank lower levels, that you get to the reason why the USA could be considered a banana-style republic. In other words, one that eventually will get to the point where they can't pay their debts. It's like primitive leadership contests in barbaric societies, if we may be permitted the luxury of that term barbaric. Shall we just say King-of-the-Hill scenarios.

The real pros in the game, let me tell you, have it figured out so that no matter who gets into offices or positions of authority, they will have some modus operandi to accomplish a certain acceptable degree of guaranteed arm-twisting. One doesn't need a Chubby Checker to twist again. This is becoming a science -- no, rather, it is becoming a virtual technology, complete with computerization, databases, and sciences you've never heard of before, shades of gray coming under the vague heading of "psychology". We never see true psychology in action. It has been usurped by the persuasion industry.

All hail the King of the banana republics, where the people it represents are reduced to the impulse buyers that enable it to survive recessions. Remember, Caesar, thou art but a man -- whoops! Let me rephrase that. Wow, Caesar, it looks more like you've got to remember you're but a Frankenstein's monster. Frankenstein saves nine.

OK , enough of vagaries. A little humor may hit the spot, but I don't see any Dalmatian here. Doggone. It reminds me of the one about the two Dalmatians having a fight, and they were invisible until you turned on a spotlight. But they didn't have one, so they had to settle for a spat light instead. I mean, the election of 2004 was a textbook case, although it may not have been the case in actuality, a real classic: using religion to put the will of the people on the side of the leader.

My best motto has always been to stay away from headquarters, but I always manage to be ending up in one headquarters or another from time to time. The use of psychology, hypnotism, subliminal suggestion, and on and on, even so much as using technology that can cause brain degeneration at a distance (commonly practiced these days) comprise the next few layers down, still obvious enough. In my investigation back in the sixties, I found evidence of a layer of blackmail as well, typically sexual blackmail, most effective of which was homosexual blackmail. In Washington, a normal man could be made to believe he was a homosexual, it's just that easy.

The rest of the stuff I found out, I don't think I'll be discussing much of that. There's an element of futility in all of this. My advice to you, kid, is to get along in spite of the political situation. Besides, in a fluid reality such as contemporary USA is, even if the government does help you out, that could be all gone tomorrow. It's a banana republic. Get real.

I tell you what, save up that vacation money, mortgage the house, head off to the District of Columbia, and run your own little investigation for a couple of years and see what you come up with.

It's just that, the next time you wanna whip out that plastic flag, made in some outsourced cheap labor country, stick a big yellow banana on it. I mean, you the people, the common average walking around scratchin human being out there -- you're so concerned about how hip you are. Forget the underwear show, and the occasional p.c., or more bluntly put, "plumbers crack", emerging from your grungy pants hanging halfway down your hips.

Quit trying to be so cool. You're just a bunch of plastic hippies getting nowhere fast. So that dates this text, early 2005. Get a banana broach and pin it next to your American flag on your lapel and put on a suit and act the part properly.

The Hamlet and Cheese Omelet

by Paul A. L. Hall.

The key to the great British navy of yesteryear was the Danes.  They were all British from the Stone of Scone, upon which the Kings were crowned. The stone brought from ancient Israel, to escape the Babylonians.

British is a word actually sometimes construed as meaning: "they live together in peace and peacefully". And said Brith is a key to prosperity from the coming together of the disparate cultures. The Danes having become Viking or seafaring, brought the contribution of the Ship Wright to the Brith of the Britons. But only after they stopped belligerence and settled down usually in Thorpes.

It's as the famous Dane in Shakespeare's play said. "To be or not to be". Well, I suppose two bes are better than one. But as you can tell from history, apparently the Danes and the Vikings of all Scandinavia were anything but indecisive. And while they could be thought of as huggers of the coastlines like the early Mediterranean sailors were, history also proves they were anything but, setting out not only into the deep open sees, but also into Arctic waters and in open longboats and what they were able to do eventually with Brits of England they were not able to do with the Native Americans of North America, and perhaps that was unfortunate.

