Dark Arts

Source: Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation & Political Control

Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. St. Augustine, City of God

Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized and brought to a close antiquitys idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man.

Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder. Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi the term is taken from Book I of Augustines City of God is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.

Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of echnologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustines insight on its head and create masters out of mens vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.

Source: Global Research

BILOXI, Mississippi, Aug 20, 2010 (IPS) - The U.S. state of Mississippi recently reopened all of its fishing areas. The problem is that commercial shrimpers refuse to trawl because they fear the toxicity of the waters and marine life due to the BP oil disaster.

"We come out and catch all our Mississippi oysters right here," James "Catfish" Miller, a commercial shrimper in Mississippi, told IPS. Pointing to the area in the Mississippi Sound from his shrimp boat, he added, "It's the only place in Mississippi to catch oysters, and there is oil and dispersants all over the top of it."

On Aug. 6, Mississippi's Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, in coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ordered the reopening of all Mississippi territorial waters to all commercial and recreational finfish and shrimp fishing activities that were part of the precautionary closures following the BP oil rig disaster in April. At least five million barrels flowed into the Gulf before the well was shut earlier this month.

But Miller, along with many other commercial shrimpers, refuses to trawl.

Miller took IPS out on his shrimp boat, along with commercial shrimper Mark Stewart, and Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group working to document and alleviate the effects of BP's oil disaster.

The goal was to prove to the public that their fishing grounds are contaminated with both oil and dispersants. Their method was simple – they tied an absorbent rag to a weighted hook, dropped it overboard for a short duration of time, then pulled it up to find the results. The rags were covered in a brown oily substance that the fishermen identified as a mix of BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants.

Miller and Stewart, who were both in BP's Vessels of Opportunity programme and were trained in identifying oil and dispersants, have been accused by some members of Mississippi's state government of lying about their findings.

"Why would we lie about oil and dispersant in our waters, when our livelihoods depend on our being able to fish here?" Miller asked IPS. "I want this to be cleaned up so we can get back to how we used to live. But it doesn't make sense for us or anyone else to fish if our waters are toxified. I don't know why people are angry at us for speaking the truth. We're not the ones who put the oil in the water."

IPS watched Miller and Stewart conduct eight tests in various places around Mississippi Sound. One of them was less than a quarter mile from the mouth of Pass Christian Harbor, and another was less than one mile from a public beach. Every single test found the absorbent rags stained with brown oil.

During an earlier test round, the two fishermen brought out scientist Dr. Ed Cake of Gulf Environmental Associates.

Dr. Cake wrote of the experience: "When the vessel was stopped for sampling, small, 0.5- to 1.0-inch-diameter bubbles would periodically rise to the surface and shortly thereafter they would pop leaving a small oil sheen. According to the fishermen, several of BP's Vessels-of- Opportunity (Carolina Skiffs with tanks of dispersants [Corexit?]) were hand spraying in Mississippi Sound off the Pass Christian Harbor in prior days/nights. It appears to this observer that the dispersants are still in the area and are continuing to react with oil in the waters off Pass Christian Harbor."

Shortly thereafter, Miller took the samples to a community meeting in nearby D'Iberville to show fishermen and families. At the meeting, fishermen unanimously supported a petition calling for the firing of Dr. Bill Walker, the head of Mississippi's DMR, who is responsible for opening the fishing grounds.

On Monday, Aug. 9, Walker, despite ongoing reports of tar balls, oil, and dispersants being found in Mississippi waters, declared "there should be no new threats" and issued an order for all local coast governments to halt ongoing oil disaster work being funded by BP money that was granted to the state.

Recent days in Mississippi waters have found fishermen and scientists finding oil in Garden Pond on Horn Island, massive fish kills near Cat Island and Biloxi, "black water" in Mississippi Sound, oil inside Pass Christian Harbor, and submerged oil in Pass Christian, in addition to what Miller and Stewart showed IPS and others with their testing.

"We've sent samples to all the news media we know, here in Mississippi and in [Washington] D.C.," Stewart, a third generation fisherman from Ocean Springs, told IPS. "We had Ray Mabus's people on this boat, and we sent them away with contaminated samples they watched us take, and we haven't heard back from them."

Raymond Mabus is the United States secretary of the Navy and a former governor of Mississippi. President Barack Obama tasked him with developing "a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible."

Mabus has been accused by many Gulf Coast fishermen of not living up to his task.