It's interesting to note that my ancestors were among the English colonists that first populated North America's shores so many hundreds of years ago. And they were most probably descendents from the stock of England's early Scandinavian invaders that had eventually settled in. All the European colonists had great problems settling in North America, but standing out from them all in ultimate success were the hearty English, who seemed to have been just the right stuff for the job.

An interesting point to make. It's like the contrast between a work horse and a thoroughbred. When it comes down to the real nitty-gritty, the thoroughbred is almost useless for anything but a beautiful horse race.

And here we see the robustness of the combination the scrambling of the ingredients of our Hamlet and cheese omelet. It reminds me of the joke about the country that needed a stronger Air Force: The Presidentee just had the air controller scramble the jets.

Here comes to play a word known as "disparity", meaning the "difference between", such as the disparity in binocular vision: When you look at something with both your eyes, each eye sees a slightly different picture. Your mind combines the two pictures and what you really see is actual perspective, known as "depth perception". It's a matter of life and depth. So what you are really seeing is what is known in visual physiology as "binocular disparity", or the difference between two pictures. Two pictures or not two pictures, that is the question.

The key to success is not always, in fact hardly ever, and maybe even never, the flawed human idea of "purity". With a good look at the hindsight of history, noting the parts where all the successes took place, we can plainly see that it is the mixture, different peoples working together in a blend of peace and prosperity, that really make a functional and prosperous society. Yet it is not always as simple as it seems.

In many societies, disparate cultures where different sorts of peoples are living together in the same nation still do not blend. I've seen examples of this in almost every place I have visited. I mean, people can do as they want. Far be it from me to criticize. What I'm doing here, though, is observing a phenomenon and pointing it out in this article.

When I lived in New York City, I resided in the West Village back in the sixties. The neighborhood I was in on Bedford Street was also a part of a section of New York City known as "Little Italy". It was a neat little place with lots of great cultural value, fantastic food, really interesting. But it was an enclave and in most places, you will also find such sorts of enclaves where newly arrived citizens from other parts of the world settle into tight-knit and exclusive micro communities that serve to, it seems, retard, as it were, the blending of disparate societies into the prosperous combination they could be.

Whatever the motive, security, purity, maybe even in some cases common sense, the outcome is usually the same: the area assumes a sense of rigidity, in which the denizens acquire an air of polarity and fragility, where the situation becomes territorial and stilted, all the while camouflaged by the color and liveliness of the culture brought in from the old country and clung to tenaciously.

If that's you I'm describing, what can I say. Real life has its insecurities were a person has to step out, front up, take a few chances, learn the new language. True strength comes from the blending of different factions, not from the misconceptions of purity where fallible human nature tries desperately to filter out anything it imagines to be impure.

In fact , we find out with some of these races, and peoples or even families that are given to inbreeding and shutting out the external world, what they imagine to be pure is really nothing more than stagnation. It's curious to note that a malfunction of the human mind is to cause, or to tend to cause it's local society around it to develop no further, but rather, in false visions of purity, cause it to implode upon itself.

What we have actually in the world today, almost 6000 years after we emerged from a stone age, is a mere shell, a fragment, of what humanity could be and should've been. We see a weakened and debilitated species that is intent on its own extinction; it's extreme intelligence being its own undoing. In other words becoming the opposite of what it had intended itself to be. But then, I suppose, two bes are better than one.

The Lost Instincts of Man Return.

Treason or Trees in the Ground?

by Paul A. L. Hall.

Did you ever get a slice of the green pizza?  The human being, they maintain, has got to be excluded from nature for nature to be natural.  They forget that the human being is also a part of nature itself.  

The alternative to human beings involved in nature is fire and lots of it.  That's what happened to San Diego county in 2003.  But naturalism, the product of stilted minds suckered into herding everyone into deadly crowded cities are really helping the very people who are the enemies of nature, the exploitationaists.  So the naturalists have become the self-righteous mantra-chanters of "leave nature alone" neglectionism.  The human being is a part of nature.  The city is the worst place for people to end up.

The great power blackout of Summer of '03 was attributed to three incidents of tree branches touching power lines. Was the Ohio power company negligent in not pruning the branches back as required?  They claim that they do trim the trees away from power lines on a five-year cycle.
This is another little hint, and I say so often, while conclusive proof of an overkill, unaffordable, beyond-shadow-of-doubt nature (which for most people is nearly impossible) is preferable, buddy, a hint is all you get.  History is replete with dead bodies all over the landscape of nations, people and organizations that just couldn't take a hint.  The tree limbs hitting the wires wasn't a wake-up call.  Sorry.  You don't get wake-up calls.  You're in the cheap motel.  This was a tap on the back.
So do I detect a hint?  Yeah.  Yup.  Uh huh.  Looks like it's the instinct of man to dig up the buried carbon and put it back into the biosphere.  And we do have some evidence, here, after all.  Just look at who is trying to stop it.  The people who want to neglect nature and not be a part of it.  They have the best p.r. and everyone gullible enough, which is the majority of peoples on the earth, believes them.  It looks like the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing an increase in the growth rate of trees.  Could it be that nature is actually slowly coming to benefit from all of this?
Unwittingly, and that's how instinct works, by the way, the human being is irresistibly oxidizing all sorts of fossil fuel and the exhausts are going into the atmosphere.  Now, those wealthy scientists out there could actually go to the trouble of measuring to see if any increase in biomass has resulted from the increase of carbon dioxide in the air.  Perhaps the reason why so many scientists have neglected to do so may be because the present education system has taken away their ability to reason in order to give them knowledge.  
So here is a tiny tap on the back.  A huge black-out caused by a couple of trees that may have been growing faster than they were a decade ago.  Look at the growth rings in a new-sawn stump.  You'll see that the growth is faster in warmer years.  But it also must be more than warmth, which is supposed to happen when the incidence of carbon dioxide is higher, but also, it could be the food it's getting, which is related to the abundance of carbon.
So what is mankind starting to do now?  The instinct, you'll notice, shifts from carbon to water.  After re-carbonation comes re-hydration.  See, the next thing the neglectionists will be screaming about is all that desert wasteland being polluted by that bad nasty hydrogen hydroxide (water), causing the baron earth to become prolific with woodlands.  It appears the neglectionists want to have a private world of a perpetual glacial ice age in which they survive at the expense of the demise of everyone else.  What would you call that?  How about exclusivism? 
Well, it doesn't work.  If you stop progressing you die.  There is no standing still except in the minds of the patrons of the institutionalism that has robbed them of reason.  What good is knowledge if you can't use it?  All the exclusivists want to do is keep the natural human being out of the natural world the natural human beings are a part of. 
I for one am not impressed with the green pizza.  The only thing they're good at is litigation.  They epitomize the social phenomenon of death, just like their peace symbol.  In ancient Germany it was the symbol of death.  But they won't pull it off.  Just when it looks like they've got the world under their litigant jack boots, they'll be crushed by nature itself.

The Predators of Man

[PREDAN]

by Paul A. L. Hall. 

CHAPTER ONE:

WANTED, DEAD OR ALIVE:
THE HUMAN BEING.

(YES, THAT MEANS YOU.)  

(But in your case, it also means "Wanted, indebted or alive.")

What’s out there is not the question. 

How indeed does one distinguish between the paranormal and paranoia?  For the most part, let’s face it.  People just don’t want to know.  And so very few really do, and most of them who are in the know are taken with a grain of salt.  But, in fact, if you’re going to take an honest look at the actual phenomenon of the fact that mankind itself has predators—then, in many if not most cases, you’re going to have to look farther than a normal perceivable environment in which mankind presently finds itself.

You then will also have to take into account the fact that some of your observations will only be paranoia, as the examination of one’s predators can often be extremely terrifying, especially considering that many of the real predators that are not fantasies of paranoia cannot be perceived by the senses and can only be observed by the effects of their actions or the “traces” or clues left behind.

Add to all that the simple reality that a lot that pertains to the unknown quantities of the predators of man is virtually beyond the human being’s grasp of understanding as well as the fact that almost all biological beings on the face of the Earth are controlled in one way or another so that no human can be assured protection from predators—add all that to the equation and you might not be surprised that the average person quite honestly just doesn’t want to know.

In fact, compared to the dilemma of man, the lemmings have got it made.  It’s too psychologically excruciating, and so, the mind refuses to tackle it.