Stewart told IPS, "Normally we have a lot of white shrimp in the Sound right now. You can catch 500 to 800 pounds a night, but right now, there are very few people shrimping, and those that are, are catching nothing or maybe 200 pounds per night. You can't even pay your expenses on 200 pounds per night."

"We think they opened shrimp season prematurely," Miller told IPS, "How can we put our product back on the market when everybody in America knows what happened down here? I have seen so many dead animals in the last few months I can't even keep count."

On Thursday, several commercial shrimpers, including Miller and Stewart, held a press conference at the Biloxi Marina. Other fishermen there were not fishing because they feared making people sick with seafood they might catch.

"I don't want people to get sick," Danny Ross, a commercial fisherman from Biloxi told IPS, "We want the government and BP to have transparency with the Corexit dispersants."

Ross said he has watched horseshoe crabs trying to crawl out of the water, and other marine life like stingrays and flounder trying to escape the water as well. He believes this is because the water is hypoxic due to the toxicity of the toxic dispersants, of which BP admits to using at least 1.9 million gallons.

"I will not wet a net and catch shrimp until I know it's safe to do so," Ross added. "I have no way of life now. I can't shrimp and others are calling the shots. For the next 20 years, what am I supposed to do? Because that's how long it's going to take for our waters to be safe again."

David Wallis, another fisherman from Biloxi, attended the press conference.

"We don't feel our seafood is safe, and we demand more testing be done," Wallis told IPS. "I've seen crabs crawling out of the water in the middle of the day. This is going to be affecting us far into the future."

"A lot of fishermen feel as we do. Most of them I talk to don't want the season opened, for our safety as well as others," Wallis added, "Right now there's barely any shrimp out there to catch. We should be overloaded with shrimp right now. That's not normal. I won't eat any seafood that comes out of these waters, because it's not safe."

Look at the scope of the discharged oil even ending on May 24.





As of this week BP has been saying that the oil, which they claim has stopped gushing, has been dispersed into the environment to such an extent that long term impacts will be negligible.

Source: Truthout

While the "empire of consumption" has been around for a long time[1], American society in the last 30 years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children - one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification. Youth are now assaulted by a never-ending proliferation of marketing strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives. Under the tutelage of Disney and other megacorporations, children have become an audience captive not only to traditional forms of media such as film, television and print, but even more so to the new digital media made readily accessible through mobile phones, PDAs, laptop computers and the Internet. The information, entertainment and cultural pedagogy disseminated by massive multimedia corporations have become central in shaping and influencing every waking moment of children's daily lives - all toward a lifetime of constant, unthinking consumption.

Continue reading.....

The timing for Simmons death has the fingerprints of devilish deeds. His outspokeness regarding BP's cover-up of an ocean floor gusher, and his ability to get that message heard, was undermining BP's armor of denial. Maybe Matt did simply die in his hot tub of natural causes, though something within me knows better. I hope the autopsy is conducted in an aboveboard way, and maybe it will provide some answers.

I'm very sad to hear this news, I felt as though Simmons always did his best to speak what he knew, even in the face of ridicule and condemnation. He has been proven correct time and again, and I don't think he's wrong about the Gulf - something very sinister is happening there - and the cloak of security around the issue is very intense, and the deception fiercely enforced.

Matthew Simmons, farewell, and may we find you on the other side.


The Matthew Simmons archive at Harvest Dream



Source: Bangor Daily News

NORTH HAVEN, Maine — Matthew Simmons, the founder of an international energy investment bank, who once advised President George W. Bush on energy issues and also founded the Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland, drowned Sunday at his home on the island. He was 67.

Gov. John Baldacci praised Simmons on Monday as “an innovative thinker who pushed ideas that have the potential to yield a more environmentally and economically sustainable future for Maine and the world.”

The founder and chairman of Simmons & Co. International, one of the largest energy investment banking firms in the world, was a seasonal resident of Maine, with homes in North Haven and Rockport.

His body was found Sunday night in a hot tub at his home on the island. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor.

The Rockland-based Ocean Energy Institute that he founded in 2007 is “a think-tank and venture capital fund addressing the challenges of U.S. offshore renewable energy,” according to its website.

The institute is a part of a consortium led by the University of Maine, which aims to design and test floating deep-water wind turbine platforms.

He also wrote the 2005 book, “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,” raising concerns about Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves and laying out his theory that the world was approaching peak oil production.

There's some anarchist idealism here, especially at the end, but it's worth a look and listen - the dialogue can be rather insightful, and the many scenes from the Qatsi trilogy captures the message pretty effectively for me.