What then can be tackled?  Well, what dilemma can and should be tackled by all is the prevention rather than the cure.  In a sense, the predator is the bitter cure.  But human beings are endowed with the wherewithal to prevent the diseases or circumstances in the first place which bring about the predators of man.

So here in this book, the intention is not to enter into an exercise of futility.  Bemoaning realities which we humans aren’t even psychologically equipped to handle.  Much more rather, it is perhaps the beginning of an effort to take reliable measures that will assure that the predators of man nevermore emerge in the first place.

 Chapter One:
The Only Truly Fair Election

Alright.  Let me toss out a phrase for you.  "Abuse of mercantile freedom".  Sound familiar?  No?  Here's another one: "Inordinate success attracts predation".

Look in the lessons of recorded history and you will find the phenomenon of the secular trend of it's upheavals, often occurring as violent and massive carnage.  You may think the next round won't get you; that you're out of the loop as it were.  But think again.  We are dealing with something so bizarre and unimaginable that only an abstract expressionist could envision it.  Or perhaps the not so abstract expressionist, such as the artists of the orient that envisioned dragons, or the peoples of some wilderness whose collective sub-conscious depicted horrific creatures.  They would know, as they are the only ones with time and silence to ponder the true dilemma of so successful a creature as man.

But let me answer the title of this chapter right away.  I don't need it's suspense, the realities I might be able to divulge in this attempt are sufficient to keep the attention of my readers if successful.  The people are really never going to have elections that will select the proper leadership over them.  First of all it's well established the very poor track record that majorities have had throughout mankind's tenure.  Next, most elections are Banana Republic style, probably rigged or maybe even won by default like the last presidential one in this country that was decided by the Supreme Court.

So the only truly fair election is that which inevitably is decided by default but of the higher order far beyond any court of man's law.  The flow is almost as regular as the tide: freedom, abuse, dictatorship, empire.  And that is the only true election.  The majority votes by it's behavior.  The crime gets committed and the criminal gets busted by an empire.  That is the pattern of history.  

But I don't see it as human beings controlling other human beings.  Mankind was perhaps fortunate in that the Third Reich happened at a time when the predators of man could only find Adolph when they were looking for some fresh meat to personify their actions.  What if they had found another Alexander?  What if they had found a professional soldier capable of swaying masses to commit acts of suicide as well as commanding a war on two fronts?

Now lets bring it up to the present.  Yes, I'm afraid my analogy fits.  There has been a massive abuse of mercantile freedom on a global scale this time.  And that calls for a global emperor and his predatory masters, real or not.  The predation need not be even so much as a reality.  That's the shocking part.  The saber toothed tiger fifty miles tall or the fire breathing napalm spitting flying dragon need only be the reality of collective thought patterns in massive numbers of human minds fulfilling some sort of terminal pattern.  

Bear with me here.  We are trying to do something extraordinary.  We are trying to attempt to comprehend something we don't have the intelligence to realize exists, whatever form it may take.  I'm trying to get to some point, like the narrator in H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds", where you and I, hopefully won't become just another statistic for which any who temporarily survive will have run out of body bags to handle.  And even if we should go, at least it would be with some comprehension of what it is evoking such massive carnage.

Do you know how easy it will be for the puppet of the monsters to walk in and take over?  All he has to do is aid the victims of the mercantile abuse.  And there are masses and masses of them right now in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, South America, The Former Soviet Union, and what may soon, if we don't take greater care, be The Former United States of America the land of the million millionaires.  

Like a troop of lions after the weakest of the successful massive herd, the predators of man stalk the weakest among us.  Not whom man imagines to be weak, but the truly weak: those who imagine themselves to be strong.  

Let's be realistic.  You thought yourselves strong in a land of the best protection money could buy.  Hey, what happens if that money can't buy so well any more?  Will your prison guards work for free?  How many public servants would be like monks with vows of poverty and continue their vigil without another pay check?  The country's infrastructure is crumbling anyway and it was also built on trust that the only way the nation could pay for it all was if it was able to conduct business as usual and go on about it's so-called everyday life.  One disturbing abundance in America (North U.S. America) is the fact that it is a "target-rich environment".

You might think the money supply is sound right now.  What backs it up?  Gold or even silver?  No, the dollar isn't even a cheap silver certificate any more.  It's based on the GDP.  Back in World War Two, they could afford blackouts.  Not any more.  Too much GDP, gross domestic product, depends on a third shift that has to light up the night to operate.  And that's just one little example.

Scientists are baffled over the ease of anthrax to spread.  Well, it's now in a circumstance where germs grow the best: extreme and shifting masses of moist enzyme-prepared protein in the form of licked glue on millions and millions of envelopes.

There may be the advent of equipment to irradiate the mail, but the point remains that extreme and anti-human intelligence is at work here.  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.  Real or not, imaginary or not, the predators of man are in the final proof real enough to take the toll.  And their hallmark is always the killing of people, from one gunman on the Texas Tower, to one leader using nerve gas on an entire village. A wanton disregard for human life, or for that matter, any life whatsoever.  

I've looked long and hard, I've carefully considered the subject.  The predators of man cause either those they use or those that form them to have pleasure in killing their fellow man.  Homicide to them is merely pesticide.  Regardless of the motivation or the ideals. I've often considered the outcome of the worst scenario.  A hermetic existence in which even all matter itself is completely destroyed.  That is "their" ideal.  The last to go would be the ones who helped them or were them, whatever.  For some it's suicide, for others circumstance.  All in all, it's really nothing more than a tragic lack of will.  The human puppets of the predators of man.

Now, how does one avoid them?  There are ways.  Curiously, they don't seem to like mountains.  Look at cities like New York and Los Angeles, and you will see a type of place where masses and masses of citizens are crowded together in the low lands.  Such predatory elements also despise if not fear the self-sufficient, so it's not a good idea to be one of those until the last minute.  

They don't like it when people are spread out.  A lot of the coercion used against humanity that can either be blamed or simply put as extraordinary coincidence has been to force people from agricultural land to urban concentrations.  Most of the nations of the world are now only about five percent farm population and most of the rest live in inordinately large cities.

I went over some reasonable advise in my song "How Do You Start With Nothing?".    It may seem simpler than it is, but decentralize and then gather others.  Depend as little as possible on infrastructure.  Organize a community in the normal way so as not to stand out.  If things have already degraded to a fallen stage, you'll have to start your own spurious currency, and other social norms associated with a functioning community.  If we still enjoy a business-as-usual situation, so much the better.  Link your community with major ones with as many kinds of communication means and transport mechanisms possible, such as wireless and optic fiber communication, as well as motor, rail and air transport (and water, if possible, even if you have to build and use canals.  They're not so bad if you have hydrofoils.).

I may point out at this juncture that if the social situation at large has decayed to a fallen stage, in which there is no longer any credible law enforcement, this phenomenon I'm attempting to discuss which I call "the predators of man", will take on different forms.  You can't stereotype something beyond your intelligence but at your own peril.  The phenomenon could take the form of mass dementia as easily as it could a solitary emperor.  

One scenario would be an L.A. riot the size of an entire continent.  The desire to kill is had by a significant quotient of society at any given time of history.  That may have been the problem with the snipers of former Yugoslavia. The pattern of those  peppered among the belligerents who used idealism as a mask to enjoy killing people was all too prevalent in that situation to be denied.  

In the mass dementia scenario that every other low-life packing anything that can shoot will be leaving the video games for the real thing, going out on the streets and enjoying murder in their favorite climate, anarchy.  You may think I'm painting a black picture, here.  Oh on the contrary.  My picture is ROSY compared to the midnight black reality you yourselves have created by your oblivion and your willful ignorance.  Now, let's do something about it and maybe it will be the incredible:  in other words, maybe it won't be too late to do anything but die bravely.

As I suggest in my song "The Flatland", so what if it turns out that nothing significant ever comes of the September Eleven upheaval of world history?  That would be a reprieve.

We all know that life will never be the same, but what if?  Well, even in that case, were you to decentralize, you would gain enrichment if nothing else, by being in a place where the existence is far more natural and peaceful.  I imagine that everyone from time to time experiences forms of mental illness much like the common cold or the flue.  It's in the presence of the natural world that one regains sanity.